27: The Secret to Profiting with a Small Email List

Welcome to the Course Creators MBA Podcast. I'm your host, Destiny Kopp. And in this podcast, we're covering actionable tips to grow your online course business. But before I begin, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by my free mini course, Course in a Box, which is your plug and play system with templates and videos to get your online course created. You can grab your free course in a box by going to destinycop.com and I will make sure that this link is in the show notes. And today we are talking about increasing profits from smaller lists. And I have two special guests with me here today. I have Robin Kennedy. And Robin Kennedy are the most unlikely entrepreneurs you'll ever meet. Sporting hairstyles that look like comic book characters and backgrounds in psychology, hypnosis, and show business. It's hard to believe that there are serial entrepreneurs with an uncanny knack for business building businesses in riotous email marketing. Rob and Kennedy, thanks so much for joining me here today. I'm very excited to chat with you.

Pleasure to be here.

I'm very excited. Thanks for having us. Thank you.

So, before we begin, I have a ton of questions for you, but before we begin, can you guys give us a little bit more details about your background, what you do, and your entrepreneur journey? And I'm very interested in hearing about your backgrounds and your psychology, hypnosis and show business. It sounds very interesting. Tell us how you got to where you are today.

Sure. So it's a little bit of an unusual story. We are both have backgrounds in entertainment, as you've probably gathered.

Showbiz.

Exactly. I am actually a comedy stage hypnotist. So I travel around performing a comedy stage hypnosis show. Started doing that, started learning it when I was 14. Started doing it when I was 16. That was nearly 17 years ago now. Been doing that ever since. And we became friends along the way through the world of entertainment. Because Kennedy's actually a mind reader.

Yeah. So I use the. I combine psychology, reading people, statistics to make it look a lot like I read people's minds. Again, mainly at conferences, corporate events, and that kind of thing. And what's really interesting about all of this is that our natural sort of calling and our attraction to understanding people has this weird simulation with marketing and salesmanship by getting inside of people's heads, understanding how they think. And then it seems that we found marketing much, much easier than I think a lot of other people do. Just sort of already on that journey, I suppose.

Yeah. And we had to learn how to market our Businesses as entertainers, which led us on this. Okay, great. Well, what other kind of business can we. Can we get into? Sure.

So I took a lot from that. So a comedy stage, hypnosis. And I want to let you know that I was hypnotized once in college at event, and that was an interesting situation. And a mind reader. So in. And just to remind everybody, I'm also a college marketing professor. So all of this extremely is extremely fascinating to me. So why don't we jump into our topic today? We have a lot of course creators who are listening and, you know, I think this topic is going to resonate with them. They might have smaller lists, whether, you know, most of them aren't walking around with, you know, 50,000 subscribers on our list. So let's talk about this a little bit more. And you know, does size really matter with your email list?

Fortunately not.

No, no, no, it doesn't. The thing is, we all read these ebooks and we all buy all these fabulous courses where we hear about these people with these monster lists and we're like, wow, that's amazing. It's like when you drive down and you see someone who's like, he's got this massive house and you think, I really want a massive house. The thing is, with a massive house comes massive problems. There's more rooms to have leaks in. There are more. There's more drafts to seal up, where if you have a smaller house, there's less sort of housekeeping to have. And the same thing is true when you have a mailing list, right?

Yeah. I mean, it sounds very attractive to have more people on your list because then you think, well, that's more people that I can sell to and therefore it's going to be better. But if you do that, that kind of comes from the point of view of playing this like a numbers game. If I got more people and the percentage of people buy it, that's more people. But actually it makes more sense to focus on how do we get the percentage of people buying stuff up and the sort of lifetime customer value of each of those people up so that I can make the same money or potentially more money by having a smaller list. Which means the smaller list means better delivery all around. It means. I mean, that means you have to work less hard and spend less money to build the list. That just makes sense.

Absolutely. I mean, think about it. We all get sort of enamored with these massive list numbers, but really, how.

Much do you need to make across?

