Episode #62 – Dan Faggella on Becoming an Email Marketing Powerhouse

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John:Okay. It’s John McIntyre, The Autoresponder Guy. It’s time for episode 62 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. Now, this is the podcast where you’ll discover step by step tactics and strategies that one listener used to make over $85,000 in just 5 months. That’s Terry Dunlap. That’s from an episode from about 2 months ago and I highly recommend you checking it out. He’s got all his stuff from this podcast, so keep listening, stay listening. Okay? Today, I’ll be talking to Dan Fagella. Dan is a friend of mine. I met him through a friend of a friend as you do and Dan is just a boss. Okay? 

Two years ago, we were chatting on a membership community that we’re both a member of and he was just getting started. He was into wrestling and he was just getting his business going and he’s trying to get the hang of the marketing stuff and sales funnels and emails, and all that stuff. In those 2 years, he has gone to tow the entire marketplace. He has completely blitz it. He’s gone from nothing to doing 30 to 40 thousand dollars a month. The engine of this business of his is email marketing and that’s why I brought him on the show today because I want to talk to him about what he’s doing with his emails. Okay?

Traffic, we’re not getting to in this one, but it’s the email stuff and that’s why you’re here. If you got traffic, if you got a product or service, this is going to be really valuable and this is going to be for business to business guys. This is for you if you’re just a product guy. It’s for anyone trying to use email. Okay? There’s 2 things here. You get the front end sequences. Basically Dan’s front end priorities, it’s about a $50 a month program and he’s got some email that funnels through towards those things. It’s a very interesting strategy and not one that I’ve heard of before. Then, you have the back end. Once someone buys that, what happens next? How do they continue making money off them? He’s got some great ideas there. 

We’re basically going to lay out, Dan is going to lay out his strategy blow by blow. If you wanted to, you could take the entire model. The entire model that Dan is using to make 30 to 40 thousand dollars a month. Take that, roll it out in your own business. It may sound complicated, but towards the end of this interview, the end of this episode, I asked Dan, “How do you do all these without getting overwhelmed?” Because it will sound overwhelming. Okay? That’s just a warning, but like I said, I asked Dan how does he do it without feeling overwhelmed and he’s got a very simple solution that really made me laugh when he told me. Stick around for that. 

To get the show notes for this episode of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, go to themcmethod.com/62, for 62. Two things; number 1, McMasters insight of the week. McMasters is my paid community where you can go to learn more about email marketing and get some of the products and join the forum. All that sort of lovely fun stuff when you make money. Anyway, this week’s insight is this: “After reading your article on why e-book suck, I’m wondering if I should change the venue for my product delivery?” This was from McMasters member named Joy. 

Now, Joy is currently selling an e-book and she’s doing quite well with the e-book making regular sales, but she’s wondering, “Maybe …” After reading this article on why e-book sucks, she’s wondering, “Maybe I should change that e-book into a video cause or something like that.” Okay? It’s a great question, right? Now, there’s a couple answers to this and this is really where the insight comes in to it. Okay? Let’s say you’ve got an e-book out there and you’re selling it for $100. Should you change that to video just because e-books are kind of lame and videos are better? 

The answer is probably not. This is what I said to Joy is that, just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it, right? There are a million things. Right now, I have Evernote open, I have probably tens of thousands of items, little tasks, that I could do on my website and my business with people, partnerships, products, so much stuff. I used to stress about it but then I realized that it doesn’t actually matter. Most of that stuff doesn’t matter at all. Within those tens of thousands of different tasks and ideas and business ideas, and just everything, there’s going to be a couple things, 1, 2, 3, maybe 5 or 10 things that are really going to matter. 

If I can identify those leverage points, I can come down with an explosive impact on those points and I can get incredible, incredible results out of all proportion to the time and effort that I have to spend. In Joy’s case, this is like saying, “Yeah. You could take your e-book and make it video cause,” but is it really going to help? Probably not. That’s one of those things that yeah, it’ll keep you busy and maybe you make a few more sales, I don’t really know. It’s not going to make a very big impact.  

To me, a better way to do this, we’re going to go, your e-book’s good, people are buying it at, I think it was $77, great. Okay? That’s proven that’s working. Now, the next step is like, you need to put out a product line. If you got an e-book selling for 77, well, these people would probably buy something for 3 to 500 dollars, but it would be videos instead. You can say, okay, so you got the e-book here and the upsell when they click the Add to Cart button, you should have a little thing that says, “All right, before you go through this, I just wanted to let you know that we have a premium version or a platinum version of this program. Instead of the e-book, you can the full video program. That gives you access to the e-book and 8 video modules with worksheets …” and whatever, you just dress it up, “… and then you’re going to be paying 3 to 500 dollars.” 

