I’m not overstating things when I say that Jermaine Griggs is an absolute master at marketing automation. Each time I learn another of his ninja strategies, I’m completely blown away.
Jermaine’s marketing automation strategies are the key to what led his initial $70 investment in his company to turn into a low-overhead 7 figure operation that doesn’t take much time to run. His truly impressive results have caused so many other marketers to ask for his advice that he’s created a marketing automation clinic as a second business.
If you’d like to learn just how far you can go with marketing automation, this is one interview you do NOT want to miss.
Listen now and you’ll hear Jermaine and I talk about:
(03:00) Introduction
(11:00) What happens when a user opts into the funnel
(15:30) An overview of how he uses negative tags
(23:30) An overview of how he tracks how long people stay on a page
(28:30) An overview of how he evergreens a product launch
(31:00) How to do a broadcast to increase profits
(33:00) How to ensure people aren’t receiving more than one email in a day
(39:00) An overview of how he’s driving traffic
(51:00) An overview of is custom dashboard and leadsources
(01:03) An overview of how he’s using upsells
(01:12) His advice on whether to focus on traffic or conversion
Resources Mentioned
Hear and Play
Autoactionclinic.com
Automationvideos.com
More About This Episode
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Listen Now
http://s3.amazonaws.com/bi-podcasts/JermaineGriggsFinal.mp3
Transcript
Trent: Hey there Bright Ideas hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas podcast. I’m am your host Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast for marketing agencies, marketing consultants, and entrepreneurs who want to discover how to use content marketing and marketing automation to massively boast their business without massively boosting the number of hours their working every week. And the way that we do that is we bring proven experts onto the show to share with you the step-by-step. The strategies, the tactics, the resources, and the tools that they have used to achieve their own success, and in this episode, you’re in for a real treat.
My guest is a fellow by the name of Jermaine Griggs. If you’re not in the marketing circles, and you’re not in the marketing automation circles, it’s possible you haven’t heard of Jermaine. However, if you do swim in those circles, I’m betting you have heard of him. He is the founder of a company by the name of Hearandplay.com, which way back in the day while living at 17 years old in his grandmom’s apartment, he started for $70, and it now, some, I don’t know how many years later, he’s taught over 200,000 people. He’s generated eight figures in revenue.
The business does multiple seven figures in revenue per year, and the most amazing part is the guy only works like four hours a week. Which is crazy. So how does he do all of that? He does by making extensive use of marketing automation, and the tool that he uses is Infusion Soft. So if you’ve ever heard of Infusion Soft, or you use it, or you want to know more about marketing automation, this interview is going to be with one of the very top dogs in the space. To put this into perspective, people who join his membership site, which is called @automationclinic.com. You have to pay $2,000 upfront and $350 a month, and so we’ve got well over an hour of, as detailed as I could make it, discussion with Jermaine. And I absolutely grill him on how he’s doing all of the various things in his business. So in just a moment, please join me in welcoming Jermaine to the show.
But before we do that, I want to very quickly tell you about the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite. If you are a marketing consultant or you’re an online business entrepreneur that is focused on marketing services to small businesses, and you are tired of being alone, and you’re looking for support and encouragement. Proven strategies and tactics that are being used by other people who are getting success using the same thing that you are doing, that’s called a mastermind, go to brightideas.co/mastermind, and you can learn more about it.
So with that said, please join me in welcoming Jermaine to the show. Hey Jermaine, welcome to the show.
Jermaine: Hey Trent. Happy to be here.
Trent: It is a real thrill to have you on. As we were kind of chuckling about before I hit the record button, I think we’ve miss tried or miss scheduled this interview a number of times so I’m super excited. You’re very well known in the marketing automation community and you’re very well known in the Infusion Soft community. You’ve had a lot of success. But there’s probably a few people who are listening to this episode who don’t yet know who you are. So I would love to give you the opportunity to just spend a minute or so, briefly introduce yourself and tell you what you do please.
Jermaine: Absolutely. Well, I’m Jermaine Griggs, and my primary business is a little website out there called HearandPlay.com which specializes in teaching musicians how to play music by ear. So I like to compare us to Rosetta Stone. Usually people get it when I say ‘the Rosetta Stone for music, how you can teach yourself any language, well you can teach yourself music with our software, our DVDs and our various media’. It didn’t start that way. Actually it started, I’ll tell a brief story of my childhood a little bit.
When my grandma won a piano off of the Price is Right in the ’70s, I wasn’t even born yet, but in the ’80s, I would begin to play this, especially early ’90s, I could just hop on there and play a Disney tune, and I just had a knack for picking things out that sounded good. No one taught me anything. I just, white note, skip every note and had myself a chord. Soon I was playing Little Mermaid, Lion King, playing for my church, and built a reputation. One thing led to another, and I started teaching kids in the neighborhood. This was around 14, 15, created these workbooks. I didn’t know the word leverage back then, but I knew that I was teaching the same thing to these kids every week. If I put this in some kind of form, media, leverage-able, tangible thing, that I wouldn’t have to do this work week after week. That was really the birth of my first product with Hear and Play a few years later, the secrets of playing piano by ear.
I launched this site at 17 years old in my Grandma’s one bedroom apartment. I grew up in the inner city. Not much money, not much experience, not much anything, but a burning desire, and that was one thing about me. I sold Avon at 12. I sold prepaid legal at 18. I sold Olympia Sales Club in the back of the National Geographic magazine. It was like a kid’s organization. I sold that at eight. I was always doing something, and here I was now a piano teacher, you know, with my briefcase out and ready to teach these kids.
So when the opportunity came to put this online, I jumped at that. I forgot who recommended it, but someone said, ‘You ought to put that online’, and that’s what we did, with $70, Network Solutions. They weren’t $7 like they are at GoDaddy now. $70 and a dream to teach the world how to play music. Here we are today, having taught over 200,000 students in over 100 countries, and living my dream teaching other people how to live theirs, through music at least.
