How to get high-ticket clients from a small email list

Mike Lovegrove 0:01

Welcome to Going Sollo. This is the show where solopreneurs and subject matter experts share exactly how they find clients, close deals, and build predictable revenue on their own terms. I’m Michael Lovegrove, the founder of Sollo, and today we’re talking all about email, how a solopreneur can use it to turn their expertise and attention into trust, conversions, and revenue, even without a huge audience or team. And joining me today is Daniel. So thank you for joining us. So for any of you that or for anyone that hasn’t heard of you or met you before, Daniel, can you introduce yourself and tell us how you went from Ship 30 for 30 to building an email agency today?

Daniel Bustamante 0:50

Hundred percent. Well first off thank you for having me. I’ve been looking forward to recording and to doing this. And yeah I’m excited to hopefully share some nuggets for people. But yeah so the story. I’ll give you kind of the sixty second version. So and then if you want we can go deeper into it or like you can double click on certain parts. But basically seven years ago I moved to the US I you know, I didn’t have a college degree, I didn’t have a lot of connections, I kind of had to reinvent myself a little bit. Part of that reinvention led me to trying creating content online.

Specifically writing on a platform called Twitter, which a lot of people now probably know as X. Very serendip serendipitously, I one day found a tweet or stumble upon a tweet of a guy saying, Hey, I’m thinking of you know, doing like a 30 day writing challenge with other people here on Twitter. Who would like to join? And I was like, Well that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. That sounds pretty fun. Let me try and do it. So I sign up. That challenge by the way was free at first. It was awesome. It was probably fifty people spamming each other, each other’s essays on a in a Slack group c or community for like 30 days. Had a lot of fun. So much so that I did it again the next month. That second one though, the founder or the guy who was organizing the challenge got a little bit more savvy and he did charge for it. And that second cohort had a hundred people. And so after going through that second cohort, I was like

Hold on a second. Like this was awesome, but also this thing is growing pretty fast. Like the first time that I did had 50 people. Now this second time there were a hundred people in there. I could see kind of everyone or a lot of people in our Twitter bubble back then kind of talking about it and like also excited to sign up for the next one. And so I was like, this guy’s onto something, let me, you know, I would love to be a part of it somehow. Let me just send him a DM. And so I didn’t have you know the same skills that I have now back then, but I sent him a cold DM to the best of my ability saying that I had enjoyed the program and that I didn’t know exactly how it could help, but I thought I could I could be helpful, especially as the thing grew and he would probably need more hands. So that let led to doing a couple of like test projects together, a couple of collaborations, and then from there I basically became the first team member of the team before there was a team or a company. And then over the past six, almost seven years now,

I went from like doing a variety of different roles from like community management. I then became head of operations, ultimately became their head of marketing slash CMO. And then in January this year, like n crazy to say this, but almost nine months ago, we ended up partnering and building and launching an email marketing agency together. So that’s what I’m doing and working on right now.

Mike Lovegrove 3:43

Boy, this is this is honestly like such a cool and crazy story. When like I must have started following you a year or two ago. I think you started to post like really good lead magnets actually on LinkedIn. And we’ll get into that at a later point in time. And I watched your growth from maybe five thousand followers to what it is today, and been really impressed with that. And I just assumed you must have also like had it Easier, I would say, than you’ve had. You have immigrated to a new country and you’ve worked your way into being the CMO for a writing company, and you’re born as Venezuela. Like, and you’re doing it in English, man. This is that is like if there is a story about someone who has gone and reinvented themselves in a very short frame of space of time.

This is like exactly it, man. Like I told you after we spoke that I was telling my wife about this. Like, fucking hell, this guy this guy’s incredible with what he’s been able to achieve. But to bring it back to today, like what point did you start to go deep on email and why?

Daniel Bustamante 4:56

Great question. So and thank you by the way. That means a lot. And also shout out to my mom, because she was the one who forced me to like take English lessons when I was like in high school and I like a bit so annoyed to go at the time and then it paid off. But yeah, back to your question though. When I started to, you know, when I started that transition from being head of ops to like doing more and more stuff on the marketing front, like that naturally because of the nature of our business and the portfolio that these guys had have built, that implied or involved doing a lot of email marketing things. And naturally, like being a writing company, like since the very beginning, one of the skills that I had been cultivating and practicing a lot was copywriting. So that was already a big piece. And like I would naturally ghostwrite things for them all the time, you know, from emails to small pieces of content. Like

And not that I was there, you know, I was a right handed man and I wasn’t necessarily like the copywriting person, but like sometimes we need a copy, they were busy, or they had to do other things and I could write copy. And so that over time that was already happening. But then as I started that transition from ops to marketing, as I said, I started to spend more and more time building email flows. I started to spend more and more time overseen like email launches because that was definitely a big part of our business. Like I would probably say I don’t have like the exact stat, which is unfortunate, but attribution is hard. But like if I had to guess probably 70 to 80% of all of our revenue comes from email. And like it’s very rare that somebody has bought something from us and they haven’t had a an email touch point. And so as I dug deeper into all of that and I started to spend more time

Building these flows, executing these campaigns. I was like, wow, email is such a such an underrated thing. You know, like it’s so crazy how much of our business relies on email, and yet very few people talk about it, very few people, at least publicly, show you how to do it at a very high level. And I was like, Well, first off, trans you know, I’m a big fan of writing online, as I said, I my whole journey started by writing on the internet, and so I was like, well. I’m gonna start writing online about this thing and you know, I love it. I wanna kind of crystallize what I’m what I’m learning and what I’m doing and I wanna hop hopefully if it works out maybe I’ll become the I’ll become known for that thing. And that’s kind of what’s been happening over the past two years since I started playing with or not playing, but writing on LinkedIn every single day.

