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Our Guest:
Danny Iny is the Founder of Firepole Marketing (firepolemarketing.com), a website and company that educates people on how to effectively market their products/services online. He started it 4 years ago, serves tens of thousands of marketers, and has been generating over a million dollars in revenue per year. Through Firepole Marketing, Danny preaches about his theory on putting the audience first and creating active participants of your website/company. Currently, Danny’s focus is teaching Firepole Marketing’s process on how to generate revenue before launching a product at coursebuilderslaboratory.com, which they have recently done (this course has not officially launched yet).
A Quick Preview of the Podcast:
- Why you want certain people to unsubscribe from your list
- How to address opting out without losing your entire audience
- What permission marketing really means and how to implement it into your autoresponder series
To See These Tactics In Action:
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[rapidology_on_click_intent optin_id=optin_2]Click Here To See The Exact Email Firepole Sent That Got Them Increased Open & Click Rates[/rapidology_on_click_intent]
To See The Transcript:
Tim: Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.
Hey fellow marketer. Thanks for being here today. Today’s guest is going to share the details on a single simple email that resulted in zero spam complaints and a massive improvement in open rates, click rates, and the value of the subscribers. To see the exact email copy he used, you’ll have to go to our website. So head over to ConversionCast.com/FirepoleDownload to download it right away. Again that’s ConversionCast.com/FirepoleDownload and you’ll get instant access to the email copy today’s guest used to increase open rates, click rates and the value of the subscribers.
With that said, today’s guest is a repeat visitor here at Conversion Cast, Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing. Now Danny is an incredible marketer who prides himself on building meaningful connections with his audience. If there’s one thing I’ve consistently noticed about Danny it’s that his marketing is done with integrity as an incredibly important prerequisite to everything he does. Today’s tactic will scare the pants off of most marketers. What’s interesting is that you’ll get to hear how Danny himself was incredibly nervous about it but you’re going to also hear that it worked out really well. You also get to hear how you can implement it in your business if you wanted to with just a couple of emails.
You’ll want to see the copy that Danny used to make this happen so don’t forget to go to ConversionCast.com/FirepoleDownload and then listen on. I’m Tim Page, the conversation educator here at LeadPages, this is Conversion Cast and here is Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing.
Hey Danny welcome back to Conversion Cast.
Danny: Thank you Tim, I’m super excited to be here again.
Tim: Yeah. I’m excited too and this is –you know, last time we talked about some really interesting things related to webinars, this time we’re going to talk a little bit about a really unique twist that you have on your autoresponder sequence. Before we get into that, I just want to know what would have been the results that you’ve had for implementing this one email that we’ll be talking about today.
Danny: So by implementing this one email, we found that first of all once I explained that people understand the expectation people have is that unsubscribes are going to go way up. But actually they don’t. Unsubscribes hold stable, spam complaints drop to basically 0 and engagement like open rates, click rates, they go way up all from one email.
Tim: Oh that’s great from one email and this is something that you know we’ve really so many people come to me like but only 10% of people are opening my emails. You know, 5% of people are opening my emails, how do I handle this and you know, that’s always kind of the first thing I go to as well are the people on your list there because they want to be there or because you somehow kind of swindled or coerced them to be there. So that’s something worth considering and we’re going to talk about that a little bit more in depth.
But before we do that, you know, I think it would be helpful for anybody who didn’t hear us the first time tell us a little bit about you and Firepole Marketing kind of what you do?
Danny: Sure. So I run a company called Firepole marketing that I started about four years ago. In that time we’ve grown really fast. I’ve been very grateful to have that experience and be able to make that kind of impact. We’ve grown from basically starting at nothing to now we serve a community of many tens of thousands of people. We’re doing about a million five in annual revenue and we’re doing it by teaching people how to do some really cool and exciting things in the world of online marketing. Everything that we do is really focused on putting the audience first and making them active participants in the outcomes that you’re looking to create with them together in your business.
