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From Cold Emails to Hot Leads: The Digital Marketing Backbone You Can't Ignore featuring Jay Schwedelson
00:40:06
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- [00:15]
A
Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown secrets of Internet Marketing. For any of you that are watching, I'm at the office. My Internet just went down right before this, so I'm a little disheveled. But I have a great podcast guest for you today. Really? One of the things that I've been talking about and we've been working on internally is email marketing, how important newsletters are. And if you think that email's lost its luster, I have news for you. Brighton SEO Ma spoke email still convert the best. And so I thought it'd be great to bring on a guest that specializes in okay, yes, go high levels hot right now, but go high level also. Activecampaign. That's actually what we use internally. Email marketing is not dead and I can tell you, let's get into a little bit more in this podcast. Just to let you know, coaching course is live@MatthewBertrum.com go check it out. If you get any value from this podcast, please share like, follow, whatever. We appreciate the engagement. I am stepping out of the agency as much as I can every month because we have a team that can do it all. So I will be doing more trainings and more content. So hit me up. I want to now introduce Jason Wright. Jason, how are you doing, brother?
- [01:38]
B
I'm doing great, man. Thanks for having me on the show.
- [01:40]
A
Yeah, so Jason's with internationally inspirely. Internationally inspiredly.com they do, they focus on automated marketing, they focus on paid ads. You know, just really what we were talking about in the kind of pre interview and we can just pick up our conversation. Jason of like, there's a lot of people out there that claim to be Internet marketing experts. And I can tell you that one of the biggest challenges we deal with when we're interacting with new clients, they've been burned by somebody in the past, right? So they have this baggage that they're coming with and they're like, hey, either it didn't work for me or man, like I just can't trust anybody. How do I find the right person to trust? And so, you know, I just wanted to kind of start it off there. What are your thoughts around kind of like email automation in general? Let's just kind of go there, like, has it died? And then we can get into maybe how to select the right vendor and, and we can maybe talk about some case studies and some of the things that you've seen really leverage email marketing to, to convert clients and, and customers.
- [02:42]
B
So yeah, I appreciate the intro. So when I started my company 10 years ago. People were saying email was dead then. So I think it's an excuse people throw out there so it makes them feel better about not doing anything with it. But it's certainly not dead. It works really well. I've generated millions of dollars online with email marketing, so it definitely works. And I think one of the biggest problems with it is people build up this idea in their head of what it needs to be. And the number one thing that people focus on too much is the design. The design doesn't matter at all. No one's going to remember what it looked like an hour from the time they read it. And the reason why is all of us get inundated with outbound all day, every day and every piece of our life. So they will remember they heard from you. They're not going to remember what pictures or what colors you use. Nobody cares. So, and that's not meant to be negative, it's just meant to say, hey, stop making up excuses why you're not doing it. Just do it. It's not hard. It doesn't require anything crazy. So one thing that has changed with email marketing is DNS records used to be the exception, now it's definitely the rule. So email deliverability has become more challenging. But it's not challenging, right? There's, there's things you need to do with smear, DNS records. All the big providers tell you what to do and if you do that, you'll hit more inboxes and if you don't, you shouldn't even waste your time trying to email market because you're, it's just not going to work out well. But email marketing is, you know, it's kind of the foundation of what we build our business on. I also really like text marketing. I think text marketing's yes, effective, you get higher engagement, simple. But with all these things, man, you're basically starting new conversations and keeping them going. Same thing we do in real life. So that is the, the simplest way that I can break it down. And really you're emailing for two reasons from a really high level. One, you're emailing to get people on a call and I'm just focused on high ticket service businesses, so I think about my own business. But you're working to get people on a call, then after the call, if they don't buy the thing that you offered, you're emailing them again to nurture them and keep the conversation going. So if you think about that in your business, you can see by Removing that, you're really missing out on a lot of opportunities, for sure.
