doberman dan’s email marketing secrets page 1 of 22 · 2019. 1. 19. · doberman’dan:’...

Doberman Dan’s Email Marketing Secrets Page 1 of 22

Markus Allen: Well hello everybody this is Marcus Allen and on the phone with me is Doberman Dan Gallapoo. Hello Dan.

Doberman Dan: Hey, Mark. How are you doing?

Markus Allen: Fantastic. Let's skip the fluff. Get right to the stuff. Today's audio tutorial on-‐line manual if you will is all about email marketing secrets and strategies. This is actually an introduction because we've got a ton of lessons that you're going to get with your purchase here and I highly recommend if you haven't done so already to fill out the email and first name below this recording which is if you click on that link that you see at the bottom of the companion notes that says email updates you want to fill that out. Because number one it will give you a year's worth of free updates even though this is a thirty day course. If there are any additional things that you need to hear about email marketing, you will get notification about it.

Plus you're going to want to get these emails because Dan writes these emails and Dan is, well let me just put it this way. I have in my emails, in my email inbox I have an A pile and B pile just like marketers do in their office for direct mail. There's only three people, actually there are four people in my email A pile. The first one, the most important ones are my members and subscribers. Any time they have issues it goes right to my A pile email section.

Then I have three marketers who catch my attention. The first one was actually Dr. Mercola. Do you ever get his emails Dan?

Doberman Dan: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's got great information.

Markus Allen: No, that was he had great information because evidently his copywriter had to of quit or left because I would say up until about three months ago they were just awesome and then they were horrible, so something tells me that his copywriter is no longer with him for whatever reason. That was number 1. Number two is Mike Corso, believe it or not from Cool Site of the Day, that guy can really write some great emails. Are you on his list, on Mike's list?

Doberman Dan: No, I'm not I never checked out his stuff.

Markus Allen: Yeah, he's at coolsiteoftheday.com and the third one is the person you're listening to right now. Now what's interesting about Dan at the risk of making him blush is because Dan lets me look at his tracking stats because I help Dan with his Internet marketing I'm able to see that Dan is


the real deal. I mean his emails, well let's just get right to it. Some of your emails gets a hundred percent response, some others get eighty percent. I'm not talking about open rates. I'm talking about click through rates.

These are people who not only open it but also click on it. You know quite frankly the open rate isn't much of a big deal. It's really the click through. I mean I could put free sex as the headline on an email and get a hundred percent open rate, but it's another thing to get someone to click on it. Dan is definitely the real deal and he gets mind-‐boggling open and click through rates and I'm a little bit envious, not jealous, but envious of that because I'd like to think I know a lot about email marketing. I have my own course on email marketing and I don't get nearly the response that Dan gets.

We are all very fortunate to have Dan on the call right now because he's going to ... We're going to jump into his mind and find out exactly how he gets these crazily high open and click through rates. Let's just get right to ... Actually before we get into it I want to kind of give you guys a little tour of Dan's adult life which [inaudible 00:04:00] do that because there's so much irony in his life. For example, Dan you were born in what town again?

Doberman Dan: I was born in Barberton, Ohio.

Markus Allen: Which is the same town that Gary Halbert was born in ironically enough. We'll get to the irony of that in a few moments but basically you somehow got into ... Where were you a cop?

Doberman Dan: Dayton, Ohio.

Markus Allen: Dayton, Ohio.

Doberman Dan: A completely different part of the state than Barberton but an equally depressing town.

Markus Allen: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. You're a cop in Dayton, Ohio and then we fast forward off of being a cop which is really, it's makes you scratch your head how in the world is a cop later in life one of the best copywriters that I know of, but it all makes sense. I mean as a cop aren't you trained in psychology too?

Doberman Dan: Well actually the training we got was not that great. The real training came was when we hit the streets because I mean Barberton was like a


working class town but it wasn't a rough place to live. It was a small town and I was exposed to the normal stuff that a kid growing up is exposed to, but it's not like living in the inner city.

Then when I became a cop and went to Dayton the first place I worked and in most of my career I worked in inner city so that was major culture shock for me. I had to learn an entirely different thought process, an entirely different culture and had to figure out like persuasion skills, really, really fast just to stay alive and to keep people from killing each other. That was where the real education came from.

I didn't even realize until years later when I left that job I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I actually wanted to erase that from my life because there were a lot of bad experiences and so I didn't mention it for years and years and years, but it was actually years later that I realized a lot of the reasons I was successful in selling in print and writing copy was the persuasion skills I learned on the street by figuring out how to talk a guy with a shotgun pointed at my head out of skilling me.

When you figure out stuff like that, it's you know this is all persuasion. That's all selling really is and that's all copy writing is is selling in print. Even though I didn't realize it until years later, twelve years as a cop is a big part of the reason that I'm a successful copywriter now.

Markus Allen: Let's take it from cop to ultimately how you got to email marketing which is again ironic because in your most excellent may I add newsletter that you add on a monthly basis, The Doberman Dan Letter, you are a bit hard on Internet marketing. You obviously have more of a passion for direct marketing. I know some of that is because there's less competition in the inbox, actually it's in the mailbox.

