#14: How To Make Huge Profits With Tiny Email Lists (with André Chaperon & Shawn Twing)

Welcome to The Growth Booth, episode 14, where today we're going to be talking about ways that you can make life-changing income from even just tiny, in fact, remarkable audiences.

Before I get to that though, I want to give you a little bit more context. I think when I look back on my online marketing career, one of the biggest mistakes that I made in the first couple of years was that I wasn't building an email list. In hindsight, this is probably something that's cost me millions of dollars. If I could say what the second biggest mistake is or the second biggest thing that I did wrong is when I eventually did start building an email list, my communication was terrible. I really sucked at it. I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't get any good results as a result of that.

But all of this changed, I want to say, maybe ten over ten years ago now when I came across a method or more an education from the special guests that I've got with me on the show today. Email marketing for me went from being like a distant afterthought to one of the main focuses. My strategy went from sort of being one of a hobbyist to one of a big-budget HBO show or a big-budget Netflix show.

The results were amazing. We'll talk a little bit more about what I mean by that in a moment. I'm a huge fan of the work done by Andre Chaperon and Shawn Twing, who are with us here today. That is because the results that I've got from implementing a lot of their ideas have resulted in hundreds of thousands of extra dollars in my pocket. I think you could probably see why I am a huge fan of these guys and the education that they put out. If you want to find out more about them, you can go to tinylittlebusinesses.com. 

AIDAN

With all of that said, Andre, Shawn, thank you guys so much for being here on the show. I think I owe you guys a dinner or something next time or when we eventually meet in person. Great to have you here.

ANDRE

Or a beer.

AIDAN

Yes, we can do both. Thanks for being here, guys. I think anyone who's got an online business is going to have something going on or should have something going on with email marketing. I thought that could be a good place for us to start because it's something that I think anyone could sort of get some results from. Why don't we dive into that?

One of the big questions I have for you is with the development of social media. Is email still the number one way for people, whether they've got an affiliate marketing business or e-commerce business software business, is email still the best way to be communicating with people? What's your take on all of this?

ANDRE

Yes, it certainly is for us. It's the center of our universe. I don't want to diminish social media because TikTok and various social media channels are the center of the universe for other people. I don't think this is all that. I think everybody should really be using email. I'm slightly biased, but it is such a nice way to communicate with an audience en masse.

I suppose TikTok and all the rest do similar things. You put out a message and it goes out to an audience. But the way that you can build relationships long-term using email, I don't think there's anything that can rubble that, certainly in terms of ROI.

Shawn said he's worked with many clients, so he could probably speak could speak more to the ROI side of it. But yeah, I think that's my big picture.

SHAWN

Prior to partnering with Andre, I ran a digital agency for 21 years, worked with 240-ish clients, managed somewhere north of $100 million in ad spend. If I look across the 21 years and even more heavily weigh the last five years of it, email never loses. Never. All of the other things are sort of adjunct. 

It's not to diminish them. It's not either/or. But if you had to remove one thing from every strategy, the last thing you should remove is email. Always. It outperforms everything. Yes, there are going to be some rare examples where someone says, "Well, wait a minute, I'm a TikTok influencer." Okay, the exception proves the rule, but for the 999,000 other businesses, email rules and will continue to rule... 

AIDAN

In our businesses across the board as well, speaking about TikTok, we finally set up some TikTok marketing for one of our e-commerce brands and my partner in that told me about that and I had to go and open a TikTok account and I just felt like, "What am I doing here?"

Turns out, it is an interesting sales channel, but again, to your point there, Sean, email is the thing that goes across the whole spectrum of the online marketing universe and it's just proven itself time and time again. We've maintained really good open rates over the years. I think part of that is because we have really adopted a lot of the philosophy that you guys sort of teach, which is building up relationships.

If someone is just starting out and they've got a very small email list, how many subscribers does someone need to be able to start making some tangible difference? I know that's a pretty open-ended question there, but to give some perspective, do they need tens of thousands of subscribers?

SHAWN

We call that "How long is a piece of string?" question, right? I mean, who knows? We interviewed a gentleman who's in our audience, he's top of his field, a coach for cyclists. He has a Ph.D. in, I don't know, exercise physiology or something, but he works with elite-level cyclists and there aren't millions of them in the world.

