Rock And Roll Email Secrets With John Fancher

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“They looked at marketers that sent monthly emails, marketers who sent weekly
emails, marketing sent daily emails and they found a higher unsubscribed rate was
for marketers who sent monthly emails, and the lowest on unsubscribe rates were
for marketers who sent daily emails.“

Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
which delivers cutting edge conversion strategies from the online trenches straight to
your earbuds. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
listbuilidnglifestylesshow.com. I also invite you to grab a free copy of “The Wealthy
List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival and now
once again it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

Igor: Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle, with your host,
Igor Kheifets. Having sold insurance fax machines and printing software door to
door and on the phone, John Fancher ditched traditional grunt work rich selling
for automated email marketing. John specializes at writing hardcore long winded
email sequences, he also authored a great reference guide titled “99
Questions” which shows email marketers number one challenge of not knowing
what to write about, by presenting you with 99 questions to ask yourself next time
you sit down to craft an email. Please help me welcome the rock n’ roll email
guy, John Fancher.

John: Hi Igor. Thank you very much for having me.

Igor: Thank you for doing this man, you’re very busy. You write e-mails for some high
profile clients and I truly appreciate taking time to sit down with me and help our
cause of educating list builders on how to properly extract big profits from small
lists.

John: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Glad to be here.

Igor: I’d like to just go ahead and dive right into the number one problem I believe each
and every single email marketer experiences right now, and that is having a hard
time coming up with email fodder, with thanks to write about. So in your opinion
John, why does that happen?

John: Well I think for a lot of reasons. Probably the main reason is they, let’s see, I
think I would start with they believe that they need to talk about their product or

service or what they’re selling in the email. My product or my service is only so
many features, is only so many benefits so they can come up with, so how could I
possibly write for example an email every single day to my list. So I think that’s
one of the reasons that a lot of people have trouble coming up with things to write
about in their emails. I think another one is, and it’s probably very close to that
first reason, is they are overly concerned about spamming their list being, being
considered a spammer or fatiguing their list by writing to them too often, like
they’re going to, their list is going to say, “Oh, I can’t believe this guy’s sending
me an email every single day.” He’s driving me crazy and I’m going to hit the
spam button and unsubscribe and all that stuff and then you get a bad reputation
with your email provider. So I think there’s a lot of reasons people have trouble
coming up with ideas, but those are probably the top two that I hear the most
often.

Igor: I agree with you completely. I’m not sure of their top two, but they’re definitely
the two most common ones that come up for me whenever I am working with my
VIP Club members, my private coaching clients, and that is quite literally like that
the fear of either offending the subscriber by sending them too much email,
like just way too many emails, and of course, believing that, “How can I come up
with so many things to write about?” So let’s circle back to the to the first issue,
and that is the belief that you have to talk about your product, which I believe is
like the one of the most common, of course, mistakes people make. We did
another episode of The List Building Lifestyle Show with Daniel Levis, another
great copywriter where we spoke about a bunch of things you could talk about,
but I would love to hear your perspective as to if not the product, what do I talk
about in my emails?

John: Well there are many things that you can talk about other than the products. I
think a big mistake that a lot of marketers make, is jumping to the solution to the
problem before they’ve spent enough time agitating the problem. I think a lot of
marketers want to jump right to talking about what I call ‘the after picture.’ You
have ‘the before’ and ‘the after’ and a lot of marketers just want to talk about how
awesome the after picture will be once the prospect purchases their product or
gets involved in their service, and they don’t spend enough time agitating the
problem. So I try, when I’m writing emails, I try to make most of my emails
about the before. About the pain, about the problem, about the discomfort, telling
stories that hopefully the prospect is reading the e-mail. It’s a story that they’ve
been through, that they can relate to, that sort of agitate their discomfort with their
current situation because some marketer, whose way smarter than me, I can’t
remember his name but he said, “People don’t make a change until they’re
sufficiently uncomfortable with their current situation.” [laughter] Right? We all
have the sort of inertia of we want to stay in the situation we’re in, we don’t want
to get up off the couch and take action unless we absolutely have to we have to.
So you know I think probably a primary job of the marketers is not so much
getting them to salivate over your solution, but to get them to be and to feel the
discomfort of their current situations. Does that make sense?

Igor: Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m actually taking notes, believe it or not. I muted myself
so won’t hear my keyboard. But I’m definitely taking notes and this says exactly
the same thing that I heard Dan Kennedy say, I believe, in one of those super-
duper expensive seminars, where he says most people, they do skip to the after
just like you’re saying. They don’t spend nearly enough time at the before stage,
which is agitating that problem. So could you perhaps give us an example, if we
are, and I hope you’re cool with doing a high wire act, by the way. Like how
would you agitate a problem if we for example sell and make money
online products? Some like a system that helps people make money from home.
An example of what would like an email look like? What kind of problem
would agitate, how would you twist that knife if you will? I would love if you
could give us an example.

John: Well I think there are a lot of different ways to agitate that problem. Probably the
best way to do that is… Okay, so if you take most of us have had conversations
with our prospects either on email, or maybe on the phone, or in person. If you
think back to let’s say an email. Say somebody sent you an email that said,
“Here’s what I’m going through right now. I have this nine to five job that I don’t
really care for, and I’d like to get out of this job, but you know, every solution I’ve
looked is going to require me to do, it’s thirty hours of work from the spare time
every week and I just don’t have that time available. I’ve got a wife and kids and
I’ve got a mortgage that I can barely pay. You know, I’ve got to get back taxes
due, and last year I had to have surgery and my insurance didn’t cover everything.
So I’ve got to cover that. I’m just looking for a way, but everything I look into
either requires tons of time, or it requires some sort of expertise that I don’t have,
that would take me months to learn, or it costs $3000 just to get started and I don’t
have that. What am I supposed to do to get out of the situation?” So if you’ve
ever had a conversation like that, or received an e-mail like that from a prospect,
that can be 90% of an email. You just start your email that goes out to your list
with something like, “Hey I just got off the phone with this guy and here’s what he
said.” Basically what you’re doing is, in Perry Marshall’s world, who I write a lot
of emails for him, we call it sort of reading your diary back to them. These are all
the problems on going through, this is the pain and I’m looking for a solution and
nobody seems to have it, and then at the end of the email, you don’t have to pitch
really hard but you can say something to the effect of, “I used to be in exactly that
situation and then I found this and I got…” Then maybe quickly list a few benefits,
and if you want to find out more about that and see if it’s right for you, click here.

Igor: Nice, nice. So 90% of that email is not about the product at all.

John: Right. One thing it’s doing, it’s bonding with the audience, and by the way, if you
can tell that story and that story is you, that’s even more powerful. So if you used
to be in that situation and you used to have all those problems and used to
complain about all those things, that makes it even more powerful and it has the
added benefit of… Okay so like, in Perry’s world, Perry Marshall, and for those
who don’t know who Perry is, he’s been the world’s foremost authority on Google
Adwords, and he’s written books on Google Adwords and Facebook advertising
things like that. So he has been an internet marketing personality for you know
probably ten years. Well respected. So one of the issues when you’re in a
position like that, is people will often think, “Well Perry is this guru, and he’s this
expert and he knows all these things, and of course he can make these things
work, but I’m not like Perry. “So one of the things Perry does a lot of emails, is he
writes about his days back before he was the guru. Back before he was an expert
and had his own company and had written several books. What that allows him to
do is, in a way sort of overcome the objection of, “I have to be an expert or guru
to make these things work. “People read it and they say, “Oh, Perry used to be
just like me. He used to have the same problem I did. He’s used to know nothing
about marketing stuff just like I do. So he’s not this superhero that I can’t relate
to. He’s this guy who had the same struggles I did, but he finally found the right
way to solve those problems and if I follow what he recommends then…
Hopefully the same thing will happen for me.

Igor: What if they’re not a guru? What if our listeners that I’m sure by the way you like
99% of people listening to this are wondering exactly the same question right
now. Okay, Perry is a guru and he has those days when he wasn’t and he can talk
about those, but what if I’m still going through those days right now? What
would I write about then?

John: Will then I think you got to, you’re going to have to steal some stories from
somebody else. [laughter]

Igor: [laughter]

John: You’re going to have to, at least as far as the after picture goes, I think you’re
going to have to pick some proof. Okay, so we talked a little bit about, a lot I
guess up to this point, about pain and again there’s a copywriting expert named
Gary Bencivenga who talks about the four Ps in marketing, and one of them is
pain or problem and another one is the proof. Okay, so if you don’t have your
own proof then you need to go out and get proof from somewhere else. Right? If
you can’t say, “I’ve done this.” Then you need to go out and find proof that the
system works when you work it. Or third party truth, or if there’s, if you can find
articles from respected sources that prove that your system works, or you’ve got
testimonials from other people who’ve done it. There’s a lot of different ways of
finding proof. And if that’s your problem, then you need to spend as much time
as you can gathering to proof elements and incorporating those in your email.
That makes sense?

Igor: Yes, absolutely. So you’re talking about studying the success stories of your
prospective company or product and leveraging those, showing those you are
emails. So I get that. So earlier, we mentioned that the second most common
reason people struggle with email is because they they’re afraid to piss people off.
They’re afraid to alienate people with the frequency of their emails. So perhaps
you could talk a little bit about why that’s a huge misconception.

John: Okay. Well there are a few reasons for that. First of all, if you do is pitch in your
emails, and that’s all you do, all you do talk about the solution, all you just talk
about your product or your service, and say what a great idea it would be to buy
now, buy now, buy now, you’re going to be considered spamming and they’re
going to consider you annoying and are going to unsubscribe, and all that stuff.
But there are many different ways to go about writing an email that don’t have to
be spamming. Kind of we’ve already touched on that a little bit, staying in the
problem, talking about a problem or bonding with your audience and agitating
their discomfort so that they’re more motivated to take action. But there are a lot
of ways to be sort of a welcome guest in the inbox rather than a pest. One is to
tell great stories, and I think people, definitely people love to hear stories and
stories sell better than straight pitching does. So if you can tell a compelling
story, then people will look forward to getting your next email. If you can give
them some practical tips that make their life easier, you’ll be more welcome in
inbox. If you are humorous and entertaining and unique and different from
everything else they get in their inbox, you’ll be more welcomed than if you were
just pitching. I always try to follow an 80/20 of content and pitching. I try not to
pitch in an individual email more than 20% of that email. Or if I’m writing like a
series of email, let’s say seven emails, I try to make five of them or so more about
content, and maybe only a couple of them harder pitched email. I also remember
a study; now this was a few years ago. Study by… Shoot, I can’t remember. I
think it was MailChimp that studied millions and millions and millions of e-mails
from e-mail marketers and they studied frequency versus unsubscribe rate, and the
correlation between the two. They looked at look at marketers that sent monthly
emails, marketers that sent weekly emails, marketers that sent daily emails.
They found a higher unsubscribed rate was for marketers who sent monthly
emails and the lowest unsubscribe rates were for marketers who sent daily emails.
Now, there’s a lot of ways to screw up sending your daily email. [laughter] It’s
not just you’re going to send a daily email and that’s going to keep your
unsubscribe rate lowest. But I think what it does point out, is there’s a major
misconception with most marketers that sending too often is annoying and will
get you unsubscribed. That’s just not borne out by the fact, and it has to do with if
people like you and like hearing from you, they want to hear from you a lot. So
if you do a really good job of entertaining or being relevant, telling a good story,
bonding with them making them feel like they’re understood, and giving them
practical tips that actually make their life easier, then they’ll want more of that.
Does that kind of answer the question?

Igor: Oh wow, you just made a huge dent in this whole thing. Like I knew the daily
emails is the way to go, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been preaching email daily ever
since we started the show and years and years before that, and I seem to have
surrounded myself with people who agree with me. My friend, Ben Settle,
Doberman Dan, Daniel Levis, and so that’s great, but I never had scientific proof.
I have had monetary proof but I never had scientific proof, which you just
supplied for us that unsubscribes go up in reverse to their frequency, and that my
friend is music to my ears.

John: Yeah. No, like I said a lot of ways to be really annoying if you send out email
every day. So you got to do it right. But the fact is that people like to hear from
you. They like to hear from you, and they’ll want to hear from you more. So if
you sort of take that trust that the given you, and are responsible with it and treat
it the right way, then there’s no reason that they won’t want to keep hearing more
from you. Because you’re doing something different than 99.9% of the emails
that they get from other marketers. Think about the emails you get from big
companies, like Office Depot or something like that. You know, who opens
those? [laughter]

Igor: Who subscribed to those? [laughter].

John: Yeah, I know. You don’t. I don’t think you even do. I think you buy a product
and then they just put you on the list and start forcing out emails to you which
isn’t another good point to talk about, by the way. I think you should be upfront
with your list about how frequent you’re going to be sending to them and you
should get permission to send an email. You shouldn’t just start pushing out
emails the way these big dumb corporations do. You mentioned some folks there.
One guy I think that there’s a really great job with this. You probably heard of
him. He’s Ben Settle.

Igor: Oh, yeah. We had him on the show.

John: Ben’s great. Ben’s awesome, and he does a fantastic job of exactly what we’re
talking about, with the daily email. If you want a lesson on how and why to do
daily emails, I think signing up for Ben’s list. I’m not getting a commission for
this by the way, I just really like what he does. [laughter] His Email Players
systems are fantastic. Little plug for Ben.

Igor: Oh yeah, and if you need the URL, you can just go to BenSettle.com/free to
download his free report. So I see like, I’ve been telling people to go subscribe to
Ben for like 15 episodes now. [laughter]

John: [laughter] Other than Perry, and of course like I write for Perry, but I think if
you’re a newsletter I get these days.

Igor: Yeah, and same here. I mean I’m paying a hundred bucks a month for that thing.
Hundred bucks a month for just, I don’t know what, ten pages a month. My
friends, they look at me getting so excited like a schoolgirl about this little
envelope that comes in every month and they just don’t get me. But they don’t
understand how I turn these ten pages into quite literally tens of thousands of
dollars every single month with my emails. So it’s pretty cool. So John, so what
kind of work do you do for clients these days? Like if anyone’s listening right now
wants to hire you, what could you do for them, how can you improve their life?

John: I offer services like daily emails. I do those for a very large client that probably
most of the people on the call would recognize. I prefer just for confidentiality
not to say who that is, but Igor and I talked about it before the call.
[laughter] And I think Igor would agree a lot of people on the call would
recognize this name.

Igor: Yeah. Every single soul on the call right now would recognize the name.

John: Okay, great. So I do some daily emails for his service that he offers, and as I
mentioned before, I work with Perry Marshall and I probably write seven or eight
or ten emails for him every week, for different programs. He doesn’t send ten
emails out to everybody on his list. Every list should be once he gets to a certain
size, it should be segmented, of course. You’re sending things that are appropriate
for each segment. I have another client, that I do the same things. He posts a
blog post a few times every week and needs email directing to those, and he also
sales info products about improving your credit score, things like that. I probably
write about, we were talking about this before, I never figured out exactly but
probably somewhere between 40 and 50 emails a week.

Igor: Wow.

John: But yeah, if there are people on the list who are interested in that service, the daily
email service, they can just email me at [email protected]/* */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--;)if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling)){p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail')){for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16)).slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e)),c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* */

Igor: Alright. And I also recommend you guys zip over to JohnFancher.com to grab
the a copy, a free copy of the “99 Questions” report, which allows you to come up
with a bunch of things to write about and just so you can see the kind of quality a
work John puts out. You’ll also find on the same very website testimonials from
some really high profile clients, including Perry Marshall, of course, and you’ll be
able to learn more about how you can work with John whether for consulting or
having him write your emails whatever that may be. But either way, John, I
couldn’t thank you enough for this call. I’m still buzzing from that study, you told
us about with the unsubscribe rates being the complete opposite of the frequency,
which is again to my ears, I’m going to mill that for what is worth, for sure.
I appreciate taking the time, I mean the guy who writes forty emails a week
probably does that have too much free time to give to some crazy Russian who
wants to interview him.

John: [laughter]

Igor: Guys, if you’re listening and you want to work with John or just want to find out
more or just want to grab some free stuff, head over to JohnFancher.com. And if
you want to hire John and want to discuss that possibility to write your daily
emails or to write your email sequence, email him at [email protected]/* */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--;)if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling)){p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail')){for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16)).slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e)),c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* */
Remember, this guy writes emails for Perry Marshall. Alright? The Perry
Marshall. So expect the price stick to hefty, don’t waste his time. Don’t
embarrass me, and make sure that you only approach John if you are truly serious.
So John, again, truly from the bottom my Russian heart, thank you so much and
until we talk next time, have a good one.

John: I had a blast. Thank you so much, Igor.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to subscribe on iTunes
or Google. Play to never miss an episode because who knows just one conversion tactic
we share on the show might double your list and double your business. Download the
transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and
don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival
Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival . This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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