A Conversation with Kenneth Burke of TextRequest
What does the marketing head of a leading texting service have to say about email? Quite a lot! Kenneth Burke , VP of Marketing for Text Request shares his astute insights into how people use different digital channels in their life and work. How long do people keep email addresses? Phone numbers? Where's the overlap, and the bright-line differences in marketing on these channels? Check out what he has to say about the ROI of text marketing!
Kenneth Burke 02092021
Thu, 4/29 10:07AM • 52:13
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, email, text, customers, channel, texting, businesses, company, messages, conversation, talking, week, interesting, pandemic, chattanooga, question, sms, email address, messaging, bit
SPEAKERS
Kenneth Burke, Matthew Dunn
Matthew Dunn
Hey there he is.
Kenneth Burke
Hey Maddy,
Matthew Dunn
can you hear me? Check? One, two? Yeah, you sound good. You sound good.
Kenneth Burke
How are you doing?
Matthew Dunn
I'm fine. How about yourself?
Kenneth Burke
I'm doing well. Yeah, yeah,
Matthew Dunn
I'm so appreciate I really appreciate you connecting I know, it's like no stranger reaches out on LinkedIn half the time it's just baloney.
Kenneth Burke
I'm sure you get a million of the we can help you generate more leads pitches,
Matthew Dunn
I hate those. And you want to respond like, if you were any good at that. You would actually, you know, take the time to read change the company name so it was human not you know, not the baloney that's in LinkedIn stuff.
Kenneth Burke
I got one a week or two ago and actually share it with our sales team because the guy put some effort into it. He researched me on LinkedIn. Yeah, he's my Navy, he pulled personal experiences, through in a customized Jeff talked about one of our owners real in a good way. And I was like, You know what? I replied to him. I said, I'm not interested right now. But you know, good job.
Matthew Dunn
Good job. Yeah, good. Good on you. Hey, do you have any questions before we actually officially start?
Kenneth Burke
Sure. Yeah. Just to confirm, you wanted to talk about how text and email can work together or just kind of how things are changing in the future is that,
Matthew Dunn
you know, I mean, I'm certainly interested in in both, I think, you know, the, the audience for this, this podcast, it's kind of skews email. But it's all marketers. And they better they better think about all of those channels, and email marketers, maybe a little bit myopic, like, everything's in email. And I wanted to push their thinking a little bit about, you know, what's possible, who's using what and what really what the differences are. In the channels, I don't think of them as competitive so much is, you know, this is really particularly effective for that and things you can do one channel you can't necessarily do and the other and so on and so forth.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, and my takes, basically, it would be complimentary. But I mean, you can hurl whatever questions you have at me, and I'll, I'll answer as good as I can we do a ton of email, you know, in house too. So
Matthew Dunn
do you Okay. Oh, that's right. You're the VP of Marketing, so we can talk about that as well. Cool. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna give the production guys a countdown. So here we go. 321. Hi, there, Dr. Matthew Dunn, here with the future of email marketing. And my guest today is Kenneth Burke, VP of Marketing for Text Request from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Kenneth sanc. Thanks so much for responding to the invitation. And joining me here today. Welcome.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Matthew Dunn
Tell us a bit about Text Request.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, so kind of the opposite of Campaign Genius. We're a text messaging software company for businesses to be able to, you know, text with their customers manage that all under, you know, one professional roof so that it's professional and compliant and collaborative and pliancy who's talking with whom and what they're saying and all that.
Matthew Dunn
You know, I had to I have to sidebar in the personalization or the personal side for a second. Literally last, the last guest on the podcast on Friday. Quiz from Chattanooga, Tennessee as well. Oh, yeah. What are the odds? Yeah, it's the it's the town for me at least is the town famous for for bandwidth and innovation right? municipal fiber network 1010 gigabit speed throughout the whole city. So right is that actually spurred, you know, startups and companies in innovation for the area
Kenneth Burke
it has. And I was actually just reading. I'm a huge champion for Chattanooga. And but one of the things I was just reading 20 minutes before I jumped on here was how we're another outlet named as the number one city for work from home or for remote workers. And a big piece of it is that exactly that that gigabit Speed Internet that's just, you know, foundational to the community. Yeah. And so people, they come here, they I talk to another person every week who's moving from Dallas, or somewhere in California and New York, for you know, to, and they have digital businesses. And so it's a really easy switch for them.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I was, I was gonna ask if you're getting an influx of people as as, you know, as moved as place shifts around and in this pandemic, and post pandemic, you know, I can work from anywhere, DOD, DOD, DOD, anywhere there's bandwidth.
Kenneth Burke
Exactly.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. My my friend Paul Shriner, who's the co founder of audience point was the guest on on Friday. And do you know that?
Kenneth Burke
I'm familiar with audience point? I don't know Paul, personally, but okay.
