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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
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.
Jonathan: You are listening to List Building Lifestyle. Welcome back to another
action packed episode with your man, fresh from the barber, Mr. Igor Kheifets.
Igor: Hey Jonathan.
Jonathan: What’s up Igor? How you doing man?
Igor: Not bad, not bad at all, excited to hit this thing, this topic that is a
mystery to most marketers although I feel that it’s their obligation and sacred
duty to actually understand this kind of stuff. And of course I’m talking about
the prospect and the way the prospect engages your list or engages with you
through your list. So you know how sometimes you’d be up at three in the morning
and you’d be watching some George Carlin stand up video, I mean everybody does
that I think, not just me and you get hit with a YouTube ad by some guy in a
Corvette that brags about all this money he’s been making off a Facebook ad or
something like that and basically says, “Come in, I’ll give you free training on
how to turn every second Facebook visitor on your fan page to a customer who gives
you $1000” or something outrageous like that. So you click on his link and you go
to his website and he says, “Give me your email”, you give him your email and then
he says, “I just dropped you the link” right, in the inbox but before you go
checkout this awesome webinar because this awesome webinar is going to sell you
something. Obviously you don’t want to go on the webinar right now, it’s three in
the morning, I mean you just don’t have the time for that and you’re in bed, one
eye shut and one eye still kind of operating so you go to your inbox and you
realize that now it will be too time consuming, to difficult to actually go
through the training he gave you so what you do is you kind of leave it for later.
Later never comes does it? You sort of say, “Okay I’ll do it tomorrow morning” but
in the morning you start checking your email and some other thing catches your
attention or you get a call from your father who wants you to drive him to Tel
Aviv to the hospital or something. So you get distracted. So later that day you
check your email again and you say, “Maybe I’ll get that training now” but once
again something else catches your attention, all of a sudden you’re not checking
it out for the next three days because you get distracted or lazy or both. Before
you know it, all of sudden, it’s not relevant anymore; you kind of have moved on
like there was no pressure in your life for you to actually get that training and
go through it and solve some kind of a problem. You did it just out of pure
curiosity because at the time that ad hit you, you weren’t like purposeful about
solving a problem, you were kind of just chilling. It distracted you from being
lazy. So now five days or seven days later, you’ve gotten like seven, ten emails
from this person and he sends you five reminders about you not getting on the
webinar and before you know it, it gets overwhelming. All of a sudden you don’t
want to read their emails at all because the more they pile up in your inbox, the
less likely you are to start going through them and that is why a lot of the times
we build a list that is supposed to be full of prospects that are interested in
whatever it is we are selling. Let’s face it someone like me would be interested
in finding out how they can turn their Facebook fans into sales because I got a
couple of thousand or maybe 1500 or 1300 or something like that. So why not?
Right? Even me. I mean even somebody who doesn’t do much Facebook nowadays anyway
but it’s just that it gets overwhelming, it gets heavy, life gets busy and all of
a sudden you’ve moved on. Now you’re now a “boarder”, you’re a dead subscriber on
this guy’s list even though his marketing is kind of professional and even though
he’s a cool dude and you like him, even though you trust him to be telling the
truth, it’s just that right now, it’s just not the ideal time. So all of a sudden
you become one of those people on that person’s list that gets the emails but
never opens them and that seems to be a very common experience for marketers out
there who build lists. Isn’t it?
Jonathan: Yeah, so I have a question that hopefully doesn’t derail you. What the
hell are you doing up at 3 am?
Igor: Honestly, well as a father you’d understand, right? So in the morning you
kind of do your work. In the afternoon, you spend this time with the family and
the only real alone time you get with your wife is when you’re child is asleep, is
in bed, right? Tucked in so for me that’s about 9:30, 10 pm or so because she’s
five now, almost five. And after that so there is now the alone time with your
wife so you watch TV shows together or maybe you do whatever, go out, maybe call
in the mother-in-law to come in and watch the kid while you take her out for
sushi.
Jonathan: Really?
Igor: Yeah, why not?
Jonathan: Wow.
Igor: And then you come back home, she goes to bed, okay? You end up staying up
late watching George Carlin stand up videos.
