Disqus - Latest Comments for brennandunn

Re: Income Report: This Game-Changing Tool Helped Me Earn 6-Figures

Brennan Dunn — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 17:36:55 -0000

Our script blocks GoogleBot, so Google sees / indexes whatever your server sends back. We just operate clientside and effectively post-process the page the visitor is looking at.

Re: Income Report: This Game-Changing Tool Helped Me Earn 6-Figures

Brennan Dunn — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:38:52 -0000

Pat, this is incredible!

Also, for anyone reading: if you sign up using Pat's link and want some help in figuring out how you can better segment your audience or personalize your sales pages or CTAs, feel free to drop me an email (personal email: brennan@rightmessage.com) and I'd be happy to have myself or someone from our team jump on a screenshare with you to talk through your business and get everything fully setup :-)

-Brennan, one of the co-founders of RightMessage

Re: 5 ways to use personalization to grow your SaaS

Brennan Dunn — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 09:45:07 -0000

Thanks Bjorn!

Re: Open Cart or Closed Cart? That Is the Question.

Brennan Dunn — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 14:35:21 -0000

I've got... a lot of thoughts on this :-)

Generally, I favor "open-closed launches" — for reasons I'll get to in a second. However, like you pointed out, there are often instances where you want a live, list-wide launch. For example, if there's a lot of personal onboarding and you want a cohort of new students to all join at once, it makes sense to have a quarterly launch or whatnot (which seems to be the de factor formula many creators use to sell courses.)

However, here's why I don't think list-wide closed launches are the way to go:

1) They force unwarranted urgency on your subscribers. Purchasing happens on *your* (the seller) timeline, rather than theirs.

The typical launch method is something like the following:

- Someone opts in to a lead magnet
- Their might be a series of onboarding emails
- They get periodic emails at some interval with little curation (e.g. today's email might be about marketing, next week's is about pricing, etc.)
- The seller then pauses educational emails and goes into a heavy launch sequence

The problem with this "shotgun" approach is that you're typically treating everyone as equals. Someone who opted in a week ago gets the same launch as someone who's been highly-active on your list for a year.

Does it work? Yes.

Does it produce great launch case studies? Yes.

But is it ideal for your subscribers? I don't think it is.

The ideal system, and the one I partly describe in a post I did for Ramit's GrowthLab (https://growthlab.com/anato..., meets a new subscriber where they are now, curates a series of personalized content that helps them *prepare to be a customer* (this is the thing I think many of us miss), and then creates a one-off, time boxed launch when they've behaviorally demonstrated that they're ready for the product.

This lets you create a highly personalized and highly relevant sequence that acquires, qualifies, nurtures, and finally pitches someone on how the best thing they can do next is to buy - and you can do this when they've behaviorally signaled that they're ready.

(Most of my products are always available for sale, but in these personalized pitch campaigns I generate discounts for subscribers going through the funnel.)

2) It's bad for cash flow and overall sales

Big burst launch campaigns drive impressive sales, but it's a bit like throwing everything you've got at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

Big launches are stressful, yield massive fluctuations in cash flow, and - in my experience - cause you to make fewer sales because you're trying to force everyone - qualified or not - into a purchase decision.

Additionally, I can work with affiliates to drive ongoing new subscribers into this funnel, and overtime have been able to determine exact valuations - broken out by demographic/intent - of people who enter that funnel.

For example, a web developer entering my primary lead magnet -> paid course is valued at $60.17, and a web developer customer who comes out of it has a lifetime value of $665.52. When approaching partners who have developers in their audience, I can basically assure them that - given no discrepancy in quality - they'll end up making around $30 per lead they send over. On an ongoing basis. Continually.

This also makes it really easy to test and optimize over time.

I regularly try new experiments (e.g., personalizing the sales page's testimonials based on intent data captured early in the email course as a trigger link, sending SMS messages to people moving through the sequence, etc.) and can pretty quickly see what effect it's having on subscriber valuation. I couldn't do this if I was just doing giant launches every few months.

Spending the time to continue to regularly tweak how this asset performs - how well it captures new subscribers, how well it gets them to engage with the content I'm sending out, personalizing the content itself, the P.S.'s, the sales pages, etc. - has (quantifiably) allowed me to make sure that all the right numbers are moving up and to the right.

Closing thoughts:

If you're just starting out with a new course and a don't have huge lead volume: closed cart all the way. Setting up all the marketing assets that reliably qualify, condition, pitch, downsell, survey, etc. people takes time, and it's generally better to do more contained launches prior to codifying it as automation.

Re: The Freelancer’s Guide To Niching Your Business

Brennan Dunn — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:03:18 -0000

Awesome Dave. Was a hangup of yours thinking that you'd need to drastically change the way you work in order to niche?

Re: The Freelancer’s Guide To Niching Your Business

Brennan Dunn — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:52:03 -0000

Great to hear that, Umar! Yeah, positioning is intimidating, especially when you think of it as something that requires you to stop doing what you're doing now and go all-in on something untested.

Doesn't need to be that way :-)

Re: The Freelancer’s Guide To Niching Your Business

Brennan Dunn — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:13:51 -0000

Thanks, Eric!

Re: A Definitive Review of the Top 6 Email Marketing Services (2017)

Brennan Dunn — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 22:56:25 -0000

Absolutely. I treat Drip as an accessible datastore that supports complex job queues that can send email (default) or do other stuff (via things like Zapier). Looking at it is just a drip email marketing app is short sighted, IMO.

Re: A Definitive Review of the Top 6 Email Marketing Services (2017)

Brennan Dunn — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 22:06:15 -0000

Love this writeup! Specifically, I love seeing how someone who's not quite a coder but knows what's possible reacts to what Drip has to offer.

10000% agree about the date timers. That needs to happen. Lack of drag-and-drop within Workflows is more of an annoyance than a deal breaker.

What I think Drip needs to do:
1) Make Workflows a first class thing. Kill campaigns. Move analytics from campaigns into workflow one-offs. Maybe keep flat automation rules, but at least make workflow triggers and actions 1:1 equivalent of flat rules (right now, there are slight differences, like a trigger not applying to a particular segment.) New accounts shouldn't have access to campaigns, and old accounts should have an EOL setup.
2) Eliminate form rules. They're just confusing and one more place you forget to put automation stuff.
3) Workflow and account variables. {{ workflow.webinar_date }} is much better than needing to edit every single email in a cloned workflow.
4) Event payloads need to be queryable (e.g. find "Attended webinar" events where "presentation" is equal to "pricing workshop") in order for them to be more useful.
5) Better reporting. The only report I really use is new subscribers because the rest are too painful to use.
6) ADVANCED: Something like Mixpanel's JQL. A JS shell that gives me access to subscriber data, etc. Right now I need to create a bunch of "set custom field" actions that leverage Liquid to get me to the point where I can setup a decision tree to do something I need to do.
7) ADVANCED: Decision trees that are more than just binary. Let's say you want 5 "tracks" based off the value of a custom field. Right now you end up with this nested mess of decision trees.

As I think of more, I'll post 'em here

Re: How To Socratically Question New Project Leads

Brennan Dunn — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 13:31:14 -0000

Nice, you know I've heard of SPIN but haven't gone further than a superficial awareness of it. I'll check it out - thanks! (Though I'll still argue that Socrates conceived of the technique 2400 years prior to Rackham :-) Can't take the Classics major out of me!)

Re: How To Socratically Question New Project Leads

Brennan Dunn — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 12:04:37 -0000

You're welcome, Colin. Happy new year!

Re: How To Socratically Question New Project Leads

Brennan Dunn — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 12:04:11 -0000

Thank you, Ro! Next week we're posting what we're planning on doing in 2017 @ DYF. It's going to be epic... can't wait to share it with you :-)

Re: How To Socratically Question New Project Leads

Brennan Dunn — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 11:15:56 -0000

You're very welcome!

Re: How Freelancers Can Kickstart Their Audience

Brennan Dunn — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 11:11:50 -0000

Please do steal it, thanks Armando! (And let me know how it works out once you've had a chance to run with it for a while)

Re: How To Socratically Question New Project Leads

Brennan Dunn — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 11:01:02 -0000

Thank you, Laura!

I think this is really inline with the talk on remote working you gave at DYFConf. Specifically, doing this right establishes a lot of trust with a prospective client and you're setting yourself up as a consultant, rather than an on-site / local "resource", which grants more creative and location flexibility.

Re: How To Socratically Question New Project Leads

Brennan Dunn — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 10:59:39 -0000

Thanks so much, Matt! I've been itching to write an article like this for a while (the #1 thing people who go through my Charge What You're Worth email course say is, 'OMG Socratic questioning... moarrrr') - glad you enjoyed it!

Re: 2016 Year In Review

Brennan Dunn — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 21:55:41 -0000

DO IT DO IT!

Re: 2016 Year In Review

Brennan Dunn — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 21:55:29 -0000

Thanks so much Anthony. Hopefully we'll get you out from your corner of the world to a DYF event soon so we can officially meet. I'll be close-ish to you in Feb (Thailand)

Re: 2016 Year In Review

Brennan Dunn — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 21:54:52 -0000

Me too! :-)

Re: 2016 Year In Review

Brennan Dunn — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 21:54:44 -0000

Thank you so much Jacklyn, and it was great meeting you at DYFConf last Sept! Also, I wanted to thank you for the video you did for us :-) Check it out here: https://vimeo.com/195658884... (not sure if Kai sent it your way yet)

Re: 2016 Year In Review

Brennan Dunn — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 21:53:15 -0000

Thanks Grant! Are you writing one this year?

Re: How Are You Going To Protect Your Greatest Asset – Yourself?

Brennan Dunn — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 07:14:11 -0000

Thank you Vincent!

Re: How Are You Going To Protect Your Greatest Asset – Yourself?

Brennan Dunn — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 07:12:15 -0000

I've done this more times than I'm willing to admit. It's always left me highly stressed before the call, neglecting the people I care about during the call, and then stressed afterward.

Re: How Are You Going To Protect Your Greatest Asset – Yourself?

Brennan Dunn — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 07:11:35 -0000

Thank you David!

Re: WP Curve joins GoDaddy

Brennan Dunn — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 16:23:43 -0000

Congrats!!