AdviceTech Podcast #31 – Feedsy – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello and welcome to the Ensombl Advicetech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And the guest joining me here today to deep dive into Feedsy has worked as part of the blind spotting Council approving grants for blind and visually impaired athletes has walked the Kokoda trail way back in 2007. So that’s like an old hand of that Kokoda trail stuff, and coached his kids footy team, I’m assuming that’s AFL, given, you know, we’re talking about an Adelaide based or South Australia based person. So thank you so much for joining me on the show. Steve.

Steve Holmes
Great to talk to you again. It’s been a long time and I really appreciate the opportunity to speak today.

Peita Diamantidis
Not at all we were just saying it has been a very many years of since we last sort of sorry, first met as part of a part of it advice community and, and interacted and you guys were I guess early in the days of feed me back then. So I’m looking forward to seeing all of the stuff that you’re doing now. But before we talk about Feedsy, let’s just talk about you as a tech user. What is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Steve Holmes
I do. And yes, we have to be the smiley face. I do that a lot. The smiley face and whether it’s a lot on an email just the colon in the bracket or a smiley face emoji I find myself using that one frequently.

Peita Diamantidis
Nice, sometimes you kicking it old school with just the colon and

Steve Holmes
this is kicking the old school. Yeah. Love anyone what you’re using?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, we remember when we didn’t have actual picture emojis we remember when you just had to do with one hand on the keyboard, right? So then, okay, so when we all like live with and on our smartphones all the time. I got together with some friends recently, and we we remarked how we wondered how in our 20s, we managed to get together at clubs or anything like that, because we didn’t have smartphones. I don’t know how we organized ourselves. So we all these things all the time, don’t we? So if you had to delete all the apps off your smartphone, which three would you keep?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, that’s a really good question, because you use multiple apps. But I think for me, I love my gardening and my lawns and things like that. So I’ve got this app called the beehive sprinkler app, or it’s just got my little zones. And I can turn sprinklers on remotely while I’m away from home. And I can just check on them to make sure that nothing goes untoward and dries off or anything like that. So yeah, beet harvest, which is pretty cool. And probably not the one I think Facebook to keep connected. I love being able to post photos or getting together with family or friends and things like that, so far as to Facebook just keeps me connected. And probably from a from a business point of view, we use a cloud bank. So in stripe. So I think just keeping on top of what’s happening with the business is pretty important when you are away from your from your office.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and it’s nice. I mean, we we are in an environment now where you can be getting a lot of information and keeping your finger on the pulse with just your smartphone for your business. Like there’s a lot of tools now. I mean, we in our practice, we use Slack a lot. And and so I can be overseas, and I can still see what’s going on and answer any quick questions. So it’s so much easier than it used to be in that sense, to sort of just keep in touch no matter where we are. Yeah. All right. So let’s dive into feety. So for those that are, and I think a lot of people will have heard of the tool, but just to give them a sense, let’s go up sort of pop level to begin with, in terms of where you guys fit in that sort of advice tech or FinTech or whatever space, what category do you fall under who you normally line up against? Like, what, what sort of game do you guys play? Generally?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, thanks. It’s really about efficiencies advisor, we know a really time poor, and they either don’t want to communicate, or create newsletters, or they don’t know how to. And so we fall in that space where we fill that gap of providing content, and automating the distribution of that content out to their clients in the form of a beautiful looking email newsletter, and just really helps them with business efficiencies. So we’re really under that business efficiency FinTech space, because a lot of players are in that area. But we’re specifically in the client engagement area of their business efficiency.

Peita Diamantidis
And I’m betting that sort of covers, you know, actually covers a lot of areas because while it sounds like it’s just odd, we just produce a newsletter, I’m betting that actually it ends up branching out into a whole lot of things because you want somebody to do something when they read the newsletter, where do they go, all that sort of thing. So I’m betting that the areas of practice you help are much broader than just the newsletter, is that right?

Steve Holmes
They are because it sort of opens up into a like a nice content piece that either the client or the advisor can share. Socially events sort of amplifies what they do in terms of what They are the ways that trying to help clients, it gives them topics to talk to, as well. And we might cover a little bit more of that on how they can use video in terms of introducing their newsletter. And also, we’ve gone into really being like a two way client engagement tool where we are on a quarterly basis asking clients to get feedback about their advisor, to rate them on how likely they are to recommend a family member, or a friend. So that’s based on all the client engagement piece. So it’s not just sending a newsletter, now we’re going a little bit more to weigh in will be getting interaction back to the advisor. And I think that’s where the magic happens. In absolutely

Peita Diamantidis
is, and it’s, you know, feedbacks an interesting approach, we’re just working on this actually, for our practice and the 10 take, because ultimately, what you’d love is a great testimonial, right? And that’s what’s fantastic. But the thing, getting them, it doesn’t feel wonderful. And and sometimes you do just get those out of the blue, they want to give you some great feedback, and they wonderful, but there’s a whole lot of people that would tell you something good, but a testimonial sounds a bit formal and a bit weird. And it’s a bit like giving a letter of recommendation. And suddenly, I need to be a wordsmith like, you know, like, there’s a lot of barriers mentally. Whereas I find even for myself, if they just asked me for feedback, and it’s like, Oh, you just want my input, then often what you’re getting is something that can become a testimonial, but it’s just it’s more relaxed. There’s something more casual about feedback that isn’t quite as intense as yet.

