The Importance of Personalization in Online Marketing with Jason Resnick

Keith:                    Welcome again to Data Beats Opinion. I’m your host, Keith. And today I am talking with Jason Resnick. Jason is similar to what I used to do in the consulting agency. Helps online businesses, info products, e-commerce get more customers, repeat customers, and really build out that conversion funnel. He’s an expert in the space. He knows a lot about all this stuff. And I’m really excited to have you on the show. So-

Jason:                   Yeah. No, thanks. I’m excited to be here, Keith. Thanks for the invite.

Keith:                    So a little bit of background. How did you kind of get started with all this?

Jason:                   So this is going to show my age a little bit, but I always loved e-commerce. Like, I literally grew up on the internet, meaning when I started college, there was no internet, and by the time I finished, the internet was there but it was not like what it is today by any stretch of the imagination. And so I found, in college … Essentially I went to college for computer science. And I was like, “I hate this,” the fact that I have to bottle up code, run up executable … like, wait for however long for the thing to compile and then see that I missed a semi-colon is ridiculous, right?

Jason:                   And so when I started there, and I literally cut my economics class and learned how to write HTML through that in the computer lab. Really geeky. But my economics class was a three-hour class and it was long-distance learning, so it was the most boring TV show that you could ever imagine.

Keith:                    Right.

Jason:                   I learned code there, and that was where I first dove into the web. And as I got jobs in the corporate space, I worked for Fortune 50 companies, small boutique firms, but really where I found my sweet spot as far as the love for e-commerce was right around 2000, I worked for a consulting firm, that historically they were an SAP shop. But because of the times, there were startups everywhere and they needed coders, and so I was brought in there because I had learned a specific language in one of my former jobs called Tcl.

Jason:                   And I didn’t want to do anything like that. It was not interesting. And I got a job there and I was writing a lot of Java code, Ruby code, and building out e-commerce sites. And where a lot of developers ran from e-commerce because they didn’t want to deal with it, I was like, “Oh, this is an awesome problem. I love solving problems.” And at that time, the problem was getting somebody to pull out their wallet with their credit card in it. Now we don’t even look at it.

Keith:                    No one trusted it. Like, people marketing today don’t have any … Like, it was so difficult to get someone to put their credit card online, was insane.

Jason:                   Yeah. I mean, people would say their credit card over the phone, not a problem, but they wouldn’t put it into a form that was secure and everything else. It was like a genuine problem. And if you could bridge that gap by earning trust, because that’s pretty much going to be the mantra here, by earning trust at that point, then you could get and you win. And that’s why now Amazon is what Amazon is, because of that.

Jason:                   But I loved it, and just me as a human and my own personal interests, I love human behavior. So there was like this synergy there, where I was like, okay, I’m solving interesting problems about human behavior to do technical things. And so I just took that and ran with it. Like, as soon as that ball was handed to me, I was like, okay, I’m going to go until somebody tackles me.

Jason:                   And so I, through my career, I always was doing e-commerce, that sort of .. I was hired at other jobs for. But then in 2010 when I struck out and I started my own business full-time, left the cubicle farms, if you well, that’s where I fell. Like, I was doing Java development. I was doing Ruby on Rails development, custom BHP work, Magenta work, WooCommerce work, and so on and so forth, really helping other businesses get their final 20% of their business online, because a lot of these packages that they would either install or set up or whatever would get them 80% of the way there and see that there was some traction, and then they’re like, “Okay, well, we want to integrate our inventory system,” or “We want to integrate our brick-and-moral POS system,” and so on and so forth.

Jason:                   And so that’s where 2010, 2011, I was really diving into a lot of that. And since I’ve really focused in on niching down and really on the e-commerce space, because I was getting burnt out by doing all the tech, various different techs, bouncing around and not working on a tech stack for a certain period of time. I focused in on WooCommerce, specifically subscription and membership type sites, and to this day, it’s more of not doing so much custom work on the site there in that realm, but it’s more of how do I meld the behavior of a visitor, a customer, a repeat customer through data that we have on the email subscriber record as well as what they’re doing on-site and melding that together to essentially get more purchases from it.

Keith:                    And it’s interesting that you mention that, because you struck out on your own with the e-commerce marketing stuff on your own about the same time I did. And back then, there wasn’t really the WooCommerce. You had to build all the stuff yourself. And it’s gotten to the point where building a system like that is no longer a high-value proposition because there’s so much out there. The high-value proposition is, A, understanding what products are out there that will accomplish that, and then how to glue them all together, just like you’re saying. It’s no longer as valuable for you to build an e-commerce platform. It’s valuable for you to take WooCommerce and that visitor tracking, meld it all together so that people understand how those visitors are coming in and who’s converting and who’s not.

Jason:                   Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I noticed probably five-ish years ago, and this was with Drip, that email marketing platform. They had a robust enough API that was able to pull the subscriber records, so like what the people are clicking on, what are their custom fields, and what is the things that we know about them from the email world, what behaviors they’re taking, and then taking that information and sucking it on the site and turning some things around on the site to then cater to the knowledge that we know about them.

Jason:                   And that’s where I really was like, oh, this is next-level stuff. Because now if we know that they’re, you know, for an e-commerce customer of mine, they do hats, T-shirts, bandanas and so on and so forth. But if know that they’re really just looking at the hat stuff, well, then we just show them hat banners on the homepage versus all of the banners, right? So just that sort of personalized experience brings that mom-and-pop back to the internet world, right? Like, we’re coming full circle. Right?

