Rob & Kennedy Intro

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Email Marketing that doesn’t suck!

Tersh Blissett: Hello. Went out there in podcast world. Hope you’re having a wonderful day. You were listening to or watching the Service Business Mastery Podcast. I’m your host Tersh Blissett and sitting virtually next to my co-host, Joshua Crouch. And we’re going to talk to a couple of guys that are they we’re going to talk about email marketing. And I know that we talk about marketing a pretty good bit, not not as much as a marketing podcast, but it’s one of the things like. We don’t necessarily talk about how to fix an air conditioning unit because most of our listeners, they they don’t know how to fix an air conditioning unit. So one of the challenges that we face is following up on conversations that we have with clients. And we send out a we’re a sales call or even a service call, and they don’t purchase a system, but they really need to purchase a system or replacement system or a water heater. It’s dated. We’re collecting tons [00:01:00] of data from this from our residents or the commercial location, but then we don’t do anything with it. It just comes to die in the in the cloud. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about email marketing and how to use it properly and how to not make it suck. So I’m super excited. Josh, what you want to add to this?

Josh Crouch: Yeah, I mean, so these guys have a unique way that they got into email

marketing. It wasn’t they didn’t come from like a marketing firm and break off type of thing. They they had different businesses than than most of you have. But they had a I think one of them was a mentalist and the other one was a comedic, comedic act. I’ll let him tell. I don’t I don’t want to screw it up. But they they they realized that a lot of these places, when they’re trying to book gigs were bad at they’re bad at following up and they weren’t booking the gigs just similar to like [00:02:00] booking jobs, right. And booking new maintenance appointments and keeping in front of your existing customers so they don’t forget who you are. So the next time that they were thinking about getting that gig or that job, your name popped up and they remembered you and these guys have have. So they have a very unique way of how they got into what they do. And I think they have some some unique. The perspective on how you can make email not boring and not suck. And that’s really the part that I think is going to be interesting to most people.

Tersh Blissett: And I request early on in the show, I request that you pay very close attention. They have a very, very thick like South Louisiana accent. So but I really, I believe 100% you’re going to get gold out of this conversation. But with that being said, let’s go ahead and get started with today’s show.

Announcer: Are you [00:03:00] looking for valuable business advice to reach that seven figure revenue mark? Do you want actionable tips to properly navigate through every business challenge you encounter along the way? Let Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch be your guide in getting you to the top here at Service Business Mastery. Tune in as they sit down with world renowned authors in business leadership and personal growth who share valuable insights about management, marketing, pricing, human resources and so much more. Let their nuggets of wisdom gold guide you in owning a thriving, profitable and ever growing business. Here are your hosts, Tersh and Josh.

Tersh Blissett: Hey. Welcome to the show.

Kennedy: Hello.

Josh Crouch: Hey, guys.

Rob: That was exciting.

Tersh Blissett: Tell us a little bit about yourself and where where you’re from and how you got into [00:04:00] doing what you’re doing now.

Rob: Yeah. So we have quite a unique story as you kind of hinted. So I’m Rob, the one with the red hair off of Rob. Off of red. Those are the only clues that you get. Kennedy is the good looking.

Kennedy: Really funny. One.

Josh Crouch: One.

Rob: Kennedy is the other one. I’m a hypnotist. A comedy stage hypnotist. That’s what it was. That’s it. Sort of like for the past, like almost 18 years, I’ve been traveling almost all over the world, performing the show as a hypnotist, getting people on stage, hypnotized them, making do crazy things with their imagination, and then sending them back to the audience. And Kennedy is a mentalist, so he uses skills like psychology and body language and reading people and statistics and understanding human behavior and influence to make it look a lot like he can read people’s minds to create the illusion of being able to read somebody’s mind and again been doing that for like 18 years. And we met at a magicians convention and became friends when I was kind of just approaching the end of school and Kennedy was approaching the end of university. We both came out of those full time education and just started a business as an entertainer. [00:05:00] And we didn’t want to start a business. We didn’t want to be business owners. We weren’t entrepreneurs. We just wanted to get up on stage and do the thing that we really wanted to do. But the problem is you then have to understand and you guys will understand this, you’ve got to suddenly get into pricing and branding and positioning and all of that stuff that we didn’t want to have to do. You just have to. And so very quickly, a couple of things happened because we were fresh out of education and just kind of didn’t know what we were doing and naive and just how to go optimistically, how to go at stuff. We were like starting to see results where lots of people who’d been doing this for a really long time were kind of struggling because they were stuck in their ways.

Rob: And they’d, they’d started this as like a side hustle alongside a job, which is fine, that’s great. But it just meant that they had a different perspective on some stuff. And so we just went for it. We had nothing to risk. Neither of us were married, neither of us had anything dependent on us, and we just went for it. And so very quickly, we became two things that most entertainers don’t think you can be. We came busy and expensive, and most people in the entertainment industry think those two things are mutually [00:06:00] exclusive. You can either be busy or you can be expensive. You can’t be both. And we were. And the main thing we used to get gigs was email. We didn’t want to be like talking to people and having to like try and do the same sales call every time and make it just as enthusiastic and just as good. Even though you’ve done it a million times and every client you speak to is different. So we realized that, sure, sometimes you got to chat to people, but generally speaking, the follow up of it all and the ongoing marketing should be done by email in a predictable way that’s done at scale across all the people who will and won’t ever hire you. And then that would that would work really well. So we started doing it. That led to other entertainers asking us how we were doing, what we were doing. And then eventually that led to other just business owners generally asking, How are you using email in a way that is different? And people like receiving your emails and they get results and it’s all good and kind of brings us to where we are today, I guess.

Josh Crouch: No, it’s awesome. So do you guys. You guys still are on stage entertaining and doing this?

