Bastian Ernst — Multi-Channel Marketing And Relationship Funnels

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flow Chart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear.

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Welcome back to another fresh episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast presented by evergreenprofits.com and today we have a guy who, to be very honest, we didn't know him prior to coming to this call and he reached out to us and we're excited. Extremely happy he did so because he's talking our language 100%, but he's kind of approaching it in a different way, which is really cool. It's kind of like our be everywhere marketing, our omnipresence. It's our, you know, whatever you want to call it, kind of marketing where it's like you land on our page once and you see us everywhere online. Yeah, that's kind of the goal. That's exactly what his or he's doing with his business and brand. His name is Bastian Ernst and he's based of Spain. He actually did this recording at like one in the morning. So thank you, Bastian. That's super cool. And he runs a business called Wild Audience and basically talks about respect based marketing, which is all about value based marketing. It's growing trust, it's growing an audience in a variety of manners similar to what we do. Email, chatbots, Facebook, yada, yada yada. But he's doing it in a very myth, you know, a very strategic way, we'll say, and personalized manner where he's probably creating the most custom type of messaging throughout a sales funnel that I've ever seen.

Oh yeah, and he's got a lot of automation and he sort of blew us away with some of the cause we think we're really, really smart with our systems and our automation. He taught us some new stuff that, you know, wasn't even on our radar. So really, really exciting stuff. I want to sort of preface this by saying we get people reach out to us multiple times per week, let's say two or three times a week, asking to be on our podcast. Most of those people end up in our recycling bin, right? They end up in the circular bin, they end up in the trash can. Patty, our support person, she does a great job of being a sort of gatekeeper for us. And you know.

When we book our podcast guests, we're booking interviews that aren't going to be released for six weeks out. So we have an abundance of guests. So we really don't take people who approach us to be on the Podcast. But when Bastian wrote into us his sort of philosophy, his message, the stuff that he teaches was so closely aligned with our brand and what we teach, we said, yes, yes, come on our podcast, we want to chat with you. And so this is one of those very rare occasions where we were just, we were blown away and we had to chat with this person about the, his respect based marketing philosophies and his how he sets up his ad campaigns and how he uses emails and bots and retargeting and a lot of the similar stuff that we do in our business he does in a similar way, but he takes it even to another level. So really, really fun, wide ranging interview about how all this stuff ties together.

So let's get into this.

Let's do it.

Hey, how you doing, my man? Thanks for hopping on the call with us.

Super excited chatting with you guys.

Yeah, so it was actually, we were just talking about this prior to the call, but you reached out to us because you listened to some previous episodes and it's always fun to talk to brand new people and kind of expand our network a bit more. But you caught our attention with. When you wrote in to kind of get our attention. I mean, you do a lot of similar things that we do. So evergreen sales, getting away from launches, bots. There's so many things that you kind of gave us and it piqued our interest in many ways. This could probably be a very long call if we really wanted it to be, but we won't. We won't do that.

Just out of curiosity, where are you from? Where's your accent?

So I was born in Austria and Vienna.

Okay.

That's where I grew up. And yeah, I live in Spain though now. I spent some time in the US and. But now I'm based in Barcelona.

Barcelona, okay. I haven't been there. I was in Madrid earlier this year.

Very cool.

That was fun. Yeah, Yeah, I like Spain.

Never been to Spain or Austria, so.

Get out there, man.

Get over there. Very cool.

Well, let's. Let's go ahead and dive right in and let's talk a little bit about your story. What were you doing before you were an entrepreneur and how did you make that transition into becoming an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I worked at kindergarten. I worked with kids, actually disabled kids, and I taught them how to write and how to read and doing math and all that stuff for around a year after university.

And then I transitioned. That was a super cool experience. I learned a lot about kids and social environments and communication, stuff like that. But it wasn't really what I want to do. And then pretty much I was at this really cool conference in Vienna and there was this one speaker. I'm not sure if you guys know him, Steli Efti. He's the CEO of Close IO, Silicon Valley based startup in Palo Alto. I saw him speak and I'm sure you guys, you all have these fanboy moments and that was one of them. I was first seeing this guy, I was like, oh man, I want to learn from this guy. And basically after his presentation, after the keynote, there was a row of, I don't know, like 120 people. But I made it, I hustled my way through and I got a job at his company. I moved all the way from Austria, tiny little and small, not very entrepreneurial Austria all the way to Silicon Valley, one way ticket. And that's where everything started, worked for him. And before I started World Audience and now I'm running World Audience, it's pretty much it.

Wow, that's really cool the way that you, you basically like brute forced your way into that company.

Yeah, I was really annoying.

No, I mean I'm sure you did in a clever. Well, in a very nice way. I mean, but it worked. Yeah.

Well, yeah. So that's crazy. So explain what you did in Silicon Valley then working for the company.

I was doing sales and marketing there. So Steli, he runs a sales company, he's selling SaaS software to salespeople and I was one of the his sales guys.

So I Learned all about SaaS, I learned all about sales and marketing. I studied a lot of sales processes and that's kind of like where I saw a lot of opportunity. And that's always one of the reasons why I'm doing what I do right now.

Gotcha. Okay, so you basically, I mean you've been taking little elements from your experience, which is very smart, and now you've created your own thing here. So Wild Audiences is kind of what it's created, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So talk a little bit about that since we're honestly pretty new to it all.

Yeah, Wild Audience is all about respect based marketing and super advanced funnel automation. So basically you want to take never changing business elements like relationship, trust, beliefs and stuff like that, and you want to combine it with modern nowadays technology. Right. And automation. And together it works really, really well. And that's exactly what we're all about. And that's what we show other companies how to implement and how to rock with it.

So you guys, are you guys an agency?

Nope.