Jason:                   It was like, you have Amazon, these big behemoths, where they’re just like, “here, whatever product you need, we’ve got it.” And so while that’s all great and convenient in some respects, what I think the trend is happening now is people are like, “I don’t want to use Amazon because of that. I want to support my local business or local online business. I want to support those crafting type-”

Keith:                    You want to support the brand. You want to support the people, not a conglomerate, right?

Jason:                   Exactly.

Keith:                    And it’s interesting that you came at this from a technical side, and you mentioned something really interesting there, which is the crafting of that message. If someone’s looking at hats, we show them hats. Because I feel like a lot of marketers, especially with re-targeting ads and things like that, there’s a lot of spray-and-pray. And there’s a lot of … And I see this a lot. I’ll go to a site to look up, I’m getting re-targeting ads, that’s awesome. I sign up. I’m still get re-targeting ads to sign up. And then I’m getting ads for different … It feels weird, right?

Keith:                    It’s like when Amazon … What was the one? You always see it on Twitter and stuff. You buy a washing machine on Twitter, or sorry, on Amazon, and then they’re like, “Would you also like to buy this washing machine?” It’s like, who buys two washing machines?

Jason:                   Yeah. Yeah.

Keith:                    But some intelligence behind this idea, otherwise it’s just this algorithmic spray-and-pray that stops being effective because you’re no longer … I always say that advertisements that are interesting are no longer advertisements. We actually wait for movie trailers to come out. We love movie trailers because they are aligned with our interests. If I’m looking to buy a car, having car commercials that align with the type of car I want is interesting to me because I want to know what’s out there. But when I just bought a washing machine and you show me an ad for a washing machine, that doesn’t help. It just actively hurts that experience.

Jason:                   I mean, to that point, last week I even threw this out on Twitter, was like, “Delta, come on. You know I live in New York. Why are you giving me emails for flights to New York?” Like, I get that-

Keith:                    You can fly down the street.

Jason:                   I mean, I get the fact that I flew somewhere and then flew back to New York, but you know where I live. Just, come on. Like, just have some sort of semblance to completing the circle of personalization. Like, that’s what bothers me sometimes about personalization. And at the time of this recording, we’re going on the advent of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And so our inboxes are going to be obliterated with bad personalization. It’s going to be funny.

Jason:                   But if you’re going to do it, then you have to do the research. You have to really close the loop. You can’t kind of go in and just step your toe in, more so than … If you’re just going to do hi first name, okay, then do that. But if you’re going to go to the level of like, hey, I’m going to take some of their information, like they bought a washing machine so they must be interested in washing machines and I’m going to re-pitch that, okay, close the loop. Did they buy that? If they bought the washing machine, then pitch them a clothes rack.

Keith:                    Right. The upsell. The cross-

Jason:                   Right. Like, pitch them something related to that. Don’t pitch them the thing they just bought, because especially that, they’re not going to buy two of them.

Keith:                    And I see that a lot. You know, I have a similar background here where I started on the tech side of things, right? And I think there’s something about having to design software where you have to think about those flows and that encapsulation of when someone does this, do this. Does it make sense for … And so we see a very structured progression of someone down a funnel, and we’re used to creating flow charts and stuff of, did someone do this? Then send them this. Did they do this? Then send them this. And having those gates there.

Keith:                    And I think that’s something that a lot of people either don’t have the knowledge behind or that they just can’t think through it as well. Right? They don’t understand the psychology of who is on their list and who’s actually … that people are actually reading these.

Jason:                   Yeah. And so one of the things that I do with my clients when we first do an engagement is I want to know what the customer journey is. And then they go on and they say, “Yeah, we’re doing this re-marketing, we’re doing this ad,” and I said, “I don’t care about those stuff. That stuff we’re going to get to. But your customers now. Can we figure out how they became a customer and work backwards?” Because that’s what I want to find out. They’re already paying you, so that-

Keith:                    Where’d they come from?

Jason:                   You’ve already got the one, the zero-to-one dollar purchase, which is the hard thing. So you want more of those people. Now let’s reverse-engineer back, right? And so the reason why I do it that way, and I have them thing about this thing, is so that they then understand the behavior of that customer. Like you said before, they’re doing the spray-and-pray. Like, they’re just, okay, we’re doing Facebook and Instagram ads because that’s what everybody’s doing in my market. And so I need to do it, too.

Jason:                   But once we know a little bit about the customers, then that spray-and-pray actually becomes like a playbook that we can then deploy out there to attract more people like the people that are already paying for it. So I like … because I start with the end in mind there, I’m completing the circle already.

Jason:                   So I don’t want to have these open looks and saying, okay, all these people are coming in from all different directions, and then, like you said, you have these if/then statements, if you will, that are just lengthy and complex and overly built out. but let’s just start with what we know works already and then we can start building off.

Keith:                    You can build out from that. And I think that’s why so many people start with the spray-and-pray, because they don’t know what works. They know they have customers. They don’t know where they came from. So they’re trying to re-create magic, right? And at the same time, they have those customers, and if they had the process that you walk them through, it’s like, hey, here’s how we find out where these people came from, what converted them from visitors into customers, if they were able to do that, they could work themselves back, but it’s a talent. It’s a skill, right? And a lot of people do not have that.

Keith:                    I think it would be very difficult for me to go into someone else’s business and say, “Okay, here’s a bunch of customers. Let’s figure out where they came from.” Right? I can do that in my business because I’ve owned it over the last eight years, but to just jump into someone else’s, it requires real talent. But that’s how you stop that spray-and-pray, right? That’s how you start with something very targeted and understand what sent people down that conversion funnel.

