Why Your Loyalty Emails Don't Convert — Yosef Peterseil, Blings

Jeremy Julian: Today's episode is brought to you by Restaurant Technologies Incorporated. They are the leading automation for cooking oil system out there in the market. If you're not familiar with them, they've been on the show a few times to share some of the unique and cool things they continue to do with oil management. I recently had their newly appointed CEO on the show, and they built an end-to-end closed loop automated oil management system that delivers, monitors, filters, collects. And recycles your cooking oil. It sounds like they do a ton, but it really is a cool system that I think everybody should be considering looking at. They clean up one of the dirtiest and dangerous jobs in your kitchen. So if you haven't heard of them, I would encourage you to check them out. rti-inc.com, or you can call them at 888-779-5314. They've helped over. 50,000 customers of the United States with their cooking oil. So clearly they are doing something right. And now back to the episode. Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us. As I like to say each and every time, I know you guys have got lots of choices. So thank you for hanging with us today. Today is a unique episode, and I'm excited to dig into it with our guests. But Yusuf, why don't you introduce yourself real quick? What you guys have built, dude. I'm blown away and I'm like super excited to share it with our guests. But why don't you give a little bit of background? Where did you come from and kind of how did you how did you get into to where you're at with blings?

Yosef: sure. Well, thanks for having me. First of all, Jeremy. It's great to be it's great to be on. a little bit about myself. I studied an undergrad in psychology. then I did my master's in business, part-time IDC pipe part-time warden. And in that time I actually had my first business, which was a brick and mortar business that I sold back in 2017. I worked for a VC for a while. kind of saw what it's like to invest in companies. And then then I'm like, I think I gotta be on the other side of this again. So me and a childhood friend came up with an idea to build a new video technology that hadn't been seen before. He's more on the technical side and he does he has a very unique perspective in client side rendering, which is what our video is based on. And I did more the go-to-market and you know marketing and sales. So we fit together very well and been doing this now for six years. Which is a long time.

Jeremy Julian: I'm gonna take a quick break to talk about one of our sponsors. How many calls did your restaurant miss going into dinner last night? One of our sponsors, Yelp, built something exactly to solve that problem. You know the Yelp for reviews. Host is their new AI phone answering service for restaurants. And the idea is simple your phone should help make you money, not cost you money. The host solution answers every single call, even after hours. No customers have to go to voicemail. No customers have to sit on hold indefinitely. You don't lose the revenue. It also helps you book tables as well as take orders and send them straight to the kitchen. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it supports over 17 languages. It integrates with multiple point of sale solutions, open table, and Yelp's own guest manager. One restaurant saved over 80 hours a week in labor, and another booked 500 tables in a three-month window using this solution. Go to business.yelp.com forward slash RTG to learn more. And now? Back to the opposite. I love it. So talk to me a little bit about blinks because again, when you and I got on before the show, like you were explaining a little bit about what you guys had done. We'd gone back and forth via email. I'm like, hey, help me understand this, but I'd love for you to kind of give a a pretty high level on what it is that you guys are doing because it sounds really, really, really cool and super unique and not something I'm seeing definitely in our space, in the restaurant space. I'd love to to have you talk a little bit about what it is and then we can dig into how you guys are really moving the needle with some brands that you guys are working with.

Yosef: Yeah, sure. I mean, first of all, when you think about the problem, right? We're in a video world. All our members, all our users, even us, like when I had to fix my washing machine, I didn't I didn't go into the manual anymore. I go to a YouTube reel, a quick video, and I'm like, how do how do I do it? You want everything to be quick. And everyone

Jeremy Julian: Mm-hmm.

Yosef: knows that. We are in a 100% video first world. Yeah, we're all sending these, you know, vague textual communications like email and SMS or even in app. All the first party communication today is lacking with engagement. It's it's lacking realism. So everything is very textual based, textual heavy. And no one's really reading it. No one's going into your newsletter and saying, my God, I can't wait for the next newsletter. This was amazing because it's all text and some images. And we realize that's a real pain. Everyone's in a video world. We're sending them, bombarding them with text. How can we make that converge? And what we realized is if we're able to uniquely turn every textual touch point into a personalized and interactive video, the assumption was that would be really great for the user, for the member. They would like it, they would interact with it, they would convert at the end of the day, right? And so that's where that's what we decided to do. and it worked very, very well from the start. So we've been growing in lots of different industries over the past six years. in Europe, in Australia, in South America, in the United States and Canada, and we're just seeing there's a real need for this and a real pull from the market for personalized and interactive videos to replace any first party channel that you have.

