Episode #178 – Changing How You Market With Email With Luke Charlton, Part 2

You're listening to the REI marketing nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors. Like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer more awesome life. And now your host, Dan Barrett.

(00:41): Hey guys. Welcome back. You're listening to the second part of last week's episode. Let's jump back in. So how do I set the entertaining emails? Yeah, the first way that I did it and the way that comes naturally to us is I just started telling stories. Right? Cuz that's how we, that's how we grew up to communicate. Most of our communication is through through stories. What I'm tell the way that I'm communicating right now is through a story. The way that we, this whole podcast is it's kinda like one story to the next. Yeah. So Mo my emails, if you get on my list and read my emails, they're most of them are story based. I would say 95% of them start with some type of story. It might be a personal story. Um, but you know, those kind of, those are kind of limited. So I had to start looking outside of, uh, my own personal stories, right? So then I went to client stories and then I went to like client case studies.

(01:35): I put those in my emails and then I started using stories from the internet. Right. So you can get stories all over the place. And this is what the biggest question people, Hey, ask is like, look, how do I send an email per day? How, how do I have enough content? There are stories, or like this podcast, I could get like three or four stories from, just from the conversation that we've had already. But an, an example, um, is remember when, um, will Smith went up and slacks Chris rock, right? Uh, a couple of months ago, a couple of my clients took that story and used it in their emails. Right. So, so the story doesn't often is totally unrelated. Don't have to worry about, is this, start with the story, right? To start with any story. I wrote a story the other day, um, I went onto a news website.

(02:20): Uh, there was a, there was a headline that says, girl, you know, something like girl gets, goes in the hospital because you know, she didn't wanna fight in front of her boyfriend. Like, so she was literally put in hospital cause she didn't wanna anyone fight in front . So I, I thought I laughed first and I thought, you know what, I'm gonna use this in an email. I didn't know how I was gonna use it. Right. So that's the first part is she, generally I start with some type of entertaining story. I get it from all over the place. Facebook groups, news news is great news. YouTube. I watch, I watch lots of like investment YouTube shows. Yeah. Every day. So I get stories from there and put them in my emails. So they, they come from all over the place. So you tell the story and then here's the thing, that story will have a lesson, right?

(03:04): Mm. Almost always it'll have some type of, I mean, for me, it'll be a marketing lesson, but I could take the exact same story like that faring one and it could have a dating lesson. Right. It could have a, um, uh, like a weight loss lesson. You just have to do a little bit of thinking, but generally most of the time there is a lesson. If you can't think of a lesson, it's all right. Move on to the next story. There's thousands more you can choose from. But that's the thing. You just go story then the lesson, and then now you're on topic, right? So you've kind of spoken about the lesson. Now, you now you're on topic and now it's very easy to transition to your clothes. And my clothes is always basically the same thing. It's just, without being said, if you need help, getting more clients, I'll show you how to do that.

(03:43): Sending one email per day, go here to jump on my wait list for my program. So that's, that's the formulary is just story, lesson enclosed. That's what I tell, teach my clients to start with. And, and by leading with entertainment in the first instance, not your content. Now you're working with people's desires. Now they will start enjoying your emails. I get people writing in all the time saying how much they, they enjoy my emails. Also, I send an email every day without, um, with a pitch, sorry, an email every day with a pitch. I pitch in every single email. And since doing this since like 2016, I've had two people write in saying you sent two too much email. That, that second one came in literally two days ago. kid, not two days ago. The other one came in about, uh, six weeks ago.

(04:27): Yeah. So, um, up until six weeks ago, I'd never had anyone say that you send too, too many emails. So the reason why I can get away with sending an email every day with a pitch is that I focus on entertainment. And so you can imagine if you start sending emails, people actually enjoy reading. You're gonna make a lot more sales, right? It strikes me. So two things jump out at me. First of all, about that story that I really love, which is first is for investors that are listening. If you are listening to this and you're like, well, that's fine for Luke. He's entertaining. Marketing is entertaining, but investing is not entertaining. I would challenge you that there's literally like three TV networks that only show TV shows of people flipping houses in real estate investing. Right? Right. There's a whole genre of TV.

(05:12): Look, look what they do for the look, what look at the, that's a really great example. Cause look at those real estate, those real estate shows and more broadly the, um, uh, reality TV shows. They're not really reality, right? So what they do, there's this show in Australia called married first sight and okay. It's I think, I think we have a version of this. I, we have, I think it's really just about two people that dunno each other, getting married and these experts kind of choose them and put them together anyway, which is just by the way, the fact that society has risen to a point where we were just like, this is what we do now for energy. I know it's pretty amazing. It's pretty impressive. But so in the beginning of that show, it was just the novelty of like these two what's gonna happen.

