Email Marketing Lists – Mike Dillard
SUMMARY
Mike Dillard, the entrepreneur, investor, author and freedom fighter, shares with us the reason behind his success. In this interview, he gives tips on how to build your list and keep people engaged. He focuses on creating positive relationship, trust and familiarity with the people on your email marketing lists.
Come join and learn his skills which give him this profitable business venture.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The most valuable asset and driving force behind the success of your businesses is your email marketing lists and the relationship that you’ve built with them.Understand that your products are not your business.
When you launch a new product or a new company, as long as that network and distribution channel is there, you don’t have to worry about getting new customers.
Having that distribution network/email marketing lists is the most important asset that you could ever own. The value of that asset is going to be determined by the quality of the relationship and the amount of trust that exist between you and that audience.
People only buy from people that they know, like and trust rather than strangers.
You have to have the genuine desire to have an authentic relationship with your followers and readers.
Hence, bring the people into your life. Share something interesting about your life. They would react, communicate and share with you as well. This activity can create that bond.
Send out catchy, interesting but short message to your email marketing lists when you have something important or relevant to say.
The skill that makes everything work is copy. It’s your ability to write persuasive marketing copy that prompts an action. That’s the driving factor behind every stage of the conversion process.
Most noteworthy to say that mastering copywriting is going to make all the difference in the world.
Communication with people on your email marketing lists is the single most important skill somebody can master.
Yet, every single copywriter is doing the exact same thing. We’re simply modeling what’s worked before us.
What works, works. If you simply follow what’s proven to work, maybe there’s a very good chance yours is going to do well also.
Success comes as a result of increasing your value to the world and the only way to really increase your value to the world is to go out and acquire some very valuable skill sets.
TRANSCRIPTION: EMAIL MARKETING LISTS – MIKE DILLARD
Luis Congdon
Hey, Thriving Launchers, let’s continue this week and talk about email list growth, email list sales, everything that has to do with online marketing. So much of it centers around email list. So let’s bring on today’s guest.
Kamala Chambers
Do you want to know how to build your email marketing lists, your tribe, your followers? Learn how to turn it to passion that builds your business even more?
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about just that. Why you need email marketing lists and consequently how to build it. We’re going to talk to someone who has made over 50 million dollars in his business.
We are here with Mike Dillard. He’s an entrepreneur, investor, author and a freedom fighter. We are excited to have you on the show.
Are you ready to launch?
Mike Dillard
I am ready!
All right. I’m glad to be here.
Kamala Chambers
First of all, this is such an exciting time for you! Most of all because I know you’ve been doing launches online for years and you are harvesting the fruits of your labor. You have such amazing success and you’re here to talk with us about how to build your tribe, followers, and email marketing lists and turn it into a passion based business.
This is a huge topic. I’m curious, where do you feel is some of essential place to start when building email marketing lists?
Mike Dillard
An interesting point in my career is where I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur now as of this year for 10 years and I’ve had 3 businesses during that time. Consequently, I’m moving into a very completely new space in a new industry outside of the online internet marketing world here in the next year.
Email Marketing Lists As Most Valuable Asset
Mike Dillard
So I wanted to sit down recently and put down into a webinar for my email marketing lists the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the past decade and dissect my business and how have I accomplished what I’ve accomplished over the last 10 years, which has been about $50 million in the sale of my own personal products, courses and everything else I’ve done.
What I came to the conclusion of was that the most valuable asset I’ve developed over the last 10 years and the driving force behind this success of my businesses was my email marketing lists and the relationship I’ve built with my lists. It’s something I think most entrepreneurs are aware of but I don’t think they understand how important it is.
Email Marketing Lists And Difference Between A Product And Business
Mike Dillard
I’ve got a friend named Kristina whom I’ve been mentoring for the last couple of months. She has written 2 books on parenting, which are phenomenal and she’s been wanting to sell those on Amazon online to make extra money but what I had to drive home with her and many other students over the years is that a book is not a business.