Mike Lovegrove 7:39

Man, that’s that what was it you say seventy, eighty percent of revenue seventy to eighty. That’s something that I think would baffle a lot of people, right? Particularly the ones that are spending a huge amount of time on, say, social media posts and thinking like, Why am I not generating revenue? There’s all these people saying they’re making all this money from LinkedIn, for example. I’m posting, but no one’s coming into my DMs, no one’s messaging me, no one’s engaging me for my services. And I think a lot of the people that are going solo, the people that are leaving their like corporate jobs, they’re very good at what they do and they and they decide, okay, I know that my potential buyers are on a place like LinkedIn, and then they start posting and they don’t get anything in return for that. And they wonder why. But I think you kind of just answered that, is that they have not

Captured that person for long enough, which I suspect is what email does, right?

Daniel Bustamante 8:42

Yeah, that’s I mean, we can talk about kind of the different reasons why I love email and like why I think everyone, including people going solo, should have an email list to an extent. And to be clear, I don’t think ’cause I see a lot of like obviously people wanna be clickbaity and polarizing and some people say, you should just do email, some people say just you should only do LinkedIn. I actually think you should do both. Right? The problem is when you rely on one entirely. Because ultimately, and we can talk about these two later. But if you want to build a list, you need you need traffic. And LinkedIn is actually an amazing place for you to generate traffic. And so they actually work hand in hand. The problem is again when you rely on one exclusively. Now, to give you kind of a quick couple of reasons why I think everyone should have an email list or a newsletter. The first one is that email, you own that relationship with your with your readers, right? Like if LinkedIn were to ban you tomorrow.

You’re screwed. You don’t have you don’t you don’t own those followers, you would lose them. With an email list if your email service provider for whatever reason decides to kick you out of the platform, you can still export your list of email subscribers and take them with you. It’s like an asset that’s portable, right? So that’s first that makes the compounding long term way more a little bit more secure and more stable. You know, there’s a little bit less uncertainty. The second thing that I really like is that There is no middleman when it comes to like who like there is no algorithm deciding who sees your stuff, right? That we’ve you’ve probably seen this roller or experienced this roller coaster with me over the past year where the LinkedIn algorithm has been changing like crazy. You don’t know what works anymore. It’s kind of yeah, everyone’s kind of baffled. But with email it’s like pretty simple. As long as you’re doing the a couple of very simple things to avoid going to spam. And

Assuming your copy and your hook and your subject line is good, a good percentage of people are gonna read your emails, right? Especially if you’re building trust and doing the right things over time. So there’s no algorithm. You send an email, everyone who you’re sending that email to will get it. Again, assuming that you’re doing all the best practices. And there is way more agency over who sees your emails versus who see your content. You know, espe is and especially if you want to generate revenue from the things that you’re putting out, then there’s a lot of it’s a very powerful thing, right? Because you get to decide who is seeing what and when. And then the last thing that I’ll say there before I shut up for a second is you’re able to track things. You know, like sure on LinkedIn you can see how many impressions your post has gotten or how many likes it has, but you cannot really see

Who’s reading your stuff? Like ver you know, wh how many times somebody has read one of your posts. You don’t have access to any of that. It’s a it’s a black box. With email, you can pop up in someone’s email history and you can see exactly how many emails they have read before they take an action. You can track behaviors like clicks or how often they’re off opening your emails. And then based on that data, you can then follow up with people. Yeah, you can I’m sure you’ve seen and heard there’s like a this whole signal based or intent based outbound is becoming a more and a more popular thing these days. And I feel like ironically that’s way easier to do with email because you have so much more data to use as signals for you to then, you know, follow up and get in touch with people.

Mike Lovegrove 12:19

Yeah. Totally, man. I’m with you actually for what for what it’s worth on like for Sollo, also our sign ups typically come from a like a welcome email sequence that comes on the back of a lead magnet which they have found on LinkedIn. And so the thing that you’re describing and I probably even took that out of your book, or that leaf out of your book without paying you for it, sorry. But I would have when I would have seen some of yours And would have seen it and thought, man, there must be something to that. So I’ll see what happens if I create something of value. But the thing that like, I mean, we both now have like okay size audiences, you know, roughly around the same, like 35-ish thousand people on LinkedIn. And so the reach that we’re probably getting is more than the next person, although the algorithm is changing all the time. But what would you say to someone that is

You know, they might have a couple thousand connections and that they are now thinking, okay, I’m gonna start my business, okay, I now I need to think about this thing email. But I don’t have anyone on there yet. How do they start getting people onto their email list?

Daniel Bustamante 13:30

Yep. Mm-hmm. Great question. And this is definitely one of the most common questions that I get. The good news is that the people listening to these are probably gonna be monetizing or selling some kind of high ticket offer, which makes things much easier because you don’t need as much volume. Right? If you’re if you told me, Daniel, we’re trying to sell it a twenty dollar or twenty pound ebook, well I was like

Well man, you better learn how to how to look how to how to go viral and get a lot of traffic because you’re gonna need a lot of volume. But if you’re selling something that’s worth, you know, a couple grand, five grand, even like ten grand, then you only need a handful of conversions for all of these to pay off and to be worth your time. So you don’t need a lot of volume. You do actually and I’ve been thinking a lot of about this from a kind of a first principles perspective, especially as we work with more clients and kind of identify who gets better results and who doesn’t. And I think it comes down to like there’s a couple of variables that you need to get the best results possible from email. So you the first variable is your offer. So obviously if what you sell is not compelling, then you’re gonna struggle to sell things. The second thing is the quality of the list. You can have a gazillion people on your list, but if the quality is not there, then you’re also gonna struggle to make sales. And then the ultimate

