Episode 28: Digital Marketing with Jimmy Huynh of Kajabi

Kendra Corman:

Hello, and welcome back. Thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of Imperfect Marketing. 

I'm joined today by Jimmy. I probably should have asked you how to pronounce your name before... Your last name before we jumped on.

Jimmy Huynh:

No problem. It's pronounced Win. It's very deceiving.

Kendra Corman:

Awesome. Thank you with Jimmy Huynh of Kajabi.

I am a huge fan of Kajabi and use it myself. It is an all-in-one marketing tool, for course, creators and memberships. I personally love the system because it makes everything seamless for customers. 

It's truly built for online lead generation and nurturing leads, and then converting them into customers. I do love, what it allows you to do and to create and how it allows you to segment customers and tag them and it's a great system.

Now, Jimmy is the Senior Manager of Customer Training, and I'm super excited that he's joining us today, so thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Jimmy Huynh:

Thanks for the warm welcome, Kendra. I love tuning into your marketing tips for solopreneurs and small business owners, so I'm extremely excited and thankful to be here on your show today.

Kendra Corman:

Thank you. All right. So, let's start with your passion for digital marketing because you've got a very strong background. I was LinkedIn stalking you. You've got a strong background in digital marketing. 

What set you down the path?

Jimmy Huynh:

Wow. I would say it all really started when I was five. My family actually immigrate here from Vietnam after the war, and if anyone's listening these too familiar, it's a third world country. It's very unfortunate. 

So, growing up, my parents, my dad, always wanted to give my sister and I sort of what they didn't really have in our homeland, which is three square meals a day and having a roof over your head was a luxury apparently in Vietnam.

My dad started his own construction business. He's an entrepreneur. As you can probably imagine Kendra, being an entrepreneur means you're not just the business owner, you're the sales department, you're the marketing department, customer service, whatever that is.

Going back to me being five, I was a part of my dad's marketing department. We would literally help create advertisements for my dad and I remember this so vividly. We would literally stay up at night and we would take these highlight orange flyers and put them into little plastic sandwich bags and put a little pebble into it.

Early in the morning, my like four or five in the morning, my dad would drive down streets and throw these bags at doorstep so that people could discover his business. 

Looking back at now, or even as a kid actually, I kind of always ask myself, "There's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way to do this."

As I got older, the concepts of marketing really just remained constant in my life in that way, just seeing opportunities too. For example, growing up, let's say if I had a birthday party. My job would be to invite my friends to my birthday party. 

I realized certain things like if I personalized the invite text that I sent to my friends, include their names after I said, "Hey, hello," or whatever, I would get a ton more people who would respond to the message. Or if I said what activities or if I had a bounce house, more people would show up or RSVP.

I learned over time that these were all basic elements of marketing and understanding basic human behavior and fast forward later on, I started a whole career, additional marketing, working with a lot of different large tech companies, as well as helping other small business owners the one my family had.

I think going back to your core question, like what really brought me down that path is being able to really help all these business owners really automate their marketing processes, not having to pack little plastic bags with advertisements to throw out at doorsteps. It still has me on that path today trying to reach all the entrepreneurs that are trying to build sustainable businesses, selling their knowledge with Kajabi.

Kendra Corman:

I love that. I love that story. Thank you. That was more than I expected, so that is amazing. I love that. 

I personally have nightmares of highlight orange paper. I remember that was the color. It was called highlighter, highlight orange, and you would go into the copy store and it would be there and it was, I think it might have been one of the most popular colors out there because I think...

Jimmy Huynh:

Yellow and orange,

Kendra Corman:

Yes, the yellow and the orange were the two most pop... And it was just black print on it and that was it. Yeah. Oh my gosh. They bring back some memories of college and doing all of that, so that's hilarious. I love that.

So on this show, I do like to get tips and information shared with our listeners from a... I'd like to ask you a couple questions that might help them with things that they're working on. 

Now from a lead generation perspective, user acquisition perspective, can you tell me a little bit about the trends that you're seeing or what you guys at Kajabi are recommending people start to pay attention to?

Jimmy Huynh:

That's a really great question. I'm always a bit hesitant to recommend a trend specifically, just because of the nature trends. They're always in flux. You don't know if it's going to be here tomorrow or not. I can recommend two probably things to help evaluate trends the very least and I think the very first thing is maybe just experimenting with a trend and evaluating if a trend is actually going to be worth considering. 

And for us personally, I always recommend customers using a sort of scientific method, something like, we all might be familiar with science class, like the sixth grade or something like that.