Jason:                   Yeah, I mean, it’s sometimes hard to approach that from that perspective, meaning … because a lot of people are guarded. Like, I’m guarded about my own business. Like, I know my business better than anybody else. I’m in here all day long. Right? So how is somebody else going to tell me how I got my customers? Well, I don’t necessarily want to tell you how you got your customers. Your customers are going to tell you, right?

Keith:                    Exactly.

Jason:                   And so for me, it’s more of just opening the lines of communication and saying, “Hey, look, we’re on the same page here. I’m going to make some assumptions. I want to validate these assumptions. And I’m going to validate them with actual data.” And so the data that you have is your customers. The data that’s up in the cloud somewhere on Facebook in profile, ID, whatever, I don’t know what that person is and they never gave you any money. So that’s just hypothetical money at this point in time. So I’d much rather focus in on what we know, get that humming along, and then we turn on the faucet of the ad money or whatever it is, whatever your campaign’s going to be, and then feed that engine that’s already working.

Keith:                    Right. And then how do you kind of … So going to the next step of once you have identified this channel of where people come from and what kind of converts them and what brings them in, how do you then walk them through that marketing funnel, especially if, depending on the type of industry you’re working with, it’s not e-commerce? It’s not this, okay, someone’s going to buy in the first three days. Maybe it’s 14 days or 30 days or 90 days. Like, how do you, A, bring people into that funnel, or how do you engage them in that funnel? And B, how do you measure that and understand, are these quick converters or are these long-term converters?

Jason:                   Right. So what I always try to do is find the time to first purchase. How many days are we talking about? That’s your sale cycle. So most of the time when I talk with a customer, they have this idea. They’re like, oh, I … Let’s just talk an example, an info product, a coach or course creator or something of that nature. They’re like, “Oh, I run a week-long campaign, three things, three training videos, a webinar at the end, and then people convert on the back end of a weekend,” right? I’m like, “Okay. But is that really your first time? How long have they been on your email list before that?” And things like that.

Jason:                   So I always try to baseline it. I try to take my best ballpark guess, because then I’m measuring this. Based off of what I know about the customers, when they bought, because they have that data, and they have the data of how long they’ve been on the email list, I try to give my best guess on, okay, it took them 47 day on average for you to close somebody once they come into your email.

Jason:                   And so having that information then is usually eye-opening to them, because they’re like, “Whoa, I didn’t realize it took so long.” And then they start thinking about all the math. They’re like, “Oh, well how much are we spending in ad money? And this is what they’re buying. Okay.” So-

Keith:                    Now you have a cash flow.

Jason:                   Then they get the real picture. Right? And so what I try to do is I try to shorten that timeline by nurturing them through email. Because you can do the remarketing campaigns, you can do the call to action on the websites and things, but you’re leaving the user up to actually going on those platforms to actually see those things. Your email is your proactive-ness into it, right? You’re sending them an email, so now they see, they’re going to check their email. The whole email is dead thing to me is mind-boggling, because-

Keith:                    They’ve been saying that for 20 years now.

Jason:                   Yeah. So it’s like, okay, but every time you send an email, you get money, so how is it dead? So for me, if you’re sending an email, then you’re prompting them to take some action. They can not take any action at all, but at least they see it and it becomes front of mind. So I try to build out a 30-day sequence that every client that I have, I work with them to build out a 30-day sequence, which is usually like 10-12 different emails that really position … Depends on the industry, like you said.

Jason:                   But let’s just take the info, course creator, digital product sort of industry. Position the brand or the person as an expert who knows what they do. But then we also want a lead score and do some other things that really align with the motivation of why somebody came in, and their intent, what are they hoping to get out of their engagement immediately from this brand? Right? So we do that just by understanding the customers. Why did they sign up? What have they gotten from the brand, the person?

Keith:                    And do you do that through surveys? Is that based on tags that they get when they opt in for … So if they’re interested, if they opt in for, let’s say, a marketing blueprint and then they get the freelancer’s guide. Like, we can kind of start to build out a visual of them through the tags and the actions they’re taking.

Jason:                   Absolutely. So the thing that I found with surveys is that, yes, they work if the survey is well-crafted. You can’t kind of come out and like, “Hey, we should send out a survey.” Okay, so-

Keith:                    Here’s the 40 questions.

Jason:                   … on Tuesday, we’re just going to roll out a thing. Those don’t work. You really have to know what you’re doing for a survey to work. So I’m more of like, hey, what pages are they looking at? What are they clicking on? What sort of … And really it all stems from understanding what the customer is doing. Like you said, where did they come in from a lead magnet perspective? That’s usually their hook. That’s their initial motivation. Okay, so if they pick that marketing, okay, so if that’s a marketing PDF that you’re delivering to them, then can we show them more marketing content? And that could shorten the time frame, right?

Jason:                   I like to share this sort of thing, that’s with all my clients, I say, “Look, you could be a virtual trainer, and your product, that you’re trying to get people to sign up for, is a workout routine for 20 minutes via Skype or whatever. Right? So that’s your business. So that’s what you want people to sign up. Why are you showing recipes as your lead magnet? While all of that is in the same eco-system, you’re attracting the wrong type of person because they want to get healthy via food and nutrition. They don’t want a workout. So if you’re wondering why you’re not converting on the people that are signing up, and you’re spending ads to that and all that, why isn’t anybody buying it? Well, there’s not an alignment.

