How to Use Infotainment to Get More Sales from Your Email List – with Jimmy Wrex

Mike: Hi there, everyone! Welcome to Episode 99 of The Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews with succe — *clears throat* Hi there, everyone! Welcome to Episode 99 of The Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews with successful online entrepreneurs. This is your host, Mike Thomas. And today on the show, I’ve got Jimmy Wrex on to talk about using infotainment to sell more to your list. Now, what is infotainment? It’s — It’s a way of creating a story and really getting your subscribers involved in the emails and involved in the — a plot line that you developed over time in, through a sequence of emails that will, in the end, make it more likely that they’ll be willing to buy the product from you. Um, Jimmy will tell all about this in the interview and, of course, in his product. But ah, yeah, let’s get right into the interview. Here’s Jimmy Wrex.

Mike: We are here today with Jimmy Wrex. Jimmy, how are you?
Jimmy: I’m good, Mike. You?
Mike: I’m great. Let’s get right into it and why don’t you tell us about who you are what you do.

Jimmy: Okay, well I myself, work with partner, Pete. And we are on a website called nicheexperiments.com. That’s a blog and we kind of talk about the, you know, the adventures and things that we find out in internet marketing on there. But um, our real journey sort of started a long time ago, back in kind of 2008. I started googling, you know, how to make money online and things like that, like a lot of people do but we, I think, we started, you know, really deep into it sort of mid of 2009, I think. Um, that’s when we started making niche sites and things just like what you did I think Mike, with all your AdSense. But we are more into affiliate marketing so, so yeah, that’s what — our sort of blog has kind of changed as we moved from niche sites to paid traffic. And from, you know, sort of sending traffic to landing pages to email marketing and that kind of stuff. So, email is really where we are at the moment, that’s the big sort of a — big sort of focus for us.

Mike: So, okay. Pretty much your focus now is on building your email list from you website? Is that how you’re doing that?

Jimmy: Well, no. We sort of in a few different niches. Um, the one — we kind of tend to work in other niches and then we blog about it on our internet marketing blogs. So, for instance Forex is um, a really really big niche for us because we got our own, um Forex Service and giving signal. So, we also do a lot affiliate marketing in the Forex arena as well. We were kind of pushed to do paid traffic in email in that — in that niche because it’s just such an oversaturated niche, you know, getting ranks and doing SEO in that niche was just gonna be too difficult, we thought so.

Mike: Okay, so it’s — you’re trying, you’re trying to get find a way to get a traffic in a niche that’s pretty much, I’m not gonna say impossible but very very difficult and expensive to try to rank your website to get natural traffic.

Jimmy: It did look impossible to us, yes. Exactly. So, a large portion of our business was built of solo ads. Um, just in case anybody doesn’t know you pay somebody else to mail that list your AdWord, you know, a free offer. And then, once you get these people on your list, you can um try and relate to them and, you know, build a bit of a relationship and then, of course, sell them things coz that’s where, that’s where the magic happens, of course.

Mike: Were you doing solo ads in the Forex niche?

Jimmy: We do it, yeah. That’s pretty much how we get the like 90% of our traffic.

Mike: Because I’ve talked to a lot of people recently and it seems to be a re-occurring topic of using solo ads and how they work. I had a guy on who explained the whole process of how he does, he’s got like ah he’s got a huge list and he makes thousands of dollars a month. And I mean, he’s — he’s doing pretty much the whole solo ad selling ankle.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Mike: But when it comes to doing solo ads for different niches, I think that that might be the way to go because it’s — everyone now, most people in the internet marketing niche know what solo ad’s like. You’re getting so, you’re on so many people’s list already. You know, what an — everyone knows what an autoresponder is. Everyone knows that when they get an email from someone and it has their first name and says, and says, “Hey, Jimmy. How’s it going?” Like, they know that’s it’s not really the person writing the email. I think that —

Jimmy: Yeah.

Mike: — there’s just too much opportunity in this other niches that aren’t saturated with these people that have their email in hundreds of list. I mean, maybe Forex has already lot of competition.

