The Guru Of Direct Response Marketing – Brian Kurtz

Serial direct marketer – Brian Kurtz

 

Brian helped Boardroom Inc create tens of millions in revenue from mastering the skill of direct response marketing. We dive deep into how businesses both online and offline can leverage offline marketing tactics in combination with online to dramatically grow their business.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish
• Infusionsoft
• How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (Signet) by Alan Lakein

Go to BrianKurtz.me for more info and check out his event Titans Of Direct Response happening Sept 11th & 12th!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I'm super excited to have Brian Kurtz on the show today. Let me tell you how I met him - I was at a conference at Ryan Lee's event and Derek Halpern, my good friend, was like "Do you know that guy?" and I was like "No, I don't," and he was like "You need to," and then he walked over and introduced me to him. He works as an intrapreneur, we call him, through Boardroom and he has grown it to be extremely successful - from just a few million to over $150 million in revenue. I'm so excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, Brian.

Brian: My pleasure, Jaime. I've been a huge fan of yours and congratulations on your new book.

Jaime: Which is crazy because I e-mailed a bunch of people for the book. I didn't think Brian would remember me at all and he's like "Of course I remember you." It was like a year before when I met you in person once.

Brian: I bought the book on Amazon immediately. I mean, come on.

Jaime: Oh my gosh, you make me so excited. That's crazy. How do you even remember? Because I was just chatting with you, "Do you know so-and-so?" and you remember so many people. One of my clients from years ago you remember.

Brian: Sometimes I don't remember names. I always remember situations. Ryan Lee's one of my best friends so anyone I meet at a Ryan Lee event. It's context, so if I met you at the Starbucks in West Port, Connecticut, I'd have no idea who you are. But now I would forever because we're Skyping.

Jaime: It's good to know people, huh? "I'm cool with Ryan, that means I'm cool with you." Good networking tactics for sure. So talk me through this - I got an e-mail from a friend of mine, Chris, who is working with he, and he was like "Are you cool with doing an interview with an intrapreneur?" and I was like "Yes!" Now, I know it's not technically the same thing but you have helped grow this company insanely and I know how amazing you are, so how did you get into that piece of it?

Brian: It's an interesting journey I've had. I wasn't born a poor kid not being able to eat and because for most of career I didn't have to eat what I killed it was a different journey. So it's not the hero's journey, you know, like when Joe Polish talks about being on the back of a truck, 97lbs, freebasing cocaine - that's not me. That's not to say I was given everything on a silver platter. When I graduated college I wanted to be a writer - I was a film critic for my school paper, I was an English major, I really learned how to read and write in college so when I got out, in my second job, I got to this company, Boardroom, ended up in the in-house list department and the entrepreneur, the guy who was the basement startup for this company in 1972, and I got there in 1981, it was a $3 million business, all direct marketing, I was on the list side of things, so I kind of learned direct marketing from the audience side - learning the list business, that part of it - and Marty and I clicked immediately. If you could call somebody an ultimate mentor, he was it for me, almost a second dad to me. He just passed away last October and we are doing a huge tribute event to him in September. What happed with Marty and I was that he clearly saw me as a potential partner in the business very early. I don't know what the magic is that says "Become a partner in a $3 million business that eventually gets to $150 million with your help." That's a pretty good path but I had to work pretty hard to get there, so that's the intrapreneurial part and the idea generating part and the stuff that I really do bring to the table. I'm a member of Dan Sullivan's "Strategic Coach" as well and Dan has told me, in no uncertain terms, "Stop apologizing for not being a bootstrap entrepreneur. You can help so many people go from that $3 million to $50 million, $3 to $100 million because of what you've experienced, doing what you did." I did become an equity partner in the business, it wasn't like I was just an employee, so I had that special relationship with Marty and the company and so that gave me a lot more of the ability to be what we're calling an intrapreneur and some of the things I've implemented have been, for me, legendary - some people think they are, some people don't - I think everything I do is legendary even If it fails because I had to work so hard at it to fail. But I think I'm done apologizing for not being a bootstrap entrepreneur and I've been on a lot of interviews and podcasts with people who are in their 20s or 30s, they're building a business, they did start it from their basement or their kitchen table, they are probably in a more deprived state than I was - I was making $12,000 when I started at Boardroom but I was still able to pay my rent in Brooklyn so, again, I wasn't in this big cash flow crunch where it was a horrible situation but I really know that world, I really do, and I've spent a lot of time studying that world and helping that world so a lot of people I've consulted with, either formally or informally, I've really tried to help think through a lot of the things, but I'm not the guy to go to for the bootstrap entrepreneur manual. I am the guy to go to for how you generate ideas in an entrepreneurial organization and for leverage in a direct response marketing context - that's my sweet spot, that's where I think I've got some super powers. So I don't want to apologize for not starting it on my own. I've been building this company for 33 years so it's been an incredible ride. I wish we were still at $150 million. A lot of that was because we got into the direct response television business after being in direct mail and then being able to make a lot of stuff work online but when it all worked together and all boats were rising it was just so exciting and that's how we got to $150 million. We're more in the $40 million range now and I'm not embarrassed to say that - I think it's a right sizing of what the company could and should be. We still have a lot of pains about how to deal with content in an online world when you come from an offline world and that's what I've been teaching - I've been trying to get the eternal truths of direct marketing to as many people as possible who are coming up and mostly just doing e-mail or online because I think there are huge opportunities in multi-channel marketing. So that's the quick story, without getting too granular. I'll go into anything you want to go into, though.

