How To Survive A Recession: Proven Strategies to Find, Convert and Keep Clients In The Toughest of Times with Draye Redfern - I Love Marketing Episode #462

If times get tough and people they're holding onto their pocketbooks or not wanting to pull the credit card out more often and you're competing with someone else in the marketplace who is just doing the normal stuff the same way they used to do it. But you're coming into with something that's hyper personalized. I'm using your name, you're hearing, you're seeing it and you're getting a video in the mail with like a video box like we've talked about previously, or it's a custom page that gets done up for them very quickly and easily. No matter what that is, I encourage you to think about what that could be. So you're mitigating your downside, you're optimizing your upside, you're hyper personalizing everything that you do.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www.gienstruitnetwork.com. 16 April 2020 marked a pivotal moment in our nation's economic history. The conclusion of the COVID 19 financial recession. However, this wasn't our first encounter with a recession, nor will it be our last. Since 1980, there six other recessions, one approximately every seven years. Recessions are part of our economic system in the United States and the rest of the world. Are we destined to face another recession this year? It's possible. Is there a recession looming on the horizon? Inevitably. So I present you with the ultimate question. Are you equipped to weather the upcoming storm? To those who can, amazing opportunities await on the other side. Because after the storm, the sun always shines. While the gales of recession may howl and roar, the seeds of prosperity are often being sown. That is the paradox of a recession. It is a time of struggle, yet it can be the cradle of immense opportunities. Today, we have a unique opportunity to learn from marketing expert Dre Redfern, who's going to share how you can use these times to not only survive, but thrive in unique ways during the next recession. Dre is the visionary behind multiple companies, including redfern media and fractionalcmo.com, a respected voice in the business world, Dre has been featured in platforms like USA Today, the Huffington Post, Forbes, et cetera.

So I wanted to lead with this because this is a quote that sort of means a lot when you frame this. And that is those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And there's so much that you can learn if you actually just like, look back a little Bit as entrepreneurs we're so driven and we're moving forward, we're doing all of these things. But the problem is that we oftentimes don't realize what happened previously that we can learn from. And so this is sort of where I came from. I spent 15 years owning or co owning and running a insurance agency. We had 8,700 law firms and I spent the last decade running a marketing agency. So I have risk management to protect the downside, but grow the upside. And it hurts my brain often when it, when it comes to running the business. So what I noticed about a year or so ago, before they changed the definition of a recession was that there's some really interesting things coming. And so I like started getting my thoughts together and I have a book that we're going to release called the Recession Survival Guide. Sort of taking a lot of these ideas and just condensing them down and just basically giving it away. So I've got sort of two segments that want to go through. I want to protect your downside and I want to help you optimize the upside in the next nine minutes. So this is a concept from Ben Hardy, dear friend, longtime client with your ceiling and your floor. And we all sort of operate here. Psychologically, I think the same exact reference points relate to you and the business. So if you are always pursuing, pushing up, pushing up, pushing up, that's great. But you've got to watch the floor. What is the downside that you may have? And so if you think about what that could be and you maybe raise your floor if things go wrong or you lose clients or the recession comes, you're doing okay because you've mitigated the downside. What that basically allows you to do is that if things pull back, you're not coming all the way back down to what your previous floor was. So that could be, you know, some people had, I lost a client, whatever else they want on a week long bender or they can't get their head right for a day or two or three days because I lost the client, had these things happen to me and we've all got those exposures in our business. So it could be for you, maybe you're over, over leveraged, maybe you've got too many, you know, one client that makes up too big of your, your, your portfolio or your company, different competitors that are positioned differently, we all have these. So I encourage you to sort of think about what they could be for you.

