Robert Sofia is the Co-founder and CEO of Snappy Kraken, an award-winning marketing platform for financial advisors. With two decades of experience, he has served thousands of companies across the financial services spectrum. A former marketing agency owner, Robert has since focused on empowering advisors with technology-driven marketing tools. He is the author of four books, including the bestseller Blend Out, and is passionate about helping consumers, advisors, and enterprises achieve their financial goals.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[1:53] Robert Sofia discusses Snappy Kraken's multilayered approach to supporting consumers and advisors
[4:02] How Snappy Kraken differentiates from traditional marketing agencies
[6:33] How Snappy Kraken prevents content saturation and maintains uniqueness
[9:15] The role of AI in Snappy Kraken's approach to personalized marketing
[13:30] Robert explains why most advisors aren't leveraging marketing campaigns effectively
[19:01] The impact of Snappy Kraken on organic growth for firms and advisors
[22:23] The future of AI in marketing and how it will revolutionize engagement
[26:03] The most effective marketing techniques and strategies that advisors are using
[33:40] The role of leadership and hard work in entrepreneurship
In this episode…
Engaging prospects and converting leads can be complex, especially for financial advisors. With scattershot marketing strategies and a lack of clear guidance, many advisors struggle to grow organically. Where can they get powerful, technology-driven solutions that foster organic growth and stronger client connections?
Digital marketing expert in the financial services industry Robert Sofia discusses revolutionizing marketing for financial advisors. He dives deep into the success secrets behind the industry's best performers. Robert shares compelling data on how specific outreach methodologies like SEO strategies, targeted text messaging, and personalized video content can dramatically bolster a company's growth. He also delves into the future of marketing, discussing AI's role in crafting even more engaging, authentic content for consumers.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Robert Sofia, Co-founder and CEO of Snappy Kraken, about creating tailored marketing strategies as an advisor. Robert discusses the multilayered approach Snappy Kraken takes to support consumers and advisors, how it differentiates from traditional marketing agencies, prevents content saturation, and the future of AI in marketing.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Blend Out: From Ordinary To Irresistible: How Advisors Can Market Like The Greatest Brands In The World by Robert Sofia
"Financial Planning Reimagined With Adam Holt of Asset-Map" on The Customer Wins
"Care For Your Customers To Serve Them Best" on The Customer Wins
"Growth Tips for Wealth Management Firms With Aaron Klein of Nitrogen" on The Customer Wins
"How Evolving From Customer To Tech Insider Helps Customers Win" on The Customer Wins
"The Value of Creating Personalized Financial Services Experiences With Valarie Vest" on The Customer Wins
"Using AI To Financially Plan Our Future With Robert Kirk" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
"When advisors are able to do more with less, not only is their lifestyle better, but often they can help more clients."
"Snappy Kraken is a software company, an enablement company, and a customer data platform."
"Real campaign marketing takes people down different paths depending on their interest — that's what generates true results."
"Success to me isn't about what you achieve, it's about continuing to build, grow, and invest in others."
"Marketing is really about that human connection piece, but doing it at scale."
Action Steps:
Optimize your website for SEO to double visitor numbers: With a well-implemented SEO strategy, you can greatly enhance your digital presence.
Implement text message opt-ins for high-conversion leads generation: Text message opt-ins can massively boost conversion rates due to their direct and accessible nature.
Focus on a well-designed nurturing sequence using relevant financial topics: Targeted email sequences on topics like taxes and estate planning drive the highest client engagement.
Harness the power of video in email communication to double your engagement: Video content can significantly improve your email open and click-through rates.
Leverage the potential of AI to personalize marketing content: Using generative AI tools can help create more authentic and tailored customer experiences, leading to better marketing results.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win, and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included leaders from Asset Map, Docupace, Nitrogen Wealth, DocuSign and Cambridge investment Research. Today, I get to speak with Robert Sofia, the CEO of Snappy Kraken, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean context, rich data that is 99.9% accurate. Visit quikforms.com to get started.
