How To Improve Business Profits With Customer Referrals & Retention
3 Oct 2025 · 41 min
In episode 200 of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast, host Dan Kennedy interviews Shawn Buck, co‑author of No BS Book on Referrals and Retention and founder of The Newsletter Pro. The conversation critiques the common obsession with constantly acquiring new customers and makes the case that the real profit lever lies in nurturing existing clients. They discuss why many businesses see stagnant referral rates despite the explosion of digital channels, and they illustrate the point with real‑world examples—from Disney’s experience‑driven loyalty tactics to a Chinese‑restaurant client who doubled order frequency through culturally‑rich print newsletters. The duo explains how a well‑crafted, physical newsletter (2‑4 pages, mailed consistently) can keep a brand top‑of‑mind, build personal rapport, and serve as a platform for overt offers via freestanding inserts (FSIs). They stress that relationship building takes about six months of consistent readership before offers become profitable, and they outline a “Top‑10 Mindshare” framework for staying in a customer’s consciousness. Throughout, they provide concrete metrics (e.g., 9% email open rates vs. 4‑month linger time for print), tactical recommendations (frequency, personalization, timing of offers), and a clear roadmap for turning retention and referrals into measurable profit growth.
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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today is the 200th episode of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Now, this podcast, if you have not listened from the very beginning, was started specifically to be able to help get the information from magnetic marketing out there into the world for free upon its purchase by Russell Brunson. And since then, we have done officially 200 episodes. And it's kind of fitting if you have been with us since the beginning, this episode that we're gonna be talking about today is all about how to improve business profits with customer referrals and retention. Now, frankly, once upon a time, podcasts were a great way to collect brand new customers, and that's still true. However, it is an excellent way to be able to take care of existing customers as well and to increase retention. So with that said, we're going to be listening to Shawn Buck and Dan Kennedy. Shawn Buck is the co-author of the No BS Book on referrals and retention, and he also won marketer of the year in GKIC. Now, Often, and we've fallen into this trap multiple times, of focusing on who are we bringing in this new, how are our ads doing, what are the different things happening to everybody that is new? And I was just in a conversation with Russell Brunson today where Russell said, what if we had focused on our existing customers? What if we had focused on them and positioned ourselves just a little bit differently? It is the job of the visionary, you, in the business, to look at ways to be able to grow your business. And it's not always looking at what is brand new, what is shiny. It is often taking care of the herd that already chose to move along with you and may have just gotten a little tired of the pasture and looked for greener grass. Let's talk about how to create long-term loyalty, how to cultivate that rapport, and then how to be able to actually do some variation of referrals in today's world, including a strategy I'm sure you've never heard of before by Dan Kennedy. With that said, let's jump into how to improve business profits with customer referrals and retention. And thank you for joining us for our 200th episode. Let's jump in.
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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.
Dan Kennedy here, of course, and you are on the Diamond Call. And if you are doubted, you are in the right place. And as you probably already know, we will very shortly today be talking all about customer retention and customer referrals and the impact of those things on profit and value and why they exist and why they don't exist. My guest is Shawn Buck, who he reminded me, has a GKIC marketer award winner is on the phone today with us and then either later today or tomorrow morning on an airplane coming here, excuse my throat, for Winners Weekend. So Sean, welcome. I'll come back to you in just a second, but thanks for making the time to be on the call.
Thanks, Dan.
So now, Shawn, who has been in my titanium groups and who I know very well, and actually most GHIC members probably at least know him by name, sight, and many are, of course, clients of his main business, which I will let him describe to you. But he and I are often in discussions about the whole issue of business people being in excess and overly obsessed pursuit of the next new customer while failing to keep the back door closed and seeing customers wander out the back door. In some cases as fast as they are putting them in the front door. I very I recently had a conversation at some length with an owner of a pretty successful business, but his 6-month customer retention rate is 10%. So 90% of all the new customers are inactive within 6 months, and they're not inexpensive to get, but what he wanted to spend his time on was new ads. And new marketing and should I do this and should I do this to get more new customers. So we're going to be talking today about plugging the holes in the bucket and making each customer you get more valuable. And with that, Shawn, I'll let you basically do your own introduction. Tell folks not all the way back to the womb but where you came from and what your business looks like now.