My recommendation, what we did, exercise wise because I, I own four different companies was go back to 2000 and then analyze the market in each of the places of what happened in 01, 7 and 8, Covid, et cetera. And that really sort of created a different frame with which to view the problems that we were, you know, we're going to be facing. So for me, running a marketing company, marketing is usually the first expense that is cut for businesses when times get tough. It's the easiest line item to go, like cut that, spend a dollar, I don't know when we get it back and we cut that. So this was just in. During the COVID time, the marketing budgets dropped by 43%. Running a marketing company employing dozens of people, I can't put myself in that position to all of my employees. So I bought fractional cmo. Well, I guess this is sort of the reason why you shouldn't, you know, Harvard Business Review says you shouldn't cut your marketing. Nielsen has studies on it and Entrepreneur says you should not cut your marketing. But the reality is it is just the first expense that ended up getting cut. So knowing that and looking back at the previous 23 years, I bought fractionalcmo.com and the assets and all of the things around it in order to basically hedge the downside. So that if people wanted to still get access to marketing ideas and all of these concepts, they could have that without the higher ticket agency price that so many people are used to experiencing. So that way I was, I could be very quick, very nimble in order to preserve my, my team, company ip, all of the other sorts of things. And that went sort of a long way, became its own separate sort of, you know, spiel. And maybe you don't buy another company, but what, how is it that your offers are positioned? How are you positioned in the market? What are the, the exposures that you have and what can you do to sort of protect that downside? So that's sort of the, the, you know, raising that floor up. Now I want to sort of go into some of the fun stuff. On the upside, my previous 10 minute talks I've talked about, you know, send handwritten notes and this is automated. We said a bunch of those. I never lift a pen. Handwritten notes as far as like, you know, letters that you get sent in the mail, never lift a pen and send thousands and thousands of those. This one I wanted to take a little bit more of a slightly different approach and talk more about video. And so this is an Ernst and Young article talking about the rise of hyperinflation. I've only been Talking about this for six or seven years. So I'm glad they're finally catching on.

But this is a quote from John Maxwell that I think is so important, and that is people may hear your words, but they feel your attitude. Now, I could write good copy. I could. You know, you can evoke motion, emotions, but if I'm looking you and I'm saying, hey, Annie, it's Joy Redfern here. There's a different tonality. I'm acknowledging you as an individual. It evokes a different sense or feeling of emotion. So one of the things I encourage all of you to do, most of you have high ticket offers, these sorts of things, is that if you're selling something above maybe a couple thousand bucks, make a custom page for them.

This takes me. Well, not me, takes my team. 90 seconds, go into ClickFunnels, clone, change the URL slug, change the name. And then at the top of the page when we change the name, so we got their name two times on the page. Ninety seconds. And I can make a customized URL. So it's redfermedia.com your first name-your last name. People are like, oh, that's really cool. They make like, that's me. And they lose their mind over it. So that's, you know, the bare minimum you should do because it takes literally just a matter of a few seconds. What I sort of do to take it a little bit further, because that's just what I like to do is I'll make a custom video. Never work with the person. I will make a custom video for them saying, hey, Austin, Dre Redfern here. Listen, I know you chatted with Tomas on our team, and I'm really excited that we can help you with ba ba ba ba ba. And I know that you express the concern of ba ba ba ba ba. And here's what we're going to do to really help you create a really winning game plan. People lose their mind over this because, number one, I'm using your name. So, Dale Carnegie. The sweetest sound of someone's ears is the sound of their own name. So you're hearing your name, you're seeing your name, and I'm acknowledging from my notes from the team of exactly what their concerns were and getting them to help move forward. And that takes, I mean, this video is maybe 90 seconds long. So at the end of that, it automatically goes to Dropbox folder. My team knows I throw it on the page. In less than 15 minutes, we're selling 15, 25, $50,000 pack.