I wouldn't say that. So we do two things. On the one hand we have trainings, so online trainings, video based trainings, more do it yourself style. And then on the other hand we do consulting. So yeah, so we work with bigger teams, people who have marketing people and they want to use respect based marketing, they want to automate their funnels, then we come in and do together with them.

Gotcha.

Got it. So very similar to our, well, what our model was, we had a model that was very focused on info products, selling online courses and then also consulting. We've recently gotten rid of all the info products and put pretty much all of our focus into handling the consulting and promoting products as affiliates. But it's a very, very similar business model. And you know, we try to use what we'd consider respect based marketing as much as possible. But let's hear your definition of the respect based marketing, because this is obviously the sort of linchpin that what you teach is built around. So what's your definition of this respect based marketing that you teach people?

Yeah, sure. So respect based marketing is all about optimizing your marketing and optimizing your communication to get the receiver to get the people you engage with. You want to get them engaged. Okay. So that's the main idea. You want to optimize for engagement. Okay. So you want to understand two things. First of all, you want to optimize for engagement. The second thing is, and that's something Gary Vee always coined, you know, the currency of business is attention. You want to attract attention, but you also want to learn how to maintain it. Right? And the way you maintain this is by getting people engaged. Because the idea is the following. If you get a lot of people engage, if you get the right people engaged, your conversion rates will go up and your revenue will go up. But because if you just think about it, if you, if you and me, we both send, you know, emails to 100 people. Right. If you get, you know, 30% of the people to click a link and I only get 10%. Right. You will achieve more with the less the same amount of traffic. Right. And that's why engagement is so important. And that's what respect based marketing is all about. We use different methods like frequency selectors, activation hooks, open loops, cliffhangers and so on in order to get people engaged and prepare them and ready them for the conversion event where we actually get people to pull up the credit card and pay you money.

Okay. Like I like, you know, Gary Vee likes to kind of, well, he has a whole book about it. But the whole jab, jab, jab, right hook, you know, you're kind of giving value, value, value. You're kind of like almost tapping them closer to that end result. And then conversion event is kind of what he calls the right hook. Go for the gold.

Yeah, that's cool.

Now with, with the respect based marketing, you know, one of the things that you mentioned in this sort of pre interview questions that we asked was that you, you tend to do the marketing without, you know, fake scarcity or product launches and, and that sort of stuff. So what, what do you do differently? Because one, one thing that I've, I've, that sort of been hammered into marketers, people that study marketing over the years is people don't buy unless there's some sort of scarcity attached. You need to give them a reason to do it now. Otherwise people will just constantly say I will get this eventually. And then eventually never comes. So what sort of tactics do you use that are sort of different than the conventional wisdom of scarcity and product launches and the norm that most people are taught to do?

Yeah, that's a good question. So here's the thing. At the beginning, I was just doing what most people do and companies and entrepreneurs do. I was using fixed scarcity, I was using urgency, I was doing product launches, I was doing promotions, I was using discounts. And the best thing was I was doing everything at the same time, right? And a lot of companies operate like that. That's one thing. And the other thing is I based my entire revenue on this, right? I was very dependent on that monthly promotion. I was very dependent on that weekly blast and so on, right? And then there was this one, I remember it very clearly. There was this one time where I had this monthly promotion going and I screwed up. Just didn't work out the way I wanted to work out. My whole revenue kind of was screwed. I was like, okay, never again. And that's kind of, that's, that was the moment when I said, okay, I want to build an evergreen asset, right? I learned about the asset thinking I want to create something, an engine which once it's built, it's built and it runs and runs and runs and runs. So what I'm saying is fake scarcity and discounts and stuff like that and promotions, they're not bad, right? But what's bad is using everything at the same time and then basing your marketing on it. So instead I would do evergreen, have an evergreen system. And then on top of that do the birthday promotion. And so on and that's kind of like the new way of how I do the stuff.

I love it. And you've said something that we are huge proponents of is building assets in your business. And that just triggered my brain because when you think of assets, you think of cash flow and it's not like a one time, there's your cash flow like at once, like a product launch. You want cash flow every single day from whatever asset you build. And that's where we've strategically built our business is. You know, we've had continuity in our business and we still do in different forms through affiliate offers, but we also have a lot of rev share deals, equity deals with partners and companies out there that we acquire. And we see it all as building this portfolio of assets and then being well diversified but being smart in building these relationship or sorry, respect based marketing type funnels around each one of those.

Yeah, exactly. It's a huge thing. And often people say like it takes a lot of time to build an asset like this, but once they understand that once it's built, it's built and it runs, then it changes the game.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean we're all about that. Our business, our brand name is Evergreen Profits. So that is literally what we go out there and focus on in our business is if it's not evergreen, we're not interested. And it's funny because we actually were recording an interview with somebody earlier today all about the product launch model. Basically it was somebody else who used to do a lot of product launches and now they don't do them anymore. And the whole thing is as, even as affiliates of a lot of products, we don't like product launches. Even though we could make a lot of money during a product launch. If we're going to put in a ton of effort to, you know, build a promotion, make bonuses to promote a product, build, you know, content around this product to educate people on why they need it. If we're going to put in all that effort, we don't want to put in that effort for something that's going to make us a spike on a, over a three day period and then disappear forever. We want to put in that effort and make sure that that effort is going to generate returns in perpetuity until for as long as that product exists.

Totally agree with you guys.

So let's talk about. So if you go away from launch models and this is a question we actually asked the other guy, but I'm curious to hear how you do it. How do you approach scarcity or how do you build in? Because obviously there's still you can do it in the right way. And even if it is an evergreen type product, you can always build a little bit of urgency to kind of push them to a buy now rather than next week. How do you approach that?

Yeah, so that's a good one because I actually tested this. And so it was last year, for one month, we didn't do any promotion.

No webinar, nothing, which was kind of like creating scarcity and urgency. And we wanted to see.

