Marketing Automation In Capital Raising - Your MOFU Secret Weapon

What happens after an investor opts in, but before they actually invest?

In this episode of Behind the Raise, Martin is joined by VirtualAd’s CRM and Automation Manager, Randy Jones, to break down the middle of funnel and why marketing automation is one of the most overlooked pieces of a successful capital raise.

They discuss what MOFU actually means, how issuers can use automation to educate, nurture, and re-engage investors, and why founders need to think about the investor journey from the prospect’s point of view. Randy shares how email sequences, behavioral triggers, CRM systems, SMS, webinars, and investor follow-up flows can help move people from curiosity to confidence without rushing the sale.

From choosing the right automation platform to avoiding overcomplicated funnels, improving deliverability, building investor referral sequences, and creating educational email courses, this episode gives issuers a practical look at how to turn middle-of-funnel attention into stronger investor relationships and more informed investment decisions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Behind the Rays, the place where issuers go to find all the cutting-edge secrets of how to run an efficient direct-to-investor capital raise, the place where we share our key learning from across the funnel to help you get started quicker and understand how to run these funnels efficiently. So today we have a very exciting episode and guest, which is Virtuals Ads very own Randy Jones. And we are going to be talking about marketing automation in capital raising, your Mofu secret weapon. And the reason that we're talking about this today is that most raises will, if you've done a good job of framing your capital raise, your investor offer, getting your ads up and running, you're going to be seeing a lot of traffic and interest generated. And what will often happen afterwards is you're going to generate a lot of leads and you're going to get a big chunk of them kind of stuck in the middle. And you're going to be wondering, what is going on with them? And what do I do with them? And that's really one of the areas that Randy specializes in. Really, his work is across both the top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. But we always find that we get a lot of questions on what's happening in the middle of funnel here. Before we get started, Randy, I want to just throw it over to you to do also, you know, an intro of yourself, your exact role at Virtual Ad, what you do here.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

That's awesome. Thank you so much, Martin. I appreciate that awesome intro. Um, so yes, as you mentioned, my name is Randy Jones, and I am the CRM and automation manager here at Virtual Ad. And I have a bit of an interesting story in that I actually started at Virtual Ad as one of your contractors. So, Martin, if you remember, you hired me on Upwork, I think it might have been like four years ago, maybe even five. So we were working in that capacity as a freelancer. I guess thankfully I did good work. So, and as your team was expanding, you thought of me, reached out and uh we had the conversation and I was like, would would love to be a part of it and expand my skills and help you guys continue to grow virtual ad as a company in and of itself. So I started copywriting actually 10 years ago, just as a hobby, just writing in my journal, writing emails, and got pretty good at it just organically. So I was doing that on the side, and then COVID happened. And then so unfortunately, I ended up being I was working in sales at the time, and I was a what I call COVID casualty, who was laid off uh from that job. And then, well, with the weight, the state of the world as it was at that time, said to myself, Well, I need to do something. So, friend of mine who owns a string of barber shops out in Quebec, obviously, the barber industry got completely decimated by the pandemic there. He's a pretty sharp entrepreneur, and he decided to pivot to e-com. So he's decided to sell all his products online. And he reached out to me and said, Randy, this is what I'm doing, but I need to write product descriptions, I need to write website copy, I need to write email copy, email sequences, set up the automations, all that stuff. Are you down? And at the time, I was like, Well, I'm not doing much else right now, so so yes, I am down. So that was my very first official freelance client, and that was in April of 2020, and just kind of scaled it from there until I joined the virtual ad team in, I believe, August of 2023. And having been working with you guys for two years prior to that. And then here we are. So, you know, my role is CRM automation plus messaging on the on the copy side. So it's pretty about I pretty much wear both hats, but they both feed into each other in a nice organic fashion, is what I would say.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

