Episode #80 – Daniel Levis on Crafting Compelling Stories That Make Email Marketing Work (attract eyeballs and convert like a genius)

by John McIntyre

Daniel Levis is an email marketing legend absolutely brimming with must-have marketing insights.

What makes him such a legend?

Sales success, check.

Copywriting chops, check.

List building skills, check.

Product Creation, check.

And the list goes on and on…

Daniel’s been writing lead generation letters, newsletters and working his direct marketing tactics since the 90’s.

Sales in print IS copywriting,

..so the transition from sales to copywriting and then email marketing was natural for Daniel

And that’s why he’s on The Email Marketing Podcast today.

Daniel lifts the hood on tried and true email marketing strategies.

Use these tips to engage your customer’s and convert $$$.

The killer info provided in this interview is enough alone to transform your marketing campaigns,

..into GOLD.

He’s a master story craftsman,

He knows empathy,

..and he enables you to know it too.

It’s not rocket science,

It’s just knowing what to do,

And then doing it.

Let Daniel Levis tell you how he creates such amazingly successful emails.

Plus much, much more…

 

In this episode, you’ll discover:

  • the 5-step process Daniel uses in every email to engage readers everytime starting at the subject line down to the CTA
  • that each time you sell to someone this certain way… you’re shooting yourself in the foot (find out exactly how to avoid this situation)
  • the bulletproof method to extract a hook and write ridiculously precise must-open subject lines
  • how casual curiosity in email subject lines only works for superstars (learn how to get to that next level of curiosityand close sales)
  • the cherry picking technique to succeed and make more money as a copywriter (find these type of clients and make your life easier)
  • how to transplant your reader from the here and now to a far far away imaginary world in every email (this should be your goal behind each and every email you write)
  • how to find attention absorbing hooks in your life, your clients’ or in anything else around you (find these hooks and turn them into a gripping story)
  • a positive acceptance technique that makes for killer landing pages

Email Marketing Podcast Episode 1

Mentioned:

Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO

 

Raw transcript:

Download PDF transcript here.

John McIntyre: Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder guy. It’s time for episode 80. That’s  a lot of podcasts – of The McMethod e-mail marketing podcast, where you’ll discover how to make more money with your list, how to crank up the value of your leads way up, and make bank with them. Today, I’ll be talking to Daniel Levis. Now, Daniel is a very interesting guy. He is very successful at copywriting, especially e-mail copywriting. He’s known for using incredible sales stories to make sales that boost conversions to just blow the records out of the water. So I thought I’d get him on the show, chat to him about e-mail, find out exactly how he uses these stories to create these incredible sales. This is a bit different to Andre Chaperon, it’s different to the Ben Settle stuff, it’s different to what I do. He’s got his own spin on things and I think he’s amazing at it. So, yeah, how to use Email Alchemy. Okay. Stories, influences. He’s got another program called The Effortless Influence. So this guy’s been in the game for a while, he has tons of insights to share, so get ready for that.

To get the show notes for this episode of the e-mail marketing podcast, go to themcmethod.com/80 for 80. We’re going to have to do a celebration when we get to a hundred episodes there.

Anyway, one more thing, before we get into the interview, I’ve got a McMaster’s Insight of the week. McMaster’s is a private community that I have. Someone mentioned the Adrius. Mentioned GKIC, which is Dan Kennedy’s recurring or continuity program, as far as I know. I’m not too familiar with it, but he mentioned that in the community, in the forum, inside the McMaster’s forum, that they’re a great model to look at when you’re brainstorming how to do your recurring billing, how to do your continuity programs. Maybe you’re doing a forum, newsletters, however you’re trying to do it, go and study something like GKIC, so Dan Kennedy’s program. You can study McMasters, you can study this. But anyway, that’s that. If you’re thinking about doing the recurring thing, the insight today is that go and look at GKIC, check out how they do it with the newsletters, and you get a good idea about what you can do or some other ideas, like you can try out Ben Settle’s e-mail players, he does a physical print newsletter, which you can sign up to. I think, last time I checked, it was $97 a month, and you get a newsletter once a month. My way of doing it is, I have McMasters, which is you sign up and you pay, there’s a few different options, but let’s say it’s monthly, and you pay every month and you can cancel any time. So that’s the way I do it with the forum and some training products in there. So there are few different models, a few different ideas, and that’s how you really build in that recurring revenue into your business. McMasters is  a private community, if you want to learn more about it, just go to themcmethod.com and in the top menu bar, you should see a link saying “Members.” Click that, and you get all the information there, including how to sign up. That’s that, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Daniel Levis.

Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Daniel Levis. Now, Daniel, I actually met Daniel, how I met, was it last week or something, at the Titans of Direct Response. Now, Daniel is a direct-response consultant, he’s a copywriter, and he’s got some interesting products out there. One of them is called Effortless Influence and another one, which we’re going to talk about today, is Email Alchemy, which, I don’t know too much about it yet, so that’s why I put Daniel on here to talk about it, because it’s got sort of an interesting take on should you use teaser copy or do you want to use longer e-mails, do open rates matter, all sorts of different stuff, so I’m really excited. You should be excited, too. So, before we get into that, though, Daniel, how are you going today?

Daniel Levis:  I’m awesome. How are you doing, John?

John McIntyre: I’m doing good, I’m a little bit tired, a little bit jetlagged, so my mind’s, you know, I told you, I got back from Thailand. So I got back from the US to Thailand, about 12, 24 hours here? So right now, it’s 8pm here, but it’s actually 9am in New York. So my head’s a little bit messy right now. But anyway, it was a nice [inaudible 00:03:40]. So before we get into the content  and Email Alchemy, can you give the listeners, a little bit of background on who you are and what you do?

Daniel Levis:  Okay, I’ll give you the Coles Notes version. Basically, I’ve been a professional copywriter since 2004 and before that, I was a salesman, basically. I got into copywriting out of necessity. I used to use telephone to generate appointments to sell my stuff, and that’s, it kind of stopped working, became much less effective in the 90’s when voice mail came on the scene. I must sound like a total dinosaur, talking about the 90’s, holy smokes.

So, I started writing lead generation letters, letters to get people interested, pick up the phone, request some type of a white paper which I would also write. I also consider that to be copy. I started writing monthly newsletters for my clients and just became much more involved with the written word versus the spoken word, but I don’t really see a lot of difference. I mean, certainly, there are differences, and you know, face to face selling, you’re right there with the client, you’re getting immediate feedback, you’ve got to think a lot faster, but apart from that, sales copies, salesmanship in print.

So that was my introduction to the written word and selling of the written word, and then I went full time as a copywriter on my own in 2004. And since then, I’ve written all kinds of pretty high-level stuff, a lot of megalogue-type stuff that goes out in the mail for financial newsletters. I worked closely with Clayton Makepeace for several years, worked with, I’m going to say like, six, seven, eight different financial publishers, people like Weiss research, and Stealth Stocks Online, and Hidden Values Alert, and the Street Authority. Pretty well known names in finance. But I really got interested in e-mail marketing because part of the process of getting clients, in my philosophy for getting clients as a copywriter is that you should have your own publication. And that’s, by far, the best way to make a name for yourself. It’s by far the best way to get clients, because when you position yourself as a guru, even from day 1, and this is what I did, you just get a lot higher-paying clients. You get people that are more serious and you don’t have to put yourself at a sort of psychological disadvantage where you’re out there trying to get clients, because clients find you. They read your blog, they read your newsletter, they see other people promoting you, or even they see people, maybe you’re promoting somebody else, but part of their mojo rubs off on you.

So that was kind of my start, and then this whole Email Alchemy came up because in the process of building my list, and making money building that list, was that you have to have a way to monetize your efforts if you’re building a list. So I did a lot of experimenting and a lot of, I mean, I must have sent a gazillion e-mails out to my list over the last 10 years, so I got a kind of feel of what’s working, what isn’t working, I would develop these products that would help me to monetize the building of the list, and I just noticed that what I was doing with those e-mails, my experience was kind of like counter-intuitive and the opposite of what most people do, and I found that, yeah, I could send a short e-mail, you mentioned teaser e-mails versus longer copy e-mails, I could send a short sort of teaser e-mail about something. And you know, back in the good old days, it doesn’t really matter what you send out, you send an e-mail out and you made money. That was just, you know, e-mail was a new thing, the web was new, and it was just a lot easier back then. But what I ‘ve discovered is that, rather than sending out these short teaser e-mails and getting a lot of traffic to a webpage, that kind of stopped working to a large extent, and what I started doing was, I would take the lion’s share of the persuasion, and stick it in the e-mail.

