Matt Treacey Joins Us On The Join Up Dots Podcast
To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:
Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes
Click Here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed)
Introducing Matt Treacey
Matt Treacey joins us on the Join Up Dots podcast today as the go to email marketing consultant for some of the world’s top business authors.
In todays podcast, we are going to discuss the fascinating world of email marketing, where we delve into the essential aspects of nurturing and developing new subscribers.
We will explore effective strategies and provide valuable insights to help you make the most out of your email marketing efforts.
Additionally, we’ll uncover the common mistakes that beginners tend to make in this field.
So, fasten your seatbelts and get ready for an exhilarating journey through the realm of email marketing!”
As our guest says “Combining a decade in email marketing automation with a background in ecology, I know what it takes to build systems designed for growth.
My book Natural Orders draws on this, outlining a framework that currently generates millions of dollars in email revenue for dozens of small online businesses across the US and Oceania.
So what was it about email marketing that made him want to build his future into the worlds inboxes?
And now with AI taking over the world, does this mean that the old methods of connecting with customers are going to go the way of the do do?
Well lets find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Mr Matt Treacey
Show Highlights
During the show we discussed such weighty subjects with Matt such as:
We discussed how AI is going to be a gamechanger in the business world but should never replace the true human touch.
Matt shares the steps to segmentation of email marketing and why its so important to plan the route of the customer journey
Matt creates a complete blueprint for a new email business from start to finish for all new business owners.
We discuss how Matt got into email marketing and the excitement that he still feels for its potential everyday.
How To Connect With Matt Treacey
Return To The Top Of Matt Treacey
Full Transcription Of Matt Treacey Interview
Intro [0:00]
Life shouldn’t be hard life should be a fun filled adventure every day. So now start joining up dots, tap into your talents, your skills, your God given gifts and tell your boss, you don’t deserve me. I’m out of here. It’s time for you to smash that alarm clock. And start getting the dream business and wife you will, of course, are dreaming of. Let’s join your host, David route from the back of his garden in the UK, or wherever he might be today with another JAM PACKED episode of the number one hit podcast. Join Up Dots.
David Ralph [0:38]
Yeah, good morning to you. Good morning to you. Good morning to you now for your journey. over the decade plus of episodes, we’ve had many, many conversations where you kind of start off thinking, Okay, how do the dots join up? And then by the end of it, you can think okay, yeah, there’s the path. And we’re going to have the one of those conversations today because today’s guest is the go to email marketing consultant for some of the world’s top business offers. We’re going to discuss the fascinating world of email marketing, I find it fascinating anyway, and hopefully you will too, where we delve into the essential aspects of nurturing and developing new subscribers, and we’ll explore effective strategies and provide valuable insights to help you make the most out of your email marketing efforts. Additionally, we’re uncover common mistakes that beginners tend to make in this field. So fasten your seat belts and get ready for an exhilarating journey through the realm of email marketing. Now, as our guest says, combining a decade in email marketing automation, with a background in ecology, I know what it takes to build systems designed for growth. And his new book natural orders draws on this outlining a framework, but currently generates millions of dollars in email revenue, but dozens of small online businesses across the US and Oceania. So what was it about email marketing that made him want to build his future into the world’s inboxes? And the big question at the moment is, with AI taking over the world, does it mean that the old methods of connecting with customers are gonna go the way of the dodo? Well, let’s find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Mr. Matt Treacey.
Thank you, that was a fantastic intro. I feel very welcome.
Well, it’s all about you. It’s all about you, you, you had some dots back join up. So I’m going to start off with that big question. Because every time I go into my inbox, every time I go on to Google, at the moments about AI, everything is AI. And I honestly haven’t seen anything move at such a pace. Since I’ve been online, it’s really sort of like dominating. So do you think that old methods of connecting with customers are going to still be valid? Do you think email marketing is still going to be valid? Or are we just going to sit back and let the AI robots do you think?
Matt Treacey [3:03]
That’s a really good question. I don’t often get a chance to talk about this topic.
David Ralph [3:07]
that’s what I started with. That’s why I started with it. Yeah.
Matt Treacey [3:10]
Fantastic. No, I think really, who knows what’s going to happen? I think we’re exactly like what you said, we’re at a really exciting point. I think it’s one of these things. It’s just, you can’t possibly know it, you can’t know what the second order consequences are gonna be. What’s that famous quote, where it was? Great science fiction doesn’t predict the automobile. It predicts the traffic jam, right? So many of these second order effects of technologies like AI, and even, I mean, look at what the internet has to offer us. I’ve heard some people say that AI is gonna be more impactful on society than the internet. That may be true, you know. So I think it’s impossible to have any really strong position about what’s going to happen, which is maybe not the answer that you want to hear. In the short term, though, I think it’s going to force people to skill up in a lot of ways. So if you’re a mediocre copywriter before, you’re going to have to either become a much better copywriter, or move into a position where you’re not just doing copy, you’re doing strategy, you have to stay above the API’s I’ve heard it said before.
