The Secret Sauce to High-Converting Emails | Marketing Misfits | Barbara Drazga | MMP #025

The Secret Sauce to High-Converting Emails | Marketing Misfits | Barbara Drazga | MMP #025 Speaker 1: First of all, I don't look at it as a list. I look at them as human beings. They are my subscribers. They are people. They're subscribers. And I want to know, and I'm going to tell you my secret sauce for closing, for monetizing my list probably better than a lot of email marketers do. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Kevin King: Senor Farrar, que paso? Norm Farrar: I'm doing fine. How about you, sir? Kevin King: Just checking in on you, you know, after you were in Austin a few weeks ago eating some good old Tex-Mex. I just want to make sure, you know, you understood. Que paso? Make sure, you know, everything's going good after those beans and rice. Norm Farrar: You know, when I got back, guess what I'm having for supper tonight? Kevin King: What? Beans and rice? Norm Farrar: No, I'm having some burritos. Kevin King: I figured it'd be mac and cheese with ketchup on it or something. Norm Farrar: It's the only way to eat it, but I can't believe you don't eat mac and cheese without ketchup. It's like not having ketchup chips. Kevin King: I think every time you come to my house, because Norm a few weeks ago was at my place. We were working on a new business venture that we're doing together and also going to a conference called Scalable. Scalability? Scalable? Norm Farrar: Scalable. Kevin King: About growing your business, which is really good. But we spent a few days brainstorming and working on this project we're working on. And Norm's always like, you know, my refrigerator, I think is his favorite part of the house. I don't know if it's that or the humidor. It's either the refrigerator or the humidor or maybe both. Norm Farrar: Yeah, you know what? I'm not going to discriminate. Kevin King: Norm comes in. Norm's got this habit. You know, whenever he gets excited, he goes like this. So every time we drive somewhere, we get out of the car and he gets out of the car, we're going to walk to the elevator. He's like, all right, it's a car time. After having a cigar, it's like, what am I going to have? Ice cream or a cookie or some gummy bear? What else? Norm Farrar: Pastrami. Kevin King: Pastrami, yeah. You fell in love with that pastrami, I think. That's good stuff. So there's a little place outside of Austin. One night I was like, Norm, what do you want to eat? And gave him some options. And he's like, these are closer, but we can take a 25 minute drive and go to this really cool place on the edge of town. He's like, let's do it. It's a pizza place. It has this oven from, they brought in from Italy. And they bring a lot of their ingredients in from Italy. So everything, the cheese, the tomato sauce, everything tastes differently. And they make these amazing like wood fire burned pizzas, like in three minutes, you know, they cook for like three minutes. Unknown Speaker: They're really good. Kevin King: Like four ingredients total. And then they also do pastrami and sourdough bread. And so we got some pastrami to go. And that Norm was, he really enjoyed munching on that the last couple of days. Norm Farrar: It was about two in the morning when I got to enjoy it, but. Kevin King: But that's your late night snack, post cigar snack is always good. You know, speaking of post cigars and something that's always good is our guest today. She's like an old school marketer doing really cool stuff right now. I had her on the AM PM podcast, you know, For those listening, Norm and I both have individual podcasts. You have Lunch with Norm. And I have AM PM podcasts. Those focus more heavily on the Amazon, Walmart type of marketplace stuff, unlike Marketing Misfits. But I had her on there. We talked about some amazing stuff. And in doing that, she's like, you know, I used to do this and this and this, and I'm doing this and this. And that's like, you've got to come on The Misfits podcast because you're like the perfect misfit. She's like, she has a warehouse in Arizona. And she still drives the forklift. I mean, when the pallets come in, she's out there on the forklift driving it up and down the aisles in her warehouse. I mean, she's one of these true, like, hustlers. And she's a really smart lady, done a lot. So I can't wait for you to meet her, Norm. Norm Farrar: Yeah, I am looking forward to it. I've never met her. Kevin King: Yep. Well, let's bring her on. Her name is Barbara Drazga. Barbara, how are you doing today? That's true. There are. We actually know someone that actually helped a brand launch an entire line of pink power tools that sold exceptionally well, aimed specifically at women. Speaker 1: I bought them. Kevin King: Oh, you bought them? Speaker 1: I put big googly eyes on my forklift. did you have all my equipment is named ellie for elephant is the forklift oh yeah it's a girl elephant's the name of the forklift her name is ellie short for ellie ellie ellie lift heavy things yeah doesn't everybody what's a pallet jack called Well, I have three of them. So the one with the, all right, now you're just trying to be silly with me. You're embarrassing me. Kevin King: What are the names of the pallet jacks? Speaker 1: I have to remember Big Blue is the blue one. He was the first one I got. So he was like, he's my baby. And then the red one I didn't name because she misbehaves and I don't like her. She's hard to pull, so I know I'm going to be adopting her out somewhere because I don't want to name her and become attached to her. Yeah, so anyway. Kevin King: That's awesome. That's awesome. Norm Farrar: Barbara, you're a misfit. You're truly a misfit. Speaker 1: I am. I am. And before we get started, can I just say something about this mac and cheese with ketchup thing you got going? All right. So first of all, Norm, it's so nice meeting you. I haven't met you before, but if we ever do lunch with Norm, I'm going to do the mac and cheese the right way. And that means with hot dogs. Unknown Speaker: Oh, that's the best. Speaker 1: You have to put the hot dogs in a pan first with some butter and get that little crispy and then you put it. Is everybody hungry now? Norm Farrar: I boil them. Kevin King: I boil them. Norm Farrar: But then you put ketchup on. It's so good. Speaker 1: No, no, no. Kevin King: Stop, stop, stop. Speaker 1: Or tuna fish, mac and cheese and tuna fish. That works too. Anyway, I just had to put that two cents in because I was cringing when you guys were talking about putting ketchup on your... Kevin King: I saw him do that. I was like, what the heck are you doing? He's like, this is the way you eat it. Speaker 1: This is the way. And the fact that I know what that's a reference to speaks to my misfit-itis. Kevin King: That's awesome. So Barbara, for those that don't know who you are, what's your story? What the heck? Who are you? Speaker 1: I'm the Deal Diva. Kevin King: You're the Deal Diva. Speaker 1: I'm totally a misfit. I'm not the normal girl. That nickname was given to me by a guy. I buy and sell at auctions and I buy a lot of liquidation loads. And about 10 years ago, I was at this auction and this big guy, I mean, he was this big tall guy. He wanted something really bad and he would get mad at me if I won against him. So he stuck himself in front of me between me and the auctioneer. And all I had to do was do this over a shoulder and the auctioneer would take my bid. I didn't even have to make eye contact. I won the bid. The guy swung around to see who beat him. And he said, oh, you're just a deal diva, aren't you? And I decided I was going to lean into that. I made a logo and everything. Unknown Speaker: That's awesome. I have t-shirts. Speaker 1: I have mouse pads. So yeah, I'm known as the Deal Diva because a lot of deals come to me, fall into my lap in my e-commerce business. It all stems from relationships because if I didn't have the relationship with the auctioneer that I could do that, that wouldn't have happened. So that's one of my backstories. Norm Farrar: Have you ever seen this guy again and were you wearing your Deal Diva shirt? Speaker 1: I wasn't wearing my Deal Diva shirt, but to him, he completely