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The Transcript

5 Key Concepts to Understand About Tracking, Testing, and Making Decisions

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information go to rainmaker.fm/digitalcommerce, that’s rainmaker.fm/digitalcommerce.

Brian Clark: Hey there everyone, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur. I am Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital. Today, as always, we have Jerod Morris, VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. We also have our very own data ninja, Loryn Thompson. Don’t ever call yourself a ninja. We’ve talked about this. I can call you a ninja, right?

Loryn Thompson: Exactly.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Brian Clark: Okay, this is a podcast, you have to talk. Today we’re flipping things around a little bit to close out our series on the elements of the modern website. We’re going to talk about testing. Instead of me rambling on about it, I’ve decided to flip the switch and let Jerod and Loryn talk about testing. As we came out of our launch and build phase — which, when we launched Digital Commerce Institute in the fall, that was the last piece of the puzzle. We don’t plan on building anything brand new or launching something new. What we’re doing now is shifting into our ‘optimize and grow’ phase.

A big part of that initiative that we knew we wanted to tackle as soon as we could — it was at the beginning of the year — was to move from tracking and testing when we thought it might be a good idea, to a culture of tracking and testing. There’s a big difference there. A one-off test here or there can give you valuable information. A process, a system, a culture that basically tracks and tests everything and then tries to make sense of the resulting data and apply that back into our own intuitive creativity, that’s where we needed to go next. That was really what I tasked Jerod and Loryn with, so who better to talk to about it than these two. Are you guys ready?

Jerod Morris: We are ready. Yes.

Loryn Thompson: Yup, ready.

Brian Clark: All right. I’ve got here some notes from you two. This catchy headline, I wonder where you got that from.

Jerod Morris: I know.

Brian Clark: “5 Key Concepts to Understand About Tracking, Testing and Making Decisions. Very nicely done, Jerod was that you?

Jerod Morris: That was me, yes, but with Loryn’s help.

Brian Clark: Good job. Oh, with Loryn’s help, okay. We know Loryn’s the brains behind this but you’re the front man. She’s got to feed you the smart stuff.

Jerod Morris: Right, and I do want to say, Brian, as the lead-in to this conversation — when we talk about data and testing I think it’s so important, as you just said, to create a culture of testing. It’s so important to have two things, number one you’ve got to have commitment from the top. Because if you aren’t committed to this and to doing this, then something like this isn’t really going to happen. I think you’ve really got to have organizational commitment to this being important.

The second thing I think you’ve got to have is enthusiasm. I think that’s really what Loryn has brought, a real enthusiasm for the subject, for learning more, for figuring out where we can use it. It’s really helped and infused what we’re doing with a lot more information and insight. I think as we talk about this, this isn’t listed here as one of the things we’re going to talk about, but it’s very important if you want have this culture of testing. Having that commitment from the top down and then individuals with enthusiasm for actually doing the work that it will take is really important.

Loryn Thompson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian Clark: Yeah. You not only have my commitment, but I’ve been nerding out right along with you. I think we’re all enthusiastic about it because it’s fascinating.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s fascinating when your intuition actually gets proven correct. It’s also just as fascinating when you’re completely wrong. You just have to be open to being wrong because …

Loryn Thompson: Whichever one makes you more money.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Blindly going along with a losing strategy is not that smart in my book. Yeah, I think the enthusiasm is there as soon as people get over their trepidation about it. People think split testing is complicated, but with the right tools it’s becoming easier and easier. Even I can do it when you let me.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Brian Clark: All right, let’s go through these 5 key concepts. What is number 1?

The Best Time to Start is Now

Jerod Morris: Number 1 is starting now. Again, this is one of those that almost seems so simple you don’t want to say it, but it’s really important. It’s similar to what we tell people on the The Showrunner with podcasting who see that there are people who’ve been podcasting since 2008 so they feel intimidated. It’s like, “Yeah, okay. The best time to start a podcast was back then — 2007, 2008 — but the next best time is now.” Same thing with a blog.

Think about if you haven’t been working out or if you’ve gotten out of shape. Sometimes you’ll think about it and it’s like, “Man, I don’t even want to get on the treadmill for the first time because I haven’t been doing it for so long.” You can’t think that way, because you can take a positive step in that direction today to start moving forward in a better way.

I think it’s the same thing with data. Maybe you’ve had analytics on your site for five years but you’ve never done anything with it and now you get in there and you’re intimidated because there’s all this old data and you don’t know what to do with it. Start today. Take a step today to understand something better or to set up just one simple test to get going.

You’re going to be a lot further along in six months if you take that first step today than if you continue to lament the fact that you haven’t started yet and continue to allow that to keep you from getting going. Again, it’s basic but it’s an important mental hurdle for some people to get over. Whatever you’ve done in the past, it’s okay. Just start today moving forward in a better way.

Loryn Thompson: Yeah, I want to add to that. Even if you don’t think that you really need the data right now or anything, or now is not the best time to devote the energy to putting everything together. It can be really time consuming to get set up. tThe important thing to remember is that with data — having the historical data, having three months of data — that puts you way ahead already. It’s always good to just go ahead and get it set up, even if you think, “Oh, Well I need to devote more time to this right now.” Just put the data in place. You’ll be glad you did in a few months.

Jerod Morris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s good advice. The next thing I want to talk about here is something I’ve seen over and over. When a company decides, “Okay, we’re going to embrace testing. We’re doing this.” The first thing they then do is look for some turnkey off-the-shelf system that they’re going to slap onto their particular business. Silly or not?

Context is Everything

Jerod Morris: I think the number one thing that you have to realize when you’re going to start doing this is you’ve got to understand what you’re tracking and what data and what reports and what numbers are going to be important for you. I think back to my time when I was running Midwest Sports Fans five or six years ago and all of our monetization was based off of display ads.

For Midwest Sports Fans the page view number was huge. Having Google Analytics driving page views — that’s how we were going to drive revenue, because we weren’t doing anything else with it. But you think about what we’re doing now and think about all of our properties — page views are a nice number and they can tell us something, but it doesn’t tell us very much. We need to convert people onto an email list. We need people to start trials of the Rainmaker Platform.

You’ve really got to start with where you want to end up. What your business objectives are, what numbers drive those objectives. And then what’s going to allow you to track that. The context is everything. I think that’s why you really need to start thinking there and that will help tell you what you need then to be tracking and what tools will help you do that.

Loryn Thompson: Definitely. One thing, when you start looking at that data it’s really useful to start breaking that down into different kinds of segments. You had one session number, you got ‘X’ many sessions last month. That’s great, but what does that actually mean? Maybe you start by looking at people who came from a certain email, or people who landed on the home page, or people who landed on a different page. Looking at how their behavior compares to behavior of people in other segments on this site — breaking that down and figuring out what those sessions mean will get you a lot more mileage out of your data.

Brian Clark: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it’s interesting. I think page views are completely irrelevant to a content marketing-driven business. With the state of online advertising they may before irrelevant to everyone. But there are certain key metrics that I think anyone who’s following along with this series … Converting the email, that’s key. Converting to customers based on various adaptive funnels that you create — the kind of stuff that we’re going through here with this series. These are all the things you have to not only see what approach works best, but then you’ve got to be able to tweak and optimize. You can’t do that blindly. You don’t just decide to change a word, you see what word works better.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, exactly.

Loryn Thompson: Yeah.

Understanding What Your Tools are Telling You

Brian Clark: All right, what about tools? People get a little bit hung up on that. What’s your advice about understanding how to use this technology to best effect?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, this is such an important one. Loryn, this is where I’ve learned a lot from just in the time that we’ve been working together. Especially this concept of, “your tools are telling you certain things, but there are also things that they are not telling you.” It’s very important to understand this. Because you can be getting this number, but if you don’t know where this number is coming from and what data is coming in to give you this number, there could be giant glaring holes that mean that it’s painting you an incomplete picture. Again, I’ve learned a lot from you in this sense. And you’ve got a couple of good examples as far as this goes which help illustrate that.

Loryn Thompson: Yeah, for sure. One of the main things is that looking at website data, you really do want to focus on users. It’s nice to know how many sessions you have, how many page views, but really what you’re looking for is when people get to your site, what are they doing? One of the biggest limitations with Google Analytics — which is a super popular website analytics tool — is that the tracking is cookie-based, which pretty much the best we can do right now.

But that means that each user, when you look at that user’s number, it’s only recognized with the exact same browser and device configuration as they were the first time. If you are on Firefox and go to our site one day, and then the next day you go on Safari, Google Analytics isn’t going to know that you’re the same person. That’s why it’s really important to do things like … There are a few things you can do to your website like user ID tracking.

Whenever you look at that user number if you don’t have user ID tracking in place it’s likely over inflated. My best suggestion with things like this is you can’t always fix these huge holes, you just have to be more aware that they exist. As you’re moving through the data if you see something that indicates that, “Look, we had so many more users this time,” it’s, “maybe people are switching from their desktop to their phone to access our site because we started putting more podcasts on,” or something like that.

One of the other things that I want to touch on is that there are a lot of platforms that will give you proprietary metrics that they don’t really tell you how they came up with them. They’re like, “This is the magical impressions reach engagement number that you need to be paying attention to. It’s fantastic.” Okay, what does it mean? If you only have that number and you don’t really have anything to compare it with, then it doesn’t really do anything to help your business. I personally would never rely on any metrics that I don’t know how they got to be there, how they were counted.

Jerod Morris: I think what’s important there is it doesn’t necessarily mean that the metric itself is bad. It could be good, but for you to make an informed decision on it you have to know what it means. It’s very important that you can wrap your arms around it, embrace it, understand what it means so you can use it to make a smart decision.

Loryn Thompson: Exactly. A lot of these companies it’s like a whole ‘business secrets’ thing, and that’s fine. But if you don’t know what’s behind it then how do you know what that number’s limitations are? How do you know what it’s really getting at if you can’t know how it’s calculated?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Balancing Qualitative and Quantitative

Brian Clark: That’s interesting. Okay, so everyone is obsessed with big data, the quantitative side of things. Is there still room for qualitative data?

Jerod Morris: Yes, and you need it. I think you can fall into that trap when you start talking about data and start talking about testing. That all you do is look at things from a numbers perspective. Numbers can tell you a lot. They should tell you a lot. But that doesn’t mean that asking questions — having actual conversations — doesn’t matter.

We started putting up a survey on the Rainmaker Platform site to get some information on people when they left a certain page to find out why they were or were not doing something, and we’ve gotten some good insight from that. Now that, obviously, gets boiled down to into data. But it’s not just tracking how someone comes and goes from a site, it’s asking them a question. Brian, just 15 minutes ago we got off the call and we were talking about reaching out to some people to get a testimonial. In that email that I sent out to a few folks I asked them, “Hey, how are things going in Digital Commerce Academy so far?”

I’ve already gotten three replies with people telling me a little bit about their experience and things they liked and things that they wish that it had. It’s really good information, because we’re reaching out to our most active people. Are we going to jump and go do something with that? No, but it’s the kind of information — hearing it from people who are clearly engaged and really using the product.

Now we take that, we combine that with quantitative data that we have about usage and different things, and now you really inform that intuition, which we’re going to talk about here in a minute. But I think you really need both. If you just rely on one or just rely on the other you’ve got an incomplete picture. Incomplete information that you’re making a decision with.

Loryn Thompson: Definitely. I think one of the major things when you’re looking at data and you’re looking at testing, the tests you can do are kind of limited to your perspective and what you can come up with. When you ask those open-ended questions you might be completely blindsided and say, “Oh, this actually what’s really important to our customer.” You are only now giving them the chance to speak up about it, whereas if you had just decided to test things and you came up with a bullet point list of five things you wanted to test, what’s the likelihood that the thing that the customer wanted would actually be on that list? It really does matter to get out there and talk to your customers and know your customers because that’s what’s going to inform which tests you actually should run.

Brian Clark: It’s amazing that I went a decade with never doing surveys. I really prefer to observe people in the wild, if you will, and comments in social media and forums — all of that stuff. It worked really well for us. Yet now that we’ve started doing this — now I’m still against multiple choice questions that aren’t carefully crafted because you can suggest answers. But the open-ended question thing? I love it. It’s unwieldy. It’s not scalable to a certain degree. But that’s where its power is. It’s real people telling you real stuff and you can figure things out from that.

Like Jerod said, one answer is not going to make you go act, but when you start seeing the same kind of pattern recognition that I would see out there in the wild, that’s where the answers come from. We’ve gotten to the point where we have more customers — 170,000 now — we have more customers than some people have prospects, so we have to talk to them. We made that shift starting a couple years ago, and it’s really intensifying now. Yeah, I totally agree with you guys on that one.

Intuition Still Matters

Brian Clark: Then finally, we’re shifting to a true data-driven company, yet we got here on intuition and creativity, which really stems from knowing your market. Knowing your audience. Knowing who these people are and what their pain points are, and doing your best to try to help them with that. Are we compromising what got us here with this data approach?

Jerod Morris: No, I think we’re informing it better. It’s like you said, you’ve done so much off of intuition, and that’s still important. You’ve got to know your customer, because ultimately you still have to make a decision. It’s not like we’re turning the decision making over to the data. These are reports, and you read the reports and you allow them to inform your decision. But it’s really important with data — it’s like the reports that Loryn sends us. These are reports of past events which we’re then using to predict the future events as much as we can, but there’s no guarantee.

A lot can change from the time that the data was collected to when the decision that you’re going to make is going to have its impact. There may be different environmental factors that change. Shifts that you’ve seen. Things that happen. “Okay this works with this data, but we know that this has changed. So let’s tweak this, but this stays the same,” and you move forward. That intuition and that knowledge of what to do is still extremely important.

We go back and we talk about that qualitative information that you gain. All of that goes into it and is combined into that gut, that instinct, that intuition that eventually helps tell you what the best decision is. But you do yourself a disservice to close yourself off to all the good information that you can get. We’ve drawn a distinction between good and bad in here. As long as it’s good information then you’ll be able to make a well informed decision, but I don’t think there’s any replacement for good intuition. But intuition is not just something you’re born with or that you wake up with, it’s …

Brian Clark: It’s informed creativity. We’re just informing ourselves better.

Jerod Morris: Exactly.

Loryn Thompson: Exactly. That’s why it’s so important to look at your data as real events. What does ‘sessions’ actually mean? It means that your website was opened and viewed this number of times. When you start to break down the data into the concrete real world as close as we can get to events that actually happened, that helps your intuition that much more. When you start looking into some of your tools you might get, “What does this mean? What does time on site mean?” It’s important to know how all of that is calculated, what all that means, so that you can go forward and say, “Yes, this is what my instinct was before we did this promotion, or this campaign. This is what we learned from the campaign. And this is how I’m modifying my instinct to move forward.”

I definitely think that that’s the way forward. You can’t really just rely on the data or just rely on going off on your own. You have to be able to marry the two and have a feedback loop where you start a campaign, a promotion, or some sort of event and then you execute it. And then you come back and say, “Okay, were those presumptions we had at the beginning correct? Were those the right ones? If not then why? If they were then cool, how do we take that and move forward with it?”

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s interesting because from a very simple standpoint when you do iterative content development you’re really looking at very simple data — social sharing, comments — just indications that it resonated. Then you do more of that and less of the stuff that didn’t get that kind of response. It’s really not that alien to me, it’s just better data. More sophisticated predictive analytics.

Loryn Thompson: Yeah. The important part of intuition for me is the exploration. Because if you just follow what the data says about what you’ve done in the past to a T, you’re going to end up doing the same things over and over that work, and it’s going to end up not working in the end.

Brian Clark: That’s so key, because you have to try new stuff to see if it’s going to work. And if you’re completely married to the data, you truly are non-creative in a literal sense because you stop innovating. You stop moving forward. Great answers. Loryn, we talked briefly about tools and I think people get hung up at this level. We use the testing tools built into Rainmaker, Google Analytics, and what else?

Loryn Thompson: As far as website data goes, we use Google Tag Manager so I can easily implement things without bugging developers.

Brian Clark: So another free tool from Google.

Loryn Thompson: Yes.

Brian Clark: Okay, my point being here that you do need the set of testing tools but you don’t need necessarily a fancy analytics package. If you know how to work with Google Analytics it’s all there for you.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Loryn Thompson: Definitely. Then we also use Hotjar, which is what we’ve been doing our surveys with.

Brian Clark: Cool, okay.

Loryn Thompson: That’s been working really well. They also have heat mapping which is pretty cool.

Brian Clark: Interesting. Cool. All right. Well, I think that covers the 5 elements that we all agreed needed to be covered. Jerod, what do we have today for the folks at home as a free offer?

Jerod Morris: We have the free membership at Digital Commerce Academy, which, if you have not yet started, you really should get over there and get started today. You can do that at rainmaker.fm/digitalcommerce. That’s where you can go get your free membership activated.

Once you do that you have access to a wealth of content, including free lessons in Brian’s course on Building an Online Training Business the Smart Way. Free lessons in Chris Garrett and Tony Clark’s course on marketing funnels. As well as some case study webinars that we’ve done that you have access to. You want to get in there and start seeing everything that’s available, because again as soon as you register — it’s free — then you’ll also get a newsletter from us every week which has very interesting and useful information in it as well.

Brian Clark: Which includes these very podcast episodes, right?

Jerod Morris: Exactly. Yes.

Brian Clark: Also, if you are listening over at iTunes, if you would — before you head over to get your free registration — if you could leave a rating or review for us over at iTunes we would most appreciate that. Helps us out to find new people in the iTunes ecosystem and we definitely appreciate any help you can give us on that. All right.

Jerod Morris: Hey, Brian, real quick, we probably should let people know the reason why we have the URL rainmaker.fm/digitalcommerce is because we’re tracking conversions from this podcast episode. Instead of saying digitalcommerce.com/free, or whatever it would be, we have that URL which will then redirect you. That way we can track whether people are actually paying attention to it.

Brian Clark: It’s a little inside baseball right there.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, exactly.

Brian Clark: Okay. Well, Jerod, where are we going from here? We’re done with our series. I guess we’re going to have to come up with some new topics.

Jerod Morris: We are. I think this is where Loryn takes over the show.

Brian Clark: Yeah, Loryn, you don’t have stuff to do right? Just remaking the culture of the company, it’s not a big deal. All right, we will be back next week with a new episode and we promise to come up with something good. Until then, take it easy, keep going. Jerod, Loryn, get back to work.

Jerod Morris: Thank you Brian.

Loryn Thompson: Always a pleasure.

The Transcript

5 Compelling Reasons Why You Should Use Free Online Courses As Lead Magnets

Voiceover: You are listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m your host Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I am joined this week by Brian Clark, the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital.

Brian, the last time we talked, you were preparing for a trip to the Philippines. How did you manage the long flight? Did you get as much work done as we had hoped for?

Brian Clark: Not really. It’s interesting because I also didn’t really sleep. I was just so exhausted the whole time that I watched a whole bunch of movies. Going over there, I was just trying to make it. That was, by far, the longest series of flights I’ve ever had. Coming back was easier. I guess once you understand what you’re in for, and the long leg of the flight this time was 10 hours instead of 13. That makes a difference, trust me.

Jerod Morris: Oh, I’m sure it does.

Brian Clark: But I got back, worked it so that I would go to bed early the day I got home and start waking up really early, which was one of my goals coming out of the conference. As you know, I’ve been up at four and five in the morning pummeling you with emails. But you also get up early, so it actually works out.

Jerod Morris: It did. It worked out great.

Brian Clark: With you in Central time zone, I actually have to get up an hour earlier than you just to be even with you, but it’s all good. I’m feeling back to normal a bit but, actually, more productive now because I’ve implemented this new morning routine. I’m just much more productive in the morning, but by three in the afternoon, I’m pretty much done. Just stick a fork in me.

Jerod Morris: I’m the exact same way. I get so much done when I get up early, so I like to do it. We had some fun while you were gone. Robert joined us. Chris joined us. We had a really good discussion on last week’s episode really linking together what you and I talked about before with adaptive websites and what we’re going to talk about today with free online courses.

Talked with Robert. He took us back to the beginning of the New Rainmaker strategy, talked some about that. We got some of Chris’ insight on adaptive websites. So you and I now, we’re going to take the next step in the conversation that we’ve been having about these elements of the modern marketing website.

We talked in episode six about the power of an adaptive website, and today, we’re going to talk about why people should be using free online courses as lead magnets. We’ve got five really compelling reasons why this is a good strategy. Any kind of overview statements before we dive in to these five reasons?

Overview

Brian Clark: Well, after we did the adaptive episode, we did the access episode. Access is a broad concept with a whole bunch of benefits that we went over in that episode. A lot of people, that seemed to really resonate with them. Then it’s what kind of access should we provide? There’s all sorts of different things that you can provide access to.

In this episode, we’re really going to make the case for you that, from a marketing standpoint, you really can’t beat providing access through registration to a free online course as the best way to not only begin a relationship with the right prospects, but to convert more of them.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, access. You’re right. I got my A words mixed up. Speaking of A words, that’s the first reason why people should be using a free online course: attention.

How Free Online Courses Help You Carve Out Attention (and Authority)

Brian Clark: Yeah. Even dating back to the old-school funnel, created by a guy named St. Elmo, by the way. I don’t know why no one says ‘St. Elmo’s funnel’ because it just seems perfect, but they don’t.

Attention is the top of the funnel, regardless of the metaphor that you want to use. This is one of the key beginning reasons why we migrated to this type of strategy. Part of the reason why it’s so effective is perceived value.

The days of the crappy PDF ebook or some other kind of marginal lead magnet, in a lot of industries, it just doesn’t work as well because people are like, “Eh, it’s probably not going to be that great. I’m probably going to get spammed and I’d rather just not.” Great content marketing means giving away something–in this case, information–worth paying for. We’ve made this point before.

People are definitely paying for online courses to the tune of $15 billion a year and growing rapidly, so the perceived value of this type of giveaway is much higher. That’s a constant battle that we’re all in–how do we create more perceived value for our prospects, and how do we deliver more actual value?

It begins with perception, and perception is a function of attention and whether or not that attention leads to the next step.

Jerod Morris: Couldn’t you also add another A word here, authority. If you have that perceived value of the course, then when people actually get in the course and they get value and they see your knowledge, you’re also building authority here, too, aren’t you?

Brian Clark: Yeah, I think so. You establish the authority after they’re involved in the course–let me say, demonstrate authority. In your landing page copy and with your other content, you’re going to have to give indications of authority that way as well for people to find the offer attractive.

But it’s a true authority enhancer once you get them to actually finish the course. As we’ll go through these elements, you’ll see that the fifth one is really compelling, and that’s a big part of it.

Jerod Morris: It is. So attention is the first reason. Let’s move on to the second reason now, which is interest.

What the Topic of Your Course Allows You to Learn About Your Prospects

Brian Clark: Right. Any time you’re trying to get someone something, whether you want to call it a ‘lead magnet,’ an ‘ethical bribe,’ or whatever terminology, you’re offering something to establish what this person is interested in–and by that, I mean what problem are they trying to solve?

By using these very strategic assets based on topical interest or problems to be solved, you’re learning something very important about them. That tells you what content you have to deliver to match up with your business objective at the end–whether that’s selling a product, getting them to call you for consulting, or some other kind of client engagement. You get the idea.

Interest is the bridge between attention and conversion, but it also informs, “What do I have to teach these people in order for more of them to want to do business with me?”

Jerod Morris: We often talk about how one of the benefits of digital products and an information product like a course is that the marketing is really baked into the product. That really comes out here–which, again, helps you develop the product that people are going to need. Then you already understand who those people are, so it’s easier to get it out to them once you have it done.

Brian Clark: Yeah. So my interest is learning how to create online courses. I know what I have to teach you as a preliminary matter to get you to take my broader course. Or you’re selling software or software as a service, and that functionality accomplishes something for people.

But let’s say with Rainmaker Platform, if you’re not well-versed in some of the strategies that the platform allows you to execute on, you’re going to feel lost. That’s just a perfect example of someone has an interest and you’ve got a solution–but what needs to happen in between those two things?

Why a Free Online Course Helps You Solve the Identity Issue

Jerod Morris: Now we move on to a topic that we’ve talked about before on previous episodes. We’ve got attention. We’ve got interest. Now it’s about identity, and again, we’ve talked about how every buyer’s journey is going to be different, and we’ve got to treat them as such. This concept of identity helps us take that first step toward doing that.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Identity is the fundamental opposite of one-size-fits-all marketing blast (you just send out the same message to everyone). Identity really allows adaptive content and automation principles to be used. In this context, it has an advantage over some of the more traditional uses of marketing automation, which rely on cookies.

Again, with an access concept, and specifically with an online course, the registration process provides identity–just like Facebook knows who you are, or Twitter, or Basecamp. Yet because you are experiencing this content marketing–which, make no mistake, that’s what this course is–inside a logged-in experience, then no matter where you come–whether it be your iPad, your iPhone, your desktop, your laptop–the identity piece is always there.

You don’t have the infamous cookie drop where your automation just falls apart because they switched devices on you, and you got this disrupted experience. That’s got to be jarring for everyone, but I definitely think that it impacts the ultimate success of that funnel.

How You Can Adapt the Experience for the People Who Take Your Free Course

Jerod Morris: Yeah. And when you have identity, this then allows you to take the next step. This is the fourth reason why creating a free course is a great thing to do and a great product to use as a lead magnet. You can adapt the content.

This is one of the reasons why creating a free course–for example, using an LMS is so much more beneficial than doing it if you just create it via email–is because you understand who the people are. Then you can adapt the experience to them, which is obviously quite beneficial.

Brian Clark: Yeah. This goes beyond even an access concept. For example, you give away an ebook, some other kind of process map, or a free download of some kind. All you know is, basically, did they opt-in, and did they download it.

If they don’t download it, you can adapt a little there and say, “Hey, don’t forget to download your free strategy guide because you haven’t yet, and we want to make sure you get the blah, blah, blah”–but you know nothing about what happens after that. It’s probably sitting on my hard drive, on my desktop

Actually, I have a reading file in Google Drive that has so many PDFs in it that I have not read. That happens, right? I opted-in. I got the thing. I never consumed it, and your follow-up emails I probably got annoyed with. I hadn’t achieved the benefits of knowledge that I was looking for from that download, so I just opted-out at that point.

With a course, it’s a very different thing, especially in a learning management system, because you know if they’ve consumed the content. Did they take lesson one? Yes. Check. Go on to lesson two. Lesson two, they got halfway through it and stopped.

Now, at that point, you can send a different kind of message that says, “Hey, I know life is distracting and things happen, so I just wanted to give you a gentle reminder that your lessons are still there available to you. Maybe you can pick it back up, blah, blah, blah.”

You see the power there. Could you watch someone with an ebook to find out if they were actually progressing through the information, but were they also progressing through chapter by chapter or page by page? We do have that ability with an access concept married with an LMS-style course.

I know you have done this kind of stuff with your Showrunner course, where you see where people get stuck, and you have tailored messages for them. That’s an amazing thing. That’s real adaptive content. You just can’t achieve that with just a static download.

Jerod Morris: Right. Well, you can even take it to the next level where, if you introduce something like quizzes, not only can you find out if someone’s progressing through the material, you can actually find out if they’re understanding the material and really getting it.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s actually a teaching strategy, too. If you test them, they will actually retain better than if you don’t. But you’re right. At the same time, that’s another indication of engagement that is very valuable to how you treat that prospect, someone who’s that highly engaged even at the quiz level–which, by the way, coming in Rainmaker very, very soon, I can’t wait to implement some quiz strategies. We’ll talk about those in the future.

When you see that level of high engagement, you might be more inclined to make an offer sooner than someone, obviously, who’s kind of poking through it, nitpicking here and there, skipping around, or just kind of fell off.

Again, every buyer’s journey is different. Yet if you don’t have the information about what they’re actually doing, consuming, engaging with, then how do you actually tailor that journey for them?

What This All Means for Conversion

Jerod Morris: Yeah. We’re talking about five compelling reasons why you should use free online courses as lead magnets. We’ve hit four of them so far: attention, interest, identity, and adaptation, and of course, now we go on to the fifth one. This brings us back to the ultimate goal with what we’re really trying to accomplish with all of this, which is conversion.

Brian Clark: Yeah. So often, this is really a mystery to me. It’s only because I’ve been doing it a long time, and I’m not being critical of anyone. But content marketing is about educating a prospect, so they can do business with you. It’s not enough to have attention, interest, or any of these other really important things on the way to conversion if you’re off the mark on what you’re teaching and how that is married up to what you’re selling.

When you understand what their problem is and you understand how your solution solves that, a course is like a laser-focused educational experience that can better convert a prospect into a customer or existing customers into repeat or recurring customers.

Now, this is the reason why we say that you need to understand your prospect and your customers almost better than they do. We have all of this information and data that we’re generating through a more adaptive content approach to where you can be constantly refining and testing.

Once you get to a point where you understand that they need to know boom, boom, boom, boom, five lessons, whatever, and that more people convert at the end of that than otherwise, that’s one of the more compelling reasons for this format.

Again, we’ve evolved along the way ourselves. Blogging every day hoping that day’s article connects with the right segment of people, and then maybe tomorrow the next one will connect.

When you create these type of very focused funnels using online courses, you’re going after a specific type of person in a very concentrated period of time with a sale in mind. This is going to be liberating to a lot of content marketers and digital entrepreneurs out there. The days of heavy-duty blogging are kind of over. I’m not saying blogging’s dead. I’m saying that laser-focused content is more effective and, ultimately, when you look at volume, easier to create.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Like you said, you’re teaching people exactly what they need to know to, and you’re giving them little wins along the way. As you also mentioned, it’s a process then of adapting and figuring out what’s working, figuring out what’s not, adapting the message, adapting the content also to the people that you’re serving and the people that you’re trying to move through and get to take that next step.

The Importance of Testing and Understanding What’s Working, What Needs to Be Tweaked, and What to Double-Down On

Jerod Morris: That’s going to lead us into the fifth element that we’re going to talk about, which is about testing and really understanding what’s working, understanding what needs to be tweaked, understanding what needs to be doubled down on so that you really are, in a sense, creating a machine that is educating people, giving them value, giving them something that they really need, and at the same time, moving them along with you so that they can take the next steps with you–whether that’s business for the first time or becoming recurring customers. Then when you put it all together, it’s a beautiful thing.

Brian Clark: Yeah. All the elements we’ve talked about right now are incredibly important and incredibly powerful, but without testing, you’re still flying a little blind. I will say that, if you did steps one through four as a strategy and left off testing, as long as you executed well, you’d do better than you would do with another approach–but why not do your best?

That’s what testing allows you to do–the right word, the right button, the right case, the right that. It’s all discernible, and the technology is easier than ever. I know you and Lauren have been running tests I don’t even know about, but you guys are like kids in a candy store right now going, “Ooh, let’s test this.”

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Hey, if you can get a 20 percent bump in conversions for the same effort, why wouldn’t you do it?

Brian Clark: Absolutely.

How to Take Your Digital Commerce Education to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You might as well, and I do want you to know, if you’re listening to this right now, and obviously you are because you just heard me say that, if you want to take your digital commerce education to the next level and if you want to learn more specifically about courses and how to put together courses that really work, then you want to go get your free taste of Digital Commerce Academy if you haven’t already.

When you do that–and you can do it by going to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce–as soon as you sign up–and again, it’s free–you get four lessons in Brian’s course on how to build an online training business the smart way.

You also get three case studies, and one of those case studies is a story of Danny Margulies, who we featured on a previous episode of The Digital Entrepreneur–who went from soul-crushing job to six-figure freelancer, all the way to creating the mega-successful Secrets of a Six-Figure Freelancer course.

Now, that was a paid course, but the elements of what make courses work–whether they’re free or paid–there are obviously similarities there. There’s a lot to learn from both in Brian’s lessons, in that case study, and in some of the other content that you get in your free taste that will really help you, that you can apply to your situation and business. All of it’s available as soon as you register. Plus you get our free weekly newsletter, too.

As I said, it’s free. Go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce and get activated, get your free membership today, and start learning more, so you can put this into practice for you. The sooner you do, the better off you’ll be.

Brian Clark: Yeah. They also get some free access to our marketing funnels course–which, when you think about courses in the context of lead generation and conversion, as opposed to paid courses, that’s what you’re creating. You’re creating an adaptive content funnel. You’re just doing it in a very methodical way with some very powerful learning management technology on your side, which is pretty cool.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. All right, Brian. Stay warm. I’ll see you on email at 3:30 tomorrow morning.

Brian Clark: I slept until five today, man. I’m just slacking off.

Jerod Morris: I’ll talk to you next week, and we’ll talk to you next week on another brand-new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

A Rainmaker Case Study on Using the Access Approach to Drive Business Results

Voiceover: You are listening to the Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: All right, do you guys just want to jump right in?

Chris Garrett: Let’s do it.

Jerod Morris: Cool.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, no idea what we’re talking about. I know you said something, but …

Jerod Morris: Hey, Chris, you know what? We’re just going to try and recreate our Monday afternoon call for the Digital Entrepreneur audience.

Chris Garrett: You mean, get us fired?

Jerod Morris: Right. Brian’s gone, so let’s have a little fun out of the Digital Entrepreneur while he’s gone.

Chris Garrett: We re going to talk about politics for an hour and a half, right?

Jerod Morris: That was my plan. We’re recording this on Super Tuesday number three. A lot of important things are going to happen today in the Republican primaries and the Democratic primaries.

Chris Garrett: Watch it, don’t say his name, don’t say his name.

Jerod Morris: Let’s give Brian something exciting to listen to when he gets back. Okay no, this is not politics talk, this is episode number seven of the Digital Entrepreneur. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and Brian is not here this week. But I have two very special guests with me to continue the conversation that Brian and I have been having.

We’ve been talking about the elements of the modern marketing website. Last week, we talked to you about the benefits of the access approach to online marketing. When Brian gets back next week, we’re going to be talking about using online courses as lead magnets. This is kind of an in-between-isode, to talk about both of those topics with two guys who know a lot about it.

The first gentleman is Robert Bruce. You know him well from Rainmaker FM and the earliest incarnations of the Rainmaker podcast. Robert, welcome to the Digital Entrepreneur.

Robert Bruce: Thank you, Jerod. I’m only here to talk about one thing today, and that is Donald Trump.

Jerod Morris: Toby, edit that. We are also joined by Chris Garrett, the chief digital officer for Rainmaker Digital. Those of you who have been inside of the Digital Commerce Institute or participate in our Q&As, you’ve gotten a lot of insight from Chris. He has a lot to share about this topic, so I’m excited to have him here as well. Welcome, Mr. Garrett.

Chris Garrett: Thanks for having me. I didn’t realize we were going to talk about Trump on this call. I didn’t come prepared for that.

Robert Bruce: Apparently, my first amendment rights are going to be taken away from me here if it’s edited out, but I’ll just keep saying it

You know what I was thinking? Isn’t it about time that, like in my case, you just start calling me robertbruce.com? Talk about the master marketing stroke. Why aren’t children being named after URLs yet? I mean, just take it straight there.

Jerod Morris: That’s interesting. Wasn’t there that one guy who sold his last name? It was something SurfrApp, and he just sold the rights to his last name. But you’re saying, like when my child is born, just …

Robert Bruce: You get the URL and you just name him the URL. Now, if you can’t get a real name URL, you’ve got an issue.

Chris Garrett: Bob.info.

Robert Bruce: But you know, then you’ve got 20 years of preparation. See, this is where Garrett gets into the conversation saying that in 20 years, URLs won’t even be around.

Chris Garrett: I was thinking cruelty laws. Surely there are laws against that.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Robert Bruce: You’re probably right.

Jerod Morris: That poor child who has to have an underscore or a hyphen in her name.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, with a bad URL, that’s a good point. All right, sorry, just thought I d throw it out there.

Jerod Morris: No, it was a good idea.

Robert Bruce: I’m trying to think, you know …

Jerod Morris: Robert, this is a safe space. All ideas are welcomed here.

Robert Bruce: Okay, thank you.

Chris Garrett: It might get edited out.

Robert Bruce: I don’t want to trigger anybody.

Chris Garrett: You said Trump, so

Jerod Morris: Robert, here’s a question that I wanted to ask you. I wanted to lead off with it, because one of the examples that Brian and I have been talking about is what you guys did in the beginning with the New Rainmaker podcast and how that led into selling the Rainmaker Platform.

We’ve obviously been doing stuff with membership sites and with the access experience for a while, with My Copyblogger and some of the other things that we ve done, but launching the Rainmaker Platform was something really different. It was a brand new product, it was off site. We were building new properties and a new SaaS application. There was a lot of new stuff going on, and you guys had a new strategy for us, which was to get into audio and start doing this podcast.

Can you walk the audience through just how that came to be? And the conversations you guys had? The big picture strategy there with what you were doing in the beginning with the New Rainmaker podcast?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, you know, for the main strategy, Brian thought it up. And I actually struggled with it for a long time, with the idea of launching what would become our main line of revenue, hopefully, from what was essentially a brand new podcast. At that time, of course, we didn’t know.

I got it, and I knew what we were doing in terms of the podcast and the content and all of that, but I had my doubts as to whether this would work based on how we had done things in the past. So yeah, the idea was, from the beginning, we start this new podcast And anybody can do this, by the way. You can go register for free at Rainmaker.FM and go through the free course. We’ll talk about this later, but there are essentially seven episodes of that podcast.

We launched this podcast, put everything we had into it. We decided to do a couple of things differently, which were, in the beginning, more high-end production value. We wanted to move at least a notch or two toward kind of that NPR idea of things and see how it worked. But really, what we were doing was not talking about the platform, although we did do that too. Instead, we were talking about the things that you could do in your business and with your business via the platform.

And as those episodes went on and on, this bigger picture appeared of what could be possible with the use of the Rainmaker Platform, for instance, the objections to it and the ways that you could go with all kinds of different things in regard to the functionality that we were going to have.

So in one sense, it’s very simple. We started this podcast and we talked about the way to build a business. I think the main line we used back then was how to build an audience that builds your business. And that led directly and literally to the launch of the Rainmaker Platform. I think later we’re going to talk about what we did with that initial content.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and that’s what I want to talk about next, because that’s what has always been so interesting to me about that strategy. That you created this podcast and those initial episodes, correct me if I’m wrong, but those just went out as podcasts as normal through iTunes. And they were all freely available so anybody could just go get them.

When did you repurpose those podcasts into the free course and then require people to actually register? Instead of just opting into an email list, they actually had to register. And they got those first seven episodes plus three webinars as a free course.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, the timing is a little fuzzy to me. I’m not really good with dates and times and things, but generally what we did was we took the first seven episodes of the podcast, and then Brian did another three more intensive webinars, like you said, and we packaged those all up in really just a basic repurposing play.

We did not re-record anything, we did not do any special editing, so there’s some stuff in there that you’ll see if you go again and register and listen to that course. It’s all really, really great information. We didn’t overdo it in terms of reproducing it as a course, necessarily, but it’s all laid out in there.

Chris, on the back end, on the dev end, and all of our developers working on the actual functionality of the membership site and delivering courses in that way — that was all being worked on in the platform. Then we could demonstrate it. Rafal, obviously, designed that course.

When you register at Rainmaker.FM, it s a free registration. You go in and you can see all of this displayed out, and what that is, again, is the first seven episodes of that podcast plus three webinars that Brian did. What this is, at this point, is an actual demonstration of what the Rainmaker Platform can do. You’re in there experiencing this content and this free training course, and you’re going through it, but you’re also in an environment which is, in real time, delivering the experience of the Rainmaker Platform to you. That was the idea.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Chris Garrett: It also told us what we needed to add to the platform to make it easy to do these things. A lot of it actually worked as education for us because it was a real thing rather than a hypothetical. It was a real use of our features. It also tells us that it’s really important to use your own stuff. It’s called dogfooding, eating your own dog food. I was saying, How do I do this and how can I make this better? And so it fed back into the platform as well. It was a demonstration of the platform, but it improved the platform too.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I mean, there were myriad reasons why setting it up this way was so smart for us, and really necessary in a lot of ways. What I want to ask you, Chris, is for most of the people listening who want to create a course and kind of set up a funnel like we did because that’s what we were doing here. People signed up for that free course, then there was an autoresponder email sequence that went along with it. So as the lessons got dripped out, they got emails with the lessons. And then interspersed in that autoresponder, there were calls-to-action to the platform.

Obviously, there were lots of reasons for us to do it, just from learning more about the platform, improving the platform, using it as a demonstration for a platform. But this idea of requiring a log-in to create this access approach, and then using an online course as a lead magnet, even if you’re not developing a SaaS app. If you don’t have a learning management system that you’re trying to improve, this is a tried-and-true, a smart strategy. Why does this approach work so well and why is the access part of it so essential?

Chris Garrett: I will tell you now that if you just change your existing email opt-in form into a registration form, it won’t work. That confuses some people because there are people who say, Well, doesn’t it add friction? Doesn’t it give you a barrier? Won’t it lower conversion rates?

We always refer back to the My Copyblogger free member library over at MyCopyblogger.com, where we had a 400% increase in conversions. Some people say, Oh just changing it from an email opt-in to a registration increased conversions. No, it wasn’t just changing the form that increased conversions.

There’s a higher perceived value when you actually justify the registration, when you tell people what’s on the other side and what the future outcome is going to be of signing up. That’s the big difference in terms of the conversion. If you don’t give people an incentive, if you don’t tell people exactly what they’re going to get and what the experience is going to be like — make it easy, explain it, and then tell them what to do and show that it’s going to be valuable — you’re not going to get an increase in activity and action. You’re going to probably just confuse people.

Robert Bruce: I think you can argue too that creating that natural barrier of registration can be and is a really good thing, although it is not necessary or optimal for all digital businesses. Like you said, Chris, you’re not going to get the kind of activity and drive and numbers that are so impressive, that so many people talk about online.

But what you’re getting when you create a barrier like that or even a simple registration is the people who really, really want to be around what you’re doing. And ultimately, they will hopefully want to do business with you. Instead of high numbers, you’re getting high quality in terms of the type of people who are actively seeking you out and have probably come through word-of-mouth, which of course, as we all know, is the most powerful marketing there is.

Chris Garrett: They re more serious because they’ve taken the extra step. Actually, it’s custom something, even though it s not custom financially, it’s custom a little bit of effort, so they value it higher and you only get the serious people. It filters out the people who would just put an email address in just to get rid of the pop-up form. People do that, you know. If they can’t find the close box on a pop-up, they’ll just put their email address in, thinking that’s how to get rid of it. In this way, you’re filtering out the wrong people. They know what they’re signing up for. They have a little bit of a hoop to jump through.

But also, it feels higher value. It has a higher perceived value from the start because you’re registering as a member for this thing, and Look at all the things that I get. They know they can have it in the future because it’s not going to get lost in their email. It’s not just going to get foldered away somewhere, it’s going to actually be somewhere that they can come back to. They can reset the password if they forget it. It’s going to persist, and hopefully, you’re going to add to it or there’s going to be something substantial there. It’s not just sign up and get this crappy video.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I echo that. Your log-in experience allows for a much more rich media delivery, and, as you say, so does keeping it there in a place that’s always going to be there.

Jerod Morris: It does, and what you guys are saying begs the next obvious question. Chris, I’ll direct this to you first. How do you decide, then, what you’re going to give away in, say, a free course or a free registration, and what people should eventually pay for?

Because you can make something really, really compelling for a free registration, but sometimes people fear that they’re giving too much away. And sometimes people are giving too much away. But I think for the most part, people probably underestimate how much they should give away for free. How do you make that determination for what you can give away for free and what ultimately needs to be held back for some kind of paid product or paid registration?

Chris Garrett: I always say there are a couple of large categories of what you should give away. The one that’s unusual, that we don’t really talk about much in this context, is you can test your audience with free content. You can see what they really like and want from you and what they need you to provide them so that you can solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.

Before creating a paid product, before going down the line of a full course or getting too deep into it, you can test your particular slice of the market to see what they respond to. You should be giving away webinars, ebooks, videos, even just testing with blog content to see what they respond to.

The problem with just a blog article is they can like it, they can share it, and they can comment, but that doesn’t really give you a big idea of what they’re going to eventually need you to create for them as a product. But something closer to the product would be webinars or something like a small course, like we’re talking about with Rainmaker.FM. It wasn’t a huge undertaking. It was already a podcast, and we packaged it up.

That can test the market and say, Okay, this is something people don’t just sign up for, but they actually consume and take action with. Now, free content, when you register for it, you can actually see what they do, so it’s another bonus for you as a site owner. You can see what they actually consume. What are they downloading? What are they responding to? What are they actually consuming and taking action with?

Jerod Morris: Chris, what’s the difference between being able to see that in a logged-in experience of a membership site versus the stats that you get from basic email marketing? Is it that much of a difference? Is it that much better for the business owner to be able to see that stuff?

Chris Garrett: Yeah, the problem with basic stats like your Google Analytics or email system is you can see if they click on an email, you can see if they do a page view, but it’s hard to connect the activity to a human being. Whereas if they re logged in with a user name, you know who they are. You know the progress of that person, regardless of device.

I am the same person logged in regardless of whether I use my phone, my iPad, my laptop, my desktop computer or whether I logged in from the library or am on vacation. Whereas Google Analytics finds it very hard to tie all those visits into one visitor who is a human being.

So you get a lot richer stats, but also, with the stuff that we have built into the Rainmaker Platform and some of the other marketing automation technologies, if they re logged in, you can actually apply tags and information to their user account. So you can say, Jerod has viewed this video for more than 30 seconds. Jerod took this quiz. Jerod completed the quiz and passed that quiz.

There’s a lot of stuff that we’re adding which builds on all of this, that’s going to make it even more rich, and obviously, you can then do automation based on those things. Everybody who passes this quiz gets module two. You can’t really do that very well with any other way than registering and logging in.

To answer the original question, the other side of what you should give away and what you should sell is, it’s really good to give away the what and the why, a little bit of the how, but you should definitely sell the detailed step-by-step how as a course or as a deeper, more detailed book or video series. Because the free stuff should be inspiration, it should give them some tips and some quick wins so they know you can help them, but you don’t want to overwhelm them with detail.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and when we look at the New Rainmaker course — and Robert, I want to ask you about how that asset has evolved — ever since that course came out, we ve talked about how this is good enough to charge people for, and we haven’t. A lot of the reason for that, I think, is because it had a bigger business purpose, which we’ve talked about. And Chris, I think as you just described, it does a lot of what you want a free course to do.

What I found really interesting about that, Robert, is how that has evolved. Because originally, that free registration also built an email list, obviously, because everybody who registers is on an email list. And when we first had the platform ready, that email list was a big part of how we launched. And now, that list has really evolved since it originally was built. Can you talk a little bit about how it’s evolved and how you can do that? As your business changes, as things evolve, these assets that you’re building, they can evolve too.

Robert Bruce: In the spirit of the 2016 presidential race here in the United States, Jerod, I’m going to not answer your question, and I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about One thing real quick before I go there is that Garrett is obviously the expert in this kind of stuff, and I have nothing to add to what he just said.

But I would like to go back around to this idea of repurposing. I think this is super, super important in many different ways for people doing stuff online in any serious way. One thing that we don’t understand, and it’s really hard to wrap your head around, is this idea that when you put a piece of content out online, even something, say, that gets shared and gets spread around really, really widely, people actually don’t see or hear that piece of content.

Now, of course, many will comment, many will share, all of that. You know, there’s that aspect to it, but generally, people really don’t see that thing the first time. There’s this idea in advertising of the power of seven repetitions. Sean McCabe, who was just on the Unemployable podcast — I think that just came out today — he has a great article and podcast episode about the power of seven. If you go to seanwes.com, he talks about this concept in depth, the power of seven, the power of repetition.

So that means repeatedly sending your stuff out, which many people are against, myself included. I’m not comfortable doing it, but this idea that people don’t actually see it, especially when you get into environments like Twitter — you know, email and RSS are a different kind of thing — but certainly in what has come to be popularly known as the social networks, stuff goes by and people don’t see it.

There’s the repetition aspect of it, but there’s also the repurposing aspect of it, which is, we literally did those seven episodes, packaged them up, and put them into this free registration, behind the wall. And they’re sitting there, the very same episodes that we had out publicly for a couple of months beforehand, and people register for the free Rainmaker course, and they experience it either again or really for the first time, all the time.

I think that’s really important for people to understand, because we have this sense of, If I publish something and I put it out, great, everybody saw it, and on to the next thing. That’s really not how it works. It’s really not how to powerfully get through to people.

Jerod Morris: I’m glad that you made that point, especially as we’re talking about these elements of a modern marketing website and we’re talking about the benefits of the access approach and using an online course as a lead magnet. I know, because I’ve talked to people, and a lot of them get intimidated at what the content creation part is going to be.

It s possible that you already created the content that you would need to create the online course that you can use as the incentive to get people into your logged-in experience. Now, you may need to update it, and maybe you have ideas for something new that you can create, but if you can use this power of repurposing, it can really help you work smarter, not harder, which is huge. Time is valuable for all of us. I’m glad you doubled up and made that point.

Robert Bruce: Sorry I didn’t answer your question. To briefly, quickly answer your actual question, I ll say that it’s evolved a bit and it kind of hasn’t evolved at all. We still have that same free course in there. When you sign up to register at Rainmaker.FM, you’ll see that there. What is happening now, though, is we are also pointing towards the Showrunner course, which is actually a paid course within the Rainmaker.FM environment.

A lot of things are going to be changing over the course of the next year in terms of how that works, but when you register at Rainmaker.FM, you get the free course. You are also put onto the email list, which you’re notified of. It doesn’t just happen without your okay. That email list has become and is becoming more important to us.

What was initially the New Rainmaker podcast email list has become the Rainmaker.FM email list, the weekly newsletter. In that newsletter, we send out the best stuff from the week, and it’s really simple right now. We’re going to start expanding that with some more content as we go along.

It’s evolved, and it hasn’t. I mean, what you see as the registration over at Rainmaker.FM now is carried on in a lot of what you guys are doing over at DigitalCommerce.com. That’s, I think, the real story.

Jerod Morris: Chris, as we kind of wrap up here, you’ve seen so much of this and you’ve done so much of setting this up for yourself, these logged-in experiences. And you talked a little bit earlier about some common mistakes that people make in feeling like they can just turn it into a registration and it’ll work. Are there any other mistakes that you see people making consistently when they’re trying to do this that maybe you can point out and help people avoid as they set out doing this on their own?

Chris Garrett: I think one of the biggest mistakes I see experienced people make is going from this idea of giving stuff away and being generous to having a scattered approach where each individual piece is valuable, but it doesn’t make sense as part of the whole.

You need to have a flow from what you’re giving away and what you’re writing about through to the stuff that you sell. And that has to fit into your prospects, goals, and problems. As we said before, it has to solve a problem or help them achieve something. It has to flow instead of, Try this and take a look at that and sign up for this, and it all being good, but not making sense and not fitting together.

I think we’ve done a good job, as Robert’s just said, of leading from one thing to the next. You get some ideas, and the New Rainmaker list certainly helped a lot of people get their head around some really key concepts, but then it led naturally into the first launch of Rainmaker.

We didn’t even put it on Copyblogger.com, the initial call-to-action. We just sent it to this list to say, Hey, do you want to check this thing out? It made sense to people. And now as well, we lead people to DigitalCommerce.com, but then we lead people back to the Rainmaker Platform. It has a flow, and that means you can see progress, you can see if everything you’re doing is leading to the next step.

When all you do is have the scattered, ooh shiny, distracted approach to content creation, you don’t know if you are actually progressing anything or if you’re just distracting yourself and making more work for yourself.

So that’s the big problem I see with experienced people. And if you’re just starting out, don’t overwhelm yourself. Get the basics in place, get those foundations in place, get some sort of a call-to-action that leads people to sign up to your list. And get the people from your list to understand the problem you’re solving, where you’re going to take them, and what to do next. Get fancy afterwards, do the advanced stuff afterwards.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, well, we have come to the end of this episode of the Digital Entrepreneur, but I would like to give each of the candidates now 30 seconds to sum up their main argument in favor of using this access approach to online marketing, combining it with online courses as your lead magnets for building your registration. Mr. Bruce, I would like to give you the floor first.

Robert Bruce: I’d like to thank the listeners for this opportunity for me to be here. My strategy for making this work for you comes down to two simple words based on the experience that we have had over the last year, and that is: it works.

Jerod Morris: Excellent. Mr. Garrett?

Robert Bruce: That’s not very compelling, actually, sorry. Let me think about this for a second.

Jerod Morris: I thought you were going to say make marketing great again.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I know. Sorry, I blew it. It needs to be more of an emotional appeal. I ll work on it.

Chris Garrett: I thought Robert was going to say, People asked me about this and we’re going to make it great. Don’t worry, we’re going to make it great.

Robert Bruce: Well, I’m already fired, so I might as well go for it.

Jerod Morris: Right.

Chris Garrett: Well, that’s repurposing, this podcast is going to be repurposed in our performance appraisal.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Mr. Garrett, your final thoughts as we lead into next week’s episode, really digging in more to using online courses as lead magnets? Your final thoughts on why people need to be doing this?

Chris Garrett: Well, the first thing is, you need to stand out from all of your competition. Everybody else in the market is trying to get the same email addresses. So what are you going to do that’s different? And how are you going to take that initial attention and really engage them, really help them get some results that they can see with their own eyes? So that you don’t have to just say, Believe me, it’s awesome. Believe me, we’re going to make it great. They can see for themselves that it’s great and it works.

To me, there isn’t another option that works as well. It helps you differentiate and it helps you get real results for your prospects so that they’d want to be customers. They’re asking you, How can we go deeper, how can we take this to the next step? That’s the position that you want to be in. You don’t want to be just getting people onto a list that they’ll just tune out of or they don’t really participate with. You can really help people with it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, you can. Well, if you want to take your digital commerce education to the next level, definitely make sure that you go get your free taste of Digital Commerce Academy. As I’ve been telling you in these last few episodes, you get free lessons from Brian’s course on building an online training business, and you also get some free lessons from Tony and Chris’s course.

And Chris, do you want to give folks just a brief overview of what your course inside of Digital Commerce Academy deals with? Obviously, there’s the paid version inside of the academy, but for those folks who do the free registration, if you go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register, you will actually get three free lessons in Chris’s course. And you can see how we’re doing exactly what we’re talking about here on this podcast.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, and the three lessons tell you the basics of everything you should be thinking about when creating funnels. And that’s those sequences that take people from being mildly interested through to really believing you can help them get ready to take the next step.

Jerod Morris: Yep, so go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register and get those free lessons. You ll also get three incredible case study webinars with Nathan Barry, Danny Margulies, and Brian Gardner. All of them are a must-watch for anybody who is a current or aspiring digital entrepreneur.

We’ll be back next week. Brian Clark should be here. We will move on to the fourth element of these essential elements of the modern marketing website that we’ve been discussing. We will dig in more to using online courses as lead magnets. Chris, thank you. Robert, thank you. It was a pleasure having you guys here today.

Robert Bruce: Thank you.

Chris Garrett: I approve this message.

Jerod Morris: All right, and we will talk to you all next week in another brand new episode of the Digital Entrepreneur.

The Transcript

5 Benefits of the ‘Access’ Approach to Online Marketing

Voiceover: You are listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I’m joined today by Rainmaker Founder and CEO Brian Clark.

Brian, when people hear this episode, at least the day that it goes live, you’re going to be over in the Philippines. Right now as we record it, you are preparing for an excruciatingly long airplane flight. How do you prepare for a flight that long?

Brian Clark: I don’t know. I’ve never been on a plane that long, so it’s going to be a new adventure. I’m in business class. That’s all I can say. I’ve heard that’s much better than economy, so we’ll see.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Do you just have work back to back to back, ready to go? I know we’ve talked about this before. I get about as much work done on an airplane as I get done anywhere else.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s the recording stuff that I have to get done before I get on the plane because we’ll not have our nice setup of recording equipment, acoustics, and all of that good stuff. I’ve got a whole stack of reading and writing that I hope will keep me engaged so that it’s not too painful. I will report back. Everyone keeps asking me this, and I’m like, “I don’t have any idea.”

Jerod Morris: Yes, yes. I’ll be very interested to know how that goes. Speaking of recording, we’ve got to get this episode in here before you go. We’re continuing on talking about the elements of the modern marketing website. We’ve talked about email, and last week we talked about how adaptive websites deliver exceptional experiences while accelerating profit.

Why Creating an Experience Is So Important

Jerod Morris: We’re going to go, now, to the next level. We’re going to talk about the ‘access’ approach to online marketing and talk about the importance of experiences. It’s interesting. It struck me as I was thinking about this episode. I had the good fortune a couple of weeks ago to go to a workshop out in LA. The workshop was about presentations. If you look at the headline, actually, on the website for that workshop, Rock the Room, it says, “Creating an experience is more important than delivering information.”

One of the biggest reasons why I had so much fun at that workshop and learned so much is because what we were learning about presentations was so applicable to so many different areas of my life and my work, including what we’re talking about right now–this idea of how creating an experience is so important, even more so than just delivering the information that you have.

Brian Clark: Yeah. If you look at the evolution of the web, you cannot escape hearing about creating experiences–whether it be customer experience, customer lifetime-value experiences, and most importantly, from this standpoint, is the experience a prospect has when they’re evaluating you as an option to solve the problem or satisfy the desire.

If you look back in the old days with the static ‘brochure site,’ it was just static information. It didn’t change. It was just about the company, and it wasn’t really oriented toward the prospect at all really.

Then, of course, we had the content marketing revolution where static sites were basically invisible. Let’s face it. Without content, you weren’t showing up in search. You weren’t getting shared in social.

Dynamic-content-based sites, that was a big change. We’re evolving to the next level where the web itself is pushing us to give the kind of interactive access experience that we’re talking about here today.

Jerod Morris: What strikes me about access–and especially since we think about it from a website perspective because I know that I’ve done this–at least before maybe a year, year and a half ago, it didn’t seem like something that I needed to do on my website, that I could do, or even perhaps that I should do.

It felt like this, “Wait a minute. You’re going to make people have to register or have a login to get to your site?” Then you step back, and you think, “Well, wait a minute. All the most popular sites online– Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, every other site–these big sites we go to, they require access. Why would we think that same thing couldn’t or shouldn’t apply to what we’re building with our sites?”

Why ‘Access’ Is Just One Component of an Experience

Brian Clark: Everything good online requires registration and access. That’s the mentality we have. We were early on this. We did our first access approach back in 2013. You’ll remember that was based on Brian’s hypothesis of what was happening online and what would work better. It turned out to work really, really well, as we’ll get into.

It’s important to remember that all of these elements are interrelated. We require registration to get access, but we’re also doing that to build an email list. Once we have that email list coordinating with the site, that’s how we deliver adaptive content.

These aren’t mutually exclusive when we talk about an experience, but access is an important component, like you said. Facebook and Twitter, until you log in, you’re not having the experience. Even Amazon, Apple, Google, Gmail–all of the good stuff that we all use–it requires this concept. There’s a pretty strong psychological mechanism going on here just when it comes to perceived value, but there’s a whole lot of other benefits to this access approach as well.

Jerod Morris: With this access that people give us comes a responsibility, too. We have to make sure that we’re delivering a good and useful experience. People do get leery of opting-in due to bad experiences, due to spam, all of that. We’ve got to make sure that the experience that we’re delivering is good, that it’s useful, and that it’s not going to fall into some of those traps that others have that give people, sometimes, a bad impression of logging in or registering.

Brian Clark: Oh yeah. That’s rule number one. If you don’t have an audience-focused value proposition, you’re just not even in the game. But you’re right, you mentioned that we’re leery of the concept of opting-in to a newsletter that we consider just to be a thinly disguised marketing vehicle. There’s got to be something more here.

So we are dealing with human psychology, the usability of the internet, and how it works. We’re mirroring that in a way that used to be cost prohibited, but now it’s not. Remember, the original web app was the membership site, and that dates way back. It’s just much easier to build them now.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so let’s start talking about the benefits of doing this and why you, the digital entrepreneur who is listening to this, why this access approach is going to be so important to you. Let’s start, Brian, with what you talked about with the app experience. Why is this such a big benefit of the access experience?

Why the Future Is HTML5, Not Apps

Brian Clark: Well, the rise of the mobile app is an important thing, as you know. It gave a lot of people the wrong idea–that somehow they had to get people to download their app and clutter up their phone just to visit and consume content. That was a mistake. It’s been expressed very loudly in various different ways.

It’s just a conversion killer. You’re putting up an impediment in front of what they want. You’re actually impeding the experiencing instead of enhancing it. It’s completely unnecessary. The way search works, the way sharing works, we have something called the open web that works incredibly well for allowing people to get where we want them to go.

The new thing really is, like we’ve talked about, responsive design. Whether they’re on a phone, a tablet, a desktop, or a laptop, the site is going to adapt to them as if it were a mobile app. Then we’ve got, of course, just basic membership capabilities that we say, “Okay, if you want this, it’s protected here. It’s valuable. That’s why we don’t just put it out there for everyone.” That sends a message–again, that whole perceived value aspect of it.

Of course, with HTML5 a webpage can now do anything an app can do. That’s really where we’re going to see things push forward with this app-like experience, but the very beginning part of a web-app experience is simply gating off something valuable and exchanging access to that for the right to email them.

How Access Helps You Build Your Email List Faster

Jerod Morris: Yeah, this is so interesting. The second benefit we talk about is building your email list faster. I’ve experienced this firsthand with one of my side projects, The Assembly Call, which I’ve talked about a lot on The Showrunner and some other shows. It’s a postgame show for Indiana basketball games.

What we did differently this year is our show has always been freely available, that’s the big hook of our content. We kept it that way, but I wanted to basically try out some of these things that I was learning and create a membership component to it since the site is built on Rainmaker.

What I love is the mindset I went into, which is thinking, “Okay, if I’m going to do this and I’m going to make people have to log in, I need to give them something worthwhile.” So we created a halftime show and made it membership only. We added a chat that was only for people who were logged in, and then we actually used the course component of Rainmaker to build this huge 50 Greatest Hoosiers of All Time content series.

What’s amazing is how much our email list, how much our audience has grown, and how much more connected people are now that they actually have to log in to get the extras. They can still go to the live page. They can get the postgame show for free. We won’t change that, and we keep that up, doesn’t require any login.

To take that next step, to become part of the community, to get on the other side of that velvet rope and really connect with the host and with the other audience members, you have to log in. It hasn’t turned people away. It has made our audience growth accelerate because now those people who were in their part of the community are so much more connected. The sharing and telling of other people has just gone through the roof.

It’s really amazing how, when you add this to your site, how it can just make everything, the perceived and real value of what you’re doing, just skyrocket.

Brian Clark: Yeah, because you’re creating a more tangible experience. We’re going to keep coming back to that word because that’s what it is. You’re giving the right value to the right people, and of course, their raising their hands in greatest numbers.

Now, remember the original hypothesis back in 2013 and the experiment was My Copyblogger–400 percent increase in email signups. It even shocked me. Now, you’ve noticed that we did it again with the New Rainmaker course that launched the Rainmaker Platform. Our flagship product was launched using this very access concept.

Now we’re doing it again over at Digital Commerce with the free registration. You get access to select lessons from our paid courses, along with some other stuff. It’s a great value proposition. That list went from zero to thousands faster than probably most. That’s pretty awesome. You match up value with access, and more people will sign up. That’s just what we’ve seen over and over again.

Jerod Morris: We’re talking about these benefits of the access approach to online marketing. We’ve talked about the app experience and building your email list faster. The third one, and I love this one, is the ability to identify people across devices for a true adaptive content experience.

Why It’s So Important to Overcome the ‘Fallacy of Cookies’

Jerod Morris: If people don’t log in, you don’t really have a great way of differentiating or knowing if this person who’s visiting right now on the desktop, did they just visit before on their phone? Are these two separate people, or are they the same person? How do you adapt an experience if you don’t know that?

That’s such a huge benefit of doing this. When people are logged in, you can track their movements, track what they’re doing, track what they’re consuming across different devices so that you can give them the experience that they need and want.

Brian Clark: Yeah. You’re talking about the cookie problem that marketing automation has historically faced. A cookie’s planted on the desktop. Then they come back on the phone, and it’s like they just started over. You have no way of connecting those dots.

Identity is something that’s really being talked a lot about at the enterprise-marketing tech level. Again, we’ve been talking about this for quite awhile, but you’re seeing it really catch on. It’s a big problem when you don’t really have a relationship with someone in the sense that, if we’re going to deliver this adaptive, custom, one-of-a-kind experience based on who you are and what you do, then we have to have this identity component.

I read an interesting white paper of someone selling an outrageously expensive solution to solve the identity problem, and I’m like, “Hey, I’ve got one of those, and it’s not that extensive. It’s called Rainmaker Platform.”

How Access Gives You the Opportunity for True Communities

Jerod Morris: Yeah, exactly. Then what that allows you to do, when you give people this great experience and you’re building your email list and you’re able to identify people across devices, now you can do what I talked about that we’ve done this year with The Assembly Call–which is taking everything to the next level, really build a true community, a branded community, create these velvet-rope environments. When people get past them, they really feel like they’ve got to the next level.

They connect more with you. They can connect with the other people who are in there. Again, when we talk about experience, when we talk about standing out in a crowded field, that can really, really separate you. Obviously, when it comes to turning visitors into audience members and audience members into customers, that’s huge.

Brian Clark: Yeah, this is another thing happening at the enterprise level. Forester started talking about this last year–how after the social media swindle and the fallacy of trying to sell to people at the social level, and then, of course, the bait and switch with Facebook and all of that, there was this movement for brands to create communities back at their sites, essentially membership sites.

Again, I’m sure the implementation over there is going to cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it doesn’t need to be. That’s kind of cool. We little guys can create these branded communities as well–and should.

Let’s face it, a Facebook ‘like’ does not mean someone’s part of your community. A Facebook group even is a poor excuse for these access-driven, branded communities that you can build. You just gave us a perfect example with Assembly Call.

It really kills me because you’ll have people say, “Well, it’s just easier to stay over there at Facebook where they are.” It’s easy to spew offers and egocentric pitches to people, too, but that’s not going to work. I really don’t like it when people say, “It’s easier at Facebook.” That’s a fallacy, and it’s kind of lazy.

Jerod Morris: Oh, it totally is. Just because it’s easy, that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s what you should be doing. It certainly doesn’t mean that it’s rewarding in any way. Ever since we’ve started to really develop the community, everything with that site and with the content has taken off.

It’s not just there. There’s so many people that we talk to in our Digital Commerce Academy Q&A’s and just that we interact with that are experiencing this very same thing. The other benefit that you really get here is, you’re able to uncover the intent of the buyer’s journey.

We talked about, in our last episode, how every buyer’s journey is different, yet we make the mistake of treating them the same.

When you have this access experience and when you’re really giving someone a great experience so they continue to consume your content, you can actually see what they’re consuming, understand them better, and deliver more relevant content to them–you’re actually able to treat them like an individual, which has myriad benefits.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Something we did back in 2013 was create multiple access points. Meaning, if you came in from search looking for content marketing, you were treated slightly differently than if you came in for searching for landing pages.

With the recent redesign of Copyblogger, we took that intent aspect to the next level. “What do you want to learn about?” Asking specifically, “What journey do you want to go on?” That’s a big step forward for us, but also think about what we’re doing with the free content at Digital Commerce Academy.

Right now, there’s this one kind of access point, the free registration. As you well know, we’ve been plotting all the different access points that show what’s the top-of-mind intent. Are they most interested in online courses? What persona are we dealing with here? What part of the funnel are they in? That’s just something you can’t do with a normal opt-in email newsletter. It’s just not the same experience whatsoever.

Using the right type of content and providing access points to that content based on where they’re at in the journey, this is really the magic of all of this stuff of adaptive content. It’s access and selective access–the way we can turn certain things on and certain things off inside the membership area based on your access point. That’s pretty exciting stuff.

Why You No Longer Need an Enterprise-Level War Chest

Jerod Morris: It is. It’s really exciting stuff. What’s especially exciting, Brian, is what we’re talking about right now. We’ve been talking about that at Copyblogger for a while. Like you said, we started doing this at My Copyblogger several years ago.

If I remove myself from the job that I have and if I’m just Jerod Morris over here creating a site, as I was before I joined Copyblogger–when you look at sites like Facebook, Amazon, and these really big sites where you have to log in and they create these great experiences–for someone like me, I look at it, and it just seems so intimidating from a technology perspective that it doesn’t really seem like something that’s attainable to me.

Yet that’s probably been one of the biggest shifts. It’s one of the reasons why this is so important to talk about now. As you mentioned earlier, with something like the Rainmaker Platform, it doesn’t need to be so intimidating. You don’t need to have some huge bank roll or these crazy technical skills to do this. It’s actually become pretty simple to create this kind of experience that we’re talking about.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting. If you’re a digital entrepreneur–which we hope you are since that’s the name of this show–you need these type of capabilities anyways to sell stuff. Whether you’re selling plugins, themes, courses, ebooks–you need a way to gate your intellectual property until someone pays you for it.

It’s already part of the game plan, but a lot of people’s minds open up when they understand how you can use this level of sophisticated permissions and what not that we have on the back-end, combined with marketing automation, to truly create an experience–not just to pay lip service to it.

Up Next Using Online Courses As Lead Magnets

Jerod Morris: Yeah. We talked about the access experience today. It won’t be next week, but when we resume this series, we’re going to talk about using online courses as lead magnets. Again, as you said, all of these elements are interrelated.

When we talk about the access experience, and we mentioned at the beginning, the importance of really giving people something worthwhile, giving them a reason to log in, well, this is where really delivering a good, a useful online course can be a great lead magnet as you start to build your membership site and create this access experience that can deliver you all of the benefits that we’ve talked about today.

Brian Clark: Yes. We’re talking about access, but access to what? Now we’re talking about, where are they on the journey? What’s the access point? What’s the intent? Mix that in with identity. You have to remember that great content marketing is giving people something worth paying for. People will pay for online education. We know that for sure.

Also, the best way to sell online education is to give them a free sample of that education. We’re going to talk about specifically why courses are the best way to determine that intent at the access point and then bring them along on their journey inside our environment–which is very powerful psychologically–then get them to the point where they realize that we’re the solution that they’re looking for.

Jerod Morris: Yep. Brian, since you can’t make it, I actually booked Donald Trump to discuss how he’s going to transition Trump University into a tremendous free online course next week.

Brian Clark: That should be very, very entertaining. Good luck.

How to Take Your Digital Commerce Education to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Thank you. Real quick, as we close up here, you listening, if you want to take your digital commerce education to the next level, I really suggest that you go get your free taste of Digital Commerce Academy.

Not only do you get seven free lessons of Brian’s course on building an online training business the smart way and Tony and Chris’ course on building automated marketing funnels, but you also get access to three incredible case study webinars with Nathan Barry, Danny Margulies, and Brian Gardner that really are must watch for any current or aspiring digital entrepreneur like you.

You’ll also get our weekly email newsletter as well, and as I said, it’s a free taste. Go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register, get activated, and get your free membership today. With that, Brian, I wish you a wonderful trip to the Philippines.

Brian Clark: I’m going to the airport. Hold down the fort for me.

Jerod Morris: I will do my best. We will talk to you next week on another episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

The Transcript

How Adaptive Websites Deliver an Exceptional Experience While Accelerating Profit

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur, everybody. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I am joined on this episode by Rainmaker Digital founder and CEO Brian Clark. Brian, welcome.

Brian Clark: Thank you, Jerod. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, which we do every day, day in and day out, but sometimes we record it.

Jerod Morris: That’s right. I feel like we should have been recording for the last half hour.

Brian Clark: Could have been good. Could have been bad. Who knows.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Last week on The Digital Entrepreneur we talked about email and were going through the five elements of the modern marketing website. In today’s episode, we’re going to hit the second one. We’re going to talk about adaptive content and how websites that can adapt their content are able to deliver an exceptional experience for an audience while also having a big impact on revenue and on profit as well.

‘Adaptive Content’ Defined

Jerod Morris: It’s probably useful to begin just by making sure everyone is on the same page with ‘adaptive content,’ what the term means, what it is. I think most people are, but just to be sure. It is the right piece of content at the right time for the right person.

One thing that you and I have discussed and debated a little bit is where the idea of responsive design fits into this idea of adaptive content. Obviously, there are differing opinions on this. When we talk about adaptive content, where do you see responsive design fitting into it?

Why Responsive Design Is the Bare Minimum

Brian Clark: So we led with email because email is still the transaction engine, the profit engine, for online marketing–specifically for digital entrepreneurs, but also across the board. Then, now, we’re coming to, what are you doing with email? What is its function?

When we talk about adaptive content, people may think, in one way, that we’re using that terminology, but you and I had a discussion where I was originally separating responsive design from other forms of serving up the right content at the right time. Ultimately, you had the better way of thinking about it, but maybe it helps to talk about an adaptive website.

What is a website, really? It’s delivering up information that people want. The adaptive aspect of it is those people need to get that information when, where, and how they want it. ‘Responsive design,’ in case anyone is not familiar with the term, means that the design–the layout of your site, of a page, of a post, whatever the case may be–adapts to the device that it is being viewed with.

The example that I always like here’s a great one because it was so ironic. I was invited to be on a radio show that’s about online marketing. I originally got the invitation on my phone, by email, clicked on the link, and it’s a disaster. I can’t read anything. Everyone has experienced this.

Everyone out there is probably using your smartphone. You’ve gone to a site, and it’s either a disaster or the print is just so tiny you have to use your fingers to stretch out a little bit of one area so you can read that part. That’s a lot of work. It has to be the beginning with the design, the wrapper, that your pages, posts, and other content is wrapped in.

If people can’t even show up for the first time on the device of their choice and have that site design, that website be smart enough to know, “Oh, you’re on an iPad,” “Oh, you’re on an Android phone,” and then adapt itself accordingly so that that content can be consumed, that desire, that intent that person had when they clicked–whether it be in search, social, email, whatever the case may be.

So you’re right. It really is the beginning of what we’re talking about with adaptive websites or adaptive content. Often, you don’t get past the first step if your design is not responsive.

Jerod Morris: Right. Again, this bare minimum, it ensures that whoever comes to your website will get it in a format that they can consume. If it was the same person coming to your website every single time or the same type of person with the same needs, you could have the same content for every person–but we know that’s not true.

There are different people, different buyers, different personas, that come to your website that need to be taken on a different journey–if you want to truly engage them. The issue, though, and where this idea of adaptive content on an adaptive website comes into play, is that too many folks make the mistake of treating everybody the same when we know that the buyer journey–every buyer journey-is unique.

How Every Buyer Journey Is Unique (Yet We Often Treat It As the Same)

Brian Clark: That’s absolutely the truth, and you broke it down into different personas. But we know from usability data and observation that even similar personas will take different steps on the pathway. It’s not even uniform in that way, so we often talk about personas, archetypes, or avatars in order to craft the right words–yet we’re still eliminating behavioral dynamics from the whole equation.

We have the technology to do this, and that’s why we are stressing that what looks cutting edge now is just going to flat-out be the norm. This is a huge shift in websites. Just like I’m telling you, responsive design is the bare minimum, and we still have people who aren’t doing that.

I’m saying that your competition who is employing these principles is going to kick your butt. I’m sorry. There’s no other way to put it. The experience will be so personalized, and this isn’t a treat. It shouldn’t be a treat. As you said, every buyer’s journey is unique, yet historically, and a lot of people presently, are treating it like it’s all the same path.

Jerod Morris: I think most people get that idea, and of course, an idea is nothing without the execution of it. That’s where actually being able to go in, map these journeys, start to plot it out, and put it together with content becomes so important. Let’s talk about some different aspects of journey mapping, the first one being conditional pathways.

The Three Aspects of Journey Mapping

Brian Clark: Yeah. Just to back up a second there, there is a discipline called ‘customer experience mapping,’ which really maps things from problem and desire, to prospect, to customer, to repeat customer or recurring customer, all of these things. It’s a broad discipline, but at the very base level what you’re trying to do is strategically map out the steps that are involved–as opposed to one linear step-by-step progression.

For example, marketing automation, old school, is just an autoresponder. We’d set up a sequence. People enter it. They all get the same message. It converts at X. But it does not take into account behavior whatsoever, and that’s fine. But it’s no longer going to be even minimally acceptable as far as what we’re doing.

There are really three aspects when we’re talking about adaptive content from a journey-mapping standpoint. Like you said, the first one is conditional pathways. You have a sequence of messages, links to content, or whatever the case may be with the hopes that, at the point when you make an offer, more people than not are going to accept it.

Yet like I said, the path is not linear. What do you do if you get someone involved in some sort of access opt-in that we’ve talked about–and we’ll talk about in more detail in the next episode–yet you find that only 50 percent of those people take the first step?

That’s a different journey right there for half of your people, yet you’re treating them as if they’re all on the same path. Well, the people who didn’t do anything at first are on a different path. That’s a different conditional dynamic that you need to think, “Okay, what kind of message does this person need?” We’ll talk in more detail with an example in a little bit, but you get what I’m saying here, right?

There’s not one path. There’s all sorts of paths that they can go by and still become your customer, yet you have to address okay, this is a good time for one of our favorite metaphors: the content marketer as mentor. They’re on a journey. They’re the hero. We’re the mentor. We’re the guide–and this, yes indeed, ties right back to the more mythical hero’s journey.

You’re not being a good guide if you give everyone the same directions even though some people are off in the woods. There’s a condition where you need to go hunt them down, pull them out by the hand with the right message, the right content, whatever the case may be, and bring them back in line with the destination you’re trying to get them to.

Jerod Morris: Right, so it meets what they need at that time. You can’t do that if you’re just giving the same thing to everybody. To get this right requires the leg work of just sitting down at a desk and charting out, “The person goes here. They make Choice A. They make Choice B. You’ve got a fork in the road, and they’re going in different directions now,” and then creating content that will meet them at the step where they need it.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It really is a choose-your-own-adventure-type exercise. It can feel a little daunting until you get into it. Then it’s cool, really cool, because you get really excited about the experience you’re able to create for people.

So first of all, you have to understand that there are conditional pathways. Then you have to do what we’ll call ‘dynamic mentoring,’ which is what I mentioned as far as steering them in the right way based on their actual behavior. Where do you get the ammunition to do this strategic exercise? Well, it’s good old-fashioned research. The thing we harp on over and over again.

Know your audience. Know your prospect better than they know themselves. You have access to a whole diverse group of people who go on these journeys. You probably do know them a little better than they know themselves–which some people can find spooky–but if you’re enhancing their journey, you’re enhancing their experience to help them meet their objectives. That also helps you meet your business objectives. That’s a win-win.

That’s the spirit in which we need to think about these elements because the third aspect of journey mapping is just recognizing that these are individuals, and this is an individual experience. Just about every one of them should be unique in the sense that the way they actually behave dictated the experience. Things worked out just like they needed them to based on reality and not your ‘funnel sequence’–which is some sort of static pathway that doesn’t exist as reality in any place other than in an optimistic marketer’s mind.

Putting the Pieces Together and Doing the Work

Jerod Morris: The other thing to keep in mind, too–because you mentioned this whole process can sound a little bit daunting, and it’s not like we want to sugarcoat it and say that it’s not–it’s going to require work. You’ve got to really get in there, do the research, do the work.

But the thing you find–and that I’m finding, certainly, doing it–is that, if you’ve been serving this audience for a while, then a lot of times–when we talk about this fork in the road where the person can either accept your offer or they don’t–the reason why they don’t accept your offer, you may have content already in your archive that you can use. That may be what that person needs right now. Them not taking that offer almost identifies, “Okay, which content that I’ve already created can I now get to this person?”

It’s not like each of these decision points and each of these moments where the content needs to adapt you have to create something new. You may have done a lot of that work. Now, it’s just putting together the pieces of this journey and figuring out what goes where. You’ll have to create some new stuff, but a lot of it you may already have.

Brian Clark: Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. The interesting thing that you mentioned there is directly on point–if someone’s not engaging, you either re-engage or you lose them. You don’t just plow through to your offer with a disengaged prospect. That makes no sense whatsoever. Not only does it kill your conversion rate, it annoys the person.

Why not send them on a path of realizing that they need a little bit more know, like, and trust? We talk about that all the time, but being able to actually know based on their behavior what their temperature is with our concentric circles that go from cold to warm to hot–literally, taking that person’s temperature based on their behavior and then warming them appropriately instead of just saying, “Ah, you’re all getting the same offer,” hammer-over-the-head-type situation.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so let’s run through a few examples of this, then. Let’s talk about how this works in practice.

How You Start the Process with a Free Course

Brian Clark: Yeah. The variables and the possibilities are as only limited by your own creativity and your knowledge of your audience, as you said. Now, the great thing about this is, the technology is not the hard part.

To do this stuff in the past was very, very, very expensive, and most marketing automation software is still at the enterprise level, costing thousands and thousands of dollars a month. That’s a big problem that we’re trying to solve with the Rainmaker Platform–same power, less hassle, way less expense–so don’t let that part of it intimidate you.

Here’s a very, very simple scenario that I know you’ll appreciate. We’re going to talk later in this series about why free courses are the best access-type opt-in or registration generator. Briefly, that’s because it gives you a very systematic and strategic way to concisely educate people into what they need to know to make their first purchase with you. Now, of course, it could be a subsequent purchase, too, but let’s use that scenario.

Person is a prospect. They’re qualified, but they’ve never done business with you before. You put them in your sequence–and, of course, with Rainmaker, you can drip out lessons with the LMS, tie that to email to make this a very carefully spaced out and delivered course–but what happens if they don’t take the first lesson? You’ll be able to see that.

What if they don’t take the second lesson? Should you just go ahead and plow through and keep delivering lessons and then make an offer? No, because you can tell that person went off path. They did not receive the education that they need to do business with you, yet you’re treating them like you did.

If you know that someone didn’t take the first lesson–again, you’re on a different conditional pathway–you need to bring them back, if at all possible, to actually experience that course. They asked for it. They registered for it, but things happen. Life happens.

So that’s just a very simple way of, instead of delivering lesson two when they haven’t watched lesson one, sending them a message that prompts them gently to take lesson one. You can do that however many times you strategically develop is necessary in order to get them back on the path.

Again, there are much more complex and creative variations of this, but just think about it from that very simple scenario. You understand your audience. You know they need to know A, B, C, and D, and then they’re likely to buy. But they don’t even get started, or they leave out a middle lesson or something. Stop. Quit forcing them on lessons that don’t make any sense because they didn’t do the first one.

Jerod Morris: That’s why pulling it out of online where it’s so easy to feel like, “Okay, we’re sending this email out to this group of 1,000 people,” instead of thinking, “We’re sending it out to 1,000 individuals.” When you think about it in that sense and when you think about yourself as the mentor for 1,000 different people instead of just the mentor for this big group where you’re trying to herd a group, you’re trying to bring individuals through the journey.

If someone doesn’t get the information they need to take the next step with you, like you said before, you’re not going to just yank them through and keep force-feeding them stuff they’re not ready for. Really thinking about your audience in terms of individuals and adapting this experience for individuals, but doing it in an automated way so that it’s scalable is so important and, really, is kind of a subtle mindset shift people need to make to be successful with this.

Brian Clark: Yeah, the individual experience is the whole thing. That’s how you bring people back in line with again, they expressed an intent to learn something or to solve a problem. It’s your job as the dynamic mentor to do your best to get as many of those people in that position. Maybe they don’t all buy from you, but that’s the process by which more people do.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Did you have another example that you wanted to cover in this episode, or save for next week when we talk about the access experience?

How You Accelerate the Profit Engine with Perpetual Promotion

Brian Clark: Yeah, this is some stuff that we’re working on ourselves, and it’s very fascinating. Again, remember the whole choose-your-own adventure. Well, they always choose their own adventure. It’s whether or not you’re staying in the adventure, or they’re going off to someone else.

But think about it. Let’s say, going back to the free course example, we have our conditional pathways, the dynamic mentoring messages that get more people where they want to go. Really, it’s not even back in line because there is no line. It’s the path that they’re going to follow.

Let’s say you’ve mapped that out, and it’s working more. You’re retaining and engaging more people, and they are educated to a point when you can do business with them. At that point, we generally will make an offer, but what do you know is the number one rule of promotions, Jerod, that they have to begin and they have to end, or people do not take action, correct?

Jerod Morris: Right, exactly.

Brian Clark: You’ve seen this. You’ve seen it upfront, live and center, for years now.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You’ve got to have urgency and scarcity.

Brian Clark: Yeah, but it’s got to be real. The quickest way to ruin your reputation is to use fake scarcity and gimmicky timers and countdowns when it’s not real. There have been creative technological solutions with cookies and whatnot, but if you’re lying, people are going to stumble upon that. It’s just not going to do well for you, so we never fake scarcity.

If we say it’s ending at 5:00 on Friday, which we often do, then that’s when it ends, but that’s old thinking in the sense that you’ve got to send that promo basically to your entire audience to get the impact that you want. You can’t just necessarily do that every month.

You could automate the promotion so that when people come to you, they’ve gone through the steps you think are necessary to educate them, and it’s time to make an offer, why not say, “Hey, we’re about to do a special promotion on this product”? It could be a gateway product, or it could be your main thing, depending on your upsell strategy.

You get someone to click on that and say, “Yes, I am interested in seeing what this promotion is.” You’re not making the offer yet. You’re actually building a launch list, a mini launch list, but remember that this is automated. When you do a typical product launch, Jeff Walker calls it a two-week ‘sideways sales letter,’ and we’ve taken that and know that content marketing itself is a perpetual sideways sales letter.

You get people to get on board, take the offer at various times, but when you think about it and this is, of course, the conventional wisdom in content marketing. That is, you show up every day with a new angle on the topic hoping to connect and resonate. Well, that can work, but what would work better without creating all that content where you get people into a certain funnel and you educate them?

Again, you know your prospect. You know your audience. You’re giving them great value, great education, but why not be able to do a promo as part of that funnel that truly does expire in five days like we typically do with our hands-on promotions? Then the technology truly makes it stop. It truly is taken away. Now, we take away things manually. There’s no difference, though, so you can create this perpetual promotion cycle.

Let’s say you’re using Facebook Ads. You’ve got your targeting down, you’ve got your ads optimized, and you’re getting a great opt-in conversion rate for your money. Then once they get into the funnel, you’re able to sell them, make that offer–at the appropriate time–but you’re able to add the incentive of a promotion that is not publicly advertised. It’s not the normal pricing.

It doesn’t even have to be priced. It could be a bundle. It could be some other hybrid offer that provides more value than the traditional out-there model. But we know that if you just leave it out there forever, you’re not going to convert as many–and why would you? Why would you leave an offer out there that is substantially better than your normal offer and just leave it out there?

It can’t, but in order to do that manually, you would be constantly overwhelmed by trying to manage the process of where are they in the funnel, this, that, and the other.

This allows you to automate the entire progress, the entire journey, culminate with a true scarce offer, and have it end if they don’t act, so you’re telling the truth. But you’re creating a very dynamic, testable, and scalable, as you mentioned, funnel to where it just runs–no matter when they start.
Here’s an example of what this type of adaptive content can do. Someone clicks on that link–this is just an example–that says, “Yes, I’m interested in hearing about this promotion.” Then the day they do that sets a trigger that says two days later the offer is presented. Then there’s another trigger that hits then that kills that offer in four days.

All the dates are dynamically inserted, and the offer ends automatically at the time you’ve designated. You can see the power we’re talking about here, and these two examples are really just scratching the surface.

Putting It All Together: A Scalable System to Grow Your Business

Jerod Morris: Yeah. In summary, you use the concepts of adaptive content and responsive design to create an adaptive website. Then you go in and use the journey mapping that you talked about–with conditional pathways, dynamic mentoring, creating this individual experience–to create an exceptional experience for the individuals who are engaging with you. Then you use this idea of perpetual promotion to accelerate profit.

The combination of those three really creates this scalable system, machine, whatever you want to call it, that not only gives people an exceptional experience when they engage with you, but gives you something exceptional, too. You’re making offers to people at the right time when they’re going to be more likely to take them–which is how you grow your business.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and the irony to me is that the hands-on, post-everyday-type approach is deemed to be more authentic, yet it’s not. It doesn’t deliver as good an experience. It doesn’t solve the problem as well for the person this all matters to, so you think about automation in terms of laziness or some sort of less-than-scrupulous behavior.

Yet if you are truly interested in creating the right experience for people–and again, it’s not going to be an option for much longer–then you should look at it this way. When you take that time to really map out the different conditional pathways and then coming up with those mentoring responses, you are being a better, I would say, just in general, citizen, certainly businessperson, certainly marketer.

If you can use technology and some upfront strategy to give people an experience that is quantifiably better than anyone else, isn’t that what we’re here to do?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and you’re saving people time, and you’re giving them something of value when they need it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and the fact that you make more money is just because it’s good business. It’s as simple as that.

How to Learn More About How Adaptive Content and Responsive Design

Jerod Morris: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. If you want more information on this, about all of the topics that we’re talking about on The Digital Entrepreneur, a great way to do it is to go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register, and you can actually get a free registration to Digital Commerce Academy.

For those of you who have been listening to the show, two weeks ago right here on The Digital Entrepreneur, we had Danny Margulies of Freelance to Win on the show. He told us this really great story of how he transitioned from this job that he couldn’t stand into becoming a six-figure freelancer and then how he leveraged that experience into building a powerhouse online course that made over $25,000 in revenue just in January of 2016. It’s a great story.

Danny is a wonderful guy, so you’ll really enjoy it from that aspect. More importantly than that, you’ll learn a lot and get some real insights into how he managed his digital business. You can watch that case study as part of the free membership at Digital Commerce Academy. That and you get some lessons in Brian’s course, some lessons in Chris and Tony’s course on marketing automation–all as part of this free registration, so go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register.

It takes you about 10 seconds to sign up. Once you’ve signed up, go in there, and you can start accessing your free content. As we move forward, you’ll start to see some examples of what we’ve talked about today with adaptive content and creating this experience and some of the mapping that we’ve done and continue to do. You’ll get to see some of it in action as part of that registration, part of that membership.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and again, the pre-taste that you’re getting over there hits on all the stuff we’re talking about–creating marketing funnels, creating online courses, how knowing your audience relates to all of that–but we’re really looking forward to putting together our own sequences, doing our own mapping based on our interactions with the people inside Digital Commerce Academy.

Then, of course, we’re going to pull back the curtain. We’re going to talk exactly what we did, how did it work, why do we think it worked, and how can you use it in your business.

Jerod Morris: Yep, absolutely. So next week, Brian, we are moving on to the third element of the modern marketing website, which is access experience–which will be a fun one.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting how much access is pivotal. It makes sense that it’s the middle element because it highly impacts the two topics we’ve already discussed, and of course, it highly impacts the last two–so good stuff.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for listening, and join us next week on another brand-new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Talk to you then.

The Transcript

How Email (Still) Creates the Profit Engine of Your Digital Business

Voiceover: You are listening to The Digital Entrepreneur. The show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. Brian Clark is back with us today on this episode. Brian, how you doing?

Brian Clark: I’m doing okay. I had a nice little tropical break, and apparently, you held down the fort while I was gone. That’s a good sign because I wouldn’t want things to fall apart or anything.

Jerod Morris: No, no. It was good. Danny Margulies joined us. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, go back and listen to it. It’s a fantastic episode that we did where Danny offered some more insight into what he talked about in his case study in Digital Commerce Academy. It was good. With his help, we held down the fort pretty well.

Brian Clark: Excellent.

Jerod Morris: What we did there is we subbed that episode in with Danny because, in episode two of The Digital Entrepreneur, you and I introduced this idea of the five elements of the modern marketing website. We broke down those five elements and then mentioned that we would be breaking them down individually on future episodes of The Digital Entrepreneur.

That is what you and I are going to start doing today. Again, just as a quick review, those five elements are email, adaptive content, the logged-in experience, online courses as lead magnet, and then test everything. We’re going to spend some time now, over the next few episodes of The Digital Entrepreneur, going through these one by one and breaking them down in-depth. We want to start with email.

It’s interesting, Brian, I did a webinar last week. It was about how to use a podcast to build an email list. We did a poll at the beginning. I was just trying to see who was building an email list already, who had started a podcast, who was doing both, and who was doing neither. Over 50 percent of the respondents were not yet building an email list, which really surprised me.

I feel like sometimes we come on here, and we talk about email is not dead, all those clichés, and take it for granted that people get that, but it still seems like there’s a lot of people out there who don’t get it or don’t trust email for whatever reason. That’s not a good mindset to have.

Some Impressive Stats to Remind You of Email’s Omnipotence

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting to me that some of our colleagues in the content marketing space really had an epiphany that, no, email’s not dead. Email is the thing. It is the first and foremost thing that should be on your mind when you’re creating content, when you’re thinking about traffic–well before you should be thinking about sales.

But here’s the thing. One of our favorite statistics when people try to say social media has or will kill email is that email remains the transactional engine of online sales. It’s not even close. The McKinsey report stated that email is 40 times more effective at converting prospects to buyers than any form of social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook. Those are the two big ones.

Not 40 percent, Jerod, 40 times. That’s astronomical. The other humorous thing that I always like to point out when people talk about social killing email or even the idea of that, which was never valid. But it’s really kind of laughable when you think about how much the social networks do email marketing themselves to get you back to the site.

If you’re not a believer, if you just happen not to like email yourself, you got to step aside from that and look at reality. This is the key thing that you should be focusing on–before sales–because this is what leads to sales.

Jerod Morris: The other thing, too, is that people seem to have this notion that, as more and more people started using their mobile devices to use the Internet, that email would start to go down and start to be less effective. That hasn’t happened.

Email is still very relevant in a mobile world. No one needs me to tell them stats on mobile proliferation. We know how quickly mobile phones are growing, both in the United States, even in third-world countries. Smartphones are growing.

The thing is, people use their phones for checking email. If you look at some of the stats just on email usage, and this one’s from Pew, it said 87 percent of people in the US use their smartphones at least once per week to check email–which actually sounds low to me, but it’s still a really high number.

But the one that really gets me is that 80 percent of smartphone users check their phones within the first 15 minutes of waking up. Four out of five check them before doing anything else.

Brian Clark: I know that’s me.

Jerod Morris: I know. And a lot of those people are going first to email. One of the things that people cited as why they use their smartphones so much is this sense of connectedness–some of the other ones: excitement, curiosity, productivity–and email remains one of the primary drivers of smartphone connectedness and productivity. It’s not killing email by any means. In fact, it’s making it easier to check email, and people are getting into their email even more.

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I also want to bring up that I did an episode of New Rainmaker last year talking about the myth that Millennials had abandoned email. It’s just not true. It is absolutely not true. Now, they are very, very tough customers when it comes to giving up their email address and about the value that you need to provide to keep them on your list.

That’s a big part of our point here in this episode of talking about, not just the importance of email, but how do you make it work? What is it that is going to get someone to trust you with that email address? What’s going to keep them sticking with you? That’s really what it comes down to.

Jerod Morris: Let’s talk about that then. Let’s talk about using email as the centerpiece of your content marketing. Because when we talk about content marketing and we talk about building an audience, you want your email to be the centerpiece of it.

Why Email Is the Missing Element That Creates the Profit Engine

Brian Clark: Yeah. You know that meme–it was big on Digg, and it’s probably still big on Reddit–where you have two items, a question mark, and then the last thing is profit? It’s kind of a way to exemplify that you’ve got a hair-brained scheme because you don’t understand the thing that comes in the middle.

It’s like content marketing is thought of as content, then traffic, then question mark, and then profit. Well, email is the missing element that creates that profit engine. That’s why it’s really the centerpiece of any smart content marketing strategy.

When we talk about content marketing, when we talk about the type of content that you need to create, what we’re talking about is information that has so much value to the intended prospect that it’s worth paying for. The other function of that content, beyond just value, is that it meshes with your business objective. It educates people in a way that makes them more likely to do business with you– plus all the know, like, and trust aspects that comes with it.

So you’ve got your content. Now you’ve got to get traffic to that content. How many times have we heard people have this ‘build it, and they’ll come’ mentality? No. Content needs distribution. It’s either going to be from search, it’s going to be from social, or you’re going to pay for your traffic.

That’s when you really start thinking about, “Okay, is this content the right content for the people that I’m trying to reach, and is it tied sufficiently to my business objectives?”

You can get all the traffic in the world and if they just stop by, then bounce, and go somewhere else–like people do–you’re done, especially if you’re paying for that traffic. You can retarget and all those kind of things, but the goal of all of that is to create a relationship based on permission, based on someone raises their hand.

This goes all the way back to the best and first marketing book I ever read, Permission Marketing, back in 1999 from Seth Godin. That’s the key to everything. The only thing we’re really trying to say here today is, the context is very different. It’s harder than it was in 1999. Trust me, that’s when I got started. People would sign up for anything. They would forward every email that was interesting to all their friends.

We live in a very different environment now, but fundamentally, everything is the same. It’s just the context and the mindset. The web has shifted to what is perceived as value and what’s perceived as likely to be spam. We really need to talk about in what context are we building an email list and how are we going to keep people on board.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Obviously, as things shift, then our mindset needs to shift. One of the biggest shifts, it seems to me, is this change from thinking about getting someone to opt-in to now where you’re really trying to get people to register. Of course, the difference is that, when someone opts-in, they’re on your list, and they get your emails. Okay, that’s fine. But if you can actually get someone to register, now it opens up a whole new world of an experience that you can give them.

The Importance of Going Beyond the Opt-In

Brian Clark: Yeah. This is a hypothesis that I had years ago from watching the mainstreaming of social media and watching how expectations and perception of value had really shifted. When you think about everything that’s really cool, everything that’s really valuable–it could be Google, Amazon, Apple, iTunes, all of these things, but especially Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn–what do you have to do? What defines your experience?

If you don’t register, you don’t get access to whatever that is. It could be Gmail. It could be Facebook, whatever the case may be. Then you have to log in in order to experience the benefits of whatever it is.

It was that observation years ago that changed my thinking. We eventually implemented this ourselves to test it out–and we’ll talk a little bit about that–but here’s the fundamental thing to think about: registration and access. This is the way the web works.

When people really want something, they’re going to register to gain access to the experience. What can you glean from that, in the context of email that makes people more likely to sign up? Every time you gain access to anything, all those examples I gave you, they’re going to email you. Again, going back to the social networks, they’re some of the biggest email marketers in the world. It’s the way that we access things of value on the web.

Going back to the other perception, the opposite perception, ‘opt-in to my marketing newsletter,’ is just perceived as, “Yeah, right. I’m either giving you a dummy email or one I don’t check, or I’m just leaving,” because people have been burned too often. Here’s the shift in context that I’m talking about from just a simple opt-in box on your site.

How the ‘Logged-In’ Experience Helps You Create Less, Convert More

Brian Clark: The other thing that’s going to permeate this entire series that we’re doing here is the importance of identity and that adaptive content. That’s one of our later lessons. On one hand, you want to be able to create less and convert more by having a higher impact experience for people–delivering the right information at the right time and all of that stuff.

But the identity piece is crucial. Again, Facebook knows who you are when you’re logged in. Google knows who you are. Identity. And when you start talking about adaptive content, which is a form of marketing automation and you’re talking about a mobile and cross-device world, the cookie approach to knowing that someone’s been there before is really flawed.

But with a registration-and-access concept, you’re able to use more advanced automation techniques. When they log in to the experience, you also know who they are, and you’re able to best deliver the right information to them based on their behavior.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. And it’s important to realize how big of a win-win this is. Whereas just going for a simple opt-in is easier, really on both ends of the transaction, it’s not nearly as high value. When you have someone register and you can learn more about them, as you said, you can create less, convert more.

Instead of having to throw 10 pieces of content at them and hoping that three stick, based on what they do, you know what three pieces of content to give them. It’s better for you, more efficient, more impactful, and it’s better for them. They’re getting exactly what they need based on what they’re doing, who they are, all of that. That’s why that registration–the ‘logged-in experience’–is such a better option than just doing the simple opt-in.

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. We’re going to explore this idea of adaptive content as one of our future elements. We’ll also talk about what we–after doing this for three years with the concept of access over opt-in and subscription–is the best thing to give access to.

It’s important not to confuse the distinction. Access can be an app. It can be a social network. It can be a content library. It can be a design template–all of these things that you can give people that provide value.

But later on, we’ll talk about why we are using free online courses. Remember, the content has to have value, but it also has to educate them to the point that they do business with. We know that the $15 billion online education industry is something people are worth paying for, but it also educates people.

That’s what good content marketing does. Having that sort of lead magnet is what allows you to really think through, “What do they need to know?” We’ll talk about that more later. Let’s stick just with the fundamental concepts of email using an access concept.

Three Illustrative Case Studies from Our Own Experience

Brian Clark: We first tried this in 2013. Before that time, we had a newsletter. It was standard opt-in, and it was called Internet Marketing for Smart People. Then we shifted that to a content library concept where we re-purposed. This was not new content creation.

A lot of content that we created over the years, we turned them into ebooks. We really upped the perceived value by formatting it for different e-readers and things like that. But it was fundamentally stuff that we had created before and was bringing in search traffic on these very highly targeted terms.

I’m going to put a link to the MarketingSherpa case study that was done on My Copyblogger a little bit after we had launched it. But the short story, shifting from an opt-in concept to an access concept raised our opt-in rate by 400 percent, and it persisted–and people stayed on the list. Having a hypothesis and seeing it come true that much is actually kind of surprising.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Well, and then, that was followed up with what you and Robert did with the New Rainmaker course. This was the precursor to launching the Rainmaker Platform where you guys started with the New Rainmaker podcast. Those episodes had really high production value in terms of the planning that it took, the script that you guys put together, and just everything that went into those episodes.

They weren’t just episodes that went out and then faded into obscurity in the archive of the podcast. There was a plan there to take those episodes, turn that into a free course, re-purpose that audio into a free course, add on a few webinars. Now that becomes the free course that is going to compel people to register and, with that, build a huge email list of people who had registered for this free course–which, ultimately, helped us launch the Rainmaker Platform.

Brian Clark: Yeah. And it still remains one of our primary sources of new customers for Rainmaker even a couple years later. That was the evolution of the access hypothesis–that it’s cool to give people all those ebooks, but it’s kind of unstructured. You don’t know if people actually consume them or not and those kind of things.

You’re right, though. Again, it was re-purposing content. Yes, we started a new podcast, but it served double duty. I knew that those first eight episodes were going to end up being a course.

What that forced me to do, going into a podcast with that understanding, forced me to say, “What do they need to know? How’s the best way to explain this content marketing thing?” That was where the whole ‘media not marketing’ thing came in. I got a lot of gratification out of that because a lot of people said the light bulb went off thanks to that course. If the light bulb didn’t go off, we’re not selling the platform right.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Even with Unemployable, which is a podcast, it’s also now a curated email newsletter, so the email is the feature there. It’s one of the main reasons, in itself, that you want people to sign up. But what I did was, while I was doing the initial six months of the whole project, just did three simple webinars.

Again, thought through, “What do I need to accomplish here? What do these people need to learn to take either their freelancing business or their entrepreneurial business to the next level?”–mapped it out, found other people to be my guests.

So I did the webinars. Then I re-purposed them into a course. You’re getting a theme here–never create content just once, if you can help it.

Jerod Morris: And we might be doing that right now.

Brian Clark: Oh, yeah, we may be doing that right now in a different way.

Jerod Morris: How meta is that?

Brian Clark: It’s interesting because we’re taking a slightly different approach here that I don’t want to talk too much about. It’s not as highly scripted as New Rainmaker was, but this is really a way of talking about core concepts in a way that we will continue to do over time and in different formats. As you said, all we have to do is get it down cold.

Jerod Morris: Exactly. Absolutely. So that’s email. Next week, on the next episode of The Digital Entrepreneur, we’re going to talk about adaptive content–which has comes up a few times in this, and as you see, going over these next few episodes, there is overlap between these. But that will be what we’ll talk about next week.

Brian Clark: People have to realize that these are not things that just live in isolation. Everything is integrated. Everything has to work together. So there’s always overlap if you’re doing something right, but at each step, you’ll expand on the core premise and really get to a broader understanding of what you need to do.

The Registration Idea in Action: The Digital Commerce Academy

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Speaking of this idea of registration, we just so happen to have something for folks to register for–which I mentioned on the last episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Again, on that episode we had Danny Margulies from Freelance to Win on the show, and he explained to us this transition that he went on from this soul-crushing job to becoming a six-figure freelancer and then how he leveraged that experience into building this powerhouse online course that just made him $25,000 in revenue in January of 2016.

It’s a great story–both for the human element because he’s just a really great guy and because of what you learn. What’s cool is that you can actually watch that entire case study that I did with Danny. It’s about 90 minutes, and it’s chock full of great stuff. Doing it, it went by so much faster than that.

But it’s part of the free membership option that we just launched at Digital Commerce Academy. To find out what that membership entails and to register in about 10 seconds, go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register.

Then you can get Danny’s complete story by watching the case study, which is called How Danny Margulies Turned His Freelancing Success into a Powerhouse Paid Course. Once you’re done with that, perhaps inspired to create your own course, you can navigate over to Brian’s course on building your own online training business, where you actually have several lessons available to you as part of the free membership as well.

Brian Clark: And don’t forget there are some free lessons on creating marketing funnels, which is very much tied to how you drive traffic onto lists. This is another example of the registration concept. In this case, you’re getting a free taste. That’s something that we really haven’t tried before. So we continue to experience, and we continue to report the results to you. That’s really the idea specifically behind this podcast, The Digital Entrepreneur.

Jerod Morris: So go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register, check that out. Then come back next week, and join us for another brand new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.