If you just put that on there, you’re going to bump your average sale from 77 to, once you even it out, up to 200, 300 dollars because a lot of people prefer videos. Some people prefer books. Okay? This is a great way to make more money and that’s one of those changes. You’ve got to identify and do it, that will make a big difference in the business especially, if you can bump that lifetime customer value, I’ve mentioned this before, and she goes out, Joy goes out and does paid traffic, she should be making 2 times or 3 times as much every time she makes a sale, which makes paid traffic far more worthwhile. Okay? 

The insight here, and it’s not about the e-books or the videos or anything, the insight here is that, in your business in all the things that you have on your to-dos that you’re stressing about like, “I’ve got to listen to John’s podcast. I got to reply to these emails. I’ve got to get this client project done. I’ve got to get this done and that done and this done,” and you’re stressing about it. The thing is, you step back and realize that there’s only a couple of things on that list that actually matters. The rest, you can probably just forget about it, delete, get rid of. Maybe that means this podcast, maybe that means not listening to this podcast. Maybe email marketing isn’t the main issue in your business, and that’s okay. You can come back to it later. 

You’re goal as the business owner, as the entrepreneur is to focus on those small steps, the small tiny little leverage points that if you hit with the hammer they will just bring down the entire wall and you’re going to be fabulously successful and wealthy. Okay? That’s it for this week’s McMasters insight of the week. If you want to get into McMasters and sign up so you can get direct access to me, join the other members and get access to at the McIntyre Method. That’s my video training program, “How to Write an Autoresponder”. It’s 4 modules, 4 weeks and you have a 10-email autoresponder sequences. “How to Write Stories that Sell” via email. You’ve got “Pages That Convert” which will show how to create great landing pages. All that is at themcmethod.com/mcmasters. Now, the only other thing is reviews. If you’re getting a lot out of this show and I’ve heard from a lot of them and they are. People are getting a lot out of it. 

I’d love it if you can, you’d really be doing me a huge favor, if you can jump over to iTunes and search for the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast and follow the prompts, it’s a little bit clunky, and leave me a review. Tell me what you think about the show. You’ll really make my day. The reviews make a lot of these stuff worthwhile. When you hear about how it’s helping people, how it’s changing their business, and ultimately changing their lives. I’d love it if you could do that for me. That’s enough of that. Let’s get in to this interview today. It’s going to be a great one, so you want to have a pen and paper because this is a doozy. Okay? Get ready, let’s go talk to Dan Fagella. 

It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Dan Fagella. Now, I was introduced to Dan via a friend of mine, a guy who I used to live with here in Thailand and was really interested to, you know, wanted to chat with Dan, talk about his marketing and actually bring him in the podcast because he’s doing some fascinating stuff with not just email marketing, but that’s one of the core components of the business, but with the whole sales funnel process and page traffic stuff, and really bringing it together and doing a great business in a tiny, tiny market. Which, I should tell you, it’s about choking someone. We’ll get into that in a few minutes. 

The reason I brought him today is we’re going to talk about some of the email marketing stuff he’s doing because he’s using emails to get people into a continuity program and then doing some really ninja stuff on the back end that I’m really curious to dig in to. I haven’t talked too much about this on the podcast, so this is getting a bit more advanced. This is more for our people with established businesses and who want to step things up and add some really cleanups. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Dan, how are you doing, man?

Dan:Doing great John, good to be here, brother.

John:Man, really good to have you on the show. 

Dan:Yeah. 

John:Before we get in to the nitty-gritty of this email stuff, give … I mean, I know a little bit about you. I’ve tried to give the listener a bit of a background, but you’ll be much better for this. Give the listener basically your story, man. Who’s Dan? What does he do?

