Simplifying Your Email Strategy for Big Results with Kennedy

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is the list billing lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, the List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

Igor Kheifets  0:52  

Welcome back to the List Building Lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets, and today I’m hosting Mr. Kennedy. Now Kennedy works as a hypnotist and a mentalist on stages during the evening, but during the day, he wears his superhero cloak and becomes one of the email marketing heroes. He is on a mission to save the world from the old fashioned email marketing that we all hate and give practical tools for small businesses. He helps people get better results by using his trademark psych sequencing emails. We’re talking about doubling profits from their email list without launching a new offer. Kennedy has also found response suits a survey platform to turn feedback into actionable insights and sales, and on top of that, he co-hosts the Email Marketing Show podcast. 

So it sounds like Kennedy and I, and I think alike. So it’s going to be a really cool conversation with a like minded email marketer. And you know, Kennedy to get us into the conversation. You know, I just came back from a trip to Moldova where I was interviewed on a Russian radio station about email marketing. Now this is you really I didn’t expect this to happen, and kind of happen almost by accident, but was really interesting experience, because in the Russian speaking world, they don’t really recognize email as a marketing tool, even though they all use it, because they pretty much rely on Instagram and telegram at this point, and that’s where all the celebrities are right. That’s where they post. So as I was talking about email marketing, one of the DJs who was sitting across the table from me, you know, kept showing with every move, you know, in his body, in his body language, how much he disagrees with me. You know, it was a really tough crowd, so I’m really happy to chat with somebody who actually understands that numbers don’t lie, and that email is where the money’s at. So welcome. Welcome to the show. 

Kennedy  2:53  

Thanks Igor. Yeah, I disagree with everything you’ve just said.

Igor Kheifets  3:00  

All right, well, so tell us, how does a hypnotist get into the email business?

Kennedy  3:06  

Yeah, and specifically, I’m actually like hypnosis was a little element of what I do, but actually it’s what in the US, they call a mentalist, and in the UK, it’s more like a psychological mind reader. And to be fair, I’ve really cut back on doing those gigs now because I’m just enjoying the freedom of not having to be flying around the world to do three or four shows a week, doing corporate events. But because it sounds glamorous, doesn’t it, it’s a bit like, oh, I can fly around the world and do all this stuff, but then realize I’m just on my own a lot, traveling the world, going isn’t this nice, and then there’s nobody there to share the minute with you. 

So that kind of sucks. But how did I get into email marketing? I think what really happened was, to begin with, I started using email to book gigs, because I don’t like doing sales calls. And I also realized that, and this was probably 20 – 25 years ago, something like that, when I started doing gigs that you can use the same principles of a lot of direct response marketing that you and I and a lot of the listeners will understand, but to sell services like that. So I had upsell automation sequences. So somebody would book me, and then a few days later, an email would go out to them, saying, Hey, I’ve had this idea. I was just thinking about your event. Have this idea, maybe I could this really cool, special routine or this extra service for your event. And people would reply and go, Yeah, let’s do that. So it was like automated upsells in and the funniest one.

This was really frustrating, but also interesting to hear the power of automating this stuff is I remember this. This charity once contacted me. Hey, can you come and do your show? Because, like an after dinner conference show, so like a lot of conference messaging and stuff to do with their events and stuff in it, and they simply come and do it, and they’ve talked me down. On my price. They’re like, Oh, we can’t afford that. Oh, and they really pushed me down. They probably talked like, they probably took like, a grand off my fee, or something like 1000 pounds, or, you know, which is about 1512, to $1,500 off my fee. I was like, Yeah, okay. And it was an animal charities, a really tugging amount. Think of the kidneys, think of the puppies, you know, all that sort of, sort of, really, they knew what they were doing, those charities they still do. Um, so I taught, they taught me down my price. And I was like, okay, that’s fine. And, you know, we booked it in, signed the contract, and then, like, three days later, I get an email them from them, saying, Yeah, that sounds great. And I’m like, What are you talking about? So I look at the email they’ve just received, and it’s this upsell of, I’ll do this really cool thing for an extra three grand. So they’ve now ended up paying me more than they talked me down on So, yeah, so that was, that was the power of it, really, from which, you know, that’s, that’s powerful stuff really, you know, you put that in place and you you’re able to make more income because I was selling my time at the end of the day, I can only be in one place, doing one thing, one gig at a time. That was really powerful.

Then it turned into what I would think of as what we all sort of do as email marketing these days, when other entertainers, other performers, other comedians, stuff like that. Magicians all start to get in touch with me, saying, you seem to be really busy, like you’ve got all these gigs. You’re always posting about where you are with photos and so you’re legit. How were you busy and charging the prices that you’re charging? Because, of course, they’re all putting fake inquiries and finding out how much I was really charging, because people are sneaky, right? So they want to, they want to know, and they want to know how to do that. So I ended up launching a print newsletter business, as you do from nothing, you know.