Let's talk about how you went from cop to ultimately rocking it when it came to email marketing. What was next after being a cop?

Doberman Dan: Well, I mean I wanted to get out of that gig. It only took a few years to realize if you want to find out where you're going you just look at people doing the same thing as you are a few years down the road and most of them didn't make it. They were either gone on some sort of physical disability, mental disability. They were dead. They never made it to the twenty-‐five year mark which is when you can retire and sixty-‐five percent who did make it to the twenty-‐five year mark alive and still sane relatively and were able to retire on a service pension sixty-‐five percent of those were dead within five years or less.


All the years that they're working there they were all broke, so I didn't want that for my life. I just wanted more control over my schedule too. I wanted to be free, so I got into all kinds of stuff. My first introduction was I think the Amway business. I got into Amway twice. Did everything they told me but still failed. A couple of other multilevel deals, all kinds of biz op courses I bought. I mean various projects. I started [inaudible 00:09:12] a little jewelry business, a home improvement business with my neighbor, sold long distance service door to door.

I mean it was nine years straight of stuff like that all miserable failures and then I discovered mail order marketing and started a little self-‐published, I wrote a little self-‐published manual about body building because I was really into that at the time and started selling that through two-‐step advertisements in the muscle mags. This was pre-‐Internet of course.

Markus Allen: Two-‐step meaning classified to a phone number to ...

Doberman Dan: Classified initially and then I figured out that was a mistake so I started doing small display ads to call [us 00:10:00] toll free, record a message and I sent them a sales letter and sold that way. Then figured out that couldn't make money selling a book. I had to make it a system, so I added audios, extra bonus reports, a video and the manual and then that was so so. That was the first success I had. Then that led me to figuring out that that market wants to buy supplement businesses or wants to buy supplements, so I started my first supplement business.

Then I wound up putting that business on the web back in '96, so anyway that's how that all started so a year doing that. After a year of doing the mail order business I was finally making enough money I could quit my job, so in 1997 was when I left the police department and have been free ever since.

Markus Allen: Mm-‐hmm. You've made a lot of money. I don't know if you are comfortable sharing this but some of the figures you told me a monthly basis was quite eye popping.

Doberman Dan: Yeah. My goal was actually never to make a lot of money although that wound up happening. My goal was just to make the same amount of money I was making at the police department which was not much, but yet do it on autopilot, you know just working a couple of hours a day, or working as a wanted to just to get me free of that job and have freedom of my schedule. Even though I have made a lot of money that's still my main I could make a lot more money if I wanted to work harder but my


main deal is just making an income that allows me to be free without having to work myself to death.

Markus Allen: Mm-‐hmm, so let's fast forward a bit. Where does the one and only Gary Halbert factor into this?

Doberman Dan: Well you know I had been ... I had found out about Halbert through Dan Kennedy. I was subscribing to Dan Kennedy's newsletter and Dan Kennedy mentioned that anybody involved in mail order needed to subscribe to Halbert newsletter so I subscribed to Halbert's newsletter. Back then it was in print and he charged a hundred and ninety seven dollars a year. Later on some time around early 2000, 2001, he started putting it on-‐line for free, but back then you had to subscribe.

He was from Barberton, Ohio, grew up like ten minutes from the house where I grew up and we seemed to have a lot in common. He'd been real successful writing copy for clients and developing his own mail order projects and I just wanted to know what this guy knew and we had so much in common I thought there might be a connection there.

I did a lot of things to get on his radar and get his attention which eventually led to meeting him in person a couple of times and then that actually led to him, I was living out of the country at the time, I was living in Costa Rica, so he actually came and lived with me for about four months I guess, three or four months and then after that persuaded me to move back to the states and live in the same building, high-‐rise apartment building with him in Miami to work on copy jobs.

Long story short I wound up working with Gary Halbert for about a year and a half.

Markus Allen: At that time when you worked with him was email marketing even available?

Doberman Dan: Yeah. I mean a lot has changed. That was like 2002 and 2003 and I'd been selling on-‐line since 1996 and doing email marketing since '96, but I mean back then we didn't have AWeber, we didn't any services like that you just had to send emails and hope that your ISP wouldn't cut you off because you're sending to too many people at once and it was now that I think about it a lot has changed.

You know by then Halbert had put his website on-‐line so he had an email list and he would email the list when he put a new issue up, but yeah


we've learned a lot of stuff since then. A lot of stuff has changed. What was working back then isn't working now.

Markus Allen: Right. Well I miscommunicated. What I meant to say was was email marketing available to Mr. Halbert back then in the sense that did he embrace it? Because if you watch some of his later in life videos he claims that he could make a hundred times more profit sending a snail mail letter than one could send an email letter and that one was a head scratcher for me. I have to admit.