Okay, yeah, so I am— I've been a GKIC member for— since I was— I've been reading your books since I was 18. I'm 35 now, so for a number of years, and I've been a GKIC member since my early 20s. And yeah, I mean, I've owned a number of different businesses over the years. My My most recent business and the one I actually love the most is a company called The Newsletter Pro. We create newsletters that sound like our clients wrote them but without them actually having to write a single word and then take care of all the fulfillment. I know you never like this fact, but we're up to 35 or 36 different employees in-house now, not outsourced or anything, and we're sending out Oh, I don't know, between 250,000 and 300,000 newsletters a month from our offices here in Boise, Idaho. And then as you mentioned, we are the current marketer, me and my team, we're the current marketers of the year for GKIC.
And that newsletter circulation, that's butcher, baker, candlestick maker mostly that you are doing them for, right? Financial advisor, doctor, etc.?
Yes, absolutely. I would probably say it's— 65% B2C and the remaining in a B2B fashion. They're almost all free newsletters, not paid subscriptions like GKIC's newsletter.
And so tell me sort of your case to the client and your view of— and then I want to back out and be even more macro. But for a second, let's stay micro on newsletters. Your view of purposes, new customer acquisition versus retention versus repeat business versus referrals, how do your clients view their investment and measurement of return on investment?
Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of different ways to measure return on investment and to view it, especially in when you talk about a newsletter. But when we're talking to them, what we're getting across is that you have done— you've spent so much money. You've done the single most difficult thing, and that is to get someone to spend money with you a first time, only to very quickly forget about them and move on to the next new person to give you money. But the mistake that's made is that that person, as Perry Belcher, a guy I believe you know fairly well, says it's the It's the single most difficult time to get someone to spend money with you the first time and the single easiest time in history to get someone to spend money with you a second time. But we ignore the second time. We feel that once they've come in and they've done business with us that our job is done. We no longer have to focus on them or invest in them or educate them or build a relationship. They should just continue to give us money forever and ever and ever. And that's just not the case. It's just not how— That's not how it works in real life. That's not how relationships work. And so we say by taking and focusing on your existing clients and just putting a small amount of money and investing in those folks that you'll actually see larger returns because they're more inclined to spend money with you. They will spend more money with you. They're easier to sell to. And there are just studies after studies that show that that is the case. Case. And so we can talk in detail about, you know, how to make it work with, you know, going to prospects and selling directly to them and cold lists and stuff if people want. But spending some time focusing on your customers and patients and clients that have already proven— that are already proven buyers, that's where the real big return and big money is. I mean, it has been for us at least in our own business.
You know, there's an enormous temptation to be okay with cost of acquisition to that first transaction and then view any money spent on the customer after that as giving money back rather than, you know, protecting an asset or stimulating business or whatever. It's we've already got this person, why would we dip into our pocket and give money back. And I contend that when you look at— and you and I were right before the call started talking about Disney. When you look at really great companies, one of the ways that you can assess them is by how many things they do for and with their customers that quote, they don't have to. Yeah. In Disney's case, what do they do once you're already on property or in a hotel? And arguably they don't have to. You're there, you booked it for 5 days, you're not going anywhere. But look at all the— look at all the stuff they do to make that, you know, experience better. And I think you can tell a very poor company by the fact that they don't really do any of that or they leave it entirely up to the direct interaction within the four walls between the clerk behind the counter at the bank or the salesperson or the service department manager or whatever and the human, but they just are incredibly reluctant to do anything beyond that. And I think one of the—— one of the greatest challenges is getting the business owner to spend money on gifting and surprise added value and continuous communication and making nice with people who are already either first transaction or even past first transaction are, you know, already giving them money. It's just— it's very hard to get people past this.
