How To Create Exponential Growth With Dean Jackson

Igor Kheifets: I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast
for those who want to build a large profitable email list and make six figures from
anywhere in the world. If you would like to get rich by building a large email list
while helping people, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free web
class I’m conducting this week to find out how I built a list of four-million-three-
hundred-thirty-one thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty-six email subscribers at a profit.
Secure your free seat at Igor.cx. Attend this free workshop to discover an easy
way to get 50 to 500 new email leads per day on complete autopilot without losing
tons of money. Just go to Igor.cx to attend this free web class. And now, once again
it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Welcome back to List Building Lifestyle, special new years episode with your host
Igor Kheifets. The timing couldn’t be better for today’s show because I truly feel
like Santa has put me on his good list. You see, we’ve been blessed to host some
amazing people on the show. We’ve had the best selling authors, we’ve had eight
figure internet marketers, and even a couple of billionaires, but nothing pumps me
more than talking direct response marketing with world’s smartest direct response
marketing minds. And boy, oh boy, am I thrilled to bring out my next guest.

He’s often referred to as the marketing Buddha. He’s just as passionate about golf
as he is about direct response marketing. He’s the go-to guy for people like Tony
Robbins, Joe Polish, and Jay Abraham, but all of that pretty much just bleaks in
comparison to his invention that forever changed the lives of millions of people,
myself included. You see, my next guest is the inventor of the squeeze page. Yes,
the page that used to get people’s e-mail addresses to build your e-mail list.
That one. That’s the page, and he was the first one to come up with that concept
and start building a list of targeted prospects for you to market your product and
services to. You know him as the co-host of the I Love Marketing podcast. He is
none other than Dean Jackson. Dean, welcome to The List Building Lifestyle.

Dean Jackson: Wow. That’s all very exciting. I can’t wait to hear what I have to
say.

Igor Kheifets: Same for us. Same for us.

Dean Jackson: Yeah.

Igor Kheifets: I had to make sure everybody understands the magnitude of this
episode because many of my followers are brand new to marketing. They’re still
trying to figure it out. They’re still trying to build that lifestyle business,
which brings me to my first question, because I know you always put your lifestyle
first. In fact, in one of the interviews you’ve done, you’ve mentioned that you
have this way of defining success and then you build your business around it,
versus the way most people do it when they sort of build their business and they
dream about success or lifestyle they’re gonna have one day.

So if you mind, maybe take us through that process because many of our listeners
are quite literally zoning in on one purpose in life and that is build a business
that they can basically, that can support their lifestyle. So this is probably
gonna resonate a lot with our people.

Dean Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. That was my goal. I started out in business before
the internet, so being a marketer and learning all the direct response things that
required mail and print and all the offline things, when the internet came around,
it really was just such a great opportunity to really build a lifestyle business
around it. That’s really what a lot of people early on were attracted to the
internet for, and about 20 years ago I went through a process and started defining
success for me. How am I gonna know when I’m being successful? That was the more
important question to me and not like most people look at success as this
aspirational thing in the future, in the distance, and they’re constantly striving
towards it, but the idea of pushing the accelerator pedal, looking up ahead, and
kind of defining how will I know when I get there? The only time you can
experience anything is right now in the present.

So the question that I kept asking was how will I know when I’m being successful?
Not when I will be successful. So the exercise that I went through was really
filling out this statement in different ways that kind of resonated with me. I
encourage everybody to do it is just ask and finish the statement I know I’m being
successful when. And for me, I have a list of 10 that I went through and they’ve
become like a guidepost for my life. That everything fit around those things. So
I’ll give you a few of them.

So for me, my first one is I know I’m being successful when I can wake up every
day and say, what would I like to do today? That’s a successful day. If you have
that kind of time freedom where you can control your schedule, you can control
your days, that’s a nice lifestyle, a successful lifestyle to me.

The next is that I know I’m being successful when my passive revenue exceeds my
lifestyle needs, and so I made the decision early on to lead with revenue and lag
with lifestyle. My lifestyle things, material things, or getting-

Igor Kheifets: Which is the opposite of how everyone else does it.

