Internet marketing expert and entrepreneur, Shawn Casey has sold over $30 million of his premier media products, services and memberships that help entrepreneurs to start and grow their Internet businesses. His more than 130,000 customers in over 100 countries have used his information, tools and resources to unlock the secrets to making their own fortunes online.
A successful self-made millionaire, Shawn is recognized as one of the world's top experts in profiting from your list, bringing in the cash flow to keep a business alive and thriving.
SHAWN CASEY: Thank you, Ric. It's great to be here.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's jump right into this. You've been doing list profiting, list building, for a number of years in a number of different venues. You've probably seen it all, been there and done that.
SHAWN CASEY: Pretty much.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's talk about someone who is just beginning. They've got their list kicking off, but obviously they want to start bringing in some money from it. Or, maybe they have a small list going, online or offline. What are some of the first things that come to your mind to watch out for, as an entrepreneur just getting started, down this road?
SHAWN CASEY: I think the first thing is this. Starting all the way at the very beginning, you should be capturing the email address of your customers and prospects. That's the starting point; if you're not, you need to. It doesn't matter if you're an offline business or an online business; you need to be able to do that. The simple fact of the matter is that you can send an email basically for free.
You're going to need an autoresponder account, and that autoresponder account will allow you to send email and automated follow-ups, however you want to use it, without getting off into the technical world that's kind of hard to explain without the visual. It's something you want to have. For $30 a month, you can send email whenever you want to. When you send an email, you have the ability to reach out and touch your people.
That means you can give them free information to make them like you. That means you could send them notices of special events and notices of sales. What most people never think of is to promote products and services created by other people, not by you. For example, Ric, let's say you sell roses, which is a fairly innocuous niche thing. The person who buys roses from you is probably going to buy things related to planting, pruning, or something else related to roses, or other related gardening things.
They're going to buy them whether you sell them or not. Whether or not you have anything to do with them, you can't stop that person from spending more money, nor is there a reason you want to stop them. We need to realize that people are going to spend money. If you're a gardener, you spend money on gardening. If you're a golfer, you're going to spend more money on golf.
If you're a NASCAR fan, you spend more money on NASCAR paraphernalia. It's what you do; it's your spending habit. If we have somebody in our database who buys a rose bush, we know certain things are going to happen. They're probably going to plant that rose bush. That might mean they need mulch and fertilizer. Some day they're going to prune it, some day they're going to want to display the roses, and some day they're going to need something to snip the roses with.
We can reasonably guess if they planted a rose bush, they might plant other kinds of bushes we might want to sell them. Let's say your sole business for the moment is that you sell rose bushes and nothing else. There are other people who sell all those other products and services. Pre-Internet, as you know, to promote those would have been, number one, hard and, number two, we would have had to go find and source all those products and services.
We would have had to either make deals with all these individual companies so we could sell them, or we would have to go, get, create, warehouse and deliver them ourselves to make more money. With the Internet, it's like magic.
RIC THOMPSON: It could have been done, but a bit more difficult.
SHAWN CASEY: Yes, much more difficult. Now with the Internet, this is magically easy. On the Internet we have what are called affiliate programs, which many people might be familiar with. There are affiliate programs for almost any product or service you could imagine these days. An affiliate program is simply an electronic tracking program where you can sign up for free.
You'll receive tracking codes, and you can put them in email, put links on your website or wherever it's appropriate, and you can refer people through that link to quality products and services. I'm the rose seller, and I know the person who buys the rose probably needs fertilizer so I could follow up with them and say, "You just bought the rose bush. One thing that happens is that you have good roses and great roses, and the difference between good and great is the fertilizer.
"The best fertilizer we've found is Jimmy Billy-Bob's Fertilizer from the heart of the south. Here's why it's great stuff, and here's a link where you can go get it for a reasonable price." That link is your affiliate link. You'll get paid a percentage on whoever clicks through that link and buys that fertilizer. They're going to buy it anyway so they might as well buy something good, and you might as well get paid. This works.
Your cost to follow up with that person is zero by email, you're doing them a favor by getting them a good quality product or service, and you're making more money. One of the things that most people are probably familiar with in business is the concept of lifetime customer value. If you're not, it's simply over your lifetime of relationship with a customer, how much money you make from them. That determines their value.
The value is always based upon, first of all, any transactions you have with them, but you also need to look at other ways they can become more valuable to you. This is because, first of all, you'll make more money on the customer. Related to that, of course, is that if you can make more money from a customer, you can invest more in marketing to get customers, which means you can increase your marketing, drive more customers into your business, and therefore your business grows because of that.
You can make more money and spend more on marketing, which makes you more money, which lets you spend more on marketing. It's a vicious cycle in the right direction, for a change, in growing our businesses. It's a very basic concept but one that's very valuable for many businesses. My wife and I spend a lot of money in a lot of different establishments. It's very rare that they capture any information from us. It's even rarer that they actually follow up and send us anything.