Speaker 2
Yeah. And the way we ask about that to Peita, is we, instead of tying in those words, we don’t say a testimonial, we just say if the writer do as a nine or a 10, as little follow up question, to say, Oh, thank you so much. What in particular do you like about us? Yeah, so they providing a comment. And that then translate into a wonderful testimonial, because they start thinking and talking about the way they like you as a financial advisor. And that makes a financial adviser school. Great. And what they do?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely, it does. And, look, we all need that. A bit more of that, I think, I think the whole being a martyr and planning on because we love what we do thing is, is actually selling ourselves was a bit of a dog story there. Because we all need reinforcement, right? You just don’t have this endless well of positivity. Even somebody is upbeat as myself. You need reinforcement of people going actually, that really works. That was it was just wonderful. And you know, that outcome was amazing. So I agree even having it merely that even if the first thing is all you’re getting is some positive reinforcement. And, you know, interestingly, and I bet you can, you’ve got some insights on this. Often they’ll say something that surprises you, that’s the thing they like, right? It’s not necessarily what you think it is, right? So hearing that the particular thing that you just do naturally and don’t even think of they think is the best thing since sliced bread. That’s valuable to

Speaker 2
Correct. Yeah. And it’s funny, when I read through the client testimonials, quite often it is we love the way that you communicate to us, you’re always sending us information. And me being the supplier of a lot of that content and the regular newsletter, I can’t help but think we played a small part in helping them get those positive comments, which is rewarding from my business point of view, because I love adding value to their business.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes, yes, absolutely. Okay, so, phase so a practice engages with you guys is do you generally find that? And we’re talking about efficiency? And clearly it’s its content and marketing as it’s falling into all those categories? Are you finding generally the person driving this is the adviser? Or is it generally another member of the team? That is the one that ends up taking this on board? And sort of taking it further?

Speaker 2
Yeah, good question. I think the perception is that an advisor may need someone in their office to take ownership of it. Right? And that can be a hurdle with with coming on board. Because I think who in my business I’m going to give this to I don’t have that many resources. I’m really tired for myself. If I spend money on marketing, am I going to make busier all those sorts of things. So with Bz, everything is completely automated. So an advisor can sit back and do absolutely nothing at all. And other than the fact of just receiving that email on a monthly basis, and reading the content, so he knows, or she knows what has been sent out. go a step above that. They might want to rearrange content, and also add their own material. Yeah, but in terms of who predominantly would do it, the one man, one woman advisor would be the person that would be drawn to feed her to say, you can really help me. Other areas. When a financial advisor has their own support staff, they might then get a little more proactive in terms of having additional stories are additional content about what the business is doing in terms of having a new staff person or a community event that might be a part of or things like that. Alright, even writing some frequently asked questions about things to heal. Yep. So that’s where I think when you have a person on board a dedicated person, they can get more involved in having very specific content about what’s happening in their business.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and depending on, you know, the size of the business, particularly, when you are a bit smaller, it does like starting from scratch. And these things could just be like, Oh, my goodness, and what articles and what am I going to do and what, whereas if you can sort of view it more as this is going to happen anyway, so I’ve now got regular content going out, yay, you know, that’s engagement, yay. And then all right, I’m gonna put aside some time where we can just add a layer to it. That’s powerful. Because it’s, you know, if you don’t get it done, it’s probably not the end of the world. But if you do, it’s only a small thing. And I mean, I could even see and we were talking about video of off air before we pressed record. And, and you could even have an introductory, you know, little video at the beginning, all I’m so excited about this month’s newsletter, there’s this and this and this and make sure you do this, like, it could just be a simple thing that positions, what’s going out, you know, they can see you and engage further with the advisor or member the team. But the actual content itself, you guys have sort of curated and it’s all sorted.

Steve Holmes
That’s right. It’s funny, I’ve had multiple training sessions of like, when I coach or or teaching advisor or their staff about how to use feeds in, we always do that, when they come on board to make sure that they can use it in the best possible way, I’ll go through how to add their own content pieces on how to add video etc. And quite often, the responses isn’t a while I’ve got you for so you support with the content for me and just send it out was absolutely ideas I’ve gotten just showing that you can add it if you want to. And we do recommend that you do add some of your own content because it means the world to your clients.