forgot that moment. I mean, I made a brand out of it. I completely forgot he did that. We saw each other at another auction like five years later. Hey, how you doing Barbara? I haven't seen you in a while. Thank you. Kevin King: That's awesome. That's awesome. So, but before you were doing all these, became the deal diva and doing all this liquidation and deals and stuff. Yeah. You were doing, you were doing like you're old school marketer. Like you've been around the block a few times and done a couple of things. Speaker 1: Right. So first of all, maybe not good to use the word old and been around the block a few times. Kevin King: Very, very true. Unknown Speaker: That was not the best word for it. Speaker 1: So yeah, you can tell I'm a little bit of a wise, I'm not sure if we can say that word, wise guy. So yeah, I've been doing, gosh, selling online physical products, 1996. And I started my first publishing company in 2002 in the global energy industry and just launched right into email marketing. Didn't even have a website, didn't know anything, didn't know what I was doing. And it's just all kind of went from there, grew from there. I held my first conference called the Women's Web Workshop, which was the first and only women's based workshop in 2005 for women wanting to learn intranet marketing, it was called at the time. And I had like Laurel Langmeier, like people who are like famous now who are nobody then. And I had one token male in the room. He was Andrew from the local massage studio or school giving massages for tips in the back of the room. It was wonderful. You can probably check the Wayback Machine and find the really bad webpage for the Women's Web Workshop in Denver, Colorado. But that was a lot of fun and it just grew from there. Kevin King: So that's the time, 2002, that's the perfect time to not know what you're doing and be an email marketing because there wasn't all the sophisticated spam traps and all the sophisticated DKIM and SPF and all that kind of crazy stuff back then. Speaker 1: Nothing. There was like Constant Contact and AWeber and I think Infusionsoft. There were only a couple of EMSs that existed. So it was an interesting time. Kevin King: Around that time, between about 1998 and 2002, I was actually sending out a quarter of a million emails a day. I had a newsletter that was going out and that drove people back to a website that had a photo of the day of a sexy model, a sexy girl. And then we had jokes and we had a joke section. We had news on there and we had all this stuff. And I remember We had these set up to where there was no sophisticated system like Beehive or some of these tools that are out there like now, these CRMs. So we had to develop our own system and we're doing it at Cron Jobs on the hour that would send out... People could choose the hour or day they got the email. So we would have... You know, whatever, 7,000 go out at 7 a.m. and 9,000 go out at 10 a.m. And it just got to be, everything went to the inbox. Everything was like, we did millions of dollars of sales off the back end of this. And we had, but then all of a sudden around, I can't remember what year it was, maybe 2003, 2004, somewhere around there, CanSpam came out and a bunch of other stuff came out and it basically killed us. Because everything started going to spam or not deliverable. And we would get on Howard Stern's show, and it'd just blow up our... Back when he was on public radio, public, not satellite, but public, and he was on every station across the US. And our server, we had to be someone at the server place, restarting it every two minutes because they'd blown it up. And we'd add 5,000 subscribers or something from being on his show. So those were the fun days. So that's the right time to be learning. Speaker 1: I crashed my server once. This was back in the day when all this click funnels is always like go high level. I was coding in front page. Kevin King: That's what there was. Speaker 1: I was creating funnels in front page. I created a funnel for a series of renewable energy reports. I placed an ad in a renewable energy email newsletter and it was my birthday. And I'd taken my staff out to dinner and suddenly my phone starts blowing up with my web developer saying, what did you do? The server just crashed. We got all this traffic. I think, you know, we're being, you know, somebody's trying to take us down. And it turns out that I drove so much traffic from that ad because nobody was doing ads asking for opt-ins. No woman's driving traffic with click here to download your free report, which now is like the norm. But back then, that ad was an anomaly. So it stood out in that newsletter and it was a renewable energy newsletter that was going straight to a renewable energy product and it crashed my server and I had a 52% opt-in rate, which is really cool, which is pretty crazy. That's my story for crashing my server by driving traffic from one ad. Kevin King: It's like a badge of honor. It's like a badge of honor. Speaker 1: Yeah. Does that make me like a total geek that my best birthday was like the 22 days I went to Italy, right? That was one. And then two is when I crashed my server driving traffic. Norm Farrar: Makes me a geek. Kevin King: So renewable energy, that's before sustainability was a cool thing to do. What was it? Speaker 1: Well, my target market is corporations. So I still have, if you go to renewablenews.com and energyandbuildings.com, I still have that publishing company. Yeah, my target market and my customers are like Department of Energy, ExxonMobil, governments around the world, their energy division, et cetera. Norm Farrar: So back in 1996, you were on the cutting edge. You were an innovator. So I'm kind of curious. I love talking to innovators because You're up against some really hard odds. You know, you've got all these people, you've got the people that, oh, this looks interesting with email marketing, but you've got 80% of the people aren't really buying into it, you know, probably for a while. Then you got these followers that are going to wait until 2024 to even get in on it. So how did you tackle that? Speaker 1: So i actually started in twenty twenty two thousand one is when i first entered internet marketing nineteen ninety six but hold on so two thousand twenty one. 1996 is when I sold my first physical products on eBay. That was my e-commerce journey. And then 2001 was when I launched into my publishing company. That being said, to address your question, I never compared myself to what other people were doing. It was like, okay, I have this asset. I have these energy industry conferences that I have negotiated to sell on commission. Now we call it affiliate sales, but back in the day, there was no name for it. I negotiated with the producers to get a 25% commission. If I marketed their $2,100 I was at an energy conference and I had an email list because I was producing conferences in the energy industry and I have the email list of all the speakers and attendees and I put them together and made money right out of the gate. It was all accidental. There was no like planning, gee, I wonder if there's anything to the email, like none of that. It was just jumping on an opportunity without doing any groundwork. Kevin King: A lot of people are afraid to, even back then, to use an email list. They're like, Oh, I don't want to bother anybody. I don't want to. It still happens today. People have, I don't know, Norm was telling me a buddy of his has a email list of. Norm Farrar: Sorry, that one had 160,000 emails and he would not send it out. Kevin King: He would not send anything to them. I'm like, what is your mental malfunction here? That's a goldmine. So many people in the e-commerce space, I mean, there's the internet marketers that they'll blast you 17 times a day. And they don't care, but a lot of people, I think that that's what scares people. It's like, I don't want to be one of them because I hate it when they do that to me and I get all these, but that's, you don't have to do 17 times a day, but there's people that are highly successful sending a single email every day. News, I mean, newsletters are a big thing right now. That's a permission to email. It's granted permission