Kennedy: Yeah, [00:07:00] absolutely. So about four months of the year, Rob is on the road, filling up theaters, hypnotizing strangers to do wacky things. And then I’m I’m up and down most of the UK now because I got sick of traveling so much, but yeah, mostly performing at conferences and stuff, so we still do that thing. And what’s amazing is while we’re doing all that stuff, while we’re out doing the job, which I’m sure you can resonate with, like why you’re doing the job, the email still kept going out. People are getting followed up with they’re getting a great experience. They don’t particularly know that you’re not the person sitting. Send an email, assist doing it. You’re not pretending you are either. But like at least that being followed up with being taken care of and they

can fall through the cracks. That’s the thing. Well, it’s not automated. When it’s not systemized, when it’s not a process, then people can fall through the cracks. That can’t happen for my entertainment gigs. It can’t happen for any of the processes we have for any part of our different businesses now.

Tersh Blissett: So how do you, I guess, [00:08:00] diving right into it? How do you avoid over automation or or.

Josh Crouch: Sending too many emails or what is there to like? Is there too.

Kennedy: Many? Yeah, I mean, yeah, there’s too many rubbish emails, that’s for sure. The thing is, right, email marketing, most of it is terrible. And so when we think about email marketing, we look at the crap we all receive and go, Well, that’s what kind of works I must do that. We don’t have to perpetuate crap. We don’t have to. The good news is, if most of everything else that everybody, every one of your customers or would be customers is receiving if it’s already crap, yours don’t have to be amazing yet. Those just have to be slightly less crap than everybody else’s. So the bar the bar is really low.

Tersh Blissett: All right, so I’m noting down notes here. Just be a little less crappier than everybody else.

Kennedy: So that’s that’s great advice. Yeah. Like, let’s be real. Why try to be like, you know, like, [00:09:00] why y be a best selling author when come on you you’ve got your business. Be great at what you do, put your energy into that.

Tersh Blissett: But that’s I mean, that’s the challenge that I have is like perfectionist. Like it’s just like, let’s overanalyze this. This is going to, like, sound the best. And then you release it and then it gets, you know.

Josh Crouch: Crickets.

Tersh Blissett: 30% open rate and then zero clicks and you’re like, this is like I just wasted like 17 hours.

Kennedy: On what happened. Just because your standards are not the correct standards, like who are you to set the standards of what perfection is? Who were you to set the standards of what good is? Why don’t you let your audience tell you? Why don’t you let your subscribers tell you, put more stuff out and figure out what they think is good? Because I can tell you now there’s some stuff we send out. I don’t think it’s good. Rob doesn’t think it’s good, but damn, it makes sales so they like it.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, 100% or not.

Josh Crouch: So. So as far as email, [00:10:00] I mean, what, what do you guys normally do like it’s like sales funnel type emails or do you do like a broad approach where you’re also doing like, like regular staying in touch with your audience type of things too.

Rob: So here’s, here’s our take on it. And this is wild, but we think email is just another content channel, right? So all we do with anything that we do communication wise is type things on the Internet and put them up and then hope they resonate with people. And you know, whether you’re sending out direct mail through the post or doing stuff on the Internet, that’s still true. And so whatever you post on social media, whatever you send by email, whatever you say on a podcast, like whatever you say anywhere, that’s that’s just content. And so if email is just a content channel, that means we need to think about it slightly differently. Instead of thinking about what most people do isn’t email marketing. What most people do is email sales. They send an email because they’ve got something to sell, and they hope that when they hurl out their monthly newsletter or whatever, that somebody might be in the right place to go and check it out and might be in the right place to to want to engage your services right now and start working with you. And that just doesn’t work anymore [00:11:00] because that’s been too much of a numbers game and this sort of idea of hope marketing got to throw the Frisbee out and whoop whoop to death that somebody catches it. And if they don’t, oh well, never mind. Email probably doesn’t work anyway. I’ll try again next month. And so our approach instead is to flip it around and just make valuable, interesting content that your audience will like and appreciate and just be there all the time so that when they are ready to to

engage your services, when they’re ready to jump on it, they can. So just become a person of value that they want to receive emails from. And that sounds like a very broad statement. So we can definitely unpack how to do that as we go through this. And so the way that we do it, one simple thing is to stop emailing about the thing that you sell or what you do, right? Stop emailing about the products or the services.

Kennedy: What? What, Rob Say that again.

Rob: It’s about the products and services because the truth is nobody gives a crap. Nobody cares ultimately. I mean, they sort of really care when it’s desperate and they really need it and it’s really that time. That’s when they care. But the most of the time when things are okay and they don’t need a new unit and they don’t need you, like most of the time things are [00:12:00] okay and that’s they just don’t care. And that means that they’re going to unsubscribe because people don’t think about the problem that might happen one day. They think about the fact that they don’t have a problem now, but they have a busy life and therefore your email is not relevant to them anymore and all of that stuff. So instead what we do is we email, we send emails and we send emails to all this every day, 365 days of the year. And we think all businesses on Earth could. But we send an email every day that’s purely designed to build connection, deepen relationships, and look after what we call the emotional needs of your audience. Now, you might think, Well, what does that mean? Because that sounds really fluffy. So basically what we talk about is in our business, so most of our customers, so we’ll give you the perspective of us and we can we can adapt this to you guys as we go. But our audience are mostly small businesses, like one, two, three person businesses with maybe a small team, maybe on their own, mostly based from home, and then either sending stuff out or going out and delivering the service.

Rob: Right? That’s who our clients typically are. And so they’ve got a bunch of things in common. The core thing they’ve got in common is the fact that they’re interested in getting better at marketing so they can sell [00:13:00] more of their stuff and have a better business. But underneath that, they’ve got a whole bunch of other things in common that are much more interesting than email marketing and business stuff. To do with things like the fact that they’re working from home and they’re trying to be

productive, but they’ve got a wife and partner and pets and kids running around every time they jump on a sales call. The Amazon delivery driver seems to turn up and they’ve got like, Oh, really, sorry, I’ve got to go and get this parcel. And they’re trying to maintain productivity. They know there’s going to be a tax bill coming at the end of the year and they know they haven’t planned for it, even though they know they should have done like all of these things that have nothing to do with email marketing, but they’re the things that we would laugh about if we went to a marketing conference or a business conference and we were in the bar afterwards, are the things that we would all joke about as friends, oh, this time? And you tell them the anecdote about the tax bill and the dog ate the tax.

