Transcript

Sigrun:
You’re listening to The Sigrun Show, episode number 383. In this episode, I talk to Bobby Klinck about how to turn cold leads into raving fans through email marketing.
Welcome to The Sigrun Show. I’m your host, Sigrun, creator of SOMBA, the MBRA program for online entrepreneurs. With each episode, I’ll share with you inspiring case studies and interviews to help you achieve your dreams, and turn your passion into profits. Thank you for spending time with me today. Building an online business takes times. I share with you proven strategies to help you get there faster. You’ll also learn how to master your mindset, up level your marketing, and succeed with masterminds.
Today, I speak with Bobby Klinck, a Harvard Law graduate turned online entrepreneur. He helps other online entrepreneurs set up the legal foundations of their businesses, and create a connection with their audience through relationship based marketing. In this episode, we talk about how to turn cold leads into raving fans through email marketing.
Before we dive in, I want to invite you to join the Next Normal, a free five day course happening from June 15th to June 19th. I’ve decided to offer you this course instead of the Selfmade Summit that was supposed to happen at the same time, in Reykjavik, Iceland, and I obviously had to postpone to next year. But, I am doing a course for you instead of a virtual summit, which was my original idea. But actually, you’re getting both, you’re getting two for one.
You’re getting a course, a five day course with me, where you will implement the online strategies you need to prepare your business for the next normal and longterm success. At the same time, all the speakers from the Selfmade Summit, which now will be in 2021, have agreed to come on panel throughout these five days. And, we have some extra guests, too. Over five days, there are 15 speakers that will share with you what they have been doing to not just survive, but thrive, throughout this crisis, and what they’re doing to adjust to the next normal. At the same time, you will be going through a course on how to set your business up for success. Sounds like a great idea? We absolutely believe so, my team and I, so we are excited to invite you to the Next Normal. You’ll find the link to join in the show notes, sigrun.com/383, or go directly to the website, sigrun.com/nextnormal. I hope to see you inside the new course, starting June 15th.
I am so excited to be here with Bobby Klinck. And we have been in the same circles for a long time, but we haven’t actually met face to face until now, on Zoom, doing this recording. So welcome on the show, Bobby.
Bobby Klinck:
Well, thank you for having me. You know, we’ve been in the same circles, always weird when that happens, to finally actually connect with people face to face. It’s one of those things, part of the interesting thing about being an online entrepreneur these days is we’re in different continents, but we travel in the same circles, and it’s a lot of fun.
Sigrun:
It’s a lot of fun, and it feels like you should know the person. You’re like, “Oh, we hadn’t actually met? Oh, wow. Oh, you look like that?”
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah, I had that happen to me quite often and I’m like, “Oh, what just happened? That’s not what I expected of that person,” for some reason or another.
Sigrun:
Yeah. Since we are in similar circles, I have seen how you went from, should we say a struggling entrepreneur, online entrepreneur, to having quite some success as a lawyer as an entrepreneur, which is unusual. Then, moving a little bit more into the business and marketing side. I’ve found that it’s a fascinating journey because a lot of people find that very hard.
So before we dive into the topic of email marketing and how we should properly do our newsletters, I would love to hear your version of the story.
Bobby Klinck:
You hit the nail on the head, there. I was a struggling entrepreneur as a lawyer for a while. First, I started doing this online marketing thing actually as a way to build my law firm practice. Because I’m a licensed lawyer, I’ve been a lawyer since 2002, and I was trying to build my legal practicing thinking oh, I can find a way I don’t have to schmooze with other lawyers, this is going to be a really good way to actually get clients. So I did that for a while, but I wasn’t really happy so I decided to make a pivot to be in the online space. And I made, at the outset, what I would call probably the classic entrepreneurial mistake.
I said to myself, “I don’t really need to talk to them, I don’t really need to do that. I can just create a course, because I already know what they need.” I did that, and that was a complete and total flop. Me being me, I went all in on it, I spent probably around $25,000 between buying the software I needed, my Facebook ads, all of that stuff. And, I made exactly one sale, and she asked for a refund on day 29 of a 30 day, no questions asked refund policy without ever having even looked at the course. So that was my introduction to entrepreneurship, and that was in 2017. At the end of 2017, I literally was about to give up. I was about to just say, “No, forget this, I’m going to go back and be a lawyer.”