How it affected our revenue. And it affected our revenue quite heavily. And after that we said, okay, we need scarcity, but how do we do it in a respectful way that goes aligned with an evergreen way of doing things? So what we do now is so basically, you know, we have, we attract leads. There are different ways on how to do that. Right. And then we have what we call, it's not a sales funnel, it's called a relationship funnel. And the relationship funnel basically deploys respect based marketing. Okay. And this, you know, relationship funnel is all about installing the right beliefs so that once someone arrives at the conversion event, which is the sales page, the sales call, the one on one sales meeting and so on, once the person arrives there, all the necessary beliefs are installed. That kind of like when she is or he is on the sales call, she can accept the desire or the need of your product. Right. And on the sales call, it's kind of quite easy to then convert that person because he or she already believes all the necessary beliefs. Right. So how do we then create urgency or scarcity? Right. So what we do, we do one of our conversion events is a webinar. Okay. That's what we use for more of our digital products. And what we do there is we have these webinars alive, meaning I do them once a week, every Thursday. And that's the way we do it right now. And what we do is we offer another product which is complementary to our core product we offer, which someone can go to our sales page and actually buy that product. We offer that product. It's 200 bucks. 225. We offer that for free. And that's only for the people who are right now on the webinar and who are in this webinar promotion which happens every week. So that's kind of one way on how we create scarcity urgency.

So it's like using bonuses, essentially, special bonuses and maybe even alternating bonuses on each of the webinars, it sounds like.

Exactly. So instead of discounting or we have A product, and we actually show them, hey, you can go and buy this, but now you get it for free.

Okay.

If you buy now. Right. And that's kind of how we do it.

Yeah, that's pretty much what the other guy was doing, too, so it works. Yeah, I didn't want to say that before hearing it from you first.

Yeah, no, that's the proper way to use scarcity. And I mean, obviously, if your product is legitimately scarce, you know, if you've got a physical product business where you legitimately have a limited quantity, use that scarcity to its fullest.

Sure.

But don't use the fake scarcity. Right. I think that's where people get. Get things wrong and lose a lot of trust is the fake scarcity. Oh, my digital ebook. There's only 50 copies left. Bullshit. There's not 50 copies left. It's digital. And I think that's where people lose the trust with their audience.

And I think also the way you phrase it, because if you say, like, okay, There are only 50 copies and it's a digital product, as you just said, that doesn't make sense. And people like, all right, this is bs but if you phrase it in a way, hey there, I only want to. I want to reward the first seven people who act and join the program or buy the product. I want to reward them for acting fast. These people get it for free. Right. Everyone else has to pay. Right. So that's kind of like one way you can phrase it. So you actually make that, you know, the listener understand why this is for free and why There are only 7 items or copies of it.

Got it. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Yeah. No, I like that. I think that's one of the things that a lot of people struggle with, is they feel like they should have scarcity in their sales message, because we know that when there's scarcity involved, it's going to convert better. They just don't know how to apply scarcity without it being a false scarcity element.

Yeah.

So I'm curious. You mentioned now relationship funnels. I like your branding, by the way, all these different terms you use, because I think that's smart for any business to have their own terms that you can kind of refer to and then you create your own language, you know, with your community, which is really cool.

Exactly.

Yeah. So, yeah, describe this relationship funnel or these funnels that you build out and kind of the elements of each do.

So the relationship funnel is a customer journey. Right. And if you run a business, right, you want to sell Your items, you want to sell your products or services. Right. And basically just like an architect needs to architect a house before he or she actually builds it, you got to do the same thing for your funnel. Okay. You want to architect the whole thing and then you want to start out and implement it. Okay. And the difference between a sales funnel and the relationship funnel is that the relationship funnel deploys respect based marketing and that the whole sales experience is optimized to get people engaged. And that's a fun thing. So if you go, for example, to my website, Wildartn Love, you will see an entire website where you can scroll down for literally like probably minutes where you see people, how they react and respond to our marketing. Right. So we want to get people to feel and respond and act. We want to move hearts, minds and wallets. That's what we always say. Right. And then if you do that, the natural, the next logical step is to get, to get them to actually convert. Okay. So that's kind of what the relationship funnel does we use. And if you guys want, we can talk about certain tactics which we deploy in order to get them to move and react so that we can actually install the right beliefs and so on.

Yeah.

Is that something?

Yeah, oh, absolutely. Is that the multi channel and evergreen sales funnels you were mentioning in the.

For example, one thing we do is a multiple channel approach. And I know you guys are big advocates of that too, right?

Yes, absolutely. Yep.

And so basically you choose whatever makes more sense for you in industry. So what we have seen is what works best for us is.

Using email as your main channel. And then we have other mediums, other channels which support that main channel. Okay. And it's a bot sequence. It's an evergreen ad retarding funnel on Facebook. Right. That could be a Facebook group. Right. You can choose whatever you want. You don't have to use email. You can choose what makes sense for you. And the cool thing is you can create these sequences, these funnels on any, like one of our customers, he actually, he's using a Facebook group. And so once someone joins the Facebook group, they need to click the COVID picture and that each, each post leads to the next post. And he's actually building a relationship inside a Facebook group. So you can, you can use whatever medium or general you want, but you can use multiple channels at the same time. Right. So that's, that's, that's one thing we do. Another thing is because I mentioned engagement quite a lot. Right. So how do you get people actually engaged? And there are a Few ways on how we actually do that. One way is, for example, the frequency select. It's quite. I mean, I haven't seen it anywhere else. If you guys know anyone, let me know. Basically, at the end of the email, or what everyone does is there's email automation, right? You send an email and then you wait either one day or two days, right? And then that's the way it is, right throughout the entire sequence. What we do at the end of the email, we give the reader the choice, basically, hey, do you want to get the next email now or in two days? Right. They click the right link and it's like, now, boom. The next email gets triggered immediately. Meaning that acts as a micro investment, right? So they click, they get the next email. And that allows you to kind of decrease ROI time because someone can consume the entire sequence in an hour if they want to, and then show up to the webinar at the same time and buy or jump on a sales call and so on. So that's kind of like the frequency is a really cool thing to get people to engage and decrease roi.