Jimmy: It really does. It really does work well, though. But what we found is you do have to have something pretty special to show them very quickly. So, we’ve got like you know, emails that kind of build the relationship but we send them to videos and prove that our service is good to get them on our side as quickly as possible. So, um we also, one of the things that you’ll find very common with solo ads is I’m sure you’re probably told you about this, using a really low — low value offer. So not the value but low priced offer. So, the first thing we offer people when they come into our list is $1 trial of our service. So, it’s kind of we — we get the people who are vaguely interested very quickly into our service. The people who don’t join our service, they go to another list where we do the affiliate marketing and we can sell them solo ads and we can do the other stuff, so —

Mike: Okay. So the ones that buy initially, those are — those are the golden ones that you take care of. And the ones that don’t buy it’s like, okay. Pretty much you’re saying those ones are not very valuable to us and we’re just gonna monetize them in a way that they’re probably gonna eventually unsubscribe from the list and we’re just gonna make as much money off of them as we can until they unsubscribe.

Jimmy: Kind of. Kind of, but not as brutal as that.

Mike: Haha. I know, that’s pretty brutal, huh?

Jimmy: Like, they’ll go through, like I say, a two-week for funnel but you know, to see whether they’re genuinely interested and if they come out the other side of that. So, let’s say that’s like 50 emails or something. If they come out the other side and they haven’t paid the $1 trial, they’re really not interested. Um, and then we will sort of sell them other things. Um, but we will kind of like we’ll still sell the other things in very specific ways. So, we’ll go find an offer. We’ll find what’s good about that offer. And then, we’ll build a few emails to kind of introduce it, pre-sell it, sell it, you know. And also, usually include a bonus as well. So, we still put like a lot to our promotions even though it is not our product. So, yeah. We’re hoping to kind of build a big subscriber based on, you know, of people who really love our stuff even if they’re not actually buying our product we own. So, if that makes sense.

Mike: Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense. Um, today, what where gonna — the basic idea of what we’re gonna, we planned on talking about was how to use infotainment to get more sales. Can you kind of explain — you kinda of talking about like the soap opera thing earlier with me before the interview. Can you kind of go over that a little bit with us.

Jimmy: Yeah, yeah. The best way I can describe that I think is um, quite often you’ll get an email from a marketer and it will say something like, “Dear Jimmy, I just picked up this great product. It will give you the holy grail of traffic. If you need traffic, click here.”, right? This is the normal kind of email. And so what we’re trying to do is think like, okay, I’m gonna send an email that’s gonna be sending a product. Rather start with that kind of an email, start with just the words: picture this. Dot, dot dot. And then go into some kind a bit of a story or add a character or just try to use an angle which is a bit different to what you would normally get in an email. Um, and if you can — it doesn’t matter if it, you know, it can be completely made up. It can be completely surreal. It just has to be entertaining and It has to get the information across as well. And I think because our inbox is just so, so, so bombarded now with so many different offers and um so you know, so different marketers that you really need to do something to stand out like that. So, the soap opera sequence thing that you were saying, that’s an idea that we got from Andre Chaperone. He’s so famous in our community for, for bringing that up. And basically, it need — you build an email sequence where they’re all tied together as you know cliffhangers and characters and the story flowing so that your readers get so involved in the story and they get so into your way of thinking that by the time you bring your offer up, they’re already sold. They don’t have to think about it. I mean, Andre does this so well, he quite often in his emails link straight into a payment page, he doesn’t even go to the sales page. Um, we haven’t quite get there yet but we’ve got very, very good at doing this for affiliate products when we go to — to, you know, the sales page or to — whatever.

Mike: Okay, so it’s, pretty much it’s an alternative way, it’s a creative way of creating — I mean, you’re creating something where the person becomes invested in the email. They become invested — they’re part of the story, they wanna know what’s going on next, they wanna know what the ending is gonna be. So, you got them, at least you got them that far and then by the time that, that you do go ahead and — I mean, are you usually telling like a story of saying, “Oh, there was this guy and he didn’t have — he was having a really tough time”. I mean, how many times have you heard that story. Oh, I was — I — I was there before, I was a failure. I couldn’t make any money online and then I came across this method and then I was able to make — you know what I mean? Like, is it that kind of thing?

