Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm really excited about my guest today. Everyone talks about the power of personalization, but most websites still treat visitors like strangers passing by a digital billboard. There's so, so much more that you can be doing to personalize and connect with your audience. In this episode of Data Beats Opinion, we're going to do a deep dive into how zero party data, behavioral segmentation, and AI powered content optimization are changing the game for marketing using personalization.
I'm really excited to have on the show Brennan Dunn from Right Message.
All right, welcome to another episode of Databeats Opinion. It's me, Keith Perhack, founder of Segmetrics, and I'm here today with Brennan Dunn, who is the founder of Right Message, as well as a bunch of other stuff, including Double youe Freelancing. Brendan, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, Keith. It's been a while.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: I love that I say us, even though it's just me.
The royal us.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: The royal us, exactly.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: So we've known each other forever. I think when you launched Double your Freelancing, we were the first podcast. Not Psychmetrics, but the Patrick McKenzie Calzumius podcast that I was on was the first podcast that you went on on that whole promotion tour.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Was that like 2012? Like are we dating 2012? Yeah, yeah.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: No, 2012. 2011. Yeah, it was a long time ago.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: We're old.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: It is consistent. So give me a quick introduction for everyone who doesn't know what is Right Message. What are you doing? What do you focus on?
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Yeah, so Right Message has changed quite a bit over the last few years.
But our current focus is we help online creators basically learn more about their audience so that you can send them better content, which leads to more conversions. So the kind of the big picture idea is when you do one to one sales, your close rate is higher because you can get very specific and very relevant.
But most websites, most email campaigns tend to be like billboards where it's one size fits all and Right Message helps you find that middle ground where you can basically personalize the content you show people with the goal of again, getting more people to buy.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And is that so how does that personalization work? Like, so if you're in a sales process, that makes sense. Okay, we're having a one on one conversation. But so Right Message, I guess for the non technical people, how does it kind of work and set up? Like how can you do marketing individually but at scale?
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So what most people do with us is they use us to collect what's called zero party data. So this would be interests, focuses, goals, pain points, identities about your audience. And usually this is done immediately after opt in. So what most people are doing with us is people join through lead magnet and then on the confirmation page instead of it saying go and check your email, it says, you know, welcome, can we find out a bit more about you so we can serve you better.
And then it'll run people through a basically a series of questions that tend to be multiple choice, including a mixture of open ended. And then all of that data gets synced up to the email platform that was added to.
So that gets added to say their HubSpot record. And then when they send out a bulk email, they can conditionally change parts of that email to say, oh, if the person getting this is in this industry, show a mini case study of somebody else in that industry. And that's basically what we help do is we help you get the data but we also help you generate this personalized emails and generate even on site changes. So if you bring people back to a sales page they can see a different headline depending on maybe what their goal is or something like that.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah, so this is something near and dear to my heart because really that segmentation is something that psychometrics is based around. I mean it's in the name. But that idea that not everyone in your list is equally valuable is super important. Right. This idea that, you know, marketing is applied psychology. It is understanding who's in your audience and delivering the right message, the correct message at that point for that person. And so I always go back to copywriters and designers.
So you have a webinar, you have copywriters attending, you have designers attending. The designers converted 80%, the copywriters converted 10%. Because you're not talking to those copywriters
[00:04:34] Speaker B: as well, you're talking to designers, aren't you? Yeah, that's exactly, exactly.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: And so where right.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Miscadent from was exactly the copywriter versus designer problem that is it because like you mentioned, I used to run a company called W Freelancing and that we had freelancers who I tried to buy my stuff. Right. And my main course was a course on pricing.
And I remember getting an email from a copywriter actually who had said she was told about my course and she's looking at the sales page and it's all these developers and designers who are, you know, the testimonials and the language is very like developery because it used to be I used to sell it to people on hacker News which for those listening is like a place for hackers, for technical people. Yeah.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Also probably the worst industry to sell to, correct?
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Exactly. Well, I made that mistake early on. But that, that, like the, the, that was, that was who the page was written for. And I, I remember from cop writer who said, you know, she'd heard great things about it, but she's like, is this really for me? Right? Like, I don't really see myself in the product.
And I, I had to reply saying, yeah, it's actually pretty agnostic. We don't care what you technically are selling. It's just about the framework of how do you find out like what business implication the project has.
But that, that got me thinking like how many other copywriters have closed the tab and didn't email me? Right? So that's straight up where write message came from. Was thinking, oh, if I could just say like, what kind of freelancer are you? When you join my list, I'm a copywriter, then you're looking at my site and then I just do a bunch of if else if, else ifs that say if they're a copywriter, say the best way to price your copywriting services. Right.