So I developed this process where, the 5-step sort of process that I wanted to put people through or that I wanted to execute with every e-mail, and that is, I would have a subject line that typically was not, I mean, the subject line has to have benefit, it has to have curiosity. If you want to be really successful, I believe, at selling. You can put a subject like, “Hey…” or just put the person’s name in the subject line. And you get a lot of people opening your e-mails.

But the problem with that, unless you’re Barack Obama, or Frank Curran, you’re going to have a lot of casual curiosity, right? People will open your e-mails to see why you put their name in the subject line, or why did you put “Hey…” in the subject line, but that doesn’t get you anywhere. All it does is  it gets your e-mail opened, right? And again, if you put like a short teaser message in the e-mail, trying to get them to go to your blog or to your video or your sales page or your launch series, or whatever it is, yeah, you’re going to get lots of people clicking through there, too, but what I’ve discovered is that, again, it’s casual curiosity. People are curious about what’s going on there. But if you really want to sell something, you need to have benefit, and you need to have curiosity in the subject line. That’s a good subject line.

John McIntyre: The interesting part here that I noticed is that, you can use, like, a “Hey,” in the subject line or a name, you know I got a blog post to my site about Obama’s subject lines, and it worked, or like a “Bad news,” subject line. Like that stuff works, or can work on like a once-off, but once you’ve done it, you can’t do it again, it’s not a long-term strategy, it’s sort of that [inaudible 00:09:46], like one time, but you can’t use it again, so it’s like you’ve got to have something more than just tricks like that.

Daniel Levis:  Yeah, I would take that analogy and extend it to the e-mail itself. I mean, you can send a very blind sort of an e-mail that’s full of curiosity that gets a lot of clicks. It gets a lot of clicks to a landing page, or whatever it is you’re promoting, but then again, how many times can you do that? Not very many. Maybe two or three times. And the second or third time that you try it, you click through it, it’s going to go way down, and it’s going to go down to the same sort of low click-through rates that my e-mails get. My e-mails are seven, 800,  a thousand words, and they take the prospects through this whole process of what I call opening. And the opening is really like a bread crumb, you know, a series of bread crumbs, or single-line cliffhangers, if you will, that are designed to draw the subject into the e-mail.

And then, I have what’s called the deepening, which is, typically, a story or some type of visual, almost like a story but told in the second person, right? So, “Can you imagine yourself doing this? And then this happened, and that happened.” But the idea is to get the prospect’s imagination activated and engaged, so that they’re no longer sitting there in front of their computer, they’re actually off somewhere in their mind, in some other place, in some other time, and that’s very key, critical thing that has to happen in the e-mail. You have to get them out of the here and now, and you have to get them in this sort of imaginary world that you put them in, almost like a trance, and while you’re doing that, you’re planting suggestions that are congruent with what you want them to do when they click through.

so you have this Deepening process, and then I take them out of that reverie, out of that imaginary world that I put them in, and I pitch them, very directly, in the e-mail. And I talk about what it is that I want them to buy, or what I want them to do, on the landing page, and I do it very directly. And then I tell them to go and do it. Go and buy it. Go and order it. Go and get involved. Go and sign up for this webinar and make sure you’re there. Because if you’re not there, you know, your hair’s going to fall out or whatever.

John McIntyre: So what example, like just something [inaudible 00:12:15] if you send a curiosity, like just a curiosity subject line, you’ve got to work the benefit in that, so there’s sort of, I guess, a relevant attention that’s opening that e-mail, that they’re opening it because they want to learn about the e-mail, or they want to learn more about how to pick up women, or whatever the topic is. Then you catch their attention, you tell a story, you use the story to deepen them and take them into a sort of trance, and then you pitch. And  you pitch for it directly, and then you push them to the page. That’s the process, right?