Trent: No kidding, and obviously you’ve, with 200,000 students that’s translated into quite a bit of revenue.
Jermaine: Absolutely, that $70, and I have to pinch myself, but that $70 has turned, over the years, into eight figures into total revenue online, never having taken a loan, not even knowing to take a loan, no knowledge of venture capital or angel investments, or anything like that. I just had to turn $70 into $140, $140 into $1,000, a $1,000 into $10,000, $10,000 into $100, soon a million, a couple of million. Then here we are looking back having not only made that money, but touched a lot of lives teaching people how to play Christian music, jazz music, how to sing, how to play the guitar. And it’s really a niche that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Trent: Yeah, I love that you followed your passion and were able to make it such a commercial success and obviously create a wonderful life for yourself as a result of that. Now as I mentioned very briefly in the intro, in the circles that I swim in, the marketing automation and marketing industry, you’re a pretty well known guy because you have put to use a lot of marketing automation into the Hear and Play business. Is that correct?
Jermaine: That is correct, and I think it came more out of necessity than me just being a real technical, I guess you can say mad scientist as my friends call me. And there is a little bit of that too in my personality, but really all of these years, I was either in high school running the business. I was in college, because there was a lot of pressure for the inner city kid to go to college and to make good of himself, so this internet thing was just speculative. ‘Don’t talk about this Hear and Play thing, you go get your law in criminology, and you become the best defense attorney’. So I was doing that, all while running an office with seven employees, much of whom were my family, but we won’t talk about that. I had to fire them all too eventually, but much of my time was really not focused per se on the business as my primary thing, because I was always a student. Till, I guess, it’s only been about six or seven years now that I’ve been out of school. So automation was my way to figure out how to put systems and structures in place so that the business could run without me and it still does pretty much several years later.
Trent: How many hours of the week does it take you to maintain that business?
Jermaine: Well, the joke is I could have wrote the four hour work week. I think that’s about right if I wanted to just kind of coast. When I want to get into growth mode, obviously, you’ve got to put in some things and come up with some new systems, but I’m the guy in the Infusion Soft circle with the 170 step email campaign. I know when I draw somebody at the top of my funnel, what they are going to be worth by the end of the funnel, and there are launches built into the funnel, right. I’ve had friends join my list, and they’ve said, ‘Hey, you’re launching that jazz thing tomorrow aren’t you? Why are you playing basketball with us?’ ‘Hey, well, that’s launching for you, Chris, but that was created five years ago’. But they feel, they’re in this thing and they feel like these are live events. There’s tele-seminars every Wednesday night going with or without me. Webinars popping up, product launches that you’ve never seen until you get to certain parts in the funnel. So basically what I’ve done is I’ve tried to mimic real life marketing, but put it in such an automated system with real dates and real personalization. That you can’t help but to think that it’s what’s going on here and now. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems with these launches.
I’m a launch guy, don’t get me wrong, but these launches, they make a lot of money, don’t get me wrong, but they’re like one time assets. It’s like once you’re done with that launch, you’ve got to come up with something new, new and fresh and whiz-bang, and shiny object-y. When I look at that as an asset, I want to take that highly producing launch, and I want to find out how to make evergreen, how to take some of the temporal elements out of it, make it permanent, and put it into my step sequence as step 70. And know that when someone gets to that point, they’re going to increase their customer value on an average by X, and that’s just a difference in thinking.
Trent: Yeah, absolutely. So when I originally came up with the questions for this interview, I had planned on diving really deep into how you were doing this, how you were doing that and the other thing, and since then I’ve interviewed quite a number of Infusion Soft users, and we’ve got a lot of the tactics that have come out in interviews. And I’ll link to some of those interviews in the show notes folks, so if you go to brightideas.co/79, which will be the show notes for this interview, I will link to some of those other interviews.
Jermaine, what I would really love for us to be able to do is for you to kind of explain what happens when someone goes into your funnel?
Jermaine: Absolutely, now we could be here five hours talking about every element, but I can kind of capsulate what would happen. So at Hear and Play, what I like to do is start people with, because you have to have a lead magnet, right? Gone are the days ‘Join my list for updates’. I remember, we could do that in 1995. Everybody was excited about email. You almost wanted email, because you didn’t want this empty inbox, right? AOL, you’ve got mail, those days are over. You’ve got to have a lead magnet and you’ve got to have some kind of exchange in value, even for something free. You’ve got to sell free more than you sell paid almost.
So our free lead magnet, if you will, is a four video sequence, and there’s meaning behind the four videos. You may say, ‘Well, you could just give away one video’. Well, the reason, not only because it sounds more valuable, but I like to collect data, because I think without data, man, if I just have email and first name, and there are marketers that are just happy with email. To me, that’s just the mailing list, and if the money is in the list, then a fortune is in the data rich list. And so I want to have the opportunity under each of my lead magnets, so Video One is about the first step to playing by ear, which happens to be learning the key of the song. If we have any musicians out there, you’ve got to know the key of the song, so I take 30 minutes, and I teach them how to do that.
Meanwhile there are questions under the video. Questions from psycho- graphic stuff like: Why do you want to play the piano? When do you want to reach your goal? How long have you been playing? What style of music interests you most? What’s your current level, beginner, intermediate, or advance? So I start with open-ended questions like that. Usually no more than two or three questions while they are watching the video, so it doesn’t take away from the experience. In fact, if they submit those questions, it happens in such a way that the page does not refresh. You’ve got to take into account the little things like that. And so, meanwhile they look like unobtrusive survey questions, but those are pieces of information.