I guess the best analogy I’ve used is if you look at Starbucks, a lot of people think Starbucks is in the coffee business but they’re not on a coffee business. They’re basically a distribution company same with McDonalds, Walmart, and with everybody else out there. Their business is their distribution network.
For Starbucks, specifically there are 14,000 locations around the world right now. Without those, they don’t have a business. They just have a bunch of coffee sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Coffee is not their business. It’s their product and they’re two very different things.
Building A Distribution Network With Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
And so what I realized that I’ve done over the past decade is to build up a global distribution network, which consists of about 450,000 people between my email marketing lists, social media channels, YouTube, and what not. That’s my distribution network.
A normal Starbucks store, an average one will get about 400 customers per day. So every time I send out message to my email marketing lists or put something out on my social networks, I’m getting access to the same amount of people as it would take 11,000 Starbucks locations to accomplish. But I’m doing it instantly for a couple of bucks online and I’m one dude sitting in his apartment downtown in Austin. So to have that reach and distribution has been an unbelievable asset.
Noteworthy Thoughts in Creating Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
What I would suggest to entrepreneurs out there is to make sure you understand that your products are not your business.
Whatever you’re working on today, they will likely not be what you’re working on two to three years from now but your following and that distribution network or email marketing lists will always be there.
Your list and that distribution network will always be your biggest asset and as long as you focus on maintaining that, delivering value to the people who make up that network and helping them accomplish their goals, you’re going to build a compounding effect in all of your endeavors that make entrepreneurship easy.
Email Marketing Lists Makes Promotion Simple
Mike Dillard
When you launch a new product or a new company, as long as that network and distribution channel is there, you don’t have to worry about getting new customers. You’ll be able to do a very quick, simple promotion. Before you know it, you have one of the biggest brands in whatever niche you’ve moved into.
The launch of my podcast two months ago is a great example of that. I’ve never had anything to do with a podcast before and yet I was able to launch mine.
Email Marketing Lists Can Be Helpful For Podcast Ranking
Mike Dillard
Within 48 hours, my podcast was the number 1 ranked podcast in the two categories that it’s labeled under on iTunes.
That was simply because I sent out a message or two to my email marketing lists and they latched onto it and supported it. That was it.
Luis Congdon
Mike, I want to jump in because that’s cool to hear about the podcast. That’s how I connected with your work.
Capture People By Using Email Marketing Lists
Luis Congdon
Online marketing and people with products is just heavily saturated now. Furthermore, every day I’m bombarded with people doing launches and doing different programs.
We need some sort of system to capture people and provide them with quality to build those email marketing lists and following. I know we wanted to focus on how to build that following.
You’re talking about providing quality in that most people businesses starts with a sense of being a distributor. If you’re a coach, you’re distributing coaching services. You need to build email marketing lists of people that you can distribute that kind of clientele. Am I hearing that correctly?
Having Email Marketing Lists Is Like Owning A TV Network
Mike Dillard
Well, the way I think of it is, is you’re building a distribution network and so instead of having 11,000 Starbucks store, you’ve got your email marketing lists and your social media channels. It’s almost like owning your own radio station or TV network. At that point, you’ve got an audience that has voluntarily asked to receive information from you.
Determining The Value Of Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
Having that distribution network is the single most important asset you could ever own and specifically the value of that asset is going to be determined by the quality of the relationship and the amount of trust that exist between you and that audience. If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.
It’s funny, you can literally go on Google and type and buy email marketing lists.
Why Some Email Marketing Lists Are Worthless
Mike Dillard
And you can literally buy an email list of a million people for $99. The reason it costs $99 is because it’s absolutely worthless. There’s no relationship, no trust, and no familiarity.
At the end of the day, people only buy from people that they know, like and trust.
Mike Dillard
If you can focus on building those three qualities (relationship, trust, familiarity) up with your network from your email marketing lists, then you have something that can produce a tremendous amount of value and become an extremely profitable business venture.
