TAM 005: John Logar – Online Marketing For Offline Businesses
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In episode 5 we talk to John Logar about online marketing for offline businesses. A common objection and misconception about online marketing is that it can't work for traditional bricks and mortar business like trades and industrial companies.
Online marketing can work for anyone. John shares some examples and case studies of some big wins from small email marketing campaigns.
Listen in to find out:
- How to get start with marketing automation
- How to engage your customers with a relevant offer
- A simple re-engagement campaign for restaurants
- 2 action steps to get started today
If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here. If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, take our best-selling ActiveCampaign Quick Start training. 
Links Mentioned In The Show
- Super Fast Business Live
- ConsultingUnleashedMasterclass.com
- Scan Biz Card App
- ActiveCampaign
- Infusionsoft
- Business Unleashed podcast
Listening options:
- Subscribe via iTunes
- On Stitcher Radio
- Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
John Logar: And I guess this is the challenge that most businesses face. Most businesses don't have a usable database. They don't have usable access. What I mean by that is, those customers are sitting inside Excel spreadsheets, in Outlook, on Microsoft products, they're sitting in inventory control or MYOB systems or Zero, they're not able to communicate efficiently because the systems don't support the customer relationship management side of things.
Announcer: Welcome to the Active Marketer podcast, where we talk about how to design, automate and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at theactivemarketer dot com. Now, here's your host, Barry.
Barry: Welcome back to the Active Marketer podcast, episode number five. I'm your host Barry Moore, and we are back to the interview format this week with a really exciting guest, John. John is a businessman and a consultant and he also coaches consultants on how they can increase their business and find more customers. But what he's really great at is going into a business and identifying how they can be making more money.
So one of the common objections that I hear all the time about this marketing automation stuff is that, "Oh, we're a bricks-and-mortar business, we can't be using this online marketing stuff, it just won't work for us." So I really want to dispel that myth, this is something that can be working for anybody no matter what your business is. So in this particular episode, John and I are going to talk about two really kind of specific examples that were used in traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses, coming in, setting up some marketing automation, setting up some email marketing, and getting the cash register to ring straightaway.
So if you want to talk about non-online business-type businesses, one of the case study examples here is an air conditioning company, it doesn't get any more bricks-and-mortar than that, and how he was able to go in there, send one email, and I think they made about 180,000 dollars, bang, just like that. And the other one is a simple restaurant example. You see those business cards in fishbowls all the time in restaurants. Well if you're a restaurant owner and you have a fishbowl full of business cards, what do you do with all that information?
So listen in and find out how you can turn those into cash, but first some news and events. March 5th and 6th, I'll be down in Sydney, Manly, at James Schramko's Business Superfast Live Event, so if you see me walking around down there and you want to chat live automation by all means come up and say g'day.
And today's guest John Logar is running his own event in Austin, Texas on March 7th and 8th, and you can find all the information about that over at consultingunleashedmasterclass dot com, that's consultingunleashedmasterclass dot com. Really worth your while if you're trying to grow your business, so check it out for sure.
And now onto the shameless social proof of the podcast, where we read out some reviews from iTunes. We've got a couple of five-star reviews to read out this week. A five-star, its from FaxLad13 in Australia. It says, "Focused, functional, and fun! It is hard to find specific immediately usable information about an area that has far too much guff associated with it. Barry does a fine job of cutting through to the core information, enjoyable yet highly-technical and market-specific information with his guests. Highly recommended."
Thank you very much, FaxLad13, I appreciate you taking the time to leave that and we've got one more to read out here, from Planet Naturopath in Australia. Five-star review. "Makes complicated things sound easy." Says, "The Active Marketer podcast has some really great info which is broken down in an easy to understand way. Love the episodes with James Schramko and Shane Melaugh. Looking forward to the upcoming episodes."
Well, thank you very much, Planet Naturopath, really appreciate you taking the time to stop by and leave a review. And if you guys out there would like to leave a review, you can head over to iTunes, leave us a review and I'll read it out on a future show. So now, let's get into this week's episode with John!
All right, so I'd like to welcome John to the show, John's, you know, the consultant's consultant, what John doesn't know about business probably isn't worth knowing, so welcome to the show, John Logar.
