Intro: 00:01

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here, I dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape.

Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. We help marketers turn direct mail into a measurable customer acquisition channel without having to build the internal team, vendor, network, or production infrastructure themselves. Built on more than 30 years of constant testing, RPM helps you launch faster, optimize performance, and drive more sales from your direct mail. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more.

Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Mary Savery, the founder and CEO of Savery Solutions. She’s a growth strategist with nearly 30 years of experience helping businesses find new ways to win customers, grow revenue and compete more effectively from startups and small businesses to major corporations. She’s led high performing teams, developed strategies that have generated millions in revenue, and earned a reputation for spotting opportunities that others overlook.

Today, she puts that experience to work, helping small clients and mid-sized business owners uncover untapped revenue and turn ambitious growth goals into actionable strategies. Thank you so much for joining me today, Mary.

Mary Savery: 01:40

Thank you for having me, Rick. I’m excited for our conversation.

Rick Rappe: 01:44

What first drew you into marketing, and how did that experience shape the way that you understand customers today?

Mary Savery: 01:52

Yeah, what a great question. To start, I was hooked on marketing since my first marketing 101 class in college and have been pursuing marketing ever since. I think part of it is because it’s the combination of art and science. It’s not just one or the other. And marketing.

In marketing, you have to look at so many different aspects of the business, not just how do you win customers, but how do you keep them and how do you do it profitably? I remember back in college, one of the very first case studies I read was about Revlon in the 1950s, when they first started advertising on TV, their advertising, their lipstick, and at that time, advertising and advertising on TV especially was unheard of. And the campaign was so successful. Revlon couldn’t keep lipstick on the shelves. In fact, they had to.

They had to stop the commercials for a while. Too bad things aren’t that way today. It takes a lot more than just a commercial to get people’s interest, but that is. That’s just fascinating in terms of, you know, how do people learn about you? How what makes them buy, what motivates them to pick one company over another?

And so I’ve been, I’ve been hooked up on that ever since. In terms of understanding customer psychology.

Rick Rappe: 03:14

That’s amazing. I had a similar experience and I don’t know if it was junior high school. I took a propaganda and speech class and, and they studied marketing and advertising, and I was just like, oh my gosh. The idea of affecting people’s behavior from a distance was so intriguing to me that I thought, oh, this is it, I gotta go this route. So ever since you spent more than 30, 20 years leading marketing inside companies like Mutual of Omaha and Cabel One, what what led you to lead leave the corporate world and start Savery Solutions?

And what services do you provide for your clients?

Mary Savery: 03:53

Yeah, I left the corporate world almost two years ago, And I’ll never regret, you know, the 20 or 30 years, depending on which day you ask me that, that I spent there. I’ve met and worked alongside some amazing people and got to work on some pretty interesting business challenges. But I grew up in a family owned business, and so entrepreneurship has always been in my blood, and I’ve always wanted to start my own business. So the timing was right a couple of years ago for me to take that leap of faith. And I did so.

And I still my early clients and still some of my clients today are those corporations that I either worked for or I have, I have folks that former colleagues that I work with that have moved on in different corporations that are my clients today. But my passion is certainly the small businesses and, and helping them understand how to grow. They don’t have, you know, marketing teams of 15, 20, 50 people like we did in some of the larger organizations I work for. And so they don’t have that, that type of expertise. And I love bringing that expertise and helping them figure out where their next, you know, their next lever is to grow.

In fact, one of my programs that I offer them is finding out specifically where is your next million dollars of revenue hiding? And you know, that could be from new customers, your existing getting more revenue from your existing customers, your product services, completely new sales channels. So there’s a variety of places that can come, but for a small business, that’s a meaningful amount of money to generate. So figuring out, putting together the strategy of how are you going to reach your next million dollars of revenue, is the primary service I offer today. And of course, that could also come from not just new customers and existing customers, but new marketing programs like referral programs.

And that’s a huge source of revenue that a lot of companies overlook.

Rick Rappe: 05:59

When you start with a new client and the business owner tells you we need more leads or we need more sales, how do you go about, you know, starting to figure out what’s holding back their growth?