Daniel Levis:  Yeah, and I would add that the subject line is not really about what I want them to do. The subject line is more about selling the readership of the e-mail. So the subject line, yeah, it’s going to have the word in it. What was the word that you mentioned, e-mail. Okay. So it will have the word e-mail in it.

John McIntyre: Right.

Daniel Levis:  But the subject line is not about Email Alchemy, or it’s not about e-mail course XYZ. The subject line is typically about the story of what’s going on.

John McIntyre: What I find is, because this is like, I found these random curiosity  subject lines, they get great open rates. But they don’t convert as well. When I find a file [inaudible 00:13:22] because I’m trying to sell that, then what seems to work really well is I have a subject line that mentions e-mail, mentions Autoresponder, mentions e-mail something, I mean, it doesn’t go into the product yet, it does what you’re talking about, where it uses that and then transitions into a story that somehow relates to e-mail.

Daniel Levis:  That’s right, yeah. Yeah, and the story, I mean the crazier the story, or the more paradoxical the story, the better, because that’s really what —

John McIntyre: Where do you come up with your stories?

Daniel Levis:  Well that’s a very, very interesting question. There’s a bunch of places that I come up with stories, but by far the best place to get the story is from the client themselves. So for example, if you look at the case studies in my Email Alchemy courses, they’re all case study-driven. You see, the craziest stories that, I mean, you couldn’t make shit like that up, because they’re just too crazy. To give you an example, one of the case studies, when you buy my course, is in the Track 1 part of the training, is from Kendrick Cleveland, and he does persuasion. Are you familiar with Kendrick Cleveland at all?

John McIntyre: Never heard of him.

Daniel Levis:  Never heard of him, okay. Well, he’s a guy you should really check out, because not only is he a character, but he has these wonderful courses about persuasion and NLP, and that sort of thing, and when I interviewed Kendrick, it was just amazing the kinds of stories that he would come up with, and he wasn’t volunteering these stories. I had to kind of be very – remember Jay Abraham when he was up on the stage and he was talking about conversations that he’d have with people, and he said, “Well, you don’t want to be in a hurry, but you want to be very persistent, but at the same time relaxed,” and that’s the kind of thing that I teach in the second track, is like how do you extract a hook, right?

So, while I’m interviewing this guy, Kendrick Cleveland, I discovered that he’s just really a character. He’s got some really interesting language that he uses when he’s telling his stories. So one of the subject lines in his series is something about Penniless Raging Bull of Persuasion. Penniless Raging Bull of Persuasion. And that’s the story that he’s telling me about how all these insane stories about how he’s selling life insurance, and the life insurance company, he gets a call one day, and he’s out on the street, because their [inaudible 00:15:52] got under or whatever, and then he’s walking around in this town somewhere in the western part of the states, and he sees a fitness gym and he walks into the gym, and he says, “I need a sales job.” And the lady comes out and she’s just drop dead gorgeous, and he’s drooling while he’s talking to her, and she gives him a job. And this whole story about how he’s cutting his teeth selling gym memberships, and he screws up the sale, and he lets the guy go, and he doesn’t buy in, and this gorgeous knockout woman just pulls him up on the rug and just totally belittles him and says, “Don’t ever let that guy go again without turning him over to me so I can close him.” And he tells all these crazy stories, and that’s where the stories come from. So, Penniless raging bull of persuasion.

He’s a cocky son of a bitch, and he gets torn down, and then there’s another subject line, another story, Brunette Bombshell of Persuasion Versus My Mom, right? So Brunette Bombshell of Persuasion Versus My Mom, well that’s a conflict, right? And conflict is what drives a story, right? So he tells a story about how his mom had taught him how to sell an MLM, and then he met this knockout woman, then he tells a story about how Richard Bandler put him in a trance when he was in a seminar, and that’s another e-mail, and that one’s darker than NLP, dark side patterns. You know? So all these stories that are real, true-to-life stories that came out of the client, that is by far, or if you’re writing your own e-mails, have somebody help you to pull those hooks up.

Or another case study that I used to teach is, this is a fitness trainer, coach. And her story was, why Amazons Scare Guys Spitless, was one of the headlines, right? So we’re talking about this, why do women want to look like that? Why do men want to look like that? Well, they want to get laid. They want to impress the opposite sex.

