The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mastering Online Business: List Building and Consent-Driven Marketing with Bev Roberts

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Mastering Online Business: List Building and Consent-Driven Marketing with Bev Roberts Bevroberts.com About the Guest(s): Bev Roberts is an accomplished business mentor and author, dedicated to guiding individuals and businesses towards sustained growth and well-being, especially when navigating challenges such as chronic illness. With a rich professional background featuring an award-winning career in executive roles and consulting, Bev now thrives in helping others create and grow businesses that align with their core values. She holds a Master's in Business and is renowned for her expertise in intuitive business strategy, consent-driven marketing, and sales growth. Bev is also the author of the book "Hope in a Dark Tunnel: Your Roadmap to Wellbeing When Navigating Chronic Illness." Episode Summary: Welcome to another exhilarating episode of The Chris Voss Show, where we embark on an educational journey through the world of consent-driven marketing and sustainable business growth, guided by the wisdom of Bev Roberts. Bev shares insights from her critically acclaimed book "Hope in a Dark Tunnel," offering a roadmap to personal well-being for those grappling with chronic illness while simultaneously managing business aspirations. With her extensive background in business mentorship along with a focus on aligning business operations with individual passions, Bev brings a fresh perspective to building soulful client connections. Throughout the episode, we dive deep into the strategic importance of cultivating an authentic email list, stressing the role of personalized quizzes in understanding audience segmentation. Bev shares techniques for nurturing a well-suited client base and emphasizes the necessity of maintaining open lines of communication to foster authentic business relationships. Listeners can expect to learn about the significance of business systems and processes, strategic mentorship, and ethical marketing practices that foster long-term client loyalty and growth. Key Takeaways: Bev Roberts emphasizes the importance of consent-driven marketing to establish authentic connections and trust with clients. Strategic segmentation and audience understanding are achieved through well-designed quizzes, which help in attracting and retaining the right clients. Email lists are fundamental assets to a business, offering twice the conversion for sales compared to social media interactions. Regular maintenance and the pragmatic cultivation of email lists can enhance engagement and business growth over time. Nurturing client relationships through personalized content and service offerings leads to sustained business success. Notable Quotes: "Authenticity matters because it builds trust and connection; we buy from people that we know, like, and connect with." "I'd say you'd never want to build your business on the rented land of social media; your list is your asset." "Conversion for sales is double from your list than it is from social media." "What you do is nurture that list – don't think once they're on the list, it's set and forget." "Consent-driven marketing, I feel, is the way all of us as business owners need to move towards."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, one of the iron ladies, that makes it official.

Welcome to the show. For over 16 years, we've been bringing the Chris Voss Show nearly 2,200 episodes. We've been bringing you the most smartest people, damn it, in the world. And why aren't you sharing the show with your friends, neighbors, relatives? Don't make me come over there, folks. Go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com forward slash Chris Voss. Chris Voss won the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet where you can find us, you know, all that good stuff.

Today we have an amazing young lady on the show. We're going to be talking about some of the stuff that she does, including the notebook that she had out in 2018 called Hope in a Dark Tunnel. Your Roadmap to Being. I'm sorry. Let me cut that again. Hope in a Dark Tunnel. Your Roadmap to Wellbeing when Navig wellbeing when navigating chronic illness by Bev Roberts. She'll be joining us on the show and she's going to talk about some of the coaching and

client work that she does. She emerged from burnout after an award-winning executive and consulting career. She found her passion in helping others to create and grow online businesses that they adore, intuitively build value and and attract their soul-aligned clients. I'm going to date them all, it sounds like. With a master's in business, Bev loves mentoring clients, enabling them to implement the consent-driven, heart-led business, marketing, and sales strategies they need to succeed, no matter what the marketplace

does. Welcome to the show, Bev. How are you? I'm great. So good to be with you today, Chris. So good to be with you as well. Soul Align clients. This sounds like my soulmate.

Is that what Soul Align clients are? So what they are is each of us has a natural affinity for different styles of people. And what we do is when we're aligned with the things that really light us up, the work that we do, we attract the people that are really wanting the work that we offer. You definitely want to have those people. Cause if you have people that don't appreciate or value what you do, they're not very,

they're not very, it doesn't make for a very good simpatico. So give us your.coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? So you can find me at BevRoberts.com. Easy. Same as my name. You can find me on Facebook and Insta at BevRobertsMentor.

Easy to find, handle too. And I love being on LinkedIn because obviously that's where my business background came from. So you can find me under BevRoberts there as well. So give us a 30,000 overview what's in your book so the book came about because i had been a high achiever all of my life and suddenly i lost my cognitive function i thought it was burnout and i couldn't recall names of things. I had no ability to remember things. I just suddenly out of the blue. And when I went to try and understand what was going on for me, and the more that I try to research, because I'm a researcher by heart, I love to learn.