How much do you need in order to do that. So what's that? What's that? What's that amount of money? Okay, good. And then how many? And we just do the reverse math thing that we all do in marketing, which is, okay, so how many people do I need to convert and how many people do need to have on my list to do that conversion? And you just do that, reverse engineer the whole math bit and just make a list that big. You don't need to go any bigger than that. And as Rob said, if we focus on that conversion and an increase in the conversion, and let's be honest, if we read the stats online of the conversion rates, you're like, you're basically. I mean, we're basically sandwiched between a rock and a hard place because we want to do really, really well with our email marketing, because we know it's scalable. We know we own the data, which is great, because obviously, if you're running chat bots and relying on Facebook or relying on Instagram, any of these things. Of course, the danger is if Facebook changes its pants tomorrow and decides you can't do that anymore. We haven't got that data. As soon as you've got that on your email list, you've got that data. Great stuff. But what we have to focus on is how many of those people actually convert into sales. And the only way we can do that is by having really targeted messaging and speaking to each individual person on that list. Right.

I think part of our obsession with having a big list comes from the fact that because most of us as online course creators don't see our customers face to face very often, it's easy to think that everybody who has an email address and might put their email address in is our perfect customer. And actually, you need to realize that, you know, crumbs. I'm not that bothered about selling to everybody in the world. I want to create a small pool of my absolute perfect customers who are going to want to buy everything I ever create, who are going to be raving fans, who are going to become brand ambassadors and tell everybody else about my stuff. Those are like, they're going to bring in your bread and butter. Like, they're the people that you absolutely want to keep selling to. So just realize that actually not everybody in your niche or in your world is going to be your perfect customer. Find the people who are and just focus on getting them onto that list.

Yeah, So a lot of stuff to unpack here. So I think we all want to, you know, spend less money building our list. We all want to Work, you know, we don't want to work as hard. And you did talk about the optimal size and trying to figure out what that optimal size is for your email list. How do we figure that out?

So one of the first things we absolutely have to do is stop being satisfied with the global statistics of, hey everybody, a 10% open rate on your emails is great. No, it's not like it might be what everybody else is getting, but 90% of the people, not only my emails, is terrible. Like we've got to be constantly dissatisfied and be moving away from going, well, that's above average great. But is it good? Like, is it any good? So let's take a look at the math a little bit.

Yeah. So effectively everything starts with that dream figure. How much money do you actually want to make? How many copies of the course do you actually want to sell? And how much is the course? And in fact even the price of the course is going to come into this calculation. It really is, how much do I want to make? And then you need to start factoring in. Okay, great, now how do I break that down? How many of those do I need to sell to hit that figure? Okay, great. What's my conversion rate of that course? Fine. And then work out how you can get the right number of people on the list to get that conversion rate that results in that thing.

What you don't want to end up with is like a bun fight within your business where you're trying to compete with your price point versus your conversion. Right. And what this really boils down to and the thing that we like to share with people that's a real eye opening moment is actually you can affect your conversion rate. You don't have to accept it, you can affect it. Right? And the way you could do that is by figuring out what is better way of communicating with each single person on your list to have the relevant conversation that's going on in their head in order to move them from where they are right now. Talk to those pain points and then offer your course in such a way that it solves their pain points and it overcomes their objections in that really smooth transitional way. So now that every single person comes, person comes through and they think, right, this is great, he or she is going to solve my problems. And the thing I was really concerned about is not a problem. And now that sale comes in so much quicker if we do that for every single person. Like, okay, if your course happened to be tens of thousands of dollars, then you can probably do that in a Consultative selling way, where you get them on the phone, you do that sort of phone pitch type thing or online. Online pitch type thing, one to one, that's fine. But most of us don't have courses at that level. Most of us have courses that are in the hundreds or low thousands. Right. Or even mid thousands. So what we need to do is. Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. So what we need to do instead is figure out a way of simulating that consultative sell. And what I mean by that is that bit where you say, hey, what's your problem? Oh, you're really struggling with that. Here's how my thing solves that particular problem and only focusing on that thing. How do we simulate that at scale? Right.

So one of the problems we have is that if you learn copywriting and you make your sales page or you put a sales video on the Internet, or you have a webinar, because that's a one to many channel as this is. That's the luxury of it. That's what allows us to create this passive income. It's also the limitation of it in this day and age. Because even if your marketplace, even if your perfect audience is women in their 30s who've just had a baby and are waiting to go back to work.

