Client Acquisition Strategy

Episode 40: Client Acquisition Strategy, with Paula Chiocchi

Client acquisition strategy that’s effective! Learn from Paula Chiocchi in this podcast on how to execute her client acquisition strategy.

When done right, a client acquisition strategy can propel your business to greater heights, and Paula will share her approach to this one.

Paula Chiocchi, CEO and founder of OMI, is an award-winning marketing industry veteran whose mission is to help businesses realize their full potential by effectively reaching their target audiences and converting more prospects into customers.

Under her direction, OMI provides Fortune 1000 firms and other clients fresh, accurate contact data to fuel outbound marketing initiatives and drive sales and profits. An expert and innovator in multi-channel marketing data, Paula has established OMI as a leader in comprehensive email campaign management services and creating a good client acquisition strategy. Along with her growing team, her goal is to assist clients in successfully navigating the complex email channel by offering hands-on guidance combined with the highest levels of email deliverability and marketing ROI.

Paula began her career with Dun & Bradstreet and developed her skills by creating direct mail, online advertising and email campaigns for leading mortgage companies, financial institutions, telecom, software, online gaming sites, sweepstakes enterprises and e-commerce companies.

Paula has been a contributing member of Forbes Agency Council since 2016.

What you will learn in this episode is about the client acquisition strategy:

• How best to nurture new prospects by using the client acquisition strategy
• How to tap into the power of a database of your prospects while protecting your sender reputation
• What type of metrics and results should you expect from an outreach campaign?
• What are some of the questions you should ask when evaluating data partners so you can feel confident you are selecting the right partner
• What are garden variety costs you should expect as you budget for 2023?

Resources:

• Download the ebook from OMI as part of the client acquisition strategy and more for FREE
• Website: https://outwardmedia.com/
• LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paula-chiocchi/
• LinkedIn Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/outward-media-inc./
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OutwardMedia
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OutwardMediaInc
• Check out this related podcast on client acquisition strategy with Erik Jensen

 

Client Acquisition Strategy: Full Episode Transcrip

 

Want a client acquisition strategy for your agency? Then, welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast. I am Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and my team and I, we created this podcast specifically for you. So if you’re an agency owner, a business coach, or a strategic consultant looking to grow a thriving, profitable business that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality, then you’re in the right place.

 

If you want proven strategies for attracting a steady stream of well-prepared, right-fit prospects into your sales pipeline, well, yeah, we’re going to cover that. You want to learn how to step away from the sea of competitors so you actually stand out on the ground you’re standing on. Yeah, of course. We’re going to cover that too.

 

You want to futureproof your business so you can navigate the next challenges that come your way. What absolutely will help you there, too. I promise you that each episode of this podcast will contain valuable insights and tangible examples of best practices, not theory. From thought leaders, experts, owners who have done exactly what you’re working hard to do. So I want you to think practical and tactical.

 

Never any fluff. Each of our guests has built a position of authority and then monetized that position by claiming their ground, by growing their audience, by nurturing leads, and by converting sales. Yes. But all the while, they did it by being helpful. So, every time someone from their audience turned around there, they were given a helpful answer to an important question.

 

So the prospects never, ever felt like they were a prospect. I also promise you every strategy we discuss every tool we recommend will be shared in full transparency in each episode so you can plant your flag of authority, so you can claim your ground, and fill your sales pipeline with a steady stream of right fit clients who never, ever, ever were made to feel like one of your prospects.

 

Be better at using the client acquisition strategy by downloading this free ebook today!

 

Client Acquisition Strategy: Paula Chiocchi’s Introduction

 

Okay, so I am excited for you to meet our very special guest expert today, Paula Chiocchi. Now, if you’re meeting Paula for the first time, she’s the CEO and founder of OMI, whose mission is to help their clients successfully navigate the complexities of email, reach their target audience, and convert more prospects into new right-fit clients. If you’ve been listening to the Sell with Authority podcast for a while now, or if you’ve attended one of our open-mic Q&A or some of our other live training sessions, you know that we consistently teach three core strategies in full transparency.