Keith:                    And it’s interesting, because I’ve had a number of clients like that, and they all say, “Well, it converts on the front end.” It’s like, “Of course it converts on the front end. People want that. But it’s not converting on the back end because the people who you are bring in, like you’re saying, are not the ones who are right for your product.” It doesn’t matter if I get 10,000 leads who want to learn more about cars if I’m selling paleo drinks. Right? The offers are mismatched. But I think a lot of people think this thing converts really well, and it’s related to my eco-system or my niche, so therefore at some point they’re going to convert. And it just doesn’t work like that.

Jason:                   Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s a hard pill to swallow, but when you actually lay it out with data, it’s not me coming to the table saying my assumptions, this is … Look at the numbers here. You get, yeah, great. So you got 100 optings yesterday for your recipe. How many of those people converted into workouts today? Zero? Because it doesn’t … It’s a mismatch.

Jason:                   And so what I try to do with that sequence is really just, one, lead score people. Because to shorten the time, if somebody’s really engaged with you, and then you and I have probably been down this road a handful of times, when we’re forced down a funnel that you’re like, “Ugh. I just want to buy this thing. That’s my need right now. I don’t want to wait for a window to open up that I need to buy.” That’s the thing with the lead scoring, is you do have some finite amount of time where the euphoria of the shiny object starts to wane.

Jason:                   So they say if you don’t close somebody within 90 days, chances are you’re not going to close them. But barring in the industry and the product and all the rest of it, if the score, and there’s a science to it and all that, but if the score where you’re sending an email every other day or every three days or whatever it is and they start clicking on one or two links, and those links are aligned with the product and so on and so forth, then you pull them out-

Keith:                    You fast track them.

Jason:                   … you give them what they want, and boom. Then they make the sale. And you start to really hone in on that. I mean, I’ve done that with several clients and we’ve shortened the timeframes drastically. Like, an info product, they were at around nine-ish days to first purchase, and we got them inside a day. A SAS product, he was over 40, and this was a real ballpark figure because he had no data on that. But he was over 40 and we got him to 90 with a free trial. Right?And so those sort of things matter.

Keith:                    Yeah. And I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t really look at, which is they say, “Oh, it takes us 40 days to close a lead.” And they don’t realize it’s not that people want to wait those 40 days, it’s that they haven’t really been offered a chance to convert that quickly, right?

Keith:                    And the benefit there, and I really like what you say, and I want to re-emphasize this, because I think it’s important, is measuring that velocity of engagement, especially at the beginning, and that lead scoring of, okay, people have clicked on, in the last six emails, five of these links about freelancing. They are obviously very interested. We need to fast-track them onto the list because I see that …

Keith:                    We had the same thing. We had a, I think it was a 20-day funnel before the sales really started pumping in for SegMetrics. And we decided, well, what if people sign up, let’s just tell them right there? So our first three days are a hard pitch. We’re just like, “Hey, we’re going to give you some awesome information. Real quick, we’re SegMetrics. A, B, C, D. You should check us out.” And conversion went through the roof because all these people, they do want that information and the people who don’t, after three days it’s fine, they go on the longer engagement campaign, and eventually within those 9 days they’ll probably come around, and they do come around.

Keith:                    But we were pushing so much back, and extending this thing to a point where they weren’t excited about the product anymore. And it’s like, why did I just ruin all this energy I had from someone who just found us and wants to check us out? You know Josh Doody, right?

Jason:                   Yes. Yes.

Keith:                    Yeah. Fearless Salary Negotiation. We talked with him a couple weeks ago, and he said the same thing because he has negotiation funnels, right? And he’s like, “I’m making everyone wait 14 days to get salary negotiation for an interview they have tomorrow.” Right? It’s like, “Why am I doing that?”

Jason:                   Yeah, and I think that that’s when it comes down to really knowing what you’re selling, right? So like with the case of SegMetrics or Josh’s business, it’s an immediate need. Like, Google drove that, the question of, “Hey, I’m looking for this thing. How do I sign up for this thing?” They are then … They want it. Like, they need to buy it now. Right?

Jason:                   So some of my customers are more long-term. I do some non-profits, I do some other businesses that have a longer sales cycle. So it’s okay to assume that it’s going to take 14 days for somebody to buy because they need that warmup time. But some, like don’t overbuild something. Like you said, like, “Hey, first three days, look, we’re going to give you some awesome value. You’ll hang in this list, but hear who we are, this is the price, this is how much is costs,” and so and so forth.

Jason:                   That’s part of an email that I send. It’s actually the fourth email in this sequence that I build out, is it’s a complete ask email, saying, “Hey, I know we’re just getting together. We’re just learning about each other a little bit more. I’m excited about the opportunities. But because I give you so much value on the free side, I often forget about the paid side. And so this is what we offer,” and you give them whatever your main products are.

Jason:                   But just asking, even in that email, you’d be surprised how many people like, boom, buy. There’s a lot of conversions off of that one email because you just asked. But you asked in a non-salesy type way and it works.

Keith:                    Yeah. So up until now, we’ve been talking a lot about kind of those evergreen funnels, the marketing funnels that are always there, always running through. I know you have a lot of experience with launches, PFL, all the … It seems like everything’s a PLF recently.

Jason:                   I think they just ran another course. Or something.

Keith:                    And I will admit, they work so well. PLF. I do get upset when people take PLF at face value and just literally do the PLF formula. Like, they don’t understand that it’s a jumping off point to put your own spin on it and that it’s a strategy, because people just keep doing the, “Okay, here are my three videos,” and you get tired of them after a while.

