| Neil: | If you’ve ever struggled with building an effective follow up sequence of emails, you had somebody opt in and then it just went flat, there’s no conversion, there’s no engagement, well, you’ve probably got a fundamental flaw in there. Today, I’ve got Chris Davis on from, right now he’s the Director of Education at Active Campaign. Previously, he was the Head of Marketing and Marketing Automation at Lead Pages where he helped them scale up to something like 37 million dollars. A lot of that based on he was called their secret weapon. Chris also has his own company Automation Bridge where he helps people implement all these awesome marketing automation systems. Today, Chris is going to talk to us about his sliced bread system and how we can get people from opt in to purchase. |
| Chris, tell me in your opinion what makes for a really strong follow up sequence. | |
| Chris: | Neil, I like to keep things as simple as possible. There’s three C’s when it comes to strong follow ups, consistent, clear, communication. If your messaging is consistent, and by consistent I mean what you gave away as a free offer matches what you’re selling so it’s consistent and then it’s clear like this is why, the benefits, the value proposition is clear. If you’ve got consistent, clear, communication, your follow up sequence is going to out perform the standard sequence or the standard benchmark that people are getting in their email performance. |
| Neil: | What is that standard benchmark based on? What do most people have and why does it not work? |
| Chris: | Most people struggle with staying anywhere above 20% open rate. Right? The reason being, and I say that with an asterisk because of course it’s really depending on your market, your audience, how aligned you are- |
| Neil: | Your results may vary. |
| Chris: | Right. Your results may vary. But the problem is a lot of people when it comes to email follow up, they build it one piece at a time. They start with what they know to do, what’s easiest. For most people, it’s easier to create a lead magnet. They create the lead magnet and they have them, “Now I need to write about the lead magnet.” What they’re missing, is the time where they need to step back and create the overall strategy. The overall strategy that’s going to govern and guide their language and positioning through that follow up sequence so hence they begin to struggle with open rates, with click through rates and they start looking at the platform. I need to change from MailChimp, my deliverability sucks. I need to change from [inaudible 00:02:57] because nobody’s buying my product when it’s really back to what I mentioned is that clear, consistent, communication and it’s because of the order in which they approached completing their follow up or implementing their follow up. |
| Neil: | It’s really back to the fundamentals of marketing. It doesn’t matter the platform, whether it’s email, whether it’s anything, those three C’s again are what? Consistency, clear, communication. That applies to any marketing. |
| Chris: | There you go. |
| Neil: | We always talk about all this new “digital stuff”. It’s all different but really you’re just taking us back to the basics. |
| Chris: | When we talk about digital, we’re talking about the methodology, not the theology or the theory. The theory of business is the same, will always be, and will never change. The idea that you could start doing things in the digital realm and just bypass solid business practices and [acumen 00:03:58], you don’t need that, you’re setting yourself up for failure. |
| Neil: | It don’t work that way. |
| Chris: | Exactly, if you take the fundamentals of marketing and business and then you learn digital strategies, you’re going to be a force to be reckoned with. |
| Neil: | Yes. This might seem like a silly question now that we just talked about that but why does a business need a follow up sequence? |
| Chris: | My mentor once told me when I was a young aspiring entrepreneur, I didn’t know the validity of this statement. He said, “The fortune’s in the follow up.” When we talk about follow up, it’s just the process of making the connection and keeping the connection. That’s it. Following up is keeping the connection. You’re very rarely going to make the sale at the point of connection. All of the sale comes from keeping the connection. When I’m talking about keeping the connection, I’m talking about building the relationships. Back to the basics, Neil, people buy from people they like, know and trust. And people like, know and trust people they have relationships with. |
| Neil: | It sure makes it a lot easier to sell to somebody you know. |
| Chris: | Exactly, right. An email follow up sequence, what it does is it allows you to ensure that at a bare minimum, you have a system in place to follow up with people that you connect with digitally, mainly. Whether it be social media or them visiting your website, that opt in is the point of connection and the follow up is how you stay connected. No connection, no sales. |
| Neil: | This approach works for any type of business. Every business we have the basics, the three C’s you just talked about. It doesn’t matter, I meet so many people that want to just take these things that you’re talking about and they only apply to internet marketers. That’s not true, is it? Have you used this with other businesses besides internet marketers? I know you have. |
| Chris: | In fact, Neil, I enjoy doing it more in the non internet marketing space because one, it’s appreciated more and the results are amazing. Oh my goodness the results are … I worked with a client once who sold chiropractic tables to chiropractors. He was a chiropractor that sold tables to other chiropractors so B to B. You would be shocked at how effective following up with leads that came to his website and just filled out a contact form were. The follow up system that I built for him, it only involved two or three emails. Everything else were internal reminders, emails to him saying it’s been a couple of days, call them. Right? Reminding him to call. But it’s still follow up. You’re keeping the connection. A sale for him was anywhere from 6,000-10,000 dollars so he follows up, has a system that reminds him to follow up or helps him to follow up and he’s closing one to two leads a week. You’ve got a real business there. |
