Marie, the floor is yours. All right. Well, hi, everybody. I can hardly believe it's the end of June. Where did the year go? But we're delighted to be doing this capstone in our trilogy. This is masterclass number two, where we've been talking about using email marketing and social media as push strategies. Remember, we're pushing out information on social media or via email, and how to make that as effective as possible for you as communicators, and communicating the value of who you are as fiduciary advisors. Our prior masterclass, we call that masterclass number one, also had three components. And it is available in the archives on the NETFL library. And that was about using things behind a gated area. So we call those lead magnets. It's pulling people to your site for the content, but then there's a little price that they have to pay. And they actually have to give up something, typically their name and email address, in order to get that valuable piece of information and use it for their own edification. So that's what we talked about in the masterclass number one. Today's session, we will be actually doing more of an interactive coaching session to capstone this particular segment on using email and social media as push strategies. If you've been joining us for the last two sessions, you already know Alex Cavallari from the Seven Group. And of course, I'm Marie Swift from Impact Communications. And today, Johnny Swift is actually on vacation. He's camping with his wife. And Colin Swift, who's also with the firm, is here filling in for Johnny. So in a minute, Colin is going to start asking some of those of you who responded to our survey, asking, are you ready? Are you ready to share what you've been working on in the area of social media campaigns or email campaigns? And for those of you who have something to talk about, but not to show us, that's fine too. Anybody who completed the survey and says, yes, please call on me, we're preparing to call on you already. But if you didn't submit that survey and something comes to mind while we're talking, don't hesitate to raise your hand and we'll be watching that chat area as well. So Colin, you're going to be serving as the emcee. Before I turn it over to you to kick us off on the interactive coaching program, I want to just also mention to our class here today that our third master class is going to start on August 24th. And we have a new set of guest coaches coming in, co-coaches with Johnny and me for that one. So again, it'll be the three parts. The first session is on what, what is custom content as an inbound marketing strategy? We call that a pull strategy, but it's not behind a gate, it's just free and available to feed the search engine spiders, as well as to feed people with the education that they need. The second session in September is going to be the how, how to create audio, video, blogs, news releases, and other end gated content to attract attention and to feed all of your social and email campaigns. And then as is our strategy for this year, from practice to theory, from theory to practice, rather, we're going to actually ask you to create something, a video, a podcast, a blog, a news release, and then bring it to share on November 2nd. So we hope to see you all for that. And our co-coaches are going to be Jodi Jacobson from the Human Skills Institute, Natasha Knox, who is a fiduciary planner in Canada. Her company is Alfea Financial Wellness, and then Rita Chang from Blue Ocean Wealth. I think she's in New York. So with that, Colin, would you kick us off? Who are we calling on first and what are we talking about? Yeah, absolutely. So to start us off on that survey, we asked a question, if you had an example ready or just an idea or concept. So we're going to start with those who actually had an example ready to have you guys look at and discuss. First on my list was Terry from Zuma Wealth, but I do not think that I see Terry in here yet. So we'll just move along to Holly of Holly Donaldson Financial Planning. Holly, if you want to come off mute and share your screen, Holly is working on an automated email sequence or a drip campaign focused on financial self-care for HR pros, optimizing your employer benefits. OK, I'm just going to click share my screen and I'm going to go to my constant contact account and show where I have this email series set up. Perfect. OK. It says my screen sharing is disabled. Post disabled participant screen sharing. We're going to fix that. Colin, do you need help from Heidi? Heidi, are you working on it? Yeah, Heidi, if you could help help me out there, I'm not seeing an option on my end to allow Holly to share her screen, but if we make her a co-host, I just I just change it so you can share. There we go. Yeah. Thank you. Tell me later where that was. I will. So, Holly, you should be able to share now. Yeah, it's taking me through some things I haven't seen before in Zoom. Sorry. System preferences. I am on a Mac. Oh, yeah. So, Mac, you need to be able to Mac needs to give you permission in order to share on Zoom. I did not know that. And that happened before. OK, I'm trying again. Security and privacy. Sorry. Holly, would you like us to give you a minute and we can go to the next person? Probably a good idea. So I can get this figure. All right. All right. You have to restart. Oh, OK. Well, I might disappear and come back. All right. Well, moving along, the next person who has an example ready is Mike of Next Mission Financial Planning. Mike, if you want to come turn your camera on or share your screen, Mike's also working on an automated email sequence or drip campaign on college planning. How are you doing, Mike? OK, we can see you, Mike. There you go. There you go. I was having issues getting off mute, but doing well. All right. Are you seeing my screen? We are. All right. So this is still in draft form, so I haven't put it into my mailer sequence yet. But basically, it's six different emails along the lines of college planning. So what they've done is they've come to the site and gotten a free college money report, which basically, this email outlines what they've received, tells them about what that college money report is, and then just introduces the fact that, hey, this is really the beginning of the process. There's more to come. And then I just introduced it over the next few days. I'll be sending them some additional information, the rest of the drip sequence, about how they go about determining their family's personal college budget. OK. Is that all you want to show us, or do you want to share a little bit more? No, I have all six emails. Yeah, let's see them all. I'll run through. So then email number two starts talking about what they'll actually pay. It explains that we don't shop for cars or houses or other big purchases without a budget, but so many people do college, just try to get into a college and then figure out what they can actually afford. So this just breaks down the process a little more, explains how our process goes about, again, allowing them to understand what they'll be expected to pay and building out their budget. Then through the portal that I also licensed, they can search for schools that are generous with financial aid and scholarships. And then the third piece is ensuring that child's perfect school is one that the family can actually afford. And I'm just going to learn more here with a link to my site. Great, keep going. Number three, just a myth, what we'll pay at each college won't change very much. Short email just saying that, you know, regularly talk to people that think that school's prices don't really vary that much and introduces the fact that most people don't pay the sticker price of schools. But that really the average doesn't matter, that it needs to be tied to what they can, what, you know, their situation and the assets of income they have. Again, kind of lays out what you can get in our tool and then has a call to action of, hey, you can schedule a meeting at the link. Four, I serve a lot of military clients, so this is really more specific to them, but planning for college, if they have the post 9-11 GI Bill, it explains that really it's a great asset, but the value is really dependent on what you pay for school without that money. Because the GI Bill is the basically