How to enrich your email list, Eric’s thumbnail coaching call, Boosting YT CPM by 50%

Did you know that you could enrich your email list?

Yes.

You can find all the— there's this tool over here that can basically find LinkedIn URLs and all the LinkedIn information. And you can hook it up with your ConvertKit or Beehive or whatever it is that you use.

I didn't necessarily know you can do all that stuff, but I know you can get the LinkedIn information and you can actually get a lot of information from other social sites. There's a lot of companies that you give them email addresses and they give you all the data that they can find about that person online.

Yep. I think this one, this one's interesting to me because I think it hooks in directly. I'm looking at maybe a Beehive interface, but you can see like founder, how many employees they have and everything, and it, it tracks next to their contact information. And I think you can just hit them directly from within the platform. That makes it a little more seamless. And, um, we started experimenting with this. This is called Mega Hit App, and this was— hat tip goes to Matt McGarry on this one.

So, so it's like Clearbit?

Not really. So here's what he said. So it makes sales easy because these folks are already subscribed to my newsletter. Plus you can see each lead's open rate and click-through rate. So you can see how engaged they are versus just like taking a raw list and like enriching it with BuiltWith or Clearbit or something like that. But you can use this to find inbound clients, sponsors, get stats on your list more. And basically it looks like you have to install it locally on your machine, which is a little interesting, but I thought that was interesting. So yeah. Cool.

So it doesn't plug in with your email solution.

It does, but you install it locally on your machine. That's my interpretation of it.

Then how does it really plug in with the email?

If you install it locally on your machine, I think you can still connect it with your web apps. So again, I haven't experimented with it yet. My team has.

You get what I mean, right? Because then you got to go manually send out the emails unless it already connects.

Not sure. Haven't tried it yet. But I just know you have to install it locally on your machine.

So yeah.

We'll see how it goes. But yeah. There's another thing I wanted to share too. I did a— did I tell you about the time I did a YouTube thumbnail coaching call with a guy that has 3.2 million subs on YouTube and his click-through rates are like 10% to 15% per video?

Okay.

So, basically I talked to this guy. His name is Mike Stack. His last name is Stack. So, he's like, you know. But anyway, check him out on Twitter.

Is his real last name Stack?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, that's cool.

So, he's like a Portuguese guy. I think he lives in like Australia or something. I don't know. But basically, we did the call and all he focuses on is like one, number one, when he's doing the YouTube video, this might not be new to some people, but the idea is number one. He has to have a very large idea TAM, right? So, for him, it's like, you know, MrBeast has like $1 boat versus $100 million boat. So, the idea TAM is really important. But the second thing is His he tests a lot of thumbnails and headlines, and he uses a thing called Video Stats, which is Mr. Beast's tool, and it shows you how many times you've changed the headline, how many times you've changed the thumbnail. He tests a lot. If anything is like below like a five out of ten in YouTube Studio, if it's below five out of ten in the first hour, two hours or so, he's constantly changing it. He was criticizing my channel, and this is good criticism. Just saying like one, our thumbnails suck. Two, our headlines aren't that good. It's because he's like, dude, your content's really good. The podcasts are really good, but you are. We weren't going hard enough on the thumbnails and the headlines. So now, like, we've adjusted it quite a bit. And I think we're getting like maybe 3% to 4% CTR or so. Now, some of the new thumbnails that we have, it's like 7%, 7.5% or so. So, it's getting higher. And keep in mind, I'm like B2B podcast, that type of stuff. So, it's slower.

So, what are you doing to iterate your thumbnails to get more clicks?

So, a guy, funny enough, after I did the call with him, magically, a thumbnail guy that works with some of the biggest YouTubers like You know, Iman Gadzhi, I think all these other people, right? He hit me up and then he was like, hey, like we'll do thumbnails for you and it's not that expensive. And like we're testing him out right now and we're gonna keep giving him more work. And the thumbnails are like levels higher. Like if you look at my YouTube right now, you can tell which ones are like the good ones versus which ones aren't. And Neil's pulling it up right now.

Yeah, I'm actually pulling it up. I'm like, how much do you pay for your thumbnails? YouTube, Eric— is it Eric Oh Siu?

No, just type Eric Siu. Leveling Up, Eric Siu.

Eric Siu, Leveling Up.

You see the difference? You can tell which one's mine.

Let's play a game here. I'm gonna guess which thumbnails are yours. I Was Very Depressed, that's you guys.

Like, you guys meaning like our thumbnail?

Yes.

Yeah, that's us. Okay.

Noah Kagan, $1 Million in 48 Hours, that was them.

Yes.

Porn Became a Hobby, that was them.

No, that was us.

Okay. I will reach 25 million. That was them.

Yes.

1 million traffic on a budget was them.

Who's that with?

Just you. How to go from 1-0 to 1 million in 90 days.

No, that's us.

Oh, that was you.

But you can tell the aesthetic.

You can start to see the aesthetic. Get filthy rich by working less.

That was with Ali Abdul. Yep, that's them.

Yeah, you can see.