So I'm always looking for new ways of doing things. And what I realized is there were no books in the marketplace at the time that would help a high achiever like me take back control from something that was controlling me. So if you've ever been unwell with a bad case of flu, double that, triple it. And that's how I felt on a daily basis. I couldn't even get off the bed. I thought this is not going to conquer me. And the way that I wrote this book is I really felt I wanted to take all the practical things I was doing for myself and share them with people.

And one of the things that was stopping me from writing this book is that my cognitive function wasn't there, so I couldn't sit and write things. So I thought I'm going to get around this and I used the word to text you know speech to text options in Microsoft Word and I just talked my book out talked and talked and talked and talked did some light editing got myself an editor went to bestseller and yeah loved I loved the process but it was a learning journey for me in the you know getting that word out so you figured out a way to hack around you know the issues you were having and getting a book written and and you know sometimes it's easier to do that

it's easier to speak it and let somebody else edit it worked for me yeah I wish I'd done that let's talk about some of the services. Actually, let's talk about what influenced you when you grew up. Your bio, basically, in your words, how were you raised? What influenced you? What were some of the motivating factors and people that shaped you throughout your life that kind of got you to where you are today when you help? I think in this sort of schooling environment, I didn't fit in because I was an innovator and I didn't really like to conform.

So those early days of learning, whilst I loved the learning, I hated the structure. And my first sort of foray into a career was to do something that I could learn and earn at the same time. So my background is actually in the medical world. I was a radiographer. But as soon as it became computerised, I realised for me that learning on a daily basis is my driver. And so I wanted to make a difference and I thought, now how do I do this?

Started an undergraduate degree and that's where the world of computers opened to me. But as soon as I got in that world, Chris, I realized that I'm a people person. I'm not a technologist. I use technology to make things faster, easier, automate things. And I was surrounded in that space by some incredible business mentors. So I worked for a small organization at first that were acquired by big organizations. I had the good opportunity of having my rise in my career really quickly because I was always willing to do what others weren't in that space and realized that it's actually all business is related to relationships and how we connect with people. So authenticity, the way that we show up every day, it matters. People want to be with people that they like.

Yeah. Authenticity matters. Why is authenticity so important? I think in a world now where you're not sure what's real anymore with the AI and things like that, authenticity counts more than ever because it builds trust and connection. And we bar from people that we like, trust, know, and connect with. In your website, you have several different services you offer and you coach on, I guess. Tell us about some of the things that you have as offerings there. Yeah, so what I realized is that not everybody has the good fortune to be in a business world like I was, you know, where I had access to that sort of business mentoring, understanding how a business actually operated at the operational level, at the financial level, marketing and all of those sort of things. So I offer what I would call mentoring for businesses

and usually online businesses. I have done a few bricks and mortar businesses, but my specialty is in online businesses and growing online businesses. And what we do is we start with the person's vision and really get clear on what is it they really want, what do they really want to do? And then we work at how they're going to get there and create all the elements for them that allows them to not have to be on social media all the time, because for a lot of us, it's pretty draining. And so what are all the assets you need in your business? That's my mentoring arm of my business. And so that's usually 12 months because Rome wasn't built in a day. So you need time, you need time to build that business and then i also focus on teaching people how to get the right people into your your inner circle i call it you know on your

subscriber list how do you get the right people in there who are good fit for your business that are ready to over time time, purchase from you. So it may not be ready right at the beginning, but for me the list growth that you have in your business is like the lifeblood, like cash flow is to your financial life flow, list growth is to your business growth. I offer services there around growing your list in different ways. One of the areas that I'm loving at the moment is Quiz Alchemy.

So it's teaching people how to deeply understand their own audience in order to segment the content they share with them, as well as provide them with meaningful and valuable content to grow them through their own client journey. So it's sort of very bespoke. It helps you understand the audience as well as offer specific, you know, so for example, my own quiz is called, you know, know and discover your client connection style, because we all have an inherent way that we show up and the way that we work with different people and for example one of them is a strategic architect so the strategic architect is somebody who's much more left brain very structured and so a lot of their work is around systems processes and less about interacting with people. When they know that,

they then realize where the areas they have a shortfall and where the areas that they have strengths and then play to their strengths. Darrell Bock And so you help them navigate this. Why is it important to build a list? Why is it important? I mean, I think some of us know what that means, what it is, but why is it important for anybody out there who's like, why do we really need a mailing list? I would say you would never want to build your business on the rented land of social media.