Doberman Dan: I don't think he really exploited his email list as much as he could. Back when I was working with him his email list he had about four thousand people on the list. I personally saw this with my own eyes. I mean I had the log in information for whatever account he was using at the time to keep his list, but he had a lot more people who would come and read his website. They just didn't subscribe to his list and so as I recall he sent very few offers out via email. It was just he would every month or so when he had a new issue up he'd send an email out about it and any selling he'd do from the actual website.

He told me that about snail mail too versus email. Back then late 90s, early 2000s, I don't necessarily ... For me that wasn't true. I was still getting really good response via email. Later on after about 2004, 2005 direct mail definitely far eclipsed the email. I can actually point to the exact year when response to email really went way down. That was 2007 and whereas like just years prior a list that was seventy-‐five, eighty percent smaller, you know responded ten percent better or ... I'm sorry I'm getting my numbers ...

Well for example like prior to 2007, I maybe had a customer list of perhaps like eight or ten thousand people and I would get ten times the response from that list as I got just a few years later. A few years later my customer list, I'm not talking about free E-‐zine subscribers, people bought stuff, my customer list was over forty thousand people and yet response was ten percent of what it had just been a few years prior.

Markus Allen: You were using the same basic strategies within your emails?

Doberman Dan: Yes.

Markus Allen: In fact you probably honed your strategies and they were probably even more responsive?


Doberman Dan: Yes, so you've got to keep on top of things and figure out what's working but I mean still to this day it doesn't mean to abandon email but if I send an email to my entire list which includes customers and E-‐zine subscribes it's probably about sixty thousand people. If I send a snail mail letter to just a thousand of my most recent buyers the snail mail letter will probably bring in ten times the number the amount of sales as the email.

Markus Allen: Right, but there's a cost.

Doberman Dan: There's a cost to that which is not much for a thousand letters, but the thing is the emails will get sales from people that I'm not going to send a sales letter to because on the email list there's maybe somebody who hasn't [inaudible 00:19:12]. The direct mail is only going to the most recent buyers and because there's no production costs or postage costs involved with email I can email much more frequently, so guys that I simply can't afford to mail because maybe they haven't bought recently or who knows maybe they haven't bought in five years I can still afford to mail them with email.

Here's the thing, I'm a marketer. I get a little perturbed when people kind of separate direct marketing and on-‐line marketing. On-‐line marketing is direct marketing. If you're [crosstalk 00:19:52] selling on-‐line you're using direct marketing. It's just a media. I'm a marketer. I just use the medias that are available to me. If in the future, there's some media that beams holographic messages in front of people's faces according to their buying [inaudible 00:20:16] they just bought a coffee at Starbucks and big brother knows that and now I can beam a holographic message in front of them telling them to buy croissant, right next door.

I mean I'll use that media. I use direct marketing to do what I want to accomplish and I'll use whatever media is effective for me. I use it all, email, direct mail, space ads, on-‐line marketing and I have been doing that since I started. As soon as the Internet became viable, I got on-‐line so I'm not saying to abandon one for the other. I'm saying to use it all.

Markus Allen: Right and by the way a little trivia, I know that Tom from AWeber started AWeber I think it was a year before, I had dinner with him, and I think it was a year before that and that was like in August of 1999, so I think he started around August of 1998 as AWeber. It might have been actually earlier than that under a different name. At least AWeber who I'd definitely recommend has been doing it for donkey's years in Internet time that's for sure no doubt about it. All right, so you continued on, so there's the Gary Halbert connection. You converted your bodybuilding


newsletter basically into a supplement business. Was there anything that we're missing in your adult life tour here?

Doberman Dan: No. I just once I figured out direct marketing then I've started a bunch of different projects. I haven't just been bodybuilding, although bodybuilding has been the one consistent market I've been in since like '95 in one form or another. I've sold in the health market. I've sold to gym and health center owners. I've sold to martial arts owners. I've sold gadgets, electronic gadgets, gold testers, other gadgets. I mean once you know the principles it's just a matter of applying it to pretty much various markets and products.

I mean that's what I do. I'm not really ... I get labeled as a copywriter. I am a copywriter but the only reason I learned copy was because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and start my own direct marketing projects, but I couldn't afford to hire a copywriter so I had to do it myself. That's what I've been about since '95 starting these kind of project myself, picking markets and developing products for it and writing the copy to sell the products.

Markus Allen: That's interesting because I have seen people consider you as a copywriter. I have also seen people consider as a gigolo, but I don't know I just thought I'd throw that in.

Doberman Dan: Well I have been a prostitute before. Let me define that. When I sell ... I mean I've done this very infrequently but I have to admit to doing it. I have been the very worst kind of prostitute. The hooker sells her body as one thing but there's a worse kind than that. Somebody who sells their mind for money is much worse and when I've needed money I have done that which means I've taken on copy writing clients and written copy.

That basically is selling my mind and almost every waking moment of my time and thought. I've sold to the highest bidder, but very infrequently and when somebody gets called a copywriter that's what most people envision a freelance guy who sells his soul for money and writers copy for people. I've done that in the past, but very little. Most of my career has been starting my own businesses.

