Pay Per Callers Show - Jennine Rexon, CEO and Founder of Rex Direct

Ringba

Administrator
Staff member
#1

With almost 20 years of experience in the space, CEO Jennine Rexon is one of the Pay Per Call industry's pioneers. See where she thinks the future of calls are headed on this episode of the Pay Per Callers Show.

Watch on Facebook | Listen to the Audio Version

Show Notes
  • Interview with Jennine Rexon, CEO of Rex Direct
  • Performance marketing provides endless opportunities for women to maintain a work / life balance and be productive in a lucrative industry.
  • You need to move fast and not put all your eggs in one basket.
  • Being transparent is key to developing relationships and building trust with partners.
  • You need to listen to call recordings and audit your campaign assets on a regular basis.
  • Rex Direct generates calls internally and doesn’t work with affiliates.
  • It’s important to have strategic relationships with partners you can trust.
  • Ping Post and Marketplaces are the next big thing for inbound calls and leads.

About Rex Direct
Rex Direct helps businesses achieve unprecedented growth by leveraging our customized lead generation solutions.
Website: RexDirect.com
LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/company/rex-direct-net-inc-/

Episode Transcript

Adam Young:
Welcome to the Pay Per Callers Show. My name is Adam Young, the founder of Ringba. And today, we have one of the most OG marketers on the planet, Jennine Rexon, the CEO of Rex Direct. She has 24 people and her company was founded almost 20 years ago, in 2001. She's been around the block in performance marketing, seen all of the industry changes over the years and has managed to survive in an industry where most companies don't make it past a year. And so that's a really big feet. Thank you very much for joining me on the show today.

Jennine Rexon:
Thank you Adam for having me. It's pleasure being here.

Adam Young:
Now, before we actually started recording the show, you and I were chatting about how there are not enough women in this space and how the performance marketing industry offers remote opportunities that most industries don't, and that more women should be joining the space. So I'd love if we could actually touch on that first because I think it's a really big deal.

Jennine Rexon:
It is, it is a really big deal. I question why more women aren't looking at performance marketing including pay per call as a way to balance work and life. The Internet marketing lifestyle is absolutely amazing. For example, raising a family and working in a productive and lucrative environment if you know what you're doing. So I would encourage ... [crosstalk 00:01:31]. Yeah, go ahead.

Adam Young:
You're at home right now, right?

Jennine Rexon:
Yeah, I worked from home. And actually, my company is a remote company. Everybody works from home because I started the company with work life balance in mind. It was really important to me to extend that culture and that philosophy as we continue to grow. So we built up a variety of technologies, processes and business practices to make sure that we're able to effectively communicate and deliver for our clients.

Adam Young:
That's amazing. And so just like that story, we actually have a girl on our team named Melissa, who works remote and she's able to have her career. Yesterday was her daughter's first birthday actually. And so she was able to have her daughter and still hustle because she worked very, very hard and maintain that work life balance. And I think that's one of the awesome things about performance marketing, is we get to do that. I mean, I'm in my living room right now, and I work from home and it's a really cool thing. My wife is actually down the hallway. She works from home as well. And so we get to spend a lot of time together. And to me, I agree it's one of my favorite parts about this industry because you can meet awesome people but still have that balance. Don't have to work in a cubicle and it gives the flexibility to work from where you want to work.

Jennine Rexon:
Absolutely. And with the ups and downs of this industry over time, I've had opportunities to reflect on whether or not I wanted to do something else. Is there another opportunity out there that I could take advantage of? And I keep coming back to the fact that there is nothing like this industry for the lifestyle that was important to me. To be there for my kids when they walk through the door, to be able to afford other people in my company a similar opportunity. And I remind them periodically that this is not life or death. My husband works as a registered nurse in an ER, and that's life or death. If you don't get back to somebody immediately, it can wait until you have a few minutes after dinner or before your kids wake up or while they're napping. So I just wanted to share with everybody that I'm truly blessed to be in this industry and truly grateful, and that for others that are looking for an opportunity to balance work and life, they should consider getting involved in this ever growing, ever changing, fast paced, but super fun industry.

Adam Young:
So how did you get started in performance marketing?

