S5E26
· 24:25
Hi. It's Matt. Welcome to Money Lab. Practice your umms and ahs. Get rid of them.
Matt Giovanisci:So I wanted to record this because I recorded an episode where I talked about how I was gonna use this process of of AI to dictate some sales letter emails, send them out, etcetera. And I dictated it live and created a sales email in real time. I wanted to share my experience doing that because I spent the last hour, hour and a half, maybe even 2 hours putting it all together, and I wanna share how well it worked because it worked pretty well. Alright? So I recorded what I recorded.
Matt Giovanisci:I took that voice memo. There's a voice memo app on the on my computer as well, and so it's synced with the cloud. It's very easy. Once I'm done recording something here on my phone, it immediately appears on my computer, which is very nice. So I just drag that memo to my desktop, which I think turns it into an MP or an M4A, which is an audio file.
Matt Giovanisci:And then what I can do is just drag that directly into Descript or Descript, and what it'll do is just translate it. Now I that that particular episode was long, and I had a bunch of stuff in there, so I could just read through the transcript and just copy the parts that I needed. So I copied that part. Now, I'm gonna share with you real quick, and I'm plugging my computer here, And I'm gonna share with you the chat GPT prompt that I wrote. It took me several tries to get this prompt right, but once I got it right, it it flawlessly executed the email.
Matt Giovanisci:It was really cool. Alright. Where is it? So it's up here. Let's see.
Matt Giovanisci:Okay. So this prompt, I had to build it. So you have to use it for your own advantage. But here here here it basically is. So I took that transcript and I wrote a prompt in chat GPT, which said, write a concise and informal warm email to, in my case, a hot tub owner using the following transcript from me, Machiavenesi, the founder of Swim University.
Matt Giovanisci:I also wrote, use emojis sparingly, keep sent keep sentences short. Paragraph should be max of 2 to 3 sentences. Avoid commas, semicolons, hyphens, and dashes, and include a short subject line and preview text. And then I just paste it in that particular transcript. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:So yeah, that that basically spit out an email that I copied and pasted into Klaviyo where I sent it. And the question is is, like, did it actually work? Well, I'm sitting here just watching sales come in, and, yeah, it worked real well. So what I ended up doing was I just made did the chat GPT and and copy and paste thing that prompt for, what was it? 3 other I don't know.
Matt Giovanisci:I'm just alright. Cool. So I did that for the other two emails that I dictated and I scheduled those out. So I have one going out, one went out today. So I just I did that email.
Matt Giovanisci:Now look, I had to create graphics for the email. I had to format the email. Like, it took time to craft the email, but writing the email emails was really fast. And I did have to edit some text, but, honestly, because it was my own words, I didn't really have to edit that much, especially because of the prompt that I used to make sure that it's in my style of writing, which is I use short sentences. I don't I try not to use commas.
Matt Giovanisci:I don't use semicolons. I don't use hyphens. I don't like them. I'll use colons and I'll use ellipses to sort of you know, that's I know a lot of, like, people who don't know how to write English or don't know how to write. They use a lot of ellipses thinking that that's, like, a pause where it's, like, a pause where it's like, no, a comma, a semicolon or that.
Matt Giovanisci:But I use ellipses in copywriting specifically because people seem to understand that for some reason means waiting or, like, anticipation. So I use that a lot. I don't use it a lot. I use it sparingly, but, I will go in and add those things. And I had to bold certain sentences and, you know, general formatting, general editing.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? If it got anything wrong, you know, especially the technical parts, like, you know, click here to, you know, get the sale or whatever. Like, those parts I maybe had to, you know, edit and clean up a little bit. But other than that, everything worked pretty well. I think that this is the way that I'm going to write specifically sales emails.
Matt Giovanisci:I now I I tried to use so I did something interesting afterwards. So, like, again, I had to create the graphics, so that took me some time. And, again, I had to format and craft the email itself within Klaviyo and schedule it and set up the, you know, Shopify discount and all of that stuff. Like, I had to there was other work clearly that had to be done. But the writing part, again, super fast.
