Basically, 2009 was our year. Despite the reportedly rocky economy, we doubled and redoubled (and nearly redoubled again) our business with nearly 2000 new clients focused on growing their businesses more effectively, using automation to manage routine tasks, finding out what’s working and what’s not in their marketing, or simply getting better inbox delivery rates.

We added a ton of system upgrades and new features including the launch of our entirely new entry-level service, SendPepper.com. We added our drag-and-drop landing page designer, integrated postcard fulfillment, a personalURL system, an iPhone app, new dashboard reports, and much, much more.

We also doubled our staff, moved into bigger offices, and created a number of very significant partnerships.

Over all, 2009 rocked.

And before us now stretches 90-ish percent of 2010. And we’re hustling like never before…

Already this year we’ve had one solid new release, made major improvements to our infrastructure which will help support our growth as new clients come aboard, released a product wiki with all new help content, and more.

We’re not quite ready yet to unveil the 2010 feature road map, but we’re VERY excited about what’s coming up. We think we’ll be able to start peeling back the curtain around the end of this month, with the best to come up around May. So stay tuned… if you haven’t given SendPepper or OfficeAutopilot a test drive yet, there’s no time like the present.

If you’re a current client of ours, thank you for making 2009 the incredible year that it was… and know that we’re dedicated to blowing your socks off in 2010.

We’re going to dive in headlong, so follow us @sendpepper

We’ll be tweeting new features, system updates, tips and tricks, and much more. So, if you’re a user, definitely follow us.  If you’re an otherwise interested party who’s not a user, follow us too!

More.

What does it do, you ask?

Well, SendPepper for iPhone is the very first email and web visitor tracking software for the iPhone.

The app will show you, in nearly real time (updates every 5 minutes) WHO is on your website, WHAT web pages they’ve looked at, HOW many times they’ve come by and how long they’ve spent, and it’ll even give you whatever contact info you have on file for them so you can follow up immediately even while on the go.

Of course, this doesn’t work with complete strangers. It’s only going to work with identified visitors. That is, anyone who’s filled out a form on your site or who has clicked an email that you sent via SendPepper or OfficeAutopilot.

It’s a fun, handy, and sort of addictive little tool. If you’ve got an iPhone get it now!

If you don’t have an iPhone, don’t worry. We have a Google Gadget that does the same thing, right in your Gmail account or on iGoogle.  To install that, follow the instructions in our support forum right here.

Note that for the Gadget or the iPhone app to work, you’ll need to have our page tracking code on each page of your site PLUS either a SmartForm on your site OR be sending emails from your SendPepper/OfficeAutopilot account.  There’s instructions on how to do all that in the HELP section (log in > link upper right)

If you don’t have a SendPepper or OfficeAutopilot account, get one now!  Take a free trial for 15-days and see what’s up.

The highlight reel, according to me:

• “Indeed, the functionality of OfficeAutoPilot compares favorably with conventional demand generation systems, while the pricing – starting at just under $600 per month for 50,000 contacts and 100,000 monthly emails – is hugely attractive.”
  

• “OfficeAutoPilot actually does a better job at split testing than most demand generation systems… This is the easiest approach I’ve seen to split testing.”

• “If anything, OfficeAutoPilot’s combination of steps, rules and actions makes it more flexible than the average demand generation product.”
  

• “There’s even a standard feature to reduce activity-based score values by a specified percentage for each day after the activity occurs. This is more than some conventional demand generation products provide.”

Of course, all the details are there, too.. Mr. Raab is nothing if not thorough.

Check out the complete OfficeAutopilot review right here.

After quite a few too many grueling months of primping and pruning, SendPepper is finally going to be launched tomorrow.

SendPepper is OfficeAutopilot’s little brother: a marketing automation tool that takes ‘entry-level’ to a whole new place. For $29 bucks a month, SendPepper gives small business marketers the tools to automate both email AND personalized direct mail in one super-simple interface. For a few bucks more, you add our award winning landing page creator and our PersonalURL system, both designed to shoot your response rates through the roof.

SendPepper is for you if you’re considering a simple email system or autoresponder like Aweber, iContact, myEmma, or the like. It will fulfill the same needs, while adding direct mail capability, split testing, landing pages, PURLs and more.

It also may be a match if you’re an offline or local business that has mailing addresses (in, say, Quickbooks) but no email addresses.  Using SendPepper to send out a personalized card to a custom landing page will be a simple and powerful way to build your online list.