Jimmy: Yeah. Not quite that cheesy. Well, what we kinda do — I mean, I know what you mean that’s — it’s not far from that in a way but we do it in a better way. So, we might start an email with: Me, Brad and Johnny. Brad and Johnny both wanted to be computer games testers. However, only Brad made it. Johnny works in, you know, a garage or you know, low-paying job . We’re going to explain what his life is like but then we say, but Brad is completely different. He gets to do some so on, so on, so on and so on. Over the next through emails, we’ll explain to you what they both did and why their lives went off on to see two different, you know, directions. And so, you can, you know, put your, you know, the choices that they make become the choices that the people reading your email have to make. Ah sometimes, um, I’m liking it to a, you know a Christmas Carol where he goes into the future and sees his future? That’s what we wanna show you, you’re two possible futures. And you know, your decision is now. And the decisions you make now will decide where you end up. So, that’s a pretty big key part of one of these sort of ways that we use email, yeah.

Mike: And what are the open rates like? What are the click-through rates like and more importantly, what are the sales rates like?

Jimmy: Um, that’s a good question. It depends. We have new customers, new prospects. Their open rates are really, really amazing. I mean, I can show you some open rates of literally 85%, you know. 50% click-throughs and stuff. But, over time, obviously, once they — once people, you know, after a year or two, people have heard these stories. They kind of know what’s coming. They still hang around and buy stuff but they do lower and lower at that time. There’s just no way to sort of go against that. But in the early days, you can really, really grab people with this stuff. Um, and you can definitely keep people subscribing and buying for longer as well. Um, some of our conversion rates, the most famous one and this isn’t normal but I’ll just tell you for fun, the best that we’ve ever had was a mail out to a list of 570 people brand new subscribers. Um, I mailed that to 570 and we um, we made 28 front-end sales 10 back-end sales. To 500 people, I mean that’s crazy.

Mike: How much, how much the — how much in total sales did you make?
Jimmy: It was a low-value offer, so a low-ticket offer. So, in total it was $455 profit from one email to 570 people and — Mike: Pretty good.
Jimmy: This is a case study that’s in our, in our book that we recently put out, yeah.

Mike: Cool. Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty incredible. I think a lot of people listening, they’ll have list that are bigger than that or I mean, or even, on scale though, to be able to send out and give that much of a return back for each one. In that one email, that’s pretty impressive.

Jimmy: Yeah, one of the key story was that was a list of buyers as well. So —

Mike: Oh, that’s an important part too.

Jimmy: Yeah, yeah. They hadn’t opted in for a free gift. They have recently bought something from us and the reason the email works so well is because we said, look, this is a new product coming out. We talked about how great it was. We also talked about how it well-fitted with these other thing they already had. And then at the last part, we said, “You know, take this new thing and take your old thing and put them together. And if you buy it through us, you get this bonus.” Bang, that was it.

Mike: What kind of bonus did you give them?

Jimmy: It was really easy in this case because it was a product that I went through and as I was reading through it, I thought, Oh I can think of the perfect way to apply this. So, it was just like an extra guide which was um, about what we would do if it was us. So, the product did sell. It was all about Facebook and making viral fan pages. And the case study I kinda gave them was um, how you would use a Lady Gaga fan page to work this method. So, yeah.

Mike: I think it’s a good idea. I mean, there’s a lot of times though, there’d people offering bonuses and whenever I see these little bonuses that people offer, it’s usually BS bonuses, like it’s that PDF file that they have sitting on their desktop that they never, they have never even read. And they’re like, it’s like, How to Make Money on Twitter. And they don’t even — I mean, it’s — it is some ridiculous method that no one’s ever done but some guy’s come up with and you know, it’s just like some of those things. And then, you offer this as a bonus to someone and I don’t know, bonuses for me never really ring true. I think that you have a great idea with the fact of offering something that a personalized bonus from your head and from your methods. I think that’s a, that’s a great idea. That might be something I’ll end up doing in the future here.

Jimmy: I really would do that, yeah. Because you make the bonus almost as valuable as the actual product, so all you kinda say like, the product is almost incomplete without this. On Andre Chaperone, we learned a lot of this stuff from him in the first palce, like kind of considered him a mentor in some ways, he — one of the things he does which is really clever is he says, you know, the product is Kermit the Frog, the bonus is Miss Piggy. That’s kind of a — that’s something we’ve, we’ve adopted as well quite a lot. So, um we do it slightly differently now because we sort of make it so our bonuses often, which is stand alone as well, so that when the next product comes out, we might offer the bonus again with another bonus. So, we kinda stack them up, if you — if you can make them stand alone. But, yeah, you really want them to, in the promotion —

Mike: I like it.
Jimmy: — you want them to be needed, yeah.
Mike: I like that, for example, there was — I had Spencer Haws on the show the other day. Jimmy: Yeah.