Jeremy Julian: Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about what that even means. Cause I you're you you used a little bit of inside language and you and I had time to talk. But for our listeners out there, you know, I guess what are they doing today? Why don't we define what they're doing today? Cause I I I know because you and I have talked about that, but what are they doing today? And how how are you guys taking that and making it personalized in a way that is so different? Because it literally was a mind-bender when I read your guys's kind of intro, and then you know, you and I've been talking. So I'd love for you to dig in a little bit deeper as to kind of what are what are they doing today? And how are you guys replacing that in a different way that really, quite honestly, I've not seen in our space?

Yosef: Yeah, so when you think of lifecycle marketers, of loyalty marketers, email marketing, CRM, what they're doing today is sending out textual-based emails, textual-based SMSs, textual-based in-app, right? Push notifications. Everything is very text heavy. So they already have different journeys, which, you know, from the beginning, from a welcome journey all the way back to a win back. And then depending on the company, you'll have an upsell, you'll have a friend referral, you'll have you know, a cross sale, you'll have a lot of different things, you know. a tier upgrade, there's so many different journeys that they have. And they're right now they're just sending them out their email. And our promise is very easy. They will say, let's just just test it. Here, try one of this. A B test it against your current email. What is converting better? And it's an easy, you know, people just relate more to video than they would to any textual. They just feel more special. They feel heard. They feel seen. You're personalizing the medium and not just, you know, the the tokens in the email.

Jeremy Julian: Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about how you guys were able to pull that off, because it sounds like it's next to impossible. You know, we've been talking about in our world, and I've had other guests on the show before that are talking about one-to-one marketing and figuring out how to get to a place. And we talked about a pre-show, but it's it's it's impossible for anybody to sit and record of, you know, part of why everybody defaulted to text and or to emails is I can throw it into my email engine and and blast everybody with what it is that I need to put out there. You guys have now made it. personalize without having to have somebody sit in a room recording for eight hours a day all of these personalized messages every day. So I guess I'd love to to have you talk a little bit about a little bit about how you guys were able to translate that because I think it's a a unique way and I know you guys have patented kind of you guys a solution, but I'd love to to have you share a bit more about that.

Yosef: Yeah, sure. So what are your options today? If you would want it tomorrow, you would want to create one million personalized videos. You would have to generate one million personalized videos, right? And there there's different

Jeremy Julian: Yes. Impossible.

Yosef: ways to do that. And you can render lots of things and you can say, okay, I'm gonna create one million videos now. It's gonna cost you a lot of money. The data isn't gonna be in real time because it's gonna be r relevant for that moment in time. And the actual file format is extremely heavy. That's why we we don't see it like in websites. So we we took those issues and we said, how can we solve for that? And what we've developed is patented a new video format called the MP5, which instead of rendering, instead of creating each video individually, we just create one video template. And that template is HTML. So you put it in your CRM, right? You create a new template and you put it in your CRM. And once the user clicks on it, It generates a video in that moment in time, meaning every user, once they click on the video, pulls in the data and the video is rendered on the end user's device in real time. So we're not pre-creating anything everything, anything. It's basically one video template that has unlimited personalized variations based on data for that individual person at that moment in time. So if you send it out an email today, someone goes in in three weeks, right? They click on the video, that video is relevant for that second in time. So it's pulling in the CRM data, it's generating it on the end user's device. It doesn't matter if it's a mobile device or a desktop. And that way we can actually create billions of videos in a millisecond. And we're the only ones in the world that can do that with the file format that weighs 60 kilobytes and the video that data is never exposed to us. So it's not like we're telling you send over your data, we'll create all that, all these videos. You keep doing what you're doing. Don't change anything. Just put in its HTML snippet and you're done. Right. And the all the data remains between your server and the end user's device. So it's never going into blings at any point.

