Making The Funnel More Human: Marketing Automation and Your Business
By Billy Jennings on 3/29/22
Referencing If You Market Podcast Episode 158#: Conversation Automation and Commerce, with Paul Ace
In this episode of the If You Market podcast Sky Cassidy sat down with Paul Ace of Amplify C-Com and tackled conversation, automating the customer journey, improving the funnel process as a whole, and the benefits of establishing a strong connection with customers for marketing data acquisition.
We’ve all experienced the massive frustration of going through what seems like a dozen automated menus while trying to get in touch with some form of customer support only to have the call get dropped when you finally get in touch with a human. It’s enough to make you want to break your phone, which I don’t recommend, since you’ll have to speak to even more customer service to fix that issue…I digress…
Amplify C-Com specializes in helping businesses understand customer languages and thus converts this into data before using the data to improve the business’ connection with customers. Paul mentions that because of the pandemic, customer expectations have gone up significantly and that everyone wants personalized service. People want quick and easy answers rather than having to dig through menus trying to self-diagnose or troubleshoot common issues. “So what we look at is how do we create more trust connection, report through the whole buyer journey right from the first point where they first come in and maybe see your website for the first time or your sales funnel all the way through to the sales process and how do we bridge that gap between a combination of using conversational language right? Where you would normally use that in conversation rather than feeling like a robot. And then we also have that human takeover where then we’ve got this basically we can do 80% human like customer experience and then a 20% human experience. So it means you get to have that personal stories with every person that comes through and at the same time you get to automate the grunt work that you want to automate at the front end. So you can give that more personalized service to everyone who comes in.”
Amplify C-Com can help business owners who are having trouble dealing with their customers by reducing the amount of time they waste. Having a good rapport with customer service right from the beginning is definitely a plus and thus leads to long-term business, increased referrals, and above all, TRUST. I recently switched email-sending providers based on customer service alone! What annoys me is that I love the service I was using, but when my business is dependent on things running quickly and efficiently, I literally can’t afford for 72 hours between customer support emails. I signed up with a nearly identical service based on a colleague’s referral where he was gushing about how great their team was at handling issues quickly. So you see- it wasn’t the product that lost me, it was the customer experience!
Other than establishing a real connection with the customers, they also do comprehensive surveys that answer questions for business owners such as, “What’s been stopping them from getting to where they want to go?”, “Why didn’t they buy?”, and so on. For business owners, it can be frustrating when you see abandoned carts! Did something go wrong? Where did I lose them? You might be thinking that there is something wrong with the way you market this product at this point, but Paul goes a different route: “We start to get this feedback loop, and then we can use those feedback loops to fix the holes in the funnel. So instead of trying to guess, then we actually just take the customer’s language. We take the customer’s feedback and then we use that to fix it.” It is undeniably practical, makes a lot of sense, and has greater chances of getting to the problem’s root cause faster.
As Paul and Sky venture further, Sky asked Paul how they get unbiased feedback from consumers.Paul mentions that it’s a lot of experimenting and trial and error. They are super thorough in their process, a lot of which sounds like it means asking similar questions in different way as well as incentivizing non-buyers, which also helps in this process. People love freebies. Sometimes a little gesture on a business’ part is all it takes to obtain the data necessary to streamline an entire process. The data then goes straight into the funnel and has to be tracked and tagged, Paul emphasized. “Every single funnel step, every single opt-in test, everything is tracked with a tag, like tagged coded, dated, and everything. So that means that we can start to see what language patterns are used throughout the whole journey.”
“Would it be accurate to say this is all about basically refining that customer journey to make it a better, more successful experience?” Sky asked in which Paul answered with a solid “100%. There are different points right in the customer journey where you can create increases… It could be if you’re providing a great customer experience, it could be the amount of referrals that are feeding the system at the start. So the better the buying experience you create than the more people are going to refer to you afterwards.” It’s basically all about listening and putting the customers first at the same time treating their responses as data and using it to make further improvements with your system. It is a win-win situation.
Paul Ace worked at Subway before becoming a wedding singer. His first business venture was selling bridesmaid dresses, but later on he realized he had a talent for digital marketing. He started Amplify C-Com with a mission of making “a new way of doing commerce online.”
His advice for people who would want to try marketing automation on their own is: “The first thing that I would do is if you’ve got a Facebook group or a community, go and look through the language pack those people are using in your community. If you’ve got a list, survey the list. If you haven’t got a list, go and partner up with someone else who you can go and survey their list together who’s in the same niche and collect those responses together. So like, find out what your customers’ language patterns are and use them.”
Meta Description: In this episode of the If You Market podcast hosted by Sky Cassidy, he sat down with Paul Ace of Amplify C-Com and discussed the importance of establishing a good relationship with customers whether they are active buyers or not, and the role their feedback plays in marketing automation.