Travis Sago

Dude, I am so ready to launch. Let’s do this thing man.

Travis Sago

That’s a great question. I could say it’s kind of broad so I’ll try to focus it down.

I think it might be helpful if I share a metaphor that’s been really helpful for my clients and me as well.

There’s a lot of different ways to approach when writing effective emails. A lot of people approach it like, “Okay, so I have livestock here. And we’re going to feed him stuff and then we’re going to take him out to slaughter.” Those are the kind of guys that just pitch and pitch and pitch. They really don’t care about the people. It’s like, just keep giving them offer, offer, and offer.

On the other side of that kind of a metaphor is, “Boy, we have this animals that we’re going to take care.” But then, they almost become like pets and there’s this fear.

Travis Sago

Yeah, absolutely right.

So, I like to step out of that paradigm completely.

Travis Sago

Yeah, absolutely.

So, as we get a lot of the confusions like, “Okay, I want to take care of them. But if I go out there and ask for a sale or ask for something, then I’m going to damage my relationship with them somehow.”

The metaphor I like to use and it really answers a lot. I think with the metaphor, this be able to answer a lot of anybody listening to these questions about email marketing is gardening. Like how we grow a garden.

Travis Sago

I focus a lot on relationships. I made a lot of my money in the relationship arena using email and such. I look at things with relationships but also the garden because you can’t force love to grow.

You can’t go out and put your hands on your hips, wag a finger at your tomato plant and say, “Grow darn you! Grow!” But we can provide it the environment, the nutrients, the sunshine, and the water. We can provide the nurturing that it needs and then it will grow on its own.

What I like to look at it is like let’s pretend for a minute Luis that we’re growing an orange orchard. We go out there. We have our orange orchard and we want to go out on a regular basis. I say “Daily.” It scares some people. They view it as like, “I’m asking too much.”

Travis Sago

If you want to get clients and make sales, nurture your readers with email marketing.  –Travis Sago

We go out there. We go on our daily nurturing route where we water and we feed and we pull out weeds. We make sure there are no varmints in the garden.

Here’s the thing, as we’re going out there and nurturing. We’re more than likely going see some ripe fruit at some point which what they call the low hanging fruit.

While we’re out there doing our daily nurturing, we also want to go ahead and pick any of that low hanging fruit that’s already ripe.

Kamala, what’s going to happen if we don’t pick that fruit?

Travis Sago

Absolutely.

It’s going to rot. It’s going to fall to the ground and rot or our neighbors going to come over and steal our competition.

So, we’ve spent all the time nurturing the roots, taking care of the garden, taking care of our tree. And then, if we’re hesitant to pick the fruit that’s already ripe, then our competitions going to come pick it. Or it’s going to fall to the ground.

This opens up a lot of questions where we can direct some of our focus. One of those questions is, “Okay, so what do we need to nurture the orange trees and the orange groves? What about all that fruit up on top that we can’t get too on a regular basis?”

As you go about your daily nurturing of your orange grove and your orange trees. You’re going to see fruit up at the top of the trees you just can’t get to. That’s when we’re going to do a harvest. I call a harvest where we bring out the ladders and the baskets. Maybe some friends to help as what we typically call a campaign. I call it a rain maker campaign.

Once a quarter, once every couple of months, we have a promotion. We go out there and we harvest the fruit at the top of the trees. But most of our daily sustenance will come from that daily nurturing and picking of that right fruit. Let’s put some context to this.

Travis Sago

Let’s say we have a coach who knows writing effective emails. He has a little bit bigger list now. But when he came to me at about 700-person list and he’s like going crazy like, “How can I get more clients?” And trying to do Facebook ads and everything, which is all great. But he had a little garden right there that he wasn’t nurturing.

So, we just started a daily nurturing campaign. Picking of the fruit and it’s really typical that you’ll get one or two people reaching out everyday to talk to with them. You have one or two conversation today just from that little 700 person list.

Travis Sago

Absolutely.

Travis Sago

Yes. Absolutely.

