Do you know your customers? Do you know what they need and when
they need it and how you can offer every single one of them
exactly the right product at the right time? Well, Brennan Dunn
knows. And he's going to teach you just how to do that. Hey,
I'm Arvid and welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I
talk to Brennan about personalization and how to best
learn the most you possibly can about your present and future
customers. And then how to make money from that, as well. This
episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later.
Now, here's Brennan.
Brennan, welcome back to the show. Last time, we were
chatting a lot about email and automation at scale. And today,
it's getting personal.
You've written a book called This Is Personal. And I'm super,
Yeah
super happy that you did because it's exciting. And it's all
about personalized marketing. How has the author journey of
this book been for you?
It's been very different from what I'm used to. So like you,
I'm kind of my background is in software and kind of like
digital products and everything. And I was telling you before we
hit record, I started this process really in 2018. It's
2023. It's finally in three weeks gonna be like an actual
product. So I'm very used to like, iterative building and
kind of this idea that you never actually finished anything. It's
like even with a course, you could still add content, you can
revise things. This whole idea of like, it's a bit like I
guess, like making a movie where once it's done, it's done. So
yeah, it's been very, very, a lot of new challenges, a lot of
at times frustration with how slow the whole industry is. But
overall, I'm glad that they're kind of the proverbial finish
line. So yeah, it's been very interesting, so to speak.
It's quite different from the creator life, right? Or
somebody, a marketer life where we have control over all the
steps leading up to the result, feels like publishing is this
kind of thing. You have to at some point, just get to somebody
else and hope for the best. Right?
Well, it's that and it's also it's such a like, I don't know
if polish is the right word, but like such a process driven,
intentional thing that I've built, but it's my cheapest
product. To me, it's just wild like. Yeah, it's been quite the
experience. I'm glad I've done it. We'll see if it happens
again. But, you know, at least now I can tick off the bucket
list, like done with the publish book thing, so.
Yeah, that's awesome. I'm so happy for you. I mean, I've been
following this journey, a few writing the whole thing and
looking kind of behind the scenes every now and then. And
it's really, really enjoyable just to also see how the process
works because it is quite different I feel from the
regular creator process where you just like experiment all the
time and you try different things and you do like AB
testing modulations and that kind of stuff. And you run those
experiments over time, you get the data, you work in backend.
The feedback in what we do with the internet, right? The digital
kind of marketing, it's almost immediately, or at least you can
get immediate data. And you can get data series over time and
kind of compare them. With books, it's kind of fire and
forget and hope for the best, right? And the audience is also
so much more diverse, like your book probably is going to end up
in like airport stores and bookstores all over the world.
And I hope certainly to find
I'm not sure about airport stores, but hopefully
Well, they'll have to be in airports. If I have to take a
copy and take it to an airport, I would make that happen. But
you know, it's gonna be just exposed to all different kinds
of people. You have no control over who it is, which is kind of
the exact opposite in a way as a medium to personalized
marketing. Right? I kind of want to go into the book because I
think the topic is spectacular. It's something that I personally
struggle with a lot because I have no educational background
in marketing, whatsoever. So that like regular traditional
marketing or fancy newfangled, you know, relational marketing
or whatever you might call it. To me, all of this is just
highly experiential. And it's nice to see an expert like you
put all their insights and knowledge into something I can
hopefully soon find at an airport store. So you know,
let's get into personalized marketing. And the question I
kind of want to lead into with is because I'm an indie hacker,
I come from a software driven background. And I, personally
also am a solopreneur. So I do all the things, right? Marketing
is but one of the many things that I do. How important is it
for me as somebody who's just myself doing all the things to
think about personalization in my marketing, my outreach, my
emails and that kind of stuff?
Yeah, so a common question is, I think a lot of people compare
personalized marketing to something like A/B testing,
where it's one of those things that work at scale. But when
you're just starting out or you're dealing with a limited
set of customers or a smaller audience, it doesn't make as
much sense. I mean, my thinking here is so with indie hacking,
so like, let's say, let's pick SaaS, right? Let's pick on SaaS.
So early on the idea is, before you spend a ton of time on a
sales page or marketing website, you should get on calls and do
demos and you know, so on and so forth. And that's kind of the
conventional wisdom, right? Like, you should learn as much
as you can from your audience. And then, hopefully,
individually, the kind of like, convince them to buy your thing,
figure out what objections they had and all that good stuff. So
that's sales. I mean, that's sales one on one. It's very one
on one, it's low scale, like you can only book out an hour at a
time. And personalized marketing, the way I look at it
is not things like putting people's names on an email or
something like that. Instead, it's trying to think, okay, what
are we doing when we do like a sales demo of a product? We are,
I'm listening to who you are, you're technical, you're in
SaaS, you're a German living in Canada. I can talk to you about
like, you know, I mean, that's more of an extreme example but
like, I have an idea of who you are. And then I'm going to talk
about different benefits that I think you would care about. And
so I think, ultimately, we should all be thinking, our
audience is probably not a giant monolith, like there are
different types of people in it. Some care about certain things
we do, feature wise. Some care about other features, benefits.