And what technology do you use to make that happen?

So I run an active campaign. My ESP is active campaign, but it's pretty much to implement that stuff. It's just a matter of tagging. So you use two different links, you use two different tags and then you implement it. And it's pretty much it's not that difficult. So we use ActiveCampaign.

Got it.

I've never seen that done before.

Yeah, we use Drip, which I believe has similar functionality.

But yeah, one of a few customers of us of ours, they use the frequency selector and they build it with chip.

Cool.

That might be something we do because we send out at least three pieces of content every week. And so we do a lot of value, but we definitely have some promos or some kind of launch that we're promoting, something of that respect, so we can try that out. I think that's really cool. Yeah, I'm curious about that love page that you had, the testimonials page, because we actually checked it out prior to the call and we used to use something similar when we're promoting this physical newsletter we sold. It's basically just load up all the testimonials. But I like how you did it. How do people find that? Is that part of the sequence that you have the relationship funnel?

Yeah, so we try to channel people to that page through, you know, through different ways. So on the one hand, I think in email 2 or something like that we link to that. Right. We have, for example, an enter ad retarding funnel on Facebook, which is all about case studies and social proof. So there we link to the love page, right? In my PS section of every email I send out, I say, hey, I build respect based or I build relationship funnels to get people to move and then feel like this. And then this is linked to my love page. Right. So I kind of like try to lead with that love page wherever I can. Because at the bottom of the love page, there's a link to my sales page. So someone who actually takes the time to scroll through it and sees all that awesomeness. Right. That person's kind of like, kind of like ready to actually check out the product as well.

Yeah.

So that's kind of the main focus then with your emails and your pss and a lot of the stuff you do is to get people to consume and check that page out. It seems like.

Yeah, because I mean, the ideal scenario is if you don't sell your product or service, but instead your customer base takes over and sells it for you. For example, I remember just like last week, actually, one of our customers, new customers, Brian, he joined and it was like super early in the morning. I didn't see it. He posted into one of our Facebook groups, hey, I'm thinking of buying the relationship funnel. Should I do it? Then four or five people jumped into the conversation on Facebook and said, yeah, you should do it, it's so awesome and you will love it. And so on. Right? And then in the morning, I woke up a new customer and I didn't do any selling, but existing customer base did the selling for me. Right? And that's what the love page allows you to do.

I'm like taking notes over here because I'm like, holy crap. This is so. Because we do a ton of retargeting. We do a lot of email, but. And we promote a lot of products. I mean, you could do this. I'm just imagining for affiliate products, for instance, they don't have to be testimonials from people that bought from you, but just the product as a whole. People loving the product. Or a case study, like you said, some of the most effective retargeting ads that we've run. And also other people have always been case studies and other people telling their story, you know, their success and all that. It's way easier than selling it yourself.

Exactly. What I also even like, I think the email I sent you guys, I think I put a few case studies and proof and then I said, in the end, hey, if you want to check out 56 more screenshot on how people loved it, check out this link.

Yeah, it caught our attention. It works, man.

No, I love that. So I want to actually jump back to where we were talking about some of the more tactical stuff, and you were talking about, you know, emails, bots, retargeting, how all that fits together. Let's. Let's go back into that. And can. Can you sort of explain how some of that stuff ties together? Because you mentioned that the main goal is sort of get them on your email list. Right? The email is sort of the main focus. But then you also do bots, you also do retargeting. You probably do some other social media stuff, Facebook groups and things like that. How does it all tie together? How does it all end up back to your email list?

Yeah, let's do it. That's a good question. So I chose to have the email list as my base.

Okay.

It's the base home. Because it just makes the most sense for my business. Okay. But you, as a listener, you can choose whatever you want, right? Whatever makes sense. Okay. But we choose email. Okay. And Active Campaign is our CRM. It's the esp, but also the CRM where we manage all our user base, our users, and so on. Right. The cool thing is that activecampaign in our case, integrates with all the other tools, meaning it integrates with Facebook. So we can create custom audience. We can actually put people into custom audience from ActiveCampaign in an automation. We can integrate with ManyJet, our bot tool, where we can trigger bot messages from activecampaign and so on. So the way we do it is we have a Facebook ad. Facebook ad is one of the channels we use quite heavily. We offer a free PDF, a lead magnet, and people need to sign up with their email address and first name. So we ask for the email address, and then they go through a second. So they arrive on the thank you page, they go through a segmentation process, and then once they finish the segmentation process, that's where we try to get them into.

The bot. Okay. The reason why we have the segmentation process first, that's basically an interview of five questions. And we ask exactly five questions. We get the data, we know exactly the problem, their goal, and how we can help them. A few other things that allows us to personalize the content on the website through a tool called Write Message. It allows us to personalize and customize the content inside every single email through Activecampaign custom fields and allows us to also customize the Messages inside of ManyChat based on those custom fields. Because all the data which we collect through the interview is synced from ActiveCampaign to ManyChat and so on.

So do you use, like, Zapier or something like that to get.

Exactly. We use zapier.

Okay. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I love how everything is integrated, and I feel like we do. Damn, I feel like an amateur now compared.

Because, I mean, yeah, like, just. Just recently we added a new kind of, like, level to the whole thing is actually personalizing the web pages because we have never done that before. And then.

Brennan Dunn, he started a new company called Write Message. And with that, you can actually. It integrates with your esp in our case, activecampaign, pull out the custom fields, and boom, you change the headlines, you change the images, the testimonials, everything. Right. We ask, for example, okay, what's your biggest goal problem? What's your goal? And then in the headline of the sales pitch, of course, we mentioned the goal. Right. And so on.

