TAM 023: Dan Faggella – Turning Leads Into Customers - The Active Marketer

TAM 023: Dan Faggella – Turning Leads Into Customers

ActiveCampaign Barry Moore Dan Fagella

In episode 23, I chat with Dan Faggella from CLVBoost.com. Dan is a long time automator and shares a wealth of experience building an automation pipeline that attract the right leads, and specialises in turning leads into customers.

Listen in as we chat about how the right way to create the right lead magnet that is going to lead to a purchase and how you turn those customers into repeat buyers.

We chat about:

  • How to create the right lead magnet
  • How to attract the right customer
  • How to create an educational autoresponder to convert leads
    • Education
    • Social proof
    • Calls to action

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

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Dan: They're getting leads and aiming to get those leads to buy stuff online. If you're cool with it, man, I'd love to just get riffing here on strategies to really maximise front-end conversion.

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 could find out all the tips, tactics, and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at TheActiveMarketer.com. Now, here's your host Barry Moore.

Barry: Hello, listener. Welcome back to episode number 23 of The Active Marketer Podcast, where we teach you how to design, automate, and scale your business to the next level using marketing automation. This week I will be interviewing Dan Fagella, a fellow automater out there. He's been at it for years and years, one of the first guys to really bring it to the forefront in the marketing space, and he's got some great ideas he's learned over the years, really honed and refined his process for turning leads into customers and customers into repeat buyers. I'm real excited to have Dan on the show. It's kind of a long interview so we're going to skip all the platitudes here in the beginning and we're going to go straight into the interview. See ya on the other side. All right, I'd like to welcome Dan to the show. Dan, how are you brother?

Dan: Doing well, Barry. Glad to be here.

Barry: I'm really excited to have you on for a number of reasons. One is because like me you're a guy who does a lot of things. You're not necessarily the one thing kind of guy. You've got a lot of varying interests, and you go and attack those, which is cool. I really love that. We also have another thing in common. Obviously you're a quite accomplished BJJer, Brazilian jiu jitsu. I studied it in the past for a while, but somehow I ended up every time I went to roll on the mat I ended up breaking a finger or a toe or something like that.

Dan: Darn it. Yeah, well we've all been there too. I know what that's like.

Barry: I was doing a lot of flying of aeroplanes at the time so that kind of conflicted with that so I kind of had to give it away.

Dan: Yeah.

Barry: But anyway, Dan is killer at customer lifetime value and squeezing the most out of your leads and customers. Maybe squeezing is the wrong word, but I wanted to get your on to talk about customer lifetime value first of all. We can talk about what that is if some of the listeners aren't familiar, and then how we can go about implementing that in your own business.

Dan: Yeah yeah. I guess, Barry, what would probably make sense here is we could talk in terms of customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value is how much does a customer pay you before they're sort of gone for good? Very few people have an indefinite stick rate business. In fact, there might be some pharmaceutical companies that have close to an indefinite stick rate business, because otherwise horrible things would happen, but really most of us-

Barry: Cemeteries?

Dan: Yeah yeah.

Barry: Cemeteries and funeral homes are the only ones I can think of.

Dan: Yeah, but even then it's like you can't keep getting payments because they're under there. They can't make the money to pay anymore. So how much is a customer worth to you? Ultimately, Barry, what I'd really like to talk about as well is really how much is a lead worth to you, because some people might say, "Okay, you know, my average customer is worth blank, but we only convert you know one in every 20 or one in every 40 of our leads into customers." I'd like to think a lot more about what a lead is worth because now we focus not only on how to get customers to buy more and buy bigger, but we focus on how to get more leads to become customers. Ultimately that's not just about being more aggressive with marketing, that's about being more segmented, building better relationships and all kind of the core skills of marketing automation and segmentation that we sort of focus on day and night at CLVboost. Yeah, we can delve first into kind of how to convert more leads into buyers, Barry. I know you wanted me to give a little bit of sort of origin story, how the heck did I get into this kind of stuff.

Barry: Yeah, I think it's a cool story that a lot of people can relate to. I'll let you tell it, but I think when everybody gets started, they get started thinking small about their own business in their own area, and that's kind of how you got started. Maybe you could share a little bit of that story.