But it's practically effortless, and it's very, very quick. So I encourage all of you to do this. Even if you don't do a custom video, you know, there's ways you can do it to make it, you know, quick and easy. Layo testimonials. So there's like, you know, Damon John, Ben Hardy, Alex Epstein. You know, I'm a marketer, so you still want to, like, you know, look credible and all of these things. But this is a very, very quick thing that you can do across the board. This is sort of taking that to the next level. This is something we've done for prospects. What you'll see here is we sent this out to a thousand people. I used a thousand different names. Hey, Daniel. Hey, Tim. Hey, Barry. Across the board, what I did was basically just have my team stand with me in our studio. And I just went, hey, Annie. Hey, Sherry. Hey, Genevieve.

And two second blocks like that end up taking 15 seconds. So they push, stop, start, stop, start. And as they're doing in that 15 seconds, they're renaming it with the first person's name. And that's it. What you can't see is my mouth here. You can see the top of my mouth. Very strategically done. It's all one frame, so it's not a cut where you see me jump around. There's no pan in, pan out, none of those sorts of things. What I'm actually saying behind the scenes is like, hello, Veronica. Like a longer style name. Then the audio from that gets removed. You just put in, hey, Annie. Hey, Sherry. Hey, Genevieve.

You think that would take a long time, but the reality was for a thousand names of those, it was like something like 628 of them were ones that were not duplicates, because there's a lot of johns, there's a lot of bills, there's a lot of things that repeat themselves. So we didn't do any of those or did them once because you don't have to do it more than once.

Yeah, there we go. So with this, so 623 of that 15 seconds. So my time was roughly 2.6 hours of my time to customize 1,000 videos out for prospects. My team's time took a little bit longer. It was a whopping three hours.

Because once you have it done, a couple lines of code and you can, and, you know, Adobe will allow you to do, you know, splice all of this together. So in a matter of a small amount of time, it was all tied together at three hours. So my question for you is how could that be useful in your business? If times get tough and people's they're holding onto their pocketbooks or not wanting to pull the credit card out more often and you're competing with someone else in the marketplace who is just doing the normal stuff the same way they used to do it. But you're coming into with something that's hyper personalized. I'm using your name, you're hearing, you're seeing it and you're getting a video in the mail with like a video box like we've talked about previously, obviously where it's a custom page that gets done up for them very quickly and easily. No matter what that is, I encourage you to think about what that could be. So you're mitigating your downside, you're optimizing your upside. You're hyper personalizing everything that you do. Fast forward a year from now. I think that we're probably going to be in a very nasty recession. But if you mitigate the downside and you optimize the upside and you personalize these things, other people may be laying people off, they may be struggling, the leads may not convert as well. But if you actually mitigate the downside and optimize the upside, you've got so much more opportunity. You're keeping your employees around engaged. You can use this as a time to really grow the business and really optimize things to take things to the next level. So what are you using to personalize that site where you have to their names written twice in the URL and what are you using to send the personalized videos on the page? You're sending a proposal or a contract like for us, our contract is below all of that so that you can just immediately like holy crap, this is really cool than, you know, spend money. That's clickfunnels. So it's built in a clickfunnels template that you literally just go clone and you know, you're just cloning the previous version. So it takes like literally I said 90 seconds. It's about like 10. So it's super quick sending the videos. It depends. You could send it in the like a video box which. But grab I have a couple real quick. So you can send them in something like this physically in the mail, which I've talked about previously. The new ones that are super cool, the second you flip that magnetic switch, there's a cellular data chip on the inside. So it immediately reports back to like the data center. So you know, the moment that it opens, you know the moment that it gets played, you know how many minutes it gets played or how what the watch through time is, you know where it was played. So I watched it at the office and I took it home or somewhere else. You get a map of not like directly to the pinpoint of where they are but you get a really good idea how deep you want the analytics campaign level or individual between 29 and 50.

