← Social Media Marketing Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
Have you ever wondered if you're the only marketer who feels behind? Well, you're not. And social media marketing world will prove it. Here's the truth. Everyone feels behind when they're working by themselves. Social media marketing world isn't just about learning new tactics. It's about finding your people, the marketers who understand your challenges and actually speak the very same language that you speak. Shelly Rosalind I, a past attendee, said, quote, I found my tribe people who speak my language and understand my challenges. Join thousands of marketers in Anaheim, California this April. Save $800 right now on all access tickets or get virtual access for half off, but only until Friday, December 5th. Visit social media marketingworld.info to secure your spot.
- [00:55]
B
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast. Help you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello.
- [01:06]
A
Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, I've got an incredible show for you. I'm going to be joined by Chris Orzachowski and we're going to explore email segmentation. If you've been sending emails and you've been struggling, getting really great results and you kind of intuitively know that there are some people on your list that are maybe not necessarily interested in your offer and you've just never really gotten into or understood or how to actually segment your list and how to increase your revenue, this is going to be the show for you. This is chock full of solid gold. Chris is amazing. I absolutely know you're going to love this. Also, if you're new to this podcast, follow us on whatever app you're listening on because we've got some incredible content coming your way. Let's now transition over this week's interview.
- [02:01]
B
With Chris Orzakowski, helping you to simplify your social safari.
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Here is this week's expert guide.
- [02:11]
A
Today, I am very excited to be joined by Chris Orzikowski. He is an email marketing strategist who specializes in helping small businesses grow their revenue with email marketing. He's the author of multiple books, including Make It Rain the Secret to Generating Massive Paydays from your email list. Chris is known online as the email copywriter. Chris, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:32]
B
I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me.
- [02:33]
A
I'm excited to have you. So today, Chris And I are going to explore how to get more revenue, more sales, more leads. Well, actually really more revenue and sales by sending smaller emails to smaller groups through segmentation. Before we get into that, I'd love to hear your story. How in the world did you get into email marketing?
- [02:50]
B
Yeah, so I actually used to be a public school special ed teacher and a wrestling coach. Cause when I was in college I like didn't know what I wanted to do. And when people would ask me like, what do you want to do? What are you going to major in? I'm like, I don't want to do anything, you know, but obviously that wasn't a viable, you know, career path. What I really meant was like I didn't want to do a typical, like get dressed in a suit, go to New York City and have a commute and do that whole thing. And I, you know, growing up it was kind of like, well that's kind of like where all roads are kind of leading to. I didn't really ever know about entrepreneurship, you know, like didn't just cross my mind as an option. Didn't know it's possibility. So went to school, I got a job. I figured, you know, I was a Division 1 wrestler. I was like, okay, I'll just, you know, coach wrestling and you know, I guess I'll take a job as a teacher and just do that, right? So I remember there was this one moment though when, when you're a teacher, they give you the guidebook, right, for your contract. And in that it has the salary and they call it like steps. So like every year is a new step and it had all 39 steps laid out and it was like basically every dollar you're going to make over the course of the next 39 years. And like I added up and I was like, I don't know if I like that number. I was like, you know, like it wasn't great, right? And I was like, maybe I could do something else to make a lot more. And it's a tough job, especially you know, special education. I was like, I don't know if I can do this for the next like 30, 40 years of my life. So I was like, okay, now I guess, you know, at the age of like 23, it's time to like really start figuring out like what we're actually going to do. So I had this mentor of mine, this guy Zach Avanesh. I used to train at his gym. It was like a semi private strength conditioning gym. And he would sell like digital products online in addition to training in person. I've been. I started following him in, like, 2003 and, you know, was reading his stuff all through high school. I graduated in 07. And so this is, like, early days of the Internet, like, pre click funnels, pre everything, right? And I was so amazed when I would read the sales page. I didn't know they were sales pages at the time, but I remember, like, reading his sales pages for his products. And I was like, there's something going on in my brain when I read this that, like, makes me want to buy the product. And I was like, what is this? So I asked him, I was like, dude, what are you doing with these pages? And he goes, I don't know. I just, you know, I wrote a lot of articles. You know, I'm just a good writer. I was like, no, no. There's like, something behind what you're doing here. And so I started kind of tumbling down the rabbit hole. I was like, maybe I could be like him and have my own digital products and stuff like that. So I started creating websites, trying to get some blogs off the ground. I had this one called Wrestling Coach Academy, which is, like, my first foray into, you know, Internet businesses, and started building that up and didn't really make any money with that. Ran that for about a year. But I had, like, a podcast. I was doing daily emails, list building. I was selling affiliate offers. I was doing, like, all the typical online business stuff. It was just a really bad market because those people don't buy, you know, $500 info products. But I discovered through that process, oh, there's this thing that I'm doing called copywriting, where you write words and get people to buy stuff. And I was like, oh, that's what Zach was doing with those pages. And then I learned that there were people who call copywriters who essentially got paid thousands of dollars, sometimes more, to hand a client a document with words in it. And I was like, I could do that. I don't know how. I didn't know, like, what went into that. But I was like, I bet I could figure this out. I bet if I spent the next, you know, year or so or two years figuring it out, like, I could get people to pay me. And I think it was May 2015, I got my first paying client. I got paid 300 to do, like, an Amazon listing and some emails and product inserts and their website. And I was like, oh, my gosh, like, someone paid me to write something. This, like, the most insane thing ever. So what I started you know, going from zero to one was really hard. It took a long time, but then I just started inching my way up, getting more and more clients. Started working with John Asaph from Neurogym, did a bunch of multi million dollar launches. I became their lead copywriter, age 26, and wrote an obscene amount of copy over the two and a half years that I was there. I worked with Jeff Walker for two years in house as his copywriter. One of his copywriters helped him with, you know, multi million dollar launches and campaigns. So I started kind of making a name for myself and working with all these other different clients. I'm just kind of like inching my way up the food chain. And then I started an email list, eventually started a agency, and now I kind of have like a. My own, like little mini email empire.