In the Infusion Soft world, we call those tags, which are nothing more than labels, just like in Word Press, if you make a blog post, you can come up with different tags to describe that blog post. Same thing with the customer, and I’m one of those guys who advocates for the more tags, the better. So if you log into my Infusion Soft account, you’re going to see like a thousand tags, Trent, because I want to know like every little thing. I want to know how far in the video you watched.
Meanwhile, there are certain things that you are telling, that’s called external data, and then there are other things that you are not telling us, but you’re telling us. You’re telling us because of what you’re doing, and those are what really count, that’s our internal data collection strategy. So what’s happening? Trent’s watching my video but what is Trent really doing in the bigger scheme of things? Well, Trent is auditioning for how intensive my email communications are going to be with him soon, right?
Here is what I hate about a lot of internet marketing tactics, I guess. You get on somebody’s list, and all of a sudden, you’re being emailed three times a day. Have you ever had that experience Trent?
Trent: I have, yes.
Jermaine: I mean you’re in the middle of a launch. You don’t know what you’ve joined, right? You’ve got the free book, but then there’s a launch going on. You’re being bombarded, frequently asked questions, wait, what have I gotten myself into? Well, we’re versed in internet marketing but imagine just somebody off of the street signing up on one of these lists, and just being bombarded with three emails a day?
Now, I’m not opposed to higher frequency of communication, but let’s make the person raise their hand, and as they raise their hand and as they meet us with more enthusiasm, we in return, through our automatic trigger based systems, we meet them with that equal amount of frequency. So that’s what going on. I’m tracking how far in the video, and we’ve gone so far as to create technologies that work with video hosting like Wistia, so I know down to like if you start the video, you get to 50% of the video, you get to 75% of the video I know, and what am I doing? I’m tagging you. So it’s not uncommon for you, after the first five minutes of dealing with me to have 20 tags in your account, because some stuff is video consumption, some stuff is data you told me turned into tags, some stuff is what you haven’t done yet. There is some negative tagging that I do. That’s something that people don’t talk about. So I tag you if you’re using Customer Hub or some kind of membership site. Sometimes it’s hard to show content based on tags that they don’t have, so sometimes you’ve got to take them with a negative like haven’t filled out survey, but the minute they fill out a survey, you remove that tag so now they don’t see the survey anymore. But those are some of the things that are going on in the beginning, but really what you’re doing is auditioning.
So you get through the four videos. You’ve either watched the videos, you haven’t watched the videos, you filled out certain pieces of data, you’ve surveyed, now we have a program for you, and we make our offer. And depending on your consumption, you get the offer sooner. So you watch the entire first video, we’re going to put our first offer in front of you much sooner, which is a free CD set called The Secrets to Next Level Growth, I think that’s what it’s called. Let me see here. Yeah, The Secrets to Next Level Growth and that’s going to be the first offer you get, but it’s not made to everybody, because you have to prove yourself. It is with a shipping offer. So we have a shipping component to it, for us to grab your credit card. The reason for that, is so that in subsequent parts of our process that we can make one click offers to you so you don’t have to do anything, right?
But the people that don’t watch the video, what do we do? It’s what I call worst case scenario marketing. So we send them reminders about Video One. So I go with a three reminders sequence, if you will. So Video One, you don’t watch it, what do you get in day two? You get a reminder to watch Video One or you get some kind of other benefit-driven email of why you want to master that content in Video One.
I have no business of moving on to Video Two if you don’t have any data, you don’t have any tags, or anything letting me know if you’ve consumed Video One, so we go about that. You could very well be on Video One, and here’s where this goes real dynamic versus using the AWebers out there that get responses or just what I call ‘static follow up.’ Static follow up is everybody gets the same thing, one size fits all.
But dynamic is, well, if Trent is with me, let’s send Trent along at a fast pace, but if SueAnne, she’s taking her time or maybe she didn’t mean to sign up, or maybe just playing by ear isn’t for her her, well, I’m not going to spend valuable real estate or email counts, because you’re charged by email. I’m not going to threaten her complaining and knocking my complaint score up or anything like that. I’m not going to frequently send her messages until she shows me interest. And that’s what the whole philosophy is all about. And we go on with you Trent to sell you the workbook. We’ll see you that for $40 and then we get you on a continuity program where we get you on a Wednesday new member call, which rolls every Wednesday, so we have one coming up tomorrow, and you think that that’s me live, no reason to think that’s not me. I mean, I don’t go out of my way to say meet me there live. ‘It will be me in color, live’, but I just say ‘Broadcast of our new member orientation on Wednesday, be there’ And we make an offer for that on our continuity program which is called The Monthly Music Mentor. Then we begin to just escalate you through our, what I call our ideal purchase pad but at your pace. So it’s possible for you to be worth $200 to me after just three weeks if you do everything I want you to, and somebody else to be worth hardly anything. But the tags are usually a correlation to that.
Trent: So let me jump in with some questions, because you said a few things that really caught my interest, and I’m going to go back a ways. Under Video One, you have some questions that they can answer without refreshing the page. Was that custom code or is there a third-party tool that you’re using or is that a setting within Infusion Soft?
Jermaine: Right. It’s called an iFrame. It’s like the best thing I discovered years ago. It hasn’t changed, and it’s like the best way that I describe it to someone is a picture-in- picture, like those TVs where you can watch a football came in the left-hand corner and then you can watch the basketball game in the main part. That’s what iFrame is. It’s almost like putting a website into a website, and if you Google iFrame code, it’s like a one line code that you put up.
Trent: So you just put the form code within an iFrame code and that solves the problem?
Jermaine: That solves that problem. What it does is it keeps the form inside of the iFrame. It’s like its own world, so it refreshes the iFrame which is just the picture in picture, but it doesn’t refresh the whole page, and I found when people do the surveying tactic, they make the mistake of just putting a form on there and when the person is like deeply involved with the video, they fill out the form, and now it’s just ruined the whole customer experience. You think they are going to take time to find out where they were in the video, or leave? Some people will, but we don’t want to rely on that so we make these kind of small little tweaks to just make sure we keep it going forward.