Jonathan: Okay I have a follow up for that? What time do you start your day, dude,
if you’re up at 3 in the morning, what time do you start? Like 12 in the
afternoon?
Igor: It’s funny you ask that because for the last two weeks I’ve been carefully
watching when I wake up and I wake up every single day at about 7:06 am like my
wife starts to try and wake me up around 6:50, 6:55 but I always wake up at 7:06,
it’s when I get out of bed so that’s my time, 7:06.
Jonathan: Follow-up question there, you say your wife, this is taking me way off
track.
Igor: Yeah.
Jonathan: No, follow-up question and then I will leave it alone. So why is she
trying to wake you up and what is she doing to try to wake you up?
Igor: Well, she’s kind of kicking me sort of. You know she like, “Get up, I’m
cooking breakfast, get up.” That’s as far as she goes then she says, “If you don’t
wake up now, I tried, it’s your fault.” Because I used to get angry with her for
not waking me up on time back when we were just dating. I would be like you have
to wake me up because I don’t do alarm clocks. You have to wake me up and make
sure I’m up by 7:15 or 7:10. But she’s like, “I tried and you told me that you
don’t want to wake up so I left.” I’m like, “No, you shouldn’t listen to me when
I’m sleepy, I’m not the same person.”
Jonathan: Ahh a little trip down Igor lane because I wanted to know about your
morning ritual but we will do that another time. So alright, you’re messing around
watching George Carlin, you’re not really in serious business mode but this ad
catches your attention, you opt in and then you ignore it. Why not block everybody
that tries to get on your list at 3 am?
Igor: Well because that could be a person that is Googling your stuff at 3 am and
they are focused about fixing a problem. We spoke about this in one of the
previous episodes how if someone is Googling your name, they are coming in to buy
most of the time unless they are trying to check out if you’re a scam. But if
you’re just distracting them from watching YouTube videos or browsing through
their Facebook newsfeed which is a place where people go to escape making
decisions then you get their contact details, you get their attention for two
seconds but to retain that attention, it’s a really difficult task.
Jonathan: Now what’s interesting to me is that you’re a guy who hounds people with
email. You said it on the show once before, when they first sign up you will hit
them two times a day, three times a day with whatever it takes so does that
actually turn off your prospects or does it convert them, why do you do it that
way?
Igor: Why would I email my list several times a day? Well for one because I’m good
at emailing and I know that as long as I can come up with an excuse to email them
about something they are interested in, you know I will be okay. Now some people
do have a problem with getting two emails per day from me and if that’s the case
they just tell me about it or unsubscribe and that’s cool but most of the time
what I’m doing is I’m so in their face and I’m so good at it too that whatever
happened, I just end up kind of plowing through the clutter if you will. Now the
secret to that by the way is to remain really, really relevant to what’s going on
in their life like the number one technique that I can ever share with you as far
as standing out in a really crowded inbox or getting attention of a prospect who’s
just distracted with a ton of different bullshit is to feedback to the prospect
exactly what’s going on in their life right now because as soon as they hear that
and as soon as you talk about their problems they are going through right now they
are willing to stop everything to tune everything else out and to listen to you
because if there is one thing that we are all interested in, it’s solving our own
problems no matter how small these problems are.
Jonathan: So how do they get there Igor because you talked about the guy that was
doing the Facebook ads training off the YouTube video, you didn’t want to watch
his webinar at 3 am so you saved it for later and then he starts emailing you and
you said the email piles up and it starts to overwhelm you which actually pushes
you away and so how do you work with that? I mean was he not a good marketer like
you? Does he not talk to your problems?