the last payer, again, outlines what we do with the college funding process. If they have the GI Bill, helping them understand what it would cost them, and then the other scholarships that might be available and strategies to stretch their bill or GI Bill. The fifth one, shopping for college doesn't have to be a black box process, talks about some of the student loan crisis that we hear. And, you know, again, reintroduces the shopping for the Ferrari for what they can afford as the Toyota, explains it doesn't have to be like that. Again, goes through our process and invites them to either reply to the email or schedule a call. And then the last one talks about how they, you know, our process again, it's the, you know, schedule a call, then it breaks down what the planning process actually consists of. And then just kind of wrap up with just again, it doesn't have to be the black box process. They can be an informed consumer. I love it, Mike. I think you've done an excellent job. And I have a couple quick questions and then I'll chime in a little bit more. But what platform are you going to use for your email sequencing? I've been using MailerLite. MailerLite. Okay. And do you feel pretty confident that you can do the sequence well, that you don't need any help with that? No. Yeah, I've set up some others using that and it seems to work pretty well. Great. And then at the end, if they haven't responded, what will you do with these people who've been receiving? I also have a monthly, I'm going to put together a monthly email about college planning. So if they got that, they'll just go into the regular monthly email funnel. Great. And who is this going to? How did you curate the list? So this will be folks that have either indicated some interest in college financial planning, or they've gotten the college funding report or college money report. That's also on my website as a lead magnet. Okay. And then visuals. This is rich with opportunities for visuals. So you're going to use a platform called MailerLite. How will you liven this up with visuals? I'll add some images. And then I have a, just a template that I use for my emails that has like my logo and some other just things in their address of the firm and those types of things. Yeah. Well, so I love everything that I've seen and I can't wait to see it come to life visually. I think you've got a really great sense for marketing. I love that you talk in the client centered voice and you address their pain points. I noticed that you started a lot of your emails with the word you, and your text is heavy on that emphasis, you and your, you and your concerns. And then you get to our solutions or what you think, and then you use the I word or the we word or the us word. I think it's sequenced really nicely. It's a nice build. I love that you have additional resources for them, the portal to search for aid, the guide that you've already mentioned. I like the way that you've languaged how to figure out your personal college budget and even helping them see themselves as a shopper, a school shopper. That's really powerful. You know, one thing that does occur to me is you have a nice call to action at the end of each of these, and they're slightly different, which I think is good. So it doesn't just feel rote. It feels like you're actually trying to engage with them and offer them different ways to think about how to engage with you, whether it's for questions or to learn more or to schedule an appointment about services. One thing I do wonder about is, could there be a way to say not shopping for a college? Maybe you have a friend or a loved one or someone that you'd like to forward this on to? I was just speed reading, but did you have anything like that in there, Mike? I didn't. That's a great point. Alex, you want to jump in? What do you notice and what do you want to add? Yeah, Meg, this is a great effort. Scroll up to the email one real quick. So, love the structure of this email. I think this email flows really well from just a copy perspective. I think one of the things that you would do this here, what I would do here is from this standpoint, you're prefacing that you're going to send the next several emails, which is great. I would also give them a little nugget of content here, specifically, whether it's a piece that you wrote or a video that you did, essentially breaking down at the highest level, how people should be thinking about paying for college. So, from that perspective, when you think about your content flow from initial drip that happens all the way to the last email, you kind of go from a broad to narrow content architecture, where essentially the first email you're covering the highest points of the conversation, essentially what people should be thinking about as it relates to paying and searching for college. And you can do that in like a two minute video or crafting up a blog post that's specific to that. So, you're giving them that nugget of value, even after they get the college report. So, in each email, you should think to yourself, and Marie said something about giving them a very strong call to action, which I love, but I think what you should think about is what is the nugget that I want them to take away? And then how can I give them the option to dive deeper in every single email that I'm sending from a content perspective? So, not even if they book a meeting, like if you scroll to, jump to email two real quick. So, from email two, you hit here in terms of like your college planning process, right? And you talk about your process. What I would do is rather than talking about your process, you could literally talk about like why the process is so important to get right. And that could be a blog post that is linked to on your site that then links to your process. But these people, because they downloaded that college report, they're still pretty much in the education slash getting a lay of the land phase. And so, from that standpoint, it's on every single email, what can I drive them back to from an education or thought leadership perspective to give them more context on the specific topic that I'm talking about? So, that's the other thing that I would just think about in each email is like what's in it for them at the other side of it. And then in addition to that, someone had mentioned it in chat, but just make sure you're spell checking some of the things in here. I think like introductory was spelled wrong. on the cadence, what are you thinking about in terms of cadence in terms of how often these would go out? That's what I was, I was going to kind of ask what I was thinking every like three days for this initial sequence after they downloaded, but I wasn't sure if that was too quick or too slow. Yeah, so what I would do is for the first few emails, like the first three to four emails, I would keep it a pretty tight timeline. So like every two to three days, sending that initial drip out. Then you're sending out that next one out three days later. And then you're like fifth or sixth email. You could space it out a little bit more just because you're kind of giving them that break to come back to it after they've been hit with those initial few emails. So like generally when you get to a cadence, like at the end of the cadence, you want to have a little bit of a bigger space because a lot of the time people just don't think about it. They'll open it and then they won't, then they won't come back to it. Right. But if they see it again, two days later, they're again, skim over it mentally. But if you give it a little bit more of a lead time, then there may catch that your name pop up in their inbox. If it's been just a slightly bit longer than your initial emails hit. So I would do, I would do initial email three days, three days, three days, four days, five days. I can't remember if you had another one in there, but another five days. Okay. And then I think on the, on the last email, just if you jumped onto the last email, you hit schedule introductory call like three times, I would just have the, the main, the, the core CTA, you know, if people, I wouldn't necessarily have an all caps schedule introductory call. I would just have like the one, the one link to schedule call core, core, core link. And then in addition to that, at the end