Do you make this mistake with your customer database?

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Back in the early 1990s, the New Jersey Nets — the NBA team that’s now the Brooklyn Nets — had a rather clever way of cutting costs:

Each season, they saved on hard drive space by deleting the names of the previous season’s ticket holders.

After all, who’s got space for all those names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who had paid thousands of dollars for season tickets?

Besides, if anybody had not renewed their season ticket this year, then what was the point of keeping their contact data? The Nets could just go out and run TV ads or radio ads or maybe go knock door-to-door to fill any unfilled seats.

Maybe my tone is not sarcastic enough, so let me make it clear:

If you do a good job selling to a cold audience — to people who have never bought from you before — you can hope for about a 2% conversion rate.

In other words, 1 out of every 50 strangers might decide to give you some money, carefully, guardedly.

On the other hand, if you do a modest job selling to a warm audience — to people who have bought from you before — you can hope for about 20% to 50% conversion rate.

In other words, 1 out of 5 people might decide to give you more money, or it might be as high as 1 in 2. Plus, the selling tends to be easier, and the price more flexible.

All that’s to say, the Nets’ habit of regularly deleting customer records was an act of criminal negligence. It probably cost the organization millions of dollars in profits over the years.

Of course, it’s not much less negligent to save customer records and never do anything with them.

One ecommerce client I worked with had a database of about 150,000 buyers. It just sat there inside Shopify, while the client worked furiously to optimize Facebook ads and bring in more new customers.

But you see where I’m going with this, so let me wrap it up:

Step one is to stop wiping your hard drive clean and throwing customer records away.

Step two is to start selling those customers.

If you want to get it done for you, write me and maybe I can help. Or if you want to get it done yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

A dirty rotten scoundrel’s secret to making a living online

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I recently watched a dirty little movie called Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is set on the French riviera. It stars Michael Caine as Lawrence, a dapper English scammer who charms rich and corrupt women for large sums of money… and Steve Martin as Freddie, a classless American jackass who milks the pity of any woman for tiny bits of money.

It’s been a few days since I saw the movie. The following monologue by Caine’s dapper scammer is what’s stuck in my mind:

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Freddie, as a younger man, I was a sculptor, and a painter, and a musician.

There was just one problem. I wasn’t very good. As a matter of fact, I was dreadful.

I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent.

Fortunately, I discovered that taste and style are commodities that people desire.

===

Like I said, this stuck with me. Maybe it will stick with you too.

You don’t have to scam anybody — that’s not what this is about.

But what Caine says about taste and style is true. They are commodities that people will pay for.

The amazing thing is that whatever your taste and style — ahem, obscure and campy 80s comedies — there are people out there who will appreciate it. And thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it’s easy and affordable to find such people.

I rely heavily on this, simply curating ideas, articles, movie scenes that I find interesting or funny or outrageous.

You can do the same. You can use your own taste and style, and simply share ideas that somehow impressed you or stuck with you.

That’s all you need to do, and you can be successful.

But if you want to do something a little bit extra with those ideas that impressed you or stuck with you, you can apply what I call the Most Valuable Email trick.

The result will be something that goes beyond what most other people will ever do.

In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

“What just happened?”

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I woke up last night at 2:30am in what felt like a fever.

​​My forehead was wet and my body was burning. “Why is it so hot…” I mumbled as I threw the covers off me.

Turns out I didn’t have a fever. But my A/C did die.

Some time after I’d gone to bed (11pm, nice and cool), the A/C stopped doing its job. Immediately, the Barcelona heat, along with my nighttime panting, brought the temperature in my bedroom up to about 990 degrees.

I promise to get to the marketing moral of this email very soon. But before I get there, I have to share one more personal detail:

I’m kind of done with traveling. The packing, discomfort, displacement — I’m getting more and more resistant to it. I can’t be bothered to take even a half-hour trip out of town.

And yet:

Last night, around 4:30am, as I sat wide awake in my sauna of an apartment, in a mild panic that this is how my life will be until the A/C gets fixed (and who knows when that will be — last year it took two weeks), I started fantasizing about traveling.

Somewhere… anywhere, as long as it was cool, or at least had A/C.

And that’s the marketing moral I promised you. Imagine if in that moment, or really even now, because it’s still very hot, I had come across an ad that said:

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Did your A/C just die?

