A Conversation with James Hipkin of Inn8ly
Veteran marketer and entrepreneur James Hipkin sat down with host Matthew Dunn to talk about strategic marketing. James has a wealth of experience with companies massive-to-small. His 'war stories' about earlier eras of marketing are gems of wisdom! The conversation covered email (of course), websites, digital tools, small business, big business and the fun business of being in business.
James also shared the 'secret' website where he has distilled this wisdom into an actionable strategy: https://hubandspoke.marketing.
Transcript – new tool!
[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: Good morning. It's Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. My guest this morning is James Hopkin, um, CEO of Red8 interactive and founder of Inn8ly. I want to ask you about Inn8ly. We didn't chat about that in our little preliminary conversation, but, uh, but welcome.
[00:00:28] James Hipkin: I'm happy to be here. I truly am. I'm looking forward to the company.
[00:00:32] Yeah, me
[00:00:32] Matthew Dunn: too. Tell, tell us a bit about your firms, your company.
[00:00:37] James Hipkin: Well, red aid. Interactive is a digital production studio. We work with design agencies primarily in New York, LA and San Francisco, uh, building large corporate websites. Okay.
[00:00:50] Um, brands that you would recognize, um, typically budgets are in low six-figures kind of thing, which is kind of a roundabout way of saying we actually know what we're doing. I love it. What we found is when we were talking to small business owners, most of them couldn't afford to work with us. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:10] But the reality is most of them should have been working with us because they've been sold all kinds of stuff. They don't need. They've paid too much for things. They don't have a proper strategy behind how the website was built, et cetera. So a few years ago we started using developer downtime to create software.
[00:01:30] That allows us to compete with the subscription service website companies 60% while 60% of our customers come to us from either Squarespace or Wix.
[00:01:43] Matthew Dunn: And, and what do you end up doing for them different and better, differently.
[00:01:49] James Hipkin: Well, it's not differently. We're using different technology, but it really isn't about the technology.
[00:01:54] Sure. Hopefully you'll smile. When I say this, we answer the phone.
[00:02:03] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. That's my philosophy too, man.
[00:02:06] James Hipkin: What these small business owners, they don't want to be handed the keys to a Ferrari and wished the best of luck. Yeah, we do it for them. We wrote our software with another opportunity in mind. Um, stay at home moms.
[00:02:22] They haven't become less smart because they've decided to stay at home and raise children. Right. They'd love to have a part-time job, but their current choices. Retail where they're being paid minimum wage and living at the whim of a retail staffing algorithm. Yeah. So we offer them much better than minimum wage.
[00:02:40] They can control their own hours. They're doing interesting work and we train them how to build websites for small business owners. So
[00:02:48] Matthew Dunn: that, that, that set of, uh, people, resources, um, are, are doing the technical work with the platform that you and your developers.
[00:02:58] James Hipkin: That's correct. And we wrote the software with that audience in mind so that they can literally take a website from beginning to end, without involving a developer and do an amazing job.
[00:03:08] And it's very satisfying work. Our customers are thrilled because they actually get to work with someone and they don't have to fight with it themselves. Um, and we have the depth of resource that. Something does go awry or they need something special. Yeah. We have the tools and, and staff that can actually do it now.
[00:03:30] Well, we look after the hosting, we look after the security, we look after the maintenance of software, all that stuff that. It is vitally important, not particularly difficult for us because it's what we do. Yeah. But it's not something the average, small business owner wants to have to fight with.
[00:03:49] Matthew Dunn: Yeah.
[00:03:49] That's for sure. Or, or, or even, you know, even knows where to punch. Right, exactly. Yeah. It's too, too technical job is that, uh, we'll get strategic in a minute, but just to geek out for a second is, is the platform work you do on, on top of. Something else are you at, are you talking database on up WordPress on a.
[00:04:12] Uh,
[00:04:12] James Hipkin: we use WordPress as an operating system and we've written software that sits on top of WordPress. That allows the, it's basically a full getting geeky for just a second. It's a full theme editing suite. Okay. So that, so that the pay it's a page builder, but it's much more than a page builder because the content specialists can deal with the headers and the footers and logos and all, it's a full, a full theme editing suite.
[00:04:38] Right. Um, and. Gives them an awful lot of power. And it's also because we build these large corporate sites. We've come to realize that 80% of layouts can be done with 20% of things. And we focused our software on the 20% of things that really matter as opposed to other page builders that exist, which tend to be very heavy and very bloated because the developers get very excited about doing everything you could possibly imagine.
[00:05:08] And a whole bunch of things you never know. I imagine. Um, so our sites are very light and they perform very, very well. Yeah, because the reality is talking about customers for just a second. You have less than six seconds, which is a shorter attention span than a goldfish. To, to catch a visitor's attention.
