Turning Your Existing Customers into Fans with Matt Barnett

This week’s episode is with the amazing Matt Barnett, the founder of Bonjoro. As a frequent user of Bonjoro, I wanted to take the chance to showcase how you can use them within your business. With a focus on loving your existing customers, this is a great episode for those that are looking to make the most of the clients and customers they already have. This is often something we ALL forget to do so I know this episode is going to be valuable to absolutely everyone.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Technology can allow us to do some incredible things, creating an endless list of opportunities for those that have online businesses.
• Your business shouldn’t be faceless, even if you’re a team of 100 people you need to ensure there is a ‘friendly’ face to your business - even if it’s just a meet the team page.
• If you’re using Bonjoro, it should be a second touchpoint with your potential customers as you want it to encourage them to take the NEXT step in your funnel. You want to use it to surprise people and show them that you care.
• To get your customers to superfan status you need to nurture your relationships with each and everyone of them.
• If you’re going to give ‘swag’ away to your customers, you need to ensure you’re staying away from the traditional. It needs to come from the heart and make someone open it and say wow.
• If you’re looking to make strong connections with people you need to make gestures that impress them, however you need to consider the ROI.
• Don’t get blind sighted by growth hacks and shortcuts, you need to find stuff that works for you. Yes, there will be stuff that is mundane and repetitive but if you do it every day, it works! There is no quick win.
• Don’t outsource the stuff that matters. You need to automate processes but never your relationships.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

Having a personal connection with your customers is the key to building a personal brand.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Introducing Matt – 04:00
• What is Bonjoro? – 11:15
• Turning people into customers – 17:09
• Creating ‘superfans’ for your business - 27:30
• Real life Bonjoro examples - 33:40
• Are bold gestures key? - 44:10

Transcript below

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. So couple of things to kick straight off with. Firstly I'm not doing this in my office, so I apologise if the sound quality is a little bit differently. And secondly I'm sure you can hear from my voice that I have got a bit of a cough and a cold. And obviously when you do those stuff that I do, i.e., pretty much everything I do is speaking, that is a bit of a problem. And it particularly is a problem because tomorrow I am ... Well I'm currently sat in Harrogate which is why I'm in a hotel room, in the UK. And I'm at a conference tomorrow with Professor Philip Kotler, who basically, if you did a degree in marketing, you'll know exactly who he is, because that's the book we learn from.

That's the kind of ... Oh I don't know how to describe it but basically he's like the main person that you learn marketing from. So to be on the same stage as him is phenomenal. And obviously, it's a little bit frustrating that I've been run down with a cough and a cold and it hasn't quite gone. So this is probably going to be the shortest intro that you've ever had. Now, this week's episode, thank god, is an interview or otherwise I would be in trouble. So this week I am interviewing Matt Barnett who is the founder of Bonjoro. Now this interview was fab for two- three good reasons actually. There's many more, but three main ones.

Firstly, I love Bonjoro and I use it in my business, and obviously we're going to explain to you what Bonjoro is. And personally I think I could find a way for it to work for pretty much every business out there and a way for you to stand out from your competitors and help not only convert more customers, but then love the customers you've got. So I'm going to be talking about how I use it, he talks about how other people use it. And I am going to put a link in the show notes, which as you'll know is teresaheathwareing.com/92 as in the nine and two. And I'm going to put my affiliate link, it is an affiliate link in there. So by all means if you don't want to click on that, no worries. Just Google Bonjoro, you'll find them.

But it's a great, great platform. I do love it. And you know full well that I don't often have affiliate stuff. I don't promote loads of different systems. I only promote stuff that I absolutely love working with. So that was the first reason that he was great. The second reason he was great is because he loves talking about how to love your customers and how you can go that extra mile for them and some of the cool stuff you can do to really build that relationship with them. Which, if you follow me you'll know that that is a fairly big part of what I like to talk about. Because that's the thing that people forget. They're so desperate to suddenly bring on a customer that once they've got then they don't really love them. So as you know and I'll talk about it in this interview, anybody's who's in the academy gets the world from me because I think they're wonderful.

And then the third reason was because on our brief discussion before we then started the interview, I found out that even though he's in New Zealand currently, lives there. He actually went to school, seriously about 10 minutes from where I grew up and lived my entire life. So how funny is that? But he's such a nice guy. I think you're going to really enjoy this interview. Lots of good tips and things for loving those customers. And yeah, I'm just going to leave you to it because I've got to rest my voice. So I hope you enjoy it.

Introducing Matt

Here it is. Okay. I am really excited to introduce the very lovely Matt Barnett to the podcast. Matt, how are you doing?

Great. Thanks, Teresa. Wonderful to be here.

Oh, I am really excited to have you here. In fact, we've just been chatting before we went live, talking about the fact that even though Matt is now in ... Are you in Sydney or you've moved out of Sydney did you say?

Sydney, but kind of on the outskirts. So yeah...