Your list is your asset. It's part of your whole business. And when you keep nurturing and connecting and providing value, they become your loyal fans and followers. So you can have somebody with a huge social media following, the account gets hacked, in a day they've lost everything in their business. Yeah, yeah. I've had that happen. We've lost hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, a lot of followers on Instagram. We got hacked by some Chinese thing somehow that got wormed into our account. And you know, it's a problem because you lose like all that access

to your things. And when you build- And that's why you have, Chris, you have the option for somebody to get a notification of your new podcasts. And that's exactly why. Because, yes, you put it out on social media too, but your inner circle get that notification straight away. If they're interested, they can get straight into it. Yeah. It's something where having your own control, having your own control having your own access you know if i've had like recently we we had a you know i run a big huge dating group and we had somebody who was on the sexual predator list for

the state of utah and they had gained entry to the group someone found them out thankfully we have a couple people in there in the police department and they and so i had to contact i had to make a post to our facebook group to say hey if anybody was came in contact with this person by the way he wasn't supposed to be in here according to his parole agent you know he was a bad man and face and and so i put a link to the database for sexual abuse profiles for the state of utah said, you know, if you need to search for anybody, you know, in the future, here's where you go do it. And I mean, that's a link to the Utah state government database.

Facebook, you know, sent me a warning to my account saying that I was promoting spam and money-making opportunities by posting that. And I was just aghast. Yeah. And so, for example, if you didn't have another way to connect with that group, and they closed your account, that's that whole part of your business gone. Yeah. And I've actually had cut off to my groups because of some stuff. And other people clearly posted. There a post that michael michael moore from michigan who you know he did several movies i reposted something he'd reposted and it had been shared over 10 000 times but i made a cut and copy of it and reposted it and yeah got suspended for

that for i think 30 days or something and i was like i couldn't access my groups i couldn't access the business on my profile. And it was something that wasn't, you know, it had been shared 10,000 times by his followers. But, you know, for some reason, because I cut it on my own, I was suspended because I was sharing terrorists. It was pictures of the Taliban, I think, or something taking over Afghanistan. And I think that's another point, Chris, is it depends on your subject matter and your content. But some people, for example, if it is, let's say, to do with dating or, you know, whatever the subject matter is, and people don't feel comfortable to share in a public domain, if you don't have a list, how are you going to allow them to be vulnerable and how they can, you can talk off topic, you know, that's not allowed on social media. So it's better to build your list and to build it with, as I mentioned, the right people

because you need a way to attract the right people, but you also need a way to repel the people who are not your people, right? You don't need people clogging up your list that will never bar from you or not interested in what you've got to share. So should you kick those people off your list when you profile them or something, or what do you do with those folks? Yes. So what I do is in terms of teaching about healthy and hygienic mailing lists, because a lean mailing list is a high-performing mailing list. So what you want is people on your list who open your emails, right?

So what I do is go through a process every quarter of making sure all the people who are not bothering to open my emails, I export them so I could use them for ads because they probably came for one reason. And then I just cull them out of the database because that just keeps how the mail systems work is that the better your deliverability, the more they serve your mail domain. It means that if you've got, let's say, for example, 1,000 subscribers and you're only getting a 20% open rate, which in some industries is a norm, which I don't think is enough personally, but say 20% open rate. That means that you basically only got the 200 people opening. What about the others? Is it the way their email is set up are they not interested in watching they're too lazy to unsubscribe what is it and that's i think we're also what i work

with is consent driven marketing so you don't just get people onto your list by buying lists or if they happen to purchase something from you on your shop, what you do is you actually invite them to, you know, do you want to receive information from me? Tick here if that's a purchase. If it's through, let's say, your dating group, is to offer them a free checklist or something like that. It's how to spot a predator a mile away, you know, and let them sign up for that.

And then they join your mailing list. They know exactly what your mailing list is about because they've received that first offer. And they're not surprised when you start talking about things that are relevant to dating. It's, you know, it's an interesting thing. And to have people, you know, have Facebook threaten you. I've had friends that they've been on Facebook and they get their ad somehow pisses Facebook off. And so they'll get suspended on their ad account. And you're just like, holy crap, you can't make money now.

You're big on the consent-driven marketing. And how do you usually map the online client journey with consent? So what you want to know is you want to identify up front, what are the touch points? Where are you going to be touching that particular individual who's in your, you know, want them to join your mailing list? Because if you identify the touch points, so for example, they might follow you on social media, then they join your list. Then they've downloaded the opt-in that you gave them and all those sort of what's the touch points. Once you know those, you then obviously are seeking permission at each stage. For example, if you developed another opt-in, you don't just send it to everybody. Even if they're on your list you say hey if you'd like to

get this new one just click here and download it straight away you're already a valued subscriber click here and download it so you don't just sort of shunt stuff towards people and then I use a lot of feedback loops so for example surveys from time time, because their feedback is going to help you refine and improve what you're offering, but also their journey. So they go, oh, I hadn't thought that I still need this, you know, or what is it that I'm missing at the moment? And then personalize the interactions. That's why I love quizzes. And that's why I teach about defining quizzes and making really good quality quizzes. Because if you design a quiz that's really going to segment your audience into, so for example, I'm not sure of the dating world myself, but I'm going to try and give an example that's relevant. So, for example, if I am younger, newly, you know, interested in finding my life

