Webinar replay: Fix your MSP’s data capture

Live 🔴 MSP Monthly Profit Booster

Every month, I put on a free webinar – that’s packed with value bombs.

In January 2021’s webinar, we discussed how to fix your MSP's data capture.

This is what you’ll discover in this replay:

• Why data capture is getting harder and harder – yet it’s more important than ever before that you do it
• How I've generated more than 15,000 highly qualified leads through basic data capture
• The clumsy mistakes most MSPs make with data capture, and how to avoid them
• Which technologies to use for data capture: Building your page + CRM + website integration
• The importance of sweating the details and A/B split testing (plus how to do that easily, for free)

The replay is below, and the transcript below that.

February webinar is
How to find, train and maximise a telephone person

Monday 22nd February 2021
1pm

Full details and register for free here

Good afternoon. Welcome to our first webinar of 2021. I've got so much to talk to you about this afternoon. Thank you very much for joining me. This is Paul Green, live from a village just outside of Milton Keynes here in the UK. It's currently 1:00 PM here in the UK. Come and introduce yourself in the chat. Hello, Mark from Ohio. Mark just said hi, Isaac said hi as well. If you go into the chat window and introduce yourself, and I'll give you a mention on the webinar this afternoon. Hi there, Kyle from South Africa. I'm just going to press a few buttons here and I'm going to bring up our presentation for today.

I hope you had a great Christmas. It seems weird to be talking about Christmas on the 18th of January, doesn't it? But I hope you had a great time, you had a great break and you're ready to get going for a really cracking year. It's great to see so many people on our call today. Hi there, Jason, from Memphis. Amazing. Thank you for joining us. Hi Glenn, as well from Canada. And hello to everyone else who is on today. So we're going to be talking about data capture today. I am recording this, I'm expecting the webinar to be around about 30, 35 minutes, perhaps a little bit longer. And as we're going through, please do ask questions as well.

In a second, I'm going to switch off the chat because I get distracted by the chats, but I'm going to suggest that as we go through, you type your questions into chat and I'll come back to those later, we'll also do a little Q&A at the end as well. James Gordon is here, evening James or afternoon, morning for you, I think, from Maryland in the US. And Susan from England as well, we've got Rodney from Devon. It's wonderful to see you all here. I'm going to switch off the chats as I say, so that I'm not distracted by it. And as we go through, if there's anything I say you'd like to ask about, just type something into chat and I'll come back on to all of those questions afterwards.

Now, this is brand new content for this webinar series, and I'm going to do one every single month throughout the whole of 2021. It's always going to be brand new content, stuff that you haven't seen before. So some of themes will be the same, of course, because the themes of marketing do stay the same over a period of time, but certainly, the actual content itself is going to be completely brand new. And we're talking today about data capture. And data capture in particular, because data capture is a critical part of your website strategy. And these are the things that we're going to be talking about today. If I can get the slide to change. There we go.

Coming up today, we're going to talk about why data capture is getting harder and harder, but still you must do it. In fact, it's absolutely critical that you do it on your website. I'm going to show you exactly what I did to generate 15,000 highly qualified leads. And I've done that over a number of years and across a number of different businesses, but I'm going to show you exactly what I did to generate those 15,000. And I'm going to show you some of the resources that are used to generate them as well. I'm going to talk about clumsy mistakes to avoid, because having done data capture for more than a decade, I've made all the mistakes. In fact, it's because I've made all the mistakes you can learn from me so you don't have to make those mistakes, which is a wonderful way of doing it.

We're going to talk about specifically which technologies to use, which CRM, landing page builders, all of those kinds of things. We're going to talk about why you must sweat the details and do some split testing on your data capture. And as I say, we'll just finish off with a general marketing and business growth Q&A. So just a quick opportunity for you to access my brain towards the end of our webinar today. Talking about data capture then, data capture is so important because it feeds the three-step marketing strategy that I promote to all MSPs everywhere.

And the three-step strategy is very simple. It's, first of all, you go and build yourself multiple audiences, so for most MSPs, that would be an email database, hence us talking about data capture today. And also for most MSPs, it would be LinkedIn. So those are two primary audiences that you're talking to. But then you go and build a relationship with those audiences. And then finally, you go and you commercialize them, so commercialize the relationship. The building the relationship is typically done through content marketing, where you are putting out content and you're educating people about how to buy from you, about technology, because the average person who is buying from you, the average owner or manager, they don't know what they don't know about technology, and they don't know much about it.

So we need to teach them, or you need to teach them to a certain extent. And then there's commercializing them. Commercializing them is actually about turning them from being just someone who's receiving your marketing messages into actually being a prospect, and of course, from being a prospect into a client. Next month's webinar, we're going to talk about hiring a telephone person, because one of the most critical elements for your marketing to commercialize an audience, a bunch of people who are listening to you, you need to have a telephone person to do that.

Now, even in 2021, your email database is your most important audience. You can build lots and lots of different audiences. I, for example, I have obviously, an email audience. I have more than 2,000 people in my email database. I have my I have my LinkedIn, I have 4,500 odd. I also have a podcast audience. Now, I don't know exactly how many listen listeners, but we had a 28,000 listens to the podcast here. I have a Facebook group with more than, I think, it's 1,100 MSPs in that now. And I have YouTube, which has about 12 subscribers. That's a starter, that YouTube one. But these are all audiences. And yet, out of all of those, even though the numbers aren't the biggest one in my email database, that remains my most important audience.

