Today we share a presentation from a panel of experts including Andy Stickel, Anneke Godlewski, Gary Burger and Jim Hacking on email marketing tip, tricks and strategies from MaxLawcon 2019.
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Transcript: “Email Marketing Strategy” with Andy Stickel, Anneke Godlewski, Gary Burger and Jim Hacking
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Unknown Speaker
Today, we’re throwing it back to a presentation from Max law con 2019. In this episode, our panel of experts discuss email marketing, tips, tricks, and strategies. Let’s get to it.
Anneke Godlewski
Email marketing is what kind of what it sounds like you send an email to your people. But the way I personally like to define it is finding interesting things that you think your audience or your clients, even your colleagues and your friends would enjoy reading, and sending them these great tidbits of information. Personally, a lot of the people that I try to help with their own email marketing, we we really like to focus on storytelling and talking about all the wonderful people in your own life and highlighting their great greatness to others
Jim Hacking
into your great email marketer, you email very frequently talked to us a little bit about your mindset with email marketing,
Andy Stickel
my philosophy with email marketing is a little different than most people’s, what I try to do in my marketing is I email every single every single day, if you’re on my email list, you’re gonna get an email from me. And what I found is that I actually have a higher open rate than the industry average is my my open rates about 30%, which is a really high number for emails. And the way that I do it is I make sure that every single and I kind of talked about in my presentation, but I always try to make sure that I’m always solving some sort of small problem in my video. So my subject line is something that’s basically do you have this problem, and then I’ve got like, you know, two or three lines that are basically talking about the problem, and hey, in this video, you’re gonna learn the solution. So it’s basically all curiosity based, and it’s all solving a problem that they have. And it works really well. And I do it every single day, because I know that I only get 30% open rate, which is high, but that means that 70% of people that get my emails, don’t open it on any given day. So if I were to email like, once a week, for example, then I’m only reaching 30% of my list once a week, but because I email every single day, it’s a different 30%. So I’m actually reaching people multiple times per week, even if they only see me once or twice a week. And because I provide value and basically just tell them how to solve a problem. And I don’t actually Pitch Anything, then nobody seems to mind that I do it every day.
Jim Hacking
Gary, talk to us about what Andy just said about not pitching anything. Do you think that’s important?
Unknown Speaker
Out of hundreds of emails that maybe I said that I co counsel with other lawyers in cases once or twice, that’s not the message, they don’t care. Everybody else says that you get every other message, every other ad saying, Here’s my greatest million dollar verdict and send me cases and it’s about me, me, me. No. So I don’t sell anything. I just talk. I just talk about myself. And my family and I in my life. And I talk about my I talk about different legal stuff, but I balanced the two, but I never sell people know what I do. And they know it’s subtle. You want to develop good real relationships. That’s the point. Whether it leads to business is secondary.
Jim Hacking
Let’s take a hypothetical newer lawyer like my man, Matt from Texas, let’s say Matt wanted to start doing regular email marketing. What if if he were sitting up here with us what would be your advice to him as far as how to build an email list?
Unknown Speaker
Well, that’s the first thing is get your list together. And you sit there and you go, you go through first name, last name, and you do email list and you work at it and you make sure it’s right. And that’s your any market before you go outside to market. You got to get your house in order and get in internally, I’ve spent a lot of time on my lists, and I redo them and I revisit them and then you want to you’re gonna tag you’re gonna say you want to tag them or mark them in terms of what relationship you have with them what’s tagging Well, it’s in different email marketing system. So you are you lawyer they a client, they a new client, are they a former client? Are they a friend, I have lists I have like my fundraiser friends that I have a list for I have my Christmas list friends, I have my lawyers, I have this and I don’t parse it out like some folks do. Because as I’ve done these email newsletters more, I found that although initially I wanted to do different ones, my messages are universal. So when I write I want to write whether it’s a lawyer or a client, whoever I want to talk to them the same way I don’t want to dumb it down for non lawyers and I don’t want to be not do personal stuff to lawyers. I want it to be a universal message.
Jim Hacking
And you have a you What would your advice be to man?
