How Customer Data Fuels Growth with Jim Harenchar

Andy Splichal:

Welcome back to the make each Click Count podcast where we dive deep into actionable strategies to help you maximize your marketing efforts. I'm your host, Andy Spleikle, the founder of True Online Presence and author the make each Click Count book series. And today we got a fantastic guest joining us, Jim Renshard, the CEO of Response Marketing Group, a data driven marketing agency that has been delivering incredible results for over 35 years. Jim's experience spans across financial services, tourism and healthcare sectors. And under his leadership, Response Marketing Group has developed proprietary ad tech solutions that are transforming destination marketing organizations across the country. From understanding customer behavior to enhancing visitor engagement. Jim and his team have been at the forefront of utilizing data to drive marketing decisions. Today we're going to explore how leveraging customer data can lead to better marketing performance, hiring engagement and most importantly, greater revenue growth.

Andy Splichal:

So I'm excited for the conversation to get started. So let's do it. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Harenchar:

Andy, thank you. Glad to be here.

Andy Splichal:

So let's start with Response Marketing Group has been in business for three decades, which in this industry is a lifetime. What do you think has been the key to staying relevant and successful in such a rapidly changing industry?

Jim Harenchar:

Well, I would say from our perspective, if you go back to our founding in 1986, we have always been laser focused on data, both from a foundational perspective, meaning the data that you have, or in the case of many of our clients, the data they don't have. In in our early days, the mid to late 80s, early 90s, there were really only two marketing channels in terms of like below the line advertising, you know, radio, tv, outdoor, all existed, but it was either telemarketing or direct mail. Those were the only two direct to consumer channels below the line and data was really the differentiator there. It was how RMG kind of built a reputation specifically in financial services. Back in the late 80s, early 90s banks were the first to really embrace data leverage Data to build models and do analytics. So we have always had that as part of our DNA. I think as the number of channels and platforms has proliferated over the last 30 plus odd years, we continue to maintain that data is foundationally a critical element in terms of how you make your marketing more productive, how you measure that marketing. And regardless of what channel you choose to use, you'll still need to know who's responding and who's not, who your best customers are and who's not.

Jim Harenchar:

And so that has remained at the forefront of everything that we've done.

Andy Splichal:

So skipping, I mean it's incredible. 36 years ago you said you started, but how does RMG approach using customer data? I mean, how are you using it to improve your customers, your clients acquisition and increase their business?

Jim Harenchar:

Well, I would tell you Andy, really our customers span a broad level of maturity. So we have some that are very new to data driven marketing or they, they have never really made it a priority. And so as time has passed and they've started to see the light, if you will, they recognize that hey, we need to collect data. So we have some of those, what I would call the less mature client. And so we're really helping them foundationally come back to what are the important things you need to keep and put into a CRM, Whether that's something formal like a Salesforce or some other much more sophisticated system, or whether that's what I'll call the digital shoebox. Right. So we've got a Excel spreadsheet of names and addresses of our best customers. The fact that they have something is a place to start.

Jim Harenchar:

So our immature clients, that's kind of where our approach begins. Our more mature client, it's about understanding with all the tools that are available in the marketplace today, how do we leverage those tools, how do we use that data, Whether we're building sophisticated next likely product purchase models, whether we're doing customer segmentation, whatever the need is understanding how to use that data in the tourism sector. I'll give you one example. So a very well respected research firm that's in the tourism industry called Longwoods International recently published an article talking about how if you are a DMO destination marketing organization, 70% of the people that visited you this year will come back sometime in the next three to five years. So our question in dealing with a client is if we accept that as true, how do we improve our odds of making sure that we know who was here this year so that we can engage with those people and increase the likelihood they will definitely come back sometime in the next three to five years or sooner.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that data. They hadn't thought about that, right?