[00:05:35] And you don't want to be wasting three of those six seconds waiting for the page page to
[00:05:40] Matthew Dunn: load. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How, what a world, what a world we've created. Huh? I, um, I'm tickled pink to talk with someone in the web space because maybe it's the gray hair at the temples, but, uh, I still find myself oriented towards web and email.
[00:05:57] And what I think of is. You know, the, the, the core internet technologies, the core digital platforms I find. Facebook at all, irksome stupid misused in a bunch of other things. And yet that's where most small businesses end up pouring their precious resources is down rabbit holes with advertising deals and
[00:06:21] James Hipkin: deadly.
[00:06:23] Well, it can be very effective if it's, if it's done within the context of a strategy, if it's just done as an individual thing. Gosh, I, my, my son-in-law told me I needed to do Facebook advertising, so I'm out there spending money on Facebook, but it's got no context. Yeah. Um, it's when you take any of the digital marketing tactics and tie them together, I call it the hub and spoke strategy where the website becomes the.
[00:06:52] Everything's rotating into and out of the website. So all of your digital marketing tactics, Facebook advertising, search engine optimization, Google ad words, email marketing are pulling people into it and taking the information from the website to color the content that you're sending out. So it's a back and forth exercise.
[00:07:15] And then the. Is the content and messaging strategy. Okay. And when you tie those three things together, you get the wheel. One of the world's most fundamental in principle inventions. Yeah. And there's an awful lot of power individually. When I used to do public speaking pre pandemic, I'd stand in front of an audience and I'd have a bicycle hub in one hand and a handful of spokes in the other hand.
[00:07:39] And there'll be a rim sitting on the electorate and I'd say, you know, these pieces are not. But individually that don't have much value. Hmm. When you put them together, you have a lot of power because the power comes from the connection. So Facebook advertising can be very effective if you've got the pixel installed on the website and you're actually tracking the information.
[00:08:04] Facebook wants you to be successful. And you use that pixel to understand what your target audience looks like, because you're attracting them back into the website via organic social media or paid social media or email marketing or whatever the tactics are. And you're taking your, I call it feeding the pixel you're you're training that person.
[00:08:28] What your audience looks like. Yeah. But because you have a hub and spoke strategy, you know what to say? You know what to say at each level of interaction that the consumer is displaying with you. It's not a black and white thing. Every customer goes through a journey. Most customers I'm going to get to email marketing in just a second.
[00:08:51] Honest to
[00:08:52] Matthew Dunn: God. No, that's okay. You're giving a context.
[00:08:55] James Hipkin: Yeah, most customers spend most of their time out on the edges of the bell curve. Where they have, you know, close to zero interest in what you're selling and doing. They just don't have a need at this moment when they do start to have a need, then their interest, I call it the interest curve.
[00:09:15] It looks like a bell curve. Their interest starts to climb that left-hand slope. They're still, you know, trying to figure out what, whether or not you, what you've got solves there. You're trying to figure out whether you're trustworthy and all of those things can be accomplished through micro-transactions that you're setting up using the hub and spoke strategy with combination of messaging media and the website to deliver the.
[00:09:48] Amount of information at the right time. So you've got these microtransactions in each time, a consumer executes a microtransaction, it builds the relationship. It builds the trust. Now those micro-transactions could be as simple as watching a video on Facebook. Yeah. Spending more than five seconds on it.
[00:10:08] A microtransaction might be actually like. Uh, post, whether it's an organic post or a paid post, a microtransaction might be sharing that post. And you'll notice each of these micro-transactions I'm describing are a richer interaction. Yeah. Yeah. They might be going to the website and reading a post. They might be going to the website, reading a post and then giving over their email address to join the mailing list.
[00:10:36] Right, right. And each of these transactions builds that trust to build that relationship so that when they get to the, to the final sale, which is not the end of the journey, by the way, it's just the middle, the truthfully people who talk about marketing funnels and they really should be talking about marketing our glasses.
[00:10:57] I said
[00:10:57] Matthew Dunn: that about five years ago, and I couldn't agree more like that's terrific. I've got a diagram somewhere on the hard disk. Of an hourglass. I'm like what's with the funnel, it's the wrong shape. It's, it's limiting your thing in
[00:11:11] James Hipkin: the right shape. It's only half of what you only have. Yes. Because once, once they've made, because the most important purchase is not the first purchase.
[00:11:19] Now it's the second person.
[00:11:22] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Or in the case of a restaurant, the third right. Third visit and you'll be come a regular.