Matthew Dunn
I promised I promised a connected to of you afterwards, you may have some may have some other interests in common. He's a great guy as well. On so I got you off track almost right off the bat text requests, businesses? Yes. Are there particular kinds of businesses size industry, whatever that tend to be your customers at this stage? there? Well,
Kenneth Burke
we do work with about 100 different industries. So it's quite broad, but we tend to fall into a few key categories, Home Services. So your landscapers, your cleaners, your electricians, professional services, financial advisors, insurance, accountants, lawyers, those kind of all get grouped together. Those are the two big ones. A lot of nonprofits. Okay, agencies, education. I can go on.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. education as well. Interesting, like colleges as well.
Kenneth Burke
Private schools, colleges and universities. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
I would, I would, I would think that I would think that would be really effective for them. You've been at the company a fair stretch yourself, right?
Kenneth Burke
Yeah. So I've been here just over six years now. So I started two months, about after we launched, so Oh, wow. They won. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Wow. Good for you. And obviously, sim sim growth. Just judging from the number of industries you mentioned has, how's that been? Going through that? Have you been through that ride with a relatively young company before and written along with the growth? No,
Kenneth Burke
this was first for me. So I mean, the only other experience I had, I mean, had jobs before building a lot of experiences like a business working with that many different industries was you know, working in dad's CPA firm. Oh, wow. Very different.
Matthew Dunn
I see from CPA firm to marketer to texting company. Give us a give us a brief, you know, like career snapshot, how'd you land end up doing what you're doing?
Kenneth Burke
It was serendipitous. Really. So I again, CPA background, I actually went to college to study music.
Matthew Dunn
What do you play?
Kenneth Burke
guitar mainly, but it was at the time. You know, you have to educate your rights, you have to play several different things. So yeah, learning piano. Yeah, for my two others. And then I was a terrible vocalist. But anyway, so flipped around a little bit, ended up in psychology really loved that. Really found my place there. But then got out of the education side of it and went into financial planning. So putting that background to us, and then also got married my wife and I wanted to move back to Chattanooga. I wanted to get out of Finance. And a friend of mine from college was one of the people one of the founding five to start Tech's request. And I said, that sounds really interesting. Let me just come join you. Yeah, he said, Okay. So nice. Nice. It was cold calling colleges and
Matthew Dunn
when when did the company start?
Kenneth Burke
2014 November 2014.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, okay. Interesting. there's a there's a company in Seattle called to tango. I don't know if you've run into them.
Kenneth Burke
I'm familiar. You are okay. So
Matthew Dunn
quick, but quick, but funny side story. I remember sitting in Derek Johnson's basement, he's the CEO of to tango. He was a kid just out of college, from my town, Bellingham, Washington. And he was getting ready to pitch the local angel investors on how text was going to become an honest to goodness marketing channel and we were sitting in his parents basement, five miles from here, talking through the business plan and stuff and I look at you know, look at how it's exploded then since then, I'm like, Derek, good on you, buddy. Yeah,
Kenneth Burke
he's You were right. And then the inch the question that's always posed to me, I don't know if you had this on your list or not, but text is a great choice. It's an additional channel for most people have been doing it before. And so communications experts or leaders always ask, okay, well, well, there's another option. How do we make sure we aren't overwhelming people? Yeah. And obviously, that's an interesting question because it comes down to consumer preferences, right? Like, people need to be able to choose how they're going to interact with you. And you need to be able to accommodate that some people really want email. Now only one email, some people really want action, they only want text, want a mix of that plus social, maybe a direct mail thrown in here and there.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. So when you're talking with customers, or prospective customers on, is there, is there any consistent line that says likely to be for this purpose? Not for that purpose? Like how do you see those two, at least email marketing, and, and text tending to coexist in people's preferences?
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, it's hard to say across the boards, I'm thinking of all the different types of industries we work with, like if I'm talking to a college, and they're their customer, the person they're communicating with is a student who's 1617 years old. What's going to work every time for them is very different from the CPA firm who has middle aged clients, right. But typically, I think of it as texting is going to be for short back and forth. Right? So things like scheduling things like quick updates, things like confirmations, or last minute reminders for that the response time on a text is I mean, average response times 90 seconds, most people see a text instantly. Wow. Yeah. So it really aids to the to those use cases, whereas email a lot of times, you see leans towards really rich content. Yeah, you know, detailed promotions, or newsletters which you can share newsletters and links through through text messaging. Many people these days do still prefer it through an email. Yeah. And then receipts and record keeping, right like, if you create a new account, you want those details log, so you can go quickly search it. Especially when entrepreneurs want receipts, because they can just fall and lock things away really easily. And you kind of filter things that way. Right? You tell conversations and email intros, you know, to different people,
Matthew Dunn
but right, right now, I'm texting, texting has been around for a while. And there's really you've got standards starting to sort of build up on top of each other, you know, the original SMS, which was the control channel for the cellular network. Obviously, we've gone past that, at a technical level, a text Text Request delivers. What kind of messages?
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, SMS and MMS. MMS. Okay.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, that's, that's, that's what I expected on I had followed with considerable interest. Google's attempt to make a rich communication service, a more broad industry standard, you know, essentially, can we take? Can we take the kind of thing you get with private messaging channels, WhatsApp, apple, iMessage, whatever, and get some universal? Everybody talks the same way to each other? And it looks like that didn't stick is that? Is that a fair assessment?