Why? Why not really make it difficult for yourself and do logistics and print and stuff, right? So I decided that would be a great idea every month having to write 10,000 words, or whatever the hell the thing was, and it was like $120 US a month subscribe to this thing, and started helping other entertainers to build their businesses, to get more gigs, and then how to charge more, and how to upsell, and do all the bits of having an entertainment business. And to do that I was doing a daily email. I had automations, I had campaigns, I had different offers I would do at different points for different parts of the thing. And that’s when I really started doing it. So what that led to was, while I’m on like, a plane flying to some gig. So, like, I was flown to Budapest, for example, to work for the Mars company and do an event, a launch for them. And I remember on the on the flight being like sitting, thinking, I’m getting paid a really, know, a few 1000 pounds to be at this event, but on the way, I’m going to write this newsletter, and that’s going to make me a few extra 1000 pounds in that dead time, so that that’s kind of how it all began, really.

Igor Kheifets  8:03  

Okay, so where did that idea to automate, to send automated emails, upselling them. Where’d that come from? Because that’s, I can only assume from experience of communicating with other business owners. That’s like a really advanced thing to do.

Kennedy  8:17  

Yeah, I remember just reading some sales books. It was probably like a Dan Kennedy book to do with, like, increasing the average order value. And I was thinking, because most of that stuff is really difficult to apply, like, if you mean, to our businesses, as we are now, with direct response and selling, usually education or coaching or something, it’s pretty easy to as a direct line to applying that stuff. But, and even if you’re like, a brick and mortar business who has, like, multiple skew, like multiple different offers available, but really, I have this one thing, I would show up, I would do a show.

There’s no such thing as existing customers, right? There was, like, no such because either it’s an upcoming gig or it’s a gig you’ve done, and usually events won’t rebook you for, like, my cycle was five years, because they want a different entertainer at every event. So a lot of the normal marketing stuff wouldn’t apply. And of course, I took that angle with you know how I sold my membership subscription, which was like, have you noticed most market advice doesn’t apply to us entertainers, because it’s completely different, because it’s really interesting on most of our webinars, like we’ll talk about, your business isn’t different. We’re still selling to humans.

But it’s really interesting to actually think of that as a marketing angle, isn’t it? If you can use it as our business is different, and that’s why you need this specialist advice. It’s interesting to be able to wrap it up in either direction. But, yeah, circling back to your question about upselling. So, yeah, I just remember hearing about, okay, well, I can’t. I’ve always been quite a creative person, like, in trying to, like, join the dots on things and how, like, rather than going, Oh, I can’t do that, I like to ask myself, well, as soon as you say you can’t do something, that’s your brain tricking you into thinking, well, I’ll not think about that anymore, whereas my brain’s like, well, let’s leave that door open. Let’s think, what if I could? What would it look like if I just could? So my brain’s kept that open about, okay, you can’t really have repeat customers, per se, in the same sort of way that somebody might come back and buy some more nails from your store, or another book from you, or another course from you. What can I do instead? I thought, well, I can’t increase how much a customer spends. 

And then I remember just thinking, Well, I don’t really want to be like, how do I do that? On the phone, like, or on a call with them when they try to book the event. I can’t be like, cool, we’ve got the contract sign. Oh, kind of selling this other thing. It needs to be more like an afterthought, where I’ve been thinking about your event. I want to make them feel special. I don’t want to feel transactional, like just an event, just an event, because when you’re doing three or four a week, it kind of does get a bit transactional. You know, it gets a bit like, hey, and you switch it on, and you do your opening joke, and everyone’s laughing. And like, you know, it is a formula, of course. I mean, you’re reacting to stuff that’s happening in the room and stuff. I’m not gonna, you know, downplay that, but that idiots become formulaic. So I want them to feel like I’m thinking about them.

And then I thought, well, rather than me calling them up, because, again, I didn’t want to, like, be calling them up and bugging them, how can I just take it off my plate. And also, how can I make it happen every time so that I don’t no one falls through the gaps, like if I just don’t fancy making that call a day, if I don’t really, if I’m not really in the mood, if I don’t like, let’s be honest, a charity gig who’s already tried to chop it or already has successfully negotiated 1000 pounds off your fee. I was never, in a million years, manually going to follow up and be like, Hey, I’ve got an idea you want to spend an extra three like, I was never going to do that. But thankfully, because of the automation that goes out, regardless, relentless, it has no, you know, it has it has no ethics, right? Then..

Igor Kheifets  12:04  

No preconceived notions about getting rejected or being disliked, right? It’s not about ethics. It’s not unethical to say, hey, no, I, I really think you can benefit from this extra service. And, yeah, it cost three grand. Yeah, it’s not unethical. You can, you can make an offer. They can decline it or not. But it’s the discomfort, yeah, of having to actually make the offer, and the potential fear of them saying, Well, no, we’re not going to do it. And, oh, and by the way, you’re an asshole for pitching me. 

