Sports Illustrated was the inspiration for this clever email marketing strategy that lead to a 7-figure business sale | #412

Dan

I have an umbrella drink in my right hand right now.

Tim

With a plastic monkey. So you have just gone on to, you know, you’ve put the dough into the next big thing. What did it feel like just out of interest when you did sell and you looked in the bank and there is you know there’s a large amount of money?

Dan

A second karma. Yeah. Second karma was a big change because I was definitely pretty close to broke starting my first two businesses. So to really get to start my third was actually you know more in there was great. You know Tim to be frank with you, when I talk to you three or four years ago, Science of Skill was only doing maybe, I don’t even know back then, maybe 30-40 grand a month or something.

Tim

It’s pretty new.

Dan

Yeah I was pretty new and you know I wanted to sell it kind of right then. My goal is to sell it for couple hundred grand and be able to move right into artificial intelligence. So those three years, splitting half my time, speaking and writing about AI, and machine learning, and ethics and then spinning the other half selling things on the Internet. It was actually really painful because it was like I wanted to break free and move on to my bigger dreams in life and kind of the ethical consequences of AI. But the upside Tim, was all that kind of pain and teeth gritting and hand wringing, if it didn’t seem to take so darn long to sell, because in order for a bank to give you a big down payment they would need to see a certain number of tax returns and I did know that when I went about. The good thing was we wouldn’t have gotten into the 5,000, we wouldn’t have gotten into you know multiple millions and the top line, we wouldn’t have been able to get a seven-figure exit without all that grit and grime. It was a mixed feelings Tim, but on the whole,  I was happy as heck to kind of do what I want to do with my life and be able to do it on my own terms and with my own fun. So it was a relief in a big way.

Tim

Fair enough. So I want to explore the marketing initiatives. I love the list that we’re going to go through that got you to the point where you could sell Science of Skill for over a million bucks but let’s just revisit. Science of Skill, it was an online business. You sold it for a million bucks last year. Describe the business for us, just briefly.

Dan

So sciences skill was in the business of selling self-defense and self-protection video training Tim. That’s basically what we sold. And now we also sold some physical gear like self-defense knives, some kind of multi tools, and physical DVD, and things like that. But primarily it was digital training sold as a subscription on the Internet. So basically, you’re learning curriculum for martial arts and self-defense sold on the Internet.

Tim

When you say subscription, looking at Science of Skill, they were one off purchases. You know you could buy a course for 9.95.  Was it all subscription based?

Dan

Yeah, well actually a lot of science skill especially over the course of the last year since I sold the company has been moved towards more of an online e-commerce store. But however, I will tell you this, if you go ahead so I’m on their Web site now which is far different than it was when I was there. If you scroll to the bottom of the site and you click on become a member at sciences skill dot com, on the right-hand side you’re going to see Science of Skill Academy for 57 dollars a month. You’re also gonna see the buyers’ club for 3 7 dollars a year. Both of those were the subscription options that we had even when I was running the company. So these are two different subscription offers that when I was running the business composed somewhere around 75 percent of our monthly revenue. Now I think it’s closer to 60 percent because they started selling a lot more variety of hard physical products. But you can still find the old subscription right there on the site.

Tim

What’s with the name Science of Skill? I never got it.

Dan

Well you’re asking a great question. So Science of Skill began Tim as a blog that I was using to write about the Science of Skill. Now you ask what the heck is that. I went to Ivy League graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and I paid for graduate school by teaching people to choke other people otherwise known as running a mixed martial arts academy. And so I was running an MMA gym and I was driving up and down the East Coast going to Philly for graduate school at UPenn. And my graduate thesis swerves my focus in the cognitive sciences as a grad student was in the Science of Skill acquisition. So what are the training regimens, the teaching regimens, the sort of psychological processes, the neural basis of learning, of becoming good at a skill whether that’s memorization, music, sport, and how do I apply that to combat sports. And that was actually my fault is for graduate school. And when I was going to grad school, I was doing a lot of writing about these topics. I was experimenting with myself and I was treating myself like a guinea pig, Tim. I would say “okay can I train in these different ways and can I go off and win some tournaments” and I ended up winning a pretty big national tournament here in the United States in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I build a bit of a following being the skills science guy. And then as it turns out, we expanded that to a whole bunch of other instructors other than me.

Tim

So this is it. So Science of Skill, essentially like a lot of online businesses, it started as a blog where the owners sharing their thoughts. In fact I had a lady on a few months ago, nourished life’s Irene Falcone who started blogging about the toxins in makeup. People started to react in shock and awe and then said “Oh Irene can you start selling us stuff because we love what have to say.” Did Science of Skill, selling self-defense training and products talk about a business for its time right now. Sadly, very sadly, you’ve got your president suggesting that all teachers be armed and you know it’s a topic that it’s going to be on people’s lives. It’s very sad I guess. But do you regret selling?

Dan

No, not at all. For me I needed to sell the business. So Science of Skill guild was started over five years ago. So more than five years ago I came to the conclusion that soon the purpose of my existence would be to focus on the bigger picture a bigger picture ethical consequence of certain neuro tech and an AI and what that’s going to serve due to the species. The thing is Tim, to get into that field and to sort of influence in that field would require having some money right. And so in order to build a media platform, in order to be able to really put a stamp on the domain of AI.  I would have to have some funding

Tim

Yeah. So it’s really interesting like Science of Skill was very much and you had the foresight those years ago before you started or when you started to go “You know what this ain’t what I’m going to be doing for very long but it ‘ s my key. This business idea is my key to financing what I truly want to do” which is my incredibly intelligent, Dan and very full of foresight for a young fellow like you but also very patient. Because in a world where we want everything now, you were happy to sit back and it’s paid off. You made a million bucks but you have to sit back and wait for that to happen.

