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James Schramko Interview On 95% Repeat Clients Without Promos, JV's, Or Launches
James: One of my friends is actually bringing a sexy Jesus calendar and I’m
not …
John: Hey podcast listener, you’re about to discover insider tips, tricks and
secrets to making more sales and generating more prospects into customers
with Email Marketing. For more information about the Email Marketing
Podcast or Autoresponder Guy go to themcmethod.com/podcast.
Hey everybody, its John McIntyre here the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time
for episode 4 of the Email Marketing Podcast where we talk about the top
tips, tricks and secrets to making more sales and growing your revenue with
Email Marketing.
Today I’ll be talking to James Schramko about how he uses email to boost
his traffic and his conversions. James sends daily emails and he does it
differently to pretty much everyone else I’ve seen including other people I’ve
interviewed. To get the show notes for this episode of The Email Marketing
Podcast go to themcmethod.com/ep4 but first before we get into that let’s talk
some news.
The Email Marketing Podcast has its first review, it’s five stars and it’s from
none other than John Dumas. John’s the guy behind an awesome daily
podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire. Check out his podcast at
entrepreneuronfire.com. Now here’s what John’s five star review says. John
knows how to bring the heat … we have the same names so it gets a little bit
confusing. The Email Marketing Podcast has instantly entered my rotation of
must listens. John brings killer guests on and extracts killer content from
them. Thanks John and keep it up.
Thanks for the review John, keep rocking those podcasts and yes it’s very
confusing having John and John and John. Anyway, now if you want to leave
a review go to dreapdeadcopy.com/podcast there’s a link to iTunes store,
click the link, get automatically sent to the iTunes page. Leave your review
and I’ll read it out on the next episode. Okay, anyway let’s get started. Let’s
go talk to James Schramko.
It’s John McIntyre here the Autoresponder Guy with the Email Marketing
Podcast. I’m here with James Schramko from superfastbusiness.com. I met
James on an online forum and I interviewed him a while back for the
McIntyre Method product that autoresponds and now we’re back to talk again
about email stuff.
James teaches people how to build a successful online business using articles,
videos, podcasts and pretty much everything you can do online. He has a
number of products with pretty much anything in that area which I’m sure
we’ll talk in just a moment. James how are you doing today?
James: Good, how going John?
John: Fantastic, always. Let’s start off. I know I gave you a bit of an
introduction there but I’m sure you can fill in some gaps. Tell us a bit, who
are you and what do you do?
James: Right, like you said we made in the jelly wrestling forum and … hang
on, a different one wasn’t it. That’s right. It was more of a marketing one.
Sometimes I get confused. I pretty much have an online business that focuses
in three main areas. It is website development, traffic for those websites and
internet business which is like a coaching and mastermind set up. I help
people drive those websites once they’ve got them up because as we know a
website is not a business.
I came from a business background that set me up quite nicely to be able to
translate the concepts that we’re familiar with from normal business with
retail stores and dealing with big brands and little brands and international
markets and local markets and to sort of make sense of it from an online
perspective. A lot of people are draw into my business because they want
help with that sort of stuff.
I’ve been doing that for about seven or eight years now and full time for
about six of those years. I’m coming up to my sixth anniversary from when I
let my boss know that I no longer required his services.
John: Wow, are you going to have a party?
James: Every year I just … well year of course, quite the expert in that now. I
do contemplate how significant that was, it was such a change in life to be
able to get away from that desk and then to start traveling more and
expanding my horizon so to speak and learning a lot more about the rest of
other cultures. I think everyone would like to do that. A lot of people feel
frustrated that it’s eluding them and I guess if I’ve got any message for
people it’s, it is worth paying the price to read a few extra books or listen to a
few extra podcasts and implement the stuff you learn because it is possible to
do it.
John: Absolutely. One thing that I’ve learned recently is that it’s just a
choice, it is nothing sensational or super exceptional about it you just have to
make the choice and then it’s pretty simple from there you can figure things
out.
James: Yes it is a choice and it requires some action and doing certain things
that some people aren’t prepared to do. I think people whistle away their time
sitting on the couch watching television when they could be doing something
productive.
John: Like email marketing.
James: Well that it does require effort to do email marketing. However
there’s a very sexy automation side to it isn’t there where you can have things
happening even when you’re not there?
John: There is, the autoresponders and you can queue up a year’s worth of
emails put some traffic on that list and then go live in the jungle for a year
and you’d make sales all year.