Trent: That is a very good idea. Now if someone does not ever watch Video One, you send them three reminders, they don’t watch it, is that it? Are you done?
Jermaine: No. No, I’m not done with them. I eventually move them on to Video Two, but how long does that take? Probably a week, maybe a week or so. One day they’ll get a reminder, number one, in one day, I’ll wait two days, they’ll get another reminder, and then I’ll wait another two days, and they’ll get another reminder. So they’re looking at Video Two by like day five or six, depending on if it rounds to a weekday. So they eventually move on, but they move on at a slower pace. Because, again, that frequency, someone who is not in tune with you, would be hard pressed to take out their wallet. Now there are some people out there, ‘Just give me the product.’ but those are the exceptions. Usually activity precedes purchase activity, if you will.
Trent: So, and I didn’t brief you on this beforehand, so if you don’t want to share it, I fully understand, but I would love it if you would send me along a screen shot of some portion, maybe just the portion of the funnel that we were just talking about so that I can include it in the show notes? You don’t have to say yes or no now, but if you would, that would be a wonderful aid to add to this.
Jermaine: Okay, it sounds like a plan. I think there is one already out there from a previous interview, so I can see if we can do that. They plotted it out for me and everything, because what it is, is that my sequence was done in Legacy, so if someone is new to Infusion Soft, and they’re using Campaign Builder, well, there was once a time before 2012 where you had to do thing in a linear, very written way. So even if I do a screen shot, that’s what you’ll see, but soon they’re kicking us old timers off of Legacy and we have to all move over to the new visual campaign builder very soon.
Trent: And the new visual campaign builder is very, very wonderful place to do your work because it does make it very easy. But I guess moving, especially when you have as much created as you do is no small undertaking.
Jermaine: It’s not, and it almost has to be done when I’m under pressure.
Trent: Okay, so let’s continue down, is there more that you wanted to explain about how they go down the funnel?
Jermaine: Absolutely, just other little tweaks in there. You might say, well, yeah, we do have tools that track videos but you can do this, there are little hacks. You just have to think creatively. Before I had all of the tools and technologies, I was still tracking how long people stay on a page, you can do that kind of thing. Like Infusion Soft has this membership portal called Customer Hub, and I started thinking creatively, and maybe this is an aside of how you can get things done in obvious ways, but they have this thing called Customer Hub, and you can store your content in there. It’s what we use to store our four videos. But they also came out with this thing called Action Links. What it is you click a link, and not only does it take them to the next page, it can then run a number of actions so it’s kind of like a link that basically allow actions to run, and then takes them to the next page.
So you can tag them when they click this link. You can cause another email to be triggered when they click this link. You can do basically anything you can do inside Infusion Soft. And I said, ‘Okay. Well, how can I make this link so they don’t have to necessarily click it, but it automatically just runs when they come to a page?’ And guess what, back to my friend the iFrame, what do you do? You just load that action link in the iFrame in the corner of the page and now it acts like a page view script. So it doesn’t have to even be clicked, but it’s like a little tracker at the bottom of the page that’s going to do the same tagging, the same emailing, but just when the page loads. And then I got a little bit more tricky, and do you remember back in the day, they don’t do them as much, but they’re called meta refreshes. You used to go to a page and it said this page is no longer here, it will redirect in ten seconds, and so I said let me go to Google and find the meta refresh code, and it’s a one liner.
Everything I do is a one-liner because I’m not a programmer. It’s a one-liner, you put the number of seconds in it that you want to refresh. Now most of them are like ten seconds. What I did is I said what would ten minutes be? I think that’s 600 seconds. Would this thing work for 600 seconds? Lo and behold it did. So I tied in 600 second meta refresh delay inside of my iFrame to go to the action link the customer had already gives us. And that’s how I said, ‘Oh, tag them when they’re on a page for ten minutes’, and you don’t need any technology other than those two pieces of codes, and now you’ve got yourself kind of like a ten minute tracker so don’t get too hung up on tracking video and things like that, where there is a will, there is a way.
But the big idea, even if you just track email clicks, because obviously, if they don’t click the email, they don’t make it to the membership site. So that should be the minimal to track, and not move them on until you’ve at least tried a couple of times to move them forward. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t move them ahead. You might find this funny, but we have developed this script that will opt them out. But to qualify for an opt out, you really have to have no tags, no purchases, absolutely have done nothing in about 30 days, even gotten a kind of a kick in the butt email from me.
I mean I get pretty down with this one, and some people reply and then after that, I pretty much can choose to take them off the list, and some people might think that’s absurd, Jermaine, what if they come around? Well recency is king. ‘What have you done for me lately?’, Janet Jackson sang. And a lot of people make the fallacy of thinking that a customer is still a customer. ‘No, they haven’t bought from me in three years’.
‘They’re still a customer though.’
‘No, they are not’. And even the 200,000, that’s who I serve, but I’d be a fool to say that’s my active customers because I understand recency, they’re some dead people there too. I mean literally, figuratively. I mean I send birthday cards, and the wives have returned them saying, ‘Oh, man, Charlie passed away last year. Thank you for the birthday card’. That’s literally too, not just figuratively. But yes, that’s my philosophy here, and we go on.
Really it’s just about creating this behavior based, trigger based, one thing begets the next thing, begets the next thing, and then you can get to 30 days, and you can say ‘Okay, well, let’s take everybody who said they’re into jazz.’ They’ve watched, let’s say, two of my four videos, any two. Because you can do Decision Diamond and come up with your own criteria, like if they have this tag or this tag or these two tags and these two tags. You can do all of this stuff in Infusion Soft now. It wasn’t this easy five years ago, but now you can. You can come to the thirty day mark, and we can say, ‘Okay, this is a crossroads, what do we want to do?’ Well, if they have this, let’s launch them the Jazz 101 program. Let’s build it up like if it were a new launch. We don’t have to say a new product is coming out that we’ve never seen before, but you can say something like, ‘In a week, we will be allowing new members the opportunity to get their hands on our Jazz 101 course. Here are the bonuses.’