Tell me about it. It is, it is a challenge. And I, you know, so as I mentioned, I just got back from taking my family to, I went to the boot camp and we did our thing at the boot camp, and the GKIC boot camp, which are phenomenal, by the way. Even if you're a long-term member, it's well worth going to. And then my family flew in at the end of the boot camp and we went to Disney World. And while we're there, I know you've been to Hollywood Studios, and They have the Jedi performance with Darth Vader. I mean, my kids love Star Wars, right? So of course we're running into the park at 9 AM to get in line to sign up for this thing. All the kids have to be there, so they're all in tow with me. As some people will know, I've got 5 kids, so it's not like this is a small— it's like a bus taking us over there. So we get in line, we wait in line for 45 minutes in line to sign up for this Jedi training thing because every other parent did the same thing. But when they— one, they don't have to do this Jedi training thing. They have the Star Wars ride. That would be enough for most. That would be enough for Magic Mountain or Six Flags, I guess is what their corporate name is. But they've got this whole experience and they give the kids pens which they write their name on and it says that they're a Jedi now or a Padawan or whatever the pen said. And those are free, which I would have happily paid for because my kids would have begged me for the pens, right? I mean, I would have given them a $5 pen. I not even thought twice about it, like beeped my little band, you know. And, you know, just everything that goes about making it memorable, it's, you know, I mean, it's just a different experience. And you see that in Apple. You see that with Apple Stores and with Apple products. You know, you see that at Disney. You don't see it at a lot of companies, but the companies that get it right, they're the most profitable, some of the most profitable companies in the world. It just— it is a challenge to get people though to focus and decide to invest, but I think there's no better person to invest in than someone who's already proven that they're willing to pull out their pocketbook and give you money.
Yeah, and I mean, look, you're telling that story and, you know, that's the other thing people undervalue enormously. So you're telling that story. Story on this call, but this isn't the only place you've told it or the only place you will tell it. Um, and, and, and we're having a conversation about them, and that has monetary value. Um, and, and it can't necessarily be tracked penny to penny, item to item, but, but the big macro Demonstration is exactly what you just said. If you go and take a look at the most valuable companies there are, and perhaps you throw off the list the one-hit wonders who are there temporarily because they've had a big IPO and that is probably going to go away, but you look at, if you will, those that sustain some time.— as one of the 100 most valuable companies in the world, you will almost always see this sort of behavior at making the existing customer relationship better in all the different ways that it can be made better versus just thinking transactionally and thinking about the new customer. I want to— and then we'll sort of get back to the micro, but the issue of referrals. So here we are in 2015 and you and I both deal with business owners of different sizes and stripes, most of whom have the ability to have customers, clients, or patients refer. The ways that an enthusiastic customer, client, or patient can spread the word, there have never been as many ways. You know, we've basically gone from personal contact across the backyard fence, the phone, coworkers at a place of business, to now this huge plethora of online media and social media and retweet this and resend that. And yet with all of that, the referral statistics in most categories of business, the most important one being number of referrals per active customer, client, or patient per 12-month period of time. All of the available data indicates that that number has not appreciably changed. And in some cases, it's actually diminished rather than improving. And obviously I'm talking averages, so there's businesses at the top of that bell curve and there's businesses at the bottom. But overall, while the plethora of ways that you could repeat that story or that somebody could directly refer has mushroomed and multiplied over a decade and the actual referral productivity has not mushroomed or multiplied, it's virtually stagnant, give or take. And why do we think that is?
Well, can I give you my theory on that? Here's what I think has happened. We've gone from where there were— and we'll use dental offices as an example because I work with a lot of dental offices. We've gone from a period in time where there were a handful, you know, you had a couple dentists in each town or one dentist in the town, and everyone had a relationship., and they had a personal relationship on some level, because it was this more small-town feel to a time where, where we don't have relationships anymore. You know, it is— all interactions are more transactional. Um, that your dentist— we were writing a sales piece and found a fact that there is a, you know, for every Starbucks in America, there are 16 dental offices. We all say Starbucks is on every corner, but dentists are literally on every corner. The next coupon is on its way in the mail. Not only have we gotten away with so much competition, we've now also become more impersonal. When you hear from most businesses, the way they operate is kind of like that relative or that friend that we all hate to hear from, that the only time they contact us is when they want money, or they want a favor. I'm sure in your life you've had that person, that relative that's come into the picture that always wants, they're always looking for something from you. Every relative?
Every relative. Or do you mean the relative?
Yeah, when they come over you're like hiding the money, you know, taking it out, you're definitely taking it out of the silverware drawer, right? I mean, it's getting locked up because you know it's just not going to, it's going to disappear. They want favors, they want, whatever the case may be. But that's how businesses actually treat their customers. That's how they treat their patients. They— the only time they communicate is when they want you to buy something else. The only time they call you might be to, again, either get you to buy something else or maybe you owe them some money. They send you bills, but there's nothing there to build any relationship. And, you know, I mean, why would you— I mean, we don't go around referring Best Buy very often. You know, we don't go around referring the big box people who are all transactional, but we've watched us kind of regular guys, our regular business owners, small business owners, we've watched us kind of mimic that. Let's just be completely transactional. It's a horrible position. I don't want my customers every time they hear from me, I don't want them to be like, "Oh crap, it's Shawn.