Dan:Yeah. Sure. Yes. You know me through [Mr. Ed Lowe 00:09:21], of course. My name is Dan Fagella. I’m a martial arts guy originally, so a lot of people have seen me in the UFC or mixed martial arts. Really, that was my first passion. I started basically a fight club in the back of a carpet store when I was in undergrad in college just because fighting is more fun than anything else, right? It’s the most fun thing to do. I ended up getting into University of Pennsylvania for graduate school and skill development and for masters. I realized, in order to pay for the Ivy Leagues, I was going to have to make some money. I turned that fight house into a martial arts gym which I later sold when I moved to Boston, but before I moved to Boston, I decided to … 

I mean, I moved to Boston essentially to do consulting and eventually get into investing which is where we’ll hopefully be once we’ve flipped some business stuff. Before I moved to Boston, I said, “I’m going to need a business that can come with me.” We turned all these martial arts techniques in a course of about 12 months, all these stuff that we’re teaching in the gym on a day to day basis in a town of only about 8,000 people, we turned into a list of about 20,000 people and ended up 30 something thousand dollar a month business teaching martial arts online in about 12, 14 months, something like that. That was my transition online and now, we run a consultancy where we do database marketing and email marketing strategy and implementation for startup companies and internet marketing folks and whatever else. That’s a little bit of my funky trajectory into this business world. 

John:As we’re saying before the call man, I mean, we’re both on a site, on a membership site called the DC or the Dynamite Circle, and I remember we talked about [inaudible 00:11:06] member, but we messaged back and forth a little while back, 1 or 2 years ago …

Dan:Yeah.

John:… and you said you’re just getting started, but now, you just blitz this entire thing man, it’s been fantastic to see.

Dan:Yeah. I mean, I always think there’s a lot more room to grow. I’m ultimately not about it for the internet marketing game, I’m about cashing out in this thing and investing in augmented reality companies and scaling a consultancy, doing go-public related things, more so than lifestyle business type thing. I have much larger aims, but I had to learn to work with what we had and the internet marketing was one of the paths. Luckily, it picked up, right? I had to get really good at email marketing because when you’re in a town of 8,000 people, John, as you can imagine, you run out of human leads actually very quickly.

John:Yup.

Dan:When you can run out of human, that’s really dangerous, so we need to make sure that all of our leads were maximally transferred to appointments and that anybody who didn’t join up would be rotated with various offers and then we could really keep the hook sunk in anybody that came in the door. Now, when I scaled that to an online niche, not just an 8,000-person local area, that ended up being, I think, the key to our success. Now, it’s really those neurotic small town habits that I had to learn and get really nerdy about and spend a lot of money on other consultants to learn how to really master that have now helped make the transfer. Yeah, it’s been a fun jump.

John:Cool man. Let’s dive in here. 

Dan:Yeah.

John:Let’s start with some of this email marketing on the front end. You talked about you’ve got some great email orders from the front that are taking your leads and getting them to sign up to your continuity programs paying $37, $57 a month.

Dan:Yeah.

John:That’s the front end, I mean, doing a continuity sale, that’s quite high for a lot of people. A lot of people talk about it being one of the hardest sales you can make because who wants to pay 50 bucks every single month, month after month after month with no end in sight. It’s a hard sale. How are you doing it, man?

Dan:It is. Yeah. There’s a lot of ways we can slice it and to be honest, when it started, it really wasn’t all that sophisticated. I’m actually spending, again, I’m really big on investing in myself. I probably spent about, not counting grad school because that would just be an entirely different story and not counting MIT where I’m now taking classes at the Sloan Business School, but probably about 80, a little bit more than 80 grand in the last 24 months. I’m working with some pretty high level continuity guys now in terms of refining the process that’s in place. 

I’ll give you the basic rundown John. Essentially, first things first, if you want to get anybody to pay for anything, never mind pay for anything every month, you better have some halfway decent positioning and a reason for them to buy your stuff. You know this is a marketing guy and you’re a copywriting guy and you already understand, and many of your readers will as well, but I’ll give you the example that we’ve taken. Basically, I’m a small guy. I walk around about 128 pounds or so and I did a lot of jiu-jitsu tournaments against guys who are much bigger than me and a lot of my earlier YouTube videos that caught on were just random tournament clips of me fighting some guy twice my size or something and twisting his leg or getting a choke or something cool like that.  

The position that we took was really the art and science of beating a bigger and stronger opponent. If you’re a smaller person, a weaker person, how you could still win in jiu-jitsu and the good news is, there’s a lot of people that that message resonates with even if they don’t weigh 128 pounds, and that is really where we decided to hone in. John, what I did to build the continuity program was, I not only really … Number 1, I mean, I ended up getting a masters in an Ivy League and skill development, so I really studied that process and how to get good fast, how to improve specific skills. 

