Ben Settle is the Founder and Copywriter at Email Players Newsletter, an offline paper and ink newsletter packed with information and tips on how business owners can turn their email marketing campaigns from lukewarm contacts into new clients and customers. Over the past 15 years, he has written ads and created email campaigns and marketing strategies for clients, earning them tens of millions in sales in the hyper-competitive market.
Ben has been featured and interviewed on countless podcasts and wrote dozens of featured articles and blog posts, spotlighting ways small business owners can improve their sales ratios with email marketing campaigns. The strategies he shares with his email list, blog readers, and podcast listeners have proven time and again to be the diamond in the ruff for many small businesses.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [0:10:05] Ben Settle talks about crafting captivating content
- [0:14:04] How frequent emails enhance your grasp of your audience’s needs
- [0:18:26] The powerful impact of daily mailing on engagement
- [0:20:56] Boosting subscription retention by keeping customers informed
- [0:21:44] Ben’s unique approach to maintaining a high-quality list
- [0:22:12] Why focusing on the long game is crucial in subscription-based offers
- [0:24:26] The significance of listening to your market
- [0:29:12] Ben’s personal philosophy and how it should thread through your emails
- [0:30:18] How curating your list fosters success
In this episode…
Building a successful brand requires a multifaceted approach. While offering high-quality products or services is crucial, this alone cannot guarantee a brand’s success. Consequently, incorporating effective marketing strategies to establish a strong brand identity and achieve customer loyalty is essential. One such strategy is email marketing.
According to Ben Settle, a renowned copywriter and email marketer, email marketing is one of the most potent ways to establish a brand and connect with your target audience. With a well-crafted email, businesses can engage subscribers, build trust, and drive conversions. However, the effectiveness of email marketing depends on the marketing team’s expertise. He recommends working with email marketing experts who can help firms tailor email campaigns to suit their specific needs and goals. By partnering with experienced email marketers, they can achieve higher conversion rates and drive revenue growth.
In today’s inspiring episode of the Timeless Marketing Podcast, Brian Kurtz sits down with Ben Settle, the Founder and Copywriter at Email Players Newsletter, to discuss how brands can thrive through email marketing. Ben talks about email deliverability, how to write quality email content, email marketing strategies to help you engage with customers, and overcoming email marketing challenges.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Brian Kurtz on LinkedIn
- Chris Mason on LinkedIn
- BrianKurtz.net
- Titans Xcelerator
- Ben Settle
- Email Players
- BerserkerMail
- Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman by Robert R Updegraff
- Troy Broussard
- Doberman Dan
- Gary Bencivenga on LinkedIn
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Titans Xcelerator.
Titans Xcelerator is a private mentorship program for direct response marketers.
It is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed.
As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
The bottom line: you don’t have to grow your business alone.
If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help
Episode Trasncript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Timeless Marketing podcast with Brian Kurtz, your connection to insights from some of the top direct response marketing minds on the planet.
Brian Kurtz 0:16
Hey, it’s Brian Kurtz here host of the Timeless Marketing podcast. Today’s episode is a clip from one of the two hour calls inside Titans Xcelerator, my private mentorship program for direct response marketers. Before we get to that, I have one question for you. Do you have a marketing insurance policy? If you don’t, you need one. And that’s why I created Titans Xcelerator, which is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
The bottom line, you don’t have to grow your business alone. And you don’t need to spend tens of thousands of dollars either. Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind. I know because I hosted a group that was over $20,000 a year. If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z.net/help.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed. As an added bonus, you receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
Again, if you want to see if Titans Xcelerators is a fit for you with no obligation, go to BrianKurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z.net/help. And feel free to email me directly. I respond to every email with questions about this episode. Or just to say hi, at Brian@BrianKurtz.net. Now onto today’s episode.
Brian Kurtz 2:25
Okay, I think Ben is on. Ben, I didn’t see you there until now. Ben, Ben. Ben Settle. The Ben Settle.
Ben Settle 2:32
I’m here, Brian. Thank you.
Brian Kurtz 02:35
How are you doing, buddy?