All right, I'm really excited to introduce today's guest, Robert Sofia is the Chairman and CEO of Snappy Kraken, the most awarded marketing platform for financial advisors. During the better part of two decades, Robert has served 1000s of companies across the spectrum of financial services, including RIAs, family offices, broker dealers, tamps, insurance marketing organizations, custodians, insurance, I mean, you name it. He's done it. Robert has also authored four books, including his latest best seller, Blend Out: How Advisors Can Market Like The Greatest Brands in the World. Robert, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Robert Sofia 1:34
Hey Rich. Thank you. Happy to be here. Great podcast.
Richard Walker 1:37
Thank you very much. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Robert, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Robert Sofia 1:53
Well, there's a lot of layers to that because of the nature of the work we do. It's not just one group. A lot of people would say, well, Snappy Kraken helps financial advisors, but actually we help consumers too. So, we've reached 39 million Americans with financial education, with the ability to make better investing decisions, to stay the course when it's tough to consult with a professional advisor, and that's through email and social media and a variety of content. So we try to help consumers. We always think about that, and most of the time, those are clients of advisors and prospects of advisors. And so we want to make sure we're delivering value for them. Of course, that value actually comes although we create it from the advisor.
So the advisors will take what we've built, they'll modify it, they'll make it their own, and then they'll send it. So in that way, we help advisors because they're getting better results, better engagement, more activity, more leads, more happy clients. That gives them the ability to scale their business. It gives them more freedom. And then when advisors are able to do more with less and have more time, not only is their lifestyle better, but often they can help more clients. And then, as a result, we're helping the enterprises that support advisors, because they're driving more organic growth. They have a recruiting advantage. They have a retention advantage. They have better reporting on what's working inside their advisor network. And so those are the three groups that we help. And I could go on talking about the way we think about our employees and helping them and our shareholders and helping them, but as a business, we really are set up to serve those three groups.
Richard Walker 3:38
I'm glad you mentioned employees, because I personally believe that if you're not helping your employees, you'll never help your customer. It does start within your company, and I think that's pretty obvious from how you lead and what you do. So one of the things I'm curious about is your product, an outsourced marketing agency. Did they just give over the wheel to you and you drive? Or is it a technology platform and a content platform? How would you describe it more tactically?
Robert Sofia 4:02
Yeah, we're definitely not an agency. There are agencies out there and you pay them money, and they do your marketing for you. But in our experience, I used to run an agency, by the way, so I had an agency for seven years before I started Snappy Kraken. So I know the challenges that presents, because what usually happens when you are an agency is when a customer comes to you, they say what they want. You build it one time for them, and it may or may not work.
And usually they make decisions by committee, or they do it based on their taste, which may not even be what the customer actually wants. And so that model, it has its benefits, but the advisors who are really crushing it with marketing, most of them are either doing it from scratch, or they're working to spend a lot of money with an agency 10s and 10s of 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of dollars, where they have a big in house marketing team. Snappy Kraken is not any of those things. Where we fit is we are a software company. We are an enablement company, we are a customer data platform. So we actually build marketing content in the form of frameworks and templates that sometimes advisors customize themselves, sometimes we help them customize, and sometimes they use an agency to customize, and so we give them proven templates.
I mentioned data because we've got data on 600,000 campaigns a year that we're launching. Last year, we sent, let's see, 67 million emails on behalf of advisors. We communicate with 39 million contacts. We had 39 million page visits. So in this way, we are able to see, what do people like, what do they consume, when they click on a page? Where do they click, when they scroll? Where do they stop? What gets attention? What images, what colors, what fonts, what button styles. And so we use all that to build really great frameworks for financial advisor marketing, and then we give them to them, and they're fully automated. All the data on what's performing for them is evident. And then we give them the one clickability, you know.
So you see 17 people just engage with this campaign. Marjorie Smith has the highest engagement rate, and she's interested in retirement income planning. Click here to send her a text message or text message or an email she just downloaded your eBook. And then we give them that one direct one to one communication ability. So it's very much a technology platform that's enabled with content
Richard Walker 6:33
That makes a lot more sense. So I have a couple of questions around this. First of all, just to reiterate, you're essentially giving the advisor the best of the best, because you can see the trends, you can see what's working. You've proven it, and so now you can just give that to them. So my kind of corollary question then is, is there any concern about saturation, like everybody doing the same thing and it no longer works?