John: Thanks for having me, Barry, I appreciate you inviting me along.
Barry: I think most of the listeners here are trying to figure out what business automation can actually do for their business. So you wouldn't go down to Bunnings or a hardware store and buy a bunch of tools and just bring it home and expect those tools to do something, you've really got to know how to drive them, so what I'd like you to share with the listeners perhaps is, some of the ways that a business can implement these kind of automation tools into their existing business infrastructure, if that makes sense.
John: Okay. Most businesses, and I'm really glad you're bringing this point up, Barry, because most businesses are actually familiar with automization in their business, purely through the concept of the fact that they're actually using sometimes integrated software that is industry-related or niche-related to their business. They may be using accounting products or software that helps them with their financials or with their inventory control.
So most businesses, whether you're in retail or you're a service-based business, you are already using some form of automation through standard software products that are available on the market. So some people have directed products that are aligned, so for example if you're in the trade industries, there are products that handle scheduling, invoicing, customer management, ordering, and inventory control. So there are levels of automation that most people are familiar with. If anybody's using Microsoft Office products or Mac productivity software, they already understand email, they already understand spreadsheets, using Office-type products.
All these products have, I guess, slowly the last 15 to 20 years have given us the ability to leverage, scale and do some incredible things. However in what you just shared, most businesses get very confused, because software can be daunting in and of itself, automation can be daunting, it's like, "What do I choose? I don't even know what questions to ask, when I choose those types of products or services!" And so they're not thinking strategically in terms of their business, they're more reactive or responsive. So all of the sudden something will occur in a business so, "Hey, we need something." Right? But we don't know what, so they then start to do the research and the homework starts.
So automation - yes, I think a lot of people know it's important, I think a lot of people have the misconception that automation is very expensive. In the past that was true. Today it is far cheaper to automate and systemize than ever before, because there are ready-made products that kind of do that for you in a lot of cases. So building your standard operating procedures, there are products already out there that have those procedures built into them. So it's almost like plug-and-play for a lot of businesses.
So price point's something that people have been concerned about in the past.
Barry: Yeah, I think you bring up a good point. I think in the last couple years, maybe last two years, this kind of marketing automation that we talk about here is, was, just some black dark mystic art that cost tens of thousands of dollars to implement.
John: Yeah.
Barry: And in the last couple years it's kind of come to the forefront of, maybe not consumer-level but certainly it's accessible to pretty much any business now at a price point that can be affordable if you're turning it into an ROI result at the end of it. And yeah, I think that the danger becomes for smaller businesses, small to medium enterprise-type businesses, is they think it's too inaccessible or too difficult, too mysterious, and they don't want to do it, and they're just going to get left behind.
John: This is, what you're talking about, is the head-in-the-sand syndrome, "I don't know what I don't know, and if I don't know it, it can't hurt me. And so I'll stick my head in the sand." It's like internet marketing. If we're familiar with the concepts of paid advertising or pay-per-click and Facebook advertising, and email marketing, we're familiar with those concepts? If we don't understand the technology that drives that, or we don't understand the opportunity that that can create in terms of our business as a platform? Most businesses are sticking their heads in the sand, because they just don't know what they don't know, and so by not doing anything, they feel like that's doing something. Right?
Barry: Yeah.
John: So, you know, people are starting to experience different pressures at the moment. I mean, I've known, working with a lot of different industries, one of the questions I'm asking is, "How is the internet impacting on your business?" You know, "What have you seen? What changes have you seen?" And they're saying, "Our customers are more educated. They're asking more questions. They're actually viewing more options. You know, I was in a retail store, it's funny, I was in a major retail chain, I'm standing there in the store, and I'm standing next to a person who's on their iPad looking at another store's shopping cart comparing prices to the product in the store that they're standing in!
Barry: Yeah, absolutely.
John: That's so ... Even though they're in the location to purchase a product, yet they're sitting there saying, "Is this the best value for the same product? Can I get it elsewhere?" Right? So yeah, customers are changing, behaviours are changing, and the internet has literally levelled the playing field for a lot of businesses as well.