Now the bonuses you can position as new or fresh or what have you. The pricing, discount, early bird this, early bird that, and you just begin to position it. You don’t come right out and say, ‘Okay, time to buy Jazz 101′. But you build anticipation just like you would do with a real launch. You count down. The great thing about Infusion Soft is that they have these things called field timers, and you can literally put a date into Infusion Soft. Now getting a date into Infusion Soft, you might have to get a plugin out there in the marketplace, but once you have a date, say you have a date called ‘Jazz 101 Launch’, and that’s a date or any kind of launch, and we store that date. Let’s say that date is December 1 2013. Well you can cause Infusion Soft to count down to that date, you know ten days before that date, do this, seven days before that date, do this, one day before that date, do this. And then the great thing about it is you’re storing the date, so you can throw that date into the email as a merge field as well, to give it some believability, specificity.
As we learned in Joe Sugaman’s book, ‘Triggers’, being specific will always be better than being general. Now sometimes you can’t be specific so you just use the regular delay timer, and you say ‘Next week we’re releasing’, ‘Wednesday we’re releasing’. That’s better than leaving it blank like ‘tomorrow’ or something like that. You can always say next Wednesday and just make sure that your email is scheduled to go out next Wednesday, because you can control the day of the week that you’re-. Oh that’s a great idea too, InInfusion Soft, it lets you control not only the day of the week, so you can say this email must go out on a Wednesday, which allows you to be a lot more personal, because in your emails leading up to it, you can say ‘Hey next Wednesday, this is releasing’.
Infusion Soft also lets you do a number of the month or a day of the month, so that would be something like 10th of the month. This email has got to go out on the 17th of the month, so then you can almost say ‘Hey, this is coming out on the 17th.’ You don’t have to say March 17th, February 17, or January 17th, but ‘on the 17th’. So take advantage of technology, and how Infusion Soft is letting us do steps on specific days of the week, days of the month, and now your emails can take on an evergreen feel and it seems very real to the point where you’re playing basketball with your friends, they’re on your list, and they think you’re launching something in an hour.
Trent: So do you do any broadcast at all or is everything just evergreen into the funnel?
Jermaine: Very rarely. Now here is an admission. One of my clients, they said, ‘Jermaine, if you actually start doing broadcasts, you’d probably double your business’. They were teaching me what I wasn’t doing. I was teaching them what they weren’t doing, because they were the type to broadcast the daytime company, hardly no follow sequences. I’m everything, said and done, I can be in Fiji, and the business would run the same way but not doing as many broadcasts. So I’m starting to take certain categories of people that had been through my sequence and maybe their emails have slowed down just because I don’t have this plotted out for five years. I’m start taking those people and bringing them to broadcast since I don’t have much automation left for them. I’m talking about people that have been through my sequences maybe in 2010, because in this automation, you always have loose ends. So I can’t say I’ve tied in every end. What about the salsa person who watched this, clicked this? I started to take them down a path and we never did that launch or whatever. You know there are tons of those kinds if you think of this as branches. There are so many branches. So yeah, I begun to look at opportunities and turn those into broadcast, but if the broadcast work, what do you think I’m doing? I’m converting those to become steps or whatever where I would need it, so there is always a connection between the automation evergreen.
Trent: All right, so I want to talk about a couple of other things. So just so the listeners know where we’re going to go. Next I’m going to ask you a little bit about how you are driving traffic to your opt-in pages. I also want to ask you about your email policy, and I think I’ll do that one first. I just want to know because I’m thinking about how I manage my own funnel, how do you decide, because your funnel, to me, sounds like there is any number of paths through the funnel, it’s very dynamic, that a user could take, based upon what they click and the answers they give you. So how did you, from a policy point of view, make it so that they never ended up getting three emails in a day or did you?
Jermaine: Right. Well, with the Campaign Builder, the way we teach it now, it’s really goal based so they’re never on multiple paths, but they’re meeting a goal that’s stopping everything from previous to it. So let’s look at the person who watches Video One, there are three emails waiting for them, but if they go on and watch Video One, those emails are null and void now. If there are seven paths, based on if you pick jazz, gospel, blues, they’re generally zero sum options. They’re not like you can get on this or that. If you click this, it will take you off of that. You clicked jazz and we wanted to know your last genre, we would actually remove gospel. Now there might be some places we’re storing that in your notes or something like that, but because I know this is very dynamic and I do know how this can get out of hand, we have to be very careful to turn off things that now don’t apply and try to keep recency as our main driver.
So it’s what you’ve done last, and there is even a concept in the peak potential profits that I’ve taught my own clients called the Orabit, and the Orabit, how it works is at any given time, if you buy product A, we turn off anything else. It’s a circle. So anything leading up to product A, we turn it off. It doesn’t matter if you were on product H before, and we sell you product B. Whatever is next in line, because we take your recency. I don’t care if you bought seven gospel things, if you bought Jazz yesterday, we turn off whatever next sequence we were going to sell you, and we put you on Jazz 2 or Jazz 201. And so that’s how we keep this from getting out of control. There is always a turning off of anything you’ve been in, but that’s not to say we won’t return.
So the Orabit is a circular kind of self-repeating organism, so let’s just say you were on product J, because you bought the product before that, and I have 30 products. So J is actually a real one. Now because you came back, and we have a catalog-type site, you can buy anything you want. They’re not hidden from you. You can go buy salsa. So if you go buy salsa, and you’re currently on the jazz follow up, well we turn off the jazz and we put you on whatever should precede a salsa purchase, whatever that would be.