of this last email, just note that you're adding them to your email list because you're essentially prefacing the fact that like, Hey, you're moving off this drip. Thanks so much for, for following along. And then you're going to move them onto your list. So they know that that additional email is coming. And then after what I would do is, so say you get, you know, you're, you have your first group run through this initial initial flow. I don't know how many people are on the list, but say it's like 50 people run through this flow. What I would do is assess after ran through that 50, look at, go back to the list, go back to each email, look at the, for the people who engaged at multiple emails. So if you have people in like in certain platforms, you can kind of look at like, who's high engaged or slow engaged, look at people who engage with more than one email, and then generally build that list out separate. Right. So you're going to create like a, like a hotter prospect list, which could be like 10 people, which generally would be carved out from that initial list of the people who engaged. And then essentially you're going to go out to them individually and directly that you're taking them off the marketing process and then moving into a biz dev process. Okay. So just measure after this flow, you go back in, you understand who's engaged with multiple emails, and then you, you reach out to them individually. Okay. Nope. So it makes a ton of sense. And Alex mentioned video embedding a video could be very helpful because we want people to get to like, and trust you. And video is a great way for them to hear your voice, see your face. A photo is great, but I think video was better. And, you know, you could consider at some point doing a bonus webinar. If people, if you know that this is of interest to them and maybe open this up to your entire list, your drip list, your house list, if you will, everybody who's potentially interested in working with you or knows you. One thing that I have been told by a friend of mine, who's an email marketing master, Robert Sophia, he said, put a BFB on your emails or on your social media posts, big frigging button. I put a big frigging button for them to see because otherwise they're looking like, how do, what do I do? So I mean, not too many, like, I think Alex, you make a great point about too many schedule and no cost introductory call. That's probably one too many, but maybe a big frigging button somewhere, you know, at the bottom for people who miss that elsewhere, you know, just having the little word click here, just with here, hyperlink might be too subtle for some people. So people are busy. Colin, I think we need to move on. Colin, would you like to say anything before we move on or amplify what you'd like? I would just amplify both what Alex and Marie said about the video. I think the video would be a great touch in this drip campaign to give a little more personal side to yourself. And that's what I would add on that. I think the video would really make this a really nice piece. Great. Thanks for all the feedback. Thanks, Mike. Not a problem. And I see that we have Holly back. So let's just roll right back into Holly, if you want to share your screen. And then we see it does look like you're muted, Holly. Just as a refresher, she's also doing an automated email sequence, a drip campaign. Her topic is financial self-care for HR pros, optimizing your employer benefits. OK, now can you hear me? Yes. And you can see my screen too? Yes. OK, great. So this is my constant contact account where I've set up this series. And I'm listening to Alex's comments about frequency. So I set it up as a weekly reminder task thing. So I'll just show the first one. It's six reminders about their own employee benefits. And the gist of the message is that as HR professionals, they are often taking care of others. And it's human to let their own employee benefits fall by the wayside. So these are just reminders for them to engage in their financial self-care. And the first week is maxing out their disability. And it's got about disability. And then each week, I have this recap of here's what you need to do for the week. And then give yourself a little reward. So I've encouraged them to do their own reward. But I'd be interested about incentives or rewards that could be built in. Maybe that nugget thing that Alex was talking about, maybe that would be good. And then there's always the schedule a call button. But I don't have anything really more pressure than that, I guess, is the way I would put it. OK, so the other weeks, the content I don't think is really as important. It just goes through different benefits. This one is making sure their beneficiary designations are up to date. And I haven't worked on the formatting on some of these in between. So that first one is had the most work on the formatting. The third one is rebalancing the 401k. And I believe I have some links in here to some blog posts I have and some outside resources. NAPFA, go to NAPFA to look for advisors too. Let's see. And then fourth one is using their prepaid legal. They have that and then a little thing about the basic estate planning documents that you want to have. Let's see. And then fifth one is HSAs and using those. And then in the final one at the end, I have more of the calls to action than I do in the other emails. So in this one, oh, I've got HSAs twice. I missed one. Sorry, it's a work in progress. So then at the end, I have this little you did it and then an option to sign up for the e-letter or take an online course or just schedule a call to let us know how you're doing. So that's it. Great. Well, so one question I had is I noticed that you had a link to the NAPFA website to find an advisor. And I wonder, I mean, we love other NAPFA members. We're all in this together. There's abundance, but maybe you could reposition that if they're hearing from you, you're the pro on this. So you could be the clearinghouse, the resource for that. So maybe you want to just talk about that for a second. What got into your mind when you were putting that in to find an advisor? Yeah, I do have sort of an abundance mentality. And I tend to be I tend to shy away from pushing myself as the only option. So if somebody's interested in having an hourly advisor, you know, it doesn't have to be me. I'm happy. But at least I want them to steer them in the right direction to get a fee only advisor and at least go to NAPFA. So I always like to give other options as well. So it's just my discomfort with saying I'm it. Yeah. Well, you know, you can always be that sounding board. So at my firm, when we get inquiries, we try to talk to everybody who is a potential client, even if we're ultimately saying, you know, I think one of our marketing colleagues, quasi competitors, full competitors, I think you'd be better served by such and such and such and such. So I know it takes time to do that, but it puts you in a position of bonding and you never know who people know. And, you know, even if they're not a fit for you, it's goodwill. So it takes a little time. But Alex, where do you fall on this whole conversation about standing in the space of expert in a clearinghouse? Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's, you know, the more you can exude yourself as an expert and position yourself an expert, the better. Some of the things that I noticed in this email sequence that I think you should just think about specifically, I couldn't tell the subject lines. Just can you go back to a single email? Yes. Yeah. It's at the top. Is that it? The financial care for HR pros? No, that's just the internal note to myself. So here's the subject line and the preheader. Okay. So and then is everyone is the go to the email to just to see the sec, the second subject line? They're all the same. Oh, they're all. It's all welcome to financial. So what I would do is make for each. So for the first one, you can have, like, welcome to financial self-care for HR professionals. But from for the next ones, I would differentiate the subject line from your first subject line and make it topical. I'm like, you know, tip two. I don't forget what tip two was, but tip two, how are you thinking about X? And then with a question, when it comes to your subject lines, like if you think about a subject line, right, most people are open their emails on their phone. Right. So from that standpoint, basically, the shorter the subject lines, the better. Anywhere from like three to six words is like ideal from a subject line. Obviously, that's very short, but in general, like just think about how when you're reading an email and you're checking email on your phone, everyone that like doesn't have the ellipses and doesn't kind of expand out to the to the edge. It's always something to think about when you're crafting a new subject lines. When you do craft that subject line out, think about like what is the question you're asking or like the one thing they should be thinking about. Like, think about it. Each subject line be very hooky in the sense of like you want them not clickbaity, but, you know, in the sense of like you want that's your that's your main goal. So many people underestimate your subject lines, but they are so important. The two things that I did, you did really well in the emails that I just want to note here is if you open up one of the emails. So and this is for other people to just take into consideration. She bolded key terms that she wanted people to pay attention to. Now, it's an art to how you do this well within content, right? Because if you do it too much, people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like chill. But when you bold key terms, headers, specific things that you want people's eye to go to, it's so powerful in terms like that reminder one where you have that bolded, that's like a core bold point. And then the other thing that you did really well that other people should just take into consideration is you have the key to the key takeaways at the end, right? So in general, if you want to keep your emails as scannable as they can, and if like they're heavier emails, you always want to give what are the, what is the one thing, the two things, the three things that you want someone to literally take away from this email. And they can take it away either from just an information perspective or a reminder standpoint or an action item that they should take. But generally from that world, you want to make sure that either keeping your emails like list form really scannable, or in this instance, somewhere you have some dense parts, which is okay, making sure that you have that recap in, love that because you're just, you're giving people like what they need to know coming out at the end of that email. Thank you. Yeah. I would say to Alex's point, keep it readable. Subheads will also help break this up and the font treatment too. So until I see this deployed, I wouldn't know for sure, but there may be something that you could do just to kind of zhuzh it up, you know, make it more interesting for the formatting and the text. Yeah. It's kind of texty. It is kind of texty, but I like it, you know, again, letting people get a sense of who you are, your face, your voice, if you can get a photo in, did you sign it with a personal email at the bottom or let's see if there's any, I mean, that's one of the things that I think is great about you, Holly, and everybody that is on this call, probably same for all of you is that you would have a personal relationship with your prospective client. And so they're not just calling into Merrill Lynch or some big organization where they're not sure if that person is going to be there, their long-term financial advisor. So with that, I think that's everything I would add. We've already covered some of the other do's and don'ts in our prior segment with Mike, Colin, anything that you'd like to add, and then we can move on. Nothing from me. It looks like Alex just answered Julie's question. I believe you're using constant contact, correct, Holly? Yes, constant contact. Perfect. That would be it for me. We'll move along here. It doesn't look like Terry is still here, so we'll just skip on to our next group of people that filled out the survey. They don't have an example to share, but they do have an idea or concept they'd like to share with you guys and discuss. First up, it looks to be Barry of Family First Wealth Management. Barry, if you want to turn your camera on or just say hello. Are you in here? I believe I saw you in here. Nope. Looks like Barry's not in here either, so we'll just keep moving on. Next up, we have Stuart of Open Doors FP. Stuart, if you want to come turn your camera on or just say hello. Stu is working on an organic media series on varied topics. I do see that I believe Stu is in here. Hey, how's it going? There he is. I'll be honest, I didn't know I was speaking today until about five minutes before the webinar today, and I'm not really sure what I was supposed to talk about. Well, just tell us what are you thinking about? What is the concept, and how can we help? It's your opportunity to get free advice. Honestly, I'm just trying to figure out how to utilize social media and Facebook marketing to get more leads. I mean, the drip campaigns, I've seen a lot of stuff on that, but how to do it effectively. So you're specifically thinking about Facebook marketing? That seems to get the most success nowadays from what I've been hearing. Yeah. Yeah. So Alex, you want to jump in on Facebook marketing? Yeah, sure. So if you're trying to go for lead gen, when you think about traditional lead gen marketing on Facebook, you have your ad that you set up on the platform, you drive to a landing page, the form's on the landing page, and then they submit the form, then it runs them through the drip. What we've seen over the past several months, ever since Apple and Facebook had their whole battle, is that, and you can untrack yourself from Facebook standpoint on iPhones, is that the metrics and the reliability of the targeting driving to the landing page and the metrics on the landing pages are as reliable as we've seen in the past. So where we've pivoted with seven group members is essentially when you're setting up a lead gen campaign on Facebook, and I'll talk through tactically how you do that, but specifically what you want to do is set it up as a lead gen form ad on Facebook. That means that they're filling out the information via the Facebook form. So generally, instead of going to a landing page and filling out the form on the landing page, it pulls, it auto pulls in a lot of their information on the Facebook forum, just in terms of what, how they have their contact information within Facebook. And then after they fill out the form, they're then driving, you're then driving them to a landing page to download the asset in that form on Facebook, you can add qualifier questions. So what we usually recommend is that you're adding, are you looking for a financial advisor on the form? Yes, no, possibly. Right. So you get some kind of indication of how they're, if they're looking or in there, if they're in the market. And then the second thing that you want to ask is it's usually a second or, or maybe potentially a third question, but the more questions you introduce, the less conversions you get. Um, second question could be what keeps you up at night financially. What's your biggest worry in retirement, specifically getting something that can dictate what your outreach is going to be to them after they download the asset. So generally how you're going to set it up is you're going to have to either create an ebook or create a guide or leverage a guide or sign up for a platform that offers licensed guides, create a landing page, um, where that ebook is going to be hosted because you can't drive directly to a PDF from any Facebook ad, you have to drive to an HTML webpage and then Jen, and we have like a whole philosophy on it. I can follow up with some information after, but generally you're going to set it up from a targeting perspective. You're going to be anywhere from 250,000 to about 1.2 million, uh, people in your target audience. And this could be demographic targeted, niche targeted, whatever it is. Um, specifically that should tie as close to a Ken to the content, whatever you're promoting. So if you're promoting pre-retirees and you're in, uh, where are you located? Uh, Southern Virginia area. So Southern Virginia, your, your, your numbers, if you're going like 50 to 65 plus, you may not get the numbers