Getting to know 81 & Sunny Digital Investments
Meet Eric & Erin Wilder, founders of 81 & Sunny Digital Investments – a digital media investment agency headquartered in Sarasota, Florida. After long, successful careers in the digital advertising industry at the enterprise level, the Wilders wanted to leave behind the brutal Chicago winters forever, and moved to Sarasota to found an agency with the goal of making the industry more accountable, especially from the agency side of things.
“We always knew there was a better way to service advertisers — and it would all start with providing 100% transparency, and subsequently, forming a solid foundation of trust with our clients,” Eric told CallRail during a recent interview.
For many years during their corporate careers, the Wilders witnessed or had first-hand experience with too many agencies in the industry, big and small, taking advantage of their advertising partners and clients. Essentially, the Wilders had witnessed how many agencies would keep their clients in the dark as to the actual ROI that clients’ digital investments were producing.
For example, Erin shared, “agencies often owned their clients’ ad accounts and therefore most performance data was not visible to their clients — rather the complete opposite – they hid it on purpose. Or, agencies would only provide performance data on vanity metrics like cheap impressions and clicks that looked good to clients, but didn’t translate into true ROI,” Erin shared. Essentially, through these tactics, the Wilders saw how too many agencies would actively work to not deliver an accurate ROI, as that would cut into the inflated margins and fees they were charging clients. Eric and Erin, on the other hand, knew there was a better way.
81 & Sunny’s focus is to drive data-proven ROI, period. They achieve this through deep industry knowledge, integrations with multiple data sources, and agency investments into first-class technology — all backed by talented people who are passionate about delivering real value for clients. 81 & Sunny believes every client should receive full data transparency, trust, and realistic expectation-setting from their agency, and they make it their mission to greet each client-relationship with these objectives.
Furthermore, 81 & Sunny respects their client’s media investments as equal to that of traditional financial investments. “After all, this is what these investments inherently are,” Eric stressed.
These days, advertisers operate in what has become an extremely competitive and complex digital environment – revolutionized by technology like: programmatic trading desks, auction-based exchanges with bid and offers, consumer supply and demand-determined pricing, trainable algorithms, and most importantly, trackable ROI.
“We believe that not drawing the parallel to traditional financial investments would be shortsighted, inaccurate and irresponsible. Our top priority is to leverage our clients’ investments into digital media programs that grow their business — and proving success through fully transparent data and analytics is the way we do it,” Eric said.
How 81 & Sunny uses CallRail to show clients the money
81 & Sunny uses CallRail to strengthen partnerships with their clients by answering the hard-hitting questions about their advertising dollars. “They just want to know the bottom line: ‘Am I making money from my investment or not?’”, Erin explained. “It builds trust when the numbers imported from the ad platforms into our monthly reports have real leads and closed deals/revenue behind them.”
In addition to using CallRail’s Call Tracking to demonstrate to clients which marketing is making their phones ring – Erin says her favorite CallRail product is Conversation Intelligence™, which analyzes all phone calls and turns conversations into easy-to-act-on data.
While Conversation Intelligence identifies and flags important keywords within your conversations, the Premium version provides the call sentiment and a brief summary for each call so you get a bird’s eye view of all your calls. “All these things together help us to easily qualify or disqualify a call without human intervention – which is a huge time-saver for us.”
And for Eric? “I would say my favorite CallRail product is the addition of Form Tracking that allows for the ability to track website form fills leads driven by paid media sources alongside phone calls. With both types of conversions being tracked in real time, we’re able to allocate investment dollars smarter and quicker while also proving out real value to which conversion action is performing best by source, by ad, by conversion value, etc. From there, we can scale programs naturally because the data doesn't lie.”
How CallRail’s seamless integrations enable productivity
CallRail offers dozens of integrations because we recognize the impact an integrated tech stack has on efficiency in business – and 81 & Sunny gets it too.
“We leverage several of CallRail’s integrations and are currently setting up the integration between HubSpot and CallRail,” Erin explained.
With Hubspot emerging more and more as their clients’ CRM of choice, 81 & Sunny recognizes the value in the seamless flow of data between platforms. “The Hubspot integration is key for our clients because they'll be able to use CallRail – the call tracking provider they trust – and that lead data will flow directly into Hubspot.”
Ultimately, it all goes back to real value for the agency: “We love that the integration will help close the attribution loop and further help us prove ROI to our clients.”
The perks of the CallRail Partner Program
Among the many perks CallRail provides its agency partners, one of Erin’s favorites is direct access to her dedicated account manager. Whenever she or one of her team members is stuck on a tricky CallRail implementation — or simply coming up with ideas for making the most of conversion tracking — she can rely on their account manager to come through.
“81 & Sunny being on the agency partner program with CallRail is really beneficial for us because it gives us a direct line to our partner manager.”
Another perk, which can be a focal point of the Partner Program for agencies, is the Revenue Share program. CallRail agency partners can earn up to 15% share of the revenue made from their clients’ subscriptions — but 81 & Sunny has identified another opportunity for those funds, rather than putting it into their own coffers.
“81 & Sunny donates our revenue share to a local charity to help impact the community around us,” Erin and Eric told us proudly. While they don’t need the funds themselves, the impact these donations have on their community cannot be overstated.
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“We would absolutely recommend CallRail as a tool for any marketing agency. If their business model is to prove what value they're bringing to their clients, CallRail is a tool that will help you do just that!” Eric Wilder, 81 & Sunny.
81 & Sunny uses CallRail to forge stronger partnerships with clients by proving the ROI their efforts are driving. See how CallRail can help your agency. Get started with a free 14-day trial.