Ben Settle 2:36
I’m good. How have you been?
Brian Kurtz 02:38
I’m good. In fact, I’m going to talk about how you ended up here on this call. Because I read one of Ben’s emails, you know, Ben emails once in a while if you’re on his list, and if you know that once in a while. And so he sent an email and it was about not doing presentations. So I’ll read it to you quickly.
Sometimes when I’m asked to present something on a mastermind call, or at a master class or to a group of paying customers or someone’s audience, the host will ask what I’d like to do for a presentation. And Ben’s answer is I don’t do presentations.
Why not? Because they are probably the single best way to bore the hell out of everyone. And the single worst way to get engagement. So Ben is here to bore us and to not get engagement just so you know.
Ben Settle 3:34
Absolutely. Right.
Brian Kurtz 3:36
And the thing that was interesting is that I commented on it. And I said, Well, Ben, I’ve been an exception, and I always want to be an exception. So you come and present again to my group, because you’ll never bore them. And you’ll be a big draw. As you are. As you can see, we have 92 people on the call. A lot of people are not even members. Chris Mason decided to invite people from my online family but not from the Titans Xcelerator family, and we got a bunch of people because you were speaking. So you know, you’re very humble in your, you know, El Benbow way. And I just want to say that, you know, you have established yourself as really and I talked about you many times as kind of a king of email. Not that everybody should do exactly what you tell them to do, or if they don’t you’ll remove them from your list.
Ben Settle 4:32
Only Kim. Maybe Kim I would remove. She didn’t obey me but everyone else did.
Brian Kurtz 4:37
Everyone else, right. And you’re promoting her as we speak.
Ben Settle 4:43
Absolutely.
Brian Kurtz 4:44
So then Ben said, we got into an email correspondence. And then he just said, so how are you Mr. Kurtz or something like that. And I gave him my update. And then I invited him to come on another call because he’s been here I think twice before for Xcelerator. Once with Doberman Dan, once alone.
You’re better with Doberman Dan, he kind of softened you a little bit.
And so then I saw an email recently that Ben wrote 15 Ways to Get Better Email Inbox Delivery, when Ben says that delivery is overrated. And then he got into all these things about engagement, which is what it’s all about, as we all know. So having Ben on this call, he wanted to talk about the obvious adams, what you need to know about email, the obvious adams. Obvious Adams is a wonderful little book, very little book. That’s Gary Bencivenga’s favorite book.
And so the best copywriter in the world says that it’s his favorite book, you know, it’s a good book. So I’m so happy you’re here, Ben, a lot of people wanted to hear what you have to say. And then we’ll get into a discussion but you gotta lay down the law on what people need to do to get engagement with their emails. Also, I do want you to talk about your new platform as well, because you have a new platform that you’ve been working on for a while, and I want everybody here to know about it. So I’m so glad you’re here.
Ben Settle 6:20
Well, I’m gonna say I don’t have a formal presentation here because I don’t do presentations.
Brian Kurtz 6:26
Oh, I thought, okay.
Ben Settle 6:30
I’ll just have a discussion. I don’t know if we can cover all 15 things in that email. But you know, the whole thing with email delivery is kind of tricky. Because first of all, let me just give one caveat, I’m not technically an email deliverability guy. The people who are the real deliverability guys are the people who get emails delivered in the inbox. We’re sending the emails, like our BerserkerMail platform doesn’t send them personally, we use an enterprise class sender that a lot of other ESPs use. Those are the guys that really understand this stuff. There’s about 30 to 40% of delivery that a platform can help you with. And I didn’t know this until I started my own platform. I mean, I was just like everyone else, right? I’m thinking, well, there’s all these things I could do. And there is. There’s a lot of stuff you can do, but there’s also things completely out of your control. Okay. And that’s why you need a good email sender, which most people probably do, right? Any of the reputable ones aren’t good.
