Dean Jackson explains how to revive old leads with a nine-word email asking a single question. Just over 50% of inquirers buy within 18 months, but only 15% in the first 90 days. A short, personal follow-up sent every 90 days can produce 40% reply rates and has closed deals worth millions.
What is the method to basically revive dead leads?
Yeah, that's the thing. Here's the thing. Has anybody been in business for more than 90 days? Just raise your hand right now. Okay, so you have leads that you've been generating. Have you had. Who's had inquiries or web forms filled out or responses to your ads? Raise those hands high. Okay, now here's what happens is most of the time, entrepreneurs, online marketers are mostly focused on how do we convert those leads as quickly as possible. Right. How do we put them through our gauntlet series and how do we get them to buy right now and get what's our earnings per? Click on the things. And we, you know, pummel people to buy right now. And then if they don't, we kind of relegate them to the affiliate list or we'll just pummel them with other people's offers just in case. But we don't treat them like they're good leads. Well, the foundational thing that drives all of it that I found was a study that showed that what happens when people inquire about anything. So what they found was this is a company on an enterprise level, handles inquiries across all kinds of different industries. If you go to a trade show and you fill in information, or you go to a corporate website and you ask for a catalog or whatever, this is a company that does that kind of fulfillment. And they handle millions of leads a year and they do something that was brilliant. They follow up with people and do what they call. Did you buy surveys? So they'll take samplings from different times. 90 days, 6 months, 8, 9 months, all the way through. And what they found was that in calling these people and asking just one question, they'd say, joe, you came to the home show, you inquired about faucets. Have you bought any faucets? Not. Would you like to buy some faucets? Not. Did you buy our faucets? Did you buy faucets? The category of what it was you inquired about. So what they found was that just over half of the people that inquire about anything will buy what it is they've inquired about within 18 months. But only 15% of them will do it in the first 90 days. So 85% of the value of a bundle of 100 leads today is longer than 90 days away. Most people's long term lead conversion process is 90 days. By 90 days, they've fully given up on them. So what we found was that if we realize now that for whatever reason, people start shopping, researching, inquiring, investigating, Whatever it is they're going to buy months before they actually do it. What if we just went back to those people and instead of saying, did you buy? What if we sent an email to them and said, hey, are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? Or are you still planning a trip to Israel? Or are you still looking for stylish motorcycle jeans? Or like one guy, we had this. Our favorite story ever of this guy's a yacht broker in Fort Lauderdale, had was in a office like the old boys network. Those guys have zero tolerance for tire kickers. You know, they literally had a file in the office called Dead Leads, paper file printed out of all the web inquiries or whatever. And he started going through and just sending them a nine word email that said, are you still looking for a yacht? And when he got a reply back from a guy who's under contract right now on a $130 million yacht that's going to be delivered next year and in the meantime bought a $50 million yacht to tide him over until his $130 million yacht is delivered. All from sending a nine word email to Dead Leeds, the same thing I mentioned. The guy did luxury trips or, you know, these are expensive trips, high end trips to Israel. And he sent an email to people saying, are you still planning a trip to Israel? And reengaged with all the people who had inquired last season. There's so many things that get in the way of somebody making a decision right now. But if you build this sequence into what you do 90 every 90 days, just inquiring with people, are you still looking for whatever it is that you do? It's like a magic trick. I've never had anybody who sends that to a group of people not be amazed by what happens. We had a job like executive recruiter who had been sending jobs and sending jobs to people and crickets, nobody replying to their emails. And she sent an email that said, are you still available? That was the email, right? Not anything about this particular job, but are you still available knowing that it's coming from somebody who they've been communicating with about a job, it was like out of the woodwork, people come. Because it breaks that pattern of you just broadcasting information to people or sending group emails to people and makes it feel like you're only talking to them. You know, I call it the Starbucks test. It's like if you recognize, let's say that somebody came into your office or they came into an open house or they came in to see you for a consultation, it didn't work out at the time, but you recognize them and then you're in Starbucks and you see them, what would you say? It would be that same thing if you say them. If they came to an open house and you're saying, oh, hi, you're still looking for a house in Paradise Valley. That's how you would say it if you saw them at Starbucks. And it's the same thing about why these work. Because most people are sending emails with that approach where they walk into Starbucks, hop up on the table, start banging the cup, and say, attention, everybody. Is anybody in here still looking for a house in Paradise Valley? Because if any of you are, you start speaking to the crowd rather than speaking to one person. That's what we really have with email is this ability to engage one person at a time. It's a very intimate form of communication. If you treat it like a dialogue where you're sending something, just imagine that scenario. You walk into Starbucks, you see somebody that you recognize, you look them right in the eye and you say, hey, are you still planning a trip to Israel? And you're looking right at them and you don't say anything else. How awkward would it be for them not to say something? Right? That's what it is. You've got to think about these emails like a dialogue, just a really slow conversation. And the great thing about it is that it's like you get to push the pause button on a conversation because when you say something, there's a delay and they send something back and you get the wonderful opportunity to respond, not react. And that's the brilliance of you can wordsmith and make sure that you're saying it the right way, saying the right thing to people, but being real makes a big difference. So that's, you know, we've seen it happen again and again and again. If you just don't overthink it and send an email to your. To the people who you've maybe been in contact with. And it went quiet. You know, that whole thing there's. The thing is that just because they don't open your email doesn't mean they didn't see it. How many times do you, you know, when you look at it right now, that email is delivered into the same stream because that's, let's face it, that's how we're reading emails now is on our phones, so we're streaming through. And that email is in that same stream where their mother sends emails. Their mom gets 100% open rate. Right? Well, one other thing that happens is if you can use a nine word email, the morning after somebody opts in and you get somebody to reply to your email, guess where you get automatically whitelisted because, oh, this is somebody that they know. So imagine we send sometimes morning after emails, nine word emails that get a 40% response rate. So you know, you're getting lots of opens but getting really great engagement. So functional deliverability. What really helps is if you can get engagement early. If you get a high level of people opening, you know the highest open rate is going to be on the first email that you send. If you can the next morning get another open and a reply, you're like establishing yourself as, oh no, these are real emails. Yeah, they really want to hear from this person again.
I will go back to what Dean says. The quicker you can get someone to engage with you earlier on, the more likely. And you can get them on different lists, you can be communicating to them in different ways because for the most part you, if they're really engaged, even if they're like, even to get them to respond back is going to. It's just a much, it's a much different relationship than if they're on a list. That's why I've always, I mean, I worked a lot with Dan Kennedy. I mean, for the first nine years of my business, I had Dan write a lot of my sales copy. And Dan, of course is brilliant. He uses terminology like the herd and it's like cattle. People you have a relationship with are not part of a herd. They're people you have a relationship with. So it depends to just how well you curate those relationships.