And that's literally where we came from. You know, I was doing that for myself and then Ankur Nagpal, who at the time was CEO of Teachable, wrote out and said like, can you just make this a SaaS so we can do it too? And that's how it came to be.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Wow, that's a great creation story there.
Yeah, it's really interesting. And I think I was just having this conversation last week as well, which is that I think that marketers, as we scale and as especially we do more ads and stuff like that, we stop thinking about, about the people visiting the site as people. I think when we have that communication like you did, where we have an email, it's like, oh, is this right for me? That kind of like removes the blinders for a moment and you're like, oh crap. But normally we're just looking at numbers and so we're not thinking about like, oh, what types of people are coming to the page and is the targeting right? I mean we look at targeting at the ad level or at that level, at that top level, but we don't look at how is the copy resonating with the people viewing it.
I always remember Patrick McKenzie had the bingo card creator and he had this glowing. So the Target audience was 40 to 50 year old school marms.
He had this great testimonial from someone named Bob. And it was this amazing testimony about the features and how great everything was.
And then he had this testimonial from a.
From Susan and it just said, bingo card creator is great. And that's all it said.
And the bingo card create the one from Susan converted like 300 times the one from Bob, because all of the people visiting the site saw themselves in it. And with the copywriter, you had the same thing where all the language, all the text, everything is very designer, is developer, is technical focused, whereas copywriters have a very different marketing worldview because they do very different things. And so, yeah, Ramit said, he always called it the special snowflake syndrome, where everyone thinks, oh, my situation's very unique and can't see past the facade, I guess, of what it is, of what you're selling to see the deeper meaning. So you have to craft towards each person.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: And I think the issue is if you're trying to, if you don't do that and you're thinking, okay, I need to cover all the bases, you, you need to write generically first off to do that, and then you're leaving it up to the reader or the, the, the person to hopefully read between the lines and apply it to their unique situation. Right. So if you have a course on, I mean, the worst is when you have like, say, say you're selling a course on digital marketing and on the, you know, the, the, the social proof is a mixed bag of new people to marketing along with veterans.
And then it's like, no matter if you're just starting out marketing or already, you know, an expert or something like that, you're making the people who are new think, wow, maybe this is going to be a little too deep for me. And you're making the experts think, there's no way any program that can help beginners is going to help me. And then you lost them both. And that's, I think the issue is, you know, we all talk about positioning, and usually we think of positioning as like a organizational focus.
But positioning can just be a dynamic thing where it's, you know, here's our program, but dynamically in real time, applying better to this person, whereas a split second later, somebody else who fits a very different profile is seeing the same program advertised or promoted, but in a different way.
Yeah, yeah. And again, it makes intuitive sense to everyone, but very few people do that.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it makes intuitive sense. Well, I think there's two reasons. I think it makes intuitive sense, but when you're looking at numbers, you Stop thinking about that. Right. You're looking at scale. And I think the second one is that I think a lot of people don't know how to do it. They say, oh yeah, I want to do that, but I don't want to create 800 different pages for this. And I think that's somewhere where. Right. Message really does help a lot. In addition to the segmentation, which is, okay, I have one page where 90% of the copy is the same because I'm selling the same thing, but I can update it in real time for the person who's viewing it then.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly it. And it's funny, like you mentioned, 90% being the same. One of our kind of flagship customers, if you will, is a guy named Justin Welsh who sells online courses and he uses us to change literally the headline and sub headline and that's it.
So if you're a coach who's starting a business, start your coaching business in 2025.
If you're a agency who's looking to scale, scale your agency in 2025.
And he's been running it doesn't take much. No, he's ran a continuous A B test on this for the last year and he averages 118% more conversions just by changing that headline.
And it sounds so, it sounds so like impossible that something that simple can do it.
But if you think of the Java copy is the first, the headlines meant to just draw somebody in. If you see yourself there, you're more likely to keep scrolling and get down to the offer.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think, yeah, there's a, you know, they say that first impression is the best, is the most important impression. And I think that happens with copy as well as really anything.
And seeing that first headline and saying, oh, this is specifically for me, it's talking specifically for me.
Every piece of copy that you see in the rest of the page is then filtered through that. Oh, they're talking to me. Instead of this is generic. I need to be convinced. I'm already convinced. I need to be assuaged at that point.
I'm sure a lot of people are listening to this and they're like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to set up a survey for every single person who comes in and I'm going to get all this information.