[00:11:27] James Hipkin: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. A vendor check talks about that. I believe. I remember hearing him talk about that. And it's true. And this is where email marketing can become a very powerful tool for a business, because you've got that opportunity where if you part going back to the interest curve, again, most of your customers are out there on the edges and that's where regular, I call it the lazy river, regular email communication with your customer.
[00:11:59] Creating value, sharing information. You're not selling anything. Don't try to sell, right? Create value, create relationship, give them the opportunity to engage with you to create those microtransactions. Your goal is to build a relationship that goes beyond the functional transactional. Equities that are created and into a, more of a, a relationship type thing.
[00:12:27] So your lazy river can accomplish that and you spend most of your time on the subject line and the preview text, because even if that's all they see, they reminds you of their positive experience and it, when. They'll dive in because they know it's not going to be a whole lot of, you know, Schilling. Yeah.
[00:12:49] They're going to get some value out of this. And you know, these lazy river emails can have really nice open rates and real. Interesting interactions. If they're done properly, you know, avoid the wall of words to create emails that look like blog posts, there's lots of single sentences, lots of white space, interspersed them with, you know, appropriate images, you know, don't make them works of art, make them useful.
[00:13:17] Matthew Dunn: Hmm. Hmm. So
[00:13:19] James Hipkin: then yeah. Keep going, keep going. This is good. Well, and then you've got all kinds of opportunities when. Interact with you. Then you can track that and have automations in place that will be triggered when they interact. They click on a link that goes to a blog post about golfing. Send them another email.
[00:13:45] Talks about golfing and more detail, right? Give them the opportunity to demonstrate that they're climbing the interest curve that they're engaging with you. Right. And there's not a better, medium than email marketing for that kind of a customer communication.
[00:14:04] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, no, I, I, I mean, I tend to agree for obvious reasons, but in the interest of hopefully there's someone in the, you know, someone in the listening audience who says, oh, Uh, why do you think someone and I'll talk about why I think so.
[00:14:19] Why email marketing?
[00:14:21] James Hipkin: Well, because it's, it's low cost. Um, it's something that people are very comfortable with. They're not having their in their email every day. Um, they.
[00:14:39] They're looking for you to see if you're interested. One of the relationship marketing principles that I talk about is good customers expect to be rewarded. Um, we're getting into some of the weeds here, but another thing that should be considered is segmentation. So that your list, not all customers are created.
[00:14:58] You've got 20% of your customers who are generating probably 80% of your sales. Right? Right. Well know who they are. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're heavy category users. They have a strong need for your product, which is why they're such good customers. But it also means they're very knowledgeable. Right. Don't craft the same messaging to them that you would craft to the great unwashed.
[00:15:24] Right. And if you do that, then you've got, you're creating value. You're, you're showing them, first of all, you're rewarding them for being great customers because you're giving them all this extra content and extra value. And you're acknowledging that they ha you know, are smart about the product.
[00:15:44] Matthew Dunn: Okay.
[00:15:44] Interesting. Yeah. Gotcha. The other thing I would add about emails as a, as a channel, because I agree with everything that you said there is, is. It's it's the, it's the digital channel where locus of control for attention stays with the guy on the other end with the recipient, with the customer. Um, I've had a number of guests, um, and some interesting conversations about, uh, the interplay between, uh, messaging and texting and email.
[00:16:18] Um, and you know, anyone selling, texting, we'll talk about the fact that, you know, you're going to get 99%, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah rates. And it's true. But if you text me, I'm going to look right. Yep. That's the locus of control, meaning you just interrupted me where it's rail world perfectly comfortable, your word comfortable.
[00:16:39] Like we're comfortable with I'll get to that later. Right? When I watch it, when I'm interested, when, when I'm looking for a solution to that problem, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so from that perspective, it's, it's got a degree of sort of respect for the respect, for the other person's attention and control.
[00:16:58] That's hard to find in most digital channels and in, in social media channels, um, you don't actually get to say whether or not the message is going to reach them. So those filters are a whole different ball. Right.
[00:17:13] James Hipkin: Right, exactly. Right. And that sense of control. One of the things I talked to folks about a lot is the difference between inside out copy and outside in copy.
[00:17:26] Okay. Expand on inside out copy. And this is a mistake that I see made often on websites in email marketing. They talk about themselves. Yeah. Yeah. They talk about all their things that they can do that. And from a consumer perspective, it's I have a problem. How are you going to solve it? Yeah. Right. I don't care about all that stuff.
[00:17:51] I have this problem and how am I going to solve it? And if you write your copy, whether it's the website copy or the email copy taking that consumer perspective, you're creating value. You're showing them. That I understand what your problems are and we're here to help. And here's why you can believe what we're saying, as opposed to, you know, we're awesome.