Markus Allen: Now the best client you can take on as a copywriter is most definitely yourself. Yeah, you don't to pimp yourself out to other people. You can take the same talent and use it on yourself if you know what to do. We talk about that on other calls that we do, so yeah you definitely don't want to do that. Let me transition to a story, I think his name is Mike Westerdal is that correct?


Doberman Dan: Yes.

Markus Allen: Mike Westerdal and you write about this in your I think it was two issues you were writing about your success that you had with email marketing and it was actually a sort of before and after story. Maybe if you can kind of give us the cliff notes version of that that would be fantastic.

Doberman Dan: Well, Mike is a friend of mine. He also bought one of my previous businesses in the bodybuilding market and he's got his own bodybuilding website at criticalbench.com. He's a power lifter and so he was helping me out with some of my email marketing and for my supplement business which is in the bodybuilding market. Mike even though he doesn't think so, Mike is a really good copywriter. He writes copy for his own business, and so he had written some emails and we did a little split test. That's one other cool thing I forgot to mention about email as opposed to direct mail.

I mean you get an idea at three in the morning you want to test, you can bang it out and send the message and A, B split test this stuff. Direct mail requires a lot more planning to do that so that's one cool thing about email. He sent out a message and I wasn't really keeping on top of it because Mike knows what he's doing, so he sent out this message. You want to read the subject line.

Markus Allen: Yeah. I have that in front of me. It is the: This saves me the biggest, I can't read my own handwriting, This saves me the biggest something muscle gain.

Doberman Dan: No, that was the one that I wrote.

Markus Allen: Oh.

Doberman Dan: The one that Mike wrote the subject line was Secret I Discovered Late in My Training Career.

Markus Allen: Okay.

Doberman Dan: This is how he starts. Here's the secret first name, most people don't secrete enough digestive enzymes to properly digest their food. Well, that just blew it right there because he revealed the secret. There is no reason to read on whatsoever and click through rates were in the toilet and this was to sell a digestive enzyme product. It wasn't a real lengthy email but it was probably like five or six paragraphs, and so actually now I


look we got no sales and this went out to a list of forty thousand customers.

Markus Allen: Let me write this down because I want to show before and after, so list to forty thousand zero sales. Do you know what the click through rate was?

Doberman Dan: I don't recall what the click through rate was.

Markus Allen: If we were going to guess, it was probably pretty low?

Doberman Dan: Yeah. I think it was pretty low.

Markus Allen: I mean not even a hundred people maybe?

Doberman Dan: I don't remember. You know I did a video with this information and I think I ... I don't remember [crosstalk 00:28:38].

Markus Allen: Well the good thing for those listening to this audio is you're going to get that video. It will be in the companion notes so that will actually detail it out so keep going with your story, Dan.

Doberman Dan: You know what now that I look about it, now that I look at this I take it back. This didn't go out to the customer. This went out to the E-‐zine subscriber list so these are just the people who opted in for free E-‐zine and that list is I think is around eighteen to twenty thousand and so no sales whatsoever.

As soon as I saw the email go out because I'm on the list I knew exactly why he immediately gave away the secret. I mean unless there just happens to be a guy like right at that very moment who had been thinking, "Gee," who knows the value of taking digestive enzymes which they are a very few people who do and was thinking, "Gee, I'm getting low on digestive enzymes, I need to buy some," and that email arrives that's the only way you're going to make a sale.

Markus Allen: Sure. Sure.

Doberman Dan: First of all most people don't even know what digestive enzymes are. They have no idea why they even need them. That's not keeping them up at night like, "Oh, my God, I have to get some digestive enzymes." This product needs some romancing. I need to get their attention first of all and present my case as to why they should even consider digestive enzymes because most of them don't know they need them nor are they even considering them.


The next day I sent out this email and the subject line was THIS in capital letters, gave me the biggest boost in muscle gaisn and the body copy was it sounds too simple first name but this simple addition to your diet can quickly double your gains. That was it. That was the end of the email.

Markus Allen: You signed off on it?

Doberman Dan: Yeah, signed off.

Markus Allen: Mm-‐hmm, so you went to the same list the day after right?

Doberman Dan: Day after. Exact day after just a completely blind email that was two sentences. It went to the same list just the E-‐zine subscriber list. Like I said, I can't remember the numbers, either eighteen thousand or twenty thousand and some and it brought in a thousand fifty dollars and ninety-‐five cents that day from that little blind email. The reason the previous email didn't work and this one did was curiosity and that's all I needed to do. I just needed to get them curious enough to click through to the website where I could present my case.

When they got to the website they weren't hit with a giant headline that said buy digestive enzymes. It was do you know this old school bodybuilding secret to double your muscle gains and then the story was about this guy Rheo Blair in the 50s and 60s who had these miraculous documented transformations, one guy from an average guy to like winning Mr. America in six months and one of his biggest secrets was digestive enzymes because people are usually lacking in those and these can't digest their food and protein that they need to build muscle.

This was a huge secret. If I gave that away in the email there's just no way I'm going to get them to click through. They make a decision based on bad information. They see digestive enzymes, they're ignorant about it but yet they still make a decision.

Markus Allen: Right and the ultimate goal of an email is not to sell but it's to get the person to find out how to buy on your landing page on your website where you've got plenty of room to do so.

Doberman Dan: Yes. An interesting and I'm just discovering recently like this year the more brief my emails and the more cryptic and the kind of blind curiosity stuff with both the subject line and the body copy, the more ... Ultimately the most important metric of sales, the more sales I'm making but of course also the higher the click through rate. Now interestingly enough


prior to 2007 at least in my business that wasn't the case. I was getting good click through and good sales from longer, more detailed emails.

In fact some of my highest producing emails as far as sales were concerned was putting the entire sales letter in an email and I'm talking stuff that if it were printed out on eight and a half by eleven paper it would be eight, nine, ten pages long. That was working great prior to 2007. I noticed exactly in 2007 is when that started to die and it seems like progressively since '07 the shorter the emails and the more blind the emails ultimately then the most important metric we're concerned about the more sales I'm making.

Markus Allen: Yeah, I can pretty much guess why that happened in 2007. That was the introduction of the spam assassins and all these spam scoring systems that were out there and the more words you add to your email the more likely you're going to include these blacklisted words that bump up your spam score. If your spam score is above like a five or it's too high, most people have by default it set to go into their spam folder so they obviously won't see it. Also some people have it where they can actually see what the spam score is while they're looking at the subject line and if they see 3.7, 4.2, 4.9 as opposed to a zero that will give them another hint not to open the message. I think that's why you saw that in 2007.

Doberman Dan: I did not know that. It makes perfect sense though.

Markus Allen: Mm-‐hmm. I would kind of like to reverse engineer this brilliant two sentence email. There's a lot going on here that even the most advanced email marketer might not pick up on. Let's literally kind of reverse engineer this word for word. When we start off with the subject line which is the most important phrase in an email that goes out because if no one is going to read your subject line and open the email it doesn't matter what you say on the inside. They're not going to see it.

You start off with ... If you can repeat it again I think it's This Saves Me the Biggest ...

Doberman Dan: The subject line is THIS, and I put this in caps, THIS Gave Me the Biggest Boost in Muscle Gains.

Markus Allen: Why do you think that worked so well? I mean I know that the first word is killer. For some reason people just go nuts when it comes to this or these.


Doberman Dan: Well and the reason I put it in caps was I was hoping that would arouse more curiosity also. Like this gave me the biggest boost in muscle gains and so naturally that leads to the question well what is this? I was hoping that would evoke enough curiosity to get them to open the email.

Markus Allen: Right. Now you broke the rule of copy writing and didn't talk about you. You talked about me.

Doberman Dan: Mm-‐hmm.

Markus Allen: What do you think about that?

Doberman Dan: You know I've read all the rules. I mean if you could see my library it's just crazy. I'm a junkie as far as copy writing books or books on selling and courses and frankly I've spent way too much money. I think you can get just as good in education with a handful of books. You can get on amazon.com for like ten bucks, but still I'm a junkie and so trust me I know all the rules. I break them all the time. I've never been a strict adherer to rules because I've found that sometimes your biggest breakthroughs come from breaking the rules.

Markus Allen: Sometimes the rules are written by people who purposefully give you bad information. I'll never forget Mark Joyner saying that his best day to email was a Friday. I don't know a single person, you included Dan, who has ever had great success emailing on a Friday.

Doberman Dan: No, I mean Fridays for me have always sucked and then we even verified that a million times over with Trace Watch.

Markus Allen: Right. Right. We'll get into Trace Watch in a bit, a very important free piece of software you need to install to track to this stuff, but let's get back to the subject line. THIS in all caps, blah, blah, blah and you'll notice if you look at it and I'll put this in the companion notes it's a benefit. You're telling people how you benefited and a lot of marketers even advanced marketers strangely enough do not include benefits in their copy which it just boggles my mind. They include either features or cryptic what's the word I'm looking for not features but well anyway I'm a lost for words.

The bottom line is they don't include benefits and advantages and benefits are what get people to really take note. You know marketing is really just providing solutions to people's problems and here you're showing people how you've done both. You've had a problem and this is the solution.


Doberman Dan: Mm-‐hmm. You know breaking the rule of talking about me instead of talking about you, some of my most successful sales pieces were based on a story and most of the time the story is about me because I was always my biggest ... I was the guinea pig for all of this stuff when I was really into bodybuilding, so naturally that's all I could write about. I could just write about me and my experience and so that's why I kind of hoped that this subject line would do well because it was kind of the beginning of a story about me and my experience.