Andy Stickel
Well, I’m a little bit different. What I try to do is I build my list just basically by kind of trying to find a kind of river As engineer my audience, like so, for example, we have a motorcycle attorney right now he’s trying to get clients that have been in motorcycle accidents. So what we did is we kind of reverse engineer and we’re trying to build a list for him. So we basically thought, Okay, who are the types of people that you most want to market to? And what we determined is that people that are ages 45 and older, are typically his best clients in terms of motorcycle accident. So we think, okay, what is a 45 year old who rides a motorcycle, what are they interested in. And we found that people that are over the age of 45, they get in more accidents than younger people, even though younger people are usually more more risky. But the numbers show that 45 And up is who actually is getting into more serious accidents. And they’re really interested in safety. So we created a guide that we at run Facebook ads to, and it says download our free guide, that’s going to show you seven things you need to know before the next time you get on your motorcycle. So they click on the ad, they enter their information. And now they’re on the list. And that’s how we build an email list for him. And I think he’s paying I think we’re at like 85 cent opt ins right now for him. So he spends like 3040 bucks a day, I can’t read what the budget is. But every day, we’re actually targeting the right audience using Facebook targeting. And then we bring them in by helping them again with like a solution to a small problem. So we give this free guide that teaches them how to stay safe on their motorcycle. So it’s an active audience. And it’s a really good way to build a campaign if you don’t have a following because most people out there don’t want to get started because like, well, I want to start but I don’t nobody knows who I am. So it’s fine. Nobody knew who I was either. I just started running ads and people and providing value. And then people started knowing who I was. So that’s the way that I run that I build my list. I’m up to about 10,000 lawyers on my list. He’s I mean, we’ve been running for a couple couple weeks now. And he’s already over like 500 people that ride motorcycles that are over the age of 45 on his list. So that’s how I do it just just through Facebook ads. And like
Jim Hacking
any other thoughts on building a list?
Anneke Godlewski
Yeah, well, I think one of the most important things to do before you start an email newsletter is to figure out what your own firm’s main core message is. So in the conversations I’ve had with countless attorneys, they always, you know, you always hear the same thing. I’ve been practicing for 35 years, I went to this law school, these are my verdicts. Well, most people don’t want to have to hire an attorney, you’re automatically at a disadvantage, because nobody really wants the problem that they’re dealing with. So until they’re dealing with that problem, you know, all attorneys kind of seem the same. So how do you differentiate yourself, before someone has the problem that they need you for, you’re going to want to stay in front of them, you know, brand awareness that Email Marketing provides, I mean, obviously, it’s very good. And you’re, you’re constantly touching people ahead of time, so that when they do need you, they remember you. Well, you have to be memorable in the message that you create. So you don’t want to talk about your vertex. And you know how long you’ve been practicing things like that, that’s a given. Those are, everybody should have those things in their back pocket on their website. But your overall message of wanting to help others wanting to give back wanting to care about humanity in the first place, will set you aside. So how do you create that message very concisely and attach it to your own personal story about why you became an attorney is important to figure out first, so that that tone, and that theme can be kind of underlying in every email that you send out. So it’s kind of that extra level of awareness, I guess.
Jim Hacking
And he talked to me a little bit about the interaction, like trying to start a conversation with people through your email, Have you have you used that as a tactic? Is that sort of part of your mindset is how do I get people to engage or you just look into broadcasts and don’t really care if you get feedback,
Andy Stickel
I typically. So my goal is not necessarily to get people to read my email. My goal is to get people to open my email and do something else, like, open my email, and then click on the video and then go watch my YouTube channel, and then subscribe on YouTube. Or, you know, go to my Facebook, a Facebook group and join my Facebook group. So I’ll encourage, I’ll encourage action that way. But I don’t really write long emails, my emails are usually like, very curiosity based. So you know, it’s like I did something the other day about website sliders about how if you have a website slider, which is where the image on your header, if it changes and changes and changes, it kills your conversions. So I did an email the subject line, do you have this conversion killer on your website? And then the, the body of the email was something really short, like a lot of lawyers have this one feature on their website that if they remove it would probably double their new clients or whatever I said, something that makes you look at that and be like, Oh, wait, do I have that on my website, so then you have to watch the video. And then from there, the reason I do all video instead of blog posts and things like that is because I want people to kind of start developing a relationship with me, where they, they hear my voice, they see how I talk, they know my mannerisms. They they know that I say all the time, you know that kind of stuff, you know, and when that starts happening They start building a relationship with me. Like I tell people all the time and say I’ve watched you know, hundreds of your videos, I feel like I know you already. So that’s kind of how I get that interaction. It’s basically and then whenever someone comments or anything like that, I always make sure to leave to respond and all that stuff. But it’s more basically trying to use that interaction to get them to do something else that will then you know, build a relationship where they kind of look at me as kind of the someone that they know, Gary, what
Jim Hacking
what do you think about when you’re working on your subject line, and when you’re working on your content as far as trying to get interaction, they don’t
Unknown Speaker
care about the law, they care about your personal stories, different things that happen to that’s the key? That’s the short answer. Can I answer your other question better, too? Sure. So I do all kinds of stuff to make my list. Everybody that you touch, everybody, you interact, they go into your list, you put their stuff in and you reach out to them, you have you develop a system in your office where you have people collecting your old emails, hey, to every other defense lawyer we’ve interacted with in the last three months, I want them in there, I want them tagged as this let’s get it done report to me. You have spreadsheets, we go through, we get new lawyers admitted to the bar, we put them in people on this list of people here that I interact with I sent we had I was a group email with the speakers. And I did this yesterday, I said, I want all the speakers, I want you to find them, I want you to put them on the list I want you to and then we’re going to then what I’m going to do is I’m going to go and I’ve met all you I’m going to go Google review you guys and I’m going to ask you to Google review me. So that’s a little bit off. But but so that’s what I do with my list on the interaction. It happens all the time. The person who I’m a speak scuba diver, and I do scuba diving stuff. And the divers talk to me, I take care of bees, the bee people talk to me, I have a family and the kid likes my pictures. My the let’s go blues, the blues are playing different PE resin just like in life, you talking to Ana, because different stuff resonate with this. And that’s what we talk about, it’s the same thing through an email conversation.
