Greg: Dan Faggella is a national Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion and also, a very talented online and offline entrepreneur. Dan his took his passion for martial arts and turned into an online niche with sales exceeding $40,000 per month. Dan is also the founder of CLVboost, an agency dedicated to helping startups and early-stage companies maximize their back-end conversions and e-mail marketing campaigns. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, Dan. Dan: Greg, I’m really happy to be here. This is great. Greg: Excellent. You’ve got quite a wide skill-set. And starting from, I guess, a different background through a lot of Internet marketers. If we dive in there, Dan, you’ve really got an interesting story with getting started as a martial arts instructor in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu space. And then, morphing into the online space. Can you share with us a little bit about sort of how that came about with you getting started with your first product, etc? Dan: Yeah, for sure. So, in terms of my initial transition to online marketing, you sort of put it right. I don’t necessarily know if I had the same sort of start to IM [SP] that a lot of other folks do where they get introduced to ClickBank or something like that. For me, really, I started a martial arts gym in a very small town here in Rhode Island of about 8,000 people, a really tiny place. And I was building this gym because martial arts is really my passion; I was a competitor and a teacher and everything else. And I still am a teacher in a lot of respects. And when I went to graduate school in Pennsylvania, I went to University of Pennsylvania, so I realized Ivy League grad school was going to be really expensive. And at the same time, I was going to be driving back and forth from Pennsylvania to Rhode Island kind of eight hours back and forth. Pretty frantically; I was the only guy doing sales, the only guy doing marketing. So, all of a sudden, I was living on my own paying rent with just sort of teaching classes and private lessons. And I realized, “Man, I’m in such a small place. If I run out of leads, I could actually run out of them.” When you’re in a big metropolitan area, you really can’t necessarily run out of people in New York City. It’s really hard unless have just the most unheard of thing ever. But mixed martial arts in my town is pretty unheard of. And it actually was relatively difficult to scale. So, I had to learn e-mail marketing and really maximizing my ROI from e-mail and keeping any and all leads that I had on rotation; making sure I could get them in for appointments. Triggering phone calls, triggering specific messages. Rotating broadcast offers to really get people in the door. And it’s really from there, actually…I had sort of a pretty rough incident at the academy where we actually had a little bit of a roof collapse in our martial arts gym because our building was really old. And it made me realize, “Man, I should probably have another income stream to pay off this grad school stuff than just this physical gym.” So, we got close to about 100 students at one point there and I had actually sold it to the fellow that owns the place. But before then, I had taken a bunch of seminars that I had taught in a whole bunch of areas, topics around beating bigger opponents. And had used the same really calibrated, really focused dead set e-mail marketing online. And I realized there’s a much bigger audience outside of my tiny town and that business really took off online. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. So, you took things that you were already teaching and then just start recording them on video and [inaudible 00:03:24] and selling them as individual products? Dan: Yeah, that’s exactly it. So, to be honest, Greg, some people… They’ll buy practically a movie set with a back drop and a blue light sort of in the background, a lot of fanciness. I had a camcorder that still had a little tape in it, actually, it was great. I had a little tape in there and I could somehow hook it up to my computer and actually still get the information off of it which was really…that was a miracle in and of itself. And it was just me teaching in my academy. But this is a topic that, for me, I’m particularly passionate about. Being able to use jiu-jitsu to beat bigger and stronger opponents. Because I’m a really small guy; I’m 128 pounds. I’ve done a lot of competitions against folks that are bigger than me. In fact, most everybody I’ve competed against has been bigger than I am. And I really hammered out the curriculum. I taught some great stuff. I laid out my best material in the best format. And it ended up being a pretty darn popular product. And then, we spun that off to 50-plus other courses that I have online of various other martial arts products and things like that. So, yeah. It started off really small, really humble. Greg: Gotcha. And how did you build your audience at that stage? Dan: At the very early stage, I get that question a lot, too… Greg: Because you went from a traditional gym to building an authority site, really. Dan: Which is a totally different ballgame in some respects. Now, the e-mail marketing was much the same. So, e-mail is sort of my deal. That’s what I teach a bunch of, that’s what we do all of our…work with startups with and whatever else and other Internet marketer guys. But at the end of the day, learning how to build a media site was a different deal. So, actually, Greg, one of the things I did early on was I really sought out joint ventures. And I would instruct anyone else in any other kind of IM space to do the same. So, what I needed to do was I needed to find a way to be appealing to joint venture partners, even though I didn’t have an e-mail list. And that’s pretty tough in Internet marketing, Greg, as you know. Greg: I agree. Dan: Sort of like the “How big is your list?” Greg: And they want to do a swap, yeah. Dan: That’s kind of the deal. So, I didn’t actually have a list. What I did is…I was kind of a nerdy UPenn guy. So, I used my skills in writing and my graduate degree in skill development and some modicum of achievement in the sport of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wrote for a lot of the bigger magazines in this space. “MMA SPORTS” Magazine, “Jiu-Jitsu Magazine,” “Jiu-Jitsu Style” in the UK. And then, I used that to become a guest writer on basically whatever site I wanted to. Now, this was a decent amount of writing, Greg, I was probably writing every morning. But here’s the thing. I had 600 people on an e-mail list that had been trickling in over the course of me building my gym and sort of not paying attention to my online business. And instead of going to JVs and saying, “Hey, I have a huge e-mail list. Why don’t you mail for me, I’ll mail for you?” Instead of doing that I said, “Hey, I can get you featured on these six or eight different websites. I can give you back links and feature interview insights and techniques that’ll put you across the entire blogosphere of this martial art. All I ask is that you blank, blank, blank.” So, I needed other poker chips to slide across the table. And the one that I decided to use because it was very cheap for me early. It was my time for writing, really. Get up early in the morning and write some more articles. It was to contribute to all the sites, pump out some great content, do it all by hand and then leverage my trust with those websites to help proliferate other people’s messages and come up with a joint venture swap. And that allowed me to do my first, sort of, JV action and get myself up to about 5,000 subscribers. Greg: Yeah, definitely. That makes it a whole bunch easier to launch additional products, etc. doesn’t it? Once you’ve got that momentum going. How did you go from then, one product into another and decide what you were going to do next? Dan: Yeah, to be honest, I fell for a lot of the pitfalls that I really wouldn’t advise my students to fall into these days. But I’ve just filmed everything and turned everything into a product. And that was actually fine, right? So, there’s nothing wrong with that? But I ended up spending a little bit too much time trying to focus on each and every individual product. Because when I’m teaching every day or every other day, there’s almost always an opportunity to point a camera at what I’m doing. And to file that away into a big hard-drive. And then, to pluck together segments and content that would go together and put together courses. So, that’s what I really did. So, ultimately, I used the time I was already spending. I put a camera on it. And I constructed material after that. But until we really focused in on one particular product and said, “Okay, I’m just going to sell the ever-loving heck out of this one product and build a business around it,” it didn’t really take off. So, I don’t advise other folks to build 50 courses the way that we did. But it’s nice that we did it. But the focus is a lot more valuable early on. Greg: Yeah. That’s interesting you say that. Because I know we’ve worked in-between 200 and 300 different businesses now from our marketing agency days, etc. And when we look across all those different businesses, it really comes back to… Each business has, whether it’s one, two, three or four main products or services than bring in more revenue than everything else. The old 80/20 principle. So, focusing on those things as money pages and then, their funnels behind them. Rather than just promoting everything is a great way to go. Dan: Yeah. Really determining your priorities. There’s businesses like… Who’s that guy? Well, Six Pack Shortcuts is a great example, right? But there’s Mike Geary’s business… I forget. “The Truth About Abs.” Greg: Yeah, “The Truth About Abs.” Dan: It’s like one eBook, right? But badda bing, badda boom, that thing gets the job done in a really big way. And I think that, particularly in the Internet marketing space, it’s likely to be the same in more or less any other business. Like you had said, you have that Pareto principle in action and it really does make a lot of sense to hone in on what works first. Greg: Yeah, absolutely. Dan: And that’s what let us really take off. Greg: Gotcha. And then you’ve got continuity going well. So, continuity can be hard to sell online; I know you had a lot of success in this area. What do you believe that you guys did differently to most, if