You’ll want to pick a target market that has the problem you solve to build your list. With limited resources, you attack on a narrow front. For those of you in real estate, this will likely be single-family homeowners in a high-turnover zip code or neighborhood who have lived in their home for 10+ years. You’ll want to buy the name, property address, and mailing address of these individuals from your title company, Remine, Propstream, or Property Radar. You’ll then want to skip trace or append email addresses and phone numbers using a service like Batch Skip Tracing. You can also do the same with a list of real estate agents for recruiting from your MLS, BrokerMetrics, MarketView Broker, or Bill’s Real Estate Agent Lists. For other industries, we like to buy prospect lists from SL360.com. Upload this target market contact list file to your Facebook ad account as a custom audience to run retargeting ads and include them in your letters. When prospects respond to you, ask permission to add them to your email marketing newsletter while also asking for an appointment. Do not put cold emails in your email marketing. This is spamming.

Ask the people you know to share your video with their database. Put your video behind a landing page to watch it. This will help you generate more leads. The very first question on the form is “Who shared this video with you?” so you can track the business. If you have a sales team, ask them to send an email out to their database to watch it. Ask your vendor partners or complementary businesses to do the same. You can even ask your customers to share. This is true “viral marketing” – it’s not just about sending videos to your database, it’s about getting others who have the audience you want to promote you to their database, too. Ask them to share it on social media and any groups they belong as well. Simply redirect to your video blog post upon submission. 

This is the initial email you send to your neglected email list. This goes to everyone who has ever interacted with you in the past. You want a warm, humble email that reaffirms your commitment to keeping them educated with a clear way to unsubscribe. You don’t want anyone clicking the “report spam” button. Keep it simple in style. Just text – no images. The goal is to shake the trees, re-introduce yourself, give them a useful update, let them know they can expect future videos from you, and provide a few reasons to respond to you now. This email message lays the foundation for all email communication going forward to set expectations about the problem you'll help them solve.

We build you a video blog to complement your website. You don’t want to send people to social media or YouTube to watch your videos. It’s too easy to get distracted or stumble upon a competitor. You want to send them to a platform you control that clearly articulates the reasons to hire you. A quality direct-response video blog will present your case on the problem you solve, why people should pay you, what makes you different, how your service works, present evidence of results, and provide multiple ways to respond (download an e-book, attend a webinar, book a free call, etc) – along with ample opportunity to spend time with you to build trust. The entire goal is to capture prospect contact information so you can follow up for an appointment. Think of your videos as the “bait” to bring them to your “trap”, which is your video blog.

Here's how we post your helpful videos to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and GoogleMyBusiness (great for SEO backlinks). We post to your business page, not your profile, for security purposes. We recommend you share them on your respective personal profile and with any relevant groups you're in. We also retarget them too through the Meta Business Suite to your website visitors, page engagements, and CRM database upon request for additional frequency. You're better off posting less frequently, with better content, and then advertising it for the necessary reach/impressions.

Teaching via a live webinar is an excellent way to generate quality leads. Pick a topic that solves an immediate pain or problem for your prospects. Invite them to attend. When they register, you generate a lead. You can also download a list of attendees afterward. These are your best leads. Record your webinar to the cloud and promote it on-demand afterward. We love Zoom Webinar because it's effective and cheap. Don’t be afraid to charge for your webinar, too. We recommend $10. It will help you zero-cost your upfront advertising spend. It also signals your content is serious, not a sales pitch or long-winded stories. The registration list is of higher quality, too. Invite panelists to speak and ask them to promote it for more exposure. Follow up with everyone who attends (and watches the longest) for appointments.

Direct mail is the most effective way to get your message out. You’re lucky if 30% of your database opens your email (and that's high). You have no idea if your target market sees you on social media. Personal direct mail letters enjoy a nearly 100% open rate if sent to a confirmed list. We recommend you mail your best contacts in your database once a month. It costs about $1 a letter. Add a 3rd page and ask a sponsor to pay for it. Here’s the 2-page letter system we recommend. We will create a letter like this and mail it upon request.

Direct response advertising is all about capturing leads for the sales team. You offer an item of high value behind a registration page to get it. The deal is they provide their contact information to get the item. This works well for e-books, courses, checklists, webinars, free consultations - and for our friends in real estate – cash offers, free home values, home searches, etc. It can even be a transactional landing page where you ask them to buy. Either way, we recommend a top-of-the-funnel (get on my email list), middle-of-the-funnel, (attend an event/webinar) and a bottom-of-the-funnel offer (free phone consultation) to maximize your opportunities.

You put a lot of work into building a responsive list with us. Invite a complementary business to buy advertising from you who wants to be in front of your customers, past clients, and prospects. We suggest you charge $325 a month. Write a co-marketing agreement between you and your advertiser. Hire an attorney to review it, especially if you’re regulated (i.e. RESPA for real estate). We’ll create a sponsor landing page to track how many free consultation requests you generate for them.

We recommend you create two long-form YouTube videos a month roughly 3-5 minutes long, but no more than 10 minutes, on our marketing plan. From each video, we extract one YouTube short under 1 minute. The clip can also be used for social media reels and stories and added to your retargeting campaigns. We also add captions to it, which must be human-reviewed because the auto-caption generator does not always get it right. The goal of a YouTube short is to have a 50% or higher average viewer retention rate (and ideally higher than that upwards of 70%) since the video is less than 1 minute.

We send upwards of 90 million emails a year on behalf of our clients. Here's what works best to send out a video email with an optimal click-through rate to watch the video on your blog, and to make it easy to respond (either by a phone call, email reply, or opt-in for an item of value). This is the checklist we follow when we prepare to send out your latest video to your database to help you get business.

A few days after we send an email to your database, we log into your MyEmma email marketing account and email you two reports.

The first is the Overview Report PDF. This will tell you how many people clicked the links in your email, which is your most important metric. It will include other information, too. You can ignore it. It's not helpful.