What is customer profiling and do you really need it? Yes, you do. But only if you do it the right way. Because when you get it spot on, it's not as boring as it sounds. Plus, it's no longer an empty tick-boxing exercise you have to do every year. And yes, it will bring more money into your business. 

Ready to get all the juicy stuff about this? 

Let's go. 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:14) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.

(4:06) Customer profiling demystified - what exactly is it?

(5:19) Is there such a thing as too much segmentation?

(9:15) How can small businesses effectively profile their customers?

(11:15) Why do you want to collect customer data?

(13:12) Start running (good) surveys.

(17:18) The Phone Pshychic approach. 

(21:35) How to run calls with your subscribers.

(26:45) Check out ResponseSuite.

(28:22) Subject line of the week.

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Customer profiling demystified - what exactly is it?

What do we, as small business owners and email marketers, need to know about subscriber and customer profiling? Let's start with this. Customer profiling is all about taking the people on your list and working out who they are, what they want, where they are, and most importantly, whether they bought from you yet or not.

So immediately, on your list, you can identify two types of people – those who’ve bought from you (i.e. your customers), and those who haven’t. And out of your customers, you have people who are super fans (and have bought everything you ever had for sale), those who only bought one thing a long time ago and then never again, and everyone else in between. 

Why is it helpful to have this information about the people on your list? Because it allows you to figure out what to do with them. 

Is there such a thing as too much segmentation? 

A mistake we definitely made when we got started was to apply tags within our email marketing platform that would give us loads of information about people, including what their interests were based on what links they clicked on in our emails. But did we really need all that information? Probably not. There are very few businesses that need to know that level of detail about someone. Most of us don’t need a huge granular level of tagging based on people’s interests.

If you have products that align specifically with each of those interests, then great. But if you don’t, then too much tagging is definitely a thing. Ultimately, you want to boil the business down to what you sell and then understand what would be useful information to have so that you can sell to those people. In other words, all you have to do is find out enough about people in order to be able to sell your product. That way, you can identify those you should sell to versus the ones you should keep away from.

So as a tiny business, you don’t need hundreds of segments. You wouldn’t send different emails every day to each of your segments anyway - most people struggle with just sending one! It’s great to have segmented data in your list, but if you have too many segments, you can't easily do anything with any of them. And that's a bit of a problem, don't you think?

How can small businesses effectively profile their customers? 

Let’s look at some of the ways you can divide people up. First of all, segmenting people based on whether they've paid you money (i.e. they're customers) or they haven't yet is too generic - it doesn't provide enough information for you to make good business decisions. What you also need to capture about all your subscribers are the following three fields:

• Recency. This includes the date when this person last bought something from you. If they haven't bought anything yet, that field will be empty. 
• Frequency. This is a numerical value of how many things the person bought from you. 
• And Monetary (value). This tells you how much money this person has spent with you so far. 

How you apply this in your specific business is going to be different, but against each contact in our list, we hold these three custom fields. It's worth pointing out that this information is only useful if we’re going to do something with it.

Why do you want to collect customer data?

One of the reasons why we started collecting this data is that we want to be able to identify the people who have bought something recently. And we want to do that so we can make them another offer while they’re in buying mode with us. They're focused on what we sell, and they're investing and learning. So this is a great time to offer them something else.

Obviously, because you also hold Frequency information, if you know that person's already bought everything you have to offer, there’s no point in reaching out and asking them to buy something. And if you have a lot of people on your list who fall into that category, you might have an opportunity to create a new offer. The opposite is also true – if you’re thinking of creating a new product but you know that most people haven’t bought your existing offers, then you might want to generate some interest in what you already have instead.

Also, by looking at the Monetary custom field, you can find the people on your list who’ve spent the most money with you. Those are your high investors – the people who really like your stuff. So maybe you can offer them something more premium.

There’s a lot you can do with customer data, including pulling out averages. On average, when did most people last buy, for example? Or how many products have they bought? How much are they spending with you? Over time, when you collect and analyse this information, you'll be able to see how you’re doing and break up your subscribers into key customer segments. 