partner, or I could be, you know, post a breakup, post a loss of my partner. So, those people need different information from you. So, you could have a quiz that actually defines what stage of their life they're at or their dating life that they're at. And then you provide them the information that they want. And then once you start to know that, you can monitor and adjust how you meet that client need. And that's what builds loyalty. Yeah. Loyalty is what you want. You want loyal customers, people who love you and support you and want to be a part of your team, what you're doing. And now you have a thing on your website, some quiz and some insights that come from that quiz. How do you recommend leveraging the quiz and tell people how they can onboard with that

and interact with it? Yeah. So when you have a quiz, what you're really doing is creating a very transparent form of communication. But what people also want to know as well is that they're going to get insights. So the way that I teach people to leverage those quiz insights responsibly is to protect people's data. For example, if I'm sharing with you that of all the people who've taken the client connection quiz, 40% are advocates, you know, so those kinds of things. So you'd normalize and neutralize the information. You wouldn't say these people with this personal demographic do this, you so you'd you'd make sure you protect their data and then you use what you understand like just with that example of dating those different life stages of dating you'd personalize that and create content specific to those people

and when you get people to sign up for your quiz, what you're wanting to do is take the minimum amount of information. You don't need somebody's surname. You just need a first name and an email address. So your email address is the unique identifier for the person. And then very important in a consent-driven environment is to ensure they can opt out when they have had enough. So you don't use your own personal email to send these things. You use what we call an autoresponder.

And that means that, you know, there's some governance around it. We also are all actually, if people don't know this, that there's the Can Spam Act. And you are, as any provider, whether you provide services or products, you cannot just add people to your database. It's legislated that you can't do that. So we do it in a way that you've communicated the purpose clearly of them joining your list. And then you stick with that purpose, right? You seem to have your finger on the pulse of how to develop lists and then, of course, the journey through those lists and how to make sure that, you know, one of the problems

I have is, and I imagine you find this a lot with clients, is, you know, we've developed a list over on, what's the monkey one? MailChimp. MailChimp. The monkey one, yes. 20 years or something, I still forget the name. It's the monkey one mail chimp mail chimp the monkey one 20 years or something i still forget the name it's the monkey one whichever it was a it was the other one for a while for half that time and then we moved over to mail chimp but yeah there's a lot of we we pay you pay for the list and and the bigger

it grows whether it's effective or not you're paying for the size of it and so doing some of the techniques that you're talking about especially size of it and so doing some of the techniques that you're talking about especially you know quarterly cleaning up that inventory and you know maybe making sure you're not paying for some more than than you're really utilizing or that that are opening your mail i mean why pay for people that are you know we have to go in and i think we archive our some of our lists from time to time if they haven't opened the email in a while. What's interesting, Chris, if I can just interject there, is what I realized, like, I understand a lot about, you know, the energy of the connection and the relationship with people. So if people are not interested in your work, what you do is when you archive them and not export them and then delete them from the database is you are still got a

tenuous, even thing connection with you, right? So what you, I feel what's best for your business is to let go of that old stale energy right if they're not interested in what you're doing good just send them on their way away with love and you know invite new people in the people who are interested and then nurture those new people to make sure that you know they're really getting value from being on your list. Because the one thing I've seen a lot of, and I'm not sure that I think some of us are guilty of this in the past, is we just regurgitate what's already on our socials. Now, I join your list because I want unique content. I want stuff first. I want stuff that others aren't going to get access to right so like your tips and methods around dating or whatever it is whatever the subject matter is

you give your best value to people who are in that inner circle because as you are generous towards those people they'll be generous in return by putting their wallet where it fits on the desk, ready to buy your product. Now, I see on the website, there's so many different offerings you have. You have a strategic, I've got a camera here in my way, strategic mentorship. You've got the quiz alchemy done for you, opt-in funnels and growing your list. Why don't we talk about funnels for a little bit? What do you do there for clients? Yeah. So what I realized is that a lot of people, when they first start out in business, they certainly didn't start their business to become

a technical guru. And in online business, it does require a lot of moving paths, especially with the technology. They get the ideas, they're ready to put all the copy and the content together, and then they get to the technology. Now, yes, you can hire someone at low cost to build the funnel for you, but that is not a strategic way to do it because the thing is that that's going to stand the test of time. So your podcast has been around for 16 years. You've got methods and processes that are strategic that you use to keep that show the way that it is.

