My First DR! · GoHighLevel w/ Robb Bailey

My First DR!

Hello All!

I wanted to take a moment and write out the story of my first DR. This was a client that I had worked with in the past. They are a private company, but the work they do is all centered around gov contracts, so there are a few adherences to policies I had to watch out for. The particular task I was hired for in this case, was for a conference that was occurring 3 weeks from the time of hire. Initially, the ask was for whatever marketing method I wanted to get butts in seats at that conference. I need to get 100 people in attendance. This conference is geared towards a specific type of business owner such as minority, women-owned, SDVOB, etc. At first, I was going to take my usual approach, but after thinking more about it this was a perfect chance to use Robb's DR method.

In the discovery call, I pitched the client on the idea and did it without mentioning GHL. However, this client is particularly up to speed on marketing strategies in general and asked if my approach was "some type of white-label GHL service". Without hesitating, I said "Yes, however, GHL is just the platform, we use our proven methodology in conjunction with your database contacts to bring you the same results that have been brought to over 500 other businesses the same way." She said, "Thats great. we use another CRM today and I was looking to move to GHL long term". Immediately, I let her know I can assist with that move. Some other things to note here is that this clients also needed a home for a LMS. I pitched using GHL to do that as well.

So with only 3 weeks to get this done and one weekend I had to perform an ash ceremony for my father who passed in July, I knew I would be in a time crunch. I wanted to skip A2P and just use Toll Free. I knew also after viewing every single snapshot Robb has, there really isn't one fit for using a link to register people. The client was using Brushfire (event management platform) and they have a link I had to get people to register with. Additionally, if the particular interested business fit the mold of minority owned, women owned, or SDVOB I needed to try to nudge them to register with her. They would be able to pay less for their registration if they did so there was an easy incentive. Yet also, if they weren't interested in this conference in this area then I needed to ask if they were interested in upcoming events in 5 other cities and if so tag them for later use.

The client has multiple list.

Registered businesses with her that HAVE opt-ed in. [though I have no proof of this].
Known businesses that fit the target, but have never spoken with her before.

The difficulty becomes that I need to get these unknowns to opt-in, before hitting them with the SMS. So I setup a page on her WordPress site that was nothing but a GHL Form. I had that form trigger to a single automation that requested an SMS opt-in as well. This provided me the "Double Opt-in" mechanism that is considered the most secure from a legal perspective that I could find. After double-opt-in or even if they don't respond to that SMS they are added into the main thread.

I then began to work on importing the list using a different label for the ones that were opt-in and the ones that weren't.

I decided to use the Home Services Snapshot and bend it to what I needed. I basically had it go like this...

MAIN AUTOMATION

Initial Offer to learn more about a conference to develop their business

If Yes, then send details that included the sign-up link.

If No, inquire about other cities.

If Yes to other cities, let them know about registering with this business to get lower cost to register for event.

If No end.

If no response, wait 30m and ask if they received the previous text.

If any response, then send details anyway.

If no response, email them the details.

OPT-IN AUTOMATION

Email that says something along the lines of "Are you a X business" (minority, women-owned, etc) and the body of the message essentially just stated that in our database we had you listed as X. If that is true, please take 1 min to click the link and make sure your info is correct. That link took them to the form page I built which triggered the double-opt-in SMS chain and eventually into the main auto. If they ignored that first e-mail it would wait a day in between and send a 2nd, and 3rd that basically just had the details of the conference in the e-mail since cold e-mail is fine for B2B.

The client had approx 750 that had opted-in already. 425 that needed to be opted-in.

Given the nature of the situation I didn't have time to warm up the e-mail or anything else. I had to just go-go-go.

So I had tested the system thoroughly and all was well. I dropped my first 20 contacts into both.

What I find out is that the Toll Free ALSO has to be registered. Even though everywhere I read said that it didn't and you could use it to bypass A2P. So now I'm in a real bad situation. Client is expecting it to run, and I can't run it. I immediately kick off A2P registration. Literally praying that it goes through quickly. 72 hours later it does. I use EIN to do A2P and have not had an issue with this yet. Usually 72 hour turn around.

Thankfully Client was calm during this period and I was able to explain the issue. Once A2P came back we were rolling again. While A2P was pending I went ahead and did 200 of the ones that weren't opted-in. This lead to about 40% open rate on first e-mail, 75% for 2nd and 90%+ for 3rd. Still only about 20 opt-in's though.

Now that A2P was back I was confident I would get better results with the list that she has. However, I had to go out of town and couldn't kick it off until I got back. After driving 10 hours back home, I walk in the house and immediately am freezing even though its not cold. Turns out I got COVID....oh man. So I was out of commission hard for 1 day. The next day I was functional enough and knew we had limited time to get this done so I kicked off 100 contacts for the ones who were opted-in. The messages came rolling in. Not a single opt-out that day and a LARGE majority were all reply'ing "YES" to get more details about the conference. While this doesn't mean they were buying, this was a good sign at least.

I then kick off the other 225 emails and in less than an hour it flags the domain due to bounce rates and errors. After working with support a few items were identified that would have helped:

Support showed me on the "Settings -> Business Profile" at the bottom there are two check boxes. One is for email bounce removal and the other for SMS. Those are VERY important and they were both unchecked.
I found an issue in the automation that the logic was reversed. I said if it bounced send the next one anyways...

After correcting these and disabling the automation for email all together I opened a ticket for support to unlock the domain. I wasn't going to use it anymore due to risk to clients actual email domain, but wanted it for future events.

Then over the next two days I did two more batches of SMS only. One had 140. The other had 500. Don't do this. It was a bad idea. After getting a handful of opt-outs the system sent a warning email for potential to shutdown SMS usage due to bad numbers and opt-out %. It wanted less than 1% and I was at 1.2%.

So now all that is left is SMS. We then run 735 numbers through the system. I end up with 150 starred messages (ones that responded positively). 10 Opt Outs. 20 Opt Ins.

I spent the vast majority of this time praying lol.

The following day I spoke with the client and I was expecting to hit around 50 sales and discuss how this could have worked so much better if we had more time etc yadda-yadda.

Turns out the client was overwhelmed from the messages coming in and was able to extend the size from 100 -> 175 and over 20% of the sales in general were Sponsor booths! She was also running a billboard and radio ad campaign and Brushfire sucks at analytics tracking so she just lumped it all together as a major success. She was over the moon happy and immediately said she wants me to work on the LMS. I likely will be involved in the next 5 locations as well!

Thank you Robb and team!

Quick Numbers:

Deposit: $5,000

Customer Lists total: 1,175

Total Responses: 150

Sales: ???

Clients Happy: 1

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