Dan

Yeah I you know I am I’ve been working 80 hours a week for forever. And so I was just splitting that time between two businesses instead of pouring all 80 into one. It was very much like pulling teeth because I thought I was going to sell it in about a year and a half or so and it took me four and a half years. So it was a little bit of pain in there, but you know it was built to be a sacrificial lamb. And as it turns out Tim, instead of getting 300 grand or whatever I thought I was going to sell it for. We were able to get 90 percent cash down and close it out for a little bit over a million. It had the upside as well and you’re right, there was a bit of patience there. And for me Tim, it’s all about control. If you got to move out to venture land and have somebody else that want 25, 33 percent of your thing off the bat, you have a new parent, right. You got a new parent and to be honest, I kinda rather be my own boss and chart my course and if I need investors I need them but otherwise I got-

Tim

Fair enough. What did you put in place Dan at the very start knowing that you were going to sell this business?

Dan

Yeah well I put in place really tight bookkeeping and accounting. So one of the things off the bat was really making sure can we track our marketing metrics and how the marketing ties to money and can we track our quick books and sort of our various categories and subcategories within the way that we do accounting and bookkeeping in such a way that it really accurately reflects month over month what’s happening in the business. Because I’ve known for selling my first company when I was 25 that the best thing you could do for yourself is have amazingly clean books and be able to talk very openly and freely about the clarity of your data. How did these marketing metrics, how did these business metrics that you have in this big spreadsheet you’ve been tracking over the years match directly to sort of your profit-margin month over month? And so one of the things I did is I said “I’m going to have some of the best clean metrics in the world so when any buyer opens up the books, they’re going to basically see like paradise in terms of clarity and I know I’m going to need that to make a sale.” So that was one thing.

Tim

The main thing how did you avoid. How did you avoid then a key person dependency? Because a business is like Science of Skill. It was your blog, they were your opinions, you were the star behind it. How-

Dan

Oh Tim, you’re bringing up a great point. So every everybody wants to know this and this is awesome. I’ve done whole interviews on this topic but I’m basically you do want to avoid that. You’re bringing up- the fact that you’re even aware of that is awesome because a lot of people think “oh I can build something up around my name and then all of a sudden I can sell it”. No, no, no, no, no. You can’t do that. That’s not going to be something that you can do. So what I had to do Tim was initially, the reason that I was the guy who is in the videos that I was selling, the reason I was the guy whose name was on the blogs and in emails was because it was really just me, right. So I mean I didn’t really have a choice but as we grew Tim, I had a marketing guy, I had a content guy and I started actually paying other instructors around the world to fill him courses so it was actually a physic kind of approach, Tim. So starting about one year into the company when we were making maybe forty thousand dollars a month,  I started gradually introducing new instructors and also new people writing blog posts and new people sending out- new author names on e-mails right. I hadn’t been writing them all for that long but-.

Tim

So it very quickly became non-Dan centric and the idea was to bring in other people, other content creators, other trainers and products too that don’t rely on a person at all.

Dan

You are totally right. So basically, here’s the way you do this. If you are a person and the brand depend on you, here’s what you ask yourself. You say what is the key value proposition that I bring to the table that people love? And now for me, Tim the answer is pretty simple. I do really in-depth analysis of the best training methods for self-protection and in my case it was more the grappling side of things. So I said “Okay. Can I broaden that value proposition to an entire website of different instructors and different products that don’t even involve me anymore can I keep the same value prop. The same promise to my readers Tim, but no more Dan Faggella and you know what we did it.

Tim

Love that. Love it. Dan is it still possible to start a business like this these days? We see a lot of these online publishing training businesses they sort of niche in these areas. Is it still possible to do?

Tim

Oh man. Yeah, it’s really possible. So if you google Dan Faggella Forbes, you’ll see the pieces that they’ve done on Science of Skill but you’ll also see a piece that they did about Timothy Reiss. So actually, your name is Tim Reid. His name is Tim Reese. R E I S S. Tim was my right-hand man at sciences of skill. Tim and I went through all the hard stuff man. He slept on my floor for five nights a week for years at a time and really put in blood sweat and tears. And he was the only person I’ve ever had up until this point in my life who had like a real ownership stake in- a real profit share into the success of the company. So he stayed with Science of Skill a little bit after I sold it but he since left and he’s already making over 100 grand a month doing the same exact thing as science skill just in fitness. So he did the same thing. He took a value prop he took different instructors he took a subscription model and he copied and pasted the business model right. It’s not rocket science. And he’s already going to be doing easily last year a little bit over a million bucks and this year he might even beat out where Science of Skill was. He was just my deputy, right.

Tim

He was your wing-man.

Dan

He was my wing-man. But now he’s kind of like just taking the copy and pasting.  I couldn’t be more proud of him and happy with him but to be honest Tim I mean I’m not going to say “oh it’s easier than ever”. But by golly I’m not going to say it’s any harder than it was.