Kennedy: Bill and all this stuff once blah blah blah. It’s that.

Rob: Exactly.

Tersh Blissett: So, so what I’m hearing is that. Like we have to let them know that we’re actually human being.

Rob: Totally. We want to get to know you. Right? They want to get to know you as the business owner. [00:14:00] So we just give them a peek behind the curtain in the same way that you do probably on Instagram stories on your shirt.

Josh Crouch: So could you could you give us like an example like you can even from your own industry? Like, what does that look like when you let’s say you tell it, you’re telling the story in an email of something that happened and you put it into an email for people to see. What does that look like?

Kennedy: Okay. So basically one of the one of the frameworks that we use, we use like four different frameworks to send these emails to people. The reason, by the way, people think they can’t email more often is because they think they’re going to they’re going to run out of content ideas like what I possibly going to say five days a week, seven days a week. So we did something which we said, look, if we’re going to email this frequently because it’s valuable, we need to cheat. We need cheat codes. We need

the fix. We need the way to, like, make this not even like doable. It needs to be flip an easy and I’m dyslexic, so like reading, writing that shit’s difficult for me. So, like, needs to be difficult for me. Like, it’s been easy for me and it’s been not difficult for me, right? So one of the cheat codes we have is this one framework of the four that we use. But [00:15:00] so the first stage of that is this story, right? It’s the story that you would tell. And here’s a little hack to come up with. A story’s the reason, a and I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why the story is really important, actually. And that is the reason people run out of ideas of what to put in their emails is because they’re just trying to teach stuff all the time. Here’s three things you need to know that will let you know your boiler is about to break.

Kennedy: And here’s six ways to figure out whether your technicians are lunatic or you should let them into your house like all of these things, right? Like this is like value. But people say, oh, you need to give value on social and give value in your emails. Have you ever sat down and opened up your email platform or anything and look at the screen and thinking, Right, okay, here we go, sleeves up. I’m going to write some value. You stare at the screen and go, Why is value basically like you have a writing value is tricky, right? So there’s like I think there’s like nine different types of value we use. But the main thing to remember is. Telling people stuff, teach [00:16:00] them people stuff is not the most valuable thing. Getting people to feel things is the most valuable thing. The proof of that is really simple. How many lists of stuff can you even remember? Like the 17 points you need to have on your home page and the 12 things? I don’t know what they I’ve got to look them up. I’ve got documents for that. I’ve got swipe files for that. Whereas I bet you have stories. I bet you have stories you still tell today to new friends about events that happened ten, 20 years ago. Why? Because stories put us in the picture. They remember people remember them. People I tell other people’s stories like we remember them. They’re emotionally charged. Right. And it means you’re unforgettable and they’re valuable for that very reason, because we can learn things through the stories like what’s the moral of our story, right? So we’re going to start off in this formula by telling stories.

Kennedy: That’s the it’s three part formula. This one. The first one is a story you’re going to tell, a story that looks after, as Rob said, the emotional needs of your audience,

the things they [00:17:00] can identify with, which are nothing to do with the thing you do or sell. That’s really important, because if they are, the only time they’re going to read them is when they’re interested in buying from you. What you actually want is people who are not yet interested in buying from you, so you can actually get your message in front of them. Right? So here’s a really quick way of coming up with stories. We have like 11 different ways to come up with stories or something like that, right? Want to make it impossible to run out of them? Here’s a great one. Ask yourself this psychologically stacked question. It’s really simple, but it really unlocks your brain. And it’s this What is the least boring thing that happened to me in the last 24 hours? Now, if you ask yourself what the least boring thing I have in the last 24 hours, what is your brain do? It goes, Oh, that was the least. Now it doesn’t say what’s the most interesting thing because what is your brain damage shuts down. It has nothing ever interesting ever happens to me because we’re all, like, cynical and we all think, Oh, we’re hopeless and terrible and boring.

Kennedy: I just sit at home in my in my pajamas and my pants. Like, if I say, what’s the least boring thing like right now? [00:18:00] Least boring thing, I happen to have the deck of the painters and decorators downstairs in my house painting this this big wall. That’s the least boring thing that’s happening in my life. There is something in your life right now. It’s all I do each morning when I get up in the morning at 530, as I walk down the stairs towards my kitchen and I’m about to fill up the kettle to make my first cup of tea of the day, I’m asking myself, what’s the least boring thing that happened in my life in the last 24 hours? All the world doesn’t have to be your life, right? Or of somebody else’s life if you don’t like yours. Right. So so don’t quote that out of context, please. That’s a whole different Netflix documentary, isn’t it? Right. So I think we’ve all seen it, too. So the so when we thought of that thing, I now flip open the laptop and while the kettle boils. And Bruce took my first cup of tea in the morning. I’m now I’ve got my laptop open at the counter. I’m writing that day’s email and I’m just writing the story. I don’t know at this point how it relates to my audience at all.

Tersh Blissett: I’m like, [00:19:00] when you’re when you’re writing this story out, are you structuring the story a certain way? I mean, because some people would say, I’m not a creative. I don’t tell stories very well and all that good.

Kennedy: Just so good about stories is like you get to just tell them how you speak.

