Collecting Data Throughout the Customer Journey feat. Julian Juenemann

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis

Chris Davis 0:32
All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast, we invite startup founders and digital marketers of all walks to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems that scale. I’m your host, Chris Davis. And today I have with me, Julian Julian gentlemen of measure school. And Julian learned the ropes of digital marketing and different startups, he co founded and quickly became fascinated with how the data driven world how data driven this world can be. And after launching his consultancy data analytics in 2013, he began helping other businesses adopt the data driven way to digital marketing. You all know how I feel about data. And we’ve got data driven in data. What was it, there’s two, there’s two ways you can be data driven or data informed. So we’re going to talk about the data driven approach. And in 2015, Julian launch measure school, it’s a YouTube channel, you may have seen him for those of you who aren’t watching the video, his voice may sound familiar if you’ve been in the analytic space. And even automation is really hard not to come by Julian. In fact, I found him through YouTube many years ago. And he teaches a new way of marketing to others with with over 150,000 subscribers. It’s become the leading source for many marketers to learn these data driven methods. Alright, today, I have Julian to talk to us all about how to collect data through out the entire customer journey. Julian, welcome to the podcast How you doing?

Julian Juenemann 2:23
Thank you very much for having me days. And Chris, Chris. And yeah, I’m doing great.

Chris Davis 2:30
Great, great. I have to tell you, as an engineer, engineer by trade, I love numbers. Okay. Um, and I’ll be honest with you, Julian, me and data have like a love hate relationship right now. I love it when it’s given to me. But it can be quite challenging, determining how to get the data from my marketing and sales presented to me in a way where I can start making decisions. Okay, so it becomes kind of like, what points should I measure? And then how do I get those measured points presented to me in a way that I can make those decisions? But I know you’ve, you’ve got a YouTube channel, and I know you’ve been digital marketing. Tell us a little bit about your journey. Up until that point, were you always in the analytics? Or were you live in another life and this life found you? Yeah, I started out, I guess. It’s different startups that are co founded and helped to build over the years. And that was always a digital marketer. I first learned SEO, how to get up on the on the search engines. And then I quickly entered the PPC game, AdWords was pretty big back then Facebook was up and coming. And there is where anybody who has done PPC, you actually spending money to not really get get people to your website, you first of all, try to gather data, and you actually pay for data. Google is a great machine to spend your money to know which customers actually react to your advertising and how you are able to buy the most the most most cheaply and efficiently how to get them to your website and then buy your product. And that is great data that we can use then, throughout our marketing throughout our business, and informs decision in the end. So when when doing PPC, I really saw the power of data because you are able to make decisions and really influence the marketing of your product of your website through data. And that’s when I first fell in love with it. And really got up and and looked into many different areas of Analytics. Google Analytics was back then out there and most of the time it was not installed

Julian Juenemann 5:00
correctly. So when I went out on my own, I really wanted to do analytics. But my clients mostly didn’t really have the data to make decisions. And that’s when I really dug into also the technical bits of Analytics. Google tag manager came along one of my favorite tools to actually build in tracking onto a website, and then track whatever you need in order to make decisions. And that’s what it’s all about. In the end, you want to get to that point where data actually does something for you, were you able to make a decision based on the data? And that’s when you get an ROI? Or value from your data as well? Yes, yes. So So you’ve navigated many, many modes, and you’ve you’ve worn many hats in the startups. And, you know, it sounds like analytics is what really stuck, right? That’s the one where you say, hey, look, there’s the difference maker. For me, Julian, as I didn’t, of course, start out in startups more and more corporate background for me. But when I started to learn entrepreneurship, I was intrigued by of course, the leverage, being able to make money from something ongoing without having to always work for it, that was kind of like a shock to my system, thinking that, Oh, the only way to make more money is to work more hours. You mean, I could work less hours, you know, with technology. And as I as I dove into it, and started to buy courses and everything, what piqued my interest was the back end, the back end systems, it was like, Okay, it’s not the website that’s making money, okay. It’s not the graphics, it’s not all of this, then you go on the backside, ah, oh, it’s the system and how you communicate ongoing your ability to to receive money. And that’s what grabbed me. Again, as an engineer, I need data. I need data to make decisions. I need data to just whether it’s anecdotal, or qualitative, quantitative, I need it all. I need all types of data. So when we talk about the the data, collecting data throughout the customer journey, let’s let’s take let’s build upon this thing, Julian, if you were to define the customer journey, what is the point that it starts? And what is the point that it stops, just so we understand under which confines we’ll be talking about these these data points? Yeah, when I think of data, and when I actually start measuring, when I get the first data points, it’s when your customer becomes aware of the solution that you have for them or the product that you have for them. Once that happens, we already can start measuring data throughout the journey, then, once they come to your website, obviously, once they buy your product, once they become a customer, up until that point where you try to retain them, and make sure that they stay a customer or resell them a product as well. So there’s a lot of data that you can gather throughout this this customer lifetime, and the journey that the user goes through and optimize that journey. So you can Okay. More profit? Yeah, got it. So we’ll we’ll go from awareness to retention. Yeah, that’s, that’s a journey we’ll talk about. And what I’m going to do is Julian, I’m going to give you the floor and I’ll jump in. But let me set the table.

Chris Davis 8:22
Our listeners, doesn’t matter if they’re digital marketers or entrepreneurs, I’ve seen both struggle with data. And the question becomes, okay, what do I start measuring? And and what does that tell me? So initially, for me, it’s like, well, you want to measure the traffic that’s coming to your site, and then the leads, right, that’s your first conversion. And then beyond that, it’s like, okay, then customers. It’s like, Whoa, there’s data points. Within there, you should look at as well. So I’m for you, if you were to walk a business through, Alright, we’ve got data. We’ve been doing stuff online, Julian, it’s working because we’re making money and you ask to see their dashboard. We don’t have we just kind of produce content and make money. How would you walk them through identifying those data collection points? Right. It’s an individual journey festival. So everything that I will say is probably more generalized. But when we start out, looking at awareness, that’s obviously on the marketing side. So knowing where your customers hang out, and then marketing to them, and really putting your marketing techniques on the scrutiny of saying, Okay, if I write something on somebody else’s blog, or if I do PPC advertising or SEO, how much

Julian Juenemann 9:44
do I actually put into this? How much do I get out of it? And there we have definitely ways to track some have become under scrutiny lately. But if we are looking at for example, PPC which is the easiest journey, we actually

Julian Juenemann 10:00
Get Data already from the advertising network, how many people have actually seen our advertising? How many people have clicked on our advertising from that we can calculate CTR. And then also the people who came to our website. Now, when they come to our websites, they come there for different purposes. Sometimes they’re just discovering your website. But oftentimes, they already making a buying decision. And if we have a classic ecommerce shop, then we want to know, what is their journey throughout the website. So did they go to a category page, which products that they click on which products that I put into the cart, and then go through the checkout. And then the most important part, and this is really

Julian Juenemann 10:43
the metric that everybody should track is the conversion, right? Whatever that means for you, conversion can be a purchase can be a lead, that fills out your form could be a sign up to your game that you’re maybe selling. And once you have that

Julian Juenemann 11:02
lead information, you can connect it back to the awareness stage. So you can actually say, which traffic, which traffic source that I have available here, and that I used in the last few weeks, has yielded the biggest impact in terms of conversions. Where did I get most of my conversions from? And this is classic optimization, then, as you say, I put my budget towards the traffic methods that work better, and maybe shifted away from those that haven’t given me the results. And this is really a really easy technique that people can follow. Just knowing where does the traffic come from? In our analytics world, we often talk about UTM there, and then measuring your conversions. If you have these two measurement points clearly set up, then you’re already further ahead than, let’s say 80%. Of, of many marketers out there.