Researching the strategy of really getting all the information. Is the cost of the strategy worth it? Is it going to cost you money? Is it cost you time? How much is that? Is this trend going to be around long enough for you even to make break even, or make an ROI? 

If it takes you a year before you even make a dollar back from it, is that trend even going to be around before you can take it to fruition.

And then really hypothesizing running experiments and seeing if those experiments actually run true. And if it works out, if it's true, if it's working well, really scale that up essentially from there. 

I know that sounds probably really basic, but you'd be surprised how many folks really don't go through like a simple framework or exercise to evaluate if a trend is even worth investing in.

Kendra Corman:

Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. I usually recommend people spend about 10 to 20% of their marketing budget and first entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, coaches, course creators, I recommend that 10 to 20% of your budget and I'm using air quotes for budget that you can't see, that includes time too. 

Because a lot of the new technologies require a lot of time investment in addition, which I think is something to think about as you're investigating. And so you don't want to get bogged down too much in the time investment either and spending a lot of time on something that's that may not necessarily provide you with the rewards that you're looking for.

Jimmy Huynh:

I'm glad you said that Kendra, because one other strategy that I actually can probably recommend that will probably save a lot of people listening on time and money is partnerships, actually. I think is one of the most fantastic methods to generate leads and acquire new customers, whether it be through influence your marketing, which we're seeing a huge rise in across the board. 

I think in this last year alone, maybe a 30 to 40% increase in that industry, just in general and I believe it's going to keep growing as more platforms really get into user generated content and stuff like that.

But outside of that, let's say if you're not into influencer marketing, you don't want to pay or work with influencers. I think just simply making partnerships with other similar businesses as yourself. Maybe not someone who's a direct competitor, but someone who targets the same audience and just thinking an example, I'm going to use this example, because I just bought like a Monstero plant for my living room.

Let's say if you're a company that sells pots or something for plants, maybe you could contact plant nurseries or florists to create partnerships. There's so many opportunities there for you to cross promote. 

You could share each other's email lists. You could use share existing customer bases. You could support each other's businesses in some way. I'm sure both businesses are going through the same struggles, challenges, et cetera. 

The list really goes on but as long as it's a mutually beneficial agreement for both parties, it's a huge, huge way to not reinvent the wheel. Don't start from scratch. You're starting from a more elevated place and getting a little bit further.

Kendra Corman:

Yeah. I usually ask a lot of my clients when I'm working with them on their marketing plans and partnerships, who's somebody that has a customer list that you envy? They don't even need to always be complimentary. There can be different ways that you can work with each other and help each other gain exposure to that audience.

But thinking about the person that you meet that has the client list that you envy, I think is a great way of going forward with that. I like what you had to say, especially you can get people that compliment your services and share and cross promote information. 

I mean, that's the whole thing of in-person networking through chamber commerces and things like that; LBNs, BNIs, all those fun things, where people actually create those partnerships and get exposure to their lists, so I really do like that.

One of the big things is that I know has grown more and more and important is personalization. Do you have anything or have you guys been sharing anything on the topic of personalization?

Jimmy Huynh:

That's a really, really big topic for us. I think at this point in time, we want to make things as easy and simple as possible and we want to make sure our messaging really resonates with the audience.

One of the best ways people really enjoy hearing their names. I feel like it's very psychological. Hearing your name, you're like, "Okay, this person's talking directly to me." So creating ways to, one, personalize the name field, but also personalize the messaging to an audience type and like segment, I think is crucial.

If you have a massive email list, which a lot of our customers do want Punjabi, it's really important to break that down. Use different tagging mechanisms. You can differentiate, why did this customer even come to you in the first place? What were they interested in? Was it a certain vase that you were selling? Or was it a pot? 

Because if you're trying to send email marketing about the pot, to the person who wanted the vase, it's not going to resonate with them. So, that's the kind of personalization that Kajabi really pushes our customers to offer in order to help nurture their leads and really get sales and have success.

Kendra Corman:

That's really the level of personalization people are expecting nowadays. Right? That's really what they're looking for us to provide is more than just their name. 

That's really easy. I mean, that's the easiest part that you can do. But personalizing the product offerings and what you're suggesting from there, I think adds a lot, so that's great.

Jimmy Huynh:

Yeah. The right messaging, the right person, the right time, all those are all the three. I think those are the three most important things to make sure you personalize with every email sent out.

Kendra Corman:

Yeah, and the content is a big piece of it. I help a client with their email marketing and they work with some for-profit clients and non-profit clients. We send a different letter the second half of the year. We send a different newsletter to the non-profit clients, focus more around Giving Tuesday and end-of-the-year giving and those types of things that they can doing. 