I love that intro. And it was so great to start working with you full-time in that way as well. And I even remember when we were originally looking for copywriters, you know, it was a pretty specific type of asking category. It was in real estate, you know, going through upwork, it was like, yes, this guy speaks English as a first language, and he is based out of uh the GTA area. You kind of knew the general topics that we were talking about and writing about. And then just through you know, having worked with you, uh, you naturally fit into that CRM automation role and been able to grow with us since then. And one thing I will say is that, Randy, you are a very prolific learner and you pick things up so quickly. So it's been awesome to see that throughout the different evolutions that we've had. And I think also recently, just how quickly the space is moving in terms of just like general tech evolutions and uh technologies that are coming out, like almost monthly nowadays. Yeah, you've been extremely adaptable, both in terms of I think writing copy technique and then in terms of the different strategies and ideas on how to engage users throughout the funnel. So been awesome to be working with you over these years in that regard. Let's get into things and share some gems with the audience here. So let's start out right from the top. And you know, a lot of our audience and founders are people that are experts in their various fields, but they're not necessarily like core marketing experts. So why don't we even start off with the basics? Like, what is mofu when we talk about it? It's not a swear word. So, how would you describe what we'd call mofu in, you know, our marketing language?

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Love it. Start with the basics. So mofu is just stands for middle of the funnel, and it's the middle chunk that takes place after a lead opts in, but before they actually convert. And it actually tends to be one of the most important parts of a funnel in general, but simultaneously also one of the most neglected parts of the funnel. Because obviously, on the top end, a lot of companies in general, not just in the capital race space, but they do focus on the ad spend. So they're always tracking ad dollars, conversion, things like that. But then when it comes after that, it's kind of left to their own their own devices. The biggest analogy I share with people in terms of how to properly think about Mofu is using actually the an example from the dating world. When you meet somebody, that's the top of the funnel, right? You meet them on, you know, a local ball game, local dive bar, what have you, match.com, whatever your thing is, and then you meet that person, right? But the bottom of the funnel is marriage, but the middle part is actually really important. That's the the courtship phase, essentially. And that's the part where both parties are essentially to a certain extent selling themselves on why they would make a great mate, you know. So, like I shower, I brush my teeth, I'm gainfully employed, my finances in in reasonable shape, you know what I mean? All these different types I'm I'm a trustworthy person, I'm nice, I'm warm, I get along with your family, I get along with your cat, your dog, all these different types of things. That's all the stuff that happens in that middle part of the relationship. So flipping them over to the marketing side, the middle part of the relationship is the part that's actually really important because you're not, you haven't gotten to the conversion stage yet. You haven't sold them on your process, you're still educating them. Um, so at that point, that's when you tell them what problem you're solving, what industry you're in, your origin story, your genesis story, if you will, how your company came to be, why you decided to go forward with this capital raise in the first place. All these different types of things that people are going to need to know and understand in order to make an informed decision. Because especially in the space that we're dealing with, again, capital raise, you're effectively asking people for money. So it's really important that you first take that initiative very seriously. It's not a light thing, but you also have to make sure you're doing your part to make sure that person feels as comfortable, as safe and understands exactly where their capital is going to be deployed, how it's going to be deployed, and what exactly it's going to be used for. So that's just a kind of an overview of what the how to think about the middle of the funnel stage.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Yeah, it's a good point. I really like that analogy because you um it's a balance. So, you know, the top of funnel is you can get people through the door, but you don't want to be like too eager. You kind of can't ask for the sale too early because people would be like, whoa, I just met you. And uh at the same time, you kind of need to get to the point eventually. It's a little bit about like taking a step by step. You don't necessarily need to get to the finish line right away. And you want to be able to build the curiosity, the interest over time. And yeah, definitely don't want to like skip to the end right away. So that's a good analogy, which um I think is important from an issuer perspective or just like a founder perspective, because we are always like so focused on getting the funds in that it can be easy to just look at like, let's just, you know, ask for the money right away. But um, one is like people generally will take some consideration to go through this, and you need to be able to walk them through the steps in a way that that guides them, doesn't rush them along. So I like that analogy. Uh, so that works. And uh I'll try to stay away from any making any inappropriate bottom of funnel jokes. You and me both. We'll keep it PG. We'll save that for the after hours show. Exactly. You know, speaking of marketing automation, this actually might even be a little presumptuous because some founders might not even know what we mean when we talk about marketing automation, and uh, it can be a bit of a broad encompassing term. So even just looking at what what in your books does marketing automation consist of?

