Keith Perhac: Welcome again to data beats opinion. I’m here with the owner, founder, owner, everything of LeadShield Brandon Shelton, and we’re talking today about… So Brandon, I’ll let you talk a little bit more about this, but you’ve grown a number of SaaS companies. I believe this is your third or fourth-
Brandon Shelton: Third.
Keith Perhac: Third that you’ve been doing. And A, that’s amazing and B you were telling me about LeadShield and I was like, this is a product that must exist, especially for marketers. And it just kind of blew me away how you had come to essentially scratch your own niche and get that product and build that out. And I’m talking way too much, instead of letting you talk. So I’m going to switch over to you and say, hey, thanks for [inaudible 00:02:34] us.
Brandon Shelton: No problem. Now I appreciate you having me, it’s definitely been a long journey, because I actually had the idea back in like 2015.
Keith Perhac: Oh, wow.
Brandon Shelton: And it just, it was one of those things where it just took a while for me to really decide if I wanted to move forward with it.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Then it’s kind of like I was working on other things at the time as well. So I kind of the way I initially built it, I kind of had to scrap that and then rethink everything through. So here [crosstalk 00:03:03] today and now I have everything good to go.
Keith Perhac: Although I found that, that’s actually the best way is the version of the software that goes out is never the first version. Like that’s just scrapped. Where did it come from though? So this is your third SaaS, this is kind of what you’ve done over and over, and this kind of came out of your own experience. So what kind of brought LeadShield to the frame? Why did you start thinking like I need to build this?
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, so it’s funny. So my first actual real online business where I actually like made consistent money, was I was selling email traffic.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So I was pretty much just building the emailing list, sending out newsletters and affiliate offers. And then I would mix in links to other people’s stuff, and they basically would just pay me for advertisement space. And what was happening is that there was a period of time where there was just a lot of spam signing up on my list.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So I was going through all the email addresses and there was like a lot of random like dot.ru addresses, and just other random addresses where I’m looking at my stats and I’m like, this is really weird. Like there’s a segment of my list that every single email opened the first, every single email address opened the first email, and then didn’t open any other emails after that.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So I’m like, okay, this definitely can’t be something that’s real. So I just grabbed one of the email addresses, put it in an email verification system and it came back as bad. So I’m like, all right, well let me just like do some research and see if I can like use the email verification system, and like have a program I integrate it into my web form, so I can stop them from getting on my list.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So at the time I’m thinking that this is a good idea. So like I got a few recommendations from friends on programmers to use, and I paid him he integrated everything into my web form. I had a WordPress site.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And then next thing you know it’s like my conversion rate dropped from 55% to 45%. And I’m like, wait-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: What’s going on? Like at first I thought it was the traffic sources and then so I was like, let me just turn off this email verification to see if that’s what the problem is. I turn it off and it goes back to normal. So then I’m like, okay, well I know that like 10% of those email addresses aren’t bad. So like why-
Keith Perhac: What’s going on.
Brandon Shelton: Was there such a big… Yeah, what’s going on? So I kind of did more research and looked at how they were actually doing the email verifications. And there’s like all these complicated status codes they send back, and you pretty much are like at the mercy of what… How aggressive or passive that they want to verify the emails. And that’s how like it was done.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So then now I’m like, okay, well in my specific case, I didn’t want to be as aggressive with the verification. I prefer to actually collect the lead, and then after the fact the side like, whether or not that was going to be a bad email address and kind of decide on the degree of aggressiveness.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So once I looked for other solutions, none of them allowed you to control that. So I’m like-
Keith Perhac: And that’s the interesting thing to me, which is that when you think about, oh I just want to get rid of the crappy emails on my list. You think that’s a simple problem, right. That’s going to take me 10 minutes. And because different, like you’re saying different systems return different things. There’s different levels of aggressiveness. There’s so many things that you… There’s no just this is a good email, this is a bad email, right.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, definitely.
Keith Perhac: It’s all degrees and not having any control of that. What I need to block my crappy emails is not the same as what you need or what someone else needs, because I have different business needs.
Brandon Shelton: Exactly.
Keith Perhac: And it just, it compounds on itself because I’ve done the same thing. I was like, oh, I have all these crappy emails, and now I have no one signing up and…
Brandon Shelton: Well, yeah, no, that’s literally the exact reason why I say, I’m like, okay well I can’t find any solutions that do this, maybe I should just build one. So that’s kind of like where I initially came up with the idea. So I’m like, all right. The initial need was like, I want to be able to verify these emails, and then control the aggressiveness or how passive, I want to verify the emails. Because a lot of the emails just come back as an unknown or the system doesn’t even know if it’s valid or not.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: So it’s like even those ones, I want to decide whether or not I want to actually collect them, or if they’re bad email. So that’s kind of like the starting point where I first created LeadShield. Then after that I’m like, okay, well I want… What happens like as I build my list? I don’t want to keep having to like click a button inside of a software to keep pulling the new leads.
Brandon Shelton: Like this should happen automatically. If I had a thousand leads this month or a hundred leads today or whatever, I want those leads to automatically start getting verified. I don’t have to keep going into a software and clicking buttons to pull the new leads. So I’m like, all right, I need that automated too. And then I was like, all right, well huh, this is pretty good. But like I need to actually segment the bad email addresses, so I can figure out what I want to do with them.
Brandon Shelton: So that means I need to either tag them or have them move to a different list, so I can identify like what was verified as bad or good. So like those kind of three things is what I started LeadShield with. I was like, all right, let me look into this to see if I can get this build, and then that’s pretty much how like the foundation of LeadShield started.
Keith Perhac: And the one thing I like about LeadShield is it’s not an all or nothing system where A, you have that granular control, but then on the other side, you’re not just like throwing them out, right. Because the system that you had originally, that you had to develop upon, most people who would try to do it on themselves, they’d be like, oh, I just don’t want it. But that’s not what you want at all, because what if they’re false positives?
