How Yaro Starak Used Content Related Offers To Boost Revenue Per Email 5x

Tim: Back in the early days of ConversionCast I had a discussion with Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur’s Journey about how he boosted his revenue per email by 5x. Somehow the episode slipped through the cracks and never made it on the show but I have recently come across it, listened again and loved it again so I had to release it now.

What I love about this discussion is that it’s something you could start testing in your business right away and those are my favorite kind of tests. So get into it and you’re going to love it even though it’s a little bit older. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey Yaro, thanks so much for being here today. I am excited to talk with you man.

Yaro: Thanks, Tim. I’m happy to be here too.

Tim: Awesome. So first off, tell us the results from this particular case study we’re going to talk about today. What were the results  you were able to get?

Yaro: This one is all about email marketing. So I’ve been doing email forever. I love email marketing and as I was just talking to you off the show, I – well to give you the answer to the question, it’s added about $500 on average to how much profit I make per email I send. Bearing in mind I sell digital products so it’s 100% profit per product. But yes, so it’s increased most of my emails to making very few sales to at least 5 or 6 six sales per email I send which can make a big difference especially if you send a lot of email.

Tim: Absolutely. Awesome. So tell us a little bit about what you do.

Yaro: Sure. So I’m a professional blogger. I’ve been blogging since 2005 and in 2006, a year too late in my opinion but I did it. I added an email newsletter to what I do. So I basically was who I am. I am an entrepreneur. I was telling stories about different businesses. I have run in the past from an English school and on my proofreading business I had a click table card game ecommerce site. I told all these stories on my blog entrepreneurs-journey.com and then that took off.

Early days ’05 it was the start of the blogging boom and I rode that way and became a teacher. So I started teaching people how to make money from blogging and the newsletter and the blog were the primary tools I’ve been using since then to make my living over a million dollars in sales or products during that time. So it’s pretty much changed my life and yeah email and blogging that’s the formula, not too complicated, although it can get quite complicated but.

Tim: [Laughs] Facets of it definitely do.

Yaro: Yes. A simple principle in concept.

Tim: [Laughs] Perfect. So with this particular case study, what gave you the idea to kind of make this change and go ahead and spill the beans and tell us what you did?

Yaro: well again it’s a simple idea. I started asking for the sale in emails and I know this sounds obvious okay. It’s a call to action. It’s a conversion at the end of the message. The thing is growing up as a blogger were in the terms of the content producer I wasn’t used to always pitching. In fact there’s a – I don’t know what you call it, it’s like a hang-up a lot of bloggers have about asking for a sale because they get told to do produce all this free content, distribute a value and then may be do one launch a year to make a living something like that.

I’ve been part of the internet marketing community as well and I’ve seen what internet marketers do with the email and they go to the other extreme. It’s just like no content buy my product, buy my product, buy my product.

Tim: Yeah.

Yaro: So finding the happy medium between those two is always the goal. For me, I guess I probably lean too far to the blogging site sometimes so I decided you know what I’m putting effort in to produce content in these blog posts. I’m always telling a story. why not tie that into a product promotion? Now I’ve done that before but it wouldn’t be every single email. I went through a period of about three or four months where I tested this on roughly a weekly basis because I send out roughly one email a week.

Just to give you an example I wrote an email, I was looking it up before. I read a book called The Toyota Way which some listeners might be [[0:04:09]] [indiscernible]  with. It just talks about some of the – [[0:04:15]] [indiscernible]  lean leadership. So it’s basically how Toyota does lean in particular with leading people. Great book, really interesting. Finished the audio version in a few days and then often as I do with my newsletter I will share takeaways from whatever I’m learning  during my life.

Tim: Uh-hum.

Yaro: So in this case the book was very fresh in my mind. So I just wrote about things like the book talks about Kaizen which is continuous improvement. It’s a Japanese principle. It talks about the big picture, things like that. So I wrote about these concepts, explained what I took away in particular how to apply that to what I teach which is the world of making money from blogging. So I obviously tie everything back to the core reason why you subscribed to my newsletter.

Then this is the difference, I made sure the end of this is a great connection between the story I’ve just told from the book I’ve just read to the product I now offer. It’s pretty simple. You know the last 20% of the email is sort of linking what I was saying in that to one of my products. So I have an interviews club product which is a series of interviews I do with millionaire entrepreneurs and it made a lot of sense to connect this story with a promotion for the club. While this worked in this case and I knew from my experience with email marketing you almost always do better with some sort of scarcity deadline element, some sort of reasonable like you need to take action now, you get all the fence sitters off the fence.

Tim: Right.

Yaro: Of course you have to justify that too though. You can’t just say it because you want to make more sales. There has to be a reason to do it. So what I started doing is having certain promotions that tied into certain events. So in this case, it happened to be the six-month anniversary of doing this interviews club and I just finished the first six months of interviews. I was actually planning on kind of ending the sequence at that point so I said hey, interviews are done, you can grab the six-month celebration special discount for this week only for the interviews club. And then next week you know, in fact I might even try and pull it up for you. So that was writing about Toyota which led a product promotion for that and then after that, I think I did a video. So I exactly okay – so again living my life I went to a networking event with Jonathan Tio who is one of the founder, well he was part of an investment group that invested in Twitter, Instagram and Snap Chat. He did a talk. One of his main concepts was that nowadays the product is the marketing especially with apps and I was thinking that was really interesting. How can you apply that to blogging and how can you apply to I guess experts, personal branded experts like myself.