Kennedy  12:40  

Yeah, we already told you we haven’t got a very big budget. But also, I think there’s two bits of one, the fact that will happen regardless of what I’m up to, if I’m in the, you know, if I’m 30,000 feet in the air or in a plane, or the fact that it’s just happening, and it’s happening every single time, and no one can fall through the cracks, which means I’m automatically increasing my income. So people are working harder. Yeah, we are working harder just by doing some work once, and, you know, tweaking it a little bit and all that, I didn’t tweak it much, I’ll be frank, like I didn’t. I probably did, I probably made maybe two or three revisions of it, just tweaked it and it made sales.

Igor Kheifets  13:25  

Yeah, and even if it only makes sales 10% of the time, you’re still increasing the average transaction value of one in 10. And I think people really underestimate the power of email automation. I mean, obviously people talk about it, and, you know, there’s many articles and blogs written about it and everything, but I don’t think most people or business owners ever lived a life where email automation is producing money for them, like, for example, this past week, I’ve gotten on at least, like, six or seven flights, one of which would have to undergo an emergency landing in a reserve airfield. It was terrifying, like I’m afraid of flying. I don’t like to travel, but this week has been just terrible. 

But thanks to email automation, my income didn’t take a dip while I was crapping my pants on a plane, I was making money, and so you know, it really helps. It was also very helpful when I moved from Israel to Canada, and I had to invest, like, a couple of months of getting my life sorted, you know, getting a driver’s license, a place to live, and bringing my kids to school. So, I mean, email automation carried me through it. And I really, I wish more business owners kind of understood that. But I think the bigger issue here, well, first off, a huge advantage to you, and a big, you know, big compliment, is the fact that you were able to spot that email is the tool to make that happen, to increase your income without having to increase your workload or complicate your life. But for some reason, to this day, still, most business owners do not recognize it.

They kind of look around and see social media. They see Tiktok, they see Instagram, they see Facebook, they see YouTube, and they tend to sort of believe what they see, that that’s just a general thing that how people are, they tend to believe what they see, and at the same time, they seem to miss that their inbox is flooded with offers from every major brand, celebrity, conglomerate and small time businesses too. Some of the most successful businesses send out a ton of email. And, you know, I’ve been in the business of trying to convince people to use email for a long time now, and still find it pretty difficult. I mean, I have my set of arguments that I can make with numbers and everything, but it seems like just, most people are just they just reject the deal together, as if there’s something inherently bad about being an email marketer.

Kennedy  16:05  

And, you know, I think there’s a few reasons for that. I think there’s a belief that people have, which is literally the reverse of the truth. I think a lot of people feel like when they send an email, whether that’s a promotion, content, a tee up for a promotion, whatever it happens to be, when you send an email, they often feel like they’re like showing up to someone’s house and being like knocking on the door and shouting through the door like, Hey, do you want to buy my thing? And that’s not what’s happening. I really, if you think about it, that person, each person on your email list or on a client’s email list, has joined your email list. They’ve come to your house, they’ve chosen to walk through the door and sit on your sofa, and if they look around and they don’t like the color of the walls, or that you’ve got a cat, or they don’t like that painting, or they don’t like the emails that you’re sending them, they get to leave the door’s not locked, the door’s left ajar. There’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email. They chose to come in by opting in. You didn’t put them there. 

Igor Kheifets  17:16  

They could also smash through your wall by hitting the spam button. That’s an option. 

Kennedy  17:21  

They’ve got choices. They’ve got choices. They got in, they chose to come in your house, and they can choose to leave your house if they don’t like the way you do it. Like I got an email from somebody of the day saying, I really find your emails too offensive, and I’m like, at school, I click the unsubscribe link for you because I swear in my emails. But if you don’t like my emails, you’re going to hate working with me. And so it becomes a really good way of saying, This is who I am. And bear in mind, we’re living in a world now. People are saying, Hey, you got to be authentic. And of course, when you are authentic, some people are gonna get offended, like, and it’s usually the same people who are telling you to be authentic. By the way, they’re fine with you being authentic, as long as it’s just like them. 

Igor Kheifets  17:53  

No, they’re fine with them being authentic, right? But if you’re authentic, you’re offending them. 

Kennedy  17:59  

So absolutely, yeah, I had, I had a complaint once about the podcast, the Email Marketing Show, and this person said, I think you’re having too much fun. It’s too much. You’re being too funny. And then the content is great, but it’s too much fun. And I’m like, Look, there’s lots of boring marketing podcasts. Go listen to them. I would rather not have a podcast than have a boring podcast that’s safe, like I say ridiculous things, usually embarrassing myself on the podcast. So yeah, but it’s the same thing.