(05:53): But as the show progressed through the seasons, what happened is the, the producers you could tell, wanted to create more and more drama. So it kind of became about the drama more so than are these people going to last or whatever is, it was less about that. And people got didn't like that so much, but it got ratings. Right? So, and what, what it became was the story, like the, all the different stories of the, all the drama, the stories within the relationship of people like cheating and other people and whatnot. And so, um, my point is back to your, your real estate example, notice, notice these real estate. Uh, so these reality shows real estate ones. It it's always focusing on their story, right? The, the person's story about why they're, why they're choosing this, you know, why they want this property. They always give that background.

(06:37): Um, otherwise there's no kind of entertainment factor. We're not really like invested in, in, in the person. So yeah. Stories are being used all the time and they don't, it's not like some magic story formula. It's like, how do you tell a story? You just start at the beginning of a story. This is like, when you're communicating to a friend or family member, you just start at the beginning of the story, tell the story and then go in, go into the lesson from there. The other thing I think is so powerful, but specifically about your setup and how you do this is you are using email to sell people on the idea of using email to sell. Right. Right. I do what I, yeah, exactly. Right. You're you do what you do. My friend, Nick always calls us eating your own dog food. And I, I will give you an example.

(07:20): And I, I think I threw it out, but there's somebody who's been writing me, mailing me in the, the mail mail, like the physical mail every month for like six months now. And he is a Facebook advertiser and he is like, Hey, I just wanted to make sure you saw my Facebook ad. So I printed it out and I mailed it to you. And like, it kinda cheap in funny. And, and he puts pictures of him and his kids in there. It's nice. Right. I'm like, it's nice. And I throw it out every time. Right. I look at it, but I throw it out, but I'm never, I never thought for a second about hiring him. And the, the problem that I think he misses is I'm like, you are selling me Facebook ads, but you had to mail me in the post to do it.

(07:56): Yeah. Because you know what I mean? And so I'm like, there's a, there's a core disconnect between what you're saying works. So amazingly and like how I'm finding out about you. Yeah, yeah. Which it just is incongruent there. Right. So it's like, you're doing in a way that aligns with you and what's so important to you. So, alright. So I, I've gotta ask you about Facebook send that he should send the follow up letter to you. That addresses that. That's what you should do. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, are you, why am I sending you if Facebook ads are so good? Yeah. It's like, uh, I got banned for Facebook for being too good at Facebook. Uh, that, that might work . So I did want to ask about Facebook. Uh, we run Facebook ads at the agency, but it's never been our primary thing. I, I, I'm very transparent about that.

(08:37): It's not, not something I'm world class at, by any means. And like one of my questions and I think something that a lot of investors are thinking about now is Facebook seems to be in real state of transition. We had the whole sort of cookie issues. There's been attribution issues and sort of conversion tracking issues. And I think a lot of, of people feel like for right or for wrong. I think a lot of people think that Facebook is kind of heading in a weird direction or maybe going in a wrong direction or whatever. It's right. So what is your take on the state of Facebook ads as a marketing channel? Um, I think it's probably safe to say we're off their peak, but I don't know you're you are the expert. So like how do you feel like that channel is? Yeah. I'm, I'm the, so I'm more of a, when it it's, it's funny.

(09:26): Um, when it comes to Facebook ads, I don't focus too much on all the new features that come up with ads or anything else going on with Facebook. I'm all that, like, what I, what I know is that if I focus on creating a better marketing message, right. If I know my client's market inside and out, and I put in a good off, you know, create a great offer, we credit a great offer for the campaign. Facebook will take care of the rest despite what new feature is out or whatnot. So my most of my time is actually not spent on the new technological stuff with, um, Facebook. It's more about creating a better marketing message. Yeah. And that's where like 95% of your results are gonna be. And then the next little like additions and tech features and hacks, that's like the final 5%.

(10:12): And so, um, that's how I'm able to get great results with my clients is I don't really worry about that stuff. So in terms of, um, your question, I, all the stuff with the tracking and the pixels, again, I, I don't actually use, Facebook's tracking to judge my ad campaigns. I, I, I actually do it in a, in a spreadsheet, like as an example. So my, my VA, every morning she'll go in and she'll grab the spend and clicks from Facebook. Cause that's the only thing that's accurate in Facebook. Either's the spend and the clicks. Once people get off Facebook, it's not accurate anymore. So we get the opt-ins from the email system, we get the sales from the CRM and that goes into the spreadsheet. And that actually tells me what my campaigns are really, you know, actually doing. I don't look at the tracking in Facebook.

