Uber's $650M secret business, Deepfake CFO, and Email marketing hacks for 2024

All right guys, let me tell you about a secret business that Uber has. In fact, this secret business does $650 million a year for Uber. What do you think it is, Neil?

Ads.

It's not so secret. So, so it's— but anyway, here's the thing. How complex do you think their funnel is when it comes to— do you think they have like a— I'm kind of setting myself up over here, but let me just show you their funnel. This is—

I was about to say, I'm like, sure, I think it's very complex based on the way you're positioning the question.

Oh no, it's actually not complex. It's this Google Form over here. No, you gotta be kidding me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Advertising. Here, you want to read it? Here, read it.

Advertising on Uber interest form. Dude, put in your email, name, keep scrolling.

That's it. And then you go down. There's a little more, I'm sure. But it's— this just goes to show you that if you want to build a great business, sometimes you don't have to overcomplicate it. And actually, Neil, let me tie this in with what we're doing. So Neil called me last week. He's like, you know, we should do something for agency owners because we both have agencies, right? And so Syed helped with this name, by the way, Neil. It's called the Agency Owners Association, AOA. And so, we have something very similar. Those of you that are agency owners, just go to marketingschool.io/agency and you can apply. It's a Google Form that looks like this. We don't need to overcomplicate things and we'll tell you what you need to do next once you apply. And then we're basically going to try to figure things out. So yeah, that actually flows in well with these both things.

Dude, you know, with Uber, I don't know how often you use Uber Eats, but we both probably use it a lot.

I use it every day.

Uber Eats and Postmates? Yeah, same here. Almost every day.

Almost, yeah.

A lot of ads for restaurants that they know I would go to or think that I would go to based on what I order. I think their system is a little bit more complex on how they're targeting and they give me deals and discounts. So I just order.

But their tech is complex, but the actual like getting into the funnel is so simple, which I love.

That is so simple. I think they'll end up changing it once they end up generating more revenue. But yes, I totally agree with that.

Did you see this deepfake CFO thing?

Uh, no.

So here, let me just—

the deepfake— I heard about it at least. Deepfake Taylor Swift, right?

She had some pictures.

I think it was nude pictures or something.

Yeah.

And then people started blocking them. Was it Microsoft or— well, some of them started blocking with them. Yeah.

Well, here, let me read you this headline. So an entire cast of deepfake people tricked a CFO out of $25 million in the multi-person video conference. It turns out everyone was fake. So that's crazy, right? Because a CFO, like, if he was tricked out of $25 million, what else is going to happen? I see like random— I'm sure you get these as well, these random phishing attacks. But we're getting to the next level now. And this is where I think blockchain actually comes into play. And Alex Sohanian from Reddit was saying this, he founded Reddit. And he was just saying, this is where blockchain makes a lot of sense. Because you want to talk about protecting your identity, you want to talk about verification and all that, this is where it all comes into play now. Because we're gonna see a lot more of these deepfakes. Hopefully you don't lose $25 million. Hopefully I don't lose $25 million.

That's a lot.

And dude, I can see people creating deepfakes deepfakes of like a billionaire, um, like Elon—

maybe not Elon Musk.

You have to go like, you have to go to like B tier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So someone who's like on Forbes that has $2-3 billion, so not as much as Elon, which is still a ton of money. Can't be famous though. Yeah, can't be as famous. And they create a video and target you and send it like, hey, I got this investment opportunity, love what you're doing, blah blah blah, send some money over here. And then boom, people are gonna get scammed out of, uh, Bitcoin.

Yeah, I remember like living in Miami, like I was hanging out, I'd be hanging out with people and they just randomly asked me, like, he was— I'd be sitting in a car with this guy and he'd be like, hey, like, I'm putting money into the Twitter deal, um, are you interested? And then he's like, yeah, you got to put up $500 grand, can you send it today? I'm like— and he just kept asking me, and I'm in the car with him, the guy's driving, could you send it today? Can you send it today? And I'm just like, dude, like, no, like, I'm not gonna just $500 grand into Twitter. And, and I, by the way, I love Twitter, I'm glad I didn't put $500 grand into it because you would have gotten back like what? Not much right now.

No, dude, that would have been so expensive.

Yeah.

Did I ever tell you that one of my old people that worked for us who was a cook, I won't mention their name, got mad at my wife and said that Neil, uh, uh, conned me out of, uh, Bitcoin or some cryptocurrency? I think it was Bitcoin.

Yeah.

And my wife's like, what do you mean? She's like, I was having an affair With your husband. And this was during COVID And then my wife's like—

This other person said they were having an affair with you?