Dean Jackson: Right. Most people, what they do is they get things that require
them to then hustle and grind and put pressure on themselves to earn enough money
to pay for the things that they’re getting. They live above their means or
aspirationally they call it. So I just focused on getting and spending my time on
building things that would create passive, recurring revenue and so that way when
you wake up on the any given day, you know that there’s money coming in and it’s
not, you’re never having to say I have to go out and make money to pay the
mortgage today. So that’s been a really good thing. By focusing on the passive
revenue, it gives you that freedom, that time freedom and the space.

My third, and I’ll just share this final one with you ’cause you get the whole
flavor of it then, that my third one is that I know I’m being successful when I am
working on projects I’m excited about and doing my very best work. Now the
important thing about that statement and all three of those statements is that
they are scalable in that they’re I’m going to, it’s been 20 years now, and I can
tell you with certainty that every single day, those have been the things that are
driving me. Those are the things that make me feel alive and successful.

So you feel like you’re being successful. I get to wake up and say well what would
I like to do today? I’ve got passive revenue that exceeds my lifestyle needs, I’m
working on projects that excite me. I get to do the projects that I really want.
I’m still doing, I’m constantly doing new things and doing my very best work and
my very best work today is better than my very best work was 20 years ago and the
opportunities that I get are bigger today than they were 20 years ago because
everything builds on top of it.

Igor Kheifets: This is incredible because for the longest time I’ve struggled and
I think I still to an extent struggle with defining what I consider to be success.
I have a couple of things, about four things that are concrete that I’ve decided
on way, way, way, way before I succeeded in what I was doing, but I love how your
statements are not really tied to I drive a Ferrari 550 or whatever.

Dean Jackson: That’s the thing, none of them are about specific material things or
about any acquisition of stuff like that because that’s not how I know I’m being
successful. But I happen to drive really nice cars and I live in great places and
I stay in five start hotels and I travel first class and I do whatever I want, but
it doesn’t define me being successful.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s truly incredible as well as notice
that in your definition of success, you don’t stop working all of a sudden.

Dean Jackson: Right. That’s the thing is we kind of think about that somebody’s
life is gonna be just running around, goofing off all day. That’s not the point.
No real entrepreneur aspires to a life of doing nothing.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah and I tried that. I actually tried that. Once I made my first
big paycheck, I went for five days just playing video games.

Dean Jackson: Yeah.

Igor Kheifets: And it was exhausting. I want to do some work now.

Dean Jackson: Right, and that’s what’s fine. I look at it that I’ve got the other
ones are all sort of about the defining what it is that I really want for my life.
I don’t know what that values or the context of things makes a difference. So I
really love having that as a benchmark because then I can filter every opportunity
that I get through all of these things. I have other ones that there’s no whiny
people in my life or that I wear whatever I want at all times and I can disappear
for several months with no affect on my income. I can quit any project at any
time. I’ve got no deadlines or time obligations. All those things are defining
what that freedom is, so any opportunities that I’m faced with, I filter through
that and say is this taking me closer or further away from that?

Igor Kheifets: Interesting, and you put it in a beautiful phrase. You say I want
to live like an artist with a 50K per month trust fund.

Dean Jackson: Yes, that’s a great life metaphor, right? The thing is when you look
at the what it actually costs to live an amazing life, there’s not a lot of what
I’ve learned in a lot of things is to define where the exponential increases in
happiness are and where the incremental increases in happiness are, okay?

Igor Kheifets: This is really important for us to touch on and I’ve heard one of
your 10 minute talks over in the 25K group, and you say there’s a difference
between just increasing your results, going from say making X to making X plus
two, versus the multipliers. So we’re going from making X to making five X or
[inaudible 00:11:55] X. So can you perhaps expand a little bit more about that?

