TJ39 – Email Marketing and Automation Tips To Scale Your Business with Dan Fagella

Hey there! What’s up listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode 39 of the podcast show that teach you how to get more traffic, leads and grow a profitable audience online.

I am your host, James Reynolds, and as always I am super stoked that you can be with me here today. I’ve got another content packed episode. If all of the recent episodes have been getting a little bit too much for you because we’ve been covering so many strategies, today is the opportunity to step back a little bit and talk about marketing automation; how to take some of those manual tasks and automate them using software or programs. So that’s the expert interview today, but don’t go anywhere after that, as we will of course have the regular segments – this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and of course to end the show, the traffic jam, which today, will be chosen by my guest, Dan Fagella. So let’s introduce Dan, he’s the owner of CLV Boost, an agency that specializes in helping you boost the value of your customers using marketing and automation, he’s a black belt in jujitsu and also a writer of poetry, which may leave some clues as to why he is effective in writing email copy.  I was introduced to Dan by Justin Brooke who presented Dan to me as an e-mail marketing and automation ninja so on that note, let’s introduce Dan and welcome in the interview section of Traffic Jam 39.

James: So welcome listener to the interview section of the show. Jamming with me today, I have Dan Fagella from CLVBoost.com. Dan, a big warm Traffic Jam welcome!

Dan: Hey James, thanks for having me here, happy to be here. James: Well, it’s awesome to have you on the call. I guess we should start by explaining what the acronym CLV stands for and then a little bit perhaps about what you do over at CLVBoost.com.

Dan: Sure, yeah. CLV is customer lifetime value and CLV Boost is our consultancy which is focused on email marketing and marketing automation, all around, essentially the customer lifetime value, for some people that’s e-commerce purchases, email sales and appointments for sales people, for higher ticket or more consultative stuff, or maybe engagement if it’s an app or website where we need a lot of users in, but anyway, customer lifetime value ties to something and we’re all about automation, email and how I drive that stuff so that’s the world I’m in with CLV and the stuff that we do here.

James: Awesome! I think we should start by talking a little bit about the automation aspect and I’d like to start with the big stuff, what could I automate if I really wanted to live that kind of Tim Ferris 4-hour work lifestyle? I mean, I guess most Traffic Jam listeners are probably familiar with email follow up, I probably will ask you that later and they may also know things about webinar automation and post card automation but what are the cooler, less commonly talked about things that can be automated, should I wish?

Dan: Yeah, totally! First and foremost, as a sidebar, I have respected Tim Ferris, he has done his thing and that’s made clear. However, automation for me does not mean more time for margaritas, it really involves finding a way to set up marketing that can scale with your business. I am in Cambridge in Boston and a lot of these guys aren’t really here to drink more margaritas, they’re here to take companies public and they’re here to really come up in the game. The work that we are doing at that time, which is automation, is setting up marketing follow up and follow up related tasks and activities that can really help a service, an e-commerce, a company really scale so they don’t need a guy copying and pasting templates. They don’t need a guy to put sticky notes on your computer to remember to call people. So when we talk about automation at a higher level, some of it will involve the very simple when you opt in this course, you have 36 straight emails about this topic so that’s relatively common, I think everybody at Traffic Jam has this idea. I mean a lot of these guys drive paid traffic and they’re down to pumping people in to posts. To be automated is based on a number of factors based off of simple triggers like that so if somebody enters their name and information for a white paper, we cannot only trigger off a sequence of automated emails but there’s behavioral calibrations that we can make so for example, let’s say, someone opts in for this white paper and they enter their name, email and phone number, there can be a task that can be kicked off to a dashboard of a sales guy, and that task will stay there until he calls that person. And then, once he calls that person, he can record what the result was – set appointment, or voicemail and then he can select what happened on that call. I set a second appointment, I failed to set up a second appointment, or I just left a voicemail. Based off which of those three that happened, the rest of the email sequence can then move forward so if he calls the guy on day 2 and he leaves a voicemail, he can then adjust the sequence and calibrate the sequence so it says something like – hey, Jim here, gave you a call yesterday, I just wanted to make sure I reached out, I saw you got our white paper on …. If he talked to the guy and the guy did not buy, he might scale back the communication, not annoy him as though they never talked but scale down the communication so now maybe 2, 3, 4 weeks later, he gets a couple trickled email from that same sales guy which are all automated, and are more like – hey I thought this other white paper might be helpful, this is just to educate you, hey I know this might not be right time but I thought these might be some great resources you might learn from, hey I am still here for you if you need help. So those are scaled on a monthly or bi-monthly basis for about 12 months if we don’t get the sale. If we do get the sale, we might have an automatic sequence that triggers to the next appointment. So based on what happens on the phone, we can calibrate all sorts of great automated fun things, and that’s just the beginning of the pipeline. That’s outside of email and how email and non-digital marketing so to speak, to kind of interact to build an automated system. They’re really calibrated to relevance, it calibrates the right kind of communication to drive a scale whether that is slow and we are at nurture mode or whether that it’s fast and we have to get the guy’s attention. Hopefully that makes sense.