Jim Harenchar:

That's right. Exactly, exactly. And so to them it's a little bit of if you build it, they will come. Right. So we have so many states and my own here in Virginia, which spend a lot of money to build awareness on the hopes that Andy decides to come to Virginia. Whether that's Virginia beach or whether that's Charlottesville or whether that's Northern Virginia, whatever we want to get you here. Yet very few of the states really have a methodology in place to understand if Andy in particular actually comes. They've got a lot of survey and research and anecdotal data to gather the number, number of visitors that we had in Virginia this year based on airport traffic and everything else.

Jim Harenchar:

But they don't know who that person really is.

Andy Splichal:

Now you've developed a proprietary ad tech solutions for your clients. Can you share a little bit more about how that technology works and how your clients have been able to utilize that?

Jim Harenchar:

Yeah. So one of the things that we're really looking at doing is helping to kind of de anonymize both a website user or an in person visitor. And so we've got some proprietary technology. Our first product is called Smart Pixel. It's placing a pixel in the header of your website. And obviously we've had a lot of conversations over the last three to five years with the deprecation of cookies and what that means for the industry as a whole. Pixels are a little bit different and pixels are a little bit harder to remove in terms of what you store in your, in your machine. So what we're doing is by placing that pixel, we're providing clear conspicuous consent on the part of the person visiting a website.

Jim Harenchar:

We have a product called Bullseye that captures physically the device that's in my pocket when I walk inside of a geo frame that is also provided based on what you've granted for location tracking with your cell phone provider or the apps that you've downloaded or the browser that you have open. So we're dealing in all publicly available information. Wanna make sure we get that out? Cause a lot of my clients, the first time we talk about what our ad tech presents, they're like, oh, that sounds like creepy pixel to me. Or, you know, how are you guys able to be able to match that information? You know, in 38 years we've built 150 million normative database of publicly available information which is coming from a variety of different sources. So reg registrations, warranty cards, subscriptions, overlaid with things like property and real estate transactions, NCOA data from the U.S. postal system, all of that publicly available information, DMV data, we ingest all of that. We. We maintain a file of that.

Jim Harenchar:

So when we've identified Jim Harenshar based on a IP address and a geolocation down to of a quarter of a mile, we then make a match, and we match off of a first name, a last name, a gender, and a terrestrial address. So we've got to have a 75% confidence factor that the person we're either seeing standing inside of a geoframe at a concert or an event or what have you is Jim Harenshar that we have in our normal normative database. So we make that match, we deliver that data back to the client. And what we're proving in our deployments is that we're able to really begin to track that customer journey. Right. We saw that Andy was thinking about coming to Virginia. He was on the website in February. He looked at all these different pages.

Jim Harenchar:

He came back again three weeks later, he looked at these pages, and lo and behold, he showed up at our folk festival in September. And so now we can map that customer journey.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that's. That's amazing. When you get all this data, what. How do. How are your clients using it?

Jim Harenchar:

Great question. Some using it from a very integrated perspective where they're informing the success of their ad campaigns. And I would tell you that was what we kind of set out to find at the outset. The tipping point for us was could we help decipher or find the holy grail of marketing and advertising? Right. Which is the ability to say, I'm advertising to Andy, and lo and behold, Andy's responding, and I am now built a personal engagement and relationship with Andy. That's. That was what we were trying to solve for. We kind of stumbled on it with a couple of data partners that had been down that road working to solve that same issue.

Jim Harenchar:

So a lot of our clients are saying, first off, we can now build customer segments we can understand, are we overrepresented or underrepresented in who's coming to our website or who's showing up here in person? And I can. I'll give you an example of that later. It also validates your ad spending to say that if we think that our ad buys are targeting married women and households with kids making over $100,000, is that who's actually coming to our webpage? You know, Google Analytics is great. It was a tool that was developed and launched in 2005. But you know, we're, we're, you know, 19 years removed from that, almost 20. And so we have fast forwarded into the ability to de anonymize some of these individuals and be able to validate. Am I attracting the right person that I want to attract? Is that, you know, is my paid advertising truly working and how do I tweak that to become more effective and build segments knowing full well who's coming to my website?