Chris Davis 12:06
Yeah, yeah, this makes sense. And I’m gonna walk us through this point by point and I want to ask you something as we go through each one of them. And let you let you clarify. So I know you mentioned PPC is is the easiest to get started, because you’ve got

Chris Davis 12:20
the information, the advertising that you’ve placed in the platform, and they’ll let you know how many people they put it in front of and how many people have clicked on it. So if you’re testing messaging, if you’re testing angles, if your test, anything that you’re testing, you can at least get a pulse and say, Okay, this is resonating. Would you say, if you were on the more organic side, let’s say you’re posting on social media to a group posting on your page, or whatever the case may be,

Chris Davis 12:49
in that event, would you then use a shortened URL with UTM? To give you that same type of data? Well,

Julian Juenemann 12:58
obviously, the PPC side is very much more on the data side, because the platform’s want you to get more data in order to spend more money with them. Now, with organic forms, it’s a little bit harder, and there’s a time component to it as well. But there’s always something to measure there. So yes, you’re right, if you have a post, where you put in a link, a shortened link, for example, that you can track. So you actually know, when people click on it, how many people clicked on it, then that’s a great measure to know how effective your post was in the first instance there, right. And sometimes these platforms, even Facebook gives you data as well on your organic posts as well. How to, it’s obviously harder to do with something like SEO, we, we have a little bit of data on from from the Search Console, for example, on how often a search result is seen, but then actually optimizing that the levers are just much harder to pull, right? It’s not as easy as turning off and on money, like it is with PPC. But yeah, there are always techniques, and one of the biggest ones is if you don’t do anything else, is to tag your links with UTM. A shortened link could also already be enough. If you routed through something like Bitly then you know, and Bitly gives you that data how many people have clicked on that link? And how many people went through that link that that’s already great information? Yeah, yeah. And listeners is twofold. The shortened link will tell you link clicks. But Bitly users I use rebrand Lee any URL shortening software will also allow you to add UTM Well, you say well, why do I need UTM? Though Bitly or rebrand, Lee will track your links. The UTM will inform Google the type of content that they that they are engaging with, based on how you define it. Google is not going to define it you get to define UTM source UTM, medium UTM content, keyword all of those things.

Chris Davis 15:00
So if this is what is a UTM? Look at that later. But it’s a way to inform Google on where your your traffic is coming from. Yeah, because this becomes important to your second point, Julian, you talked about capture, it could be capturing a lead, it could be capturing information for a sales call a demo, somebody could be signing up for software. So that capture point gets dynamic, right? It’s really tough to have a general capture point. But at that point of capture, you have now gone from anatomised data to known data, right?

Julian Juenemann 15:40
Theoretically, yes, obviously, if you, if you have a conversion that you would track that is just a button click or just an action that this anonymous user took on your website, you wouldn’t be at that point yet. But it’s true. If you have something like an email opt in form, you go from data that this user is just another guy on your website, to somebody that you can actually identify and even have a conversation with, if you use automation tools, email marketing, and so on. Yeah, and the important part is this everybody, if I see,

Chris Davis 16:15
a lot of traffic is coming from Facebook, I don’t know who that is, I can look at trends for the most part, and see which platform has given me the most traffic, I can see it over time, things of that nature, trends are great. But if I want to look inside of those trends, and say, Who are the people coming from Facebook, this is where the UTM, or any form of lead attribution, comm lead source attribution comes into play. Because when you put a face to the name, or or I should say, when you put a name to the trend, or even more accurate when you put an email to the trend, all right, now I can start to nurture that lead. And all sources are not equal. So though, in this random example that I’m bringing up, Facebook may be sending a lot of traffic, when I start to identify those people in my CRM, because I’m capturing the source that they came from, because because I’m taking my URL, I can see Man, these Facebook leads, I’m getting a lot of them, but they’re not converting. Strangely enough, Twitter is sending me half the leads, but double the conversion rate. Right, it becomes a game now, where just at the capture point of a lead, we’re starting to be informed with the quality of the lead, right. And it’s actually also interesting in terms of what is going on in analytics, currently, everybody knows that. Not everybody is purchasing, maybe in the first session, maybe even not on the same device, maybe they got aware of you on their mobile device, opted into your email list, but they actually later purchase on a desktop device. Now, once you have that information in your CRM system, have that individual user and you know, okay, the first instance that they came through to my website was from Facebook, you’ll be able to much better track them later on. Because when they purchase maybe one week down the line, you will be able to know this lead came originally from that source at the beginning when when he signed up. And that is not always possible when you have a business, like for example, an ecommerce store where people don’t usually leave their lead information before they purchase, they just go there and buy right away or they leave the website. So having a CRM in place, or something that makes us actually identify themselves, give them your your email address can be immensely powerful in terms of the data that you’re gathering. Yeah, and one trick that I’ve done, everybody in my in my automation service provider program that has gone through it, and even those in the community. Know I love to hide fields, I will hide a fit. I don’t know if I have too many forms online that don’t have hidden fields. And it’s just a way for me to populate. Sometimes it’s a link within my website, I’ll tag the URL and capture it that way. If I’m on a if I’m doing a training with another person’s community, right, I’ll give them a URL that expands and tags because sometimes depending if you’re a service based business is big influx of leads all the time CPA dentists you know, anybody fitness trainer, maybe 100 leads a month is like wow, we did really good, right? But it wouldn’t be an realistic for you to be able to anecdotally look at some of your leads and the sources that they’re coming from and start to make decisions from that. You know, you don’t necessarily I’m treading lightly here. You don’t, you should have a dashboard.

Chris Davis 20:00
You don’t if you’re just getting started, and you have a you have a question that’s like, how did you hear about us? Right is usually how most people start with their source attribution, which isn’t always the truth, by the way, but it at least gets you in the game to start to understand, okay, these are the sources that are sending me traffic, the next step is to not rely on somebody to tell you, but to know from their behavior. And those are things that we’re talking about clicking link tagging, a URL tagging, and all of those things. Yeah, and I must agree, hidden form fields are the best kept secret.

Julian Juenemann 20:37
As as this the CRM, basically, databases, and you have, you can push information in there. And if you think of tracking, that is another informational field that you can fill with whatever information you want, we usually use it to connect. So there is an identifier inside of Google Analytics, for example, which is called the client ID, and we connect that to a hidden form field. So we will be able to later look up the customer who has bought from us or who has signed up in Google Analytics, and then you can see everything in terms of like, what they clicked on, and so on. So it can be really powerful in terms of connecting also these pieces together. And now, Julian, you blew me away, everybody, that was a true gasp, if you heard it, I had out of all of the data that I put in hidden fields, I hadn’t thought of the client ID from Google Analytics to tie the anonymous visit data to an actual individual. Now we’re talking about full customer journey here. I know what you did before I knew you.

Chris Davis 21:41
And now that I know you, I can see what what you’ve done. And you’re using Google Analytics throughout the customer journey. But but now you, you everybody listening, we’ve gone from them being on the website, doing something maybe even on platforms external to our website. And when they get on our website, we’re able to say, Hey, you came from here and look at what you’re doing. Then they give us information capture point, they give us information. And now they’re known, though Google is still looking at the pages, they visit buttons that they click, we now have this additional opportunity to gain insight from a CRM. So we can start to see email behavior, we can start to see if you’ve gotten a membership site, or if you’re sending events back to your CRM from your platform, we can start to see the events that they’re participating in. And now the data starts to be a little more juicy, right? Because I’m starting to really understand who my prime, hopefully, who my primary customer is. So Julian, I know I’m asking a lot. And it’s very hard to stay general, for some people to get understanding. And sometimes we need a tangible example. But if you would take something similar to like a business that has a online course that sells an online course. Alright, so you may have a lead magnet up front, that’s your capture. And after that, you want to nurture them to get them to enroll in your course. And that event, all everything that we’ve spoken about thus far still stands. Right, all good. But now I’ve got the client ID too, so I can see your your behavior. What am I doing now, Julian that I know you and I have this ability to reach you with messaging, and really understand more about you? What am I measuring? What am I looking for what indicators to help me get them to enroll?

