Email Marketing Like A Pro

Email Marketing Like A Pro!

David Hoffman, Sr Director of Product Management from Service Titan

Josh Crouch: Happy Wednesday. An early Merry Christmas to everyone that tunes in and watches or listens to the Service Business Mastery Podcast. Today we are talking. It’s a great time to talk about it. 2022. Everyone’s trying to plan and put their goals into place and get their marketing systems set up. We are talking with David Hoffman, who works at Service Titan. He was the product manager who brought about this. He was in charge of the Service Titan Marketing Pro platform, which if you are not on service, Titan is an email marketing and now also a direct mail solution that helps automate some of your customer interaction, including follow-ups and things of that nature. So Tersh, you guys, you have marketing pro, don’t you?

Tersh Blissett: Yep, we do.

Josh Crouch: Do you want to talk a little bit about that before we bring them on?

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, absolutely. So my thought with Marketing Pro is the automation factor of it. And you and I, even just a few seconds [00:01:00] ago we were talking about this Ari Meisel, he’s like a, I don’t know, a mentor of mine. I was fortunate enough to meet him in person a couple of years back, and he wrote a book called Replaceable Founder, and it talks about automation and taking yourself out of the the daily grind and the fire fighting type of thing. And one of the things I really like about marketing pro is the fact that it’s got some I’m sure there’s a technical term and Dave can correct me on this, but it’s more like a if this then that type scenario. So like if if this invoice is still or if they didn’t open our close estimate then and they’re over 90 days old or under 90 days old, then it can send out an email sequence to them. And it’s really cool. Once you build that email sequence, you can just you literally can set it and forget it almost. And I have some that I’ll go back and they’ll reply to it. And in the marketing [00:02:00] campaign it tells me where they actually replied and what what email campaign they replied to. And it was one that I had set up last year and I completely forgotten about it actually. And so it was really cool to, to have almost service Titan drumming up a little bit of extra work for us to off of stuff that that I had forgotten that, that we had set up. But, and that honestly, if you can set up automation that does that kind of stuff that’s that’s the name of the game replace me.

Josh Crouch: Yeah. Well, let’s think about it. I mean, we’ve all seen the statistics through our years of the number of touch points before a sale is made. And it’s no different with the home sales unless it’s 100 degrees outside. Right. 100 degrees. That can make a decision day. But when it’s it’s milder in those those shoppers that do a little more research, you need to stay in front of them. And a lot of times the human part of that is, oh, when did I follow up with them last? I don’t want to follow up with them too quickly. I don’t. You just set it up to a point where it’s like, here, this is the sequence based on what we [00:03:00] think is best for educational purposes and staying in front of them. And you can do it in a non salesy way. And so David is going to jump into that. We’re going to talk about marketing automation just in general, kind of where he thinks the market’s going, especially for the trades versus, you know, maybe some things that can bridge some of the e-commerce things to to the trades industries where we have some gaps. So stay tuned and we’ll be right back.

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Tersh Blissett: Hey. Welcome to the show, David.

David Hoffman: Hey, thanks for having me. Absolutely.

Tersh Blissett: So for those who don’t know who you are, a little bit about your background. Would you mind sharing who you are, where you came from? What makes you an expert in this realm of things?

David Hoffman: Yeah, sure. So my background is pretty deep in the software. Before I even got into product management, I was a software engineer for about ten years, long time, then been doing software for a very long time, both [00:05:00] on technical and product side. Before Service Titan, I was in the ecommerce space. I worked for a company that that did marketing automation for ecommerce companies, some pretty big brands like like Figs Target and I joined Service Titan to help launch Marketing Pro and bring some of that expertize from the eCommerce space, some of the things they’re doing into the, the local services. And so that’s, that’s how I got to service Titan and Marketing Pro and definitely excited to be here. I love this space, by the way.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, I do too. Personally.

Josh Crouch: It’s a it’s a space. Once you get into or you fall into it, you just you love the people you work with and you kind of just stick around like it’s hard to it’s hard to leave. I kind of I fell in the same way. I had no intentions of being in this home service space. But here we are ten years later.

David Hoffman: It’s really the best. [00:06:00] You know, like the customers that I’m working with, they care so much more about their business. I feel like just just the fact that there’s a social media sort of groups out there, I can’t think of other businesses that are really like that. Like, oh, really?

Josh Crouch: They’re very passionate.

David Hoffman: Very passionate. The line between personal and business, there is no line. It’s it’s all there. And I love it. I just love that that aspect of it.