Keith Perhac: Like you want to be able to hook it into your system so that your CRM is doing all the processing it does, and then tag them or sort them or filter them, through a system like LeadShield, which I just thought was a really smart way to do it. We built a online course system, like a LMS a long time ago, and we did not do it that way. And that was the stupidest thing we ever did. We were like, oh no, we’re just going to control every-Nope, nope. And so-
Brandon Shelton: Well, it’s funny because the initial version of LeadShield, even though I knew that doing it on a web form was kind of a problem, I initially built it that way. So I’m like, I built it that way to actually go on the web form. And then as I’m like, oh, and I’m like, what am I doing? Like I’m creating the same… Like this is the same problem that I had before where I’m not actually collecting the lead first.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So I was like no, I have to do this a different way like [inaudible 00:09:31] and that’s why I decided all right, let me go on the back end, just collect the bad leads and then let… Like, I don’t want to be deleting in your contacts. If you want to delete those bad emails, that’s fine. You can just go into your CRM, choose segment, like whatever the ones that still has a bad email tag and delete them, but you should be able to decide what you do with that data.
Brandon Shelton: Like some people you might want to take them and put them into a Facebook custom audience and run [inaudible 00:09:55] to see if they’re actually real or not. You might want to put them on a backup autoresponder account and email them off a different IP, just to make sure that they’re bad email address, so that you don’t hurt the email reputation of the main account. So like I don’t know how you want to handle that. So I want to just be able to like, use the power to be able to do that themselves.
Keith Perhac: Right. Which makes you like essentially an invaluable or in disposable part of the marketing funnel, right. So you’re not controlling anything, but you are helping people make these smart decisions of like, just like you’re saying like, okay, we know these emails are bad, let’s re target them, find out if they’re actual people, if they’re actually bad. Let’s send them a nurture sequence, a re-engagement sequence on a lower quality IP, so we don’t F our own IP address-
Brandon Shelton: Exactly.
Keith Perhac: That’s super smart, that’s super smart. So what are some of the kind of crazy slash or if there are any interesting things that you’ve found with the data, and with this whole process? Because one of the things that we’ve talked to people a lot is like, problems that seem simple on the surface, always have some really weird thing that you’re just like, I can’t believe this is a thing I have to deal with. And I’m sure with email addresses there’s a ton of them. Have you run into any that you’re like, why do I have to deal with this?
Brandon Shelton: There isn’t one specific one I can think of that jumps out. I think that one, I think that has surprised me is that the level of variance of email lists that have bad emails, it’s just been a much wider range than I expected.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Like some lists have been only 3% bad email addresses, and then some have been as high as 20%-
Keith Perhac: Even with no cleaning originally.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, so it’s like-
Keith Perhac: Interesting.
Brandon Shelton: I didn’t realize that the range would be that wide because from my own personal experience, I’d never had, like I was always in between that like five to 10% range. So I’m like okay, that’s like a normal spot range. And as more people started verifying emails and just like having a buddy of mine run it through the system, I was like, wow like I didn’t realize that it was this wide of a range. So I think a lot of that too has to go with how people are collecting their leads-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: As far as like if you have like a random WordPress site, well I shouldn’t say random, but if you have like a blog and maybe you’re doing more SEO, I think like you might tend to get more spam leads that way just because you’re like just, there’s a lot of just spiders, a bunch of stuff [inaudible 00:12:22] that, just happen to get on your list. So I think like in those situations you might end up having like a little bit of a higher percentage.
Brandon Shelton: I think if you’re mostly just using [inaudible 00:12:30] and affiliate traffic, you probably going to have a little bit of a lower percentage of bad email addresses. So I think a lot of that just depends on how you’re collecting your leads.
Keith Perhac: I’ve always wondered that like how… Because I had a site that I was working on for a long time, and then one day I just started getting 50 leads a day. And they were all crap, they were all dot.ru. But I was like how did they find me? Like how did they figure this out? Like it was going fine for so long. And then I’ve started standing… I was working with some clients back in the day and we were standing up brand new sites, and we were using drip.
Keith Perhac: And for some reason, there were bots that were sniffing out the drip code, and they were just scanning every website on the planet for that drip code, because they knew they could go right in and get in there. And they started getting the same problem, which was all these bad emails. It’s always been interesting to me. Like you’re saying, some places have 3% and some places have 50%. In my case I was getting like 90% crap emails, because they apparently found me as a good honeypot so.
Brandon Shelton: But it’s funny because bots are actually a much bigger problem online than people really realize. Like 65 of internet… 65% of internet traffic is actual bot chat.
Keith Perhac: What?
Brandon Shelton: It’s crazy. And like I got a lot into this just from when I was working a while with ClickMagick, because it’s part of the feature set of it, was to block bots. So like we were just dealing with that a lot. So I ended up just knowing a lot more about bots than I actually wanted to know. And it’s just something that you run into a lot and people don’t really realize. Like if you actually just think about it, anyone who’s had a WordPress blog, I’m 99.9% sure that you’ve had someone like go to your contact form and sign up and you know for a fact that it was fake.
Keith Perhac: Yeah.
Brandon Shelton: Like that is just going to happen. It’s just like those types of things just happen all the time, whether they’re malicious, or they’re just like a lot of search engines like Google stuff. Like that’s literally what they do, is scan the web with bots so that they can be able to gather more data for the [inaudible 00:14:38].
Keith Perhac: And there are definitely good and bad bots, but if you ever want to have like small conniptions log into your server and watch your like apache or Nginx error logs, and just watch all the bots just trying every single thing they can to hack into your WordPress site. And it just, it’s scary. Like I always get like the PHP admin, the PHP tests, they have this list and they just ping every single site on the internet for it.