James: Absolutely! Let’s roll back a little bit and start at the beginning, what marketing or sales function, if any, do recommend a business get started with when it comes to automation?

Dan: When you’re talking about basic automation, a lot of people will have mail chimp or something. Mail chimp will only get you so far, it’s kind of like the go cart. I am not bashing on mail chimp, so many people use them here in Cambridge because they have a free trail but then so many people also really want to make money with email and they really can’t do it without more functionality so if you want to get started in the end that’s where mail chimp can actually be very helpful. And of course they do serve a good roll and they are a good company. A basic functionality would be your basic follow up sequences and the really essential ones are – what is your new prospect and your new customer sequence. So someone opts in through form A, now you might have B and C and D but we’re just talking about A. What kind of communication are you going to consistently deliver to them? And then next question, when they buy product A, what now is the communication that we need to drift out? And all of those things are geared towards what would be like their next step to be and how we can optimally entice that with a mixture of education, testimonials and calls to action so if they opt in for a thing, we might want to educated them, show them other successful smiling people showing them what we want them to do and then present our offer, whether that’s setting up an appointment or whatever the case may be. When they buy that thing, we might want to retain them on a monthly retainer so we might want to consistently give them helpful tips. We might want to send them other testimonials, we want to encourage them to call support and understand the functionality of the software that they just bought or encourage them to repurchase; they bought a pair of sandals and we want to offer them other summer fun gear so the basic automation sequence James, if there is anything at all is, what happens after they opt in, what is the ideal string of communication, and what happens after they purchase, what’s that ideal string? Those basic steps are probably more than what an online store have and it is very, very helpful to have those in place.

James: Yeah, and I guess this is where the CLV element comes in right? You being able to bring a prospect closer to a sale or you are moving a customer closer back to a sale hopefully just by nurturing them again and offering them other stuff and getting them back in to the purchase cycle. I guess my next question would be, what shouldn’t be automated?

Dan: This is pretty interesting. I like to think about automating as much as we can. I’ll talk about some automation blunders maybe here James. One thing that I don’t generally prefer to be automated is like newsletter type content. If it’s a business that you’re not planning to scaling on some bigger level or you kind of want it on the side and not think about it, that’s okay, but generally, any kind of weekly or monthly news or newsletter type ought not be automated because a lot of the pull of those emails which are going to encourage your long term click through rates and ultimately your long term conversions and now we are talking about CLV again, ultimately, a lot of that there is going to tie to relevance. It’s going to tie to what just happened, what happened in the news that we can use in the subject line that gets opened? What happened recently to the client when they got featured in this big press release that’s going to want to make all your clients want to be successful too? That newsletter type continuous education, continuous testimonial more light stuff nurture stuff, if possible and if it’s business you care about and for some of you out there, I think I can put myself in this category sometimes, you have some side businesses, there’s funnels that are pumping and you just sort of like say one day I’ll sell that thing but right now I’ll just make money from it. Great! I mean, who cares about your newsletter in that business. If it is a business that you really want to take care of and you really want to build a rich database that very attuned and pay attention to you, make your newsletters not prescheduled six months in advance but make that something you actually take the time to calibrate right then and there. At least that week, what is going to get the open, what is most relevant, what is most exciting? What’s most timely and what’s going to do the job right here now. So that’s one thing I would recommend not automating along the time out.

