The Dual Sequencing Cheatsheet: 3 Different Takes on Dual Sequencing from Ben Settle, Alen Sultanic, and Todd Brown

Email lists tend to die a slow death and nobody knows why.

The opens and clicks look ok. The unsubscribes haven't spiked.

But nothing converts like it used to. The follow-up emails don’t move the needle. The promos feel like they're hitting a wall.

The problem almost never is the copy.

It's that you're treating your whole list like one person.

The subscriber who clicked your last email and didn't buy is not the same person as the one who didn't open it. 

The person who's ready to buy right now is not in the same headspace as the one who's still thinking about it. 

The person who reads at 9am processes information differently than the one reading at 9pm.

Sending them all the same email is like a doctor prescribing the same thing to every patient because they all came through the same front door.

Dual sequencing is the fix.

Three of the best marketers alive figured this out independently. 

Ben Settle calls his version the most profitable thing he's ever taught. 

Alen Sultanic built it into everything he does with the people he mentors. 

Todd Brown structured his entire database communication system around it.

None of them call it exactly the same thing. 

None of them execute it the same way.

But the underlying principle is identical: the right message, to the right person, at the right time… not the same message to everyone, every time.

Here's how each of them does it.

These are the raw notes and this doc won’t be public anymore after today. So make a copy, download it, etc.

Here’s the google doc version to make it easy for you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O7bANs28L1_Ymxsz3biZZjP_d_EPp8m-64Lc4-WkLBk/edit?usp=sharing

Ben Settle’s $0-$100k in 30 seconds Email Trick

Ben considers this the most profitable thing he’s ever taught.

Send 2 emails a day during a promo. One will bring emotions down and the other will bring them back up.

2 different strategies: one for more emotional markets (like weight loss, anything with women, or more emotional men esp if there are more younger guys) and one for more logical left brained people

Emotional market:

Send a morning “horror story” email. Think Paranormal Activity. This type of email wrenches on their fears, insecurities, keeps them up at night and plagues them w Sunday night insomnia, what they’re afraid of, worried about… their pain points.

Send a nighttime “inspirational/feel good story” email. Think Rudy. This type of email tells stories of people in industry who made it and went through incredible odds.

There’s no content or how-to stuff… just horror stories and inspo stories with highs and lows, a lot of tease and giving them a reason to join.

More logical market (like Ben Settle’s crowd):

Morning email is content-ish, good info and valuable.

Nighttime email is a testimonial or hard tease.

Bring out the emotions more to left brained people by teasing them and using curiosity to the hills.

Alen Sultanic - “Dual Sequencing”

“When it comes to email marketing, dual sequences tend to beat single sequences, but the key is knowing what makes them different.

Dual sequences, meaning morning and evening emails, posts, or whatever.

Now, when it comes to knowing how to sequence emails, the key isn't to focus on the email, but rather on the person reading it and their state of mind and context of the mind (what they're doing at during that day of the week).

This will greatly affect the response of the types of emails being sent.

The human brain has two modes of operation, storing memory and retrieving memory (this is a big one when it comes to writing VSLs — more on this later).

Morning minds are rested, and fresh, and absorb information easier. This is when the storage of memory is faster and requires less energy.

This is why we tend to go to school in the morning or focus on learning.

So morning sequences should be of educational/inspirational nature.

Educational is a lot of "how to" and inspirational is a lot of "making them realize" they're good enough to do that how to. Inspirational has an "in" in the word, so it's within them.

Now, as the day progresses...the brain stores information/data through interacting with the world and gets tired (this is why you're tired in the evenings)...

...The brain literally runs out of juice to absorb new information and synthesize it, so sending educational/inspirational emails in the evening will do you no good because you'll automatically get categorized in the "I'll read it in the morning" pile, and then in the morning, you'll be forgotten.

At best, it's good in terms of planning and daydreaming about the next day.

And this is where motivation comes into play and why evening emails should be of motivational nature.

If you reflect on your own behavior, you'll notice that we tend to focus on movies, tv shows, entertainment, and things that are motivational in the evening and less educational / learning.

Music, movies, TV shows all hit differently in the evenings, and this is why.

What you'll notice in yourself and others is the whole "I'll do big things tomorrow", and so on and so forth...the brain is very easily motivated in the evenings.

This is something I'm doing that we've been implementing a lot with the people I'm mentoring/working with within FF / NHB+, and it's also part of my seasonal adjustment strategies, and it absolutely crushes.

The other thing is if you send motivational emails in the evening, they'll go to sleep with a positive association with you and will be a lot more receptive to you in the mornings.

Now, if you pay close attention to what I do..you'll notice that my posting/email patterns in the NHB group, my FB wall, and my email list use this strategy.