Igor: Well, he is a good marketer absolutely and he obviously spends a lot of time
on video marketing because that seems to be his strongest forte but to be honest
with you the reason I’m not responding to his ads so far is because he’s not 100%
relevant to want to achieve. If he was and he was marketing in the really relevant
way then he would keep getting my attention because the ad that got my attention
spoke about a problem that I faced recently that I wanted to solve specifically
that was a problem when I was sharing with you and the listeners about the
Facebook ads thing. Right? I was really vigorously testing Facebook ads trying to
see how I can get more clients for my agency using Facebook ads even though I
don’t like Facebook ads but I admit to the fact that a lot of my customers are
hanging out on Facebook so why not. I’ll try it. So you know the problem I run
into is that Facebook application or Facebook leads were really, really cold,
uneducated, skeptical, kind of barking back at Dennis for some reason like really
being just difficult and impatient. This guy’s ad was all about watch me get on
Facebook and have somebody I never spoke to before give me $1000 by the end of the
day or something like that. So it all came down to him showing and I kind of sped
through the training like using the player, right? So he showed how he’s basically
getting somebody to respond to an ad by messaging him then he gets that person on
the phone and he literally got on the phone on video and he made a no brainer
proposition. Let me do something for you for free and if it works, you pay me
$1000 and he did it and it worked and he got $1000, whatever. So he basically
said, “Let me work for you for free and prove to you that I’m awesome and you pay
me later.” Now incidentally, I’m never going to do that you know why? Because my
product isn’t my time, my product is actually traffic and it has added costs.
Jonathan: It has costs, yeah.
Igor: Exactly, exactly so we’re not talking about sending somebody 10 clicks or
something like that. We’re talking about doing a full blown campaign for someone
that comes with a really high cost so no longer relevant to me. If I was selling
coaching, if I was selling consulting, I would consider taking on that sort of
strategy but even then I wouldn’t do it probably simply because I have done
coaching and consulting before, I sold it before and I never had to work for free
to prove to somebody that I am worthy of their money because that put the prospect
on the pedestal and not the kind of strategy I want to take on. Right? So even
when I was getting 15 and even to the tune of 50, I had a few clients who paid me
50 grand, I never had to do any work upfront for free for them. That is just not
the kind of business model that I want to build on. You know what I mean? I don’t
have to prove anything to anyone at this point but of course if you’re brand new
maybe that’s a good tactic to follow. My point is this, I failed to continue to
consume his market simply because from that point forward it was no longer
relevant and I got too lazy about consuming it in the first place. Now the reason
I know what his marketing is all about is again because at 2 am in the morning I
literally set the player to double the speed and then I started going like fast
forwarding a minute here, two minutes there, I kind of went through it real fast
and then he of course promised to give something else in addition to that and then
there was a timer that was ticking down from like 45 minutes, I didn’t wait for
that. So my point is that if you see that people stop responding to your emails
like if they open the first email and then what starts happening next is they
don’t respond at all so there is like a spike at first and then it goes down like
that abruptly then you’re not relevant and you need to change the content of your
emails to be more relevant and more urgent for your prospects. Or maybe it’s your
offer that is possible too. I actually just recently revamped my front end offer
for people who kind of apply to work with us and then they refuse to take action
in the first X days. I created an offer that was a true no-brainer. It didn’t
require that I work for free or anything like that but it made a really sweet
offer, it’s a brand new one and it was targeted directly to the people that kind
of reached out to us but then got cold because believe it or not, we don’t convert
everybody.
Jonathan: Oh my God!
Igor: As much as I want to pretend to be the god of conversion or whatever like
it’s not true. On average, we convert about 1 out 10 people that reach out to us.
Jonathan: For the VIP?
Igor: And that doesn’t sound like much. No, just for the regular traffic because a
lot of the people who are reaching out to us are really, really cold. So by
redeveloping the offer, we were able to get it from 1 to 3 out of 10. So now we
are getting somewhere. Now of course there are traffic sources, I would say
sources where we are getting clients like if somebody used us and they say to
their friend, “Go use Igor”, I mean that’s not going to be 1 out of 10 that’s
going to 9 out of 10 but if we are talking about cold traffic which is really the
difficult part like nobody actually gets into this business and all of sudden has
people being referred to them, do they? Right it just doesn’t happen overnight. It
happens after seven years probably. So you have to get good on getting those
visitors cold and sell cold traffic, it’s 1 out of 10. Now we got it up to 3 out
of 10 simply by developing a really sweet offer.
Jonathan: Dude!