Dan: For sure. I very much did not start off as a tech guy, Barry. I was the last person of my age to get a cell phone. I think I was a freshman or a sophomore in college when I finally got a cell phone. Then I was the last person to get a smartphone. I'm not really the biggest tech guy. I was a jiu jitsu guy. I like philosophy. I wasn't really a tech nerd, but I started a martial arts gym in a really small town, and we didn't have that many people in this town so we didn't get that much volume of traffic to the website because it was a really small town. I decided, "Man, the only way I'm going to stay alive is I have to really build relationships with every lead and get as many of them to come in through the door as possible." Barry, I didn't realise it at the time, but that's called conversion, right?

Barry: Exactly.

Dan: It's how do I maximise the number of people that see my site or become a lead who then ultimately will become a paying member of my gym? The way that I focused on that was not just having big red text on my website. The way I focused on that was by giving them a great reason to opt in, but then having very, very segmented and targeted messaging depending on what programme they're interested in, what their goal was. Sometimes I would even change up the sequence if they lived in a far away town, if they submitted their town. There's a town called Providence. It's a bigger city but it's quite far from us, so we had to beat down those objections in the autoresponder. I really ended up calibrating a lot of email copywriting to really maximise conversion.

Barry, once I got the gym up to about 80 students in a really tiny town, I thought to myself, "Man, you know, I can probably only take this conversion thing so far in a little town. What I really should focus on is making conversion work in the big broad world of the internet." I took these martial arts techniques, turned them into online digital curricula, and then got the same kind of opt-ins, except not just from my small town, but from all over the world from guest posting and putting up a lot of great YouTube videos and things like that. Now instead of going for a conversion it's the same exact skill but altering it a little bit going for conversion to appointment to my martial arts gym, I actually sold my gym and I started going to maximise the number of people that opted in to the number of folks that then would start paying every month for our online martial arts curricula. Now that's a $73,000 a month business at the time of this recording, basically selling the same stuff I was doing at the gym, except the gym is long sold and run by somebody else, and now I'm doing this thing in my boxer shorts. Essentially I stumbled into conversion being important because I was in a town where traffic wasn't a skill I could use, because
Barry, when you got 8000 people, you run out of humans really fast.

Barry: Yeah, and that's the element of the story that I really like is that that particular story was driven by necessity. It's not like you could just [crosstalk 00:07:12]

Dan: Completely, man. I didn't want to be an Infusionsoft guy. I didn't want to spend all that money on Infusionsoft, you know?

Barry: Yeah. There's only so many leads you can burn in a town of 8000 before you're done.

Dan: That's it, so it's, "Yeah, I got to get every single one of them through the door." That was my focus on conversion. Barry, if you like I know a lot of your folks who might be tuned in, they're familiar with Ryan Deiss or other internet marketer folks, and maybe they sell online products, eCommerce products, whatever the case may be, and they're getting leads and aiming to get those leads to buy stuff online. If you're cool with it, man, I'd love to just get riffing here on strategies to really maximise front-end conversion.

Barry: Yeah, go brother. Let's go.

Dan: Cool, man. But anyway, yeah. In terms of selling on the internet,
Barry, one thing that's really important on my end is this, and I want everybody who's tuned in to think through this lens, okay? I'm going to try to avoid talking about one-off tactics that like you could use once and it might be kind of nifty and cool, and I'm going to have people really think strategically about how they can immediately refine and improve their conversions and their customer lifetime value in their business now. One thing is this, is Barry, anybody who's listening in right now, if they ask themselves, "Of the people that come to my website, what do most of them come there hungry for? What do most of them come there looking for? What do most of them come there aiming to ... What's the problem they're aiming to solve when they show up?" I ask that question because, Barry, before I even talk about what products you're going to sell, we have to talk about how we're going to capture the lead. When we talk about how we're going to capture the lead, Barry, ideally we want to capture a morsel of the same intent that will be the [inaudible 00:08:57]