Rob: Rob Yeah. So we just start really, really simple. And usually the only thing that we really and always and consistently try to do is to start the story somewhere in the middle of the action. So you don’t want the story to begin with? Well, yesterday. Well, you definitely want it to begin with. Hi, first name. How are you? I hope you’re well in these trying to in all of that you want to like start with, you know, so most people start with the story but they’ll start with. So yesterday I got up and I went downstairs and I poured myself some corn flakes and I had the corn flakes and they were good because I had to go to the banks. When I finished the cornflakes, I went to the bank and when I got there, what we start with is like the word bag. The shotgun went off in the bank because the James Bond film never starts with him getting up and then having a shower and washing his hair. And I [00:20:00] put my keys. Oh, I never put my keys on the key. Right. Where did I put my keys? Like it always starts with the train flying off the tracks and he’s running on the top of the train chasing the bad guys. Right. Because that’s interesting. And then how you get to that point and why he’s on top of the train, that that will be unraveled later on once it’s done, some jumping back and forth a bit. So we do that with our stories really great.

Rob: A friend of us who’s what we call a recovering journalist, she shared this story with us, which is just to like start writing the story and then just go and just chop the beginning off the story. And usually it still makes sense. You just get rid of all of the the fluff on the beginning, but you start right in the middle of the action. So we tend to just find the story and again start in the middle of it, start in the middle of the action. So like I told the story and during the pandemic about a delivery that turned up at the front door and the whole subject line angle was like, this weird guy at my front door. The story line was, what’s in this box? The the opening of the story was just there was a knock at the door. There’s a knock at the door from this weird guy. [00:21:00] And I’m straight into the story. It doesn’t matter what the context is, doesn’t matter anything else. And that’s really the only structure. And then just strip all of the all of the detail out of it, keep it short, keep it punchy. My emails particularly look like those little poems. I can’t remember I called, but like, there’s just very short lines. Rarely, rarely does my emails drag on to

more than the paragraphs drag on to more than one line. It’s very like punchy and short. So just keep it. Keep it engaging like that.

Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. So you tell your story and basically your story doesn’t need to relate. It should in fact, it should not really ever relate to what it is you sell. So Rob told us, told stories about crying at Edinburgh Zoo when he saw the penguin parade about buying a new mattress during a pandemic when you can’t bounce on them in the shop. I’ve told stories about stories about literally just the least boring thing that happened in your day. That’s literally it, right? So that the next phase of this three part formula is to is so [00:22:00] you’ve got a story and then it’s a lesson. What is the moral of the story? What is the fable of the story you’ve just told in probably two or three lines? By the way, that story, as it relates to your audience, what’s the thing they need to hear from that? So in the case of Rob buying a mattress, I’ve bought a mattress. I didn’t know how to pick a mattress on the Internet. It’s very difficult.

Tersh Blissett: That is that’s going to be how. How would you even email marketing?

Kennedy: Okay, let’s do it.

Tersh Blissett: So. Well, no, I mean, I’m thinking, like, how how do you even pick a mattress on the Internet without laying on it?

Kennedy: Oh, it was awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob: So I just delegated that to my girlfriend, and then it was her fault if it was rubbish.

Kennedy: I have this vision of Rob saying, Can you do a zoom call and just lie down on different mattresses and I’ll just see how much you go. Ooh, no. Yeah. You know, so. So how do we get from a story about buying mattresses into an our case email marketing? You should join our membership program or you should listen to our podcast [00:23:00] in the marketing show or whatever it was. So what we did is Rob went from trying to buy a mattress on the Internet, very, very difficult. But then again, buying anything online is very difficult. It has a huge risk. And our job when we’re doing email marketing or any

kind of communication is to reduce and remove that risk and make it easier for people to buy. That’s a lesson that makes your audience go, Oh, makes our audience go, Oh yeah. I’ve never really thought about like it is. It’s risky to buy something on the Internet. Am I removing that risk? You could do exactly the same thing in your market. So the first two pieces are story lesson. The third piece is offer story, lesson offer, and the offer can be a paid thing. So in our example, so if you want to know how to do exactly what we just talked about and use our templates, here is our you can come and join our membership called the League of Human Marketing Heroes, blah, blah, blah. Click here sales page.

Kennedy: Off we go. But the offer could also be a free thing. So it could be. [00:24:00] And we talk about three ways of doing that. On this week’s episode of our podcast, the email marketing show, click here to go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, blah, blah, blah, or here’s a report about it, or here’s a blog post I wrote about it, or we’ll talk about that and tomorrow’s livestream. Here’s the link to it. So it’s story lesson offer. And here’s the beautiful thing about it. We want to remove as much of the cognitive load as possible from writing these emails. So what we no longer have to worry about is what value? If you just start writing a story and don’t even know what the weather offer is going to be? You certainly don’t know what the lesson is going to be from it. There’s no cognitive load there. But here’s a cool thing. You don’t have to sit down at your email platform anymore and worry, Oh, is today a value led day or is today a day? I dare make an offer. You don’t need to worry about it because every day you’ve got two pieces of value story and lesson to one offer to one ask, and sometimes that’s even free. So you automatically every single day have 2 to 1 ratio of value [00:25:00] to offer. And you can do this exact formula every single day if you want it to.

Tersh Blissett: Hmm. So you’re saying do all three in one day?

Rob: Yeah, but that’s one email. It’s really important because what we’re trying to break away from is the traditional email newsletter that looks like it was made, like the school newsletter in Microsoft Publisher with sections and columns. And we won this award, isn’t it good?

Tersh Blissett: Which is what every template looks like. Yeah.

Rob: We did a we did an episode on the email marketing show lately about like lies that your email marketing platform is telling you. It’s a little bit of a cheat title. One of them is you should use one of our beautiful templates like our emails are so plain white background, black text, no images, no logo, no nothing. The only exception to that would be if we’re sending to people to like a video or something. Sometimes we’ll put a little screenshot or a little gif of the video in the email and they click on that. So it looks a bit like the videos playing in the email. That looks quite cool. Even though that’s not technically quite possible yet, it’s nearly possible, not quite. And if it was, we wouldn’t do it. So like [00:26:00] people click on that image and it takes them across to go and watch the video or listen to the podcast or whatever it’s going to be. So so.