- [07:02]
A
Very cool. Love the story. So talk to me about segmenting. Why is segmenting. And we're here really talking about email marketing to a lot of marketers who probably are doing lots of things in addition to email. They're probably doing social marketing and everything else. And I'm sure they're sending emails, maybe they're sending newsletters, maybe they're sending offers to their audience. But talk to me a little bit about the concept of why segmenting is so important when it comes to email marketing. Like, let's just focus on the benefits.
- [07:31]
B
Yeah, I mean, there's so many benefits. When I first started realizing the importance of this, you know, I've always known about segmentation, doing it for clients and things, but it really. I hit home when I had my own email list and I was selling my own offers. And I started realizing, like, you know, when I write certain things, certain people light up and others tune out. And when I launch certain products, the performance of those products. Like, for example, I launched this course one time to my list of 13,000 people, and I got 119 sales. And I was like, why didn't I get more sales from that? I mean, it was a decent launch. You know, it was 40k in sales. Like it was okay, but I was like, why wasn't it 100k? You know, I was like, what's going on here? So I started looking under the hood and I was like, you know what? This offer really wasn't for everyone on my list. This was for a small segment. So I was kind of beating myself up over the performance of this offer. And it's like, well, the total addressable market is not in your entire email list. The total addressable market might actually be a very small sliver of people. So if you actually think about, you know, not just your entire email list, but like who all these pockets of people are who are on your list, you feel a bit better about yourself. That's the first thing. Because you're like, okay, this actually did well given the context of how many people are actually interested in this offer. But then you start to realize while you're running that offer, you could be running other offers to other segments and making 2, 3, 5, 10 times as much money because you're putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. And that's where these things get really exciting. Because a lot of this stuff can be automated and a lot of this stuff can be used where if you know, you know every list has whales, right? There's minnows and there's whales. The whales are the people who buy your high ticket stuff. They buy often, they spend a lot of money. When they do, they're a pleasure to work with, right? And then there's minnows, there's people who come in and they'll buy your ebook for 20 bucks or 10 bucks and they'll never buy anything else. And, and the way that you grow your business is by growing the number of whales. In order to grow your business by growing the number of whales, you need to find out who the whales are and how many whales you have. You need to find out where they came from and you'd find out what they interact with, what they want to buy, what their opinions are when you survey your list. Because those opinions are more important than the minnows who never buy anything or buy very little. Because once you do that, that changes everything else in the business. That changes what you do for your lead magnets, that changes what you do for your front end offers, that changes what you do for organic social content. That changes what you do for ads. It changes everything because you're, first of all, you're not trying to build an emails list, excuse me, an email list, you're trying to build a buyer's list. And really once you built the buyer list, then you're trying to build a whales list. That is how you grow the business the fastest. And without segmentation, you're kind of flying blind when you look at all of these social media platforms. Let's use meta because most people are familiar with meta. Meta ads, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. The reason why platforms like meta are so powerful is, is because they have the most insane segmentation on the planet through their Machine learning and the algorithm, right? They know what you're interested in, they know what you're not interested in. They know if you buy things or if you don't buy things because they have all that data. Because you're constantly being shown ads and interacting with those ads and content and they're storing all that and they're looking at other websites. You're on everything, so they know everything about you. That is why it is such an efficient machine for advertising. Because you can give your ads to Meta and it'll say, hey, we'll go find the buyers, we know who the buyers are, we'll go put your ads in front of the buyers. If you're doing a conversion objective, for example, when you get that buyer or that email subscriber onto your list from Meta or from any social platform, none of that data comes along. So that's their moat. They're not going to just give that information you freely. So now you have this email address or first name and email address and you don't really know anything about these people. You don't know what their pain points are. You don't know what they're interested in, what they're not interested in. You don't know what they're looking for. Now you can get away with doing one size fits all marketing. And I've done that for years. One size fits all marketing. I built a, essentially a solopreneur business up to a million dollars a year doing one size fits all marketing. It's not like you can't find success with that. But how do you 2 or 3 or 5x the results? Well, you have to get smarter.
- [11:31]
A
I love it. This is like candy to some of the people that are listening right now. They're absolutely enthralled. So what do marketers need to think about before they actually begin the concept of segmenting? Because so many people don't do what we're about to talk about. So let's just lay the groundwork for any fundamentals that are really important before we get into the details of how to segment.