[00:18:20] We're awesome. Here's a whole list of features and attributes. You figure out which ones work for you,
[00:18:25] Matthew Dunn: right? Right. Yeah. Good. And the smell of small business, a track for a moment. This has struck me many times, both, both as you know, as someone who works with small businesses, knows a lot of people owns them and, and, uh, run small businesses in a sense myself.
[00:18:45] There's a, there's a lot of overhead to this digital stuff. It's like resource expensive and intensive. We, we thought it, we thought it was going to make life easier and better, but you know, in, in our conversation thus far, You've been describing a fair amount of work. That's not the actual service. If, if I'm, uh, you know, if I'm a bike shop, local bike shop in town, you know, I think my shtick is selling bikes, servicing bikes, helping people use their bikes, but right.
[00:19:20] You know, writing about bikes in models and hubs and spokes and all that kind of stuff. W where was that in the business plan? I didn't realize that it was, if I was a flipping pump.
[00:19:31] James Hipkin: Right. And, and, but they are, and it is, and this is where one of the other things I talk about within the hub and spoke strategy, don't try to boil the damned ocean, right.
[00:19:47] Pick one or two things and do them really well. Yeah. Create value. Don't try to be all things to all people, because first of all, you can't. Second of all, it's very expensive and not just monetarily expensive. You touched on it a second ago when you referenced to resource allocation, you know, for most small business owners, time is their most valuable commodity.
[00:20:13] Yeah. Yeah. Much more valuable than cash. You know, in many situations. Yeah. Um, and you want to pick the channels that are going to generate the most effect for you and talking to your current customers. I mean, there's five ways customers contribute to your revenue. The longer they stay with you, the more return you have on the initial investment required, they're much more likely to buy more products and services from you because they understand your value proposition.
[00:20:46] They're much more likely to full pay, full price. You don't have to bribe them to come back. They're less expensive to service because they know how your product and service, they know where you live. They know where you work. I mean, they, they know the address, et cetera, and find. They're much more likely to refer other customers to you.
[00:21:09] Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:10] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Think about it in marketing, right? They
[00:21:14] James Hipkin: become part of your marketing. So that's five different ways these customers, I mean, I'm pulling from my past in the corporate world. Um, I had visa as a client for a long time and, and I was very involved in, in this kind of. Customer work with visa and they did, they had the data on a 10% increase in customer loyal.
[00:21:42] Would generate a hundred percent increase in revenue. Wow.
[00:21:46] Matthew Dunn: Wow.
[00:21:47] James Hipkin: Yeah, I did a program with, uh, back in the day, back in the w during the long distance wars in the nineties. Um, I had a customer, a sprint, and I worked with the chief marketing officer and. They were spending $150 million a year on advertising back in the 1990s.
[00:22:11] Wow. A lot of money. It's a lot of money and they were not moving their market share. So we
[00:22:18] Matthew Dunn: started, they were understood MCI at the time,
[00:22:20] James Hipkin: right. MCI and at T and T to long distance services. T and T was sending out checks at MCI, had their friends and family program. Yup. So. I sat down with the chief marketing officer and we developed an idea around this customer idea, this five ways customers, we found the 20% of their customers who were the most valuable to them.
[00:22:41] And we built programs. It wasn't email marketing at the time. It was direct mail. Yeah. But we built programs with them where we had streams of communication that did what I was just describing. They didn't try to sell anything. They created value by describing to the customers. How could they could better utilize the services they already.
[00:23:02] Hm. Hm. In a three, in a 3 million piece direct mail package, we'd have up to, up to an, over a million different versions because we were customizing the, um, the messaging in these direct mail packages to suit what the customer actually had and how they use their product, because we're getting open, open rates in the 60% range.
[00:23:25] Wow. A direct
[00:23:26] Matthew Dunn: mail.
[00:23:29] James Hipkin: And then we also took their interactions and the way they use them, we use that to streamline say, Messaging. So we reduced our costs on the sales side because we were sending fewer pieces. We were getting conversion rates in the high teens on direct mail on these sales messaging, because we earned the right to talk to them and we were sending the right message to the right person.
[00:23:57] Yeah. Over five years doing that program first took about a year to get it all up and running. The second, the next four years, we were generating a 20% revenue growth on a $2 billion base of business. Wow. Year over year. Wow. And they never moved market share. Wow.
[00:24:19] Matthew Dunn: Well, how, how did you help? How did you help a customer in this case?
[00:24:26] Sprint. Think beyond nominal and transactional to that broader, uh, value view of the long-term relationship with a customer, because I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make a bunch more long distance calls. If, if you, if I'm already a, let's say a sprint customer, right. I'm only gonna, I'm only gonna have so many conversations for so many hours back when we paid for a long distance.