So it is with building opt-ins and funnels. There's ways to build opt-in and funnel that ensures that you move somebody from one step into the other and that they willingly go to that next step, right? So we don't coerce people. We invite them into that next step and keep them moving forward in the funnel. But a lot of people get tripped up because they just don't know the technology or the strategy. And so what I do is do, you know,

understand what it is you're trying to create, give you all the checklists to go away, build all these things, and then we do it for you. So it sort of takes the pain out of being in an online business. You know, there's a bit of pain. I mean, it's hard for people to navigate all this stuff. I mean, and then what you're doing is, you know, monitoring it-tuning it assessing it you know and all this stuff i mean you can't you know we've i mean we've had mailing lists for a long time and there's a lot of just i don't know if redundancy is the right word but there's a lot of you know fall off you know especially over as long as we've been around and you know as people could open

the emails and and they wander off for whatever reason sometimes google start school start sending everything to spam maybe seen that movie uh and there's probably different ways people need to set that up do you help people with you know like we we do some sort of anti-spam there's some sort of secure setup where we prove you know yes through it's i think it's a google workspace or something and we you know there's some sort of process i forget the terminology we set it up years ago yes so in last october um both were a number of large email providers like google and others wanted to limit the amount of spam that was being sent off their platforms and so they introduced a lot of rigorous things that needed to be done. And it caught a lot of people short because they didn't understand the underlying technology. So

what we did at that time was offer a service to get that. But I always check when I work with anybody, always check a couple of things. One is, is your email going to get delivered into the email box nine times out of 10? Because sometimes it could be a subject line or something that triggers a spam flag. We teach people, okay, these are the spam triggers. You're not going to use those as subject lines. Like the word money. Money is one of the biggest triggers for spam filters, right?

So you've got to talk about wealth instead of money. Silly, but yeah, so those kind of things. So getting the underlying technology is important to get that right. But the other thing is knowing how to use the subject line preheader so that it does get into somebody's mailbox and gets their attention. So on your smartphone, you'll see if you open up your email, you see the top two lines. Use that space really well and it'll help people go, oh, I'm curious about that. So I would say don't use clickbait stuff, but focus on making someone curious enough to actually open that email.

And then also in the funnels, what we look at is the timing. So the frequency of your opt-in funnel is important because if you keep bombarding with people with emails every day, they're just going to get, you know, they're going to say, I've had enough. I'm out. So your timing of your emails, the communication frequency is important. And also just in each of the emails, they don't have to be war and peace. They need to, though, hit a sweet spot. What is the purpose of this email? What is that person going to get a quick win or an idea to do something differently and move them through that so there's there's a few things you know that you can you can

see that that beyond beyond the technology there's a lot of strategy strategy required to get all those emails into somebody's inbox yeah what do you what do you think of the people there there's people that they send a massive amount of emails and sometimes they're like i don't know how you explain them but sometimes they're like kind of guilt you haven't clicked on our links we kind of feel like we miss you and or you know it's kind of clickbaity but not really but i don't know how to explain what what those types of emails are and they they clearly come from someone who programs this stuff and sends it out to clients. And here, use these titles. It's kind of like guilt trips stuff where it's, do you still like us?

Open our emails. You know, that sort of thing. You know what I'm talking about? Have you seen people do that? No. Like, what I would normally do, so for example, you know, I said I've got a quarterly process and I've actually got a high-performing email list product that I use to teach everybody that quickly because I had to keep repeating myself. So I just made a product that people could get.

And the first thing is to understand if they're still interested. And so I use fun and personalization. So, for example, one of my emails would be like, this is a bit awkward. My system's telling me that you haven't opened the emails. Now, this could be because your email setup is different. But, you know, it's like telling the birds and bees to your kids. So you do a bit of storytelling that's light, that's fun,

but not the guilting. Like, I mean, you've got to put yourself in the shoes of the person getting that information. And for those people who are learning from other marketers, I'd say, please don't disengage your brain and your own thought process. Because if you wouldn't like to receive it, please don't send that stuff out. You know, the cold, cold emails in your LinkedIn profile? Well, I found out that there's a lot of new tools with AI that actually scrape your LinkedIn contacts and then just start spamming them with these different emails. And people think they're appropriate. And I said, what is appropriate?

If a door-to-door salesman came to your door and said, I'm selling the Encyclopedia Britannica, would you like to buy? You'd probably just close the door and move on, you know? So don't think that those tactics work. They do not work. I can remember somebody saying, oh, but I've got a few clients from it. I said, you could have got a lot more clients if you actually just offered them something of value from your posts. And they see it and they go, oh, this person gets me.

Like, I'm interested in what they've got. But don't come and hang out in my DMs. Sorry. I'm not. Yeah. I don't want that. out in my DMs. Sorry. I'm not. Yeah. I don't want that. That stuff drives me nuts. And the other thing is spam emails. So they'll get my email off of LinkedIn.