Yeah, they used to work for us. And my wife's like, how's this possible? It's COVID. And it wasn't just COVID, it was COVID lockdowns, right? So then she's like, well, it was more just through texting. And we pretty much had everything over TikTok. At that time, I didn't have a TikTok or was it Instagram? Either way, one or the other, but when my team was using it. So my wife's like, can you log in? And I was like, I'm like, honey, I gotta go find my login. So I call some of my team members and my wife's like, no, no, it can't be my husband. He was here. And, uh, and my wife also knows who the person is because they work for us, of course, but she knows what my type is and she's not my type. But she's just like— I was like, no, I didn't. My wife's like, oh cool, I trust you. I'm like, all right, whatever, this is a moot point.

Yeah.

So then all of a sudden She's like, yes, I've even seen his body or whatnot. And he sent me pictures. And then my wife's like, okay, forward it to me. So one, I'm OCD. When I first met my wife, one of the reasons I knew it was meant to be is when I was at the airport, I would go around checking each and every single gate to figure out which seat is the cleanest so I can sit down on it. I'm like that OCD. And my wife wiped it down with sanitizer. She went into one of the stores like Hudson.

Yeah.

Got some sanitizer. And then I sat down. So then first off, this person sends a picture with them wearing shoes on the bed. Okay, so that's already a no-go. I don't wear shoes. 2, they're basketball shoes. I don't own basketball shoes. The 3rd one, and this is the real dead giveaway, is it was a Caucasian person. I'm Indian, so I'm pretty sure there's a difference in skin color, right?

Yeah.

So then my wife's like, this isn't even my husband. This person isn't the same skin color even.

Not by a little bit.

Like, I'm talking about someone who's really pale in skin color. Brown and tan, right?

Yeah.

I'm not trying to be racist or anything. I'm just saying it's it's it's the reality. But no joke, she was pissed off because she said your husband duped me out of five hundred dollars in Bitcoin. My wife's like, my husband wouldn't try to get five hundred dollars. She's not trying to be rude, but like I wouldn't try to run a scam for five hundred dollars.

Yeah. One, I wouldn't try to run a scam, but two, you would go for more if you were going to run a scam.

Yeah, dude. I do dinners where sometimes they cost two three thousand dollars or four or five thousand dollars.

It's like whatever.

It's a normal night.

Yeah.

And I'm not trying to boast. I'm just saying that's the reality. A lot of it's business expenses. But nonetheless, you know, I got scammed and she ended up showing my wife the thread. It was either on Instagram or TikTok or whoever I was messaging. And then my wife's like, this isn't even my husband's username. And it was just someone, you know, faking as if they were me. She must have told someone that she worked for me and like, oh, they have money.

Let me just— Yeah, but your wife even, she started looking into it. thing. These, these—

and then she—

so she caught it, but there's still some— like, imagine how much more sophisticated these are going to become.

They're going to be so much more sophisticated because people are going to send a video of me and then they're going to try to fake people. But what was crazy about this whole ordeal and experience, the lady was still pissed off. And even when she's like, no, this is my husband, she's like, okay, what are you gonna do to reimburse us on the money lost? We're like, nothing, we didn't do anything wrong to you, we're sorry about it. And she was really angry with him. She's like, My wife is like, you're getting mad at me when you were trying to have an affair with my husband, even though it wasn't my husband, but you were trying to have an affair with him.

Here's the thing, I think for everyone, the takeaway here is, one, be vigilant. 2, these scams are going to become a lot crazier. There's also evil marketers as well, so you got to be careful. 3, you got to learn how to secure your stuff, right? You got to protect yourself. Sure, you can have 2-factor authentication, good passwords and everything, but eventually you're probably going to have to have some type of token that Can verify your identity, and that's going to have some blockchain technology that's tied to it. So all that stuff comes back. We haven't talked about blockchain for a while, but now we're talking about it again. By the way, Neil and I have an agency 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.

Dude, blockchain is coming back. You see the a16z? They started talking about blockchain. What'd they say? They were just talking about, you know, there's a lot of potential there and fundamentals and the technology, the same old stuff that you hear.

You know, our friend— so we have a mutual friend. He sent me something today and it showed like the 9 best opportunities for this year, investment opportunities, which I don't usually pay attention to that stuff. But the first 3 were Ethereum, second one was Solana, third one is Coinbase, right? And then the rest are like defense stuff. And then you have like food stuff like Chewy, right? Yeah. I found that to be interesting. So that stuff's not going anywhere. And, you know, We'll just leave it at that. We don't need to talk about blockchain all day. We can end it off with this one over here. So do you know? Do you know this guy? He's a friend of mine, Matt Paulson. Do you know who he is?

No.

Okay.