Robert Sofia 6:54
Yeah, big time. That's a real problem, but we don't really do mass marketing in that way. So the primary marketing channels that we use for helping advisors engage with clients and prospects are email and text message. So the ability for them to go and brand themselves in their market by doing seminars, radio shows, television ads, advertising, local networking that's all enabled by other services that generally will feed into Snappy Kraken. So for example, we have an integration with a really big seminar mailing company, and all the data from advisors who do seminars with them will feed it.
The leads will feed into Snappy Kraken, and then they can be nurtured by our system, and advisors can take action on them. So it's not mass marketing, it's more the enabling of the human connection piece of marketing, but doing it at scale. And the other thing I'll say about that is, although we do social media, the content that we provide for social media is very supplementary. You know, there's a lot of companies out there that will say things like, well, we're going to do all your social media for you. It's for you, and then they blast the same content out for everybody. With our content, we give advisors campaigns. They choose which ones they want to launch.
They can use AI to generate their own images. They can change the images with stock libraries. They can change the text. Everything can be dynamically adjusted. And so advisors just take our frameworks and modify them, and then even if they use them as is, it's only a supplement to their other social media activity, and if they customize it, it doesn't look the same anyway. So we really try to give advisors a hybrid of something that's really working, but that they make their own to avoid that problem.
Richard Walker 8:41
And something I learned in social media is that you can put out the same message three times, and the same person may not even see it three times. They may see it only once. Even 10 times, they may only see it once. And so this idea of saturation, the market is so big, and to your point, you guys are customizing it a lot. So I'm wondering about something else, and whether you're using AI to do this or not. Are you helping the advisor pinpoint the needs, the desires, the trends or whatever that specific clients or prospects need to hear or see? Are you guys getting, like, really micro in your approach?
Robert Sofia 9:15
Yeah. So that's a really critical element of being successful with marketing. And so there's a whole part of our business that I really haven't even talked about so far in the context of this conversation, and that's really the branding piece and the website piece. So we do also build websites for advisors, and that's the closest thing to an agency that we have, and that's a one-time process to understand their business, understand their clients, the psychographic profile of those clients and set them up with a really effective website. After that, everything that flows through is nurtured inside Snappy Kraken, but we create a variety of campaigns for different profiles.
So, we've got a campaign for technology entrepreneurs who are women. We've got a campaign. Series for first responders. So we've got a campaign series for retirees who are between 50 and 60 and one for retirees who are between 60 and 70. And so the point is, we do have content for different audiences. So the way it usually works with Snappy Kraken is and really, with any great marketing strategy, there's some assets that you own completely that are 100% unique. That's where your website needs to live. But then you've got other content that can be used. It doesn't always have to be completely unique. It just has to be focused on the right Prospect Profile. And so for that, that's where our campaigns come in, and then advisors can go in and just tweak them a little bit for their area geographically, or for the nuances of their client base.
And they use our frameworks. So it's a hybrid approach. We don't do everything custom from scratch for their audience. We do the essential things custom from scratch for their business. And then everything that can be based on a proven framework is.
Richard Walker 11:03
So let's go back to another kind of Genesis problem for an advisor, or really any business. And I've faced this in my company, and it's that agency problem, I as a customer to the agency may not communicate well enough to the agency what I need, and part of that problem is knowing what I need. So at what stage does an advisor say Snappy Kraken is the right solution? Do you help somebody at the beginning? Do you help them define their message, define who their audience is, or do they have to have that really well underhand to come and be successful with you?
Robert Sofia 11:32
Yeah, it depends on what aspect of what we do they're going to leverage. So Snappy Kraken is not just our marketing automation and campaigns platform. We also have the website platform, and we have the text message marketing platform, and all of them are integrated into one central hub. And so advisors actually will come in and say, I want all three. I want just one. Or in some cases, they'll say, I just want the service piece of this. I'm already using this product, but I want you to run it for me, and that's a different thing. So, we've got some options there. And the idea is to meet them where they are if they don't want to build a new website, and they are happy with that, we may give them some consultation and recommend they make some changes to fine tune their results. But they don't always have to take it.
I think the biggest thing when it comes to doing what advisors need, and meeting them where they are, and helping them understand that it really comes down to us doing a good job comparing their performance against the benchmarks. So one of the things we like to do is say, okay, this is how we look at 10,000 advisors around the country. We've got firms that have billions under management, and we have firms that have 50 million under management. And we say, okay, so here's your numbers. How do you compare here, here, here, here and here. And usually that will reveal a weakness somewhere. And then we say, Well, then let's start by bolstering this area. And typically, we have a solution for that. So if, for example, they're not generating enough leads that we might go down one path, if they've got a great website, it looks great, but it's not converting.