Julian Juenemann 23:43
Right, I think from an analysis standpoint, for what I would probably do without going too specific here is probably that I would first look at the behavior of those that actually go through the funnel or make a purchase, in the end, what do these people have in common, and then we can help them along the journey with all the automation tools that we have available, by reminding them of certain things, helping them to make a decision. And that is possible by looking at first of all the data of people who have successfully converted, what do they have in common. And then later on, putting that into our journey, but also looking at our journey in or putting our journey under the microscope and making sure that we actually keep on measuring so we can optimize, right? So some stuff will work. Some stuff won’t work. And you might see that nobody clicks on that special email that you send out because of that report. And that is something you can obviously then adjust the power of data here is that it can help us to make decisions and see a way forward rather than just going in the dark and trying things out because we have heard maybe

Julian Juenemann 25:00
on the internet somewhere that this is the best practice we can really go out and, and customize our journey to our,

Julian Juenemann 25:08
to our customers to our journey to our online business.

Chris Davis 25:12
Yeah, and we’re talking about efficiency. So some of you are who don’t have the money to hire full time employees, or you even have to watch your budget for your freelancers. You can’t afford to just be doing stuff and hoping that it works. You’re putting money into your website, you’re putting money into your CRM, you’re putting money into your graphics, you’re putting money into your messaging, you’re putting money into your business overall. So you want to make sure that your efforts are yielding the biggest fruit right from them. And data is the key, how else do not rely on yourself to just feel like this is working or hope that it’s working? You need data to be that that truth teller, and sometimes it can be really humbling, you know, what data tells us about what we think we know to be true? You mentioned, we both have been talking about this journey. And you know, are they really reading that email? Are they really going through the checkout page, so maybe, maybe you don’t have a problem with your course, before you go make a whole new course and say, hey, people aren’t buying it? Well, they’re not even getting there. Right. They’re not even clicking the links in the email that are getting there. But in the event that they are, and people start enrolling, we’ve now introduced a second capture point, which most businesses I think overall have to capture points, you’ve got a lead capture point, and then a cost a lead conversion, and then and then a customer conversion. At that point, you still have all of the data from the marketing, as well as the source. So have you seen cases? Well, let me ask this first. Now that you have

Chris Davis 26:56
customers, and you want to tie back customer data to sources and behavior as well, which, which is more important, by the way, customer source is much more important than marketing source. Because these are the ones that are actually paying you money. And you want to see some consistency and say, hey, look, from a marketing side, we’re seeing a lot of leads that are converting coming from Twitter. And then they’re also the ones enrolling, right. That’s the ultimate would you say, Julie, the question that I’m trying to get to here? is would you say that the customer conversion is the ultimate teller of the power of the source?

Julian Juenemann 27:36
Yeah, absolutely. I think that when we look at somebody becoming a customer, then we, we usually divide between micro conversions, micro conversions. Now, micro conversions are these big, hairy goals that you have, when a user comes to your website. Why does your website exists? Well, it exists. So people can buy my product, and or my service. And if the customer reaches that goal, that is always good time to celebrate. There are also micro conversions, which lead up to the macro conversion. So it might be a lead, that is the user is maybe halfway there. But it’s not full there yet. And obviously, the micro conversion is the most important part, if we have that available, if you have enough data available, then we are able to really optimize our marketing based on these micro conversions. Now, some business models have different macro conversion. So maybe for a SaaS business, it’s not only the sign up to the monthly plan of $9, but actually then the retention of many years to come. And so the the source might only reveal itself after three or four years that it’s been the most consistent source for for the business. So you can always tie it down to the the actual conversion of the first payment. It all depends on the business model. Definitely. But I would say yes, once you have once you are able to get the macro conversion

Julian Juenemann 29:12
captured and and tied to the initial source, then you’re golden and can can do a lot with it. Yeah, and to keep us moving this is this is really good.

Chris Davis 29:26
By the way. He just got my mind is just spinning this with data does to me anyway. Um, so we’ve got the customer conversion, right. This is our macro conversion. This is the main one because we have indicators up into that point, Julian, right. We’ve got these leads coming from Facebook and Twitter, like I mentioned, those are indicators that those sources may be good for us. The behaviors that we’re observing. There are indicators but we don’t know until they become a customer once they become a question

Chris Davis 29:59
Customer, it validates that journey. It validates everything that we seen. And now it informs us with what we need to do or how to expect to go find more people like that, right. So this is, you know, your marketing and sales, alignment, sales funnels, all of those things. I don’t mean to gloss over it, this is an entire profession. Right? We just talked about digital marketing. And like one sentence, however, when they become the goal with data is to get is to pay attention to behaviors, look at trends, to get leads to become customers, right. But once they become customers, the game changes, because I’m no longer looking at your behavior as much as a lead. Now I’m looking at your behavior as the customer to turn you into another customer over and over and over again. So it’s this real iterative cycle. But I’m not saying I throw away that data of you as a lead. But my focus shifts when we go into the retention portion of the customer journey. I’m now concerned about what are you doing? And what can I observe? That shows me when to put the next offer in front of you? Or how to keep you paying for that initial offer that you got? Right?

Julian Juenemann 31:25
Correct? Yeah, I think that when you look at onboarding, for example, can be very important for a business that may helps you, for example, with a with a software tool, if you don’t get the user on boarded correctly, he might churn or leave your product after a while. And you can make that out in the data. How many people have actually,

Julian Juenemann 31:48
for example, created a new project in the last 15 days. And if you have a productivity software, for example, and that can give you an indication, and even a churn probability of somebody who didn’t do this, and you might be able, even with automation, then again, to reach out to that customer and encourage him to create that project. Because you know that this is one of the success factors, the success path for somebody using your product in the long term. So there’s a lot of data again, when a user becomes a customer, to retain him. And that’s something that is a science in itself. I mean, if you look at product analytics, or product retention, even even something as Facebook has become very good at keeping the user scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Right. So that has become also Facebook isn’t shy about this. This is a lot of data that they have crunched and found this out over a lot of experimentation. What makes the user actually keep them on the platform. And you kind of want to do the same with your product or service. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and I’ll tell you,

Chris Davis 33:04
keeping, keeping them

Chris Davis 33:08
keeping a customer is

Chris Davis 33:12
where I see a lot of businesses lose sight of they, they they they start to focus on new customers more and more and more new customers. But I’ll tell you,

Chris Davis 33:25
the data, that paying attention to your customer data is the most important data that you can look at, I promise you, everyone, once you get some customers in, and you see trends, and you can start to talk to them. By the way, don’t be scared to talk to your customers early on, on in business and continue to do so. But that data of a customer also is going to inform you on where to look for leads that would more than likely convert to customers. And what I see people do, Julian is they literally turn off the data. After they become a customer. They’re no longer watching. They’re no longer listening. They’re no longer tracking what that person is doing.

Chris Davis 34:12
To simplify this everyone, surveys are amazing. If this is just overwhelming to you, like you guys lost me at UTM. And everything else has just been over my head. Let me bring you back in surveys are immensely valuable. I cannot tell you the amount of startups and they range from construction industry all the way to thick, where time surveys throughout the onboarding in the initial customer experience can provide so much feedback. So much information. Julian I’m a huge fan of air table. So that feedback regardless of what form I’m using for it, I’ll make sure I dump it into air table because it’s easier, easier for me to manipulate the data than any CRM, you know. I like to manage

Chris Davis 35:00
Are my CRM in airtable? Just so I can look at the data quickly group things, see see what’s what, right. Um, but timing those surveys at the right time, it may some people have a 30 day onboarding, 14 day onboarding, seven day onboarding, that information delivered to you in a database where you can start to see oh, wow, this is why you joined. These are the features that you want to use most. Now, this is what they’re saying, Julian, I love to believe what people say. But I’ve just learned to better believe what they do. So I like to couple that with the data that I can actually track. So given me, you know, I’ve got a membership site, one of the proponents of a membership site, everybody, the user is logged in.