Barry: Absolutely. If you want proof positive of that, just look at Best Buy in the United States, right? Everyone says it's just basically turned into the Amazon showroom, right? People go in there and they can touch and feel the products and sit in front of the TV and see what a good picture it has, and then they just get on their iPad or their iPhone and buy from Amazon for a fraction of the price, or 10%, 20% less than they can get it in the store.
John: Yeah!
Barry: So it's become their de facto showroom for online vendors. And also the same kind of model applies to the corner DVD shop, with the advent of digital delivery of movies and television shows and it's - if they keep their head in the sand and just go, "Well, Geez, business is off, I need to advertise more in the local newspaper," or whatever, that's not going to solve their problem. Their problem is the market is changing, so I guess it really comes down to whether you see change as opportunity or something to be feared, I guess.
John: Absolutely, and a big part of that also, you bring up a really important point, when you start understanding the behaviour of your customers, when you start paying attention to them, then you can start to adapt and actually look at ways of adding value. Even in the DVD world, there will be businesses that will survive in that world, but what they're going to do is they're going to niche down to their customers. You know, some DVD stores will remain open because they know their customers, their customers know, love and trust them for their service, they will never go to other options, and they'll actually niche down.
Same thing is happening in the book industry. A lot of the bigger players are moving online. In fact recently in the United States I think the only bookstore, chain bookstore, that overcame the crisis is Barnes & Noble. They still have their chain stores - for how long, I don't know. However, all these smaller bookshops are starting to appear. Traditional niche-type bookstores seem to be building relationships with their customers, and so they build a customer base where they're delivering a specific product to a market that has a very specific interest. And for businesses, this is a real opportunity, it's a real signal to - you can build a great business out of niching your business.
Barry: But just to loop back that DVD thing for a second - yeah, there will be DVD vendors who thrive and survive through the changing marketplace, but those would be the ones that do exactly what we talk about here at theactivemarketer dot com, is if they design, automate and scale their business they can survive. So what you're seeing now is the close-down of those corner shops and you're seeing DVD vending machines everywhere, you see them in the grocery store, you see them on city sidewalks.
John: Yeah!
Barry: So they've just changed their business model to automate it more, and they're still making money, you know? They don't have the overhead of having a huge shop.
John: Yeah. Yeah, and you're carrying less product, and the product is relevant product, and so they're able to distribute or shift their product fairly quickly through those vending machines. But you know, there will be a point where there's still a market for customer service, where you have direct contact with a human being. So yeah, so that point of "things are changing," I think industries are shifting across the board, it's not something that is unique to high-touch type businesses like retail, purely because of access to information, and electronic information, essentially through the internet.
But the biggest challenge that most businesses face is being able to utilise their customer base efficiently and effectively in a way that helps them grow. Because they really need to start thinking about what Seth Garden talked about a few years back, was that concept of "the tribe." If you're a small business, you want to build a tribe of customers. And to build that tribe, you need to understand who they are, what they like, what they don't like, how your product or service gives them the best possible result, whether you solve a problem or you give them pleasure, in the way that you deal with your clients.
And in doing that, and I guess this is the challenge that most businesses face, most businesses don't have a usable database. The second thing is, most people's databases are relatively small. Small businesses on average, and I say "small businesses" from say 100,000 to five million dollars, those businesses will have on average between, in terms of access that they can have, between 600 customers that they can have access to, up to about two to three thousand customers that they would have access to. And even at that two-to-three thousand level, they might only have 600 to 800 email addresses, right? So they don't have usable access.
What I mean by that is, those customers are sitting inside Excel spreadsheets, in Outlook, on Microsoft products, they're sitting in inventory control or MYOB systems or Zero, accounting systems where they've got the details of the customer in those systems, but in those integrated systems in and of themselves, they're not able to communicate efficiently because the systems don't support the customer relationship management side of things.
So even CRM products, some CRM products don't allow you to email from within the product. You have to integrate an external product to be able to email your customers. Now that's changing for a lot of CRMs, especially those that are online already do that integration, but package software like the original CRMs that we saw from the Microsoft range or other types of services didn't have that integration.
