The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

By John McIntyre, The Autoresponder Guy

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Mar 24, 2014 • 3min

Episode #48 – James Kemp on Staying Out of Spam and Sending 1 Million Emails Per Day

Are your emails going straight to Spam? You spend hours writing your email copy… Crafting an entertaining story. Designing the perfect pitch. And yet – A chunk of your prospects may never even see your offers. Pity… They were ready to buy, cash in hand. You might not even know it. It could be happening now. Here’s the good news – James Kemp can help. James runs the email marketing at GrabOne, the biggest daily deals site in New Zealand. GrabOne is like a Daily Candy or Groupon. They did $130 million in sales in 2013. The best part? 80% of that revenue comes via email marketing. Today, you’ll get a rare look inside the mind of a guy who sends over 1 million emails per day. Do you have a small or medium-size list? Then pay attention… …because in this episode, you’ll learn the tremendous upside available to you with email marketing. The only question is… How big do you want to scale? In this episode, you’ll discover: 2 multi-million dollar businesses driven by email James’s most important piece of advice for getting your emails seen how to become a trusted source to your prospects the best time of day to pitch your list (HINT: how much is your product?) when it makes sense to pay for email deliverability help how GrabOne gets insane engagement from weather-based email targeting the % conversions e-commerce owners should aim for a few “small hinges that swing big doors” in email one variable that makes tiny lists pay HUGE dividends a challenge for listeners to implement Mentioned: HostGator SendGrid Aweber MailChimp Daily Candy James on LinkedIn GrabOne Deals – James’s employer Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John: It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with James Kemp. James is a subscriber on the McMethod daily email list and he got in touch with me after I send out an email saying I was looking for people who send a large volume of emails. James sends 35 million emails a month, which is over a million a day. So there are some very specific issues that he’s going through that people who were sending less emails aren’t. I think he’s got some really interesting takeaways that we’ll get into in just a minute. I’ll let James explain all of that. James, how are you doing today? James: I’m great. How are you doing? John: Fantastic mate. All right, before we get into the specific issues, tell people a bit about what you do, what you’re working on, and why are you sending so many emails? James: Yes, so GrabOne started as a daily deal site in New Zealand about three years ago. So number one daily deal site off the back of the success of big companies like Groupon, GrabOne carved out its own little local nation in the New Zealand market. We’ve got just over a million daily subscribers, and then we send about a million emails a day. That covers everything from travel and product all the way through to local experience and stuff. Our partners, we’ve got over 15,000 businesses we work for, and we market anything from a pedicure all the way through to a cruise in Alaska. It’s a business that started as daily deals, but increasingly we’re an ecommerce store first for anything and everything you want to see … John: Are you there? James: Yeah. John: Oh sorry. Just cut out for a second. All right, so let’s talk about that real quick. Just email specifically, you said a minute ago before I hit record that email is the engine that drives the whole thing. Can you explain a bit about that? James: Yeah, definitely. We’re throwing out about 150 offers a day, and when you’ve build a brand and something that’s as iconic as us in the New Zealand market with 80% of the market share, people are waiting, looking up, and seeing what there is to do, whether it’s a restaurant offer, or a beauty offer, or a holiday. We’re very much connecting people and inspiring them to do something locally. Email is for us the quickest way to get that message out there and also the most economic. It’s broadly two thirds of our business, sending an email out, putting something in front of someone that’s relevant. And relevance is what city do I live in, and what’s around me, and what’s local. And it’s the cheapest, fastest, and easiest channel to do that. John: I think what’s interesting here is that GrabOne, we’re talking like a massive company on a massive scale here. Some people might think that email marketing is for Internet marketers and small time people. But there’s companies like yours there’s … I read recently about company called Daily Candy and they sold basically a glorified email newsletter for different cities in the States with deals … I don’t think it was deals. I think it was more like restaurants and cool stuff to check out, fashion, that sort of thing, and that sold for $125 million. It’s basically like an email newsletter with content wrote into it as well, which is I just found incredible. And now I’m just seeing these companies pop up all over the place. I think that’s the first very interesting thing. The second is you guys are doing daily email. Everyone is saying literally daily was way too aggressive, whereas you said the complete opposite. James: Aggressive, I mean, we make 30 offers in every email we make. Yeah, if you want to sell something, you’ve got to make an offer, don’t you? John: Right. James: So we’re putting it out there and we’re making sure we’re sending the right email to the right people. We’ve got algorithms which say what’s your propensity to buy in certain categories based on behavior that you’ve exhibited before. We’re also showing people what other people are buying, have been introducing their social proof elements, how many have we sold, what’s selling faster in your city. But, email, you can’t really beat it in terms of getting something in front of people. Coupons have been around for a long time, and I think the daily deals model and also ecommerce as a whole meet that apex at the time and said, okay, coupons work, people like a bit of a discount in a deal and value, and now we’ve got a method to put it in front of them frequently, and easily, and cheaply, and they can access it anywhere, especially with mobile and those kinds of things just accelerating. You can get it anyway, you can consume it, you can purchase it. It’s the method. John: I’m curious, how does this compare to social media for a daily deal site like yours? James: In terms of revenue social media is about 1% of what we do, which is when you’re a $100 million plus company it’s a big number but it’s still 1%. John: And then email you said was 80%? James: Yeah, we’re about two thirds in attribution or direct attribution so it’s how we get out there. It’s the engine. If email goes wrong, which it occasionally does when you’re sending the volume that we’re are, you really notice it. John: Interesting. I think that’s a cool thing to bring out, is [inaudible 05:31] about social media these days, and another one is content marketing. I think the proof is in the pudding right here. It’s email all the way. James: Yeah, yeah, we introduced content into email when it’s appropriate, but nothing can beat making an offer to someone, so if you’re sending email, make an offer. John: Let’s get into some of the … There are going to be some major challenges that a guy like you is going through compared to say a guy with 100 people in his list. So let’s talk about some of that stuff. What challenges are you facing on a daily basis when you’re sending that kind of volume? James: I think when you’re a big volume and when people frequently fatigue is a big factor, so for us it’s been giving our people or consuming our emails options about how and when they consume them. So for example, by default we send people 2 emails a day based on where they are, but the minimum that you get when you originally sign up is 2 emails a day. So the content is different in both of them. About 12 months ago we introduced a project to give people an option to receive one email a day. And that was a logical step to churn mitigation, to … people, the last mail is always on subscribing, and that’s been really successful in giving a personalized solution to these people to personalize both in the way they consume it but also in the content of it, because it’s personalized for the individual, which is an algorithm that we’ve built in house. I think one of the also the biggest challenges is when you’re sending over a million emails a day is stepping outside of the boundaries of the people that control who sees the email, so our friends at Google and our friends at Yahoo and etc., when you’re sending that volume of email, if you send more they don’t get it because they, say, “Well you’re already sending a million. Do you really need to send them that many more?” So you have to operate in a fairly narrow channel of when your volume and scale you need to make sure you’re sending … you’re keeping consistent with that. I think also in terms of personalization, that’s the massive thing as I mentioned in terms of how many emails people are getting every day, but also in terms of the content. The more you can get the user to put their hand upon or what kind of content they’re going to see, the more credibility you’ve got in their inbox. So I think when you’re looking at such a big number, a million is, you forget that there’s an individual user on the end, so focusing on making sure that the big numbers get there, but making sure they’re relevant to an individual user is a constant challenge. Because even if you segment them down to groups, your top 10 % of purchases are still a big group. So you’ve got to keep focusing on the individual. John: I think that’s really cool, that relevance in any level, relevance when you’re small, when you’re big, that seems to be the biggest thing. What you’re trying to do is just work out rather than doing it manually, which is what someone in the smaller situation might do, you have to create these algorithms, it’s like Google’s algorithms, that figures out what to send to who. James: Yeah. And for a small business they create the relevancy because they know they have the better relationship with the audience. They can afford to build a closer bond with those people because it’s a smaller number of them. For us, that job is done by math, but for a small business I think it’s the classic know your audience and know you’re sending too and respond to their wants in the way that they want to be communicated via email. John: And then you’re sending 2 emails a day. You find that that works for most people? James: Yeah, definitely. It’s the context of how people receive things nowadays. For us, we’ve created a habit of people checking an email between 6:30 and 8:00 in the morning on the commute, increasing those people to checking it via their mobile phone. And then potentially following up with some of that content to reinforce the things you really want them to see. But also varying some other content within the second email around that light morning period when they’re starting to think about lunch time or there’s time to wind down and they got a bit more personal time at work. We’re very cyclic so our Monday to Friday is the beast that feeds us, when people are at work and commuting and they’ve got to access to these devices and they want to switch off of whatever they’re doing when they’re in the office. Those mobile devices have made it easier for people to check these kind of things. Making sure that messaging is consistent between the 2 daily emails and getting them back to the site where that purchasing is spiking around early morning and then you get, you see another spike around lunchtime, and then increasing in the evening with mobile and tablet devices. A lot of people are sitting in front of the TV and having a bit of a browse or rechecking the email they saw earlier in the morning and flicking between the content of the two and then purchasing between 6:30 and 8:30 PM. So if you’re an ecommerce business you’ve got to try to think about that immediate conversion of those devices and when they are likely to be looking at it, and on what device, and when are they going to have the time to make that purchasing decision, and who’s involved in it. High value stuff tends to sell in the evenings with the more impulse stuff tending to sell quickly in the morning, because it’s a snap decision which is easier to make on a mobile, or a tablet, or a desktop. John: But if you’re buying a holiday to Bali or something you’re going to have to think about it at least for a day. James: Yeah, yeah. You know what else folks, we’re not the only decision makers as well in that. You usually got to ask for permission, don’t you? John: Absolutely. One thing I found interesting there is you’re timing emails based on when you think people are going to be checking them, which they’re on the train to work, there are many … If you knew when everyone was on the toilet, which unfortunately that’s that probably at random during the day, but that would be another great time I imagine. James: Yeah. I haven’t gone that much in depth into our purchasing behavior, but we’ve found some really interesting stuff. Adult products funnily enough have a higher open rate on mobile, and it’s pretty obvious why, you want a bit of privacy. So you’ve got to think about what your product are and what is the likely behavior you’re going to initiate with people and when and where and how are they going to access it. So if your product has something a bit sensitive then mobile is probably going to be it. But if it’s something such as a holiday or a high value transaction, you’re going to want to know what other decisions makers who are involved in that and what information do you need to get that conversion down the funnel, what information do you need in your email, and what information do you need on your site to sell something. John: Now I want to step back to deliverability for a second. When you’re at that level, deliverability is a huge issue of whether you can get that email into the inbox. I suppose what are some