Kenneth Burke
More or less than in? The unofficial take is that it's kind of back to your Android iOS. Bad? Yeah. Yeah. Where Apple is premier said, hey, we've got all this baked in into iMessage. Yep. Yeah, I want that rich content. Just use us and Google saying, you know, well, let's make it kind of a
Matthew Dunn
common universal is
Kenneth Burke
for everyone. Yeah. And so yeah, there have been some talks about and we're keeping a very close eye on it, because it would make a lot of sense. Oh, sure. All this route. But there have been a lot of talks of them reconciling so to speak, there being some kind of alternative where everyone can can play in the same sandbox. But it is an interesting ongoing conversation.
Matthew Dunn
I I'd have to say, my read on it, because, you know, throw rocks and prognosticate for fun sometimes. If you if you look at the battleground around privacy now. It seems to me more unlikely that Apple and Google would reach the taunt on messaging because they don't seem to see consumer privacy in at all the same way. And apple in particular is is really staking some brand equity on Nope, we'll we'll cover it will protect you know, we'll get rid of phone IDs, the idfa that change that they're they're talking about making insight, trying to get trying to reconcile and work together and still preserve that strikes me as a big lift.
It's a great point. It's
Kenneth Burke
also interesting how like Apple last couple of years in particular is really put their money where their mouth is, you know, new product updates specifically around that. It's not just them saying they're going yeah, I guess that goes back to the Was it 2015 where the FBI asked them to
Matthew Dunn
unlock a phone? Yeah, yeah.
Kenneth Burke
But it's also interesting that Google's been coming along in creating verified SMS where you can, you know, they're verifying your ID. That's actually a whole bigger trend and telecom right now anyway, but going through verified SMS or verifying that these are real businesses sending legitimate messages to real people to cut back on on spam, because as that becomes such a huge problem,
Matthew Dunn
spam spam and texted SMS and MMS has become a problem.
Kenneth Burke
Well, I mean, it's, it's like anything, right? I mean, if you can get a message out to a lot of people quickly, someone's gonna
Matthew Dunn
abuse it. Yeah. Yeah. We've, in our platform Campaign Genius. We make occasional use of API's from Twilio, when I'm sure you're more than familiar with them, and I always look and say, Gosh, I bet I know how those those dorks that just, you know, spammed my, my inbox on my phone, like texted me on my phone a minute ago, I'm betting they spun it up, said a bunch, and then beat feed out of town. It's got to be any much. I
Kenneth Burke
mean, a lot of times we've seen it, you know, it's it's a stolen credit card, they buy a list of contacts, and then they, you know, they'll go until you get shut off unless you're able to stop them before they start. Right. Right. Anyway, so so there's a lot of people out there, Apple included, you know, in general, where we're all working to, and I'm sure you as well, you know, make sure people can't do that.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, well, it's it's such a messaging texting such a, I think of it as a fairly intimate, it's a high priority, interrupt if you're old enough to know what that means. Right? It's like being at I mean, literally, we're sitting here having this conversation, I muted my phone, but it lit up because there was a text from my wife. And of course, I looked at it immediately, like, you know, less than 90 seconds, and you said 90 seconds is the average. Yeah, it it's, but for me, and I'm curious to know what you see in terms of the patterns for your customers? Um, I'm pretty picky about who I want to hear from on that channel. Hmm. Fair. You got to really earn me not saying shut it off. Don't bother. Don't Don't get me here.
Kenneth Burke
Oh, yeah. And I think one thing that's really interesting, well, there's a few things that come together to be really interesting one, is it any report pretty much any sampling? About 90% of people say they do want to text with businesses back and forth? Right. Wow, saying they're not saying they want to be added to a list. Yeah. But they're saying they if they have a question about sales or service, yeah, I would either like to receive info through text, or I would like to text the question.
Matthew Dunn
Okay. Okay. So that's,
Kenneth Burke
that's really interesting. There's another that email, and I would say this is a good thing. But collecting email addresses and email marketing has become a really easy way to get someone into your pipeline. People are pretty willing to give up their email address in exchange for a discount or an E book or something. Right. And you are seeing that with with text, really. It's more, there's a few retail companies doing really well. In particular, and then there's, like, our local newspaper, you know, uses it for really, for different updates, which I love, right? I mean, if you screwed up during the the COVID crisis, or whatever it was, I guess in its most stressful part, or most, where there's the most misinformation going on, and no one really had any idea what was true or not, they did a great thanks to Chattanooga times Free Press, shout out. They, they would pull together the five most important pieces of info each week. And then they would say, hey, if you want us to just text this to you know, subscribe here, and we'll just text it to you. I loved it. I thought it was great. Yeah. Anyway, a lot of people enjoy receiving updates like that. Right. But a big thing for for text is like you said, it is a little more incidents on a more personal. And so if they're going to I'm thinking specifically for marketing for getting on a list. If they're going to get on a list. It needs to be a very clear opt in that hey, I am Yeah, yeah, opting in for this specific thing at this specific frequency. And then if you you know, if you break my trust, and I'm going to opt out, right, right. That's kind of a fair, fair statement for any channel. Yep. It is interesting that the for those who opt in the lifetime for what we can see the lifetime opt out rate is under 5%. So once people, they're very loyal. Wow.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Wow. That is fascinating. And you talked a bit about the diversity of the customer base. The Text Requests serves on broadly speaking, what's what's the what's the where are they coming from when they end up finding, you know, finding you and becoming a customer and putting it under that kind of business management umbrella that you described early on? Is? Is it the overworked intern who says I can't keep doing this from my phone? Or where are they coming from when they end up with you?