- [05:02]
A
So I want to circle back to something you said previously that I really want to key in on. So I was actually on a Russell Brunson ClickFunnels conference, right? And they brought on, like, Napoleon Hill or not. Not. They didn't bring them on, but they, they showed some videos of him talking about it. And one of his partners, Napoleon Hill's partners, made so much money from Mindset, and he kept saying, do it now, do it now. And everybody that worked for him, I could forget who it was, but it was like he said, a hundred times a day, do it now. And he made everybody that worked for him say, do it now. And then also, there's a book written by. I just got back from podfest called Start Ugly, right? And so you just gotta get started, do something, get that initial inertia moving and then you can perfect it. And even with podcasting, like, people fall off before seven podcasts, right? Like, you just gotta, you gotta start that process and get moving on that. And I think email is so critical. Email's just like an address that someone has, like, for, like, mailers that they don't change emails for like, eight years typically. And if the deliverability is good and it doesn't go to, like, spam, you're going to get right in front of that person that they're checking every day now text, I think, you know, 99%, like, open rate on top of it. Even if it's spam, like, why are you not doing that? And I, I was in a training years ago, and it said, what is the relationship you want to have with your customer? Right? So is it quarterly? Like, oh, I know who that person is. Like, if you send stuff quarterly, you'll probably get put on a spam list more than if you send stuff daily because they don't even know who you are, right? Like, so it's based on that relationship. So, like, you know, how close do you want to be to them? You know, really weekly, I think is. Is really good. Monthly is okay, you know, daily, if you're trying to build that, that, that really close rapport with them, like a best friend or a family member. Like, you got to think about all that and you got to think about a lot of different things of how maybe. Let's talk about that. How would you set up, like a standard campaign for, you know, I don't know, an E commerce business? And then we'll say like a service business or something like that.
- [07:11]
B
Yeah, I mean there's different pieces of it, right. So for E Comm, a lot of when people are coming in is to get the 15 off, right? To hear about the sales or if it's a, it's a shopping cart abandonment type thing. But the newsletters I like once a week. If you're emailing me more than once a week, I don't want to be your friend. That's too much. Right. But once a month I'm going to forget about you. So I think the magic is, and it depends on your personality, if you're authentically like every day feels good, do it. Once a month is not enough. But sometime somewhere between two, two to four times a month is a good range. And if you can do twice a month for six months and step it up because some people really struggle with that commitment. They make it this really big deal and it's not so conserver space. Business is kind of what I said before, right. They could come in through a lead magnet or come in through a program and get some value but getting them on that newsletter list where they can kind of see what you're doing and I, I urge this to people all the time and I'm not giving any advice here or anywhere ever that I don't follow myself. It's all based on actual experience and never theory. But be yourself, man. Put your, your wins and more importantly your losses out there because people don't want to connect with your brand. They want to connect with Matthew, they want to connect with Jason. So put yourself out there. Some of the best open rates you will get on emails. Emails like you're not going to believe this massive failure I had. People are sick, man. They love that stuff. So why do you think reality, reality tv. Go ahead.
- [08:39]
A
No, I, I just, I, I totally agree with you. I think that really you got to think about what are you trying to do with email. You're trying to connect with somebody one to one. And if you're always putting your best foot forward, it's like, you know, everybody can look at an interview. You know what I mean? Like people want to know the real you. They want that authentic feel. And also if you're not passionate about something or you're doing something because, oh, I need to do this because xyz. But it's not inside you. You're not going to keep it up. So speaking to the once a day like there's, there's things ritualistically like that, like certain kind of news that I look at, I could easily turn that into a newsletter and just share what I'm finding with you. Right. Like, so it's not, it's not that hard to find something if you're passionate about it, that you have a why to connect with somebody on how to do it. And you know, I think minimum you have to do it once a month because if you do, if you don't do it once a month and you just start sending emails later, that whole list is dead. I think because you're going to get so much spam off it and you're really looking for engagement rates. So you want to constantly stay in front of them. Even if they don't even read the email, they're still seeing it. Like, and I would even say like on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's got a lot better. And it's a LinkedIn's job to filter out all that spam because marketers of course ruin everything. But I'm going to tell you, even if you sent that spam email in LinkedIn, if those people are locking into LinkedIn and they're posting, they're going to see your name, they're going to see what you do and they're going to see that headline. And when I, when I do email marketing, which was, it's like an add on service for, for other things that we do, I, you know, if I don't, if I don't know what the right thing to do is, I just use the whole Alphabet and I test, you know, I'll set it up or I'll set up like you know, 26 different titles, you know, and, and figure out what are people responding to. And, and then the kind of, that's the great magic about Internet marketing is you can continue to optimize based upon data. You don't have to just guess like in branding or traditional marketing. So I think it's super powerful. And the email analytics, I mean that, that should, that and SEO. In my opinion, that and SEO are kind of like the core of your business because people continuously organically find you and at all funnels of the channel. And then email should work from not just like cold email, but nurture existing clients, keeping people up to date of what's going on. Like email fits in everywhere just like SEO does.