And the number of the reasons for that is, it's critical for a number of different reasons. First of all, you own the data in an email database. So all of those other platforms, all of those other audiences can be taken away from me. Google can decide it doesn't want me to have a YouTube channel anymore, Microsoft can get me banned from LinkedIn. Mark Zuckerberg can have me banned from Facebook. What was the other one? Podcast. The podcast actually, that's one that I retain, but of course, I don't know exactly who is listening to me.

Whereas in my email, I know exactly who is in my email database. I know their names, their email addresses. For about 80% of them, I have their physical address. I can then track what emails they're opening, what actions they're taking, and all of that kind of stuff. But critically, I own the data. So all of those platforms can be taken away from me, but no one can ever take my email database. In fact, even if I fall out with my CRM, the email database is mine and it stays as mine. So you always own the data. And I'll mention about tracking behavior as well.

Tracking behavior is a critical thing as well, because it's not just about having a database of people, it's about being able to leverage that database so you can actually do something with it as well, and that is about knowing, what are they looking at? What web pages are they going on to? What links are they clicking? You can build up pictures of people over time. We tend to find, with sales of our MSP Marketing Edge, that we have a rough split between people who have built a relationship with us and have looked at sometimes dozens and dozens and dozens of articles and listened to podcasts and done things, and they pass the Facebook group and they connect some LinkedIn and we've had interactions and phone calls. And sometimes there's people like that.

And then often, the other half are people who just come in completely cold off an advert or something like that. As you can imagine, the client that someone is is quite deeply effected by how they've come in. So someone who has over a period... I'm going to have to have a bit of a cough again. Will you excuse me? I'm going to mute this because you don't want to hear this. Hang on a second. It's all good. It's not COVID, we hope. So, someone who's come in and they've got a pre-existing relationship with me, because they've looked at stuff and they've engaged with us in the past, they are much more likely to go on to be a highly engaged clients.

Whereas, of course, someone who's coming cold, off an adverse and signed up, we have to work a lot harder to build a relationship with that person. So being able to track people's behavior is absolutely critical as well. And the other thing is that your CRM, your customer relationship manager, which we'll talk about specific ones later on, but that becomes your sales database. We use something called Infusionsoft ,and we primarily started using it to email people, but increasingly, it's become our sales database. So all of our data, about our our leads and our prospects, it's contained there within Infusionsoft so we can do stuff with it. We can start to leverage that.

I think the other thing to bear in mind with email marketing and why you need to do data capture is that email is still the principal form of business communication. Yeah, there's Slack, there's Teams, there's WhatsApp, there's all sorts of messaging and project management software and all sorts of stuff like that, but really, B2B the primary principle form of communication is still email. And so getting an email into someone's inbox and getting them to open it and act on it still has a certain amount of power. Now, the question then we need to start with is, how do we get them to sign up in the first place? And in the old days, by the old days, I mean the turn of the century when we all had Yahoo and Hotmail addresses in the old days, you could say, "Hey, sign up for our newsletter," and a certain proportion of people would do that.

Now it's completely different. There are three things now that stop you from just saying, "Sign up to our newsletter." The first is, people's arms are folded like this in massive skepticism. They are highly skeptical because everyone's pushing this data capture and they're very, very skeptical of it. There is also a certain amount of something called data capture fatigue. Everyone's doing data capture. It seems that everyone wants users to sign up for something and pop your email address in. And this isn't the reason why you shouldn't do it, it's just something that you need to be aware of that there is this data capture fatigue. And I think now more than ever more, you've got to look at this. It's the world's most listened to radio station, WIIFM, which actually stands for, What's In It For Me?

And this is what anybody who is potentially going to sign up to your email newsletter is asking themselves, "What's in it for me? What's the benefit for me of signing up for this? I buy quite a few clothes from Levi's. I just never thought about this stuff, except with good 501 jeans, which I've worn forever. And I've started buying shirts. In fact, look at that, by complete coincidence, this is a... You can't see it, but this is a Levi's shirt that I'm wearing. I went on to the Levi's website. And if you go on in incognito, particularly if you've been on it before. I've been on it before, I went onto it and incognito, and one of the first things that came up was, "Hey, sign up for Levi's emails and you get 10% off plus free shipping on your next order."

What's in it for me? Hey, I get 10% off and I get free shipping. I've been a client of Levi's for some time and I must have put my email address in back then. So it's really easy for e-commerce, and you see a lot of e-commerce through essentially the equivalent of sign up for a newsletter, but they're just giving you a bit of a, "Hey, here's something for free." And it's very, very easy for e-commerce, it's a lot harder for a B2B business. Now, there are a whole series of different options open to you. In fact, the B2B options for data capture are to do something like a newsletter sign up. I would argue for most MSPs, no one really cares. You do see newsletter sign ups.

In fact, as I'm looking at some of the MSP-orientated news sites. I'm trying to think of one, I think it's Graham Cluley, which you might know, which is like a security tech blog. And he's got a very simple, just sign up for my newsletter, but then his product is his information. So in signing up for his newsletter, you get all the basics that non-subscribers get, but for an MSP, sign up for a newsletter is simply not going to work. You can do sign up via social media, and you get to see that quite a lot. Now, again, for most MSPs, I don't think that's going to work, that whole signing up by social media isn't really something I think the average business owner or manager is going to do.

You could do competitions and, or surveys. I think that can work quite well. It can certainly be a good way to drive people to sign up. The downside, I think, of a competition is often they're signing up just for the competition and not for any other reason. The surveys are quite hard to do because, of course, business people are busy. They're as busy as you are. So that can be quite a difficult one to pull off. Offline events and business cards can be quite good ways to do data capture. Of those 15,000 leads that I was telling you about, probably two, three, maybe 4,000 of them have been generated at events over the years.

I used to own a niche healthcare marketing agency. We only worked with opticians, vets, veterinarians, and dentists. And we would often go to their trade shows and we'd have a big stand, and the only reason for us being there, or the main reason for us being there at a trade show, was to do data capture. It was to get people's details. And we would literally, if it was a big event and they'd got a badge on, we'd blip their badge, if not, we'd have an iPad type thing, or we had some before tablets, before iPads came out, we had some little mini computers and we'd literally take their contact details.

And so you can do data capture at events when we can do events again. And business cards can be great for data capture as well. I don't have business cards in my current business, but the business I used to own, that one I was just telling you about it, I used to hand out my business cards to anyone I met, and we've probably got five, six, 700 people into the database over the years from the business cards. And the reason we were able to know that was because we tracked the lead source of every single piece of data that came in. So we would have lots of different data capture pages, which we're going to talk about later on. Something else that you can do is something called gated contents.

You'll see this on newspaper sites. For example, here in the UK, the Daily Telegraph has gated content, the Financial Times has gated content. So they have a small amounts of content that's for free, and then you have to sign up for it. A lot of the MSP, a lot of the channel new sites are exactly the same. Again, for an MSP, unless you're churning out some serious levels of content, gated content is not a good data capture methodology for you, you simply don't have the compelling enough content. So what we get onto then, what I recommend to most MSPs, what I would do if I owned an MSP, what I think you should do, is to have a big fat, lovely, ethical bribe. An ethical bribe is something you give to someone in return for their contact details. It's a bribe to have their contact details and for them to sign up.

And I like to think, and there are lots of different ways of doing it, but I think the best kind of ethical bribe is a book, a physical printed book that you give away. So for the members of my MSP, Marketing Edge Service, and I found we just hit 370 members this morning, we give them a book, it's called... No, we don't. This is my book. This is my book called Updating Your Servers Doesn't Grow Your Business. This is the book I've given away more than 2,000 MSPs, and you can get a free copy of my website right now if you go to PaulGreensMSPMarketing.com/book, or you can just go into the homepage and you'll see a picture of it there.

So we give this away. And the 2,000 MSPs, and that's active MSPs in my database, those people, virtually every single one of them, has gone on to my website, filled in their contact details, and then in the US and the UK, we physically send you a copy for free. And if you don't have a copy of the book or you've lost one, lost yours, just go in and please do fill in the data capture forms. So I've been using lots and lots of books over the years. I'm going to show you some of my other ones in a second. As I was just about to say, for my MSP Marketing Edge Service, we have something called Email Hijack which we offer to our members.

This is a book which I've written, it's about a fictitious story of a business owner whose business basically, someone intercepts an invoice and changes the account number so they pay the 12,000 pounds or dollars to the hacker. And then of course, they have to pay the money again to the actual supplier, so they lose 24,000 pounds or dollars. And what we do is we wrap up in that fictitious story how dangerous email is and how they've got to take action to prevent themselves being hacked through that email. And that's provided to every single member.

Now, as I said, I've done lots and lots of books over the years. If you promise not to laugh, this was my very first book, and this was back in 2008. You can't quite see how young I am there, but I am very young. I was 34 when I first did that book. And I got spiky hair, not a single gray hair. Look at that. Isn't that incredible? But that was when I run a PR company called... And that was my first ever book, PR Success Made Easy. Then I did another book, and this book was called It's Time To Fight Back. And this was aimed at opticians. This was when I'd flipped away from doing PR and flipped my marketing business into niche healthcare and I used this book to build my database.

And then I did another book. We had a disastrous foray into restaurant marketing. This was a book called Recipe For Disaster. And how predictive that title was, because I lost £40,000 on that venture. Or, look at it this way, I invested £40,000 and found that hospitality is a shocking sector, and restaurant owners are not great clients to work with. There we go. Then I came back into health care and I did a book for vets. This is called The Game Is Changing. And that's because at the time, the world of veterinary was changing quite dramatically. Then I started working with dentists and I wrote this book called The root of the Problem. See what I did there, dentists? The root of the Problem. Yeah.

And then after I sold my business in 2016, I started to invest in other people's businesses, which again was a project which didn't quite work out for me. But because it's what I know how to do best, I wrote a book and that book was called Locked In A Prison Of Your Own Design. And I used that to meet a whole bunch of business owners, who it turns out their business. But you get the idea here. So these are lots and lots of different books, and these are all off my personal collection, photographed in my kitchen at the end of last week. Overall, if I look at all of those different books and those different businesses and different ideas, they've generated more than 15,000, a lot more than 15,000 highly qualified leads. Now, that is not a massive, massive number because that's a 10-years' worth of work.

But that was enough, certainly back in the last business, to build a million pounds of business a year through in terms of turnover. The books, and certainly in the last business, it generated more than enough leads to keep three telephone people happy, to keep two field salespeople busy and to save about million pounds a year through the books, and ultimately, to make is a very, very sellable entity. And I think what you got to remember with data capture is it is not about quantity at all, it is about quality.