Matt Giovanisci:So I decided to try and use my prompt with a little bit of editing and use it to also write quick emails promoting blog posts. Alright? So I did this once, and my process got so much faster, and I'm sure I can improve this even more, but I wrote it down, and I'm keeping track of this. So this one for just general email creation is, actually, you know what? I did I posted it on Twitter.
Matt Giovanisci:So I'll share the Twitter one, because the Twitter one doesn't include, like, my specific thing. Alright. So here we go. So, this this does not require dictation or transcribing. This is simply just a chat GPT prompt.
Matt Giovanisci:So I the the prompt is write a concise and informal warm email to an audience member, and you just input the audience member. So in your if it's, like if I was writing for a brew cabin, I would write write a concise and informal warm email to a home brewer using the following transcript. Oh, no. Oh, that's my transcript one. Sorry.
Matt Giovanisci:Hold on. I'm gonna go back to my email creation. Ah, here it is. So okay. Write a concise and informal warm promotional email to a hot tub owner, home brewer, pool owner, homeowner, etcetera, from Matt Giovanisci, so your author name, parenthesis, the founder of Swim University, whatever company you're using, promoting the following article.
Matt Giovanisci:Please read and summarize the article from the URL before crafting the email. Use emojis sparingly. Keep sentences short. Paragraphs should be maxed of 2 to 3 sentences. Avoid commas, semicolon, hyphens, and dashes.
Matt Giovanisci:Include include a short subject line and preview text. So then I paste the URL of the article. And so it does. It goes and summarizes it. You could see it's like researching with Bing and it does the whole thing.
Matt Giovanisci:And it wrote me a pretty decent I would say, like, a, yeah, a really decent email. And it's and, again, I've been doing this, like, instead of doing newsletters where within the newsletter itself, I'm writing this huge article, I'm not doing that because I just don't think my audience reads an email. Like, they're not gonna save an email. Well, 1, I don't want them to save an email. They're not gonna do that.
Matt Giovanisci:I would I would imagine a majority of my audience, a large majority of my audience. I think I am in the extreme 1%, or perhaps 0.99% of of people who that's not even 0.1 0.01% of people who have inbox 0 and keep their inboxes clean. So when I put these emails in, I don't want the information to be in the email because it's just it's just piling up. So I want it to be short. I want you to know what you're gonna be what what you're gonna learn quickly, and then I want you to click the goddamn button to go read the the post for a few reasons.
Matt Giovanisci:The reason I don't really wanna do it in email is because the post itself has affiliate links that I want you to click, has pitches for products. The email also has pitches for products, and then we get some traffic boosts from that. So it's a good thing all around that I'm that we're doing that. So every new article that I write, I basically as part of the process of promoting it, this is one of those things. Put in the prompt, put in the URL, and then I can use the image that I created, the featured image that I created for the URL, for the article in the email, and I can add other images that I made for the article in the email as well.
Matt Giovanisci:If I usually don't do that. And then I manually write these emails because I used to put it in sort of an evergreen newsletter funnel because I just had somebody ask me this question, and I figured I'd address it, which is, do you I used to do an evergreen newsletter, and I was very adamant about this is the way to to do it. And then when I switched to Klaviyo, they really didn't have a good solution for evergreen newsletters. So I they were they were kind of like, yeah. We we tell people that they should be manually sending emails every week.
Matt Giovanisci:And I was like, okay. That's that feels like more work, but it turns out it's actually not more work because I used to with the Evergreen newsletter, I'd have to go in there every week anyway. So this time, it's I I still schedule emails. So every Monday, which I'm recording this on a Monday, every Monday, I have a task, which is to craft a bunch of emails. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:Obviously, I'm using chat GPT, so I'm not writing this stuff. It's it's it's pumping out that way. The content that I'm promoting is already complete, so all of the assets that I need are done. All I'm really doing is just crafting the email and scheduling it for a later date. So I like to batch and do, I don't know, 2, maybe 3 emails, and then send them out, you know, later or that or that day, depending.
Matt Giovanisci:So, like, today, there was already an email scheduled, and I decided to, like, let's push that a couple weeks forward and let's run this sale for the week. So this week is a sale week and then, you know, almost like a pledge week if you if you listen to NPR or anything like that. So it's like that. So, yeah, I am writing my emails now every week. What's nice about doing that or the value that I now see is I can pick and choose which products to remote when.