So I think when people get worried about emailing that, it’s because they believe they’ve gone around to that person’s house. But let’s look at some anecdotal evidence for a second. Right? Think about the gurus in whichever space. Right? The gurus in whichever space, let’s say all the people you can think of, probably build their audience from different platforms. So I know people in the marketing space who build huge audiences on organic YouTube videos.

They’re killing it. I know others who are doing it with paid YouTube ads. I know some people who are great on Tiktok, some people who are great with Tiktok ads, some people who are doing all these different types of things to build their audience. And they’re also all selling different things. Some of them are selling in the health space. Some of them are selling high ticket items. Some of them are selling low ticket items. Some of them are subscriptions. Some of our B2B, some of them are B2C.

They’re all selling different things, and they’re all building their audience in different ways. The one commonality of all of these people is they are taking the audience they’ve built and moving it to an email list, and they’re able to then move the subscribers of that email list to their high ticket, low ticket subscription one time, their B2B, their B2C, that they’re all able to so the one thing they all have in common is email. They all send emails. It doesn’t matter whether they’re afraid. Email entrepreneur or a male guru or whatever they happen to be, email is at the center of it all, and so that’s not by accident.

That’s the one common thing they all have, because they understand the ability to type a message and send it straight to someone’s mobile phone, which is in their hand. We’re all stuck glued to our mobile phones, and so if we can send a message that goes straight to someone’s mobile phone and send a message that goes into their brain and that makes them feel something and helps them with something, that’s the reason those people are all doing that thing.

Igor Kheifets  20:34  

You know, someone listening to this might say, Well, sure, they all have email, but they also all have social media profiles, and I’m sure. So how can we tell that it’s the email that really brings in the money? 

Kennedy  20:49  

Yeah, it’s a great question. And the answer is that if you look at how everybody’s doing this, they’re all doing a different social media channel. So some people will tell you, Pinterest is where other people will absolutely go to the grave and die on the Hill of it’s organic Instagram. And others will like, they’re each using a different I’m like, on MySpace all day. Yeah, exactly. And babo, and there’s some people building a list off Tinder, I am sure, right. There’s somebody swiping right and getting rich. I don’t know how they’re doing it, but they’re doing it right.

Igor Kheifets  21:22  

They’re in the meat niche. 

Kennedy  21:29  

So that’s the thing. But no, because you’ve got all these people who are successful, who are on different channels, on different social media channels, the one thing they’ve got is they drive people to email. So you might comment on that thing, on that post, or that story, or that real on Instagram, but when you do, they’re DMing you with some stuff, and most of the time they’re moving you somehow onto email, because it is…

Igor Kheifets  21:57  

Now, let’s talk about why they do that. I have a friend who’s an educator in the men’s sexual performance niche. 

Kennedy  22:07  

We have a client who does that too under the same person…

Igor Kheifets  22:11  

I wonder if we will not disclose them, yeah, yeah, later we can discuss this guy, I actually had him on the show, and he’s, he’s a really cool person, and he started a YouTube channel teaching guys how to perform better in bed. Yeah, right. Obviously, I stumbled into that channel not because I don’t perform well in bed. It’s only because I wanted to verify that he’s teaching the right things. Absolutely.

Kennedy  22:34  

You were just given my ego seal of approval. Yes, yes. 

Igor Kheifets  22:38  

So anyway, and I did the same thing about buying all of his courses just to make sure, just to make sure,

Kennedy  22:44  

just testing his funnel. Yeah,

Igor Kheifets  22:46  

So anyway, really, by the way, he writes really great copy. I genuinely enjoy reading his copy, because it just, you know, just hits the spot. So he built this YouTube channel, and it’s and it had a, you know, the so called hockey stick growth at one point, and he surpassed something like half a million or a million subscribers very quickly. Fantastic. So you can imagine the views, and you know that he was amassing, and it’s all like sexually frustrated men, so they’re like, sitting on the bike, but absolutely,

Kennedy  23:22  

yeah, button in one hand. I don’t know what’s on the other hand. Yeah.

Igor Kheifets  23:29  

So, one morning, he says he woke up and he receives a million messages on Instagram saying, Hey, dude, I can’t find your YouTube channel. Oh, no, turns out his YouTube channel got deleted overnight, not just suspended. You know, Shadow band just deleted all of his content. Yeah. Now, fortunately for him, he was a smart guy, and he pushed everybody to his email list, so in every video, he would have a link to download a report with some tips and tricks and things like that, and he ended up building like a 60,000 person email is off of that. Now you may say, Well, you know, a million YouTube subscribers, but only 60,000 on the list.