Keith:                    I kind of derailed ourselves there. But I was going to ask, what do you see as kind of the difference between that launch style funnel and the evergreen funnel, especially when you don’t have time to go in and tweak stuff ahead of time because you’re doing everything in real time?

Jason:                   Yeah. Well, launch mode is always interesting to me, because it’s like … And 90% of my clients, I build out the evergreen stuff for. Not saying that they don’t do launches and things, but for me, launch is always kind of like a high-energy, high-emergency, high … you know, it’s like, “Hey, we’re dumping a bunch of money and we’re going to get as many people into this thing as possible and we’re going to give them the juicy stuff so that they can sign up by Sunday.”

Jason:                   And so for me, the think that I find a lot of times is that … And this is what I talk to with my clients a lot, is the reason why that works is because it’s a numbers game, and if you’ve got a boatload of money to put up at the top of the funnel, yes, there’s going to be some things falling through. And especially if your ad is good, that brings in those right kind of buyers. Then totally, yeah, that whole formula is just a math problem. The cadence and everything, it’s just a math …

Jason:                   The reason why it’s PLF, it’s because that F is formula, right? So it’s just a math problem. But then they’re like, “Okay, now we launched. And we got to do it again next quarter.” Right? Like, we paid whatever, 100 grand or 200 grand or whatever it is, right? And so we need to do it again. And then I always come in and I say, “Okay, so you just got a whole boatload of people in. And this was a great one because you got 5% conversion. Now you have 95% of those people that opted in, what are you doing with them?”

Keith:                    You’re launching the same thing to them in a quarter, right?

Jason:                   Right. Exactly. So what I always try to do with that is then try to figure out how we can then not launch them next quarter, but how do we nurture them in a way that makes total sense how they came in, they saw the ad, they saw the pitch, they saw all the bonuses they missed on and all the rest of it. At the end of the next 30 days, they’re still excited. They’re just, you know, timing wasn’t right, money wasn’t right, whatever the reason is, right? But they just didn’t buy for whatever reason.

Jason:                   Often times, I find it’s more timing than money. It’s just like, they just don’t have the time. They saw the ad, it was interesting, it’s a need that they have, they just don’t … I got other things going on, I just don’t-

Keith:                    Especially with courses, right? Because it’s a commitment.

Jason:                   Oh, 100%. Yeah. And you don’t want to buy something and let it sit there on your desktop or whatever and like, “Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that thing.” Right? So people don’t buy. But now you have 95% of the people that were actually hot for you right now sitting there, and then you’re just going to send them your Tuesday morning broadcast about your podcast or whatever? That just doesn’t make any sense.

Jason:                   What I’ve build off of the back of those kind of launches is another different 30-day sequence that really piggy-backs off of that. It’s a more of a longer sales cycle. It’s the same training, language, everything that they’ve launched with, just longer. Like, these are just people that the timing wasn’t right. And you can re-coop 10, 15, 25% of that 95 that fell through within that first 30 days just by doing that, just tailoring …

Jason:                   And most of the time, these people have tons of content that is still related to everything that they just talked about for a week. Well, let’s just give it to them. And there’s no reason why they can’t. Now you have grabbed those people. You’ve re-cooped a lot of your ad cost. And then at that point in time next quarter, maybe you don’t need one next quarter.

Jason:                   You pitch them, and the other thing too is, which is a really interesting little human psychology thing, is because a lot of times in that launch sequence, say like, “Hey, you’re never going to see this deal again.” Well, if you pitch them 30 days later with the same thing with a higher price point because that lower price point is, well, now you’ve already positioned yourself as not a liar. You could position yourself as, it was 50% off on the launch. Well, you’re getting 30% now. And you saw that it was 50%. This is the lowest cost ever. Right? And so you then go ahead and close the loop on that level, too.

Jason:                   So for me, launches are a different beach because I look at the other side of the coin. Like, I let the company, the person, all that, I’ll write all of the mechanics and the technical aspects of it out for them, but I let them put the energy into that and then I’ll think about everybody else that’s coming through. You worry about your five percenters, because that’s a good launch, right? If you have a five percent conversion, that’s good.

Keith:                    That’s huge. Yeah.

Jason:                   Right? I’ll worry about the vast majority of the people that falls into the cracks, and I want to re-coop that. And so that for me, I always look at launches as a 30-day thing rather than the week and a half, two weeks that-

Keith:                    Oh yeah, definitely.

Jason:                   … PLF does.

Keith:                    I mean, we find that the majority of sales happen the day the cart closes, and then also the next week and a half afterwards when we do a re-open or we do a down-sell or we do all the other stuff to kind of re-engage the people and maybe even just answer the questions of the people who were having problems that didn’t want to buy. Right? Like, just having support ready when they call, say, “Hey, I missed the sale, but X, Y, and Z.” Like, “Oh, yeah, that’s definitely doable,” and we can regain that sale.

Keith:                    I think you’re exactly right. It’s almost always a timing problem. If they weren’t interested in the product or the content, they wouldn’t be on the list.

Jason:                   Right. The hook is the ad. Right? So if you’re selling marketing stuff or if you’re selling life coaching, or whatever you’re selling, right? Like that ad, and you got that email address, then they’re interested. They’re interested in it in a way that is enough for them to at least see what else you got.