Igor: Yeah, that spoke to the prospects needs and let’s face it, almost nobody
does it. Almost nobody is willing to make any kind of changes to their email
follow up to their front end offer, to their back end offer, to their second
chance offer, nothing. Nothing. Even though it’s common fricking sense. If you
have a person coming into your store every single day for 10 days and they are not
buying. Aren’t you at some point say, “Look I know you’re coming in every day and
you’re looking at this pork chop and you’re not buying it. So there is only two
reasons you’re not buying it either you don’t eat pork but you kind of really want
to give in and eat pork in which case I can’t really help you or maybe you’re not
buying this pork chop because it’s too expensive for you or something like that.”
Although I don’t believe people buy necessarily on price but let’s just say for
the sake of simplicity, you’re not buying it because it cost 50 bucks and you
don’t have 50 bucks. So how much money do you have? Oh I have 30 bucks, okay well
let me get you half of this pork chop so you can still get it even though you’re
budget is lower than what you need to have in order to get the full one. Most
likely if he had been coming in for 10 days, he’s going to say, you know what sure
get me half or a third, no problem. I was just afraid to ask or I didn’t know you
could do that. You’d be surprised how many sales you could salvage just by getting
creative about figuring out the reason why people don’t buy from you right away.
Most people don’t spend anytime whatsoever on this, they just want to get their
affiliate link and just want to send people that link and for those people to buy
whatever they are selling and that’s what they call a business which of course it
isn’t. It’s just a funnel.
Jonathan: So I’ve got one more question for you because I know we are coming close
to the end of this one. You said that people don’t go in and find out why folks
aren’t buying and how do you do that Igor? Do you just guess and just start
throwing different offers at them? Do you talk to people? What’s the process for
you?
Igor: Well it really depends on who you are. If you’re a people person and you
love talking to people, I would recommend interviewing people on our list.
Offering like free consultations during which you would be asking questions and
they would be sharing all kind of different concerns and fears and goal and that
would be really, really sweet if you could do that. Now I personally, I just have
a lot of experience so I know. I understand the market. I’m very intimate with my
market. If you’re brand new, you could like test new offers. Literally just throw
offers together, completely outrageous offers with all different kinds of angles
and different types like components and see what works. I accidently discovered
actually most recently – I rebuilt an offer that is now becoming a flagship offer
that was pure luck because I said you know what we never tried this. Let’s try to
putting this offer together like so and test it out. So we put it together, it
took us two days; we mailed it out, all of a sudden great success. We incorporated
that offer into our funnels and all of sudden it’s making money, people are
wanting to buy and it’s not an angle we have tried in the last three years. We
just didn’t try it. It’s not that we didn’t know that it existed, we just never
tried it. So try new things. Be cool with failing and be cool with maybe looking
stupid to your market although that’s very unlikely if you’re just working on
making them a really sweet offer that they would want to say yes to. Definitely
consult experts in our industry like if you can find somebody who has been in the
industry for a long time and especially in the industry in relation to the market
you’re trying to sell to, you could always consult them and see if they can shed
some light on what are these people buying. Because as much as it’s relevant and
useful to interview your market, your target market can’t always be precise about
why they buy certain things and why they don’t. Like a lot of people, one of the
first r reasons they say that they don’t buys something is price. But that’s not
true. That’s not true at all. We buy based on comfort, quality, convenience,
prestige. We are always willing to give money in exchange for buying more time
even if we don’t have much money. So it’s not always about the money but most
people the first thing they say is the money which again just not true. I mean why
would somebody not ride an Uber if it’s super cheap, they have their own reasons,
definitely have the money but they will tell you why would I pay money. So anyway,
yeah there is no definite way to do it, talk to people in your market, get
intimate, read books by marketing leaders in our community, Dan Kennedy, he’s
really good at this stuff. He has written dozens and dozens of books and if you’re
like in the restaurant business or the information marketing business or in the
seminar business like you can just read his book and get all of these details just
like that. You don’t even talk to anybody because he already figured it out. So no
easy way as usual but at the very least right now, you know where you need to be
headed.
Jonathan: Alright. That’s sounds good. I think that’s our time for today so that
is a wrap for another episode of The List Building Lifestyle Show, we’ll be back
in your earbuds next time. Thank you Igor and thank you List Builders for tuning
in.
Thank you 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.
This is the ThePodcastFactory.com.