Anneke Godlewski
I think a lot of times if you have a call to action in the subject line or in the preview text, so you know, if you open if you’re scrolling through your phone, most of us read emails on our phone, I mean, let’s face it. So you see the subject line. But then there’s two or three lines of preview text that you can’t see once you open the email, but you can see it while it’s in the feed. So if you have a subtle call to action, that’s still interesting. That makes a difference. Like for instance, we do weekly email with Don and Edith McClure throughout Houston, it’s called the Friday five. And it’s literally five things that is going to help your life in some way. Sometimes it’s kitchen hacks, like one kitchen hack, it’s how to save money, it’s how to teach your kids about goals. It’s how to you know, we always do pepper in you know, one about what to do if you’re injured in a car accident, or you know, something related to the firm. But it’s just interesting stuff. So, but we use the Preview text for to give a little teaser of what’s going to be in the email enticing people to open. And we pair it with video. So they do this weekly video, and everybody gets excited to see what they’re gonna do next. It’s fun.
Jim Hacking
Alright, so let’s talk about drip campaigns and about the power of tagging. So Gary talked about tagging. And last week, Tyson and I were with a bunch of lawyers for Gary CLE. And when we were talking to them about email and marketing, their eyes sort of glazed over. So I think that our group here is a little bit more sophisticated. But let’s talk a little bit about what you can do with tags and how you can separate out your list or have particular campaigns like for motorcycle accidents,
Andy Stickel
I don’t do a whole lot of tagging. I mean, I kind of like for for Okay, so for my personal stuff, I’m mostly targeting lawyers. So what I suppose I could do is I could take the same approach that you take where you’re you’re sending, you’re tagging different types of you know, personal injury lawyers go in one sequence, you know, immigration attorneys in another sequence. But I don’t do a whole lot of that. But that’s definitely one way you could do it. I’m a big fan of kind of keeping things simple. So I’ll use tags, and then I’ll create and it’s a little more advanced, but like I use something called Active Campaign, which is really easy to use once you kind of figure it out. But what you can do is what I do with tags, and I do this for our clients I did for myself is I’ll send the same emails, but then I’ll put things in the in the footer of the of the email that are tagged dependent. So when someone buys a copy of my book, for example, if they have not bought my book, then I have a piece in the footer that’s going to say if they haven’t bought the book, show them this this line that says you know Did you know I have a book out and then once they buy the book, they get tagged as a book buyer. And then I have and then the email the same email, it’ll say if they have bought the book if their tag book buyer, then show them the line to join my Facebook group or whatever I’m doing that way. So I don’t actually do new emails, but I’ll use tags for subtle things so that you’re not seeing promotions for the same products that you’ve already purchased. So that’s a good way to do it with Laura’s it’s a little different. You could maybe go into man able to tag people as client versus non client. And you can put in your footers if they’re a client, you know, you want it to say this, if they’re not a client, you want it to say that that’s probably the best way that I would do it. And then you know, there’s a million different things you can do if you’re creative with it. But that’s kind of how I do it.