Peita Diamantidis
It does and I think because they’re not necessarily coming to you for information, right. And so I liked the idea of them seeing you as and when I say you I mean the advisor or the principal, as you know, curator of great content. So, so then create the positioning thing, which could be I mean, it could be a minute that video, it could be really quick. But it positions you as you know, thought leader, Guru, you know, curator, and then the information comes after that. So there’s sort of two layers to this stuff. And so that’s why you don’t have to be writing all this stuff yourself to your point you don’t, you just don’t have to. But I do like the idea of adding that layer. And also, you know, the brain processes, you on video, as you write in front of that person, it sort of can’t tell the difference, right, it still thinks you’re right there. So it’s a bit like a podcast too, as I’ve had actually comments from a painter, I feel like you, you’re right there next to me, I’m driving, and I feel like he’s sitting right next to me chatting away. So it’s it’s very personal and quite intimate in that sense. And that’s powerful, too, that’s reinforcing the connection with the client. In a really one to many way, you know,

Steve Holmes
yeah, and it doesn’t take long to record a video. So and I did one this week, and after a better practice will approach because I’m gonna do it in the easiest possible way, I just went and grabbed my new iPhone, pointed it and put it on that new video mode. And just did a one and a half minute video. And I was just introducing basically the content that I had underneath it. And that’s what I would recommend advisors do with Well, we know we supply with a lot of the content, they could just point and shoot, create a very small little video to say, hey, it’s Peter here, got some great news for you this week, got a really nice estate planning article here. And another one on life insurance. And high the third one, which I really recommend you say he has one on lifestyle tips for retirement. That’s all for me. Have a great week. And that’s all I need to do. And like I said, I become so familiar with you as the newsreader like we do on the news, which we turn it on, we become very familiar with that reader. So your clients can have the exact same feeling when they hear from you every month.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, exactly. And there is also a you know, there’s a great deal of trust that goes in in the financial advisor and client relationship. And so to hear your voice again to Have you measured, comfortable, confident, like all of these things is sort of that conditional messaging, right? It’s really sort of just just reinforcing you there. You’re on the wall for them, you know, they can rely on you I think those things we underwrite that value because without it there’s a void right between yes, they might get the comps but I do I agree with you, there’s you can really amplify the power of that tool, just with a little bit of video. And then you guys can do all of the hard work of you know, one of the articles is mom’s you know, what are we going to sit down and making sure it all looks good. I mean, all that stuff, just it’s just a black hole of time, isn’t it just trying to do that yourself? So that makes a lot of sense. So let’s talk about somebody you know, practice that’s new to the tool. All and then and they’re coming on board, you know, is there anything that you feel people should get done first, because there any I don’t know cleansing of a list or anything like that that you feel would be helpful before they embark on something, something like I’m using,

Steve Holmes
it just hit the nail on the head there. Because getting the client list rather than CRM, right, because that is the source of truth. Yeah, so that’s where they fall notes are is where they’re salutations are their email addresses, all that type of thing. So the cleaner that list is, the better. Because soon after they come on board with feeds, he will actually ask them to do an export, and then just drag and drop that client list into Fevzi. And we can do that every month. Or whenever they’ve got a, you know, a reasonable change in that in that client list. And every time it just overrides and updates from the previous month and just adds those new people. Because we can never have a duplicate email address on file and within crazy, so I just keep on adding new people, and really does quarantine anyone that may have unsubscribed it protects those. But the cleaner that list, the better the outcome because as you know, a really clean, beautiful list is going to mean that you’re going to be addressing your clients to their first and we know salutation is right? The husband, the wife, or the mother wouldn’t partners. And it’s just beautiful. Like it’s just when you got data quality data, it really becomes seamless.

Peita Diamantidis
And is there is there an extent to which that’s required to I know, and it may not be the case for the way you guys send things out. But I do know that you know if your bounce rate is a bit high, or if if you know that sort of thing is a bit high for for, you know, email campaigns, then you can get a bit penalized in terms of deliverability and stuff like that. So therefore, a cleaner list that, you know, you know, that client is there at that email, as opposed to gee, you know, we haven’t spoken to them for a long time. But we still got their details, let’s just add them to a list like is there some approaches you would recommend in terms of who goes on the list and, and making sure those details are up to date?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, if we actually help with the clients either, too. So I say, just said that, hey, the cleaner the list, the better. But we do actually help them as well, because we don’t really work on that. So we want to make it easy for the advisor. So if they’ve got been using another program, we’d actually import all of their unsubscribes. First we protect what’s happened historically. If they bring all their clients either over and I want to start using salutations, it’s just a matter of working that a little bit in Excel and giving them advice on how to update their CRM, you’ve touched on a really important point with bounced emails and things like that we’re getting through is all we do there is we either ask for their username and password to log on to their domain, or within the instructions to their IT person. And either way, what we do is add a what’s called a TXT record a domain. Once that happens, it authenticates the email sending so that it’s a trusted sender, right so that our email solutions are going direct to their inbox and not getting a bounce rate. So it’s really, really important. And probably not something that we talked about that often apart from when I’m actually with a client, but it’s really important that it is more well known because bounce rates, you know, and spam emails are bad on authenticate your domain. And if you’re sending bulk email messages, you don’t want your primary domain to get blank rather than sending normally miles either. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
correct. Correct. And it’s um, it’s something I’ve discovered the highway because using our CRM, we had to go through that process. And the other thing that, and please correct me if I’m wrong here. But the other thing is, it’s, it’s the difference potentially, between if somebody say using like the G Suite, and they they use Gmail for their email, then is the difference between being in the main inbox versus the promotion or the or the, you know, the other categories? It’s going to categorize? Because if it’s, it’s not so much that it may even be spam. It’s just that it’s like, it is just feels like it’s just rubbish, you know, so, versus it being something that’s been confirmed? Yes, we know that’s a real domain name. We know, like those sort of things can just increase the likelihood of your client even seeing the email, which of course, is the first step before even getting them to open it. Yeah,