that you want. Um, so you may expand it out to other cities or you can expand it out to other cities or States and then add some, some additional qualifiers in terms of the targeting on top of it, whether they're. Uh, and you know, the top five, 10% of zip codes in those areas, or, um, specifically they're interested in certain things that more affluent people would be interested in, um, in terms of just general interest, you can add those layers on to help you get to those, those numbers that you want to get to from a targeting standpoint, and then you set up, you essentially set up the ad copy creative, um, build a form on Facebook. And then from a budget perspective, what we've seen in our sweet spot is in terms of ROI is around that 30 to $35 per day is kind of the sweet spot to start for two week ad runs, and then generally you're going to measure your cost per lead, your number of leads, obviously, and then your followup rate and engagement rate on the emails that you're sending after, um, open rates, click-through rates, et cetera. Right. So specifically that process, you don't want to just follow the lead conversion. You also want to follow the, the email conversion. So what I would determine is like, do you have a guide that you can promote on If you do great, if not either create one or on a topic that you want for your, for your specific audience, sign up for a landing page platform, like a lead pages.com, um, set up the landing page to host the actual asset, build a graphic, you can use Canva, build your copy, your ad copy, a really good resource to look at inspiration for ad copy and creative, just Google Facebook ads library, and that will literally give you everybody who runs Facebook ads. You can search key term. You can search companies. You could go and see like what, you know, Fisher investments is running, whatever it is, like it does since they run so many ads, like it doesn't matter, but you can essentially get inspiration for your copy and creative there. Um, and then set up the ad through that process, uh, via, via Facebook. And then if you want more information, just, just ping me on email and then I can send you more. Awesome. Thank you. Also going to add a little bit about that and Colin, I know you do some Facebook marketing with our team as well. Um, we've tended to move away from Facebook because of all the controversy. Um, a lot of people still go to Facebook cause they want to keep in touch with their kids and grandkids and they're kind of addicted to that convenience. Right? So I still think it has some efficacy, but you can do something called a lookalike audience. Alex was talking about targeting by selecting, um, interests and demographics, both age and geographic location. But Colin, can't you feed a list of clients up and it'll find a lookalike audience based on those profiles? I believe that you can do that in Facebook. Yes. Alex, do you want to chime in on that? The lookalike audience feeding a list up? Yeah. So, so it just, let me just try sharing my screen. Hold on. We'll try it. I'll just, we'll just do this real time. So basically if you're on Facebook, one of the ways that you can go into your audiences is there's two ways to really build an audience on Facebook. You can either. Um, and it's kind of like where you're at within your Facebook ad process. So like, if you're at the beginning of your ad process, you can't really, unless you're uploading a list, you can't really build a lookalike off like your web traffic, because you may not have the web traffic there. Um, but specifically. Essentially how I would say, say you don't have a list because a lot of people don't have a big enough list to where you can like build a lookalike off of it. Um, what I would do is I would start with cold targeting. So like demographic targeting, location, targeting, interest-based targeting, run that for, call it two to three months, right? You're running ads off of that. Now, when you're running ads off of that, you can essentially start to build audiences off of the people who interact with that ad or go to your website. So for example, if I wanted to, um, build a, if I wanted to build an audience, I can't pull it up. If I want to build an audience based off everybody, who's come to my website and I want to build a lookalike off website visitors, I could do that. I can build a lookalike audience directly off traffic. That's come to my website. I can also build a lookalike audience off people who've interacted with my content on Facebook. So essentially what I would do is start with cold ads, run that for two to three months, build the interaction off your current ads, and then build your lookalike audiences off of that. Now it gets kind of, when you're in ads manager, it gets kind of technical and confusing as it relates, like specifically how to do that, but there's a ton of resources online that can show you how to do it, but you have to essentially, unless you have an email list that you can upload, that's fairly decently sized, that can give you a good lookalike off of it. Um, you want to start with like more of the demo cold, and then you can essentially build a lookalike off the demo cold, the cold audiences that you built within Facebook. Yeah. Hey, Alex, let's talk about buying lists. So typically buying lists is not a great idea. Um, however, recently I've learned about something called catalyze AI, where they're looking for triggering events in people's lives, and you can sign up for this service and their artificial intelligence will harvest publicly available information and the first triggering event that they have available for sale is a brand new company. Um, the first audience that people could buy a list would be for inheritors. So if people on this call are thinking, I'd like to get my content in front of inheritors, you can actually buy these lists from catalyze AI and they'll give you 200 leads of people that have over 750,000 of net worth in your area. And so you can target by zip code and, um, their artificial intelligence is telling them these people have inherited or should be having a triggering event that would lead to an inheritance. Alex, have you heard of catalyze AI or any other lists that are good to, in order to enhance the email list capabilities or that lookalike audience and feeding up into Facebook? Um, no, I haven't. I, you know, I'm not a, uh, like when it comes to the scraping or the AI formalities, I, you know, I, we've just generally stayed away from it. Um, in terms of the recommendations, I think, you know, the best way to build the list in addition to like some other tactics that you could do is, um, you know, leveraging those called audience to build your email lists on Facebook and LinkedIn to run ads to them, to those guides, and then essentially you're building your list on top of that. Um, but I don't have a ton of experience with the AI tools. Yeah, for sure. If you can build your list the old fashioned way by human intelligence instead of artificial intelligence or a list purchase, like sometimes we hear about zoom info or info USA, I wouldn't do that, but, um, I'm going to report back because I have a couple of my, uh, marketing retainer clients that are going to try this catalyze AI. So I'll have some real case studies to report back probably by the fall when we do our next masterclass trilogy. So I'll report in on that, but I ran into catalyze AI at a, at the jolt conference, a jolt marketing conference. You probably saw him there too, Alex, you and I were both there in Las Vegas. And so I'm kind of curious to see if this works. All right. So, um, anything else from you, Stu? I know we kind of put you on the spot, but hopefully you got something out of that. Yeah, it's been perfect. I guess we can mention following up in the Facebook piece, especially Alex. I'd love to do that. Yeah. And let me just show you real quick, uh, Marie, is that cool? If I just, yeah, absolutely. And just while you're getting that teed up, I'm just going to tell our audience that it does not appear that we have anybody else who has pre requested that they share if you are here and somehow Colin miss seeing you. We had some people who kind of backed out at the last minute or said they had a sudden conflict. But if you want to share and you ask to share, we want