John Newtson: All right. Hey everyone, it’s John Newtson again. I am here today with Michael Kim, who is the c e o of AssetMark which is a turnkey asset management company. And Michael, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, John. So I, I’ve, I’ve talked a bit with people in, in our industry about what you guys do and it, it’s been.

Really an interesting conversation. People are very interested because we know that you work with advisors and we know that a large segment of our traffic and customer base are advisors, but we as an industry don’t segregate them out normally, and we don’t market to them as advisors. And so it seems like there’s an.

A very obvious opportunity here to kind of work together with you to, to kind of monetize that audience in a way that, that our industry is not currently doing it and is non-competitive with what we do. So with that said though, yep. I don’t think you, most of us understand what it is that a tamp is and what AssetMark does.

And so if you wouldn’t mind, would you kind of explain who AssetMark is, what you guys do and why advisors work with you?

Michael Kim: Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, John, thank you for having me here. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

You know, in terms of who is AssetMark and what is a tamp, and what do we, what exactly do we do?

Those are, I think, probably the best questions and a place to to start. So in terms of what is a tamp, and I’ll go into who is AssetMark? TAMP stands for Turnkey Asset Management Provider and in immediately in plain English, what we do is we support financial advisors who make a difference in the lives of their clients.

Again, our customers, our financial advisors, and in turn, they leverage our services to really work closely with the individual families, the individual investors whether they’re high net worth investors. Or mass affluent investors and really working closely with them to help their financial goals and dreams come to life.

Now, in terms of what exactly does that mean and, and what are the specific products and services that we offer to the financial advisors? So there’s really three big categories of services. You know, number one, we wanna make sure that we provide the best investment solutions. For your financial advisors who are again, are creating financial plans, managing portfolios on for their clients, and the best investment solutions really entail everything from mutual funds to ETFs.

To stocks and bonds and all different combination thereof. John, as you, as you know, and I’m sure your audience appreciates, there is just a plethora of different investment products out there, and as we like to say, what we do at AssetMark, one of the key values that we offer is we sort of boil the ocean, as we like to say, and we bring what we believe are.

The best solutions across the different risk profiles and across different sort of framework and boxes that we have so that the advisors can select from the best prefix menu, if you will, and then really bring those solutions to the clients. Otherwise, the advisors will be spending bulk of their time trying to do research on thousands and thousands of different products, and we believe that the advisors.

Time is better spent working closely with their clients. The other two areas that we that we offer in terms of servicing advisors is the second is, is on technology. Making sure that both the advisors and their clients have the best, the, the, the fresh digital eye-popping technology experience and just making it easy.

And so that’s the second category. And the third, Is in terms of making it easy, making sure that all of the paperwork, all of the back office operational support, and really the administrative functions, again, we take care of all of that for the financial advisors. Again, so that the advisors can maximize their time with their clients.

At the end of the day. John, that is probably to sum it up to the best way to describe what we do, is we free up the advisor’s time so that they can really go deeper in terms of financial planning, understanding the client’s goals and dreams, and working closely with them to bring their financial goals and dreams to life.

John Newtson: Okay, so that’s great. So when, when I think of like the, the publishing world we’re speaking to the do-it-yourself investor, the, you know, the person who, and, and I think that’s why we have so many advisors in our Yeah. Universe. And, but we also know that the vast majority of the investment world is actually in not a do-it-yourself or they’re a done for you person.

And so the advisors serve that universe. And so, if I’m understanding correctly, then They have, you know, obviously the client generation, client management kind of side of their business, and then they have the deliverable side, which is they have to stay on top of the seemingly endless supply of investment vehicles and opportunities.

And so what you do is you, you basically curate the best of the best of, of that so that they don’t have to spend. Hundreds of hours researching all the time to do that.

Michael Kim: You you nailed it. John and, and in fact we actually use words like curated investment platform to describe our set of solutions that we offer.

You know, the other dimension, John, I think we’re sharing for your audience is, you’re right, many of the investors today are the do-it-yourself investors. Many of them have accounts directly at the retail brokerage firms, and they may be trading the accounts directly. At the same time, you know, a couple things.