If that seems daunting, fear not. We’re also launching SendPepper Services, which is a collection of data and campaign management and creative services designed to make putting SendPepper to work as easy as pie. We’ve even got a specialized ‘Quick Change’ service designed to make transferring your existing lists and campaigns from another service to ours completely painless.

Of course, as your business grows, SendPepper grows right along with you - into a full-featured OfficeAutopilot account - with the click of a button. No more having to tear apart your business systems as you outgrow them.

Take a look at what we’ve put together. We think it’s pretty cool and are very excited to finally be putting it out!

More to come!

We’re going to push this one through pretty quickly, because we got another SERIOUS update hot on its heels. Late this month we’re releasing some stuff that changes the game altogether....

For now, here’s what’s new:

1. Totally new and improved fulfillment lists. You’ll be able to schedule when they go out.. once a day, every Tuesday, once a month, whatever.

2. All sorts of new permission settings. Much more granular control over who can do and see what.

3. Call Outcomes.This is cool. For phone-type tasks, you’ll be able to set available ‘outcomes’ for the call and then run rules based on the selected outcome.  For example, the call pop screen says ‘What happened on this call?’ You set the drop down fields: No answer, Left message, Wants Demo, Long-Term Prospect… whatever. Then, you can add those outcomes to ActiveResponse rules: ‘If Call Outcome = Long-Term Prospect then add to long term lead nurture sequence’ or whatever you want. It’ll be interesting to see how y’all use this.

4. Improved Bounce Manager. Yep.

5. Product Management and Purchase History. Record purchases and see the actual revenue you’re generating by marketing channel. See customer lifetime value. Also, purchases will now be in ActiveResponse… so, for example: ‘If contact buys product x, put them on the product x follow up campaign’.

Getting purchases into the system can be done in several ways. Manually, of course, but also via the API or with our snazzy email parser: just copy us on shopping cart receipts and we’ll merge by email address and update the contact record. Ask for more info if this sounds interesting.

6. Email Logging. If you’re not using Outlook but you do want to keep a log of emails back and forth, this is the way. We’ll give each user a unique email address that you can forward or BCC your emails to, and if we find an email match, we’ll pop in into the contact log. Simple, but sweet.

7. New Rule: “Set date field to today” You asked for it, so here it is.

8. Serious backend upgrades. If you’ve got a big database, you’ll notice serious speed improvements. We’ve updated how all kinds of different processes interact with the database, and we’ve found huge speed improvements all over: contact log is much faster, sending large email blasts is about 10x faster, search is faster, adding to sequences, etc etc.

That’s about it, I think. Lots more in a couple weeks. Some BIG stuff.

Talk soon.

Copywriters tend to have some serious chutzpah when it comes to the fees they quote.

They tap out a few paragraphs or pages and, as if they were literally gold-coated, they’ll quote seemingly astronomical fees of thousands, tens of thousands of dollars.

Sometimes they’ll even demand a piece of the action… that is, a percentage of sales created by the ad or direct mail piece that carries their golden prose.

To me, it’s always seemed over the top, so when I recently met direct response copywriter Chris Haddad I decided to get him on the phone, press record, and grill ‘em.

I asked him some pretty tough questions like ’How DARE you!?‘ and ’What difference do you really make?‘

He was gracious, and he even spent the rest of the call schooling me on why I should never pick up a pen (or keyboard) on behalf of my business again.

In the call, he tells us:

• Why Tags Lines Are Useless.
• The Biggest Mistake Business Owners Make When Writing Their Own Copy.
• The Three Ways to Tell if the Copywriter You’re Hiring Sucks.
• Two Basic Copywriting Lessons You Probably Never Learned.
• How to Deal With Objections in Your Copy.

So, despite the well-known fact that all copywriters are scumbags, Chris really hooked us up with some gems in this call.

Pop it into your Ipod and let me know what you think.  If you’ve got questions for Chris, post ‘em here and I’ll make sure he knows about them.

Download ‘Haddad vs. Ray’ Here.

(Note: If you’re not yet an OfficeAutopilot user, please ignore anything that doesn’t make sense.  )

Faster Contact Browsing
Although we liked our animated contact screen (how it swooped open and closed.. nice right?) we noticed that it became a little annoying when you’re using the interface seriously all day long.  So, it got the axe.

In its place, a totally new and improved contact manager that features faster browsing, quick page jumping, easier customization of your overview screens, and a super slick new search function that makes the old one look like.. well, old.

Also, we’ve upgraded the way you add and remove tags to a contact and subscribe or un-subscribe them to sequences.  Very modern.  You’ll see.

