Keith Commins of Pearl Design reveals deep, down and dirty email marketing secrets that you can use to explode your lists profits

2. Who Am I and Why Should You Listen to Me?
• Keith Commins
• “Direct Response” marketer and copywriter
• Just a marketer
• We’re all marketers. If you want to leave your house in
the morning, you need to know some level of marketing
• Your level of success in business and life is directly
proportional to your success as a marketer.
• Email marketing is just another marketing tool at our
disposal. No different to Adwords, direct
mail, Facebook ads, newspaper advertising or any other
media we use to influence others as to what we do

3. Email Marketing Intro
• It’s all about the relationship
• One takeaway tonight: most important lesson with email
marketing is to just click “send” – email hard and email often
• Even if you send the most interesting, relevant content once
a month, you’ll still be a stranger to your list
• Treat your list no different to how you would treat your
friends. You must maintain the relationship in the same
way, and offer them value in the same way
• Your emails should sound no different than a conversation
between you and a good friend over a few pints in the pub
• Email marketing is the last port of call in our lead generation
journey

4. The 2 Styles of Marketing
• Brand/image advertising (Madison Avenue advertising
CHECK NOTES) V direct response marketing.
• Brand advertising is predicated upon creating awareness of a
company’s brand via repeated exposure of the product or
company’s brand imagery.
• Brand advertising is unsuitable for start-ups, or SME’s
• Unless your company is well established, nobody cares about
your brand. They care about receiving great value, a fantastic
product and amazing service, which is best described via
copy.
• Direct response is based around getting an immediate
response from your prospect via a crisp, clear unambiguous
message which spells out exactly what is it for them, should
they use your product or service.
• We will view email marketing in the context of a solid direct
response marketing strategy. Important to know this
because it will affect your overall lead generation strategy.

6. Direct Response Advertising
• AIDA – Attention, Interest, Decision and Action
• Attention: get your prospects attention with a
headline that appeals to his self interest or piques his
curiosity
• Interest: describe the problem back to your
prospect, enter the “conversation happening inside
your prospect’s head”,
• Desire: heighten the desire for your product by
describing the benefits your product or service offers
• Action: lead your customer by the hand to action
(email opt-in, buy your product, phone call, send an
email) .Whatever your “most wanted” response is.

10. Selling Off The Page V Lead Gen
• Instead of selling your product outright, we merely wish
to get our prospects to raise their hand and say “I’m
interested, tell me more…”
• We attract them into our sales funnel by giving away
something of real value, e.g. a free report which solves a
problem or addresses a need
• In order to get the free report, they must provide us
with their email address or some means for us to keep
in touch
• From there we use regular follow-up to demonstrate we
have the expertise to solve their problem, and that we
are somebody they can trust
• Best way to do this is via email, although direct mail
and telemarketing can potentially be also used if needed

12. Why Email Marketing?
• If you meet someone for the first time, you won’t
propose marriage straight away
• Takes time to build trust and to demonstrate expertise
• Best done via repeated dates (follow-up)
• Only 5-10% of prospects are ever in a position to buy
your product at that time.
• The rest need more information, more time to think it
over or perhaps they need to trust you more
• Regular follow-up builds trust and demonstrates
expertise within your niche
• If you’ve done your job, when the time comes for your
prospect to buy, you and you alone will be top of her
mind, nobody else

14. What NOT to do
• Embrace BDC (aka “Big Dumb Company”) email marketing and
pretty but pointless HTML “newsletter” style emails (Good rule of
thumb, the bigger the company, the worse their email marketing)
• Make your prospect do any more work than they need to, hence
the problem with HTML/image emails. HTML emails scream
marketing
• Constantly push the hypey, hard sell, be all mouth and
trousers, e.g, “Buy Our Stuff Now! Save 25% If You Buy Before
Friday!”. St. Patrick’s Day Sales. Selling is fine, but you must give
value first and foremost, whether its via entertainment or
education. If you are 100% pitch, you’ll burn your list
• Show no empathy or understanding, make it all about you, your
company and your product. Remember: nobody cares about
you, they care about themselves first and foremost, remember
“WIIFM” – what’s in it for them
• Be boring, or be just another crappy email people receive in their
inboxes telling your prospect about how great your company is or
• Worry about open rates. They are irrelevant, and a distraction.

15. Email Myths and Misconceptions
• “I will be labeled a spammer!”
• “Nobody wants to read daily emails from me”
• “Writing daily emails is a lot of work”
• “What will I write about?”
• “My customers are a sophisticated bunch. They won’t
appreciate conversationally driven emails”
• “And I certainly can’t sell to them!”