Chris Davis 35:44
You can see everything that they’re doing, along with the surveys and what they’re saying, right?

Julian Juenemann 35:51
Yeah. And I think I must agree, surveys, everybody thinks I was fun, we think about analytics, that is data in Google Analytics might seem a little bit overwhelming when you first log in. Here, you see mainly aggregated data. So every time somebody comes to a website, opens up a site, it sends over this tracking request to Google Analytics, it’s all aggregated into these reports, you can glean a lot of information, but you need to learn how to read this information as well. So that will take you some time. But if you want to make decisions fast, just have a customer conversation is number one, or the surveys, super easy Google Google Forms, you send out a survey, you get that also in the into a spreadsheet. And just from reading it, even if you have only a few responses, you will be able to make decisions on the snap really fast. And maybe one thing where ties into that that other data point, again into our our more quantitative data, when we ask these questions that have maybe a drop down. So for example, what are you are you do you see yourself as an entrepreneur, as a freelancer, as a business owner or agency owner, these are really great categories that you can put into place. And we call them also segments. So in Analytics, you can segment your data based on the answers that have been given. And this can even impact what target group you go after, at the awareness stage, right? So all the way back to when the user signs up to your, your email list, you might already ask them, hey, what do you see yourself. And that might inform how you market to them, you can personalize these requests as well. And later figure out again, when when the user is a customer ready, which groups are actually most

Julian Juenemann 37:47
likely to sign up to my product. And maybe you get on a phone call with somebody or this, all of these techniques that we have as our marketing, as in our marketing arsenal, we obviously

Julian Juenemann 38:01
could try them all out. And but we don’t have really the time or the resources to do them all correctly. So let data inform that what you should actually be doing and where you should be going next.

Julian Juenemann 38:16
Rather than just spray painting everything and trying to try and everything out, just to see if it yields results.

Chris Davis 38:25
Yeah, and what we’re doing here, everyone who who got overwhelmed with the Techie Talk, is we’re telling you that you can still collect data, old school, talk to somebody, talk to your customers, that’s still a form of data collection. And if you want to start with tech surveys, forms, I’m now I’m a stickler for asking for the right question, Julian i It is my pet peeve is when I see a form, and they’re asking repetitive questions, or they’re asking for information that I know they’re not going to use. It’s just like, this has nothing to do, the amount of kids that I have has nothing to do with branding. Like, I want it for this, this business over here has nothing to do with kids. Why are you asking me how many kids I have, but a lot of people do that. Because they just start thinking, Oh, I can collect all of his information and they get out of control. You still need to be strategic in the questions that you ask. So for my non techie folks, think about what information would help you better serve the customers that you have right now? Do you know what part of your platform they like the most? Listen, I survey, I survey my community members quarterly and say, hey, look, this is what we’re producing. What would you not miss if we stopped? And they’ll tell me like, hey, I really wouldn’t miss this part. So why would I keep producing it? Put my effort into the things that they’re like, you know, if I left this community, or I’m not leaving this community for these reasons, well, I’m definitely going to put energy into those reasons, right. But this is not

Chris Davis 40:00
Julian that’s not techie. That’s just strategy.

Chris Davis 40:04
Right? And making sure that you’re you’re talking to your customers. And the biggest pieces that you’re always collecting data, one more thing I want to say is, when somebody leaves your company, your product, your course, whatever the case is, it is also a great opportunity to ask them, what did we miss? What what was missing in this experience, that that could have made you stay. And if you want to, you can even incentivize them with like a $5, Starbucks gift card, that data, somebody’s way out. That data that you can capture is invaluable? Because it especially if you look at their customer record and realize, man, you’ve been with me for like six months, you’ve been, you’re really valuable what what happened? And it’s just blind spots? Man, we don’t, Julian, we’re not smart enough in that kind of data, helps us identify the blind spots. Before we go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about measure school. All right, what is it and who is it for? Right? So measure school is our central YouTube channel, but also a website, where we run a program in the back end called measure masters. Now measure Masters is already for professional marketers who want to learn the data driven way of digital marketing. So if you are, for example, in an agency, or if you’re looking to start your freelance career, there are great ways to level up your what you’re doing already, and just be a little bit more data informed, or data driven even. And for that, you need to know how to capture data, how to work with data and analyze it and uncover the hidden insights in the data really. And then later on, communicate that to your clients, your superiors, your stakeholders, so they can actually take action on it. Because oftentimes, we are not the only ones who can actually act on that data. But they are really great people that can have a bigger impact than ourselves. So we need to get really great at communicating data as well. And that’s what we teach within our measure master’s program. Yeah, and I love it. You all know, I’m on the techie side of things. I found Julian before he had an official measure masters, he had a video on a script to do lead scoring and Active Campaign. And it was it was easy. So what I’m telling you is the way that he teaches and breaks down these analytics, I hope that this podcast reflected that accurately, but very patient, and very clear, and breaking these very technical things down for your business. So it’s great for digital marketers to have a resource dedicated to data collection, data decision making, you know, all of that. So we’ll make sure that we link to that in the bio as well. Julian, I, I can’t thank you enough for coming on to the podcast. My hope, my hope for every business owner is that you would not only control and capture your data, but you will start looking at it and never stop

Chris Davis 43:25
looking at it and collecting to make decisions. If there’s anything that you all walk away from. Just like you look in the mirror every day, every day, Julian, I’ve seen people rush out the house and they didn’t look in the mirror. Well guess what they’re looking at. They’re looking at reflections in windows and everything multiple times throughout the day. Your data is the mirror of your business. Look at it every day. Please look at it every day. It’ll make your life easier. Any parting words for our listeners from you from you, Julian?

Julian Juenemann 44:01
Oh, it was a pleasure being on thank you for the invitation. Yes, I would just say, just second that as well. I mean, data might seem overwhelming sometimes and messy. But once you learn the basics can be so powerful can transform your business. And that’s why I would encourage everybody to start at least a little bit of that data journey.

Julian Juenemann 44:24
The right way, I would say but yeah, take it easy at the beginning and capture the data, even if it’s just a survey that was already great data that can make you see the world differently. And that is the power of data. And that’s why I got into it so long ago, and I hope that makes a difference in your business life as well. Yeah, digital marketers, you have a resource, measure school measure school.com You have a resource to go and learn this data driven approach. CEOs and entrepreneurs who tech is just goes over your head

Chris Davis 45:00
You now have a resource to send to your digital marketer.

Chris Davis 45:03
Okay? And it’s the same, just like I admonished you all to say, Hey, I’m techie, I’m a digital marketer. And I want to go deeper in automation. What we didn’t discuss, but I mentioned now is data in automation go hand in hand, I’m just the other side of the coin, we build the systems to deliver the data,

Chris Davis 45:27
which you still need to know what to do with the data. So you see Julia and I as brothers in arms on this battlefield, this marketing Battlefield, trying to conquer all of the roadblocks and hindrances that are before you all, when it comes to business growth. So hopefully, um, depending on where you’re at, in your journey, you you know, you’ve got two programs on the table here, you can go deeper in the automation side, you can go deeper in the analytic side, guess what, at the end of the day, you’re going to need both.