- [11:49]
B
I think the first step is you start to get a piece of paper and you start to list out anecdotal observations that you made about your audience. I'll use my own email list as an example. Anecdotally, what I've noticed is that there are a lot of people who are copywriters, freelancers, email marketers, service providers, people who do email marketing for a living. And they essentially take the stuff, the systems that I create, they say, okay, Now I'm going to take this and sell as a service to a client, do it on their behalf. The other half of the people are people who own their own businesses or who, you know, have a job working in a bigger business. And they say, I need to learn email marketing so I can execute it for my company. So right off the bat, that's something I've noticed. And how have I noticed that while I've done group coaching programs, I've had thousands of people reply to my emails. So I've had discussions, I've done little surveys over the years. So what that allows me to do, they start to generate, okay, here's some things that I know about some of the people on my list. At least the people that I've interacted with. I know that the people tend to fall into these type of buckets. What are the questions that people have asked me before? The reason you're thinking about this is because this is what's going to form the primary challenge that people are having. And that's one of the most important things that every brand can really figure out. When someone gets sent to your email list, are you asking them what's the primary challenge they're trying to solve? Because depending on that primary challenge, you could put people down very different paths. For example, with my email list, there's a small percentage of people, I mean it's not insignificant, but it's, you know, 3, 4, 5% of people come in, they say deliverability is my number one challenge right now. Well, I have a program on deliverability. Should I put them into a program, Excuse me, an automation that sells them something on list growth? Probably not. I should probably put them into the automation that sells them the course on deliverability, obviously. Right. But until you start doing this, you don't know and everyone just goes down the conveyor belt and gets pelted with whatever emails you're sending. So you have an opportunity to think through, okay, what do people usually come to us? What are the questions they usually ask? What are the things that they're usually looking for? And that is what's going to allow you to start to build out some type of basic segmentation survey that you could take your list through, that all the new opt ins can go through, that you could start to back populate some of that data from the existing subscribers. So a lot of it is, I don't want to say common sense, but it's just what do you already know from the months or years that you've operated your business and interacting with your people? Like, who are these people? What are the challenges that they have? And the other thing is, what is the criteria that makes up a good lead? Like, some of the things that I ask my list are a, do you have an email list, yes or no? And then B, how big is your email list? And also, what email software are you used? Are you using automation, Blah, blah, blah. But I even ask questions like, when are you looking to get help with your email automations? And the three questions are, I want to do it myself sometime in the future or asap. So what happens when you start collecting data on the people who want help asap? Well, can you follow up with them and close them a lot sooner than you ordinarily would have? Because maybe next month you're going to do a pitch for your services. Well, you could automate a pitch right now to that person who says, hey, I need this solved right now. Right? So what do you need to know about the people on your list that's going to put them into the bucket of a good, hot, ready to buy lead, or someone who is looking for a different solution or they want to do it themselves in a B2B context? And obviously depending on what you sell, this might change. But there's always questions that you could ask to say, what are the things that would qualify someone as a good ready to buy prospect? And how do I create a segment of those people so I could follow up a little bit more aggressively with those people and make sure that I can give them what they need? Because what happens is a lot of people when they don't find what they need, when they interact with the business, they'll leave, they'll go buy from someone else. If someone says, I have this problem, I need to solve it right now. And you're like, oh, I'm not going to pitch anything. Oh, I'm not going to, you know, market to you. They're going to say, well, I got to find someone who can help me solve it. They're going to go buy from one of your competitors.
- [15:34]
A
Okay, I love this. I want to dig in a little bit on something you said, which is ask them questions. How do you recommend we ask questions said another way? Do we just deal with people responding to every single email, or do we actually have like different links that they click on that somehow trigger something inside of our email system so we can tag them? Like, talk to me about the fundamentals of how people can do this, because a lot of people might find this overwhelming if they have a lot of people on their email list.
- [16:02]
B
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of ways you can do this. The tool that I like using is called Write Message. Brennan Dunn is the guy who created it. And it's an excellent tool. It integrates with like 11 different email platforms. It integrates with Kit, which is what I use. There's other ones out there. That's just the one that I like. And it's super powerful because it collects all this stuff. It pushes the data into ConvertKit and it also pulls data from ConvertKit. So it kind of goes two ways and it syncs everything up as custom fields within each individual subscriber's profile. So the creating segments is super easy and then building automations off those segments is super easy. You could also use things like Typeform. You could, I mean maybe even use something like Google Forms. Obviously with some of these solutions you might have the ability to push the data into their profile. But Right Message is the one that I like to use.
- [16:41]
A
Okay. And we're going to get into Right Message a little bit later. But fundamentally it sounds like this, like depending on who you use. Like for example we use Drip. I know you use ConvertKit, but sometimes they allow you to do like trigger links where like you ask a question, there's a couple of options and then when they click on the option it puts it back in the email database with the tag on it. Effectively that's what we're talking about here. Right. Just coming up with a couple of questions that will allow you to kind of identify new subscribers or do you even recommend doing this on the form when they're coming in in the first place? Do you understand where I'm going with that?
