Invisible Selling Machine - critical summary review

Ryan Deiss is the CEO of one of the largest marketing blogs in the world, DigitalMarketer.com and one of the greatest email marketing experts in history. In his book Invisible Selling Machine, he presents to his readers what is considered the greatest dream of any businessman since the dawn of mankind: being able to sell automatically, with little effort, literally while sleeping. He tells how he set up your digital business and through good use of email marketing tools, was able to come to an automated sales process that has taken on his blog and several companies for which he consults, generating millions of dollars in sales. What if you were able to automate and perpetuate your sales process in such a way that you could literally sell while you sleep? Would your life change? This is what he seeks to teach you in Invisible Selling Machine. The book is a great success among large companies, small businesses, and startups. Shall we learn a little from Master Ryan?

Creating Money, From Nothing

Every entrepreneur and marketer dream of leveraging their sales and affording to have the peace of mind of being able to create money out of nothing. For you to be able to assemble this sales machine, it is important to have a fast, automatic process that works perpetually. This machine can invisibly convert strangers into friends, friends into customers and clients into passionate fans.

Ryan begins by saying that he has an incredible talent for making money out of nothing and that he realized this by inviting a friend to play golf. The friend, most likely not as talented as he, would not accept the invitation because he did not have the money to buy the necessary equipment. Faced with a problem like this, Ryan (who wanted a partner for his golf games and did not see another person available) made a bet with his friend: "I bet I can raise the money for the clubs I need with a single email and in 1 hour or less, without sending any email to people you or I know. " Bet accepts, Ryan writes an email clicks on "send" to the list of subscribers of his blog and begins to see the money entering. Every time he updated his email again, he saw that there had been more sales alerts and more money. Like magic, money was increasing exponentially, and in less than half an hour the two had more than enough to buy the golf clubs.

The problem was solved, and he felt special. He was really capable of creating money, out of nowhere. Shortly after this revealing event, however, he finds himself in an unpleasant situation when confronted by his accountant. His company owed an invoice of $ 250,000 in taxes owed to the US Internal Revenue Service. He did not have cash on hand to pay for this and would have to close the company if he was not able to pay these taxes quickly. In the US, if you do not pay what you owe to the Government, you are actually imprisoned! He set himself up, made a plan of action and created 6 email marketing campaigns that in less than 24 hours generated about $ 80,000 so that he could pay the first installment of taxes. In 2 days, he was able to pay the full amount, only with the results of these email campaigns. That's the promise of the Ryan Deiss method, which he called The Invisible Sales Machine.

If you have a list of emails and know how to use it, this template will help you to print money. For Ryan, it doesn't matter if your business is B2B or B2C, whether you are a dog trainer, whether you are in the music business or own a clothing store - if you apply the system the right way, it will not fail. And that's what he teaches throughout the book, a formula for making email marketing focused on building the long-sought Invisible Sales Machine.

The Power of Email Marketing

For Ryan, email marketing is the most powerful sales tool there is. There is only one, however. According to Fortune magazine, the average American receives about 147 emails per day, and more and more businesses use email marketing to relate to their customers. So you need to have a plan and follow a method. When done properly, email marketing functions as a salesperson working for you 24 hours a day. Still, many companies do not use this tool because they feel they have databases with few subscribers and small email lists. The problem, however, is not the size of the list itself, but rather the process that is used to communicate with it. Most marketers focus their efforts on growing their mailing lists without creating a method for communicating with them, which is a big mistake. The important thing is to have a method before and then focus on growing your list to ensure that you can sell systematically. For Ryan, if you follow the method he created, you will be able to extract money from lists of any size.

The 2 Great Errors

When you work with email marketing, you should avoid 2 extremely common mistakes. The first big mistake is not following up. If you have generated a new lead on your list, you can never forget to communicate with it. You have to follow up and introduce yourself. If you send emails only when it is in your best interest, you leave lots of money on the table. Have a system ready to receive your leads and make sure you always communicate with your subscribers, so they remember you and do not want to unsubscribe from your list by forgetfulness. The second big mistake is simply sending the same email to everyone on your list. Every subscriber on your email list is unique, and you need to engage them. The right way is to have the right message for each subscriber, is always focusing on personalization. Knowing how to segment your contacts by activities (such as opening emails and engaging) and areas of interest, is crucial if you want to set up a machine that is actually capable of selling to your list while you sleep.