Jason:                   And then, as they go through, and you set up the mechanics in the way where you know that they binge-watched the videos, they’ve checked all the emails, they’ve clicked all the links, they saw the sales page. You know they’re about ready to buy. You know that person is probably ready to invest in whatever you’re selling. Well, if they didn’t buy, I always say, ask. Right? Just send them an email. Why didn’t you buy?

Keith:                    What’s going on?

Jason:                   You get a lot of information back. But when you do ask, they’ll say, “Yeah, look, I’m just going away next month. I just don’t have the time for this,” or “I missed the window of opportunity because I was away at a long weekend up at the lake,” or … It’s always those sort of things where a lot of the business owners that I work with, they’re like, “Maybe I should just lower my cost” or “Maybe I should add a different bonus,” or, like … I’m like, “Well, why don’t we just ask and find out from there.” So-

Keith:                    And I think that, it goes back to a bigger topic that I always get a little bit frustrated with, it’s that … and I do this as well. It’s looking at the people on my list as numbers instead of people. Right? And especially when you get up to the 50,000, 100,000, half a million sized list, I think you start looking at things as a numbers game and not a people’s game.

Keith:                    And while that’s good because you need to look at conversion rate and how things are flowing, you also have to look at … You have to have that psychological insight of why are people doing what they’re doing, right? It’s not enough to just say, “Oh, sales were bad. It’s too expensive. Let’s lower our prices.” It’s, like you’re saying, the timing’s probably bad or maybe there’s other offers, or let’s just go ask them. I think a lot of marketers forget that the people receiving the emails are people.

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Keith:                    Yeah. And it’s at scale. I understand. And you can’t target everyone. But it’s like, you still have to understand that they’re people with their own lives going on.

Jason:                   And to that point, I had a client who decided to do a launch right when Social Media Marketing World was going on. So what happened was their audience was also … a lot of people would go there. Right? So it was a conference that was a real life thing that they’d lost … They were like, “Why was the opt-in so low? Why was the views so low on the videos? Why was-”

Keith:                    Because everyone’s at a conference.

Jason:                   You know, the webinar. And so at that point in time, I was like, “I don’t know. We’ve run this thing pretty consistently. We get pretty consistent numbers. I don’t know. There’s got to be something going on.” And so I just happened to open up a calendar and I saw on Twitter the hashtag. I’m like, “Oh.” I’m like, “That’s why.” But that goes along with the people, right? It’s like, there are humans on the other end of it.

Jason:                   And yes, while it’s a math probably where we can just turn on a switch and the thing will just flow and all the numbers will work themselves out, well, the human element there. And that goes back to what I was saying before about motivation, intention, understanding the behavior of the person. If this is a person that’s going to go to a conference that is at the exact same time as your launch, then, well, maybe you postpone the launch a week. Right? So you have to think about these things.

Keith:                    And that’s why I think it’s important to also be on your competitors’ lists, right? So to understand when they’re launching, because especially if you’re into marketing, you can tell a good month or so, if they know what they’re doing, when they’re going to start ramping up for that launch and make sure that you’re not going live at the same time they are. Right? And make sure that if you have affiliates, that everyone’s schedule aligns. And don’t try to launch on Black Friday. Like, there’s just so many. Like-

Jason:                   I mean, it’s funny. I try to think outside of the box sometimes with helping out my clients and myself, too. So like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you know people’s inboxes are going to be obliterated with stuff. People are going to be on … They’re going to have tabs open refreshing flash deals and so on and so forth. They’re just not going to be paying attention to your thing.

Jason:                   So I say, “Well, do an anti-Black Friday.” On Tuesday the week before, let’s do something. Right? And so they’re like … Name it, Business A Tuesday. Right? Like, just make it your own and kind of think outside the box. Or do something that’s completely out of the box, like Black Friday. So one of the things was … And this was just an experiment that I ran, was like, “Hey, this thing is now this price.” And I raised it. And what happened was the week and half prior to that, I said, “Hey, my Black Friday thing is coming. This price is going to be affected on this product.”

Keith:                    Raise prices on Black Friday.

Jason:                   Right. So I raised prices on Black Friday, but I didn’t tell them that I was going to raise prices until Wednesday. And I said, “Look, this is the final time you’re going to see this at this price.” And then, boom, a whole bunch of people came in at that point in time.

Keith:                    That’s awesome.

Jason:                   So trying to think a little bit more about if you really want to stand out from the thing, like you said before, tell a story. Engage in a different way that’s going to be interesting and doesn’t become an ad. Right? It becomes shareable, maybe, or something like that. If you’re into marketing and trying to do something that is in a crowded space, you kind of almost have to think five degrees to the left sometimes, just to stand out.

Keith:                    Yeah. I actually made a joke last year that, oh, we’re going to start having Black Friday in September, and this year my first Black Friday email was first week of November. So people are starting to … And even we’re doing a … We call it the three Black Friday sales. So Friday before until Friday after, we’re doing out sale. Because people don’t have time to shop on Black Friday anymore.

Keith:                    It’s interesting because I think Black Friday’s starting, other than going to Walmart for the spectacle of it, I think that most people are like, “I know the sales are going to be going on. I know there’s going to be other sales. I don’t have to go to a store to buy anything anymore, so I’m just going to wait for the Christmas sale.” Or it’s like, the Christmas sale will be there two weeks before Christmas. It’ll get there in time.

Jason:                   Yeah, and it’s funny you say that. Like, my wife and my mother-in-law always go shopping on Black Friday. It’s crazy. But they go to the mall and all that, and they get the door buster deals and whatever. And she always … I’m like, “You’re nuts.” Like, the first time we started dating and she did that, I’m like, “What are you, crazy? Why would you do that?” But always … and it never fails, she’ll take a picture of the parking lot at the mall and it’s dead. It’s like totally empty. And she always comes back with good deals and things like that.