That's a different path. If, if they're not getting traffic, that's a different path. If they have a huge email list, but none of those people are raising their hand and saying, I want to say, I want to talk to an advisor. That's another problem. And so we try to help them see where those problems are and introduce a strategy to address those problems.
Richard Walker 13:30
No, that's great. Do you think that most advisors are doing marketing campaigns or the majority aren't?
Robert Sofia 13:36
Oh no, most aren't. The vast, vast majority are not. And what's crazy about that, it's actually the thing that annoys me the most about my competitors, and I don't talk about my competitors a lot, but Snappy Kraken, when we launched back in 2016 we were the first company to enter this space with actual campaign marketing. Omni channel, with all the triggers built in. And all of our competitors, when we started getting market share, immediately came out and said they offered campaigns, and none of them still do.
They don't offer campaigns. They offer single marketing actions in the form of recurrences. So they'll have like, an email that goes out every week. They call that a campaign. Or they'll have like, they'll blast the same social posts for 10,000 advisors and call that a campaign, but a real campaign, a true campaign takes people down different paths depending on what their interest is or where they're engaging. It's got timing considerations. It's got lead scoring considerations. It's got multi-channel considerations. So there's coordinated elements for email, social media, text messaging, with your website, your landing pages. Nobody else really has that. The only advisors who are doing that today are the ones who really invest in marketing.
So they go out and they buy a tool like HubSpot, and they build it out. HubSpot is a true campaign tool, or they've got Salesforce and they've really engineered it and built it out, but those firms are really a minority. So, if they're doing campaigns, they're either using Snappy Kraken, or they're spending a heck of a lot of money on marketing.
Richard Walker 15:10
I love that you talked about this, because I love the strategy thinking around this. When I started Quik!, one of the first things I realized was a user, a technology user, needs a series of emails to onboard, to get help, to be reminded to renew all these things. And we had to think through like, what is the message? How do we string it together? What is the timing of it? What is the trigger of that event to cause it? And to me, marketing is very similar.
We use HubSpot for ourselves, by the way, so you have to have those sequences of what's next and what's next, and where are you trying to drive them to? I think there's so much to learn about marketing that people need you because they don't want to learn it themselves. I mean, I was an advisor. I really didn't want to learn everything. Wanted to be an advisor. So I wanted to ask you, what are some of the trends that you're seeing in the marketplace or with what advisors are doing well or not doing well that you might share with others.
Robert Sofia 16:04
There are some advisors that are doing really well and others that are doing terrible, and it looks like scattershot to me. When I look out at the industry broadly, I don't see consistency of any strategies being executed. At a broad level, I see advisors who are doing one thing really, really well, or maybe a big firm that's doing a lot of things really, really well, but the industry as a whole is all over the place. That's really the point. So when I look at, for example, some data that was recently brought to me by a journalist, it showed that advisors had doubled the number of videos they produced based on the survey, but they weren't getting results from those videos.
That's a perfect example, right? So they're doing more videos but they're not getting results. That's because they're not doing it correctly. So, I spent a lot of time talking to the journalists about it. And my point is that if you look at certain firms that are growing, and you've probably seen the data about organic growth rate, most firms are growing like 2% 3% 4% but the firms that are growing 17, 18, 19, 20% or faster, they're not the majority. They're the minority, but they have a strategy. They've got a way to bring leads in, and they're measuring the volume of those leads and the quality of those leads, then they have a way to nurture those leads, and they have funnels and workflows for that, and they have points in time where those leads receive links to other marketing they've done, links to their videos, links to their podcast, invited to workshops, invited to webinars, invited to watch videos, and then they've got people calling at certain times to engage those prospects, and they've got a good brand.
And this is all part of a package that makes a company succeed, and most advisors rely on a piece of it. For example, they'll just have one resource for growing business. Like, how do you get your business? Well, I do seminars. Okay, great. So tell me about your numbers. Well, I go, this many people come, this many people end up meeting with me, and this many people I close. Okay, great. You got a business? What do you do with the rest of them? Ah, nothing, really. Okay, by the way, your website looks terrible. I don't care about that. Nobody goes to my website. They just get my seminar mailers. See that's not a growth strat. It's a single activity. And because the revenue is so good from a client in this industry, and because a lot of advisors are happy with the lifestyle they have, they can do that. And make half a million bucks a year or whatever.