So the biggest problems that most business people have - and it's not a big problem to overcome, by the way - is what they need to do is sit down and say, "Let's look at our customers, and let's extract those customers, put them into a usable format, right? And then upload that usable format into a tool that allows us to communicate with multiple customers at the same time. And even in doing so, being able to segment our customers and try and test different messages so we can try and improve our marketing and get much better results." And automation tools right now, that are very affordable, enable you to do that quite exceptionally well.
Barry: Yeah, I hear that a lot from people. They say, you know, "I can't get started with this, we don't have a database," and I'm like, "Well, you have customers!" So those customers usually end up as an island of data somewhere in some system, so it might be their inventory system or their point-of-sale system or something, those customer records are somewhere.
You've just got to get them out and get them into the right tools so that you can start addressing those customers. But the first thing you need to do is start gathering new ones. So if your website does not have the ability to gather someone's email address? That's probably the very first step you need to do.
John: You need to have some form of - and the other thing that I'll point out because you brought up a really good point of being able to capture details - the one thing I recommend is for people not to offer a newsletter on their website, and the reason why I say that is, is because nobody actually wants to opt-in for another newsletter.
Barry: Yeah, they don't convert to ...
John: I'm not looking to add to my email count of the 200 emails that I get a day from subscriptions that I've subscribed to. So they need to think about what they can provide that has value and they need to put that on their site. And when they're looking at their website they need to take into consideration when a customer comes to their site, what are they looking for? What is the action that the company wants the customer to take, what are they offering the customer that the customer is wanting to engage with?
So whether they're providing an incentive, all we need to do is look at sites like Amazon and ASOS and look at some of the great retail online stores, SurfStitch is another perfect example here in Australia, for the Australian audiences. If you go to their site, if you look at the top fold of their site, it is all driven towards the selected market of their customer. They're making offers, they're providing incentives, they're looking at value ads and saying, "Hey!" You know, they're not giving away product or giving away discounts, they're also saying, "Hey! Be the first to get access to this information!"
Barry: Yeah.
John: So they're providing an incentive for people to leave information, and then what they're doing then is through automation, which is what you just meant, by using a thing like an order responder or an email service, they're starting to follow that up with regular communications so they can build a relationship with those customers.
Barry: Yeah, and even if you consider yourself to be maybe more of a traditional non-digital type business, you can still do this stuff. I mean, the people who do this really well in the kind of offline space are Bunnings, you know the hardware store here in Australia, you know they sell tools and they sell building materials, et cetera, et cetera. But if you go into a Bunnings, like every couple hours they're running a course on how you tile a floor or how you build a fence or, you know, so how you use the products you might buy in their store.
So you could do the same thing online. Bunnings could turn all those courses into digital online video series, get people to opt in for, you know, "How to build a deck" video series, right? Much, much more valuable than a traditional newsletter, and then you can track all that stuff in your automation platform, like the ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft or whatever, and you get to see who's just finished a course, right?
So if they've just finished a video, now it's time to sell them on some new fence posts or a new hammer or some new tools or give them a coupon to come in and buy something. So even if you consider yourself, "Oh, I'm just a builder," or "I'm just a traditional retailer, I can't do this stuff," well there's an infinite number of ways you can get started.
John: Look at Lululemon. Yoga classes in their yoga brand.
Barry: Right.
John: Bring the community into a traditional retail environment and give them any available services. I mean, to take old-school, let's go old-school with the fact that I don't have customers but I'd like to build customers, if we look at say a restaurant, if we're looking at restaurants. Restaurants live and die by their customers, you know? It's all about putting bums on seats and getting people to buy the food, yeah? And drinking drinks.
We've all seen the traditional fishbowl with the business cards in the fishbowl, okay? And so I'll share a simple story. This is a true story. A particular restaurant here in Australia, I was sitting at, they have the fishbowl in their restaurant, they were collecting local business cards. And I had a great meal and I asked the restaurant, so I said, "What are you doing with the cards?"
He said, "Oh, we generally once a month, we pick one out and we give away a free meal." I said, "No, no, I asked you, what do you do with the cards? Like, what happens with these business cards, right?"