- [17:17]
B
Yeah, you could do it. I think it works best as a post opt in thing when people join your list. But the thing is, you know, most people who are listening to this, they already have the list and they haven't started, they didn't start doing it when they started their list. I mean that's a very common scenario. And I've lot of the trigger link stuff in the past and it's not perfect, it's not ideal, but it does work. And the way that I typically use it, like Trigger Link specifically is whenever I link up a product, I will sign a trigger link to that that tags someone with interest. And usually what I'll do is every now and again what I'll do like each month I'll do this two or three times a month I'll say like, hey, by the way, if you're Interested in growing your list? Like, you should check out this program of mine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I will send that to all the people who have never been through the automation for that and the people have never bought it. And so that'll cut down the total overall, you know, amount of people that I'm sending to. But I know the people who click on that link and say, oh, I'm interested in list growth. Now we know, and now we can create an interest segment and we can also put people into those automated sequences. And what's really cool when you do this is a lot of people say to me, like, oh, I had this automation, I had this many subscribers coming in. But like, the conversion percentage is so low. And the thing is, it's not that the conversion percentage is so low, it's just everyone's flowing into the one automation and it might not be the right thing for them when you do it with trigger links. And I have some of these sequences that are anywhere from 12 days to 50 days long. An email every single day following up with just more info, more stories, more teaching about the product, you know, teaching them little tips and things like that and encouraging them to get in. I have courses that sell on Evergreen for anywhere from $10 up to 997. And why does that work? People are like, oh, 9 97. You can't sell something in that price point unless you do an open and close and there's a deadline, there's urgency and blah, blah, blah. Yes you can, if you're putting the right offer to the right person, the right time. Because what happens is people have inciting incidents in their lives. Kind of like the hero's journey, right? It's like the call to adventure. Like something happens and they have the call to adventure and they say, oh my gosh, this just happened. I need to solve this new problem. I'm trying to become this person now because I realized this thing and they go off on this hero's journey when that happens. Or if someone is kind of in that phase of their life and you send an email with a trigger link and they click on it because they're like, oh, this sounds like it could be for me. And you just keep following up until they buy. They tend to buy. I mean, not everyone. You're not gonna get 100% conversion, but the rate conversion rates are really, really solid. And you can do it in an automated way, which is really, really cool, as opposed to just putting everyone through one size fits all, you know, path, and then being like oh, the numbers are really small. I mean, maybe you'll need to put 100 people in a week through that sequence and get six or seven or 10 sales from a product. And that happens to me all the time with these automations because we're hitting people and following up with the right offer for them at the right time.
- [19:59]
A
Here's a truth about marketing conferences. Many organizers choose their speakers based on how big their following is or how much they're willing to pay to get up on that stage, not on their teaching ability. This results in stages filled with people who are excellent marketers for themselves, but not very good at teaching you. When I started Social Media Marketing world Back in 2013, I made a different choice. I personally recruit every single speaker based on three different criteria. First, they're actively doing the work, not teaching from outdated playbooks. Second, they're exceptional trainers. Being an expert and being a good teacher are completely different skill sets. And third, they're committed to pure education. That means no course pitches, no upsells, no holding back strategies to sell later. Instead, they bring the solid gold. Justine Johnson said, quote, I was grateful it was a genuine educational event and not a gimmicky sales pitch for each of the speakers. Online courses, unquote. Join us in Anaheim, California this April, but today, if you get your tickets, you can save 800 on all access tickets and half off on virtual tickets. But only until Friday, December 5th. Visit social media marketingworld.info and secure your spot. Talk to me about why people are and aren't buying. We talked about this when we were prepping and I know this is going to be really helpful because a lot of people outside of obviously wrong audience, you know what I mean? But let's dig in on some of the challenges as to why people buy or don't buy and objections and all that kind of stuff.
- [21:39]
B
Yeah, I mean, it really comes down to a few things. Number one is do they understand their problem and why they're experiencing the problem? And it's kind of like, well, you have these symptoms and here's the underlying cause of those symptoms. A lot of times people don't really take the time to unpack that in their email marketing. And I'll write emails that are strictly like, if you've ever experienced X, Y and Z, you might think it's because this is happening. But actually here's what's really happening, like, here's why you're really failing. Right? So a lot of times to be an effective email marketer, you have to shift beliefs And I think that this is also true of social content. I think it's really true of all types of advertising. If you could shift someone's beliefs. And you know, because a lot of people come in with false beliefs, they are propagandized in various ways through the media that they listen to. I'm not talking in the political sense, I'm just talking in general. They are, you know, these ideas about their problem or about who they're trying to become, they have all these false beliefs. So it's like you kind of have to unprogram their brains and saying, like, I know everyone says this, but this is actually the worst thing that you could possibly do. And here's why that is, and here's what actually has worked. Here's what works for our students, here's what worked for me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So making sure they understand the problem. The second thing is making sure they understand the solution. And this is one of those things where like a lot of times I'll critique people's emails and they'll write this great email and they'll say, and by the way, you should buy my thing. It's like, okay, well unpack the offer. Like, you should buy my program, you should buy my supplement, you should buy my, you know, physical good, whatever it is. The reason why is because when you buy this, it's going to do X, Y and Z for you because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People don't explain why the thing is good, how it changes, changes their lives. Like there's features, there's benefits, and there's dimensionalized benefits. So a feature is part of the thing, right? It's like, oh, the thing has this feature. The benefit is the good thing that the feature does, the dimensionalized benefit is how does your life change once you have experienced the benefit? And one of the things I always do with people when I look at their copy and look at their emails is I push them to say, okay, you're talking about the benefit here. Or sometimes they're only talking about the feature. And I say, what is the dimensionalized benefit? How does their life change once they've used this? Right? So I just wrote some emails last night for this soap company that I'm working with. It's like, well, why are people buying soap? Because that's the all natural ingredients. And I'm like, okay, well that's a feature of the product. What is the benefit of the all natural ingredients? Well, the benefit is these actually nourish your skin. And the reason why that is important is because especially when it gets cold outside and the wind is whipping across your face and the cold air doesn't let as much oxygen come to your skin so you're not getting as much nutrients and it gets drier quicker and you can lead to breakouts and everything else that doesn't happen anymore. But the real dimensionalized benefit is you are going to glow all winter. You are going to have aura, you are going to look amazing, you're going to feel amazing because you look amazing, right? Like that's the, that's what people are buying right there. People stop so short of that and it's like you need to literally spoon feed people the reason why they should buy the product.