As we know, surveys don't work because no one wants to fill out a 20 page survey before they can get any copy or anything. Quizzes, on the other hand, something else. So how does write message kind of thread that Needle of you need the information, you need the data from people, but they don't want to fill out a six page survey before they can get anything.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So the good thing is we have a lot of data that has helped us kind of establish effectively a best practice, at least for our customers. And we're now averaging. Most of our customers now who are doing a new lead segmentation survey are getting about a 80 to 85% completion rate for all new leads, which is passive.
And the reason for that is.
Well, there's a few reasons. The main thing is that most surveys are very almost like inward facing. So you get an email from Delta like how was your flight? Right. You know, this is just for them to update some NPS score that they use on a boardroom presentation. This doesn't benefit me. The difference is if I just fill out a form that says I want to get emails from this person.
And now on the thank you page I'm, I'm shown so I can make sure I give you exactly what you need and nothing more. Can you take 15 seconds to share a bit about what you want from me? And it's all multiple choice. If there is any open ended, it's at the end.
So the first question is inevitably going to be ideally a yes no. Because my thinking here is you should be able to answer that while intoxicated.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Like this should be a very simple thing. People make mistakes all the time with a very loaded question with very loaded answer options and it requires too much thinking. Whereas. Do you own a business? Yes. No yes.
Are you full time on it? Yes no yes.
And that's kind of, you know, treating it as like almost a multi stage thing, which is how we do it.
That tends to work best. And the benefit is that the way our tech works is even if somebody bails on the fifth question, that data's synced up. So even if they don't carry on all the way, you at least have, you know, they have a business, they're full time on it, all that kind of stuff enriched on their new record. So yeah, most of our customers are doing like I said, 80 to 85% completion rates. And there's some other stuff too, like making sure that you don't want to dump them on a page with a survey and a video embed and your nav bar. And like you want it to be a very simple one thing to do.
But yeah, I mean that's, that's generally what people are doing. And then a lot of them are also promoting a Recommended first step offer at the end of the survey. So you add so much things based on your responses. I think you need this entry level course and here's why. And then that's kind of how they're doing tripwires now.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah, I've always liked the idea of that one question survey or that identification, segmentation through action. Right. Like, oh, I want to send you a PDF. Do you want the copywriter PDF, the designer PDF or the developer PDF? And then based on which one they choose, you gave them value. But then you also know exactly who they are and exactly what they're doing with their business.
And yeah, that's always been a huge, huge thing of mine, which is, okay, how can you then segment that and then understand those conversion rates and everything that happens further down the funnel as well?
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's why, I mean, that's where you come in because that's what a lot of our customers then do is they're like, we're syncing up all this custom field data about like industry equals whatever, pain point equals whatever into say HubSpot. And then they go to Segmetrics and set up a like a table report of like, okay, what is the relative lead value for people broken down by pain point.
What is the relative customer value again, broken down by pain point. And that gets really interesting because like you said, not all leads are created equal.
And sometimes it's like, yeah, okay, obviously the college student is going to be worth less than the others.
But sometimes it's like, it's surprising, like, why is copywriter worth so little in comparison? And that's where people tend to get serious with personalization, thinking, okay, how are we losing copywriters? What are we saying that's alienating them? And then they can go and they can set up some email personalizations or sales page personalizations to speak better to copywriters, let it run for a bit and then revisit and say, and look, is the number going up? Like, is the value going up? And that's really where the like CRO angle of personalization comes in.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And because right message is saving everything as custom fields. And do you do tags as well or is it just custom fields for
[00:17:17] Speaker B: choosing one of many? It's only custom fields.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Okay, so you have the custom field, which means not only can you.
And this is one of the things I really like about it is that it's not this silo data thing where, okay, now you got to do everything in write message, like, we're not giving you any of that information in your CRM and so you can use that same information to like you're talking about segment your emails, change the text in your emails, report in it with either your CRM reporting or with segmetrics or something like that. Like I'm a huge believer in that type of open data where okay, now you have this tool that is building on your data, enriching your data and you can do other things with it down the pipeline.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: That's right, yeah. Yeah. And that's what we try to. Or kind of in middleman. We're not trying to be owning your. I mean obviously we have like high level analytics and stuff that you're not going to get through your email platform, but.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Right, exactly.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: The other thing that you know, we talked about, why are copywriters and not to pick on copywriters, but why are copywriters so low value in the funnel is that it's, I always say whenever you see a low dip like that, so you see a segment that's underperforming within your funnel, it's a great opportunity to decide what you want to do with your business. So are copywriters a place that you do want to focus and try to optimize your pages or do you just say like I don't care about this segment. And going back to what you were saying about, you know, if you have generic copy, no one's going to convert. But also if you are trying to serve too many types of customer avatars, you're not going to be able to focus your product and your and your marketing correctly even within being able to segment in real time with something like right message. Right. If you're, if your audiences are too disparate.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Because you're going to, I mean what some people do is they look at us as, okay, it's one thing to say I'm going to give everyone the same product, you know, lead everyone to the same product and dynamically change the way we promote it. But I think the really smart people are thinking, I have multiple products and I'm going to use Right Message as a recommendation engine that will say, oh, okay, this person opted in. They shared X, Y and Z. They should buy this thing first. I'm going to sync that up to my CRM and then after we are in our onboarding emails, we're going to focus them over toward that thing.
