Fun Follow Up Sales Tips: The Fun Series Finale I Love Marketing Live Series with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #478

Welcome to I Love Marketing. We took a batch of questions from the I Love Marketing live event and distributed them as individual podcast episodes. And so we're having a lot of fun with that. More questions from this live episode will be presented in future episodes of I Love Marketing. And if you want to attend an I Love Marketing event, definitely head out to ilovemarketing.com to get more information there. Kylen Schroeder wants to know, What are your favorite sales follow-up fun tips? What do you got?

You know, I think one of the best examples would be my buddy Derek Sivers. He had a company called CD Baby. And CD Baby, I have a great interview with Derek, which you can listen to on my YouTube channel. Dean, why don't you explain what CD Baby did? And I'm going to find the famous CD Baby sales letter from Derek Sivers.

Yeah, this was great. So CD Baby, you know, every opportunity, every moment in a timeline becomes an opportunity. And what CD Baby realized, that their most opened email of all the emails that they send was the receipt for your purchase or confirmation of your order. Soon as somebody's most excited about it and they open that, and most companies just send generic, here's the— got your order, here's confirmation, here's the confirmation number. But what they did, they created a letter that when people— as soon as your order came in, he goes through and just tells people how excited they were when we got the order. When your order came in, everybody dropped everything, the bell rang, we all created this, we We all said a chant. We put your— wrapped your CD in the finest, in the finest wrapping. We all marched down to the post office to wing your order to you on the CD Baby private jet. And we're all exhausted, but we hope that you— we're excited that you'll come back and shop again at CD Baby.

Let me read this from Derek's blog post. All right, so here it goes. When You Make a— The Most Successful Email I Ever Wrote is what it's titled. When you make a business, you're making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn't matter how things are done everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be. When I first built CD Baby in 1998, every order resulted in an automated email that let the customer know when the CD was actually shipped. At first, this note was just the normal, your order has shipped today. 'Please let us know if it doesn't arrive. Thank you for your business.' After a few months, that felt really incongruent with my mission to make people smile. I knew I could do better, so I took 20 minutes and wrote this goofy little thing. 'Your CD has been—' So here's what he would—

Here's the actual letter. Yeah, here's the letter.

'Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed on a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure It was the best possible condition. It was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved bon voyage to your package on its way to you in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as customer of the year. We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to cdbaby.com. That once, and then that's the end of it. And then he writes, that one silly email sent out with every order has been so loved that if you search the web for private CD Baby jet, you'll get thousands of results. Each one is somebody who got the email and loved it enough to post it on his website and tell all his friends. That one goofy email created thousands of new customers. When you're thinking of how to make your business bigger, it's tempting to try to think of all the big thoughts that come up with world-changing massive— and come up with world-changing massive action plans. But please know that it's often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you. And so that would be a great example. And now with AI, every single one of you can create your version or get assistance in something like that. And so Mark, who's the founder founder of imemories.com. I just put up a video on our YouTube channel with him, an interview that he did, which is phenomenal, and I would highly encourage you to watch that. But it's polish.tv, goes directly to my YouTube channel, by the way. You know, this CD Baby is a great example. Every one of you can have an after-the-sale or during the sale communication like that in order to infuse fun. And doing something like that really is easy, lucrative, and fun.

You know what else is really fun is Jesse Cole from the Banana Bananas. We did a great I Love Marketing episode. I think it's number 410, something like that. But he's He's got a great book, Find Your Yellow Tux. But his whole thing is about making baseball fun. And so many great ideas in that. That's a huge home run. A billion-dollar company now. It's crazy.

Talk about a guy who has had such a belief in his idea and just put everything that he had behind it. I mean, it's such a great success story. And he's genuinely just a cool dude. One of the Savannah Banana players has a larger following than any Major League Baseball player. Like, I mean, their, their social media is incredible.

I will tell you, in, in the early days of podcasting, one of the things we did was we, uh, we burned, um, podcast episodes to CD. Some people actually liked that or did best of, did really well with the comedy guys. And I'll tell you, one of the most, one of the most confusing, boring, and depressing ideas was, uh, working with fulfillment agencies to ship these CDs. And what was great was I heard, oh, there's these CD Baby guys, they make it fun. And so we went from something absolutely depressing and absolutely annoying to, you know, hanging out with these people online because they were so much fun. You've been listening to a live recording of the I Love Marketing Podcast. And if you'd like to come to a future live recording of the I Love Marketing Podcast where all sorts of wackiness comes into play, uh, visit us at ilovemarketing.com. Make sure you sign up and we will do that in the future.

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