And, you know, it's there. But they'll get my email off LinkedIn. And they'll be like, hey, we sent you a message on LinkedIn. You didn't reply. And so now you're in my mailbox? Maybe there's a reason I didn't reply. You know? And I used to be nice to marketers. And now I burn them. And so now you're in my mailbox? Maybe there's a reason I didn't reply. And I used to be nice to marketers, and now I burn them.

And so if they send me a, what is it, through LinkedIn, they charge you an in-mail fee, I think it is. Okay. And so if you don't reply and you just say ignore, my understanding is they don't charge the people for the in-mail it's only if you respond or something so i always make sure i respond i'm gonna ask i just finally was like you know what i'm tired of being nice i'm tired of the abuse you know i have i think 60 000 followers on linkedin so i just get slammed. And the biggest F you that you can point at me is to take my email off of something and I'm not responding on LinkedIn. And then you're like sending it to my email and then they'll send three or four emails after that. It's such an invasion of privacy. Honestly, It's such an invasion of privacy and why people think it's acceptable.

That's why I say when I started in the online space, I did a couple of marketing courses because I thought I might have some gaps in my own knowledge in the online space. And I just actually, my gut turned at some of the tactics, right? Because when I first started an online business, people were buying lists. And I thought, there's got to be a different way. There has to be a different way because those people never invited me

into their space. And so why should I just go barging in like a bull in a china shop into their personal space, whether it's through DMs, through the email, or like, you know, the bots are going wild on Facebook with tagging you in messages and stuff like that. And it's constant vigilance. And I'm going, this is not, there's nothing ethical about it. So if you're an ethical business owner, why would you do it?

Yeah, I'm glad I found a fellow person who's not interested in that kind of style of marketing. Yeah. I hate it. I wish I could find, I usually block and the spam people, but there's like a, I don't know how to explain it. I'm trying to see if I have anybody doing it, but I usually kick them pretty pretty hard But there's like these guilt trip sort of heart tugging Things like we love you. We miss you. We haven't heard from you. It's kind of weird I feel like dude like I'm busy and you know, I've see I guess I see it all really when it comes down to it But usually I find that there's But there's another way, right?

There's another way. I'm talking to… I feel that consent-driven marketing for the future is where all of us as business owners need to move towards. That's… I mean, do you really think that pissing people off right at the beginning is going to make them customers? I don't know. I really don't think so. I wonder if there's like a

what's that what's that thing called when you kidnap somebody and then they fall in love with you it was the stockholm syndrome stockholm syndrome it's almost kind of like some sort of narcissistic starkholm syndrome they're playing with you like you have an open door email do you still love us or do you hate us you're like I don't know you well enough to hate you. I mean, that's kind of strong. I'll click your link. Okay, sucker. I think people, all of us like autonomy, like we want to make our own choices.

So more so in marketing, right? That's why I say, even if you've got a product and somebody buys your product that does not that's implicit consent it's not explicit explicit consent is where you say would you like to sign up for our newsletter check this box right that's explicit consent and it's the same with you know opt-ins as we mentioned opt-in funnels you take somebody to a landing page you tell them why it's a really good reason to download this avoid predators you know checklist and you take them on that journey and then i think the other thing that we so the one side is how do you get the person on your list that's right for your business and you know for the long term you want to build a trusting and lasting relationship with those people.

So what you want to do is nurture that list, right? Don't think once they're on your list, it's set and forget. I'm getting emails from you every time you're releasing a new podcast, right? So I know you're sort of training me really nicely to say, hey, Chris is going to only email you when he's got value to share. Yeah. Although if you weren't podcasting regularly, you would still want some sort of frequency. Yeah.

Some people say weekly. I feel that's a bit much with our busy lives at the moment. I'm kind of for choose what works for you. How can you be consistent if it's for you know you don't say fortnightly if it's every two weeks or if it's once a month but do it and add really value-driven content right make make each email count right so i know when i get yours and i get the summary i go yeah that's fantastic i'm going to go and listen to that piece because it's about marketing i'm going to you know so i think that's where for us it's the one part starting the list not being you know held ransom by the social media and then it's actually growing and nurturing that list so

that people really get to know you you get understand. I always put invites for people to hit reply, you know, and tell me what's going on with that particular thing. Because you start building up rapport with people, even if they haven't bought from you yet. Maybe, let me ask you this. What about asking questions, you know, not the guilt trip, narcissistic, weirdo questions. You know, I wish I could could find it but i know that

somebody makes these and they're like a boilerplate question guilt trip emails that go out and i'm just like what the fuck what about asking questions and i think you mentioned surveys in a conversation a few minutes ago so sometimes yeah sometimes i'll use a survey and obviously what you don't want to do is somebody to spend hours doing it. But, for example, when I launched my quiz, I asked the question, which of these titles do you think, you know, actually reflects what I've just shared with you about what I want this quiz to be able to do. And I got stacks of replies because everybody loves to share their opinion, but I'm not guilting them into doing it. I'm saying, hey, this is my quiz. This is what it's about. If you want to discover your client consent, sort of that connection style, then this is what it's's about but this is what i'm thinking of naming it