- [24:31]
A
And by the way, it sounds like you go all the way through that storyline like you just did, right? Because like saying you're gonna feel better in the winter and you're gonna glow. I mean I feel like that's like, I like the baseline. You're building a, you're building a, here's the benefit, here's why and here's what it means for you, right? Like it's all that together needs to be part of the storyline. Am I right or am I wrong that?
- [24:54]
B
Oh, 100% right. Because really like the end goal is like they're walking down the street and someone compliments them, right? They say, oh my gosh, you look amazing today, right? Or like, I don't know, let's just say, you know, I know that's an appropriate example, but like someone at work comments that like, you're looking great. Have you been working out? Blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, I just got this new soap that has me looking beautiful. You know, like that's what they want to buy. That's the product is just a tool that helps them do the job of getting to that point in life, right? They want to buy the outcome. And this is the big thing. Like people don't sell outcomes. Every product is just a vehicle to get to an outcome. When that is true, if it's a service, it's true. If it's a digital product, it's true. If it's a software, it's true. If it's a physical product, right? These are all vehicles to get an outcome. People don't dangle the outcome. Like that's why they buy the product, because they want to get the outcome. And that is why you have to go through the dimensionalization process in your copy in order to get people to say, ah, I get it, yes, I Want that, I want that. So I'm going to buy this.
- [25:50]
A
Talk to me about stories.
- [25:52]
B
Stories are great because they are delivery mechanisms for new beliefs. And the other thing about stories is that people tend to put themselves or see themselves in stories and they're not very non confrontational way of selling. You know, some people's brands are a little bit more aggressive. I'm probably a little bit more aggressive than the average marketer in terms of the way that I talk to people because I'm a very blunt person. That's just, you know, New Jersey, it's how I am. Right? But you don't have to beat people over the head with your sales message. You could just say like, hey, I want to tell you about my friend Peggy. Peggy was having this problem and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then here's what she was experiencing, here's what she was going through. She realized that this was happening. She decided to make a change and try this thing. And then this happened. And here's why this good thing happened. People are reading that and they're like, ooh, maybe I should be like Peggy, right? It's a very like easy way to sell products. And the important thing about stories, the reason why stories work so well, which no one ever talks about, is stories are a demonstration. Gary Bensabanga, one of the best living copywriters for many years ago, he said this, he said the most powerful form of proof is a drama demonstration. Well, everyone says, well, how do I demonstrate, right? Like you think of demonstration, you think of like the shamwow infomercial, right? Like how do I do that in an email? How do I do that in copy? How do I do it with words? Well, if you tell a story, that automatically is a demonstration of the point that you're trying to make. So if demonstrations are the most powerful form of proof and people do not buy without proof. It's not the size of the promise, it's the size of the proof. That's another Pensivenga thing. Then if you start wrapping stories around all of your sales messages and turn them into stories, it's a very non confrontational way to demonstrate and prove the point you're trying to make. There's showing and there's telling, right? And when I was a elementary school teacher, I, you know, I taught writing and we had to practice the skill. Don't tell me what happened in the story, right? Show me what happened in the story. A lot of people, they just action. Everything's action. There's five types of sentences, right? That go into, like, every piece of writing ever. And it's actions which are an obvious one. The boy went down the street. There's thoughts, there's dialogues, there's feelings, and there's literary devices. Right. When you add in those other four, that's when stories get really exciting. When you have the feelings, what's going on inside their body, inside their mind, what are the. The thoughts, what are they thinking about? The dialogue that creates a small moment out of the story. Right. People think a story is like, susie did this then. She did this then. And like, that's a very basic level story. But if you zoom in into a small moment, like, almost like you're watching a scene in a movie that's like, Susie's talking to her coworker, and her coworker said this. It's like you feel like you're a fly on the wall right then and there's. So that makes the story way more powerful than just, Susie did this, then did this, and then she lived happily ever after. Like, those stories are kind of surface level. They're okay. When you zoom in and make it a small moment, it gets more powerful.
- [28:31]
A
Talk to me about how we can actually, I know one of the things we were talking about when we were prepping this is sometimes you get people on the phone. And I would imagine part of the reason you want to get people on the phone is to potentially find those stories that you can share in emails.
- [28:42]
B
Right.
- [28:42]
A
Do you have any tips on how you do that?
- [28:44]
B
For getting them on the phone or finding the tips? Both.
- [28:46]
A
I mean, we'll get them on the phone and then maybe ask them the right questions so you can come up with a story.
- [28:50]
B
Yeah. With getting people on the phone, I mean, the obvious limiting factor here is your own or your team's bandwidth. So this is, again, is why segmentation is so important. Because when I. I get prospects on the phone all the time, and a lot of times when I'm developing a new offer, I'm like, I need to just talk to, like, five, 10 people and just tell them the idea and be like, is this a good idea or is this a stupid idea and I shouldn't pursue it? So I will say I'm looking for someone who meets these criteria. If you are that person who. What I do nature of my business, I'd love to give you some free consulting for half an hour. If I could just tell you about this offer and you just tell me if it's a good idea or a stupid idea and people take me up on that. And then I just ask them questions and I listen and they tell me amazing things. And then I get to present the offer to them and I say, listen, I am not pitching you this. I'm going to tell you about it. I'm going to tell you why it's awesome. I'm going to tell you the price. I'm not going to ask for your credit card. I will not take your credit card number. But you just need to give me your honest feedback. And that is an amazing way to get great feedback. Because I have done this and I say, you know, I'm thinking that this is really like the most important thing. And they're like, actually, I don't really care about that at all. I really care more about this other thing that was kind of like secondary. I'm like, oh, okay, maybe I should lead with this other angle instead of the initial angle that I thought. So it really helps you hone in the new product or whatever it is you want to launch, or it helps you understand why people, you know, if you call one of your top customers and say, like, you know, you bought 17 times from us, like, why do you keep buying? Like, we love it, we want you to keep buying, we want to keep you happy. But, like, why do you like this so much better than other products? And they will tell you why. They will give you voice of customer copy that you could use in your ads and your emails, social content, whatever. Like, it's super powerful to do.