You see people talk about generating 300,000 leads, 500,000 leads. That's fine. I'm sure that could be done. And I'm sure I could have done this at greater scale had I wanted to, but for me, I wanted quality, exact the same with my MSPs. I've only got 2,000 MSPs in my email list. Obviously, I've got other audiences as well, but that's enough. I don't need any more than that. That puts more than enough business into the business. I make more than enough money out of the business because I'm not just in this business for money, I'm in it for fun and money. And I love doing stuff like this, I love the work I'm doing the clients. And the point it stops being fun, I'm not going to do it anymore.

So for me, it's about getting the balance right. And those 2,000 people that are in my database, they represent both some fun that I can have doing work I enjoy, but also some future revenue. And that's why I think you mustn't be obsessed about numbers because you might look at 15,000 and think that's a lot, but actually for an MSP, you only need 500 as a minimum. The best is to have 1,000, even better to have 2,000 because the numbers game comes into this. If you got 2,000 people in an email database, then it's the same amount of work to send emails to that database, but the chances of you getting a return are higher.

Email 50 people versus emailing 2,000 people, of course, you'll get a better return on the 2,000 people. Now, there are five key ingredients that you need to do data capture very well. And the first of them, we've covered off there, it's the ethical bribe. Here's my book. I got a copy of my book here. So if you're going to do an ethical bribe, the easiest thing to do is just come and join me on the MSP Marketing Edge. You can try it free for a month, or for outside of the UK and in the UK, it's a pound for a month. The reason for those payment variances is just down to the platforms that we use. GoCardless won't let us do a free trial for month, so we have to just charge a pound for us.

But we'll give you a copy of Email Hijack. You can put your name on the front, so you can go and print it. It becomes a very, very useful tool for you to use for data capture. An ethical bribe there is a must-have thing. And it needs to have a perceived value. The reason I had this book done and I had 5,000 of these printed and I've had another 2,000 printed in the States, we put an ISBN on the back, which is the barcode, and you'll see down there, there's a price as well, price of 4.99. I think it's $4 99 in the US version as well. This is about packaging. So I could have put this into a PDF.

This isn't actually a very long book, could have put it into a PDF, but by putting it in a proper book and getting it printed properly with the proper spine and everything, there's a perception that that has a higher value. And that's the thing with an ethical bribe, there's got to be a perceived value to it. You can't just give away a PDF, you can't just give away a bit of information because that doesn't have any perceived value. The greatest perceived value comes from the packaging, and that's why having something printed works very, very well. But even then, if it's just printed off your laser printer, that doesn't have the perceived value that, of course, a book would have. So you've got to get that absolutely right.

The second thing you need is you need a data capture page. So the data capture page is where they go to enter their details. Say if you go onto my website, you can see a live one, Paul GreensMSPMarketing.com/book. Don't put books, plural, because that takes you onto my recommended books page. But if you go into book and you'll see something like this. And you'll see up here at the top... This, by the way, is an iteration of something that we've been running for about 10 years or so. So the data capture pages I was using 10 years ago, this is now a version of that same page, which is pretty cool actually.

Obviously, we've changed huge, huge amounts of it, but these are the basic building blocks that we've got right now. So on the left hand side, we've got what we call the hero shots, which is a picture of the book. And we have tested whether or not we get a better response by having that on the right or the left. Currently, it's having it on the left works best. We've got a headline at the top about exactly what it is and telling them that they can get a free copy. Then we've got some bullet points. And then as we go down, we've got a data capture form on the right. And then that thing that says, "Continue with Google or Facebook or LinkedIn," that's called, I think that's called booster.io. And the reason I don't remember it is, a tiny number of MSPs actually use that, I mean, a stupidly small proportion.

For every 100 people who sign up, we don't even get one in 100. Maybe that's an MPS thing. Maybe you'd get more with business owners and managers. It's basically, if you're logged into Google or Facebook, you can just press that button and it does that, but it still puts the details into our CRM, it uses Zapier to do that. But we certainly find that say 99.8%, I just made that up, a very high proportion of people filling the form. And if I was redoing this page again today, I'd take those Continue With Google things off and just focus on the form. Now, because we have an international audience, we have tick boxes for where people are, and that's because it affects what happens in the automation and the CRM, which we're going to show you in a bit.

Underneath that, we've got a testimonial from a lovely client of mine and a good friend as well, Stuart Ward, and it's talking about how he thought he'd be bombarded with crap back of getting the book and that wasn't actually the truth. So you do want some social proof in your data capture page. And then finally, we've got a bit at the bottom or two bits at the bottom. One is a bit about the author, which obviously adds some credibility and authenticity to the data capture. And secondly, it's addressing the elephant in the room, and saying why are we giving this away for free? Why don't we even charge postage on this? And I do think you have to address that.

So a data capture page, you can massively over think your data capture page. I mean, there are services around that will build them for you. I used to use LeadPages.net. I used that for some time. It's been years since I've used it. I used that for awhile. We ultimately ended up just getting one built in fiverr.com or by someone on fiverr.com, and then we iterated and iterated and iterated it through split testing. So we use something called Google Optimize. I talk about split testing later on. Yes I do. Yes. So, I'll tell you about the split test results later on. But yes, the basic elements of the page are there. I would advise...