I can't wait to hear the example you do in this niche.

You might think that is the perfect audience. I can write a sales letter. It's going to hit all of their pain points. It's going to be perfect. What you've got to realize is that even though that sounds like a really targeted demographic, those people, the minute you've got more than one of them, they have different pains and desires. So some of them might not want to go back to work. Some of them might. Some of them might not need to go back to work because they're financially independent. So suddenly you realize the moment you look at it, you go, crikey, there's loads of different things here that differentiate these people. And so what that means is that you now need to speak to them differently. Which means your one sales page or your one webinar or your one sales letter has to try and tap into all those different things. It has to speak to the people who do want this and the people who don't want this, the people who are frightened of this and the people who are not frightened of this. And suddenly you realize, actually that's quite. It's impossible to do with just a single sales process. So that's why we have to be able to carve people up, put them down into what we consider to be this sort of choose your own adventure story. So you always talk about this as a thing. You know those books as a kid that said, if you think that person went down over the bridge, turn to page 32. If you think they went down the dark and windy path, turn to page 48. And then you choose which way the story goes. We need to give our audiences the ability to decide and determine what we say to them and how we speak to them and how we tap into their hopes and fears and wants and desires.

And it makes perfect sense. Look at the way we consume content. All of us, we right now. I know if my dad called me up and he said, look, are you watching that show on TV right now, Kennedy? I'd be like, no, dad, because I don't watch TV that way anymore. I turn my Netflix on or on my Amazon or whatever it is I'm watching and I choose the show I want to watch at that moment in time based on the mood I'm in and what I fancy doing, Whether it's a weekday or a weekend. Like, I choose different content depending on what I'm doing at that moment, Whether I'm with my girlfriend or I'm just sitting on my own or whatever it is, I'll watch different stuff, right? So why have email marketers for the most part, why have none of us done the same thing where we allow people to choose their own adventure? It's quite interesting I think about that, isn't it?

I love that. So, and I'm an avid reader and used to read all those adventure books when I was younger. And so as I'm thinking about this, so we get somebody on our email list, right, and we want them to choose their own adventure. So how do we tactically go about doing this? How is this actually done in real life?

So what most people do obviously is, and most of us have been here for a long time is somebody joined your list for whatever reason and now the first thing that happens is you say, great. They either go into like an automated follow up sequence that either welcomes them to their business and then starts to sell to them, or it sells to them straight away, or they just start getting your broadcast emails or a combination of the two. But either way, whether they're like automated sequences of campaigns or they're done like you know, right up to this very minute broadcast emails. The problem with that is that you are selling on your agenda. In other words, you're saying, right, well, I've got this course that I want to sell. And I have this particular sales message that I want to say about it. So this will help you to save time and get fit and get a girlfriend and train your dog. And, you know, you're going to. You're going to sell it on your agenda.

This is a really good course. I'm getting a girlfriend course.

I love that with army knife course. So what happens is you now sell on your agenda on the things that you think they think are important. So actually, that means that that conversion rate is lower than it could be if you stop for a minute to find out exactly what they want and then offered them that, or if you find out exactly what their pain points are and help them to overcome it.

So one way of doing that is to say you've got one single course. Let's take that example.

Let's take that example first.

Yeah, sure. All right, so let's imagine you've got one single course. Now, you could put that course in front of your entire mailing list. When I say your entire meaningless, I'm talking about that could be 25 people. That could be 100 people. It could be a hundred thousand people. Doesn't matter. You've got your one course. Let's say that course is about how to be amazing at. Name something, Rob.

Jigsaw puzzles.

Oh, thank you. Right. How to be amazing at jigsaw puzzles. I wish I hadn't asked you. Now I should concentrate.

I'm just gonna get the popcorn.

Thank you.

So I'm gonna just pedal down this a little bit, and we'll see if this comes with any content anybody can listen to. Great. So how to get good at jigsaw puzzles. So you have this list of people who really want to get good at jigsaw puzzles. And now what we're going to do is send them a survey which asks them one question. Basically, that question is, what is your biggest challenge with completing jigsaw puzzles?