Okay. So even though it's early morning for him, evening for me, he actually went to school in the town that I grew up in, which is crazy, crazy small world. So we've just been having a really good chat about that. Kind of got a bit distracted about the podcast, but anyway let's crack on and do the podcast. So Matt in case my audience don't know who you are, they might not know who you are because I think the product is the name that they will know, do you want to explain to my audience who you are and how you got to do what you're doing right now?

Yeah, sure. So my name's Matt. I moved to Australia from the UK maybe kind of 10 years ago chasing surf as you do when you kind of in your 20s. Found tech, started building tech products. So we run a company called Bonjoro, which you may or may not have heard of. I'm actually an artist and a product designer by trade. So how on earth I ended up building a tech company, I'm not sure. I can't remember why but here we are.

Crazy.

The whole reason it started is because we used to run an agency. And moving to Australia we still had clients in the UK and the US. And we used to get these clients coming in. And we were quite frightened if they ever met us. We've got a lot of kind of charisma. We were a little bit brat-ish I would say. So as these leads were coming in, we used to send them videos. We used to send them comedy videos. So we'd get these leads coming from Ogilvy and these giant agencies. We used to get the ferry to work, so I'd be on the ferry, go past the opera house having a chat on a video. Like wind on my hair probably couldn't understand me.[Jamie 00:05:54] having a bit of a good time with the coffee peep. And we send these videos to these pretty serious leads.

Brilliant.

And they loved it. And it was a creative industry. And what we were after was going into your own pitch, this agency that we had.

Yeah.

And then we know what you guys do still, but come in and see us when you're next in London, when you're next in the States. And it was kind of a bit of an eye opener and we were like, "Well this is interesting." You have the videos where you get a personality across which is a big part of our brand, which is how we get it and then it kind of sale. And then one of his clients one day was like, "Hey, there's this video email thing, can I they use this?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure. It looks like a dog's dinner, doesn't really work that well but go for it."

And then a few of their customers came through them to us and they were like, "Oh, could we also use this?" And we're like, "Hang on, hang on. This isn't really a product." And then you know against all kinds of, I guess advice in the world, me and my CTO were having a beer and I was like, "You know we have to build this?" And he goes, "I knew you were going to say that." I'm already building one company. He's like we really shouldn't start another one. I was like, "I know we shouldn't, but we also should."

Yeah. So Bonjoro was born and was there a transition period? Where you went, actually this is... Is there still the agency or did the agency just get shelved? And how did that work?

Yeah so we run both of them. Bonjoro starts to grow faster. I actually did the agency, we kind of looked at him, I said, look, well, well Joe has got much, much higher growth rates. It's now over. Can't taken it. Maybe like a year ago. I mean Bonjoro is only like two and a half years old. So it over took it pretty quickly.

Yeah.

Grew pretty, pretty rapidly. And you see that and you go, well you have to kind of follow the kind of business is going faster. But then the agency, which we had to go buy off then had it's best than a year in doubled. I'm like, "what the hell?" And so we're in this weird place where we have these two businesses and we're like, "right, I guess we need to run both." And, and there's challenges there because they both have different funnels that they both live in culturally and they have different business models. So really, really need to get to a stage where we can split them out and so like, well the one we're moving to London like full time and we're looking for someone to kind of help come aboard and lead that because I think as a leader you really need to kind of put all your focus on one business at a time.

Yeah. It's hard to try and especially when there are two very different businesses, and two very different audiences. Granted they're not a million miles away from each other. It's not like you're selling, you know, I don't know dogs and shoes or something, but they are- they're two very different structurally like you said, how you manage them, who are in that business, how you market them. So yeah, I totally get that. So, so it was his Bonjoro your thing that you, you want to focus on or as you know, is that kind of where your baby is that you want to grow and get bigger and bigger?

Yeah. So again Bonjoro is exciting because, so here's the crops. It's not a video business. It's basically a relationship business. So really what we discovered was by chance but I guess we were kind of already doing it and that many businesses I'm sure do every day. So it's, if you invest time in customers at some points on the journey, that's usually appreciated. And I think in a world where we have so many online businesses and online interactions, that's been diminished. It used to be a lot. We used to, we used to have the grocer and, he's known you all day to get the butcher kind of stuff and then you've kind of dropped off over time in pursuit of scale and bringing that humanity back to that, so it's the customer journey. Turns out people like that because we're social animals, we enjoy interactions.

I think, you know most of my interactions get more lonely. So what Bonjoro is doing is just say, "hey look, yeah, at some points in the customer journey, you need to get personal. Here's some tools that help you do it, you know, go and be you." And that works really well. But if you take that ethos and you run with it, then you go, well it's much more than just like what the company is now is much more than just videos. The question is where else on a customer journey does it make sense for you to invest time, and where it makes sense to go and use the automation, which you know, is still very, very useful. That's a pretty big goal, and a big shift in how people do business. And that's I think, pretty exciting.

