Episode #81 – Jack Born on Cranking Out Killer-Converting Email Funnels (and how to use scarcity correctly to skyrocket your sales)

by John McIntyre

Jack Born is the creator of AW Pro Tools.

It’s a powerful tool that transforms your Aweber list into a sales machine through marketing automation (but that’s a show topic in itself).

Jack’s on The Email Marketing Podcast today to talk FUNNELS,

..and SCARCITY within them.

Funnels are what leverage Email Marketing into the powerful, profitable tool that it is.

And the sense of scarcity used wisely within them will transform your prospects left and right into customers.

So if you want killer funnels,

..definitely tune in to what Jack has got to say.

He’s got a way to pinpoint EXACTLY when to hit someone with scarcity for maximum effectiveness.

This deadline funnel strategy/software will juice results,

That’s what he gets into, plus:

..the money generating pull behind scarcity and urgency,

..and solid insights into exactly why and how these tactics make an email marketing campaign run at peak performance.

Jack’s a bit like Rob Walling from Drip…

…a software guy who KNOWS Direct Response marketing.

He’s got a lot to teach.

Put your email marketing into tip top shape.

And create quality well-timed FUNNELS.

 

In this episode, you’ll discover:

  • the power behind using scarcity and how to blow all your sales records by using it
  • why having a product that fills a need is step one to utilize urgency in your campaign (no amount of good copy can hide a crappy product)
  • how a deadline driven evergreen offer to past non-buyers is a smart move that piles up money left on the table
  • the moment when urgency hits its peak (learn how major companies use urgency in their promos)
  • the exact situation when and where deadline offers are best used (there are 2 requirements that if your product has, you better be using deadline offers within your funnel)
  • how to set up your countdown timer
  • that scarcity actually creates a physiological change in your brain (learn how to tweak scarce resources for max profits)
  • a way to dynamically adjust your promo timing
  • what fake scarcity is and how an evergreen deadline is NOT fake (fake scarcity will hamper your credibility… don’t make fake deadlines)
  • how an evergreen deadline is like a DMV license renewal

Email Marketing Podcast Episode 1

Mentioned:

Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO

 

Raw transcript:

Download PDF transcript here.

John McIntyre:  Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for episode 81 of the McMethod E-mail Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover how to make more money with your e-mail list, with autoresponders, with segmenting, with all that good stuff, okay? The idea here is how to make money every time you send an e-mail to your list, which is pretty cool if you can do that.

Today, I’ll be talking to Jack Born. Jack Born is the founder, the creator of AW Pro Tools. He has a number of other products, including Deadline funnel, which is a great little script that allows you to, when someone joins your list, you can, say after a week, send them an e-mail about a special promotion I’ve got running that’s available for 24 hours only, and put a script on the page, so that if someone visits it on that seventh day they’re in the Autoresponder sequence, show them the time, I’ll show them the offer. But if they visit on Day 8, the offer’s gone. Now, what’s great about this is it’s going to dynamically adjust depending on when someone signs up. So someone will sign up today, seven days’ time they get the promo. They could sign up in a month, seven days after they sign up in a month, they get the promo. So it dynamically adjusts to the subscriber. It’s a great little app, so there you get Jack Born to talk about this, for that urgency [inaudible 00:01:04.13], why having these deadlines, and how to get the technical side set up so you can crank up the response. I like that word, been using it a lot, crank up your sales. Doesn’t that sound good? And we’ll also sort out the research behind why it works, because when you understand that, you’ll probably be a bit more excited to go and do it just because man, this stuff works. You’ve got to try it. If you haven’t done anything with a ticking clock or a time or anything like that, you’re going to be blown away by how well it works.

To get the show notes for this episode of the E-mail Marketing Podcast, go to Themcmethod.com/81. Now just by the way, I wanted to make a point here, I just thought of – did you know you can e-mail me any time? If you’re on my e-mail list, you can hit “Reply” to any of those e-mails and you can say something, and I will get back to you. Sometimes, it’s the same day, sometimes it’s 24 hours, sometimes it’s a week. It really depends what I’m doing, where I am, if I’m at the computer or even checking my e-mail, because sometimes I’m not. Okay? But you will hear back from me. Usually pretty quickly, too. So I just wanted to throw that out there, because I’m wondering if I’ve got someone listening to this who thinks I’m a little bit distant or hard to contact, I’m not. So, I’d love for you to reach out, say hello, tell me what you like about the podcast, what you don’t like. What I’d love for you to do, if you really feel [inaudible 00:02:14.09] make my day, go to iTunes and leave a five-star review – or any star review, really – just be honest, and I’ll read out the review on the podcast, okay? You can mention your website, and just say, “Hey, it’s John here, from Themcmethod.com, and I like this and I like that, blah, blah, blah.”