Josh Crouch: You’re saying so you’re saying sometimes when people are making emails, they’re making it too pretty, like it’s too it’s too, too much stuff to distract what you’re actually trying to.

Rob: Do. Really great reason for this is like, let’s imagine you’re telling a story, right? And you’re telling a story about going to visit your great Aunt Maude, who you haven’t seen for years. And when you get there to our dusty old house and everything’s dusty, she’s got this horrible sofa. It was like this. It looked like this. In fact, here’s a picture of the sofa. You put a picture of this horrible sofa, blah, blah, blah, and then you get on into the email. If is reading that story, they’re immediately building a picture of what a horrible sofa looks like in their head. And then they get to the.

Tersh Blissett: Point you.

Rob: Imagine for a second a it looks nothing like the sofa they pictured. That’s very likely. Small chance, but possible. They see a picture of their sofa that they just ordered last week and they think, just beautiful. You just created this huge disconnect years ago in the UK, right? When televisions first became like a thing that lots of people had in their house. There was this amazing [00:27:00] journalist was interviewing a little girl and she said to the little girl, What do you prefer? Do you prefer the wireless, the radio,

or do you prefer the television? And the little girl said, I prefer the wireless because the pictures are better. And I just think it’s such a great example, this innocent example of how great the pictures are that we create in our own heads versus the amazing now high definition eight k picture that we get streamed to our television.

Kennedy: I mean, J.K. Rowling didn’t get part through Harry Potter and thought, I’ll just walk in a quick picture of him just now.

Josh Crouch: Like, oh.

Kennedy: Don’t do that, do it. Don’t go. Let’s stick in a photo. No, of course they don’t, because the pictures and when you design that picture in your head, it’s personal. It’s your world, it’s your reality that you’re building. That’s why when people who are massive fans, the Harry Potter movies went and see the film where he doesn’t look like a Harry Potter, to me.

Josh Crouch: That’s I’ve done that before, where I read a book and then I watch it and I’m like, That’s not really what I had pictured.

Tersh Blissett: The red October. Red October did that to me, right? It was horrible. [00:28:00]

Rob: So some of our customers, like we’ll sell stuff that is like physical products, like jewelry and that kind of thing. And if you think about some of the stuff that you’re going to supply, like units that are physically going to sit in somebody’s office or house or whatever, the important thing to to think about that is you might think, oh, there’s a choice of them. There’s a big one, a little one, there’s the pro, there’s the max, there’s the whatever. And you want to you want to put those in. But actually, you’re sort of website and sales process that’s supposed to do the job of selling and helping them pick your online sort of catalog, if you like, or speaking to you. All the email has to do is get them on the phone or get them on a call or get you an appointment or get them to that website where they can actually browse what the options are. That’s that’s going to do that. All the email has to do is get them excited, interested, and then drive them over to

that conversion bit.

Tersh Blissett: So what would you say to somebody that would say you should use the email, especially if you’re putting out 365 of them, that you should have your logo and brand on it, and that would be a branding vehicle.

Kennedy: You can. The thing is, you absolutely can we [00:29:00] test everything like crazy and we encourage you to like test like if your software allows you to do it. And if it doesn’t, don’t worry too much. But like if your software allows you to do it, do an A, B split test, that’s just one button. Like we press one button and it does it for us and it allows us to test the click through, like how many more people click on the links and those emails when there are images in where there are logos in versus when they’re not. And we have found in 100% of our tests, when there are no images whatsoever in the emails, we get more clicks and well, there’s a few things, a few things going on there, like it looks less like a business newsletter. It looks more like your man Josh just whacked out an email to you and that feels good. Like, that’s the cool thing because here’s the big another big lie is that the subject line of an email is the thing that gets your emails opened. I don’t know who came up with this. This is not true. It’s not.

Tersh Blissett: I still see that. I see that all the time.

Kennedy: Subject lines don’t get your emails open like they help [00:30:00] a little bit. They’re not the thing that gets your email opened. The thing that gets your email opened is your net. Name that first column like I don’t care what Tersh sends me as an email. He can have no subject line. If my mum sends me an email and there’s no subject line, I’m still opening the email. Of course I know the subject line just helps a little bit. But it’s your reputation. Your reputation as a person who’s who they get emails from. That’s what gets your emails opened and what’s and you know this, right? Because that’s true. You get emails formally, you go, I don’t care what it’s about. I’m not open it. There’s other people you go on that email.

Josh Crouch: Interesting.

Rob: Interesting thing that most email marketing platforms are all the ones we’ve seen won’t let you send an email without a subject line, but we have once in all lowercase. Just take the words no subject line, which is roughly what appears if you send somebody a genuine email without a line and it got huge opens, which just proves the point, I think. Well.

Tersh Blissett: Joshua, [00:31:00] we’re finished with this. I hope you whack off an email to me that that’s.

Josh Crouch: It’s going to say no subject line.

Tersh Blissett: So oh, man.

Josh Crouch: It’s so it’s so interesting to me because I’m in digital marketing. So there’s but what you mentioned, like there’s certain people that sending emails that I know the like I know I want to open when I send it because I know their content’s good. I know.

Tersh Blissett: Their.

Josh Crouch: Stuff is even if the subject line is kind of like I still open it because I’m like, they usually send me some.

Kennedy: Good stuff.

Josh Crouch: Or something that’s interesting. There’s like, so there’s this geo grid tool that we use. Actually, I don’t even use it anymore, but I open their newsletter every Friday because it’s, it’s fun. Like, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not boring. Like it’s different facts, it’s different stuff that’s like, honestly, it’s not even relatable to, like, marketing all the time. It’s just.

Kennedy: Exactly. So it’s funny that because it’s nothing to do with their product.

Josh Crouch: Every Friday I open their email and I read it because [00:32:00] it’s interesting. It’s not the same old boring shit. They’re not trying to sell me something every time.

