Transcript
Good morning and welcome to Ask Wildman. My name is Miles Bassett, and this is Ask Wildman, an open Q and A produced by Wildman Web Solutions. We are a digital marketing agency based here in Lawrence, Kansas who provide technology and marketing services for small and medium-sized businesses. And we produce this show as.
An open question and answer period for anyone and everyone who wants to S to ask us questions about technology, marketing, advertising, or anything else you want to throw out there, we’ll do our best, but those are generally our areas of expertise. So, my team jumps on here, my team, and I guess jumped on here and answer your questions every Wednesday at 11 we are live streaming right now to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account.
So, pick your poison there, jump on, watch us live and throw your questions in the comments below. But if you’re not seeing this live, you’re catching us later. You can still get your questions in there by emailing us your questions to ask wild man at Biomet, web.com. And we’ll get to you next week. Next Wednesday at 11.
We’re doing this every week to answer your question. Again, if you have any questions on any of this, we’re watching the comments here. So, throw your questions in the comments below, or email us your questions to ask wild men@wildmanweb.com. And if you need that address, I have at scroll on below me here.
And that little crawler there without any further ado, I’ll go ahead and bring on my partner in crime here to help us answer some questions. Mike, Hannah. Good. How the heck are we doing miles? I’m doing well. How are you? Oh, fantastic. But I’ll get better. That’s a good line. That’s a good line. I might steal that one.
It’s just the God-awful truth. We’re here to answer your question. So, anyone watching here, please throw your questions in below. And we’ll get those as they come up, but I did have something to start off with. Oh, far away, as you may know, but maybe our viewers don’t know, we here at Wildman web solutions are hiring, which is a very unique process.
And we’re a fairly small, relatively small team over here. We don’t have 500 people. So, this is we can all play a role here, a very personal role in bringing someone else onto our team. And going through the interview process, trying to find the right people it’s been it’s been interesting.
It’s been a challenge. I just wanted to talk a little bit about people getting into this field as we’ve gotten a lot of the same questions in our interviews. I wanted to answer some questions. We don’t normally get to answer typically on this show, we’re trying to give some information out for small business owners, entrepreneurs, people wanting to get into business who don’t necessarily know how to leverage technology properly.
They need to know how to get a website up or how to build an app or what SEO is or something like that. But I want to take a little bit today and speak to the people who are just getting into this field and want to know a little bit more about technology, about marketing, about advertising, about just the digital agency space and maybe answer some of your questions there.
So, I’m going to speak a little bit on my side of things as a software engineer, software developer, web developer whatever title you want to throw at me, I typed them things get made. And then I think Mike, I’ll toss it over to you for your side of the house. And see if you can’t give a little, give them a little bit of wisdom there.
Software development is a little bit different than any other industry. I think it is the special little alcove. It is the last remaining wild west of accreditation where you have everything from, someone coming in with a master’s degree in computer science for a prestigious university to someone who’s just completely self-taught with no real formal education coming in and applying for the same position.
And honestly, in, in some circumstances it is a toss-up as to which one is going to get it. And I don’t think that we get that in a whole lot of other industries. Like I could be wrong, but I happen to see this as part of my world here in this industry, if you have that drive and you want you want to get into this and you are willing to.
Do you put in the hours, put in the effort of the blood, sweat, and tears to learn something new? That’s worth quite a bit because quite honestly, no matter if you went through a four-year institution, you got an associate degree somewhere, you went through one of the bootcamp training programs, or you’re completely self-taught.
If you learn with technology yesterday, it’s going to be obsolete by tomorrow. So actually, learning a language, a coding language, or learning some sort of element framework is it is valuable and it’s useful. It’s an absolute, it is a must to get into here. The real skill is learning on the fly.
Being able to pick up new skills very quickly and effectively. Because like I said, no matter what you do, you’re going to have to learn something new tomorrow and the day after that. And the day after that, to me, that’s one of the exciting parts about the job is that every time, every day I wake up, I work on this.
I never know what I’m going to do. Even when I was working in more corporate environment, I would never know what I was going to do that day, walking in that morning, I could have a general idea, but then, 9:00 AM hits in that plan, completely shifts, something else broke over here.
I have to work over here. It turns out there’s this whole other language that I have to learn in order to make this work. And like I said, for me, that’s a bonus that’s the fun part of the job is that it is a little bit unpredictable. There’s a lot, a bit unpredictable. And for some people that’s not so much of a pro as it is a con.
If that doesn’t sound like you, then I might look in some other industries for work, because that really is the name of the game here, learning new stuff, picking up new technologies, new languages, new platforms, do frameworks all day, every day. Most of the decent developers, I should say once the decent developers that I know go home.
And learn in their off time. It’s not just a network thing. They like doing this. This is a hobby. And so even when they’re off the clock and no one’s telling them to do anything, they’re often learning something new. They ran into some old legacy code and some VB script, and they need to jump off and figure that out.
Cause they’ve never encountered that before. Or they’ve seen some new things come up. Some of the new JavaScript frameworks come up, they all of a sudden realize they need to know angular and they’re out there figuring that out. If you are looking to get into this industry if you are trying to become a software developer, software engineer, web developer, whatever you want to call this kind of coding person code monkeys I’d say that is the number one attribute that you have to have.