anything? Dan: It’s tough to say in some respects. I think that continuity in and of itself as an Internet marketing strategy can be tricky, as you have said. To have somebody sign up for something and [inaudible 00:10:13]. Greg: Open-ended [inaudible 00:10:15]. Dan: It’s tough. So, a couple things that we did. Number one, I like to think I’ve done a halfway decent job at leveraging a little bit of story. So, I’m probably the only guy in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu who isn’t necessarily a big name. And by “big name,” I mean multi-time world champion, any fan off the street would ask for an autograph. So, I’m probably the only guy in that niche that actually kind of makes some bucks in the Internet marketing world there. And I think it’s because I’ve leveraged the story of a 128-pound little guy in a little town, goes to study nerdy, Ivy League stuff. And uses his interviews with world champions to structure his own training and go on to win the No-GI Pan-Ams at brown belt and tap out some really big folks and things like that. So, I think that telling that story is actually something that got a lot of people kind of relate to and resonate with what I’ve got going on. Particularly a lot of folks who are a little bit older because they’re also not really strong. I’m definitely not the beefiest guy on the mat, the biggest natural athlete wrestler type. So, a lot of people resonated with that story, we that well. And the other thing, Greg, is we did a good job of mixing and matching our offers. So, instead of saying, “Hey, here’s our monthly program and here’s what’s included,” we always throw in a whole bunch of other material and other bonuses and incentives on top of it. And then, we always find new and cool ways to be able to frame those different sort of front ends. To make them exciting and to make them different and to appeal to different people. So, instead of only getting a tiny fraction of folks on board, because it was only a certain kind of value proposition, we were able to use a whole bunch of different value propositions and different kind of fun bonuses and really unique training courses to bring on different people for the same core continuity program. So, varying that front end with much more than one sales page, but really still one core program is what allowed us to sort of scale it a little bit in this niche that we’re in. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. So, were you putting the continuity as like an up sell behind different front-end offers, etc.? Dan: Yeah. We would do it as an up sell. And then, we would also just do it as one of the many things included in a downloadable package. So, we would have front-end DVDs that would include free trials. And then we’d have binders that we’d mail out where we do the same thing. And it certainly wasn’t everything that we have on the front-end. But a lot of our front-end at least integrates some level of continuity. There’s plenty of stuff people can buy that involves no continuity at all. But we always put together good offers that do involve some level of continuity, but have different kind of fun, cool, different resources on the front-end for people to be able to dig in to. And some people do cancel right away and it’s par for the course, right? Greg: Yeah, gotcha. Dan: Some people will sign right up and they’ll say, “Hey, this stuff is cool, but I don’t have the money right now” or “That wasn’t exactly what I was interested in.” And that’s perfectly fine. It’s part for the course. But there’s, then again, a lot of folks that’ll stick around. And again, I think there are people that sort of can resonate with the story, the underdog story that really was kind of my life in jiu-jitsu. And they’re down to kind of roll with me and sort of learn in the environment that we’ve built for them online. So, the variants of the offers, Greg, I think was pivotal. And then, also being able to really justify why we’re learning this way, why this is a unique course. Again, you need a really good reason to have somebody be willing to pay more than one time. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. You definitely did some clever strategies there and mixing it up so that it was evergreen, not just one-off. It was really clever. I know another thing that you did really well was surveys. It’s well-documented that you used surveys a lot in your marketing. So, what was sort of your game after your game with that survey approach? Was it at all about segmentation? Dan: Yeah. Actually, it really is. So, we do, right now…we switched up a bunch about the survey offer. The survey offer ended with some sort of lower-ticket front-ends that people could get in on, which is relatively common. We have a bunch of people that’ll get in on those sort of lower ticket front-ends. But at the end of the day, really, the biggest payoff is that I can pull up a list of people who are over 40. I can pull up a list of people interested in MMA, interested in self-defense. People that are under 150 pounds. People who have a more traditional game or a more modern game. And I can craft e-mails that are really specific to those interests and segments. So, I don’t have to sell some kind of a back pain reduction eBook that a buddy of mine had created. To my whole list, I can just find the people interested in injury prevention. So, it really, to some extent, prevents a little bit of sort of the vanilla communication burnout. And then, to another extent, again, it really increases that engagement and then allows me to target my offers a lot better. So, surveying for me, Greg, is all about richness in the database. And I talk about this a ton in more or less any business and we can come up with all sorts of great examples. But if we make a very simple example in the info niche – although it’s very much not the only place I’m playing now, if you have 10,000 e-mails for weight loss and you have just 10,000 e-mails, that’s cool. If you have 5,000 e-mails and you have first and last name, the state that they’re in, their current weight, their goal weight, their preferred ways of working out, their not-preferred ways of working out, the major hurdles that have held them back from losing weight, the biggest motivators in their life that will drive them to that next level. If you have those sort of parsed and selected out into categories that I can adhere to and I can clump them together with, I’ll take the 5,000 list all day long. And when it comes to flexing, people like the bigger numbers. And I’m fine with that; I’m down to have my list be as large as I can get it. But at the same time, I don’t just want an e-mail address. Really preferably, I’d like tangible, meaningful data points that allow me to communicate in relevant ways that makes them sort of more interested in what I have to say. And then also allows me to communicate offers to them that they might like. And then, not communicate offers that I know they wouldn’t like. That’s also important, is to make sure I’m sending them the right stuff. Greg: Yeah, that’s awesome. So, you’re really segmenting your lists well. The tricky thing is, how do you get them to fill in the survey? What stage were you introducing that? Dan: There’s actually a few different places. And I haven’t played around a ton with this in terms of my own info business, but there’s a few different ways that this kicks off. So, I have some squeeze pages that the direct thank you page of the squeeze page is survey number one. Where we offer them a whole bunch of special, cool submission courses if they opt in and follow through to this thing, yadda-yadda. And that’s definitely all well and good and it works out really well. But most of the time, people have the tag applied to them, I think it’s on day 11 or something like that. Day 11 of being in the system, they’ll receive their first e-mail about this kind of 100% free bonus that I’m giving out for people that fill out the survey. And then, if they don’t fill that out, they’ll be reminded again in about a week and a half. And if they don’t fill that out, they’ll be reminded again of a different bonus for really the same survey. It’s colored differently, I give them a different freebie, but it’s the same survey. And I’ll remind them of that. And then, if they don’t do it again, I’ll remind them of that. And then, if they don’t do it again, then I’ll just send them survey number two because maybe they just don’t like survey number one, so that’s fine. So, I’ll send them survey number two another, I think, three times or so with a couple different front-end bonuses. So, there’s a subtle rotation of every week and a half or two weeks once people are in the system. They’re being exposed to some cool, free stuff, in exchange for letting me know what the heck their weight class is, what their actual goals are. If they want to be a competitor or a teacher. And this applies to absolutely any business, of course. We’re working right now in sort of the e-mail marketing side of things with a fellow in the day trading space. So, he runs a software company in Canada, in the domain of day trading. He has people of different experience levels. And in jiu-jitsu, people of different goals, they want to be a teacher or a competitor or they just want to get to the next belt level, they’re sort of driven by different things. And in software, people at different skill levels, they’re going to respond to different language. They’re going to understand different terminology about trading or what have you. So, relevance is relevance. And I always fight to have as much of it as I can when I communicate with [followership? 00:18:56]. Greg: Yeah, wow. You’re doing a lot of good stuff there. Which really builds this into the stuff that you’re doing now with CLVboost. So, I know you do a lot of auto responder and automation design. We have spoken about segmentation via the survey model, etc. What other best practices do you really try to build into marketing funnels that you design? Dan: Yeah. So, again, now, it’s cool because I’ve got the almost overwhelming opportunity after the Mixergy interview and whatever else, to kind of get my hands dirty with a whole bunch of different businesses. Everything from learning music online to pain reduction/chiropractic-type material. To physical brick and [inaudible 00:19:39] PT clinics and software companies. And now, I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts and there’s a ton of startups running around and we’re going to be diving into this world pretty hardcore, working with the tech guys. So, I’ve gotten to apply a lot in many ways. I’ll go over Greg, if it’s helpful, maybe a few of the things that really fall flat a lot of the time with general e-mail marketing as sort of the quick fixes that a lot of people might be able to plug in, if that sounds good. Greg: Yeah, that sounds perfect. Dan: Okay, great. So, I run smack dab into these same things time and time again. And they’re really no-brainers. This is just going to be a little bit of clarity and some, again, applied best practices, as you had put it. So, one thing is, I was on a recent interview. And it’s funny because every other interview that I go on after I’m done with it, whoever the interviewer is does something different with e-mail afterwards. I hope that’s a good thing, right? Greg: It is. Because sometimes, you know stuff. But if you’re not doing it and then, to know and not to do is not to know. Dan: It’s just a reminder, you know? It’s got a nice little Johnny Appleseed feel to it. Sort of spreading the love of e-mail marketing and profitability. But one thing is, and this is a recent interview I was on, a fellow had an e-mail sequence to sell an initial front-end product that was about nine e-mails long. And my supposition is almost always that. Whether you’re in info-marketing or any kind of B2C or even in certain B2B instances, our general e-mail front-end sequences have two things that, on the aggregate, are a little bit weak. And the first and most blatant is that they’re often rather short. So, this fellow had nine e-mails. And he switched it to 25 e-mails. And I forget the percentage of lift and I don’t know if he’s crunched all the customer lifetime value numbers. But you write those extra, what is it, 16 e-mails one time and then they sit there. But e-mail 12 and e-mail 17 and e-mail 8, they’re all going to make you bucks, and if you’re pumping thousands of people through a funnel on a monthly basis by golly, that one-time grind, so to speak, of building out those e-mails is big. So, for me, Greg, anytime I’m trying to sell a thing, I like to think about it like multiple swings. So, I think about it like baseball. Now, I’ve never played baseball, but I make analogies that I think other people understand and I think a lot of people understand baseball. Is that in baseball, a lot of people in Internet marketing, they’ll have sort of an education sequence. Maybe they’ll even mention some testimonials when they’re really sophisticated copywriters. And then they’ll have sort of a push-on program, they’ll let people know about a program. And then drop off. And then, maybe they’ll get the every month vanilla newsletter, which we’ll talk about in a second. That’s often not the right time to give up. Napoleon somehow got more than half a million guys over the mountains into Russia and came out of Elba and took over France again. We can get sales and Internet marketing. We don’t have to give up. There’s great examples of not giving up and Internet marketing is a very low courage needed to just not give up. You’re not even doing anything. You’re just writing the e-mails once and let them fly. So, for me, it’s always, “How can I reframe the benefits of this same product and hit it again? How can I add some additional bonuses or tweak the value proposition or tweak the way that I’m explaining it to give it another go? Back it with more testimonials? Bolster it with more educational, great content that people can learn from. Frame it in a different way that shows its real utility and shows some great case studies. And let’s take at least three swings.” So, my supposition is any funnel whose main job is to sell one product. If you don’t have at least three parts of that funnel where you are really thumping for that product, where you’re going for it, then you’re missing out. Because if you’re getting a 12% open rate or something like that, things dwindle over time or what have you, sometimes, people just didn’t see your real push on e-mail. They missed that great testimonial. They didn’t watch the educational video. But e-mail 18, if they do end up watching it and you end up framing it in a different way and there’s a testimonial that relates to them, then bam. That’s when the credit card comes out. So, taking at least three swings, which oftentimes, is going to be at least two dozen e-mails, to mix it in with education and testimonials, is a nice quick fix. Anybody out there with six e-mails, move it to two dozen. Make them good, make them educational, make them great case studies. Convey the value. Convey it in different ways. Present different front-ends. Like I talked about with my continuity, Greg, one of the reasons we sell a lot of it is because more or less, all of our front-end sequences go through multiple offers. They go through binders and DVDs and free downloads and drilling guides and all these other factors that can really bolster the offer. And one thing I don’t do and I don’t condone is making it cheaper as they go along. I don’t really do that. What I’ll do instead is I’ll throw entirely different offers. Sometimes, they’ll be slightly more, slightly less expensive, but they’re entirely different offers. So, it’s not like, “Hey, you’ll pay half price of the guy who opened last week’s e-mail.” I don’t really like doing that because I don’t think it engenders trust and it’s not really a best practice I adhere to. But three swings for any main front-end funnel, two dozen e-mails for anything that means anything to you. That’s really one big one and we can go on and on. But that’s one that almost always is a plug and play fix. Greg: Gotcha. And with those, you’re talking about a combination of giving content and linking off over to the offer as well as just straight up e-mails about the offer? Dan: Yep. So, generally, the way that I do it and it’s not something I’m dogmatic about, but in general, I tend to do this. We could talk about 12 ingredients, but for the sake of this relatively short interview, Greg, we’ll talk about three ingredients. The three ingredients of any auto-responder, in general, in my mind are education, some kind of social proof/testimonials and then explicit calls to action. Which normally are to a sales page of some kind. So, normally, I’m mixing that in a nice sort of a balanced diet, so to speak. But at certain points, during an e-mail funnel, I will be very clear and overt that I do have something to offer. I don’t insult anybody, I don’t tell them they have to buy anything or I’ll be angry with them. But I just say, “Hey, this is this thing. This is how it’s helped other people. By golly, you haven’t gotten in on it yet, but this is what we have to offer” and I’ll really lay it out there. So, I think that a lot of the time, there will be a lot of dribbly e-mails that sort of might get to the point or might have a PS link that links to something. But I’m a big advocate of having some e-mails that are thumpers. That really do the job. Their job is to sell. And to have multiple swings like that. Not one e-mail, not e-mail number six and then, all of a sudden, it’s broadcast land. Give them e-mail six and seven and then go back into mostly education and testimonials. But then, later on, find another value prop, find a great case study and thump it hard. Be in there and stay in the game and you write those e-mails once. And six months later, there’s hardly anybody that doesn’t thank me for it because you collect more money out the back end. Really hard to argue against that. Greg: Yeah, absolutely. And when you’re talking about testimonials, you’re talking about rewriting those as case studies so that it’s social proof of the stuff you’ve done, etc.? Dan: Exactly. And there’s a lot of ways to play this card. So, I’ll give you an example. When I say “social proof,” I actually don’t just mean testimonials. So, in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, when I first started my escape program, I have a program dedicated to escaping inferior positions, we didn’t have any students in the escape program because I just created it. So, what I did initially for “social proof” is… Well, I did have some just general kind words from some world champions and guys that were pretty big names and whatever else. But in addition to that, what I did that I think is arguably as, if not more important, is I found specific competition matches where specific world champions were using some of the strategies that I was talking about. “So, here’s why in this position, you really need to bear this in mind. It’s always important to have a backup plan and to be able to escape in this particular weight. In fact, if you watch blank blank and blank blank in the world championships, they both save themselves from losing a match by using this exact technique.” So, that’s social proof without being an explicit testimonial. Social proof is an ingredient that you can sprinkle on to any product. If it’s a good product, you can find a more than adequate way of doing it, whether or not you have an overt testimonial. So, I always like some element of social proof. It could be outside validation, it could be outside research. It could be an explicit testimonial from a big name, from a small name. Whatever the case may be, it all fits in that big bucket of social proof that’s an inevitable part of a really effective sales funnel. Greg: That’s very clever, because most people just really think about testimonials but you’re talking about using other industry sources, etc., which is excellent. Dan: Yeah. Social proof is social proof. Greg: Just tie it in and make it part of the story like you were talking about. Something we haven’t spoken about, Danny, is the platform to do a lot of this stuff. The tagging, the “If this, then that,” that kind of thing. We use Infusionsoft a lot in our businesses. What do you use from a platform point of view? Dan: I like to be as platform-agnostic as I can be, Greg. In other words, I like to be able to function within the world that I need to function for me to do whatever my job is. But in general, that does involve technology that’ s a little bit more robust. So, I use GetResponse in some capacity in my own business. But I generally won’t use it with a client who, for the most part, are paying me for real functionality. For real segmentation, for real richness in the database. And there’s just some tools that do it and some tools that don’t. So, I do end up functioning a decent amount inside of ONTRAPORT/Infusionsoft and advising people on those technologies, in particular. However, whether it’s Pardot, Marketo, we were inside of a Salesforce account for a toll-free 1-800 number we were doing some copywriting for. And then, every now and again, there was a guy who was still using AWeber. And he doesn’t want to change, he just needs a specific copy project done or analysis kind of crunch form, or what have you and he’ll kind of keep the technology he’s in. But in general, Greg, I’m an ONTRAPORT/Infusionsoft guy, but Marketo, Pardot. Anything that has robustness is really what I use for my own businesses. And it tends to be what I want to use with clients who take ROI seriously from e-mail. Greg: Yeah, that’s great. And that builds into our next point, ROI is really what it’s all about. I know you’re really strong in the increasing customer lifetime value space. What are key areas that you see money being left on the table for a lot of businesses that you work with? Dan: Yeah, completely. I think that one really blatant money on the table shebang for me is anybody who has been a customer of a particular thing maybe one of those – we talk about the Pareto principle, one of your 80/20s. Somebody who’s an 80/20 subscriber, an 80/20 purchaser, whatever the case may be. Who, for whatever reason, is no longer active. If there aren’t automated and/or regular and rigorous methodologies of getting those credi– [no audio from 00:31:11 to 00:31:23]. Greg: Yeah, sorry. I think we cut out for a minute there, Dan. Dan: That’s fine. Where did I leave off? Greg: So, if I we backtrack… What about if we do that question again and I’ll edit it. So, Dan, I know you’re strong in the increasing customer lifetime value space. What are key areas you see money being left on the table for a lot of businesses that you work with? Dan: Yeah, big time. So, one of which is not engaging with past customers and clients. So, folks that… There’s guys at PR agencies that charge just astronomical amounts of money for individual gigs. And then, those customers and clients don’t get any kind of reach-out outside of the quarterly bland vanilla e-mail that everybody else gets. Or there’s folks that have a really core… I’m working with a guy now, again, who’s in the software space in finance, financial software. And he’s had a lot of people that have paid $200 a month and then, all of a sudden, weren’t paying anymore. But they were never talked to. Nobody ever said, “Hey, you paid us about $2,000. Did something happen? And how can we fix this for you?” It’s sort of very much a no-brainer to find a way to set in place either automated [inaudible 00:32:39] which is preferable, or regular and rigorous methodologies of reengaging and re-approaching anybody who has paid you in the past. If there are people who have paid and are no longer paying, what is the automated or what is the regularly executed methodology of reengaging and getting the bucks out again? Because CLV can be lifted rather swiftly, pretty much without exception at least as of yet, in the businesses that we’ve worked with, by reengaging those folks in a more rigorous fashion. So, that’s one really big one. Another one that oftentimes is sort of neglected as well as I had mentioned before, sort of that richness to the database. So, people often think about customer lifetime value in terms of the first 30 and the first 60 days. And by golly, you ought to be increasing it in the first 30 or 60. And some businesses have really long cycles; other people are in eCommerce and it’s much shorter. So, it’s always different business to business. But on the aggregate for us, in various niches and spaces, being able to have a very big bucket of people that you know a whole lot about allows you to continuously rotate really interesting stuff and have folks that haven’t bought in eight months all of a sudden come back to life and spend some money. So, now, you take your overall make per month and your overall number of subscribers who have been in there for six months, 12 months longer. And you’re still milking those guys because you’re giving them offers of value, you’re speaking specifically to them. So, adding richness to the database with surveys or by tracking purchase activity or a link activity or what they’re interested in or where they opted in or all the data points you can find about their business and them as a person allows you to keep up a nice broadcast regimen. That’s something a lot better than the, “Hey, it’s the first of the month. We’re sending you this really boring e-mail kind of communication.” It allows you to, again, rotate a lot more target and efficient offers. So, I think richness to the database is another really big one. Greg: Yeah. So, I think a lot of what you do and what you talk about is definitely relevant. So, the relevant message and the relevant offers to the right people and not hitting everyone with it. Which would make your whole list happier in a way, isn’t it? Because they’re not seeing a whole bunch of stuff that’s not relevant for them. Dan: Yeah, that’s the ideal. The ideal is for it to be a really significant win-win. That your list is happier because you’re providing them with stories, content, learning and product that actually would matter to them and might help them. And then, at the same time, they’re not being exposed to the opposite of that and feeling as though they’re just being bombarded and deciding they’re just going to turn off from you completely. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. Dan: That’s so important for us, Greg. I can’t overstate that. A lot of people, their entire revenue stream month to month is dependent on how many new leads they got in through the door. And don’t get me wrong, traffic is very important to me and conversion on the front-end is very important to me. But I am, week by week, very rigorous and meticulous about how we’re continuously grazing through our existing list because there is always money to be found there, if we’ve nurtured them right and we’ve learned enough about them to stay relevant and stay top of mind in a good way. Greg: Excellent. Spot-on, I couldn’t agree more. Hey, Dan, I know you’re now working with a whole bunch of different businesses, from software business, bricks and mortars, everything in-between. What is it you’re doing with these companies now? Dan: Yeah, so in general at this point again, you’ve got the trajectory. It’s been a little bit of a funky path; Internet marketing, starting off as my own kind of mortar guy, then going online. Essentially, what we realized was the strategy that we were using to sort of scale at a certain level in a martial arts niche and then in the Internet marketing niche and some other places. It ends up really applying just as well, if not a thousand times better to businesses that could really scale. So, whether it’s somebody who could have 20 physical therapy clinics in the United Kingdom and we have a client that’s really getting pretty ambitious there in terms of expansion. Whether it’s a software company that could hypothetically have a million customers. And they could have a lot of the same infrastructure in some respects. A business that really could, unlike a downtown laundromat where you really can’t have that many folks. Those kind of businesses having automated, targeted, hyper-refined and testable e-mail marketing matters even more. So, folks that can get to the seven, eight, nine, ten-figure mark with certain business models, they can leverage the learnings that I’ve used on a really small scale, on a really big scale. So, generally speaking, what we’re doing now is I’m really kind of applying a lot of the very neurotic tendencies and testing methodologies that I’ve used in my own businesses in bigger and more scalable stuff. And a lot of the time, that has to do with sort of what I see as the four key areas of e-mail marketing and marketing automation, which are the collection piece, which just being able to optimize in the front-end and make sure we get people through the door, connection, which has to do with that relevance. How we’re parsing them, how we’re communicating with them. What the frequency is, what the regimen is there. Conversion, which is whether it’s to the phone for an appointment, whether it’s eCommerce, whether it’s engagement in an app or a software platform, whatever the case may be. And then, circulation. So, circulation is that broadcast messaging that the guy who came in six years ago; he’s still sitting in your bucket somewhere and you’re still sending out those circulated broadcast messagings. How can we make that relevant? How could we make that also drive ROI? So, generally, we’ll do an assessment of all of that. And then, we’ll usually pick out two or three things that we just know we can crank out of the park and deliver some dead serious ROI and then just knuckle down into a project. So, it all starts with kind of looking at things holistically though, at least on my end. Greg: Okay, brilliant, really. And what about for people who want to find out more info from you online? Where is the best place to find you on the web? Dan: Yeah, for sure. Anybody who wants get in touch can always get in touch. It’s just Dan@CLVboost.com. CLV stands for “Customer Lifetime Value.” So, CLVboost.com would be the main website as well. On the bottom of the page, there’s also a spot, too. So, we’ve talked about a ton of strategies. But there’s a white paper that goes into some case studies and some really kind of plug and play stuff from what we’ve talked about here today. So, a lot of people might kind of like that. But anybody… Feel free to reach out to me directly and e-mail Dan@CLV. But, yeah, the main site, Greg, the short answer, CLVboost.com. That’s the main spot to find me there. Greg: All right, excellent. And we’ll put that link below this on the blog and also in the magazine so that people can easily find it. Dan, there’s no doubt about it. You’ve definitely got a wide knowledge base and very deep in lots of areas as well. So, thanks for sharing these valuable and timely insights today. Dan: Greg, thank you so much for having me here, brother. Greg: All righty. That’s a wrap, guys. Thanks, see you next time. Cheers, bye. [Background music] Greg: Dan Faggella is a national Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion and also, a very talented online and offline entrepreneur. Dan his took his passion for martial arts and turned into an online niche with sales exceeding $40,000 per month. Dan is also the founder of CLVboost, an agency dedicated to helping startups and early-stage companies maximize their back-end conversions and e-mail marketing campaigns. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, Dan. Dan: Greg, I’m really happy to be here. This is great. Greg: Excellent. You’ve got quite a wide skill-set. And starting from, I guess, a different background through a lot of Internet marketers. If we dive in there, Dan, you’ve really got an interesting story with getting started as a martial arts instructor in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu space. And then, morphing into the online space. Can you share with us a little bit about sort of how that came about with you getting started with your first product, etc? Dan: Yeah, for sure. So, in terms of my initial transition to online marketing, you sort of put it right. I don’t necessarily know if I had the same sort of start to IM [SP] that a lot of other folks do where they get introduced to ClickBank or something like that. For me, really, I started a martial arts gym in a very small town here in Rhode Island of about 8,000 people, a really tiny place. And I was building this gym because martial arts is really my passion; I was a competitor and a teacher and everything else. And I still am a teacher in a lot of respects. And when I went to graduate school in Pennsylvania, I went to University of Pennsylvania, so I realized Ivy League grad school was going to be really expensive. And at the same time, I was going to be driving back and forth from Pennsylvania to Rhode Island kind of eight hours back and forth. Pretty frantically; I was the only guy doing sales, the only guy doing marketing. So, all of a sudden, I was living on my own paying rent with just sort of teaching classes and private lessons. And I realized, “Man, I’m in such a small place. If I run out of leads, I could actually run out of them.” When you’re in a big metropolitan area, you really can’t necessarily run out of people in New York City. It’s really hard unless have just the most unheard of thing ever. But mixed martial arts in my town is pretty unheard of. And it actually was relatively difficult to scale. So, I had to learn e-mail marketing and really maximizing my ROI from e-mail and keeping any and all leads that I had on rotation; making sure I could get them in for appointments. Triggering phone calls, triggering specific messages. Rotating broadcast offers to really get people in the door. And it’s really from there, actually…I had sort of a pretty rough incident at the academy where we actually had a little bit of a roof collapse in our martial arts gym because our building was really old. And it made me realize, “Man, I should probably have another income stream to pay off this grad school stuff than just this physical gym.” So, we got close to about 100 students at one point there and I had actually sold it to the fellow that owns the place. But before then, I had taken a bunch of seminars that I had taught in a whole bunch of areas, topics around beating bigger opponents. And had used the same really calibrated, really focused dead set e-mail marketing online. And I realized there’s a much bigger audience outside of my tiny town and that business really took off online. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. So, you took things that you were already teaching and then just start recording them on video and [inaudible 00:03:24] and selling them as individual products? Dan: Yeah, that’s exactly it. So, to be honest, Greg, some people… They’ll buy practically a movie set with a back drop and a blue light sort of in the background, a lot of fanciness. I had a camcorder that still had a little tape in it, actually, it was great. I had a little tape in there and I could somehow hook it up to my computer and actually still get the information off of it which was really…that was a miracle in and of itself. And it was just me teaching in my academy. But this is a topic that, for me, I’m particularly passionate about. Being able to use jiu-jitsu to beat bigger and stronger opponents. Because I’m a really small guy; I’m 128 pounds. I’ve done a lot of competitions against folks that are bigger than me. In fact, most everybody I’ve competed against has been bigger than I am. And I really hammered out the curriculum. I taught some great stuff. I laid out my best material in the best format. And it ended up being a pretty darn popular product. And then, we spun that off to 50-plus other courses that I have online of various other martial arts products and things like that. So, yeah. It started off really small, really humble. Greg: Gotcha. And how did you build your audience at that stage? Dan: At the very early stage, I get that question a lot, too… Greg: Because you went from a traditional gym to building an authority site, really. Dan: Which is a totally different ballgame in some respects. Now, the e-mail marketing was much the same. So, e-mail is sort of my deal. That’s what I teach a bunch of, that’s what we do all of our…work with startups with and whatever else and other Internet marketer guys. But at the end of the day, learning how to build a media site was a different deal. So, actually, Greg, one of the things I did early on was I really sought out joint ventures. And I would instruct anyone else in any other kind of IM space to do the same. So, what I needed to do was I needed to find a way to be appealing to joint venture partners, even though I didn’t have an e-mail list. And that’s pretty tough in Internet marketing, Greg, as you know. Greg: I agree. Dan: Sort of like the “How big is your list?” Greg: And they want to do a swap, yeah. Dan: That’s kind of the deal. So, I didn’t actually have a list. What I did is…I was kind of a nerdy UPenn guy. So, I used my skills in writing and my graduate degree in skill development and some modicum of achievement in the sport of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wrote for a lot of the bigger magazines in this space. “MMA SPORTS” Magazine, “Jiu-Jitsu Magazine,” “Jiu-Jitsu Style” in the UK. And then, I used that to become a guest writer on basically whatever site I wanted to. Now, this was a decent amount of writing, Greg, I was probably writing every morning. But here’s the thing. I had 600 people on an e-mail list that had been trickling in over the course of me building my gym and sort of not paying attention to my online business. And instead of going to JVs and saying, “Hey, I have a huge e-mail list. Why don’t you mail for me, I’ll mail for you?” Instead of doing that I said, “Hey, I can get you featured on these six or eight different websites. I can give you back links and feature interview insights and techniques that’ll put you across the entire blogosphere of this martial art. All I ask is that you blank, blank, blank.” So, I needed other poker chips to slide across the table. And the one that I decided to use because it was very cheap for me early. It was my time for writing, really. Get up early in the morning and write some more articles. It was to contribute to all the sites, pump out some great content, do it all by hand and then leverage my trust with those websites to help proliferate other people’s messages and come up with a joint venture swap. And that allowed me to do my first, sort of, JV action and get myself up to about 5,000 subscribers. Greg: Yeah, definitely. That makes it a whole bunch easier to launch additional products, etc. doesn’t it? Once you’ve got that momentum going. How did you go from then, one product into another and decide what you were going to do next? Dan: Yeah, to be honest, I fell for a lot of the pitfalls that I really wouldn’t advise my students to fall into these days. But I’ve just filmed everything and turned everything into a product. And that was actually fine, right? So, there’s nothing wrong with that? But I ended up spending a little bit too much time trying to focus on each and every individual product. Because when I’m teaching every day or every other day, there’s almost always an opportunity to point a camera at what I’m doing. And to file that away into a big hard-drive. And then, to pluck together segments and content that would go together and put together courses. So, that’s what I really did. So, ultimately, I used the time I was already spending. I put a camera on it. And I constructed material after that. But until we really focused in on one particular product and said, “Okay, I’m just going to sell the ever-loving heck out of this one product and build a business around it,” it didn’t really take off. So, I don’t advise other folks to build 50 courses the way that we did. But it’s nice that we did it. But the focus is a lot more valuable early on. Greg: Yeah. That’s interesting you say that. Because I know we’ve worked in-between 200 and 300 different businesses now from our marketing agency days, etc. And when we look across all those different businesses, it really comes back to… Each business has, whether it’s one, two, three or four main products or services than bring in more revenue than everything else. The old 80/20 principle. So, focusing on those things as money pages and then, their funnels behind them. Rather than just promoting everything is a great way to go. Dan: Yeah. Really determining your priorities. There’s businesses like… Who’s that guy? Well, Six Pack Shortcuts is a great example, right? But there’s Mike Geary’s business… I forget. “The Truth About Abs.” Greg: Yeah, “The Truth About Abs.” Dan: It’s like one eBook, right? But badda bing, badda boom, that thing gets the job done in a really big way. And I think that, particularly in the Internet marketing space, it’s likely to be the same in more or less any other business. Like you had said, you have that Pareto principle in action and it really does make a lot of sense to hone in on what works first. Greg: Yeah, absolutely. Dan: And that’s what let us really take off. Greg: Gotcha. And then you’ve got continuity going well. So, continuity can be hard to sell online; I know you had a lot of success in this area. What do you believe that you guys did differently to most, if anything? Dan: It’s tough to say in some respects. I think that continuity in and of itself as an Internet marketing strategy can be tricky, as you have said. To have somebody sign up for something and [inaudible 00:10:13]. Greg: Open-ended [inaudible 00:10:15]. Dan: It’s tough. So, a couple things that we did. Number one, I like to think I’ve done a halfway decent job at leveraging a little bit of story. So, I’m probably the only guy in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu who isn’t necessarily a big name. And by “big name,” I mean multi-time world champion, any fan off the street would ask for an autograph. So, I’m probably the only guy in that niche that actually kind of makes some bucks in the Internet marketing world there. And I think it’s because I’ve leveraged the story of a 128-pound little guy in a little town, goes to study nerdy, Ivy League stuff. And uses his interviews with world champions to structure his own training and go on to win the No-GI Pan-Ams at brown belt and tap out some really big folks and things like that. So, I think that telling that story is actually something that got a lot of people kind of relate to and resonate with what I’ve got going on. Particularly a lot of folks who are a little bit older because they’re also not really strong. I’m definitely not the beefiest guy on the mat, the biggest natural athlete wrestler type. So, a lot of people resonated with that story, we that well. And the other thing, Greg, is we did a good job of mixing and matching our offers. So, instead of saying, “Hey, here’s our monthly program and here’s what’s included,” we always throw in a whole bunch of other material and other bonuses and incentives on top of it. And then, we always find new and cool ways to be able to frame those different sort of front ends. To make them exciting and to make them different and to appeal to different people. So, instead of only getting a tiny fraction of folks on board, because it was only a certain kind of value proposition, we were able to use a whole bunch of different value propositions and different kind of fun bonuses and really unique training courses to bring on different people for the same core continuity program. So, varying that front end with much more than one sales page, but really still one core program is what allowed us to sort of scale it a little bit in this niche that we’re in. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. So, were you putting the continuity as like an up sell behind different front-end offers, etc.? Dan: Yeah. We would do it as an up sell. And then, we would also just do it as one of the many things included in a downloadable package. So, we would have front-end DVDs that would include free trials. And then we’d have binders that we’d mail out where we do the same thing. And it certainly wasn’t everything that we have on the front-end. But a lot of our front-end at least integrates some level of continuity. There’s plenty of stuff people can buy that involves no continuity at all. But we always put together good offers that do involve some level of continuity, but have different kind of fun, cool, different resources on the front-end for people to be able to dig in to. And some people do cancel right away and it’s par for the course, right? Greg: Yeah, gotcha. Dan: Some people will sign right up and they’ll say, “Hey, this stuff is cool, but I don’t have the money right now” or “That wasn’t exactly what I was interested in.” And that’s perfectly fine. It’s part for the course. But there’s, then again, a lot of folks that’ll stick around. And again, I think there are people that sort of can resonate with the story, the underdog story that really was kind of my life in jiu-jitsu. And they’re down to kind of roll with me and sort of learn in the environment that we’ve built for them online. So, the variants of the offers, Greg, I think was pivotal. And then, also being able to really justify why we’re learning this way, why this is a unique course. Again, you need a really good reason to have somebody be willing to pay more than one time. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. You definitely did some clever strategies there and mixing it up so that it was evergreen, not just one-off. It was really clever. I know another thing that you did really well was surveys. It’s well-documented that you used surveys a lot in your marketing. So, what was sort of your game after your game with that survey approach? Was it at all about segmentation? Dan: Yeah. Actually, it really is. So, we do, right now…we switched up a bunch about the survey offer. The survey offer ended with some sort of lower-ticket front-ends that people could get in on, which is relatively common. We have a bunch of people that’ll get in on those sort of lower ticket front-ends. But at the end of the day, really, the biggest payoff is that I can pull up a list of people who are over 40. I can pull up a list of people interested in MMA, interested in self-defense. People that are under 150 pounds. People who have a more traditional game or a more modern game. And I can craft e-mails that are really specific to those interests and segments. So, I don’t have to sell some kind of a back pain reduction eBook that a buddy of mine had created. To my whole list, I can just find the people interested in injury prevention. So, it really, to some extent, prevents a little bit of sort of the vanilla communication burnout. And then, to another extent, again, it really increases that engagement and then allows me to target my offers a lot better. So, surveying for me, Greg, is all about richness in the database. And I talk about this a ton in more or less any business and we can come up with all sorts of great examples. But if we make a very simple example in the info niche – although it’s very much not the only place I’m playing now, if you have 10,000 e-mails for weight loss and you have just 10,000 e-mails, that’s cool. If you have 5,000 e-mails and you have first and last name, the state that they’re in, their current weight, their goal weight, their preferred ways of working out, their not-preferred ways of working out, the major hurdles that have held them back from losing weight, the biggest motivators in their life that will drive them to that next level. If you have those sort of parsed and selected out into categories that I can adhere to and I can clump them together with, I’ll take the 5,000 list all day long. And when it comes to flexing, people like the bigger numbers. And I’m fine with that; I’m down to have my list be as large as I can get it. But at the same time, I don’t just want an e-mail address. Really preferably, I’d like tangible, meaningful data points that allow me to communicate in relevant ways that makes them sort of more interested in what I have to say. And then also allows me to communicate offers to them that they might like. And then, not communicate offers that I know they wouldn’t like. That’s also important, is to make sure I’m sending them the right stuff. Greg: Yeah, that’s awesome. So, you’re really segmenting your lists well. The tricky thing is, how do you get them to fill in the survey? What stage were you introducing that? Dan: There’s actually a few different places. And I haven’t played around a ton with this in terms of my own info business, but there’s a few different ways that this kicks off. So, I have some squeeze pages that the direct thank you page of the squeeze page is survey number one. Where we offer them a whole bunch of special, cool submission courses if they opt in and follow through to this thing, yadda-yadda. And that’s definitely all well and good and it works out really well. But most of the time, people have the tag applied to them, I think it’s on day 11 or something like that. Day 11 of being in the system, they’ll receive their first e-mail about this kind of 100% free bonus that I’m giving out for people that fill out the survey. And then, if they don’t fill that out, they’ll be reminded again in about a week and a half. And if they don’t fill that out, they’ll be reminded again of a different bonus for really the same survey. It’s colored differently, I give them a different freebie, but it’s the same survey. And I’ll remind them of that. And then, if they don’t do it again, I’ll remind them of that. And then, if they don’t do it again, then I’ll just send them survey number two because maybe they just don’t like survey number one, so that’s fine. So, I’ll send them survey number two another, I think, three times or so with a couple different front-end bonuses. So, there’s a subtle rotation of every week and a half or two weeks once people are in the system. They’re being exposed to some cool, free stuff, in exchange for letting me know what the heck their weight class is, what their actual goals are. If they want to be a competitor or a teacher. And this applies to absolutely any business, of course. We’re working right now in sort of the e-mail marketing side of things with a fellow in the day trading space. So, he runs a software company in Canada, in the domain of day trading. He has people of different experience levels. And in jiu-jitsu, people of different goals, they want to be a teacher or a competitor or they just want to get to the next belt level, they’re sort of driven by different things. And in software, people at different skill levels, they’re going to respond to different language. They’re going to understand different terminology about trading or what have you. So, relevance is relevance. And I always fight to have as much of it as I can when I communicate with [followership? 00:18:56]. Greg: Yeah, wow. You’re doing a lot of good stuff there. Which really builds this into the stuff that you’re doing now with CLVboost. So, I know you do a lot of auto responder and automation design. We have spoken about segmentation via the survey model, etc. What other best practices do you really try to build into marketing funnels that you design? Dan: Yeah. So, again, now, it’s cool because I’ve got the almost overwhelming opportunity after the Mixergy interview and whatever else, to kind of get my hands dirty with a whole bunch of different businesses. Everything from learning music online to pain reduction/chiropractic-type material. To physical brick and [inaudible 00:19:39] PT clinics and software companies. And now, I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts and there’s a ton of startups running around and we’re going to be diving into this world pretty hardcore, working with the tech guys. So, I’ve gotten to apply a lot in many ways. I’ll go over Greg, if it’s helpful, maybe a few of the things that really fall flat a lot of the time with general e-mail marketing as sort of the quick fixes that a lot of people might be able to plug in, if that sounds good. Greg: Yeah, that sounds perfect. Dan: Okay, great. So, I run smack dab into these same things time and time again. And they’re really no-brainers. This is just going to be a little bit of clarity and some, again, applied best practices, as you had put it. So, one thing is, I was on a recent interview. And it’s funny because every other interview that I go on after I’m done with it, whoever the interviewer is does something different with e-mail afterwards. I hope that’s a good thing, right? Greg: It is. Because sometimes, you know stuff. But if you’re not doing it and then, to know and not to do is not to know. Dan: It’s just a reminder, you know? It’s got a nice little Johnny Appleseed feel to it. Sort of spreading the love of e-mail marketing and profitability. But one thing is, and this is a recent interview I was on, a fellow had an e-mail sequence to sell an initial front-end product that was about nine e-mails long. And my supposition is almost always that. Whether you’re in info-marketing or any kind of B2C or even in certain B2B instances, our general e-mail front-end sequences have two things that, on the aggregate, are a little bit weak. And the first and most blatant is that they’re often rather short. So, this fellow had nine e-mails. And he switched it to 25 e-mails. And I forget the percentage of lift and I don’t know if he’s crunched all the customer lifetime value numbers. But you write those extra, what is it, 16 e-mails one time and then they sit there. But e-mail 12 and e-mail 17 and e-mail 8, they’re all going to make you bucks, and if you’re pumping thousands of people through a funnel on a monthly basis by golly, that one-time grind, so to speak, of building out those e-mails is big. So, for me, Greg, anytime I’m trying to sell a thing, I like to think about it like multiple swings. So, I think about it like baseball. Now, I’ve never played baseball, but I make analogies that I think other people understand and I think a lot of people understand baseball. Is that in baseball, a lot of people in Internet marketing, they’ll have sort of an education sequence. Maybe they’ll even mention some testimonials when they’re really sophisticated copywriters. And then they’ll have sort of a push-on program, they’ll let people know about a program. And then drop off. And then, maybe they’ll get the every month vanilla newsletter, which we’ll talk about in a second. That’s often not the right time to give up. Napoleon somehow got more than half a million guys over the mountains into Russia and came out of Elba and took over France again. We can get sales and Internet marketing. We don’t have to give up. There’s great examples of not giving up and Internet marketing is a very low courage needed to just not give up. You’re not even doing anything. You’re just writing the e-mails once and let them fly. So, for me, it’s always, “How can I reframe the benefits of this same product and hit it again? How can I add some additional bonuses or tweak the value proposition or tweak the way that I’m explaining it to give it another go? Back it with more testimonials? Bolster it with more educational, great content that people can learn from. Frame it in a different way that shows its real utility and shows some great case studies. And let’s take at least three swings.” So, my supposition is any funnel whose main job is to sell one product. If you don’t have at least three parts of that funnel where you are really thumping for that product, where you’re going for it, then you’re missing out. Because if you’re getting a 12% open rate or something like that, things dwindle over time or what have you, sometimes, people just didn’t see your real push on e-mail. They missed that great testimonial. They didn’t watch the educational video. But e-mail 18, if they do end up watching it and you end up framing it in a different way and there’s a testimonial that relates to them, then bam. That’s when the credit card comes out. So, taking at least three swings, which oftentimes, is going to be at least two dozen e-mails, to mix it in with education and testimonials, is a nice quick fix. Anybody out there with six e-mails, move it to two dozen. Make them good, make them educational, make them great case studies. Convey the value. Convey it in different ways. Present different front-ends. Like I talked about with my continuity, Greg, one of the reasons we sell a lot of it is because more or less, all of our front-end sequences go through multiple offers. They go through binders and DVDs and free downloads and drilling guides and all these other factors that can really bolster the offer. And one thing I don’t do and I don’t condone is making it cheaper as they go along. I don’t really do that. What I’ll do instead is I’ll throw entirely different offers. Sometimes, they’ll be slightly more, slightly less expensive, but they’re entirely different offers. So, it’s not like, “Hey, you’ll pay half price of the guy who opened last week’s e-mail.” I don’t really like doing that because I don’t think it engenders trust and it’s not really a best practice I adhere to. But three swings for any main front-end funnel, two dozen e-mails for anything that means anything to you. That’s really one big one and we can go on and on. But that’s one that almost always is a plug and play fix. Greg: Gotcha. And with those, you’re talking about a combination of giving content and linking off over to the offer as well as just straight up e-mails about the offer? Dan: Yep. So, generally, the way that I do it and it’s not something I’m dogmatic about, but in general, I tend to do this. We could talk about 12 ingredients, but for the sake of this relatively short interview, Greg, we’ll talk about three ingredients. The three ingredients of any auto-responder, in general, in my mind are education, some kind of social proof/testimonials and then explicit calls to action. Which normally are to a sales page of some kind. So, normally, I’m mixing that in a nice sort of a balanced diet, so to speak. But at certain points, during an e-mail funnel, I will be very clear and overt that I do have something to offer. I don’t insult anybody, I don’t tell them they have to buy anything or I’ll be angry with them. But I just say, “Hey, this is this thing. This is how it’s helped other people. By golly, you haven’t gotten in on it yet, but this is what we have to offer” and I’ll really lay it out there. So, I think that a lot of the time, there will be a lot of dribbly e-mails that sort of might get to the point or might have a PS link that links to something. But I’m a big advocate of having some e-mails that are thumpers. That really do the job. Their job is to sell. And to have multiple swings like that. Not one e-mail, not e-mail number six and then, all of a sudden, it’s broadcast land. Give them e-mail six and seven and then go back into mostly education and testimonials. But then, later on, find another value prop, find a great case study and thump it hard. Be in there and stay in the game and you write those e-mails once. And six months later, there’s hardly anybody that doesn’t thank me for it because you collect more money out the back end. Really hard to argue against that. Greg: Yeah, absolutely. And when you’re talking about testimonials, you’re talking about rewriting those as case studies so that it’s social proof of the stuff you’ve done, etc.? Dan: Exactly. And there’s a lot of ways to play this card. So, I’ll give you an example. When I say “social proof,” I actually don’t just mean testimonials. So, in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, when I first started my escape program, I have a program dedicated to escaping inferior positions, we didn’t have any students in the escape program because I just created it. So, what I did initially for “social proof” is… Well, I did have some just general kind words from some world champions and guys that were pretty big names and whatever else. But in addition to that, what I did that I think is arguably as, if not more important, is I found specific competition matches where specific world champions were using some of the strategies that I was talking about. “So, here’s why in this position, you really need to bear this in mind. It’s always important to have a backup plan and to be able to escape in this particular weight. In fact, if you watch blank blank and blank blank in the world championships, they both save themselves from losing a match by using this exact technique.” So, that’s social proof without being an explicit testimonial. Social proof is an ingredient that you can sprinkle on to any product. If it’s a good product, you can find a more than adequate way of doing it, whether or not you have an overt testimonial. So, I always like some element of social proof. It could be outside validation, it could be outside research. It could be an explicit testimonial from a big name, from a small name. Whatever the case may be, it all fits in that big bucket of social proof that’s an inevitable part of a really effective sales funnel. Greg: That’s very clever, because most people just really think about testimonials but you’re talking about using other industry sources, etc., which is excellent. Dan: Yeah. Social proof is social proof. Greg: Just tie it in and make it part of the story like you were talking about. Something we haven’t spoken about, Danny, is the platform to do a lot of this stuff. The tagging, the “If this, then that,” that kind of thing. We use Infusionsoft a lot in our businesses. What do you use from a platform point of view? Dan: I like to be as platform-agnostic as I can be, Greg. In other words, I like to be able to function within the world that I need to function for me to do whatever my job is. But in general, that does involve technology that’ s a little bit more robust. So, I use GetResponse in some capacity in my own business. But I generally won’t use it with a client who, for the most part, are paying me for real functionality. For real segmentation, for real richness in the database. And there’s just some tools that do it and some tools that don’t. So, I do end up functioning a decent amount inside of ONTRAPORT/Infusionsoft and advising people on those technologies, in particular. However, whether it’s Pardot, Marketo, we were inside of a Salesforce account for a toll-free 1-800 number we were doing some copywriting for. And then, every now and again, there was a guy who was still using AWeber. And he doesn’t want to change, he just needs a specific copy project done or analysis kind of crunch form, or what have you and he’ll kind of keep the technology he’s in. But in general, Greg, I’m an ONTRAPORT/Infusionsoft guy, but Marketo, Pardot. Anything that has robustness is really what I use for my own businesses. And it tends to be what I want to use with clients who take ROI seriously from e-mail. Greg: Yeah, that’s great. And that builds into our next point, ROI is really what it’s all about. I know you’re really strong in the increasing customer lifetime value space. What are key areas that you see money being left on the table for a lot of businesses that you work with? Dan: Yeah, completely. I think that one really blatant money on the table shebang for me is anybody who has been a customer of a particular thing maybe one of those – we talk about the Pareto principle, one of your 80/20s. Somebody who’s an 80/20 subscriber, an 80/20 purchaser, whatever the case may be. Who, for whatever reason, is no longer active. If there aren’t automated and/or regular and rigorous methodologies of getting those credi– [no audio from 00:31:11 to 00:31:23]. Greg: Yeah, sorry. I think we cut out for a minute there, Dan. Dan: That’s fine. Where did I leave off? Greg: So, if I we backtrack… What about if we do that question again and I’ll edit it. So, Dan, I know you’re strong in the increasing customer lifetime value space. What are key areas you see money being left on the table for a lot of businesses that you work with? Dan: Yeah, big time. So, one of which is not engaging with past customers and clients. So, folks that… There’s guys at PR agencies that charge just astronomical amounts of money for individual gigs. And then, those customers and clients don’t get any kind of reach-out outside of the quarterly bland vanilla e-mail that everybody else gets. Or there’s folks that have a really core… I’m working with a guy now, again, who’s in the software space in finance, financial software. And he’s had a lot of people that have paid $200 a month and then, all of a sudden, weren’t paying anymore. But they were never talked to. Nobody ever said, “Hey, you paid us about $2,000. Did something happen? And how can we fix this for you?” It’s sort of very much a no-brainer to find a way to set in place either automated [inaudible 00:32:39] which is preferable, or regular and rigorous methodologies of reengaging and re-approaching anybody who has paid you in the past. If there are people who have paid and are no longer paying, what is the automated or what is the regularly executed methodology of reengaging and getting the bucks out again? Because CLV can be lifted rather swiftly, pretty much without exception at least as of yet, in the businesses that we’ve worked with, by reengaging those folks in a more rigorous fashion. So, that’s one really big one. Another one that oftentimes is sort of neglected as well as I had mentioned before, sort of that richness to the database. So, people often think about customer lifetime value in terms of the first 30 and the first 60 days. And by golly, you ought to be increasing it in the first 30 or 60. And some businesses have really long cycles; other people are in eCommerce and it’s much shorter. So, it’s always different business to business. But on the aggregate for us, in various niches and spaces, being able to have a very big bucket of people that you know a whole lot about allows you to continuously rotate really interesting stuff and have folks that haven’t bought in eight months all of a sudden come back to life and spend some money. So, now, you take your overall make per month and your overall number of subscribers who have been in there for six months, 12 months longer. And you’re still milking those guys because you’re giving them offers of value, you’re speaking specifically to them. So, adding richness to the database with surveys or by tracking purchase activity or a link activity or what they’re interested in or where they opted in or all the data points you can find about their business and them as a person allows you to keep up a nice broadcast regimen. That’s something a lot better than the, “Hey, it’s the first of the month. We’re sending you this really boring e-mail kind of communication.” It allows you to, again, rotate a lot more target and efficient offers. So, I think richness to the database is another really big one. Greg: Yeah. So, I think a lot of what you do and what you talk about is definitely relevant. So, the relevant message and the relevant offers to the right people and not hitting everyone with it. Which would make your whole list happier in a way, isn’t it? Because they’re not seeing a whole bunch of stuff that’s not relevant for them. Dan: Yeah, that’s the ideal. The ideal is for it to be a really significant win-win. That your list is happier because you’re providing them with stories, content, learning and product that actually would matter to them and might help them. And then, at the same time, they’re not being exposed to the opposite of that and feeling as though they’re just being bombarded and deciding they’re just going to turn off from you completely. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. Dan: That’s so important for us, Greg. I can’t overstate that. A lot of people, their entire revenue stream month to month is dependent on how many new leads they got in through the door. And don’t get me wrong, traffic is very important to me and conversion on the front-end is very important to me. But I am, week by week, very rigorous and meticulous about how we’re continuously grazing through our existing list because there is always money to be found there, if we’ve nurtured them right and we’ve learned enough about them to stay relevant and stay top of mind in a good way. Greg: Excellent. Spot-on, I couldn’t agree more. Hey, Dan, I know you’re now working with a whole bunch of different businesses, from software business, bricks and mortars, everything in-between. What is it you’re doing with these companies now? Dan: Yeah, so in general at this point again, you’ve got the trajectory. It’s been a little bit of a funky path; Internet marketing, starting off as my own kind of mortar guy, then going online. Essentially, what we realized was the strategy that we were using to sort of scale at a certain level in a martial arts niche and then in the Internet marketing niche and some other places. It ends up really applying just as well, if not a thousand times better to businesses that could really scale. So, whether it’s somebody who could have 20 physical therapy clinics in the United Kingdom and we have a client that’s really getting pretty ambitious there in terms of expansion. Whether it’s a software company that could hypothetically have a million customers. And they could have a lot of the same infrastructure in some respects. A business that really could, unlike a downtown laundromat where you really can’t have that many folks. Those kind of businesses having automated, targeted, hyper-refined and testable e-mail marketing matters even more. So, folks that can get to the seven, eight, nine, ten-figure mark with certain business models, they can leverage the learnings that I’ve used on a really small scale, on a really big scale. So, generally speaking, what we’re doing now is I’m really kind of applying a lot of the very neurotic tendencies and testing methodologies that I’ve used in my own businesses in bigger and more scalable stuff. And a lot of the time, that has to do with sort of what I see as the four key areas of e-mail marketing and marketing automation, which are the collection piece, which just being able to optimize in the front-end and make sure we get people through the door, connection, which has to do with that relevance. How we’re parsing them, how we’re communicating with them. What the frequency is, what the regimen is there. Conversion, which is whether it’s to the phone for an appointment, whether it’s eCommerce, whether it’s engagement in an app or a software platform, whatever the case may be. And then, circulation. So, circulation is that broadcast messaging that the guy who came in six years ago; he’s still sitting in your bucket somewhere and you’re still sending out those circulated broadcast messagings. How can we make that relevant? How could we make that also drive ROI? So, generally, we’ll do an assessment of all of that. And then, we’ll usually pick out two or three things that we just know we can crank out of the park and deliver some dead serious ROI and then just knuckle down into a project. So, it all starts with kind of looking at things holistically though, at least on my end. Greg: Okay, brilliant, really. And what about for people who want to find out more info from you online? Where is the best place to find you on the web? Dan: Yeah, for sure. Anybody who wants get in touch can always get in touch. It’s just Dan@CLVboost.com. CLV stands for “Customer Lifetime Value.” So, CLVboost.com would be the main website as well. On the bottom of the page, there’s also a spot, too. So, we’ve talked about a ton of strategies. But there’s a white paper that goes into some case studies and some really kind of plug and play stuff from what we’ve talked about here today. So, a lot of people might kind of like that. But anybody… Feel free to reach out to me directly and e-mail Dan@CLV. But, yeah, the main site, Greg, the short answer, CLVboost.com. That’s the main spot to find me there. Greg: All right, excellent. And we’ll put that link below this on the blog and also in the magazine so that people can easily find it. Dan, there’s no doubt about it. You’ve definitely got a wide knowledge base and very deep in lots of areas as well. So, thanks for sharing these valuable and timely insights today. Dan: Greg, thank you so much for having me here, brother. Greg: All righty. That’s a wrap, guys. Thanks, see you next time. Cheers, bye.
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