Brandon Shelton: That’s definitely, sure. I get those emails all day, because I use security on my site.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And I get those emails all the time. I had to use Google authenticator on my actual site, because like I was getting like 100, 200 a day. And I was like this is ridiculous.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: There’s just so many people trying to hack it to my site.
Keith Perhac: It’s, yeah, it’s just constant. It’s just constant. My favorite one is, so we use Mailgun as our email sender. And there have been some, I don’t know if I would call them smart or just very dedicated. They search and they find people who are on Mailgun, and using us to sending, and then they send emails spoofed from Mailgun with the guy who… There’s a guy at Mailgun who actually emails you with support issues and stuff like that. It’s got a guy’s name.
Keith Perhac: And they’ve spoofed all these emails and it’s like Michael, I can’t remember his name. It’s like Michael says, hey, you need to go check your Mailgun account and check, click here. And I’m like, this seems fishy, but it’s so well done. But if you are on a Mailgun account, you just get hundreds of these. It’s crazy. Like they’re just, they’re smart.
Brandon Shelton: They are, like they definitely are. It’s like one of those things where it’s like Jesus Christ, like you sit down and think of coding these types of things that just fly on the internet.
Keith Perhac: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I’d love to talk a little bit about… So this is your third SaaS you have a track record in being able to build these things, as far as the marketing and the growth goes. When you’re looking at LeadShield as a way you’re growing this, what are you kind of looking at as a growth factor? Like you obviously focused on emails, email is not dead. Email is very effective. They’ve been saying email is dead for the last 10 years.
Brandon Shelton: Seriously.
Keith Perhac: What are kind of your growth strategies that you’re looking at as you’re starting essentially from scratch? I mean, you have knowledge, but you’re starting a new SaaS.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, so that’s actually a really good question. So for LeadShield specifically, I guess I’ll kind of take a step back. From my experiences, every single SaaS is a little bit different, especially depending on what type of market you’re going after. So even from deciding like SaaS is what I want to go forward with, I have like a good sense of knowing exactly what I want as far as… If you’re in an industry that… Like for example, if you want to start a SaaS that you’re trying to get to 100 million.
Brandon Shelton: That’s automatically going to eliminate what types of niches that you can get into that has that type of skill. But if you’re a person that wants maybe more of a lifestyle, you don’t want to have a huge team, you have less employees, then that will significantly change the type of industry you’re in. So like with email verification, I know that’s not going to be a hundred or to $200 million company.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And I know that the audience for LeadShield is small, because I’m specifically targeting people who have at least 10,000 people on their email list, or who are acquiring at least like three to 500 new leads per month.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: So that’s automatically going to shrink the market of people I can go out there. It’s not like every single person who does email marketing is going to have a use for LeadShield.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So knowing that I’d basically, it’s like, all right, well there’s only really, I can choose to either go the content SEO route, I can go pay traffic or I can go for referral route. And for me personally, I’m going to start with referrals and doing some paid traffic stuff. And I know going into it because the market is so small, I’m going to overspend initially. Because I have to be able to have a wide, basically a wide message to people who do email marketing, and then segment off the small people who actually are good fit for LeadShield, and will care about email deliverability.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So going into that, for me it’s good because I know that all right, my expectations already set where I’m going to spend X amount. I don’t care really as much if the cost per lead is super high. I’m spending a lot to acquire customers, because I’m just getting that initial base.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: And then on the backend I’m going to be focusing on turning those customers into advocates, and that’s how I’ll get my warm traffic. And then that’s kind of like, it’s weird because the two previous SaaSes I’ve helped grow, they are complete opposites with how they’ve grown.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So with like ClickMagick it was pretty much all referral, and just people just recommending it to friends-
Keith Perhac: Nice.
Brandon Shelton: And affiliates just coming in and it was very much more product focused, and we focused on just like cutting support times, making sure that people were happy, making sure that the knowledge base tutorial base were extensive, so that people could find the information they were looking for. And that we did do some outreach but not the first year. Like the first year and a half, it was mostly just focused on okay, literally gave away like a hundred accounts, just to use the first initial base.
Brandon Shelton: And then it’s from there it’s like, okay, what do you guys think? Like what features do you want? That type of stuff. And then those people just became advocates without us even asking. And that’s literally how it grew all the way to pass over 10,000 customers, over seven figures, all that stuff.
Brandon Shelton: With GearBubble, we are much more I want to say aggressive with marketing, but we’re much more aggressive than we were with ClickMagick. So with GearBubble it’s a primarily email marketing strategy. I wasn’t with Don who’s the CEO from the beginning, so when I came in we already had like a base of users-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: A large base of users. So from there it was more how do we get more leads and how do we extract the most revenue out of our current base, while still doing it in a way where we’re providing value, and making sure that people are still happy.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: So it’s like trying to find that main balance. And from there we kind of basically just came up with strategy. I gave it a name, I just call it mechanical sequences now, but pretty much what we do is that we plan all of our email marketing strategies on like a quarterly basis. So we’ll look at a 90 day window and we’ll basically say, okay, in these 90 days, like what do we want? Like what are our actual sales promotional stuff? Whether they’re affiliate products or they are internal promotions. And once we decide what we want to actually promote for those 90 days, then we’ll just basically stick them into certain dates to play in that calendar.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Once we do that, now it’s like, all right, well, because we know what we’re promoting, it’s a lot easier for us to now strategize the rest of our email marketing strategy, because if we have a promotion coming up two weeks from now, then we know, okay, well we’re going to have to start pre-selling on this date. And if we want to send content, then the content just needs to be related to whatever we’re promoting.
Keith Perhac: Right, and that’s-
Brandon Shelton: Go ahead.
Keith Perhac: Oh, I was just going to say that’s one thing that I think a lot of people don’t get to be honest, is that because I’ve worked with a lot of people that they’re like, okay, we’re going to do a promotion this week and you don’t… All the content leading up to that promotion, is completely different. And then suddenly it’s like, and now we’re talking about this. And it’s like no, no you’ve got to prime this, pump for like a month or two months. Like the longer you prime the pump, and the softer that ramp up is, the better your promotion is going to be.
