Key Factors You Need To Know To Boost Your Email Marketing

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and before we talk about today's guests, I really would like to just welcome my co host, Six Sigma. You know him, you love him. He's done over 170 deals this year. He is sleeping on piles of money now because you can Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmoto.com and most importantly, not automating your Craigslist postings, hosting domination.com thelanging Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm great.

How are you?

I'm great. I just had more coffee.

Well, guess what? I gotta take something. Your intro is kind of wrong because it's not 170 anymore.

Oh, we're up.

We are at, let's see. Grand. We had a sale today, and today we are at 190.

190.

190 sales. 190.

All right, so we are recording this two weeks before the end of the year. So you probably. You might hit 200 for the end of the year.

That'd be a nice goal, wouldn't it?

It would be amazing. So why are you selling so much more now? Not that you weren't selling. I mean, like the last two weeks, I thought you're at 170.

Yeah, in the last, I think last week we had 10. Just about. We were like 171 like a week ago. We had like nine. Nine deals over the last week.

Why? Promotion.

Just.

Just where we. We have a hot market, you know, we found a hot market and we're feeding into it.

Love it. I love it. All right, well, let's talk about today's guests.

Let's talk about them.

Unless you want to plug away. Should we plug first and then.

Let's plug.

All right. Today's podcast is sponsored by LoanEEK. Lonegeek IO the easiest way to automate your payments. I used to spend Sundays manually typing in to some ancient software program that would crash on me on my old PC. Every single Sunday hours would go by, you'd have to pick up the phone, talk to borrowers. They'd say, hey, what's my current balance? Gonna make a prepayment this month. No more. It's a set it and forget it automated system and if done correctly, becomes a profit center for you. So save money, make money, and get your Sundays back. Lonegeek IO what do you think, Scott Todd? Good commercial?

Yeah, I think you gotta rewrite.

I think.

I think you need a copywriter.

Right? Okay.

So speaking of, let's, let's segue into today's guest, shall we?

Yeah, let's go.

Let's wanna start. We'll plug at the end because that is a good segue because today's guest is a professional copywriter, Joshua Earl from Joshua Earl dot com. You can't see his face. He is in his mid-30s with three children and he looks like he's 15. He's like. Joshua Earle is a copywriter, an email marketer, a programmer. He runs a weekly email newsletter for programmers with more than 70,000 subscribers. He's the author of two self published books for programmers. And we've got a lot of programmers in our community because we're geeks. And he's written articles for national publications including the Washington Times Writers Digest. And his blog posts have been featured on sites like entrepreneur.com, smart, passive income, lifehacker, and sitepoint. Josh. Earl, how are you?

I'm great. Thanks for having me, guys.

Well, thank you. So based on that loan geek commercial, we're. What did I do wrong?

Oh man, you're putting me on the spot. You know, I need. I don't know, honestly, I need to go back.

How much time do we have, Mark?

I need to go back and review the script more carefully. But I like the angle though that you took as far as you kind of calling out the pain point, describing what your life was like before and giving a strong call to action. So the basics are all there.

There you go, Scott. Todd, I'm dropping the mic. Boom.

You gotta measure the results though. You know, it doesn't matter till the market speaks.

I love that. That's a tweetable quote. It doesn't matter until the market speaks. So let's talk about the market. Let's specifically talk about your market. So, Josh, tell us, how did you become sort of this the darling of the copywriting world?

Slight bit of overstatement there, but. Well, I kind of fell into this whole copywriting thing backwards really. I got into back about three or four years ago now. I was, I was a programmer and I was kind of working the 9 to 5 and I discovered, I started to hear about people that I knew publishing ebooks online. And you know, they're. Every once in a while you'd see this article about somebody who published a book and you know, $50,000 in sales or whatever and had a big launch. And so I just, I was like, I gotta get me some of that. So I ended, I started, I ended up starting. I wrote an ebook about A software programming tool called Sublime Text and launched that and basically just kind of through that process, started to learn about online marketing and really fell in love, especially with the process, the process of email marketing, because I realized basically all of my sales for these launches that I was doing were coming from email. And, you know, social media was useful to help me build the email list and build the audience. But I noticed all of my sales were coming from email. So I really, I started to just kind of invest all as much time as I possibly could into mastering copywriting, particularly email copywriting. And it's been a wild ride. But now I'm doing this. I quit my job about coming up on two years ago now, and I'm doing the. I'm doing email copywriting thing full time. Basically. I've teamed up with another programmer and I'm helping him to take his blog. He's got. He's built this huge blog audience and I'm helping him to sell his products, basically. So he puts the products together, I sell them. We're a good team that way.

I love it. Scott. Todd, we should hire this guy. Maybe.

Maybe. I mean, you got, you got a project for him.

Loan geek.

I do have a project for you. Loan Geek.

Well, unfortunately, I'm off the market at the moment, so, yeah, I'm going steady with my current business.

So see, Josh, that's, that's where you're wrong.

Right.

Because in real estate, we've learned that.

Everything is negotiable, everything is for sale at the right price.

Right, Right. I think, yeah. I mean, Josh, I think you have an interesting story, you know, like, how you felt fell into it and everything and how you got going. What are, like, what are some of the challenges you see with. With people and kind of copywriting today? And you know, especially in today's society where we're just like drowning in email.

Right.

Like, how do I. How do I stand out?

Yeah. So two things, two challenges. I think there's one challenge from the business owner's standpoint is people are very reluctant to sell. I see this over and over and over and over again. And I get a ton of people coming to me with questions because I do. So I blog@joshuaearl.com that's kind of my side project. It's a passion project. I do a daily email there about marketing. And so I get a lot of people coming to me responding to those emails that I send out and asking me questions. And I see a ton of people that are just like, they're very, very hesitant to sell their product. And it's because I think a lot of times it's because they just don't believe in it enough. And if you just are just going to try to put your product out there and you know, timidly tell people about it, you're not going to make a lot of sales. So that's one really big challenge that I think a lot, I see a lot. As far as how to stand out. The biggest key that I've found has been storytelling and the emails that I write. That's actually when I found copywriting. What I really, really fell in love with was the fact that it was so much about storytelling. I actually, when I graduated from college, my ambition was to be a magazine journalist. I wanted to write for like the New York. I loved, like the New Yorker. Like the long form journalism where you go and you like, you know, you spend a month studying some topic and doing a ton of interviews and then you condense that down into a long form. You know, magazine article and copywriting and especially email is so personal that, that you can really, you can take the time and you can tell really interesting, engaging stories. And when you do that, over time, people actually start to expect to hear from you. They look forward to your emails even when you're selling stuff. I regularly get emails probably at least once a week from my subscribers complaining that they missed an email. And usually it's like they think that. I had one guy email me and ask me if I was okay recently because he missed my email. It was, you know, it was, it was 10:30am and my email was not in his inbox. So he was actually worried about me and he emailed me and it was just in his spam folder because I send an email every day. But you know, when you tell, when you can, when you tell stories like that, you don't have a problem of standing out anymore because you know, people, your audience is actually looking for you and looking forward to your emails.

Yeah, I want to rewind, rewind the tape there because you said something really, really important that a lot of people are trying to, you know, sell raw land through. You know, Scott and I teach them to build your, your list, right, of people that want to buy land. And we teach us a boot camp. We say, look, you can't email enough. At least show up at least once a week with a promotion. But Josh just said he emails every single day, right? And a lot of people I think don't email enough. Now that being said, if it's always just Selling, selling, selling, and nothing of value, I could see how that could burn a list.

Oh yeah.

But if you're giving something of value and you're saying, hey, by the way, I've got this 40 acre parcel in Nevada, you to be 29,000 on terms, now it's 24,900 on, you know, easier terms with only 7% interest managed by loan geek. It's, you know, that, that could do it. Scott. Todd, you look, you look skeptical there. What do you, what's going on with you?

You're muted, I think.

Scott, this microphone, I'm not skeptical. I think, you know, it's funny because I, I've been like, I'll watch what other people are doing and I'll use that as kind of a gauge. Am I doing too much or not enough? And Mark, this past week, over the last week I've been doing some private coaching calls, Langee coaching calls. And the thing is that I was working with somebody who told me that they don't email their buyers list. You know, I'm like, that's a mistake. And then they said, well, I email it like maybe once a week if you know that. I feel, I feel bad. I'm like, stop. And I pulled up my email and I went and I just did a search in Gmail right there on the call for Grant Cardone. And that guy is kid you not. He emails me two to three times a day.

A day.

Okay, now it's all different. It's not the same stuff. But you know what? He is, he is selling me every single email. And I look at that, I'm like, why do, like, I don't not buying today what he's selling. Maybe I will in the future. But I don't unsubscribe either. Maybe it's because I want to, I want to just see where he goes. But for, for every, you know, person that that's there, he's not, I don't think he's killing his list. I think that, I think you're right. I mean, if I just emailed every day at 10 o', clock, what's the worst that could happen? Someone unsubscribes and look, there's 7 billion people on this planet. What's one person? What's two people? It's not.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I can tell you exactly. If you started to do that, like, you'll say you had 10,000 people on your list. You'd have in the first month, you'd probably have your unsubscribes would spike for a few weeks and then after that it would settle out and you, you'd get next to no unsubscribes every day. I mean, because people, the people that are gonna leave are gonna be the ones who aren't really that into what you're doing and the people that stick around are gonna be really, really into it.

Yeah, no, I feel the same way. My philosophy is you'll buy or unsubscribe. Right? And then so when you, when I get it, unsubscribe and someone, you know, sends me something on nasty on frontier properties. Not interested. I smile like, good. Now aweber is not going to charge me for.

Exactly. Oh yeah. If people email me and complain then I like I had a guy email me on Thanksgiving recently because I had an email scheduled for Thanksgiving. It was just a regular email. I didn't think ahead to make it a Thanksgiving themed email. And he's like, you're sending out stuff about sales and marketing on Thanksgiving. And, and I was like, scroll, scroll, scroll, unsubscribe. Because they hit reply and unsubscribe link is right there. So you know, goodbye, you're off my list.

Yeah, I mean I had somebody that they like send me a nasty gram like I don't want your email ever again. And they afford it. I'm just like to the bottom, unsubscribe. It's simple, right? Like let me do it for you. I can do it for you too. It's not a problem.

Yep.

Yeah, I love that stuff because it makes your list that much more valuable because you really have a very engaged, you know, list. Just like you wouldn't want to go to a party and hang out with a bunch of people that don't want to see you. Right?

Exactly.

Now Mark, you, you, you put the rewind button and said he emails once a day. And I like the other thing that he said too, which is people are afraid to sell to their list.

Right. Like.

And I see that all the time too is, you know, there's no, there's no ask for anything like, like the. Okay, hey, I got this property and, and what do you want me to do? I want you to buy now or here's why you should buy now. You know, like, you know they get timid of like because they don't want to be that salesperson.

Right.

But if you're not going to be, if you're not going to be the biggest advocate for your brand and ask for the sale, who will? I mean you, you're the one that has to do it. And if you don't, then no one's.

Going to do it. Exactly. Yeah. You really. Yeah. You have to ask. You have to ask for the sale. And it's not that hard. Like, once you get used to it, it's not that hard. And you don't like. With the types of emails that I typically write, you're. It's not a big, it's not a big long sales pitch, but you do have to ask.

Yeah. So, Josh, let's play a fun game.

Okay.

Construct the perfect email. This 40 acre parcel of land. What elements do we need to have in there?

Okay.

Mindset be. Before we start putting our, in my case, my stubby little fingers on the keyboard and start writing your mindset be. And then how do we construct it?

Well, the first, the first thing, and I don't know, this is what I don't know about your business is who. Who is buying this land? Like, who are the, who are the. Who's the buyers list that you've got for the land? Is it people that are buying to invest primarily or. So when you're teaching and when you're teaching your students how to work this system, tell me just like the 32nd version.

Yeah. Let's say they're investors.

Okay. That was not 30 seconds. All right, so you've got a list. So everybody on your list is. Is investors. They're interested in investing in land. And then what do they do with it? They flip it to sell it to developers or they develop it themselves or what do they do?

Well, okay, let's not say they're developers. Let's say they think it's cool to own land.

Right.

They might use it recreationally as far as like a legacy investment. Like if they want something real they can hold on to for the rest of their lives, it's the only thing that's going to last. Right, right.

Right. Okay. So kind of. Yeah. Kind of a buy and hold type of mentality. Yeah. You're putting together a portfolio and so the idea would be you could. It's going to appreciate over time. You know, you could sell it maybe someday. Almost. Almost more like a savings bond type of type of deal. Okay, so where I would start with that? Gosh. So I usually am. What I, what I am usually doing is looking for stories, stories that will resonate with the, with the audience that I'm selling to. So who are, who are the type of people that. Give me a thumbnail of a typical investor.

Middle aged guy that is looking for. He's tired of the stock market and he's looking ups and downs and he's looking for something that will appreciate over time and maybe even have some good times out there with his family.

Okay. All right. Well, there's two, there's two angles in what you just said that you could, that you can start with. So, so the first one would be to take somebody through kind of the wild stock stock market ride. Right. So do you, either of you have, have either of you know anyone who's lost their shirt and their retirement in the stock market?

I do, yeah.

Okay, so tell me a little bit about that. Like, what happened.

They. They were, they were retired. They were, they were, they were, they were middle age, retired. They did well and they had all their family money and they were doing stocks and options and everything like that. And they decided to go all in against the banks to short the banks. And when they did that, it was right during the meltdown crisis.

Okay.

And the government put a hold on the ability to short the stocks or to sell the stocks. As a result, as the stock was going up against them, they couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't close out their position. And as a result, they lost everything, including their house to the, to the brokerage firm.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. All right, well, I think, I think, I mean, do you think you could turn that into an email?

Yeah, I could tell a story about like, Meet Fred. You know, Meet Fred. That does name, not really Fred, but Meet Fred. This is what happened to him.

Yep.

You know, and then as a result, I had to go back to work.

And so, so typically what I'm doing, what I do with these emails is I will have some kind of story that illustrates, basically, it's like a fable. Right. You could think of it like an Aesop's fable where it has, you know, it's got a story. It's. There's some, there's some, it's some, some entertaining aspect to the story. It's, you know, it's like the train wreck that you can't look away from or it's, you know, it's a humorous. This would be an example of that. Like, it's, it's kind of. It could be a horror story. It could be just a really, a humorous anecdote. It could be something that they could relate to in their, their daily life. And then I'll bring that around to some kind of. Some kind of timeless lesson or principle that's valuable and that's. I think that Right there is what keeps people reading my emails and looking forward to them is that you know that first part and then from, from there, all you're doing is you just make a short hop connection to whatever it is that you're selling. I've got this 40 acre parcel. It would be perfect for this specific type of person and I don't know if it fits in your budget or whatever. Kind of help them know if this is a good deal for them and contact me for more information or click here for more information or whatever, whatever the next step is.

Yeah.

So like, how long, I mean, is it too long to have, you know, I mean, because I could tell a story and it could be like a longer email. Is that bad?

No, if my emails typically will run anywhere from 400 to a thousand words. Wow. So, yeah, it's just the length is mostly determined by how long the story is and how interesting the story is. If it's a, if it, if you can carry the reader's interest for a thousand words because it's like a really amazing story and you've got a lot of really captivating detail to include in the story, then I would spend the time and just develop it, you know, and let it, don't, don't cut it short. You know, sometimes it can be just. The story can be like a short three, four, five paragraphs, you know, doesn't need to, doesn't need to drone on and on. But, but yeah, like people will read, people will read a thousand word plus email if it's interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I get hung up on that too. It's like, is this too long? Right. And I think I, you know, I remember going through like a copywriting class and, or a book and it said after every, after every line of your copy, ask yourself, so what? As if you're the reader. And when I did that, I could take out a lot of the fluff and just get straight to the meat. Now if I'm telling a story right, that story has to connect. When they say, so what? Well, you know, the emotional attachment. Well, the so what might be, hey, I feel really bad for that stock investor.

Right.

And then here's how I solve pain of that. Right?

Right. Yeah. The key with stories is that every detail that you include in the story has to be essential. You don't want to, you know, like it's very. A lot of people make the mistake with storytelling where they'll, they'll go off on an irrelevant rabbit trail that goes for two or three sentences or paragraphs and because they think it makes it more interesting. But if it doesn't, if it's not crucial to the, to the overall story, then. Then the reader's going to be sitting there thinking the rest of the email. They're going to be wondering, like, how does that rabbit trail tie in? And if it doesn't, like, the whole thing kind of falls apart. There's a saying in screenwriting that if you show a gun in the first scene, it has to go off by the third scene because otherwise people are going to be like, oh, my gosh, there's this gun. And they're just going to be sitting there the whole movie wondering what's going to happen with the gun. And if nothing does, then they're just going to be confused.

Ah, makes sense. Makes sense. So, Josh, what advice then would you give someone that is trying to build their email list and trying to basically sell via email to, like, a buyer's list like Scott and I have? What's your general advice?

As far as what, like building the list itself or, or just the actual sales process?

I guess that's a really bad question. Tell us something we don't know about selling and constructing email to our list.

Well, the first thing is that most people get really hung up on the whole thing and they think that they're going to ruin their business if they send a bad email. And so people end up getting completely paralyzed. And they never, they just, they, they, they'll spend so much time on. They. Maybe they get one or two emails out and they'll get, they'll spend so much time on it and polishing it and everything, and then they send it and then they just, they can't bring themselves to do it again. I see that. I see that over and over. So getting into, getting into the habit of just emailing regularly is far and away the number one thing. And like you said, you said emailing once a week. To me, that's the bare minimum. Any less than that and people aren't gonna remember who you are. People, like, literally will start to forget who you are, and by the time like a month or two goes by, they, they're completely. They don't remember you at all. So, yeah, so I just, just do it. I get, I get. So, like, there's just. It's frustrating sometimes because I get people that email me and they' agonizing over, like, I can't find my voice as a writer. You know, I'm just really frustrated and I don't, I can't, I can't seem to get started. And making the commitment. Making your, you know, a commitment to your list that you're going to email them at a specific time on a specific day, and then just showing up consistently is a good half of the battle.

I love it, Scott. Todd, are you. Are you fighting that battle?

Well, you know, like, I do email my list. I try to show up. I mean, that's something that you, You've said all the time, too, is just show up. You know, it doesn't matter how, how you show up. Just. Just do it. Don't, don't be afraid that, you know, you're gonna ruin your list or something. I mean, you know, not. Not to boast, but, I mean, I got 1800 people on my list, and frankly, 40% of them are, like, not. Not doing anything else. Let's unsubscribe them and get good, good people. If I'm going to pay for the list, let's not have it. Why not have a good list?

Exactly. Yeah. People are really worried that they're going to, like, somehow emails. Extremely resilient. Like, an email list is. Is one of the most. Most resilient things you can have because people. People are very forgiving. They're shockingly forgiving. I just, just on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we did a promotion for one of our products, and I sent out the first email and the links were all broken. And so then I sent it out again two hours later, and same subject line, same email. We got, like, zero complaints, zero spam complaints. And we made more sales. You know, we made. We made more sales from that second email than we did from the first email. And then I sent out two more emails to close out the sale. And every email that we sent, we just made more and more sales. So people, for one thing, they're not paying nearly as close attention to what you're doing as you think they are. And they'll overlook an accident. They'll overlook a bad email. It's not the end of the world if you send out an email that's not perfect.

Yeah, I love that. And I think that's why Grant Cardone can get away with sending Scott and myself three emails a day. Because he knows, you know, morning ignoring me, afternoon ignoring me, but that third email, damn it, I won't be ignored. And the thing is, like, if he's going to email me that much, well, okay, let's take a look what he's got. Like, I don't want to miss out on something. I think we all have fear of missing out. And when he's showing up that much. Right. I will check it out. Even though I have the attention span of ferret on a double cappuccino.

Well, that's why he has to show up three times a day, right?

Exactly, exactly. So I think if we're gonna, you know, really glean the real meat from this podcast, it's, number one, you can't email too much. Number two, so what if it sucks? Right. As long as you're trying and you're telling a story and you're a good call to action, you'll get better at it. And I think the third lesson of all this is that your email list is shockingly resilient. And so, you know, you really can't mess up. Josh, did I miss anything?

No, that's, that's, that's really the highlights there.

All right, well, Scott, Todd, are we ready to put Josh on the spot?

I think so. Let's do it.

All right. So, Josh, Earl, what is your tip of the week? A website, a resource, a book, something actionable. With the art of passive income, listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Well, as far as I've got a tool here. I use this thing constantly, all day, every day in my business. It's called, it's called Thrive Thrive Themes. So if you have a website and you need to grow your email list or sell anything, Thrive Themes, Thrive. It's an entire set of tools. It's email pop ups you can use to build landing pages. And I literally, I live in this tool all day and I love it. It used to be such a pain. So difficult to set up that simple stuff that you need to actually build, you know, build the online part of your business. But Thrive makes it super, super easy. So it's thrivethemes.com is the website.

I actually use this in my land geek site. And I love it.

It is great. It's better. I've tried a bunch of different products and the other one that I can recommend would be Sumome. That's a free tool for building email capture and pop ups and that sort of thing.

So fantastic. Great tips. Sumome and thrivethemes.com Pretty geeky, but great. Scott, Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Oh, man, I'm stuck on Thrive Thrive themes. That's pretty cool.

I didn't tell you about Thrive Themes. I apologize.

Yeah, no, you left me out, man.

I don't want to overwhelm you with tools.

Yeah, okay, okay, Mark. Okay. I Mean, you've heard of, like, gratitude journals and being grateful and just, like, capturing those moments that I think are important to each of us. And I'd like for you to check out this iPhone app called Evaluate. E L E V A T E Evaluate. Celebrate the small wins.

Evaluate.com or no, it's a.

It's in the iTunes store. Apple iTunes store. And what's cool about this is that it's a great way of capturing those small little wins that we all have every single day. Okay. And, you know, it uses a picture, too. So you take a picture, you put on there what it is, like, what was your small win or small victory? And then you can go back and flip through all these small victories that you had. Okay? So, I mean, what's nice is that it has the. To me, it has the visual component to. It's not just, oh, yeah, I mailed out, you know, my offer letters today. I mean, you can take a. Imagine taking a picture of all the offered letters going out in the mailbox, and you're like, I did it today. And then you captured that moment so that tomorrow or the another day, you can go back and you can go, man, what am I doing here? Like, you know, when you're struggling in a day, you can look at all of these small little victories that you've had, and you have a photo memory of them.

Is this Evaluate day your personal smart diary chip studio?

No, no. Here, let me. Let me send you the link and we'll make sure that the link is in the show notes, too. Right. You know.

Right, Right. I like gratefulness IO if you've ever been on that. And then I use the heck is this thing called? Probably gonna make fun of me. Josh Earl is like, oh, no.

What is.

What is he gonna say? It's.

It's.

It's a journal.

And you know what? I'm sitting there saying, value of this diary.

Check out grid diary, you guys.

Grid diary. And elevate. Not evaluate. Elevate.

Oh, elevate makes more sense, actually.

Okay, awesome. Getting it right now. All right, well, I, you know, because we didn't plug in the beginning, I want to remind Everybody, go to thelandgeek.com download for free the passive income blueprint. Get the ebook how to avoid three failed Land Buying mistakes. And get this always engaging and informative podcast delivered each week to your email inbox. Or as Josh Earl would say, at least once a day. And look, give Scott Todd some love. Go to landmoto.com go to scotttodd.net and most importantly, go to hostingdomination.com the landgeek, because we can always make more money, but we can't get more time. And this automates, which is my favorite word, Josh Earl, it automates your Craigslist postings. And then please go and check out JoshuaEarl.com we'll have a link in the show notes and check out loangeek IO. So, Josh, are we good?

I think we're good. Yeah. Good show.

All right. Fantastic. Scott, Are we good?

Mark? Great.

All right, well, I want to thank all the listeners, please. The only way we're going to get the quality guests like JoshuaEarl.com is if you subscribe, rate and review the podcast. Send us a screenshot@supporthelangic.com we're going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit. Scott, should we try it or no.

Let'S take a pass. Today we're going to scrap it.

All right, thanks, everybody. Let freedom, freedom ring.

I feel like I just dodged a bullet there.