Email Marketing

The truth about daily emails

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I’ve been on a learning kick lately, reading and watching and slurping up everything I can find by a guy named Travis Sago.

I won’t list his resume here.

Suffice to say he’s an Internet marketer who’s been around for I guess close to two decades.

​​He’s made many millions of dollars.

What’s more, he’s done this profitably (ie. without building up a giant organization, but just him and a couple of elfin helpers).

So if you are a person like me, who doesn’t dream of starting a 100-person company, but who does dream of having a 7-figure income by dabbling in marketing, then you might find what Travis has to say interesting. So I’ll share one Travis thing with you.

It’s one of his 6 secrets for successful email campaigns.

Says Travis:

“Make your email campaign an EVENT”

Now maybe this sounds trivial to you.

But I think it’s a crucial lesson for a lot of businesses today who are hopping onto the daily email bandwagon.

As you might know, I’m also a big fan of Ben Settle. I believe Ben is responsible for the bandwagonification of daily emails. The way he was able to do this was by writing daily emails himself — promoting his own methodology, building his own brand, and refining his ideas and strategies. In other words, there’s definitely a lot of value to writing daily emails.

They help you get positioned as a leader in your market…

They distill your own selling and marketing approach…

They help you create valuable content.

But here’s one thing that they are not likely to do:

They don’t make sales.

Not lots of them anyways. Not in my experience.

For sales, you need an EVENT, just like Travis Sago says.

And to be fair, this is something Ben Settle teaches and lives as well. He’s constantly running events and promotions. And even his core offer — his paid monthly newsletter — is basically an event that comes to an end at the end of each month.

Still, a lot of people who only follow Ben on the surface, and who are bouncing along merrily on the daily email bandwagon, miss this important point.

And that’s why, if you are writing daily emails, and you aren’t getting the results you want, maybe try creating some EVENTS.

As for me, it’s back to work, toiling away at an upcoming event. While that’s not complete, you might like the following free offer — even without an EVENT to promote it:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

I screwed up yesterday

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Yesterday, I was sending out an email to my aromatherapy list when the Internet died.

Normally, I write my daily email in a text editor.

I then paste it into ActiveCampaign, tweak the formatting, and then click “Send.”

Yesterday, however, between the pasting and the clicking, the Internet died.

I restarted the router, finished sending out the email (so I thought), and got on with my merry day.

It was only later I realized I’d screwed up. Because the Internet had died at the proper moment, the email body didn’t get saved in ActiveCampaign.

So I managed to send out an email with a tantalizing subject line, “This essential oil treatment only works for 25% of people”…

… But the body of the email talked about something entirely unrelated (it was the template copy, from an email I had written two years ago).

​Most importantly, the email wasn’t promoting what I wanted
it to promote (Essential Oil Quick Start Guide, my book on aromatherapy).

Shamezul.

What to do?

Well, I simply waited. And then today, I sent out another email saying, “I screwed up yesterday.”

I explained what had happened.

And I pasted in the correct email body from yesterday’s email below my explanation.

Many people opened this “penance” email.

Some read it.

And a few might even buy through it, as tends to happen when I include the right link.

Now, you might wonder why I’m mentioning all this. It’s to illustrate a principle I first heard from email marketing guru-in-chief Ben Settle. Says Ben (I’m paraphrasing):

“Nothing bad ever happens to you when you write emails”

In other words, everything can be turned and twisted into a good email.

So far, I’ve gotten new email content out of negative Amazon reviews, doubts about my credibility, and accusations thrown at me on Facebook.

​And as you’re currently reading, out of a story of how I botched my actual email sending.

All of which illustrates that it’s not hard to come up with fodder for daily emails, once you get in the groove.

Of course, you can’t send out an “I screwed up” email every day. You’ll need some other email ideas to keep things interesting for your audience.

If you want my ideas for the kind of email content you could be sending out to your list day after day, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing. For more info or to sign up for a free copy, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Selling “male enhancement” with one easy, simple trick

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A few years back, I paid $500 for an online course called The Energy Blueprint.

This is offered by a guy called Ari Whitten, and it deals with increasing your energy levels and reducing fatigue.

The reason I actually plopped down the $500 was instructive. You see, out of the flood of marketing that Ari was putting out to promote his course, only one tiny bit caught my attention.

In one of his lead magnets, Ari gave a practical tip for increasing your energy. Says Ari,

“Drink a glass of water the first thing when you get up.”

“That’s it? How lame,” you might think.

