TAM 006: Andre Chaperon – Using Storytelling To Sell

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In episode 6 of The Active Marketer podcast we talk to email marketing heavyweight Andre Chaperon. Andre has an industry wide reputation as one of the best email marketers in the world. His signature training product Autoresponder Madness has been used by thousands of people to improve their email marketing.

We chat with Andre about the power of using storytelling in your emails and how you can use it to up conversion rates and increase sales.

Andre recently changed systems to ActiveCampaign for the relaunch of his updated seminal email training product Autoresponder Madness.

In this episode talk about

• Storytelling
• Soap Opera sequences
• Marketing automations tools
• ERJA data
• Lead scoring
• Re-engagement sequences

If you would like to have a chat about how you could be using marketing automation to grow your business join us in the Automation Nation private Facebook group.

Links Mentioned In The Show

• Lee Child
• Autoresponder Madness
• Affilate Bully
• Frank vs Matt
• AWeber (no link 'cause they suck)
• ActiveCampaign
• Infusionsoft
• Ontraport

Listening options:

• Subscribe via iTunes
• On Stitcher Radio
• Go to the top of the page and use the on-site player.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Barry: Do you ever have trouble keeping up with sequences straight in your head?

Andre: Umm... Yeah sometimes.

Radio: 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 the activemarketer.com. Now here's your host Barry Moore.

Barry: Welcome back, listeners to episode six of the active marketer podcast. I'm your host Barry Moore and I'm super excited this week. And the reason I'm super excited this week is because I have on as a guest this week someone I look up to quite a bit in the internet marketing space and that is Mr. Andre Chaperon. If you started discussion with anyone about email marketers and who's the best email marketer and who the famous email marketers are, certainly on that short list will be Andre's name. He has been killing it with email marketing for a number of years now and is such a fantastic story teller. I actually look forward to reading his emails. Also, he produces some of the seminal products in email marketing. If you want to learn how to email marketing really, really well, almost everyone will tell you that you need to go out and get auto-responder madness which is Andres' course that teaches you specifically his techniques to do successful email marketing. And I've taken it, I highly recommend it. I think it's a great product. What really peaked my interest for this episode was the fact that Andres just relaunched his revamped Autoresponder Madness course late last year and he is running his whole platform off Active Campaign.

So I want to get Andre on the Podcast to share his secrets for successful email marketing and chat a little about why he chose Active Campaign as his platform going forward. But before we get into the interview, we're gonna go into the shameless social proof section of the show where I read out some reviews that have been left on iTunes. We're gonna go to the U.S iTunes store this time and read a couple of the U.S reviews. We've got one from Matt E[inaudible 00:02:12]. He said, "Great podcast five stars. Love this podcast from the first episode. Keep going Barry." Another one from [inaudible 00:02:22], "Great advice, five stars. I just started using Active Campaign in my business so this is prefect timing. I can't wait for more. Keep them coming." And one last one here from Cole260, US, "Awesome interviews. Five stars. I just listened to the interview with Dan Norris which is episode three. Good stuff. I like to hear more about how other online marketers are using marketing automation." Well Cole260 and all the reviewers, thank you very much for your reviews. And Cole260, this is the episode for you. We've got one of the most well known online marketers out there, Andres Chaperone, to guide us through how to do marketing automation well and why he's using Active Campaign. So let's get into that interview now.

It's my great pleasure to welcome Andre Chaperon to this show. Andre, welcome.

Andre: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Barry: I've been going through your Autoresponder Madness course recently. Actually, so I've been dying to talk to you about a lot of things. So anyone who is familiar with copyrighting there is one or two names that always pop up and yours is certainly on that short list and the seminal product autoresponder madness is certainly one that people talk about all the time. All the time. So maybe we can go back. I know you used to ... you know you like so many people have a full time job and decided that, that really wasn't doing it for you, and you didn't want to work for anybody else and you decide to ... or what prompted you to go out on your own and then got into the internet marketing kind of side of things? At point did you kind of have that ah-ha moment that you know that story telling was really kind of your thing and that was really what was working in your business?

