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
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