Yeah, so there's, well, there's
Kenneth Burke
kind of three threes, six or three types of companies, or profiles. There we go. buyer personas, buyer persona, drought, the buzzwords. We have a there's a small business persona, where it's typically either an owner operator or an opposite administrator who's running everything. So they're touching payments, and customer service and sales and feedback and everything. Okay. And in their case, that's that one owner or head of office who's they're overwhelmed or overworked and they say, I need something better. Okay. So usually it's them say, usually, it's them reaching out like them realizing they have a problem they're searching for. It's a pretty active market now, which is great. So people are primarily coming to us. Sometimes it's, you know, an email sent out to them right place, right time. Right. Okay. Okay, or social media posts that I've had two people last week said, Hey, cannot this all you know, such and such on social and that resonated with me when we talk. So that's one type. Another type is, is more that mid market, where you either have multiple locations, multiple branches, or you have multiple distinct departments. Okay, so Well, a lot of times we'll have a branch manager or VP of Sales come to us and say, Hey, we, you know, we're having to call customers 568 times. And then we're barely reaching anyone, and it's running our operations. Right, right. So we need to bake something in. And then the third is more of an enterprise use case where they need to build something themselves. And like you mentioned Twilio, earlier, you know, it becomes a conversation of do I want to go with a Twilio? where, you know, the world's my oyster, but I had to build it myself or don't want to go with something that's a little more that's already built out. It's kind of a plug and play. Okay. Okay. That builder by conversation, Does that answer the question? Are
Matthew Dunn
we going more
Kenneth Burke
acquisition channel,
Matthew Dunn
oh, wasn't worried about the acquisition channel, I was just trying to get a bead on on, you know, on the on a call, let's call it communications, you know, communications maturity cycle that says, Okay, this, this channel, texting is now a viable piece of my business, whether it's operations or marketing, or information, in the case of your newspaper, it's not just a one off happenstance thing, it's like, there's some, there's some deliberation to it, and it becomes it that list I would assume becomes an asset, especially at a 5%. churn rate, like, Oh, for sure. It's something
Kenneth Burke
that's unique to us to, or at least, has been, you know, since we've started, or what distinguish us from Tango is, we're focused on conversations from the start. So marketing is a part of that, right? Like, you can text from your landline, what have you, and it takes hundreds of 1000s of people, promotions and to drive sales, but what we really focus on is creating conversations. So getting your customers to text into you, you know, from your website, or from whatever else you've got going on. And then if you got an update, or you needed to engage with them in some way to be able to say, you know, hey, Matt, can you give me that sample? Or, you know, following up on the estimate, did you have any questions to start those conversations,
Matthew Dunn
so let's go on the basement, it just was making video live with the just list making definitely could become much more of a conversation channel, I think, not just not not just a broadcast out to lots of people channel. So in terms of the in terms of the tool set from your company, does that mean that a customer that's really rockin it with Text Request may have multiple employees, you logged in and paying attention to that channel?
Kenneth Burke
Yes, and it depends on the situation again, like if it's a you know, a smaller company, it might just be an opposite administrator, or maybe it's one person buys. You see this all the time. You know, one person buys the account, one other person actually uses it. Okay. Interesting. But then there's, I mean, there's probably, I won't give a number but there's a substantial percentage of ours who they have our customers who they come on, and then they add everyone in the company, right as a user, or they'll create different accounts, you know, doing different logins for different departments.
Matthew Dunn
You know, it's been a jumping I'm jumping around a little bit but you know, what, watching? What was the best monitor for it, let's just say messaging super generically like short back and forth. And initially at least written language text centric you had, I forget the name of the company, I think they were from Israel, one of the first messaging systems to take off, they got bought on we had WhatsApp and the whole class of private messaging kind of explode. And now that's petered out. And now the ones that are very, very privacy focused as private channels, the telegram and signals appear to be having a bit of a day in the sun, I don't know how long that lasts as well. And then that long, slow steady from the signal channel, SMS to overlaying MMS so that you can get a little richer conversation going on, that is never going to go away, because it's going to be very hard for someone to pry this phone number out of my hands. Right? If you've got this number, you've got a very long term relationship with me, which is where you guys sit?
