How the creator of VSL’s used deadlines to sell out his products
Published: Fri, 06/03/16
Enjoy…
BEN SETTLE: Do you have any tests that you've done with deadlines that just showed a gigantic increase in sales?
JACK BORN: I have two clients that I think would be really good examples of folks that had a huge increase in sales. I have another story about a promotion that I ran with Perry Marshall, but just remind me to come back to that one. There's a case study that we put on our website from a guy named Nick Stephenson. Nick Stephenson sells information for new authors on how to get your first 10,000 readers. What Nick used to do is that he used to run a semi-manual, Jeff Walker-style launch, and let me explain what I mean by that.
He would have people opt in for his videos and his content, and then he would drip some additional content, some additional videos to them, but they were basically put into this waiting area and he didn't tell them what was coming next, but there was nothing really for them to buy. Then about every two weeks, he would take everyone that was on that waiting list and then he would move them onto a list that put them into an automated sequence that would then end with a deadline. He would have an offer, and it was an automated launch but he had to manually move people from one list to another and then the thing would start. This would happen about once every two weeks.
He was really looking for a way to automate this, because what he found was that when someone waits around for two weeks ... when they first come in, when they first opt in, they're excited. They want a solution and so they're consuming your content, but they really want to buy something. They don't want to wait, and so what are they going to do? They're going to go find something else that they can buy, because they're going to scratch that itch. Waiting around for two weeks, he was losing a lot of people. At least he thought, "You know, I'm probably losing a lot of people that if I gave them a chance to buy a lot sooner, then I would be making more money. Plus, what if, instead of having this promotion run twice a month, what if I could run it every single day?"
He went searching for a solution and he came across my software. My software, which we'll talk about later, made it possible for him to do a launch every single day and just run it automatically. Once you set it up, it's sort of like the ... to steal a line from Ron Popeil, it's the "Set it and forget it " method of running a launch. Once you get the thing set up, people go through and they're assigned their own personal deadline. If Bob comes in on Monday, his deadline might be Friday. Susie comes in on Tuesday, and her deadline's going to be Saturday. What he found was that he saw an immediate 38 percent increase in sales, and now he works less, and this is just running all the time in the background.
BEN SETTLE: Nice, so that's just an automated thing. No matter where they come in on the timeline, they're all going to get their own different deadline. It's not like everybody has the same deadline.
JACK BORN: Right. It's like their own private launch, that's just set up and automated using technology. There's no reason why you wouldn't want to have technology do this for you. It's the same thing as having autoresponders, and Ben, of course I know that you're a big fan of sending an email a day, and there's great reasons for doing that, but there's also ... I know that in some of your businesses, you have really long autoresponder series, and so there are situations where it makes a lot of sense to have the emails queued up to go out so that once someone comes in, what's going to happen day one through possibly day 20 or even beyond that, is already set up and scheduled.
You're leveraging technology to have these emails go out on an automated basis, so you're not sitting there and trying to figure out, "Okay, let's see here. This group came in on Monday, so let me manually send this email out to them. Okay, this group came in Tuesday." You would never do that, so it just makes sense. Why wouldn't you also automate the whole launch cycle? That's what we did with Deadline Funnel, is we have set it up so that you can have a perpetual launch going, so that everyone who comes through gets their own unique deadline.
The other story I want to tell about this is really short. I was helping Jon Benson set up Deadline Funnel because he wanted to test it out, so for anyone who doesn't know, Jon Benson is the creator of the video sales letter, sometimes called a VSL. It's these videos with ... typically it's just text that's going across the screen and someone's reading it to you, and the first time you see it, you might think, "Why am I watching this thing," and then all of a sudden you're hypnotized and 45 minutes later you're listening to the pitch, because it's just that powerful.
He created the whole concept of the video sales letter, so he's always looking for ways to increase his conversions. He had heard about Deadline Funnel from some of his peers and some of his clients and so he wanted to test it out, so I helped him get it set up. He Skyped me yesterday and I just have the quote. He said, "Hey, Jack, we closed out Sellerator." That's his product. "We closed out Sellerator, and our sales doubled from the previous promotion with your tool. Probably more than that, but I can say two times for sure. Many sales the last day and the last hour." That was another example of someone who really watches his conversions like a hawk, and saw a big bump by adding a deadline.
By the way, one of the things ... and we'll get to this later, but one of the most important things is it's not just ... don't walk away from this and think, "Okay, well, I'll just go and grab a cheap countdown timer and put it on my page." It's having a deadline that actually is enforced. You have to make sure that your deadline is being enforced for each person who's coming through.
BEN SETTLE: This isn't one of these idiotic guru tricks where you put this fake, phony countdown thing up there and hope that people aren't intelligent enough to figure out what it is.