Brandon Shelton: Definitely, definitely. I 100% agree it also gives you like structure because a lot of people who don’t… Like, I know a lot of people who actually have large lists that don’t email very often. And the main reason is because one, they either say they don’t have the time or two, they say they don’t know what to say.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So it’s like this pretty much eliminates that, because now it’s not like every day you’re just thinking about all right, what am I going to send? Or you just wake up like I don’t know what to send to my list. Like I don’t want to promote too much, Or I don’t want to send too much content. Like what’s the balance between value and selling and all that stuff. Like this gives you the structure. It’s not like you’re just coming up with it out of thin air.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: So once you kind of plug all that in, like we pretty much, we’ll structure our content around those promotions. And like I pretty much have like a systemized way now where it’s like, I know for whatever price points we’re selling, like how long the sequence needs to be.
Keith Perhac: Oh, that’s great.
Brandon Shelton: So I know like, okay, well, if we’re doing a product that’s $1,000 or more then, we’re probably going to want the card open for at least seven days.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So like the promotional piece of the card itself will be open seven days. And then how much do I want to pre sell before that? So like I might do maybe one or two days of presale emails before that, and then before that will be the content chunk. That’s like three or four days. So then it’s like, that gives me my schedule, but it’s like we might do another weekend. So that’s like, you know, $100 product. So in that case, I know, well the card is only going to be open three days. So in that case the sequence will be a little bit shorter. I might only do one or two days of content-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Then a presale, then roll into that 72 hour sequence close it and then do it that way.
Keith Perhac: And that’s something that you have to find out on a per audience basis. Like what you find there is not going to be the same as what John over here is getting with his list, right?
Brandon Shelton: Exactly.
Keith Perhac: We were working with someone who had a 14 day funnel, because selling the $1,000 product, we were like, no one is going to buy in under 14 days. And we were like, do we know that? And we knocked it down to seven and conversion rate didn’t drop. And we’re like, we can sell this a lot faster and get our money back a lot quicker, and not have to drag this out.
Keith Perhac: And this is one thing that I think was interesting when you were talking about for LeadShield, you don’t care about the cost per acquisition right now, because you’re in that first step. And I think that’s one thing that a lot of people do not realize at the beginning is that, you don’t know what your customer lifetime value is at all.
Keith Perhac: So if you freaked out when you’re spending $30, $50 on a trial, well are people going to be worth $300? Like are you making that money back? At this stage you have no idea because it’s too early to really understand that yet. And that once you get those numbers and understand like, oh anyone who signs up is going to be worth $3,000 over their lifetime. I can spend a lot more money to get one of these customers.
Brandon Shelton: Exactly. I 100% agree with that. Like that was one thing it’s where I think that because of the SaaS industry, there’s like such a [inaudible 00:25:45] it’s like very, very metrics driven. Where it’s like what’s your churn? What’s your retention rate? And what’s your growth rate? And all this different type of stuff. And it’s like, well all of that data really doesn’t matter until you’re in like year two.
Brandon Shelton: Like, not that it’s not important, but whatever you’re looking at, I’m telling you six months end is not going to look the same as it does two years end. So you kind of just have to focus on making sure… Like I look at it like you want to just focus on keeping your customers happy, making sure that your product is great, and then communicating what the great benefits of your products are to your potential customers and in an effective way.
Brandon Shelton: And if you can do those things, then everything else will kind of take care of itself. And then once you kind of get past that year mark, get to the year and a half, two year mark, then you could start looking more deeply into the numbers. But it doesn’t really matter what your lifetime value is, if you can’t even acquire customers because [inaudible 00:26:42] the first place.
Keith Perhac: Right. And I think that you’re exactly right, especially the first two years, and I’ll tell a story about SEGMetrics in a second. But you can’t look at the aggregate data, because you don’t have enough data to look at it in aggregate, right. So in our, I think it was first year and a half, we had a low number of customers, but man they were good customers. And we had like a $2,000, $3,000 a lifetime value per customer, because they stayed on forever.
Keith Perhac: And then we started growing, and we got all these new customers and we got like maybe like 20 a week or 30 a week or I don’t even remember. We got all these new customers and our lifetime value drops like a rock, because we have all these people who have been there for a month. So of course they have no lifetime value. So if we are looking at an aggregate and if those people, if like half of those people churned, then our churn rate would go up.
Keith Perhac: Like we just didn’t have enough people to really make informed decision. So what we need to really be looking at was number of trials coming in, number of people that convert from those trials, and then how long those people stay on. And that should have been our main number of what we’re looking at. Not this overall aggregate of what like metrics or something like that would give us, right.
Keith Perhac: Because we want to be very specific at that early stage when if you have a hundred people on your list and two of them unsubscribe, that’s a 2% unsubscribed right there. That’s not a useful number.
Brandon Shelton: And a key thing that you said, is that you only actually named three KPIs, and that’s like something that is extremely important, especially in the beginning. Like you really don’t want… Three is like the ideal number four like-
Keith Perhac: Pushing it.
Brandon Shelton: You don’t want to go past four. Like once you get to four is like you really shouldn’t be looking at like any other really key metrics, past four metrics.
Keith Perhac: This is something interesting that one of my favorite things about talking with our customers and our clients and everything, is that I’ve been doing analytic stuff for 15 years now. I’ve been doing conversion rate optimization marketing for about a decade now. And one of the things that got me was we were talking about these KPIs and they’re like, well, if I just watched these three KPIs then I’m good, right.
Keith Perhac: I’m like, no, no, no, God no. The three KPIs, the KPIs that you have are telling you is the business improving or declining. The KPIs themselves give you no information about what you should do about your marketing. Because and here’s the thing I said, it’s like, okay, let’s say you have three Facebook ads.