Rob: Yeah, and here’s the thing. The base relationship that you set up between you and your subscriber and the rules of engagement that you set when they first join your list, we have a thing that we turned out called the Getting to Know You sequence. It’s our version of the email welcome sequences for emails, text for days, and you’re literally just saying, here’s who I am, here’s why it’s good. Here’s what’s coming up for you. Here’s what you should pay attention. Here’s what’s unique about us in our business and why that’s cool, that kind of thing. And one of the things we say in the opening email is, look, here’s what you can expect. You’re going to get an email every day. It’s going to help you with your email marketing. You’re going to like it. You’re going to get an episode of the podcast every week. If you want to listen to that. We’ve got our free Facebook group, the email marketing show community. If you want to go here, we’ve got our membership, the league. If you’re ready to jump in and take things to the next level and get all of our stuff, you can come and join the league. Here’s a link to that and we think of it a bit like that. When you first get on the train and the train guide comes over the tannoy thing and says, Welcome aboard the train to wherever that’s calling here, here, here, and here. Here’s what to expect. Somebody’s going to come up and down the train and sell [00:33:00] you some chocolate and things, and that’s going to be great.

Rob: And you know exactly what to expect. Then you know you’re on the right train, you know you’re in the right place. And that little bit of relationship setting up there that that first couple of emails does allow you to do two things. It brings a load of subscribers really close to you and gets them excited and it drives a bunch of them away. The ones who go, What are you going to email me every day? I’m not that interested. And they unsubscribe. And that’s great because subscribers are not Pokemon, you don’t have to catch them all. So that’s like baseline relationship that that baseline relationship bit that you get to set up, then that’s your baseline. And then the, the funky, cool subject lines. They say on top of that, that’s the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. So we like to play with subject lines and we get geeky over it. We’ve got a train in about subject lines

and on our podcast we do a subject line of the week every week because subject lines are like the fun, nerdy bit of email marketing of how clever can the subject line be? But realistically, if you if I gave you a list of a million subscribers and you were legally imported them into your email marketing system without permission and you’re about to [00:34:00] spam the hell out of them, you can have the best subject line in the world, and that is not going to go well for.

Josh Crouch: You because they’re not going to know who it’s from. They’re not going to do anything about it.

Rob: They don’t care. And if they do get in if you do, if you did manage to use a tricky subject line and get a whole bunch of people to open it, all they’re going to do is they’re going to read the email, think, what the hell is this? And then never if they don’t unsubscribe, just never open another email again. So what we look at what our little test for subject lines because especially I write all of most of the emails for email marketing here was this business. I wrote most of those emails. And so sometimes our subject lines are a little bit edgy and a little bit near the knuckle. Our test for whether a subject line has gone too far is if it gets a really if loads of people seem to open it and reply. Not that open rates are particularly trackable now, but if loads of people seem to open it and reply and pay attention. But we don’t get lots of people clicking on the links. The subject line screwed it because the subject line, the subject line.

Josh Crouch: Needs to come in, but it didn’t.

Kennedy: Engage. Let them down.

Tersh Blissett: Exactly, yeah. So is there [00:35:00] a point like if we put the wrong content? In the subject line that it automatically sends like a Gmail, sends them to a spam folder.

Kennedy: No, basically, the good news is we’ve used the word free. I mean, we haven’t tried, you know, hot girls in Las Vegas as our I mean, maybe maybe we should hot girls near you girls email. Well, basically, the way I mean, spam is much more complex than

what words do you use? Like it’s so much more than that. But in brief, it’s imagine like a credit score. Imagine like a points system. If you’re doing everything else right, you’re keeping your list clean. People are replying Gmail and others like getting good or getting good other signals from you. Then you can put we use the word free sometimes not very often, but like because not that interesting, but in a subject line you could do that. Emojis in subject lines can work. You know, there’s things like.

Tersh Blissett: I’ve been told that exclamation points in subject line is bad news. [00:36:00] Like.

Kennedy: Yeah. I mean, some of it’s I mean, to use more than one more than one piece of punctuation subject line is one of the points. But if you did that and everything else is perfect, you’re probably going to be totally cool. But like there’s technical stuff to do with like, I mean, there’s technical things like called an SP record and a De Kim record. It’s all these technical stuff which we could talk about maybe another time or whatever. But there’s technical stuff, there’s deliverability stuff, that’s reputation stuff. Like one of the things you want to do, one of the things we teach us, get people to reply to your email. So if you’re doing story based emails like what you just talked about, people reply to say, What kind of manners did you go for? Or when Rob sent an email about taking up running, he was like, they were like, Oh my God, I hate running or I love running. You’re going to love it. It’s going to be great. Somebody else said, I sell high visibility running fest. Send me your size, I’ll send you one. Like people replying Oh hello. People reply I got very excited that replying is the second best signal you can give Gmail and the others that you’re a good sender. [00:37:00]

Tersh Blissett: The top one.

Kennedy: The number one is when somebody forwards your email to somebody else. That’s like the hyper endorsement gold seal.

Tersh Blissett: Hmm.

Kennedy: That’s really interesting. And we have strategies around how to do that as

well. But again, we have more time to go into that.

Tersh Blissett: But like, yeah, I’m going to make sure my mom forwards all my emails that I send her.

Kennedy: Cuttings all about AC machines.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, all about that. So here’s a so for the people who are thinking like that’s a lot of content to create, even if you’re thinking the least boring thing from your previous day. Is there ever a point where you recycle any of those emails like over the like next year you might put it in there again? And if so, does that ever is there ever a point where it’s like, all right, that’s not as genuine? Or is there a fear that you’re going to be like, Oh, this person was on the email list last year [00:38:00] and so they’re going to not believe this.