Get away from the heat with our special “while your A/C gets fixed” hotel package!

Beautiful getaway in the cool Pyrenees mountains, only two hours’ drive from Barcelona. And yes, we do have A/C in all our rooms, just in case!

To book now, call 1-800-HELLA-HOT

===

… had I seen this ad, I can tell you, I would have called. In fact, I might even go to the trouble of researching such a hotel and calling it now, even without the ad.

The bigger point:

Nothing ever gets done without a deadline, right?

Right.

That’s why marketers have invented a million tricks and tactics for amping up the fear of missing out — countdown timers, 10+ emails on the final day of promos, disappearing bonuses, etc.

All that stuff’s necessary when you’re trying to motivate people who are not internally motivated at that moment.

But there are people who are internally motivated at that moment. And the way you find them is by asking yourself, or better yet, by asking your buyers,

“What just happened? Why did you buy, now?”

Often, it won’t have anything to do with your specific offer (continental breakfast, stylish wood paneling, friendly staff).

Instead, it will have to do with your buyers, and their life circumstances. The A/C that died in their apartment the night before, and the three hours of sleep they got as a result.

Useful info. Because once you know it, you can use it to pick these people out easily from among a huge crowd… to make them a premium offer… and to do them a huge service.

That’s my free advice for today.

But if you’d like to contribute to the Bejako “while the A/C gets fixed” fund, and learn techniques used by A-list copywriters to rope in just the buyers from among a huge audience, you can find that in my Copy Riddles program.

​​For more information on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

**HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT**

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Alex Hormozi, the bearded, trucker-hatted, nasal-stripped author of the book $100MM Offers, has been aggressively running Facebook ads that open with:

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**HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT**

I’ve never publicly endorsed anything until now. And that’s because I’ve built my reputation on giving amazing value.

Anything I endorse has to live up to that. Nothing has, until now.

For many of you who want to start a business online, this is the fastest, easiest, most fun way I’ve found.

===

The ad goes on, but the gist is that the fastest, easiest, most funnest way that Alex is endorsing is… Skool.

You might know Skool — it’s an online community platform, much like Facebook groups, but without all the stigma that anything connected to Facebook has today.

I don’t know the deal that Hormozi has struck with Skool. But even at the most plebeian level, Skool offers 40% to affiliates, lifetime, each month, for anybody who comes in and creates a group (creating a Skool group costs $99/month).

So maybe Alex Hormozi is wrong?

Maybe Skool is not the fastest, easiest, most fun way to start a business online?

Maybe promoting Skool is? Or if not Skool, maybe some other software-as-a-service?

This got me wondering about what other worthwhile SaaS platforms have generous lifetime affiliate programs.

I know that many email marketing and web hosting companies do. But what else?

Software for design? For sales? Practice management? Inventory management? Pet store management?

If you know of a good software product that offers recurring affiliate payouts, write in and let me know. I’m curious. And in return, I’ll reply and tell you about a super-clever way I’ve seen one affiliate promoting a SaaS company, and apparently making a killing right now.

The myth of mindfulness for the overworked and overstressed

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True story:

Before my mom retired, she was a pediatrician.

​​The small pediatric hospital where she worked kept piling on more and more patients, year after year, while not increasing the number of doctors.

My mom, and all the other doctors at the hospital, had to work longer and longer hours, hurry more and stress more, sleep less and think less.

Eventually, a kind of doctors’ mutiny formed. The doctors pushed back against the administration, saying that this was irresponsible, that they cannot handle the load any more, that patient care was suffering.

The administrators listened and nodded with understanding. “You’re absolutely right,” they said. “Something has to change.”

And so next week, the administration brought in a mindfulness coach to conduct a mindfulness training, and teach the overworked and overstressed doctors to breathe in more deeply, express their gratitude more freely, and work more efficiently during their 13-hour shifts.

I’m telling you this because maybe you’re telling yourself, “I’m not getting enough done. I’m too slow.”

And maybe you are — God knows I am.

But maybe you are just working too much. If so, no amount of productivity and efficiency training will help, and the only real solution is simply to work less.

This isn’t about mindfulness, but a change in how you make money… the kinds of clients or customers you work with… how much you charge them… and where you draw the line about what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Those are big questions. I won’t pretend I have all the answers for you, or a push-button Jack-in-the-box that will give you those answers.

