Marketing Runs Deep: Episode 14

Hey everybody, This is Bryan Hatch, founder of AutomateBIG and I want to jump into another episode of Marketing Runs Deep, on a topic that comes up all the time in businesses nowadays, because you can't avoid it. There's just no way to avoid what you can do. If you are avoiding it, you are missing out on such a massive opportunity for better results for your clients, better results for your customers and better revenue for your company.

What it comes down to is email and automation. Now I separate those out a little bit, email and automation. There's email automation, but there's automation independent of email. There's text message marketing, there's chatbot marketing. There are all kinds of fun stuff independent of emails, although email is still the basis of the crux. That's what I want to start first.

Some people think that email marketing is dead, and that is one of the notions that you just have to get out of your head because people still use email addresses. I do agree that the viewership, the open rates, click rates are definitely lower than they used to be way back in the day. At the same token, they still are used to generate millions of dollars. If you want to build a brand, if you have people's email addresses, if you have 100,000 email addresses and they engage with you on a decent level, you're going to make more money than someone that has 1,000 email addresses and they engage at the same rate. So obviously, bigger numbers make a difference. So email marketing makes a difference.

Now, one of the big tips on email marketing specifically, is that I use the rule of threes. If you're going to send someone an email that tells them to go do something, I would say, send that to them three times. Now, it doesn't have to be the exact same message, but from some of the people that I worked with, you can actually send the exact same email, maybe just a slightly different subject line and get massive results. Because when open rates are 20% or lower, depending on what you're doing, we have actually generated open rates of 40% to 45%, 50% in some cases, depending on what we're working on. But if you're getting low open rates, then what you need to do is send information to them more than once. It's just the way that it works.

If someone doesn't see it, then if you send it again, there's no problem with that. That's one of the really big tips that I'll give you in email marketing, is you can actually email people almost the same exact email multiple times, and they're barely going to even notice. The ones that do are the people that bought anyways, and that's part of the automation side. Now on the automation side of the fence is, it's kind of the 'if this, then that.' That's a term that's been a little more popularized nowadays, where if X happens, if someone responds or, let's just say in the email marketing situation, that you're going to send three emails that say, "Buy this, buy this, buy this." Well, if someone buys it after the first email, you don't want them to get the second email.

So that's the 'if this.' If they buy after seeing the first email, don't send them email two and three. That's the automation, that's directly related to email automation, but there's a lot of cases that work out very, very uniquely for your business. If someone purchased this product, don't let them see or get the ad or the social media post or the email automation or the chatbot or text message automation that will tell them they can get 10% off the same thing they just bought at full price. That's the critical piece of automation that really makes a difference. I can't even tell you how many people nowadays still get this wrong. I'm sure that you can look in your email box right now. You bought product X from who knows what, whatever it is that you needed to buy, you bought it online specifically.

Then a week goes by, a month, goes by whatever it is, and now you're getting more people, a lot more people, on your list. Then you send an email saying, hey, 10% off the thing they already bought. I can't stand businesses where I purchased their $300 offer and then three months later, I get an email that says, buy that. I already did. I already own it. Why would I buy it again? Simple segmentation is a part of the automation. That if they own this, if they have a special tag, if they have some kind of differentiator, then don't let them do this other thing.

The other thing that's really cool about that as well, especially in the email or text messaging marketing space, is that you can alter your path. So if you have one email that goes out and says, 'Hey, buy this thing'. If someone clicks on it, but doesn't buy, they're more motivated than someone that doesn't click on it at all, correct? Okay. So if you are doing that and someone that clicks on it but still doesn't buy, then give them an alternate message than the person that didn't ever click.

So even if in a text message, you send a text message. Someone never clicked. Give them a path that maybe it has two more text messages that say what it is you want to say. And then the person that clicks, but still doesn't buy, that's still the goal over here. If they don't buy, then give that person a different message than the default. So you make it special and personalized. That's the part of automation that I really love is that you can say, 'Hey, I noticed that you checked out my page, but you didn't buy. Maybe you had one of these three problems.'

Now you're talking to them as if they know, and you know, what's going on as opposed to acting like they're just kind of one of the many, so that's a critical part.  There's a lot of fun things you can do with automation. There are great things that if you have multiple businesses, have multiple softwares. So if you have a software over here and then you have a different software here and you need them to talk to each other, like I just said, if this one's sending your emails and this one holds your promo codes, then this email needs to know if someone bought something, so you need to be able to communicate back and forth. There are many different automations and softwares you can actually buy that's kind of like a connector between those two.

