#64 Email Marketing Isn't Dead, Your Emails Just Suck: Ely Delaney’s Guide to Real Connection

Welcome to the Podfather podcast. You can find all our episodes on podfather.me. Here's a question for the listeners. When was the last time you actually followed up with a lead? Not thought about it, not added it to your to do list that hasn't moved in three weeks, actually did it with the right message at the right time automatically.

My next guest has spent 17 years building systems that do exactly that while you sleep. He's been a guest on over 300 podcasts. He's got his own shows, which makes.

Which either makes him the world's most generous sharer of knowledge or the greatest living proof that consistent follow ups pay off. Probably both. He's a two times Amazon bestseller, and I just spoke to him.

He's got a book that just released last week, so we're going to touch on that. He's over 1400 students learning how to network like a rock star. And people call him the people whisperer.

I just call him the man who's about to make every business owner listen, feel very motivated to open their email. Please welcome to the show, Eli Delaney. Thank you so much for having me, my friend, I appreciate it.

No, no, no. He's I mean, this is one. Yeah, look, I want to I just want to honor you with your book, because I think I know I actually wrote a book, but never released it.

But I know the amount of work that goes into it. And you've previously been a bestseller. So let's well, like it's exciting when something is finished.

It's like the baby's been born. It's been in the bag. Yeah, it's right here.

You know, yeah. So this is the proof copy for anybody who's watching the video version of this. This is the proof copy that I got a couple of weeks back.

And I'm like, OK, now now we need to get it actually live so people can buy it and everything. They're like, oh, yeah, we're not ready for that yet. I'm like, oh, and it took a took a bit.

But last week we went live with it. We did actually hit number two in one category and number four in two other categories. So I was pretty happy with that.

And it's and you talk about writing a book being a lot of work. It really was a lot of work. I had hoped to actually get it finished up by January.

And, you know, we're now into April and it finally went live. And my brain's already thinking about the next one. I'm like, nope, we're just going to put those notes away because we ain't touching this for at least six months because I don't want to go down that route for a while.

But it was a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun and it's very good to have it out now. Not important.

So I suppose because I mean, you've been on a lot of shows, you've you've got your own shows. So can you tell me your own podcasting journey? Yeah. So my podcasting journey, it's really funny because when I actually thought about this, I had a conversation with somebody and probably about six, eight months ago.

And I actually did the timeline. I actually had an Internet TV show back in 2010. And this is back when like YouTube didn't exist.

Nowadays, you just call that a YouTube channel. But back then it didn't exist. We had, you know, professional equipment we used and all kinds of fun stuff.

And then 2012 is when I launched the first podcast called Driving Your Marketing. People can still find the episodes up there. I don't I haven't done it for quite a while.

We took it over 100 episodes. And then I kind of got burned out for a while and decided I just guest on other shows. And so I've done that for years.

And then just as I was before I was getting ready for my 50th birthday, I was like, I think it's time for me to do this. And so I literally launched the Meikle People show on my 50th birthday. And we're now 127, I think, episodes in.

And it's been a lot of fun. I tell you, you know, putting on a podcast is definitely a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun. You can have some good conversations.

And being a guest is so, so much fun. I like to say that people for a long time were like, are you are you going to launch that new podcast? I'm like, yeah, maybe at some point. But right now I'm having too much fun and not having to do all the work.

I just show up and say, say stuff, you know. So it's been a lot of fun with it. But, you know, the biggest thing from a podcasting standpoint is I think of it as a connection tool, as a networking tool, as opposed to a it in itself as a marketing asset.

It is a marketing asset. But I love some of the relationships that I've built because of the show have been phenomenal. And to me, that's the most important thing, which kind of goes back to my personality.

The follow up code book is all about building relationships. And that's kind of the core of everything they do. It's about how do we build a relationship based business, not a transactional business? The transactions are a side effect of building great relationships.

And so for me, that's how podcasting came to be. I've made some of the most amazing friends by being on their shows and and sometimes inviting them on my show. And it's it's I think anybody, if you're in business, you definitely need to be getting out there using podcasts as, you know, as a tool to get your name out there.

But Bill, use it as a networking tool, get connections with other people because it can make a huge difference for you. Excellent. So I've kind of usually people, they kind of they continue on.

And, you know, one runs its course and they go on to the next one. So you kind of had a gap. Yeah.

Because there's some people they're thinking of starting. There's some existing ones. You've obviously done a transition and learned.

Yeah. What was the difference between your first one starting off and kind of the journey to know? Yeah. So the first one, driving your marketing, I would invite guests who were marketing experts in their specific field.

So like I wasn't I'm not a video marketing guy, so I might invite a video marketing guy. Or at one point I had somebody who was a book marketing person. So she each one there.

These are people that honestly I wanted to connect with them because I wanted to be able to pick their brain. And if I can pick their brain on a camera, that's even better. They're much more likely to do it, not charge me.

That's literally how it started. Right. It's like, OK, can I have you come on and teach cool stuff to my listeners? Because I want to learn this stuff and I know they do.

And that's where it really came from. I am getting a lot of business from it, which was awesome because we had we had a skill that we did within our business that was not actually widely known, and they kept asking about it. And I'm like, well, yeah, I can help you with that.

And that's where at the time we were we were doing CRM stuff early on automation. I'm I'm an email marketing guy. I have been forever.

And they were coming to me going, OK, you got some really cool stuff. Who's who's doing this for you? And I'm like, well, we're doing it internally. Like, OK, here's my credit card.

How much? And that's kind of how this business went. But that podcast was just I want to bring people who are great at their specific area of marketing and interview them for my audience so people can learn more things around the marketing arena. This show is very different.

The Meekle People show. First and foremost, I don't take random people as guests. It is somebody that I have to have a relationship with.

Because it is somebody I have to know you well enough to think that you're cool people. And there's a lot of people out there, quite honestly, to think they're cool and they're not. I have people come to me like I should be on your show.

I'm cool. I'm like, well, just the fact that you said this is now. And so it is much more a passion project for me than than a marketing asset.