Well, I can attest to the fact that he’s probably more profitable with a 60,000 person email than 1 million YouTube subscribers because they don’t compare equally. You know, I would much rather have 60,000 email subscribers than, let’s say, 600,000 Facebook followers, that’s for sure. And his income did not dive. He was immediately able to rebuild a YouTube channel. So he started a new channel, launched a few videos, and emailed the videos to the list. Bam, he’s grown again, and all throughout this experience, he continues to mail offers to his books, to his front end offers, back end offers, and so on and so forth. So having an email list not only allowed him to rebuild the social media, but it actually. Actually had him maintain a big, big sense of control and a degree of control over his business, yeah, because, had he not had the email list his entire business Gone, gone.

Kennedy 25:15  

And here’s the thing, if you like, if you fall out, if you have a fallout with, let’s say, Instagram, and they just shut you down, which happens every day. People are getting shut down every day, right? Down every day, right? In all kinds of niches, not just risqué niches, like we’re talking about just regular, normal niches, just because of the algorithm is what shuts you down, usually, not a human being. Like, it could be a glitch that’s better minds. We’re not talking about human beings going, Oh, that needs to be shut down in general. It is an algorithmic reason that this is happening based on AI, which is obviously flawed. It’s not perfect like humans, right?

And if you fall out with Instagram, you can’t download those contacts and upload them anywhere else, like you can’t if you have a problem where you’re just not you don’t even own the audience. Yes, they own the audience, right? Whereas, if you’ve got your email list in let’s make a like for like comparison, if you’ve got your email list an Active Campaign, and they dislike you for whatever reason they don’t like the content, you don’t whatever reason you fall out with them before they shut you down, they’ll stop you from being able to send and you’ll be able to download your stuff from, say, Active Campaign and upload it into, let’s say, GHL, or something else. You own the data. You own the data. And that means you can move and be more flexible.

And if, in the worst case scenario, do a self hosted version, like you’re not going to run out of options, and someone will host you with that information. And so this makes it really, really, really powerful. And I think one of the big mindset shifts people need to have is they need to stop thinking about email as this thing that people sit down and read on their computer. It’s not this thing where we’re opening Microsoft Outlook and doing it nine to five. That’s not how people are consuming email anymore. It’s another content channel. It’s another channel by which we can communicate directly with people, and that means we can combine value, stories, humor, if it’s your style, storytelling, like I said, vulnerability and offers all at once, the same as you would on a social media channel. What social media channels allow you to do is understand what really drives engagement.

And if you take the learning from social media, because social media’s job is to see what gets engagement and push out more stuff, like you people on a platform for engagement, well, if the game of marketing is about attention, if that’s the currency of marketing, really is attention. That’s the same currency as social media. So then we can look at okay, that messaging, that style, that whatever, that principle got me a gazillion views on Tiktok. That same principle will, should, and almost always will serve you very well to use the same principles in email, like opening hooks, getting people’s attention, keeping people’s attention, keep changing, make it interesting. Like if people applied that same thinking, we’re still dealing with humans on the other end of it, and it’s amazing how we silo as human beings. We naturally silo information and silo things. But actually it’s the same human interaction that we need to be and that we need to be concerned with.

Igor Kheifets  28:22  

Yeah, I agree with you. I think, I think having social, social media following and having an email following is almost like the difference between having a brick and mortar business in a in a in a facility you rent, where the landlord can kick you out just because they want to, for no good reason and without notice, versus owning the building, right? That’s to me, that’s what the difference is. In other words, no one can take this away from, for example, one of my best friends back in Israel, he owns a deli, and that deli is actually located in three, like rooms of one sort of building, but there were, like three units, if you will. Okay, so he’s renting the three units, and he’s been renting those units for a long time, but he’s got an issue, because the old lady who owns the units is either about to go, or might have gone a while back. And now that her kids are taking over, the kids can come in and just decide not to keep renting it out to my friend, or maybe to sell it, or to sell it to somebody else, or demand that he buys it if he wants to stay. And that’s like a fear that he has to wake up in the morning every single day. 

And, you know, this is like a big deli with, like, hundreds of 1000s of dollars in stock, you know, produce people, like many people, rely on it for jobs and so on and so forth. And you see that that’s a big liability. I don’t like that. But like me, personally, I’m very averse to liability and risk, and I usually stack the odds in my favor any way that I can. And out of all the media out there, I find that email is that media, that channel, if you will, that allows me to do that one, because it’s the source of control, because I own the data, and like you said, if I get shut down, I can upload the data into a different email service provider. But also, you know, we run a comparison between social media and email, and yeah, the things that will get your attention on social media will also get your attention on the email. And the key difference for me is that on social media, you may get attention, but it’s really hard to monetize that attention into actual dollars and cents while in your inbox or in the prospects’ inbox. It’s much easier to do because you’re entering their personal space, where they were they go, to make decisions. In other words, when I’m on social media and I’m scrolling through I’m almost trying to escape reality. I’m almost trying to avoid making decisions. I’m trying to numb it out. Now, I don’t want to think, I don’t want to think about my problems, my responsibilities, right? But if I log in into my inbox, like, if I log in into my books, right now, there’s going to be emails waiting, about company, information, about real estate about, you know, banking related issues and all these things are very personal, right? And they put me in the frame of mind of decision making, which is very important when you’re trying to sell something. 

