How To Automate Your Marketing With Jake Hower

Podcast: Download (Duration: 38:15 — 35.1MB)

Marketing automation makes life easier and business more profitable. Are you making the most of it? Make the right system work for you. Learn how from marketing automation whiz Jake Hower from Incresio.com.

Jake Hower

In this podcast:

02:21 – Why should you be interested in marketing automation?
04:15 – How tags work for opt-ins and creating compelling sequences
06:38 – An example of clever and simple automation (and why simple is best)
11:59 – Why OTR is so powerful and the key to making the most of it
13:18 – What automation software should you be using?
15:10 – The 1 question to ask when choosing a tool
16:41 – Are you facing this technological barrier?
18:02 – The essentials of setting up an automated sequence
20:08 – The 2-step process for maximum sign ups
20:49 – Follow-up messages that get you 20% more opt-ins
24:30 – Get the messaging right
26:02 – The biggest payoffs of automation
29:28 – Investing in your CRM system
30:59 – The secret to cracking the code
33:22 – A recap
33:43 – Why hire a tech genius?
34:56 – Action steps to take

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Tweetables:

How do you make a tennis ball stick to a wall? [Click To Tweet].
Marketing is no longer a linear game. [Click To Tweet].
Short behaviour-based sequences convert. [Click To Tweet].
Simple and clever automation is best. [Click To Tweet].

Transcription:

James: Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness and today we’re digging into a topic that you probably heard about, you know that it’s good possibly and there’s a good chance you’re not doing too much of it, like I wasn’t for many years. It’s not something you do when you start out online and it comes with a little bit of a complexity syndrome. I’m talking about the topic of marketing automation and we’ll actually dig into what that means and how it works with my special guest today, Jake Hower from Incresio.com.

Jake: Hi James, how are you?
James: I’m good. Now you have been on my show before but we were talking about FuzedApp, which is a great software company that you built that does some fantastic things and anyone interested in that could go and listen to the episode. Now one of the great features of that software is that it does things for you automatically and I’m using it every day.

But what we’ve been working on lately is a special project because I’ve come to you and I’ve said, “Jake, you’re really good with this technical stuff. Can you help me get some of the things in my business happening on autopilot so that I don’t have to manually do some of the things that I was doing before?” And you are kind enough to come along and have a look at what I’ve got.

So today, we’re going to talk about: what is marketing automation and what sort of things have we been using on my business, and perhaps for some of your other clients of Incresio. And we’ll just see where that goes. So first of all, why should we even be interested in marketing automation?

What’s interesting about marketing automation?
Jake: Well, the analogy that I’ve been using, whether it makes sense or not is: imagine your goal is to stick a tennis ball to a brick wall. So, if you’re throwing all these marketing at your business, the marketing is the tennis ball, your business is the brick wall; it’s likely that if you just throw it straight at the brick wall, this tennis ball is going to bounce off. And marketing automation can allow you to essentially take a piece of Velcro, stick it to the brick wall, so that next time you throw a tennis ball, it’s going to stick.

James: Great! I was thinking you might say that it’s like having one of those tennis ball machines that keeps launching the tennis balls at the wall because it’s probably doing both.

Jake: Yeah, it is.

James: And I like how you used tennis balls instead of sh*t. I think that’s classy.

Jake: [Laughs] I’m a big one for marketing automation, I think it’s great. A lot of people talk about marketing automation more so about the automation, so I think I’m just going to create this massive sequence of emails, etc., etc., and run people through that particular sequence. I think people are a lot more smarter than that now and they can understand when they’re receiving something, which is dated, and it’s very hard to not deliver a message that is going to appear dated when you’ve got something so long.

James: Well, I’ll just stop you on that. I totally get what you’re saying there. If we would wind back the clock maybe 5 years, I used to have; I think something like 50 messages lined up in my autoresponder for people who joined my main blog back then. One day, I just went and just deleted them because I found that even though it’s evergreen, if anyone joins your list more than once, which was a possibility, they start getting the same sequence.