And yeah, it does. It does help for the marketing side as well. But for me, it's like I meet people.

Sometimes they're clients. A lot of times they tend to be clients. Sometimes that they're people that I network in other arenas.

Sometimes I speak on stage and I see somebody else on stage and they're just phenomenal. And then I get talking to them and I just really like them as a person. So I'll invite them on.

But it is an invite only show. Like if somebody just randomly comes to me and says, can I be a guest on your show? The answer is no, because I don't know you yet. But when I get to know somebody from a professional standpoint and get to know them, like their personality, I think they're doing good things.

I know they're making adding value to the world. Then I might go, you know what? I would love to have you come on the show. And so it's very much more a passion project versus a intentional marketing tool for me.

The beauty is that is that it works. It does work as a marketing asset as well. But that's not the purpose of it, which makes it much more relaxed because I come in, I have good conversations with good people.

We record it and then it goes out as a show. You know, that's I mean, I haven't heard of somebody that's going to that's the process for actually having people. I think it's fantastic.

That's it. Yeah, that's a that's a nice bit. And regarding then hosting it and using your marketing for kind of growing, what what what way are you doing now? From a marketing standpoint, number one is I do share out all the episodes when they go live.

So the beauty of that is then people, other people see it like that. The guest shares it out. I give them content to help share it out.

And then people come to me. They're like, OK, who's this Eli guy? He's got the show. Let me see what he's up to.

And then they see stuff that I'm posting. Otherwise, that's really related to my business. Again, going back to email marketing stuff in my email, marketing is specifically about how do you write emails that build relationships so it builds no like trust and loyalty with the people that you meet.

So when they're ready to buy, you're the first person they think of. And so I talk a lot about that process of how do you communicate differently? Because we've all been on those lists where it's a pitch every day and you just really want like you sign up and you're you're you feel dirty, like you need to take a shower and you want to unsubscribe before they've even sent you the product you bought. Right.

That's that's what's ruined email marketing for people that say email's dead. I still hear it to this day. People keep saying, you know, email's dead.

I don't know why you even bother. And I'm like, no, you know, it's not dead. Your emails are sucky.

You know, you need to change it up because I get clients who come to me and they're getting, you know, they might be coming to me at a seven to 10 percent open rate on their emails and we'll get them to 40 or 50 percent for the first 60 days. Yeah, because we change how we communicate. We treat them like a real human instead of an ATM.

And that's that's the magic. And that's kind of that's the basis of the book. It's called the follow up code for a reason, because it's a code.

And I actually incorporate the Bushido, which is the code of the samurai into the principles that we use, the same virtues like honesty and integrity and respect and kindness. When you start bringing those top of mind, which are virtues that we should all have anyway, but you start bringing those to top of mind for people the next time they go to send an email to the people on their list. They're like, OK, does this does this sound like I'm just pitching them again or does it sound like I actually care about them? And when you can run that through, it's like, yeah, maybe I should rewrite that first.

And it makes people much more intentional, which is what we really want. And have you figured out like the ratio of providing value, providing value and then looking for the sale without it being too salesy? Yeah, there's no magic number with it. But for me, I generally have and we have I have my framework and methodology is called the ultimate follow up system.

And when we do, we help clients actually do that. And I actually go straight for a lot of my clients. So I get on a Zoom call, interview them, pick their brain on all these things.

And then I actually write as them. By the way, if anybody thinks, hey, you could go around my book. I do not do that, but I know several that do.

I specifically do emails. But we find that generally speaking, I will send five to six emails that are content driven and they may have little touches on, yeah, you know, if this makes sense, you have any questions, just reply back. Let me know something like that.

So it's a very, very soft pitch. And then we'll have an intentional offer. A lot of times we'll do a couple email campaign that's specifically promoting a specific thing.

But that's in between, like I said, five or six emails to this one, we call it a mini launch, essentially. And then we go back into a ton of value. And here's the cool thing about it is value.

This is where people mess it up, is that value has a lot of different. I guess pictures that you can see with that value could be answering frequently asked questions. That's cool, because a lot of times people, they have those questions, so if you can help them out, that's great.

But it could be a tip. And that tip doesn't have to be about your business. It could be.

But I would recommend that people actually, if you have tips that you can recommend, recommend stuff that has nothing to do with somebody buying your product. So as an example, you know, I work with a lot of people that are fairly new to business, and my first company was a web and graphic design agency. From that standpoint, I would tell people, it's like, you know what? If when you go to get your domain, I recommend you actually register your own domain.

And if you're working with a designer, I recommend that if they're going to register it for you, you verify they are going to register it in your name, not their name, because back in the day, I mean, I started that company back in 1995, so that tells you how old I am. I people would actually like web design agencies would register it in their own name. And then if there's a falling out or sadly, I had this literally happened to me three times, the web designer passed away, and the business had no access to any of their stuff, and there's nothing we could do about it.

And so I used to tell people, it's like, Hey, you know, if you do have me register for, I'm going to put it in your information, but you need to, whether you use me or not, if you're talking to somebody else, you need to make sure that you're registering it yourself or make sure that they're registering it in your name. If you want to do it yourself, here's the website to go do that at. Like I'm giving it to him and I didn't make any money off of that.

I did that just purely to make sure that I'm keeping their best interest in mind. Now, on the other side, it takes something totally separate. I have a recommend, like, here's a great book that I recommend.

I keep it on my desk. I talk about it all the time is the go-giver by Bob Berg. Have you read this one? Okay.

You definitely pick up a copy of it. You should read it. It is, it's a short book.

You'll see, it's kind of really thin here. It'll take you about three hours. It took me four hours and I'm a slow reader.

But it talks about how you walk into a room coming from a place of service and how you add value to look at what can I do to help people as opposed to walking into a room saying, how can I sell these people something, because it creates social karma, and if you do it right, social karma will come back tenfold. It may not come back from that person, but it will come back to you. If you give enough, if you add enough value, if you help enough people, you know, as a gym runs is you can get anything you want.

If you help enough other people get what they want, that is so, so true. And this book really puts that into play. Now, here's the thing is I just shared the story.