David Ralph [4:24]
Now I see AI as hugely exciting in many ways, but I also see it tapping into my, my lazy side, where I look at it and think, oh, that’s brilliant. I can just link back to that and put that to that. And I don’t actually have to do that anymore. with email marketing. Is it all about real human connection? Because I get so many emails that come through to me I don’t even read I just mean oh, that’s gonna be boring. You know, I rarely read emails now because of that feeling of kind of just jadedness. So how do we get back to that? citement of going, oh, there’s an email from Join Up Dots, I’m going to read this.
Matt Treacey [5:05]
Yeah, I think that really hits the nail on the head, because it’s, that’s what marketing is about. At the end of the day, it’s about really understanding your audience, and then sending things to that audience that are super valuable that they find valuable. If you’re using chat GPT to generate all your subject lines and your copy, and everybody else is doing that, and you’ve got competitors in the market, then it’s going to be very hard to differentiate, right, there’s not going to be any way to cut through, I think the human element for now, is still quite important. Who knows what’s gonna happen in five or 10 years, but I think the alpha that we have, as marketers still is our breadth, reading and knowledge about different areas and calling that into a unique understanding of our market, testing different things about what that market might respond to. I think that’s where the novelty factor comes from, which is very important.
David Ralph [6:01]
Now, I honestly want you to get me excited on email marketing, because I’ve kind of, I’ve had so many conversations with people over the last few years. And the overriding thing is, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work anymore. There’s too much noise out there. So what for somebody out there, I imagine there’s a listener who’s just starting to get their idea of their first business, and they’re starting to build their list. What’s the first thing that they can do that cane really get their excitement going so that they can see results?
Matt Treacey [6:37]
I’m glad you clarified who I’m speaking to on this, because it can be a tall order to get the average job excited about email marketing, but I personally find it exciting, mainly for the reason that, you know, there, there’s are a lot of misconceptions around email marketing. I mean, starting from starting from the very top, right, I mean, there’s there’s cold email, which is one thing, that’s like sending a message to someone, you know, out of the blue, trying to get their attention to something that’s not what I deal with at all. The other side of it is something that’s been popularly recently referred to as inbound marketing, which is where you’re organically growing a list of people who are interested in the content that you’re sending out, I’m interested in hearing more about what you’re talking about online, and then building up a list over time, and then creating kind of a subscriber journey for that list. So creating a narrative for those people creating a world that they can enter that’s really interesting, and gives them content that they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. So I think take it from that perspective, that can be a really powerful way to build a business online that you actually own. That’s off a social media platform, you know, that it averts what they sometimes called Platform risk. So I think from that angle, email can be really exciting for a business owner.
David Ralph [7:57]
Now, I am going to talk to you from past experience, because that’s all I’ve got, really, but I know that early days with email marketing, and I don’t do a lot of it, I have to be honest, I do a lot of sort of webinars and different routes. But um, I found that I was creating a bucket of email subscribers, but I hadn’t defined what it was going to lead to. And then further down the line, I would create a product. And then I’d think I don’t know which one of these people it should be for. So that the segmentation and the campaigns were so far down the route of my email marketing, it was just create a lead magnet, get loads of emails in there. I’ve been thinking, What the hell do I use it before? Is that possible to get that organised right at the front end? Or do we all have to go through that journey of having all these emails and then thinking, actually, I might clear these all up and start again, what do you think?