Now, before we get into the interview with Jack Born, I’ve got one thing, this week’s McMasters insight of the week. One thing that’s been going on a lot inside McMasters lately is this issue lead bait or opt-in bait. You know, should you offer an e-book? Should you turn the e-book into a series of e-mails? Should you give a video? And honestly, there’s not really any perfect answer. Part of it’s going to depend on the context or the market, the niche, that you’re in – however you want to say that, I get mixed up with these words.

Honestly, there’s not really any secret to it. Like I said, you can have an e-book, you can have e-mails, you can have a video. I think I would be using all of them. I would be saying, I don’t actually use the e-book thing, maybe because e-books, they’re a lot of work to put together, right? I mean, you could put together a short report. My feeling is that most people don’t really read e-books, so what I would do is I would create a short report, perhaps, if you really want to test it, see if that converts better. Or, instead of saying, “Here’s a report on the seven mistakes of e-mail marketing,” you could say, “Here’s, you know, just discover the seven mistakes of e-mail marketing, sign up here.” And then after they sign up, that’s when you say to them, “I’m going to deliver this in seven e-mails or over the next week or two weeks, or whatever.”

And then video and audio and any sort of content like that, engaging content, that’s a great way to get people to see you as a person, because you can’t fake being on a video. You’re either good on video or you aren’t. I mean, you get better, but if you can be good on video, people really start to think that you’re a boss, because a lot of people aren’t very good on video, okay? So what I do right now, is I’ve got someone signs up the daily e-mail tips on how to get more money with e-mail, then they get a video and some text, and then they get daily e-mails, daily e-mail tips. Okay, that’s how I do it.

There’s not, honestly, there’s not really a perfect way here. The idea is, test your opt-ins, maybe an e-book works better. Maybe you’ve got a market full of readers that love to read e-books. Maybe they hate e-books, and therefore, you just send them a video instead. Or maybe it’s a mix of both. So that’s the insight this week from McMasters, that’s got a long thread that’s been developing for a while inside the community there, which is all about this topic. Should you offer the e-book, should you offer the video? So, if you want to check out that thread, you’ll need to get inside McMasters. More information about that at themcmethod.com. In the top menu bar, there’s a link to “Members,” click that, and you’ll get all the information about McMasters. Like McDonald’s, but McMaster’s. Masters of the McIntyre method, that’s how one person described it. So, that’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Jack Born.

It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Jack Born. Now, Jack is the creator of AW Pro Tools, and AW Pro Tools is a pretty badass little tool because it lets you plug into AWeber, sort of. AWeber is a very simple tool, right? You pay 20 bucks, 30 bucks a month and it just sends e-mails, basically. But marketing automation, which is where you start sending triggers and all that sort of, you know, if someone clicks a link, make this happen. That’s what Jack created; it’s sort of like a plugin for AWeber. But anyway, that’s not why he’s here today. He’s here to talk about something called Deadline Funnel. And just quickly, I’ll give it over to Jack in a second, but I met Jack, was a week and a half ago, or two weeks ago. He was over there recording at Titans of Direct Response, which is a pretty sweet little conference, and we started talking about e-mails and podcasting, we just did an interview of his stuff, but I thought we’d get him on the McMethod E-mail Marketing Podcast to talk about what he’s up to with the Deadline Funnel, too, which is pretty badass, because it’s all about scarcity, which is a great way to crank up your sales. So we’ll get into that in a minute. Jack, how are you going, mate?

Jack Born: Doing great, great to be here.

John McIntyre:  Good to have you on there. But before we talk about the Deadline Funnel stuff and scarcity, give the listener a bit more of a background on who you are and what you’re up to.

Jack Born Sure. So, I’ve been on my own, I left corporate America in 2001. I got into a fight with my boss, called my former wife on the phone, and you know, it was, “I just told the boss to stick it.” Had one of these conversations, which was like, “Well, what are you going to do now?” I was like, “I don’t know.” And this is so common of entrepreneurs; where you pretty much jump out of the building, metaphorically, and then build a plane on the way down. Like, you leap before you know all the answers, right?