Anneke Godlewski
Yeah, so I have to give a shout out to the law man, Bill Romanski, in Orlando, Florida, because he is like the king of tagging, he has totally organized his email newsletter list, which has, I want to say upwards of 20,000 people on it. And he has everything from his rotary people, to his British people, to his French people, clients, old clients, new clients, it’s awesome. So he does emails targeted to each of those different groups, based on you know, the different subject matter. But one thing that we also like to do is we take his regular newsletter, his monthly print newsletter, and we digitize it, so we give out an electronic version of that same thing. And he but bit the fact that he hasn’t so organized, a let’s allows us to not send that regular E newsletter to the people that are overseas, it won’t just won’t make a lot of sense. So, yes, think about tagging in terms of like, what message you want to get in front of people. But also, there might be some messages that you don’t want to go to some people. So think about tagging in that, you know, in terms and those terms as well, because sometimes you just, you don’t want them to get that same message for whatever reason,
Unknown Speaker
I have 27,000 people, I also have my class action lawyer. So I have probably set 6000 People tagged in a different class. And so as I’ve managed that class, they’re all tagged that way, I don’t mark it to them otherwise, but I send them updates on this on a class action case. If I bring in a new client, they’re automatically going to be tagged, everybody has tagged as a new client, they get about five or six emails over eight days because I want to fight buyer’s remorse. And I want to it’s videos, it’s connecting to videos, it’s connecting to to do’s it’s email, it’s that these are who are working for you. And then they’ll go into a sequence of auto slip and fall med mal general PII and then over then, then the over about six months, they’ll get 3020 to 30 day emails. So by the end of the time, they’re done trading, they I’ve educated them on auto slip and fall these other things and they, and they’ll send it back and keep me updated on your medical that kind of stuff. That’s in addition to the newsletters that they get bi weekly, I do it every other week. Email, I know you do a weekly one. People don’t remember the time the timing of it, though. It’s funny. So I do tag in different ways. But there’s some tagging thoughts.
Jim Hacking
I believe the cardinal sin of email marketing is being boring. Can you guys talk about being boring or talking too much? I mean, we talked we’ve talked a lot this morning already about talking too much about yourselves. But just generally, Andy, if you had clients that were maybe a little too boring, or how do you sort of spot it? What do you say to him? How do you encourage them to get away from that?
Andy Stickel
Yeah, I always tell people that, you know, and Annika touched on this, also, nobody wants to hire a lawyer. At the end of the day, nobody, you know, they want the benefit that hiring a lawyer brings them. So somebody told me I heard analogy, where if holes dug themselves, no one would ever buy a shovel, you know, so you’ve got to stop making it about yourself. And like she said, nobody, you know, it’s like, awards are great and everything, but nobody cares. At the end of the day, people just have problems, and they need solutions to the problem. So the way that I do it all the time, by the way is I just use I, I’ll leave with curiosity. And I’ll have it be a solution to a problem that I know lawyers have. And that’s like, if you look at my book, my book is called How to Get More law firm clients without losing time and money or getting screwed by a marketing company, who here can relate to that title as a lawyer. So like, I’ve done my research, I know my clients I know my clients want are not just my clients, I know who my art, I know what my audience wants. So I know my audience. And when you speak when everything you do, it’s kind of like that, that’s kind of the grand theme of everything that I do is how to get clients is how to do it without wasting time how to do without wasting money, and how you’re how to make sure that you never get screwed by a marketing company again. So everything that I do kind of falls within one of those types of things. So I know that’s what people want. And then I give them that. And that’s how I put that in the subject combined with some curiosity. And it works really well.
Unknown Speaker
Though I learned not to be boring because I’d send an email and Jim had sent me one and said, That’s really boring. So I learned from messing up and you can learn it. You can look at your open rates. You can look at what people are who’s interested in what you can learn how to you’d learn how to do a subject line. Never when I do an email, I never have a paragraph that’s more than four lines. And most of the times there’s three Jim does a sentence a paragraph, you intersperse with pictures, I do talk about myself, but I don’t talk about my I talked about cool stuff that I do. I try to talk about universal stuff that I do. I my last email I got I got rear ended and I had to chase the person down and I and I and I and I chased him I took their picture and it was great. Yeah And so that and that kind of a car crash where I’m like, Are you kidding me. And so and you know, and so I just tried to do interesting stuff, but I also don’t do it too much. And then I have I have, my wife will read it before I send it and she’ll be like, whatever. So I’ll change it now, and then I do legal stuff. But you got to talk about the law in an interesting way that’s universal, so that if you’re a divorce lawyer, and I’m talking about a personal injury case, issue, you still get the lesson. And I also talk about my failures too, as a lawyer, because we learn from our failures too. And people like that, too. I had the second biggest verdict in Missouri last year. But I also had the fifth worst defense verdict against me, I got a I got defense verdict and a med mal case. And that happens if you try cases. And so Mike, one of the favorite thing I was was the successes and the failures, and people love that. And when people come up and get my email, they don’t talk about anything about the law. It’s about the BS of the dive into this or that. And then the one other thing, though, is, when I’m settling cases, and talking to other lawyers, I do these emails to everybody in this community. And so everybody knows it. So I they when we’re talking about confidentiality and stuff, I joke that I said, No, I’m not doing confidentiality, and you’re gonna begin my Monday email.
