[0:00:00] Clay: So the other day, I was talking to a friend who had purchased a newsletter from a marketing guru, and pretty soon after he joined that newsletter, he was asked to join this marketing guru’s Platinum Club. So he joined that marketing guru’s Platinum Club, and then he was asked if he’d like to join the Platinum Elite Club, and he was really kind of amused by the guts they had to upsell him so far. So he took the Platinum Elite offer, joined the Platinum Elite Club, didn’t even know what it was, but he was like hey, I’ll just take the upsell and see what happens. And then after he joined the Platinum Elite, he was asked to attend a conference. So he was sold on this conference, and then at that conference, he was sold a $10,000 per year mastermind, and then they tried to upgrade him from the $10,000 mastermind to the $20,000 mastermind and he took that upsell. Then after he joined the $20,000 mastermind, he was sold on $40,000 a year coaching. So he took the $40,000 a year coaching upsell, then he was offered a day with this marketing guru for an extra $10,000. So he took that extra day with this marketing guru, a full day of coaching, and then he was offered consulting services when he showed up. When the guru showed up to do coaching, he pitched him on doing copywriting for him. So he hired his guru to write his copy. And the point that I’m getting at any sort of the moral of this story or sort of the endpoint is that the upsells never stopped. This person’s business listed about $40 million a year, and he had the cash on hand, and he wanted to pay to reach the end of this marketing funnel, and he never freaking reached it. There was no in. In fact, at some point, they were making up stuff to upsell him on because they did not want to stop upselling him because those rule of that business that the upsells never stopped, that the engagement never stopped. Hello, my name is Clay Collins, and I’m joined by our head coach Andy Fossett, and today, we’re going to be talking about why you should always be adding opportunities for more engagement with your community. It doesn’t mean you need to price gouge. It doesn’t mean that you need to have, you know, $40,000 coaching packages or anything like that, but there should always be an opportunity for people to engage further with you. Andy, how are you doing? Andy: Doing very well, and I think that this is something that’s super important especially just because anyone who comes to you, anyone who contacts you, anyone who visits your website or joined your email list or whatever, these people, they’re doing this because they feel like you have something to help them with, something to teach them, so definitely, they are looking to you for advice and for next steps, and if you don’t give it to them, then they’re going to either be disappointed or they’re going to be letdown in some way, you know, either explicitly or implicitly. So they’re looking for advice, so you just constantly give them next steps and give them things to do. Clay: And speaking of which, speaking of greater levels of engagement, Andy Fossett – The person that you heard in the background was Andy’s newborn daughter… Andy: Yes. Clay: …nicknamed Momo, and if you want an opportunity for further engagement, you can become a fan of Momo on Momo’s fan page. I will actually – I don’t know if you’re offering that. Is that just for friends and family or is that for the public? Andy: No. anyone can check that out. She’s all about engaging as you can hear. No matter what you do, she will consistently engage with you, and there is no end to it until she gets extremely tired. Clay: Cool. Cool. We’ll put a link to her fan page below. Is it an easily rememberable repeatable URL? Andy: I actually can’t remember. I can’t remember if we have her last name on there or not, so yeah. Clay: You know, Andy, if I ever have a child, the first thing that I’m going to do is get up a fan page so that my child can compete with your child to see who’s getting more likes on Facebook, but I have a feeling you’re going to have a few years head start on me. Andy: I’ve got a head start, but we haven’t started building your email list yet, so you know, you might be able to catch up. Clay: That’s hilarious. Yeah, my kid’s going to have more newsletter subscriber than yours or not. I don’t know. Let’s just start the trash talking now. So you know, when it comes to your website, you know, there’s so many different ways that you can increase engagement. I was talking about this on an episode of The Marketing Show about how of all the billions of pages that exists on the internet, somehow, when someone arrives at your website, they’ve arrived at yours, and lucky you, of the millions of pages they could have gone to, they ended up at yours somehow. And then… [0:05:00] …if they end up at that page, and they decide to do something like Like you on Facebook or opt in, most of the people who visit your website don’t do that. Check your stats. Check your analytics. Most of the people who you’re lucky enough to attract your website end up navigating away. But some people think that you’re doing stuff that’s interesting enough that they want to opt in. So after they opt in on the thank you page, you should have something else for them to do. Maybe you can offer them to like you on Facebook or maybe they should join a webinar or maybe they should tell – You could ask them to tell your friends about you, or maybe they can fill out a survey, right. There’s a whole host of things to do, and guess what. After they fill out that survey, maybe I should invite them to that webinar, and on that webinar, maybe you should offer them a product or maybe you can offer them an opportunity to get on live stream, and maybe on that live stream, you can engage them in conversations with some other people, and maybe out of those conversations, a Facebook common thread should emerge. The point is that the engagement chain should never, never end, and when you first get started, you’re not going to be able to do this. You’re not going to have a long sequence of engagement activities right at the beginning, but you can extend it. Every single week or every single month, you can make a point to extend the engagement path that you have set up in your business or on your website. Andy: Yeah. And I also want to say that, you know, engagement path is a really good way to think of this, but also, don’t get trapped into thinking that it has to be linear because at every point of engagement, there’s a fork in the road. You can take the engagement opportunity