I don’t so much care about where you went to school or how many languages, if you don’t have that, then you’re not going to make it here. In addition to that if you’ve got that covered, you want to learn stuff. You want to pick things up quickly. You want to grab new technologies and run with those, and you want your days to be a little bit unpredictable.
Then the next thing I would say is find some online resources before you pick a school to go to, or you start pursuing a degree or anything. There’s a ton of great online resources out there for people who are just getting started. And maybe aren’t absolutely a hundred percent sure you want to just dip your toes in the water.
There are free resources off the top of my head code academy is a wonderful one. Lots of they have several interactive online classes there to teach you a plethora of languages from the front end, all the way through the military, to the backend. So that’s a really good resource out there.
There are some paid ones where you can just, pay 50 bucks and, get a fairly holistic course online. So, I’d recommend doing that next. But don’t just jump straight in and, take out student loans and jump in for a four-year degree. I would definitely recommend checking some of this out because it’s out there.
There’s lots of resources out there for people to become these sorts of self-taught coders. And I know a lot of people that had zero formal education jumped into the space and figured it out on the fly and they’re doing great. I also know several people that went the more traditional route and got their degrees and then jumped in and, they’re doing wonderful as well.
There’s lots of ways to skin this cat. It’s totally up to you on how you want to do it. Some may require a little more work than others, but if you are unsure, if you’re even the slightest bit unsure, start with. Look online, find some of those free resources. There’s a ton of them out there. And get started there.
If you have any other questions on this, you want me to dive into it a little bit deeper spends a little more time on this, or Andrew answer some more specific questions for your specific situation. Please throw your questions in the comments below. I can provide some resources here, some links in the comments for anyone who’s watching this later.
Probably show that code academy link at their, at the very least, but I did want to toss it over to you, Mike. On your end of this spectrum here what does it take for someone to get started in the marketing space more generally, and then maybe narrow it down into digital marketing and what we do.
You have to be completely psychotic. I think miles to even start to go down that road, my advice would be to forget any of that. And go to law school, go to medical school, do what your mother and your father told you should have done. And we can get them real job for God’s sakes and, quit pestering those poor business owners.
That’s my honest advice. No miles, I don’t know, to be honest. To me you have. You have to get in, in the trenches, so to speak and you have to live and breathe it, some people would recommend going to school or getting a marketing degree or something like that.
I would not be one of those people. I think that confuses and hurts probably more than it helps in a lot of cases. Depends on what you’re trying to do, if you’re trying to be a, the COO of some big organization or something like that there may be need that kind of a background, but no, for most of the time when we’re working with small, medium sized businesses, like we do it’s just putting ourselves in their shoes and wearing their hats and literally coming in as a consultant or, sometimes even in envisioning ourselves as the operator, while also having that outside perspective of, being able to.
Filter through all the information in an objective way, which sometimes is what happens w to the operator that they can’t filter things subjectively. That’s why they call in an outside consultant or a marketer or somebody like that. And so, we have to be simultaneously seeing their point of view and the customer point of view and from all the different angles that the customers will engage with a client on.
So, to me, the only way to do that, Is through trial and error, trial by fire. So, my say working with cut clients, one-on-one, I don’t think it’s really something that you can teach per se in a classroom. Now you can train yourself, you can train other people to know how to do this, to know what to look for.
But again, it’s really just comes from experience. And that’s why quite frankly, so many people don’t last in this business. I think I think I saw a stat once that, 90, I think it was like 97% of all media sales marketing people will leave the industry in their first year.
Yeah, it’s just it’s, abysmal to, I say, code to something else, unless you really love to do it. Like you’re probably better off, honestly not doing it, I, I just can’t turn it off. I even when I’m on vacation, this that that I don’t know that innate feeling about business and wanting to see the angles and wanting to figure out, man what if they did this a little bit better?
Or what if we changed this and, could we get better customer experience? I’m like, yeah. Even when I’m on vacation and I go out to a restaurant or wherever I’m sitting there trying to mind my own business, but I’m thinking, God, what about this? Oh, I’m thinking about their marketing messages.
I’m thinking about their marketing bridge. I’m thinking about all these things. So, like I said, I can’t turn it off. So, to me, I really enjoy it. And so, it’s not like working, for me. And that’s honestly the best advice I could get. Anybody career-wise is trying to find something that you love to do.
And so, it doesn’t feel like work, it just feels like something that you want to be able to do. And you were some ways born to do and that’s the way I just feel. And I don’t know what it is, I come from a long line of entrepreneurs, so I don’t know if it was something that I was born with or, my, my father was a business consultant and a psychologist for a long time, so he dragged me around to, places. Maybe I picked stuff up like that as a kid, but yeah. Yeah, to me, it’s the only thing that I’ve really done other than the music business, which is even a sicker and more twisted place. Then the marketing business that I felt like, man, this is really fun. This is what I’m supposed to do.
And so, if you feel that way then yeah, just jump in with both feet, wherever you can get on and start learning by trial and error would be my advice, but yeah, for most people I don’t think it’s an, a calling and I think even most business owners they hate to think about this stuff. We talk about it all the time miles, it’s like, Hey, I’m a great painter.
