Email Marketing That Doesn't Suck (eBook)

Part I

Email Marketing Fundamentals

Before we dive into what you do or do not know about email and email marketing, my editor has suggested that I should tell you a thing or two to bolster my credibility. I wanted to just say, “I graduated with honors from Harvard Law School.” But my party-pooper editor informs me that my fancy law degree is cool and all, but it has nothing to do with email marketing. Apparently, you might just be completely confused about how someone could go from Harvard lawyer to email badass. Fair point, so allow me to explain.10

My Journey from Lawyer to Marketer

I graduated from Harvard Law School in 2002, and the first twelve years of my career were experiences that looked great on a résumé, including:

• A prestigious clerkship with the Honorable Richard S. Arnold on the United States Court of Appeals. Judge Arnold was one of the greatest liberal judges never to serve on the Supreme Court.11
• Working for a prominent law firm in Washington, DC, where one of my mentors was a lawyer I just called Neil at the time, but who I now have to refer to as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
• An illustrious gig as a federal prosecutor, where I got to stand up every day and say, “Robert Klinck on behalf of the United States of America.”12
• Working at a small plaintiff’s firm where I went up against the biggest defense firms in the country and kicked their asses up and down the court.

Even though I seemed very much like your typical, boring lawyer—putting on a suit and tie to get paid to argue with people all day—that’s never who I was as a person. Quite the contrary.

Growing up, I was the consummate rebel. I was the kid who wore purple Doc Martens (before they were cool) and flannel shirts in a town where Wranglers and Justin Roper boots were the norm. I was in a punk rock band starting my sophomore year in high school, and I accepted the trophy for winning the state debate tournament wearing a Charlie Brown T-shirt and blue jeans. So you can probably imagine that I chafed showing up as a boring lawyer.

Even suiting up as a lawyer, I still felt very much like that rebellious kid.

My Unexpected Turn to Entrepreneurship

In 2014, I left my job to strike out on my own with Klinck LLC. It wasn’t something I had planned, but I leapt in with both feet. Exactly one client came with me (yes, it was pretty much my very own Jerry Maguire moment), and that case settled relatively quickly.

And then I found myself with a lot of time and not a lot of work.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a guy with a Harvard Law degree and my fancy-schmancy credentials would have no trouble building a law firm. But you’d be wrong. All my technical skills as a lawyer weren’t worth squat because I didn’t have the first clue how to market myself.

Ever the student, I started reading marketing books for lawyers. How do I put this gently? The nicest thing I can say is that lawyers are shitty marketers. They think marketing means writing articles for other lawyers, schmoozing other lawyers, and sending out the world’s most boring newsletters to other lawyers. They missed the whole “talk to your potential clients” part of marketing. So I quickly threw away all those marketing-for-lawyers books and started searching for information about marketing in general.

Somehow, that search led me into the wild and crazy world we know as online marketing. Along the way, I discovered concepts like inbound marketing, content marketing, and email marketing. It made a whole hell of a lot more sense than anything in those “marketing for lawyers” books, so I started creating content to attract my ideal customers. A funny thing happened when I threw out the legal marketing books. As I niched, clarified my message, and started using inbound marketing techniques,13 my business started to thrive.

The trouble was that even as my business was starting to thrive, I wasn’t exactly happy. So I started working with a life coach.

That Freaking Life Coach Changed Everything…

My sessions with the life coach started with my relationship with my wife, my friends, my hobbies, and just about every other part of my personal life. But, at some point, we turned to my work. That’s when I had one of the most important discussions of my life:

Coach: “Do you like what you do for a living?”

Me: (stammering) “Uh, well…no. I don’t.”

Coach: “Okay, so what are we going to do about that?”14

Me: “I have no freaking idea.”

After chatting through it a bit, she said she could see me teaching entrepreneurs about the legal stuff and suggested I’d be a natural as a guest on podcasts and radio shows. (I’m told I have a radio voice. Of course, that might just be a nice way of saying I don’t have movie-star good looks.)

As a “fire, ready, aim” kind of person, I swung into action immediately. Before our next meeting two weeks later, I had hired a company to book me on forty podcasts. Mind you, I had no business—not even a plan for a business yet—but at least I was taking action.

Creating an Online Course Would Make Me Rich…Right?

It didn’t take long for me to formulate my plan. I knew there were people selling “online courses,” so clearly that was what I should do too. Because, y’know…why not?

My plan was simple: spend the first three quarters of 2017 building my list, getting on podcasts, and creating my course about the legal stuff for entrepreneurs…then launch that baby in November and make a shitload of money. I mean, that’s what all these people online were telling me would happen. Surely, I was headed for that passive-income, living-on-a-beach, freedom lifestyle the gurus are always promising us.

Can you guess where this story is going? Do you think I got rich on that first launch?

Yeah…no. Not even close.

Throughout 2017, I spent about $50,000 on my business. During my big launch, I made precisely one sale, for $627. But wait, it gets worse! That customer asked for a refund on day twenty-nine of a thirty-day refund period. At the end of year one, I was in the hole $50,000.15

After that launch with its single sale, my life coach said it was awesome that I had made even one sale because most people don’t sell anything their first time out. Um, that information would have been valuable before I went all in on this whole online business thing!

Business Genius from the Most Unexpected Source

To say I was in the dumps at the end of 2017 would be the understatement of the year. People who know me know that I’m not one to get depressed or really show sadness, but whoa baby was I feeling like shit at the end of 2017. I felt like a complete failure who had practically mortgaged his family’s future on the crazy dream of building an online business.

As 2017 came to a close, I felt so shitty that I was about ready to give up this whole online thing and go back to being a boring lawyer (as much as I hated it). Fortunately, I decided to go to church rather than sulk.

On the last Sunday of the year, December 31, 2017, the pastor was talking about the power of giving and how giving changes you as a person. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was speaking to my soul and giving me the will to continue. Most importantly, he was giving me the business advice I needed to hear.

Not quite grasping that the “fire, ready, aim” thing was what had gotten me into this mess, I figured that same tactic would surely be the way to get out of it! On the spot, sitting in church that Sunday, I decided that “giving” would be my word of the year for 2018.

And so I started giving—not thinking about it as a tactic, but truly giving, just to give. Giving without expectation. Giving for the joy of serving other entrepreneurs. Giving because I chose to put my audience’s needs above mine. Giving because my personal values told me to be generous.

And who woulda thunk it, that sense of generosity helped me build a real freaking business. Things started to snowball in late April, when I made my first sale, and continued into May, when I made $70,000 in sales. By the end of that year, I had made a quarter of a million dollars.

As a rebel, I’m proud to say that my success had very little to do with following the “rule book” that all the online gurus were pushing. My success came from throwing that sucker out the window and building my business my way, based on my personal values.

Sometimes You Need Help from Tarzan

The next year, I went beyond being simply “the legal guy.” People came for the legal stuff, got hooked by my emails, and then started to see me as a business mentor because of what seemed like a natural ability to connect with people.16

Enter Tarzan. No, not that Tarzan. My friend, and original email mentor, Tarzan Kay. On Easter Sunday, she sent me this message:

I heard you posted something really nice about me in Amy’s group—just wanted to say I’m really grateful to have a friend like you to walk this entrepreneurial road together. You’re the real deal, Bobby.

People don’t talk about this much because it’s not marketable, but the people I see who are successful online...