For him to start a business, he doesn't need 1000. I guess there probably are 100,000 elite cyclists, but his audience is not enormous. What matters and it's the dimensions that we consider when we evaluate something.

There are two dimensions, and it's not either/or. One dimension is quantity. The other dimension is quality. If you have a business whereby email it's a very light footprint, you're not really engaging with your audience, then you need thousands of people on an email list to get a result.

That's really what the foundation of the original internet marketing was. The foundation was just volume because traffic was really cheap.

When traffic is cheap, you can have a 25% conversion rate and you can make a business out of it. People did. The problem is traffic is no longer cheap. Traffic is incredibly expensive yet a lot of people haven't adopted the strategy. They haven't adapted their strategies to the new reality. 

It becomes a brute force. You need a massive email list because the signal-to-noise ratio is so small. What we emphasize on is if you're going to do the work to acquire somebody's attention, do the damn work and really get their attention and be willing to not get the attention of people who probably aren't going to engage with you over a long period of time, spend the time to focus on the qualitative side of the decision making.

When you over-emphasize in relationships, that pays dividends over a much longer period of time. That's the thing that people miss so much. We talked about Dean Jackson's observations and the research he's shared a lot, which is the summary of it, is that Dean has evaluated a lot of his clients' data. Dean has access to a tremendous amount of data. We've seen this reinforced by many others in our audience where what Dean observed is that of the people who buy over a two-year period, only 15% of people buy in the first 90 days.

That's not like something we hope is true, we think is true, it might be true. It's the truth. It's as true as gravity. We've seen this a lot. You can argue with gravity, but when you jump off a building, gravity wins. You can argue with the gravity of the Internet. You can argue like, "Oh, no, I want to get somebody's attention right now, and I want to make the sale right now," but the reality is of the people who buy over a two-year period, only 15% are going to buy in the first 90 days, and the game then, four times the opportunity exists after 90 days.

The moment people internalize that everything in their business changes because the emphasis changes from "How many people can I get on my list?" to "How well can I take care of the people who are in my audience? How much can I respect their attention? How much value can I give?" because it's going to pay off later. It's not going to pay off necessarily right now. It's a long answer to a short question. It's one of my favorite questions though. 

AIDAN

Well, I did ask you how long the piece of string was, so I'm glad we get in some detail. The one thing that I've always often come back to is the 1000 true fans. If you've got 1000 true fans, 1000 raving subscribers who hang on every word, I mean, that is more than enough to be able to build a really sizable business just on email marketing alone. It almost doesn't matter if it's affiliate marketing or e-commerce.

If you just think about the numbers there for a second, 1000 subscribers, if you could get each one of them to invest $100 in something that you're doing, and again, using the elite cyclists niche as an example, here in most niches, you can find things that people are going to spend some money on. 

I think the other really important thing you mentioned there was just making sure you are talking to a specific audience and not trying to please absolutely everyone. I mean, that's one of the fastest ways to lose sales, is by trying to please absolutely everyone versus having an absolute sort of laser-focused message. 

One thing I've seen you guys do a lot is if you're running a marketing email of some kind is you might ask people to tell you if they're interested in hearing more about something. Could you share with the listeners here today what is that? Why do you do it, and what's the benefit of doing it?

ANDRE

Yeah. One of the things we do is we want to be respectful of people's attention, and it's something that is a holy grail. We always want to work to be as relevant as we can with everything, with every communication, and at the same time, we recognize that every single thing we have to share isn't going to be relevant to every single person on our email list all the time.

When you come to recognize that, then what we do becomes an easy thing to do, which is to ask people to raise their hand if they're interested in a certain thing. Whenever we're doing any promotion, in fact, we're getting ready to do a promotion next week. We've sent out one of these emails that I'm talking about now, which we sent out yesterday, which is we frame what's about to happen and this thing that we are going to promote.

Then we just simply ask people if this is of interest to you, "Click this link to raise your hand," and then we'll add you to the segment and you'll get to hear about it next week. Certain people raise their hand and most people don't. It's important to recognize that, that most people don't raise their hand, and that's okay because we're respecting their attention. 