- [30:23]
A
Well, actually that's perfect. So we don't need to go to the other part of the question because I got a lot more Questions here. Write message.com. you mentioned it earlier. Just kind of explain what the heck it does so people can wrap their brain around a little bit. Because I think you're pretty excited about this, right?
- [30:36]
B
Oh, yeah, it's like such a game changer. What it does is it gives people an opportunity to answer questions that you set. Obviously, it's kind of like a personalization tool. Right now people will say, what is personalization? People think personalization means like, oh, you just show a dynamic product image based on what they've. It's like, yeah, technically, I guess that's personalization. But really what personalization is, is, for example, if someone says, well, I'm an agency owner and someone else is an E Commerce brand owner, you want them to tell you that information because when you write your emails and your landing pages and sales pages, you want to reflect that information back. So like, let's say I'm selling a program on email marketing for the sake of simplicity. The product I know works for everyone because I know like when I do email stuff, I do the same way for every kind of company and it just works because my stuff works. Right. But if someone is an agency owner and they want to give this program to their team, they're going to be looking for something different out of it than someone who's an E commerce brand owner versus someone who's a copywriter versus someone who sells online courses. So I could actually gather data, people tell me who they are, why they're here, you know, all the questions that I want to ask. And then I could personalize little bits and pieces of the funnel, I could personalize the email. So that means I can generate hundreds if not or dozens. Hundreds, even thousands. Even hundreds of thousands. If you really want to get crazy of variations of all of your assets and you can do this with AI it sounds very complex. It's really not that complex. It just takes a little bit of strategy and thinking through. But you could change the headline on your landing page. So it could say the number one course for agency owners who want to train their team on the art of email marketing.
- [32:06]
A
Oh, hold on a second. This is fascinating. What I'm hearing you say is not only can this help you segment and customize the messages, it will also transfer right on over to the sales page. And it's smart enough that somehow the sales page headline might change and the sub headline or whatever might change based on that data that's coming through this tool. Is that what I'm hearing you say?
- [32:30]
B
And the emails as well. So you could change testimonials, you could change like everything.
- [32:34]
A
Has that been a game changer?
- [32:35]
B
Yeah, so far for, you know, the stuff that I've done with it. Yeah, it's, it's just insane because when you think about it, like I, I know when I develop programs and stuff because I have such a diverse audience of people doing, you know, different types of businesses, I'm always like, I have to make sure, like I include, like I have a headline that is all encompassing enough and I get this all the time, people will write into me and they'll say, hey, I have this kind of business. Is this right for me? And I had, every time I launch a product, this happens. Like it's not like a one time thing, this happens dozens of times, you know, a quarter, a year, whatever. Like I'm always in people, like, I just want to make sure that this is right for me, blah, blah, Blah, blah. Like, well, the reason they're asking that is because they're looking at and they're gonna say, well, it's a course on this. But, like, is it? Does this fit my situation? Like, I know that it fits their situation. A lot of times I answer that, I'm like, based on what you told me, yes, because of module three and module four and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. But. But they don't see it on the page. So if someone owns an e commerce store and I'm like, here's how to use daily email to increase your profit margins, drive more repeat purchases, increase your customer lifetime value, and take your email revenue from 0% to 30, 40%, even higher. That's what they're looking for, right? Versus someone who is a course creator. And we could say this course will teach you how to sell more courses. So you could have the biggest launch of your life and have tons of happy students and get a lot of word of mouth. Like, the course will offer all of those benefits because it's the same underlying stuff that I'm teaching, right? Yeah, like that doesn't have to change because it's the system. The system works. Right? But what people see in it and what they're there for might be a little bit different. Right? So that's what's really cool about this, and this is the reason I'm so excited about this stuff is because I've been doing email marketing a long time. It's awesome. I love it. Don't think it's going anywhere. I think it's only getting stronger. It's funny, I see all these surveys, these industry surveys come out from different places and everyone is saying, like, what's the number one thing you're going to focus on this year? And email is just like far and above. And it's like everyone, you know, like, they just under. They're starting to really understand the importance. It was funny back in 2016, 2017, people like, email's dead. I was like, we're not even getting started yet. But it allows you to reflect back what people want to see. So they see even like something like a skincare product. It's like, well, why do you want. Or the soap? Why do you want the soap? It's like, I have dry skin, I have eczema, I have acne. I don't like synthetic ingredients. Now, someone might be trying to solve for all four of those things, obviously, but maybe one of those things is the dominant desire, right? So if you could reflect the dominant desire back on the sales page or back in the emails, if they tell you, hey, this is the thing that's most important to me, and you reflect that back to them. Do you think you make less sales because of that? I mean, probably not. It's pretty impossible. You're obviously going to sell more because it's just like if we were in a phone conversation. What happens in the phone conversation? There's probing and there's matching, right? You start asking questions, you say, hey, based on what you told me, you told me, this is really important to you. And guess what? That's one of the things our product does is blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's going to help solve that issue you're experiencing. The next person you talk to is going to tell you something different. And what are you, as the salesperson going to do? You're going to adjust the pitch. We have never had a way to do that before and now we do online.