Andy Stickel
Can I can I say system? Sure. That’s actually a really good point is if you talk about carrot, like character flaws a lot of people want to make make themselves seem perfect. And what I found is that I, I get better feedback on the videos where like, my dog is barking in the background, or my daughter’s like crawling through the back trying to not get on camera, and she’s clearly on the camera. You know, like, those types of emails, those types of videos, when when that type of stuff happens, it shows you that you’re a real person, because everybody nobody’s perfect, you know? And like, what do you call perfect people. And when you’re a kid, you call them goody two shoes, nobody likes perfect people, because you can’t relate to a perfect person. So exactly. If you tell stories, like you know that you’re not perfect, and you show your vulnerabilities and you show your you show that not everything you do is 100%. I think people relate to that a lot better than you get better results.
Anneke Godlewski
Two things. One, always have a running list of things that you think might be interesting to talk about. Good examples in the front is the Friday five, when I’m scrolling through Apple news in the morning, when I wake up, if there’s an article that just I click on, because it’s interesting to me, or if I feel like it could be interesting to some of my clients readers, I keep a running like Friday five file. And I always have these links to interesting articles that might come up later, you know, weeks later. And to on that same list of ideas. Think about the things that you’ve talked about during the day, who you’ve interacted with what your kids have to say at the end of the school day, what a problem might be that they dealt with, or you know, a story that your grandma told you when he went to visit or at the nursing home, like all of those things that you would find interesting in conversation with other people keep a running list of those because they might come in handy for email newsletters later,
Jim Hacking
this week about defeats I, I’d sent one out a couple weeks ago after I did the Tough Mudder. And I talked about how last year I ran up the wall and slid down the wall ran up the wall. And I’ve got more comments about the failures on the wall than the actual success. So that’s good stuff. All right. Now, when we had our meeting, I believe it was you Andy, somebody talked about the Seinfeld sequence. Was that you? Can you talk about that?
Andy Stickel
Yes. So the Seinfeld sequence is basically it’s kind of the idea that like, you basically take something that’s not related to anything that you do and relate it to, to the law, basically, or to your practice area, or some sort of lesson. The idea comes down to that with Seinfeld, those episodes, were really never about anything, you know, so like, what you can do like, like, if I was going to write an email for Jim, I would write an email talking about, you know, it would start with a picture of Jim covered in mud at the Tough Mudder you know, or was it a sports store was it was it tough mudder. So it was, you know, and and if you have, if you have a GIF of him going up and sliding down and going up and sliding down, they just play it over and over, that’d be better. But you basically say, you know, I did this thing today, I’ve never done it before. And I ran up the wall, and I slid down, and then I ran up the wall, and I slid down and I looked around and everybody was kind of I was like, I gotta make it over this wall. And that reminds me of this case that we had a couple of weeks ago, where, you know, the client of ours, you know, they were trying to file for this, this visa, and it got denied. And, you know, they they so what we did is we went to this next step, and we try this other thing. And we tried again, and we tried really hard and we worked, you know, all this time, and it got denied again. And then finally we did this, this this and they finally got over and we finally got over the wall, you know, and I felt and I couldn’t really exactly, you know, so like, and I’m just coming up with it. I mean, if I was actually if I was actually writing this out, it’d be better. But you can take that story. And you can relate it to applying over and over and over again until you finally get over the wall. You know what I mean? And like stories like that, especially when it’s related to you and relate it to something that happened to you, if you have pictures to even kind of support it. That just works really well and then you know, so it’s just basically take anything that happens in your daily life and relate it to something that’s some message that you want To get to the to people, instead of just saying, you know, we will file appeals on your behalf if this happened, you know, tell a story and relate it to somebody.
Jim Hacking
I’m like, can you talk a little bit about lawyers telling clients success stories in their newsletters.