Jeremy Julian: Yeah, it it it almost sounds I mean it's definitely unique and it's really, really cool how you guys are doing that. I guess talk to me a little bit Yosef, you and I were talking prior to Hit and Record about, you know, kind of a how most of your clients are taking this on. They're not trying to take on their entire campaign, everything that they've got, because many times this is a 10-year-old like CRM that they've got all these different win backs and birthdays and anniversaries and all these different things. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what does it look like more practically? Like let's go dig into I think you use the the birthday example, but use whatever example you want with a brand that you guys have seen and kind of what what's happening and what's changing within their world as they start to deploy blings and kind of how you guys are doing this.

Yosef: Yeah, so basically we'll we're gonna layer onto whatever they already have, any existing data, any existing journeys, right? Essentially, we have companies that use us for just let's think of tier upgrade for a second, right? Not every company knows exactly how many points. They don't know which products they previously purchased, the members, not everything's accessible. So they're not gonna go to tier upgrade saying, Hi, first name. These are the products you previously purchased, this is how much each one of them costs. Click here. To finalize, so they're not gonna do that, right? We can get to ex extreme personalization. First, we're gonna go to the lowest hanging fruit, right? What do you have? Do you have a birthday? That's awesome. You have a welcome? Great. Let's A-B test that. So you have first name, you have date of birth, that's enough. It doesn't have to be extremely robust, and definitely not at the beginning. But once you see that we'll outperform both birthday and win back, and welcome and anniversary. An end-of-year summary, whatever it is that you already have existing, that's when we see with our clients, they have an aha moment. They have a eureka. They're like, hey, we have more data that we should be using correctly. And personalization, you know, it's definitely a buzzword of 2024, but it still is. Like if you're not personalizing, you're doing something wrong. Everyone knows that in the back of their mind. And this a lot of time ignites that transition to becoming more personalized to hyper-personalization. Because you now have a video technology to adapt to.

Jeremy Julian: So what's getting delivered? Is it Cornell Sanders at KFC getting on the mic and talking about what the offer is? And obviously I'm I'm saying it somewhat jokingly. Is it Shaquille

Yosef: Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: O'Neal from Big Chicken standing there doing something? Or is it the text with a a flyover of the of the products? Like, talk to me a little bit about what's even rendering on the get on the guest side when they engage with this video.

Yosef: That's a great question. And thank God for AI and for being in 2026. because what we would do three, four years ago, it's it is outdated. So what we can do today is a different ballgame. So you can create a full-on production today, if you have the rights with Shaquille O'Neal, right? So we're just saying we would have Shaquille you know, give us two minutes of talking, we can personalize it for everyone after that. so it could be from an avatar, some you know, someone actually explaining what they do that would be completely personalized for each individual to two-dimensional animation. just showing burgers flying and your name here and like so so to like I I guess any any kind of video that you want today can be created with an MP5, which that wasn't true a few years ago. So our technology, our product is super advanced today. And you can connect different voices for different people, right? If you want, you know, different access. So we we created a video for Meta. one template, 33 different languages based on geolocation. So you only create one template. You have different languages, you have different accents for different places, different data, different narrations. So anything is possible. So you could think out of the box. We really tell marketers that we work with, be creative. How can you stand out? What is it that we can do? Let's do that.

Jeremy Julian: Well, and the thing that that that blows me away so much, and I know we talked about it earlier, is just the idea of doing it at scale. Because prior to prior to a solution like what you know you guys have built, it's impossible. You can't send a personalized message. You can s potentially get to the data where you're personalizing and you've got multiple journeys, and you've got the soccer mom and you've got the business guy, and you've got, you know, you build these avatars, but those avatars can can get delivered, and then you segment your market, but not to the level Where now you can create not just a personalized text message, but you know, something that's that's being delivered. How does the guest, you know? So now they're receiving this video, whether it's Shaquille O'Neal coming on saying, check out our new, you know, Nashville hot chicken, you know, sandwich to you know, this burger flying in and all of these different paths. You talked about it being personalized, but it you also talked about the guests being able to engage with it. I guess I'd love to to to hear what the guests receive and kind of what is their engagement? Because Most of the emails are just pretty static and then you hope to get them in the building. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about what that looks like from a from an engagement perspective, especially on the first party side.