The 5 Steps of The Invisible Sale

A solid email marketing strategy involves understanding the purpose of each email and using them according to these goals. For Ryan, every email sent has one of five purposes:

• Indoctrination: Introduce yourself and your brand to new contacts; tell why you are relevant, and thus turn strangers into friends.

• Engagement: Talk to your leads about something that interests them and encourages them to buy a less valuable but relevant product or service so that they enlist with you.

• Ascension: Welcoming your customers and encouraging them to buy a higher value product, a product upsells previously purchased.

• Targeting: Learn what they want to hear more and what else they may want to buy next.

• Re-engagement: Bring them back when they are no longer in touch or when the relationship between your company and the customers gets cold.

Each step above depends on and involves the previous step, working on the transition from strangers to your company's superfans, who will recommend you to other potential customers and perpetuate a successful sales cycle for your business. The steps are therefore essential and sequential. None can be ignored for the machine to work. Like a machine, if a part is taken out of place, the system stops working and becomes inefficient. Now we go deeper into the 5 steps of the machine.

Step 1: Doctrine

If you got a new subscriber on your mailing list in a legitimate way, such as through content marketing or in exchange for a free offer on your website or blog, you have that person's permission to contact you. To do this in the right way, your indoctrination email must be able to convey the message of what your company is and represents successfully, at the same time achieving a level of closeness with the client (almost as if it were a welcome hug). It is important to remember here that this is the time when your lead will most likely be excited to hear from you and everyone, so do not waste time and send this email immediately after noticing the prospect's interest in you! Introduce yourself, tell them why you and your company are relevant and share some of your best content in this email so that that person is truly "indoctrinated" by your brand. At this stage, you need to answer the following questions that are in your subscriber’s head:

• Who are you?

• What do you believe in?

• Why are you different and why should your subscriber care?

• What should the subscriber expect from you?

• How often will you communicate with him?

• What is the next step he should take?

Answer these questions clearly, and your lead will be indoctrinated by your brand, impressed with your answers and knowing exactly what to expect from your company.

Step 2: Engagement

In this email, your goal is to convert your prospects into customers. They already know you, and they like you, they respect you, but they have not purchased anything yet.

The engagement email should bring an offer and call your potential customer to take action. Good examples of offers for this email, for example, would be an invitation for a free trial of a software or offer a free e-book that may interest your contact to take one step further in terms of commitment to you. At the end of your engagement sequence, the important thing is that potential customers have effectively become customers so that they can expect multiple emails. More expensive products require more effort and therefore more emails than cheaper products. If your product is cheaper, you can already "ask for the sale" in the first or second email. Another important point is that the email must be signed by a person and not by the company to make the email seem more personal and cause a greater engagement. If you are too aggressive or too fast at this stage, you will end up driving away your potential client. Since scaring them off is the last thing you want, you need to be calm and plan your engagement sequence very carefully. Take it easy and keep your emails focused on the topic that caught the attention of that potential customer and made him or her join your list. Ryan calls the bait that gets people onto your list of a magnet for leads, a bait for people to want to get these emails. A good bait is a content by which your target customer has a great interest in and solves some specific problem for the market in which it is inserted. Checklists, free ebooks, and free tools are great baits to capture leads for your business. What is important is that your engagement series is connected to the subject that the lead was interested in early on. If you have multiple lures and multiple entries in your list, make sure you have appropriate engagement campaigns for each one. Otherwise, you will be burning your list. Once you've engaged your audience, it's time for step 3: Ascension.

Step 3: Ascension

That is the series of emails from which most of your revenue should come in from. If the goal of the engagement stage is to make your potential customers into customers, the goal of the ascension series is to turn your customers into more profitable customers and sell more expensive products. For every offer/product you make available to your audience, there are always people who would like to buy more. The ascending series should begin exactly after a purchase from your client. Your ascension series will be successful if your product/service has generated value for the customer previously, so it is important that you have the right offer in the previous steps as well. Once you have been able to generate value for your customer, it will be even easier to sell to him a second, third, numerous times as long as you can satisfy them. The ascension email should be sent immediately after the engagement to reach customers who would be willing to buy even more from you. The fact that you have been successful with your previous attempt to sell something to your customer for the first time makes him even more likely to buy from you again. If customers say no to offers of ascension or engagement, it is time to change our strategy. And this is the goal of the next step, segmentation.