Let’s move at the nurturing a little bit. Then let’s talk about that being really specific on writing effective emails. And how we make that 700-person list seem like it’s a 7,000-person list.

It could be really really long. Let me just give you the highlights of like what the orange trees need to grow. And what do our subscribers need to grow due to writing effective emails.

I wouldn’t say the most people have it wrong but they’re not really focused in. People think they need to deliver a lot of content to these folks. They usually overlook writing effective emails.

What I would say is, it’s like delivering a set of Encyclopedia Britannica’s to your next door neighbor day after day. This is not going to end up paying you or not going to end up liking you. There’s information overload. I call it a, “braingasm.”

The insight is what grows. It’s the fertilizer for our orange trees or our subscribers but that insight can be delivered very very quickly.

Most of my emails that I do or my daily nurturing takes me about 15-20 minutes a day. When people get started out, it takes them a little bit longer but our looking for is that, “Aha” moment. You give a little bit different shift in perspective about the problems or about a symptom that they have. That would make them go, “Hmm. Man, I didn’t look at that like that. That makes so much sense.”

The insight goes more to fertilize, grow, and ripen the fruit than like dumping a 45-page PDF report. I’m all for a webinar as long as the webinar has lots of insight into it.

Travis Sago

There’s a lot of other things that kind of go into the relationship and the bonding. But mother nature makes it pretty easy to bond because that’s why it’s supposed to be. You know, this is how babies fall in love with their mothers and mother fall in love with their babies. You have a sister that you end up loving even though you tear each other’s hair out almost.

Travis Sago

Absolutely. You’re so spot on it.

My favorite tool for making this happen is Triangle of Insight. I teach people what I call the Triangle of Insight that makes a framework that makes this happen really easy.

My favorite thing is what I call Meat and Potatoes metaphor. What I mean by meat and potatoes metaphor, it’s metaphors that everybody understands. Any person will understand even if like you’re in an industry.

If you will try to get away from that like, “Oh, we’re going to make it all technical.” But the meat and potatoes metaphor really make things work.

For example, I was working with a client who had some very revolutionary stuff he was doing with lower back pain. Of course, it was really complicated. And that was part of his trouble, getting it across in the emails how complicated it was.

He was telling me a story about his son and everything. The other day, his son had come and the oil was out of his car. It was all smoking but he didn’t know what was wrong with it. His basic thing that he did the spinal calm was that as you get older, you lose a lot of the fluid out of your spinal column. And when you lose that fluid, then your vertebrae and all the discs and everything start rubbing on each other. It’s like out of oil.

Travis Sago

We just took that story, it’s like, “Hey Luis, how are you? I hope you had a great weekend. This weekend, something funny happened. My son came over and he said, “Dad, can you take a look at my car? The engine light is on and it’s making this weird smell and weird rattle.” So I go out there and first thing I do is check the oil and it’s like bone dry. Well, what happens when your car ran out of oil? Then all the pistons and the rods and everything all rub together. But before you know it, you’re going to blow your engine out, right? Well, you’re back is like the same thing. You have spinal fluid inside. Once that spinal fluid drains out, then your bones and vertebrae are going to rub together causing you pain, right?”

So I’ve come together and it depends on how far we’re going in the pitch. What we’re going to do there, but there’s that insight. Nobody understands the spinal fluid there. It’s just the real meat and potatoes metaphor.

Travis Sago

Great question. Absolutely.

Again, the question goes back to the metaphor. It’s happened to introduce that metaphor.

If you’re going out there and you’re doing that daily nurturing and you see a ripe orange, you want to pick it. So yes, I prefer picking rather pitching.

You want to nurture and pick. Nurture and pick any of the ripe fruit out there that you want to go ahead and pick.

Then a lot of times, I’ll be more smooth.

Here’s another example. I make a lot of money in the relationship advice niche so it’s like the same thing. I’ve used this metaphor in relationships.