Chris Davis 45:59
You’re going to need both. So Julian again, man, thank you so much for jumping on to the podcast. I really appreciate it. Everyone, all the links will be in the show notes for you to connect with Julian at measure school. YouTube, what’s the best what’s the best URL for someone to go to if they want to find out about your your your academy as well as YouTube is a measure school comm Yes, correct. Okay. Measure school.com. Everybody, Julian, thank you so much, man. Thank you, Chris. All right. Great. I’ll see you online buddy. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis

Chris Davis 0:32
All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast, we invite startup founders and digital marketers of all walks to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems that scale. I’m your host, Chris Davis. And today I have with me, Julian Julian gentlemen of measure school. And Julian learned the ropes of digital marketing and different startups, he co founded and quickly became fascinated with how the data driven world how data driven this world can be. And after launching his consultancy data analytics in 2013, he began helping other businesses adopt the data driven way to digital marketing. You all know how I feel about data. And we’ve got data driven in data. What was it, there’s two, there’s two ways you can be data driven or data informed. So we’re going to talk about the data driven approach. And in 2015, Julian launch measure school, it’s a YouTube channel, you may have seen him for those of you who aren’t watching the video, his voice may sound familiar if you’ve been in the analytic space. And even automation is really hard not to come by Julian. In fact, I found him through YouTube many years ago. And he teaches a new way of marketing to others with with over 150,000 subscribers. It’s become the leading source for many marketers to learn these data driven methods. Alright, today, I have Julian to talk to us all about how to collect data through out the entire customer journey. Julian, welcome to the podcast How you doing?

Julian Juenemann 2:23
Thank you very much for having me days. And Chris, Chris. And yeah, I’m doing great.

Chris Davis 2:30
Great, great. I have to tell you, as an engineer, engineer by trade, I love numbers. Okay. Um, and I’ll be honest with you, Julian, me and data have like a love hate relationship right now. I love it when it’s given to me. But it can be quite challenging, determining how to get the data from my marketing and sales presented to me in a way where I can start making decisions. Okay, so it becomes kind of like, what points should I measure? And then how do I get those measured points presented to me in a way that I can make those decisions? But I know you’ve, you’ve got a YouTube channel, and I know you’ve been digital marketing. Tell us a little bit about your journey. Up until that point, were you always in the analytics? Or were you live in another life and this life found you? Yeah, I started out, I guess. It’s different startups that are co founded and helped to build over the years. And that was always a digital marketer. I first learned SEO, how to get up on the on the search engines. And then I quickly entered the PPC game, AdWords was pretty big back then Facebook was up and coming. And there is where anybody who has done PPC, you actually spending money to not really get get people to your website, you first of all, try to gather data, and you actually pay for data. Google is a great machine to spend your money to know which customers actually react to your advertising and how you are able to buy the most the most most cheaply and efficiently how to get them to your website and then buy your product. And that is great data that we can use then, throughout our marketing throughout our business, and informs decision in the end. So when when doing PPC, I really saw the power of data because you are able to make decisions and really influence the marketing of your product of your website through data. And that’s when I first fell in love with it. And really got up and and looked into many different areas of Analytics. Google Analytics was back then out there and most of the time it was not installed

Julian Juenemann 5:00
correctly. So when I went out on my own, I really wanted to do analytics. But my clients mostly didn’t really have the data to make decisions. And that’s when I really dug into also the technical bits of Analytics. Google tag manager came along one of my favorite tools to actually build in tracking onto a website, and then track whatever you need in order to make decisions. And that’s what it’s all about. In the end, you want to get to that point where data actually does something for you, were you able to make a decision based on the data? And that’s when you get an ROI? Or value from your data as well? Yes, yes. So So you’ve navigated many, many modes, and you’ve you’ve worn many hats in the startups. And, you know, it sounds like analytics is what really stuck, right? That’s the one where you say, hey, look, there’s the difference maker. For me, Julian, as I didn’t, of course, start out in startups more and more corporate background for me. But when I started to learn entrepreneurship, I was intrigued by of course, the leverage, being able to make money from something ongoing without having to always work for it, that was kind of like a shock to my system, thinking that, Oh, the only way to make more money is to work more hours. You mean, I could work less hours, you know, with technology. And as I as I dove into it, and started to buy courses and everything, what piqued my interest was the back end, the back end systems, it was like, Okay, it’s not the website that’s making money, okay. It’s not the graphics, it’s not all of this, then you go on the backside, ah, oh, it’s the system and how you communicate ongoing your ability to to receive money. And that’s what grabbed me. Again, as an engineer, I need data. I need data to make decisions. I need data to just whether it’s anecdotal, or qualitative, quantitative, I need it all. I need all types of data. So when we talk about the the data, collecting data throughout the customer journey, let’s let’s take let’s build upon this thing, Julian, if you were to define the customer journey, what is the point that it starts? And what is the point that it stops, just so we understand under which confines we’ll be talking about these these data points? Yeah, when I think of data, and when I actually start measuring, when I get the first data points, it’s when your customer becomes aware of the solution that you have for them or the product that you have for them. Once that happens, we already can start measuring data throughout the journey, then, once they come to your website, obviously, once they buy your product, once they become a customer, up until that point where you try to retain them, and make sure that they stay a customer or resell them a product as well. So there’s a lot of data that you can gather throughout this this customer lifetime, and the journey that the user goes through and optimize that journey. So you can Okay. More profit? Yeah, got it. So we’ll we’ll go from awareness to retention. Yeah, that’s, that’s a journey we’ll talk about. And what I’m going to do is Julian, I’m going to give you the floor and I’ll jump in. But let me set the table.

Chris Davis 8:22
Our listeners, doesn’t matter if they’re digital marketers or entrepreneurs, I’ve seen both struggle with data. And the question becomes, okay, what do I start measuring? And and what does that tell me? So initially, for me, it’s like, well, you want to measure the traffic that’s coming to your site, and then the leads, right, that’s your first conversion. And then beyond that, it’s like, okay, then customers. It’s like, Whoa, there’s data points. Within there, you should look at as well. So I’m for you, if you were to walk a business through, Alright, we’ve got data. We’ve been doing stuff online, Julian, it’s working because we’re making money and you ask to see their dashboard. We don’t have we just kind of produce content and make money. How would you walk them through identifying those data collection points? Right. It’s an individual journey festival. So everything that I will say is probably more generalized. But when we start out, looking at awareness, that’s obviously on the marketing side. So knowing where your customers hang out, and then marketing to them, and really putting your marketing techniques on the scrutiny of saying, Okay, if I write something on somebody else’s blog, or if I do PPC advertising or SEO, how much

Julian Juenemann 9:44
do I actually put into this? How much do I get out of it? And there we have definitely ways to track some have become under scrutiny lately. But if we are looking at for example, PPC which is the easiest journey, we actually

Julian Juenemann 10:00
Get Data already from the advertising network, how many people have actually seen our advertising? How many people have clicked on our advertising from that we can calculate CTR. And then also the people who came to our website. Now, when they come to our websites, they come there for different purposes. Sometimes they’re just discovering your website. But oftentimes, they already making a buying decision. And if we have a classic ecommerce shop, then we want to know, what is their journey throughout the website. So did they go to a category page, which products that they click on which products that I put into the cart, and then go through the checkout. And then the most important part, and this is really

Julian Juenemann 10:43
the metric that everybody should track is the conversion, right? Whatever that means for you, conversion can be a purchase can be a lead, that fills out your form could be a sign up to your game that you’re maybe selling. And once you have that

Julian Juenemann 11:02
lead information, you can connect it back to the awareness stage. So you can actually say, which traffic, which traffic source that I have available here, and that I used in the last few weeks, has yielded the biggest impact in terms of conversions. Where did I get most of my conversions from? And this is classic optimization, then, as you say, I put my budget towards the traffic methods that work better, and maybe shifted away from those that haven’t given me the results. And this is really a really easy technique that people can follow. Just knowing where does the traffic come from? In our analytics world, we often talk about UTM there, and then measuring your conversions. If you have these two measurement points clearly set up, then you’re already further ahead than, let’s say 80%. Of, of many marketers out there.