Start running (good) surveys

Collecting statistically useful customer data automatically and in the background is the first step towards customer profiling. That's based on the spending behaviours of your subscribers. But there's more you can do. And that's reaching out to your subscribers and customers to get their input. 

How do you go about that? One of the methods we use (and that we’re big fans of) is running surveys. Good surveys though – not ones that are terrible, too long, and no one will want to complete! We like to create really simple surveys to collect data about what people are struggling with, what their biggest priority is right now, and what they’ve tried in the past. We ask a bunch of simple questions to allow people to give us data that’s going to enable us to make business decisions.

But we can't stress this enough - before you send out your survey, ask yourself what you're trying to do with the information you’re about to gather. Don't send out surveys for the sake of it! You want to ask questions that serve you and your business – what specific decisions are you trying to make? Based on that, you’ll then decide what questions to ask. For example, if you’re trying to find out how your audience refers to the problems they’re experiencing, ask them questions that allow them to give you that. Only collect information that you know you’re going to use.

Another key thing is to make sure you only send your surveys out to a small percentage of your list – something like 10%. And then watch the results come in. When you see the answers, you’ll know whether you’ve worded your questions correctly in order to get the types of responses you want. If people aren't taking the questions in the way you intended or you aren't getting answers that are useful, then you can refine and adjust accordingly (if you need to).

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The Phone Psychic approach

This is about jumping on a call with people. It doesn't have to be the phone - it could be on Zoom, Skype, or some other digital platform that allows you to speak to your audience directly. We regularly have calls win our non-customers – i.e. the people who haven’t bought from us yet. This allows us to collect qualitative data about our subscribers and their current position, mindset, and state.

When running surveys, we generally collect stats and data to segment and target people accordingly through multiple-choice questions and answers. But during these calls, we ask them questions that lead to longer-form answers. We prod, poke, and push in the right direction. If you’re inside our membership The League, you’ll have seen our battle plan called Phone Psychic. This has our entire approach and breaks down all the questions to ask so you can identify the people to call and decide what to do with the data. It also details how to get on a call with people in the first place because you want a good angle for that. 

One of the key things you want to do during these calls is to pick up on the language that your audience uses. For example, we noticed that our subscribers and customers rarely use the words revenue and profit. They talk more in terms of making more sales. And so that's the phrase we tend to use too - it's more colloquial and more relatable to our customers. 

Why speak to non-customers too

You'll also want to make a point of having calls with non-customers. People who have already bought from you clearly believe in what you do, so their opinions are somewhat skewed. With non-customers, you get a different type of value because these subscribers haven't yet understood what you can do for them.

So get on these calls not with the intention to sell but to understand what the person is up to. And often, you'll find that when you ask someone why they haven't joined your programme yet, the next day they'll go and do just that. Because they've been possibly thinking about it. So while these aren’t sales calls (and the aim is to collect useful profiling data), they might generate more sales than you’d anticipated.

How to run calls with your subscribers 

If you're interested in jumping on a call with some of your subscribers, the first thing you want to do is to record the call. Tell the person in advance that you're doing this for research purposes, and ask them if it's okay for you to use the content in your marketing. If they say yes, hit record and re-confirm they’re happy for you to go ahead. 

After the call, grab the transcript and then head over to ChatGPT and ask it to summarise the main points and themes of the call. Then go through it and pull out phrases verbatim – exactly as the person says them. You could even ask ChatGPT to summarise the main reason why the person didn’t buy, what pain points they're experiencing, and what objections they have that stop them from buying from you. This is brilliant because you can then use all these words in a new email campaign. Or you can update your sales page based on what people tell you.

What’s key here is to grab their exact turns of phrase. You want to use the words that come from your prospective customers’ mouths in your copy. That way, when they read your content, they think you absolutely get them. This is the biggest shortcut to writing high-converting sales copy. It removes the guesswork for you. And it also addresses those underlying subconscious assumptions that we, as business owners, often make about our audience.

Once you have the information, if you feel stuck on how to overcome any objections, you can ask ChatGPT. The AI tool can act as a professional sales copywriter and come up with some suggestions for you that would be both ethical and effective. 