Rob: So our business kind of falls into two different bits most of the time, probably 70, 80% of the year, where writing and sending these emails live in the moment every day, just get up, write the email, send it. Or worst case scenario, if we know we’re going to be away for a few days, then I might write four or five and just have them scheduled to go out so that I don’t have to think about it while I’m traveling or away or whatever. And then every now and then we’ll go into kind of a more salesy mode. So even though most of those emails are making an offer of some description to either have a call with us or whatever, whatever the call to action mechanism is, we will sometimes do like a high. So like Black Friday is coming. We’re going to do this special offer here and it’s just a very intense sales mode where we’re just literally it’s still interesting and valuable and wildly entertaining, but like they’re not like really story driven. And most of the time when we run those campaigns, we’ll just pick the same campaign off the shelf and literally run it again. So like we every June, we run an online event called Inbox with a bunch of amazing speakers, all talking about email marketing and that kind of thing. When that [00:39:00] comes around, apart from changing the names of the speakers, I can 100% tell you those emails will be the same as they were last time.

Rob: And like when we do a five day online free challenge thing which suits our

business model, again, the emails are exactly the same. We’ve run one of them probably eight times now, over five three years, and we’ve never changed any of the emails and that’s mostly fine. Having said that, with the story driven ones, we know people who recycle them too, somebody we know has just like a year’s worth of them ish and and just keeps adding a new one to the end every now and then. And that kind of works. That kind of works for them. And then they go back to the beginning again because people have such short attention spans and such short memories. So we prefer not to we like to see it as a challenge. I’m even subscribed to our list with a spare email address purely for the satisfaction of being able to log into that email address and just see stacks of emails, like going back over all the years that we’ve been doing it. And that’s kind of quite satisfying for us as marketers and business owners. So yeah, for us, part of the pleasure comes from doing this every day and building this huge thing of content.

Tersh Blissett: So let me ask you about this one. [00:40:00] We waited a train. Josh, I don’t know if you were on that training or not. And I’m trying to think of who it was. I should have been more prepared for this. But he was talking about non word email.

Kennedy: Yeah. This is Dean Jackson’s nine word email.

Tersh Blissett: There you go. Dean Jackson. It was a Dean Jackson training. And what’s your thoughts on that?

Kennedy: It’s great. It’s really great. We’ve used it. I mean, it’s great to follow up with people. If anybody doesn’t know that, definitely go check out that training that you guys did because it’s it’s great. Like, it’s really amazing. It’s really good to be succinct because sometimes like, okay, these story based emails like on average, including the story lesson offer on average 175 words, 175 for the whole thing, but people got short attention spans. If you can do a nine word email and get to the point and they can see.

Tersh Blissett: Or that’s hard to do. It’s really.

Kennedy: Hard to do what one.

Rob: Of the really great places for for you guys to use the nine word email is we have a thing that we call the Tell Me More campaign. And basically what the Tell Me More campaign does is it watches [00:41:00] out for people who are engaging with your stuff more than a certain amount of times in a certain time period. So because we email every day and if you an email every day, this is going to change slightly. But if you don’t because we email it every day, we are looking for somebody clicking to go and look at the same thing or the same service or whatever. Three times in 60 days, if somebody does that, they’ve got some sort of intent the first time. They’re just curious. They want to have a look the second time. They kind of might be thinking, Oh, what was that thing again? I need to go and check the third time. That’s intent. Nobody’s going there by accident for the third time in 60 days. And if that happens, we just take them out of they won’t notice the difference, but we take them out of all emails and we put them into this short email sequence. Six emails called the Tell Me More campaign, which sort of is much more salesy and it really like kicks up the gear. I know you’re interested. I sort of know that you’re looking at it. So let’s anyway, at the end of that, if they haven’t bought a book to call or whatever it is, I would stick. I think that’s the perfect place to stick a91 email saying, Hey, listen, are you still looking for help with whatever it.

Kennedy: Is it is? Yeah. I mean, if you think nine words is [00:42:00] a lot to do, like just ask a question. There is the shortest story in the world. If you know about the shortest story in the world is six words, the whole story. Now, I will just tell you, this is a bit of a triggering story. So if you’ve had any treatment in your life, this is a really sad story, I’m going to say with an upbeat voice to how sad it is. But Hemingway wrote a six word story and this is the story baby shoes. Sorry for sale. Baby shoes never worn six words, whole story. You know everything you’ve got the emotion you know what happ you’ve got an idea of what the whole thing is there. So the amount of words have got nothing to do with how well you communicate. It’s just like one of the things I’m going to do to begin with is you’re going to be you’re going to be bad at this. But here’s the good news. Your list is only good at your subscriber list is only going to get bigger. Right? It’s only going to get bigger. I’m going get smaller necessarily. Right. It’s probably going to get bigger. So [00:43:00] the sooner you start with this, you might go, I’ve only got 20 subscribers. Cool. We’ve got people in our world. You’ve got less than 50 subscribers

making six figures a year doing just great because of the quality of that communication. The good news is if you start doing this now. You’re going to get better faster. Right. And you don’t want your first gig. To be in an arena in front of 20,000 people. You want a shitty backroom of a pub in front of 20 people.

Josh Crouch: And hopefully they’re drunk.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, well, listen to episode one, two, three, four of the Service Business Mastery Podcast.

Kennedy: I was, too. Like, we need to go back and do a demo, like the intro episode where we’re like, Hi, I’m probably going to talk about, aren’t we? Yes, we are. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was just shite.

Tersh Blissett: Mm hmm.

Josh Crouch: So do you guys do you guys do a done for you service, a done with you, a training? Like what? You guys sounds like you guys have a couple of things going [00:44:00] on. Like, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you and understand what it is you do. What. What would you tell them?

Rob: Right. So there’s a couple of different bits for sure. We have our community of people who this is like the done with you bit. So the league of Email Marketing Heroes is for business owners who really want to get stuck in and get all of our templates and all of our stuff. That’s like right now there’s like 27 campaigns in there. We give you a new one every single month that to coaching cause every month, plus a campaign workshop where we break down the campaigns and that kind of thing. And an amazing community on Facebook, hundreds of members in it. So that’s there that’s the the league email marketing here is dot com forward slash league. And then for people who are just like, I’m so busy, like I’m interested in it but like I just don’t have the time to do it. We have our agency where we basically built a team of writers who use all of the templates and frameworks and the stuff that’s inside the league and everything else that we create in our business as our playbook. And then and then do email marketing for people as well.