Jennine Rexon:
Well, I actually started out as a management consultant living in Manhattan, and I gave birth to my second child. And my brother, my younger brother, actually started in internet marketing before me and out of the gate was extremely successful with it. And when he saw that I was away from home and not enjoying my family he said, "I'll give you the skills and the technology that you need to build your own Internet marketing business." And within six months, I was able to leave my management consulting job and focus strictly on my internet marketing business and save enough money to purchase a house. We moved out of the city and continued to reinvest in the business and grow the business to where it is today.

Adam Young:
What were some of the first campaigns you worked on back then?

Jennine Rexon:
Back then, I was an emailer. That's what we did. And my brother set me up with a few emails sites and an email server. And at the time, there were only about three or four affiliate networks, which sounds crazy today. There were no tracking platforms. Direct track didn't exist. So we worked as a consortium myself, my brother, and about 20 other publishers. And I would manage the Excel spreadsheets. Everybody would have a unique link and I get reporting from the advertisers, and we put them in the spreadsheets and then I sent emails to everybody with their numbers every day.

It wasn't until about a year or two into that, that I was one of the first on the direct track platform and that's effectively how Rex Topia got built. But back in the day, there was Johnson Lane, which was like a credit card, prepaid card. There was Web Clients, there was Sheriff Sale, and then there were a handful of others that don't exist anymore. And then we tried to work directly with clients because we saw all the way back in time, that's the best way to get the best rate and to take advantage of our volume as a consortium was to go direct to the advertiser.

Adam Young:
What do you think some of the most painful lessons were that you learned early on in business?

Jennine Rexon:
With this business, you got to move fast. Timing is really, really important. The second is probably to not put all your eggs in one basket. I've been somewhat criticized for that. Like, why don't you focus more, whether it's on the channel or an industry or a vertical. And although there are certain things that I do focus on, I do have a fairly diversified suite of products and clients that we work with. And that's because I've seen too many companies that have purely focused on one thing come and go. And in this industry, things do come and go beyond our control. So in order to maintain the business and continue to grow it, I've tried a lot of new things. That being said, I also love innovation and I love new technology, so it's very easy to get shiny object syndrome and run here and run there. So stay focus is probably my biggest issue. At the same time, managing a balanced portfolio. And then [crosstalk 00:07:19].

Adam Young:
I think there's some exceptional advice for affiliates in this space, especially if they're going to come into the pay per call space, where it's a little bit more of a different game than CPA or Lead advertising. Like, find a campaign that wins but you should always be maybe spending 20% of your time testing those new campaigns and looking at new opportunities in the space. Because if your campaign that's producing all the money starts to dwindle or just disappears overnight, which actually happens sometimes, you [crosstalk 00:07:51] back up.

Jennine Rexon:
It always does. You just have to have the mindset that it may take two years, it may take five years, it may take 10 years, but invariably it's going to go away. So you have to take the opportunity to take advantage of it when it's available.

Adam Young:
So when did pay per call come onto your radar?

Jennine Rexon:
Pay per call came onto my radar very, very early on. I think by industry standards, we were one of the first clients on the ** BLEEP ** platform. But prior to that, and we were on the [inaudible 00:08:25] platform. And prior to that, we worked with a couple of clients on putting unique phone numbers on unique landing pages. And each one of us affiliates or otherwise, we would have our own unique URL and then we would get the calls reported to us by the client, and then we would import them into the system. So as you can imagine, if you go back that far, pay per call's been going on for a really long time, but we just didn't have the technology to manage it. So when [inaudible 00:08:57] came out, they knew that I was a leader in the industry, especially when it came to technology and they knew I'd be all on board in terms of taking on that challenge and taking advantage of the industry.

t was very challenging in the beginning, both technically and from a business perspective to get pay per call to work. First of all, nobody knew what it was. So I spent a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to learn which verticals make the most sense for pay per call because a lot of us didn't know. And we also needed to educate them on what pay per call meant. And then type the logically, we had all kinds of issues with tracking, integration, reporting, cost structures. Who's going to pay for the technology cost? What do our margins need to be to stay in business? Et cetera. So the good news is fast forward, I guess about eight years now and a lot of those issues have been resolved, which is why we're making a big investment into pay per call in 2019. I think we're at a point now where consumers are highly educated or buyers are highly educated.