One is, as you know, John, it seems like every day there’s a massive headline that creates, creates a lot of volatility and, and just sort of uncertainty in the market, right? And it’s, boy, it is hard enough to navigate the markets when. When you don’t have the inflationary concerns, when you don’t have sort of this mini banking crisis that we’re kind of going through here today, not to mention all the geopolitical issues that we’re all going through.

So given the complexity of just the issues that the investors face today, our belief is that. These day-to-day portfolio management and really managing the financial affairs should be delegated to a professional who is actually who is actually the expert in this field. We use a lot of analogies at our firm, and it’s sort of like when you have an illness, you’re not gonna try to kill cure it yourself.

You’re gonna go see the specialist. And so in a way, we believe that financial advisors are the experts best suited. To work closely with the investors and again, making sure that,

Not only the portfolio management, but a holistic overall financial plan is on track to meet their goals. The other thing John Worth mentioning is and to me this is gonna be a bigger and bigger theme as we go forward.

Just the demographics you know, the average investors based on a number of different industry studies that have kind of, that the, the median, the highest median size and brokerage firms is in their late fifties. And so as the investors get older, Again, their needs get more complex. They may need income, they need a lot more downside protection and capital preservation.

 And so it’s an opportunity for the experts to work closely with the investors and again, helping them make sure that their goals are met. So those are some of the drivers, John, that we see and trends that we see kind of furthering the relationship between financial advisors and the investors.

John Newtson: Makes sense. I think, and, and it’s interesting too cause I, I have done a lot of research into the data on self-directed investors and even within the broad segment of self-directed investors, the vast majority of that is actually somebody who just wants to be able to understand enough to be able to be part of the conversation with their advisor and feel like they have like more knowledge as they talk to an advisor.

It’s not really a replacement for the advisor, so. That’s right. That’s right. Very good points. And so when, when. From, from the publishing perspective then, if we’re talking about how do we select and find the, the appropriate type of advisor for AssetMark to, to start a conversation with what is the, the messaging, I know you mentioned the curating and stuff.

What is the kind type of messaging then that, that would attract the, the appropriate type of advisor? Are there different types of advisors that you prefer to work with versus you find that you don’t work with? Who is that customer on a little bit more of a granular level, I guess. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Michael Kim: So, so John, we we’re fortunate enough to support over 9,000 individual financial advisors and, and really couple of Common denominators, I guess, come about in terms of an ideal client for for S M R number one, we work exclusively with independent financial advisors. Meaning they are they have their own firm, they are maybe affiliated with an independent brokerage firm.

Or they may be their own registered investment advisor. Another way to say it is, is they’re not part of a, a large national brokerage firm where they’re employees of those companies. We believe in independence, John. We believe that the financial advisors should have the highest level of fiduciary standards, you know, governing their engagement and their activities with the clients.

And it’s our mission to support those independent. Fiduciary oriented financial advisors. So that would be one common, you know sort of trait and characteristic. The, the second is the advisors, their number one goal. Their number one goal is to serve the end clients, the, the investors. And you know what, as we talked about earlier, one of the key things that we hear every single day is, What the, the most important thing from the investor’s perspective isn’t whether the advisor you know, purchased sort of Google or Microsoft and sold IBM or, or what have you.

It’s whether they’re gonna be okay. The number one question that we hear from the end clients, investors to the advisors is, Am I gonna be okay? Is my family gonna be okay? Right. And so we believe that the number one job that the financial advisors have is to just spend this much time with the clients, assuring them that they’re gonna be okay, making sure that the financial plans are adjusted, updated in a timely manner to reflect what may be going on both in the macro environment as well as in the lives of the clients.

And making sure that they’re gonna be okay. And so what we do is to free up the time. For the financial advisors so that they can spend that extra two hours, three hours with the clients working through their financial goals. And so making sure that the the advisors are independent and fiduciary mindset advisors.

And number two, they value, they cherish. The time that they spend with their clients. Again, making sure that they’re okay and really letting a firm like us take care of all the research, all the due diligence, and really coming up with the best options for their clients. And so that is really kind of how we think about the idea client of AssetMark and really opportunity for us to make a difference with the lot of the clients.