| Neil: | I like what you just said there. You took the real world and merged it with the digital world. You have a hybrid system there where he’s got follow up phone calls and other touches built into it other than just emails. |
| Chris: | Absolutely. |
| Neil: | I think if the “real world businesses” understood that part, they would treat this so much differently. |
| Chris: | You know what it is, it’s the perception of digital is more, it’s just overwhelming, especially for corporations and businesses and people who don’t understand the technology. Since it’s overwhelming, they’re uncomfortable and they don’t understand that it’s really not that different than what you’re doing, it’s just a new method. It’s just a new method. But, like I said, technology is just overwhelming in general and there are so many people that abuse it, abuse technology because there’s not qualificating parameter saying you can use technology and you can’t. Everybody can use it which muddies the waters even more. |
| Neil: | Yeah. I like to say that every business has a system. Whether you realize it or not, you have a system today. You can take that system and you can build it and you can automate it. Everybody’s got a starting point. You have this interesting theory I wanted to talk about with you. Sliced bread system is what you call it. Tell us about that. It’s really from getting people from the opt in to the purchase. How does that work? |
| Chris: | Absolutely. It generated from just paying attention to just a lack of high performing email sequences at my time at Lead Pages. I would help a lot of our clients, our customers, coach them through their follow up and they all made the same mistake. In fact, one guy, I was meeting with him and he said, “Hey Chris, I’ve got a book for sale.” I was like, “Great, what’s your lead magnet?” His lead magnet was like a five steps to success and his book was about cooking. I was like this is real. I was like wait a minute. Immediately I’m like do you not see that they’re not connected? He couldn’t see it. He was just like, “Well I’m giving something for free.” He just thought that as long as I give away anything for free, inherently, they’ll want my product no matter what it is. With that in mind I realized that the space needed some educating. Instead of using technical terms, I tried to find something that everybody is familiar with which is bread. Everybody’s familiar with bread. It’s really a page from Stephen Covey’s book, begin with the end in mind. |
| Neil: | I love that quote. |
| Chris: | Instead of starting with the lead magnet, start with the product. What do you have to offer? That’s what it’s all about, right? What do you have to offer? Get clear on the key benefits of what you have to offer. What paying points are you eliminating or alleviating with your product? That becomes your loaf of bread. What you’re going to do is from that, you’re going to take out a slice and give it away for free. |
| As I mentioned, as I say to people, I don’t know about you, Neil, but every time I take a slice out of a loaf of bread, it leaves crumbs. No matter how careful I am, it leaves crumbs from the slice to the loaf. In follow up, or in marketing, those crumbs are analogous to your follow up emails. You actually don’t want to clean those up. You want to keep the crumbs there because the theory is if they like the slice of bread, and they consume the crumbs, they’ll love the loaf. This is where that consistency comes in. But so often, people are giving away a slice of bread and maybe they’ve got cookie crumbs and they’re selling a muffin. | |
| Neil: | But Chris, they’re all baked goods. Why doesn’t this work? |
| Chris: | That’s right. You can have the best bread, the best cookies, and the best muffin but since it’s not aligned and consistent, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what you are. It behooves you to do this in a matter that ensures consistent communication from the lead magnet all the way to the product. Here’s an extra benefit from it. |
| When you have your product, I define a product, Neil as not something you can touch. Something you can touch and consume is the physical manifestation of a product but a product is an idea. This is how you can get funded on Kickstarter. This is how Apple can present the new iPhone without it being manufactured and make millions of dollars in pre orders because an idea communicated clearly becomes a real product in the minds of your consumer. If you have an idea of what your product is, your job right then and there Neil is not to create a lead magnet. Your job is to figure out how to communicate that product, that idea so clear that it becomes a product. Once you do that, you can essentially create your sales page, right? | |
| From that, now watch, oh my gosh I’m getting excited. [crosstalk 00:12:58] If you have your sales page created, all of the copy, you’re paying points, your positioning, your bullet points, your price, everything. When it comes to create your lead magnet, what are you going to do? You’re not going to start from scratch. Take three of your bullet points that’s on your sales page, that has check marks and create a checklist of it, the three things that you need to be doing in your business right now. It’s guaranteed to align with your product because you took it from your product. | |