Yosef: Yeah, so so everything is very much connected to data, right? So we know what what videos people like to engage with more. So like a welcome series. I'll give you, I'll give you an example, something working very well with QSRs today as a welcome series. It's hi, first name, we have a gift for you. Click to reveal the gift. You know, and everything is very nice in animations, and then you click on that, and then it opens a specific gift based on person, location, whatever. If if there is, or it could be a generic very simple. All we needed is first name. And interactivity. So the MP5 video is made of HTML. HTML forever doesn't know is really what every website is made out of. So every website can be clickable. Every website you can scroll, right? When you look at your Instagram page or Facebook page, everyone gets the same thing, right? And everything is clickable. But you see an MP4 video in there, it's always static. It's never gonna be live. So our video essentially Is a lot it lives with the page. So you refresh the page, the video itself also refreshes, right? so basically any kind of interactivity is welcome. So it could be the every video has a KPI. So we want someone to click, we want someone to buy. What's what's the best way to get someone to buy? Is it is it to get have another click in the middle saying, hey, click on this to reveal your gift? You click on that, you get a gift, or maybe it's just Put that call to action in as fast as possible and get them to click on that so that they'll actually redeem whatever it is you want. So there's a lot of database for each one of these different videos, for each one of these different journeys. I'll tell you one thing in a welcome journey, I'll tell you something else in a win-back journey or in a tier upgrade journey.

Jeremy Julian: And are you typically trying to drive them to digital sales or or in-store engagements or a little bit of both, I guess? Cause again, I think there's different, you know, different strokes for different folks. And I know when I talk to restaurant operators out there, they're trying to drive people, you know, marketers are constantly trying to get attention. And then once they get attention, they're trying to get action. In that action, do you guys have the ability to even drive behaviors that way through these videos? Is that kind of what you guys are trying to do?

Yosef: Yeah, so so again, that depends on the KPI. A lot of times it is omnichannel. Like make sure

Jeremy Julian: Okay.

Yosef: to go into the store and redeem this. that's that's one use case that we've done many times. Another time it's just complete a purchase from within the actual video. So you want this, you can actually click on the video, it connects to an API, and you you either redeem or you actually purchase through the video. So it depends on how tech savvy the the company is. Right. Do they have APIs? Do they even know what APIs? A lot of times they don't. A lot of

Jeremy Julian: Yes.

Yosef: times they don't. And that's fine. And you know, that's that's you know, the majority I would say, even the companies we work with in QSR. we have the ability to do amazing things based on whatever data and whatever abilities you have, but we are very adaptable even for someone that only has first name, and that's the only thing they're doing in their CRM, we'll still be able to help you a lot.

Jeremy Julian: Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about how dynamic the offer can be. You talk about rendering the video real time. You talked about earlier, you know, you send out this text, you send out this email, you send out this, and they don't eng engage for three weeks. Well, maybe my offer today was to try the new Nashville hot chicken sandwich that's only available till the end of the month. And it's only available for the next 10 days. Do you guys have

Yosef: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Julian: the ability to kind of do an if-then statement that says, hey, if I don't open it till 10 days from now? That Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich is no longer there. And I need to try the new Buffalo chicken sandwich that that is coming out. Is that, you know, is that part of what it is? Cause in that static email that's rendering when you send it, it's out and it's gone. And when they see it, it may or may not be able to be there. I was just I guess I'm just wondering how dynamic can you guys make those offers based on where the guest is at, how close a store is, any of those kind of things when they render that video.

Yosef: That's a great, great question. we're actually just launching a campaign now with Papa John's, where it's gonna be every two weeks, it's gonna be a different offer. So what we did there is there's a countdown to a specific time, right? So you get the offer, you'll see the clock ticking, right? So it it it creates a sense of urgency. you go in three days later, it's the same clock, it's the same thing that's actually ticking down. At the end of those two weeks for them specifically. It's gonna be sorry, this offer is done. So the video would change. The same video now changes, saying, that's done. We will be back with the new offer, right? That's one option. And click here to continue shopping. second option, which we can also do is just switch that offer to a different offer, right? Or more than that, even A-B test it. So have one with a click, you know, click to reveal the offer and one without. They can both run in parallel. Whatever's converting better, our algorithm knows how to optimize and say, okay, for this specific population, make sure to use only the one with the gift review. That's working better. Right. And then

Jeremy Julian: What?

Yosef: at the end of those two weeks, it would start it again with a different offer, that same A B test, but it would be timed based on whatever the business need is.