Another one was, My Jiggly Embarrassing Bums, see it on video. That’s the subject line. And this is about when she would compete to get on the stage, and before they get on the stage, they have to get this brown war paint painted on, and they have to have their G-string glued on. So one of the subject lines is, Body Sculpting #5: My Glued-on G-string. So you think people are going to open that? Yeah, they’re going to open that. But it’s got nothing to do with the product. It’s not evident  what’s for sale here or what the desired action is. We just want to get them to open that thing, we want to deepen them with the story, we want to put them there in the competition, getting their G-string glued on and the brown war paint painted on by some old fart in the gym there, and that’s the kind of thing we’re doing. We’re just kind of creating all of these stories.

So another one was, Discount and Expiring, this is later on in the campaign. Discount and Expiring in little square brackets, and then it’s Embarrassing Husband Story. And what woman is not going to open that? An Embarrassing Husband Story. And she tells a story about how the UPS man or whatever they have down in Australia there, came with a bunch of maple syrup to the door and her husband opens the door and the name of her business is IdealBodiesOnline.com, and the FedEx guy or whatever he is, DHL, I think it was, I don’t know. And he looks at her husband, and he’s got a bit of a potbelly, and he looks at the bill of lading and it says, “IdealBodiesOnline,” looks back at her husband, looks back at the bill of lading, he says, “Yeah, IdealBodiesOnline.com, yeah, right,” you know. So, all of these stories are real, true-to-life stories that I pull out of the client or out of myself, if I’m the one telling the story or trying to sell something directly.

John McIntyre: Right. So tell us like, I mean the story, like you can tell a story about something completely random. One guy, one of my guests back in the past said he goes to a new site and finds the weird section. He finds just crazy, crazy stuff. That gets a lot of open rates, but what we’re talking about is, if you’re going to tell a story, it’s got to be weird, it’s got to have the conflict, and it’s got to be something that contrasts with like, how the hell does that work? Well you have to read it. But it also has to tie in somehow, to not too much the product, but the topic, whether it’s e-mail, or having better relationships, or losing weight.

Daniel Levis:  Yeah, absolutely, and there’s nothing wrong with doing what you said there. There’s an old story that Gary Halbert would tell, and he’s working with his students, and what Gary would say to the student that wants to learn how to write copy is,  “I want you to wake up every morning and go on and buy The New York Times, or buy The Wall Street Journal, or buy whatever publication, and just open it up at random, and find a headline. And then I want you to write a story that ties that headline to whatever it is you’re doing. And that’s what I want you to do every morning when you wake up. And that’s exactly what you described, whoever this guest was. He said, you know, “go to the…” and there are sites online where you can go and you can find unusual stories.

The site that I love, it’s called, what the hell is it called… Urban Dictionary, I think it’s called? And you go to the Urban Dictionary and every day, people are going on this site and they will define something. So they’re defining a particular term and it’s always funny and gross and unusual and they use all kinds of strange words. So I’d go there and I’ll find one of these Urban Dictionary definitions, and I’ll turn it into a story. Or I’ll find some kind of crazy video on YouTube, or whatever it is. No matter what it is, I’ll find a way. If it’s attention-absorbing, if it’s got this sort of, and I have a whole list of what I call hooks, things like controversy, and embarrassment, and conflict, and intrigue. All these sort of checklist of the types of stories that grab attention, and I’ll find a story that has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m selling, I’ll turn it into a story.

So that’s another way of using stories, another way of pulling people into your e-mails. But there’s all kinds of different ways, and I really love the idea of finding a story inside of the person’s life, or inside of your own life, but there’s all kinds of different ways to do it.

John McIntyre: Right. One thing I’m interested in is, like, let’s say, because you mentioned, I think, that some of the sequences might go for two weeks or 20 days or something like that. So what are we talking, someone joins the list, and then they get the two to three-week e-mail sequence, or you writing say, seven e-mails or something, and sending them every three days, and you just send that out to a list you already have?