to email and you put your marketing message in there. But even besides that, Why do you think so many people are afraid to use an email list that they've built up? Speaker 1: That's a great question. In fact, my coaching student last Wednesday, Karen, I told her to set up a promotion and do a flash sale on one of her products. Four days, here's day one, you do this, two, three, four, five. Well, I don't know if I want to email them. I don't want people to opt out. And the answer is, they're not your ideal client. If they were on your list because they were a freebie seeker or whatever and you're sending a, you know, very respectful one and then two and then one or two, one, one, and four. That's my formula. Two emails on day one, then one, one, and then four on the last day. And if they're going to opt out, then they're never going to buy from you anyway. Kevin King: And now a word from one of our sponsors, one of Norm and I's favorite tools, Stack Influence. Norm Farrar: Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform Stack Influence can help. Stack Influence pushes high-volume external traffic sales to Amazon listings using micro-influencers. And guess what? You only have to pay with your products. They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products. Right now is the best time to get started with Stack Influence to crush it during this holiday season. Kevin King: That's right, Norm. Sign up today at stackinfluence.com or click the link in the video below and mention Misfits. That's right. Misfits. M-I-S-F-I-T-S to get 10% off your first campaign. Head over to stackinfluence.com right now. Speaker 1: So I think the not wanting to bother people is a people-pleasing thing. Kevin King: Yeah, I think people... I don't know. Unknown Speaker: I don't want them to be mad at me. Speaker 1: I don't want them to judge me, right? Kevin King: Like you said, they're going to cancel. I don't want them to cancel. I took a lot of effort, but exactly what you said. Unknown Speaker: I don't want them to cancel. Speaker 1: My perspective is opposite. If they're never going to buy from me and they're only going to open something if they get something for free and they're going to complain, then I want those people to go away because my open rates, my deliverability, my open, my click through everything will be better, will improve when those people aren't on my list. Kevin King: I do that with my newsletter. I mean, I have kicked off over 4,000 people, including some people that we know a few times because they don't open and click. You can say it. Norm has been kicked off a couple of times. Norm Farrar: Three times. Three times. Kevin King: Because he didn't open and click. He's like, did you get the news there? Yeah, I don't know. Speaker 1: The first thing I do, I got to say, the first thing I do with the BBS is that I read the stump basics, but then I scroll all the way to the bottom. To see the answer. I bet you a lot of people do that and then don't actually scroll back up to read stuff. Kevin King: My rule is you have to fix that. Don't scroll all the way back up. But the whole point is to get you to scroll down so you see something on the way, but you don't scroll back up. Speaker 1: But okay, the way I scroll is zoom all the way to the bottom to find the answer. Kevin King: And then you bail on the whole thing. Speaker 1: I don't bail. But the last time I did that, I thought, you know what, I should tell him maybe he should try something else to see if his click-through rates improve. Give him the answer right away, like one article and then the answer to see if the click-throughs on the next article. I'm just saying. Kevin King: The hot news section is at the bottom, right above that, and that's one of the most clicked areas of the newsletter. Speaker 1: Interesting. Kevin King: Those hot links, like hot news or whatever it's called, and then any kind of tool, any kind of AI tool, any kind of tool, always massive clicks. And then what's at the top? But if you don't open and click at least once a month, I kick you off because exactly what you said, you're not my ideal customer. And there's newsletter, there's emails, marketing emails I get from people in the Amazon space that I delete 9 out of 10. It just comes in, I delete it. But I don't unsubscribe because every once in a while, I want to see what the hell they're doing. Or they'll say something, this is someone I follow. So I'm still, I guess, in their avatar or whatever. Speaker 1: Yeah. Kevin King: I think so many people, but the power of email... Speaker 1: Instead of removing them, not that you asked me my opinion, but I can't help myself, maybe strip them out, put them in a separate list. And then a month later say, Hey, we didn't want to bother you. So we took that and do another warmup series. See if you can warm back. I'm sure you do. Yeah. You know what you're doing. Kevin King: Yeah. I do that. Speaker 1: And that's how Norm got back on. Kevin King: They don't get permanently deleted. They get the emails that if someone pays me, right now I charge $3,000 for a solo email to go out into the list and that includes those people. So those people are still included until they unsubscribe. It's on two different systems, two different email service providers. Everything is separated. So if they unsubscribe from that one, it doesn't affect the other one. Pretty good on all that. But back on the email marketing, so the power of segmenting, a lot of people, one, they might build an email list, but they don't segment it. They don't actually know who's the multibuyers. They don't know how did they come in to the list. They don't know. They're not putting any kind of tax. Talk to me about how important that is to actually not just have, I got a list of like Norm said, of 160,000, but to actually know what type of buyer, what the profile of them is, what the source of those was, how important is all that to know when you're... Speaker 1: There are really good questions in there. So let me break this down. First of all, I don't look at it as a list. I look at them as human beings. They are my subscribers. So it's not this list, which is like this, you know, esoteric thing. They are people. They're subscribers. And I want to know, and I'm going to tell you my secret sauce for closing, for monetizing my list probably better than a lot of email marketers do. I get to know about them right out of the gate. My first email in my welcome sequence, and also sometimes I'm still testing both, right after opt-in on the thank you page, I send them to a survey and I just use Google Forms. I've used SurveyMonkey. I mean, there's so many survey programs out there, but Google Forms, it does everything I need it to do. And I really drill down and tell me what you love. For instance, I did this, I'm doing a campaign now. I launched about 90 days ago to farm girls. Women who like the farm life and most of them live on farms and they have farm animals. And I started a subscription box because I want more recurring revenue, monthly revenue. And I built an email list of almost 20, I'm almost up to 2,500, like 2,463 this morning, I think it was. And with ad spend that was completely covered in the welcome sequence by putting a product in front of them that I just threw together because I had it in stock. So, what I found out about them when I sent the first welcome email and it was, tell me about yourself. I want to know what you love about living the farm life. Tell me, you know, what is your favorite animal? What kinds of things do you like to get that make you happy? And the responses to those blew me out of the water because I thought cows would be, chickens and cows in that order. This is Gertrude. This is my taxidermy chicken. And this is a dog poncho that I sell. So I was kind of in the farm girl market, which led me to doing the subscription box. Anyway, it turns out horses, Horses, by far, were the most popular animals and t-shirts and sweatshirts were first and second in what they'd want to get in a box. And I thought it'd be like luggage and totes and drinkware. So in doing that survey right out of the gate, I pivoted and the very first box that went out at MELD last week was all horse stuff. So I could make them super happy right out of the gate. Like I was going to do a chicken box, the first box, and the first box ended up being a horse box with a t-shirt, a tote bag and some jewelry and some fun stuff. So by doing a Google form or any kind of survey right from the beginning, I start making a connection with them because I'm asking them not to take a survey. I forget how I ordered it. I can look. Tell me what you love or something. I made it about them. They're people. It's not just a list. Those are people. Those are humans. Kevin King: How many of them actually opted in to give you that information? 