Mike Taber

Mike is the founder of Bluetick.io, an email marketing tool for warm and cold lead followups. Bluetick systematically automates followups and helps our customers approximately triple their response rates from warm and cold leads. For years prior to the launch of Bluetick, Mike was responsible for selling conference sponsorships for MicroConf, a conference for self-funded software entrepreneurs. Over $100k of conference sponsorships are directly attributed to the process that Bluetick largely automates.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Mike’s success

Being systematic about following up until getting an answer or deciding it’s no longer worth pursuing

Result if you follow the steps in Mike’s session

Approximately triple response rate by simply sending more than one email

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Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I actually implemented this as part of a demo process that I ran for Bluetick a while back, that when somebody would come to the website, and there it was, back when the product was still kind of in an early access period. You could go to the website, and there was a form there that you just put in your email address and says requested invite that would take you over to a forum, was run by Gravity Forms on a WordPress website, and it would ask a bunch of questions.

And from there, I would look at the response and say, do I want to talk to this person or not? Because there were some people who would fill out, who listened to my podcast or they were students, they just kind of wanted to kick the tires or take a look around. But the reality of situation was, it was going to be a waste of my time to try and interact on a one to one basis with these people.

I didn’t want to have to commit half hour or an hour to doing a demo with a student who’s simply not going to pay for the software. So I use that as kind of a filtering process. And at that point, they’ve raised their hand. They’ve filled out the form and they’ve said, hey, I would like to see this or I would like to get in on this and at least kick the tires a little bit and see if it’s going to work for my business.

So I would kick those into an email sequence and then customize that first email and invite them to come on to a demo. And all of the emails that were in the rest of that email sequence, they were completely automated. The first email tens, and this is kind of a general rule of thumb that I’ve seen the first email, in a warm email scenario will get about a 30% response rate.

If you do a really good job with your second email, you can get another 30% and then fourth, third, fourth, fifth, six, etc, depending on how far you want to take it. That will comprise the rest of it. And this particular email sequence, I got an 80% response rate.

Now, not everybody clicked through and actually scheduled a demo, but I got an 80% of the people who went through that process. I got a yes or yes, I’m going to be on a demo or hey, I’m just not interested this time or just some questions. But I at least got responses and the fact that number is high as it comes from two different things.

One, is they were kind of warm email prospects. And the other thing is that they’d already raised their hands. So they were highly targeted already.

And the combination of those two things really drives that number up, and obviously, like it helps the bottom line of your business, you know, in terms of whatever the KPIs are around what you’re trying to do.

With that particular example, what defined a warm email?

You mean the target person or the email that was being sent?

Well, you just mentioned there that it was a combination of the warm email, which meant that you had maybe some kind of prior relationship with them that helped you get that 80% results, what was it that turned them into like a warm lead or that into a warm email?

So it was the fact of them coming to the website and then filling out a form and essentially requesting more information and saying, hey, I’d like to be invited into the software to take a look at it. So they’ve that point, they’ve really raised their hand already to say, I would like to see more.

And those people who said, I want to see more of the personal invitation to sign up and see a personal demo from me, was what got it to the 80%.