Kennedy  31:34  

Yeah, exactly. And one of the things we have to understand is that people are in different states of mind when they’re doing different things. And, you know, the real job of social media is to interrupt marketing, you know, and that’s what we used to call it. Back in the day, it was like, Oh, I’m going from one minute, I’m watching a funny video of a chef making something really funny and really intricate, or an artist doing something cool, and then the next thing I see is an ad for a problem that I might have and I want to solve, and but that there is that moment when it’s all really about hooking attention, hooking attention, hooking attention, whereas when someone’s like, when someone’s in your email list, it’s like that like social media is Again,

Igor Kheifets  32:19  

very important distinction you made earlier. They let you in. 

Kennedy  32:23  

They let you in exactly. They came in and so, like, it’s a bit like decorating your house for the holidays on the outside to get dry people who are passing by to see and go, Wow, look at the decorations on that cool house. Like in the, you know, in all those Christmas movies we all see, like, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, where it’s like a, you know, crazy Christmas house, and you go, that’s cool. That’s what social media is, but going inside of the house, and now you can actually have a conversation, because they’re not still in the car, they’re not driving past. The windows are not up, they’re not distracted, and the music’s not on in the car. They’re in your house. You’re sitting down, you’re having a cup of tea, there’s a conversation happening, and it’s the next level of commitment for that person. It’s the next level. It’s the next stage of the relationship, which is why there’s all the Hey, chat, the word type, the word help for me to and I’ll send you this resource. 

It’s about moving people think the way I think about all marketing, to really zoom this out of it, is, if you think about your marketing for yourself or for your clients as a relay race where you have to have to pass the baton, what the mistake I see when I’m giving copy feedback or I’m giving funnel feedback and critiquing or Designing funnels for clients or things, is they’re trying to get each piece of the marketing to do too much. An actual fact, the job of each bit is just to pass the baton. So, for example, the job of the email is not to necessarily sell the thing. It’s to tee up the beliefs and the excitement or whatever, to get people to go to the sales page. And the job of the sales page is to do the various bits which are to get people to the car. Like, think about each bit as a relay, and then where does social media fit in? That’s the bit at the beginning where you capture the attention, and it passes the baton to the opt in page, and it passes the baton into the thank like, so thinking about it as just one step at a time makes it one less overwhelming. And secondly, you’re really not trying to do too much with one element. 

Igor Kheifets  34:29  

Yeah, I think a really cool way to think about it is dating. So most people, they think they want that one thing, right? They want whatever the one thing is that’s going to make them very successful. And when you mention email, they think it’s the sort of thing where you go, you meet someone, and the moment you meet them, like, the first time you see them, you’re like, Let’s get married. Yeah, right, because that’s, that’s what they want to do. It’s like, they see my ad, and I’m like, immediately pushing. A $10,000 thing on them. It’s like, Let’s get married right now. But dating doesn’t work like that, right? Dating requires time, requires micro commitments. First, you both have to swipe right on each other, then the conversation has to start.

Then, you know, you get a date going, first date, second date, whatever. So it’s like, it’s micro commitments in the very similar sense, your marketing is usually structured like that, where you get them a commitment from add to click visit page, to give you their email, to review whatever information you gave them. Read your next email, see the subject line, get into the email, read the email, click the link, click the link, visit the page, and there’s lots and lots and lots of steps. And I think what often business owners are missing is they’re confusing the process of taking orders in the process of marketing, because most business owners today, they’re order takers. They want to start a shop, and they want people to just show up and say, I need what you have, and I need it right now. Here’s my money. Give me the thing, right? So

Kennedy 36:04  

That’s like, that’s like, 2% of our 3% of the Exactly. 

Igor Kheifets  36:08  

That’s it exactly. It’s like, you know, I have, I like playing video games. Me too. I’m not gonna call myself a gamer, because I’m terrible at it. But I like playing video games. So every now and again I play FIFA, and every now and again, I rage and I break controllers and stuff. So the other day, I actually broke another controller. So today I’m gonna go to a store, I’m gonna walk in, I’m gonna pick up a controller off the shelf, I’m gonna buy but that’s, that’s me, right? That’s like one in 10, one in 100 times that’s gonna happen. But the process for a different consumer might start with, do I get an Xbox? Do I get a PlayStation five? Do I get a steam deck, right? Do I get a Nintendo Wii? Do I get all of them? Do I get an Oculus quest? And so the marketing process actually starts way, way back. And if you’re looking to sell stuff like that, if you’re looking to market stuff like that, your material commitment, content communication, has to lead the prospect from whatever the point of awareness is, right? This is going back to Gene Schwartz talking about it to the point of, Okay, I’m ready, I’m ready to buy, and specifically, ready to buy from you.