Matt Treacey [8:59]
Absolutely. And that’s the point people most often find themselves stuck at. I mean, really, that’s the impetus behind me writing my my book that you mentioned earlier on, is people think to themselves, well, I know there’s all of these cool things I can do with email segmentation needs, spoke about personalization. automating things like sending offers to all these different groups of people wake up in the morning, have a really sales, all these great things to hear about email marketing, but they don’t know how to get there. They’re in that position exactly what you spoke about. They’ve got all these lead magnets, like if these people come into this, and they don’t know where to go next. So yeah, that’s exactly what I talked about in the book. And you know, I really break it down to three stages. I take the ecosystem angle a little bit, we can get into why later. Basically, I think you’ve got to organically grow this thing over time. You can’t sit down and pencil out this masterpiece automation from scratch. You have to have really strong foundations so that you have Have strong engagement deliverability and then build up from there. So what does this look like in practice, it means making sure that everyone on your list in the beginning is being sent are being sent emails, where they’re likely to open them. So you make sure that you send value to people all the time, where See you can do is send people offers for products. As soon as they’ve joined your list. As soon as they’ve joined your list, the best thing you can do is send them something really valuable. So it establishes like a hook so that they are more likely to open your emails in the future. Once you do that, and you send multiple emails, that’s when you can start thinking about segmentation. And you can use things at some of these email marketing services call either tags or custom fields, that might be several different names for it. And then based on the interactions with your emails that you’ve been sending, and that they’re opening crucially, you can then determine those segments are going to be
David Ralph [10:56]
I have had many, many lists, and I’ve deleted literally all those lists at times, because I just didn’t know what to do with them, you know. And now I’m starting a new business, I can see it totally my head, I can see every element that needs to be done. It’s just like, there’s a, there’s a blueprint that I’ve developed over years of failure, failure failure, but I don’t want people to fall out of their mat. And as I’ve got you on the show, you don’t want people to fail either. So let’s give them that blueprint that I can scribble down on a bit of paper. So we’re going to create a business, okay, we’re going to create a business straight off the top, and we’re going to have a business that helps ingrown toenails. Okay, I don’t know why I just thought about that. But people are hobbling around. They can’t get it sorted. We’ve got a solution and Benepe free of pain. And we’ve all businesses as the closest to the pain point, the easier the sale. Okay. So that’s that’s our framework. That’s our framework. So we’re going to call it I don’t know, ingrown toenail.com. I’m not that creative. That’s as good as good domain.
Matt Treacey [12:07]
Good start. Yeah,
David Ralph [12:08]
I’m on there already. And it’s $12,000. I’m going to look for something.
Matt Treacey [12:13]
No, no, we’ll go with it. We’re committed to this.
David Ralph [12:17]
We want to this. So what would be do you think the first thing to do? Would it be a lead magnet that pops up every time somebody comes to the website? Or you know, because that’s one of those things that it’s kind of annoying, isn’t it that every time you go on a different page that pop up turns up and the pop up? Turns up?
Matt Treacey [12:37]
Yeah. Okay. So that is a good place to start in terms of email marketing, but you know, to answer that question, probably actually have to think about what the traffic sourcing is. So let’s assume for a moment that we’ve just spent all this money on the domain at this domain has come with a bunch of backlinks, right. And we can do some SEO traffic. So say, the top page on that site 12 months after writing a whole bunch of content, ingrown toenails is how to remove ingrown toenail and you get 10,000 uniques a month, let’s just say. Hey there, David. Yeah, I
David Ralph [13:14]
was down there. I was jotting it down. I was I was making notes.
Matt Treacey [13:18]
listening intently. I thought I’d bored you to tears. Man, you asked me to make email marketing. Interesting. I’m trying my darndest. But no say so you get this traffic and it’s coming to the site. And it’s yeah, 10,000 uniques a month and the term is how to remove ingrown toenail. So what the way I would look at that as someone who does email marketing is okay, so that person falls into one of five different stages of awareness. So if they knew that there was something wrong with them, but they didn’t know if it was an ingrown toenail, you might say their problem were like, they know they have a problem, but they don’t know what’s causing the problem. This person has just typed into Google how to remove ingrown toenail. They’re a little bit further along, they’re at what you might call solution aware. So the second of these five stages, so they know that they have a specific problem. So that’s where you want to intercept them, you want to enter the conversation going on in the prospects mind. So what you need to do on that page is promise. Transition from solution aware from where this person is they say how to how to remove ingrown toenail to product aware. So this is where you’re going to get them on your list because you’re going to promise them the solution to removing their ingrown toenail in exchange for I don’t know, this is a really bad example and not one that you’d ever want to use. I advise against this all the time, but just for the sake of our budding business experiment here, let’s say a PDF guide that’s 10 different ways to remove an ingrown toenail. So I’m gonna jump
David Ralph [14:54]
into that I’m gonna jump into that so why is that? Why is that bad because I see by all the time a checklist, a PDF checklist that goes out, so why would that be a bad thing?
Matt Treacey [15:07]
Because there, it’s a low bar. And it’s not really that valuable. And you see it so much it’s done to death. You know, it’d be much more helpful in a situation like this now that I’ve had a little bit more time to think about it, is if your article that ranked number one in Google for how to remove toenail is a unique How To Guide. How to actually go about doing this. We use a bit of a gross example here, but but we’ll roll with I could have
David Ralph [15:35]
gone worse. I could have gone worse. I promise you. You’re grateful. You’re grateful, but my mind hadn’t quite kicked in.
Matt Treacey [15:44]
Okay, okay, good. But yeah, it looks like it says a 10 Step 15 Step process. The more helpful thing that you could do in exchange for an email address would be a planning document for how to how to go about removing this, this turnout or you know, something that actually helps them implement the advice from the article in a way that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise with just the article writes. So suddenly, it goes above and beyond what they’ve just read, to help them implement.