You can then start emailing your audience based on the segments you’ve identified using the phrases you picked up along the way. Remember that the key to good customer profiling is to be super clear on what you're going to do with the data you collect. That way, the information you gather will help you convert better and make more sales. 

Check out ResponseSuite

If you're interested in running surveys, check out the platform we put together called ResponseSuite. Even before we started teaching email marketing, we were passionate about surveys. We wanted to serve our audience better and to segment them inside our email platform based on what people were telling us. But at the time we didn't have the technology to do what we wanted. So we decided to hire a software developer, get an office, and start a business. 

There's a real need for people to be able to carry out this kind of marketing. That's why we created the platform in the first place! You can build and drag and drop surveys really easily. And then you can hook them to your email marketing platform and segment people based on which answers they choose. So go ahead and grab a completely free account here.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “How to be better looking.” We took this surface-level thing that everyone aspires to (be better looking) and used it as a subject line. It's intriguing and evokes curiosity because it seems impossible. Another similar idea would be “How to make a million dollars.” It’s a bit out there and seems impossible to achieve. And that's why the subject line works. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

What We Really Think About Customer Avatars.

6 Techniques To Segment Your Email Subscribers.

When Is It Too Early to Segment Your Email Subscribers?

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

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Unknown 0:40

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy. Hello.

Unknown 0:43

Today on the Email Marketing Show, we're talking about understanding customer profiling the what, why and how of knowing your customers and it doesn't have to be quite as boring as we've made it sound.

Unknown 0:53

One of the ways that you can really get information on your customers is to pay attention to what they are clicking on. But that means you have to get them to be clicking on things. So we want to make sure that as many of your emails as possible have links in them. You have to do that in a way that means people don't get bored of clicking on the links in your emails, especially if you're talking about the same thing quite a lot. So the way that we do this is by dressing up those links in different fashions and we put together a really cool free report that will give you 12 of our favourite creative ways to get more clicks from every single email that you send. Starting from the next email you send. And it's called quick tricks. All you have to do to download it totally for free is head over to email marketing heroes.com forward slash

Unknown 1:26

tricks. What a treat, he doesn't dunk biscuits, it's comedy and it tastes rough and tumble

Unknown 1:31

and he loves the TV show The Rookie it's psychological mind reader Kennedy.

Unknown 1:39

Obviously, you know,

Unknown 1:40

it's like a light hearted Drama Mystery ish

Unknown 1:49

Nathan affiliate, you know the guy that's got pretty good, great characters

Unknown 1:58

that we've heard about what's your

Unknown 2:03

channel turn on channel 27 likewise that by

Unknown 2:11

service providers review

Unknown 2:13

exactly. Tell us about you don't don't I didn't know this about you. I've offered you a biscuit before at my house. We had a cup of tea you don't dunk them?

Unknown 2:20

No actually the biscuit during the tea. I have dumped biscuits. That's why I know I don't like so it's not like you know it's not like that's wrong. I'm one of those people like you always well who says I don't like that what you actually mean is I've never had that and I've decided in advance that I'm like, I'm told I don't like it when I was oh you're told like that. Look what you did. You know like something fancy lifestyle you don't like that son you don't like that? The holidays to Disney World.

Unknown 2:45

Bedding on top of your bed? No. So you don't

Unknown 2:48

like that? So I have done biscuits. I just happen to know I don't I don't I just don't happen to know I don't like them dumped. They got

Unknown 2:55

a Hobnob or a ginger snap. It don't need a cup of tea. It's all warm and as we've

Unknown 2:59

said before, I like boring biscuits like a rich diva digestive or something. I just I just have a good I just don't know. How

Unknown 3:05

do you say digestives I know she said that. I don't know. Oh, I suggested.

Unknown 3:13

Gentlemen grinder did. Did you have a digestive? Digestive? I think it's quite a good word. I think I'm gonna try and start using it. It's about D

Unknown 3:30

stop. I'm trying to be lame. Right. Hello. Hi. Are you listening? probably know by now. Anyway. We every week on the show, we show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We're talking about email marketing strategy digestives, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now. To make more sales online with a brand new episode every email marketing Wednesday. Make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player.

Unknown 3:58

There we go. So let's talk about this customer profiling thing. What exactly do we mean it sounds like something that police would do doesn't it?

Unknown 4:05

Sounds like companies like ours for supermarkets that lose some customer profiling.

Unknown 4:09

Right, exactly. And so what we're gonna do is we're going to take this premise and we're gonna boil it down to the stuff that we small businesses need to know when it comes to I guess really its subscriber profiling as much as anything for us as email marketers. We talked about taking the people on your list and working out who they are, what do they want whereabouts are they specifically and most importantly, as it applies to their relationship with us and our business have they bought yet haven't they bought yet so on your list right now, you've immediately got two different types of person. You've got people who've bought from you, great, you've got people who haven't bought from you. That's a bit of a shame and you figure out why you've got people who bought from you a long time ago but haven't bought anything since you've got people who bought once you'd like to get buy twice. You've got people who've bought everything you have, you know those customers where it doesn't matter what you put out, they're going to come and be the first to buy it. So we immediately get to kind of break our our subscriber lists down into people's profiles as it relates to them becoming a customer or being a customer or maybe becoming a customer and kind of allowing us to figure out what we're gonna be able to do with those people.

Unknown 4:57

Yes, and here's the thing I want to make sure that this is this is a mistake I definitely made and I'm sure other people have made when they get their email marketing platform and it's what I used to do is depending on what I said to people, is I used to apply tags to tell me loads of stuff about them, depending on what they clicked on. So if I was sending them a link to a video that was about cheese, or how to make how to grow your own cheese, for example, how to grow your own cheese. I would say if someone clicked on that app you like, right tag them with interest equals cheese, interest equals video, interest equals grow your own food, interest equals food like and I would have all this stuff. And then I remember like years ago, why do I need any of that information? Like there are very few businesses that you need. To know that level of detail about people. If you are in a business or you're building a newsletter, or your business is the newsletter where you sell advertising space, or you sell the ability to broadcast to particular segments and you need to have hey, I need to grab the cheese section of my list because I've got you know somebody from Wensleydale cheeses wanting to wanting to advertise to them, then that's useful. But for most of us who are selling our own product or selling stuff as an affiliate or a little bit of both, then you generally don't need a huge granular level of tagging of people based on the interests. So that's a thing you can be free of and it's I think I had never really run that I sort of totally completely forgotten that I even did it. Did you do something similar? Or did you never get down that?

Unknown 6:22

Yeah, so because I had this business in the sort of self development space and so I would put out you know, content or blog posts or videos or whatever on different topics and some that one might be about self confidence and another one might be about, you know, happiness and warmth and those were sort of disparate topics. One might be about the digestive system. There was like such disparate topics that I wanted to make sure that if somebody clicked to go and watch a video about self confidence, I knew they were interested in that. But the truth is, I didn't have products about all those different things specifically and I didn't plan on creating, you know, there's 100 different sub niches of your niche. You're probably not going to create probably shouldn't create products on all of those things. And so there is definitely a thing, there's definitely a such a thing as sort of too much, too much tagging, and that kind of thing. I think that ultimately what you need to really do, and we've done this a lot with our business is to boil the business down to what do I sell, and what would be useful information to help me to sell those people and

Unknown 7:10

that's the only information that I get really like nothing more than that. Really, the some of the bits will sort of share a date you might not have realised, oh, that might be useful, potentially. But in general, I think that's exactly it. Like what do I need to know in order to figure out how to sell my thing and how to identify the people who I should sell it to and keep and keep away from people I shouldn't. So I mean, as a tiny business you don't need hundreds of segments right and a small because you don't need hundreds of segments right? If you're if you're not a corporation, which is not our crowd generally I know there's a couple billion corporations do this on the show because I've heard from them but like in general, it's not our crowd, okay. You've basically

Unknown 7:41

the reason the part the reason why you don't need hundreds of segments is you got to figure out what you're gonna do with those segments later. So let's imagine in a dream world you go yes, I'm going to have, you know, 50 different segments of my email list you call grid, but you need to be keeping in touch with your subscribers on a frequent basis what you're gonna do send 50 emails a day, most people can't even send one. So I think it comes down to it's all well and good having this having the segmented data in your list, but at the same time, if that means you've got so many segments, you can't easily do anything with any of them. That's that's actually where the problem comes in.

Unknown 8:06

Yeah, it does. So let's look at some ways you can divide people up and then we'll also talk about how to actually deeply profile your customers and get understand a bit more about them and how they think as well. We're gonna get that in a bit in a minute. So let's get some data points. First of all, first of all, as Rob said, you said, customers people who've paid yet people who haven't paid yet that's too big, too big segments, right? People who have been cut have paid people who've not customers, non customers to really good, good segments. Another thing you can do and a bit of information that we store on each subscriber is a classic age old marketing thing. One of the very few age old marketing things that we actually implement in our business is something you might have heard of, called RF M. And it stands for recency, frequency, monetary, are FM and these are basically just in practical sense give you the sort of overview obviously, how you apply doesn't do this in your business gonna be different depending on your tech stack, what you're doing and all sort of stuff, but against each contact. So next to Rob's name. For example, in our in our thing, we'll have a custom field called recency and another one called frequency and another one called monitoring to three custom fields. In the recency field, we have the date that Rob last bought something, and if he's not bought anything yet, that will be empty. So he's going to self select at that point of being non customer great. So recency frequency in that field, it's going to tell us a value and numerical value of how many of how many things has robbed bought. Okay, so if he's bought everything, it might have a number six, or number five, or number 200. And it depends on what you businesses, right? Or if he's bought one thing, I'll have another one of them. And the final one is the monitoring how much has Rob spent with us, so it might say $25,000 And we'll be like great, that's, that's what he spent. But this is only worth collecting. If I said if you're gonna do something with it, the reason we started collecting it and for years ignored it but then suddenly started collecting it is because we want it to be able to identify who the people are, who have bought something recently and be able to make an offer to them because we know that they are the freshest people. They are in buying mode with us. They are in a world right now. Where they are spending money investing. They are so focused on in our case, email marketing, they're in investing and learning mode for nothing but a great time offer somebody something. Frequency tells us how many things they've bought, if the answer is if we've got 10 bullets, if the numbers 10. Well, we probably don't want to email that person because they've already bought everything or it might also have a lot of information to do with that, which is if if you've got a lot of people who've got a high frequency that might tell you actually there's an opportunity for me to create a new offer. On the other hand, if you feel like it's time for you to create a new offer, it might be a case if you go in well let's have a look at what our frequency is. Most people haven't bought most of our stuff. Let's not create a new offer. Let's instead get more people to buy the stuff they haven't bought. Okay, so you can pull it up as a report and then monitoring we can see who are the people in our list who have bought who spent the most money. And this means you can actually say okay, these people are high investors. They are the people who really like our stuff and we can go and offer them more premium stuff. Now, all of that interesting, all of its fascinating. And it also means you can not do it, subscribers by subscriber, but you can pull out averages. So on average, when did most people last buy? Or on average? How many products are people bought? On average? How much are people spending with us when they've got a value of more than $1? Right? So you can pull that up as well and you can think about that over and over. Time. See how you're doing. So recency, frequency monetary, is something you can implement to allow you to break up your subscribers a little bit. So that's a way that's a way of doing this data.

And what that gives us is that we have a bunch of stuff that's basically now being automatically collected. Okay, what's been happening here is the customers don't know what's happening. The subscribers don't know this is happening but in the background, you're paying attention to have they bought yet have they bought more than once yet have they not bought yet. And you're paying attention to the recency frequency monitoring, you're just collecting that information in the background. It's statistically useful. It's good information that you can sell just gather without any input from them. And that's really the first step of this of this subscribe to this customer profiling thing. The next step of this process now is to outreach to them and collect data that they are going to give you and that means they're gonna be profiled in these two different ways. One is the stuff that you can just do without their input without their knowledge. You're just it's obvious based on what they've done and their activity. The second bit though, is stuff that you can't necessarily immediately know about them. And we're gonna have to kind of get their input on this.