Open rates, and again, they're no longer valid and we can talk more about that. I'll put a link to why they're no longer valid in... But when they used to be valid and I'll have a link in the show notes, but when they used to be valid, they would go up to 300% over that same segment getting the regular list, because we're talking to them about stuff that matters to them. I think that's really important. 

I do like that and I love all the tagging capabilities and everything like that, that Kajabi has to be able to allow you to do that, so it that's really, really cool.

Kendra Corman:

Now I am a huge fan of email marketing and that's a little bit with what we're talking about. I know Kajabi is too. How are you recommending email be used to launch courses or what success are your subscribers finding with email?

Jimmy Huynh:

Yeah, we're doing a very, very big push towards email. We actually just launched three brand new courses for our customers about email marketing. One's on email marketing fundamentals. One's on how to convert new prospects into lifelong customers. 

Others is to promote and reengage existing customers and increase your revenue with them. These are all actually led by Marketing Rocks or John Grimshaw, who is also the CMO Smart Marketer.

The reason why I bring that all up is because we believe that in the course itself, like we all teach the importance of an effective freebie or lead magnet and to really target your audience, it actually warm them up and drive them towards and nurture them towards actually becoming a prospect or becoming a customer.

I think one thing that can definitely share is, don't start your emails off trying to sell something too soon. Thinking of, maybe let's say dating. Sometimes when we date, let's say we're on a first date with someone. You wouldn't go on the first date and sit down at dinner and all of a sudden we get on one knee and ask them to marry you. Right?

Kendra Corman:

That would be crazy.

Jimmy Huynh:

She or he would... Yeah. That would be crazy, for most people, hopefully.

Kendra Corman:

Or, if you're on the Bachelor.

Jimmy Huynh:

That's this rose is for you.

Using that example, you want to get to know people through the dating process. If you're thinking of dating and prospects the same way, so it takes a lot of time for us to really nurture them, get to know each other, get each other comfortable before you ask the big question, "Will you buy this product for me?"

I think stats really show that it takes about eight plus touch points to make a sale these days and it could be more if you're selling something really complex.

Kendra Corman:

I've been hearing as like up over 13 now. It used to be like seven to 11 back in the olden days when I was the Jeep advertising manager, so that was easy, but because we're getting so many messages, yeah, eight to 13 or 13 and up. I mean, that's a lot of touches that you have to get to somebody and they're not seeing all of them.

Jimmy Huynh:

Yeah. It's really important to just not give up and get those messages out there. Crack those messages really well. Experiment to see where the dropout. Look at all the data.

But going back to your question, in terms of success, I can tell you right now, right off the bat, that any one of our successful entrepreneurs who've made 5,000, 50,000, five million on Punjabi, they can all tell you that acquired prospects and nurturing them with email marketing on Punjabi, was a core pillar to their success and a very popular strategy actually for a lot of our entrepreneurs is leveraging low ticket offers. So, kind of creating an offer that you can't refuse, so to speak.

If you're familiar with the Godfather, creating an offer that's low price, something that they definitely really want and getting them through the door, and then using email marketing to further nurture and make a bigger sale high ticket offer later.

I think in marketing, we always say it's easier to get a customer to buy again, than to get the initial customer to begin with. So, getting them through the door of that low ticket offer, that trip wire, is the way to go, I would say.

Kendra Corman:

Trip wire, monkeys paw, all of that. All of those. All of those phrases go with them. But yeah, no. I definitely agree with you. And again, like I said, I'm a huge fan of email marketing and I just love it when other people reiterate that with me because I have conversations on a daily basis with people that are like, "I don't want to do email marketing because..." 

They don't want to be sending spam or they get too much email as it is, so they don't want to add to other people's inboxes. And I keep saying, "Well, then don't send spam. Send value to people because that's what they're looking for."

Jimmy Huynh:

Yeah. That's really important. I agree with that wholeheartedly. If you're setting something that they want to receive, I think that's a really big difference between EO marketing and spam. 

Spam is something that you did not want and that makes it spam because you weren't expecting it. You didn't want it. But if you're giving them something like of value, something that they woke up and looked at their email like, "Oh my God, this is exciting. I want to read this," you're going to have really, really great engagement rates, really quick, great quick rates and stuff like that.

Kendra Corman:

I did get an email from Kajabi by the way, with the new courses and actually in one of my 75 open browser tabs. I'm very happy my computer's still running right now. 

But in one of my 75 open browser tabs is that email marketing course because I love to hear what other people have to say about email marketing and so I do study up on what other people are saying about it too, which is great, so I'm looking forward to taking those courses.

Jimmy Huynh:

That's great. From the course, we're actually going to have a live webinar coming out sometimes soon, where John Grimshaw is going to be answering questions, following up after the email marketing course, so feel free to take the course and drop into our webinar and see if you have any questions.

Kendra Corman:

Very cool. Yes. I'll make sure I put a link to, it's called Kajabi University. Right? I don't know. I just click on the links.

Jimmy Huynh:

Oh yeah. So, Kajabi University is available to all of our existing customers who have an account or trial account, but we also have a full blown customer training webinar website that hosts a ton of free webinars where anyone can register in Kajabi, watch a live webinar or an OnDemand webinar, about marketing, about the platform, etc.

Kendra Corman:

That's great. Well, we'll definitely have links to both of those sections because I do know a lot of people that use Kajabi are in this community and listening, so I do appreciate that and I'll make sure that we provide a link to the public ones for the people that are not already clients of Kajabi. And of course we'll have a link to Kajabi and how to sign up there too in the show notes, so we'll do that.

Now, one of the pieces that we're talking about is you're talking about well bringing in clients or customers or prospects and leads, and we're nurturing them to take them from cold to warm audiences and mastering that pipeline can really be a difficult process. 

You really need to understand your customers to get them to your landing page, because you need to target them, a lot of times with Facebook ads, Google ads, things like that. Even showing up on other podcasts or Facebook groups, all of those things. 

And they drive them to your landing page and then you have to make sure that those emails you send relate to them, change them again from a cold lead to a warm prospect.

It takes a lot of work and a lot of thought through that process. What are you guys talking to people about as they're trying to build their funnel and pipeline?

Jimmy Huynh:

That's one of the reasons I really love Kajabi. Our email automation, or funnels, feature literally has tons of email templates that are sort of battle tested, so to speak, for our customers to customize and emails can be triggered to send out based on a bunch of different use cases, soy you can be more hands off and really focused on your business.

I know as an entrepreneur, or a business owner, or a marketer, everyone's notoriously very, very busy. So, setting up these processes and having these automations and having it run in the background for you, is going to be a huge, huge time saver and you can really just drop in once a day and just look at the analytics, see where the click rate is dropping off, for example, at which step of the funnel, and then focusing on that so that you can create a great funnel where you get them from start to finish to final purchase, that end goal that you want.

Kendra Corman:

Yeah. I agree and when you're looking at it where we're talking about experimentation and testing, make sure you're only changing one thing at a time. 

Don't change the whole email. Maybe change the subject line, then change maybe how it's worded or things like that because that way you can trace back to what you've changed and what's working and what's not working.

So, that's great. Anything else that you think people listening, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, course creators, anything else that you would share with them from a marketing education perspective?

Jimmy Huynh:

I would really say that with the current market, the way that advertising is now, the way that everyone gets so many spam messages into their inbox, like they were saying, it's really important to sort of show up authentic. 

Show up really personal or genuine, when showing up to prospects. People can kind of see like that hokey sales pitch from a mile away these days because they're so inundated in it.

I think it's really important to just be true to yourself, be true to your product, be true to your brand and show up how you would want a brand to show up to you, with that authenticity and genuineness, I think is really, really important for anything related to strategizing and try to generate leads these days.

Kendra Corman:

I love that. I was talking to somebody the other day and she's another Kajabi client and we were actually talking and she had had a marketing consultant tell her that, "Oh, if you want to increase your reach on Instagram and your reel, you need to do lip syncing." So, she did lip syncing and a little bit more of a hard sell than what she usually does.

Well, her regular followers were like, "Are you getting desperate? What's going on?" This is not the kind of content that I like to see from you and they were actually talking about unfollowing her and stuff. I mean, it was pretty drastic because that's not who she was. 

So, she went back through and deleted all of the lip syncing reels, but it's very true. You need to be authentic. If you're not true to who you are, then you can alienate your core audience.

Jimmy Huynh:

Yeah. If you're running a paid ad campaign, that's one thing maybe, but like if you're creating content, you're trying to offer value, I think because the reason why they're there, if it's to watch entertaining content or to see some kind of valuable tip that you're offering them, or your social media let's say or email marketing, I think the last thing people want to see is a constant sales pitch throughout.

I think sometimes a soft pitch or just having that option there is okay, but to have the whole email or the whole message just be the sale, is people don't like that. We don't like that. It's like watching YouTube and seeing an ad pop up every 30 seconds. No one likes to see that.