I certainly did. After all, I do a ton of reading about health, and “drink water” is neither new nor exciting advice. And yet, Ari managed to sell it in such a way that this one small, not very impressive tip got me to buy a $500 course.

So what’s going on?

I thought about this in a lot of detail today.

That’s because I’ve been talking to a potential client.

He sells information in the “male enhancement” space and he wanted my thoughts on the lead magnet to use for a new product launch. (By the way, a lead magnet is the video or PDF that you give away to get potential leads onto your email list.)

So I thought about Ari Whitten’s easy, simple water trick, and how it worked on me. I broke it down into 3 crucial parts, all of which operated in tandem to convince me to actually buy his course.

Anyways, I shared the structure of Ari’s “water lead magnet” with this potential client.

And I’ll also be sharing it in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.  In fact, I think this kind of lead magnet works best for health offers — “male enhancement” included.

I’m planning on selling this book when it’s out. But if you sign up for it now, you can secure yourself a free copy. To do so, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The salutary effect of paying for traffic

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Right now, I’m running a paid Facebook ad campaign.

It’s promoting a lead magnet for my aromatherapy website, titled The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams.

I don’t know much about running ads on Facebook, but it seems like I’m getting leads for pretty cheap. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be the highest-quality leads — many people who opt in never even download the lead magnet.

But that’s ok.

Because the very fact of paying for traffic is having a salutary effect on me.

I got that phrase from negotiation master Jim Camp, who talked about “the salutary effect of cold calling.” When you cold call, Camp used to say, you have no expectations, and you have a great opportunity to eliminate all your neediness (one of the main pillars of Camp’s negotiation system).

Well, paying for traffic doesn’t have the same salutary effect.

But it does make me want to write emails every day to these leads. What’s more, it makes me want to write emails that get read and get people stirred up. In other words, I’m no longer just writing for the sake of being able to say I’ve done it. Instead, I’m writing to make sales.

That’s both because I’m spending money on traffic now (rather than counting on an indefinite stream of leads from Google)…

And it’s also because it becomes a game — can I make back the money that I will spend on ads, so I can do this all over again on a bigger scale?

Speaking of games, I’m running another ad campaign, and that’s on Amazon.

I’m promoting the aromatherapy books I have .

And once I finish up my new book, about being a successful freelancer on Upwork, I’ll put it up on Amazon, and promote it through ads as well.

However, before I do that, I will probably take advantage of Amazon’s free promotion period. This means, for a few days, once the book is published, it will be available to download for free.

In case you want to get notified when this happens, sign up below, and I’ll keep you in the loop:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

A lesson from Widows: How to tell you’re winning a negotiation

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I just saw the surprisingly good Widows.

There are many scenes in this movie that would make for good email — or blog — fodder.

One that sticks out is the following:

Jamal Manning is a former crime boss who’s looking to get respectable, so he’s running for alderman in Chicago’s 16th district.

And in this scene, he visits the reverend of the largest congregation in his district, trying to get support.

The reverend speaks first:

“Election’s in less than a month. If I was a doctor, I’d be telling you to get your affairs in order. Three weeks from now, you won’t need a doctor. You’ll be asking someone like me to give you last rites.”

Manning is getting impatient. He thinks the reverend has already decided to endorse his opponent.

“I didn’t say that,” says the good reverend.

He then suggests he’s still keeping his options open.

Finally, Manning can’t take any more. He blurts out:

“I’m gonna cut to the chase here, reverend. I’m in the driver’s seat. I just don’t have a set of wheels. All I need is your endorsement and your contribution to help me get across the finish line.”

And there it is.

The phrase that tells you you’ve been negotiating right, and are near to crossing the finish line.

Did you catch it?

“I’m gonna cut to the chase.”

That’s not my wisdom.

Instead, it’s straight from the late negotiation expert Jim Camp, who said his students always love to hear that phrase. “Cut to the chase” means the other side is getting worn out and they are ready to agree to just about anything.

So how do you get to that point?

Well, you do what the good reverend did.

Which is something that doesn’t just apply to local politics or crime movies.

In fact, it’s another tenet of Camp’s negotiating method.

And it’s even something that’s been adapted to writing more effective sales emails by that devoted Camp disciple, Ben Settle.

You can try to glean what I’m talking about by closely reading the script above.

Or you can get a copy of my upcoming book when it comes out, where I will cover this topic in much more detail, and give several examples of emails where I’ve used this same strategy.