I’m a great plumber. I’m a great physician, whatever it is. But yeah, just thinking about man, my marketing messaging, my marketing bridge, how to improve the customer, experience, retention, all those things. They’d rather go. Throw up and sit around and think about that stuff. And so that’s why they hire us, which is good.
But other people love it and that’s the reason that they get into business for themselves. And it all just goes back to self-awareness miles and figuring out what’s going to make you happy. And hopefully that aligns with something that you’re able to provide extreme value to the marketplace for.
So, you can get paid well I have a question for you, and this is a legit question from me to you. We’ve talked about the difference and the differentiating factors between sales and marketing before, but I want to see you take it from this point of view, as someone getting into the field or looking for jobs, and they’re seeing these different roles out there, or as a company looking to hire a salesperson or a marketer, how do you see that?
What’s the difference in the market? Between a sales role and marketing role between a salesman and a marketer. We’re just tackling the differentiation from this new angle here. Okay. That’s a good question. I don’t know if I’ve really ever thought about that as far as an employee or prospective employee goes, to me, marketing is much broader, in sales as a part of marketing but as a much more focused part of marketing.
And so, I think, to really be a great marketer, you really need to be able to see the big picture and to be able to connect dots through the, through those different, big picture ideas. And that’s a whole different skillset. A lot of times than salespeople, sometimes salespeople.
That actually hurts them. They think about the big picture, and they think too much, they need to be more laser focused, it’s more of a rifle than a shotgun kind of thing. And that would be one key difference, differentiating part, but it was one hand washing the other.
And so, if you can understand marketing, you can do better in sales and vice versa. If you understand sales, you will do better in marketing. And I think that’s one of the critical mistakes that a lot of businesses, especially at the corporate level make, as they try to separate the two things out, like literally in complete departments and don’t let them talk to each other, other than some BS meeting where, you have the two heads talking on behalf of the entire department and really those should not be separated in my mind.
They should be separated at some level, but also be working together because what you have happened is they don’t work together. And then the marketing blames, the sales and the sales blames, the marketing, and you get less efficiency within your business. So, I don’t know if that’s really the question that you were asking me miles, but you know that’s some of the differentiation between the two, but I also think there’s so many similarities that they do not need to be separated.
And if you can combine them both, whether that be with your departments are actually people that are able to do both skillsets. You’re going to be better off. I just, I know that we’ve had this conversation before, even on this show. And then he was a few weeks ago at 1 million cups when I plugged them again, 1 million cups, Lawrence, Wednesday mornings at nine o’clock check out the Facebook page for information there.
One was presenting and she said something along the lines of I’m a marketer. I’m not a salesperson. And you made a very clear line there saying I’m not going to be this; I’m going to be this over here and was really trying to put that forward. As if people are approaching her as a salesperson all the time.
And this is something that she has to clearly delineate between these two roles. Yeah. And that’s fine. Some people they want to draw that line. Again, I’m not one of those people, I’m not saying they’re right or wrong or vice versa. I just, I like to blend it as much as you possibly can because, like I said, sales to me are just the next step in marketing.
Marketing is getting people’s attention; it’s getting people’s interest. And then sales are actually getting them to take the action step, the decision, and the action step to aid. And of course, da I w I won’t get into the ABC speech miles, Glengarry Glen Ross, shout out to everybody.
But that’s what we’re talking about. The AI. Attention and interest are really the marketer’s job. The da par the decision and action are really the salespeople job. Like I said, if you want to separate, see your skillsets into one or the other, that’s fine. But then in my mind you have to have some sort of connection to the other side, whether that’s a partner or a coworker or colleague, somebody, because I really think that separately, they do not work as well as they do in tandem.
I think there’s a there’s a parallel in my world as well. When I, when I was talking about this, I was continuing to list off the different title options that there could be that I’ve, I think I’ve held all of these position titles of software engineer, software developer, web developer, and I’m sure I’ve had a hundred other roles here.
And there are some people that. They really hold to the divisions between those. And they say, I am this, I am not. And I’m more, or on your side of things where, I think that those lines are fairly blended and that if you can do one, then you could move into the other space fairly easily.
And more than that, if you, aren’t seeing some overlap there, if you aren’t blurring those lines, then maybe you’re not doing awesome at your job. Maybe you should look over the fence a little bit and extend yourself. The clearest delineation I can really think of is as a software engineer, you’re going to go deeper rather than broader.
So you’re going to understand the actual workings of some of these machines. Do you know how a compiler actually works? Can you just write assembly code versus someone who can, they can? For me, I’m a.net developer primarily. I’m writing C-sharp or something, and I can code that all day, but if I don’t really understand the depth of how that works and why that works and what the, how the environment that I’m coding in works, then I’m not really a software engineer.
Software engineer understands the depth of what’s really happening here and how we turn typing these logic puzzles into a screen, into the ones and zeros that a computer can understand, whereas a web developer or the other grand Know, they don’t necessarily have to understand how the computer works.
But they can put a website together. They are a little bit more on the marketing side of things. They have to understand how a business works. They’re a little more on the design side of things, cause you ultimately have to create something that is customer facing. You have to create a front and that is appealing.