Jeremy Julian: Well, that's pretty cool that you guys are able to even render different videos, not just based on time, but even your A B testing. I mean, a lot of a lot of digital marketers, whether it's text and and and or email, are doing exactly what you're doing. They'll send out a thousand emails and whichever one gets gets clicked the most, then they'll push everything that way. The fact that you guys are able to do that on the backside with video is really, really cool because again, you guys are seeing it and and knowing knowing where those things are at. Where are you guys finding the most success? I I know again. lot of people you you talk about the fact that you guys can get any any content out based on what you get from that guest. I know that SMS is a big piece. The return rates oftentimes are are greater on that. You know, text message for those that don't don't know what that means. Emails are also something I guess where are you guys finding the most success with rendering video? Because SMS is great, but mobile data is not always as great as, you know, plugged in data on a browser and all of those kind of things. I guess I'd love to to hear a little bit about kind of the back end story of where you guys are at because Rendering video on a mobile while I'm on the train in New York is probably a little bit different than, you know, sitting at sitting at your house right next to a cell tower or whatever else.

Yosef: so for us it it doesn't matter. We have developed technology called HLS. It's a little bit like YouTube, right? So if you're if you're on YouTube on on a train, what does it do? It decreases the quality of the video, but makes sure that

Jeremy Julian: Okay.

Yosef: it loads right away. So the loading time will always be zero. The quality might decrease based on you know the the access you have to Wi-Fi. So, but in terms of the differences, we don't see, I wouldn't compare email to SMS at all. It's two different channels. Like

Jeremy Julian: Okay. Yes.

Yosef: here you'll see a 30% click-through rate, and here you'll see a 0.05 click-through rate. You know what I mean? In the same company, people react differently to mobile. People like mobile more. It's also more expensive. So a lot of times, you know, a lot of companies are steering away from that or have it in the roadmap for next year. A lot of companies have it in the roadmap for next year, for several years.

Jeremy Julian: Yeah, exactly. It just keeps becoming one of those things that like, we're gonna get to it. We're gonna get to it eventually and a hundred percent yep.

Yosef: It's something we're gonna get to it. We're we're collecting. We're collecting. But it's a it's it's a different being, right? And for us it doesn't matter exactly.

Jeremy Julian: Yep. And you communicate differently on it ty typically.

Yosef: And what we would say is let's see what you're doing here. We're gonna increase it from 30 to 35 percent to sixty percent, right? Whatever. Well, we're gonna A B test it and see what we can do. Same thing with the email, same thing with the push. We we see them as different channels and we have a different strategy on each one. based on whatever our client is telling us about their members. We wanna see their members. We wanna understand how they act and how they would react to a video.

Jeremy Julian: I I love it. talk to me a little bit about I guess, discernment from the clientele side of things. you know, everybody's worried about AI slop and everybody's worried about putting stuff out there that that that doesn't represent the brand well. A lot of marketers are always, you know, they always get this, well, you're sending stuff out and you're rendering it on my behalf. I guess I'd love for you to talk to those listeners that it might be a little bit skeptical, but you're just sending AI video slop out into the world that's not necessarily. not only driving the behavior that you're looking for, but it might even damage the brand if not done well.

Yosef: Yeah, that's also a a great question. I think it's a legitimate fear that everyone has because we're seeing so much of it, right? And if a company isn't fearful of that, they should be. Should that it's exactly.

Jeremy Julian: Yep. I mean we don't need somebody with six fingers on on a hand or, you know, everybody remembers the the video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that looked like he had three eyeballs or whatever

Yosef: Yep, yep.

Jeremy Julian: else. And I think that's a lot of people's perception, because to your point, that was three or four years ago. But people keep bringing it back around to say, well, this is what it what it was. So sorry, I'll let you keep answering the question. I do think everybody

Yosef: Yeah. Yeah, I'm

Jeremy Julian: should be skeptical, but tell me why they why you guys have have, I guess, built the guardrails around that to make sure that you guys protect the brand.

Yosef: Yeah, if someone sees AI Slop, they won't trust the brand anymore. That's done,

Jeremy Julian: Mm-hmm.