Anneke Godlewski
So instead of coming right out, and just saying, oh, this person had these wonderful, great things to say about me, one way that we kind of tried to turn the tables just a little bit is we focus on what their worry or stress or was, before, they even thought that they needed an attorney. So immediately after the accident, not only did you feel physical pain, but you were freaking out, you couldn’t sleep because you couldn’t figure out how your bills are going to be paid. Since you couldn’t work. You didn’t really know what to do, because you had nobody to help take care of you. And you know, your wife was working and your kids are still screaming, and they’re still hungry, and you still need to go about your life. What are all the worries, right? Then? What was it that made you make the decision to call the attorney? Was it a friend or a family member or, you know, a review that they might have read? And then how is their life different after the fact you know, how has, how have things changed from then until now, you leave that middle portion about how you helped kind of vague, because that’s assumed that the only reason that you’re able to tell the story is because they were your client, and they helped. So in a roundabout way, you are sharing the testimonial, but you’re putting the focus on the client, and their stress and their worry, and it’s coming off as more caring. But you’re also kind of tooting your own own horn in a in a roundabout way, but keep the focus on the client, Gary,
Unknown Speaker
I tell the clients stories a lot, my message is, I do talk about what I do, because it’s important. People think that if you get hurt or something they should pay you. And that’s just not true. We fight so hard to get these folks full compensation for their injuries. And you’re fighting against these the the big insurance companies, that kind of stuff. And so, you know, I want the message to be it’s not about what I did necessarily, because there’s other great lawyers, but that we took the fight, we took it to the mat, I hate you get into What’s your why to when you do these things, like I hate bullies, and I hate the little men getting bossed around by these big companies, insurance companies. And we stand up to them when we empower them. And, and we show that it was hard, and it was a long battle. But we did get it and we take offers you I’ll put a picture of the offer letter of $1,000. And then I’ll say how we got them the policy in them and $100,000 settlement. So we show tangible results. And I do these videos to where so that people because when people are hurt on it because right and is that they have that’s highly stressed, they all face similar things if you do enough of these cases. And so it’s a universal message. And so you want to teach either through your videos or through your messaging, you want to teach the public that they have rights, and then they can stand up and that lawyers facilitate that and are their champion.
Anneke Godlewski
But really, you’re absolutely right, because so let’s just say that this this happy client want recognizes the fact that maybe their friend or family member is going through the same thing that they did, and they needed to need a lawyer. The way that you’re describing it would help that happy client explain to the potential client exactly what that person is going to do for them to help push them over the edge and and buy if you will. So good point you need
Unknown Speaker
to teach lessons. These everybody when they’re injured, they have a it’s a it’s a catastrophic financial hit to them. They need to manage that they need to manage their injuries, there’s a lot of things they need to manage, where there’s a divorce or bankruptcy or intellectual property. Whenever you win. If you’ve represented a lot of folks, their issues rise to the surface. And that’s the thing you want to teach people about and give away. You want to give away knowledge and give away help.
Jim Hacking
John Fisher recommended a great book to his mastermind group. It’s called Story brand by Donald Miller. And then that book I did I listened to the audio version he talks about how we want to be not the hero of the story, but the guide. We want to be not Luke Skywalker, but Yoda. We don’t want to be Harry Potter, we want to be Dumbledore. We want to be showing the path that they need to take to get to where they want to be. All right. So we’re gonna open up for questions after this last question. We got about 10 minutes left talk to me a little bit about the importance of finding a voice I suppose it’s the opposite of being boring but talk about the importance of having a particular point of view
Andy Stickel
you it’s good to be semi controversial or maybe it’s just not vanilla, you know, like so for me a lot of times I’ll talk about you if you can have this kind of like us versus them mentality. It works really well because, you know, putting kinda like you’ll form almost like a tribe. So I kind of throw rocks at other marketing companies and people that give bad information or my clients personal injury attorneys, for example, actually go back to the motorcycle example. One thing that we one message that we try to get across is that how they’re always fighting insurance companies who are trying to say that no matter what the circumstances of the accidents are, they are always says the motorcycle riders fault because of the fact that they say that they knew riding a motorcycle was dangerous, so we shouldn’t have to pay them. And I tell them to really harp on that type of thing, because anyone that rides a motorcycle is gonna be outraged by that, and they’re gonna get on your side. And it’s kind of crazy, like rallying effect, you know. So creating a voice is good, having an opinion is good, obviously, you know, I mean, it’s like, you can’t go too far to the left or too far to the right, because then you’ll alienate a lot of people, which actually isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you’re, you know, if you’re like, really, really, really into the Second Amendment, you’ll