00:11
Kristen Amendola:
Welcome to a limited series of real, raw, unedited marketing content. All in ten minutes or less. This is Mini Moves.

00:20
Rachel Reed:
Kyle, you're looking a little tired today.

00:21
Kyle Mollison:
What's up, dude? I want to talk about it. I woke up at three in the morning thinking about Joey Manasala again.

00:25
Rachel Reed:
Well, you're talking about yeah.

00:28
Kyle Mollison:
You know who Joey Manasala is though, right?

00:30
Rachel Reed:
Is this a new client that I don't know about?

00:32
Kyle Mollison:
How have I not told you about Joey Manasala? It's like my hyper fixation recently.

00:37
Rachel Reed:
I don't know anything about Joey Manasala, but I'm not sure if I want to know.

00:41
Kyle Mollison:
He's a world record holder. He has the most unread emails in any inbox in the world.

00:48
Rachel Reed:
Oh my gosh.

00:50
Kyle Mollison:
4,294,967,256 and probably counting.

00:57
Rachel Reed:
That's so many emails. He's probably never opened an email in his life.

01:01
Kyle Mollison:
I know, it's unfathomably large like that number and Joey is just seared into my brain.

01:08
Rachel Reed:
You're having nightmares about Joey?

01:10
Kyle Mollison:
Absolutely. Because as a digital marketer, how do we market to him when he's got an endless void of an inbox?

01:19
Rachel Reed:
I'll have to check to see if Joey Manasal is on any of our lists.

01:22
Kyle Mollison:
God willing, he's not.

01:24
Rachel Reed:
It's crazy to think about though, because I've heard, and even myself, I don't open a lot of my emails. I have over 900 unread emails in my personal inbox.

01:33
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah, I don't know how you do that. That's beyond stressful to me.

01:35
Rachel Reed:
It's promotions, it's things that I don't really care about, so I just don't open them. But what I do open, unless it's from you, are my text messages.

01:47
Kyle Mollison:
I was going to say I saw that one coming. Yeah. Now that you talk about it, the average response time is nearly 60 times faster for SMS than email. If you even get a response from email.

01:59
Rachel Reed:
True. Yeah. Makes me think about that campaign, that text message campaign that we ran for one of our higher education clients. Do you remember that?

02:08
Kyle Mollison:
How could I forget? This is a moment of sheer brilliance from you and I.

02:12
Rachel Reed:
We created forms on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok that collected cell numbers. And we knew that when people were filling out these forms, they were going to be on their phones, they were going to be looking at Instagram, TikTok. And so, like, we thought about how do we reach these people with text message even after they fill out these forms?

02:35
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah, and I think what made it really successful was the messaging. Again, the best thing about SMS is right person, right time, right message. Because we knew immediately after filling out that form, they were going to go back to Doom. Scrolling, scrolling through TikTok, trying to find out if Livy Dunn rizzed baby gronk or what? The hottest influencer is up to these like you're just back doom scrolling for minutes, hours on end, and doom scrolling.

03:08
Rachel Reed:
When I doom scroll. And I'm sure when a lot of other people doom scroll, you're not really feeling that good about yourself. You're seeing all these things that you're like, wow, these people are super successful. Look at me, I'm on my couch in my pajamas, eating Cheetos, rolling through my phone. And I think that's where we kind of thought of the messaging.

03:24
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah. I think it was you who came up with the message and it was absolutely brilliant.

03:30
Rachel Reed:
Yeah. And it said, stop doom scrolling and invest in yourself with a degree from this higher education client.

03:39
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah. I vividly remember telling the client about this after the fact, after we launched it because the results were absolutely insane. I vividly remember we ran a test with this SMS campaign versus an email autoresponse after filling out that form and the response rate on the SMS was nearly 420 times higher.

04:03
Rachel Reed:
Yeah. And some people probably didn't even open the email message. Where as the text message? They're seeing it, they're on their phones, they're not going to let that notification go on red.

04:13
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah, exactly. And that reminds me of the other text campaign that you and I ran for that same higher ed client at graduation.

04:19
Rachel Reed:
Yeah. We knew that these people were going to be at graduation and we knew the time frame that they were going to be sitting there on their phones.

04:27
Kyle Mollison:
Ignoring the commencement speaker, not paying attention.

04:30
Rachel Reed:
Taking pictures with their friends, and really thinking about this is the end of this chapter of my life, what comes next?

04:36
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah, again, I vividly remember at my commencement, like on my phone, googling, which side of the mortar board does the tassel go on? Doing everything except really paying attention to commencement, but being on my phone.

04:51
Rachel Reed:
Yeah, I was texting my parents to figure out where they were in the stand so I could wave to them. So, yeah, I was on my phone too and thinking about this. We crafted this message that had said thinking about the fact that they probably didn't want to leave college, it was the best four years of my life, so I didn't want to leave. And telling them, this doesn't have to be the end.

05:12
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah. This doesn't have to be a goodbye moment.

05:16
Rachel Reed:
Yeah. And pushing them to apply for their graduate education at the same school. And it's crazy the results that we generated from this campaign because we were sending the right message to the right people at the right time.

05:30
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah. Again, I remember this was another moment that was great in the recap meeting because we were able to tell that client, hey, within this two hour window around commencement, we generated eleven applications for the MBA program.

05:44
Rachel Reed:
Yeah.

05:45
Kyle Mollison:
Which is ridiculous, but it really speaks to the power of right message, right people, right time.

05:53
Rachel Reed:
And it's cool to think about the fact that they were actually sitting there at their graduation and applying for their graduate degree. You could almost see them responding to the campaign.

06:04
Kyle Mollison:
It's awesome. And it really makes me think that yeah, gold standard for the longest time for lead generation and data that you want to collect for your clients is email. Email is king. Emails is gold standard. And yes, it still really is important. That's an important piece of data that we need to collect, but really we need to be collecting cell number a lot more as well, just so we can really lean into that hyper contextual, hyper timely messaging.

06:34
Rachel Reed:
Yeah, for sure. So I think the biggest takeaway from these campaigns is that when thinking about how to reach your audience in new ways, it's doing that hyper contextual messaging in the right time with the clear call to action to convert these people, we know they're going to be there and we know the action that they're taking. So they're ready to convert.

07:00
Kyle Mollison:
Yeah. For me, at the end of the day, we don't want to be yeeting emails into the black hole that is Joey Manasala's inbox to be Lost Forever and never read when we could just shoot someone a text.

07:12
Rachel Reed:
I'm still not responding to your texts, Kyle.

07:16
Kyle Mollison:
Fair enough.