 

You’ve heard Erik and I teach about how to grow an audience, how to nurture leads and how to increase sales. Those are the three courses to grow, nurture, and increase sales in each of those three core strategies accompanied by pulling some tactical levers over and over and over again. So, for example, we know that in order to grow your audience, the levers that need to be pulled consistently are one: plant your flag of authority to create cornerstone content and three, apply acceleration.

 

It’s the apply accelerant lever, essentially how to put some gasoline on the fire. Paula and I will likely focus most of our time during this conversation today on that. So here are a few things that we’re likely to be talking through: First, how to build an email list. Second, how best to nurture new prospects to accelerate your client acquisition.

 

Third, how to tap into the power of a database. So a database of your prospects while protecting your center reputation. Fourth, what type of metrics and results should you expect from an outreach campaign like we’re going to be talking about? Fifth, So what are some of the questions that you should ask when evaluating data partners so you can feel confident that you’re selecting the right partner?

 

And then maybe sixth. What are some of the garden variety costs that you should expect as you budget for 2023? Now, that’s just a sampling because there’s a lot more to this than what it might look like on the surface, which again, is why I was super excited when Paula and I were talking about the potential of her guest in us having this opportunity to really go behind the curtain and learn from an expert who’s been doing this a really long time and has a lot of experience.

 

Ask more about the client acquisition strategy by attending our next open-mic Q&A

 

Client Acquisition Strategy: The Humble Beginning of Outward Media

 

That’s why I was so excited for this conversation. So without further ado, welcome to the Selwyn Society podcast. Paula Thank you, Stephen. I’m so happy to be here. Well, I am so happy that you said yes. And thank you for saying yes. So before we dive into what is probably going to feel like a litany of questions fired your way, take us behind the curtain, if you will, and give us some more context about you, your path, and your journey, and then we’ll dive in.

 

Sure. I started my career with Dun and Bradstreet, that’s a database company for B2B marketing marketers. I spent about ten years there and then decided I really wasn’t cut out for corporate America. So I decided to start my own business by myself, which was interesting and focused on the internet, was just coming on and everybody was trying to figure it out.

 

I was like, wah, wah, wah. So, at that time, I focused on media buying and placement for advertising on the Internet, email marketing campaigns, distributed display ads, and that type of thing. And it always bothered me that we didn’t have any intellectual property in the business. There really were the customers and the goodwill.

 

So fortuitously, my partner and I started building out our own databases around 2004 and we’ve grown it from being an actual email app because email was just starting to come on strong from an email open business to building out a full marketing database of approximately 18 million companies. Wow. So that was exciting for us to be able to offer this to our customers fully, what we call a full data record versus just an email service.

 

We also entered the campaign management business, where we deploy campaigns for companies. Most recently, we decided to join the live Web ecosystem and submitted our file to them to get the digital IDs where a company or an advertiser can actually—you know, the new word is omnichannel marketing—facilitated through direct mail.

 

You have a telephone still there. Not too many people make outbound calls like they used to, and email marketing and display advertising have evolved from around 2000 or so to today. And that’s what we evolved into. Okay. Some terms here are just to kind of give us a foundation because we’ll probably use them throughout the conversation.

 

Be better at using the client acquisition strategy by downloading this free ebook today!

 

Client Acquisition Strategy: Identifying Your Client Base

 

So when you say full data record, define that for us. Just so we can be on the foundation here. The question is because as an email open business, we were simply taking in somebody else’s data files and appending emails to their data that they provided us or back in the day what we call manufacturing the email, which we don’t do anymore, which is knowing the pattern and the domain, we would actually create the email.

 

But this is like 15, 20 years ago. But today, what we’ve morphed into a full data record would have the actual address, phone number, industry codes, the size of the business revenue employees, how long they’ve been in business, and then the different contacts and titles of four different employees. So we focus on director and manager level and above titles in the database, and we’re approaching 100 million right now.

 

Wow. Yeah, it’s huge. Okay, So I want to make sure that I have this correct. So 100 million is that 100 million records across the 80 million companies, correct, in the state in the United States? Okay. So there are 100 million records across 80 million companies. Holy bananas! That’s a whole heck of a lot of people why you might want probably a better way to say it, Stephen would contact 100 million contacts associated with 18 million companies.

