Vince De Benedetto, Dream big, start small.

MO You have your finger on the pulse of the small business owner and entrepreneur. What gaps are you seeing in their online strategies?

VD I'm actually quite surprised at the lack of follow-up. A lot of people don't realize how follow-up across all channels can really get people to join your calls. If someone's signing up for a discovery session, if somebody hasn’t paid, if you want to make sure they're there, Ontraport gives you the ability to track those reminders. Have they opened? Have they clicked? Have they seen it? You can catch those possible no-shows a lot sooner.

MO Tell us about your specialty, “conversational marketing.”

VD Conversational marketing is a whole new channel that we haven’t been able to scale before. You’ve had email, where you send it and pray that someone will click. You’ve had SMS, where you try to get the right amount of impact in a small amount of text. You’re not really able to have conversations that way — but now, all these platforms exist where businesses can have conversations at scale. It really helps you reach people where they want to be reached.

Facebook Messenger is one communication channel we can insert into omni-channel marketing strategies. It's still really novel; people aren't used to receiving marketing or business messages via Messenger. It helps you cut down the customer journey from multiple web pages to just one web view.

The bounce rate is low, and click-through is really high. When you send reminders, that open rate is close to 95-100% — and you can continue to have a conversation in there. It's really strong and much more flexible than SMS.

Managing appointments is one of the most common flows we have with Messenger. For service-based businesses where you have to make phone calls, for example, we're using Messenger to pre-qualify and route leads to the appropriate sales team and sales members, then people can book in that frame.

MO What’s next for you?

VD We’ve accidentally built full-fledged SaaS products with our clients in Ontraport before. My team is mapping out a few product ideas that we can hopefully create an MVP for, validate and go after this year.

MO Is there anything else you'd like to share?

VD With automation, I think it's really important to start simple.

When it comes to starting new projects, I’ve always wanted to go for version 2.0 or 3.0. But lately, I’ve been tag-teaming client strategy sessions with another consultant on our team. He's all about simplicity, and I'm all about getting the whole masterpiece done. I'm starting to value that simplicity more and more, because that's where you start to see immediate results — and it's quicker to launch.

When you start simple, it's less risky. I think people give up on automation because they try to get the whole masterpiece done, and then when something doesn't work, they throw it away and say, "Well, automation doesn't work for me. It's not for my business." And that's just not the case.