[00:24:56] Right. Is the objective wasn't to get. To spend more time on the phone, long distance. There's a lot, there's a lot subtler objective there. That objective
[00:25:06] James Hipkin: was to get them to not churn because we were targeting the best customers. We were targeting the 20% that represented 80% of the revenue. Okay. Gotcha.
[00:25:18] And the longer we could keep them. Yep. The more ROI we were getting. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. The better the relationship we had with them, the more likely they were. I'll get my paging from sprint to right. And services. I'll get my internet from sprint to yeah. You know? Yeah. It was back DSL back then, if you could remember that, but you can see, and this is how we were generating those kinds of revenue growth, that kind of revenue growth.
[00:25:49] Yeah. From that customer base because of the five ways customers can contribute and they were spending less time on. Customer care calls because they knew how to use the service. Right. Right. You know, they were dare telling their friends about that. What a great relationship they have.
[00:26:09] Matthew Dunn: We're going to need a, we're going to need to put a glossary and hyperlinks with this particular podcast episode, because between the two of us, we've been making historical references that I'm not sure everybody is going to get to long distance.
[00:26:24] Huh?
[00:26:28] James Hipkin: Well, you know, I, I remember I started at a New York ad agency called Ted Bates. And this was during the time when the apple Lisa was launched and the IBM PC was launched. And we, we were considered advanced because we had a word processing team in often a room that was, that was where we were with them.
[00:26:52] I went out and I, I, I leased an IBM PC. Yeah. Yeah. We had to do these budget control reports and they required a spreadsheet and we were doing it all by hand and we calculate it and we turn it into the word processing room and they would make mistakes. Then we'd have to edit back and forth
[00:27:13] Matthew Dunn: VisiCalc or Lotus 1, 2, 3, Lotus 1, 2, 3.
[00:27:17] James Hipkin: And I figured out how to use it. And I built the budget and my boss, actually my bosses boss at that time, he ended up being CEO of the organization globally. But, uh, but he, he was raging by my office. We had offices back then, which is very cool.
[00:27:35] Matthew Dunn: I hear they're coming back into fashion. Yes, apparently.
[00:27:38] James Hipkin: And he, I could almost hear him skidding in the hall and he came back hip God, what have you done?
[00:27:45] What is that thing I'm not paying for that thing who's paying for that thing. Right? Big, giant computer on my desk. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's and when bill stopped yelling. Yeah, I sit here, come here. Remember budget control reports, bill. Oh yeah. Oh, awful things. Yeah. Fair. Look at this. And I showed him what I could do and I should see if I change this number here.
[00:28:07] Everything else changes and it's all correct.
[00:28:10] Matthew Dunn: And it's all
[00:28:11] James Hipkin: correct. And he's like, holy crap. Yeah. That's going to save us so much time digging. And within six months, every account executive in the agency.
[00:28:22] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. I had a personal computer. This is probably right around the, this is just before the Charlie Chaplin, modern time themes, um, uh, ad campaign for the, was it the PC junior?
[00:28:34] I don't
[00:28:35] James Hipkin: remember. Yeah. I remember the ad campaign. I remember what I do remember at the time. And I use this case study often with folks that wonderful example of the power of positioning, the, the apple Lisa was launched. And then shortly about six months later, the IBM PC was launched, but apple Lisa's marketing was all very fast.
[00:29:00] It was all focused around, gosh, isn't this amazing technology was inside out. IBM launched the PC, which was inferior technology. Yeah. But they launched it with where the personal computer for business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they summarily repositioned apple as a toy and it took them 20 plus years to recover from that.
[00:29:25] Matthew Dunn: Billy arguably they've never recovered in terms of the positioning of the Mac and you're talking to a hardcore Mac guy, but an ex Microsoft guy as well. Right. Oh, no, no, no. Sherry is, if it's on your desk and you're running your corporation, you going to have, you know, windows, computers, a descendant of the IBM PC.
[00:29:46] Yeah. 'cause they,
[00:29:48] James Hipkin: they, they told the people who could actually afford the computers that this was for them. They had the brand cache to back it up and they repositioned the competition. Mm. Without even mentioning them now
[00:30:02] Matthew Dunn: without it. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And then all the were hiding out in the creative department for right.
[00:30:11] And port Linux with no one in charge and just doesn't have a snowball's chance of, uh, of landing on the desks in any significant numbers ever it's better or not. Does
[00:30:21] James Hipkin: it matter, does it matter? And this is another great example of being outside in, versus inside, out, outside
[00:30:28] Matthew Dunn: in meaning I think from the customer's point of view.
[00:30:31] James Hipkin: Yeah. Solve the customer's problem. Yeah.
[00:30:33] Matthew Dunn: Yeah.
[00:30:34] James Hipkin: Interesting. And, and give them reasons to believe that your solution will in fact
[00:30:39] Matthew Dunn: work on, do their thing. I'm curious about something in, in, in your business says plural, you know, innately red eight. It's gotta be interesting to have a foot in the world of solving the website problems of a large, you know, large brands and then taking a technology and mechanisms, knowledge, and, and, and working with small business customers.
[00:31:06] What do you find the same between them and what do you find jarringly different?
[00:31:13] James Hipkin: That's a great question. I wish I had a glib answer, but I don't, they're just very different. Um, with small businesses, you're typically dealing with one person and you're typically dealing with the decision maker. And if you can have a rational conversation, demonstrate why the solution is going to help their business, they'll usually say.
[00:31:42] It's not a lot of fuss and bother about the whole thing. When you're dealing with the large corporations, you're dealing with a committee, you've got stacks of folks. I can't tell you the number of times I've said to our contact there. Okay. Has the CEO seen. Because we don't want to be two days for away from lodge and the CEO says he wants something changed.
[00:32:04] Right, right, right. So I have to encourage them and coach them on communication and getting, you know, lots of people need to see this. We talk to folks about functional requirements and I'll, I'll say, okay, I hear what you're saying. Has anybody talked to him to talk to HR? What are their requirements from a job perspective, job recruitment perspective.
[00:32:29] Oh, well, that's an interesting idea. We hadn't thought of that. I hadn't thought of that. Has anybody talked to the, you know, how the marketing operations people, the sales team, how they need this to work for them? Yeah. Are you using a CRM? Yeah, well, yes we are. Would it be a good idea for the website to be integrated with the CRM?
[00:32:53] Oh, wow. Yeah. What an interesting idea. Okay. This is, it's mostly about the co the conversations that we're having, what I'm dealing with, small business owners, I'm dealing with the owner of the company, and, you know, we can solve problems quickly, easily. And if. When I'm dealing with corporations, it's just a whole different language.
[00:33:17] It's a whole different,
[00:33:19] Matthew Dunn: well, yeah, you, you, you're not, I mean, you're not talking with one person, which you already said clearly. I mean, in, in earlier, you don't really, or stages of, uh, of our company. We had a ton of big corporate clients where we were developing explainer videos. We were one of the first studios to start doing their kind of work, uh, well over a decade ago.
[00:33:40] Um, and that drove me nuts. Because it's like the bigger the company, the dumber, the end point to be crass about it. It's like, you know, they're responsible they're, but they're responsible for, you know, the whole relationship and success of the project, et cetera, et cetera. But then. There's this ridiculous, invisible army of people with a say in it.
[00:34:08] And, and, uh, the reasons to do something or not do something aren't necessarily about the project. They're about, you know, politics, budgets, control, climbing ladders, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Like honestly, they made me a little bit nuts. I got more and more draconian about process as we went along because I realized it's a lot more expensive.
[00:34:31] To be efficient with, with big companies than it is with small companies, because you can't go rational conversation identified the key factors, make a decision. We're done move right. It's months of pulling teeth made me crazy.
[00:34:51] James Hipkin: And we're just, we're just dealing for the most part. We're the construction general contractor.
[00:34:56] Our design agency customers are. Dealing with all of that. We're just dealing for the most part with the folks in the design agency. Since I have an agency background, I know how to speak the language. Yeah. I remember being in a meeting with an agency in San Francisco and I walked out of the meeting and the executive creative director walked out with me and put his arm around my shoulder.
[00:35:19] And you could do that back then, um, and said, Quite something. And I said, why am I quite something he said, we just spent an hour with. Talking about websites and you didn't talk about code once.
[00:35:38] Matthew Dunn: Right? Right, right. Yeah.
[00:35:40] James Hipkin: And I said, well, I assume that, you know, that we can do that. We're trying to talk about is can.
[00:35:48] Can we represent what you're doing creatively and strategically in a way that your client is going to just love. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a whole different layer. I mean the code part. Well, yeah, of course we can do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I get it. He said, but um, most people don't do that.
[00:36:12] Matthew Dunn: Right, right. Now, those of us.
[00:36:16] Those of us in the technical field and those of us in the creative field, don't always talk well. Right. Steve jobs, intersection of technology and liberal. Uh, you know, background science, like yeah. It's a tough intersection to hang out in, or it
[00:36:32] James Hipkin: was interesting. I actually did some work with them. Yeah. Um, I was worked on the team that launched the original, uh, apple iPod.