Andre: The honest answer is, I don't remember the exact timeline but it was way back when. So back in the 2003 is when I started out, thrown into the deep end. So I had to figure that stuff out really quickly. And then there weren't really mentors back in those days so certainly weren't many courses, training courses and coaching courses, you know it was pretty much the Wild west back then. So yeah, I just tired all sorts of things ... everything, you name it I've tried and because I am an introvert, I'm shy and I don't like talking like we are now. I certainly don't do video, I don't do audio, I very rarely do podcast but so that's just the way I'm wired I guess. So for me when I started to play with email, it just seemed like the perfect ... it was like a match made in heaven where I could just be my normal reclusive self, tying email and communicating with an entire audience. It was basically a match made in heaven for me. That's kind of of how I ended up sticking to it.

Barry: And I assumed you tried a number of different angles before you kind of hit something that worked. Is that right?

Andre: Yeah, I was doing everything. I was doing all shorts of things. And as you know [inaudible 00:05:41] is something called that every single person should be doing, every marketer so it's kind of ... it's a common thing to almost every business model out there. I mean everybody should be [inaudible 00:05:52] a list no matter what the business model looks like. You know I got into email very, very, very early on. It was I think as early as a few months into my little journey to being thrown into the deep end and I started using email. And in fact I had my one AWeber account since 2004. So, it's been a while and again it was just one of those things I started to do it. I mean I was terrible at it but I just could see the power of it and also it just seemed to resonate with me like I said, I'm an introvert and you know just writing an email and [inaudible 00:06:33] and communicating with a bunch of people was perfect for me so I gravitated towards that and focused on that.

Barry: Oh yay for the introverts. I consider myself one as well. All the best people are introverts.[crosstalk 00:06:52] So when did it kind of of clicked that story telling was working better than some of the other things. Was there any particular campaign that you know you said, I'll just try it, some story telling in this one and like hey presto that started working well. Or was it like a considered choice or did you kind of stumbled upon it?
Andre: I just kind of started off telling stories and I didn't know what I was doing so like I said there weren't many mentors and things back in courses back then. And there certainly weren't any email marketing courses back then.

Andre: I just kind of started off telling stories and I didn't know what I was doing so like I said there weren't many mentors and things back in courses back then. And there certainly weren't any email marketing courses back then.

Barry: Yeah

Andre: So it was just a matter of watching what everybody else was doing and then doing the opposite. So basically just told my ... I was just telling my stories about what I was doing and it kind of just felt right and it seemed to work well because people were connecting with what I was saying. And [crosstalk 00:07:45]

Barry: So were you always a good story teller like as a kid? Or you know ...

Andre: No, no, no not at all. I'm in fact that one thing at I shouldn't be doing based on my previous experience is writing anything. It was my worst subject by far, at school, was english ... was written english. I'm dyslexic so I can't spell either so I'm not rigged to write anything. So it the strangest thing in the world where I've actually turned out to be a writer pretty much.

Barry: Yeah, no. I loved that story. So how did you go about teaching yourself story telling. Where there books, or guides, or was it just trail and error that you kind of stumbled upon the ...

Andre: Yeah, it was just trail and error. I mean it's one of those things that the more you write the better you get at it. The simple act of me writing more email, I got better at writing, it that makes sense. I certainly wasn't trained in creating ... crafting proper stories. That only came later. But you can do lots of things wrong and still do well. So consistency wins so you know you just gotta be consistent. And also sending the emails ... and again early on I figured out that I didn't want to be a person that needed to do something every single ... basically I wanted to use leverage so the way that I utilised leverage was I really focused on creating follow up sequences. For me I could write one email and stick it into the system and I know that email would be used over over over and over again to do it job. So, essentially me writing emails for hours, I was creating assets. I know lots people, in fact a very good friend of mine, his whole business model is daily broadcast so for him it's writing and email once and sending it out and then that's gone. It has done it's job, never to be used again, for the most part. So I've took the other road of automation and creating these follow up sequences and that's kind of how the whole thing started to ... how I started to figure the whole thing out. Creating these story based sequences. It's just kind of ... you know I was writing story type emails and I was focusing on creating follow up sequences so the whole automation thing started to make sense. And then I started to write email that across multiple ... well stories across multiple emails and that seemed to worked really well. It's only a lot later that the penny started to drop in certain aspects of what I was doing. And them I started to get better and focused on understanding on how to write story better.