He's here to sell me something." I think it's that. I think it's your effort. I think it's also, you used the word, I think that as all of the communication media is multiplied, its impersonal character has multiplied with it and taken over. So email gets, response gets automated, that dental office sends out an email thank you on Thursday to everybody that's been in that everybody knows is an automated email. It's not like somebody's sending thank you notes. Uh, if there is a call, you are right, in 9 out of 10 cases, um, it is prompted by the direct desire to somehow separate you from your money. I, uh, I got a call this morning, and I rarely take a direct call, but I did in between— this is phone day, but it was a 20-minute break. And it was actually from the director of a charity where I have given them— purchased some charitable gift annuities. The bad news is I just bumped over the age mark, so distributions are beginning to occur with one of them. And she was just calling to let me know that I was getting a check for the first time this month and should watch for it, and ended the call happily without asking me to do anything or give them any more money or anything else. And I thought afterwards how rare such contact from any vendor, provider, seller, you know, merchant is. And when it does occur now, it's sort of systematized and robotized and automated, and I think therefore the conversations that could prompt referrals happen that way too. It's just, you know, it's— You telling that story via a Facebook post is just not the same as you being motivated enough to tell that story, to deliberately go out of your way to tell that story to some friend of your family who also has 5 kids. It's just not the same thing. And working at prompting that is somewhat of a lost art.
Well, I mean, you even get a bigger problem, which is because we have become so transactional that, you know, half the time they don't know who you are, what you sell, or that you're even still in business. And it's hard to refer if I don't know your name. I have a lawyer who's also a GKIC member and he was a client and we've become really good friends just over the last few years and he was telling me that the reason they started doing newsletters was because they were getting virtually no referrals as a personal injury attorney, virtually no referrals, and so he couldn't figure out why and so he sat down himself himself and pulled out a list of just random, I don't know, 50 people, how many other people it was, 100 people, and he sat there and started making phone calls. What he found out was, he said that over 95% of them didn't even know who he was, regardless of the amount of money he had won for them, didn't know who he was, and he said a large percentage of them had thought he was trying to solicit them for business. And even hung up on him. And so, you know, he's like, man, if they can't even remember my name 6 months from now, even though I, you know, I won this guy $60,000 in his auto accident case, you know, I mean, how am I ever going to get a referral? And, and so you have, you, you have a lot of that going on as well too.
Yeah, fame is fleeting. Yeah. And there is so much competition.— and people— or attention— and people are so overwhelmed that, that to expect them to have their, their lawyer, who isn't even really a lawyer they interact with on a regular basis. Yeah, right. It's somebody that basically was a one-and-done, or anybody, CPA, dentist, whatever, to be on somebody's consciousness when opportunities to refer occur, if they're not proactively doing something to sustain that position. I've long called it the top 10 list. So other than people you're sleeping with, who are the 10 people that either a day or no more than a week goes by without you being conscious of their presence in your world and thinking about them. And there's only 10 spaces. And you, as whoever you are, their dry cleaner, their dog groomer, their dentist, you want one of those top 10 places. Places. And getting it is one thing, but defending it is another. And you want to defend it. You want to not only get it, but you want to keep it. And to do so, you're going to have to expend some bullets shooting at everybody else trying to take it. And, and you're going to have to invest in reminding the person that you're one of the 10 and that you've got it. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Um, you know, you meant— so not counting email, um, because I don't see it. It happens, but I don't see it. So not counting email, we mentioned Disney earlier, um, because of the various Disney things we're in, which is a strategy in and of itself. Uh, so between, uh, DVC, Vacation Club, and D23, and on notification lists for events, um, like the annual, uh, food show, Food and Wine Expo, and on hotel lists. So I kept everything last year and put it in a pile, right? There's 52 weeks in a year, and I've got 31 pieces of offline communication from Disney.
Yeah, and you would think, you know, Disney thought they could do it via just an email. If they thought that they could, you know, I mean, they would.