Oh, man, that is so. I mean, the biggest thing I know with any. For anyone listening, if you're selling anything or trying to persuade someone to do something, you always hone in on their present pain. It's wherever they're at now. And then show them the light, where they want to go or where they think they want to go. And, oh, my God, if you can match the message where everywhere they see it, you know, and any channel that you kind of can control, you. You win. I mean, they win too, you know, it's a win win.

And that tool was called Write Message. Yes, Write Message. Okay, cool.

It's really cool.

Definitely gonna have to look into that. That sounds right up our alley for sure.

Yeah. You can go to wildaudience.com tools and that will give you all the tools I use for that.

That's very cool.

So the main sort of traffic flow into your business, is it mostly from people sharing? Is it mostly from ads? Is it mostly from SEO? What sort of traffic sources do you go after to get people into these initial funnels?

Yeah, so we use a lot of Facebook ads, meaning paid. That worked really well for us last year. But I have to be honest, this year, things are changing. Facebook is changing. It's getting more expensive. Our cost per leader getting up. So I'm right now in the process of diversifying my sources. It's also one of the reasons why I'm here with you guys today. So I'M doing all kinds of different things right now to diversify the traffic. But the cool thing is it doesn't really matter where I get the traffic from, where I get the people from, because I know all these people are taken care of in my relationship funnel. Because once someone hits that blog post, if it's free traffic, or if once someone hits that landing page, if it's paid, right. I know everything is going to boom, boom, boom happen, right? There's going to be segmentation, the beliefs are going to be installed, the relationship is going to be installed, the trust is going to be installed, the conversion event is ready, and everything is going to play out. Because I already architected the whole thing from scratch and it's just, you know, running and running. And as we talked before, it's an asset, right? It just once you. Because don't get me wrong, it's not like we build it and it works, right? We had iteration one and two and three, and now when iteration three and now it's the way we want it to be, right? So it takes, it takes work. But once you have it, once you have that sweet spot, it's rock and roll.

I love it. Yeah.

Now, can we talk for a second about, about your, your, your backend funnel? Once you get a customer, what do you do with that customer once they've already purchased something from you?

Yeah. So right now we have a front end, we have a core, and we have a backend. We don't have recurring, we don't have a continuity funnel yet, meaning we don't have a software application or have a lot of recurring income yet. That's something we still got to do. But our backend is basically.

We build products which are supporting each other, meaning they're building on top of each other. So if you, the first from this, for example, understanding the funnel strategy, right. Of course, once you understand the strategy, you actually want to implement it. That's what the core is, right? And then the back end is basically, okay, once I have the funnel, ooh, how do I drive traffic? That's one product, right? How do I launch the funnel? Meaning how do I go through iteration 1, 2 and 3? What are the metrics to hit? And so on, right? That's another upsell. Right? And then some people, they prefer more one on one personalized attention. That's another backend product or in this case, a service, actually. So that's kind of how we try to increase the clv the customer lifetime value and just also offer a service or a product for the Right person at the right time, depending on where they are in their business journey.

I mean, I just see the opportunity for so many cross sells. Yeah, these upsells. Like you were saying, if you have so much of this linked everything and everything's so perfect, personalized, you're understanding exactly where people are now, do you?

So for example, sorry, once someone becomes a relationship from the customer, meaning they actually want to implement the relationship funnel, it's our core product. Right. You know, they log into the customer platform and then we have different videos and lessons and so on. Right. And then once they complete certain modules, we know where they are in the building process. And then I know, okay, this person is now ready to launch. Boom. The automated upsell sequence to upsell our launch product is going to play out. Right. So that's also pretty cool.

So with your email marketing, based on this intake survey that you put people through, do you send different emails based on the intake survey or are you just changing the wording of emails that are already going out based on the intake survey?

So in the past, or let me share how I do it now. So basically what we do now is we have two types of sequences basically to sell our core product. The one is basically we divide between do it yourself and done for you. Done with you, done with you is more expensive and so on. Right. And these type of people are very different. That's why we have different sequences. But I try to keep everything as simple as possible. Meaning if you check out our automation, there is we use one email and then inside the email then it looks very fancy because pretty much every kind of text block has only show if tag X, only show this if tag Y. So inside the email we use lots of custom or what's it called, customer content. Custom content based on the data we get from SurveySlam, which is our survey tool.

Got it now, okay, so this survey, do they opt in with their email and then get taken to a survey or is this survey presented at the same time you asked for the email?

So we use a kind of like, I got inspired by Ryan the best care. So we do bucketing, meaning in the past we just said, you know, we had first name and email. That's it, rock and roll. Now we do it differently. We have first a question. So they sign up for the lead magnet, the PDF. Okay, eight steps how to build a Sales funnel and evergreen Sales funnel.

Right.

They want to have this PDF, we first going to ask them the biggest problem we want to figure out. Okay, do they want to transition from launch to, to Evergreen. Do they have an ROI problem or is it more not knowing how to start out? Right, so we get the biggest problem, then they enter the email address and then they arrive on the thank you page. And then on the thank you page is hey, thanks. Welcome to wild audience.

This lead magnet is going to be sent to your email. You know what, I've actually created a seven lesson course on the same topic to solve problem X. And I know the problem because that person just told me. And through right. Message I'm actually going to show this on the website. Right. And there if they want to join that free course, we ask four to five questions to collect more data and then only then we're going to add them into the email sequence. Meaning the difference here is probably most companies, what they do is they have a lead magnet and then after they just add them into a sequence and send them automated emails, we don't. We ask for permission first because if we do and that person actually gives us permission, everything changes for him or her and for us as well after that point.

Got it, got it.