Tersh Blissett: That’s really cool. What would you say? What would you say is the the biggest thing? I don’t know. There’s a couple there’s a loaded question a little bit. What would you say the biggest difference between E Commerce’s and the home service industry before you got in? And and what would you say is one thing is that you you see now that has come from e commerce that’s over in the home service side of things.

David Hoffman: Yeah. [00:07:00] I mean the biggest, the biggest difference is the level of tooling and sophistication on the software side, like, like E commerce even say a, I don’t know, a brand like Target, right? They’re they’re a retail brand. They have stores everywhere, but they embrace technology, I think, in a in a different way than the home services have until until sort of recently. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think the thing that I want to bring and the changing part of the of home services is really that embracing of software and automation, it’s no longer like this ancillary thing that you do, sort of just because everyone else is doing it. It’s really a core part of your business now or that’s that’s the way it’s going. And and I think those companies like that are [00:08:00] the big E companies that it is. That’s who they are. That’s their business is both technology and, say, retail or fashion or something like that.

Tersh Blissett: I love how you brought in Target there because it’s it’s very easy for me to picture when I when I think e-commerce like just a a site like Amazon, it’s very e-commerce driven. And then when it comes to social or to the service, the customer service side of things, it’s easy for me to say, well, their ecommerce store, they don’t have to interact with the client a whole lot. You figure it out the automation side of as soon as it’s sold and it goes to shipping and all that stuff. But then you brought up Target and the fact that they still have locations, they have brick and mortar. So they’re similar to us in the service industry. They still have to perform for the client. Right. And so I feel like there’s a lot that can be taken from that. I love to [00:09:00] think outside of our industry whenever it comes to how do we how we can improve our business and how we can improve processes within my business. Service Emperor It’s one of those things where I’m like, I don’t want to do exactly what the other AC and plumbing company, electrical company down the street is doing. I want to do something that’s outside of our industry and it’s amazing to think about something like Target that. I mean, who was it that I mean, heck Sears, they just like the Sears book. We always had that every Christmas. It was like my parents would.

Josh Crouch: Remember doing that and make my. That was how I made my Christmas list.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And item number. And then we gave it to our parents and stuff and now they’re gone, you know? And it’s that that’s what I feel like. The home service industry is going to be very similar. You’re going to have some of these mom and pop shops that are going to stay forever. But in in the long run of things, we really need to we have to update with [00:10:00] the times and see what everybody else is expecting out of us as a I mean, they they don’t know most often they don’t understand that we’re not the same as Amazon, but they still expect the same treatment as a target or something e-commerce related like that.

David Hoffman: Oh, yeah, they absolutely do. You know, like we do a lot of you can see my data hat in the background. We we do a lot of analysis and studies here and we did a survey of homeowners and the differences in consumer preference between older homeowners and and the millennials is is pretty astounding. The all the older homeowners I am looking off to the side because I’m going to pull up the data right now. Oh, you’re good. It was something like. I think it’s about 90% of people 65, [00:11:00] 90 or 95% of those 65 and older preferred to get on the phone. But if you looked at the millennials, 34 and younger, it was 50%. That’s how they preferred to book a job. And the other 50% was online using some sort of Web scheduler, Google, Yelp, text messaging, like all these different channels. And I read an article, too, recently that half of all the majority of all home buyers now are are in that younger group. So if you can’t forget about phones, obviously phones are obviously really, really, really important. But things are changing. And as the the demographics skew younger, you’re going to have to keep up with that and have those digital interactions.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, it’s funny you mention that, because just the other day my [00:12:00] wife was out of town and it was me and all the kids at the house and she was like, Just order pizza from pizza. And I was like, okay, I’ll do that. And then I was thinking to myself, Man, I don’t want to call Pizza Hut. I don’t want to deal with that nonsense. Like I’m going to go through a call tree and then I won’t have to deal with some punk that doesn’t really want to take my order. And I was like, You know what? Screw this. And not only that. What the craziest thing and this is this is really one of my pet peeves. And I think it’s partially because of being a business owner. They don’t offer me all the options available. They’re just like, they’re just going to give me whatever they remember and just leave it at that. And then I get online and I order the pizza from this huge menu. Oh, it’s a massive menu. And then, like, I get this crazy family box that we’ve never had before because it’s and so it’s like I walk out of Pizza Hut and my kids are like, What in the hell is in your hand? Like, this thing is like three times the size of a pizza. I was like, honestly, I bet I [00:13:00] bet.

