**NOTE: If you are watching this as a REPLAY, the interview with Dan Cricks will begin immediately after the Q&A**
Make sure to stay tuned and check your email inbox to receive emails about our CopyDoodles Swipe File Book which is coming out soon and where you can see the full-size images of Dan’s promotions!!
Click Here to download the transcript from today’s Lunch & Learn
Lunch & Learn Transcript:
Hi everyone, this is Lauren, your CopyDoodles Success Coach. Welcome to today’s CopyDoodles Lunch and Learn. I hope everybody is having a great week. Today we are going to be talking about The Steps to Creating Perfect Promos, featuring Dan Cricks.
I spoke with Dan a couple of weeks ago. He was very helpful in giving me some advice for how he adds CopyDoodles to his marketing pieces to make them successful, and a few other exciting tips that I’ll talk about in just a moment. That is what we will be discussing today.
If you want to ask a question here’s how — though Dan’s presentation is recorded if you want to ask any questions I’m actually going to have you ask questions before the presentation; anything that you’re wondering about CopyDoodles, or if you’ve had any problems, or anything like that, feel free to ask. You can even start typing them in now.
Additionally, next week’s topic will be Getting the Word Out. It will be all about adding CopyDoodles to email. I get a lot of people asking me, “How do I add CopyDoodles to my email program? I use Infusion,” “I use iContact,” “I use Constant Contact.” Really it works the exact same way for all of these programs. I’m just going to be showing you some tips and tricks in order to add CopyDoodles to your email blasts.
Moving on, it’s time to get the conga line ready, it is time for your Deal of the Week. If you haven’t been here before, if you attend my Lunch and Learn webinar you are going to be receiving your member-only Deal of the Week. This week’s deal is actually a preview, for you stay tuned, the CopyDoodles Swipe File book is going to be coming out very, very soon.
Today our presenter, Dan, is going to be talking about his entry in the CopyDoodles Swipe File book. He received some really, really great responses, and you’re going to get a preview to what kinds of things you’re going to see in the CopyDoodles swipe file book in today’s webinar.
There are at least 719 or so pages. It’s a huge book. We’ve got some really great examples in there from CopyDoodles users, so stay tuned. You should be receiving emails in the next week about it.
If you submitted your CopyDoodles pieces for the Swipe File book, and you’re waiting to receive some of your bonuses, keep an eye out on your email. We’re going to be sending those either this week or next week, so make sure to look out.
Moving on we’re going to be talking about The Steps to Creating Perfect Promos, featuring Dan Cricks. Like always we’re starting this Lunch and Learn session with an introduction to The Big 3. Dan is going to be talking about a lot of stuff on this webinar replay. It’s 20 minutes long, exactly 20 minutes. Here are three of the big key things that I thought he talked about that would be really, really helpful to people who are
listening — he’s going to be talking about an email marketing campaign, this campaign I’m going to be showing you during the video, and you will also see the campaign full size in the CopyDoodles Swipe File book. He’s going to be talking about that campaign that he used CopyDoodles on. It literally blew his old promos out of the water and you’ll see why in just a second.
He’ll also be talking about simple copy writing tips that Dan swears by. Now, I had no idea that Dan was going to be talking about these when I interviewed him. I kind of just asked him a little bit about the tips that he uses and how he creates his CopyDoodles marketing pieces, and he gave really, really great step-by-step how he creates it. So, if you’re having trouble creating your marketing pieces and you don’t know where to start, definitely make sure to get out a pen, get out a pad of paper and start taking notes.
He’s also going to be talking about the short-cuts that he uses for creating marketing pieces that capture your audience and don’t take too much time out of your day to create. You can really do these in just an hour or two. Make sure to take notes because you don’t have to sit around and create copy 24 hours a day. You can be doing this really quickly and easy, sending it out to your audience, and getting really great results.
If you’d like to see the CopyDoodles 20-minute presentation with Dan Cricks head over to [No Need to Head Anywhere.. the Interview is directly after this video/script], where you can catch the whole video. Right after this I’m actually going to do some Q&A, so if you want to hang on to ask me any questions, or anything like that, please just stay tuned.
I look forward to seeing you on next week’s CopyDoodles Lunch and Learn. We will be talking all about email, so I hope you enjoy the rest of your week.
Interview with Dan Cricks:
Lauren: Hi everyone, this is Lauren. I’m here with Dan Cricks of Results Marketing and Business Consulting. Hi, Dan.
Dan: Hi, how are you doing, Lauren?
Lauren: I’m good, thanks. How about you?
Dan: Good.
Lauren: Good, well tell me a little bit about your business, and then we can move onto the pieces that you submitted for our Swipe File.