And it seems like yeah, on that thank you page you're, you're almost incentivizing them to give you more information. And I mean that's gold. You can.

But what you need to understand is though of course not everyone will go through that interview and actually join your course, that's something you need to take into account because you will feel like, okay, if I just have the lead magnet then send automated emails. So 100% of the people who sign up for the lead magnet will also get the emails. Right. If you put that extra step in between, what we currently get is around 50 to 70% depending on the target of the people to actually complete the interview. So we lose people in some cases even half of the people. So even if you, that means if you drive Facebook ads and you pay 4 bucks per email address. Right. That means only half of the people go into the rbs. Meaning you paid twice that time. Right. Of the initial price. But that person now raised their hand, actually said, hey, I want to be part of this and you will see the whole engagement go, you know, will go through the roof because that person opted in and micro investment invested into you and now you have all the data, you can personalize the whole experience and so on. Right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean that's the difference of looking at like when we look at rev share potential partners, opportunities that come our way, we're not looking at a list size, you know, 20,000 people. It's like, yeah, that doesn't matter. If only like a hundred of them actually take action. It's like really engagement and it's exactly what you're doing. So you're paying a little bit more but it's totally worth it in the long run.

Yeah, go ahead.

And then. So one thing I wanted to mention is so if not everyone goes, you know, through, goes through and actually signs up for the email address for the email sequence, that maybe be also an indicator that that person is not into emails. Right. So instead of showing them emails, you can then invite them to a bot or may into a Facebook group or into a webinar. Right. Or into a video sequence. Whatever. Right. It just doesn't mean that person. It just means that this person is not interested in that email course. But you can still try different things before you unsubscribe that person.

It's like a choose your own adventure is what they're giving them.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's really cool.

Now you mentioned that you did a Facebook relationship funnel that achieved 4x ROI and 330 days. Would you mind sharing that funnel and.

How you got those kinds of results with that funnel?

Yeah, so that was actually September 2017. So last year this is a case study we share also with our customers and so on. So basically.

The case study goes like this. So we spent almost 7k us. So it was 6, 800 and something. So almost 7 and we made a little bit over 25. So 26 something. And that was within 30 days. Within a 30 days span time span. And basically the funnel was the funnel I just shared with you guys. Right. Lead magnet Facebook ad, lead magnet segmentation and then email bot retarding and then conversion event which is in our case a webinar. Right. And that's how we did it.

I love that outline you just gave right there. It was so short. So yeah, just we'll have to. Well if you're listening, just rewind.

Is there any special advice you'd give people on actual Facebook ad targeting? Because I know that's something that comes up a lot when we're working with people with Facebook ads is trying to figure out how to go after the right targets. I could tell you how we do Facebook targeting, but I, but I want to, I want to hear how you do it first and then we can have a little discussion off that.

Yeah, the targeting thing. Yeah, I'm super interested in how you guys do it. So let's talk about it. But with the targeting that's very interesting because for example if you have an ad set and you run it and you see, oh, the lead only costs, let's say three bucks, and the other ones cost five or six bucks, and you get all excited about it. But this doesn't actually mean that you're attracting. Even though it's cheaper, it doesn't mean that these people will actually convert. And the way we looked at this was because we have that segmentation process, right. We asked. We have actually five questions in our interview, right. And one of those question is, do you start out or do you already generate revenue? So we want to work with businesses who already generate revenue, have products, right. The more the better. Right. So we saw, for example, that some of our ads, which had lower cost per acquisition, attracted more of the people who were beginners, which were not our target. So that's kind of how you got to look at it. And then we saw the people, the leads, which were more expensive. They were more, you know, experienced entrepreneurs and so on. Right. So that's something you always going to keep in mind, even though sometimes you see, ooh, it's cheap. But this doesn't actually mean these kind of people will actually convert. Right?

Right. So as far as actually finding audiences, is your Facebook strategy, is it like pretty much purely like a retarget strategy, or do you have. Do you have certain ways that you go about finding cold audiences?

Yeah, so what we do is. Or what we currently do is so we use ads, twofold Facebook ads, twofold on the one end for lead generation, meaning attracting cold people. And then once they're in the funnel for multiple channels, like retargeting, with two retargeting funnels, one for case studies and one for distributing the content, which is in emails, also via Facebook ads. Okay, so let's talk about the lead gen stuff, because that's the question, right? So with the lead gen, what we currently do is.

So we have all of our audiences above 1 million, actually, they're almost like between 5 and 10 million. And basically we try different things. We have local likes plus interest targeting. So we do flex targeting there on the one end, and then we just do interest targeting. So these are kind of like the different ad sets. And like with Facebook ads is once you find a winner, it will go and go and go until a point and then it will stop working. Right. So I can share with you, like, this is the way to do it. That's the only way it works. Sometimes this one way of, you know, let's say we do flex targeting, it works really well and Then we try it a month later and it doesn't work. And just interest targeting works or just look like audiences work. So my take on Facebook ads is you gotta try. So we always launch six to seven ad sets. Usually we get two to three winners. We scale it up until it doesn't work, and then you play the game again.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So basically when you say lookalike audiences are you. You're basically importing a customer list into Facebook and then telling Facebook, find me more people that look like my existing customers. And then by flex targeting, you're saying, okay, I want more people that look like my customers, but also who like this interest.

Yes. So you combine lookalikes plus interests. When you take lookalikes, those las, you always got to look at the source too. Right. If you take customers, of course, you will always have.