Oh, you can also get data capture pages built within your CRM as well. So you can go into some of the CRMs I'm just about to recommend, and some of them will actually build those pages for you. Most of them just generate a form that you can put into the page, but you can get them built. What you got to remember that your data capture page is, it's got to appeal to people at an emotional level, and it's got to make them really, really want the thing you're trying to give away for free, because it's actually quite hard to give away a printed book. It's surprisingly hard. We have a conversion rate on our pages, because we have lots of different versions of these pages. We have a conversion rates anywhere between around 15% and 40%.

So our main ones, when we drive traffic and they know they're going to that page, people know they're going to that page to fill in the form, to get the book, as you can imagine, our conversion rate is quite high. But even then, you have to say, only four out of 10 people do it. What are the other six doing? I guess some of them will come back at some point, but that's the thing with data capture, it's not a particularly efficient process. But the reason we want to do data capture is because once they're in our email database, we can build that relationship with them, and the chances of them becoming a client down the line is dramatically higher.

So the next element, the next to the five elements is to get your CRM right, your customer relationship management. And there's lots of different software that you can use. So I use Infusionsoft, which is also known as Keap. They're actually two separate products. The company lost its way a little bit, the original founders and are now back in charge. They're merging the two products back into being one product, whether it's called Infusionsoft or Keap, we'll have to wait and see. But the code base was essentially the same, so they've just got to combine those two products. I didn't recommend Infusionsoft for a long time, but I'm back on. I think they've started to find their way again, and it is a wonderful piece of a quite complicated software, but there's a lot that you can do with it.

We've built essentially our entire business around Infusionsoft. I've been using Infusionsoft for about eight, nine years. Sometimes I regret building the entire business around it because it's made it very hard for us to leave if we wanted to. But it in terms of automation, there's lots and lots that we can do, which is just wonderful. The ActiveCampaign seems a very popular choice for MSPs, so if you're looking for automation and you're looking for something that's got all the toys, ActiveCampaign certainly you want to look at. The number one piece of software for this data capture seems to be something called HubSpot. I've never used HubSpot myself, but I've had to look at it many, many, many times. And certainly. if you read, They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan, you'll know that HubSpot powers that They Ask, You Answer strategy.

So HubSpot has a series of advantages that a lot of these CRMs don't have, which is you can see what web pages people have been looking at. And there's a whole series of different integrated tools. Now, for most of MSPs, all of that is overkill. Literally, 80% of MSPs, you want to go with something like MailChimp or MailerLite or Zoho CRM, or there is the, I've never used it, no experience of it, but there is an MSP-specific one called Honey CRM. Certainly MailChimp and Mailer Light are the lower down ones, less the functionality, but free to get started, and you just start to pay as you add in some functionality.

So I'll definitely have a look at those. I think that the route is, if you don't have a CRM right now, start with MailChimp or start with MailerLite, and then you can always upgrade onto ActiveCampaign or something like that down the line. One note on... What was that I was about say there? I have completely forgotten. If I remember, I'll come back to it later on. I had two thoughts in my head, and one canceled out the other. That's how it goes sometimes, isn't it? Fourth thing you need of the five things that you need, and that's an initial email sequence.

When someone goes through your data capture and they sign up, what you want to happen then is an automated series of emails to go out. And the reason you want to have that is, you want to hit people with some of your best content straight away. And the more automation you can use, the better. You would pick pre perhaps five to 10 emails, and there'd be five to 10 of your best pieces of content, and you would send those out immediately. So I'm going to show you one of our sequences in Infusionsoft. So this is something called a Campaign Builder in Infusionsoft. And this is showing you what it looks like. So here on the left, this is where it starts, and then it goes off a little bit. You see all those green boxes stacks on top of each other? That's where it's going and doing some testing to see whether someone's in the US or the UK and whether or not they've actually got the book already. And we do a whole series of tests.

And all of that is automated. And then it comes over, you see roughly in the middle where all the lines come back together, and there's a little green box and it says, "Three emails." Here it is a little closer up. And in that box, if I was to click in that box and go and have a look, it'd be an email that we send out, and then there's a seven-day timer, which just waits for seven days. Then there's an email that goes out, then the seven day timer, and then another email. Those three emails are some of our best content. So someone joining the list for the first time, they get those initial emails with some of our best content. And then we come onto the bit here. You see, there are three boxes stacked on top of each other.

This tests, automated, have they bought the MSP Marketing Edge yet? And if they have, they shouldn't get the email, although that went wrong today for someone who emailed me in. So these things do fall over sometimes, but if they're already a client, then it will skip over that and it will go on to the next three emails. And that's the sort of thing you can do with automation, you can look and see, has someone done something yet? If they have send them this, if they haven't sent them this, which is just wonderful. So we send that, I think it's nine or 12 emails initially in our initial sequence, and then eventually, we drop those people into what's known as the broadcast buckets, and you'll want to do exactly the same thing. So the broadcast bucket is where you literally go in and send a broadcast to someone, so for example, I sent out an email on Friday evening, it was about the book, Atomic Habits.

I've written that article, and I went ahead and sent that out to everyone in my broadcast bucket. So that was 2,000 something people. And the people who didn't get are the people who were still receiving my initial sequence of emails. So those people who were getting the first 10 or whatever it is, emails from me, they didn't get that, but the people who'd reached the end of that sequence, they did get it, because you could have a sequence of 50, 100, 200 emails. In fact, I have a friend who has a four-year sequence with 200 emails in it, which is insane. So he doesn't bother with broadcast, when someone's in the sequence, they just go through it and that's it.