So, that was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, that’s the short version. But I realized very quickly that I had something unique, and that is that I had the type of mind that I am extremely passionate about psychology and direct-response marketing, but at the same time, I’m also really skilled at coding and programming. Now, these days, I have my own team, and I’m happy to say that a lot of the people that I’ve hired to my team are better coders than I am, but at the same time, being able to think like a coder and think like a marketer at the same time has given me the ability to look at problems that I face in my business as a marketer and a direct-response entrepreneur, and say, “Look, I’m frustrated,” and rather than just throw something against the wall, I set about trying to fix it. And so, I used my knowledge of coding and technology plus my passion of direct-response marketing to come up with a unique solution, and so because of those skills, and what I bring to the table, that’s how I was able to create some of the software products that I have.

You mentioned AW Pro Tools, that’s one. So for anyone using AWeber, definitely check out AW Pro Tools at awprotools.com. But I also was looking at – I wanted to do promotions, so a lot of these products came from problems that I had that I tried to solve, and so with AWeber it was. I wanted to do list segmentation and also have the follow-up messages changed based on people’s behavior, but I didn’t want to leave AWeber, and so I’d figured out how to do that. With Deadline Funnel, I wanted to be able to build in urgency and autosend scarcity into some of my promotions, but I wanted to do it in a way where, number one, it wasn’t fake BS baloney scarcity, where you come back tomorrow and the counter is reset. And there are a couple other things that we will get into later that really frustrated me, and rather than being just frustrated or dealing with something that was just OK but not perfect, I decided to create my own solution. But we’ll cover that later.

So, basically, the nuts and bolts is that I am passionate about direct-response marketing and I’m also a software guy, so I build software products and that’s the tapestry on which I paint. I’m a big believer that we’re all artists in our own way, I got that from Seth Codin. So my tapestry is software. That’s how I bring my gifts to the world. I think today we’re going to talk about scarcity and urgency, right?

John McIntyre:  Yeah man, that’s the idea. We’ll talk a bit about Deadline Funnel a bit later, but tell me about the scarcity stuff. You said you’ve got some research papers or – let’s try to unpack this scarcity idea, because it’s trumpeted around the marketing world as this savior or this heaven or it’s just going to explode your sales, and I guess it can, but it’s not a magic bullet. So let’s sort of start to unpack it.

Jack Born: Right. Right, and it’s not a magic bullet. I mean, you and I have done an interview to my audience about copywriting, and one of the things you brought up very early in the conversation about copy is that your copy is not going to save a weak product or a crappy offer. So in the same way, you have to have something, number one, that the world wants. You have to have a good product. You have to have – it works best when you have a really strong offer.

Basically, your audience has to want what you have. You can’t take a bad product and bad selling, bad marketing, bad copy, and then put a countdown time on a page and say, “Well, that fixes everything,” and walk away. But what scarcity and urgency can done, when done correctly, is that it can add extra “oomph” to your campaigns, and it’s especially effective in situations where you’re doing a limited-time sale. So for prospects that didn’t purchase on the first go-round. You can come back and make an offer to them, that is an aggressive offer and very deadline-driven offer, to say, “Look, here’s the best offer that I can make, it expires at a certain time.” And so, rather than just giving up on them, you know, because you sent out three to five e-mails and then that’s it, you can go back to them and offer them a great deal, but make it a deadline-driven, evergreen offer. I think Frank Kern has something he calls a 4-day cash machine, something like that, where you go back to folks that, basically, you tried to sell to, but they didn’t convert on the first go-round. So, you can go back to them and make a very aggressive offer.

So that’s one way to use it, but you certainly can use it on the front end. I have a lot of, especially joint-venture offers where I’m partnering with someone, and they go into a funnel and they go into the campaign and then so I’m making a deal that, normally, they would not be able to get it if they just went to my main webpage. And so I want to make that a deadline-driven offer, for several reasons: one, I don’t want them to be able to just send everyone back to that page, I want it to be truly a special promotion for the folks that are on that offer. But also, I know that deadlines work, and so if it generally is, number one, something that they want, and number two, a deal that’s better than they can normally get, yeah I like to put a deadline on it, because it juices results. And so, just to talk about – beyond deadline funnel and how I use it – just to talk about other companies that are using it – not using Deadline funnel but using scarcity and urgency – but also to talk about some of the interesting science behind it, let’s go ahead and dive in.