Kenneth Burke
Yeah. And that was I was actually something I scribbled down before the conversation was, it's really interesting to me. How many people keep a phone number longer than they keep an email address? Yeah, I'm not knocking email at all. But I mean, you get a phone number, when you're 13 years old. I still have the same number. I've always had, you know, people who have sometimes you change it when you move to a new city, but then you have to change, you know, tell our contacts all that jazz.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, no, I think I would. Have you seen any studies about that? I'd be curious. Like, how long are people keeping anything formal?
Kenneth Burke
I mean, I've seen some anecdotal anecdotal stuff. Yeah, that's anything formal now that we've talked about, I need to go see if I can dig something up.
I'm headed about the
Kenneth Burke
average person changes jobs every three months. Or sorry? Not every three months, every three years. Yeah. That's a new email address every time and use Gmail or Outlook or AOL you've had for ever? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. But but but you know, the the phone which is now the mobile phone, right? My, my older son, when he hit that stage, where it was like, okay, we're gonna get on the phone, got him a phone, and he ended up with the last four digits of his number, being the month and year he was born. Nice coincidence? complete coincidence, right. But I remember thinking he's never gonna give this number of ever. Like No way. And you when you get it fanned out and you're in, you know, you're in an unknown number of address books out there list of businesses, etc, etc. Yeah, I, I think you're right. And email addresses being used as intentional temporaries is so common as well, like, yeah, I'll keep a you know, I'll go sign up for a free gmail account and put all of my promotional crap there. Because why? Because I don't want it in my regular inbox. Sure, why not? But you don't you don't idly do that with your phone?
Kenneth Burke
When it's interesting to you. We're talking about the different messaging channels like WhatsApp and telegram at all? Yeah. You're right. I mean, there are just so many options. Now for messaging, every social media platform has a messaging tool baked into it. You know, a lot of a lot of other apps that businesses have, you know, that would be kind of not seen, we use but have one purpose. Yeah, getting this to interact with this business, you know, even those have messaging baked into them. And I think what will be really interesting is to see long term, who comes and we're working towards it some but who comes out to pull all those channels together into one place? Hmm.
Matthew Dunn
If they can't come forth? Yeah, if they if they can, it's it's also this is true of email as well. I've joked with people, you know, cocktail party conversation, whatever, that the one thing we left off the internet was identity. Because Because really early, early underpinnings all of the early protocols, you there was no who, right? And people use email somewhat like identity, someone an email marketing and say, Well, if you don't have an email address, you're digitally homeless. Okay? Agreed. But I don't have just one and almost nobody has just one. And you could say email addresses, very, you know, is very, is a very personal thing. But as you said, you'll have multiple business addresses over time, and you have to deal with cleaning that up because you're done. All of that's not true. of the mobile number now, like that's a very intimate, close to an eye, you know, close to an identity level thing that number my son's Never gonna give that number up. You've had the same one. Your whole life like wow, that's, that's, that's a really high bar in terms of the value of that connecting point between you and other people.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, and especially if you draw from that and you start thinking about customer lifetime value or having an even if you're, I was talking to someone who runs a marketing agency for furniture retailers last week, and he was saying they Their typical customer buys or like, on average furniture customer buys, or replaces furniture once every eight years. Okay, and so my question is, how do you? How do you create a loyal customer that way? Right? When they're coming to you once every eight years? Maybe? Yeah, maybe there's an opportunity to mix in there somewhere. But it's it's incredibly infrequent. Yeah. But you know, you're talking about you keep the same, same number, same piece of identity over time, that can be a great way to show people engaged and stay with them.
Matthew Dunn
So the challenge for that, for the marketing use in that case is how do you how do you stay in contact without and and make it a valuable conversation? You don't want to just keep sending them ads for furniture, if they're not going to buy for years, you're eventually they're gonna go just be like bozo filter, stop. Stop sending me stuff.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, you're right.
Matthew Dunn
So tough equation. I mean, email emails got this somewhat the same thing. But I think you touched on it. There's a there's a degree of tolerance with email, because it's not such a high priority interrupt, because the sort of tool set for me, I'll get to that later. And the habits are more built in.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, I think about it from a little bit different angle, I think of my bias will show but I think of taxes right now. And I think of email as maybe later. So just like if I'm trying to get quick engagement, or I need to, we have customers all the time who they'll send, you know, they need a boost in sales at the end of the month. So they'll send every all their past customers a text, you know, the last week and try to drive more bookings or services, you know, what have you. But then I think of email where I'm getting 10 things a day that I have zero interest in. But you know, on on Saturdays, when I might go to a shop, or I think about oh, I want to get a new book or buy a new whatever, or my wife wants this. I'll go look for that coupon that was just sent to me. Right, right. So I'll go back and look it up. And anyway. So I think of like email is there as a record, I can go back to Yep, yeah, which to engage with right now. You know, it's a text,
Matthew Dunn
which doesn't, my wife deletes message threads, text message threads, no matter who they're from, like, she doesn't keep while she deletes them. But she keeps email forever. And, and I'm almost at inbox zero, which is a whole nother conversation. Never thought that would happen. doesn't mean they're deleted, just means they're out of mind. Right? But by text messaging records, go back to yours. Like, I might want to look at it later. Oh, keep it particularly when it's from, you know, friends and family and stuff like that. We flip flop on on that on that matrix? I did want to ask you, I mean, as as as marketing VP, you also probably end up with a hand in email as a channel as well, like, tell me about coexisting with those two things in your job?