- [35:42]
A
Fascinating. Okay, let's talk about segments for a little bit. We've been hinting about. This has all been incredible, by the way. But now the real question is like, what segments, which should we create? Right? Because obviously there's an endless amount of these things that you could do. So talk to us a little bit about segments and sequences, really, because, like, you know, otherwise this is just like a massive headache for marketers, right? And creators.
- [36:05]
B
I mean, yeah, it is, it is a very deep topic. So I'm going to try to give everyone like the 8020 here. So the way that I think about segments, I kind of work backwards from products and offers because, like, well, why are we doing any of this segmentation in the first place? Well, we're doing all of this because we want to sell more stuff, whatever product or service or offer it is. So that's really where everything kind of starts in my opinion. Because you say, okay, well if we want to sell X amount of units of this thing, well, we need to know how many of these people, what is the total addressable market that we have to work with? Do we need to increase that or do we need to market to those people more effectively? So like, when I think about this for my business and I'm just keep going back to that just because the context is easy.
- [36:45]
A
Yeah, go for it.
- [36:46]
B
I have like 15 different products and courses and offers, right? Like consulting, digital products, books, book funnels, things like that. So a lot of times what I'm doing is, I'm saying, okay, well, how do I create segments and find out who would be interested in what? So If I have a course in deliverability, like, I'm going to make sure I ask, hey, are you interested in email deliverability and increasing it? And you can even ask that as a yes. No. Like a lot of these things you can say, are you interested in this? Yes or no? Are you interested in this? Yes or no? And people will tell you, no, not interested in this. Yes, I'm interested in these three things that will allow you. Or you can do this multiple choice. I mean, there's a lot of ways to do it, but that will allow you to start to bucket people. And you're starting to know, okay, here's what people really care about. When I did this on my own list, I found out like 46% of people are interested. Their number one challenge is list growth. And I said, okay, well, I have a program on growing your list. So maybe what I should do is I should take that segment of people and run them through the automation that sells the list growth course. So a lot of it, it's like, it sounds complex and it is, it can get very complex. But when you think about it, it's actually kind of simple to get started, right? Because you say, okay, let's find out who is interested in what. I had this guy on my list. He's great dude. He owns an E commerce brand. He's been a customer of mine for years. I've talked to him many times. He says, hey man, I love your emails, I love your stuff. Whenever you talk about digital products, though, I tune out. Because he owns an E commerce store. Of course he's not interested in digital products. I mean, duh. So like, I even just think about who wants to hear about certain things and then who doesn't want to hear about things. Like, I have a very small segment that 3 or 4% of people in my email list who have SaaS businesses, I don't ever want them to see an email about getting copywriting clients because I have programs for that too. Right. I don't want them to ever see that. I want them to be excluded. And segmentation gives you the ability to do that. So it allows you to set. Set exclusionary criteria and allows you to set inclusion criteria.
- [38:36]
A
Let's talk about any tips on creating a sequence. One of the things that we were talking about when you and I were prepping for this thing is that you don't have to start from scratch. You probably have messages you've sent in the past and stuff like that. So talk to me a little bit about how we can kind of simplify, if you will, the process of creating sequences.
- [38:52]
B
Yeah, Sometimes when I sit down to write sequences, I get, like, overwhelmed because I'm like, oh, my gosh, I have to write, you know, 10 or 20, 30 emails, whatever it is, right? And I'm like, man, I really don't want to. To do that. So what I started doing because I've been writing a daily email to my list since 2017, like, every single day, like a psychopath. So what I started doing was I said, I talked to one of the guys on my team. I said, can you help me assemble this giant spreadsheet with different tabs? We said, every email that I've ever written, we're going to put into a tab and we're going to say, what were we promoting that day? And what you find is like, I have email Copy Academy for copywriters, right? We could take every email that I've ever written to promote Email Copy Academy. And there's like, I don't know, 5, 600 of those emails. So we put them into a folder, right? I do that with all of my different offers, and I categorize every single email. Then what I do is I say, well, this email that I wrote back in 2021, is it a bad email because I wrote it four years ago? Like, no, it's not a bad email. Like, I sent it, people loved it, they bought from it. Do I have any reason to believe that people would not buy from it again? Like, if someone joined my list yesterday, they never saw the email from 2021. They don't even know it exists. They never heard it before. So, yeah, I could write another 600 emails, you know, daily for promoting this course. Or I could just look and say, out of these 600, or maybe it's 100 emails you've written or 50 emails you've written for product. But, like, if you've written 50 emails over the course of the years for a product that you have, can you pull ten of them out that are evergreen? Or can you evergreen them? Can you make them evergreen or even.
- [40:23]
A
Get inspired by them? Right.