But since this is a newsletter about marketing, let me point out some relevant facts:

– It’s easier to have time if you can sell to hundreds or thousands of people in parallel

– It’s easier to charge more if you have a captive pocket of people who look to you as an authority

– It’s easier to draw the line if you know for certain you’re not beholden to any one customer or client, because there’s more of them out there, and you know how to get at them

There are different ways to take advantage of these facts, and to make them work for you.

My personal choice is to have a small online audience, in the form of an email list, and to write them daily emails, and to make offers to them on occasion.

I’ll have an offer about building up an email list soon. Meanwhile, if you want to know how I write emails, and make offers inside them, and how you can do the same:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The final straw that broke this email camel’s hump

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Yesterday, when I got ready to schedule my daily email in ActiveCampaign, I got hit with an ugly yellow banner that read:

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You are approaching the limit of emails sent per month.

You currently have sent 87.45% of your available emails to send per month. You may want to upgrade your plan to allow sending more emails.

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I had no idea what this is about, so I looked it up. It turns out ActiveCampaign doesn’t just have subscriber limits to its various pricing plans. There are also monthly email send limits, set at 10x the limit of subscribers.

I don’t know if this is a new invention, or if I simply never noticed it before.

In any case, it’s the final straw that broke this email camel’s hump, and that will force said camel to move off ActiveCampaign for good, some time in the next month, even though I expect the move to be a mess.

But that’s not what this email is about. This email is simply to highlight how crazy, stupid, or simply out of touch the ActiveCampaign policy is.

10 emails per subscriber each month?

It reminded me of Bill Gates’s infamous statement, back in 1981, about how nobody will need more than 640Kb of computer memory. (Gates denies he ever said this, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here. But the more often you email your list, the more money you make. It’s a very simple calculus.

I’ve never personally sent 10 emails to my newsletter subscribers in one day. But I could imagine it could be lucrative, particularly if I have an offer that’s doing well, and a deadline is nearing, and people need a push.

Short of that, sending an email each day of the month, and sometimes multiple times a day when there’s reason for it, is the smart thing to do.

It’s not a matter of burning out your list for the sake of short-term profit. It’s a matter of staying visible, of continuing to nurture a relationship, and yes, of making sales when sales are there to be made, because it’s in both sides’ interest to make the exchange.

Again, you probably know all this. But if you don’t yet send daily emails because don’t have time or energy, hit reply and get in touch.

I might be able to find an email copywriter for you who will write daily emails for you on commission only.

​​Just make sure you’re not using ActiveCampaign if it does happen.

The Golden Triangle of Success

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In software development, a field in which I spent the salad days of my life, there’s a meme known as the Iron Triangle. It’s about how software is developed, and it says:

“Fast, cheap, good — pick two”​​

Yesterday, I fielded interest in a new offer, “Work alongside me to launch or build up your list via paid traffic.”

In a nutshell, I’m about to start building up a new list via paid traffic. And if you like, you can work alongside me to launch or build up your own list… follow the same process I’m following… plus get my feedback and input on your ad copy and lead magnets etc.

I got a good number of people expressing interest in that.

But inevitably, I also had a few people write in, saying they are not sure if they have the money.

To which I thought up a kind of Golden Triangle of Success, similar but different to the Iron Triangle above. The Golden Triangle says:

“Time, effort, money — pick two”

This is similar to the Iron Triangle — because you pick any two for guaranteed success. One will not do.

But it’s also different to the Iron Triangle because this is about requirements on inputs, rather than constraints on outputs.

​​In other words, pick two — or three. You can have all three corners of the Golden Triangle.

But what if you don’t?

What if you don’t have the money corner, specifically?

No shame in that. Was a time when I was in the same situation. You can get up and out of it with enough effort and time.

On the other hand, if you’re simply not sure whether you have the money to invest in an asset like an email list, then the Golden Triangle of Success might give you a different way to look at your situation.

In any case, if you’re interested in the offer I made yesterday, to work alongside me to build up your list, write in and let me know. I want to hear your situation and get your feedback as I decide on the final form of how this will work.

Work alongside me to launch or build up your list?

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I’ve launched a new email list. I’m planning to grow it via paid traffic, starting in the next few weeks.

I’m not a media buying expert. But I did my research, and I did find a media buying expert, someone who specifically builds up email lists via paid traffic. I will be following his process to grow my list.