They want to hear different case studies, examples and so on. So
I think ultimately, it's a thing we should all be striving
towards. But early on, I don't think you should drop everything
and be like hacking away at writing conditional content in
your sales emails or anything like that. What I do think,
though, that people should do sooner than later because it's
harder to do, once you already have an audience is to have some
go beyond just first names and email addresses. So most of us
have like an email address opt in form and we get their first
name, we get their email address and that's all we know. And then
we'll tag them or something that they buy from us. But I do think
it's really important to try to uncover at a macro level, the
different identities needs of your audience. So it could be as
simple as you know, with Create and Sell, which is my email
list, when they join, hey, what's your focus now? Is it on
building an audience? Is it on selling to your list? Or is it
on automation? And then from there, I ask questions about
like, how experienced are you with your email platform? What
do you as an email platform and so on. So I think even if I
don't do anything with that data, I think it's important to
have that information. So you can see, like, what kind of
content should I be, you know, focused on. It kind of lets you
do, really just kind of market research on your own audience
and get kind of percentage based numbers that you can then use to
make decisions about acquisition, product creation,
what newsletter content you should write about or whatever
else. So I like doing that early. Like I started doing that
when I did create and sell and launched it to the world at
first. Immediately, I was segmenting, but I wasn't doing
anything with that data. So I do think it's important to kind of
enrich it to the best of your ability, your early audience
with who they are and why they're following you.
So I'm just gonna throw in a couple of thoughts at you at
this point as a solopreneur, who wants to do this, but has a
couple fears. Because we tend to fear reactions of people that we
interact with, right? From a developer background, I very
much struggle with talking to people in any case, right? Or
interacting with people in any case. So my immediate fear is,
am I asking them too much to start segmenting themselves at
that point? Because I haven't built a relationship with them
just yet when they sign up, right? Is that the right point?
What can you say for that?
So the good thing is we because the primary use case at this
point for my software company, RightMessage is to do post opt
in subscriber surveys. I have a lot of data on like, not
conversion rates, but engagement rates of the surveys. And
typically speaking, there are some surveys that do really
well. And some that don't do well. And the common theme
between the ones that do well and don't or the common theme, I
should say about the ones that do well, are really a few
things. So the first thing is that they make it clear this is
not just like market research data that we're using to put on
a PowerPoint somewhere that we're going to show to a board.
We're getting this information or I'm getting this information
so I can better serve you. So if I know that you use ConvertKit,
I'm going to talk to you about my ConvertKit course probably
but if you use ActiveCampaign I'm not, right? Like so you make
it very clear. And usually it's a one sentence thing that says
hey, thanks for joining. Do you mind taking 15 seconds 20
seconds, make it very low work on their part, sharing a bit
about why you're here so I can better best get you what you
need. Because I think there's a lot to be said about people
ultimately want what they care about, right? So even if you're
not yet sending hyper personalized like these people
get this newsletter because they fit this profile and these
people get that newsletter. Even if you're not doing that yet,
the fact that you're saying I want to be able to better serve
you that as well. So across the board, we're seeing between an
80 to 85% response rate. So completion rate of the surveys
for new subscribers when doing that. And the other thing that
people do well, I think to get those high rates is they don't
make the questions hard. I think the mistake people make is it's
like, a three sentence question. And every answer is like another
two sentences. And it's like the mental overwhelm of trying to
figure out like, well, which one is it? Where instead of
something like what Jay Clouse does, where it's like, hey, so
we're gonna best give you what you need. Are you on LinkedIn?
Yes, no, cool. Are you on Twitter? Yes, no. It makes it
very, almost conversational. Right? So it's very easy to
answer. No one really needs to think it's not like, how would
you solve, you know, world hunger. It's very specific,
choose one of the following options. And he's getting a ton
of data about that about who his audience is. And it helps him
better understand not only who they are, but what products he
should be offering them. So, you know, if you like, with Justin
Walsh, if you don't use LinkedIn, LinkedIn OS probably
doesn't make sense for you to use, or at least not yet. So
yeah, I think as long as you just make it, you know, the
questions need to be easy. And you need to make it clear that
this is for them.
So you don't really start asking why questions or you don't want
to prompt them to actually go deep into something. You just
want to kind of allow them to self categorize into binary or
like multiple choice situations?
Yeah, I like one of many, especially for personalization.
It's hard to do. If you have an open ended text input, you can't
really I mean, I'm sure you could pipe it up to ChatGPT and
like, infer things. Great. But for the most part, it's more
work to fill in a textfield than it is to click a button. And on
top of that, if it's like which of the following do you like
red, green, or blue? They choose red, it's very easy for you to
then say, hey, if you chose red make the background red or
something. So I just, I prefer one of many. Yeah
Okay. Yeah. That makes sense to me. It feels like again, easy,
right? If you want it easy for people to be able to quickly do
it and to get to where they want, which is you knowing what
they want, them knowing what you have to offer and kind of
combining this into a successful transaction. How much is asking
too much? I always wonder with personalization, like, can you
over personalize? And I guess like, if I have 100 people on my
email list and I send 100 different emails that are all
personalized to their use case, then I have kind of 100 pristine
and handcrafted emails. That's a bit much but even just in
collecting data, how much data do you actually want to collect
before you kind of saturate the willingness to respond to data?
of going to the next question, right? So if they answer the
first question, if you make the question easy to do and as long
as you're making it, again, you're setting the expectation
that this is going to take like 20 seconds, then the response
rates tend to be almost like everyone who starts will usually
finish. But yeah, I mean, in terms of like, there's two
things, right? Like, you don't want to ask too many questions
because then you're, I mean, unless there's really something
in it for them. So if you position it as like a
personality quiz or something like that, sure. They get
something at the end that says you are, you know, house
gryffindor or something right? Like, then that's the win that
they want. But, yeah, I tend to keep it to at a minimum. You
should be uncovering two things. One of which is why they're
currently interested in what you have to offer. So in my case,
that's what is your like what are you looking for audience
growth or sales or automation? And then a who question is, so
the who for me is, what email platform you use? And how would
you self assess your experience with it, like how good you are
with it? And that gives me a good idea of like, this is
somebody who is a self identified complete beginner
with ConvertKit. And they want help with audience growth. That
tells me a lot about them. Whereas somebody who's pretty
already advanced and they want help with automation, they could
probably both benefit from me, but they're going to benefit in
different ways from what I have to offer. And on top of that, I
can also look at that top line data and say, well, I have a lot
of people on my list who are complete beginners. I need to
create more beginner type products. I don't really have
anything for them. And that's actually what I'm doing exactly
now because I'm looking at that data to help me fill in the
blanks of my own offerings.