Jaime: That was why I was like "Heck, yes, I want to have you on the show." I don't care that you didn't start your own company. I think your mindset in growing companies is way bigger than even a lot of the people that I've had on the show before. Because $40 million, $150 million, just having something that's that huge is so important for us to see. I have a whole bunch of questions for you. So you started with that company before I was born so you've been in this industry for a ridiculously long time. Like you said, you were offline first and now you're online so you've seen the transition. So what I want to ask, because I'm a huge future of technology geek, is was this predictable? You didn't know about the internet or anything like that in 1981 but did you see the trend and did you know that things were coming along?

Brian: It was hard to predict what the internet would be and things that changed so quickly. The one thing that I did know as soon as I started seeing e-mail and websites and squeeze pages and all of that was that I saw the internet as the ultimate direct marketing medium. I think the initial thought was "Man, this is so much cheaper than direct mail. We can do e-mail at $1 per thousand or 75 cents per thousand whereas we're paying $500 per thousand in direct mail and obviously direct response television is incredibly expensive and comparably radio is expensive as well as space advertising." So with e-mail being so cheap the original inclination was just to throw stuff out there and whatever sticks will be fine. I went the other way - I saw it as if we could use the internet and e-mail for good as opposed to evil, because I was so conscious, all the time, of my list and not bombarding my customers with a lot of crap - because I couldn't afford to bombard them with a lot of crap because direct mail was so expensive - so I had that mindset right away. If you realized that getting return on investment in everything that you do, and I don't care if your media is cheap or expensive, you always want to get a return on investment on everything that you spend and that is a direct marketing principle. So it's come full circle and actually just a couple of weeks ago I was at an event with some of the best internet marketers on the planet, like Jeff Walker from PLF, a lot of your listeners probably know him, and we were talking about Facebook advertising and how a lot of people in the room live and die based on the amount of affiliates they can get for a marketing campaign and I tried to explain to people, not trying to be grandpa or the dinosaur in the room, but affiliate marketing is just an extension of the endorsed mailings that we did in the 1970s and 1980s. So it's on steroids and it's everybody mailing for each other at a very low cost, however what it's done is it's made a lot of lazy marketers because a lot of people are doing just affiliates and not in addition to actually buying media that might pay out. The kick in the head is watching great, young, online entrepreneurs figure out that they could offer a very low priced product as an introductory product, get people into a funnel and pay for the advertising initially - God forbid we pay for advertising, right? So they pay for advertising, they get people into a funnel and they realize they're never going to make their money back on that first sale and this is a lifetime value proposition that we've been living in since the 1960s. Not me, personally - I was born in 1958 so I wasn't even doing direct marketing in the 1960s but Readers Digest was and Readers Digest had figured out that somebody who buys a book for $30 that you lose money on who buys a subscription for three other books can be invested in in a whole different way. That type of thing, I saw that. I did see that, I'm not saying I was Nostradamus but I saw it. I saw that that's what the internet could be, but I want to be out there as much as I can talking about these issues, the eternal truths of marketing and direct marketing, because I think that everybody can just be better. I think that all boats can rise when online marketers realize they shouldn't be in one channel. I would say someone who defines themselves as an online marketer is being kind of silly - why would you want to define yourself by a channel and why wouldn't you want to be a solution in different channels? There is so much opportunity to do direct mail even on the backend - maybe not as a lead generator, I mean e-mail is still the most efficient way to do list building through squeeze pages and all of the techniques that you're an expert in - you know more than I do - but I think when you get a good customer you can keep them on your list for a long time and use other channels and move them around and see what else they like. Maybe they'll like some physical product, believe it or not - God forbid we ship a product, right? The perceived value of physical product is huge and a lot of people who have been completely online with digital product are seeing that as well. So I did see some of this early on and now I'm seeing so much opportunity to not be digital and not just being affiliate marketing, just being online, just being direct mail, just being print, just being TV or radio. It's all connected. The book I want to write, I want it to be called "O to O to O - Offline to Online to Offline." So basically any transaction can start in any medium and you can move people in and out based on their preferences of different media and different perceived values within that media. I'm seeing a lot of examples of it now. In the book I plan to accumulate a lot of case histories which I think could be incredibly instructive to a new generation of marketers coming forward where it's basically online or nothing. I'm not being a Luddite here, don't get me wrong - I love the internet, I think it will catch on. I love e-mail, I love e-mail marketing, I think there's so much power in it. As someone who is a student of copy as well, I see some of the best copywriters as the passionate entrepreneur writing about what they like best or what they do best. They're not trained copywriters and yet some of the best copy I read online are text e-mails from people passionately talking about their product and services. So I've seen a lot of really nice transitions there. I'm seeing a lot of crap, too, and I've been blogging about it a lot - just because it's cheap doesn't mean that you bombard your audience with a bunch of crap. Retail is the worst - sign up for some retail credit card and get on their e-mail list and I'll show you what really bad e-mail marketing is all about.

Jaime: I want to go over good versus bad in just a second but I think it's really awesome that you have such a history. You keep calling yourself a dinosaur. My mentor was so old school - only offline, not a tech guy at all, and I remember being like "But I want to do online! I'm a geek and I love computers!" and it's so funny that I go back to what I call my roots and realize that he had something. It's not as though I can ignore that and just move on this. So I think it's amazing that you've got such a history - because it repeats itself and you can see the trends, offline and online.

Brian: I'm educating myself - I'm in mastermind groups where I am by far, if not the dumbest person in the room, I'm close to it. That's one of my credos - if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. That's why masterminding with people who are smarter than you is so important. I make the dinosaur joke but I'm not extinct so that's good. The way I figure it, I might still have another 50 years left so I've got to figure out how I bring something to the table but I'm getting so much. I am basically getting a PHD in online marketing so all of these mastermind groups that I spend a fortune to be in is my tuition for my PHD, that's how I look at it. I'm getting the better end of the deal - I'm telling you right now - because I'm hanging out with the best. I only put myself in groups where everybody in the room is smarter than me and I can't think of a better way to live my life at the moment. I heard a new definition of retirement and it's "Retirement's not stop working and go fish. Retirement is you retire from the things that you no longer want to do or you don't like to do and you retire from the people who you don't want to be around anymore, that don't life you up, and if you retire from those two things you have just created a new career for yourself."