Steve Holmes
of course, we treat that really seriously. And we really make sure the advisor is well aware of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it in terms of making their because at the end of the day, we want to give them the biggest open rates and click through rates as possible. Yeah. And that’s part of the demo that we do as well. We go through their own individual site as to what they’re experiencing, you know, for their first first email to get those rates as high as possible.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. Well, let’s, let’s sort of touch on that. So I’m sure everybody knows what open rates and click through rates are. But you know, so the open rate is literally who bothers to even take a look at the email itself, the content, there’s sort of, there’s a variety and what that definition is leaves isn’t there? It’s a bit vague sometimes, depending on people, you know, there’s little windows where they can see a bit of the MLS and stuff. But generally, hey, somebody’s open to click through rates, then of course them taking an action, what is some of the call to action? So what what are people clicking through to when they’re getting the Fevzi email as a client?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, funny. There’s, there’s obviously some top articles there. And a lot of them are, we’ve got this new fee exclusive fee, which is all about how to live better lives. Yep. And guys, at the moment are getting the biggest open rates. So might be living retirement without regret, or the top 10 Things you can be to be this call parent, or whatever it might be. So it’s actually lifestyle type things we’re getting a lot of those being read at the moment, as opposed to a news content, obviously, is there and it’s great as well, but they’re really hitting on those on my lifestyle ones. In terms of other things, every now and then we see we see that people are clicking on equities, or acquitted on privacy link. So I’m not sure if there’s a few compliance minded people within their list, but we are finding some of those there. And also contact the Contact link. So people are probably looking at that, and then bringing the practice. That’s probably one of the ideal things that advisors are experiencing at the beginning of the regular email. It might be unrelated to any of the content within the email, but they’re actually replying or calling off the back of it, simply because that advisor has kept in touch with the client and they shined the bag out. And I think that’s when something changes in their life. The client knows that their advisor is there to help them. And sometimes their marketing, I should call my advisor because this has happened. And then they wake up in the morning and think they need a new iPhone. So they their mind goes off with something completely different. And then the email hits. Oh, yeah, but the call, I’m gonna call my advisor. Now. So that’s, that’s where happens. And funnily enough, we get quite often feedback from an advisor saying, Oh, thanks so much for the for the email, this particular mark, that would have taken you a long time to put together. And the adviser says to me, and I said, thanks. Because it did. Good on you. Because you should say thank you, Ed, it’s yours, you know, take ownership over it. Because it is something you’ve invested in, you should feel proud of it. And it’s great that your clients love that. So I love hearing feedback like that.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. And so then, let’s imagine the, you know, the client clicks through it, like there’s an article that you’re really interested in that they click through, where are they? Are they are they going to the advisors, where are they actually going when they click through to something

Steve Holmes
you hear. So when they click through, it can be a number of different ways. We either link it direct to an advisors blog, on their website, which is actually hosted and everything on their, on their blog, so. So it’s actually going the content sits on there on the advisor site. The other scenario is we create a subdomain where it’s all the URL, the whole link, all looks like the adviser site is branded the adviser site, they wouldn’t know any difference. But we’re actually hosting the news page. Okay. The other way that can click through to, but the very next link is like a Contact Us that will go through either sites where all the traffic is always directed in either of those cases, back to the website.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, fantastic. And so if an advisor is looking to sort of shore up their website beyond a, a big business card, which, you know, it can feel a bit like that, sometimes we like it, because it’s not particularly dynamic. And of course, with all, you know, Google and all these things, SEO, all these sort of stuff changing, you know, dynamic, updated content is rewarded. So it sounds like then that then by using Feedly, as the sort of provider that content can sort of shore that up, and it can be something that’s getting updated regularly. And and you know, has new content available via the blog?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, correct. I think the there’s probably two elements that get updated constantly within the website is the content coming in. And also the testimonials coming in. So when you have a look at their testimonials, those are the adopted that approach, the testimonials are updated every time because there’s a quarterly survey that goes out. And the news articles are updated every week. So there’s always regular content on there. So the site looks alive with with people’s feedback with up to date, testimonials, and just nice content coming through looking fantastic. So yeah, it makes a site live and well. It’s amazing how some a lot of advisors come to me and they think, okay, I really want to get my comps and that sorted but my website is terrible. I really need website help. So I said, right, that’s a priority. Let’s start there. Okay, and we can help them build a new website. So we do that first. And then we say okay, now that you’ve built this big, beautiful website How you gonna attract people to it? Yeah, because people don’t just find it.