But if you really want to scale, you ask me if you're doing it right? Yeah, then you're going to have all those things in place, and they're all going to be working together for you, to support your brand, your image, to nurture every lead, to have a great service model for your clients. And that's just not the norm. It's not the norm.
Richard Walker 19:01
Yeah, I think you're talking a lot about that leap that advisors have to come from being an advisor to being a business operator and thinking about their business in terms of, how do I get other people to work? How do I scale it? How do I create standards and operations and procedures, all those types of mechanisms and the marketing is a mystery to most people. I mean, I've been in my business for 22 years, and we're constantly learning about this, because we're not experts at it. And I know advisors go through the same thing, because they're small business owners.
So I also find it fascinating, because you said you see this marketplace as kind of scattershot. There's so many different things happening, so few people doing the right thing and Hitting the Bullseye. Is that the opportunity for you guys, do you see that as, like, easy wins for Snappy Kraken to come in and help that? Or is it really hard to get this to happen?
Robert Sofia 19:50
Yeah, it is very hard to get it to happen through advisors. And I wouldn't be so organist to say we're going to solve that problem. We don't even solve it. The entire problem, frankly. I mean, I can't send a videographer to your office to record a video for you every week. I can't write a book for you. I can't come in and plan your client events to make sure they're a great experience, right? I can't come in and analyze the response time of all your client interactions, and I can't coach your people on how they answer the phone. I used to do all that stuff right in my firm, but I don't do that stuff anymore. So my point is, I can't do all that for you, but this is how I think about the industry.
You've got advisors who are willing and eager to do those things, and they recognize that Snappy Kraken is a piece of their overall technology stack to get those things done, and they're willing to go out and find the other pieces that they also need and make sure those things are integrated and part of their entire strategy. Those are the advisors I want to serve, and further, I actually want to serve the enterprises that support those advisors and give them the data to say, here's your top 20% of your advisors. Let's look at what they're doing. Where is their lead flow coming from? What does their nurturing process look like, and then help those enterprises replicate that. So one of the things we're doing right now is we've created some new enterprise tools that can give that visibility to the firm, so they can say, I got 3000 advisors here.
Here's my top 200 or 300 or whatever the number looks like. And I want to really understand what they're doing and then evangelize that, democratize that, and get another 10% of my advisors doing it, so they're driving organic growth inside the network, and so those are the two places where we're really leaning in to the individual correct advisors and to the enterprises who have groups of advisors that they want to really get online.
Richard Walker 21:52
I think that's an incredible opportunity. A lot of broker dealers and firms grow through acquisition. It's hard to grow organically, and you're giving them the organic path to try to build that out and make the advisor more effective and more successful, which is what the advisor wants. It's just how do they do it? So I'm curious about AI. We talked about it briefly in this conversation and mentioned it a few times. How is AI playing a role in your world with marketing and automation, or even in your software? Are you building out AI tools? What does the future look like for you guys?
Robert Sofia 22:23
Yeah, I want to make a distinction, just for the sake of those who may think of AI and think of investment models and other things that AI can do. Specifically, we are in the generative AI sandbox, so we have integrations with Dall E and ChatGPT, and those are inside of our tools. So we're not trying to build our own AI, to be clear, but our system is API first, so any AI tool that has an API we can swap out. So we're watching to see what AI tools continue to gain the most adoption and have the best APIs, and then we're working that into our text. So for example, I told you we have these proven content frameworks.
We know a landing page will convert at the highest rate if it has an image on the right side, if the imagery lends itself toward or points toward, or if the person is looking toward the call to action, we know that if we use a contrasting color in the button compared to the rest of the landing page, it'll have a higher conversion rate. We know that three bullet points and one strong headline concerts at the highest rate. So if you add four or five or six, the conversion rate goes down. This is an example, right? So we created this template, right? We give it to the advisor. But if they go and they open it up and they don't like the verbiage, or it's too casual for them, or it's too formal for them, they can immediately click a button with AI and generate a new version and then generate another and generate another version until they get a version they like that's completely unique.