 

Okay. Yeah. Wow. Okay, then. All right. So, when we think about it, let’s turn our attention toward, you know, how I was introducing this conversation to our audience, and I mentioned the acceleration piece. So it is in I guess you can sort of say, well, you’ll give us your expertise here. Like, is it really realistic to say, okay, this is what our niches are, this is what our ideal right fit client is there?

 

I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of data here, but how close to a fit can we really get in? Does it start with identifying the right fit client? These are the attributes. These may be the psychographics, demographics, and so forth. And then you and your team match that with the records. Like how does that process work?

 

Well, if an advertiser doesn’t already know about their client base, what we can do is we can take that client base and match it to ours and then produce, as you mentioned, a report with firmer graphics. You can also get psychographics, that type of thing. And then they can then get a picture of who their customers already are.

 

And then what you do is it’s commonly known in the business, it’s called look-alikes, and they go into the database and pull data based on what your best customers already look like. That’s been around for a long time. But you’d be surprised. A lot of companies in fact, have Fortune 100 telecom.

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Businesses Will Have Attachment If You Provide Them Value

 

How do you build an email list, and where do you start? It’s just said recently, you know, for us to just start emailing, we really don’t even know who our customers are. So that’s our first start is we’re going to take that filing and tell them who these small businesses are. Our core competencies are at zero, like the 500-employee range of small- to medium-sized businesses. We’re very strong.

 

Okay. So let me give that back to you. Make sure I’m tracking you. So, our audience typically consists of small and midsize agencies, business coaching practices, and strategic consultancies. And so if their prospective clients are running companies of 0 to 500 employees. So essentially, as the SBA would define that as a small business, that sounds like my sweet spot.

 

Correct. Even though that’s the most volatile because you may already know this, the 0 to 20-employee range is 80% in America. For businesses, 80% are in the 0 to 20-employee range. Amazing. And so you say volatile because, like the turnover of those brands. Yeah. To give you a perspective, during the height of COVID, we wrote out of business about 6 million businesses in three months, and then we wrote out about our businesses or moved or just gone around 15 million employees or titles was all, Wow.

 

Okay, so let me give that back to you. Make sure I’m tracking you here, too. So does that mean that that pre-COVID so we talked about 8 million companies like did that number used to be 24 million? Is that why there are 6 million fewer? Technically, the United States government says there are about 30 million businesses. Okay. The 18 million that we have seen is a subset of about 40 million postal record companies.

 

We have. Okay. Because people come to us for digital assets and abilities. We silo that 18 million away from the 40 million total that we have. But believe it or not, I mean the resilience of America. You wouldn’t believe how many businesses started coming on because of the need. You don’t have a job, you know. So it was phenomenal.

 

We were right back, even though we wrote all those out. We were right back at 18 million in a very short period of time. One of our partners builds all the new business files every month, and it just ballooned it because people out of necessity were starting businesses that ran. A lot of these are going to be, you know, zero one, what we call zero, which is an individual to one or five employees.

 

Be better at using the client acquisition strategy by downloading this free ebook today!

 

Client Acquisition Strategy: Consulting Companies on How to Reach Their Target Market

 

But, you know, it’s America’s resilient thing. They go do something else. Okay. So I will probably ask you a series of questions that I’m just going to ask for, Your Grace. Write about our fun because, you know, they’ll probably be thinking, my gosh, I can’t believe you’re asking me such a basic question.

 

But okay, so with your grace here. So when a prospective client comes to you and says, Hey, I would really like to add X number of people to my email list and so forth, my guess is that’s not actually framing it correctly. It’s more about I want to create a campaign that I want to reach out to these people, and this is my right fit prospect, and they look like this, and these are attributes and so forth.

 

It’s not necessarily like essentially buying a list, right? Correct. And there are two ways you can go about it. Some companies are, you know, savvy enough that they know how to do everything themselves, and they’re just looking for the data itself to power their campaigns. Others are not. So we kind of pride ourselves on being very consultative. We don’t charge consultation fees, but we pride ourselves on being very consultative, and we work with companies to help them understand how to reach our target market.