Peita Diamantidis
No, no, no. And I think we all, we all need to get over ourselves a bit to that extent, I think lots of us have all we’ve got to get along because people are going to be searching. And we’ll just come up with like, no, like, let’s be real here, we’re going to be directing people to it like this is, this is our virtual home where people can check the check us out and get a good feel. And it might take them a few goes to be sent to that before they’ll act. But But I think we’re a little naive, we’re thinking that somebody’s going to randomly find us, I think that’s far less common than then people would like to think, yeah,

Steve Holmes
that’s funny, you say that, because 12 years ago, Peter, I started in business, and I build a website, and I just thought, okay, suddenly, this goes live. phone’s gonna ring. And it doesn’t, so you don’t do it. And I just can’t, it doesn’t happen that way. You got to work with it, you got to do your socials, you got to do your email outreach, and all that sort of thing and promote what you’re doing and tell your story. And, yeah, that type of thing.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. But I do like the idea, you know, the things that I realized, we struggle and struggle is an exaggeration, but that we never quite get to, in a practice, the things that we don’t just make part of the process. So to hear that you guys can also do that feedback, grabbing the testimonials, and it’s just part of a process, you know, is a great thing to just tick off, it’s something we all need. Moreover, no, I know, we need to do more. So it’s, it’s not to then have a way that that just happens, somebody’s just going to be doing that, you know, because it is, you know, we’ve got so many things we have to be across. And if you are project managing every one of those things, something’s gonna fall off. It just it’s a matter of course, so. So, you know, depending for the listener, depending on where they’re at, this could be a way to just take that thing off, you know, you might have a practice manager and a dealer group, or somebody saying, you really need to get some testimonials happening, it’s like, yeah, right, then this could be a great way, you know, combined with getting the newsletter and the content, you know, humming, this could just be a great way to get that in place. And I know what’s going to happen, you know, was a

Steve Holmes
little bit more cautious to Peter. So they might not like the automated email going out every quarter, what they might prefer, and their system allows every advisor to do this, they go into the backend of Feedsy. And they tick a box as to when they would like that individual client to get the feedback email. Okay. And that might be after they’ve done the Soi, or an ROI, I want to send it off now. And then the very next day, I’ll get an email to say, how do we do? How likely are you to recommend us to family member or a friend, so get that same email, but they’re actually triggered manually, rather than an auto response? Once they get feel comfortable with that guy, then by up to all the money for all their clients, but I can start slowly tread carefully. And trust in your process?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and that’s a valid point, I think it is. It’s, it is quite exposing, to just ask, everybody would think like, look, I’m sure it’ll be broadly good. But you know, we’ll see. But I, so I like the way that you can, you can ease into that. And, and to be fair, also, you know, getting top of mind feedback is valuable, like they’ve literally just experienced a bit of an in depth process, then the feedback then would probably be a little more specific. And I think that’s the other thing I like, and it’s, it’s only been sort of watching my own reaction to restaurant testimonials. So I’m a foodie. And I almost never go to a good restaurant without going online, checking out, you know, the Google reviews, that sort of stuff. And the worst testimonials are, you know, great food, great atmosphere, that is useless. That doesn’t tell me anything. Whereas the all you’ve got to check out, check out the deep fried chicken or whatever was a little like, like, the more detailed the feedback or testimonial, the more valuable it is, and useful, you know, for other people. So I’m sure that that you get a bit more of that when it’s closer to an experience or a process.

Steve Holmes
True, because you and I think the we can be very well positioned from the advisor to because they might say, as soon as someone says, Thank you, if the opportunity to ask for feedback or potential referral, but they might sort of say, I think, you know, that’s so good. I can really see my retirement goals coming to fruition now. And that’s, I’m really glad you feel that way. Is it? Okay? If I send you a little survey tomorrow, we just go through your experience and perhaps write offs in terms of how likely you would be to talk speak highly of us, because if I send that, and I go, Yeah, sure. So you just go into the back of the feeding trigger, and they go, they, like give you the feedback. So nice way to position that. But then you’ve got this way of capturing that, ironically, or capturing that in a social sense. So you can share and help you Grow to get more clients?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, exactly. And I think the the other thing that I’d say for anybody that sort of running a practice out there, as opposed to is an advisor within it, then, you know, one of the things you could do to, to make this happen. So one of the things, it’s a struggle, when you’ve got a practice and you got a few advisors is, you might say, Hey, we’ve got this great thing, and we’d love you to do it. But actually getting people to send it to their clients to use it is like pulling teeth. So, you know, don’t be shy seeing a KPI of a certain number of testimonials, they’ve got to ask for a month, right? I mean, hey, we need far from your month, like they should be doing a lot more so as an ROI isn’t that a month. So we need at least this many. Now, if you you’d only need a few advisors in your practice to be doing that every month, just as a matter of course, and you will rapidly collect a whole lot of testimonials, but they’ll still be in control, you know, and feel more comfortable about it, because they’re choosing who. So I think that could be a powerful combination. But yeah, there’s a particular person that I love catching up with, and he and I wax lyrical all the time about, you know, the great idea isn’t isn’t the first, you know, isn’t the final step, it’s actually getting it to flow through in the practice and able to actually use it.

Steve Holmes
Challenge. And we provide this time designated page, if you like Peter, with, with all your testimonials on there, and it’s a nice little link, that link can be on the bottom of your email footer of every email you ever sent, might have a little link or comment saying, Hey, don’t just take our word for it, you know, read what other clients are saying about this here. Or it might be a pre appointment, email that comes in to say, hey, you know, looking forward to seeing you don’t forget to bring x y Zed. Yeah. But in the meantime, when you have a look at what other people are saying, clients just like you. So like, go to this page and read about all the nice things that other clients are saying about them.

Peita Diamantidis
Lovely, lovely. Now let’s talk about integrations. Is that something you guys need to or have done? Do you integrate with any other tools? Or do you recommend people standalone? How does that work?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, a good question. On integrations, we, I guess we call it a soft integration. It’s not a rule coded one. But we know the ultimate is to have one CRM CRMs are quite often hard to get a full integration with. But CRMs like work sorted an X plan what we can do, they’ve got a like a designated works order the x plan, email, they can actually blind copy into a phone note, and our system. And that’s probably just to CRMs that we do do. But we can get blind copy an email newsletter, we’d go to the clients. So they’ve got the phone, like, depicted there. But like, it’s in terms of every, every page that we put online, all integrates beautifully with your social. So a practice or the clients of a practice can very easily share the content. So all of those buttons are embedded on every story kind of practice can go in, just hit the Facebook link. It integrates and shares beautifully through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and they can use all the links to sheduled through HootSuite and things like that as well.

Peita Diamantidis
Nice, nice. So is there anything either that was like a ninja user that’s just gone? Like, wow, they’ve really gone to town and taken advantage or, or conversely something they like, I can’t believe nobody uses this more often. Like, are there any of those elements of the tool?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, hopefully I can answer that in probably two elements, I think where users have really gone to the nth degree and really using it to streamline what they do. One is probably on the video, and I just probably, quote work one that particular advisors doing, he wasn’t comfortable in filming himself necessarily. But he wanted to relate what the markets are doing to an 80s video clip. So he would go through and find the YouTube video. And I think during the lockdown of COVID, he found Neverending Story. And he put that on there. And then he spoke about the markets and about locked down about what it meant and things like that. And he was getting amazing open rates because he let his sense of humor go and injected that into his comms. Wonderful. And he had, and I couldn’t take massive amount of time, but it’s a novel idea that he injected into his emails. Really, really cool. I actually look forward to I look forward to receiving those each and every month. I’m sure his clients did too. Yeah. The other one is we can set up a journey like an email journey, where it might be a review date system, very similar to a birthday just triggers a nice birthday message. We can do that. But on a review situation. They might have a Calendly invite there and they might have all their clients with a review date. Since they’re probably three different journeys in there, they say did you You open? Yes? No? Did you click on a link? Yes, no. And it goes through and actually just helps them book times with their, with their clients. So it could be along that line. But it doesn’t just have to be renewal date, it could be anything marketing related to say, I want to send out a piece of content to people. And there might be three or four or 10 different emails in there to add value to Pacific core segments. Right, so we can do email journeys, if I really want to get down the path of educating their clients, and that’s over and above the regular monthly email newsletter.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, and so let’s talk through that then. So the the email journeys like I’m what I’m hearing is sort of like choose the like those Daggy, choose your own adventure books that I used to love, where, you know, based on what page you picked, it took you on a different journey. So let’s say they got the email, and maybe they clicked on something. So it’s taking them to, you know, there’s another email that might come through, do they are they able to therefore see that happening, so that they can sort of get a sense that maybe somebody is diving deeply into some estate planning stuff? Well, like they can get a really good sense of somebody who’s continuing, you know, engaging in that journey.

Steve Holmes
So it’s not probably too good to be clear is not an AI, sort of, based on whether reading might be used, or we don’t go down that path. But there might be 567 predetermined emails, and we’ve got like a bit of a pipeline of content. And then what we can happen is see where people might be in that pipeline, me open and click through rates and who they were, as they go through that pipeline of content. So they can to determine that people are engaging with it. So every one of those emails will have an opening, click through rate on them.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and it’s an interesting to be counterintuitive, because when we talk about newsletters, often we’re thinking like, there’s the you know, there’s a couple of lumps, I don’t know how many you normally have, but I don’t know, three to five sort of broad topics, or whatever it is, you know, in a newsletter, whereas sometimes we something like this, that you’re talking about where it’s this journey, maybe it’s a series of five emails, one after the, you know, one after the other drip feed out, then those actually being shorter, and punchy, could be quite powerful, you know, somebody can grasp something a single concept quickly, and have knocked it off quickly. And then you know, we’ll only that you’ll get the next one tomorrow, or whatever, whatever the journey is, whatever you’re designing it for. I actually, I engage with those quite well. And in fact, m from ensemble does those really well. So she’ll just, Hey, guys, you know, this was the conversation happening in this, you know, channel on the community. It’s a brief introduction, it’s super short, either you click through or you don’t, you know, like, it’s a really easy thing. There’s no scrolling or, you know, so it’s an interesting, you know, using both methods, because they will appeal to different people in different stages. So it’s yeah, the the journey thing makes a lot of sense, as a different way to engage.