Jaime: That's awesome. I love that.

Brian: I got that from Dan Sullivan.

Jaime: That's awesome. I'm living that now - sweet, I'm retired!

Brian: Retirement is not a concept for me. Not retirement in the traditional sense - I've got too much to do, too many things I love. I'm a serial direct marketer and I'd be nuts not to share the stuff that I have. I just love sharing.

Jaime: I want to talk about mastermind groups for just a second. I talk about mastermind groups and I love the fact that you're talking about this too, because you're in super high level mastermind groups. Can you tell me about some of them and what you really get out of them, the reason why you do it?

Brian: Sure. There are two mastermind groups and one workshop but for the context of this conversation we'll consider them all mastermind groups. One of them is Joe Polish's group, which he calls the "Genius Network Mastermind". He calls it the 25k group and people resent the fact that he labels the group because of a price tag but it's actually interesting because it sets the bar that you aren't going in that room if you're not ready to put up or shut up. So the thing is that it's not just that you're paying $25,000 to be a member but you're surrounding yourself with people who are living in a contributory way and everybody in the room is giving more than they are taking - and by giving more you end up with more anyway. I was just on a call with Jay Abraham, the great Jay Abraham, and we were talking about Joe's group and I made the comment about the $25,000 being this nice bar that you set that sets the room up but then you still have to behave yourself correctly in the room. I hate the term networking. People call me a master networker and they say that I know everybody and that I'm connected to all of these great people but, to me, you have to contribute before you connect. So that would be a big actionable thing that I would give to your audience - whenever you're in a group you know that everybody in the room can help you with your business or your personal life or both. Everybody in the room. So you have to think first "How can I contribute to everybody in the room?" and not expect anything in return - and because you're not expecting anything in return you get so much more in return. You might not get it 50/50 - in fact I wrote a blog post recently where I said that the concept of meeting halfway has never existed in my life. Unrealized expectations are the killer for everything because you expect something from somebody because you gave them something and then the relationship goes soft because they didn't give back. Well, you know what? I give 100/0 and if I can get something back, great, but I understand what my contribution is to that person. If they feel beholden to me, great. If they don't, great. I really don't give a crap. What happens is, even if that person who you gave a lot to didn't give something back - I mentioned before this call that we have a mutual client and I gave them a lot of free advice - I don't know, but serendipitously something might happen from that. Maybe this interview happened because of that because you remembered that I was a good guy and I gave them good advice, or whatever. That's what turns me on and Joe's group is very much like that - you have to contribute before you can connect. He has expanded the people in his group from just marketing people to people from Dan Sullivan's group so you have incredible successful entrepreneurs in completely different fields to what I've ever seen before and that's enlightening to me. I love hearing from people who have built multi-million dollar businesses from scratch. Believe me, the fact that I didn't build this from scratch doesn't take away any of the admiration that I have for the people that did. So that's Joe's group. I'm also in Jeff Walker's "Product Launch Formula Plus" group. I'd never done an online launch - perfect transparency - so Jeff Walker invited me as a guest once and, low and behold, the dinosaur delivered something that the folks in that room thought was of use to them in their online work. There's a noise in my ear.

Jaime: I'm next to a road.

Brian: That's okay. I thought it was Jeff Walker saying "Don't talk about the secrets."

Jaime: Wait, tell us more!

Brian: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's under the cone of silence. But what I'm learning from those guys, the dexterity with which they understand using content to sell product and not to go in for the kill right away, that you deliver a lot of great content before you sell something - what a great concept. Boy, I want to be that online entrepreneur when I sell products online. I don't want to be Banana Republic, giving you a 40% sale every single day and assuming that on the sixth day you'll take me up on my 40% sale. I'm not interested in that at all. The third group is "Strategic Coach" with Dan Sullivan and that's more of a workshop but that's where you work on yourself. You've got to be accountable to yourself. Marty Edelston, the founder of Boardroom, who was my mentor and like a second dad to me would say "I can fool you, you and you but I can't fool myself," so it's very exciting yet confronting to look at your life, to be around millionaires, to be around the best entrepreneurs in the world and feel like a slacker. The thing about feeling like a slacker is that you can't let that stop you. Eleanor Roosevelt has a great quote which is "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent," so it's up to you to say "I'm a slacker because Jaime has written a book and I haven't," or whatever, as opposed to embracing the fact that you wrote a book and you're going to give me advice on how to get my first book published and the mistakes that you made and the good stuff that you did. So you have to be careful with that but "Strategic Coach" kind of keeps you in check with yourself and you're surrounded by amazing people who are achieving at a very high level, which is true of all of the groups that I'm in. so that's sort of an overview of what I'm in. you still have to come back and do stuff - you can't just be in groups all day and talk about it.

Jaime: Darn, that sounds way more fun!

Brian: It is way more fun but you've got to confront yourself on what you need to do.

Jaime: How do you do that? So you're in amazing groups with amazing people who are consistently giving amazing advice, I'm assuming. This is one of the problems I have - I'm talking to amazing people all the time who give me amazing advice but I only have so much time so some of it I can't even come close to implementing or it's not even in the business model but it sounds like an amazing idea. How do you know what to do and what not to do?