Yosef: right? It's something that we're very well aware of. I mean, it's very different, but I love nature movies videos. Like I see all these reels and I saw this like snake against an iguana, and an iguana had two heads at a certain point, and then it went into one, turned into one head. I'm like, my God, I'm I'm unfollowing this channel. I do not trust them anymore. You know, they had my I believe in them, I don't anymore. That can happen to any brand. Right, QSR or nature channel, doesn't matter. For us, there's always a human component. Nothing is ever 100% AI, and everything is approved by the client. So we have lots of different abilities to get a video to 70, 80% done very quickly. And we can turn around with any video within 72 hours. Right. So it'll take whatever, it'll take the context, it will take the text. It's not going to be 100%. It's not. But we have people on our team that will take it from the 70, 80% to 100% getting the client's approval. A lot of times we'll have four, five, six, seven different variables, right? And we'll say, look,

Jeremy Julian: Mm-hmm.

Yosef: this scene will be created eight times with something different in each one, just to prove that. We send it out, and then we see what's converting best. And that our algorithm will do by itself after all the scenes were approved.

Jeremy Julian: So for those that are out there that have never had to record, you know, they've been a text warrior, they've been a Canva user or use some form of other marketing where they're used to, you know, rendering emails and getting the top of the fold stuff. How hard is it to get that same message into a recording? Cause you guys are are having to have them record the templates, you know, and and and and I can hear these marketers that have been doing it for 20 or 30 years going. there's no way I can set up a studio to do all of these kind of things. And for those watching on video, they see your your smile. Tell tell us how

Yosef: Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: hard it is or how easy it is to create the videos that it is that you guys are talking about. You s you mentioned scenes just a little bit ago. I'm assuming with all of the technology we have, even today recording this podcast, it's like five years ago when I started these things. It was a hell of a lot harder to do these podcasts on video than it is today and and all of that. So I I'd love for Love for you to to dispel those myths that says I gotta go to some Hollywood level studio to record my, you know, thirty second clip for people.

Yosef: Yeah. So so we have a few different ways to create the video. one is a professional video editor, right? So anyone using something called Adobe After Effects, creating videos, can use our technology, right? We have a special extension for that. So if you have someone in-house generating videos, do whatever you want. You want an avatar, you want two dimensional, whatever it is you want, do the same thing. Use our extension. You got that for yourself, or we can do that for you if you want like a full on branded The second option is using templates, existing templates in our platform. You just need a click, another click to connect. Very easy. You're using that. You can change things you want into template within our platform, change your logo, change your colors, you know, change the wording. Everything is really at the tip of your fingers. Very easy. So you're using an existing template that already proved value for similar brands. The third option is just taking that email, right, and pasting it in our AI. Right, so it's like a text AI, it'll give you that output, which will take you to again 70, 80% of the way. You can change it yourself, or we can have our creators look at it and say, this is what we would do, and change it very, very easily. So you have those three ways from extremely customizable with like Adobe After Effects to do it yourself and customize it however you want, anywhere in the middle. as well as by the way, Figma. So we have an extension for Figma. If you have you know, designers in-house working on something, we can pull it from Figma and turn it into an MP5 video today. So you get all the design, you do what you want. If it's within Avatar, it's gonna work a little differently, but assuming it's not directly from Figma and we animate it.

Jeremy Julian: That's amazing. let's talk about some success. I know we talked a little bit earlier about the Habit Burger. for those that are not familiar with Habit, it's a West Coast based burger brand that recently got bought by Yum. I know you guys are doing some really, really cool stuff. And when I saw the numbers, I'm quite honestly, I'm like, all right, really, really are we delivering those kind numbers? So I guess I'd love for you to talk about the success because you guys have been doing some work with with habit and really driving some some in additional engagement that they weren't and They're owned by one of the biggest restaurant brands in the country, you know, Yum brands now. And so they've got people in house that know how to do this stuff for Taco Bell and and, you know, some of these other KFC and whatnot. But obviously you guys are driving some success. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about Habit Burger and what you guys have been able to do for them.

Yosef: Yeah, so what we did for them is actually very unique. We all know friend referrals, right? It's something, you know, it works some of the time, it doesn't work the other times. we understood, first of all, it's very important for a referral program to have a two-sided incentive, right? The

Jeremy Julian: Yes.