And we’re actually right in the middle of kind of teaching the process that we’ve used to build all our really successful products following the same kind of process of bringing people into it with you making them active participants, which makes your product a whole lot better. It means that they’re going to sell a whole lot more. You can often generate a whole lot of revenue before you’ve ever launched product.
I mean the case study example is that we are you know, it‘s kind of meta like as we do it, we’re launching this kind of product as we speak. And it doesn’t even –you know, it’s not out in the world yet but it’s already generated over $100,000 in revenue.
Tim: Wow.
Danny: And that’s the process that we teach and anyone who wants to learn more about that could just go to CourseBuildersLaboratory.com.
Tim: I love it. CourseBuildersLaboratory.com and I’m really excited about this. We were talking about this a little while ago and so definitely check that out. If that’s something if you’re kind of in that space I think it would make a lot of sense and honestly probably if you’re not in the space, you could still learn a lot about you know, how to presell and kind of get things going.
So with that said, let’s talk about this email because I’m really excited about it. I can kind of set the stage but I think you might do a better job so tell us a little bit about how somebody would get to this email and what it does.
[0:05:03]
Danny: Okay. So we’ve elaborated this a little bit. Now we have a couple of instances in this email but I’ll explain it the way it was when I first implemented it. It was one single email super straight forward, really easy to implement. So what would happen if someone would subscribe to my email list whether they found my free book or my video course or you know, whatever it is, they get off my list and they get a whole bunch of emails from me because that’s what happens when someone gets on your list they get emails about my book and about leaving reviews and different things that I’m doing.
And then after two weeks, I added this email. On the second week so 14 days after they sign up, they get an email and the subject line says too much email? [[0:05:44]] [Indiscernible] are you getting too much email? And what I wrote in the email is this is basically the copy almost word for word. I wrote you know, hey you’ve been with me for about two weeks and in that time I’ve sent you a whole bunch of stuff.
I want to tell you something interesting that happens whenever I hit send on an email. I get a whole bunch of people who reply and say thank you so much for putting together all this amazing stuff for us, you’re the best. And I also get some people who reply and say you know, you’re sending me way too much email, slow down or I’ll unsubscribe.
So how can you have such disparate responses to the same email? And the answer is that it comes down to chemistry. You know, sometimes you meet someone and you really hit it off, you want to spend more time with them, really get to know them well and that’s great.
Other times you meet someone and you’re just not feeing it. So you know it’s not you it’s me. Let’s just be friends. That’s kind of what’s going on here, right? May be we’re really hitting it off and you’re loving it and may be not. So I want to give you an out. If you’re not really loving everything that I’m sending you, then here’s an unsubscribe link. No hard feelings. You know, it’s not you it’s me, just click on that link we’re all good. I put a link right there in the email. I said you know, but if you like what I’m sending you and stay tuned because it’s about to get a whole lot better, that’s it, that’s the email that I put into my autoresponder sequence. Everyone would get this after two weeks. I was – I’ve got to say I was terrified.
Tim: [Laughs] that was going to be my next question, how scared were you the first time you put that in there.
Danny: It was an experiment. Like I was freaked out but I was like I think it is going to work, I’m going to try to do it. And the results were insane. So first of all what you expected to – like the unsubscribe rates would go up but they did not. My unsubscribe rates did not change in any measurable way.
I got a whole lot of people replying to these emails. Some people who are following me because they’re marketers and they’re watching what I’m doing as a marketer, they’re like wow this is awesome, I’ve never seen a marketer do this. You’re the coolest, that’s fantastic. I also found that I was getting a whole lot of people who are like almost apologizing like no, no, no, no I’m reading your emails, please keep sending me. I don’t want to unsubscribe. Like really excited about like reaffirming yes, I’m in this, no, no, no do not take me off this list , which was awesome. You know, I had replied, I’m like yeah no problem get to whenever you get to it, this is okay.
Tim: [Laughs] That’s so great.
Danny: And what’s really cool is that spam complaints not on that email, on all of my emails drop to basically zero. My engagement went way up, click rates, open rates they all went up. And it’s all from one email.