Brian: I don't think there's any one great thing to do because you end up taking pages and pages of notes and when you get back it's pages and pages of notes. So what I do, while I'm taking the notes, is I do try to highlight things. You've got A, B and C everything in your life. There's a great book on time management, an old time book that Marty used to give out to people called "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life" by a guy called Alan Lakein and it's an old time, old school time management book but it's actually pretty easy to read and it's just really basic. Like every time you make a list, reprioritize that list. Every exercise I do in any one of those groups, like for example they say "Write down all of the things you have achieved in the last 90 days", you write them down, then the next part of that exercise is to circle the three that are the biggest, then decide which one of those three is the one that is the biggest achievement and then put that in a different place in your notebook. This is an exercise you do in "Strategic Coach". Then you start talking about the present - what are the five things you're most excited about right now? After you make the list, go back to the list, circle the three that are the most important, because you don't always write them down in priority order so you always have to go back to them and reset the priority. Always, when you make those lists, take the one and put it in a place that you go to every day so that you're not inundated. I did one blog post, I think the subject line was "Where good ideas go to die? or something and it's that notion of where you're in a brainstorming meeting and there's always more ideas and the more ideas you have the more that kills doing anything. So it's really important to set those priorities. It's a very simple thing. I just read "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits" by Verne Harnish, it's a great book. You get the big five and then the one in terms of priorities. You've got to do that with your notes from all of these events. Do I do it every time? No. It sounds like I'm leading a blessed life of always being in the top priority - I am not, I've got to go and umpire little league games because that's one of my passion and I leave priorities on the table when I go out on the field. I'm human. But those are some techniques. So the last 90 days, present and then the next 90 days - you list the five things you want to accomplish in the next 90 days. Again, keep it tight - too many ideas usually means nothing gets done. That's a shorthand of what I try to do and if there's a plane ride involved on the way home from these I try to do it on the plane ride home because you get back to the office,

Jaime: I know, sheets everywhere, all over the place.

Brian: Look at the crap behind me. I'm surrounded by junk. Good junk, but a lot of junk. So, yes, you've got to have that free time. I don't follow a lot of the great techniques, like Tim Ferriss's tip about not checking your e-mail in the morning. I'm terrible - my phone's next to my bed so I get up and it's like "Who e-mailed me overnight from the west coast that I want to respond to while I'm in my pajamas?" I'm a little obsessive with that.

Jaime: That's good to know. I know when to e-mail you to get results. What I want to talk about, because you're such an amazing marketer, at the beginning you were talking about good and bad marketing and I would love to hear your definitions. What's good right now and what's the bad stuff right now? I know you said the 40% off at Banana Republic is probably not the best but tell us more about that.

Brian: There's a bunch of things. I'll do the bad first, the things that I really cringe at. Some of it is in the affiliate world where people are sending non-sequiturs to their list. I've heard horror stories about this - someone who's got a woo-woo list of people who are worshipping somebody for their daily tips of inner meditation and then they send a real estate investing offer to the list to make money. I'm using that as an example but when I see some of that it's like why would you want to have that level of unsubscribes to make some cash in the short term? That's a really bad one. Most of the people I hang out with wouldn't do that and it's easy for me to say because cash flow is not the number one priority for me but for a lot of people it is and you have to cash in on that. So the good, that would be attached to that, would be starting to invest in ways of buying media at an acceptable return on investment and learning ways to buy media at an acceptable return of investment, and some of that can be very cheap, as we know. There's a lot of stuff you can do in social media to create lists and I have to do a lot of that - one of my five things for the next 90 days is to get my personal list to 5,000. I'm only at about 1,000 now. I know I'm a slacker.

Jaime: How are you going to get from 1,000 to 5,000? Tell us how you do that. Because a lot of people who are listening probably only have a list of about 1,000 and they want a list 5,000 too and they don't know what to do, so what are you going to do in the next 90 days?

Brian: I have a pretty long list. I don't know If I'll get there but I want to set the audacious goal so that I know I have something to shoot at and if I don't get to 5,000 in 90 days I'm going to get to 5,000 in 60 days at the latest. So doing podcasts and getting people to opt in to my list like this,

Jaime: Opt in to his list!

Brian: Yeah, we'll give people the opt in to my list. I think leading up to my event in September, which will be really big, it really inspired me to go through my Outlook e-mail address list, which I had about 4,000 addresses in, so once I got the losers from high school off that list,

Jaime: They're not going to buy anything from you?

Brian: I don't think so. They don't even answer the phone when I call - and that's my brother! It's painful to do that by hand but that's the best way to do it the first time so I'm really going to start targeting it. I'm going to start using LinkedIn. I'll give your folks an interesting tip - I assume that most people, when they get a LinkedIn request, they look at it and, for the most part, they just accept it, unless it looks like someone is stalking them, like they're from a foreign country and they have no contacts at all. But what I do with LinkedIn is I let the requests accumulate over a week or two - and I get a lot, I get 30 or 40 requests over a two or three week period, and then, usually on the weekend, I spend about an hour going through each one of them individually. Some of them I might know, some of them I don't, but I go to their request, I go to their profile, I look at where we're connected, either people, organizations, background - are you a copywriter, are you a direct marketer, are you a baseball umpire, whatever - and then I send them an e-mail - not a LinkedIn e-mail either, I send them a personal e-mail, because if you just reply to a LinkedIn request you get their e-mail that they've signed up to LinkedIn with and I send them a personal e-mail and say "Thanks for linking in. looks like we both know Jaime and that's incredible because she's awesome and I love her book, I hope you do too. You should sign up for my list at BrianKurtz.me and I hope we can connect soon." It does mean that sometimes some people will start to stalk me but I watch that closely. But I accept their request and now I'm going to go to my LinkedIn file, which is also about 2,000 people, and I'm going to import all of those e-mail addresses because I know every one of them got at least one e-mail from me, because I don't usually go out and request people to LinkedIn with me so I'm usually responding to their requests so it's not an intimate relationship but I've got something. Plus it's more interesting just to hit "Accept, accept, accept." I'm not bragging that I have 2,000 contacts but I will brag that I have 2,000 contacts and I've e-mailed every single one of them.