And that works. That does whatever that business needs it to do. So, there’s a little bit of marketing understanding there, a little bit of business, understanding there quite a bit of design understanding there. And that’s where you get into web designers versus where web developers, which I do think are, are two different roles.
But then in between those two points, there is just infinite variability. And like I said, if you’re not crossing those lines a little bit, if you’re not a web developer that, at least wants to, and is trying to understand the environment of what you’re coding, or if you are a software engineer, that’s not even trying to understand the business side of what he’s doing.
Then you may be falling a little bit short here of what you’re trying to do. So, I, for one thing that those lines should be blurred in order to Improve the performance and broaden the range of anyone who holds any of those titles. But I know there are people out there just that draw some very clear lines and say, no, I am this, you are that people especially get very touchy on the software engineer role because the engineer title comes with a certain connotation.
Usually there’s a degree involved. They went through engineering school versus, someone that just builds websites. Yeah, that’s a good point miles and I’m just going to make one last point here and then we can move on regarding the sales, I won’t get completely on my soap box with this, because you’ve heard me go down this rabbit hole many times, but when we really think about it, everybody within the organization, certainly anybody in a management position needs to view themselves as part of the sales team and as a salesperson, because no matter what we do, we are all in sales as a Zig Ziglar used to famously say, even if we’re washing cars, we’re selling.
And so, we always need to take that frame of mind and always be, positioning ourselves to be the best salesperson that we can be. No matter what it says on our job title and people can fight me on that all they want, but they’ll be wrong. But yeah, miles, I did have to switch gears here.
I did have an interesting story I wanted to discuss and open up for a broader discussion re revolving around a subject. I’m actually finishing up an article on, and that is customer retention. And I know we touched on this briefly, I think last week, maybe. But then we’ve been getting some actual, some questions from clients and things like that.
And this topic has been, come up several times over the last few weeks. So, I wanted to get into a story about customer retention and loyalty rewards if that’s all right with you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. I wasn’t sure if we were, you had another boat to put on that discussion, but no, hopefully we put some good information out there and anyone who’s wanting to get into either of these industries now knows not to undergo runs, running, screaming for the Hills.
Yes. Yes. Hopefully people know there was a little bit of sarcasm when I was saying there, but yeah. Okay. So, let’s talk about customer retention and loyalty reward programs for a minute and miles. This story comes it has a little bit of a low. Next to it. And that it has to deal with the chicken wars our good old friends, the chicken wars which we’ve been experiencing here in Lawrence for, I don’t know, maybe the past five, seven years or so.
It’s not quite bleeding Kansas level of warfare yet, but there, what was that? Maybe we have maybe five, six yeah, new chicken places opened up within the span of a few years. And I think most of them are still around Saxby’s I know, which is out by me closed. I saw the other day there’s a new breakfast brunch type of a concept place going in there.
I think most of the other ones though, correct me if I’m wrong. Miles, R S oh L there was that. Yeah, there was one downtown. I forget what was. It wasn’t a quick service line. It was actually a sit-down restaurant, but we’re talking about Popeye’s today and Popeye’s of course is a big player in the chicken market.
Have you ever had pop-ups? Of course. Yeah. I’m a big fan of French and that is my advice here. I always felt like crap afterwards, but I go into it anyway, knowing full well what’s going to happen. All right. Should I ask you, do you know what your favorite is or is that going to, is that going to open up?
Okay. No. No. Okay. Popeye’s has launched its first ever loyalty reward program called Popeye’s rewards, which provides exclusive access to deals celebration swag, and the chance to earn and redeem points for menu purchases. According to a press release released by Popeye’s this week. And of course, this is.
A great tool that you can use on a mobile app. And even the smallest of businesses can utilize this type of a tactic in order to get people to come back more often. And this is gamified. So, it’s a point system, which I know miles really like some aspects of gamification in our loyalty rewards programs, but the chain is offering a welcome to the Popeye’s family meal to promote the launch.
So, you get a welcome meal when you join up and sign up for the rewards program and download it. And then you get some offers at exclusive, only exclusively available to loyalty rewards that have the app. You can, yeah, you get more rewards, the more points that you receive. And of course, the more points you receive by ordering more things through the app Popeye’s digital sales make up about 17% of its total sales in the U S and that has been double digit growth, of course.
Since last year, as well as their regular store sales are up 30% over a two-year basis from Q1 of two years ago. So not only are their digital sales exploding, but Popeye’s is exploding in general. And I’m actually surprised miles that they have. Offered a loyalty reward program since then or since now is what I meant to say.
Excuse me. So why are they getting so concerned about customer retention? Let’s just back up for a second. Talk about the importance of customer retention. We talked, like I said, we did talk a little bit about this on the show last week, but customer retention is the easiest way that you can drive down your cost of average, your cost of acquisition and drive your advertising cost down.
Makes perfect sense. If I’m keeping people in the bottom of the funnel that I’ve already sent all the way down through my sales funnel and converted, I don’t need to spend as much money putting as many people in the top. If I’m bleeding people out the bottom, meaning they’re coming in one or two times, they’re not having a good experience.
