The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

There’s no such thing as an overnight success. Whether success came fast or slow, There’s usually always a backstory. …one that includes lots of hard work, determination, and a bullheadedness that leads the way. Bret Thomson knows that type of success. He’s currently one of the highest paid conversion strategists and direct-response copywriters in Australia. And he attributes this success to his willingness to work hard, To at the end of the day… make it happen. In this interview Bret talked about his rise to the top and a few things that enable him to stay there. And how if you hold this mindset, You too will one day become the most popular copywriter or whatever your trade is in your country. Put on your philosophical caps for this one, Actionable advice? Yes, some. Load of food for thought? Absolutely.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how as an entrepreneur or freelancer, you might wanna watch out for S.M.E. (try to lay off Facebook or even blogs for a bit) that working on yourself everyday, ei. personal development, can fill the void in your day to day life that attracts negative thoughts the dangers of becoming complacent as an up and coming hustler entrepreneur how the comparison game is a double edged sword (use it to hurt your progress or catapult you to success.. you choose) the right way to turn energy into productivity.. don’t let fear halt your progress (an all too common setback for entrepreneurs) the early morning (or night?) hour Bret wakes up everyday to begin his grind towards even more success the self-doubt smashing technique in order to always perform at your peak level the 2 BIG things to creating successful copy (nail these two things, and you’re golden) how a failed campaign gave Bret an “aha” moment and what he discovered that sticks with him today how getting good conversions does NOT come down to your writing skills Bret’s highly effective past ten clients interview approach that makes writing copy easier and FAR more effective why you should ask for product customer stories instead of opinions when doing copy research Mentioned: Bret Thomson’s Blog Client Rush Elon Musk Marketing Makeover HQ Larry Ellison Eric Thomas Pete Godfrey Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre here, the Auto Responder guy, and it’s time for episode 85 of the McMethod Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover how to get more customers with less time and less effort AND make them spend way more with you every time they do business with you. I’m liking that little tag on there- anyway today, I’ll be talking to Brett Thompson, an Australian guy. He’s one of Australia’s highest paid in demand copywriting and marketing and conversion strategists. He’s a best selling author, a speaker, a coach and a mentor to thousands. I actually met Brett at the Titans of Direct Response seminar back in Stanford, Conneticut a couple weeks or months back, actually, by the time this episode goes live. And I heard of him before, I knew he was a copywriting guy, and he’s a friend of a friend, and I’ve been wanting to get him on the podcast so I popped the question and he was keen so we went home. He went to Australia and I came back to Thailand and jumped on Skype and we had a conversation. And what’s interesting about this one is that this was very, not just casual- it was a bit philosophical. So I thought, we do talk about.. the idea was we were gonna talk about research. About how he gets amazing conversions and some the work ethic that he applies to that research that he does when he writes copy. But what sort of happens is we went down the rabbit hole of talking about what makes you successful at business and life. This is my favourite kind of conversation; it’s one of my favourite style of podcasts that I do. We get to talk about some of the bigger ideas instead of just tactics, okay? So today is a bit philosophical but there are some stuff you can take away today and apply in your business. Now to get the show notes of today’s episode of the McMarketing Podcast, go to  themcmethod.com/85. This week’s McMasters inside of the week is a book recommendation. The book is called All The Money In The World, and I picked up this book when I was in the US recently. It’s about the Forbes 400. All the guys, all the men and women on the Forbes 400. The 400 richest people in the world, okay? So the fortunes that these people have is absolutely incredible. I think the lowest, the minimum- that you have to get on that list is right around  billion dollars. A billion with a B, so, this book goes through: how they made their money, how they spent it, how they lost it, how it plays through their family.. And anyway, it’s just a fascinating book and it’s opened my eyes to the level that you can go to in business and entrepreneurship. Absolutely worth the read if you like getting into that stuff. Will sort of reframe how you look at some of the companies online, successful people- It’s made me kind of look at guys that used to be idols, used to be people I used to look up to, and thinking, man those guys are small. You look at these Forbes 400 guys and that’s big. That’s really, really big. So I highly recommend you go and check out that book. Now to get more insights like this- It’s not much of an insight, it’s just a book recommendation. (laughs) But  anyway, McMaster’s- It’s a private forum, private community that I run, and there’s a forum called the library which has some of the book recommendations. And really, it’s just about helping you: helping my customers and clients get more customers for their business. And so there’s a forum, where I’m in there, and you can hear other people in the forum and there’s a whole bunch of training products on e-mail marketing and sales funnels, and all that great stuff. If you want to learn more about that, that’s the mcmethod.com/masters  and I’ll see you inside. It’s for a monthly fee. Okay? So that’s it for now, let’s get into this interview with Mister Brett Thompson. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Brett Thompson. Now, Brett is a direct response copywriter. He is one of Australia’s highest paid in demand copywriting, marketing,and conversion strategists. He’s got a best selling book out. He’s a speaker, a coach and mentor to thousands. Now, what’s really cool is that I met Brett two or three weeks ago at the Titans of Direct Reponse, which will actually be three months ago by the time these podcasts goes live, give or take a few. But we bumped into each other as comers and talked about copy, and talked about Australians coming up into the world and sort of showing these Americans and these big business guys that we actually, as convicts,we got exported out to Australia from England, that we can do marketing too. We had a good little laugh about that and I thought afterwards, why not get Brett to come on and talk about some stuff that he’s known for, which is really to get some crazy conversions. According to him, we were just talking that a lot of that comes down to his work ethic when it comes down to marketing. So today, it would be really cool to have a chat not about copywriting, not really about stories or any of that. Sort of after the copywriting and after that fact, to really look at what sort of attitude you’ve gotta have when you approach marketing and approach copywriting, before you write a single word to actually get good conversions. So that’s the “how to have a good work ethic,” all right, the right ethic you need to be a good marketer. Something along those lines we’ll get to in a minute. Brett, how are you today? Bret Thomson: Right on time too, awesome. Thanks for having me mate. Look forward to it. John McIntyre: Good to have you on the show, man. Good to have another Aussie, we should get more Aussies around. Bret Thomson: Haha, beautiful. John McIntyre: All right, so before we talk about some of these work ethics stuff, I’ve given you a quick intro there. Can you give the listener a bit more of a background on who you are and what you’re up to. Bret Thomson: Sure mate. Look, you did a pretty good intro, mate. I’m kind of excited to hear what I’ve got to say after that one, I must admit. (Both laugh.) Bret Thomson: But mates, look. I guess what I love about my story is that I kind of went all through school and didn’t read a book. I failed English. And a lot of copywriters have  similar stories, but I was a… All I did when I finished school: I remembered celebrating never having to work- never having to read a book again for my whole life. I thought it was fantastic. So I started a kind of a ten year career of being a full time investor, and I invested about ninety percent of my income in my social life. (Both laughing.) John McIntyre: I like that man. Bret Thomson:   I was picking [xxx] But I guess that’s why I became a good storyteller, and I suppose I got a lot of confidence and guts to have it going wash. But I only tell that story to give people hope, right, because a lot of people saying “Where are you from?” In the seventies, you’re doing this… you’ve generated over two hundred and twenty million dollars of new sales. But that thing gets, you know, very rare, but really anyone can do it, and I love giving people a lot of hope that if someone like me, who went all through school and didn’t read could do it, anyone can as well with the right attitudes and disciplines. John McIntyre: It’s really cool actually when I’ve spoken to people before… like I’ve only started getting this because I haven’t been this for just as long as you have, but people come in and sometimes the attitude that they have is that, “Wow you’re amazing,” “I can’t believe you did that,” “I can never do that,” “It’s just, you know, it’s incredible.” But when you’ve been in the game and you’ve done this stuff you realize that it’s not that- if you’re good, and you work hard, and you practice, and you research, there is no magic to it. You get better over time and you get bigger jobs, and things just pick up steam and you just gradually build. It’s really not that difficult, it’s just about staying in the game, staying in the ring, and showing up every day. Bret Thomson: Absolutely mate, and there’s no doubt that I am definitely amazing. Like, you can’t forget that. (Both laugh.) Bret Thomson: Uh, not really. But you’re spot on right it’s funny. Like a lot of kids, a lot of people look at the outside and think that you must be this amazingly talented person. But I think us, as in entrepreneurs, when you’re in the trenches- you don’t really see yourself as that. I mean, you probably should tell yourself that more, but it really is, it’s just that you’re in the grime and you’re just going that extra mile and if anyone’s prepared to do what you do, then for sure they’ll get the same results. It’s not really a matter of skill. I have to try and outwork a lot of my competitors because a lot of them are more skillful than me. John McIntyre: Well let’s skip over that man, we were just talking about this work ethic thing. I asked you what you wanted to talk about and what really defines you as a marketer. What sort of really sets you apart of the other people, and you mentioned that the work ethic you bring to copywriting, and you bring to sort of marketing and doing the research. So tell me about that. Bret Thomson: Yeah, mate , well I guess when I first learnt copywriting… I’ll tell you this quick story, I don’t know how much time we’ve got mate, so I’ll try to keep it tight, but I started my business because I thought I had a fantastic idea to kind of motivate kids cause I read my first book when I was in my mid twenties. It was called Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. And so my whole philosophy became personal development and I became a walking, talking person, but like a robot. I pretty much burnt all my friends very quickly from that, and so I had this idea. I’m going to teach this to kids between seventeen to thirteen years old, because I was a dad with two twin boys at the time. So I handed in my resignation after fifteen years and kind of jumped inside of my own business. And everyone said,you’ll do great, fantastic- everyone thought it was a brilliant idea. And then I learned very quickly that you can have a good idea in one area, but if you don’t understand marketing then you can lose a lot of money. And that’s pretty much what happened to me. Lost my money, found myself in a marketing seminar and a guy came up on stage called a millionaire maker in Australia and he said, “What I’m going to teach now is to put more money in my bank account than anything I’ve spent in my whole life.” So I said, “Whatever comes out of this man’s mouth, I’m going to do it.” And he said it’s the out of writing [xxx] words on paper and then there’s copywriting. And oh no! I only just started reading, and I hate writing, but I gave it a go and I’ll tell you that story because I had no prior training to this industry. All I knew was if I was going to get good at this, I mean- in my first year of business I made sixteen thousand dollars. And that’s pretty hard when you’re bringing up a family. I knew I had to hussle hard and really put in so much time studying. So I really just followed the path and read all the books that everyone suggested. All the great books. And a lot of the best gems are in the books that were written 20, 30, 50 years ago, right? And so I studied them. I would do everything that all the others weren’t doing. I would write out sales that is.. I pretty well had to put my own title. And then I had to kind of hussle for clients. In my first years as a copywriter, I went from sixteen thousand dollars to over two hundred thousands dollars cause I was cause at seminars. Just every time there was a speaker on stage, everyone would line up waiting for them to kiss their shoes and all that and tell them how awesome they were. I’d wait until the crowd died off and say, “Hey, I’m a copwriter. I’d love to help you out with your marketing.” Cause I knew I was only a week away from my phone ringing and people asking for money, so I guess, that really was an attitude. It really had nothing to do with skill there. Cause it’s really an attitude and an urgency, which really kind of separated me from the rest. John McIntyre: It reminds me of- there’s a story that Tony Roberts, now that you mentioned him and Awaken the Giant Within You. He tells the story.. plenty of people tell it about.. I don’t know, I can’t remember the actual story who its about. Basically its ancient Greece or something like that and they go sail to another land to conquer it or they get into a fight, basically. And they land the ships and the commander gets them to burn all of the ships. And all the soldiers see the ships burning and they have no choice but to fight their way the enemy and lo and behold, they win the fight because they have no other options. Is that what you were talking about, is you ended up in a situation… You know, your back is up against the wall, this was me in the Philippines, actually. Two hundred bucks left in my bank account. I was about to buy a ticket on my credit card to go home and go get myself a job, and that’s when things finally began to click. So it’s funny how that works. When you finally get to the point you realize, look I’m going to do whatever it takes. I have to work twelve, fourteen, fifteen hours a day just to make some money just so I can stay in the game and keep doing this. That’s what I’ll do. When you get to that point, that’s really when the magic starts to happen. Bret Thomson: That is a good story. You told it really well, by the way. (Both laugh.) Bret Thomson: But it is true, it’s all attitude and through that, through persistence- I mean they talk about doing ten thousand hours and work harder. I don’t know, but I swear I would’ve done, maybe in the first three years, I think. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I really had to work and so there’s nothing glamorous about it. There is no skill or natural talent that I can share with anyone. It was all the gems, and everything you do is just standing before you on the shoulders of the giant before you, isn’t it? John McIntyre: Right, one thing that I struggled with personally sometimes is that things are doing pretty well and I’m happy, but I get caught up sometimes. I might look at, it might be a marketer, it might be someone more successful than me. They’re making more money, they’ve got a bigger business or whatever, and sometimes I feel like that they’re doing it faster than I am and I start to feel frustrated. This isn’t always conscious, sometimes it’s just a negative feeling of I can’t keep up or I’m not doing as well as I’d like and it creates a lot of tension. Well sometimes it might be, I’m looking at Elon Musk. Sort of like a billionaire inventor. Sort of co-founded Paypal and now he’s doing the electric car with Tesla, Solar City… Just doing some crazy stuff. I told you about a book about billionaires, or it’s about billionares.  So sometimes I’m looking at that and I come back to my own business and I’m like, what am I doing? This is so small, and so tiny, and so slow.. I mean, how did you… Have you ever had to deal with that in your journey? Obviously, you have to work hard and you gotta put that together, but have you ever had to deal with that feeling of however fast you’re going or however well you’re doing, you’re still like “Aw, it’s not good enough.” Bret Thomson: Mate, first of all, I’ve gotta say: I love your honest in bringing it up. I believe everyone goes through that and it’s clout for you to admit that and bring it up. It’s something all of you go through all the time, but I honestly believe that in some way, and it’s a bit of a claim, but I reckon that nearly everyone on this Earth has some form of them feeling not good enough in some way. That might sound like a big statement, but I know good friends of mine making ten, fifteen million dollars a year. I’m thinking, wow man that’s pretty sweet. I’ve been in mastermind groups with fifteen dollars an entry and surrounded by these guys and it very rarely comes in. The strategy comes down to feeling good enough about themselves to go to the next level. Look, the comparison game is a double-edged sword. One side it can stop you in your tracks and you could freeze, be intimidated- it could be subconsciously and your output could be very poor and you’ll beat yourself up. And that could go for some days, or weeks, or months, maybe years. The other side of it you can use as a motivator and that’s something you have to consciously choose to do sometimes and use it to get far and up. I mean here’s a thing- I believe you should never compare yourself to others. You should try and be better than others. You just try to be the best you can be. And that sounds really nice and it’s true, it’s just a daily thing for me, mate. I see other people really smashing it and I’ve got to make sure I’m just on the right side of the fence with this. I heard someone call it SME, which is Social Media Envy in a call. So, again you see other people on social media and you think, wow they’re smashing it. For me, as I kind of touched on earlier in the call, I work on my personal development every single day, cause if I don’t, if there’s a void, I think it’s a human nature- we kind of fill that void with negative. So I can’t allow that to happen, because it directly results in lack of productivity, which slows in the money flow. So I have to make sure my cup is full and the way I see it. I used to teach these sermonees, I used to kids pers [xx?]. Everyone has like a bucket- a self esteem bucket and everyone’s got holes in their bucket. You can read a book, listen to a podcast, get a seminar and feel pumped up and on fire, but slowly, slowly, slowly it leaks out and you always, always gotta keep refilling it. And that’s something I’ve got to do every day. So you’re not alone man, and I’m glad you brought it up cause that’s cool. John McIntyre: Well that’s the funny thing, the reason I brought it up is that sometimes you’re working really hard, and I get this- sometimes it’s really inspiring to hear a story about guys who are much more successful than I am. But then sometimes, like you said, it creates that freeze. You feel overwhelmed. Well there’s no way I’m going to catch up or something like that. What I’ve been actually reminding myself of… I guess the analogy that I use to break out of that is that I am lifting weights. So when you go to the gym, and there’s a Crossfire gym that I’ve been going- I’m not going right now, but I have being going for a lot of this year, and it’s interesting going in there cause I’m a really competitive guy so I look at this other guy and he’s lifting more than me so I have to be outlifting that. But the thing is if you look at the whole situation, like take the whole emotion out of it, and you look at it scientifically- The way for me to lift, let’s say I’m lifting 200 pounds, or you would say 100 kilos, if we were talking Australian. A hundred kilos, and he’s lifting 200. The way for me to go and lift two hundred is not to just go and pick up a two hundred kilo bar. The way for me to lift two hundred is for today to lift one hundred, tomorrow lift a hundred and two point five. The day after lift a hundred and five and basically go up in small increments like that. Scientifically, that’s just how the body works, so I can’t go from one hundred to two hundred. And so, you know with business, on sidenote, to go back to the gym, you’ve got to be a little bit zen about the whole thing. Well, you take your emotions out of you and go like “What needs to happen for me to go that next step?” And you sort of map out that thing and what’s reasonable cause it’s not reasonable for me to go: well I want to be a billionaire tomorrow. That’s just not going to happen. I’m not going to make a hundred million dollars tomorrow. But what I can do is get a little bit better tomorrow than I was today and then so on like that, and once you take the emotions out of it and look at the path you’re going and making a billion dollars is in it. What’s that Chinese proverb, you know? The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It’s that. Bret Thomson: Spot on right, spot on. It’s constant, never ending learning isn’t it. Never growing, I suppose, and you’re a great example. You’re surrounded and interviewing some of the greatest minds on the planet right now in this area, and I’m sure this topic comes up so often in all of the best entrepreneurs in any field. It’s constantly building up on itself and trying to get that next level. [xxx] of it if it really stops. John McIntyre: It’s funny you mention that, cause in this book about billionaires that I’m reading, they’re talking about Larry Ellison, whose the third richest guy in the planet and he basically competes with a couple of Microsoft guys. Bill Gates, and Paul Allen is one of them… Steve Balmer. They are all around the same level- 20, 30, 40, 50 billion dollars total in terms of their net worth. This guy is forever competing with them- trying to have a bigger boat, or a bigger house, you know that sort of thing. So it’s just funny to notice that you could be one of the richest guys on the planet and you could still fall into that trap of feeling like you need to compete with someone else. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a hamster wheel. You don’t get any of that. Bret Thomson: No that’s right. As long as you’re on the right side of it, because those guys… they know how to turn that energy into productivity. But I think that’s the difference because a lot of people get intimidated and that envy kind of makes them doubt themselves. And out of all of the hundreds of people that I mentored- These really skillful, talented people, right? And I could give them the best strategy and the best copy in the world, but a lot of them just don’t do it. Cause there’s a fear there. These are highly intelligent people and it really comes down to their self worth. It is a constant thing with entrepreneurs and I guess that the better you get at channeling that into positivity and keeping yourself in the right zone, then the best success you’ll get from it. John McIntyre: One that’s also interesting-  Well the original topic we’re going to talk about is work ethic and how it applies to research, but this is fascinating. I love this kind of stuff, it gets me so pumped up. One thing I am interested in hearing about is sometimes I think, I get caught up in this, is that my business needs to be… well I need to have more money so I can… not necessarily buy more stuff, but it just needs to be bigger, better, more automated than it is now. Something that is other tha what it is right now. And the trap of that is that it’s again a hamster wheel. I might not be competing with someone in terms of bikes or yachts or personal jets like Larry Ellison is, but it’s still the same kind of thing where I’m always comparing right now with what it could be and creating a sense of dissatisfcation, and so it brings up this question of do you play the business game because you feel like that is what you need to, I guess, keeping up with the Jones, or do you say “Hey, look I’m making some good money right now.” Like in my case I could be like, well I’m making some good money right now, I’m in Thailand… Why don’t I just chill out, sleep in every day, ditch the alarm clock, go to the pool, sit in the sun, read a book… Why don’t I do that every day? Because a lot of us… Once you get good at making money, you sort of get into a position like that, where you don’t really need to hustle as hard as you used to. You get those days where your back is against the wall, but then you’ve got times when money is flowing freely and you don’t have to worry about much. And then it’s like, do you take time to smell the roses, or do you stay hungry? Because on the one hand, there’s sort of like, you’ve got guys like Tony Robbins. Motivational gurus who always preach that you should always be growing, and always be trying to get somewhere. But then there’s the other side where everybody dies, and we’re all going back out of it, just the same place where everybody came from right, we’re going back into the ground. That’s just a fact of life, so does it really make sense to bust your balls all of your life to really build a big business? Bret Thomson:   Well, that’s deep buddy. A big question, mate. And the thing is that the cool thing about the question is that is the answer will be different though who you’re talking to. See right now, this stage of my life, all I felt [xx?] A number of years ago, I got comfortable. I had some great recognition in Australia. You know, doing some events with a few other people, making some good money, and still working hard, but just not really pushing myself if that makes sense. And here’s what I think, and this is touching back on something else. When I see someone really smashing it right now, in the years I’ve been in this game, I know that things happen in waves. You look at celebrities- They can be the flavour for a year, and then they’re out of the spotlight again. Same with entrepreneurs and business owners… It’s very rare to see someone on top of their game all the time, and it maybe Dan Kennedy is an exception, but he’s a bit of a freak. I see people come up in the spotlight and I used to think, “Oh my gosh, they’re really smashing it.” I used to sometimes doubt myself and think maybe I should do things better and faster and harder. But then I just gotta go out of the spotlight again and I’ll [xx?] number of years, so I know that things happen with waves, and even with myself. So when I was one of those kind of victims… Everyone knew me in Australia, I was getting great recognition. Then I finally got comfortable and I let other people kind of surpass me. So, I tell you that because you’re asking me that kind of question right now at the time when I’m really hussling and hungry more than ever before. I’m on the upcurve to the point where, and this might scare some people, my day starts at three A.M. in the morning. John McIntyre: Are you serious? Dude, I was at Thailand at one of these dinners and I was speaking to one of these guys from Early To Rise and he said he got up at 4 A.M. and I could not believe it, and now you’re telling me that you get up at 3 A.M. Brett Thompson: 3 A.M. And you know why? Because no one else is doing it. That’s why? John McIntyre: What time do you go to bed though? Bret Thomson:   9:30. John McIntyre: How do you manage to go to bed at 9:30 and wake up at 3? And then you stop all day? Bret Thomson: All day mate, all day. And I’m not saying that I’m boasting about it right, but I don’t really.. John McIntyre: The thing that boggles me is that if I get a few nights sleep at 6 hours, I get depressed, man.  My mindset goes off and self doubt creeps up and all that. Whereas if I get a couple 8, 9 hour nights, I feel like a million bucks. Bret Thomson: Yeah, that’s true. It depends what you do in your waking hours really. I don’t mind telling you what I do, right? Cause I know it’s not duplicatable and it’s not something that I teach. I mean, I won’t do it all my life because I’ll probably, in a number of years, say, “You’ve got to have a balance, and you’ve got to spend more time with your family.” I’ll probably have one of those talks, and we can have a conversation later on  about it, but right now you’re talking to me at the time I’m going so hard because I’ve got such big goals. I’ll tell you where it happened. I was going to a seminar. This was only 4 or 5 months ago and they go by the name of Eric Thomas. He’s called a- John McIntyre: The motivational guy. Bret Thomson: Yeah, yeah. So he came out to Australia and was doing a talk and I was surrounded by a couple hundred people at the seminar. Well, probably actually around 400 people and he was talking about how he gets 120 percent on anything he does. He yells everything and he says, most people they’ve gotten 60 percent, 70 percent, and all the rest. So he took a survey in the crowd and goes, “Who reckons they got 120?” and no one really put their hand up. He said, “What about 100 percent?” and I put my hand up, looking around, hoping everyone would see me cause I was thinking I was going pretty hard. And then he kept on asking, and there was a bunch of people putting their hand up at 60 or 70 percent, and I thought that’s so embarrassing man, why don’t you just work harder? And then he told me what he does for 120 percent and he gets up at 3 A.M. because his competitors get up at 6 or 7 and he’s got like a 4 hour start on them, and he told me [xxxtated.. fruitated?]. And I was going, wow, that is a whole new level.And he came back and did another session, and he asked the same question again to the audience, and this time I put my hand up for 60 percent. Cause I thought I was I was going to 100 percent, but sometimes- John McIntyre: Well sometimes I am, that’s the thing, man. I’m like, man, I’m doing pretty good. I’m waking up at 6 or 7 most days and get started and then I hear guys like you- crazy, crazy, doing shit like this. 3 A.M. That’s insane. Bret Thomson: Look it is, but I’ve got a lot of urgency with what I’m doing right now, right? I guess I’m fueled on by a lot of things. Like I told you, my beautiful bride [xxx] and I have 6 kids between us. I was kind of the black sheep in my family where everyone’s done the traditional route where they’ve got a job, got an education, got a deposit for a house and stuff like that, where I’ve kind of just jumped into business, throwing money at business all the time, and just so many peaks and trusts. And then I found out a little while ago my younger brother just sold a property for 1.8 million dollars, and I love my brother, but that annoyed the crap out of me. I thought, man, he’s just under it, but it seemed like he was- And that was a fuel, I thought “I’ve got to really hustle.” All of a sudden, my kids and [xxx] get me out of bed in the morning and some bigger financial goals that I’ve got as well. So I guess for me mate, the getting up at 3 A.M. was… it sounds absurd and ridiculous to a lot of people, but for me it’s fantastic because I knew that a lot of people in my industry who are a lot more talented than me and stuff like that, and I have to study and research, and I have to work on my personal development, and so in that 3 hours I work on my personal development. I kind of sock myself up, I go back into the books and research and write and do all that kind of stuff. So by the time it comes around 6 or 7 o’ clock, you know, every day I get 3 or 4 hours of really good solid stuff, so I don’t give myself time to… It’s very rare at this stage for me to have a lot of self doubt. It still happens, but my routine is really kind of shaped to get me in the right zone. John McIntyre: Interesting, man. So one thing that… cause I mean we said we were going to talk about research. I feel like we’ve got to squeeze this in somehow. So now I’ve heard about some of the work ethic and some of the mindset stuff. I mean, you mentioned that one of the things that puts you ahead of the other copywriters, and other competitors, and others in the game is that you are willing to go to an insane level in terms of the work that you are going to put in to make sure something wins. So with all this extra time and the amount of commitment that you have to something, you put a whole lot more effort into this research before you write a word of copy. Bret Thomson: I’m glad you asked me, I’ll tell you where it all first started. When I first started I learned from Pete Godfrey- He is now one of my best mates and so I got very good, very fast, because to write a successful copy I think the two big things, I think, is coming up with a big idea, and out of that you get the big headline, and the other thing is writing the conversational tone. There’s a 1001 things, but I think those 2, if you can nail those two, you can get pretty good success so I started getting some huge success really early on in my career, and then people started offering to pay me some good money to write a copy. And I thought I was a bit of a legend in my mind, because I had no evidence to prove me wrong. Until one time, one of my campaigns failed and I was like, “What?” I just couldn’t understand it and I just did not like that at all. So then what I realized is.. I found out why I couldn’t ring up clients and I found out why they didn’t buy. And that just gave me a good indication that I hadn’t done enough research, and I really understood that to get good conversions, you don’t really have to be a great writer. You just have to understand the psychology of your market and really what they want and how to communicate it to them. Now I spend probably 70% of my time researching the market and interviewing people. A lot of people… Like, if you had an average copywriter they’ll say,”Yeah, I’ll take on someone’s project. No worries.” They say go fill out this questionnaire, and the business owner will fill out the questionnaire saying: “This is who my market is, this is the 3 daily frustrations, this is the problem that keeps them up at night.” You know, this, this and that. The copywriter will go, “Oh, thanks for that and they’ll start punching out copy and giving it back to them.” A lot of the times, it doesn’t really work because the business owner is not the client. That’s the big distinction. So when I get them to fill it out, I say, “Thanks very much. Can I also get a list of your top 10 clients, most recent clients.” Then I’ll ring these clients up and  I’ll just say, “Good day, this is Bret Thomson. I’m working with Bob. I asked Bob for a list of his top 10 clients, and you’re at the top of my list. So I was wondering if you have a couple of minutes, I’d love to ask you a few questions cause I want to help Bob get his product out and help people.” I’ll do that call over and over and over again and that’s where all the gems come from: those interviews. I used to ask really dumb questions like “What headline do you think will work these days?” and just don’t ask them their opinion, all right? The way you get the gold is to ask them to tell their story. Say “How did you come across Bob?” Cause they can’t fudge a story, right? If you ask them their opinion, people have this… They consider that they have to try and give you the right answer or try and sound smart. But if you ask them to tell their story, then it eliminates any of that, and you just get the pure gold. Inside that story, you can ask them: “Who are you looking at, why didn’t you buy from them?” and you kind of dig deep in that. So, that’s kind of the extra level that I go to when I write copy because by the time I’ve gone through those kind of calls, I know exactly what the market is feeling right now. Not two years ago, but right now.That’s just one of the things I do and I know not a lot of other copywriters do that, but it’s my reputation on the line. If I want to get good conversions and maintain my reputation, I’ve got to go that extra mile and spend more time on the research and doing the writing. John McIntyre: Good stuff man, I like it. I like the idea of getting their story instead of asking them about their facts or headlines or that kind of thing. We’re right on time, so before we go though, if someone’s listening to this and wants to know more about you or buy one of your products or anything like that, where is the best place for them to go and do that? Bret Thomson: Cool, thanks man, I appreciate it. I’ve got a blog which is probably a little bit neglected last couple of months, but I’ve got a lot of really cool teachings there at bretthomson.com. By the time this recording comes out, I’ll have a site going called Marketing Maker of A HQ dot com. But if you really wanna learn a deeper level of what I do and how to get the core results that I’ve got, it’s all wrapped up in a book called Client Rash. So you go to clientrashbook.com. I’m really proud of that book as an information marketer. I mean, I’ve put programs together that are worth 1000 dollars, 1500 dollars and I’ve invested a lot of those as well, but I can honestly say that the stuff that I’ve put in that little 25 dollar book is probably equal to a 1500 dollar home study course. So yeah, that is a good way to get introduced to more of me. John McIntyre: Good stuff man, I will link to those sites in our show notes at themcmethod.com. Bret, thanks for coming onto the show. Bret Thomson: My pleasure, mate. You’ve made it really easy and I love what you do on [xx?] Big fan of yours so keep charging, buddy. The post Episode #85 – Bret Thomson on Hard-Work, Persistence and RESEARCH As Traits That Will Always Keep You Up Top appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Drayton Bird is on the podcast today. And it’s a doozy. Drayton’s been in the game longer than you’ll ever guess, And still going strong well into his later years. He had an agency in the U.K. back in the day, Then sold it to David Ogilvy, ..sticking around to work with him for years after. David keeps his skills sharp by practicing his copy every day, He follows and studies current email marketer’s emails, Making his understudies do the same. Today Drayton will let you know that you need to connect with your readers better. That you need to STOP writing like a corporate drone. Because if you’re in corporate zombieland territory, You’re in a bad place. If you want to be successful, The ONLY way to be successful.. ..is to tone it down. To write like you talk. Let Drayton explain this in his words: He’s an entertaining guy with a ton harsh truths that you might not want to hear. Be prepared to face yourself with certain questions afterwards. In this episode, you’ll discover: the one thing Drayton did to become a successful and wealthy marketing pro (hint.. you’ve done it before most test days at school your whole life) the most important book ever written about marketing, and sadly how few have read it tiny little things can make a huge difference (DON’T THINK SO BIG all the time) the number one most important and vital step you need to be taking when building email marketing campaigns (it’s actually two very related steps) a shocking discovery made about the Kellogs Marketing team (even fresh-meat marketers know the importance of this one) yet another stupid-crazy discovery about corporate marketing pros’ opinions on ROI Drayton’s Golden Rule that will make each email you send beneficial for whoever opens it The Read It Out Loud method (would you actually say what you just wrote down to someone in person?) Mentioned: David Ogilvy Daniel Levis Jon Benson Drayton Bird’s site AskDrayton.com Rory Sutherland Claude Hopkins (have YOU read him?) Ryan Deiss Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre here, the Auto responder guy. It’s time for episode 84 of the McMethod Marketing podcast where you discover how to get more customers with less effort and make them spend more every time they buy from you. Now today, I’ll be talking to Drayton Bird. Drayton is a well known copywriter. He’s a direct response guy and he is one of the big yachts, let me put it that way. He actually quit an agency in the marketing industry that was in the UK, Britain, as far as I’m aware, and sold that to David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather and he went to work with David for a while. So, this guy Drayton, he is a bad ass when it comes to copywriting. He’s not really an internet marketing guru or anything like that, he’s an old school director that gets shit done kind of guy. So that’s Drayton Bird and that’s what today is about. We are going to talk about how to not write like corporate zombie land. He says, “Don’t imagine you’re a pretentious corpse writing to other corpses.” Ok, he has kind of posted on his site about this, this whole idea of when businesses write emails to their customers, clients or any other businesses, they make it sound so freaking boring, they sound like they are these pretentious corpses and I really hope, if you’re listening to this podcast, that you are not doing this with your business because, I mean, you need to make it fresh. Now, that’s going to mean something different depending on what market you’re in, yes, but don’t use all the corporate language speak. Try something, mix it up, be friendly. Anyway, that’s what we’re going to learn all about today. So I don’t need to talk about that right now because you’re going to hear about it in a few minutes’ time. To get the show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast go to www.mcmethod.com /84. This week’s McMasters inside of the week is really really simple. One thing I’ve noticed recently, while talking to a variety of different people, people much more successful than I am, who’ve been in the game a lot longer than I have.  