Chris Davis 12:06
Yeah, yeah, this makes sense. And I’m gonna walk us through this point by point and I want to ask you something as we go through each one of them. And let you let you clarify. So I know you mentioned PPC is is the easiest to get started, because you’ve got

Chris Davis 12:20
the information, the advertising that you’ve placed in the platform, and they’ll let you know how many people they put it in front of and how many people have clicked on it. So if you’re testing messaging, if you’re testing angles, if your test, anything that you’re testing, you can at least get a pulse and say, Okay, this is resonating. Would you say, if you were on the more organic side, let’s say you’re posting on social media to a group posting on your page, or whatever the case may be,

Chris Davis 12:49
in that event, would you then use a shortened URL with UTM? To give you that same type of data? Well,

Julian Juenemann 12:58
obviously, the PPC side is very much more on the data side, because the platform’s want you to get more data in order to spend more money with them. Now, with organic forms, it’s a little bit harder, and there’s a time component to it as well. But there’s always something to measure there. So yes, you’re right, if you have a post, where you put in a link, a shortened link, for example, that you can track. So you actually know, when people click on it, how many people clicked on it, then that’s a great measure to know how effective your post was in the first instance there, right. And sometimes these platforms, even Facebook gives you data as well on your organic posts as well. How to, it’s obviously harder to do with something like SEO, we, we have a little bit of data on from from the Search Console, for example, on how often a search result is seen, but then actually optimizing that the levers are just much harder to pull, right? It’s not as easy as turning off and on money, like it is with PPC. But yeah, there are always techniques, and one of the biggest ones is if you don’t do anything else, is to tag your links with UTM. A shortened link could also already be enough. If you routed through something like Bitly then you know, and Bitly gives you that data how many people have clicked on that link? And how many people went through that link that that’s already great information? Yeah, yeah. And listeners is twofold. The shortened link will tell you link clicks. But Bitly users I use rebrand Lee any URL shortening software will also allow you to add UTM Well, you say well, why do I need UTM? Though Bitly or rebrand, Lee will track your links. The UTM will inform Google the type of content that they that they are engaging with, based on how you define it. Google is not going to define it you get to define UTM source UTM, medium UTM content, keyword all of those things.

Chris Davis 15:00
So if this is what is a UTM? Look at that later. But it’s a way to inform Google on where your your traffic is coming from. Yeah, because this becomes important to your second point, Julian, you talked about capture, it could be capturing a lead, it could be capturing information for a sales call a demo, somebody could be signing up for software. So that capture point gets dynamic, right? It’s really tough to have a general capture point. But at that point of capture, you have now gone from anatomised data to known data, right?

Julian Juenemann 15:40
Theoretically, yes, obviously, if you, if you have a conversion that you would track that is just a button click or just an action that this anonymous user took on your website, you wouldn’t be at that point yet. But it’s true. If you have something like an email opt in form, you go from data that this user is just another guy on your website, to somebody that you can actually identify and even have a conversation with, if you use automation tools, email marketing, and so on. Yeah, and the important part is this everybody, if I see,

Chris Davis 16:15
a lot of traffic is coming from Facebook, I don’t know who that is, I can look at trends for the most part, and see which platform has given me the most traffic, I can see it over time, things of that nature, trends are great. But if I want to look inside of those trends, and say, Who are the people coming from Facebook, this is where the UTM, or any form of lead attribution, comm lead source attribution comes into play. Because when you put a face to the name, or or I should say, when you put a name to the trend, or even more accurate when you put an email to the trend, all right, now I can start to nurture that lead. And all sources are not equal. So though, in this random example that I’m bringing up, Facebook may be sending a lot of traffic, when I start to identify those people in my CRM, because I’m capturing the source that they came from, because because I’m taking my URL, I can see Man, these Facebook leads, I’m getting a lot of them, but they’re not converting. Strangely enough, Twitter is sending me half the leads, but double the conversion rate. Right, it becomes a game now, where just at the capture point of a lead, we’re starting to be informed with the quality of the lead, right. And it’s actually also interesting in terms of what is going on in analytics, currently, everybody knows that. Not everybody is purchasing, maybe in the first session, maybe even not on the same device, maybe they got aware of you on their mobile device, opted into your email list, but they actually later purchase on a desktop device. Now, once you have that information in your CRM system, have that individual user and you know, okay, the first instance that they came through to my website was from Facebook, you’ll be able to much better track them later on. Because when they purchase maybe one week down the line, you will be able to know this lead came originally from that source at the beginning when when he signed up. And that is not always possible when you have a business, like for example, an ecommerce store where people don’t usually leave their lead information before they purchase, they just go there and buy right away or they leave the website. So having a CRM in place, or something that makes us actually identify themselves, give them your your email address can be immensely powerful in terms of the data that you’re gathering. Yeah, and one trick that I’ve done, everybody in my in my automation service provider program that has gone through it, and even those in the community. Know I love to hide fields, I will hide a fit. I don’t know if I have too many forms online that don’t have hidden fields. And it’s just a way for me to populate. Sometimes it’s a link within my website, I’ll tag the URL and capture it that way. If I’m on a if I’m doing a training with another person’s community, right, I’ll give them a URL that expands and tags because sometimes depending if you’re a service based business is big influx of leads all the time CPA dentists you know, anybody fitness trainer, maybe 100 leads a month is like wow, we did really good, right? But it wouldn’t be an realistic for you to be able to anecdotally look at some of your leads and the sources that they’re coming from and start to make decisions from that. You know, you don’t necessarily I’m treading lightly here. You don’t, you should have a dashboard.

Chris Davis 20:00
You don’t if you’re just getting started, and you have a you have a question that’s like, how did you hear about us? Right is usually how most people start with their source attribution, which isn’t always the truth, by the way, but it at least gets you in the game to start to understand, okay, these are the sources that are sending me traffic, the next step is to not rely on somebody to tell you, but to know from their behavior. And those are things that we’re talking about clicking link tagging, a URL tagging, and all of those things. Yeah, and I must agree, hidden form fields are the best kept secret.

Julian Juenemann 20:37
As as this the CRM, basically, databases, and you have, you can push information in there. And if you think of tracking, that is another informational field that you can fill with whatever information you want, we usually use it to connect. So there is an identifier inside of Google Analytics, for example, which is called the client ID, and we connect that to a hidden form field. So we will be able to later look up the customer who has bought from us or who has signed up in Google Analytics, and then you can see everything in terms of like, what they clicked on, and so on. So it can be really powerful in terms of connecting also these pieces together. And now, Julian, you blew me away, everybody, that was a true gasp, if you heard it, I had out of all of the data that I put in hidden fields, I hadn’t thought of the client ID from Google Analytics to tie the anonymous visit data to an actual individual. Now we’re talking about full customer journey here. I know what you did before I knew you.

Chris Davis 21:41
And now that I know you, I can see what what you’ve done. And you’re using Google Analytics throughout the customer journey. But but now you, you everybody listening, we’ve gone from them being on the website, doing something maybe even on platforms external to our website. And when they get on our website, we’re able to say, Hey, you came from here and look at what you’re doing. Then they give us information capture point, they give us information. And now they’re known, though Google is still looking at the pages, they visit buttons that they click, we now have this additional opportunity to gain insight from a CRM. So we can start to see email behavior, we can start to see if you’ve gotten a membership site, or if you’re sending events back to your CRM from your platform, we can start to see the events that they’re participating in. And now the data starts to be a little more juicy, right? Because I’m starting to really understand who my prime, hopefully, who my primary customer is. So Julian, I know I’m asking a lot. And it’s very hard to stay general, for some people to get understanding. And sometimes we need a tangible example. But if you would take something similar to like a business that has a online course that sells an online course. Alright, so you may have a lead magnet up front, that’s your capture. And after that, you want to nurture them to get them to enroll in your course. And that event, all everything that we’ve spoken about thus far still stands. Right, all good. But now I’ve got the client ID too, so I can see your your behavior. What am I doing now, Julian that I know you and I have this ability to reach you with messaging, and really understand more about you? What am I measuring? What am I looking for what indicators to help me get them to enroll?