probably alienate an entire group of people on the left, but you will also the people that are really, really into the Second Amendment, also, they will follow you even harder, you know, so what I tried to do is, I kind of take the guide approach where basically, I’m just trying to let people know who I am, I’m pretty much the guy you see the videos is who I am, I’m just here to help people. And that’s what I think a lot of people that actually get up there and create a lot of content, the ones that really do do a lot of content, the ones that are really successful are the ones that genuinely want to help people. So you know, when you start doing that, you start kind of building your own voice. And like, when I look at my, my videos from a year ago, I mean, I came and watch them, they’re so bad, they’re healthy, is that you have to keep going, you have to get through being uncomfortable on camera, and you have to understand that you’re gonna suck at first. But eventually, you know, there’s very few things that you do over and over and over again, that you get worse at, you know, so, you know, I still don’t think I’m great, but I’m effective enough that it works for me, and I am who I am, you know. So that’s how you kind of build that up is you just build it up by doing it and having an opinion on something, and then people will latch on to that opinion. And then they’ll start following you,
Jim Hacking
I made a decision with immigration that I was going to piss off 50% of the people. If I didn’t do that, I would have I’d have the most milk toast content that you’d ever want us, no one will want to read it. It’d be boring and bland. And my tenten I let loose a video last fall about Donald Trump and some immigration thing that he was making. And we had 252 comments and 80,000 views in a week. And and I don’t say that to brag, I say that because it’s because we took a position. And most of the comments were negative. But YouTube doesn’t know that YouTube doesn’t YouTube just sees the interaction, they don’t know that you’re getting this hate response. It’s just as good as getting love response. So that’s a really important thing, Gary, or Annika,
Anneke Godlewski
I was just gonna say, when it comes to voice one, go back and remember to create your own message, like create your own identity as a as an attorney and an entrepreneur. But to you always have that one friend who’s like the connector, right? They always know everybody, and they’re always welcoming to everyone. And they, if they hear about somebody who has a problem, they think about another friend that might be able to help and they kind of bring the community together and they bring their circles together. That’s kind of a good approach to have with email marketing, highlight your favorite, you know, business owners highlight your favorite pizza joint, highlight your favorite cupcake shop, highlight all the different things going on in your life. And you’d be shocked at some of the relationships that ended up coming up and ended up turning into referral sources. And just one thing I wanted to add real quickly is your guyses lists have a lot of value. So if you are talking about some of your favorite places around town, you’re those companies and those small businesses. They’re in the same boat. So we are they don’t have huge marketing budgets. They don’t really know where where to start. So if you go out to somebody, Gillian Todd does an amazing job of this on in Atlanta. She highlights the local people in her community and they are thrilled, you know, in tiny little Jonesboro, Georgia, they don’t have $1,000 to create a TV commercial, nor would anybody really pay attention if they did. But if she approaches him and says, Hey, can I highlight you in my, in my newsletter and my E newsletter, these people are just they’re honored. So it kind of puts her in a position of, of a connector, and she’s just graciously offering the value of that huge audience that she’s already built up through her clients and colleagues.
Jim Hacking
It’s great, Gary, anything on voice?
Unknown Speaker
Don’t be afraid to find it. Don’t be afraid to stumble. It’s not It’s finding your own voice on what hat are you going to wear? We wear different hats as lawyers. What hat are you going to wear? Learn your voice on your jokes. I try to be funny. I try to be dry. Usually not. And I learned that from Jim. I’m hilarious. Don’t ask my kids. So I put a tray I put a hike that I did the other day. So I do that stuff. Do I talk about other business? I talked about other lawyers or other people we like I talked about news stories. So just your your voice can be varied, but don’t be afraid of it. The other thing too is it’s hard. You want to have people like Jim or whoever your people are to get your new E newsletter and email you back and say, You know what, on that one, you went over the line because I also go right here and I think I’m hilarious. But, you know, Steve Martin said comedy is not pretty right. So, you know, so that maybe you go over the board. Maybe you go over on the Second Amendment issue, but you can talk about it. So you need to have people to keep you in the lane. And so what do you How did you find your voice? I know what you did with immigration? Did you have your wife telling you too much? Or little? Or what do you have? Because I know I’ve emailed you some time. And I said,
Jim Hacking
I’ve gone too far sometimes for sure. And we all let me know. It’s interesting when you have people on your email list who are married to an immigrant who don’t see how current immigration policies affect them. So a lot of those people write back to me sort of Matt and I laugh and say, Okay,
Unknown Speaker
I’m friends with a lot of defense lawyers, and they know and so anyway, there’s, but you create a conversation. And there are two sides to all these issues, that many of the issues
Jim Hacking
are we got about five minutes left? Does anybody have any email marketing questions for the panel? Yeah, Josh. Story brand by Donald Miller. Right behind him. Yeah, email marketing program.