James: Yeah, it is actually a possibility and we know some people who have
a similar approach to that.
John: Absolutely. You do everything, you’ve got email and you’ve got …
I’m seeing here page traffic, you do a lot of SEO but since this is the Email
Marketing Podcast let’s talk about emails specifically. I know that you have a
fairly unique way of doing things in the emails you send and how often you
send them and that kind of thing. Tell us a little bit about the James
Schramko email strategy.
James: Well I’ve got a fundamental rule my golden rule is that someone must
be off opening the email. For that reason there’s always some value attached
to my emails and there’s always a purpose or a reason for the email that will
benefit the recipient of it. That set of rules they aren’t … you know the
people, they sort of put I’d really value your inbox in their email and then
they send you 27 affiliate offers. It’s like they don’t actually subscribe to
what they’re telling you.
My way of … I mean I value my email marketing above all the other traffic
channels, it’s fantastic. These are people who selected to receive emails from
me and whom I’m able to build a relationship with so I really value it highly.
For that reason I just use it to let them know when there is something for
them. It’s as simple as that.
It could be some information on a topic that they’ve expressed an interest in,
it could be a follow up to a service or a product that they’ve purchased from
me that explains more how to use it or what else we’re doing for them or
what else we have that they could also benefit from or it could be a response
to an action that they’ve taken. I use a lot of triggers in my email sequences
in my marketing where an email will be sent if something happens. It’s like
an if this then that rule and I love those things. I think they’re really
awesome.
John: Okay, it sounds like you don’t do much direct selling via email you use
it more like primarily as a relationship building tool.
James: Primarily I use it to get people to my site where I am doing a lot of
value content based selling. I’m always selling however it would be rare that
I send an email with the sales letter in the email but I do that maybe once
every six months and it’s highly effective when I do that however it’s not my
standard operating procedure.
John: Okay, give us some examples. What are you actually saying in these
emails, what are you sending them?
James: Usually I’ll just have a small story. I might say … firstly it’ll go to a
specific segment so I’m really thinking about who is receiving this. If I have
a website customer who buys websites from me then I would send them an
email with a story about, “Hey imagine if you traffic to your website halved.
That would kind of suck and one of the first things you could do in that
situation is to really improve your conversions to try and double it because
the overage website might sell a couple of percent, 2 or 3 percent of the
visitors. It’s not that hard to lift conversions up to 4 or 5 percent. That’s one
of the first things you could do if your traffic halved.”
Then I turn the email around to say well recently one of my websites actually
increased in traffic and it went up like nearly 50 percent and in that six
months period my conversions went up almost 500 percent. Then I’ll attach
proof, I’ll say have a look at this and it’s a screenshot from my analytics. It’ll
be like a four hundred and something improvement. Then I go on to say I
actually made a video to see if I can help you improve your conversions for
your website. It’s very relevant, it’s all about website conversions and it’s got
then a screenshot of the video that is on the page that they will click to. I will
link to the blog post in the text, I’ll link the images to the blog post and then a
final call to action might be go and watch the video here.
That will lead them to a page that has the exact same video that they saw in
the email and that video will be a video about some things you can do to help
your conversions and it will also let them know that we can do it for them if
they’d like. Then that will link to the exact product that we have that will
improve their conversations and us do it for them.
John: Okay, you’re doing some really … I guess it’s advanced but it’s also
just very well thought out in the sense that you’re starting with … someone
get’s the website, joins the list and then you’re going to send them an email
and each email tries to get them back to the website. They watch a video and
they could see some sort of content they can get value out of it and then you
have a relevant offer because you have … I guess you must have 10 or 20
different products that you sell to them so then you can attach a relevant offer
to every single video that you have.
James: Yeah most of my customers can buy most of my products which is …
I call it the chocolate wheel but it’s very powerful because I end up … I was
just looking at last month’s stats and this might be interesting to listen to this
but I had over 95 percent repeat customers last month so in the last 30 days. I
do this without affiliates, I do it without promotions, I do it without joint
ventures, I do it without launches and I didn’t actually do page traffic last
month. I just do it through organic growth of my content marketing and list
marketing. In fact in that 30 day period I sent over 200,000 emails.
John: You’re sending daily emails aren’t you?
James: Pretty much every day. I’ve got a pretty small list relatively speaking.
I think it’s about twenty two and a half thousand people in my office
autopilot account and I’m sending couple of hundred thousand emails a
month. In fact over the last 12 months I sent 1.6 million emails and I made
far more than that in dollars. So I literally make more than a dollar for every
email that I sent.