- [11:04]
B
So you said something earlier in the show I wanted to touch on. So you really were talking about just get started with where you are. So a phrase we use in our business and that I live by is good enough to get it out there, right? Just before this podcast, I launched a new Facebook ad, it goes into activecampaign and all that exists. There's a notification, there's no email. I'll get to it later today. Right. I didn't have time to finish it, but at least that, that damn ad is out there and approved and I'll get the rest of it built. I can't tell you the amount of automations where people have hit an email and below it it's blank. And I know I have a three day wait and I haven't even finished it yet because so many people in business, this is all parts of business and in life. All right, you got me up in this soapbox now. So now you got to hear it. They want.
- [11:50]
A
I love it. I love it.
- [11:51]
B
They want to wait till things are perfect. No one cares if it's perfect and they're not going to know if it's perfect or not because those are your rules. You're assigning to it, not somebody else's. So if it's perfect and on the shelf, it doesn't have any value. It's got to be in the game.
- [12:07]
A
So, so to even pile on more, right. A social media post on average has a four hour lifespan. Okay. And like even if you start looking at like all kinds of like really interesting data, people are more concerned if you meet somebody with how they acted in that scenario. There's like 20 memory in anything that you even did. So unless you did something that hit the, you know, really bad, really good, you blend in. Like you, you know, you just blend into the background. Obscurity is the word I was looking for. But what I can tell you is you want to make sure whatever your message is, boom. You hit that message and then all, all that else that matters is just that you're available and you're following up and you're, you're there. But people just. Yeah, I think that there's. People freeze and don't execute. Now certainly you run an ad or something like that and the link doesn't work. Like you want to double check and make sure. But, but some of these platforms will protect you in that. But email marketing, that email, you know, is going to be seen by people for 3 seconds or 7 seconds and then they're probably not going to see it again. And so, you know, would you rather create that touch point or not? Right? Like, and so you got to take massive action to change like your trajectory as well as like where you're currently at. Like, and that's what I think a lot of people don't understand. Is how much action has to be taken to move the needle because there's so much noise. There's something like. I don't even know. At one point, it was like 800 messages a day. But it's gotta be double that or triple that now that we get inundated with it. So how do you cut through the clutter? Well, I think you cut through with consistency.
- [13:55]
B
That's the key right there. Y. It's just like the weight room. If you go to the weight room and have the best workout of your life once a month, you're never going to see any change. It's not going to happen. Now, if you do a C workout five days a week, you're going to see a difference in three months, big time. So it's not my opinion, it's fact. Go try it out. So, yeah, consistency, that's. That's more important than anything. What's the secret to success? Be consistent with something. Right. Well, I'm not seeing results. Do it longer or try something different, but nothing good comes overnight, man. The hardest lesson. I talked to somebody the other day about this hardest lesson I've had to learn as an entrepreneur. I was not a patient person when I started this business 10 years ago. But what I found is the timeline is unknown, right? For things to happen, click, change, blow up, whatever, I don't know what it's going to be. So you keep going until it happens. Like, I'm not a I'm going to try this and go back to corporate America kind of guy. I'm not that guy at all. Last year was actually a very. Maybe the hardest year I've ever had in business. Very hard. My wife at one point was like, do you think you need to go get a job? And I said, I will never get a job that pays what I make now. That's not an option. Never say that to me again. Get out of my face. We're not doing that right. And I'm wired that way. Most people aren't, but I'm wired that way. But let's find a different offer. Let's get things going. That makes sense. And eventually something's going to hit and you start figuring it out, right?
