Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Rainmaker.FM

The Digital Commerce and Content Marketing Podcast Network

  • Home
  • Shows
  • Hosts
  • About
  • Home
  • Shows
  • Hosts
  • About
  • Member Area
  • Log In
Menu
  • Log In
  • Free Training
7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing
Hack the Entrepreneur
Members Only
Rainmaker.FM Elsewhere
Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites
StudioPress FM
Technology Translated
The Digital Entrepreneur
The Missing Link
The Showrunner
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
The Digital Entrepreneur
hosted by Sean Jackson and Katy Katz

Is Your Email Marketing Leaving Money on the Table?

  • Social:
  • Link:
  • Embed:
https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/digital-entrepreneur-021.mp3
Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes
Previous Episode:3 Simple Hacks for Better Copy and More Conversions in Less Time More Episodes Next Episode:How Joanna Penn Designed the Lifestyle (and Career) of Her Dreams

All Episodes:

May 17, 2018

Stop Being Afraid and Start Building Your Business

May 10, 2018

Crazy Creative Ideas for Content Repurposing

May 3, 2018

The Creative Way to Use Video Marketing on LinkedIn

April 19, 2018

Is Blogging a Waste of Time?

April 12, 2018

The Smart Way to Grow Your Service Business Using Content Marketing

March 29, 2018

Rand Fishkin’s rise to fame…and fortune?

March 8, 2018

The Psychology Required to Successfully Grow Your Business

March 1, 2018

The Secret to Guest Blogging on Your Favorite Website

February 22, 2018

How to Make Money from Podcasting

February 15, 2018

Is Facebook Marketing Dead?

February 8, 2018

How to Build Meaningful Membership Communities

February 1, 2018

What Every Online Marketer Must Know about Google Analytics

January 25, 2018

Is Google AMP a Waste of Time?

January 18, 2018

The Ultimate Framework to Help You Achieve Your Goals in 2018

December 20, 2017

The 6 Top Online Marketing Trends for 2018

December 14, 2017

Why You Should Start a Digital Marketing Agency

December 7, 2017

Does Traditional PR Really Matter Anymore?

November 30, 2017

The Current State of Search, Social, and the Open Web in 2017

November 22, 2017

How to Protect Your Online Reputation When Disaster Strikes

November 7, 2017

Does Online Marketing Suck for Women?

October 26, 2017

Can Social Media Drive Sales, or Is It a Waste of Time?

October 19, 2017

How (and Why) You Should Sell Your Online Business

October 12, 2017

The 5 Things Your Customers Actually Want to Buy

September 28, 2017

The Essential Chatbot Resource for Online Entrepreneurs

September 21, 2017

The Smart Way to Build and Grow a Profitable Podcast

September 14, 2017

How to Build and Profit from a Hyperlocal Community Site

September 7, 2017

How to Handle Negative Online Reviews

August 24, 2017

The Biggest Challenge to Running an Online Business

August 17, 2017

The Secret to Becoming an Online Expert

August 10, 2017

Does Your Online Business Fill Your Life with Purpose?

August 3, 2017

How to Deal with the Stress of Running an Online Business

June 1, 2017

Emerging Online Marketing Trends for 2017

May 25, 2017

The Biggest Mistakes Online Entrepreneurs Make and How to Fix Them

May 18, 2017

Should Online Entrepreneurs Write a Book?

May 11, 2017

A Different Way to Think About Your Online Competition

May 4, 2017

How to Recruit the Best Talent for Your Online Business

April 27, 2017

How to Hire the Right Contractor or Employee for Your Online Business

April 20, 2017

The Essential Guide to Hacking the Growth of Your Online Business

April 13, 2017

How to Do Simple PPC Advertising for Your Online Business

April 6, 2017

A Simple Framework for Pricing Digital Goods

March 30, 2017

How to Use Amazon Publishing to Grow Your Online Audience

March 16, 2017

What Online Entrepreneurs Need to Know about Affiliate Marketing

March 9, 2017

Does Email Marketing Still Work?

March 2, 2017

Does SEO Still Matter?

February 23, 2017

Is WordPress the Right Solution for Building Your Online Business?

February 16, 2017

6 Business Insights that Could Radically Increase Your Online Engagement in 2017

February 9, 2017

Can Customer Insights Really Drive Innovation for Your Online Business?