And he's doing upselling and down selling and all sorts of things. That took him years to build, but then he's got a completely automated business. But that's selling stuff on the internet, internet marketing things, that's not what you could do or indeed should do. So I would do for you five maximum of 10 automated emails that go out in a sequence, and then at the end, you just drop people into that broadcast bucket. And you've got to get into the habit of sending out a broadcast once a week. Now, let me look at the five most common MSP data capture mistakes, and this will push you in the right direction.

And remember, as we're going through this, I can see we've got some chat questions, I will come and answer the chat questions at the end, as we're going through, if you have got questions, please type those into the chat and I will come and answer them. Now, the first mistake is that the ethical bribe isn't compelling enough, it's got to be utterly compelling, otherwise, people simply won't want it. And the easiest way to know whether it's compelling or not is, there's two things, it got to be compelling and you've got to sell it really well.

And again, go and have a look at my data capture page and look at how much effort I'm putting into selling a book, a free book. You don't have to buy, you don't even have to pay the postage on, and yet I do a whole chunk of selling on that. So you need to make sure it's utterly compelling. You also got to make sure that it's relevant to your target audience. So when we wrote Email Hijack, which is what our MSP Marketing edge members use to attract people into their email database, we wrote that from the point of view of your average business owner or manager, who of course, is afraid of loss, of losing access in some way.

Now, the easiest way to be relevant to someone is to operate within a certain vertical. When I wrote this, Updating Service Doesn't Grow Your Business, it was really obvious for me that it would be utterly relevant to the MSPs, to the IT support companies that I wanted to reach. And that's easy for me because I'm operating a vertical. So the easiest way to do data capture is always in a vertical. If you currently have a general business and you've been thinking for some time, I really should put my foot into a vertical as well, do it and focus your data capture efforts on that vertical, because you will get so much a better response and you'll get so much more out of that vertical than you will from just a general audience, although it is possible to do it for a general audience as well.

Another mistake is that you don't do split testing. I mentioned this earlier, we are constantly running experiments on our website, we use something called Google Optimize, which is free. If you'll just go and Google, Google optimize, and you put a bit of code into your website, and what it does is it creates versions for you. So you'll have your page that you've done, which let's call that the A page. It will create an exact copy of that page, let's call that the B page, and then you can change one little element on it.

And Google will basically put traffic through, so as people come through, it will send the first person to the A page, second person to the B page, third person to the A page, fourth person to the B page, etc, until it's put a roundabout 1,000 people through that test, and then it will declare with some confidence, some statistical significance it will declare which of those pages is the winner. And this works really well with data capture because with data capture, you've got a specific outcome, which is they fill in the data capture for. So split testing works really well when you've got a specific outcome.

It's why it works very well for the e-commerce businesses, very difficult for MSPs, but actually quite easy on your data capture. Let me show you an example. This is what our current data capture page looks like, and there are two elements that we've changed in the last three months or so. And those elements are, up here at the top where it says the quick guide and then the arrow on the right-hand side. So if I show you the old version, it used to say the ultimate guide, and there was no arrow. So if you look back at that again, so this is what it currently looks like.

You see, it says the quick guides with that arrow pointing down, and it used to say the ultimate guide. What we found was, well, we did the split test and we found that quick guide outperforms the words ultimate guide. And we think that's because when someone's looking for free books, they don't want the ultimate guide, they don't want the 10,000 page version, they want a quick guide. And actually, this is designed, you can read it in one sitting on the toilet or in bed in a couple of hours. And the reason we put that arrow in is because that helps move people down the page because on many screens, this page doesn't seem to have anything underneath it, of course, actually the form is.

So by putting the arrow, that has that there. We're recurrently testing, I think, we're currently testing having a different color arrow and having it lower down and we'll see what that does for us, but you need to be using something like Google Optimize, and all of the services available, Optimizely one, Unbounce, I think is another one, but I'll just stick with Google Optimize and just super optimize your web pages. As I say, with 1,000, you need 1,000 people going through. So it's going to be some time until all that test complete.

But even if you only do two tests a year, then that's absolutely fine to do that. Another mistake is to treat data capture is a one-off task. Sure, setting it up is a one-off task, and yet actually, driving data capture is an ongoing thing. You've got to be constantly looking at it, predominantly driving traffic to it. You have to drive traffic to your data capture page. So we spend somewhere between two and £4,000 a month on traffic overall, mostly on Facebook, a little bit on Google, a little bit on LinkedIn. We do some remarketing, which is where you show adverse to people who've already visited your page.

And we do a lot of custom audience marketing as well. And a proportion of that goes on to our data capture. Much of that is to our services, but some of it is going into our data capture as well. So we've constantly got a trickle of people joining our data capture. And quite often, when MSP sets up data capture, they then say, "Well, it didn't work. No one's joined it." And actually, when you look at the numbers, that's because they're getting not four visits a week to their websites and not actually driving traffic to the data capture.