This is, of course, a joking example, but you get the idea.

Yes, sure. This is a terrible niche. I am sure someone's going to write to us after this and be like, I'm in the jigsaw solving niche. You are idiots. Which wouldn't be the first time, I can tell you that. So you've got this call. So now you're asking this question of what's your problem with solving jigsaw puzzles? And it might be finding the time to do a jigsaw puzzle.

I also thought you were going to say finding the corner pieces, in which case.

That is actually difficult.

Where's this going? It was also professional at the start this, wasn't it?

She did say unlikely entrepreneurs.

She did, yeah. Finding the time to do it. Secondly, finding a surface to do these jigsaws on. I'm going to stop with two options, but you may have more options than that on your particular survey about people's objections to buying your wonderful course. So what that means is I'm now email that survey to all of my people on my jigsaw puzzle list and say, hello, please tell me, please go and fill out this survey. It's literally going to take you like one click, two seconds.

I'd really appreciate it just to jump in. That's not, that's not a survey that's angled to say, please tell me what course you want to buy or why I should sell it to you and then I'll show you the course. It's very much a hello, you're in our universe now. You're on our. You're in our world, you're in our tribe. Yeah, whatever your lingo is, I want to make sure that I serve you best. I want to make sure that I give you the most relevant content. So listen, just take a couple of seconds of your day, fill in this super quick survey. It's only three questions. It's all multiple choice. It's super quick. And that means I can make sure I send you the most relevant stuff. And people love to receive that as soon as they've come into your world.

So the first thing you do is you validate and you tell them that I actually care about you and I care about your opinion. If social media has taught us anything about the world and about human nature, it's that people love to share their opinion, especially when it's about stuff they've got nothing to do with. So people definitely like to share their opinions. So that's what they're going to do at this point. They're going to like click and take your survey as soon as person A comes in and they say, oh, yes. The reason I find jigsaws tricky is because I haven't got the time to do them. They click that, they hit submit on the survey and immediately because your survey, you've linked it to your email marketing system, whether that be your mailchimp, so your activecampaigns of this world, whatever the heck it might be, you've linked it from your survey to that email marketing system and you now tag that person in your email marketing system to say the reason this person can't do jigsaws is because they haven't got time. Now you kick off an automated campaign, a sequence which helps them overcome that. You're going to tell them all about how your program is the fastest way to solve. To solve jigsaws, it's how to do it while the kids are asleep or however the heck you overcome that objection. However, while that's happening with person A, person B came along and she said the reason she doesn't like to do jigsaws is because she hasn't got any space to do one on that next page or in that next email sequence. Your whole email sequence is about how to do these jigsaws in a smaller space in a faster time, which means you can use the dining room table, but at the time the kids are coming down to eat, they'll have finished up the jigsaw and they'll have packed it away.

Now, that's a stupid and super overt example to show you how this works. But if you think about it, there's a million and one different reasons why you might need to sell to different people differently. For example, if somebody comes into your business and they are 21 to 31, the way that you speak to them is probably going to be very different from somebody who's 61 to 71, if that makes sense. The examples they're going to want to see. So now imagine if every time you send out an email and you want to use like a case study from one of your existing customers, you could send them a case study or a customer that's exactly like them, because you can run a little report inside your activecampaign or mailchimp or whatever, and pull up a report of all the people who said in your survey that they were 20 to 30 or 60 to 70 or whatever. You can literally ask whatever questions you need to ask in your little survey to get the data, whether it's demographic or psychographic, whatever. You need to find out who these people are, what their pains and emotions are, what their basic stats are, and then sell to them in the right possible way.

So now you'll be able to use this in two ways, just by running this one survey. And initially, when you set this up, you'll send it out your existing subscribers, hooray, you've now got them segmented. You also pop it into your onboarding, or what we call our getting to know you sequence, which is the automated sequence that people get when they immediately do after they join our sort of universe and we put it in There. So it happens to every single person who comes through. And now, yes, we immediately put them through a sequence, an automatic campaign to sell them something and offer to solve their problems. But going forward, like Rob said, it means every time you have a new promotion to put out, you segment those people and send that broadcast message out to them, either just to the right segment or to each segment, but in the most appropriate way. Does that make sense?