I needed to use that on myself because I’m in a town of 8,000 people for crying out loud, but convey that on the membership site. It’s just a little bit of a selling point, but more importantly, I analyzed it’s on a very specific lightweight matches. I interviewed all the best world champions of the lighter weights or at least many of them, a vast, vast number of them, top level black belts who are small guys. I really extracted their secrets for goal setting for tactics, for strategy, for skill development, whatever it was. The positioning was, this is really the place to get the full blown analysis, tapping into world champions and understanding the art and science of skill development at a very highly level for beating bigger, stronger opponents. Positioning was the only reason that we’re able to really get the credit cards out on a consistent basis, in my opinion. That’s when you even allowed people to consider buying from us rather than just watching YouTube videos.

John:I love what’s going on here and that it’s not about the copy, it’s not about the orders [inaudible 00:16:05], it’s not about any of the technical or the tactical stuff that’s going on here, it starts with the strategy of basically, as Gary Albert says, going in and finding a starting crowd …

Dan:That’s it.

John:… and giving them what they want. You’ve got that starting crowd right there.

Dan:Yeah. The cool thing is, John, it seems like a niche within a niche, but it’s actually really not. I think it was great and I’m not going to give myself credit because I didn’t think it through this far, but looking at it retrospectively, it was good because the people who buy in this niche now, granted now we’re in a bunch of other niches, so we’re working with everything from software companies to people that sell 1-800 numbers to thousands of business, to change of physical therapy clinics, but in the martial arts niche, this whole thing of beating bigger, stronger people, the buyers in that niche are all 40 something year old guys. They’re people with disposable income. 

We’re not selling to 22 year old kids; A) they know how to illegally download things and they could probably find my stuff and download it without paying for it, B) they don’t have a disposable income and if they did, they’d probably spend it on beer or girls, or something like that, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s 40 something year old dudes. Forty something year old dudes are very rarely … They’re very rarely the most athletic strongest guys in the gym. They do feel like they have a little bit of a disadvantage to these 22-year old guys, straight out of college with 4 years of rugby under their belt who are just like mopping the floor with them because they’re older and they work a desk job. 

It’s the desk job guys that ultimately are the buyers. It seems like a niche, but really, anybody with a credit card and an entire space fits that category. That positioning, oddly enough, it seems like a, “This is for me,” right? Dan Kennedy, Gary Albert, if they read it, it’s like, “This is for me.” Ultimately, anybody that’s really a buyer who isn’t like a natural athlete that doesn’t have disposable income anyway, they resonate with my messaging as the underdog dude, the smaller guy against bigger, more athletic beasts and anybody who’s a buyer already feels that way. That positioning is the starting crowd that we talked about, John. 

The second aspect of really selling these membership sites and this is … People replicate it in a million other places since and we have a lot of variations of it, but it is this kind of splintered front end programs that drives toward the same continuity program. Get this, if you’re watching my YouTube videos about let’s say, leg locks and you opt in … Underneath that YouTube video is a link where you can opt in for a video about, now you guess John, what do you think the video is about? 

John:Leg locks. 

Dan:Yeah man. It’s about leg locks for crying out loud. If you just watch a YouTube video about leg locks, I’m probably going to get you to opt in for leg locks if you really liked it, so we’ll have them opt in. Then, once they opt in, they’re going to get consistent messaging about, you guessed it, and then we’re going to present the membership program about, you guessed it. A lot of the other aspect of it is what we call contextual parsing. Contextual parsing, for me, and there’s a bunch of ways that we could do this, but contextual parsing is based on where you come from, based on where you found out about me, where you gave me your information, I already know blank about you. 

One of things, if you came in from one of my YouTube leg lock videos, I know you like watching leg locks, so I’m going to get you to opt in for a free course about that and then I’m going to see you on that. All I know is your email address, but I also know your lead source and that it’s from a leg lock video, so you are a consumer of leg lock videos which means your likelihood of potentially buying that is way higher than a guy who I don’t know him from Adam. We use contextual parsing to determine our offers and to drive towards a core continuity program. 

I might have 7 different e-books, John, that all came off a couple different … Like, the initial front end emails are quite different and then it’ll go into … They’ll all merge into this core main funnel that’ll all push this core continuity program. You might read an article about guard passing, you opt in for an e-book about guard passing and now all of a sudden, we talk about guard passing for bigger and stronger people and then bam, we’re right on the train for the continuity program for beating bigger, stronger opponents. You opt in for escaping against bigger, stronger opponents, you have a couple of emails about that and then bonabing, you’re right on the train for the same continuity program.  