Tim

Well you could argue it’s easier than ever because again, I’ve interviewed a number of e-commerce success stories. And one thing they all say is “when we started we were coding and creating bespoke e-commerce.  Now with things like whether it be Shopify or Udemy or whatever it is, you’ve got these platforms that are drag and drop plug and play.

Dan

I got to say,  there is something to be said of that. I luckily Tim even when I started my first business this was back in 2008 when I was like a 20-year-old kid who just needed to pay for school and I decided to teach people to choke people instead of getting a job. Even then WordPress and e-mail automation tools were already pretty plug in playable right. I didn’t get started in 1998 where I was like writing the code in my basement. So, it’s been pretty easy for a while and to be frank Tim, it’s just as easy now.

Tim

We’re talking really to Dan Faggella. I’m going to call you an online business specialist? What would you call yourself? It’s a hard one, I don’t know what I call myself either.

Dan

Yeah, I have no idea. I guess you could say an entrepreneur interested in artificial intelligence might be a good way to-.

Tim

You are about to take us through and I’m excited by this, the marketing strategies and tactics you used in order to get Science of Skill to a million-dollar sale. But before we do that Dan, I’m just interested to know why. Why you are a very good teacher. Just listening to you speak, I’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos, you have this innate ability I think to want to share knowledge. Why did you reach out to me again to say “hey listen I’m sold and this is what I did and I want to tell the world”?

Dan

Well yeah, two things I guess first and foremost I did a handful of interviews when Science of Skill first got started and actually as kind of like a reminiscing after the sale and listened to some of the old ones. And I thought to myself like “what the heck was I doing three and a half years or four years ago or whatever”. And when I listen back to them I was like “oh man have you called or reach back out and see if maybe an exit story could be fun for Tim?” And I guess that was kind of the shtick man. I mean you know I’m definitely doing some interesting stuff that crosses over with marketing now in terms of what I’m doing for research that you know might be fun for people to learn about. But for the most part I mean I had a bit of a nosology exercise with you and a fellow by the name of the guy who runs on Entrepreneurs Journey.

Tim

Yaro Starak?

Dan

Yeah, Yaro. And it was like two or three episodes that were kind of my early Internet days and I was like “hey you know what, maybe it’d be a fun thing or something.”

Tim

I think it’s really interesting and good on you because I mean one of the things you know- this is about episode 400 something. And I have this conversation with myself as like there are so many more business owners that I haven’t spoken to versus what I have spoken to so I’m going to keep reaching out to new ones. But then I go wow, of the 400 plus business owners that I’ve interviewed it would be interesting to go back and see where they’re at. Because I know two or three of them are actually out of business. I know many of them are making now tens of millions of dollars. I mean the idea of going back I think is actually really interesting. So let’s talk marketing and regards to Science of Skill. Now you sought inspiration Dan from Sports Illustrated. I would have thought that when starting a business-like Science of Skill, online training and e-commerce, you would just go to these Internet marketers. They’re all making 10 million bucks an hour and lying on a hammock. Why did you go to sports illustrated?

Dan

Well I guess you know when I first started Tim, my question that I want to ask myself is I wanted to grow it as fast as I could, I wanted it to become something that was separate from me and then I could sell. And I said who’s essentially making revenue selling affinity slash sports related information basically?  who’s selling information on the internet and doing like a billion dollars in terms of annual revenue and you know sports Illustrated does do about a billion-dollar annual revenue between advertising and between subscription sales. And I said okay, these guys are selling subscription information about sports, I’m selling subscriptions for self-defense. I’m going to look at all the best marketing pieces and the strategies and the basics that I think they’re using, and I’m just going to use that as the skeleton of the first ideas I have instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Tim

Brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I often say there’s a lot we can learn from the big guys. Some of it good some of it bad. Either way are we going to learn as small business owners. So you looked at the Sports Illustrated now I’ve sought a lot of inspiration from Sports Illustrated Dan but probably the wrong inspiration, if you know what I mean there.

Dan

I’m there with you pal. Yeah, I gotcha. I gotcha.

Tim

What did you input- just explain that pulling apart? How do you pull apart the business model? You didn’t get access to their boardroom.

Dan

No, no. Instead what I did is I signed up for their e-mail newsletter and I sort of like subscribe to all the little side things that I could. So I think they had like a survey five years ago. But you know they had some kind of survey thing that I filled out all kinds of marketing data about me and then I just let them pitch me stuff and I would figure out what’s going on. And one of the critical things that I learned Tim and this is a lesson that I harped on forever. But the biggest initial lesson that I learned Tim was  that Science of Skill sell the same subscription to everybody. However, they usually sell it to different people in different ways. Let me articulate to you what I mean. So this was a critical pivotal idea from Sports Illustrated and this actually was maybe one of the most important ideas in terms of scaling Science of Skill period. Like very, very big deal was that if you are a fan of let’s say, I don’t follow sports by the way Tim so I was the wrong guy to subscribe to sports illustrated. I don’t follow sports at all. But you know if you if you are in New England and you root for the Patriots which is a United States American football team or you root for the Panthers are you root for the Eagles or whatever. Like if they win some kind of special playoff game or something like that then Sports Illustrated might come out with a commemorative like plaque or something of all the different like play of victories that they had that like each of the score. It’s like commemorate the year. So looking at all the victories that they had in the playoffs throughout that year they may come out with a little plaque and you can buy that plaque for 40 dollars or maybe even just 29.99 and with it you’ll get one month free or three months free of Sports Illustrated. So you can get the magazine, you can get the digital access. If you don’t like it you cancel but if you like it you keep it.  And so Sports Illustrated would come up with all kinds of different varieties. They find people that like apparel and they would sell the subscription along with a hat. Sometimes they even give you the hat just for shipping right. Pay as 9.95 we’ll send you the hat. You’ll get the magazine two months later or you’ll get the magazine free for two months and then if you want it for the third month you know you can keep paying. And so they find apparel, they find affinity gear, they find all kinds of commemorative products really well tailored to different themes, to different kinds of preferences but it would all be selling the same subscription. I thought to myself “that’s a good idea.” I bet you there’s people that are interested in firearms training, there’s people interested in knife defense, there’s people interested in hand-to-hand but they all want to learn the basics. I’ll just need to kind of create unique bundles and unique offerings. They’re going to appeal to different people but give them all access to the core curriculum that I took a long time to build and that I believe in.

