- Duration: 18 min
- Platform: meet
- Attendees: Liam Lawson, Liam Lawson (Presentation), Michael Houck, liam@aitoolreport.com
- Source: Read.ai 01JD5D6J5NWWG1P9DW3X3FQX52 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JD5D6J5NWWG1P9DW3X3FQX52)
Transcript
[Liam Lawson]: the ad side of things. I think it’s Alex as our contact usually. But no, I’ve, yeah, I’ve heard of him, but I don’t know the guy you’re talking about. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it was a good combo. He’s a, he’s like a really solid bootstrap founder. Yeah, good guy. So yeah, just got done that. [Liam Lawson]: How about you? Just been working away all day. We’re going to be doing a bit of a rebrand actually over the next month and a half. So we’re moving more. And it’s the enterprise side of things instead of AI to report. It’ll be the AI report Can I get a parent brand that handles more enterprise side of things? So just basically planning out how to do that changing our ESP changing sending the men’s website forwarding emails like Everything to do with rebranding. So and yeah, that’s even that a lot of a lot of ops work Yes, indeed. My favorite part of the job Local man, I won’t take up too much your time. [Michael Houck]: But yeah Yeah, good to touch base. I’m glad that we’re moving forward and kind of excited to help you guys with growth. You had mentioned sort of wanting to use a lead bank you guys already have with HubSpot. [Liam Lawson]: That makes total sense. What do you think in there? Yeah, so let me, let me just kind of show you what I’ve got, System Sense. Google Chrome. I’ve got a new laptop, so I’m just, hello. I’ll just join, give me two seconds, I’ll rejoin this meeting. [Liam Lawson]: Sorry about that, it’s a new laptop so it’s asking me to do system settings and everything yet. All right, let me show you. So I hop into this. So basically we’ve got a partnership with HubSpot and they provide us with a bunch of offers that we can use at any point. And so it’s got all the copy in it, it’s like sales trend reports, all the way to like entrepreneurship for business builders and education offers so on so professional development plan templates we could essentially use any one of these they’re giving us a load of different ones and so we use one and our automation sequence as well which I’m just gonna pop up quickly hold on I’ll just show you how that’s kind of structured this was all prepared to Let me re-enter this. All right, let me share my screen again. All right, you see that? Yes. So this is how it looks as like part of our welcome automation sequence. They hop in and as part of the welcome email, they get kind of this, like a free guide to use for HubSpot. So we can create something similar to this with one of these pieces of coffee. We’ve obviously got nine different offers to choose from We’ll be developing more. So could you choose one that you think is going to have the best product market fit, depending on the questions you ask us? And then we can just put that in there as part of that welcome automation sequence before we add them. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it makes total sense. I think the emails won’t be as pretty as the Beehive ones that we’re sending, because they’re text-based emails. But yeah, having that many versions or variants of it is really smart. We can target those to different sort of subgroups within the audience too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Liam Lawson]: So as part of that, how does that work? You said it’s in a sequence that they get entered into. How many emails is that? Do we help develop the copy? What is the logistics of that? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So it’s usually a four, sometimes three or four email sequence that we do. We set that up. We can run the copy by you. You guys can write it if you want, but we can also totally take it off your hands if you The goal of the copy is basically just to get one of three things to happen, which I mentioned. It’s either them to open at least half of the emails, they reply to an email without asking to unsubscribe, or they specifically click through and grab a lead magnet that we include. If any of those three things happen, then we want them to get at it. [Liam Lawson]: And we’re basically, for those 8,000 subscribers, only 8,000 active subscribers. If they’ve engaged with said thing in some way, they get added in that cohort. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll be sending more than 8,000 emails. You guys have paid for us to deliver 8,000 subscribers to be added to the newsletter, if they meet those criteria. All right. [Liam Lawson]: I mean, that sounds ideal. So yeah, I mean, we’ve obviously paid invoice, so we’re pretty keen to get going, whatever. So what do you need from me to kind of help us make this a success? [Michael Houck]: I think that Google Sheet, if you could share that, that would be great, especially with the links to the copy, because maybe we can just take that off your guys’ plate without you having to do anything with that as an example. Matt, my co-founder, has already sort of gotten started getting the data together. And then I’ll probably also loop in Max, who’s my chief of staff. I know Matt and Max. Max will help write some copy. If you want, we can run those by you, and then we’ll get that up and running. Cool. [Liam Lawson]: See with the emails as well, as it kind of branded under like AI tool report? Does that kind of warm them up to the brand? What does that look like, [Michael Houck]: It’s up to you. I think since we’re using a branded lead magnet, it probably follows that we should brand them as like AI tool report. But some people don’t like that. Some people are like, we want you to not expose them to the brand until they get into our welcome sequence. So it’s it’s up to you. [Liam Lawson]: Yeah, I mean, like my mind goes to some kind of like co branding thing like show them the HubSpot lead magnet and then have some sort of like mention of the ITIL report there. So when they are added to that list, they’re not like totally confused by what’s going on. [Michael Houck]: I think that makes the most sense to me. Okay, cool. Yeah, we can draft up a couple variations and you let us know sort of which framing I think makes the most sense to you. [Liam Lawson]: Cool. And yeah, just let me know exactly what you need from me. I’ll get you access to that sheet. Let me just see if I can take this. I might want to change things around in terms of some URLs. But let me just check and that’s the chat. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: The only other thing we would need from you, I mean, it’s not, we don’t actually need it, but it’s, it’s recommended just so we can take some of the ops work off your hands. [Liam Lawson]: Um, we can either, what’s that? [Michael Houck]: Sorry. [Liam Lawson]: You have access like admin access. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Either we can, we can send CSVs to you or you guys loop one person from our team in to sort of be able to set up the segments and all that stuff. [Liam Lawson]: Latter sounds the better. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, with all the admin work you guys are doing for the rebrand, I can imagine the last thing you want is more. [Liam Lawson]: So we got you for sure. And then just one thing to keep in mind, we’re obviously adding lots of contacts with another person as well. So just when these contacts are uploaded, they’ll need to be tagged specifically as well. So we can differentiate the quality of your audience with his audience basically. Totally makes sense. [Michael Houck]: We’ll, um, we’ll run through what we’re doing for other folks, which is just setting a tag, setting up a segment, and therefore you guys can just track it straight away. [Liam Lawson]: Beautiful. Beautiful. All right. All sounds good to me. Let me know exactly what you need just via Slack. I’ll get that over to you. And then to give you context, if this goes well and we see good results from it and everything goes well, we’ll probably look at doubling or tripling numbers in January and then just keep going from there. If the quality is still there, the answer sub rates low, the CTR is good, the open rate is good, quality of the traffic is great, then we’ll just continue to pour more into budget. [Michael Houck]: Cool. And just so I have like a benchmark in my head, when you say unsub rate is low, CTR and open are good, what is that for you guys? [Liam Lawson]: Because that differs for everybody. Yeah, I can show you our performance by source table for the current import so you’ve got something to work off. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Liam Lawson]: Subscribers report Always takes a second to populate Yeah, and they gotta they gotta work on the speed of their charts. [Michael Houck]: I think Yeah for sure. [Liam Lawson]: I think this is always like the slowest possible one still waiting great And from memory, so let’s see that there. 52% open rate, 2% click-through rate. And then more subscribers, so you can kind of see that as well. And sub rates, 8%. But we have managed to get that down recently, if I remember. So I checked this last week, because we basically got them to change some of the targeting. And from what I remember, the past week has been better. In terms of that unsub rate being below 8%. Give it a second. Assuming with the targeting you’re doing as well, like that unsub rate is gonna be pretty low. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, what have you seen work well with them so far in terms of getting that down? [Liam Lawson]: What do you mean? [Michael Houck]: Like you mentioned that you changed the targeting and the unsubscribe rate went down. What was the change? [Liam Lawson]: Yeah, I think we were just going for a kind of And then we were looking at more like enterprise B2B subscribers. And that’s what we changed in terms of the targeting. It was like general people interested in AI, whereas we tried to focus more on like enterprise consulting, C-sweeps and so on. And that’s what got that answer right then. Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: If you guys have anything else that you want us to do in terms of targeting, just let me know. Either, you know, we can do it now or you can send me a Slack whenever we would like, we will adapt to whatever you guys want us to do, for sure. [Liam Lawson]: Well, I mean, I would say quality is everything. We’re majority US-based, so US-based would probably be primary thing. Anyone with, if you can distribute by higher income, that would be excellent. Stuff like that. We’re just trying to drive as much high-quality subscribers as possible, so whatever you can manage on that side of things would help us. [Michael Houck]: What do you see in terms of, what is the audience interested in? Psychographics or interests rather than just demographics? [Liam Lawson]: I’d say in general where we perform best is like practicality. So what tends to perform the best like in terms of the newsletter itself is always like the training tools section. Everyone’s always interested in automations, training, education, and there’s a lot of like interest from like public education departments in the US, stuff like that. So it’s all about being taught practically AI skills. That’s in general. I don’t know how that kind of converts to psychographics, but I would say that’s what we see the most in terms of like where people are most engaged with us when we can actually actively teach them something and any kind of thing that goes around. That’s a lot of HR reps, a lot of operations where people are practically applying AI. So less students and stuff like that, more like areas where people actually use or can use AI on a daily basis. [Michael Houck]: So less product manager, more for operations, basically. Exactly. Okay, cool. [Liam Lawson]: That’s helpful. [Michael Houck]: What I’ll do then is I’ll talk to Matt, and we’ll probably propose some like interest based stuff and just see how you guys react to that and see what you think will fit best for the audience. As we as we get things ramped up. [Liam Lawson]: It’s not Matt McGarry, is it? [Michael Houck]: No, no, no, it’s not not Matt McGarry. He’s a friend. We worked together before, but not on this. [Liam Lawson]: Oh, just like newsletter I’m a guy who’s the first guy that comes to mind when I think about that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, this is my friend, Matt, who’s my co-founder on this. He’s like a Teal Fellow. His last startup was funded by Y Combinator. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Michael Houck]: He’s super legit. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Liam Lawson]: And what’s your guys’ podcast? Just so I can give you a follow and a listen. [Michael Houck]: Oh, thanks. It’s on YouTube. It’s called Founding Journey. [Liam Lawson]: It’s just YouTube at Founding Journey. YouTube. [Michael Houck]: I can find the link to make it here to the founders journey. [Liam Lawson]: No, here. I just dropped the link in the, in the chat. [Michael Houck]: Awesome. Give you a subscribe and have a lesson. [Liam Lawson]: I like your thumbnails as well. You got a good designer on the go now. I’ll tell them I’ll give them the compliment. [Michael Houck]: Thanks man. Awesome. Well, you got me on Slack. [Liam Lawson]: Just message me anything you need and what can I get moving from there? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: We’re, we’re getting So I’ll loop you in with some questions soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Liam Lawson]: Appreciate your time as always. We’ll speak soon. [Michael Houck]: Same to you, man. Talk soon. Later. Bye bye.