So there are two softwares that don't talk to each other. Now you buy something in the middle, you create an automation to where it translates and makes sure that everything is, a-OK. Very critical in your business, and now, so that you can kind of get the actual look at this. I want to jump into this. I want to show you some ideas of things that you should be doing. Now, there are a lot of things you can do with automation. I don't think that you should do it just because you can do it, but there are things that are necessary, and so we're going to show you a few of those examples. I want you to actually implement these tactics in your business because if you do so, your automation's going to take off in a really positive way and your customers, your clients, even those that are prospects, are going to be really happy about how you handle your marketing efforts.

Okay, to jump right into some automation you can create that is meaningful between one software program and a different software. I like to use a tool called Zapier. There are many things you can do with different softwares. To show you something that you should do is if you have an external calendaring system, for example, there's one that's very popular. It's Calendly. So basically what this really quick and simple automation does is when someone creates an appointment for me, to be on my calendar, to talk about marketing or strategy, whatever it is that I've created, then I set up an app and I say when an invitee is created, so when someone creates an event, then I want it to pass into Kajabi. What this does is I can put in what site, the form that I'm putting it into, the name and the email address. I can put in any quantity of fields that I need to, from that appointment in Calendly and populate that inside of Kajabi.

Now my emails might be coming from Kajabi. I might be using Kajabi as my CRM. That might be opting them in for my weekly emails that I send out. There's a number of things that I can do because of this. For this example's sake, pulling someone off of your calendar and putting them into your CRM is a very useful automation to create that way. You can do a myriad of things that you want. Just like any automation you want to think through what problems you're trying to solve in your business, what matters most. As you do that, and you say, okay, well I need this that's over there in program X to be over here in program Z, then it's easy to find out what you want it to do and move forward. So this is just one example of something you can use inside of Zapier to get calendar appointments into your CRM.

Another one is inside of Infusionsoft. There's a couple of things I want to show you. First and foremost, as an email automation, when someone gets in, they've opted in to a free training. They get an email that confirms the training that they wanted to get into, which is awesome. Well, next I want to do a couple of things different. So a lot of people will create a process and whether you are and are not Infusionsoft users, don't worry. This is just a diagram that helps us understand. A lot of people, what they do is create an email sequence and then for the important reminders, they got a free training and they want to opt in and talk to me or whatever.

I want to deliver them the free training, and then I want to send them a few more emails saying, 'Hey, why don't you schedule an appointment to talk with me after you've been in the free training,' if that makes sense. So in the email automation that I'm going to be using, I send them what they requested, and in that email that says, Hey, here's the link to the free training, by the way, if you want to talk to me and click here to schedule.', there are two paths. One is that they scheduled an appointment.

So if they get the first email and they schedule an appointment, then they move from this side of the fence and keep working down the path. If for some reason they have not scheduled an appointment, I've automatically applied a tag, but again, no stress about some of the flow inside of Infusionsoft. Then they're going to start getting emails that say, 'Hey, why don't you schedule an appointment to talk with me so I can help you with the things you're working on.' So those emails will go, and again the goal is they schedule an appointment.

So the segmentation is the key ingredient that I'm trying to show you here. When I've segmented out, those that have scheduled, they move on. They don't get any other emails that say, 'Hey, why don't you schedule an appointment with me?' If you don't schedule an appointment, you'll start getting those emails, and once you've scheduled an appointment, then you'll stop getting the emails to tell you to go schedule an appointment.

It seems kind of crazy, but it's straightforward when it comes to what your users experience. A lot of times what'll happen is we will schedule an appointment with a business and then we'll keep getting emails saying 'Hey, come schedule. Hey, come schedule. Hey, come schedule.' And that's really not useful. Secondarily, right here, the same thing happens once they've scheduled, they get appointment reminders. I've got some other things that come over here if they don't show up or whatever the case is, so that is example number one of how to use segmentation to send unique messages to people instead of assuming that everybody's done it. If they scheduled an appointment right from this first email, there's no reason for them to get any of these emails, and that's why I do it.

Now, to jump inside on a second level. The sequence that I recommend everybody should be using when someone schedules an appointment with you. Now, appointment softwares will do this for you in many cases, but you still need to make sure you do this because there a couple of things that come up. Three days before their contact appointment, they get an email reminding them about our appointment, giving them some more value, helping them see why it's important to come meet with me.

A day before their appointment, they get another email that's different. Then the same day of their appointment, they get another email. Because I do appointments at a certain time, I make sure that they get a text message the morning of that appointment as well. I know that I don't have any appointments on my calendar before 9:15 AM. And so for me, a text message to anybody that has gotten on my calendar and scheduled makes a lot of sense for me, so that's another automation that makes really great sense and helps my customers or potential customers be served really well.

Now there's another thing that they get a confirmation email when they schedule. So if they schedule an appointment with me, they get a confirmation email. A few minutes later, I send them a scheduled text. Now this is inside of Infusionsoft, and this is just one way, but it is not something that you have to do if you're using Calendly, if you're using other systems, they often have text message opportunities, reminders in addition to the emails that they can send and remind, which they'll create the same sequence inside of the software you're using.