Dean Jackson: Sure. You’re talking about it in terms of results. I’m also talking
about it in terms of happiness, and so I’ll talk about just the happiness first
and then I’ll share about multipliers, but when I look at it, you realize that
there’s a exponential increase in utility and happiness. Going from not having the
car to having a car is an exponential improvement in your situation. Then going
from having a car to having a reliable car, to having a luxury car. A luxury car
is sort of incrementally happier than having a car that works, but having a
Ferrari or a Rolls Royce, those things are the reward or the exponential happiness
level is not. That’s not what drives me. I like top end, normal luxury cars. For
my personally happiness level.

Igor Kheifets: If you don’t mind revealing, if this is not too personal, what do
you drive and what have you driven? This is actually pretty fun. I’m a big car guy
and I always love those tidbits on Top Gear if you ever watch that. They’ll bring
out celebrities and they’ll be like, so what did you first drive, what did you
upgrade to when you became famous? So why don’t we do that?

Dean Jackson: So my progression, my first car, my dream car that I always wanted
when I grew up was a Porsche 911 and so almost 20 years ago I got my first Porsche
911, which I loved. Then I got another one and then moved into a Mercedes SL550,
which I loved and then I have a BMW X5M and I’ve had three of those the last three
vehicles that I’ve had, which are all, so we’re talking about hundred thousand
dollar cars, not four hundred thousand dollar cars and for me, that’s what I say,
that’s where my optimal happiness level is.

I saw a documentary about sugar and they talk about these scientists that measure
out what they call the bliss point of flavoring where this amount of sugar is the
bliss point and then a little bit more is where it starts to get too much. So for
me, my bliss point is hundred thousand dollar cars as opposed to four thousand
hundred dollar cars.

Igor Kheifets: [crosstalk 00:14:44].

Dean Jackson: Yeah. So that said, on the business side of that, I always look for
not incremental improvements, but exponential improvements. Where are the
breakthroughs? Going from testing the blue buy button versus the red buy button is
gonna be an incremental improvement. You’re not gonna have a breakthrough with a
color change or a word change, but the way that you make an offer can be an
exponential improvement in something, right? That’s all I’m looking for at all
times is where are the exponential breakthroughs?

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, and this is what we experienced recently in the last couple
of months. We’ve finally, finally, and I’ve been adamant, I’ve been so stubborn
about it and I regret it so much, my mentor Tom [inaudible 00:15:36] was telling
me, dude, you’ve got to develop a webinar. I’m like no, we’re doing perfectly fine
with having an application process and a sales person. He’s like no, but you have
to do a webinar. So eventually we did a webinar, we created one, and just having a
webinar in and of itself became an exponential for us.

Now, from there, we created the webinar offer and it wasn’t working as well as I
hoped it would. So then we changed the offer completely. We sold the same thing
but we positioned it so differently that it didn’t seem like the same thing. All
of a sudden the webinar went to start converting at 10, 12, sometimes 15% and that
also became an increment. So now that was two incremental, sorry, exponential
increases in a span of just three months and of course obviously the bottom line
grew and the business started evolving. All of a sudden we needed to serve more
customers, so we’re now experiencing challenges with the staffing. It was just a
bunch of things and it happened so fast.

Dean Jackson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s what can happen, exactly. ‘Cause then
one thing opens up other opportunities.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and this is something I also noticed about
media. So for example, when I started this podcast two years ago, same thing
happened. All of a sudden my name started appearing places. All of a sudden I
started connecting with people on a different level. It was because I owned a
media. So people just don’t realize how quickly they can create different results
if they’re just willing to step outside their comfort zone.

Dean Jackson: That’s it.

Igor Kheifets: Now there’s another thing, another quote that I wrote down here.
You say that the biggest misconception about marketing is that people think that
it’s all about you getting yourself out there, and this is really big for the
industry that I operate and which is the internet marketing space because that’s
what people hear. Put yourself out there, shoot YouTube videos, show people you’re
a real person and yada, yada, yada.

Now you’re saying something that’s completely different. Perhaps you could share a
little bit about that.