Part is like the quality of your marketing, right? If you have a good offer and then a good audience, maybe you can get away with not having the best emails. But you would get the best results possible if you also on top of the other two things, if you also do a pretty good job with your copy, if your sales page is solid. So all that to say the audience component and the quality of that audience is pretty important. And again back to the offer part, if you have something that’s somewhat expensive, then you don’t need a lot of a lot of email subscribers. Now, that’s not a cop out to the to the question. I’ll still answer the question. One thing that I really like about LinkedIn is that there’s this thing where you can basically at will grow your audience and I feel like most people don’t really use it, which is your ability to send connection requests. You know, unlike every other social platform where you can either follow someone or be followed

By somebody else. LinkedIn has this very s unique thing where you can send connection requests. And the interesting thing about a connection request is that the moment somebody accepts your connection request, they automatically become a follower. And so if you think about it, you can just make a list of who your ideal readers would be. You can send them connection requests. Obviously not everyone’s gonna accept a connection request, but on average based on what I’ve seen, it’s like between 30 to 40%. So And you can send up to 200 connection requests per week. I might yeah, I think that’s accurate. So that means you can be getting anywhere from like 50 to 60 people, maybe even more depending on the quality of the message and your overall presence, but you can g be getting 50 to 60 people in your ideal audience to follow you every single week. That to me feels pretty powerful and pretty magical. And then

The other obviously the follow up from there, because just because they’re accepting your connection request doesn’t mean they’re gonna become newsletter readers or subscribers. But that naturally opens the door for you to send a message. And I actually haven’t done this myself. I wish I had done it, but I have a good friend who did something extremely smart, and this is what I would tell anyone to do if they’re starting an email list like we’re describing right now. This guy, Just fast forward probably, I think it was like between nine to ten months from starting his agency, he got his agency to over a million in annual run rate. And he was able to do that despite only having around eight hundred to nine hundred people on his email list. Very small list. But the quality was extremely high. And what he did was he personally he made a list of his ideal readers, people who were like

His dream clients, basically his dream one hundred, and he went and manually sent them emails and LinkedIn DMs inviting them to join his newsletter. And the last thing that he did that was I think the most brilliant part is that he framed it as a private newsletter. So instead of like publicly saying, here’s my newsletter, sign up to get my tips and my tactics and whatnot, he didn’t promote it publicly. He very intentionally framed it as a private thing where he was sharing the learnings and from working with people with at his agency and then he would manually invite those super high quality people to the list and obviously he also put a lot of time and effort into like crafting a personalized message and h his uptake rate was super high and so after a few months he had a couple of hundred of super quality people on the list and that’s how, you know, fast forward to like almost a little bit o under a year and he had this freaking awesome agency doing all this revenue because of

That little habit of like, you know, sending those invitations and reaching out to people proactively.

Mike Lovegrove 19:00

That’s wicked. That’s a really cool story. I haven’t actually tried that particular tactic before, but I think it could work for a for a lot of people. And I want your take on this. What about if they were to send something that said like, hey, you’ll get you’ll get access to one, two, or three if you if you subscribe or something instead? So they’re like giving like a lead magnet.

Daniel Bustamante 19:28

A hundred percent. Yeah. I’m a I’m a big fan of doing that and I think that would work pretty well.

Mike Lovegrove 19:34

I don’t know if you just heard all that background noise. The neighbors have decided to start trying to rip off Why do you have to do that while we’re doing this podcast? Anyway. Okay, cool. Okay, cool. And for the listeners at home, if we don’t cut this out, then just so you know, my neighbors have decided to try and rip a wall down. And I don’t have noise cancelling walls in my shed outside, which is where I do the podcast from. So if you

Like, I mean, I was solo for two years as a sales consultant and I knew that I needed to grow an email list and that should be where I should start to sell from and I should bring people into a welcome sequence, all of that type of stuff. But at the end of the week, man, you’re just you’re just really tired and you’re like, I don’t do I have time or should I send this email out? So my question for you is like if you only have a couple hours a week. If you are someone that is an independent consultant or a coach, like how do you maximize the value that email can bring you in that small amount of time that you have? Like what would you do?

Daniel Bustamante 20:47

Yeah, great question. I think I have a few a few suggestions. The first one is being extremely intentional with your format. I think the problem is that a lot of people sit down. First, the one of the reasons why it feels so overwhelming and so taxing is because there are no constraints. It’s like blank page, staring cursor. I have to write this masterpiece in like the twenty minutes that I have left this week and I’m freaking tired. Right. And so that obviously is pretty hard. But if you spend some time thinking about what you want your newsletter to do and generate for you and you set like a very specific set of constraints, that can be much easier. I’ll give you an example. Back before I had a twelve thousand person email list, before I had my almost forty thousand person LinkedIn audience, I had a t tiny newsletter of like around eight hundred to a thousand people. And for probably six months I wrote every single week

These email using the same exact format and I called it funnel breakdowns. The idea was every single week I would sit down, find someone’s like a popular creators funnel and like a newsletter or email funnel and I would go through it and I would take notes on like the things that I thought were pretty smart and that I would probably steal from them. And also the things that from my perspective they could do better or they could do differently. And then I essentially took my notes Turn all of those notes into a long form email, just sharing my notes with people. And couple things. First, since I intentional like you can see how that format was very intentional. And one of the things that I tried to intentionally do was make it very you know, make it almost impossible for people to read that and be like, Daniel knows their sh his shit. You know, like he knows what he’s talking about. And like I wanted my format to like create that feeling of like

This person is an expert, right? Because it’s very it’s very hard to f to go through someone’s funnel and fake insights. You know, it’s you need to have those reps in that experience. So that was one. But then on the other kind of point, I didn’t have to think about my format every week because I had already made that decision. You know, I had my constraints. Every week I knew exactly what I was doing. I had like I also knew kind of from a from a writing perspective how that was gonna be formatted. And so I only had to like fill in you know color in the lines and I only had to like fill in the blanks of my template and that made the process so much easier. So that’s the first thing that I’ll say. Granted that still took effort so it’s not like it’s just a 15 minute thing. It’s it still take takes effort but even with a very small audience using that format I was able to land multiple five and ten thousand dollar clients which was incredible. The second thing that I’ll say is that