Tim: Yeah.
Danny: So shall we talk about the psychology a little bit? Shall we talk about why?
Tim: Yeah I definitely want to. I just said, you know, I wonder and I guess this might be just kind of throwing this into the universe but I also wonder if that email increases the value of each person on your list or whether it’s at that point or whatever. But I just wonder if you know, because those people are so engaged if that results in a higher you know, value per subscriber?
Danny: Absolutely. There is absolutely no question that it does. If more people are reading your emails and more people are clicking, it means more people are buying.
Tim: Yeah.
Danny: And we built our business on really high engagement. Something that I pride myself on is that you know, I don’t have the biggest list in the world. You know, we’re blessed with a lot of people who follow our work but there are a lot of people who have much, much larger audiences. But I have not seen anyone who generates as many dollars per subscriber on their list as we do. We average I think about between $3 and $8 per subscriber per month depending on the month and we’re usually hovering around five or six. So it’s a crazy high number.
Tim: Yeah that’s great. all right. So Dr. Danny tell me about the psychology here.
Danny: All right. Well it comes down to really understanding at a deep level what permission marketing means. So permission marketing is this idea that Seth Goden pioneered you know, way back when 10, 15, 20 years ago, however long it was. Basically the idea that all of what we do in the online marketing world is kind of built on now , which is that people give you permission to send them emails. And when they opt in, you know, opting in that’s the word they’re opting in giving you permission to email me. So that’s the assumption. That’s was kind of where we started.
[0:10:03]
But starting from there and getting to where we are today where everyone has got a free report or an eBook or a special thing everyone is trying to get your name and email address. At this point, you know, putting your name and email address in a box on somebody’s site it’s not really intended to give them permission and say yes I really want to hear from you. It just kind of table sticks. That’s what I’ve got to do to kind of see what they’re about.
It’s just kind of where it is.
Tim: Right.
Danny: And what this email does is it brings that permission marketing aspect of it back to the forefront. It makes it real. It kind of takes it from you know, yeah because remember what you said earlier when you were you know, just two minutes ago. You were like you know, it’s not about a list of people you just kind of swindle to get on your list and be able to email them. Well a lot of people might hear that and be kind of scratching their heads like no I didn’t. They opted in, I sent them a report. That’s exactly what we did.
[0:10:58]
Tim: yeah.
Danny: Except that people are so used to it that they didn’t really see it as permission. They kind of feel like why is this marketer emailing me even though they did opt in.
Tim: Right.
Danny: So technically on paper, you’ve got the paper trail. They opted in, double opt in, yes they confirmed but in their minds they never made that commitment. So this email gives them an opportunity to reaffirm no, no, I’m not just here by accident. Yes I want to be a part of this relationship.
Tim: Yeah so it kind of makes them commit a little bit as well as kind of keeps you honest. Because if you want them to not unsubscribe in this email that you’re going hey here if you don’t want this stuff, unsubscribe, it kind of forces you to make sure that you’re providing valuable content so that they do stay on your list.
Danny: Uh-hum. Absolutely.
Tim: Yeah I love that and so I guess the only other thing is I wanted to point out that for some people it might be easy to hear this and go well great. So I just need to add an email to my autoresponder sequence that says if you don’t like me unsubscribe. Right? But there are some subtleties to the way that you presented this. I mean you showed them that at first, you know you’ve provided value and then it’s been helpful and kind of may be reminded them a little bit about what they’re doing and why they’re there. And then you’ve offered the link and then just a little bit of extra stuff at the end that said but if you stick around kind of the best stuff is coming.
And would you say there’s any kind of formula to that or is that just how you kind of would want to be spoken to if you were on that list?
Danny: You just want to think about what makes sense like because there are different ways to do it. Like now we use, now in our onboarding sequence, we have I think three emails that do this in different formulations. So another one that we do for example and I feel like it goes out around ten days or something what it basically says is you know, this is a public service announcement. I send to everyone who subscribes to my stuff. That we’re all over subscribed. And we live in a world where there’s way more information than we have time to deal with. And that’s a problem because you know, reading and reading and reading does not get you results.
