In this insightful episode, we dive deep into the world of email courses and lead magnets with the Swiss army knife of email marketing, Daniel Bustamante. Daniel, who has been instrumental in the success of Ship 30 for 30, shares his expertise on creating effective email courses that not only educate but also convert subscribers into paying customers.
As the host, I found Daniel's approach to email marketing refreshing and data-driven. His method of using segmentation to tailor the sales process is a game-changer for anyone looking to improve their email marketing strategy. The discussion on creating urgency and scarcity in digital products was particularly enlightening, as it's a common challenge for creators and marketers alike.
Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting out, this episode is packed with actionable advice on creating email courses that convert. Daniel Bustamante's expertise is a valuable resource for anyone looking to up their email marketing game and drive more sales through lead magnets.
Remember to check out Daniel's new newsletter, Funnel Breakdowns, for more in-depth analysis and tips on email marketing funnels.
That's a wrap for this episode! If you're looking to level up your email marketing and lead magnet strategy, be sure to implement the tactics discussed today. And don't forget to subscribe for more valuable insights in future episodes.
00:00:00 - Email Course Engagement and Segmentation
00:00:13 - Identifying Audience Personas
00:03:02 - The Power of Lead Magnets
00:03:53 - Starting with Lead Magnets and Email Marketing
00:04:47 - Working with a Spouse and Choosing Lead Magnet Topics
00:06:14 - The Structure and Benefits of Email Courses
00:07:27 - Advantages of Email Courses Over Other Lead Magnets
00:08:32 - Training Subscribers to Open Emails
00:09:18 - The Concept of Digital Dust
00:09:24 - Creating Urgency and Trust with Email Courses
00:10:21 - The Role of Newsletters in Email Marketing
00:11:48 - Monetizing Email Courses
00:13:01 - Using Segmentation to Personalize Offers
00:13:08 - The Importance of the Thank You Page
00:15:08 - Personalizing Emails Based on Subscriber Data
00:17:59 - Choosing Topics for Email Courses
00:20:02 - Driving Traffic to Email Courses
00:22:01 - Using Email Courses as Evergreen Assets
00:24:06 - Advanced Segmentation Strategies
00:26:23 - Defining and Personalizing Email Content
00:31:11 - Creating Urgency with Deadline Funnel
00:33:08 - The Length of Email Courses
00:34:18 - The Role of Deadline Funnel in Email Marketing
00:36:15 - Final Tips on Email Courses and Lead Magnets
00:40:02 - Creating Personalized Deadlines for Offers
00:41:35 - Scarcity Tactics in Digital Products
00:43:00 - Pricing Strategies for Offers Post-Email Course
00:44:03 - When to Use Sales Calls in the Funnel
00:47:13 - Where to Find Daniel and Learn More about Email Marketing
Andy:You said that if people click a couple links in the email for us to get the course, the next email early, you know, you basically will send that and they say, Hey, you're super into this. Here's our paid course, right? You kind of do it early. Now, what are some other segmentation that you would recommend?
Daniel:I call it the who question. And it's a question that allows you to identify like the soup audiences or the likes. different type of personas within your bigger arts. The questions that we were asking were, what type of business do you have? Are you an agency owner? Are you a freelancer? Are you a creator? Are you a solopreneur? Then what's your biggest goal for being more productive? Do you want to scale your business and make, I don't know, seven figures?
Andy:been kind of like online Twitter, LinkedIn friends for what, like two, three years now or something. He runs, he's part of the Ship 30 team, which is an amazing program. Highly, highly recommend it for anyone that's wanting to get started on, all my writing. I've taken it before. It actually influenced me to start Brand30. So, amazing program, amazing program. And Daniel's like, you started as like the automation guru there, no? And like, what kind of stuff are you working on right now? Just because you're very savvy, bro. Yeah.
Daniel:Yeah, man. I'm, I'm a Swiss army knife. Uh, well, that's how we, that's how we like to joke internally, but it's funny cause full transparency. When I first, like I've been involved in Shim 3430 in some shape or form from the very, very beginning. So it's been almost three years now. So initially, I participated in the very two original cohorts. And as a student, right, like I really enjoyed it. I had fun. I kind of fell in love with the community and with the whole idea. And from there, I essentially called DM my way into the team. Um, and back then I, like my skillset wasn't nearly close what it is today. Obviously I still have, uh, an infinite thing, a number of things to learn, but like the, the, the ground, the growth has been substantial since then. Uh, but all of this to say that initially I had no clue what Zapier was, what automation was like. I was just winging it and tried to create opportunities for myself. And so it was actually a few months into working with the Ship 30 for 30 guys, Zeki and Cole, that I was essentially forced to start automating things because I didn't have more hours in the day to keep up with all the stuff that we had to do. And so that's how I discovered Zapier. That's how I, for a while, became the Zapier guru because I've started also sharing like the things that I was learning and automating in the business. But yeah, nowadays I like to think of myself as the guy who takes care of everything behind the scenes so that Dickie and Cole can just show up to the live sessions, write content, create content, and teach and share their knowledge, right? And I do everything else. So they can just focus on doing that.
Andy:Hell yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot's going on there. And I want to ask you, like, point of this, I want to get really deep in the lead magnets with you, man. And so, like, I think what caught my eye with you is I think on Twitter you posted something like, oh, I created a lead magnet for a client. I think you mentioned that you charge them like 10 grand to do it. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm like, we need to charge more for distribute, which helps, you know, creators and solopreneurs make lead magnets. You mentioned that that lead magnet I think I created this person like 300k in revenue so far, something like that, right? And so I want to just start from zero with you, man. Like from the very beginning, like why lead magnets? We can get into everything, right? But like, why lead magnets? What made you get started helping build these out on the side for people? What's your take on the best kind of lead magnets? Let's just go deep. I think that'd be great.
Daniel:Awesome. Let's do it. Yeah. I love to geek out on all things like lead magnets and email marketing too. So we're, yeah, like if you're listening to this and you're looking to kind of level up your email marketing game, you're in for a treat. But going back to my point from earlier where we're talking about skills, right? Like in this process, last almost three years of working at Ship Theory for Theory, one of those skills that I've built is not just automation in general, like when it comes to business ops, but also automation in the context of email marketing. And when I combine kind of that skill set and all of that knowledge that I was learning with my interest for copywriting, which was what initially led me to join Ship Theory, that kind of took me on a path to experiment with new things. And so earlier this year, I launched like small agency with my wife as an experiment doing... Oh, amazing, bro, with your wife. We'll get into that too, like dogs with someone with your wife.
Andy:Yeah, I think me and my wife would kill each other, but yeah.
Daniel:Oh, good. It's definitely not for the lighthearted, but... Yeah, no, no. It's a challenge, but yeah. So earlier this year, we launched this agency as an experiment. And since then, we've worked with a couple of interesting clients. It's specialized in, as I said, in creating lead magnets, but also a very specific type of lead magnet, which is email courses. The reason why I picked this type of lead magnet is because I was able to see firsthand how it was such a game changer for Shift 3430. Uh, because essentially, like, obviously Deakink are amazing writers and they have been able to build huge followings and generate a lot of traffic on social media and primarily LinkedIn and Twitter. But then what they do have that a lot of other big creators don't have. It's an engine to turn that attention from social into like actual raving fans paying customers that then join their programs, right? Like in that engine, or at least on the front end, and we can get into the specifics in a minute, but at least on the front end, the front end part of the engine is the email course. Right. So I was able to see firsthand how powerful the system was. Once I knew how to build those systems, thanks to working with them, I started to, you know, give this idea a try. And that's what we've been doing. And luckily we've been able to generate some amazing results for some clients, as you were alluding to earlier. But yeah, that's kind of the backstory.
Andy:Okay. So email course lead magnets. That's interesting. Where do you start with that, bro? Like, how do you start with what to decide as an email course? Let's start there.
Daniel:Like, how do you decide on what to do with, you know, what's perfect. I think that's an amazing question. Although I would, before answering that, I'll take a step, like a one step back, one additional step back and answer the question of why an email course in the first place. Like we, it might be easy to assume, especially for me, because I'm so, so like in the weeds these days, it's, it might be easy to assume that people know what an email course is. So I want to define that first, an email course, right? So an email course is essentially a drip sequence. But what's interesting though, is that you're using a drip sequence in a, and you're combining that with kind of a specific timeframe, like five days, seven days, it's usually a short timeframe. And you're using that drip sequence to. educate people in a very specific topic or problem and help them, like, get a very quick but substantial win, right? Like, help them solve a real-world problem that they're experiencing, right? Like, ideally, only Magnus should do that. Not all of them do, of course, but that's kind of the definition of an email course.
Andy:Now... Yeah, in all... One sec there, I'll butt in. Why I like email courses specifically, I did one, I've done one for one of my courses brand 30. It was on how to do LinkedIn well or something like that, right? And because mine's very LinkedIn specific. And why I like it is because you can daily or every other day or however you do it, like get in front of people, whereas opposed to, opposed to like a regular course where they have to go find their sign in, find their login, and then go in and then figure out what to do. So it seeds it to them every single day and shows up in their inbox, which is amazing. So they can take like one nugget at a time, which is actually how people learn these things, like the best way to learn, right? Versus give me a shit ton of, you know, like stuff and then figure it out on my own. So yeah, just saying from my perspective, why I personally love as the end user of a, of an email drip course, why I like it, right? Cause it's not like, oh, I have to go through three hours of stuff. It's like, no, you'll get this stuff every day for seven days, 14 days, three days, whatever. So it's amazing, bro. It's amazing. Yeah.
