📂 Ads are costing you too much: Here's what you need to do about it

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Today's newsletter is proudly supported by Ahrefs 🙌

Ever since going through Blogging For Business, I've been a massive fan. In fact, they're one of the companies I feature in Marketing Like A Media Company with their top-notch blog, YouTube channel, media personalities, and more.

You know I'm a massive fan of SEO. It's the only source of free, recurring traffic for SaaS companies. And Ahrefs is the essential tool to build and scale SEO for your company. Even if you're completely new to SEO, you can start by creating a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and get a full website audit that'll tell you how to improve as well as which keywords to rank for. Check out their latest keyword data update. 🤯

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Today's newsletter is by my friend Jason Resnick.

Jason is my go-to email marketing expert since he's a developer and creator who's well-versed in many email automation platforms.

And for the Swipe Files audience only, he's sharing some behind the scenes content of real projects with clients.

Email is dead!

Chabots for the win!

SMS is the email killer!

You’ve heard them all before.

I’m Jason, in for Corey today. He’s stepped aside so that I can grab the mic and share with you what I know to be true about conversions and reducing churn because of the 12 years of amazing results I’ve achieved for my clients.

Everyone talks about how email doesn’t work anymore.

Yet, during the busiest online shopping weekend of the year, your inboxes are flooded with offers of the best Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals.

But like Vito here, there’s a constant game played where the bottom line is the prize.

Then it becomes a focus on optimizing for fractions of a percent and hopes that the platform doesn’t change the game (which you know they will).

Instead, build an engine that you can push any channel into and convert at a much higher percent and form a deeper relationship.

Imagine your ads, organic traffic, cold emails, partnerships, and even existing users flow through to get more value from your product.

Over the past 12 years of working with clients, nothing beats email when converting visitors into customers and retaining those customers longer more effectively.

​Grab my Sales Booster Campaign, which takes a new subscriber to a customer in 6 days.​

Ads may play a role in bringing awareness and new subscribers, but if those subscribers sit on your list only to get your latest feature push or blog post, they’ll unsubscribe as fast as you paid for them.

Imagine this…

You walk into a nice clothing store, and someone greets you. “Hello.” That’s your ad.

As you look around, someone else asks if you need help. That’s your lead magnet.

Notion does a great job at this with almost zero friction, only asking for your email address to start.

You try something on, and the salesperson asks you about the event you are attending, asks about the people it’s for, when and where the event is, and maybe even your favorite color.

That’s segmentation and personalization.

When someone signs up for a trial, they are obviously interested at some level. Learn as much as you can about that individual by sending them resources, asking them questions, seeing which features they are using, and customizing their journey through that trial.

Asking “What do you need help with today?” is a powerful question that can then be used in your pitch, more on that in a minute.

Now a tailor comes out to help you size your selection to fit perfectly.

The salesperson shows you other accessories that work well with what you picked out.

That’s the link in an email to your product.

Zapier pitches their plans based on the data they know and understand about the individual user.

Everything matches perfectly together.

As you pay at the counter, the cashier greets you by name and says, “Hope you have an amazing time at your sister’s wedding.”

That’s your pitch and upsell sequences with everything the subscriber wants and what you know they need.

You and I have seen those Dropbox notifications about storage upgrades, right?

While the pain of running out of storage may be enough to get some conversions.

Imagine if you know that the user is a YouTuber backing up videos and can swap out the copy?

“Most of us, as creators, entrepreneurs, business owners, we think we're in the business of selling a product and we're not. We're in the business of selling a vision behind the product. That's what gets people to buy.” - Russell Brunson

Your subscribers want your products because you can speak their language, know their next steps before they do, and see that your product will get them what they desire.

When that happens they’ll continue to come back for more.

That’s your onboarding and retention. (Two keys to reducing churn.)

That’s where your money is.

While folks do all these elaborate omnichannel, remarketing campaigns, keeping it simple with an engaging email campaign accomplishes what Vito described as his two main goals with ads.

I know this because I’ve done this for my clients.

“Subscribers on our list who purchased that were engaged with a nurture sequence converted at 15% vs 4% who were cold from Facebook Ads. Plus reducing the payback period from close to 80 days to 27.” said Ian McIntosh, theguitarinstitute.co​

There isn’t a need for over-complicated ad campaigns that cost you a ton.

You need a channel that attracts people to your business enough that piques interest.

Then let your engine do the converting.

Take my sequence as your starting point and run with it.

Let me know how it goes.

—Jason

Thanks again to Jason for sharing on email marketing.

What did you think?

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →​

Thanks again to our featured sponsors:

1. ​Agorapulse: “The Zappos of social media management platforms” helps you plan, schedule, and report on your social presence.
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3. ​The Juice: “Spotify for marketing & sales content” to discover blogs, podcasts, and videos to help you grow your business.
4. ​42/Agency: My #1 recommended demand generation agency for SaaS to help you drive demos and signups.
5. ​Supermetrics: Get all your marketing data into your reporting tool of choice. Push data from 70+ integrations into Google Data Studio, Sheets, and more.

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