We splinter the front end to basically to appeal to any blog post, any video, anything people find. There’s something very specific for them, we merge that benefit into the core benefit of beating bigger, stronger opponents and then we sell it to that core membership site. You don’t have to type in beat bigger guys in grappling to find me, you type in anything in jiu-jitsu, I got 700 blog post out there. I’m going to find you and as soon as you opt in, we’re going to convert that desire into something that relates to a program that we offer and we’re going to give away some great free stuff and present our offers. That’s how we build the list we have and that’s been a really big key for getting as many people as we have into membership programs. 

John:Interesting. Okay. What I’m seeing here is, you’ve got several different funnels for basically various different pain points in that module or the main things we’ll be paying attention to. 

Dan:Yes.

John:Then, you’ve got several emails. Someone signs up, gets a specific e-book on that typically where there’s leg locks or guard passing or anything like that, then they get a few emails. How many emails are they getting on that specific topic?

Dan:Yeah. Right now, for guard passing for example, I think you get 2 to 3 of them. There’s couple other … There’s like throws, like takedowns. I think have one course on takedowns, it’s like really limited. I’m not a takedown guy, but here’s the thing man, people are Googling takedowns for crying out loud, so I’m not going to deny them of that kind of an e-book and that kind of a download. They’ll get 2 or 3 emails about that, but then they go on to the same train tracks as everybody else with a nice leg … We ease them into it like, “Hey …” like we start talking about how takedowns relate to beating bigger guys. 

We show some competition videos that relate to that and then we drop them into the right place on the sequence that’s going to ultimately going to get them towards beating bigger, stronger opponents. Yeah, it’s essentially, it’s called like a splintered front end. We’re selling the same thing and often times, it’s with a similar sequence, but we’re splintering the front end widget, the freebee, and we’re splinting a couple front end messagings in order to indoctrinate and to educate, and to give people some great content about exactly what they care about, what they want to learn. 

John:Okay. Let’s say after that, I go through the splintered sequence and they get dropped under the main sequence, what happens there? Are you sending them daily emails or do you have to …

Dan:Yeah.

John:… like 5 to 10 email sequence? What happens there? I’m really interested.

Dan:Yeah, man. They essentially end up on more like a 36-email sequence and for the most part, it’s like every day or every other day. We do go pretty hard in this niche. To be honest, I haven’t even tested emailing them every 3 days, I’ve just decided to email them every day. People that aren’t into it obviously will jump off the boat pretty quickly. The people that are, and we have over 20,000 people that are, so if it really sucked super hard, I imagine we wouldn’t be making any money and nobody would be paying attention to our stuff anymore, and we wouldn’t be coming close to a 30,000-person list. None of those things would happen if the content was bad and people didn’t like it.  

We email them on daily basis for 24, 36 days. Essentially in that sequence, John, we go through what I refer to as a roller coaster of offer intensity. Let me take a step back and talk about what I’m talking about. Basically, any autoresponder sequence … Now, we could get more complex than this, but this isn’t like an 8-hour podcast, so we’ll go pretty simple. Any autoresponder sequence basically, if you’re going to have to make it only 3 components, we could make it 30. If you’re going to make it 3, we’ll really talk about education, testimonials, and calls to action, basically. Basically. Education, testimonials, calls to action.  

If you have a good mix like if you think about it s like vegetables, starches and proteins in your diet, you want a decent mix in your emails as well. What we do initially is we go with a lot of great education and honestly, when I wrote a lot of these sequences, we didn’t even have testimonials. Now, I have pages and pages and pages and pages of them, but what we have realized since is we didn’t have them, although we do integrate a decent number of them. We educate them and we include testimonials. We educate, we include relevant testimonials, and then we’ll come to a head maybe around email 5 or 6, like 5,6,7,8 where we’re really presenting one offer rather strongly.  

We’re presenting let’s say a free DVD that we’re going to mail to their house just for the price of shipping, plus a 14-day free trial of a membership program and a whole bunch of other cool video bonuses that we know they’re going to like. We’ll present all those things for … Four days is really strong, but if people don’t get it on it, what most people do, John, is they’ll be like, “Gosh. We missed that. Goddammit.” Then, that autoresponder sequence will end and then they’ll just wait for another lead. Instead of doing that, what we do is we go back to the roller coaster, so intensity of the offer drops, but we still keep up a bunch of great education and testimonial content to keep people engaged, keep people believing, to teach them awesome stuff, and to continue to fill their inbox with things that are relevant to what they came to us for. 