Daniel Levis:  Well, both. Certainly both, the case study campaigns that I do, because I’m going to… See, I like to cherry-pick as a copywriter or marketing consultant, I like to go and find a client who already has a list. I don’t want to deal with clients that are trying to build a list. Now, that doesn’t mean email alchemy doesn’t apply in that particular scenario, it’s just that I can make a lot more money as a copywriter if I deal with people who already have a list. So if you buy my courses and you look at Jon Benson’s campaign for his recent three accelerator where the scale in Australia or Kendrick Cleveland, that’s the scenario. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the exact same scenario when you’re building a list. And you most certainly should, it’s just a different sort of an animal.

So in terms of lead generation, I have people who buy these courses, and they use them to generate leads. So they’ll typically have some type of lead generation page there, where they’re giving away something. And then as soon as somebody opts in for this, then they will get these story generate, story-based sort of e-mails that are typically designed, and a lot of this is service-based stuff. So the people will be selling some type of a service. Maybe they’re a social media consultant, maybe they’re a landscaper, or maybe they do some type of renovation at home, or maybe they’re some type of a consultant, a coach, whatever it is, and so they, in exchange for a special report, in exchange for some type of consultation or whatever, they have the right to follow up with this prospect, and then maybe every two or three days, they’ll send one of these Email Alchemy e-mails, and the intent of the e-mail, if somebody’s requested a special report from you, a white paper or whatever it is, and this goes back to my days in sales and selling, direct selling, is that I would then follow up on that lead generation magnet, that special report, or white paper, whatever it was, with a bunch of these e-mails that are designed to take the prospect to the next step. So, not only have they read you or indoctrination your strategy, the principles that you use to get a specific job done, now it’s time for them to get a half-hour consult or an hour consult or a 90-minute consult or whatever it is so that they can get specific, custom-tailored advice, and the duration of that appointment, if you will, would coincide with the amount of money that you would be asking for at the end of that consult.

John McIntyre: Okay, okay. So you say that this works, because a lot of people come to me, and they ask me, well, I sell services, I sell products, and people come to me, and they start to ask, “Can I sell…” you know, a lot of the questions that I have [inaudible 00:26:25] what you’re doing when you’re selling services. So you’re saying, when you do it right, and I know this, but sometimes, the list on mind now is that you can use the story by selling method for business to business and for selling services. It’s not just for people with an e-book to sell.

Daniel Levis:  Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. We have people who buy this and then they’re selling $15,000 kitchen renovations, or multi-thousand dollar consulting engagements. We have people doing this who are selling management consulting, believe it or not. And it’s a great way to sell management consulting, because you don’t want to be talking to people who have not already drunk your management consulting Kool-Aid, right?

And how do you get them to drink your Kool-Aid, well, you’ve got to get them to buy or request a free report, then you want them to consume it before you get on the phone with them or whatever. If they don’t do that, there’s no point getting them on the phone, because then, you’re going to have to sell them on the phone, which is about the least effective way to sell somebody something. If you have to sell somebody something, one-to-one on the telephone, that is just stupid. You are shooting yourself in the foot. They should be sold on you before you ever get on the telephone, and the way to do that is to write a book or write a special report and to send them e-mails that captivate. That get them really thinking. That open their mind. That deepen them into this imagination, get their imagination  flowing and see them moving forward in whatever it is they want to do with you, kind of like the orchestrator of it all, well before you ever get them on the telephone, so that when they’re on the phone, you’re asking them questions about what it is they want to do, and you’ll ask them those questions in the spirit of discovery, so that you’re sort of asking them questions that are selling them on you, rather than you trying to sell yourself on to them.

If they’re already sold on you, you’re asking them questions that are saying, “Okay, do I really want to work with you, Mr. Client? Are we a good fit? Are you the kind of person that I want to work with in terms of making this result happen for you?” So that’s the spirit of the interview, and that’s what Email Alchemy and that’s what this whole process of pulling a client towards you, but it can certainly be business to business, absolutely.

John McIntyre: And one last thing, before we wrap this up, that I wanted to know is just, on a rough, I mean, what’s the sort of rough review if I had a structural campaign? If I had to e-mail my list today, for example, and use the methods that we’ve talked about here, do I write, say, seven e-mails, and send one every three days, and have a story that’s sort of spread out over those e-mails, or do I have a different story every day, or does it follow some sort of arc or I don’t know, what’s your thinking there?