of the most surprising things you’ve learned about how to get good deliverability? James: Pay someone to do it. We spend a lot of money on email. The ROI we get on is about 78 times of what we spend on it. When it is 78 times. But when your volume you’re walking the tight rope of subject lines, make sure you’re not including stuff that might get you on a black list or spammed both from an algorithm point of view and from the email providers such as pharmacy or some of the drug products and things like that. Make sure that you can probably change it up as well. So consistency in terms of the time and the messaging and the branding. John, you take your emails with who they’re from at the beginning in little brackets, and that creates that recognition that it’s from a trusted source. But after a while fatigue may sit in. You change your subject lines, you can put icons on them, you can put little things in there that make sure that people are opening them and not necessarily spamming them. Because if people start to spam your email you may think it’s getting there, but it may not be. Make sure you’re consistent, but you’re changing it up to keep the audience interested. John: So some of the tech stuff because I said to you earlier that before we recorded that someone had asked me about SPF records and all the tech stuff, which I have no idea about, but there’s a lot of tech stuff that goes into when you send an email such as I think it’s in the headers, the IP address, the SPF stuff. You’re saying instead of worrying about all that stuff just pay someone whether it’s half million dollars or a million dollars a year like whatever you have to pay them, pay them to do it and then you can just focus on doing the simple stuff. James: Yeah, I think that applies at any level. I think you focus on your audience and the message you want to serve them and you get other people to make sure it gets there. Email is a channel. Facebook is a channel. We pay Facebook to make sure people see our messages, but we focus on the message, and to us email is no different. You focus on the message in the audience and make sure someone else gets it there. John: The interesting thing about deliverability I find is that mostly it just amounts to sending stuff to people who actually want to read, like there’s always hacks and you can pay these companies and use these little things putting icons in the subject line, but in the end of the day you have to be sending stuff to people who want to read or your deliverability is just going to go down. James: Yeah. And it’s all about engagement, open rate and things like that are really vanity metrics. You can pat yourself on the back about a high open rate, but if no one clicked on the contents of it, then all you had was a clever subject line and you hit someone at the right the time. Yeah, you’ve got to make it the right stuff. But it’s all about the user, or the customer, or the prospect, and how they want to interact with it. We’ve done stuff on the fly as well. Think about the context of what people are consuming your product. It was raining in Oakland, which it often does one day, and we’ve got the ability to pull together a page that says a load of products from the site pertains to a rainy day, your raincoats and your umbrellas and things like that. And then we send them an email saying, “You know it’s raining outside,” because it was. Your open rates are high and subsequently your engagement is high because you sent a relevant email in the context of what’s happening right outside the window. So you’re making that little bit of extra effort to connect with those people based on the context of where they are. Not everyone’s got the ability to do that, but if you know their location of where users are and you maybe know something is happening in the general area or there’s a major event around it use it because you’re giving people context for what they’re doing and they’re more likely to open your email than the other 10 that are sitting in their inbox at the same time. John: The rest of them, they’re not relevant, they’re not as relevant as saying it’s raining right now. James: No, you’re reading their mind, don’t you? John: Yeah. James: Well, well. John: How does he know that? James: I know it’s raining. Yeah, it’s just that other layer that other people don’t have that you can add onto the context and you’re going to be the one who cuts through the inbox. John: What about mobile email design? Are you sending … and then related to this is HTML versus text email, what are you finding … because you have the data to back this up, what’s working for you in terms of email design, template design and then also when you send emails to mobile phones? James: Yes, so mobile is very much be careful what you change if you’re already sending something, but also focus on the imagery. With mobile for our site the mobile traffic on the site mobile users on average visit twice as many pages as desktop users. Hypothesis or anecdotally say you know well the scroll is the factor and it’s a lot easier to click and browse with your thumb. But with mobile email the visuals on a small screen size are far more important. And if you’re not sending responsive emails or things that people can consume easily on the 50 plus devices that are probably most commonly used in your marketplace, then you’re doing your user a disservice. The other thing that we found is while in a lot of developed markets Android and iPhone are very similar in terms of the number of devices out there, iOS and Apple is where a lot of people are purchasing. So if you really have to focus on one thing, all our evidence is that across a few different verticals and businesses focus on the Apple user because they’re the ones who are going to pay the bills. John: That’s probably a good assumption. James: Right, if you spend 1000 bucks on a phone then you’ve got something, don’t you? John: Right. If you go get a cheap Android phone well you’re probably not going to spend that much money on stuff. James: Yeah, and Apple also gives you a pretty consistent platform whereas Android when you start to develop or if you’re trying to be cute and focus on certain devices it’s still pretty fragmented. If you have to focus on one thing with mobile make sure it’s responsive and make sure the Apple users are well looked after. John: Another thing too which is probably worth pointing out is congruence from the start to the end of the process. So from the subject line whatever it says has to relate to the content of the email. And whatever the content of the email says has to relate to the content of the page that you’re linking to. Some emails, I’ve seen sites do this, they write all about something very specific in the email and then they link it to the homepage and leave you to figure out where there the hell to go to find whatever they were talking about in the email. By that point you just close the tab and you’re off. James: Yeah, definitely. I think we’re pretty lucky on ecommerce sites you’ve got a pretty short funnel from the email into the page, whereas a few other sites with probably more complex sells you’ve got to keep that consistency all the way through. But consistency of your inventory you copy your text, your pricing, all those things that are essential to capture that user, because they’re making those decisions under a kind of 30 seconds window to whether they’re going to buy it not. And you’re not going to convert everyone. The go to ecommerce is 5%, so if you’re getting that 5 out of 100 then you’re doing well, but you’ve got to have that consistency in every element all the way through the button color and all those kind of things. But people know, people need a clear cool direction on all those points from subject line through email onto a site when they’re buying and putting their credit card or whatever other details in there. But consistency in all those elements is crucial. John: I’m curious, we’re just coming up to time soon, but someone is listening to this, now some of these issues like deliverability and going and paying somebody to do that for them, I guess that’s essentially what’s happening when you go and use Aweber or MailChimp, one of those companies, you actually assign your deliverability to them? James: Yeah. John: One thing I’ve seen some people do is they bring that in-house, they go and get a private server with HostGator or something like that and then drop on SendGrid or private email software. Do you recommend doing that or you’ve said before that that’s … You didn’t really like that idea. James: No. John: No. Why not? James: That’s a terrible idea. The tools out there are so cheap and accessible. Mailchimp is basically free. They make it pretty easy to set up something to make sure it gets there and also tell you what happens. And telling you what happens whether it was effective is the crucial … and I commend anyone who sends emails to existing database or tries to build a new one, but you’ve got to know what happens in what they’re effective, and even if you don’t test anything and got to encourage people to test stuff at every level, but even if you don’t test anything, paying someone to make sure they get there tells you what happen when they get there is effort’s free. You got to make sure that someone else does it. John: So it’s like first focus on the engagement, focus on creating content that’s relevant in building that message and all those things. Once that’s done, once you’ve nailed that, and then you’re ready to scale. That’s when you start worrying about deliverability and looking into other solutions. James: Yeah, definitely. Once you’re at that scale you know about it, you are worrying about those small hinges that swing the big doors in, and when you are at scale improving your open rates slightly might improve your engagement, slightly might improve your click through, slightly might improve your conversions slightly, but if slightly is 1% for us that’s $100,000 a day so all those things become apparent when you reach scale. But if you’re starting, sending the right email to the right person and most importantly making an offer is where you got to start. John: This even applies to not just even people getting started, just people with smaller lists. You might have like a small business or a medium size business with a high customer value. It could be an architect or a property developer or something like that where the list is small but the people on the list spend huge amounts of money. So because you’ve got such a small list that 1% boost in open rate it’s not worth worrying about right now. The more important point is you’re getting that message on target and making that offer. James: Yeah, definitely. Or you’ve got to be making offers consistently, but you got to be deriving value. In our business offering value to the people who are in our list is sourcing. And it’s obviously curating those things, because there’s a lot of them out there. They’re getting ahead with a lot of offers and all these different restaurants and stuff like that every day. They trust us to curate the best. So if you take that position of offering value to your audience by curation or giving them something they can’t get anywhere else, that doesn’t need to be offers. That could be expertise. That could be insights. That could the people behind the curtain. And if you’re in professional services, that might be tax advice, that might be legal advice that they couldn’t get anywhere else. But if our needs are a bit more and if you can fairly solve the problem make the offer. John: Cool. Well, we’re right on time right now. Before you go I just thought it would be cool to find out just one more question which is what’s the most or maybe the most or the top 3 most counterintuitive things you’ve learned in working on sending that many emails a day? James: Whoa, you put me on the spot, counterintuitive … Shit, John. John: Let’s just go on. What’s the number one, just the most counterintuitive, the thing like where you’d never believe this about email? James: Honestly I can’t think of anything. John: Nothing? Daily email maybe. James: Nothing, I’ve got nothing. John: Maybe it’s the daily email, make regular offers because a lot of people when they hear that for the first time it’s just there’s no way that works. James: Yeah, I guess the most counterintuitive thing is sending a lot of emails, actually works for many people say you got to communicate and frequently and offer a lot of value and not necessarily sell anything. We send a lot of emails and we sell a lot of stuff and we make a lot of offers. So I guess to a lot of people that’s pretty counterintuitive. John: Absolutely. And if anyone is listening to this I am as you should think about what sort of business could they start like a massive business, not like a small niche site on something but a big business that could be built off the back of email like Daily Candy like GrabOne like any of these daily deals companies? Because I think there’s going to be more and more of this and there’s plenty of money up for grabs. Now you do, you mentioned before you do consulting. I don’t know if you want to talk about that now but before we go I always give my guest the chance to tell people where they can learn more and get in contact if they’d like to talk to you. Is there somewhere where the listener can go to learn more about you? James: Yeah, I’m a corporate guy and LinkedIn is to look for me. I have a small number of clients at the end of the month I’ve got space for one more. If you look for James Kemp on LinkedIn I’m there. I specialize in building automotive marketing systems for small businesses and using the expertise that we’ve built and the everyday testing of a big business like GrabOne. So if you’re looking for someone to do that then reach out and maybe we can work together. John: Cool, okay. So I’ll grab your link from LinkedIn and put that at themcmethod.com for the podcast. People can go there and just click over and it’ll make things easy. So thanks for coming on the show James. James: Cheers John. The post Episode #48 – James Kemp on Staying Out of Spam and Sending 1 Million Emails Per Day appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Mar 17, 2014 • 3min