I recommended the book for you. Everybody listening should go buy the book. And I always tell people like, read the book and shoot me a message.

Let me know what you think. That same content I just shared with you is also in an email. Exactly what I said.

I talk about the book. I go into a little bit more detail of how I actually met Bob. We've met virtually.

We've had great conversations online. We've never been in the same room together, but I consider him a friend. And, um, I share a lot of that kind of extra stuff, but I put it into an email that I share out.

Now, if somebody buys the book, yes, I am an Amazon affiliate. I'll make like 30 cents if you buy the book from my link. So it's not, I'm not doing it for the money.

Like I always joke about the fact Amazon sends me enough to buy like two mochas a year, and I think we, you know, with the cost of mochas going up, I'm not even sure if it's that, so if you can add that value, that is not self-serving. So like if I were, when I recommend my own book, it doesn't matter how good the book is or how great I think the book is or what you can, you know, what you can accomplish by reading and implementing the book, I think you could do all those things, but it's still self-serving. Cause it's my book.

If you buy the book, I'm going to get paid. And so if you spend more time adding other things of value than you do pitching your own stuff all the time, people will pay attention more because if it's all about you and your services, you're training them to tune out. You're training them that if it's not something specifically that's going to help them right now, if they don't need your services, they're not going to pay attention to it, no matter how good the information is.

But if you're sharing something outside of your realm, and the beauty is if you're, especially like for me, I'm in the B2B space, obviously, um, you're dealing with other business owners. I can recommend books. I can recommend podcasts.

I can recommend, uh, YouTube, uh, videos like TED talk. You know, some of my mentors taught me some really amazing stuff. And I'll impart that wisdom on people on my, to my people on my list.

So they now learn something from it. It doesn't have anything to do with me, but the beauty of it is they already know what I do. So if they have a question about what I do, and this happened a ton of times, they'll reply back and like, Hey, thank you so much.

This was awesome. I really appreciate it. I've actually been meaning to reach out to you.

It, can I get on your calendar? Cause I need to see if you, maybe you can help me out. And that starts a conversation conversations lead to sales. And so that's the, the mindset behind it.

And when you build it into a system, it just works. It works forever. Just kind of touching on a few of the things you said, one of the ones with the websites as well is sometimes people, when, when you want the changes and they're in control, the hand comes open and then, you know, they do a cheap force just to get you in the door and then the hand comes out a little bit.

And then some, I've heard of people just starting again, cause it was just better to do it. And regarding that book you mentioned, I mean, it kind of reminds me of a BNI. I was in BNI in Ireland years, years, years ago.

And I was always about, how can I help people? It was never that I helped you, you must help me. It was like, it comes back and some, and I got so much business out of it. And there was so many, you know, there was a few people, let's say they just complained.

This doesn't work because all they did is exactly what you said. They're going in there with their hands going, give me some exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. If you, if you come in with the idea of what can you do for me? You're going to lose period. It's just going to happen.

So the million dollar question, and I, I get different kind of thoughts on this and it's the sequencing of how often, because if you've got the grand card on, it's like, I don't know what you get three a day or something like that. That's like, is that, you know, and then there's others if it's relevant. So, you know, with your experience.

Okay. Yeah. Uh, so timing is always in every industry is going to be a little bit different with it, but, um, I am not, there's a lot of great marketers out there that they are at that three a day kind of thing, or at least daily.

I, first and foremost, my clients tend to be in niches that are not in the hype mindset. So you have, you have consumer mindset people. These are the people that are always looking for a deal.

They're looking for the quick win. Uh, these are people that, uh, claw them into the internet marketing space primarily, and they they're looking for the next dopamine hit. You can pound them to death and they'll still open and read every single email because they're looking for the next deal.

It's a dopamine hit for them. Most of my clients don't live in that space. Most of my clients are professional services.

We're talking about fractional CFOs. We're talking about business consultants that are coming in and helping, you know, the company that's, that's sitting at 5 million a year and they want to go to 20. They need a, you know, leadership consultant to come in and help them make sure they're right, right.

People are on the right seats on the right bus kind of thing. Um, that kind of stuff is a complete turnoff for those kinds of people. And that's the beauty of knowing your audience, because if you send that kind of email, that's hypey and it's too much, they will unsubscribe and they will never refer you to anybody.

Then you have the opposite side where people are like, I don't want to be that person, so I'm going to send them a monthly newsletter. Problem with that. Most newsletters suck.

They're all about the person. Like it's all me, me, me. This is what I'm doing.

This is where I'm speaking. This is the podcast I've been on. Nobody cares.

And sometimes they add some content, some value, but usually it's not enough. It's usually it's a veiled pitch for their stuff. So, you know, it's like, eh, whatever.

And most of the time people don't read it. They may not unsubscribe, but they don't really pay attention to it. They don't do anything with it.

Um, I'm a person of here's where's the middle ground and the middle ground tends to be for most people in my, my realm, it tends to be roughly seven days. But I say that roughly because we don't send out, you know, we don't send out an email at Monday, you know, at 7 0 AM every Monday, because number one is that that looks acts and feels like a newsletter. And so if they're getting the same thing at the same time, every week, it's too consistent, and even if it's not conscious, subconsciously, their brain says, this is a newsletter and you, you lose a little bit of that psychological trust, so we do what we call consistently inconsistent, which means it might be seven days, it might be 10 days.

It might be five days. It might be in the morning. It might be in the afternoon.

It might be in the early evening, mix it up. So it looks and acts and feels like a real newsletter. That I opened up Gmail to send out to you.

And when you do that, and by the way, the other piece of this is strip out any fancy formatting, do not make it look like a newsletter, make it look like an email you just sent from Gmail. When you do that, people will pay attention more and they'll look for your emails because you treat them, you make it look, act, and feel like you just opened a Gmail to send an email to them. They know better.

Subconsciously, they truly know better. We're never going to lie to them, but when you do this psychologically, it actually makes them more receptive to it. And then when they open it up and they see something of real value, it can be short, it doesn't have to be very long.