So you can see the aesthetic now. It's significantly different.

Yeah. Most self-help is an effing scam. That was them.

Yes.

Yeah, you could tell.

Yeah. Because the—

and the way I'm basing this, I know I was wrong, I think on one or two of them. But the way I'm basing this, I'm just looking at Eric's thumbnails, the ones that were just plain text and didn't have much, I assumed it was him. The ones that were visually more appealing, I assumed was The person he was paying.

Exactly. Yep. So anyway, I mean, those are a couple of experiments we've done. I think the takeaway here is absolutely talk to people that are good at their craft and then also testing people. People reach out and he gave me a really good offer. One, if you're going to reach out to someone on Instagram when you're DMing them for services, just send them like one-liner. Like if it's a one-liner, good offers, like, hey, I'll just do something. I'm going to do a thumbnail for you for free. Can I do it? And like, by the way, I've worked with these people. I'm like, yeah. Absolutely. And then it was good. I was like, oh dude, like give me more of that, right? Um, same thing, like Brad didn't give us that offer. Brad's offer was more—

it was just very simple.

It's like, um, I think it's like, I don't know how you got me, Brad. What did you send? Something interesting? He— Brad's looking at these. So those of you that are watching on YouTube right now, Brad, uh, Brad from weeditpodcast.com.

Recordeditpodcast.com.

Oh, sorry, recordeditpodcast.com.

But, uh, you were looking for studios and I said we do On location shoots. Okay.

And then that kicked it off. Oh yeah, so I posted a story and then you responded?

Yeah.

Okay, so that worked out. He addressed a need and that's how he got it. So anyway, it's so funny too.

You know what the thing I hate the most about service providers? You reach out to Brad and he responded to you. Whether it's realtors, accountants, or anyone, people complain all the time, oh, I don't have enough leads, I don't have enough sales. Have you followed up with the people that are actually reaching out to you? Yeah, I called them a week later. Well, why don't you call them right when it came in? Try calling them in the first 15 minutes that a lead comes in. Then tell me the difference on your revenue.

The fortunes of one, you have to follow up fast. Time kills all deals. 2, fortune is in the follow-up.

It really is. And there was a guy named Steli who had a— Steli Efti?

Yeah.

Close.com. I thought it was .io or something.

He bought .com.

Oh, he bought .com. Good for him. And I remember he used to always say, you got to have people follow up in the first 15 minutes. We do that. And by the way, it makes a big difference on close rates.

Do you guys have a situation where you guys, a lead comes in and you call them like immediately? Like, you know, those other call centers?

Yeah, we do that.

Is it like instant, instant connect, or is it like in a couple of minutes?

It takes some time because we analyze a lead.

Got it. And when you say you analyze a lead, what goes— are you enriching it with Clearbit? Are you like looking at some stuff in the backend? Like what's going on there?

I don't know who we enrich it with, but I know we spend an arm and a leg enriching the data.

Yeah. So you enrich it. Here's the argument I had when we— or the argument that was made by someone at the Founders Retreat last week. So it's like, just collect the name, Work email, phone number, and then forget about the rest.

That doesn't work for us. We've tried that.

So you guys collect, you guys collect budget, you guys collect like, what are you looking for?

Budget, URL, you know, their full name. We don't want just their first name. All this helps us figure out, is this person going to be a decision maker? Are they not? Because the sales pitch we use with someone who's not a decision maker is very different than a sales pitch we would use with someone who is a decision maker.

And you guys qualify the hell out of the lead because you guys are going to be spending time and resources on doing a proposal for these people. So it better be like pretty good information.

Yeah, and Eric knows the middle part, which he didn't talk about. When Eric says a proposal, what he means by that is at my company, NP Digital, we're not just saying, hey, we talked to John or Susie or whoever it may be, like, yeah, we can help, let us crank out a proposal. Instead, we do a first call with them, We get to know the business. We do another call with them to get more of the business. And by then we should have had data access. So we've analyzed the business and we will ask them questions wherever we're missing anything on. Then we go into another call where we'll do a presentation and we'll break down all our findings, our learnings, what can change. Sometimes we even do projections depending on the business and where they're at in the lifecycle. And we'll focus on all areas, right? From savings to growth opportunities, what we think is pretty much certain, which what we think is More of experiment, all different low-hanging fruit that they may have not even thought about. And then we'll create a plan on what they can do for a year. And we present that all, we break down how it can be done, what could be potentially achieved, and we're doing a pitch. And then from there, there's a few more follow-ups and calls going over more things. And then maybe we get a contract signed. And to sum it all up, I know I only talked about 3 or 4 touchpoints. There's way more. There's going over case studies, there's follow-ups, there's adding emails that add value, there's even more phone calls, then there's talking to multiple people in an organization. Sometimes you have to do a pitch a few times. Then some other people bring up different divisions and issues they have. All in all, I don't know how many calls we do, but it's a lot. And typically a customer takes, on the quick end for enterprise, 3 months to close, more realistically 6 months.

