Andre Chaperon joins us today to discuss why leading with the client’s needs and interests helps us create the business and life that we desire. Andre is an email marketing and story-based marketing wizard. He’s here to share his top tips for email marketing so you can create relevant content no matter your client’s interests. We discuss how to set up and automate emails, the best automation systems and much more!
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Marketing Speak. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, and today I have with us Andre Chaperon. He is a wizard at email marketing, and story-based marketing for that matter. It’s a distinct pleasure to have you on today, Andre. We met through a purely online mastermind called Tuesday Billionaires, through a mutual friend who is also on the mastermind, Susan Lassiter-Lyons. It was just an incredible experience to be part of this mastermind where I first came in as a guest speaker, and then I got to meet the group and you were a part of it, and I was just floored with your depth of knowledge and willingness to share everything, and it was a great experience. Unfortunately, that mastermind ended up closing down after a while but you guys kept it going for several years.
But yeah, you are an expert at email marketing having done it for over ten years, got a product called Autoresponder Madness that you are quite famous for, it’s all about developing highly relevant emails to every person so that you persuade them, you get them through the funnels buying your stuff, serving them with great content and great results. You’ve got another product that you are known for called Tiny Little Businesses that was done in partnership with Steve Gray-all about testing very quickly before you create the products to validate your marketing messages and what the big problem is, and then using story to connect and persuade. And then your newest brand is called Storyfluence, it’s really the center-point for all of your marketing now. It’s story-based marketing, about email marketing and online marketing in a more effective manner.
You are based currently in Gibraltar, a peninsula that juts off Spain with a population of only 30,000 people, and I am going to have to have you on my other show, Get Yourself Optimized, to talk about your lifestyle design and all that, because that’s amazing. You were based in Marbella, Spain before that, which is also an amazing destination-a lot of people would just dream of, oh I wish I could live there, but really when you design your business and your life to meet your own needs, you can live anywhere, so we’ll definitely have to have you back on that show to talk about that. You’ve also got a book in the works, and you may even get into fiction at some point and do some fiction writing. It’s a pleasure to have you on Andre.
Thanks for inviting me man, I’m excited, let’s see what we can do. I bet I am your first guest from the country of Gibraltar.
Let’s line up a handful, though. Let’s start with the email marketing, because a lot of people don’t really understand that very well, they are getting their hands dirty with Facebook marketing and really email marking is a staple that you need to have a finely tuned machine for that, otherwise it is going to be hard to maintain rapport and relationships with your prospects. What is it exactly that makes your process different than traditional email marketing, because we get a lot of noisy emails, newsletters, and spammy things that aren’t tailored to my particular needs as the recipient-what makes your process different?
I think the biggest thing, and I’ve got to be careful because I don’t want this to come out or be perceived incorrectly, and I am going to generalize somewhat, but I believe for the most part-I mean, people receive emails all the time so they can be the judge themselves, but most marketers rig their system and their email systems and they do certain things and tactics with their own best interest first and foremost. The customer is an afterthought. It’s about them sucking as much money as they can out of a new subscriber, but I guess at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. The way that I approach it is that everything is rigged with the customer as the most important thing. How do you create an environment that every single email that goes out is made so it has their best interest at heart? It’s very relevant, I tell stories so I think that is what differentiates what I do from other people. The most important thing is that those emails are relevant, using the framework and system that I have developed from when I started doing this stuff. And then just using technology to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
You serve the customer, and really put them front and center. A great analogy of this, I learned this many years ago from a past VP of marketing from my previous agency that I had founded-he told me that when you put your face to the customer, you put your butt to the company. Most people do the opposite, they put their butt to the customer and face to the company, because they don’t want to lose their jobs. The problem is, you are just doing self-serving, kind of marketing speak-ironic that we are using that word, the name of the show here-but it’s just a paradigm shift that we need to turn around and face the customer. You might end up losing your job, and I apologize in advance if that ends up happening, but you are going to serve the customer so much better. Relevance is a great pathway to that, there are other ways that we can do that, but let’s talk about relevance. What is an example of highly relevant and highly irrelevant in email marketing?
