FUNNEL HACKING – Bitcoin Giveaway

• $1 Million Dollar Bitcoin Giveaway – Palm Beach Group Takeaways –
• Joint Venture with several influencers that have large email lists
• Email marketing crushing it for new product launches
• Funnel Hack successful programs to learn what’s working

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Doug: Welcome back, listeners. We’re so excited to bring you another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Doug Morneau here. Today we’re going to do something different than we’ve normally done. I am going to walk you through a process very similar to what Russell Brunson talks about for ClickFunnels called funnel hacking, but we’re going to do this from the email point of view. In episode number 19, I talked about list rental and what is list rental versus email list buying. One of the tips and suggestions that I left in that episode was that around joint ventures and affiliate marketing.

Back to Russell Brunson as an example, with his business, he often talks about funnel hacking. In that, he suggests finding a sales funnel, somebody that has built something that is similar to what you are doing or is speaking to an audience that is similar to your audience, sign up for their program, walk through the process, and then see what you can learn and apply to building your own sales funnel.

Today, I’d like to share with you the same approach but from an email point of view. Right now, if you’re into the financial markets or you’re at all watching the news or Bloomberg or any of the financial news broadcasts, you’ll see that BitCoin and cryptocurrency is the hot topic of the day. Many people are saying that cryptocurrency at this point and BitCoin are very similar to the 1990’s and the dot-com industry for investing as it was in Silicon Valley. I was just talking to a business partner of mine. We were looking at a couple of opportunities and some people who have seemed to have hit the home run in terms of success. If you’re in the BitCoin space, you do a little bit of research online, you’ll come across a group by the name of Palm Beach Research Group. They are a public publisher. They publish several financial newsletters, and they’ve been in that business for quite a while, but recently they just did a launch for a brand new product. That was for BitCoin.

Now in terms of their sales and marketing, they did something that was not unique in terms of how they launch, but it might be something new to you. That was they assembled a team of approximately 150 affiliates to help them launch their product.

Typically, when you’re working, you’re looking for affiliates, you’re looking for people who have large networks. You’re going to approach them and a joint venture with them. In many cases, you’re going to give away anywhere from maybe 25%, maybe up to as much as 50% of your sale.

You may ask how does that apply to email marketing. Quite simply. When you’re looking at doing a joint venture for this sort of launch, or if you’re looking to launch your business and not buy or rent email lists, and you were doing a true joint venture, you’re going to look for people who already have a large, responsive email list. That’s what they did. They assembled this team of approximately 150 people. Then in addition to that, they bought various sorts of online media to drive people to their landing page. The offer they made was a one million dollar BitCoin giveaway. Now they weren’t giving away a million dollars to one person, but what they were doing was they were giving away $200 worth of BitCoins to every member or every person who signed up for their program. Their offer was basically, I think it was a $1,500 or $2,000 offer. Running through this process, they were able to generate a huge number of signups.

Now we have not been able to confirm exactly what the numbers are, but the numbers on the street and the feedback that I’m getting from the people I know in the industry is that they generated in the neighborhood of 10 million dollars $USD in sales.

They started with an email that you would receive when you signed up, and it was from one of their editors. His name’s Teeka Tiwari, it’s, a very simple welcome message, not unlike welcome messages that many of us would use when people sign up. That was the start of their sales funnel.

Then they went on to send a second email within a couple of hours with a short video with some testimonies of people who had been making money with cryptocurrency.

Following the sales funnel and the process they went through, the next day they sent out another email talking about being 48 hours away from an emergency briefing. Then they had two subsequent emails with video from Teeka Tiwari talking about what was happening in the cryptocurrency and the new laws that were coming into place. They were very smart in terms of building up their sales funnel and using a combination of emails, video embedded in their emails, and driving people back to a landing page, and then finally to an online webinar.