SPEAKER_02 9:08

Yeah, so it actually is a quite a broad spectrum of things that it does encompass. So the first thing if it does encompass is obviously the email. Your email sends and the messaging you're putting in those emails to send the people and your segmentation. Um, the second thing it encompasses is the CRM aspect. And this is probably more for capital raisers who have or capital issuers who have sales teams. There's a pipeline aspect of it that would usually mimic a company's sales process that you move each prospect through. So that's another part of it. The other part of it is reporting. How are our messages doing? How are our emails doing? How are our SMS messages doing? You need to have a good understanding about the data points in order to fully make better decisions moving forward. So if we see that a group of people, for whatever reason are not responding to a certain email in one of our sequences, if they're not opening it, well, that's usually a subject line issue. If they're not clicking it, that may be a call to action or a body copy issue. So the data points help us diagnose different things that are taking place within our funnel in order for us to make good decisions or more profitable decisions, if you will, going forward. Another thing that's not really spoken about when we're speaking about funnels is the behavioral component. So that really it's kind of encompasses how do our prospects behave to the messages that we send them and what happens based on those different types of behaviors. So obviously, the easiest one to think about is opens versus non-opens. If people are opening a certain email, okay, great, what do we do with those people? If there's an entire different group of people who are not opening those emails, A, what do we do with those people as well? But B, why are they not opening it? Right. So what behaviors are people taking that we can kind of match and almost anticipate in to a certain degree as well? Because what I really feel is that there is a in the automation messaging side in this world, the entire middle-of-the-funnel world, there's a big behavioral psych component to it as well, which I don't think people are aware of or or think about, right? And what I mean by that is what is the headspace and psychology of the people who are coming into the funnel? Where are they at in their personal journeys? What do they want to know? Why did they opt in in the first place? How does this opportunity benefit them in their current state of where they are in their lives? Are they a high net worth individual that's looking to increase their portfolio? Are they looking for different opportunities? Are they looking to expand their portfolio? Or on the complete flip side, are they a relatively new investor who, you know, they may have had some financial challenges in the past, but they've made a decision. I'm gonna get my act together. And now they're they've you know they've paid down their debts and now they're looking for different investment opportunities to get started with, right? Again, the high net worth person and the new investor, those are two different psychographics that we're speaking to. So we have to make sure that we are communicating with those two people in a manner that resonates with each of them, which two those two things are gonna resonate. Those two uh people are gonna have different things that resonate with them just based off of where they are in their in their current lives.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Yeah, definitely. There's a couple of interesting points in there. And so when we think of uh marketing automation, what is really like the engine of that? Where does that come from and what what drives it?

SPEAKER_02 12:18

So the engine I would say is essentially whatever platform you're using. That's the engine. That's what does all the heavy lifting. So that could be clavial, that could be go high level, that could be HubSpot, that could be Active Campaign, that could be RAIS, Beehive, whatever, right? And I think the choice point between what CRM engine should I use really depends on the size of your offering, the size of your company, and how much features and functionality do you need in order to successfully move prospects from top of funnel, middle funnel, and down to the bottom of the funnel stage, right? So every company is gonna have different needs. Some may have more of a sales team that that's gonna be incorporated into that middle of the funnel piece. So their engine would be something like HubSpot, active campaign, or even go high level because it does have those features and functionalities from a sales aspect standpoint. Others, such as Clavio, that's more on the e-comm side. Um, so that's gonna be specific to that world. Things like Beehive, that's more on the for companies that are more pure media publishers, that's gonna have different functionality for people in that world. So, really and truly, I think it comes down to having the issuer fully understand and have a detailed understanding of what it is we're trying to accomplish and what system can help us get us there in the cleanest, fastest, and least convoluted fashion uh as possible, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Yeah, exactly. Like you don't need too many bells and whistles. It's actually, I think, about sometimes ease of implementation, ease of use, and understanding what you fully need. Like sometimes there's that temptation, people look at like Salesforce as this best in class, you know, tool, but it really to me is something that's like a large enterprise tool. And if you're more in that like SMB space and even just managing like a basic sales pipeline, you really don't need like Salesforce. You actually just need the bare bones. And ideally, you know, we do a lot of the reporting, but you can have a lot of like in-platform reporting as well. So it's like functionality, ease of use is really important when you're in that beginning of stage versus like complexity.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

Correct. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Because oftentimes people will pick platforms based off of hearsay versus based off of their own individual needs. If you have a team, Claviel might not be the best thing for you, right? Because again, that's the but but on the flip side, if you don't have a team and your investment opportunity is, for example, a regulation CF, so a crowdfunding, right? Where there's there's no outside people involved. Well, then I'll actually might be a good option for you in that case. It is a pretty pretty robust system. So I think it's a matter of having really clear insights into what you want, what you need, and how it will be used and deployed um throughout the course of your own capital raise.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Totally. Going back to something that you were you're talking about a little bit earlier on the um the trigger side of things, I thought this would be interesting because basically marketing automation really only activates based on a specific action or a trigger. And it's also like stage-based as well. So the next step isn't initiated until something's completed. And I thought it'd be interesting to kind of help issuers understand like what triggers a marketing automation and you know how that works. So, what are the various types of triggers that can activate a specific automation?