to put you ahead in the queue, we're going to go until 15 minutes after the top of the hour, we're slated for 75 minutes today so that we have time to really dig into this. And so Alex is going to screen share in just a minute, but if you're not on the list and you want to ask us some questions, we will probably have time for that. So Alex, take it away. Yeah. So Stu, this is kind of to your question and what we talked about, like lookalikes. You know, this is, this is a decently in the weeds concept when running Facebook ads, but, but generally you can see like, this is our seven ad manager. Um, but essentially like within audiences, you can create different audiences around characteristics of people who've interacted with your content. So it's important to get your Facebook pixel on your site. Um, generally it's important to also connect to your, connect your domain to Facebook as well, generally. Um, if you have like a WordPress site, a lot of that happens automatically through the integrations that Facebook has with WordPress. But if I wanted to create a custom audience on Facebook, I can go and create a custom audience. So essentially like if I wanted to say, okay, I want to target retargeting when we go to Amazon. So if you go to the seven group.com and you go back to Facebook or Instagram, you're going to get our ads. It's just the nature of the beast. And if you go to Amazon, you'll get their ads. Um, so if I want to create an audience based off source, I can create an audience based off source. The cool thing about what Facebook does, and this is why it's important to build that like group that you're initially going after over time for those first two to three months. And the sense of if you're going to cold audiences and they're interacting with your content on Instagram, on Facebook, you can then build audiences off those cold audiences that you've targeted. So from that standpoint, if I wanted to target everybody who's interacted with my Instagram content, um, in general, uh, not, this is one of the, our, our members, but in general, I could do that, right? So if I wanted to target all those people who've interacted with Instagram, I could do that. If I wanted to go to here and say, all right, I want to go to people who've interacted with all of our website content in general, I can build an audience off that, right? So once you build your audience off the individual, we can build a custom audience off any attributes. So if I wanted to build off an audience who's interacted with our Facebook content and I can interact with them to say, all right, everybody who's interacted with our content specifically, um, that's not selecting. Um, if anybody's interacted with our page content or like the page or interacted with any post or any ad we've had, I can build an audience off that. So once you've created that custom audience, then what you can do is, and you've, you've gone after them a little bit, right? Then you can build a lookalike off that custom audience. So basically I'll just go to other sources here and then I'll go to like seven group. Uh, where's my seven group one. So this custom audience that I'm doing, uh, creating a lookalike off all the website visitors that came to the site. So generally you're creating your lookalikes off the audiences that have already interacted, and that's going to tell Facebook, I want to target anybody who's looks exactly like those people who you're driving to your website, interacting with your posts. And that's why you want to use those first two to three months to build those cold groups into a group that you can then leverage into custom audiences and then lookalike audiences. That's really helpful, Alex. And I think that the seven groups platform looks awesome too. I'm not sure if the everyday email programs have those types of, uh, sophisticated features. Do you happen to know, is there any other platform that does what you just showed in terms of lookalike and targeting and interaction linked? So you can do it on LinkedIn. You can build out custom audiences via list upload or people who've interacted with your content on platform on website. You can do it on Google ads as well. You can upload lists, um, on, on Google ads. So you could on pretty much any platform. Now you can upload a list or build off custom audiences based on people who've interacted with your cold ads. That's why it's so important as your, your, your ads, aren't just like cold forever in the sense of you, you want to build on it. So you want to build your ad strategy cold upfront. And then as you're, as you're going and you're building your ad audience of people who've interacted and seen your ads, and this is why, when you, when you interact with like one ad, you go to another platform or you go back and you're just getting hit like left and right with similar products, or you're getting left in or hit left and right with the same brands ads it's because they're, they're taking that evolution of that cold audience that you saw just randomly, but then you saw it, you interacted with it, maybe you clicked on it and now you're getting shown to other people's lookalike audiences and now you're getting shown to their retargeting audiences. Um, so any, any, any major ad platform, you can do the custom audiences and uploads. Hey, Alex, I'm looking at some of the chat here and I was busy just thinking and watching some of the prior interactions, but there's some good stuff in here, so, um, you already addressed one of them verbally, but I want to just kind of unpack some of what's on the chat here. So for the benefit of the recording. Um, so one of the questions that I haven't heard us talk about is CRMs and you addressed it here in the chat. You want to say what you said and then embellish a little bit. Yeah, sure. So when it comes to email marketing and kind of contact management, you really just, you want to make sure you have a, a solid CRM, so that could be wealth box is a great platform that's specifically for financial advisors. I'm sure a lot of people use it here. Um, you could also do if, uh, uh, I don't know why the other, the other big players escaping me in our space, uh, red tail, red tail. Um, so you have red tail as well are kind of the two big players. You also have advise on who's, I know, uh, a decent player in the space from a CRM perspective. If you want to go outside of industry, CRM, um, obviously Salesforce is the behemoth. Salesforce is very technical from my experience using Salesforce. It's yeah, it's, it's, I have, I transparently, I know we're recording, but I loathe Salesforce. Um, we, you have, you have HubSpot, which is an amazing platform. Um, but basically you want to identify your, your CRM portion of the contact management system. And then in addition to that, you're going to identify email marketing system. So that could be constant contact MailChimp HubSpot has that built in a seven group, uh, you know, snappy crack and whatever it is, um, you have it. You want to make sure that you have that, that, that content manager contact management system, and then making sure that they're talking back and forth with each other. So if you have, you know, we're, we're launching a wealth box integration within the next two weeks, um, with, if you have that, that email system, making sure that you're able to flow data back and forth to, to make sure that if they're interacting with their emails and it's feeding back into the CRM and vice versa. Yeah. Um, I love everything you just said. And Salesforce is a beast and it's probably not applicable just for learning curve and the investment of time and money for most of the people on this call, but I have heard good things about accelerate and they're a Salesforce overlay that's specifically tailored to the industry. Any comment on Accelerate? Anybody jump into the chat or otherwise we'll move on. So my team uses MailChimp when we're hired to do marketing campaigns. We like MailChimp quite a bit. I believe that a couple of my people are here from the MailChimp team, Teresa and Quinn. I don't know, Colin, if you see them on the chat, but in a minute we might see if they want to add anything or if people want to ask about MailChimp. I've got two people who work in MailChimp. There's Teresa and Quinn. Say hi, you guys. Wave your