Kennedy  37:26  

Yeah. And what’s really interesting though, is when you put an offer together, I think it’s interesting to start as close to that hole as possible, to make sure you’ve got something that even the ready to buy, people will buy. So I think I do see people when they first launch an offer, like, I’m gonna go for people who are just problem aware. And I’m like, I would probably go a little bit close up the whole just to offer validation. So for me, offer validation is gonna be like, you’re most aware, like, ready to buy cash in hand, like, just, I’ve got this problem. You know, they’ve hopped into the emergency room with their legs hanging off. There’s blood spurting up the walls they need, they need the surgeon to sew it back on again. That person offers validation. Then once we’ve got off of validation, we’re gonna hop backwards one, we’re gonna hop backwards one and go, cool. We now know that the people who want they are at that because what we don’t want to do is do all this demand generation and all these beliefs towards like the product and the problem and the problem awareness and then and solution awareness and moving people through those stages of awareness, as Schwartz talks about and breakthrough advertising, we don’t want to end up with a bunch of people when they get to the front door of the shop and they look at The shop and go, oh no. Not this. Now I’ve got that problem, but I don’t want this. No, no, no. Thank you. Not for me. 

You don’t want that. You want to make sure the people who are closest to the door, who’ve got the problem, who’ve got the blood flying all over the walls, go, yeah, that’s how I want you to sew the knee back on. That’s how I want you to do it. And so I think when you look at those stages of awareness, as stages of awareness, definitely validate from closest to the whole but then step back for the mass marketing, and that’s what we’re going to do through the nurturing. It actually reminds me of one of the other things, which I haven’t thought about for a long time, going back to when I was a full time entertainer traveling the world. One of the reasons I was so fully booked was basically because of this exact thing. And this is, this was the big secret source to being fully booked. And I think this would work in any service based industry, I think. And that was when somebody inquired, but I was already booked, or when I did any sort of cold outreach, because I’ve been referred into somebody and they said no, so basically I couldn’t do the gig, either because I was already booked or because they were like, we’ve already booked the entertainment for this year, I would put them into another automation. 360 days from now, because I know this is when they’re booking the entertainment, I would be following up with them, saying, hey, it’s a shame we didn’t get to work together last year. 

Um, how’s things looking for this year’s event? If you do that for three years in a row, in year four, you are fully booked. You can’t help it, because you are now turned because what most people are doing is that exact thing. They’re thinking, it’s a no. Now I need to go and find the next Yes. Now you don’t need to find all the yeses. Now we need to find 3% of yeses now, we need the other 97% to be in the pipeline, and we need to email. An email is the best way to do this. Email is the best way of reminding people you exist. The reason people aren’t buying from you, the reason they’re not coming back even though they know who you are, it’s because they’ve forgotten who you are. They’ve app and they and if they’ve remembered, they’re like, What was that person’s name?

Who helps me with who could do my lawn? What is that person’s name again? What was their email they got? If you’re in that person’s inbox multiple times a week, they don’t get the chance to forget if they want to find my information. Somebody wants to learn the best ways of automating your email marketing, your sales through email marketing, you get an email from me every single day. You can find my products 100% there is no chance that someone could not find their products, and that’s a big reason to stay in touch with people, whether it’s every day, three times a week, whatever it’s going to be, they’re forgetting who you are. So making sure that remember only 3% of the people are going to buy right now, what are you going to do about the other 97% of people? That’s 97% of business, of work, of money, of profit that most people are not currently making.

Igor Kheifets  41:49  

You know, I like the word that you mentioned, the word pipeline. I think it’s an amazing word, because, again, like I mentioned, I’m very risk averse, and I try to make things as predictable as possible. It comes to money, because I grew up poor, and actually, I wasn’t always poor. We were like, okay, but then really poor. But then I succeeded again. And so this sort of gap, the 10 year gap that I went through, really left the mark. So a concept of a pipeline that you build using email marketing automation is a powerful, attractive, sexy concept for me, because what it does, it gives me a sense of safety and control and confidence that whether or not, like I made X dollars today, I’m going to be making something tomorrow as well. It’s a very important piece of the very important piece of the puzzle for me when it comes to creating a peace of mind.

Kennedy 42:52  

And I think one of the best ways I love to calculate that, is I like to know the numbers of what is a lead worth to me, a new subscriber, a lead, however you want to call them. What are they worth to me? And after seven days, 30 days, 90, 180, 1 year, like, if I know on average what a lead is worth to me, I have that confidence because I know, okay, yeah, we spent, you know, 10 grand this week on ads, or whatever the number is. And I know because we brought in 10, you know, 5000 leads, or whatever that might be, I know that, on average, each one I’m going to get this return within seven days, I’m going to get this other return within 30 and that means I can more confidently spend on acquiring the leads, because I just know those really simple numbers. And so yes, initially installing the systems to figure out those numbers was a total head screw, and I hate it, so I hired somebody else to do it, but now I have a dashboard that shows me seven. Actually I have 714, 30, 90, 180, six. Think is what we have. 