David Ralph [16:20]
It does make sense, but I know a lot of people will be out there. And I had the same thought going through my head as well going. Well, if I give them the solution. What are they going to buy? I’ve already given away the crown jewels.
Matt Treacey [16:34]
Yeah, but we’re selling toenail clippers. And I’m assuming, I mean, what do you what do you sell for ingrown toenails? I’m assuming our product on the back end is toenail clippers, right? But
David Ralph [16:45]
I was gonna send the young Thai lady round who could clip it.
Matt Treacey [16:51]
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So low volume, high ticket. That’s, that’s good.
David Ralph [17:00]
What would I like in my life, and that’s where I’m heading.
Matt Treacey [17:04]
Good, good. Okay. So now, let’s say that the opt in is a cardboard cutout of toenail clippers you can construct at home, all you have to do is print them out. And they’ll, they’ll help you ease your pain momentarily. And then once they’re on the list, we’re going to hit them with crucially, this is goes back to what I was saying before, look ourselves them straightaway, we’re going to, we’re going to intercept this solution aware stage, we’re going to give them foot care tips for how to avoid getting an ingrown toenail in the future, we’re going to send up know 10 or 15 emails at that those people who engage with that and show interest and a really devoted for fanatics. We’ve got an interesting market here, that’s where we’re going to hit them with the Thai lady. service offer.
David Ralph [17:56]
So winner, it’s a winner. I can I can already see. And it works on multiple levels as well, which is great. Because what we’re saying here is we’re reverse engineering, we’re thinking about our product, first of all that we want to sell. And then we’re going one step back and thinking about all the benefits, and then linking it to the problem. And so somebody comes along, and I think in our class, my foot hurts, my foot hurt, and they might Google, why does my foot hurt, and then we come up with your butt hurts, because you’ve probably got an ingrown toenail. And that’s really difficult to solve. But this is the things to look out for, first of all, so we’re sort of like building their awareness of Yeah, Christ is this is our I think this is the problem. And then we sort of just ease through the benefits until we get to a point where we go and look tangis Wally around she, you know, you can get this solved in about three days, all you need is Best Buy it now. So we have to backtrack, I would think and I don’t think people do that. They don’t think about the product, the benefits into the solution into the awareness all the way back. So it’s reverse engineering good for this.
Matt Treacey [19:11]
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you have to otherwise, what happens is, your list will collapse because people think, Okay, well, I’ve got them on my email list. And this module offers and that’s where people get into trouble. You know, it’s, I call it the top down cascade. It’s just like an ecosystem collapsing, your engagement is terrible. That leads to unsubscribes this starts eating itself or a boss, you know, and before you know it, your email marketing isn’t working. And you’ve got another person say email is dead. Email doesn’t work.
David Ralph [19:43]
It’s interesting, though, isn’t it? Because you know, we were created this game changing business in about six and a half minutes. And it makes perfect sense. absolute perfect sense. But does it only make perfect sense because you and me are in this? You know what? would with a new person that comes along, be able to get to this this depth? Or do they always need to reach out to somebody who has been there before? Do they need to reach out to Matt Tracy?
Matt Treacey [20:14]
So I think that everything we’ve spoken about right now is your basic level. This is where people, for me, at least typically come to me and they’d say, they may not have the stages of awareness sketched out, but they’ve at least got this, this chugging along this anything’s out to people. But there’s a lot more that you can do this, this stage is beyond that. I’m not sure if we’re gonna keep going with this. Yeah,
David Ralph [20:39]
I’m fascinated, I am fascinated. And this, this is gonna, it’s got legs. It hasn’t got a foot. Yeah, it’s got legs, this business.
Matt Treacey [20:48]
Okay, so I think the first thing we do is, we would expand our content strategy, so that we’re hitting those people who are problem where they’ll just bring more traffic into the system. So those people who don’t know that they have an ingrown toenail, that they have a source, bring them in somehow, not sure what keywords we target exactly, but bring them in, build all this stuff that way, and then nurture people from an even earlier point. So introduce them to the solution, and then introduce them to the product. For those people who have come in already. And to have already bought a product or looking to buy a product, what I’ll do then, is we’re going to have several products on the site, it’s not just going to be this high end service, there’s going to be some intermediate products, I can’t tell you exactly what those are. But we’re going to track what people do when they go on to the site, and what emails or interact with as we expose them to these different offers. And then we’re going to use tags or custom fields, like I mentioned before, to send people down different offers based on what they’ve expressed interest in, right.
David Ralph [21:57]
So how did they do this? How do they express interest? If they’re looking at an email? How do we get this these this data?