We could go into the local, massively built lighting-supply store and buy a couple of lamps for several hundred dollars. My wife has been in there enough that she knows the salespeople by name, but we never hear from them. We don't get a phone call, a postcard or an email from them because they don't capture that information. Think about the logic of this. You've been in the store enough that they recognize you, at least by sight, and you know them by name, yet they don't follow up with you.
There are thousands of other customers like us who they could be sucking back into the store to make money on, and that's a huge, huge thing. We're not even talking about anything complicated. We're not talking about brilliant marketing strategies here or anything else. It's just that you have customers and they're going to buy stuff. We're going to buy lamps, so you'd think you'd want to suck me back into your store to buy lamps.
RIC THOMPSON: Let me ask you this, Shawn. I sell rose bushes, and I do have this whole list of other things: the tools, the fertilizer, the mulch, maybe other plants. My head is now swimming. How would I choose what direction to go? If I've got this massive list of things I could be offering, how do I choose what I do want to offer?
SHAWN CASEY: Let me digress for one moment, because I meant to mention this before. Here's how you find affiliate programs, first of all, in case people don't know how. You don't want them out in the cold saying, "This sounds really great, but I don't know how to find them." The easy way to find them is to go to Google and find '(keyword) affiliate program', like 'rose affiliate program', 'mulch affiliate program', 'gardening supplies affiliate program'. Just keep searching and you'll find tons and tons of them.
There are so many you could make yourself nuts. One of the things I like to do for research like that is not to do it myself. If I don't have a staff member with the time, I'll go to a service like www.eLance.com, www.RentACoder.com, www.Guru.com, or any of those. You could post a job like this for research and just say, "I want someone to go get all the data. Get me the name of the program, what they pay, the URL of the registration form, the URL of the information and put it into an Excel spreadsheet."
You'll get somebody to do that for a very small amount of money. That's the way you find that stuff. Where do you start? I always try to start from two aspects. The first one is what makes me the most money, which is a pretty good business concept, because different affiliate programs pay different percentages and different products have different prices. If I can promote mulch and I make $5.00 on mulch, but I can promote pruning shears and that makes me $17.00, I'm probably going to mail the pruning shear one first.
Then, of course, part of it is what is more likely to sell to the people. I could make more money if I could convince them to go on the Gardening Tour of Europe, but that's probably less likely to sell. Try to do that. What happens to most people when they start to do this is this. Now there's so much information and so many possibilities that you're going to over-think it. One of the dangers in marketing is always spending way too much time thinking and forgetting to actually do stuff.
Just pick 20 of these and stick them in an autoresponder. Every prospect or new customer who gets onto this email list with their permission gets an email every other day that says, "If you're interested in this, you'd probably like this." Let that run for a month or two, and eventually go look at your stats. You look at them and say, "We sent these 20 emails over this time and they did 'X'." Rank them in terms of what made the most money. You'll start to go right down the list.
You'll see pretty clearly where the hotspots are. All marketing is testing. Good marketing is the experience to get closer on your first test, hopefully, but it's all testing. You don't have to be really smart at marketing, Ric. You just have to test a lot. As long as you test a lot, the marketplace will come back with the answer. The marketplace is always right. You and I are not always right; the marketplace is always right.
We run these out, and dozens of people have seen these emails. At the end of that time we pull a report, we stick it in a spreadsheet, and we sort on the column that says 'Made the Most Money'. One of them might have made $1,000 and six of them might have made less than $20. Pretty soon we'll have deleted all the ones out of there that made $20. Then we can test something else.
Another mistake people make is to run an ad one time and quit. If I had one of these that made $1,000, let me tell you something; that ad would go in there again. If it worked once, it'll probably work twice. It might not work as well. It might only work 70% or 80% as well as the first time; but 70% or 80% is good because $700, let's say, is way better than $20. Don't be afraid to reuse ads over and over again when you see something that seems like it's working.
RIC THOMPSON: To clarify, I'm selling rose bushes. I take the name and the email address of the person who just purchased that brand-new rose bush from me, and I pop it into my autoresponder series where I have these 20 email messages. Some of these look good from my initial research, but we'll see what the market decides. What you're saying here is when I have a winner that I should have multiple instances of that in the autoresponder?
SHAWN CASEY: Definitely. It only makes sense when you think about it. It's like if you had a store and sold lots of one particular rose bush. You'd have that not only featured out front, but you'd have other places in the store, probably, where people could trip over that one, right? You think, "Everyone buys this one so we'll get it in front of them more. They love this one." In the same way, we would do that with the email. We would make sure they had multiple chances to see that.
RIC THOMPSON: Then let me ask you about this, Shawn. Let's say I'm new to list building. I just sent out this ad, so didn't everybody see it? Isn't everybody going to act? I sent it to everybody; they're either going to buy it or they're not going to buy it, right? Why am I re-sending it?