Right. And those emails will be personalized based on other data that they've given us. But our goal is going to be to Push them to that product because that's the best fit for them. And obviously that takes time to build out that portfolio. But like if you have, which I think a lot of people, a lot of the creators we work with tend to have is they have, whether it be a multi sided audience or just like these are beginner products, whereas these are more advanced products for something like that where you can get people to kind of self assess. Because obviously what I think a lot of people do is a lot of, you know, they'll say, okay, people join the list. We try to pitch them on the entry level video course and then they buy that and we upsell them on the coaching. Then they buy that and they upsell them on the Mastermind program or something like that. Right. Like there's this funnel and we try to.
That's obviously like a vertical funnel.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: But, but other creators and other businesses have more of these kind of horizontal funnels.
Especially in like the world of E Com, right. Where you might have, you know, I don't know, men's stuff, women's stuff or you know, we have a lot of like fitness people who use us. So some people want to build muscle, some want to lose weight, some want to get better at sleep. Like those are all different end results that they could be pushed toward based on how people answer a intake survey. So I think that's, that's a big thing is like it's not just the personalization of the content, it's also the underlying recommendation engine.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: I think this is something that you keyed me into, dear Lord, many, many years ago, which was not a product funnel as much as a stair set, but a product orbit, right. Where all of these products live in their own little solar systems. And then based on how people interact and what products they buy and their segmentation, they can then move from one orbit to another and go through your entire product, your entire product suite, but in a non linear fashion.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. Which makes more sense. The problem with linear is it tends to be kind of top down organized. Right. Like if, if you're just dictating, okay, first they go to A, then they go to B, then they go to C. It's probably not the ideal path for everyone. And you're, you're losing out if you do that.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Well, I mean, directly to your point, if you start everyone off at the beginner level in your sales funnel and, and you have someone who's coming in at the intermediate or advanced level, then you've instantly sold them on.
This is not right for you. Because we're starting at this level, right? You need to, you need to start at whatever level the customer's at. Not whatever level you, the majority of
[00:22:15] Speaker B: your customers are at.100%. Yeah. And that's, that's the problem when, when everything's like broadcast based, where it's okay in the month of June, we're doing this.
I think it's, it's again, like, like what you and, and me and Patrick Behenzi and people have talked about a decade ago. Like life cycle based, not organizational based. Right. Like life cycle of the person. Life cycle does not just mean, you know, relative to when they joined. It's also relative to who they are and what they need.
And, and yeah, I love that we,
[00:22:48] Speaker A: we kind of the marketing world rediscovers this about every decade or so. They're like, oh yeah, wait a minute, we had a B testing. Oh, wait a minute. Y.
We had customization email. We built out funnels. And then everything gets kind of sanded down to a genericness and then one person figures out, oh wait, remember this stuff? And then it becomes a boom. Everyone has their minds blown and they just go back to what was 10 years ago. And we've been doing that for probably 80, 100 years at this point.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: There's nothing new under the sun.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. Email is dead for the last 40 years is what I've been hearing.
One thing I do want to talk about is so when you are, what do you see as we talked a little bit about action based segmentation, do you see other ways that you can use action?
Not just like survey and like people saying, hey, I'm a copywriter, hey, I'm a designer. But the actions that they take, or maybe from ads or something, how can that feed into a segmentation and optimization funnel?
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Yeah, so we do that. We, we as a, as software support that and a lot of our customers are doing that. And, and you have kind of, there's the zero party, I'm this, I want that kind of inputs. But then you also have behavioral cues. So one thing we do, for example, is we, if you're running say WordPress, we can analyze the most red category of content on your site by a given individual.
So we could say, oh, they're mostly reading articles about marketing. So there's probably a good chance, it's probably somewhat safe to assume that that's what they care about. Or you could say, look at the original landing page. Like what we do, we integrate with a lot of email platforms. So if you come to us through ActiveCampaigns integration directory or Hubspots or whatever else. We just assume that's what you use.