Julian Juenemann 23:43
Right, I think from an analysis standpoint, for what I would probably do without going too specific here is probably that I would first look at the behavior of those that actually go through the funnel or make a purchase, in the end, what do these people have in common, and then we can help them along the journey with all the automation tools that we have available, by reminding them of certain things, helping them to make a decision. And that is possible by looking at first of all the data of people who have successfully converted, what do they have in common. And then later on, putting that into our journey, but also looking at our journey in or putting our journey under the microscope and making sure that we actually keep on measuring so we can optimize, right? So some stuff will work. Some stuff won’t work. And you might see that nobody clicks on that special email that you send out because of that report. And that is something you can obviously then adjust the power of data here is that it can help us to make decisions and see a way forward rather than just going in the dark and trying things out because we have heard maybe

Julian Juenemann 25:00
on the internet somewhere that this is the best practice we can really go out and, and customize our journey to our,

Julian Juenemann 25:08
to our customers to our journey to our online business.

Chris Davis 25:12
Yeah, and we’re talking about efficiency. So some of you are who don’t have the money to hire full time employees, or you even have to watch your budget for your freelancers. You can’t afford to just be doing stuff and hoping that it works. You’re putting money into your website, you’re putting money into your CRM, you’re putting money into your graphics, you’re putting money into your messaging, you’re putting money into your business overall. So you want to make sure that your efforts are yielding the biggest fruit right from them. And data is the key, how else do not rely on yourself to just feel like this is working or hope that it’s working? You need data to be that that truth teller, and sometimes it can be really humbling, you know, what data tells us about what we think we know to be true? You mentioned, we both have been talking about this journey. And you know, are they really reading that email? Are they really going through the checkout page, so maybe, maybe you don’t have a problem with your course, before you go make a whole new course and say, hey, people aren’t buying it? Well, they’re not even getting there. Right. They’re not even clicking the links in the email that are getting there. But in the event that they are, and people start enrolling, we’ve now introduced a second capture point, which most businesses I think overall have to capture points, you’ve got a lead capture point, and then a cost a lead conversion, and then and then a customer conversion. At that point, you still have all of the data from the marketing, as well as the source. So have you seen cases? Well, let me ask this first. Now that you have

Chris Davis 26:56
customers, and you want to tie back customer data to sources and behavior as well, which, which is more important, by the way, customer source is much more important than marketing source. Because these are the ones that are actually paying you money. And you want to see some consistency and say, hey, look, from a marketing side, we’re seeing a lot of leads that are converting coming from Twitter. And then they’re also the ones enrolling, right. That’s the ultimate would you say, Julie, the question that I’m trying to get to here? is would you say that the customer conversion is the ultimate teller of the power of the source?

Julian Juenemann 27:36
Yeah, absolutely. I think that when we look at somebody becoming a customer, then we, we usually divide between micro conversions, micro conversions. Now, micro conversions are these big, hairy goals that you have, when a user comes to your website. Why does your website exists? Well, it exists. So people can buy my product, and or my service. And if the customer reaches that goal, that is always good time to celebrate. There are also micro conversions, which lead up to the macro conversion. So it might be a lead, that is the user is maybe halfway there. But it’s not full there yet. And obviously, the micro conversion is the most important part, if we have that available, if you have enough data available, then we are able to really optimize our marketing based on these micro conversions. Now, some business models have different macro conversion. So maybe for a SaaS business, it’s not only the sign up to the monthly plan of $9, but actually then the retention of many years to come. And so the the source might only reveal itself after three or four years that it’s been the most consistent source for for the business. So you can always tie it down to the the actual conversion of the first payment. It all depends on the business model. Definitely. But I would say yes, once you have once you are able to get the macro conversion

Julian Juenemann 29:12
captured and and tied to the initial source, then you’re golden and can can do a lot with it. Yeah, and to keep us moving this is this is really good.

Chris Davis 29:26
By the way. He just got my mind is just spinning this with data does to me anyway. Um, so we’ve got the customer conversion, right. This is our macro conversion. This is the main one because we have indicators up into that point, Julian, right. We’ve got these leads coming from Facebook and Twitter, like I mentioned, those are indicators that those sources may be good for us. The behaviors that we’re observing. There are indicators but we don’t know until they become a customer once they become a question

Chris Davis 29:59
Customer, it validates that journey. It validates everything that we seen. And now it informs us with what we need to do or how to expect to go find more people like that, right. So this is, you know, your marketing and sales, alignment, sales funnels, all of those things. I don’t mean to gloss over it, this is an entire profession. Right? We just talked about digital marketing. And like one sentence, however, when they become the goal with data is to get is to pay attention to behaviors, look at trends, to get leads to become customers, right. But once they become customers, the game changes, because I’m no longer looking at your behavior as much as a lead. Now I’m looking at your behavior as the customer to turn you into another customer over and over and over again. So it’s this real iterative cycle. But I’m not saying I throw away that data of you as a lead. But my focus shifts when we go into the retention portion of the customer journey. I’m now concerned about what are you doing? And what can I observe? That shows me when to put the next offer in front of you? Or how to keep you paying for that initial offer that you got? Right?

Julian Juenemann 31:25
Correct? Yeah, I think that when you look at onboarding, for example, can be very important for a business that may helps you, for example, with a with a software tool, if you don’t get the user on boarded correctly, he might churn or leave your product after a while. And you can make that out in the data. How many people have actually,

Julian Juenemann 31:48
for example, created a new project in the last 15 days. And if you have a productivity software, for example, and that can give you an indication, and even a churn probability of somebody who didn’t do this, and you might be able, even with automation, then again, to reach out to that customer and encourage him to create that project. Because you know that this is one of the success factors, the success path for somebody using your product in the long term. So there’s a lot of data again, when a user becomes a customer, to retain him. And that’s something that is a science in itself. I mean, if you look at product analytics, or product retention, even even something as Facebook has become very good at keeping the user scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Right. So that has become also Facebook isn’t shy about this. This is a lot of data that they have crunched and found this out over a lot of experimentation. What makes the user actually keep them on the platform. And you kind of want to do the same with your product or service. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and I’ll tell you,

Chris Davis 33:04
keeping, keeping them

Chris Davis 33:08
keeping a customer is

Chris Davis 33:12
where I see a lot of businesses lose sight of they, they they they start to focus on new customers more and more and more new customers. But I’ll tell you,

Chris Davis 33:25
the data, that paying attention to your customer data is the most important data that you can look at, I promise you, everyone, once you get some customers in, and you see trends, and you can start to talk to them. By the way, don’t be scared to talk to your customers early on, on in business and continue to do so. But that data of a customer also is going to inform you on where to look for leads that would more than likely convert to customers. And what I see people do, Julian is they literally turn off the data. After they become a customer. They’re no longer watching. They’re no longer listening. They’re no longer tracking what that person is doing.

Chris Davis 34:12
To simplify this everyone, surveys are amazing. If this is just overwhelming to you, like you guys lost me at UTM. And everything else has just been over my head. Let me bring you back in surveys are immensely valuable. I cannot tell you the amount of startups and they range from construction industry all the way to thick, where time surveys throughout the onboarding in the initial customer experience can provide so much feedback. So much information. Julian I’m a huge fan of air table. So that feedback regardless of what form I’m using for it, I’ll make sure I dump it into air table because it’s easier, easier for me to manipulate the data than any CRM, you know. I like to manage

Chris Davis 35:00
Are my CRM in airtable? Just so I can look at the data quickly group things, see see what’s what, right. Um, but timing those surveys at the right time, it may some people have a 30 day onboarding, 14 day onboarding, seven day onboarding, that information delivered to you in a database where you can start to see oh, wow, this is why you joined. These are the features that you want to use most. Now, this is what they’re saying, Julian, I love to believe what people say. But I’ve just learned to better believe what they do. So I like to couple that with the data that I can actually track. So given me, you know, I’ve got a membership site, one of the proponents of a membership site, everybody, the user is logged in.