So if you're going to take data capture quite seriously, you must do some split testing, you must put some monitoring in there and you must actively drive traffic as well. That's all I've got to talk to you about on this now. Coming up next, I'm going to answer your chat questions and we'll do the marketing and business growth Q&A. We are live, so I'm happy to answer any question you put to me. I just want to tell you about the next live MSP Monthly Profit Boosters to the next webinar. It's going to be on Monday the 22nd of February, the same time.

And as I say, we're looking at how to find, train and maximize a telephone persons. This is someone to phone your audiences for you, and I've found those people to be typically the very best return on investments. You need all the marketing stuff, and you need the audiences for them to call, but having someone making phone calls on your behalf is absolutely critical. Now, before we just come on to the Q&A, I want to tell you about my entry level service, is called the MSP Marketing Accelerator. We've got 20 MSPs going through this month's course. We had, I think, 18 going through December, which is just wonderful.

And what we do is, I've put together the fast track way to get your MSPs marketing sorted. So this is a very, very low cost, a. And I'll tell you the price in a second, very low cost, relatively low commitment, but high value life training course, which I actually run myself, and we do one per month. January unfortunately has already started and that's gone, but we do have a new course starting in February, another one in March and another one in April. And what we do is we jump on a live Zoom call, it's a one-hour Zoom call. It's an hour plus time for questions once a week for five weeks. And we look at five different subjects. Each call is live.

In week one, we look at your website and we look at everything that you need to get sorted on your website. On week two, we look at how you profit from LinkedIn. And again, we look at everything that you need to get sorted on LinkedIn. On week three, we look at how to build those multiple audiences that we were talking about, and also how to build a relationship with them. Week four, is about marketing campaigns, and this is part of the commercializing. And in fact, having a phone person is an important part of that as well.

And I show you some multi touch point marketing campaigns that turn suspects into leads into prospects. And then in week five, we have a success blueprint. Literally, I'll show you a blueprint for every little thing that you need to have in place in order to have the most successful MSP. Now, we don't touch operations or technical stuff, so I'm not a technical person, I'm just a marketing person, but we look at all the marketing and sales aspects and how you can generate more net profits out of your business. And every week on this call, because it is completely live just like we are here, it's done over Zoom, but you can ask me absolutely anything.

And I encourage, there's great interaction on those calls. Oh, and not only on those calls, can you talk to me, but in-between the whole five weeks of the course, you can email me as well. You're more than welcome to email me with any questions whatsoever. And around about half of the people on each course do that, and it's wonderful answering their questions and helping them get things done. As I said, January's course is gone, has already started, February's course starts on the 24th February. We have three places left on that. March's course starts on the 18th of March, six places left on that. And April's on the 28th of April five, places left.

Oh, and it's so, so low cost, I deliberately made this low cost because I'll tell you why I've done it. I've been quite open about it and I have been right from the start. This is deliberately low cost for a five-week live training course because it's a way for you and me to start a relationship, a marketing and operational relationship. Some of the people who are on our course go and buy other things from us, some of them don't, and that's absolutely fine. And there's no pressure to buy anything else ever, but it's a great chance for you and me to spend some time together.

I can help you to fix your marketing, you might find that I have some things that will help your ongoing with your business. So the pricing is very, very low, in the UK, it's £49 plus VAT. And you pay that by GoCardless, please For the US and outside of the US, it's $69. And that's paid by Stripe by credit card. So you can go and see if there are any places left or how many places you've got left and sign up. It's all self-service, so you can just do it there on the web page at PaulGreensMSPMarketing.com/Accelerator. Let's get onto your questions then. I'm just going to open up the chat and we'll have a look and see what we've got.

Simon says... Oh my God, that's the first time I've seen that one. Simon, you must be talking about the book when I was 12 years old. Yeah, I'm getting rid of those photos. It does actually come up on eBay. If you go into eBay and you type in, what was it called? PR Success Made Easy or something like that? Bizarrely, there's always at least one copy of my book up for sale on eBay, which is funny. Someone else says, "I'm glad the books are a little better now." Yeah. Thank you.

And Isaac says, "Would you ever consider videos as the content of an ethical bribe pros and cons?" Yes. I would consider video, a video course, because remember, Isaac, you've got to get the packaging right. So videos in themselves, I remember, we're used to watching YouTube for free, we don't value videos, but we do value information delivered in a video. I have a big, big marketing course I put together last spring which we've been selling, I think it's about £700. And we've sold a small number, not a massive number of those, but we have sold quite a few of them.

And we've been considering whether or not we'd use that as an ethical bribe, we'll do a cut down version of that. So it wouldn't be the fact that it was videos, it would be you'd get this video course. I think the only downside of that, Isaac, is for time poor people, a book 44, 48-page book, absolutely, you would read. But would you watch five hours' worth of videos? I think for time poor people that might be an issue. Jason says, "Became a member of the Tech Tribe, blamed you, perhaps we'll explain and encourage." Yeah.

Thank you, Jason. So the Tech Tribe is a community of MSPs, there's 1,400 people worldwide are parts of that, whereas I only just work on MSP Marketing, and I do work on business growth as well, but marketing is primarily my thing, where the Tech Tribe is everything. So that is a place for technical issues and all sorts of other things. I don't want to boast about it, but I was made a tribal elder last week, which has only 10 of those. So I'm quite proud of that. So good choice, Jason, and it's highly recommended, the Tech Tribe.