Yosef: one that's sending the referrer and the referee, they should both be getting something. So that that was a starting point. Now, it was actually their idea. They're like, hey, let's turn this into a friend referral video. We've never done that before. Like this sounds great. The current referral rate, you know, is anywhere between two to five percent. We went out with that. And think about it. This is the first ever video referral program in the world. They were the first ones to do that. What does that mean? You you know says, hey Jeremy, you just won a free burger, right? Click here to redeem. You click, that's an API. You got your burger right away. And it says, Do you want to share the love? Yes. You click yes. Who do you want to share with? And then you can type in the video because it's HTML. Yosefe. In the video, you're doing this. And then you click share, opens all the sharing capabilities you have on your device. You could send it through social, you could send it through text, wherever it is you want. And then I get a video saying, hi, Yosefe. Jeremy just sent you a free burger. Right. So this is you just generated a video for me. So it's not spam. You get to more people. and the the reactions were incredible. So we had a 40,

Jeremy Julian: I can imagine.

Yosef: 42% share rate, right?

Jeremy Julian: That's insane.

Yosef: And a 47% click rate that wanted to register. So it's it's a different like I the way we started, people are craving video. People are almost

Jeremy Julian: Uh-huh.

Yosef: expecting video. And it's we we need to give it to them, right? And so the referral was something when we're talking about creativity, we didn't even think about that. that's why we we like to understand our client, we like to understand their pains, their focus, you know, what they need to do. And then we could come out with like game plan, this is what we should do together, you know, for the next year. We need these five campaigns. Let's change the bottom line. Let's move the needle in the way that you want it to be moved. And we have different use cases for each one of those directions.

Jeremy Julian: Yeah. And so on that, I've got a good friend that that works in the loyalty space. and she's been on the show, Olga. she actually used to work for for for Yum years ago. And we talk about, you know, we talk about it. She actually just posted an article about it recently, about getting people to sign up is great, but really loyalty and and and driving behavior is really what you're looking to do. You're looking to, you know, she said two articles this week where people are like, signups are up, but sales are down. That that that that

Yosef: Mm.

Jeremy Julian: doesn't do anything for us. All it's doing. So I guess I'd love for you to talk a little bit about some of the other brands that you guys have driven, not just the signups. That's really cool that we gave away some free burgers and we've got 47%, you know, 42% share rate and 47% redemption rate. But second visits and third visits and fourth visits are really what we need in order to drive sale top line sales for Habit Burger. And I know you guys have done that across McDonald's and some of the other brands that you guys have worked with. So I'd love for you to kind of just share a little bit more, not just about getting people into the program. But how do I get people to spend more, engage with the brand more and do all of those kind of things? If you can if you can share a story or two, that would be great.

Yosef: Yeah, so first of all, you you need to think of a KPI, right? What is the goal of each video? Just like you you would for an email. Right? What

Jeremy Julian: Mm-hmm.

Yosef: is that goal for the email? What is the goal for the video? For a friend referral, we're trying to get people to register, right? At the end of the day. so it's an acquisition play. It's not even a retention play. It's how do we acquire through existing users? So that's what we were measuring. and that is the first step. Once you do that, How do you get people to continue buying? And that's a different video. And we've done something, like you said, with McDonald's that was really amazing. very loyalty play. So someone that made at least one purchase got a video saying, you know, hey Jeremy, this is the amount of points you have, right? And these are the products that you previously purchased, and you show them and how much of them each one costs, each one of those, how many coins you need to redeem. And once you click on that. It actually opens up and said, okay, here you go. You can actually buy this now for this amount, or you get this one for free. Come redeem. And once you get someone in, they buy something else, right? So that's another different strategy to get to from first to second purchase or second to third purchase. but just showing a member that you know them, right? We know what you like. We're not just showing

Jeremy Julian: Mm-hmm.

Yosef: you random things. This is what you like. You know, you're a McFlurry guy, and this is what you need. Here, come back and get that. So once you show members that you care about them and you're not just spamming them. There's so much spam. We always

Jeremy Julian: Mm-hmm.

Yosef: like it's a race to the bottom. And it's not so much in QSR. I think they're QSR, you know, fast casual like actually like the food and bev is better than a lot of other industries, like what we see in retail. They are sending out two emails a day. It's two two emails a day. I'm like, why would anyone like your brand? It

Jeremy Julian: Mm-hmm.