10%, 20%, 50%? Speaker 1: I'd have to check on my opt-in rates. My opt-in rates on my ads, my click-through rates on my ads were the highest I've ever had. I want to say they were 24% or something like that. Kevin King: How many gave you the additional information? It's enough to actually make an educated decision. Speaker 1: I'd have to check. Probably about 400 or so last I checked out of 2,500 emails. That's pretty darn good. And then the second email is an offer for a BokBox, which is a chicken tote with a chunky bracelet and a pair of chicken earrings. And it was 20% off that. So it was $25 product. That I have for like $8 is my cost. If that with Polly and label $8 and I converted enough of those to the chicken tote that I already had in stock. So it was already sunk. I mean, I already had the stuff in stock. It wasn't like I had to go source it. So all of those sales paid for all of my ads. And then some. So I profited before I even launched the actual subscription box a month later. Kevin King: That's awesome. Speaker 1: Now I can really dial in because think about it. If I know what they want ahead of time, then I decrease my churn rate on the subscription box because they're looking forward. Now the first thing they get is horses, which they love. Now they're looking forward to the next thing, not hoping it might be something they like because I cheated. I know what they want. Norm Farrar: When you're doing the next step, are you doing any value-added or are you just targeting them with another promo? Speaker 1: The value-add for the first promo was $50 box, I gave them 10 percent off and a free gift, a free surprise gift. And then I pack the box. And because I buy liquidation, so a lot of boxes that are selling for 50 or $55 have maybe four things in it. One thing of high value and then some little stuff. But because of the way that I source, my profit margin is 65% already on the first boxes, which is 50% is about the norm, 40 to 50% in the subscription business is about the norm. But because I know how to source and I got a lot of stuff locally from some local liquidators, What was your question? Norm Farrar: I was asking about, like, people are receiving these emails, so they'll be constantly receiving the emails. Do you send out any value emails? Speaker 1: Email number three was, not just a thank you for filling out the survey, everybody got it, was coloring book pages of farm animals. And then we have a Fri-Yay newsletter, F-R-Y-A-Y, Farm Girl Fri-Yay newsletter, which is like jokes that people who live on a farm would like, and a link to an article, kind of like what Kevin does, only for women who like farm animals. Kevin King: Are you writing that or do you have a staff or AI doing this? Speaker 1: I started with AI and then I put my voice to it because I have a distinctive voice. I'm tongue-in-cheek and fun. I never want to just use a copy and paste AI. People can tell. I can tell that it's not original. If I'm talking to people, then I want them to know that I'm talking to them, not some AI copy and paste. It's about that relationship. Kevin King: So you're doing most of this yourself. You don't have like a team or an agency or something? Speaker 1: I don't have a team or an agency yet. And here's why. It was my first subscription box. And I have, my personality is I want to, if I'm going to launch something, I want to do it, learn, see where I need to tweak and fail and set up processes. And then as I scale, then I know what to outsource. And during that learning period, I'm setting up SOPs so I can outsource. If I outsource right away, I wouldn't be able to see where the areas are that I could get better. Or what was not working that could work better. So I'm doing all of this myself, but it's only the first box. I'm headed into this second box in about two weeks. It's going out and I've learned some things. Like somehow, I don't know how, because I swear to God, I had it tracked. Somehow everybody who ordered a large shirt got a 2XL. So I had the piles next to each other in my offices and I pulled the two XLs and put them in the large boxes and the XL. So I sent everybody I screwed up on a shirt. But I didn't pay a lot for the shirts. But I was going to make sure they got what they needed and then told them to keep it, give it to a friend, wear it as a night shirt, etc. So I'm going to fix my processes when I pack my boxes for this month. I don't know how I did. I swear to God, I thought I had it all organized. Things like that. I can't blame it on anybody, can I? I did it. Kevin King: No. You can't blame it on Ellie. Speaker 1: You can't blame it on anybody, which means my process wasn't clean or I was tired or I was distracted or something. So now I get to fix that. Kevin King: Go ahead, Norm. Norm Farrar: Most of your traffic, your external traffic's coming from ads. Speaker 1: Go ahead, finish your question. Norm Farrar: Is there any way that you can leverage all these other lists that you've built? Unknown Speaker: Sort of. Speaker 1: So the people, it's for sassy farm girls. So I really dialed in the ads and the demographics. I have other lists of various people where they might be crossover, but I don't want to burn those lists if they're not actually interested in, they might be, oh, maybe a few people are interested in farm. I don't want to burn those lists because there might be a few people on there. Norm Farrar: Right. Kevin King: And you can actually do some demographic stuff. There's tools out there that will actually take your 2463 farm girl people and actually overlay that against your other list and actually find the ones most likely to match. And then you don't email the whole 100,000 or however many on the other list. You email the 1700 that are actually most likely to match. There's some cool tools that will Do that and they're fairly good. I mean, you're going to have a couple that are unsubscribing, but the vast majority, you're not burning the list really. Speaker 1: I'm interested in knowing that tool. What I've decided to do next, however, is to reach out to identified one, I wouldn't call her an influencer. She is a lady who's really well known in the farm girl circles. She raises and breeds racehorses and she is prolific with content. I mean prolific. She has hundreds of thousands of people viewing her and everything from my calf is sick. Here's what I do. You know, when your chickens won't lay eggs, here's what happens. And I binge-watched her videos and binge-watched her whole Facebook and her YouTube and saw that she, on her website, she had product. She was doing print-on-demand t-shirts with her horses. Like people want to buy stuff because her horses are on the t-shirt. I was like, well, this is interesting. And then one of her videos had box openings. People would send her gifts and stuff and products and she would open it up on camera. I reached out to her yesterday. I wanted to wait until I got my box out. She owns a very famous racehorse called VS Red that is highly valued in the breeders market. It was like $100,000 and she makes a lot of her money on the breeding of that horse. We know that a lot of the people who follow her are horsey girls. I reached out, she sent an email with Halloween products, T-shirts and stuff. I responded offering to send her my box and let her know I have an affiliate program. I got a response this morning saying, send it on over with her shirt, guys. Kevin King: Awesome. Speaker 1: To Excel. I have plenty of those because I sent the wrong one. So I will send her that box because if she's got, I forget, it's Katie Van Syk, I believe. I