Unbound with Chris DuBois

I think 30% email open rates are great. Well find out how 50% can become your new baseline with today's guest. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Ed forto is a self proclaimed sales and marketing geek and has been since starting his first business cutting lawns in his neighborhood at 14 years old. He has been an early adopter of technologies to improve his sales and marketing leading to the launch of his company email, open rate optimization and subsequently, client acquisition actuarial service. With both he helps businesses leverage technology and data driven strategies to deliver tremendous results in the form of revenue. Hey, welcome, Ron, back. Yes, thanks so much for having me on. What an introduction, I have to take you around everywhere I go. Yeah, I am happy, you can find my rates on the west. So we got to kick it off with the bank. Especially because I'm excited to actually get into just everything. Like I think, by this point, any listeners know I do a pre interview and like we chat and just like, I feel like I think our interview actually went long, because we were just nerding out on some sales and marketing through all this couple. Yeah, I'm super excited now to pass this to our to my audience here. Let's start with with your origin story. Let's Let's hear more about you. Sure. You know what, I won't go back to birth or even my childhood. But I will go back to when I was first attracted email, I did a lot of direct mail, and back in just before 911. So it's quite a while ago, I was selling a consulting service to real estate agents and real estate brokers. We were testing email, because before that we were using flyers that we'd send that as flyer service that was send these flyers to the real estate offices, and people will see those and then they call and place an order. But then we got connected with email. So I had someone that was able to harvest emails. And then every morning at 10 o'clock, I sent a batch emails out, didn't have an autoresponder, autoresponder back then we were using a desktop application called postmark. And it didn't do a lot of the things I wanted, I had to kind of retrofit the thing. So I send the emails out of 10, people would get the email and back then everybody opened email, it was a it was kind of a new thing. They get the email, they say, Oh, this is something that I'm interested in, they reply to the email the reply within send an order form to them via email that if to get that open that email, print the email, fill out the form, go to the fax machine, fax order back to me the system that would absolutely fail miserably now, I swear to you by 1030, the fax machine was start running email at 1010 30 orders are coming in on the fax machine. It was like printing money, it was the greatest thing ever. And from then on, I was hooked on email is a prospecting and client attraction tool. And just the the concept of this right the number of steps and the actual physical requirements of like printing something up filling it out, putting faxing it like I mean today, it's like such a different beast. Like, if a web page doesn't load within two seconds, people are bouncing. And it's just like entering their email. Now we talk about having to earn the click. And if you'd have gone back then and say, Well, you have to really work hard to get somebody to click on your email, I go here, why are they super lazy? Well, things have changed. And now it's just crazy how much time, time has already changed. Okay, I would love to dive into the concept of micro errors. I think this is just a fascinating concept that if leaders can grasp this, it's going to dramatically help their businesses. So can you I guess start by defining it. And then we'll we'll just dive it. Yeah, Michael, micro areas. And I'll mention another concept too. But micro error is the type of errors that you don't see or overlook in your business. I'll give you an example of what I would consider a micro error. And that's something that when we look at email, we look at open rates and say, well, average open rate is around 20 22%. And I have a lot of people that come to me that say when I say well, how's your open rates and I'll go on Pretty good. We're at 25%. Close to 22. Then I'll say to them, are you happy with that? Well, yeah, we're better than average average. Okay. You have any kids? Yeah. Pretty smart kids. Yeah. Okay. Right. A student's? Yeah. Okay, what happened? What would happen if your kids came home with straight C's on a report card? That's average? Would you be happy with straight C's on their report card? No, no, average is not good. And, and that's a micro error error that we can fix. Because it's a perception microlayer. The problem with that micro areas, the mailbox providers don't like C grades either. And they actually penalize you, if you have an open rate under 30%. And even that is not what is acceptable, because all of my clients have open rates above 50%. It's very possible to get 70% 80% 95%, open rates with open rates with click through rates of 4050 60% or higher. And that's what you should be shooting for and not settle just because you see things are