so it's those kind of things or for example if people have been on your list for a long time you could be asking the question of what are you looking for what's missing do you need something else from me you know is there something that i could fill a gap for you that kind of question email this is what the hell do you people want already don't don't do that people it's not that's a joke not quite not quite it's not going to build rapport but it's sort of you know it's two-way communication and then you'll see people start to just respond to your emails you know or you know send a reply and say hey that podcast episode was absolutely stellar i need to hear more like that that's a good one what's the best maybe you know like i could ask people because

we put out a lot of content we put out two three two three shows a weekday which is about 10 to 15 shows a week there's been times where we do four we try not to do four so much anymore because it's i don't think my i think i think by four i'm a little drained and i'm not on my point the audience right now is yeah he's not on you can always tell what the fourth one is no that's not true folks sometimes sometimes i'm i'm just hitting on all cylinders by the third or fourth one i'm kind of warmed up and in gear and And it kind of depends on the guest and the day. But, you know, maybe we should ask people, what was the best podcast you liked this week out of the 15 we sent to you?

And that's where, remember I was talking to you about segmenting the audience? So one of the ways you could do that is with a basic quiz is to say, because you've got different subject matters. So I noticed you've got someone marketing, there was someone on mortgages and financials and those kind of things. So you could say, tick which ones apply, right? And then you'll start to see where the trends are, right? And that's where you could go towards that because I think is people will show in

what whatever they interested in and that's what I like about some of the people whose lists are subscribed to where they say which of these topics would you like to hear from us on ah so then we can ask people what kind of guess would you like to see that we don't have on the Chris Voss Show? Correct. So it could be a two-part questionnaire, basically a simple questionnaire that says, out of these topic areas, tick all the ones you love listening to, and then who would you like to hear on the show?

That's going to take you one minute. Tick, tick, tick, put some names down. I get a lot of feedback on YouTube on the show? That's two. That's going to take you one minute. Tick, tick, tick. Put some names down. I get a lot of feedback on YouTube about the show, too. Hey, can you shut up more? I actually shut up on that one and let the guy talk. And I mean, I did the intro. What more do you want from me?

Yeah, I like the two-way conversation. Yeah, yeah. Although sometimes it ends up like the host jumps in too much. And I'm like, that the guest didn't give me anything he was giving me like one word answer so i had to fill and sometimes you have to carry the guest because you're like so tell us about your book it's published uh you got any more in that book there you want to share with people you know it's got a cover on it you're like you're killing me holmes give me more but yeah we get nice feedback but i like this interacting with our list you know some people i i think we might be guilty of this we treat our we we kind of just treat our list and it's over

there it's hopefully it's still working and for example if somebody is not on social media, right, the mail list is doing its purpose. So I'm getting that alert on my mail list. And so I'm choosing, okay, yeah, I'm going to watch that one. No, not going to watch that one. So it's a good self-selection tool. We have Bob on Wednesday. Why do you hate Bob? know didn't open bob's

link to bob i mean he was talking about the sex life of insects evidently it wasn't popular so we're just kind of curious why do you hate our you know now it's a guilt trip thing why do you hate our show no no yeah you're not going to get a response. It's kind of just opt out. Just, you know, that's what I think. Like with all things, there's seasons for things, right? So I will consume some podcasts because I'm in a learning process for something. And then it gets to a point where I've got like, I think I've done enough and I will, you know, opt out of that. And I think that is human nature. Right. So I don't, that's why I say if people have got to the point where they don't want to open your emails desktop and they forward email from Gmail or something to Outlook on their desktop, it might not show as red on the original because it's still sitting

in the Gmail folder. So that's why I always do the check-in, you know. The system says this, but, you know, it's a bit awkward, you know. Are you still interested? If so, click here. here if not have a wonderful time we'll take you off our list i know there's a lot of people that do that they'll send me an update maybe we've been on their list for a lot of years and they'll be like hey do you still want to get stuff from us or do you hate us no i'm just kidding don't do the guilt stuff but and and so

then you you end up replying to them going hey you know put me on your new list and it seems like they just create a whole new list and they wash out the old list that seems like a technique or people are using does that sound about right no i would say for example in in terms of what i would say like the the hygiene the cleaning out of the list is what you're doing is you're looking for people who haven't opened your emails between 90 and 180 days. So, in other words, three to six months. So, they really turned you out at that point if they're not... Yeah, really. That's true. So, if they've not opened any of your emails in that time,

you could just do one re-engagement email. And if they don't respond, you just export the data, put that into your ads file, and then remove them from the database. And as I said, I feel that that's an energetic cutting. Now we're not connected anymore. Go well. So after 90 days, they've kind of forgotten about you. You're not on the important list maybe.

