The One With Brian Kurtz - Bonus Episode - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish and Dean Jackson

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hello, this is Joe Polish, and I'm here at the Piranha Marketing and Genius Network headquarters with a very sharp friend of mine. We got all dressed up.

Yeah, you got long sleeves.

Yeah, I just, you know, you look good. Thank you. Before we start recording, Brian's like, do I look okay? I'm like, you're fine. We're just good to talk. So, Brian Kurtz, I've known for almost 20 years, and you have done all kinds of things, including running, you know, the awesome company Boardroom, Inc. Which was founded by the late Marty L. Who was a direct marketing, direct mail genius. As are you. And of course, I started in direct marketing. Direct mail first learned about it in 1992. Before the Internet existed as a sales platform, I used direct mail and advertising and many forms of offline marketing to build and grow my business. First as a dead bro carpet cleaner who used marketing to transform my small company. And then I fell in love with marketing, and then I started teaching it to other carpet cleaners.

Well, I used to come out here for the boot camps, which was just incredible. I mean, you were teaching them gold. I mean, these are carpet cleaners from all over the country, and you're teaching them basic direct response techniques. Then being able to market at a level that world class marketers were doing in all other industries. And the carpet cleaners were lucky because they got you, you know, and I used to be amazed being them.

Yeah. And I mean, when you came out to talk to the cleaners, you were pretty awesome. You've always been great.

I love talking to them because they were just so hungry for this information. And I remember, I just remember the first time I came out, you gave them a book. It was like this thick and it had. It was basically a how to be. How to be, not how to be a carpet cleaner, how to be a direct response maven. And it was, you know, the sample ads, and you were basically teaching them basic direct marketing and basic direct response. And a lot of it was direct mail. I mean, back then, right?

No, and it still is. And what I've always said to people too, is because anyone that's not in that industry, because now in Genius Network, I mean, you're part of the group. We have a billionaire in the group. We have people running 100 million to $500 million companies. We've got about 15 people in the group that do that. So what I've always told people is that if I can figure out how to successfully sell carpet cleaning services using direct mail and direct marketing and you've got anything even remotely more exciting, anyone could use it. Because what first comes up is a negative for some people saying, oh, that won't apply to me because I'm not in that business. Soon realizes if you frame it properly that this applies to.

Well, we talk all the time about. I spend a lot of time now at conferences of Internet marketers and it just blows me away that anybody would want to define themselves by a channel. We used to look at ourselves as direct marketers. Direct direct mail was a channel. Space was a channel. When email came out, that was a channel. Direct response television. All of those are channels. And to not use everything at your disposal, you're not really doing justice to being the kind of world class marketers that you and I are and the people that we like to hang around with.

Well, let's talk about for people that don't know who you are because you never positioned yourself as a guru. You don't go out there and you always downplay the knowledge that you have, but you have, you've mailed how many letters do you think?

You know, I tried to like estimate recently and I put it into some bio stuff now because it took me a long time to count it all because it was 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail and it was only over the last 20 years. And only over the last 20, over the last 20 years. So I don't know what the total number would be. And of course I didn't, you know, lick every stamp and I didn't, you know, put every piece in the mail. But I was overseeing that kind of volume over a long period of time with an incredible staff of people who really understood the intricacies of how to do direct mail. And it's not just direct, it's database marketing. The thing that's been so fascinating to me in the Internet world is that we have a database of 9 million people on our database of people who bought something from us over the last 20, 25 years. And I tell people if they have a 9,000 name list or a 900 name list, to not look at that audience and think about what's on that list and what they bought, how they bought, how much they bought, and all the basics of direct marketing, which is what we call rfm, recency, frequency, monetary, which we can talk about if you want.

Yeah, we're going to, I'm going to make a little note of that.

Yeah. But I think that all of those things still apply even it's not just because we had a big database. So, yeah, I can brag, as you say. You know, it's not bragging if you've done it, but I think John Wayne said that or something. I thought Joe Pollard said that.

Well, you can credit me and make me look better, but no, I definitely was not the first to say that.

Yeah, but it's a good. And the thing is, it's not bragging to say, you know, you mail 1.3 billion pieces of mail. But what's really exciting is that we actually were targeting customers in a way that enabled us to mail that many names at an acceptable profit and loss because of the, the way we selected our list, the way we did our creative, the way that we looked at the whole process. Which, you know, you can be a lot sloppier today. Right. I mean, the quote is, the quote that I like today is 75 cent. Marketing deserves $500 per thousand. Thinking so 75 cents. We'll say it's the average cost for an email.

For an email or I guess the.

Send email is about, I don't know, 50 to 75 cents. 1,000. So I don't know, I use 75 cents. Maybe I'm overpaying. I better go check my vendors. You could be. It could be ye. But $500 1000 is a rate that you would pay with postage and printing. And we do magalogs and all kinds of different formats and direct mail. And if you're spending $500 per thousand to do your marketing, you better be thinking carefully about before you put anything in the mail. And I think that there's just a lot of haphazard marketing going on because email is cheap and anybody can get into business. The beauty of the Internet is that the cost of entry is low. The bad news about the Internet is the cost of entry is low.

So people can be very sloppy. They don't think through everything.

Exactly.

And they think because it's free, it's really free. When in reality, what you're saying, if you put some serious thinking into the offer, that's everything, everything, then the returns could be 10 times greater.

Well, Gordon Grossman was one of my gurus. He built Reader's Digest. And he used to always say that in direct mail that when you mail a certain segment of your list, that if it was a bad offer and the wrong select those names. Not to say that they're not going to respond next time to something else. But you've now kind of You've kind of made them. The possibility would be that they might not respond as well next time to the next offer. And I don't think, you know, the online marketers think that way about the attrition of their lists. And I came out of the list business too. That's really where I started. So going back to my history, it was more about the audience and the list. And I just love the idea that you have this list of there are no unique names, only unique lists. Right. And so the assembly of that list and online marketers have figured this out on steroids, right? I mean, knowing that they've developed this tribe and they can give them so much good content before they really sell them something, those are the guys that are doing it, right? The ones that are just bashing their list all the time. They're not using that $500 per thousand thinking. And not only that, they have no interest in doing direct mail either, which is kind of like what you and I want to be out there talking about and saying, you know what? You could use direct mail even though you've never used it before.