Barry: So do you think that story telling aspect is something that anyone can learn? Or do you think you are so good at it because it particularly resonates with something inside of you?

Andre: I'm definitely not good at it in a sense that [crosstalk 00:11:13] I've some special ability that ... But that's just consistency. So it's just about ...the last year or so, I've had a story coach so that's only something I've done now. So now I'm getting better at understanding the story telling and he says that pretty much anybody can learn to tell stories. Again you just need to do it and read ideally. I read lots of fiction. I'm a very slow reader it takes me a while but I read fiction every single day.

Barry: Okay. Cool. What's some of your favourite fiction?

Andre: Lee Child and so his Jack Reacher's series are by far my favourite and it actually influenced my writing style more than anything else. So if there was a secret weapon that would be it, read the Jack Reacher stuff. His writing style resonated with me, it's sort of short punchy sentences and by default people tend to write longer sentences and that I don't come across very punchy. So ...

Barry: And it's not conversational either. You wouldn't sit there and [crosstalk 00:12:44] rattle off seven sentences, paragraph to somebody if you are just chatting over coffee or something

Andre: Right exactly. But people seem to write that way.

Barry: Yeah. So for those folks maybe who aren't familiar, could just kind of give basis of your soap opera sequence?

Andre: Yeah, it's simple enough. There's two components, the one component is the structure. It's how the physical thing is actually mapped out. So like I've said already, it's all based on follow up sequences. We emails goes out sequentially, you put them in the system and they go out with the predefined gap in between each one. Then you can go on level deeper and you can set yourself, okay ... someone's going through these emails and everyone is different and everybody has different needs and so you can create context with your emails ... with your story sequence. And based on the context, different people can take different actions, right? Because certain things sort of just resonate with certain people. So understating that is ... then I started to implement these behaviours sequences so basically if somebody takes an action and clicks on the link so ... whatever that might be depending on the market they click on the link because it makes sense to them or they want to know more about a certain thing and then what I do is that launches another several [inaudible 00:14:23] sequence and send them down another little path.

So the tools now a day are a lot more slick then they used to be. It used to be a bit of a mission to set the whole thing up. It wasn't a simple process, maybe people between less [crosstalk 00:14:41]... it's a lot more now. It's a lot more elegant now. Where there could just click a link. Whereas before they had to actually [inaudible 00:14:48].

Barry: And have you found optimal length for your mail soap opera sequence? Or really depend on the subject matter or the customer avatar that you talking to?

Andre: As a rule of thumb, you just keep adding onto it so it doesn't end. Yeah, it could be ... just keep writing. I mean initially it'll be like a week long. You write seven emails worth of stuff and then you just create a process whereas every single week you would just keep adding, writing more emails and adding them to that sequence. And over time it'll get longer, it'll be 30 days long or a month long then 45 days, 90 days and you just keep going.

Barry: Have you looked at the metrics to see if there's any kinds of drop off the longer it gets or are you such a good story teller that you keeping people hook for 45 days?

Andre: Well I know people go all the way through them and they click all the way through them so ...

Barry: Wow

Andre: Yeah so I just keep adding to it. And obviously there's other little off shoots so as people are doing things and clicking on certain things, it launching other emails. So they are always engaged. Yeah I mean marketers and anybody interested in a certain topic are gonna read stuff and click on links cuz they want to discover more. And when you start to use little cool things like open loops and cliff hangers, it keep people reading.