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, it's kind of interesting, too, because one cold emails done properly can be a great sales acquisition channel. And so we're, I mean, we're kind of phasing out a startup phase. We've been profitable for years, but you know, a bootstrap startup. And so sure, we had to figure out how to how to get sales quickly. Yeah, I would never advise cold texting people.
Matthew Dunn
No politics
Kenneth Burke
or nonprofits is the only exception or non commercial uses the only exception. But even then people well, there are too many, there are too many cooks in the kitchen trying to do the same thing. The same people, so it just creates problems. You did more of a centralized approach. But anyway, cold email was something that worked really well for us. And then it I mean, the stuff you do all the time, reengagement for cold leads or for just keeping customers in the loop. I mean, we still send out you know, a newsletter every week. Okay, we've got you know, different email campaigns going on all the time. You know, we've got someone who have their job is is email or we got two people who have their jobs or email so I guess one full time position.
Matthew Dunn
Wow. Okay. So it's still it's part of it's part of the business still.
Kenneth Burke
Well, I mean, it needs to be right like yeah, you know, this there's I mean, speaking from a text message company, like text needs to be a part of how you communicate. Yeah, so does email people use email to communicate with each other people text to communicate with each other people are on social media to communicate with each other people are on you know, Google searching for what they need they're in forums discussing their problems you need to be in all these places. Yeah, yeah. If you miss one year you know you're missing out and emails it's not going anywhere
Matthew Dunn
it's not going to her yeah and and and and I did Oh, is one of the three lines of this conversation so far. You know, did Oh, texting, right. It's like, not gonna it's not gonna go away on its I happen to use an iPhone. On and I'm in I'm a Mac head, I freely admit I'm a Mac head on. Polo. I worked at Microsoft for 10 years. So I actually knew windows inside note as well. Please give me my Mac back. But I get my I get my messages on my, on my desktop as well. But I still think of the locus of that channel as being the my my mobile device, not my desktop. Conversely, I don't do much email on the phone, I'll mostly deal with it. At the desktop. Do you see anything about consumer behavior? That is that just an edge case? Or do people mostly keep texting on their phone?
Kenneth Burke
Um, it's a bit of a mix. I mean, all I have, I don't have much data from our customers customers. there except for you know, the aggregates that you can find anywhere. Yeah, cuz I'm trying to think most. I mean, it is it is edge case that messages like your situation is edge case that messages. People still use it from desktop. from desktop. Yeah. You see it with with, like, iPads. You know, okay. Tablets all the time. Yeah. Interesting. We'll have them synced. But yeah. You know, there's still fewer people who have a tablet as well. Yeah. But it's interesting. You talk about you do all your email on on your desktop. I think the last report I saw it's 55 or 60%. of, you know, opens are mobile, mobile. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Well, that's, that's open. So it's like I like oh, yeah, I'll read it later. Right? Read it, deal with it, especially if I'm gonna respond to it. I'll type so much faster to keyboard that it's just a pragmatic decision. Like, yeah, I can get back to that guy a lot better, and I won't have as many won't have as many typos. Um, yeah, well, I'm curious. And this is like, this is sort of particularly coming from the the angle of the things that our company does Campaign Genius. But do you see shifts in the balance between SMS and MMS? And what's happening with, with media and visuals and the sort of richer component of what that MMS can deliver? Is that on the rise? Is it? Is it behaviors just as it's always been? Or what?
Kenneth Burke
That's a good question. I was actually in a conversation with our demand generation specialists about this. Last week, I guess. And it, it kind of depends, I mean, there's so much noise going on, and from so many different channels that it is tougher to stand out. And because of that they're in because I mean, people are continually innovating and we're forever competing with each other. So we're getting better and better about grabbing people's attention. And then people adapt, and you have to figure out a new way. Yeah. And so one of the ways to get people's attention is richer content. Yeah. And so there is a I mean, I'll tell you, if you're sending marketing text, messages with an image are almost always going to perform better than messages without an image.
Matthew Dunn
Not surprised. But yeah.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah. So I mean, there's there's that piece to it. But I think it still comes back to something you said earlier, where you can't just be messaging people for the sake of message, and then we have to have something of value to offer some reaching out. Yeah, yeah. And because I mean, we, we see in our customers see it too. This would apply to text as well as to email and other channels. Boring, plain text, you know, let me ask you a question to start a conversation can be as effective and have as high or higher returns as the fancy is template.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Right. It's also where there's context. You know, if I'm getting something rich, interesting, you know, richer media, as you said, from somebody, I wouldn't expect that be the first thing I get from him, because it would be like, wait a minute, why did you go to all this work?