One of the most popular ways of delivering emails to a list of subscribers is basically broadcast. No matter what email system you use, every single one of them has the functionality to write an email, stick it in the system, select a group of people, which is typically everyone-either all customers, all prospects, or everyone, and send email. Now, the problem is that email is not going to 100% relevant to every single person. I’m very careful with how I do broadcast emails, I never do broadcasting emails-well, very rarely. When I do, it’s framed differently, it’s part of an approach. For the most part, broadcast emails go to only special segments of people, what are the groups of people in my email list that I have identified that they are good match for whatever email I am about to send out.
But that is the opposite of my email system, the emails that get sent out, 95% of the emails that get sent out are using the autoresponder emails, where somebody subscribes and they start getting the sequence of emails at the time. That is where I spend the most of my time, because now I can rig the system and make it behavior-based. Based on the behavior of the subscriber, it can trigger other email sequences, so if someone wants to go deeper into a certain topic or they are interested in a certain thing, when they click a link that tells me that they have raised their hand about a certain thing. I can then deliver them more relevant emails based on that. I can tag them for later on, if I am doing a broadcast email, I can identify those groups of people very easily. I don’t know if people remember, back in the day there used to be these series of books, these choose your own adventure books, so that’s basically how I rig my email systems. It’s essentially a choose your own adventure.
Everyone starts off in the same adventure, in the same story, if they have come via a certain squeeze page, and then I will quickly try to figure out what they are about and I will create different pathways. I will allow people to self-select what interests them. If I start talking about traffic for example, not everyone is going to be into paid traffic and not everyone is going to be into SEO or free traffic, organic traffic, so typically marketers are either one or the other, just using that as an example. Sure, some people want to do both, but typically there is a choice that is made at that point, and at every single point or part of marketing. That’s what I’ll do, I’ll just rig it like this, so I will tell stories, create context for the link, because having a two-line email and a link, there is no context there so obviously you are not going to get a deep sense of understanding or intent behind that. I guess that is another thing that is different with the way that I do things opposed to the way other people to things is that everyone just wants to get a damn click, right?
Choose your own adventure.
The most important thing in the world is just to get the damn clicks, which is kind of stupid really because that person doesn’t know what is behind the clicks. Reading a blind email with a link inside it doesn’t really tell you anything other than you’ve tricked somebody, or you created enough curiosity for them to click the link. It doesn’t mean they are interested in that stuff, because when they get to the destination page they may think this is shit, or this isn’t for me, but now they have already clicked the link. I am very careful about how I position and create context for links, I know that everything is super relevant. I guess that’s the high-level version of what I do – choose your own adventure.
That’s a great way to explain it. It’s like you are conveying intent in your emails, well actually, the recipient is conveying intent depending on how they are interacting with your emails, it’s not just getting the click but getting them to convey that intent so that you can put that into your CRM or your database and then launch different emails to them based on the tailored interest that they have expressed.
The great thing is that I then get to promote more things, because now people have self-selected. Not everybody gets the same offers, people have chosen what they are interested in, so at some point I can put a certain solution in front of them if it’s not my own thing, if it’s somebody else’s stuff, and then I know that it’s very relevant and that’s why I get very high conversion rates. I do very well on launching the boards even though I have the smallest list, and that’s a factor.
When a lot of people are taking about is the power of trigger-based emails versus broadcast emails, they are talking about a different thing. They are talking about if someone abandons the cart after a certain period, you send them an email to remind them that they have a cart just sitting there waiting for checkout. But this is different, this choose your own adventure approach is really about getting inside the head of the recipient and understanding what drives them, servicing their needs, and solving their problems versus just finding an opportunity where they lost track of something such as their checkout process or something. I think this is a really powerful way to do email marketing. Now, moving from relevance, let’s talk about what technology you are using to do these autoresponder based emails that are behavior-based and capturing these rules, storing all this by using like InfusionSoft or Ontraport, are you using an email only solution like Aweber or Constant Contact, or a combination of different platforms? What is the technology look like?