John Newtson: Oh, that sounds great. So there, you’re, you’re, you’re working with that very entrepreneurial side of the advisory world. That’s right. You are independent and so when our world is, is. Talking to, to, to try and identify those customers. That’s kinda the language that they’re, that they’ll be working with.

That’s right. Yep. No, I think that makes, I think that makes a ton of sense. And is very clear from our perspective on what kind of messaging we should be looking to do to attract them. And I know that I’m, we’re gonna follow up with this, with, with a conversation with Megan on the kind of the, the details of.

Working together on a marketing basis to kind of explore opportunities and I really appreciate you taking the time, Michael, to, to share this with us.

Michael Kim: N o, john thank you. And, and maybe just one other thing that you know, I probably should have mentioned earlier, there’s actually a business dimension here for the financial advisors as well.

And, and what I mean by that is, you know, not only are these advisors that trusted advisor to the clients and the families. But they’re also business owners as well. And so what we think about is, is how do we help that advisor be the best, trusted advisor the wealth counselor for the client through the different solutions that we talked about.

But in addition, how do we help that advisor now put on their entrepreneur hat, their business owner hat, and really helped them grow a, a thriving business? And We have a whole suite of consulting services, kind of business management consulting services that are designed to really help that advisor take the business from a level of entrepreneur spirit to a scaled enterprise.

And so that’s another. Big sort of value that we offer to the advisors and really one of the main reasons why so many advisors not only come work with us, but also stay and continue to grow with us. So I wanted to just share that point Yeah. As well, john.

John Newtson: Yeah. That’s amazing then. Yeah. So you’re actually providing kind of the, the, the business growth kind of consulting or advise to help them build a stronger, more robust business.

Exactly. I I would imagine that’s a pretty exciting marketing message as well. In addition to the time saving on the other side and the due diligence and all of that.

Michael Kim: Well, a absolutely, and, and again, if you, we always look at the issues and the opportunities from the client’s perspective. And again, our client are the financial advisors.

And so, you know, they’re, they wanna spend as much time with their clients and the actual investors, and so, To the extent that we can help them find the best investment option, design the right technology components, and oh, by the way, consult with them from a business management and growth perspective we believe that we’re adding value.

We believe that we’re making a difference to that advisor, both as a trusted fiduciary to the client, but also as a business owner as well.

John Newtson: That makes perfect sense. Awesome. Well thank you so much, Michael. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. This has been super helpful. And then Megan and I will, will follow up this conversation with some of the technical details on, on, on ways we can work together.

And yeah, this is great. I appreciate you. Thank you.

Michael Kim: That sounds great. Well, thank you John. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thanks.

Take care.

John Newtson: All right, so, so now I’m like to introduce everybody to Megan Burling, who is the director of the Client Acquisition marketing team at AssetMark and Cullen Richardson, who’s the senior manager on that team. Thanks guys for joining me. Thank you for having me. You bet. So I know we’ve got a lot of excitement on our side of the industry about this opportunity because it is it’s one of those great kind of.

Affiliate marketing, joint venture opportunities where it’s totally non-competitive. We share the same customer in a lot of ways. And so I’ve, I’ve had a lot of interest. But one of the things before we get started that I wanted to kind of. Say to everybody is when you talk, like I found like going from one industry to another industry, and then also going from kind of smaller entrepreneurial marketers to larger company marketers, that there’s a lot of like language conversations that are like, the language is different, right?

And there’s, that tends to be confusing sometimes for people. And so and then also there’s a process issue of like, We have different processes. You have different processes. Standard operating procedures are very different. And so I feel like the, the, the success of any initial first kind of cross industry marketing effort starts with kind of like managing expectations for everybody and getting on the same page.

And so with that in mind we’re gonna talk about ways for the financial publishing world to drive their advisor traffic over to AssetMark for a c p a, like a cost per acquisition. That means different things to different people, what that acquisition is. And so maybe that’s the best place to start is what does an acquisition mean here?