Steve Holmes
I suppose the other thing we can do when some of the advanced users have got more segments within their client data, and we import those, and I can very easily send a campaign out to accumulators or retirees so we could all that broken down. But if I’ve got one of those who with might be advisor name, they’ve got five or six advisors in their business, we can customize that advisor name and use it almost as a mail merge, right into the email. And that then allows anything else to be mail merge, much like we did with our Word documents years ago. So merge field here, we can make it quite personal, but in a digital way, on a on an email newsletter.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, which is great, too. I think it’s, yeah, it’s hard. It’s no, I’m just reflecting actually, because we all get, you know, and once we’re in a practice, we’ll get loads of provider emails where the platform or fund managers or insurers or whatever they are, and, and there’s nothing stranger than getting one from the CEO. I mean, they I get why they’re doing it, because they’re putting importance on it. But it seems a bit weird. Like, that’s not who I am. Whereas if it’s the person I’m dealing with, you know, when you can see their name, and you know, who they are that once again, feels more personal. Yeah, you know, that

Steve Holmes
doesn’t matter. merge that into the email title as well. From all that sort of thing, just to make it it’s all about being custom make it, you know, friendly. come from a trusted source, which is your financial advisor.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, fantastic. So what’s on the development? Like what’s coming up? You know, what are the things that that are either, you know, definitely on the development path or release path? And are there any things way down the track that you’re, oh, I’d love to be doing this. You know, that’s something that’s a bit more pie in the sky, but that you’re excited about?

Steve Holmes
Yeah, we’ve just launched a couple of really exciting things, which I love at the moment, I mean, design, we’ve updated all of our templates, which are really, really cool. We quite often get asked, as I call up and we and we took and asked about specific content, as I say, but which I would love to see more self managed Superfund articles or estate planning article or whatever it might be. So we’ve actually opened up a portal on our website where advisors can have a closer two way relationship with with me so For example, because I’ll be picking a lot of that content. But if an advisor wants something specific, they can put an idea or content request through our website, we’re going to write it. And we’ll go back to them. And we can either do that on a one to many basis, which doesn’t cost anything, we just get their ideas out to the community, or a one on one peices, where we just bought a piece of content for them for that practice. So that’s just been launched. But I guess what we are looking at now, we talked about the client feedback or the survey type questions, where hey, what do you like about us? Right? It’s between one and 10. And we’ll give you business Net Promoter Score, we do all that. But we don’t do it by text messaging. So I think content now by text wouldn’t work. I love that idea. But in relation to client feedback from a business, hey, writers, between one and 10, what do you like and give us a few comments. I think that would work really well by text. We’re sort of going going next,

Peita Diamantidis
almost like like messenger, like there’s like a bot when you do messenger use messenger for that same thing. So it’s sort of just asking, yeah, okay, that makes sense. And and if it means they can do it straightaway, and that feels a bit easy. And you might increase the number of responses, perhaps, yeah, we

Steve Holmes
can all do that as well. So we’ve got all the mobiles in the in the system, it might be after an appointment, or text message is sent the day after, instead of an email. So just giving a guys that particular option.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Awesome. And so like, is there really, we’ve covered a fair bit is there anything we’ve missed any elements of what you guys do that we’ve missed? You think?

Steve Holmes
I think we have pretty well covered everything, but I think probably just once Twitch probably going to leave you when we had to. And this is all about client feedback, and Peter, and what that can mean for an advisor, because we had a situation where it was around the COVID, or just pre COVID, around the COVID time anyway, where licensees are changing. A lot of businesses were closing for various reasons. And probably to advisor came to me and said, You know what, I feeling really depressed, bad about what I’m doing, I can’t see your way forward and things like that. So her back is stopped paying us for a period of time. And when you’re ready, I would like to show it pretty awesome, pretty special. So we came back, probably six months after and the seminar, I’m ready to sort of start back again, that’s okay, let’s survey your clients. And we did that. And all the really positive feedback came back. And he got you know, you’re a great advisor, you’re a great person, you take a care on our CEO, all these sorts of things. And he said, read them all. And if it well, for the first time, in a long time, I’m actually proud to be an advisor. And they’ve really given me some steam full steam to get out there again, and to see people and to see clients. And that meant that meant the world to me, because we played a small part in in feeling good about being an advisor or accounting. And the best people that took to tell that story are your own clients. Yeah, you know, there’s no, no one more meaningful than that, that sort of rule, positive feedback and humble feedback and coming from your own customers. So that was a really good story about what we’re doing in terms of testimonials and feedback back to an advisor.

Peita Diamantidis
And I and and to that point, you know, when we were asking for that feedback, talking about the rest of the team, I think is important to, you know, sometimes the person that stands out really is the admin person that took them through a, you know, whatever the process is posted or some difficulty they had, and they solved it or, you know, like, everybody deserves that wonderful feedback. And it feels great. And you’re right. I mean, gee, we felt being beaten up for a long time. So

Steve Holmes
it’s really tough times. Exactly. But ecosystems are the private, small part in helping advisors through that time. And, yeah, it’s,

Peita Diamantidis
it’s really important, isn’t it? And I think, you know, everybody needs a virtual hug, once in a while, you know, why not? Let your clients do that? You know, we and particularly if you own your own business, I don’t think we necessarily good at that stuff. Because we’re individual, like, the mere fact that we do start our own business sort of has an individuality to it, you know, we sort of would, we’re probably not great at getting that sort of positive reinforcement or asking for it. So I think I like that idea as a way to reinforce yourself and even your team and go look, we’re on the right track here. We’re really adding value like let’s let’s keep going. Let’s keep keep out this. Yeah, and yeah, I love that. That idea. Alrighty, advice, explorers. If you’d like to find out more about Fevzi, then the website link is in the episode show notes along with Steve’s LinkedIn details. So feel free to reach out to him and I’m sure we can point you in the right direction or, or set up a demo, whatever is most appropriate. Thank you so much for joining. Joining us on the show. It’s been great to get an update on where you guys to read and all of the different layers of the practice, you can impact and, and really helping advisors sort of plow through that barrier of content and engagement with their clients on an ongoing basis. So thank you so much.