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Distributing Email Deliveries

 

The best way to accomplish email campaigning or display advertising. So some kind of know what they’re doing, and some don’t see. And so it’s our job to kind of educate them if they don’t know, okay, still remember the pitfalls. Okay, so let’s save that. Let’s go savvy first and then they may be non-savvy, so let’s say savvy first.

 

So they have a really good idea of who their prospective client is. They have their own value ladder really dialed in, and they know what the calls to action are. Let’s say that they’re pretty good on writing email content, and it may be everything from sort of the initial warm-up emails or nurture emails all the way through to what may be more like sales kind of conversion-oriented type emails.

 

So let’s see, they have all of that. And then do they just like give it to you for distribution and sort of architecting? How does that work? Depends on the client. Some will do their own distribution of the email campaigns. They have their own platforms and then we just supply the data. But it’s gotten a little bit trickier trying to get the email delivered so that Fortune 100 clients want us to do it because they don’t want the headache.

 

And then we have small companies that, you know, we introduced to smaller platforms, and they do it themselves. So it just depends on their bandwidth to be able to conduct it in-house. If not, they can make it absolutely easiest to conduct campaigns. Okay, so let’s think about the tricky piece. So let’s slice that apart because like you and I were talking about it in the green room before we started recording, there are pitfalls to this, right?

 

So, if you just buy a list and try to put it in to keep or some other type of platform, there’s a nuance to that, trickiness, and risks. So, let’s talk about some of those types of things that people should be aware of if they’re trying to do the distribution themselves.

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Doing The Email Campaigns In-House

 

So, what are some of the things that you would want people to watch out for? Well, number one, you never use your own corporate domain as you’re sending the domain. You could compromise that domain and your website. So, you would want to have what we call a subdomain. So, in other words, if your company companies like my OutwardMedia.com will have all my dash marketing dot com then that would be your sending domain.

 

That’s a big one to know a lot companies don’t know that even Fortune 100 sometimes don’t know it so that’s a big one and then the one of the main problems we’ve had over the years of clients is that you counsel and do not take this to a CRM platform like a Marketo or Eloqua or constant content contact can get the MailChimp because they’re going to block it.

 

And I don’t know how they know to block it, but they do. And then you end up with 50% of your data not getting delivered. And then I think the data is bad. But before we ever deliver a file, we actually test the emails by mailing them and get a receipt of the email being delivered. So we know we’ve given them a file, and when you tell them, we guarantee 95% validity on the email.

 

We know that because we’ve already mailed it ourselves. So that’s a huge one. And so we recommend a couple of platforms that people can use if they want to do their campaigning in-house and not outsourcing. Okay. And very important. Yeah. So, it sounds like what the like when you mentioned the trickiness in a different domain whether it’s a subdomain or whatever but that protects the sender reputation.

 

Right. As opposed to using PredictiveROI.com and then and then our domain gets blacklisted or something like that. I mean, that becomes very problematic right? Yes. You don’t want to end up on the blacklists and the Spamhaus list because, as those people, they leave you there for at least six months. 

 

So then, how does this so I totally understand how out of 100 million contacts across 18 million companies you’re going to probably be able to build a list of rights. So prospects and that kind of stuff or whatever. So how does that help keep your clients out of I know I’m not going to say this in the right way, so forgive me, but like hot water as it relates to spam and in, you know, any sort of compliance with that or anything like that. Let’s talk about that.

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Avoiding The Aggressive Approach to Email Campaigns

 

Well, I think one of the things that I’m glad you brought up is warming up your domains. You can’t send half a million out of them. You have to visit one of the domains over a two-week period as you start your campaigning, and then the ISPs get used to seeing or the corporate servers get used to seeing email coming from that domain, and then less blocking or even soft blocking will occur.

 

So that’s important. And then obviously want to follow the can spam rules. You know, if somebody opts out, you have ten business days to remove them, or you can potentially be fined. And it’s very critical that you follow that. But one of the misnomers that do exist is that you’re not really allowed to email what we call new customer acquisition email, which is not true in the United States.