And one thing I’ve learned lately was that my gut intuition was probably right because of the opt-ins that I get on my own site, a huge proportion of them are people who have opted in before because of the way that people are coming to my site from so many different angles. They’re opting in for so many customized pieces of content.

Marketing is not a linear game
So I’ve had to get more sophisticated now in terms of tagging those people, in terms of where they’ve come from. And one of the other interesting things that I’ve found that again proves this idea that perhaps marketing isn’t so linear, is that when we’re looking at the conversions we get, in some cases, people have been accessing my site 25 different times through 5 different channels. It’s really depending on your marketing methods of course, and mine is extremely well-rounded compared to some. It’s not a linear game, is it?

Jake: Exactly right. And I guess that tennis ball shooter is the old style of marketing automation but Velcro has replaced it. I think instead of going really long, what I found really powerful is just really short sequences based on the behavior of your users. If somebody opts in for the OTR course for example on SuperFastBusiness, it’s highly likely that SuperFastBusiness membership is going to be relevant to them.

So what you might do is, because I’ve shown interest in learning about improving that business and about this strategy, you might over the course of a week or two, send them a few extra emails about that specific topic and encourage them into the community. But if they don’t take action, then you might just move them back across to your main OTR blog list, where they’re receiving more information outside of just that specific action.

Things you can do with automation
James: So let’s just get into the technical here, it’s important I think when we’re talking about this to point out that we can do clever things. Such as when someone opts in, we can go and check to see if they’re a member of SuperFastBusiness membership or not, and then we can tune our campaign through the use of software to start sending a relevant message.

Now, we’ve been doing a case study for my own live event, and one of the automations that is there is so simple and so clever, and it’s something that I used to do manually, but you’ve helped me set this up automatically; and that is: if someone buys a ticket to my live event, we go and check if they’re a member of my membership or not.

And from memory, this is how you joined my membership in the very beginning. You bought a ticket to my live event, and I sent you an offer to join my membership, and you joined. And I’d actually forgotten to do that a couple of events and you reminded me that’s how you joined and I thought, “We should do that again.” And now we’ve got that completely automated using software.

Simple is best
Jake: Exactly, exactly. I think the key thing you mentioned there is simple. Let me explain my experience with marketing automation. So I’d learned quite a bit about marketing and what it can do for you. I bought my platform, which I was using at the time InfusionSoft and I went dove head first and did all this stuff. I’m a very technical so I understand how to do it all and learn it. But I’ve built out something so complex that I didn’t know how to actually use it. I was afraid of using it because it would break the system.

So over the course of 18 months to 2 years, I basically scrapped everything and realized that simple is best because everybody appreciates simple.

James: You know Jake; you’ve just described what every single person does when they’re growing their business. They go complex, and over-engineer and overthink things, and then eventually at least a paralysis because you don’t know what to do, and then you just basically rebuild.

My business has gone through that many times. I actually had a simpler email system for the majority of the years after that first phase. Now when you came along, I had to look under the hood in my business. You would have seen that there’s plenty of short behavioural triggers and sequences, but there’s a lot that I’m not doing and that’s really the stuff that I think we should focus on.

So the first one was a really simple thing saying, “Hey, you’ve just bought this, let’s go and check if you have the thing that goes with it. and if you don’t, we’ll offer it to you. And if you do, fantastic!” And the other thing on the flip side of that, we realize, “Hang on a minute, what if someone’s a member of the community but they haven’t bought a ticket yet? We should really follow them up as well.” So we’ve got this cross checking going on and it’s very easy to do with the software. And I’m going to ask you to explain how that works.

How tags work for opt ins
Jake: Yeah exactly. So you’re an Ontraport user and it allows you to apply tags to people based on different events. So for example, you would tag people who were opting into your blog for the OTR course, so you’d tag your SuperFastBusiness membership customers. So what we do is we create a very simple rule, which is triggered by somebody visiting the sales page or the live event page, and it then checks to see whether or not that particular person who visited the site is already a member. And then it decides, what course of action to take based on just filtering through a few different parameters like that.