hands. They're calling in from our Denver office. They were just on a call working with 20 over 10 and FMG. Now they're one in the same company on some communications for our clients where we love building websites on the 20 over 10 platform. And now I guess we're going to love building on the FMG platform, right guys? Teresa and Quinn are on mute there, but they're smiling. So Melinda says, yes, MailChimp would be helpful. So Melinda, would you mind coming off mute and just asking us what you mean by, yes, MailChimp would be helpful? What specifically would you like to know about? Is Melissa going to come off mute? Can't get off mute. Oh no, Melinda. Oh, I said Melissa, but it's Melinda Satterly. Okay. Yeah, there you are. Yeah. No, I have been sending a blog through MailChimp a couple of times a month and I had an intern set it up about a year ago. So I know it's not real pretty. And I guess I would just, but I probably just need to do tutorial on my own. I don't need to take time here to do it, but I guess I could, if anybody else has used it or how they use it or any good advice on MailChimp. Yeah, Colin, I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm going to get you, give you a minute to go and find one of the MailChimp campaigns Johnny has been doing for say Stratus or I forget who else he's doing them for Intercontinental. Those are a couple of nice email newsletter type campaigns that Johnny has been doing for those two clients of ours. And then Teresa and Quinn, if you can think of anything that you would like to say or share about what makes for a good MailChimp campaign, I know you're doing them for a number of our clients, setting them up either as a sequenced one-offs or regular newsletters. So Colin, anything that you've found that you want to show visually for what MailChimp can do when it looks nice? Not currently. Give me just one second. I'm trying to log into the system here. Emma, Linda, if you had one of yours that you wanted to show us so you could get some quick feedback, we could tell you if there's something that could be better. Do you feel like bringing something up and showing us your last blast? She's quiet. Melinda. She says, I will show you. Okay. She's going to show us something. As Melinda, just in terms of what everybody should be thinking about in general is when you're setting up your MailChimp templates or your templates in your email system in general, you don't need to create one from scratch every time. You should pick like three or four templates that you create within the template section of any email system and use those consistently. So maybe you have a newsletter one, maybe you have like a drip template, maybe you have like a direct follow-up template. So generally the best way to scale it is to make sure you have those templates. So then when you go to create your next newsletter, you don't have to, and I'm sure people use the templates all the time, but you don't have to create it from scratch and you just dupe the template or leverage the template. But it's good to create more than one just so you have it for the different use cases. Yeah. Thank you. I have a question for Teresa and Quinn in our Denver office. Can you put a form right inside of a MailChimp? Tell us what you can embed. Quinn, come off mute and talk to us. You can embed videos, forms, images, obviously raw HTML code, text, all kinds of stuff. So it's a drag and drop. Is that right? You see a little widget and you drag it over and that's your video that you drag the HTML code in. Is that how that works? Yes, it is a block builder. So you would drag a block or an object over from the sidebar and place it. As far as how customizable that form might be or advanced it can get, I haven't really done many advanced forms in MailChimp, but I do know there is absolutely the capability to embed a form within a e-blast. Yeah. I'm going to answer Mike's question here. Hang with me, Quinn and Teresa. So Mike, you asked for the name of the AI company. It's like Catalyze. Catalyzing event. Catalyze AI. A for artificial, I for intelligence. Catalyze AI. I happen to know that they have a special going on until the end of June. So it's half price because they want to improve the efficacy. So I think it's normally a thousand dollars a month for 200 leads based on these catalyzing events, based on inheritors that they're scraping. But they'll do a one-year deal or a six-month deal for 500 a month and tell them I sent you. I don't get a commission or a toaster. I think they'd just like to know that I said something about them on a webinar. But there is a question here in the chat and Colin will go back to this in a minute. Is this you showing? Who's showing this marathon? Is this Melinda? Melinda. Yeah. All right. Melinda, talk us through this. Yeah. So again, my intern set this up and when I go through it and I do have the same template for each blog post, but I, this is showing you how it looks on a computer. It looks a little different on iPhones, but I don't know. I just think the type is small and it's just, it's just not very attractive. And I can't seem to get like why women should love stocks. I would like that to be in the opening line, but it's not. All you see is the latest blog post from Marathon Wealth. So I think it's just, I need to do a little more training on MailChimp or creating a template. Teresa and Quinn, do you want to jump in and say anything as you're looking at this? Anything jump out to you? I know it's small. You're on mute. Okay. Scroll down. Quinn, are you telling me that no comment? Is that what that hand gesture was? Like move on? Or you're on mute. There we go. We couldn't unmute ourselves. No, everything she's pointing out is kind of initially what we noticed. Some small pieces of text sticking out that maybe didn't make sense. Some small spacing issues. That initial image is maybe a little too large, could be scaled back, but it sounds like she's aware of all these things and is going to go get some training on them. All right. I'll go do that. Overall, it's a good grade on this. This is not bad by any means, but it can, like almost everything, be improved upon. Yeah. So I just see that in the templates in MailChimp, just kind of there's some things I could do there to help with all this. Quinn and Teresa, that's a question for you guys. Templates in MailChimp, Alex is saying, get a couple of templates. Are there ready-to-go templates or do you have to create them and then run? They're absolutely ready-to-go templates. They even have the option, if you came from another builder and you can get the raw HTML, you can import raw HTML templates over. The way we do it is just pick one of the pre-themed templates. And as was stated before, we customize it and we'll have one for a newsletter, one for a holiday message, one for a streamlined message, et cetera, et cetera. And then you just go in, you pick that template. So you go, OK, it's the second week of the month. That's newsletter week. I'm going to click the newsletter template, click clone or duplicate or whatever it says in the back office. And then you just work on the clone of the master template from there. All right. There's a question here. Do most templates, I mean, email templates, I think is what we're talking about. Are they mobile friendly? Yes. Although we have run into some where a client has asked us to use something like, was it iContact, Teresa and Quinn? And we're like, oh, no, this is not mobile friendly. This is not modern. Alex, most of the email template builders are mobile friendly, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I can dive into Greg's question too. I was typing it, but I can answer that specifically. So Greg asked, can someone from MailChimp comment on this from a spam perspective? It's like my favorite topic ever as someone who runs a ESP, like it is something that you have to obsess over as a email platform. So MailChimp and other ESPs, email service providers, all the majors, essentially if you sign up for their platform, you're likely on a rotated IP. So essentially they have a block of IPs that they're rotating through consistently as emails are being sent. So like your emails could get sent from one IP and then you could rotate on your next send to another IP, they have blocks. Now they do this