So there’s companies like QBC, huge direct-response marketing company. Anytime that you’re watching QBC, you’re going to see a countdown timer on the screen. That’s a big part of how they’ve built their business. EBay. Every single auction on eBay has a countdown that shows you when it’s going to expire, and usually, the majority of the action happens right in those final minutes, because that’s when the urgency and the scarcity really hits its peak. Groupon, Groupon is another example of a company that uses scarcity and urgency in every single promotion. So the idea that you can’t use it in every single promotion, you know, QBC and eBay and Groupon are great, huge examples of companies that use deadlines and urgencies in every single promotion that they have. And another one that is really interesting that causes me a lot of psychological pain when I go through their process – but in a good way – is Ticketmaster. So, John, I don’t know if, forgive me for that –

John McIntyre:  We have something like – we have like a ticket sale. Similar kind of thing, really.

Jack Born: Okay. Well, it’ll be interesting to know if they do the same thing. So here’s what happens on Ticketmaster. So, when I’m going to purchase tickets for a concert, what happens is, you choose your seats, so they have the picture of the stadium, you click on the place where you want to sit, and then you get to a payment page. And they have this countdown floating on the page, that basically gives you five minutes to fill out the damn page. I mean, especially if it’s a concert that you know is going to sell out, it adds a tremendous, I mean, I’m flying across the house to grab my wallet because I don’t want to lose these seats. So it’s extremely powerful.

We talked about QBC, eBay, Groupon, and Ticketmaster. These are just four examples of very successful, very large companies that do extremely well and that use scarcity and urgency all the time.

John McIntyre:  Hmm. It’d be fun to think about – because here, the urgency thing you’re saying, “Well, this is going to close in 24 hours,” but the other way of doing it is like, you can bind them and say, “We’ve got 25 copies of this book that we’re going to send out, mail you out, physical copy, and so it’s not going to last forever.” So there’s the urgency of knowing that it’s going to sell out very quickly, but there’s also the scarcity of there’s only 25 copies. So it’s a pretty – when you have both, you can like stack that, you know, the urgency and the scarcity, it just goes, like, you can have one or the other and it’s going to do pretty good anyway, but if you can combine them, it’s pretty epic, the sort of response you can get.

Jack Born: Absolutely, yeah. And so, when you have a situation where there are, you know, live events are a great example, and that’s just one example. But if you have a live event or you actually have a certain number of books, physical books, printed up before you have to go and order the next box of books, then it makes a lot of sense for you to offer that way. You know, “Here’s how many books are left, and to sell out, I’m going to go ahead and offer a special deal, but once they’re gone, there’s going to be a two-week delay while we order the next round of copies.” And so yeah, if you can build that in along with your countdown timer, sometimes you can set it up where you can say, “Whichever one expires first.” It’s either over when the countdown hits zero, or the launch is over or the sale is over, or when we run out of supplies, whichever comes first. So yeah, that can definitely be a two-for-one type of deal.

John McIntyre: And, interesting that – I’m reading a book right now, actually. It’s called All the Money in the World. It’s about these billionaires from the Forbes 400. And it’s a fascinating book, but it’s amazing how some of these guys, these big, big, big entrepreneurs, billionaires, some of them, they’re aware of this sort of stuff but on a very, very big scale. So they’ll go make a product, they’ll market the crap out of it. So there’s a whole bunch of demand, and then they’ll purposely not produce enough of it. So obviously produce enough to meet, sort of just below the current demand, but sort of like they manufacture, and it’s a very smart thing. They understand that scarcity drives the value up, so they’re always kind of don’t produce too much and don’t let it become too available, or too common. I mean, some of these guys are billionaires because of this. So when you start to play with this sort of stuff at a higher level, it’s very powerful.