The choice is yours. If you want the second option, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The Dwight Schrute school of email marketing

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“I like the people I work with, generally, with four exceptions. But someone committed a crime, and I did not become a Lackawanna County volunteer sheriff’s deputy to make friends. And by the way, I haven’t.”
— Dwight Schrute, The Office

This morning I concluded the launch weekend of my new aromatherapy book.

Spoiler alert: everything went according to plan.

I sent out a lot of emails.

I sold quite a few books — in fact, more than I had anticipated.

And I also got some unsubscribes.

It’s this last bit that I want to talk about.

Before I started this promotional launch (which spanned 4 days and involved 9 promo emails), I sent out an “email avalanche warning” to my subscribers.

I told them what the email forecast was for the weekend, and I also told them that, in case they don’t want to hear me pitching my book, they have two options:

1. They can ignore my emails until next week

2. They can unsubscribe

And sure enough, a few people (though not very many) did unsubscribe at that point.

However, once the email launch actually kicked off last Thursday, more people unsubscribed, including a few who had been faithful readers of my blog and email newsletter for several years.

And my reaction, without any bitterness or sarcasm, was Schrute-like. (In case you don’t know, Dwight Schrute is the jackhammering, hard-working, merciless alpha male assistant to the regional manager from the TV show The Office.)

You see, with a few exceptions, I generally like the people who are subscribed to my email newsletter.

But I’m selling a book and trying to make a solid business out of my Unusual Health website.

And I did not become a low-level aromatherapy expert to make friends.

In other words, when people who would never buy anything from me unsubscribe from my emails, I actually feel glad to see them go.

Anyways, if you want more details about my ebook launch strategy, including the reasoning behind the emails I sent and the schedule I used, you’ll want to get a copy of my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.

Fact: It’s not out yet, but you can get a free copy when I do finish it.

Here’s where you can find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

What’s the frequency, Brian?

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Did you know a group of ladybugs is called a “loveliness”?

Entomologists might not use this term, but it is what former CBS anchorman Dan Rather seems to call a ladybug congress. I found this out from a Tweet that Dan posted today.

He seems very chipper these days, does old Dan, enjoying being retired and spending time with his grandson. But it wasn’t always so.

As you probably know, poor Dan got beat up on the streets of New York back in ’86 by a guy who kept yelling, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

The “Kenneth” phrase became a kind of 80’s meme and inspired the big R.E.M. hit, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

The song’s lyrics are opaque and also include the line, “Richard said, ‘Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.'” This in turn comes from a scene in the movie Slacker, directed by Richard Linklater, in which one of the characters offers Oblique Strategy cards to a passerby, and the “Whithdrawal in disgust” card is what the guy picks.

Oblique Strategies, by the way, are cards designed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. They hold short, cryptic instructions to help with creative work.

This links back to the R.E.M. song, which slows down at the end. Apparently, the bass player had appendicitis as the song was being recorded, and they had to stop playing and rush him to the hospital. They never finished the recording properly. I don’t think this was one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, but it runs in the same vein.

You may think this is aimless rambling. And it is — but there is a point to it as well.

A while back, Ben Settle linked to a video that he said was very influential in how he wrote emails. The video is titled “Admiralty Law: Word Controlled Humans & The Law of Money” and it’s the recording of a presentation of one Jordan Maxwell, a world-famous conspiracy theorist.

The video is kind of mind-bending to watch, and the email marketing lesson I drew from it is the power of stringing two ideas together in surprising ways. Each idea has to be somewhat interesting on its own, at least to you. The way you string them together is also up to you — it doesn’t have to make too much sense.

Why do this?

Well, one reason is that surprising people is always a good thing. It wakes them up and makes them pay attention.

But there’s a second, and possibly more important reason. And that is:

Because these are your curious associations between different facts and ideas, they give your unique flavor to what you write. It’s this unique voice that helps you build a relationship with your readers. And ultimately, building a relationship is the highest level of email marketing.

So developing your own voice can be done consciously, like I did with the “Kenneth” stuff above.

The thing is, this association game is not the only way to develop a unique voice for your copywriting.

There are several other strategies. I’ll go over them in similar detail in my upcoming book on email marketing. If you want to get a free copy when it comes out, sign up here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Thanksgiving frustrates Bejako’s turkey

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I’m preparing to launch my new book on essential oils, and while I’m pretty much ready to pop this turkey in the oven, there’s a snag:

This Thursday is Thanksgiving.

The day after is “Black Friday.”