Jaime: That's insane. You're the media buying guy and you're still doing one-to-one on LinkedIn. That's really impressive. Newer entrepreneurs want it fast, the Facebook ads, that's sexy. E-mailing people on LinkedIn does not sound as sexy but that's what you're doing.

Brian: It's about quality, not quantity. The 5,000 to me is a goal because that would be really nice but I've seen the products and they're good, you know, like "Get 10,000 Fans" by Brian Moran, which is brilliant. I might do that, I don't know, but to me, unless I'm doing it, and maybe it's not 10,000, maybe I'll get my 5,000 fans by giving away really good content at the top of that and make it a relationship. There's a great quote from my buddy Dean Graziosi who's one of the greatest marketers ever - he's the real estate millionaire, he's been on TV, he's just an awesome dude. Dean has an expression - people refund transactions, not relationships. I grew up in a world of $39 subscriptions and books and cancellations as part of like. When you're selling $1,000 and $2,000 digital products to help people with their business and you start getting 30-40% return rates you did something wrong in either the development of that product, the product is a piece of crap, or the relationship that you built before you sold them that product was flawed. Again, there's a balance here and a lot of people are probably listening to this going "This guy is crazy. He's never going to get a big list. He's not going to be Brendon Burchard." I know that. Brendon's a friend of mine, I love him, I envy the fact that he's a household name for most people in that space. That's not the game I'm playing right now. Do I need to play in some of those pools? I probably do and I have a bunch of other things that I'm building on my list. I don't want to build it too slowly but I want to build it organically, I want true double opt in people who have read my content and want to be in my tribe, as Seth Godin would say. Jeff Walker talks about this all of the time and maybe it's my age but at 56 years old I don't want to be hanging out with people I don't want to hang out. I want to attract people into my life who don't just think the way I do but I can learn from them and they can learn from me and it just becomes symbiotic. So maybe getting the 5,000 the way I'm doing is not going to be easy to do in 90 days - getting 60 opt ins in one day is really huge for me, 60 really good opt ins. I've done that a couple of times with some podcasts and that's really exciting for me.

Jaime: Let's see if ours can beat it! That's what I do too - I'll do a guest post and, to this day, I still check them and you're like "Look at how many I got from the Michael Hyatt blog post I just did! That's so cool!"

Brian: Just put me to shame for a minute - how many followers do you have?

Jaime: In general?

Brian: Just in general.

Jaime: I only have 16,000. I don't have very many.

Brian: That's not too shabby.

Jaime: That's the funny thing - I've never done paid traffic or anything like that. Let's talk about media buying, actually.

Brian: I think that now that you have a book and a brand and a great personality I think that you are really in a great position to do some paid traffic.

Jaime: So let's talk about that. You're the guy who talks about media buying but offline stuff too in general, and I haven't done any offline stuff either. So give me some advice, Brian. What do you suggest? This is my show, I can ask this stuff!

Brian: I think this is really good advice for everybody. So you have a 16,000 list - have you done a lot of segmentation of that list?

Jaime: I have InfusionSoft now so we're going through it and surveying and all of that fun stuff.

Brian: So you want to know interest areas, of course. The most important thing you want to know is all of the transaction data. You might do this but a lot of people don't but I don't think it should be very rare that you communicate with all 16,000 on your list with the same message. Moving copy to different segments of your list is so critical and such an obvious thing. With direct mail that was super expensive and we still did it. I have stories that I tell about having two different control packages - we call them control packages in direct mail, that's the best package that you're using for a particular offer - and one would go to a particular group outside of the list, so one would be more of an opportunity seeker audience and one would be more of a broad base consumer audience. So the letter and the direct mail piece that I would send to the money magazine list would be very different to the direct mail package that I would send to a list of people who came in from some opportunity seeker type offer. So using that as an example, can you see the application to anybody's e-mail list? You have people on your list that are clearly VIPs and you have people on your list that you want to move from suspects to prospects to VIPs or whatever - everybody would have different criteria for how they would segment the list and it's all based on a basic tenet of direct marketing which is RFM. Have you ever heard of RFM?

Jaime: No.

Brian: RFM is the basics of list selection and media buying for everything that we ever did in direct mail and it all applies to online. R is for recency - someone who came on your list last week is worth more than someone who came on six months ago and never bought anything from you, we call that hotline. Frequency - if they came on your list and bought something or they came on your list and clicked on something or they came on your list and started more action with you, that's frequency. In our case it was always about how many times they bought and frequency became a multi-buyer, as well called it, which it could be for you too, it could be that they bought multiple products. And M is monetary - how much did they spend? Now you can start mixing and matching those criteria and you will have a VIP selection of people who have been on your list for the shortest amount of time, they came on recently but they've done a bunch of things already, they've been active with you in some way, buying or responding, and they might have even spent money with you. Now, those people deserve a very different communication than the people who just came on your list from Facebook and, not only that, it doesn't always have to be e-mail. I think direct mail is still a wonderful medium for the backend of all of this - I'm doing it. For my event, I have this huge event in September, so I have a list of people that I've sent e-mail mailings to, big lists of e-mails, and I know that there are people on those lists who have spent $100,000, for example, with a particular guru. I'm going to take that subset and I'm going to create a letter, and it's actually on paper, you've heard of that, right?

Jaime: What is it?

Brian: This paper thing, and then you actually put it in an envelope, it's this thing that you put paper into, and then you put a stamp on it.

Jaime: It's a sticker, not a stamp.

