Direct Marketing

Yesterday, I promised to share with you how I paid off 6 months of very expensive coaching in less than 60 days.

The story is this:

Back in 2019, I’d been working with an ecommerce company for about a year, writing their entire sales funnels, including advertorials and Facebook and YouTube ads.

At the height of it, we were making 2,000 sales every day to entirely cold traffic.

And then the next day, it was time to make 2,000 new sales to entirely cold traffic.

Meanwhile, the previous buyers’ data went off to some cold storage facility in a bunker at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Over and over, I proposed to the ecomm guys to start sending emails to these previous buyers. “It’s free money,” I kept saying. “Let me do it. I’ll do all the work. Just pay me a part of the money I’ll make for you.”

I did this maybe five times over the course of the year we had been working together. Each time, the ecomm guys had some excuse, and they said no. The reality was they were simply making way too much money on the front end, and they didn’t feel like bothering with the setup.

In the meantime, I joined Dan Ferrari’s coaching group.

I also realized that, even though I was getting paid $150/hr to write “horror advertorials” for dog toothbrushes and strapless bras, there was not any opportunity here to reach the next level as a copywriter. And frankly, I was bored with writing advertorials day in and day out.

I decided it was time to cut off the relationship with the ecommerce company, and in that way, to force myself to look for better clients.

“What about writing emails for them on a rev-share basis?” Dan asked me.

“I tried selling them that,” I said. “Each time, they dragged their feet and eventually said no. They obviously don’t want to do it. I’m done with them.”

“Sure,” said Dan. “But try it one last time.”

So I did.

Because one pact I made with myself during this very expensive coaching with Dan was to do whatever he said — even if it seemed futile, even if it felt repulsive, even if I knew better.

So one last time, I made the rev-share email pitch to the ecomm guys. And whaddya know. They finally agreed, for whatever reason.

A few days later, I started writing and sending emails to one of their buyer lists, made up of 40k+ people.

It wasn’t an immediate win. But within a month, I figured out what worked.

And then, the ecomm guys opened up a second 40k+ buyer list for me to mail. And that’s when the money really started rolling in, both for the ecomm guys, and also for me.

Like I said yesterday, this new source of income paid off 6 months of Dan Ferrari’s coaching in under 60 days.

That was not the only bump in income and opportunity that I got from Dan’s coaching. There were others, where he had a much more direct and involved role. But though valuable, those other opportunities don’t compare to the money I made as a result of this simple piece of advice. “Sure. But try it one last time.”

I wanna highlight two things:

You might say that Dan’s contribution was trivial in this case. Maybe so.

But without his trivial piece of advice, I’m 100% sure I would have ended that ecomm relationship early, and I would today be out a large sum of money, and a large amount of experience with email marketing at a very high level.

You might also say the stars had to align for Dan’s comment to have the impact it did.

I mean, how many businesses making 2,000 sales a day are dumb enough to never try to sell another thing to previous customers? It’s easy to make money in that situation.

Again, maybe so. But many businesses, even successful businesses, have marketing cracks like this. But often they can’t see or can’t fill those cracks themselves, and it takes somebody from the outside to force a change.

The same is true of people.

If you’re smart, like Dan is, then you set yourself up to coach people who have a lot of the pieces in place already. People who just need an outside perspective on plugging up cracks, or a push at the right time in the right direction for those existing pieces to click and fuse together.

Because getting somebody from 0 to 1 can be impossibly hard work.

Getting somebody from 1 to 10 might be less hard but isn’t much more rewarding.

But if somebody already has a half-dozen 17’s in hand… then you don’t need to show them how to go from 17 to 30. You don’t even have to show them how to add up their half-dozen 17’s to make 102.

You just have to show them something like the “multiplication trick”, and suddenly, their half-dozen 17’s click and fuse and are suddenly worth over 2 million.

I hope I didn’t lose you with that mathematical analogy. Because it’s time for my pitch, and I’d like your full attention.

As I wrote two days ago, I’m starting my own coaching program. The focus is entirely on email marketing. How to send more emails. How to make those emails more interesting. How to sell more, and at higher prices, using email.

If this is something that interests you, and if you suspect you have a lot of the pieces in place already, then I’d like to talk to you. As the first step, you will have to be on my email list. Click here to sign up.