So what we're going to do that is the first one is, as you probably know, we're huge fans of surveys, good surveys, not shit surveys motor. So as of what we've all seen, terrible, too long, the break lots of rules that have low completion rate, all that sort stuff. But what we'll do is create a really simple survey to actually collect some data around what they like, what they're struggling with what their biggest priority is right now, what they've tried in the past. how that how that served them, how it hasn't served them, we're going to ask a bunch of simple questions that allow people to give us some kind of customer data that's going to allow us to, to to make decisions. And before we go to the second thing, which is one of my personal favourite things to do and which you do we do every single year. We do a survey every year as well. We do both these things about six months apart. So we do a survey and secondly, do the thing we're about to talk about. The really important thing here is before you send out your survey before you sit down and write your questions for yourself before you write down the stuff that you need the next step, you need to ask yourself to become very clear. What am I trying to do with this information? We never want to be doing this just to get a general feel. That's a terrible use. You will you'll you'll have woolly questions, which leads you nowhere you'll end up going. Oh, that's nice. You're looking at Google. That's interesting. And what is the decision you're trying to make? What are the what are the questions? You're trying to answer all the questions? Is it like, Oh, we're looking at 12 A new programme or a new product or service next year? Let's find out where people's gaps are great. Ask questions about that. If it's to do with how to talk to your audience and find out their their turns of phrase or how they express things, ask questions that allow them to do that. So that's just two examples of the types of things you might be trying to do. But you want to be collecting information that you already know how you're going to use our setting and it's really important to only collect information that you already know how you're going to use it. And then when you send out a survey really important bit, and bloody nobody talks about this. It's so strange, is when you send out a survey, send it out to a small percentage of your list 10% Something like that, send out a 10% and watch the first results come in. Because when you read those results that come back in, you will realise whether you have worded the question correctly or not to get the types of responses you want. You might see that people are taking the question completely not the way you intended. Or you're getting answers which are not what you're looking for and which are not useful. And if you've sent that survey out to everybody who wants you've got no recourse, you've got no way of fixing that. Whereas if you just sent out let's say 10% or something like that percentage of your list, that at least you can go great. I've got that information that all look good grant. I can now send it out to more people or send out the rest of list. If they came ba ck and of course they've gone absolutely off the wall with their answers. You might want to refine the question. So you might find that one question becomes two or three questions so you can really step them through giving you a response. So that's the first thing you could survey them. The second thing is what we call the phone psychic approach.

Now this is basically where we're going to do the unthinkable. We're going to get your email subscribers on the phone, on the phone. When I say on the phone, that could be on zoom of course on Skype, it's much more likely to be on some kind of digital platform than it is to be on the actual old doggone moon but a Cockney rhyming slang for that. Yeah. And so here's what we do with that. We basically have calls with non customers. Those are our favourite calls to have people haven't bought stuff yet. And we have some calls with customers as well and they both have their own merits. And basically what this is really looking to do is to collect qualitative data around your customers and their current thinking their current position, their current mindset, their current state with you as a business and generally in their in their activities. And so whereas you know, running surveys, generally speaking, we're trying to collect stats and data we're looking to segment and target and do all that stuff on relatively multiple choice type questions. Whereas when it comes to having these calls, we can't easily do that when we're having these calls. What we're doing instead is we are asking them questions where we get to let them do long essay form sort of answers, but over the call, and then continue to prod and poke and push people in the right direction. If you're in our programme, and you've seen our battle plan, which is called Phone psychic, you'll have seen the entire approach to this, which is literally breaking down, breaking down all the questions to ask and how to identify these people and what to do with that data. How to get on the phone in the first place. That's a really important part. You know, how do you get on the phone first, let's

make sure you have a really good approach for that.