Daniel:Totally. Yeah. That's, that's, that's actually, uh, you're answering the question for me. So that was the first reason, like when you compare an email course with other vehicles, like, uh, the classic is like the, the ebook or the PDF. Right. Like it's a bunch of information all in one document. Like it's so overwhelming to do the same thing. I usually download the freebie whenever I'm curious. I see all of the information. I get overwhelmed. Best case scenario, like I skim through it and maybe find a couple of golden nuggets. More often than not, I just click. I just close the file and never open it again. In my computer collecting digital dust.
Andy:Yeah. Oh, digital dust. I love that. Yes, yes. That's good. That's good. I love it.
Daniel:So I think that's the first reason, right? Like the email course by definition makes the content way more digestible compared to other types of lead magnets. I think the other reason that I think makes the email course very powerful is that by making the content digestible and dripping it out in a seven day, five day, 10 day, whatever number of day sequence, you're also training people to open your emails. Right. Compare, compare, to compare, compare that to a weekly newsletter where you're only sending one email per week throughout a long period of time. Basically you're taking way longer to create that, that goodwill and the trust because you're only sending one, one valuable email per week versus the lead magnet. You're sending five, seven, 10 emails. super valuable emails one after another. By the time people finish your email, of course, damn, I don't want to miss any of these emails never again, right?
Andy:Because I already know they're super valuable. Yeah, that's actually a good point. A lot of people right now are tripped up on creating a newsletter. And I will say, newsletters are great. I'm at like $27k, this podcast is going to go out to those $27k and hopefully people are going to be like, wow, let me try email courses. With that though, newsletters are hard. Because it's once a week, it's hard for people to build the habit, once again, of opening your email. If there's one off week, like your newsletter isn't good one week, then the next week you decrease your chances of them opening again. So I do like that email course of building a relationship day by day with high value content quickly. And it's funny because everyone, because it's the new shiny object thing, newsletters, right? It's like a hot thing right now. People are kind of missing other ways to capture emails and build that relationship. The goal of this email course is still to upsell people. Right? Like you're still giving them something free. So I want to get into that with you. Like these email, maybe, maybe we should hold off on that until you think we should talk about something different. But like, but the point of every email is you're still sliding in and up. So like in the PS line or something, right? That's like the obvious thing. Are there other obvious things that like these email, these email courses are providing besides, you know, like the email every day that you see, I mean, it's ultimately goes up. So, but yeah.
Daniel:Definitely, I agree. I think I do have some very strong opinions in terms of how to use emo courses as a way to generate those cells, because that's, as you're saying, that's the holy grail, right? That's what we all ultimately want. Obviously. But let me close it up with the last reason why I think email quotes are very powerful. And that reason or that kind of point, actually, it's a perfect segue to the monetization part. If you download an app, like if you're using a PDF or an ebook or any other type of file as your lead magnet, and let's say you have some or there is a super engaged reader that actually reads your thing and doesn't let the file collect digital dust. their computer. There's no way for you as the creator of the lead magnet to know that that engagement is taking place because that's just a file in someone's computer. But if you're using an email course instead, every click, there's different mechanisms. There's different ways for you to track those people's engagement with your lead magnet and then do segmentation and other fun revenue generating stuff based on that data.
Andy:Let's get into that. Like teach me Daniel, because how do you, so you mentioned segmentation. So like, what are your strategies here?
Daniel:Okay. I'll give you like before getting too in the weeds into segmentation, which we I'm happy to, but I'll give you like an easy example. You don't even need to do segmentation to do some of this stuff. For instance, one thing that we do at Ship Theory that I do with my clients when I build email courses for them is that I usually include a link at the bottom of the email course as a PS almost. I give people the ability to get the next lesson in advance if they want to. It's an automation thing, but from the user perspective, it's very cool because even though you're dripping out the content, some people are also very eager and they want to just binge it. And so when you do something like that, what we do on the backend is we're tracking how many times someone is clicking one of those, give me the next email links. And based on the number of times they are clicking one of those links, they click more than twice, objectively say, okay, this person is very engaged. They are binging the course. And based on that behavior, we then trigger another automation that sends them an email saying, hey, I just noticed you're flying through this. I think you might enjoy this other thing that we created, usually a paid product. And since I see you're so committed to learning this new thing, here's a discount to help you out as a thank you for signing up. Oh, smart. Based on a few clicks, we can objectively separate who's more engaged in the segment, if you will, or in the email list. And then based on those behaviors, offer those people who are more engaged all their special offers that maybe everyone else doesn't get.
Andy:That's pretty genius, man. Because the problem I have, being super hot, I'm just believing it's a chance. I'm like, P.S., here's a link to the paid product. I have no... I'm not tracking the link clicks and then saying like, oh, this person's objectively engaged. So it makes total sense, right? If they're super into it, your odds of getting them to get your paid is probably way higher. Right. And so that's interesting, man. So you're doing that and you're doing all this through ConvertKit, right? Like that's how you're using ConvertKit.