- [15:16]
A
So, you know, now you opened up offers, right? Like, so I had Billie Jean is marketing on the podcast a while back. And, you know, that's what he hit home. Like, yeah, if you're not getting the results you want, like, the message is getting heard. If you're doing it right, you have a bad offer. And if you. If you want a 10x better return on like create a 10x better offer. Right. And I, I like the consistency of the military. Just really help helps you or having that routine, whether it's working out or whatever, getting up to do those things and you're right. Like you work out for forever. You don't know when the muscles are going to start showing up. You don't know when the six pack is going to be there. You just keep going because you know you're doing the right thing and you're moving in the right direction and certainly some actions better than no action because you're definitely going to be moving towards that goal away from it. Now I want to switch gears. We were talking in the pre interview about activecampaign Go High Level. So a lot of people that listen if they're not in digital marketing and a lot of people that listen are in digital marketing but there's a lot of kind of people that are taking over their parents business or they bought in a business or they're trying to digitally transform their company from the traditional way to generate leads. And you, you got HubSpot advertising really strongly. You got ActiveCampaign out there, you got GoHighLevel. Go High Level seems to be the hot thing out there. I remember when Go High Level launched like there was no like even like manual like how to use it. Like there was no customer support. Like it was really tough but everybody that knew how to use it was just absolutely raving about it. Now I think we've come a long way since then, but maybe you could kind of set the table as far as like I mean Infusionsoft. So on the ClickFunnels conference they were talking about Confusionsoft that they were just kind of like knocking on it like so like set the table for like the different email marketing tools and maybe what, how you view what they might be used best for because everybody's positioned a little differently.
- [17:14]
B
Yeah, great, great question. So Go High level. It's everything ClickFunnels wanted to be initially. I'm just a straight shooter. So Go High Level. The Calendly feature looks exactly like Calendly. They ripped it off the automation builders. Like ActiveCampaign looks a little older but it's more powerful. It's an attempt to be an all in one tool and I've never seen an all in one tool that I really love for all reasons. But Go High Level gives you a lot of potential functionality. It's very overwhelming for new clients. There's a big Learning curve. Activecampaign is a competitor. It is going to be, in my opinion. I still use it for my business, even though we work in both with our clients. Activecampaign is a cleaner interface, smaller learning curve. It's still the king with automation and CRM. It just is. HubSpot's a great one. HubSpot generally gets very expensive. So as people start building, they kind.
- [18:07]
A
Of get you in different ways and they lock you in and then you have to do it. And like, I. I get into people like, I was HubSpot certified. I get in and I'm like, you're doing an email newsletter once a month and you're paying for cheaper craziness, you know?
- [18:19]
B
Yep. So HubSpot, we lose about 10 clients a year to HubSpot, and they're generally moving up to, you know, significant revenue. And they. I almost feel like it's a badge of honor. Like, people like, nah, now I can afford this. I'm going to do it. Like, whatever. But so you've got these different tools out there. Activecampaign is not going to be mailchimp.
- [18:35]
A
Don't forget about mailchimp. That's what we want to start with, right?
- [18:38]
B
Yep.
- [18:39]
A
Like, I don't. I've never really used AWeber, but Mailchimp, I think, is great. And you can actually set up multiple accounts in there. And it's a. It's an easy to use, fast tool. Like I. Like I said, we use ActiveCampaign because I like kind of building out the workflow a little bit and the messaging and the lead scoring. But, I mean, you can get started with mailchimp in a day.
- [19:02]
B
And the key here is use something. Use something. I started with mailchimp years and years ago as well, but use something. Build a list with a purpose. Right. Nobody cares about your newsletter. Nobody cares about your white paper or your ebook that somebody on Fiverr made you that they've made for 50 other clients. Create three videos with two or three minutes of authentic screen. Share value and do something different. Do something your clients actually care about in your own style. There's an idea for a lead magnet. Your lead magnets or your offer to get a name and email address should be worth a couple hundred bucks or more in perceived value. Otherwise, nobody cares. Okay, so. But take advantage of email. It's a great way to keep in touch with people in addition to getting them on your YouTube or your podcast, whatever else you got going on, it doesn't require much effort to be effective. I cannot tell you the amount of people like, well, I'll get that done later. Here's the way that I teach funnels, right? You've got three pieces of a funnel. The first piece is traffic. You're getting attention online or offline, directing it to a page online. The second piece is the front end. It's the pages online. The last piece is the back end. Everybody wants to do the back end last. It's really dumb. You should do it first, have a plan what happens when people get to your list, then worry about traffic, then do your front end. Right? You can use Facebook lead ad forms, conditional logic, make them very high intent and push people directly into the back end. You can do it with high level or activecampaign. You don't even need a website and you can still get qualified people on your calendar in two or three days from now. And people want to argue with me while I'm generating leads for myself and my clients doing that same thing. So it doesn't have to be hard. The hardest part is a conversation you have with yourself about why you can't do it.