Mary Savery: 06:10

Well, a lot of folks, that’s the first thing they say is we need more leads. As a small business owner, I probably say the same thing, but it’s really about understanding the entire buyer journey and or the entire customer journey. Because maybe you bring in plenty of leads today, but the sales team isn’t closing them, or they’re only closing a fraction of them. Or maybe they’re doing a fine job of closing customers and you’re bringing on new customers, but you’re losing them as fast as you onboard them. So there’s different places in the customer journey that the customer can fall off.

And it’s not always. Sometimes it is, but it’s not always just generating leads. So the first thing I look, I talk with business owners about is understanding their entire customer journey. And then we look for where, where are the holes? Where, where is it leaking?

And we try to solve that problem first.

Rick Rappe: 07:07

Yeah. There’s usually a lot of opportunities for companies to do better with their current customers or even winning back their former customers. In my experience, absolutely.

Mary Savery: 07:16

Those folks have, you know, you already have a relationship with them or have had a relationship with them and they know you, they know your products and services. So it’s always ask any marketer and, you know, they, they would tend to agree. It’s always cheaper and less friction to keep your current customers or grow your current customers than it is to find new ones.

Rick Rappe: 07:38

Yeah. Well, that led into my next question, which was what opportunities do businesses overlook? And I know we talked about current customers. Are there any other opportunities that come to mind that businesses are often overlooking.

Mary Savery: 07:54

Well, specifically about current customers. Businesses tend to look at a current customer in terms of what products and services do we offer? Can we sell that? Can we sell our customers? The question they often don’t ask is once they buy our product and service, product or service, what are they going to need next?

And it maybe it’s not something that you offer today, but maybe it’s something that you can expand your service offerings. So for example, one of my clients is a garage door company. And so they’re, you know, installing new, new consumer garage doors while they do business too, but installing and maintaining garage doors. But what does a customer need after that? Well, they’re probably going to look around their garage and maybe they need an epoxy floor.

Maybe they need shelving, a place to store their tools, new lighting. So there’s a lot of ancillary services that that garage door company could offer that their customer is going to need next. So thinking about are they buying, are your current customers buying everything from you that you offer, first of all, and then what is the next thing that they’re going to need after they buy from you? Potentially you could offer as an offer as well.

Rick Rappe: 09:13

Yeah. You really have to dig into the customer’s mindset and their situation and understand the what they’re going through. Which is sometimes hard to do when you’re inside the company. It’s a little easier when you’re outside the company to sort of take the customer’s point of view and think about things in a, in a fresh, with a fresh perspective, I guess you’d say.

Mary Savery: 09:36

That’s funny that you say that. I’m in a couple of business masterminds with other business owners. And we talk about that a lot. Like my business is helping other small businesses grow and figuring out where you know where they’re there next. Growth lever is going to come from doing it for myself is almost a blind spot for me.

So those masterminds certainly help, but that’s why I also love, you know, helping the small business owners. A lot of them are masters of their trade or their craft, but not marketers. So always having an outside perspective certainly helps.

Rick Rappe: 10:14

Absolutely. In our earlier conversations, you described a referral program that generated over $1 million in incremental revenue. And I wanted to dig into that a little bit more and see if you can walk us through that and what made it work.

Mary Savery: 10:31

Absolutely. So it was $1 million of incremental revenue. This was a B2B referral program I created and put in place when I was at Cable One. And actually it was $1 million in monthly recurring revenue, so almost $12 million Annually, and it was a wonderful program. Interestingly enough, a lot of the sales folks were already getting referrals from folks in the community.

And I’ll talk about the different channels in a moment, but they and they were paying those folks gift cards or some sort of, you know, discount on their service. So they were already they already had a network of folks that could refer them new customers. But it wasn’t it wasn’t formalized and it certainly wasn’t tracked. So that was one of the biggest things that we looked at. But subscription businesses are particularly well suited for referrals because every month a customer is essentially choosing you again.

And so when they’re continuing to choose you by paying their bill every month, there’s an opportunity to ask them to refer their friends and family or, or business colleagues, what have you. So there’s a natural opportunity to ask people ask for referrals. But really what happens? It’s a lot of companies have a program, they create it, they put it in place and set it and forget it. And a referral program isn’t doesn’t run that way or isn’t successful, at least in my experience.

So what made ours successful was treating it like any other marketing program where it has to be constantly fed and nurtured. So first we start with recruiting referral partners. Employees are a great place to start getting your employees to refer their friends and family to your business. But we also and current customers, of course, we also look for other businesses that were complementary to ours, not offering the same services, but serving the same types of customers. So in this case, it was small businesses.