Either way, it's still great email automation to make sure that when someone has an appointment with you, they're getting consistent reminders, ideally different. Ideally three days before, one day before and the day of should be different messages. It shouldn't be the exact same email, even though some systems like Calendly do that on their lowest-tier grade, is to have the same response email go to the person three days in a row, which is obnoxious in my opinion. But that's just one way to do it. So that's another example of how email automation can really, really serve your customers or your potential customers, or whoever has an appointment with you, this way. Now getting into another example is inside of Kajabi. When you use Kajabi, there's different automations you can create. And this is consistent with a lot of platforms out there that are robust, that have a lot to them. And I want to go back to this example that I've talked about is, if somebody makes a purchase, you want to stop emailing them about that purchase.

So here's an idea is when an offer is purchased, and I can select the offer there, then I want to make sure that I unsubscribe them from an email sequence. So that's one of the automations I can create that says, 'Hey, they bought so stop telling them to go buy it.' That's a critical thing. And there are still people that are not using that correctly that use Kajabi, which bums me out. You should always use automations to stop people from getting emails once they've bought something. That's one opportunity.

The other thing that's really great about what you can do with email automation and segmentation is look at when a tag is added. When a tag is added to somebody, and a tag is just a way to segment who's who in your database, most every system has their version of tags, and most people call them tags. Some people call them lists or groups, but a tag is fairly consistent across a lot of marketing space software. But if a tag is added, then you can also remove them from a sequence. That's one way to skin the cat. The other thing that's nice to know is if someone, for example, clicks an email. I really love this automation as well. If somebody clicks an email, then apply a tag.

The reason that's so critically helpful, and that's in most every system you could use, is if someone is clicking on your emails that are for your prospects, like if you just have an email you send out once a week that keep people on top of what you're doing, or you're providing value to their lives, then add a tag if they click. Because if you ever want to test an offer against the people that actually care about what you do, send it to your clickers.

Let's say you have 10,000 people on your list. This single automation that I'm showing you here can help you get a litmus test of your next offer. Say you would just come out with a new product, whatever it is for whatever price it is. Well, if you have, if you've tagged everybody that's ever clicked on your emails consistently, then when you go to send out the first email, send it to your people that are obvious followers of your brand. Not people who just opted in once and have not ever responded, go to the people that have either opened or clicked your emails and send them your offer first. Get an idea. Did it work well? Did it work bad? If it worked well amongst people that love you, then at least you have an idea. If it works bad among the people that are clicking, that are actually paying attention to your message, then maybe you want to go back and make some changes before you send it out to everybody.

So another way to do that is use the automation side of Kajabi. Because there are so many opportunities here, there are countless opportunities to create automations and you can actually get kind of looping automations and make all kinds of crazy happen. But this is just one way of things that you should be doing is tag the people, segment the people that are clicking and opening your emails, whatever system you're using, and then send them a priority or give them a different path. Don't send them the same core message you send everybody else. Make them feel special in some way, shape or form. 

The last one is kind of a bonus that I wanted to share with you that sometimes you might have two systems. Kajabi does things that Infusionsoft does not. Infusionsoft does things that Kajabi does not. Because we use them both for AutomateBIG, one example is when someone submits a form inside of Kajabi, I format their name and make sure that it goes in correctly because there's just difference in systems. I want to make sure their first name and last name go into Infusionsoft. Another way to do that is I've taken in the name, and then I separate it out into first and last. So I've got the first name separate, and that way, when I put it into Infusionsoft, it does that right.

So I know it's a little more in the weeds and more technical than maybe you wanted to get. Just note, if you ever have to put something in two systems that seem like they do the same thing, Kajabi and Infusionsoft, they both send emails. They both create automation, all kinds of fun stuff, but you might be using more than one, and so you want to make sure your data is synced. That's the foundational bonus principle I want to give you. If you are using multiple softwares, you want to sync them up so that you're never trying to figure out what happened in another one. If all the data, all the segmentation you've created inside of one, like Kajabi, but you don't ever share it with Infusionsoft, the day that you need to use Infusionsoft will be a bummer because you have to go back, pull all the tags and pull all the segmentations you've created for people, upload them into Infusionsoft, which is going to be a pain. It's going to cost you a lot of time and energy, where if you kept them both synced up, you'd be happy.

So these are the ways that you can use automations and email to get ahead in your business and make some really great things happen, so you don't have to worry about the frustration of not doing these things.

So thanks again, for paying attention to the automation and the email marketing solutions that you can actually put into place in your business to improve your profits, your revenue, and actually improve your relationship with your clients, your customers and your prospects. I know that if you'll do this, you'll have some really good success in your business, and today's episode is just another small way to AutomateBIG.