Tim

So I’m going to just understand that for the greater small business community listening to some of bricks and mortar business owners, some are e-commerce owners whatever it is. So what the understanding is there the big learning is that sports illustrated have a core offering of which is a very mass offering and many people are interested in it. As a man as a sports magazine and publication, in order to get people to that core offering, they’ve gone or identified little  niches, little groups of people, patriot followers ,  winter Olympic followers and developed little offerings specific to their passion. Offered it to them. I’m going to guess probably it cost or without trying to make any big profit but getting them into the funnel so that they then can sell their core offering which is their ongoing subscription. Have I got it?

Dan

A hundred percent Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the time Tim, they are bundling their subscription with the front end-.

Tim

So it’s not a twostep process. It’s like “here’s your Patriots snow dome “ and you’ve got your subscription at the same time.

Dan

Yeah, No doubt about it. So basically, you get the gear and then you get the magazine at the same time and then the next month you get the magazine. And there’s some letter in it. And you already know this because you paid for the thing it it’s like “hey this is your last free edition. If you no longer want to be a sport illustrated member” or whatever. So sometimes they would do that. They would also, don’t get me wrong, they would also come up with other kinds of product offerings that would just be a first purchase. And then like you said they would follow up to try to sell you the subscription later on. But a lot of the time they would bundle it but they would bundle it specific to individual tailored needs which I thought seemed like kind of a smart idea. And so that was one of the first ideas I ran with and it was what got us to 40 grand a month which was enough to run it full time and you know keep going.

Tim

It feels very complicated. The idea that- because I cover sports illustrated, they’re a big company with lots of resources and the idea of niche targeting and niche marketing is hey, it’s what they do. They’ve got departments for that kind of stuff. You didn’t but yet you have this core offering of self-defense training. But then you’re going off and identifying these little niches. It just feels very labor intensive, Dan.

Dan

Well I’ll tell you how I did it, Tim. So none of this stuff is really rocket science and basically what I did is I said, all right well what are the main important interests and drivers that bring people to my Web site, that bring people to my articles, that bring people to my videos on the Internet. And so I ask that question to myself and I thought a better idea would be why don’t I go ask that to my readers and my listeners. So I did two things. Number one, I sent out a bunch of survey email. I think everybody that didn’t reply to it the first time I waited about 11 days I sent it again and then I wait another 11 days and send it again. Different subject line kind of different angle but it was still the same survey. So I’m trying to get the maximum percentage of folks to fill it out over the course of half a month.

Tim

Just out of interest, using survey monkey or Google Docs?

Dan

Yeah I was literally just using google forms. It worked fine for me. So you know I was asking the questions like “What was the problem you were trying to solve when you came here?”, “what is the biggest self-defense skill?” or “what’s the most important self-defense skill that you really want to learn? ” , “what do you like most about our materials specifically?” Questions like these to try to tease out what are they trying to solve and also why do they think we’re unique. And some of the big takeaways from that when I first started the company Tim, we were focusing on the Brazilian jujitsu market. So remember that the martial art that I train and that’s where I got the black belt and did the national tournaments and whatnot. So that’s where I had my credibility. So this was mostly grapplers and kind of ground fighting folks. And there were sort of like a couple major clusters. There was a lot of people who were really interested in leg locks. So we had a lot of videos on YouTube at the time about how to basically attack an opponent’s angles and how to beat them in a grappling match by attacking their legs and angles. There were other people that just wanted to learn had a beat bigger opponent. These new me Tim, I’m a pretty small guy, I walk around about 125 pounds. So they saw me doing all these tournaments with all these competition videos choking out these really big guys and they thought “man beating bigger opponents is really what I’m here-“.

Tim

So when they surveys Dan they’re responding and giving you insight into their wants and needs and what they’re looking for you then taking that information and manually tagging it inside like an Infusionsoft or a sales force kind of system.