Josh Crouch: You spent more money because you shopped online than you would have done just over the phone.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they were told me the special like two for $10 or something like that and I wanted to spend like 50 or 60 bucks. And, and the thing about it is, I mean, sure, we ate it and we enjoyed it, but like I just liked the the ability of being able to go online and do it. Now, keep in mind that I’ve also had bad experiences. We were out of town and had Uber eats, and then we waited 45 minutes for them to tell me that the store was actually closed and it was like, Oh, this is if we would just called, we would have known that they were closed. So it’s a catch 22 it depending on how well you are doing it when it comes to the online e-commerce side of things, for sure.

David Hoffman: Yeah, absolutely. One new feature we’re launching is the Web scheduler. It’s in beta right now, but it should be rolling out. I’m not sure if this is different.

Tersh Blissett: Different? This is different than the. The old Web scheduler.

David Hoffman: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This this is a lot different. It’s [00:14:00] mobile friendly. It hooks into your actual schedule. It uses for those of you not on service titan and uses some advanced scheduling functionality that we that we have. So when you display times when you see a time on, on the web, just like our GLC integration, these are like actual real times time slots that are available. And that’s the expectation of consumers now, right? I don’t like I’ve never called Instacart in my entire life and I do expect my Instacart to show up in the time window they gave me. And it should be that way for the trades to, you know, like software should deliver that for you. And we’re, we’re working pretty hard to get that out. And soon we’re going to go straight to the disk dashboard from the Web scheduler and yeah, yeah.

Tersh Blissett: Now currently [00:15:00] we can do that with our LSA. Correct? Or it goes to the booking page, it.

David Hoffman: Goes to the booking page and puts in all the details and you got to click book. But this is the experience people are expecting and we having that end to end automation and having to go straight to the dispatch board and then using some of our other more advanced features to to reshuffle the board the right way. That’s that that gets you that end to end that Instacart type experience for the homeowner which is I think what people in my I guess younger than me the millennials are looking for.

Josh Crouch: I agree. Yeah, I think well, I think if you think about it, people want guaranteed appointments because they don’t. The old days of the cable company, we’re going to be there between eight and five and they show up at 430 and you’ve got to be home all day. You know, it’s stuff like that where even cable companies have figured out they got the little like the guys on the similar service Titan [00:16:00] and other softwares. They got the guy that’s on the way, you know, exactly when they’re going to be at your house, which is I mean, think about it from a perspective like, Oh, I’m going to go run an errand. I got to go pick up my kid. I got to go run my dog here or whatever, you know, exactly when someone’s going to be back to your house so you can still live your life and that convenience people will pay for that service experience instead of.

Tersh Blissett: Well, we call.

Josh Crouch: You and run the way, but it’s going to be in this four hour, hour window.

Tersh Blissett: We used that a lot in our whenever we’re first talking with the client, when we first schedule a call like, hey, look, you’re going to get a notification in your email, click on that or your text messaging, click on that link and you can follow the technician as if similar to like an Uber or Lyft type type scenario. And they’re like, Oh wow, really? We can do that kind of thing. Yeah. So if you’re, if we’re 45 minutes away and you need to run up to the to the corner store real fast, you can see us right there, you know, right where we are. You’re tracking us constantly and people love that, that feature alone. Yeah.

David Hoffman: And the cool thing about [00:17:00] technology and web schedulers in general is they don’t they don’t get sick a web schedule. They can’t put you on hold. Right.

Josh Crouch: They work 24.

David Hoffman: How many how many how many jobs do you potentially lose? Because some of that got put on hold and they got frustrated and went somewhere else. You know, like, good point. These these things are essential.

Josh Crouch: Yeah, I can add to that because I been on the marketing side we use call rail and for service type customers will connect call rail to service type and rate just so we can help them out because a lot of companies the it isn’t necessarily anymore leads to operational side but there’s a lot of companies where the phone rings for like 30, 40 seconds before like a voicemail clicks over and the voicemail doesn’t have anything about, hey, sorry for the inconvenience of making you wait. Please go to our online booking book, your appointment at your convenience. Otherwise leave a message and then we’ll call you back type of thing. And a lot of times the call ends as soon as voicemail picks up, like almost I would say it’s probably 80 to 90% of the time because people [00:18:00] just don’t leave voicemails anymore and having something maybe even when you like, you have your guys as service titan automated thing where it says this call may be recorded even having something in that initial like before it actually goes to a CSR. If you’d prefer to book online, go here, which you could drive it back to your website, which for marketing guys like me is always a win. So it’s just, there’s, there’s other things that can be, can be done to use the technology to make the service experience better, make your customers happier, and honestly drive your ticket up because they’ll pay for it. We pay for convenience.