Creating Relationship with Your Email Marketing Lists
Luis Congdon
I want to bring this concept about building a list and all of that kind of in a different way and then get you to talk about it some more.
Because I went to a meeting and this big time business man went up there and he talked about he doesn’t care about having a list. The email marketing lists size is irrelevant to him because he doesn’t believe in sending out one email to 2,000 or 10,000 or a million people and feeling like you can build a relationship with them.
What do you think about that?
Mike Dillard
From my personal experience, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s going to depend on what the email says.
Be Authentically You To Your Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
My goal is to be as authentically myself as I can in whatever I send out to my following and so you’re never going to get this fancy html or generic company logo email from me. It’s always going to be from Mike Dillard and it’s going to feel as if I wrote it to you personally. That’s an extremely important piece out there.
Bring Your Email Marketing Lists Into Your Life
Mike Dillard
Another thing that I feel it is important to do is to bring them into your life.
The majority of the messages I sent to my email marketing lists don’t even have to do with selling or marketing. It might be sharing with them pictures from my race last week or pictures from another vacation or a mastermind event.
I would share just something interesting about my life that I think they would enjoy participating in. It’s those kinds of things that build that bond. I can’t tell you how many times I have gone to events or even genuinely been out in public where people come up to me and recognize me. They say “Hey, I follow you,” “I bought your stuff,” “I’m a customer.”
It’s weird. I almost feel like I’ve known you for five or six years and we’re friends despite the fact we’ve never met.
Importance Of Building Rapport With Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
Therefore, that’s the kind of rapport that you can build. There have been two instances where people have literally shown up at my house. They found out where I live. They showed up at my house and they just wanted to meet me and hang-out.
The relationship that you can build can be extremely powerful. Also, meeting in person the people you sent only messages on your email marketing lists can strengthen the bond which was before unseen.
Kamala Chambers
What I love about this is your just bringing it home in such a clear and concise way.
Utilizing Email Marketing Lists To Make Connections
Kamala Chambers
Entrepreneurs, we know we need email marketing lists and now, we’re hearing it from someone who is utilizing his lists and social networks to make these connections and do launches.
I think that whole thing you’re talking about creating personal relationships and keeping people engaged, I had that experience many times. Every time I go to an event, people come up and they say, “Wow. I know you!” They start talking to me because of the content I’m putting out. This is something that you don’t even have to be a huge name out there to keep people engaged.
Frequency of Sending to Email Marketing Lists
Kamala Chambers
How many emails do you like to send out a month to your audience? Do you just do it when you want to or are you very consistent? I know that there are different schools of thought on that.
Mike Dillard
That’s a good question and there are different schools of thought on it.
If you look at guys like Aggora or Stansberry Research who do $200 million a year in revenue, they feel adamant about the fact that you have to send out a message to email marketing lists every single day. That’s great if you have a team of 5 writers, an analyst, a full-time editor, and you have the staff to support that.
Email Marketing Lists – Quality Over Quantity
Mike Dillard
For me, my personal feeling on it and conclusion has always been it’s not quantity that matters, it’s quality.
I only send out emails to my email marketing lists when I have something important and/or relevant to say that I think they’ll have been glad to have read or opened at least. That’s been my rule of thumb.
I only send emails when it’s something important, it’s something they need to read it, it’s something that’s going to help them or either it’s going to entertain them with the personal rapport, the pictures, and the lifestyle stuff.
Sending Important Messages To Your Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
I’ve gone periods where I’ve not sent a message to my email marketing lists for two months because I didn’t feel I had anything that was worth their time to send them and also I don’t believe that hurt my relationship with them at all.
My opinion is it probably helps because my readers know that if they get an email from me, it’s important. They might go a period a month or two without getting something and so when I do send it, it means they need to open it and read it.
That’s been my philosophy for the last 10 years now.