Matt Treacey [22:06]
Yeah, that’s a good question. So it depends how you want to define it, you might say I drop you into a sequence that’s about that is a prelude to one of our products, I might send you five emails, and if you’ve interacted with three or five of those emails, I might say, Okay, this person’s interested in their sales qualified, right? And then that would trigger the actual new product sequence. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna show you hopefully purchase, we might use clicks, I might say, Okay, well, only if this person’s clicked the last three emails we send about this topic, then that will trigger this next thing. It might be something else entirely, it’s up to you to decide what the important points in your customer journey are going to be. In order to define that.
David Ralph [22:53]
So the interesting thing about this is what you’re talking about, you’re talking about the ecology of, of email marketing. And your background, interestingly enough, was ecology. And I have to be honest, I kind of vaguely knew what it was in the back of my head. But I had to look it up. And it was the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms, organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. So basically, how do things interlink with each other? So when you had this background in ecology, in the sort of science and the nature world, was it a instant leap into email marketing? Did you think, oh, yeah, I know all this, or was it something that just sort of took you by surprise, but you kind of knew how things were supposed to connect and speak to each other?
Matt Treacey [23:43]
Yeah, so a perfect definition. That’s exactly what it is. So I studied that. And I worked briefly in that field. When I was in Australia, and then I went over to the states, and I had an opportunity there to get into marketing. And I grabbed it with both hands, because a really good thing from someone who taught me quite a lot. But yeah, I did see some of the more superficial similarities at first. People have said before, that there’s some of these things between marketing and ecosystems is same, right? From niches in the forest. And you have niches as in competitive strategies between businesses, right? There’s other things like the total addressable market being similar to the carrying capacity of an ecosystem. There’s all these different types of market participants, like you have different participants in an ecosystem. So there’s some of these superficial things when I got into marketing, and I thought, Okay, that’s interesting. But honestly, for me, it was when I started working email, I was like, wow, this is just like this is just like managing a small little ecosystem and so natural resource management. And that was, that was because of a couple of the common mistakes that I’d see people make. So To be honest, some of the mistakes that I made myself when I first was starting out. So I mentioned earlier, this one about what I call the top down cascade, like the ecosystem collapsing in on itself. That was one of those classic mistakes, right? It’s this negative feedback loop of poor engagement, that just almost inevitably leads to poor retention in the spirals into itself collapses. Same thing happens in an ecosystem when fundamentals collapse. The other one was, I think, also alluded to this one before was this idea of building this masterpiece from scratch, you know, I mean, we’ve just rift on this very exciting business idea. But I’m
David Ralph [25:39]
not as positive on it as me, man, I feel a bit. There’s an element of sight of sarcasm and cynicism, cynicism.
Matt Treacey [25:47]
I will we bought this $12,000 domain, so I feel committed now of it. But we jumped the gun on it. But no, it’s everything that we spoke about there was was pretty basic stuff like good best practice. But the danger that you can get into with email marketing is when you start talking about all of these advanced offers and stuff that don’t exist yet, like the way I spoke about it before in this business, that we may start together was that you have to have these tags. And these interactions naturally evolve over time, you can’t guess that they’re there, because it’s just never going to work. There’s this thing called goals for so complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works, right. So you need these simple building blocks. So, you know, like I said, these, some of the similarities are there. But it was these things specifically like the feedback loop, the simple building blocks, and then like the big outsized effects of what can go wrong, when you don’t do those things correctly. Those are actually features of what you’d call a complex adaptive system, which is what an ecosystem is, it’s the best example that we know of, of a complex adaptive system. There’s all sorts of types. And look, email marketing is definitely not complexity, science, or anything close to it. But there is this like, tangled spiderweb of interrelationships that can very easily get out of hand. And if you don’t do things correctly, you can get into trouble with it. So I found when I went back to some of the management practices, and some of the things I’ve learned about in ecology, that really was a big, a big factor for me being able to get success, so I’ve had people,
David Ralph [27:37]
so do people, you know, because the classic one for years was MailChimp, and they allow 1000 sort of subscribers for free, and then they sort of move on to a paid. And I know in the early days about people haven’t got money in there. That’s why they’re trying to build a business to sort of improve their situation. So is there sort of, is it best to go free? Or do we say no, you know, for the bells and whistles to make it so much easier actually get into a paid service straightaway, straight early doors.
Matt Treacey [28:11]
Yeah, I understand where you’re coming from. But there’s, there are a lot of other free services other than MailChimp, you know, and if you’re looking for an email marketing service, the two things are really important. A good visual automation builder that allows you to do all the cool stuff. If they’ve got that, then that’ll last you forever. And what that’s predicated on, probably, more importantly, is the ability to segment via a lot of different discrete conditions for your contacts. So being able to determine whether some an email gets triggered by clicks or opens or a tag being added, or a custom field changing or myriad other factors, the more the better. Those are two things I look at and then the the automation builder will be based off its power will be based off how many of those factors you can actually use.
David Ralph [29:09]
MailChimp, I have to say to you, I hate and I wasn’t gonna say, yeah, no, I use MailerLite I find that’s quite good and quite easy to use and stuff. And it does have a visual aspect to it, which makes sense as you’re, as you’re connecting the triggers. And so for the listeners out there, one of the things that we’ve got to get clear to you is where the automation of email marketing isn’t hard. The hard bit is actually planning the route you’re taking making sure that you understand which part of the buying journey you’re actually speaking the right information at the right time. Now, we’ve we’ve all this as well, can we and I’ve just thought how about if we change the business to in-growing time nails that does that actually get you better map
Matt Treacey [30:01]
I beg your pardon? What if we were in growing
David Ralph [30:03]
tight? I’m still thinking of the Thai lady going round. What about in growing tiny nails? That’s good
Matt Treacey [30:08]
as time nails, it really mean ingrown toenails.
David Ralph [30:12]
Instead of toenails. We put the word Thai in it, and then we can branch off into sort of adult areas.
Matt Treacey [30:20]
Okay, yeah, I mean, it’s not, it’s not something that I did are typically foray into personally, you’re,
David Ralph [30:30]
you’ve stepped out of this business. I’m on my own now.
Matt Treacey [30:36]
Despite our big commitments,
David Ralph [30:37]
yeah, I feel like I’ve finally lost you on that one. So let’s get back to you as well, because I’m interested what what was it about email marketing that got you sort of excited? Because, um, you know, I find it exciting, because I love how things talk to each other. I love how the dots join up. It’s just something that I’m fascinated with. What was it about this about you? Oh, yeah. This, this might be a business idea for me?
Matt Treacey [31:03]
Oh, absolutely. I mean, look, I did quite a few different things for digital marketing. And also just getting started talking about a bit of SEO, before I did a bit of that. Social media around who does digital kind of dabbles a little bit, they call it being a T shaped. For me, I’ve really went deep into email. And the reasons for me going so deep in work, because I mean, in a word, or two words, platform risk, I mean, you can have your audience taken away from you, at a moment’s notice, you know, policy changes, algorithm updates, I’ve seen that happen before people just get robbed. They’ve built this massive audience on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube. And then things just get taken away from them, they’ve no recourse, and their business can collapse overnight. Whereas when you have an email list, you own your audience. But more importantly, you can gather and build data about that audience, and in a way that you can’t do on those other channels. So it’s more powerful, right? You can do all these things like automation, expanding the lifetime value of the customer, you can’t do that if it’s just on Instagram, for example. It’s something that takes time and requires a relationship. And that’s really as that last point has been what’s kept me in email for so long, especially working with authors. I mean, it’s, it’s a really powerful way to kind of develop a narrative and develop a conversation with a group of people over time that you can’t do with anything. So I think it’s really interesting.
David Ralph [32:35]
Does your partner find it interesting, when you sit at home and you go, I tell you what happened today? Does she just glaze over? Or is she is excited as you
Matt Treacey [32:48]
hangs off every word? loves it.
David Ralph [32:52]
I feel I feel deceit coming from you on that one. Because I went out for dinner with my family last night. And I actually said to him, you’re not interested in a thing about my life. There’s no point in me ever opening my mouth again, because you are not interested in anything that that happens. And but I kind of understand it as well. And a few times I go to say something and they say What were you gonna say ago now I’ve suddenly realised I’m talking to the wrong audience. which funnily enough, brings us to sort of email marketing again, knowing what the audience wants to hear. And I’m going to drill back into this because I think this is the biggest learning part of the whole thing of actually understanding the customer. So how do you find out who your customer is for offers, instead of him saying, Oh, it’s ladies from America at the age of 30? Yeah, very generic. How do you actually know what they actually are interested in?
Matt Treacey [33:55]
I mean, that’s, that’s a multi billion dollar question, right? I mean, it’s what marketing and advertising is all about a spectra now understand who this person is. I mean, you can only really come out to, you can only really come out with a thesis you’ve built up about a sub assumptions of who the person in the market is, and then testing against those assumptions. Yeah, you’ve just got to go build up a model and stress test it, and I think it gets stronger over time. There’s ways you can support that with things like surveys. Yeah, the interaction data, again, that you get with email can be really helpful. If you send a five email sequence that falls flat. That’s a good signal, right? You’re not I mean, going back to what’s interesting about this, I think that is what keeps me hooked on this because it’s like you have your models of the world and you you stress tests against an audience’s going to either tell you whether you’re right or wrong.
David Ralph [34:53]
Yeah, but only only when you’ve got a reasonable sized list. You know, I when I started Join Up Dots and it’s stupid Thinking back on it. I had a big build up, I thought I was going to hit big. And the first first day I had 46 listeners. And then the second day, I had 300 listeners. And then the next day, I had something like 48 listeners, and I thought, What, Where’s where’s the others? Why don’t they listen and men have suddenly fall? They might be on holiday, they might be sick. You know, it’s such a small percentage of people. So how do you know, when you’re getting going, if your emails aren’t being clicked, that they’re not the right emails? Because you’ve only got a few people actually receiving them now that you know, or maybe you just can’t, you just got to keep on putting it into the bucket until the numbers start meaning something to you.
Matt Treacey [35:43]
Yeah, I mean, when you’re early stage, you, you do have to persevere to a degree, I guess it’s the same with building any audience. And, you know, I mean, you need a lot of emails to be statistics, statistically significant. Reform experiments, you know, so that that’s a long way off, and most people are getting started. So yeah, that there is an element of just running with an assumption, seeing what works, seeing what seems to not work it there is a little bit unscientific at first, when you got small numbers, but you just go keep going.
David Ralph [36:15]
Now, what I want to do is before we sort of bring the show to an end is give the listeners five steps, that they can jump over to Google and find out more information so that they can sort of understand it more. So what would be the five things for somebody totally new mat that you think would be useful for them to get more information about in email marketing?
Matt Treacey [36:41]
So five areas like like a little curriculum, yes. Go and study.
David Ralph [36:45]
Yeah. So that they can they can get as excited about as you in Myanmar?
Matt Treacey [36:51]
Yeah, that’s a good question. Let me think. Okay, number one, direct response copywriting, if you can, become a wizard, that’s going to be a huge help for you. Number two, I may not get to five here, number two,
David Ralph [37:06]
you will do I will stay silent for three hours until you get it. I believe in you. I believe you can do five.
Matt Treacey [37:15]
Okay, okay. Number two would be maybe the technical aspects of things like deliverability. Getting good sender score some of that stuff that it’s just good to know, I mean, necessary to know, when it comes to email. Number three, and we’re getting a little bit more esoteric here. But I think it’s extremely helpful. Once you’ve mastered the direct response stuff. And you know a little bit about all of those basic marketing things that are used in startups, digital marketing, small online businesses, let’s group those all into category one. Number three would be narrative, right? Whether it’s something as broadly known as Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, or if you want to go a lot deeper than that, there’s there’s a lot of resources out there, I think, understanding that how to tell a good story. How to, yeah, how to build a narrative over time. I think in email marketing, that’s such an underrated ability. If you have that, that’s, that can be massive. What are we up to? Is that three? That’s right. Okay, for now, I’m just gonna double down on those three. If you do those three, you’ll be a master.
David Ralph [38:24]
Oh, come on, man. Come on, man. You could you could do the technical aspect of signing up for a, say MailerLite and learning that become really, really good at that. Right. So that that would be for Okay, yeah. Okay,
Matt Treacey [38:39]
for Yeah, find a tool and master the tool. I mean, but they will have different works. And there’s all different things you can learn about each one. But yeah, that should be straightforward. But again, it’s not about the tool. It’s about how you use it.
David Ralph [38:52]
Absolutely. I say that to my wife all the time. And the the the fifth one I would say is understand how your customer wants the emails, I do a lot of video email marketing. I actually create videos because I’m a an audio guy. It’s very good for people to be in see my A haggard face and go, Oh, that’s what he looks like and stuff. So I find I get a good response on actually embedding videos into emails. So I’m not actually writing, I send it out and it’s far more personable. So that would be my four and five, I would add to those but really understand the way that your listener or your email person wants to learn. And give it to them that way and maybe embed a video in there, somebody wants to watch that. Put a little bit of text on or maybe have a link to a deeper bit of information because people learn in different ways.
Matt Treacey [39:50]
Beautiful, I love it. We have our five
David Ralph [39:53]
There we go. See, I know you could do it, man. I knew you could do it. Thanks. Yeah, right. Okay, so what I want to do I just want to say At some words, and I’ve suddenly realised I haven’t played any of the speeches I normally do, I’ve got so engrossed in email marketing on this one. But this one’s important to me. And it’s important to everyone on the show. So here’s Steve Jobs. Of course,
Steve Jobs [40:12]
it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards, 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path. And that will make all the difference.
David Ralph [40:47]
So stepping away from email marketing and getting into Matt Tracy, do you think they make a difference? Did you think that those words are true?
Matt Treacey [40:57]
Or they’re absolutely true? Yeah, that’s true to the name of the podcast. Yeah, I agree with that.
David Ralph [41:02]
And what part of your life this is the big sort of follow up question that I hit with it is, is your big dot, where you look back on something and you think, oh, yeah, yeah, that’s when the dots started to really join up for me, because we all have these moments where we’re sort of walking around, we don’t really know what we should be doing. And then suddenly, one day might be a conversation, it might be a YouTube video, we watch it, it might be something you suddenly think, Ah, this is where I’m heading.
Matt Treacey [41:32]
That’s interesting. Yeah, I guess you can look at it from the sense that there is one big dot that’s like this inflection point that changes things, I, I tend to see it more as a Psych 1000, small things over time shape, the directions that you end up going in, right? It must just be that, like, it’s 1000 small decisions that you want to path towards 1000 and other small decisions in that general direction. You know what I mean? I couldn’t relate it down to one major
David Ralph [42:06]
point. Now, with all those little decisions. This is another question that I ponder all the time. Why are people frightened to do anything? Because you just make another decision, you fail, you make another decision. There’s nothing game changing. There’s nothing that can stop you. Why do you think man, why are people reluctant to sort of build their own future when you just keep on making decisions? Some of them work? Some of them don’t? What do you think?
Matt Treacey [42:40]
That’s a massive question. On the one hand, is our own biases, stuff like sunk cost fallacy? Maybe that explains why some of that
why we don’t just choose a new path all the time? Yeah, I don’t have a good answer for that, why people don’t do these things. I struggle with these things as much as anyone,
David Ralph [43:04]
I can’t get to the bottom of it either. Because, you know, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, I’ve had so many conversations with people that just opened the door to law, I didn’t really know what I was doing. But I tried loads and loads of beings. And then little by little, it made sense. And they knew sort of move forwards. And it’s the the absolute catalyst to everything in life, just start doing stuff, just start doing stuff, and some will work, some won’t. So um, ya know, just interesting. I was just wondering what your point of view on it. But there is something that we really need to know. And that is the end of the show. And this is the part we’re at now that we called a sermon on the mic, that we’re going to send you back in time to have a one on one with your younger self. And if you could go back in time, and give some advice to the young Matt, what would you actually tell him? Well, we’re going to find out because I’m going to play the music and when it fades, it’s your time to talk. This is the Sermon on the mic
Intro [44:08]
of the show.
Matt Treacey [44:26]
So David, I think I said to you earlier, I’ve never had to refer to my younger self before. I guess that means I’m fine. They’re getting old, but I’ll try my best to impart some 30 year old worldly wisdom on my late teens, early 20s self look, nothing specific. It’s the same advice I give to anyone younger. I think the big thing is Stay curious. Stay open minded realise you don’t know anything. As part of that read, I think readings a massive thing. He just keep reading books all the time and building up in knowledge in all sorts of different areas. Do that as long as you can. And yeah, meet lots of different people, while you still don’t have this strong sense of who you are, you know, if you always try and figure out who you are when you’re a young kid, I’m only 30. But, you know, the longer that you don’t have that idea of who you are cemented in your mind, I think the more open you’ll be, it’s just gonna always pay dividends.
David Ralph [45:37]
Oh, you finished right. Okay, I was I was hanging on that there, Matt. Okay, so um, here we go. So what’s the number one best way that our audience can connect with you who have been listening to you, and your knowledge on email marketing. So
Matt Treacey [45:51]
yeah, you can go to my sight. And you can find out more about my book. And everything else about me is there. And you can get free chapters of the book there as well. So that’s natural audits. book.com. And yeah, you can get three free chapters to the book. And I’ve got a whole bunch of articles and stuff on the site, if you are interested in, in my marketing,
David Ralph [46:15]
and we will have all the links in the show notes to make it as easy as possible. So Matt, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Joining up those dots and sharing your knowledge with us. And please come back again, when you got more dots to join up. Because I do believe that by joining up the dots and connecting our pasts is always the best way to build our futures. Matt Tracy, thank you so much. Thank you very much. So Mr. Matt Tracy, yeah, email marketing, it’s, it’s something that needs to be planned out. And it’s something that you need to do right, early doors, and to build that, that communication and build that business that you actually own. Because once you own the emails, that is your business, it can’t be taken away from you. So go back onto that episode because there was a lot of great information there and follow the steps but the bottom line is really understand what your customer wants. Only give them a good stuff because that is how you build a strong relationships, which work for business. So until next time you look after yourselves and any questions at all you can come across to Join Up Dots, leave voicemails, or send an email join up dots@gmail.com And until next time, we will be here again. See you later. Cheers. See ya. Bye bye.
Outro [47:34]
That’s the end of Join Up Dots. You’ve heard the conversation. Now it’s time for you to start taking massive action. Create your future create your life. Easy only you live God we’ll be back again real soon. Join Up Dots Join Up Dots Join Up Dots Jolina Join Up Dots