How to Bribe Your Customers

In this episode, you’ll discover: 00:28 – how to find an opt-in bribe suited for YOUR audience 00:41 – why the e-book “status quo” sucks 00:53 – 2 bribe ideas you can implement in the next hour 01:13 – the head-scratching reason the length of your bribe DOESN’T matter – and what to focus on instead 01:20 – how most businesses “put the cart before the horse” in their funnel 01:44 – a weird bribe that worked wonders for LeadPages 02:26 – how to offer a bribe without creating ANYTHING new 02:56 – an easy way to stand out from your competition Tweetables: They’re gonna give you their email address – what are you giving them in exchange? Speed of execution matters a lot right now. Transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John: Okay – it is John McIntyre here again, the Autoresponder Guy from TheMcMethod.com for another email marketing update. Now, in this video, I am going to talk about bribes, marketing bribes. Some people will do e-books, you can do reports, you can do videos, you can do crash courses. Now, people ask me what is the best bribe? What is the best bribe I can offer to my list. Unfortunately, the real answer, the good answer is that you have to test, okay. So, a different thing is going to work better for different people, but that is not what you want here. What you want is something you can get started with today. Now, I personally do not like ebooks, I think they take way too long to create, and most people do not even read them. Some people will, but most people will not read them, okay. So, I would do a crash course. Which is basically my version of how to teach people how to do something, which does not give them so much that they do not need your help, but gives them enough so that they know that you are the expert. And how would you do that? With some sort of video or audio, okay, or a web sheet. Something that is really really quick and easy to create because what we really want right now is speed of execution. That matters a lot, okay. So, where does this come from? Where do you get the idea for the bride? Okay, so … what you want to do is, if you have not done this already, or if you do not have a good understanding of your marketplace, send out a survey and find out what the previous most painful objects are in relation to your niche. Whether it is weight loss in your market, feeding, even how to swim, you know, out by the river here. And then, create a brand based on that. So, I know I talked about Clay Collins of LeadPages and one of the webinars he has done. It was, I think, one of the best bribes you could do. It was the top five… It was like the top resources to help you do X. That is like a one-page PDF with five different things that probably linked to an Amazon buy-now page. It is such a simple thing to understand, that people will want to sign up for that. So, there is no secret here. You really want to be solving a problem with your brand, and ideally you want to do it as fast as possible. I think it takes so much longer to write an e-book. You can do a video in two minutes. You can create a video on how to solve a problem that matters. Sign up now and I will send you a free video of me explaining how to solve X. What I do with my list is I do not give a bribe away at all. I just tell them that I am going to send them daily email tips on how to do better recon marketing. Okay. That is what I do. You could do that as well. I am going to send you an email every three days. But you have to offer something. If they are going to give you their email address, what are you going to give them in exchange? That is all you need to think about. Based on understanding your market, and do it in a form that works for your personality. If you are good on video, do it video. If you are good on audio, do it audio. If you are not true enough, do it on audio. I would avoid just doing the e-book. Just eliminate that. That is what everyone else is doing. Forget about the e-book. Do a one-page crypt sheet or a five-page guide. Something really simple and really easy to create or just send out emails. Just tell them you are going to send out emails to teach them how to do acts. Okay. I am John McIntyre, The Autoresponder Guy. You are watching another email market update from the TheMcMethod.com. The post How to Bribe Your Customers appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Mar 16, 2014 • 3min

Inbox Preeminence: How to Become Your Market’s “Trusted Advisor”