Often, we have dinner, we have coffee, and we talk about business and what works and what doesn’t. When I first started hanging out with these kind of people I used to think that maybe there’s a secret. What’s different about them? Why are they successful? What are they doing differently? Thinking that there’s something like a magic bowl of special ability they have and, you know what, there is no special ability. There’s no magic thing to it. Every time I speak to one of these guys about this secret, they all go back to, “There are no secrets. You work hard and you do what others want. So you might be like ‘I don’t want to wake up at 10 am because I can, I work online, I don’t need an alarm, I’ll wake up at 10 am’. Well that’s great but I bet you there’s someone out there who is willing to wake up at 7 am to get his work done and I reckon actually, that there’s someone out there who’s going to wake up at 4:30 am  and he is at the office by 4:45 am  in the morning to get started. I mean all things being equal, the guy gets up at 10 am, how is he going to compare with the guy who gets up at 4:30? There are other diminishing returns (not clear) with this and you obviously need to sleep at some point, but the idea here is that if you need to wake up at 6 am every day and get to the office or if you want to be at the office by 6 am to work and that’s going to make a big difference in your business, then do it. Do whatever it takes, I mean, this depends whether you are in a small or lifestyle business where you can live on the beach in Thailand, for example. There are no beaches where I am actually, unfortunately, or whether you actually want to build something big. This is going to mean something different for different people and you want to get clear on the values and once you’re sure how big you want to go, you want to commit to it, you want all in and like I said, work hard and do what others want. Do what others want. That is the secret to success. This is the McMasters inside of the week. If you want to get more insights like this, you want to join McMasters. McMasters is a McPrivate training community. There’s a forum in there, write in there, where you can post, you can ask questions and get advice from myself and other members. It’s also set with training products and email marketing and sales files and really, it’s all about how to get more customers with less effort so you can grow your business and maybe, you know, maybe you don’t have to work at 6 am or maybe you can work at 6 and just make way more impact anyway so that’s McMasters. A little more about that go to the mcmethod.com/mcmasters and I’ll see you inside the forum. That’s it for now. Let’s get into the interview with Mr Drayton Bird. It’s John McIntyre, the Autoresponder guy and I’m here with Drayton Bird, now Drayton is a long time copywriter,  a direct response marketing consultant and he actually worked with David Ogilvy and I want him direct so that’s Ogilvy and Mather and Ogilvy said that Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone else in the world. So with that in mind I thought I would see if Drayton wants to come to the show and talk a bit about email marketing and the history of email because he’s been doing this for a while, so we’re going to talk about email and, in particular, one post which we’ll get to in a minute which is ‘I’ll just grab a towel on that because look at you, you’re excited (unclear)…the towel is Good Email, Bad Email, The Right Way and Let’s spoil the Living Shit out of You on How to Write Emails, so we’ll get into that in just a minute. Drayton, how are you today? Drayton Bird: I’m very old, I’m at least a day older than I was yesterday. I’ve just been in my kitchen here in Bristol in England and I discovered that I’ve got maggots in the rubbish. This has caused a major panic— John McIntyre: –when you picked up the phone, you said, ‘Hang on a second, I’ve just got a minor crisis going on right now,’ so— Drayton Bird: We forgot to put the rubbish out last week. I’m not going to upset people about telling the full horrible home –. Okay, I’ve been in this game for about 50 odd years. I came into it because I wasn’t making any money as a journalist and what’s interesting to me about email is that everything has changed in the last 20 years. I started in advertising, got very interested in the kind of advertising that got results or a direct response, built up a business in England, in London which became the biggest direct marketing agency around and then sold it to Ogilvy and Mather. I worked for Ogilvy and Mather for about 8 or 9 years and I still kept in contact with David Ogilvy for the rest of his life. He was a great mentor for me, but I am a copywriter. I write copy every day, I’m not the world’s oldest copywriter, but I’m 78 years so I must be running it close. Before you scout me, I was writing some copy this morning. What’s interesting to me about email: the first thing that was interesting was that I was used to sending out direct mail. Direct mail cost money to send out, substantial amounts of money. You have to print the stuff, stick it in an envelope and get somebody to send it and so on. Once somebody came along and said ‘There’s this thing called email and it doesn’t cost you anything’. Well, that’s a very important fact, you know. A positive advantage derives from people who find something that is thrust unnaturally. I took cheap compared to the other methods that people are using so email was incredibly cheap and also that was new and I can remember, I spoke at a conference in the Netherlands about 20 years ago and somebody from Sysco said to me, “Hey, we’re sending out emails and getting a 10% response, how about that?” I mean I laughed out loud. You get 1% response you know you’re doing pretty well, I had to think, ‘How does this differ from what I’m used to? How does it differ from advertising? How does it differ from direct mail to get response? And I discovered that to all intends and purposes there’s very little difference indeed except for technical reasons that do with the nature of the medium. For instance, let’s take the two factors that determine whether people will read your email or not. They are: Do I know this person? Do I know who masters this direct mail in advertising? Broadly speaking, if somebody knows the advertiser, they are twice as likely to read the advertisement than they are not to. If somebody knows the advertiser, they are at least twice as more likely to open the envelope in a piece of direct mail. Same thing applies, so, very often the most important thing in an email is, “Do I know you?” so we said this morning that I got a thing from…, the subject line was “From Ricky Murray…From Ricky Murray.” I get a lot of this from so and so. I don’t know who the hell Ricky Murray is, I don’t care who Ricky Murray is although is opened it. It was such a stupid email because I like to look at them. So I opened it to see if Ricky Murray had anything to say and  below there was a cryptic line and I still didn’t what he was talking about. So what’s the second thing that matters when you send out any communication, be it direct mail or advertising? Whatever it might be, the second main thing is, ‘Does this interest me? Now…so one of the things you…you get it every day from somebody, some of the things that say, “No subject”. I don’t know you and you want to talk to me about nothing, great! And this happens all the time. I often think that the other reason I made a living in this business is not because I’m any good but because often a lot of people are very very stupid. Some of the golden rules that you can apply which relate to an icon in communications, let’s take the headline in an advertisement. If you have a headline which is hard to read your audience isn’t going to work very well. If you have an email where the subject line is more than 40 characters long, some say 35 characters long, then people are not going to see the whole of that subject line, so you better be damn sure that what you say at the beginning of those words, that whatever you are saying is interesting enough to keep people reading on or alternatively, you’ve got to make damn sure that what you have to say fits into 40 characters. That is an area where the nature of the medium determines the tactics that you use because everything I’ve discovered, and I’ve done, God knows how many, split tests over the years, and everything I’ve studied most people shows that long headlines in advertisements work better than short ones. They work better than short ones because they can say more, they can make a more precise promise. On the other hand, you can’t do that with an email subject line, so that sort of thing influences the success or failure of an email. The same questions come up time and again. Should we have a short email? Or should we have a long email? Now one of my colleagues, I have a relatively small business and he’s certainly a writer, but we have discussed it around various countries. He was writing that you should have a very short email that leads into a long landing pledge. But another man whom I respect a great deal, Daniel Levis, who makes more money than God, sitting out somewhere in Canada sends out very very long emails inviting people to very very long events. We’ve been asked… John McIntyre: I actually just spoke to him. I did one of these interviews with Daniel maybe two weeks ago. Drayton Bird: Oh really? John McIntyre: Yeah, so he’s doing a long email to a long long sales pitch …to an even longer event… Drayton Bird: …And he …again, another thing that people talk about is, ‘How often should you mail? Daniel mails virtually every day of the week. I mail virtually every day of the week. Bob Larry, whom I respect enormously, only mails, I think, 2 days a week. Corporate people tend to think that if you mail people more than once a month you are overwhelming them. The only thing I can say about that is that the one certainty I can give you is that, generally speaking, study whatever large corporations are doing, and do the opposite. Because the route to success in a large corporation is through climbing your way up the corporate ladder. Not necessarily doing a better job. Fitting in with the corporate guidelines, not necessarily doing a better job. One other thing that occurred to me when people ask about emails is, “When should you email? What day should you email?” I was talking to another of my partners, we have a business called Young Birds, which is essentially younger people who work for me, write for me, who write copy which I’m creatively directing, rewriting general (not clear)…that one. Gerald finds that Thursday is the best day for him. Other people say other days. I have no idea what… my other partner (not clear) thinks that he likes Sunday, Monday. You know, his theory is that anybody who’s writing out an email of Sunday is very serious. I noticed that yesterday, the day before yesterday, Saturday, Daniel Levis emailed on Saturday, so did I. I don’t normally do it so you really have to test and find out what works for you. John McIntyre: Well, it sounds like, how do you resolve this? How do you explain this difference between …I guess you say you’re exhausted that you’re doing emails daily, Bob does twice a week, you know, everyone seems to have a different strategy even the actual emails themselves looks very quite a bit …now what …if someone, they either don’t test or they don’t have a volume required to test this sort of thing, or they just want a best practices idea of what they should do, what do you think? Should they …what is your suggestion?  If, I know they can test it, but if they have to pick one of the other how often would be mailing and how long would the emails be? Drayton Bird: I cannot …I really don’t know. I honestly don’t know. And I don’t think anybody knows. I’m a great collector of quotations and George Bernard Shaw said that ‘the golden rule is that there is no golden rule’. And it depends what suits you. There are certain things that I think I can say with some confidence. Number 1, some of the people who make more money than anyone else are the people selling investments, people like The Motley Fool, for instance, the Daily Reckoning. I study their stuff very carefully. They send out incredibly long emails, their landing pages are incredibly very long. I once took the trouble to measure how long one of the Daily Writings landing page was and I watched out that if you printed it out it would be 233 pages long. But I happen to know these people make a tremendous amount of money and of course they–. I think that they, again going back to my experience in advertising, the rule there was, the more interesting the subject was to people and the greater the amount of money involved, the longer the copy should be. In other words, if I’m selling somebody, well, which I have done Perfect Brick (unclear) …or Bobby, which I also have done; there is a hell of a lot you could say. There isn’t a tremendous amount you could say about Bobby without going to jail. But on the other hand, the most expensive product I’ve ever sold or helped to sell, was the Air Bus which was an airoplane, which cost a lot of money, I don’t think that I would have sold it with two or three words, but the other issue of course is what should the format be. A great amount of people lose a great deal of money by sending out emails which are, in effect, like leaflets. They are mostly designed in htmo…there’s lots of colours …this, generally does not work as well as things that look like text. Until you’ve got somebody signed up, somebody interested, somebody who’ll join your list, and that way you can start sending out more elaborate looking things. My partner is an Italian lady and she works in the financial services area, in fact, she does most of the marketing for a very very successful investment firm here in Bristol. The most successful of its kind in this country, one of the most successful in the world. And what she does is that she uses things that look like text to get people and after that she sends out things that look like newsletters. I wouldn’t argue with that very much. She trained with me, but she’s bloody sight better than me now. There’s a moral from the story somewhere. John McIntyre: Okay, so you’re  saying you can, at least initially, you have to engage people as a person using text, being interesting but over the time, once you have that relationship and that rapport you can actually get away with sending, or maybe, do even better to send nice fancy emails that have colour and images, and all that sort of stuff. Drayton Bird: I think it is appropriate that even the most surprising, I’ve got lots of collections with different texts that I’ve written, so one area you’d think would work very well was sort of jazzy, consumery, exciting visuals  is gaming, betting. …and I’ve got one such a free mail where they did some test between three different designs, one that just looked like text, one was fairly interesting looking with a bit of colour in it where we had lots of stuff going on,  very interesting visual. The text one …so I think it’s so easy …if you’ve got people you can’t send out things that look like leaflets and again, there is the parallel with direct mail. One of the things that I discovered about direct mail was that the most important thing in a direct mail in a mail pack is the letter not the not the leaflet. But a lot of people still send out the leaflets without letters. And there reason for this is that if the communication is a personal communication, which an email is, then it should look personal. Even the language that you use should be personal. My own view is that if you want to be any good at this, you have to do the same things that you have to do with everything else, you have to study it. I spend…God knows I should be, I’ve been surpassed here, I should have given up years ago, but I still study every day the emails that I get and I tell my people to study them and since we were talking about Daniel Levis, I told my people ten days ago. I said, “Read this series of emails from Daniel and see what you can learn from them.” Because he does things that other people don’t do. He has a consistent theme in his communications. He makes the most…(unclear) process and then he proceeds and, in effect, to challenge people to make them justify them but he writes an awful lot of copy. The theory about the length of copy is really simple, the theory is that nobody is forcing the ready to go read all these stuff. The reader can stop whenever the reader likes. It’s up to you to how long you can keep people interested. But the longer you can keep people interested, the more likely they are to buy it and higher percent of them are likely to buy and it is as simple as that. There are an awful lot of things going on at the moment and they are being tested in this field of online communication. So I have a thing, which is a monthly program called Askdrayton. This actually started a year ago… over a year ago… with a series of emails and a long landing page,  a long landing page that is laid out, is not laid out very sleekly, but is laid out. If anyone wants to see it, just go Google askdrayton.com and you won’t see what it looks like. Or maybe you won’t see what it looks like because about talking to John Benson who is… what he calls very ugly videos I think. Which are, in effect, are nothing more than just the script rolling across the page. So I thought, well, give that a shot. John McIntyre: …Drayton.com and the video is already loading so the copy is long … Drayton Bird: So is the video, the reason the video is loading is because it beat the written landing page 3:1. But the words are identical. That is a startling example of the fact that you can take something and the means by which you communicate it, not what you say may have more impact than anything else. In the same way I’m saying if you send out a text, it’d probably do better than a … (not clear) you people…so that sort of thing absolutely fascinates me and right now I’ve got someone working on another version of that landing page which we’re going to test which is the one I’m sure you’re seeing…a hand drawing. So, we’re testing now, we’ll see what works with that. Now, the implication of this is very important. The one thing I would say to anybody listening to this is the most important thing to is to test a measure… I’m doing a talk in Poland next year to the Havard Business Review and what I’m gonna talk about,  is that I haven’t thought about the title. But the essential subject is why your marketing people are rubbish? Why are you so disappointed with your direct marketing people? …and don’t tell me you’re not because in lots of surveys show that most of them show that people are not very impressed with marketing people. And I’ve some quotes from senior marketing people from companies like Kellogg’s…they don’t bloody measure. They don’t measure. The guys from Kellogg’s when they first started measuring they said, “Oh this is like shining a light in a dark tunnel.” And I was showing this to some people in Portugal about three weeks ago and I said, “Can you imagine that this man got to a senior job in Kellogg’s, without ever bloody measuring anything because they probably very good at getting senior jobs? Not very good at marketing. He wasn’t the only one. There’s a wonderful survey from Fornays who do surveys to research into what’s going on in marketing which points out that the overwhelming majority of marketing people don’t think (not clear) investment matters. If there’s anyone listening to this who’s trying to make their way in this business, I’d say one thing to you, “You are in a great business, and the reason you are in a great business and the only reason why I’m still making a living and the only reason why I make an awful lot of money is that most of the other people involved were idiots. They were not trying hard, they didn’t study. If you go into a room full of people and you know more than anyone else in the room it’s difficult to put a price on the advantage of that. So I started studying and I wrote my first book on marketing in 1992, which is still selling, still selling in 17 languages all over the world. But it wasn’t me, I didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and say I’m the only one who knows what works in direct marketing. I just spent a lot of time studying and I think that anybody who goes into an industry where people don’t study and decides that they would study, that is the ultimate, competitive advantage. It really is. If you can’t test, just keep trying, you’ve got nothing to try, you’ll soon find out that which once get the most opened and so on, which ones get read, which ones get responded to. You’ll find out. My golden rule which I often ignore because we learn more from success is that whatever you sent out should seemed to be helpful and it should be easy to take in and amazingly enough, I received an email from a very very  …(unclear) a promotional email, written by a man who is supposed to be a bloody genius in this business. And I looked at it and then I simply went to word and measured how long the first paragraph was. Forty words. Then I looked at the second paragraph, the second paragraph was thirty five words. This man (the name is unclear)  all I can say is that I know paragraphs forty words long are almost impossible to bloody be read by the average person. People just get lost, they forget where it began … the average length of a sentence if you want to write successfully should be about 16 words, the easiest sentence is 8 words. Anything beyond twenty five words, people just cannot remember what you were talking about at the beginning of the sentence. It’s these simple things that make the difference is not … I have a guy that I employed back in the 1980s, called Rory Sutherland, if you go onto the internet and look up Chad look up Rory Sutherland, you will see he’s one of the funniest and cleverest people I’ve ever come across and I’ve ever hired. He’s the vice chairman of the Ogilvy Group here in England and he did one talk, I think on tape called, ‘Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff’. Actually what he was saying was, ‘stop worrying about big strategic ideas, trying little things can make a huge difference’. For instance if you’re emailing people and, instead of just asking them to reply, you ask them to choose to write back and say yes I’m interested or no, I’m not interested, maybe I might be interested in this, you’ll get more sales. I didn’t invent that. That was invented by my client, Readers’ Digest about forty years ago. And what he got to do has got to do with salesmanship, and what we got to do as salesmanship, that’s what we are doing, all we have to do is follow salesmanship and I was last week in Vancouver, week before last, an audience of marketing people and I said to them, “How many people have read Claude Hopkins, not one single person had read Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins in 1926, 1924, 25, 26 wrote the most influential and best book on marketing ever and most marketing people have never even read it. And if you write emails and you read Claude Hopkins’s book, you’ll even more directive  emails than when he was alive. It’s a book forty eight pages long, again, if you go to any of my sites and you can download it for nothing. John McIntyre: What’s the book called again? Drayton Bird: It’s called Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, and I suspect you haven’t read it. John McIntyre: I’ve read it at least two or three times actually. Drayton Bird: Oh good. John McIntyre: I’ve also read My Life and Advertising, have you read that? Drayton Bird: Yes. John McIntyre: Yeah, that was good too. Drayton Bird: I got worried about you there. It’s amazing to me, in that audience of a couple hundred people, no one had even heard of, never mind read, the most important book ever written about marketing. If you look at say, the shortest chapter in that book, is just Salesmanship, two and a half pages long, and you’ll learn something about what you should be putting in your emails, what you should be putting in your ads, what you should be putting in your commercials and what you should be doing, it’s just amazing to me that people don’t study it. John McIntyre: Tell me about…I’m almost done here, but tell me quickly about this Good Email, Bad Email , the right way or wrong way of, we’ve talked a lot about long email, short email, subject lines and all that, tell me how all these corporate companies are boring the crap out of most of  these subscribers and what people should be doing. Drayton Bird: They don’t use creative language. There’s one here, it says, ‘consumer cloud storage’, and then it goes:  …this the typical stuff for business and its one of the biggest concern about cloud based service is security. I don’t even know what bloody hell they mean by cloud based service, by the by. There is a lovely old American rhyme, ‘Tell me quick and tell me true what your product is going to do or else my love to hell with you’. That’s a bloody good thing to remember while you’re writing emails. Consumers are very concerned about business security, with the quick growth and popularity it goes on and on with the rapid growth of popularity, many employees have started using consumer cloud services for business because of the simplicity of such services. Consumer services…this is boring, just awful… tell me what the hell you’re going to do for me, it’s appalling. Here we are, popular consumer cloud storage services offer very limited features, many having just folder synchronization. Folder synchronization! Jesus Christ! The thing I would suggest to… it’s a very good idea is that if you’re writing anything, to read out loud and just say to yourself, “Does that sound like somebody talking?”  Would you actually say that if you were in front of somebody? It is so simple that nobody believes it. There are a lot of things that I say because you are allowed to do things off the cuff that I don’t. I worry, I recommend worry. Worry is a very good thing. I worry like hell. So here is something that never  fails…some American companies casting the most jobs…all these lists you say are all over the place…they work and  people love lists…Here’s one proof, Ryan Dust (not clear) who I do think is very very clever, that ‘nearly one hundred percent auto pilots business …now what he’s doing is interesting. He’s making an outrageous claim and he gets himself off the hook in advance by saying nearly. And he then goes, he makes the most amazing claim. This is the true story. He said that this is a true story. He just said it’s not really true, hypothetically. The true story of a practically hands free auto pilot business and there’s a link to it. And then traffic comes (not clear) out on autopilot …Lizards converted into castles are also on autopilot and bars are turned into …yep you guessed it also …its good copy. As long as there’s somebody. It’s an amazing story that you can apply to your business too. There’s an old link. That’s a very good communication. I happen to know that putting things in autopilot is bloody hard work. Nearly doesn’t begin to say that, I also happen to know that Ryan Dust is brilliant and almost everything he says is good advice. If anybody is listening to this wants to make lots of money, you can make lots of money, it can be done on auto pilot but it is bloody hard work because when you’re seeing these cases of these guys living in his car about three months ago and made 6 million dollars, that kind of thing…every now and then a miracle occurs and it doesn’t make sense that a miracle is gonna occur to you. John McIntyre: It does. It does take hard work. Drayton Bird: Life is not as easy as we would like it to be. Here is another one I saw this morning, hold your (not clear) while using this pressure pump…if you have back pain and I’ve had clients that interested in that sort of thing, people are going to read that. …another one …A sneak peak of the pitch boot camps…everybody likes to know about something that is secret…David Ogilvy was an advertising man. People always like to know about something they shouldn’t know about. It’s essentially the principles that govern other media, govern the email, that govern email with and for the fact that there is an email, there’s just certain constraints. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, we’ll find out what works …ago and tested what the most important thing is to persist. I went broke but came back spectacularly in 1970, a long time ago. I went broke for a millions today. And I had to do anything I could do to earn a living because, any damn thing you can think of. I just kept going and when I reached about sixty five again I had a similar problem because I was at that age I was seen by lots of people as being too old to be able to perform. Young people involved in marketing didn’t think a guy my age could be …hell, so I said, what I’m gonna do is I’m going to master the bloody internet. I already had a website, and I was already beginning to use emails, I got to built a list and so I sent out an email to ten thousand marketing directors and asked them would you like thirty one ideas in thirty one day …it was signed up, and then I started setting these things up and then these are growing, could you please selling so many? So I said to him, do you mind if I sell one in three days? He said, yeah that’s fine. So I started sending emails once in three days. I said should I carry on and people said, please do. So now if you sign up to my help and ideas, you got over a hundred. John McIntyre: It says fifty one free ideas and you’re saying that it’s actually more than that. Drayton Bird: You know why it says fifty one? John McIntyre: Because it’s a nice rounded number? Drayton Bird: Because I checked …we found that fifty one looked better than a hundred and one. John McIntyre: Interesting, very interesting. Drayton Bird: Are you surprised? John McIntyre: So did you test fifty one? Fifty two, fifty three, fifty four? Drayton Bird: No, it was really… who tested it without telling me. And I suddenly saw this thing saying, I like people who do things without telling me as long as they’re not stupid. What the hell are you …out here? Why is it fifty one and not a hundred and one? So he said, I’ve tested it. They also tested, we have a little ad that said, get my fifty one free tips. Get Drayton Bird’s tips, something like that. Drayton Bird’s fifty one free tips. Capital T capital B, I could never have predicted that. You human beings are really strange and the only person who …strange creatures…but unfortunately that’s where the money is. But that first email went out these ten thousand people and eighteen hundred plus, created thirty thousand responses eventually. That’s the list that we have now. If you don’t have a list, forget it. When are we on? When are you putting this out? John McIntyre: I reckon it’s an hour of recording. It’ll take six weeks, because I’ve got, you mentioned John Benson, it’s going out soon. Let’s see I think it’s about six weeks. So it’ll be about two months from now actually. Drayton Bird: Okay, it’ll be bloody Christmas. John McIntyre: That will be a Christmas present to my listeners and here we go interviewing Drayton Burt. Anyway so if people want to hear more about you or want to sign up to this list and free Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising where should they go? You mentioned Drayton.com or Draytonbird.com. Either one works? Drayton Bird: Either one works. Draytonburt.com you get the book, John McIntyre: I’ll have links to that on the mcmethod.com so if anyone wants to access those links they can go to the site there. And get them. Drayton, thanks for coming on the show man. Drayton Bird: Pleasure. I wish I were in Chiang Mai. John McIntyre: I wish you were too man. The post Episode #84 – Drayton Bird on Using Old & New School Copy Techniques To Trudge Your Way Out Of Corporate Zombieland appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Daryl Urbanski has been there. An entrepreneur since the teenage years, It wasn’t always easy. He fumbled his way through much of it, ..until one day he realized marketing is the key to success: “Good marketing can sell a non-existent product, but bad marketing can’t sell free gold.” That’s the quote he’s ran with ever since. And now today.. Daryl is raking it in as the 7-Figure Funnel Master. Not only does he smash out 7-figure numbers from his launches now, ..but he teaches others exactly how to do the same. The results speak for themselves, And that’s why he’s on the Email Marketing Podcast today. Daryl dives deep into his 7 Figure Formula, the results that his students get from it, And most importantly, Actionable steps that will let you recreate his success in your own business. Build yourself crazy-profitable sales funnels after today using Mr. Urbanski’s methods.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how non behavior-based email marketing will set you back with low conversions (and how to avoid this) the absolutely most important decision you need to make before you put pen to paper on your sales letter or start your sales funnel mapping (this will save you tons of heartache in the future) how Daryl made 1.4 million dollars with a launch this year having only a few staff the most revolutionary thing to happen in marketing history (a skill that you might have and can definitely learn) the scaling power behind multi-step marketing campaigns (the ultimate selling tool and how to use it) 2 main staples to every funnel that are must-haves in order to scale to big-dog status the Oprah Effect and it’s ultimate scaling meter (is your business ready for Oprah’s recommendation?) how to avoid getting your reputation dinged when scaling your product to the masses the first thing you need to do when you have a hot scalable product ready to hit the market (bust out the calculator, time to number crunch…) that making too much money too fast can be a company killer (find out the safe way to avoid this… never be afraid to scale again) Mentioned: The 7-Figure Funnel Formula Ken McCarthy Michael Gerber Titans of Direct Response The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: Okay, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for episode 83, the McMethod Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover one simple thing, how to make more… how, basically, how to get more customers. Let me just break it down. It is about e-mail marketing. It is about sales funnels, but, really, the secret to this podcast is getting you more customers, making them spend more money with you so you can work less and spend more time with your family, your snowboarding, or hey whatever you wanna do. Okay? Whatever that is. Today, I’ll be talking to Darly Urbanski. Now, Daryl has a thing called the 7-figure funnel formula. It’s pretty much Hey, I’m doing good John… doing good… glad to be here. How’re you doin? Good to have you on the show man; and we actually, it’s funny coz we were both at Titans… the titans conference a couple weeks back but we didn’t even meet at the conference. It was funny when i got your email… I think from, i think it was Yes. …and then I saw you floating around on facebook in the Daryl Urbanski: It is a small world, especially, I guess at the, at the, echelons, so people are really living and breathing it, so… That event was so awesome… the caliber people So you were just tellin’ me about, uh, like, Ken Mccarthy and… and that we’re gonna get some of the other guys to, you know, some of the other gurus in the industry, although… although… though they are a part of a more well-known gurus in the internet industry to the conference, and then they ended up getting Ken Mccarthy who would… you’re saying he is really the guru behind the gurus, the guy that all the gurus that everyone knows go to; but, uh, no one knows who he is. Most people don’t know who he is. Daryl Urbanski: well, yeah, coz he, He’s kinda been out of the game. I mean, he was the first one… he was the godfather of titan’s group, i was like, “ah, it’s just like a small world”. John McIntyre: internet marketing. He put on the first internet marketing Cool, man. Before we get into this 7-figure funnel formula can you give the, uh, the listener just sort of a bit of a background on, uh, on who you are ‘coz I just met you… David Urbanski: Sure. Sure. Sure. Well, yes, so, I am a Canadian boy. Uhm, I guess to start off, I mean, I… I’ve been trying to succeed in business since I was seventeen… just fumbling and figuring it out. Canada’s not as entrepreneurial as the States. We are kinda on the walk Nice, man. You have a lot of stuff going on. !Yeah. well, it’s just about the journey… I mean, you’re talking about that when your big takeaways are just people that have a mission and motivation; and reason to get up and, you know, I set a goal that I wanna help That’s the funny thing about thailand… man, it has just got… On the one hand, you got guys hustling hard and they really try like they’re here to build a business to Exactly. Yeah. It’s an interest split. John McIntyre and they’re really both right… ‘coz i mean at the end of the day, all the pieces go back in the box, right? Uh, i mean. you can’t take it with you !Yeah. That’s it. It doesn’t matter. You do whatever you want here; but at the end of the day, it’s just about doing stuff that fulfills you and that’s why I want to help entrepreneurs who wanna change the world or solve That’s one of the funny things about it. It’s like you can… I mean you could be a completely unethical, you know, person but like in business you’d be like a one hit wonder, you’d work once and as soon as… …that one knows what it’s like Yeah, so you could just take ethics out of it completely and you still have to play by the rules, like.. you still have to play as though you are an ethical person. It sounds a little bit sinister now. You still have, look yeah… like what I said, good business sense to do it regardless.. David Urbanski: Yeah. …what you agree or believe you’re the most ethical or moral person in the world… just makes good business sense Yeah, and it’s really kinda disheartening when you see good marketers that sell empty boxes or do, you know, just, I don’t know – they just try to suck money out of people and places, and then it kinda disappears, it just… I don’t know, it’s just uh, different type of person, I guess. Well, cool man. Let’s talk about this 7-figure funnel formula… what’s getting you all these results. Let’s, uh, let’s start with like a big pitch or overview over of what it is… Sure. …and how does it work, and what’s the sort of thinking, I don’t know, if we could dive into some of the, uhm, big concepts of the nitty gritty stuff. Sure. Sure. Sure. So yeah, I’m a, you know, fully transparent here… I’ll give much content as I can with the time we have.. so, I mean… one of those most revolutionary things that happened to marketing was the Right. So the real core of the 7-figure funnel formula is creating not even just… not even just like a sales letter ‘coz a sales letter is just one step but multi-step marketing Okay, and how is it, I’m… I’m always curious, ‘coz someone – like, I’m with a community and I teach people about, you know, bad e-mail marketing or bad sales funnels and that sort of thing on my end, and what I have noticed is that you sort of got, you probably see this as well, there’s a lot of marketers out there and everyone talks as though they have their own method so I guess… John McIntyre: …doing marketing, doing a sales funnel, doing that; but often I don’t know, what I have seen out there is you start to think that a lot of it is very similar. At the end of the day, it’s, you know, about someone and giving them some sort of pitch and then following up making sure you’ve got your, uh, your product dialed and what sort of… what makes your 7-figure funnel formula unique, what makes it unique. What do you think? Sure. So yeah, and you’re right. It always has been the same, so the difference with our technology or with this course is that it shows case studies and real life David Urbanski: Yeah. Absolutely man. I mean, one thing I’ve noticed with… I mean, the… the tricky things are at, uhm, the times of the response in comforters like that is… I think Yeah. …and so that applies in any level like to make a million dollars that’s a very different question, how to make a hundred million which is different again from a hundred Yeah. …so it’s sort of like actually finding my own life that it’s very… it’s actually quite helpful to start to think on that scale that before you optimize any… before you write lead but they’re making David Urbanski: Yeah… no, exactly. I mean, that’s something I picked up from Michael Gerber, was the rule of ten thousand. He basically applied that everything… Michael Gerber, the e- methods is all about systemizing your business and Right, but one thing I’m curious about is some of the nitty gritty stuff of how this funnel of yours, like, plays out… so walk me through like a typical funnel. sure, well of course in every funnel you’ve got traffic, and you’ve got conversion, you got a conversion event whether it’s your sales letter or whether it’s a webinar or Yeah. So I mean the best situation is like with, again, with John, who is my client right now… they’re spending six dollars and eighty-seven cents to get a lead. John McIntyre: Okay. And so what do.. so let’s say you set up a funnel.. Is every funnel… does it follow the same form like in the sense that you get cold traffic going to an opt-in page Well, that also depends on the market; so, for example, I have a client that’s in aroma therapy and she… you know, I’m not gonna say her name but she’s gone through a couple of recent internet marketers funnels coz she has Yeah. …and that can even be that you’re building the relationship or you’re solving the problems, that’s another way to look at it but.. so that’s.. i mean, that’s as far… as I like that. That makes it really simple when you kinda… you’re either building a relationship when you’re selling them something. Yeah, that’s it; and when you’re selling them something but, that’s why I changed it because selling isn’t supposed to be hurting the relationship at all, like that’s So that’s like golf-swing when you’re gonna take one degree difference on the golf swing, it doesn’t make much.. doesn’t look like anything when you’re hitting the Exactly, exactly, exactly… so I mean, a funnel is a funnel and you can have seven upsells and downsells and the front end, you can have five different webinars or five No, this is good. It’s interesting. it’s – it has end up being quite a lot… like a conceptual or high level of chat because I actually thought that there would be like more… I suppose, uhm, nitty gritty. It’s funny too, like the great thing about podcast is that I can get on and if some of these questions are relevant to, uhm, the funnel I am sort of running right now and I’ve got to improve it.. and that’s why you know, I find it so interesting, but, uhm, i’ve just always been curious like you know, that’s why I ask the whole is there a set formula that you use with everyone or does it vary? …and what I’ve gathered… I Yeah, and I mean, really… to be really honest, i don’t know if losing a money is… I know a lot of people do that and if you got the money to afford that… I just think that Yeah.. but then once you’ve been cooking long enough and you’ve got enough experience, you can make your own recipes and make it happen and it’s, you know, someone John McIntyre: Go on man …but that comes from a theory I have about learning, you know, I never went to a university. I was accepted at the school of commerce but I never went, I went to Japan instead and i feel part of what has helped me be so effective.. my learning is that there is a drive that hey if i didn’t go to school i better keep up them so it actually made very very studious but the other flipside is that Yeah, absolutely man. John McIntyre: Well, cool. This has been fantastic man. We’re right on time though so before we go, can you give the.. uh, you know, where should someone go if they wanna learn more about the 7-figure funnel formula. Sure. Sure. Sure. We got a webinar on it, and they can go to bestbusinesscoach.ca, there’ll always be a link to it there and of course, you can find me on Facebook or any of the social media sites you can reach me, I’m just another person so, just like you. Yeah, Cool. Cool. All of those links are at the mcmethod.com. Daryl, thanks for coming on the show man Yeah, thanks for having me. The post Episode #83 – Daryl Urbanski on Notching Record Sales With Bulletproof 7 Figure Funnels appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Forget all the books. Forget all the endless nights of Dan Kennedy study. We got Jon Benson on the show to talk copywriting. And you’re about to learn a TON. Jon’s THE Video Sales Letter Guy.. ..he invented them. And in the process, …he’s etched himself onto many favorite-copywriter lists. So today, Jon’s talking copy. He’ll tell you how to compel people with truths so ridiculous, they NEED your product. He’ll show you how to strike people at their core with your copy, ..no matter what your industry is or who you’re writing for. Start making more money now with Jon’s insights. He throws out gold. Pure gold examples, real time, ..of various situations, And how he would write within each. Jon’s entertaining, smart, and a damn good copywriter. Chances are you’ll be hitting pause or 15 second rewind many times for this one.   