It does. So as I was thinking through this, as you were describing it, so when somebody, you know, signs up for our lead magnet, they get on our email list in our welcome series. Some people call it a nurture series. We start the segmentation process then and we might sell them something or offer them something at the end of that.

Right.

And then from there, let's just say they didn't buy. You would at some point segment them again and then figure out how you can help and, and work with them. Tell us about, let's just say somebody has multiple courses. Would this change, this process change or what would you recommend?

So the great thing about this is the process is exactly the same. You just change the sort of questions you're asking them, why you're asking them. So for example, in the instance we just gave you, that's for somebody who's got one course but sort of needs to find the right angle to sell it. So now if you've got more than one course, whether that's two or like a load, you can now find out what, which of the, you know, what's their biggest struggle right now and sell them the course that fixes that thing. So for example, if you teach dog training and you know that some people have a problem with their dogs, you know, like house training, and some people have a problem with their dog jumping up and trying to bite strangers. You can now find out where, you know, somebody fills in your service. So I mean, let's imagine you give away some lead magnet for dog trainers with the top 10 tips for people who want a more well behaved dog. Right, Great. Somebody's going to come in, they're going to opt in for that. You don't know whether their dog, whether they've just got a dog and that dog is a puppy and therefore needs very different training from a rescue dog who's maybe, you know, nine years old and is stuck in their ways. And you need to train them very differently. So now you get to run a survey and find out so you can ask a quick question like, you know, how long have you had your dog and how old is the dog and answer that question and then the next question down. All multiple choice. So very, very easy. The next question down might be which of these things is your biggest struggle right now? And you give them some options. So again, it's going to be, you know, for a newer dog, it's more likely house training. You can ask them those sort of questions and now you can make sure that you put them into the email sequence that sells them. The cause about house training your dog as opposed to if they say, actually, you know, my dog is quite aggressive. You can now put them into a sequence that's about training your dog to be a nicer dog.

Love that. So let me ask you this and Robin Kennedy, I'm sure you have some like real life case studies that you would be willing to share without giving out names, of course. Can you tell us how some of your current clients are used using this in their online course business?

Yeah, sure. So for example, one of our clients sells courses about social media. So how to do social media for businesses. And her, the reason she got into that was she used to coach social media freelancers. In other words, she coached people who do social media for small businesses. So she's giving away this amazing free report, this free download which was all about it was called something like the social media checklist for social media freelancers. It was that prescriptive in the title.

Okay.

And so she's building this list of people and initially thought, great, I've got all thousands of people opting in running Facebook ads into it and they must all be social media freelancers. Look at all these people giving me their email address for this social media freelancer report. And it really was that prescriptive. And when she ran a survey to them, it actually turned out that like a big percentage of those people weren't social media freelancers. Some of them were, but a lot of them were people who work in a job doing social media. Some of them wanted to get better. Some of them were entrepreneurs just like you and me who needed to learn social media in order to do, you know, run their one man or two man band business. Some of them were people who were working within agencies. So they were doing the same job but not working for themselves.

And some of them were these freelancers.

Yeah. And suddenly she realized now that actually there's a big bunch of people on here. Let's imagine I'm going to make this number up, but let's imagine that only 25% those people were actually social media freelancers. She'd have been emailing 100% of her list about stuff that actually only affects 25% of them. For example, if you work in a job doing social media in a company, then there's no point in her sending you emails saying, here's how you get more clients as a social media freelancer. Because you can't do anything with that other than quit your job and start doing that instead. And so likewise, on a flip side of that, some people would opt in for that thing because it sounds great. Here's 10 top tips to maximize your social media, or whatever it's going to be once they get opted into that thing. The next bit might be okay, great. Well, some of those people are going to have a massive audience, like a million followers. Which one of our clients does have a massive audience of a million followers. They don't need help getting followers because they know all about that, but they might have terrible engagement, which our client doesn't, by the way, but they might have terrible engagement. So they need help with engagement. Other people might have no followers, but would be really good at creating engaging content. So again, the course that you need, that our client needs to offer those people is going to be different depending on what their big challenge is. So I think it's easy for us to assume that just because somebody's opted in for a social media checklist means we can just bombard them with everything we know about social media and that's going to be okay. But the truth is, if somebody has a really big audience and you're bombarding them with stuff about how to grow their audience, that's just going to annoy them. So this particular client has found that by running that survey as soon as people come in and segmenting them into those different buckets, not only does she find out who each person is right. But she also gets to find out what their big challenge is. So every single piece of communication that goes out is selling them the right product in the right way for their particular situation. Does that make sense?