You know who else serves serve small businesses. A commercial realtors, CPAs, attorneys. Other technology managed services companies. So there are a league of other businesses that want that have a vested interest in their customers being successful and our fabulous referral partners for you. But then it doesn’t stop at just recruiting those referral partners.

You have to stay top of mind with them. And so again, it’s not a once in a while we will tell you or remind you about the referral program. We had consistent monthly, sometimes bi monthly communications going out to our referral partners to remind them of the opportunity. We would do success stories and promote those success stories of here are other referral partners that are making a lot of money, sending us referrals, or have had a lot of success. So there’s a little bit of FOMO on going on with the other folks.

Also the psychology of if other folks, if other people are doing it, then I want to, you know, join that bandwagon and do it as well. So that was an instrumental part of the success is the constant promotion. The third part, though, is tracking and prompt payouts. So if someone sends you a referral and you know that that person became a customer, but you don’t get you’re not told about it, you’re not you don’t see the reward. How likely are you to make another referral?

Not very likely. So tracking it, keeping in communication with the referral partner saying, here’s what’s going on with the referral that you sent me. And then once it becomes a customer, the prompt payout. So we used automated systems to help with a lot of that. But that was key as well is those prompt payouts and reporting.

Rick Rappe: 14:41

So people see the incentive. They, they, they see the reward for their referral, and that motivates them to keep that going and make more referrals. That makes perfect sense.

Mary Savery: 14:52

Yeah. And then we would gamify it, right? We would have contests every quarter for every, you know, for employees. It would be, you know, whichever office submitted the most referrals, they would have, you know, they could have a backyard bar or, you know, back office barbecue or, you know, their employees could win scooters. I mean, we, they were small prizes.

We had small prizes. And we also had very large prizes. So making that very visible, the awards very visible was also important.

Rick Rappe: 15:23

We met through the Fiber Broadband Association, and we had a great conversation earlier about messaging and strategy around that. So I want to bring you back to that conversation and talk a little bit about standing out when you’re in a very competitive industry, like the ISP space and everyone’s making the same promises about speed, reliability, good service, competitive price. How does the company find a meaningful point of difference and stand out? Stand out from the crowd of everybody else?

Mary Savery: 15:58

That’s a great question. And this particular industry is certainly as competitive as it’s ever been. And, and going through a lot of trials and tribulations. Now, in fact, you read the headlines just this week, right? The Comcast laying off a lot of employees because of broadband losses year over year.

They’re not the only ones. By the way, when I was at Cable One, we were having the same conversations that it’s become so competitive now. The industry has matured. It’s not we’re not convincing people for to why they need internet service. Most people have it.

And I think that the number is was 87%. Just a couple of years ago. Most households have broadband service is probably higher today. But when you’re in a mature market and the products and services are becoming increasingly commoditized. Talking about the same things you did ten years ago to win customers isn’t going to win them today.

Because like you said, everyone offers the same thing. It’s price, speed, reliability, customer service, local service. Every provider claims the claims are very similar. So how yeah. How do you stand out for from a customer’s point of view?

If everyone looks the same then what is your primary purchase driver for consumers anyway? It’s going to be price. So there’s, there’s been this race to race to the bottom on pricing. Because of that, businesses may be a little bit different. They certainly are price sensitive, but maybe not quite as price sensitive.

Reliability is probably more important to them. But the point is you have to find a way to differentiate yourself. Table stakes saying like, you know, we offer two gigs instead of one gig. A consumer doesn’t know the difference between a gig. So the speed, price, reliability, customer service really are table stakes now.

So yeah, you need to have them. But what, what is going to trigger someone to choose you over competitor kind of goes into, well, what triggered them to consider changing in the first place? So understanding that purchase trigger for a business, it could be they’re adding a second location. They have more employees now, more connected devices. It could be they’re having trouble with their existing provider with outages, but it’s usually something specific that’s happening inside the business that is triggering them to look for a new provider or a second provider.

So messaging around those triggers is definitely a way to help the customer understand that or believe that you understand them. So building that trust that you understand them and talking about how easy it is to get service at your second location. So the ease of doing business is certainly could be a differentiator, but only if it’s actually easier. You can’t just say we’re easy to do business with if you’re not. And people love to hate their broadband provider or their utility company, their cable company.