Yosef: is 100% spam. So you gotta also be aware That you want to send them something that counts. Right. And any touch point, it should it should count. Otherwise, you just spam it.

Jeremy Julian: Yep. No, I love your idea of kind of KPIs and making sure that that people are doing it for a reason. one last thing I want to talk about before we can let people know how to engage. The fear that the marketers that are sitting here listening to them is I've already got my program set up with my email. I've already got my thanks, punch, loyal, you know, patronics, whoever the player is that's out there, you know, session lots of different players out in the market that are doing these things. You guys sit alongside of them. You're not replacing them. So I guess I'd love for you to dig in a little bit to that just to set people's mind at ease that you're not ripping and replacing everything they have. You're augmenting what they have and giving them capabilities they don't have today.

Yosef: Exactly. It's email and steroids. You have email. We're not going to ch replace that. You have a system set up. We're not replacing that. We're a very copy-paste, snippet, easy to use, something that will make whatever it is you're doing, we'll make it actually convert. We're going to increase the engagement on whatever journey you have. Right. So right now we're partnering, we're we're working on partnering directly with Patronics and with Punch. we're already with Bray's official partners, and we complement each other, right? It's definitely not so so we're working on just making it official so that like you said, people won't fear so much. It is a new technology. It's no one wants anything else on their tech stack. So we're we're trying to see how we can become native to help out, you know, the the the actual marketers that fear change. but I can say there's nothing to fear. It is it is very easy and it is just gonna help the bottom line. That's what we're here for.

Jeremy Julian: make them look like superstars if in the process because they're gonna get two, three, four X what they're getting today. So how do people

Yosef: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Julian: learn more? How do people engage? Where should they go to, you know, to dig in? I know you guys have got some you know, some different paths to to drive people down towards.

Yosef: Yeah, so I don't know when this is going to be aired. We're going to be a fast casual. First of all,

Jeremy Julian: Okay.

Yosef: I don't we're definitely gonna be there. We're gonna be you can find me on LinkedIn, Joseph Petersal. you can sign up on the website, blings.io. and I usually reply pretty quickly. If you want to hit me up on LinkedIn, that that would probably be the best place website. Or if you're coming to FastCasual, we're gonna be there.

Jeremy Julian: I love it. yeah, probably come out right around then. I'm I'm thinking about it. That's here in Dallas, I think, sometime in October, I believe is fast casual. so

Yosef: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.

Jeremy Julian: awesome. Well, I'm excited to continue to see what it is that you guys are doing. I think it's a really unique offering and I'm excited you know, not just to learn, but I think it's a real good medium. I've got kids. I know that they watch, you know, these dumb YouTube shorts and and Instagram reels and you know, TikToks. It's like that's that's all they live on. That everything is twenty, thirty second videos. They don't want to read anything anymore. Even my,

Yosef: Yeah.

Jeremy Julian: you know, my ten year old daughter's like, can we get it on Audible, Dad? I don't really want to sit and read that book. Can I just, you know, can you can you can you buy it on Audible for me so I can just sit and listen to it? So I think in general, you guys are hitting a real sweet spot to be able to engage, especially with with this next generation of of users in a way that is gonna resonate with them and really drive the behavior that people are looking to do. So thank guys for creating and thank you for for sharing a little bit about your guys' journey. is there anything we missed on the show that that you want people to hear about before we we sign off?

Yosef: I think we really covered everything important. I I I didn't emphasize, but we're we're not never exposed to any data. And that makes us very, very unique. So I will emphasize that. Another fear that a lot of marketers have are they're gonna go into my data. Now I'm gonna have to go to see no. So we're not we're never exposed. It's soc to. you know, it's it's easy, it's everything we need, even though we don't need it. We have

Jeremy Julian: Yeah.

Yosef: it to make sure that everyone is is secure. And we're very excited. Next few months we have some big if you follow us on LinkedIn, you'll see some very good QSR launches that I can't yet talk about, but it's gonna be a very good couple of months now.

Jeremy Julian: Awesome. Well, thank you for for coming on. Thank you guys for you and your co founder for creating what it is that you guys have done. To our listeners, like I said at the onset, thank you guys for for listening. Thank you guys for for continuing to show up every week. If you haven't already subscribed, please do so and make it a great day.