Barry: Yeah, I love that you are open [inaudible 00:16:32] writing style. I just read the emails, just for the sake of reading them. Just because they're so good to read. Any kinds of standard length for those subseries? Are they quite long or quite short or just designed [crosstalk 00:16:47] to do a specific thing or ... ?

Andre: Typically there'll be two emails or three emails. They're never that long. It's just sends down that little path and it goes a bit deeper but sometimes you could have a little promotion link to something so if they've shown interest in a certain topic or certain product, it can then launch a little ... a evergreen launch sequence that then provides some preeminent content and then goes into a little [inaudible 00:17:22] so that could be a few emails long and then once that's done, you can do the same thing again. You know somebody goes from being a prospect to a customer so now they could move to the customer sequence and that thing plays out um ... you want people to consume the product so it starts over the consumption sequence and then just yeah ... it just move people all along a path.

Barry: Do you ever have trouble keeping up with sequences straight in your head?

Andre: Um yeah, sometimes. Yeah, services like AWeber don't make it very easy. You have all these different lists and there's no easy way to see how they're linked together whereas at least with products like Active Campaign, it's a lot more visually ... visually you can see how things work together.

Barry: Yeah. So, you've been at this for a while and you've probably used heap and heap of different tools to try and find the best one so can you talk us through some of the ones you've tried and what you are using now?

Andre: So I've been using AWeber for like I've said since 2004. And I have a love hate relationship with it. They don't seem to have progressed at all very much in the ten plus years that I've been using it for. Yeah, it's solid. It does what it said a [inaudible 00:18:54] but we want to start to do things like I do, it becomes a bit more challenging. Also they can't lead each single lead as a new ... they charge you there per lead because it's not a proper CRM if you have 100 lists of ... I hope this is not gonna be to technical for you audience but if you have 100 and one person is on all 100 lists that essentially charge you for 100 people.[crosstalk 00:19:32] If that makes sense.

Barry: Yeah they get counted a 100 different times. Yeah.

Andre: So although your list may be 2000 unique people, if you're doing lots of list segmenting that could easily be 10,000 people essentially which they then charge you for. So that's not that cool so systems is like Infusionsoft, Ontraport, Active Campaign, I think are a lot more elegant the way that they connect to everybody as a single person and then you can just use tags to segment them. Yeah so a few months ago I started using Active Campaign and I love it. Fell in love with it straight away so a friend of mine suggested that I try it and it was like perfect straight away. I'm in the process of moving people across now.

Barry: Yeah. Well I certainly hear you here they are loving that you want to keep finding more and more inside of it that's really cool. Have you had a chance to get down to the hood and look at any features, anything that you really stands out that's something you like other than obviously the tagging?

Andre: Yeah, the way that the automation works I think is very sexy. I love that. It also got, I forget what it's called now, I don't have it open in front of me but they'll let you put in data points. So as soon as somebody subscribes, you can then select in your billing area, all the different data points that you want them to attach them to a certain person and they'll try their best to pull those data points in. So that's all [crosstalk 00:21:06]

Barry: The [crosstalk 00:21:06] data, is that what you're talking about?

Andre: That's it. That the [crosstalk 00:21:09]. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a whole bunch that I've pull in just because want to test to see how it works but it's really nice. So you know at any point in time, you can say send an email out to people in Australia or people in Sydney that are into goth.

Barry: It's very very cool, bordering on sightly creepy. Yeah.

Andre: Yeah.

Barry: How much stuff they can find out. Yeah [crosstalk 00:21:37]

Andre: And then it's got scoring which is ... I'm busy playing with at the moment where you can score things which is amazing so if somebody purchases a product if they click a link, you can score them differently and if the score goes above a certain threshold, it can then trigger another action sequence which then can do something else. So you can really go a bit crazy with how you implement these automation sequence [crosstalk 00:22:08]. It's just insane.