Kenneth Burke
To so you can only go downhill from there, right? Like, if you start with your best, it's not going to get better? That's true. Yeah, it's true. It's true.
Matthew Dunn
I find, at least for the businesses that I interact with, just as you know, just as a person on the sort of utilitarian a day to day use of text is the channel is wonderful. Like, for some reason, my dad is totally on top of his texting game. I literally got a text this morning, like, you have an appointment on and I was like, Oh, well, thank you. I would have completely forgotten that. And they must know that that's a high priority interrupt like they ping me there. It's not gonna get lost in my inbox. Oh, yeah, I do have a double click, make sure it's on the calendar and stuff like that, is that one of the things that you do that you find your customers doing?
Kenneth Burke
And it's interesting for that particular use cases there's about a 20% lift and kept up appointments from those confirmation messages, which is money in the bank, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I dollar for dollar I'm more familiar with with the home service industry. And so you say you're talking 150 bucks for cleaning or service like that, you know, you send one message and you can have these scheduled in advance. Right. So it's you don't think about it. But a message will cost you what a penny or a few cents, and it gives you an extra 150 bucks. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. One one appointment saved in your head for 10 years.
Kenneth Burke
It's really interesting. Because it I think, Well, I think about this applies to campaigns you used to, because I just think dynamic content. And I see we've seen it with a lot of dentists as well, and other medical professionals where if someone or even salons, people back out last minute life happens. You know, you're not gonna keep everything. Yeah. But then what do you do with that time? Well, you can go to a list of customers who were maybe overdue. And you can say, or who are, you know, several weeks out, right. And you can say, Hey, we had a last minute opening. Right, right. Do you happen?
Matthew Dunn
That's a great idea. And it works to Wow, that's a great idea, Phil. Yeah. That Phil and your hairdresser, you know, service industry? Like what do we know we're gonna be in the neighborhood? Did is there I don't know why that occurred to me. Is there? Is there any really targeted like geo fencing capability in text requests? Can I say I just want to get get to people that I know are within five miles of my, you know, dental office,
Kenneth Burke
there's not it's very interesting conversation around that because they will there's there's the one piece, right, like, a lot of people who start with geofencing want to push out or push notifications. So they want to say you see a lot with retail, they say okay, well, you know, it's it's the weekend is a lot of tourist traffic, they've never been here before, let me just push out notices to the you know, whoever's in a five square blocks of me drive traffic to in store, which is really interesting, a bit invasive, but it works. So it's kind of that you know, that pops up. Yeah. But then an interesting point to like, if you're talking text messaging, people need to be on your list. Alright, I guess it'd be email to people need to be on your list already. Or have that opt in and then you would need to GPS tracking or each person is to see if they're in your radius or not. Yeah, yeah, it gets. It gets fascinating. But really, yeah, complex.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, gets gets gets daunting me for, for email, and this is this is this is to be blunt, really cutting edge email stuff, like, we can enable someone to email and change the content based on where the recipient is when they open it. But it's that such a new thing. It's such a new capability for email that, frankly, you know, customers were we talked to are still like, wait a minute what we can what, like, yeah, we could say, deliver a pixel if they're not within range x deliver a coupon if they are within range x.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah. And it makes it makes so much since two I'm thinking restaurants is an easy one. Yeah, there's a particular restaurant in Chattanooga that comes to mind. They have the head for three locations. Yeah. All in different neighborhoods around town. And so if you know they sent out I don't know, one thing a day, one thing a week, and it just showed up with whichever restaurant, whichever location you were closest to at that time. Perfect. Yeah, great. Let me let me walk two blocks. I'll get some tacos. That'll be fantastic. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, yeah. Yeah, perfect, perfect. And that kind of anything we do to get people back in restaurants when we're done with this pandemic mess. How's that been a total personal sidebar, but as Chattanooga sailed through the pandemic, okay, it's been it's been weird here for
Kenneth Burke
sure. nega is, well, okay. It has negatively affected a lot of people in very profound ways that some people won't recover. Like, that's Yeah, yeah. Some businesses have gone out. But it has been great to watch our community come together for each other and even even to see how how they come together to keep businesses alive. There is a an entrepreneur in town who his shop is a mile down the road is a friend of mine and he was talking about how whenever the pandemic first hit, and for us, it was March whenever everything was shutting down. And he's thinking I don't know. I don't know how we're gonna keep going. I don't know. You know, we were kind of berry berry not barely staying staying up. But you know, he wasn't driving a Lamborghini or anything like that. Yeah. But anyway, so he was Considering closing down and he said, and then he, he talked to a few people or a few people, customers came to talk to him about how much they needed him. And he didn't realize how much you know, customers needed the businesses as much as the businesses needed the customer.
Matthew Dunn
That's terrific.
Kenneth Burke
Anyway, so it's just been a very fascinating story to watch in town. And then, I mean, for us personally, it worked. It's worked out pretty well as a company.