James: To put this in perspective from the business owners point of view, this is my experience. For this particular live event, there’ll be 100 and something people in the room. My main job this time has been several months ago to spend one day making some videos that you prescribed for Ryan Spanger and I to make.

I’ve been talking to Ryan about videos and that will be a separate podcast; but the videos we made were then all loaded up into the system. You’ve come along and just “rejig” the system, drafted some emails, set some timers and some sequences. And now, my job is just to send people to my content, do my usual thing, which I call OTR and that’s just continually publish podcasts, and infographics, and do some social media marketing and let people come to my site.

And if they opt in or they visit my site, we can take a retargeting cookie, and we can start advertising to people the relevant message based on what we know about them already when they hit the system. It’s like, “OK, we’ve just got a new person in the system. Let’s have a look at what we already know about this person because of their email address.” And if they’ve just visited my site, then we can at least follow them up and send them a very specific message. And the scale of this might surprise people.

One of the Facebook campaigns that I’ve done are selling live event tickets for 1 cent. That’s how specific and focused you can be. When you combine things like retargeting or remarketing, that’s really like the Velcro, isn’t it? You’re following that tennis ball around.

Creating powerful sequences
Jake: Exactly. OTR is the tennis ball. For me, I resonate with this method of marketing because OTR is powerful. I believe it’s powerful because it allows you to modify your message based on what you want to amplify, but it’s also very consistent and very fresh, I opposed to having this big, long autoresponder sequences.

And what you can do is you can just ensure you’ve got the right calls to action and by implementing some relatively simple marketing automation sequences for your different products or the different offers in your membership or your live event, then you know that all the promotion you do following just the OTR strategy, you’re going to capitalize on that because you’ve got these funnels in place.

James: Exactly. It’s like in OTR, one way to think of it, it’s like the gate to Disneyland. You’ve got all these buses rolling up, and trains and cars and taxis. They’re just all rolling up to the front gate. Everyone’s going to that front gate and when they’re in, they go off to their different adventure lands depending on their preferences and their likes and dislikes. And it works well for our paid visitors, it works well for new visitors because like you said, the real key is behavioural based.

Now, one question that’s going to come up, because it comes up every time you and I hang out anyway, it’s “Jake, what should I be using? InfusionSoft? Ontraport? Aweber? MailChimp? ActiveCampaign?” People would have seen on my site, I review Ontraport, and ActiveCampaign, and I used to use Aweber, in fact I tried InfusionSoft but it wasn’t a good fit for me. How do you answer that as an automation expert?

What software should you be using?
Jake: The simplest answer is the tool you use is better than the tool you’re not going to use. I always say that every tool is going to perform the job for you that you require it to do. It’s more about just maximizing what you’ve got. There’s a lot of InfusionSoft versus Ontraport versus ActiveCampaign. I think that’s an invalid question to be asking. It’s more about, “What do I need to do?” or “What do I want to do?” and then looking at which tool is going to be more suitable.

James: Right. So it’s kind of similar to our tools test in my own business, which is, “Is it a good tool to start with?” because obviously, you don’t want to get into a crappy tool. But any of the front-line options are going to be pretty good. Do we know how to use it? Have we learned it? Have we gone into the tutorials to apply the things that it can do? And do we actually implement?

And you talked about how exciting it can be when you get a complicated tool and I’ve got a pretty powerful tool with Ontraport, and I’m not really tapping some of the areas that give it a lot of its power but that’s where you’ve come in and just polished that diamond, you know?

The 1 question to ask when choosing a tool
Jake: Yup. Exactly, exactly. And I think that’s probably the first question to ask when you’re even considering tools is, “Have I broken the tool I’m already using?” or “Am I using to its full potential?”

James: I think that’s what happened with me when I reached the line with Aweber. It was great for small lists and for linear marketing. It’s not so great switching people between lists because you need add-ons for that. And by the time you do that, you might as well just get one tool that harnesses that.

So for me, that puts most of my audience into ActiveCampaign or Ontraport because most of them are small businesses. Not too many staff. Maybe teams of 5, 6 or 10. And I think it’s probably the more technical people, or people with a sales force or people with a bigger business. They’re going to start tripping into the InfusionSoft region.