Daniel:Yeah, right. Like I do, I've built it for a couple other clients in using like other systems like Cartra and other like email marketing tools. But ConvertKit is my favorite one is the one that I specialize in. If you want to, we can also like, I think, again, I think this is the perfect segue into monetization and kind of my, my frameworks and opinions there. Do you want to do that?
Andy:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about that. Yeah. I'd love to hear all this.
Daniel:Cool. So at the beginning of the sesh, one of the questions you asked was, okay, how do you even go about deciding what to make the email course about and whatnot? So the reason why I bring this up is because my team and I are very intentional about the topic that we make our email courses about. We basically are strategic about the topic and we pick the topic so that the person who's written it can get a win. We help them solve a problem, but it's not just any kind of problem. It's basically, we basically ask ourselves first, what's the problem that the paid offer that we are eventually trying to plug and get people to buy solves, right? Like what's the value proposition of that offer, paid offer that we're going to eventually pitch people on? And then we kind of reverse engineer the lead magnet based on that, because here's the logic. So imagine a paid offer helps people get a six pack app. Then we ask ourselves, okay, what's an earlier problem that someone who wants to get six-pack abs needs to get solved before they can even worry about that. Because if we can help someone fix or solve that problem, then they're going to trust us. They're going to be thankful and feel kind of you know, the law of reciprocity, they're going to feel compelled to somehow thank us for helping them solve that initial problem. And then if we can, on top of that, offer them the solution to the very next problem that they're going to experience, which is getting those six-pack abs, they're going to be like, damn, of course, I'm going to Obviously, if I have the means to buy your thing, I'll probably buy it. That's the framework. So we kind of take a step back, think about the problem that we solve with our paid offer, right? Like the one we're going to plug at the end of the email course or throughout the email course. We very clearly define and articulate the problem and the benefit of that paid offer. Then based on that, we say, OK, what's the earlier problem that someone needs to solve before even worrying about that so that Right. So we can help them solve that problem. And then whenever they're done with the email course, it's a no brainer for them to then buy our thing. Yeah.
Andy:It's like we actually did this. This is how we scaled Taplio, actually, like a SaaS that we built, which was we actually did use lead magnets to get end users. And so what we did is, for example, Taplio helps you schedule lead LinkedIn posts, basically with automation, right? And AI in the platform to help you generate all these posts, curated posts, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what we did is like, what we noticed is people want to post carousels. And so we were like, oh, we could generate a carousel. We could create a carousel software product, right? And that's our deliveries. We deliver a piece of software and that software product's a free carousel generator. Because guess what? After they're done in a carousel, guess what we did? We said, Hey, you want to schedule this, right? It's the next problem that you're going to have. And Hormozy went into this and his like, uh, lead magnet mastery thing too. Right. Which is like, uh, obviously he articulates it really well, which is part of his superpowers, but Yeah, it was like the problem before the big problem you're trying to solve, right? So what's a problem you can help solve for free that builds that trust level where they're like, Hey, okay, you've got, I look at it as like a series of small yeses, right? When everyone's going to buy your shit, it's like, especially in today's world, the super saturated is how can you become the master of getting a bunch of small yeses from people? That's the way I think about it. And it's like, it could be free email courses, free software products, lead magnets. right, like all this free stuff and I think that's the message that a lot of people. that's not talked about enough, which when we say like, oh, give away your stuff for free, people don't talk about the why enough, right? And the why is because you're trying to build that trust level with people. And it's not like you're gonna give away your main product for free. No, you're giving away a bunch of stuff for free. That way you already have the trust to actually sell something of a monetary value, right? Now, my question to you is, how often should you be creating these different email courses? Right, I guess is a question like,
Daniel:That's a great question. It's actually one of the beautiful things about the email course that if you get it right and you like put the, you know, do you think through and have the right strategy behind it? It's almost like a setting stone asset that, you know, I'll give you a concrete example the ship 30 for 30. Um Email course we haven't really updated that email course in like more than 18 months and it's still printing Right, it works and it's it's evergreen. Um The only thing that we do is whenever we are on a launch period, because by the nature of the product, the product is a cohort-based course, we have different cohort start dates throughout the year. And therefore, we also have specific launch periods throughout the year. Because of the nature of the product, we sometimes when we're doing live FOMO campaigns and stuff like that. We pause the sales component of the email course, if you will, during that period. But the rest of the year, the email course is just working, right? And obviously, we've also created other email courses for other offers and other products that we have also created. But it's really up to you. I would say if you get it right, you can get your email course working forever after a few couple of iterations. And it just works. But also, also, you can also kind of combine that strategy with doing other sort of smaller drops that help you grow your list, funnel more, even more people into the system. And so it continues to run right in general, generate sales.