Then I need to continually be putting more and more money in the top of the funnel. So, my cost of acquisition is always going up. And then you probably call pupil like me, whoever your marketer is and say, what the heck is going wrong here? Why are our sales slumping? And sometimes it is your marketing.
Sometimes you’re not effectively putting enough people in the top of the funnel, but the majority of the time we either a, we also have a customer retention problem, or that is the problem in itself. Is there a customer retention is so bad that it’s actually costing us way more money than it should to put somebody through our funnel?
And so, it’s a really important and important metric to measure to be able to measure accurately and then be able to know how to react to those results that you see according to a Harvard business school study. If you can increase just your customer retention by just 5% in a restaurant, you will increase your bottom-line profits by 15 to 25% over the course.
5% increase in customer retention leads to a 15 to 25% and profits increase. That’s amazing miles. And it’s really important that people understand this. The other thing that it does is it increases your lifetime value, and it increases the number of customers that you can attribute to your lifetime value.
Domino’s years ago, ran a study on the lifetime value of their customers, and they told their franchise owners that each individual customer, once they can get them to the point of once w at least once a month coming into a Domino’s or ordering online or delivery or whatever it is that they have a least, the very least a $4,000 lifetime value of that customer over the course of the next three to four years, I believe is how they were measuring that.
And so, if I can get one customer and retain them, I’m obviously going to be able to increase my lifetime value significantly, which is going to increase my bottom line significantly, which is how you get that kind of an increase between a 5% retention in 15 to 25% gross sales over a year. Okay. It’s by significantly increasing your lifetime value and having more customers that you’re able to put into that column of attributing to your lifetime value.
Hopefully it wasn’t too much mass there. All right. Let’s a little bit of background about why this is so important. Now let’s jump back into the specific example of Popeye’s and then I’m going to have miles go into some specific examples of how you can use technology and some tools like apps and customer listening and things like that to improve customer retention.
But one of the big reasons that Popeye’s is taking this step is of course, because of chicken. Chick-fil-A has had an amazing loyalty reward program. That’s been wildly popular to actually rank second, according to a customer satisfaction survey across all restaurants in the nation. And they’ve been doing this for several years.
They have tens of millions of people already enrolled in our customer loyalty program on their app. And Chick-fil-A, of course has been the dominant force in the chicken wars. Let me see if I can pull out this stat here. Yeah. Okay. According to 2019 publishers clearing house study this may be the one I was looking for.
Sorry, this is a good step. 19% of the customers said a loyalty rewards program would be enough for them to try a new QSR, quick service restaurant and 30% of respondents to that they would download a restaurant app to gain loyalty points. The stat I was actually trying to find there was the dominant.
Chick-fil-A in the marketplace. I believe it’s 40% though. I believe that 40% of the marketplace is dominated by Chick-fil-A, but somebody can correct me if I’m wrong on that. But that last stat let’s talk about that. This is also not just okay. Retain customers, but with the slats, this last stat is indicating it’s also a great way to bring new people in the top of the funnel.
So, with this one technique, you’re showing up bottom of the funnel. You’re also adding people at the top of the funnel because that, just that opportunity to be in a loyalty rewards program and to get that local team, whatever they call to Oakland with a family meal is enough for almost 30% of people to download your app and to opt into the rewards program that is huge to get new people that are not trying your food yet to jump in and do it.
And then what can you also do once those 30% of new customers download the app and to jump into divorce program? By gosh, you’re going to be able to market to them so much easier to get them to go to three and four times back to your restaurant fours. The golden rule when we’re talking about restaurants.
Okay. If I can get a cut. To come to my restaurant four times, as long as I haven’t made them angry on the fourth time, I’ve got, okay, I’m going to be in that Rolodex. And they’re top of mind when they think, where am I going to eat at, where am I going to have pizza tonight? Where am I going to go have Mexican food?
If I can get them that for, I’m in the top of the mine Rolodex. So, it’s super, super important. It gets them to that fourth table seating or dine, dine out experience. So, if I can get them to download the app initially, like I said, then we can market back to them. And miles are going to talk about some tactics of how to do that through push notifications and other things.
What’s the other thing I can do here? I can get all kinds of crazy data about what they want to buy, how they want to buy it. Do what kind of menu combo items. They like, we could get so involved with studying the behavior of our customers just through the usage of their app.
All of that is very relative information that then we can go back to the bottom of the funnel and tied into customer retention, right? Because once we figure out what they want, we can, modify and optimize in order to get, give them more of a, what they want. And they’re going to be happier.
They’re going to come back more often, that lifetime value is going to go up. That cost of customer acquisition is going to go down. And then what happens of course, to our profits. Ooh, we have a party. So, a really interesting article here, miles and move by Popeye’s. And the only last thing that, that was here at the bottom of the article that I wanted to point out, and I’m going to toss it back over to you is they made an interesting point here of, another battle that is going on is space on people’s phones.
And if I already have the Chick-fil-A app on my phone, Will I download another chicken app, or vice versa if I already have the pop-up app on my phone? I downloaded a Chick-fil-A app, and so that’s going to be something really interesting to watch as well as how much of an advantage does like a Chick-fil-A have that already has this massive database of millions of users compared to a Popeye’s as I guess we could say it’s late to the game, nothing is late at this point, as we’ve talked about before we’re still in the very, very early stages of the internet folks.