Then, maybe 12, 13, 14, 15, we come up to a head again and this is a different offer. This is a different bunch of downloadable bonuses and maybe it’s the same membership program, but there’s a bunch of different free e-books and maybe a drilling guide that comes along with it. It’s a totally different looking sales page. It’s a different offer. It’s a different call to action. Then, if they don’t buy from that, John, as you can imagine, we drop them back into the sequence and I probably don’t have to tell you what happens after that. We like to do at least 3 rolls of the roller coaster before they get off the train. If they buy from any of those roller coasters, they then get kicked into a tier 2 sequence where we aim to present them with the program that has a higher price point such as 97 or 127 dollars.  

Essentially, when they get on to the main track, it’s not a … We don’t take one swing and then go sit on the bench. We give them a bunch of great stuff and we take a bunch of swings, John, and it’s not swings of the same exact sales page because when you say no to a sales page, I’m not going to throw your eyeballs in that same sales page over and over, I’m going to throw your eyeballs on a different fun, illustrious, different angle, different hook, different color scheme, different headline, different way of presenting the benefits. I’m going to find a way to get that credit card out because that’s a business I’m in. 

Now, that’s where people pay us to do for their businesses, but in our business, in order to eat food, in order to move to Cambridge, in order to potentially sell this thing and invest in augmented reality companies which is what I’m really here to do, we got to get the cards out. In order to get the cards out, we got to try much harder than most people do. I highly recommend that kind of roller coaster, more persistent approach. That’s a huge factor for our success in this niche.

John:I love it Dan. One thing that I think that I really want to mention is I remember speaking to friend of mine here in ChangWai, Thailand. It was a couple of weeks ago, we’re speaking about emails and he told a story about a friend of his, Armand Morin which is a … I haven’t heard of him at that time, but he’s a, I don’t know, an school internet marketer and he’s famous for saying something along the lines of, “You stop sending them emails when they stop opening them.”

Dan:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John:Most people will write a sequence and it’s usually 5 emails or 10 emails. That’s what people pass to [inaudible 00:28:19], say a 10-email sequence, but really in an ideal world, you never stop sending them emails until you got 0% open rate. Until no one cares, that’s when you stop sending emails, but until you hit that point, those emails should keep going out.

Dan:Yeah, man. I mean, there’s no reason for them not to. There’s no reason for them not to. Then, that takes us into the database marketing side of things when the autoresponders do end, how do we still stay relevant, how do we still get the cards out. Yeah, I mean, you’re completely right. I mean, we all know the stories, right? We all know the stats. The average sale, you have to ask for the sale X number of times. There’s all these statistics. The studies at IBM and the top 20% that produce 80% of the sales, what they really do is they just call the guy 50% instead of calling them 3 times and saying he’s not interested. Boeing, all these big companies, they’ve done crunch numbers on their sales people. Just convert those same things to email. 

It’s not necessarily about being Captain Hard Core where it’s just like, “Yeah, the more pitches you hit on …” To some extent, you do have to nut up and actually present an offer, but in another sense, if you can stay relevant, if you can deliver things they care about and if they say no to one thing, if you can find something else that’s fun, that’s appealing, that is something that they’d actually want, you’re doing a better job for you and for them and ultimately, I think that’s why we’re compensated for what we do. 

We have a wide array of programs, a wide array of offerings, way more written articles, way more interviews than anybody else, so we have content for days. If people are into BJJ, they can learn from us forever. I got dozens of world champions that I’ve interviewed and magazines that we’ve written articles about this stuff and it goes on forever. We’re delivering what people want, but just like you said, I mean, keep it coming, keep it coming because if they’re opening them, there’s a chance you’re going to get that card out.

John:That’s exactly right. All right. Let’s talk about this back end then. They’ve been through the front end.

Dan:Yeah.

John:They’ve been through that splintered sequence. They been through the main one. They’ve bought. Somewhere along that roller coaster, they’ve signed up and they’re in the program. What next?

Dan:Yeah. Yeah. Eventually, the autoresponders do end. When the autoresponders end, inside of Infusionsoft, we tag them with the broadcast tag. Now, the broadcast tag means this person’s no longer receiving autoresponder messages and so we can now send them rotating newslettery type messaging. Now, by newslettery type messaging, I mean, this is … When the autoresponder ends, these are the messages that we’ll send out on a weekly basis that we’ll schedule out. Basically, any given week … Now, this is going to be different niche by niche, but our space actually is pretty accepting of frequent emails. If you sell like, I don’t know, if you sell face cream, you really can’t probably make face cream exciting every day. I mean, maybe there’s a way, right? Like there’s probably …

John:There’s got to be a way, man. 