Igor Kheifets  44:10  

And I think they asked me a bit longer too, which I don’t really look at, but now I’m able to more confidently go, Okay, how do we cash flow this Kenny look. You’re obviously a wealth of knowledge when it comes to this stuff, and it’s a tremendous pleasure to pick your brain. 

Kennedy  44:24  

I wish we had a little bit more time, but I probably will end up inviting you for another episode, because there’s a lot of discussion. We’ve opened lots of kinds of worms today,

Igor Kheifets  44:27  

exactly, lots of open boots that I need, I need to seal. I was wondering if you can maybe share with the listeners a little bit about what your main focus right now is, and if it aligns with what they got going on, how can they work with you?

Kennedy  44:44  

Yeah, sure. So my main focus is, I have a really great podcast that I’m very proud of. We’ve just changed the format again, and I’m really loving it. It’s called the Email Marketing Show. So literally, wherever you get your podcasts from, if you’re easily a. Offended. You probably don’t want to tune into that. There’s lots of swearing, lots of me being British and silly, but I talk about email marketing strategy every single week. Off the back of that as well, we have discussions about it in a free community called the Email Marketing Show community. It’s on Facebook.

I’ve got a Facebook search for the Email Marketing Show community over there, and from that, you’ll be able to get on my email list. See how I apply some of the stuff we’ve talked about today, some of it will be obvious to you now we’ve talked about it, some of it we haven’t had time to get into right now, and hopefully you want to learn from later. And so I think they’re probably the best ways of connecting with me. Our flagship product is literally the magnum opus of email marketing. It’s everything from getting your emails delivered to email campaigns that make sales and automating the sales element of your business. It’s called the Email Hero Blueprint. If you go to emailmarketingheroes.com/blueprint, you’ll find out more information, or just get on our list, you will. It’ll not take you very long until you hear about it.

Igor Kheifets  46:02  

All right? So that’s the podcast is called the Email Marketing Show, and the URL for your program is the emailmarketingheroes.com/blueprint that’s right. Awesome. Cool. Well, Kennedy again, thank you. It’s always been a dream of mine to interview at Kennedy. I’ll be Dan Kennedy, but hey,

Kennedy  46:24  

I like second rate Kennedy right here.

Igor Kheifets  46:28  

I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I interviewed Kennedy today. It’s a good day. So thank you for making the time and waking up early to make this happen. I really appreciate it. Let me ask you one question before I let you go, and that is, if you could go back in time, maybe say 10 years. I’m 40.

Kennedy  46:47  

Jesus, you don’t.

Kennedy  46:49  

Thank you. Man, yeah.

Igor Kheifets  46:50  

Oh, wow. So let’s say you go back in time, and you know, you get to talk to yourself back when you’re like, 30-60, seconds. What would you tell yourself?

Kennedy  47:04  

Wow, uh, how to create some dead air? Um, let me think if I could tell myself something.

Igor Kheifets  47:12  

Okay, let’s narrow it down. Let’s narrow it down in the context of your business, entrepreneurship, email marketing, making more sales, automation, more freedom, while maintaining the same or higher income, things like that.

Kennedy  47:28  

Yeah. The big lesson for me is that you should have one, what I call a roam offer. Everything leads to that, and everything that every other micro offers you come up with needs to directly link people, ultimately, to that Rome offers. So for us, it’s the email hero blueprint. Over the years there have been different products, but you can’t buy anything from us, and this is what we’ve installed over the past five years. You can’t buy anything from us without on the back of it hearing some kind of offer for the email hero blueprint. That basically means you get to compound the effect of all of your marketing, because all of it, every marketing dollar and every marketing minute and second, ultimately leads people to buying the one thing you want them to all buy, regardless of what it looks like on the front. So I would say, pick a Rome flagship offer and obsess, obsess with how you get to understand, to communicate that offer with more people.

Igor Kheifets  48:25  

That’s, I think, that’s amazing advice, I think, and the name too. I love the way you name things. It’s Rome all, all roads lead to Rome, right? That’s the old saying. Well, again, thank you. It’s been really fun to host you on the List Building Lifestyle. I really appreciate it. Guys. If you want to find out more about Kennedy or work with him or spy on him by getting on his list, head over to emailmarketingheroes.com/blueprint and also look up the email marketing show on your favorite podcast platform. And with that said, until next time we chat, have a good one. 

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com Also remember to claim your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list buildings starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints, go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.