So if you come to us from HubSpot.com, all the messaging doesn't talk about we integrate with your email platform, we say we integrate with HubSpot Smart and we do the same if you land on our Help Doc page as the first page on our site that you visit, especially if you come from Google. So we our rule is set up saying if the original landing page is this and referring domain as Google because then again we don't get keyword data from Google any longer. But if the first page they land on was our Integration doc for help HubSpot, you could probably safely assume that's what they were looking for. Right.
So yeah, we have the ability within Write Message because with Write Message you're basically setting up a segmentation playbook. So that could be based on UTM parameters that could be based off. A lot of people do this with affiliates. Like if you have an affiliate from Pat Flynn sends you traffic, you could segment people who come from that into the Pat Flynn segment and then change your hero to be a pull quote from Pat about how he loves your stuff. And that's another really common use case for using us in that way.
So yeah, I mean you've got UTM parameters, you have random query parameters, you have, you know, pages viewed. You could do on people use us for on site retargeting. Like if you viewed the pricing page but you didn't buy, then make the pop ups on site change from then on out to be nudging them back to the pricing page or something like that. So there's just a lot of workflowy type things you can do that are based on behavior.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm getting very inspired. I'm like, oh, I should really go sign up for Right Message to do some stuff. Because it's funny because you know, we've been talking since I think you started Right Message about a lot of this and I think one of the benefits in addition to the product getting better over these years is that you now have all these specific use cases. Like there's always the understanding of how you can use it, but things like the pricing page item that you just said, I had never even thought of, but now you have all these, I guess case studies is a good way to say it, but all of these, all this data of how to use this the best way possible. And now I'm like, oh man, we could totally do that, oh yeah, we have a bunch of affiliates coming in. Oh, this is a great idea. We should do that.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: Well, the, you know. Yeah, very excited starting out was we built website personalization software and you'll probably, you'll probably understand this more than most in that we built this and people were like, yeah, I'd love to change the, you know, the headline to be based on their pain point. How do I find out their pain point? Right, like, how do I like most people? When you look at most email marketing databases, it's first names, email addresses and what else? That's it, right? Yeah.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: So maybe they have a tag for the opt in.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Yeah, they tagged it when they become a customer or something. Right? Like, yeah, and that's, that's the extent of things and very few people are getting more than that. And that's why it was a bit of a failure for us when we started doing website personalization because people didn't have the inputs. Like we were creating a tool that would let you change stuff, but you need the inputs. So that's why we kind of shifted in a way to doing well. We'll help you get that data both through behavior and through what people share directly with you through a quiz or a survey. And then it was like, well, what if, okay, what if we could go further and become like a replacement for your pop up tool? Because most pop up tools treat everyone as anonymous.
Well, what if we could say, hey, when we're returning customers on the site, incentivize them with your pop up to upgrade to the annual plan instead of join your email list.
No brainer. Right? Like, but that's what a lot of people. And you're right, like over the years we've developed these kind of recipes or templates and yeah, just, actually just last week we shipped a new template gallery with one click install. So that's been a long time coming.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: I have also found with Segmetrics, we had kind of the same problem where we've always had all of that, of this power and we've had all of this, hey, you can figure out anything and you can do anything. As a very bad sales strategy, it really is like, hey, here's the template you need to do X, here's the report you need to do Y. Here's the specific thing to answer your question, here's this for you. Here's the specific way to use the pricing page to convert people. Here's the specific way to do a landing page opt in survey to get information and customize an Email. Right. Like yeah, yeah.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: I mean that, that's, that's the double edged sword angle of when you have a really powerful tool like Segmetrics or to a degree like right. Message can be.
And it's like you can do anything with it. But sometimes that's not the best for growth. You kind of want a tool that's like so opinionated and straightforward that you could just. Yeah, it's just like we had the
[00:29:50] Speaker A: same issue in the agency days. So we had, I mean we could do anything. We were technical marketers. So the idea was like yes, throw us at your funnel and we're going to help you improve it and do all this stuff. And that's a horrible sales pitch. And so we always started with this lead magnet to conversion funnel conversion rate optimization. And that was the initial thing that once we picked that as our niche and it's like we are doing opt in conversion rate optimization and that is what we do and that gets our foot in the door and then we do all the other stuff too.
But you have to have that very simple, tangible piece that people can bite onto to be convinced. Which goes back to the conversation of. Right message. Like you can't have generic messaging. You have to have specific messaging and then you glom onto them and then you're able to show all of the other stuff in your product orbit.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Specific messaging about where they're in the journey, their awareness of problem space you're in.