Markus Allen: Now what's interesting is you did not put ... You did not personalize the subject line with the prospect's name, instead you carried that personalization to the first sentence and I have in my chicken scratch here and tell me if I'm wrong, the message is it sounds too simple first name and then you continue one but this simple addition to your diet can quickly double your gains. What you did is from an html and we're going to talk about html versus plain text, you made that entire second sentence there but the simple addition to your diet can quickly double your gains as the clickable link to your landing page.

Doberman Dan: Right.

Markus Allen: One again you've included ... Now you've personalized it and used the word your as opposed to me and you've added another benefit of why someone should click on that link.

Doberman Dan: Exactly. You know I got in a rut for the longest time with this particular business and emails where every single email either started out with dear first name, hi first name, you know hey first name, something like that. I mean literally for probably two years that was just a habit of mine because that's like when I'm writing a personal email to somebody that's how I usually start it, but I just wanted to try something different here. I can't say whether or not that contributed to how this worked or not, I just wanted to try something different because I got to thinking about that and I thought huh, you know maybe these guys are just getting accustomed to seeing that and maybe something a little different will change it up.

Markus Allen: Which leads perfectly into my next set of news and again in the companion notes there is a file about the sample emails subject lines that you can click and these what I've done is since 1997 I've collected and have stalked for lack of a better word all those people on various marketing forums who bragged about how great their subject lines are and bragged including their template their formula and their subject lines and I've wrote those down and I've tested almost all of them myself and I


got rid of what appeared to be the losers, kept the winners and right there I mean this is absolute gold if you take a look at the sample, email subject lines below again below this recording in the companion notes, you'll see.

With that said, Dan, do you have a favorite like a go to subject line? I'm going to put you on the spot because we haven't talked about this. Do you have a favorite go to subject line that works almost every time you do it?

Doberman Dan: Wow.

Markus Allen: If you don't, I can start off with a couple that worked for me.

Doberman Dan: I can actually look through my AWeber account and find some that worked really well but you know one that worked really well was Holy Crap.

Markus Allen: Yep. Yep and that's the second one on my list if you see it's right there. Now the problem with holy crap is you're going to get complaints.

Doberman Dan: Yeah.

Markus Allen: If you're politically correct, I'm sorry to hear that you are one way to get around that is you can say holy crabby patties kind of variations of holy crap and it works. It doesn't work as well but you're right holy crap and I actually got that holy crap one from a forum, Godlike Productions forums which is the biggest message board, most active message board forum I have ever seen in my life. I'm a message board marketing junkie.

I noticed that anytime someone started off their subject line with holy crap. You can see how many replies and how many views it would get. I mean it was off the charts every time. That's another great way by the way to test an email subject line is to go to a forum and test it on a forum and they'll give you the stats. It will tell you how many people viewed that particular topic. It's a fantastic way to test something out.

Doberman Dan: That's a good idea.

Markus Allen: Oh yeah.

Doberman Dan: In the bodybuilding business, here's a recent one that I tested that actually had a much higher click through rate than normal. All it said was, "Yo first name it's Rick." Rick is the figurehead of a supplement business


and the reason I tested that was because I got a personal email with that headline from one of my friends and I thought, of course I knew him I knew who it was so I opened it but I thought, "Huh I wonder if that might work as an email to my list."

Markus Allen: I'm writing that down to add to my subject line swipe file. Yo name, right?

Doberman Dan: Mm-‐hmm. Then your name, yo first name it's Dan.

Markus Allen: Oh, yo first name, it's Dan. That's interesting. Okay.

Doberman Dan: You want one that had now that I'm looking through my list of recent emails over the past you want to know one that had the lowest click through rate out of all of them and it may be perhaps the lowest click through rate I've had in years.

Markus Allen: Sure.

Doberman Dan: Hold on a second. I have to open it up because I'm only getting part of it on this screen. I did not write this. This was part of a launch and I was an affiliate helping a friend launch product and I used his supplied copy and the subject line is fast acting bonus is expiring and in parenthesis open now. It has gotten the lowest click through rate of any message sent perhaps over the past two years.

Markus Allen: Wow. Can you give us an idea of what that rate was?

Doberman Dan: Point five percent.

Markus Allen: Wow so one in two hundred opened it?

Doberman Dan: [inaudible 00:46:30].

Markus Allen: Was that click through rate or open rate?

Doberman Dan: That was click through rate.

Markus Allen: Oh, okay.

Doberman Dan: Amazingly open rates were eight point one which isn't bad.

Markus Allen: Yeah, it could have been the inside of the copy. The message that just turned someone off. I know there's words that leads right into the next


topic as a matter of fact which are power words and there are words that are just magical like the word breakthrough. I don't know if I told you this day but when Google Ad Words was affordable and they were friendly and they let you test as many creative ads as you wanted as a split test I tested a hundred and thirty-‐one ads in one campaign.

Doberman Dan: Wow.

Markus Allen: One hundred and thirty-‐one ads and the difference the one that got me twice exactly twice the click through rate but just one word difference was by adding the word breakthrough to my ad, so that's on my power list of about fourteen or so words. Again the power list will be below but if you're just listening to this it's words like advantage and fast, gain, guaranteed, help, truth, this or these, how to lose, trust, tips, solve, techniques revealed and methods. It interesting when you use words like that it can really help it's certainly worth testing.

There are also words that really turn people off like holy crap might turn someone off you don't know until you test it out. It reminds me of that Everyone Loves Raymond episode when I used to watch TV. It was probably one of my favorite episodes. Did you ever watch that show?

Doberman Dan: I was never a big fan of that show. I mean I've seen it a handful of time, but I never watched it much.

Markus Allen: There's was an episode of where Ray's brother who plays a loser and everything always works out for Ray, he gets the money, he gets the good-‐looking wife and his big blubbering brother Robert can't get chicks and can't get a job and all of that kind of stuff. Well he finally meets the girl of his dreams and she's perfect. She's hot. She's nice. She's sexy. All of those things except for one thing, when they were at the dinner table, Ray while Robert was doing dishes so it was this woman and Ray at the dinner table, Ray I think left and then snuck back in and he saw her eat a fly, so it's kind of like there are certain words in copy writing that no matter what you say there's certain things that you can say that just instantly turn people off. That might have been the reason why it was a pretty decent open rate but a horrible click through rate.

Doberman Dan: Right. You know one thing I used to get a really big boost in open rates and even click through rates by including the person's first name in the subject line and that hasn't had the same effect now for the past couple of years. Maybe it was ...

Markus Allen: I think that's been overused. I think that's why.


Doberman Dan: Yeah. It's just been totally abused by everybody and I noticed a lot of people who are savvy, who are marketing savvy I really don't get this very much at all with the bodybuilding list but with my dobermandan.com list a lot of those people are marketing savvy so when they opt in they don't use their first name or they'll use their first name and put like BD by it or Doberman Dan or they'll use Doberman Dan as the first name because they want to see if I'm spamming them or sending or selling the email list to other people. They want to track what messages are coming from em so obviously that loses its effect if I try to do something with the first name in the subject line.

Markus Allen: Mm-‐hmm. Yeah, I've gone way away from using first names in any of my messages for that very reason.

Doberman Dan: Mm-‐hmm.

Markus Allen: Let's talk more about long versus short because that's really the discussion that we're having here. Basically to make a long story short this is not like copy writing on a landing page or in a direct mail piece. There's always that as long copy is worth it, is short copy worth it when it comes to email especially nowadays I think we both unanimously agree that short wins every time.

Doberman Dan: I have tested that time and time again. You know even going back to '05, '06, I've tested this time and time again, and back like you said prior to '07, longer was winning in fact just putting the whole damn sales letter in the email always outperformed but since '07 it's gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and blinder wins. I mean just totally eclipses. If I write a four or five hundred word email and test it against even a five word email, that uses curiosity the shorter email is winning not just in click through but in sales. I mean who knows that could change some time down the road but right now that's what's working best for me.

Markus Allen: Right. Let's talk about subject lines again. How do you come up with your subject lines? Is it just something you don't even think about? You just whip it out. Do you have any formulas? Do you have, for example when it comes to writing blog posts we have a formula which of course you know Dan which is the three word keyword phrase to the left and you go space hyphen space and you then you have benefits to the right. Do you have any type of formulas for your subject lines that you use or again do you just whip something out of your mind?

Doberman Dan: Yeah, I probably should have formulas but I don't. I come up with something somehow or another throughout the day or something pops


into my mind or something that happens to me or to my dogs or a current event or something happens in the gym or whatever usually sparks an idea and if it doesn't I can't afford to wait for the muse to arrive so to speak. I'd grab that muse and put a freaking gun to her head and make her cough up something and I do that by looking through my subject line swipe file which I'm doing the same thing you do I keep a swipe file of any email subject lines that I think are particularly enticing. I also I'm own so many direct mail list sometimes I'll look through my stacks of direct mail with headlines or sub-‐heads or even envelop teaser copy and get ideas that way.

Markus Allen: You know I have two really cool tricks to find the best headlines that could double as subject lines right from an Internet connection in your favorite browser. As everyone opens up their maybe Google as their browser and you type in, we did this before Dan what is the name of a magazine that's in the muscle niche that's popular?

Doberman Dan: Muscular Development is a big one.

Markus Allen: If I type into Google search Muscular Development, man I have to spell development. I think it's O-‐P-‐M-‐E-‐N-‐T and then you type in cover, like a cover of a magazine, Muscular Development cover and then you click on images you'll see every Muscular Development cover in a glance.

Doberman Dan: That should give you enough email subject ideas to keep you busy for the next ten years or so.

Markus Allen: Right, I mean everything from the future on bodybuilding, train hard, grow fast and this is kind of like the thing everyone learns the first week of copy writing class. You want to go to the National, what is it, National Inquirer, all the what do they call those rags?

Doberman Dan: Yeah, the a ... That's what I call them rags. I don't remember [crosstalk 00:55:42].

Markus Allen: Tabloids. Tabloids.