In this episode, you’ll discover: the compelling versus convincing technique you should always use in your copy (litigators use it to convince juries) the 4 Quadrants of Desire nurturing tactic that will break your readers’ hearts how to take any problem out there… and make it catastrophically big (make people walk away needing your solution) the burden of consciousness strategy that hooks people into whatever you’re saying (does fear drive sales? Yup) how agreeing with someone is just like pulling an Aikido or Judo move on an attacker (don’t worry, it relates to copywriting) the XYZ Principle that builds instant rapport and will impress whoever you talk to don’t be a superhuman copywriter, be a super-relatable one and sales will come how Shakespeare would make a horrible copywriter how aggravation can be the best persuasion tool you never knew you had Mentioned: Sellerator Agora Ryan Deiss Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:  Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for episode 82 of the McMethod E-mail Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover one simple thing, how to make more money every time you send an e-mail to your list. But you know what? I’ve really been thinking that, uh, this podcast is sort of that email marketing but really I just think it’s about business and marketing and how to really get more customers and make more money so you can just have more fun with life, whatever that means to you. So, uh, I think as this podcast moves forward it’s going to head more in that direction, and with some more of the, uh, general marketing focus. Still the email twist, with uh, with me getting on here with the radio voice, but, uh, thinking of broadening out a little bit. Anyway today we are talking to John Benson. Now John… man I’m pumped to have him on the show. He’s the creator of the “ugly video sales letter”. So he’s the guy responsible for all those PowerPoints, you know, those video sales letters that have, you know, there’s a PowerPoint with black text on a white screen and it just cycles through with the voice going over the top. He’s the one responsible for starting that trend in, uh, in online marketing, as far as I’m aware. Now today we’re going to talk about some of that, but also about some of the stuff he’s been doing lately, which is, rapport building stuff, like, he calls it “agreeance”, which is getting sort-of like an emotional buy-in. With the way you write copy you can get someone to emotionally buy-in to your message, so that when you present your offer they’re much more likely to take you up on it. To get the show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast go to TheMcmethod.com/82. Now, I’ve got a McMaster’s insight of the week. There’s a question; I had dinner with a very interesting character a couple nights ago, very successful, very wealthy. He’s not in, in marketing or anything like that but, his advice, when we’re chatting about clients and chatting about sales and he goes; Look, the single most powerful question you can say to someone when you’re trying to get their business it’s not, well, it’s not your pitch, it’s not asking them all about their business, going into real specifics, just say to them, “How can I get your business, you know, what do I have to do today to get your business?” Because here’s what’s gonna happen when you’re trying to pitch someone; you’re gonna go in, your gonna give them the pitch and they’re gonna go… yes or no. Maybe they’ll say yes, great, but lets forget about those. The ones that say no, there’s a reason they’re saying no, ok. The quickest way to get to the heart of the matter of why they’re saying no, just say, “Look, what do I have to do to get your business?” Maybe they’re gonna tell you that the price is too high, ok, maybe they’re gonna tell you that, uh, that another provider is offering them a bit more than you, and then you can just make a decision whether you want to match that offer or not. Ok? It just cuts the heart of the matter so fast. Whether or not you decide to match, you know, accept it, it’s still a very good question. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha ok? So that’s it for now, now if you want more insights like this you should join McMasters. McMasters is like a private business community there is a bunch of products in there on email marketing, and also just on how to build your sales funnel and get more customers for your business and if you want to learn more about that just go to www.themcmethod.com/mcmasters, and you’ll learn all about that over there. Now, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Jon Benson. It’s John McIntyre here, the auto-responder guy. I’m here with John Benson. Now, uh, you might have heard of John Benson before, he is the creator of the “ugly video sales letter” he’s got a course that teaches you how to sort of, uh, make those sales letters with the PowerPoints and the screen flow and all of that, and, uh, also the psychology behind that. Why it works, why, uh, why they’re so effective and why you see them all over the internet now. So I thought I’d get him on the show and we’d talk about, not so much, not specifically the video stuff, but some of the core psychological tactics and strategies underlying the video stuff. Cause now John’s working on, um, we’ve got a copyrighting thing. I think it’s a product or a software, so it’s all about, it’s not just about videos it’s all really just persuasion and how to get someone to, uh, buy your product or buy your service. So we’re gonna talk about some of that rapport and the psychological stuff underlying all of that. So we’ll get into that in just a minute. Jon, How you going mate? Jon Benson: I’m good John, How’re you man? John McIntyre:  Fantastic, man. So before we get into some of that rapport building stuff can you give the, uh, the listener a bit of a, I’m sure, I’m sure he’s probably heard of you but, uh, just in case he hasn’t can you give him a quick background on who you are and what you do? Jon Benson: Ahh, sure, most people know me as the guy that started video sales letters, uh, that’s, that’s true, um… the guy that taught Ryan Dice and all those guys and has written a lot of copy. I didn’t start off as a copy writer, I actually started off as a fitness marketer, and, uh, my first book did real well but I had someone else write the copy for it and it cost me half the product, so… I just determined that I had to figure out how to write copy somehow, and I really struggled with it I decided to create an “ugly sales video letter.” Which, I didn’t’ say I’m going to create an “ugly video sales letter” I just happened to put words over a video that I had shot, that I didn’t want to shoot cause I just didn’t, it was a fitness video and I didn’t, I didn’t look my best. So, it was like, you know, I don’t wanna, I’m unshaven and all this stuff and I’m thinking, yeah it’d probably be better if I just don’t, if I’m not live in this one and just ended up putting words over the, words just to my voice and, uh, that ended up like sextupling the conversions I normally received from that. So, that led to me doing it for my, for the sales letter that I did and that ended up, within a month, having a, you know, a million dollars a month in traffic being spent on it because the conversions were just out, out the roof and that led to me writing the one for Mike Gary. That was the second one that was written, and then, then me writing the one for, um, pimslur and it kind of went on from there and I kind of accidently stumbled into a career as a copywriter and now I’m known as one of the better copywriters out there, which is flattering and, uh, I’m in that circle but, I don’t write copy for other people anymore. I have a team that does that and I just kind of copy my thing and my thing is the copy accelerator, which is my course that teaches people how to do this, because I’ll tell you right now, unless you get a pro on your side or if your naturally good at it great, but most people aren’t and most sales pages suck, so it’s that simple. So, yeah, so that’s really, that’s me in a nutshell. Somebody that can help someone’s sales pages, you know. John McIntyre: I like it man. It’s kinda cool, like, it’s funny how, like, everyone comes into this world in sort of like a different way. Like sometimes people fall into it, sometimes they go into it thinking I’m gonna be an internet millionaire. It’s, it’s always curious, or interesting to see how its… John Benson: Yeah, I wanted to be an internet millionaire. I did real well with my first book, but, uh, the thing is that never happened until I got copy. Until I got sales copy and in my case I got lucky with, you know, video sales letters weren’t, there wasn’t anyone around to compete against in that mode for about six or seven months and after that I taught Ryan Dice how to do it and he came out with a product about it and, uh, it just went nuts from there and his product was just a very cursory, very simple look at how to do it but, um, it was enough to get the more advanced marketers that already understood copy, it got guys like Agorra and other big companies doing it and then I consulted with Agorra and a lot of other companies to kind of tweak things further but the point is, is that, yeah, unless you’ve got badass copy on your side you might as well just forget about it. I mean throw traffic at a crappy page and you’re just going to get more crappy results, it’s just, the bottom line is most of your time in a day should be spent on copy. In this case you can either have somebody that’s already done it and proved it, and put it into a system that’s made over a billion dollars for people or you can try and figure it out on your own. It’s up to you but you need to figure it out. John McIntyre:  I’m curious, how did you end up learning copy? If you sort of fell into it did you sort of sit down with your fitness business and, uh, like make a conscious decision to go, I’m gonna go and learn copy, you go read the books and look at old sales letters and all of that stuff or did you just have a natural aptitude for it? John Benson: Okay. This is going to sound really cocky and its, but its, not meant to be, its, there’s no bullshit here. I never read a single book, I never looked, I never read a sales page. I never did anything. I never really studied any serious copywriting at all until after I was established as a copywriter and then I did, and one of the reasons I didn’t want to do that is, uh, I wanted to create something new. I always had this ambition in my life to, if I could, if I wanted to do a book it would be something no-ones done before. Which, my first book was unique and, uh, if I write copy for a sales page I’d like it to have my own voice to it, I don’t want it to sound like everyone else, and I was a good writer, I just wasn’t a good copywriter. It was two different things, totally. You don’t have to be a good writer to be a good copywriter. You really don’t, I mean it helps, you could write some really awesome stories but, uh, there’s formulas for that too that I created but what really ended up being the case for me was, I just dove into.. I’m gonna try and write my page myself and it was disastrous to be honest, and so I said, I’m just gonna put it all into a video sales letter, and when I did the copy on the page changed, it was like it didn’t make sense anymore with me talking the way that it made sense when someone was reading it and that’s one of the key differentials between sales pages and video sales letters is, uh, when I was talking it felt silly not going into a rapport, and that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight, it felt really stupid as a matter of fact. To talk like a sales page felt stupid. But, to talk like a conversation and I’m talking to one person and I, uh, and building rapport by telling a, what I call, and I’m telling a personal story in this case and going from there. That ended up being the real gem of this thing. There’s certain things you can do in a video sales letter that’s impossible to do on a sales page. I think you need both, don’t get me wrong. To actually say that sales pages are dead, they’re not. You just, you need both and you need them to interact together which is what we teach people to do but without a video sales letter you’re shooting yourself in the foot.  John McIntyre:  Yeah, Absolutely. Alright man, well let’s talk about some of that… John Benson: Hang on, I think I lost you John… John McIntyre: Are you there? John Benson: Ok. Yeah we cut out for a second there. Yeah, we’re back. John McIntyre:  Alright, let’s get into some of this rapport building stuff man. You talked about, um, let’s sort of take like a big picture look at what’s rapport and why does it matter, then we can drill down into some of the stuff you can do in videos and sales letters, and all that to make it happen. John Benson: Yeah, so rapport is basically the idea that you have to substantiate yourself without… as a real human being to somebody that’s a total stranger on your site, which is much more difficult to do on a sales page than it is on a video sales letter. Um, and a lot of people think that it’s easier to do with, like, live video but the problem with live video is that people are looking at you and their not listening to what you’re saying. So, they’re looking at you and I found this out the hard way, they’re looking at you and leaving comments like, oh, I think you’re really cute, ewww your nose is big, oh your hair is goofy. Whatever the case may be, it could be anything right, I mean how many times have you gone to a website and it’s a beautiful woman talking and your like, what did she say? I lost you about ten mili-seconds after you got started. That’s the problem with videos you know, it’s a double edged sword there. So, video sales letters remove that and create this really hypnotic effect by listening to a voice and just seeing the words on the screen. It’s almost like you can’t help but read those because it’s going by, it’s going by rather quickly. So, in that sense you want to build rapport by first of all establishing the fact that you’re just, you’re a lot like the person that you’re talking to. Maybe you’re a few steps up the ladder, maybe your ten steps up the ladder but you used to be like them. In fact it’s even better when you can say I used to be probably a lot worse than you are. So that’s one of the common rapport based strategies but the two I wanted to talk about tonight, that most people haven’t heard of, except that have gone through some of the more advanced training I have, is called the yes reflex. In other words, getting a yes by reflexive nature instead of coercing a yes. Instead of feeling like somebody’s twisting their arm you have to actually compel them to say yes because they’ve already said yes to things they already agree too over and over and over again. It’s like micro commitments but it’s on a much deeper level than just saying; how many people in the room want to make more money and they raise their hand. That’s one way of saying yes from a stage. What I’m doing is getting people to agree to things that you know they already believe in. If you have a profile of a person that hitting your site, you have a basic understanding of what their core values are, and the more you relate to their core values and talk about like, you say, say I know your probably a lot like me and you believe that family and friends that are very important to you, in fact, I bet that you would go so far as to say they are one of the most important things in your life. Well, did you know that when you carry extra weight, it’s a burden on your family, and you may not feel like you’re being a burden on your family right now but ex cetera, ex cetera. So, I’m getting them to agree to something and then I’m telling them something that would be shocking, if taken in that context. Most people don’t think of, like of losing weight as being a bad parent but in a video sales letter I will take them down a road from a bad parent to a financial failure and down the line without coming out and saying those words in such a harsh way. The only way you can do that is by, first of all working within a rapport structure and second of all taking away the no response. So, here’s the deal; when you’re a child you hear no something to the tune of 700 times more than you heard yes. Um, it’s just, if you have a kid or you know people with kids, I mean how many times do they say no to their kid? It’s, we have a dog right, we have a puppy and we say no to Titan like 57 billion times in a day versus… We actually don’t say no, we say “enhh” of whatever. So it’s the same basic thing you know, leave it, so that’s the same thing we do with a child. The only difference is the child, their subconscious mind is imprinting this over and over and over again and that leads you into your life, and a lot of people say no to things that they know are good for them like how many people, for yourself, how many things do you know that are really good for you, I mean without one shadow of a doubt that you’d say no to. Whether, it could be working out, eating right, um, saving money, whatever the case may be right. There’s nothing harmful about any of those things yet we reject them.  John McIntyre: I’m wondering if this is, is this part of the pitch or this is explaining it, it’s just like, cause this would work as part of a pitch just talking about this “no” thing. You’ve got to say yes to your life. Jon Benson: Well it very well could, yeah. This is not a pitch, this is actually what we’re doing underneath the surface, so, uh, we’re not doing Tony Robbins; “you gotta say yes to your life!” This is what we’re doing, we’re getting people to understand in a very subtle way that they’ve said no so many times to various components of, I’ll take weight loss as an example, this could work in any field at all, it doesn’t have to be weight loss of course it’s just one that I know well. But, people have said no to I’m not gonna be healthy I am not gonna be fit. I am not, and they are saying no to things and they are saying I am not going to exercise, I am not, and they know that they want to be fit and they know that exercise is not traumatically terrible and yet they are saying no to it and the reason they are saying no to it is because those engrams that are just imprinted into the brain from the time they were a child and they’ve gotten linked up, there’s some weird connections going on there. So, the way to disconnect that and get a yes reflex out of people is to agree with them. We talked about “agreeance” when we first got on the call, agreeing with somebody is the best way to completely take them off their game. It’s like an akito move, if you’re familiar with the martial art, ok, well, in akito you actually move toward the attacker. In judo and other grappling arts you do as well, so you move directly toward them, so somebody’s swinging a punch at you your natural reaction is to step back. Well, in Akito and other martial arts you actually walk right into them, ok. What does that do to their energy? It totally dissipates that energy and then you have total control. It’s the same thing when your agreeing with somebody, that’s saying, and you know what they’re saying because you’ve just gone through a profile that’s very simple profile that you fill out saying what are my customers, what are their paying points. What are the things that they have tried and failed at? What are the things that they would love to see done, right? Um, so, um, in a video sales letter for a weight loss product I’ll say, you know, you’ve probably heard that dieting is difficult and if you’ve ever tried it you probably know for a fact that dieting is really a challenge. Your right. It is a challenge. It’s really difficult, and the reason why is it’s a challenge is the reason why you don’t see very many fit people around. But let me give you this, this is something totally new and what I’ve done is realized first of all yes is a challenge for so many people and it was a challenge for me in a major way, what can I do to lessen that challenge, and actually make it somewhat easy. So, all I’ve done is just simply agree with them that it is a challenge, I’m rattling this up inside my head, and change the tone of that to what if it could be easy? Yes, I know it’s a challenge but what if it could be easy. So, you’ve agreed with them. Yes, you’ve probably gone through one diet after another. You probably consider yourself even a failure, and I hate to use that word, but maybe you’ve said that to yourself and you just got really frustrated, and they’re shaking their head yes, yes, right and guess what the only reason why that has been a struggle and continues to be a struggle for so many people is they don’t know the xyz principle. The xyz principle is what makes this easier and then they’re open to it because you have agreed with them that it’s hard. So, this is building rapport. Because when you agree with somebody, and anybody knows this when you meet, when you talk face to face, if you sit there, if you go “So tell me about yourself.” Oh I’m in politics.” Oh, I love politics, that’s awesome, yeah, that you just immediately, either, if you’re not, if the guys not a douche, you immediately kind of like this guy. Your like, oh, yeah, politics is cool, I really dig it, yeah… well I’m into so and so… yeah? Yeah, me too. So, this is very common sense when you’re dating, your picking up girls or doing whatever you’re doing, meeting a person and trying to impress them. Copywriters don’t use this, they don’t use this agreeance principle. John McIntyre:  This reminds me of the, feel, felt fan thing that people use in face to face and you’re really just acknowledging someone or what they think or what they believe and then acknowledging their belief and then saying, “but, hey, it doesn’t have to be that way if you said xyz formula, whatever it happens to be. Jon Benson: Exactly, exactly. So, it’s acknowledging their belief at the same time it’s acknowledging that what they think is actually true, if it is true. So, for example, dieting is difficult. So I say, you know, dieting can be one of the most difficult things anyone ever does. Especially if you do it like you’ve been taught over and over again. So don’t blame yourself if it was difficult because I understand it was difficult. You know, and so, all I’m doing is historically agreeing with them there, but I’m saying, however things are done a little bit differently over here in this part of the woods, so, um, and that’s a way to get someone to go “oh, really?” So, you’ve disarmed them. If you come right out to somebody and go, “You know what? Making money is easy.” They’re gonna go, “Fuck you, I don’t believe a word your saying because I’m poor and I don’t have jack.” So it’s the stupidest thing to ever say, you would never say that, ever. But you hear this all the time in copy, it’s like, “how I made 57 million dollars the easy way.” It’s like, no-one believes that. John McIntyre:  Yeah, another example of that is you get like guys getting on stage telling stories, like entrepreneurial kind of guys, they’re selling some sort of make money… it could be online it could be real estate and they tell a story about how they’ve been an entrepreneur since they were like 13 years old and I realized one day that pretty much, there’s probably like 1% of people in the audience that could relate to that story. Everyone else is thinking, “well, I was not an entrepreneur when I was 13 so how the hell am I going to do what you just did?” Jon Benson: Exactly, anything that you state that takes you out of rapport and makes you something super-human is going to ruin sales. So, here’s what you can’t do, I’m pretty much against lying in copy, so you can’t say, “I grew up in a wet rolled up newspaper, and I have no schooling at all. I can’t even spell or speak but still I managed to make millions of dollars.” So, that’s not true, right? Although I know guys that have done that. John McIntyre:  It’s true for some things. John Benson: The lying tactic is what I call it. John McIntyre:  Ok. John Benson: But what you can do is like, somebody like, you ask me… “Do you just have a natural knack for this?” And somebody could argue, and I could make a pretty good argument that I probably did because I didn’t study it. But what I do instead is say, “I did have a knack for writing but what I found out was writing and copywriting are nor remotely the same. In fact, copywriting breaks every grammatical rule you can think of. Copywriting requires no eloquence of writing what-so-ever. It doesn’t require you to be Tolstoy or Shakespeare at all, in fact Tolstoy and Shakespeare would suck as copywriters. So, if you’re worried about being an artist and a copywriter, differentiate those two right there. So, that’s one way I might say it and, uh, then I would say something like, you know, I figured this out by just going back and doing a lot of reading in psychology and I was a psychology minor, so I just went back and re-read all these books, and you know what? I did it so you don’t have to. So, right there, just saying “I did the hard work so you don’t have to.” So, if there is something, like, well I don’t have a minor in psychology or a major in philosophy and I don’t understand the rules of logic, I don’t say that. I say, “Yeah, that true. So you don’t have to.” That right there builds back rapport, so, the whole thing is… if you stay in a state of rapport the entire way through, then when you do make what I call a super-hero comment, and you do it in, in, and there’s a section in our accelerator that talks about a modest introduction, and then when you introduce yourself for real, the way that you modestly introduce yourself is you can say, you know, “I was not always considered the best copywriter in the world, in fact, that’s kind of ridiculous for me to even say right now, in fact, I used to suck at copy. I was terrible. I had no natural skills for this what-so-ever. My first 4 sales pages bombed, it was unbelievably bad.” So, all I did was, in the very first of that I said… “Now, I wasn’t always known as the best copywriter in the world and certainly not the best teacher of copywriting in the world. In fact, so all I do is I don’t say… “I’m John Benson, I’m the best copywriter in the world.” It’s a douche kind of thing to say and, you know, whatever, you can say like “I’m John Benson and I created the video sales letter.” That’s a factual statement, ok, um, or I created the “ugly video sales letter”, that’s a factual statement. But you could say, and that “ugly video sales letter” has gone on to make other people over a billion dollars. That’s a factual statement. But, I haven’t said anything about me other than I started this thing. So, but that doesn’t, they’re wanting me to say that. In other words they’re wanting to talk to the guy that started something so that they can learn what it is. But if I start talking about the stuff they have to do… because they don’t have to create the video sales letter right? They have to actually create one for themselves. If I start talking about in either way, like look this is so easy a monkey could do it, you don’t need any training at all anyone can do this. They’re gonna shake their head. “No way, I’ve tried it and it didn’t work.” Or “No, I just don’t think I can do it.” At the same time if you say “look, this is super complicated.” Then you’re gonna lose your rapport there. So, what I do is say, “Listen, if you had to remember all stuff that I spent years and years studying, your head would probably explode. Not because you’re not smart enough but because you’re running your business, right, you’ve got your own business and that’s where your smarts go. You don’t need to be worrying about this other stuff, let me worry about that for you. Follow these steps. Yeah you’re gonna roll up your sleeves and you’re gonna do a little bit of work but every good thing has work in it. In fact, you know how many times you’ve been sold a bag of lies and somebody telling you something is cheap or easy or whatever and you know that’s not true, you know that and I know that and I know that you’re smart enough to know that too.” So I’m speaking in copy, so I’m agreeing with them and at the same time I’m telling them, “Don’t think that this is like push a button and out pops a million dollar sales video. It’s the next best thing to it.” So that the thing, and these are all rapport tactics, and they’re all geared to, like I said, to trigger a yes reflex. And let me talk about this one last then and then I’ll get off the subject, it’s the concept of compelling versus convincing. John McIntyre:  Ok. John Benson: So I looked at litigators to come up with this model and litigators that are really skillful, here’s how they do it… here’s how they convince a jury, right or wrong by the way. They convince the jury by merely letting them agree over and over and over again with the deep stuff they already believe in. Then what they do is they link that deep stuff that they already believe in to the person they’re defending. They do it in a very subtle way. Its anchoring, its classic anchoring but, this is what you need to do. So if you’re talking, and this is so weird, if you’re talking about like making money online, right? So this is stuff you normally don’t hear about making money online, well you do with good copy but, you say; “If you’re anything like me you value your freedom and you value your family and you probably have this little bitty voice that’s inside your head that says ‘I don’t want to be a failure. I don’t want to be embarrassed in front of my friends because I tried this crazy internet marketing thing.’ If you’re feeling that, you’re just, you’re honestly, you and I are like brothers because I completely get it, you know, I completely understand I had the same feelings myself. The good news is that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” So all I’m doing again is I’m, I did the same thing there with the whole rapport building tactic, but I anchored these very deep emotions. The feelings of acceptance, uh, the feelings of family and friends. Those kind of things came out in that sentence. John McIntyre:         It’s very nurturing. It’s a bit like, you know, when you talk to your                                                                           mom or maybe a wife or a girlfriend. You really have that nurturing kind of interaction that they listen and validate. I think women are very good at this kind of stuff. John Benson:         Yeah, yeah. Validation, it’s huge. It’s known in psychology and it’s known, and that’s one of the reasons why I think I did have a knack for it.    John McIntyre:         It’s like you’re a counselor to the, uh, the reader or the listener.         You’ve really got to capture them all. John Benson:         Yeah, yeah you do. I’m all for what I call the “quadrants of desire”.    You have to do it in all 4 quadrants. So what I’m doing right now is talking about, uh, there’s fear. Fear of not being excepted, there’s the fear of being considered a failure and those kinds of things. But you have to do it in the other quadrants as well. In some of them you can be right in their face, so that’s great. It’s just a whole dynamic here, you know, it’s not all just like, everything’s feel good. Like for example the big section in my five step formula for video sales letters, there’s a whole thing called the big problem and I take your problem and I can take any problem and I can make it really catastrophically big. Like you can say I, you know, I don’t, like you could say for example, “you know what I need a better gun. Um, my gun it’s kind of misfiring sometimes so I can’t hit the target as well as I used to but it’s no big deal, I need a better gun.” And you’re on my better gun site right? And I’ll say, “You know you probably have a problem right now and that you probably want a better gun. Maybe its misfiring maybe it’s doing these things. Did you know it’s actually probably a bit worse than that? Do you realize that your gun could actually be the one thing that saves your life in a critical moment? In fact they say that it takes a half second to respond to a critical moment and if your gun doesn’t fire right you could lose the life of your loved one. So this isn’t about target practice. This is about maintaining the safety of your family, and did you know that most children that injure themselves with guns do so”… and I’m making this up cause I don’t know a lot about it but you get the idea. I would make your problem really big. So you’d walk away from this thinking, “Wow, I’ve got to do something about this because I believe in, I love my family and I love my girlfriend, I love my…” You know, and that’s getting you to agree with it. John McIntyre:         Right, right, this is like classic copywriting. I just did some stuff for the community where I’ve got, I made the point, you know, you get someone’s’ attention. You ask them a question about the problem or talk about the problem in some way and then you don’t really force them to do anything. It’s not even really about persuading them to do something, it’s more about just aggravating the crap… making that problem that they have so big that they naturally want to take the next step. And when you say, “By the way, if you want to protect your family, if you want to get a new gun, just click this link and I’ll send you one tomorrow. John Benson:         Right, exactly. And then it comes down to what I call the grand offer. The offer has to be irresistible and big, but, but yeah, so if your solution is, the bigger solution is what I call it, is bigger than the problem. So it not only solves the problem with this it solves the problem with this, that, and the other. They don’t know that they have this, that, and the other when they hit the site, that’s the whole thing. They may feel it on some obscure level but someone that needs to lose weight has no idea they are being a shitty parent and instilling their RNA into their next child, who will also be a food addict. You’ve got that burden of conscious to deal with, and you know, you can go down the line. If I know I’m going to a predominantly white conservative audience I’ll throw in, I’ll thrown in biblical stuff like; your body is your temple and let’s face it, stuffing your navel full of sugar and grains is probably not the best idea, you know. So, I mean you can, I mean that’s just ultimate persuasion. So, yeah that’s not a good idea at all. So, but, I’m not saying anything that isn’t true. I’m just stating, there’s nothing I’ve said that isn’t true at all and that’s the thing I wanted to get across. I’m not lying, I’m not even exaggerating, I’m compelling them. John McIntyre:         Your motivating them, your kind of an inspirational speaker in that sense that, this is why you’ve got to have a great product, you know you’ll be ethical about it you know. People have limiting beliefs about, you know, I can’t lose weight or I can’t, you know, or I’m not good enough to help my family and our job as marketers is to empower them and that’s really where all this persuasion comes in and we empower them to go solve those problems for themselves. So I think it’s like a duty that we all have. John Benson:         Yep, it is a duty. I think it’s an ethical duty too. Because I mean if you have a product that you know works, you need to sell it to the best possible ability that you have. Ethically, honestly, but with the best possible ability that you have and if you’re half-assing copy then you’re actually being unethical. Cause that means being impure to people that you can help. John McIntyre:         Absolutely, well cool man. This has been, this has been fantastic. Before we go though, if someone wants to learn more about this. I know you’ve got the 3 accelerators, tell the listener a bit about that. So they can go to sort of, learn more about it or purchase it if they would like to. John Benson:         Yeah, cool, so accelerator.com, it’s, um, and it does exactly what it sounds like, it accelerates your sales. So that’s where you would go and it’s a combination of a course that is built into software that is online, nothing you download. It literally spits out copy for you and it’s copy that I’ve written. So it’s copy I’ve written over the course of many, many years, doing the top video sales letters in the world. I’m taking the copy that I know works and I’m putting it into a format that anyone can use, and what’s really interesting about it that it, uh, comes out very unique because inside each slide I give you a little video that you can watch. Here’s how you personalize this, here’s how you make it a little bit different, and so many people have gone through accelerator and spit out, like, multi-million dollar videos. So, there’s so many letters I’ve kind of lost count, and even the ones that don’t do that, they take their sales page from making 10 sales a day to making 50 sales in a day. They make a big difference in part time income or whether you want to be a professional internet marketer. So the key thing is, it’s not turning you into a copywriter that loves to do this, right, but most people in here are not copywriters, they’re business owners and they don’t want to be copywriters. So let me be the copywriter and let you point and click and watch videos and let me do 90% of the hard labor for you. Yes, you’re going to have to do the other 10% of the labor, I’m so freaking sorry, you’re gonna have to do something. You’re going to have to actually work for this or you can peg out 100,000 dollars for me to do it for you. If I still did it, but I don’t. So, it’s a lot cheaper than 100,000 dollars. So go to accelerator.com and check that out. John McIntyre:         Cool, man. Well, I’ll have a link to that; www.accelerator.com at, uh,         the mcmethod.com. Thanks for coming on the show man.   The post Episode #82 – Jon Benson on Striking People At Their Core and Blasting Your Sales Through The Roof appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Jack Born is the creator of AW Pro Tools. It’s a powerful tool that transforms your Aweber list into a sales machine through marketing automation (but that’s a show topic in itself). Jack’s on The Email Marketing Podcast today to talk FUNNELS, ..and SCARCITY within them. Funnels are what leverage Email Marketing into the powerful, profitable tool that it is. And the sense of scarcity used wisely within them will transform your prospects left and right into customers. So if you want killer funnels, ..definitely tune in to what Jack has got to say. He’s got a way to pinpoint EXACTLY when to hit someone with scarcity for maximum effectiveness. This deadline funnel strategy/software will juice results, That’s what he gets into, plus: ..the money generating pull behind scarcity and urgency, ..and solid insights into exactly why and how these tactics make an email marketing campaign run at peak performance. Jack’s a bit like Rob Walling from Drip… …a software guy who KNOWS Direct Response marketing. He’s got a lot to teach. Put your email marketing into tip top shape. And create quality well-timed FUNNELS.   In this episode, you’ll discover: the power behind using scarcity and how to blow all your sales records by using it why having a product that fills a need is step one to utilize urgency in your campaign (no amount of good copy can hide a crappy product) how a deadline driven evergreen offer to past non-buyers is a smart move that piles up money left on the table the moment when urgency hits its peak (learn how major companies use urgency in their promos) the exact situation when and where deadline offers are best used (there are 2 requirements that if your product has, you better be using deadline offers within your funnel) how to set up your countdown timer that scarcity actually creates a physiological change in your brain (learn how to tweak scarce resources for max profits) a way to dynamically adjust your promo timing what fake scarcity is and how an evergreen deadline is NOT fake (fake scarcity will hamper your credibility… don’t make fake deadlines) how an evergreen deadline is like a DMV license renewal Mentioned: AWPro Tools Deadline Funnel Aweber Frank Kern Influence Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:  Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for episode 81 of the McMethod E-mail Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover how to make more money with your e-mail list, with autoresponders, with segmenting, with all that good stuff, okay? The idea here is how to make money every time you send an e-mail to your list, which is pretty cool if you can do that. Today, I’ll be talking to Jack Born. Jack Born is the founder, the creator of AW Pro Tools. He has a number of other products, including Deadline funnel, which is a great little script that allows you to, when someone joins your list, you can, say after a week, send them an e-mail about a special promotion I’ve got running that’s available for 24 hours only, and put a script on the page, so that if someone visits it on that seventh day they’re in the Autoresponder sequence, show them the time, I’ll show them the offer. But if they visit on Day 8, the offer’s gone. Now, what’s great about this is it’s going to dynamically adjust depending on when someone signs up. So someone will sign up today, seven days’ time they get the promo. They could sign up in a month, seven days after they sign up in a month, they get the promo. So it dynamically adjusts to the subscriber. It’s a great little app, so there you get Jack Born to talk about this, for that urgency [inaudible 00:01:04.13], why having these deadlines, and how to get the technical side set up so you can crank up the response. I like that word, been using it a lot, crank up your sales. Doesn’t that sound good? And we’ll also sort out the research behind why it works, because when you understand that, you’ll probably be a bit more excited to go and do it just because man, this stuff works. You’ve got to try it. If you haven’t done anything with a ticking clock or a time or anything like that, you’re going to be blown away by how well it works. To get the show notes for this episode of the E-mail Marketing Podcast, go to Themcmethod.com/81. Now just by the way, I wanted to make a point here, I just thought of – did you know you can e-mail me any time? If you’re on my e-mail list, you can hit “Reply” to any of those e-mails and you can say something, and I will get back to you. Sometimes, it’s the same day, sometimes it’s 24 hours, sometimes it’s a week. It really depends what I’m doing, where I am, if I’m at the computer or even checking my e-mail, because sometimes I’m not. Okay? But you will hear back from me. Usually pretty quickly, too. So I just wanted to throw that out there, because I’m wondering if I’ve got someone listening to this who thinks I’m a little bit distant or hard to contact, I’m not. So, I’d love for you to reach out, say hello, tell me what you like about the podcast, what you don’t like. What I’d love for you to do, if you really feel [inaudible 00:02:14.09] make my day, go to iTunes and leave a five-star review – or any star review, really – just be honest, and I’ll read out the review on the podcast, okay? You can mention your website, and just say, “Hey, it’s John here, from Themcmethod.com, and I like this and I like that, blah, blah, blah.” Now, before we get into the interview with Jack Born, I’ve got one thing, this week’s McMasters insight of the week. One thing that’s been going on a lot inside McMasters lately is this issue lead bait or opt-in bait. You know, should you offer an e-book? Should you turn the e-book into a series of e-mails? Should you give a video? And honestly, there’s not really any perfect answer. Part of it’s going to depend on the context or the market, the niche, that you’re in – however you want to say that, I get mixed up with these words. Honestly, there’s not really any secret to it. Like I said, you can have an e-book, you can have e-mails, you can have a video. I think I would be using all of them. I would be saying, I don’t actually use the e-book thing, maybe because e-books, they’re a lot of work to put together, right? I mean, you could put together a short report. My feeling is that most people don’t really read e-books, so what I would do is I would create a short report, perhaps, if you really want to test it, see if that converts better. Or, instead of saying, “Here’s a report on the seven mistakes of e-mail marketing,” you could say, “Here’s, you know, just discover the seven mistakes of e-mail marketing, sign up here.” And then after they sign up, that’s when you say to them, “I’m going to deliver this in seven e-mails or over the next week or two weeks, or whatever.” And then video and audio and any sort of content like that, engaging content, that’s a great way to get people to see you as a person, because you can’t fake being on a video. You’re either good on video or you aren’t. I mean, you get better, but if you can be good on video, people really start to think that you’re a boss, because a lot of people aren’t very good on video, okay? So what I do right now, is I’ve got someone signs up the daily e-mail tips on how to get more money with e-mail, then they get a video and some text, and then they get daily e-mails, daily e-mail tips. Okay, that’s how I do it. There’s not, honestly, there’s not really a perfect way here. The idea is, test your opt-ins, maybe an e-book works better. Maybe you’ve got a market full of readers that love to read e-books. Maybe they hate e-books, and therefore, you just send them a video instead. Or maybe it’s a mix of both. So that’s the insight this week from McMasters, that’s got a long thread that’s been developing for a while inside the community there, which is all about this topic. Should you offer the e-book, should you offer the video? So, if you want to check out that thread, you’ll need to get inside McMasters. More information about that at themcmethod.com. In the top menu bar, there’s a link to “Members,” click that, and you’ll get all the information about McMasters. Like McDonald’s, but McMaster’s. Masters of the McIntyre method, that’s how one person described it. So, that’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Jack Born. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Jack Born. Now, Jack is the creator of AW Pro Tools, and AW Pro Tools is a pretty badass little tool because it lets you plug into AWeber, sort of. AWeber is a very simple tool, right? You pay 20 bucks, 30 bucks a month and it just sends e-mails, basically. But marketing automation, which is where you start sending triggers and all that sort of, you know, if someone clicks a link, make this happen. That’s what Jack created; it’s sort of like a plugin for AWeber. But anyway, that’s not why he’s here today. He’s here to talk about something called Deadline Funnel. And just quickly, I’ll give it over to Jack in a second, but I met Jack, was a week and a half ago, or two weeks ago. He was over there recording at Titans of Direct Response, which is a pretty sweet little conference, and we started talking about e-mails and podcasting, we just did an interview of his stuff, but I thought we’d get him on the McMethod E-mail Marketing Podcast to talk about what he’s up to with the Deadline Funnel, too, which is pretty badass, because it’s all about scarcity, which is a great way to crank up your sales. So we’ll get into that in a minute. Jack, how are you going, mate? Jack Born: Doing great, great to be here. John McIntyre:  Good to have you on there. But before we talk about the Deadline Funnel stuff and scarcity, give the listener a bit more of a background on who you are and what you’re up to. Jack Born Sure. So, I’ve been on my own, I left corporate America in 2001. I got into a fight with my boss, called my former wife on the phone, and you know, it was, “I just told the boss to stick it.” Had one of these conversations, which was like, “Well, what are you going to do now?” I was like, “I don’t know.” And this is so common of entrepreneurs; where you pretty much jump out of the building, metaphorically, and then build a plane on the way down. Like, you leap before you know all the answers, right? So, that was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, that’s the short version. But I realized very quickly that I had something unique, and that is that I had the type of mind that I am extremely passionate about psychology and direct-response marketing, but at the same time, I’m also really skilled at coding and programming. Now, these days, I have my own team, and I’m happy to say that a lot of the people that I’ve hired to my team are better coders than I am, but at the same time, being able to think like a coder and think like a marketer at the same time has given me the ability to look at problems that I face in my business as a marketer and a direct-response entrepreneur, and say, “Look, I’m frustrated,” and rather than just throw something against the wall, I set about trying to fix it. And so, I used my knowledge of coding and technology plus my passion of direct-response marketing to come up with a unique solution, and so because of those skills, and what I bring to the table, that’s how I was able to create some of the software products that I have. You mentioned AW Pro Tools, that’s one. So for anyone using AWeber, definitely check out AW Pro Tools at awprotools.com. But I also was looking at – I wanted to do promotions, so a lot of these products came from problems that I had that I tried to solve, and so with AWeber it was. I wanted to do list segmentation and also have the follow-up messages changed based on people’s behavior, but I didn’t want to leave AWeber, and so I’d figured out how to do that. With Deadline Funnel, I wanted to be able to build in urgency and autosend scarcity into some of my promotions, but I wanted to do it in a way where, number one, it wasn’t fake BS baloney scarcity, where you come back tomorrow and the counter is reset. And there are a couple other things that we will get into later that really frustrated me, and rather than being just frustrated or dealing with something that was just OK but not perfect, I decided to create my own solution. But we’ll cover that later. So, basically, the nuts and bolts is that I am passionate about direct-response marketing and I’m also a software guy, so I build software products and that’s the tapestry on which I paint. I’m a big believer that we’re all artists in our own way, I got that from Seth Codin. So my tapestry is software. That’s how I bring my gifts to the world. I think today we’re going to talk about scarcity and urgency, right? John McIntyre:  Yeah man, that’s the idea. We’ll talk a bit about Deadline Funnel a bit later, but tell me about the scarcity stuff. You said you’ve got some research papers or – let’s try to unpack this scarcity idea, because it’s trumpeted around the marketing world as this savior or this heaven or it’s just going to explode your sales, and I guess it can, but it’s not a magic bullet. So let’s sort of start to unpack it. Jack Born: Right. Right, and it’s not a magic bullet. I mean, you and I have done an interview to my audience about copywriting, and one of the things you brought up very early in the conversation about copy is that your copy is not going to save a weak product or a crappy offer. So in the same way, you have to have something, number one, that the world wants. You have to have a good product. You have to have – it works best when you have a really strong offer. Basically, your audience has to want what you have. You can’t take a bad product and bad selling, bad marketing, bad copy, and then put a countdown time on a page and say, “Well, that fixes everything,” and walk away. But what scarcity and urgency can done, when done correctly, is that it can add extra “oomph” to your campaigns, and it’s especially effective in situations where you’re doing a limited-time sale. So for prospects that didn’t purchase on the first go-round. You can come back and make an offer to them, that is an aggressive offer and very deadline-driven offer, to say, “Look, here’s the best offer that I can make, it expires at a certain time.” And so, rather than just giving up on them, you know, because you sent out three to five e-mails and then that’s it, you can go back to them and offer them a great deal, but make it a deadline-driven, evergreen offer. I think Frank Kern has something he calls a 4-day cash machine, something like that, where you go back to folks that, basically, you tried to sell to, but they didn’t convert on the first go-round. So, you can go back to them and make a very aggressive offer. So that’s one way to use it, but you certainly can use it on the front end. I have a lot of, especially joint-venture offers where I’m partnering with someone, and they go into a funnel and they go into the campaign and then so I’m making a deal that, normally, they would not be able to get it if they just went to my main webpage. And so I want to make that a deadline-driven offer, for several reasons: one, I don’t want them to be able to just send everyone back to that page, I want it to be truly a special promotion for the folks that are on that offer. But also, I know that deadlines work, and so if it generally is, number one, something that they want, and number two, a deal that’s better than they can normally get, yeah I like to put a deadline on it, because it juices results. And so, just to talk about – beyond deadline funnel and how I use it – just to talk about other companies that are using it – not using Deadline funnel but using scarcity and urgency – but also to talk about some of the interesting science behind it, let’s go ahead and dive in. So there’s companies like QBC, huge direct-response marketing company. Anytime that you’re watching QBC, you’re going to see a countdown timer on the screen. That’s a big part of how they’ve built their business. EBay. Every single auction on eBay has a countdown that shows you when it’s going to expire, and usually, the majority of the action happens right in those final minutes, because that’s when the urgency and the scarcity really hits its peak. Groupon, Groupon is another example of a company that uses scarcity and urgency in every single promotion. So the idea that you can’t use it in every single promotion, you know, QBC and eBay and Groupon are great, huge examples of companies that use deadlines and urgencies in every single promotion that they have. And another one that is really interesting that causes me a lot of psychological pain when I go through their process – but in a good way – is Ticketmaster. So, John, I don’t know if, forgive me for that – John McIntyre:  We have something like – we have like a ticket sale. Similar kind of thing, really. Jack Born: Okay. Well, it’ll be interesting to know if they do the same thing. So here’s what happens on Ticketmaster. So, when I’m going to purchase tickets for a concert, what happens is, you choose your seats, so they have the picture of the stadium, you click on the place where you want to sit, and then you get to a payment page. And they have this countdown floating on the page, that basically gives you five minutes to fill out the damn page. I mean, especially if it’s a concert that you know is going to sell out, it adds a tremendous, I mean, I’m flying across the house to grab my wallet because I don’t want to lose these seats. So it’s extremely powerful. We talked about QBC, eBay, Groupon, and Ticketmaster. These are just four examples of very successful, very large companies that do extremely well and that use scarcity and urgency all the time. John McIntyre:  Hmm. It’d be fun to think about – because here, the urgency thing you’re saying, “Well, this is going to close in 24 hours,” but the other way of doing it is like, you can bind them and say, “We’ve got 25 copies of this book that we’re going to send out, mail you out, physical copy, and so it’s not going to last forever.” So there’s the urgency of knowing that it’s going to sell out very quickly, but there’s also the scarcity of there’s only 25 copies. So it’s a pretty – when you have both, you can like stack that, you know, the urgency and the scarcity, it just goes, like, you can have one or the other and it’s going to do pretty good anyway, but if you can combine them, it’s pretty epic, the sort of response you can get. Jack Born: Absolutely, yeah. And so, when you have a situation where there are, you know, live events are a great example, and that’s just one example. But if you have a live event or you actually have a certain number of books, physical books, printed up before you have to go and order the next box of books, then it makes a lot of sense for you to offer that way. You know, “Here’s how many books are left, and to sell out, I’m going to go ahead and offer a special deal, but once they’re gone, there’s going to be a two-week delay while we order the next round of copies.” And so yeah, if you can build that in along with your countdown timer, sometimes you can set it up where you can say, “Whichever one expires first.” It’s either over when the countdown hits zero, or the launch is over or the sale is over, or when we run out of supplies, whichever comes first. So yeah, that can definitely be a two-for-one type of deal. John McIntyre: And, interesting that – I’m reading a book right now, actually. It’s called All the Money in the World. It’s about these billionaires from the Forbes 400. And it’s a fascinating book, but it’s amazing how some of these guys, these big, big, big entrepreneurs, billionaires, some of them, they’re aware of this sort of stuff but on a very, very big scale. So they’ll go make a product, they’ll market the crap out of it. So there’s a whole bunch of demand, and then they’ll purposely not produce enough of it. So obviously produce enough to meet, sort of just below the current demand, but sort of like they manufacture, and it’s a very smart thing. They understand that scarcity drives the value up, so they’re always kind of don’t produce too much and don’t let it become too available, or too common. I mean, some of these guys are billionaires because of this. So when you start to play with this sort of stuff at a higher level, it’s very powerful. Jack Born: Right, and so that’s probably good segway into what actually happens in our heads. I’m not a neuroscience expert, but I’ve done a lot of research on this. Again, I’m very passionate about direct-response marketing. And so, everyone’s seen the commercial about Folgers where they had the hidden camera. I don’t think they show these anymore, but I think back in the 80’s, okay. So let me paint the picture, you can go look it up on YouTube. So, Folgers’s would do these commercials where they would have these people sitting at this fancy restaurant, and the announcer would be whispering into the microphone, saying, “The Smiths don’t know this, but we secretly replaced the expensive coffee with the Folgers’s. Let’s see what they think.” And so someone comes over and asks them, “How’s the coffee?” And they said, “Oh my gosh, it’s the best coffee I’ve ever had.” “Well, did you know it was switched out with Folgers’s?” And they’re just shocked. Well, what’s going on there is that – and this has been repeated in different types of experiments I’ll talk about – but because of the high price, we associate high price with scarcity. You know, one of the signals that we get that something is scarce is that it’s a high price, they kind of go hand in hand. And so, when someone thinks that something is scarce, they automatically add more value to what it is. In fact, there’s another experiment where the same wine was served to these people in this test, they didn’t know they were going through this test. But it was the same wine, but the only thing different was the price was different. But they actually were able to determine that the folks who tested the higher-priced wine rated it as much better tasting than the lower-priced wine. So it’s, you know, the scarcity, they’ve been able to determine through other experiments using MRIs that it actually does change something physiologically in our heads. When we experience something that’s scarce, we truly do perceive it – it’s not a game or a trick, it’s an actually physiological change that goes on in our head based on scarcity. So when there’s a resource that is scarce, we just add more value to it. Another experiment that I read about in the book Influence by Cialdini that everyone’s heard of, is the cookie experiment, where some folks – so there’s a jar with 10 cookies and there’s a jar with two cookies. They’re the same cookies. And so they were asked to do a taste test and judge which one tasted best, and the one with only two cookies in the jar, the scarce commodity, was rated as better-tasting. So, something’s happening at the physiological level that increases our perceived value and even affects taste, and so it’s a very, very powerful effect that we can’t just switch off. We can try to ignore it, but it really short-circuits some of our decision-making mechanisms. So, scarcity is extremely powerful, especially, you know, and it’s really, really important to do it correctly. So one of the things that we should, you know, I’m going to go ahead and [inaudible 00:19:09.10], because you might have some things to say about these experiments, but it’s really important that we talk about how marketers do this wrong, and some of the things that you want to make sure that you do right. John McIntyre:  Well tell me about that, man, I mean I’m really content listening to this; this is good stuff. So tell me, what are the mistakes that people make? Jack Born: Sure, yeah. So one of the obvious mistakes, and this is really what gives scarcity a bad name, so everyone talks about, you don’t want to use fake scarcity, you don’t want to use fake scarcity, but I think that there’s a little bit of confusion over an evergreen deadline, and it’s assumed that, “Well, if it’s an evergreen deadline, then it’s fake scarcity,” okay? So I want to go ahead and dispel that myth. But before I do, it is important for me to say that yes, fake scarcity is something you want to stay away from. So what is fake scarcity versus what I call an evergreen deadline? So in my opinion, fake scarcity is simply when you go to a page and it says, “When the countdown reaches zero, which is midnight tonight, this deal is over. We’re giving you a great deal, you know you want this, but better act now, because tomorrow you’re not going to be able to get it.” And then, for whatever reason, you forget, you left the tab open and you hit refresh on the tab, and the counter starts back over, okay. That is fake scarcity. And as soon as you do that, you’ve lost a lot of integrity with your audience. Having your audience know they can trust you is really, really important, especially for repeat sales, and it’s getting more and more difficult to build a business just on the front-end offer. It’s really important to have your happiest clients to purchase more things from you and higher-priced stuff. And so, you really want to – if you’re going to use a deadline, it’s really important that, whether it’s a fixed counter deadline, like a product launch, or an evergreen deadline, that the deadline is real for that person. And so, fake scarcity is where that deadline resets when they come back to the page and they’re not really held to it. So how is that different than an evergreen deadline? An evergreen deadline is, I’ll use an example of the DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles, since you’re not in the States. Every so often, we have to renew our driver’s license, but it’s not the same day. It’s not like tax day. Tax day, for us in the U.S., is April 15th, and everyone has that same deadline for tax day. But everyone has a different deadline based on their birthday for the DMV. So that’s a rolling, evergreen deadline. It’s based on several different factors: when you last renewed and also your birthday. But it is not a fake deadline. If you decide to ignore it, and you drive around with an expired license, you’re going to find out that it is not a fake deadline. You’re going to get a ticket. So that’s an example of how you can have an evergreen deadline, if it has a downside to missing that deadline, then it’s not fake scarcity. So that’s one of the things that I wanted to build into the deadline funnel, was to make sure that you could set it up so it wasn’t going to reset everyday, that you can have a deadline, an evergreen deadline, and when someone came into your funnel, if you said, “This is going to expire two days from now at midnight,” and they see the counter that it actually is going to expire for them. But some of the other things that I was really frustrated with, and I think everyone listening is going to be able to relate to this, is that I wanted to be able to use two other things that are really, really important to me. Number one, I wanted to be able to – I have a funnel that’s more than just one page, okay? So I’ve got pages with educational videos where there’s a little bit of content and then I talk about a special offer, but you know, the next day you’re getting another e-mail – so that’s the other part of it – is that e-mail marketing is a really, really important part of my funnel. So I want you to come into my world, and I’m going to give you a way to sign up for a free trial of something or to offer you a lead magnet, and now you’re on my list, and I’m sending you broadcast and follow-up e-mails. So this is a very important way which I build [inaudible 00:22:49.05] trust, and then eventually turn you from a prospect into a happy client. So, I wanted to be able to integrate the deadline into multiple different pages, not just have it tied to one specific sales page, but also to tie it into the e-mail marketing, so that when you receive an e-mail from me three days after you enter the funnel, if I said, “Hey John, I just want to make sure that you know, this Wednesday, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time, the deadline expires,” that it was perfectly synced up with what you were seeing on the webpage. So to me, that was really, really powerful, and I couldn’t find that anywhere else, and so I wanted to create that so that I could have someone come into the funnel and have multiple different pages if I wanted to, with the same countdown timer all ticking down to the same deadline, and the e-mails that they were receiving all synced up and coordinated, and have it truly be set up so that if someone decided to wait around to see what would happen, that they truly did miss the deadline and they would be sent to a “Coming soon” page, or wherever it is that I wanted to send them. So those were a few other things that I couldn’t find, and again, coming back to where we started this conversation, I used my skills as a software guy and a direct-response marketer to come up with something that I would be proud to use my own marketing. And then the last thing that I’ll mention, which is, we’re not going to be able to cover everything, but one of the other really important things is that, we all know that more and more of our audience is reading our e-mails and visiting our webpages on mobile devices, smartphones, and tablets. Again, going back to how other solutions are being implemented, I realized that if someone visited my webpage on Monday, and they saw a countdown that was ticking to Wednesday, and then they came back and they visited on their iPhone or their tablet on Tuesday, and the countdown really was reset, because that was the first time that, on that device, they were visiting that page, to me that wasn’t good enough. I wanted it so that, when John McIntyre comes to my page on Monday, if you happen to get my e-mail from me on Wednesday and you click through on your smartphone, I wanted you to see the same damn deadline, especially if I’m saying in the e-mail, “Hey John, today’s the last day. It’s Wednesday, and so at 11:59 tonight, this offer expires. It’s only good until then.” If you click through to that page and you’re on your smartphone, it’s really, really important to me that everything is consistent. I don’t want you to see a countdown that says three days left. And so, I wanted to build everything, have everything taken into account so that it truly was an evergreen deadline for someone. Or I should say a deadline, it just happened to be set up in an evergreen fashion, because I do a lot of webinars, I like to do something once and then set it up on auto-replay. It’s also a great way to work with someone who’s a joint venture partner and you know, you record an interview, or you do a webinar, and yeah, there’s a rush of people who are sent to that webinar the first time, but what about after the event? Wouldn’t it be great if that partner could set it up in their autoresponder, and every single person could watch the replay? You don’t have to pretend like it’s a webinar, you can say, “Hey, come watch the replay. It was a really good webinar, come watch the replay.” And now you’re being completely authentic, and you’re offering the same deadline of three days that you offered to the folks that are on the webinar. So those are some of the things that I wanted to build into the deadline funnel that I felt were going to address some of the mistakes that people were making with the way that they were implementing scarcity and urgency in their campaigns. John McIntyre: Right, I mean, I noticed this on a Facebook funnel I’ve had running for the last three months, that just having, I’ve got like a countdown timer on there, and just having that timer on there, it’s a cookie-based thing, so same kind of thing to the deadline funnel, and it’s like dynamite. It’s incredible to see how well that works. If we take that off the page, the conversions drop instantly. So I couldn’t recommend it more, if someone’s listening to this and they have a product and they want an easy way to sort of crank up the response, this is by far one of the easiest little tricks – I suppose it’s a little bit of a trick, but it’s just a really easy way to bump your conversion rate. Jack Born: Absolutely, yeah. So for any of your listeners who want to give this a shot, normally, what I’d do is I require a credit card to start a free trial, but I thought, what I’d do for your audience is to set it up so that they can try it without a credit card. You can just sign up, give it a whirl, and obviously, it’s a limited time trial, so after a certain number of days, your access will be turned off unless you decide to enroll, but here’s where you want to go: deadlinefunnel.com/mcmethod, and you can just sign up with no credit card required, give it a whirl, and then what I’ll do is make an offer once you’re in there, that will be better than what you would normally get if you’re going just to the main page of the website. So that’s two reasons to go over to deadlinefunnel.com/mcmethod. But yeah, you were mentioning the cookie-based timer. One of the things that, in order to make this technology work, it was not easy, but my system has to be able to recognize you, whether you’re on your desktop, your laptop, your wife’s computer, or you’re at a coffee shop and you’re clicking through on an e-mail. So I created a system that basically, I shouldn’t say triangulates you, but that’s a cool way of saying there’s three different ways that my system tracks you. And so, if we don’t find you one way, we could fall back to another way. If we don’t find you that way, fall back to another way. And so that’s how we’re able to set it up, so that when your prospect is going through, if they’re visiting your page the first time on their desktop, but then the next time, they’re clicking through on your second e-mail while they’re at the coffee shop on their smartphone, they’re going to see the same countdown timer, which is really, really powerful with people being so mobile these days. John McIntyre:  Hmm. That’s a really cool feature, I mean, you’re absolutely right. They’re going to go at a coffee shop, open their e-mails, and click over. And there’s a plugin to WordPRess or anything like that, or is it a standalone thing, how does it work? Jack Born: Yeah, I’m glad you asked, because that’s another huge advantage. So, I know that – I should answer your question first. It works with WordPress, but it’s not a WordPress plugin. Basically, you’re given copy and past code. The same as if you were adding code to your page for Google Analytics or something like that, you just copy and past the code in there. A few other tings that you can put the countdown timer wherever you want on the page, you can put it multiple times, like top, bottom, just wherever you want. Just like you were putting an image on a page. You can say, “Okay, well I want the countdown timer here,” especially if you’re using WordPress. But another cool reason why not being a WordPress plugin is an advantage, is because if you’re using something like lead pages, well, it’s really, really easy to be able to set it up to work with lead pages. It works a little bit differently, in other words it’s in a footer, a floating footer at the bottom of a lead pages page, but now, if you’re signing people up for a webinar or using any one of their other dozens of campaigns out there, you can use this, you can use deadline funnel on lead pages, you know? So, you don’t have to be using WordPress in order for this to work. John McIntyre:  I like it. So a nice little script that you just copy and paste across. Jack Born: Yeah, it’s a snippet of code, but it’s a web-based, it’s a SAS product. So it’s a annual recurring license to be able to use the software. John McIntyre:  Cool. Cool, okay man, I love that, that’s really cool. I’ll have the link to – so it’s deadlinefunnel.com/mcmethod. So I’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this podcast at themcmethod.com. Easy. Any final words of wisdom before, you know, on deadlines or scarcity, or any other marketing stuff before we sign off? Jack Born: No, it’s just a real pleasure to be able to share tips and ideas with other like-minded direct-response marketers. I mean, like you, I’m super passionate about direct-response marketing. I get excited about this stuff, and it’s great to be able to talk to you and your audience about things that get me excited. I don’t know if you experience this, but because I’m married with kids, you can’t go to the neighborhood barbecue or the PTA meeting and talk about this type of stuff, so I always love – I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed meeting at the Titans of Direct Response, because everywhere you turn, there’s other people like us with their own unique twist on things, but everyone’s excited about the same stuff, so that’s it. I’m just super excited to be able to share what I’m passionate about and what everyone else is passionate about, as well. John McIntyre:  Good stuff, man. Well cool, thanks for coming on the show and sharing. Jack Born: Okay. Take care. The post Episode #81 – Jack Born on Cranking Out Killer-Converting Email Funnels (and how to use scarcity correctly to skyrocket your sales) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Daniel Levis is an email marketing legend absolutely brimming with must-have marketing insights. What makes him such a legend? Sales success, check. Copywriting chops, check. List building skills, check. Product Creation, check. And the list goes on and on… Daniel’s been writing lead generation letters, newsletters and working his direct marketing tactics since the 90’s. Sales in print IS copywriting, ..so the transition from sales to copywriting and then email marketing was natural for Daniel And that’s why he’s on The Email Marketing Podcast today. Daniel lifts the hood on tried and true email marketing strategies. Use these tips to engage your customer’s and convert $$$. The killer info provided in this interview is enough alone to transform your marketing campaigns, ..into GOLD. He’s a master story craftsman, He knows empathy, ..and he enables you to know it too. It’s not rocket science, It’s just knowing what to do, And then doing it. Let Daniel Levis tell you how he creates such amazingly successful emails. Plus much, much more…   In this episode, you’ll discover: the 5-step process Daniel uses in every email to engage readers everytime starting at the subject line down to the CTA that each time you sell to someone this certain way… you’re shooting yourself in the foot (find out exactly how to avoid this situation) the bulletproof method to extract a hook and write ridiculously precise must-open subject lines how casual curiosity in email subject lines only works for superstars (learn how to get to that next level of curiosity… and close sales) the cherry picking technique to succeed and make more money as a copywriter (find these type of clients and make your life easier) how to transplant your reader from the here and now to a far far away imaginary world in every email (this should be your goal behind each and every email you write) how to find attention absorbing hooks in your life, your clients’ or in anything else around you (find these hooks and turn them into a gripping story) a positive acceptance technique that makes for killer landing pages Mentioned: Kendrick Cleveland Jon Benson Daniel Levis Email Alchemy Effortless Influence Stealthstocks Online Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder guy. It’s time for episode 80. That’s  a lot of podcasts – of The McMethod e-mail marketing podcast, where you’ll discover how to make more money with your list, how to crank up the value of your leads way up, and make bank with them. Today, I’ll be talking to Daniel Levis. Now, Daniel is a very interesting guy. He is very successful at copywriting, especially e-mail copywriting. He’s known for using incredible sales stories to make sales that boost conversions to just blow the records out of the water. So I thought I’d get him on the show, chat to him about e-mail, find out exactly how he uses these stories to create these incredible sales. This is a bit different to Andre Chaperon, it’s different to the Ben Settle stuff, it’s different to what I do. He’s got his own spin on things and I think he’s amazing at it. So, yeah, how to use Email Alchemy. Okay. Stories, influences. He’s got another program called The Effortless Influence. So this guy’s been in the game for a while, he has tons of insights to share, so get ready for that. To get the show notes for this episode of the e-mail marketing podcast, go to themcmethod.com/80 for 80. We’re going to have to do a celebration when we get to a hundred episodes there. Anyway, one more thing, before we get into the interview, I’ve got a McMaster’s Insight of the week. McMaster’s is a private community that I have. Someone mentioned the Adrius. Mentioned GKIC, which is Dan Kennedy’s recurring or continuity program, as far as I know. I’m not too familiar with it, but he mentioned that in the community, in the forum, inside the McMaster’s forum, that they’re a great model to look at when you’re brainstorming how to do your recurring billing, how to do your continuity programs. Maybe you’re doing a forum, newsletters, however you’re trying to do it, go and study something like GKIC, so Dan Kennedy’s program. You can study McMasters, you can study this. But anyway, that’s that. If you’re thinking about doing the recurring thing, the insight today is that go and look at GKIC, check out how they do it with the newsletters, and you get a good idea about what you can do or some other ideas, like you can try out Ben Settle’s e-mail players, he does a physical print newsletter, which you can sign up to. I think, last time I checked, it was $97 a month, and you get a newsletter once a month. My way of doing it is, I have McMasters, which is you sign up and you pay, there’s a few different options, but let’s say it’s monthly, and you pay every month and you can cancel any time. So that’s the way I do it with the forum and some training products in there. So there are few different models, a few different ideas, and that’s how you really build in that recurring revenue into your business. McMasters is  a private community, if you want to learn more about it, just go to themcmethod.com and in the top menu bar, you should see a link saying “Members.” Click that, and you get all the information there, including how to sign up. That’s that, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Daniel Levis. Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Daniel Levis. Now, Daniel, I actually met Daniel, how I met, was it last week or something, at the Titans of Direct Response. Now, Daniel is a direct-response consultant, he’s a copywriter, and he’s got some interesting products out there. One of them is called Effortless Influence and another one, which we’re going to talk about today, is Email Alchemy, which, I don’t know too much about it yet, so that’s why I put Daniel on here to talk about it, because it’s got sort of an interesting take on should you use teaser copy or do you want to use longer e-mails, do open rates matter, all sorts of different stuff, so I’m really excited. You should be excited, too. So, before we get into that, though, Daniel, how are you going today? Daniel Levis:  I’m awesome. How are you doing, John? John McIntyre: I’m doing good, I’m a little bit tired, a little bit jetlagged, so my mind’s, you know, I told you, I got back from Thailand. So I got back from the US to Thailand, about 12, 24 hours here? So right now, it’s 8pm here, but it’s actually 9am in New York. So my head’s a little bit messy right now. But anyway, it was a nice [inaudible 00:03:40]. So before we get into the content  and Email Alchemy, can you give the listeners, a little bit of background on who you are and what you do? Daniel Levis:  Okay, I’ll give you the Coles Notes version. Basically, I’ve been a professional copywriter since 2004 and before that, I was a salesman, basically. I got into copywriting out of necessity. I used to use telephone to generate appointments to sell my stuff, and that’s, it kind of stopped working, became much less effective in the 90’s when voice mail came on the scene. I must sound like a total dinosaur, talking about the 90’s, holy smokes. So, I started writing lead generation letters, letters to get people interested, pick up the phone, request some type of a white paper which I would also write. I also consider that to be copy. I started writing monthly newsletters for my clients and just became much more involved with the written word versus the spoken word, but I don’t really see a lot of difference. I mean, certainly, there are differences, and you know, face to face selling, you’re right there with the client, you’re getting immediate feedback, you’ve got to think a lot faster, but apart from that, sales copies, salesmanship in print. So that was my introduction to the written word and selling of the written word, and then I went full time as a copywriter on my own in 2004. And since then, I’ve written all kinds of pretty high-level stuff, a lot of megalogue-type stuff that goes out in the mail for financial newsletters. I worked closely with Clayton Makepeace for several years, worked with, I’m going to say like, six, seven, eight different financial publishers, people like Weiss research, and Stealth Stocks Online, and Hidden Values Alert, and the Street Authority. Pretty well known names in finance. But I really got interested in e-mail marketing because part of the process of getting clients, in my philosophy for getting clients as a copywriter is that you should have your own publication. And that’s, by far, the best way to make a name for yourself. It’s by far the best way to get clients, because when you position yourself as a guru, even from day 1, and this is what I did, you just get a lot higher-paying clients. You get people that are more serious and you don’t have to put yourself at a sort of psychological disadvantage where you’re out there trying to get clients, because clients find you. They read your blog, they read your newsletter, they see other people promoting you, or even they see people, maybe you’re promoting somebody else, but part of their mojo rubs off on you. So that was kind of my start, and then this whole Email Alchemy came up because in the process of building my list, and making money building that list, was that you have to have a way to monetize your efforts if you’re building a list. So I did a lot of experimenting and a lot of, I mean, I must have sent a gazillion e-mails out to my list over the last 10 years, so I got a kind of feel of what’s working, what isn’t working, I would develop these products that would help me to monetize the building of the list, and I just noticed that what I was doing with those e-mails, my experience was kind of like counter-intuitive and the opposite of what most people do, and I found that, yeah, I could send a short e-mail, you mentioned teaser e-mails versus longer copy e-mails, I could send a short sort of teaser e-mail about something. And you know, back in the good old days, it doesn’t really matter what you send out, you send an e-mail out and you made money. That was just, you know, e-mail was a new thing, the web was new, and it was just a lot easier back then. But what I ‘ve discovered is that, rather than sending out these short teaser e-mails and getting a lot of traffic to a webpage, that kind of stopped working to a large extent, and what I started doing was, I would take the lion’s share of the persuasion, and stick it in the e-mail. So I developed this process where, the 5-step sort of process that I wanted to put people through or that I wanted to execute with every e-mail, and that is, I would have a subject line that typically was not, I mean, the subject line has to have benefit, it has to have curiosity. If you want to be really successful, I believe, at selling. You can put a subject like, “Hey…” or just put the person’s name in the subject line. And you get a lot of people opening your e-mails. But the problem with that, unless you’re Barack Obama, or Frank Curran, you’re going to have a lot of casual curiosity, right? People will open your e-mails to see why you put their name in the subject line, or why did you put “Hey…” in the subject line, but that doesn’t get you anywhere. All it does is  it gets your e-mail opened, right? And again, if you put like a short teaser message in the e-mail, trying to get them to go to your blog or to your video or your sales page or your launch series, or whatever it is, yeah, you’re going to get lots of people clicking through there, too, but what I’ve discovered is that, again, it’s casual curiosity. People are curious about what’s going on there. But if you really want to sell something, you need to have benefit, and you need to have curiosity in the subject line. That’s a good subject line. John McIntyre: The interesting part here that I noticed is that, you can use, like, a “Hey,” in the subject line or a name, you know I got a blog post to my site about Obama’s subject lines, and it worked, or like a “Bad news,” subject line. Like that stuff works, or can work on like a once-off, but once you’ve done it, you can’t do it again, it’s not a long-term strategy, it’s sort of that [inaudible 00:09:46], like one time, but you can’t use it again, so it’s like you’ve got to have something more than just tricks like that. Daniel Levis:  Yeah, I would take that analogy and extend it to the e-mail itself. I mean, you can send a very blind sort of an e-mail that’s full of curiosity that gets a lot of clicks. It gets a lot of clicks to a landing page, or whatever it is you’re promoting, but then again, how many times can you do that? Not very many. Maybe two or three times. And the second or third time that you try it, you click through it, it’s going to go way down, and it’s going to go down to the same sort of low click-through rates that my e-mails get. My e-mails are seven, 800,  a thousand words, and they take the prospects through this whole process of what I call opening. And the opening is really like a bread crumb, you know, a series of bread crumbs, or single-line cliffhangers, if you will, that are designed to draw the subject into the e-mail. And then, I have what’s called the deepening, which is, typically, a story or some type of visual, almost like a story but told in the second person, right? So, “Can you imagine yourself doing this? And then this happened, and that happened.” But the idea is to get the prospect’s imagination activated and engaged, so that they’re no longer sitting there in front of their computer, they’re actually off somewhere in their mind, in some other place, in some other time, and that’s very key, critical thing that has to happen in the e-mail. You have to get them out of the here and now, and you have to get them in this sort of imaginary world that you put them in, almost like a trance, and while you’re doing that, you’re planting suggestions that are congruent with what you want them to do when they click through. so you have this Deepening process, and then I take them out of that reverie, out of that imaginary world that I put them in, and I pitch them, very directly, in the e-mail. And I talk about what it is that I want them to buy, or what I want them to do, on the landing page, and I do it very directly. And then I tell them to go and do it. Go and buy it. Go and order it. Go and get involved. Go and sign up for this webinar and make sure you’re there. Because if you’re not there, you know, your hair’s going to fall out or whatever. John McIntyre: So what example, like just something [inaudible 00:12:15] if you send a curiosity, like just a curiosity subject line, you’ve got to work the benefit in that, so there’s sort of, I guess, a relevant attention that’s opening that e-mail, that they’re opening it because they want to learn about the e-mail, or they want to learn more about how to pick up women, or whatever the topic is. Then you catch their attention, you tell a story, you use the story to deepen them and take them into a sort of trance, and then you pitch. And  you pitch for it directly, and then you push them to the page. That’s the process, right? Daniel Levis:  Yeah, and I would add that the subject line is not really about what I want them to do. The subject line is more about selling the readership of the e-mail. So the subject line, yeah, it’s going to have the word in it. What was the word that you mentioned, e-mail. Okay. So it will have the word e-mail in it. John McIntyre: Right. Daniel Levis:  But the subject line is not about Email Alchemy, or it’s not about e-mail course XYZ. The subject line is typically about the story of what’s going on. John McIntyre: What I find is, because this is like, I found these random curiosity  subject lines, they get great open rates. But they don’t convert as well. When I find a file [inaudible 00:13:22] because I’m trying to sell that, then what seems to work really well is I have a subject line that mentions e-mail, mentions Autoresponder, mentions e-mail something, I mean, it doesn’t go into the product yet, it does what you’re talking about, where it uses that and then transitions into a story that somehow relates to e-mail. Daniel Levis:  That’s right, yeah. Yeah, and the story, I mean the crazier the story, or the more paradoxical the story, the better, because that’s really what — John McIntyre: Where do you come up with your stories? Daniel Levis:  Well that’s a very, very interesting question. There’s a bunch of places that I come up with stories, but by far the best place to get the story is from the client themselves. So for example, if you look at the case studies in my Email Alchemy courses, they’re all case study-driven. You see, the craziest stories that, I mean, you couldn’t make shit like that up, because they’re just too crazy. To give you an example, one of the case studies, when you buy my course, is in the Track 1 part of the training, is from Kendrick Cleveland, and he does persuasion. Are you familiar with Kendrick Cleveland at all? John McIntyre: Never heard of him. Daniel Levis:  Never heard of him, okay. Well, he’s a guy you should really check out, because not only is he a character, but he has these wonderful courses about persuasion and NLP, and that sort of thing, and when I interviewed Kendrick, it was just amazing the kinds of stories that he would come up with, and he wasn’t volunteering these stories. I had to kind of be very – remember Jay Abraham when he was up on the stage and he was talking about conversations that he’d have with people, and he said, “Well, you don’t want to be in a hurry, but you want to be very persistent, but at the same time relaxed,” and that’s the kind of thing that I teach in the second track, is like how do you extract a hook, right? So, while I’m interviewing this guy, Kendrick Cleveland, I discovered that he’s just really a character. He’s got some really interesting language that he uses when he’s telling his stories. So one of the subject lines in his series is something about Penniless Raging Bull of Persuasion. Penniless Raging Bull of Persuasion. And that’s the story that he’s telling me about how all these insane stories about how he’s selling life insurance, and the life insurance company, he gets a call one day, and he’s out on the street, because their [inaudible 00:15:52] got under or whatever, and then he’s walking around in this town somewhere in the western part of the states, and he sees a fitness gym and he walks into the gym, and he says, “I need a sales job.” And the lady comes out and she’s just drop dead gorgeous, and he’s drooling while he’s talking to her, and she gives him a job. And this whole story about how he’s cutting his teeth selling gym memberships, and he screws up the sale, and he lets the guy go, and he doesn’t buy in, and this gorgeous knockout woman just pulls him up on the rug and just totally belittles him and says, “Don’t ever let that guy go again without turning him over to me so I can close him.” And he tells all these crazy stories, and that’s where the stories come from. So, Penniless raging bull of persuasion. He’s a cocky son of a bitch, and he gets torn down, and then there’s another subject line, another story, Brunette Bombshell of Persuasion Versus My Mom, right? So Brunette Bombshell of Persuasion Versus My Mom, well that’s a conflict, right? And conflict is what drives a story, right? So he tells a story about how his mom had taught him how to sell an MLM, and then he met this knockout woman, then he tells a story about how Richard Bandler put him in a trance when he was in a seminar, and that’s another e-mail, and that one’s darker than NLP, dark side patterns. You know? So all these stories that are real, true-to-life stories that came out of the client, that is by far, or if you’re writing your own e-mails, have somebody help you to pull those hooks up. Or another case study that I used to teach is, this is a fitness trainer, coach. And her story was, why Amazons Scare Guys Spitless, was one of the headlines, right? So we’re talking about this, why do women want to look like that? Why do men want to look like that? Well, they want to get laid. They want to impress the opposite sex. Another one was, My Jiggly Embarrassing Bums, see it on video. That’s the subject line. And this is about when she would compete to get on the stage, and before they get on the stage, they have to get this brown war paint painted on, and they have to have their G-string glued on. So one of the subject lines is, Body Sculpting #5: My Glued-on G-string. So you think people are going to open that? Yeah, they’re going to open that. But it’s got nothing to do with the product. It’s not evident  what’s for sale here or what the desired action is. We just want to get them to open that thing, we want to deepen them with the story, we want to put them there in the competition, getting their G-string glued on and the brown war paint painted on by some old fart in the gym there, and that’s the kind of thing we’re doing. We’re just kind of creating all of these stories. So another one was, Discount and Expiring, this is later on in the campaign. Discount and Expiring in little square brackets, and then it’s Embarrassing Husband Story. And what woman is not going to open that? An Embarrassing Husband Story. And she tells a story about how the UPS man or whatever they have down in Australia there, came with a bunch of maple syrup to the door and her husband opens the door and the name of her business is IdealBodiesOnline.com, and the FedEx guy or whatever he is, DHL, I think it was, I don’t know. And he looks at her husband, and he’s got a bit of a potbelly, and he looks at the bill of lading and it says, “IdealBodiesOnline,” looks back at her husband, looks back at the bill of lading, he says, “Yeah, IdealBodiesOnline.com, yeah, right,” you know. So, all of these stories are real, true-to-life stories that I pull out of the client or out of myself, if I’m the one telling the story or trying to sell something directly. John McIntyre: Right. So tell us like, I mean the story, like you can tell a story about something completely random. One guy, one of my guests back in the past said he goes to a new site and finds the weird section. He finds just crazy, crazy stuff. That gets a lot of open rates, but what we’re talking about is, if you’re going to tell a story, it’s got to be weird, it’s got to have the conflict, and it’s got to be something that contrasts with like, how the hell does that work? Well you have to read it. But it also has to tie in somehow, to not too much the product, but the topic, whether it’s e-mail, or having better relationships, or losing weight. Daniel Levis:  Yeah, absolutely, and there’s nothing wrong with doing what you said there. There’s an old story that Gary Halbert would tell, and he’s working with his students, and what Gary would say to the student that wants to learn how to write copy is,  “I want you to wake up every morning and go on and buy The New York Times, or buy The Wall Street Journal, or buy whatever publication, and just open it up at random, and find a headline. And then I want you to write a story that ties that headline to whatever it is you’re doing. And that’s what I want you to do every morning when you wake up. And that’s exactly what you described, whoever this guest was. He said, you know, “go to the…” and there are sites online where you can go and you can find unusual stories. The site that I love, it’s called, what the hell is it called… Urban Dictionary, I think it’s called? And you go to the Urban Dictionary and every day, people are going on this site and they will define something. So they’re defining a particular term and it’s always funny and gross and unusual and they use all kinds of strange words. So I’d go there and I’ll find one of these Urban Dictionary definitions, and I’ll turn it into a story. Or I’ll find some kind of crazy video on YouTube, or whatever it is. No matter what it is, I’ll find a way. If it’s attention-absorbing, if it’s got this sort of, and I have a whole list of what I call hooks, things like controversy, and embarrassment, and conflict, and intrigue. All these sort of checklist of the types of stories that grab attention, and I’ll find a story that has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m selling, I’ll turn it into a story. So that’s another way of using stories, another way of pulling people into your e-mails. But there’s all kinds of different ways, and I really love the idea of finding a story inside of the person’s life, or inside of your own life, but there’s all kinds of different ways to do it. John McIntyre: Right. One thing I’m interested in is, like, let’s say, because you mentioned, I think, that some of the sequences might go for two weeks or 20 days or something like that. So what are we talking, someone joins the list, and then they get the two to three-week e-mail sequence, or you writing say, seven e-mails or something, and sending them every three days, and you just send that out to a list you already have? Daniel Levis:  Well, both. Certainly both, the case study campaigns that I do, because I’m going to… See, I like to cherry-pick as a copywriter or marketing consultant, I like to go and find a client who already has a list. I don’t want to deal with clients that are trying to build a list. Now, that doesn’t mean email alchemy doesn’t apply in that particular scenario, it’s just that I can make a lot more money as a copywriter if I deal with people who already have a list. So if you buy my courses and you look at Jon Benson’s campaign for his recent three accelerator where the scale in Australia or Kendrick Cleveland, that’s the scenario. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the exact same scenario when you’re building a list. And you most certainly should, it’s just a different sort of an animal. So in terms of lead generation, I have people who buy these courses, and they use them to generate leads. So they’ll typically have some type of lead generation page there, where they’re giving away something. And then as soon as somebody opts in for this, then they will get these story generate, story-based sort of e-mails that are typically designed, and a lot of this is service-based stuff. So the people will be selling some type of a service. Maybe they’re a social media consultant, maybe they’re a landscaper, or maybe they do some type of renovation at home, or maybe they’re some type of a consultant, a coach, whatever it is, and so they, in exchange for a special report, in exchange for some type of consultation or whatever, they have the right to follow up with this prospect, and then maybe every two or three days, they’ll send one of these Email Alchemy e-mails, and the intent of the e-mail, if somebody’s requested a special report from you, a white paper or whatever it is, and this goes back to my days in sales and selling, direct selling, is that I would then follow up on that lead generation magnet, that special report, or white paper, whatever it was, with a bunch of these e-mails that are designed to take the prospect to the next step. So, not only have they read you or indoctrination your strategy, the principles that you use to get a specific job done, now it’s time for them to get a half-hour consult or an hour consult or a 90-minute consult or whatever it is so that they can get specific, custom-tailored advice, and the duration of that appointment, if you will, would coincide with the amount of money that you would be asking for at the end of that consult. John McIntyre: Okay, okay. So you say that this works, because a lot of people come to me, and they ask me, well, I sell services, I sell products, and people come to me, and they start to ask, “Can I sell…” you know, a lot of the questions that I have [inaudible 00:26:25] what you’re doing when you’re selling services. So you’re saying, when you do it right, and I know this, but sometimes, the list on mind now is that you can use the story by selling method for business to business and for selling services. It’s not just for people with an e-book to sell. Daniel Levis:  Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. We have people who buy this and then they’re selling $15,000 kitchen renovations, or multi-thousand dollar consulting engagements. We have people doing this who are selling management consulting, believe it or not. And it’s a great way to sell management consulting, because you don’t want to be talking to people who have not already drunk your management consulting Kool-Aid, right? And how do you get them to drink your Kool-Aid, well, you’ve got to get them to buy or request a free report, then you want them to consume it before you get on the phone with them or whatever. If they don’t do that, there’s no point getting them on the phone, because then, you’re going to have to sell them on the phone, which is about the least effective way to sell somebody something. If you have to sell somebody something, one-to-one on the telephone, that is just stupid. You are shooting yourself in the foot. They should be sold on you before you ever get on the telephone, and the way to do that is to write a book or write a special report and to send them e-mails that captivate. That get them really thinking. That open their mind. That deepen them into this imagination, get their imagination  flowing and see them moving forward in whatever it is they want to do with you, kind of like the orchestrator of it all, well before you ever get them on the telephone, so that when they’re on the phone, you’re asking them questions about what it is they want to do, and you’ll ask them those questions in the spirit of discovery, so that you’re sort of asking them questions that are selling them on you, rather than you trying to sell yourself on to them. If they’re already sold on you, you’re asking them questions that are saying, “Okay, do I really want to work with you, Mr. Client? Are we a good fit? Are you the kind of person that I want to work with in terms of making this result happen for you?” So that’s the spirit of the interview, and that’s what Email Alchemy and that’s what this whole process of pulling a client towards you, but it can certainly be business to business, absolutely. John McIntyre: And one last thing, before we wrap this up, that I wanted to know is just, on a rough, I mean, what’s the sort of rough review if I had a structural campaign? If I had to e-mail my list today, for example, and use the methods that we’ve talked about here, do I write, say, seven e-mails, and send one every three days, and have a story that’s sort of spread out over those e-mails, or do I have a different story every day, or does it follow some sort of arc or I don’t know, what’s your thinking there? Daniel Levis:  Well, yeah, it depends on your objective, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to sell, how much does it cost, what kind of behavioral change are you asking your prospect to make? Give me a little context. John McIntyre: Let’s say I’m selling a product for $300, and the customer, or the prospect, well, they’re interested in the topic. They haven’t bought anything yet, though. Or maybe they bought something small, for, say, $20, and they’re interested in taking the next step, but they haven’t yet. Is that enough context? Daniel Levis:  Okay, and what is this $300 dollar thing that you’re selling? John McIntyre: Say it’s a, I mean, just for a, let’s say it’s simple, like a weight-loss thing that’s going to teach them, like an advance weight-loss system. Daniel Levis:  Okay, cool. That’s exactly the same product that I was talking about that the lady in Australia was selling, it was a $300 membership site, where they would go in and they had this, I  think it was like a 12-week program for weight loss and figure sculpting. More weight loss than figure sculpting. So it’s the same sort of thing. So how did we sell it? Well, we used a simple landing page, had a video on it, and the video was like, I think it had 12, maybe 8 to 10 sort of little stories that were like 30, 45 second stories, with a before and an after picture, and here’s a fat lady, and here’s a hot lady. So that’s the landing page, and underneath the landing page, it was kind of like positive acceptance copy that said, “You’re damn right, Sue. I’m in on this, and here’s everything that you’re giving me.” So, kind of written in the reverse voice, so it’s the prospect talking on the landing page, and then in terms of the e-mails, we would send an e-mail every single day. I think we sent e-mails for 14 days. So every day, they got an e-mail, and it was all something, kind of crazy story about this lady and her exploits as a figure sculptor, and how she was fat before and now she’s thin, and all these emotional issues that she had when she was a teenager, and real stories about all of these things that these women are going through. And every day, for, say, I probably have the series here in front of me. I can tell you exactly how many days the campaign went for. So, like 10 days, we’d send an e-mail every single day, and then on the 11th day, we sent two e-mails, on the 12th day, two e-mails, and then the last day, we’d send four e-mails in one day. So, the idea is, you have this window of opportunity, this limited opportunity to get some special deal. So they could get this course for $300, but if they missed it, and they didn’t get it during this window, then they would have to pay $400 or they wouldn’t get such and such a bonus along with the main program for $300. So there’s something bad that happens at the end of the 15 days or how many days. John McIntyre: Like it closes, or the price goes up, or something like that. Daniel Levis:  Exactly, yeah. And then, each one of these e-mails would have kind of like an ongoing sort of narrative that becomes increasingly clear. The way to look at it as a narrative, okay? Typically, there’s some type of a problem  or a thing that happens to this individual in the e-mail, and that’s the deepening part. There’s a problem that occurs in the e-mail, and that problem is solved in that e-mail. They go to the video, they watch these before and after things, and they buy, but there’s also like a secondary sort of situation, a secondary sort of problem that always comes back in the next e-mail, that doesn’t get solved until the end of the series. So there’s always like a primary problem, and I classify this as, you know, you do e-mail marketing. You sell Autoresponder series. So there’s a reason why somebody would want an Autoresponder series, okay? That is the primary sort of problem resolution. And then there’s a secondary problem that doesn’t get solved until the end, or it’s always recurring sort of thing, and that is, why does somebody need John McIntyre to write an e-mail Autoresponder series? What is your unique selling proposition? So there’s the problem of, “I need more sales, I need follow-up, I keep forgetting to follow up, I need a way to solve that problem, and this is how I solve it, with these machines that automatically follow up, but I could never write them in such a way that resulted in sales when people landed on the page. So I needed to get John McIntyre, because he had the secret sauce of how to not only follow up, but get action when people followed up. That sort of things. So there’s the primary problem resolution in every single e-mail, and then there’s this recurring sort of secondary problem that is a unique selling proposition of your particular weight loss program, or insurance strategy, or Autoresponder follow up, whatever, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, it’s always the same sort of principle. John McIntyre: Cool, cool. Well thank you. Before I wrap this up though, I mean we talked about, so obviously, you’ve got a product called Email Alchemy, but as far as I know, it’s closed right now, so tell the listener, where, if they want to learn more about you or about the program, where they can go, and I know you mentioned that you’re going to open it up, where you’re doing a sort of special promotion special offer in probably a month, which will be, this podcast, will go live, I think it’s about four or five weeks right now? So by the time I – Daniel Levis:  Yeah, yeah.  Yeah, so what you want to do now, if you’re intrigued by any of this, you need to go to my website, www. DanielLevis.com, and there should be a pop-up that will come over the site and it will offer you a free report, I think it’s called 9 Forbidden Secrets of Info marketing, or something like that. So go ahead and get that, and you’ll be on our list, and then next month, when we introduce Email Alchemy, we’ve got three different tracks for you depending on who you are, and we’re going to be having special offers on all three tracks. The first track is very reasonably priced, and it is for the do it yourself-er. For people who want to write their own e-mails, to sell their own products or services, in much this sort of vein that we’ve been talking about here today. And we’re also introducing 10 Royalty-free Templates. So you’ll be able to take this subject line, opening, deepening, pitch, call to action structure, which is Email Alchemy, and you’ll be able to, basically, fill out a questionnaire with details about your business, and then you take the answers and you just kind of paint by numbers and you’ll have e-mails that are really compelling, interesting, proven to work and to close, for your business very quickly and very easily. And, of course, you have the whole course that shows you how to write them from scratch. And if you’re a copywriter or a marketing consultant, you’re just going to be eating that up, you’re going to be learning a ton, and it’s going to help you create these high-converting Email Alchemy campaigns. You’re not allowed to resell those templates, they’re only for the promotion of your own services, regardless of what those services are. And then we have a second track, and this track is specifically for copywriters, marketing consultants, and the second track kind of walks you through the process of getting clients as an e-mail alchemist for hire, selling these types of gigs, these engagements, and getting paid a lot of money to do it, and being able to go to a client with a very seductive proposition that allows you to get paid 10,000, 20,000, 30, 50, 60, even $100,000 for one gig writing Email Alchemy series for them, and I’ll show you exactly how to do that. And by the way, that track also gives you all the marketing that you’ll need. You’ll get lumpy mail campaigns that you can send out in the post to generate leads, you’ll get special reports, case studies, proving that Email Alchemy works. You’ll get Email Alchemy campaigns for following up on those prospects, and getting them to inquire, and how to close them, and get paid this money for writing Email Alchemy. And then the third track, which is brand-new, never been sold before, I’m going to give you everything you need, I’m going to give you all of the training, all of the marketing, all done for you, to go out and get Email Alchemy clients as an E-mail Alchemist for hire, going and showing clients the found money in their list that they didn’t know was there, and that they will pay you, gladly pay you 10, 20, $50,000 per assignment writing e-mails, and I’m going to actually write the e-mails for you. Almost. I’m going to give you royalty-free templates that you can go out and you can resell. So not only the marketing and the training to find the client, but I’m actually going to write the e-mails for you, almost. So you’re going to go, I’m going to show you how to adapt an Email Alchemy campaign to a specific client need so that you don’t have to be a copywriter or you don’t have to be a marketing wizard. All you have to do is, almost like a McDonald’s franchise. All you have to do is pay me some money, I’ll give you everything you need, you can go out and be in business virtually overnight, with everything done for you. You just put the key in the ignition, and you go out and you apply Email Alchemy to the marketplace and make 10, 20, $50,000 per engagement. So that’s really exciting for anybody who is spinning their wheels out there online, don’t know what to do, or having a great deal of difficulty trying to create a product, trying to do this, trying to do that. Here’s a way for you to make money right out of the gate online, selling Email Alchemy campaigns. So that’s brand-new, it’s going to be introduced next month. John McIntyre: Fantastic, okay. So by the time this podcast goes live, it’ll be in about, just over four weeks from when we’re recording this. So that will go live around that time that you should be live as well. So people want to go and learn more about this and get this, they go to Daniel Levis.com. I’ll have the show notes, now, and a link to that at TheMcMethod.com. Daniel, thanks for coming on the show to talk about all this. Daniel Levis: Oh, you’re quite welcome, John, I enjoyed it. The post Episode #80 – Daniel Levis on Crafting Compelling Stories That Make Email Marketing Work (attract eyeballs and convert like a genius) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Are you focused on running your  business, …on doubling down on your main skill to give your clients what they want? What if that main skill that grows your business isn’t marketing? As a business owner, I’m sure you have some marketing chops, But the truth is, You have better stuff to focus on, And like all smart business owners, You see where you could improve… …but instead of being a one man army, You seek out someone with that specialized skill to teach you OR do it for you. That’s where Corissa St. Lawrence comes in. She’s the regional director for Constant Contact in Southern California, And she KNOWS small business email marketing. If there’s ANYONE you want in your business’ email marketing corner, It’s Corissa. You’ll agree with me 100% after listening to this interview. So to ALL business owners, whether you got those email marketing skills or not, I GUARANTEE that you’ll be quite dang impressed. From marketing staples and fundamentals, ..to detailed tips and impressive money-pulling, list-growing ideas, Get ready to come away with TONS of ideas and a renewed energy to increase your business skills, And success. In this episode, you’ll discover: the number one thing small business owners mess up their marketing with (you think this is a good tactic, but it’s not… it’s hurting you) how making it about the audience as a B2B biz owner or expert will build up your cred and get you more clients must-know pro tips to get you a new clients when you must go through a gate keeper (impress the head honchos through communicating with non-decision makers) the vital importance behind knowing who you’re talking to (segment your audience, be empathetic, and then reap the rewards off those new intimate relationships) the power behind reframing within your email marketing to establish yourself as the GO TO (tell them, show them… reframing makes prospects look for you when they need that expert) Mentioned: Constant Contact Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for episode 79 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one really simple thing. It’s pretty simple, right? How to make money every time you send an email to your list. Okay, now, today, we’ll be talking to Corissa St. Lawrence from Constant Contact, that’s one of the big email orderer of Responder Providers. So, it turns out Constant Contact does a lot of coaching with the new customers, so if you sign up, they’re going to teach you about your ***, about how to get people on to your list, about how to really engage them via email and build that audience, so why not get Corissa? She actually signs up to my email list. Wow! Let’s get Corissa since she’s from Constant Contact and find out what they’re doing with their customers because I’m sure she has a bunch of valuable stuff to share at that, so that’s why she’s here. We’re going to talk about ***, how to build that engagement, how do ***. This is somewhat email marketing basics, but even if you’re advance, nothing is still going to be helpful because there’s no time when you just stop learning fundamentals, okay? So, to get this show notes of this episode of the Email Marketing Podcast, go to www.themcmethod.com/79. Now, before we get to the interview, I have one special review today. It’s from Smuthie, five stars, “Listen, learn, act. I love this Podcast. I’ve been listening to it for the last two months and I’m listening to the latest Podcast featuring Jesse Moskel and it’s  so inspiring, hearing how he transforms his life makes me think about all the excuses we make.” Thank you Smuthie for the review. If you want to leave a review too, you will really make my day and these things really give me the juice to keep going, the motivation to keep going. Go to iTunes, search for the Podcast, leave me your review and just in case you’re wondering, this Podcast about Jesse Moskel, Jesse was in Thailand long time ago. I think when he’s 30 years old and he actually got caught. It’s quite an interesting story. He got caught by the police for a certain crime, ended up going to prison, actually got sentenced to a 100 years prison in Thailand, which is not way you want to be and while he’s in prison, he learned how to do Direct Response Marketing. His brother was sending him books. It’s just a really cool story and now, he’s back in the US. He’s out from prison. He didn’t have to stay in that for a 100 years and now, he’s building a great marketing and advertising agency, so if you’d like to listen to that episode, go back, it’s episode 78, that’s just last week, so I would go and listen to that if you want to know his story. It’s very inspiring and it really highlights the fact that our excuses, my excuses, your excuses, all of them then nothing. I’ve never gone in prison, chances that I might do. So, that’s the Podcast, go and listen to that. Other than that, let’s get on into this interview, this audio training with Corissa St. Lawrence from Constant Contact. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Corissa St. Lawrence from Constant Contact. She’s the Director of Regional Development in Southern California. Now, Corissa signed up and then she came through my email list. It’s some point in the last three months or so and I saw that she’s from Constant Contact and I’m always looking for people from some of the email marketing service provider that are out there to get that perspective on email marketing and find that how they’re different and what they’re up to because they all have a unique perspective, a unique angle to add to the, I guess the marketing discussion or the email marketing discussions and today, we were just chatting – is that Constant Constant is a really good for people whose, say non marketers and they’re not amazing copywriters or amazing conversions specialists or anything like that, just small business and they understand they need to be marketing online with email, all that stuff, so that’s Constant Contact specializes in is helping those people, so we going to talk today about some of those stuff that Corissa and the team of Constant Contact, what they do to work with this non marketer in service, some of the stuff that they teach them and what they suggest and the actions that they give them because there’s a lot of coaching involved, which I thought was really cool, so to answer that, in just a minute. Corissa, how are you going today? Corissa: I am going really well, John. So nice to be on the broadcast of this. Thank you so much for having me on. John: It’s good to have you on. I mean, we went back and forth, for I say, a good month and a half trying to sort that time, that’s just what happens sometimes. You know what I heard, you just said you would come out to Thailand in couple of months. Corissa: Yes, I cannot wait. It’s been on our list for a long time to come and visit, so it’s going to be awesome. Can’t wait. John: Sounds a good place. Alright, so before we get into the content that I just mentioned, I’ve given you a little bit of background and maybe you can fill in the gap, so maybe just give yourself a bit more of an intro on who you are ***. Corissa: Sure, I actually came to Constant Contact because I have a passion for helping small businesses and all profits grow, so before joining Constant Contact, I owned a marketing firm where I just did that. I help support the small non profits, as well as small businesses grow through the use of tools that they didn’t know about. I mean, they just didn’t have any access to this knowledge because they were busy cutting hair and changing tires and doing everything that a small business does. They weren’t in the business of marketing and so, for me, it was really.. I saw this need in my community to help these small businesses utilize these tools that I know about, as well as, even back then, utilizing methods that even the large corporations were using that they weren’t using. So, that’s how I came and actually prior to that, I owned an old different small business. It feels like a lifetime ago, but in a whole another industry and learned on the ground how to market myself and how to grow my business and so, for me, it’s just a continuation of that passion to help empower these businesses and helps them work smarter. John: Okay. So, just to summarize that, you’re working with, sounds like the hair dresser or someone, the mechanic down the road, these are people who have no businesses who know customers, but *** about *** marketing or incident marketing and then it help with the, that’s your avatar role at your client, right? Corissa: Yes, absolutely. So, really, it’s that 0-10 employee group. It is those people who are looking to and know that they have to do marketing. Everyone is hitting them over the heads saying, “Hey, you got to send out emails. You got to be on Facebook. You have to do these things and so, we get a lot of this host, so I, myself and my team here that I manage in Southern California, we go out and actually teach live seminars and teach people how to do go about doing online marketing, whether it’s an email or through Social Media. We talked to people about building their brand online and we actually teach people, we get so many folks, have it say, 90% of folks that come to our classes are the small business owner who doesn’t know *** about marketing. John: Okay, interesting. So, tell me about that, like what happens or I guess, you say you bring them on *** sign up to Constant Contact until they come to one of your seminars, how about the start, what are some of the mistakes that you see these people make? Corissa: Oh, gosh. There’s so many. I think, one of the biggest mistakes is not engaging with people through their content. They think that, “Okay, great. Now, I’ve got someone’s email. I just start sending them a bunch of information about my business.” and we say, “That’s a big no no. At the beginning, we really need to build a relationship with these people. They don’t necessarily want to immediately hear about who you are, what you do. Let’s lead them to the top if you will and certainly you know that best as far as leading people to take that call to action.” and so, we’re really more of that. We look at nurturing from the beginning, the relationship through sending great content that the audience wants and then, inserting calls to action that makes sense to the business. I guess the biggest mistake they make is not making a plan around that, not making a plan for what it is they really want out of their emails and even their social post. They just go, “Great. Okay, I’ve got this thing. Now, I’m just going to start writing and sending it out to their emails.” and becoming useless, either useless information that don’t even have calls to action or they’re useless because it’s all about them and all about calls to action, but developing a relationship, so we help them balance that. John: Okay, interesting. So, it sounds like, I mean this is a class that they want people with they’ve never done sales and if they’ve never done marketing before, they think that making a sale or marketing a product, you just go at there and  you talk all about your product, but one of the first things  people have to learn is that before a sale, it’s really all about the prospect and before you can mention your product, you really have to figure out who is this prospect, what are their needs, what are their goals, what are their wants, what are they really trying to do in that business, so that when you introduce your product or service, is the solution, the person goes, “Wow! That’s profit. Where can I sign up?” Corissa: Absolutely and I’ve read it in your emails and your posts that you send out. I’ve said this to my audiences all the time and finding out what the pain is for your prospect. What is it that they really need help with? What is that pains, so that you can become the best solution around that and also among the many mistakes that are made, I think by a novice email marketer, it’s really one not knowing what their end goal is, what is the end result they’re trying to get and to constantly always talking about themselves and not really helping, either solve the problem or describe things in the correct way and then the third thing is just not doing it, it’s not sending, so we have a lot of people who sign up and then they just get, either scared or busy and obviously, if you’re not sending stuff out, you’re not doing anything with the power that you have at your fingertips and so, that ends to becoming a big problem for small businesses who are juggling a lot. John: Okay. So, how do you, I mean, you’ve said you work with these people, coaching them and helping them and telling them what to do, what are the some of the things you get to do to solve these problems or stop making these.. Corissa: Yes. I might see one of these folks or someone on my team has taught a class and they’ve signed up and that person is excited to go. Our coaches from Constant Contact call, these folks, so they actually reach out and I get so many people like come to seminars who are customers as well and they’ll just stand up and go, “I couldn’t believe how I got a call from a real person wanting to have me.” It’s so amazing. I’m from a software company and they just couldn’t believe it. I actually reach out to people right away when they sign up and say, “How can we help you?”, “Have you done this before?”, “What do you know about email marketing?”, “What are you scared of?” and just get to what their biggest pain are, so that we can help them in the best way. So, all that coaching is done either through the phone, through online chat or through email and it’s really not your typical serve text support. It really goes well beyond that into marketing coaching and empowerment coaching and all the things that we do to try to get our customers be successful. John: Okay. So, what would you suggest? You said a lot of *** will come in there and then they think it’s just about mailing and crock pot, at least telling them all about the product, what do you see working with these small businesses in terms of, are we talking surveys or are they doing research or are they keep running orders. What stuff works for them? Corissa: It’s going to depend of course, the business and what they’re trying to do with the beginning of what we meet them and see them or when they buy our