Kendra Corman:

Nobody wants to be sold to. Right.

Jimmy Huynh:

Right.

Kendra Corman:

All right. Well thank you so much. This is just great information.

There's two questions that I ask everybody, so we'll start with the shows called Imperfect Marketing because marketing isn't into perfect science, right? 

I'll bet you those flyers with the pebbles in the bag worked pretty well back in the day and might even work for some people nowadays, but because it's not perfect, we always have lessons learned.

What has your biggest marketing lesson learned been?

Jimmy Huynh:

I think the biggest lesson that I've had to learn is knowing when not to give up. And if you're listening out there, I want you repeat after me. I will not give up on my business until I've made my first dollar. 

I don't mean to immediately just quit after you've made money but what I'm trying to say is that, once you've made that first dollar, you could really look back and kind of evaluate, reflect and ask yourself, if you can see yourself continuing to invest in this marketing campaign, or this business, or whatever that is, sometimes with marketing campaigns, you can quit too early, before the campaign's able to reach its fruition point or for you to get to that point where it's going to start making money because you've learned enough from it.

Other times, we feel we've invested too much in it. We can't give up now and it's really important to, once you start making that money, to really look back and kind of ask yourself, "Hey, can I see myself continue to invest in this way, whether it be time, money into this?"

Early on my digital marketing career, one of my very first early ad campaigns, you go in there and you make assumptions that like, oh, the very first campaign that you run is going to be successful. I'll tell you right now. 

It usually isn't and it's almost funny just to think that way back then, because everyone would be a millionaire right now, if that was the case, if advertising was that easy and marketing was that easy.

I think that's one thing that I would definitely share is just knowing when not to give up. Stick in. Stay in there and focus and do your best and try to learn and grow before you just kind of throw the towel.

Kendra Corman:

Oh, that's great. I love that because there are a lot of people that give up right before they move on to the next level. So, that's a fantastic. Fantastic tip. Thank you for sharing that.

Now my final question that I have for you is a question I ask of everybody because I love Marvel and I grew up on superheroes and sci-fi with my father, watching TV. But what superpower would you choose for yourself if you could and why?

Jimmy Huynh:

Oh wow. I need to go watch Thor after you mention that. The power to control time, I think is, and it's funny because I've thought about this multiple times throughout my life. It's like power to control time and I used to hear the saying, people would say, "Love and passion are infinite, but time isn't right." 

And to relate this back to being an entrepreneur, doesn't matter how much love and passion you have for your business, or for your market campaigns, you just don't have enough time. I think we're in this weird world where there's so many things just trying to grasp at our attention and fill our time. 

I really wish I could just sort of freeze time in moments and actually matter to me, like spending time with people I care about, like freezing that moment. Or, going back to that moment or doing things that you love the most, or revisiting a beautiful moment from the past would be so amazing I think.

It would also be really cool to see how we all came into existence. I think I would love to see that with control time. So ,that's my answer. What's your answer actually, I'm kind of curious?

Kendra Corman:

Oh, that's a good one. I actually had a hundred. But no, it really, I'm torn by a bunch of them, like teleportation. A previous guest suggested that she wanted the power to function with no sleep, so never need sleep again. 

Could you imagine what that would do for time? I was like, "Oh, I want to steal that one."

But yeah, it all comes down, I would say the most common ones I get are all the ones that I want too and that's all around time and making more of it. Because you're right, it's limited. 

So teleportation, being able to skip the travel piece and getting right into your vacation, or seeing your family wherever they're at. Again, it's all about that time-saving piece, so it's been pretty cool to hear what other people have to say, but they're all related to time and I want more than one because I'd like to fly too because that would be fun.

Jimmy Huynh:

That'd be very fun. I would love that. Where would you fly first?

Kendra Corman:

I would probably just fly over some people I know houses just to say, "Hi."

Jimmy Huynh:

I can fly. "Hi."

Kendra Corman:

Exactly but that's probably what I would be doing first. But yeah, no, I think that there's just so much that we can do to make more time for ourselves and leveraging technology and I know you've been a lot in the tech world and there's definitely never enough time to get done what we need.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I appreciate your time. I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us. I know that I got a lot out of your comments and what you were able to share. I love your story from growing up. That was amazing and I really do appreciate it.

Thank you all for tuning into another episode of Imperfect Marketing. We're going to have some links for Kajabi related trainings and how to sign up for Kajabi and learn more about it in the show notes. Be sure to check those out so you can learn more about marketing as we go.

Thank you again for tuning in and I'll see you next time, same day, same place.