I think you should be part of as many communities as you can. So being part of the Tech Tribe, absolutely, doing some stuff with me, absolutely. You're getting different, being exposed to different things in different places, which is not a bad thing. Jason's said, "I have recommended Memphis when we return to events, fun, delicious, fairly priced, centrally located, and easy to get to." What's not delight with Memphis? I can get my business to pay for me to have a trip to America. I am looking forward to having that one.

Great. And then you've ruined it by swearing and saying Robin Robins has a fully built Infusionsoft for MSPs. You don't have to use her marketing, the CRM unit, owner can use yours. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And Thomas has asked, do you recommend Salesforce as a CRM? I don't actually, Thomas, unless you're an enterprise-size business, which you're statistically not likely to be, say, statistically because thus, most of the MSPs I speak to are under about 20 staff or less 20 staff or under.

Salesforce is a big business solution. If you want the smaller business version of Salesforce, I'd go Infusionsoft or Active Campaign, but Salesforce is probably too much. It's too much overkill. David, great question, what's your view on the best ways to use Google AdWords for lead generation? Does it work for you? We don't use Google ads for lead generation, we use Google ads to drive people to direct service pages, and we use Facebook more for lead generation.

I think David, you need, it's one of those things you need to test it, limit your downside by setting limits to budgets for what it is you're going to try and do it. Now, for most MSPs, and I've got a few MSPs who have tried lead gen with Google. I've got a couple who swear by it, I've got many more who swear at it. I've got a client in the States who spent $45,000 on Google ads and declared it a complete waste of time. And that was using an external consultant, that wasn't doing it himself. I have a client in the UK who spends quite a lot and put himself through 20-hour Udemy course, U-D-E-M-Y.

He put himself through that, and he gets, I think, he estimated it costs him around about £4,000 per client. He gets lots of inquiries, but it'll get a lot of time wasters. Can you fix my iPad's cracked screen? Great. I've just paid £85 pounds for that lead. So his estimate was £4,000 to win a new client. Of course, a new client is worth a lot more than £4,000, someone's paying £1,000 a month and they stay for 60 to 120 months, which is five to 10 years, then there is a return on investment.

But my gut feel for the vast majority of MSPs is Google ads, is not right for you. Debbie's also asked the follow-up questions, do you use LinkedIn to push traffic to your site and ethical bribe? We've tried LinkedIn quite a lot and we have not yet cracked LinkedIn. LinkedIn is doing my headache because it's such a great platform for reaching the right people, but the ads don't seem to work, and we don't know why that is. In fact, we're hiring a consultant this week to work with us on our LinkedIn ads, because I'm determined to find how it can work because then once I know how it can get it to work, I can teach you how to get it to work.

So at the moment, David, no, we're not using LinkedIn, and we're primarily using... Well for paid traffic, we're primarily using Facebook, but we do a lot of organic stuff as well. I'll give you a great example. Earlier on, Jason mentioned the Tech Tribe, and in the Tech Tribe, I go and do lots and lots of, I add value. I will address marketing questions in the Tech Tribe. And then in my footer, there's a link back to my website. And some people, I couldn't tell you how many off the top of my head, but some people will follow that and we'll get a free copy of my book.

Essentially, will join my email list from having seen me in the Tech Tribe. Now, there is an equivalent for you in some way, there's a business forum for you or a Facebook group or something. And this, again, this gets easier if you're in a vertical, niche marketing is always easier, but there is something somewhere there for you where you can absolutely do that. So you want to mix of paid and organic. Either way, driving traffic costs you, it either costs you cash, or it costs you time.

If I spend half an hour a day in the Tech Tribe, which is roughly what I spend, that's obviously two, two and a half hours a week of time that I'm giving up, which is a big price I charge myself at, that's a loss of cash time, or you spend cash on buying traffic. But either way, traffic is not free these days, you have to use some resource for it. And Jordan, [inaudible 00:49:57] of the question, Jordan. Great question, Jordan, you mentioned testimonials for the Email Hijack book. How would you go about collecting them?

And Jordan, I know you work with Mark, so I know you've got an established business with lots of clients, ask them and send them an email with a PDF of Email Hijack and say, "Hi super favorite clients. We've just written a book, we've just written a book." It's been written for you, but you don't tell them that, "We've just written a book about email security. You're one of the first people in the world, or you're one of the first people in Holyport to see it. Could you have a look through please? How would you feel about giving me a short testimonial to go on the back of the book or to go on the data capture?"

No, you wouldn't say on the data capture, but, "How would you feel about giving me a short review or short testimonial of the book?" You'd use the word testimonial actually, not review because you see it on the back of books, you don't see it where it says people who've read it, people who matter have read it, was of course, if you've got a local business owner who's read it, that's equally important, it can go on your data capture page. So Jordan, just ask your clients and get Mark to give you two or three people that you could approach to do that.

Jason just says, "I have plenty of data, it's engagement I'm looking for. And importantly, to show interest and perhaps intent to buy." Absolutely, Jason, engagement is everything. In fact, when you're doing anything on social media or you're looking at how people have opened your emails, read your emails, all of that kind of stuff, engagement is the number one thing that you're looking for. So we're going to stop there. Don't forget to go and have a look at the MSP Marketing Accelerator. We have courses starting every single month. This year, it's only for 20 MSPs per month, and it would be a delight to work with you on one of those.

Have a great rest of today. I'll send out the recording for this, probably it'll be tomorrow when we get the transcripts. Enjoy yourself. Have a good one. Cheers. Bye-bye.