There are a lot more sources available that understand the practices and the best practices associated with them. And now's the time, I think to really reinvest in pay per call and grow it. Especially, I think one of the most important and exciting things about pay per call is the number of channels that it lends itself to. And you talked about always testing and trying new things. I think if that's for you, if that's what you like to do, is testing and trying new things, of course, you need a base of business that's static and providing a good source of revenue. But you can go offline, you can go online, there's different quality, there's different pricing, there's different durations. If you want to be creative and you like to be creative, this industry is so exciting, especially pay per call.

Adam Young:
I think that's interesting you mentioned that you're going to be making a big investment in the space in 2019. First of all, I think that's the correct decision for anybody. So anyone that's in this space now knows that Ringba acquired a significant portion of all the communities and is building them. And one of the most exciting things about having that level of oversight in an industry is the ability to see how much it's growing. And so most people aren't aware, but the pay per called community in itself has grown over 25% in the last four and a half months, which is a huge amount of growth, a very exciting amount of growth. And I think that's directly correlated to the fact that there's a lot of garbage in performance marketing and calls are not garbage.

There're interested people who want to buy a service right then and there from a business. And so what we're seeing is there's actually focus and drive towards businesses wanting more phone calls, more investments in onshore call centers. The fastest growing market for call centers in the world right now is actually the United States, which [inaudible 00:12:10] crazy. But Americans want to talk to Americans. They realize the value of phone calls. And I see the industry as well growing extremely rapidly over the next couple of years as people want that human connection. Again, I think people miss the human connection because we're all texting, we're all on the Internet and when we want to buy something that's important to us, we want to pick up the phone. We're never going to buy a house over chat. Or maybe we will, but probably not in the next 20 years. And so I think that's driving a ton of growth in the space and we're very excited about it.

Jennine Rexon:
Right. I completely, completely agree. I think the calls that work best on a vertical perspective for pay per call are the longer duration sell, or the more complex sell. And to your acquaintance, it's hard to communicate or sell that product or service over a chat or via email. A conversation really is needed and I can say that for my own clients, and testing pay per call and being part of a revenue share program on the sales side as opposed to being compensated purely on a CPA model, generating leads and generating calls. I have really good metrics into how effective inbound calls truly are. So much so that with most of these programs, we are reducing our lead volume to maybe 10% and focusing strictly on our pay per call strategy because the conversion rates are so much higher. It's better from a marketing and sales perspective and it's a better use of call center time and hours.

Adam Young:
Now, you actually take the time to learn the business behind your customers that are buying your calls, right?

Jennine Rexon:
Absolutely.

Adam Young:
Yeah. So I think what's interesting about that, and one of my favorite things about how you operate, is the effort you put in to do that. And it's very apparent and obvious by your reputation in the industry. I don't think a lot of affiliates and even a good portion of the network's truly understand every single one of the campaigns, what their clients need, how those phone calls need to be qualified so that they can be driven in correctly. And when you do that, I think what you get is not only a better relationship with your buyers, but the ability to negotiate with them for preferential pricing. And when you get that preferential pricing, then you can outspend everyone else to acquire the phone call. So [inaudible 00:14:42] smiling. Can we talk a little bit about that and try and convince people to take more time to understand their clients' business?

Jennine Rexon:
Well, I think when you explore other business models and you're willing to take that risk and investment in each other, it happens automatically. So, for example, we've explored revenue share relationships versus pay per call relationships with partners that have the technological sophistication to be transparent. And to show us what calls are working, the disposition report's real time. And that way we can build up a trust where we can see how effective our marketing media is in their sales process. And in doing that, we're seeing clearly, like you said, which sources are producing the greatest results. And were able to adjust our pricing without signing another contract, being more competitive for the sources that are working, being less competitive for the sources that aren't defined in ROI that makes sense. And because of these risks and investments that we're making in our advertising clients, we actually only have a handful of them. We're looking to grow that list, but carefully because of the amount of time and effort that we've put in to making sure that it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

Adam Young:
So what does your quality assurance process look like?