James: And I guess it is getting that balance, right? I mean let’s use the example of this website that the Traffic Jam podcast sits on that the Traffic Jam episodes, they get broadcast. They go out when the episode gets published, the conversations, and the things that you and I are talking about and perhaps they are timely and relevant to a certain moment in time, that’s when they want to be going out. But there’s other information that might move prospects closer to a sale that’s going to remain pretty standardized over the course of a lifetime and I guess those are things that perhaps go in to a sequence and be automated if and when someone opts in, right?

Dan: Yup! Exactly! So there’s your yellow brick road type stuff and there’s the sort of the moment to be very relevant type stuff. So yellow brick road as you’re obviously well familiar, is when someone does X we should give them S, T, U, V in a direct row, in a direct line, in a direct sequence in this amount of time to make sure they take the step Z or whatever the case may be, right? We’re really enticing a particular action, in that case, like your Facebook fan page, when someone likes your page, you don’t automatically see the post in order that you want. Facebook is always like a broadcast. The benefit of email is your initial relationship, it can be the look, smell, feel and the experience a certain way for everyone. And that’s something that when you get a dial down system and when you actually know how to test these things you can have a front end sequence that converts 25% higher than your front end sequence and you can be testing it but you can have all your people running through a very, very efficient funnel so yes you are correct. Some things, obviously we want a yellow brick road so to speak, other things of course we want that relevance, we want that time line and it’s not really like we want to keep that relationship alive. James: Yeah, well, you’re obviously at the core phase with all of this stuff Dan, what’s the most impressive use of automation you have created yourself or you’ve seen out there in the market place?

Dan: I think the really well done stuff here – there’s plenty of people in the bigger technology they are using this; there are a lot of great case studies with Infusion Soft. I think the best example, there is a business called hearandplay.com and it’s all about how to play music by ear, it is an interesting business with 12 million bucks a year their leveraging in marketing automation is significantly better than the vast majority of companies like when you opt in on these email funnels that they have set up, a lot of it is based in calibrated behavior. So the higher level and the interesting things set up really what I think is a big direction for the future of marketing information is calibrating communication based on behavior of a prospect so if we know that we send them away paper but they did not click it to download it, it is worthwhile to at least test so we should not necessarily calibrate everything because it does not necessarily make sense but if we know that assumption of a white paper is an essential factor to the sales guy closing the deal right? We need an educated client, we need an educated person who’ll say well, you sent me a bunch of stuff so I am going to get back to read it. So if we know that that’s a critical step of how they book their appointment or even calibrating to their note to the sales guy to let them know that this guy has not read the white paper. Those kinds of functionality is based on behavior. Very, very interesting and I think that in terms of the future of marketing automation, there is a lot of big companies getting a lot of funding at dawn and silver pop just got bought out and Infusion Soft is hopefully going to go public soon, they’re all thinking about how they can all be a step ahead and really that’s not just the level of pre-scheduled automation but that’s a level of calibration to the behavior of the prospect. That’s the cool stuff in the future. And an example with the phone appointment and you can send them an e-book first which means clicking a link. That’s just one example. We might remind that person two days later, hey I noticed you did not download the e-book yet, I just want to make sure you saw this before you talk to Frank on the phone on Wednesday at 5:30, thanks so much. That’s totally automatable and that’s a great way to make that sales guy’s not wasting his time.

James: Yeah, we’ll I’ve got some pretty good results with I guess a very low level of what you are talking about. On my SEO Agency we have something that gets triggered if someone goes on to the package pages, the deeper internal content of the site where they really looking at the sales material and if they don’t go on to place an order, there’ll be a message that follows them up a couple of days later that literally just says hey, saw you checking out our packages, have you got any other questions or would you like to hop on the phone to ask a bit more. Here’s the telephone number, here’s to go about it and you’ll be surprised how many people actually respond to those which actually could seem a little bit intrusive or a bit stalker style to think that someone is sending a message just based on an action on a website but they’re really, really relevant and some people just forget to do stuff so if you can help them do stuff they are planning and maybe a little bit further then it is well worth your time, right?