I assume they would do it in a hot second. Yeah. And I'm sure that conversation has to occur incessantly and be rejected. And furthermore, they're Disney, so there would be a tendency to presume You don't have to do this much because after all, damn it, we're Disney. Yeah. You know, and, and so you're Charlie Rabinowitz, the dentist. You got to think you got to do more, not less, because you ain't Disney. Yeah. And, and so I— last year is the first year I did it, so I don't have a year-to-year comparison, but it's still pretty damn significant., in 52 weeks' time, 31 physical touches. That's a ton. Yeah. Um, so let's go all the way back and talk about the new—
the customer newsletter specifically.
Okay. And, and all of those conversations— gee, can I just do it electronically? Why do I have to do it in print? Um, Do I have to mail it? Why can't I just stack it up on the table in the reception area for the whole month and let people take it? And gee, do I actually have to do 4 pages? Can I just do 1? And all of that.
Give me your little wrap on best practices. Well, I mean, email, I think, you know, we can be short on email. Although the question comes up, it's pretty easily overcame. I mean, the numbers are showing that open rates are about— on business-to-consumer communications are about 9% on average across everybody, roughly a 3-second time that they actually review it in comparison with the Post Office running their annual study. So this would be a 20-second 2014 study that newsletters, publications can linger on average 4 months in a house. So I mean 2 to 4 pages or a single page to 4-page, that's also pretty easy. You just don't have enough time to build that relationship. The biggest mistake we watch people make when, as you can imagine, I'm on like a bazillion email lists. People just randomly add me, which is completely fine and I do you look over them, but they're not personal. It's all business. And when I'm talking to a GKIC member, I point out to them, just go read Dan's articles. What are the things we all know about Dan? Like, he loves Disney. He's been married a couple of times. Wife number 2 is also wife number 3. I mean, you fly private. You're not the easiest you've got to get a hold of, you love fax machines. There are things that we all know. Those are personal things that you open up to us and tell us that help build a relationship. It's funny reading your newsletters now. I can see you doing it, which may just be second nature at this point for you, but I can watch you building those relationships which, "Oh, me and this person now have something in common." they also love classic cars. And so, you know, there's a point. There's a little hook, right? And in 2 pages you don't have enough time to do that. You've got to be personal. You've got to tell them a little bit about you. It doesn't have to be, this is what I did on my last vacation, but you've got to open up. And so it doesn't work as far as leaving it out on the coffee table or the reception table. Well, you just aren't going to get everybody. And so if you're going to be top of mind, you've got to be top of mind. You've got to be there in their mailbox. You want this for them to pass this around, for it to linger around their house, to go from their kitchen to their bathroom, up to the bedroom. I mean, you want to have a presence in their space and in their life. And I can assure you a newsletter will— will do that. I've watched it walking into— years and years and years ago when I actually went on sales calls, like cold calls, like locally and stuff. I remember walking into this vet's office and she's got 5 newsletters, 4 or 5 newsletters lingering all over her desk. It was a fairly messy desk, but I was able to count 4 or 5 of them and we had sent her a greeting card. I can't remember what for, but we'd sent her a greeting card and I saw that sitting on the desk as well too. I mean, I was all over this lady's space, you know, which is probably why I was sitting in her office that day.
But yeah, I mean, that's why you've got to do it in short version. There's a member of ours that owns 3 local, in local areas, Chinese restaurants. And, um, a big part of their business is home delivery. And so as she puts it, she— her competition is not another Chinese restaurant, it's pizza, because the most ordered for delivery food on the planet is pizza. There seems to be an unending number of pizza joints that can be opened.— in some places I can't even figure out the math myself, but— It's increasing in Colorado and Washington though right now. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, there's a reason for that, of course. But so she views her competition as, you know, as pizza joints, and so we're going to call up and get something. Delivered, we got coupons laying around and we've used 4 or 5 pizza joints and everybody takes a pizza first. So she said she thinks it's pretty much the industry average. It certainly was hers that their A-list customers would order from them twice a month. The B-list customers would order from them once a month. And when she set out to get a handle on this and talked to a bunch of customers, she found that the customers who ordered from them twice a month ordered pizza for delivery to home no less than 6 to as many as 8 times a month. So, you know, the battle's being lost pretty heavily. But really, she's doing the same thing the pizza guys are. Everybody's got a menu. Every delivery there's another menu in the bag. There's bounce-back coupons in the same community she's in, Valpak, etc., etc. So I had this conversation with her, I guess, 3 years ago at a super conference, and she said, so we decided that we had to leave all that in place because who knows how bad this would be without it. Yeah, but we went to a twice-a-month newsletter to all our customers that had feng shui stuff in it, good luck stuff in it, holiday stuff in it, Confucius say quote-unquote meditations in it, a wise thoughts of the month page that comes out and sticks on the refrigerator with a magnet, all of the stuff that you would imagine. So basically kind of a Chinese culture for America piece. Having nothing whatsoever to do with food or eating or the restaurant itself. She said over 6 months, those ordering twice a month were now ordering 4 times a month. Those ordering once a month were now ordering twice a month. And she said for the first time, we started to inch up our prices. And within another 6 months we have raised prices across the board by 20% with no diminishment in business. And I mean, I think she got it exactly right. I think she figured out a way to be a presence in a different way than the pizza guys are a presence. And all she did is every time now somebody said in the household, eh, let's not go out, don't cook anything, let's call up and order something, instead of everybody automatically ordering pizza, somebody said, hey, why don't we call the Chinese place?