Doberman Dan: Yeah. Tabloid.

Markus Allen: You want to go with [tabloids 00:55:46] because they typically hire really good copywriters to write their teases. Well you're going to get the same things when it comes to niche publications like these muscle mags, Muscular Development, I'm sure there's probably dozens of other titles


and in a glance you're going to be able to see all the headlines right on the cover of the magazine.

The second place I go to which I've talked about just five minutes ago is Godlike Productions which is at godlikeproductions.com and again I'll post a link in the companion notes and what I'll do is I'll actually go to their search function which is at the top and I'll type in the niche I'm going after, again I'll type in muscles and let's see what comes up. Studying the human muscles right now, Pentagon re-‐growing shoulders muscles, Spring is here, blah, blah, blah, how do muscles make [inaudible 00:56:37].

Now these are regular people putting in topics into Godlike productions. These are not professional copywriters writing it it's average Joe's who are putting this in. You're not going to get very emotional, very benefit laden, subject lines here but what this does is it does tell you as you see there's replies, views, rating, posted, and updated. I'll take a look at the views count and typically what I try to find is something that has zero replies and at least one hundred views.

I'm look right now to see if any of that fit the bill.

Doberman Dan: How does the Pentagon re-‐growing soldiers muscles do because that could be turned into something pretty cool?

Markus Allen: I did see that. That one only got thirty-‐three views.

Doberman Dan: Oh, okay.

Markus Allen: Zero replies. The reason you want to go zero replies is you want ... See this is how works with message boards. The topic is the tease. The preview of what's to come when you click on it and then you can read more about it. Just like a headline. Just like a subject line. The reason you don't want any more than zero replies is because as soon as someone replies to the message then that message goes right back to the front page of Godlike Productions and it's for everyone to see and that skews the results.

We want to see zero replies and at least a hundred views and sure enough when I scroll down and I did not do this before we have one that has zero replies and a hundred and eighty-‐nine views. That's a lot. You get close to two hundred views that means someone is very interested in clicking in what that has to say and that one particular one Structures of Skeletal Muscle Fibers Found in Martian Meteorite NWA998, now this is a


conspiracy site so obviously anything bent towards a conspiracy is going to get clicked on.

The bottom line is you can do this on any forum. If you've got a forum that's in the marketing business, we've got the Warrior forum which is one of the popular forums. You can literally do the search function and see what the views are and get a huge short cut advantage over your competition and see what words is getting people to click on that message. Not necessarily to reply but to click. Let me see if I find any others that have high counts.

Doberman Dan: You know I just did your Google images magazine covers technique and found not only a way cool subject line but actually the body copy to my email. I searched for cosmopolitan covers so it says be a sex genius. These brilliantly naughty bed tricks will double his pleasure dot, dot and yours. If you're in the dating market, be a sex genius is your subject line and you've got your body copy right there too.

Markus Allen: Yeah, that's like probably one of the best tips in this whole course that you're going to get is to do that because you're literally borrowing from people who are getting paid the big bucks to write for these publications, to get them to open that cover, that's what it's all about. Open the cover and that's what it's all about with email is to open the message.

Doberman Dan: See creativity is vastly [crosstalk 01:00:05] overrated. If you want to be creative find some other outlet for that. If you want to make money, your creativity is overrated. Go do this technique on Google images and crank out about twenty, twenty-‐five emails to send out every other day and make a ton of money. You don't need to be creative. This stuff is already done for you just adapt it.

Markus Allen: Perfect timing. We just eclipsed the one hour mark. That's typically when I tend to wrap things up because we have all these ideas melding and marinating through our mind to get things going. You want to get things going. When it comes to email marketing every single moment that you're not doing email marketing I guarantee you're missing out on a lot of visitors coming to your website, you're missing out on getting subscribers to your website.

Of course when they subscribe you get to email to them as often as you like. One of the things that you're going to pick up with this course is how often to send out emails. You're going to find out when, what date you should send out emails, day of the week, even the time to send out emails which is really cool with AWeber that's one of my favorite extras


with AWeber is they now have a function that gives you a window of opportunity to mail out. There's definitely a better time of the day to email and we're going to show you how to do that.

We're also going to talk about free versus the pitch. I know that's in a lot of people's mind especially new email marketers how often should I pitch something in my emails? What's the combination of free versus pitch that I should do? We're going to go over that also and much, much more, everything from frequency to even more subject line formulas, more power words, more case studies showing what's getting the best open rates and what's getting the best click through rates. With that said, I would like to thank you, Dan. Thanks for coming on.

Doberman Dan: Thank you Mark. I enjoyed it.

Markus Allen: We'll talk to you guys soon. Again, you want to make sure to sign up for the email alerts, if you click on the email alerts button that will open up so you can put your email in there and put your first name in there. Dan is writing those emails so if you want to see how Dan is going to magically get you to go to the next section of the course you can follow him and emulate what he's doing and I'm sure he wouldn't mind if you steal those emails too. With that said, stay tuned and we'll talk to you soon.

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