But I decided to give it another try, and part of the story is I also chose giving as my word of the year for 2018. So I just started giving up myself, and being a nice guy. In the process, I doubled down and actually took the time to get to know online entrepreneurs because I serve pretty much me, and everybody whose in this online space. I was like, “Let me try to understand them,” because candidly, I didn’t understand a lot of the concerns. I didn’t understand what they were thinking, what the fears were, so I took the time to do that. And then, I had some good luck at the same time, which was this law called GDPR, which came about, which required a lot of online entrepreneurs to think about the legal stuff.
About that time, I was getting on the radar of Amy Porterfield, so she had me on her podcast. That podcast episode came out literally the day before my first relaunch and I had this huge success, so I did that. But then what happened was after build that legal side business, selling legal templates and just giving all the training for free, people started to say, “Well, how are you actually getting people to be your raving fan, when you’re selling legal stuff?” I said, “Well, I don’t know.” I thought about it, and I came up with a way to talk about what I was doing, which is different than most people I think, and how I was doing it as … Well, I like to say I view it almost like a shop owner in a small town, back in the 1970s. I get to know my people, I know most of the people who bought from me. Not personally, but I have them in my mind. And I take a high touch approach, and I found a way to make it scalable.
By doing that, people have really gotten this sense where people fall in love with me. It’s weird, people either love me or they hate me, and that’s fine, I don’t mind. I say they hate me, they don’t hate me but they don’t like me, and that perfect because I would rather have a smaller group of raving fans than a bigger group of people who are like, “Eh, he’s okay.”
Sigrun:
Yeah. And then, you basically took this topic of GDPR and made that your entry. Actually, I think you were not the only lawyer, I saw a couple of others, also in Europe, there were people who spotted the opportunity and say, “Okay, here are a lot of confused online entrepreneurs, I know something about it. Maybe I don’t know enough, but I can actually find out more about this topic, and then I can share what I think.”
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah. And the funny thing is, I didn’t set out to do that. What happened was, people were asking me a lot of questions about it so what I wanted to do, I wanted to try to find a training that I could send people to. That I could just say, “Here, go watch this, it’ll teach you.” And candidly, I would walk out of these trainings, and even as a lawyer, I would be so confused. If I can’t figure it out, how in the world are other people going to figure it out?
So I dove in … I’m trying to remember, I think the law is 270 pages long or something, but I went and I dove into it. Again, this is where things dovetailed, and why I had mentioned that I had adopted giving as my word of the year for 2018, because a lot of lawyers and privacy people were trying to exploit it as an opportunity to scare people, and to say, “You’ve got to buy this checklist from me,” and all this. On the other hand, I put together a three part training that was free, and I was doing it in my Facebook group. Then, Amy heard about that, then she has me on her podcast. She’s like, “Wait? You’re giving this away for free?” Like I said, it was in her communities and all that.
So it was this thing that I spotted it, there was a need, I dealt with it. Yes, I sold people my privacy policy at the time, now I give that away for free, but that was my rise. And I like to say that GDPR will keep lawyers like me in business forever, because the funny thing is although the law, GDPR, requires us to be clear in explaining things, the GDPR itself is not clear, which makes no sense.
Sigrun:
No, it’s not. It’s interesting because you’re on my podcast now, we do not agree on the interpretation.
Bobby Klinck:
Right.
Sigrun:
Yeah. I saw what a lot of lawyers were telling my clients and I said, “No, no, no. Here’s how I, as a business owner, see you, with decades of experience, running businesses,” and how I deal with the law, and explaining to people that law is not black and white because people don’t know that. I said, “Here’s how a business owner deals with it. You will never know if you’re 100% right, or 100% wrong, unless you maybe kill your business and stop doing business.” So yeah, we can have difference of opinions, and we can still be friends.
Bobby Klinck:
It’s one of the interesting about the law, because one of the things that I didn’t like about the fear mongering was that a lot of people were acting like if you don’t get this right, if you don’t pay me 1000s of dollars, you could be in deep trouble. I always said, “Look, there are no GDPR police coming after us small time entrepreneurs, let’s be honest, so do your best.” That’s what I was telling people.
Honestly, I disagree with some of the other American lawyers about what is and what is not allowed, and what the best practices and that, and we all have different views, and that’s fine. But now, I come at it largely from the perspective of a business owner first now, and a lawyer second.
Sigrun:
Yeah. What did we have? This was a little bit like the 2000, everyone was scared in 1999 that 2000 was coming, all computer systems would break down, and I feel GDPR is pretty much the same. Yes, if you’re Facebook and Google, you should be worried, you should be really worried. But small business, no. Anyway, we didn’t want to do that, a whole episode about GDPR.
Basically, you figured out online business, and it started to work for you. You got this Oprah moment like we call it, like when you got on a famous podcast, that is an Oprah moment. But then, you were able to use that to … You were selling templates though, at some point?
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah. At the time, back in the GDPR days, what I was selling was … I called it a membership, but really it was a combination of templates and training, so that’s what I was doing at first. I had a core set at that time, I think it was eight legal templates that people got when they joined the membership, and also legal training, so I had this success.
But then, I tried doing weekly webinars after that, and doing the traditional online entrepreneur way of doing it, and the problem was unless you have … I don’t even know how much you have to have, but unless you’re willing to spend probably $10,000 these days, in ads per week, doing weekly webinars is going to be tough in the entrepreneurship space.
Sigrun:
I know, I stopped. I stopped, too.
Bobby Klinck:
I would do these webinars and I would have three people show up live. Now, I’d have 50 people register, but three people show up live, and it’s hard to really do that. So that’s was I was doing at first, and then at some point, I went to an event and a friend who I met, again it was the first time we’d met in person, and we sat next to each other at a dinner and we just started talking, so we started working together. She said, “I think you’re making it too complicated.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “I don’t think people want the training, I think people want the templates.”
So I went and I looked at my numbers, and that year I had spent 95% of my time, my money, everything, trying to sell this membership, and the membership was 35% of my revenue. The other 65% of my revenue was people who’d just gone on my template shop and were just buying individual templates. I said, “Okay, well I guess she’s right.” So then, I’m just going to give [inaudible 00:13:31] free to everybody. The only thing I charge for now, on the legal side, are the templates. I have individual templates, I have packs, I have an all access pass, but that has been my core product since, I guess it would be October 2018. That’s been the core thing that I’ve sold are my legal templates.
I joke with people that, nowadays, it’s one of those things that … I don’t want to say its recession proof, that’s not the right way to say it, but it’s almost marketing proof. It’s kind of like, no matter what I do, I just have the sales come in. I could put a lot of effort into it and sales come in, or I could put not much effort into it and sales come in. We haven’t yet cracked a way to really do a traditional marketing funnel that really revs sales up, but it’s fine because people are buying, and it is a thriving, multiple six figure business, just on that, without me having to do a lot of the high stress stuff.
Sigrun:
That’s amazing. And, I happen actually to have a client that wants to sell templates. So you don’t have a funnel for it? Basically, you just go out there, you’re nice to people, you go on podcasts like this one, and then people hear about your templates?
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah. So last year, I would do what I called non-launch launches. I did a traditional webinar launch of my template library, which is my all access pass, I did that at the beginning of the year. It was fine, it worked well, but we were paying way too much to get leads in and all that. So I presented to the mastermind, and we talked about it and people were saying, “I think a webinar is just putting something in the way.” So I started doing email only launches, where I would basically send emails over a week. I still had limited cart open at that point, for my all access pass, and I was doing that. I would send emails, make 50 grand, send emails, make 50 grand. I did this four or five times last year and I was like, “that’s a pretty good deal, if that’s literally all I have to do.”
But then, we just shifted and now, everything is evergreen. We will do things like, last week I was on vacation, and my team did a bundle sale where it was if you buy one of these core agreements, you’ll also get some bonuses, and that brings money in. But, for the most part, yeah it’s people find me, maybe they’re on my list for a while because they got their free privacy policy template from me, or maybe they just find me some other way, they hear me talking about it. And then, they realize that they need to get the legal templates, and they buy from me.
The big revelation we had on this is, especially in this space, if I’m their first touchpoint from the legal perspective, I tend to be their legal guy. So if I give them that privacy policy for free, which my competitors change 300 bucks for normally, they get into my world, and when they need to buy stuff, they’re going to buy it from me, so I treat it as a long game.
Sigrun:
So we want to talk about how emails play a part in this, and obviously you touched on it already, that when you’re selling something that is let’s say relatively low price, right?
Bobby Klinck:
I mean, individual templates range from $97 up to $247.
Sigrun:
Yeah. Yeah, I would say this is the lower price category. So yeah, like you said it’s not worth doing webinars, because webinar signups are too expensive. You get them on the list, free privacy template, that’s great. People have to come up with their own amazing freebies. But, you discovered something around emails that changed everything.
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah, it this weird little thing. It’s one of the themes I talk about a lot, is that I seem to stumble into things, but I don’t think I’m actually stumbling into things. At that same event where the woman had that insight for me, that I should just sell templates, she also told me … There was a presentation about email and I said, “Yeah, I need to work on storytelling.” She said, “What are you talking about? You’ve been doing nothing but telling me stories for the last three hours.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” All these little stories, they were just little tiny stories that I was telling. She said, “Those are awesome.”
So I started to, basically, shift what I did in my emails, my weekly emails, you call them newsletters. I’m on a vendetta to get people to stop using that word.
Sigrun:
Okay, sorry.
Bobby Klinck:
No no, it’s okay, because it’s a mindset thing. Because if you say newsletter, it makes you think of a traditional newsletter. Here’s what’s going on in my business, here’s my podcast, and it’s all about content. The big shift I realized was that I needed to shift away from content and more to just telling stories.
What I tell people, my business framework, I call it my FANS framework, it’s find, attract, nurture, and serve people. Once people are in your world, the content, they already know it’s there. Sigrun, I don’t know about you, but most of my podcast downloads aren’t from people clicking on a link in an email, it’s people who are subscribed. But, I still need to connect with them, and the purpose of that weekly email, I believe, is to nurture people from relatively cold leads into raving fans. The quickest way to do that is let them get to know you.
I started telling these wacky stories. Literally, the first email that I’d made that was a shift to this … Before this, it had always been my podcast this week is about X, here’s what you’ll learn, blah, blah, blah. Boring, nobody liked them. The first email where I made the shift, the subject line was “Why are you sending me pictures of you with random women?” I told this story of I had taken a selfie at this event, and Porterfield’s in the background, photo bombing me. I thought it was funny, and I texted it to my wife, not realizing she doesn’t know who Amy Porterfield is. She knows of this person, so she literally, the next morning texted me back that, “Why are you sending me pictures of you with random women?” I sent that email, I told that story, and then I linked it in to you need to have a community of people who understand you, which was the podcast topic for that week.
When I did that, for the first time people responded to my emails, and responded telling me, “This is hilarious.” Literally, it was either that week or the next week, someone sent me an email saying, “I’ve been on your list for a while. For the first time, I feel like you’re a person, not a company. And for the first time, I want to do business with you.” So I really started leaning into that, so basically every single week now, I send a story of my life. Often, they’re these little tiny tidbits that I can somehow link into whatever my podcast episode … I would say three quarters of the email is the story, and only the last quarter is about the podcast, with a couple of calls to action, but my point isn’t to get clicks, it’s to get people to respond.
Now, I get responses every single week. People view it almost like an episode of Seinfeld, they’re getting a little something that will make them laugh for the week and it keeps people coming back to my emails.
Sigrun:
So somebody listens to this and is like, “Oh, I have been sending out my podcast every week,” and just telling people what’s in the podcast so they click on the link to the podcast, and they are thinking, oh that was wrong.
Bobby Klinck:
Well, it’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just … This is the thing I say, I say a lot of people, I think, are focusing on open rates and click rates, and one of the things I say is as long as you have an open rate that’s not ridiculously low, I don’t care what your open rate is because that tells me nothing about whether they’re likely to buy from you, or connected with you, or anything like that. Because an open is eh, that’s what it is. I care more about are people clicking reply? My emails never ask people to click reply pretty much, but they always do. They have to tell me how the story that I told them connected with them.
One of them, I told the story of a speech I gave in speech and debate in high school. This person, and so many of these emails start this way, “I never respond to these, but I had to respond to this one.” In that case, it was a woman telling me she had to do that same wacky speaking event, and there was this level of connection. She felt connected to me because now there was something that we had in common. To me, that’s the power of email, that’s the power of social media, that’s the power of all of this is you can build those kind of [inaudible 00:21:46] connections, where people feel connected with you because they have something in common with you.
So my emails are everything from … I’ve talked about speech and debate, I sometimes share stories that aren’t great. I shared a story about my father being in a plane crash, and what I learned from that, and difficulties of that. But then, sometimes they’re wacky, I told the story of how, when I was a prosecutor, I got a call from an agent asking me to authorize them to use deadly force, but it was all a prank. But I told this story, and people are just like, … People get to know me, and as a result, we all talk about it, we need to build know, like, and trust factor. To me, telling those personal stories about you is the quickest way to do that.
Like we said, if all we’re doing is summarizing what’s in our content, why do people want to read the email? They can already go and get the content, and that’s what they’re going to do. So I think we need to make our emails into an event separate from our content. Now, I want to give a caveat. You still link to your content, you still tell people about it a little bit, that’s just not the focus. Because, like I said, I stumbled into it because I have a podcast and I know most of the people who are listening to my podcast are subscribed, and they’re not clicking on a link to go to my website to listen to the podcast, so I think that was part of what made it easier for me.
Sigrun:
But how personal do you get?
Bobby Klinck:
Oh, I get very personal, I share all kinds of things. I mean, my wife has said that my daughter is off limits so I don’t talk about her. But also, my brand style is to be funny and cheeky, so most of mine are funny, fun, and happy. But, without a picture or anything, I shared that we got an email from my daughter’s school one time that there was a confirmed case of lice in the class, and I used that as the story. I told the story, like I said, of my dad’s plane crash. And that one has, to date, the highest positive reaction, but also the highest spam complaints of an email I’ve ever sent out. That one they didn’t like because I made them sad, I guess.
But, I found that’s also a common theme. The emails that have the highest positive response, that people love the most, are also the ones that people who don’t like me, they really dislike. I sent one of my now famous emails last year, Easter week, my email subject line was “I don’t like Sweet Baby Jesus.” But I immediately said, “I’m talking about the beer, not the person,” that was the first line of the email, because there is beer here in the United States called Sweet Baby Jesus, which is an atrocity. But, I do things like that and again, that’s why I say people either love me, they love my sense of humor, they love the person that I am, or they can’t handle me and they get off my email list very quickly.
So I’m willing to share anything and everything. This is where the fact that I was selling legal stuff instead of marketing stuff up front helped because early on, I didn’t mind sharing things that I had screwed up about business because I wasn’t trying to teach people business. I was selling legal stuff. The funny thing is now, people who even back then told me those were their favorite episodes, now they actually are buying my business advice partly because they’re like, “You’re actually real, you’re telling me the stuff that’s hard, and the stuff that’s going to get screwed up as well.”
So I shared all kinds of stories about things I’ve messed up, about things I’ve done right, but normally they’re kind of funny because I think, generally, people would rather feel good than feel bad, so that’s the way that I generally approach it.
Sigrun:
Yeah. Yeah, well I once sent an email out that … “My dad has cancer,” that was the subject line. I thought long and hard about, do I send that out? Actually, I was in the middle of a launch, which feels very inappropriate, but it was actually he was in hospital, and it was hitting me that this is happening. In that email, there was no link to buy anything, but it was in the middle of a launch. Positive respond, but one person wrote back and said, “Very inappropriate, I am expecting business emails.”
Bobby Klinck:
Right, and that’s the thing, some people aren’t going to like it. One of the things I’ve done now is we’ve recently redone my welcome sequence, when people get on my list. It’s now 12 emails long, and the first email, I think it says, “Buckle up, it’s going to get weird.” I’m telling people right up front what to expect. Literally in that email I say, “Look, if you’re not going to like this, go ahead and click the unsubscribe button, if cursing is going to …” I don’t curse a ton, but I do some. “If that’s going to offend you, click the unsubscribe button now.”
What I’ve done is I’ve taken 10 emails that were, essentially, the highest engagement, positive and negative, and those are repurposed for the middle 10 emails. The point is, I’m getting people to know right from the get-go, this is what you’re going to get when you’re on my email list, so that they know because I think there’s something to that. If people are expecting one thing and get something else, they’re not going to like it. So I am setting the stage, and you don’t have to be as wacky as me, you don’t have to be as over the top as me in your emails, but I think setting the stage so people know what they’re going to get is helpful.
Again, I think what I like to come back to is, and this is something that people get in social media, but I think they don’t get it in email … A lot of my friends who are Instagram gurus will tell me that their stories that are just random things about their life, those are the ones that people like the most. Coach Glitter talks about how her stories about celery juice are the most popular ones she has, I mean, the love. Their little tidbits about your life that I’ve just found that most people will react more to that than they will to the heavy content laden stuff. I think there is something there, and we just need to get people to expect that, and not expect that everything is going to be content heavy from the get-go.
Sigrun:
If you are doing a weekly podcast, and you’re sending out these lovely emails … everybody’s going to go and subscribe now, of course. Where can you talk about your templates?
Bobby Klinck:
I do those separately. I now have two podcast episodes a week, and the Friday one is a shorter episode. So what I’ll tend to do is, once a month, I will have one of those episodes be about something legal. So the call-to-action in that podcast will often be to go get the template, or to go get something. But also, we will do flash promotions is the way we actually get people, often, to buy from us, rather than doing it in the weekly emails. Then, we still have promos.
We have, on my business side, my business side is a membership and we do a workshop the first week of every month. We tend to do a promotion for a week before that, which is basically a $1 trial of the membership for 14 days, so they can actually get that workshop and see if they like it. We will do a series of emails in addition to our weekly emails, on top of that.
I think of promotional emails and my weekly emails as separate things. The weekly emails is really about building the connection, the promotion emails, that’s where I’m actively trying to sell things to people, for the most part.
Sigrun:
So, your longterm subscribers would know the difference? Also, maybe the time of the week as well, when they can expect each?
Bobby Klinck:
Yes. Here’s the funny thing, this is a funny thing. I get way less spam complaints, but with my list size, most emails I get one or two spam complaints. But, I get more from my weekly emails than from my promo emails, which I still don’t understand. I think it’s because, it’s like what you said, I think people are like, “Wait, I thought you were going to be selling to me, and selling to me is okay but telling me a story isn’t.” It’s so strange, the way people act.
But, I think my list, people on my list, understand on Tuesday they’re going to get an email from me which is about my podcast. Normally, on Friday they are, too, but then there’s going to be other promos through the month.
Sigrun:
I love that, I love that. I made a similar discovery early on in my business, and I guess it’s easy when you are already telling stories. You thought you weren’t telling stories. What about people that think they’re not a good storyteller, is that just a limiting belief?
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah. I think that people who believe they’re not good storytellers, they are, they simply don’t know the right kind of story. I think part of it was, a lot of people have the same misconception I did, which is they think that a story has to be this grand, epic thing, it’s got to be Lord of the Rings level of story. It doesn’t. Most stories that I tell, I call them personal vignettes, they can be something that happened that was 15 seconds of my life, that there’s some lesson I can take from it. Or, just these little things that happen through the day, through the week.
It takes some practice, but once you start focusing on that, and really thinking about stories … What I tell people, early on, is keep a story journal. Just keep a small, little notebook, and you don’t even have to write the story out, just write the topic, what the story is, just so it jogs your memory. Maybe put some bullet points about what lessons or themes you could pick out of that, that are related to the lessons and themes in your business. In my business, it could be about overwhelm, because a lot of the people that I’m talking to are feeling overwhelmed. It could be about connection, it could be able all kinds of things like that. It could be about freedom, and how I’m only able to do some of the things I can do because I’m not tied to a desk. So all of those things, now, come naturally for me. But, early on keep a journal, and just do it.
Let me give you some examples of stories I’ve told. I mentioned the lice story, that was actually for a promo email. The story was that I get this email from my kid’s school, that there’s a confirmed case of lice in her class, so that set me on this four hour going to the depths of the internet, trying to figure out how we’re not going to get lice in the house. And that I could only do that, here was how I did the pivot, was I could only do that because I have a scalable online business. If you want to learn how to build one of those yourself, my friend over here has this webinar about build an online course, maybe you should register for it, so that’s one pivot.
Another one of my classic stories, this used to be the story that I told in pretty much all of my last call emails, was I was walking around DC, I would get up early in the morning and go for a walk or a jog. At six AM, I would see these people out, dressed like they were going to the club, and I just couldn’t understand it. At some point, I mentioned it to my wife and she rolled her eyes and said, “They’re doing the walk of shame, dummy.” So I tell that story, the hook is, and let’s not have you doing the walk of shame because you missed out on this promotion, so go ahead and buy now, so that’s the kinds of things I tell. I’ve also told this story about how I forgot my dad’s birthday one time as a reason to take action, don’t wait.
Sigrun:
I love it. And I love, I think you have made people so excited about subscribing to your email list. So my question is, how are they going to get into your funnel?
Bobby Klinck:
Well, it depends on what they need. If they just want to get onto my email list, they just go to my website at bobbyklinck.com, they can get there. I go against the conventional wisdom because now, on my homepage, there’s a spot to just get on my email list because so many people were asking. But, I also have a lot of freebies, I’ve got my free privacy policy if people need that legal template, and that’s bobbyklinck.com/freeprivacypolicy.
I have a lot of different ways, but if you just go to bobbyklinck.com, you’ll find a lot of different ways.
Sigrun:
Yeah, we’ll link that all up in the show notes, every link you mentioned and we’ll make sure that you get access to all the freebies that Bobby has. So you are guaranteed to land on his email list, and enjoy. You mentioned, yeah it’s like an episode of Seinfeld, every week, Bobbyfeld, Bobby Klinck episodes, and I think that’s a fantastic way.
I remember, actually, I attended a strategy session with Gary V., and he was saying we’re all a media company, and you should look at the content creation as a series. So when you said that, with your email, your email is a series, every promotion is a series, your Facebook Live is a series, your podcast is a series. And your email list is one of those series, it’s just a different way how you put it out there.
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah. One of the more refined ways I like to do that is I have running themes. I mentioned that one of the things that people see in my emails is, and this is a reference to an old US TV show, but I often appear like Lieutenant Columbo, from the Columbo series. By that, I mean a lot of times I appear to be stumbling into things and bumbling, but eventually people figure out, wait, you don’t actually stumble into all this stuff constantly, but that’s one of the running themes. It used to be that my wife, because no pictures are allowed, she doesn’t want pictures of her, but I would use her as a standard character in my stories. So my audience gets to know her, and now I do the same thing with my team.
Doing that builds these through lines that people see, so they will want to see what you’re going to do from week to week. But each email stands alone, but still, there are these themes that people get over time. And if you can do that, that is the goal.
Sigrun:
Yeah. I did watch Columbo, I remember that! They showed that on Icelandic TV. Or, maybe I saw it even in Germany, synchronized. That’s pretty horrible. But yeah, keep them coming back because they want to know what’s happening next.
Bobby Klinck:
Yeah. And when you can do that, that is gold. But, it’s also having little inside jokes for your long time subscribers makes them feel like they’re in the know also, so all those things are great, and are gold.
Sigrun:
Everybody’s getting on Bobby Klinck’s email list, that’s for sure. Thank you for sharing all those wonderful stories. I think you gave people a lot of examples, especially the skeptics, those who think they are not storytellers, they’ve got some ideas. Everyone, take advice from Bobby, start to write stories in your emails and keep making people come back to read them, so your open rates go up, and you sell more.
Thank you for coming on the show, Bobby. It’s been a pleasure.
Bobby Klinck:
Thank you. It’s been my pleasure, and I look forward to entertaining more. And, anyway I can serve, let me know.
Sigrun:
Go to the show notes at sigrun.com/383 to sign up for the Next Normal, a course and a panel happening from June 15th to June 19th. Of course, in the show notes you’ll also find all the links to Bobby Klinck, and how he creates relationship based marketing.
Thank you for listening to The Sigrun Show. Did you enjoy this episode? Let me know that you listened by tagging me in your Insta Story or Instagram post, using my handle @SigrunCom, and the hashtag #SigrunShow. See you in the next episode, and also, in the course Next Normal.