don't know how, I can't remember how many people she had on her page, but it was like in the millions. That one lead right there will have a net effect more so than seeing if there's like a dozen people on one of my other lists. Kevin King: No, it will. It will. Speaker 1: Tell me about this 2114. That was just for her particular promotion. It's the Pretty Pickleball Company. If you're into pickleball, go follow the Pretty Pickleball Company. But she produces high-end paddles, themed paddles that are just gorgeous. US Pickleball approved. We've been working together. She was just an Amazon seller back about a year and a half ago, about 20 months ago, when we started working together and we identified this niche and then we went all in. And she wanted to do a flash promotion. Because in between promotions of her paddle, she also had these cute bag sets. So I said, okay, let's do just a four-day promotion. And on day one, you're going to send two emails, warming them up. On day two and three, you send one email each to remind them that closing day on day four is they have till 1159 tonight to buy. And that's when you... Kevin King: Wait, wait, wait. Back up. Back up. Let's break this down a little bit. Speaker 1: Day one, two emails. Kevin King: Day one, the two emails to warm up. What does that mean? So people listening, what's a warm-up email mean? What's an idea of what's inside that? Speaker 1: Basically, hey, we're doing a flash promotion. We wanted to get our bags into your hands so you could look really adorable on the pickleball court this coming weekend. We only have 50 available and we're going to give you a 50% off coupon, but you have to buy by Thursday night, something like that. That wasn't the exact promotion, but something like that. Kevin King: So that's warm-up number one. That's the first one. Speaker 1: And then the second one is a teaser of the actual three bags. There's a purple one, a teal one, and a pink one with photos of those in there and saying, hey, check it, which one is your favorite color? Tell us which one's your favorite color. Respond to this email telling us which one's your favorite color. I think it was. And then a reminder. Kevin King: Neither one of these ask for the sale or with a link to the sale or they do? Speaker 1: They do have links to the sale, but it's soft. We do the hard close on the last day. And we push the deadline on the last day. So day two and three, you know, most of your sales are going to come in right before your promotion ends, right? You'll get that initial pop. And then the days in between are kind of meh, but you want to keep in front of them. You don't want to just send emails on day one and day four. You have to keep it top of mind. Hey, Friday's coming. We just wanted to let you know we still have pink, blue, and purple in stock and et cetera, et cetera. I don't remember the exact verbiage. We did use AI to help write those emails, but then I took that AI and completely massaged it using psychological triggers. We use the word like, hey, check out the purple bag and what we've matched it with. One of our models is wearing a cute little lavender skirt and white top and it matches the purple bag set. But we use the word checkout instead of go see or go look. So just these little psychological triggers. I don't think AI, it doesn't do it the way I do it. Maybe I shouldn't say, maybe it sounds egotistical. AI's not giving me the kind of, the way that I write, have been writing emails. It's not giving me that yet. Kevin King: So I still want it. It'll do it if you, if you model it after a well-known copywriter that does that. So if you tell it right in the style of Perry Belcher, right in the style of Dan Kennedy or whoever may do those kinds of things, it will actually do that. Speaker 1: Okay, I'll get better at prompting AI. I'm not even remotely admitting that I'm like great at AI. Kevin King: So those are those two and then the last day is four, you said. Speaker 1: Those days are all about urgency. There's one in the morning, one at lunchtime when people take a break to eat lunch and at the commuters and they're checking email, etc. Stay-at-home moms are waiting for the kid to be picked up at school and then we wait about six hours and then do the last two in the evening. We don't send any in the afternoon. Kevin King: Like 3, 4, 5 is not a good time to, in my opinion, not a good time to be sending emails 2, 3, 4. So where in the sequence do you see the most opt-out or unsubscribes? Speaker 1: I don't know. Kevin King: Which email do you actually see where the biggest unsubscribe is? Is it like after the third or fourth one, they're like, just leave me the F alone. I don't know. Speaker 1: I haven't dug into, I'll just be honest, I haven't dug into the stats for that to find out. But we can find out. Kevin King: Yeah, I'm just curious to see. Speaker 1: I would think it would be the final day. Like those last couple of emails are like, all right already, shut up. I bought, I'm not buying, go away. I would think the people. Kevin King: Do you omit the people that bought? Do you actually, so if they bought on day one, do you omit them from the sequence after that so they're not bothered? Speaker 1: We should. I don't know if we did, but we should. Kevin King: Yeah, you should. Speaker 1: That being said, what we did do is people who added to cart on day one, we emailed them again on day five. After the promotion ended, we emailed them saying, hey, look, we see you're on the fence. Maybe you're waiting for your paycheck to come in or whatever. We just wanted to give you 24 hours, give you till tonight just to pick up any last orders we could. Norm Farrar: Now, a quick word from our sponsor, LaVanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it. Kevin King: That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from. Norm Farrar: So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. Kevin King: Have you done on your landing page, like from your Facebook ads, for example, that you've captured the 2463 from, what about the people that go there to check it out? They click on the ad, but they don't give the email. What are you doing to capture them? Speaker 1: Nothing. I know. I'm not retargeting. Kevin King: You're not using retention.com or data zap or anything to actually grab about 30 to 40% of those email addresses that they didn't even give to you? Speaker 1: Nope. Did not do it. Which is not to say, do as I say, not as I do. Which is not to say you shouldn't be doing it. I had a lot on my plate and I frankly didn't expect I was going to get The options I got, it was an experiment. And a lot of women, I got, I sell stuff for, for, for chickens. I wonder if there are other farm girls and it kind of took on a life of its own. And my ad, it's crazy. I've never done an ad with no freebie. My ad was simply, if you go to thefarmgirlbox.com, it's sign up for the wait list. I didn't offer them a download of anything. So the quality of the leads was better than people who were just freebie seekers, I found. And that was a surprise. So I'm afraid to change the ad. Kevin King: Well, that wait list is actually powerful because people want to get in or they even want instead of buy or purchase, it's apply. Because people want to feel like they're selected or that they won something. So that's a hot trend right now in landing page and email marketing is wait list or apply and purchase or buy. That's hot right now. Speaker 1: It's like a reverse psychology. What do you mean I can't buy right now? Kevin King: Norm and I are doing, we've done that on a couple of our projects where it's join the waitlist and we'll let you know. And pretty much, you know. Not everybody is going to make it through, but I did this to build my initial newsletter. When I first said I'm going to do a newsletter last year, I think I announced it in June, and I actually used a software tool, I can't remember the name of it now, that actually creates waitlists. And then it says, I'm only going to send the first newsletter to the first 500 people. If you want to be in the first 500 and you're not number 500, because right now you're number 572, according to the stats that signed up, refer somebody. And for every