(10:55): So all that, all the stuff with the, the pixel and stuff, it hasn't really, really bothered, you know, bothered me. So I gave, give you all of that context to answer your question is like, you know, is Facebook at its peak? Is it not? I don't know. My, my, my, my clients is still getting great results because I focus on the things that don't change. Yeah. Which is the market, you know, getting clear on the market and great offer a great campaign. If there comes a day where Facebook goes under because of all their illegal activities that I'm sure they're doing. Right. Um, you know, I don't really care because there's gonna be another platform that I just transition to. And I'm just gonna focus on the same things that don't change the market credit. Great offer. So at the, at the moment, I think Facebook is still working really well.

(11:38): If, if you do those things and, and do them well. And I actually, personally, I'm finding that the cost per click at the moment, I think because the economy is like going down the drain at the moment, there's a lot of businesses that are, that are pulling out of Facebook because they just, it's funny, funny, you you'd think, well, no, you would think for me when, when the economy is going down and business are pulling out, that for me is a signal to spend more on your ads because you've got less competition. And that's what I'm finding. I'm finding my, my click cost is actually they're, they're cheaper than what they had been like, uh, said at the beginning of the pandemic where all the stimulus came in, all this cheap, easy money everyone's spending money on Facebook. Everything's great. That's when I saw the a costs were a lot more, a lot more expensive and it was harder to actually make profitable campaigns now actually finding it a bit easier cuz the, the click cost signs aren't as high cause there's less competition on Facebook.

(12:27): So for me personally, at the moment, I think it's, I think it's a great opportunity to run ads, whether you're on Facebook or YouTube. I think YouTube is down in click cost as well. Yeah. I don't really do. I need do my own YouTube ads, but that's what I'm seeing. Um, so at the end of the day, like, is it its peak? Is it not? I don't really care. All I care about is are my, my client's campaigns profitable and, and they are, and that's what all they care about as well. And you, you hit on something too that I think we, we do, even on the Googled side there, I think Google had less conversion tracking issues, but we still just track everything in, into Google sheet. Right? Like we use the Zapier connection to put all the leads in a thing with the URL information.

(13:06): I should probably set that up, save my VA from doing that. But well, they're like, no, I need that job. Uh, but you know, be kind as you mentioned. Um, but it's like, but, but whatever the system is, I think your point, right? It's having a single source of truth that you control, not necessarily the, the corporation. Right. Which I think is so critical. Um, and so if you, if you're listening to this, we're, we're, we're, I'm gonna wrap this up because we're, we're going a little bit long and I wanna make sure that we take a moment. It like, for people are listening to this, first of all, you need to go, I, I will put all the links and stuff on the show notes, as you might expect from hearing Luke talk, he's got, have done a really awesome offers and like opt in stuff and like cool stuff we can link you to.

(13:49): So I'm gonna link you to all this stuff I wanna ask you though, because you're such an interesting person, you have this really interesting business and you do these things that are highly impactful. You mentioned the whole hermit thing. So this is like, this is a callback. We're bringing it full circle, bringing it back. So bring it back. Yeah. I, I'm curious if you look back more at your, you know, your business journey, your sort of personal development journey, what's been something that you've done in your life that has really made a difference to you either, either personally or professionally, because you strike me as a person that is a really good example of playing your own game, right? Like you are, you are running a business in a way that it aligns really well with your personality. It aligns really well with your strengths.

(14:34): You are not, you know, doing, you're not, you're not pitching the exact same thing that every marketer is pitching. Right. You have your own approach and it's working really well. Right. So what was something in your personal development journey that really made an impact on you and sort of helped you to do that sort of carve your own way forward? If that makes any sense? That's a great question. I love these questions like these kind of mindset questions. Cause I think they're the most important aspect of, of becoming successful. Um, so what was the thing that, sorry, can you just re repeat the question again one more time? Yeah, I guess so what was one decision you made or something that happened in your personal development journey? However you want to define that. Yeah. That sort of helped you get to where you are today and you could take that wherever you want.

(15:19): I think. Yeah. So I'll give you a bit of background. So I, I left, so I worked nine to five from, uh, when I was about 23 to 26. Uh, maybe I'm younger than that, but anyway, I live, I worked, uh, I used to live in Canberra, which is the capital of Australia, which is just like a government town. There's all like these public service jobs. Like everyone's a public servant basically. And I was the same and I just really did, like, I worked there, it's kinda like most jobs, like it's great for the first six months cuz you're growing and you're learning. And then after that is just like, yeah, the monotonous. And I knew I'm like, I lost, I can't do this for the rest of my life. So it was more in the beginning for me, it's just like searching of like, what am, you know, what am I gonna do?