In this episode, you’ll discover: 00:17 – how often you should email your list 00:34 – a puzzling pitfall most businesses fall victim to in their marketing 00:54 – the 7-letter word that will guide ALL your marketing decisions 01:05 – how to make email marketing FUN 01:19 – the “Facebook message” frame of mind you should use when mailing your list 01:32 – the difference between Broadcasts and Autoresponders 02:14 – a SUREFIRE way to lose your customers (STOP this habit today) 02:38 – how to mix up how-to and entertainment in your emails Tweetables: Email your list AT LEAST once per week. Email marketing, don’t take it too seriously. I send out articles, jokes, and stories. Transcript: Download PDF transcript here. OK, it’s John McIntyre here again, the Autoresponder Guy from themcmethod.com with another email marketing update. Now today, I want to talk about how often should you be sending your emails. This is a question that I get a lot. I send daily emails. If you sign up to my list at themcmethod.com, you will get an email a day for the next 70 days, almost 3 months. There will be more emails that that soon, I’m always adding more emails to it. So I send daily, but is that right for everyone? Well, probably not, OK? But I would say on average, typically when I speak to business owners about this, most people send far too few emails and not too many. Daily is perhaps too aggressive for some people, for some markets, just because the purchase cycle- people don’t want to hear from you that much. If you’re emailing CEO’s, really, really busy CEO’s, they probably don’t want a daily email ‘cause they’re too busy doing other stuff. First of all, they probably wouldn’t be signed up to all this in the first place if they’re that busy, OK? So you really want to understand who you’re trying to market to, but I would say at least be emailing people once a week. Ideally it’s a couple times a week with something helpful, entertaining, valuable. Email marketing- don’t take it too seriously. I tell all sorts of random stories. I tell…I’ll send out jokes. If I find a good article, I’ll just send out a link to that article. You don’t need to- don’t make it into a big deal or think it’s this massive thing that needs to be perfect. Just treat it the same way you treat it with your friends or on Facebook. You know, you find something cool, you send it to them. So if you find a cool link that you think people in your market, you know, need or would like to hear about, or you think it would help them in their business, just send it out. Don’t even think about it. Just send out that broadcast. Send out- so a broadcast…this is another video…the broadcast is a one-off email and an auto-responder is an automatic email that’s cued up. Just wanted to clarify that. You can send out these as broadcasts or auto-responders, it doesn’t really matter. The main thing that I want you to understand watching this video is you need to be emailing as- not as often as possible, but regularly. At least once a week, preferably more, OK? I mean, you just got to think about it like it’s a relationship. The longer you leave it, the longer you leave it without emailing people, the colder that lead becomes because they haven’t heard from you. They’ve got no reason to think about you. So if they think- if you email them once a month, like a lot of people, or less, like a lot of companies, what’s going to happen is half-way through that month, they think about, you know, they want to buy something that’s in your market. Who are they going to think about? Are they going to think about you, who emails them once a month or less, or are they going to think of one of your competitors who’s emailing them once a week with some sort of helpful newsletter? Think about it like that, OK? You want to be top of mind, you do not stay top of mind by contacting them once in a blue moon. You stay top of mind by contacting them regularly. This does not mean spamming. I’ll get to that in another video. This means providing useful, valuable information. Not just how-to information, but stories, entertainment, all this sort of stuff. All right; you’re going to learn all about this stuff at themcmethod.com, and you can sign up to my list and see how I do it, but that’s it for now. I’m John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy. You’re watching themcmethod.com email marketing update. The post Inbox Preeminence: How to Become Your Market’s “Trusted Advisor” appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Mar 15, 2014 • 55min