JACK BORN: Oh, no. This is ... in fact, when I originally wanted to set this up for myself, I went out searching for a solution so I wouldn't have to create it myself. Even though I am in the business of creating software, I really wanted to just grab someone else's product and just use it and call it a day. Nothing else out there was going to do all the things that I wanted it to do, and one of the most important things was that it had to be genuine. It had to absolutely track each individual prospect as they went through the funnel, not just a simple countdown timer that goes on one page.
I like to have sales funnels where there's multiple different pages of the funnel, including the checkout/order page. I wanted to be able to make sure that every single page of that funnel would be protected, just like you do in a launch. When the launch is over, a lot of times you don't want people going back and just viewing the content. You want to say, "Hey, the whole promotion is now offline. You're no longer able to buy it." I wanted to be able to make sure that, no matter where someone was in the funnel, that they had their own personal deadline. It was really, really important to make sure that that technology was rock-solid, and I just couldn't find it anywhere else, so that's why I decided to create it.
BEN SETTLE: You know, there's something else to that, I think, and I've seen this in my business. I can't speak for you or anyone else, but when you actually enforce a deadline and you don't sit there and make a bunch of exceptions and all this, there are people on your next sale or launch, whatever you're doing, that will jump on it like right away, because they know that you're for real and not just talking nonsense.
JACK BORN: Absolutely, yeah. I have heard a lot of other people talk about training your list, and I think you talk about training your list. I think there's something to that, that it's really important to set people's expectations and also to stand out as someone who actually does what they say. It sounds so simple, but you'd be surprised how many people actually don't do that.
When you start actually enforcing the deadlines that you say that you're going to have, it really makes an impression on people, and the folks that waited around because they thought, "Oh, yeah, he's not going to enforce it," or they just happened to innocently hit the snooze button, they know the next time that you come out with something that they're going to jump on it, so they're not going to wait around.
BEN SETTLE: That's one of the things I like about what I'm hearing here, because it makes it so you can't like ... I've done this on accident where I fell asleep, you know, and left everything open, and it almost looks like I'm doing it on purpose but I really wasn't. I guess that would take that to where that would never happen.
JACK BORN: Right, right. Actually there are some stories about some friends of ours. One of them is Ronnie. You remember Ronnie?
BEN SETTLE: Yeah. Yeah.
JACK BORN: There's a story where he used Deadline Funnel for a live promotion. This is kind of funny, because here's the situation. He and his wife, Melissa, were set to have their second child in December, and the way that that works is that when you find out that you're pregnant, the doctors give you a due date, and they say it's a specific date. They'll say something like, "Okay, well, your baby is due on December 17th," and they say it with the sort of conviction that you really think, "You know what, that doctor actually believes that that baby's probably going to come out on that day," but you know that it could be plus or minus several weeks. The way the doctors say it, it's very convincing. Anyway, so they give you a due date, but you know that there's a big margin of error.
Well, Ronnie decided that he was going to do a live launch, his end-of-year launch, at the very beginning of December, and he knew. You know what, even though there's two weeks between when the launch closes and our official due date, things could happen where there could be some overlap. He came to me and said, "Can I use Deadline Funnel to run all of the links and all of the pages for my live launch, so that when I queue up my emails, if I'm not able to be there, if I have to go to the hospital because we're having our baby, is this going to work?"
I said absolutely, so I showed him how to set it up so that he could send out one link, and that one link, through the multiple emails that he sent out, would redirect people to the waiting list page, to the "Cart is open" page, to the "Sorry you missed it" page. He set up his entire launch, and it's a good thing that he did, because sure enough, he was called away to the hospital.
The great thing is he didn't have to worry about having his team FTP different pages and different files up at 3:00 a.m., because all of his deadlines were midnight, Pacific Standard Time. He didn't have to worry about his team making a mistake when they uploaded a file. He didn't have to be there on his computer, checking things, at three in the morning. He was able to be there, fully present as a husband and a father, and really enjoy the experience without having to worry about what was going on with his launch, because he set up the automation ahead of time and it just ran for him.
Really, even if he wasn't going to the hospital, that's the best way to do it, because a lot of the deadlines you set are typically at midnight, and a lot of times in the U.S. we'll set it for Pacific Standard Time, which ends up being 3:00 a.m. on the East Coast where I am, and you don't want to be up at 3:00 a.m. changing your pages out. You should let technology do that for you.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, and that was one of the things I had. In fact, I always set mine so that everything ends at 9:00 p.m. my time, which isn't necessarily convenient for the rest of the world, though, so that's what I like about this. All right, so let's go back to something you mentioned before, a Perry Marshall story, and how he turned his slowest month of the year into a huge cash cow. What's that about??
End of part 2, to be continued tomorrow.
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