SHAWN

And really, it's two things, right? We respect in attention and we reward attention. The person who is interested right now and clicks and is added to an interest list, that person gets the squirts of dopamine that the following email campaign creates for them and if they're interested in it, they get a benefit. But the people who don't raise their hand, they don't know, they don't even know what happened.

We're not removing them from their stores of attention. We're not in their inbox. This is conventional wisdom. It's like, well, email is cheap. It doesn't cost you any more money to send 10,000 emails than 1000. Why would you only send to 1000 people who raise their hand? Why not just send everybody everything all the time?

But again, this gets back to we're looking at the wrong dimension of analysis when we do that, we're looking at the dimension of how much does it cost me in dollars to send an email, not how much does it cost my audience in attention to be bombarded with emails. As soon as we change the dimension of analysis to let's focus our attention on what the audience is giving to us, even if it's slightly, they're giving us their attention. 

I think Andre brought really two really interesting conceptual ideas to Internet marketing that really have radically changed everything. This is one of them. This idea is that there is a bridge between the attention that you have to cross over something, and if you don't, then you don't see things. Then the other is this idea of bringing the serialized narratives and the longer narrative arc to email marketing. There's one more thing that I like, which is framing.

When you put those three those are three legs of the stool that can make an email marketer effectively unstoppable. If you have value to share with the world and you understand framing the narrative arc and the bridge between attention and respect for inattention, that's it. That's the whole game. Everything else is details. Those are the three big levers. 

AIDAN

Yeah. Just to let everyone know, if you're listening to this right now and you're hearing us talking about segmenting and having someone raising their hand by clicking a link, these are actually quite simple things that any half-decent autoresponder is going to have. It doesn't matter if you're using ConvertKit or AWeber, it doesn't matter at all. I mean, there are so many of them these days. They are a dime a dozen, but they do all allow you to segment audiences by having them click on links. Some make it easier than others, but it's something that you can easily do.

In terms of keeping someone's attention, so you've got someone on an email in your email list with all of the distractions around us in the world and come back to social media. This is a huge one. What are some of the things that you can do to keep people opening emails in addition to just being relevant and giving them what they originally signed up for? What are some other ideas that people can think about there?

ANDRE

Well, there are many tactics you can use. The one that's more complex to unpack is the narrative arc across like a campaign of emails. If you're promoting something and it's over seven emails, you can have a narrative arc across that. But outside of that, you can use little things that create tension in people and it's a good form of tension. You can establish in people that you can mention something without giving it all away. It pulls their attention forward because there's something that you know that they don't know and they want to know. It's a little game you can play. That's one of the things about using open loops. 

AIDAN

That was a huge takeaway for me when I started learning a lot from you guys many years ago. Being able to be consciously aware of how a lot of these big Netflix series, HBO series, they keep you hooked on a cliffhanger kind of a thing and how you can actually apply that to e-commerce emails, affiliate marketing emails, info, product creation emails, SaaS company emails. You can do this really easily just by planting unanswered questions.

I had a website in the woodworking niche, must be about a decade ago and it's a very lucrative niche for starters. But I had this whole soap opera sequence, as you call them, a series of emails. It seems like it could be as simple as a one-liner in the PS section saying in the next email, "Keep an eye out for the next email. We're going to talk about the golden ratio," and then a woodworker might be like, "What the hell is the golden ratio?" Obviously, I'd hype it up and make it a little bit more exciting than that.

But just to get the point across, people would be waiting for the next email to come. Then if an email didn't come in the next couple of days, they'd start emailing me and saying, "Hey, I haven't got the email about the golden ratio. Could you make sure that you've sent that out to me?" This is how at that stage and that email list back then when I was getting started, like any email list, when you start off, it's got very few people. But even with a few hundred people on that email list, this was happening. For me, that was, wow, there really is something to this open loop, closed loop stuff. I understand a bit more about how that works now.

One of the things you mentioned there was about relationship building and how can someone go about a relationship with a complete stranger via email. What are your thoughts on starting that process?