SHAWN CASEY: That is a perfect scenario. Let me address this from two standpoints, because I'm on a lot of email lists. There is a school of thought-and some email recipients will have this school of thought, so let's deal with this-that goes like this: "You sent me that one time. If I was going to buy I would have clicked. You've insulted my intelligence by sending it to me a second time." I've actually seen marketers who've written this into email management companies, lists, and things like that, that they're offended.
They have every right to be offended because this is a free universe; they can do that. Some people will be upset. Some people might even, Ric, unsubscribe from your email list if you do that. The truth is that if you're smart, you don't care at all. The reason you don't care is this. When I watch football on a Sunday afternoon, Budweiser, Miller Lite, or some beer company advertises, and how many times do they do that?
RIC THOMPSON: Over and over and over again.
SHAWN CASEY: I saw the commercial once. How come they're insulting me by running that commercial a second time? Even better, they probably spend $100,000 every time they show me that commercial. Why are those idiots wasting all that money if they showed me that commercial one time? Clearly, they could save billions of dollars in advertising by showing a commercial once. Don't bother showing it again; everybody saw it. Hopefully everybody's laughing like you are as they listen to this.
Clearly, that is just stupid when you put it in that context. We know that not everybody saw it the first time, not everybody reacted, and not everybody got out of their chair, ran down to the beer store and bought a case of Miller Lite. One of the things we know about advertising is, number one, that repetition works. Number two, at the time you first see an ad you might not be ready to buy. In the case of email, you might have been wanting to click through and check it out.
You might have even checked it out but didn't have time to complete a purchase because you got distracted, the spouse called you to dinner, you had to go put the kids to bed or whatever. It might not have been the right time. So much of what's involved in marketing is that you want to be there when someone wants to buy. Just because you sent an email today doesn't mean the guy wanted to buy today. Maybe he wasn't ready; maybe he's not ready to buy for six months.
If we really want to make great sales, we want to have what's called top-of-consciousness positioning. It's a really cool term, but basically it's that we want to be in the right place at the right time. Let's say you brand a product. For example, if you wanted a non-aspirin pain reliever, what's the first one that comes to your mind, Ric?
RIC THOMPSON: You're asking the wrong guy. I haven't watched TV in over 10 years.
SHAWN CASEY: If I sent you to the store and said, "I need pain reliever that doesn't have aspirin in it, what would you buy?"
RIC THOMPSON: Tylenol, I believe.
SHAWN CASEY: Good, you'd buy Tylenol. Tylenol for you has top-of-consciousness for pain relief.
RIC THOMPSON: Okay, I got you.
SHAWN CASEY: It doesn't matter what it is as much as the fact that they won that battle in your brain. What you have to think about if you're the pain-reliever company-and I'm trying to hit the guy who is someday going to go the store and buy pain reliever-is how to get that position in their brains. If I'm the Energizer Bunny, I want people, when they walk in and they're thinking, "I've got to buy some batteries," to hopefully somewhere in there equate 'I need batteries' with 'Energizer Bunny' so they buy the Energizer Bunny batteries.
When that guy goes to buy, hopefully we just happened to hit him with an email during that buying period, or he just got one and he remembers he got one so we can get his attention at that point in time. There are multiple reasons to do that. Again, we have to remember the marketplace is way smarter than we are. How do we know when we've sent an email too often? The very simple answer is the email no longer gets any decent response.
That doesn't mean you should send it every single day for 30 days, but if you have a six-month follow-up cycle to your autoresponder and you're sending it every week or every other week, when you go back and look at your stats you find that after the first six times it really just drops right off. You found the limit of that. In the first six times, you made $6,000, or whatever you made. That's probably more money than you would have made if you only mailed it one time.
Again, if someone on your list is offended and wants to leave, that's fine because people leave lists all the time. However, the majority of people stay. I was speaking at a conference Saturday here in Atlanta. It turns out there was horrible weather outside while I was speaking. It was hailing, the skies opened up and everything else. We were safely in our room having a conversation, but this issue came up there as if often does: How much email is too much email?
I asked everyone in the room who happened to be on my email list to raise their hands. This wasn't my conference, but half the room is on my email list. I asked them how many of them got email from me every single day, and they all kept their hands up. Here's a group of people, and there were probably 50 people with their hands up, saying they get email from me every day. I pound them with emails, and they're still on the list.
This is because it's in an area they have an interest in. If you were sending me NASCAR ads every day, I'm not interested. I'm not picking on NASCAR; it's just not my particular interest. In that case, I would just remove myself from the list, which is fine because I wasn't buying anything anyway. No harm, no foul.
RIC THOMPSON: I got you. For a NASCAR fan, if that's their hobby, hearing a little something every day about NASCAR wouldn't be a bad thing at all. They'd probably actually look forward to it.
SHAWN CASEY: They might. They might be dreaming about the day they can put the down payment on the Richard Petty china-and they do have Richard Petty china; I'm not being sarcastic-but if you're a NASCAR guy, you're excited about this. It's all about what you're interested in.
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