Well, my hope would be that anyone watching this, listening to this, would become interested, intrigued enough to realize there is a ton of gold within their. Within their existing database, within their sphere of influence, within their affiliates. If they're an affiliate. There's a tremendous amount of untapped gold that most people aren't even aware that they could mine for it because they don't even know this mining methodology. It's like handing someone a shovel that can or a pick that can dig up gold, but they don't even use it. And so why direct mail? Why now? Of course, this could open up a whole stream of different paths we can go down. A lot of people don't use it because they don't understand it. They don't know where to start. Me and you are going to have lots of conversations. This is not going to be the only video that we record. But I wanted to just sit down and see if we can start getting people intrigued and interested so that the action that they want to take is like going, I got to figure out how to do this. That makes a lot of sense to me. I see why I should go down this path.

Sorry, everybody's going right. Maybe go left and see what's there. There's a lot of opportunity. I mean, I'll use it as a very trite example, but. So I was looking at the database of an online marketer recently. Not a big list. Maybe she Had, I don't know, 10,000 people on her list. And she was like showing me a list of all the different people of what they bought. So, you know, I have, you know, this many people have bought two products, this many people bought three products, all the way down. She had one person who bought 17 products. So I made sort of a joke, but it wasn't really a joke. I said, how many times have you have you had that person to dinner, the one person who bought 17 products? And she looked at me like, what are you talking about? And I said, well, I'm actually teaching you database marketing. Because what I'm saying is that if you knew that all the different aspects of those people at the top of your list, like your list of 25k members, you treat them like gold because they're all VIPs, but the average marketer doesn't think about their database that way and doesn't have to be that big or small database. So I just love that concept of making sure that you're not sending the same message to everybody. And it might be that person who bought 17 products from you. And I'm not saying you have to invite them to dinner, but you could, but then you'd send them the three dimensional packages that we talk about, which is direct mail. Right. It's not just.

Well, yeah, because you're saying before we start recording, you can't send a three dimensional email.

No.

Explain what you mean by three dimensional. I mean, I get it because of direct mail. A lumpy mail. A lumpy mail. What does that mean?

Well, you know, it's funny, Marty Edelston, who just passed away when I was doing his eulogy, just died recently. And at his eulogy I was saying, you know, Marty, you know, not that he didn't get the Internet, but he understood that if there was someone he really wanted to have that personal connection with, he knew that a note in his handwriting with things that were of interest to that person, it's a lot different. I mean, yes, we love to attach funny videos and email and we're going to continue to do that and it's great. And for certain people in our lives, that's great. But when you start looking at people working at a very high level with high ticket products, the ability to connect with people without meeting them individually, I think direct mail gives you an opportunity to get inside their heads in a way, get inside their dreams, aspirations, things that you have in common with them. And it's, you know, I tell people, I tell college students when they go on interviews, you know, I had a whole group of college students. I said, I said, you know, if you go to an interview and after the interview, instead of sending an email, you actually write out a letter. You use paper, and I took a piece of paper. This is called paper and this is called a pen. And if you send a letter and then maybe if you attach an article that you might have been discussing during the interview of something that you were talking, I was making up what it could be, it could be anything that I will tell you. And then I whispered into the microphone, you'll be the only one doing this, right? So the differentiation for someone getting a job in a market where you can't get a job, that's direct mail. So then why not take that to the next level, even if you're doing more mass marketing? So I don't know if that makes sense, but it's like a philosophy, it.

Makes total sense because it is something that no one else will be doing. And let's just take young people right now, okay? Now, if this video is watched 50 years from today, totally different story. But right now, anyone over the age of 35, 40, 45, 50, that you may be wanting to work for or partner with or do, I mean, they're used to get, they live in a world where I'm one of the, this is like the last generation. Here's what I say to people that say, you're my age. I mean, right now I'm 45 years old. I'll be 40, you know, six in a few months. And you know, I remember when there was no fax machines and fax machines came onto the scene. I remember, you know, dialing televisions, black and white televisions as a little kid and the invent of cable television and going to remote controls and going to cordless phones when there was rotary phones and it was touch phones and then it became cordless phones, that was like a new thing. And then when cell phones were like a brick and then pagers, and then we got to, you know, smaller cell phones and then now smartphones and everything else. I mean, there's never going to be another generation which didn't transition to that. Now, any kid born today, they would have no clue.

Well, I told you the story before about how apparently all three year olds are walking around their houses all day going like this because they're playing on their iPad all day. So they think the wall is an iPad screen and they think their mother's face is an iPad screen. They're going to the refrigerator. They think they're going to get food by, by wiping the screen. So I'm not worried about them right now. I mean, I don't know how I'm going to market to them and I'll be dead. So I'm not going to worry as much. But right now, as you said, everybody has at least had some exposure to a mailbox and it becomes we're talking multi channel. I'm not saying that we should be talking about direct mail as the be all end all that it's going to replace all other media. But it's this forgotten medium that no one understands it as well as they should. And, and you've always been such a big fan of it. I've lived it for my whole career. And so we've been talking about this for a long time saying, well, I'm.

A fan of it because it still works.

It still works very well.

I mail letters. People buy stuff, they join stuff. It moves them along the line. It is an addition to what in your current tools, in your toolbox. If you added this to your. If you're already a successful Internet market and we've seen it in our world, I mean, you're teaching people how to do it. I teach people how to do it. When we take all of our 25k members, I sit and say, if you're already a successful business owner and every or the majority of the business you're acquiring is online, one of the best ways that I there could be people far smarter than me in different channels and different areas, I don't know that could come along. The smartest thing that I think someone could do to double, triple their revenues, their profits is simply add direct mail into the mix.