average. So that's, that's an example of one type of micro error. There are a lot of others that are hidden that we don't necessarily see right away. But the things that we need to correct that make a really big difference in our end result. Yeah, that is, I mean, so let's, let's get into some other examples here, because I like that one. I like the idea of differentiating it right as a perceived or perception micro error, where it's because I'm sure a lot of founders fall into this, this challenge where they started the company, right? They don't necessarily know all of the marketing stuff, they don't know all of the sales stuff. And eventually, they're going to have a team around them that they're experts in these crafts. But until then, until they get to that point, they're kind of relying on themselves and what they can learn and what they can experience. And so how I guess, how can you or what are some other examples of some of the micro errors you've seen, that leaders are running into? So they can just be more aware of like, what those are? Right, right, one or the other? It's I said, I've mentioned a couple of different things. The second one is a simple question that you should ask yourself. And that's one of the things that I used to do in my business that worked, that I'm no longer doing what I should be doing. And I just did a poll on LinkedIn with us today. And 95% of people said, yes, there is something that I used to do that I don't do anymore. I know I should be doing. And and then the next question is, well, why not? Why aren't we doing those things? Maybe it's shiny object syndrome. Maybe we just got bored with it. But it's, it's interesting to see how people will switch to some novel thing or some brand new things, something that they've never tested, it's unproven, maybe some I promised that would work really well, when you have things that you've already done, that you go back to and do again, and will produce the type of results that they used to. And that's a different type of microwear. that's out there. But there's there's others in your business things that you're unaware of that you haven't seen that you need to fix, right? So how do you? I guess, say, I'm, I'm that founder, right, whose? I guess I don't want to call it shiny object syndrome, but I'm on to a new thing. How do I know that? I'm not following shiny object syndrome like this is this might be the new thing that I actually have to follow for my business. Right? Like, I guess differentiating, first, I'm changing for the better. Or I'm just going off because I'm dissatisfied with a previous version. I don't know if that's, that can be a tough one. But I do have an answer for that. A, for example, automation, and AI, could be shiny objects. But they are necessary if you are not keeping up with AI, for example, right now, ignoring it or saying it's a fad, or I'm not gonna learn it or I don't, I don't like it. I'm fearful what's going to happen, you'll quickly get left behind AI moves so fast. It's it's very disruptive. And it's, it really is only become mainstream for about maybe seven, eight months now. But it's changed so much in that period, and you waited another three months, and you're really behind a good example would be voice synthesis, synthesizing your voice. When I was looking at applications that did that. And this is just three months ago. I was quoted prices as high as $2,000 or $2,500. Setup and 200 $300 a month. I can now get it done. For under $100 a month, actually, I can test it for $5 as an app, where I could actually do it for free. And you could I could use these, these apps to save myself a tremendous amount of time, when I'm doing videos VSLs, and I'm doing the background audio, it may take me an hour of getting through all the verbal mistakes that I'm making to get through a five minute video. But I can just type the script up, it's uploaded, and it would be difficult for you to tell the difference between synthesized version of my voice and the real version of my voice. It's a tremendous time saver, right? And so being able to identify where you're actually going to see, see these improvements, and then leaning into that, rather than just hoping that you're gonna find something great. Right? Right, right, you want to you want to look at stuff in your business that you could replace, automation is another great thing that you can do. I'll give an example there. Nowadays, I'll use email again, a lot of people just send email blasts out. And the problem with doing that, you may still get away with it now. But one of the problems that you have is, first, the mailbox providers don't like that, they look at it as spam. And second, the users that your recipients are getting used to seeing emails that are relevant to them. So with AI and automation, with automation, you can tag people, you can begin to bid develop profile about what they like, what they're interested in, you can use what's called behavioral segmentation. And you can then craft emails that are really of high interest to the people that are that are getting it and you can send the right email to the right person at the right time, highly relevant, those emails get open. Now compare that to someone who's not doing that. They're sending a general email, you're going to find that those emails not only aren't open, but those people are going to unsubscribe, they're going to mark your email as spam, you're not going to be able to do business. If you're not learning how to use that automation in the right way, as opposed to the wrong way would be just sending out as many emails as you possibly can. Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Let's, uh, let's talk more about email. Actually, it. Let's assume I'm a new client coming to you, what are the first steps you're even taking, like to just kind of analyze how my email performance is currently going, and what direction you want to take it in order to actually get those open rates, because I'm just gonna for anyone who's not right, like if you're able to get 50% open rates and better on emails, like, go ahead, go talk to Ed right now. Like, if we're not getting if a client of mine is not getting at least a 50% open rate, there's a problem. And I'm telling them that they're, we're not getting all emails into the primary inbox. If for under 50%, in for the 60 to 70% range 80% range, then we are in boxing, and he can't just assume that you're gonna get in the inbox, you're more likely to get into go into spam than you are in the primary inbox. But if you aren't getting in the primary inbox, now we can get very accurate data as to how people are responding to our emails, we start segmenting those emails, based on behavior, even based on personas. And now we have like different groups of emails. I'll give you an if you don't mind, if you'll indulge me in this. Years ago, I did affiliate marketing I just had playing around with it. Yeah, it's not a small list. And I was always on the top 10 of the leaderboards. And even with my small list going against people that had massive lists, like 200,000 subscribers, and I would get asked all the time, well, how come you're always in the top 10? You know, well, the first thing I do when somebody joins my list, I put them in different buckets. I'll ask them questions like, what type of products if you bought before? How much do you pay for those products? What products do you use? What products have you bought? That you don't use anymore? What's the least you would pay they get impulse buy for you? What would be the most that you would pay? And so I'd have all this information. And when when a product would be launched, I look to see okay, who am I which bucket would be most interested in this product? And I'd have 2000 people I might have 20 I might have 50 I only mail to those people. And that's what I really saw the what if you could you could use behavioral type targeting, segmentation and targeting to really like, you hit the bull's eye every time with your emails, I would have 90 plus percent open rates every single time because what I was talking to them about was relevant to them. It was even though these were sales emails, a lot of times you send to see a sales email, and you go the, if you get crickets like, I'm not buying this, if it's information, people over that open those all the time, but sales emails a lot harder to get get open, and responded to. But if you are talking to them, specifically on what they want, what they liked what they've purchased in the past, you'd be amazed at how easily you can sell the email. And that's what I first learned it. And I've just taken that that was over 10 years ago, like maybe 15 years ago. And I've just moved that forward to how we do business now. And so I look at everyone's the way they approach email. And we start crafting things based on my experience with behavioral segmentation. And now we can add on personas developed by AI and it's, it's it's, it's, it's amazing how well email works. Right? Even today. Yeah, you got me thinking of a couple of things. I think it was Dan Kennedy, who said you should be able to earn like $1 per month from each member of your list. So the bigger your list size, right? She did $1. I feel like with your method, it's almost a guaranteed hitting even if you're only sending that email to 50 people on your list of 1000. But all 50 Buy because it's so targeted. It's like, yeah, you're just crushing it like That's why waste email sends people who aren't sure for sure. So you're just harassing them at that point? Yeah. Question. So let's talk. Just like lead generation, I guess around around building your list? Is that where I get some some of the common approaches you're taking just to even get people excited to be on there. So I feel like you're going to be very good at maintaining people on your list, like it's one that won't often get a lot of unsubscribes. So what do you need to generate? Well, you're right. If you're if you're being relevant with your emails, you won't have a high end subscribe, right? People will stick with me for years. I'm focused more on b2b, although we can there's different b2c techniques that we could use. But let's let's start there. The first thing that I'm looking for is interest. So I will go out and there's different ways to do it. Let's we'll use LinkedIn as an