At the end of the day, you can pretty much use anything. Certain technologies are going to be a lot easier to use because they have been built with this in mind, whereas when Aweber was designed and built, and even now, it’s one of the oldest standing things but they have the most basic system in the world. Anyway, I’m not knocking them too much, but even with Aweber you can do this, it’s just a bit more challenging to create-to-code links that trigger other things and move people around. I use ActiveCampaign, it does everything and more that you could ever want with a pure email system. Yes, there are people who use InfusionSoft and Ontraport, there’s a whole list of these things, and if you use it already you can stick with it, but if you don’t use one of these yet then ActiveCampaign would be my suggestion. I think subscriptions start at $9 per month and you get all the functionality for $9 per month, then it just depends on your list size. They’ve got full automation built into everything and you can do some really nice advanced stuff like lead scoring, then based on those lead scores you can then trigger other automations-you can have VIP lists if people purchase certain products or certain combinations, or visit certain pages, it scores that and then when there is a certain score you can trigger the autoresponder sequence, then it delivers different types of emails for a type of person that’s like-some superfan would probably buy all your products, right? So now using that technology, you can identify that and reward them for that, and give them things that you wouldn’t give anybody else. For example, you can create some special bonus that the bonus was only ever created to give to your best customers.
You can automate that entire process and when they get this thing they think oh my god this guy is amazing he’s just given me this cool thing and no one else has got it. So you can make people feel very special and you can do this whole thing using automation which is the most amazing thing in the world.
That reminds me, when you’re talking about super fans, of Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans”. I love that concept that the describes in that article or small ebook of this rabid fan base of true fans. Let’s say with a podcast show you create that fan base which I’m trying to do here with two shows, this one and also with the Get Yourself Optimized. In fact, with Get Yourself Optimized, I’m looking to build my fan base up so when I have my book ready to launch, publishers, when I shop this around, this self help book that I’m working on, they’re going to chomp at the bit because they are going to say wow you’ve got 1000 true fans or whatever that number is who just really love you on your podcast show. They are going to be hitting the streets just really excited, telling other people, asking the bookstores “hey when is Stephan’s book coming out?” and so forth. 1000 True Fans, I love that concept. So Active Campaign, I’m familiar only just kind of tangentially with that software. I’ve heard good things about it. I like the idea, like in InfusionSoft you can tag customer records and say ok this person wen through this particular hoop, they jumped through this hoop or whatever, and thus you can build a campaign or an email that goes out just to them, I’m assuming there is a similar sort of tagging feature in Active Campaign?
Tagging is baked into the core of how the system operates.
Yeah, tagging is baked into the core of how the system operates. Everything is tagged based so yeah that’s awesome. They’ve actually been around since 13 or 14 years, the company, but there is less marketers that have heard of them because they don’t target, their ideal customer base isn’t the internet marketing crowd. So if you’re just a pure affiliate marketer then its probably not a good option for you because they aren’t going to want you. They’re not going to be welcoming you with open arms. If you’re in the supplement business they’re also weary about that so there’s certain spaces whereas Infusionsoft is happy to take anything and everything. If you’re in most markets, then Active Campaign should be fine.
Ok, and so then whether you’re using Infusionsoft or Active Campaing or Ontraport, or some other software, I know like with Infusionsoft there are certain tools that you can add to your core Infusionsoft installation. So you could buy third party extensions to infusionsoft, for let’s say, intergration with GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar. You could also buy, kind of recipes of pre-built campaigns with all the triggers and email sequences built out like, digitalmarketer.com offers a product they call ‘The Machine” which has a whole bunch of these sequences. Do you recommend any particular recipe sets like that or do you offer one, what do you suggest there?