Jason:                   But to your point, last year I wanted to buy a new monitor. And so what happened was I bought this nice 42-inch monitor, right? Things like that. And my wife and I were in this house now two and half years. And so we had our old TV from the apartment, which was also 42 inches. And it kind of … Let’s face it, I was saying it was small, for the living room and all that.

Jason:                   So I wanted to get a bigger one, and so I’d shopped around, and I was like, “Okay, this is the TV that I want. I’m going to wait for Black Friday.” And so my wife and I discussed it a little bit and we’re like, “Yeah, this TV works. We don’t really need to spend this money. We’ve got Christmas, and my son’s birthday is two days after Christmas. Do we really need to spend a few hundred bucks on the TV right now? Like, we don’t really need it, right?”

Jason:                   And so I went ahead and said, “Look, I’m buying the monitor because I need that.” My other monitor was going. So there was a legit reason for it. So I bought the monitor. A week later, our TV went. The whole thing. Like, I’m watching TV and it looked like it was like paint, just all the colors melded together and the whole thing went. I’m like, “A week after Black Friday. Even after Cyber Monday. Like, come on. Like, are you kidding?” So I was so annoyed.And then I was like, I’ll just wait til the Superbowl.

Keith:                    Right. Yeah.

Jason:                   Right? Like, I just took the old monitor, but the old 24 back, but the 42 back in … the new monitor into there. And I was just like … But you’re right. You could just wait, right? And that’s the same thing too, right? A lot of these times with the funnels and all the rest of it, you’re also training your viewers, right? So if they don’t convert on the front end, now they know that you do this thing. So if they’re with you enough, they’re going to see it multiple times.

Keith:                    Yeah. And this is why I always liked Remi Sadé’s strategy of … He never discounts. What he does is he opens up a price. You cannot buy his … You might be able to now, but his flagship products, you used to not be able to buy. You have to be in a launch or an evergreen funnel to buy it. And so it made them special. And so it wasn’t a, “Oh, I’m just going to wait until it’s on sale again.” Right? Because you knew you weren’t getting that until he opened it up again.

Jason:                   Right. Yeah.

Keith:                    And that type of scarcity, I think everyone puts things on sale so much that sales have … Who was it? JC Penney, I think, or Macy’s. It was probably Macy’s, recently had a probably because they put everything on sale all the time. You go into a store, everything’s on sale, right? So it doesn’t matter anymore.

Keith:                    When all you’re doing is selling and all you’re doing is discounting, it no longer makes the product valuable and people are just going to wait for the cheapest value they can, not think, “Oh, I really got to grab this now.”Just like with your TV. It’s like, “Oh, I missed Black Friday. Christmas is in two weeks and then Superbowl’s a month after that.” These are prime TV-buying seasons.

Jason:                   Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, Sean D’Souza of Psycho Tactics does the same thing. Like, he’ll open up the window to, I think it’s his community. And he’ll tell you that he’s got these other products, and then he’ll open up this limited seat window sort of thing for all the other products, but if you bought the community first, then you get first dibs. Like, he’ll send an email to his list the day before, and that’ll be to the community members, and then you hope that the product is still available, right?

Jason:                   And so he does such limited seats that the product is never available to the public. So you kind of have to buy into his community when he opens that so that then you could go ahead and get all the other things. So that whole FOMO scarcity model I think works well, too.

Keith:                    And I think you end up training your audience, for good or bad, right? If you do it like Sean or Remi, and your audience knows, when this goes out, they’ve got 20 seats or 50 seats or however many it is, and that thing’s going to go like that. Then there’s this scramble. There’s this, I have to make that decision right now. I can’t sit on the fence because then it’s going to be gone until who knows when. And that’s a good way to train your audience, because it creates that fear of missing out.

Keith:                    The converse of that is if you’re always pitching, and that’s all you do, and it’s always sales, then everyone knows, “Oh, I’ll just wait til the next one.” Right? So it removes, even though you’re creating scarcity by having that discount, you’re actually removing it through that long-term training. Right?

Keith:                    And half of it is understanding your audience, and half of it is understanding how you have trained your audience to react. There was an interesting tweet I saw that said, “I bet when anyone rang a bell, that Pavlov thought about feeding his dog.” Right?

Jason:                   I’ve seen that. Yeah, yeah.

Keith:                    And it’s really true. It’s the reverse. It’s like you’re creating this scarcity. But once you’ve done it multiple times, what is the overall message of your marketing that you’re seeing? And it’s very hard for the product owner, the product creator to understand that, which is, look at this through fresh eyes, through someone who doesn’t see all your marketing funnels. And how does someone like that view your marketing?

Jason:                   Exactly. Yeah, I tell that a lot to my clients. Pretend like you’re first time coming through. Go through your emails. Sign up. Get your free newsletter, your 10% discount. How does all of that work? Go grab an alias to an email and just put it in a folder, and then read. Pretend like you’re a customer of this brand. Would you buy from them? Or what is your perception? Do you think they’re selling too much? Or are they not selling enough?

Jason:                   So it’s interesting too, when you put yourself on the other side of the table there, because what I tell a lot of my clients is like, “You are training.” So to the effect of what your emails look like, what do your links look like, are you only including one link, are you including three? Does your email formal vary? Like, do they know that on Thursday they’re going to be getting a roundup bunch of links of resources that are around the web, versus your Monday email, which is always a video, right?