16. “I Will Be Labeled A Spammer!”
• Be upfront from the get-go about what someone can expect
when they sign-up to your list. Collect email addresses in a
legal and ethical way. If you are going to be controversial or
embrace touchy subject matter, tell your sign-ups from the
very start.
• Actively discourage prospects from entering your funnel if
they are a bad fit – your market is NOT “everyone”
• This ensures that the only people on your list are quality
prospects you want to hear what you’ve got to say, which also
has the side benefit of ensuring quality customers..
• Reduces risk of whiners, freebie seekers and tyre-kickers
• If you are upfront and transparent about what to expect and
apply sound “permission marketing” principles, you won’t
have a problem with spam

17. “Nobody Wants To Receive 5 Emails a Week!”
• Its all about relevance. People will read the bible backwards
if it interests them. Reading the Koran
• If you’re emails are boring, corporate sounding and you
write like a self-obsessed stuffed shirt, then you’ll be ignored
• “Most people live lives of Quite Desperation” –
Henry Thoreau. Be the highpoint of their day by bringing
some humour, education and entertainment into their
otherwise dreary, unexciting lives
• If you give value and entertain –it changes the game
• People will become addicted to your emails
• Tell stories, weave tails, make people laugh. BOOM!
Suddenly you’ll have a following..
• We ALL can do this. ALL of us…….

18. “Writing Emails is A lot of Work..”
• It will take a lot of your time at first
• But really, you DO have the time. How much time do
you waste watching TV or messing around Facebook?
• When you start writing emails, expect to find it tough
• Like exercising, or anything which is difficult at first it
gets easier the more you do of it
• Unfortunately you just have to have faith you’ll get
better

19. “But My Business is Different..”
• No it isn’t.
• Whether you’re selling sophisticated financial products
or low-rent sex toys, people are people, and are
motivated by the same motivational drivers regardless.

20. “My prospects don’t like to be sold..”
• True. But nobody likes to be “sold” anyways.
• We’re not in the business of selling outright.
• We’re instead in the business of developing a solid
relationship with our prospects via educational and
entertaining conversationally driven emails, so that
when the time comes to buy, your prospects will not
look anywhere else..

21. “What Will I Write About?”
• Anything you like so long as it’s relevant. There are endless
possibilities
• Your family, your thoughts on the price of tea in China, missing
Malaysian airplane, crisis in Ukraine. Look for the hidden lesson or
moral, tie it into your product or service
• DO NOT be afraid to ruffle some feathers and to annoy people, but
don’t do it just for the sake of it. Be authentic
• If you have an opinion on something, say it. DO NOT fear
polarization. You want to arouse emotions.
• People will complain, but equally there will be those who love you for
it
• Its better to be hated and loved than to be outright ignored. But the
people who don’t like what you say, were they going to be your
customer anyways? Even if they were, would they be good ones? A rule
of thumb: if you’re not getting complaints, then you’re NOT pushing
hard enough..
• Your aim is to develop a relationship with your prospect. Some won’t
like you, some will. But those you do like you, will be loyal to the last.

22. Anatomy of a High Converting Email
• Reawaken your creativity and imagination
• Get hip to direct response copywriting , resources at the end of
seminar. Study the masters…
• Keep your eyes and ears peeled for the bizarre, the weird, the
unusual and the interesting. Build your “fodder” database. Be
constantly taking notes, and be on the look for things that will
make intriguing subject matter. A-list direct response copywriter
John Carlton gets you to think of your prospect as a “giant slug
glued to the couch”. You need to pull out all the stops to get him to
act.
• Ask yourself, how can I link my product to one of my interesting
topics?

23. Email Writing 101 – Warming Up
• Regain your long lost creativity
• Time to re-awaken your “inner child of creativity” – NOT new age
nonsense
• The adult world KILLS creativity!
• The Artists Way – Julia Cameron
• Write for one full hour every day if possible
• Stream of consciousness, gibberish, nonsense..doesn’t matter
• Aim of this is to get “outside your head” and to kill your “inner
critic” stone dead
• Practice this exercise often enough and you’ll find your creativity
will cast off the shackles imposed by your adult existence and
begin to see creative angles in places you didn’t know existed, it’ll
work with joyous abandon..
• Imagination work..