Jake: Exactly. Absolutely. Unless you’ve got someone who has the ability technically in the business or you’ve got a service that you can use to actually run it, then that is best to keep things nice and simple.

James: Right. So really, most people are going to be in that Ontraport, ActiveCampaign. And if they’re small, ActiveCampaign is really well-priced; and if $300 a month is no trouble for you, then Ontraport is a great starting point. So that’s hopefully addressed those concerns for the majority of “Which tool is right for me?”

And that’s why I suggest people come to an expert like you and tell you what their business is and what results they want. And you would say, “Oh, well for that, here are the templates, here’s the system, the sequences. We’ll just go and lay them into the machine for you.” Because that’s the technological barrier that most people face.

Are you facing this technological barrier?
It’s like, “Great. I’ve got this powerful tool.” It’s like someone off the street buying a Formula One car, and they’re like, “Well, I don’t really know how to drive it.” You’ve got to hire a driver. Well, you’ve got to learn to drive. There are basic things that everyone should do and then there’s the option, which is what I found a lot of power in lately, is having an expert like Jake, actually coming in and saying, “Well, this is good. Now what you should do is this and this.”

So what I’m enjoying is that when the end of the month comes up, I’ve noticed that there are sign-ups coming into my system because the emails have started going out based on a date sequence. It’s counting down to the deadline. And it’s like having a product launch that is completely automated. And you could set this up for an ongoing evergreen thing, or you can have it for a date-specific thing like a live event.

The essentials of setting up an automated sequence
Jake: Yeah, absolutely. I think you’re talking about knowing what to set up. There’s probably a few things that we’ve done that take very little time that we’ve gained from this particular campaign. If we go through it now, probably the first one that we did was putting an abandoned cart sequence.

Now that is simply, if somebody goes to the checkout page to add a ticket to attend the live event but they don’t go ahead and complete the purchase, then we put them into a very simple sequence that sends them, I think it’s 2 or 3 emails over the course of 7 days, just reminding them that they actually did go ahead to try and purchase a ticket but they forgot for some reason or got distracted for some reason. It sort of encourages them back in to complete that purchase they were going through.

James: Yeah. I think a lot of people are sitting on the edge or they might have 17 browser windows open or their kid drops a glass in another room or they’re running late for a bus or something.

Jake: Exactly.

James: So it’s not that offensive to follow someone up for something they’ve already indicated that they had some interest in.

Jake: Exactly. And it’s very relevant. And you’re not really selling them. All you’re doing is reminding them that, hey, it looked like they tried to do something and then got distracted, say, “Here you go, you can complete it here now.” So it’s very simple, very easy to implement. And it’s actually applicable to a lot of different cases.

So commonly, it’s applied in the e-commerce space or somewhere where you’ve got somebody to actually make a purchase. But if you’ve got a lead generation form on your website, what you’ll find is that sometimes you need to click additional information or you need to convince somebody to book an appointment after they submit their details to you. And it can work in those situations as well. You can apply the same philosophy in the same sort of system, where you send them a few reminders until they complete the action that they should have taken initially.

The 2-step process for maximum sign ups
James: Exactly. And we call that a 2-step process. I’ve used that very successfully with Ontraport. We had a customer that had a newspaper campaign and a radio campaign in a year or so ago and we wanted the maximum signup. So we just asked for an email field, and then on the second page we asked for more details.

And now we could follow people up who didn’t fill in the second page specifically. So we had 2 groups and what we found was about 80% of the people filled out both pages. So there’s 20% of people that we may not have gotten in the first place, that’s my estimation by doing the 2 steps.

Follow-up messages that get you 20% more opt-ins
Jake: Exactly. And just adding one simple follow up message, I’ve sort of found roughly on average about a 20% bump. So of that 20% of people, 20% of those would have then gone on to complete the form. So in every 100, you’re getting an extra 5 people to complete the process.

James: Right. And there’s no reason you can’t market to stage 1 customers anyway, but the stage 2 ones, you’re giving that more granular detail.