It’s not the lead, it’s a, it’s a converted customer. Am I correct?

Megan Burling: That’s correct. We refer to them as NPAs, which stands for New Producing Advisors. And the way we look at it is an advisor who has essentially signed a contract to do business with us and is putting a dollar at least on our platform.

We consider them a new producing advisor. And so that’s how we define true client acquisition. We have a model where we allow some advisors to sort of test out our platform so they can get credentials to log in and we classify them as a new advisor, but until they get that account opened and they start funding for dollar, that’s where, where we truly set the, set the clock or set the mark for them being an an actual acquired client.

Okay,

John Newtson: perfect. So that’s for, for everyone in the trader education then pub space. This is think of it like the trading brokerage world where it’s a funded account. Yeah. Except here it’s an advisor and there’s a lot more there. So I guess then the, the, the follow on question to that would be, What does the sales process look like once the lead kind of comes to you so that people can have expectations of timelines and this is not like, hey, soon as somebody clicks, there’s a conversion and you get paid.

This is more like there’s a sales process. So I guess that would be the, the next thing.

Megan Burling: Yeah. So our sales process, the timeline definitely varies. We find with our digital marketing efforts, the timeline is much faster compared to more traditional efforts. Think like. You know, recruiting and lead generation from conferences and referrals, those tend to take more time because that person is still trying to understand sort of the brand and the value from a digital marketing standpoint.

We find that they’re doing their research and that when they’re coming to our sales team, they’re more primed to buy. Mm-hmm. And we have two ways that our sales team will engage with them. The first is we refer to as a hand raise. So we put a lot of content out there. You know, maybe a lead hasn’t necessarily meant like a marketing qualified status yet, but the minute they go, I wanna talk to sales, we automatically qualify them as a MQL or marketing qualified lead.

And our sales team has a pretty rigorous process where they will reach out to that person within 24 hours. And then maintain I believe it’s about seven touches with that contact. So they’ll do three emails, three phone calls, and then kind of a final like goodbye email if they’re not getting any contact.

But usually within that time they’ll, if, if that person is really interested in talking to sales they’ll start engaging with that salesperson right away. And what we see is typically the timeframe from co, from lead. So the minute they become a lead in our system to client on our platform, it’s about two and a half months.

Sometimes it can be three, sometimes it can be two. But a lot of it is because they’re very. When they’re requesting to speak to sales or they’re interested in speaking to sales, they’re pretty ready to go. Mm-hmm. The next situation is what we would say is more of our qualified leads. So these are people who are sort of browsing, they’ve expressed interest.

They’ve, you know, maybe they’re a lead now and then they eventually market and qualify based on like their level of engagement with our website and content. In those cases, sales takes a similar, like, really like diligent follow up approach, but they’ll be a little more casual about it because they don’t wanna pressure this person if they’re not ready to buy.

So they’ll do outreach. Again, they do two to three emails and two to three phone calls. Trying to assess, you know, where this person’s level of interest is. Sometimes clients need more time. Sometimes they have really complex situations that they have to work through. And what I’ll say is one of the factors behind all of this is if they have a more complicated transition.

So they might be changing custodians or they might have a broker dealer relationship that’s a little more complex. That can add to the time that it takes to really get them set up. But in general, we see about two and a half months is the approximate time from the moment they become a lead, which for us is any engagement, like any top of funnel engagement.

 To the point where they become a client. And our sales team is pretty good at filtering out people who are not quite ready, not quite interested, and we move them into an ongoing nurture because they might not be ready now, but they could be ready in the future. And comparatively, our more traditional marketing channels, we see a sales cycle that can be anywhere from six months.

The longest we’ve seen is 18 months. And again, that’s with really complicated cases. But compared to our digital marketing much faster, we’re averaging about 2.5 months. And that’s typically what we would see from our sales side as well. Okay.

John Newtson: No, that’s, that actually two and a half months doesn’t seem, I was, I was, I’m thinking that maybe the longer cycles might be what it, what it was, but two and a half months on a digital lead seems pretty good considering that, I would imagine that in that two and a half months, is that, is that two and a half months to where they’re funding the account so that the entire onboarding process is included in that?