product, but for a typical small business is just getting into marketing or starting marketing, we tell them, “Okay. Let’s gather the contacts certainly, load up your contact list, but segment it if we can, so we know that we’re going to be sending.. For example, we have a customer who is a rock climbing gym and they have members for their gym and then they’re people who just signed up for their email list and so, that’s a really simple way of *** segment and send out different content to two different audiences, so we’ll work with them to do some of that simple stuff at the beginning and then teach them about how to gather information that will help them further segment down the road, so it opens up the conversation for trigger segmenting where your clicking on the link and then that link will then be captured and that response will going to be captured so that someone can then put those folks on a specific list for follow up, specific way or specific author expander list and so, we teach them at the beginning very slowly because again, these are folks who – you say the word Autoresponder and they freak out. So, we work with them or wherever they’re at, wherever they’re coming into contact to see what would be best, so setting up certainly making sure their accounts ready to go, we within Constant Contact, there’s a welcome email that’s automatically generated when someone signs up for someone’s Constant Contact emails, so we will coach them around how to create a great welcome email, not just a default message, but a welcoming email that ***.. John: What is that great welcome email look like? Corissa: So, I’ll give you an actual example. There’s a green good story of the Eco friendly products store that’s in ***, Massachussetts and I love what they were doing with their welcome email. They actually send: Hey! Welcome to our email list. We’re going to be sending out this type of information and if you come into the store and say, I forget what their actual phrase was, but they had a basic to their promo code that you could say when you come to the store and you got a breezable shopping ***. So, it was a way that to drive people directly into their store and to thank them for joining their email list. Really simple, it got them right at the beginning when people signed up and were excited and it drove people to their store. So, that’s a simple welcome email, welcome offer that we would recommend our audience to do and then from there, they can set up autoresponders that are based on obviously, different types of results they’re trying to get, different calls to action and certainly, you know better than me about that. John: Yup. That’s interesting. So, if I’m a hairdresser or I’m a mechanic or I’m an organic health food store, that’s a really cool idea. When someone signs up and immediately, you give them something really cool. I mean, this is a local business, so I haven’t really done much of this, I work with a lot of them, *** with digital products or just consulting services. That’s certainly not so much a small business like this, so it’s interesting that you sort of what works and what’s the staff works for, but I like that idea, how making an author like that straight away with something really cool, like I come in for $10 off when you have your first hair cut or something like that, getting them right to the store because chances are they’re 10 minutes down the road. Corissa: Exactly, right. We’re talking about people who are their immediate target audience right there on the corner and *** work with a lot of online businesses, as well as people who surf international markets, but certainly, good core, agroup of our customers are knocking up and they can just offer something great to start to engage right away. It may not be, “Hey, come into the store.” It could be, “Call us and you get this thing.” or it could be that they click on the link and they’re able to download an ebook or a white paper or series of videos that were created for them. John: Okay, and what do you see working best? I just noticed on your website, like *** templates for these small businesses or like a text space email or a plan, what sort of email usually work? Corissa: Before our client, again, depending on the type of business they are because we work with *** non profit, but typically, a nice little mix of, I would say mostly, text space, but with supported images. So, I would never recommend people to include an image that overpowers or overshadows the content, the text because that’s the most important part is getting people to believe what it is I am to say to hopefully to get them to do what you want them to do, so the images are great and nice eye catcher, but they really should just be supportive to the copy. John: Yup. Okay. And you mentioned BTB (Business To Business Emails), I hear a lot of people would come to me and then like, “Why email marketing?” Maybe it works for BTC, but for Business To Business, probably doesn’t work, I think it’s different. It’s too difficult or businesses don’t respond to that stuff. Obviously, it does, I mean you said you got BTB customers, what’s working for them? Corissa: Yes. It’s really being the expert and showing up to prove that extra cheese through great content and then you can move them to whatever next step that they need to take, so BTB similar, I would say, to a doctor in the sense of.. Someone’s not going to just click on a button to *** a doctor or necessarily just see something and then email, “I’m going to hire this company for $10,000 worth of consulting services.”, so this higher and not just higher and a price like, but just longer sales cycle types of businesses and they do really well with email because it’s that, if you’re providing great value as they sent content they’re building their relationship and then also prooving their expertise, so if you’re talking about selling our expertise, you want some of the higher *** from marketing or you want someone to book you as their surgeon, then you really need to prove to them that you’re the expert that they need. So, it’s about sharing expertise, and then also, giving people great calls action every time so that they *** the ones that are ready can take that next step. John: It’s one of the cool things about the content, like I’ve noticed with that podcast of *** and the emails that I send, that really has a powerful effect or a powerful influence on the positioning in the way people see me and my business. It really creates an expert positioning and I didn’t really understand it before I started. When you just send out, it’s got to be valuable, it’s got to be good content and it’s relevant, all that stuff. If you just do that regularly, you start to be seeing this preeminent expert in the eyes of your customers and clients and prospects. Corissa: Absolutely. You’re spending the time sharing that expertise and even if your the biggest expert in your field, the fact that you’re the one with the bull horn, you’re the one that actually making the connections and talking, it will put you in that seat as the preminent expert, so it’s really about making, not just the connection, but then nurturing that connection to all of that great valuable content. John: Right. So, I’m interested, can you give me an example of say like, a Business To Business email or like an example of an email that business might send out to another business to get them to hire them? Corissa: Well, I think it’s certainly not something is going to happen across one email, but in a series of emails, let’s say, it would be about sharing their possibly customer or starting out with talking about their expertise, but not telling people about their expertise, but illustrating their expertise whether case studying, customer store or through a series of tips and advice that they give, which *** they’re going to be giving advice around something that means, they obviously have expertise around it, so if you frame it in the: I’m teaching you something. I’m sharing something to help you because I know this stuff, then it’s all about the audience and I think anytime that an expert or a BTB can make it about the audience, they’re going to start winning over that audience and building up the credibility that they need with that audience, so that a person whose ready to hire whatever you do is going to look to you. So, it’s a reframing then you can easily tell people that, “Hey, we have expertise and excellency.” or you can just show them that you have that expertise by sharing information that helps them around that expertise. John: Right. I like that. And so, I mean, one challenge to BTB is that I found some of the clients that I’ve got *** is you call to actions change a little bit because you’re right, people aren’t going to buy from just one email, often they might not even be the head of the company that might be working in the Marketing Department or any other department. So it’s like you got to, this comes back to the empathy thing or understanding what your ***, in the case, let’s say an employee, they’re going to be motivated to buy on a different, they want different benefits to, say someone at the head, they want to make money and they want to grow at the bottom line and that sort of thing. Someone in the middle, an employee wants to make mostly do a good job, making a good impression, maybe get a bonus, that sort of thing. So and then that changes the call to actions in the sense that this person in that department, maybe they can actually buy the product themselves, but they’re responsible for convincing their boss to buy the product. So when you take that into that *** call to action *** and instead of saying, “Buy now.”, maybe, you got some ideas that I’m assuming is going to be something like, “Reply to this email.” or “Give us a call or something this phone number.” or “Download this white paper.” and then the white paper has a call to action. Corissa: Absolutely. So anything that they can share or ***, that happens a lot with us where it is a marketing person or even an administrator *** that signs up to come to our class and they’re coming to do this information gathering for their boss and so, if you can get them with some next step with you whether, it’s to a class that your teaching or to a webinar that you are holding or to your white paper or ebook. It’s just going to deepen the connection and get them a little bit closer to taking that steps so ultimately, one of the educating that person who can then pass along the education and the information and I think, if you know that you’re talking to a non decision maker who influences a decision maker then if you’ll empower them with information, knock down some objections as you go and if you could provide them, go as far as providing them infographics and reports that they could even print out and share with their boss or decision maker, you’re really empowering them and making them look good, so that’s pretty good strategy. John: I love that idea of giving them what they need to be able to explain to their boss why they should buy the product or why they should buy the service. So, it’s cool to think, you even had an email like look, we know, you know that this is a useful thing, what we wanted to do, we know that it’s not really up to you to make the decision, so if *** special PDF or *** that outlines ten reasons why your boss buys this product or service, so that they can take it or you could say, “Use a PowerPoint Presentation *** to your boss.” You have a lot of fun with it. Corissa: Absolutely right and then they’re going to love you for it because it’s going to make them look good and whether, they make the decision and to come over to you and make some look good the fact that they’re acting professionally and do diligence that they need to do to make the good decision. John: And that really comes into the empathy of understanding that the employee usually, it depends on the company, but usually is more interested in doing a great job and getting respect within the company, maybe increasing his/her positioning for the next promotion or something like that and then you can start to tail the content, *** benefits of doing business with you. I have a conversation with a friend a while back, we talked about what benefits in *** benefits, it’s so important, always *** about the benefits of the product or service and that’s how really you saw it, which is true, but only to a point in the sense that you could still get the wrong benefits like if you’re selling to the employee, but you’re talking about how great it’s going to be on businesses automated or you can just disappear and you can take off and live in Thailand for example ***. It’s just not going to make sense because the benefit doesn’t relate to them. It’s not relevant and that’s not the benefit that isn’t really looking for and that’s not the benefit that’s going to get to enjoy. So, it’s like it’s great to talk about benefits, but you have to tail the benefits to the person you’re talking to. Corissa: That’s so true. I’ve never looked it that way, but it goes back to what we’re talking about. I was *** segmentation and making sure that you know who you’re talking to and that you spend the time, whether it’s up front and certainly, as you go and grow these relationships to segment your audience so that you could have more intimate conversations with each of those audiences and tailer the conversation to them. They can only do that if you know who they are. John: Right. It’s a one way to do this with BTB guys is that, you could say at the start, it depends on the marketing. Maybe, you go both people sign up, employees and business centers, so you’re not really sure how to talk to them, you could have one on your form, you just say, “Are you a business center or are you an employee of the company and then you just have two different Autoresponders, so you can *** those two different groups of people. Corissa: Absolutely. So with Constant Contact, very simply when people are signing up for the email, they can indicate who they are within the contract system. You could send out a survey that has more director, questions that can more get into the *** of who they are and then you can go into each contact detail and tag those details with specific bits of information that will be helpful for you and in segmenting them so it’s all there, you have the capability to do it with our tool and with others that are out there, so it’s just taking the time to do it and when you do, yours going to get way better results so it’s important and smart to do it. John: That’s cool. We were right on time before we go to that, we’ve been talking about Constant Contact a little bit through here, tell me a bit more of what someone gets when they sign up, obviously, they’re going to get a phone call, which I’m always tempted to sign up just to get that phone call. Tell me more about Constant Contact and what they get and where can people learn more about it. Corissa: Yes, absolutely. So, signing up is pretty simple, you just go to www.constantcontact.com and you can sign up for a free trial. We offer 6 day free trail with no obligation within that 6 day period, just so everyone knows, you can import 10 contacts or up to 10 contacts, so really, the trial is more of a test drive, a test run of the products, rather than to really test out sending campaigns really look at reporting, much of that, out of 10 contacts. So when you’re ready and you feel like, “Okay, I get the product. I understand how it works and I just want to go.”, you can convert to buying. We charge a monthly subscription fee for that and based on the tools that you want to have access to the sides of your list, the pricing will vary. John: Cool. And that’s all in www.constantcontact.com? Corissa: It is. Yes. John: I’ll have the links to that in the show notes in the www.mcmethod.com. So thank you for coming on the show, Corissa. Corissa: You’re so welcome, John. Thank you so much for inviting me. The post Episode #79 – Corissa St. Lawrence on Empowering Business Owners With The Power of Email Marketing (insanely actionable tips to level up your game) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Ready to be fascinated? Jesse Moskel is on the email marketing podcast today to blow your mind. Really. 99.9% of direct response copywriters or marketing agency owners have NOT been through some of the depths Jesse has… …and that’s what he spills the beans over on today’s show. The fact that he had to go through what he did, And how he handled it every step of the way… ..is inspiring, impressive, and a worthy story to be told over and over again. Imagine living out a real-life intense movie… That’s Jesse. The depravity involved in his crazy real-life adventure changed him for the rest of his life – For the better. This interview is more personal development than email marketing, But it shows the damn interesting story of someone whose been there, ..at the bottom of the pile. No hope, no future, living a total nightmare, Yet MADE IT OUT. If you’re a budding entrepreneur, a new copywriter, or maybe you’ve had your skin in the game a while, but still trudging the trenches, ..this show’s for you. Listen to what Jesse went through (only a screen writer for a cool as hell movie could top it), and the habits he forced himself to develop in order to develop a mindset that would eventually change his life, Molding him into who he is today. In this episode, you’ll discover: the grittiest learning technique you’ll ever learn to honing your copywriting chops (NOT the most fun way to learn copywriting… but I hear it works) how a man (not Jesse) stuck in a horrible situation made tens of thousands of dollars simply through a compelling sales letter how to dump the head-trash causing you life destruction so you can progress to your next step in life (if you find yourself back where you started over and over again, you might have some head-trash) the happiest person technique that magnetizes the RIGHT people around you to you (it’s all about attitude. Live life like one big fun party and the cards will fall in place) a simple mindset tweak that helps get you past the mental block from bad things that happened in life that still affect you Mentioned: Moskel Marketing Agency David Ogilvy Malcolm Gladwell Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. Hey, it’s John Mcintyre the order responding guy and it’s time to episode 78 of the mcmethod email marketing podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing: How to make money every time you send an email to your list. Now today, I’ll be doing it through Jessie Noskel. Jessie is a fascinating guy he emailed me one day with an epic story. I just sent an email to my list, what was it called “Do you like your green smoothies?” and then I told a story about how I was drinking my green smoothie, I’m actually drinking it right now it’s got eggs and spinach and some green powder and blueberries, its great! Anyway the email was about that and he replied “That was a cool story Rob, I think I’ve got a better one.” And then he proceeded to tell me how he’d been on sort of an interesting journey ended up in Korea, and then ended up in Thailand and went through some incredible stuff. I don’t know what to say, how much I can say without giving away the story so you’re gonna have to listen to the episode anyway it’s an amazing story and sorta sounds like the sort of thing you would hear in movie. Crazy adventure in a way and he was also learning. It led him to direct response marketing. And now he’s a copywriter. He’s having a blast building an advertising agency ok. So the story blew me away and you’re gonna hear it in just a minute.  To get shown at this episode of the email marketing podcast go to themcmethod.com/78. This week’s mcmasters inside of the week is something that I’m very fond of this idea; and that is Cajun, which from what I understand the idea of a Kaizen comes from Japanese companies: its constant never ending improvement. That means every day, you just show up and you improve something and you do it the next day, next day and the next day. And so what happens is, you know , that’s really how small changes, small changes, small changes add up to add up into incredible changes over time. But if you’re set out to make a massive change you’re really going to fully fall flat on your face and become demotivated and frustrated because no one makes a big change just like that. You have to do it incrementally, well, you don’t necessarily have to do it incrementally but that’s typically how it works. Okay, so that’s the idea, Kaizen When you show up to your business in the morning, when you show up to write an email, just get a little bit better… just get a little bit better. Doesn’t matter where you are today, only that you improve just a little bit every single day. That’s what we’ve been talking about at McMasters and this is sort of something that I’ve been suggesting to people who are trying to get better on email and marketing, traffic or whatever the case may be and yeah, anyway, so that’s Mcmasters. To learn more about McMasters go to themcmethod.com/mcmasters. It’s a VIP training that I have. There’s a form in there, there’s training material, there’s also a fill in the blank templates so that means you can sign up and you can have an order respondent up and running within an hour. You just fill in the blanks with some templates and upload then and while that’s working for you, you can go and learn how to write emails and do this stuff yourself. That’s really where the big money is, okay? So that’s McMasters, www.themcmethod.com/mcmasters. Now, anyway that’s enough of that. Let’s get into this interview so you can hear about this crazy, crazy story from Jessie from law school  INTERVIEW: JOHN MCINTYRE:   It’s John Mcintyre here, the order respondent guy and I’m with Jessie Moskel, the direct response copywriter and I think that was a week ago he replied to my emails. I was talking about green smoothies or something like that. Actually I’ve got a green smoothie right next to me right now because it’s actually 9am here in Thailand and you know I told everyone I’ve got my green smoothie and Jessie replies and said, look, that was kind of a cool story and I don’t know if you said you can top that or you’re like, Tell me if I can top that. This tops mine, tops yours. And he goes on to tell me a crazy, crazy story about how he was in Thailand once and it uh, all different stuff, it was very interesting. And then he sort of ended up being a copywriter now so he’s got an agency with his brother. They’re doing copywriting and adwords and all sort of stuff there and I thought I wanted to get in mine because number one, this is going to be a huge deal of inspiration to anyone who’s just getting started or even has just gotten started just finding things slow. I think it’s going to be a hell of an entertaining is a hell of a story. I haven’t heard the whole thing. I just know what you can fit into an email of 300 words so it’s gonna be an interesting little episode. Jessie, how are you going? JESSIE MOSKEL: Great John, good to be here. JOHN MCINTYRE: Good to have you on the show man, so, before we go into this story give the listdown sort of a background, who you are and what you’re doing right now and then we’ll kinda go back in time and to this story you told me in the email. JESSIE MOSKEL: Sure. Okay, I’m Jessie Moskel and I’m a copywriter with my brother. We do advertising and marketing for small, medium-sized businesses. I’m based in South Carolina in the US and just enjoying life out here. JOHN MCINTYRE: Cool man, let’s see, let’s get dive in the story then. You were in Thailand once. This was 20…how many years ago does this story start? JESSIE MOSKEL: This was actually starts back in 2006, I was 30 years old. I was a salesman working for a big telecom company here in the US and I was just bored. And I looked at my passport I didn’t have any stamps and that really frustrated me. I thought that by the time I hit 30 I should have been around the world at least a couple of times so I looked online and ended up going to a place in Korea to teach English in 2006, 2007. JOHN MCINTYRE: Okay. JESSIE MOSKEL: So, when out there, taught English and let me tell you John, life will take you on some funny spins. It’s not really relevant to our story here my co-teachers and I but I ended up getting into some drugs. I like to smoke marijuana back in the days and that whole party thing kinda…you know JOHN MCINTYRE: This was in Korea? So the English- teaching scene? JESSIE MOSKEL: Yup, weren’t selling drugs to the kids but my fellow teachers and I would get marijuana for the weekends and smoke and have some beers and go in the city, that sort of thing. JOHN MCINTYRE: Yeah, pretty standard, I mean, all things said, that’s what a lot of young people do anyway. So it’s not, I mean, I think that’s pretty typical behavior. I heard a lot of people who have been there at certain stages in their life so…Yeah, you were in Korea, you were doing this teaching thing and you were having a bit of fun with the marijuana with some of the English teachers, so what happens next? JESSIE MOSKEL: So what happens next, I guess the, the drug scene just kind of got a little heavier. We started getting ecstasy on the weekends and this friend of mine needed me to, you know, share it around for my fee. Share it around firm. So what I did was I was selling ecstasy on the side while I was teaching English and I don’t know if you know but over there, as in the States, any sort of drug like that is considered pretty hardcore. What ultimately happened was I was bouncing around Southeast Asia as you made me familiar with doing and I got arrested in Thailand with a quantity of these ecstasy pills. JOHN MCINTYRE: So you have bees out of your bag. You were in Korea teaching English and you’ve decided to carry these pills for that buddy of yours. Now you end up travelling around Thailand with a bag of ecstasy pills in your back. I mean, that sounds pretty, as mean as bad as my beat looking back on it sounds like it’s going to pretty, pretty thrilling…doing something like that feels like you’re in a movie or something. JESSIE MOSKEL: Yeah, I guess you could say that. I would say this John, I didn’t do any carrying of the drugs around and I don’t want to get into all that stuff but basically what you’re saying is right. A long story short, the Thai police caught windows from drugs being moved around and they got me and another guy, another American in Thailand. We got arrested in a patia actually so, the next thing I know I was in a small cell with about 40 or 45 other Thai people. No Americans, no English-speaking people and it’s a very hard situation. I’ve never been in Thailand without air-conditioning before. And you know, most people don’t get to Thailand for the men but that’s what I was with. There was a lot of men, it was crowded and they were stinky. There was one toilet and after about two days there was another Thai guy that came in that spoke a little English so he took this document and you know John, Thai language is like cake frosting, alright. JOHN MCINTYRE: You know when I first saw it, I thought it looked like the Indian script but whoever made it wanted to make it twirly, spotty things on every letter but cake frosting work too. JESSIE MOSKEL: Yeah, well, I can’t remember where I read that anyways, I couldn’t decipher it. I didn’t know what it was but this guy looked at it, read it and it was two or three pages, then he looked up at me real slow and sadly shook his head and said, “You, my friend, will never go home from this prison.” So what started out as kind of what I would label as slightly innocent drug- dealing turned into a nightmare. A year later I went into court staying in prison this whole time and ended up getting charged with two life sentences plus four years which is a total of 104 years. JOHN MCINTYRE: Damn. JESSIE MOSKEL: So, it’s one of these things where I kind of thought… JOHN MCINTYRE: So does that mean you’re 130 years old right now? JESSIE MOSKEL: No, that’s the good part. I’ll get to that but basically what happened was I ended up spending all my money paying lawyers and I was sentenced to 27 years when I was 31. So, and let me process this because this is an email marketing podcast right? So while I was in prison for the next 5 years I wrote a lot of letters and it’s kinda interesting when you think about it because if you’re behind this wall you’re kind of separated from the whole world and so the only way that I was able to communicate by large was through letters that I would send out from the prison. On these few occasions I have family members travel around the world to visit me. Again, they would come through a window and I would have to yell through the window and through the bars and the chicken wire for 20 or 30 minutes and that was it, and they were gone again. So, you learn this economy of words and you learn that you need to say exactly what you wanted to happen in order for you to reap the desired effect. So unbeknown to me I guess I was getting a bit of a copywriting education at this time. JOHN MCINTYRE: That’s one way to develop your copywriting skills, go to prison.  JESSIE MOSKEL: Yeah! I highly don’t recommend it. So I met this guy while I was there and he had several millions of Baht in his bank account and I think I mentioned this story to you before but it sounds better when I say several millions of Baht in reality its worth about £15000 or $30000 US but he was a multi-millionaire in prison and the way he did this was with a sales letter. JOHN MCINTYRE: He was a Thai guy… or? JESSIE MOSKEL: No he was an Iranian. JOHN MCINTYRE: Oh, that’s right, yeah you mentioned this guy. Coz you mentioned Baht I was thinking a Thai guy but I think a million baht would be about $30000 so a hundred grand would be three million. JESSIE MOSKEL: So he had this sales letter and he would send it out to various concerned groups such as churches and charities and they would donate to his cause and het got rich behind bars! With this simple sales letter that you know, really pulled on heartstrings. So the elements of my copywriting experience back there. JOHN MCINTYRE: SO, did you talk to him and was he like well, you wanted to find out how he was making his money and then you sort of.. JESSIE MOSKEL: Well, I didn’t really have to do that same thing too… Indirectly, I mean he wouldn’t share the letter with anybody but he told us how he was doing it. Anyway, it was a sign that a lot of money could be made with copywriting. Anyway, the story that I have is, once I got here and I thought I was gonna stay in this prison for 27 years, I decided that no more could I live the kind of life that brought me there. I changed in the letters that I was sending out. I changed my FROM address from Bumba prison I changed it to Bumba maha witthayalai which you may know is, you know that word? ‘ JOHN MCINTYRE: University. JESSIE MOSKEL: There you go. So the prison I was in was Bumba prison it became Bumba University and every day I got out of bed I started studying the Thai language and I started applying, you know,  every minute I could to educate myself and changing who I was. Basically what got me to prison was kinda having this head trash and going in a circle instead of a path, you know. Being involved, being mixed up with drugs, some people say its fine, it’s okay, when you’re doing it while you’re young but some people, and unfortunately I was one of those, it just became that circular path and, you know, ultimately it once destroyed my life. JOHN MCINTYRE: I think there’s lot of people like that…This is one of those things where it’s all fun and games until someone gets hell. And most people won’t have trouble with it but the people who do, like; it has a huge, huge downside. It’s one of those things where the upside is not that big and 99% of the time, the downside is not that big EITHER, YOU’LL BE FINE. But that 1% of the time when something goes wrong, there’s an overdose, or you get arrested, or you get to prison, it gets real, real bad. JESSIE MOSKELL:Yeah, indeed. And this was, you know obviously this was the worst case scenario situation. I hope that it doesn’t happen to anybody that’s listening to the show but basically, the message that I started living was these horrible things happened to me but one of the small ways that can turn it to my advantage and one of the small ways that I can improve even though I’ve already very screwed up and gone down to this horrible path, how can I make it better?  JOHN MCINTYRE: That’s a cool little lesson there for anyone right now whose listening right now who’s trying to get somewhere. I think before you can move past a bad situation or a situation you don’t like in life you really got to get to a point where you appreciate it, as bad as it might be for the lessons that it can give you and that applies to getting into learning copywriting because you might not be a writer. Some people can be like; I’m not a writer but pony up, figure out how is that a good thing. But this philosophy is also, this is kinda, this is a very inspirational podcast, man. This isn’t just about me and marketing. This is about life! JESSIE MOSKEL: So, the great part of the story is after I spent five and a half years here I got accepted to transfer back to the US. Fortunately, the US doesn’t look upon the drug situation quite as dramatically and as drastically as Thailand does so they brought me back to theoretically serve the rest of my 20 year sentence in America. And two months after I got back they came and knocked at my cell door and said “Hey, we’ve got great news, we’ve recalculated your sentence and we’re gonna give you time served.” JOHN MCINTYRE: Nice, so what does that mean? JESSIE MOSKEL: Well, basically it means, the time, you know the sentence was 27 years. I’ve been in there that time, that point for 5 and a half years but the American court was saying basically, you’ve done enough time and we’re gonna let you go home. JOHN MCINTYRE: Well, how did that feel when that happened? JESSIE MOSKEL(Whistled) Well, I just told you I’m a copywriter but I’m probably lost for words on that one. JOHN MCINTYRE: So you went out, you got back, did you spend any time in prison in America or did you just get back and like, alright, we think you’re done? JESSIE MOSKEL: Yeah, no. I had to stay for two months. JOHN MCINTYRE: That was it. Two months, then you were out? JESSIE MOSKEL: Yup, so I got back to America, stayed in prison for two months and walked up the front door in LA and went down and got on a Greyhound bus. I don’t know if you know this John, this is the big brand. Greyhound in America so I had to make a bus trip from the West Coast of America all the way to the East coast and it took four days! And after the first day, I wanted to go back to prison really, really bad. JOHN MCINTYRE: Really, why? So, what after how many days? Four days? JESSIE MOSKEL: Well, you can imagine sitting on a bus for four days with no shower and with people that are, like, can’t afford to fly on planes. It’s not a pleasant ride.  JOHN MCINTYRE: Okay, yeah. I can imagine but you’ve been in, so was it like an overwhelming sense of freedom or just felt like you’d be more comfortable to be back… JESSIE MOSKEL: Oh no, it was wonderful. But the funny thing is John, anybody who has been in that position where your movement is restricted, all you want is freedom from that thing. And once you get it, I wasn’t ready for the surprise. I thought that all my problems would go away and everything would be magically healed but that was actually the beginning of another journey that was, in a lot of ways, is more difficult. In prison, everything’s sure. You’re gonna go down stairs, you’re gonna go back upstairs into the cell and you do the same thing the next morning. Nothing changes. But in life, you gotta go out and make a living; you gotta worry about certain things. And you know it was a challenge re-adapting to life outside. JOHN MCINTYRE: I can imagine. Yeah, but how is it now? I mean, how long ago has this been? You’ve been out for 5 years?  JESSIE MOSKEL: I’ve been out for thirteen months and I gotta tell you, it’s uh, if anybody can take anything from this, I want to say this because when I came out I know that I wanted to share this story and I know that it would be inspiring to some people because first of all, drugs are kind of a big deal and we in America, we want to fight the war on drugs but the truth is we don’t put drugs in prison. We put people in prison and these people are often your little brother, your mother, your father, your cousin or your friend down the street. Everybody knows somebody that’s affected by this problem and I think what happens whether it’s drugs or any other thing that sets you back that you feel ashamed for it and the problem is, when I came home I wanted to share this story but I felt ashamed and embarrassed about having been to prison. And I was worried, you know, maybe if some of my clients hear this, you know, coming out, maybe they’ll say “ Hey, we don’t want a former drug addict or drug dealer writing our copy.” It’s all about realizing that things happen to us in life and those things aren’t us but they do, you know, they are just things that happens to us and that’s all they are. So when you can see it that way, you can really overcome them and make these things a positive in your life. JOHN MCINTYRE: I guess the tough thing with that is that you can get to that realization but it doesn’t mean that clients are going to hear it and not be resistant to the idea of hiring you. Like some clients are just gonna wanna lack it. Religion is one of things and I don’t even want to talk about religion at least in my scene anyway, but what they believe, because if you go one way, or the other, you know, it’s like politics, as well, it’s touchy issues. I guess prison is sort of like that as well. I mean, once you say it ,it doesn’t really matter in the ground especilly as far as copy goes but it’s one of those things that triggers resistance in people. But I like that. I think that’s a really cool lesson to know you gotta get to that point so you can really move forward in life with anything because, well, this isn’t so much about email marketing now but you have to get to that point. And you’re not beating yourself up for it. You know, it’s in the past. It’s done and it’s not really you, it’s like life happens and stuff happens and you gotta deal with what you can to solve the problems.  JESSIE MOSKEL: That’s right, John. I mean, life is so short, you know. Nobody knows how long we’re going to be here and I think it’s just important for me to go embrace who I am and you’re right, maybe I’ll lose a business with this admission but the truth of the matter is I should be in that prison for another twenty years, so number one, I shouldn’t even be here. And number two, it’s something I do on the side and I don’t really talk about it much but I speak for free. And I do this for kids, I work for kids and schools and sometimes at risk kids as well so it’s kinda a gift to be able to give back and do something and say “Hey, I’m really lucky.” And a lot of people don’t make it through what I did so if I can tune anybody away from a negative lifestyle or I can inspire people who are going through a tough time to pull through and keep up the fight. That makes it all worthwhile for me. JOHN MCINTYRE: That’s cool. I hope if someone is listening to this, this is helping them. Or if they know someone who might be going through something like this or even something tough in life after sharing this, this is bad ass man. So just to recap on this, you’re in Korea, started taking marijuana with the English teachers, and started getting involved in ecstasy and get caught up in drug trafficking somewhere in Thailand so you get to prison and then you started calling it your university instead of prison and you mentioned in your email that you sent me that your brother used to send you direct response books so you can sit there and it sounds like you really studied hard when you were in prison and now you’ve come out you’ve got some marketing jobs which you’ve turned into a marketing legacy. JESSIE MOSKEL: Yeah, I’m having a blast with that. You know John, two more things I wanna touch on. Number 1 is when I went so summer cam when I was 14 or 15 years old there was a couple of chances where I kind of fell in love with a young girl that I went to summer camp with and when you get home, you kinda write letters together. You know maybe she lived across the country and I remember a couple of times we wrote letters back and forth frantically every week. This was before email really. And as time goes on, the letters become less and less frequent and you have to move on with your life but I just feel like that copywriting and marketing is kinda like in my DNA because all this letter writing I’m talking about, how different is it really that what we do, you know what you and I both do on marketing every day. We’re trying to romance companies either for ourselves or on behalf of our clients, and if you think about it, when you write a letter to a woman that you’re in love with, at the end, you’re going to put you most powerful language into persuading that person to be with you. And at the end maybe a special PS that summarizes everything you want. You know, you’re gonna draw a little heart, color them maybe. If you like me, you know the D doubles and the etc. JOHN MCINTYRE: Oh, you’re a romantic huh? JESSIE MOSKEL: Yes, sir but you know, it’s how far we move this from what we do, writing copy? JOHN MCINTYRE: I’d say from doing marketing and copying sales files, it’s just like dating, just like seduction. And it’s so many parallels and I’ve notice that too. Like when you start understanding body language and social dynamics and sort of that side of the human sphere, a lot of that carries over very easily into podcasting like this, or it could be writing an email to the list. There are so many parallels. It’s not even a parallel. It’s just the same thing really. It just depends on who you’re trying to romance, is it a girl, or is it a company, or a customer. So what’s the plan, what’s the the future plan for Jessie Moskel, are you coming back to Thailand to do the…like this, you know, they call us the “digital nomads” over here. Laptop warrior, I think sounds cooler but a bit cheesy as well but anyway. You go into coffee shops and you travel and you work and you do all that. That seems to be one direction that people want to go in with their internet business but what’s your plan? Are you gonna stay in the US and put up the agency or are you going to travel, or get married, or romance or what? JESSIE MOSKEL: All of the above. Yeah man, after sitting still and doing nothing, I really want to do everything. I want to just , I’m so excited to be alive right now. There’s a second story I want to tell you quickly John. One day, when I was really depressed I was waiting to see if I got a hundred year sentence or if I was gonna go home or any other of not very appealing options came through court, I’ve decided one day and you’re surrounded in prison by a lot of negative people. People that are upset with themselves for making the decision that they did to get there… I decided one day after all this complaining going on around me, I said “You know what, I’m gonna be the happiest person in here today.” I know it sounds silly but it was clear who was the saddest person there and I thought, you know, there’s really no competition for being really happy in here but let me try this out one day and if it sucks I’ll go back to being miserable tomorrow. So I carried that position through me because obviously it worked the first day, and the second day it worked, and the smiles came easier and the right people sort of get magnetized to me and I really started having a lot of fun while I was there. I’m not supposed to admit that but it was not as bad as everybody thinks it is by watching tv and movies and and so forth but it’s all about attitude, and that position I kind of molded to myself and now that I’m out here, I’m still the happiest person. You know, I really embrace life. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’d love to get married, I’d love to build an advertising business, I’d like to consider myself a junior Ogilvie. Who knows? Life is just one big party and I’m glad to be here. JOHN MCINTYRE: I’ve been through that before, Well, not the prison thing but that whole, trying to be real happy is everyone is back in the office and I had a job and I used to make a similar challenge like trying to be the happiest dude in the place and I always wanted to be the guy who would go out and party with people and I don’t know what it is to this but say, suppose I don’t want to drink alcohol that night and to go out and have people and basically party harder and laugh more and dance more and be happier crazier and wilder even without drinking. Like sometimes, if people ask you how you’re going and you say “Fantastic!” I don’t know if people are serious enough but if you’re a really happy guy and you cultivate that kinf attitude people start to wonder, they make jokes like “Are you on drugs?” And I was like, “What was wrong with you? Just calm down, and it was funny because why would you want me to calm down when I’m the happiest guy around? JESSIE MOSKEL: Absolutely. It’s really people’s default position that they are moaning and complaining about everything that’s wrong in their life when really, there’s just so much to be grateful for. JOHN MCINTYRE: Hm. Cool man, and you mentioned a podcast, in your email that it was helpful. Obviously I wasn’t around when you were in prison but it has been helpful in the last year when you have been building your business?  JESSIE MOSKEL: Well you know, I’m a really big fan of Knock and Gladwell. I’ve read all of his books and when I was in Thailand, one of them talks at length about the 10,000 hours hypothesis where, you know if you spend 10,000 hours on one discipline then you can consider yourself, if not an expert then at least of professional capacity. For me, getting home was the beginning of that 10,000 hours so you know when I discovered that I can listen to email marketing podcasts while I was driving to the gym and keep it going through my workout then my hours went up considerably within the day so you know, I’m just a student of the game ,I’m learning and I spend a lot of money on Amazon these days, every time I get a payment from a client I dump a bunch into new books and research and everything I can to learn more. JOHN MCINTYRE: Nice, nice. Cool man. Thanks for coming and sharing your story and I really hope that I think it’s going to be someone who’s listening to this, or at least a few people who would get a lot of value from this so thank you. Before we go, if people want to, say someone wants to email you, you said you do speaking, or if they want to ask you about the agency or they want you to do some work for them or maybe just want to chat and hear some more of your story, where should they go? Where do you want to point people to? JESSIE MOSKEL: Thanks John, The easiest place to find me is at moskel.com JOHN MCINTYRE: Cool, great. Well we’ll all have the link to moskel.com at the show. It’s at the Mcmethod.com so you can go there and get the link. Thanks again, man.  JESSIE MOSKEL: John, it’s been a pleasure. The post Episode #78 – Jesse Moskel on Living A Total Nightmare To Living The Dream (a copywriter’s zero to hero real life tale) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Jason Stapleton is a bona fide email marketer. And he can back that up with the fact that he made 3/4 of a million dollars in just 3 days… …with a list of only 14k. That’s a lot of money for a list under 15 thousand. He didn’t do it by using a bunch of tricks out of the profit-pulling email marketing bag either. Nope. Jason made it much easier on himself. He took the natural approach. The friendly approach. Some call it non-pushy… Or the consultative approach, But Jason just thinks of it as providing value – EVERY TIME HE SENDS SOMETHING. It creates TRUST. He doesn’t see emails as dollar signs, He sees them for what they are, People. People with names, with trades, and with aspirations. Jason takes his list down a journey of pure value, Waiting 90 days until that first pitch. But man is it worth it (he’s also added new strategies since, to not have to wait 3 months for the revenue to roll in). Jason reveals today on The Email Marketing Podcast his most profitable methods behind HOW he creates sales minus the gimmicks. He’s got a lot of tricks up his sleeve too, but they’re not really tricks… …it’s just good old fashioned personal and business values.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how to lead your readers from hooked-on-you fans to paying customers why you shouldn’t think of your list as a list… but as a collection of real human beings (this mindset will force you to provide better value) the reason why giving away your best stuff for free every time is a smart idea the 3-video campaign method that made Jason 3/4 of a million dollars in just three days (develop this type of relationship with your followers for infinite monetization possibilities) how to push the envelope using video in order to create strong long-lasting relationships (video creates a celebrity effect and much, much more..) consistency is key… and king in the profitable email list-building world (Jason’s kept up with his insightful weekly videos since 2008. Every single week) how to use the commitment barrier to turn your followers into ultra-committed customers (a strategy he actually picked up from Glenn Beck… who you can’t deny is an awesome marketer) the segmenting strategy to pitch your list super targeted offers instead of burning them (whether through marketing automation or manual list building, segmenting is an essential ingredient to cust. lifetime value) Mentioned: Trade Empowered Kurt Vonnegut Jeff Walker Brian Kurtz John Carlton Ryan Deiss Frank Kern Titans of Direct Response Glenn Beck Agora Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:  Hey, it’s John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for episode 77 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing- how to make more money (or how to make money actually, every time you send an email to your list). Now, today I’ll be talking to Jason Stapleton, and Jason is not big in the marketing world, he’s big in stock, that’s online trading, forex trading, stock trading world. Now I met Jason on a private Facebook group for people who are going to ‘Titans of Direct Response’,and by the time this interview goes live I will have come back from Titans of Direct Response, which is going to be a fantastic seminar just over in Connecticut, and will be my first time in the US and it’s this week, but this podcast won’t go live for about a month.  So anyway, so I met him in this group and we started chatting and he mentioned that he’d been listening to the podcast, and so we caught up one day on Skype and I found out that he’d been doing a tonne of email marketing and he had some very interesting stuff to say about how he’d built an amazing relationship with this list and he’d done an incredible launch which we’ll hear about in a minute from himself, and so I wanted to talk to him, I was like “Man, we gotta do a podcast on this. We gotta talk about this stuff because, you know I’m new to this, I’m a very aggressive guy when it comes to emailing, daily emailing,sometimes two or three emails in a day, and pitching everyday and offering. And that works, in its own way, but there’s other ways of going about it, and maybe they’re more effective. Or maybe they’re just different.  So what I found fascinating about talking to Jason is that he had some great information to share about this, how to build that relationship with the list, and stuff that I’m honestly, I’m familiar with it, but I wasn’t familiar with how well it worked. So like I mentioned withBond Halbertlast week, this has challenged me in some of the ways that I think about marketing, especially email marketing, and I think it’s going to be part of the reason that I update my email strategy and marketing strategy in the next few months, so get ready for that! To get the show notes for this episode of the podcast go to themcmethod.com/77 and this week’s McMaster’s Insight of the week comes from, (sorry ‘Insight’ not ‘Inside’, I’m slurring those words a bit there), comes from Kurt Vonnegut, he’s an old author. I think it was, posted something quite fascinating into the McMaster’s forum, which was an info graphic, I’m just looking it up right now (I had the tab open, but you know how tabs disappear sometimes),so he posted this info graphic and it’s called ‘The Shape of Stories’, and it’s a fascinating sort of info graphic because it’s all about how to use the different story arcs that author’s use to bring you in and make it so that you can’t shut the book, ok, so the basic idea of Kurt Vonnegut’s thesis is that the story’s main character has ups and downs that can be graphed to reveal a story shape. And when you learn to use the benefit of these stories is that when you go ad write emails, write sales letters, go and talk to people, when you want to persuade people and you use a story, and stories are the most persuasive thing on the freaking planet ok, and when you get this persuasion just becomes so much easier- for better or for worse (and you do have to use this ethically ok). So I’ll give you a couple of examples, so if you go to google and look up ‘Kurt Vonnegut stories’ in google images you’ll find the info graphic, it’s called ‘The Shapes of Stories’. So for example one of them is ‘Man in Hole’, so the image is basically the man is sitting in his lounge room reading a book, he’s relaxing, then something bad happens and he fall down into a hole, so he gets into trouble, then he has an idea at the bottom of the valley, he has an idea, gets out of trouble and at the end he’s better for having had that experience. That one’s called ‘The Man in Hole’.        Another one is ‘From Bad to Worse’, let’s see, the main character starts off poorly then gets continually worse with no hope for improvement. That might be more of a tragedy, more like Shakespeare. How about this one, ‘Cinderella’. It doesn’t really explain it here but there’s an image that shows her going up the steps than almost sort of dies, gets thrown in a dungeon, then ends up becoming the princess or something like that in the end.     Anyway, the point this is that when you start to understand that stories, there is a blueprint to persuasive stories you can then start to create these stories, weave them into your marketing, and use the stories to persuade people to help themselves by buying your products and by buying your services, and this is so wonderful for email marketing because email is a great medium for you to tell stories in and build an incredible relationship with your list and its also just persuasive, just gets people acting and feeling and doing what you want them to do.       Ok, so that’s that. Now that was shared Inside the McMasters, like I said by I think it was Rob Hanly who you’ve heard before on this podcast, and it was just one of the things going on on the forum, so part of the McMasters private membership is a private forum where we get in there and talk about a bunch of different stuff with marketing and email, but really just marketing in general. The other thing I’ve been mentioning over the last few weeks is the new templates which I’ve just put inside McMasters which ‘are fill in the blank’, which means you just pop one open and fill in the blanks with your email- simple as that. If you want to learn more about McMasters go to themcmethod.com/mcmastersand all the information is there. Anyway, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Jason Stapleton.      It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, I’m here with Jason Stapleton. Now I met Jason through Titans of Direct Response, actually, or will have happened by the time this podcast goes live, but right now as of this recording Titans hasn’t happened but there’s a Facebook group that we’ve been talking in and Jason posted in there and said he’d been listening to the podcast, that he got some great results with email marketing, so we got to talking, jumped on Skype, had a bit of a chat, and I thought he’d be a great guest for the podcast because he’s got some really cool stuff he’s doing with the list and today we’re going to talk about some of that which is really about the relational aspect of what to do with your list, how everybody says to build a really solid relationship if you want an engaged list, and they’re willing to through out a couple of tips here and there, but Jason really has sort of a wealth of knowledge on how to actually do it. Which is why I got him on, so we could talk about that today.  Now, Jason’s from tradeempowered.com, that’s his main business, where they help build consistently profitable traders, to help people learn to trade the market and do it consistently and profitably, so that’s that.  Jason, how are you going mate? Jason Stapleton:Hey I’m doing great John, thanks for having me.  John McIntyre: Good to have you on the show, hey are you in the studio that last week when we spoke -was it last week of two weeks ago?- you were in this great looking studio, it looked like you were on t.v. or something.   Jason Stapleton:Yeah, we’re attempting to take things to the next level in the way that we deliver content to our listeners, and so we have the studio, the studio you saw me in was a smaller studio I have in my home, but we actually have a very large studio that can live-stream over the internet and we can deliver realtime commentary and information to our listeners in a way that isn’t being done by anybody else and it’s really cool, I’ve learned a lot about it over the last year or so, and it’s been a lot of work and a lot of money but I think it’s going to pay off.   John McIntyre:That’s really cool man. So before we get into, I mentioned the relationship stuff and we just chatted about it but before we get into that, can you give the listener a bit more of a background on what you’re up to in the online world?   Jason Stapleton:Well I started Trade andPower with my business partner Todd Brown about five years ago, and I was an active currency trader and I decided that I wanted to start a company and I sent Todd a note who was a friend of mine and had been doing something on a smaller scale for a while, and asked him if he wanted to partner up and so we made the decision to kind of partner up together and he had the background and the knowledge in how you actually start an online company because his company, while small (kind of a one-man-operation) was very successful and I thought “man, if I can build something half as nice as he had already built then I’d feel pretty good about myself.”                                     And so I started researching and doing a while bunch of training and I bought courses, one of the very first courses I bought was from Ryan Deisswho’s just a phenomenal person, I was in one of his mastermind groups for a while and he’s very personable, just an extremely good person. So I learned about building funnels and, just a great deal of information about how to generate and cultivate a relationship with your list. And on of the things that Ryan said, and I’ll never forget it because it’s something that I employ and continue to employ in my businesses, is “give them your best stuff for free.” He said “if you give them your best stuff for free then they’ll keep coming back for more and they’ll give you money to get the rest of it.” I took that kind of to a different degree in the sense that I started my company and I actually was on a 90-day cycle where all I would do was deliver content to them via email and video a solid 3-months before I ever asked them for any money. So it was a chance for me to, you know to put my best foot forward and try and validate what I was doing and what I was trying to teach, before I ever turned around and tried to monetize that email or that individual, and so we’ve been doing it now for several years and, like I said, we’re constantly trying to push the envelope in creating that personal relationship and one of the best things that we’ve found is through video. I think that when you’re talking to the camera and it’s like you’re talking to someone on the other side of that camera, not only does it create celebrity authority (which everyone wants to have in their business) but there’s also a relationship that develops there on a subconscious level, and we’ve been extremely effective at reaching our audience that way.  John McIntyre:Ok, so one thing that I’m curious about, because I’ve actually got a bullet point on my site where people can read about why they should sign up to my list, and one of the bullet points says something that basically says why content marketing is bullshit, and the reason why (well, my theory) is because a lot of people go and do that and they hear this idea that they need to go and give away a ton of information to build a relationship and what happens is they either give away the wrong kind of information and it’s not going to move people further down that sales funnel, or they end up giving people so much information that there’s no reason for them to buy down the track. But it sounds like you’ve had this experience where by just by delivering so much value it’s actually worked in your favor. You know, you’ve done it I guess the right way or maybe it just works across the board, I mean it sounds like it’s working for you.   Jason Stapleton:Well ultimately, in my opinion, what you have to do is, the first thing you have to do is you have to acquire an email address, you have to acquire information. Then you have to get that guy to continue to open up that email that you sent, and how do you make those two things happen? Well, acquiring the email can be done through a variety of ways: you can purchase the list, you can provide an ethical bribe. But what people tend to forget is that that’s a human being on the end of that, a human being who’s interested in some sort of content that you had, whether it was just for a short period of time or not, but while he’s there and he’s listening you have to respect the fact that he’s a human being and when you communicate with him you don’t ever want to communicate- one of the things that I learned from Frank Kern, who’s good at a lot of things, he’s a pretty good copywriter, but what he’s exception at is developing a personal relationship through video.And one of the things that Frank said was “Don’t ever send them an email, don’t ever communicate them where you’re not adding value.” And so what Frank did which was genius, was he would start out and say “hey I’ve learned something really cool, let me show it to you!” and then he show’s the the little trick or whatever it is that he’s learned and then he says “now there’s a whole bunch more about this that I want to teach you and if you’d like to know more just go ahead and click the little bottle underneath the video and it’ll take you there”. And, sure enough, when you click on the button there’s an order form there and a little sales page that says ‘buy my stuff!’ But every time you open an email from Frank there’s value there, so what I decided to do was that I want to do the same thing, whenever I communicate I want to add value and the way I did hat initially was I started essentially a video podcast where every single week I went through the markets and started talking about what I though was going to happen over the course of the next week, and I did some training on structure analysis and some of the other things that are important in our business and then I said ‘hey, if you like this, then here is where you can get some more information, or sign up for my list and join my little subscription program”, and it just worked like gangbusters. The validation that you provided to them by doing what it was that you claimed to be an expert on has a massive amount of value. John McIntyre: But I suppose is there a risk that you give them either the wrong kind of information or that you give them too much information, so that they don’t need to, you know so like in Frank Kern’s case if you give them 10 tips, and you give them the first tip but then say the nine others you say click the button below and you can go get the other nine, but that’s sort of like you’re in the supermarket and they offer you a taste of a biscuit and you take the biscuit, eat it, and you’re like “Wow, that tasted great! I want ten of them, I want a whole packet” and then you have to go and buy the whole box.  Jason Stapleton:I get it I’ve just never thought of it that way, I’ve never treated it that way, you know “Now how do I rope these guys into buying my stuff.” Don’t get me wrong, there’s a massive amount of sales, and marketing, and funnelling that happens to create interest and desire and build that authority and to line people up at the gate. What I like to do is, I like to have people at the end of the day when I open up the card say “hey, come and get my stuff” I want them just like driving like, here in America we got the sales that happen around the holiday, the Black Holiday Sale, where people are just literally breaking down the doors to get what you got. And there’s a massive amount of sales and marketing that goes into that stuff, but for me it’s always just been a matter of ‘if I just keep providing really great information then people will keep coming back and asking for more’, and it doesn’t matter whether I say ‘hey, if I sell a $49 subscription they want the $300 product, and if I sell the $300 product they want the $3,000 product, and if they get the $3,000 product then a portion of them will want the $10,000 Mastermind Program.’ And so we’re literally like continuing to create levels inside of our organisation to handle the need and the desire for more clients to simply be able to do more with us. And I think it’s critically important if you’re providing a massive amount of value that you are actually good at what you do, there’s a huge opportunity for you to create I list. I recently did a launch for a product that we had, to a small list of about 14,000 people and to give an idea of the power I’ll share some numbers with you, but the power that has evolved from being able to cultivate a personal relationship with the list is that I did a 3 video campaign, just did three videos and showed them the product, explained why they needed to buy it, and over the course of three days it brought in just shy of 3/4 of a million dollars, off of a 14,000 person list. I attribute that entirely to the relationship we developed with that list, the trust that we built with them.  John McIntyre: So part of that building that relationship, building that trust, is doing this, really over-delivering with the content. This is cool man, I’m getting ideas for my own stuff as I’m about to revamp- probably within the next 2-3 months- all the email marketing stuff I’m doing, and it’s just so good to get ideas from smart guys like you to see how I’m going to change things and push it out to the world. But you said, it sounds like you’ve got a number of tips, what are some other ways that you’re using to really create that incredible relationship with your list? Jason Stapleton:Consistency is important. The guys have to know, like the vide I do every week, I’ve been doing it since late 2008, and virtually every week without fail I’m in there doing the video and people wait for it. If I don’t email it out or for some reason I’m gone I get emails, people saying “hey, where’s our preview this week?” You know, people who are sitting there waiting for it.  John McIntyre: So what’s the video? Jason Stapleton:It’s just a video of me, and I have a camera set up in the studio that you saw, at my desk in front of my computer screens, and I say ‘ok, let’s take a look at some charts. Here’s what I think is going to happen and here’s why, and this is what you ought to be watching for next week as the markets start to open and here’s where I think the best money is going to be made and what I’m going to be looking to trade. That’s it. It’s about 15-20 minutes long depending on what we do.  John McIntyre: So almost like a podcast, you just say “Hey, what’s up? Here’s some news updates…” that sort of thing? Jason Stapleton:Yeah, it’s actionable information that they can take away every single weekend and on occasion we’ll break from that and I’ll do some training, because there’ll be a good training opportunity, and I’ll say “Ok, let me teach you a little technique here, let me show you something that’s really cool that most people don’t know, and if you like this go and join my syndicate and you can join me every single day when I do this.” And when they’re in there then maybe I’ll say “Well maybe you’d like to  learn a little bit more and take a full training course”, and sure enough there’s a certain percentage of the people who roll over and do that and, you know I’m never pushy, one of the things (not to toot my own horn) is that I am a very, very, very good salesman, but we use a consultative approach. So I never demand, we never heavy hand, we always lead and direct- we always know where we want the client to go- and ultimately we feel like it’s in his best interests because we feel like we know what we’re talking about, and I do believe I have a product that’s of extreme value to people, and so I want to lead them to that in, but how we do that is through a process of consultation, it’s not through any trickery.  John McIntyre: It reminds me of Perry Marshall’s Power Curve, where you’ve got people coming in on the front buying your $47 subscription and then a certain percentage of them are going to jump up to the $300 product, and then a certain percentage of those will jump up to the $2,000 product and it just keeps going up.  Jason Stapleton:You’re exactly right, and one of the things that I’ve found to be extremely effective is, and something that Glenn Beck (I’m not sure if you know Glen Beck, he’s a radio show host and t.v. show host here in America), and despite what your listeners might think of his political views, he’s an amazing marketer and one of the things that he does very, very well is he draws a line in the sand and he says “You are either on that side with them, or you are on this side with us.” And they create that barrier, that commitment level barrier, and I attempt to do the same thing in my market by simply saying “Look, you’re either committed or your not. If you’re not committed then I have a massive amount of free information online for you, if you go to my youtube page there is more free content and training there- and better content and training- than you will find in most $1,000 courses that you buy online for forex training, and it’s there for free, and that’s for you because you’re not ready to commit to what we do. But if you are ready to commit then here’s where you need to go and here’s what you need to commit in terms of your time, your energy and your money. What happens then when people cross that line is that they’re ultra committed, with refund rates of around .25%, year after year. So when people come in they’re ready to go and they know exactly what they’re getting, it’s been incredibly effective across the board. We haven’t always had successes but it’s been phenomenally successful for us being brand new at this. You had Ryan on your podcast the other day and he’s been in this for like 30 years, I’ve been in this five so I’m a child compared to some of these guys, and I just look in awe at what they’ve been able to accomplish because to email email and internet marketing is one of the quickest and easiest and most effective ways for you to reach an audience. You know, you don’t have to drop $40,000 on a marketing campaign through direct mail to get people to try and buy your stuff, you could do it with a minuscule budget and you ought to go and get your training on that stuff because it’ll change your business, change your life. John McIntyre: One of the things that I’m curios about is that you mentioned consistency, and so we’ve got this idea that you want to be creating tons and tons of value that you give away for free, and you want to be doing it consistently, but what I’m really curios about is say someone’s got a blog or a podcast or are advertising through Facebook and google and somebody gets onto their list through maybe, an email opt in or maybe they bought a product and get an opt in, after that, once they’ve got on and given their email address, and I know we need to be over-delivering and we need to be doing it consistently, but what’s sort of the rough flowchart for what happens there? So, would we be doing an email a day for the first week or two emails a week after that for a month, then one email a month after that? Do you have a sort of formula that you follow? Jason Stapleton:Well there are several different ways to do it, you know Agora Modelis very simple, there’s no real personalization at all; you get on the email list, you download or get the free subscription to there little newsletter or whatever, and then Stansbury or whoever it is, they just hammer you with emails and offer after offer. That’s a marketing strategy that’s very effective but it wasn’t the type of business that I wanted to run, I actually wanted to have that relationship with people. So, what I did was if you signed up, it was kind of funny because the first year we were in business we did about $780,000, and if you went to our website there was nothing you could buy, not a thing. All there was was just pages and pages and pages of free content, and we did all of our selling through email marketing. We did one offer every ninety days. So I would take everybody who came onto the list and I would do nothing but deliver content to them for ninety days and then I would make an offer. Then another ninety days, then another offer. John McIntyre: What do you mean by ‘make another offer’? Do you mean that you would have an email launch sequence of say three or four emails?  Jason Stapleton:Yeah, like a Jeff Walkerlaunch right, here’s a three-video campaign and we would bring in a big chunk of money over the course of that launch period, so we’d do a two week cycle. What that started out being was I would hold a live two-week long webinar series, a boot camp. I would say ‘come and join me for two solid weeks and I’ll teach you a bunch of stuff about trading” and at the end of that two weeks I said ‘if you liked that I’m doing a 90-day course, and you can join that 90-day course for like $3,000. Well, over that 90 days I would teach that group of traders who said yes and I would build more and more rapport with all of the new people that were coming onto the list. Now, one of the downsides to a marketing strategy like that is your revenue comes in really big spurts, and you better hope that every 90 days you have a very successful campaign and a very successful launch,  because if you don’t then you’re going to be starving. We started to recognise that so what we started doing was creating content and subscription projects like that in between to try and smooth out equity in the business and cash-flow, and that has worked extremely well for us and now we have smaller products, and I typically will bring guys in that do an offer say once a month, but I’ll segment the list out, say I’ll bring an offer out to a specific group of people who bought this specific product, and then then the next month I’ll do make an offer to this group of people that haven’t bought a product. And the idea there is that a guy’s not constantly getting hit with offers, and if you’re trying to build and maintain a relationship with a list then that’s the way to do it.  John McIntyre:So what’s the advantage of doing it that way? At the moment I’m doing it more the Agora-way with daily emails with more or less an offer in it, and that does work. But I guess what you’re talking about is the more long-term approach, and there is the benefit of an engaged list, but do you end up with a list of free-loaders who are used to getting free information from you? But it sounds like that’s not the case. Jason Stapleton: Yeah, yeah, and they can stay on as long as they want to and continue to get free information, I love to have them there because, eventually, they’re either going to have nothing but good things to say about me or we’re going to turn them into a buyer. So I don’t mind those guys being there. One of the things that we were able to develop by creating a personal relationship rather than just a consistent email everyday with an offer is that lifetime value. Agora looks at it a specific way, they look at it in terms of ‘there’s a certain amount of money that this individual is going to spend on this specific topic over a set period of time’, and our goal is to extract as much money over that period of time as is humanly possible, then have them go on their way. Like I said, there’s nothing unethical about that marketing strategy, but for me what I want is for that guy to continue to buy over and over and over again from me, and I don’t  want to have to try and twist his arm to get the money. So, the lifetime value of client for us is really, really good. I think the lifetime value of client for us is somewhere between $1,200 and $1,500, that means for every single guy who gives as $1 he’ll end up giving us $1,500. We can pay a lot, more than anybody I know because our lifetime value is so high, and that ties back to how we treat and how we respect the people that are on that list, because it’s not, you’re thinking about it wrong if you’re thinking ‘it’s my list’, no: it’s a collection of people that are really interested in what it is that you have to share, and that’s human being on the other end of that, it’s Ted who’s an electrician who’s trying to get out of his dead end job, and it’s Tom who’s a doctor who’s 65 and rolling into retirement and who’s trying to figure out how he’s going to manage his own money, you know, they’re human beings, they’re people. When we start thinking about it like that it changes, for me it changed who I wanted to be because I wanted to be the face of the company and I didn’t want to go home feeling dirty at the end of the day. John McIntyre:I like that, it sounds here like the goal is, and I think this will resonate with a lot of people, is being a person. Instead of being a marketing machine and, like you said, extracting as much money as possible in the shortest period of time, to look at it more like it’s a dynamic, it’s like a marriage or you’re girlfriend and boyfriend, where you’re growing in a dynamic relationship where you meet up for coffees and go out to dinner and go out and do holidays and trips together, and you’re on a journey together; it’s not just you trying to slap on as many products as possible. Jason Stapleton:Yeah, my videos and in my morning video with the guys who are on subscription with me, I talk about my family, the vacation we went on, the stupid stuff my kids do. The whole goal is to develop a personal relationship, it can’t really be personal because you’re not friends, but there is a relation that’s developed and there’s a trust that’s built. John McIntyre:One cool thing I think about this too  is that you could send out, say, you could turn up in New York next week and send out an email and say “Hey, I’m going to be in New York and at this bar for a meet up together if you guys want to come hang out I’ll buy the first round of drinks” or something like that, “7:30 this bar, this street, this address”, and I bet you, by the sound of it, you’d have people show you and you could shake hands, sit down and get to know hem.  Jason Stapleton:Yeah, I do that every time I go somewhere. I sent out an email recently, I was in Dallas and I said ‘hey I’ll be in Dallas’, I was in San Francisco last year and had a chance to meet with a couple of my clients, I’ll be in London in November of this year and I have a bunch of people from the UK who are members and clients of mine who haven’t had the chance to come to the United States and I’ll be meeting with them there. So yeah that was another thing, that I didn’t want to have to hide from my clients. I wanted to be able to meet these guys and share in their experiences and I derive a great deal of joy and satisfaction in helping people achieve a goal.  John McIntyre: I like that because, it’s interesting, what I do, I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, is tell a story and slide into a pitch, tell a parable, so there is value in the email, it might be inspiration, or a tip that email marketing is about empathy, and then leads into a pitch so it’s sort of trying to bridge those two gaps, give away some value but also make an offer. I don’t know if it works as well as your one does in terms of that relationship, but it’s blown me away sometimes, I remember when one guy responded he said, maybe one guy in Germany and one guy in LA or something, said to let them know if I ever go there and I can crash on their couch. The first time that happened I was like “what? that’s crazy!”So… Jason Stapleton: Yeah, that’s that relationship. And you know what, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing it the way you’re doing it, and I don’t claim to have the right way I just, you know, the way I’ve done it has blown my mind just in terms of the gratitude and, I like going to work every day and I like the clients that I have and if I din’t like the clients I just give them their money back and send them on their way. I made a decision a long time ago that I didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t want to do, and I wasn’t going to do it anymore. And so I don’t like doing taxes so somebody else does that for me, I don’t like mowing my own lawn so somebody else does that for me, if you’re a jerk of a client then you just get your money back because I don’t need it.  John McIntyre:It’s a tough life, hey? Jason Stapleton:Oh yeah I know! I’m sitting here in my home studio talking to you, it’s just crazy, baffling how far, what we’ve been able to achieve in our company with our marketing strategy over the last several years. And I’m excited for the Titans event, I know you mentioned that, and getting to meet some of the real legends in our business, and what they’re doing, and I might be eating crow when I get back, I might say “don’t use that interview John, because I learned a bunch of stuff at Titans and I don’t think that way anymore!” The way we’re doing it, I enjoy what we do and we’ve been making a lot of money. John McIntyre:Yeah, I certainly noticed it worked that way with the podcast, I mean I started this podcast way back about a year ago, just over a year ago here in Thailand, and at first I just thought it sounded like a cool idea, a nice way to get traffic and some authority, but I had no idea just what it would do. Now I get emails and emails from people going to Titans and stuff, chatting with Brian Kurtz(the guy who’s putting it on) via email and stuff just because I had him on the podcast, then looking at how that creates, I got an email from someone the other day, probably listening to this right now, he said he was in, told him a story of how I was in Thailand and I how I made a green smoothieor something like that, and he was like ‘that’s a cool story but I think I can top it’. Then he say that a while back he ended up, I won’t go into all the details, but he ended up going to prison in Thailand, he get sentenced for something like 25 years, got out after 10 and now he’s learning direct response marketing, he’s give n up that old life of his, and says that he’s loving the podcast. I remember when I got that email and I was like “that is so cool!” Jason Stapleton: Well I don’t even know how I came across your podcast, but I had been looking for, I listen to John Carlton’spodcast and I’m always looking for them and most of them are so bad, and I downloaded a couple of your episodes and I was like ‘man, this is really good, and this guy has got a lot of really big names coming on his podcast with just incredibly valuable and entertaining information” and I was hooked, and that’s when I reached out and said “hey man, I want to just talk to you about what you’re doing because this is really cool!” And, I think we met on the Facebook forum, and I said I think you have one of the best Marketing podcasts out there, and I know you deserve every success.   John McIntyre: Cheers! I still don’t have that studio that you’ve got, right now I’m outside of a coffee shop so you can probably hear the trucks rolling past. Jason Stapleton:You’ve only been doing it a year- it’s coming, it’s on it’s way. John McInture:Alright man, right on time here. Before we go, for people who want to learn more about you, send you an email or go check out this website Trade and Power where’s the best place for them to do all those things? Jason Stapleton:You can go to tradeandpower.com or you can, my email address is just jason@tradeandpower.com, that one goes to my phone, so you can email me there if you’ve got any questions. But I really enjoyed chatting with you John, thanks for having me on the show. John McIntyre: Likewise Jason, and you can grab the show notes and links at themcmethod.com if anybody wants them.  The post Episode #77 – Jason Stapleton on Growing, Bonding, and Providing Value To Your List For Maximum Profit Potential (time to stop thinking of your list… as a list!) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Ever wonder what it would be like to be raised by a famous legend? Well today’s your lucky day fellow email marketer – Halbert, Bond Halbert… …is here on The Email Marketing Podcast. Gary Halbert was the greatest copywriter and marketing mind that ever graced this Earth. And today his son Bond – another amazing marketing mind, Gives us a peek inside that only Gary’s sons could have. Bond, The same son who was stuffing, stamping and sealing direct mail campaign envelopes when he was 2 years old. The same son who trained copywriting and advertising starting at the ripe old age of TEN. The same son who played guinea pig for all the lessons Gary taught his protege’s or used in his timeless newsletters. Yup. He’s quite the marketing persona. Not many people in the world (I’m guessing none) have started their marketing careers years before they could even walk into a PG-13 movie. It runs through his veins. And he lives and breathes it as much as Gary did. Today, Bond’s marketing-mind-blowing interview shows us how his dad trained him, And how he applies those core marketing concepts ingrained in him into today’s online world. He hit’s email marketing strategies, autoresponder psychology, and much, much more. Also, Bond shows us how he took Gary’s timeless work, …enhancing it to make it a one-of-a-kind copywriters dream source of learning information (the only marketing info product to ever give him goosebumps).   