SPEAKER_02 15:45

Yeah, uh, great question. So I've obviously the most basic trigger is someone entering a funnel or filling out a form. So they follow the form and they get hit with XYZ automation or XYZ email. It doesn't always have to be email, it can be other touch points as well. But you know, for ease of conversation, we'll just kind of go with email. So that's one behavior-based triggers. We can also do that. So if someone opens an email, we can trigger something else. If someone clicks on a certain email, we can do something else. If your system that you're using has the dynamic capabilities, we can show uh CTA links to a certain segment of the audience versus a non-segment. Now, for example, what would that be used for and why would that be important? So if you have a system where you're sending um an email to all investors, but there are some of them who are newer than others, right? So you look at your data points and you say, okay, we have a we have 50 investors for EasyMath. 10 of them invested yesterday, the other 40 invested last month. So for the people we want to all we because they're all investors, we want to send them the same email. However, for the 10 people that invested yesterday, maybe we want to give them something extra. Maybe we want to give them some behind the scenes information. Maybe you want to we want to send them a special founder's message that comes directly from the founder. Maybe we want to offer them a phone call direct with the founder so the founder can thank them for their investment directly, right? So we don't want to show that to everybody. We only want to show that to a small segment. You can use a dynamic condition block in your email. So that messaging will only be showed to those 10 people because they are at a different stage of their journey than the other, the other 40. So that's one. Um, other things are just even just regular behaviors. So if you do have a team, we can trigger it by phone calls. Was a phone call completed? That can trigger one thing. Did the person not pick up? That can trigger another thing. Did the call go to voicemail? That can trigger something else, right? WhatsApp, we can trigger it by WhatsApp in some systems that they have the WhatsApp integration. So I know Go High Level does have that. So if someone responds to a WhatsApp message, we can send them an entire flow strictly based off of their the WhatsApp conversation. Um, we can send entire flows if someone responds to a text message or an SMS message. We can do it if someone goes to a certain website, right? So, for example, a lot of issuers will have investment landing pages. So if someone goes to a certain page or clicks on a certain button on a certain page, we can trigger an automation to start in that sense. So, what I always like to tell people is that behavioral triggers and just automations in general are really dependent on your creativity. Because whatever you can think of, there's a good chance that there is a platform that can manage it. Again, not all platforms, unfortunately, are created equal, but there's a good chance that if what you're thinking about is fairly reasonable and not super, super crazy, like we want to send, you know, uh drones to your door or something. But we're not we're not there yet. But I don't doubt it's probably coming. We'll find a way, we'll find a way. Exactly. You know, um, most platforms can find a way to whatever it is you need to be triggered on, but that will be strictly dependent on the platform capabilities itself to the creativity you have in building out your automations. Okay, what do I think would make sense? And just a good understanding of how the people in your space behave because people investing in ag tech may behave differently than people investing in real estate, who may behave differently than people investing in military equipment, who may behave differently than people investing in the food industry, right? So we have to take a few different things into consideration as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Yeah, it's amazing to like hear you walk through what the different possibilities are. And how do you sometimes manage the temptation to go like a little crazy on the automation? Because you can, like, if you really get into it, you can make all of these, you know, crazy different like sub-routes. And I think that uh everybody that's you know worked in that field or worked on a customer funnel at one point has like been like, oh man, like let's go really deep here. There's that point of like diminishing returns, I would say, and it can be based a little bit on volume or even just complexity to like finally get somebody through a full automation or funnel. So, how do you balance that temptation to get really, really creative or really kind of you know go all out versus the practicality of the outcome? And where do you like kind of draw the line for yourself or for issuer outcomes? That's a really great question.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