Dean Jackson: Part of the thing with direct response, of course, is that it’s more
important to, it’s not about getting your name out here, it’s about getting their
name in here. It’s like that’s the thing that’s more important that you know who
they are than they know who you are initially and that change, I often say to
people it’s the difference between focusing on getting rich or getting famous. And
it’s a lot less expensive to get rich than it is to get famous, and so I always
encourage people to focus on that first and then to take that money, if they still
want to, and spend it to get famous.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, interesting. Interesting. I never thought about it that way.
My goal was always to get rich. From day one. I was very, very fortunate to pick
up quite a few of Dan Kennedy’s books and courses and Dan Kennedy’s all about
pragmatic, get rich, direct response, get stuff done sort of philosophy and I’m
not sure exactly why, but he resonated with me so much that I take anything he
says as gospel.

Dean Jackson: Right.

Igor Kheifets: So that really served me in my business because I bootstrapped just
a giant business out of my bedroom and that was great, but I’m also seeing a lot
of people say on social media, for example, what they’re trying to do is they’re
trying to become famous to become rich and that’s a way more gruesome journey, in
my opinion.

Dean Jackson: Yeah, because ultimately if you think about just the bottom line of
no matter you’re getting famous or whatever, the money has to come from somewhere
and the money, in fact, is coming from the exchange of good or services for
someone else’s money in exchange for a result. That’s really what they’re buying.
And so the better you can get at being able to produce a result for somebody that
is a multiple of what they spend for it, that’s where your real outcome’s gonna
come from. Better to be get famous for helping people multiply money. If you
really have the goods, if you’re really able to produce results for people, that’s
going to bring fame along with it because people are gonna talk about you and
they’re gonna share that.

Igor Kheifets: Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me take you back in time. Let’s go back
to the time where you invented the squeeze page. I really want to hear the story.
How did you come up with it? What inspired you to do it? What kind of problem were
you facing?

Dean Jackson: Sure, yeah. I love that whole lore. That whole thing. Back in the
day when the auto responders were just getting started, people had newsletters and
everything was you could have a sign up form on your page where people would leave
their e-mail address to join your list and that’s what everybody would do is right
in the upper right hand corner of their webpage, they would put join my e-mail
newsletter, and what I really started observing and testing was that I realized
that the most valuable outcome I can have on a website at first, is for somebody
to leave their name and their e-mail address because that way, I don’t ever care
if they came back to the website. I’ve got now their e-mail address. I can send
messages directly to them, and that what I found was the more you focused on just
that, meaning getting it all the way down so that the only thing that somebody
could do on your page was leave their name and e-mail address to move to the next
page, that got the highest response of anything.

If you had your offer for your e-book or your newsletter or whatever it was you
were using for people, if you had that on your webpage, people would leave their
name and e-mail address, but the majority of them would click all the other things
that are available on your website first before they would do that. So the fewer
the options that we had, the more people would leave their name and their e-mail
address. So the first kind of experiments I did with that were I took what I
called the Cosmo Magazine approach where I looked at it as the table of contents
of Cosmo and I would put all these things that were inside and I would say instead
of click here, it would say free inside and then it would say something else, and
then more inside and free inside. There would be five or six things that you could
get that looked like the table of contents of what’s inside the website and then
it would come to get free instant access, leave your name and e-mail address and
they would get all of those things, and that got the highers response.

So that became the standard of what I would do for everything now and it really
has taken off as being just a standard thing.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to
listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this
episode. Oh, and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the
show. It really helps. Thanks.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, absolutely, and it did become a standard. It still is the
standard. At least for people who are measuring their response from the traffic
they’re getting. How, if at all, did it evolve for you in your business?

Dean Jackson: So now it’s even simpler. A lot of the things, so I’ll run full page
ads in Success Magazine, say for my e-mail mastery book and when you go to
emailmastery.com, you see that the only thing you see is the cover of the book,
the title, and the chance to leave your name and your e-mail address to get the
book, ’cause that’s what I’ve encouraged them to do in the ad. So I look at it
that I’m not trying to convince them to leave their name and their e-mail address.
I’m not talking about anything that’s going to happen after they leave their name
and their e-mail address. I’m not adding any new information on the page. It’s
just like a placeholder that lets them confirm to them that yeah, you’re in the
right place.