Brian: It's a sticker, right, you put a little smiley sticker on it because then it feels like e-mail. Then it's all personalized and think about that. It's a little bit of an aside but it's really interesting - I've dedicated my whole career to direct marketing education and I've taught direct marketing at colleges. I did a full semester at my alma mater in 1989. You were born then, right? Please tell me you were born!

Jaime: Yes I was born.

Brian: So I did a full semester at Rutgers in 1989 and it's so interesting that all of these principles of direct marketing and direct mail all still apply. It fascinates me when I speak to students. I did something last year where I spoke to 350 students who were all seniors in college looking for marketing careers, specifically direct marketing. I got up in front of them and I said "When you go on an interview how many of you, as soon as you get home, send an e-mail response saying "Thank you for the interview," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Almost everybody raised their hand. Then I said "How many of you actually send a letter?" Very few people raised their hand. "How many of you people would actually send a three-dimensional package to the person you interviewed with and send them something based on something you talked about? Like if you talked about an author or you talked about an article." There's this thing called a paperclip, I don't know if you've seen them, but you take this paperclip and you attach it to this letter and you put it in this big envelope from you with this thing, "Thank you for interviewing me. I found this article by John Smith, who we were talking about, who's a great author about this topic, one of my favorites." Don't lie in the letter but do something. I went to my microphone and said "If you do that, you will be the only one doing it." So differentiation is what I was trying to teach. Now let's take it to marketing.

Jaime: I never thought of it. Dan Miller, who wrote the forward of my book, he said he loved "Back to the Future" so I sent him a DeLorean model replica.

Brian: Fantastic. Three dimensional is great.

Jaime: I had no idea. That's so awesome.

Brian: Stu McLaren just told me about Dan Miller.

Jaime: I love Stu.

Brian: I love Stu too and he said Dan Miller is somebody I should definitely try to get to my event so I need to be connected to him

Jaime: I'll do an intro to him too. I love Dan.

Brian: I don't know him, I've only heard amazing things about him.

Jaime: Oh yeah, he's amazing. I totally interrupted you - to me, I've always seen it as a networking thing. I did this with my mentor, I sent him a letter before he ever became my mentor, and that's one of the reasons he became my mentor. He was like "You mailed me. Nobody your age mails me." I've thought about doing it to my list before, which I'm sure they would adore.

Brian: Absolutely. What about your top 50 people - send them a three dimensional package with something in there, whether it's a blog post that you print off. It doesn't have to be that extravagant.

Jaime: I send million dollar chocolate bars to my clients.

Brian: I love that stuff. Terry Marshall, who's speaking at my event, he's one of my heroes because people think he's a Google AdWords guy - don't let that fool you. This guy is a direct response titan. Terry, when you're in his renaissance club, you get a post in your e-mail saying the new newsletter is up but then, within two or three days, In the mail I get a 9x12 envelope with a transcript of the newsletter with a CD. Joe Polish does the same thing with his Genius Network interviews. Don't underestimate physical product. It's not just that, it's not just direct mail. Everybody's going to say "Oh, he's just the direct mail guy." It's about the relationship building through different media and showing people, as you move them up that ascension model which we all know in the online world, everything in the ascension model doesn't have to be online, everything in the ascension model doesn't have to be digital.

Jaime: It's almost better quality if it's not. It's like it builds the relationship even more.

Brian: It should. Not with everybody. Some people would be like "Why is this dinosaur sending me a direct mail piece'" But mail boxes have not been destroyed by the government - they're still there. I have this phrase that says "The least crowded inbox is the one you grew up with." Maybe not the one you grew up with but the one I grew up with - the mailboxes are emptier. I have an interview that I did with Joe Polish on my site and it's called "Everyone's going right, time to go left," and Joe is a huge fan of direct response marketing, whatever the medium, so that's why Joe and I are like brothers. We spent an hour just talking about how maybe direct mail is not the way to go for prospecting because it's a little too expensive - it's like making sushi, you don't want to do it. I'd rather buy my sushi, I don't want to make my sushi at home - and it's complicated, it's messy, it's got a lot of moving parts if you don't know what you're doing. However, on the back end, anybody can do direct mail. Here I am - I've mailed millions, billions of pieces of direct mail and yet you should see me at my desk - I'm preparing a letter with my assistant that we're going to hand put into envelopes and it just went out to 180 people. It's not that hard to do. Now, you do have to get them to go from offline to online. I could have an 800 number, which is another way to go, or I could have a reply card, but these are really online people already so in that respect if I get a good URL I can get them to go online very, very quickly from that letter. So, again, you don't have that barrier anymore of if you send them direct mail you can't get them to go online. My general audience for Bottom Line's products are like 80 years old so they're not going from a direct mail piece to a website so fast.

Jaime: It depends on your audience. But the people on my list, yeah, cool.

Brian: So they're totally online people and yet I believe they probably have a mailbox.

Jaime: Hopefully. We don't have a landline but we definitely have mailboxes.

Brian: Using 800 numbers and telemarketing on the backend - don't underestimate that. That's so underused and when it gets used - going back to the good and the bad - when it's used with cold calling through recorded messages, that's the bad part.

Jaime: I was going to say. Oh, good, that's the bad part.

Brian: I have this one joke. I've used it in a lot of podcasts but I'll use it here because there will be people who haven't heard it - I looked at someone's database once, it was an online marketer, let's assume one product from her - and that was like 10,000 people. Then there were people who bought two products, so that's a smaller number, and it goes all the way down to the bottom. She had one person who had bought 17 products from her. So my joke was, which wasn't a joke, "See that person who bought 17 products? How many times have you invited them over for dinner?" And I wasn't really joking. Why wouldn't that person get a special phone call from you, assuming you had permission and they weren't in the telephone preference service where you can't call them, or they've given you their phone number in some other transaction? I'm calling because you bought 17 products from me. What else should I be doing' Talk about surveying the right person. I hate focus groups because seven people in a room, they come for the cookies. You're not going to get the big picture on what your business is going to be about. I want to talk to the person who bought 17 products from me. What makes that person tick? "What were your favorite? What was your least favorite? What's missing?" Talk about a product development call. And then, after the call, I'm sending them that "Back to the Future" thing.

Jaime: DeLorean!

Brian: I'm sending them a three dimensional package. I'm sending them a bottle of champagne.

Jaime: That's a good point. I get tons of e-mails from people saying "I love you!" My assistant sends them to me and goes "Here's another Jaime Tardy super fan." I don't go into InfusionSoft and tag them but I really should because I love e-mailing these people. They're amazing people in general.
ing people in general.

Brian: That would be what we call a tick on the file. A tick is a good name here. I have a database of nine million names offline. Nine million records of people who have bought from us going back to the late 1970s with addresses corrected. They don't all buy from us anymore, of course, and when they're dead we try to get them off the list, but they've had a lot of health products so we've kept them healthy too so they can buy more stuff and I'm keeping them healthy, life's good. Everything that they do, you want to keep records online of what they clicked on, what they're interested in, where they went on your site. Every piece of data could be valuable. In my case I have what we call a trailer record on every one of those nine million names of everything they bought, every time that they were mailed, every time they were mailed and didn't respond, every time they mailed and did respond and then didn't pay or they paid - because we have a "bill me" offer, it's not always a cash upfront or credit card offer. So we have all of that data so when we go back with a new offer we're modelling the names based on all of those criteria in a scientific way. I always say the nine million name database should be treated the same as the 900 name database. So someone who has 800 names right now, it's not a big list but I'm trying to treat them the same way. You can't do everything. I'm not modelling them, believe me, but when I find people on my list who are super fans - there was one who was a super fan who was so bummed they couldn't afford my event in September and I don't have a payment plan and they were in a foreign country really far away, I think it was Dubai, and I went back to them and said "I'm not doing a payment plan but you've been such an amazing fan - you're responding to every one of my blogs, you're sending it out on your Facebook page, I don'
Brian: That would be what we call a tick on the file. A tick is a good name here. I have a database of nine million names offline. Nine million records of people who have bought from us going back to the late 1970s with addresses corrected. They don't all buy from us anymore, of course, and when they're dead we try to get them off the list, but they've had a lot of health products so we've kept them healthy too so they can buy more stuff and I'm keeping them healthy, life's good. Everything that they do, you want to keep records online of what they clicked on, what they're interested in, where they went on your site. Every piece of data could be valuable. In my case I have what we call a trailer record on every one of those nine million names of everything they bought, every time that they were mailed, every time they were mailed and didn't respond, every time they mailed and did respond and then didn't pay or they paid - because we have a "bill me" offer, it's not always a cash upfront or credit card offer. So we have all of that data so when we go back with a new offer we're modelling the names based on all of those criteria in a scientific way. I always say the nine million name database should be treated the same as the 900 name database. So someone who has 800 names right now, it's not a big list but I'm trying to treat them the same way. You can't do everything. I'm not modelling them, believe me, but when I find people on my list who are super fans - there was one who was a super fan who was so bummed they couldn't afford my event in September and I don't have a payment plan and they were in a foreign country really far away, I think it was Dubai, and I went back to them and said "I'm not doing a payment plan but you've been such an amazing fan - you're responding to every one of my blogs, you're sending it out on your Facebook page, I don't even ask you to do that. What can I do to get you to the event?" and I set up a handheld with my assistant, like doing direct mail, payment plan and she?s coming to the event.

Jaime: That gave me goose bumps. That's so crazy that we can connect with one person when you've got lists of crazy numbers of people.

Brian: With a $500 ticket you can do a lot. I wasn't doing that with $39 books and newsletters ' you have to weigh it. But, still, this is fun for me.

Jaime: I can tell. It's so cool.

Brian: I'm a little enthusiastic.

Jaime: It's so crazy that you're getting into this space because you know everybody who's big in this space in general so you can be 'Hey, everybody else I know has already done this before.' So you only take the cream of the crop, which is why I asked you that. You only know the good stuff from all of the amazing people that you work with.

Brian: The questions are great. They've really inspired me, obviously.

Jaime: You're going to have to come back on the show again at some point. We have to start wrapping up. I want to ask many more questions but I can't. The last question that I always ask everyone ' I gave you a heads-up beforehand so you should be prepared for this one ' what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Brian: There's a bunch that I would choose here. I have been blogging about a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about today and I'm going to blog about a lot more and that will be my first eBook but I think that concept of 100/0 and how you put it into place today. Everybody here, you're going to have some interaction in the next week, whether it's just a connection to a new person, it could be a major negotiation of a contract, it could be something in between those two things - it could be very major or very minor - but I encourage you to think about, when you go into it, don't start with "How am I going to get my 50/50 part of this deal?" Go into this as "I'm going to throw out 100/0. I'm going to put myself out in the biggest way possible", whether it's a LinkedIn request, a Facebook request, a contract where you don't know what the results might be on the first test and you want to leave it open ended " "Let's do this deal like this but let's revisit it when we get the results," which is what direct marketing is all about, "and then we'll see what the profit looks like and do the deal that makes sense so that no one feels slighted or cheated." I guess you can put that into effect in anything that you do in relationships - business, personal or otherwise. It seems kind of simple but I will guarantee you that the world will reward you for being totally generous in that 100/0 capacity. I got a lot of feedback on that blog post about 100/0 so I figured I really wanted to dive one step deeper. Was that specific enough?

Jaime: Yes. We are so lucky that we live in an age where we can do that. I love giving. I don?t care if I get anything back in return. My coach gets mad at me - she's like "You never ask for anything," but I love giving to people and helping. We are so lucky that we live in a place that's like that now. I know my mentor before would be like "No, there's competition!" but the fact that I can just give and so many people are like "How can I help you? Let me see what I can do," it just makes everybody's day; it makes everybody happier, and that's kind of why we're here too.

Brian: Sometimes it's a business relationship that needs a big contract and needs all of the bells and whistles for protection. I don't let lawyers run my business but you've got to be protected. So this is not about being flippant but it's really about being generous.

Jaime: I love that. Thank you so much, Brian. Tell us about your event and how we can sign up for your list because that is so important and you're so excited about that, so tell us more.

Brian: Let me do the list first because then it makes this interview much more evergreen because the event is happening this September of 2014 so if someone is listening after that at some point,

Jaime: You missed it, darn it!

Brian: Yeah, you missed it, but I'll have DVDs. So my site is BrianKurtz.me - I couldn't get BrianKurtz.com, somebody had it already, I was way too late to the party on that. At BrianKurtz.me there is a squeeze page that has an interview that Joe Polish did with Marty and I about how we built a $100 million business in less than a decade. It's a really good interview - it was done about ten years ago and Marty, who passed away last year, was still with it - it was after his stroke but he was still with it - and it was really powerful. Also on that site I have a lot of other content - that interview with Joe Polish about direct mail, a bunch of other things about newsletters and a bunch of other stuff. It's all free and I do a blog post every week which I'll turn into an eBook shortly. So it's BrianKurtz.me. The event is called "The Titans of Direct Response." It's September 11-12th. There was a VIP for 13th but it's sold out already. The speakers are Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman, Jay Abraham, Perry Marshall - all of the best copywriters who have ever written for Boardroom and are responsible for 650 million pieces of direct mail. Gary Bencivenga, who is probably the best living copywriter, who probably a lot of your listeners have never heard of, will be coming out of retirement to speak and he's the most amazing copywriter. Then I'm going to do a round table on masterminding and true accountability with the three guys who are in my $25 group - not my $25,000 group, my $25 group - who are my buddies here in Connecticut - Ryan Lee, Jim Quick and Michael Fishman.

Jaime: Jim and Michael, that's great. $25 - so you put $25 on the table every time?

Brian: It's $25 to buy bagels and now we're all gluten free so forget it, right? It's the four of us and we're going to have a session on that. I know I left out a speaker - oh, and then Greg Renker, who's the number one infomercial guy in the world, from Guthy-Renker, a $2 billion business. So he's speaking on direct response TV and then Fred Catona on direct response radio. So all multi-channel, all of the things I've talked about, this is a dream come true.

Jaime: They are titans.

Brian: They are all titans and it's in honor of Marty Edelston who passed away last October. All of these people are coming out for Marty. So there will be a lot about entrepreneurship, there will be a lot about direct marketing. Dan Kennedy and I will share the stage for the first half of the first day, talking about a lot of Dan's secrets but a lot of my secrets too, about how we built this company and what I learned about Marty. Dan was so enthralled with my eulogy of Marty, that's how this whole event started - he was a big fan of Marty Edelston. Dan Kennedy doesn't wax poetic about people all that often and Marty Edelston was one of the people that he looked up to and when I sent him my eulogy - it's all in my sales letter at TitansOfDIrectResponse.com. Everybody should go to that before September and sign up. I think it's going to be an incredible, epic event. TitansOfDIrectResponse.com. You can also go to BrianKurtz.me/titans and I think you get to the same place. I'm very excited - it's a lifelong dream to put together a dream team of the best direct response people. Everybody who's speaking, except maybe for Fred Catona because I don't know him that well, and Greg Renker has been a hero but not necessarily a mentor, but everybody else who is speaking is either a really close friend or a mentor or both and so this is a dream come true event for me. I really want the new generation of marketers to be there to see how this business was built and how it's going to be built going forward.

Jaime: That's so awesome - and you get so excited about it. It's so cool to see how excited you are about this event, let alone the titans you have that are going to be there. That's insane - I'll have to check my calendar and make sure I'm not doing anything. I hope everybody enjoyed this interview. Thank you so much for coming on today, Brian. It's been so nice to connect with you and I hope everybody goes and signs up for your list right now because everything you give is ridiculously valuable and I want to make sure everybody takes time for that so thanks so much for coming on the show today, Brian.

Brian: Thank you. It's been my pleasure.

Jaime: I hope you enjoyed that interview I did with Brian - our very first intrapreneur but he is full of a ton of interesting information which is why I made that exception and maybe I will in the future too. The funny thing is I just did four millionaire interviews yesterday - I recorded them all in one day - and one of them was with my mentor, Mike Lovitch, and he brought up Brian's name just because apparently they're really good friends, I didn't even know that. It's so funny what a small world we live in. everybody seems to be interconnected in similar spaces. So hopefully you loved Brian and you love what he's doing and can sign up for his stuff too because his was an amazing interview. If you haven't already signed up for our wait list for Millionaire Hustlers go to EventualMIllionaire.com/waitlist. I cannot wait to kick your butt for 90 days. So if you've been needing a butt kicking, lovingly of course, I can't wait. You know I do martial arts. I can't wait to kick your butt. Go to EventualMIllionaire.com/waitlist to find out more. Take care.

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Tags: Brian Kurtz, Business Growth, business success, direct response, direct response marketing, direct response marketing techniques, marketing techniques, millionaire interview, offline marketing, offline marketing tactics

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Mentors and Mastermind, Millionaire Interviews, Relationships

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