[00:36:42] Oh,
[00:36:42] Matthew Dunn: wow. Cool. Would that be all right?
[00:36:45] James Hipkin: Yup. That was a fascinating listening to him. Talk about what the real thing was and, you know, keeping people on track with what the, what they were really selling, which wasn't that device, right? It was the iTunes store. Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was the brilliant innovator.
[00:37:05] Yup. Yup. Device was just
[00:37:07] Matthew Dunn: the vehicle. Yeah, yeah. Was just a, was the end point if you will, for that whole, yeah. Wow, fascinating. Um, let's go back to email marketing, just for fun for, for a second. Um, as you said something early on about email marketing, sort of being, you know, undervalued under, under, under utilized, maybe even under, under appreciated, appreciated.
[00:37:30] Yeah. Why.
[00:37:32] James Hipkin: Well, because it's old. It's like, like it's like those of us with gray hair on our temples, we don't always get valued. Um, but it's an oldie, but a goodie. And, um, it is something we. Dealing with customers, they're being overwhelmed with things and all kinds of shiny new things to talk and, and Instagram and, and, you know, Facebook is now old, but.
[00:38:04] You've got to get past a bunch of barriers with email marketing. You don't have to get past those barriers. This is something they've been doing their entire adult life. So you can get immediately to your messaging, which is why the subject line and the preview text are so important. If you're not there, they're willing to embrace the medium.
[00:38:27] They embrace it multiple times every day. Yeah. Yeah. And so you're not, you don't have to climb that hill,
[00:38:35] Matthew Dunn: right? You don't have to introduce a habit.
[00:38:37] James Hipkin: Right. And you're not interrupting anything you made this point really well earlier in our conversation. You're not interrupting anything. They're choosing to look at their email.
[00:38:49] Okay. And if you make that choice worth their, while they will engage with you via that email. There's there's no other medium out there that can do that as efficiently, because it's also not, it, it does take time. So it has some resource expense. There's no question, but it's also, um, you know, automation can be really effectively used.
[00:39:16] Yeah. Um, I mean, Uh, I've built automation programs for email automation programs for the island of Bermuda earlier in my career, they were just sending everybody the same stuff all the time. Sure. And when we started segmenting the audience and we started using automations to actually respond when people interacted with the link, the results were spectacular and it wasn't that difficult to do.
[00:39:46] Right. Right. Um, It just required some strategy as opposed to just, well, I'm going to be sending emails out to everybody. Yeah,
[00:39:55] Matthew Dunn: yeah. Yeah. I think the age is the age of the channel, the sort of, uh, uh, you know, it's, it, it, it may be had key cache pre grade temples for some of us, but, you know, it's like, it's been part of the landscape for long enough where there's N there's nothing to it and critically.
[00:40:18] There's there's nobody pushing it, right? No one, no one's sold you email, like you kind of had to, or you did, or of course you need to. So at some point you got on the on-ramp, but no one ever called and gave you a big pitch about buying their email client or, or get getting, getting emails. Like we all just sort of absorbed it.
[00:40:42] And, and so there's no, there's no champion to, to keep the channel. Visible either. Arguably, arguably Google and Gmail do something of that job. But, but with a very different motive,
[00:40:59] James Hipkin: Gmail is more focused around transactional emails, um, as opposed to marketing, did you see that Intuit recently bought MailChimp?
[00:41:08] Yeah. I was going to
[00:41:08] Matthew Dunn: bring that up. Yeah. $12 billion, but yeah, that's a, that's a, uh, someone thinks email is still valuable. Obviously.
[00:41:16] James Hipkin: Obviously I frankly. Terrified, um, outcome being, being a QuickBooks customer, uh, into it, hasn't met a user interface that they can't mess up. Yeah. And MailChimp's biggest. We recommend MailChimp to all of our small business customers.
[00:41:37] We have a contingency law because it's so easy to work with,
[00:41:40] Matthew Dunn: easy to work with. Yeah.
[00:41:43] James Hipkin: Yeah. And, and relatively inexpensive, there are others that are cheaper. Um, and if somebody is a really advanced, um, user, then we may migrate them up to something like active campaign or one of the more mid-level ESPs.
[00:41:58] But, um, yeah. Email marketing is an under appreciated under utilized with a little bit of effort, not a lot, but with a little bit of effort, you can increase the impact of email marketing. I mean, huge.
[00:42:14] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Which means increased increase. Right. I mean, it not just the impact, the long-term long-term return on it.
[00:42:23] The other thing it's worth saying again, even if one of us has already said it, you know, within the last 45 minutes, you own that you own that connection. That's correct. Someone else doesn't own the way that's a big, big, big deal.