Episode #47 – James Schramko TEARS Apart The McMethod

James Schramko grows businesses SUPER fast. His team helps business owners with SEO, web development, and content marketing… …to go with his private business Mastermind, paid community, and several elite podcasts. ALL centered around exploding profits. His most potent strategy? Deconstructing revenue models. See – Exciting, shiny tactics (that the “gurus” love to sell you) only get ya’ so far. In this episode, you’ll get a front-row seat to a brilliant marketing mind tearing down revenue model STRATEGY. If you own a business with clients or customers, this is a gold mine. It’s also why Schramko’s businesses make 7-figures. Do you have hidden opportunities for profit windfalls in your business? Are you spending too much time chasing new clients? What are you the BEST in the world at? I asked James to come tear apart my business. …He pulls NO punches. So break out a legal pad… Ask yourself some profitable questions… And discover all the growth opportunities in your blind spot. This one just might double your business. In this episode, you’ll discover: why you NEED a recurring revenue model today the odd reason the McMethod was turning down 10 paying clients per week how to only concentrate on what you’re the best at one singular focus that lets James do 7-figures in SEO services annually the “SOP framework” to make your biz run without you how to give yourself a pay-raise by marketing to the Ritz (and ditching the Motel 6) a little-known trick to “filter” in ONLY customers who can pay you 3 steps to leverage your time with group “Masterminds” Mentioned: Schramko’s interview with Pat Flynn Schramko’s interview with John Dumas Schramko’s interview with Damian Thompson Silver Circle – Schramko’s private business mastermind Super Fast Business.com Think Act Get – Schramko’s podcast with Ezra Firestone Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John: It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with James Shramko. James came on the podcast in episode four to talk about how he gets 95% repeat customers without affiliates, promotions, JVs, or launches. You can find that at dropdeadcopy.com/ep4. Today, I wanted to bring James back not about marketing specifically, but because he’s recently been causing a bit of a stir on the Internet going on people’s podcast and really knuckling down onto their specific business and talking about their business model, and then breaking it down. He’s done with a few people, and it’s fascinating to watch. He did it with Pat Flynn. He’s done it with another guy, Damien Thompson from Linchpin. It’s just like a back and forth banter about what their business model is now and what he thinks it should be. It’s not just fascinating. It’s very, very helpful because then you start thinking what could I do in my own model. I thought I’d get James back to talk about this kind of thing in relationship to Drop Dead Copy, and the McIntyre method, and the email marketing podcast, and the whole thing. Because I’m in a stage right now where I’m trying to figure some of these things out. Rather than just do it on a quiet phone call I thought it would be really helpful to record it, turn it into a podcast, and it’s going to be helpful for anyone, I guess, who’s doing business online. That’s what we’re going to try to do anyway. How you doing today, James? James: Good, thanks, John. I’m glad you did invite me back. I always love to have discussion around business models. It’s something I do pretty much every week with business owners. The thing that I tend to gravitate towards, I guess, that’s why I couldn’t help myself when I was speaking to these guys on my own shows or on their shows eve is to ask them these questions. Sometimes maybe they haven’t even thought of that angle before. It is enlightening. Hopefully, we’ll come up with some cool stuff today. John: Okay, okay, cool. I’m just curious, when you do these podcasts with other people, are you intentionally trying to rile them a little bit and challenge them, or is it just you’re natural way of talking, you’re just saying what about this and what about that? James: Definitely, my default position is I’ve been direct before. In the case of Damien, I really wanted to break through there because he had such fixed positions on stuff. I really felt that it would be helpful for him to bust down some walls. In the case of Pat and with John Lee Dumas, it really fascinates me. These guys have a huge following, have huge distribution, but they under monetize themselves like crazy compared to their potential. It’s in both cases because they’re inexperienced, and they have a fair bit of fear around change, and they’re quite slow moving towards the business model that I think they would be crazy not to do. It generally intrigues me. When I had them on my show I wanted to talk about their business and where they’re at. In both cases, I think we arrived at the stage where they’re in their early phases, but I don’t understand why people don’t move to the later phaser much faster if the past becomes clear, so it was great to have that discussion and really insightful. I continue to have those discussions with both of them. John: I think what’s really interesting about this is that guys like John Lee Dumas and Pat Flynn they can be very successful in a way, yet they can be vastly under utilizing or under leveraging what they have which is very exciting when you put it that way. James: Phenomenally. In both cases, they’re under leveraging what they have and in different ways, I think. Pat is interesting. He has so followers. He has a moniker for his business that is kind of unrealistic. It certainly doesn’t appear passive the amount of effort that goes into it. What he does is he puts his best efforts into managing a Facebook fan page instead of having a business community that he could monetize for gazillions. That’s interesting to me. On the John side, he doesn’t love recurring payments. He thinks it’s overrated he told me on a tweet. He’s has a few good profitable months selling lifetime memberships, but then the big question is what next. I just see a huge opportunity there missed in a way. I also have done this in own business, and I’m talking about seven years ago or eight years ago. I used to giveaway lifetime memberships to a program. It was totally related to confidence and lack of experience. When you harness the recurring income machine that’s when business becomes amazing. I don’t think that it’s overrated. I think recurring income is phenomenal, and that’s why telco’s do it and credit card companies do it. There’re so many examples of recurring programs. To some extent, even if you own a car you’re on a recurring fuel program in a way. Having this thing that people need all the time is a good position to be in. John: Absolutely. I like this idea as well that if you can find those things like going from lifetime membership thing to recurring, you can find these little points in the business, these tiny little leverage points in the business which is so small but just one change can turn the whole thing and just put it on steroids. James: That was effectively one of the main changes I made. I used to promote a one-time product as an affiliate, and then I switched to promoting a recurring product. My income started snowballing because of this one change. It took from a reasonable income to dramatically better income. Then, when you start looking at how can you apply this to services, that’s when it gets really cool. One of the changes I made was to only offer a recurring subscription for services for packaged services rather than a one-time service for my main service. It very quickly built up into a $500,000 or $600,000 a year revenue just because the automatic product was actually a recurring subscription and that was the main way that it was sold. You can come to the market and change the game to some extent. I saw Vodaphone do this in Australia in the early ’90s when telephones were not sold on contract. They came to the market with contracts, and they had people sign up and go on contract to basically commit themselves for a long time on a recurring program. John: One thing I’m going to be wondering as we continue to talk about this is is there a right time to do it? Do you need to have a substantial user base or audience before you do it, or could you just start out from the outset with the recurring revenue model? James: You could start out from the outset. There are some people who say build up an audience, build up distribution, and then monetize it. That’s okay, and it’s great. It works for Amazon. It works for Facebook. It works for Twitter. It works for John Lee Dumas to some extent, getting that distribution. Here’s the thing. If you have distribution you’ll be able to monetize it at some point probably regardless. You can monetize it to a great extent all at once. However, if you can set up a nice recurring program in the beginning you can start getting the money from the beginning, and you can grow it and snowball it without having to go through that phase. Some of the big questions you’ll want to ask yourself is are you selling a one-time product because you lack the confidence to ask someone to commit to a recurring program? That’s a confidence question. Are you selling a one-time product because you haven’t really taken the time to understand your customer and find out what else they need and then get yourself in a position where you could be the one to offer that? John: How about we get into it? I was thinking I’ll tell the listener what my plan for Drop Dead Copy is and the business, and then we can talk about because I don’t have any recurring revenue model in place at the moment. This is what you mentioned on the podcast with Damien that I was in the profit market for recurring revenue, and it just kicked me in the face. What do you mean? I wanted to find out. I’ll talk about what my plan is, and then we can talk about how recurring revenue could apply to all that. Does that sound good? James: Yeah, let’s roll. John: Basically, I where I am right now, Drop Dead Copy, there’re 32 podcasts published. There’s a three-month email autoresponder sequence with daily emails. All that’s working really, really well. The traffic’s kind of okay. What’s been happening is I was doing client work up until about March this year, then I created the McIntyre Method which is a product which I charge $200 and $300 depending on what level someone does to teach them how to write autoresponders. When I created that then I tapered back the client works because I didn’t want to do it. I was just doing one-off things at a fairly low price at that point because I didn’t have as much confidence as I do now. There was the McIntyre Method, and then client work tapered back, and then I went to work in another business with someone I met in Chiang Mai. Now we’ve ended that project, and now I’ve decided to return all focus back to Drop Dead Copy because I’ve started to, I guess, I’ve started to dream a little bit and think if I was to really apply myself what could I turn it into. I think there’s a huge amount potential, but I have to really knuckle down on it. What I’ve been doing is I’ve been turning down clients for about six months. I usually tell them I’m booked up because that’s basically truth because I’ve been working on other stuff. I might get anywhere from two to five people a week, sometimes 10, asking if they can hire me. I’ve been just turning them down just saying, “Go join the waiting list. I don’t know when I’m doing client work again, if I’ll ever do it.” The problem is over the last month or two, especially since Bangkok when we had that conference, the DC conference, people have been saying, “You should start doing these services.” I don’t want to do phone calls. It’s a pain in the ass. I then have to communicate with clients by email, and all this just basically making excuses and being a bitch about it. I finally decided to give it a shot and launch an agency model. I don’t really know what prices to do or how to do the recurring thing. I was just going to try and sell an autoresponder for say 10K and charge someone 30 emails for $10,000. Then, what I’ve actually done this week is I’ve sent out a few emails for an offer where they get $3,000 for 10 emails per month, $3,750 for 15, or $6,000 for 30 emails a month. The ideas was that they would just pay for the emails. I’d deliver them, and that’ll be it. I’ve sent that out this week and I’m just watching the response now. The idea is no custom jobs, so I don’t have to get heavily involved in talking to the client and the emails in the McIntyre Method style, so clients pay for the brand, so to speak, basically to eliminate competition, all that sort of stuff. We just have a set framework or flow that we use for every single sequence, and we just execute it and it gets real easy. That’s the plan right now. It just started taking over in the last few weeks. I’m still testing the waters and trying to figure out what model, what offer, what people are really wanting. What do you think about that? James: How are they voting with what they really want with the order button? John: No one’s signed up for this offer this week that I’ve put out so far. It’s been out since Monday, but then I’m not sure if that’s is the list too small or it’s just the price is too high or too small? James: It might come down to who is your actual customer for that and what sort of problems are they having because you’re trying to create a solution. Let’s just back up a bit. One thing is with build-to-sell, one of the main elements to that is that the thing will have to