Josh Crouch: Okay. And then you guys and we briefly talked. But you guys have your own podcast. If people want to learn from you and other industry leaders and stuff like that, [00:45:00] they can learn. And that’s called the email marketing show, right?

Kennedy: The email marketing show, actually, also what we did is we hooked you guys up just for being lovely listeners and viewers of this show. We hooked you up with a little gift. So we were talking earlier on about the importance of like dressing up your links and your emails to make them more compelling. Rob talked about having a video preview. I think there’s some really interesting ways you can make sure people don’t go blind to the links in your emails. And we’ve got 12 really creative ways of dressing those links up. And so basically if you guys go to email marketing heroes dot com slash SBM, obviously then you’ll be able to pick up our book called Click Tricks which is 12 really creative ways you can just it your links to we get more clicks from the very next email you send email marketing heroes dot com sbm to get hooked up with that for free.

Tersh Blissett: Man we really, really appreciate that. That’s awesome. Can I ask you one last closing question?

Kennedy: No.

Tersh Blissett: I’m going to ask anyways. What? What [00:46:00] as a business owner of a home service company, HVAC, plumbing, electrical company, keep in mind, not the digital marketing people, agency type stuff, what platform should we be using to send these documents out, these emails?

Josh Crouch: Oh, he’s asking for a friend.

Kennedy: Well, I tell you to take this one off.

Tersh Blissett: Truly, for friends.

Rob: I’m going to I’m going to go now. I’ll leave you with Kennedy.

Josh Crouch: On this one.

Josh Crouch: See you in an hour.

Kennedy: So, no, he is we actually did a whole episode of the show about this as well. How do you pick your CRM? This is the strategy, right? You take a bit of paper and a pen or something like that and you draw what you think is a reasonable complexity of the type of stuff you want to be able to do in it. You want to be able to do automations which have delays between each email, if that’s what you want to do. Draw one out on a bit of paper. Take that bit of paper. So so far, no email marketing platform because you want to [00:47:00] make sure the platform serves you, that you’re not a slave to the platform. It’s got to work for you, right? So planet like that, we write all of our emails in a Google doc before we send them. We don’t write them into the platform because we don’t get taken down the road of the restrictions of any platforms. Right. So you’ve got that. Then you go when you take a free 30 day, seven day, whatever trial of your top four email marketing platforms, and then you try and build that one campaign in all four of them.

Kennedy: And then this is the important bit you go with the one platform that makes you want to throw your computer out the window the least. And this is important because what the way your brain works is different to how mind works, how Rob works. It has to be the most aligned to how you think. Right? And it can only be a personal choice. That’s platforms which we think have got the best functionality, but they’re all like, great, and they all have their weaknesses. They’re all good for different stuff. [00:48:00] But like if you go with a top bunch, like if you’re going with your keeps, active campaigns, your report, those of this world, you’re doing pretty well like the other three I would say definitely go check out convert gets pretty good it’s definitely going up there now so they’re the four that I would say like go go check those out offer some industry specific ones you want to check out as well, put them in the mix, try and build the same thing in all of them and then make your decision for you.

Tersh Blissett: So where’s MailChimp on that list of of Rob smiling.

Josh Crouch: You said MailChimp. Why is that?

Kennedy: It’s I mean, it’s I mean.

Rob: We’re not a fan.

Josh Crouch: Okay?

Tersh Blissett: I don’t know.

Rob: I got one of the things one of the things we have to be one of the things we see a lot of people do is they’ll sign up for a platform because it’s free or cheap to get started for like the first couple of thousand contacts. And often that really comes to bite you. Once you get to a like a smaller list than you might think, suddenly it becomes very expensive. Like that’s their model, get you in for free.

Kennedy: And [00:49:00] some of them as well, like some platforms, they make it really complicated. So people come to us to go, How on earth email marketing is so complicated? And you say, Which platform are you using? And they say Which one it is? And you go, That’s because you’re using that one. That’s not a really it’s not an intuitive platform for me. Try some others. Like if you put loads of difficulty and hurdles in your way, you’re going to put off doing the work, which means you got to stop yourself getting the results. You’ve got that control. Choose a platform that makes it easy. Okay. Are you ever going to enjoy it? You might. You might love it one day. You might not ever love it, but at least you can hate it less.

Rob: Yes, our personal our personal top four though I’ll keep active campaign on report ConvertKit probably in that order.

Josh Crouch: I would say.

Tersh Blissett: Awesome. Yeah, I signed up for MailChimp one time and I was wanting

to send the same exact email on the same day of every month repetitively, like every single month. And they’re like, Yeah, no, you have to like sign up for the highest level package to make that happen. I was like, But I just wanna send [00:50:00] one email a month.

Kennedy: That’s great. They’ve all got their own, you know, they’ve all got their own business models and how, how they do it. You know, it wasn’t that long ago when ki when they used to be called Infusionsoft, you had to pay to when I got my first ever account you had to pay two and a half or three grand or something to get set up. And I did that at the time because that’s what I wanted to do. Right? But like everyone’s like, I mean they’ve changed that now. You don’t have to do that anymore, but they’ve all got their business models and they’ve got a free package to begin with. Some of them don’t like. Everyone’s business is different. Like, like your business is different to my business.

Tersh Blissett: It’s all just cool. Guys, we, we, we truly appreciate your time and spending, spending the afternoon, the evening with us and sharing all of this. And if anybody has any questions, listen to the show and have any questions. Don’t hesitate to reach out to these guys, wonderful people and very entertaining as well. So don’t forget to check out their podcast. And yeah, until we talk again next time. I hope you all have a wonderful and safe week and thank you again for checking out Service Business Mastery Podcast.

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