Andy:Yeah, they'll see that. Like, how do you drive traffic to this thing? Is it, is it just through like social media posts or like how are you getting people to give you their email to get in the course?
Daniel:Yeah. Um, the savvy thing to do, the wise thing to do is we, if you have these super effective asset, instead of, instead of plugging your newsletter, for example, everywhere, do you just focus on driving your traffic from social media to these assets? Right. And then what a lot of people, don't understand is that at the end of the day, obviously not everyone who goes through the email course will buy your paid stuff. And those people who do not buy your paid stuff will just be dripped into your newsletter and they're just going to continue to receive those emails that you publish every week. You're going to continue to nurture them. But So either way, people are going to end up in your email list and getting your newsletters. The difference is if you have the super effective system with a way more value prop on the front end, you're also getting more email subs, right? Because Again, from a user perspective, if you compare the value proposition of a newsletter to an email course that's helping you solve a super specific problem in a super short timeframe compared to, yeah, I'll send you one email per week on this topic that's interesting. Which one converts better? Probably the email course. But yeah, to answer your question, We drive most of our traffic from social to the email course. The email course does its work. And then whoever doesn't buy after going to the email course, we just add those people to our newsletter. And those people continue to be nurtured with our weekly emails until eventually they buy. Nice. Okay. to complement that real quick. And whenever we do like other viral lead magnet drops, we deliver that lead magnet. And then we also say, Hey, by the way, if you don't know, we also have like the super valuable email course that you might be interested in. Here's how to sign up. Right. And we, right. We kind of, once people are in the email list, we can also kind of cross promote those different assets.
Andy:Yeah, right. You have their email now, so you can work on that, which sounds like interesting. So in one thing you mentioned, Daniel, within this was you said that if people click a couple of links in the email course to get the course for the next email early, you know, you basically will send that and then you can say, hey, you're super into this. Here's our paid course. Right. You kind of give it to them early. Now, what are some other segmentation things that y'all are doing? right like that you would recommend because this is this is this is interesting because i i've heard many people talk about this part right like i'm curious to see how you segment i'm glad you ask um because yeah that's you're ready you're ready you're like i'm
Daniel:It's a fascinating topic that I really like to talk about. And I think you're right. Like a lot of people either aren't doing this or if they are, they are not being very loud about it. But the way we do it and the way I do it with my clients is right after someone opts in for one of our email courses, we send them to a thank you page, right? And a little insider baseball thing that a lot of big players don't tell you is your thank you page is super, super valuable real estate because that's in the next, like the immediate next thing that someone sees right after they make that little bet and that little decision of giving you their email, right? And so we leverage that real estate to ask people a couple questions. And we basically include there what I call a segmentation survey. And it doesn't have to be like super fancy. It's just, it's usually three or four questions that I like to ask. The questions are usually, what's your biggest goal in the context, like in your example of brand theory, what's your biggest goal when it comes to building an audience on LinkedIn, right? or your biggest reason for building an audience on LinkedIn. Then the second question is, what's your biggest struggle when it comes to building your audience on LinkedIn? And then the last question that we ask that kind of varies or you have to frame it a little bit differently depending on your paid offer and like the context of the offer. But it's basically, I call it the who question. And it's a question that allows you to identify like the sub audiences or the like different type of personas within your bigger audience. So in your example, it might be like, are you a solopreneur? Are you a SaaS founder? You're trying to identify what type of person that subscriber is. Then we use a very nice tool called RightMessage, shout out to RightMessage, to create the survey, right? And then what RightMessage does that is super handy and convenient is it sends that data from the survey directly to your ConvertKit account or your email marketing account or tool, right? And then you can leverage that data to personalize the emails that you're sending at scale. And so you see, I'll give you an example from one of the client that you referenced earlier in the conversation. So that one of the reasons we've been able to, in my opinion, see such results with this client is because even though he has a very like broad offer, he essentially has a productivity course that teaches a lot of different people how to, you know, reduce the number of hours they're working and make more money in their business. But that's pretty broad, right? Like, and so one of the things that we did to make the whole system more effective was we included this segmentation survey. We capture all of these data by the way, like it's like 50 to 60% of new subscribers who actually take the time to respond to the survey. So we have data from a good chunk of people. And... Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. I was going to ask that. How many of you watch YouTube? Yeah. Real quick to speak to that. The reason why a lot of people feel it out is because of the way we frame it. It's not like, here's a survey, more work to you. No, it's like, and it's genuine, right? Like the way I frame it is, can you please take 30, 60, 90 seconds to answer a few questions, quick questions. And if you do take the time to answer these questions, this will help me know what are you struggling with, get a better sense of how I can better help you, and personalize the content that I send you based on that. It's the framing that's very important. And then different email marketing tools have like different ways of doing this, but what you're doing with this data is essentially adding like dynamic content to each email, right? You're basically adding like logic that says, if person, if the subscriber said X thing on the survey, show them this piece of content, right? This content, or if they didn't say this other thing, show them this other thing. It's basically the same copy, but personalized based on the response to the survey. And we add those snippets, like those personalized snippets throughout the email course, and especially throughout the sales emails that we send folks after the email course. And so when we start to pitch the paid offer, like the email that you get feels like it was made to you. It was written to you because it's like, Oh, great. Again, an example of my client. So the questions that we were asking were, uh, what type of business do you have? Right? Like, and so we, we ask, are you an agency owner? Are you a freelancer? Are you a creator? Are you a solopreneur? Then what's your biggest goal for being more productive, right? Like, do you want to scale your business and like make, I don't know, seven figures? Or do you want to just work less so you can spend more time with your family? Stuff like that, right? And then what's your biggest struggle? Same thing. We gave them like different options based on the data that we had and the struggles and the goals that my client already knew his audience wants to get and solve. And then when we had that data on our end, like on the email marketing tool, and when you read the email that you're receiving, it says like, since you're an agency owner, right, obviously, as long as that person said they're an agency owner, since you're an agency owner, and you're struggling with this, this and this, here's this product that's gonna help you solve exactly the problem that you have. And we are able to position the paid offer that is actually quite broad in the messaging. The offer is actually quite broad. But since we have that data and we have it in our ConvertKit account, we're able to add scale and automatically personalize the messaging based on what they said on the survey. And the email felt like it was written to them.
Andy:Yeah. Which at the end of the day increases your conversion rates on sending out those email offers, right? Interesting. So you're not going in and just blasting everyone in your list and saying, hey, do you want to buy this? You're saying, no, let me get all the founders versus all the salespeople. writing a unique message. Maybe you're just changing a few things, but you're writing a unique message to each of those people. Okay. What do you do with the people that don't fill out the survey?
Daniel:You just, they get a whole nother, I guess they're like the broader, yeah. The standard version of the cell sequence that's by definition, like a little bit more vague and tries to appeal to different, because you're essentially guessing, right? Like what's their biggest problem. What's Right. Yeah. But yeah, that's, that's what we do. But again, like a big, I was very surprised because a lot of people feel, fill out the survey actually.
Andy:So yeah, that's great. I mean, yeah. Cause they've already given you the, again, the small, yes. Right. They've already said yes to this. And so the likelihood of them filling out as much higher, most newsletters, I will say besides my own newsletter, most newsletters are kind of like vanilla. I would say like, cause they're very hard to like, to entertain people for a whole email is very freaking hard. I mean, I've spent over a year trying to perfect this, right? And still, my opening rate's like 40% on some if I'm lucky, right? And it's freaking hard, man. It is not easy. So I feel like we're definitely in a bubble with that. I know this is a whole other topic with the newsletter thing, but I feel like it's going to be the best of the best. We'll open the newsletter.
Daniel:Totally. I agree.
Andy:And then the rest, who knows what's going to happen. Maybe some companies will do it, but that'll fall flat, I think. But I'm not to be pessimist, but it's just having been in the weeds. Not having been in the weeds, it's freaking hard, man. It's like a very hard thing. And this is why I would say like, I would tell people, man, like do an email course first.
Daniel:You know, I think you're right. Like a lot of people underestimate how much work and how much of a skill and a muscle it is to write a newsletter consistently every week for a long period of time, right? Versus writing five, six, seven emails out of the gate that are very good and that will essentially work for you for a long time because it's an automated sequence that as long as people are subscribing, they're going to get it. The way I think about it is imagine you could Imagine you have a company and you have a sales team. Imagine you are able to automate your best salesperson and make it so it's available to work and educate people on your product 24-7, 365. That's essentially what an email course is.
Andy:Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. Now, okay, this brings up another question that I have, which is, how long should the email course be? Seven days, 14 days, 30 days? And it's a depends answer, of course, right? But like, what's kind of your, your reasoning for the different like,
Daniel:I would say it should take as long as you need to help people achieve the outcome or get that win that you're looking to help them achieve or get, right? So going back to the example of the Six Packs app, like if the win, okay, let's pretend that the win that you're helping people achieve is understand how many calories a day they should be eating. Fake example. Right. If you only need two emails to provide a win to people, it should only be two emails. You don't need to do like 10, 20 emails just for the sake of doing 10 or 20 emails. Like it should be as long as you need to in order for you to help that people get that small win that you need for them to then say, okay, I'm ready to solve the next problem. Help me solve that next problem.