Matt Giovanisci:And because my business is seasonal, I can be like, okay. Let's, you know, let let's promote this product or that product, etcetera, etcetera. The other thing is, once I do a year of this so I've been doing this since September. I've been on Klaviyo since September of 2023. Once I get to September of 2024, I will have had an entire year's worth of emails in the system.
Matt Giovanisci:So it's very easy for me to go like, it's let's say it's January 2025. It's very easy for me to go, oh, what did I send this week? And I go back to 2024, and I go, oh, and I could just clone that email and then just schedule it for that week. So I'm not gonna be, you know, writing new emails all the time. I'm gonna write a bunch of emails this year and really craft them well.
Matt Giovanisci:And then I'll look and see, okay. That email I sent last year, what was the open rate? You know, How did it do? Can I do can I do better this year? So I'll clone it because it's like, oh, maybe we wanna talk about the same or whatever, and I'll craft a better subject line or preview text or, I don't know, something.
Matt Giovanisci:You know? I might clean up the the text in the post. I might put a different graphic in, you know, something to sort of try better next year. So, yeah, I am crafting these emails every week, but it's not really a big deal for me, because it's literally the most important part of my business. Like, every time I send an email, regardless of if it's a sales email or not, it I make money from it.
Matt Giovanisci:So the more emails I craft and the more sales pitches I make, even if they're soft, the better. So my audience does not seem to be pissed off about that at all. They kinda love it. In fact, I get a lot of emails more than more than any other email saying, I love these emails. Keep sending them.
Matt Giovanisci:I was like, okay. Great. Yeah. Every once in a while, you're gonna get a sales pitch. Sorry.
Matt Giovanisci:But, usually, it's a sales pitch in your favor. It's usually a discount or something. So, you know, gotta run a business here too. You're getting all this shit for free. But we never get we never get I I don't get emails that are like, oh, stop sending these pieces of shit emails.
Matt Giovanisci:I get sometimes I'll get that when it's like they for some reason, the tech well, they weren't satisfied with something and they think they're getting, you know every once in a while, one falls through the cracks, but it's but maybe, like, 2 a year. So we're not talking about a lot. Anyway, Yeah. I just wanted to share that experience of using I use 3 tools now. I use Descript, which I don't pay for.
Matt Giovanisci:I'm using it for free. But if I keep doing this, then I probably will have to start paying for it. And I'm only using it for sales emails because I feel like I can dictate, and I said this on the last podcast, I think I can dictate a sale better than I can write it. Even though I feel like I'm pretty good at writing and specifically writing, like, sales copy, I think I just have a natural excitement when I'm saying it out loud, and that's definitely translates. And I think of things in the moment.
Matt Giovanisci:Every time I'm doing these podcast, something comes into my brain and I spit it out. And and sometimes I'll spit it out and it could be wrong, but I don't care because I dictated it. Didn't take me any time. Right? So it wasn't like I crafted it and went, whatever.
Matt Giovanisci:But I can just delete it, if it doesn't make sense or, like, reorganize a story. So I think I'm able to and then it would another thing would be interesting to try is, like, you know, I have a lot of these books actually sitting right in front of me on like, I have a book called Cashvertising, a 100 Secrets of Ad Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything TO Anyone. Amazing Tips and Strategies Revealed. But I'm like, okay. Let me just take one of these principles, read it, and then try to dictate it out loud.
Matt Giovanisci:And it's like, alright. And then we I just my biggest issue with doing this, like, I could sit down or stand up and walk and dictate sales letter after sales letter after sales letter on every single product. I can keep doing that. I can do that all day. The question is, how the hell do I test that on a consistent basis?
Matt Giovanisci:So I have 2 ideas. The first idea is obviously email. Right? I write a sales letter. It's a pretty immediate response when I send it if people buy or not.
Matt Giovanisci:So in this case, like today, I'm just I can literally put Shopify on live analytics and just watch sales pour in, which is pretty cool. Right? So now I have that, like, as one, like, piece. Alright? Whenever I need to drum up sales, I can run that exact same sales scenario.