Why is that the right there’s, there’s usually a reason for that. So can you find what the, what the usual pain point is that customers don’t like about businesses in your industry. I think back to what Apple is a great example with with all their I products, but Saturn. Do you remember Saturn? I think it was back in the 90s when they decided that there they were going to message and market around the actual buying experience.

People hated going into car dealerships to buy cars. They hated that haggling process. So there they came, their messaging and, and they fundamentally changed their business model and their business processes to take out, to eliminate that friction that most consumers hated. So they didn’t offer no haggling. Consumers like me, that didn’t work because that’s one of my favorite parts about the car buying process.

But you get the idea. So yeah, it could be that you have to fundamentally change your business model and then message around that, that how that’s different as well.

Rick Rappe: 20:32

Yeah. But having that deep understanding of the clients or the customers. Friction and wear what their motivation is. And speaking to that first, before you get into the company’s brand points and bullet points that a lot of marketers like to put that stuff right up front. But we.

In direct mail, we definitely do try to speak to people’s situation and get them to really think about something and be emotional almost about it first, and then that’s a great part. That’s a great point to jump off from and start to convince them of. There’s a better solution and we’ve got it, you know, so.

Mary Savery: 21:17

Absolutely. And if you think about even just consumers and you know, what, what triggers them? Well, your customers don’t care about, you know, about your business model. They don’t necessarily care about your, your features benefits, maybe to an extent, but you know, what’s in it for me? How is this going to solve my problem?

And so one of the one of the friction points for internet providers specifically is outages. And, and, you know, if a customer’s, if their service isn’t working the way they expect, then that’s a friction point. A lot of times it’s not actually the outage from the internet provider. It’s something with the customer’s wife. You know, their wi-fi inside their house.

We now have technology to monitor that inside a customer’s house. I was talking with a colleague just a month or two ago, and she was telling me about how they are looking now at because of that technology and be able to identify a customer is experiencing some wi fi interference or some issues inside their home. Let’s tell them, hey, we’ve noticed you’re having some sporadic issues with your wi fi. We’ve already noticed it. We’re working on it.

We’ll let you know when it’s fixed. Boy, that is a different experience than what customers typically experience today is. Oh, I’m having problems. I’ve got to call someone now and tell them about my problem. And first I’m going to talk to the front line associate that answers it.

Then they’re going to transmit it to someone else. I have to tell my problem again. And it goes on, you know, 2 or 3 times down the line. What if the company now is calling me or texting me saying, hey, we noticed you have a problem. We’re working on it.

We’ll let you know when it’s resolved. You don’t have to do anything. That’s a much better customer experience. So that’s, it’s exciting that that technology is evolving so that ISPs can be more proactive than reactive when it comes to customer experience.

Rick Rappe: 23:21

Yeah, I imagine AI would be really useful in that situation to help almost create those predictive models of what are the signs that someone’s going to churn, and how do we head that off before it happens. That sounds like an amazing use of new technology.

Mary Savery: 23:39

Yeah, it certainly is. We had put in place some predictive some AI. Predictive modeling to identify when customers were likely to churn, which is great to be able to say, all right, you know, based on these. And I think it was actually hundreds of data points, but they kind of fell into maybe, you know, 4 or 5 different buckets, whether it was, you know, they were new, you know, their tenure, their how many devices were connected, how many times they had called. There’s a variety of different buckets of things we monitored.

But knowing which customers are about to churn and proactively getting in front of that are two different things. And so you can’t just know here, you know, and knowing far enough in advance before the customer actually calls to, to disconnect is important to putting, putting some marketing programs, some customer communication programs in place that you marketer are triggered of, here’s a customer, here’s who’s likely to churn in the next couple of months. And what are you going, you know, what are we going to do about it? You know, we’re going to do some outreach, we’re going to do some diagnosis. We’re going to figure out diagnostics.

We’re going to figure out why they’re going to turn and proactively solve it. So it’s one thing to know there’s a problem, but then another thing to actually have automated systems in place to address it.

Rick Rappe: 25:05

Yeah. Right. Well, that data we use that we use that data sometimes about our about customers, even after they’ve churned us former customer winback programs, we, we have a very large scale winback program that we manage for a particular client, and we’re able to use predictive modeling on that data to really hone in on the people that are going to be most likely to come back with a with the right marketing efforts and the right offers and things like that. So all that data is just a wealth of, of, of great information if you know what to do with it. So.

What happens when marketing and sales, when marketing, sales and customer service tell different stories? And how do you bring those different organizations and different people into alignment and help them be able to tell the right story to the right people?

Mary Savery: 25:59

That’s a common problem in a lot of organizations, right? Is, you know, they’re departmentalized. And despite their best efforts to kind of break down those silos, as they call them in the corporate world, they’re still thinking about their own department and not necessarily across departments, but when especially those three marketing, sales operations, you know, our customer service are saying different things, that erodes customers trust. And so it erodes it from, you know, the handoff between marketing and sales as well as between sales and, and customer or, you know, operations, customer experience. And so, you know, if marketing is making a promise, sales kind of sets that expectation and then the customer, the operations team has to deliver on that from a customer’s perspective, it’s one company.

They don’t care that they’re being passed from department to department. So making sure that that’s consistent helps the customers build trust. It helps build trust with the customers. Of course, that goes hand in hand with, with your brand and what you are known for. So I recently worked on exactly this problem with a broadband provider, a regional fiber provider.

And it’s similar. It happens in most of the companies that and this was particularly this was for B2B. So we. We wanted to understand what the entire customer journey looked like, from marketing to sales to customer experience. And the first thing I did was bring all three departments together and, and have us go through that customer journey.

And it helps operations understand what marketing is doing and marketing is thinking, but it also helped them understand what is the customer experiencing throughout all of that. And then when we could identify not just the funnel, right, of going from marketing to, to, to sales to operations, but who the different decision makers were at each stage. And what they cared about was equally important. So a CFO, for example, is going to care of, you know, about finances. They’re going to care about if we’re bringing on the ROI of bringing on a new provider, whereas a company’s operations are going to care about is it is if we’re bringing on a new provider, are we going to be able to service our clients more efficiently?

Are they going to have a better experience? So looking at it from that customer perspective, we were able to then identify, here’s the entire journey, here’s what the who, who, the decision makers are at each stage and what they care about. Then create the messaging for each of those scenarios and keeping the keeping all three departments together throughout developing that messaging and then presenting kind of the final results or recommendation for here’s the company positioning and messaging. And when you when you bring it out, what stage of the customer journey. You talk about it was helpful and in all three departments then had a stake in it.

They had a vested interest in making sure that it was complete because they were part of the conversation from the beginning. So that, I think was is instrumental in making sure that all departments are saying the same thing to customers is having them all in the same room or being part of that exercise and understanding the customer journey.

Rick Rappe: 29:39

Well, that makes a lot of sense. Earlier when we were talking, you made some distinctions about, and I guess this relates more to search marketing. There’s a big distinction between being found by AI and being recommended by AI. What should business owners understand about the new ways of being found and being recommended by AI?

Mary Savery: 30:03

Yeah, this is fascinating. You know, it’s so new just in the past couple of years, right. SEO is dead according to some people. It’s not trust me, it’s not dead. But more and more people are going to, you know, the chat tools, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and asking questions to get to do their research before ever contacting a brand for any type of service.

So but there’s a difference in that actual question, right? If I for example, if we look at marketing agencies, if I go to ChatGPT and ask, you know, what marketing agencies are there in Phoenix, Arizona. I would hope Savery Solutions is listed. But that’s just listing me among among all the other all the other agencies. But someone likely is asking though, what marketing agencies in Phoenix, Arizona can help me solve a specific problem.

And maybe it’s generating more leads. Maybe it’s growing customer revenue. Maybe it is solving an operations need, whatever it have you. That’s probably the question that someone is asking. One of the AI models is how, what agency or what business can help me solve this particular problem?

And that’s the Buddha. Then that becomes how does chat or any of the AI tools decide who to recommend? And that there’s a whole science behind that as well of how are they? How are they deciding who to recommend? Because it’s not pay to play yet.

Yet with the AI channels, they truly are trying to be trying to give recommendations that are in the customer’s best interest. So they’re looking at not just the business’s website, but their entire online ecosystem, from customer reviews to what third parties are saying about them to is there proof that they can handle this specific customer challenge or situation? So that’s different. A lot of companies, mine included, are offering, you know, free AI visibility and discovering audits or, or reports. I would say take advantage of that and find out how.

How is AI finding you and recommending finding you today? And not only can they find you, but would they recommend you based on what customers are asking? And there’s tools that can identify what are the, what are the phrases that customers are typing into the chat tools that you want to be found for so that that’s, it’s not as refined as the SEO keyword tools yet, but it’s getting better. So I would say take advantage of those free audits and find out where your, where you might have some gaps.

Rick Rappe: 33:06

That sounds amazing. So that’s you call that an AI discovery and visibility review. And I’m, I’m probably going to take you up on that offer because it sounds great.

Mary Savery: 33:17

So awesome. All right. I’ll have it to you to.

Rick Rappe: 33:24

Well. Are there any practical steps that you recommend for businesses that want to improve how they show up in AI? Once you’ve done the review.

Mary Savery: 33:32

Yeah, absolutely. So certainly making sure your website is so mostly most businesses will write their website. Well, actually further out there about them, the products and services. But if they’re more savvy, they’re going to write it for the customer who is coming searching for a problem. That’s great.

You still need to have that. But AI is looking at your, you know, your schema, your Json files, you know, the background structure of, of your website and can it easily read and understand what you do. So, you know, have a, have a web specialist, take a look at that, an SEO specialist and make sure your website is using the right technology. The files are updated enough that AI can understand what you do. But then it’s not just what a business says about themselves, about themselves.

It’s what does what do other folks say? So as a business, are you listed? Are you a member of other associations? You know, your local chamber of commerce or you know, business associations? Are you listed in their directories?

And I just did an audit for a company last week who has changed their name a few times over the past 20 years. Well, actually, they’ve had different DBAs, you know, always the same parent company, but different DBAs. And I was really struggling to understand how those days were connected. So we talked about how do you go back to some of those previous listings where you’re in someone’s directory as an old name versus your new name, and what content can you put on your own website to tell that history of name changes. But are there other other businesses, media?

Certainly a great one. But are there other businesses that can talk about can validate you and your services and what you offer? Customer reviews are huge, not just on your site, but on, you know, on Google, on Yelp and all of those. So the I would say the first thing a business should do if they want to improve their visibility on AI is take a look at their entire digital footprint, not just their own website, but where. Where are they showing up across all of their digital properties, across all the review platforms, across other, you know, their associations and directory listings and making sure it’s consistent and telling the same story.

Rick Rappe: 36:06

Yeah. That leads me into my next question, which is, I mean, there’s, there’s so many digital channels and there’s a lot changing about the digital world all the time. When you’re thinking about channels and talking with a new business, how do you decide which part of the media mix in deserves that investment? And how do you think about the media mix?

Mary Savery: 36:36

That’s always a challenge for marketers. And I think it’ll always remain a challenge because it changes. And what works today isn’t going to work tomorrow. But I would say the first thing is look at where are your customers? Where are they consuming information and not just your customers, your prospective customers?

Where are they getting their information today? Where are they consuming that information and meet your prospective customers where they are. And so if you are, if you’re talking with, with a particular group, let’s say they’re, you know, the young folks, you’re, you’re selling to teenagers or, you know, people in their early 20s, some of the older social media platforms like Facebook that are for us, for us oldies, they’re probably not on Facebook. They’re going to be on different social media channels. And so advertising on Facebook may not make sense for you.

If your audience isn’t there, same thing. If they’re not, you know, reading, reading newspapers, or, you know, going to news websites, doing advertising on those types of sites isn’t going to matter. So finding out where your customers consume information today is a great place to start identifying where, where you want to invest your advertising dollars.

Rick Rappe: 37:58

That makes sense. We obviously like to think about the physical offline direct mail marketing here at RPM. That’s our area of expertise. So we founded some physical marketing. And reaching people in their mailbox is a great way to, to reach more people than we can even reach in those digital channels.

And everybody sort of pays attention to their direct mail to some degree. And so it’s been a very effective tool for a lot of our clients to kind of go around that, around that digital, the digital, the constraints and the challenges in the digital world. We sort of are going around that and going back to physical direct mail. And it’s with some new twists, right? And better targeting, better personalization, a lot of new new tactics that make it more effective than ever.

So.

Mary Savery: 38:51

You know, I have a little I love direct mail. I also find I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with it, though. The thing I find about direct mail, there’s so much to test, right? You have to test everything in marketing and in direct mail. You’re testing the format, you’re testing the list.

You’re testing the creative, the messaging. You’re testing the offer. And I’ve always found that you can you test all those things and you get to a champion and you’re like, this is it. This is the one that’s performing the best. You roll it out, you run it for a couple of months, and then the results start to decline because it’s not it’s not static, right?

It’s what worked for you for a couple of months. Well, I should say it’s not static if you’re targeting the same list, if you’re in broadband, we sent the same list, a direct mail piece twice a month. So the fatigue of the same offer, the same piece mounted very quickly. And trying to, you know, trying to stay ahead of that was, is always very challenging. But the second we stopped doing or pulled back on direct mail, it affected everything else, right?

It affects online searches and direct traffic to the website and brand awareness. So Direct mail is more than just a direct response mechanism in my book. It’s also brand awareness as well. And it lifts. It lifts every other campaign.

Rick Rappe: 40:25

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. We drive sales through all the channels with direct mail for sure, and even through channels that you’re not intending to drive sales through. That’s the there’s, there’s a tracking and attribution aspect that’s always challenging with direct mail. But to what you said, I’m thinking through some of our different clients and, you know, we stick with a control package, something that’s proven and we can use that over and over again for, for a client, if they’re not mailing too often.

So it depends on how aggressively we have to hit the market, like in internet and cable companies, some of our clients that are in internet and cable companies, though, they need to hit their geographic area and their market quite aggressively, like, you know, multiple times per month. So yeah, you can’t just mail the same piece to the same people every two weeks and expect it to continue to perform. So we have a strategy which involves obviously. Control structures but using them in rotation. So you’re you start with something and you and you prove that it works, but you don’t necessarily just hammer that over and over again.

You end up with having a portfolio of things that you have proven work, and then you’re rotating through them and changing the offer, updating the creative sometimes. And so it’s a little bit of a science, but it’s also a little bit of an art like we talked about at the beginning. So that you’re not hitting people and you’re keeping it, keeping it fresh in their mailbox and kind of through, through that approach, we’ve been able to keep, maintain performance and even improve performance over time. And you still have to try to do testing so that you can get some answers to your important marketing questions. And, and that makes things even more complicated.

So when you’re really hitting the market aggressively, aggressively, multiple times per month, it’s a different level of strategy than if you, if you have a nationwide footprint and you can mail millions of pieces but only hit people once every two months, then that’s a different strategy. Yeah.

Mary Savery: 42:30

It’s well, it’s good that they, your clients have you as, as kind of that advisor as that strategist, right? I remember, you know, and of course, in an organization, everyone’s, everyone knows how to do marketing or everyone’s a marketer. And I, the first thing when we’d come out with, you know, a new product or a new offer, let’s send a mailer, let’s send a mailer, let’s send a mailer without any idea of how many mailers we were already sending to the marketplace. So yeah, that’s not a direct mail is deceptively complicated. People think it’s simple, right?

It’s not. There’s a whole lot of strategy that goes into that.

Rick Rappe: 43:08

There should be hopefully, hopefully, if it’s done, done right, there should be a bit of strategy. Yeah, we have a document, a tool that we call our performance framework. And I’m going to send that to you and share that with you and anybody else that’s listening. If they’re interested in our performance framework, let me know and I will send it to you as well. But it’s a really good tool to check.

It’s a checklist, if you will, but it shows how you should be thinking through your direct mail from top to bottom. What’s most important. And it’s a great if you cover all the points on this framework, it will really. You’ll. You’ll be sure to have a good strategy at the end of the process.

So.

Mary Savery: 43:50

I look forward to that. Thank you.

Rick Rappe: 43:52

Yeah. You said marketers should often be testing. And they talk about testing actually a lot more than they actually do. What does a useful, consistent testing program look like?

Mary Savery: 44:06

Well, it depends on the, the, your campaign, right? It’s going to be different for indirect mail than it is in digital. Yeah. There is a study recently that Facebook did of companies that tested their creative. So just the ad that they were using in their campaigns and companies that always had that were testing something.

So there was always an A/B test. Were 11 times more likely or 11 times more successful in whatever their outcome was with lead generation or impressions or what have you. Than those who didn’t run any tests. So at the bare minimum, if you have something out in the marketplace, you should have. There should be two things out in the marketplace.

There should be an A B test at the bare minimum. But ideally, and of course, it depends on how big your market is, how big your footprint is. You can’t have too small of a segment, but ideally you could test several different items. but a good. A good test starts with a hypothesis, right?