David Hoffman: Yeah, I was I was booking something and I was looking through the glasses and I skipped the ones where I had to call.

Tersh Blissett: So you went straight to the ones that you could you could book online because.

David Hoffman: Yeah, it’s because it’s just easier. Like, I don’t want to pick up. [00:19:00]

Josh Crouch: You just want to see how it worked.

David Hoffman: I know how it works. I was a product that I developed or my team developed here, but I just I kind of do that for everything, to be honest. It’s just so much faster. If I need if I want to get three quotes or something, I can schedule three pretty quick. Yeah. Using using people who have online schedulers, it’s just easier.

Josh Crouch: Yeah. Instead of making three phone calls. And then we all know, even though everyone, no one would admit to it, there’s a lot of companies that still don’t answer their phone very well. And so being able to book and make that convenient or, or I haven’t the text to chat type stuff like, like podium and I’m sure you guys have something come up with that to just the convenience people want to people want to text and move on with their life and they’ll wait for response. They don’t want to sit there on your website with a live chat person per say and sit there for 15 minutes while you’re going back [00:20:00] and forth. They just sent me a text when you’re ready and I’ll just move on with my life in the meantime.

Tersh Blissett: So tell me about the one that the feature you just came out with or you’re coming out with here soon. With the text, the chat.

David Hoffman: Text, the chat. It’s it’s a widget that sits on your website and they put in the, their name, phone number and a message and it’ll just kick off the chat with the CSRs on your screen.

Tersh Blissett: Now that’s and that goes to a text message to them or does it stay on their website?

David Hoffman: No, it goes the text message to them.

Tersh Blissett: Oh, okay. Cool, cool, cool.

David Hoffman: Yeah. Which is nice because then they’re not just sitting on your website. Right, waiting for a response. I can kind of move on.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah. If they bounce off the website for some reason, then you’ve just lost that interaction. That’s that’s the tough part about strictly web chat type features.

Josh Crouch: Well, and then so I like that it goes into that section where you guys can do the chats because then you can always rehash that too. Like, if they never answered, you keep following [00:21:00] up until they give you like, stop contacting me.

David Hoffman: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Text is really important and people see it on their phones and they they will write like if they started that chat, the odds are that they’re not going to just go see you.

Tersh Blissett: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s a that’s 100% fact. Now, what do we have to have to in order to have that feature is that.

David Hoffman: It’s in beta right now. Those aren’t like those are just that’s just core core features.

Josh Crouch: That’s what will be a part for anyone that has service type and they can get the text chat thing set up.

David Hoffman: And and the new web scheduler.

Josh Crouch: Okay.

David Hoffman: We can we can talk about marketing CRO now though.

Josh Crouch: Yeah, I know we’ve talked about everything else, but this was all really cool stuff like this is this is the well we’re looking into 2022. This is the future here because I mean, we talked about Target and the one thing we didn’t talk about is they took the so the online shopping [00:22:00] in a lot of places do this now even small grocery stores they take the online shopping experience and pair it with the in-person experience where they have all the stuff kind of sitting at the front of the store, you just come pick it up and just creating a different level of service experience because that’s what people want. And I think a lot of times as contractors and. We just do things the way we’ve always done them because that’s just the way they’ve been done.

Tersh Blissett: The way it is.

Josh Crouch: Just the way just the way it is. Right. And the problem is the rest of the world, especially even pre-pandemic and especially the last two years, has changed dramatically. And it’s just one of those things that if we don’t move with the times, the companies that do, all the millennials buying up the homes of the I hate to say it, the older generation that’s moving out, maybe moving to like those senior living condos and stuff like that where you’re probably not going to need to service them as much. All those houses are going to be bought up by younger people and you’ve got to make sure you’re ready for it.

David Hoffman: Yeah, absolutely not. Not to get to [00:23:00] tech nerd, but Marc Andreessen, pretty, pretty famous VC wrote that article ten years ago, How Software is Eating the World. And it’s really how this sort of transformational moment where software is becoming integral to everyone’s business. And you think about sort of all the examples like how Netflix is really an entertainment company, but they’re also a software company. And I really think the trades too, you’ve got to be kind of a software company at the same time and deliver that sort of digital experience.

Tersh Blissett: Oh, it’s 100% correct. I mean, that’s like we have one of our televisions in our house is a smart television and it was so annoying that I couldn’t get Netflix on. I bought one of the screencast things and then it was like, But Netflix is just like, Oh, you want Netflix? Let’s put it over here. Like it just pops up. They know like they, they can sense [00:24:00] that I want it on this television. So they made it a lot easier than HBO. Max Which is impossible to get the streaming.