So, for me, I would say it's more on a case-by-case basis. So I'm a fan of iteration and I'm also a fan of simplicity. So, what I mean by that is a start simple. So start with your basics, start with your welcome, pending on your investment platform. You can start with an abandoned, abandoned checkout. You have your thank you, you've got your nurturing, you've got your newsletter, the basics, get those up and running. From there, what I do is look at what's happening in the account, what are prospects doing within the account? And those behaviors will usually dictate how we build out future automations, future branches, expansions, reductions, so on and so forth. So, really and truly, if an offering is fairly simple and the simplicity is working, those basic flows that I mentioned earlier, if those are working, I'm really a big fan of if it's not broken, don't fix it. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, each capital issuer, their goal is to meet their raise goals. Their goals are not to become professional email marketers or CRM managers, right? So, whatever we can do that gets them to that goal is what works. If it's email, if it's SMS, heck, if it's even carrier pigeon, we can we reincorporate that in, right? So I think a lot of people in the industry kind of gravitate to complexity just because. But I always say use leverage complexity as it's needed for the specific situation or client that you are dealing with. So, for example, a team with capital raise that does not have a sales team, their automations and their pipeline is going to look significantly different than a capital issuer who has an eight person sales team, right? The issuer that has a bigger team, their automations and their funnels are going to look by default slightly more complex than the one that is on the more simple side that doesn't have that sales team. On the flip side, perhaps the company or the issuer that does not have a sales team, maybe they have a fairly complex offering that does require a lot more education, a lot more information, a lot different styles and types of touch points. Because we often think of automations and we gravitate to email, which is right, but there is also SMS. There is also video. There is also ringless voicemail. There's also webinars. There's also live streams on social, right? So if you're doing a live stream, you can create an email campaign that directs everybody back to that live stream. So it's really dependent on a case by case. So it really, again, dependent on case by case and the goal of the issuer and having a good understanding of the prospects that are coming into the pipeline and the ones that currently live there as it stands.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

And so, kind of uh, you know, following that thread a little bit, what would you say are some maybe some big misunderstandings that founders can have about marketing automation in a capital raise?

SPEAKER_02 23:01

Okay, first one I would say not thinking about the offering from the point of view of the investor versus them. So obviously, all founders are uber passionate about their business. If not, they wouldn't be in business. So they all are naturally biased to thinking their business, their opportunity is the greatest thing since slice spread, which is fine. And you should think that. If you don't think that, you probably shouldn't be embarking on this journey. However, your audience doesn't necessarily think that. There's a gap between them even knowing you exist and then getting to the point of, oh, this is actually a great opportunity. I do want to make an investment, right? So again, the biggest mistake I see is issuers not looking at things from that standpoint. So that would look like, okay, what do they need to know in order to make a decision? What are the questions they may have that I need to answer ahead of time in order for them to feel confident and comfortable making an investment? What do they need to see from me? Whether it's an investment deck, whether it's founder background stories, whether it's financials, maybe it's a combination of all three. What do they need to see in order to understand that this is a legitimate opportunity? Because I think, especially in the online world that we're in right now, the other piece that capital issuers miss is understanding the architecture in which that capital raise is taking place online. And what I mean by that is that oftentimes you're gonna be running ads, and that could be on meta, Google, TikTok, insert platform here, right? But a lot of those channels essentially act as interruption pieces. So no one goes on Facebook thinking I'm gonna find the next big investment when I when I doom scroll for the next, you know, 45 minutes. That's probably not what they're thinking, right? So that's the environment, that's the architecture in which our offer is first being placed. What do I have to do in order to make sure that the person seeing that offer understands it, intrigued by it, and wants to learn more about it? So there's obviously an entire like targeting piece as well, but I think there's a big misunderstanding into the psychology of potential investors that's missing because the natural feeling is or the natural inclination, if you will, is to here's what I think of my offering. It's great. This is the minimum investment amount, this is our target raise, invest today. That's great for you because you know all the details because it's your company. Someone seeing it for the first time doesn't have that context and they need that context in order to make that decision.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Sometimes, like, easy to assume a level of knowledge on the part of the audience. They might already know a certain bit about real estate, or maybe there's uh sometimes a miss on the issuer part, or even generally when crafting the offer, sometimes to fill in the gaps for what uh investors are looking for because they really are starting from usually like a ground zero place. So it's about yeah, providing a bit more background information, not skipping directly into the offer, like yeah, building that curiosity at the beginning is important. We were talking about this with Danielle when she was on, which was kind of moving slowly step by step. And I think you also mentioned it as well when you were going through your analysis there, which is in the ad, you ultimately like you don't need to sell them on the investment in the ad right away. You want to be able to get them to the landing page or to book the call, to have the interest to start the conversation. But they're not necessarily like booking a call to place the investment with you on that call. They're ultimately calling to get more information or learn more about the opportunity. So you want to give enough information that they're calling to have an informed discussion. You need to give them enough information so the discussion's informed, but it's not one where they're just like, hey, this looks really interesting, but I know nothing about you. That's also not helpful, but you can book a lot of calls that way because you can have a really interesting hook, but it's not the most productive for the sales team. So there's definitely a balance there that you need to strike. And like to your point around that temptation sometimes to go straight to the offer, you can skip that for a little bit. So I think that's a good point. Looking at some, you know, automation, yeah, like mistakes, I guess. What would you say is sometimes the let's say you're looking at uh either uh some pre-existing automation, somebody's come in and asked to take a look at what I have going on right now, or even just generally when you're starting to strategize with clients on the automation side, what are some of like the biggest mistakes that you're encouraging issuers to avoid as you're going through that process?