 

When you know the client acquisition strategy, you can email anybody, but it’s actually removed. You have, so that’s something for marketers to be aware of. Okay. So, then let’s go to the warm-up piece here because if I’m understanding correctly, there are essentially maybe two phases of it. There’s like a technical warm-up so that like the servers and that kind of stuff that they’re sort of, you know, you’re not just like this brand new source and all of a sudden going to start hitting their servers or ISPs or whatever the correct term would be.

 

But then also for the recipients, there’s a content warm-up. Am I tracking you? Yeah, yeah, sure. And here’s another thing. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this. Another thing that’s been happening is what they call email bots or corporate servers that are acting as like an email bot where when an email a certain creative comes through, you know, from the outside somewhere, they click all the links in the email because they see looking for phishing or if it’s, you know, a valid email.

 

And that can cause the results of your campaign to be skewn. So that’s one of the reasons you want to start out slow, too, is just to start getting the rhythm of using your send-your-sender domain and getting the recipients used to seeing the email come through because that can totally see your results. And we’ve seen it.

 

We’ve seen it. We have to manually go through sometimes and pull out records because anything that clicks on more than three links, we don’t consider that a real opener. Click on Side of The View. I know this is kind of recent because we’ve been doing it since 2004 and we’re noticing that this year is when we start noticing, okay, so what?

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Focus On Data Quality Instead of Relying on Bots

 

So what is the goal of email bots, then? Like, is it so I don’t understand why, why, why would that be put into play? So maybe it’s a simple explanation. Maybe I’m just not getting into, like, why? Why do they put that into place from the corporate server position? They’re doing it because they’re looking for phishing or, you know, malicious software or something, trying to get into their corporate environment.

 

Okay. The email bot, I haven’t figured that one out yet, why they exist or what they’re doing. I mean, I understand why they exist and display because it’s like fake clicking of display advertising, but I know I’m not really sure why that happens, to be honest with you, in the email environment. But I’m told it’s only about 3 to 4% of the fake clicking on the links comes from that.

 

So okay, one of the things that, you know, that I wanted to ask you is, okay, so let’s say someone in our audience wanted to go down this path and they wanted to be asking questions of, you know, trying to figure out who might be the right partner for them. It sounds like then maybe having a conversation around OMI bots and how you clean the data, how you can ensure that the actual results and that kind of suffer from, you know, human recipients and all of that.

 

It sounds like those types of procedures might be something to investigate. You definitely want to investigate those, but in my opinion, your number one question is going to be about data quality. Do they stand behind their data? And if you don’t get a copy, they’ll say, yes, we stand behind the data, and I warrant that the percentage is accurate. We have to warrant 95% validity on emails, but I would get at least 90% because that can cause problems with your mailing too hard-bouncing emails.

 

That sense sets up all the warning bells again that you know, who is this, who is sending this what you know to the different servers and for me, that would be my number one question out of the gate. Do you stand behind your data? What can I expect in terms of quality? Okay. I love that. That is excellent.

 

And to avoid a pitfall there, So what type of campaigns, you know, work best for this type of application? Like, like creative? Is it a branding campaign? Is it legion? Is it like e-commerce? Because you want to get to an audience to sell stuff right away? What type of campaign works really well in this type of effort?

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Managing And Monitoring Your Campaigns

 

We see a lot of different things there. I would say most of the campaigns that we work on, and again, they’re all B2B. They’re looking for lead generation or visits to their website. They’re looking for form downloads. Most of them are looking to quantify an area on the back end. They’re not branding campaigns, so to speak.

 

I think you see a little bit more of branding campaigns and then display the ad market. So we’re headed to an r y. I mean, how much do we spend on the data? How much would you spend on the delivery? We’re the ones managing the campaigns. And what is what we make on the back? And I’ll give you a for instance, one of our clients is a Fortune 100 telco and we’ve been doing business in for 11 years.

 

Then they brought the email campaign back to the House for a while and started getting blocked and fined for using their platform. That was the Sierra Club. They came back to us to start back up again. We managed it for about five, eight, five, six years and we started with a five-year campaign, and for three, they invested $36,000 in us doing that.

 

We only licensed the data, but we generated close to $1,000,000 out of the delivery. Yeah. Office three, we did a sequence of three emails sent, and they executed one direct mail, not with us, but with their agency, one direct mail piece. And they attributed that revenue in a three-month period. So it definitely can work. But, you know, if it’s something that we don’t think won’t work, we’ll tell the clients they don’t think it’ll work.

 

So it’s not a matter of just everybody jumping in and thinking they’re going to get rich overnight, so to speak. I’ll tell you, one of the things that makes it more effective, and I don’t think you and I talked about this previously, is whether you are familiar with intent monitoring. It’s been coming on in the last ten years?

 

No, I don’t think I’ve heard that term before. Yeah, it’s called the tick monitoring of the PA. The largest is a company called Bambara. Okay. And that’s basically the monitoring of websites, searches, SEO searches, and content downloads on about 25,000 websites in the United States. Then we get the actual intent signal, and then we match that to our IP address to our company database and see what context it’s in the company to promote because they’re considered to be in the market at that time equally bananas.

 

Yeah. Okay. I’ve heard of that. Okay, and almost like it is an intercept as it relates to search. And then from that perspective and then doing like a display. Yeah. Based on that intent I’ve not heard of said where, where you just described it as a match to your content on track record. That’s what’s interesting. Right. And one of the things that we developed that we’re going to start launching in January is what we call triggered email.

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Doing an Intent Check

 

So, monitoring the intent signal will trigger an email. And this way, if they want to definitely trigger an email to the contact within 48 hours based on that intent signal. And I’m sure you’re familiar with McKinsey, the consulting firm there. In the near future, all campaigns will be based on tap signal. So it’s a big deal and we monitor about 14 billion signals a week.

 

Wow. Okay. So is it based on website visits or is it based on your monitoring keywords? How does that work? It’s based on website visits, content downloads, and SEO activity. Those are the main ones. Brilliant that 20,000 websites are being monitored. And to give you a perspective on that, we had a cybersecurity firm say, you know, they wanted to craft an email campaign.

 

We asked about who the market was, and they said, Well, you know, everybody at Department employees. I said, Wow, that’s like, now, making 18 million companies. And so we took their keywords and did an intent check for a week, and we found that we paired that large universe down to around I believe it was around a hundred thousand companies and about 200,000 contacts that were searching.

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Narrowing Your List Will Create Better Conversions

 

There are three keywords. Okay, now that makes sense. I mean, that’s how you get closer to somebody that’s deemed to be in the market versus just spraying out, you know, email to 1259 companies, which would be cost prohibitive. Amazing. So let’s go back to the $36,000 and then $1,000,000 is in gross revenue as a result of that. You said three emails sound good. So does that mean three individual emails or, like, a series of emails or excuse me, three series of emails?

 

So, more than three individual emails were transmitted to the same database three times over a three-week period. It literally was three individual emails going to the same list three times. Anybody who had already interacted was removed from the next send. Yeah, yeah. Because you figure, let’s say, you get a six 10% open rate the first time in any kind of book, right?

 

Then you take those out and go back to the ones that did not open it. But from the first transmission that’s how we do it. Okay. So, let’s talk about the open rate because you know that I want to chat a little bit about metrics. So you mentioned six, 7%. So is that that is that typical one kind of sending it to a cold list like this, that 6 to 7% is maybe a decent benchmark for open rate?

 

I think anywhere from like 2 to 6% is average. Okay. So 2 to 6. Yes. Okay. So then if 2 to 6% is kind of average for open rate, what’s, what’s typical click through eight usually under one. Under 1%. Yeah. Okay. Usually, it just depends, you know, it depends on brand recognition too. And I think it depends on how well you curate the list of potential new customers.

 

Yeah. And as you know, as we talked about in the green room as our audience knows, I mean, we’re huge proponents. It starts with a niche. I mean, planting the flag or planting a flag of authority, building an authority position, three ingredients, niche point of view, and creating cornerstone content. And the narrower we go, the easier or faster it is to monetize and really build a great audience.

 

And it doesn’t matter the size of the audience. So I think what I’m hearing you say is the more narrow, the more detail that you have around the right fit client or the right fit prospect, the more psychographics, the more demographics, the more you’re able to articulate who that person is. You know, the list might be small, but you’re open.