In this episode, you’ll discover: the surefire way to get your readers addicted to you (avoid predictability with this random-reward strategy) how Bond would use daily emails to imprint himself onto his subscribers… and never be forgotten the gun to your head marketing mentality that revolutionized direct mail campaigns also will do the exact same for your email marketing. why you should avoid using cheesy tricks that get people to open your email everytime (learn what these cheesy’s are and the only times you should ever use them) an email trick that is so dang powerful, it forces people to open (ESPs will only let you use it 10 times… choose wisely) how randomness goes a long way in building long-lasting relationships how Bond applies what his dad taught him about bulletproof headlines to his email subject lines (there’s nothing wrong with forced teaser copy as long as you use it this way) the vital importance behind getting someone’s main email address (forget about spam filters… avoiding spam emails is step one) how Bond left Aweber and GetResponse employees speechless and in awe if you want to build a great repoire with your list… your in-person relationship building skills are more important than you might think Mentioned: The Boron Letters The Boron Letters (The McMethod Summary) Gary Halbert The Gary Halbert Letter The Gary Halbert All Star Series Joe Sugarman Gary Bencivenga John Carlton Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:  Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. It’s time for episode 76 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing… How to make money every time you send an email to your list, which is really I think the goal here as we wanna learn, how to take the email addresses that we have in our email list and make them buy stuff. And it’s not just because we’re trying to make money or trying to scam anyone, it’s because we’re trying to Help people. Because email is a way to build a relationship. So… it’s god to have you here. Today I’ll  be talking to be talking to Bond Halbert. Now, you might recognize that last name. The reason why is that Bond is the son of the late Gary Halbert, one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived. K? Now you might have read The Boron Letters – Gary wrote it out to his sons. They’re good go check that out if you can. Anyway… Today we’re going to talk about how to create an engaged list, and I was very interested to talk to Bond about this because of his experience with, obviously he started learning his marketing I think he said when has was like 10 or 4 years old. Crazy young at the time. And so he’s grown up born and bread by marketing, so it was great getting him on and talking about some of this stuff. And I was surprised to be honest. Its made me rethink and challenge my ideas and my ways of doing email and I think over the next few months as I update my own business and my own sorta marketing funnel, things are going to change based somewhat on what I learned from Bond.  And I’ve got another guy coming up next week who also will be talking about a similar thing. Now, to get the show notes of this podcast go to www.themcmethod.com/76.  This week’s McMaster Inside of the week is a good one. This is something I’ve been sharing in some of the webinars I’ve done with people. It’s something you can take away right now as an insight and go and apply on your business and I think you’ll get some great results from it. Ok?  Split-testing the Price. I’ve found in the last few months, the single biggest thing I can do in terms of split testing is split testing the price. From changing the price of $7 to $17, $17 to $25, $29.95, and it’s incredible to see the conversion rate difference because sometimes I found for example, I went from $7 on one product to $17 and the conversion stayed the same. Incredible. Then I went up to $19.95, didn’t really work. $24.95 didn’t really work. $29.95 was interesting, but I think $17, if you blow it out through the upsells through an expanded view, $17 works better because it has a slightly higher conversion rate which means there’s more front end customers which means more people buy the upsells. Ok? It’s absolutely fascinating, so split testing the price – the really simple way to do this is create a couple different paypal buttons, sign up to Visual Website Optimizer and set up a test. Grab versions of your sales page, one has one price one has the other – split test them with your traffic and you will be astounded at the results. Maybe a couple tests you don’t find out much, but a good friend of mine, a conversion rate optimization guy… he’s fond of saying that 8/10 tests won’t do anything. They won’t make a difference, you’d be better off going with whatever you started with. But the one or 2 that you find occasionally that take a bit of work to get to, they are just pure gold. They will bump things by massive amounts. Ok? The lesson here, go and test your price. If you’re a freelancer, double your rates. Hell, quadruple your rates and see what happens. See what people say and you’ll be surprised. You gotta say it with confidence though. Have confidence…  The other reason why I’m excited about McMasters right now is these templates. There is a whole bunch of these fill-in-the-blank templates, 10 to be exact… inside McMasters, so that anyone can join, be up and running with their Autoresponder with 5 or 10 emails in literally a couple of hours and if they want to they can go back and start studying the training material which I highly suggest cuz then they can go back and learn how to write the emails themselves and they wont need to use templates all the time. Ok? Now I love templates. They make things easy. They remove the writer’s block and all that crap. So,  templates inside McMasters. To learn more about McMasters whether its templates or you wanna know what training materials are inside there, go to themcmethod.com/mcmasters and I hope to see you in there. Now, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Bond Halbert. It’s John McIntyre, here, the autoresponders guy. I’m here with Bond Halbert who is the son of the late Gary Halbert and I thought I’d get him on the show to talk about some of the stuff he’s learned over the last few years and I guess how that’s changed, and what Gary teaches or taught and how that’s evolved. And what he’s up to now. Now Gary Halbert, if you’re listening to this you really should know about The Gary Halbert Letter. He was one of the greatest copywriters on the planet and he’s got this  Gary Halbert Letter. Every copywriter or direct response marketer has been through it at some point to learn from it. Some of the issues, all the issues… I went through it bak when I was still getting things going when I was living in the Philippines, and it was a great resource to just learn. It was so good. You hear it mentioned everywhere. I mention it in some of the emails I send out to the list. It’s still around and now Bond is actually tweaking it and doing some interesting stuff with it which I’m sure we’ll get into today… Bond how you going man? Bond Halbert:I’m doing well. Thank you for having me on this.  John McIntyre: Good to have you on here man. I think it’s been. I heard about you a while ago that was when I was living in the Philippines, writing down sales letters by hand the way Gary suggests. I remember seeing you there. I found your website. I think I just got caught up with other things for a while and then it circled back through a friend of ours Dan who was like “I know Bond” so I figured we get you on the show on the podcast so we can talk a but marketing, so it’s funny. It’s a bit of a small world. Bond Halbert:Yes it is. It’s amazing. They have 6 degrees of separation… in the marketing world it always seems as if it’s one. (laughs) John McIntyre:Exactly. Well let’s just start, we didn’t plan this out too much, but let’s see where this goes. Before we get into the meat and potatoes give people sort of a background on you know who is Bond Halbert and what are you up to right now? Bond Halbert:Well uh, in the marketing community I’m pretty well known for being my dad’s right hand man for a long time, learning the ropes in copywriting a so forth but I went off and took we he had taught me and started selling info products and did quite well with that. And then when he passed away I actually tooled down for a while. I took a lot of time off to you know recover from the shock of it all. And then I got up and had to start retooling and I found that a lot of people were really still wanting more info. It kinda helped in picking up the slack and teaching people some marketing tricks. Basically, showing people how to take the Gary Halbert lessons and letters, especially the older ones and translate and show people the value in how it’s being used today. And so I started falling into the pattern of teaching people through products and services and consulting and taking clients on and stuff. Also, I’m pulled into a lot of high-level masterminds as an idea guy and stuff because you know marketing is one of those things that a lot of people picked it up at 25 or 30 then they moved on and discovered copywriting and stuff. So one of the things you have when you start off as early as I did. Because my dad really started training me. I mean I was stuffing, stamping and sealing envelopes for test mailing since I was like 2. But he started really training me when I was about 10. When you have that kind of understanding of it and you hear the lessons as often as I did, and know them so well… cuz I was basically .. If my dad taught you anything in the newsletter or he taught proteges in person, I was the original guinea pig for that lesson, and I was the original guinea pig several times over and I would watch him teach these other people as well, so when you have that kind of level. What you start to do is you start to see automatic things or you start to understand the core concepts and the psychology that’s invoked with the techniques he shows you right? when you get that, you start to understand how that works and you get to apply that to the more modern marketing techniques. I’ll give you an example of that. One of my dad’s early newsletters, he has this letter that’s all about 900 numbers. And 900 numbers for those who don’t remember them are numbers that when you call it, the phone company would then charge the person who called them. So it was a way of charging quickly. And for a recorded message. Now, 976 numbers were for porn, recorded sex talk, but 900 numbers were more for things like horoscopes, and 10 dollar message on “good homes to buy in Los Angeles” or whatever the information you were selling was. And A lot of people would look at that and say “I can see that hook being used in this website or something but…” I would turn around and say look. That’s perfect for a short text code. You know those 5 digit text codes you get “to get your horoscope” or “text here to make a donation”. So, all of those lessons translate in that way. And my dad’s A pile B pile speech where he teaches how to get your snail mail open and read, I took  all those concepts in it and applied it and I started getting higher opening rates. You know opening rates that I’ve heard people at Aweber and GetResponse get amazed at. If you can impress them (laughs). And so I started applying that to Autoresponders, to email marketing..the core concepts, but there are some subtle differences between then and now. For example, online, the way that the attention span is broken up is a little bit… you’d used to break up your paragraph for eye relief in an ad, and you do that in print. Online you have to do that even further. Ok?. the funny thing is you have a shorter attention span to get to people. Because people value their reading time more than anything else. if i turn around and tell you “hey there’s a great new show on tv”, you’ll give it a half hour right? If I say there’s a cool song you’ll give it a minute to listen to. If I say here’s a 12 page sales letter you wanna read it, you’ll put it away for after dinner and figure out a way to not read that (laughs).  And so todays fast paced world is just getting faster. i think a lot of the things that. One of the key differences. You’ll see it a lot with copywriters. It used to be that they wanted to write to a 5th grade level and now they’re even lowering that. They say you wanna write in a 4th grade vocabulary.  John McIntyre:Yup. Bond Halbert:And it’s not that people are less articulate or have a slower vocabulary. They have less time and less of an attention span online. And so in some instances. I don’t believe in absolutes in marketing. In print, you can still do the same thing. Btu if you think about it, our parents generation, they grew up reading for entertainment SO much more than you know out generation. And my daughters generation, they  are reading short short stories  you know fan fiction ,  John McIntyre:…Facebook status updates Bond Halbert: Yeah, and you have to adapt to that medium that you’re in but anyways, so on elf the things that I very much focus on is trying to show everybody in the world that what my dad taught is still being used in the world today and a lot of great marketers are using his concepts. Some of them are giving him credit for it and some aren’t (laughs). But so much of his stuff, even his words you’re seeing used over and over in copy, but some of it just needs that understanding of the psychology of it to understand why that’s working and how to adapt it. John McIntyre:Right. I think the interesting part here, cuz I was wondering, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you is, are you just doing direct mail stuff with the stuff you learned from Gary or are you doing it online? So it sounds like you’re kinda doing it online, but you had to sorta update it and tweak it to make it fit. Bond Halbert: Yeah, Ill give you an example. In my dad’s A Pile B Pile speech about getting your mail opened,  John McIntyre:Just before you talk about that, what is the, for the listener who might not know what that is, what’s the A Pile B Pile? Bond Halbert: Ok, The concept is this. When you would come home and get your mail, you would sort it over a waste basket an into 2 piles. Well really three. there some stuff obviously you didn’t want to throw away BUT you would sort out your letters and all the stuff you had to open, bills, personal correspondents and so forth into one pile… the A Pile.  That was the stuff you were gonna read for sure. And the B pile was stuff you might be interested in you know like an offer for an oil change you might need so you put that down for a second. You look at it and say, “I’m so so sure about this” and you put it on the B pile. Well later, what happened is, the B Pile starts to pile up over the week and Saturday your friends are coming over to take you to a movie and you’re straightening up so you just throw it all into the garbage. And so a lot of the mail just wasn’t even opened. And my dad sat down when he was having problems and following everybody’s advice to mail bulk rate because you’ll need fewer orders to be profitable and all this stuff… he really invented Gun To The Head marketing. This was in the 1960’s. He sat down and said, “ok, you know Gary, if somebody had a gun to your head and he said he’d pull the trigger unless you made the sale, what would you do differently?” Out of this longer speech, on of the first things he said was “ I would put in a live first class stamp.” And there were 2 reasons for that. 1 of the keys was getting past the human spam filter – the brain. It was looking at the envelope for a window or a bulk rate mailing, or anything that indicates that its junk mail.  He didn’t want that so a live stamp was better, but the very first portion of that was actually that first class mail was treated better by the post office. His first worry was getting the mail delivered right? So I was sitting there thinking what’s the first thing I need to get the mail delivered? And everybody in this industry at this time when I first started talking about this was very concerned with spam filters. Here’s the thing. Let’s suppose.. this is your average internet experience. You want something. So, for example you want to learn how to cure stage fright, so you go looking online and some guy says “I have the 7 step cure formula and Ill give it to you for free but you gotta give me your email address”. So what do you do? You give them a spam email address. Right? And then he says, “not so fast you gotta confirm through a confirmation link”. So you got to that email address and you see those 500 emails that have piled up since the last time you were there. You go to the top. you find out whether he’s even got what you need or he doesn’t. If he’s got what you need you’re off trying to practice it and trying to do it with the forgotten promise that you’ll probably resubscribe if he’s the right guy, which you never will. OR more than likely, he’s probably failed on his promise. He hasn’t impressed you and you’re off to the internet to go find your solution. Either way on the way out you ignore or delete ALL 500 emails. Later on that evening you go to your regular email address and you see your spam filter with 25-50 emails in it. Do you just delete them? No. You actually scan them to make sure nobody slipped through the cracks because this is your primary email address. Maybe somebody sent you something maybe there was an ebay notice whatever. So you scan it real quick and make sure everything is spam then you hit delete. And the lesson here is it would be better for your mail to make it into the spam box of your primary email address. Then to make it to the primary inbox of a spam email address. Worry about getting a primary email address before you worry about getting through spam filters.  Now, there’s a lot of tricks and stuff like that you can go on to learn that will help you get primary email addresses, but that core concept my dad was taking about was the Right focus on getting your email delivered right? And then, he used a lot of curiosity to get the email opened. And unfortunately, you can’t just send a blank email to a lot of people. The law will only allow you to send 10 with a blank subject line because they’re so powerful that everybody will be forced to open their emails. John McIntyre:You mean there’s no subject lines? Bond Halbert: Yes. John McIntyre:I’ve never done that. So you can only take, legally, you can only send 10 of them… Bond Halbert: Yes. what will happen is your ESP won’t let you send out more than 10. and everybody’s sort of forced to look at it John McIntyre:And how long, what’s the time period? Bond Halbert: You know it’s usually at a shot. Maybe you can hire somebody to sit there and send out one at a time for a while. I don’t low Ive never tried. But I don’t have to try that cuz you wanna build a relationship with your autoresponders as you know. The one thing you don’t want is to use cheesy tricks to trick them into opening it. For example, the big ones that will always get a boost or Oops or Help, these key 1 word things that will get them to open. But you need to save those for the time you actually need it right?  Trust me, you ARE going to send out an email with a broken link. I do it all the time. You’re gonna need the Oops so when you do use it, it’s not a case of the boy crying wolf and give false results. So if you’re trying to get someone to open these emails, it’d be just like a couple people. You’re just trying to make sure they open it. And you have a regular type of email address not associated with bulk mailing like a gmail address and a normal sounding name and you have a blank subject line… it’s almost impossible not to open that. So it’s great to send that if you’re trying to get 5 people to open the email but if you’re trying to do a mass mailing to you know, 20,000 names, that’s a lot of work even if you could get away with it, I don’t think that, you know, your ESP is not gonna appreciate that much. And the reason is, the people will open that, because they gotta find out what it is, it’s blank… and people who’ve been tricked into opening are much more likely to complain and hit the spam button. So the spam rating goes up, it goes up on the server at your ESP whose managing all these emails for you… so that server gets tagged as a spamming server and it kinda ruins it for everybody whose mailing through that server. So it’s a karmic payback…. Now, if you get people to open your emails through you know, using good ol fashioned curiosity, and benefits, and dark-sided wording and language, but they’re very happy with why they got inside, you don’t have a problem. The problem is when you get people disappointed and make them feel tricked. But yes a blank subject line will do that. Back to what I was saying So a subject line is like forced teaser copy. So the envelopes,  the gurus would say put great deal etc on there and my dad would say put only personal or first-class on there right? The deal with subject lines is they were more like forced subject lines right? Forced teaser copy. I started looking and applying what he does with headlines, and applying all these things to get the subject lines that get higher opens but also lead through to click-through rates. Cuz remember. It’s the bottom line and the dollars that’s the most important. I was talking about this earlier, one of the subject lines I came up with that I really liked was “Thank God My Dad Went To Prison”. And it’s because my dad when he spent some time when he was put away for a while… he spent his time writing letters to me proving, and it was the only proof I had of this extraordinary education I had very early. Cuz I was 15 when they were written. And they were a couple years after I was being educated too. John McIntyre:Yeah… Bond Halbert: When I say thank God my dad went to prison, the curiosity and the dark side… everybody’s gotta know what I’m talking about right? Then they come in and see that I’m talking about this book of letters that my dad wrote to me when he was away and my reason behind being thankful for it. Nobody feels like a cheated them into opening because I didn’t. It’s congruent. It’s continuous and it matches from the beginning to the end and I’m still able to tell you about the Boron Letters and pitch it. John McIntyre:I think the interesting part with this is that when it comes to online marketing, so many people get caught up looking for this magical subject line like the oops, like the thank you, like the help, but the funny part about that. its getting gore and more like this. It’s not about tricks, its about building a solid relationship with the people n that list which requires you to not use tricks because then they feel tricked. You actually have to be helpful. Use a subject line like that and lead into something valuable. Bond Halbert:Yeah, what people don’t understand is online you have a greater relationship opportunity than in direct mail. DM used to be, you mail to them, they mail you back and then maybe you mail them again. So maybe 3 or 4 products so maybe 3 or 4 communications is all you got. And online you have this ability to build relationships that are much more valuable. Overall. The thing that people forget about copy is that its just persuasion and salesmanship in print. Online it’s the same thing except its relationship building which is the same thing as relationship building in person. You meet the guys who do the best job online with building a repoire with their list, they’re also the best people at building a repoire with people in person. And all you have to do is think about it in relationship to building relationships. For example. I get asked about timing of autoresponders all the time John McIntyre: (laughs) I get the same questions man. people say how long should I send them or how long should my autoresponder be? Bond Halbert:Yeah, and I tell them i say listen, first of all here’s what you gotta do. You mail a certain once a week until they will not forget who you are. Because one of the biggest problems you get is you get a subscriber, you don’t mail them for 3 weeks, they forgot who you are. You mail to them then the spam rating goes up. People complain. You feel dejected and then don’t wanna mail again until you have something really good to say, so now it’s a month and a half before you mail again… the situation gets worse and so forth… and eventually you’re looking at the situation and saying , “this is a 5% open rate” and you get all dejected its horrible. but the truth is, if you mail something really sensational, and this is key…I didn’t give you a certain timeframe to do this because you can say something so fantastic and memorable, and in a single conversation, you and I are not going to forget each other in a week. But if I mail to you once a week for 3 or 4 weeks for a point. Soon as I make sure you’re going to remember who I am then I can mail to you when I have something good to say. And f you think about it, you can time things to be on a regular basis… if you promise an email a day or a tip a week. You need to deliver on that promise. But there is no hard and fast rule with this. There are some people that will mail until you squeal and get off their list and there are other people that will open your email every single day if you send them a message for a year. But its really about relationship building. the way I like to look at it is.. When you’re building a relationship you wanna be like the coolest person in their life. And who is the coolest person in your life/ It is somebody you don’t get to see all the time. You’re not overexposed. Everybody has a certain amount of exposure time. I can spend all day everyday for weeks or months with my wife. That is not true with my brother or friends, you know, every body has a certain amount of time that I can stand to be with them. And it’s not their fault. Usually somebody who really spends quality time, if they improved your life and gave you a lot of value, and this is true with your gurus too, think about it, and then you don;t really hear from them too often. But when they come in it’s sort of like a randomness, and they come in always full of life, and they’re fun, and you just always look forward to it. They’re the ones that are the most exciting that you know… that’s the emails you can’t wait to open because those are the friends you can’t wait to see. Letting the timing ebb and flow more naturally is a better idea that forcing a formula in my opinion. And of course this is direct response marketing so you can test everything. You know, the answer is always in the testing. And I don’t believe in any absolutes, but I just believe that in the beginning, the goal is  to mail often enough and good enough stuff to be remembered.  And then, from then on, you could be more dynamic with it. You can change up the timing, you can change up what you’re doing because the emails I look forward to are from people who are just full of life, they’re always doing something, and there’s just no way I can predict what’s in that email. Those are the ones that are exciting to me its a grab bag. And that’s the way the Gary Halbert letters are.  His letters are addictive and the reason was when you opened it up, you didn’t know if you were gonna hear some harrowing tale about him in an airplane, or if he was gonna tell you the secret to how he built a million dollar empire, or if he was down in the latest trials and tribulations of his life. He was a once and all type of a guy. But that randomness. Randomness causes addiction. And that’s something my dad taught me. People because addicted to random rewards. So you know you wonder, if people become addicted to that random behavior that uncertainty… you know the shows you love the most are the ones you can predict the least. As soon as you catch on to the Three’s Company formula, this is always based on some stupid misunderstanding… every show sucks. You know because you just know the pattern. That’s another reason  I think shows get so few few of them can go. The ones that can go forever you can never predict what’s gonna come next and they keep people excited that way. But you know there’s lots of timing formulas and they’re different per industry, how often do you wanna hear from your plumber about saving the leaks in your house.  That newsletter wont have a serious longevity to it. But there are other people you wanna check into them as often as they got something cool to say. So the answer always depends but the one thing I do insist on, mail at least enough cool enough stuff to make sure you’re remembered until the next time you’re ready to mail, because  not being remembered, and who you said before is the biggest indicator  of what you’re going to  get opened up the next time. It’s even more important that the subject line.  John McIntyre:Right.  Bond Halbert:There’s some people, it doesn’t matter what the subject line is, you’re opening the email because of who they are. John McIntyre:Right, right. So right now I’m feeling a little bit guilty here because  send daily emails. I got the idea from Ben Settle. He does it as well. And people often ask me, should they send daily emails, and I usually have been saying, well ya, they can work for a lot of people, but now what you’re saying is that maybe that’s not the best strategy.  Bond Halbert: Well, first of all again, I don’t believe in absolutes and I’m not saying Ben Settle’s wrong here. Sending emails every day to your list is fine to do, especially in the beginning if you have something really cool and you’re sending them little short snippets and they can take it in small bites. I you sen them a long 8 page letter everyday, you’re really hammering that list too much. So it depends and the length of that message and how long you’re doing that. If you’re doing that for a year straight, I guarantee you my open rate after a year is a lot higher than yours, but you may have extracted more money. Remember it’s the bottom line, it’s the dollar that counts. But for my money, what I would rather do, is I would rather mail every single day or every other day for a while until I am remembered. Remember, I said at least once per week. I wasn’t saying that you couldn’t mail once a day to make sure you’re remembered in the beginning.  But what I would do is, start turning into a more random-reward type of situation, where, “Hey I have heard from John McIntyre for a while let’s see what he’s been up to”. Where, if you’re just hammering them every single day with a new email, you got a lot of people are just unsubscribing on your list, and also  aren’t really paying attn. It’s too impossible to be different every day. Do you find something so revolutionary and cool that you have 365 new things to talk about over the next year? And, here’s the thing that I think marketers make a mistake in… apply it to yourself. Who sends an email everyday and you open up every email? Not some friend of yours, even a marketing guru whose your friend doesn’t count.  Some guy who sends you an email every day and you open them up religiously, and then look at the people whose emails are on your list, people you don’t know, whose emails, like when you get it you say, “ok I got to open this whenever he sends em”. It’s usually cuz you don’t get them that often. And you’ll find that the people whose email you open up all that time match a lot more my “cool kid” theory than a very predictable, you know, set up an autoresponder that’s 365 emails long. John McIntyre: So it sounds like you really need to keep them guessing. You might do daily emails for example for 2 weeks, then just not say anything for a week, then go back for every 2 days for a week, and then drop off the radar again, and always be mixing it up Bond Halbert:Yeah, and mixing up what you’re delivering too. John McIntyre:The format, the stories, all that sort of stuff yeah. Bond Halbert:Absolutely, You know what you get when you get an email from me? you can be getting told about a new book that’s out, you can be offered and told about something that we’re doing, or I can be just sending you an off the wall email marketing tip or just pure content, I could be just handing you Jay Abraham content, I could be doing all kinds of stuff. I was on my Facebook yesterday, cuz yesterday was the anniversary of the first issue of the Gary Halbert Letter, so I took a printed copy of it, took a picture of it and put it on Facebook with a link to the site. I said, anybody who shares this is entered into a raffle to win this printed copy that comes from my dad’s own personal stash. 75 people shared it. But the thing is, it’s like Facebook or anything else. On social media you see somebody who their entire wall is just filled with quotes from other people, Ben Franklin and Hellen Keller and stuff like that, and that’s all that’s there. You’re like ehh thats boring. So like, somebody else they’re just telling you about the constant amazingness in their life and they’re just manifesting goodness for everybody. And you know after 10-12 of those you start to get sick of it. There’s nothing you don’t start to get sick of after 10/12 times.  But if you’re mixing it all up, and people don’t know what’s coming next, and you’re being you and you’re showing yourself. You’re not formulated. That’s part of the problem. People think that nobody recognizes the formula, and they do. Do you know you can take a formula from one industry and apply it to the other.Quite easily. But when you take someone else’s formula doing exactly what you’re doing, you start to look old hat quickly. And the example I love to give for this is let’s suppose I started a marketing campaign called The Wealthy Bastard right?  Everybody knows “hey thats just the rich jerk” or you know like, done over again. I don’t get nearly the same play as the guy who did it first.  And so when you’re used to the exact same ad formula and the exact same layout on a sales page. They don’t all call for the same thing. You know sometimes I’ll write it much more like an article you can find replicated on Digg rather than a WSO “big buy” button at the end and timers etc. And there’s a place for the timers too. There’s a place for all this stuff, but I don’t believe in absolutes and I thank that that randomness we’re talking about goes a long way in your relationship building. John McIntyre: Right. One thing I’m thinking though is if you’re just handling a newsletter, if you’re just maintaining a list of relationships sending out content and doing the occasional product thing, this would work very well. But say you’ve got paid advertising to a landing page, and someone signs up and you wanna make that person buy something as fast as possible so you can recoup the spend, what you spent on the advertising… are you suggesting do the same sort of strategy or would you do something more aggressive that’s trying to get the money out of them faster? Because it sounds like what you’re talking about is taking a bit more time, warm them up, do seduction, but when you’re doing paid advertising, you might wanna do it a little bit quicker, right? Bond Halbert: Well actually I think you wanna mix the the two because auto responders save the day.  There’s no reason that what I do can’t be done in an autoresponder, so what we will do is set up an autoresponder so it’s mailing at least once a week and then it tapers off right? It starts to get more random and that is a setup system of content and pitch and content and pitch and the way that you wanna do that is this: you wanna do it with upsells more than you wanna do it with backup emails. Somebody comes in with content and one of the best ways to do that is just to drive the traffic to something that is a loss leader purchase for you. We spend the money in the ad spend and it drives everybody in the traffic and gives them Gary Halbert Letters All Star Audio Series lets say. And then they go to buy that and of course there’s an upsell to it if you’re going in and you’re about to buy it. And I wouldn’t put them through the GoDaddy upsell Hell. If you’ve ever been through GoDaddy, you try to check out and it’s like 20 pages later… but you know you put them through upsell right there because if they’re hot to go they’re hot to go. And then you decide your on formula and content. You give them reasons to think that not everything you send is a pitch. Ok? Then she you do mail again and you sell and pitch something you can then up sell them again when they hit buy on the shopping cart for the first thing. So you’re doing a combination of those things and you’re just using the timing of it… the timing of the auto responders to automatically replicate this process. Let’s suppose you were doing it in the formula I’m talking about.  I’m driving traffic to the Gary Halbert Letters All Star Audio Series, they buy that, we get a whopping $15 bucks from it. So we can spend 15 dollars on traffic to get that one sale. Once they’re in there an they’re now on this list, we up sell them stuff. We talk about the profit ok? we’re building the relationship but here’s one thing that’s very critical.  We’re in a business where we can build a relationship that’s worth while. If you’re a plumber then hit them up fort he money right away.  Hit them up while they’re doing that. Get them on your list but you’re going to be mailing them infrequently. You’re going to mail them a couple of free things real quick, and tell them that.  “Im gonna mail you a couple things real quick and you’re gonna get this and this and this etc.”  over the next 3 days. And after that you’re gonna hear from me. You’re gonna get season things like reminders that tell you how to you know, “I’ll send you a system that will tell you the temperature is getting down to 30 degrees so you wanna crack open your pipes so they don’t freeze.” Stuff like that. John McIntyre:Yeah. Bond Halbert:And then you give them that kind of excuse or reason to be on your system and then you can do it. So it really also depends on what you’re selling and what your business is. If you’re doing teaching people marketing it’s a lot longer longevity, so for us it’s a lot easier to go ahead an wait a week and give you some more content and some more goodness and then before springing something else on you that you didn’t know about or give you another offer. John McIntyre:Right. Bond Halbert: So again I don’t believe in any absolutes. The only thing I’m saying is mail often enough and make sure you’re memorable in the beginning. Because who you are and what you mailed before is critical in getting your emails opened in the future. John McIntyre:Interesting. Ok. Cool man, well that’s right over time right now. We kinda filled that up pretty good I think for no plan at all. Before we go though, you mentioned this Gary Halbert All-Star Series. Tell me about that. Bond Halbert:Ok. What we did was. I had this idea, and its not a stroke of genius, I don’t think it’s an original idea i just happened to have it and be in the power to do something about it. But we were taking about after releasing the Boron Letters about how people just like stuff in different formats, and what we really know every body wants is to be able to listen to the Gary Halbert letters in the car or at the gym. So we were just about to sit down and start reading the letters and I was like wait a minute, why don’t we get copywriters to each read a letter? So, then it dawned to us to let them add commentary, whatever they want. So i picked up my phone book and I ran through hit real quick. First name that popped out at me was Joe Sugarman, so I called him up and he said yes and from that point we were off to the races. I lined up and sent out emails to a bunch of copywriters that I could get a hold of that I knew had a lot talent, a lot of stuff to add, a lot of respect for our father, for his legacy, and what he’s done, and I just emailed a bunch of them expecting a few of them to come through and do this for us. And what we got back was nothing short of incredible. It’s the only copywriting product I’ve seen in my entire lifetime that has actually given me goosebumps when I started to listen to it. Right? And I’ve been around this business for a long time. And when you hear these legends, you know, Gary Bencivenga, coming out of retirement, probably one of the greatest copywriters left on the planet. All these guys, Carlton, Dale, Deutcsh, Garfinkel, Gerber, they’re all either number one top selling authors. Theres nobody on there that’s not responsible for a million dollars in sales minimal. If there’s somebody in there that’s not responsible for way more than that I would be shocked.  What they added was the context and explanations of the letters, and behind the scenes stories in some cases, and they gave you a new perspective, so the people who are new to the letters are going to get much more out of it than the people who just read them, and the people who read them now get to look at it in a whole new light. And we threw in a letter that was never posted before, on the website. There’s a lot of people who would get a kick out of that. The letter I read my dad mentions these hidden lessons inside of that newsletter, and I go on and explain 7 of them; and point them out, and highlight them and explain what those lessons are. And they are straight up Gary Halbert lessons. And so we put that all together. We got Dan Kennedy, and the names you don’t know like Paris Longpropolis and maybe Scott Haines, these are as John Carlton would say, “in the trenches” most talented working copywriters, and they’re sharing insights and secrets, and some of these commentaries are worth the entire price of the series alone, which is only $30. It’s so ridiculous and that was just because we put it on iTunes. You can also go and get it from thegaryhalbertletter.com or Halbertising because we found out later that, iTunes is a great distribution channel except for theres a lot of people who really don’t like iTunes because they charge double in Australia or they’re on android phones. But we put it on iTunes on iTunes pricing – 2 albums – 7 rock stars each, and made a series out of it. It really is something I am exceedingly proud of. It’s something everybody on it has been proud of not only to be a part of it but to get the chance to honor our father and what he did and what he meant to them. As Brian McCloud likes to put it, its “a whole new way to experience the Gary Halbert Letters”. and it’s actually an improved way. The reason I’m proud of it is how do you not touch the original and still improve it? We found that way by having these guys read it in its original format and then just adding commentaries and explaining what it meant to them. The value the insights had. The lessons and how it can be translated and all hat kind of stuff. And we’re just getting started. If you don’t see your favorite copywriter on that list, I have a long list of people Im going to invite who don’t even know Im going to invite them. I’ve got some people on my list I’ve never even spoken to I’m planning to invite. This is going to be a huge hit. There’s nobody who hasn’t heard them and hasn’t been amazed on what’s on there. But this is going to be an ongoing thing and we’re just gonna continue to get more and more great copywriters til  we’re done with all the letters, and we have a lot of letters to get through. John McIntyre:Well cool man, I’ll have links, that’s at thegaryhalbertletter.com/stars right? Bond Halbert:Yeah, he made that URL so long.Kevin jokes because somebody was complaining about his short personal aol email address. he’s like “oh,  you can spell out kevin@thegaryhalbertletter.com” and they’re like ok never mind (laughs).  John McIntyre:(laughs) Cool. i’ll have a link to that on the show notes at themcmethod.com, so if people wanna get the link they can just go their or they can just type it out if they can remember it, thegaryhalbertletter.com/stars Bond Halbert:Thank you. John McIntyre:Bond, thanks for coming on the show man. It’s been good to talk about email marketing. Bond Halbert:Ah its great, anytime you wanna talk about it just hit me up. I love it. The post Episode #76 – Bond Halbert on Creating An Engaged Email List Using Gary Halbert Principles In Today’s Online World (and how he enhanced his late father’s work to create magic) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.