There's even things like, I mean these are, these are kind of like marketing best practices at this point. But you know, somebody who lands on your site on a blog post is going to be very different than somebody who comes directly to your homepage generally.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: Like there's a different level of awareness typically, especially the kind of content they're reading. They found, you know, more kind of like generic catch all article versus a very long tail, super specific thing.
I mean that's really the power of all this stuff we're talking about is like how do you, how do you top down orchestrate and curate? Like how do we modify experiences based on these different inputs? Right. Like where they're in our journey, which we're tracking in our CRM or our email platform, but also what they're doing on site, what kind of content they're engaging with.
Yeah, all that stuff combines to kind of profile people in this very multivariate way.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I know. So one of the things that I always feel is, would be amazing if it works well and I still Am kind of on the fence of whether this works well or not is Facebook and Google and all these ad platforms, they know so much about each of us. And you can get really specific in the targeting on these ads. So you can target especially with like LinkedIn and stuff like that. You can target companies that have this many people and are in this industry and are these types of people, blah, blah, blah.
Have you found a lot of your clients or customers using the personalization and the targeting in ads to then feed into Right. Message when they land on that page from Meta.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: I love it when you get customers that do that. We actually have one customer, their jewelry shop. Right. And what they do is they're running ads that they have two different main assets, one of which on Meta runs to people who are self identified as married or actually there's three assets. One married men, one single men and the other everyone else.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: And what they do is if you come, if you click on the ad targeting married men, that context is passed via a UTM parameter into write message. And then on site all the focus becomes on anniversary presence. Right. Like you know, like basically get your partner anniversary gift, whereas if you're a single man, it's the wedding like engagement ring kind of thing. Right. Interesting. And then the other one is if you're a woman, it's the assumption is it's the she's getting ideas to kind of feed to the partner.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: But what's brilliant about it is because one thing, that one thing we do that's kind of cool is most, you know, you often see UTM parameters pass their landing page and then that maybe then gets passed up to the email platform. If they opt in, we actually persist that data.
So even if they hop around the site a while and those UTM parameters get dropped, if and when they convert, even in a future session, that original context is synced up automatically to their resulting record.
So you know, a good example would be, let's say, let's say we sponsor business software, you know, conference and they target other software companies.
So somebody like is checking out their site and they see our little logo on it, they click over and they check it out and they're like, okay, this looks cool. They bookmark it and they come back later. I don't know if people bookmark anymore, but let's say they do.
They come back later, they come back a week later. But we still know they came from business to software and we're still segmenting them internally as company type equals software. And then all the social Proof is focused on software but if and when they opt into a lead magnet that data synced up. So then they get our onboarding emails and it's talking to them as a software company and we don't have a sales team but if we did like all that would be available to them too. So you have like, you have this kind of holistic end to end thing and yeah you can absolutely if you're smart piecemeal pull out you know as parameter data from the targeting of an ad and then feed it into right. Messages segmentation engine. And then we can use that to trigger changes on your site but also sync it up if and when they convert.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Yeah and this is something that I love about the technology that you have and we do something similar as well where because you are synced together with that email platform when. Because now everyone's on multi device. Right. I have four or five devices that I'm using to browse anything. There's no way to cookie track across them all. But because you are connected to the ESP when someone clicks that email and all of the email systems do this now they're putting the contact id, the unique, the unique ID of the person in there. So now you're able to say oh.
As time goes on you're like oh, we had this person browsing on their phone and then this person opted in on their computer and then they opened an email on their phone. So now you have the phone and Right. Message and psychometrics as well now knows that the phone and the laptop are the same person and we have all that history connected and we can do even more cool stuff with it to
[00:36:06] Speaker B: customers is like it's a bit like I have Facebook on my phone and I have it on my computer and they're the same user record that is driving the dashboard. Right. It's the Brennan user record.
And basically like you said, all these email platforms have a way to basically do one click sign ons right through click a link. I mean it's terrible. If anyone forwards an email you have a bunch of people impersonating you. And we actually do. I'm sure you do the same. But we will strip out that unique ID in the URL so that if they do share the post on Twitter or something, you don't have everyone who clicks on that impersonating them because probably with being one click sign on is that it's easy to kind of spoof in a way. Right? Yeah, but yeah, I mean it's like we, we recommend people do the same for affiliates, instead of just doing cookie based tell your affiliates, hey, we're going to actually drop the attribution in their resulting CRM record. So if they buy three months from now, you still get the kickback and makes you a lot more interesting as an affiliate if you do that.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: It's interesting because that used to be the way that the affiliate systems work back with infusionsoft and keep and stuff like that. But as affiliate tracking became something that is a separate system, that kind of went out the window. Right. Everything's cookie based within that affiliate system. So there is no lifetime tracking anymore because it's hard. Right. And so you're exactly right. Using Right Message to then say, oh, this person came from Pat Flynn eight months ago.