Jason:                   They start to understand that sort of thing, and then if you change that and if you change it at a drastic level where they actually enjoyed and those things were converting for you, why do you think your numbers went down?

Keith:                    They don’t know what to expect from you.

Jason:                   Right.

Keith:                    And it’s interesting, because I actually started sending myself the emails, because it’s one thing to read them in your email system, because you’re reading them all in a block, right? And so you don’t understand the cadence that goes behind it. And I started sending them to myself, like just put myself … Every couple of months, I’d put myself in the beginning of the funnel and I’d just run through it. And I’d make specific notes.

Keith:                    I’d try to read every one, but I’d make notes about when I’m like, “I really don’t want to read this.” And I’m wondering, like, why didn’t I want to read this? Or I read an email and it’s like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be getting out of this email. I know I wrote it. But the mood that I’m in right now, with the cadence of being busy every day and this just popped into my inbox, I now have a different relationship with it than when I was in the Google Doc writing it.

Jason:                   Yeah, 100%.

Keith:                    And that I think is valuable. It’s like when they say with SAS products, you need to sign up for your product every month to check that onboarding flow, A, make sure it works, B, make sure that it’s still viable, that it’s the best it can be. Same with your email flow.

Jason:                   Yeah. And to that point, to that next level, is where are they reading it? Are they reading it on their desktop? Are they reading it on their phone? Right? Because a lot of my e-commerce clients, like 70+% of their viewership on their web is mobile. Right? Like it’s just people shopping on their phones now, or iPads, or something of that nature.

Jason:                   So don’t write long form email. Because if you’re writing a long form email, there’s a good chance if they’re looking on their phone, there’s going to be a notice that comes in, it pops in, and if that notice is a text message or Instagram post, or who knows what, they’re going to click that and your email’s gone. Right? So get to the point, pretty concise, especially …

Jason:                   And this is where the analytics side of thing goes in, understanding what your viewerships are doing. Like, what are the subscribers doing on your website versus just assuming what they’re doing, right? Like you say, Google Docs looks very much different than Gmail. Right? What does it look like in Gmail? Is this a big wall of text, even though that it might be just nicely formatted and spaced out in Google Docs, you know?

Jason:                   So you have to really kind of do … I love that you do that, because I encourage anybody to put themselves through their own funnels to make sure that it makes sense, the lengths work, things look good. I mean, I do the same thing, and to this day, I know I have to fix a logo on a page. When I tested it, the logo was all wonky. And I’m like, ah, this … I’m like, how many people saw this now? And then it just … You know, you got to take pride in that, in what you’re sending out.

Keith:                    Yeah. And you can’t let it get to you that every time you go through it, something else is going to be wrong. First book I wrote, I must have edited that thing 80 times because I was stupid and I edited it myself. But every time I went through it, I found something else. And I’m like, [jeeb 00:52:13], like just, man oh man. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, go ahead.

Jason:                   Nah, I was just saying, like you do have to validate … Like, get another pair of eyes. Like right now, what I noticed is for our client, I guess this is a change in Gmail that … I always alias, right? Like Jason-plus-whatever at my email, right? And so I’ve always done that for years now, and I’m just like Jason plus highly engaged, Jason plus no engagement, right? And I put those through the funnel and take action just to make sure that the sequence and automation and tagging and all the rest would work.

Jason:                   Well, I noticed last week that … Well, I’d put four subscribers through a funnel, all different stage. All of the sudden, after the first two emails, I was only getting one. Just deliverable to one. And I’m like, well, what the heck is going on here? Found out that Gmail, the way that it now works is that if they see that there’s the same email that’s happening at a certain period of time, even though it’s an alias, they’re actually saying, “Okay, this is the same email address.” Like, it’s the same.

Keith:                    And they’re just dumping it.

Jason:                   I don’t know that they’re dumping it, they’re just kind of merging it, because on the other side of things, it says it was delivered. Right? And so for me, it’s like, oh, that’s awesome. So Gmail … I mean, I get why they do that because Gmail’s basically saying, why are we going to flood this person’s inbox because it’s the same email, it’s the same … It’s literally the same content and it’s the same email address, it’s just aliased, so … But for me as a tester, it’s hard for me now to test.

Jason:                   So I have my wife going through one of my funnels that I’m testing. So I’m always like, every hour I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got to go check her phone.”

Keith:                    Go check that one.

Jason:                   And so … But the thing is, it’s like, she has a different phone. She has a different desktop and all that. So now I’m actually, I’m like, oh, yeah, that doesn’t look good on this phone. So now I can go adjust it and change that way.

Keith:                    As soon as someone could do mobile-responsive emails where it will take out parts of the email if you’re on a mobile device, I think it’s going to print so much money. Like, can you imagine being able to write long form emails for desktop and then have it condense down and only specific CTAs and stuff for mobile?

Jason:                   That’d be … Yeah, that’d be pretty sick.

Keith:                    It’d be really nice. It’d be really nice. Awesome. Jason, well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I have so many things I wanted to ask and talk to you about, but I do want to be conscious of your time. Where can people find you if they want to learn more?

Jason:                   Sure. I’m @rezzz on Twitter. That’s Rezzz with three Zs. And rezzz.com, as well with three Zs.

Keith:                    Sounds good. And we’ll link those in the show notes as well. All right. Jason, thank you so much for joining us today, man.

Jason:                   Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Keith. I really appreciated it.

Keith:                    Definitely. Take care.