And he says, "Oh, we've got boxes of them out the back." I said, "What do you mean, you've got boxes of them out the back?" He said, "Well, that. We've got literally shoeboxes of business cards we've been collecting."
I said, "How long have you been doing this for?" So, "Well, we've been open for two years, we know it's important for us to get people on a thing, we've had two years worth of boxes of business cards, right?"
And I said, "Do you mind showing me, like, can I come out and have a look?" And so this was in his office. Behind his office there was a bookshelf, and in this bookshelf all you saw were these different types of shoeboxes. And every shoebox - they weren't even stuck together, you know, like with rubber bands? They were literally just tossed in a mess into the boxes, right.
And I said, "Why don't you take these things, get a uni kid to put these cards into a spreadsheet so that you can upload them into an automated email system and send an email inviting people to your quiet evenings to enjoy some of the food you've got?" And he says, "Oh, we don't have time for that." I said, "No, you don't understand. What if you got somebody else to do that for you? What's a customer actually worth to you? What do they spend, when they come here?"
So, an average customer will spend, you know, 70, 80 dollars, or average sale is between 80 and 150 dollars. "So for every business card in there, if you said they were worth between 80 and 150 dollars because they've already spent that when they've come here, do you think they'd come back again if you invited them back?"
And he said, "Well of course they would." So I said, "What's a table of ten worth to you?" He said, "1500 dollars." I said, "If you took half of that 1500 dollars, gave it to a kid to put all this data - they don't even have to type it out, they can just scan it a scanner now, there's a free app called BizCardScan, where you just scan a business card and it automatically puts in a spreadsheet." I said, "You just give the kid the app, scan the cards, and it will automatically put all those cards in a spreadsheet, all the emails, and then you just upload it and send one offer."
He said, "That's a really cool idea, but I don't have time." Right?
Barry: Aw, man!
John: This was his response, right? So in the end I said, "Hey, I'll tell you what. Give me one of the shoeboxes, I'll do it for you for nothing, I just want to show you this." Right? Because I thought this is an opportunity too good to miss. So I took his shoebox and I did exactly what I suggested he do. I actually hired a high school kid. I said, "Listen, kid, I need you to do this, scan all these cards, put them in a spreadsheet. When you've done that, just email me the file."
And then I uploaded it into an email product, an email software product. And it was like 250 names, right? And so I went to the restaurant and said, "Look" - and I had a USB stick - I said, "I've got the list on this stick, but I've set up this account for you, all the names are here. What offer do you want to send out to this list?"
He says, "What do you mean, what offer?" So, "What do you got right now? What are you pitching? You know, what are you making as an offer right now?" He says, "Oh, we're doing on a Tuesday night, we're doing where if you buy one dessert you get one free." Right? I said, "How much are your desserts?" He says, you know, they're 18 dollars for a dessert. Okay? Pretty expensive dessert! So, instead of "buy one, get one free," why don't we give them 20 bucks cash to spend on a dessert? You're giving it away anyway, might as well give them 20 bucks. Right?
So what we did was, we just wrote a very quick email saying, "Hey, thanks for coming back to- thanks for dining at our restaurant or enjoying the experience at our restaurant. You know we're about to go and spend a lot of money on letterbox drops and promotions and flyers and instead of doing that we thought we'd give you the money instead. So here's 20 dollars that you can spend at our restaurant to have your dessert, and right now we've got these cool new deserts!"
So it was a really simple email, right? All they had to do was hit "Reply" to book, if they want to book a table, or print the email out and bring it in with them, right? And then I left it at that. It didn't take very long to do that, send it out. I didn't - I just left it at that, basically. I walked away. And I thought, I'll just leave it for a week and see what happens, right?
Two days later he calls me. And he says, "We've had 17 people come back to us with this thing, with the email, and we've got like five people who actually booked off the email itself, like they hit Reply, yes, we'd like to book a table." Which caused a problem for them because they didn't know how to handle those bookings, right, because they didn't have an automatic system to handle bookings online for their restaurant. However he says, "We've had 17 people." I said, "Now multiply 17 by 70 dollars, right?" I said, "We were in your office for fifteen minutes and that 15 minutes generated nearly 1800 dollars for you."