Megan Burling: Yeah, entire onboarding. So the minute they become an N P A and we have first dollar funded.

Cullen Richardson: So it wouldn’t come as any surprise to people in the fin pub world that the more you put in, the more you get out. So the more touches we have with them, the more money they put on the platform actually.

So the, the deal happens faster and they add more money. So you know, marketers have at it, you can, the sky’s the limit

John Newtson: can do well. I think I love that in the, that like, it’s, it’s, you know, One industry over kind of an ancillary industry, but the marketing process is the same. I would imagine that with the, with the online leads, maybe part of the, they’re ready to buy because they’ve had a chance to consume more information and they’re much more educated and prepared.

And so that increased. It’s almost like when you increase friction in marketing, you qualify people more. And so if you are providing them with more information and they have more things to consume, they to make a decision, when they do reach out, they’re much more qualified. Versus here’s an opt-in for something that might be interesting.

Megan Burling: Yeah, that’s, that’s 100% what we’re seeing. We think that consumer behavior right now, most people are gonna shop around before they make a buying decision. And that when they’re ready to, I use an example of like, I’m searching for black shoes or something. By the time they’ve decided, like, these are the shoes, they’re ready to buy them already, cuz they’ve already searched and looked and price compared and, and if they’re landing on, you know, this site, they’re, they’re pretty ready to go.

That’s what we’re seeing as well. And we’re trying to do a really excellent job through our marketing to, to level set the value that advisors can get from AssetMark and really how to get started with AssetMark in the right way so that there’s no. Failure of, you know, expectations and, and reality not lining up.

John Newtson: That makes sense. And do you have like preset or, or existing lead magnets people could use? And like, basically, so process wise, I’m thinking about this. Is this something where people can take some of the creative that you have? Create traffic drivers for themselves with their traffic, and then just Dr.

Use those traffic drivers to point to existing assets that you have an existing sales funnel or if they wanted to kind of build their own version of that to kind of then nurture them a little bit, get them qualified first, and then link to you like, what are the options, I guess in that sense.

Megan Burling: We have a number of options Cohen can definitely add into this.

But we, we bucket our, I would say kind of our, our menu into full fledged campaigns, which anchors around a top of funnel P C O that’s connected to a landing page. And all of that’s built out already. Each PCO focuses on some sort of broader thematic that. Addresses a, a common advisor pain point and then really showcases how they can resolve that pain point.

And more importantly for us, how they can resolve that pain point by working with asmr. Mm-hmm. In addition to that, once they download that content, they’re then enrolled in an email nurture that brings additional content to their inbox. And then we, once the, once the nurture ends, we kinda give them an opportunity to then choose something else.

We, we refer to it as the choose your own adventure. So we’re finding a lot of success with that already, just from a standard of getting them in and then getting them at least marketing qualified. Mm-hmm. The other areas we have is we regularly publish to our blog. So we have a lot of great articles there.

Sometimes a, a subscriber model into the blog is a little less I would say a little less like skin in the game than signing up for a A P C O. And then we utilize a number of ads through Google and LinkedIn. And so all of that is available. And if Colin, I don’t know if you wanna share anything else around the campaigns that we have, but we definitely, yeah.

Within a dozen campaigns right now. Yeah.

Cullen Richardson: Yeah, I was about to say, those are pretty much your options. If you want to email on our behalf, if you wanna buy ads pretty much the top funnel stuff would be the blog content. And then like Megan said, we have about 12 PDFs. That’s generally our entry point for all of our leads.

It would be a white paper or a guide, et cetera. Okay.

John Newtson: So in those, so what are, what are those top kind of pain points then? Just in terms of like the messaging strategy that that, that things are built around?

Megan Burling: So what we find is this is gonna probably be relevant for everybody, it’s time. Time is the biggest pain point I think for most financial advisors.

Depending on how their business is structured, they’re trying to do a lot. And clients more and more are demanding more of their advisors time, or at least demanding more. Sophisticated technology or tools or features that an advisor might not have time to vet and implement. And so we our company hosts a outsourcing study, which is really all about like why it financial advisors can benefit from outsourcing to platforms like ours.

And again, one of the, the biggest. Biggest components that we put out there is that, you know, you’re, you’re looking at saving almost one, one workday a week, so you say about eight hours on average. And that seems to be one of the biggest challenges we find financial advisors is you get in a situation where you are trying to do everything.

And in some cases you don’t have the expertise, you don’t have the interest. But overall you don’t have the time. And so that’s one of the major themes we see. With that there’s obviously other things that factor into it. Some advisors, we also find that one area is around growth, like how to properly scale and grow your business, whether you are planning to retire and you wanna sell it or maybe you wanna transition it to someone in your office.

We have a lot of consulting resources within our firm that help advisors make that transition. And if you’re just getting started and, you know, maybe you’re contemplating, do I want to do I wanna go r i a or maybe I wanna go hybrid or maybe I wanna tuck in somewhere, or maybe I’m very comfortable with a broker dealer relationship.

They can help financial advisors kind of understand that landscape a bit more and then help them with their transition. And so that’s another area that we find that there’s a lot of interest and that we have a lot of expertise to offer. And then other areas, which are were always interesting is we have a lot of great thought leadership, so, Anything around the market, the current market volatility that we’re experiencing, some of the, you know, inklings around, are we headed for a recession?

We bring in a lot of thought leadership around that. And have content focused on helping advisors have those conversations with clients, which seems to be. Really the crux of, of where they’re getting at. They’re experts. They understand what a lot of this stuff means. Mm-hmm. Their clients necessarily don’t.

And sometimes the challenge is how to get that information to clients. So we covered that area as well. And then the other thing we’re seeing a lot of, which is really interesting, but related to what I just said is marketing. Marketing. It gets more and more complex. I, I have kind of a statement of a, if you’ve been in marketing, but you’ve been out of it for a number of years, whatever you thought you knew, you now don’t know anymore.

So I think financial advisors, again, they’re, they’re not skilled marketers. That’s not their career path. But they need to use it and they need to understand it. So we have a lot of content around how to think about marketing, how to utilize marketing in your business, and of course, How to outsource all that marketing using tools and services and the professionals in our company to help them do that more effectively.

Especially if they’re not interested in becoming a professional marketer on their own.

John Newtson: Right, right. No, that’s great. That’s not, I mean, that’s very understandable I think, cuz it’s the, these are the pain points like you said, of, of if you have a business, this is, you know, you know, how do you save time? I love that concrete.

It’s a very concrete statement to save about one day a week. Like that’s very, That’s a great like copy angle and then, you know, business growth. Makes sense. Total sense. And, and like customer service essentially. How do you talk about the comp, the complexity of the markets and then Yeah. Marketing obviously is, is a huge thing.

So so then you have assets around all of those things that people can work with and drive to and use. And I would imagine when somebody starts working with you to try and drive traffic, then they can get a, they can get access to all that stuff so that they can, you know, Maybe cut pieces out or redo things to, to, to put into their own traffic drivers and send over and then I guess like the, the, the next question I would have then is like, I kinda the technicals or technicalities of tracking this.

So if you have, you know, three people who are sending over traffic you know, what’s the process for them seeing what’s happening? How do they track it? How do they know that, you know, How do they get their, their, their feedback from the traffic that they send to see like, Hey, these guys are in cycle, this percentage of people were in the sales process.

And then, you know, when they convert, obviously, like, what’s that first, the, I guess the, the tracking piece look like, and then I would say like kind of the, the communication piece with them.

Megan Burling: Yeah, we pretty robust campaign tracking. And col sets up a lot of that. So come on. I’m actually gonna let you take this question.

Explain just how we track and, and report.

Cullen Richardson: Yeah, so we use HubSpot as our C R M, so we build the links in. They’re custom, if anyone wants to build out their own affiliate links and things like that. I think we’d probably be open to that. I don’t think we’ve discussed it much, but that would be our baseline, so we could at least follow the publisher.

So we just need basic information about whoever’s publishing what, what their name is, what the campaign is. Mm-hmm. Things like that. So we’d have to work together.