New Message Library
We’ve added owners and permissions to individual emails in your message library so you can limit who can edit the emails in your message library and who can pull and send them.  That way, you can make it so your sales people only see the complete, approved emails that are meant for them to use.. and not your entire list of everything.

Field Editor
Create and edit your own contact database. Add fields and sections.  Finally, right?

This is a long time coming and it may seem stupid that we didn’t have this available to you before, but.. well, let’s just say that this project wasn’t painless over here. 

One super-nice new feature is the added ability to hide sections from different user types.  That is, if you don’t want your sales people to see some private information, or tags and sequences, or whatever.. you can now hide those sections from those roles.  You can also choose to show a section, but make it uneditable to a role.  Nice.

Rule Triggers in Tasks
Ok, this feature is very interesting.  I know some of you are going to put this to use in some interesting ways that I haven’t thought of, so let me know how you’re using this, if you do.

It is a bit of a brain bender at first, though, so sit down.  (Non-OA Users, please close your eyes and ears!)

We’ve added a new rule trigger called Task Link Clicked. What it allows you to do is add a link (via a merge field) in the body of a task that, when clicked, triggers a rule.

Confused yet?  Let me explain….

Here’s the deal.  Automated systems are what we’re all about, and they’re wonderful in many ways.  But sometimes you will want to allow a little human intervention into your system. 

For example, say you have an email that goes out 30 days after a contact’s last purchase date.  The email says, ‘Hey, where’d you go? Why aren’t you buying?’ and it’s sent from the contact’s salesperson. That’s all good, but what if the sales person and the client have a real relationship… and the sales person actually knows that the client hasn’t been buying because they’re on their honeymoon?  To send an automated email saying ‘hey, where’d you go?’ when the sales person knows darn well where they went.. well, that’s a little robotic even for us (and embarrassing for the sales rep).

Wouldn’t it be nice to give the sales person a heads up before that email is sent?  That’s what Rule Triggers in Tasks are for.

So instead of automatically sending the email, you send a task to the sales rep.  The task will say: “Client Joe Schmoe hasn’t bought in 30 days.  Click Here to send the ‘where’d you go?’ email”.

When that link is clicked, it triggers a rule in ActiveResponse, which can then do whatever you want (send an email, subscribe to a seq, etc etc).

Dig?

As I said, I think y’all will come up with all sorts of interesting uses for this, which is why we decided to put it in. (Feedback, please.)

Split Testing in Email
OK, this is both cool AND simple.

As you know, testing your marketing is the key to improving it. Some tests, though, are easier than others to get done.

When you’re sending a big email blast, it’s easy to send half your list one email and half another… but what about in an automated follow up sequence?

Wouldn’t it be nice to test different subject lines on your ‘thanks for signing up, here’s your free report’ email to see which gets the most to actually download your report?

Yes it would, and now it’s easy.  You can write as many as four versions of each email in your sequence, and we’ll automatically round robin them and show you the results. Check back in a bit, and you’ll see the winners emerge.  Rinse and repeat.

Support Vids
We’ve recently added Tobin Poppenberg to the team as our Training and Support Jedi.  He’s put together a whole bunch of new training vids. You’ll find them in the HELP section, link in the upper right of your screen once logged in.  We hope you like ‘em.  Let us know.

If Received Email rule.
Another addition to ActiveResponse, this one for Outlook Plugin users only.  Now you can trigger a rule when you receive an email from a contact.  This is useful in situations where you’re emailing a series of emails to a contact requesting that they write back… once they do, you want to stop any more automated communications.  So, ‘if we received an email from contact, then… remove from sequence X’ or whatever.

If you’re using a PC and Outlook, but don’t have our plugin, you’re missing out.  Let us know.

Coming Soon...
This release cycle is going to be a short one.  Next update is scheduled for 5/19, which will bring a few new features, one of which is going to change the way a lot of us think about and manage our businesses.  Stay tuned.

There’s a growing marketing underworld that you are probably only peripherally aware of. Born from the direct marketing gurus like Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert, the new breed has taken the game to a whole new level, and it’s very likely that you’re missing it.

That’s too bad, cause these kids are on the very cutting edge of what’s possible in social engineering, and they’re learning - and sharing - more every day.

I just spent the weekend with a bunch of internet marketing weirdos.  It was in San Diego at the Hard Rock Hotel.  Our host was Frank Kern.

The event was attended by about 500 buyers of Frank’s latest information product called Mass Control.