So, the that’s another, just customer behavior. Stat to watch is, world there’ll be a limit, especially categorically speaking to businesses that people are going to be able to engage with through the app platform miles. I know that was a lot that I just laid out there for you, but can you get into some specifics about leveraging technology like Popeye’s is doing for a loyalty rewards program to build customer retention and bring new people in the funnel?
Yeah. And I’ll jump into some more yeah, some specifics and what you can actually go out there and do by, do you want to hit a couple of high-level things there that you talked about there? Just to start off with I’ll go backwards here, starting off with, there, of course is a certain level of the Matthew principle of economics.
Flowing through here. That would be, it’s actually a Bible line, a Bible verse that says something like something along the lines of to those who have everything, everything will be given to those who have nothing, everything will be taken away. And so that’s now been applied to economics saying that the more that you have, the more weight that you have to throw around and the more that you can get, the more that you can win here.
There could be something to say for, if someone in your space has already been doing this, or if you are the one in your space, that is the first to do that. Then if you can grab some of that land early on, it could be harder for others to take that market share away from you and easier for you to pick up additional market share.
You were talking about using a loyalty program to attract new customers. If you can do that in order to grab some more market share, to get some more people, at least trying your product the first time then that Matthew principle will start to work in your favor rather than against you.
Anything you can do to start making up ground or start grabbing up land wherever you can, is going to help you. There’s a snowball effect that happens with these kinds of things, especially with the math that you were talking about there that is highly scalable math where you have someone coming in.
If you just increased by 5%, you’re going to see something down further down the funnel. Namely sales here increased by 15%. That is highly scalable math. So yeah. Anything that we can do to start picking up some ground here is clearly going to be a big winner, and it’s going to allow you to start that snowball to really start to pick up more and more ground, more effectively in the future.
So, let’s start with this jumping into more specifics here, you kept mentioning an app is one of the most popular most effective means of technology-based customer attention out there. It’s a little bit harder for some people to get an app. Not everyone can just go out there and get an app developed for their business.
So, there’s a little bit. More of a barrier to entry than some other ones out there. There are some easier ones that you can just jump into without needing any development like that. But if you do get an app developed, it’s very sticky for some of the reasons that you just mentioned there. Usually when someone downloads an app, they don’t really delete it unless you’re just being obnoxious and sending them notifications all day, every day.
They’re probably going to keep it on there. I’ve said this before on this show, pick up your phone, look at it and see how many apps are on there that you haven’t used in a year or more. People tend to just accumulate these things and keep them on there. And so, if you can convince them to download that the first time that’s going to be a very it’s sticky conversion.
You’re going to keep that app on their phone, which is going to keep you top of mind. It’s going to keep you keep them from searching and seeing your competitors next to your name. They’re more likely just to go to you and does give you a more direct line of command. Tying this more into customer retention, which is the point here.
Obviously, you can implement a loyalty rewards program within that app. Anything that they buy, they can get points for. They get credit for; they can get stamps for however you want to do it. You can do something to incentivize them to come back more frequently and to buy your products more than just that first time you said that for as a magic number there, if you can get someone to come back four times to a restaurant and they’re more likely to come back and that’s something I didn’t really realize until you, you said that the first time, every time that we over here at the Bassett house are looking at going out to eat it’s a pretty short list.
Yes. That pops up. Hey, you want to go out to eat. Yeah. Where do you want to go? One of these four or five places that we always go unless we’re making a special effort to go out and try some someplace new. It’s a pretty short list that really ends up being that option. And if you can work your way into being that, on that list, there, I’m going to be a lifelong customer.
Yeah. As long as you don’t make them angry really quick, let me just jump in there because yeah that, that stat actually came from a study that I read. It must have been five, 10 years ago at this point. And it talked about, that people can, I think it was six people on average, when you ask them, hey, where do you want to eat?
Or where should we go eat? And what do you want to have for dinner tonight? They can usually come up with about six restaurants off the top of their head. And then if they don’t decide on one, then they’ll go to the internet, then they’ll go to Google or Yelp or wherever, and start that search process.
But if we can get inside the top of mind, going back to the old school, traditional advertising, Concept of top-of-mind awareness, then we don’t have to worry about our SEO ranking or are they going to click on her ad or any of these things were already there, but it takes a great deal of market voice penetration.
In order to get into that top of line. So go right ahead though. I was, sidetracking there. So, thanks for bringing me back in, but an app is a really powerful tool if you can do that, but there are other ways to accomplish this that maybe are, have a lower barrier to entry. I’m thinking, we are constantly talking about building up a zero first party data grabbing someone, collecting someone’s phone number or their email address for an email marketing campaign.
Maybe we’re doing some text message marketing or whatever some way to contact them directly in app is a really cool way to do that in that you are just live in there, right on their phone. And you can send out a push notification, which can be a very personalized message or at least feels that way.
There’s a certain intimacy to that form of communication that just pops up right there on their phone from you directly to that customer. But you can do that just by shooting them a text or by sending them an email. So, anything you can do to collect that information can be less fridge for customer retention.