December 15, 2016

Laura Roeder on Building a Business that Supports the Lifestyle You Love

December 8, 2016

Lessons on Business and Life from the ‘Zen Master of Marketing’

December 1, 2016

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should (Plus Other Life Lessons from Seth Spears)

November 17, 2016

How Becoming a Digital Entrepreneur Helped Jarmar Dupas Get His Life Right

November 10, 2016

Why Trusting Your Instincts Can Lead You to Your Passion

November 3, 2016

The Power of Not Being Stubborn

October 27, 2016

How One Successful Digital Entrepreneur Stays Entertained by Her Business

October 20, 2016

How to Create Impact That Endures (Instead of Ending Up in a Landfill)

October 13, 2016

How Will Falconer Stopped Trading Dollars for Hours and Found His Calling

October 6, 2016

Are One-on-One Connections the Key to Jumpstarting Your Online Business?

September 29, 2016

How Jay Baer is Navigating New Waters With His Latest Digital Product

September 22, 2016

The Upside of Setting Outrageous Goals

September 15, 2016

Sean McCabe’s Tried-and-True Techniques for Getting More Meaningful Work Done

July 28, 2016

Why You Should Build a Business That Shines a Light on Your Talents

July 21, 2016

How to Market Like a Magnet and Build Your Personal Brand

July 14, 2016

The Two Biggest Keys to Consistently Doing Work That Matters

July 7, 2016

How Joanna Penn Designed the Lifestyle (and Career) of Her Dreams

June 30, 2016

Is Your Email Marketing Leaving Money on the Table?

June 23, 2016

3 Simple Hacks for Better Copy and More Conversions in Less Time

June 16, 2016

Practical Advice on Turning the Challenges of Building Membership Communities Into Opportunities

June 9, 2016

Brian Clark is Doing … What?

June 2, 2016

Sonia Simone’s Secret to Starting the 1,000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle of Building a Successful Business

May 26, 2016

Does Your Social Media Strategy Need a Mindset Shift?

May 19, 2016

Brian Clark’s Lessons From a Decade of Developing Successful WordPress Products

May 12, 2016

How Virtual Reality May Shape the Future of Digital Commerce

May 5, 2016

WordPress Product Development: Start with the Business Problem

April 28, 2016

The Myth of Set-it-and-Forget-It Marketing

April 21, 2016

Making This Common Mistake Could Kill the Profitability of Your Online Course

April 14, 2016

Why You (Still) Don’t Need a Mobile App That is Separate From Your Website

April 7, 2016

5 Key Concepts to Understand About Tracking, Testing, and Making Decisions

March 31, 2016

5 Compelling Reasons Why You Should Use Free Online Courses as Lead Magnets

March 24, 2016

A Rainmaker Case Study on Using the Access Approach to Drive Business Results

March 17, 2016

5 Benefits of the ‘Access’ Approach to Online Marketing

March 10, 2016

How Adaptive Websites Deliver an Exceptional Experience While Accelerating Profit

March 3, 2016

How Email (Still) Creates the Profit Engine of Your Digital Business

February 25, 2016

Secrets of a Six-Figure Online Course Builder

February 18, 2016

The 5 Elements of the Modern Marketing Website

February 11, 2016

Who Is a Digital Entrepreneur?

October 22, 2015

What is Digital Commerce?

October 15, 2015

Behind the Scenes: The Rebranding of Copyblogger Media

September 3, 2015

How to Create Legendary Content That Builds Your Business

August 20, 2015

6 Steps to Building an Audience That Builds a Business

August 13, 2015

How the Integration of Content and Commerce Creates a Winning Difference

August 6, 2015

Native Commerce: Media That Makes Real Money

July 30, 2015

Behind the Scenes: The Reimagining of Copyblogger.com

July 16, 2015

The Membership Imperative and the Persistence of Audio Content

July 2, 2015

Darren Rowse on the Intersection of Blogging and Digital Commerce

June 18, 2015

Three Subscription Revenue Models for Digital Content and Services

June 11, 2015

The Two Components of The Perfect Online Business Model

June 4, 2015

Is Creating Online Training Programs a Viable Business Model?

May 28, 2015

How to Succeed in Online Education (On Your Own Terms)

May 21, 2015

Behind the Scenes: Authority Rainmaker, the Next Wave of Rainmaker.FM Shows, and the Departure of Robert Bruce

May 14, 2015

Will Millennials Kill Email Marketing?

May 7, 2015

Does Audio Create Authority Faster Than Text?

April 30, 2015

A Much Better Revenue Model for Podcasting

April 23, 2015

How Online Courses Accelerate Any Business Model

April 16, 2015

How to Escape the Social Media Swindle

April 9, 2015

Why Every Great Website is a Membership Site

April 2, 2015

How to Become a Digital Media Showrunner

March 26, 2015

How to Start a Podcast Network

March 19, 2015

How to Build a Profitable Email List With Social Media Advertising

March 11, 2015

Why Copyblogger Media is Betting Big on Podcasting

March 2, 2015

Henry Rollins on the Art and Business of DIY Media

February 25, 2015

Three Misconceptions About Modern SEO That Confuse Content Marketers

February 16, 2015

How an Email Newsletter Publisher Built an Audience of 223,991 Subscribers

February 9, 2015

Has Social Media Killed Consumer Trust?

February 3, 2015

Split-Testing 101: How to Know Which Words Work

January 27, 2015

5 Traffic Strategies That Build Your Curation Audience

January 19, 2015

3 Ways to Grow Your Curated Email Newsletter Faster

January 14, 2015

Position Your Content Curation for Success With These 5 Essential Elements

January 7, 2015

Behind the Scenes: 2014 in Review and the Road Ahead

December 16, 2014

Seth Godin on Stepping Up and Making it Happen

December 11, 2014

Michael Hyatt on Building a Media Platform and Becoming a 10-Year Overnight Success

December 9, 2014

David Siteman Garland on the Infinite Scalability of Online Courses

December 1, 2014

Pat Flynn on Entrepreneurial Inspiration and His Profitable Content Strategy

November 25, 2014

Jay Baer on “Generosity Marketing” and the Power of Business Podcasting

November 19, 2014

How to Use Content Curation to Create a Recurring Revenue Business

November 12, 2014

7 Ways to Find a Topical Market that Will Fuel Your Digital Commerce Business

November 5, 2014

The Crucial Starting Point for Building a Digital Commerce Business

October 8, 2014

Behind the Scenes: The Launch, Membership Sites, and What Punk Rock has to do with Content Marketing

September 25, 2014

Keep Them Fascinated: How to Discover Your Winning Difference as a Content Marketer

September 2, 2014

The Key Element of 21st Century Persuasion

April 3, 2014

The New Rainmaker as Magical Mentor on the Buyer’s Journey

March 24, 2014

Behind the Scenes: How the New Rainmaker Strategy Evolves in Plain Sight

March 11, 2014

The Critical Thing You Need to Earn Targeted Traffic – Today, and into the Future

March 5, 2014

8 Ways a Digital Media Platform is More Influential than “Marketing”

February 19, 2014

Why the New Rainmaker is a Digital Media Producer

February 11, 2014

Behind the Scenes: How (and Why) New Rainmaker is Produced

February 4, 2014

How to Build a Lucrative Asset While You Make it Rain

January 28, 2014

Why a Personal Media Brand Beats “Marketing” Every Time

January 21, 2014

Why the Key to Business Success is Media, Not Marketing

June 30, 2016

Is Your Email Marketing Leaving Money on the Table?

It’s not enough to just be doing content and email marketing anymore. Those are merely the prerequisites to join the game.

To have a chance at succeeding, you must be doing more — and in this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur, we discuss what that looks like in the present and near future.

In this 29-minute episode, Brian Clark and Chris Garrett join Jerod Morris to discuss:

  • Why tagging and segmentation are no longer nice-to-have email features
  • Simple examples of smart marketing automation done right
  • What lead scoring is, and why it matters
  • How we’re building RainMail to integrate all of these features under one roof with the Rainmaker Platform
  • The difficulty of using website, email marketing, and automation solutions that aren’t integrated

Listen to The Digital Entrepreneur below ...

Is Your Email Marketing Leaving Money on the Table?Brian Clark
  • Social:
  • Link:
  • Embed:
https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/digital-entrepreneur-021.mp3
Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

  • How Email (Still) Creates the Profit Engine of Your Digital Business
  • Digital Commerce Institute
  • Brian Clark
  • Chris Garrett
  • Jerod Morris

The Transcript

Is Your Email Marketing Leaving Money on the Table?

Voiceover: You’re listening to the Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information go to Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce. That’s Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to the Digital entrepreneur. I’m your host Jerod Morris, the VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital. For those of you scoring at home, this is now episode number 21. I’m joined today by a couple of familiar voices. First we have Brian Clark, the Founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital. Brian, welcome back to the show that you started.

Brian Clark: Do you really think people are scoring at home?

Jerod Morris: No, it’s a callback to an old Sport Center catchphrase. I’ve always wanted to say it.

Brian Clark: I do appreciate the reference, and I did get it.

Jerod Morris: We’ll see how many other people do. Now, a person who definitely did not get that reference. We also have Chris Garrett, the Chief Marketing Technologist at Rainmaker Digital. Chris, I hope this appearance helps cure your podcasting withdrawal symptoms that I’m sure you’re still going through.

Chris Garrett: Yes, that it does. And I can confirm, I did not get that reference.

Jerod Morris: Yes, that was a sport and goal reference.

Brian Clark: Inside baseball.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I know.

Chris Garrett: I don’t even get inside baseball. I have to have somebody explain that one to me.

Jerod Morris: All righty. We are not going to talk about baseball today on this episode of the Digital Entrepreneur. We’re going to talk about email. We discussed this topic back when we did our five episode series on the elements of the modern marketing website a couple months ago. We’ll have that episode link for you in the show notes. Email actually kicked that series off. The episode was titled, “How Email (Still) Creates the Profit Engine of Your Digital Business.” If you are not yet convinced that you need to be building an email list, go back and listen to that episode and then get started building an email list.

For this episode we’re going to assume that you understand the importance of building an email list, are in fact already doing so, and are at that next-level stage where you’re looking to become more sophisticated with your email marketing. You’re working with autoresponders, you want to get into tagging and segmentation, and perhaps improve what you’re already doing in that area.

That’s our big idea today, which is to stress the importance of thinking in a more sophisticated and strategic way about what you’re doing with email. Also to discuss how we’re building these tools and features into the Rainmaker platform in a way that no one else has really done because of one key huge difference which we will get to here in a bit. First, Brian, I want to start off by asking you, why have tagging and segmentation become such essential elements of an email marketing campaign?

Brian Clark: It’s all about that providing a more personalized experience. When we’re putting together our email sequences everything depends on the action or inaction. There are usually a couple to several variables that are always at play. Isn’t it smarter to speak to someone based on what they actually do, what they show interest in, than some one-size-fits-all autoresponder stream? That worked great for me in 2001 to 2005, but we’re in a very different world now.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, we are. The message that you are delivering to your audience needs to adapt. We’ve talked about this idea of the right message for the right person at the right time, and that’s what this allows you to do. Chris, Brian and I were actually talking the other day about the difference between tagging and segmentation. What is that difference? Can you explain what tagging and segmentation actually are from a more technical standpoint and what the difference is between them?

Why Tagging and Segmentation Are No Longer Nice-to-Have Email Features

Chris Garrett: Segmentation is what Brian has just talked about, talking to the people who are interested in the topic about that topic, and not sending them information that they’re clearly not interested in. You segment them. You put them into groups. So this group is interested in red widgets and this group is interested in blue widgets. You can do that by putting them on two different lists, or you can have one master list and add information about them. Brian is interested in basketball and Jerod is interested in football. It can be one list called “sports,” but that information about what they are interested in could be a tag. It could be a custom variable.

It’s a piece of information about that subscriber or that prospect. Back in the day, with the early sales CRM processes, you would say, “This is a prospect. This is a warm lead. This is a qualified lead.” You would say, “This person has shown interest. This person is ready to be closed.” That’s a piece of information about them. Just like you would tag a blog post to say it’s about science fiction or romance, you would tag a person to say, “This is what we know about them.”

Jerod Morris: It’s so important to be able to do this to have flexibility. I’ll give you an example from a project that I was working on with a certain email provider. I wanted a way to send messages to the people who visited — this was for The Assembly Call — people who watch the show the most. If people had visited that page ten times I would tag them a certain way, but I actually had to create a separate list for those people and send it to a separate list and pay separately for that list, as opposed to it just being a tag for those people, those subscribers all within my list already that I could just email.

Brian Clark: That’s what I have to do now, and I’m not shy, it’s AWeber. Chris, when are we moving me to Rainmaker? It’s so unwieldy when you have to create a new list.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I hate it.

Brian Clark: It doesn’t make sense. And I think AWeber has some much more expensive advanced features that may include this, I’m not sure. But my opinion is, this is just email in 2016. This isn’t advanced email marketing. This is just email marketing. MailChimp and AWeber and all these people who are vanguards of the industry are saying, “Sure, we’ll sell you that for this much more.” I disagree with that approach, because I think everyone needs to be doing at least basic segmentation and tagging. It just makes much more sense than creating all these separate lists and, of course, being charged for them.

Chris Garrett: You want to be encouraged to do this. The more you know about your subscribers — the more you know about your customers, especially — the better you can provide the service to them that’s not annoying. It changes how you approach the copy as well, because if you’re sending an email saying, “You may have seen this,” or “I don’t know if you saw this what I’ve talked about last week,” it’s awkward, it’s clumsy. It’s a lot better to say, “You were on the webinar on July the 10th and we’re doing it again.” Being able to say, “I know this about you, therefore I know you will be interested.” Or, “We met at a conference in Denver,” instead of, “Did you see me in Denver?” You’re talking to a person instead of the group as a whole. When you’re talking to a person you get through to them better. You can include the things you know about them.

Brian Clark: Looking at it from a conversion standpoint, if I send out an offer email for a promo and someone clicks but doesn’t buy, that is an important piece of information compared to someone who either didn’t open the email or opened the email and didn’t bother to click. The first person is probably seriously thinking about it. They at least went to check it out.

That’s a very different message that I would send to that person compared to someone who doesn’t seem to be interested at all. Maybe they didn’t see it. With that person you can say, “Hey, did you see this email? Because you didn’t open it.” The person who saw it, clicked, and looked — that’s valuable information. What if you gave them some incentive to tell you why they didn’t buy? That’s incredible information in return that you would also get from knowing that.

Chris Garrett: Also, the majority of the people aren’t going to buy — 95% are not going to buy. If you only focus on the 5% who take the action, what about the majority? What about all the others who might be ready later? They might, as you say, have good reasons why they didn’t take action right now. There’s a lot of money and goodwill sat there that you could be just ignoring.

Simple Examples of Smart Marketing Automation Done Right

Jerod Morris: The other thing that’s interesting too, is how much more you can do when your email is fully integrated into the platform. This is what I want to ask you about in regards to Rainmaker, Chris. As I go through and start using some of these features, I’m finding so many more options available for tagging and segmentation and being able to adapt the content based on what people do on the website. If you’re just using a third-party email provider, you can obviously do a lot based on what they click in the email and all of that stuff, but actually having it integrated into the platform gives you a whole world of other information that you can use to tailor the experience that you’re giving them.

Chris Garrett: Yeah. One of the things that I know you and Brian have talked about a lot is the free member library concept or the free course. We’ve really focused on making that as useful and valuable as possible. Because, if you’re sending people off of your site to a third-party training platform or video hosting platform, you’re losing a lot of opportunity to know about what is really engaging to them — what is really exciting for them, or gets them to take action — or what they want to go deeper into. Having just that website and that training platform in one, that’s huge increase in what you know about your customers or your prospects.

If you look at how we use it — we know if somebody has started Brian’s course versus started the funnel course or Chris Lema’s course. We know if they’re a paid person or a free person. We have a free library because we do what we teach. We know to not send people information based on whether they are free or paid.

We don’t want to send them the stuff that you should pay for, but also we don’t send them things that will annoy them. We don’t tell them to buy what they’ve already purchased, which sounds basic, but how many times would you signed up for something where they should know but they still tell you irrelevant things or they still mistake you for being a prospect when you’re already a customer? If you just go around the web and you see all the remarketing ads for stuff that you’ve already purchased, you know what I’m talking about.

Then, as we add to the platform, we want to look at people who haven’t registered. Maybe they haven’t even signed up for your email yet, but we still want to know information about them to use later. Think about if you’ve got a blog and that blog has call to actions to get people to sign up for the email list or sign up for the free membership, then that free membership gets people to pay. If you’re sending people to separate sites or separate tools all along the line, you’re losing those connections. Once somebody has shown that they’re a human being and a return visitor we want to build up information about them. Then you can start segmenting through your content and through your own site experience. You can have on-site call to actions based on the actions they’ve taken and the interest they’ve shown.

You can have blog post series that lead people to have a deeper interest in a topic and then you can give them the opportunity to go deeper into that by registering for a free course — either as an email course or as a learning management system video-based course with downloads. That’s another opportunity for them to express more interest and show more action. Sign up for webinars — you know if they’ve signed up for the webinar, but did they attend the webinar? That’s all information you can build about them, and it’s all through their actions and their interest rather than trying to infer, spy, or use analytics, which is not really great for drilling down to an individual.

How We’re Building RainMail to Integrate All of These Features Under One Roof With the Rainmaker Platform

Brian Clark: Tagging is an email concept, obviously, but it’s also a CRM concept. You’re actually building a database of informed information. You can review that information, but Rainmaker does most of the heavy lifting for you. I think that the really exciting thing that we’re going to be able to move toward that third-party automation solutions can’t is — because you’re essentially controlling the email list and the site in an integrated fashion, that allows you to truly adapt the site — literally change elements of the page based on topical interest, behavior, and identity. To where, if a certain interest is determined…

For example, we sell a lot of different things, but if someone comes in at Copyblogger through the email marketing landing page, that sends them into My Copyblogger along with everyone else. That’s valuable information, because we know that their point of entry was email. Therefore, the follow-up sequence for that person is different from everyone else, even though they all ended up in the same place based on a tag that is placed right there.

Chris Garrett: If you think about the things we sell on StudioPress, if somebody buys the foodie theme versus the real estate theme that’s good information for us to know. They’re actually expressing that they’ve got an interest in industry in a vertical, and that is really useful information.

We’ve got people in our customer base who are writers, we’ve got developers. They have different needs. They have a lot of overlapping interest, but they also have different interests as well. You can service them better the more you know about them and know what they might be interested in. Also, if you give them an opportunity to express interest and they don’t take the opportunity, that’s also information that you can glean as well.

Brian Clark: Let me ask you this, Chris. You and Nick, one of our developers, were geeking out. We’re trying to extract reasonable deadlines from you — like marketers do — without much luck. Tagging is really the smarter way to segment. But you guys were talking about advanced segmentation and some other stuff that we have coming later in the summer for Rainmaker. Tell us a little bit about that.

Chris Garrett: One of the problems with tagging is that a lot of the time a tag will be a “yes” or a “no.” It’s really interesting to say Jerod is interested in basketball, “yes.” But I think it’s more interesting to be able to say Brian started this course on June 22nd and show a different message if somebody started before June the 1st or after June the 1st. Then there’s things like lead scoring. If somebody downloads a white paper, do you give them ten extra points to say that they are really interested versus somebody who’s got a lead score of one? Is that person now a lead score of 20?

What Lead Scoring Is, and Why It Matters?

Brian Clark: Lead scoring — just so we don’t lose anyone here — this is a way of giving a rating or a numerical value, if you will, to a prospect in which case, if they are more highly motivated than someone else, you might send them an offer or a different message than you would send everyone else.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, exactly. Or you would use that to develop correlations between the activity you’re doing and the quality of the prospects and leads that you’re generating. You might want to know: Did the Google Hangout do better than the white paper? Did the webinar serve you better than the email autoresponder sequence? What is generating the best lead for the money and the investment you make?

Brian Clark: Where did they come from? I guess.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, is a search prospect better than a Facebook advertisement prospect? It might not be just down to picking up the phone and calling your best prospects. It might be, “Okay, this is where our investment is going and this is how it’s paying off.” Down to — once they become a customer — did it take them a long time to become a customer? Did it cost you a lot of money to make them into a customer? This is all valuable information that allows you to tune and tweak things. It’s not just about, “Yes, we can show different messages on screen. We can show different email copy.” It’s also where you’re putting your efforts. It’s the 80/20 rule, 20% is going to be 80% of your payoff.

The Difficulty of Using Website, Email Marketing, and Automation Solutions That Aren’t Integrated

Jerod Morris: Chris, how would someone even try and do something like this with a mishmash of a bunch of third-party providers? As we’ve talked about them, that’s with Rainmaker and it being all integrated. That’s what I was hinting at earlier when I said the one huge key difference — it is that integration having everything in one. How would someone even do this at this level of sophistication when they’re putting parts and pieces together?

Chris Garrett: We tried. We tried to piece all these things together. It didn’t work so well. That’s why we built what we built — we built it for us. If you sign up for a Rainmaker trial or if you sign up for the Digital Commerce, you can actually see us using the stuff we’ve started building. Obviously it’s all going to roll out to everybody who’s our customer on Rainmaker.

We couldn’t really do this integrated thing. We were spending a lot of money and time in development to glue all these things together, and we just thought it would actually save us time and effort to build what we needed instead. The multi-device world we live in — take that alone — where you take a lot of actions on your phone and then you go to the website on your desktop, because bigger screen. You’re ready to use your credit card and it forgets everything about you.

That’s what we want to get away from. We want people to sign up for your free course on the phone being able to follow it on their iPad and then download the PDFs on the desktop and it all be the same person, the same experience, or an enhanced experience. We want you to tell us by viewing the video past 30% that you’re interested. We don’t want to glue all these different tools together. It needs to tell your email subscriber, your member record. It needs to tell your on-screen experience. It needs to tell your experience six weeks down the line that you showed an interest. It shouldn’t forget about you. You can, if you’ve got a big team and a lot of effort, get some of that by gluing a lot of things together. But not what we needed and not to the level we want to take it.

Brian Clark: There’s a ton of businesses out there these days who are essentially one person. They do very well. Of course they have virtual staff and freelancers and designers that are part of the eco system, but you need your technology to be your business partner not a liability.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Chris Garrett: How many businesses have got the resources or even the time and bandwidth to have a team of people looking after this? Every extra team member you add — even if it’s a freelancer — is taking mind share away from you as a CEO.

Brian Clark: If your automation solution requires you to hire a consultant, you’re doing it wrong.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Chris Garrett: Outside of this company. I don’t want to do myself out of the job. The funny thing is how many of these tools are sold as being easy, but really they’re consultant-ware. That’s one thing to be really nervous about. If you have to take a great deal of expensive training and then you have to have a lot of resources to manage the thing, and then you’re so tied in because of all that investment that you’re worried that you’ll never be able to go anywhere else, then you’re not doing your job. You’re not marketing or producing products, you’re not doing customer service. You’re dedicating all that resource and that energy to a tool. The tool should serve you, not you it.

Jerod Morris: Chris, did I hear you correctly? You mentioned earlier — we’ve talked a lot about the importance of the logged in experience and what you can do from a marketing automation perspective when people are logged in. The importance of that will never dissipate. But did I hear you that folks will be able to perform some of those marketing automation functions even when people aren’t logged in?

Chris Garrett: Yeah, I think that’s important for us as a step that we need to work towards as much as possible. Like you say, the logged in experience is going to be the ultimate because we know if they hit that Facebook log in button or that Facebook registration button, we’ve got a lot of information about them and then everything they do. Not everybody’s going to log in and not everybody’s ready to log in. A blog creator doesn’t need to be logged in. Reading an article — we want to know that they are really interested in the 3D printing category versus the basketball category without them having to log in. Then, clicking links — you don’t have to necessarily log in to show an interest, because you’ve clicked the link. All of that needs to be, if they logged in, great, if they are not logged in, to still work.

Jerod Morris: I think you and I need to create a site where it’s possible for someone to take a path of either 3D printing or basketball.

Chris Garrett: Nick and I were actually talking about using these tagging and segmentation rules features to do Choose Your Own Adventure. Do you remember those books?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Chris Garrett: We’re actually seriously considering making Choose Your Own Adventure using these tools. I think that will be fun.

Jerod Morris: That would be fun.

Chris Garrett: Ten plus points minus five heath. That kind of thing.

Jerod Morris: All right, can we nail you down on dates when all these stuff is going to be done?

Chris Garrett: No, you cannot.

Brian Clark: We do have one date that we’re fairly …

Chris Garrett: Yeah, we really want to get this into your hands as soon as possible, but at the same time we want it to be great. I really hate promising. But in July we definitely want you to be able to tag people and to be able to show or hide based on those tags.

Brian Clark: Tagging really is the next killer app of the killer app. It’s not necessarily new, but most of the solutions out there that offer this, like I mentioned earlier, it’s an upsell. Remember when we tried out Marketo and they finally figured out that we don’t have a sales team and their solution wouldn’t work for us? We paid a lot of money for that. Of course, that was the moment when we decided to build it ourselves.

The integration in Rainmaker is interesting because it’s a total platform. We don’t have to maximize profit on email. Not only do we not upcharge you for tagging, you’ll see that our email prices — despite world-class servers and deliverability — are cheaper than everyone else out there. That’s simply because it’s all part of one solution. You got all these companies that are SaaS companies that are basically a feature. Rainmaker is the exact opposite philosophy of that.

Chris Garrett: A lot of these systems as well, they don’t understand that one company can have multiple brands. But back to the start of Copyblogger when you started Teaching Sells with Tony, Brian, you had Copyblogger and you had Teaching Sells. A lot of these companies don’t understand that concept that you might want to email from Teaching Sells as Teaching Sells even though the company is Copyblogger. With our solution, your subscribers are your subscribers. It doesn’t matter what websites you have, you can brand it from those different sites. You have the advantage of it being one subscriber going across two brands, but you can also email from that brand.

Showrunner can email somebody. StudioPress can email somebody. We could actually charge extra for that, but it would sound silly to me. It sounds like something that would be obvious for you to be able to do. A lot of those system are set up for, as you say, the sales person to lead them from being a prospect to a “yes” or a “no” and then dismissing them and discard them. We’ve got people going back to 2007 that are still loyal customers. Why would we do that?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, it’s all very exciting. Obviously, Brian and I love seeing these new features and getting to play with them, and we love the ability to share them with you as well. We’d love for you all to go to Rainmakerplatform.com and take a test drive. What was the Rainmaker email service is now RainMail. It is fully integrated in the platform. You can take a free trial of the platform if you go to Rainmakerplatform.com. We’ve also added a monthly billing option now that you can take advantage of. Get in there, test it out, try it out. We got Chris to go about as far as he will go in terms of a promise by letting you know that there will be some new features in July.

Really, there are going to be new features rolled out in July and August and September, because we’re constantly updating the platform with new features and with new updates to be able to do all of the things that we talked about in this episode today. Make sure that you go to Rainmakerplatform.com, get your free trial started, and see how this can take your marketing and your business to the next level. Because the features are great and they will be able to do that. Chris, thank you for your insight. It’s always appreciated.

Chris Garrett: I had so much fun. I don’t want to overpromise, but I’m sure it’s fine.

Jerod Morris: Brian, thank you as well. Always great to have you back on the show.

Brian Clark: I’m pretty sure he hasn’t overpromised.

Chris Garrett: You’ll make sure of it.

Jerod Morris: All right, everybody. We will talk to you next week on another brand-new episode of the Digital Entrepreneur.

Never Miss New Shows and Episodes on Rainmaker.FM

Get the best of the Rainmaker.FM network in a single weekly email, along with two weeks
of free training that will change the way you think about online marketing ...

Free Registration

You might also like...

7-Figure Small with Brian Clark

Create Successful Products with the MVP Process

Listen to episode
No Sidebar

How Our Obsession With Greatness Kills The Ability to Do Good Work

Listen to episode
Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites

[44] 3Q to Answer As Soon As You’ve Chosen Your WordPress Theme

Listen to episode
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience

How Bestselling Author Greg Iles Writes: Part Two

Listen to episode
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker

Marketing Your Book All the Way to the Bestseller Lists, with Jay Baer

Listen to episode
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience

How Oscar Nominee Emma Donoghue (Screenwriter of ‘Room’) Writes: Part Two

Listen to episode

Comments

  1. Hashim Warren says

    July 5, 2016 at 9:07 PM

    I can (and have been) achieving everything you need guys mention here with Mailchimp, Woocommerce, and Woocommerce Memberships.

    But agreed – if I had those features under one roof it would be easier.

    A simple example: Right now if something goes wrong I don’t know which customer service to call. Is it my host? WordPress? Woocommerce? Mailchimp?

    A couple unified customer service experience is a huuuuuge deal.

    Reply
    • Brian Clark says

      July 8, 2016 at 11:37 AM

      We think so too.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Copyright © 2023 Rainmaker Digital, LLC. Powered by the Rainmaker Platform.

Privacy Policy  ·  Refund Policy  ·  Cookie Policy  ·  Terms of Service  ·  Contact