Barry: The cool thing about the leads going too is you can actually use that in a negative way as well. So like if someone doesn't open an email in three months or whatever, you can subtract points from it's leads score or from their lead score and potentially you can find those people who aren't being engaged with or aren't engaging with your messages anymore and try some sort of re-engagement sequence then or something. Yeah lots of really cool stuff to dig around and play with in there.

Andre: Yeah there's also some nice ways to self optimised your list, your entire list. There're people aren't, that haven't clicked on anything for a period of X months you can then trigger another automated sequence that says listen if you don't click this link or don't do something or read my stuff, I'm going to remove you from the list.

Barry: Yeah that's right. Yeah, I've seen that as a technique where people have said exactly that and send a email and go "hey look, you haven't open anything for six months. If you don't open something soon we are gonna remove you." And people actually reengage. It's pretty interesting customer behaviour.

Well I know you don't have a whole lot of time today Andre and I really appreciate you spending some time with us today and talking us through your sequences and a little bit about how you're using Active Campaign so if anything wants to find out more about ... I know you've got a couple different businesses but why don't you tell listeners where they can find out more stuff about Andre.

Andre: Yeah, just go to Google and type on up Andre Chaperon with a C. Everybody spell it with a S. Otherwise, if they go to Autoresponder Madness it's a big sales page. So one thing that can do is scroll all the way down to the bottom, I'm strange like this, whereas everybody talks about sticking opt-in pages above the [inaudible 00:24:01] for my one, you gotta scroll to the bottom of a 8,000 word sales letter and there's an opportunity to opt in. That's really for people that aren't really to purchase Autoresponder Madness and basically puts them into a little sequence that basically shows them what Autoresponder Madness is and how it works. I know lots of people add themselves to that, just to see how the whole thing plays out. So there's a sequences that'll go out. It's got all of the stuff we've spoken about. If they click a link it'll launch another sequence. I think there's one of those and the sequence is currently about a week long, I think. So it's not awfully long but you'll get an idea of how the whole thing works. And again there's nothing to buy, you don't have to buy anything. So yeah [crosstalk 00:24:54] if you want to get ...

Barry: Yeah, I'm certainly a big fan of Autoresponder Madness. I've don't it myself. I think it's a great course, great teaching tool, great learning tool. And if you want to see how good Andre is at sucking you into a story, you can also go over to affiliatebully.com, that a great series of about eight pages that you just click [crosstalk 00:25:14]. You just have to click [crosstalk 00:25:16] the next one and see ... Yeah, you have to just click through the next one and see what it is. You have to, it's great.

Andre: And a page that you can go look at for story telling. Again, there's nothing for sale at this page. It's a whole bunch of cool information. Frank versus Matt so it's F-r-a-n-k, F-r-a-n-c-k and then vs for versus then Matt, M-a-t-t dot com. And it's just a story about these two characters and there's tonnes of links that goes all over the show. And basically it's just a story. [crosstalk 00:25:52]

Barry: We'll check that out and really appreciate your time, Andre, and look forward to getting more of your stories in the mail everyday. Thank you.

Andre: No worries, Berry. This been fun.

Barry: Wow. Great interview there with Andre Chaperon. I really appreciate him stopping by. He's widely known as a bit of an introvert and reckless so he doesn't do too many interview so I felt pretty lucky that we got him here on the activemarketer.com. Now you can find all the show notes over at the activemarketer.com/andre and we'll have links to everything that we've talked about during the show. And I love to hear what you thought about what Andre had to say if you want to go over to activemarketer.com/andres scroll to the bottom and leave us a comment down below in the show notes, I would really really love to hear what you have to think about his story telling and whether you've done Autoresponder Madness and how you found that. And if you're using story telling in your business I'd love to hear about it. So please leave us a comment and we'll see you on the next show. Thanks everybody.

Radio: Thanks for listening to the Active Marketer podcast. You can find the show notes and all the latest marketer automation news over at the activemarketer.com.