I have a very simple system, really, cause we use Click Bank to process all orders, just because we’ll be based, we don’t have access to types of carts that other people do. Lots of the US-based guys, its very easy to get a Stripe or merchant account where its more challenging when you’re living in a different place. There’s no Stripe here in Gibraltar. We can get one in the UK but then its you know, its not US-based. But anyway, there’s ways around stuff but for us it’s a very simple set up so we use Click Bank to process all our orders, and we use a dedicated system, Active Campaign, just for pure email. Active Campaign can integrate with most everything anyways, but it doesn’t have its own built-in shopping cart. If you wanted that sort of tied integration, then InfusionSoft that’s what they do. If you want to have your affiliate stuff, and your shopping cart and everything inside the InfusionSoft then that’s probably the better way to go. For me, we use Click Bank and then we use Active Campaign for our email. But they do support a whole bunch of integrations, I’ve just never looked at them because it doesn’t interest me. They do integrate with GoToWebinar, GoToTraining, GoToMeeting, and a million other things. Go to activecampaign.com/apps, they got a million apps on there you can do integrations with, including Zapier. Then you can obviously integrate with all sorts of things with that. But I’ve never really invested in that.
So just for our listener’s benefit, Zapier is a connector that allows you to connect different softwares and service tools with other software and service, or SAAS systems. That’s if you’re trying to do complex integrations then there isn’t an easy way apparently to integrate the two. Zapier probably has a connector for whatever you’re trying to connect up. You also mentioned Stripe, for those listeners who don’t know what Stripe is, its for taking credit cards, and payment gateways and all that. There’s also Square, which is that little device that you plug into your iPhone and then you swipe credit cards. Let’s say you’re, you got a business on the side of the road or whatever and you want to take credit cards and be able to swipe their cards, Square is an option there. Stripe is, maybe you can describe the benefits of Stripe for those who aren’t familiar with it?
Yeah, you can just, my understanding is you can just take, you can pretty much stick a credit card box on any device easily and directly take credit card information.
Yeah, so it’s a pretty simple way to start taking credit cards versus going through and selecting a payment gateway. Selecting a merchant payment processor, all the details that might be foreign to you, having never taken credit cards before. Stripe is a really simple option to get up and going. And then you mentioned Click Bank, for those listeners who aren’t that familiar with Click Bank that’s kind of a marketplace for information products, and what else about Click Bank do you think listeners should know?
ClickBank is the world’s largest digital marketplace of digital information products.
Yeah, I think they try and frame themselves as the world’s largest digital marketplace of digital information products. They don’t frame themselves as a payment processor, although that’s what they do. So they take credit card payments, they handle, the piece that I love about them which is I use them, I mean they’re slightly more expensive than using something like Stripe. Stripe would be two and a half percent, plus a certain dollar, twenty cents per transaction. Whereas Click Bank is more expensive, seven and a half percent plus one dollar per transaction. But then, they handle all affiliate stuff, they pay off affiliates, they take and manage VAT or sales tax on everything. Depending on where the customer is in the world, what country, wherever, they will then determine where the person is, they will then levy the sales tax or the VAT. They will then take that and they will declare that and they’ll do whatever they need to do with that. And the vendor doesn’t have to worry about any of that. So there’s a lot of stuff that they do for that seven and half percent which is why we’re just happy to pay that. Once a week they just wire us out our money, we have a corporate account in Singapore so it literally doesn’t matter where you have your bank account, they’ll just wire you the money and you have your money once a week into your corporate bank account. For us, with the way that we live, that’s the best setup for us. So we don’t have the pain of trying to figure out all the different tax things in the US. You know each state has a different tax, there’s some law where you’ve got to add sales tax depending on where you are. The same thing is now, as of January 1st, of this year, there is some law in Europe, that no matter where you are in the EU, you need to charge sales tax. So that’s twenty percent, twenty-one percent depending on where you are. And that’s like, Jesus, I don’t want to think about that. For us, that’s why we use Click Bank.
Let’s talk about trying to get your emails delivered, its getting harder and harder. Where spam filters and junk folders are really the bane of the email marketers existence. How do you get around this, how do you, what are your best practices and recommendations?
Well the number one thing, the first fundamental thing that I do which is the relevance, because all my emails are so highly relevant, I’ve never really had a major problem with the whole spam wall, going to the promotions tab. I also do certain things that are, I’ll rig my system so say there are, if somebody purchases a certain product of mine. Lets say a customer comes around and purchases orders, that first email that goes out is going to say something to the thing that you know “add us to your watch list” if you’re using Google Apps or gmail you can create a tag or an actual filter and as part of that filter you can check the box that says “never send to spam”. So theres a box inside of gmail and google apps that allows you to do that. So now you know that every single time you email that person, 100% of the time it’s going to go to their priority inbox, its never going to go to the spam, even if its been triggered to go to the spam. Cause sometimes, I actually create tags with all my most important emails and these filters.
