Email vs Facebook

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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
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List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival and now
once again it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

Jonathan: You are listening to the List Building Lifestyle show. Welcome back boys
and girls to another edition. We’re about to fill your ear holes with some list
building goodness, here is Igor Kheifets.

Igor: Hey Jonathan, are you excited about this episode, man?

Jonathan: Yeah. Any time we talk about anything I know about I get excited,
because I don’t know about much. [laughter]

Igor: Well as promised, as promised I think it was the episode before last. We are
going to be chatting about email and specifically email versus Facebook, because
this is really the question everybody’s mind today, especially the listeners of
the List Building Lifestyle Show. I’ve been preaching that email is the shit. Just
like a few other experts who know what they’re talking about, but I was never able
to provide, besides my own income any scientifically proven data for that. So I’ve
actually stumbled into some research that was done by MailMunch, which is a I
believe in either a landing page company or an auto-respond company, but they have
something to do with email and list building. And they’ve done extensive research
about what’s more profitable, email or Facebook, or Twitter. You know, social
media in general but they took Facebook and Twitter as the two primary ambassadors
of social media in this experiment. To give you the short version, if you’re short
on time and you’re listening just before you’re about to step into work or
something, email wins. Episode is over. We can wrap up, thank you. See you next
week. [laughter]

Jonathan: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, Igor, wait, wait, wait.
Email cannot win, because every time I look at a social media post and I see one
of these pink haired social media gurus, they’re telling me email is dead. They
say all the time.

Igor: Of course it’s dead. And here’s why they tell you it’s dead, by the way.
It’s dead because when they email of their open rates and clicks through rates are
really low. Now we have seen an overall across the board decrease in open rates
and click through rates throughout the last couple years. I agree. But that is not
important. You see, the reason it’s not important is because the only metric that
does matter is whether people buy or not. And compared to Facebook and Twitter,
where do they buy more. And so email has been, and this has been super consistent,
it is the media where people are actually conditioned to buy. Okay? That’s not
something I needed this like study to prove to me, but email is actually the media
where people buy. Facebook and Twitter is not. Facebook and Twitter is sort of
like the fan boy media where people will cheer for you, but they don’t necessarily
buy stuff from you. And when they tested Facebook ads versus Ad Words, by the way,
versus SEO, SEO in Google versus Facebook Ads, I notice that Google leads are
actually four times as profitable.

Jonathan: What?

Igor: Yes, I’m killing my Facebook ads budget.

Jonathan: No kidding?

Igor: Yes.

Jonathan: Because they’re doing a search, right? It’s intentional.

Igor: Exactly.

Jonathan: Oh, my gosh.

Igor: So Facebook is overrated. It’s just so overrated, it’s ridiculous. And
whoever tells you that Facebook is the next best thing since sliced bread or the
microwave, they have no idea what they’re talking about, and I bet they don’t have
any data, any really smart data to prove it, because all they’re tracking is
Facebook. Right? They can’t really compare it to anything else. So email is the
media where people actually buy, that’s one. And you can see it by the amount of
money produced every year from email versus the amount of money produced off of
Facebook. Now, some of the specifics stats that were presented in this study,
which fascinated me, are follows. Now, first of, having 2000 email subscribers is
not the same as having 2000 fans, and here’s why. Turns out that back in 2014, and
I already knew that it happened, I just did not know how horrible it was, back in
2014 Facebook decreased your organic reach to just 6%, which means if you’ve got a
thousand friends on Facebook, only four to six of them will actually see your
message, will actually see status update. Can you believe that?

Jonathan: That’s ridiculous.

Igor: I mean the kind of dick you have to be to do something like that is
incredible. Now of course, why would Facebook do that? Very simple. Ad revenues.
They want you to advertise with money if you want to reach people. Now here’s
another funny bit, well it’s funny to me, tragic to anyone who relies on Facebook.
If you got a really, really rich fan base, your fan page has a rich fan base on
Facebook, your reach is further decreased to 2%. 2 freaking %. Okay? That’s just
wow. Wow. It’s just so, so, so painful for me. As a marketer, as somebody who
wants to reach as many people as possible, the same amount of time and effort it
takes me to write say a long Facebook post versus a long email, my email which
more people. And they’re going to be better people to reach, they’re going to be
buying more, and overall I’m going to be making more money. So another data which
they provided, again fascinating article, and if you want to check it out go to
https://www.mailmunch.co/’s=+email+vs+social+media. So the other statistic they
provided is, average clicks rates for each channel. Check this out. Email
marketing, 3.57%, which doesn’t sound impressive, right? Until you learn what
Facebook produces. Facebook is producing 0.07%.

Jonathan: [laughter] Imagine buying clicks there. [laughter]

Igor: It’s ridiculous. Now, Twitter is last on that list, and it’s 0.03%. Now,
that’s nothing. That’s really nothing.

Jonathan: Oh my gosh.

Igor: You’ve got no reach. Now, another report, which they don’t necessarily
provide a source of, or do they? Well, I’m going to just take their word for it.
66% of online consumers made a purchase as a result of an email marketing message.

Jonathan: 66%?

Igor: Yeah, 66%.

Jonathan: Whoa.

Igor: That’s a lot which tells you that the vast majority of revenues are still
being produced from email. Now, so, we now understand we know we have some proof
that email is the best. The question that’s on your mind is, for how long? Can it
remain that way even though it has been able to remain the most profitable media?
In my opinion, email is going to remain a really powerful player, and I plan to
further develop and build on my email marketing efforts throughout the next couple
years. In fact, for the next five years I’m going to be probably investing more
money in the email than I have been up until this point, and I really hope
Jonathan, and this is may just wishful thinking, but I really hope somebody will
come in and tax email.

Jonathan: Tax?

Igor: I really hope…

Jonathan: Email, that way you can get rid of the junk?

Igor: Yes.

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: Exactly. Thank you. I really hope they come in and they tax every email you
send out so 90% of amateurs just get out of that inbox, and that will increase the
CTR, will increase the open rates again, and we’re going to have ourselves a
really, really powerful media.

Jonathan: I don’t agree with any kind of taxation, because that’s just the kind of
guy I am, but when you say that you’re going to invest more in email, I don’t know
if I totally understand, maybe the List Builders are wondering the same thing.
What does that mean? What do you have to invest into email? You have an
auto-responder that you pay for monthly and you type an email. What does that
mean?

Igor: Well, for one, auto-responders come in different costs. There are some
auto-responders that are fairly cheap like AWeber, but there are some other
auto-responders out there like Infusionsoft or Amarpost that are far more
expensive. I’m just saying that I will not shy away from paying more money for an
auto-responder, because I will fight for my delivery rates. Now, this is not to
say that anyone who charges more money necessarily will deliver better, but I am
not afraid, I’m not going to be shying away from throwing money at it to test it
out and see who delivers better, and even if it means paying more money to get
that delivery, I am willing to take the bite, to basically buy the bullet because
I understand how powerful email is. Because I know that most of my business comes
from email, these are my most profitable leads, and a lead that comes to me from
my emails is probably much more likely to take me up on an up sell or remain a
client for a long time, than somebody who found me through a different source,
such as a Facebook ad or something like that.

Jonathan: Okay. I’m going to get a little geeky. So what are you using now, just
because everybody loves tools, you said Aweber. Is that the only one you’re using
now, or are using Infusionsoft? What do you guys use?

Igor: Well something you should know about me is that I learned back when I lost a
bunch of my accounts and back when, especially back when I lost my Aweber account
with 100,000 leads in it, I have learned my lesson not to keep all my eggs in one
basket. Because you can literally have your entire income wiped out overnight,
even though the auto-responder companies cannot tell you what to say to an extent
as much as the social networks can, you still, while the owned that media in a way
you can still be shut down. You will keep the leads and you can re-import them
somewhere, but that specific company can shut you down because they don’t like
you. There’s no law that prevents them from doing that. Now I have at any given
point about a good half a dozen, if not more, auto-responders running at the same
time.

Jonathan: Okay.

Igor: Okay, so AWeber is definitely one of them, but it’s not my preferred weapon
of choice. In fact you’d be surprised, but I’m using an Israeli auto-responder
right now that’s really, really good. It’s sort of like what AWeber used be ten
years ago, only it’s not abused because it’s in Hebrew. The marketplace, if you
will, does not know what exists, and even if they are knew it exists…

Jonathan: They cannot access it.

Igor: …they cannot use it.

Jonathan: Okay. So you’re hedging your bets. Okay, got it. Okay, so another
question to go along with that, not to take it too far off track. Sometimes I just
like to ask questions for myself, I don’t care about the listeners, so sorry
listeners, this is for me. [laughter] But all right, so do you use any automation
software going along with your Aweber or any of that other stuff?

Igor: Yes, absolutely. This can take you from being a fairly decent List Builder
to being a really good one if you set up smart automation. So as far as automation
is concerned, if you’re using AWeber, you got AW pro tools. If you’d like to set
up automation for scarcity and deadlines you can use something like a Deadline
Funnel, I think, by Jack Borne, which is a pretty cool software. There’s also
another software which you can use by Jim McCain, I don’t remember what it’s
called, but it allows you to create four different things in your emails,
including scarcity. There are some automation rules inside AWeber, and inside Get
Response, which they kind of built in as the default thing. My favorite automation
tool by far is Zapier. Yeah, it’s pretty cool because not necessarily because it
creates automation within my auto-responder account, but because it creates
automation integrating all the services I use. I use about twelve different
services when it comes to managing my traffic business, so Zapier literally
connects all of them together into one breathing organism.

Jonathan: It blows my mind. I’m sitting here thinking about all this stuff,
because after I learned from you about Zapier. I started using it, and so now
that’s a part of my business and it ties into my CRM, it ties into my project
management, it ties into my auto-responder, is pretty amazing. So that’s a bunch
of nerd talk that we did not need to do. [laughter] So back to email versus
Facebook, or versus social media in general. So what is a purpose of social media
then? Because when we were talking before we got on the air you said you cut out a
lot of your social media.

Igor: Yeah. I decided to… That’s why you don’t see me updating my Facebook posts
anymore. I just recognized that if I have 24 hours in the day and I can choose to
invest the same say the same hour of effort into something, I would prefer for
that something to be the one activity that makes me the most ROI. Considering how
social media has pretty much the lowest possible ROI after watching You Tube
videos, or something like that, then I decided to get off social media, or at the
very least to strictly, to be there strictly like for a very strict amount of time
every day. Like 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes. So I don’t update my posts
anymore, I don’t necessarily scroll through my news feed. In fact I disabled the
news feed a long time ago. I don’t have the news feed anymore, so doesn’t suck me
in, because that thing kind of sucks you in. I removed Facebook from my phone.

Jonathan: Oh.

Igor: Yeah. At first a disabled the notifications on my phone, and then I just
removed it altogether so I can’t log in on Facebook through an app on my phone.
Moreover, once it did that, I was like, “Man, what am I doing with my time?” So I
went ahead and I deleted a bunch of games from my phone, too. Like Swamp Attack
and Candy Crush and Angry Birds, all that stuff is gone.

Jonathan: How did you have yet to build a Solo Ads business with all that?
[laughter]

Igor: [laughter] Trust me, somehow I managed to find time to play games, and now I
feel like a total jackass for doing that, because I probably, I can’t say for
sure, but I probably found the time when I was not working, when I was with my
family, at the dinner table, whatever. I probably did back then. It just hurts me
to think of all the time a wasted. Not just on social media and games, but in
general. So that’s why in order to maximize my ROI and get more done, and have, I
guess… Not even get more done, but have higher impact, have better impact on
what I’m doing and on the on the community, and on my business and my life. I’m
just choosing to maximize my time by focusing on the highest ROI activities. And
when it comes to choosing between email and Facebook, I choose email. Now what do
we need Facebook for as far as marketers, we can create conversation, we can just
stay in touch with our audience, we can allow our audience to cheer for our brand,
but Facebook is not a brand building tool, it’s not a marketing tool, really. I
see a lot of people, they use Facebook as a “branding tool” by post motivational
quotes on Facebook.

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: Exactly. That’s exactly…

Jonathan: Only on video, only on video you get that. [laughter]

Igor: That’s such an incredible waste of time because it doesn’t brand you, it
doesn’t help you, it doesn’t make you money, you’re just literally wasting your
time Photo Shopping these quotes into images of lions and beautiful sunsets.

Jonathan: That’s too good. You’re inspiring me. In Strategic Coach we talk about
unique ability and really spending more time in your unique ability, and that’s
the same thing you’re talking about, high ROI activities, and that’s what I’m
finding too. I looked at my week last week and Cupcake was sick, I had to watch
Don way more. I only got seventeen hours of work done and I started looking at,
“All right, what’s going to have the big impact? Am I going to go look at Facebook
or am I going to go ahead and run these ads? Am I going to go write these emails
or am I going to go check You Tube?” So really, you don’t need more time in your
day, that’s the secret, right? You have plenty of time in your day, it’s where are
you choosing to focus those bits of time. And I like the fact that you have
realized, because that was painful for you, but you realized that you were
probably taking time away from your family to be a goof-off. And now by focusing
you don’t have to do that any, I don’t think you have to do that.

Igor: Well, at some point it became such an incredibly deeply rooted habit that I
still do it sometimes. I still, when I feel bored, or when I don’t have anything
to do I, my hand reaches for the phone. But I’m trying to do less and less of that
and try to a kind of un-learn this habit, and maybe replace it with something else
more productive. Because whenever I am on social media I am not present with my
family and that would really hurt the quality of the time we’re spending with my
family. Not only that, once they do that and I feel bad about it, all the sudden
I’m finding myself guilt tripping for an hour for being such a shitty dad. Not
only do I work a lot, and when I do work I give my work like this priority and
“don’t disturb me” sort of attitude, and when I’m with my kid, because I consider
this to be leisure time, I’m allowing myself to get on social media and I’m
hurting my relationship with my child. And not to mention the signal you’re
sending to your kid. When she runs up to you’re like, “Yeah honey, just hold on,
just one sec. Yeah, sure.” You know? And you’re not present for them, and it just
hurts to remember how big of an ass I was.

Jonathan: So real quick, have you read Battle for the Mind? You got to read that,
Igor, Battle for the Mind by William Sargant. It’s about brainwashing, and I think
we’re all brainwashed by social media. That’s what I think. The little red light,
we’re addicted to that. Pavlov’s response. As we’re wrapping up, because this is,
we’re coming close to the end of this episode, anything in closing?

Igor: Well, that’s about covers it when it comes to email versus Facebook. I’m
happy to report that email wins. Okay? I’m raising, I’m holding emails and right
now, raising it as the champion and Facebook is lying on the floor, lying on the
mat, beaten to death and bleeding from its nose. So thank you again for tuning in
for another edition of the List Building Lifestyle, with your hosts Igor and
Jonathan. Until the next time we chat, have a good one.

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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