Dan

We didn’t do it that way. But I’ll tell you how we did it. So we started with a soft survey where we just said, give me your preferences in words and then they gave us their preferences in words and then and then what I did was I had to cluster those preferences to see what are the biggest groupings of core interest areas. And now look there’s some risk that you’re going to get it wrong. But if you get 130 or 200 people to fill out a survey like we did, you get a pretty decent idea of what the heck is interested and why. And so I took those ideas and then when I started doing, Tim is I would create e-mail opt-ins specific to each one of those. So I created like a free video course about leg locks. I created a free little P.D.F. about how to be a bigger opponent. It essentially be like breaking down some specific set of techniques,  it’s like a seven page PDF with some video screenshots and detailing the most important techniques and strategies that were involved and maybe some articles that were related there to. And make it look nice and professional. And I would create different options that related to those core needs. So when somebody came in from the leg locks opt in for my blog or when someone clicked on the beat bigger opponents opt in from one of my videos on YouTube, I would then know okay this person is tagged with this. So yes Tim I did eventually put them through Infusionsoft but initially just the google form, there was no tagging with that. It was just an idea clustering. And then from there I figured out what are the major subgroups I want to appeal to. And then as it turns out you know we take all the people who opt in for leg locks we sell them a leg lock program along with the subscription all the people that want to be bigger opponents will be bigger opponents program along with the subscription and we have an opportunity to have a higher conversion rate because we know what they’re interested in.

Tim

If you do- because this all starts again, this goes back to content. You’ve got to be found, you’ve got to drive traffic. You’ve done a blog post on Science of Skill for example of making this up around leg locks. Five keys to a great leg lock. I’ve never thought I’d say that on the show but it made sense. And at the bottom of that I’m assuming then that there’s a call to action which is “like what you here? Want to find more things about leg locks? Click here, give us your email address” and you go into some kind of auto responder system? Or do you just direct them directly then to purchase a training product around leg locks?

Dan

Yeah well, a little bit of both. So the Thank You page for specific opt-ins would definitely take them to a related product and that sometimes would be a subscription oriented offer but more importantly, yes you’re right we would put them directly into an auto responder. That would be kind of targeting a leg lock fan with related content and articles and you know maybe sometimes it was only about 12 e-mails long and then they would go into the general broadcast list after that. We just kind of send them you know three or four e-mails a week on the broadcast list. But initially their first 12 e-mails with us would be tailored content, tailored videos, and tailored offerings for the subscription that were bundled to the affinity area they were interested in.

Tim

You’re big on auto-responders. A fundamental success before Science of Skill. The fundamental success kind of criteria I guess. Tell us about the basic rules of writing a great auto responder series.

Dan

Yeah I mean there’s a whole lot to go into oneness, Tim but I guess if I’m going to be really succinct about it. I’ve written a bunch of articles about this that I can see that might be useful references but the fundamentals are this. One of the most important things you can do is have a good first e-mail. So what do I mean? I’m just going to drive home the points I think are most valuable, quickly and you can move me on when you’re ready. The most important thing is having a good first email. So if you get somebody to open your first e-mail and to see value in opening future e-mails, that’s like one of the most important things you can do. That might even be more important than in some cases, than making a couple dollars on the first email assuming you blow your trust and you blow the reasoning for them to come back to you. So for a first e-mail, what you want to do in that first e-mail is you want to first thank them and affirm that they’ve opted in for whatever they opted in. You want to deliver whatever you promised. So was it a video link, is it a PDF whatever. And then you wanted two things in that first e-mail, Tim. You want to provide a very compelling reason for them to to open your next e-mail. And you also want to provide a very compelling reason for them to stay in touch with you long term. So let me give you an exact example. I’ll go all the way back to four years ago back when I first talked to you about how we did this in the martial arts world. So in the martial arts world we’d say something like “hey, this is Coach Dan with science skills. Thanks so much for signing up for a free leg locks course. Here’s the video series you requested. You can click an access course whenever you like and you can stream it on any device. I’m glad to have you with us here in the Science of Skill community. Leg lock techniques are one of the biggest areas of focus that we have on the site and it’s one of the best techniques for defeating larger attackers. In tomorrow’s e-mail. I’m going to send you a second video about how to do some specific drilling and skill development exercises to make these leg locks really click into your game and become muscle memory. So you want to keep an eye out for that.”.

Tim

The old hook tactic.

Dan

Yeah one of those. And then the longer ball game is this, we’ll really want to prep them for why do you want to like –  Even if you don’t open my next 12 e-mails when you see the 15th one floating in there what is the reason for you to open it? So what’s the value prop and again, make sure that that’s evidently clear. After the leg lock series- again here at Science of Skill, our focus is sending people the best kinds of techniques to defeat a larger opponent and we regularly send out a short three to four-minute video clips and unique training drills to help you improve your leg like game. Not just with a new move but with the exact way to implement it into your game, bigger opponents or whatever the case will be. So kind of touching on the value prop rubbing in the value prop. It’s been four years but that’s the basic gist.

Tim

That’s great. I mean I get the idea of the first email. You want to gain trust, you want to give them a reason to open the next, and you want to give them good reason to stay in touch. I imagine like one of the things I love spending time on is writing e-mail headlines and split testing them. I imagine you would’ve put a fair effort in to the headline because if we don’t get a good headline, that e-mail ain’t going to get open, right?

Dan

You’re totally right. For the first e-mails interestingly enough, I actually like to keep the headline vanilla and that’s for a couple reasons. So when I see vanilla what do I mean? I mean generally, I like to mention like a thanks slash confirmation in the brand in actually the subject line and here’s the reason why you might say, man that’s the most boring thing I’ve ever heard of. But here’s kind of the important thing. They’ve never seen you in their inbox. So if you have seven exclamation points or you have all caps or you have some cute or quirky little phrase that relates to your personality and you don’t know who the hell you are, you may very well not get opened or you maybe will not be trusted. So what is what is a brand? If they buy from Macy’s, if they buy from anybody who is not a joke, what’s the first freakin’ e-mail look like? Well you should probably look like that. So they want to treat you like a professional company and not like some skiddy Internet marketing.