John Newtson: Okay. And then it would just be working with what, with you Cullen in terms of like, Hey, we’re, we’re sending this amount of traffic. And so it’d be just kind of a personal relationship then, right?

With you guys?

Michael Kim: Yeah,

John Newtson: exactly. All right. So very easy, straightforward. And then I, I guess the other question would be, Once you have converted customers, kind of what’s the, the timeline on, on like getting paid? Just so everyone, again, setting expectations like, so that people know what’s happening and they don’t, they have something that’s working and they don’t know it yet, and then they stop because they haven’t waited it out.

Megan Burling: Yeah. So our finance team bills with like a net 30 model. So essentially as soon as we get. As soon as we have someone on platform and they have a dollar on there, we would look to pay, I would say roughly within 30 to 45 days following that. Mm-hmm. And of course if there’s other sort of payment terms that we need to modify and pay towards, we can certainly do that.

We just have to essentially create a, what we refer to as like a statement of work and a purchase order with our finance team. But that’s essentially how we pay all all vendors, all payments. And then we also utilize invoicing, so, mm-hmm. We don’t do credit card payments, credit card payments, it depends on the amount, but in most cases we do invoicing.

Right. And it’s, that’s typically how they, they would process it. So what I would say is probably for the sanity of everyone is essentially doing like a monthly Here’s all the converted clients and then we’d pay out following that monthly report within 30 days.

John Newtson: Alright. Yeah, that’s fairly straightforward then again.

So then I guess, I guess the, the final thing would be if somebody wants to, you know, start testing traffic in terms of the, would just be a contact. With you. I mean, I’m happy I, I’ll send over a bunch of introductions to everybody and I don’t wanna post your email addresses out there so that they can be scraped by bots or anything, but like I would imagine that’s really just what it is, is anyone who’s interested, reach out to me.

I’ll make the introductions, send you over and you guys can take it from there. That would be great. Yeah. Easy enough. All right, well I think, you know, like I said, there’s a lot of excitement about this cuz I think it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s another revenue stream for, for publishers and hopefully a, a new acquisition source for you guys.

And so I’m gonna get this out to everybody and, and anyone who’s interested, like, please reach out to me. And if you have any questions and you know, you guys are happy to, to answer ’em and we’ll. Test this out for everybody and hopefully we have like a big win-win here. Sure. For everybody involved.

So

Cullen Richardson: I wanted to tack on real quick what a sample conversion rate might be. That might be a question on mind.

Yeah, that’s right. Sorry. Historically, in our digital marketing program, we’ve been around for three years, maybe give or take. And o over that time we’ve seen about a 0.78% conversion rate. So you have to bear in mind, we, we started really slowly as a pilot program.

 And we, we brought our cost per lead down from four figures to three to low, three figures, almost two figures. So we’ve made a lot of progress in that meantime, I, I think, and experienced digital marketer, if they stay on top of it and make the case on our behalf, they’d be able to get in front of the customer easier.

I think they could maybe do better.

John Newtson: Yeah. That’s great. No, that’s great. I think that’s, like I said, there’s a lot of people who are already excited just from my conversations with them to give this a shot and some pretty big traffic sources out there. And just again, to reiterate to everybody who’s listening There have been folks who have had outside parties look at their traffic and identify that somewhere between eight to 10% of that traffic is just advisor traffic.

And then if you look at your customer lists, like you can see like, because we always talk about this in the industry, you can see like. There is you know, an advisor URL behind a lot of the names on your customer lists. You have, you have these folks in there and you haven’t segmented them out. And so this would be a way for you to, to, to monetize that segment of your, of your audience.

For a lot of you with, with a product, with a, with a payoff that’s more than the products that you sell. So like that’s a, that’s a really exciting additional revenue stream to throw in there for not, not a whole lot of effort on your part. So I’m excited to roll this out, and thanks again, Megan and Cullen for doing this.

This should be a lot of fun to, to see how, how it works out.

Megan Burling: We’re excited to give us a go.

Michael Kim: Yep. Same. Thanks, John.

John Newtson: Thanks. All right. Take care. All.