Or if they go in and they use our email builder, and we've written this email about recent market moves, and they want to change the tone of it, they can do it with a click. Or if they want to add a paragraph, they can just type, add a paragraph. Here about this, give them a quick sentence to generate, and they have another paragraph.
Richard Walker 22:38
So you enable them to prompt the engine, oh yes, they make this a more friendly, optimistic tone.
Robert Sofia 24:27
Yep, yep, exactly. And we do that with social posts, emails and landing page copy. So generative, AI the way I think about so that's how we do it today. This is how I think about the future. Everybody wants marketing that's relevant for them, the more relevant, the better it will perform. So the idea of using canned content, the same content on everybody, I think that's going to die off, except in big advertising. So the future to me is looking at the data, preferably the first party data that you have, and advisors have a lot of it, by the way, because of what's in their financial planning tools and their fact finders. And then you enrich that with some accessible big data sets. And pretty soon you got a picture of somebody, then you've got a proven framework.
That's what Snappy Kraken has, too, with our templates. So step three, which is what we're working towards, and we're not there yet. I want to be clear, but step three is, take the data, take the framework, modify the content for every single person in a way that is meaningful and authentic. And that's the piece that is missing. We can do it, but it doesn't feel authentic and personal enough. So that's what we're working on. And then everybody who gets an email will get an email that feels truly tailored to them, and that's where I see it going, and that's where I think the impact is going to really be felt, because they'll see open rates go up, response rates go up, conversion rates go up, and that's pretty exciting to me.
Richard Walker 26:03
Oh, I love that. I don't know if you've heard of InterGen data Robert Kirk, he was a prior guest on my show, because what he was doing with big data to create insights to people, I think is just incredible. And maybe that's somebody you're partnering with already and thinking through, but I agree with you, getting down to what people care about and having a personalized message. I mean, that's the point of having an advisor. You want to trust your advisor because they understand you. You want to think and feel that they understand you.
So therefore the messaging needs to do the same, and it can't be the same message to everybody. So I think it's fantastic that you guys are working on that. I'm also kind of curious, when you think about the marketing process, of how people engage with an advisor through the marketing of different mediums. What do you think that journey looks like for the most successful outcomes?
Robert Sofia 26:51
Yeah, well, I can share a few data points with you to try to explain where my thesis comes from. We talked a little bit about what's unique to the advisor and over saturation. This is why, when it comes to certain assets that the advisor has, and owning them and making them unique really pays off. So the best results we're seeing are coming from step one, a high converting website that's optimized with content for a specific audience. So just to give you some idea, we looked at all the websites that had professional SEO optimization and content on a consistent basis for SEO, and we compared them with those who didn't.
The websites that had an SEO strategy were performing at twice the level so just to give you an idea, average 3000 website visitors a month with a website SEO strategy, it jumps to over 6000 visitors a month. Average page views loaded on your site, the additional visits of secondary pages goes from 1391 I'm pulling up the data and looking at it real time here, to 24,176 that's a 74% performance advantage. So those couple of things. So first of all, getting people to your website and them seeing relevance, that's one but then you've got to drive the conversion, right? You got to drive the lead. So we started looking at what drives the biggest lead conversion. So we've got all different types of calls to action.
Everything that at the bottom of the spectrum performs the worst, which is, subscribe to my newsletter, by the way. So if you go to your website right now, it says, subscribe to my newsletter, and you're not getting leads. I could have told you that, because the data told me that.
Richard Walker 28:43
Another newsletter.
Robert Sofia 28:44
Those don't work. But at the highest end of the spectrum, here's what we found: advisors who text me your questions about taxes, or text me your questions about estate planning, or text me, do you work at Amazon? Find out how your RSUs work. Text me your questions. More specific, the better. What happens is their conversion rate of lead gen on their website jumps 400%, 400%. So now you're talking about what works, what's the journey like? Get them to your site, have a great brand, convert them as a lead that's the best way to do it, with a text message, opt in, and then the right type of nurturing comes into play. So that's where ongoing sequences for lead engagement really matter. And so we started looking at different types of lead engagement campaigns and different types of offers. Saving money on taxes performs higher than anything else.