person you refer, I'll move you up 10 spots. So people were out of time or something on the left and right. And that list went to like 1600. That's crazy. Yeah. So the email marketing is super powerful. But what about. Speaker 1: I haven't done any referral, you know, forward this on and refer a friend like you do with the refer. If I haven't done any of that yet, like I said, this is, I literally just got my first box shipped out last week. And the, the Helene, the devastation, you know, in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, I had to go through the whole subscriber list and see who was in those states and send them an email saying, Please confirm I can mail this. And there were nine people who haven't responded yet. So I held their boxes back because there's a really good chance they not only don't have mail service, they don't have a mailbox or a house. So that kind of threw a wrench in things. And you have to be, you see what I mean? They're people. I'm not just mailing out boxes. You have to see your subscribers as their people and treat them as such. I think that's the key. Kevin King: When I'm writing an email, I have an avatar in mind. I have one of my customers, I think of a person's by name, someone I've met at a show or if I'm writing something to someone that's a service provider or in the internet space, it's an educator. I'm writing, come participate on my webinar. Or something, or by training, I write with somebody in mind. I'll think of, I don't know, it could be Norm. All right, if I was writing this email to Norm, to convince Norm, what would I need to say? And so it's not just, okay, I'm writing this to all these people out there, some nebulous crowd. I put an avatar in my mind. I do it with all my other businesses too, where I'll have somebody, a customer that I've met or talked to on the phone or whatever, what would Johnny buy? And I think that's important. A lot of people don't do that because they're, like you said, these are human beings. Speaker 1: Well, in surveying them because what we think they like, sometimes might not be the case. I thought they would want chickens and cows and then horses, but that's not what the survey told me. That's not what they told me. I still like to challenge myself as, okay, what's really important to them? Well, let me ask them instead of just guessing. I can do a ton of research on my own and have AI build a profile for me, but maybe that's not boots on the ground, what they really want. I still want to ask the person I'm looking to sell to. Norm Farrar: Is there a way when you're building this list, like Kevin was talking about an avatar and it's so important, but we might have multiple avatars. Do you send out a list or can you send out your email to try to target, to find out who that avatar is? So maybe there's that chicken lover, the horse lover and the cow lover, and you're going to target them with some sort of print on demand thing later on. Are you doing anything like that? Speaker 1: Which part of it targeting? Norm Farrar: The avatar. So specifically, like if you have an app, maybe the, the avatar would be, I don't know, it could be the horse lover on a horse farm. And then you find out that there's the teen, the teen who loves cows or, you know, just specific avatars for that farm girl. Speaker 1: Gotcha. So first thing I did on the opt-in page, it's not just name and email, it's what's your favorite farm animal. So they're dropping in there what their favorite farm animal is and that data informs me and that's before they even get the survey. Second, in watching the channels, the YouTube channels and the Facebook Reels, That are targeted to this sassy farm girl market. I'm learning a lot about the different avatars and the big one within that is stay-at-home moms. They're called farm wives. There's actually a whole Facebook page for farm wives or group. I think it's a group. I don't remember the size, but it's huge. So just going through those posts and reading. The first, it won't be print-on-demand, but it'll be digital. The first digital I'll do in January is a farm planner for the entire year. So counting the eggs and tracking when you milk the cows, just do a whole planner for that. Norm Farrar: I guess the other thing that you'll have to do with something like that is get into these groups to understand the lingo. There's certain phrases and certain things that they'll talk about and you can't make it up. It sounds like you're doing that exact thing, going into the Facebook groups or looking at reels and pulling out those phrases that they might use. Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely. I even bought myself a cowgirl hat. It came on a liquidation palette, I can't say I bought it, but it's white with a big pink star on it. And I put it on and I walked through my little boutique with, you know, saying, Hey, we're about to launch the Farm Girl box. Some of this stuff could be in your box. Check it out. And I just walked through the whole boutique area and didn't like zoom in on any particular product, but there's a lot of pinks and pretties in my boutique. So it gave them a, Ooh, there's, I have a lot of totes with farm animals on like, Ooh, there's a horse and there's a chicken. And, um, so I'm starting to lean into the avatar personally, although I'm not a farm girl. I do like horses. What girl doesn't? But I can't ever say I live the farm life. But I wanted to understand them instead of being separate from them. Kevin King: And there's ways like you said on segment like this or finding out there's ways to do that with polls or just contests where you could send out if you want to find out you have a list of 5,000 people of women and I wonder who's in the farm life and who's not. I don't want to burn the list. You could send something to them. Hey, we're having a little contest vote and you have a picture of one's a cowboy on a farm, you know with some horses or cows or stacks of hay or whatever and the other one's a guy in a Lamborghini and on Miami on a beach or whatever. You get the idea where just based on what they choose, you can actually segment them and you can actually, what they choose, if they chose the cowboy one, you could actually take it to one or two more levels. I wouldn't do too many. But then narrow that down even more with the next question that's got two more choices or something. You could really refine your list. Who was it that we had on? Was it Kat that we had on, Norm, that said they did this for political stuff? She said that Big Client had a list of a million people, and they wanted to find out who the Trump people were and who the Biden people were. This is when Biden was still in the race. So they sent something in the morning basically saying, I forget exactly what it said, but Trump is the greatest of all time and you know, he's the best or whatever. So they could click here if you agree, if you're a MAGA. And then so they could find out all the MAGA people. Then they sent in the afternoon the same list all about Biden. Biden's the best ever. If you hate Trump, you know, click here to support it. Speaker 1: A lot of opt-outs from both sides. Kevin King: They got the buying people, but they knew who clicked to support. They didn't care about the opt-outs. And then that night, they targeted each one of those separately and it crushed. Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'll bet. Kevin King: Very dedicated email to each one so that they did not want a totally separate ESP. So anything that they burned on the first one, you know, reputation wise or whatever, a lot of opt-outs or spam or something, you know, because people are like, ah, I don't want this Trump crap or this Biden stuff coming to mind, whichever way you lean. It works brilliantly. So there's all kinds of cool stuff you can do like that to segment your list too. Norm Farrar: I think that was Elaine Polfeld. Kevin King: Was it Elaine that did? Okay. I thought it was Kat. Norm Farrar: It might've been Kat, but I thought it was her. Speaker 1: Anytime you have a really passionate, like sports are the same thing, political issues, sports teams and people hating one and loving the other. Anytime you have that kind of polarization, I think that's a lot easier to do. I'm pretty sure my sassy farm girls don't have a lot of polarization, but you never know. So the cow lovers might have it in for the horse lovers. Kevin King: You know what? Every time you've been saying this, farm girls, you know what comes to my mind? You've seen that TV show, Farmer Wants a Wife? Norm Farrar: Yeah. Yeah. Kevin King: It's like a reality show. Speaker 1: Is it a dating show? Are you serious? Yeah. Kevin King: It's on ABC or CBS or just look it up on your Hulu or YouTube TV or whatever. There's two seasons of aired and it's Farmer Wants a Wife and it's like four farm guys, Oklahoma and Georgia and wherever they are. And like 20 women that compete to actually, they choose like five and these five come and live on the farm with them. And they show the whole process. And at the end, you know, hopefully he picks one that's going to end up being his wife. It's a dating app. Speaker 1: I just read it. Isn't there a dating app? Kevin King: Farmers.com. Farmers.com. Speaker 1: So, you know, I'm going to go see if they have an affiliate program. Kevin King: Yeah, you should look at farmers.com. Speaker 1: That's the answer to Norm's question is how can I drill down inside the demographics of the demographics? How many of them are single and how many of them are not? Or how many of them want to be single? Kevin King: Yeah, or even people that it's not just the farmers wives. It's the people that you know, I would love to live on a farm sometime. Maybe that they have that affinity. They're living in a big city, but they're really a small-town girl. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd love to live on a farm away from, you know, off the grid and back to the blast. Kevin King: Finding those people and letting them live vicariously through your box could be a lot. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's people who love like Cows, like people wear cow earrings and carry totes who are city girls. So it's people who like the farm girl life. Not necessarily ones who live on the farm, but clearly a lot of them are going to live on a farm. That's why I added, when I wrote the original opt-in page, like, you know, do you love the farm girl life? And I changed that to, are you a farm girl? And then I added one word, sassy. Because I picture that sassy farm girl, you know, mucking stuff, but she's got cute earrings and a cute little cap on. I wanted the cute part of it, the, you know, feel good about yourself and love the farm lifestyle. That's my, currently that's my avatar. Kevin King: Are you doing any testing on the emails? Are you doing A-B testing, like send one out in the morning and see which one, two different emails, see which one gets clicked and then follow that up? Speaker 1: Not right now. Right now, I've opened the box for six days for the next box. Now my churn rate's been really low for this box, which I'm surprised. Kevin King: It's six days between boxes? Speaker 1: No, no, no. It's a month between boxes, but I open the cart once a month. So I open it this morning, it closes next Monday, and then I ship Friday. Kevin King: How much does a box cost? Speaker 1: 50 bucks. Kevin King: Plus shipping or that's everything? Speaker 1: Plus $10 to $9.99 shipping. And then in between the cart opens, I hit them with a mystery t-shirt. So they can buy a mystery t-shirt. It comes with little accessories of my choice, like a little, you know, necklace or something. And then I can just pull from stock I have based on, they tell me what size they want. I just pull from stock I already have. So there's no money out of pocket because I already have a product. And then the chicken tote bundle. You know, I love to bundle, right? The chicken tote with the chunky bracelet and earrings. I put that in between, and then I just launched Boo Mail, which is everything and anything I have in my boutique that is related to Halloween. And then I have a Moo Mail. These are one-time, one-time things. It comes in a poly, and the poly bag has cows on it, duh. And it's a cow t-shirt and a bag of cow tails, which is like these little caramel things, which are really good, and some cow earrings, and one other thing, I can't think about them all. Oh, it's, oh, a little crossbody bag. For $39. And that's and because it's not in a box, boxes cost close to two bucks a piece. But I got Polly's for 40 cents a piece. It had these cute cows on it. And that becomes part of The allure of it, when they get that packaging, they have that, oh my God, that's so cute, before they even open it. And that's Moo Mail. And then I have a Christmas box, which is separate from the subscription box. And it's only Christmas product, not farm-related anything. Just, do you love Christmas? And there's a box of a bunch of Christmas stuff that I already have in stock. Unknown Speaker: And I'll get that. Kevin King: Everything in these boxes is coming off of liquidations. Speaker 1: Yeah, or it's stuff I already have in my warehouse. Yeah, all of it is liquidation, except for, well, let me think about this. Yeah, no, it's all liquidation right now. Kevin King: That's brilliant. That's really smart. Norm Farrar: Have you ever reached out? I've worked with some subscription box companies before and where their profit lies is companies that provide them with samples. Speaker 1: Yeah. Norm Farrar: Do you do that? Speaker 1: I do not. Here's why I've chosen not. If I did it, it would not be as part of the regular stuff in the box. It would be a little thing, a little extra. Because there are boxes out there. I don't want to say any of them. One of them starts with FFF. But all it is a samples of random stuff. And the reviews on those are they just threw a bunch of stuff in there from different manufacturers with marketing stuff in there. And I bought like a snack box once I got a snack subscription box. And there was just random stuff in there that was clearly all samples smaller. And the perceived value of it was Nah, I canceled them. I didn't continue with them. So if somebody wanted to give me samples, I'd put it in a box, but I wouldn't make it in place of something else. Unknown Speaker: That make sense? Kevin King: All right. Norm Farrar: Yep. Speaker 1: I want my people to be surprised and shocked and awed and wowed and put a big smile on their face. And I don't think samples is going to do that for me. Kevin King: Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Norm Farrar: Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Kevin King: Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say. Norm Farrar: I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too and we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Unknown Speaker: Yikes! Norm Farrar: But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits. Kevin King: Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like norm. Speaker 1: Oh So another one of the promotions is they can buy a gift subscription but a three month subscription I'll give them a discount on it. But the first box since I have extra horse totes We'll be the horse box that went out last week. So when they buy somebody a three-month subscription for Christmas for somebody else, it will not renew. It'll be a one-time because you know, after three months, like I'm not paying for the subscription for this Aunt Ida who came for Christmas for another three months, right? So it'll be like three boxes, one-time purchase, but it won't be the new boxes coming up. It'll be the horse box that I still have 50 of. Because I still have 50 of the totes, which is the main thing. And that product, it gives them the thing that farm girls tell me they really like the most, horses. And I use up that product. The new person getting that three month doesn't know that that was October's box. So those are the things I'm doing this year with the subscription box. Kevin King: And not every box might be the same because you might run out of something. Unknown Speaker: Oh, no, no, no. Speaker 1: They're all the same. They're all the same. Kevin King: But what if you run out of a little horse that you're putting in? You have 700 people that order a subscription box, but you only have 613 of these little horses