Some people will have a very arbitrary sort of an opt-in that they'll just assume, "Okay, well you know, they land on the site, I got to give them something. What am I going to give them?" There's the guy in the bodyweight fitness space who people would land on the site and he had an opt-in about let's so isometric muscle building or something like that. Whole website was about bodyweight fitness, this is about isometric muscle building. As it turns out, only far less than one in four people who are landing on the site, who are on his subscriber list now, are actually interested in building muscle. Most of them are weight loss. Most of the articles about burning fat and things like that. So Barry, it seems like, "Well, I just need an opt-in," you know? "I got to get an opt-in on my site," but you really don't. Ultimately what you need is you got to figure out what is the intent that people are there for in the first place? If you can poll your current subscribers, if you can look at the keywords that are currently driving most of your organic traffic, then that's going to help you define what your lead capture is. Make sense?

Barry: Yeah, absolutely. I kind of say the customer is always on a journey and they've come to you because they're on the journey. If you help them on the next step, you don't have to sell them. You just have to help them on the next step of that journey, whatever that is.

Dan: Exactly. Yeah, what is that? Capturing that intent. Most people though, Barry, will assume what that intent is. Like the fellow in the bodyweight space might have said, "Well, you know, I mean, they're interested in working out. They want to build muscle obviously, so we'll do like a how to build muscle in your arms kind of ebook thing or video course, and that's as good as anything else because they're landing on my site." But ultimately if we find out they're really looking for something else, then we should calibrate to that. Similarly, Barry, once we have an idea of what they're coming to the site for we can create a great opt-in. If we have a great opt-in, we can make sure it aligns with what our initial offer is.

Let me give you another example of what we might call a mistake there. The fellow in the bodyweight fitness space, if we want to fix that issue we would determine let's say that most people are really interested in their biggest benefit is they want to save time by doing bodyweight stuff. They don't want a gym membership. They want to burn fat. Most of them are interested in fat loss. Then we would create what? You would create a PDF ebook with some video links of three different simple five minute full-body metabolic workouts that require no equipment and no athletic skills, right? That might be a better fit for the audience if we know what they're searching for. That's matching our opt-in to what our traffic is there for in the first place.

Next up though, Barry, we'll look at little bit at how to go from the opt-in to the offer. Depending on what your offer is, you'll want to alter what your opt-in is. I had another buddy who was selling nutraceuticals, selling actually a herbal supplement of some kind aimed to sort of improve focus and performance and things like that, like focus and concentrat [inaudible 00:11:48]. This guy's aiming to sell focus and concentration for athletes. He's driving people to an ebook of some kind, some kind of an opt-in that is it's like 11 Ninja Hacks or Mind Tricks to Make You More Focused as an Athlete. That's the name of the ebook. Now, Barry, let me ask you this. What percentage of people who download an ebook about the psychological tricks to staying focused as an athlete are even remotely in the market to eat herbs to aim to get that benefit? Not inherently, right?

Barry: Yeah.

Dan: It's like they're sort of interested in the sort of same benefit, but jeez, we're not parsing out people that want to eat herbs. Like we're ultimately going to get these people to eat things. We should get an opt-in that relates directly to that desire. Barry, the question I always ask people is, does your opt-in, whatever it is, does it necessarily, I didn't say "kind of," does it necessarily imply the same intent that would drive them to make the first purchase that you're going to put in front of them? Everybody who's tuned in, listen to this stuff. We break down so many beginner info marketing businesses, membership sites, and online course, and coaching stuff. It's very, very, very much unlikely actually that this is inherently aligned. The question is, does your opt-in, whatever it is, an ebook, a white paper, a webinar, does it necessarily imply [inaudible 00:13:19] that desire that would drive somebody to make the first purchase? If not, you can change it so that it does, and that's going to make a more congruent sale.

Barry, what this guy could have done, okay, if he wanted to do an opt-in, is he could have done ... There's 1000 ways to skin this cat. He could have just gone the straight up coupon way as some of these other nutraceutical guys do, but if he wanted to do an ebook or a white paper, he could have done some kind of a report on the top seven ingredients or herbs, natural herbs, that improve ...