Sometimes I’ll receive and email from somebody that I obviously want to receive the email from which is why I’ll have taken the time to set up the filter. What google does is right at the very top of the email, they’ll say “this email was sent to spam but its in your inbox because of your filter”. So that’s why I try and condition my customers to do early on. Because I want them to want the email that Im sending them, and for the most part they do because the emails are so relevant and the emails are also part of the training. So they get the training which we deliver through one of our portals, one of our academies, but then component, theres actually part of the training. So we deliver, we give a different perspective, and we drip that out through email, it also creates better engagement and better consumption. I’m not big into the whole idea of somebody buying one of my products and then never going through it. I want to have customers that turn into fans, and the only way for them to do that is for the content to be impactful for them or for them to get a certain result from it. Therefore, they have to consume it. And ideally also take action and implement it. So email is a great way for me to do that, so I try my best to get customers to create filters and do things on their end that then facilitates them receiving all these emails. I know that all my best customers are going to get my emails.
I want to have customers that turn into fans, and the only way for them to do that is for the content to be impactful for them Share on XWow that’s great. Its also a powerful approach to do this “choose your own adventure” sort of approach instead of a big email blast. Because when gmail or yahoo get this massive set of emails coming in, that seem to be very similar to each other, that pretty much flags you for junk, for the junk folder. Whereas you’re sending out highly relevant emails, and its based on a timeline dependent on the recipient. And you’re also getting them to go through this process of essentially whitelisting your emails with the gmail filters. It’s a brilliant approach. Do you have any recommendations around spam scoring or checking to see if you’re using maybe kind of the wrong words or formulating the email in a way that looks kind of spammy but you just didn’t know any better?
I don’t necessarily pay too much attention to that to be honest. Active Campaign that I use and also I’ve still got a few Aweber accounts, they’re system tells you, if you use the word ‘guarantee’ and ‘money’ in the same sentence or whatever, it will just warn you that could trigger a spam thing. So I see those sort of things but for the most part, I don’t really keep that much attention to it because I know that the fundamental system that I have is rigged in a way that’s almost always going to deliver those emails to those people. And I also do other little things, where I’ll put up for example a certain batch of emails will say part one of five, part two of five, for example, and I get emails, our support desk gets emails all the time saying “hey, I’ve missed email three” or “I’ve missed email 27” no one gets that, but we get that. So they’ve now told us that they’re waiting and anticipating these emails, and they’ve missed one. So now they’ll shoot an email to our support, and we’ll just either manually resend that or send them and archived version of where they can read that email. So that’s another one of the things we do. Which is why I don’t pay too much attention to that little bits and pieces.
You don’t have to fool the spam filters when you create highly relevant content-rich emails.
Right because it’s no longer about playing tricks, like oh let’s try and quote an email in the email blast we’re sending out to fool the spam filters. You don’t have to fool the spam filters when you create highly relevant content-rich emails. It’s essentially content marketing, delivered via email.
Yeah, and then we also use a lot of engagements, so, I’ll get people to hit reply and respond to the emails. So that’s another algorithm thing, when Google or Gmail see that that person is hitting reply to your email and there’s this conversation that’s happening. When they hit reply and they send a certain response, that goes to our support desk automatically. I get the ability to get our support lady to forward those emails to me and I get to respond to them. Not all of them all of the time, because I do say when I know there is going to be some volume, I do say “I read all my emails, but I may not be able to respond to all of them”. I do kind of put that out there so I don’t create these expectations that I can’t meet. But when I do respond to them, now there’s dialogue going between my email reply and the customer who is the recipient. A lot of the emails that I’m sending, there is this human interaction happening. You always end up in the inbox.
You mentioned you have a framework. Do you want to walk us through a bit more of the framework, or did you kind of already do that?