Keith Perhac: You have one that’s doing okay at bringing people in for $10 a week. You have one that’s doing great and bring people in for a dollar lead, and you have one that’s bringing is horrible and it’s a $100 lead. Well, if you look at the KPI, it’s all around that $3 range. So sure, you’re doing great, everything is good.
Keith Perhac: But you have this thing that’s costing you $100 a week, but you can’t see it because the KPIs are averages. You have to go into that to find the outliers. You have to find it hey, this one is doing great focus on that. This one is doing crap, kill it. Like you have to find these outliers, and KPIs measure how the company is doing, but they don’t tell you what to do with your marketing.
Brandon Shelton: I 100% agree with that. That was one of the main reasons why I like SegMetrics, when I was looking into everything. Because I was just like, all right, well I need a baseline of just what I want to quickly look at to know that the business is healthy.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: But then there’s these little micro things that I know at some point you can’t optimize with KPIs.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: Like it’s just not detailed enough information. It’s more of a business healthy.
Keith Perhac: Exactly. And that’s why going back to the LeadShield like the quality of your leads. That’s why when you’re looking at a broadcast or you’re looking at a sequence, and they only show you that top number of number of clicks per email sent. And I’m like who cares? You need the clicks compared to how many emails got opened, right. Because every email you send is a funnel, right.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah.
Keith Perhac: And so the subject line is the first step in the funnel, did they open it? If you have no opened, then you didn’t have a good subject line. The click is how good the body copy is. And just looking at the click to number of sends doesn’t tell you anything. So then you need to go in and say, okay, of the people that didn’t open, oh look, LeadShield is telling me that a third of them are just crap bots, right.
Keith Perhac: And that’s to me that’s where it kind of comes together, which is understanding the people on your list, and being able to say are these good leads or not? Because you can get 10,000 leads from an opt in form from promotion, but are they A real, and B are they ever going to do anything?
Brandon Shelton: I agree. I always look at it like there’s two parts to email mark-Well to effective email marketing. There is getting your emails delivered-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And then there is the actual email marketing strategy.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: And then it’s like well getting it delivered, you have like the technical stuff or like sending up SPF records and checking email sender reputation. And that’s the part of where I wanted to tackle with LeadShield where it’s like, I want to make sure that people are able to easily just click a few buttons, get all their leads verified and not have to worry about that three to 20% of leads that are not doing well, because the main metric that a lot of the email service providers look at is engagement.
Brandon Shelton: So like if you just look at it from a pure like just a logical standpoint, it’s like well engagement, this is based on the surface level is just how many people are opening your emails. Obviously there’s other engagement metrics-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: But like the first metric that is easy to understand. And if the email is bad, they can’t open the email-
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: So that’s automatically going to hurt your reputation. So it’s like all right LeadShied helps tackle that. And it’s like once LeadShield takes care of that, now you can just focus on the email strategy part like, you’re saying where it’s like all right, subject line-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Making sure that the people who are real are opening the emails. Then from there it’s like, all right, how do I actually direct them to where I want them to go? Like getting them to actually enticed to click on my emails to send them to, whether it’s content promotions or whatever. And then it’s like you can kind of focus on that other piece of it.
Keith Perhac: And it’s frustrating because you’re exactly right. The email providers are using your open rates as a decision of how high quality your sending is going to be, and which IP addresses they’re going to put you on and how they… Because they need to protect their IP addresses because there’s so many spammers-
Brandon Shelton: That’s all they care about.
Keith Perhac: That’s all they care about, is predicting how good their sending reputation is. And so if you have a lot of emails that are the dot.ru or crap emails and stuff, and they start saying, hey, you have an 11% open rate. They’re going to put you on that lower tier, which means even if you clean it up, if you’re still just blasting, you’re still going to stay on that 11 tier.
Keith Perhac: And it’s funny because the people who are good get better. If you have a high open rate, you’re going to get higher tiered, which means you have better deliverability, which means you’re going to go up more, you go up more. But on the converse, if you are not cleaning that list, if you’re not looking at the quality of your leads, you’re just going down at each time. And you’re going from, oh, I had a good list to suddenly I’m only getting 5% open rates.
Keith Perhac: And they don’t tell you that the deliverability or the engagement or whatever is bad. You don’t know because then spammers could use that to stop the… To spam better, right. And so they’re not giving you that transparency, but you just see your engagement levels just drop like a rock.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, it’s crazy. I remember when I like first was building LeadShield. I was looking at a bunch of just different email data reports, and [inaudible 00:34:51] had ran a report they like they ran a report through like billions of emails that they analyzed. And through the study it was email addresses that have been on your… that have been on the emailing list. Like this is across a whole bunch of different industries for three months or longer, 47% of them are inactive across all the data set that they saw.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And then what’s even crazier is that, email addresses that were on the list for three months or less. So like actually your actual newer leads that actually jumped up to 66%.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So I was like in my head I was like, wait, this doesn’t even make sense. Because I’m like well like shouldn’t fresh leads be more active than leads that had been on your list longer? And then I started really thinking about it, I was like, well, I guess like if you kind of think about it when you first go acquire a lead, your first few emails, the open lead is like if you have a sequence is always super high.
Keith Perhac: Yeah.
Brandon Shelton: And each email as you go along gets lower and lower and lower. But then what happens is that they pretty much decide if they’re going to become a fan of yours and stay, or they’re just like, ah, like I got what I wanted, or I’m not really feeling what you’re sending. And then they stop. So I was like, I guess in that sense it makes sense because if someone has been on your list for at least three months, they actually know you better than a new lead. So it would make sense that if they stayed around that long, that there’s going to be a higher percentage of them that actually [inaudible 00:36:10] emails
Keith Perhac: Yeah, exactly. I mean if someone… There was a tweet came back up somewhere that I had tweeted a long time ago from last black Friday. I was like, there should be a name for the after black Friday when you just unsubscribe from everything. Because everyone is sending all these emails, and you’re just like F you, F you, F you.