I may follow him on Instagram. Is that the plane guy?

He has a plane, but he's I don't think he's a plane guy.

Not Instagram on Twitter. He yeah he bought a plane.

He just bought a plane.

Yeah yeah yeah. He has like some newsletter financial business or something. Yeah yeah yeah. I follow him on Twitter. He puts out good content.

He does. So he says this: Yahoo. So basically these are some email marketing secrets for 2024 and beyond. So he says. Here are 24 ways to get started. And these are email secrets for anyone that sends more than 5,000 emails per day. So, more than 5,000 people. So, I'm just going to rattle these off really quickly and then we'll go from there. I'm just going to get the first 10. Number 1, target a 20% global open rate or 40% open rate including fake MPP opens. Cut down your segments until you reach this number. MPP is Apple's opens, I'm assuming. You know what MPP is?

No.

Okay, anyway, we don't know what MPP— Neil's Googling it, I think. Yeah, I am. So, number 2, use Kickbox, Neverbounce, or BrightVerify to verify every new email before adding it to your list. Do you do that?

MPP, Mobile Measurement Platform.

Okay.

So— What was the second one that you asked?

Second one is, do you use anything like Kickbox, Neverbounce, or BrightVerify to verify every new email before adding it to your list?

We don't, but we don't have that problem because Knock on wood. We scrub our lists on a daily basis.

Oh, daily basis. That's a lot.

Okay. No, but on a rolling 30. Okay.

So, that's pretty good.

Yeah. So, we look at all the people who didn't open in the last 30 days and then we scrub them. And it's a daily rolling 30. So, every day we look at the previous past 30.

And that brings me to the 3rd point, which is what Neil just said. So, unsubscribe anyone who doesn't open any of your first 20 emails. And number 4, your daily—

20 emails? I wouldn't go that far.

Would you go 10?

No, I would go like 5.

Yeah, well, your OCD is a little different. Your OCD carries over into your email hygiene too.

I'm like, they don't want your emails, they didn't open up the first 5.

You're like, I want to save money. 4, your daily sends should target 30-day active users, target 30 to 90-day active users 1 time per week, and greater than 90-day active users 1 time per month to reactivate them. I think that's pretty good. And number 5, automatically remove hard bounces, spam reporters, and invalid emails from your list.

Most email platforms do the last one automatically.

Number 5?

No, the one you just said. It removes hard bounces.

Yeah. Oh no, number 5. Number 6 is don't count fake email opens. So Apple MPP, which is what I just said, as user activity. Number 7, monitor email open and click rates by lead source. Stop buying from sources that lead to low open and low click rates. Number 8, get rid of bot clickers. Use Cloudflare to monitor and prevent bot IP addresses from hitting your click tracking URLs. Number 9, last but not— second to last but not penultimate one. Periodically check your IPs and sending domains for blacklist placements using multi— multi—

I can't see your screen.

Yeah. MultiRBL. So MultiRBL.

I have no idea what that means.

.valley.org. And so this will help you Check your IP and sending domains for blacklist placements. So I'm going to spell it out for everyone before we go. The word multi rbl. valli.org. So multi rbl. valli.org. And then last one is use Glock Apps, Inbox Monster, or eData Source to monitor your deliverability performance. Do you do that?

Dude, this is just so complex. I do.

This guy sends a lot of emails.

I send a lot of emails. He probably sends way more than me and makes more from emails than I do because that's his business. I think it's this business, right? Because it's a financial newsletter. It's the ads, yeah. Yeah. So ours is really simple. We get traffic, we have spam checks on our end, whether it's Cloudflare blocking bots and our developer puts in some stuff where if people are too aggressive, they start getting CAPTCHAs. And we collect emails. We scrub our list on a rolling 30. So every day we scrub it. If people didn't open in the past 30, we stop emailing them. And it's really simple. We send really good emails with great subject lines, content with text-based copy, little to no images, technically no images, short emails between 100 and 250 characters, 1 link, 2 max. Sometimes my team puts in 3 and I get a little pissy because I just feel that's too many and it starts affecting deliverability. And that's it. That's the playbook. And you calculate what's your ROI when you send the emails, how much revenue you're generating, which type of emails generate the most. Because sometimes the ones with the least open rates and least clicks sometimes make you the most money, believe it or not, like consulting emails. Hey, sign up for a pitch to get pitched by us on us doing your marketing. You're going to get way less opens and clicks, but it's going to generate more revenue. And then you can figure out what you want to do balance-wise. But that's as simple as we keep it.

All right.

We don't do much more than that. I don't think you need to.

That's a good place to end it. So please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Maybe we'll go a little deeper in the near future. And we'll see you tomorrow.