Tim

That’s interesting.  I hear what you’re saying and I think it makes sense. So you’re vanilla e-mail headline is like” hey welcome to Science of Skill. Here’s the video” versus some-.

Dan

You’re totally correct. However, Tim, here’s the e-mail number two, three, four might be a little bit more possess, might be a little bit more personality, might be a little bit more a kind of hook but the first e-mail is very much like “look we’re a professional business. We have a very succinct value prop. I’m delivering exactly what I told you. I’m not coming out with crazy whizzbang nonsense on day one. I’m giving you what you expected. Now you get to know me and look out for the future e-mail” so that’s the purpose so I’m with you once we’re testing subject lines generally e-mail numero uno. I say pretty vanilla and like exactly what you expected right. Give them exactly what they expect.

Tim

Before we leave, with auto responder tactics, Dan. Is there an amount, is there a frequency that kind of is best practice?

Dan

It’s really, really hard to say depending on the industry. However, I’ll say this, a lot of people are way too shy about this and they do know auto responders. My opinion on this is you know, you can easily do no matter how professional or snooty or fancy your niche is, you can you can easily do two to three e-mails a week for like the first four or five weeks on an autoresponder and you’re not going to come across as like,  “oh my god super unprofessional.”

Tim

Halleluiah, brother. And can I add to that because there’s a lot of business owners listening who go “We get enough e-mail already and I don’t want to overburden people’s inbox and you know there’s enough information.” My view is get over it. Your creative challenge is to make sure your emails are helpful, are problem solving, are engaging, make people’s lives infinitely little bit better if they open them and do it because of you don’t your competitor will.

Dan

All day long Tim, I’m going to second your sentiment on that and I’ll actually drive home that point all the more places I go by saying- I’m going to drive the point home by saying in order for us to get to two million dollars plus in revenue in the last year that I ran the company. And I think the business now is closing the gap on three or four. I was emailing twice a day to almost the whole list so everybody would get an email and the first half of the day we would segment them there’s a duper segmentation strategy that we used and then the second half of the day, we would pick additional sub-segments that we thought were hot or that maybe we haven’t hit in a while and we would rotate additional offers. So we would basically do one and a half e-mails a day to basically everybody on the list. And we did that for a year and a half leading up to the sale of the company for 7 figures or so. If sending e-mails every day is a bad thing, you know I never got arrested for it.

Tim

Wow man. We’re going to talk about the habit of writing e-mails so you can keep your powder dry on it but that’s just feels like a lot of work which clearly was, I think you said earlier working 80 hours a week. So now I know what you doing.

Dan

Actually by the time I saw signs of skill, just so you know one of the reasons I was able to get 90 percent cash down on the business despite the seven figure evaluation was because my work hours were under 20 every week for like the last month and a half of running the business so I did get it to a point where that riding, that segmentation was kind of a process and I had Timothy I had Marcus I had Dylan to execute on our process and get it done. So the actual writing was not me and luckily by the end of it, I was spending 75 percent of my time on Tech Emergences.

Tim

Whether you are a vet, a plumber, a real estate agent, or you have an e-commerce business. Anyone listening. If you haven’t got an auto responder series happening on your website, if you’re not capturing e-mails and other data on your customers then you are leaving a lot of dough on the table. So I would encourage you to go and have a look at whether it be an Infusionsoft or a sales force or something like a MailChimp or an active campaign. Go and do it. The three ingredients to an automated email campaigns, what are they? We’ve talked about auto responders but specifically to- Yeah what ingredients?

Dan

Perfect. So we’ve got are we’ve got education, we’ve got social proof, and we’ve got calls to action. So I’ll give you an idea of what I mean. Education is like value. So this is something like people showed up on your website because they have a problem or an interest and you want to deliver on that and give them what they came for. Did they come for recipes for healthy food, did they come for self-defense techniques to bigger attackers, did they come for small business marketing tips, whatever the case may be that’s education. The deeper more robust your value there, the better.  On top of that though you have your social proof. This is to say the other people who think that you’re awesome and the evidence that what you’re doing actually works. Now normally this is really pretty well embedded into your education but the goal is that you want to be able to warm folks up to the idea that you know what you’re talking about enough for them to buy. So when you when you’re sending some initial blog posts to your readers, it’s great when those initial blog posts can sometimes maybe be success stories, are some of your customers, or people who have somehow garnered tremendous benefit from your products or services. And so social proof is a big point or if you have any big celebrities or brand names who’ve had great things to say about you or who used your products. That’s kind of the social proof side. And it calls to action Tim, are just what you think. Basically, telling somebody go ahead and click this and buy it. Go ahead and click this and set up an appointment. You know whatever your call action is whether it’s a phone appointment, or an impersonal appointment, or whether it’s an actual online purchase. That’s a call-to-action.