work without you for it to be saleable. Do you have anyone else in your team at this point? John: No. James: Right. That’s going to be a major thing because that’s going to determine the type of business model that works for you. For example, if we look at my SEO business, I don’t want to be writing articles or posting them out there onto blogs, so I have a team that does that, and that allows me to sell package services that does not require me. Do you plan on bringing in a protégé or having some people who are able to create autoresponders using your formula and doing some diagnosis of the customer scenario? John: That was the idea. Someone signs up, I’m going to go and hire someone and then get them to write it. Actually, it was about two weeks ago I posted a blog post just saying I’m hiring. People would sign up with their email, and then I ask them all to write an email to me in the style I do for Drop Dead Copy on why I should hire them. I have I’d say at least 25 applications from some really, really high quality people. It’s a first time I’ve really been exposed to it. People are trying to win me over and send me tips and really try and get me to do accept them, to work with them. I have all these people who want to work for me now. Now it’s about finding the right model so I can give them all work. James: Beautiful. That opens up options. If you have a team, then that means that you could actually tap into both types of, typical economies, there’s the work for the hour type economy. You could literally sell hourly time as a package. That’s one of the things we sell at our website company. We sell hourly packs. For example, you could sell a package that is certain number of autoresponders or certain amount of time that people could spend going over or reviewing or rectifying current autoresponder services. You could put that under a recurring plan You always looks to other examples for validation of this model. In the IT industry, there’s maintenance packages where people spend certain amount of hours updating or cleaning or servicing the servers and making sure the technology works. In your case, you could have an autoresponder rescue pack. It’s like five hours. We will diagnose your existing autoresponders, we’ll create a recommendations report on what we think needs changing, and then subject to your approval then we’ll implement the changes till the end of the five hours. On the checkout page, you can actually have the ability for them to select multiple five-hour packs, say two, or three, or five five-hour packs because you might in their report say that we recommend all of these changes, and we will complete as many as we can in the remainder in the five hours. However, we recommend you purchase another 10 hours for us to complete everything there. Basically, you’re doing a paid gap analysis, and then getting paid to implement. That works really, really well, and it’s a totally valid model. Initially, you might do it, and document all of the steps you’re doing in a standard operating procedure, and then have your protégé step in and start doing this for you. John: Okay. James: The other thing you can do is sell by the result. You could say, “Buy this package and we will give you X number of emails,” which is where you’ve arrived at the moment. I’m just wondering if quantity of emails is relevant or not or if there’s some other measure of success that a customer would value more highly. Maybe it is that you could result in them building their list faster or perhaps you could increase the open and click through rates on their current lists. There’re all these sort of offers that might be more interesting to a customer. John: Yup, okay. James: Think about how they would judge your work and do they find impressive. There’ll be metrics that are different, and this is the challenge that you may have had with custom work is that every customer will have a different way to measure your success. John: Yeah, yeah. James: Some of them won’t really give you much judgment at all, others will be whether it impresses their boss, others will be if it actually sells more stuff, others will just want to feel that they’re not getting ripped off. People have different success things. You also have the options to slide between done-for-you and do-it-yourselfers. The done-for-you is they’re going to want to pay you money and you solve all their problems and they don’t want to be involved in it. They don’t dedicate a lot of time and energy to it, so you’re working totally on the result there. Then, the do-it-yourselfers probably they would like you to teach them how to do stuff. This is where you go into a recurring program that may not be fully serviced based. It might have an element of information. It could be a master class. It could be delivered over 10 weeks. It might be a 10-week master class that they pay for over two or three payments. Now you’ve created a recurring information product at a higher price point. It may not involve you delivering anything live. It may involve you having prerecorded modules that they watch, and then you amazingly have an autoresponder that delivers the modules, and then you can invite question and answers which might be via email. It might be email coaching. It might be via a forum. It might be via a Q&A webinar that you hold once a month, for example. There’re so many ways for you deliver your expertise. The main thing is focus on what you are absolutely the best in the world at there, and start bringing on a team so that they can learn the system and apply it for all the ways that you need to test till you find something that sticks really well. Then, have a look at when you are pricing, have a look at annual programs that people could pay in phases. They could pay annually, they could pay quarterly, or they could pay monthly. I’ve been messing around with some of those different payment frequencies. It’s really interesting to discover what happens when you do that. I’ll give you a few tips on that. One tip is get your first customers, get them grandfathered in or locked in at a low rate than your eventual customers so that they feel like every month or every quarter that they’re being billed. They feel like they’re winning because they took a bet on you early in your life cycle. Because in a year from now or two years from now who knows how powerful you’ll be in the space. You’ll be looking back at your first programs thinking, “Geez, I undersold myself there. I was too cheap,” but your customer will be thinking, “This is like me buying a Van Gogh painting before he was famous. I got in at the ground level and I’ll never let my subscription lapse.” If you think about it, I’m looking for examples outside I want to go to a webinar plan that I purchased seven years ago, and it’s a $100 a month or $1,000 a year, something ridiculous, for a 1,000-seat webinar. These days it costs hundreds per month. I would never let that subscription go because it’s such great value and it’s so much cheaper than to replace it with the new version. John: Okay, okay, right. It’s positioned differently as well because you’re grandfathered in. James: I always do this with my recurring subscriptions. I’ve done it with my services. I’ve done it with my coaching communities. I’ve done it with my mastermind. The longer term loyal members got in, they took a risk on me, and I repay them with loyalty. Each year I get better, and our service improves, and we refine our ability to deliver results and the rates go up because it’s worth more in the marketplace. Everyone’s a winner in that scenario. John: One thing I just thought of when you’re talking about building the team was how do I pay them in terms of what’s the model? I was thinking if I’m just going to do autoresponders maybe that’s too simplistic it sounds like. I was just going to say I’m going to pay you per email, so I’ll pay you $30 per email, $50 per email, and you just write X number of emails for you. It sounds like what I really need is someone to come on and really understand the entire system and they put in 30, 40 hours a week for a salary, and then I get them trained up so they can deliver this the autoresponder rescue pack or those different things. James: This is where you pull out a Google docs or a spreadsheet and you start factoring your costing model. This is something I would regularly do with a mastermind student. When you’re working out how to package services you need to know how long does it take to do the service and how much are the equivalent rates for the service out there in the marketplace. There’re a few ways to cost something. You can do a cost plus profit margin which is pretty typical in a retail market. You might say to write an autoresponder takes one hour, for example. I don’t know how long it takes. I’m just making that up. Maybe say it takes two hours. Let’s say that you would have to pay somebody who’s half good at writing $20 an hour if you’re getting a really good writer in a student environment or something. It might cost you $40 to write one autoresponder. The cost plus profit margin might be $80. You would sell it for $80. You want 100% profit margin, right? John: Yup. James: Now then you’d say a good well written autoresponder might cost me this much, this is how much I want to sell it for, and then you can start packaging them together and having bulk discounts and you can put them on a long-term contract. Now you can work out should I be hiring people per order autoresponder or should I be paying per hour because you get someone good over time they’re going to improve their performance by about 20% as a baseline because they get more in the routine, they get some comfy job security, they enjoy it, they’re good at it. Now they can basically have that stability that comes with being an employee, and you know that you can get a good effective rate per finished autoresponder. It might be lower than hiring a freelancer. If you’re paying $20 an hour for a freelancer, chances are you can probably pay $7 an hour for a full-timer because you’re taking more risk. You’re committing to a longer contract. In the case of my team, I’m committing to perpetual employment of more than 50 people, so I’m taking the risk. My risk is that I can buy all this labor. I can buy whatever it works out at, 500 hours of labor a day, and then I have to be able to package that. I have to use that labor into packages that I can then resell for a profit margin. The good news is that it works out for me that I can do that, but I couldn’t do it if I was hiring them piecemeal or per unit. There’s only a few roles in our company where we’ll pay per unit and that might be per press release or per article. They’re very similar to an autoresponder. It’s up to you to work out a job agreement that works for. Do you want full-timers? Do you want some part-timers? What part of the world are they going to live in? What level are you going into the market at? Are you going in the IM market or are you going into the high end commercial lawyer retail market? Because you could sell autoresponders for thousands to those customers and you’ll probably sell them for tens of dollars for the low end of the market. John: I want to go to the top end. James: Go for the top end of town. That’s where you should focus. That’s where my resellers are focused. They’re selling to real businesses. Here’s the other thing, are you selling wholesale or retail, and that’s why you really have to work out who is your customer? Is your customer a reseller who’s dealing with the end user having that end relationship? Because if you’re doing that then you’re going to be deal with the same people over and over again. You’re not going to have the relationship with the end customer, but you’re not going to have all the hassles that comes with that. You’re not going to have to answer all these questions or educate them from scratch because your reseller does that. That’s what they’re doing as the retail. They’re actually handling all the customer service. You’ve effectively outsourced your marketing, and now you’ve become the supplier. That’s your special skill set. Now if you want to retail these, just keep in mind that you’ll have to consider some things like customer support. At the moment, it’s you and you’re going to get bogged down really quickly with crappy stuff like what do I get, how much is it. Every time someone asks you that make a video or an audio about it and put it on your FAQ page and build out your library of answers to every possible question that you could ever be asked which is where we’re at now with our SEO stuff. We have FAQ pages. We have glossaries. I have stacks of videos that answer what is the difference between blah and blah. Then, you’re going to need to scale up support. For support, it’s not expensive to do this. You set up a Zendesk or similar. You make sure that it’s under your branded name, and then you hire someone to run it. You quickly train them as much as you can to handle support because that’s what’s going to get you busy unexpectedly is support. A lot of people with my business say, “Your support team is amazing.” It’s no coincidence. That’s because I came from a high level brand. I understand that it’s frustrating when you can’t get anyone to talk to you or to explain something. The secret to our recurring business, and I will credit Dean Jackson for helping me on this concept, is to continually focus on keeping that customer that already have instead of continually chasing new ones. If you just look after the ones in your system, and that’s where support’s really important and lots of other little techniques you can do and that’s a more advanced topic, but