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Yes. So the first one is going to be counterintuitive, but it is ignoring active investors. And I say that because what I often see is that there's heavy influence on the top of the funnel with the ads. Then there is an understanding that emails are necessary. So let's just let's just send them some stuff, right? Until they invest, because we're trying to get the conversion and then they invest, and that's it. They get a thank you email, that's it, or a quarterly update. The challenge there is again, thinking back to the framework. They saw an ad on the internet, the messaging was compelling enough. That ad allowed them to click over to the landing page. The messaging on the landing page was compelling enough that it allowed them to opt in. And either at that point, the landing page made them decide that I have enough context, this is a good idea, I'm gonna invest, or on the flip side, they're said, okay, I need more information, so I'm gonna opt in to get more information and learn more about this. So then we send them all the things that happen in that little the funnel phase. They convert, send them a thank you, and that's it. One of the biggest things, I think, in just in business in general, is the concept that it's easier to source a new customer or client from your existing database or from existing customers and clients than it is to find net new customers and clients. So, in the same fashion, it's easier to farm investors from an already established bucket of investors than it is to convert net new investors to your opportunity, right? So if someone already invests, that means they already get it. They already get it, they already think it's a good idea and they're confident enough to place their money into the opportunity, right? It's a signal of trust, right? Since they've already taken all those steps, they too can now tell others about what they have just done because they have context. They can go tell all their friends because usually investors, especially the high net worth ones, usually don't live in a bubble. They're usually around other high net worth investors, entrepreneurs, business people, so on and so forth. So if investor A invests in company A and thinks it's a great opportunity, there's a good chance that investor A can go and tell his friends, investor B, C, D, E, F, that this is a great opportunity, you guys should should check it out. So I think one of the biggest mistakes that people miss miss out on is investor sequences. Investor sequences to essentially spur, intentionally spur referrals, because oftentimes we think of referrals as things that just kind of happen by happenstance. Oh, someone had a good experience in my company and they told their their two best friends, and one of them came to me, and then that was great. But what if there was a way to intentionally generate and create referrals from a group, a segment of individuals who have already overcome those trust barriers, knowledge barriers, understanding barriers. They've already done that. They've already invested, they've crossed that finish line. I think it'd be it's highly valuable to farm those people for other people like them. Kind of similar to how meta uses look alike, right? They take the profile of one target audience and find other people who have similar properties to those initial group. It's the same idea. We're taking our investor group, investor segment, and looking for other people who have similar qualities. And there's a good chance that they already have that in their organic circle of people they interact with on a daily basis. That's the biggest one I would, that's the biggest miss I see that could be corrected. Other ones, just to kind of quickly run through, is not paying attention to email deliverability. If your email goes to spam, unfortunately, there's not a button that we push that lets it go into the primary inbox. That's a problem. So that's something that should be taken care of before the raise even starts, ideally, or in early as early in the process as possible so as not to adversely affect the middle of the campaign once the ad team is kind of figured out what messaging works, so on and so forth. The third thing that that is also like exit conditions. So what happens if a person invests? Do they still need to go through all these sequences, or do we need to transition them to something else? Or do we just leave them alone? Those decisions are going to be really on a case-by-case basis. What we do, depending on your offering and pending and how those people have interacted with our previous messaging that we've sent them so far to date up until that point of time.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