that you're putting in. Do you fill it with something else from the liquidation and those other people get a slightly different box? Speaker 1: My numbers say that I want to grow X amount of percentage every single month so I can kind of prognosticate out how many t-shirts I'll need. You have to plan out as you grow. As I get bigger, I'd have to plan six months out. Right now, I know I have plenty. I have a spreadsheet with the four boxes that are upcoming for the next four months plus the one of boxes in there and all the product on there is product I have plenty of. In my box, if I needed to fill something in, I would do something similar. I might offer, you know, just grab something, go one of the local liquidation houses or if I have to go to Walmart to buy something to fill in, then I will. If it costs me more to fill in those extra 10 boxes because I didn't have one product and I have to buy retail, I will. I won't leave it out of the box. Because that hurts the box experience and then increases the opt-out, the churn rate. So I want to make people happy. And because my box cost is really low because of the way I source, I can afford to have that extra bubble of money in case something like, all the XL, all the large t-shirts I had to send to people, I XL it and said XL to XL. Yeah, I can eat that because I've got the t-shirts in stock and I didn't pay that much for them. Norm Farrar: I think that's another important thing that you just brought out is that, yeah, you can go out there and market to anybody, but there's going to be problems. Unless you're on your customer service, exceptional customer service will take care of most problems that come up. By giving that Excel right away. Speaker 1: Not only that, but I put some stickers in there too. I didn't just send them the t-shirt. I put a little, you know, whatever, some stuff I have around, you know, one of these in here, I'll put one of those in there. Right. I just put something extra in there. You know, Halloween is here. So what does it really cost me to put one of these guys in it? A little skull pen as a little thank you. And the weight's not that much extra. So instead of just getting the t-shirt, now they get a t-shirt and a little gift that just increases that goodwill a little bit. Just that little, the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. And I run my business based on that, well, my life too, based on that theory. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. Norm Farrar: I think that's a good way to end this podcast. So if there's any sassy farm girls that are looking for subscription boxes, how do they get a hold of you? Speaker 1: If they're interested in the farm girl life, then thefarmgirlbox.com. And if anybody wants to ask me questions about anything marketing related or business, I like business and marketing strategy. I like building businesses and buying and combining businesses. You can go to marketingmojoclub.com, something I just started, marketingmojoclub.com, where we get together and talk all things marketing. Norm Farrar: All right. Kevin King: Awesome. Well, it's been great, Barbara. Thank you, guys. Always fun to chat with you and always fun to talk. The time flies too fast. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on, gentlemen. I really appreciate you. Norm Farrar: We had a blast. Kevin King: Appreciate you too. Awesome. Norm Farrar: All right, Barbara. I'm going to remove you now and Kevin and I are just going to talk for a sec. Speaker 1: Okay. Norm Farrar: Oh, there's the chicken. You're true. Speaker 1: You're true. Kevin King: You're true. Speaker 1: Thanks, guys. Kevin King: Thanks. Norm Farrar: Thank you. All right. Kevin King: Good stuff. I always enjoy talking marketing and shopping. Time always flies when we talk to someone that is very creative and innovative and doing things in a cool and different way. That's a true misfit. Norm Farrar: A true misfit. Yes. And you know what? What I liked was right at the end, because we talk a lot about marketing strategies, but there's that one little thing that you got to add, and that's that customer service. Exceptional. Barbara summed it up at the end. I mean, it's all about that exceptional customer service will get you that client or have a loyal client or customer. Kevin King: Yep, it's going, it's that over and beyond and just surprising and delighting. We're willing to admit when you make a mistake and make it right. Norm Farrar: You know how I can see this. You know, when I go to your house and you have my little Coke Zeros, because you know I like my Coke Zeros. Then you have my ice cream. You have my gummy bears. Not, you know, my gummies, but my gummy bears. That's called exceptional customer service. Donuts, donuts in the morning. Kevin King: It works, doesn't it? Norm Farrar: Tiff cookies. Kevin King: It works. It works. Yeah. I mean, someone, I mean, literally if someone comes to my house, I think it was Amy, Amy Weiss, you know, Amy, and she, she came and stayed with me for, uh, in my guest room for internet marketing conference. I think it was back in March. And she loves tea in the morning. And she actually, she's like, do you have a tea sift or something? I don't drink teas. I was like, what the hell is that? And I'm looking around everywhere. I said, should I have one here somewhere? I couldn't find it. I ordered one on Amazon that day. She's coming back today. Actually, another conference here. She's going to stay a couple of nights. And I have it. And Norm, my brother came to town and his girlfriend loves some sort of black English tea. And I didn't have it. And so I immediately went and got it. But that's customer service. I mean, that's taking care of people, whether it's my friends or my business associates or my customers. That's part of going over and beyond. Now, some people will take advantage of you. I take advantage of that from time to time. But usually those little things go a long way. I mean, we were at dinner last week and Guy, remember when he said the story about when he came years ago. He didn't have a charger. And he still, seven, eight years later, still remembers that. And those things carry on. And that's what a lot of people forget. It's exactly what Barbara said. These are humans. And treat people not as a customer, not as an object, not as a number, but as a human. And you can do amazing things. Norm Farrar: You know, I want to add one other, just another story to this and that's our Life Pods. So Kevin and I, we got to finish with a cigar story. So Kevin and I have these biometric Life Pod cigar humidors and I brought it home one day when I was traveling back and the paint started to chip off of it. Now, these aren't cheap. They're a few hundred bucks each and the paint started to chip off. So I sent an email over to the customer service. They got back to me right away. They didn't ask for a picture. They didn't ask for anything. They just said, we're going to send it out right away. Gave them the info and they sent out a brand new life pod. Which I just picked up at your house, by the way. No questions asked. I think that's just, again, it's exceptional customer service. And then they followed up. So keep that in mind. Kevin King: And keep in mind that you don't want to miss an episode of Marketing Misfits. Every Tuesday, a brand new one comes out. Hit that subscribe button. Follow us on social media. Go to marketingmisfits.com. No, no. I can never get this thing right. MarketingMisfits.something. Norm Farrar: I'm going to put that over the top of you there on the wall. That's what we should do is put it on the wall behind you. It's MarketingMisfits.co. Unknown Speaker: There you go. Kevin King: You can find out everything about the show. And if you like this episode with Barbara, forward this on to somebody. If you know a farm girl, forward this on. Like, hey, you got to listen to this. Check it out. Or if you know someone that's thinking about doing subscription boxes or whatever, forward this episode on. And let them check out The Marketing Misfits. We're happy you're here with us. We're happy you stayed till the end. And we'll see you all again next week. Norm Farrar: All right. See you later. Kevin King: Ciao.