Mike: I think you know him. Yeah, he’s got his software Long Tail Pro and it’s a software that I really stand behind. I use it myself. I have it on my desktop right now and it’s — that would be something where I did the interview with him, and we talked about the product and I recommended it to my people. I endorsed it, said okay, this is something I use, this is something I would say go ahead and get this. And if I had gone ahead and perhaps, made just a little extra video of how exactly how I use it and how I do keyword research with it. I mean, people would have been oh, okay, that would have been a valuable bonus to add along with it. So, I really like your idea of doing that. Nice, nice little nugget there. Let’s get into talking about on your sales page, if you wanna open that up, you talked about the three lies of — I guess of marketing or email marketing or internet marketing. Here we go. I’ve been trying to pull it —

Jimmy: Yeah, yeah. We kinda take of it in general.

Mike: And the first big lie is the money is in the list. Let’s talk about that.

Jimmy: Yeah. It’s just one of those cliches that you must have heard a million times and I know we’ve all heard it: money is in the list. We really believed that first but if we could just build a list, we could send our offers and it was, you know, this kind of live on the beach kind of dream of not having to do any work. Um, but what we found is it’s actually, you know, it’s not. The money is not in the list. It’s in the relationship, like that example I was talking about a moment ago. 500 people generating 38 sales. Um, we’ve you know, we’ve also experienced the other side of that of sending promotions to a thousand people and not making any sales, you know, in the early days which is what has let us down this path and let us to use this methods. Um, so yeah, the money definitely isn’t in the list. There is some money in the list. You can just use it to try and burn an approach. Um, but yeah, the money is definitely in the relationship. I think, that’s why marketers like Frank Kurn, even though he comes in the so much fire and you know, takes so much hassle from everybody, you know, the gorillas lie to you and all that kind of stuff he always says, he has a very strong following because his relationship is good. The people in his list hear people say bad things about him but they don’t care because they feel like they know Frank and they feel like they get value from him. So, so yeah. But definitely the relationship is where it’s at.

Mike: And the second big lie, it says: You need a massive list to make email marketing work.

Jimmy: Um, again yeah, this is sort of following on – fitting on what we were saying before that you — if you have a huge list which is really, you know, untargeted and you are just blasting your whole list the whole time. Um you probably not gonna do as well as the guy with the small targeted list. A line of offer we were talking about before where we said, look, this product has come out. If it’s perfectly with — perfectly with what you just bought and you know, mix it in with this bonus, that was just as targeted as it you can possibly get. We also send um, that same promotion to some other lists we had. But we didn’t get anywhere near that good of a response because it was like, you know, it just wasn’t that targeted. So, if you get people on your list for a specific reason and then you show them off some bonuses at that time with that, that’s — that’s really what you need to take care of your smaller list.

Mike: And the third big lie you talk about is traffic is your biggest problem.

Jimmy: Yeah. That’s an interesting one. I wasn’t sure if people were gonna sort of agree with this or not. The point I was really trying to make is that traffic is not really your problem. Conversions are your problem because anyone can take our credit card and buy a lot of traffic right now. You can get traffic if you really want it and you’re really willing to pay for it. But if you can’t convert the traffic, then it’s just a waste of money. So, if you focus on your conversions and make them really, really, really good, your traffic

problem goes away because the traffic pays for itself essentially. Um, if your, you know, every clicks you buy pays you more than it costs, then you know, you’re golden really.

Mike: Yeah, definitely. And the last thing here that I wanted to touch on is and I think we kind of — I wanna make sure that we’ve covered most of it, but the product that you’re selling is the Wise Old Email Gorilla. Have we —

Jimmy: Yeah.

Mike: And what is that? I mean, when people go ahead and they buy this, what will they be getting from this product?