Barry: Focus and concentration. Yeah, for sure.

Dan: ... that improve focus and concentration, right?

Barry: Yeah.

Dan: Because if you're reading about herbs, you're not interested in just looking at herbs. You're aware if you're a human being [inaudible 00:14:03] must be consumed. If you're reading an ebook about the ingredients, you're the kind of person that is going to eat ingredients. You're interested in consuming something and getting a result that way, as opposed to being a guy that wants to learn psychology [inaudible 00:14:17] Tony Robbins course or something like that that you might have from the first ebook. Those are the first two there, Barry. Before we even get into individual conversion strategy, and I'm really, really excited to do that, but before I start talking about tactics, I always like to focus on what is the intent that is organically floating in the world already that's driving people to your site, and how can we capture that, and is that capture, that lead capture, does it imply the same MF'ing intent that would be required for somebody to make your first purchase?

Because, Barry, let me give you another example, you know? Let's say in the martial arts world, let's say people land on my jiu jitsu website and I say, "Hey, download this free guide, you know, 7 Quick Drills to Improve, you know, Your Hand-Eye Coordination for Jiu Jitsu," or something like that, okay? Let's just hypothetically, Barry, let's just say that that's my ebook.

Barry: Yep.

Dan: All right. Then as they ride my autoresponder, I sell them on a course on how to escape from side control and mount position and all these other bad positions. It's not unrelated. I used a double negative to be emphatic. It's not unrelated, but ultimately, Barry, it's not exactly the same. We have multiple front-end opt-ins that drive down differing funnels that present differing value props because we want to capture what people are ultimately most interested in in the first place. That's the philosophical preframe to our convo here.

Barry: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I always say strategy's more important than tactics. Everyone wants the latest, greatest tactic that's, "How do I get more people onto my page?" It's like, "Well, think about the strategy first." Another point, golden nugget in there is that that opt-in is determining what kind of leads you're going to get, not just the fact that you're getting leads, but what type of leads you're going to get.

Dan: All day long.

Barry: If you have the wrong lead magnet, you're going to get the wrong leads.

Dan: That's it.

Barry: If you have a magnet that appeals to freebie seekers, you're going to get freebie seekers who are never going to buy anything from you, but like you said, if you can relate it more to your product then it's just a natural ascension from one step to the other, from the lead magnet to the product, and you're already attracting the right customers for the product to begin with.

Dan: That's exactly it. Yeah, who are you ultimately soliciting, and does the opt-in, is it driven by the same desire to fulfil a problem that your product solves as well? We ultimately would like to have them be perfectly aligned where anybody who opts in on that thing is necessarily in the market to get your product as well. Then we can start talking about actually tactics to sell folks to.

Barry: Yeah, cool. Do you recommend splintering that front end, like a front-end offer product? If your signature product is that martial arts training package, the big [matzo 00:17:11], splintering a kind of an intermediate offer so there's something on defence, or something on takedowns, or something on sweeps, or escapes, or-

Dan: Yeah yeah.

Barry: Yeah. Then that lead in product actually takes you to the signature product at the end.

Dan: Yeah, in many respects. There's a lot of ways to skin this cat,
Barry. Ryan Deiss actually in a older info product of his actually about continuity programmes talks about this, but really the best example is HubSpot. Are you familiar with HubSpot software?

Barry: Yeah, a little. Yep.

Dan: Okay. HubSpot's a public company in Boston here, and if you go to HubSpot's blog, under every blog they have a unique ebook or course or webinar related to the exact same thing that that blog related to. Then that is going to pull you in deeper and deeper into the HubSpot environment and atmosphere, ultimately always selling the same thing, Barry, which is called HubSpot software. They make you pay a lot of money upfront. It's really, really pricey, and ultimately it's all about selling HubSpot, but it's not just, "Get a demo, get a demo, get a demo." It's "Download this white paper about Twitter marketing because you just read a blog about that." Then they got two weeks worth of autoresponders, blending in Twitter and social strategy with lead gen and making money and how HubSpot can help with all that, and they get you to opt in for something else or to then book an appointment to learn about that. Then they can rope you right into selling you the core software. Yeah, splintering by interest. HubSpot does this very well.