And I tell them here’s what you do. Go through your inbox, find, make a list, grab a pen and paper, make a list of all your subscriptions. Once you’ve made this list, take a highlighter and highlight the three most valuable ones. Now go unsubscribe from all the rest and I hope we make the cut. I waited two weeks after you signed up or whatever the length of time is so you have a change to get a sense of what we’re about. Again it’s the same kind of thing. I’m telling them first of all you know what I’m not hiding away from the unsubscribe button like as if you I don’t mention it you’re not smart enough to think that it exists.
Tim: [Laughs]
Danny: Like we all know they can unsubscribe so I’m putting it upfront. You know, if you don’t want to be here, don’t be here that’s fine. I want to do the thing that is best for you and people love that.
Tim: Yeah.
Danny: Right? Often I get you know what yeah no, you’re sticking around and I mean a nice side effect of doing that is that they unsubscribe from all of my competitors.
Tim: Yes. [Laughs]
Danny: [Laughs]
Tim: I didn’t even think about that.
Danny: So there’s a lot of – honest to say there’s a lot of ways you can do a formulation, there’s a lot of language that you can use but the bottom line is you want to just deliver some value first. You’ve got to get a sense of who you are. I mean if they opt in on the first email you send this please unsubscribe, they’re like something is broken.
Tim: Yeah.
Danny: So send them value, deliver useful stuff to them first and after you’ve delivered some useful stuff, think about just what is the real reason why someone might not want to stick around. they could over subscribe and getting too much stuff. They could just not really like your character personality. If someone has got a very flamboyant personality then that would be a great angle to take. Like do you find me hilarious or annoying, right? If you think I’m hilarious, stick around, it’s going to get even funnier. If you think I’m annoying well it’s not going to get any better so you might as well unsubscribe.
Tim: [Laughs]
Danny: And the people who think you’re hilarious would love that.
Tim: Right. No that makes perfect sense and I think this is a great way and people are so afraid of unsubscribes but you know, a certain level of unsubscribes is a good thing because there’s no use in having people on your list that really don’t like you, don’t resonate with what you’re doing and don’t care because those are the same people that are not going to buy. They’re going to be the most effort and really somebody who’s on your list that doesn’t want to be on your list that has an unsubscribe or whatever, every time they get an email they’re going to be annoyed and it’s going to put a bad taste in their mouth.
[0:15:30]
So I think this is good for them.
Danny: And that’s [[0:15:30]] [Indiscernible] it’s like we don’t live in the days where you can just email someone and they keep ignoring it and nothing happens.
Tim: Right.
Danny: These days you know, Gmail and Hotmail and Yahoo they’re looking at what happens to your email when they land on people’s inboxes.
Tim: Yes.
Danny: If less people are opening your messages, that signals to Gmail that your stuff is spam. So if someone is not interested in your stuff, you really don’t want to be emailing them.
Tim: Yeah that’s exactly right. Well this has been great and I think I have a feeling we’re going to start seeing a lot more of this going on in people’s autoresponders and I think that’s a good thing. You know, I really think it could be helpful. So thank you so much Danny for sharing this and again the website for people to check out your new course is what?
Danny: CourseBuildersLaboratory and the course isn’t even out yet. We’re just putting out tons of free information teaching people how to apply these same principles that I’m talking about where you take someone from being a path of recipient of information and make them an active participant in their relationship with you , which is why they get more excited, get more involved and spend a whole lot more money. We’re teaching a whole lot of that for free right now so people can just go to CourseBuildersLaboratory.com and enjoy.
Tim: That’s perfect. Well thanks again Danny and we hope to talk to you soon.
Danny: I will look forward to it.
Tim: Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.
Listen To Discover The Exact Email Copy Danny Used To Increase Open & Click Rates
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