Jake, one of the questions I get asked all the time, and that sequence you just mentioned where someone visits the checkout page, they don’t buy, I start following them up. I do this. Occasionally, I get people hit reply to my follow up and they say, “Wow, this is incredible. How do you do this technically? What’s happening to make this possible?”

Jake: OK. So you need to know who that person is obviously to be able to follow up with them. Ontraport is powerful enough to know that if someone visits your site from an email, then a little piece of information is stored on their computer. So if they come back and visit your site again, it recognizes that user. That’s one way.

The other way is to have some sort of a formal or some way of collecting that person’s email address. So it’s either using, like you mentioned before, a 2-step opt-in, where you collect the email address before taking them to that payment page, or it’s having the first field on the page being an email form. So what happens if they enter their email address and then go through and don’t complete all of the fields or don’t add their credit card for payment. That information is collected automatically as well. So that’s the second way you can do it.

James: I think the way that I’m doing it is using a special redirection link on my checkout button. So just to put it in layman’s terms, one major change I made a year or two ago was on my sales page. Instead of having my payment form, I put that on a second page called checkout, and then I put on a button, where people have to click on the button that says, “Buy a membership,” or “Access Now,” or whatever, depending on the product. As soon as they click that button, it tags them with the checkout abandonment sequence, and then it goes along in 1 hour, and checks to see if they bought. And if they didn’t, then it sends the follow up email.

So that must rely on remembering who someone is based on them already being on my email system, which for me works, because probably 65% of the people on my site have been there before and many of those have opted in.

Jake: Yup, exactly. And for those that aren’t already known by the system, you can utilize Facebook remarketing, which is what you’ve been using to sell event tickets. So basically, anyone who visits that checkout page, Facebook knows who they are and they can show ads to them.

James: Right. So they don’t have to give an email address. I may never have seen them before. They can go to my checkout page and now, when they’re on Facebook, which pretty much every person in the world is, I could run them a little ad. And like you said, this seems to stem from the e-commerce world. I know Amazon do it. And I’m sure if you’re not familiar with this concept, you’ll think it’s uncanny. If you want a pair of red shoes on a shoe store, and then you go and check some out and the next day, you start seeing them on Facebook, that’s what’s happening.

Getting the messaging right
Jake: Yup. Absolutely. Now, I think it’s important at this point to get the messaging right because I think it can be a little bit too Big Brother-ish. I don’t really resonate with messages where people have been using this type of sequence where they say, “I saw that you visited our page 5 times but you haven’t made a purchase. Can I help you with anything?”

So I don’t like that direct acknowledgement that as a business, they know exactly what their users are doing on their site. I think that’s it feels invasive as a user. So I like messaging that’s sort of convenient. So instead of saying “I noticed you visited this page,” it’s like saying, “Hey, I’ve got SuperFastBusiness Live coming up. If you’re interested, I’d love you to come along. Let me know if you’ve got any questions.”

James: Exactly. It’s subtle. You’re not being a smarty pants, you’re not offending anyone, and it’s done tastefully. I noticed when someone ask me what microphone I use, I might go to Amazon, find the exact microphone, get the link, paste it into an email, and then the next day or two, I’m going to get an email from Amazon, “Hey James, we’re you still interested in the microphones?” And it links me to the page. It’s not too offensive, it’s very clever though.

The biggest payoffs of automation
What do you estimate the results of doing this for business owners?

Jake: Well, I think, probably the biggest thing it does is it simplifies everything. So if you’ve got this in place, it’s one less thing you have to worry about. So in your instance, if you’ve got these funnels set up, you can basically forget about that conversion stage and just focus on producing the OTR content, knowing full well that the system is going to take care of a lot of the rest.

James: Right. So I’m tipping stuff in the top of the funnel and the funnel is built.

Jake: Yes.

James: It’s a conveyer belt machine that starts processing.

Jake: Exactly. So instead of having to worry about you spending time on each spot of that particular funnel, you can just focus on putting people into the funnel.