Matthew Dunn
probably been stressful, of course, push stressful, but it did it. Did it actually spur some things happening faster. Yeah, interesting. I
Kenneth Burke
did, you know, a lot of people, everything shut down. And so all these companies all of a sudden said, we had to figure out how to let our customers know that we're either open to taking certain precautions that they can home service that we can still, you know, we have, you know, fewer than 10 people at a job, or fewer than five, or whatever the number was at that time, so we can still help them out. All these different things. And I'm sure you saw this to happen across the whole, well, everywhere, but a compression of that digital transformation, something that would have naturally taken two or three years. Completely and a couple of weeks.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. A couple weeks.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah. Yeah. Which was helpful for us, you know, just from a business, you know, dollars. Yeah, standpoint. But it was also tough, I'm sure you saw was too tough to watch. A lot of customers we worked with for a while, they had to shut down their businesses. And, you know, we're sad to lose them as a customer. But there's a much more important story going on behind the scenes that you feel for.
Matthew Dunn
And we're not, you know, in terms of that, that kick into the digital future. You know, I don't think we're going back. I don't think we're gonna even take a half step back on that stuff. I mean, I would expect do people go into the office or not? It's not going to look like now. But it's also not gonna look like a year ago, ever again. Right?
Kenneth Burke
Yes, it's tough with predictions, because like making predictions is always the best way to, like a fool in hindsight. But it feels very much like, like an old rubber band, like we've kind of stretch things that we're going to be, you know, there's that new normal, and then it'll, it'll bounce back a little bit, but not not,
Matthew Dunn
not exactly the same shape. Right. And especially with people, you know, going up, and I'm going to pick up and move to Chattanooga, Tennessee, right, like, Hey, boss, you, you said telecommuting was going to work. And I have a house here now. So I'd like to keep working for you. But I'm gonna pick up and move back right. I do think I've done the remote thing for a very long time, and run teams remotely distributed teams for a long time. And I don't think it's a great fit for everybody. There are people who really need the social energy, and I think they're probably having a miserable time right now. You know, stuck at home yet. It's freedom in one sense, but we're meant to be with each other as well. And cutting that off is gonna cost.
Kenneth Burke
It's really interesting to me, a lot of this stuff is interesting to me. But working remote or working from home, in the current times is nothing like you know, how you work from home or work remote for years, right? Because you can't just go out to a coffee shop and hang out You can't go to those networking or social events, and really get that people time. And so like I'm an I'm an introvert and so you know, I love people. I like spending time with people, but I get better work done, and I recoup whenever I'm by myself.
Yeah, yeah.
Kenneth Burke
But even I, it's tough for me to work from home for more than a couple weeks at a time without going crazy. And my wife even works from home with me. That's not a knock on her. But
Matthew Dunn
no, yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying. Gotta
Kenneth Burke
get out and see people. You know,
Matthew Dunn
I I'm curious because you mentioned it because it's a shared interest. Did you have musical activities going pre pandemic that are now off the table?
Kenneth Burke
No, but I haven't really done musical activities in a while. So they weren't really on the table beforehand,
Matthew Dunn
like top of my list.
Kenneth Burke
I missed that.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, that to the top of my list. I'm fairly active musician and all of that got cut off and just like Kok, like, really a bummer. But going and singing with people, there's not a good idea.
Kenneth Burke
No matter what messaging so it just close to you. There's an uncle of mine up at over in Kirkland. Okay. And he he was playing I mean, he's been he's almost seven years old and playing in a band with five or six other guys you know about his age. Yeah. They would go, they play, you know, show, they practice several times a week and play show once once a week or so. Right. I said that was the he's retired and all and that's the that was the biggest shift for him is they couldn't go up and play or do their social Oh,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, that'd be so hard. Especially if you had an active group like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's just that's one thing you do together, but it's one that's gotten particularly here just because of the specific nature of what we're what we're all battling that that I think theatres toast for a while, but Oh, well. Bring real bring it back when we can. Um, we should wrap up because I managed to occupy more of your time. You even promised me but part, you know, if you were talking with a business, it says well tax down or no, like, what do you tell let's let's let's get a parting message that really frames why they should be looking at what a company like Tech's request could do for them.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, some of it depends on the use case, specifically how your company operates and all that. But I mean, the root of it is we're all trying to boost or increase engagement with our audience, whether that's customers, whether you're a nonprofit, and trying to connect with donors and increase donations, you live or die on how well you can interact with your audience. And these days, texting is the best way to do that. Right. It's not the only way. But it's something that has to be a piece of, of your customer communications. And then we just make it really easy to manage that whether it's for one on one conversations or for sending messages out to to a large list.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah,
Kenneth Burke
the return is I mean, the average returns 25x. That's been so
Matthew Dunn
Wow. There you go. There you go. Well, listen. Kenna thanks so much. It's been wonderful getting getting acquainted a bit and learning about the company. And I appreciate the I appreciate the time. Hopefully we get a bunch of listeners learning more about you for the for the time you spent doing this.
Kenneth Burke
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Matthew Dunn
Cool. All right. That's a wrap. Thanks, everybody. We hit pause about that. Where's the pause?