The online webinar was a live event hosted by Bob Irish who is their host. That was Teeka Tiwari who was there. Then another gentleman by the name of Charlie Shrem, who is a BitCoin pioneer. If you look at the background of these guys and where they came from, Charlie Shrem is American. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s a BitCoin advocate. He co-founded the now defunct BitInstant and BitCoin Foundation, and he served as a chairman. In 2007, he joined Jaxx as their Director of Business Development. So you’ve got Charlie Shrem with his extensive background in BitCoin and an early pioneer. You’ve got Teeka Tiwari. Teeka’s role is he’s the co-editor of the Palm Beach Research Group, and he’s responsible for the newsletter. He was also an editor for Jump Point Trader and Megatrends Investing at the firm. His background in terms of publishing is there, and he has extensive experience as a contributor to Fox News, CNBC, ABC, Nightline, The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, as well as many international opportunities to get in front of the press.

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Their sales funnel basically continued through a series of it looks like about seven emails and a conclusion with a webinar and a signup. They made a special offering on the signup. It was $2,500 for the year, and then each person received $200 in the BitCoin, so that’s how they came up with their number of offering up to a million dollars. It was very well orchestrated. They brought together a number of list owners, like I mentioned, about 150 who all took their well-crafted messages, sent it out to their internal database, and would have done a profit share on the signups. I’m sure that everybody was happy in the process looking at the large numbers that they did in terms of signups and the 10 million dollars or estimated 10 million dollars in sales.

In my space, being in the email space, and having access to this sort of data, databases, and affiliates, it’s gotten a little bit busy around here. We were getting some inquiries and some calls of, “How can we find this data? What email list do they use? What media do they buy? Who are the affiliates that have big lists? How can we contract those guys and get them involved in our launch?”

Stay tuned as we continue working through this process. Just understand that there are many ways to get access to email, email data. Obviously, you’ve got your house list. In this case, by partnering with somebody and doing a joint venture or an affiliate relationship, you are getting access to their house list.

Just a few heads up if you’re thinking that this might be an avenue or a direction that you may want to go. If you’re looking to set up an affiliate program, what you’re going to find very early on is that as you approach people who have large internal databases, they’re going to want to see that you’re established. They’re going to want to see that you’ve had some traction. The more sophisticated guys are also going to want to know that in addition to having launched and had some traction, you actually know what your conversion numbers are. They’re going to want to know that, “Hey, if I take your email that you’ve written and sent out to my database, how many people are going to convert? How many people are going to convert on the first letter and the second letter? How many people are going to go to the video landing page? How many people are going to convert there?” They’re really looking to see is this worth their while to take your offer and send it to their list. In some cases, it doesn’t make sense. Economically, it doesn’t make sense, so it really depends on the offer. A digital product obviously makes sense because it’s a very low cost to deliver that.

Now, what you may have heard me just say they’re going to send your message. That means that in this case if you’re looking for affiliates or you’re looking to do this sort of joint venture, you’re going to have to create all the content, so all the video, the video sales landing pages, all the conversion, all the backend tracking in terms of tracking affiliates whether you’re using ClickFunnels or you’re using Infusionsoft, or whatever your favorite backend is, you’re going to be responsible for that. You’re going to need to deliver that to the affiliate or joint venture partner.

In addition to that, they may ask you for reciprocal mailing. What that means is if you approach somebody who’s been very successful in the online business, and they have a subscriber base say maybe half a million names in their database, and you say, “Hey, I’m launching this new affiliate thing. I’m willing to revenue share with you,” and whatever the number is, 20%, 30%, 50%, whatever it ends up being, they may ask you, “Hey, I’ll send out to my list your affiliate offer if you’ll send my offer to your affiliate list.”

As a new startup that can be a bit of a sticking point, because it’s very likely if you’re just starting out, you probably don’t have a database of half a million names. In most cases, what the affiliates have done, or what I’ve seen done in the past is that they will send to the same number or the same size as your list, so if you’ve got a list of 100,000 names, even though they have a list of a half a million, you might not be able to get them to send to the list of half a million. They may simply want to do a reciprocal joint venture offer, in which case they will send to 100,000, you’ll send to 100,000.

The other thing to be aware of is that because this industry obviously is online and people want transparency, you’re going to be required to have some software that is going to allow your affiliate or the joint venture partner, whoever it is that you are approaching, to be able to log in and see the results. If you’ve provided them the creative and they’ve sent it out to their list, they’re going to go look at the backend of your website and they’re going to see how many people opened the email, how many people clicked, and ultimately how many people have dropped into the sales funnel for your particular offer. Then they’re going to have the ability to track those people through the time that they signed in and first signed up for your lead magnet or whatever your free offer was, right through to the time that they pull a credit card out and they buy their membership. Most of the software like Infusionsoft will give your affiliates the comfort of knowing that it’s third-party tool and that they can log in, and they can trust and see the data there reliably, and see what the commissions are due to them.

There’s just another way that you can use a third party email list. It is not in any way renting a list. You’re not getting access to the data. It’s not going to be considered spam under the CASL Rules because the list is owned by the third party. The third party is then just sending your message out to their list. They’re basically endorsing you. Think of this as the ultimate and early adopters of influence marketing where you’re borrowing somebody else’s database. Or you’re not borrowing it, but they’re sending your message to their database, and they’re endorsing your product or your service in exchange for some money.

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One new thing for you to add to the many things on your desk in terms of sales and marketing, but one that I think is quite powerful and may give you an opportunity to grow your business.

There’s a couple of other affiliate programs that are coming out. It’s not uncommon for large publishers to bring in a team to do this. If you tuned into my episode with Kevin Harrington last week, you would have heard Kevin talking about something he’s quite excited about. He has acquired the rights to market Zig Ziglar’s intellectual property and will be rolling that out in the new year.

He said, “Hey, I’d like to get back on your show.”

I said, “Hey, I’d love to have you back on the show. Would love to support your rollout.” That was that. With that came an introduction to be a part of their affiliate joint venture team to help roll this out and promote it. It can be as simple as that.

If you’ve got a product or a service or an especially a digital product and you’re looking for a way to monetize that and get access to a new audience without necessarily paying somebody upfront, you may really want to talk a look at joint venture or affiliates. To do this, it’s no different than buying any other media, because at the end of the day, if you’re going to share revenue with them, you’re actually buying the media. You’re just buying it post-send instead of before it goes out.

As you want to make sure that the guys that you’re looking at that are in the business and that have the large lists have the right avatar. You don’t want to be trying to cut a deal with someone who’s got the wrong people on the list. It really comes down to knowing who your customers are, your preferred customers are. Just like you would with any other type of media that you’re buying, identify the best sources of that media, and then go out, and in this case, pitch them why they should take your call, have this discussion with you, and ultimately move forward and promote your product to their audience.

If you have any questions around that or any feedback, or you have any other great examples of people who have, in the last few years, rolled out a really successful membership launch using affiliates, I’d be happy to take look at that to answer your questions. Shoot me an email. All my contact information’s on the website. Take a look at the show notes. We’ll have details of the show notes on here as well, as well as links to the Palm Beach Group. You can go take a look at their website, but I’d really suggest taking a look at your audience.

Take a look at what your competitors are doing. Sign up for their offers and walk through. In many cases, I’m going to suggest just like Russell Brunson does, he says, “Hey, pay for it.” So sign up, buy it, and take a look how they move people through the sales funnel. It may give you some ideas on how you can take that and adapt that process to selling your product or service. That’ll also show you what the affiliates are going to expect you to produce in terms of content.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Just something new for you to consider, a new way to get access to email, not through list rental, not through purchase, not through a house list, but you’re going to do this through somebody’s existing list as an affiliate.

Until next week, keep plugging away. I look forward to catching up with you soon.

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Resources:

• Palm Beach Group
• Charlie Shrem

 

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