Matt Giovanisci:Then I can even track it and say, okay. How well did this sequence do? How well did this campaign do? So I'd have to, you know, maybe create a spreadsheet after any campaign that I do and just go, like, how well did this campaign do? Right?
Matt Giovanisci:That's email and that makes a lot of sense, but I can't do that every week because my audience would get totally burned out from that. So what else can I do? I could so if I do if I create it as a sales page, you know, it's just copying our sales letter, I can run it as an AB test. The only problem with that is that crafting an AB test with new copy is time consuming. It's a really difficult thing to do.
Matt Giovanisci:And where am I doing that? Am I doing that for, my OTO sales page or my regular, you know, sales page that doesn't get a lot of traffic? Am I running ads to promote that? Possibly. Maybe maybe it's always a campaign like that.
Matt Giovanisci:Maybe it's always, you know, alright. I'm going this is not this is an interesting thought. So let's say I have a sales page, and I am I am just it's kind of private. Like, no one knows a sales page exists. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:And I'm just trying to really optimize that funnel. And I'm not AB testing. I'm gonna run an ad directly to a sales page once a week and just spend a bunch of money and just see how it does. Right? And that and that sales page is, you know, completely different every single time.
Matt Giovanisci:I could do that, and that wouldn't be a bad idea. That would not be a bad idea. But I don't know if I could do that all the time, And, especially, it's seasonal too. So, like, yes, I could I don't know. That's an interesting thought, is to is to to not use my existing audience because my my existing audience is always going to, you know, I wanna treat them the absolute best.
Matt Giovanisci:So, yes, I'm running a sale for them, but I can't be running a sale for them every week. They'll get even every month sometimes, like, I think they'll get burned out from it. But if I were to run and spend money put pushing people direct see, but that's the other problem too is you have 2 variables now. It's not just a sales essentially be a single a single campaign all the way through, which, you know, I guess that's what a campaign is. So that's an interesting thought, and I'm I'm just thinking this out loud now, is it would be cool to keep track of sales campaigns, and those campaigns can just can be like they're they could have multiple parts then.
Matt Giovanisci:They could have, like, what is the product that we're selling? Right? What is the hook? What is the funnel type? Like, is it a sales campaign?
Matt Giovanisci:Like, it could be a campaign that I run where it's like, okay. It's a paid campaign. Right? The platform is Facebook. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:Or Facebook and Instagram or just Instagram or, you know, Google or whatever it is. Right? So I can I get I have the source of the campaign? Then I have what type of funnel is it? Is it the are you are we just getting leads and then taking them to a sales page?
Matt Giovanisci:Are we, you know, are we taking them directly to a sales page? Is it a discount? Is it not a discount? That sort of thing. And just kinda constantly just always be doing that.
Matt Giovanisci:But it's like, if I was always doing that, I would never write blog posts. I would have no time in the world. So I don't know. It's interesting. I this is a really, fun place to start because this is technically the first sales campaign email sales campaign of the year, and I can track this.
Matt Giovanisci:I could put this in a a line item in a spreadsheet and go, okay. Here's the campaign name. Here's the campaign type. Here's the campaign source. You know, here's what the campaign pieces are.
Matt Giovanisci:Here's the campaign hook, etcetera. And then I could put in how many people saw the campaign, how many people converted. And I could just manually put in those numbers and go, okay. This particular campaign was a 3 email sequence sent in January, and it garnered a, you know, let's say, a 1% conversion rate or whatever it is. It's like, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:Cool. That and and then maybe I can compare it to another email campaign that I do for a different product. And I go, okay. That worked better or that worked worse. So let's run this campaign again.
Matt Giovanisci:But this time, instead of the the one variable we can change is we don't run it in January, we'll run it in March. And we see, okay, does the same campaign work in a different month to a to an audience who's already seen it. Let's be honest. That'd be that'd be interesting. It might be something to start tracking.
Matt Giovanisci:Anyway, this has gone on far too long, but I just wanted to sort of describe my process and and how it turned out. And I'm very happy with the results, And I'm gonna do it again. So that was good. If you have any questions, email me, matt@moneylab.co, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
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