Know What Works For You And You Email Marketing Lists
Kamala Chambers
I think that’s fantastic. That’s what I tend to do as well. I felt like “Oh, God. I can’t make it contrite,” that I need to feel the inspiration to do it. Some people say “You got to send it out every Tuesday at 9am,” the people who are successful.
I think it’s good to customize it towards what works for you and your audience.
Another thing I love to get into with you is there are many ways to build a list. You can do webinars or tele summits. You can put out different products or YouTube videos.
I would love to hear from you most of all the email marketing lists building tips. What are your top ways to help build email marketing lists?
Mike Dillard
Well, in my opinion there’s the smart way and the hard way. Then, there’s the immature way, there’s the professional way.
Immature Way Of Building Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
The immature list building consists of a lot of work; blood, sweat and tears type of effort specifically when it comes to social media. Posting on Facebook and Instagram 20 times a day. Twitter, just grinding away at the social media stuff and you’re earning follower by follower.
What people don’t realize is a social media following is a dramatically different thing than an email following. The difference between the two of them in money perspective or value perspective, revenue wise is 10 to 1 in favor of email.
Don’t Use Social Media To Transact With People On Your Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
Therefore, social media is typically not a place for people go to transact or buy things. It’s where they go to hang-out with their friends.
When you go to your social media channels and you try to sell stuff there, it is reviewed in an extremely mediocre way. The response in my experience and from what I’ve heard from my colleagues in the industry for them as well is that, is absolutely horrible. I totally get it. That’s not why people are there.
So, I use social media first and foremost to build the bond and rapport and then I’ll redirect those people to a landing page of some kind to get them on my email marketing lists. Offer them something for free to download like a podcast episode or a webinar but I don’t use social media for transactional type of messages.
The Use of Advertising in Growing Your Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
How do I build my email marketing lists?
It is 100% through paid advertising. That’s the biggest lesson I can share with folks out there.
The way that you can go and you can build email marketing lists of 5,000 – 20,000 email readers in a span of a month or two, it’s not through hard work, blood, sweat and tears. It’s by working smart and essentially you’re paying for it. You are buying the list. What I mean by that is you’re buying the traffic.
Smart Way Of Building Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
Target a traffic to send to your opt-in page to generate real and genuine opt-in list subscribers. The more money you have to do that, the faster you can grow your email marketing lists. That’s the truth of the matter.
Everybody out there that has a giant list like myself, that is the result of spending hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in advertising over the course of years.
Building Email Marketing Lists Even You’re Broke
Mike Dillard
How do you pull that off and do that especially if you’re broke?
The good news is that it’s totally 100% doable. Even if you’re someone who’s established, you’ve got a 7 or 8 figure in your business, if you’re buying traffic and you’re paying for advertising, it means you’re successfully converting that traffic into paying customers. Essentially, you’re putting yourself in a position where your customers are funding the entire ad campaign and you do not have to pay anything out of pocket.
So for you, as far as you’re concern, it’s free. But in order to do that, you’ve got to put a marketing funnel in place that’s successfully converts.
Traffic Isn’t Necessary To Build An Email Marketing Lists.
Mike Dillard
One of the biggest challenges I always hear from people in this industry is “I don’t know how to get enough traffic, Mike. Where do you get traffic? I don’t know how to do the traffic thing. Maybe, email marketing lists can do traffic?”
My answer to that is “I have no idea how to generate traffic.” Me, personally, I have no idea. I haven’t done it in seven years and I’ve realized it’s because it’s a skill that I don’t need.
Building Email Marketing Lists With A Marketing Funnel That Converts
Mike Dillard
Hence, if you don’t have an offer that successfully converts that traffic to a paid customer in a profitable manner or at least break even, it doesn’t matter how good at traffic you are or how much traffic you have in the world, you’re still going to lose money on it. It’s still not going to work.