Dan: Totally, and ultimately, I like to pay attention to the people that are at the head of the curves, they guy at hear and play, that’s one example but I like to look at how marketing animation software companies actually leverage their own software or leverage marketing animation so if you go to Hub Spot for example or you go to Marketo or you go to Power Dot, they have higher price points and all that but their follow up is very much not like hey, here’s Whiz Bang tip#3. It is very much like, hey this is Stephanie with Hub Spot I saw you got in on this white paper I’d be happy to help you and be your point person here. Here’s my phone number, when is a great time that we can chat? That’s the kind of automated messaging that they have. It just seems professional, they know what you’ve done, they know what you’ve grabbed but it is automated. But their follow up is exactly just like you have mentioned. So it’s not all like here’s funky video #6 like in your everyday email sequence. It’s a lot of the time that B2B kind of higher touch, higher personalization and like you said you’re getting responses in those kinds of email and it doesn’t surprise me one bit.

James: Yeah, and I mean that’s the thing. Some of the best results in the business are actually based on real manual actions, it’s sending a hand written thank you card, it’s taking a customer out to lunch, all that sort of stuff but still you can use automation to actually facilitate the reminders that want you to go out and do that stuff so it’s not just all about a blanket email with no name on it. You really can personalize it to make it really engaging even for a high touch point business like that right?

Dan: All day long, just like you said. I mean here’s some great examples. Let’s talk about taking a client out to lunch, let’s talk about writing a personal card. People would say that’s all that new age business mumbo jumbo. Back in my day we have to go pull off some goodness. Personal cards still work right? I do it , you do it, we do it. But the thing is, if you have to remind a reminder from yourself how and when to send those cards, that’s a little bit annoying. If directly after XYZ type of transaction happens in your system, you can have something pop up in your dashboard and or email that will say this is going to keep annoying you until it’s done and it’s all about sending that postcard, that will actually facilitate the “non-automated stuff’. Similarly James, something that we’ve done in international martial arts online business, which is a niche that we’re in in addition to the consulting world is that when somebody spends a certain amount, what’s the thing that we now want to happen so if their lifetime value just hits $500. Maybe for you James, maybe whatever your threshold is, that’s the – hey James it’s time to call this person and take them out to lunch now if they live too far away, you’re going to go to this website and the link is already in the email, and you’re going to buy them brownies and send it to them. You know I mean, like boom – that email as soon as somebody within your CLV hits a certain point within your CRM, you can automatically kick off a trigger to make you call them and do an explicit action like taking them out to lunch which of course you don’t have any robots to take them out to lunch yet, if we wait more years we’ll see how that goes but with that stuff being aside, that can actually be a facilitator and note that those little reminders can kick off in places that you don’t want to have to comb your eyeballs on all the time. I don’t want to look to 25,000 martial arts contacts and figure out in a weekly report coming through 1C 2C, hey who hit the $500 threshold to send a personal letter? Heck no, see you later. How about sending me an email when that happens? That guy gets a personal note, he knows he’s cared about, and now the non-automated stuff becomes automated.

James: Yeah! It’s kind of funny actually, I’ve got a whole box of books, I’ve got Joe Pulizzi’s epic content marketing, a big huge box sitting by my side here and I have a sequence that runs out of Ontroport, they system I use, which just prompts me at about five and a half months, once the client has been onboard for that period, at that point, they’re a pretty decent customer, they’ve got high value to me, I get a little note that says send them a gift and at the moment the gift and at the moment the gift that is going out is the book from Joe Pulizzi and it just takes nothing but the return that I get from that is fantastic, I mean, the emails, the comments, it’s all great!

Dan: Oh, yeah. And again, you want that reminder to happen automatically, you don’t want your brain to run through those things over and over and over. You just want to see it pop to your inbox, you write a note on the inside cover, you send it with a card, and now that person is delighted and that’s something that you can set up with your automated system.

James: Good! Now, you were introduced to me as the email marketing badass by Justin Brooke so I have to ask you a few questions about email marketing automation especially kind of follow up sequences and segmentation and all that good stuff, the first question I have got is as marketers we always want the most relevant conversation possible of course with the prospect or customer, whoever it might be, with that in mind, what do you recommend the business do in terms of categorizing, tagging or segmenting their subscriber list so they can be sending the most relevant messaging possible?