Tim

I always say Dan without a call to action you are simply creating art. And none of us are here to create art. We’re all business owners. So yeah what do you want people to do. Tell me I have a fun- just on emails generally and I send out e-mails to my list. Anyone who registers at small business big marketing dot com gets onto my list. I can’t break away from just sending simple text emails with links, right? But they look like- and they are- they look like very personal emails that come directly from me which is what they are. I avoid fancy newsletters, I avoid graphics, I avoid embedding videos. My emails are very plain, they have a good open rate, they have a low unsubscribe. So I feel like I’m on to something? What what’s your view.

Dan

So I’ll say that in general I think that cuts the mustard especially for a small business. I mean there’s no reason to get Smancy Dancy and have things not show up well on mobile. The biggest thing is you want to make sure that if you test the readability of your e-mail on any given mobile phone that’s on the market that it’s going to read just fine and if you’re, one of the easiest ways to do that is just keep it simple right? It’s hard to mess up. Now Tim, there are markets where people are expecting a certain kind of formatting and professionality. I’ll give you an example. If you run a reasonably substantial let’s say a make-up brand. Okay you’re in the fashion space or let’s say you run a firm that is involved in like very, very pricey legal services. You probably don’t want it to seem like “hey it’s Jimminy Stevens in your inbox again” right? It’s not going to be as personal. You’re going to have to meet the expectations and garner the trust in the right way which may involve formatting in a way that’s expected and congenial to what you or your people want. However Tim, if you’re selling online training or whatever else, there’s a lot of instances more businesses than people think where you can very much keep it simple.  At Science of Skill when I sold the company, other than having a Science of Skill header at the top which was kind of you know very straightforward with the brand. Other than having kind of a little bit of branding at the footer of the e-mail that made it clear was coming from the brand. Other than that, it was a text e-mail. It read from the top to the bottom, it had some links embedded in it, that was it. Every now and again we had some images you know. But for the most part they were very straightforward text emails with a little bit of sinked company branding to keep it coherent but that was it.

Tim

Yeah, love it now Dan moving on. You send a weekly newsletter that was purely focused on business results like appointments or getting online sales. Again, newsletters- I don’t know when I see the word newsletter, I’m sort of half go to sleep.

Dan

Well you don’t have to use that word. It depends on the market in terms of how well it’ll work or not. At Tech Emergence which is my business now, we get something like anywhere between five and seven hundred people a week signing up for organic traffic for what is more or less just advertises or newsletter right. It’s not that fancy.

Tim

Hang on. I’ve got to ask that’s a good number. Now you’re in the States so there’s more people but from the 700-people signing up a week for Tech Emergence newsletter, what are you doing? Besides applying everything you’re speaking to us about now. That’s a lot.

Dan

It is a lot. We haven’t even started split-testing those opt-ins and our traffic is going up a lot these days. So I actually expect that we’ll get that to a couple thousand a week within the next let’s say four months. The main gist is when people land on our site it’s for something really specific. So for Tech Emergence it is for business insight on the applications of artificial intelligence, in pharmaceutical, in banking and all kinds of niche industries that are obviously very important industries. And there’s not that much information about how AI is really making a business difference. And so we make it clear that on the web site it’s pretty clear this is what we do, this is why we’re different. In other words, we speak to the C-suite about the power and the opportunity of artificial intelligence without the hype and we talk to the biggest names in the industry.

Tim

Are you buying a traffic or are you just creating an extraordinary amount of content?

Dan

It’s 100 percent SEO. So it’s really hard to build SEO for an executive audience. Again we attract VPs and directors and C-level executives but we attract a quarter million page views a month from that crowd which is obviously enough to sustain a business especially because we’re not cat pictures and you know naked ladies here. It’s hard core business insight about some of the most important I.T. technology of the next decade.  So we make the value proposition of the content very clear and essentially we ask for the e-mail, it’s pretty bland. It’s not like a new fancy, white paper or like P.D.F. special seven tip guide on every single page. I had felt that there’s a little bit of a risk for credibility there and there’s also a little bit of a risk of short termism there. The value prop is look, “you came here for this, you came here for business insight about AI. We deliver that every single week and we think we’re the best at it in the world. And here’s where you can learn more.” So if you go to Tech Emergence dot com. You’ll see just how doggone kind of boring the opt in is. However, it’s very clear that it’s coherent to the single, powerful, unique differentiator of the site. And so sometimes you don’t have to be that aggressive with your hours. I will make sure to emphasize that.

Tim

I love that. Dan writing, everything we speak, we about newsletters auto responder emails, broadcast  e-mails requires writing. The blogs that you’re writing to generate the content. You’ve got any writing habits that you can share with non-writers?

 

Dan

Yeah you know what I mean I got to tell you I’m not much of a writer either. I have to do it. And what do you do, you develop a taste for things you have to do, right?

Tim

Well either that or you outsource.

Dan

Yeah. But I mean some things you can’t outsource. So if you’re like a one man show and you try to outsource your marketing like I don’t know. You’re basically that’s how you fail you know you have to handle your marketing. You have to get your hands dirty with the words that get people to pay you money. There’s no way around that. As far as I’m concerned. You know if you’re doing e-commerce and kind of online sales stuff like some degree of that you’ve got to be able to consciously mold yourself. I mean Tim, I’m not an accountant but I understand a balance sheet and a PNL really, really well because I’m an adult.  And so like you just have to do certain things as an adult. And one of them is you know you learn accounting if you want to run a business. Same thing if you’re in a business where marketing is important and content marketing is important, outsourcing it entirely is extremely dangerous as far as I’m concerned. I mean you have to be able to get your hands dirty.