So they’ve reading a print ad, they decide I’m going to go and get this book. Then
they go to e-mail mastery and instead of adding new information, all it is is yep,
you’re in the right place, come on in. That page, when I run those ads, we get 68%
opt in from cold magazine traffic, leaving their name and their e-mail address.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, that’s insane. We’re seeing this online, but when it comes to
offline visitors, that’s pretty incredible.

Dean Jackson: Yeah. So that, I prefer those really simple things. I’ve really
honed it down that the best converting things that we’ve got are books and using
that landing page that only just offers the book.

Igor Kheifets: Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about conversions.

Dean Jackson: Sure.

Igor Kheifets: You’ve obviously been building lists in the different industries.
You’ve got the stopyourdivorce.com, you’ve got the real estate business and the
real estate education business, because you’ve had your start in real estate cold
calling people. So obviously, and I’ve been telling people for years, I’ve
recorded so many episodes and written so many guides and shot so many tutorials
telling my customers look, people don’t buy right away, but perhaps it’ll help if
they hear from somebody that’s one of the first people in the world to ever build
an e-mail list for the purpose of selling something to the list.

Dean Jackson: Well here’s the thing is that the reality is that there’s five times
at least more money in the long game than the short game. That, as an internet
marketing community, an industry, we’ve sort of fetishized the first 30 days as
conversions.

Igor Kheifets: My industry’s like 14 days.

Dean Jackson: I know. Exactly. I was talking about, that was being generous with
people ’cause that’s still really short term. 30 days. You’re absolutely right,
it’s more like the first 14 days that people opt in, they go through this 14 day
gauntlet series and hammer, hammer, hammer to buy now, and if they don’t buy now,
then they’re considered-

Igor Kheifets: They’re bad.

Dean Jackson: They’re bad leads and they just get in the affiliate file and you
just hammer them with other people’s offers. That’s what it is and so that just is
like a churn and burn kind of model and a lot of those, sometimes people can scale
those because they’ll do all these things and trip wires, having things where they
try and get their earnings per click up enough that it pays for the ads that you
ran to get the opt ins and leave some for a profit, and then just continuing to
scale that out. Well, when you look at it, I look at that’s an expense based
approach to list building and marketing on those.

So what I try and encourage people to do is instead take a capital investment
approach to it and realize that the asset that you’re buying is the list. The
asset is the prospects and so I’ve based everything that I’ve done off of a
framework that my expectation is that I’m hammertizing or looking at the cost of
these people, the multiplier investment over two years and I look at it that when
I first started really studying conversion and lead management there was a, I
would go deep into academic stuff and industry stuff and enterprise level stuff,
and I found a study and a company that does inquiry handling on an enterprise
level. Millions of leads a year.

And they would do surveys that would take anything that people have inquired
about. Let’s say that they would handle for corporations, trade show leads, or
somebody goes to the trade show, they scan their name card for information or
whatever, they would do the fulfillment and the distribution of those leads and
stuff for all kinds of different industries. So they would follow up with people
and do something brilliant. They would do these what they called did you buy
surveys, and so they would take a swoth of a sample at 90 day increments and they
would call you up at 90 days and say hey, Igor, you came to the home show and you
inquired about faucets. Have you bought any faucets? Not can we sell you some
faucets or do you wanna buy some Kohler faucets? They just want to know did you
buy faucets? This is what they’re trying to gauge is your actual buying intention.

Igor Kheifets: Interesting.

Dean Jackson: So what they did was in their study, they found that just over half
of the people that inquire about anything will buy what it is they’ve inquired
about in the next 18 months. So I like to be conservative, so my construct, I took
that and said let’s reduce that to 50% and let’s extend it to two years. So my
expectation is if we have a bundle of 100 leads that come in today, inquiring
about anything, whatever it is, that if we tag them and then watch them two years
from now, that 50 of them are going to have bought something in that category. So
if they inquire about faucets, they’re gonna buy faucets, 50 of them.