So my questions to you:

Do you have a list?

Do you want to grow it?

Are you open to using paid traffic to grow it? ($10-$15 a day is fine, that’s what I’ll be starting with.)

Would you like to work alongside me to launch or build up your list… follow the same process I’m following… plus get my feedback and input on your ad copy and lead magnets etc.?

If so, hit reply and let me know.

From the archives: DON’T VOTE FOR A NEGRO

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An angry Seth Taft stood up in front of the crowd and held up a tear sheet from a newspaper.

The year was 1967. Taft was the grandson of former U.S. President William Howard Taft, and was running for mayor of Cleveland. He held up the tear sheet to show a full page ad that had recently run in local papers. In large, bold letters, the headline read:

“DON’T VOTE FOR A NEGRO”

That ad had been paid for by Taft’s opponent in the mayoral race, Carl Stokes.

The odd thing was that Stokes was black and Taft was white.

And yet, here was Taft, the front-runner and shoein for the office in predominately white Cleveland, angry and complaining about how unfair this ad was. And it was the folks behind Stokes’s campaign who had paid for an ad seemingly telling you not to vote for their guy.

The long and short of it is that Stokes won that election. In the process, he became the first black mayor of an American city.

​​It’s impossible to say whether this ad won Stokes the election. Nonetheless, the ad is a brilliant example of effective messaging, and of a general principle that holds as true in political propaganda as it does in other influence disciplines, including sales and copywriting.

What’s the general principle? And more importantly, how might you apply it in your business?

For that, take a look at link below. It’s a post I wrote a couple years ago, inspired by this ad.

​​In case you’re looking for a slight edge in your business… or in case you have a significant disadvantage relative to your competition… this post might give you some good ideas:

https://bejakovic.com/dont-listen-to-me-im-just-some-guy/

The most likely solution to all your problems

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At the risk of sounding like an idiot, let me pay off today’s subject line by telling you about my olive tree:

I have a small olive tree on my balcony. It arrived as a present for my birthday two years ago.

(Btw, if you ever want to get me a present I’ll love, a plant is a good bet.)

Right now, my olive tree is thriving. It’s got lots of healthy leaves. Small shoots are popping out everywhere. There’s even one green olive that’s maturing, which I’m planning to cure when it’s fully ripe.

But earlier this year, my olive tree was only causing me worry.

Each day, I went out onto the balcony to inspect it. Leaf after leaf was turning yellow and falling off. No new shoots were visible anywhere. At this pace, my olive would soon become barren and die.

I stood there each day, inspecting my olive tree and worrying.

Was it some kind of fungal infection? Had the soil become depleted? Was it bad feng shui?

It was only after weeks or maybe months of this that it occurred to me that the olive tree might be parched for water.

I mean, it’s sitting on my balcony, exposed to the blasting Barcelona sun, for many hours a day, day after day. Maybe a cup or two of water, twice a week, just wasn’t enough for all the heat?

That’s why I said I risked sounding like an idiot.

I told you how healthy and thriving my olive tree is today. Watering it every day is the only change I made from then to now.

Watering a plant is the most obvious thing to do to keep it alive and healthy. And yet, I thought of every other rare and novel explanation first, while my olive tree turned yellow and withered.

Now that I’ve risked sounding like an idiot, let me risk sounding like your mother:

Maybe don’t have an olive tree. But maybe there’s another area of life that’s struggling, withering, or causing you worry. Maybe it’s family, or your health, or your business.

A rare and novel explanation might really lie behind your problems.

But more likely, there’s a common, obvious explanation to it all.

You can’t keep going the way you’ve been going, inspecting and worrying. Most likely, you just gotta water more regularly – or do whatever the equivalent is for the problem you’re seeing.

But enough gardening wisdom. On to sales:

Maybe you have a business. Maybe you’re working too hard, or you’re not making consistent sales, not as many as you’d like.

What’s the real reason?

Maybe you need to optimize your ads… or increase the conversion rate on your landing pages… or innovate and come up with totally new products, new funnels, new sources of traffic.

Maybe.

Or maybe just gotta get your existing customers to pay you more frequently. Maybe you just gotta email them more, instead of allowing them to wither away. And if you want something to make your emailing easier and faster:

https://bejakovic.com/sme