- [20:44]
A
No, for sure. I mean I can tell you that if you're even skeptical calendarly, which is kind of the market leader right now for calendars, they send you a text message or even an email if you verify in to get people to make sure they show up for that appointment, if that is turned off. Like I can see a depreciable amount of people that show up to meetings if they're not reminded about it. So even if there's an automation that, that's that simple to say, hey, you've already agreed to this meeting. Like please come to it. Like the, the show up rates are so much higher. So email has so many uses and it's like so, so powerful. Like if you're not doing it right and if you don't, if you're not generating an email list, that's the one thing that is your asset, right? That, that, that you have like certainly your website. But to, to, to reach out to people, to interact with them, to communicate with them even. Um, you know, I need to take my own advice for, for this podcast because I have a lot of listeners that I don't know who they are and I need to have a downloadable and there I'm really kind of shifting from working in the business to kind of doing more of the, the teaching and stuff like that. Get it getting out there on social media. Let's talk about that. So how important, like so email is like backbone, right? And you got, you got, you got a website and you got an email to get people to that website. It's a high converting website, you know, okay. It's shipping, showing up with SEO in, in, you know, for the different keywords. So people are organically finding you. So you have a little bit of a funnel going. Okay, where do you see paid ads fitting in? Because I think paid ads, I started in paid ads. I think paid ads is fantastic. Like, I think it adds it, it's a compounding kind of effect. And so kind of, okay, a lot of people are running advertising. Almost anybody I talk to, they're running a bunch of advertisers. They're spending way too much money, I think, on one channel advertising. And I'm like, spread this thing around. Let's like, you know, let's hit some multiple channels. Here is, is typically what I advise. I mean, how, how do you see that, like when someone comes to you, what are the issues that they're dealing with and then like, what are you recommending to them? And then how do you combine paid ads to, to the mix? I just kind of hear that. Your thoughts on that?
- [22:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, so it depends what niche they're in. I mean, we work with a lot of capital raisers for real estate, but high ticket service providers are really our broader niche. Typically when people are looking for more leads, they're just relying on referrals. You know, they don't have a whole lot going on. They might be doing some organic posting to LinkedIn, but nothing's really happening from it. So if they have a budget Facebook, Facebook ads as a supplement to what they're already doing is generally where I go first. It's the quickest way to start showing them some, some life, some blood in their business, then obviously getting that nurture set up. What happens after the call is super important. Important as well, because not everybody's gonna invest or buy on the first call. Most won't unless you have some really high pressure sales tactics, which we don't. So that's really important. You know, doing something. I think guesting on podcasts for me has always been more valuable than hosting my own show. Your show is really successful. You did a long time. You probably have a different experience. But I love getting on as a guest. I've been on, I don't know, 110, 115 podcasts now. And it's, it's great you get for the new audiences. It's fun, it's a good use of your time. I like YouTube. I like getting in front of the camera and the mic, getting on stage. So YouTube's a platform that I like to create and totally unplug. So I think getting yourself on video is huge and a lot of people don't like it, but face to face is best. But it's not scalable, right? It's not scalable, it's expensive, it's inconvenient. But getting on video is huge because people can figure out very quickly, within a few seconds of watching you speak, is this person full of. Or they do. They seem like they're kind of authentic. They, they figure out and they make a lot of decisions quickly. So it really can shorten that no like and trust thing. So doing stuff with video is great. I really like it.