Step 4: Segmentation

The easiest way to lose someone from your subscriber list is to keep sending emails with subjects and messages that do not interest that person. In addition to not being effective, these are the emails that mostly go to the spam box and that most cause people to unsubscribe to your list. The goal of the targeting stage is to get your potential customer to raise their hand and demonstrate their interest in a specific subject, either by opening emails or by clicking on a specific offer, so that you know exactly which upcoming emails to send them. When he or she takes this action, the targeting campaign is complete, and the lead must be put back into a new series of engagement emails, focusing on what has been perceived to be interesting to the customer. The client itself is targeted in this way, and this is what allows you to be able to switch your contacts between multiple subjects. A series of well-crafted segmentation can create a chain reaction, where people are interested in new subjects and products, and this generates more and more sales. Finally, the last step is the simplest and often the one with the biggest impact on your email marketing process. Let's re-engage!

Step 5: Re-engagement

What happens when your leads stop opening and clicking on your emails? If your company does nothing with these leads, you are losing a lot of money. Creating a series of re-engagement is one of the simplest and most impactful sales activities your company can do. The re-engagement e-mail series is intended to make customers who have already purchased and are absent and subscribers who have lost interest in their emails "wake up" and re-engage. When the customer stops responding, something must be done. Doing nothing given the fact would be like ripping money, and if he ever showed an interest in your product/service, there's a chance he's still interested. Sometimes all you have to do is re-engage with your content, your products, and your services. One thing to notice here is that some subscribers to your mailing list should actually be excluded from it. And you will want to do this, after all, subscribers who do not interact with your emails in any way (do not open them and do not respond) are most likely putting you in a bad position in the inbox of other stakeholders. If you are not getting the desired engagement, often your email starts to be redirected to the spam box, making it impossible for potential customers who are really interested in your product/service to see your emails, or even if they are delivered by your email marketing tool. The re-engagement series should catch the attention of your users and invite them to take action to demonstrate that they want to keep hearing from you. If they do not take this action, it's best if you actually delete emails that have not been committed from your list.

Profit, Logic, and Fear

A powerful email sequence created by Ryan Deiss is called Profit, Logic, and Fear. It is commonly used in the engagement stage, to convert people who downloaded some marketing bait as an ebook or a checklist. If the person has downloaded a free material, signed their email list but did not buy anything, the technique must be used to get this person to buy. It is based on 3 emails, each focusing on a psychological aspect of the buyer and working out the top 3 reasons why people buy.

• Profit: Demonstrates to the potential customer what he gets if he makes that purchase;

• Logic: Demonstrates to the potential customer that this is a good rational decision and that the purchase makes complete sense;

• Fear: Demonstrates to the potential customer what could happen and what could go wrong if he does not buy that product.

The Key Elements of Emails That Convert

To create emails that convert, you need to become a good copywriter and know the elements of email marketing that make people convert. The 3 main elements are:

• The Subject of Email: There are 2 main types of subjects, and they should be used according to your purpose for that email. The first type is the blind subject. Its role is to arouse the interest and curiosity of his potential client to open the email. The second type is the direct subject, in which the purpose is clear, leading the potential client to take action hence making the benefits of that action very clear.

• The Body of Email: To write emails in which you convert, you must give as many opportunities as possible for the reader to click and engage. So in your text, you should, whenever possible, have multiple clickable links, each focused on a psychological reason for the person to click. In the same email, have clickable excerpts that arouse curiosity, benefits for the buyer and also scarcity, so that the user clicks for the reason that most matches their interest.

• The landing page that the visitor arrives after the click: It is essential that it refers clearly to the emails that led the user to it. You should have both similar design and text to that of which used in your emails. Make the same benefits clear and connect emails and landing pages as much as possible. If you can use these 3 elements mastery, you will be able to optimize your filter constantly, and each time you have a list more engaged and buying more.

Final Notes:

The invisible sales machine is the methodology of lead generation and customer nutrition that, through various types of marketing emails, allows anyone to make sales through the internet. For Ryan, the important thing is that his steps are followed and that the user makes constant experiments to learn more and more about their subscribers. Your goal is simple: to achieve the incredible feeling of power that comes from knowing that you no longer have to worry about money.

12min tip: Did you like this microbook? Be sure to read our microbook Launch, based on Jeff Walker's book.