Even if I would recommend that, I don’t think you need to start there. Like there is there’s lower friction ways to start. I’ll give you an example. Every single Sunday I look at my best performing posts, LinkedIn post from the previous week, and I send an email curating those three posts. I is I like I choose three out of the seven that I made, and I send an email being like, Hey guys, you’re probably busy, you probably missed some of my best stuff last week. This is what you missed. And I have a quick description with a blurb and a link for people to go and check out each of the posts. And for a long time when I started writing on LinkedIn and I got tired of my funnel breakdowns format, that’s all the only thing that I did was that. And I probably did that for four or five months. And it was great because it was pretty low left. Like pretty easy for me to create. That one definitely does take like fifteen minutes, especially if you have some systems in place. It was also great because, you know

We were talking about the funnel, right? And like you wanna send your LinkedIn traffic to your email list, but then most people just let that die there. And I realized, well, what if I can also use my email list to continue to accelerate my LinkedIn and kind of create a little bit of a flywheel? And so if you think about it, by sending that email every Sunday, what I’m effectively doing is sending that concentrated traffic that I have on my list back to LinkedIn to posts that have been out for a couple of days. And when people click on that on the links from the email, they sometimes they engage with the post. That then makes it where the post gets resurfaced on the feed and then suddenly I get a couple a kind of a new wave of engagement and impressions and then potentially new email subscribers. So there’s a nice flywheel in there. And it’s just much easier because you’re already creating that content. You know, you don’t you don’t have to do anything besides just curating the content, which is also great because by just

Going into your analytics and curating the things that did well, you also start to build that pattern recognition for your LinkedIn content of this is what’s working, this is what’s not working. And so that’s kind of a nice side benefit. But I ha I could keep going, but ho I just wanna make sure that makes sense.

Mike Lovegrove 25:55

Totally makes sense. And it’s actually giving me ideas. I’m like, man, I should copy that. I should I should I should I should do that and like, yeah, like you’re saying, like a it ends up being like you’ve already created the thing, go ahead and share it again because I an another point to it is people are operating at like ten percent mental capacity when they are on LinkedIn or something. And they’re scroll sometimes scrolling aimlessly. I would say that people are probably operating at like a higher cognitive ability when they are reading email. And so they’re being much more deliberate about going and reading your stuff. And so even if you are sharing stuff you’ve already shared before, the chances that someone is actually engaged with is probably really low. And so this also comes back to the point of like continually hitting the same point over and over and over again, which is what exactly you were doing with those funnel breakdowns.

Is that it’s the same concept. You’re teaching the someone the same thing each time and after a certain period of time, you’ve given so much of this value away that they just wanna work with you because they’re like, this guy, Dan, from Venezuela, that now lives in the US. Knows his shit. So one of the things that you did a really good job of as well was you created lead magnets, right? That pulled people to your newsletter. How did you co go about creating those lead magnets?

Daniel Bustamante 27:23

Great question. Yeah, that’s been That’s been definitely a big lever for my growth and an amazing tool and mechanism. Both on LinkedIn and for my email growth. I have actually like a super in-depth resource on like my I have like probably at this point like seven to eight different like approaches that I use to come up with these lead magnet ideas. And I can walk you through the entire process, but maybe we can include that in the show notes and people could find it helpful. But I genuinely think that the easiest way to start

Start creating good lead magnets is to back to my previous point, look at your LinkedIn analytics more often. Because when you’re creating a lead magnet, one of the first things that I’m trying to like optimize for is creating an asset that’s gonna work, right? Because obviously we want to avoid wasting time creating something that then’s gonna flow up and then it’s not gonna lead to any results. So the question is how do you how do you reduce that risk and maximize the odds that your lead magnet actually does work? In my experience one of the easiest ways to kind of optimize for that is to take a look at your LinkedIn analytics for the past month or so and identify two to three posts that did pretty well. They did above your average and they also are

Educational at least to an extent and ideally are kind of within your within your domain of expertise that you want to be known for and that you know that’s the thing that you’re la using to land clients or that the thing you’re helping people with through your services and your consultant. And the reason I make the clarification is because sometimes you might have like a personal update go semi-viral for you. And that, you know, just because that went semi-viral, that doesn’t mean that’s the best topic for a lead magnet. You know, you don’t want to make a lead magnet about your wedding. But you could try. You could try. Probably not gonna land the right clients. But yeah that’s la the final disclaimer. But the reason why I love doing that is because again, it’s like people are already telling you what they want help with and what topics they’re

Resonating with and kind of the things that you’re interested in. And so if you just if you’re putting out the data points and you listen to the signal, then it’s gonna be very easy for you to identify things to build a lead magnet around. Now the next question is well how do you go from having this LinkedIn post that did pretty well and turning that into a lead magnet? Well the easiest the easiest way to think about it is you just want to expand it. You want to take the same thing that you did as a LinkedIn post And find ways to make that more meaty, more comprehensive, more valuable. And the way to do that is it’s actually pretty simple. You can add more examples, you can add more stories, you can add additional tips and tactics, you can add graphics and make it more polished so it looks, you know, it looks more professional, it looks more it looks better. You can add additional resources for people so it’s easier for people to actually implement the information like

For example, you were a sales consultant. Say you were creating a lead magnet about how to cold call. You could include your post could be just about the framework that you use for cold calling, but your lead magnet could go deeper on the framework. It could also have a script for how to execute the cold calling framework that you’re explaining, and it could also have an AI prompt to help you identify what things are you’re doing, you could be doing better when you cold call people. And so you can see the difference between post only explaining the information from a high level, lead magnet goes way deeper. And essentially the whole kind of mental framework that I use is or mental model is how can I what can I possibly do to make it as easy as possible for people to just actually implement or at least be more likely to implement this thing. And that’s kind of I think that one of the easiest ways to go about it. That makes sense?

