A secret way to turn your “down” months into cash cows
Published: Sat, 06/04/16
Enjoy…
BEN SETTLE: 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?
JACK BORN: Right. This was ... I call this the promotion before Christmas and all through the house, not a client was buying, I guess not even a mouse. Every December is the worst month in Perry's business. Is this true for everyone in the info marketing space, that December is usually a down month, or is December usually a good month for you?
BEN SETTLE: It's good for me, but I don't really have down months, if I do it’s usually the summer but even then it’s just a hiccup due to the way I market.
JACK BORN: Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, for Perry's business December is typically a down month, and I guess everyone is thinking about Christmas, everyone is thinking about New Year's, and you still have payroll. You still have to pay your team, you've still got expenses. The Infusionsoft bill is still coming due, and so you really can have a pretty negative month in terms of cash flow if you don't pull a rabbit out of the hat. This was my last month as Perry's marketing manager, and the team was all looking at me to bring in a big win.
What I did was I took a product that they had called Consulting Accelerator, which is a training course that will teach anyone who wants to be a consultant how to go from zero to hero very, very quickly, or if you already are a consultant, it shows how to make more money and also to build a team and do all those wonderful things, so it's targeted to consultants. It's a $2,000 course, and so what we did was we took that existing course and we ... I decided, "Hey, why don't we set up a new webinar, and what we'll do is we will run this webinar and have a deadline that ends before Christmas."
The deadline is December 22nd, and what we did was when we did the webinar initially, we might have gotten one or two sales, and then no sales the next day and then no sales the next day. I'm thinking, "Okay, I've let everyone down," and this was not the way that I wanted to send people off to Christmas, and I was really feeling bad. We kept rolling forward with it and we had that deadline, so I told the team, "Okay, what I want you to do is I want you to make sure that you send no less than three emails on that last day. I want you to send three emails." Now, this was something that normally, a few years back, Perry would be reluctant to do, but I said, "Look, I want you to do this. You have to send these three emails," and I gave him the emails to send."
They sent those three emails on the last day, and then all of a sudden we came back that next Monday and found out there was $54,000 in sales. Now, the interesting thing is that $46,000 of those sales came in on that last day, December 22nd. That's another example of the power of having a deadline. Just imagine. If we didn't have that powerful deadline and if we didn't really hammer it home with multiple emails on that last day, to make sure that no one could ignore it, do you think we would have had $46,000 come in on that last day? No, so it's really important to have that deadline because it forces people to make a decision.
That's an example of having a really powerful offer, because we did juice up the offer and it was an irresistible offer, but even with that irresistible offer, it was the deadline that really got the cash register to ring.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, and every time I've ever done a special sale or launched anything, it's always the last day. It's always significant. In fact, with my podcast, we created a store last November and we did this Thanksgiving, like Black Friday or whatever sale over the weekend, and the two people were like, "Wow, there weren't that many sales in the first couple days." I said, "Hey, just relax. Come Sunday ... " and sure enough, because there's that deadline pushing, but we didn't have your technology. I think it would have made that even way better, so that's interesting to think about.
Are there any other stories you can think of about people who have used deadlines and how they used their deadlines to see significant boosts in sales, or saved their business like in the Perry Marshall? Not save his business, but it certainly saved Christmas.
BEN SETTLE: Are there any other stories you can think of about people who have used deadlines and how they used their deadlines to see significant boosts in sales, or saved their business like in the Perry Marshall? Not save his business, but it certainly saved Christmas.
JACK BORN: Right. Well, I've got a story of our good buddy Andre Chaperon, who saved his birthday. Andre likes to go skiing with his wife on his birthday every year, with his wife, Anita. One year he came to me and said, "Hey, do you have anything that will help me run this launch while I'm off skiing, because I really don't like to be checking my email and changing things while I'm skiing. I just want to be out there having a great time." He likes to drink beer, just like and you I do, so he wanted to be having just a great time and not having to worry about it.
Just like Ronnie, I set him up with Deadline Funnel, and we set up his promotion so that the deadline would end at a specific time, and anyone who was even a minute late wouldn't be able to get in on the deal. Even if they kept their tab open in their browser, it would redirect to "Sorry, you missed the page."