Jack Born: Right, and so that’s probably good segway into what actually happens in our heads. I’m not a neuroscience expert, but I’ve done a lot of research on this. Again, I’m very passionate about direct-response marketing. And so, everyone’s seen the commercial about Folgers where they had the hidden camera. I don’t think they show these anymore, but I think back in the 80’s, okay. So let me paint the picture, you can go look it up on YouTube. So, Folgers’s would do these commercials where they would have these people sitting at this fancy restaurant, and the announcer would be whispering into the microphone, saying, “The Smiths don’t know this, but we secretly replaced the expensive coffee with the Folgers’s. Let’s see what they think.” And so someone comes over and asks them, “How’s the coffee?” And they said, “Oh my gosh, it’s the best coffee I’ve ever had.” “Well, did you know it was switched out with Folgers’s?” And they’re just shocked.

Well, what’s going on there is that – and this has been repeated in different types of experiments I’ll talk about – but because of the high price, we associate high price with scarcity. You know, one of the signals that we get that something is scarce is that it’s a high price, they kind of go hand in hand. And so, when someone thinks that something is scarce, they automatically add more value to what it is. In fact, there’s another experiment where the same wine was served to these people in this test, they didn’t know they were going through this test. But it was the same wine, but the only thing different was the price was different. But they actually were able to determine that the folks who tested the higher-priced wine rated it as much better tasting than the lower-priced wine.

So it’s, you know, the scarcity, they’ve been able to determine through other experiments using MRIs that it actually does change something physiologically in our heads. When we experience something that’s scarce, we truly do perceive it – it’s not a game or a trick, it’s an actually physiological change that goes on in our head based on scarcity. So when there’s a resource that is scarce, we just add more value to it. Another experiment that I read about in the book Influence by Cialdini that everyone’s heard of, is the cookie experiment, where some folks – so there’s a jar with 10 cookies and there’s a jar with two cookies. They’re the same cookies. And so they were asked to do a taste test and judge which one tasted best, and the one with only two cookies in the jar, the scarce commodity, was rated as better-tasting.

So, something’s happening at the physiological level that increases our perceived value and even affects taste, and so it’s a very, very powerful effect that we can’t just switch off. We can try to ignore it, but it really short-circuits some of our decision-making mechanisms. So, scarcity is extremely powerful, especially, you know, and it’s really, really important to do it correctly. So one of the things that we should, you know, I’m going to go ahead and [inaudible 00:19:09.10], because you might have some things to say about these experiments, but it’s really important that we talk about how marketers do this wrong, and some of the things that you want to make sure that you do right.

John McIntyre:  Well tell me about that, man, I mean I’m really content listening to this; this is good stuff. So tell me, what are the mistakes that people make?

Jack Born: Sure, yeah. So one of the obvious mistakes, and this is really what gives scarcity a bad name, so everyone talks about, you don’t want to use fake scarcity, you don’t want to use fake scarcity, but I think that there’s a little bit of confusion over an evergreen deadline, and it’s assumed that, “Well, if it’s an evergreen deadline, then it’s fake scarcity,” okay? So I want to go ahead and dispel that myth. But before I do, it is important for me to say that yes, fake scarcity is something you want to stay away from.

So what is fake scarcity versus what I call an evergreen deadline? So in my opinion, fake scarcity is simply when you go to a page and it says, “When the countdown reaches zero, which is midnight tonight, this deal is over. We’re giving you a great deal, you know you want this, but better act now, because tomorrow you’re not going to be able to get it.” And then, for whatever reason, you forget, you left the tab open and you hit refresh on the tab, and the counter starts back over, okay. That is fake scarcity. And as soon as you do that, you’ve lost a lot of integrity with your audience. Having your audience know they can trust you is really, really important, especially for repeat sales, and it’s getting more and more difficult to build a business just on the front-end offer. It’s really important to have your happiest clients to purchase more things from you and higher-priced stuff. And so, you really want to – if you’re going to use a deadline, it’s really important that, whether it’s a fixed counter deadline, like a product launch, or an evergreen deadline, that the deadline is real for that person. And so, fake scarcity is where that deadline resets when they come back to the page and they’re not really held to it.

So how is that different than an evergreen deadline? An evergreen deadline is, I’ll use an example of the DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles, since you’re not in the States. Every so often, we have to renew our driver’s license, but it’s not the same day. It’s not like tax day. Tax day, for us in the U.S., is April 15th, and everyone has that same deadline for tax day. But everyone has a different deadline based on their birthday for the DMV. So that’s a rolling, evergreen deadline. It’s based on several different factors: when you last renewed and also your birthday. But it is not a fake deadline. If you decide to ignore it, and you drive around with an expired license, you’re going to find out that it is not a fake deadline. You’re going to get a ticket. So that’s an example of how you can have an evergreen deadline, if it has a downside to missing that deadline, then it’s not fake scarcity.