So that’s been my framework. Now what they also found is that of the people who
buy, only 15% of them buy in the first 90 days. 85% of the value of a bundle of
leads today is 90 days or more away.

Igor Kheifets: Interesting.

Dean Jackson: And so that framework, if you look at it now, that’s why-

Igor Kheifets: It didn’t change once you measured it. In our business, what we do
is we sell advertising leads, traffic, and basically help people build their
e-mail list and when we measured it, last year, we actually started tracking
specifically what is the average amount, in percentages, buyers that act within
the first two weeks or 30 days of working with us or applying to work with us.
This is after they’ve gone through a lot of warm up through our content, through
our presentations, downloadable material, and we found that it was only 12%.

Dean Jackson: Okay.

Igor Kheifets: Yes, and then we found that the rest are dragging their feet so to
speak and only buy much, much, much later and sometimes we’ll get the occasional
e-mail because we e-mail twice a day, which is a little bit aggressive that e-mail
maybe once a week at best. So we don’t often get e-mails from people saying how
they’ve been on our list for eight months, or they’ve been on our list for two
years. A lot of times people apply at the state of being ready to buy now and they
say I’ve been following you for years. So it obviously takes them a long time to
finally get to that, psychologically to get to that place to commit to a buying
decision.

Dean Jackson: Yeah, it’s true and so the asset that you have, if you think about
it as we’re taking this capital investment approach, the asset that you have is
the portfolio of unconverted leads.

Igor Kheifets: Yes.

Dean Jackson: Those e-mail addresses, the bigger the list, the more value it has
as it ages.

Igor Kheifets: Yep. This is not a concept people don’t get. I’m glad you said as
it ages because I notice that the more time people spend on my list, the easier it
is for them to transact with me and the more on average they will spend per
transaction.

Dean Jackson: Yep. That’s right. It’s so fun, I do my breaks and blueprint event.
The small mastermind events. I do nine of them a year, and it’s $5,000 and every
event that I do, there’s somebody there that it’s the first interaction that we’ve
had and they’ve been in my world or on my list for five years, seven years,
whatever, and this is the first time I’m meeting them. It’s profound the value of
that over time.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, and it never seems to stop to amaze you. We talk about it as
marketers and educators, we try to help other people recognize this idea, but when
you meet someone or talk to somebody and they say Dean, I feel like I’ve known you
for years because I’ve been watching your videos and attending your webinars,
you’d be like wow, incredible. It’s really cool, and you have another metaphor
which hits so well for me, personally, about strawberries.

Dean Jackson: Tell me about that one. Forget this one. Remind me.

Igor Kheifets: Okay, cool. So you were giving this one talk and you were saying,
again, about the leads in the context of tapping your biggest asset in
non-converted leads. You said that you break them down into clusters of 90 days
and that every 90 days, you reconnect, and this is me quoting you, reconnect with
the green strawberries who turn red.

Dean Jackson: Oh yes. Right, right exactly. Okay, right, right, right.

Igor Kheifets: And you do it, of course, with one of the most famous things that
you do, is the nine word e-mail.

Dean Jackson: Yes, and there’s the thing is that that’s where the best opportunity
is at 90 days to send an e-mail to someone and say hey, Igor, are you still
looking for faucets? That’s just the simplest thing. Are you still interested in
faucets? Are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? We had a great story of
a guy, a yacht broker, who sent that nine word e-mail to a list of what they were
referring to in their office as dead leads. He sent a nine word e-mail to them,
are you still looking for a yacht? And the uncovered a guy who’s under contract
now for $120,000,000 yacht. And in the mean time, bought a $50,000,000 yacht to
tide him over until this yacht will be delivered.

Igor Kheifets: In the meanwhile.