Dan: I have spoken a lot on this and this is a really relevant topic and sometimes you probably have similar things James where it’s like when you go to a business and you get them to think of X problem like you can just walk away and send them a bill for a massive amount of money and totally feel justified because you just know like, wow! Like if you just implement that that is extremely valuable like in your SEO business there are businesses that you have worked with I am sure you turn the dial on XYZ keywords and you find how to make that sustainable and it’s like magic. Segmentation on the front is one of these strategic higher level thinking things that there’s research behind but really makes a business hum and click. When you can fill in your folks that are segmented and tagged in relevant ways, you are so well ahead of the curve of even large and sophisticated companies and it’s not even funny. So here’s what I really recommend James, really good take home stuff for anybody tuned in, is highly recommend segmenting on the front end and I recommend segmenting on the front end in the absolutely most relevant way so the question is if it’s a 3-7 option drop down menu, what one data point would we want to have about this person when they give us their name, email, phone number. We’re going to add a drop down to the front end forms. Normally, we’re going to see the same opt in rate by the way. Every now and again, you’ll see a drop down, lower it by a percentage. Every now and again, I have seen a drop down with an increase in a couple of percentage particularly in spaces where there is a little bit, I have not done a study across eight million companies or something but when all you see is just email, email, email and that’s what everybody is using, you’ll sometimes get higher opt ins when you add a drop down so a lot of people are afraid, oh my goodness, adding another data point, why I’ll get half the opt ins. Not true, test it. And here’s the thing, I even would say, even if you have a significant drop which I very rarely would see, almost never. And again, it’s almost insular, not 10 million companies tested here, but I encourage everybody to test it is that you won’t see a significant drop, even if it drops a little one, it pays for itself and so check this out, one of the small companies that we did work earlier on was a consultancy in the crowd funding space. So these guys do big consulting projects, five-figure type film and promotion and all the stuff for crowd funding projects and instead of having give us your email and we’ll tell you about what we do for crowd funding, I asked them the question which I am going to let the listeners run through their own brains right now, what is the one most relevant data point that if we could put on this person it would allow our messages to be optimally relevant. In other words, James, it would give us the best access to the magic buy button in their brain. So here is the magic question, we can do it in a bunch of different ways; we can do it by what is their major goal and objective? Goal and objective in the internet marketing space could be do you want to be super rich? Do you want to live off of your laptop and be super rich with your kids? Do you want to quit your job because you hate it so much? Those are like major goals, right? When its position for this crowd funding consultancy, it was –are you an entrepreneur? Are you a marketing agency or are you an independent creator that wants to crowd fund something that they’ve made? They found that the people coming to them fit in to those three categories. They decided to go that route. They could have also done, how big is your company? 1-10 people? 10-30 people? 30-100 people? 100-500? You know what I mean? But they decided to go with role. So role was entrepreneur, content creator, or marketing agency? Reason being, they determined that was the most relevant data point that would allow them to pinpoint target every single email they sent. Because, as you can imagine, if they are sort of white labeling their services, something that another agency is wrapping up in to a big project they are doing for a company, they need to market to an agency a completely different direction than they need to market to entrepreneurs and they need to do that completely differently to someone who doesn’t even know business and they just want to crowd fund their money and they just want to get their work. They don’t think about business and they talk about metrics. So now, what they did and this is what I recommend anybody out there do. All of their front end emails where not somewhat relevant. Let me explain where somewhat relevant email is. Somewhere relevant email is hey, you’re interested in doing a crowd funding project, here are some best practices. That’s okay right? We know they are interested in crowd funding and they might buy a service but if I know you are interested in crowd funding and you are an entrepreneur then guess what kind of education I am going to give you, how entrepreneurs can leverage crowd funding. I might give you something similar but that on the subject part get open rates at magnitudes higher than just best practices for crowd funding. You’ve used the words entrepreneur when they told you they are one, your open to new clicks are going to jump in every single substance unless you are screwing it up. So the other thing is here, every testimonial on the entrepreneur funnel, let’s say 12 emails long, where are all the testimonials from? Are they from marketing agencies that use you well? No, they are from entrepreneurs who succeeded in their entrepreneurial endeavors and made more money because of what you did. That’s what they want to see. With content creators, are you telling about entrepreneurs? No you are telling about people that love their craft and used you to help expand their heart and share something with the world with the desired benefits. Those are your testimonials. Your opens go higher, your clicks go higher. And now, let’s say you get the same percent of opt in on your desired site, because you’ve worked to them on their front end. Now every single email gets opened higher and every single gets click through higher. Even if we are talking about tiny percentages, that is a lot of money at the end of 12 months. So I recommend everybody with a bland opt in, allow it to be a drop down and segment those guys in the front end because three months later, you’ll thank me for it.

James: Yeah, that is fantastic stuff! And I guess the other thing that you could segment would be things like service category like – I will use the example of my business, we do SEO on one side and we deal with Adwords Management on the others so we are doing paid traffic and organic traffic. If someone comes to my site and lands on a page and interacts with content about SEO, it makes sense to tag them that they have joined the list via an SEO page right? So I can give them more SEO related content because that sort of stuff, they are interested in.

Dan: All day long, and if you go to Hub Spot again, I like to go there and look at people and they are eating dog food so some people might know, some people might not, like Hub Spot makes a lot of money, like most internet marketers they are probably going to go public and some marketers aren’t. I like to watch business. So if you look at them, they have a bunch of blogs about Facebook marketing, guess what the e-book is at the bottom of that? It’s about Facebook Marketing. Guess what the initial emails you get about are? They are about Facebook marketing and how entrepreneurs can use Facebook marketing, and you say the size of your company, they are going to call you already knowing that. They are already calibrating, so yeah, for you James, it could be the type of service. And you can even go deeper, maybe you do a lot of work. Maybe half of your SEO work is people making half your money in adsense site types. You know like SEO for product sites, right? And now the SEO adsense guy, the SEO email they get from you is about how you murdered it, guess who I am going to call? It’s all you, not captain generic oh I do SEO and I do design, if you were seating on beaches and you are doing half a million on banners, I am calling you really, really quick. So yes, type of service, totally a great pick there James.

James: Yeah, taking a little bit of side step now, what do you find is the most optimum contact frequency email and I ask this question because outside of this whole internet marketing space in the offline world almost every kind of business I talk to kind of pisses their pants if they send more two emails every six months or so, they just worry that they just are going to annoy their customers. What have you found to be the optimum frequency for driving sales?

Dan: You are absolutely right about that and there are a lot of really interesting things about that, you know particularly – and this is particularly when this is the case, right? I find that people that explicitly make money when they sell emails don’t care as much about getting opt outs, right? Because they make money. I believe that it’s truly the only the CMO or the entrepreneur who kind of get it kinder and they understand correlation of email and revenue and are compensated likewise, they are less fearful as you have said of pissing their pants and they respect having an opt out or having somebody email them back like I get too many emails from you. I have a 25,000 email list that I email pretty much every day and I don’t know, probably two of them a month gets freaking obscene. And at the end of the day, we are really monetizing at martial arts and all that is pretty hard to monetize, it’s a real crazy niche but yeah, the idea is this. I wish I had a simpler answer for you James, but like anything in business, that’s a pretty complex question. If I am working with a company with CLV Boost, ultimately, some of the front end testing will not only be about themes and hypothesis or subject lines, it’s also going to be about timing and testing so we might do once every two days, we might do once every day for the first two weeks and spread it out farther. Those are the things you need to do cohort testing with and really, really study. Most of the time people as you know James, there’s plenty of people listening to this call but if you hadn’t seen the same email sequence for 5 years, and they have never tested frequency one time. Never split tested it against a frequency that’s less frequent or more frequent. You make two or three tests and now you’re making 10% more money for every single human being that kind of goes through that in terms of fund and revenue. How do we let that run for years? Even if that is the bottom line but nobody does it so it is not a very simple thing and involves some testing. Here’s some best practices and this will be enough for people to have take aways James because I don’t want to say it’s complicated. And I would rather give something that is useful. So generally, if you are working in an infinity and or fun niche or space normally your frequency can go higher. When you are working with something that someone would not want to consume in terms of a semi- snackable content on a semi-regular basis, you have to be a little bit more tentative. So if you are a PR agency, I think it is very, very difficult to give PR advice every single day, maybe there is a sub-segment and you’ll want to select that frequency, but it usually really is not the case. One of the businesses that I am in, I still run my own internet marketing agency and we are growing in order to sell so that we can invest in one of the companies here in Cambridge, but we have to raise the box in however way we can so we are going to scale this in the marketing businesses is the martial arts niche and the jujitsu niche that’s where I got my black belt and did the national tournament thing and the martial arts gym which I sold a year ago and those people can get an email every day. Because it is an infinity thing, right? Because it is fun! Like, cool! Martial arts moves! And people like that. If you are in the pet niche, you can probably do the same thing. If you are selling face creams, although beauty might be something that you can be frequent about, no one wants to be reminded of face cream every single day. That by itself is not something that they want parted upon and shoved on their face on a regular basis. So you have to kind of calibrate it by the level of affinity and snack-ability and usefulness or fun-ness of the content. So if people are there and for that kind of fun-ness, then normally your frequency can go up and you really can stay in their radar by doing more of that and generally speaking again, anybody test is when you really are on the opposite end and you are on the utility or you are more of a onetime service or you are something that people do not want to be shoved in their faces, you start to begin more slightly on occasion. Not cutting dry James but I hope that was helpful for you.