Yeah. Keep in mind, Neil said enterprise here, right? So these are, we're talking 7, 8, 9, Not 9, 7, 8-figure deals, maybe potentially 6 to start. Correct?

There's no, yeah, there's no 9-figure deals for us.

No 9 figures.

But it is sometimes rarely for enterprise, it's 6 figures to start. You're starting a small division, you know, you can grow it. We consider those pretty much loss leaders. And then, yeah, in enterprise, we're really looking for 7 to 8-figure contracts.

I think the important thing here too is, is People can say different things like, oh, you should remove the budget and everything. But you know, one, you have to kind of just test for yourself. Strong views loosely held. If it doesn't work, you can always roll it back quickly. Always A/B test this stuff if you can too.

And one thing I talked about is how are you getting the lead? Or we didn't talk about is how you're getting the lead. If you're getting a lead with just a budget, form fields, and name and email, that's one type of lead. A lot of our revenue comes from people giving us RFPs. So they're emailing us through a contact form saying, hey, We're so-and-so from this company. We're interested in hiring a digital shop. We're going to do an RFP. Do you want to be included in that? And then they say, all right. Not only are you giving data and stuff, but you're giving homework assignments. Hey, here's the scenario. What would you guys do and show us what you're going to actually do? And it's a lot of work. We expect results. Yeah. And a lot of these pitches, some of them you're spending, no joke, $100,000 to $200,000 to pitch to the customer. No joke. But the contracts are large.

Yep. The more you play the game, the more you'll understand how this all works. And you'll have to find out for yourself. By the way, Neil and I have an Owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. How much money do you make on your YouTube? Like $5,000 a month or something?

Zero?

No, no ads? You don't have your, your ads on?

No?

Okay, anyway. Those of you—

I have ads on. I have an agency that makes money.

Those of you that have ads on— Why do you have ads? I just left them on. I don't know. You should turn them off. Yeah. But no, because I don't have any ads for like the things that we do. I don't talk about what we do or anything like that. So, I just like leave it there. But I will remove the ads and then add in mid-rolls. So, for example, it's like, hey guys, you can go over here. For example, if you're an agency owner, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. That would be an example of a mid-roll. And that's actually what I recommend for people if you're going to do a lot of long-form podcasts. You know who does it well that you interviewed you? Ryan Pineda.

Oh, cool.

So his podcasts have like multiple mid-rolls for his own products and services.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

I've done an interview with him. I'm doing another interview with him, I think in like a month or two at his event. But yeah, I didn't realize he had ads.

So if you do have ads on, if you want to drive your CPM, you want to boost your CPM by 50%, this tweet is from Brandon Ezavado. And it takes 30 seconds and a few clicks. So those of you listening to this, maybe congrats on some more money right now. All you have to do is this: go to your AdSense in YouTube or Google, just enable gambling and alcohol ads, and then it'll boost your CPMs because you're now opening up— like, by the way, is it safe for your brand? I don't know, that's your decision to make. But I thought it was interesting that this little change could boost it. Yeah.

That one change just boosts it, even if they don't show gambling and Because that means people are more— more people are competing for that inventory.

Yeah, gambling. Because I'm assuming if you're running gambling alcohol, like there's not a lot of inventory available to you. You get what I mean? Yeah.

So it causes other people to have to pay more to target your videos.

Yep.

I don't really worry about that too much because for you and I, we're in B2B and in B2B, if you want ad revenue, the CPMs are amazing.

Yep.

The view count's just not as high.

Nope.

But dude, seriously, you should just turn off all your ads.

I should put in the mid-rolls and turn off the ads.

What do you make from your ads right now on YouTube?

Nothing.

Like, what's— give me a number.

A few hundred dollars.

And you had some videos recently that really hit from My Rich Best Friend.

Uh, Rich BFF, that one. So her video alone drove $5K. So that was like an anomaly in my opinion.

$5K in ad revenue?

Yeah.

No!

I'm not joking. You want to see? I'll show you right now.

I believe you. So $5K in ad revenue?

Yeah.

That one video, how many views did it get?

350,000.

You couldn't have gotten $5K in ad revenue for 350,000 views. I'll show you right now.

Seriously? I'll show you right now. Because personal finance, the CPMs are higher.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the thing is like, this goes, all goes back to like the cost, like the lost leading content team, right? So, so that's all it is.

Yeah, that's true. If you actually look at it in the grand scheme, look from that podcast episode, you yourself don't really sell anything personal finance related. It makes sense for you to throw in an ad, but for any of your marketing related videos, it doesn't make sense for you to show ads because you can just monetize through your own agency and building up your own brand.

I just think for most people, if you're going to do podcasts like this, there should be mid-rolls. Like you should have some type of offer that you're pushing. And now that we have the Agency Owners Association, we just keep pushing that. So yeah.

And for anyone who doesn't know, if you own an agency and you're looking to grow it, reach out to the Agency Owners Association by going to marketingschool.io/agency.

Agency. Yep. There you go. So that being said, that's it for— that's it for today. And please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. And we will see you tomorrow.