Keith Perhac: But you’re exactly right. The people who I am actually interested in following and the people that I want to learn from, I’m going to stay on their list, and I’m going to continue opening those emails. It’s the junk crap that comes in after like three months. I’m like, I just can’t deal with you emailing me anymore and unsubscribe, or just throw them all to trash or spam, right. There’s something I was going to mention about oh, so this is actually something that we saw with SegMetrics, which someone had recommended.
Keith Perhac: He said in the first three days I send out a welcome email, a story about myself, or about the company and myself about why we’re doing what we’re doing. And then like a, hey, let’s get on a call. And he said, that just rocketed my conversion up, and we tried it and it did. And it’s exactly what you’re saying, that people are engaged for about three days, maybe a week, and then they make that decision of is the content good enough or not? So if you’re stringing out this engagement and you’re like saying, oh, I’m going to wait a week until I emailed them the second time, they’ve already forgotten about you, right.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, seriously.
Keith Perhac: You have this very short window to for a cold lead to get them in and say, hey, this is who we are, this is what we’re doing, and this is our value proposition.
Brandon Shelton: And I think back too like, there’s a lot of times where like, someone will run a campaign and it’s just, they have a very compelling lead magnet. Whether it’s like a PDF, just something I asked it to a free tool, just something that I’m like, all right, I’ll give my email address for that. And I basically opted in to get whatever That lead magnet was-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And then I literally won’t open any of their emails after that. So it’s like I’m joining their list, I download whatever I want, I get my login credentials and then-
Keith Perhac: Then I’m gone.
Brandon Shelton: I just never… Yeah, I’m gone. I never respond to any of their emails. So it’s like those type of situations happen as well, where you’re not dealing with those type of people. You’re not like having like some sort automation set up, where you’re looking at people who are not opening emails over like a 30, 60, or 90 day period. You’re not getting rid of the invalid emails like those components, is such a large percentage of your list. It’s actually larger than the percentage of people that do engage.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: So if you can segment those people off, it’ll also help you too from a metric standpoint, where I love when people always like ask like, oh like how much do you make per subscriber? And it’s like well, if you have a list of 50,000 people and only 15,000 of them have opened your email in the past six months. Like your actual earnings per subscriber shouldn’t be based off of 50,000.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: It should be based off the 15,000. So you could be making a lot more per subscriber than you think. But you don’t actually know, because you’re not calculating it based of people who are actually interacting with your emails.
Keith Perhac: Right. And that’s something that we’re talking about that engagement in lead quality, you really have to look at. And I’ve seen people who have much more or less, I’ve seen people with a 10,000, 20,000 person list, make a good 30 to $50 per subscriber when they do a launch, because everyone on that list, there’s no general person on this list.
Keith Perhac: Everyone on that list is there because they love being on that list, and they’re getting value out of it. So when you do so, and then I see people with a million, 2 million people who are getting less than a dollar a week, it’s like 20 cents, right. And it’s just I found this the same with the consulting agencies. It’s like do you want to do it at scale and do a mass market blast? Or do you want to be very specific about who you are talking about and build that rabid fan base?
Brandon Shelton: I think some of it is just a little bit time consuming to build out the… To be able to do the segment thing-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: So people just get into a habit of well you know, I built my list for this thing and once I kind of get over these number of contacts, I’m just going to keep sending to everyone. Like I don’t want to go through the process of-
Keith Perhac: Of cleaning up.
Brandon Shelton: Segmenting out… Of cleaning up things just because well I’m still making money, so I must not doing anything wrong. And it’s like if you clean up the list, you actually realize you’re making even more money. And if really, if you wanted to. If you decide that you do want to delete those contacts after you like run it through a re engagement process or email them from like a separate IP or something. Like you actually will save money-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Because now you’ll be paying for a lot less contacts and emails send in your CRM.
Keith Perhac: And it’s all about… And that’s going back to LeadShield again. That’s why I like the tagging. That’s why I like the analytics and the not just blocking them, but understanding how those email addresses are performing. We did a promotion and they were like, hey, do you want to block all the Gmail and all the Hotmail and all the free things that come in?
Keith Perhac: I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know how they perform. So I did a scan of all of our customers and lead values and stuff and who engages, and our Gmail accounts actually engage a lot. Because what happens is someone signs up with their Gmail account and then they go through the engagement. They’re really engaged and then they sign up with their business account, right.
Keith Perhac: But we’re able to connect them together. I’m like, if I had just filtered out all of these email accounts, I would lose so much margin right here, because I think that, oh, free emails. But that’s my audience. We’ve seen it on other ones where if you have a Yahoo or God forbid an AOL account, like just burn it with fire.
Brandon Shelton: My actual Hotmail… The first email address I ever had my Hotmail one technically it’s still active now. And I still get emails to it all the time. It’s like I literally haven’t checked the email address for like five years.
Keith Perhac: It’s all security alerts. So I have a Hotmail account from 98, maybe 99. And it’s all just security alerts at this point. It’s like so and so requested a password reset. I’m like, okay, this is [inaudible 00:42:29]. But it’s very interesting to me how different everyone’s audiences and how creating a blanket rule of this is a good email, this is bad, is A not possible, and B makes it so much more difficult to market correctly.
Keith Perhac: To just take a general idea and say like, this is what you should do and be able to apply that, because you don’t know. You don’t know until you test it out on your list. Going back to the Yahoo, I don’t think anyone on my list is a valuable Yahoo email user. But I have people I’ve worked with that they focus specifically on older, like 60 to 80 year old women, and nine times out of 10, that is a Yahoo address. And that’s their main source of revenue, right.
Keith Perhac: And it’s like those are their best customers. And so the more you can understand and the more, with something like LeadShield where you can customize exactly who’s coming in and be able to understand everyone is coming in, just makes it so much more valuable I think.