James: Yeah absolutely! And I guess the other thing is if you’ve got the technology to support it you can also perhaps allow people to select their own frequency right? If they get too much email, instead of unsubscribing say hey, move from the daily option, would you prefer to have a weekly summary or something to that effect.

Dan: Big time! You are very much correct there and giving people the ability to modulate their own communication is a fantastic option and you use Ontraport if you’re familiar with, Infusion Soft is the same thing. Any of the more robust systems will let people do that.

James: Yeah, well let’s finish up with technology. We’ve mentioned a bunch of systems- you said Infusion Soft, Ontraport, we’ve talked about Hub Spot. There still are a bunch of options out there outweighing one another, what sort of feature should we be looking for in a system to kind of automate our marketing effectively. It is really going to depend on your needs so if you are a pretty simple internet marketing business and you don’t plan on doing a quarter of a million bucks for the next twelve months or whenever else, you can sort of get away with we sending people down one big funnel and when they buy product X they move on to the second tier of offers and when they buy our products on tier 2, we move them to tier 3 and they end up in a general nurture sequence or something. If your business is a very basic level where that is kind of the case, let’s say a newbie internet marketing business or a newbie e-commerce style business, then I kind of recommend to get responses of the world, get constant contact of the world, A weber as well, well Aweber is being pounded with endless DBS attacks. Anybody using that software knows that it is down half the time now because I could not tell you why, I don’t know why there is so much anger in Romania, it might have to do with living conditions or vodka or other factors but either way getting response to other factors, their interface in my opinion is nice. Anyway, short answer – simple business pure e-commerce and internet marketing I would recommend Get Response Recall your content. You want to get more robust, you are selling higher ticket and you’re involving sales guys and dashboards and things like that, stepping into Infusion Soft and Ontroport is usually a good move. If you are more of an enterprises she-bang and we are talking about 50 or more people or hundreds of people, you’ll probably going to need to scale up to a Par dot, an exact market and a heads up so in terms of the software that I at least am familiar with I would recommend, I am by no means and expert on them but I can speak their language so to speak, those are the recommendations I would give based on the level and the complexity of what you are doing. James: Fantastic! Well Dan, I think we should leave it there that has been absolutely been content packed and action packed episode, I’d like to make sure that our listeners can reach out and find you somewhere on the web wherever you are hiding out. Where should they go to to check you out?

Dan: I actually am hiding out right now, I am focusing so much on scaling and selling the XX Marketing that I am like dragging myself out for consulting sessions. In terms of learning a little bit more about CLVBoost.com, again CLV stands for customer lifetime value. We have a lot of white paper that basically goes on a lot of plug and boost which is what we talked about today and sorry if I talk fast, I drink a lot of coffee but I aim to be as positively useful as possible. We have a white paper on four or five case studies and very common mistake is that when your read through it once it is guaranteed like new ideas on holes that you can patch and you can at least get an idea of what we do as well in that way that will be very useful. We also at CLVBoost.com, people who want to reach out to me can go there but I definitely the way in paper in terms of getting an idea of what we do, CLV Boost is the place to go James.