It's a good point around the post-investment process because it's really one of the main advantages of raising capital this way is that you eventually are able to build your own list. A lot of issuers forget about that community building opportunity because one, there's a whole reinvestment potential down the line of those people just re-investing their own capital. But like you said, they can bring others in. So that's definitely a whole area of opportunity for a lot of issuers. You also see it sometimes when people will invest and then watch the webinar afterwards. And it sort of shows that there's probably a little bit of like, I always feel like there's a when people buy something, there's that like buyer's remorse or like the buyer's confirmation. So they're like, okay, I do the right thing. I gotta let me watch this webinar and like learn more about what I got into. So I think that that's a good point, is that the nurturing of that community is a is a big opportunity for issuers. Yeah. And then is there like an automation that you think a founder could set up this week that would have immediate impact? Or is there a uh, you know, something if you were met a founder at a bar that was looking to raise catmal and they asked you, hey Randy, what can I do uh on the automation side this week to get things going, aside from obviously working with virtual ad, what would you point them towards?

SPEAKER_02 32:52

I would first ask two questions. Uh, first question would be Do you currently have anyone in your pipeline as it stands? If you do have people in your pipeline, I would recommend um a re-engagement sequence. But I would start with so there's a marker, his name is Dean Jackson, and he's also Canadian. I'm not sure if you knew that. He's from Georgetown. He has this thing called the nine-word email, which is essentially like to re-engage cold prospects. And all it is is just subject line, high name. Are you still interested in blank? That's the entire email. And what that does, it allows people to self-select and it allows you as the issuer to gauge behaviors. So anybody who first of all opens an email, that's a start, right? They're paying attention. If someone responds, actually, I am still interested investing in military technology, for example. Great, perfect. Now we that's a behavioral trigger. So we can use that to our earlier point in the conversation. That can be a behavioral trigger we can use, and we can funnel those people who respond to said email into a more uh fleshed out sequence. So that's what I would start with. So that's the first question. If the second question would be if you don't have that and you're starting net new, I would recommend an educational email course, also known as a welcome sequence. But I framed it that way intentionally. Here's why an educational email course is hyper effective from a capital race standpoint because of the simple infrastructure, like I mentioned, that capital races are situated in. Coming from Facebook, they're coming into the funnel, they need to know more. The educational email course is your opportunity to do that. It's your opportunity to tell them about the problem your company is solving, why you started your company, the investment details, where the funds are going to be used, how you're gonna mitigate risk and be transparent in any risk that do exist. Side note, it is important to tell people about the risk and your capital raise. Don't just say you're guaranteed to increase your investment. Tell people about the risk. Trust is a big is a big deal and it works, right? It's just not good morally, it's really good marketing strategy. Trust is really important. The educational email sequence does all that. And as that being the first entry point into your funnel, it gives people everything they need to know right off the hop. So I was speaking to Mina, our data analyst, and she gave me an interesting stat. And she said that for the capital raises without sales teams, and when the investment ticket is between $500 and $1,000, the investment actually takes place in 24 to 36 hours. When the investment ratio is more high ticket, the that process can be as long as two months. That's that really tells me a few things. One, people with the who have the lower amounts, the $500 to $1,000 to invest, they look at these things as opportunities to expand their portfolio or get started. So there's a probably a good chance they're a fairly new investor and they're like, okay, I can spend this thousand dollars on sneakers, or I can invest it in my future into someone that's hope potentially gonna pay me back somewhere down the road. So they choose the latter in that in that situation. Great. But for someone who's coming in and saying, Okay, well, I have $250,000 that I want to place, there's a bit more needs to be done there, right? So the educational emails email sequence may not capture those people, but it will move them a hell of a lot further down the line so they'll be more confident as to how and why they can deploy their quarter million with your opportunities specifically. The people on the smaller range, the educational email sequence gives them everything they need to know and reconfirms that yes, this is a better play for your thousand dollars than those sneakers. Here's why. Here's everything that'd be covered. So now it's your to what you mentioned earlier. Now they can feel even confident about their investment. Because I actually wouldn't even recommend turning that sequence off if they invest after email one or two. Or if the sequence happens to go three, four, five emails, I would actually recommend running them through the whole thing just so they're still getting touch points post-investment to avoid the purchase remorse, right? Did I make a good decision? Damn, I didn't want those sneakers though. Right? Like we do, we still have to combat that, right? Because there's also a a chance of for refunds. People may get cold feet and say, you know what? I actually do want the sneakers, give me it back. We'll we'll think about this down the road, right? So it just helps to combat a few of those things.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Absolutely. Those are some good examples. I like the framing of the the email mini course. And yeah, I think the difference between those two timelines as well is pretty significant. So when we have the lower ticket, it's a quicker turnaround, could be seen as a maybe like an impulse trip purchase or somebody that's like making quicker decision making, but that window of communication is much smaller. And whereas, yeah, 250k decision making process is like, you know, it's very delicate. You're managing uh degree of consideration and so many different steps on the sales side, but the automations need to be like fairly tight in order to execute that. So we are just coming up to the the top of the hour here. So I wanted to move uh quickly into some rapid fire questions for you before we wrap things up and have uh a couple here to ask you, which is uh, Randy, what is one tool you just can't live without currently in uh in what you're doing?