Mike Lovegrove 31:25

Awesome man. I mean, yeah, it does make sense. I have downloaded many of your lead magnets, I’ll be honest. And I’ve always thought, man, this is good stuff. And like to your point, like it’s or your point a while ago was that ends up painting you as someone who knows this stuff and then you gain a bunch of trust out of out of doing so. I had f for me, you actually like what you just suggested was something that very similar to what I actually did. I ended up creating for my consulting business, I ended up having like two thousand email subscribers in the space of about three months. And that was and that was from doing exactly what you were suggesting. I like would create on LinkedIn like a cheat sheet about some things and then I would say if you want more, here is my sales vault. And then people would subscribe to that to get the extra

Deeper resources. And yeah, I would say that’s that alone like was the thing that always landed me the contracts that I ended up getting. Not because actually they signed it via email, but they or sorry that they I closed them via email because these are like thousands of thousands of dollars that I was charging for it, right? But on the back of the email they might have booked a call with me. And so they’ve seen what you know. They like what you know.

Daniel Bustamante 32:45

Yes. Mm-hmm.

Mike Lovegrove 32:50

And then they come into your sphere because you’ve got them on email and you’ve given them something for free. And actually this probably segues quite nicely that on the in the research that my team did actually about you, Daniel, beforehand was like you often talk about giving stuff away for free. And I love this because I also believe the exact same thing. And you say that people will pay for implementation rather than information. And so let’s just I wanna make it so that we assume that the listeners believe this. Because I like it I mean it’s working for you, it’s working for me. I think if you go to the likes of guys like Hormozi, he preaches this type of stuff for like just give your shit away for free. And the fastest way to make money is to pay to charge a lot of money to a small group of people as opposed to trying to do these

$49 e products, which by the way, to digress, this is genuinely the fastest way to make money is to go and charge a lot of money to a few people. I then don’t get sucked into the to what some creators say to you about trying to charge, you know, throw out a nine dollar product out there. Don’t do that. Just go for the go for the whale to start with. But in your experience, let’s assume that people are. They agree with this and they are selling a high ticket offer and they’ve decided to give away something of value for free in their like via lead magnet and then they have this email list. How do you start to sell to it?

Daniel Bustamante 34:34

From a from a tactical perspective of like what to send, how to execute the emails. Yeah, okay. And I ask that clarifying question because a lot of times there’s also like the mindset component of I don’t want to be salesy or you know, and that’s kind of a different rabbit hole. But yeah, from a tactical perspective First, I think I’m a I’m a I’m a believer that this whole idea of like give, ask, and like having a higher or a high give to ask ratio where you’re for the most part giving and asking here and there, I think that applies at the macro level, but that also applies to the micro level. And the reason why I like to also apply it to the micro level is because

And this is something that I’ve fallen victim to a lot of times. It’s very easy for experts to hide behind giving stuff away for free. And it’s very easy to forget to also make the asks. Right. And so it’s like, I’ve sent, you know, I don’t know anyone who’s keeping track of how many emails without a call to action they’ve sent to so they can send one with an with an ask. It’s very rare. People just keep sending the free stuff and they forget to ask. And so my preferred way of like solving that problem is well w you know, j again, generally, sure, I want to be giving more than I’m asking from a high level perspective, but I also want to do that with every single or at least every single email that I sent or most of the emails that I send. And so what I do is in my case, I’m a pretty

Hardcore guy. And at this point I’ve kind of graduated into sending daily emails. So I s I do send daily emails. I don’t think everyone, especially people listening, should go and do that. But I send daily emails and then probably ninety-five percent of the of the emails that I send is like here’s like here’s exactly what you should go and do if you go try and do it yourself. And then at the end there’s like a quick PS being like, by the way, if you Rather just have me and my team do that for you, let’s chat and we can see how we could potentially help. And worst case scenario, you just walk away with even more clarity on what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing. So that’s what I do with most of my emails. And that’s kind of again what I tried what I what I’m trying to stay away from, which is a mistake that I that I made for a very long time with my funnel breakdowns actually, is I would send this super long thought through

Essays breaking down these funnels and I wouldn’t have any asks and I was still landing clients from it which was good and that was reassuring. But in hindsight I could have landed even more clients if I had taken a little bit of time and a little bit of real estate from those emails to like promote the things that I was doing or at least make it known that I could help people do those things, you know, because otherwise people don’t know. People just read your thing oftentimes and they just find it helpful and they just move on. Otherwise, you know, and so I don’t know, I can I can share a couple of additional things and tactical like ideas, but f the easiest place to start is definitely just have a small CTA in every single email you send and then you know, as long as you’re providing more value than you’re asking for, then it’s completely fine.

Mike Lovegrove 38:08

Yeah, cool. I know that like a lot of people when they get into this, they are they are just allergic to selling. Right. And I think one framing that works really well for me and it for a lot of people I’ve coached over the years has been you are not a salesperson, you are a problem solver. You solve a specific problem, now go out and solve it for more people. Only way to do that is to ask them to buy from you. And that at least been the thing that is helped me get over like a like this is ten years ago now, but like get over a hump of like, I feel awkward asking someone to buy my service. But I see it really regularly now where yeah people will either whether it’s like in a meeting, even like a format like this or whether it’s with their messaging or any calls that they make or don’t make, I should say.