Andy Splichal:

So in the tourism industry, I mean, you've worked some high profile clients. Visit Savannah, the Ritz Carlton. Can you tell us some of the unique challenges that destination marketing organizations face and how RMG's data driven approach addresses those challenges?

Jim Harenchar:

Yeah, so I'll give you a couple different challenges. So if we take, let's take a Ritz Carlton, we've had a great relationship with them. And if I asked you to tell me when I say Ritz Carlton, what's your impression of advertising from Ritz Carlton? And it's probably a print ad somewhere or maybe, maybe it's a TV spot, but more than likely it's a print ad or a digital ad or something you've been exposed to. And it's likely a 60 and older white couple with gray hair who are standing in a beautiful vista somewhere. Right? That's, that's what you get from Ritz Carlton. Well, one of the things we did was a deep dive into who their guests were. And one of the byproducts of doing that was that we identified 72% of their guests had a child 17 or younger that was in the household. And we were like, where, where is the young people? Right.

Jim Harenchar:

Not all your customers can't be gray haired, 60 and overs. Right? So why don't we put kids on paddle boards? Why don't we show kids building sandcastles? When we did that, we increased the awareness and booking rate in those targeted segments by 30% in less than, in less than 12, 12 months. And you know, it only makes sense, right? The family that is looking to take a beach vacation and wants to go in the middle of summer and narrows maybe a couple of the Ritz Carlton destinations, they created custom landing pages based on all the demographics that they had on their guests. So if we know that Andy fits this description when he comes to our page, this is what the imagery, this is what the copy is going to look like. So we've had tremendous success in using those types of adoptions of the Data to how the client then speaks to their customer groups or build segments. I'll give you the opposite end of that. We had a small little destination that was in Florida that had asked us to present our findings to their board. And one of the things that we recognized in terms of their website traffic, 18 to 34 year olds were less than 10% of their site traffic.

Jim Harenchar:

And they were like, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. We've got great outdoor assets, we've got airboat tours, we've got all these different horseback riding, We've got some of the best state parks in the state of Florida. We have swim with the manatees where how are we missing this segment of the market? And so they came up with the concept of building out something called the cool craft trail. So craft brewers, craft tea manufacturers, antique shops. And they created 17 sites on a map that became a landing page on their website and then ask us to identify households within 5ft or markets of their geography that we could reach out to. They could add target. And we generated an overwhelming response to this Cool craft trail and site traffic that was now relevant to that 18 to 34 year old segment.

Andy Splichal:

Interesting. Yeah, no, I mean, once you have the data, it's amazing what you can do with it. I guess my question would be, now with all the privacy laws you said you're installing the cookies, are you getting a lot of people opting out of having the cookies installed and being able to track it? And I guess is that where the predictive analytics really comes into play?

Jim Harenchar:

Yeah. So I would say that there's certainly two byproducts. We have to navigate a compliance and regulatory side of all of this. Because the minute, you know, we're not following each of the, of the states that have some higher threshold of compliance than the general U.S. so there's, there's roughly 12 states that are very, very much kind of asking for another level. We always hold California and the CCPA requirements up there, but there's another 11 states and there's another 16 that in 2025 have that on their legislative docket. So the landscape is constantly shifting. But as I said, we're only dealing in publicly available information.

Jim Harenchar:

We're advising on clients on how to navigate that landscape. We're providing clear, conspicuous consent. Someone can unsubscribe if they do not want to have their site experience tracked. So with all of that and using no pii, you know, we've been successfully able to advise the clients, hey, should you be marketing into California and someone Says, where did you get my name? Or I want to be unsubscribed. Here's the protocol that we follow to do that. I think that to your specific question, we've seen about an 8 to 10% reduction in the availability of folks in the market to be able to be captured. Some of that is driven more by the manufacturer, right, the device manufacturer. With Apple making a variety of changes both to device and their operating systems.