Barry: Fantastic! Yeah, there's so much opportunity that people just overlook every single day.
John: Yeah. Well, now he's got all those shoeboxes in a database now and they're regularly sending out offers, and right now all their quiet periods are busy. So it's not hard. That's old-school. There are easier ways, like you said putting an opportunity for people to capture information details on their websites, but the other thing also is they just need to get to know their customers a little better and look at what their customers are buying.
You know, if you've got your inventory control software, it's very easy to extract a report out of that or get your accountant to extract a report for you saying, "Hey, who are our top customers? Who are buying regularly? How much are they spending?" Because then you can identify who that customer is and start to look at how you market to that marketplace. First of all to them first, because you should always be offering something to your existing customers and this is a thing that most businesses don't do.
And if you're listening out there and you're in business, the first thing that I would do is go send an email to your existing customers saying, "Hey, would you like to buy some more?" Make an offer, because you'll be surprised, some people actually come back and say, "Funny you should send this email, I was thinking about buying some stuff from you." Okay? But most people don't offer regularly, and they're not offering the things their customers are looking for. So first place I would look is in your current customer base, look at what they're spending, how much they're spending, how often they spend it, and then create an offer around those behaviours and you'll be surprised, that you'll start to see more people buying your product.
And then I worked for a plumbing company and we did that exact thing that I just shared, we looked at their customer base, we looked at what they were spending, how often they were spending and we realised, or what they realised just through that simple analysis, that a lot of customers that were purchasing a particular product, had not thought of another service that they could attach to that as an upsell, that would support the initial purchase. So they started marketing the extra service saying, "Hey, you bought this from us, by the way you could have to make that better or to improve that or get a better result or to make sure that lasts longer, you need this."
Barry: Yeah, absolutely, increase your average transaction value and you don't need any more customers, right?
John: That one idea increased their business on a month-to-month basis by more than 30%.
Barry: Fantastic! And that's another crazy thing you mentioned, making offers there, that's another insane thing I hear from people, they go, "We need to get more people into the database, need to get more people into our database," and I'll say, "Okay, you're gathering people, that's a great first step. How many people do you have in your database?" Oh, 5000, or 3000, or whatever it is.
I'm like, "All right, when's the last time you email them out? How often do you email them?" "Uh ... maybe like a couple months ago?" "Well, why do you want to gather more for, if you're not doing anything with the people you already have on that list, right?" So yeah, you're right. Craft an offer and get it in front of people. That's how to make money.
John: To give - to keep it simple, to give you a really simple analogy? You talk about customers that have three and four thousand people on the list, you know I've worked with a customer, or a client that only had a hundred customers on their list. They had a hundred emails, that's it, right? Their average sale of their product was 35,000 dollars, 35 to 55,000 was their average sale. And so they said, "Well, we've only got a hundred customers, you know. What's going to happen with a hundred customers?"
I said, "Well, tell you what. Let's write an email, and what have you got that you want to get rid of?" Right? So they said, "Well, we need to get rid of, we've had these four massive air conditioning units sitting here, they're all refurbished, ready to go, but they're normally - at retail, these things cost like 130,00 dollars. But we got them for nothing. But we can even offer a three-year warranty on them, like a brand-new warranty, and we can sell them for like 60,000 dollars, right?"
And I said, "So, how many have you got?" He said, "Well, we've got six." "So, let's put an email out to those hundred people and say, 'We've got six of these units, they're normally worth 130 grand, they're totally reconditioned, we're going to give you a brand new warranty for three years, you can have them for 60 grand. But I've only got six, so first in, first served.' Right?"
Barry: Yeah?
John: Within two weeks, every unit was gone. To a list of 100. And they'd never experienced this before. They thought, "We never thought to our existing customers to offer them something that we're-" That, originally what would have happened with that product is, they would actually take those air conditioning units, stripped them for parts, and probably end up being worth five or ten grand to them.
Barry: Wow.
John: Whereas this way, they reconditioned them, made them like brand-new, gave them a brand-new warranty, and like, you know, it's virtually you're getting a brand-new product for half the price. Right? And that would serve as the product was part of the deal.