Hit the like / love icon and the comment box if you have any questions or just want to show love for the content and help the algo kick it up so the rest of the NHB community can get value out of it too. More to come your way.

- Alen

p.s. What comes after the dual strategies is that post I shared in the NHB group about conversion time windows.

p.p.s. If you're doing emails for clients, use this to double the number of emails you can sell them lol.”

“One of the lessons in this game that has always stuck with me over the years is hearing Ted Nicholas say something in one of his book / seminars that I’ll never forget, and also that made me a whole lot of money over the years.

And that something is (I paraphrase) “There’s only one type of lead worth anything — and that’s a buyer”.

The lesson for me wasn’t directly applicable to what I was / am doing, but rather indirectly.

In the sense that it made me realize something.

When you’re running ads online, people that buy your stuff (give you money) are actually, very much ROI positive, and yet the people that don’t buy your stuff (don’t give you money), are actually ROI negative.

In order to reach those who will buy something for you, at the same time, you have to reach a whole lot more who will not buy anything from you.

So much so that, this ratio of non-buyers to buyers is usually 10 to 1 or even in some cases 100 to 1, and in some even 1,000 to 1.

Low ticket offers have 10% conversion rate on average (if you’re using the AC model) - that means that 90% of those who see your offer will cost you money, and only 10% will make you money.

VSLs have about 1-3% conversion rate on average - and that means for every 100 people that see your VSL, only 1-3 will make you money, and the other 99-97 will cost you money.

Webinars are even worse - the way we tend to mitigate this loss of sales is by one of price economics, we just raise the price, stack on upsells, get the phone teams dialing and so on and so forth.

And all those are very good ways to do it.

But what you do up stream, largely affects downstream.

So the focus should always be to improve the front end conversion of non-buyers to becoming buyers.

And one of the best ways to doing that is first understanding buyer psychology, how people buy, when they buy and their timeline of buying things

To me, there is no such a thing as a non-buyer.

There’s only a “not now” buyer.

The reason for that is we have all different convincer models and how to tap into them (I’m writing another post about this and will go into how to create the perfect email follow up).

In this case of “not now” buyers

What we have are basically two types of web visitors.

1. We have people who are buyers (very small percentage)

2. We have people who are browsers (very large percentage)

Now, pay attention here - this is the meat of the post and what really matters:

The TIME Of the day when someone is likely to be a BROWSER vs BUYER changes dramatically.

If you go into your stripe account right now, and export your buyers, and look at data - you will notice that about 95% of your buyers buy based on a certain block of time.

Say 11 am to 6 pm.

During this time, you’re either ROI positive or at least break even.

OUTSIDE of those times, you what you will notice is that this buying behavior turns to browsing behavior.

You’re still paying good money for ads to advertise to them, but they’re not going to buy.

If your conversion rate is 10%, the real conversion for that buyer “conversion time window” will be about 30-50% higher. so 13-15%.

While if you flip that around and you look at outside of that “conversion time window” and go into “non-conversion time window”, what you’ll notice is that now your conversion went from 10% down to something like 1%.

This difference here is what will determine the profitability of your offer.

This is the same reason normal businesses have “business hours”, because at some point it costs more to keep it open than it’s going to make you.

If you look at your conversion events in your ad account, you will notice the same exact pattern emerging.

What I used to do was used to look at the days of the week, so on my supplement offers, one day of the week was very low conversion rates, while the other one had super high. So I would just shift the entire budget over to the high-days.

These days though, the stop-and-go doesn’t work as well.

A better model is to take a look at your ad account and determine these conversion time windows, and then use a script that redirects them to a page.

Time window of buyers = send them to a page where they can buy

Time window of non-buyers = send them to an optin page, where you can get their info → redirect to a sales page → than follow up with them using automations during the exact time that has the highest probability of them buying based on the time window of buyers.

What happens here is interesting - you now have a lead that can bring them back to a sale when they probability of them is way higher.

This morning, I woke up with a DM in Fast Forward from someone (in the dating niche) asking me about how to structure the geo locations of his ads.

I asked him to look at this data, and sure enough, here’s what it came out to:

“Alright so it's using 28% of ad budget during dead times, and about 1.5x-2x ROAS during the peak times”.

So 28% of his budget was wasted with NO ONE buying, all browsers, NOT buyers.

During that time window of “dead times”, a script is going in that will automatically redirect them to an opt-in page to collect the lead, than send them to a sales page, than in the morning when the rush hour starts, the script automatically redirect the traffic to the right page. Mitigating the losses.

Hence you go from sales to lead-gen based on time of day.

So if you’re a CMO, CRO, an offer owner or touch traffic any sort of way, look at your data and you’ll see this pattern emerge.