Andy:Mm hmm. I love that. I love that. Yeah. It's a really good point. Because when I think email courses, I'm like, yeah, hit him with 20 emails, you know, when people like, but More email is better, right? Like maybe people think that, who knows. But no, that makes sense is like how long it takes to actually get the win, which is interesting. And then that's a good way to position it too, is like, what's the win? What's the big benefit they're going to get when they're done with this? Like, what can they go solve now, right? Which is freaking awesome. Or feel confident in doing, because you may not necessarily solve, you may not, you know, like change their tire on their car, but make them feel more confident to like, go get in the driver's seat, right, of whatever that may be. So, amazing, man. Well, shoot, I like trying to keep this to about 45 minutes, which we're at, but like, what's the other, what's kind of something that we didn't mention about lead, you know, email courses and lead magnets that maybe people should know? Or did we cover it?
Daniel:I think I have one more thing that I'd like to share that I think can be, it's very tactical, but it can also be like very helpful for someone who's trying to implement this stuff. Yes, please, man.
Andy:Cool, let's do it. I'm learning too as we talk.
Daniel:Perfect, let's do it. So, as you know, when you're trying to sell something, no matter what you're trying to sell, one of the most important variables there in the kind of the sales process is how do you create urgency, right? And so, considering that for most people an email course is like this evergreen asset. Remember you asked me, okay, how many of And my answer was like, if you do it right, like this thing can work for you forever, essentially. Now, if it's working forever, the trickier question that maybe more advanced folks ask themselves was, okay, but if it's evergreen and it's working forever and it's essentially, how the hell do I create urgency with the email course so people take me up on my offer of the pay thing, right? And so there is a very powerful tactic that we've been using with this tool called Deadline Funnel, which is, okay, I'll actually, I'll introduce the problem first. So how, okay, you're sending emails, right? Like people sign up for your email course, they receive the whole thing. I think Distributed could be a good example of that because it's a product that anyone can sign up for at any time, right? You have, imagine you have your email course for distribute. I do educate people on the value you provide. You help them solve a quick problem. Then you, Hey, Hey, by the way, I also have these amazing, all of these amazing features. If you want to sign up, here's, here's how to do that. How do you create urgency for a product like that? Especially when, again, anyone can sign up at any time. There is no like, it's not like a cohort, right? When a cohort it's easy to sell. I like to say, because you have the cohort starting on the next date and you're Actually, you're going to close enrollment at some point. You know, people are going to miss out if they don't, if they don't join by X date. Right. You don't have that with, by definition, but with a product like distributor or any other SaaS or like evergreen digital product, you don't have that baked in. So you have to essentially engineer it artificially. And so a good way to do that is to do either expiring discount or an expiring bonus. But the way you make it, you make it actually expire is with this tool called Deadline Funnel. Deadline Funnel creates like a personalized deadline for each subscriber that's going through your sequence. And so Right. So by the time, because if you try to do like, uh, uh, most countdown timers in the, in the, in like most email marketing tools, they're, they're tied to a actual date, right? Like tomorrow, five days from now. And if you're doing an evergreen sequence, you cannot use or cannot rely on those timers or those deadlines because you have people coming in to your email course at different times of the year and the month and the week. Right. So. How do you solve that problem? Using a tool like Deadline Funnel, you can essentially create a personalized deadline for each of your subscribers. Say you subscribe today, by the end of the week, you start to receive the sales emails. And by the time the sales emails start, your personalized deadline starts as well. And before the deadline ends, you're going to receive those emails and the link with the offer, like the special offer that you're giving people are going to work perfectly. But when the deadline ends and you click on those links, you're going to be taken to a page that says, hey, sorry, your offer expired. I was for real.
Andy:This is crazy. This is a cool tool. Yeah. No, it makes sense. Cause it's like, it just basically creates a personalized link, right?
Daniel:That is yeah.
Andy:That's a personalized deadline and interesting. And there's a bunch of stuff behind the scenes going on there, but that makes sense. So, and then when they get to your page, I'm guessing when they click on the link, is that, Is it a personalized page or something that they get on as well? Like when it is not expired or what's that like?
Daniel:You could. That's like more advanced, but in... Right? But in essence, it's like the powerful thing is the timer. Because if you don't have that mechanism, you're basically saying, hey, here's a special discount that will expire in three days. But in reality, the discount will never expire because your email marketing tool doesn't allow you to do that. Or you would have to manually create like coupons and special links for everyone, which is obviously not scalable.
Andy:Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I like this. I'm going to implement this. This is cool. Yeah. It'll say, Hey, we're done. Like, sorry, it doesn't work. Interesting. I love that. Okay. Deadline funnel. Okay. So this is good because urgency and scarcity, right? How do, how do we do that? Um, in the, this plays on the urgency side, right? Like, Hey, you know, sign up before the deadline. How, what are you doing to play on the scarcity side? Right? Which is the obvious like, hey, only 100 spots left is kind of the obvious one. But are there any other tricks that y'all are using or that you've seen work?