Steve Holmes
All right, thank you so much to Peita, and wonderful to speak with you again, as always has been awesome. So yeah, yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
So, are you a current user of Feedsy, you know, are you finding it’s just taking the pressure off, you know, that there’s content going out to your clients, as a newsletter, it’s happening. And you find, even if they don’t necessarily react to a specific piece of content, it’s more that you’re top of mind. And when something comes up, they remember you. If that’s the case, you know, reach out on the ensemble community platform and share their experience, what worked for you what didn’t work, whether tips you’d give advisors, as you know, this is all about crowdsourcing ideas and solutions. So please be sure to share your thoughts. Now, as for my take on this look, the first thing I say is, you know, a few episodes ago, we talk to financial writers, and that was, of course, getting the content yourself, but then you distributing it, however, you wanted to distribute it, whereas this is getting the content, but also having somebody that then distributes it for you. And so these are all just layers of outsourcing automation, and it just depends on for you, how busy you are, how busy the practices, what’s going to work, what’s best for you. But you know, better to have something going out than nothing at all. And sometimes, and Steve and I were chatting offline, actually, before we hit record that, you know, sometimes we can get in our own way, by doing all these things ourselves. And, you know, that can be a mistake, you could use a tool like this overtime, and then gradually add your own flavor. And, you know, to the point of adding your own flavor, you know, we you may find that you’re a bit concerned about Robo tools or Robo advice or you know, online or all these things that are coming up that you feel may challenge our businesses or our industry as a whole. And the thing that we have that Robo doesn’t is being human, right. And the best way to capture being human is video. It’s the thing that is toughest to fake or to imply or to make generic, right. So even just having that intro short video to each newsletter that goes out, that you could do sitting at your computer like I am, now I’m recording this sitting at my desk, you could very quickly knock off video that could just be the intro to this month’s newsletter, and could just create that personal connection and deepen that personal connection for your clients. So I’d really encourage you to certainly embark on better and more consistent content for your clients and for your leads, but also consider ways that you can then just add your element of curation or your flavor to it that just makes it more and more your style and connects them more deeply with you. Now, as you know, there’s only one skill we need to become bionic advisors. Those of you that have been listening since the beginning will know where that is. It’s avid curiosity, we just need to be super duper, duper, duper curious. And so to help you to continue to build that habit, today’s curiosity corner app that I wanted to take a look at is called Blink, that’s blink with a que rather than a que@blink.me. That’s Bl inq.me. And their tagline is the easiest way to share your details. Now all of us are just getting out and about more now aren’t we were all going to industry events. Or we might be going to networking events, to interact with people that might become clients. And so blink can provide you with a dis digital business card. So it can be on your phone, have your details all the different ways they can get in touch with you can even have a sample of you know, an article you’ve written in LinkedIn or downloadable or like all those sort of things can be in there. And you interact with somebody I’d love to keep in touch. Blink provides a QR code they can quickly scan. And then your details get uploaded into their contact record. And they can even tick and say Yes, happy to have my details sent back to them. So it’s this really quick and easy way to interact with details. Now. If you weren’t aware, LinkedIn actually has a similar ability. There is a QR code for your LinkedIn profile you can use when you’re at events but all that does is connect you via LinkedIn. Whereas Blink has of course your mobile number, your website all sorts of other details can be included in the sort of little QR code they create. So that all of that all of those details are there. And you can take it even further. And they can create for you a wonderful email, footer email signature, that quite dynamic looks really good. But based on those same details that can, you know, be that at the bottom of your email, whether you’re using Gmail or Outlook, you know, I’m pretty sure that that yeah, they do they interact with Outlook, and even Apple Mail. So this could just be a great way to get your details, the best way to get in touch with you and maybe even highlight a popular article you wrote or a YouTube video you did. So I’d encourage you to check it out. It might just make that interacting and getting people’s details things super easy bit of fun, and a talking point. So check it out. And let me know what you think. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you’ll get your advice, tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And I would love to hear other tech providers, you’d like me to interview things that you think are really working or that you’re just sort of wondering what they’re about an onshore and you’d like PTD to go and interview them to work it out. And I’d love to hear about your ideas. So please feel free to reach out to me either on the ensemble community platform or on LinkedIn. And if I can perhaps provide some you know, further content viral Lunch and Learn or some topic. I’ve you know, recently did one on client portals that helped a few people out then please reach out, and I’d like to add some value where I can. Otherwise I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.