25. Imagination “Gym Work”
• Ever felt completely “in the zone” where great stuff just came
naturally? Want to know a hack to “replicate” this?
• First warm up your creativity by using stream of consciousness
• Take a random simple object in your field of vision, could be a
pillow, a wall, a tree, anything simple..
• Taking a pillow for example, what could the pillow be?
• Eye-patches for a giant?
• Elephant slippers? Hemorrhoid pads for a REALLY big person?
• Frisbees for the “athletically challenged?”
• Mind mapping for ideas
• The purpose of this exercise is to throw off the constraints that
have imposed on us by adulthood, and regain the unrestrained
child-like imagination we all had at one stage in our lives, but has
since atrophied.
• You need to look at things in an entirely different way. Lose your
conditioning! This is how you begin to find new ways to talk about
your product or service..

26. What To Write About?
• Your product or service is irrelevant. The important thing is
determining the hook, and how
• Politics: “How to stand out like an honest man in Dáil Éireann”
• Marketing: “Rarer than a sober Irishman”
• Breaking Bad: “From mild-mannered cancer victim to meth-
slinging badass”
• Web Design: “The beauty in butt ugly”
• Copywriting: “The Copywriting Gun Under Your Pillow”
• Business: “Beware buzzword-Bingo Loving Consultants”
• Me: “A corporate stooge rotting in a cubicle”
• Humans are hard-wired for stories ever since the days we crawled
out of the cave and clubbed our first wholly mammoth for dinner
• Write a captivating story and you’ll have people’s attention, link
them into the product or service you are selling
• Lets take a look at how a high converting email might work..

28. Start With The Subject - HTML5
• Lets think about HTML first. Describe it in detail. Get as much down
as possible, even if we don’t use it in our email
• Been around a while, invented in 1990 by Tim Bernars-Lee
• Originally a simple markup language used for web authoring, has
evolved into something far more powerful, capable of graphic
intensive 3D and high-quality audio
• Historically not seen as a proper language by many developers
• Something which has since changed. Its now taken far more seriously
by developers right across the spectrum
• And therein lies our hook
• Its underwent a “transformation” from not being taken seriously by
many developers to being treated with “a lot more respect”
• Now is there something or someone that has a story that mirrors
HTML’s transformation?
• This is where you need to dip into your ideas database, and make
notes of ideas and what you see around you. With practice, you’ll start
seeing ideas for emails everywhere.

29. So How Do We Tie in Breaking Bad?
• Takes practice to recognize how to tie a vanilla subject into
something more interesting.
• Always be building your email fodder database
• TV shows and films, news, books, public figure or famous person, a
phenomenon, an event. Challenge existing dogma. Anything which
a large number of people can relate to.
• Hone your storytelling chops.
• Watch George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Bill Burr, Patrice O’Neal, Jim
Norton standup, Seinfeld
• Write out classic sales letters by hand to hardwire your brain for
story writing. The style of writing must become part of your muscle
memory.
• Unfortunately, HTML in and of itself won’t be interesting to many
people bar hardcore nerds. However making HTML into a story
that our brains can absorb will.

30. I’m Interested, tell Me More…
• Embrace anti-professionalism and rogue entrepreneurship!
• Professional but without the wimpy ass-kissing
• Get hip to direct response marketing and copywriting first
• John Carlton (john-carlton.com)
• Gary Halbert (www.thegaryhalbertletter.com)
• Anything by Dan Kennedy (www.nobsbooks.com , gkic.com)
• Claude Hopkins – Scientific Advertising
• Victor Schwab – How To Write a Good Advertisement
• Robert Collier – The Robert Collier Letter
• John Caples – Tested Advertising Methods
• Drayton Bird – Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing
• Robert Cialdini – Influence
• Breakthrough Advertising – Gene Schwartz ($500 on Amazon)

31. How To Write Emails That Sell
• Develop your ability to spot interesting subject matter. Create an
email fodder “database” of material you can dip into
• Learn to hone your ability to notice things that people would be
interested in hearing about. Keep a sharp eye out for the
weird, unusual, the bizarre or anything that make a great email.
• Anything is fair game. You make the rules.
• Iconic characters in TV shows
• Classic rock
• Public figures , “Charles Haughey’s X-Rated Persuasion Secrets”
• Quotes by famous people
• Develop your imagination.
• Things that annoy you, things that excite you
• There is no end of material you can use in your emails

32. Email Marketing Specific Resources
• Ben Settle ( www.bensettle.com )
• Jon McCulloch (http://jonmcculloch.com/ )
• Andre Chaperon ( autorespondermadness.com )
• John McIntyre (http://www.themcmethod.com/ )

33. Autoresponder Companies
• Aweber
• Mailchimp
• Infusionsoft
• Sendpepper/ Office Autopilot

34. • .