Josh Crouch: I agree, man. I had to like buy a new TV to be able to get the option for that.

David Hoffman: What is it? What is it with that? I don’t.

Tersh Blissett: Know. I don’t know. And they just it’s like they don’t want you they want you to pay for it, but they don’t want you to use it. Yeah, but yeah. No. And to think that like you said, they provide used to back in the day it was like, okay, well we’re going to get you some DVDs and then you figure it out the rest of the way. And now it’s like, okay, we’re going to figure it out. The whole experience for you. And it’s that’s where we need to be focusing and that’s where we need to be working towards.

David Hoffman: Absolutely.

Josh Crouch: So, David, we’ll jump back in our, what, 20 minutes in. We haven’t really talked about marketing. Crowe is and maybe this is marketing pro related and also like email marketing related. So customers that are really using it well, I’m sure your feedback a lot. What are they? What are they doing even for? Let’s say they’re not on service [00:25:00] Titan and we have other listeners on different software. What are they doing that has been so effective for their business and they just think is is game changing for them?

David Hoffman: Yeah. I mean, we can go I’m going to take a step back and go sort of the origin story of marketing pro just to tell you why we even developed it. Say you had a list of members that you wanted to follow up with for for whatever reason, the old way of doing it would be to get a report, download the report, put it in a spreadsheet, do whatever filtering you needed to do. Upload that. Upload the filter sheet into MailChimp. Run your campaign one time. Download the results, match that back with the revenue numbers and see how effective your campaign is. That’s a lot of steps. That’s a lot of work to run. The key thing [00:26:00] here, which is personalized, targeted email marketing, that’s how you should be doing it. That’s how e commerce and everyone else is doing it. They’re looking at, what’s your situation, what do you need right now? And they’re sending a message that matches that. The whole thing about right message, right time. Yeah. And so that’s what we try to do with marketing pro. So the bacteria question those companies that are doing really well on marketing pro, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re building the audiences that are very specific. They’re using templates that have specific messaging, say like following up on an estimate or renewing an expiring membership and then automating those. So they don’t have to think about it all the time so that those messages go out at the right time, say like a week or two before membership expires. And that’s how they’re being successful. And because I love data, I’ll [00:27:00] tell you, those customers that are switching to marketing pro, they’re gaining on media and this is even those who are using it. Well, 356 jobs per year.

Tersh Blissett: Okay.

David Hoffman: And before and after.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah.

Josh Crouch: So with. What was I going to ask?

Tersh Blissett: Oh, man. So I started.

Josh Crouch: Giving data and I went blank.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, no, I can. I can ask more questions until we’re blue in the face here. So whenever we’re signing up for Marketing Pro or we’re doing anything, marketing pro was my guess. So the the problem that I have and I’ve seen Sara’s on here, too, and she’s a marketing whiz and she, she could probably like she’d probably laugh at this question because I’m not the creator of content. Like I’m not a great content creator. We put out a ton of content, but I’m not a great creator [00:28:00] of it. How do I know what’s good and what’s bad whenever it comes? I mean, because you have templates built into to marketing pro, but I mean, leave it to me. I can still screw that. I can make a bad template. I mean, I can make a great template look bad, you know what I mean? So how do I know where to go with that?

David Hoffman: I would say don’t don’t overthink it. Sarah is actually on my team and she leads the content creation. So you could also just blame her. Sarah Sarah’s fantastic. We have a couple of tools built in to try to help you not mess up your subject lines, which is one of the.

Tersh Blissett: Those are nice. Yeah.

David Hoffman: There’s no quicker way to mess up to go to spam than to put some janky stuff in your subject lines. So we try to protect you there. I like the comment there. Be authentic. I think being authentic is great. [00:29:00] And just what would you say to that person in the situation that you’re that you’re trying to message them? You know, just think about it that way and just put that in the email. A lot of the times you try to get too cute and you overthink it. And maybe my personality is just just be straightforward and just get it out there. And the numbers will show. And if. It’s not working. Switch it up.

Tersh Blissett: All day long, I’m like, Oh, I need something that’s real cutesy and artsy. And it’s like, I could sit here for 2 hours. You overthink it. Oh, yeah, way, way overthinking. But one thing I did learn is I’m an excitable type person and I think that things are really exciting. And so I’ll use exclamation points. And one of the things that was like, you want to go to spam folder, use exclamation points. I was like, Really? I always use all caps.