On the other hand, if you have an offer that converts traffic into revenue in a profitable manner, then all of the best traffic experts in the world will show up at your door and be willing to send you as much traffic as you want basically at no cost because you’ll just pay them an affiliate commission.
That’s how I built all of my email marketing lists. I focused 100% on creating the marketing funnel or an offer that converts profitably and a cold market advertising environment.
If I do that, then I have super affiliates again from all over the place who will show up, who will send me as much traffic as I can possibly handle until that offer no longer converts anymore, which will tend to happen over the span of 1 to 3 years. But that’s how I’ve built all of my email marketing lists. That’s how I’ve generated all of my revenue and I’ve done all of that without having any idea how to personally generate traffic.
The Significance of Copy in Yielding Email Marketing Lists
Luis Congdon
I’ve heard Ryan Deiss say the same thing. It is especially relevant to note that traffic is not your problem. Conversion is your problem. What he said is there are basically two ways to get traffic. You can do it organically, which for most people is going to be incredibly slow just because it’s challenging for anything to go viral, for people to share it, to get people to land on your page.
Right now, it seems like every minute there are thousands upon thousands of new blogs being created. Therefore, the market right now is incredibly saturated so paying for traffic is the top way to go.
In addition, another problem that people have is how to do split testing and figuring out what the ROI is just on conversions because I’ve seen a lot of people just dump a lot of money into Facebook ads or Pay Per Click. I’ve heard of people paying as much as $30 for a click to their website and only getting a few and realizing “Okay, this isn’t working.”
Write Persuasive Marketing Copy To Build Email Marketing Lists
Luis Congdon
Do you suggest any resources so people can learn that?
Mike Dillard
For me, the skill that makes all of that work is copy. It’s your ability to write persuasive marketing copy that prompts an action.
The copy on your Facebook ad has to prompt a click and once they land on your capture page, it has to prompt them to opt-in. And once they see your offer or your video sales letter, it has to prompt them to pull out their credit card and buy. That’s the driving factor behind every stage of the conversion process.
For me, the place that I have mastered and spent the vast majority of my time when it comes to study and practice is in the copywriting arena. That is the lever point that’s going to make all of the difference in the world.
That is also one of the most difficult things to outsource because no one is going to know your audience as well as you as far as hiring an outside copywriter goes. They’re not going to know your audience as well as you. They’re not going to feel as passionate about your product as you.
Importance Of Communicating With Your Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
If you’ll really learn how to write persuasive copy, then the world is your oyster at that point.
Ultimately we’re in the business of communication. If we’re online, we’re communicating with our audience. So for me, that’s the single most important skill somebody can master.
Creating Connection With Email Marketing Lists
Kamala Chambers
I absolutely agree with that.
You have to know how to speak to your audience. You have to know what their pains, passions, and desires are. If you’re not speaking to someone, they won’t feel like “Oh my God. This person understands me. This gets me.” Then they’re not going to feel special. They’re not going to feel it’s for them and they’re going to keep moving on.
Here are episodes we had on copywriting: Kevin Rogers, Lukas Resheske, Andre Chaperon, Chris Orzechowski.
And one on Facebook ads with Cat Howell.
Luis Congdon
Mike, you know, we’ve been talking about copy and for me, that’s where I’ve been focused. I’ve been putting a lot of my energy and attention with two different things.
Learning How To Write Copy And Building Email Marketing Lists
Luis Congdon
One of them is the first thing we talked about. It’s building your tribe or your email marketing lists. I’ve been working incredibly hard networking, becoming friends, and associating with the types of people I want in my circle of friends and in my audience, people that will build me up to be better as well as the types of people that appreciate what I have to offer already. It’s because we are the average of five people we spend time with.
The other thing I’m looking at and it seems pretty important if you’re a listener is how the heck do I get good at copy? What can I do? Where should I go to learn strategies around copy? It can be a highly complicated process if you don’t know anything about it.