Anneke Godlewski
MailChimp is really helpful, I’m sorry, real
Jim Hacking
basically, you can almost for free, MailChimp is cheap, just until you start building that list. And then just go from there.
Anneke Godlewski
One thing you have to when you’re looking at figuring out which which company to use, some companies require you to have some sort of verification that all the people on your list have in fact, opted in. So you have to send an initial email, they opt in, then they’re like on the list. MailChimp doesn’t require you to do that. But be honest with your list. You know, don’t buy lists if you can avoid it.
Unknown Speaker
So use MailChimp to start because you can if you dump everything in MailChimp, and then you and then a lot of those people unsubscribe and stuff, then you can go to an Infusionsoft or another program, you get to Infusionsoft and other places use different servers to send out the emails and then those servers and those IP address get tagged as spam. There are some law firms that don’t get my will not take a personal email for me because mice, burger law.com has tagged as spam. So but but they get around it and they move it and stuff. So there’s that issue, can I and then one thing about my voice, I put together one of the books on my website is I put together two years of my email newsletters, I put them into a book and I put them on a newsletter. So if you want to steal from me, and how I structure it and different messages and stuff, if you go to Burger law.com I have it’s called client success stories, because that’s what my emails are. Like you’ve said they’re all clients success stories. So if you wanted to get some voice and content and other ideas, there’s two years of emails in that book.
Andy Stickel
So I agree MailChimp is really good. It’s a really basic one. I actually like Active Campaign because Active Campaign, it’s as powerful as as Infusionsoft almost as powerful as Infusionsoft. But you don’t need a programming degree to figure out how to use it. So you can start with very, very basic stuff with Active Campaign. And you can kind of work your way up as you kind of ease yourself into you know, internet marketing, but MailChimp. Like if you just want basic emails. MailChimp is good. If you’re looking for something to maybe grow a little bit and wanted to some of those advanced tagging features and automations, then Active Campaign would probably be a good thing.
Jim Hacking
We have time for one more question. Yeah, Mitch,
Andy Stickel
I do not use what you say it’s called bom bom. No, I’ve never actually used that. What I do is I every every email I have for I mean, like 99% of my emails are trying to get you to watch a video, what I do is I take a screenshot of the player in the video, like, I’ll go to YouTube, take a screenshot with the play button in the play bar below it. And I’ll insert that as an image in line with the email. And then when they click it, it takes them to the video. So because most people because you can’t, as far as I know, you can’t insert a video or a video that actually plays in the email. But I like having that there because people think that you can watch a video in the email so then they click on it and then it takes them to wherever the video actually is rather than than just having a link
Jim Hacking
just real quick here Bom Bom for those of you who don’t know, it’s a software that allows you to create a video message email to someone and what the cool thing about it is it sends us like was it five second GIF? And it sort of shows you that they’re that you’re trying to talk to them and it gets really good interaction. I’ve used it. I haven’t used it in campaigns, but
Andy Stickel
does it play in the email? Yeah, so it’s a gift that it plays in the email. Yeah, that’s cool to look into. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
I use Infusionsoft Infusionsoft plays video. Mitch, I put in videos at leat almost every email I do now or videos, mostly of clients. I do you want. Here’s my, here’s my hack. I whenever I have a client, I’m given out a settlement check. I Facebook Live it. We sit there and talk and I say what was your experience? What was your challenges? What did you go through? And it ends up being the same issue as Annika was talking about, I put it up on YouTube. And then we tag it there and then it ends up being going it goes on my website and my clients success stories and it also goes in an email. It goes one is somewhere in my email.
Jim Hacking
I don’t know you get the last word.
Anneke Godlewski
So Friday fives done a need as always do a video every single week. We upload it to YouTube, but the thumbnail that we choose for the video, you know you don’t want somebody’s face. It’s like this. You want some thing that’s interesting. So if we can’t, you know, get a good thumbnail, we’ll design something in Canva and just put that up there. But we’ve gotten a lot of good response from they always do Friday five and they high five. And sometimes if we have like the high five in there, or one time, Edith was or Donald’s in a sombrero and Edith was in, you know, just like the Cinco de mio gear, so anything that’s just, you know, interesting and not always just them sitting in front of a camera always gets a little bit more interesting