So I learned a lot of this from my business partner, Troy Broussard, who, you know, he’s been in this game a long time. He’s a navy nuclear engineer. So we understand the actual science and not like internet marketing science, like if he didn’t do real science, something blows up under water. It was a big deal. And then he became the Director of Technology at Encyclopedia Britannica where he was running a $15 million department of programmers. See, he kind of understands how programmers think, and how developers think how machines think. And he did a bunch of SEO stuff. He understands how Google thinks. He just dominated in SEO for a while, and then he became like, the guy for Infusionsoft and some of these other ESPs. And he was split testing a list of like 2 million people’s names. And there’s just a lot of things he knows from that side. But even he will tell you, he’s not an email deliverability expert, because there’s only so much you can actually do. A lot of this is outside of our control.
So I’m going to talk about the stuff we can control. Right? So it won’t matter what platform you’re using, necessarily. I mean, some are better than others. But, you know, for the most part, I’m gonna talk about the things that we can all do. It’s all in our control. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started yesterday, or if you’ve been doing this for 30 years, whatever, it doesn’t matter. I just want to talk about the big things, the big sweeping stuff. How does it go? The screams, not the whispers. That’s all I want to talk about.
Brian Kurtz 8:52
Right, And essentially, on your 15th I think you say, if you don’t do the first two, then don’t even read the rest of the list.
Ben Settle 9:00
Oh, yeah. And the first two, or I probably say the first three that I’m gonna talk about are the most important. And I’ve been doing this long enough to know what works and what doesn’t just from an email side. But now that I see the data from the platform side, which is a whole other planet, a whole other universe, I don’t even completely understand it. We have people much smarter than me dealing with that, like our chief architect, Pedro, this guy is like a savant. He talks to the people who get the emails delivered. And I was back and forthing with him recently about this. And he said, of everyone on the platform, I get the highest delivery as far as they know. I don’t know how they can tell if you’re actually in the inbox or stamp or via get the most delivered. And I’m going to talk about the stuff I do, and that the people who also get very high delivery, our platform specifically do the same type of thing as aggressive as me, but they do basically the same stuff. So I suppose the first thing, now this is going to blow everyone’s mind this first thing.
Brian Kurtz 10:00
Oh, yeah, I fell off my chair when I read this. I really did.
Ben Settle 10:05
I want everyone to take notes. I don’t want you to see you paying very close attention right now. Okay. I don’t want to see you dozing off. I want a notebook out and a pen out. And I want to see writing going on. And it better not be doodles, it better be actual writing. The first one is, just write interesting content people want to read. If you do nothing but that and you know, this is funny because I had this customer and he doesn’t want me naming him for obvious reasons. And he was working with this client, and they were working with one of the bigger ESPs. And I named them either because I’m not trying to tear anybody down. There’s no perfect platform. But you would think that one of these platforms would, you know, be a little bit more savvy about this. But this is the problem that listening to programmers and developers and out markers were about the same. So they were telling him and I wrote about this actually, in the upcoming email first issue this month so some people might already have it right now.
They were telling his client to do things to game the system for engagement. Like try to encourage people to, you know, do this and do that and put an unsubscribe link at the top and, you know, they literally use the word game engagement. There was no word, there was no talk of, well make sure you’re writing interesting content they want to read, because that’s 90% of the battle, as far as I can tell us, in my experience, at least, is being interesting. If they’re looking forward to hearing from you. Your engagement is pretty much set like they’re going to be doing all the other things you want them to do. But what do most people do? Well, let me game the system. What is Gmail doing now? What is Yahoo want? Now? What is AOL doing now? I mean, you could chase that all day long, and you’re just gonna go crazy. And some people do and that’s fine. I’m not saying it’s all bad. But why not start with the very basic stuff that everybody can do? You don’t need a special course for it. You don’t need to go to a seminar for it. Just be interesting.
And how do I be interesting? Well, you have to understand your list, you’d have to know your market. If you don’t know what’s interesting to your market, that means you don’t know your market. Right? Like if you know what their pains are, what they’re talking about. I mean, right now we have so much stuff going on in the world. How can you not comment on something that’s interesting to them? Right? It doesn’t matter. So that’s the first thing.