I want the listeners to get an idea that copy doesn’t have to be something you get stuck on. It can be something you can dive into and learn the strategies.
Resources On Copywriting That Will Help Grow Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
There are few staple resources I always recommend for beginners.
One of the first is The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy. All the guy does is write copy for a living and he’s one of the biggest legends in the world when it comes to that topic.
Then, David Ogilvy‘s work as well. He’s one of big guys from broadway or the street in New York where all the ad agencies are decades ago, one of the Godfathers of Copy.
Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins is another one of the oldie but goodies from a grand copywriting master.
Then, Yanik Silver’s Instant Sales Letters program, which is still up and available. It’s super valuable. It’s one of the first copywriting courses I ever bought 10 or 12 years ago, which is nice because it’s a template-based piece of software essentially. It comes with a huge wide file of headlines, bullets, transitions, offers, guarantees, and it comes in a fill up the blank format. So if nothing else, it teaches you the structure for a sales letter which will be very useful in growing your email marketing lists.
One of the most important things I ever did years ago is I’d print out letters that I knew were very successful and that converted. I’d take them into my room. I’d sit down on a desk and literally write them out by hand for about an hour a night until I finish each letter. I did that for probably two or three months.
Scientific Formula Used By Great Copywriters To Grow Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
What that is going to do is it’s going to train your brain to see, understand, and get the language patterns that are present in an effective sales presentation because they do very much follow a pattern based on human psychology that will lead someone from a place of pain and to a place of relief of that pain by the time they get to your product and your offer. That’s a scientific formula that is used by every good copywriter. That’s one of the ways to internalize that process and those language patterns.
It’s funny. If you go to different part of the world and they speak with an accent, within a few hours I’m speaking with inflection points and tonalities like they are. It’s the exact same process when it comes to copywriting. As a result, you’re going to internalize that dialog in a way that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
Grow Email Marketing Lists By Modeling
Luis Congdon
One of the things you were talking about before we wrap up is taking sales copy and mimicking it or rewriting it yourself.
One of my friends, what he does is he’ll take letters from different people. I saw a sales letter by Frank Kern and I reached out to him and I said “Did you see the new letter that he sent out?” and he said “Yeah man, I took it. I copied it pretty much but tweaked it just a little bit for my own purposes,” and he made $20,000 in two days using that.
That’s another tip for people. I’ve seen it done. I’ve been playing around with it myself.
When I see a great sales letter, I’ll take it, copy, paste it, put it into a new document and then I’ll just switch up some of the different things that are more particular to my particular business. That’s another way people can get great at doing that.
Know The Emotions Of People On Your Email Marketing Lists
Kamala Chambers
One nugget we could take away from that is just being clear on what the pains, passion, and the emotions your audience are feeling. Getting to know your audience on that level can help with just even developing copy.
Before we sign off, I would love to know is there anything else you want to make sure our listeners know about you or about building their tribe, following, and email marketing lists?
Mike Dillard
I would just say thank you guys for having me on and if anybody wants to follow up with what I have going on at the moment, mikedillard.com is a great place to do that. I’m going to be having a webinar on this whole list building process at some point here in the future.
Other than that, this is a process. It’s not an event. It took me about 5 or 6 years before I ever made a dime as an entrepreneur.
Increase Your Skill Sets To Build Email Marketing Lists
Mike Dillard
The big turning point for me was acquiring a skill set to build email marketing lists. It’s when I realized that success is not going to come as a result of a ground floor opportunity or an idea or gimmicking marketing system. It comes as a result of increasing your value to the world.
Mike Dillard
The moment I did that, and I started to acquire the skill of copywriting and marketing is when I went from basically broke and waiting tables to building a million company in less than a year and a half later.
Learn Skills Related To Growing Email Marketing Lists
Kamala Chambers
Wow, powerful! We’ve been here with Mike Dillard.
Thank you so much Mike for being here.
Mike Dillard
Luis and Kamala, thank you so much for having me! This was fun.