So that’s one of the things that I wanted to build into the deadline funnel, was to make sure that you could set it up so it wasn’t going to reset everyday, that you can have a deadline, an evergreen deadline, and when someone came into your funnel, if you said, “This is going to expire two days from now at midnight,” and they see the counter that it actually is going to expire for them. But some of the other things that I was really frustrated with, and I think everyone listening is going to be able to relate to this, is that I wanted to be able to use two other things that are really, really important to me.

Number one, I wanted to be able to – I have a funnel that’s more than just one page, okay? So I’ve got pages with educational videos where there’s a little bit of content and then I talk about a special offer, but you know, the next day you’re getting another e-mail – so that’s the other part of it – is that e-mail marketing is a really, really important part of my funnel. So I want you to come into my world, and I’m going to give you a way to sign up for a free trial of something or to offer you a lead magnet, and now you’re on my list, and I’m sending you broadcast and follow-up e-mails. So this is a very important way which I build [inaudible 00:22:49.05] trust, and then eventually turn you from a prospect into a happy client.

So, I wanted to be able to integrate the deadline into multiple different pages, not just have it tied to one specific sales page, but also to tie it into the e-mail marketing, so that when you receive an e-mail from me three days after you enter the funnel, if I said, “Hey John, I just want to make sure that you know, this Wednesday, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time, the deadline expires,” that it was perfectly synced up with what you were seeing on the webpage. So to me, that was really, really powerful, and I couldn’t find that anywhere else, and so I wanted to create that so that I could have someone come into the funnel and have multiple different pages if I wanted to, with the same countdown timer all ticking down to the same deadline, and the e-mails that they were receiving all synced up and coordinated, and have it truly be set up so that if someone decided to wait around to see what would happen, that they truly did miss the deadline and they would be sent to a “Coming soon” page, or wherever it is that I wanted to send them. So those were a few other things that I couldn’t find, and again, coming back to where we started this conversation, I used my skills as a software guy and a direct-response marketer to come up with something that I would be proud to use my own marketing.

And then the last thing that I’ll mention, which is, we’re not going to be able to cover everything, but one of the other really important things is that, we all know that more and more of our audience is reading our e-mails and visiting our webpages on mobile devices, smartphones, and tablets. Again, going back to how other solutions are being implemented, I realized that if someone visited my webpage on Monday, and they saw a countdown that was ticking to Wednesday, and then they came back and they visited on their iPhone or their tablet on Tuesday, and the countdown really was reset, because that was the first time that, on that device, they were visiting that page, to me that wasn’t good enough. I wanted it so that, when John McIntyre comes to my page on Monday, if you happen to get my e-mail from me on Wednesday and you click through on your smartphone, I wanted you to see the same damn deadline, especially if I’m saying in the e-mail, “Hey John, today’s the last day. It’s Wednesday, and so at 11:59 tonight, this offer expires. It’s only good until then.” If you click through to that page and you’re on your smartphone, it’s really, really important to me that everything is consistent. I don’t want you to see a countdown that says three days left.

And so, I wanted to build everything, have everything taken into account so that it truly was an evergreen deadline for someone. Or I should say a deadline, it just happened to be set up in an evergreen fashion, because I do a lot of webinars, I like to do something once and then set it up on auto-replay. It’s also a great way to work with someone who’s a joint venture partner and you know, you record an interview, or you do a webinar, and yeah, there’s a rush of people who are sent to that webinar the first time, but what about after the event? Wouldn’t it be great if that partner could set it up in their autoresponder, and every single person could watch the replay? You don’t have to pretend like it’s a webinar, you can say, “Hey, come watch the replay. It was a really good webinar, come watch the replay.” And now you’re being completely authentic, and you’re offering the same deadline of three days that you offered to the folks that are on the webinar. So those are some of the things that I wanted to build into the deadline funnel that I felt were going to address some of the mistakes that people were making with the way that they were implementing scarcity and urgency in their campaigns.