Dan: Well, I’m a marketing and business consultant. My niche is independent auto-repair shop owners. I’ve been working with them for over eight years now. I show them how to grow their business and improve their profit margins, improve their business, and most importantly improve their lifestyle.
I also work with other individuals outside that niche, but the piece I created using the CopyDoodles I’ve had a lot of great success with, and that we’re going to talk about today, is in the auto-repair niche.
Lauren: That’s awesome. You’re the Been There Done That Repair Shop Marketing Guru, that’s what everyone knows you by.
Dan: Yes, and that’s because I spent over 18 years in that business actually using the stuff that I teach, the marketing that I teach, the strategies, and the management strategies and tools.
Lauren: So, you definitely know what works.
I’m going to move on to your piece. You sent out an email sequence of four emails. These are the first two. These can also be found on Page 22 through 26 in the Swipe File book, under Success Stories, if anybody’s who’s listening would like to see the full size of these emails and read them a little bit.
Just tell me a little bit about the piece you created. Start with the first two emails, tell me what they are, what you used it for, and who you sent it out to.
Dan: First of all let me say that this was all done pretty much online, supplemented with faxes. In my niche usually I can’t get away with great success going just online.
This was the first email that I sent out. It was for a webinar that I was doing. This was a paid webinar. As you can see on the slide, I used CopyDoodles in a couple of different places, as a matter of fact in the square in the middle with the testimonial, the font — actually I think that’s Lauren Font there —
Lauren: It’s the best one.
Dan: Yeah — to get that to stand out a little bit and get their attention because I know these guys are busy and they’re not going to read a whole lot, so I wanted to get their attention on a couple of things.
In the second one you can see a lot of the same information, but I changed up what I used, as far as CopyDoodles. Then on the third email, again, I moved some things around and changed the CopyDoodles. Again, I take it from the perspective that I know they’re not going to read a lot of this, and I know what some of their hot buttons are, and I know what some of their pain is, the things that they deal with and what their apprehensions are. So, I try to use the CopyDoodles to address those things.
You can see on this email on the left, I used the arrow on the right that says, “With no strings attached.” I want to make sure that they saw that, even though I bolded it, because that’s the thing… lot of them are thinking, “OK, what’s the catch,” because this is a really, really, really good deal. I knew that would be a problem for them, so I wanted to make sure that jumped out. I even used the, “Good news,” CopyDoodle in there, just to make sure I drew their attention to it.
As we all know the subject line is very, very important. That, “$2,000 in your pocket,” I figured if I could get them to open it, then I could kind of let the rest take over.
The other thing they’re a very impatient groups, so as you can see I have the link for them to click in three locations. I didn’t wait until the end, or late in the email, I had it there right away. Again, I used the CopyDoodles, because sometimes you hear that thing, “Well, you had me at $2,000 in your pocket,” so all they want to do is go sign up. I wanted to make sure that they were able to that.
Lauren: Yeah, I think that’s really important.
Dan: Absolutely. Again, on the one on the right, the last one, you’ll notice that, again, I put on there, “Risk Free,” and that they didn’t have to buy anything, again, addressing the movie going on in their mind, “OK, what am I going to have to buy to make this whole thing work?” In the webinar I gave them three strategies that they could implement without buying anything, I wanted to make that very, very clear to them.
Then, again, as you can see that I used the testimonial near the bottom, in the box, and, again, I want to make sure they went there and read that, so I popped in a new CopyDoodles that I hadn’t used, “You can get results like this…” That’s one of the things I love about CopyDoodles, I can go online and create whatever CopyDoodle I want, customize it to say specifically what I want. If I want it to say, “For repair shop owners only,” I can do that. I love that feature of CopyDoodles.
Lauren: Yeah, I think it’s definitely fun and easy to pay around with too. I think everything that you’ve shared is definitely really, really help for auto-repair shop owners, or really any business owner, that they should be using, the strategies they should be using in marketing pieces they’re sending out.
I think what’s really great about your pieces too is that you received a really great response and you really just tweaked each email very slightly, you added different CopyDoodles, you changed the subject line because you never know what people are going to open, what subject line people are going to open the email for. So, if you missed somebody at, “$2,000 in your pocket,” you might have somebody open the email for, “Last call for…” and you’ve got the same information and sign-up, but they didn’t read the previous emails from you.
Dan: Yeah, that’s exactly right. They’re pretty much all the same emails. If you go back to that first one you’ll notice instead of the box around that testimonial, I used the circle around that, that kind of gets it to jump out a little bit more. Without changing them up a whole lot I was able to make them a little different.
You’ll see in that second one that I used an arrow pointing to the other testimonial this time, to draw their attention to that one. Something that I learned about copy writing is that you don’t have to create totally new pieces. I used to be uncomfortable doing that before, but with the availability of CopyDoodles, and using it, I feel more comfortable basically using the same piece and just adding, and removing, and moving CopyDoodles around makes it look like a different piece, or a different email.
Lauren: I think that’s really important for everybody who’s listening, to know that everybody is a time-strapped entrepreneur, time-strapped business owner. It doesn’t take too much time for you to just tweak everything slightly and add new CopyDoodles on it.
This piece was going out to promote a webinar. What were you hoping to achieve with this piece? You weren’t selling on the webinar, correct? You just wanted to get people on a training webinar?
Dan: Right, this is a training webinar. This went out to a warm to cold list. What I mean by “warm to cold” is some of these people have been on my list for quite a while, but have never bought anything from me. Others had just been added to my list recently, as I’m doing lead-gens and getting people on there through Facebook and different venues.
So, this was going out to people who, like I said, were warm to cold, many of which had never bought from me. I was trying to get them on the webinar, kind of start a relationship and say, “Hey, here’s what I’m giving you. Look at the value I’m bringing to you — that can help your business.” And, these strategies I shared with them are all absolutely awesome strategies that are working right now, today. I wanted to get them on there and see if I couldn’t get them to spend a little bit of money with me and get something started.
At the end I gave them bonuses, and by the way I had 100% of the people stayed on the webinar until the end.
Lauren: Wow, that’s really good results. That’s awesome.
Dan: Yeah, that’s why I wanted to mention it. That’s pretty cool.
Not only did they pay for the webinar, which wasn’t really the big thing, it opened some conversations and I had opportunities. I gave them a free consultation to help them get started. I gave them a partial offering, so they could go out and be making money right away in their shops. They had to respond, and by doing that I got their information updated in some cases, again, opened the door to some conversations, and I actually picked up coaching clients that I didn’t have before.
Lauren: Wow, so I think that’s a really great strategy for anyone to use to build your rapport with people, to get them to know, like, and trust you. One of the reasons why I actually picked your example and I wanted to interview you today is because I thought it was amazing that you told me that you received I think like a 3% response sending out similar emails to this, without CopyDoodles, promoting a free webinar and then I think you said you got a 6.9% response on a paid webinar, just because you changed everything up and used CopyDoodles in your faxes and your emails.
Dan: It was more than double, the response rate was more than double. Needless to say I was absolutely thrilled. The other thing too, this was another test for me. This niche is not real great online and that’s why I supplemented with faxes. The faxes also had CopyDoodles on them. Sometimes with this group I have to send them a fax to get them to open their emails. To get that kind of response, to have it double, and they’re paying on top of it, was absolutely phenomenal. I truly believe that the addition of CopyDoodles and strategically using them helped a whole lot.
Lauren: Yeah, that’s great that you saw such an awesome response like that.
I know you kind of talked a little bit about the process you went through when putting the CopyDoodles on this marketing piece, but is there a process that you always go through when creating pieces like these that would be really helpful to listeners? Just about how you choose the CopyDoodles you use, how you choose what colors? Anything that would be helpful for anyone listening in how they can put CopyDoodles on their marketing piece and receive a response just like yours?
Dan: There is. Lauren, probably if you talked to many copy writers they’ll tell you they have a process. I do a lot of copy writing. I actually have a paid subscription newsletter to this group called the Straight Talkin’ newsletter. I need to have a process.
One of the things that I do as part of my process is I decide what I want to say in the piece, just kind of start letting it flow from the mind, then once I get that I start cleaning it up. The big thing is I identify what points are the most important to the client, the things that are going to hit home with them, like I mentioned before maybe addressing a pain that they have or misgiving they might have, then I look for a way to highlight those points.
Once I feel like I’ve got it pretty much laid out and it looks good, then I go back and try to read it from the point of the reader. One of the things that I know — not just in my niche, but all business owners or entrepreneurs, they’re very, very busy, like you mentioned earlier. Most of them skip read, especially if they feel like they’re getting pitched on something, they’re going to skip read. That’s when I go to the CopyDoodles.
Most of the time I don’t put my CopyDoodles in until I’m done with the piece and have it all written, then I come back and say, “OK, I have to make sure that they see this testimonial,” for example, like on the first one, the idea that this guy got 103 new prime customers in just a little over a month. I had to make sure that they saw that. That’s why I used two CopyDoodles there.
That’s the process I go through. Then I start looking at what CopyDoodles might work best or are appropriate. I’ve been a CopyDoodles subscriber since day one, so a lot of them I know what I want to use, but sometimes I’m not sure. I’ll go into the CopyDoodles file and just start going through them and then one will jump out at me. I’ll say, “Oh, wow, I really like this…” That’s kind of the process that I use.
Once I have it to where I think I want it, then I go figuring out what it is that I know I need them to read, that I want to make sure they read, that might motivate them to read more. The more you can get them to read, the better chance you have of them responding positively. That’s the struggle today is people don’t like to read. If you can kind of suck them in a little bit to your piece and your message, your odds go up.
The other thing is a lot of times you only need a couple of lines to get them to go ahead and register, so I use CopyDoodles to help me to do that. For example, just using in that one testimonial the Lauren Font, that’s the only place I used that. It really makes it jump out in that first email. It just really makes it jump out to people, and it draws their eye there. That’s part of what you’ve got to do. That’s a lot of what I use CopyDoodles for.
Then, like I said, on one of them there I created my own CopyDoodles to say what I want. If I don’t find something that kind of meets what I’m looking for when I go through the regular CopyDoodles then I go online and I say, “OK, this is what I want to say,” I go create it. I love the fact that I can make it any color I want because, like I said, I use it everywhere, in newsletters that I do. Sometimes I want specific colors, for example St. Patrick’s Day I want a green, or whatever it may be.
Once I get through all the basic ones, if I’m still looking for something in particular then I go online and create whatever CopyDoodle I want and add it in.
That’s kind of my system in a nutshell.
Lauren: I think that’s really, really helpful for everyone listening. A lot of business owners aren’t copy writers, they don’t know how to write copy, or they struggle finding what to write, or what to do. I think your step-by-step, that you just laid out, will really help a lot of people figure out exactly what they want to say to their customers and then choose what CopyDoodles they want to use to enhance what they’re saying to their customers. I think that’s really helpful.
Dan: You know, Lauren, some people feel like they have to make this look [like] the final thing as they go. One of the things that we know is there is there’s a lot of distractions in our life. For me, it works best to get the message down and then come back and add the cosmetics to it, the CopyDoodles, and font changes or whatever else I may want to do. When you can see the piece it makes it easier to do that.
Once you have it laid out, for me, it’s getting to the point of almost now, like I said I’ve been using CopyDoodles for so long that sometimes I’ll look at that piece and it almost jumps out that it needs a CopyDoodle there, you know? “It needs an arrow here.” “It needs to be circled.” It’s almost automatic now, in some places, once I have the piece all laid out.
Lauren: I think those are some really great tips for everyone listening. I really liked how you said, “Sometimes people will just see the CopyDoodle, they’ll see the testimonial, and they’ll click on it right away, they don’t even need to read the rest of your emails and they’ve already purchased.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your marketing piece, or what’s going on with your business, or any other tips you want to share with everyone listening?
Dan: The one thing I would say to people as far as CopyDoodles is go in there and look around. There is so much stuff. It’s constantly being upgraded. I know when I first got onboard with Mike it was a no-brainer for me. I just did it. Then when he came out with the online version I just jumped on it because I know Mike is going to over-deliver.
I’ll tell you what, there’s so much to use. I use a lot of the comics in there in my newsletters. I can’t imagine doing my newsletters without CopyDoodles today.
It’s just a no-brainer for me. If you’re not using it I don’t know why. It saves you time, it saves you money, and it will improve response. There’s just all kinds of reasons. I’m not even getting paid to do this.
Lauren: No, you’re not. But, yes — I mean you’re completely correct.
Dan: You could mention that to Mike, by the way.
Lauren: I will. Maybe we should put you on our team.
Dan: The other thing that I would just like to mention — if I could put a little plug in for my business.
Lauren: Oh yeah, of course.
Dan: My Straight Talkin’ newsletter is an absolutely awesome newsletter that anybody can use in their business. It’s a marketing newsletter — Straight Talkin’ — it came off the moniker that my clients gave me of the Been There Done That Repair Shop Marketing Guru. I pretty much tell it like it is, and they love that. I don’t sugar coat it. I tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. I stay on top of things and I keep them up to date. If anyone might be interested in that newsletter they can just go to www.autorepaircoach.com/st
Lauren: Awesome, everybody should definitely pick that up. I think you gave us some really, really key tips here for everyone who’s listening on how to create your marketing piece, how to add CopyDoodles, and the step-by-step formula that you use in order to receive a great response and have people coming back for more.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Dan: Good, I hope it was helpful.
Lauren: It was so helpful. Thank you so much for joining us, and it was great talking with you. Again, if you want to check out Dan’s examples in the success stories book make sure to check out Pages 22-26 under Success Stories.
Again, Dan gave so many great tips. I can’t imagine how great his newsletter is, so make sure to check it out at www.autorepaircoach.com/st
Have a great day, thanks for joining us.