James: Awesome! Well I am going to make this super easy for you listener, that resource and all of the others that Dan mentioned in today’s show, episode 39 of Traffic Jam will be on the episode page along with the full transcript, a link to CLV Boost and I guess a link off to Dan’s social media profiles as well so Dan, once again, thank you for coming in on Traffic Jam, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Dan: James, thank you for having me brother!

This Week’s News in Traffic                            

Okay, so to our first story this week, we head on over to Facebook and the story I picked up from Marketing Land and the story is that Facebook, back in March, announced a change to brand pages which was rolled out initially to a small section of brand pages on Facebook and it is about to get a wider release on June 6^th. In this change to the page design, instead of news feed posts appearing in two side by side columns as they currently do, for brand pages on Facebook, they’ll now appear in one column. Additionally to that, there is also some changes to things like administrative tools and insights which have changed location. Most interestingly, they are adding a snapshot of engagement tricks displayed to the right of the cover photo showing details about ad campaigns, page likes, post reach and notification in one simple dashboard right at the top of the newsfeed for you to see. So if you want to go check out what those changes are I will of course keep a link to that post in this week’s episode page. Just head on over to the post show notes and you’ll find further details there.

To our second story this week, we head on over to Twitter who appear to be testing a feature to encourage more video sharing on their network. The test first reported by Peter Kafga in recode, apparently limited to the iOS app prompts users to post a trailer clip from Seth McFarlan’s upcoming A Million Ways to Die in the West movie when someone starts typing in the hashtag #aMillion. Twitter has long made it clear that tweets with visual elements like pictures or videos perform much, much better on their network. So to make it simpler to add videos to tweets certainly makes sense for Twitter. All of these follows a recent move by Twitter to display videos within the timeline of Twitter itself when you are logged in via the mobile application. So I think the movement towards a more mobile-centric and video-centric platform is certainly a good move by Twitter. For further information on that story, also head on over to the show notes page of Traffic Jam #39.

In other traffic news from elsewhere on the world, well, SEO, they are in disarray again with the roll out of Panda 4.0 on the 21^st of May which apparently has affected some 7% of search results according to reports. If you have low grade content on your site, you may have experienced a drop in your rankings. Also from Google, some interesting developments with remarketing options. If you are retargeting people who have visited your site which may be a good idea, you may want to go out and check those options as well. All links to these stories will be in the episode page for Traffic Jam 39.

Wow! What can I say? Truly a heartfelt thank you to you if you’ve left a review for the show, I would love to get your comments and feedback, and it certainly is helping because this week, we climbed up to #3 in the media and marketing category on iTunes and that is just ahead of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income so that is pretty cool. So a real heartfelt thank you to you, your comments and reviews have really helped the show additional exposure and that is exactly my aim. I want to get this content out to more people. So thank you to you if you have left a review, if you’d still like to do so, the places to go and do it are iTunes and Stitcher. In both places, you just log in, you select a star rating for the show and then you leave a comment for it and as you’ll know if you are a regular listener of the show, I tend to read those out on episodes so if you’d like to get yourself a bit of airtime, that is also pretty cool.

The One Minute Traffic Tip Have you ever wondered why you start to see advertising for a particular website immediately after visiting it and why those ads seem to follow you around the internet for weeks and weeks after? Well remarketing is the answer to that one, I conducted a whole interview on remarketing on episode 15 of Traffic Jam with Justin Brooke but remarketing is so powerful I wanted to mention it again. Here is how it works, using a service like Google Adwords, you can install a tracking cookie on your website and then follow up visitors to your site with tailored advertising as they browse around the internet. Now you can segment those visitors based on action they take on your site so as an example, as they visited a particular product page, you can follow them up with advertising showing the benefits of that particular product in the ad. If perhaps a visitor has added an item to their shopping cart but does not check out, you can entice them back to your site with a discount coupon in your advert. I absolutely love remarketing because it is so damn ninja for one but also it gives so much more leverage to your other traffic sources because it entices back to the site the people that are already interested in your products and services.

Thank you for listening in to Episode 39 of Traffic Jam, I will of course be back next week with another show, remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for a direct link to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode and get the links to all the resources mentioned in today’s show. Also, head on over to veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and of course to learn how I can help you more traffic via the search engines. We end this week’s show with a track chosen by Dan and it’s called Show Me by Kid Ink. Enjoy!