(16:02): And I actually, I, I kind of stumbled across co coaching and I left that job and I moved to London. I kind of just, and I thought, you know, London has more people than Canberra. So that means it's gonna be easy to get clients. And I did and I failed miserably and I got one client in 12 months and that didn't even come from any of the marketing that I was doing. uh, wow. And so I, I came back to Australia and I ended up living with my man cause she was the only one that took me in LA, allowed me to live with her rent free. And I knew that, uh, and I wanted, as I said, I try these, all these different complex funnels. And I, I knew that I just, that that was not the right strategy to go. Like I, I, they were really appealing.

(16:41): I loved all the, I loved all the new funnels and stuff. I'm I've I grew up with tech. So I'm tech comes naturally to me, but I could see that the true thing to success, like the boring things that, that people like follow up as we spoke about before, like follow up is such a boring thing. Oh, I've heard that before. Yeah. But are you actually implementing it? Right. Um, so I, I kind of knew that, okay, I'm not successful cause I'm chasing all these bright shining objects, the things that the gurus say that are gonna make you successful overnight, that doesn't work. What does work? It's the fundamentals, it's the boring things. The, the do unpolished things that, um, that people kind of ignore, they know that they should be doing, but they're not doing it. Like for example, researcher market get very, very clear on your market.

(17:25): Start with that. Um, pick a really painful, unique problem to solve that. You know, if you're going after a high ticket offer, solve a high ticket problem, like start there, don't worry about your offer. Don't worry about any funnels like that. So anyway, the boring, fundamental stuff, like building your list, emailing your list. And so I'm like, okay, that's probably the biggest shift for me is I just started focusing on the fundamentals and that's what I teach. So what I teach is not, it's not the most sexy thing. It's not the most exciting thing. Um, but it's what works long term, long term success. I, I mentioned before that I didn't care if Facebook goes down because there's, I can take my skills of researching the market, creating great offers. And I can just put that into a new advertising campaign. You know, if, if there's still goo, if YouTube's still around, I can just run ads on YouTube for my clients, um, or whatever the other social platform is or advertising platform.

(18:16): So I think that's the, you know, focusing on the fundamentals, that is what really shifted to me. And then in terms of like a mindset thing really, really big is two things being persistent, like focus on the fundamentals, be persistent. And then the next thing is be patient too many people want success, you know, overnight. And, and particularly my market, I work with a lot of coaches. They don't view their, what they do as a career, right? They're not looking at this as like, I'm gonna be doing this for the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Right. They don't have that long term view. They want the clients in the next month. They want co high paying clients in the next 30 days. Otherwise, you know, that's it I'm going, or they're going to the next bright, shiny funnel. You have to have a long term view if you want to be successful in any business venture.

(19:01): And that's notice the most successful people in business, they have a long term view they're patient and they persistent. They've been doing it for years and often decades. Right? Often it takes them like 10 years to get to that seven figure, mark, but people don't wanna wait 10 years, but that's what it takes. So being persistent, being patient to mindset things, I would say, yeah, I, I love your, your point about patience because I think, you know, we are often sold a sort of view of things. That's very rosy and reality is complicated, right? And sometimes it's hard to figure out what actually works and what's gonna stick. So Luke, I just wanna say, thank you. This has been so awesome. And I think it's, it's such a necessary point of view that I think investors don't typically hear this idea of, look, there's such a big proportion of the market that you are not reaching and not addressing with your marketing.

(19:54): And you can do that. Like you said, with the most profitable way of reaching somebody, which is emails, emails pretty much free, maybe not a hundred percent free, but more, you know, you don't gotta pay for a stamp. We'll put it that way. It's better than sending yeah. Physical mail to that. uh, yeah, it's a little bit cheaper than that. So, um, we mentioned this before at the top of the show, Luke has been kind enough to put his personal email out there. If you wanna reach out to him and talk or perhaps work together or whatever, you can email him@lukelukecharlton.com, that's Luke, Luke charlton.com. Do you have any other kind of websites that you wanna pitch to people or social media that you want people to follow you on? Uh, just, yeah, my Luke chat.com website as well is a good, there's good resource, lots of, um, blog posts on there.

(20:42): And um, you jump on my list and just read my emails, see what they're all about. I, I was gonna say, look, you can, you can jump on his list and see what he's actually doing day to day. You know, now that he takes his own medicine, eats his own dog food, whatever the gross metaphor you want to use is, uh, he's doing it in real time. Uh, Luke, thank you so much for coming on me. This has been absolutely awesome. I really appreciate it. No worries, man. I had, it was a great conversation. Really, really good. I really, really enjoyed interview. So thank you for

(21:18): This is the podcast factory dot.