And the Monday after is “Cyber Monday.”

Which means every retailer, online and offline, will be bombarding their email lists with offers and special discounts.

Not a good time to try to vie for attention, especially since I plan to do so starting on a Thursday and ending on a Monday.

I’ll have to wait a week.

No problem though, because it will give me time to write all my promotional emails ahead of time.

And there will be a lot of them.

I’m largely following the product-launch strategy that Ben Settle outlined in his September 2017 issue of Email Players.

And it’s something I’ve applied once before, with a lot of success, for a big client, RealDose Nutrition.

This is an 8-figure company in the supplement space.

I rewrote their front-end autoresponder along the same lines I will be using for my own product launch.

The outcome was a 30% increase in sales — and that’s for a company built on direct response, and one that already relied heavily on email marketing.

If you want to get the full details of what I did for RealDose, you’re in luck.

Because this will be an ongoing case study in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.

The book is not out yet, but if you want a free copy when it does come out (it will sell for $17 after that), you can sign up here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

How a hardened criminal won over a nation in 16 minutes

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I just watched the most remarkable interview.

It was done on one of the local TV stations in Croatia, by one of the country’s most respected TV anchors.

The interviewee was one Olivera Ćirković:

The face of an unrepentant criminal

Yes, Olivera is a statuesque and handsome blonde. But there’s much more to her than just looks.

Back in her native Serbia, she was the child of a wealthy family, a straight-A student, and even a professional basketball player for Red Star Belgrade.

More interestingly, she is also a former jewel thief who has organized dozens of heists and has stolen millions of dollars worth of valuables.

And she’s also somebody who has done prison time on at least 3 occasions, and who made a daring and successful escape her last time in the hoosegow, earning herself the unusual credential of being the only woman ever to escape from a Greek prison.

Now, Olivera is a published author (an autobiography, predictably), with an eye to a big Hollywood movie deal about her life.

And yet:

All of these exceptional things are not what is most unique or impressive about this real-life Pink Panther.

Instead, it is her attitude and her way of speaking and carrying herself that is pure gold (or diamonds).

In fact, during this 16-minute interview, she managed to visibly charm and win over the normally serious and hardened TV anchor.

And by what I’ve heard from my secret contacts on the streets of Zagreb, she seems to have done the same with just about everyone who saw her on TV.

What’s Olivera’s secret?

Well, I can think of at least five separate things.

And I’ll be expanding on them in full detail in my upcoming book on email marketing.

You see, this book will contain a section about the mindset and attitude that you should have when communicating with your audience through email.

This attitude section won’t be relevant for all situations. But if you’re planning on sending out daily emails, particularly in a first-person, hello-from-the-CEO style, then there’s a lot you can learn from Olivera and her natural charisma.

Anyways, if you want to Pink Panther your way to a free copy of my book, you’re in luck. All you need to do is sign up at the link below, and I’ll send you a copy when it’s out:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails

Omnipresent and unexplained email content

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Pop quiz:

What do the following headlines all have in common?

1. How did cool become such a big deal?
2. Why it’s hard to sound like Jimi Hendrix
3. A comprehensive guide to yellow stripey things
4. Why whales got so big

(The third one, by the way, was for an infographic on the differences between wasps, bees, yellow jackets, hoverflies and dirt daubers.)

Think you have it?

Ok, let’s compare answers. Here’s what I had in mind:

Each of these headlines promises to explain a part of your world that is so obvious that it’s actually not understood. Something you’re well aware of, but you’d never really thought about before. Something that gets you saying, “Yeah, that’s right! Why is that?”

These kinds of topics can easily be modeled to write interesting emails. For example, applying them to various health markets, we get:

1. How did essential oils suddenly become such a big deal?
2. Why it’s hard to avoid belly fat past 35
3. A comprehensive guide to different types of erectile dysfunction
4. Why your joints don’t self-repair like other tissue

(Health markets are in fact a very good match for this kind of topic. We all have a lot of experience with our bodies, and yet much about them remains a mystery.)

In short: find something omnipresent but still unexplained (at least to non-specialists). Put it in your subject line, and then write a short email surprising people and opening their eyes with the answer. And then, tie this into whatever you’re selling.

Easy.

Peasy.

By the weasel, this is one of about two dozen email topic ideas I will be sharing in my upcoming book about email marketing for health products.

If you want to find out what the other ones are (they’re very exciting), you’ll need to read the book. You can sign up here to get it when it comes out:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails