Amplifying Your Success by Focusing on What Works

What if the key to skyrocketing your subscription business lies not in chasing the latest trends, but in doubling down on what's already working?

Join me, Gary Redmond, on "Unbox the Inbox," where I unravel the secrets of email marketing success, drawing from my personal journey and transformative experiences. Discover how a pivotal shift in focus helped me harness the power of webinars by expanding my email list for greater conversion rates.

At BusterBox, we uncovered the magic of a direct, personal, and text-based email style, steering away from outdated graphic-heavy designs to achieve remarkable results. This episode is all about recognizing the strategies that deliver success and amplifying them to avoid the constant allure of the new and untested.

Explore the liberating idea that most people aren't scrutinizing your every move, allowing you the freedom to refine and repeat strategies that yield positive outcomes. Consistency, rather than relentless innovation, lies at the heart of sustainable growth.

By reusing and enhancing proven methods, you can attain ongoing success without the pressure of constant reinvention. Whether you're in the business of subscriptions or simply seeking effective tactics in your entrepreneurial journey, this episode underscores the power of focusing on what works and pursuing it relentlessly.

Tune in to gain insights that can transform your approach and lead your business toward sustained prosperity.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Growing Your Business With Email Marketing
• 10:19 Reusing Successful Strategies for Email Marketing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your subscription business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach, helping founders like me and you create your dream life through your online business. All right, so today I want to talk a quick enough episode, I hope. Today we're going to talk about a simple yet incredibly effective strategy for growing your business. This one sounds so obvious and I'm so guilty of doing the opposite, but basically the answer is to do more of what works. But so many people caught up so many of us, including me gets caught up in constantly searching for the next thing or the next trend, or trying several different strategies all at the same time and really not getting results with any of them. Not because of the strategy, but because your focus is so scattered. Okay, because we're always looking for the next thing, even when what we're already doing is getting results. Okay. So when you land on the winning formula whether it's a specific type of email, an ad or a a marketing strategy your best is to double down and do more of that, but this is very, very hard to do, okay, because I have so much experience with this over the years, not only in buster box but in like the coaching business and side business stuff like so, for example, a few years ago I was trying to, you know, get this coaching business up and running right and I was doing webinars. I think I might have mentioned this story before, but I was doing webinars and I was getting people to show up. People were watching the webinar all the way to the end and some people were buying my coaching and my course and stuff like that and I was like, oh yeah, that's, that's good, like I'm getting. I'm getting a few sales, like one, two, three sales, maybe four, probably in the best one that I got when I did a webinar, but it was never enough, like it was never like a game-changing amount of sales. So I ended up like trying all these different ways, like dms, messages, launches, um, like so many different things, different ways of selling, sales calls or whatever, and like I kind of got good at all of them. I suppose in a way it's kind of helped me in the future, because I do obviously know all these ways, but I didn't really make nearly as much money. Pretty much that I could have made if I just got really really good at doing webinars. And that's kind of one of the biggest lessons I learned and the reason why I wasn't getting as much sales as I wanted simply because my list was so small.

Speaker 1: 2:25

Okay, so I was focusing on getting better at selling when really I just needed to get better at getting people on my email list. Because if I was like the conversion rates on the webinar were gigantic, like I have an email list of like 500 people and like 50 people would register and then like 20 would show up, like 12 would make it all the way to the end, and then like 20 would show up, like 12 would make it all the way to the end, and then like three or four would buy. So like the amount of people that I had in my audience, like I was selling a large percentage, like all those conversion rates, like the amount of people registering from a small list, the amount of people showing up and the amount of people staying to the end and the amount of people buying were all gigantic conversion rates from each step of the funnel. So like if I had 12 people left and three people bought. That's one quarter of the people who were there. So I was just looking at it, completely wrong, and I was like, oh no, it's not really working that well. I'm going to go and spend two years trying to figure out all these other ways to sell when I really just should have got more people showing up. So lesson.

Speaker 1: 3:22

So again back to BusterBox and a recent example. Recently we discovered a new email style that's been working really well. It's super direct, personal and to the point and it's text-based rather than graphic-heavy. So what we did once we saw it was driving a lot of results, we didn't move on and try to find or go back to our graphic emails and say, and this stuff we've done in the past. We had this Joe Biden email that comes out every few weeks.

Speaker 1: 3:52

It's and the stuff we've done in the past like we had this joe biden email that comes out every few weeks and it's like another actually resource you can go to is mildcom, m-i-l-l-e-d and you can actually see. It's basically like an, an email spy tool, and you can see what other companies and like not even companies donald trump, joe biden and stuff we were looking at before. What kind of emails are they're sending? Okay, but basically it was like we discovered a really short email that joe biden had sent, obviously trying to get votes, whatever, a few years ago and it was like six lines long. And we tried it and it worked really, really well and we kind of just forgot about it. We went back to doing our graphic based emails and then kind of we bring that email back. Another tip actually mini tip is if something works, you can bring it back in a few weeks or a few months if you can't use it again right away. Okay, but anyway, that's not what I want to talk about.

Speaker 1: 4:30

So, with this new type of email that we're sending now, we saw that it was working. And then we said of like moving on and just kind of going back to what we did previously, we're like leaning into it a lot more and sending more and more emails in this style. And then we're like writing variations and writing things that are quite similar, and then we're resending the email that we sent the day before if it performed well, but adding like a FWD at the top and writing like a little note being like hey, did you catch it? Could you catch this email yesterday. It's really important you read this. It's it's I've attached it again below and like these are the types of emails. They're totally different to what we used to send like six months ago, even because we were all graphic based. You know, really sexy, get the offer in there. That was all working really really well for a point in 2022, even in 2023, but this year it's kind of seemed to die down.

Speaker 1: 5:15

I think people are looking for more authentic and just sort of I don't know just more. I don't know just a graphic based, polish based emails. They're still fine, they still do get sales, but, um, this kind of is something that we're seeing is working quite a lot better. Okay, but it's just the lesson really is like, when we saw that it was working better, we just kept sending them over and over not the same email, not the exact same email. You were either making changes to to the content slightly, but we were writing more emails very similar to the ones that were working.

Speaker 1: 5:43

Okay, and I know this sounds obvious and maybe it's like what a boring episode, that's like so obvious, but it's something that doesn't really always happen, because if you keep experimenting and you kind of move on from something it's hard to spot too because, like for me, it's great looking back two, three years later and saying the webinar thing, like that was that was the wrong thing to do. But it didn't feel wrong at the time. It was like, oh, I should just, you know, sell a different way. I can get more sales that way. So what you want to look for is, like you might not notice it straight away. Okay, obviously, for us, we noticed it with the email, like it's got a lot of sales and we're like, oh, let's do more of that.

Speaker 1: 6:17

But sometimes you need to think about the conversion rates. Okay, so if you have a small audience or a small list and a particular email gets three sales and you're used to only getting one, you know it might not seem like a game-changing amount to get three, but it's three times what you normally get. Okay, maybe that's a bad example, but sometimes it's hard to see and it's it's something you need to just try and identify. That's something that works to a to a decent level. You look more conversion rates rather than total number of sales, if that makes sense. Okay, because, like I said, if you said if you get three, you usually get one, that's three times 300% what you usually get, so it's pretty good, okay.

Speaker 1: 6:53

So the way to kind of systematically do more of what works is to try and look at your data and look for signs of success. Okay, whether it's a higher open rate, okay, increased clicks on an email or an ad, or obviously, conversions are easy to see. But if we don't have conversions, you move, move back up the funnel and look at the conversion rate. So, like, say, with the email example, if you sent an email out that got a really high click through rate, it means that email that really email really engaged whether it was design or the design or the copy a lot higher percentage of people click that one than usual. Okay. Or, if not, go back up and look at the open rate.

Speaker 1: 7:29

Okay, and look at, maybe, the subject line for this email. Like, this email got opened 20% more than all the rest of our emails. Okay, what was it about the subject line that worked? How can I do more of that? Okay, what was it about if it was the click-through rate? What was it about that email that got a lot of clicks?

Speaker 1: 7:44

Okay, and if you don't get any sales, obviously you can look at your website and look at the conversion rate and see if there's anything you can learn or anything you can improve to actually get more conversions, whether it be your offer or whatever. I've talked about it before. So another thing that you can do which helps I know I talked about AI a week or two ago, but what you can also do is uploads things to ChatGPT. Okay, so, like, let's say, you got an email that got a really high click-through rate or ran out or whatever. What I like to do sometimes is just like upload it to ChatGPT and say why do you think this worked really well? And this would give you some ideas and some frameworks and figure out the psychology behind why it worked and then you can try and replicate it in future campaigns. Okay, again, you could also upload the entire funnel metrics.

Speaker 1: 8:28

Okay, this email got a high open rate. This email got a high click-through rate, but it didn't get any sales. Why do you think that is? And it will tell you. More than likely, if it has any brainpower, which I'm sure it does it will say that the email, wherever you sent them, didn't convert. Okay, so I would look at the landing page. So one final thing you can do is actually you can ask it okay, if this worked and this worked and this worked three different emails, for example hey, can you make me a template based on these emails and you can actually refer to that going forward and you can apply the same structure and tone and style to your future emails, and that's how you can keep that winning formula going strong. So I just final note is you'd be surprised how many times you can reuse something that's proven successful and it will continue to work. So many people, especially in the beginning, think I've already said that I've already done that like we'll literally, like at least once a week, we'll roll out an email that worked three months ago and just send it exactly the same way again. So, like, it's just about taking feedback from your successful campaigns and replicating them and finding and refining as you go.

Speaker 1: 9:33

Okay, so don't like fall into the trap of thinking every marketing effort has to be new. Like, most of the time, the key to growth is just doing more of what's already working, and that means recycling content, slightly tweaking content and bringing back offers that work well, like even for us. Like you know, there is a certain amount of time where your offers kind of needs a break, okay, or or, or, for whatever reason, just people stop engaging with us. You take it away for a little while to let your email list or whatever, or whoever your audience or social media audience, your ad traffic, whatever, like see some different offers and then you bring it back. For example, our dog bed is really good for most of our sales, but sometimes it goes stale. So we take it away for a while and then we bring it back two weeks later, a month later, and it gets more sales again. So often it's just cycling things out so you don't get stale as well.

Speaker 1: 10:19

So that's it for today's episode. I hope that wasn't just a whole lot of general tripe. It makes sense to me, but it's very, very easy to you know, kind of run around in circles and just do different things. So if you find something that works, hope I've given you some some ideas and just at least a pointer in how to replicate your success and at least let you know that you can reuse things over and over again. No one is paying as much attention to you or your business as you think. So if you enjoyed this episode, please let me know, subscribe, share and rate, and if you have any questions, reach out to me in the Subscription Box, success Facebook group and let me know if there's