Chris Davis 35:44
You can see everything that they’re doing, along with the surveys and what they’re saying, right?

Julian Juenemann 35:51
Yeah. And I think I must agree, surveys, everybody thinks I was fun, we think about analytics, that is data in Google Analytics might seem a little bit overwhelming when you first log in. Here, you see mainly aggregated data. So every time somebody comes to a website, opens up a site, it sends over this tracking request to Google Analytics, it’s all aggregated into these reports, you can glean a lot of information, but you need to learn how to read this information as well. So that will take you some time. But if you want to make decisions fast, just have a customer conversation is number one, or the surveys, super easy Google Google Forms, you send out a survey, you get that also in the into a spreadsheet. And just from reading it, even if you have only a few responses, you will be able to make decisions on the snap really fast. And maybe one thing where ties into that that other data point, again into our our more quantitative data, when we ask these questions that have maybe a drop down. So for example, what are you are you do you see yourself as an entrepreneur, as a freelancer, as a business owner or agency owner, these are really great categories that you can put into place. And we call them also segments. So in Analytics, you can segment your data based on the answers that have been given. And this can even impact what target group you go after, at the awareness stage, right? So all the way back to when the user signs up to your, your email list, you might already ask them, hey, what do you see yourself. And that might inform how you market to them, you can personalize these requests as well. And later figure out again, when when the user is a customer ready, which groups are actually most

Julian Juenemann 37:47
likely to sign up to my product. And maybe you get on a phone call with somebody or this, all of these techniques that we have as our marketing, as in our marketing arsenal, we obviously

Julian Juenemann 38:01
could try them all out. And but we don’t have really the time or the resources to do them all correctly. So let data inform that what you should actually be doing and where you should be going next.

Julian Juenemann 38:16
Rather than just spray painting everything and trying to try and everything out, just to see if it yields results.

Chris Davis 38:25
Yeah, and what we’re doing here, everyone who who got overwhelmed with the Techie Talk, is we’re telling you that you can still collect data, old school, talk to somebody, talk to your customers, that’s still a form of data collection. And if you want to start with tech surveys, forms, I’m now I’m a stickler for asking for the right question, Julian i It is my pet peeve is when I see a form, and they’re asking repetitive questions, or they’re asking for information that I know they’re not going to use. It’s just like, this has nothing to do, the amount of kids that I have has nothing to do with branding. Like, I want it for this, this business over here has nothing to do with kids. Why are you asking me how many kids I have, but a lot of people do that. Because they just start thinking, Oh, I can collect all of his information and they get out of control. You still need to be strategic in the questions that you ask. So for my non techie folks, think about what information would help you better serve the customers that you have right now? Do you know what part of your platform they like the most? Listen, I survey, I survey my community members quarterly and say, hey, look, this is what we’re producing. What would you not miss if we stopped? And they’ll tell me like, hey, I really wouldn’t miss this part. So why would I keep producing it? Put my effort into the things that they’re like, you know, if I left this community, or I’m not leaving this community for these reasons, well, I’m definitely going to put energy into those reasons, right. But this is not

Chris Davis 40:00
Julian that’s not techie. That’s just strategy.

Chris Davis 40:04
Right? And making sure that you’re you’re talking to your customers. And the biggest pieces that you’re always collecting data, one more thing I want to say is, when somebody leaves your company, your product, your course, whatever the case is, it is also a great opportunity to ask them, what did we miss? What what was missing in this experience, that that could have made you stay. And if you want to, you can even incentivize them with like a $5, Starbucks gift card, that data, somebody’s way out. That data that you can capture is invaluable? Because it especially if you look at their customer record and realize, man, you’ve been with me for like six months, you’ve been, you’re really valuable what what happened? And it’s just blind spots? Man, we don’t, Julian, we’re not smart enough in that kind of data, helps us identify the blind spots. Before we go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about measure school. All right, what is it and who is it for? Right? So measure school is our central YouTube channel, but also a website, where we run a program in the back end called measure masters. Now measure Masters is already for professional marketers who want to learn the data driven way of digital marketing. So if you are, for example, in an agency, or if you’re looking to start your freelance career, there are great ways to level up your what you’re doing already, and just be a little bit more data informed, or data driven even. And for that, you need to know how to capture data, how to work with data and analyze it and uncover the hidden insights in the data really. And then later on, communicate that to your clients, your superiors, your stakeholders, so they can actually take action on it. Because oftentimes, we are not the only ones who can actually act on that data. But they are really great people that can have a bigger impact than ourselves. So we need to get really great at communicating data as well. And that’s what we teach within our measure master’s program. Yeah, and I love it. You all know, I’m on the techie side of things. I found Julian before he had an official measure masters, he had a video on a script to do lead scoring and Active Campaign. And it was it was easy. So what I’m telling you is the way that he teaches and breaks down these analytics, I hope that this podcast reflected that accurately, but very patient, and very clear, and breaking these very technical things down for your business. So it’s great for digital marketers to have a resource dedicated to data collection, data decision making, you know, all of that. So we’ll make sure that we link to that in the bio as well. Julian, I, I can’t thank you enough for coming on to the podcast. My hope, my hope for every business owner is that you would not only control and capture your data, but you will start looking at it and never stop

Chris Davis 43:25
looking at it and collecting to make decisions. If there’s anything that you all walk away from. Just like you look in the mirror every day, every day, Julian, I’ve seen people rush out the house and they didn’t look in the mirror. Well guess what they’re looking at. They’re looking at reflections in windows and everything multiple times throughout the day. Your data is the mirror of your business. Look at it every day. Please look at it every day. It’ll make your life easier. Any parting words for our listeners from you from you, Julian?

Julian Juenemann 44:01
Oh, it was a pleasure being on thank you for the invitation. Yes, I would just say, just second that as well. I mean, data might seem overwhelming sometimes and messy. But once you learn the basics can be so powerful can transform your business. And that’s why I would encourage everybody to start at least a little bit of that data journey.

Julian Juenemann 44:24
The right way, I would say but yeah, take it easy at the beginning and capture the data, even if it’s just a survey that was already great data that can make you see the world differently. And that is the power of data. And that’s why I got into it so long ago, and I hope that makes a difference in your business life as well. Yeah, digital marketers, you have a resource, measure school measure school.com You have a resource to go and learn this data driven approach. CEOs and entrepreneurs who tech is just goes over your head

Chris Davis 45:00
You now have a resource to send to your digital marketer.

Chris Davis 45:03
Okay? And it’s the same, just like I admonished you all to say, Hey, I’m techie, I’m a digital marketer. And I want to go deeper in automation. What we didn’t discuss, but I mentioned now is data in automation go hand in hand, I’m just the other side of the coin, we build the systems to deliver the data,

Chris Davis 45:27
which you still need to know what to do with the data. So you see Julia and I as brothers in arms on this battlefield, this marketing Battlefield, trying to conquer all of the roadblocks and hindrances that are before you all, when it comes to business growth. So hopefully, um, depending on where you’re at, in your journey, you you know, you’ve got two programs on the table here, you can go deeper in the automation side, you can go deeper in the analytic side, guess what, at the end of the day, you’re going to need both.

Chris Davis 45:59
You’re going to need both. So Julian again, man, thank you so much for jumping on to the podcast. I really appreciate it. Everyone, all the links will be in the show notes for you to connect with Julian at measure school. YouTube, what’s the best what’s the best URL for someone to go to if they want to find out about your your your academy as well as YouTube is a measure school comm Yes, correct. Okay. Measure school.com. Everybody, Julian, thank you so much, man. Thank you, Chris. All right. Great. I’ll see you online buddy. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends