#836 Don’t Write Another Landing Page Without This Framework [2026 Email Funnels Playbook] #836

One year we made them over $200,000 with all the bumps. I think it was $233,000 and $212,000 from upsells. What can you do with $200 extra $1,000? Happy Thursday morning everybody. Welcome back to the Tropical MBA podcast. I am in my hotel room in New York City, E and I are here in New York with 30 listeners of the podcast who run seven and eight figure business. Our goal as always at these events is to take copious amounts of notes and bring them back to you on the podcast. So look forward to that. Recently I was reading the survey that we put out and a lot of what I heard from you, the listener, is that give me tactics that are working right now that are proven that I can make money with. So today's guest has the tactics and the receipts. I was actually personally on a recent six figure promotion that I saw on an email and I was like, who did this? They said, John Ainsworth from Data Driven Marketing did this campaign. And so in today's interview and conversation, you're going to learn how to increase leads, how to increase revenue per lead, and the best news is you can do it with the tools and team that you already have. So John is an expert at using email marketing and smartly designed landing pages to improve your profit and revenue. We already have these tools that are disposal and most of us aren't using them to their capacity. So stick around to hear what every business can do to make more money from their emails, how to organize your promotions, and you'll also share a tactic for dramatically improving your opt-ins, which has had some dramatic results across his clientele. We're also going to get into some specifics like subject lines for promotions, how to stay out of the promotions tab in Gmail, and how to train AI to effectively write campaigns so no fancy copywriter hire required. All that plus some specific tactics that John's used to build a seven figure marketing agency and have one of his best years ever. So hope you did this one. We're going to get into it right now. My name is John Ainsworth and I am the host of the art of selling online courses and I also own an agency called Data Driven Marketing and we help online course creators with their email marketing and funnels help people make a lot of money. But you really help people make a lot of money and all kinds of niches. Like we can take these tactics that you're learning from online courses and apply them to e-commerce, apply them to services. You do it in your own seven figure agency. Like so we're going to take these nuggets and apply into our business and get results. We're going to get into specific tactics, but you said that people don't use email promotion well in general. You hang out with a lot of entrepreneurs. Why is this the case? There's a few things that I know with our clients that I see consistently. The first one is people are really worried about spamming their email list and people getting upset. I think they're too salesy and unsubscribing. And this is a forced dichotomy in my opinion because it assumes that the options are send bad emails that piss people off or don't send emails. Don't annoy anybody and then don't make money from email. Imagine for a second that we live in a world where there's more than two options. It's like what if you sent good emails that people liked receiving. There's ways of being creative about this kind of thing. So that's a lot of what we do with people. We help people send what we call nurture promos. And so there's a lot of value and useful information within the emails, which are also moving people towards a sale. So that's like one thing that I'll be with another one is people don't know how to do email promotions. How to do them well so they don't know what to write and they go back to what they're comfortable with. So like let's say that most people we know right have got a marketing tactic that they know like driving more traffic. That's the majority of people that seems to be the thing. The search engine optimization YouTube, whatever it might happen to be. And then they haven't gone right. I'm also going to learn this other tactic of email marketing in order to make sales to the list as well. So I guess that's another one. I still find it perplexing. So I guess this is an online business. Email marketing is like one of the fundamental things within it that actually makes money. How is everyone not doing this? Yeah, I was even at like the car shop the other day watching all the phone calls come in. And I was just imagining if like me and you rocked up to the desk and we're like, we could totally fund a person sitting here not going back and forth from the desk because they have thousands of email contacts. And I know because I'm a customer that I'm not receiving any kind of interesting promotion from them. And it's typically the case with most businesses you spend all this money to get your funnel people engage in your YouTube or your Instagram or whatever. And then we're not squeezing them into be passionate customers. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're talking about a bunch of tactics to do it. So for the listeners, you've shared with me the receipts. I'm seeing a lot of up into the rights for black Fridays and to the holidays season. I was actually on some of the promotions that your team wrote and they were so good that I replied to one of your customers. This is a true story. And I was like, yo, this is sick that you're finally doing this. I love being on this email and following along with what you're doing. And he's like, oh, John Ainsworth that I for me. Okay, cool. Let's get into it. So let's talk about email promotions tactics in general as a top line. If right now you're just sending out a newsletter or whatever. How can we turn that into an email promotion and do it effectively and creatively like you mentioned. So the basic principle is to send an email promotion every month. So every time I talk with client, if they look at their revenue chart, I will see there will be two or three spikes during the year. And I asked them what happened in those two or three months. And I know the answer is that they send an email promotion. And it'll be black Friday and one or two other things. And I said, well, why aren't you sending them in the other months? And it's because they're worried like I was saying earlier about being spammy salesy people unsubscribing. So it's like, okay, well, we need to run a promotion every single month. So we make a list of like what's the offers? What can we sell to people? And a lot of people if they've only got like one thing that they're selling freak out about that. And it's like we can repackage this. We can offer this in different ways. We can spit it up. We can bundle things. We can have bonuses. What have you? There's a way to figuring out. So then the actual email promotion itself, we want to do two weeks for the first week. There's no promotion, but it's connected. It's a warm up week. And so we have three emails, pain, agitation, solution. And the pain point is whatever your audience is biggest pain point is that your offer is going to solve. And you're talking about that and empathizing with it. If people don't think that you understand their problem, then they will never believe that you've got the solution for it. But if you can show you understand the problem better than they do, they're much more likely to believe that you've got a solution before they've even seen what it might be. So the second email then the agitate one, you've got this rare position compared to them where you have seen hundreds or thousands of people like them who didn't have the problem solved and then did the work that you're talking about and then solve the problem and their life is better. So you've been able to see what is it that is affecting people's lives more generally than just the specific problem. So they've got the problem. Let's say they don't know how to do video editing within some piece of software. Well, that's affecting their lives in a dozen other ways that they're not they haven't worked too much. They're not getting good enough clients. They haven't taken clients that they don't like. They're not spending enough time with their family. They don't have enough money. They're all of this stuff that they can't really see because they're too close to the problem. And then the solution, you give them a solution to the problem. A small thing they can do in 15 minutes. And then you tell them if you want the full solution next week, we're going to provide you with that. Then in the promotion week, you got six emails that go out, gain logic fear going going gone. So the game one is an announcement to email you talking about what is great about this thing. How is their life going to be better once they have it in place. The logic one is fact statistic studies data information for people who are more analytical and then the fear one is more emotional. So it could be what's their biggest fear that stopped them from doing this, but it could be some other emotion. It could be something else emotionally that is blocking them from taking action on this. Like you don't feel like you have the time to do this right now. It could be a big one. It could be it could be procrastination. It could be fear of failure. You'll have to serve a audience in advance of all this so that you know what the problems are so that you can address the correct one rather than just kind of coming up with something from your head. And then going going gone is all about urgency. So we're reminding people of the offer will have a discount on the offer during the week when it's on promotion. We provide them with maybe 30% discount on two bonuses something like this in the course space. It might be different in depending on what you're niches. And you have three emails there and the last one is just like a reminder it's going in a couple of hours. People respond really well to having something that says take action now. There's a reason to do it now until you get big spike right at the end. So that's the the overall sequence of it. I know that for anyone listening who's like that's not enough information about it. I've done loads of episodes on the podcast about it. So if you want to hear exactly what does all that look like you can go check that out. I really want to highlight one thing you said, which is the number one question to answer in these promotions is typically why now. That's like the framing question because it could be next month. It could be next year. If you can effectively answer why right now. The problem has been persisting in the prospects mine for a long time. If you want to see a masterclass of this. J Feldman has a really good email list which he does this super effectively. So J Feldman is a essentially a diet coach. He has a group coaching solution. but he will. follow a framework very similar to what you're talking about where he'll repackage it in a different direction every month. So the informational period will be like, he'll give you a helpful resource like a food table. Like, don't eat this, moderate this and eat this. But then the next month, he'll be like, I know a lot of you are concerned about like things like light exposure. And that's actually funnels right into the diet stuff too. And then the next month, he'll be like, some of you are concerned about ingesting microplastics. And so here's this helpful chart about, you know, like don't use a curing machine or whatever the solution is, he'll give you a very helpful resource. You could even imagine like, I like show my wife this PDF and I'm like, look, like we shouldn't cook it in a plastic dish or would pray, you know, and then all of a sudden you're reminding yourself as you're being educated that this guy's empowering me. I'm solving problems already. Why aren't I solving the big problem? And then he'll follow up with the offer for that month to join the coaching. It's very, very well done. All right, next topic, simple funnels. Yes, so this is particularly for people who are sending lower ticket stuff that you can sell through a simple funnel. So courses often tend to be like this if it's an under $500, but e-commerce similarly as well. And so what we're looking at here is having a sales page and a checkout page. And everyone's like, well, I've got a sales page and a checkout page just like, yeah, but they suck. So let's make them good, right? And it's, I think we'll understand how much better these can convert if you improve them, if you put all the right kind of tactics in place. So we've got a client we're working with who we doubled or more than doubled the conversion rate from her sales page to the checkout page. So the number of people who clicked the checkout page and then more than double the people on the checkout page who actually then converted. So that's four times the number of sales from the same amount of traffic. Just how do we do it? Making these things get. So there's 15 elements to have on a high performing sales page. I'll see if I can remember them all off the top of my head, but it's we're trying to make all of these as good as possible. But the first step is just have them all in place because people are off of missing steps. And so that's the easiest thing to fix. So we want an eyebrow headline. So that's something to tell people right at the very, very top, quite small text saying who this is for, who the target audience says so people who are in that audience know they're in the right place. Then a compelling headline, not just the name of your product, but what is the benefit someone's going to get if they buy this product. Then a subheading that's going into more detail about that benefit and really spilling that out for people. So it's still quite big font, but a bit smaller than the headline. Then we want to have a video sales letter. So two to five minutes something like this is going to summarize most of the points from on the sales page. Only about 10 to 12% of people will watch it. But that 10 to 12% of people are more likely to convert if you have that at the top there. Then you want to have a call to action button and you put this in the first person. So yes, I want whatever the result is that you're offering to people. And the reason you want in the first person is because for most of the sales page you're talking to them. This is them taking action by clicking on it. So it's them talking to themselves. So you put it in the first person. So next and nearly everybody messes this, we want a pain agitation solution section. So same as I talked about in the emails, you want to show people you understand their problem. You want to bring it to life through the agitation. And then you say, here's the solution to it, probably a paragraph for each bit. Oh, and underneath the call to action button, you want to have a reminder of the guarantee in small text underneath there. And if you've got a discount going on right now, you put a countdown timer. Countdown time is on the sales page in our testing of improved conversion rates 12%. Just by having that on the page. Next, we want to go into the benefits of the product. So why is it somebody should be getting this from you? How is their life materially going to be better? Then we're going to get into the features, which is very important to have, but most people only have the features without having the benefits. When you do the features section, what you generally want to do is tie each of those features back to a benefit as well. So it's not just saying this is the feature, this is the feature, which is what gets you X benefit. Now we're going to have something that is explaining the authority of the person who is in our case selling the course. But if you're selling something in e-commerce and as I'm what is your background, why should people trust you? Why do you know, how can they know that you know what you're talking about? We want social proof. So that's testimonials, but it might also be awards that you've won a number of customers that you've had places where you've had reviews, whatever it, you know, places you've had press. So the people are like, oh, this is a trustworthy, veritable thing. Other people in the world have said good things about and have said it's good what your trust pilot review is for you. You're just taking Charleney's list and just going down through it. Oh, it's like he did the work. Right. You did the work. Robert Chaleney did the work and figured out this is the things that people need in order to buy. If anyone he doesn't know persuasion by Robert Chaleney, he basically identified this is the things that people do in sales that cause people to buy. And it's like, yeah, do all of those. Yes. I'm going to make it a simple and practical for people to do it in each situation. But none of this is invented by me, right? This is just like what works. Well, even a simple example of this is like, I know a lot of famous influencers on social who've paid for a lot of their followers. And the reason is because there's a threshold for every ICP and for every platform that would chew way more likely to subscribe if you see that a lot of other people have subscribed as well. And so it's just like the simple principle, which is like, I'm way more likely to buy if I know that other people have bought it. And so how can you generate that social proof in your particular way? And for these folks I'm talking about on social, they consider it perfectly ethical. Like, look, I had 30 grand to go to upwork or whatever and get all these people to follow me. That should show that I'm serious. Yeah. Like, you find a way. You find a way to make it work. All right. Cool. I interrupted you at the social proof. Yeah. So future casting and almost nobody does this. This is, you might think this is similar to benefits, but it's very, very important. It's sharing people how their life is going to be different in a day, a week, a month, three months, six months. And because you've worked with people, people have bought your product, they've bought your course, your coaching, your service, whatever it is. You've seen how their life is actually different day to day. Yeah. And so you can talk about a day in the life of a person who has already gone through and done this and bring that to life. And these people who are thinking about buying from you, they don't know that that's the case. They don't know how that is. And obviously your testimonials help with that and they benefit to help with that. But this is a section just about that. We want to frequently ask questions, a summary of everything else that's been on the sales page because the sales page by now is quite long. And then after each of these sections that I've mentioned, you have that call to action button, the countdown time of the guarantee again. We have the guarantee as its own section down somewhere towards the bottom where you're really making a point of what is your guarantee. And make this as strong as you can risk reversal. Yeah. This is risk you're not to buy. Essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. And Jay Abraham talks about that a lot in this book, getting everything you can out of all you've got. And I really try to take that to heart. And be like, okay, if you buy this course from us and you don't like it, we will give you your money back and you get to keep the product from us. So it's like, oh, I'd be crazy not to get this. Why would I not get this? You know, right. Someone's going to take the risk. As the business owner, I think it should be you. I think for a lot of founders that have a great top of funnel, like a YouTube channel, there's a little bit of a pivot of mindset here where you are being like this super generous giver a lot of times of information. And now all of a sudden, you know, we're squeezing into this more problem solution sale mindset. And I think that that probably is where people like you come in, it can be tough to like play nice all the time. And now all of a sudden it feels like a little bit more hardball. Can you talk a little bit about the struggle that your clients face about that transition and how critical it is to go over because one of the things I find over the years, if you're not willing to make this squeeze and have a strong sales portion of your organization, well guess what? You might not be able to fund your YouTube channel for the next five years. People are uncomfortable, but also they don't know how to do it. I think the discomfort part can be addressed if you just really start to understand that it's like it's allowed to do this. People are on your email list because they're interested in what it is that you've got on offer. And if people don't want to receive it from you, they can unsubscribe. In fact, what we do to make it really, really easy is people can unsubscribe from any given email promotion. It's so easy for someone to choose not to hear about this. There's just no real problem with it. The reason you've got the email list is in order to promote products to them otherwise, what's the point of it? You know, let's then talk about webinars. How do you decide whether or not to inject a webinar into your promotional sequence versus just pushing them to the landing page? So it's a couple of things. One is how expensive is the product video selling? If it's under $300 or $500, it's probably not worth doing the webinar. It depends on your niche, right? If you're going to consumers where 500 is quite a lot for them, a webinar might be a really good idea. If you're selling something for $97, though, it's just it's not going to be worth it because the conversion rates don't actually add up to make it fully worthwhile. So is it expensive enough that it adds up? Second thing is, is the client going to be willing to actually do a webinar. And that's a really big deal because a lot of people are not and we struggle with this and I've still not completely figured out how come people are so bothered about it because a lot of our clients are YouTubers who are great on camera but they still don't want to do it and I think it's the pitch part. So they're happy to teach something but then you've got a transition and then you've got to pitch something to the audience and that makes them feel uncomfortable and then they don't do it. When I started this business I thought all we do is webinars and then I just found it was so difficult to get people to actually do the webinar. So we started doing more email promotions but like as a friend of ours Sarah Weaver she sells coaching for making money from residential property. Yep. Buying residential property out of state in the US and she'd heard me talk about webinars and she hadn't done anything to make money in like six months and she'd just been having a lovely time and she's like oh I need some money I should do a webinar and she did a webinar and she made $70,000 from it and she messaged me and she's like what should I do now? I was like do another webinar. Okay cool. So she did another webinar and she made $80,000 and I messaged her earlier today and I asked her have you run any more webinars because after that she said what do I do now and I was like Sarah it's really straightforward. I'm going to start to charge you for this every month. What I want you to do is run a webinar to either to your audience or to a partner's audience or build a bigger audience you know do some more work to get more people onto your email list or do it on a different topic or whatever it is. We're going to use every tactic we can do to make this happen but every month to do another webinar. So she told me I had a webinar last month and got six signups at $9,800 a pop. I had 12 sales calls total the two days following. Did the same webinar last night and have six sales calls today. So I was like they're so good if you're selling higher ticket stuff they're so good. What is the Cliffs Notes to organizing a webinar of the best resource that you know about how long, how much information, how much pitch? Yeah so the best book on it is Expert Secrets by Russell Bronson. It's outstanding, it's fantastic. I was chatting with Lydia Maruchova. She's doing an episode here where she talked about the framework that Russell shares in that book. Yeah she does a great job with it and she just launched a new product which is an AI tool for helping you to learn how to learn the language. Instead of selling courses she's sending the AI tool and she did a webinar for it followed Russell Bronson's perfect webinar system from Expert Secrets. Absolutely like refined it perfectly and then she made three times more than she'd ever made in any previous launch. That's the combination of doing the webinar and the new product but she does a great job with it. If you're going to make one great webinar presentation that's the system to follow. It takes a long time to put all of that together because what he's basically done is he's taken every tactic that works in webinars and he's put them all together into one system and it integrates and the whole thing all builds on itself and you can do more with AI now to make that faster, make that kind of easier to put together but it's still a lot of work. If what you're doing is the other kind of webinar teach and pitch webinar you can still read Russell Bronson's book and especially the sections where he's explaining about the transition and the pitch but you don't have to do all the whole build up. It won't convert as well but you can do these more often because you can teach a different topic each time and then transition and then do your pitch. What kind of conversion expectations would you have on a webinar for a multi-thousand dollar coaching product? Yeah, so a really good one. You're looking at something around a really good webinar with a really good product market fit and so on. You're looking at about a 10% conversion rate from attendees to sales and that might be via, you know, people buying direct or depending on the price it might be via sales schools after that as well but that's like about the kind of upper limit. I think Sarah was a bit above that. Sarah's very, very good presenting, she's very enthusiastic, very knowledgeable, audience love to, she's got great, but like there's a lot of things that lined up that made that a really good fit but I think she maybe was doing it like 15% something like that. Trature. Cool, next one. Improving your email options and building your list. I feel like we go in and out on this one all the time. What are the best practice tactics you're seeing to get people from content to email subscriber? The basic principles here are really simple. As with everything, there's like a ton of little details but if you just do the basics right, you're way ahead of where you probably are at the moment. So we had this one client, Tiel Swan, they had 100 opt-ins a week and they had this massive audience. This is like an extreme example. They had 3 million followers across different social media platforms, YouTube, Facebook, etc. And we took them to 5,000 opt-ins a week by implementing this. Fikes up to 10,000. Most people can like 2 to 10 times their opt-in rate from this. So first thing is you want to have a great lead magnet. At least one, so definitely one really good lead magnet, maybe you'll do multiple. Start with one. So that means something that is super useful, really, really easy to consume. So they shouldn't have to take a course or learn a thing, whatever, they just use this resource that you've given them and it should be really valuable. And that can be kind of hard to find but I'll give a couple of examples. We worked with someone in the digital painting space and he had 10 free tutorials and resources was his giveaway and it's a bit vague and a bit generic and it's kind of like what exactly am I gay? I'm not sure. And we swapped that for 10 free digital paint brushes. And so this is something, these are people who are already painting on their iPad or what have you and they are now able to use these specific paint brushes that they didn't have before. They don't have to learn anything else. They could just use them straight away. So it's really, really useful but it doesn't take extra time to start doing it. One that I mentioned, Teal Swan, she had I think just a newsletter opt-in and we replaced that with 5 free meditations. And so these are people who are already meditating. They now can get this guided meditation from Teal and so it's like it's really easy for them. It fits with their life. They're very happy with it and it's super valuable to them. The next thing with a really good lead magnet is it should link to the thing that you're selling so that the people who are opting in are the same kind of people who are going to buy the product that you've got afterwards. So you don't just grow your list, you grow your list with people who are good fit. And so for example, Teal was selling a meditation vault with 27 meditations for 27 dollars. And so if you download 5 free meditations, you're exactly the kind of person you might want to spend 27 dollars to buy 27 meditations. It is a perfect fit. There. I think back to Jay Feldman, you listened to him talk for an hour and a half about the science of whether or not you should eat one bean over another and what the amino acid does in your small intestine. But in the back of your mind as a potential dieter, there's a question that's lurking in your mind, which is, well, what do I eat just in general? If I buy that this guy's smart about the freaking beans. And he says in the middle of the podcast, he says, Hey, I've got a free food guide for you that will outline all the key food groups and what you should eat and what you should moderate and what you should me check out landing page. It's the easiest lead magnet of all time because it's the question in the back of your mind. He doesn't need to have a great landing page. He doesn't need to have a great copy there because you just want the guide. I try and do the same thing. So I give away things like templates. It's like, okay, I'll explain to people. Here's how you write a great email promotion. And it's like, okay, but that all sounds probably quite hard. Still, I've got a template for you and just go through and you follow the template and you can just go download that from the website. I just like, Oh, perfect. Right. Now I understand what it is. I've got the free thing that's going to allow me to use it. The screen free ICP two, if we're targeting seven eight figure entrepreneurs, often they'll download the templates and send it to their team, which is fantastic. That was step one, which is get a great lead magnet. Yep. And then the second part is, put it everywhere. And people just don't do this and it boggles my mind. So above everything else, promote the lead magnet, not the product. So you've got your YouTube channel, right? You've got your YouTube video during the video, mention the relevantly magnet that you've got. Then put a link to it in the description at the very top. So someone doesn't have to click more. They just see the link to it. And then put it in the pinned comment as well. And then do that for every video you've got that's still driving traffic. You can do this with your back catalog too. Yeah. Absolutely. A simple project. Go through all your blog posts, put it in there, put it on the homepage, put it in a pop up, just put it everywhere. And like if people were thinking, what kind of difference can that make? Well, that's what we did with Tills one, create a lead magnet. Just one, put it everywhere. If you're putting on Instagram, like promote it, actually have a post that is promoting the lead magnet and then get many chat as the way for people to download it. And that's what, you know, multiply their leads enormously. Fantastic. Let's talk about then increasing revenue per customer. Now we're doing the promotion. They're on the sales page. How do we get them past just the initial purchase? Yeah. So there's two basic tactics that we use in the work in the online course space. They work with the commerce. They work with services businesses. They work in all kinds of places. Order bumps and upsells. So the same concept that selling an additional thing to the person who's already buying, you go to buy a big Mac, do you want fries with that? You go to the cinema, you buy the popcorn as well. You go to buy a car, you get the leather seats and the nice radio on what have you right. That's the basic concept, but they're done in different ways. So the order bump is on the checkout page. It's a tick box with two or three lines of text that people can just quickly read and go, "Oh, that sounds like a good fit. I'm going to buy the that thing as well. The upsell is on the confirmation page after the checkout page. Yes. Put the credit card details in, they've hit Submit, maybe they bought the order bump, maybe they didn't. Now they see another page with another offer. Now the order bump tends to be about a third of the price of the main product you're selling, and the upsell tends to be about the same or a bit more as the thing that you're the main thing that you're selling. It would typically be a mistake to present both options on the checkout page. What you want to do is sequence it so only the people who've purchased the first option get to see the second option. Then you could always promote the second thing later. But the timing is critical because if you're putting people to, you know, you have to make a lot of decisions to make like a thousand, two thousand dollar purchase. Let them focus on that one core decision, and once they've opted into that, they're way more likely to buy the next one thousand dollars thing. The idea was I see a lot of sales pages that will present both options on the sales page, which I think one of the themes we've been talking about is timing a lot on the podcast is like what is the right time to present this particular promotion is often right after or right during depending on the ratio of the price to the solution they're opting at to. So we did this with someone recently. It was those two tactics, but we also sold the more expensive thing through the email promotion. So instead of selling a monthly membership, we sold the annual membership, which is very common. You need to be selling something that's expensive enough as your main offer. We did this with the client recently and his average order value went from $34 up to $120. That's like if you sell four times as much per person, you're probably going to make more money, you know, there you go. Very cool. So we're going to use order bumps at one third ratio and then the upsell at the same price essentially. So it will pull up. Yeah. Ballpark. What kind of conversions would you expect to see ballpark when I. And these are going to be high relative to I mean, if you're not doing this right now, this is one of the easiest ways to increase your LTV. Yeah. So order bumps is about 30 to 60%. If you're doing a good job with it, like the highest we've ever had is like 85, but normally we'll see within the 30 to 60% range. And then upsells is about 10 to maybe 25%. Incredible. An enormous economic change. Yeah, between the few of them they add like maybe 50%. The guys I mentioned before, Tills One, they made in one year, we made them over $200,000 with order bumps. I think it was $233,000 and $212,000 to list from upsells. What can you do with $200,000? You can do a lot. It's incredible. It's remarkable how few of our businesses do it because there's a lot of constraints here. Like, you know, it took us so long to build our product. I'm exhausted with just like getting everything into the products. So now I don't have anything left to sell. It's a common kind of small bootstrapper objection to this kind of thing. Are there easy ways we can explore after we've put our heart and soul into this one core product, how can we conceptualize an order bump or a premium upsell? Most people I talk to who say, well, I haven't got anything else to sell them. When we sit down and we make a list of what is everything that you've ever sold, give me access to your Stripe account, let's go through and find all the things you've ever saw. We almost always find they've sold a bunch of other things in the past. It's like, all right, well, let's start with that. And it might not be the perfect order bump or the perfect upsell, but having something is better than not having anything at all. Unless it's a completely crazy fit. It won't help your audience at all. But what about if you did some paid training, they've get in the kind of coaching space, maybe you also at one point did some coaching sessions with people on a slightly different topic and you charged them for the six week program and you recorded it. Okay, well, have you got recording still? Can you sell that? Upsells, if you've got a monthly membership, maybe sell the annual membership as the upsell or a quarterly one, something like that. But normally, like nearly everybody has got a bunch of other things they have sold before. You go through, just pick what's the best one, add that in as your upsell. There's a DCA who we both know. He's selling a service for several thousand dollars. And then his upsell is guarantee or like a, you know, if something goes wrong, then you get an extra six months to come back and talk to us about it. And like 10% of people buy it and it's like an extra five hundred bucks. And he just messages me every so often. He's like, I've made this many extra thousand dollars by having this order bump in place. Incredible. There's a moment for like extreme elegance here. Like that support thing that is highly profitable because people at the time of the purchase, they want the confidence that it's going to be there. But they're probably not going to take advantage of it. It's insurance policy. That's a great way to do it because your margin on it is going to be ridiculous. You're taking advantage as an online entrepreneur, this classic psychology, we can all feel, which is like, should I go to this restaurant or whatever? I don't know. Like, you're going to have a drink John who sit down. I don't know. I don't need. Okay. Order a drink. And then all of a sudden, you're in. You made the, you made the hard decision, which is to sit down at the restaurant. Let's just get it, get an extra appetizer, you know? And so what is your extra appetizer? What is the nice bottle of wine? Because we're already sat down. We're having a great time. Let's offer that to our customers. The results are almost universally incredible. Look, I hate surveys. You hate surveys. But I needed to know what was actually working on the podcast. So I use perspective AI and it's not a survey. So for the past month, I've been asking you all to fill out a survey for a chance to win a free coaching session and a bunch of you did and we appreciate it. And I'll be reaching out to the lucky winner very soon. But what was really interesting is what I learned from it. I use perspective AI to actually talk to a bunch of TNBA listeners. And here's what I came up with. Long time fans think the show's gotten too polished. A bunch of you are over the e-commerce content. One listener has been stuck at 50K MRR for years and feels completely stuck. I feel for you and we're going to do our best to help you. And apparently I'm also bad at LinkedIn. Totally fair. Here's the thing. I learned more from these conversations than I have in two years of analytics. So if you're building anything, a product, a podcast, whatever, you've got to talk to your audience. Perspective AI makes that easy. It runs AI moderated interviews that actually feel like real conversations. So check it out at getperspective.ai. The link is in the show notes and a big shout out to the team at getperspective.ai for sponsoring the pod. Okay, cool. So we spent a lot of time on increasing revenue per customer. Two more tactical topics before I get into some quick fire stuff, John. Using AI to get all this done. I know you're doing a lot of AI stuff. How are you using it right now to improve funnels? So AI is not as good as a high level copywriter. But it is if you do your job right as good as a copywriting intern. So a copywriting process involves a lot of little steps to get to version one, to get you 70% of the way there. And so the best thing to do is to use AI to actually help you to run all of those steps. So if you're working with a good quality copywriter, they're going to start out by what we do is we'll start out by surveying the audience. We will go through them. We'll put all the data from all of your customer service emails, all the testimonials, put all that information together. We're going to use that to create a customer avatar and a customer language document. Then you're going to have information that you put together about your offer. What's your product? Why are people going to buy it? What problems does it solve? All kinds of questions you ask there. We call ours the big ask question there because it's just like it's so big that we can internally start referring it to us that I never changed the name of the document. And it's just like there's so many questions that you need to know. And you get all of that data together. And AI can help with some of those steps in terms of the customer avatar analysis and billing and analyzing all the data from your testimonials. What have you to start to create that summary in the customer avatar? But then if you give all of that information as the raw process to AI, then that makes it much easier for it to give you a good output. If you just say, write me some emails or write me a sales page, it doesn't know what all of those bits for information are. But then the next thing you want to do is give it an example of a really good email promotion that is as similar to what you are going to be writing as possible. Maybe it's from a competitor, maybe it's one you got someone to write for you before they converted really well. Something that you like, this is in the same kind of niche for the same kind of audience, but it's got a different offer. So you got to train the AI to the same way you would train the intern essentially. Like here's our ICP documentation. Here's the customer survey response. Here's a bunch of data from customers actually talking about the brand. So you could dunk in your help desk or whatever. And then here is the model of what we're trying to produce out of this. If you do that, you're saying you get seven out of 10 results. Yeah. And maybe version one, it gets you back like five or six out of 10 because sometimes AI makes stuff up. So then one of the things we'll do is say, okay, how truthful was that? Is there anything in there that wasn't honest? Is there anything in there that's too hypey or salesy or inaccurate or whatever it is? And then it'll kind of give it, you get it to give itself a rating and you say, well, now try and make it into a nine out of 10. Make sure there's nothing that is inaccurate that is false, that is made up that is, you know, any way I've talked about. And it's getting slightly better at this, depending on what version you use, we use Claude for it that tends to be pretty good. Different people tell me that other models have overtaken, but Claude has generally been pretty good on this kind of thing. And at the end of that, then you will need to go through, read it, make sure it does actually follow the structure that you're trying to follow, does it actually be completely honest in something that starts a tweak it? - But it gives you a version one, and everybody who's written in the thing knows how hard version one is. - Yeah. - It's so hard to get to a sh*t first draft. But you have to go to a sh*t first draft to get to a better second draft and a better third draft. And so that's the overall process. I mean, we've spent months refining our prompts that we use for this, the process, what order did you put these things in? How do you tweak it? What have you? And we still have to afterwards go through and actually edit it and tweak it, what have you. But that gives you a really good starting point and it saves a lot of time. - Great tip there. Final piece, tripwire, finals. What are they and how can we use them? The basic idea we were talking about timing is after someone has just taken action is that the time they're most likely to take more action. So when they've just signed up to your lead magnet, a tripwire funnel is when you offer them something cheap on the confirmation page. So when I mentioned before that Tiel Swan had that five free meditations, we then came up with the idea of, let's put 27 paid meditations on the confirmation page. And a 12% of people who signed up for the free one, then converted and bought. Now of course we then also added in an order bump and we added in an upsell and we added in an upsell. And we added in an upsell sequence and all of the stuff, the great sales page, great checkup page, everything we've talked about. So why wait for four weeks until your next promotion comes around? Xana, hit 'em while they're hot. This funnel converts better than any other step in the entire process because it got 100% of people are seeing the sales page. So if you have an email promotion that goes out, what percentage of people open your emails? 30% how many people click on it? 1% 2% something like that. This sales page is the only one that 100% of people signing up. See, and so therefore, I can vote as much better. Beautiful. So essentially we're taking all the best practices and accelerating it to the opt-in moment. Yeah. So we've got a whole framework here worth ridiculous. I mean, maybe you could just give one general case study of like someone who's just on like the YouTube, the newsletter and all of a sudden, they take these seven ideas and apply them, which could take a few weeks of your time. What is the potential here? Yeah, so we have Dave, who's in the guitar space, who've been working with recently, probably the most extreme example. He was making about $20,000 a month. And then we started working together in September. In October, we got up to $120,000. And in November, he hit $170,000. There's a DCer who you know well, hand-done email promise before, we added $55,000 to her revenue last month. We had an Amazon seller, something a course, she went from $17,000 a month to $40,000 a month, the best month was $50,000. It's like, this is the typical kind of range, like normally between two and five times revenue. Business question before we get into quick fire email tactics, when are you going to start taking minority stakes in these companies? Yeah, I've thought about that a lot. And I haven't quite figured out the model on it. And I keep thinking, I keep saying to Yosip, who's like my head of funnel strategy, CRO, right hand man kind of guy. And he's like, we've tried doing partnerships where we just are going to take a revenue share with people. And it hasn't worked because people then don't do the work when they're not paying for it. We've seen that enough times, they were like, ah, something's not working right there. And I've thought, well, we should be getting a percentage of this like long term from people who ever started to work with us. And his response to me was, let's do what we're currently doing until we've got like X amount of money in the bank account. And so that we like stable and we know, okay, we've got that. And then we can look at what's the other ways we might do it. He says, and then if that happens, that means it's working. And then we should just carry on doing that. And I was like, there's a certain amount of like, that's a weird logic, but there's a certain amount of logic to it. And it started working for us like, we've started to start to really take off. Like we made a lot more profit this year than we've ever made before. It's really starting like everything's coming together. Everything's working really well. My temptation is then like, okay, well, let's change it to this better other business model. And his is like, let's keep doing what's working. Just do more of it. And I'm like, there's a certain sense to that, you know? So I don't know, Dan. I don't know. I think about it regularly. And I don't know the answer. I sat down with my team, some marketers on the team, and here are some quick fire questions for the email expert. Number one, how to stay out or get out of the promotions tab. Yeah. So engaging with people is really good through content emails to ask them to reply to your email. It could be by asking questions, which is what we normally did. But we actually had, we had one client recently, what he did is he said, if you've come until this point, reply with banana. So I know you're one of the real ones who actually want to learn something from this. It's like, that's maybe not ideal, but it as long as it's getting them to reply, because then that tells Gmail and whoever else, this is someone who is actually a legitimate email sender because people are replying back to them. So we'll do stuff like we had one with a client recently, his first warm up email. We had an interactive survey. So we basically asked people just to reply with their biggest challenge. Is it a, b or c and got hundreds of responses? And then that improved list engagement. It doesn't just improve it with those people who've responded. It improves the overall because they say, oh, this is a good sender, we're going to improve their kind of ranking. There you go. So telling people to respond and then you replying back to them as well, that really really helps. How do you get a real read on your email engagement despite changes to Apple mail update? Yeah. So what we do now is more focus on click-through rate and the reply triggers, like I was kind of mentioning above, to see how good the emails actually are. So you can use open rates to judge one against another, but that doesn't actually tell you the full figure of how many people actually opened it. And then also unsubscribe rates and bounce rates. So click rate, we're looking for something between about 0.5 and 1%. Open rates definitely we still want them to be above 25%. Even with all of the data that we can't collect unsubscribe rate, we want no more than 0.3% and then a bounce rate under 0.5% as well. And so those are kind of the ways that we're tracking it. Fantastic. Best subject lines you've seen recently. So this is the best ones that we've used, so I actually had the data on it. So we heard early Black Friday opens, bracket you're invited and then their name. And that was a 81% open rate. Going, going, gone. 77.8% open rate. I'm sorry, I have to close this offer. 55.7%. So you see quite a few of these are like the urgency ones, right? Time to hit 0.42.6%. A personal note for first name, 41.5% and then course name enrollment opens now was 41.2%. Excellent. What are the difference between a killer subject line for an email versus a YouTube title? Yeah, so a YouTube title, I mean, there's certain bits that the same, right? You've got to engage a lot of times curiosity with people. You might want to talk about a benefit with it. The difference between subject lines is these are people who already know you. You know, these are people who are who are warmer, who are more interested in what it is that you actually have to offer. So you can have stuff that is more focused around you, your offer, what it is that you are actually going to be giving them right now that is connected to the stuff that you've already got. Whereas people on YouTube, you're often trying to reach new people. So you have to like talk about things that are more general with not assuming any pre-existing knowledge. So I think that's the big difference. You're still looking at curiosity and what can you have in terms of a benefit and what do you got in terms of like why they should take action now on this thing. And that's the, I'm thinking particularly about like discovery based YouTube videos. Ah, you've just got a much warmer audience so you can presuppose information and knowledge and understanding and therefore treat based on that. When people on your email list like subjects that perform really well like might be a narrative based thing about the audience like, hey, I'm sorry, our server's crashed. Here's the full story that typically will do really well. Whereas like on YouTube, those can perform pretty well too. I see YouTubers will do like one for the algo, you know, and then they'll do one for their subscribers and so might go both ways there. Your favorite lead magnet if I had to pin you down to one right now. Of mine, our best one is our email templates. If anyone wants to get that, go to the website, download it. But the best one that we've ever had was that 10 free paintbrushes that I mentioned before. Something immediate value, yeah. A no brainer gift. I think the main constraint there for a lot of founders is figuring out what that is. So it's like in the conception phase, like what can I produce that, you know, like what's something that's worth $100 of value or plus that I'm just going to give away for free? There's a classic marketing strategy, right? It's like what is a portion of value that my business has generated, a data set, a guide, templates that could be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars that you can simply have for free by being an insider to this brand. Cool. Any other tips or tactics regarding making more money via email that come to mind before we pivot to Statoch. a little bit about running your agency. I think the biggest thing with it is, be willing to be uncomfortable in doing this and just start doing it regularly. Say to yourself, "I am now an email marketer as well," and start sending out these email promotions every month and be like, "Oh, I didn't want to work." That's okay. That's all right. I'm going to send another one next month and just keep doing it, and it's rating and improving because so many people, it causes me a lot of emotional pain. I mean, like friends of ours, and I'm like, "But you could just be doing this thing and making all this money." Then they don't do it, and they don't make all. Anyway, make the money while you can make the money. Go make some money. This is your therapy session. You're worth it. Go make the sale. Okay. You said you had a great year this year. You run an agency. A lot of us listening to this run of services business. I want you to share with us some of the top ways that you've had one of your best years ever. You mentioned the Dream 100 approach. What was the impetus for this and how does it work? Yeah. The Dream 100 is a concept as far as I know it's come up with by chat homes, and he talks about it in the Ultimate Sales Machine, which is a great business book. We've got very specific requirements for who we'll work with. Someone who's already got to have an audience. It's generally on YouTube, most of our clients. They've got to have at least 5,000 views a month, but the best clients have got millions of views every month. They're already selling the courses, and their clients love them, despite the fact they haven't got good funnels. That narrows down our market really, really tight, a relatively small number of people. That's great from a delivery point of view, because we can help though. That's why we get people such amazing results, because we're working with people who are the absolute perfect fit and the thing they need is what we've got. That meant that a lot of our more mass market approaches like SEO or YouTube or partnerships or whatever, they didn't tend to work, because there weren't other people with that audience that we could get a bunch of. No other people didn't have that exact same audience. There's like three podcasts that do, and I've been on them, and that was great. Right? And it's like we're done. There isn't the fourth one. You can't just keep bumping it. Yeah. So the Dream 100 idea is you basically go, "Who is your absolute ideal customers?" And it doesn't have to be 100. That's just a catchy name. And so what we did is we went through and started to make a list of them. We scraped from the internet, everyone who had a teachable account or could jar, but you're only the software where people host courses. And lots of people there, they have a course, but they don't have any traffic. So we then used tools and automation and developers to scrape information about what's their website visitors and what's their YouTube subscribers, how many Instagram followers that they got and so on, and added that into the spreadsheet. Then we could go right, which of these are a really good fit. Then we also are still working on like, we just have people going through YouTube and find people with big followings, see if they have courses if yes, add them to the list. And then what we do is we reach out to all of those people with the code email and I invite them to come on the podcast. And I get the chance to talk to them and hang out for an hour and as part of that, I will help them with their funnel. Yeah. And at the end of that, a bunch of them are like, "Oh, could you help me with that some more?" And it's like, "I certainly could. Let's have a chat. I'll connect you with the team. We're going to have a, you know, see what else we can do." And if that doesn't work, if they're like, not interested at that point in anything, then I said, "Well, we've got a WhatsApp group, got a community for course greatest just like you. Would you like to join that?" And then we stay in touch with them through that. So we just help them consistently until they're ready to get our help. Just a little bit of background, the dream 100. I went to this super expensive CEO bootcamp with Verne Harnish, world famous business coach. And it's interesting because we talk about operation. We talk about every single topic. And the last day we got to marketing. And marketing is this big question mark, question mark profit thing for a lot of founders. Like, what do I do? Especially service providers. And he basically presented the dream 100 to us. He's like, "This is your marketing strategy. Here is my list of 100 people. Here's all the gifts they get every Christmas. Here's how often we send them some nice note. And every person on the list might have a different modality depending on what they want to hear about. So it could be, I send this person a link to some cool shit that they're into every four months. And we call it roll index marketing. We have a spreadsheet. You can download it at tropicalmbi.com resources for free. But the basic idea is that for a lot of businesses building an Instagram account, obviously for the majority of businesses doing one of these easy button, quote, marketing tactics that you see businesses that are native to that platform using successfully. I think a lot of us services businesses try to emulate that. I should be posting on Facebook all the time. Maybe that's a good strategy. But for nine out of 10 businesses, the dream 100 is a good strategy, which is to say, who exactly do you need to be having conversations with? And how do you start those conversations? And I think that's why so many people go to in-person events because it's a way to emulate the dream 100 strategy by building relationships. People are in events. They want to hang out. They want to chat. They want to meet cool people. Well, you can do it from your desk. Your team can do it by taking on the dream 100 strategy. And you can start with five people, ten people and see how it goes. But I think the way you framed it up there made a ton of sense there. The way Vern put it was like, there's like 10, five to 10 people that are going to like make all the difference for you next year. Uh huh. Are you going to try to reach him via your Instagram posts? Is that your plan? It's a lot of it. Right. So if I was starting to work on YouTube and I was like, okay, well, now I'm getting for some videos a couple of thousand views. So what percentage of those people are the ideal, exact person who I want to have as a client? Because if I have someone who is a great client, we are going to make them like an extra $100,000 a month and we're going to make a good amount of money ourselves as well from it as like a great. And if someone's like an okay client, then like, you know, we'll make them more money and we'll make a bit of money as well. But it's like those absolutely perfect ones. It's such a difference. It's so much more money that they're making and that we're making. So what's the odds that they're the one who saw that YouTube video? It's quite low. But if I reach out to them personally, then they are definitely the one who, now not all of them reply, but everyone who replies is definitely exactly the right kind of person. So you have a podcast, which I listened to. This is part of the strategy. It's the industry part strategy, right? And let me know how this works. I've seen a lot of people do this successfully. It's basically using the podcast as a way to network with your audience. It's a network with your absolute ideal, like dream 100. The people in the audience like it because they're listening to a podcast, which is with people who they want to hear from, the people who've been successful in your industry. And people are delighted to come on because they like to go on a podcast and be asked about their opinions and especially if you're good at being a podcast host, which I happen to be the right kind of personality and interest type and whatever that I'm good at interviewing people. And you get the chance to network and talk with that absolute ideal person. And so it's just a really good win, win, win kind of situation. Are there other types of things that you think could work for those? I mean, podcast is a big, big lift. You know, Vern Harnish talks about he sends gifts. You know, you can send article links. Have you done any experimentation in terms of like when you come up with a template, do you like send it out to those dream 100 or do you ping people? How does that work? Well, so we asked them if they want to join our community, which is totally free and they pretty much all say yes. And then I share a lot of information with people in there. So it's like Black Friday was just very recently. And so in advance of it, I gave people, here's a complete guide to everything that we do with Black Friday. Here's how we do Black Friday. Here's how we do the pre-Black Friday. Here's how we do Cyber Monday. Here's how we choose the offer. Here's the emails that we're sending, etc. And then people from that group are messaged me and being like, oh, yeah, I did the things you said and I made 50% more revenue from it. Now each individual person won't necessarily then become a customer, but it's like everyone's hearing, we know what we're talking about and we're helping people. And that's our system at the moment. But I want to do more with it. I want to stay in touch with those people more. Another thing we do is we'll just follow up with people every few months and be like, house things, house everything going and then provide them a couple of bits of help but advice if we can and then just be in touch. That's kind of it really. Amazing. I love it. I think the Dream 100 approach is fascinating because it's the kind of thing like we always used to bring up cold calling on the podcast because it was almost like a measure of your seriousness and commitment to reaching your goals and feel like a Dream 100 sits as like a very clear path to a lot of our goals. It's like here are the 10 people who are going to hear the 15 people are going to make a difference like are you reaching out to them are you following up are you asking them on a podcast are you putting them in a text chain. What are you doing about it? Because it makes people bristle that have less intensity or ambition. And so it's almost a filter. Hmm. One of the things I found so this community of course creators who are a perfect fit to work with us, not run by me. And I found that all of them know about us so much and talk about us so much that they refer to my business not as data driven marketing but as DDM amongst themselves and then assume that everybody else in the group also knows who DDM is. And I was like that's awesome. I love that that happens and we have now a bunch of them as clients and we've helped you know worked with a lot of them and that's great. But I'm like I want to copy what works right. I have tried a thousand things here is a thing that has worked almost by chance. Can I do it? Can I do more of that? So I'm basically trying to like can I create my own community and then enable them to talk to each other so that they're all talking about DDM and referring each other to us in a incredible way. And either thoughts from a great year in business were winding down the year here. What are you thinking about as the year ends and how are you planning to continue your success in 26? Yeah, so another big part of the success for us was using AI. How can you get more done? How can you get the basics done with AI that don't take you so much time. So with a smaller team, you can still get the same amount of results. Or the same size team get more results, however you so that's been a really big deal. The thing that sticks with me and that I think about every week, every day is, how do I manage to stay focused on the things that are working and not getting distracted by my? Oh, I've got a great new idea. Brain, which is like it runs at such a speed. There's so many new ideas that just keep coming off from my head. And thank God I got your sip because I go and talk and through with him and he's like, "BOOM, that's a great idea. Let's keep doing the thing that's working." It's like, "Okay, yeah, good point. Yeah, let's keep doing that." I just like, "Oh my God." And I think I talked to so many other entrepreneurs and it's like the same people going through the same thing, you know? Like everyone's got this ADHD brain and they're just all firing and they're creative and they come up with all this stuff. It's like, how can I just stay on track and just keep doing the stuff that's working again and again and again? Everybody listening can relate to you. It's the root awakening of entrepreneurship because you need one creative idea that takes off and then is there a way that you can harness that creativity behind the focus or are you going to let it distract you? And I think that's a question we all face. It's a good way to leave it. No solutions to that one. That the perennial. John Ainsworth, we appreciate your expertise and your time spent with us here today at the podcast. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, and I'll always guys. I think everybody wants to go check it out. The podcast I've been talking about is the art of selling online courses and you can get that email template that I mentioned from data driven marketing.co/resources. Incredible. John, we hope you'll be back on soon. Thanks for joining us. Wicked. Thanks, John. Become a Tropical MBA Insider today at TropicalMBA.com. It's 100% free. You'll get access to some of our best business building resources, templates on everything from quarterly plans to budgets, all that plus a weekly email from yours truly. Go in the fun over at TropicalMBA.com.