Tim

Can I just call me Dan because I think again that puts a pressure on business owners listening but I also know that a lot of those business owners going, “Geez, it’s more work.” Well start treating marketing of your business more seriously.  You’re listening to this show after all so clearly you are treated as an investment not as your accountant would call it an expense although that’s how it got treated on the books. That’s cool. But you do, you have to find some time. I mean if there were people say What are the commonalities between all the successful people you interview. And one of them among a few is that they view marketing as a hobby and they don’t talk about it in those words but the way that I mentioned the word hobby. But they talk about marketing as if it is a hobby. They find money for it, they find time for it. They can’t wait to do it again and that’s a hobby, right?

Dan

Well yeah, I think I think you should hopefully enjoy it. And I think hobby implies fun and to be honest I think in an ideal universe, yes you would actually find some fun. And I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t have some fun doing marketing strategy with Science of Skill and everybody hits their head against the wall and has hard times. But I think at the end of the day like the activities that you do, that scalably bring in revenue are really fun activities, right. I mean it’s there’s nothing more fun than that. And so marketing is you have to make time. It’s like none of us, myself included, have any way of bending time. And so we just have to make it. But the thing about marketing is you know the time you spend there if you spend it right and if you figure out is worth way more than the hour. It’s worth revenue months and months into the future as you build out campaigns and processes that really work. And so yes, finding the time is critical and if you want I can go a little bit into kind of some writing habits stuff.

Tim

I love you to do that.

Dan

Awesome. So a couple of things I really like to do here Tim, number one I like to find companies who are already doing what I want to do and making you know more than I even want to make. It or for Science of Skill I never necessarily wanted it to be as big as Sports Illustrated.  I had different goals in Sports Illustrated. I want to work in a different field than that. And so I never want to say where Science of Skill go for 20 years and build it to a billion dollar business. I’ve handled that goal with another company which I’m running now. But the goal was look at the people who are doing really, really, really well in terms of their marketing clearly making a lot of money with marketing in your space. So if you run a fitness gym and you know that the guy with the most profitable tri-state area fitness gym where he’s got 20 locations, growing really quickly, clearly a good business like just making solid healthy money, go ahead and look at that guy’s landing pages look like. Go ahead and look at that guy’s content marketing looks like. Go ahead and look at with that guy’s e-mails look like. Not because you have to copy them verbatim but because you want to find three or four examples of people making 10 times more money than you make and then see if when you start writing, you don’t start from scratch. You start from winning you start from people who are winning. And so when you when you move your hand on the keyboard, you’re sort of in some way drinking in and replicating what success already is. So I took a lot of sports illustrated e-mail marketing and kind of landing page strategies and tried to blend them into my business and I think it helped me kind of imbibe the principles they were using to get people to convert. The kinds of calls to action, the kinds of words, the kinds of descriptive detail that they were including in order to get an e-mail opt in or get somebody to click to a leaning page or talk about a subscription. I use their words. And I think that was very handy, I think in any business somebody is making 10 times more than you and if you’re going to take the time to write marketing go ahead and take the time to write about what works.

Tim

Great advice. Great advice. Love that and enjoy it. You know sometimes and writing too, it doesn’t mean you have to actively write. You could transcribe, you could do it. There are other ways of doing it. I’ve had numerous guests who either don’t like writing or don’t like video or don’t like podcasts. But want to share content so it’s about finding the medium that works for you. So that there’s less friction between you know the idea and actually doing it. Yeah great buddy. Well it looks like we have covered under a number of the marketing tactics you very kindly revealed for getting that sale. Are we missing anything?

Dan

I’m glad. No. I mean those are some big ones, especially for getting off the ground and I think it is a really important thing to start with the detail about auto responders and sort of first email principles and modelling the best. I think those may be some of the most critical for us so I hope they are for your listeners as well.

Tim

No doubt. You have a million bucks in your pocket, you’ve moved to Silicon Valley, wife in hand as we found out earlier. I don’t imagine a million bucks is a whole lot of dough in Silicon Valley. That’s probably the cost of a couple of turmeric lattes.

Dan

Yeah, a couple slices of avocado toast, yeah. No, I don’t need that hippie junk Tim. I eat a peanut butter with a sharp knife and I drink tap water and that’s what I do. So I find the way to ascetically live in an otherwise non ascetic place. But yeah, you’re right, basically with a million bucks in your pocket in Silicon Valley you’re broke.

Tim

You’re broke. Well I wish you all the luck Dan for Tech Emergence dot. C Certainly AI. I mean we won’t talk about it now but I may well get you back for a third appearance because I think A.I., Artificial Intelligence is something that is here. It’s not future anymore it’s here. And I think it’s also here to the point where it’s accessible to small business owners with limited funds and no longer just the big guys with big budgets. So maybe we can have that chat down the track but in the meantime, people can go and let’s get that subscriptions two thousand e-mails a week you.

Dan

We do actually have some research on the near-term implications of machine learning on marketing, I’ll make sure I zip that along to you. Yes, you’re totally right it is hitting the ground running and there some fun stuff for us small business folks to tinker with.

Tim

Dan Faggella, thank you buddy. Well done on the sale of Science of Skill and all the best for the future.

Dan

Cool, Timbo. Thanks brother.