to avoid bad actors affecting their entire customer base, right? So they do this intentionally, but they have, I don't know the number, but they have 20, 30, 40 IPs of a set of customers that they can consistently rotate. So that's the first thing is that bad IP reputation can affect your emails in a major, major way. However, a lot of the big service providers are negating this by having those blocks of IPs that they own. Sometimes these spam filters will also, not these spam filters, like the blacklist filters, they'll actually, not all blacklist filters are created equal. Like Barracuda is like the gold standard and blacklist filters or blacklist providers. A lot of these other ones that if you like search the IP that your emails are being sent from, and it's on that blacklist, a lot of them that are like actually extortion lists. So generally you have to be like very clear about like what blacklist you're coming up on, because some of them just like select a block of like MailChimp IPs, they'll throw it on their blacklist. And then specifically that will be like, that'll show up and you'll freak out, but it's actually not anything that's necessarily warranted. If you're going with like a smaller email service provider that doesn't have the budget to rotate 20 to 30 IPs, they may have one or two dedicated IPs that they're sending from. And they may have very strict guidelines around how you're collecting your lists, right? So like you can only send to opt-in people who've opted into your emails, or you have to run an opt-out email prior to running an opt-in email. So from that standpoint, like from a spam perspective, that's just the one way that MailChimp and all these other bigger ESPs are assessing this and helping you navigate this as users of those platforms. Additionally, and Holly made the point too, when you sign up for an email service provider, your domain is not connected to that service provider. Meaning what you have to do when you sign up for a service provider is go through the domain connection process. So they'll provide you a set of records for your DNS settings to wherever you bought your domain. We do this with our platform too. So if you bought your domain for GoDaddy, they'll provide you a set of records. You want to add those records from that email service provider to your domain, wherever you bought it. The reason why you have to do this, and this will clear up a ton of spam issues, is because a lot of the time, if you don't do that, what it will do is it will essentially, you can like type your from name in, you can like type your from email in, but that's just like kind of an alias on top of the MailChimp email that's being sent from. So unless you do that direct connection in terms of you're adding the records to your domain from that email service provider, when you do that, that's telling the inbox, the inboxes, the Gmails, the Yahoo mails, the AOL mails, that hey, oh, I recognize this email saying it's being sent from this. Oh, and it actually is being sent from this because it's connected into that domain. So from that perspective, just make sure you're adding any records when you're sending it for email system to your email service or from your email service provider to your DNS, it'll clear up a ton of issues. The other thing is, is that a lot of the time now, a lot of these spam filters will trigger finance terms, unfortunately. TBD and like which ones are triggering more don't have all the answers, but specifically, you know, using concepts, money concepts or money terms can help trigger spam filters. So just make sure if like there's an email that goes to spam and like you had a specific term in the subject line, just make sure you're thinking about that as you're crafting up your subject lines. Last thing and I'll shut down on that is make sure you're asking clients when you're sending, having your quarterlies, if they're getting your emails, right? Because a lot of the time, from an Apple perspective, if I don't hit load content in the top left, and I don't have my tracking on from an email standpoint, it actually won't show as an open, even if I showed you should open your email. So specifically my email, even though if I opened it, it may just say delivered on your ESP on your email service provider. So from that perspective, like if you think your emails may be going to spam, best way to do it is just literally go out to a subset of 10 people who had delivered as shown on their emails and ask if they got the email. And then that way you can test, okay, is it just Apple being Apple or are my emails actually going to spam? Because delivered does not mean they hit the inbox. It could, they could be in the spam inbox. Good advice. So Alex, I don't know if you saw this, but Holly says that thanks to your spam advice from a prior session, she linked her constant contact to her domain or whatever it said that you said she should do, kind of like what you just said. And it cleared things up a lot and her open rate went from 46% to 61%. Woo hoo. That's awesome. That is awesome. Yeah. So we're coming up to the time, so we don't have time to actually open up another MailChimp and show you how we think about good MailChimp design, but we'll try and do that next time. The last thing I think might be worth talking about is Alex, you mentioned setting up a landing page. And so a landing page is basically just a single topic, right? So people don't get lost in your website and it's very clear what the offer is, what the call to action is. Could you talk just briefly about landing pages and you mentioned lead pages and comment on a MailChimp landing page versus a different other kind of landing page? Yeah. So landing pages are great for really kind of two core things in our mind, an event, like a webinar specifically, and then a download, like a download asset, right? You're going to be using landing pages when you're doing very targeted communication. So you're either targeting specifically to an email list or you're targeting specifically from like advertisement. Didi just asked the question, why is landing page separate from my website? So you can build landing pages in your website builder, like a lot of website builders, WordPress, I think 20 over 10 now has this, they have a landing page functionality that you can build. The reason why it's a little bit different from like your core web is that most of the time landing pages don't have your primary navigation in the actual landing page. So it's just, you're shifting the content up on the page. So it's just focused on the message of the content to drive that conversion versus if you go to like the general site, you're in more of like an explore mode and you're kind of clicking around in the nav, you're jumping to multiple pages, the nav key, a landing page, especially if you're doing advertising, because you don't want people to click around, right? You want it to be focused on the message of what you drove them to from an advertisement. So that's where landing pages come in is they keep people focused on a singular message. They don't give them distractions, guardrails exactly, to keep them in that content and to the core goal that you're trying to have them accomplish, which is likely fill out a form or sign up for something. So landing pages are great use cases for webinars, events, and guides or like reports too, but generally those are kind of the core use cases for landing pages and then paid email are both good for them as well. Yeah, fantastic. Well, that's a great note for us to end on. Really great discussion, everybody. Thank you for bringing your questions and your contributions today. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you and we'll see you again in August. August 24th is when we kick off again with our last masterclass, the three-part trilogy on inbound custom content. And we're going to talk a lot about voice and authenticity and making really good content that resonates with people. So thank you for your comments and we'll see you then. Thank you again, Alex, for being our guest coach this time. With that, we'll say goodbye. Thank you.

email marketing

social media

push strategies

targeting ads

budgeting

measuring success

landing pages

MailChimp

specific demographics

CRM platform

spam filters