Dean Jackson: Yeah, in the meantime. He needed something for the next three years
while they’re building his super yacht. So that all from a nine word e-mail to a
list of dead leads. So there’s value and I always get it’s like a magic trick that
when people first experiment with a nine word e-mail, it’s like surprising to them
the number of replies that they get.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah. This is exactly what happened to me. I used a nine word
e-mail the first time you talked about it on the I Love Marketing podcast and by
the way guys, if you want to find out what the nine word e-mail is, it’s actually
super simple, but I still want you to go and get it from Dean’s site, I think you
said it’s emailmastery.com?

Dean Jackson: Yeah, emailmastery.com. Yep.

Igor Kheifets: Yep, so head on over to emailmastery.com right now as you’re
listening. If you’re driving your car, stop your car, put on the blinkers and just
go to emailmastery.com on your phone, enter the e-mail, get the nine word e-mail.
I used the nine word e-mail when I was selling, I called it back then, solo
[inaudible 00:37:16] coaching. It was a coaching where I taught people how to
build businesses just like mine. Again, the classic Dan Kennedy model. You get
good at doing something and then go teach other people how to do it as well.

Dean Jackson: Yes.

Igor Kheifets: So I’ve had a list of prospects I’ve generated off of I think it
was Facebook ads at the time, and they didn’t convert. I think I’ve had 600 of
them and I sent out a nine word e-mail and I got 152 responses. Now what I didn’t
account for was the fact that I needed to communicate with each and every single
one of them personally because a part of the whole strategy is to have a dialog
with them, right?

Dean Jackson: Right. That’s exactly right.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, and I wasn’t ready for that. So all of a sudden I found
myself talking to 152 people at the same time. So guys, this is just to tell you
that it’s dangerously powerful if you have a list of unconverted prospects, and
what’s really cool, and this is just me taking it to the technical aspect of it,
is that from a delivery standpoint, it will look and feel and just seem as a
completely friendly, personalized e-mail to Google, Yahoo, and all the other
e-mail service providers, and you will have responses. People actually hit reply
and write to you like they would to a friend. The e-mail delivery to that list
will automatically go up and you will land in the primary inbox more often because
of those responses.

Dean Jackson: That’s right, yeah. Absolutely. That’s kind of the hidden benefit.
That’s one of the secrets of it is making that e-mail, treating it like you’re
only sending one. Like you’re only sending it to one person. That’s the mindset,
that we often have this broadcast voice that when we’re sending an e-mail, we’re
thinking about sending an e-mail to the list broadcasting. The only people, they
don’t know that they’re on a list or that there’s other people. Or they don’t know
whether they’re one of 100 or 100,000. They don’t have any context for it. You’re
showing up in their inbox, and if you’re showing up as a marketer with a headline
on the subject line that you’re trying to convince or tease somebody into opening
the e-mail, you’re gonna look like all the other marketers. I will say to people,
your mom has 100% open rate on her e-mails. Because your mom is sending individual
e-mail to you.

Igor Kheifets: Yup.

Dean Jackson: So if you look at, this is a really great subject line exercise,
actually, is if you look at your inbox and you just scroll through to find the
last e-mail that was just for you, what you’re gonna find is that those e-mails
are very different than the e-mails above and below it. Because your mom and your
friends, the marketers are using it as a headline, your mom and your friends,
people are sending you individual ones, it’s almost like they have a label maker
and they’re writing using the subject line as the label for how you’ll file this
e-mail away later so you can find what it’s about. So your mom might send an
e-mail with the subject line that says dinner, or whatever. Or your friends might
send you an e-mail that says movie Friday, or something that’s just overtly clear
of what’s actually inside the e-mail.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah. I have a friend of mine, we bounce ideas back and forth and
he now works in The New Offer. Now that I recall, again, just because you kind of
pointed it out and I never even thought about it that way, and I do e-mail
[inaudible 00:41:19] for a living, and I pride myself for it. The last e-mail he
sent me was 10 bullets for The New Offer. I only reviewed them maybe three days
later, but I knew exactly what I was looking for. You’re right, it was like a
label.

Dean Jackson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Igor Kheifets: This is crazy, this is nuts, and the other thing that really comes
to mind is I was interviewing Nate Rifkin, he writes for Agora, and he said
something really amazing, which, again until he said it, I didn’t recognize that
when people check their e-mail, they don’t go looking for e-mails to read. They
go in looking for e-mails to delete.

Dean Jackson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think there’s looking for ones that
they don’t have to read. I think that actually my experience is I don’t know that
people actually delete e-mails anymore. You just get so many of them, it’s so
overwhelming and there’s no reason to ’cause it’s all in the cloud. Everybody
keeps every e-mail all the time anyway. So I think what we’re really doing, and
the reality is we’re scrolling. Nobody’s going on their desktop to read e-mails
anymore. It’s all really we’re scrolling through our inbox to, on our iPhones or
whatever, and so you’re just scrolling through to find the ones that are, that
you got to read.

Igor Kheifets: Whoa, this is so cool. What you mentioned about treating your list
as if it’s one person was so profound, too, because a lot of times people come to
me and they’re like Igor, I don’t know what to say in my e-mails, and my answer to
them is what if your prospect or your best customer was actually your best friend
and you were having coffee, and you were sitting right across the table from them?
What would you say then? All of a sudden the penny drops and you’re like oh, I
would say this, this, and this.

Dean Jackson: That’s it. Conversational. That’s the whole point, conversational
conversion. That’s the words that I used for what I practice. Conversational
conversion.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, you use the word dialog a lot and this is what marketing is,
isn’t it? It’s the dialog that happens between you and your best customer in their
head, right? As they consume your marketing.

Dean Jackson: Yeah, that’s exactly right. But the reality is in e-mail you can
actually be in a dialog. That’s why when you start, all I wanna look for is see
who’s willing to engage in a dialog so I’ll often ask, I use what I call a spear
e-mail. S-P-E-A-R. Short, personal, expecting a reply. That’s the magic words that
I’m looking for here, right? So I send something to somebody and for six and a
half years now, the e-mail that I send periodically to my list to fill these
breakthrough blueprints all over the world is the same e-mail. It’ll have in the
subject line Orlando Mastermind and then it’ll say, hey, Igor, I’m getting
together with a group next month for a marketing mastermind. We’re gonna spend
three days going deep in applying the eight profit activators to your business.
Would you like to join us? That’s it. So it’s short, personal, and expecting a
reply. I’m asking would you like to join us?

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to
listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this
episode. Oh, and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the
show. It really helps. Thanks.

Igor Kheifets: Now at the end of the interview, Dean was just finalizing the example of
having a personal conversation with your prospects and emphasizing the importance
of conducting a dialog rather than shouting at your prospects and at your customers
with your claims, which is way more effective and as we were closing as well, we
started going over some of the things you can do in order to work with Dean as
well as learn more from him because he’s widely considered to be one of the best
direct response marketers in the world.

So I highly urge you to go to deanjackson.com where you can download his
breakthrough DNA report about the eight profit activators you can trigger in your
business right now. I also recommend you subscribe to morecheeselesswhiskers.com
podcast where you can listen to Dean’s podcast as well as joyofprocrastination.com
where he and Dan Soloman host another podcast. Dean has been on podcasts, as you
understand. And I also urge you, when you go to deanjackson.com to go ahead and
also visit emailmastery.com where you can download the amazing nine word e-mail
that brings dead leads back to life, okay?

So with that said, thank you again for tuning in to The List Building Lifestyle.
Now we’re gonna switch to our usual outro. This is Igor Kheifets. I hope you
enjoyed this episode. Happy new year and have amazing, an amazing celebration
tonight. Caio.

Thank you for tuning in to the the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous
episodes, the transcript of today’s show, and exclusive content at our website at
listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the
traffic workshop I’m conducting this week where I’m showing how I built a list of
four-million-three-hundred-thirty-one-thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty-six email
subscribers without losing money. And how my clients are pulling anywhere from 50
to 500 new leads per day on their list at a profit without any list-building
experience. Just go to Igor.cx to claim your free seat now.