The audience of customers will usually be smaller than the audience of leads. So if you, let's say, only have, let's say 200 customers, Facebook will have less data to play around with. Right. So for example, we have different types of leads. We have normal Leads, we have MQLs, SQLs, we have customers. Meaning MQLs are marketing qualified leads. SQLs are sales qualified leads. These are people. These people, the sales qualified leads are ready to be sold to on the webinar, on the call, and so on. Right. And then we have the customers. Right, so and the more you go towards customers, the smaller the audience will be. Right, Meaning Facebook has less data to play around with. So we saw, for example, you think, okay, and sales qualified leads, right? They are there, they show interest, they must be, they are really hot. Right? So if I give these people to Facebook, Facebook must, must find the best kind of people. Right? But what we have found is that sometimes, actually that wasn't the case. It was more expensive. The reason for that is because Facebook has less data to play around with. Right, got it.

So you have to load it up with more and more and more, you know, as many as you have. Exactly, yeah, yeah.

So. So just to close the loop on the Facebook ads thing, the way we do Facebook ads, we never, ever, ever use cold targeting to an offer. Any sort of offer, email offer, sales offer, nothing. We never use cold targeting towards an offer. We pretty much, if we're going to do cold targeting, we'll do cold targeting to content. So we'll, we'll do cold targeting to a blog post. And then anybody who reads that blog post, we are then going to retarget them On Facebook with ads relevant to the content they read. So we will use cold audiences where typically we go pretty broad. We'll go multiple millions of people in the audience. You know, we'll use like names of niche influencers and try to make the audience as big as possible. We'll put a piece of content in front of that audience. Let's say the piece of content is about, you know, building a funnel, for example. So we'll write a blog post about building a funnel. We'll cold target them. Anybody who reads it. We might now start putting an ad in front of them on Facebook for click funnels, for example, because we know this person is interested in funnel building, they just read content about it. We're going to put the most relevant affiliate offer that we have at our disposal in front of them through retargeting. So that is how we do our sort of ad play. And then we also use Google Ads for cold traffic as well. So if somebody is searching for. Going back to the click funnels example, if somebody searches for click funnels, we might advertise to a blog post about click funnels on Google and then they'll start seeing our retargeting ad about clickfunnels on Facebook as well. So that's how we use Facebook. Facebook for us is cold traffic to content, retargeting traffic to offers.

Awesome. Yeah, we do it the same way. We never for lead gen, cold lead gen. We never send them to offers. We always have. We don't do blog posts though, because for us it was. We had blog posts and then PDF, meaning the lead magnets where we get into opt in that was more expensive than sending them direct directly to the lead magnet. I'm not sure why, because actually the way you say it makes more sense to me. But yeah, hey, if you can get.

It to work, that's cool.

Yeah, I mean test everything. Obviously different niches have different results. Different offers are gonna have different results. So you know, you just gotta kind of test it all.

Especially with Facebook ads.

Yeah, especially with Facebook ads. The thing about Facebook is Facebook is not necessarily buyer intent traffic. Right. People are on Facebook to see what their friends and family and acquaintances are up to and to get sneak peeks into other people's lives. They're not necessarily in a buyer mode when they're on Facebook. So the only way that we could sort of effectively get in front of people on Facebook is to find out what their interests are off of Facebook using our content. So we essentially segment using the content and now we know they have buyer intent because they read content about whatever this offer is. So we love Google search traffic as our favorite paid traffic source because that's mostly buyer intent traffic. If somebody's searching the name of a product, they're most likely interested in buying that product if they're hunting for information about that product. So we use Google traffic to find that buyer intent traffic. Once they've read our content, then we use Facebook to retarget them with the offer that they were initially searching for in the beginning.

Yeah, I love it. And I guess one thing I would add here real quick is when you do Legion, right, if you want to attract leads from Facebook, let's say into your funnel and onto your website. Because we talked about targeting, right? And we just did this mistake last week or solved the problem last week, let's say was, you know, we did all kinds of different targeting and we saw the ads, you know, the costs go up and we're like, okay, why is that happening? Why? Because we tried it in the past and it worked so well. Why is it not working anymore? Until we played out with lookalike and Flex and all kinds of targeting, Right. Until we figured out maybe it's the thing we offer. Right? It's the PDF we offer, we change the PDF, which is the thing which you offer. Right. We give away and then everything starts to work again. Right. So always keep the offer always in mind. Keep. Keep the offer in mind. Because that we did that mistake and we actually spent a lot of money and we lost a lot of money because of that.

That means that's always good. I mean it's again, it goes back to the whole like solve the present pain. That offer just couldn't have been really resonating, you know, and then you tweak it, even if it's just the copy, it could make all the difference. Yeah.

So one last question before we ask our sort of final wrap up questions. What is your marketing stack? What tools do you use to accomplish all this? We know you'll use ActiveCampaign for your email follow up sequence and your CRM. You mentioned a survey tool. I actually didn't write down that survey tools name yet. But I'm curious what your marketing stack of tools are that you use to accomplish everything you're doing.

Yeah, yeah, I love those. I love tools, I guess, like you guys. So basically the heart is active campaign, as I mentioned before, right. To build all the. So we are WordPress based, meaning we don't use ClickFunnels, we use WordPress and then to build the landing pages and the funnel pages, we use a tool called Thrive Architect. Okay. And then for segmentation purposes we use Survey Slam. Okay, that's S O A M survey. And then just like slam one word. They're actually really cool. I promote them quite a lot because they're really cool tool. And the guy behind us is also really cool. And it's. The cool thing is so it's, it's a WordPress based tool though. I mean I think you can also use it without WordPress. But the focus is WordPress. It's a one time fee and a two. The time we record this, it's 97 bucks. You paid once and then you have it. You Compare that to Typeform for example, which is I think around 20 bucks a month. Right. And it does everything, it does all the segmentation stuff and it integrates with all the ESPs like ActiveCampaign Sense data over done. Typeform doesn't do that at the time we record this for example.

Right.

So I use service time for the segmentation and then for webinars I use Demio and then for bot I use manychat to integrate all the tools I use Sapier and to personalize the website I use. Right message.