SPEAKER_02 38:11

This may not apply so much to the automation side. It's more on the messaging side since I do both. So I would say it's Perplexity Pro. That because it allows me to quickly research and validate data points and facts in a much cleaner way than you know having 12 tabs open with a bunch of different Googles, uh Google searches on them. Um, so Perplexity Pro has been low-key, probably the most invaluable tool in my stack in the last three months, I would say. Because I've I used to use the regular version, but I was like, I'll make the investment. And it's been it's I don't regret it at all. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

I gotta get into the perplexity game. I've been hearing good things. You have a hot take for the audience to get the marketing community up in arms. Ah, yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:54

So the email marketing community can get their pitchforks out. Open rates are overrated. Here's why I'm coming with that. And maybe not everybody in the community will get their pitchforks out because I feel like seasoned email marketers share that exact same sentiment. So here's why I say that they're slightly irrelevant. They're probably a poor choice of words, they're not irrelevant, but they're overhyped. Here's why someone can open an email to delete it and to unsubscribe. Right. Our platforms cannot measure, at least that I know of. If you know someone in the comments, let me know if that's if that's not true. But to date, our our platforms cannot differentiate between someone who opens the email to delete and someone who opens it to read, right? Yeah, the system just counts them as opens regardless. So the the details, the behavioral insights may be slightly skewed in that regard, right? So if your open rate is 50%, does that necessarily mean that half of your audience is loves your emails, or actually 40% of them love your emails, 10% can't stand you and open it to get rid of it? Second thing, with all the new technologies that have come into the marketplace, such as AI and Apple's privacy, don't want the exact term, but there was a privacy privacy policy that they that they rolled out, which essentially scans emails for you. Most CRM platforms interpret those scans as opens. Same thing with uh AI that reads emails, it incorporates it interprets those as opens as well. So a lot of times our open rates are not a hundred percent accurate. There are certain nuances that exist with whatever number that you're seeing. Now, am I saying that, okay, well, ignore open rates, whether it's 10% or 50%, it doesn't matter. Not true. You actually don't want a 10% open rate, but you do want a high open rate because that means people are engaging, are opening your emails. Pay attention to the subject line because that's what impacts that. But looking at it as a stat all on its own, there are nuances behind it. So just be mindful of that aspect.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

Those are some good points there. Coming up to the end of the episode here. So uh wanted to thank you, Randy, for your insights and just kind of recapping some of the major points that we covered here, which were one mofu, middle of funnel automations. Uh so for those of you that are new, it's not a swear word, it stands for middle of funnel. You know, when it comes to the the marketing automation side, picking your engine is important to stay focused on what are your key outcomes that you're looking for. You don't need to overcomplicate it. Similarly, when it comes to the actual automation side, there's a ton of different options, but it's good to keep it simple so that you don't necessarily overcomplicate things and you know keep focused on your main outcomes there. When it comes to the biggest automation mistakes, Randy, you you talked about having losing focus on actually closing your investors and like fostering that community, which uh can be a temptation for everyone. And then I really liked what you touched on there with that mini email course and basically educational courses, how you're framing it for the automation that founders can start up right away to help educate people and walk them through the process in a way that they're they're learning about the opportunity. So some really great insights today, Randy. Thank you for hopping on, uh, sharing your insights, and we'll definitely have you back for another episode. Awesome. Thank you, brother. I appreciate this. This was a great time, a great conversation.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Appreciate you, Matt.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

Thank you so much, Randy. We'll we'll talk to you soon. See ya.