What do you believe? Why do you believe it? And what evidence would convince you you would change your mind. And so and that’s what you’re testing against. So you might believe that a better offer would have better results, or you might believe a better creative, a better direct mail package.

The format might have better results. So start with your hypothesis, then develop a test to determine whether that hypothesis is true or false.

Rick Rappe: 45:30

Yeah. What’s one good marketing principle that you wish every business owner understood before they spent money on tactics and marketing?

Mary Savery: 45:42

Well, marketing is a tremendous driver of growth, but it’s not the only driver. So if you have if there are other issues, and I kind of mentioned this at the very beginning, if if you can be generating a lot of traffic to your website or a lot of phone calls, a lot of leads, but if your sales team isn’t closing them, then you would be better to invest in a, in improving your sales process than spending one more dollar in marketing or driving more leads or if customers were leaving as soon as they came in the door. Then figuring out how to retain customers is more important than generating new customers. So I think that’s probably the one thing most businesses are so consumed with. How do we generate more customers that they forget to look at what’s happening with the leads they’re getting today or the customers that they’re getting today?

So marketing can’t. Can’t we talk about it? You know, you can’t put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig, right? So if there’s something else broken in your business, marketing isn’t going to be able to solve that.

Rick Rappe: 46:38

Understanding that whole customer life cycle within your business and understanding the metrics of what’s happening, what’s driving. I think it’s always really important for business owners to understand lifetime value and all the different things that are contributing to lifetime value. I mean, that’s the front end. It’s retention. It’s cross-selling, upselling, it’s all of these things kind of going in together that affect the life, the lifetime value and the customer’s journey through your company.

Yeah.

Mary Savery: 47:01

You’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t have and don’t track the entire customer journey. So that I guess going back to that, that question, I would revise it to say, before you spend one more dollar on marketing, make sure that you’ve identified the entire customer journey and what customers are experiencing and what they’re thinking, what they’re doing, how they’re behaving throughout that entire journey.

Rick Rappe: 47:21

That’s great advice. Absolutely. Who is one person that you think more marketers and business owners should be listening to.

Mary Savery: 47:27

Listening to in terms of authors or public speakers? There’s two that I consume and anything and everything that they put out. The first is Alex Hormozi. He is a great speaker. He’s a great author.

He. I really appreciate how he thinks about growing businesses. Of course, he’s focused more kind of on the smaller businesses and a lot of the free stuff he has out there. But he challenges business owners to think beyond the traditional marketing tactics and look more at that bigger picture of the entire customer journey, as well as your particular offers. How do you create offers that people actually want?

How do you get more value from the customers that you already have? What how do you build a business that can grow? But he’s also great at taking kind of a complicated business function or business concept and putting it in everyday language. So he’s great. I also listen to Mike Michalowicz a lot.

He’s the author of Profit First is great as the first business book I read when I started my business, understanding how to make a business profitable as well as The Pumpkin Plan. How do you create your next giant Atlantic pumpkin? I won’t give away the premise of the book, but he has great. His. His purpose is ending entrepreneurial poverty.

Of poverty. Sorry. Ending entrepreneurial poverty. So making sure that businesses are sustainable and and profitable. So I really like both of those.

There’s others. But those I would say those are the first two that business owners should start with.

Rick Rappe: 48:46

Perfect. Thank you. Where can listeners learn more about you and where can they connect with you if they want to learn more about your solutions and about talking to you about their challenges?

Mary Savery: 48:57

Awesome. I would say the first place is probably my website, which is Savery Solutions. And Savery Solutions is like, like the flavoring just spelled a little bit differently, right? As SAVERY instead of ORY. So saverysolutions.com.

I’m also very active on LinkedIn. Find me there. Mary Savery it’s not the same way. SAVERY. I always love connecting with business owners, talking about their challenges and other marketing professionals as well.

I love swapping stories like with you, Rick.

Rick Rappe: 49:23

Well, this has been a pleasure today and I’ve really learned a lot. I think it’s going to be good to continue to get to know you and work with you through the FBA Marketing Committee. I’m looking forward to that. So thank you so much for your time today, and we’ll talk again soon.

Mary Savery: 49:35

All right. Great. Thank you, Rick, I appreciate it.

Outro: 49:37

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

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