Okay. No, we have at least one client. Now at least two clients that do one thing is super smart. And I don’t know why more people don’t do it. And that is collect information in order to access the business WIFI. If you have Wi-Fi on site, lots of people are wanting to connect to it, especially if you’re like a coffee shop or something like that.
People are going there to study, do homework, have meetings. They want to connect to the Wi-Fi. Maybe they have to connect their social media in order to access the Wi-Fi. Maybe they have to provide an email or access the WIFI. Most people are going to do that. And they’re not going to think anything of it.
It’s just like logging in there. So first off it does provide a little bit of security and just that, not anyone and everyone is going to be leveraging your WIFI. But then obviously you are collecting their information and you can market to them later. If they come in there, they come into your coffee shop, they grab a cup of coffee.
They sit there for an hour and study using your WIFI. Overall, that’s probably not a huge sale, but if you can email him the next day saying, hey, thanks for thanks for coming to our shop. Here’s a coupon for your next time. In most likely they’re going to come back. And if you can leverage that kind of strategy again, just to get them to come back a couple of times before, it you’re in that Rolodex and they are a lifetime customer.
And then I did want to talk a little bit more about one thing that we’ve both said a couple of times here. It says something like, unless you make them angry, this is all great. This is all great. Unless you make them angry. This is great unless you make them angry because it doesn’t matter how many times I go to a restaurant.
If I get food poisoning, I’m going to think twice about going back there. So yeah. Listening to your customers and keeping them happy is of the utmost importance in customer attention and can play into a loyalty and rewards program. People don’t necessarily think about this. They think about stamp cards.
They think about apps. They think about email marketing when they’re trying to do this, but equally as important is listening to your customers where they are. And it’s easier now than ever to engage with your customers and to get that kind of feedback, before the internet, you just, I don’t know, went out on your front porch, and screamed that you hated Chick-fil-A.
I don’t know how it works, but. Now we have it. These just these direct lines of communication. You’ve got reviews on Google, on Facebook, on Yelp, on all these industry specific sites. We’ve got people talking on social media about you commenting on your posts, messaging you directly. And if you are not just eating that all up and really paying attention, and then also providing that kind of engagement back then you are missing out here.
This is your chance to engage with your customers, where they live and to find out what they like, what they don’t like when one of them is angry, maybe you can pull them back, or at least you can get them to stop telling people about this. So, we’ve got a couple of tools there that can help you with that.
Reputation management, software’s. There are tons of them out there. We happen to have a really nice one here at Wildman web solutions but find one that fits you that allows you to track multiple review sites. It’ll notify you when a new one comes in. So, you don’t just have to be.
Manically checking Yelp all day. That’s not healthy. You lose yourself in that. So, find a tool that will help you with that. There are tons of them out there. Find a good one that fits for you. That allows you to keep an eye on all of these specifically reviews that are coming in and then go out there and respond to them.
If you don’t know how to respond to review, go to our website, we’ve got articles there. I’ve written two one on how to respond to good reviews on how and one on how to respond to bad reviews. We’ve also talked about it before on this show. So, check that out. But please respond to reviews as just your customers begging you for attention.
They’re just walking up to you with this on a silver platter taken. Just take it. Then you’ve got something called social listening, which is something that Mike referenced earlier. This is something is a technology that allows you to monitor social media. Twitter is the big one, just because it’s a more searchable index.
Platform. And there’s, it’s all text-based so it’s easily easy to search, but if someone tweets about you within a certain radius, this technology will tell you about it. If someone mentions a certain keyword or a phrase that you have identified within a certain parameter, it will notify you of that.
So again, you are Chick-fil-A and you set up a social listing here to if anyone, within 10 miles of my location or within five miles of my location, tweets about a chicken sandwich, it’s going to tell me about it. And I’m going to be able to jump on there and pull them in for the sale, offer them
I don’t know whether you want a coupon or maybe ask them to download the app and jump onto a loyalty rewards program. Apparently, that’s going to work for a third of people, whatever you offer, you want to put out there, it’s just allowing you to jump into the conversation and be aware of how people are talking about you.
These technologies can be used in a number of ways. Again, like that’s a nice and creative one. If anyone tweets about a particular phrase, you can jump in the conversation. You can also monitor employees; social media is that way. And if one of your employees is bad mouthing you out there, cause that looks pretty bad.
So, you can address that and hopefully fix whatever it is that they’re mad about. Happy employees are always important. Just as important as happy customers. So again, putting out, I’m going to summarize here, and then toss it back to you here. As I know we’re coming up on time.
Customer attention is. So important and is a very scalable way to increase your business increase profits. There are a couple of technologies out there that can help you to do that. There’s a ton of options out there, but of course we do have all of these here at Twilio solutions. Mobile apps are awesome loyalty reward program, either built into the app or built into email marketing, text message, marketing, some sort of marketing plan like that.
In order to leverage those here, you have to collect their information. So do something to collect their than zero- or first-party data to collect their emails, collect their phone numbers. You can do that by having a smart WIFI system where you have to provide your information to access the WIFI.
Or you can just ask for their phone number and say, hey, you want to join our program or whatever, there are low tech ways to do this as well. Review management or reputation management software’s go out and get one. They don’t cost very much. And they allow you to see what people are talking about.