A matter of fact, for me, an email that's 300 words long is actually on the long side, we want to keep it fairly short. It's like, Hey, here's something I found. It's pretty cool.

I liked it. This is why I like it. I think you'll get some value out of it too.

Here's the link. Let me know what you think. Now we're starting a conversation with them and we're encouraging them to reply back once they've checked out the thing that you're just recommending to them.

And again, it could be a book, could be a video, could be a TED talk, doesn't matter what it is. But if you keep doing that, they're going to be seeing your emails pop in as, Oh, what is Roy got now? You know, they're super excited about it. And so then now your open rates go up when they reply back, the email gods are appeased and they're more likely to put you in the inbox and in the primary.

Because those are things that they're looking for. They've been looking for him for years. They just started putting it out about a year, a couple of years ago, maybe where they actually admitted they were looking at that stuff that they, I knew they had been for years.

It's like, if you get people to reply back to you, that's what shows them your legit and people want your, your information, they want your email. So they're more likely to deliver it and put it right up front. It's like, Hey, you replied to, you replied to this guy last time.

This is obviously he sends important stuff here. It is again. And so when you're doing that, it changes the entire experience for them, and it creates a much more, um, casual communication back and forth with them.

And when you do that now, when you actually go to sell something, the walls are down because they're already apprehensive. It doesn't matter what your business is. They're expecting you to pitch them.

That's why nobody wants to get on a sales call these days. They keep on, Hey, get on a strategy session. No, it's a sales pitch.

We all know better. And that's one of the things, like I always tell people, if you go right to your website and the first thing I see is book a call, I'm done. I need to change my, cause I only done that recently.

I added that recently. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So you don't want that on your homepage. Now you could have it.

Like I have some people that they'll also put it like at the top right hand corner is one of their menu items. That's fine there. But if that's your hero image section, you lose them because that's like asking somebody to marry them before they even go on a date.

And so what you want to do, this is where I focus on. There's four phases to a sales conversion. First one is eyeballs.

This is how do you get in front of people? So that's attraction. And there's a billion ways you can do that. Getting on podcasts is one of them, right? A sponsoring podcast is a, one of them.

There's a lot of different options out there. Speaking, networking, even just your social content, all the different things that are out there. Everybody in their dog talks about a billion different ways you can get in front of people.

But then we go into the capture and the capture phase is, do they like what you have enough to raise their hand and say, okay, tell me more. And we go from the capture page to the nurture, which is the stuff that I've just been talking about. We build that no, like trust and loyalty.

So when they're ready, they're going to buy your stuff. You're going to be the first person they think of. And then the fourth one is the actual conversion.

Can you get them to give you a credit card? Most people focus on the first one and the last one. Now, my big specialty has always been the third one, which is the nurture side. That is where my whole framework and methodology came to be.

But the capture site is important too, because a lot of times piece people miss the boat on this. The capture site is based around how do you give them something of value that isn't just a veiled pitch. And there's a lot of different ways to do it, to do it.

And nowadays people have such strong ADHD that a lot of the ways that have been in rotation for the last 20 years, they don't work very well anymore. Used to be webinars were a big thing. Well, nobody wants to sit on a webinar for 90 minutes anymore.

And so many people don't understand. We don't have that kind of time. He's like, Oh, it's a 60 minute webinar.

And three hours later, they're finally hanging up. It's like, no, I don't got that kind of time. On demand videos better, but still it's, I have to sit there and actually watch the video.

Checklists, eBooks, eBooks, and nobody wants to read an eBook because it's too long. And how many times have you caught something, you get a PDF and it just says you save it on your hard drive. You're, Oh, I'll go back to that later.

And next thing you know, you've collected a thousand of them. Exactly. You got a whole hard drive full of stuff, collecting digital dust.

Okay. So what we do is we actually have eliminated all of that. And my framework is using, we call an educational email course where basically it's a five biggest mistakes or five, uh, simple facts, things like that, that are five things that you can do.

Like my personal one is called the follow-up fix by biggest mistakes, people making their email marketing and what to do to fix them. Okay. So that's the key is you have to say, here's the mistake, but I also am promising that I will give you the solution, what to do instead.

And instead of a PDF that you can download, that you're going to get through page three, and then your dog's going to want outside and you're going to forget all about it. I'm actually going to send you an email one a day for the next five days. It's going to be very short.

You're going to be able to read it in like four minutes, and it's going to tell you, here's the mistake and here's what you do instead. My goal with it is that if you download that, you're going to get the email. You're going to say, okay, I have this problem.

Here's what he said to fix it. You're going to go do it. And tomorrow I'm going to have a different one.

So now you're taking action in small bits. Now, obviously for all of us that are in business, the goal is to get people to hire us, you know, cause that's how we pay our bills. What we do with it is we bake in the, your framework and methodology and your mindset and everything.

So your personality, all the things that make you, you and why they would want to work with you. And at the end, the next logical step will be, Hey, if this stuff makes sense and you want some help with it. Now, I would love to get on a call with you.

Here's like my calendar, but you've already given them value. You've already given them actionable steps, things that they can do on their own, even if they don't call you up. So now you build that no like and trust piece.

So they may not need you now. They may go like, Oh, this is really good stuff, but I don't think I'm ready for him yet. So I'm just going to do it on my own.

They're going to go back. They're going to do it. They're going to realize they really didn't want to do it anyway.

They're going to come back and talk to you because that's where a good portion of them will end up going. And the beauty of that is that's your capture piece. That's where somebody is like, okay, I think I want help.

You're like, this is go get this, this thing I'm going to go through. I'm going to give you an email a day for the next five days, quick and easy. Read it in four minutes or less.

That's a very small commitment for people. And so they're very likely to actually engage with that. And this is, these are stuff that we help clients with is helping build these out and things like that.

But once you do that, you've got now got that capture piece. So no matter where the eyeballs are coming from, so you've got the attraction going. Again, there's a billion different ways to attract yourself in front of people, but the capture is the part that people are missing.

And when they do, they're using something that just doesn't work nowadays. And so you put that in place. Now, once they finish that sequence, they go into the nurture, which is what I call the ultimate follow-up system.

And you build that out to where you got a year. Like when I build it with a client, we're at 12 to 15 months, depending on how the sequences land. And it's a hundred percent evergreen, meaning everybody starts at the beginning, there's nothing that's time specific in there.

And we build it into your CRM. So it's an automated system. So it's a hundred percent evergreen, a hundred percent automated, meaning you build it once it's an, and it's an asset that works for you for years.

I always tell people, once we get to like month 10, come back to me, let's do another year. Because if you can do the second year, now you've got two years worth of stuff, to be perfectly honest, when they get to the end of the second year, they're not going to remember anything. You can move them back to the beginning.

I mean, it's just, it's just an honest truth that if you do this, right. It will work for you forever. I have, I have a guy who came back to me.

He replied to one of my emails, uh, September, September 16th of 2020. He says, Hey Eli, I've been on your list for a couple of years now. I want to thank you for all the help you've given me.

It's been massive for my business. My son is starting a construction company. I'm wondering if you can help us with some marketing stuff.

So I replied back immediately. I was like, yeah, tell me more. I'd love to help if I can.

Then I go into my CRM. I'm like, what does it quote unquote a couple of years mean? He had actually seen me speak July 3rd, 2010. 10 years and three months later, this dude's coming back to me, referring his son to me.

When you build it, right. It works forever. And it's designed to be the long game, build the relationship because we never know when they're ready.

We just want to make sure we're there when they are, because how many times have you said, Oh, you know what? I need this. I knew a guy. There was a guy that I met a while back.

What was his name? And you can't remember it by doing this. You come from a place where you're not pitching all the time. It's not annoying.

You're adding value. So they open your emails. They pay attention to them.

Even if they don't reply, you're still making an impact. And generally it's a positive one. I have one client that like two weeks after we launched our campaign, she came back to me and she was like, Eli, I got to tell you.

And she did this actually under group coaching. She, she came back. She was like, okay, I got it.

Eli, I got to tell you this, but I want everybody else to pay attention. If you're not getting this up and running, do it. I have been in business for over four years.

And in the last two weeks, I've had more people reply to my emails, thanking me for them and asking to get on my calendar than I have in all four years combined. It's just how you communicate with them. That's the key.

That's what, what makes it work. So there's one that I'm curious because yeah, I've seen it a few times. I don't think you've done it, but I don't know.

People send out an email, their first name, last name, whatever way the code doesn't work or something. Yeah. What's the best way to address that? So I, my general rule of thumb is remove, remove the merge.

Uh, anybody who gets an email from me, part of it is also, and this is the important part is personality. So how do you address people when you meet them? When I see somebody, especially somebody that I know, I'm going to walk up to you and go, Hey there, how's it going, man? And so when I send an email out, my acknowledgement at the beginning is usually, Hey there. Because that's also, that's my personality.

And I also remove issues with the first name, last name, merge fields, all that kind of stuff. Cause we've all got those emails. I guarantee everybody has, I probably got a hundred and if not hundreds of them over the years.

Um, and sometimes it's technology. Sometimes I know one time, um, like somebody had some emails when we were just doing some CRM stuff for him and Dave decided to write their own emails and they wanted us to actually put it in place and they had a different merge field and nobody caught it. And so it came back with the brackets when it should have been like the two squirrely brackets.

And so it came back, Hey, first name, you know? Um, so yeah, I'm a big, I'm a big advocate for just go ahead and take those out. People there's, there's, there's psychology that says use people name, people's names in the conversation. The problem is that people then try to stuff it in places that it doesn't make sense.

Like if you were to send an email out to somebody one-on-one, would you start with their name? If not, then don't do it in your automations. You know, you have to think about your style, your personality. How do you address people? You know, I've had people that, um, and this is another big one is like, I have people that are like females.

A lot of times they'll use like, um, like, Hey, lovely. And that, and that works. If that's their personality, that works for them.

Now, what doesn't work though, and this is a big, big, important factor is if they were to go hell, Hey, lovelies, well now you just said this email went to you and 5,000 other people. So how you write it, you write it. Like you're sitting down having a cup of coffee with a friend, always write to one person, even if it's going out to 20 million, you write to one person, make it look, act, and feel like you just opened up Gmail to send them an email and because people can lose a credibility and the trust in a heartbeat just because of one little word.

And that's, I mean, that's kind of where I really, that's like my stickler P at point with it is I read this stuff and I go through when I'm writing emails, whether it's for myself or my clients, I go through and I read it four times before it goes anywhere. And I'm like, okay, what does this feel like? What is, is there anything that's throwing this off? And I'm looking for those nuances just in case I've been doing this long enough, I very rarely catch them, which is great. Hey, they, they just don't happen very often.

Um, I've got one client I started, I was working with just recently and like we could write, you know, 12 emails and he might change 10 words out of the whole thing, you know, um, but if you, you gotta pay attention and the attention to detail on this stuff does make a difference because these are all psychological triggers you understand is, and it's all about how do you make them feel? Do they feel like they trust you? Do they feel like you're a trusted confidant, a guide, or just another internet marketer that wants us, wants to pitch your garbage to them. And that's the difference. That's what makes email work.

And the beauty of it is that if you do this right, you use all the other platforms that are out there to help you build your list, but email is the only list you actually own. So you have it. If, if Facebook blows up and goes away tomorrow, you still have your email list.

If LinkedIn blows up and all of a sudden they don't like you anymore, you still have your email list. YouTube goes under tomorrow. You still have your email list.

So you do all the other things to get in front of it, but you keep inviting them back. It's like, uh, I use a term, get them in the castle. My job, my job is to get them in the castle and keep them in the castle.

Use all the other platforms to go out. You're going to go, go to their parties, get to know them and invite them back. Because once they're in your world, you control all of it and you can talk to them the way you want.

You don't have somebody else's rules other than the basic internet rules. You know, email providers, they can be a pain sometimes, but if you do it right and you keep this stuff that we're talking about today in mind, you have a massively higher chance of getting in the inbox and getting, getting your emails delivered very easily just by following basic guidelines. It's not that hard.

It's much easier than so many other platforms that change their rules all the time. I know you mentioned, you know, a platform might disappear. My space, but came back, but there's also the censorship because like I got removed two channels of YouTube, loads of stuff getting removed.

So you mentioned CR, like I hear that a lot. There's a lot of people, there's so many different systems out there. Yeah.

Which one would you recommend? Okay. Uh, this is a question everybody asks this question. Uh, the best CRM out there is the one you use.

Okay. Plain and simple. Most of them will do most of the basic stuff.

Now I do have my preferences. Uh, if you're on MailChimp, that's not a CRM, go find something better. Uh, I personally use high level.

I am an affiliate for them. Uh, so if anybody wants to take them, take a look at it, just reach out to me. I'll send you my link.

I appreciate it. I make a few bucks off of it. Uh, but I've been, I've been using them for five, six years ago, or five, five or six years now.

Um, and they've just been phenomenal. They're great. All in one.

They're very cost-effective. Um, for a business trying to run a business, they have everything you need in one platform, which is pretty cool. Um, there are other ones that are out there.

You've got HubSpot, you have pipe drive. I mean, all these other ones that are out there, the reality is most of them do a lot of the same stuff. And so, and this is where so many people, they get into starting a CRM and they're like, oh, well, you know, this thing, the software sucks.

It's too confusing. Well, it's because you don't understand it and you don't know how to set it up. The reason most people don't know how to set it up is because they don't know what they want.

And that's why it's really good to hire a professional to help you just to get it set up originally. Like I've, you know, for me, when we, when we're working with people, we're helping them build their capture and their nurture campaigns. And when they have those two in place, after that, everything's easy because that's like the foundation of everything.

And then they can build, you know, you want to set stuff up for your follow-up for your, um, calendar system, and you want to set up your order forms and all the other things going on. You can do all of those, but you have to know what you want. You need to know what's the flow.

What do you, I want email one to go out today. I want email two to go out in three days. I want email three to go out in five days.

You need to write all the emails. Don't ever, this is the number one thing. Do not go into whatever software you're using.

I don't care which platform it is and try to build it on the fly. You will fail. You need to go through, map it out, draw it out on a piece of paper of what the flow looks like.

Email here, text there, email here, phone call here, whatever you want it to do. And then you need to write all the stuff that goes with that. And if you have landing pages or something, you need to write all the copy for the landing pages and get your graphics together and all the things that go with the thing before you ever go in the CRM, because if you try to build it on the fly, you're going to skip steps, you're going to get confused.

You're going to have things missing. And most of that, this is number one problem. I see everybody have when they just get in there and start playing around.

Is it's overwhelming. And the reason is because they don't know what they want. They don't have the process figured out.

So figure out the process first, get all your ducks in a row. It's like, if you want to build a spaceship out of Legos, you've got to have two important things. Number one, you need to make sure that you have the map, the graphics that show you what order to put the Legos together, and then two, you have to have all the Legos.

And if you take all the Legos and you follow the instructions in the map, you're going to build a spaceship. But if you don't, who knows what you're going to find? And you're going to probably have a bunch of leftover Legos. You don't know where the hell they go.

There's an important thing on this one as well, though, that I've seen. Sometimes people use one CRM system and they have a few different things. So for example, the podcast, then they have their business.

One I got recently, the guy had paid clients and he sent out an email. I was like, Ooh, I've got access to something I shouldn't have. Yeah.

Because sometimes they mix up. So that's the same thing as really, they're not really understanding the system. Right.

You need to, you need to think through it and understand the basics of what you want to accomplish first. And this is where hiring a professional to help really comes in and play because you don't have to keep them on forever and you don't have to have them do everything, but the basic setup to get you up and running and then learn. As you go, it will save you so much time and so much headache.

Um, because you can run a lot of stuff through a single CRM. I don't really recommend it. I recommend if you're going to, especially if you've got like.

Clients and like two different businesses per se, I wouldn't run them under the same platform. I would say two different accounts, essentially just a smarter way to go, which again, high level will do that for you. Um, the beauty of it, you pay for one account and you get, uh, two or three sub accounts where you actually can run independent businesses from it, which is pretty slick.

Um, but you, you want to have that differentiation, but that's where like tagging and your segmentation comes in so important. Um, and that's, those are the right types of reasons why hiring a professional to help you to begin with is so important. And the beauty of it is if you have somebody like us, we're like, I'm not here to just set up somebody CRM.

We're building the foundational machine. So the system is in place for the most important things, your capture, your nurture. Then you build other stuff on top of it.

But when you have those two things in place, now you're rocking and rolling and you literally can take anything that you do your marketing efforts to get in front of people. You can easily cut your expenses down by half or a third. Your ROI will easily double or triple because of the fact that some people just not going to be ready to buy today.

They might be, it might be take three, six, 12 months for them to make the decision that they're actually ready. It doesn't matter what the reason is. And if you have a system like this in place, when you, when they are ready, whatever that looks like, you're the first person they'll think of.

And that's, I mean, I built this stuff for myself back in 2008 when I got into speaking, cause I was closing about 10% of the room from, from stage speaking and my first thought was, God, I must suck 90 people just walk out of the room and I started building followup processes and I started converting an additional 10 to 20% over the next six months from the exact same people. And it was just because I built the followup process. And to this day is still the biggest problem that I see most businesses have.

All right. Good. This is one it's looping back into the podcasting world, but connecting the thing I had, um, I have a school group for podcasters, the hot father, and I brought it up and there was other people, the comments were kind of similar way because you've been on something like 300 shows, you probably know that you're going to some farms and booking the calendar, you have to hit the box that you'd be on their email list.

There's not the option. Some have the option. Yeah.

And I do not like that because I guess there's a, and it's like, um, it's different if I'm interested in something because I go, okay, yeah, that's okay. But the fact that you don't hit the box, you don't get to hit, okay. And then you're going, all right, this is my thought process.

Do I unsubscribe? I wait until I'd be on their show. Then I unsubscribe or just, you know, and it's like, and you're just getting bombarded with stuff you don't want. Yeah.

I, I a hundred percent agree with you on that one. I think that if you're booking on a call, booking on a podcast, booking on a virtual coffee with somebody, um, I'd at least make it an optional thing. At minimum, because I want, I want to get emails related to the podcast, obviously, um, but I don't want to be added to their list and I cannot count the number of times where all of a sudden I'm getting on people's list.

And a lot of them are just doing it without even having the, the, the agreement box, they're just doing it, which is highly illegal, honestly. Um, they, if somebody decided to push it, they could get nailed. But, um, I'm a big fan of those.

Those conversations are not to get people on your, on your list. You can give them options. It could be an optional checkbox or on the thank you page.

When they register with you, you could say, Hey, I do this thing. I have some really cool things. If you're interested, I would love for you to sign up.

And here's how you do that. And then you give them the option. And if they're interested, like, Hey, you know what? I think he might have some cool stuff.

They'll, they'll fill out the form again, or you can even have it. So the form auto fills and all they have to do is hit the submit button. Now you're legitimately getting them in there without hurting the relationship out of the gate.

It goes back to the basic psychology again, is that if you're, if you're going to be on somebody's podcast, you're there to be on their podcast. You're not there to sign up for their newsletter. And so if they forced you to, they have broken the trust.

They've, they've hurt the relationship and the walls are going to go up. And so if you can, and this is for everybody to think about, think about the experience as a user coming in, would I like this? Would I be perfectly okay for them to sign up for some people? The answer is, Oh yeah, I could just unsubscribe. Yeah, you can, but what's that going to do to the relationship of them getting on the show? Are they going to treat you differently at that point? Because you just unsubscribed, you know? So think about these things.

I mean, if somebody wants to, wants to try to get people on their list, there's nothing wrong with that. But my recommendation would be give them something of value. That after they have booked it, it takes them to a thank you page and says, Hey, thank you so much.

I look forward to our interview. By the way, I have this really cool thing. If you'd like to get a better feel for what I do and how I help clients, this is what it is, this is how it will help you out.

If you'd like to do that, sign up below. And like I said, most CRMs now you can actually have it. So it'll pass the variables across.

So they'll already have their, the form filled out. All they have to do is hit this, hit the submit button. And I would, that's how I would do it because then it gives them the option.

If they don't, they don't, that's no big deal. Um, but it doesn't force them into something that they don't want, which is then going to actually hurt the relationship right out of the gate. With, uh, getting on shows with the emails, like I, I tried having all separate emails and going in and then I forget to go in.

So what I do is I divert everything to my main email. And that's the way that that works for me. And there's been times where somebody would be writing to get on the show.

And sometimes I look at it and it just, it does thousands. There's just this time somebody has written three times to remind me and I'll get them on the show. So it wasn't me not intentionally responding back.

So with you, have you found a sweet spot? How often, what way, if there was a show you definitely wanted to get on? Um, I haven't had that issue. Um, most of the time when I'm looking at shows, um, most of the time, honestly, a lot of times they ask me to be on shows. Um, but if I'm, if there's a show I'm going after, you know, I'll follow the process and then, you know, if I don't hear back from them, um, I'll give it like three or four weeks because I got plenty of other shows to be on.

I mean, I'm on three shows this week. Um, and I'm speaking twice and on top of that. So if it's not a rush for me to say, okay, I have to bug them about it, but I'll fill it out and, you know, and I put it again, you know, if you have a good CRM, you can create a pipeline, a pipeline, uh, which is basically it's designed as a sales pipeline, but you can go through it's like, okay, here's where I've submitted, here's where they've reviewed yes or no, these, the ones that said, no, here's the ones that said, yes, you know, you can track all that.

And then you go back and you follow up with them and you're like, all right, I haven't followed up with them for three weeks and I'll put, I'll put them into my CRM that way I have it. I don't, they don't get added to a newsletter or anything like that, but then that way I can track and say, okay, I was supposed, I submitted for race or Roy's show, but yeah, I haven't heard anything back yet. So he's over here in the waiting field.

Let me go through and I'll create something like every three weeks. I'll assign myself a task to just check in with you. So three weeks, probably a good amount, uh, maybe four, I wouldn't do it any less than that because people are busy and you do it too much.

And we're like, dude, go away. No, you know, I mean, there's, there is that, you know, everybody's busy and hosts get bombarded all the time. I mean, even like, like I said at the beginning, my show is an invite only, but I get bombarded by strangers all the time, sending me emails, wanting to get on the show.

And, you know, and I try to be quick about saying, no, that's not how, how this show works, um, but if I got 50 other emails that are more important, it's going to go down to the bottom of the list because it's not that important to me. So don't bug people. There's nothing wrong with following up, but I would say three, four weeks out is a good timeframe to check back in.

Yeah. Excellent. With like London real has done this Tucker Carlson has done this, even my clock is I, I, I, I use a lot of different AI's and I think it's my claw.

I said, Oh, I'll do that. It was like 20 bucks. And then it was like, you have to buy credit.

So I was like, well, so I thought, I don't trust this. So I use one of the disposable carrots and within three days it was used up, but I was like, all right, so then I just, it was very hard to actually get rid of it. But I, I basically unsubscribe and it's still, so now it's going to the spam London rail, what their thing was doing.

Your man, Brian Rose, he'd have crypto at London rail, you unsubscribe and they're creating ones that you've never subscribed to. And in the end, I forget why, like sometimes you can do a trust pile thing or just send them that you're going to charge them every time they're sending. But I get that constant.

And the worst thing is that's why if somebody like you that had, I mean, I've asked you to come on my show, cause I researched and I saw, but just think, just say you were trying to, I might miss that because of all this crap that's coming in, because I still have to spend time to go in and say, what's this about marketing spam, but it's still, it's time. And every right. Is there any kind of secret way of stopping that crap? Cause it drives me crazy.

Yeah. Just a spam report. Most of your systems nowadays, you'll, you can not only just spam record, but you can also block them.

Um, now if they change, if they change to a different email address, you can't, that's not going to make any difference. Uh, unfortunately, people like that, those are the, those are the bad seeds that that's why so many people don't like email these days is because people do stuff like that. Um, so if you're out there listening to this and you're doing stuff like that, stop, don't do it.

It's stupid. Um, so yeah, if you get stuff like that, if I get stuff like that, it's immediately spam report. And if I see too many of them, I put them as a, as a spam and delete immediately.

So it doesn't even go into my spam folder. It just immediately gets deleted. So, and, and there's only so much you can do, but it's, it's something at least.

You know, we mentioned the 300 shows you've got your own. What, because I, I'm, when I'm guesting, I'm picking up stuff and even on the forums and go, Oh, that's interesting. Or I'm, I'm always kind of tweaking things based on it.

I mean, you've been on 300 shows. What things have you learned or what things did you go? Ooh, that's good. I want to incorporate that.

Yeah. Um, for, as far as being a guest, a couple of things that are really important. And I actually, I help people a lot of times I'm helping my clients coach them through being a guest on shows because they want to do more of it.

The number one thing is, um, well, actually this is the, after the most important things, make sure that you have like your bio, your pictures, everything's super easy, put them into Google drive. So you have them copy and paste wherever you need to go. It's just going to speed everybody's life up.

But when you're getting on a show, no, the single most important thing in my opinion is know when to stop talking. And you're, you've been an awesome host. You've let me talk and tell a lot more of my stories that I have.

Um, I try to stop and make sure that I can check in with the host to make sure that they don't have questions. Uh, cause I has as a host, I have had people and speakers are the worst at this. So I'm very familiar with that.

Cause I am a speaker and I know these guys, um, they're used to doing a 90 minute presentation where it's them talking nonstop and they forget that a podcast is a conversation. So talking bites, if you, and you can see, especially if you're doing virtual, like we are, but even in person, it's the same thing. Um, if you, you can watch the host and you can see where they kind of look like they have something to say, shut up, let them talk, stop where you're at, you know, because.

It is a conversation and that's the most important thing. I mean, I can, I can be truthfully honest on this. You've given me a lot more time to just talk and tell, you know, tell what I had to say, um, then a lot of hosts do, and it's been great.

Cause I get to share more, which I appreciate. Um, but we, as a guest, it's our job to read the room. We have to read what the host is looking like and, and not just get up there and just talk about ourselves for 90 minutes.

Cause that's just annoying. Nobody wants that. If you want that, do your own show, you know, um, but, and do a solo show by that.

But that is the most important thing. You know, the, the second most important thing with that is make it real simple. Um, you know, most hosts and they, and I know you do this, but when you get to the, you know, when people ask you at the end of the show, almost every host is going to ask you, how can they, how can people follow up with you or how can people get ahold of you? Um, keep it simple.

Give them one link. Don't give them a bunch of links. Don't say, Hey, here's my phone number.

Here's my email address. Here's my LinkedIn. And here's what to do.

If you want to send us fire signals. I mean, it's just, you know, it's just ridiculous. And it's like, give one, give one link out.

When you do that, it just makes everybody's life easier. And you can have one link. I have, you know, the site that I use that I'll give out is, is a hub site.

What I call it, I call it a hub site. And from that site, you can find me any way that you need to find me. Whether you want to book a call on my calendar, you want to, you want some of my freebie stuff.

You want to link to my book on Amazon. You want to connect with me on LinkedIn, whatever it's all on that one place. And so instead of having to rattle off 15 different things, I just give one link.

Build something like that for yourself, go to link tree, build it out. I built mine custom, but you could use something like link tree to get you started. Yeah, excellent.

I actually got kicked off link tree because they don't like what I'm talking about. I use bio link, but, but then I found what happened is a lot of times people get confused with the different stuff. So then I sent them to my website and then it has all the shows and things like that.

Yeah. So we, we do, we actually, that's another thing that we started doing for clients, especially if they're using high level, we actually don't even build a site like that for them because you can do that with something like high level. It doesn't have to be super fancy.

You can keep it very, very clean and simple. Excellent. Listen, Eli, totally enjoyed it.

You might hold up the book again, because I think with the knowledge that you shared and the fact that it's new, I think people might appreciate it and might get it. And you might give me that one link. Cause if you give me two, I'll give you a virtual slap.

I appreciate it. Well, I will give you one link. So the followup code is on Amazon right now.

Like I said, it came out last week and it's an easy read. So if anybody wants to check it out, I appreciate it. Definitely.

Let me know what you think once you read it. Uh, for me, the easiest way I do one link can make it super simple. Connect with Eli.com and Eli is E-L-Y.

So connect with Eli.com. You can go there. There is also the Amazon link to the book is right there. I have the followup fix I had mentioned earlier is there.

Uh, my link, all my social media stuff is on there. Um, even if you, if you liked this episode, connect with me, reach out, say, hi, tell me where you found, found me from. And if you really want to get on my calendar, my calendar is on there.

Grab a spot down there. It's not a pitch. It's a good conversation.

I call it a quick chat. Get to know each other. If it leads to something where I could possibly help you out and you're okay with that, we'll have that conversation, but it's more about just getting to know you.

Cause like it says above my head, I like to meet cool people. Yeah. Well, and I think, uh, I I'd like to be on your email list because based on what you've said, I can learn a lot from the emails that I received.

Well, go, go grab the followup fix. It'll, it'll help you. And that's, yeah, that's, that's really the first starting point for everybody.

No. Brilliant. Okay.

I'll make sure I'll put all the links, both on the audio and the video. Thank you very much. Awesome.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This has been fun.

So that's all for the podfather. You'll find all our episodes on podfather.me. You can scan the QR code or go to roycoughlan.com and that's what the QR code does. It brings you to roycon.com. I'm going to do a second link.

If you're looking for virtual assistance, go to va.world. Be sure to give us a thumbs up, five star rating, maybe share with three friends. And when you get Eli's book, do the same thing, because when you give a review, the algorithm shows it to more people. And I know from listening to what he said, you know, that he knows what he's talking about until next week.

Take care.