example of identifying interest. So if I'm looking for people for email marketing, I will look at LinkedIn events. I might look at LinkedIn groups that talk about email marketing, I may look at LinkedIn classes that talk about email marketing, there is a filter with Sales Navigator Vance, for buyer intent. So I can look for people that have looked for buyer buying email apps, or email verification apps. If they have those two, that indicates to me that they're looking to do cold email outreach. So now what I do is I'll reach out to those people. If if I may. And this may, this explanation may take a couple of minutes. I don't know if I want to take that much time. Oh, let's go okay, it's probably great. It's something I call content amplification. And I have interactive brief. If someone goes to my profile, they just pick it up on my on my feature section of my profile on LinkedIn, for free. And it goes into it in more depth, but this is how it works. So first, I identify people that have an interest. If somebody doesn't have an interest, it doesn't matter. It's a don't add them to your list. I keep in mind that according to Chet Holmes, that only 10% of people are in market in any given time. So 90% aren't interested in buying 10% are 3% are in market, meaning they're ready to buy right now either either have done research, or there has been some trigger event that's happened, where interest is now moved over to need and they have to take some action. One of the problems that I have with people, especially in b2b and LinkedIn is they're reaching out to everyone regardless of interest. And they're asking for a 15 minute appointment. You probably have had that happen. If you're on LinkedIn, a lot people connect. Hey, let's meet for 15 minutes. The most annoying thing I've ever been if you put CEO or founder in your title anywhere, they will find you absolutely yeah, I took it off of the top of my title but they still find it. And it really it really it's one of my pet peeves, like I do not have 15 minutes to spend with someone that I do not know, and I certainly don't have 15 Minutes to subject myself to a sales presentation masked in something like, oh, let's collaborate, or like share ideas, something that's fairly insincere. So this is what we do instead, I love for people who are active on LinkedIn. So A, they're interested in email marketing, V, they're active on LinkedIn, active to me is they're posting, they're posting articles, they're putting up posts of videos or whatever. And then number two, they're not getting much traction. And that's important, because you don't want to go through putting together posts, and then hardly anyone likes it. But number three, when somebody does engage with their posts, they reply, so somebody comments, they reply, they comment reply, I can see that when they're posting, if I were to go on their post and comment on their posts, more than likely, they're going to reply that comment. So that's what I do. And I ask a question at the bottom of that, that that the comment that I leave, and I wait for him to reply back to me, most of the time they do that I have a converse a public conversation with them, let's say, Chris, you were posting, and I commented on your post, and I left a question that draws drew you in is related to the post, not by my stuff. And you reply to that, that comment. And now we're having this puppet conversation going back and forth. That may happen two or three times, and then I'll ask to connect with you. And more than likely, you're gonna accept the connection request. And I'm going to carry the conversation that we had on your posts now to DM. And at some point, I'm going to ask you an obvious question, which is, I see your posting a lot. I've enjoyed your content. I'm curious, why do you think a this may be embarrassing, but why do you think you're not getting as much engagement? As I think you should? I think you should probably have you probably feel the same way. You'll answer that question. Next thing I'll say is, Would you be open to supporting each other's content? I, whenever I see your content, I'm already doing this. But whenever I see your content, I promise I'll engage with it. And whenever you see my content, you would engage with my content. Would you be open to doing that? I would you be open to do it? Sure. Yeah. It must be for everyone else. Everybody says just that. So now what happens is I've got you coming on to my a, my profile, you're taking a look at that, see what I do. You're commenting on my posts. And just like almost everybody, suppose I have people that are commenting. And they're saying three things that are influencing you before you even do your first comment. They're saying nice things about, they're saying that I'm smart. They're saying I'm really good at what I do. And then they're asking me questions, so that I can look smart. And so I look like the professional and the expert, ideally, the expert that I am. And you're now influenced to have a similar comment about me say nice things, already saying nice things about you on your post. So you're just kind of reciprocating. Now I wait. Because in my world, everybody that has