James: Right. Because in the past I would have had to think, “Oh, gee. I put a diary note, I better send a note to people who are coming to the event. They might want to join my community so they get to meet all the other attendees.” Now, it’s just going to happen. And it has been happening. The results have been, from my perspective, are really impressive.

You know, we’ve sold over 100 tickets. I’m getting people coming into the community who have come into the live event and they’ve joined the community because they come to the live events. So we’ve seen it actually play out. We’re seeing very low ad costs because it’s so relevant and it’s just all working in the background. I have been able to focus on other things like doing podcasts and stuff.

Listen to Jake talk at the SuperFastBusiness Live event
One of the exciting things is at the live event, you are going to go through some of the behind-the-scenes statistics. Like some of the actual emails that were written, some of the ways that you had them send out; like how many emails, what they said, which ones convert. We’ve been tracking everything with a software that shows all of the conversion path and it’s fascinating to watch. I mean I’m literally amazed at how many times some people visit the site before they buy.

Now maybe I’ve got to improve my sales copy, or maybe, I just have a very low-pressure environment where people eventually buy. And I’ve got patience and I’m allowed to let that happen by osmosis.

Jake: Well, you’re not forcing people into making that decision; they’re making it on their own terms, aren’t they?

James: Exactly. And I think I get a really good type of customer because of that. I’ve got very motivated and low-pressure customers.

One thing I was looking at recently was this long thread on Facebook. It went like as long as your arm. And it was all these Internet marketers talking about the Internet marketing special offers, and marketplaces, and affiliates, and syndicated promotion gangs, and mini launches, and high-level mastermind Facebook thing.

And I don’t understand that whole world now because it just seems like: a) a lot of work, b) somewhat shifty, c) a very inefficient business model, compared to just setting up a substantial, authoritative website where you put good content, you attract the right people, and then you have relevant messaging. You don’t actually need to go too advanced on that. You just need a good software to support your business.

I’d say a lot of people underinvest in their CRM system. What do you think?

Investing in your CRM system
Jake: Yeah, definitely. I think anytime I would start a business, what I recommend, that’s probably the first thing you get in place and working on because it’s so powerful. It’s very hard, even with InfusionSoft to Ontraport, it’s very hard not to get $300 worth of value out of the platform with just less than 30 minutes of work setting it up.

James: That’s it. And people spend $1,000 a month on affiliates or some other thing, but this $300 a month investment is a monstrously powerful machine.

Jake: Well, it allows you for instance to sleep while you’ve got these people on Facebook talking about different strategies. I bet you sleep incredibly soundly, wake up when you want, sometimes even late for a podcast episode, for instance. And know that what you just need to put out a couple of pieces of content and work on ensuring that community engagement and a few posts in the community and everything is just going to keep ticking over.

The secret to cracking the code
James: That’s it. Most of my time is just a balance of some fresh content and supplying content to existing customers. That’s it. It’s like a 50-50 split. I’m not spending a lot of time doing the hassle or the midnight burn anymore. And I think that tools like these are really the secret to cracking that machine, is to invest in the right software, give it some instructions that are intelligent, and let it do the work.

And if you want a great metaphor for that, I just watched a movie called “The Imitation Game,” and it was about Turing who cracked the code that the Nazis were using in the World War II. And he basically built a machine that could decipher the code that no one could do by hand. It would take something like 3,000 years to try every possible combination and he more or less invented the computer.

When I was watching that movie, my instant recognition was, “Hey, this is like the software systems we’re using now.” That they take in all this data, they automatically do the things that we used to do manually, and it really is like that Utopian dream of when computers come, they’ll just start doing all the work. This is one aspect that’s actually true even though the rest of it probably hasn’t worked out the way that they thought. But this is as close as it gets.

Jake: Yeah, definitely. And I think importantly as you said, it’s either things that you were doing previously or were never doing, and I think it allows you to focus on doing the things that a computer can’t do like flying across to London and shaking the hands of your customers.

James: Yeah. Like literally when you’re spending a day of travel, you want your business to just be functioning automatically. And when you combine it with other things that I talk about like leveraging podcasts, every single week, I’m getting around 10,000 downloads.