David Hoffman: Yeah.

Tersh Blissett: Oh yeah, that was crazy. I had no idea [00:30:00] that was so that was very helpful in itself for sure.

Josh Crouch: Do the people that struggle using marketing pro or any kind of email marketing do you find it’s it’s like lack of like. Ideas on creating sequences. Like they just don’t like they can’t think about like. Like if somebody books an estimate, you can start a sequence before you go out on the job. And then after that type of job, if it’s not closed set, do you find that the ones that aren’t utilizing marketing pro to the best ability? That’s kind of like one of the bigger problems is they just can’t like envision these sequences and what, what kind of content needs to get out there.

David Hoffman: Yeah, I generally agree with that. We’re, we’re working on that to a particular feature to help make it easier to do that, to do campaigns sort of in a box. The audience building seems to be the the hardest part because we let you do basically anything you can kind [00:31:00] of automate off anything you want. We put in an example audiences to help make it easier and the templates and all that. But I would say generally that’s that’s where they get caught up. But again, it’s still it’s still easier than trying to do targeted marketing without it. And if you don’t have marketing pro I. You beg everyone out there for the good of your business, try to do some targeted email marketing, some at least once a month. I know it can take it’s extra work, but it’s definitely worth it because you want to maximize the value of every customer you get. And the best way to do that is to email market, direct mail, retention, marketing, all that.

Tersh Blissett: Tell me this. You’re a numbers guy. Do you know the numbers where it’s we’ve hit the the too many emails and is there a minimum that’s like a.

David Hoffman: Yeah, [00:32:00] that’s that’s an interesting question in my work at my previous company and that dealt with E Commerce. It’s actually something that we want to bring to the trades eventually. But the idea of like personalization, that’s also something that can be personalized. Some people can tolerate more emails or want more emails than than others. Sure, we do have a feature in there identifying if somebody is dormant, you can just filter them out of your list. But that’s a personalized thing I think, in the future. So if there.

Tersh Blissett: Is that bad, I mean, should we not try in like, hey, let’s get to the top of your email inbox.

David Hoffman: So if somebody hasn’t done a job for you for or somebody hasn’t interacted with you for like two years.

Tersh Blissett: Gotcha. Yeah.

David Hoffman: Maybe. Like, why why are you going to continue to email them? Like, at that point, [00:33:00] you’re probably in their promos tab and they just don’t pay attention.

Tersh Blissett: Oh, good point. Yeah.

Josh Crouch: Well, I think it’s important to so and I always stress this to people. So email automation is probably the first thing I would set up based on filters and audience and stuff like that. But for those people that if they haven’t heard from you in two years, you’re also doing something wrong in your business, especially most businesses. We do try to turn service calls into maintenance and new installs into maintenance like you try to keep. So that way we don’t have these crazy demand seasons. Everyone wants maintenance and service and installs all at the same time. And then we got three months where we don’t have anything. Send out a once, even if it’s just once a month or once every other month, send out something, some kind of education, find an educational piece somewhere else, turn it into your words and send it out like it doesn’t even need to take that much work, but at least send something touch base with them. [00:34:00]

David Hoffman: Absolutely. Yeah. If you’re not.

Josh Crouch: Up to date on your on your business, like did you add a new employee, send send something out to your audience because if they don’t hear from you, guess what? They’re going to forget about you the next time they need somebody. And I think Marketing Pro also handles bulk emails. Correct. It’s not just an email automation. Yeah.

David Hoffman: Yeah, it does. But if you’re not using marketing pro, you use the automation and we have a way to automate on idle what we call idle accounts. So people that you haven’t had a call from in a while, you can automate those emails to them, but. If you’re not on it, just just like you said, one touch base a month, that’s not too much email. I get emails actually every day from all kinds of companies and e-commerce and once a month, I don’t think is over emailing anybody.

Josh Crouch: No, honestly. I mean, if there’s companies you’ve done business with and you and [00:35:00] you start figuring out the content game, people will actually look forward to hearing from you. Yeah, I do think I won’t go into video too much because I love video Tersh. But creating videos is if you if you’re not doing it. Or you’ve heard of it and you don’t know where to start. I would start asking questions because if you’re not doing video very soon, just text type stuff is going to be very hot. I tell your kids, don’t watch or read. They watch videos. That’s what they do all day long. So the days of text marketing is going to be there’s still a place for it.

David Hoffman: But yeah.

Tersh Blissett: Videos are there to watch. Are there any templates out there for a video if we want to embed a video into it, you know.

David Hoffman: You can bet the links.

Tersh Blissett: You can.

Josh Crouch: Embed. You guys can embed that. I think you can embed the YouTube link in there and it will I think you can even embed like a. Like a thumbnail. [00:36:00] If you really get into it, you can do stuff like.

David Hoffman: You can embed the thumbnail if you try to get it to play. There’s hacks where you can try to get it to play. Do not do that because that’s a way you can go to spam.

Tersh Blissett: Good to know, because that’s exactly where my mind was going, right?

David Hoffman: I mean, you think about it, somebody’s scrolling through their email, the video starts playing and noise. It’s kind of not cool, I mean, from the consumer standpoint.

Tersh Blissett: Oh, yeah, yeah. Especially if it’s set up to auto play and then you’re like, Oh.

David Hoffman: They’re in a quiet place where they’re not supposed to be checking.

Josh Crouch: They’re blasting the.

David Hoffman: Video.

Josh Crouch: Then all of a sudden that’s happened. All of us at one point or another.

Tersh Blissett: Oh, that’s hilarious.

Josh Crouch: Awesome. So what’s what’s what’s what’s coming down the line, I guess with marketing pro in the product?

David Hoffman: Yeah. The vision of Marketing Pro is to become this comprehensive data driven marketing automation [00:37:00] platform for the trades. So we started with the email, but we’re already into we have a reputation management solution that we can talk about a little bit where we’re doing things on the conversion side with web scheduler and the chat to texting. But we want to be full funnel and we think we’ve got an opportunity to do that for the trades and in a pretty interesting way. So that means on the awareness part of the funnel helping optimize your ads, we have some some cool betas going on right now around using the data within Service Titan to help optimize ads. We’re we’re coming out with a solution to help get better data in more complete data into service.

Josh Crouch: Titan V is dynamic number insertion right so that so that way you can track the. Essentially a little earlier in the funnel where the lead came from to your website to the conversion aspect.

David Hoffman: And [00:38:00] also integrating that into the Web scheduler. So you don’t you don’t want to get campaign attribution for Web scheduler. That doesn’t tell you anything. You want to know where they came from higher in that funnel and just having more visibility there.

Josh Crouch: Are you guys working on anything with with? I know there’s there’s probably a lot of areas to or muddied waters for text messaging, but are you guys working on anything for along with the email campaigns like text message campaigns, stuff like that?

David Hoffman: Yeah. Just one. And I want to say, it’s going to go into open beta. This this week is our.

Tersh Blissett: Timing.

David Hoffman: Is our SMEs for recurring services feature so it’s a pretty just because there’s a lot of rules around text messaging. This is transactional message that’s built on a prior business relationship. So if they have a recurring service [00:39:00] that’s set up, this is a reminder text that they’ll get to schedule the service. That’s going to be eventually that will be to all service type new customers having the SMS recurring service in the future. We we want to look at SMS for marketing as well. There’s a lot of rules around that and it’s just taking time to develop that out.

Josh Crouch: Yeah, there’s, there’s a ton of rules around that and especially as more and more in e-commerce is going to ruin it for all of us. Right.

Tersh Blissett: Right.

Josh Crouch: They’re going to screw it up so bad that by the time we and well that in election season.

Tersh Blissett: Oh yeah.

Josh Crouch: Yeah they’re going to screw it up so bad by the time it gets around to us it’s you know, it will be at least we’ll know the rules and we won’t make those mistakes but.

David Hoffman: Yeah. With all the the ATP ten DLC stuff, I’m sure maybe [00:40:00] you haven’t heard about that, but that’s a whole new set of rules and on text messaging that we’re all we’re all dealing with right now.

Tersh Blissett: So that’s where we had to we had to register our phone numbers, didn’t we? Or something to.

David Hoffman: Yeah. As far as more of the future, obviously we’re sort of working on the awareness, the consideration, part of the funnel. We already have reputation management and some interesting data on reputation. Let me bring this up really quick. So this is just within service titan. So those who are using it versus those who are not, those who are using reputation management to generate more reviews or have a their call volume growth is 18% versus 13%. So that’s pretty significant in their revenue growth is higher as well. [00:41:00] Again, even if you’re not using marketing pro, please use a reputation management solution like this is how people decide on whether to call you versus somebody else. It also goes into, as we know, SEO rankings now they’re looking at social, at the number of reviews you have, whether you’re responding to those reviews they’re looking at all that is getting. Obviously, Google doesn’t say, but there’s some evidence to support that. Those go into the algorithm on how you how you show up on your GMB pages. So reputation is really important. And then obviously the conversion piece we already talked about and then retention, we have direct mail is a newer feature email. We’re going to continue to improve as time goes on with some more advanced features that I’m sort [00:42:00] of bringing from the ecommerce space into in the marketing pro.