We take that same philosophy even to our lead generation efforts and even to our prospect communications before you buy a product, but it’s just based more so on clicks and that sort of thing, but we try not to have you on too many things at once. Now there are things where you click a link and we have a one day delay that will say, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Kind of like a cart abandonment kind of thing. Those I can’t really help, but chances are, you probably are not going to be exposed to 20 different cart links or something like that and get 20. So I just take those kinds of battles when I can, but that’s generally how we do it.
Trent: Do you keep all of your automation in one campaign or do you have it spread? Do you have a campaign for each product? How do you kind of manage it from a campaign perspective?
Jermaine: That’s a great question. It has a lot to do with how I keep my sanity. The main lead sequence, the one that I’ve been describing, it’s like a 170 steps, one campaign, so I control every single thing. So for example, if I have five steps, and keep in mind this is done in Legacy, so it’s a little different. I have five steps that go out as Day Number 18. Well, I fully control the qualifications and criteria needed for those five steps. And like I said, they’re generally zero sum, which mean if there are five steps on Day Number 18, well one is going to be, if you have jazz in your custom field. One is going to be if you have gospel in your custom field. Another one might be if you’re gospel and beginner. Another one might be if you’re jazz and you clicked the link last week, but they are always zero sum gain. So when I plot these out on the whiteboard, it is impossible, or I’ve set it up wrong, it is impossible for you to get even more than one. Because a lot of the things I do, we store them as data custom fields. So that’s a little different.
You store the tags we use as well, but when it comes to sending an email based on a criteria, if you do it based on a tag, well it is possible for someone to get the gospel tag, sign up again, and maybe get the jazz tag in most people’s campaigns. But what do we do? If you sign up again, we remove gospel, salsa, blues, pop, rock, and give you the jazz. So you only get one tag, and it’s based on your most recent activity. But even if we do allow multiple tags, say we did allow them to add jazz and then gospel, usually when we send that email out, the criteria is not based on the tag that they have, but more so on that one finite piece of data that’s stored in their custom field called Favorite Style, and at any given time, you can’t have more than one favorite style in a custom field.
Trent: Correct. Okay, for me, I do occupation that way. You can only have one. All right, now I’m going to back up to that other question I alluded to before about traffic. How are you driving, because you can have the best following in the world, but if you don’t have a steady supply of traffic to the lead magnet, of course, nothing works, because there is nobody in it. So how do you drive traffic to you lead capture pages?
Jermaine: Absolutely, so I have a lot of traditional, I’m more of an old school type of guy, I have some new social media strategies, as well. But I guess at the base of it is our organic and ppc traffic so my Google Analytics shows me that from organic, we will average 38,000 to 45,000 visitors a month just because we’ve got a blog with thousands of pages and at one point, my blogging strategy was an article a day, and there was this little plugin, just this rinky-dink little plug in called SEO Presser. He probably wouldn’t appreciate me calling it rinky-dink but I just mean, just small, light $9, it probably was like $7 or something. I don’t even remember, and there are probably other equivalents. And it would analyze your blog post, and there were 12 criteria. Does it have an H1 tag? Does it have an H2? Have you italicized your keyword? Have you done this? It would give you a score. I would just use that, and I did this for maybe like a few years straight, every day I was blogging on something when I could, and with 90% the rating, so it was like highly SEO optimized, and we would take terms. And the great thing about it is that we would already go to terms that were promising in our Google Analytics, that people were finding us on and then we ran out there, obviously we’d go to keyword research tools, SEOMoz and some of those tools.
Google had a tool and even Overture back in the day had this phenomenal search inventory tool where you could find the top keywords in your niche. Word tracker, and then we would begin to do our blog posting on that. That’s still, even though I don’t blog as much now, those assets are still out there so that’s just the basis. PPC, we’ve got Google on one end. We’ve got Bing on the other end. I find my traffic from Google is a lot more qualified than Bing, but I find that you can get like penny clicks on Bing literally, a penny, two cents, three cents, but your opt-in rates come way down. I’ve also found …
Trent: Let me just…
Jermaine: …re-targeting …
Trent: Oh, yes, sorry go ahead. Retargeting, that’s a great topic.
Jermaine: I’ve also found re-targeting to work well and we use AdRoll as well as Google’s built-in retargeting as well with their audiences and stuff like that. But AdRoll works very well, not only on Hear and Play but on the automation clinic side. I can’t tell you how many people say, ‘man, you’ve been following me around the net. I’m at dictionary.com and five of my banners are around the word I’m looking up’. I say, yeah, this is pretty cool, especially for customers that don’t understand what retargeting is. The psychological impact of retargeting makes them feel like you’re a big company.
Us as marketers, we know that it’s a cookie and it’s following me specifically. But to a customer, it’s like ‘Wow, this Hear and Play site has got a big budget. They seem to be everywhere I am.’ And I find that to be true, because people will actually say that, even family and relatives. ‘How much are you spending out there man? You’re everywhere.’ I say ‘You know how it is. Go big or go home.’ But really it’s not. It’s following them. Now the name of retargeting, the name of the game there is that you’ve got to get your cookie on as many machines as possible, so there has been many trends now. Not only do you put your cookie on every, and when I say cookie, it’s just the code that they give you, right? So when someone visits your website, it just basically gives them this cookie if they’ve got it enabled on their machine and now we know who they are, and we can go and follow them with our banners and stuff like that. But now you’re able to put this code inside of emails, so now I can harness my 170 step campaign, and placing that code in the HTML.
Sometimes you’ve got to do it as an image. You have to get a little creative, but most times, you copy and paste right in, and now if I’m sending 30,000 emails a day in my follow up sequence or what have you, or whatever my average is, that’s 30,000 possible cookies being reinitiated if you will, and so now our population can grow. In AdRoll, I think my population, which is how they describe the amount of people that you’re targeting, I think that I’m almost up to almost a half a million people. So go figure. A half a million people that I can now focus on. These are people that have been to my site, they’re on my list. Another great thing is you can make sub-segments.