I might be telling a young woman or even older woman that you can’t force love to grow. I segway that into what’s going on with my life. “Hey how are you? Hope you’re doing well. I can’t stay very long. I’m helping Jeannie grow some tomatoes outside. We’re growing some tomatoes out there and it’s a funny thing. We can’t like, literally force those tomatoes to grow, right? All we can do is make sure they got the sun, the light, and everything and then the tomatoes will grow all on their own as long as we’re taking care of them.

It’s kind of a same thing as love. There’s actually four things that make love grow. If you’re wondering what those are, it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re a love coach, hey, let’s jump on the phone. We’ll talk about those things. If you’re having a hard time, then you may be missing one of these ingredients. Let’s jump on the phone and find out.”

Travis Sago

If you’re sending them to a VSL, you might say, “That’s in the VSL.” If you’re putting out a webinar, that’s “Let me talk about in the webinar.”

Nurture and pick.

It’s very rare that I send emails out that don’t have some type of response mechanism to it.

Travis Sago

You are so right. Absolutely.

Now, what you do with that response mechanism depends on how big your garden is.

So with my client at the 700 people, I want to make it super simple, “Just reply back.” I’d say, “Hey, if you want to talk about this, please reply back.”

Now, I had a client with bigger a list. It wasn’t huge but we actually filled up all of the sales guys using the nurture and pick. We actually had to stop sending but we had them fill out a strategy session form and we had to get it really detailed. We had to throttle some other response to qualify those guys more.

If you have a 10,000-person email, you could be literally get 50 or 100 responses back or more. So you might have to have a little bit more of a filtering mechanism, but you’re absolutely right. You want to pick.

Travis Sago

If the fruit’s ripe, you want to go ahead and pick it. It doesn’t hurt the trees at all. It doesn’t hurt the people at all and a matter of fact, it actually helps.

Travis Sago

I am so happy you ask Kamala.

I have a completely different take on writing effective emails.

Travis Sago

It is how I convert as well like 20-25% of the entire email list overtime.

Let me use another metaphor. The way most people go about like open rates.

Let’s say we’re selling a hammer and they’ll say, “Hey, have you bought our hammer yet?” Or they will come up with some subject line that tries to get everybody to open like, “Hey, this is personal.” Personal about hammers, really? Come on.

So we’ll go into the email and say, “Hey, have you bought our hammer yet? Our hammer’s really awesome. Our hammer’s better because we used an alloy head that never rusts. All these other hammers use a metal that will rust.”

Then the next day, they might come along and say, “Hey, is your hammer too heavy?” and say, “Hey, you should really use our hammer. We use an alloy. It’s lighter.” So on and so forth.

Travis Sago

You can only get so many of those of emails before you get bored as hell with them. The marketer runs out of things to say and then so therefore, the opening rates go down. Because they’re trying to get everybody to open and it’s not relevant and they run out of things to say and people will get bored with it. But there’s another way.

Here’s how I sell hammers. I figure out what they’re doing with the hammers. What problems they’re trying to solve with those hammers and then I write really specifically to that.

So I might say, “Hey Luis, are you building the birdhouse this weekend?” That might be my subject line. Nothing to do with hammers. Again, I would be a completely off topic here but Luis says, “Holy crap! How did he know? How did he know I’m going to build a birdhouse with this thing?”

So, I may not get the biggest open rate on that, but the people that will open are like, “Holy crap!” They will open that and so, I’ll say, “Hey Luis. If you’re building a bird house this weekend, you needed a kind of special type of hammer because you have really fragile wood and you’ll end up splitting in that wood so you’ll want our little 3-ounce hammer” but you’ll talk about building that bird house.

My very next email maybe, “Hey Luis. Are you remodeling a bathroom?” and you’re like, “Oh my God!”

Travis Sago

Yeah. Especially if you were like building a birdhouse and then, remodeling but you’re going to be like, “Oh my god. This dude’s amazing.”

But, if you weren’t building that birdhouse, you won’t open that email but if you’re remodeling a bathroom, you might say, “Holy crap.” You’re going to open that with much more enthusiasm. So, our open rates may be less but our sales or a response at the other side is way higher.