Daniel Levis:  Well, yeah, it depends on your objective, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to sell, how much does it cost, what kind of behavioral change are you asking your prospect to make? Give me a little context.

John McIntyre: Let’s say I’m selling a product for $300, and the customer, or the prospect, well, they’re interested in the topic. They haven’t bought anything yet, though. Or maybe they bought something small, for, say, $20, and they’re interested in taking the next step, but they haven’t yet. Is that enough context?

Daniel Levis:  Okay, and what is this $300 dollar thing that you’re selling?

John McIntyre: Say it’s a, I mean, just for a, let’s say it’s simple, like a weight-loss thing that’s going to teach them, like an advance weight-loss system.

Daniel Levis:  Okay, cool. That’s exactly the same product that I was talking about that the lady in Australia was selling, it was a $300 membership site, where they would go in and they had this, I  think it was like a 12-week program for weight loss and figure sculpting. More weight loss than figure sculpting. So it’s the same sort of thing.

So how did we sell it? Well, we used a simple landing page, had a video on it, and the video was like, I think it had 12, maybe 8 to 10 sort of little stories that were like 30, 45 second stories, with a before and an after picture, and here’s a fat lady, and here’s a hot lady. So that’s the landing page, and underneath the landing page, it was kind of like positive acceptance copy that said, “You’re damn right, Sue. I’m in on this, and here’s everything that you’re giving me.” So, kind of written in the reverse voice, so it’s the prospect talking on the landing page, and then in terms of the e-mails, we would send an e-mail every single day. I think we sent e-mails for 14 days.

So every day, they got an e-mail, and it was all something, kind of crazy story about this lady and her exploits as a figure sculptor, and how she was fat before and now she’s thin, and all these emotional issues that she had when she was a teenager, and real stories about all of these things that these women are going through. And every day, for, say, I probably have the series here in front of me. I can tell you exactly how many days the campaign went for. So, like 10 days, we’d send an e-mail every single day, and then on the 11th day, we sent two e-mails, on the 12th day, two e-mails, and then the last day, we’d send four e-mails in one day.

So, the idea is, you have this window of opportunity, this limited opportunity to get some special deal. So they could get this course for $300, but if they missed it, and they didn’t get it during this window, then they would have to pay $400 or they wouldn’t get such and such a bonus along with the main program for $300. So there’s something bad that happens at the end of the 15 days or how many days.

John McIntyre: Like it closes, or the price goes up, or something like that.

Daniel Levis:  Exactly, yeah. And then, each one of these e-mails would have kind of like an ongoing sort of narrative that becomes increasingly clear. The way to look at it as a narrative, okay? Typically, there’s some type of a problem  or a thing that happens to this individual in the e-mail, and that’s the deepening part. There’s a problem that occurs in the e-mail, and that problem is solved in that e-mail. They go to the video, they watch these before and after things, and they buy, but there’s also like a secondary sort of situation, a secondary sort of problem that always comes back in the next e-mail, that doesn’t get solved until the end of the series.

So there’s always like a primary problem, and I classify this as, you know, you do e-mail marketing. You sell Autoresponder series. So there’s a reason why somebody would want an Autoresponder series, okay? That is the primary sort of problem resolution. And then there’s a secondary problem that doesn’t get solved until the end, or it’s always recurring sort of thing, and that is, why does somebody need John McIntyre to write an e-mail Autoresponder series? What is your unique selling proposition? So there’s the problem of, “I need more sales, I need follow-up, I keep forgetting to follow up, I need a way to solve that problem, and this is how I solve it, with these machines that automatically follow up, but I could never write them in such a way that resulted in sales when people landed on the page. So I needed to get John McIntyre, because he had the secret sauce of how to not only follow up, but get action when people followed up. That sort of things.

So there’s the primary problem resolution in every single e-mail, and then there’s this recurring sort of secondary problem that is a unique selling proposition of your particular weight loss program, or insurance strategy, or Autoresponder follow up, whatever, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, it’s always the same sort of principle.