John: That’s good to know, that’s really cool. So you can send an email and
go there’s this amount of people on the list I’m sending out this email
therefore I’m going to make this amount of money from this email.
James: I don’t actually calculate … I don’t really predict that far in advance
but what I can be certain of is if I do send out an email about conversions and
send people to the package that of the people who get that email it might only
be two and a half thousand people who have purchased a website or similar
service that a percentage of those will open, probably a pretty high percent
and half of those people will probably click through and watch the video.
Then some of those people will actually go and order the package which from
memory is about $400. I know that we will make sales the next day from
when I send that email and mostly for the next week because as you know
people’s inboxes are quite full. They don’t throw mine out, they don’t
unsubscribe, they don’t complain but they might sit on it for a few days to
actually get to it on the weekend or something.
John: Okay. You’re a content machine, you’re having content that comes out
is it five days a week or seven days a week?
James: Seven days a week. I create content every single day. In an average
week I will put out five or six video blog posts all of those will have the
podcast. I’ll put out a weekly summary and then I’ll put out two several
podcasts for my other podcasts and all of those will get an email. However
not everyone is on the master list so some people might only be on one
podcast or they might only be on a traffic list or they might only be in a
business list.
Then if they’re part of my business communities I also make a private video
for each of my two business communities only those people get them. In one
of them there’s about 30 people and the other one there’s about 700 people
and only those people get that video.
John: Okay, so you really have … you set it up so you have a reason to be in
these peoples’ inboxes every single day because you can say I have
something new to share with you?
James: Exactly and a lot of my pieces of content are very short. They might
be one minute or two minutes, they’re not onerous. Then my main podcast
that’s like a 40 minute episode once a week and people just demolish that.
John: One thing that I think is very interesting because I’ve switched to daily
emails recently and I’ve been advising … telling other people to do the same
and I think one of the biggest barriers that most people have is what do they
write about? Everyone has a different way of doing it, I’ve spoken to Ben
Settle and John McCulloch and some other guys and they have their own way
of telling stories and things like that. You have your own way of doing things
so how do you exactly … how do you come up with content that you can
create every single day? How do you not run out of ideas?
James: I’ve got enough ideas for the next 10 years so if you ever need a few
just drop a line. Seriously like I could give you 10 different ways to find
ideas. One is actually have a note thing on my iPhone that says make this
video and whenever I think of something I just jot it down.
For example about three weeks ago I was going away so I thought I might
make a couple of videos just to put on my hard drive, my little portable flash
drive as backup in case I just feel tired or when you travel sometimes it sucks
your energy and I put out … I made 12 videos in just a few hours, 12 in a
row. I did a three part profit booster series, I did all sorts of tips, I can
literally dig into my mastermind notes from week and pull out … I will have
30 business owners telling me their deepest darkest problems every week for
about five hours. I actually make notes on every single person, what they
said, what I told them to do. Each one of those could be a video. I could make
30 videos from that.
Then there is my forum, 700 members posting questions every single day so I
can simply just sort by thread and find the most discussed topics. Then I
could head over to my help desk where at any one minute there’s over 500
support tickets and that’s with ongoing jobs, recurring jobs or people coming
to the website, hitting live chat question, leave a message and then they ask a
question. Can I be a white label reseller of your products? Do you offer this
service? How would I best use this? How does James use office autopilot?
All these questions and I just simply take the frequently asked questions from
my help desk and I have my team compile them. I say to the team what do
people keep asking us? They send me a little Google doc and it says the top
100 questions we get asked. There’s 100 pieces of content I could make and I
just air to them one topic per video and you could just stick a how to in front
of it and you’ve got something that’s useful for your customers.
John: Right, what I love about that is that it’s 100 percent driven by real
problems that people have not you sitting away in some dark room
brainstorming stuff it’s you going out there and finding out what does …
what do people want?
James: Yeah, I’m instant. I like to utilize, I think they call it that from acting
or whatever. I was sitting here yesterday at about this time and I got an email
from Amazon and it was for a Zoom H4N audio recorder and I’m like wow
that is tricky. The reason it was tricky is I happen to have one of those and
my friend was asking me hey dude is this the Zoom that you were talking
about and he sent me a link in Skype to the product on Amazon. I clicked on
the link, went to Amazon and they’ve obviously tracked me by cookie
because I buy Kindles like every day or two I’ll probably buy a Kindle.
They’ve then stored that information, they’ve gone and check a few days
later has James purchased a Zoom H4N yet? No. Okay, we better send him a
little email. They send me the email, “Are you interested in Zoom H4?”
They’re all over me. I actually recognized it because I do the same thing all
over my stuff. That’s one of my favorite ways to communicate with people
by email because they’ve taken an action that tells me clearly that they’re
interested in something and using my database of people who visit me over
and over and over again I can actually tell that they haven’t or they have
purchased and then I can follow them up accordingly.
John: Okay so using a lot of advanced segmenting there based on what
people want and then sending them emails based on what they want.
James: I know it’s crazy isn’t it?
John: Who would have thought? One thing that’s really obvious here is it
seems you don’t really about open rates or click throughs what you care
about is constantly churning out content and content, more and more and
more content and not so much fuss over the little stuff like open rates but
your overall trend of the business.
James: Well I just want to be relevant I just want to solve problems. I do care
about unsubscribes and complaints but I just don’t get them and my list
grows every single month organically from my opt ins on my site. I’m not
getting people giving me hate or abusing me for sending too many emails
those are my worst fears. The thing is I’m more likely to get someone to
email me and say, “Hey have you taken me off the list because I haven’t
received an email from you for a week or so and what’s happening?” They
literally do that.
I also get a lot of replies to my emails and that gives you fuel for the next
one. I’ll actually have comments on my posts or an email reply with a further
question that I maybe didn’t cover in the first video and then I’ll just make a
follow up.
One of my classics was the guy who … I put out a video about the equipment
I’m using and this guy complained. He said, “You got to stop wearing $2
shirts and a good shave.” I took his comment and made another video out of
it and I called it should you shave and what should I wear? I put me in a nice
shave … shirt, I put me in just a Tshirt and then I had a little sort of cut away
shot of me nude in between not showing what I should wear. That had, it had
like 300 comments it just went ballistic.
People want to be entertained, they want something fun and they look
forward to opening emails like that, they want to express an opinion. It was
really helpful to me and as a result of that I now have a lovely collection of
about 12 polo shirts that apparently are kind of acceptable … they still say
sporty and wealthy but they’re not a tie, it’s not dressing up for the camera,
it’s just a nice sort of in between and do shave more often.
John: How often, once a year?
James: No I’m not going for the Jesus look or anything like a couple of our
friends are. It seems that I keep bumping into people, one of my friends has
actually been in a sexy Jesus calendar but I’m not down that track. I recon I
probably shave two or three times a week and before I would have shaved
maybe once or twice a month, it was kind of like a resistance to corporate.
John: A Jesus calendar that’s …
James: A sexy Jesus calendar.
John: I didn’t know Jesus was sexy.
James: It’s overage.
John: It’s got to be. All right man, we’re just coming up to time right about
now. This has been really cool and all this talk about jelly wrestling is
making me laugh. Let’s finish up. Give yourself a play, talk about what
you’re selling and give people … tell people where they can find out and sign
up to your list and start receiving these emails of yours.
James: Okay, well surely the easiest way to find out what I’m up to is to go
and have a look at superfastbusiness.com. There’s about 3000 ways you can
opt in and by the way I actually do track each one right down to the opt in so
I know which one’s better than the other ones and in all seriousness there’s
about seven different ways and I’ve learnt a lot about that. That’s why I had a
500 percent increase in my opt ins even with only a 50 percent increase in
traffic over that six months period and that’s important to know how you get
people to opt in.
Go on, have a look at what I’m doing and the best thing is with my emails
you can hit reply and it’ll come straight to me. Hit reply and tell me how to
improve, tell me what would make it a better experience, tell me if you think
they’re good or the suck. I’m interested in having that conversation and that’s
the key I think to staying realistic with your audience and not overstepping
the mark because your good customers will be the first ones to tell you when
you’re pushing it but luckily they don’t tell me that very often.
John: You’re dirty man, all right James that’s at superfastbusiness.com and
I’ll have the link in the show notes so you can check out the millions of opt
ins there. That’s it for now, thanks for coming on James.
James: Thanks John, always a pleasure.
John: Hey everybody, thanks for listening. If you want to discover more
insider tips, tricks and secrets about driving sales with email marketing sign
up for daily email tips from the Autoresponder Guy. Go to
themcmethod.com/podcast sign up, confirm your email address and I’ll send
you daily emails on how to improve your email marketing and make more
sales via email. You’ll find out why open rates don’t matter and the seven
letter word that underlies all effective marketing and much more.
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