Jim Harenchar:

Android doing a little bit of the same. But honestly Andy, we expected a higher percentage. So we've been happy that it has maintained that 8 to 10%. The other thing that we find we hear back from our clients wasn't our specific intent is that engagement rates are going up when people are receiving advertising or messaging that is relevant to them. So if I am the empty nester, I don't need to see diaper ads anymore or I don't need to be, you know, promoted. Different types of events that are targeting, you know, young kids, that's, that's not what I'm doing. And it also opens up. The inverse of that is, hey, I know families, when kids are in school can't travel Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Jim Harenchar:

So I can promote a discounted rate to an empty nester who's retired that can, you know, leave in the spur of the moment. And so that's proven to be very successful.

Andy Splichal:

So I mean the big question really when it comes to marketing is, is is it profitable? And with my clients, I work with exclusively E commerce clients and it's a lot easier, you know, they go to the website, they make the purchase. But with your clients and tourism industry, how do you measure the roi?

Jim Harenchar:

Well, I think I'll speak to tourism in particular because we do have clients in other industries as you alluded to earlier. Healthcare, financial services, retail. Let me speak first to tourism because response attribution was the number one question. The example I gave you, right. The state of Virginia spends a lot of money promoting and building awareness for the state of Virginia, but has no idea whether Andy or Jim ever show up. So helping clients to understand are the ad buys that we're doing, the audience that we're targeting, the people that we're driving, Are we getting that, that right audience we have, we have a client who was in the lending business. Lending to doctors, veterinarians and nurses thought that they were target and driving a fixed set of traffic to the site only to find after we overlaid our Smart Pixel tool, wasn't the case at all completely the wrong audience allowed them to get a lot sharper in terms of narrowing their focus on their advice. So that's number one.

Jim Harenchar:

GA4 is great, but it still doesn't give you all of the. It's aggregate data. It's, you know, not. It's. It's anonymized data. We believe that we have kind of a little bit of a uniqueness around the ability to do that. The second thing is, I think everybody has a finite budget, right? I mean, GE may have a lot more budget than a small business does, but it's still finite to everybody. And so if we can make that finite amount of budget deploy more effectively for you and give you tools that will allow you to say, yes, this is working.

Jim Harenchar:

Yes, this is not working, or if you want to do some testing and you say, I do have a finite budget. I can't pour 10,000, 100,000, whatever your multiplier is, into this, but I would like to dip my toe in it. We have the ability to be able to give you back in as little as 48 hours or two weeks or four weeks. A definitive answer on is that household of African American women in Dallas with kids that I'm targeting actually responding to this campaign and then building a database with which you can engage going forward.

Andy Splichal:

Now, you had mentioned some of the different industries you serve. I guess, take us through the process of what kind of. When somebody comes to you, I mean, obviously they got to have some sort of a pain point. What.

Jim Harenchar:

What are.

Andy Splichal:

When do people come to you typically? And what services are you providing them?

Jim Harenchar:

Yeah. So good or bad, we find that most of our clients come to us as a referral or, you know, a recommendation for somebody, or they see us on a podcast like yours or a post that we did on LinkedIn. We don't spend a lot of money. And we. And we also, I'm. I'm fortunate enough, we. We do conferences, so that we'll speak at conferences and we'll have people that will walk up afterwards. And I love when someone walks up and says, where have you been all my life? You know, we.

Jim Harenchar:

We love those, but normally it is a client who is probably a little further along. When I talked about that scale of maturity, Right. Someone who gets to the point that says, you know what? We've been doing it this way for a long time. I think it works, But I'd like to dig deeper into that. And they are willing to embrace data. And so regardless of how much data you have, what we advise is we got to make sure that we start collecting it. If you're less mature on that curve, then let's gather information in the tourism industry, crude example, but we've got clients that have been gathering information at visitor centers, right? So the person, Jim parks his car, he's going to use the restroom, buy a soda, walks in, there's a book there that, that asks you to fill out where, who you are, where you're from, how long you're staying. And, and I've got a client, a state that, that had over 900,000 people voluntarily fill out that information and they were doing nothing with it.