Jennine Rexon:
In the beginning, it's really, really tight. If we're allowed to record calls, that's my preference, is to listen to the calls on a regular basis and provide consistent feedback to our clients about how they can approve either their sales or their script or on our side, our IBR or our presentation of the materials to find the right mix of volume, pricing and quality, to make it work as a campaign overall. That's one thing that we do. Also, you have to watch out for tracking. You have to make sure that the invoices are correct and that you're being compensated properly. So there's a business component as well as a technical component that needs to come together, as well as a marketing component to make sure everything works out properly. And once you have those pieces done, then typically we're spot checking on a regular basis to make sure, especially as we bring on new sources, again, we're 100% focused on making sure that the new sources are delivering a quality product to our client, consistent with what we've asked for and what we expect. Otherwise, we eliminate them right away and move on.

Adam Young:
And the fact that you're doing Rex share models with a bunch of your backend buyers, forces you to actually do exceptional quality assurance because you take the hit as well, right?

Jennine Rexon:
Yeah, absolutely. As we grow these channels, it gets more and more complicated. So we've also made an investment in our own technology. We built our proprietary platforms that pull in data from [inaudible 00:17:47] or whatever tracking platform we're using as well as the client's platform, and put them together so that we can reconcile the data extremely fast and be able to provide feedback to our sources at a disposition level and at a sub level so that we can get the results that we need without spending an extraordinary amount of money.

Adam Young:
Now, when working with publishers, what are some things that people should really watch out for?

Jennine Rexon:
We have changed our stance over the years. We used to have an affiliate network both on the network side, from a traffic side and from a call side, and we really pulled away from that actually. We do a lot of media buying internally and generate calls that way, as well as using partners that own their own inventory or their own channel. We don't really work with affiliates anymore and as a result, we've been able to manage our quality a lot more effectively over the last few years.

Adam Young:
That's something that I talk about a lot on this show and also a masterclass that I just put out for new people in pay per call. Is that building your own properties in your own assets gives you a lot more control over just about everything? And not only is that a way to build enterprise value is something that you can sell at some point, it gives you the ability to go to someone like Jennine and say, hey look, here's my website. Here's how the calls are being generated. Here's what type of quality you can expect because it's coming through these funnels. It gives you a brand to build and I think that the evolution of the affiliate space, not just pay per call, but the entire affiliate space is going to be going into this. I think we're going to see a rapid shift into quality and owned assets and content creation and actual work that-

Jennine Rexon:
I agree.

Adam Young:
I've got have to do to build a business.

Jennine Rexon:
I agree. I think that that's definitely the way to go and certainly we landed on that trend in terms of building our own properties and our own brand over the last few years because it's something that we saw as the future of performance marketing that we needed to be able to control more of our inventory, more of our supply. That being said, you can't do it all alone and scouts. So it is important to have strategic relationships that you know well, where the media is coming from, what quality they can produce so that you can grow your business. I think it tops out. If you're going to do it all yourself, you're going to top out. So it is important to have relationships that you need to be strategic about them. That's my philosophy on it.

Adam Young:
And also transparent. What I see by moderating a lot of these communities is people don't want to be transparent, and affiliates don't want to be transparent. And in the pay per call space, that's not something that's sustainable in any way, shape or form. But the real way to build millions of dollars worth of business into a portfolio is to work with people like you. But to be fully transparent about everything that's going on. And what I mean by that, what I mean by transparency is just showing people what you're doing, owning it, being honest about it so that they can give you feedback, whether it's okay, not okay.

And what I typically find and what I saw when I worked with companies back in the day when I was an affiliate, is when I showed them what I was doing, they would give me feedback that allowed me to scale it better, to increase the quality, to get higher payouts. They would actually help me with that. And so yeah, there's some fear that people will steal things, but in reality the benefits are so great by just being honest with your partners that anyone in the affiliate space should really focus on that type of relationship.

Jennine Rexon:
Yeah, it's unfortunate. We try and be as transparent as possible. But over the years there's certainly advertisers as well as sources of data that have violated that trust and I think it's hard often to get over that once you've been burned a few times. So I understand where that fear comes from. I think it is a real one, but sometimes you just have to put yourself out there a little bit and take two steps backwards to take four steps forwards. And as an industry, I think we definitely need to do that.