Brandon Shelton: It’s weird too because with… I think I just [inaudible 00:43:46] want to say with LeadShield, what was I about to say? I think I just lost my train of thought.
Keith Perhac: It’s been one of those days. It’s the end of the week.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, definitely. I’m trying to think, oh, so when you’re verifying email addresses one thing too that people don’t realize like how you were talking about the false positives earlier.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: It’s like, well, if you just look at it, we like especially as marketers or people who are business owners. Anyone that has a site, your site has been done before.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And there’s been times on the internet where like Amazon S3 went down where it’s like they power like half the [crosstalk 00:44:27]-
Keith Perhac: Everything.
Brandon Shelton: Or something. So like all these [crosstalk 00:44:29] just stopped working.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And imagine like if you’re running like a Facebook campaign or a YouTube ads campaign that day, and all of the email addresses that are associated with anything that was on Amazon S3. If you get it verified, like say you have it like how I used to have it on the web form level-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Because I actually know people who still do this because they think it’s the… They feel it’s the best way. And it’s like if you put this on the web form level, that one day when the… Or the few hours when the internet is down. Every single email address that goes on your [inaudible 00:45:02], the majority of them are going to return as bad, because the servers on them are bad. So the system won’t be able to ping the SMTP, and they’ll basically say, oh well the domain is down so.
Brandon Shelton: Like that means that this email address must not be working. And it’s like that’s like a whole day of leads that you are actually paying traffic for, that you’re not going to collect.
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: Because you put it on the web form instead of allowing the leads to come in first and then verifying it. And then deciding what you want to do with it?
Keith Perhac: Yeah, and this is something I think that especially nontechnical people don’t really get about the internet. They’re like, oh, the internet is down. How hard can it be when if you talk to people who deal with servers, or deal with that type of stuff, they are amazed that the internet works at all. There are so many things that can go wrong. Just a single frame of this interview goes through so many different touchpoints, talks to so many different servers.
Keith Perhac: There could be a blip in like a cable could get bent, like there could be a sunspot. There’s so many things that can go wrong at any given second, and not even getting into the bigger email side of it. And when people are purposely trying to do something, I was just talking with someone. We were talking about credit cards and he’s like these credit cards, they fail and then it goes through again and it passes, what’s going on there? Why do we have all these failed [inaudible 00:46:21]?
Keith Perhac: I was like, because banks suck and the internet suck. It’s really what it is. It’s just, it’s mind blowing that the internet works first of all. And to then trust, okay, the internet will work at this specific second when someone is trying to opt in, and if it doesn’t, we’re just going to throw them out, right. Is mind blowing.
Brandon Shelton: That’s like… When you put it that way, it’s such a great point, but it’s like something that you don’t ever really think about. And even for myself, it’s like I only know this now through experience from doing it, but if I like didn’t know all this stuff and I was just like, all right, well I want to stop people got emails from coming on my list. I probably would have did the same thing I did the first time, was just put it on the web form connect it through the API of the email verification system and think like, all right, like this is-
Keith Perhac: We’re done
Brandon Shelton: Now they’re never coming on my list. I’m good to go. It’s like no, this is not a good idea. You want to collect the lead first.
Keith Perhac: Right. Exactly.
Brandon Shelton: And even if you don’t want to email them, it’s fine because if you still collect the lead first, you can still set up automations where it’s like, if the target says bad email don’t put them into the sequence.
Keith Perhac: Right, exactly.
Brandon Shelton: So that way you’re still collecting their email address and you still won’t email the bad leads.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: But you actually have it on file.
Keith Perhac: Going back to people just opt in for the PDF and then never opening an email. I would actually like to see at some point now we have really good retargeting and stuff. I’d love to see either a no opt in PDF that we then re target with. Or something where you do opt in, you get the thing and it says in the email like, hey, we’re going to remove you in three days if you don’t click here.
Keith Perhac: And just make people make that decision of yes, I want this information or no I don’t. And I’d be really interested to see how many people are just like, oh cool I just won’t be on this list now, versus now I don’t want… Kind of that [inaudible 00:48:18] thing of I don’t want to miss out on some this great content. And B, because we also know that as soon as you click on a link in those emails, your engagement in that goes up and so your sending goes up.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, exactly.
Keith Perhac: So this is a great way to even segment people who are just lookie-loos for that one thing, and find better leads that way.
Brandon Shelton: And I like that idea a lot. I can’t remember what podcasts I was listening to. I was listening to one recently where they were talking about a business that actually does not allow people to just buy their product. You have to actually opt in and go through actual sequence before you get the permission to buy.
Keith Perhac: Oh, interesting.
Brandon Shelton: And by them doing that, it makes their emailing list really, really engaged because-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: You can’t just easily like buy, you literally have to be interacting and follow through with the sequence, in order to get a chance.
Keith Perhac: Do you remember if that was a SaaS or was that an info product?
Brandon Shelton: It was an info product. It wasn’t a SaaS-
Keith Perhac: Okay. Because I know-
Brandon Shelton: I wish I can remember what… I don’t even remember what the pod podcast was, but it was literally like two days ago. I was listening [inaudible 00:49:24] that’s an interesting like concept.
Keith Perhac: Yeah, I’d be interested in who that was. I know Rameet Sadie did that for a while. I think he finally opened it up. But you could not buy any of his products without going through a sequence. And every sequence was made as if it was a live launch. And it was so funny because people would be pinging me it’s like, oh, Rameet just opened up this new thing. I’m like, I don’t think he did. But then I realized they’re on this evergreen sequence and you’re exactly right. Yes. That engagement up MeetEdgar.
Keith Perhac: And this was interesting because I love that on info products. I love not being able to buy a product, you have to go through the sequence. I think it really builds that engagement and builds that conversion. MeetEdgar did it, and it just annoyed me. Because I was like I want to sign up for your software, but I don’t want to go through this whole, like I don’t want to wait a week to try out the software, right. To go through the sequence.