Jimmy: Um, well it’s an interesting one. I’ll tell you how this came about. We — we promoted a product while back and we made one of our really awesome bonuses. And we send other bonus with the product and load of the people on our list emailed back saying, that the bonus — they enjoyed the bonus more than the product they bought. They really, really loved it. And it gave us an inkling to the fact that people really like these email marketing case studies. All we did was take a — an email sequence from one of our website which had been destroyed by the Google updates so it wasn’t making money anymore. And we put it, you know, into PDF and explained each email, broke it down, why we did this, why we did this, why we did this. And then gave some stats on, you know, how it did. And um, people liked it so much that we decided to get a few more package to the – all aps. So, six case studies with a full analysis of each um email sales funnel. Um, and put that on sale as the Wise Old Email Gorilla. So, that’s what it is really. It’s real life – – it’s an inside look into our business and how we convert subscribers and traffic into sales.

Mike: So, it talks — so pretty much what it’s gonna show you is the emails that you sent and it’s gonna show you the results of the emails. Is that how that works?

Jimmy: It does with some and it doesn’t with others. And the reason is — is that for instance, in the early days, we had some websites, were in some niches but we have lots of websites and banners and all sorts and we were collecting emails. So, we can’t work out the exact amount of sales from the early days but in some of the later ones, we can give you, you know, the exact number of subscribers, exact number of sales and all the rest of it. You — with the whole package, you get pretty much everything we do in the email marketing. Yeah, you get to see deep inside the methodologies and you also get to see the results as well.

Mike: So, what I would say to this is, like it’s great — it’s cool to see like what other people have done and what other people have been able to be successful with but if I — I’m trying to think myself as the buyer, If I pull up my credit card and I buy this, what’s — how am I gonna be able to apply what you’ve done to my business so I can make some money from it or make — get some success from it.

Jimmy: Ah, well it will work pretty much in any niche because fairly enough, if you were to go through it you’ll see um, one of the niches we use is internet marketing where I talk about what it is like, you know, the story of internet marketing and there’s also one which is how to — we’re selling a product on how to become a games tester. It’s a high-selling ClickBank product. And the similarities between them are so similar, you know, there’s so many because it’s speaking to the same aspirations in people. It’s basically, you know, targeting the same wants and needs. It’s using the same methos. I mean, there’s tons and tons of stuff in there but you can definitely, definitely transfer it to pretty much every niche. I can’t really think of a niche where you wouldn’t be able to do it as long as your — your sales conversions relies on you know, people’s emotional sort of um, state, when they’re buying. It does play on people’s emotion and so, if you are gonna use this, you really do need to you know um, and be a good guy. And not use your super powers for evil sort of thing.

Mike: So can people go right ahead — is it cool for you if people go ahead and pretty much copy what you guys have written or —

Jimmy: Well, we kind of like — I hope people wouldn’t use my name, obviously. We kind of expect that, anyway. Because people copy your stuff even when you, you know, don’t wanna let them so. So, if people wanna take those um case studies and actually use them, they can. I would recommend they change amount of it.

Mike: Yeah just, just go ahead and kinda rewrite them a little bit. I mean, if people wanna keep the same idea of the stories, that’s — that’s, I would think that’s fine but just kinda not make it word for word.

Jimmy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like I would just have fun with it. Like, if you — if you’re gonna copy and paste it and stick it in there, then you’re not really gonna be invested in watching how it goes and if does well. But if you put some of your own work into it, some of your own ideas, suddenly the game becomes a little more interesting and a little more fun and so, I would hope that most people would do that, yeah.

Mike: Cool, Jimmy. Well, thank you for coming on the show today. Is there anything that you wanted to mention before we finish up today?

Jimmy: No, not really. Um, it’s basically, you know, if you’re interested in coming and sort of have a look of what me and my business partner, Pete do everyday, then you can come and check our blog, Niche Experiments. And also, we just opened a private mastermind group, a couple of days ago, which is a Facebook group. So um, just contact us through the blog and we will ah, we will send you a link to that. Um, but that’s it really. Yeah, just come and ah — come and hang out and say hi and we’ll be happy to sort of see you and say hello as well.

Mike: Cool. Well, links to all that in the show notes at mikefrommaine.com. Jimmy, thanks again.

Jimmy: Great. Take it easy. See you.

Mike: I hope you enjoyed the interview today with Jimmy. Make sure you go to mikefrommaine.com/gorilla, G-O-R-I-L-L-A, if you wanna check out his product. Also, if you’re not subscribed to my list, go to mikefrommaine.com and at the top there, you’ll see a bar where you’ll get a notification every time there’s a new interview on mikefrommaine.com. Thank you very much for watching and I will see you all tomorrow.