Adam Young:
So what are some of the biggest opportunities, if you don't mind sharing, you don't have to give too much away, in pay per call right now that people that are new to the space or people that have been in it a little while and are growing their businesses should be taking a look at?

Jennine Rexon:
Well, one of the items that we talked about before this call actually was the concept of [inaudible 00:22:26] calls and marketplaces. I have been truly interested in that technology for leads as well as calls over the last few years. And the leads business has become a lot more prevalent. Back in the day it didn't exist, and I think it is the future of calls. I know that a number of companies already have that technology in place, but I think that there's a majority that don't. I think that once it becomes more mainstream, the possibilities of new businesses and new ways to generate revenue and profitability are going to come to fruition and I'm really excited to take advantage of that.

Adam Young:
Us too. We are very excited about programmatic calls. I think it's the future of the industry and we're making a heavy investment in it because to me it's like calls aren't display ads 10 years ago or 15 years. All the business development is done manually. Everything's done manually. And the future of that is programmatic. And so there's no reason why calls won't go programmatic as well. And I think that type of technology will create hundreds or thousands of new millionaires. And that's really, really exciting to me. And that's one of the reasons why we're investing heavily in the space. So I completely agree with you.

Jennine Rexon:
Yeah, I think that's really, really exciting. I think it would also be really cool to get a few other industries or verticals involved in the pay per call space. I think that there's a tremendous number of companies in general that still don't understand performance marketing and more specifically pay per call marketing, and continue to buy or not even consider pay per call because they don't know it exists. And I think that a lot more education has as becomes more popular, especially around the success of inbound calls compared to outbound leads, is a phenomenal way to continue to grow the industry into the future.

Adam Young:
Well, effectively, every small business that's high value would absolutely love a phone call. The industry is finally catching up on a technology basis so people can put things like 1800 dentists together. And I think that's a really big thing. There's no reason why law offices and dentists and car rental companies and the mom-and-pop stores that run, I don't know, flower shops, just basically any small business that sells something could take a phone call and sell to that person a service. So I'm very excited about that and we're starting to see people start to build these networks of small and regional buyers so that they can connect a lot of these small businesses into the larger ecosystem. And so [crosstalk 00:25:09].

Jennine Rexon:
Right. We're actually doing that within the moving space.

Adam Young:
All right.

Jennine Rexon:
Yeah. We're starting to aggregate and build our network. And I think probably, it hasn't happened in these little local businesses and across other verticals, is because it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And how do you manage thousands of small businesses versus a few bigger businesses? It's definitely a different business model. And as a business owner, you have to consider where your stance is, where you want to be in the marketplace because it is definitely a different approach to the way that you manage your company.

Adam Young:
So how do you think your business will change over the next few years?

Jennine Rexon:
I hope that we're doing a lot more business, dollars wise without adding too many more people. That's my goal in terms of continuing to drive efficiencies into everything that we do. I think being a remote organization forces you to be creative about building a business that has minimal infrastructure but maximum yield. I'm really proud of that fact and I want to continue to increase that ratio across the three things that we do, calls, leads and traffic. And as part of that strategy, it's about building out our own internal capabilities and continuing to scale those across those three types of solutions so that we can implement and more ourselves and continue to build strategic partnerships with the right companies to accelerate growth.

Adam Young:
I have no doubt that you'll get there.

Jennine Rexon:
Thank you.

Adam Young:
So thank you so much for joining me on the show today. If people want to do business with Rex Direct, how do they get a hold of you?

Jennine Rexon:
The best way is to go to our website, RexDirect.com, there's a contact form there as well as a good summary of the kinds of services that we offer our clients.

Adam Young:
Thank you so much for joining us.

Jennine Rexon:
Thank you.



----

Thanks for checking out the Pay Per Callers Show! Let us know what you think by joining the conversation and leaving us comment. If you liked this episode, leave us a like and be sure to subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode!

This episode of The Pay Per Callers Show is brought to you by Ringba Call Tracking and Analytics. See how Ringba is inventing the future of calls at Ringba.com.
 
Last edited:
Top