You can either turn the ads off, and run them in conversion time windows, or change them to an opt-in and follow up.

Let me know if you have any questions, comments or just want to show love for the FB algo, hit the like and comment below.

MOAR to come!

- Alen Sultanic

p.s. I’m having one of my developers pull our time-redirection script, I’ll upload it in the comments as soon as he pulls it out of our system.”

Todd Brown

How to keep your database responsive – how do you keep your buyers buying more?

How do you continue to put out content and offers in front of them without burning them out? 

Well, this is a super powerful system and super simple. 

The foundation of this is based on the idea of lead generating out of your own database.

We're going to get interested people in your database to raise their hand and identify themselves as being interested. 

And then we're going to follow up with those people more aggressively promoting the offer. 

It's what we call communicating with dual sequences. 

There are two email sequences at the core of this that make up these dual sequences that make up this approach.

And I want you to think of these two different sequences. 

These dual sequences, as together they are, they're a unit and you could have several of these back to back to back. 

So the first of these dual sequences is what we call click sequences. Three to four days of emails to identify prospects that are interested in a particular topic and or offer.

The second type of sequence is what's called the conversion sequence. This is a sequence that's designed to convert the prospects who expressed interest by clicking a link in one of the click sequence emails into a buyer. 

So we've got the click sequence, which identifies the prospects that are interested in a particular topic and or offer. And then we have the conversion sequence to follow up with those interested prospects, to convert them into a buyer. 

The click sequence runs typically three to four days. It's one email a day, and it typically consists of content and a soft pitch or a soft call to action. So this is where you present some content on a particular topic. The topic would be related to one of your offers.

And at the end of that email, you would present a soft pitch for them to learn more like, Hey, if you're interested in learning the full system, go over here and check this out. If you're interested in learning more about how to do this, go over here, check this out, something like that. So it's content with a simple, soft pitch. 

Then what we've got is we've got the conversion sequence. Now this is about three days to four days also of emails. One email a day, and these emails are all about the offer. 

Now the key here is that these emails only go out to the people that expressed interest in the click sequence. Meaning the conversion sequence is only triggered when somebody clicks a link in one of those click sequence emails and goes over to get more information about the offer and they don't buy.

So of course, some people will get the click sequence emails and they'll click and they'll go over the offer and they'll buy. They never get the conversion sequence. They just get the thank you sequence for the product that they purchased. 

Then you'll get some folks that click one of the emails in the click sequence. They go over to the offer and they don't buy those people are then taken out of the click sequence and they only get the conversion sequence, which follows up with them now about the offer. 

And then you'll have some people on your database that get the click sequence and never click any of the emails in the click sequence. Meaning they're not interested in the topic that you're talking about. Those people will never receive the conversion sequence emails. 

So what happens is you're only following up aggressively in terms of the offer with the people that have expressed interest and the people that don't express interest, they never see your aggressive follow-up if you will, about the offer. 

So this keeps your list responsive because you're only talking to people about the nitty gritty details of an offer and the benefits and what they get and the bonuses and all and whatnot in the conversion sequence. And only to the people that have expressed interest in the people that don't express interest. They've just gotten your click sequence emails, which is content with a very soft pitch. 

Now what happens is you can string together these dual sequences one after another. So for example, you might have a click sequence about, let's say topic “A.” It goes out over the course of three days. And if somebody doesn't click on any of those emails, they never get the conversion sequence at all. 

They just now go into the next click sequence, giving them more content with another soft pitch this time for a different product. Again, you're lead generating out of your own house file out of your own database to ensure that you're only talking about offers and bonuses and benefits of offers to the people that have expressed interest and the people that haven't don't see those follow-up messages.

Example:

1). Send your list the “click” sequence for Offer A with value content and a soft pitch (to get them interested, raise their hand, and click for more info)

2). Take the clickers out of the “click” sequence and automatically put them in a “conversion” sequence that aggressively sells them Offer A

If someone doesn’t click any of the links in the click sequence, put them in the click sequence for Offer B and start the whole cycle over again.

You can do this indefinitely with all your offers.

The simplicity and the beauty of this is that you are only talking about offers. You're only talking about the nitty gritty details of the benefits. Overcoming objections, answering frequently asked questions, focusing on the bonuses.Really talking about the value of the offer.

You're only talking to the people that have expressed interest (by clicking emails in the click sequence). So you're not burning out your list. You're not burning out your database by talking to people about offers that they're not interested in. 

And so this is a beautiful thing because you can take all of your offers and you can put together a little click sequence and conversion sequence for each, and then you can run your prospects, run your database through that series and know that you're only talking to the people that have expressed interest about the offers and to the rest of the people – you're just moving them to different topics to see what they are interested in. That's how you keep your list responsive. That's how you use dual sequence communication.