Dan:… like beauty tips and whatever, but it’s a little bit more creative. You’d have to make it something other than the cream itself, you understand what I mean? 

John:Of course.

Dan:You’d have to find related stories and beauty tips and other stuff. For me actually, John, I think we’re fortunate in this niche because it’s easy, because if you’re interested in BJJ videos, I can literally send you BJJ videos everyday and you’ll like it. If you’re interested in face cream, I can’t send you like pure … It can’t be about the product over and over and over, it has to be about related stuff, but all my related stuff is really the same as my paid stuff. People are interested in just consuming pretty much exactly what they’re ultimately going to pay for. It’s not like tips for sports that we sort of hint at jiu-jitsu, we’re straight sending freaking jiu-jitsu videos every day, man. 

We rotate what we do as in any given week … Now, in any given month … Now, everybody will do this differently and I’m going to be talking, I’m spending a relatively , for the fact that’s it’s only going to be 120 minutes, a borderline exorbitant amount of money to talk to a very smart guy about this and potentially change up some of our database marketing tenants, but right now, it’s working rather well and I happen to think we’re doing significantly better than anybody else certainly in this niche is, any given month, we create a 3 to 4 email sequence just for the people that have spent a hundred dollars or more in the last 60 days. We also create a unique 3 or 4 email sequence just for the people that have never bought.  

We speak to those groups explicitly and we call them out for their condition, and we address them for that condition, and we aim to move them to the next level. People that have a hundred bucks or more, we recognize that they’re investing in their development as jiu-jitsu athletes. We talk about that explicitly. We talk about why we recognize them that’s why they’re getting this special offer. The people that have never bought, we’ll talk about how we know they haven’t bought and haven’t gotten a lot of emails, and how we’re going to have this crazy guarantee on why we’re giving away this stuff this month, “Here’s a bunch of testimonials from people that finally got in to one of our programs that really changed their game,” something like that.  

Every month, we’ll create offers like that. On a weekly basis, I’ll create as many as 7, 8, 9 individual messages that’ll go out to … Usually, about 2 of them will go to everybody, so 2 of them will be just sent to the list, but I will normally break the list up so it won’t be sent to everybody. I’ll send it per lead source or I’ll send it to buyers and then non-buyers. I’ll still break things up because I like to address people more individually than “blast emails”. To give you an example of a niche list, John, I sent out an affiliate offer for an injury prevention product to all the people that have selected injury prevention as an area of interest. 

I also sent out a blog post that I’m looking to really build its cloud online, its social buzz online and get it to rank online. I sent it to all my guys who are over 40, makes sense, right? Then, I’m also going to have a higher ticket offer that we’re going to send out this week, which is going to be a 3-email sequence all about guard passing and it’s going to be a hundred dollar offer. It’s going to be sent to people that have spent at least a hundred dollars in the last 60 days. We’re going to address them specifically. 

In any given week, we pick subsegs based on interest, lead source, activity, purchasing history and things like that, and we’ll present an array of offers, content, education, testimonials to those relevant groups to the tune of 1.2 emails going out per day to these various … rotating in these various subsegs in order to consistently give people messages, John, that say, “This is for me. This is for me. This is for me.” If you’re on my list, you will never stop getting messages that address you by age, by interest, by what you’ve bought, by what lead source you came in. You will get hit with things that make you feel like, “This is for me,” forever until you stop opening my emails. 

John:The one thing that I’m thinking like … because I don’t have anything this advance set up in my member’s list at the moment, and I’m thinking maybe the listener is going to be in a similar situation and they’re going to be thinking, “This sounds great. I’m sold. Sign me up. I know how to do it. I want to get right there and do this yesterday.” However, it seems, the impression of it is that it seems like a complete nightmare to manage because there’s about a billion things flying in a million directions at once.

Dan:Yeah.

John:Email’s going to this person and that person in that segment, in this segment, and it’s … How do you even manage something like this, man?