I mean, you've been doing some stuff with space also space advertising and how that can. Yeah, but direct mail, and as you said before, it still works. I mean, we're seeing response rates. I mean, the problem, you know, you're dealing with the Postal Service, which is tough. And you know that I lobby on Capitol Hill because I don't want it to go away. I still believe in it. And I feel like I don't want to have regrets later on that I didn't educate senators and congressmen, that they're making some mistakes about how the Postal Service is going to price themselves out of this incredible business. But we're seeing, I mean, we've been in business for 40 years. I've been there for 32 of it. And our response rates for some of Our offers today 2013 are as high as they've been in the last 20 or 30 years for certain products. I mean, sometimes they're not. Sometimes it depends on the product because we're still doing the same kind of great creative, we're still doing the same kind of database marketing. The biggest difference is we don't have the list universes that we used to to have. But I'm in $39 product too. I'm selling mass market books and newsletters. What you and I are talking about is kind of taking those same principles and start applying them to some of these real high end businesses as another channel. And now I'm pretty excited about that because as you said, I can get someone's attention in a whole different way than I can from an email or from, you know, from tv. I mean there are so many different ways to go after your prospects. And I think where direct mail is going to be most useful for, you know, as we, as we move forward in the kinds of stuff that you and I want to probably do together in the marketing world and teach, is that it's going to be with the high end marketers that we are hanging around with that are selling high priced product. They want to have a real touchy feely relationship with their audience. And doesn't matter that your list isn't that big. The size of the list mattered. At $29, $39 product, you just can't get the critical mass and it's very frustrating.

Well, you know, one of the things that I do as a test, like I'll go to conferences and I'll speak and I'll get a bunch of people give me business cards and I will shoot a video and we'll upload it to YouTube and put a link and send an email out personalized video. And then I'll send personalized cards and things. Always get a response from the letters. Far more. A personalized video is pretty touchy feely. It's not just a text. I mean it's me talking to people. And all the time I continually validate to myself that when you send something physical to somebody, you know, when you're looking, what's that saying about that you always talk about with the inbox? The least cluttered?

Oh yeah, the least cluttered inbox is the one that you grew up with. So yeah, it's the mailbox.

What does that mean?

Well, it means.

I know what it means.

Well, I looked at your computer when I came in today and you couldn't even find your email. Right. It was like. And so you know, you look at someone's average inbox in their email and even if they're great sorters of that they can't figure out like what the noise is ridiculous. It so happens that because the postal service has not run the run things as the way they should and a lot of people got out of direct mail, lo and behold, you got an empty mailbox. Right. And then you got more attention. And then if you still are slave, a slave to world class creative as we are. We were sticking out in the crowded mailbox. Yeah. Now we're sticking out in a less crowded mailbox. So you can see the potential there.

And if it's less crowded, the likelihood of getting noticed and getting through and getting attention, you have an advantage on your side. And so that is the number one reason why I think people should be looking at this because it's not going.

Away the postal, you know, the post office. The reason why the post office is a monopoly is that they nobody else can get access to those post boxes. And people are not chopping down, they might be chopping down trees in their backyard. They're not chopping down their mailbox. They're still waiting for something in that mailbox. I don't know what. I mean, look at your genius network interviews. I don't know if I'm an exception or the rule, but you sometimes send links with a hot interview that you just did with somebody. It won't be this one, I'm sure, but you do the hottest. You actually have done ones that we've done, which I love. But then you send an envelope with a CD and a transcript of the interview. I think you're still doing that. And so I wait for that. I wait for that.

I have people that still to this day, since I first started a which used to be called the Joe Polish Superstar Audio tape of the month club, which I started I believe in 1995.

Wow.

That still to this day. And we're doing this at the end of 2013. This particular recording that pay money every month since that period of time because they want to get something physical in the mail.

Yeah. I mean I know a lot of great online marketers who when they send me something three dimensional in the mail. I don't want to mention other names, but same thing. People who pay $50,000 to be in high end mastermind groups when they get the physical package of the interview of the month or whatever, the transcript and the interview makes a big difference. So you start seeing, I mean maybe yes. That situation. They're not selling that piece of physical product because they bought the bigger product, but just the level of interest in that physical product and what keeps them connected to that guru. And I know that there are people that stay connected to you from the physical product.

Absolutely. It's kind of like if you're going to bring your wife, your girlfriend, your husband, your spouse, flowers, it's just going to be a different sort of feeling than if you send an email saying hello. It just can't be replicated. I don't think it's a stretch to make the same comparison to anything physical. You can just do things in the mailbox that cause you to stand out and get attention that just aren't quite the same. So like what you were saying earlier, this is not in lieu of, this is not a replacement of. This is enhancement absolute to everything that you're doing. So let's go back to what you did. Talk about RFM recency, frequency and monetary. Yeah, and sometimes called unit of sale, you know, whatever.

Right.

Explain that because I want people to kind of understand, not only just think of this as a direct mail thing, but think of this as marketing, you know, because the list is as if not more important than, you know, than the copy, than the offer. But when all of them together, timing how often they purchase are put together, then it becomes lethal.

Right? Well, I mean the best segment of our lists are always either our multi buyers or our ex buyers. Those are always your best lists and for the reasons that we just said. Because in the case of an ex buyer, it's someone who bought, so it probably is an accumulated amount of money that they spent. But a multi buyer is someone who's bought multiple times and they are frequent buyers. That's the frequency. Now recency is what we call hotlines and direct mail. But someone who bought today, you know, you think, you know, common sense. And I used to teach this to college students and I'd say, you know, someone who bought in the last three months is more likely to buy now again. And they go, wait a minute, don't you have to give them a rest? You know, but you start getting all the data on how people buy and why they buy and, and then all of that data, once you have all that recency, frequency and monetary, you can start modeling names. Now a lot of guys online are starting to model their databases and I think this is going to be a breakthrough for online marketers. And I'm seeing it already and I'm very excited about it, but we've been able to do that in direct mail forever. You can do credit screens up front. I mean, I have this dream for online, like for display advertising online, that we'll be able to eventually sell something without a credit card, that we can actually sell what we call a bill me offer in direct mail. I mean, think about that. You know, any online marketer, if they didn't put a credit card offer with their offer, they'd say, I can't market that. I can't afford to. Especially if there's physical product involved. And even if there's not, they don't want to give it away on a bill me bill me, meaning I'm going to bill you later, I'm going to let you try it for free. Right in direct mail. We've been able to do that forever. And the reason you can do that is that you do the pre screening because you can basically take out the people that you have files of bad debt information. Do that in what we call a merge purge. We're not getting into all the nitty gritty today, but I think those will be some other. We'll do a whole, maybe a whole video just on merge purge and how you pre screen your list so that when you're spending 500 bucks, 1,000, you are really careful about every piece that you put into the mailbox.