We set this up, he went skiing, and had a record launch. I think he sold ... it was either $17,000 worth of his AutoResponder Madness course or it was $21,000. I can't recall, but he did it all without having to pay attention to it, without having to worry about going in and changing things or changing the page, logging into WordPress. He didn't have to do any of that. It was just set up days before he went out of town, and so he could have a great time and enjoy his birthday.
BEN SETTLE: I assume that somebody could ... if they really were on the ball like a real business, and I don't do this as much as I should, but somebody can map out the next six months of sales, special sales, and have it all predone, just without thinking about it.
JACK BORN: Yeah. This gets a little bit advanced, but you absolutely can. We have step-by-step documentation that shows people, shows our clients, how to set up Deadline Funnel in a way where your email system will kick off the automation. Think of it as your email system talking to Deadline Funnel and saying, "Okay, the deadline for this promotion starts today for this specific client." As people go through your funnel, your email system, Deadline Funnel will talk with your email system and make sure that the deadline and what is being said in your emails is all synced up and matched up.
It does some really cool stuff. It adds in some very specific details, like you have the ability to add into your emails the actual day of the week, the day of the month, the calendar date, even the time zone that the deadline is, and so those details really get people's attention rather than just saying, "Hey, the deadline ends tonight." Sometimes it gets a lot more sales by being able to say, "Hey, the deadline is tonight, which, just to make sure you understand, is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, August 15, 2016."
You can form that any way that you want, but by putting in the details of exactly the time zone and the day of the week and the calendar date in the email, and personalize it for each person that goes through your email system, that really helps get people's attention. It really helps to get their attention and increase sales.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah. I was just thinking, earlier last week, this friend of mine named Igor ... I don't know if you know him or not, but he's a list-building guy ... he wanted to interview me on his podcast, and it was for ... he's in Israel. It was 7:00 p.m. my time and 7:00 a.m. his time, and I thought it was the next day because of the time zones. You just would never have known either way. We just said, "Yeah, it'll be 7:00 on this Tuesday." It really screwed things up, and I thought, "Man, I wonder how many people have missed sales and deadlines because of the time zone thing?" That's actually reminding them, which could probably just squeeze out a lot of sales just alone.
JACK BORN: Absolutely. Absolutely. The other thing which really helps people know exactly when the deadline is when they're reading your email is that Deadline Funnel gives you the ability to put the countdown in their email, which I know is something that a lot of people have seen these days. The unique thing that Deadline Funnel does is that it makes it specific to each person.
Now, instead of only being able to do it when you're doing say a product launch or a one-time promotion, now you can have it running all the time so that on the last day, if you want to have your email contain the countdown clock in the actual email itself, not only does it grab people's attention, but in one quick image it shows them exactly how much time is left, and it really gets their attention and gets them off their wallet and purchasing your product.
BEN SETTLE: You have all this software. I assume you use Deadline Funnel to promote even Deadline Funnel.
JACK BORN: Absolutely, yeah. We bring people into our funnel in a bunch of different ways. We've got different ways that people get onto our list. We've got case studies, we've got downloadables and we're going to be adding webinar replays, but yeah, with all of those we have a deadline. If you think about it, even in the most basic way that someone would come into our funnel, someone could arrive at the home page, decide, "I'm going to give this a try," and what we do is we give people a 14-day free trial, but the free trial automatically rolls into charging their credit card. They sign up, and even though we don't charge them on day one, we take their credit card, and so there is a deadline to try it out.
One of the things that we found is that, if you don't ask for their credit card, a lot of times they won't use it because in their mind, "Well, I can just always try it later. I don't actually have to get in there and figure out how to use this thing." Whereas just by asking for the credit card, yeah, you're going to get fewer people to sign up, but they're going to be a lot more committed to actually putting it into use, and when you're selling software, that's what you want them to do.
You want them to put it into use, and so they're going to pay a lot more attention to the emails that you send out, pay a lot more attention to the training. They're just a lot more motivated to get some use out of it during their 14-day free trial, because in their mind there's a deadline to test it out before they're charged, and they want to make a decision. They're motivated to take action.