I’ve spoken about it already, but I’ll restate it again. When somebody subscribes through one of the funnels, there are on a page – I’ll rewind slightly. Someone is on a page for a certain reason and there is a context, right? There is a certain expectation when they subscribe to get whatever, whether they are making a purchase or they are just going to pay for a site with some information. That story continues via email. I know that the first few emails of the adventure story or the secrets of emails is going to be further with what they really consumed. Maybe at some point, five or six or whatever, there will start to be these forks in the road. I’ll write out maybe two weeks worth of emails and I’ll add it to the system, and I’ll have a little system where I just keep adding emails to that sequence over time. So that sequence gets longer and longer over time. And people who are already in the sequence who have kind of gotten to the end of the sequence, for example, whenever I add new things, they continue to get those emails, obviously. And the person that is new will get the longer sequence. That’s great because now emails are never just in isolation. There’s never just one email with a sense of “Why is he saying that?” for example. It’s – there’s a story happening. They know that I’ll create anticipation in the emails using open leafs, whatever. So they are expecting a certain email from me. When that email arrives, it also sets up future emails, so there is this narrative that is happening across that sequence. That sequence could be, if it is a prospect sequence, it could be 30 days long, it could be 60 days long. Whatever.
And within that framework you can slice and dice, do the choose-your-own-adventure thing, and then tag people according to their interests. And that’s how the whole thing starts. And I’ll set up a little marker that says – people are only open up to broadcast emails after they’ve reached a certain point in the system, because I want to create this bond between myself and them, and you can do that really nicely through these sequences. You can take them down this journey and help them and try to figure out what their problem is and then how you can help them solve it in a way that matters to them. At a certain point, when I know that the person probably has a pretty good sense of who I am, there is a bond that has happened, then I’ll stick a little tag on it that they will say that person can now receive broadcasts if I do send out a broadcast to everybody. Whereas people who are still new coming into the system are excluded from broadcasts if I ever do a broadcast whereas I think most other systems you get to the point where somebody subscribes today and then suddenly tomorrow they are part of this launch sequence because that is just the timing on their part. They’ve got no context, they are just given this person they have an email address for without a sort of trust and hope they can solve a problem. And suddenly they are a part of this launch that is just played out. So that is what I kind of do, it is the bottom layer of the system and that whole thing is automated. The layer above that is the broadcast when I can cherrypick where that broadcast email is going to go. And that is the higher layer. Because the broadcast isn’t the main part of the system.
That is such a powerful distinction. Not everybody should get the broadcast emails, they should meet a certain threshold of expressed interest before they get any kind of broadcast, that’s amazing. And when we are talking these open loops, that reminds me of when you learn about how films are made. There is always this story arc. You take the viewer on this journey. And if you were to just happy ending or if there was happy in the middle too, then there just wasn’t any story of struggle, we wouldn’t be engaged. Keeping people really riveted through the story arc. This is a critical concept I think for listeners to get.
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been a big fan of Lost and all those tv series that the whole thing is just loops. I use that in my emails for a million years now, and it works really really well. Over time I’ve got better at understanding story and telling story and since then I’ve become very good friends with a story coach who coaches me. He helps me get better at stories. My storytelling is getting better. You don’t have to be some crazy monster storyteller to write these emails. The most important thing is the system, the structure of sending emails to people. You don’t have to have the best emails in the world to do that. Just to wrap up here, one more thought that – I heard this was a best practice and I just want to get your take on it. It’s called the nine-word email. And I know Taki Moore loves this, he uses it in his own business. Kind of goes against what you’ve been saying, giving a certain amount of context when they convey their intent. A nine-word email doesn’t even have a link necessarily. It is just like an open-ended question. Kind of like a friendly – “hey” – I don’t know, what would be an example of a nine-word email? What is your thought process on sending the nine-word emails?
I wouldn’t use short emails until later on in the sequence until I’ve already established things.