A couple of things that this comes down to in the end then what it allows you to do first of all, is to start to pick up on the language that your audience use. One of the things that we noticed quite early on, in doing this process is that our customers generally speaking, don't use words like revenue and profit. Instead, they use things like I just want to make more sales great. So we as a business generally speaking, occasionally we slip but generally as a business we have trained ourselves out of using the words revenue, we don't particularly talk about profit, per se, we do say things like and you get to keep more of that money, that's more profit in your pocket at the end of the whole thing, but it's kind of quite colloquial, rather than saying revenue and profits and all that stuff, because our audience generally speaking a small one and two person bands who just want to just you just want to make more sales. That's what they want

to hear themselves in line revenue and gross margin like that. None of that's happening. Exactly. And so talking about that shit. They don't use those words. So we won't use those words either. Otherwise, they'll

start to think our stuff isn't for them. So you'll start to build the sort of vocabulary of your business by talking to their customers and finding out what they what they say. Another thing that happens is you will find that you will jump on calls with non customers. And that's really it. There's there's an interesting argument as to which one is more useful. We think that sort of balanced customers are useful because they are the right kind of person to buy from you because they did buy but their opinions are also skewed by the fact that they are already believers in what it is that you've seen. Non customers. That's a different value in that conversation, because they haven't yet understood the value of what you can do for them. And therefore it's useful to find out why a lot of the time that you'll find you get on those calls with non customers, you'll basically say, Hey, listen, this is not a sales call. We're not trying to sell you anything. We just want to understand what you're up to. And at the moment why you haven't bought and a lot of the time you'll have those calls. This is completely unintentional. And you'll literally just say what is it you're trying to achieve? And they'll say I want to sell more stuff with email, you'll say great, you'll say why haven't you joined the programme yet? And you'll they'll tell you why they haven't joined yet. And you can tell that they don't really have a good answer for that a lot of the time a lot the time they're like, Well, you know, it's sort of it comes down to a lot of the time they're just a bit scared a bit nervous that you know, they haven't just haven't actually within days of doing those calls, hours sometimes we've seen those non customers just randomly wander over to our sales page and just buy the programme. Purely by having that call. They sort of remind themselves Oh, yeah, I do want to sell this. And I haven't done that yet. But it does sound good. And I have been thinking about it. I might as well do it now. So they're not sales calls, but they do have a knock on effect as well as collecting all this useful profiling data of actually generating quite a lot more sales than you would anticipate to.

They do they do and so here's some tips about doing those calls. The first thing you want to do is you want to record the calls now tell the person this is a research call. I'm going to record it, I'm going to go and use it in our marketing. Is that okay? And they say yes. And then I hit record and say just to confirm, you've just confirmed that it's okay for me to record and use the recording of this call me say Yes, great. So now come on. We're going to record the whole thing. Then we're going to have we're gonna grab the transcript. So if you're using zoom, it already automatically transcribes your your calls. Other platforms do the same. I think Google meat does the same thing as well. So it grabs the transcript, then we're going to do something really cool. We're going to grab that transcript, and we're going to go over to chat GPT I've been practising saying that since bollocks it up lots of times on this bloody podcast. Anyway, you're gonna go over to chat, and you're going to ask it to summarise the main points and themes of the transcript. Right? And then you're gonna go through the transcript and you're gonna pull out phrases verbatim exactly as they say them. So what you gonna end up with is an analysed transcript of the themes of the reasons or you can ask chat, any question you want, why did this person not buy? What's the main reason you had a bunch of pre written questions to ask chat to analyse from all of the transcripts? You added to the list of them. So now you can go into use all of that information about what's the biggest pain point why haven't they purchased what's the resistance what what are they trying to sell, etc, etc, etc. And then you've got all the information that you can now go into using a new email campaign you can use, you can update your sales page, we've added entire sections, huge section, like big meaty sections to our sales pages, based on what we heard on those calls. And then we'll also grab their exact turns of phrase. So if they say, Oh, I'm really worried about what we boyfriend will think about if I invest in a programme. We might say if you're really worried about what your boyfriend will think when you invest in the programme, we're literally using the words that come from our prospective customers mouths in our copy so they can see oh, this person absolutely gets me this is the biggest shortcut to writing high converting sales copy is literally using the words that your prospective customers are actually thinking and seeing using the right as they go. This person totally totally gets me