SHAWN

The first thing you have to ask is you have to switch the focus, right? Most business owners, marketers, and human beings in general, the first question we're trying to figure out is "What's in it for me? What do I need to happen to make this successful?"

The first thing you have to do immediately is to switch the narrative around and say, "Okay, what do I think is most valuable?" What I actually do every time we send an email, every time we create, literally every single time I have a pencil, scratchpad, whatever is on my desk, and I ask myself, I write down one question, "Why does the audience care?"

Whatever the topic, I'm about to write an email about X, why does the audience care? Then what will often happen is I'll write something and I'm like, why would they care about that? Then I write something else. Why would they care about that?

Sometimes it's two or three times, sometimes I get really lucky it's the first one, but most often it's the third, 4th, 5th, whereby at that point I'm frustrated with myself. I generally get irritated with myself, where I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

All of a sudden, I write a sentence, "Oh, that's why they care. That's what this is actually about. This is what this is going to do for them." Once I have that, then I know the value that I'm delivering on in that email or in that campaign or in that video, whatever it is. Now, I know the actual thing that's valuable for them because I've taken the time to figure it out in advance, and that changes everything.

It may sound a little simplistic and it can be if you write down, "Why does it matter?" and you write an answer and then you run with it. That's simplistic because most likely it's not the core, visceral, emotional thing that you're talking about. But if you hammer away at it a few times and ask yourself over again, "Why does that matter? Why does that matter? Why does that to them? Not to you. Why does that matter?" finally, something reveals itself and you realize that's what we're really doing here, and once that becomes the focus of everything that you do, the relationship is then emergent, not deliberate.

This is a hard thing. Andre and I, system steerers. We talk about emergent properties a lot versus deliberate activities. We don't want to go down that rabbit hole right now, but the lesson here is that to try to forward-engineer a good relationship is very difficult, but to provide value from the perspective of the recipient and to focus solely on that as your guiding North Star, from that the relationship emerges. It sounds like we're splitting hairs, but it's very different it's hard to go.

If you've ever hit it off with somebody, it wasn't delivered. It's like, "Oh because we went to this place at this time and we did these things and we talked about these things and ate this meal." No, it's that you put yourself in situations where you're interested in what the other person is talking about. You have shared interests or you have whatever it is like you put yourself in those situations and then later you realize your relationship has emerged from that collection of opportunities. 

That's very similar to what we do. We focus so much on the value our audience can get from us. We pour our hearts and souls into it and then we observe over time that relationships have resulted from that activity. 

AIDAN

I think that's a really good tip, and it's the kind of thing you could have a post-it note pinned up next to the computer if you're doing emails and just have on it there what's in it for them. The other thing that we've always really tried to do, especially on initial interactions, is just overdelivering. Massively over-deliver. In fact, go above and beyond, especially if it's something free that someone is getting because that almost has them thinking, "Well, oh my God, if I'm getting all of this for free, imagine what there is on the inside."

I think when you really embrace a lot of the ideas that you're talking about here, you get to the point where you can forget about selling because the selling just happens as a by-product of delivering the value. You're in this very sort of harmonious relationship, which is sort of a virtuoso cycle where you're from good to better and you're building all the while building out raving fans.

Something else I wanted to get your thoughts on. We've spoken a little bit about segmenting and some of the value in doing that. What if someone isn't opening emails? What is the approach? You've got someone on your email list, you can see them on the email list, but for whatever reason, they haven't been opening emails. What is a tactical solution or what are your thoughts around what to do in this instance?

ANDRE

Well, there are many things you can do. The one thing you can do is try and maintain a clean email list as soon as possible, recognizing that over time people's attention diminishes and you can have different levels of attention, and your most engaged fans are going to stay engaged fans for a lot longer, sometimes forever.

There are other people who are just tire kickers, for example, for lack of a better word, and their level of attention is just fleeting. You can use the tools within your email marketing software and identify those people that aren't opening, and then you can do something. You can do a reactivation campaign if you wanted to. You can just delete them. That's something that I've done in the past. Just find everybody that hasn't opened an email in six months and hit delete.

Yes, there are some people that can get caught up in that, which is why it's really better to have a campaign asking for people. "We've noticed that you've not been opening our emails. Tracking isn't perfect, so if you just click this link, we can reengage you. If you're not interested in hearing us anymore, that's cool. There's nothing you need to do."

AIDAN

Do you worry about the accuracy? I mean, you mentioned there that some people can get caught in the crossfire if you're deleting subscribers. I sometimes worry about the accuracy of whether or not someone is a cold subscriber if they are appearing as someone in my autoresponder who hasn't opened or clicked on an email for a while.

The reason I say this is because I've taken a group of cold subscribers into thousands and I run them in a re-engagement campaign, or I just start sending them an email, even if it's not a reengagement or reactivation campaign, and I'll get a large percentage of people opening and clicking and it gets me thinking, "Well, how would these people why are they in that cold segment in the first place?" 

The cold segment is the group of people that don't open an email. It varies, but with Convert Kit, I think it's like 90 days if you don't open it. If someone doesn't open an email in 90 days, they're sort of tagged by the system as being a cold subscriber.

Is this something that you worry about or how do you sort of deal with that?

SHAWN

I would categorize this as making decisions on the wrong side of the decimal place. Right. We can make .1% decisions in our business, or we can make 10X decisions in our business. Reengagement campaigns with audiences of cold subscribers, they're not .1% decisions, but they're not 10X decisions either.

If you think about your various analogies, like the analogy of a tree, you've got the roots, you've got the trunk of the tree. These are the things that are most important, like the big issues, like segmentation. Relevance of your messaging, creating value for your audience, those are the roots, those are the trunk. When you get to reengagement with people who don't seem to be opening, you're out in the leaves at that point.

It's not something that you should think about, but it's something to think about in the proper context, that if it takes away from doing something else, that's more important, don't worry about it. But if you have the time and the size of that audience is large enough, then re-engagement campaigns are a really easy solution to it.

What you just mentioned is a great solution. Put everybody in a bucket. We send people a re-engagement campaign to say, "Hey, we notice you haven't been paying attention. We understand that the tracking software is not 100%. If we got it wrong, click this link. You're all set. If you're no longer interested in 72 hours, we'll take you out of the system. You don't have to do anything." That's it. We created it. It's done.

We run it once in a while, and it does its work. I wouldn't advise investing really any more time and energy than that into it unless your list is hundreds and hundreds of thousands in this segment is really important. Other than that, there's just not a lot of there. 

ANDRE

Different ESPs deal with what it means to have an open show as an open. With the ConvertKit, for example, if somebody clicks a link, that's counted as an open. Even if someone's tracking is turned off and images aren't showing, so it's not firing, this has been opened. If they click a link in that email, it will then show it as opened. That part does work, clicking on links. The part that doesn't always work, and it's becoming less and less accurate, I guess, especially now with the Apple blocking so many of the images showing. If you're just relying on opens, then it can be very inaccurate, I'm guessing.

For us, we always try to get people to click on links. Even if you opening, passively reading emails, every so often it makes sense that they click a link, right? Whether it's to raise a hand for something else or just something of interest, a video that we've shared, all of that requires somebody to click a link. That's an important metric for us because we want engagement. We don't want all of our subscribers just to be passively reading stuff.

Then there are also other things you can do, like try and get people to respond to emails, which just adds to the crazy algorithms on the back-end that decide if your email ends up in someone's priority inbox or not or ends up in the spam. We can't always control all of these variables, but we can do things like just get people to respond to emails as much as possible, "Hit reply, let us know X," whatever, and that then goes into our support desk software. Then we can interact with those prospects and customers in real-time, and all that stuff matters.

AIDAN

I think it's really important to keep in mind or be aware of what the underlying sort of overarching strategy is that you're doing with the email marketing. I've seen something lately which has been really frustrating me quite a bit in my inbox where I've got a couple of different people and they will change the From name. I'm seeing that one day I'm getting an email from Joe. Okay, who's Joe? I don't know who Joe is. The next day I'm getting an email from Melissa. Who the heck is Melissa? When I dive a little bit closer, I see it's the same sender email and it's the same company that's sending it, but they're just changing out and swapping over the From name and it's like the most annoying thing ever.

That's almost the opposite of everything that we're talking about here today, about building an audience. If you're building an audience, if you're providing value, then your name is probably one of the biggest things that are going to get that email opened, whereas here it's having the opposite effect. I'm like "Unsubscribe, unsubscribe." 

Conscious of time here. I do have one more question I want to ask. Before that though, is there anything else that you want us to quickly sort of touch on here today? I think we've spoken given probably a 30,000-foot overview of a few ideas and something we can talk about for many days. But is there anything else that you think is really important that we should include in this before we wrap up?

SHAWN

I'll point out one thing that we talked about and mentioned earlier. Andrea and I are system steerers, but what does that actually mean? The two of us, we've been in the game for 43 years, we're both dinosaurs, and we sort of reached this point where now it's a lot less about what we're adding and it's a lot more about what we can take away. Like, can we find the kernels of truth underneath everything else? We spent some time about a year and a half ago really trying to distil internet marketing and digital marketing down to its essence. What are the non-negotiables?

What we came to is that every business really needs three irreducible components: awareness, engagement, and conversion. Awareness is that we can think of it in terms of traffic. Someone sees you, maybe they see Andre on TikTok or whatever. They become aware that you or what you have to offer exists. It can be paid, it can be organic, it could be whatever, it could be something like this where people have never heard of us and they hear of us on a podcast and they think, "Oh, those guys seem weird enough." Maybe you'll check them out. That's awareness.

Engagement is when they take a step towards you generally. Lead gen is the sort of canonical idea of engagement, but it could be anything. It's when someone clicks through to your site, when they read a landing page, a sales page, they watch a YouTube video, whatever it is. 

Then, of course, conversion is when they become a paying customer. No business can exist without all three of those components. You can have the best offer in the world with the most sophisticated checkout process and all that, but if nobody knows about it, you don't have a business. If nobody ever takes a step towards it, you don't have a business. If you have all the awareness in the world and people come to you, but you have no way to turn them into customers, you don't have a business. These are irreducible, but they can't be managed separately.

ANDRÉ

If somebody doesn't do email at all, it is never too late to start building your first prospect and then a customer. But email is massively important. From our perspective, there's no business that exists that should not be using email. If you do use email, it's never too late to get better at that engagement and building that relationship with an audience.

AIDAN

Yeah, I think also, it's never too late to start using email if you've had a business going for a while there, I see, especially in the e-commerce space where people tend to discount it. There's so much more that you can do. There's so much you can grow your business even by just having the bare bones, the basic email marketing campaign built in there.

I think my big tips here today would be to think about the lifetime value and look at your customers through a longer lens, not through a simple transaction from one day to the next. If you don't have an autoresponder set up, then just go and set one up. You can get started for free with something like MailChimp, and there are dozens and dozens of them out there. We use ConvertKit a lot for a lot of our businesses. We use Klaviyo, we use Aweber. It really depends on what we're doing. But don't get overwhelmed by all of that. Just get any account to get started and you can always change to something which is more specialized later and create a simple email sequence.

It doesn't have to be difficult. I really liked what you mentioned a moment ago, Sean, and the word that came to mind was congruence. You want congruency between each element of the process and the system that you've got going there. Just be aware of this.

Another thing that you mentioned a little bit earlier, Shawn, or Andre, was just about keeping things really simple. When we were talking about re-engagement or reactivation campaigns, this doesn't have to be something that you spend days and weeks agonizing over. It could be done in literally five minutes by exporting a list of people who haven't opened an email and sending them an email and see if they click on it. You could literally do that in five minutes flat, keeping things just as simple as humanly possible. This is again, something we could talk about for hours or days on end, so hopefully, I can have you guys back at some stage in the future. Really appreciate taking some time out of your day here.

As I say, the strategies and the ideas that you've been talking about absolutely added a lot of money to our businesses over the years, so it's great to be able to share some of them with the listeners.

This is Episode Number 14. We will have show notes, show transcriptions, important outbound links as well and you can find out lots more information at TheGrowthBooth.com. 

Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.