I don’t use them that often, but they do work well. I’m not sure who made it popular, but it is no different than sending an email to a friend, it is just a quick little thing. But if you’ve set up context before that point, it doesn’t have to be in that email. If you’ve queued up a certain thing, and they are expecting this email, it doesn’t have to be in that email. That email that they get doesn’t have to be a long email. It is just “okay, be ready. If you understood, hit reply and let me know.” That could be a nine-word email or a seven-word email and it can work really well. Probably wouldn’t use a short email early on in the sequence where somebody doesn’t yet know me at least on a deep level and I haven’t established myself as an authority for their perspective. Then I probably wouldn’t use that. Because then you’re just trying to get clicks. And then trying to close somebody, which is fine I guess, depending on the way you want to do things. For me, I wouldn’t use short emails until later on in the sequence until I’ve already established things.
Okay, well this has been a fabulous episode. You just delivered a ton of value, thank you so much. How would somebody find you if they maybe wanted to sign up for AutoResponder Madness or I guess Storyfluence would be the main thing to go into. The story-based marketing and the email and the whole academy. Where would they go and how could they reach you if they wanted to sign up?
One thing you could do is my name, andrechaperon.com. And I started to blog again for the first time in nine years. I blogged many years ago for four years and then took a nine year break. So one of the things I’ve started to do now, this month literally, is I’ve started to blog again. I enjoy it, it is an outlet. So that is all happening on andrechaperon.com. From there, there’s links to the various other stuff I do. If anything that is the best place to start.
Perfect, well welcome back to the blogosphere! I took a long hiatus myself. I still blog with SearchengineLand and Huffington Post but not so much on stephanspencer.com. I need to get back into that. Occasionally I will post there, but I’m kind of a few months behind you there. Cool, and so andrechaperon.com, and listeners if you also want to go to marketingspeak.com and grab the shownotes and the transcript to this episode. The transcript is a nicely formatted pdf, and it has got a checklist with some of the key points and actions to take from this episode are just right there for you to start ticking off the boxes. So definitely go to marketingspeak.com and grab that transcript. Thank you Andre for the great knowledge you shared, and thank you, listeners!
It has been a pleasure, Stephan, and this has been great!
We’ll catch you on Get Yourself Optimized where we are going to talk all sorts of cool stuff like lifestyle design and biohacking.
I’m excited, yeah.
Looking forward to that too! We’ll catch you guys on the next episode, thanks for listening!
Important Links
- Andre Chaperon
- Autoresponder Madness
- Tiny Little Businesses
- Storyfluence
- Twitter – Andre Chaperon
- Facebook – Andre Chaperon
Your Checklist of Action to Take
☑ Create a list of tasks that you have either been putting off, or that you haven’t had time for. The things that are the least important, toss.
☑ Start delegating! Find websites where you can post job ads for assistants in the Philippines. Create an ad that is engaging, but tells your potential new employees what you need
upfront.
☑ Get organized. Set up a project management system like Trello or Basecamp to keep track of your tasks, notes, and statuses-you’ll never wonder what is going on with a task again.
☑ What makes your favorite movie great? You can give that kind of engagement to your newsletter emails, but you need to look at the long-term story arc.
☑ The selection to start with broadcast emails should be a choice made by you according to the amount of engagement a certain prospect has had about you as a thought leader.
☑ Nine-word emails are an awesome way to make email list members feel like a close friend. However, they are best utilized when they’ve been in that email list for a good amount of time.
☑ Less is more: read Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” to learn how establishing a core, loyal base of customers can do more for your business than intermittent customers.
☑ If you deal with a lot of international orders, you may want to consider Click Bank as your payment processors as they handle all the tax levies no matter where in the world.
☑ Want to avoid ending up in the spam folder? Focus on high quality, relevant content.
☑ Try numbering your emails, for example, “1 out of 5 emails” so the customer is on the lookout for the rest and stays engaged with high-quality content.
About Andre Chaperon
Andre Chaperon is an email marketing expert who has been in the business for over ten years. He is the creator of Autoresponder Madness, helps people problem-solve and validate marketing messages with Tiny Little Businesses-which was done in partnership with Steve Gray, and is now stepping into the world of story-based marketing with his newest brand, Storyfluence. You can find Andre on Twitter @andrechaperon.
Barry Moore says
Great episode. Andre is a champion.