Not only is that valuable for us as a marketer, but also valuable for Pat Flynn because it's like, oh, I'm, I'm going to get, going to get affiliate commission off of that as well.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean we have people also who they'll stuff like the almost like the timestamp of when they posted on say LinkedIn.
So if they posted a year ago a thing linking to a lead magnet on LinkedIn they'll have UTM parameters of when they shared it. That data gets enriched by Right message into the contact record and then on Segmetrics they can go in and see show me the value of that tweet that post on LinkedIn from a year ago and lifetime sales. Right. And that's where things get really fun.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I really. Yeah, it's. I mean I said this years ago when we, when you first said I was like, honestly, Segmetrics and Right message. We have the exact same world view of marketing, which is segmentation is the most valuable thing you can do in your marketing. And we're kind of the two sides of that coin. One, we're showing you what those segments are that are important to look at. And Right Message is the one that lets you then take that information and improve your website and your marketing and your emails and everything like peanut butter
[00:38:53] Speaker B: and pill and get the data too. Because I mean, I don't know how.
[00:38:55] Speaker A: And get the data too. Yeah, exactly.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: Like that's, that's the thing like when. Because we're all syncing it up to the. You're pulling from the ESP and we're pushing to the ESB and people too. But you know what I mean, that's that single source of truth where you source from, we source from and it just makes it work together easily it's
[00:39:15] Speaker A: honestly the craziest thing about some of the systems that we have seen in the past, which is they don't have a single source of truth like an esp.
The source of truth is always either internal to themselves or it's something that is not at the person level. Right. And like Facebook Ads Manager is a great example where yeah, Facebook knows who everyone is, but they're not showing you. There is no single source of truth. Of like this is Bob, this is Susan. Right, like. And that's.
That is I think the key to marketing which turns it from these are just averages and generic numbers to. No, no, these are people. These are people who have desires that they want to accomplish with your product and are interacting with your marketing in a way because they want to solve a product problem. And I think it elevates to be able to understand more about people through something like right message and to be able to optimize that messaging.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it's speaking the same language.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I do want to kind of talk about AI a little bit and how it is changing advertising and how it's changing marketing because we've seen it already how it's changing marketing. Copy and ads as a example are now Google's really going into the you pay us money and we'll get you leads, we promise. Like that's really with this AI max that's coming out where they essentially say, give us a URL and we will create the ads, we will do the targeting, we will do everything and promise we'll get you ads.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: News to me.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh yeah.
They've been pushing it with PMAX for a while, but Google Ads, I mean it's essentially like they just want the money and then we promise, well, you have no more levers, no more levers to turn.
But I'm wondering, how do you feel with AI specifically in the marketing and segmentation world?
[00:41:19] Speaker B: Maybe. I mean to be honest, for us at Right Message, it's been probably the best thing that's happened to us ever.
And the reason for that is like conceptually the things we've been talking about make a lot of sense to most people, but the hesitation's always been like, shit, now I need to write like 10 copy variations of my headline. Right?
Yeah, AI can do a lot of that. Right. You could say given my default headline and I'm tracking these 10 segments, create variations.
So we have that in our tool as a one click thing that does that. Where you can.
We, we actually have a way now where you can say Paste in your. A newsletter or a sales email or something.
Paste it and then you map it to the different things you want it to be changed based on, right?
Based on industry and goal and pain point.
And that could yield 125 combos, right? Five times. Five times five.
There's five of each.
We generate the variations with AI and write all the liquid. So then you just paste the thing directly into your email platform.
And now you have an email with 125 possible variations that you like. No one wanted, no one's ever wanted to learn how to write liquid code, but you can use AI to write liquid code.
And we've actually built an interface with like, it's a one like you. You hover over the fragment of text that's personalized and then you set up your variations and click save.
And it's writing liquid behind the scenes for you.
[00:42:52] Speaker A: And it's also automatically pulling in the segments. So it's like if segment equals X, then do this Y automatically mapping it
[00:42:58] Speaker B: to the custom field. If, you know, subscriber dot, industry equal, equal, whatever. Like we've done, we've tried to.
Our issue's always been it's. People would get the data with us and they'd be like, okay, I want to personalize, but what writing, like, what's liquid? Right?