 

Rates are going to go up, and your click-through rate is going to go up. Am I tracking with you? Absolutely, totally agree with you. Okay. So, I know that we need to come in for a landing here, but give us in. This might be a really difficult question to ask or to answer, I should say.

 

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Client Acquisition Strategy: Avoiding Pitfalls with The Right Partner

 

But, you know, you mentioned the $36,000 give us sort of garden variety cost, if you can, for these types of campaigns. Yeah, that was based on just the actual transmissions of the campaigns. But I would say when we first work with somebody, usually a pilot program with us is we ask for like $10,000 for a pilot program and we structure, we hone in on who that best prospect is for them.

 

We help advise a little bit on the creative. We also have software programs that will tell them if the creative is too heavy with links or images or what have you. And then we put it through span testing, all that type of thing, before we ever even get out the door. So, we look at that first campaign as our benchmark to see where we can go from there.

 

You know, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, so there’s nothing they were 100%. But then you try to tweak from there what worked and what didn’t. And that’s usually how we start out with a brand-new client. Okay. So it could also maybe give some foundation here. So $10,000 to the pilot, and how many records are typically included on that one?

 

I believe that’s probably up to 100,000 potential prospects. And then you do emails. The three sequences that I told you about don’t include if we decide to use the intent monitoring; there would be a little separate fee for that. Sure. But that would include us doing what we call more on a rental model versus a license model because we want to we’re trying to get the metrics down and then go from there as to what’s working and what isn’t, and then we can build it out as to, do you want to rent the data was like I was doing it three-time use, we push it for you or do you want to rent a lease?

 

Actually, license the data and then bring it in-house. So a couple of options with us. Well, I don’t know. This is going to sound a little bit biased, but, you know, it seems like because of some of the pitfalls that we talked about, you know, a center reputation, excuse me, as well as some others, it’s like having you do the distribution or a partner like you do the distribution that seems to be safer.

 

It seems like you can avoid some potential pitfalls by having a great, qualified partner do it right. I think you’re right. Yes. It’s like, you know, because I come from a direct male background. Stephen, I thought when I got in this business originally early on and said, I can be so simple. You just push an email out. No is way harder than a direct man with all the nuances.

 

In fact, we actually developed what we call an onboarding packet that goes into all the details. We know the nuances of email marketing because a lot of people have never done it before, and they probably think the way I thought this is going to be easy. And so yeah, no, but yeah, if you have an expert who knows how to do it and you prefer to outsource it, I think that’s probably the best way to go.

 

Ask more about the client acquisition strategy by attending our next open-mic Q&A

 

Client Acquisition Strategy: How To Stay in Touch with Paula

 

Now that you know the client acquisition strategy, it’s time to take it to the test. Okay, this has been a fascinating conversation around this accelerated piece and how to grow the audience in a safe way. You know, adhering to all of the guidelines, keeping the business safe, keeping the domains safe, but yet still putting accelerant on the fire like we talked about. You know, when I introduced you to our audience, it was amazing.

 

So, Paula, thanks very much for sharing your smarts. Before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, is there anything you think we might have missed, anything, any final recommendations that you would like to share? And then please tell our audience the best way to connect with you. 

 

I would say our look at testing, and if it doesn’t work the first time, don’t look at it as a failure, because in marketing, it’s always an evolution to keep testing and keep finding out with the new nuances in the business that are coming on and things that you need to know about.

 

For instance, as I mentioned, intent monitoring is relatively gaining steam and getting a new good. Always be willing to test because you’re not sure what’s going to work. They get in there and try the best way. 

 

Well, you can reach me at OutwardMedia.com and on LinkedIn and phone number 3102745312. Awesome. And we will put all of that in today’s show notes as well And okay everyone, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and listen to Paula’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do.

 

The key is to take it, apply it to your business, and accelerate your results by doing so. So, Paula, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I am grateful that you said yes. My gosh. I thank you very much for coming on to the show, being our mentor and guide, and helping us move our businesses onward to that next level.

 

Thank you so much, Paula. Thank you, Steve.

 

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