or you can ignore it or you could, you know, do something else. So this is a path that keeps splitting off in different directions, and so it’s also really important to make sure that you don’t leave any of those as a dead end. No matter what somebody decides to do, no matter which action they choose to take, you want to make sure that you continue to engage them and continue giving them opportunities for further engagement. If they’re not interested in a webinar, by all means, do not leave them hanging and say, “Well, you didn’t want my webinar. Screw off, man,” you know. You got to give them something else that maybe is more of their style. Clay: Yeah. And Momo obviously agrees. It’s important to know which of those activities have the highest return-on-investment long-term for your business, the things that people can do that are most beneficial to you. I think so much of copywriting or conversion is merely about emphasizing the things that are most important whether that’s a sales letter and taking the most important point and putting that in the headline, and taking the most bullet points and putting that into the top, or making things bold. Simply by emphasizing things. Don’t need to write new copy. You don’t need to become better in almost every single respect you have tremendous increase in conversion rates. All you need to do is take special care to emphasize the things that are most important, and most people don’t do that. Andy: Yeah. And this is another case of, you know, doing the things that other people don’t do is what’s going to give you the results that other people are never going to get. Clay: So Andy, you mentioned linear and nonlinear engagement. I think examples of nonlinear engagement are usually social media based or at least social in nature, so commenting, you know, engaging on Twitter, engaging on Facebook, these are all different, you know, forks in the road that can split off in a number of different directions. So I do think it’s important to realize that the engagement can be nonlinear. I think it’s also incredibly important to make sure that you have a linear path of engagement as well, and what that takes, the form for most businesses is a follow-up auto responder sequence by email. So someone signed up their email address, and 3 days out, you give them a marketing lesson, and 3 days out, you give them another lesson. Maybe 3 days after that, they get invited to a webinar and 3 days after that, they get notified that the webinar is that day, and 3 days after that, they’re invited to get a sample chapter of your product, and 3 days after that, they’re invited to a Ustream, and 3 days after that, they’re invited to hear an interview that you did with someone else, and 3 days after that, something else happens. So the nonlinear is a given. You need to engage on all channels. You need to be everywhere, but it’s also important, and I firmly believe that you need to have a calculated, very specific follow up in auto responder sequence that spans multiple months, that takes people on a very specific journey that you have crafted for them intentionally, and that has that result of folks essentially buying your… [0:10:00] …product. The most research shows that you need to engage via email a customer at least 7 times before they purchase, and I found that to be true. Often, it’s actually much more than that. I was just looking at stats on our website, and the majority of the people who opted in had been on our website for like over 30 minutes, and it was like their fourth visit or something like that, and that really drove home the importance of just kind of sticking it out, but in terms of that linear engagement experience that you craft, there is nothing like an auto responder sequence when it comes to follow-up. Andy, what do you think about that? Andy: Yeah, definitely. And of course, you know, you know this as well is that it doesn’t end at the sale either, you know. It doesn’t end at one sale or it doesn’t end at 5 sales. Even after the sale, you want to make sure that you check in and make sure that, you know, they got everything they needed and that you give them opportunities for, you know, upsells, of course, but also just to continue the relationship with you so that when you do have other offers, if you don’t have one immediately, that they’re going to be – You know, they’re going to be attentive to that, and always giving them more opportunities to engage even after the sale too is something that, in my personal business especially, I found to be very, very useful. Clay: Yeah. I mean – Right. So the engagement never stops. So if someone purchases, and right then, you should have a survey trying to figure out why they purchased. You want to know – You know, survey data that you gather several months after the fact is not going to really give you insight into that head space that someone was in when they first purchase your product, and that’s what you want to capture is the head space they’re in when they purchase. So you certainly need to follow up with a survey, but after the survey, it’s important to engage them to reduce the possibility that they’re going to refund and increase the probability that they’re actually going to use the product and get results, and if they use the product and get results, it’s important to engage to ensure that they still have a positive feeling about the brand so that they do word-of-mouth marketing for you. And even after that, it really, really never ends because even someone who’s purchased, the more you work on them, sometimes, they can become more and more of an evangelist for your brand they’ll be more likely to share stuff, they’ll be more likely to tweet it, they’ll be more likely to talk about you to their friends, to write up blog post, to be an active affiliate, whatever. So I’m a firm believer that yeah, the engagement never stops. Andy: Absolutely. I can’t really add very much to that. You pretty much nailed it Clay: Cool. Well, thanks so much everyone for listening today. Andy, did you have anything else to add to this? Andy: Yeah, if you have a question or a topic you’d like us to cover on the next Marketing Show podcast, we’ve got a fancy voice mailbox set up for it, so give us a call at 707-969-7469, and we will take the best of those questions and comments, and we will use them as fodder for our clever bantering on the next show. Clay: Awesome. You’ve been listening to The Marketing Show podcast. I’m Clay Collins. I’m joined by Andy Fossett, our head coach, and we’ll talk to you next time. [0:13:24] End of Audio