| Now, when it comes time to write emails, what are you going to write emails about? Just expound on those three things, that three checklist. Now you have three emails. That answers the question how many emails should I put in my follow up? Tell me about your product. The stuff literally writes itself. A lot of people if they do know how to do this, if they’re like that makes sense, what has prevented them from actually implementing it is their fear of repetition. In marketing, repetition is your friend. It doesn’t matter if you mentioned it on the sales page, then mentioned it in your lead magnet then mentioned it in your emails, people need that because they need as many opportunities as possible to get a picture of your product. They need to see themselves with your product before they will actually buy the product. | |
| Neil: | My most successful clients write the same thing over and over and over again. |
| Chris: | There you go. |
| Neil: | Just phrased differently. We’re doing the same things, the same launches, the same emails, it’s the same concepts, just over and over and over. |
| Chris: | There you go. Now that you said that, if you think about it, you’re just packaging your product differently. I’ve got a loaf of bread and I’ve got this one slice that you can buy and then I’ve got these crumbs. You’re just packaging, your product is one package, your follow up is another package and your lead magnet is another package. It’s the same messaging packaged differently for consumption. Throw in podcast, throw in webinar, all kinds of things and as long as they’re sourced from your product, they’re automatically aligned because you started at the destination and you will immediately, you don’t even have to wait, Neil, you’ll immediately see higher conversion numbers immediately. |
| Neil: | Yeah. Which slice of bread should I give away? I want to give away that end one, right? That’s the one that I don’t really want? I don’t want to eat that one, I should give it away, correct? |
| Chris: | If you don’t want it, nobody wants it. If it’s not good enough for you, it’s not good enough for them. I tell people give away your best slice. Give away as much as you can. Here’s the reality, your product, your idea of a product is just the beginning but a full product is the combination of your ideas and the feedback of your audience. Until you have both, a clear idea and a feedback of your audience, you don’t have a full product. When you’re starting at the idea phase, give away as much of your idea as possible because what you’re going to do is you’re going to get feedback whether it’s verbal feedback to a survey or what not or you’re just paying attention to your web analytics, blog post that they’re reading, conversion numbers. You have feedback in many ways. You’ll take that feedback and you’re going to adjust your product offering and make it stronger. |
| The more leads you get, the more people you talk to, it’s only going to strengthen your product, not diminish it. A lot of people will fear that. If I give this away, what am I going to sell? Trust me, give it away and you’ll figure out what to sell because people will tell you. They’ll say, “Hey, I downloaded this and I was wondering, did you also show me how to do X, Y and Z?” You’re like oh, let me add X, Y and Z to my product. Do you see what I’m saying? That’s the power of web 2.0 or 3.0 I think we’re at now where you have the direct feedback to the consumer. You use that to perfect your product. Nobody creates a perfect product in a vacuum. | |
| Neil: | It’s no longer a one way conversation. It used to be. |
| Chris: | Absolutely. |
| Neil: | But now it’s with technology we have and all this automation, we are not just preaching, we are getting a conversation. A conversation is two ways. That’s a great point. We just have a couple minutes left here and I just wanted to ask obviously you have this system in place at Lead Pages. You talked about that. Nowadays you’re at Active Campaign here in Chicago with me. |
| Chris: | I’ve moved on to the wonderful windy city. |
| Neil: | Are you using the same concept at Active Campaign now? Is that something you put in place there and you’re working on? |
| Chris: | I am. Its kind of difficult to do it on a company level. At Lead Pages, the capacity I was operating in was I was the Head of Marketing Automation. I was taking marketing automation platforms and implementing the strategy and that’s where this came from. I was like oh my gosh, I need a way to qualify, I need a way to ensure that the leads that come in can have an easy path to our landing pages. In that sense, yes, I was able to do that at Lead Pages. As a company, I’m the director of eduction here at Active Campaign so technically I’m not in marketing. I can give feedback and say hey guys, we have the product, it’s Active Campaign, marketing automation platform, let’s just take features from that and see what we can give away or how we can position it. But the business model is so different that I’m not able to have as much immediate control and say so in how we do the marketing of it. |
| Neil: | Right. Great. Is there anything else that I should have asked about today that I have forgotten? |
| Chris: | That was everything but you know in answering that last question, it reminded me of my approach to follow up like starting follow up. Your whole thing is beyond the opt in. A lot of times, well not a lot of times, your main factor after the opt in is engagement. If you have zero engagement, I don’t care how many leads you’re converting on, you have zero engagement. Engagement is so critical. When I was at Lead Pages, I was like how can we get, I realized that if they engage early, we have them. We have them if they engage early. |
| I came up with a process. We were using the [fujisoft 00:19:33] and we migrated to [huffspot 00:19:34] so this process had to go beyond platform. It had to be an approach that could be applied anywhere and essentially, it’s the process of not relying on your platform tool to do the double opt in but still perform the double opt in. From the tools standpoint, it looks like you’re doing single opt in. But from a functionality standpoint, it gives you the security of double opt in. When you implement it, I call it my single double because it’s the best of both worlds, single opt in and double opt in but what you do is you’re now able to capture an email address and instead of that system generated double confirmation that we all hate, it’s very hard to customize, it’s just upending. | |