Daniel:Yeah, that was a trick, especially like with digital products that are, you know, essentially unlimited and it's kind of hard to find a like genuine real way to do it. And honestly, when if it's not real, and that's one of the reasons why I like Deadline Funnel so much. If it's not real, like sometimes you might lose trust from people because you know, everyone knows like your freaking PDF can be downloaded a million times, right?
Andy:Yeah. Versus like a shirt that you only need limited to a hundred because you can probably make a hundred, right? Like that could be, it's a physical product. Right.
Daniel:So yeah, that's trickier. And I, full transparency, I haven't really found like a good, good, like the equivalent of deadline funnel for scarcity. I haven't found yet, but yeah, like that's my take, you know?
Andy:Yeah, unless you're truly allowing 100 people into a specific cohort. Then yeah, then you can do that. Maybe another way is like, some people do it with like, oh, you know, we only, it's the same play. We're only allowing five clients. We're only allowing 100 people to join the course. We're only, that's the scarcity. Oh, this thing's only going to be available for three months. right? Or we're only going to open this up once and then we don't know when it's going to be open again, this email course, right? That could be it too. But yeah, I agree. It's definitely a lot harder with digital products.
Daniel:What you could do is have some sort of application process where you're essentially saying, okay, this is not for everyone. You need to qualify in order to get access to this product that you could do at scale. Even if it's a digital product, I feel like obviously you might want to, you don't want to do that just for the sake of doing that and create fake, you know, but that could be like a mechanism that you could use if, especially if you're, if you're doing like a higher ticket offer.
Andy:Yeah. Yeah. Higher ticket off. That's interesting. Oh, next question. Everything we talk about always brings up the next question that I think is interesting, which is you have this free email course, right? Like you're pushing people. It's a free email course, lead magnet, let's call it. And then you're pushing people to a paid offer. What are the price differences in the offers that typically you've seen work with an email course? I know Ship 30 is like, what, 800 bucks. From clients you've seen and people you've seen, have you seen it work for things that are more than that, less than that?
Daniel:That's a great question. So yeah, 800 bucks definitely works. Slightly less, I've seen it work with like 200-ish, 400-ish products. That's perfectly fine as well. I would say even easier to sell, right? Because seven-day highly valuable asset, like after this, you know, take my money, right? But I've also seen it work with, so for instance, we have coaching, it's essentially a coaching program, it's a mix of coaching, education, and community. And that's about 5k. And on the front end, we use an email course to educate people on joining the program. So it works. Now, the only kind of price range that I haven't personally experimented with is like below 100 bucks. But I have some potential clients in the works that I might work with soon that have lower ticket products. But I honestly think regardless of the price range of the offer, it can work. Obviously, the higher the price point and high ticket stuff, usually requires a more hands-on and more prolonged sales process. So obviously, in the case of the coaching program that I just mentioned, that's not the only thing we do, that we also do other stuff. We have sales goals and other stuff in place. But on the front end, we still use the same mechanism to build that trust. to educate people and to prime them on joining when they're ready.
Andy:Yeah. So maybe the email course doesn't go straight to the purchase page, it goes to like a landing page, it's like book the call, right? Like with the team because... Yeah. Okay. So the mechanism is still the same, but then where you lead them to from The lead-back mechanism is what changes, is what it sounds like, right? Okay, interesting. What's the level from where you think, based on what you've seen, and this could always range, right, but where things need to start to take a sales call? Is that after like the $800 mark? Is that like in the
Daniel:I would say, based on my experience, I've sold programs up to 2K without any sales goals. Just doing a lot of education, email course, and then a couple of sales emails with personalization and stuff. I would say probably between 2K and 3K, depending on the type of commitment to, that's where you probably need to get more hands on and get people on the phone and talk to them. Although there's also creators who kind of challenge that notion and they sell like higher seeking stuff videos at Google. And that's valid. Personally, I would say between 2K and 3K, you probably need to at least have a phone call with someone to get them to work with you or buy your thing. Cool, man.
Andy:Well, thank you so much, Daniel. People can find you on Twitter, LinkedIn, Daniel Bustamante.
Daniel:If you want to learn more about like email courses and how to level up your email market, like your email marketing funnels, we recently, it's still, you're getting early access if you're listening to this, where it's still like in beta alpha, but we recently launched a newsletter called Funnel Breakdowns. So if you go to funnelbreakdowns.com, you can see my, it's basically me. analyzing other people's funnels, like six-figure and seven-figure creators' funnels, and pointing out both the things they're doing good and the things they could be doing better, so you can learn from those people without, like, doing 20 hours of research like I do. Yeah, yeah.
Andy:Nice. I'm actually gonna go sign up for that. FunnelBreakdowns.com.
Daniel:Hell yeah, that's gonna be awesome, man.
Andy:Because a lot of people do that for, like, big companies, but for creators, it would be interesting too, right? In that whole world.
Daniel:Cool.
Andy:I'll talk to you soon, man. Later, bro.