you’ll be diverting a lot of your attention onto retention rather than acquisition once you have a recurring model in place it will be that valuable for you. Instead of having to be out there promo-ing and firesaling and jamming orders into the final discount sale or cyber Fridays or Black Mondays or whatever they are, you’re going to now just sit back, relax, coast along. If you’re lucky enough you’ll end up with the business like mine where there’s so little pressure and hype involved in making sales. It’s really just looking after the people you’re already dealing with game. That’s such a better game. John: Absolutely. Then, I start listening to podcasts on one-time speed instead of two. James: Yeah, you can chill a bit, take your time, enjoy it like a fine wine or a good meal. You don’t want to rush that down. John: It’s all those vegetables. One thing I’m really interested in is I can see how the model could work. Let’s say once you have something up and running whether it’s a rescue pack or any sort of package like that, once it’s running it seems like it’s fairly easy to fee the rest out. You’re just ironing out the kinks. The initial part, like I’m just not sure about that. Am I meant to be let’s say coming out with five or 10 different packaging or offers, and then just putting them all on one page or sending them out at different times and just seeing … basically chucking out different types of bait and seeing what people buy it? James: It’s not ideal. It’s not really the minimum viable product start up thing doing that. Really, you should be working more with your customer’s problem like Gary Halbert was famous for saying, “All I want is a starving crowd.” What are people starving for? What do they already ask you for? That’s a good indicator rather than you having to guess. John: Once I’ve done that, once I’ve let’s say I’ve gone into my email inbox and I’m looking at people who have emailed me with questions in the past to warm leads or whoever they are and I have a list of things. How about this package? This package looks like it’ll solve … James: Hang on a sec. Are you getting people asking you to teach you how to write autoresponders who have bought your product, or are you getting people so say can you just do my autoresponders for my business, or they say I have someone in my business could you tell me if they’re any good or not or train them? What sort things are they asking you for? John: The most common one would be someone who says … usually, they don’t seem to know much about it, but they’re like I want to set up autoresponder for my business when can we talk? It’s a very vague thing. James: Do they want you to do it, or do they want you to show them how to do it? John: I would say in most cases they’d want me to do it. They want to get on the phone and they want me to suggest some sort of solution. When I was doing client work six months ago I would get on the phone with them, and I’d just talk to them, find out what their problem is, and I’d tell them, “How about we do this? We’ll do a 10 email autoresponder,” and then they’d pay me to do it. James: Right. Simply you just an offer, and then a system to cater for it and get your funnel cranked up. It might look like this, you might have a page on your site with a video of you saying, “Hi, your business is probably underperforming, blah, blah, blah.” You know all the reasons and the hooks and everything. “The next step, if you want to sort this out is to apply for our autoresponder fast start program. In that program we will find out more about your business, design an autoresponder sequence system that works for you. We will install it and you can expect these sort of results. If this sounds like what you’re after apply here. Have them apply and pay some money. You need a trip wire here to stop yourself wasting time with people who aren’t right for the program. The deposit will count towards the service. As a minimum … like you could do something like a paid report, and we do this our SEO. People pay us to go and look at their site and tell them what’s wrong with it and what we do to fix it. We include that as a rebate against any service. If they don’t buy something, then they have a great value report. Okay? John: Okay. James: You could have … the first step is you order autoresponder diagnosis report. That’s where you tell us what your business is right now, what if any autoresponders you currently have or how you’re communicating them, what system you use, and we will give our professional opinion. They fill out this form. They pay the money, so now you have a qualified lead. Then, someone in your team who you’ve hand trained in the beginning will go through a check list, and they’ll fill out the answers for all of the things that they could then give to you. Now at the first time you’re dealing with anything you have a paying customer who’s already paid you and someone on your team has delivered you the things. Then, you teach them what you’re going to do as a result of those. You create a system for finding out the hook, structuring the emails the way you like, formatting them, integrating them into whatever CRM system they have, if any, or recommending that they use your affiliate link to join one so that you can go and set it up. Then, you send back the report and you say, “Here is what you need to do, etcetera, etcetera, and here’s how you get started on the program.” You have a monthly program or a quarterly program that says you roll out phases. Phase one will be designing the autoresponder sequence. Phase two will be implementing it into the system. Phase three will be running it, split testing it, and coming up with improvement suggestions. Phase four is leverage where you take all the things you’ve learned and add the next layer of triggers and responses. Phase five is you go and rewrite all the autoresponders and check the analytics in the click tracking and so on. You have 10 phases that you take people through that loops around and around and around and just goes on until they say stop. John: Okay. You do the phase. You write, do all the emails. You deliver it, and then you go and reiterate, and then you’d reiterate, and they just keep paying by the quarter or by the year or whatever. James: It’s like when you buy a car. People think that’s the end, but that’s the beginning. From now on, you’re going to buying fuel, tires, insurance, registration. You’re going to service it. You’ll be buying spark plugs, oil hook, gear boxes, petrol caps. It refracts. It just goes on and on. Details. They come in thinking I need to get my autoresponder sorted, but is there much more you could do for that business once you’ve written those autoresponders? It’s not like you just write them, pop them in the system, and then leave it. If you think back, you did this originally for Lifestyle Business podcast, but they probably have other businesses. They have e-commerce stores. They have a membership community. They’ve changed the name of their site. Have they gone and revised all of those things? Are they optimizing everything that you could be doing if it was business? Probably not. It’d be time to reactivate those people. John: Okay. This is fantastic. I have tons of ideas now. James: I’m thinking that the best idea of all is aside from your services surely they would be space for a community of people who want to specialize in the craft of writing autoresponders and to be able to go and offer services like this to other businesses which you could then have them buying your wholesale service. John: You mean they would come in, they would go through, say, my product that would teach them how do it, or they would just go and sell the service? James: Yeah. Let’s say you have the, by the way, do you like how you kept talking about the rescue pack? Because even though I mentioned it once it was so catchy you can’t help but remember it? John: When you give a name to something like that it’s that hook. James: That’s right. You come up with a catchy cool name for community. I use the word community because that’s what we want to build, but we want to make it something really cool. There’re lots of different names out there for communities. I’m actually building a brand new community now. It’s such a cool catchy name that I love the name so much I get emotional and warm and fuzzy about wanting to create it. You create an amazing community which is really dedicated to the craft of Autoresponderology, whatever that happens to be, all of the encompassing elements. It has a blend of copywriting. It has a blend of technological understanding, a bit of persuasion and psychology. You specifically dedicate this community to the aspects that every business really finds appealing and that is that the idea that they need to capture and record onto their database, and then have a sensible communication with that person that will increase sales. Then, you go beyond just that initial capture. It’s how do you reactivate old people. It’s how do sell more to your existing customers with cross promotions, and how do you even get customers referring and promoting. You’re going to have these seven layers of autoresponder graduations that people could go through and you could have modules in a community. You could charge them a fee. It might be $39 a month. It be join in our community. We will teach you to go beyond the surface, to go past where most people go with deep insights into these seven different areas. Not only that, we’re going to show you how can turn this into an amazing business for you. Once you know how to do this you will be the hottest thing going to any business owner, especially if they’re not doing a fraction of this which pretty much every business falls into that category. Should you want to go out there and hook up customers and if you find yourself swamped and you can’t keep up with it, then you can come and buy rescue pack hours or whatever you want. Like you can provide them the services then that let’s them have it all done for them because effectively you’re they’re surrogate team. You’re the backend because you’ve gone and figured it out. You’ve hired. You’ve trained. You’ve systemized. You’ve SOP’d. You’ve set up the system. They’re not going to do that because they’re not John McIntyre. They’re going to be focused on business development and marketing. You have your marketing team in place, and you’re training them, and they’re paying you to learn. John: Yup, okay. This is a lot like what you do with fast way of forming an inner circle. James: Fancy that. My very best customers they will pay me, when I say that I’m being cheeky. They invest in themselves. Let’s be clear on that. They invest in themselves to learn from me how to grow their business and where they need help beyond their potential or capacity I step in with a service that can provide everything through website development, hosting, and search engine optimization. There are services I don’t provide. I don’t provide autoresponder or CRM services. If someone like you did, guess who’s customers are also your customers? John: Why don’t you do any autoresponder stuff? That’s just not your key area? James: It’s not my key area. I think I write a reasonable email. We spoke about this on my podcast about I have a different approach than a lot of other people. I’ve really gone into behavioral based triggers and sequences. I do a lot of fresh content with my own racecourse. I can’t do everything. I’ve tried. I’ve done a bit of pay-per-click advertising. I’ve done a little bit of social media stuff. It takes a lot of energy and effort to grow an entire business around it. We’ve done well with SEO. We do over a million dollars a year in sales revenue for that. Our website development and hosting is my current focus, and we’re really kicking some butt there. We’ve very quickly busted through the six figure mark and we’re on our way to seven. Again, to do eventually single splinter I’m just one guy. I still have a very successful mastermind and Internet business community to work on. They’re my passion spots, I suppose. They’re the ones where I’m really putting a lot of my focus on next year. There’s a lot of gaps for other people. You want to go and be a Facebook agency, you will kill it with my audience. You want to be a pay-per-click expert, you will kill it with my audience because I don’t those things. There’re hundreds, like there’re literally hundreds of people. It’s like your friend Ben who’s in the podcasting area. He wants to do this sort thing in that space. He’s going to smash it because it’s just getting started. So many opportunities. That’s why I think if you’re looking for building a recurring revenue business, then you just think what’s your special ability, what are you known for, how can you structure it so that you’re not doing every single piece of it, and what are people asking. I reckon it will come down to a do-it-yourself program that you can get people to pay you recurring for you to teach them the subtleties around it whether you create an autoresponder training for it or a community. Then, there’ll be the done-for-you services where you package things up in a way it might also work for retailers. John: Okay, okay. One thing I wanted to ask you about before we go is these mastermind things. I actually ran a mastermind with a couple of people. We finished two weeks ago. I charged them $1,000 and we jumped on the phone once of twice a week. It ends up being that I would just review their emails. By the end of it, they were really happy. I’d get on and review one of their emails for half an hour, and then other one for half hour, and that’ll be that. What do you think about