But, we can literally do this for a thousands of days because how many things can you do with a hammer?

Travis Sago

It’s a great question Kamala.

I think I have this saying, “Hey, it’s the cake in the icing.” I really think it’s more of an icing thing more than the cake. If I have the name I will use it. If I don’t have the name, I won’t use it and it depends on the niche too.

If they’re a bunch of internet marketers, they’re hip to what’s going on. But like in the dating space, for some of the women that I talked to, it’s like, “It’s really nice to get that name.”

I’ll even use like city. If I have it and it makes sense, I’ll use it. I don’t like put a whole lot of greens on that either way.

Travis Sago

Absolutely and I would like to add to that. This is a really good point.

A lot of people, part of the reason why they don’t use email or go out into their garden as much is that they feel like they have to be a really great writer. They have to feel like they have to be a really great gardener.

Going back to the mail order days when they had to pay for names and email address. They realized that 60% of sales success was in the list. 30% was the offer that they made in the list and only 10% was the words that they used.

It would be foolhardy for me to say that the words don’t matter. That’s like saying that because your heart only takes up 10% of your body it doesn’t matter.

Travis Sago

The words really are more of to give emotional pay off so people open the other emails. But have very little to do with the actual sales success.

Let me give your readers a tip on that. A lot of marketers are good about talking about pains and problems but, you can step it up a level. Let me give you an example. It’s a recent email that I’ve sent.

One of the problems that women have when they’re in a relationship is feeling the passion is dying. The passion is fizzling away. If I’m not having the best brain day, I might just start out the subject line “Is the passion fading in your relationship?” But that’s very common and everybody’s saying that.

What’s different and what I found works really well and takes a lot of lifting of off the writing is bringing out what symptoms do they have, what symptoms are they seeing or feeling or hearing in their life? What is he saying? What’s happening in their life and starting out with the symptoms.

Here’s an example and I took it to another level. One of the symptoms of passion fading is maybe they’re not getting passionate kisses anymore. They get those little pecks on the cheek.

Travis Sago

Yeah.

I even took it to another level.

Create a subject line that labels a problem better than they can label it.

My subject line was, “If he kisses you like your grandpa.”

Travis Sago

And so, boom. Open it and it started, “When was the last time he took your head in both hands and kissed you for longer than 2 seconds?” My pen name is T Dub. “Hey, it’s T Dub here and I roll into a story about when I was kid.” This is like the bonding that I do. I said, “I remember when my mom sat me down. We watched Gone with the Wind. I was about 8 years old and I couldn’t understand why Scarlett and Rhett kissed for so long. It was just like weird to me. I’m like, “Mom, why did they do that? It’s so gross.” She tried to explain it to me as best as she could to an 8 year old but I label that movie star kisses. That’s why movie stars kiss because nobody else really kisses like that.

Now, I’ve got something else that’s very clear. So I’ve already hit them with the symptom, which is what I call Hell Island, which is grandpa kisses. And so, I set a gap in there to go from grandpa kisses to movie star kisses and here’s what’s involve a girl from grandpa kisses to movie star kisses.

Travis Sago

Thank you.

Starting with the symptom is way more powerful than the problem itself. – Travis Sago

I’ll have to admit, some days, I’m just brain dead and I’ll just go with the problem but it’s way more powerful to go with the symptom.

Travis Sago

One of my big ones is, “Why does it take him so long to text back?” because that’s like a big frustration. I get not only a huge open rate but I get a very engaged open rate.

Now, if they’re not having that problem, they’re just not going to open and that’s totally cool with me.

It’s not about selling. It’s about selling what are the problems they have in their life because they don’t have your product.

What are the symptoms? What’s popping up?

I think that will really help folks and that’s how I just convert over 6 months or a year 20-25% of the entire list is just by, “What’s the symptom?” On a single product and then just being really symptomatic with that.

Travis Sago

Thank you. I had a great time.