Yeah. I heard— I mean, it sounds like she did do everything right, which is very few can, so good job to her. But I had a couple things. One, the 6-month number, that's a number that a lot of people don't understand is that when you're building relationships, it takes about 6 months. We'll tell people, don't think that this is— this is not a direct mail piece that you're sending out and you're going to expect an instant bump off the first letter that hits houses. It is 6 editions before you're really going to see results, the full-scale results, and they will continue to grow, but that's where you can really start to see it. And the second thing is, at the end of the day, you know, we— We all prefer to do business with people we know and like. And so by her being more of a presence, by her providing some additional value to them, my guess is that they just thought she was, you know, they knew and liked her better than the pizza guy, right? I mean— Yeah, and thought of her.
And thought of her, yeah. So the last thing, and then we'll get ready to do Q&A, you've got to it is the, "Yeah, okay, yeah, this is great, but how do I make it pay its own way in a way I can count?" So tell me what you tell people about the inclusion of overt offers and the use of the media for lead generation.
Yeah, so for overt offers, I use FSIs, or freestanding inserts. We use them just as an idea in our business. We have different newsletters for different groups, but for our clients, they'll get a similar newsletter to all of our prospects, but they will get a different FSI in there because obviously we want to talk to clients differently. So that's where we make our offers, or we will— sometimes for clients it's not offers. It's, you know, we're telling an additional story. Now usually that story is tying back into an action we would like them to take, right? So being that, you know, we are telling, listen, one of the most important things you can do is mail on time, you know, every month so that it kind of shows up in the mailbox at about the same day every single month. Well, if the last quarter of the year is coming up, we know that if they don't actually mail a little bit early or go first-class mail, but that's not going to happen. So it could be an educational piece. It could be an actual offer. It just depends on what it is. So we use freestanding inserts, and we use it really well. It works really well for us to support our other offers that we're doing, and it's one more touchpoint. So if I've got a 3-step campaign going out and they get the newsletter— and sometimes we do them as solo pieces. That's the only— The only place they can get that offer is via the newsletter.
So give me like the dental office and how do you feel about the insert with the tooth whitening offer?
Yeah, that's the place to make it, to make the tooth whitening offer, to make the use or lose benefits offer at the end of the year, to make the Invisalign offer. And you can make the offer as a direct offer with a coupon. Coupon or discount or as driving to a landing page for a free report or calling in for a free report or however you give people information. But we use them all the time for ourselves and for our clients.
So we know they work very well.
And you do not have a concern about it mucking up the relationship-building nature I don't have a concern if you do it as the FSI. FSIs have been used in newsletters for decades and decades and decades. GTIC uses them. All the boardroom reports, all those guys are using FSIs. It's when you start putting— you know, I see— the funny thing I see people do is when they're sending it as a self-mailer and it's an 11 by 17, folded down and then folded in half and then folded in half again. And on the back of it is coupons and on the front of it is the address section. That's where you're mucking it up. That's where you're creating problems because now it just appears to be another sales piece. But the loose leaf piece has not— we have not seen any negative effects towards it. Now I will say with one exception. We don't use it— and we strongly recommend not using it in the first 3 months as a minimum. 6 would be preferable, but the first 3 as a minimum. Build that relationship first, build readership first, and then, you know, and then worry about, you know, making the offers. Because if you don't have readership, if they're just gonna throw it away, you've just wasted your time and money.
Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing these in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free. Just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.
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