- [40:24]
B
Or even take them and rework them and say, I really like angle. But, like, this was for a launch and now it's an evergreen product. So we'll just change the bottom. Yeah. And that's what I did. And I started just looking back and I said, I don't have to write a single word for these sequences because the sequences are already written. And this is what I do with clients, because my whole thing is, like, I'M like, start writing. You don't have to start daily, but ideally you work up to daily and then you do that for a while and you realize you have so many emails that you could use. And then building a sequence is very easy. And then what you could do is just build, I call them intent sequences, which are kind of, you know, kicked off by the trigger links, like you said before, where if someone clicks on a product link, then I just follow up, like the greatest hits emails that I wrote in the past until they buy. And those are the ones that get super high conversions because they're relevant. They're only going to people who clicked and they're obviously interested. If they clicked on it, they're like, ooh, what's this? Right? Well, if you're curious what it is, you probably want to know a bit more about it. And those emails just follow up. So it's so simple to do. And people think like, you know, you don't have to be Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill every day. I mean, I enjoy it. I like rolling the boulder up the hill. I like writing my daily email. But I also like leveraging automation based on the stuff that I've written in the past.
- [41:32]
A
Talk to me about the story arc for people that have not done sequences before. Like, what are the basics? If you were to start with like five or six emails or whatever, what would be the things that would be in the beginning of the sequences?
- [41:42]
B
You could actually write these. I mean, there's a lot of different frameworks and things that people have. I think in general, the simplest way to think about this is you want. Want to. This is like a Jeff Walker concept. He talks about the sideways sales letter and he talks about it in the context of video. He says you take a sales letter and you turn it on its side. So, like, if you think about how you write an actual sales letter or landing page, normally there's a story at the beginning in the lead, right? And then you go into a story, the discovery, you get into the sales argument for the product, you get into the mechanism behind why it works. Then you get into the features and benefits, you get into what's included, you get into overcoming the objections, you get into the price anchoring, the guarantees. And like, obviously they're going to see some of that stuff on the page. You don't have to follow it exactly like that. But when I think about the emails, like, I have some emails that are like, hey, by the way, I forgot to mention, like, there's this bonus in the product. Like I'm not going to put that as email number one on the sequence. That can come later down the chain because I'm going to write the sequence assuming that I'm going to get the highest engagement at the beginning and then it will slightly drop off as it goes. So the most amount of people going through it at the beginning are going to be paying attention. And also the person who starts at email 1 and does read every single email in that sequence that's dripped out one email a day, I want to make sure they're getting kind of like a logical sales argument. And usually sales pages tend to follow a pretty logical structure. So it's not the only way you could do it, but it's a very easy way to get started. So the basic gist of what you should take here is front load it with a lot of stories and if they're problem based stories, even better because again, most sales will just start with calling out the problem and you can kind of take people through that sideways sales on a journey through the sequence.
- [43:22]
A
And you've got a call to action every one of these messages that says, if you want to discover more, I've got a product that can solve this. Here's the link kind of thing.
- [43:29]
B
Oh yeah, always I laugh when people say, like, don't include a link to buy. And every. I'm like, why would you not include a link to buy? Like I wrote an email one time about, it was a fictional story about, oh, I went to the Jeep dealership and I said, you know, I need my car service. And they said, sorry, today's a value only day. We're just going to teach you about the history of Jeep and we're not going to take your money. How ridiculous would that be? Like, it's a made up story obviously. But I was trying to demonstrate a point here, right? That would be pretty ridiculous if you went into a business and they're like, sorry, this is a nurture day today. We're just going to nurture you. We're going to nurture you. Come here you. We're going to, we're going to cradle you in our arms. We're going to nurture you. We're going to rub your head, right? Like, like, no, like solve my problem, please. Right? So I just, I laugh when people like, oh, you should. Only I heard one time someone was telling me that they were listening to some marketer and they said they should follow the Fibonacci sequence or whatever in terms of farther and farther spaced out Calls to action. I was like, what are we doing here? Just put a link in every email so people want to buy. They want to buy. And the thing is, if you. Let's, let's put our data hats, our data scientist hats on for a second. If you don't put a link in every email, you're not going to know which emails drive response. Right. You're going to want to see, ooh, this one had three times the click rate. What was it about this email? That was the hot button. And you don't get that if you got no link in the email. So it's kind of common sense.
- [44:45]
A
Chris or Zukowski, we have just barely tapped the insights in that brain of yours. If people want to connect with you on the socials, where do you want to send them? And if they're interested in the services that you offer, where should they go?
- [44:56]
B
Yeah, so I mostly hang on Twitter. It's at Chris Orzi, my handle. O R Z E O R Z Y Y.
- [45:04]
A
Okay.
- [45:04]
B
Yeah, Chris Orzy. And then I have a YouTube channel as well. It might be Chris Dash Orzi, I think. I don't know the exact URL, something like that. But if you just search my name on YouTube, it's there. And then my website is Orz Co, Orzy Co. And I give away a free copy of my $100 a month newsletter if you join my list.
- [45:22]
A
Awesome. Chris, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
- [45:25]
B
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Mike.
- [45:26]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to today's episode. If you've been a listener for a while, would you give us a review on whatever platform you're following? And if you would share with your friends, that would be amazing. You can find the show notes for today's episode@socialmediaexaminer.com 695 also check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing podcast. I am your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be right back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving.
- [45:57]
B
The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [46:06]
A
This episode is brought to you by Social Media Marketing World happening April 28th to 30th, 2026 in Anaheim, California. For the first time ever get two world class conferences under one roof. Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World. Master social marketing strategies. Deep dive into AI. Connect with thousands of fellow marketers all in one incredible experience. Plus you're walking distance to Disneyland. Turn your professional development into a family vacation. Ready to level up your marketing? Grab your tickets now atsocial media marketingworld.in fox.