So it’s not just one size fits all, which obviously is my philosophy. I’ve got to like that feature. People that got to my thank you page, they become a part of this population. People that got to my check-out page, they’ve become a part of this population. People that got here. Just think about it. Based on that page that they got to what could you be offering them? How could their sales message change? Dan Kenny talked about a message to market match, and this is message to behavior match. Because now you can re-target people to specific places in your site. And I had to admit I wasn’t as sold on retargeting as much, because I’m like, ‘Well, these people are already on my list, in many cases. They’ve already revisited my site, why am I paying almost the same amount to get them back, than to attract a new person?’ I had to get around that and see the benefits of that because it takes, Brian Tracy will tell you that it takes at least seven times for somebody to ever consider your offer just that many exposures or frequent exposures to your offer. It’s not a one-night stand. So re-targeting helps in getting those exposures up, and so we can . . . I’m sorry.
Trent: Sorry I cut you off. Let me just jump in with a question there. So with the retargeting in email, does that mean that you’re putting some code from AdRoll into the HTML of an email so that they’re seeing your banner ads?
Jermaine: Yes, so you’re building your population through that.
Trent: Buy why would you do that as opposed to just putting the banner ads into the email and not even using AdRoll? I don’t get it.
Jermaine: Well, it has nothing to do with the email. All you’re trying to do… The aim of re-targeting is building up your population base.
Trent: Oh, you’re using the email to place the cookies so that when they’re back out on their browser, they’re seeing your banner ads where ever they go because the emails renewed the cookie.
Jermaine: Yes. Exactly, because where re-targeting doesn’t work is if you got a population of ten. It’s not going to work. So you’ve got to build up the number of people that have your cookie out there, and some companies have tens of millions of people because they got that reach, and now they become our population. Or the amount of people that we’re going to be able to target. If you’ve got your AdRoll code, you’ve got your retargeting code on just your website, you’re only getting so many visitors to that, and then people are refreshing cookies, deleting cookies, you might not be able to get past a few hundred people. And what’s that’s going to do with normal impression, click through rates, and stuff like that? So you try to find as many places out there.
You can even get your affiliates. So let’s just say, I don’t know if you have to update your terms or how that works, I’m not a law legal guy. I went to undergrad, but I didn’t get further than the BA degree or whatever. I mean imagine if your affiliates are already putting banner code out there, right? Imagine if you just appended your re-targeting code to the bottom of that banner code or maybe had a programmer, I don’t imagine -, actually I’m getting an idea here. You know that they say you retain 90% of what you teach? You actually get more ideas when you teach than when you’re on the other end?
Trent: Yeah.
Jermaine: So what I’m thinking about is instead of giving your affiliates just the regular image code, have a programmer wrap the re-targeting code and the image code into like a one line java script or something, and then if it still ends up with the same banner showing up, but it brings the re- targeting code with them. So the name of the game is just get that retargeting code out to as many eyeballs as you can, and now you’ve got as opposed to Google, I mean Google’s great too, but the click through rates, half a percent, a tenth of a percent, you know? But now when you’ve got interested people that have been exposed to you, your partners, your email, and now you follow them around, I think the results go way up to click through rates. You can get a percent two, three, and on banners, that’s really, really good because we have just found that the rates diminished over time just with straight out banner and image advertising. You’ve just got to have a lot of impressions. So that’s one thing.
And then we moved on to Facebook, which I’ve always been late to the social media thing. I’m like an old school Dan Kennedy guy. But we eventually jumped on when I started seeing how far their pay per click has gone. I can’t say that I’m much versed in fan pages and that kind of thing, but the targeting capabilities are huge. Because it’s another Google Adwords but in a different way. Now on Google, they’re searching.
On Facebook, they’re living it, they’re liking it. They’re putting it on their page and describing themselves, and then Facebook has also contracted with some of these bigger data houses, and now you can get real psychographic data, interests, you know, all kinds of things, car buyers, you can really drill down deep. Kind of the whole re-targeting idea now, you can import your list to Facebook in the same way. So I can go download my list, and I can import the emails into Facebook, Facebook will analyze it, and then now that can become my population in the same way that I describe AdRoll to run Facebook ads to. But I think that the implications are huge.
My programmers are working on implementing this for me right now. We have a list of things to do, just so much to do, and I guess working four hours a week, it doesn’t help me in getting these things out, but I do try to get back in growth mode when I can. But one of the things I said is, ‘What if at different stages, so if Trent is watching Video Three’, and I know that there is going to be an offer coming up, well imagine if at Video Three, I can go ping my script, my custom built thing with, we call the HTCP post. All it is is a fancy way to say Infusion Soft wants to talk to something else out there. So that’s something else that’s going to be my script that’s going to be like a medium between Facebook and Infusion Soft. What if I can add them to my custom audience in Facebook and basically call them people that have gotten to the third video? Show them a very time sensitive ad based on where they are in my sequence. That’s where I see this going. I think CRM to Facebook and then the whole retargeting thing, really being not only to have them in your specific sales funnel, but even follow them around the net. Whether Facebook, banner ads on dictionary.com, where ever they are based on where they are in your funnel.
Now that is the next level and that really excites me.
Trent: Yeah, no kidding. So when you’re doing all of this advertising, pay per click, retargeting, and so forth, the important thing is figuring out where the spend is working, and where to spend isn’t working, and that comes to us in reports.
Now, I’ve not talked to you about this, but I’ve heard that you have done some pretty interesting things with the Infusion Soft dashboard, so I don’t know whether that is true or not, but if it is, could you tell us a little bit about that?