that? To me, that’s like … James: Did you enjoy it? John: I enjoyed it, but showing up for the calls annoys me. That’s just a personal thing I think. James: What was your effective hourly rate for it compared to the other things you do? John: Quite high. James: All right. What if you had 30 people paying $2,000 or $3,000, let’ say 30 people paying $3,000 for a three-month course? John: Yup. James: You’d have $90,000. Is that right? John: Yeah, yeah. James: If $30,000 a month? It’s $1,000 a day and you just have to speak them maybe once a week for an hour. John: Yup. James: That’s an unleveraged way compared to what you could do, but it’s still not bad, right? John: Absolutely. One thing, this will be a whole new conversation, maybe we’ll have to do another time, but the mastermind thing. I wouldn’t know how to a mastermind with 30 people. James: I do. I’ve set this up for so many people, like dozens of people. Everyone from Ezra Firestone through Jen Sheehan, Victoria Gibson. There’s so many. It’s always worked well. It really comes down to if you enjoy it and how profitable it is. It’s something that I enjoy. The reason I enjoy it the most is because it really sharpens me up. Another reason I enjoy it is I tend to have my very best customers, so that I get to talk to them every week. It’s like paid CRM. They’re paying me. I get to turn up and give them massive value. I learn a lot in the process, and then I’m able to provide every kind of service that they really need and that will solve their problems. It tends to work out really well for me and for them. John: That’s what I found. Apart from the fact that I had to wake up in the morning and show up to the call I had a blast. It was great. I learned so much about some of the core problems that people are having when they’re sitting down to write emails. It’s fun building the relationships with people who you’ll never probably meet, but you were able to help them get better results in their business. It was very satisfying and fulfilling. I think … James: Here’s the thing. Like in a leverage sense, I did this with Mark Rhodes for PPC and we called it Superfast PPC. I did it with another guy called Andy who’s a superaffiliate. We called it Superaffiliate Master Class. I think we sold 30 or 40 people at $3,000 each. We did 10 weeks. I recorded the whole thing, and then sold it as information product for hundreds of dollars. John: When you get on the phone call with them, are you getting on a phone call with 30 people? James: Yeah, you set up a GoToWebinar or GoToMeeting depending how many people. You have a framework. In this case with those courses, we just did a 10-week course. We did PowerPoint presentations, and I wasn’t even the subject matter expert. My role was to get bums on seats, make the sales, organize the expert, run the thing, record it, and prosper. I still have those courses inside Fast Web Formula which people can now pay a monthly fee to access. I’m still getting recurring revenue from that work from a few years ago. You know why I did that in the first place? I did it for one of the reasons you touched on in this call. I did it to see if I could make Silver Circle work without me in case I wanted to sell that at some point. The proof of concept was successful. Yes, I can. Then, I would switch back to me being the expert and running it like that in its current iteration. I am the talent in that. I don’t have a prestructured call each week, but I do one-on-one work in the background to help people map out their quota and we push through that and the results people get are just off the Richter scale. We say, “Okay, you want to do a mastermind.” I give the exact blueprint. I show them every single step of the way, and then I make sure that I crack the whip every single week that they’re implementing and getting progress. It cannot fail if they do what we talk about. That’s the result that I’m delivering. My result that I would like deliver anyone is that they will double their business within three to six months. That’s a very typical result in that environment because I have filtering in the first place. I’m only speaking to people who apply, who have watched the material, who feel they’re a good fit, and then I spend 20 minutes talking to them to make sure, and then I send them the link where they can purchase. They can’t just buy this. They have to apply. They have to be accepted, and I reject at least 50% of the people that apply who aren’t ready yet or aren’t a good fit for the program. That keeps the group solid. John: Interesting. One thing that I’m just really interested in, I know that I’m enjoying talking about this. I’m sure you are too because there’s probably people here who are listening who might want to join. One thing I’d really like to know is what when you get on the call? How you coordinate 30 people on a phone call with some sort of organization so you get something out of it? You ask someone to put up their hand or do you have a topic of the day? James: There’re a lot of ways you can approach this. You could prior to the call ask people to submit their best questions, and then you can consolidate them and find out which ones are going offer the most value to the most people, and you can cover them as some bullet points. You could preset modules that you want to cover each week, and then have Q&A time. At the moment, I run our mastermind call each week even in Fast Web Formula and we’ll get 30 people on there, but not everyone will want to participate but they love listening, and they like observing, and they like being there in real time, and they might like to chat a question as well. You can chat or you can have voice. In the case of my mastermind, I actually have three call times. I can address anyone in the world. I have early, mid, and late. That gets the US and North American market, and then the mid section tends to get the Aussies and people from Dubai and New Zealand, and then the late session I pick up Europe. I get the English people and the late Aussies and stuff. That way I usually have around about 10 or 11 people on each call. I don’t stop the call until we’ve spoken to every single person individually. We have a pretty simple format of what they’ve been up to last week. It’s really important to celebrate wins and to share successes so that everyone on the call benefits from 10 successes, something that worked for 10 people. They might share their best tip for the week. Imagine if you have a high level entrepreneur doing six or seven figures a year and they’re telling you the one thing they did last week that was amazing. If you pick up 10 of those a week you’re going to move forward. Then, we talk about what they’re going focus on for the next week. What’s the one thing and I really want to narrow it down to one thing because you can’t escape one thing. That will be the thing that moves the business forward more than anything else. If this was a mastermind call and it was turn right now I would say, “John, what are you going to do between now and next week’s call that is going to change your business forever?” It could be something like that you will sit down and plan out your recurring program or your recurring programs. I would suggest in your case you have the potential to do at least two, probably one of the do-it-yourselfers who want to pay you to be engaging with them with occasionally and perhaps a forum where they share ideas around autoresponders. You might want about 60 people to make that work and somewhere from $30 or $40 a month would be enough to get that going. You might want to do a high level done-for-you-service. The thing is the lower price do-it-yourselfer forum is probably less demanding on you than a service business in some ways because they will help each other. You have user contributed content. They answer each others questions. They form a community, and then you can do other stuff like an annual event which you’ve been to my event. You’ve seen the magic that happens when you get a community of people who know each other and bond well, the same as you’d find at the event we went to in Thailand. You get a community of people who share experiences. It’s a really satisfying and fulfilling thing to be a part of that. There are also income opportunities for you if you get it right to continue other services that you can offer these people, at least a great broadcasting platform for you to share what’s new with them. John: Okay. This has been fantastic. Thank you. Thanks for coming on and sharing about all this. James: I hope you have some … you probably have more questions than answers. My goal really, as you mentioned in the beginning, I’m looking to stir some thoughts here. I want to cause a bit of questioning, go back and test some of your assumptions, ask yourself some big questions because you’ll get some big answers. It might be something like how can I put together a program that works really well for my customer and solves their problem in an amazing way, they’re happy pay for, and that I don’t resent that I actually enjoy delivering. It might involve a few team members. There’s going to be a bit of work. I’m not saying this is a magic pill. However, I’ve really put a lot of time and effort into building communities and building service businesses in the recurring space. I have at least four now. I’m doing a fifth one or maybe it’s the sixth, I’m not sure, even down to hosting which is a recurring service that people really need and there’s a big gap in the market. Think about putting in the work up front because once you make that sale and the thing’s working it’s such a great flywheel to have spinning. It just throws profit off and everyone feels like they’re getting great value. John: Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. I have more questions than answers right now. I’m go away. I’m going to make that plan this week. James: I think the most important thing right now you should be thinking that the last thing you want to do is continue your job of exchanging money for writing emails in an unleveraged fashion. That’s has to go, for sure, right? John: That’s exactly where I’m at. I just wrapped up on these other project just before the conference in Bangkok, and now I’m like I want to find a way to grow Drop Dead Copy, but I don’t want to do any client work myself. I want to figure out a way, and of course, there’re plenty of ways, but I want to find a way to do it so I don’t write a thing because my job is to go and do the podcast and make connections and grow the business. James: You got it. That’s exactly what you can do, and that’s what your question might look like. John: Okay. Cool, man. Before we go, I tell people I’m sure they’re probably wondering where they can hear more about Fast Web Formula, Silver Circle, and all the podcasts you run as well. James: Probably the easiest place to go is just superfastbusiness.com. I put up podcasts and business videos, most of them lead somewhere, of course. You’ll get to see what I’m talking about in action. That is a really successful site for me. It’s only a year and a half old at the time of recording this, but it’s my primary place at the moment. It feeds all of my businesses which are on the products page. Even if you go and have a look and just see how it’s structured, but keep in mind that I’ve been able to build this business, I’m the only person in Australia involved in the business. My team are overseas, and they are mostly involved in running the services. I’m mostly involved in running the community. You can build quite a scaled business if you think about it from the customer’s problem point of view and how you can solve that without you having to do every step. Hope I see you over there, and thanks so much for being brave and asking yourself honestly some of the big questions that people hide from. You’re half crazy. You’ve invited me to come on your own show and critique your business model. I reckon you’ll get something from it too. John: I was a little bit nervous coming up to it. I know you can be a blunt guy, so I was wondering … I didn’t really know exactly what to expect, but I know that this sort of thing is so valuable. It’s incredible. The why not. Let’s do it. Let’s see what happens, and we’ll make a podcast out if. James: Cool. John: All right. Listen now, if you want to check out James’ videos its superfastbusiness.com. I’ve been watching them the last week. I was just saying to James that I’ve been doing it while I’ve been cooking dinner. It’s a great way to make use of that time if you have no one to talk to. It’s great content. You get some of the long podcasts an interview with a guest and some really short stuff, just short and snappy. Definitely check that out. I’ll have links to Super Fast Business in the show notes at dropdeadcopy.com. Thanks for coming on, James. James: Thanks, John. The post Episode #47 – James Schramko TEARS Apart The McMethod appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

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The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

Episodes

Mentioned books

The Power of Storytelling

What Is the Best Time to Send an Email?

Do You Know the Most Profitable Word in Marketing?

Episode #49 – Marcus Lucas on Putting Your Video Marketing on Email Steroids

The Simple Path to Become A Rock Star Copywriter

Steps to Build Your Email List Today

Episode #48 – James Kemp on Staying Out of Spam and Sending 1 Million Emails Per Day

How to Bribe Your Customers

Inbox Preeminence: How to Become Your Market’s “Trusted Advisor”

Episode #47 – James Schramko TEARS Apart The McMethod

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