Yeah, and I think you're right. I think there's a few things you've, you've talked about there that I want to touch on were first off, we're in a world where Tech is sometimes seen as pulling us further away from each other because of the fact that you're not walking into your local shop who knows your name and you're buying something and he goes, "oh I got this thing cause I know you like this," and that sort of thing. However, in some ways the fact that you're in Sydney and I'm in Shropshire and we're having a conversation face to face, it's crazy. It's, you know, it's a world that you look at and think, "oh my actual goodness, that is phenomenal isn't it?" So that I love and like I said, I think the more the online stuff happens, the more opportunities there are, but also the more people want it. They want that personal touch, they want that kind of way in which you can break through that online stuff and actually see a human at the end of it and to actually see the person who you're interacting with.

What is Bonjoro?

Do you see that- I want to talk about obviously the point is are building those relationships online, but yeah. Do you see especially in the agency sector still lots of agencies who are so faceless? Like even to the point I was looking at an agency not that long ago- even to the point where they don't have some pictures of who they are or a list of staff and it's like, why would anybody, in my mind, why would anybody want to deal with you if I literally have no idea who you are?

That's faceless. Yeah. So the other day, we're talking about they're building more lead magnets and stuff for us. And I was like, "why don't we just do a plug and play about us page?" Because so many people don't have a good 'about us' page. I'm like, "it's very simple. You just put some images up. It puts a video of your teams be like, you look at that and go, oh that's Brian. That's Jim."

Yeah.

Like re-humanise it. It's almost like the piece of the website that gets left to the end, but I'm like, it's probably the first thing you should do because your people are going to be the majority of your brand. Especially, when you're starting up, like a brand isn't a logo, a brand is an ethos. It's values, you know those imagery and stuff that comes on. But that's, you know, like I had to design it, like that's actually only the 10% of the brand.

Yeah.

And the brand is everything below the surface. They need to get that up. And that's how you differentiate yourself, you know, because anyone could have a nice logo. Now a dribble exists like I'm working-

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And you're right. And the other thing is with this online world we're in now, to make yourself look a certain way is so easy. So again, and I'm sure you've seen it, but I've seen agency websites where there's literally only one person. And it's like "we, we, we, we, we," but there's no substance behind it, you know? And it's like, I think because it's so easy for people to put this front on, having the honesty and the reality and the actual physical 'look, no, this is me.' It's just brilliant. I think that's such a great way of doing it. So just in case people don't really know what we're talking about, let's just quickly tell people what Bonjoro is and what it physically does. So can you explain what the app is?

Okay. Yeah, sure. So, essentially it's a piece- generally we, we plug on to lead software tools, CRMs, customer sources. So things like MailChimp, Patreon, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, you name it, it's basically a layer that's assessed on top of that. And what happens is when customers perform a certain action, so at the very simplest, this could be you get a new lead that comes into your form, or a new customer turns into a paying customer, we actually find that customer with a bunch of information into this platform called Bonjoro.

And we send you a notification. We say, look, Jenny just signed up from San Diego. She works at, you know, Dog Socks "R" Us. Yeah. You know, why don't you send her a video right now and just say welcome on board. By the way, she also hasn't done this step in your funnel. She hasn't filled out this form. So why don't you ask her to go fill out the form as well. And then what happens is that notification, you open it on desktop, or on your phone, you record a message for journey at Dog Socks "R" Us. You talk about a bit about San Diego, and then you send that message off, and you get back to work. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute.

It does all the move for you. We package it up, it's all branded. It has what we call to actions. It has a link for her to go in and do that one thing you want her to do. That's get off, gets delivered to her inbox. She gets a little moving image in there. She clicks, opens it up, see's this video of you. She can respond and talk to you and start a conversation there. So that's it in a nutshell, it's a little bit more complex behind the scenes.

I could imagine.

But yeah, essentially that's it.

Yeah.

And it works.

And that's the thing, right? That is the best thing of all. It's almost so simple from our points of view anyway, which is what you want from a user experience point of view. You don't want us to be sat there thinking, "God, this is long and enduring and difficult." So I was using it with Infusionsoft, and I was using it every time someone bought something. Which is interesting 'cause there are different ways aren't there? So obviously you gave an example of a funnel when the leads came on, and I used it on a sales, and it can be used for both, which is brilliant, but I used it when someone boards, and I just sent them a really quick video. And like you said, it was easy, pinged on my phone. And actually it was quite exciting because every time that went off it's like, 'hey, someones just bought something."

And then you're like, genuinely, I'm very excitable anyway, but you know, record yourself at this really short, really easy, really quick video. But like you said, you know something about them and then you could say, Oh, this is great, this is going to be really good. Make sure you go check out this thing or make sure you do this thing or you know, please come back and tell me if you need anything. And the responses. And that- I remember when my very good friend, BizPaul from Market Live and you guys, yeah, and you guys sponsor Market Live, and I remember the first time he introduced me to Bonjoro and he sent me one and I was like, this is phenomenal. And he said to me that his open rate and his click rates, were massive compared to at standard email. And it's like, why wouldn't it be because of the fact that I've sent you a video, I've said your name. And it couldn't be more authentic if it tried could it.

So for me, I think, like I said, there's a couple of ways of using it.