Jermaine: Yeah, so well we built our own custom built dashboard. Now you can use Infusion Soft as well, but I wanted to know every little thing. So at the basis of it is lead source tracking, so whenever we advertise on any different medium or vehicle, at the bare minimal, you have to create a new lead source for that. So Google would be an example for a lead source or a lead source category. And then under that, whether it’s Google PPC, Google Image or Google Re-targeting, and then under that, even with the general message, what angle you took. Did we go with the fear base? Did we go with the embarrassment? Did we go with the positive? Take your plank [sounds like 52:25] to the next level? Did we go with the dangle and the carrot for video sequence, the specific message, and then that would spit you out a lead source as a number like, lead source one, two, three. And then all you have to do is when you advertise, you make sure that in your link, so the worst thing that you can do is just send them to hearandplay.com.
So if you type in hearandplay.com or whatever your domain name is straight into Google, you’re probably in the dark with what’s converting and what’s not. You might say, ‘Well, Google’s got conversion stuff for me’, and that very well may be true, but what happens after that? And you want to be able to follow people months into your sequence, and the lead source really helps with that. Because I found when I was just trying to make it work, based on I guess money in the bank after I guess every 30 days or however I was looking at my reports. Meaning, how much I spent and then how much Google’s conversion told me that the conversion were worth, I mean that can get discouraging. Sometimes you get hits, but most times it’s going to be misses.
Ask Proactive Solution, they don’t make their money back until eight months down the road, and we don’t have that kind of money to float like that. When you do Lead Source tracking, you get a lot more insight, because what’s going to happen is they’re always going to be tied to Google adwords. So that first purchase, yeah, it may be only $30.00, that four levels to next level growth thing that I got, but what if they go on and my sequence works? What if that new member sequence gets them to buy $97.00 or they get on my gospel music training session at $37.00 a month and stay for ten months, and then they go on to do my Jazz 101? Well Google’s not telling you that, Google’s only giving you that first conversion.
So with Lead Source, I can say, and we do this, I can say, ‘Okay, take me back to January 2013, give me everybody with the Google adwords lead source, and then we go to the Customer Lifetime Value report, and I want to know what all of those customers are worth’. Because that add up all of their purchases, their total paid. Now I can take that figure, I can go back to Google, and I can say, ‘In January 2013, what did I spend?’ and then now I got now my six month ROI, my three month ROI, my 12 month ROI, and what I spent in Google never changes. That’s written in stone for January 2013. But if you actually follow Lead Source and do this kind of reporting and analytics, you will see your lead source will only grow, because time brings about more valuable customers if you’re following up and stuff. So you find that you have a lot more than you think to spend on customer acquisition, and as Kennedy would tell you, he or she who can spend the most on the customer or to acquire the customer, generally wins.
Now as it relates to the dash board, we’re triggering every little specific thing on this dashboard that I built. And what it does is it works by HTTP post which is again is that thing inside Infusion Soft when you want to talk to a server, and all it does is every time an action starts to happen, it pings my script, and my script just counts up by one. My script is looking for a unique contact ID, but that’s the only criteria, meaning that if Trent kept clicking on the first video, it’s only going to count you by one, because it passes your ID, whatever your ID is going to be. It’s only going to accept one unique ID for that stack. And so I’m able to do math and stuff, so let’s say I’m tracking how many people signed up, how many people go to double opt in, how many people go to watch the first video, how many people do the survey, how many people do the second survey, how many people request a free CD, how many people upgrade to the workbook, how many people register for the new member call, how many people join the call, how many people buy for the $97.00, how many people go on to then join the continuity program, how many people go on to buy the jazz launch? So I’ve got all of these numbers. They’re showing up in my dashboard. But, I wanted to take it up a notch, because the problem even with Infusion Soft’s dashboard, they’re just raw numbers. So I said what if I could make calculations with these numbers? What if I could divide this into this, and that into that, and come up with these ratios that change every day. I could drill down, and I could say today, yesterday, the last seven days, and those numbers, the calculations themselves as well will change before my eyes based on the date durations and stuff. And that’s all we did. We just took it up a notch through our own little dashboard script, which I actually give people in my Pinnacle Club program.
It’s month one, and now people are out there doing it now, not just me. People have repackaged this up eventually, but we did this five years ago and just now got to packaging it up a few months ago. Then it can take these calculations and put them on these custom pages so I can make all of these different custom pages, and then the best part about it, because I think reporting is nothing if you don’t have systems to keep those reports in your face.
How many times have you gotten excited about a report, some new analytics, logged in the first time, a couple of times, and maybe a couple of months, and then for whatever reason, it doesn’t stay in the forefront of your mind? If you don’t have systems and structures to keep those in front of you. Now if you have team meeting and things, and it’s somebody else’s job, to point those out that’s one thing. But owner marketers, CMOs like me, there have been many times, if I can be truthful. I have these reports emailed to me every night. Some are on a seven day, that’s one of the features of it. Some are on a thirty day and so that keeps those numbers fresh in my mind, and I think anything you want to keep consistent, automate it. That robot or that chron-job, the technical term, is never going to sleep. It’s always going to work. If you rely on yourself going in and pulling numbers, well, that’s probably going to get tired one day. And so that’s basically the idea, keeping those numbers fresh in mind and keeping them moving in the right direction. But setting up systems and structures to do that.
Trent: Man that is cool. I would love to see some screenshots of that.
Jermaine: Well, I said I was going to add you, so you’ll be able to install yours. It’s a five minute installation.
Trent: All right gang, so there it is. So I will spend time working with this dashboard on my own and get the best version of it that I can, and I will blog about it and share it. So just make sure that you are a subscriber to Bright Ideas and a regular reader and you will get to see the results of what I learn from that version of software. So Jermaine, thank you for that.
Jermaine: Yeah, my pleasure.
Trent: Man oh man. Where do I want to take us now? I’ve got a lot more notes here.