BEN SETTLE: We kind of already talked about the benefits of using technology to automate deadlines. You know what, let's just switch right into Deadline Funnel, man. Let's talk about it. Let's get deep into that.
JACK BORN: Okay. As I mentioned, Deadline Funnel, when I originally started creating Deadline Funnel, it was only after an exhaustive search of trying to find other solutions out there. I really wanted to find something off the shelf that I could just go and buy and install and just be up and running with it, but what I found was that most of the ... all the software out there didn't fit the bill, in one way or another. In most cases, in many ways, they didn't do what we needed it to do.
I wanted something that was going to be completely genuine and authentic, so a lot of people get tripped up about this idea of, okay, what's fake scarcity. Now, everyone has different definitions of what fake scarcity is, but my definition is pretty simple. Fake scarcity is something where you've told someone that there's a deadline, and then you don't enforce it. In my mind, that's fake scarcity. Now, other people will say, "Well, no, fake scarcity is when you automate this," so everything that we talked about, that's fake scarcity, and I disagree. I think that automating the deadline is no different at all than queuing up emails that are going out.
Because how many times have people received your emails that are queued up in an autoresponder, and they think, "Oh, well, Ben sent me this email today," and that's not what's happening at all. You're using automation. All you're doing is you're automating something that you know has a proven conversion increase. If you believe in your product, if you believe in your services, and you're selling to the right people and you're telling the truth, you owe it not just to yourself but you owe it to your market to aggressively convince people to use and buy your stuff. If you buy into that, then it only makes sense to take the technology that's available and to automate what works.
We've already talked about how having a deadline absolutely works, so what Deadline Funnel does is it adds in the automation, but it makes it absolutely genuine. I wasn't able to find a solution that was going to do what I wanted it to do, so me and my team started to create it. When we started to create it, at the time mobile devices were becoming more popular, but they were nowhere near as popular as they are now. We didn't even realize that there was going to be another issue coming down the road that was going to affect how deadlines are used, and that is that over 55 percent of emails are currently being read on mobile devices.
Now, the reason why that's important is because you don't want to look like a liar. You don't want to tell someone in your email, "Hey, there's only 24 hours left," and when they click the link in that email, they go to a page where the countdown timer shows five days left. Now, even if you're trying to be as ethical and honest as possible, what can happen is that if someone opts in on say their desktop, and then email number four they happen to be reading in line at Starbucks, where they're on a completely different IP network and there's no cookie on that device.
They read your email and your email says, "Hey, Ben, today's the last day, so click here and order now or else you're going to be locked out forever," and you click the link and it loads up on your iPhone, and you see a countdown that shows five days left. Well, now you've just lost faith in what that person has said, even though they were trying to be completely ethical and honest.
What we did was we created something that is a proprietary technology that we call the Deadline Fingerprint technology, and Deadline Funnel is the only software that has it. What it does is it tracks people from one device to another. We have multiple different ways of tracking people, but with the Deadline Fingerprint technology that you can only get through Deadline Funnel, what that means is that even if your best prospect is reading your emails on a completely new network, on a mobile device while they're either out shopping or out walking around, when they click that link, Deadline Funnel is going to recognize them and know exactly how much time to show them for that countdown, and it's going to put a new cookie on that device once it recognizes who they are.
Deadline Funnel and the Deadline Fingerprint technology will track people from one device to another, so no matter what devices they're reading your emails on, when they click the link from your email to go to your website, the countdown time is going to be right.
BEN SETTLE: That's really cool. That's something I'd never even heard was possible. I didn't know that was possible until now, actually. Now, let me ask you some more questions that are just kind of coming to mind. I want to put myself in the shoes of different people on my list. I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here, but that's what makes it fun, right?
JACK BORN: Sure.
BEN SETTLE: Let's say somebody is an affiliate marketer, selling somebody else's product. How could they use Deadline Funnel for that?
End of part 3, to be concluded tomorrow.
In the meantime, to try Jack’s Deadline Funnel free for 14-days… and get a fat discount on it if you decide to keep using it… go to this link:
http://www.EmailPlayers.com/deadline
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