So there's that sending those in the mail and that's what we did with ours. We sent a thousand of them on these doing them on the online if you had UTM codes on your URLs, whatever else you could have that and that could pull from a particular video file that you have on an Amazon AWS server to play that video on a page or you could send them. There's a bunch of ways that you could slice and dice that in the digital space with like literally just pushing one button and running it thousands at a time. So those are the two ways. So click funnels for the individual like hyper personalized with the applications or the contracts and then video boxes or like custom code to run it thousands of pages at a time. Yard is good. Yeah. If you're going to send like a one off thing like a connection sort of thing like just a one off not like a mass market element for like that one off that I showed you there that's my domain, my URL. So and then we're taking and just embedding the things that want or control onto that page. Problem is is when with the way email security and all that sort of stuff. Yeah that's you. They're not loading the images because it has a security threat. So you may have that there on the give it's automated but they may never actually see it. So instead if you just have the URL tech like you know red for me.com Joe-Polish Joe's like that's pretty cool. And that's my URL going to a URL that I control, not a Vidyard URL. His name in the URL in my URL. That's pretty cool. That could get them to click. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Because Vidyard does. I mean if you didn't know people in this room may know that service but if you didn't know it then it kind of looks like am I going to get like you know, ransomware or hacked. But if you have worked with our company or you whatever else you're going to click on that URL because you've already interacted with us at some point in time, and then it's your name with you.

But.

And if they didn't, then you could send them something like this, where they immediately open it up with no analytics and get it for like, 15. $15, $15 a box. So if you took 100 of the best people that you want to Target, you're talking 5K. You can go campaign level or individual level. Just sort of depends on what you would want to do that way. So this is a client of ours that we ran one of the analytic campaigns with that we sent it out in October. 238 days later, it's still getting played 163 days later, 195 days later, 144 days later. So you can see it's still getting open, played months and months afterwards. And I could see the ex. They opened it, all that sort of stuff, the amount of engagements that they, you know, played on it, the total watch time. So if you had a sales staff, you say, go out, like.

Go after that guy. He's engaged with it 17 different times, 11 times, 8 times. Like this guy 8 times that watched 11 minutes of it, and he's engaging with 146 days after the fact that Dre.

Great stuff. Totally love the hyper personalization. We've used HubSpot before. We use something that performs like 5x better now, and it's stupid simple. It's Gmail. So. So.

There'S an extension. If you go to Google Sheets, there's an extension called Mail Merge with Attachments. So what we do now for our personalization, and we've dabbled with a little bit of this, not to that level, so I appreciate some of the insights that you shared, Dre. What we'll do is I'll have a spreadsheet with all my contacts. I can even export from HubSpot a CSV of all my contacts. I load it into Google Sheets, and then I go over to Gmail, and then I type an email as if I'm emailing each of those people individually. And you can use all the variable insertions. So first name. Or you can create custom ones. So I was literally doing one last night. Hey, first name, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I create the email. I then go back over to Google Sheets using that Mail Merge with Attachments extension. And I say, okay, here's the sender's name. You know, it's me. It's coming from my email subject line, blah, blah, blah. You can customize the subject line with parameters. And then what this does is row by row in the spreadsheet. It's doing a variable insertion into the email and sending off one email. So now you're skipping the promotions folder because Gmail thinks that you're just sending a manual email directly to that person. It doesn't look like a marketing email from HubSpot because, I mean, we can snip those out. You know what those look like. There's no unsubscribe link because it's not a marketing email. It's an individual email. So we send out tons of these. We get great open rates. Way better than HubSpot because it feels authentic, it feels personable. And so especially if the copy in your email sounds like you're just emailing your friend Bob or whatever, it's going to perform way better. And it's just. It's stupid. Simple. Simple. The plugin costs like 20 bucks. We use it all the time. And it's amazing. Daily limits. I think it's. If you have a. So if you use a Gmail account, it's like a few hundred, but if you have a corporate Gmail account, like for your own domain, I think it's 1500 people a day, if I recall correctly.

You have a business that does all this sort of stuff for people. Yeah. So if you want to. And now I want to do this.

Damn it.

I mean, I've used video boxes before, but I wasn't doing it with the analytics.

It's pretty awesome.

Yeah, it's totally cool. So. All right. Was that valuable?

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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