Dan:It’s actually kind of easy. I have a weekly checklist which is, “Hit 3 subsegs. Rotate 2 of your own offers and 1 affiliate offer.” The reason I send out affiliate offers is not because I need affiliate money. I have enough of my own programs, but it’s essentially to maintain good relationships with people that send those traffic by selling a bunch of their stuff. There’s very few ways to somebody’s heart that’s quicker than selling a bunch of their stuff on the internet. Two of our own subsegs, they’re broken up into offer education sequences, one JV offer that’s broken up to offer education sequences, 2 emails that will go to the whole list so that we don’t miss anybody even if for some reason we don’t hit their subseg for a while, 2 emails that go out to the whole list. That’s on a weekly level. 

For the emails that go out to the whole list, I also have get response. I use get response to send out those “hit everybody” emails. In order to make sure delivery is high and we can get to everybody, we’ll send out through get response often times. Then, on a monthly, I have a couple of things on a monthly. I have hit all the non-buyers with a specific non-buyer offer. Make sure we hit all the buyers in a certain level and a certain buyer offer, and otherwise, just keep up the weekly regimen, “Okay, 2 emails to go to everybody. What offer do I want to test? What social thing do I want to share?” Whatever the case may be and then 1 of the 2 subsegs and products, and then the affiliate offer and product that I want to pitch, and then I construct my emails for the week. 

I generally will write them on Sunday. I’ll schedule them out and then we’ll count the money on Monday morning, the next week or whatever. We just repeat that process and make sure we rotate through all the subsegs. Does it think a little bit to write the emails on Sunday? Sure does, but at the end of the day, even if I didn’t get anymore leads, the fact that we could cruise well above 20 grand a month is a cool thing in a niche that’s pretty much for idiots. No, really, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu niche is not like a business niche. I mean, I got into this because I had a bunch of trophies hanging on a wall from choking a bunch of guys and it’s easier to sell expertise.

Because I was doing jiu-jitsu all day in a martial arts gym that I was going to sell, we could film that and we could turn that into product. It wasn’t like, this wasn’t my billionaire niche, right? It’s a silly nominal domain, but the fact that you can hyper-monetize an existing list by a simple rotation schedule like that, and again, all I do is write it down one day, “All right, 2 of our own subsegs and our own offers, 1 affiliate offer, 2 blast that will go to everybody, and then here’s 2 things we’ll do every month. Okay, see you later. Let’s just keep running this algorithm.” That’s essentially how we monetized the list. In terms of managing it, it really isn’t rocket science. 

John:I don’t know what to say, man. You blow me away here. This is just simple, straightforward, but it’s bad ass.

Dan:Yeah. We’re going for it, man. We’re trying. I really think, I mean, I’m a believer in this stuff, John. Anytime I see a business where it’s like there’s an existing list that we have all these data points, but it’s like there’s this weekly or monthly blasé email that just goes out to everybody. I mean, I think anybody that understands direct response gets that this makes sense and it’s just a matter of like, “Oh, if we just set a regimen and we run and gun and put our heads down for a month, we can count the money at the end of the month and see if it was worth our time.” Nine out of ten times, unless you’re really starting off with the wrong angle and you have no idea what your customer wants and frankly you’re a bad marketer, this will work.

John:Fantastic. Okay, man.

Dan:Yeah.

John:Thanks for breaking down this, man.

Dan:Of course.

John:Right on time here. Before we go, though, the listeners might be a bit curious where they take out some of this jiu-jitsu stuff or I’ve heard you mentioning the [inaudible 00:39:52] stuff, man. Where should people go if they want to learn more about what you’re doing, maybe get in contact?

Dan:For sure. If people want to see our BJJ, I mean, just type in Dan Fagella grappling or something on YouTube. There’s 8 million funky videos and you can see what we’re doing for lead gen and you’ll find 700 something blog post out there in the world or wherever else. For the folks who are interested in database marketing and email marketing, we’re a team based now in Boston, so we’re working with a lot of very sharp companies up here essentially implementing these systems into e-Com, into service-based businesses, into even app companies that need engagement because a lot of the tenants and principles are the same. 

The website it, CLVboost. You know, John, customer lifetime value, very big metric, right? We’re all about lifting that metric. In CLVboost.com, we have a really basic breakdown on white paper of a couple plug and play strategies in both automation and in the database marketing side. If people just want something to chew on and give a shot for their own business or they want to give a shout out and yack it up with me, that’s the place to go; CLVboost.com. Yeah, that’s about it for me, brother.

John:Fantastic, man. I’ll have links to those at the show notes at themcmethod.com. Thanks for coming on, man.

Dan:Thanks John, appreciate it.