John McIntyre: Cool, cool. Well thank you. Before I wrap this up though, I mean we talked about, so obviously, you’ve got a product called Email Alchemy, but as far as I know, it’s closed right now, so tell the listener, where, if they want to learn more about you or about the program, where they can go, and I know you mentioned that you’re going to open it up, where you’re doing a sort of special promotion special offer in probably a month, which will be, this podcast, will go live, I think it’s about four or five weeks right now? So by the time I –

Daniel Levis:  Yeah, yeah.  Yeah, so what you want to do now, if you’re intrigued by any of this, you need to go to my website, www. DanielLevis.com, and there should be a pop-up that will come over the site and it will offer you a free report, I think it’s called 9 Forbidden Secrets of Info marketing, or something like that. So go ahead and get that, and you’ll be on our list, and then next month, when we introduce Email Alchemy, we’ve got three different tracks for you depending on who you are, and we’re going to be having special offers on all three tracks.

The first track is very reasonably priced, and it is for the do it yourself-er. For people who want to write their own e-mails, to sell their own products or services, in much this sort of vein that we’ve been talking about here today. And we’re also introducing 10 Royalty-free Templates. So you’ll be able to take this subject line, opening, deepening, pitch, call to action structure, which is Email Alchemy, and you’ll be able to, basically, fill out a questionnaire with details about your business, and then you take the answers and you just kind of paint by numbers and you’ll have e-mails that are really compelling, interesting, proven to work and to close, for your business very quickly and very easily. And, of course, you have the whole course that shows you how to write them from scratch. And if you’re a copywriter or a marketing consultant, you’re just going to be eating that up, you’re going to be learning a ton, and it’s going to help you create these high-converting Email Alchemy campaigns. You’re not allowed to resell those templates, they’re only for the promotion of your own services, regardless of what those services are.

And then we have a second track, and this track is specifically for copywriters, marketing consultants, and the second track kind of walks you through the process of getting clients as an e-mail alchemist for hire, selling these types of gigs, these engagements, and getting paid a lot of money to do it, and being able to go to a client with a very seductive proposition that allows you to get paid 10,000, 20,000, 30, 50, 60, even $100,000 for one gig writing Email Alchemy series for them, and I’ll show you exactly how to do that. And by the way, that track also gives you all the marketing that you’ll need. You’ll get lumpy mail campaigns that you can send out in the post to generate leads, you’ll get special reports, case studies, proving that Email Alchemy works. You’ll get Email Alchemy campaigns for following up on those prospects, and getting them to inquire, and how to close them, and get paid this money for writing Email Alchemy.

And then the third track, which is brand-new, never been sold before, I’m going to give you everything you need, I’m going to give you all of the training, all of the marketing, all done for you, to go out and get Email Alchemy clients as an E-mail Alchemist for hire, going and showing clients the found money in their list that they didn’t know was there, and that they will pay you, gladly pay you 10, 20, $50,000 per assignment writing e-mails, and I’m going to actually write the e-mails for you. Almost. I’m going to give you royalty-free templates that you can go out and you can resell. So not only the marketing and the training to find the client, but I’m actually going to write the e-mails for you, almost. So you’re going to go, I’m going to show you how to adapt an Email Alchemy campaign to a specific client need so that you don’t have to be a copywriter or you don’t have to be a marketing wizard. All you have to do is, almost like a McDonald’s franchise. All you have to do is pay me some money, I’ll give you everything you need, you can go out and be in business virtually overnight, with everything done for you. You just put the key in the ignition, and you go out and you apply Email Alchemy to the marketplace and make 10, 20, $50,000 per engagement. So that’s really exciting for anybody who is spinning their wheels out there online, don’t know what to do, or having a great deal of difficulty trying to create a product, trying to do this, trying to do that. Here’s a way for you to make money right out of the gate online, selling Email Alchemy campaigns. So that’s brand-new, it’s going to be introduced next month.

John McIntyre: Fantastic, okay. So by the time this podcast goes live, it’ll be in about, just over four weeks from when we’re recording this. So that will go live around that time that you should be live as well. So people want to go and learn more about this and get this, they go to Daniel Levis.com. I’ll have the show notes, now, and a link to that at TheMcMethod.com. Daniel, thanks for coming on the show to talk about all this.

Daniel Levis: Oh, you’re quite welcome, John, I enjoyed it.

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