So, yeah, so here the profit margin - because these were machines were actually taken out of an existing facility, they were in great working order. They were perfectly okay to be out there to be working for the next ten years. So instead of stripping them out, I said, "Why would we strip them out? Why don't you recondition them and sell them off? But if you're going to sell them off, why don't we-" So, "We've only got a hundred emails." Well, here's-
Barry: You only need six people!
John: Yeah, you only need six people. That solved them in two weeks. One customer bought three of them! So one customer bought 120,000 - 180,00 dollars worth of air conditioning units. And the cash, by the way, the profit on that was huge, huge.
Barry: Well, that's fantastic. There's two really important lessons there, I think, to lead back to. One is the fact that as I think you mentioned, you don't need thousands of people on your list to start selling, you only need ... well, you only need one person, really, and the appropriate offer for that one person. But, and then the other thing is, there are opportunities sitting under everybody's nose, and I think people get too wound up in the day-to-day grind of doing whatever it is they do for a living that they don't actually see those opportunities, and that's where having an external partner who's got a pair of fresh eyes actually helps quite a lot.
John: Absolutely.
Barry: All right, so John, it might be time to wrap this one up. So for the traditional business owner out there, what are two steps they can take away to get started straightaway?
John: Number one, if you've email addresses and you've got the name of the person, extract those, get those out and put them on a list. Number one. And the second thing I'd do is, construct an offer. If you've got something that you'd like to get rid of or move, if you've got a premium product that you want to share with that email list, make an offer. Make an exclusive offer to that list.
So all you've got to do is, either find somebody if you don't have the skills or the knowledge, it's really easy to ask the question of somebody else, to say, "Look, can we get out the email list or however many emails we have, let's put them in a list, let's put the name in, and let's send out an offer to this group." One offer. So the first thing is get the list, second thing is send out an email that offers your product or service, that has some sense of value to your list.
Barry: Yeah. Fantastic. You can't sell anything if nobody knows about it, right?
John: Yeah. The more offers you make, the more money you make.
Barry: Fantastic. All right, John, we might wrap it up here. Where can people find out more about you and get in touch with you?
John: If you want to, probably the best thing to do would be go to www dot consultingunleashed dot com, and there's a whole bunch of free stuff and ideas and strategies and tactics that people can get access to from that website.
Barry: Okay, fantastic. And you also run a podcast as well too, don't you?
John: Oh, I do. I have businessunleashed dot com, basically talks about a lot of the tactics and strategies I just shared, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It's businessunleashed dot com.
Barry: Great. Thanks for coming on, John, some gold nuggets there, and we really appreciate it.
John: Thanks for having me, Barry.
Barry: Thanks.
Well, there you've got some really great information from John there, and proof positive that you can be using this marketing automation and stuff in any type of business. So many businesses out there are just doing nothing with the contacts they have, so get them into a system and start making some offers to your customers.
I'd love to hear how you're using marketing automation in your business, so if you want to head on over to the show notes at theactivemarketer dot com, forward slash John, that's L O G A R, all the show notes will be there, and I'd love you to scroll down to the comment section, tell me how you're using marketing automation in your business, what kind of offers are you making today to your customers, and what have the results been? Love to hear about it.
Also, if you can do me a favour, this is a new podcast so we want to get it out in front of as many people as possible, so if you could just share this someone who you think would find it useful, I would really appreciate it. And if you head over to iTunes and subscribe, we've got a really great interview coming up next week that you're not going to want to miss, and that is with Andre Chaperon.
Andre Chaperon is widely known for his Autoresponder Madness product and technique and using storytelling and soap opera sequences in your emails to get people hooked on your message. So I was really, really fortunate to have him on the show, he's kind of reclusive and doesn't do a lot of interviews, so don't miss that episode, it's coming up next. So go over to iTunes and subscribe to make sure it goes straight to your phone or straight to your iPad.
That's all I've got for this week. Thanks for tuning in, everybody, and we'll see you on the next show.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Active Marketer podcast! You can find the show notes and all the latest marketing automation news over at theactivemarketer dot com.