| Neil: | It stops the process dead in it’s tracks, that one? |
| Chris: | Yes. Right. In most platforms, you don’t even know the contact has opted in until they’ve clicked the link. You have no access to them. What I do is I say forget that single opt in, I want to know all of my leads that are coming in. I’ll do my due diligence to qualify them in platform. Get your hands out of the cookie jar. I’ll do this. What I do is- |
| Neil: | Take turns being soft or whatever. Get your fingers out of my [inaudible 00:20:51]. I will take care of that. |
| Chris: | I’ll do this, right? What you’ll do and what I’ve done is I create the email that goes out and says click here so I can control 100% of it. Guess what? Furthermore, I can send reminders and then I as a marketer can say, okay, if you opted in, got the welcome email and got two reminder emails and you took no action, there is no way I’m sending emails to you. You’re a dead lead and all you’re going to do is lower my deliverability. That’s it. But that’s very hard to do with the system generated double opt in. |
| Neil: | It’s very hard to do from a mental/psychological standpoint. People get so attached to those leads. I’ve got 500 people! Well, 498 of them aren’t opening any emails so you really only have 2. |
| Chris: | Exactly. You’ve got to get them to engage early because statistics have shown personally, me, I have eyewitnesses personally but there was either a [kiss 00:22:02] metric or [lamaze 00:22:03] article that talked about you’re 46% more likely to make the sale when someone is opening your email. To me, I’m just like listen, if you’re not going to open an email, please move so someone who will can sit in that seat and increase my chances to 46%. |
| It’s tough for some people because they’re numbers focused, they’re quantity. Oh my god 1000 leads but only 300 of them are clicking and opening, just give me that real number. I’m a big boy, I can take it. I can take the fact that only 300 people are engaged. It’s not only because I can do more damage with an engaged 300 leads than I can with an unengaged 2000. That’s the whole process, that’s my whole thought process in creating the single double and it’s something that I live and die by. | |
| Any time I’m doing something for a private client we do it. Anytime I do it for myself we’re executing it, that’s the only thing I would add to it. It kind of goes hand in hand with the sliced bread approach then you can understand my exact approach to marketing follow up, digital marketing follow up and why I was able to scale a marketing machine like Lead Pages within two years of making all those millions. I think 37 million was the total amount that we raised while I was there. You had to build systems that scaled and that people engaged with. It forced engagement. It was very successful. Just like business, Neil, just like sound business practices, nobody stops doing what’s working. | |
| Neil: | Yeah. That’s true. |
| Chris: | You don’t get so creative that you stop doing what’s working. It’s working so I continue to do it. I’m always refining it. It’s fun, man. For everybody listening to this podcast, they’ll be able to get that entire flow chart and methodology for free. |
| Neil: | Chris, thanks for coming on today and sharing all your knowledge with your experience at Lead Pages and Active Campaign. We really appreciate it. |
| Chris: | Neil, I appreciate you. Anytime you need me back, the virtual door is open. |
| Neil: | We’re going to knock, don’t worry, I’ll be back. Thanks Chris. |
| Good takeaways today from what Chris had to say. I think the biggest thing if you get nothing else out of this podcast was his 3 C’s, clear, consistent, communication. That is an awesome way to think of it. If you can just put that into anything you do, it’s not even your email, it’s anything you do in marketing. It’s the universal truth of marketing, it’s clear, consistent, communication. I think so many people throw that right out the window when it comes to the follow sequence on the emails just like Chris talked about, they’re starting at the beginning and they’re not consistent, they’re not clear and they’re probably communicating but probably communicating the wrong message. | |
| Really, that’s the biggest thing to take away so go back, look at your product, start from the end, and pull out the pieces to make your lead magnet to make your emails and to pull out those clear messages that you need to send about your product so that when it comes time, when you make that offer and say hey, here’s my product, I’d love to talk to you about it or I’d love it if you went and bought it or whatever it is, however you sell it, you want people to respond to that. If they haven’t engaged with you since the moment they downloaded your lead magnet because everything you sent them didn’t make sense to them, they were confused, that’s the C you don’t want, right? You don’t want confused C, you want the other C’s. If they were confused then they’re not going to take action. Sit down today and think about your product, build it backwards, get back to the lead magnet and start over with that process. I think you’re going to have much better success with your email follow up system. | |
| If you like what Chris had to say and you want to reach out to Chris, you can find him at automationbridge.com/splat as in Email Splat which is my company, but he’s set up for us there. He’s got a nice download for us to take advantage of over there where it’s got his complete bread system, sliced bread, that’s the word. He’s got his complete sliced bread system as well as his single double blueprints. If you were interested in learning more about that, you can download that at automationbridge.com/splat. |