Oh, wait, you know, I want to. Can you hold that thought?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. One thing that I was talking to you about before we started recording here is we're talking about people that are in Genius network and some of your other clients and people that want you to teach them how to do this. And we're like going, what would it be worth to actually teach an already successful person who has a million dollar plus company as an example how to do this? Because it could add millions of dollars to their business, to their revenue. So I'm going to just put something out there. If you're already a successful business owner and this is making sense and you're going to continue obviously to watch the rest of this. Take some recommendations that Brian will give you and that I'll give you. As we go through this and you actually want to learn how to do this, I said to Brian, I said, you know, what we should do is we should teach people if they want to add another million dollars of revenue using direct mail and direct marketing, what we do is we charge them something like 10 grand up front, which is only 1% of a million dollars, but we actually take 5% of a million dollars, which would be like $50,000 money that they never had that. They're never going to get to if they don't utilize this and we actually guide them.

You were thinking, so it's an upfront against some royalty, right?

Exactly.

Which is how our copywriters get paid, by the way. Yeah.

And so I said I would do that. I mean, who wouldn't do that as a smart business owner? So if that is something that sounds. I'm not even saying we're going to do this. This is just a thought that I have.

You just mentioned it today and I'm like, that's. We're connected to some of the best marketers on the planet.

Absolutely.

And so we really would enjoy, I think, working with people like that. Yeah.

Because it's not just knowing how to do direct mail, it's a strategy behind it. Right. This is not about dropping something in the mail for the sake of doing it. This is, you know, I mean, look at all the know how that we have and with all of the people that we know that are the best in the world in this stuff. All the know how, you know, to actually basically install that know how into someone's company and have them pay just so they have skin in the game. Something like 1% of a million dollars. But we only do it with people.

That's a cheap consulting fee when you think about it. Because if you really want it to be in direct mail, I think that anybody with a postal. And most online marketers already have the postal addresses because they've been selling with a credit card. So they already have their list. So figuring out what they'd want to do in direct mail to supplement what they're already doing. It would be strategy sessions. Right. With me and you and. Yeah, that'd be really fun.

That's just thrown out there at the end. I don't even know how this is going to. How that would. Exactly how we're going to deliver it. We might do initial training, but we'll put some contact info if you are interested. And what I mean by that is if you really take this seriously and you're already at a certain level, if you're not at that level yet, take everything we're talking about and just learn it and utilize it. I mean there's so much. Just even knowing the possibility of what we're talking about in and of itself is a tremendous value.

And there's so much literature out there out. I mean, we've educated ourselves on books, you know, through books first. Right. I mean, Gary Halbert and Dick Benson and cables.

I Mean, you know, everything back in the day. And so. Yeah, well, I'll put. So if that's of interest to you, then that's sort of like a planting a seed pitch in the middle of.

Yeah, this was not. This is jazz. We don't know what we're doing, but we didn't know there'd be a pitch. But I want to go back to that dream I have, and it really is. I think, that I love the idea of. I think when we were in direct mail, when we were able to sell things on a trial basis and not have to take a credit card up front and be able to either ship a book and. Or ship product and then know that because of the credit screening we did up front, that, yes, we would get some people that would rip us off, but net net, we would end up with a positive P and L because we would get enough people to pay us because we. Of the pre screening. And also the way that we did our promotion and the way we did our billing as well. I'm thinking online, you know, and I'm hearing we're close to this, where someone clicks on an ad on a. On the Weather Channel. And in real time, you will go to either a landing based on a database of that person who clicked on, based on what we know about that person in terms of their credit history. You'll either go to a page where you have to put your credit card in, or you'll go to a page possibly that you'll get a bill me offer. Now, to me, I know that we took the boardroom business from. We went from a $3 million business. When I got there in the early 80s, we ended up at our height. When we got into TV, we were as high as $150 million, but we got from 3 million to 100 million. And you did an interview with Marty and I about this. Getting into the bill me side of the business, we had trouble with cash flow. We couldn't do the cash with order, so we had to do cash with order in direct mail, which we just couldn't scale it. But you get such a higher response rate with a bill me offer, obviously. And if you can control that back end and get the right payout, I just think that if we could nail that online, that's the knowledge. I'm just pretty excited about that. So I'm actually in touch with a few guys who are kind of the rocket scientists of the analytics side of the Internet business. Some of them we both know personally. And if we unlock that, I think we're gonna take the online marketers. They're gonna see a principle that was really started in direct mail and that would get their interest in that as well. So I just think that, you know, those principles are just so powerful and it's what I grew up with. I grew up with Bill. I didn't grow up with cash. With water.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember even doing CODs when I first started.

Oh yeah.

Which is.

We didn't do much of that, but a lot of people did. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of catalogers.

I mean it almost goes back to if you can figure out how to make something work in places where most people can't afford the cash flow, you know, even really expensive advertising. I mean, I still have people that are trying to figure out how I was able to run full page ads for very expensive seminar in Forbes, Fortune Inc.

Successor US Airways. Yeah.

And people are like, well, you know, I can't. You can't do that. And. And of course the reason that I did that, because it's a long term play. But being able to figure that out, being able to mine with methods and environments where most people don't know how to do the mining or don't even think there's any gold there, if you can figure that out, that opens up.

Yeah. I.

The book that.

I mean, obviously a lot of people are asking me to write a book and John Carlton is going to kill me if I don't write a book. But you know, and you know, John, you know. But the basic concept for the book I want to write first is what I call O2O2O online to offline to online. And you're already doing it with those space ads. Being able to go directly to a website from a space ad. We haven't seen a lot of people going from a direct mail piece to online. That's obviously coming. How do you do it? You have to test it properly. We have all the methodology in direct mail to do that right now. The supplement guys, when they got into direct mail. Direct mail was huge for the supplement business. I mean it exploded. The nutritional supplement business. Absolutely. And so that was a cash business. And most of the people were responding via 800 number there. So it wasn't off order forms which was the norm in direct mail. So they already broke that mold. Of course the catalogers were always using 800 numbers. So now you're mixing and all they are response devices. So online is just another response device.

Exactly.

And I think you figured that out with your space ads. Now I Think you were smart because you started with Space EDS and B2B magazines. And I think B2B folks are going to be more inclined to go from one media to another because they're living on their computer at work and that type of thing. But I think in the consumer world, again, this next breakthrough is when we start getting consumers to be able to go from one medium to another. And if you have command of all the different media, I think you're in a much better position to be able to, to monetize things in a variety of ways.

Yeah, well, you know, One of my 25k members, Brendan Bouchard, runs a lot of full page ads giving away a free book for shipping and handling. And most authors cannot figure out how a book that's costing more than the, you know, approximately $6 international, he'll even send it to someone overseas, which he'll lose money. And what he does when they opt in of course is he's capturing their physical address because he has to send them the physical book. And by doing so he's able to do things in those letters when he mails it to them that he's in the direct mail business. Although he's driving people online to get the free book. It's not a make a phone call, it's go to this website, his name Freebook and they go there and they pay shipping and handling. Going back to the thing you said earlier about some people saying, oh do you want to wait? Are you responding too quickly to them? The Internet marketer is doing one click upsells or the multi upsells as soon as someone makes a purchase. It's the whole psychology of purchasing something doesn't satiate the urge to buy, it excites it. Once people are in this excitable sort of mode and you want to keep the excitement going by continuing to offer and offer and offer until they're satiated, you know, until that emotional, you know, engagement is, you know, it's done.

Let's go back to what we said about Brendan though is really important because, you know, I think he also is understanding a basic direct response principle which was started more in the world of direct mail, which is lifetime value. Right. You know the great quotes that I love to quote. One is Chris Farrell, which he says, you know, a product is not a business. And John Carlton always says a promotion is not a business. And you know, the world class marketers we know, and they may be 100% online, they understand the lifetime value of a customer and how much they, you know, how much a customer is worth to them. But the thing that is missing still for a lot of folks is that how much are you willing to really lose on that first bite at the apple? Because you now have figured out. And again, the good marketers online have figured out their funnel and they figured out their ascension programs and all that. But for the average Joe who's trying to, you know, try to figure out how to make some money online, if they're not thinking ahead, I mean, this is in Dick Benson's classic book on secrets of successful direct mail. How much can you afford? He's called it his bogey. And we use that. It's the bogey. The bogey was how much you could lose in year one to make it back in year two with your renewal from your subscriptions. This is all subscription marketing. This started in the subscription marketing business. And some subscription marketers said, I don't have to make my money back to year three or four. That's a conscious decision. If they can wait that long to get to break even, then that's a real investment. At a $40 ticket, that's a long wait. And I don't know if I want to be in that business. It's a tough business. But the guys that we're talking about can get their money back a lot faster. So Brendan was, I think, very forward thinking, and there's a lot of guys who do think about. I mean, I think Dean Graziosi does the same thing with his book. His book's like a loss leader and he starts bringing people through that Ascension program. But he's using all media and that first bite, which happens to be a book, a physical product. I don't know if he's still. I assume he's still doing the book on his tv.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, but he's giving them a physical product right off the bat. But he then gets them into, you know, and he knows how to really romance his audience and he knows how to create a tribe. And that's really what it's all about. But physical product does play a huge role there.

Okay, so going back to rfm. So real quickly, explain again, recency, frequency, and monetization.

So in the list world, I used to do a two day seminar just talking. This is years ago, just to talk about lists. And it was response lists versus compiled lists.

And what's the difference?

Okay, so big difference. So compiled lists is basically who you are and where you sit in the phone book with overlay information. So if I want to mail to dentists in Des Moines. You know, the odds of me getting enough names on some response list of someone who actually responds to a dental offer, a dental magazine or something like that in a very small zip code area, slim and none. So I have to go to what they call a compiled list. But there's nothing in a compiled list that says someone really would respond to an offer. But they fit a demographic or a lifestyle or they fit something. Whereas a response list is the key. And that's why they're much more expensive. And that's why in direct mail response lists are people who've responded to direct mail offers before because they have a propensity to buy by the mail and they'll buy again within that recency. Frequency and monetary are just critical because I said before, you'll pay a premium on your response lists for what they call a hotline. So someone who bought in the last three months, if the list is $100, 1000, you're going to pay an extra 10 or 15 or $20 per thousand for a hotline select because they just bought in the last three months. Again, they are hot to try right now. Frequency is someone who would be a multi buyer. So on those lists, if I could get someone who bought two products and they also are existing within a hotline, now I've got the cream of the crop and I'll probably pay a premium for that list as well. On top, these are selection charges on your list and then monetary value. It's interesting, monetary value. In my world of $39 newsletters, what they spent on the product was actually less important for my selection. But if I was selling a high ticket that was a cataloger, for example, and most of my products were high ticket. Like, you know, Joe Sugarman back in the day, he had to be very careful because his JSA catalog had some very high priced products in it. He didn't want to putz around with a catalog that a catalog buyer who only spends $20 or $30, you know, because he needs like a. So he would do like, you know, I'm not saying this is a real number, but he might say, you know, $75 plus buyer and then that's another differentiator for that type of mailer. But all of these selections are, you know, the thing about direct mail list selection is that all of these were selectable because it was proven, we proved the RFM theory time and again over decades of direct marketing and direct mail that these factors were worth paying extra for.

Absolutely.

So I think there's all of these factors and I think that if a, if online marketers watching us talk here today, they're saying, oh, I do that when I'm dripping content to people, I'm basically figuring out who I'm going to get the people that are the most interested. You can do that, it's cheap. But if you had to mail them something at a very high price, you can't drip content in direct mail. So I think you can use these techniques. I think recency, frequency, monetary are very important. And that's why I think any online marketer that's not slicing and dicing their database, I mean that's really, it's not about direct mail, but it's. And that's when I made that joke about one person who bought 17 products. Are you inviting them to dinner? What about the people that are buying? This is frequency. So the person who's buying five plus products should be getting a certain type of message from you that's different than the person who's a tire kicker. Now I think again, good marketers online are segmenting their prospects from their buyers. But then what are they doing within that? You can do a lot more within the buyers. There are subgroups and I think that's kind of the secret sauce that direct mail people would bring to database enhancement for online marketers. And then we can decide within that database who we might want to send bulky packages to because it can be expensive. So why would I want to send physical product? I want to send it to maybe my best customers or I want to send it to someone who maybe is a middling customer, but that bulky package could start making them move into a higher priced category. So using direct mail to move people within your database from multi buyer, bigger, multi buyer, spending more money with you being more beholden to your products and your services and loving what you do.

One of the simplest ways to probably improve stick rapport, connection longevity. Even if you weren't doing direct mail campaigns, but taking great clients, which I would argue that could be applied to almost any buyer, is sending like a physical thank you, like literally something as simple as a physical thank you note and everything you just rattled off. If someone jumped into this direct mail world and said, you know, I'm going to figure this out, I'm going to try one thing here. What will happen is all of the other areas of promotion and marketing and client acquisition would improve because when you're forced to spend money to put a letter in the mail, you think about it differently than just, you know, Oh, I got to whip up an email and blast something out to my list of 100,000 people. You know, put five minutes of thought into it. That's not going to operate that way in direct mail. It just isn't. But the level of thinking that you'll put into it, if there is any strategic byproduct of doing direct mail, is the act of going through. Doing it in your business will simultaneously give you insights and perspectives and thinkings. Thinkings. It's not a real word of how you're going to approach all your marketing that you just will not come to without.

You know, it's funny. You practice what you preach even when you're joking around. You did one to me recently that was just a riot because, you know, Marty, who just passed away, had been ill and not that we were like, you know, scavenging around his office, but there was one piece of art in his office that I absolutely had to have, and it was something that you gave him, which was a hand painted toilet seat from an artist out here in Arizona. It was Spider man, and it was Spider Man. And so what I did was I got it into my office, I took a picture on my iPhone, and I sent it to you. And. And then what you did is that you then took that picture, put it on a postcard, and sent me a physical postcard back. The postcard is now on my wall underneath the toilet seat. Now, I'm not saying you sold me anything more. My relationship with you is solid. You didn't need to do anything more with me. But the kind of rapport that I could repeat that story. Can you think about all the marketing applications and you do this, right? I mean, I know you create these postcards.

Yeah.

And it's, it's, you know, people want to be.

Yeah. How often someone tacking an email up on the wall, unless you're coming from the president or something.

Not happening.

Yeah.

You know, and. And so, you know, and Marty, interestingly, you know, give a little, little deference to my mentor and someone who I knew he loved you to death. And I know you loved him as well.

I have a file of letters Marty sent me to this day.

Always handwritten, right?

Yeah.

He'd always, like attach something and then he once sent you like a box of checks. Right.

You can find that video on YouTube.

It's one of the first things that come up. Yeah, I think it's one of the first. I wanted the first thing Marty. I wanted some videos of Marty when he was on PBS to come up On a search, I couldn't get it to come up higher than the chicks.

That's funny.

But now I figured, I figured I had to get the Marty video to come up first.

Good.

But. But it took me a while because he sent you these, this box of chicks and, and it's like, you know, the relationship there. And you know, Marty didn't do it because he was going to come and ask you for a favor one day. But you know what, the level of intimacy that you had with him, that all he had to do was pick up the phone one day and in fact you did it. I'm thinking of it now. We did an off site once and you know, you travel all over the place. It's very hard to nail you down. And you came and spent three days, I think with my entire staff, which is not a norm, normal thing for you to do. Right. And you came because that relationship has been built over time. So I'm not, we're not talking about just selling here. And I'm using this as maybe it's not a great example, but that's direct mail, you know, that's physical.

Just like during the holidays, if you get a bunch of holiday cards and people would put them over their fireplace and hang them on street, or they'd put them on their counters, they put it on the mantel. I mean, you know, people aren't doing that with email videos. No, they're not doing that with emails, they're not doing that with text messages.

I have a theory on that though. I'm not a big holiday card guy because my theory is give, give Christmas, you know, basically relax during Christmas and just give Christmas cards all year round. Which is kind of what you do too, you know, I mean, and it's not that I'm not anti. I'm not bah humbug or anything like that. It's just like everybody's sending you a card then. So finally, you know, that's the only time the postal service has some decent revenue in first class mail. That and Mother's Day. Right, right.

But we should invent more holidays.

We got to invent more holidays so the post office can get more money. But I think that during the year it's like that ongoing thing of sending stuff on a regular basis when no one else is. Everybody's sending stuff around that time. Yeah. But when you, if you again going back to the empty mailbox, you're sending stuff all year round. Everybody else isn't. You're going to stick out, you're going to differentiate. And if you have a business, let's go, let's get into direct mail for the Internet marketer. If you have a business with very high priced products, your best customers, to be able to communicate with them in this whole new area that you're probably not doing at the moment could open up new relationships, new ways of selling. And you can still sell things in those three dimensional packages as well. You don't have to be. They're not just gifts. I mean, you can make them sell, but when you have a high ticket buyer, you have a lot more money to work with too. I couldn't afford to do that with a $39 product. So I think I'm excited about the use of direct mail in higher priced businesses. Like that's kind of a niche within the niche that I think for me going into my next 30 year career, that's exciting to me, you know what I mean? Because I think there's a real application that wasn't as obvious before.

Yeah. You take things like a newsletter. To this day, one of the most effective returns on investment of any sort of marketing is mailing a physical monthly newsletter, especially financial.

Yeah.

Well, I was just going to explain in terms of math because the real business you're in is the arithmetic business.

Okay.

At the end of the day, if you can make the math work, that's direct marketing. Yeah, it is. And marketing math is different than like reading a P and l, although it's part of it. One of the highest paid carpet cleaning companies that I'm aware of in the world is one of my clients who has mailed our monthly client newsletter that's written for professional cleaners. He has not missed a single month of mailing our newsletter to carpet cleaners since I believe 1996. I mean, it's 2013.

That's unbelievable.

And this guy does close to 600,000 a year with one truck. He pays his carpet cleaning technician 120,000 a year. Most business owners, especially in a service business, many don't even grow so much.

And they can't keep employees, they can't do anything. He's building a real business.

Yeah. And he used to have, before me, before using my marketing methods, he used to have a low price operation, low price coupons. He used to have 28 vans and 68 employees. And he nets more money with one and a half trucks because he has an extra truck in case one breaks down.

And I mean he just leveraged. You know, I don't want to embarrass you, but the Reason why when I fell in love with you as a person was when I went to that boot camp the first time. You were basically changing lives.

Yeah.

You know, a guy, a guy with a $30,000 business all of a sudden has an $80,000 business, and he's like, he's. He's groveling at your fee. He was willing to pay you a thousand bucks a month to be in your platinum group. Right. 12,000 bucks a year. That's a huge amount of money for a carpet cleaner. And what were you teaching them? How to get physical product out. How to do a newsletter. I'll tell you, also, the newsletter, I'm really glad you brought that up because. Okay, so bottom line, personal, we still have 400,000 subscribers to a print newsletter. I don't see it as a big growth business for the long term, but it's not going away right away, and it's a beautiful business. But I just did an interview with a guy, a wonderful guy. I met him through Janik Silver, who's a mutual friend of ours. And this guy's Mike Capuzzi. I don't know if you know Mike.

I know the name.

He does a lot of coaching. And so he calls me up through Yannick and he says, I want to interview you, Brian, about newsletters. And I'm like, you want to interview me? You're going to teach people about. I assume it's E Newsletters, right? He goes, no, no, no. I'm going to have a workshop, and I'm going to teach Marketer. He'll be a guy that we have to get on one of these videos. I'm going to teach marketers about the value of having a printed newsletter. So I did this interview. I'm really proud of this interview, too. He interviewed me, and I didn't think I was ever going to do an interview ever again the rest of my life for an hour and just talk about print newsletters and the power of them. So what's old is new again?

Well, yeah. And so, I mean, out of all the different methods they can generate business, it still works. Meaning it brings in. Assuming the company. Any company. And this would apply to almost any service business, Assuming they actually. The caveat being they have to deliver a service where people would want to call back. I mean, the person has to be happy. So assuming they actually deliver a service that people are happy they paid money for and they don't feel like they've been taken advantage of or got lousy service, if someone cleans their carpets based on what it costs even today if someone cleans, let's just say it's a dollar per issue, which is even less than that. The way we actually teach it. Print newsletter first.

Yeah, you gave them the whole template.

Everything's all done.

And it's gotten more expensive because paper.

But the bottom line is you're talking about if the average job of a carpet clean, average job is 150 bucks. And let's just say it cost a dollar to mail it out. And they mail it out for. What we came up to for most carpet cleaners is they can mail out a print newsletter every month for 11 years. And the person only needs to have their carpets cleaned from them once every 11 years before they lose money. Now if you're mailing someone a physical newsletter every single month and they're probably going to clean their carpets more than once every 11 years, the average person will clean every year. Especially if you're in that much communication with them. And if they're not cleaning within a year, you make a phone call, you send an email.

It created the classic thing, classic barrier to switch. I mean they could switch. I mean, carpet cleaner used to teach that. How do you make this commodity business a specialty? One of the ways you do it is that personal relationship in a newsletter is one way to do it. I never thought of newsletters. I didn't know we'd get here today because this has been kind of like jazz. But I think that the newsletter is part of the whole direct mail, right? I mean, I hadn't thought of it. It is.

Well, see, when we talk about like what me and Dean Jackson on I love marketing, we talk about the before unit, the during unit, the after unit. And a newsletter is a huge part of the after unit. After someone gives you money, how do you continue to deliver world class service and orchestrate referrals? Because it's not just sending a newsletter for the sake of sending a newsletter. I've always loved the saying that the time when you will lose your client to a competitor is when you allow your competitor to pay more attention to your customer than you do. One of it is don't ever quit paying attention to them. Mailing out a useful newsletter is a good thing to do. I always remember the thing that.

And useful is the keyword because you always would have always on tips, you always want to make it seem like I'm, you know, you might have a coupon. The carpet cleaners, I think you said, you know, you have a coupon, you have this and that. But it wasn't it was a selling vehicle per se, but it was editorial content. The best online marketers have figured this out, right? I mean, the ones who drip content over a long period of time before they sell the crap out of you, they're the ones that are doing the best, what I can tell. Yeah, but same principle.

Absolutely, absolutely. So it's, it's, it's just one of those things. And so even today, when I've some service business will be like, what should I do? I'll be like, well, one of the main things. When's the last time you actually mailed a physical newsletter to one of your clients? And most people don't do it. And the competitive advantage is doing. See, and this isn't like, what does.

Dan Sullivan call that? He has a. It's competitive advantage. But maybe it is. That's his phrase of phrase.

Well, it could be unique packaging. It could be, but it is.

It is competitive. Unfair advantage. Unfair advantage. Unfair advantage.

I'm not sitting there going, what do you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you, like you wouldn't know. Dan Sullivan.

I'm glad you said it because how could I do a video without mentioning.

Exactly.

Yeah. So unfair advantage. Another phrase that could actually be useful here, a couple of them. One is, the problem is not the problem. The problem is how you think about the problem. Problem. When people are like, oh, I need to generate more business right now. And almost everyone that's in business, most of them would not say, I have more clients and customers than I know how to serve. Although there are a few of those. Why would you even do direct mail if you have that? Well, if you have more than you can even serve, I can guarantee you're probably having delivery problems, you're probably having contact problems. You can build in and automate all of this direct mail, which we'll save that for another video. Which letter shops and how do you find, you know, yeah, because we could.

Do creative and merge, purge and database. We've touched on a lot. We've kind of been all over the place in this one, but this was our first.

Well, in the best one, I want. The best thing I want to accomplish with this is just igniting the interest in getting people to. If people have already used a lot of direct mail in the past, hopefully this will remind them that, you know, wow. I mean, people that have been in business for a long time that are marketers have probably done stuff in the past and they forgot to do it. I mean, some of the people in 25k, me and you constantly Talking about direct mail has caused them to think, well, that always used to work, and I just quit doing it because I kind of got sidetracked with all this Internet stuff. And they've forgotten. So part of it is just reminding people that knocking on doors actually this way does actually get people to open it. So that's one thing. The other is people that are new to this, to maybe have them look at this is a capability that can be added into their business if they learned all the things. But we have spent years. And personally, I still talk about this. There's not a year that has gone by in the last 15 years where I have not spent at least $100,000 on my education. And in the beginning, at least 10 years of that was heavily involved direct mail. Absolutely.

You know what I'm saying, too? I mean, it's been very exciting and rewarding. The last. Right now at Boardroom, we have seven direct mail launches of new products. I hate to use the word launch because you say launch and you always think online, but I've been doing launches since 1981. Exactly. But seven direct mail launches of new products between now and we're in November of 2013. Between now and April, at least three of those seven are products that have only been sold as online products. In two cases, it's books, and in one case it's a nutritional supplement. And what I identified was some products in the marketplace that I saw had all of them. Maybe this will be a good tease for our next video, because I saw some elements that there was a story to tell. There was a product that already had some creative that looked like it was doing well online, but could be expanded quite a bit in the kind of formats that I know there was the ability to show certain things that in photographs and in the kind of formats that I love. Tabloids and magaloids. We talked about formats, too, versus everybody thinks direct mail is just number 10 envelopes. No, it's not. I mean, you got a lot of creativity involved. So I guess my point is that. So here I identified three. Whether these launches will work or not, I don't know. But I got three Internet only people to say, why don't you come over to Boardroom, give us your product, we'll pay you a royalty. We'll take all the risk because it has all the elements that I think that a good direct mail product should have, and that might be the lead for the next video. Like, what things do you really need to even think about a direct mail product? And we're launching three new products, which is just totally cool in 2013, 2014. And we'll see how it goes. I mean, but we'll be able to report back on all of those. But there was like a lot and there was an appetite for it because I knew the three people that I went to either knew about direct mail or wanted to know more about it, or they wanted to see the nutritional supplement folks. They just wanted to diversify into another medium. The other two actually had done direct mail in other parts of their life and then stopped doing it because it was too expensive or they just didn't have the patience for it anymore, or it was just too hard. It's like making sushi at home.

Things are hard if for one, you don't know what you're doing. And I've always loved that quote from Anthony Greenback in the book on survival. And it goes something like, you don't need to get through an impossible situation. You don't need the muscles of a Hercules, the reflexes of a gram pre driver, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do in this environment. You don't need to be a rocket scientist, you don't need to be a genius. You just simply need to know what to do. And there is a know how that a guy like you has incredible knowledge and wisdom on that. You know how to make it work. I mean your company has brought in literally in the billions of dollars because of this know how. And so by talking today, hopefully those of you listening, I guess we can look at any of the cameras here.

Yeah, right. That I, I've been looking at you.

The whole time, which is good.

No. Cool. You're a handsome guy.

Yeah. So what I'd like you to do is, is think about if this makes sense to you and if you actually want to go deep and learn this. And on the next videos that we do, we'll talk more about this. But if this is the only time that they see us or watch this, I'll put some sort of contact info to go back to my kind of cleverly disguised unthought through pitch. If you all a successful entrepreneur and you know the value of wisdom, you know, it's kind of like if you're going to, if you have to do brain surgery, do you want someone that's performed the surgery like never or right out of medical school and this is their first time or do you want someone that's done it a thousand times? And so, you know, people that are willing to, you know, they want to make this work and give it the highest possibility of success. You know something I like the scenario of lockdown, you know. You know, 10 grand to put some skin in the game, maybe. I mean, targeting the right.

I think we'd be open to anything that makes sense. I think what hopefully comes through on this, I don't know. I just love this. I want to be able to, like, teach it to the next generation. So the passion is there. I started putting like all my content up. You know, you had given me all the two genius interviews I did with you. One of them was on List Mastery, the other was with Marty. Right. So I put up this squeeze page and I'm starting to, like, build. I'm building a list of people that want to learn all this stuff. So having that up there and like the interview I did with the guy on the newsletters. And every time I do an interview now, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I just want to put it all up there and start accumulating this content. And then I'm just really excited about the possibilities.

Well, and I like talking about it too, because every time I talk about this, it causes me to see the other applications that have the diamonds are still there. You just kind of forget that they're right there.

It's frustrating, I think, for a lot of marketers getting used to email and how inexpensive it is, getting used to digital product versus physical product. It's tough because margins shrink very quickly when you're talking about direct mail and you're talking about physical product. So that's why I think, as we move forward, because I don't think the Postal service is going to be reducing costs anytime soon. And it's not going to be simple. But that's why I think probably the big application is as a supplement with higher ticket products and higher ticket businesses. And I didn't go into this interview either thinking that's where my head would go, but that's where it went. As opposed to trying to go teach. I don't want to go teach somebody to go do a $39 newsletter and direct mail, you know, and you go to the M and A conferences and there's no investment banker that's buying a company that's print based, believe me. And so we know that. So that's what, you know, let's make sure that, you know, that's why my moniker for everything I'm doing now is dinosaurs and cowboys. So, you know, I don't want to be an extinct dinosaur, but I think using the knowledge that we have to not become extinct and then be able to, you know, use the best techniques and bring them all together, it's pretty. It's exciting, you know, and it's a medium that is so rich, right? And you and I have lived through some of the most amazing direct mail campaigns, either individually or with other companies and people that we know. And, you know, it's a rich heritage that.

Well, and I think Genius network members are going to be, with our guidance, are going to be creating some of the newest, most amazing direct mail campaigns ever.

That would be really cool.

And going back to the thing you said, and then we'll wrap up with the college students or someone looking to get a job or whatever. I don't even know where I first read this, but I tell people to do this all the time because it works. That if you want to build rapport and you want to transform the relationships in your life, I heard years ago, send 10 postcards to someone every day. If you have to automate it, which you could with a simple computer.

I don't see people who do that.

Or you just physically handwrite. If someone wanted to say, oh, we're full of crap, this direct mail stuff, or they actually want to see the impact. Not even using any brilliant creative or list selection, just looking at who are the most important relationships in your life. Clients, family members, whatever. And mail 10 postcards a week. Not even every day, just 10 a week. And three months from now, see how the interactions with people change. See the phone calls, the opportunities.

What about books? I mean, you're awesome at this too. Mail him books. I mean, you can't do that with everybody. But look at what that's. You can't. I mean, you can't say that every book you sent I made this much money. It's not about that. But look at the. Look at the. As Jay Abraham would say, the relational capital that you have in the world and that I have in the world. I think that's one of the things we really have in common, right? We are relational cap. We're very rich.

We.

When it comes to relational capital. And it's not because we've been manipulative with people. It's because we love people, right? We love humanity. People have told me that I'll be good at whatever I do because I like people and you do too.

And people need to get stuff.

They need to get stuck.

They need to physically interact. I love it. Hopefully you found this interview very useful. This conversation very useful. It's giving you some perspective. And until next time, if you're interested and you're a player and you want the best in the world, or at least kind of up there, I would say Brian's the best one. I'm not saying myself.

You're the best.

Then you take a look at whatever the heck I come up with is putting as the mechanism for an email or a phone call or a website or whatever. And if you're interested, we'll see if we decide to do something or not. And if we don't, then at least you got some useful stuff to hear about with direct mail. And so go make yourself rich.

It was fun. Thank you. Thanks for doing it.

Yeah.

Thanks, Brian.

Appreciate it, man.

Loved it.