They’re just really adverse to asking someone because they feel like it’s manipulative. When actually, if they’re served if they back their service, they’re able to deliver value to someone, then there’s no harm in asking. And I really liked what you said, Daniel, about like three bits of value before one, before you like have like a specific ask, if you’re not doing that the daily email. But actually on that point, if someone signs up for your lead magnet, should you like strike while the iron’s hot and then make an offer quickly. Should you use that in that PS format or should you just avoid it altogether until you’ve like given them three things of value?

Daniel Bustamante 39:42

Great question. And to your to your previous point, by the way, there’s a quote. It’s a little bit cheesy, but I really love the quote from Zig Ziglar. He says, I’m gonna butcher it, but essentially says, if you truly believe that whatever it is you sell, it’s helpful and beneficial for people, it’s like your moral responsibility to try and sell it. Because it’s gonna it’s gonna help them, right? It’s gonna have a positive impact on their life or their business. And so that’s kind of again, it’s kind of cheesy, but I that’s what I try to remind myself whenever I run into that into that mindset. But to answer your question, I do think and this I think this is a Hormozi thing, but like the worst the worst offer is an offer you didn’t make that you could have gotten a yes to, you know? And so I think the problem is in I think there’s a couple things. So the first one is obviously you wanna avoid just asking and

Mike Lovegrove 40:11

I love that.

Daniel Bustamante 40:41

For the most part, you wanna give more than you ask. So that’s one general principle. The other general principle is that, or thing to keep in mind is that you can actually sell with taste, right? Like you could have a c some kind of call to action right away when people sign up for your lead magnet, but it can be tasteful and it can be it can be timely. And I and I do think it’s worth including because the thing is you don’t know who is signing up for your lead magnet. You know, it could be a stranger who just saw your profile for the first time after your lead magnet got some traction and it went kind of viral. But it could also be someone who’s been lurking and reading every single post that you’ve made on LinkedIn for the past, I don’t know, call it a year and they finally took a kind of a further step. They joined your email list and they might be ready to get on a conversation with you. And if you don’t ask them, they’re probably not gonna do it. You know, ’cause most people are not gonna

Reach out and send you an email and ask you for the link to book a call. They have to you have to nudge them to take that action.

Mike Lovegrove 41:44

Nice. I wanna change tack for a second, Daniel. And move into the world of AI, which I think unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that this is in most conversations now. And like I mean I can go down a rabbit hole of like getting really upset and annoyed about the amount of slop that I that I see, that I read. That even like I have sometimes not by my own team, but like delivered to me by external people where you just like look at it and you’re like, this is this isn’t even been reviewed. And like we’re in a moment where anyone can now write with AI, write a something at least. LinkedIn posts, emails, sales pages. What part when it comes to creating an email should stay human and what part should we use AI to help us with?

Daniel Bustamante 42:41

That’s a great question. I think the way I think about it is I think about AI as a fast typewriter and a very smart editor with the right frameworks and like guidelines. Right. And so my preferred way I think the problem, I think there’s two root causes for AI slop. I think the first one is People who don’t know what they’re talking about, right? And so they don’t have expertise. They’re faking their expertise and as a result they outsource their thinking to AI. So that’s problem number one. But if you’re an expert, if you’re listening to this, you’re an expert, you’ve been working in a specific domain or industry for like several years, maybe w over a decade, you don’t you don’t have that problem because you’ve learned a bunch of

Super valuable skills, you have insights, you have things to share, right? So that’s not necessarily the problem for a lot of people listening to this. Now the other problem is outsourcing so the first one was outsourcing your thinking. The second one is outsourcing how you communicate your ideas. And so the pr the other problem and the way everyone’s sounding like AI slop now, is not necessarily that they are using AI for it. That’s obviously one variable. But I think the bigger problem is that. They are just outside like they’re letting AI choose how to communicate in package those ideas that they wanna communicate in package and share. And so but if you’ve been, you know, practicing your craft, the craft of writing, the craft of copywriting, you know what good copy looks like, you know what how or how do you want to or you like to share your ideas from a from a copywriting and execution perspective, then that shouldn’t be a problem either because you can simply just tell

Your AI or share with your AI a series of guidelines and examples in terms of how it should format your things and then it should you know do a pretty decent job at least of feeling and sounding like you, right? But the nuance is you need to know what that looks like because otherwise if you don’t if you don’t, you’re not gonna be able to communicate that to your AI and AI won’t be able to do that for you. Right. But if the if those two things are true That’s when in my opinion AI just becomes a very fast typewriter and a pretty great editor. And so just to walk you through my workflow real quick, generally what I like to do is I come up with an idea. Sometimes AI helps me kind of surface the idea, but generally I have like a running list of ideas. I decide I’m the strategist, right? I decide what I want to write about. I then outline, I create my own outline of the piece because

You know, I again I don’t wanna outsource my thinking to AI. AI doesn’t really know the nitty-gritty of what I wanna talk about. I do. And so I outline that. I share that with Claude or whatever tool I’m using. I go on a walk, I s enable voice mode and I go, Okay, Claude, this is the thing that I wanna write, this is the topic, this is the outline. Ask me any questions that you need to ask me to gather every single piece of context that you need to create a banger email from this, and then using my vast library of like dozens of emails that I’ve already shared with you, once you have all the all the context, go ahead and draft an email that sounds like me and is executed like I would execute it based on all this library of examples that you have. Right? And again, I’m giving it the thinking. So I’m not outsourcing the thinking. I’m doing the thinking. And then I’m giving it all this data that it can use

In terms of how I write, how I like to execute my emails, my copy, all that good stuff. And then it just needs to follow the instructions and do a good job of kind of removing the fluff from the stuff that I share, which AI is actually great at. And then it comes up with a pretty decent draft. And then I can I can edit it, make any tweaks because it’s obviously not perfect. Any tweaks that I wanna make and then my email is done. But you can see how, you know, for me it’s the really the unlock is being able to type like AI can type a thousand times faster than I can. And he can also sometimes polish and organize my thoughts and my ideas faster than I could. Not that I couldn’t do that, but it’s just way faster and way more efficient to have it do all of that for me and then I just stay in control of the highest leverage thing, which is

The idea, the thinking, the framing, the packaging. You know what I mean? Does that does that make sense?

Mike Lovegrove 47:23

Totally, man. And so I think it’s the right way to go about using AI. And some of the things that what I like about your process, right? First off is you talk about being the strategist and that you’re giving it all the information. But then you’re also training it on your past emails that you have sent. I mean, I’m a I don’t know about you, but I’m a Beehiiv user and so the MCP has been bloody beautiful, man. And so pulling all my previous posts so it learns my tone of voice, so it can create even a skill around my tone of voice to do virtually the same thing so that I can pull even my sales calls, the themes of the sales calls I’m having on the problems that people are coming to the table with, and then you can go down the exact path that you just described and get AI to help you bring it together. But then once it’s produced, I suspect there’s a there’s an element in your process, Daniel, where you are then

Validating and editing and adjusting what it ends up putting out.

Daniel Bustamante 48:24

Great question. Well, it’s actually the other way around. Actually, the same approach that I was describing for coming up with lead magnet ideas, I use the exact same approach for coming up with email ideas. And so I take a like I look at LinkedIn as market research. If a post if a LinkedIn post did well, it’s probably worth expending it in and turning it turning it into an email. And so a lot of my email ideas come from there. So I actually have Three or four different go to sources that I get ideas from. One is the one that you were just describing, my sales calls, or like any sales calls, coaching calls, podcasts that I do, that’s a great source for me to like get ideas from. LinkedIn is another one. And then the final one is when I started writing on LinkedIn every day back in like two years ago, I was really struggling to like pull ideas out of my brain. And so at the time I was also starting to journal every morning.

And so I was like, Well what if I f you know, somehow kill those two birds with one stone and find a way to use journaling to come up with content ideas. And so I found this very helpful prompt, which is once one thing that I did, worked on, or built yesterday that I could write about today. And every single morning when I do my journal, which is nothing f my journaling, it’s nothing fancy, I spend like three to five minutes doing that whole inserting a few prompts. One of those prompts is that prompt. And it’s been extremely helpful because it’s forced me to kind of identify and spot things that I’ve worked on that I would have just taken for granted. In the past, I was like, yeah, I built that funnel or I executed this multi six figure launch and I just move on and forget because that’s our nature, right? We just keep we do one thing and move on to the next thing and we don’t really pause to reflect on the things that we do and how it they could be helpful for other people. And so

This prompt has really forced me to do that. And so I’ve been journaling every single day for like probably over a year now. Well more than ’cause I said that started when I was writing on LinkedIn too. So that’s been at least going for two years. So now I have all these running lists of things that I’ve worked on over time that I thought could be somewhat interesting. And whenever I need writing ideas, I could either go to my sales call transcripts, my podcast, my coaching calls. My journal or my LinkedIn analytics and there is I actually wish LinkedIn you know, you could make Link LinkedIn work by posting more like other platforms. LinkedIn I think the sweet spots like the sweet spot’s like one post per day. So it’s not great for volume. But I actually wish I could post more because I have all this raw material that I you know I would love to put out.

Mike Lovegrove 51:13

That’s really cool. And think like, I know, it’s not the exact topic of this podcast episode, but like the thought of like just generally what to write about. I love that. The hey, what is one thing that’s from that happened yesterday, happened today, that I could potentially write about? And ’cause we do, we forget that. Our lived experience we take for granted and our knowledge we take for granted. But for someone else, that is that is super useful. So for your email list or for a LinkedIn post, that’s like that is prime time real estate right there. We are getting towards time, Daniel, and I’m still getting a whole bunch of racket next door. So I apologize again if this is coming through. But I wanted to ask you, like, what is something you believe about email today that Daniel, who joined Ship 30 for 30

Would find hard to believe.

Daniel Bustamante 52:09

Wow, that’s a great question. What’s something that I believe about email that I didn’t necessarily believe a few years ago? I think one is that I think email is becoming a an increasingly it’s gonna be one of the most valuable skills that any business owner or solopreneur can have over the next couple of years. Both in terms of growing your own business, but also I’m very bullish on email as a service. Obviously unbiased because that’s the thing that I’m doing. But I also think there’s an insane amount of people learning how to do content well and how to generate attention. But at the same time, all of those people have no idea or a lot of those people have no idea how to turn that attention into revenue. And as I was saying, after, you know, seeing how big of a revenue driver email was for ourselves in our portfolio, I really

Do believe that, you know, being able to do email well is like a very powerful skill. And there’s gonna be all these people with massive audiences who have no idea how to turn those audiences into revenue. And so if you can help them use email to turn that attention into revenue and that traffic into revenue, I think you’re gonna you’re not gonna go hungry. You’re actually gonna you’re gonna have you’re gonna be able to make a pretty good living. Whether again that’s Providing that as a service, but also doing that for yourself and your own business.

Mike Lovegrove 53:37

Awesome. And just the last one, before we before we go, Daniel. What question about email and building an independent business does almost nobody ask, but they should?

Daniel Bustamante 53:51

That’s another great question. What’s some what’s something that nobody asks about email, but they should? Mm taking my time here ’cause it’s a it’s a deep question. I love it. I would say

I don’t think there is enough people and like this is also a note to myself. There isn’t or people aren’t asking enough generally, what are the emails that are

Generating the best results, and driving the most sales. And it sounds kind of kind of Dumb, right? Because, you know, as a marketer, one of the you know, you wanna s you w you wanna identify what’s working and just do more of that, you know. So it sounds pretty natural. But I do think with email it’s pretty easy to kind of fall into that trap of just give value away, give value away, and then wait for some big grand moment to like to some sort of launch and then capitalize on that and then the revenue will come from that. But I think,

As I was describing, you can have asks, small asks in pretty much every single email you send, whether it’s daily or weekly, or however often you send it, and you can start to track, you know, which emails are performing better, you know, even from a from a click perspective, and then iterate from there. You can do more of what’s working and I think the reason why it’s a little bit harder and easy to easier to ignore is because It’s not as obvious as a LinkedIn post popping off. You know, when you when you have a LinkedIn post do well, you open LinkedIn and you’re flooded with dopamine and notifications. With email you have to like really dig, pay attention, find the data and like I identify that trend with it. So it’s much harder. But I think that’s ultimately where the money is at, you know?

Mike Lovegrove 56:02

Nice. I wanna move into some rapid fire questions now. Just to just to finish us off. And so the first one for you, Daniel. What is the smallest list size that already justifies sending emails?

Daniel Bustamante 56:20

Well, I’ll give you a an interesting example from a client. We just had a client, she’s in a very small niche. I think her TAM is like eleven thousand people. So like that’s total addressable market, eleven thousand people. Tiny. She’s got over a little bit over six hundred people on her list. And we just did a mini launch to a smaller subset of that list. I think the segment was like eight a hundred and eighty people, something tiny. And we generated almost thirty sales and drove a little bit over seven grand in revenue in like a couple of days, to that small with that small list. So I think a few hundred people it’s completely worth your time and your and your effort, as long as you have a high quality audience, which is what we were talking about before. You have something that’s you have a good offer, something worth paying money for, and then you’re doing a decent job with your copy and your marketing.

Mike Lovegrove 57:19

Nice. Somewhat related, but if someone has a couple hundred subscribers, do they start trying to sell or do they try and wait and grow it?

Daniel Bustamante 57:29

That’s great question. I would go back to my framework of you know, try to, you know, both from a high level but also at the micro level, try to like always have reminders, have some sort of nudge for people to at least know that you offer something because again, people are not they’re not mind readers, they’re not gonna know unless you let them know. So you have to advertise what you do. I do think there is a case for building a lot of goodwill though. And like I’ve seen people If you ha the nuance is do you have all the revenue streams or other income streams to like be able to not make any asks, right? Because if you’re starting your business, you just quit your job, you need to pay your bills. And so there is no like moral argument for starving to death and not paying your bills just because you don’t want to make an ask. But if you have other revenue or income streams coming in and you don’t you’re you have the luxury of being patient.

And you don’t have to make an ask or make money from your email list tomorrow, then yeah, I do think there is a an argument for waiting a pretty long time and basically letting people beg you to take their money. I think that’s a pretty good signal actually, when you don’t offer anything because you can afford to not offer anything, and people start to reach out and be like, Man, girl, I like this been extreme like your stuff has been extremely helpful. How can I give you money? If you get to that point, you’re on to something. But again I think the big caveat is do you have other income streams or other ways of generating opportunities so that you can actually do that and not, you know, having money issues.

Mike Lovegrove 59:13

You gotta choose one. Ten thousand followers on LinkedIn or a thousand right people on a list.

Daniel Bustamante 59:22

I would I’m biased but I would probably choose the well let me let me think on that for a second. I think I would choose the LinkedIn followers actually because if you have ten thousand LinkedIn followers and you’re savvy, you can get a thousand people on your list. But if you have a thousand people on your list and no following, that’s gonna be harder to grow the following and back to what I was saying earlier, I think you actually need the two. You need the traffic and you need the email systems because that’s gonna generate revenue. But without the traffic, it’s gonna be hard. And so there’s a the my it’s a kind of a cop out answer because I’m saying ultimately you still wanna have the list, but it makes it way easier to create the list if you have a growing LinkedIn audience, you know.

Mike Lovegrove 1:00:13

Yeah, nice. And what’s one piece of advice you would give someone who’s just starting out on email?

Daniel Bustamante 1:00:21

Great question. Advertise your things. Let people know that you can help them in whatever shape or form that is. And stick with it. It’s a long game. I do think there are ways to make it more sustainable. We’ve we talked about a lot of them, setting constraints, being intentional about your format, not investing time on s on a topic or excuse me, a question that’s not been proven somehow, you know? But there are all these different things that you can do to make it more and more and more sustainable and enjoyable and easier for you to stick to. But all you know, it’s a it’s a long game a long game, sorry, the most of the benefits come from compounding. And so, you know, back to Charlie Munger’s first rule of investing, the you know, you never stop the compounding. And so if you can also apply that to your to your email game, I think you’re gonna be

In a pretty good spot over the long run.

Mike Lovegrove 1:01:22

Awesome man. Daniel, this has been super useful even for me. I’m thinking, man, I need to analyze this transcript. I need to take what this guy has said. I need to implement into my business. How can people find you?

Daniel Bustamante 1:01:35

Yeah, Daniel Bustamante on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place. If you want to get my daily emails and level up faster, you can go to dailyemailtactics.com. And yeah, I send daily emails. I do try to make them as helpful and actionable as I can. So every s every single morning you wake up to a little a little tactical nugget to either grow or make more money from your list. And then yeah, LinkedIn, I’m also sharing Stuff every day there. So that would be the two places.

Mike Lovegrove 1:02:08

Awesome man. What we’ll do is we’ll include all of that in the show notes as well as the resource that you suggested earlier on in the podcast. All of you tuned in, thank you for tuning in to episode one of Going Sollo with my man Daniel from Venezuela that now lives in the US of it.

Daniel Bustamante 1:02:27

Hell yeah. Thank you for having me, and hopefully this was a great first episode.