[00:42:39] James Hipkin: And one of the reasons why I put the website is the hub and the hub and spoke strategy is because you own that.
[00:42:47] Yep.
[00:42:48] Matthew Dunn: Yep. Agreed
[00:42:50] James Hipkin: space on the Facebook platform. You're not renting the space, this, this, and that. You own your customers. Yeah. Yeah. Use an email marketing is a fantastic medium to use, to communicate with those valuable customers,
[00:43:07] Matthew Dunn: valuable customers. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:43:09] James Hipkin: Do your segmentation recognize that there are a lot of folks that just don't need you that often.
[00:43:16] So do your segmentation understand who your best customers. And get the right message out there to the right people at the right time and do it consistently. The lazy river is a powerful thing. You
[00:43:30] Matthew Dunn: know, it's interesting. I mean, I'm sure someone has done this, but
[00:43:37] despite the age of the two channels, we've been talking about most web email for a lot of historical and technical reasons they have. Evolve to be typically separate offerings in the marketplace. Right. You've got, you know, Squarespace, Wix, uh, you know, innately and MailChimp, active campaign, et cetera. Um, I'm sure there are decent, you know, website plus, uh, you know, email offerings out there.
[00:44:14] I'm hard pressed to name. Right. So that, that, that, that connecting job of, of like really your segmentation should be in part powered by the pixel powered by the website, powered by the transactions. Well Evey, good luck trying to find a system that does that for you,
[00:44:32] James Hipkin: but they do a reasonably good job. I mean, we have a lot of e-commerce sites that we've built and manage and MailChimp, for example, does a really good job of integrating with WooCommerce.
[00:44:44] And, and can set up those triggers very efficiently and very effectively, relatively easily. But once again, our point of differentiation is that we don't ask the small business owner to figure this out for themselves. We don't hand them the keys to the Ferrari and don't crash. Yeah. We have folks who know how to do this.
[00:45:07] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, I've done it a few times. It's either. So,
[00:45:11] James Hipkin: and, and from an investment point of view, would you rather, as a small business owner spend your valuable time because that's the most valuable thing, figuring all this stuff out or pay one of my content specialists to do it right,
[00:45:25] Matthew Dunn: right. Yeah. No, it makes, it makes sense.
[00:45:27] It makes sense. It's too. Uh, it's still too detailed too, you know, too technical, too much specialized knowledge. To just expect to pick it up and figure it out yourself.
[00:45:38] James Hipkin: Right. And, and sure you can, you're smart people, but you're never going to do it as well as somebody who does it all the time. Yeah.
[00:45:48] You're never going to do it as fast as somebody who does it all the time. Yeah. You're never going to be able to see the, the additional layers of opportunity compared to somebody who does it all the time. Yup.
[00:46:00] Matthew Dunn: Yup. Agreed. Well, listen to us, man, wandering far in a field, what a delightful conversation. It's,
[00:46:08] James Hipkin: it's been a blast.
[00:46:09] It's been wonderful. Thank
[00:46:10] Matthew Dunn: you for the opportunity. Where does, where does some, if someone's listening to this and you're like, oh man, I need that kind of help. Where does, where does the small business guy hunt you down? And where does the agency who might work with red 800?
[00:46:22] James Hipkin: Well, um, let me talk to that. I really like folks to embrace the hub and spoke marketing strategy and see for themselves the power of this connection.
[00:46:33] So we've created a URL hub and spoke.marketing, where you can download our ebook journey to success, digital marketing for small business owners. Nice. Let me repeat that hub and spoke.marketing. So see how John connects the. Which is his content with the spokes email marketing is what we've talked about most today, but all the digital media channels and the website and just the power that comes from that, that would be a great starting point for folks to reach out.
[00:47:08] Hub hub and spoke.marketing, and you know, and it's a wonderful little ebook. Um, you know, my liberal arts degree, I can actually, you know, put a word or two together. Um, and, uh, do you remember the book called the goal years ago? That's good. It's good. I re-read it several times. It's still very germaned today, but he did a wonderful job of turning all this technical information into a story.
[00:47:40] And that's what we tried to do with his ebook. Nice. Is this, it's not a treatise on, on digital marketing. It's a story about a small business owner named John nice hub and spoke.marketing
[00:47:52] Matthew Dunn: of his folk Denmark. And he will send people. My, uh, my guest today has been James Hopkin is CEO of Reddick, interactive and innately, and sounds like one of the driving creative forces behind hub and spoke.marketing.
[00:48:08] James Hipkin: Thank you very much.
[00:48:09] Matthew Dunn: It's been a pleasure. Thanks.
[00:48:11]