So I did a video talking about that and then you know you just do a related pitch to what that is. So you know blogging is obviously about building a platform. So I can sell my blogging training program connected to that. So there’s always a product related to a story that I can connect with this and I did this experiment over a sequence of emails to see whether it actually worked. Again it should be no brainer.

Tim: Yes.

Yaro: [[0:07:36]] [Indiscernible]  But for me the difference was in the past I always had an either/or mentality. it’s intent or pitch email. So I might be doing a launch and I’ll be talking 100% about the launch for two weeks and then stop.

Tim: Yeah.

Yaro: I said I want to do this so that I’m always having both going. You know I might be doing a launch but even when I’m not doing a launch I want the cash flow to be stable especially because I want this to be an automatic sequence of emails too. I don’t want this to be just broadcast messages and I only make money when I write something new. I want this to be a sequence that goes forever that a new person can start today and have three years’ worth of emails to go through.

Obviously [[0:08:15]] [indiscernible]  to get that going but for this to be a cash flow positive stable business then I need to find ways to do that. Otherwise I’ll be always dependent on me to write something new to make a living. So I’ve been experimenting with ways to do that. This is one of the experiments and that’s basically they’re trying to get a bigger return with each email you send. So that’s the goal.

Tim: It feels like the things that you’re doing are incredibly simple in theory but then in execution it’s a matter of really figuring out how to do it right. And so in this case you’re talking about you know, combining quality content and asking for the sale. So was that a difficult process to kind of figure out a good way to combine those?

Yaro: It is and it’s a lot of psychology like this is something you kind of have to keep testing as well. You don’t know how your audience responds to certain offers. You don’t know if you can continually send them an offer every single email. You know my experiments as well as my own studies of other people’s email marketing advice shows that you can send a pitch every email. what you need to do is making sure that you’ve got your segmentation right so you know if they’re there for traffic advice, so if they’re there for information about a certain type of product or a help or whatever industry you’re in that they’re getting that like the matching is right and then adjusting based on response. Like obviously you can look at your click through rates, your open rates and this is what I’m focusing on this year is rather than having broadcasts go to everyone just sending everything to everyone on my newsletter, it’s well I’ve got this channel that’s just traffic advice which leads to my traffic front end product.

[0:10:00]

It’s channel that’s just productivity and mindset advice which just leads to my product om that and then there’s a channel that’s just interviews with entrepreneurs which leads to my interviews club product. And the good thing about that is it allows me to I guess get that more for less. So I don’t have to worry that when I send an interview to my newsletter I’m turning off all the people who don’t like audio. From now on —

Tim: Yeah.

Yaro: -it’s just going to the people like audio and then there’s a product that’s an audio product being sold to them throughout that process. But like you said there’s a lot of things to get right here and if you’re trying to set it up so it’s a permanent autoresponder sequence I don’t want to have to go back and keep reediting that over and over again.

Tim: Yeah.

Yaro: The whole point is to set this up once and then move on to the next one know that works. So you really do want to do your due diligence and kind of get your marketing right or your psychology right, get your segmentation right, get your understanding of your customer right, get the right product fit, get the right pitch fit, get the right call to actions in each of the emails the right headlines. There’s a lot of things that go together that you have to kind of experiment with. But obviously once you get to the point where you know what I’m happy with everything then the fun part comes in my opinion to get to go out there and expose yourself to everyone. I don’t mean taking off your clothes but I mean getting yourself on podcasts and get buy-in traffic on Facebook doing all the things to market yourself. Well that’s the fun part when you get to be everywhere and get to talk about what you know about resting on the confidence that your assistant behind all that works to create a sustainable, profitable business.

Tim: That’s awesome. Yeah I love it. Thanks so much for coming on at ConversionCast. We really appreciate having you here.

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Alright, that’s going to do it for another episode of ConversionCast. Thank you for sticking around and checking it out. Listen, this upcoming Thursday, if you haven’t attended one of our webinars yet or even if you have, you are going to want to join me for a free live webinar that’s happening at 3:00 pm Eastern time. it’s called Four Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List without Spending all of Your Time on Marketing. The thing I love about this webinar is that it is a step-by-step guide. It’s four steps to get in there and implement in your business that will give you an immediate boost email opt-in rate and make it so that you don’t have to constantly be focusing on how do I grow my email list or how do spend all of my time on all these other things and still have my list working for me. It’s a great webinar, I’m so excited for it and I want to see you on it.

To join if you’re here in the US, you can just take out your phone right now, I’m sorry text LeadPagesLive, that’s all one word, LeadPagesLive to 33444, again if you’re in the US, you an text LeadPagesLive to 33444. But don’t worry if you’re outside of the US, to join me on this Thursday’s live 3:00 pm eastern time webinar, all you need to do is go to LeadPages go to LeadPagesWebinar.com, again that’s LeadPagesWebinar.com. You can to reserve your spot there. This webinar has been blowing up lately so the sooner you can reserve your sport and the sooner you can actually join me on the webinar, the better. I hope to see you there and in the meantime we’ll see you next on ConversionCast.