email eventually as an email problem, or an email question, or it may come up from a post that I write, but I'm waiting for a trigger event, where interest which I've already determined becomes need. And I don't have to do any selling at all. I've let everybody else do the selling for me. And eventually you come to me with a question for help. And it works every time. Right? So you're leaning on social proof aspect? Absolutely. Absolutely. In order to make happen. Yeah, no, I did sales training for 12 years, I can tell you, it is way easier to make a friend than it is to make a sale. So my philosophy is make friends, talk shop, do business. And if I find those three steps, everything's all good man. And I'm sure once you once you make one friend, it's much easier to get introduced to make other for Oh, very easy, very easy. I love to have content amplification partners because something always positive comes out of it. Either I get a client, or the very least I have somebody that is saying nice things about me on my posts. And even if they quit, I've already established myself as an expert in what I do. So when they do have a problem, I'm the first person that comes to mind when even just getting that virality right, where if if I just engage with your posts, my audience now sees it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the spread just becomes exponential at some point. That's that's a bonus. Right? Yeah. Okay, you were talking I think thinks as with your affiliate marketing days, yeah. Just being able to ask a bunch of questions and stuff to learn more about the person ahead of time. So if we're getting into behavioral segmentation, and what are you primarily doing this through polls? You know, just getting feedback from them? Or are you looking for other bits, like interactivity on websites or just other actions? How are you kind of, what are you using? I guess to say, yeah, yeah, it can it can, I try to use as least amount of friction as possible. So what I'll do is I'll map out a strategy in my posts, to segment people as we go along. So you have your welcome sequence, and then I have another longer sequence that people go through. And that sequence is designed specifically to identify which buckets to put people in. So we're just tagging people on the way they open, everything's a binary action, you open the email, you don't open an email, that's, that tells me something. And so I can put a tag on you, because you opened up the email, you click on it, or your link, or you don't, that tells me something, if each time you click, it's to go to a video or a blog post, or it's something on another site, that tells me that indicates some level of interest in that particular topic. But I thought ahead, if somebody's buying this product, and I use AI to help me with this, if someone's buying this product, what interests would they have that would that would correlate with buying this product. And as you're clicking each one, you're telling me which bucket to put you in, and what products you'd have interest in. And you're also telling me how to sell you on buying this product. So you're giving me all the information I need. And then I need to do is write the email to you and that group of people that that that you've helped me to form and send that to you. And we get high open rates. And we do this and sometimes a two step where the first email is to determine whether you have interest in something. And then the second email might be to send you to a booking link, or a sales page, we've done this with small lists of 500, we've done it with big lists of over 2 million, the stats are always the same, you're gonna get an open rate somewhere between 80 I'm sorry, 70. To 95%, you're gonna get a click through rate anywhere from 30 to 70%. And it's consistent doesn't matter how big the list is. But that's the power of behavioral segmentation. Right? Get it to the right people at the right time. Exactly, exactly. Awesome. Man. I want to jump back to micro errors, if we can. So we talked in a in our pre interview, just some of the ways that we can kind of train ourselves to better spot micro errors as leaders or even just to help with becoming more detail oriented. What uh, what, what ways do you use this in your own life or your own business to just ensure you're, you're looking at everything? Well, I'll go back first. And because we're all guilty of this, and that is looking at the things that have worked, I haven't been doing lately that I need to do so then I'll go back and put those things back in place. I'm looking at my time and how I'm spending it. I'm looking at how to be more efficient. If you're a solopreneur. It is very difficult to run operations and do sales. You You really can't do both, you have to kind of pick which one you're going to do. And you can't get so caught up and doing both where your your prospecting, which you need to do and needs to be consistent just can't stop because you got a client, because what ends up happening is you you prospect, the client stop prospecting the clients, when the client leaves, you've got to now start the whole cycle all over again and your income kind of goes up and down based on that. One of the things you have to be willing to do is hire other people. Now with AI, what you should be looking to do is look at what can I use AI for to supplement work? You're a bit young to know this, but the artists prints when he started out, he did concerts by himself. He would he would play all the instruments by himself. He'd sit in the center, there'd be a keyboard and Some other things around them, you can hardly see the guy. And he was singing and playing instruments. Then he finally they got a band. And he might have had a band before that, but it might have been just a period of time when he was doing everything. With AI. Now, you AI can do a lot of the work, where you only need one or two people, along with AI and automation, to do the work of 10 people, 20 people, and you should be thinking as a leader is how do I leverage myself to do this, and you have to start thinking about it now, not six months from now, six months from now, things are going to be a lot different than they are right now. And so you have to start thinking about putting those things in place today. And we work with clients to help them do that identify areas where AI could be used to increase your productivity, right? Yeah, it's awesome. Because Because you could do more with fewer people. Or you can do even more with the same people. Right? Like just by training them on how to use AI. It's like now everyone is exponentially more productive. Yeah, I know, guys that have had staffs have 50 to 100 people. They're down to under 10. Right now. So they've got their 10 best people. And they're way more productive now than they were when they had a staff that was five times and was 10 times bigger than it was even bigger than that than they have now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, primarily two ways of thinking about it. Right? You can cost savings and keep the best people so that we can make sure this is going up, or figure out how can we actually create, like an onboarding process for AI so that everyone is coming in and getting leveled up? To the point where they're dangerous within in their field now? Yeah, oh, absolutely. The little guy cannot compete with larger companies, right? It really has if you if you understand how to use AI, properly and automation, you can compete with pretty much anybody right now in a way that we couldn't before. It's leveled the playing field. Yeah, technology is the great equalizer. Absolutely. And this has been an awesome conversation. I want to go through the last three questions here, which are, first, what book do you think everyone should give a read to? My favorite book, I'll show that there we go. Is flipped the script by Oren Klaff. Not only have a, you can see my bookmark there actually, too. I've probably read this book five times, but I go on a five mile walk every day. And I listen to this book, maybe 100 times I practically memorized. It is life changing, especially in the way that we can and should be pursuing sales in the future. I know you have a background in sales, because you just the way you just pitch that look. I'm gonna grab a copy right after this. Next, what is next for you professionally? Sure, um, I am going I'm doing a series on based on the 50 152 ways to profit from any email list. teaching people how to find basically hidden money, found money in their business, find money in their email lists. It reminds me of when I was a kid where you, you find a quarter on the ground and it was almost better than Christmas, you take their quarter, you go buy some candy with it. Everybody loves found money everybody else. So what we're doing is we're showing people how to get big wins right away with their email list. And I think it's their ongoing LinkedIn event. If you go to my LinkedIn page, you can see it there. If you reach out to me on LinkedIn, you can see it there. The easiest way to get to my LinkedIn page instead of trying to figure out how to spell my name is to go to everybody loves found money.com. So not only do I like the phrase, I actually bought the domain, and you can go there, you can sign up for my newsletter. You can get the content amplification, interactive beef that I mentioned earlier to there, and then you can also sign up for any of the LinkedIn events I'm doing. Yeah, it's awesome. And I guess besides going to everybody loves sound money.com Where else can everyone find you connect with you? If you can, well, that'll take you to my LinkedIn page, which is probably the best place to go. to@forto.com is one of my websites, email, opt in email, open rate optimization is another but it feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Send me a connection request, they'll be more than happy to have a conversation with you. Awesome. You just talk business not I'm sorry, talk shop, and then maybe talk some business. Right? And at least become a friend in the process. Absolutely. So awesome. Edie, thank you for joining me. This has been awesome. I'm so excited. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it man. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership, visit leading four.com As always deserve it