Yeah, we love ManyChat too. ManyChat is just such an awesome tool. And that's another one. The price to me has always been such a no brainer. It's 10 bucks a month.

It's just crazy to me to start out with. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

That's good stuff, man.

And then I guess one last thing that would be interested also. What do you guys use for that? For analytics, we recently implemented Conversion Flash into our entire funnel to start tracking it. And also we use it in combination with Heap Analytics. What do you guys use for analytics?

Pretty much just Google Analytics and then custom spreadsheets that we had built for us in Google Sheets. We actually had a developer develop some Google Apps scripts for us in Google Sheets that pulls in data from multiple places. So it pulls in data for us from Drip from Google Analytics, from our AdSense account, from various places around the Internet. It pulls it all into one spreadsheet and then analyzes the data for us. So that's something that we actually paid a developer to build for us inside of Google Sheets.

Okay, very cool because I'm very interested in analytics. But to be honest, I haven't found that tool yet, which is the dream of my analytics tool.

Well, that was our struggle as well. And I guess we're in a different Scenario because we're not really selling a lot of our own products anymore. We used to. Or else we'd probably be doing conversion fly and all these other things. But definitely, it seems like there's still a gap out there in the market for really good analytics. Yeah, agreed. So we'll keep a lookout for you.

We build it ourselves.

Yeah, we basically built a custom solution right now for us. But it's not something that's really sellable. You know, it's built in Google sheets and a lot of the code in the backend has our own personal APIs in it. So whoever wanted to use our thing would have to get into the backend code and mess with all the API data that's built into it. And it just, it's not something that we can actually provide other people with, but it's something that's built for our business and it's. We call it our command center. And I actually do have a video about it on the blog, so I'll link to that in the show notes about how Backend Command center works. But yeah, you know, it pulls in, it pulls in the last 30 days. So it's got a list of every piece of content on our blog and it automatically pulls in the last 30 days traffic number for every piece of content on the blog. So I can quickly sort by what our most traffic posts are. You know, it's got data on what our best keywords are in Google. We're big into the SEO stuff, so it's got a lot of SEO data in it as well.

Wow. Okay. Very cool.

Yeah, we'll put that video in the show notes, I guess before we wrap up. Is there anything we're kind of leaving out that you feel like we should ask you that makes it unique or something we might have missed?

I guess one thing.

Which is really, really important. So if you guys build a sales funnel, if you guys want to build a relationship funnel. A funnel is always based on a belief system. And kind of. I mentioned it before, but I think it's so important so I want to mention it one more time. So we buy stuff based on how. On beliefs. Right. So you have a belief system. You guys have a belief system. I have a belief system. Right. And that's how we decide between right and wrong. Right. And that's why we do certain things and don't do certain things. And these beliefs are always based on stories and experiences we have in our daily life. Right. So if you want to sell something, right. If you go to the supermarket and you Want to buy an orange? You're only going to buy that orange if you truly believe that orange is healthy and yummy. If you don't believe that, you will never buy that orange for yourself. Right. And the same goes for if you want to sell your product. Right. So what a sales funnel is, what a relationship funnel is, it's nothing else than communication between you and the prospect. And the goal is to install all necessary beliefs that he or she can accept the desire or need of your product. Right. And then once those beliefs are installed, then you can add that person to the conversion event. You know, jump on a call, put them into the webinar, and then you will get that person to convert. But don't do it before. Right? And all these objections and roadblocks, these are all false beliefs. And your job as a marketer, as a salesperson, as an entrepreneur is to break those beliefs, reinstall them, and then once they install, you can sell that person. Right. And the thing is, you can build an awesome funnel. You can implement all the things we talked about today with personalization and bots, multiple channels, retiring and so on, but if the funnel is based on a wrong belief system and installs the wrong beliefs, this funnel will not convert. So you want to make sure the foundation is rock solid and the foundation is a belief system.

Yeah, I love it. That's really good reminder. Yeah, that goes for business in general, is always build that very strong belief system around what you're doing.

Exactly.

Good stuff. Well, one of our wrap up questions is we always like to ask people, but what's one book that you kind of see yourself recommending other people or you kind of go to yourself for like a good reminder maybe, you know, often.

Yeah. So I guess Cialdini, Persuasion, Robert Cialtini is one of my favorite books.

That is so interesting. Okay, so I just have to say this real quick. We did four recordings today and out of the four recordings, three of them mentioned Cialdini.

Really?

So that's awesome. That definitely speaks into that book in that author.

Yeah. Just the way it's written, it's sometimes difficult to understand, you have to reread a sentence, but I really like that until I actually grasp it and understand it. And his stuff is golden.

Oh, it is, man. And it's all told through its stories and case studies, which I think lets it sink in even more with proof. Yeah. It's not just theory. So good stuff, man. I appreciate you being so honest and transparent too with your funnels because I mean, you laid so much Gold out here. This could literally be like a framework. Draw it and process map all this stuff out. So I challenge a listener to do that and then send it to us.

Yeah, I'm glad it's helpful.

Yeah.

Awesome.

It was helpful.

So everybody needs to go and check out wildaudience.com and definitely, definitely look@wildaudience.com love, because that's just. And we're going to link those up in the show notes. But that's just an awesome example of what he's trying to achieve. Go ahead, Joe.

And slash tools. I know that you mentioned that as well. Shows all the tools.

Yeah, Tools is slash tools for the tools. And then if you guys wild audience podcast, then basically that goes to a page where you can download a PDF which summarizes the whole thing, what we talked about today.

Ooh, awesome. So wildaudience.com podcast.

Cool.

Exactly.

Awesome. We're definitely going to link all those up and make sure everybody goes and checks those out.

All right, man. Thank you very much, Bastion, for being on the podcast and for reaching out in general, guys.

I enjoyed it a lot. It was good talking to you guys.

All right, man.

Awesome, man.

Take care. See ya.

Take care.

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