John McIntyre: Right, I mean, I noticed this on a Facebook funnel I’ve had running for the last three months, that just having, I’ve got like a countdown timer on there, and just having that timer on there, it’s a cookie-based thing, so same kind of thing to the deadline funnel, and it’s like dynamite. It’s incredible to see how well that works. If we take that off the page, the conversions drop instantly. So I couldn’t recommend it more, if someone’s listening to this and they have a product and they want an easy way to sort of crank up the response, this is by far one of the easiest little tricks – I suppose it’s a little bit of a trick, but it’s just a really easy way to bump your conversion rate.

Jack Born: Absolutely, yeah. So for any of your listeners who want to give this a shot, normally, what I’d do is I require a credit card to start a free trial, but I thought, what I’d do for your audience is to set it up so that they can try it without a credit card. You can just sign up, give it a whirl, and obviously, it’s a limited time trial, so after a certain number of days, your access will be turned off unless you decide to enroll, but here’s where you want to go: deadlinefunnel.com/mcmethod, and you can just sign up with no credit card required, give it a whirl, and then what I’ll do is make an offer once you’re in there, that will be better than what you would normally get if you’re going just to the main page of the website. So that’s two reasons to go over to deadlinefunnel.com/mcmethod.

But yeah, you were mentioning the cookie-based timer. One of the things that, in order to make this technology work, it was not easy, but my system has to be able to recognize you, whether you’re on your desktop, your laptop, your wife’s computer, or you’re at a coffee shop and you’re clicking through on an e-mail. So I created a system that basically, I shouldn’t say triangulates you, but that’s a cool way of saying there’s three different ways that my system tracks you. And so, if we don’t find you one way, we could fall back to another way. If we don’t find you that way, fall back to another way. And so that’s how we’re able to set it up, so that when your prospect is going through, if they’re visiting your page the first time on their desktop, but then the next time, they’re clicking through on your second e-mail while they’re at the coffee shop on their smartphone, they’re going to see the same countdown timer, which is really, really powerful with people being so mobile these days.

John McIntyre:  Hmm. That’s a really cool feature, I mean, you’re absolutely right. They’re going to go at a coffee shop, open their e-mails, and click over. And there’s a plugin to WordPRess or anything like that, or is it a standalone thing, how does it work?

Jack Born: Yeah, I’m glad you asked, because that’s another huge advantage. So, I know that – I should answer your question first. It works with WordPress, but it’s not a WordPress plugin. Basically, you’re given copy and past code. The same as if you were adding code to your page for Google Analytics or something like that, you just copy and past the code in there. A few other tings that you can put the countdown timer wherever you want on the page, you can put it multiple times, like top, bottom, just wherever you want. Just like you were putting an image on a page. You can say, “Okay, well I want the countdown timer here,” especially if you’re using WordPress. But another cool reason why not being a WordPress plugin is an advantage, is because if you’re using something like lead pages, well, it’s really, really easy to be able to set it up to work with lead pages. It works a little bit differently, in other words it’s in a footer, a floating footer at the bottom of a lead pages page, but now, if you’re signing people up for a webinar or using any one of their other dozens of campaigns out there, you can use this, you can use deadline funnel on lead pages, you know? So, you don’t have to be using WordPress in order for this to work.

John McIntyre:  I like it. So a nice little script that you just copy and paste across.

Jack Born: Yeah, it’s a snippet of code, but it’s a web-based, it’s a SAS product. So it’s a annual recurring license to be able to use the software.

John McIntyre:  Cool. Cool, okay man, I love that, that’s really cool. I’ll have the link to – so it’s deadlinefunnel.com/mcmethod. So I’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this podcast at themcmethod.com. Easy. Any final words of wisdom before, you know, on deadlines or scarcity, or any other marketing stuff before we sign off?

Jack Born: No, it’s just a real pleasure to be able to share tips and ideas with other like-minded direct-response marketers. I mean, like you, I’m super passionate about direct-response marketing. I get excited about this stuff, and it’s great to be able to talk to you and your audience about things that get me excited. I don’t know if you experience this, but because I’m married with kids, you can’t go to the neighborhood barbecue or the PTA meeting and talk about this type of stuff, so I always love – I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed meeting at the Titans of Direct Response, because everywhere you turn, there’s other people like us with their own unique twist on things, but everyone’s excited about the same stuff, so that’s it. I’m just super excited to be able to share what I’m passionate about and what everyone else is passionate about, as well.

John McIntyre:  Good stuff, man. Well cool, thanks for coming on the show and sharing.

Jack Born: Okay. Take care.

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