It’s mind-blowing to think that in any given day, like right now, several people are listening to me talking on a podcast that I’ve already put out there, that podcast will lead to my website, the website will lead to either a Facebook campaign or an email campaign that the system is going to sift and sort and automate depending on where they’re at already and what selections they’ve made, so their behavior will drive the result, and the end result will be dollars put into a bank account. And that is mind-blowing.

A little recap
And I think what you’ve done here, we’ll just do a recap, is if you’re impressed on why marketing automation is so valuable, and what it actually is, specifically we’re talking about 1 or 2 pieces of key software that can make greatly relevant decisions and do things for us automatically. But we’ve got to program them in, and that’s where people often get stuck. They’re like, “What if I’m not technical?” “What if I get overwhelmed with all these things?”

Why hire a tech genius?
That’s when I suggest you hire someone to set it up for you, or you learn about how to do it yourself. In the beginning, I watched the training modules and set up what I started with all by myself and now I’m at the point where I’m saying, OK. I’ve given it a good shot, now I get someone tech genius for the marketing understanding like Jake to come in and say, “OK. Well, here’s what you can do to make this even better.”

And there is a lot that can be done. I do think if you can invest in it, just get someone to do it for you. It would be the best solution because once you’ve done it once, once you’ve put in that upfront investment of either time or money or a combination of both, the payoff for any reasonable business, this does rely on you actually having a good product or a good affiliate offer that you can promote, and it does rely on you being able to tip things into the front end of the machine.

So that’s important. You’ve got to have something in the beginning, and you’ve got to have something in the end. But the bit in the middle, that’s where you can get so much advantage. Have I explained that properly?

Jake: Perfect.

James: OK. So what would be some action steps that one might take having just spent some time listening to this? They’re all excited. They’ve probably got a standard run of the mill email set up, collecting a few opt-ins, sending a couple of broadcasts, or maybe 5 or 6 autoresponders, that’s about it. I’d say that’s a typical scenario. What would be thinking about right now?

Some action steps
Jake: So right now, I’d go away and I’d review what you’re already doing. If you haven’t got an abandoned sort of sequence in place, I would do that. You can just start with one email. So I’d put in place whenever somebody either reaches the point of a purchase or they reach an inquiry form and you need them to do something else. Just try with one email. 15 minutes after they complete the first step and just ask them if they need help to finalize the process.

The other one I think, which is really beneficial, is having a user onboarding sequence. So most businesses have information that needs to be conveyed to their user and it’s something that people don’t necessarily think about systemizing. Just think about what every customer needs to know about your business or about what they’ve just purchased, and put that into an email. Again, it can be just one single email and that really helps people get embedded into your business and it creates a really good experience for them.

James: Beautiful. And an advanced one for someone who’s already got those set up?

Jake: Yup. I’ll look at creating funnels, which would cover the marketing side of things for each of your different product categories. This is stuff that I guess we’re going to cover at the live event and we’re already covering it inside your community. But if you’ve got a product look to put in place, that Velcro that we’ve been talking about, and then you know that any traffic you’re sending to that, it’s going to hopefully stick.

James: Beautiful. Well Jake, thank you so much for sharing. If you need help with your marketing, I do recommend Jake. He’s the one I’ve asked to come and help me. He’s got a site called Incresio.com.

And also, Jake’s going to be speaking at my live event, and we’re going to open up the books on my own business. We’re going to show you behind-the-scenes in my automatic email follow up system. We’re going to have a look at some of the conversion statistics, some of the advertisements that we used, and how we tied it all in with the video marketing, which is a whole other side of the equation.

But the point is, once I did that, one day of video filming and handed over the keys to the logins to Jake, the rest of the marketing was autopilot. That’s the exciting part. I hope you can come along and see that. Get access to the recording of the events that have already been run and hopefully, Jake we’ll get you back in the future to tell us what you’re up to in the next amazing iteration of your online journey. It’s just fantastic to watch this proliferation.

Jake: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. I’ve enjoyed it.

James: Thanks Jake!

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