Keith Perhac: I just want to try out the software. Whereas in info product, I think I’m more… I need to know the pain dream fix. I need to know more about it. By the time I’ve got a need for software, I just want to jump in. But they were doing it so apparently it works. So maybe I’m completely wrong.
Brandon Shelton: I know because it’s funny because I actually just recently saw another podcast from her recently, but I have heard previous ones of Laura, the person-
Keith Perhac: Laura Roeder
Brandon Shelton: Who started MeetEdgar. And I remember during the time when she still had that, she was talking about like that strategy and stuff, and apparently it works. I know that she said they got to like 2 million or something in sales, before they… Now they’ve changed it. I think it’s opened up now.
Keith Perhac: It’s opened up yeah.
Brandon Shelton: But previously that’s how she did it. She basically just treated it like her sales per SaaS home page as a landing page pretty much.
Keith Perhac: And that it’s interesting because I think as a beginning growth tactic, that’s very good. You see a lot of people like, oh, we’re open in the beta I have requested an invite. And I don’t know if that still works as much, but it used to be really effective.
Brandon Shelton: I know ConvertBox actually does the same thing now.
Keith Perhac: Oh, do they? Interesting.
Brandon Shelton: They have like a request and by type of funnel where it’s like the homepage you request the invite, they collect your information. And then from there it’ll [inaudible 00:51:36] basically to like a OTO where you can it’s like a one time offer. They have the VSL and stuff like that. And then I mean, he’s been doing it for ever since he like started. I don’t know their numbers or anything, but I know like the group has a lot of people. And I hear a lot of people talk about ConvertBox, so they must be working for them.
Keith Perhac: And I wonder, or I don’t wonder. I know this is very much based on the audience that you’re trying to serve because especially enterprise, like if you look at Kissmetrics now, you cannot sign up for Kissmetrics anymore. You have to go through a call with them, because they are now enterprise. If I go to a SaaS or software and they’re like, oh you have to get on a call or you have to go through a list I’m like they are our competitors. Like I’ll find someone else. But that’s because I am not their target market and-
Brandon Shelton: I’m the same way.
Keith Perhac: But their target market obviously does respond to that, because they’re doing it and they’re growing to like Laura said, 2 million, right. It’s an effective tactic.
Brandon Shelton: It’s interesting how especially like when you’re growing a SaaS to try to take yourself out of it to really understand the way your own ideal target market like thinks, and how they buy, and how they’re going to consume things and kind of like take [inaudible 00:52:55]. Like that’s one of the things that’s extremely difficult-
Keith Perhac: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brandon Shelton: And that even with not even just from marketing, just from a feature standpoint too where it’s like, just as entrepreneurs and people who are building software like, you have this creative mind with this like oh, it will be so cool if you added this, it will be so cool with that. Everyone is going to love this feature and it’s like you add it and no one uses it, and you’re like, oh shit like damn. I just wasted like months or weeks of dev time for something that no one likes except me, or no one even uses it except me.
Keith Perhac: And I think that’s one reason why SaaS is being a scratch your own itch kind of product are always really good, because you understand maybe not 100%, but you have a really good deep understanding of the problems there, because you’ve lived through that every single day. That’s where SEGMetrics came from, that’s where LeadShield came from, and it’s like that to me is a huge competitive advantage. It’s not just some guy saying, oh, this guy is doing something cool over here, let’s copy that, right. It’s more of like why does this tool not exist? It has to exist and I need it so much that I’m going to go build it.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, and I 100% agree with that. It’s extremely difficult to build a SaaS in a area that you don’t have first hand experience with, or aren’t partnered with someone who does.
Keith Perhac: Right.
Brandon Shelton: You can do it, but it’s extremely hard.
Keith Perhac: It’s rough, it’s rough and especially even if you do have experience not having a wide berth of experience. So our first product we did was like I said, online course ware, and we had only worked with top echelon people like the Jim Kuakes, the Eben Pagan [inaudible 00:54:29] of the world, right. And their use case is so different than a standard person.
Keith Perhac: And so we built a product we were like oh, we know exactly… We’d have like 10 customers already that would be happy to use this. We built it for them not realizing there’s may be 30 of those people out there. So we had a lot of features that they needed, but no one else new at all and they didn’t even want. And so you really have to live in that world for a while and really understand that problem set, and that’s what makes great software.
Brandon Shelton: Yeah, that’s definitely, that I 100% agree with that.
Keith Perhac: Well, Brandon I want to be conscious of your time. Thank you so much for joining us on data beats opinion. And where can people find you? And what should people look out for?
Brandon Shelton: So first of all, thank you for having me. I’ll definitely appreciate, but it’s always great talking to you. The website is leadshield.io I’m actually going to set up actual discount page for your people. It’ll be at-
Keith Perhac: Awesome.
Brandon Shelton: Go.leadshield… It will be go.leadshield.io/databeats.
Keith Perhac: Awesome.
Brandon Shelton: They will be able to grab a [inaudible 00:55:41] and save up to 50% on [crosstalk 00:55:43].
Keith Perhac: 50%. Awesome we’ll definitely link that up there.
Brandon Shelton: Thank you. I appreciate it. And I mean, that’s pretty much it. Yeah, just pretty much LeadShield I’m on Facebook obviously Brandon Shelton, so shoot me a friend request if you’d like. If I don’t respond, please shoot me a PM because I actually have a lot of friend requests that I haven’t responded to. But after doing this interview, I’ll make sure that I actively like go check.
Keith Perhac: I know that feeling. I tell people my inbox is where things go to die.
Brandon Shelton: Seriously.
Keith Perhac: All right, Brandon thank you so much and I’ll talk to you soon.
Brandon Shelton: All right. Thanks man. Have a great one.