Do you try and recapture those and say, hey, let's be friends again? Or do you have to... Well, I do re-engage them to email and give them a reason to stay. So if there's something that they may have missed by not opening the emails that other people have seen a lot of value in, I'd say, maybe you missed seeing this. If you're interested, click there, that sort of thing. The re-engagement process is at the beginning of the cleansing process because as i said it could be the way the email set up it just could be where they are at in their journey but if they don't respond at

all that's your answer right yeah if they don't respond at all sounds you know how much time should i think you do some of the services for this, but how much time does someone be, you know, putting into their mailing list, you know, maintenance and kind of trying to, you know, get it to become more active? How much time do you recommend a week, either someone like you who helps people or someone, but you need to have a regular newsletter you know how often are you doing that and then that back end is the cleaning bit right so you keep filling the bus from the front inviting new people in but you in the middle of the middle section is the people who've probably I mean like you said you've been going 16 years Chris there could be people on your list who've been with you all the time because they're loving what you're doing. They love the variety. They love the tongue-in-cheek stuff, you know.

And they could have been there for all of those 16 years. Oh, and, you know, hopefully. And because they know you've been sending them an email all the time. This is a new podcast out, new podcast out, whatever. You know, so they know. You've fed the need, right? You fed the need. That's what we do around the Chris Voss Show.

We feed the need. Yes. That's a new motto. Feed the need. Subscribe to the Chris Voss Show today. Yeah. Because I think that's the other thing that I notice in my work is that people say, I want this, I want to do this in business, you know, I want to grow my business. All right, but what do you actually need?

What's missing that's stopping you from getting there? So it's that kind of thing, terms of time every week, I would say probably if you're a business owner, at least three hours if you don't have a team. It is something that once you start growing a team, you can actually delegate. So you can come up with the ideas for all your social posts and those kind of things or for blogs or for podcasts or for interviews. And obviously, you're going to do the podcast yourself and those kind of things or for blogs or for podcasts or for interviews. And obviously, you're going to do the podcast yourself and those kind of things. But the background, the engine room could be done with other people, you know, supporting you to get that done. So the time I think that you allocate depends on which stage of business you're in.

So as we go out, just been really informative, folks. If you haven't been through the whole episode, be sure to listen to it. As you go out, give us your final pitch to people to onboard with you, reach out to you, how they can handshake with you, find out if they're a fit for you and yada, yada, yada. Yeah. So as I said, I'm really passionate about consent-driven marketing because I just find that the need to connect authentically is greater than ever in the time today. So the best place to head to is to my website, BevRoberts.com, and that will get you started, right? And you can reach out to me in multiple different ways. There is a messenger that you can just send me a message straight up

from my website if you want to, or you can, you know, there's areas, there's free resources you can download, getting yourself organized to do that. Or if you're interested in working with me, there's a way to do that as well. Set up an appointment and we can see if we're a good fit. I'll do a business assessment with you. So the business assessment kind of helps people, you know, kind of know what they need work on and how you can help them and their strengths and weaknesses, I guess. Yeah, so I'm looking sort of quite helicopter view. Okay, where are you now?

Where do you want to be? What's the gap? Here's my three suggestions of how you fill that gap. Can I support you to do that? Are you interested in working with me? All right. It's been wonderful and very insightful to, you know, you've made me, you've guilt tripped me into thinking about my list more.

Good, because list growth is business growth. You know, and it is too. I mean, it's the one thing you can control. I think I've seen data and studies that say that, you know, the best results come from your list rather than, I don't know, posting on Twitter. In terms of conversion for sales, conversion for sales is double from your list than it is from social media. Yeah, listen to that. And they even got accident with the beep there. So that's how important it is.

Anyway, thank you very much for coming to the show, Bev. We really appreciate it. So I appreciate appreciate the opportunity i've had a blast yes wonderful discussion as well and let's see chris nielsen from linkedin it just might be the right time follow-up is everything thanks for that i think he put that at the bottom of the half so i'm not sure he's referring to but thanks for the comment thanks for tuning in order up bev's book wherever fine books are sold hope in a dark tunnel your roadmap to well-being when navigating chronic illness and check out our services and all that good stuff you know make sure you maintain your list don't forget about that thing you're paying for it every month you know so if you you know we did that for a lot of years we just let it pile up we're just like hey what is that thing doing over there because

the money just keeps going up. The bigger cards. Yes. Should we be doing some of that? I don't know. Anyway, thanks for my answer. Tune in. Go to Goodreads.com.

Fortress. Christmas. LinkedIn.com. Fortress. Christmas. Christmas. One on the tickety-tockety and all those crazy places. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out, Bev.