[00:43:16] Speaker A: Like, yeah, you need to get them
[00:43:18] Speaker B: to learn how to do that with an email platform. That's one thing.
Or it's like, yeah, I'd love to change my sales page up. But even though cool with right message, we have a single sales page instead of 80, we still need to come up with different variations for different bits of copy.
So with us, we can. We're building it. We're about to release a thing that says type in your sales page URL, map it to the survey that you're tracking, and then we will crawl the page, pipe it into ChatGPT and say, what are the different elements? We have some prompting that we've built about, like, what parts of the pages should be changed and how headlines and sub headlines and like other sub headlines make a lot of, you know, matter, benefit, copy matters, all that kind of stuff.
So we pipe that in and say, AI, like, here's the payload of context about that. We have available the different segments we're tracking. Here's their current page, come up with some places that we should modify. It comes back with like, you know, basically the.
Not to get too technical, but the, like, the CSS selector that needs modification, which is the point on the page, the Variations and then we map it into our data model and then now they've got a fully personalized sales page that's 95% of the way there. They can go and tweak it, but it makes it, it eliminated that blank slate issue.
We've also done a thing too where we can now ingest every newsletter somebody sent from your email platform. Since we integrate with your email platform, we can now pull your broadcasts. And we've developed what's called a rag, which is a retrieval augmented generation context that we then use where you can now chat with your audience and say it'll have access to everything you've written publicly through your email platform along with all the data yet we've been ingesting for you. So survey data, quiz data, open ended data, you could say things like, based on what I've written in the last six months, write me my next few newsletters.
And these should be rooted in audience pain points and it shouldn't conflict with anything I've written about recently.
And it's based again, it's just chatgpt on the back end. What's Claude? But it has that project knowledge of this real time feed of the things we're collecting along with all the stuff you've been producing.
So we're really bullish on that because I think that's what I mean. We started just sending a Monday email that's like, here's five social media posts you should write about based on your audience and would say stuff like 32% of your audience in the last week has shared X.
You should write this social media post, copy paste. Yeah, people love that. I mean it's like, yeah, it wasn't hard to build, to be honest, but people have like, they're like, like, wow, there's outside.
[00:46:08] Speaker A: We, we are getting to this point. So I remember, I think you were the first person I saw do this, but many, many, many years ago. So there was always the merge fields in emails, right? And it's like, hey Keith. And then the rest of the copy's all the same. And I think you were the first person I saw that put the merge field inside the body copy. And there was a specific email that you said says, hey Keith, blah blah, blah. Imagine you're at a party and someone comes up to you and says, hey Keith.
And as soon as I saw that, it just stands out and blew my mind. It's something that is technically so easy and has outsized results. And I kind of see AI especially for right message and for this content understanding and tweaking and consolidating content to put out. I see AI in the same way, like it is almost magic in the outsized results that you can see from a small thing like analyze how many people clicked on this thing and then recommend stuff that's like that.
Right.
It's such a simple ask, but it's such magic when it's implemented and brought to you.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think what's going to be really interesting with the future of marketing, to go back to your original question, is like, what happens when this becomes more real time? So the minute we're still doing, we're basically using AI at least a right message to like generate a rulebook. Right. Like if these conditions are true, show this text.
But the really interesting thing is going to be, well, what if.
What if we're continuously generating some context window about an individual based on what they do in our email with our email platform based on what they do on site and everything else.
And we can make it so they're not just seeing your email opt in or their. Well, that wouldn't make sense, but like a promo on your site for an upgrade or a they should buy. But what if that was generated in real time based on this context uniquely for them?
[00:48:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:48:16] Speaker B: Like that to me, I mean, that's inevitable, I think. But that's going to be. That's like Minority Report style, if you remember the personalized advert that's talking with him. Right.
That's the next step, I think.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And once it gets too far and someone lands on site and says, how's your dog Miffy?
Did you feed her today? Kind of stuff?
The AI has got a little everything
[00:48:40] Speaker B: and live in the woods.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: By the way, you have something on your notes when you get to this.
Brennan, thank you so much for joining us. This has been. I love talking about this stuff with you, like segmentation, understanding customers, being able to give. I keep wanting to say the right message, but that's the name of the product. So it feels awkward saying give the right message to your customers, but you should definitely give the right message to your customers. Brennan, where can people find you online?
[00:49:11] Speaker B: I mean, rightmessage.com is our website, but you can always email me. I'm just Brennan. B r e n nrightmessage.com awesome.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: Brennan, thanks so much for joining us and. Yeah, see you soon.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Keith.