I love that example and I think that's very applicable to a lot of the course creators listening here today.

Awesome.

Robin Kennedy, any last minute tips or anything that you want to make sure that you bring up today before we close?

So I guess the big summary of everything that we try and preach is that what we call send to all marketing is dead. The days of just email marketing is definitely not dead. It's alive and well if we start to do it differently. But the old ways of doing email marketing are definitely dying. So we no longer Believe in a world where you can log into your email marketing platform, you can write an email, you can send it to everybody in your list and expect that for a long time that's going to get great open rates, great click through rates and great conversions.

Because those numbers are never on the rise.

No, those numbers are always falling industry wide across every niche. So instead what we need to do is to start sending fewer emails, but better emails and more targeted emails to smaller segments of people. And then that's how you can start to win this email marketing game.

And we don't just talk about this stuff, we don't just do it in our business. We literally have been info, product and course creators ourselves for the past. How long have you done this, Rob?

Since 2009.

Okay. So a while. I'm not gonna do the math on that. On the flag. So I look stupid. 10 years. There you go. And we believed in this so much and we understand the impact of this so much. We started a business about it and that's what we did. So we do it. Responsuite. Responseweet is the email platform that connects with your email marketing is the survey platform which connects with your email marketing so that you can do all that triggering and segment people in that way, seamlessly, automatically. Because one of the other big secrets that I want to leave you with is that you have to automate this stuff. It has to be a campaign. It can't be something you do today, like run a survey a day and then do it again next year. It has to be embedded and segmentation has to be embedded in your business and a constant. Working towards this understanding of your audience and the people in your list is critical to your ability to communicate with them more effectively. So this should be right in there at all times. Now, before we go Destiny, we do have a little confession to make.

Well, let me know what it is.

We need a sort of evil.

Have you been reading my mind? Because I was thinking I need to go check this out.

The little confession is that before we started the podcast in of you, we actually sort of had a little hidden agenda, like a secret agenda. And it has absolutely nothing to do with marketing or surveys or emails or courses or any of that stuff. It's completely a random thing.

Yeah, it's basically we've been talking around a secret theme that, like Rob said, it's got nothing to do with marketing or, or Destiny or any of these things. But we've been using it as metaphors throughout this entire episode to describe things. And as you Listen to it now for the first time. You'd probably have missed most of them, but one of the things that marketing is about is seeding ideas. And we've been seeding an idea all the way through this and would like you to listen back and figure out what it is.

As a hypnotist and a mind reader, we spend our lives influencing and dropping ideas into things, and that's exactly what we've done here. So what that means is, for example, let's imagine that the secret theme was farmyard animals. Now it isn't. Let's imagine it was then. I might have said something like, you're at your favorite restaurant and you're really pigging out.

Oh, Rob, moove out the way.

See what I did there? Now, it's not that obvious. It is a little bit more subtle than that and you'll probably have to listen through a second time like Kennedy said. But if you do and you spot the theme, the secret theme, then we want you to tweet us responsesuite with whatever you think the theme might be. And if you get it right, you will win a prize.

A prize. We haven't figured it out. Yeah. So apart from that. Yeah. If you want to check out Response Suite and we can help you out with any of that sort of stuff, that'll be awesome. We'd love to see you over there.

Well, thank you so much. And I'm definitely going to have to go back and listen because I'm not sure I really know what it is yet because I was busy taking notes as you guys were talking because you had such great information to share. And I will make sure that those links are in the show notes so everybody has them. Course creators, thanks so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Robin Kennedy with Response Suite. We'd love for you to rate and review the podcast on itunes or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.