- [24:41]
A
Well, so to speak out to videos, I mean, this is I think a golden error for, for videos since like all the live days, like when everything was going live was like awesome. And then now, now if you're, you know, if you're a business, like, you're not going to get any visibility unless you pay to play play, which I understand that. And, and I think that there's value in kind of giving the search engines or, or the different social media platforms a little bit of money to kind of warm up to you, you know, and, and it makes a lot of sense to do that. But I can tell you right now, posting on TikTok, if it stays around, like it's back and forth, I don't know, you know, YouTube shorts and Instagram is, is where it's at to get organic reach. You can set up a mini chat where, where you have like a downloadable text me this, send you that. Now you got the email address right off organic traffic, right? And you've given them some value. And then you can continue that conversation because a lot of people are like, well, I don't have the right lead magnet to your point. If you get the right video of just you answering a problem of like, hey, here are the three things that I do that do whatever and you can speak to it and your authority on it. You put that together with the call to action. You can put that on your website, it will convert. You can put that on a newsletter, you can put that on social media, you can turn that into a paid ad so like everybody has access now that zoom is a thing since COVID right, Or whatever, whatever you're using. Google Meets whatever it is, you know, Microsoft, I'm sorry, so there's a lot of problems, but, and my mom worked there, so I can say that. But I would tell you that you can get on video and you can record video. There's no excuse to be able to do it. Like you said, you're just in your own way figure it out, what you have value in. You're, you know, no I can trust. They pick up so much from you by what you say, right? There's so many on, on, you know, on things that are not in words, right? So like there's things that are not in the words, especially text, right? You get text confusion all the time of what's going on. But if you're an authority, you're an expert, right? And you're trustworthy, that that's all you need to communicate in whatever it is that you're offering. Put that, sell, put that out there and you know, put a couple videos. The, the algorithm's gonna tell you if it's good or not. And then you can pick that up and turn that into an ad. But like you could do this all in a day and you could start generating a list. But I think that even going back to the beginning, do it now, do it now. Like to the beginning of, of it. You just gotta, you gotta take action. And I think one of the things that I would love for you to speak on and we were talking about this in the pre interview is how do you figure out who to trust, right? Because everybody and their dog can hang a shingle out and say, you know, I actually wrote so this book, I'm meeting with a client like after this. But I wrote this book a couple years ago when I kept seeing like 15 year old kids on Instagram saying they're going to help me grow my business. And I was just like. And for anybody that listening, it's called how to transform yourself into an authoritative brand and attract your ideal customers. Build your brand mania. So that's, that's a book I wrote about five years ago, but I literally wrote this book explaining my journey and like how to do it. So, so I say I drink like just like you. I drank my own cool aid, but like there were kids. I like, how can you prove to me that you do it if you're 15? Like how are you a business consultant? Like I just couldn't. Like it was just, it was, it was too much. And so that, that, that kind of perpetuates is okay. How do you do email marketing, right? It's not like accounting, you know what I mean? Like it's kind of a little bit of an art and there's so Many people out there that say they do it. And look, I call it kissing frogs. Honestly is, I've been doing this long enough. I. I have so many different people. I've used agencies, consultants, people that I've known, hired, done partnerships with. Like, I kind of have a sense of, like, who to use or where to go. But for somebody that's starting out, it's like, I'm running this business and I need somebody. Email marketing, like, I can go 50,000 places and get 100,000 names of people that do this. I mean, I can tell you there's like, I don't know how many. I think there's like 1800 something agencies in Houston. Like, okay, how do I know which ones are good? Like, I don't know any of these people. Right. So, like, when you're looking at email marketing, maybe what are some questions you can ask them or what are some things you can look for? Maybe, like, I know the badges and the certifications are super helpful as a starting point, but, like, how would you evaluate an email marketing person if. If you were trying to hire somebody today?
- [29:12]
B
That's a great question. I mean, like you said, unfortunately, age has a piece to it. You know, if you're living at home, I don't really want to hear your life lessons because you've never got out of the world on your own. So finding somebody that's been doing it for a little while, but getting them on a video call, get them on a zoom call, have a conversation, and if they oversell themselves with the results, they're probably full of. Honestly, we've worked with close to 700 people in activecampaign in the last 10 years. I jump on.
- [29:43]
A
That's a good number. Yeah, it's a lot.
- [29:45]
B
It's a lot. I jump on and call people, I figure out what they're doing, what they're trying to do, and if it's not a good fit, I'll just say, hey, you know, ecom's not really our focus. There's other people that focus on that. It's not really us, but let me give you a couple of pointers to leave you better than I found you while we're on here. Off you go. So jumping on a zoom call with them, asking questions, kind of seeing what they are when people want me to, like, guarantee stuff. Can you guarantee leads in a week? We don't play that game. Because if you've been on Facebook or anything long enough, algorithms change, the market changes. I don't want to be tied to that.
- [30:17]
A
So, Jason, I had a client or a potential, potential client that, gosh, I'm venting to the world here. This is like a year ago, two years ago, actually. And I took them, got a verbal. They were like, oh, let's meet at the steakhouse. We'll get you a lunch. And I was like, I'll, I'll get you lunch. And then he invited a bunch of people. Okay, so then we did this lunch, and, and then he ghosted me, right? Comes back a year later. Hey, like, actually, like, we want to use you. Like, we're talk to some other people. Like, actually, you're the right person. And so they're like, we're going through that process, and then that was the next thing that they wanted to do. They were like, sorry, I totally vented. Everybody, apologies, but everybody has those bad clients, I guess. But I, but you got to look for those things, right? You got to look for those red flags. But they, they say, so this was like, a $15,000 proposal. And they were like, if you don't get his first position for SEO in, like, three months, like, are you going to give us all our money back? Like, we want that guarantee. And I was just like, I was like, I can't call Google up and, like, guarantee that, you know, like, I, I'm gonna do all the right actions. Like, I think we can get to the top three, but I can't guarantee you the first position. And certainly, like, that's not how I'm structuring this agreement to give you a guarantee. Now, certainly, I can structure a guarantee to give you that kind of agreement, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna cherry pick the keywords. You know, I'm gonna charge it three times more than I need to. Like, you know what I mean? Then, like, I can get you there. And, and people pay for expediality, right? Like, I don't even know that's the word. But people pay for guarantees, and people pay for speed, and, and I think that that's valuable to some. But, yeah, like, I, I, I'm sorry. I totally vented to everybody.
- [31:54]
B
Good man.
- [31:55]
A
But, but I, I, I was a little hurt by kind of what they were asking. Right? And, and you, you, you really got to identify those potential pitfalls early on, because I'm like, this, this client already showing red flags. Like, we don't, we don't want to work with this client. And so, you know, I told him, I said, you might want to go with somebody different. And then they, I won't even go into even more what they're asking for. But it hopefully people can understand, like the pain.
- [32:24]
B
Oh yeah. If somebody listening's never had that pain, they haven't been doing it long enough. You'll find crazy clients, potential clients. So that same guy you're talking about, I would say if you want something to guarantee you that, good luck with your search. It didn't sense. Make me have a good day. Like, I don't want anything to do with this scenario because we're just starting and this is coming off crazy and I. You're going to be a nightmare six months down the road. I'm hate my life because of you. So I'm gonna set you free and send you on your way, brother. I have no problem telling people that I might have one of those conversations today, to be honest with you. So we'll see how it goes. I'm a nice guy, but I'm not scared to tell you exactly what I think, and especially if it's answering a question. If you have a question, I'm gonna give you an answer. So.
- [33:03]
A
Well, I think, you know, see, again, consulting and giving people advice on, on what to do and how to stay out of the ditch, you know, I, I'm happy to provide that, that direction. And, and I have lots of years of experience and lots of campaigns to be able to say, hey, this is what I'm seeing going on and this is what I really think you should do. And, and, and so, But I can tell you that the, the guarantee business is a different model. Like, like, okay, well, give me, give me a piece of the revenue, right? Like, like, we got to get more involved, but like, out of the gate, like, I want. We need to step into this thing, right? And so there, there's a lot of those kind of things that I think that people, if I'm speaking to the agency owners out there now and, and the freelancers don't pick up the wrong client because, look, I'm always going, I want to hit this out of the park. I want to get a good review out of this. I want this client to be my client long term. I want to get referrals out of this. So, so I know what my ideal client is. And if it's not, I try to tell them that and I try to dissuade them to say, hey, this ain't going to work, or if it's going to work, we need to make sure that we build. Because a lot of people know what they want, but they don't have the budget to do it right. And so the worst thing you can do, even if it's not a bad client, is take on a client that you know that, that, that, that you're, you're, whatever you're doing, they don't have enough horsepower or firepower to deliver that right. Like, so if you're brand new product and you're doing cold email marketing or whatever, like you got to have enough accounts going, you got to have enough emails. Like, and it's a numbers game to, to, to a certain degree. But like if, if you're trying to rank for a very difficult keyword and you have big competitors, hey, like you're not going to get there on like a shoestring budget. So it's really about evaluating, I think for all the freelancers and agencies out there, the right client, because that client's going to cost you a ton of money. And that's how my agency has been able to scale, is making sure we're picking the right clients. And also that goes back all the way back to email marketing is making sure the hook, the hook is right because you're gonna, you're gonna see in the leads what the bait is you're putting out, like from a phishing analogy. And if you tweak that, you can get exactly what you're looking for in the right messaging, solving the right problem and hitting the right people. Right. I think that it's, you know, what is it the right target at the right time with the right message or something like that. Like really is. I mean, tell me a little bit about like sequencing and then we'll, we'll start to kind of wrap up here. Getting close to time.
- [35:47]
B
Yeah. So I mean, I always tell people it's like any new relationship in life, you're going to talk more, more often when you first meet somebody. And as time goes by, it's not necessary. Like if my mom, after me being alive for 43 years now, she wants to talk every day, I'm gonna be like, mom, how about once a week? Every day is kind of a lot. I don't have much to say. I work at home. It's not that much going on. But if a new neighbor moves in next door, at first we're going to talk often to get to know each other. So it's kind of the same way with your sequencing. You don't want to be overwhelming. Like if I get on your list and you contact me every day, I'm not going to be there long. But that's just my personality. So you Definitely want to take care of the new relationships and making those touch points. Something I was going to say just with like email structure, what I use. I love playing to curiosity. It's one of my favorite things to do with subject lines and even the beginning of emails, but curiosity to get it open. Little hook at the beginning, little storytelling about our real pain or our real success or whatever. One actionable question or thing and then some kind of a call to action. I pretty much do that in every newsletter and it's very conversational. If you read my emails, they would say, man, it sounds exactly like Jason. It's because it is, right? I, I say I speak exactly how I write and vice versa. And it works well because it's easy for me to create, it's easy to consume, and it's different than everybody else. So I hope there's value there.
- [37:08]
A
No, I think that that's great. I, I think that many times I've talked to people or messaged people and then I've spoken to them or I've met them in person, right? And, and they're different, right? And, and that's so wild. And, and you would think, you would think that across all mediums, you, you want to be the same person and be. And communicate that same way. I've started to do a lot of emails where I'm just talking, right? So I'm not typing anymore. I'm just talking and then I'll grammar check it or whatever and just very conversational. You know, There's a formula, 7, 11, 4, that was put out by a Zero Moment of Truth study by Google that said seven hours of content they got to consume seven hours. Whether it's talking to you live or checking out your stuff or whatever, reading your emails and you know, they see your message 11 times and they need to see it on four different channels. And if you follow that formula, you're gonna, you're gonna, and you're targeting the right people. Good things are gonna happen. Like, I, I just, I don't think there's any, any other way, way around it. But man, if they just know who you are over, over that quote, unquote, seven hours, they're gonna know I can trust you and they're gonna decide whether to do business with you. Like, like you're, you're like a straight up, like, you know, no, no, like, right, get right to the point kind of, no nonsense kind of guy. People are going to listen to this and go, man, that's what I want. That's who I want. To work with. Right.
- [38:34]
B
I describe my style as unapologetically authentic.
- [38:38]
A
I like it. I like it. Well, hey, we're. I. I want to make sure people know how to get in touch with you. Where are you hanging out? What are you doing? I know you got email newsletter. People inscribe true. Kind of tell. Tell everybody your info.
- [38:52]
B
Yep. So company is intentionally inspirational dot com. So that is also the website you can go to if you really want to see Jason Unplugged. More of this, but even a bit more hardcore. Our YouTube channel, we have a playlist called Smoke Flow and Grow. And it's turned into me reviewing a lot of cigars and hanging out by my pool and talking a little bit about business. But it's. It's a great place to. To get more of a feel for me Unplugged and yeah, intentionally inspirational dot com.
- [39:19]
A
Love it. Jason, thank you so much for coming on. So, everybody, if you're trying to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet, reach out to EWR Digital for more revenue in your business. Also, check out ewr digital.com because most people that listen to podcasts I see in the audience set, so they know about the podcast, but they don't know about business and vice versa. So please just share that with somebody. You know, if you got value, you know, Check out Matthew bertram.com I am growing like a coaching business and kind of. I just. I just became a public figure on. On. On Google. So that was. That was pretty cool. And until the next time, guys, bye bye for now.