Estate planning performs best after that, you start hitting them with nurturing series that address those issues. Your lead conversion rate goes up, you get a click rate of about an average of over 40% on those. So, this is the point: get them there, get them converted, start the nurturing, primarily by email and text message and all of that leads to an appointment with the advisor. The last thing I'll say is advisors that do all this really well, if they want to get another performance bump on those opt-ins and their lead lists from other sources. If you send a message with a video, that is the best way to take the journey from cold to really hot fast. So when we started comparing emails that go out that say video versus those that don't, the open rate doubles from 27.4 to 59.4 so you're doubling your open rate.
And then when the video link in the email is there, your click through rate goes from 16.7 to 36.7 so the compounding effect of all that, just imagine you used an SEO strategy to double your website visitors. Then you use a text message to often opt in to 400% increase your opt-ins. Then you use a nurturing sequence on taxes or estate planning to get your open rates and engagement rates really high, over 40% and then you send a video and you double your open rates and your click rates.
Richard Walker 31:19
Yes, double, double, double. I mean, over and over again. Man, I don't know why anybody's not working with you. Wow.
Robert Sofia 31:28
We were trying to get them all.
Richard Walker 31:31
No, that's fantastic. That is such interesting data. I have to be respectful of our time, because we're running out of time. And there's so many other questions I want to ask, like AI video where people are being cloned and stuff like that, but I don't know if we have time, so Robert, let me ask you before I ask my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Robert Sofia 31:50
Yeah, they can connect with me in any of the following. I'm pretty active on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can just type my name in, Robert, first name, last name, Sofia, and that's to engage with me personally. If you want to learn more about Snappy Kraken, just go to snappykraken.com.
Richard Walker 32:09
Awesome. That's perfect. All right, here's my last question. One of my favorite questions to ask is who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Robert Sofia 32:19
Definitely my grandfather. He's 91 and he still works every single day. No, on his hobbies, not for age, but he's out working. And the work ethic and the salesmanship. He was an entrepreneur. He had his own business for many years. I went to his office and worked with him when I was, like, 10 to 14, just doing a variety of different things. And he taught me about selling, and he taught me about hard work. And that trickled down through my dad too. I mean, my family's historically worked for themselves in small businesses, but if you were standing still on a job site, they built swimming pools and did a lot of masonry work and things like that.
If I was ever standing still when I was supposed to be moving a pile of dirt, my grandfather would literally come up and kick my butt, like, actually kick my butt. And that type of thing really instills a lot in you. So I have a very resilient, hardworking, blue collar sort of DNA, and I'm never afraid to get my hands dirty in our business, even though I'm in technology, because I wanted to save my knees. But I definitely have a lot that I give him credit for. And even still, when I call him, he always gives me some piece of sage advice, like, to keep moving or make time for the important things or whatever. And I value that a lot.
Richard Walker 33:40
Oh, that is so awesome. I love that, and it's certainly the hallmark of an entrepreneur, that hard work ethic and the willingness to keep pushing and pushing. Man, congratulations on all your success. This is really an amazing story. I'm so glad you're on the show.
Robert Sofia 33:53
It's great to be here. Thank you. We're just getting warmed up Rich, though.
Richard Walker 33:56
I know we could go for hours here. Maybe we have to have you another time.
Robert Sofia 34:00
I don't measure success as something you achieve, you keep working, you keep building, you keep growing, you keep trying to be a better person. Keep investing in other people. So people, sometimes, from the outside, they'll say things like that, congrats on your success. And I'm like, oh man, I don't, I don't know. I just, I don't think I'm there yet, you know, and I don't know that I ever will be, that's, I think, one of the things that actually helps me to keep driving forward.
Richard Walker 34:22
I share that I do because I think that success is about fulfilling your potential, and my potential keeps expanding as I grow, so I'll never fulfill it. Yet, I heard something really fascinating a couple months ago. He said, have you ever stopped to think you've already achieved a bunch of the goals you set for yourself? And it's good to reflect on that too, because you have, you have achieved a lot. All right, let's wrap it up. I really appreciate this conversation, so I want to say a huge thank you to Robert Sofia, the CEO of Snappy Kraken, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Robert's website at snappykraken.com and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com, where we make process forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Robert, thank you so much for joining me today.
Robert Sofia 35:09
It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me Rich.
Outro 35:14
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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