Jim Harenchar:

We're like, oh my God, what a gold mine, right? So don't overlook the obvious. If we look at the other end of the scale, we have some clients that are very, very mature. Use a lot of our peers or partners in the industry. For us, it's looking at how do we build predictive analytics and things like, okay, if Jim Harenshar, based on age, income, presence of children, home value is your target customer, then let's see how we find more. Jim Horrendous. And that applies Andy, not just a tourism, in fact it's one of the later industries to adopt that in financial services. They've been doing that for years. You know, going back to the early 90s when you did get that piece of direct mail in your mailbox, it was because of predictive analytics to determine that you were number one most likely to respond based on all your demographics, but secondarily because you look like an existing customer.

Jim Harenchar:

So we're using those things that have been in place for years and years, still very applicable to today's market and still working exceptionally well.

Andy Splichal:

So you help your clients get the data and then what, what's the next step?

Jim Harenchar:

So the next step is depending upon their level of segmentation. I'm sorry, of sophistication. It tends to be segmentation. So it's like, okay, you know, let's look at how your entire base of customers or prospects are allocated. So what is in that age band? What's in that income band, what's in the net worth band? What are their interests? We've got over 150 self reported interests that are a result of you subscribe to a golf magazine, you made a purchase of golf shoes on a website that we're tracking something along those lines. So if we can begin to enhance the portrait of that individual, then you know how to communicate with that individual. Making relevant opportunities. We had a client in Georgia that was getting ready to launch Restaurant Week for the first time ever.

Jim Harenchar:

They Went into all the data that we had collected on their site visitors where we identify things like an interest in running and exercise, an interest in or subscribe to cooking magazines. All of those interests were identified. They pushed out an email to those folks based on their self reported interests and got a 37 interest rate on their, I'm sorry, 37% click through rate on their email for launching week.

Andy Splichal:

Wow. Yeah, that's huge. So who out there, if they're listening, needs to get a hold of you and how can they contact you?

Jim Harenchar:

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean I think to my point, if it's folks that say either I'm intrigued by data and we've only dabbled in it, but we want to get our arms around it, we'd love to start there with those that are what they believe are proficient and now want to take it to the next level because yeah, I've been deploying GA4 since it launched. Got a good understanding but I, I need to get better. I need to understand that customer journey. I do want to de anonymize my site visitors. Those are the folks we'd love to talk to. The easiest way to get to those people is via our website. One of the things we've done, Andy, for your fans and for subscribers, we've actually set up a link where you can get a discount to use our services.

Jim Harenchar:

So if they go to www.rmg Robert Mary George, rmg-usa.com forward/each click, they can get a special discount on RMG services and learn a lot more about what we do.

Andy Splichal:

Well, that's great. We'll make sure we put that in the link in the show notes here. Now this has been a lot of fun, Jim, but is there got to wrap it up. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we close it down?

Jim Harenchar:

You know, I, I think Andy, we've been very lucky to be around as long as we have. We've tried to remain relevant. I know a lot of people ask me from time to time, what do you see? The future holds, right? Are you guys still going to be here 10 more years from now or 10 months from now? I think we will. You know, I do chuckle to myself having been in this business longer than I care to admit that, you know, AI is. You can't have a conversation around marketing now and talk about AI. I think the funny thing about that is when I first started it just went by a different name. But it was, you know, it was, it was. If it wasn't big data, it was predictive analytics or it was machine learning.

Jim Harenchar:

I mean, I think AI will be very, very interesting for all of us to follow, and certainly it will impact my business and everybody's business. But at the end of the day, whether it is AI or machine learning or predictive modeling or what have you, it's still data, right? And data at its baseline is understanding the difference between Andy and Jim and all your other listeners and compiling as much of that information so you can build as robust a picture to engage with that individual.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, yeah, no, those are great final words. Thanks, Jim.

Jim Harenchar:

Thanks, Andy.

Andy Splichal:

All right, for listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding connecting with Jim or RMG Marketing, you'll find the links in the show notes below for that discount. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our Podcast Resource center available at podcast.makeechclickout.com We've compiled all of our different asked guests by topics in case you would like any information discussed on previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I'll talk to you in the next episode.