That is super interesting. How do you do that? How do you
figure this out? Because looking at all that data, again, the
more segmentations you have, the more data you have and I think
it can quite overwhelm you if you don't really know what
you're looking at. So how do you personally look into this data
to find these trends and then see what you can do with them?
So I have ace up my sleeve, however you say it, that I've
been using and it's been really interesting and this is a tool.
I don't know if you've heard of it, called SegMetrics, but
SegMetrics is it pulls in all your email contacts data and it
superimposes like Stripe or whatever data on top of that.
And what it does is not only gives me things like that, you
can kind of get from the ConvertKit dashboard, like
average subscriber value, but it also gives me average customer
value, time to purchase, all that good stuff. But I can also
break that down by any dimension I want. And I can see, oh,
ConvertKit people for me are worth about $80 per subscriber,
but somebody on ActiveCampaign is worth about, like five,
right? So that tells me like either ConvertKit people have a
lot more disposable income and they really like what I'm doing
versus Active Campaign or I'm dropping the ball with them. So
like what I've been learning is, as my list has grown and become
less and less CovertKit-y but my core offering is a course on
ConvertKit, which is a bit of an issue. So I've been looking at
that hard data about people's experience levels. I ask people
what they've done and haven't done when it comes to like, are
you currently doing any form of segmentation? Do you want to be
doing segmentation? And I asked these questions throughout kind
of their experience with me. And it really made it clear that
there was a high demand for some sort of training product that
will help people get a basic like segmentation, one on one
understanding regardless of what you do and regardless of the
email platform you use. So that's actually, yeah, I mean,
that's what I've been doing. Now, I'm working, no surprise,
but a little mini course on exactly that. And it came from
looking at that data, looking at it in SegMetrics and realizing
that people who answered a certain way, were just not worth
much. And it really became a question of, well, why aren't
they worth much? Well, it's due to this gap in my product
offerings. So I really like, you know, that kind of approach of
looking at, instead of just saying, I made this much money
with my audience or I have these many subscribers, being able to
individually reduce it down to exact conversion rates of
subscribers, exact valuations of subscribers, that is super
powerful once you start doing that.
Do you sometimes think of new potential questions or new
answer options to add to your existing, you know,
personalization questionnaire as a consequence of looking into
this data?
Yeah, so not for that data as much. But one thing I'll often
do is I'll have like an other option. And then if you choose
other, I asked you to put in your own words like what other
is. So over time, you get a lot of data and then you can start
to think okay, is do I need to add another option? But I'm
always wary of doing that because, again, if you have 20
options, that's a bit extreme. I usually try to limit it to like
three to five buttons. But I've seen over time, like how there
have been holes in my own understanding of like, who my
audience is, that I could then go and backfill by either
removing questions that we're getting, like a 1% response rate
in favor of questions that we're getting a lot of other response
rates that, you know, that I then added.
I wonder like, in this case, since you change things, does
that make it harder to look at the data as a whole? Because,
you know, if you start with certain kinds of questions, you
get certain answers and then you add new things that kind of
shifts the response pattern in there or do you just look at
like certain timeframes within your data?
Yeah, so the thing I learn with SegMetrics is I can give it
certain time, time windows and look at it that way. And I also
sometimes will just change the label. So case in point, like
with one of my businesses, Double Your Freelancing. We were
getting a lot of people choosing other and we asked people what
kind of work you do. And they be like developer, designer,
marketer, writer, or other. And if they chose other, they could
then tell us what other was. And a lot of people would put like
branding or logos and stuff. And I'm like, that's design, like,
why aren't you just choosing design? So then modify the
button to be design/branding and pretty much all those others
went away. So that's an example of where I didn't really add
something new. I just kind of rephrased one of these existing
options.
That's very interesting. Like how a little word like a little
difference there can just impact the data so much. It's funny, it
reminds me very much of my political science studies. We
had a lot of like quantitative data analysis and all that kinds
of stuff in there too. So that's kind of would you have to do if
you do surveys with people around the political topics and
stuff. It feels like it's the exact same math. Obviously, it
is, like underneath these kind of surveys, responses and the
kind of coding that you have to use, encoding and decoding of
the answers into certain kinds of categories. It's very
interesting to now see this thing that I never expected to
ever use again, to be part of my creator journey. And one thing
that stands out for me is that I did not expect to ever have to
use this in my creator journey. And I think a lot of people
might also not expect or even think of using that kind of deep
qualitative and quantitative data analysis in their lives as
a creator or as a founder, as an entrepreneur, whatever they
might be. It sounds like a lot of work. Let's just say that. So
it sounds like you've spent a significant amount of time on
that. Is that right?
I don't know. I mean, to be honest, like, so we've been
doing recently kind of started doing consulting again with this
little agency thing. And we've been doing pretty much for all
of our clients setting up segmentation survey funnels. And
it doesn't take that long. I mean, really, what it involves
That's really cool. Is there like a minimum size list for
is, I think most creators have, we know like things like our
list size and less growth rate and things like that. And then
we kind of have a good understanding of who our
audience is based on emails that came in from like, replies to
our newsletter or something like that. But we don't really have
like, we can't say 40% of my audience is a beginner or hasn't
started a business or something like few of us can do that. So
that's what the clients that have come on board with us have
wanted. And really, what we've done to do that is either if the
person we're working with has a good understanding, they just
haven't, like captured it, then we will do like version one of
the survey based on their understanding, but we've worked
with some people who don't know anything. So what we've done is,
we just do a simple broadcast that goes out to the list and
says, hey, we want to make like, we're working on the next kind
of like our future content calendar. And we want to make
sure that what we're creating aligns with you and your needs.
Would you mind replying to this email with one or two sentences
about a bit about like, who you are and what you're looking to
get from us or me? And that's the email and then you get a
bunch of replies. And then you basically just normalize all
that into, okay, like, these are the top like three or four
things that keep coming back. I mean, you'll have outliers, but
you just kind of ignore them, you just focus on what are the
common things that people are saying and that becomes your V1
segmentation strategy. So I mean, yeah, that upfront work
can take some time. But once it's up, it's up. I mean, I
haven't really changed the Create and Sell one that I have
running now. I've tweaked it a bit, but I haven't really
changed it in years, but it consistently is getting 85% of
all new subscribers on my list telling me or sharing with me
why they're here, what ESP they use. I've been able to see the
growth of Beehive not on Twitter, but by virtue of the
fact that people are now selecting Beehive instead of
like, ConvertKit. So like, I'm getting, you know, hard data
about what I'm also seeing trend wise online.
I mean, I think like, so again, with our clients. So the good
this to make sense? Or should you start like from the
beginning the moment you start a newsletter or a marketing list?
thing about working with the clients we're doing is these all
are people, creators, like hundreds of 1000s people on
their list, so we're able to get like really good statistically
significant data. But without fail, they're all getting about
that 80-85% new subscriber segmentation rate. But when it
comes to them sending out broadcasts to their email list
saying hey, like, I'd love to find out more about you. Would
you mind clicking this, take this quick survey? It's super
small comparatively. It's hard to get people to click links to
go to surveys but it's a lot easier to say when they just
gave you their email address and click submit on the next page
capture a bit more data because they're pretty engaged at that
That sounds to me like it does make a lot of sense to set it up
point.
very early to get that immediate engagement from the start.
Do it early, get the data and then you can use it later on.
Okay, nice. That's a nice idea. I still struggle with it. I do
now send like a follow up email and I suggest some kind of stuff
but I don't segment much because I honestly personally I don't
think I've understood yet and I'm just saying this as I come
to terms with my own incomplete business strategy here just why
I should do this necessarily. Because I do still have sales.
People find my stuff eventually. I also, I guess for my business
I go in very broad in terms of I just want to have a lot of
impact on a lot of people and then have word of mouth
happening so I don't have direct sales much from the stuff that,
I don't push my info products a lot. So I think I still need to
be convinced that segmentation, effort in segmenting people is
worth it for me. Can you help me with that, please?
Yeah, okay. So I think like, I think we could probably all
agree that if you were to go, if you were to niche down heavily
and say, Arvid only helps people who are doing SaaS and they are
pre product or something, right? Like, if you only dialed in on
that and you made everything you do focused on that, the
conversion rates or whatever, whatever you're tracking for
people who fit that profile will be high comparatively than, you
know, trying to have a wider net, right? So we all know like
niching always works, right? Like, because with niching, it
always works for the audience you're targeting because people
want to buy into the thing or subscribe to the thing that is
specific to them and their needs. So if you go too generic,
you end up making putting the onus on them to kind of figure
out how to apply what you're saying to fit their unique
circumstance. Like even with a lot of specialty consulting
stuff, a lot of the consulting stuff I've done over the years
has been clients who have literally just wanted me to
rehash a blog post that I know they've already read to fit
them, right? And so you know that happens all the time. Like
we all want the thing made just for us. So with that said, if
niching works better, it doesn't always make sense for me to have
like, I don't know, mastering ConvertKit for book authors,
mastering ConvertKit for SaaS. Like that would be insane. So
instead, the idea is what if we could then dynamically niche? So
instead, it's like, they are getting a email that I send
about the course. And then if they're a creator, maybe I put
the quote from Dickie Bush of Ship 30 because he's a creator.
And if they are a consultant, maybe I put the quote from, I've
had quite a few people who have said, like the views with our
clients to like make, to basically they've taken what
I've taught them and build a really good little personal
freelancer, agency business. So it's that kind of thing where
like, the agency person is going to care more about how can this
product help me get better clients maybe or help me like,
sell my clients on more stuff by offering them this as a service.
Whereas the, you know, the course grader doesn't really
care about that, probably. So the thinking is, again, like,
this is an example of just using simple if-else's to say, this
person is going to see this testimonial with this case
study, whereas that person is gonna see something different. I
have both because both people have equally benefited from my
product. And you're just basically saying exactly like,
if I was trying to talk to you over the phone about buying
mastering ConvertKit. I wouldn't explain, although I would just
focus in on what I know about you and what you've shared with
me to try to convince you to buy the thing, right? And so it's
basically, I look at it as the middle ground between what most
of us are doing now, which is basically online brochures where
you have like your website, which is like a brochure, it's
like the same thing for everyone. Everyone sees the same
thing. I call it like billboard kind of marketing. It's the
middle ground between that and what you would do if you picked
up the phone and we're trying to convince somebody of either
following your newsletter or buying your product or whatever.
Okay, yeah. Okay, billboard makes sense. That's quite clear.
That's how I feel. I do it right now. Just throw it out. And
hopefully the right people to look at it at the right time,
right?
Yeah
Instead of writing a message that reaches people at the right
time for, not necessarily just in a convincing way, but in a
relatable way, right? In a way that actually allows them to see
Anything goes beyond that. Like, I think like, if you need to do
the billboard thing, let's say, let's go back to Ship 30.
Because they're actually using what I teach at Ship 30. So you
oh, yeah, this is something in my wheelhouse. I know Dickie
have everyone from people who have never written publicly, to
people who are already doing pretty well and they want better
Bush, right? That kind of stuff
systems to do it better. Right? So you have that those are the
Yeah
Okay. If you rephrase it like that, it makes a lot of sense.
two kind of extremes. But if you were getting their marketing
stuff and they needed to say constantly, you know, regardless
of if you're just starting out or are we really experience,
Ship 30 for 30 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, regardless of if
you're just starting out or experienced, Ship 30. If you see
that, like when you see that, if you're pretty experienced,
you're going to be thinking I mean, can something that helps a
complete newbie really work for me and vice versa. The same will
happen for the newbie who's seeing like, big crater types
who have used it or something. So it's one of those things like
I think it's just, if you can say like, I know you've told me
you're starting. You've told me you're a newbie, basically.
Here's why this product, maybe it's the same product for
everyone. Maybe, you know, here's why Ship 30 for 30, as a
cohort based course, is going to equip you to start a really
great ready habit and build your audience from scratch. And it's
just thinking in terms that it's not about like having 50 million
parallel sales pitches, it's just conditionally saying this
part of the email, we might want to change up. And that's all
basically we are going to do.
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Like, if you say, this is for
everyone, that's just general startup advice, right? If you
build for everybody, you build for nobody. Because nobody is
everybody at the same time. Everybody's somewhere on the
spectrum. And that makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't want a
product that is both great for the expert and great for the
beginner because then I know it's somewhere. It's trying to
do everything. It's the thing that doesn't speak to me. But if
you can angle it, if you can look at it from a certain
perspective, this part of it is great for beginners. There's
another part not for you, not even gonna mention it, right?
I'll mention it to you if you are an expert or when you become
one. That is interesting. My question that comes immediately
to my mind is, how can we make sure that this insight into the
psychology maybe even of our potential customer is not abused
to a point where they feel that the thing we're writing is
almost creepy or intrusive, like we are over personalizing it to
them? Like we know too much about them and it kind of shows.
How can we prevent that?
Yes, I think the creepiness becomes when or starts when you
do have you seen like, what Clearbit reveal in platforms
like that allow you to do were given an IP address, it will say
we think they work at IBM and then like a little pop up will
show up like a chat drift bot saying, hey, IBM or something
like. That to me is because I've been at like a Starbucks, where
presumably maybe some guy at IBM was working there, too. They
think now Starbucks' IP is IBM and now me, I'm getting
addressed as like an IBM type person. Like, I think that to me
is where it's kind of the Account Based Marketing is the
way that it would be described. That's where it gets a little
creepy. What I prefer is just more like, I'm very open to
people and saying, hey, like, when you joined, you shared with
me that you use, I don't know, let me give you a hard example
of that. So with some of the work we're doing now with Justin
Welsh, like we're capturing information about where they are
in their journey, like, are they just starting out? Are they
already pretty successful with a team? And we're very clear about
not just saying, like, you know, this works great if you have a
team. Instead, it's like, hey, so you shared with us that you,
you know, you work with a team. That's awesome. So here's why we
think that this will be able to help you get you and your team
to the next level. Right? So it's not about being coy. It's
not about being, it's just about like, again, like showing that
you're listening and saying, I'm listening. And here's a
different set of bullet points for you that I think are gonna
really resonate with you about why you may or may not be
interested in this thing. And I think people do, I mean, there's
been like professional Google of like, personalization stats and
stuff. And HubSpot did a big thing where they had different,
you know, all these attributed stats and one of them was about
how people do are generally okay with sharing this information
with a brand, assuming it's used for good. So assuming it's not,
you're not just sneaking stuff in, you're not like labeling
people's IBM employees when they're not. Instead, it's
you've shared this with me. So here's why. I want to make sure
you're getting enough email, you're getting enough view on
webpage is like let's cut to the chase and not try to cover every
FAQ, every possible edge case, let's just focus on you. So this
is you. This is why you need this. And somebody who did that
well, is we worked with Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income a
few years back with his black friday promo where he had a lot
of products on offer. And we just did exactly what we're
saying now, which is you fit this profile, you obviously
haven't bought this product. We think you need this product. And
here's why. And they did a proper AV test control because
they weren't sure like would this actually work? So what they
basically had, I think, I forgot what the whole back rate was,
but some meaningful back percentage that got what their
black friday campaign was going to be, which is just, here's
everything we have on offer: discounts versus the really
focused thing. And it was something like 2.38x more
performance or 238% more performance for the personalized
niche thing than their control group. So it's just again, it's
one of those things that make sense why it works. It's not
black magic. It's just saying, if you fit this profile and you
shared this with us, here's why we think this product is
probably better for you right now.
That makes sense. I like what you said like listening,
listening instead of just like assuming or enriching with data
that you're not supposed to have, right? Like listening is
just really okay, you have a need. You express it very
clearly. And I have something for you. Whenever it comes to
marketing that uses these kinds of things and speaks to people
directly in both a personal and yet also an automated way, I
always have to convince myself that it's okay. I'm just, I have
been so burnt by the kind of outreach that is personalized,
but it's really not.
Yeah, they're not filling in blanks. I mean, that's like,
hey, Arvid. Hey, first name.
One question is like, what's the worst way you could potentially
personalize an email?
I think it's when you're putting in specific data and it's the
wrong data. Like, if I was addressing you as Jenny, like,
what's going on there, right? Like, I think that's the worst
thing you can do. And that's why I try to make it like, again you
shared this with me. Have an ability, you can use a tool like
smart subscribers something to let people like remap things
because people's needs change. Maybe now they're focused on
this instead of that. So I think like, my big thing is,
obviously, I want to treat my list like adults. So yes, this
is an automated email. But I wanted to, you know, listen to
the fact that you shared x with me. So here's a set of benefits
that I think you're really going to resonate with. And making
that clear, like not trying to be all like, you know, it's like
you, I hate like, you know, like these automated webinars where
it's the fake chat room. And they're like layering the ghosts
of previous live webinar or fake webinars, like on top of the
same timestamp. So it looks like it's like, really high
engagement. I hate that stuff personally. I just want to be
able to say, I can't talk to all 10,000 of you one on one. So
here's my best attempt to try to make it clear should you get
this or shouldn't you based on what I know about you.
Yeah, yeah, I hate the fake stuff, too, because it's so
obviously fake. However, and this is probably a whole topic
that we could spend hours talking about. But it becomes
less and less fake the better the technologies get that
emulate real human beings, right? I kind of want to talk to
you about AI. And its place in this whole thing, like ChatGPT
you already mentioned it. That is, for many people an
interesting avenue to like, kind of uniquefy emails that they
send, like turn something that they know, give some context
about the person and then have the whole email rewritten
automatically by Chat GPT and then send out that, for example
exists, but there are probably many, many other different ways.
Even to collect the information, you could do it in a kind of
talkative manner, right? Where the ChatGPT becomes the agent of
collecting information and then spits out some kind of
normalized data. Without any prior judgment from my side, I
would like to hear your prior judgment on this whole thing
because you've been working in this for a long while without
these tools. So I wonder what do you think about AI, both the
good and the bad for the future of personalized marketing?
I think I'm generally a fan of it for kind of basic, I was
talking to a friend about this the other night, like basic,
like junior analysis type stuff like. So I talked about how I,
when we don't know what the core set of questions should be, ask
your audience for a one or two sentence thing. You can upload a
CSV of his responses to ChatGPT and say identify, you know, up
to four trends about why people are joining my list. And that's
pretty great. I mean, I used to do that manually with a
spreadsheet where I would like have all four or all the CSV
responses. And then as I went through them one by one, I would
say, oh, this is an agency owner. I'm going to create a new
column called agency and paste it here. And then I'd have a big
like, second column of all the agency owner responses. And then
now this is a, I don't know, health clinic, same deal. So
it's definitely made my life a lot easier for kind of the data
analysis thing. I also think for things like writing, because one
of the annoyances, if you will, of doing personalization right
would be, let's say you want to, you have five industries you're
targeting and you want to have a different headline on your sales
page for each five. It's still, like the hardest thing is
copywriting here because you need to come up with five
variations. But you can easily go to ChatGPT and say, hey,
given these five industries and this core headline, modify it
for each and it'll spit it out and you run with that. You can
even get it to write liquid code that you can then use to.
Yeah, that's cool, right?
Yeah, exactly. So it definitely made my life easier. Like I
don't do a lot of content creation with ChatGPT. I really
do much of it. It's really the beginnings of like the headline
modifications I just mentioned, but I am a big fan of using it
for identifying trends over large datasets.
It's funny because I use it the exact same way for my writing.
ChatGPT is my writing research partner. It's not my writing
partner, doesn't write for me, but I throw topics at it. I tell
it to give me like 20 versions of a certain headline until I
find one that I like and then use parts of it to use for my
own or I just ask it to look into a certain topic for me and
give me a couple interesting but not all too common like
perspectives on it. You can use it like a human being that you
just, like ask a question and it gets your data, but you can feed
data into it and have a look at it, too. I've been doing this
too with my analytics and like, look at trends that give me
certain insights. It's a research assistant, that's what
it really is. It's not a good writer, right? The writing of
the tool is so generic and so bland, sets the whole point I
guess of ChatGPT even if you try to color it in a certain way,
but I use it a lot in my early exploration and my drafting
stages. And that's where it belongs, personally. So where
does it not belong for you? Like, whenever it comes to
writing, would you use it? Like, if you had all this data about a
person and you send an email, would you allow it to rewrite
the whole email without you actually getting to check it off
and then send?
Possibly, but not the whole email. So where I found the idea
of what ChatGPT does well to work really nicely with is so in
order to you to do and I'm gonna switch to just talk about the
English language for a second, we're gonna get more complex in
a second. But let's say you wanted to do something like you
wanted to change up a sub part of a sentence depending on the
email platform they use, right? So let's hypothetically say you
wanted to say, all you need is a email marketing platform. Right?
So keep it in English now. Now, if I knew that you wanted to use
Active Campaign. I couldn't say all you need is a fill in the
blank Active Campaign account. Because now a with a vowel
following sounds weird. So when you think of the actual
technicals of you know, personalization, for example,
it's a lot of that. It's a lot of, but then you have these
articles, like a and an, where there's very specific grammar
rules around how that works. So I think that's the hardest thing
I've run into in doing things like, we do this all the time
for clients. Like a common thing you see at the bottom of
newsletters now is here are x ways I can help you when you're
ready. And we've been for our clients been making it. So these
descriptions and our personalized and even the
products being shown are personalized, depending on what
you've bought or haven't bought. So if it's like, if it's one way
that they can help you is here is one way is, not are, is one
way singular. I can help you. And then here are two ways
plural that I can help you. And it's that kind of thing, which
is really tedious to get right. It's doable, but it's annoying.
And I think what I like about ChatGPT is the ability to know
basic grammatical rules. And it'd be great to be able to say
like, hey, we're looking at put here are x ways where x is a
number, modify their surrounding sentence as necessary to make it
grammatically correct. Like that's the thing, I don't know
how to do that yet with, like, during that same ConvertKit. But
that would be the were the biggest, interesting use case
for me right now.
It's interesting to see, like, you're thinking about AI here as
a tool, like with one input one output, right? It's not that AI
does a job for you. AI is just kind of complicit and making the
thing that you already create and structure more effective. I
think it's a very important distinction. And it kind of I
feel the same way, right? I want it to be there for a specific
part. But I don't want AI to do my work. Right? And it would be
wonderful if AI was kind of smart enough or ChatGPT was
smart enough to actually draft like a full email very specific
for this person. But if there's one cringe statement in there,
right? That the whole thing is lost. And I wouldn't want to do
that at scale. That's very interesting. It's an interesting
perspective. And I think there must be a way for ChatGPT AI
tools or something to offer this. And if not, it's a great
SaaS idea to like
Yeah
Like a grammar, it's just really simple, really grammar checker,
Exactly, yeah
grammar corrector kind of tool. You know, it reminds me very
much a Feedback Panda, our SaaS that we built and sold a couple
of years ago because we had the same problem that you're
actually talking about. We had student feedback templates,
where you know, online teachers would write feedback for the
parents of the student and that was a male and the female
version. And obviously pronouns are different, right? If you
only write one version, you kind of want to have the male or the
female version as well. You don't want to manually write the
same thing, right? Because you teach male and female students
at least. In China, they have a pretty strong binary perspective
on this still, but that was kind of what we were serving, right?
Chinese schools and we had like American online English
teachers. That was kind of the market we were in. So they had
So I built this complicated machine learning system that
these templates, only one version with a he and they would
manually go through and change like the his to her or the him
to her. But the other way around was tricky because if you have
her, you can't automatically know if it's a him or a his. You
can't change her into him.
took like 18 hours to train like a statistical machine
translation model in the background. That was probably
the largest like technological thing that I needed to build for
this really simple text based app because ChatGPT did not
exist. Today, it would be one API call with the text and would
come back with the perfect pronouns in the exact spot.
And funnily enough, I did exactly that. Today, I mentioned
the, like agency thing that I kind of started. I took my
intake document that I've been using for years for my own
clients. And it used to say, like, hey, I'm super excited to
work with you. When you're ready, let me know, you know,
that kind of thing, right? And I needed to go and modify that
whole thing to be we, instead of me and it's yeah, it's that
exact thing, which is like, oh, it's such a like, this is such a
solved problem. As a coder, I'm like, why am I doing this
manually? But then like, it's easier just doing it manually
for this one off need. But, yeah.
I think AI has a lot of potential with that kind of
stuff where it has through its own training data, so much
information that can make a snap judgment so easily. Where for
us, it would just be a lot of if then statements, which is kind
of what personalization is, right? So it's kind of also why
I'm asking because I wonder if you can train. And that's maybe
the speculative part in all of this. If you can train a system
to understand what you want. And it then sets up these things
that you're currently setting up manually and it looks into the
data and creates new products, like branches or information for
new products all by itself. So you only really have to say yes,
sure, I want this or I don't. Do you see this coming? Do you see
this coming in the more approximate future? Or do you
think this is still a long while?
I think we're already seeing that kind of like, if you look
at like E commerce with the recommendation engines, they're
kind of increasingly getting toward that, or at least the big
ones, right? I mean, we all know Amazon does this. We all know,
like, the enterprise players are doing this really well. But I
think it'll probably start with more recommendation engine type
stuff before it gets to dynamic product or messaging,
positioning. I mean, the personalization tech now is kind
of its hands on at this point. But I do think if there's a high
degree of likelihood that it wouldn't screw up, then that'll
get even, yeah, that'll become more of a real thing. I mean,
we've even had to like I've built an internal tool that
allows me to say, given all the different possible segmentation
options, first off, tally up how many total combinations there
are and then run this bit of text with liquids surrounding
it. So liquid is the engine we're talking about for doing
like, if-else's and personalization over email,
paste it in, and then it'll yield the output for every
possible combo. And what's nice is you can then just skim it and
say, oh, a active campaign or this is grammatically off or oh,
shoot, this looks awkward. And then you can go and fix it
accordingly. Because it's really hard, frankly, unless you think
you have a programmers mentality to look at, like a block of
if-else's, especially if they're nested if-else's. And think
like, what are the possible permutations that can come out
of this?
Wouldn't it be cool if there was like a liquid command just for
correct grammar? And it would automatically
It would be great. Yeah, you use Rails, right?
We're using elixir, but yeah, I do some Rails in the past.
Okay, well, there's a, I haven't used Rails in years. So I'm
probably gonna botch this up. But there was a active method, I
think it was called or active something function called, was
it like PluralEyes, where you could say like, the first
argument is a number. The second argument is a word like way or
thing or something. And then it will output five things or one
thing and it'll like do that for you. So I'd love to see, like,
the equivalent of that being brought into a templating
framework, like liquid. Yeah
Interesting. I wonder if we're ever going to see like grammar
correction on the client level, but the email client actually
goes through the thing and just fixes the little mistakes and
that would be an interesting feature too, because that would
kind of absolve you of the need to your if-else statements all
the time.
If you think of it like real time translation services, it's
kind of the same thing. It's just like translating from
English to English, let's say or something.
That's what ChatGPT can do as well which is kind of crazy. And
that's a whole other thing, didn't even think of this
before, but you could automatically like translate
your full email into the local language of choice of your
potential customers without having to do it.
Yeah
Is that something you would ever try? Or would you be quite
afraid of the potential cringy translation?
I'm actually still I'm doing that not with translation. But
I'm doing that with on my website. So I'm write messages
website, where if you're in a, I think and I set up for Canada
because I think Canada does as well. So but like if you're in a
country where it's an essence that have a Z or a zed, it's
spelled that way so like, personalized with an essays
rather than
Wow!
Yeah, so I've done that. And, but that's an example of like,
it's more of a parlor trick there. Like, I don't think
anyone's gonna care. Like, I don't think somebody in Britain
who's used to like, the Americanization of everything on
the planet, like he's gonna go to a website and be put off by a
Z instead of asked for the word personalization.
But they will appreciate yes, right? That's the thing. That's
where this comes in. Right?
Yes
It's nice to see something done for you, not to you, but for you
Exactly, right!
That is very cool. Well, I'm very, very excited by the
prospects of this, particularly in the future as it becomes more
of a thing that understands what I want and does it for me, like,
prepares these kinds of things for me instead of me having to
dig into all these if then else statements. But I also see at
this point, at least, how valuable this could be. And I'm
really fortunate, I guess, to know you and know that you have
extreme levels of insights and put them all in a book, which is
also very cool. I'm really looking forward to reading the
whole thing. One thing that I wonder about this book in
particular and we talked about it at the beginning of this
conversation, right? Books are kind of products you finish and
then you sell them at scale. But your marketing approach tends to
be a personalized one. How do you combine this? Like for this
book product, in particular, do you have any ideas on how you
can still personalize the sale for this? Like your sales
efforts? How can you still kind of market it in a personal way?
Yeah. So funny enough, I kind of beta tested this last Friday. I
was at a local conference and I brought copies of the book to
the event. And what I did is when I would talk to people and
meet with them, depending on kind of where they were like,
are they you know, like, what are they working on, like their
business, whether current challenges and so? Like the
normal stuff you do when chatting with people at a
conference, I would recommend certain chapters to them. So I
think that would be where I'm going to plan on doing this is
depending on what they share with me, like if it's audience
growth or automation or whatever else. I can say, hey, so I'd
love to tell you about my book, This Is Personal. I specifically
want to talk to you about why you're going to love what I
talked about on chapter or page 75, where I get into onboarding
new subscribers and how I think that what I cover both there and
in the rest of the book is going to benefit you. And I think
that's something that could be done like, yes, it's a generic
kind of mass market product because you can't personalize a
book. I can give recommendations for what I think they should
read specifically, pay attention to specifically in the book. And
that went over really well. You know, from my limited, like,
five sample size. I did the conference last Friday. But I
think that's what I'm planning on doing is exactly that.
That's so cool. I just love how you have this deep insight into
this whole approach so that you can even use it. You can even
personalize the unpersonalizable. That's
awesome.
Like I said, it's still one size fits all. But yeah, the way it's
yeah, it's a book recommendation to a friend. Think of it like
that. Yeah. Like, why do you think you'd like this book?
And the specific one, right? It's not just the book is great,
but it is great. And here's the part that is good for you. I
think that's just like if you look at any kind of marketing
that you can do or that you do and give that information to
your customer at that time, like this is not just wonderful. Of
course. It's wonderful. That's why I did it. Right? But it's
wonderful and wonderfully useful to you because of this
particular part. That just to me explains why personalized
marketing is so powerful because it contextualizes and empowers
people right there.
Exactly! That's what I've been trying to get across to you.
It took 50 minutes. No, I really appreciate you like sharing all
of this with me. And I bet a lot of people will appreciate
reading this book and I hope they do and I hope they find
you. So where do people go to find you on the internet? And
where do people find the book?
Yeah, so let's start with the book. I do have a vantage domain
for it. So thisispersonalbook.com
There it is.
It just links to like Amazon and stuff. So that's the best place
to get the book, comes out 17th of October. I would love you to
reach out and let me know what you think of it if you do buy it
and read it. But my createandsell.co, that's my
twice weekly newsletter on whatever happened to be thinking
that week about stuff like what we just talked about. I talk
everything about personalization, but also just
email marketing in general and what I think it can be done for
how creators like us can use it to better connect with our audience.
That's one of the few newsletters that I always read.
So I really, really appreciate you sending that out as much as
you do and as personally as you do. So I appreciate being on the
receiving end of that as well. Thank you so much, Brennan, for
being on the show today. That was wonderful. Thanks for
sharing all of your knowledge with us today.
Of course! Thanks, Arvid.
Absolute pleasure.
And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor:
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right option for you right now.
Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder
today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you'll
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