How people are talking about you online. And when new reviews come in from a multitude of different review sites so that you can engage with those, and you can respond to them properly. And then finally social listening. There are tons of social listening tools out there that will allow you to engage with your customers, where they live to see what they like, what they don’t like and catch problems, way earlier.
All of those tools are going to help you to increase customer attention, which again, Mike put out there at the very beginning, you put, you increase your customer retention by 5%. Your profits go up by 15%. That is math. All of us can get behind by doing. You want to toss it back to you, Mike, and I’m going to do so in the form of a question from our favorite viewer, Mr.
Jeff Frye, why do we not see more locally owned places doing rewards programs? It was great question, Jeff. I, I think partly that’s a good question, and I would be I’d be curious, to know, cause I don’t really know, I’d be guessing, what percentage of local businesses are doing loyalty rewards programs?
I think it’s a, probably a couple of different things. They don’t have the infrastructure, whether it be an app or a way in their POS or even a text messaging platform or something like that in order to easily orchestrate it and execute it. And then they may not be seeing the value in it.
A lot of a lot of local businesses or maybe, psychologically still fearing the oh God, what was that thing called? Groupon. Yeah. They may still be fearing the group on days. A lot of businesses got burned on Groupon and God, there were so many knockoffs out there for a while.
And they all jumped on board with it. It worked for some of them, but a lot of them, it didn’t. And unfortunately, that is a very primitive, type of a loyalty rewards program compared to what we’re talking about these days. But I don’t know if business owners have been explained to that concept properly that, hey, we’re not just giving away coupons.
We’re not just discounting stuff for the sake of discounting stuff, in order to get people in the door, that’s not what this is. This is about building. Brand and loyalty and engagement in, in association between the customer and you, and bringing them into your fold and vice versa, that’s what the, that’s what real customer loyalty or rewards programs should be focused on, not just giving stuff away to discount, but I think maybe people hear that here.
Oh Lord, I don’t want to, I don’t want to do that anymore. And so there could be a little bit of miseducation there which is probably, people like are miles an asphalt for not being out there explaining this more. But yeah, that’s a great question. I would say. Yeah, they don’t have the system set up and they maybe don’t have the right perspective and outlook on how to execute that.
It’s because it’s really much more than just giving stuff away at the day. But then yeah, miles. And then just to Jeff, if you have a follow-up to that, put it down there be happy to answer it, but yeah. Then going back to what you were saying, miles, I totally agree. Yeah. The only other tool I throw in there, which I just mentioned is a text messaging platform.
I think that is gold for sure. Customer engagement and customer retention. I went on a recent trip stuffed to Nashville and Atlanta. I don’t think I went to a single restaurant or store that did not use a text messaging platform. Everybody was using a text messaging platform and customers were more than happy to, to opt in.
It was, is really effective and interesting to see those businesses using it to this end. And then the final points I’ll make your just two quick points. And to follow up on, on you made miles was that none of this technology is worth a lick. If you can’t just simply take care of your customers.
That is the bottom line on this customer retention story is just a good old school. Do what you say. You’re going to do, take a care of them. Don’t be ask them and get them what they need and want. And that’s going increase your customer retention far more than anything else. These tools are just ways to amplify what you’re already doing to take great care of your customers.
It’s not to replace that in any way, shape, or form. And then the final point I’ll make your miles is just about listening, which you brought up several times there. And just to tie this back into the question you asked me earlier about, what makes a good salesperson, that’s it? And so, what makes a business better at sales?
It’s really listening. And I think a lot of times we get that turned around, we think it’s no, we need to the message better. We need the message louder. Yeah. Yeah. That could be part of it, but you’re not going to message better if you haven’t first listened and at a high level. And so that is really the most important part when we’re talking about an individual salesperson or organization as a whole is listening to our customers first and foremost.
And listening twice as much as we speak and we’re going to be better off increasing our customer retention, our sales from that. So that’s all I got miles, a good discussion, and I’m a hunger for some fried chicken, old son. Oh, no. Yeah, we do have to wrap up here. We are coming up on just past an hour here, but we did have one final point here.
One of the clothes on, of course, our favorite topic of golf.
Jeff says congrats to Mike on winning the U S open picks. Why did I let him pick first? Why this is a recurring theme on this show? We always say I hit it, hit pay dirt. On Sunday, my boy, John Rahm did come through and I’m not trying to brag, I did go a little bit on Phil last month that the at the PGA championship.
So, I’m playing with house money right now, going into the open Jeff and look forward to that coming up here in a few weeks. But yeah, it was great tournament lots of exciting golf happening on the weekend. Awesome. I’ll end it here with a shameless self-plug. If you like what we’re doing here.
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And let some other people see it. If you want to learn more about this, make sure to follow us at wild men web on your social media of choice, go to Wildman web.com. Like I said earlier, we’ve got some awesome articles up there. We have the archives of this show. So, if we said something real smart, a couple of weeks ago, you could jump back and see that what we said or just tune in next week next Wednesday at 11 we will be live streaming here again on our Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch.
Send us through your questions that ask while men at wild, my web.com and we will get to those next week. All right. That is, it. Thanks Mike. As always. We’ll see you again next Wednesday. My pleasure. All right. Bye everyone.