Josh Crouch: Awesome. Yeah, I think that’s it’s it’s what I like about service make these hires where, like, people like you, they come from. Decide where. Marketing automation is already really advanced and trying to bring that to the trades, and I know they’ve done that with a few other people that I know that are with you guys now. So I think it’s interesting just the strategy of what they’re trying to do and try to bring some of this stuff to us so that way we can figure out how that works. Obviously, a service business versus retail is different, but try to figure out how that works and how that looks in the service space where we’re we’re trying to get in front of we’re getting in someone’s home versus picking out a product. But I think I think you guys are on the right track, especially with the marketing automation. I know that that’s the piece I loved. Of course, I’m a bit of a marketing nerd, so the other stuff, [00:43:00] I like the numbers and stuff too. The marketing side where we’re creating all these automated sequences and stuff like that was was fun for me. And I think that’s it’s not only the future, it’s today. That’s the present. The more, the more you can get ingrained with this. Now, you can stay on top of future changes, but that is present and future.

David Hoffman: I think is.

Tersh Blissett: Good.

David Hoffman: Sort of circling back to what we were originally talking about with the way consumers want to interact, this is part of keeping that conversation going right through through digital means. It’s sending the Thank-You card. It’s reminding them about their point, their upcoming service appointment. It’s just checking in and letting them know updates on your business or something you’re doing in the community. But it’s keeping the conversation going long term.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, I agree with that. I think the biggest thing for me as a business owner is the automation aspect of it like it is. I don’t have to worry about it constantly. As long as it’s [00:44:00] set and it’s operating properly, I can just revisit it every so often. I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways that I have of that whole the whole process.

Josh Crouch: Yeah. You said you set it once and then. Work on other aspects of your business and then come back and set another one once you start seeing if that is working. Awesome. So if any of you guys that are interested, you can certainly book a demo service type. I’m sure they would go over some more of the features. Maybe you could see the back end of the marketing pro product and stuff like that. They would just go to service Time.com, right? Is that where have to a book demos.

David Hoffman: Yeah. There’s a there’s a marketing pro landing page. If you click around on the service titan and you can book a demo specifically for that.

Josh Crouch: We will put that in the show notes just in case I’ll get the link and put that in the show notes when we get that ready. Is there is there anything else that you wanted to talk about, David?

David Hoffman: I [00:45:00] can talk about marketing all day. No, not really. Just whether on service Titan or not. Just pay attention to these things. Retention, marketing, your online reputation, even to how much you’re spending on ads and making sure that you’re optimizing those things. It’s really it’s really important. You want to get the most out of every customer that the cheapest customer you can acquire is one that you already have.

Tersh Blissett: True story.

Josh Crouch: Amen.

David Hoffman: So like, like email is email’s pretty is a pretty effective way to get more jobs and referrals and stuff like that. And don’t forget about that. I know there’s there’s a lot of stuff in in ads and how to acquire more customers. But don’t forget about the customers you already have. That’s going to be your best source.

Josh Crouch: That is a great way to [00:46:00] end the show. That’s a great sticking point. So hopefully people stick around to hear it because it’s such an off forgotten thing. And I know Sarah and I talk about it all the time in the Marketing Pro Group and other places that you if you’ve been in business for any five, ten years, you have a list of really nice list of customers use it. Don’t feel like you’ve got to go spend 5 to $10000 a month on new client acquisition right now. Squeeze the juice out of your list because it’s there. You just don’t know it because you haven’t touched base with them.

Tersh Blissett: And another thing that you mentioned there, Josh, just in case you’re not aware of it, if you if you’re not aware in your service, that end user there is the the service titan mastermind group on Facebook. And if you’re a marketing if you use marketing pro they have a Facebook group is also also so use those to ask questions and definitely reach [00:47:00] out to to the team over at service titan and they will definitely help you out. And Sarah, she’s obviously full of a lot of great information. Also, she was adding a lot of messages here in the chat. So yeah, would that be and said thank you. Thank you so much, David, for spending some time with us today and and really helping us understand what you have going on, plus the real benefit to to using marketing automation in general.

David Hoffman: Yeah, thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun. Happy to come back any time.

Tersh Blissett: Cool, man. We appreciate it. We’ll see.

Josh Crouch: You. Thank you, David.

David Hoffman: Thanks.

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