LIST BUILDING LIVE: 1000% ROI with Classified Ads with Daniel Throssell

LIST BUILDING LIVE: 1000% ROI with Classified Ads with Daniel Throssell

Pat Flynn: Hey, it’s Pat Flynn, and you’re listening to List Building Live, our first ever virtual audio summit right here on the SPI podcast, where each day we release about six mini episodes to help you grow your email list. Why? Because you don’t own social media, but you should own your audience. So each day for three days in a row, we are bringing you people directly from Liz’s and my communities to share what’s working to grow your email list today.

That’s right. No, quote unquote, experts or eight-figure entrepreneurs talking about what worked for them years ago. Just regular creators like you who are working towards making a living online. Enough talking. Let’s get into it.

Liz WIlcox: Oh my goodness, I am so freaking excited about this one. Daniel, please tell us who you are and how you’ve been growing your email list lately.

Daniel Throssell: Well, thank you, Liz. It’s lovely to be here with you in person for the first time, kind of. My name’s Daniel Throssell, and some people say I’m Australia’s best copywriter, though I’m very mum on that claim. But the strategy I want to share with you, something that we’re doing to grow our list that’s working really, really well.

I actually call it, or we call it internally, the our 1000% ROI classified ad strategy. Now, that’s not an income guarantee. However, like it’s, it’s based on we’ve had insane results from it. And so essentially it’s a spin on classified ads in other people’s newsletters. Now that’s not, that’s not original, but we are doing it in a way that I haven’t seen people doing it before.

So we start off by firstly finding good lists to advertise in, and that is sort of a, a skill in and of itself. And I have a wonderful assistant, Paris, and she has a, a really deep proprietary process around this. That’d be its whole other thing to talk about. But she will identify lists that are a good fit.

And I think that’s how, you know, we first connected, Liz. Maybe, maybe she reached out to you or something. But yeah, she, so she found you, and you were, you were one of the best people we’ve done a partnership with, by the way. Your list is amazing. So she did really well there. But yeah, we find good lists to advertise in where we can pay them a fee to run a classified ad.

So, so far, so simple. What most people do at this point is they’ll come up with a lead magnet, or they’ll have their standard lead magnet and they run an ad and it’s like, “Hey, I’ll show you how to, you know, get three times your open rates by doing this simple thing. Opt in for the lead magnet.” Okay? And that’s all they’ll do.

They link to their standard opt-in form or maybe a custom opt-in form to track the leads, and that’s it. What we do is a lot more high effort and it gets a lot better results. So the first thing we do is we actually research that list to find out what do those people want, and we go through our offers, our paid offers, right?

You’re, like, talking courses that cost $1,000, $2,000. And we will extract parts from a number of different offers to custom design a package for that list. So that, that has a few benefits. Number one, we can tell the list owner, “This is a custom thing just for your people.” And that makes them look good. That makes them want to run our ad.

It makes them want to prioritize it ’cause we can say, “Hey, because you’re a so-and-so reader, we’ve got this special bonus for you.” It also means we have a very targeted bonus for them, and the real trick of this is that if we pull out pieces from a $1,000 offer, a $500 offer, a $2,000 offer, we can legitimately say, “This is stuff you would normally have to pay $3,000 to get, and you get it for free.”

So by doing this, we have a really valuable offer made up of parts of paid products that’s gonna entice people who are likely to buy our offers, and it makes our package look super-duper valuable. So that’s the first thing we do. We have a really, really high-effort custom giveaway. The second thing we do is that we write a sales letter for that.

So a lot of people, again, would just send to their standard opt-in page. And the philosophy we’re taking is, like, if I’m paying $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 to run an ad, I want to milk every single dollar of value out of that. So I don’t just want to send someone to my standard opt-in flow because a lot of these people are gonna see my email once and then never do it again.

So I want as many of them as possible. So we’ll actually write a proper sales letter, and we kind of c- uh, assemble this from, from copy we already have for the offers. And then we put it, the third thing we do, we put it on a very tight deadline. So a lot of people will just say, like I said, uh, “Go to this website and get the freebie.”

Now, you would know, Liz, and probably anyone who does email marketing would know, no one does anything without a deadline. And so to me, it’s crazy that most classified ads get run without a deadline on them because the deadline is the single most powerful thing for getting someone to convert. So what we do when we’ve got this really en- enticing, sexy, valuable offer, we’ve got some great copy selling it, and then we say, “You only have 24 or 48 hours to get this, and after that it’s gone.”

Now, that is really scary to a lot of people because they’re like, “But then I’ll lose all the traffic that would’ve seen it in two, three, four, five days from now. You know, I’m just gonna lose out so much.” And the truth is, you know, anyone who’s run an email list knows the, the curve of open rates. Like, you just have such a small tail going after the first day or two that the benefit of having a deadline there far outweighs, in our experience, leaving it open forever.

And what we actually do is after the deadline expires, we don’t just turn it off. We just make it a smaller version of the bonus. Like, we’ll leave one of the little freebies there so that we can still capture the ongoing traffic, but we also get the second bite of the cherry by having a deadline for that first one.

So we’ve got a custom bonus package made up of parts of our paid offers. We’ve got a sales letter promoting it. We have a tight deadline for it. And so that entices people. If you don’t get on it now, you are gonna miss out. And we actually position it as, as an event rather than just saying, “Oh, here, go here to get this lead magnet.”

We say, “Hey, this is a giveaway event for readers of so and so person.” Then what we do, rather than just give everyone the freebies when they opt in, again, that’s another mistake a lot of people make. You get them on your list and then they bail. We make it that you have to stay for three days to get the bonuses.

Now, the reason for that is, like, we have a bonus package that’s very valuable, so they will stay, okay? It’s not just a free PDF. But I want them in the habit of reading my emails before they actually get free stuff from me. And so by doing that, we actually have a lot better retention ’cause people are clicking and reading the emails to see when they’re gonna get their free stuff.

And so they don’t get it until they’ve engaged a little bit, and that results in much better retention for us. So we do that stuff, and we routinely will get hundreds of leads from one of these ads, whereas, you know, if you don’t do all these things, you can… You know, sometimes you get dozens, okay? So we have legitimately had, like, a 10 times increase in the amount of leads that we get from running ads like this.

We’ve been doing it quite profitably this year and we’re actually still doing it to grow my list. So yep, that is the strategy I wanted to share with you.

Liz WIlcox: Okay, y’all. I don’t, I don’t know if you understood the genius of this. So yes, I have, uh, been on both sides of this. So I actually saw Daniel do this with someone else’s list, I don’t know, it was years ago.

Before we hit record we were debating what year it was, but it seems like forever ago, and I thought, “This is so genius.” You know, the fact that, well, number one, it is that special limited time offer. It’s custom to the person. So, you know, what he’s doing for my people is not what he would do for your people.

And then it was like, wait, you’ve got to stick around for a few days. So you might get this rush of people simply because, you know, FOMO works, right? LTO, limited time offer, works. But the people that are really actually going to go through the funnel, book Daniel’s service, or buy a course, they’re gonna stick around for the three days.

They’re gonna read those, nurture those onboarding emails, whatever you want to call them, and really, like, get hooked on Daniel and his type of writing. Like, it’s, it’s so, so genius. And one thing that Daniel did not mention about himself, he did mention he’s debatably, you know, Australia’s best copywriter.

But y’all, what y’all don’t understand is there’s so much in that sales letter that Daniel did not break down for you. It’s so just high-level personality packed. You are not going to sign up for that if you don’t, if you’re not all in already. Like, Daniel is putting his best foot forward. He’s putting all of himself, not just the offers, but he’s putting himself, his style of business, his style of writing, et cetera, right there on the page for you.

And so that is extremely… And if you’re not watching him, he’s, he’s laughing ’cause he’s like, “Yeah, maybe that’s true.”

Daniel Throssell: I forgot to mention that, yeah. So there’s, just for context, that there is a, a, a, an anime style illustration of me, like, standing there cackling like an evil villain, and it’s like, “Mwa-ha-ha, I’m gonna, yeah, kidnap all your best leads.”

It, it is very full on. Yeah. But yeah, you’re right. It does turn on the people who are, who will enjoy what comes next.

Liz WIlcox: Right. Right. It definitely does. And so if you’re thinking, especially when, like Daniel said, he’s paying 1 to $3,000 to get on your email list, Paris is working really hard to find those really good lists.

He knows that they’re worth that kind of money. He’s got to put his best foot forward. And I think a lot of us out there You know, we think, oh, we’re just gonna create a lead magnet, put it up there, and by osmosis perhaps every, you know, people are gonna come. But you’ve got to put your best foot forward, right?

And what I love about this strategy is, ’cause I always say, like, you know, a lot of people have time or money to invest in list building. Daniel’s doing both, and he’s seeing, like, crazy results. So that’s kind of what I want you as the listener to take away, is put that best foot forward. Don’t be afraid to be yourself, because you’re gonna attract the right types of folks that are gonna wait those three days, book a call, buy the course, hire the agency, whatever the thing is that you’re doing, listening, right?

But it’s only when you really put yourself out there and think about who you’re putting yourself in front of, right? He said each one is catered a little differently, that the strategy really, really works. Is there anything else you want to share that I just sparked for you?

Daniel Throssell: No, no, that was great.

Liz WIlcox: Okay,

Daniel Throssell: great.

I mean, the only other thing, the only other thing I would say is we actually do have… There’s another list building strategy I have, and you mentioned before, like, tell people where to find it. So if, what I will do for people who listen to this specifically, if they go to my website PersuasivePage.com and opt in, if you reply to the welcome email, ’cause I ask a question, “How did you find me?”

If you reply to that and tell me you listened to this specific episode, I will send you another training. It’s called the Referral Magnet Strategy. It’s another completely separate and I think equally clever thing that, um, I came up with for getting leads. It’s part of, it’s actually part of one of my $2,000 list building trainings, but I will send that for free just for your listeners, Liz.

Uh, they have to tell me, they have to mention that they listened to this, though, ’cause it’s not publicly available.

Liz WIlcox: Right. Right. So mention List Building Live, and I’d love… Y’all, let me just say this last thing, and then we’ll let you go. It’s the gamification for me. What Daniel is doing is gamifying all of this, right?

Oh, this is special just for you, but you, 24 hours only. Oh, you got to wait three days. Oh, you got to reply. That’s gamifying. But it’s al- it’s fun. It’s fun for you to create. It’s fun for the audience as well. So I can’t wait for people to hit reply. Remember, PersuasivePage.com. Get signed up today. Thanks so much, Daniel.

Daniel Throssell: Thank you, Liz.

Pat Flynn: Okay, another great list building strategy from one of our amazing community members. I just love seeing people find ways to grow that I didn’t even think of. That’s something I’ve always loved about being in communities with other entrepreneurs. It’s just so inspiring and motivating at the same time.

If you need that in your list, a group of business peers to help you take what you’re learning here at this event and turn it into real action, come join us inside the SPI community. Not only will you finally have people keep you accountable, you’ll have all the resources you need to make a living online, not just with email marketing, but content creation and monetization as well.

And right now, we’re offering 50% off and some other fun bonuses just for List Building Live listeners, and that’s you. Just go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/listlive and use code 26LIST, that’s 26LIST, to grab this special rate. SmartPassiveIncome.com/listlive and use code 26LIST.