In the martial arts niche, man, we've got every one of our YouTube videos fits into three or four core categories. Every single one of those categories has its own opt-in and it's own back-end flow to drive them towards a membership because those people are ultimately looking for different things, leg locks, escapes, beating bigger opponents. I'm a big fan of splintering when you can, but Barry, if somebody's listening in right now and they're just starting off and they're like, "Oh, I don't want to create 20 ebooks," don't worry about it. Just find the one opt-in bait that is most apt given the value proposition of your site, given why people are coming there in the first place, given what your subscribers actually want. Just find the one best match. Ultimately when you get more advanced you're going to splinter it off, but in the beginning, man, find a real nice Cinderella fit there and make sure it lines up to your product, and you're already doing better than 95% of internet marketers, you know?

Barry: Yeah, for sure. For sure. All right, Dan, so what's the next step? We've got our leads. We've got the appropriate lead magnet to attract the appropriate lead. Where do we go from there?

Dan: Yeah, so next up we'll focus on getting our first sale. There's a lot of ways to skin this cat, and again I feel like I'd be a little bit too tactical if I said, "Well, you want to go with your low ticket products for four days, and then you do a two day period where you triple price." It's like nah, that's just kind of silly.

Barry: That's the magic button that works on everything, isn't it?

Dan: Yeah, the magic bullet. Instead, Barry, what I'd like to talk about is kind of anatomy of a good autoresponder. Most people feel as though, and they're right, generally speaking they're right, they ought to do some degree of education and kind of bonding with their list. When a subscriber signs up, not just say, "Hey, thanks for subscribing. Buy now," and then the next email says, "Thanks for subscribing. Buy now." Instead of doing that, they're aware that they should integrate some degree of education. Where I believe most folks often sort of go awry here, Barry, is that they're of the belief that that implies that they cannot actually be sort of selling in any kind of soft or hard way when they're doing what they would call "education." What I would advise is if folks are selling ... Barry, give me an example. I think it'll be better if you give me an example. Somebody who's tuned in right now might be selling what on the internet? Just you give me the one to run with.

Barry: Say a coaching product for example. They've got a coaching programme for whatever, five grand, ten grand.

Dan: Okay, a coaching programme for five grand. What are they coaching in? What is the area, the niche? Is it horseback riding? Is it Facebook marketing?

Barry: Yeah, let's say Facebook marketing.

Dan: Or $5000 a year, whatever it is, coaching in what we might call high end coaching programme for Facebook marketing, teaching people in depth how to run Facebook marketing and use it successfully in their business. They're ultimately selling big ticket coaching. Barry, what we could do is we could talk about all the products that would spin off of that, but let's just talk about the coaching. I'm just going to go into the coaching for right now. If in fact that is the case, then when somebody opts in on the front end there, if we want to ultimately get them to come in for this coaching programme, we'll likely want to educate them first. We'll think to ourselves, "Okay, well what does education look like?" Generally speaking, Barry, any good autoresponder includes, and I could give you 50 ingredients, but I'm going to give you three that probably matter the most. We have education, some degree of social proof, and calls to action. Education, some degree of social proof, and calls to action. If you have 12 emails and you're missing one of those entirely, you may be in trouble, and in general it should integrate it.

If that is in fact the case, then let's say the first two or three days we're educating folks. We're showing them cool videos about Facebook marketing, different tactical stuff, different ways of setting up ad campaigns, different ways to get started with your ad campaign or build your first landing page, whatever the case may be. We're sort of educating people in that particular respect. Most people would assume, "Okay, well we just sent them to the videos, and then seven days later, then we'll finally let people know that we actually have a coaching programme." Sometimes that's right. I am of the belief that in general it's wrong, because Barry, by the time email number 10 rolls around, you might be at only like a 12%, 10% open rate, you know what I mean?

Barry: Yeah, for sure.

Dan: Depending on your niche. It's kind of like, "Man, if we don't at least let the hot people buy, we might kind of lose them while they're still really excited about us." In those first couple educational videos, instead of sending somebody to YouTube, or instead of just sending them to an arbitrary video, let's embed that video on a blog. Underneath the blog we'll explain what's happening in the video, and at the bottom of the blog, or on the right-hand side of the blog, we'll say, "Hey, by the way we often teach these Facebook tactics in depth to business owners and marketers around the world and help them transform their business in three to six months with the power of Facebook advertising. If you'd like to apply for our coaching programme, you can see some of our happy and successful customers here, and fill out the simple application and we'll get back to you soon." That's very different than the first email saying, "Buy now, you schmuck." It's not saying that, but instead we're just doing what I call keeping the buying door open.

Yes, we're going to educate them. We'll educate them for the first three, four messages. We'll share a great testimonial from our successful student who has a great study about some useful Facebook tactic. We'll explain some Facebook fundamentals that people need to understand, all these different videos and fun blog posts and things like that, tell a little bit of our story, but softly in the PS of the email, softly underneath the blog, softly on the right-hand side of the blog, softly at the end of the video we're going to have light calls to action that will at least let the hot people buy. Because Barry, there's a certain percentage of the people who watch that first or second or third educational video and they're halfway they're saying, "Man, if I could pay this guy I would."

Barry: Yeah, for sure. I think we've all done that. I think we've all seen those slightly slimy sales pages where they've got the video without the controls on it and you can't fast forward and you can't stop and you're like, "I already want to buy this thing, but now I've got to wait for five minutes before the buy button pops up," you know?

Dan: Yeah. Yeah, but if you're doing it with a blog post, you could just embed a YouTube video on your actual blog and again, if that person is hot on that day, day three, don't say to yourself, "Well, you know, I can't even show them the sales page until at least day 12." No no no. Let them make the choice. Don't shove it down their throat, but put it lightly around the education because the interested people, the hot people, want to take the next step forward. You don't have to throw them through the door, kick them through the door like Sparta, like boom right to the chest. You don't have to do that, but what you do have to do is make sure they can see the door. Make sure the door never disappears, because every single time you get a click from an email is not something to take for granted, because at some point most of those leads, they ain't going to be opening anything that you send anymore. You get a certain number of those clicks and you get a certain amount of light of overt calls to action before you've got no more calls to action and then you can't make money from that guy anymore.

That's one thing, Barry. Integrate testimonials. Integrate education. By all means, lay it on pretty heavy in the beginning. Generally in any info product business, first three or four days will have a pretty good deal of education on the front end. But on the bottom of the blog, on the right-hand side, in the PS of the email, there's always a nice little toe in the door where if somebody really was hot they could take that next step forward. That's one big tactical tip that I think a lot of people forget about.

Barry: Yeah. Exactly right. I guess the message there is yeah, you don't want to jam it down your throat, but you don't want to deny them the ability to buy from you whenever they're ready.

Dan: That's it. A lot of people will say, "Aww man, I have a 12 email autoresponder, Barry, and you know, people opt in. I'm trying to sell this Facebook coaching. They opt in, I give them 10 days of great education, and on day 11 and day 12 I tell them all about this coaching programme. And you know, we had 200 people go through it. They got the 11 and 12 email, you know, and they're just not good leads. You know, they didn't buy." It's like wait a second, they probably didn't even open email 11 and 12. You should have given them the opportunity to buy on number one, two, and three, either in the PS of your email, the right-hand sidebar, underneath the blog post. Maybe right underneath at the bottom of one of your blogs you have a testimonial video from one of your really successful and happy students, and underneath there says, "Hey, if you'd like to apply to go through the same programme that Steve went through to transform his business in six months, then, you know, you can apply here, and blah blah blah." That's one. Barry, if it's possible here I'd like to go into one other tactic for getting more out of any given autoresponder. That first one was keeping the buying door open with education, testimonials, and calls to action. I'd like to get one more in if I can.

Barry: Yeah, for sure, but there's just a gold nugget before we move on for that.

Dan: Well, do it. Do it. Yeah, let's go.

Barry: Is yeah, don't just put your autoresponder out there and then never touch it again. Go back and look at the metrics. What are the open rates on email one versus email five versus email ten? Is there some point in that sequence where they're dropping off dramatically, and what can I do to fix that? Or maybe everyone drops off after seven, so maybe I don't need a 12 email responder, I just need a seven email responder, something like that. Look at the metrics and then split test from that.

Dan: Yeah, big time. Yeah. Some people don't have the traffic to split test of the bat, but I like that some software, ActiveCampaign included, will allow you to kind of parse out and segment your autoresponder so people can go down different channels. But yeah, it's great to be able to get feedback from those because like you had mentioned, shucks, you might have thought the subject line on email six was a real schnazzy one, but it might have the lowest open rate of anything that you got in the first dozen emails. Being able to tune into that feedback is more than useful as well.

Barry: Yeah. Okay, cool. What's the next one?

Dan: Yeah. I know we're short on time here, but I'll make sure that I can integrate this as well. This is one that, Barry, I really, really feel like anybody ... Instead of throwing individual tactics that really might not be best for everybody, again I like to give people lenses that they can look through, look at their business, and just know that most people are going to be able to find ways to make more money by looking through these goggles. The goggle that I'm talking about here is the goggles of multiple angles or multiple swings for your product.

If we're using coaching for an example, Barry, this is a really good one because eCommerce is a little bit simpler for most people to grasp. We got to get them to the sales page. There's a lot of ways to slice and dice the sales page, and a lot of people actually screw that up. If you're trying to sell one product, there's a lot of ways you can ... Long-form sales letter you can put at the end of videos. Different people are going to get excited about a product and buy it in different ways, but presenting your offer, and flavouring your offer, and rotating your offer in different ways knowing that different people will want to respond in different ways. Barry, if L.L.Bean mails you a catalogue, you can mail them back an envelope to get your backpack. You can go on the web [inaudible 00:29:46] to get that exact backpack. You can phone in and get the backpack. You know what I mean?

Barry: Yeah.

Dan: If they all of a sudden stop doing the phone, they'd be losing a lot of money because certain people are not going online and they're not mailing envelopes. They are phone responders. If we're using a coaching programme, and now I could go on and on about this in eCommerce. Anybody out there who's selling an ebook or a downloadable video programme or something like that generally speaking leaving, jeez, like 40% of the bucks on the table by not presenting it in different ways for the people that don't take it on the front end. I could go on for days about that, but unfortunately don't have time. If we're talking about coaching, so getting people on the phone, Barry. Ultimately what you need to do to sell $500 coaching, unless you're a lot smarter than me, Barry, is in general you'd have to get them onto the phone.

Barry: Yeah, for sure.

Dan: How do you do that? Some people might say, "Okay, well we have an application form that we get folks to fill out." There's like an appointment form or an application form that people can fill, and then you get back to them and you call them and you follow along with your sales process. Other people, Barry, instead of getting them to fill out that application form on the bottom of a blog post, they might really never feel comfortable enough filling up that application unless you got them sitting in front of a webinar for 45 minutes and really building trust and laying on the social proof before you present the application form. Then and only then will you be able to nudge them over the edge and fill that thing out. That's one more way to kind of eke out more people.

Similarly, Barry, you might also let them book their own time to talk to you. There's a lot of these apps, like Calendly and TimeTrade, and I think when I had you find a time to interview me here, I think you probably used one of those with me as well. We do this for physical therapy clinics and other consultants and things like that, is let them book their own times. So say, "Hey, you know, a lot of people are interested in such and such programme, but really they just want to get a breakdown of sort of how it might work for them given their own goals and what their own business is, and I know that everybody's got a hectic schedule and it's really tough to be able to, you know, clunk some time, you know, that I might suggest, but I can tell you we've got some slots open in the next two weeks. Go ahead and find the time." That's a little bit of a lighter call to action there, Barry. A little bit less kind of je ne se qua and kind of intimidation than an application form, but sometimes that will get the guy on the phone, and that's the point, isn't it?

Barry: Yeah, absolutely. That goes two ways. They just want to get on the phone, because the internet, there's tonnes of slimy people out there, and they just want to hear your voice and talk to you and chat with you, and make sure that you're not a jackass. The other thing is as a service provider, you want to be able to screen your customers as well. You might have a coaching programme, but obviously the coaching programme might not be good for everybody.

Dan: [crosstalk 00:32:36]

Barry: Make sure that that application form or that inquiry process actually screens your best people out and not those people who aren't going to be successful in the programme to begin with.

Dan: But there's a lot of ways to frame and slice and dice and re-present the same call to action to tease one of those folks who's sitting on the fence to finally make that leap. By not even necessarily coming up with 20 products or 20 coaching programmes in the examples we had, Barry, we can just present the same things in different lights and be able to eke out a higher percentage of conversion on the front end there.

Barry: Yeah, for sure. Great advice. Great advice. All right, Dan, there were some value bombs there. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I know there's lots of places you can find you on the internet. What's kind of the best place for people to find out more about all these techniques and find out more about what you do?

Dan: For sure, yeah yeah. We are certainly all over the place when it comes to the online marketing and segmentation, but the main website is CLVboost, which I think you already knew, Barry, but CLV stands for customer lifetime value, so CLVboost.com is the website. We didn't get to talk about a decent amount of kind of the higher up strategy, which we have an ebook on the site, or a white paper that was done quite some months ago actually now, about doubling your customer lifetime value with segmentation and automation. That's a little bit more on a tactical, kind of plug and play stuff, so sort of taking what we've talked about today kind of down to earth on a tactical level. People can download that at CLVboost.com, or they can just reach out to me on the site too and just say hi, tell me you heard about me through Barry. That'll be fun as well. CLVboost.com is the place to find me for this nerdy marketing stuff.

Barry: Great, Dan. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your knowledge with the listeners. Tell us a little bit just before you go quickly, a little bit about the TechEmergence side.

Dan: Oh sure. Yeah yeah. TechEmergence is ultimately my grandest passion and really kind of life purpose is in the domain of emerging technology, and particularly where technology crosses over with psychology. TechEmergence is a website where we interview researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors in spaces like brain-machine interface technology, or artificial intelligence, and things along those lines, essentially with the purpose of kind of bringing to the fore a real serious conversation around where these technologies are taking us. In terms of the technological capabilities, but also the ethical issues. That's very high and lofty there, Barry. I know I'm probably nerding some folks out, but ultimately the future of virtual reality and artificial intelligence has some wacky, wild implications, and there are some really cool breakthroughs going on there in particular kind of niche or industry developments, and we really like to bring those to the fore in kind of the technology space.

Barry: Yes, very interesting and thought provoking stuff over there. If you're at all interested in that kind of stuff, I would suggest you check out just techemergence.com, yeah?

Dan: Big time. Big time, yep.

Barry: Cool. Well, thank you very much, Dan. I really appreciate your time, and I think the listeners probably got a whole lot of stuff that they can take away and implement. I appreciate it.

Dan: Great, Barry. Yeah, big time. Thanks for having me here.

Barry: Thanks. All right, I'd like to thank Dan again. All right, I'd like to thank Dan again. That was a really interesting interview. He's a great guy. Really, really smart, and I'd urge all the listeners out there to go and head and check him out over at CLVboost.com. Lots of great strategies you can implement in your business and put to work driving more leads and converting more leads into customers. You could find all the show notes, everything we mentioned in the show, all the links over at theactivemarketer.com/Dan. I'd also like to leave you with a little bit of an announcement. I've also opened up a closed Facebook group called The Automation Academy. Love to see you in there. We're going to talk all things marketing automation. We're going to share tips, tactics, techniques. We'll even be sharing some sequences, all that kind of great stuff. Head over to the show notes, theactivemarketer.com/Dan. You'll find the link to the Facebook group there, and hope to see you inside. So until next week, everybody, I want you to go out there and design, automate, and scale your business to the next level. See ya.

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.com.

Barry Moore

Entrepreneur, aviator and former eCommerce and technology executive, Barry Moore is the founder of TheActiveMarketer.com. When he isn't geeking out about how sales and marketing automation can help your business, you can find him in the surf or in an airplane.

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