and this is really what turns guesswork about who you think your audience are, or underlying subconscious assumptions that people make. I think it's really easy. We just did it. In fact, the other day, we were just thinking about something that we're working on at the moment. And we looked at our audience and we basically both came to the same conclusion at the same time, which is we had these underlying subconscious assumptions that were just wrong. We hadn't ever sat down and thought the words of our customers or our subscribers are x, y Zed, or our ideal customers are x y Zed, but they were just these sort of unconscious bias is by using these biases that we had. And actually, when we sat down and rationally thought through the content that we've gathered through doing these calls, we were actually not there at 30 in this very specific position. And so that was really, really useful. Of course, whilst you're in the sort of world of chat GPT and AI, you can even ask for ideas on how to overcome these things. If you're sat there going, I don't know how to overcome this. Like, you know, I've got to go and speak to my partner about it or whatever. You can just ask what's a good sales I've been acting as a professional sales copywriter or a sales person, what's the correct way for me to overcome this in a way that's both ethical good and will work? So you actually get inspiration for your ads and emails and stuff from chat GVC before you then go, start putting it all together. It's super cool.

So then what we're gonna do is take all that information and start emailing our audience based on the segments we've identified, and then start using those phrases on about the themes that we've identified. And this is the really important thing, please do not ever go out and do audience profiling, customer profiling, customer research, because it's something you're supposed to do every year. That's a terrible waste of your time. Instead, know what you're going to do with it and then step back write the questions, create the process to get you to that point. So if you know that in a few months or a few weeks, or you're planning on writing a new sales page, writing a new email campaign, putting a new author out, doing anything new, or positioning something in a new way, or if something you think hey, that's completely okay. I think it could convert better this is the time to go and do that and know what information you're gonna need in order to have that effect. So that's what we want you to do make sure that you know how you're gonna go and use this information before you just start doing it. willy nilly. In fact, Rob one of the things we obviously talk about a lot is surveys. Do you want to talk about our survey platform because he does a really cool deal on it?

Yeah, absolutely. So we basically put together a survey platform is the reason why we even have a business together was basically to help small businesses do the thing we're talking about here. This is before we decided we wanted to teach our passion for email marketing. This was literally just an idea we had we both selling stuff using email. And one of the big things we were doing was surveys. And the problem was we wanted to build to serve our audience and segment them in our email platform. Based on what they said. And that was impossible. And so we weren't well, you could do it. We'd have to like patch together bits of software with Zapier and things like that. And it was very clunky and slow. And some of the stuff we wanted to do was just literally impossible. And so we decided to do what any sane people would do, and hire a software developer, get an office and start a business for that software. And so that's what we did. We delve down in this hole we realised there was a real need for people to do this kind of marketing. And so we created response suite.com It's a really amazing survey platform. You can build drag and drop simple surveys, kind of just like you know, dragging an image together in Canva is really easy. Dragging a survey together in response, which is super simple. Just grab elements from the left, put them onto the canvas and you're good to go. You can then hook that survey up to your email marketing platform. ask whatever questions you want and then segment people based on specifically what they say in which answers they choose. And you actually grab a completely free account to get set up and start building your service. All you have to do to get it is head over to response tweeter.com Check out all the details, see all the stuff you can do. But then go and make a free account. Just have a play with it and you'll quickly see how easy it is to do response rate to.com

Absolutely love it. Okay, now time for this week subject line of the week subject line of the week. I like this one.

How to be better looking. That's the subject line. I quite like this idea of taking this thing, this sort of surface level thing that everyone aspires to be like everyone would like to be better looking especially in the day of comparison we're all looking at you know, Instagram supermodels and thinking oh, I don't like that. I'd actually do that like that. In which case why don't you but most of us are looking at the thing which I don't like that it's very unhealthy and all that jazz but it's a cool it's a thing everyone's and just to take this thing that's fundamentally impossible, like so how to make a million dollars. Like that's a tonne of pennies. Have you learned how to be better looking especially to an email marketing Mr.

So like hang on what? Yeah, like how to be better looking this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. I know enough about the Wednesday and other show over thank you so much for listening to the whole show this week. We do this every single week. It's totally free. But do make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player so that the next episode downloads automatically and you don't miss it. We're about next week say goodbye Robert goodbye. Robert.