Mass Control was launched, sold-out, and closed on February 1 of this year. The product was a series of videos, emails, pdfs, and the weekend in SD.  It sold for two thousand dollars. He sold three million dollars worth in four hours, before shutting the doors.

At the event he was selling seats in his mastermind group for $2700/mo.  This also sold out to 20 folks, leaving another 20 on a waiting list. That’s another cool $50k/mo, ongoing.

Lest you believe that this is some weird exception to the rule, check this: Mass Control was small peas.

Frank’s buddies were all in attendance, many of which have done launches far bigger that his three million dollar day. For example, Jeff Walker recently launched his product (which happens to be about launching products) and apparently sold nearly ten million dollars worth.  In a day.

Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon were there. In 2006, these guys pulled off the biggest launch in Internet marketing history - 23 million in 18 hours, I think it was. They rolled that into a membership site, off which they are apparently pulling in over a million per month.

These are real businesses with serious earnings that are being created virtually overnight.

As a guy who straddles both worlds (I work with ‘mainstream’ businesses but also buy these products and show up at these events) I know what most folks think of these guys.  Their marketing looks sleazy. They’re young punks with their shirts untucked. It looks like a scam, or a high-school popularity game.

But I think there’s much more to what’s happening here, and I think that if you’re not watching and learning from these guys - and others like them - you’re missing out on the best marketing education available at any price.

What these guys are doing is literally architecting a social phenomenon. They create products designed to make their market frenzy. They create social proof across the web, and they communicate their message in ways that literally create a panic to buy. They attract attention like magnets and have re-sellers and affiliates lining up begging for part of the action.

It’s very tempting to believe that our businesses are different. “These guys operate in a niche where this kind of thing can happen. I sell shoes. What does this have to do with me?”

I have the same questions myself. But it’s our challenge as marketers to transfer what we’re seeing here.  It doesn’t do us any good to dismiss it.

I believe that the explosive growth in information marketing (selling how-to stuff) is just beginning. I think one day they’ll legitimize themselves and begin to eat at the higher education market. Literally, folks (like me) will learn from in-the-trenches experts instead of going and getting an MBA. It’ll be cheaper, and they’ll get a better education.

More, I think we entrepreneurs should reconsider our business models. The question is ‘how can we incorporate information marketing into our sales/marketing process?’

If we’re selling high-end data storage systems (that’s you, Jame), we should be looking at the knowledge assets we have in-house, making it into products, and selling it as a front-end sale. 

I’m not talking about a $39 e-book/sales pitch.  I’m talking about a high-end ($500-1000+) package of your best people’s best stuff that really and truly educates the buyer and gets them a real result, regardless of whether or not they’re buying your product later on.

The benefits:

• Positioning as the keeper of the highest-value stuff in the marketplace.
• A product that’s easy to sell, easy to promote, and self-liquidates (that is, pays for it’s own lead generation costs, so you end up with free leads for your main biz).
• A product that you can do a launch around. Drive press around. Get partners mailing their lists for you.
• And more that I’ll talk about in another post.

I’ll be writing more about how we should be thinking about this stuff in future posts.

In the meantime, tell me what your experience of the info-marketing crowd is? Have you used their strategies? Do you plan to?

At age 25, before the dot-com bubble began, I could feel that something big was afoot. I’d read about the ‘soaring’ Cisco stock price in the SF Chronicle… and Yahoo, which had just gone through IPO. I hadn’t been ‘online’ yet (apart from BBS’s when i was a kid - remember those?), and didn’t yet have an email address. But I remember feeling that a renaissance was beginning and that I wanted to be a part of it.

Unfortunately for me, I had no MBA. I didn’t even graduate from college. I’d been more interested in traveling the world with my beautiful new girlfriend.

But I needed a way to get involved in what I was reading about each day. Soon, my dad discovered what would soon become known as ‘day trading’. Over the next couple months, I did my research and packed my bags. I moved to New York and got a seat at Broadway Trading.

At that time, Broadway was tiny. I was probably the 20th trader there. But this was Wall Street (actually Broad Street, around the corner) and I knew that this was the center of the action. Guys were making money - sometimes $1000 a day or more. It seemed incredible.

The way it works is that you watch from the sidelines for awhile. Then you get an account and trade small lots, 100 shares at a time.  Usually, a beginniner would spend a good two to four weeks watching.

During my watching time, a young Russian kid named Serge made $4000 in one day. On the same day, Yahoo! traded up to $12. I thought these lofty numbers had to be the froth at the end of a crazy run. I was late to the party, I figured.

It turned out, of course, to be just the beginning…

Through the Pain

Over the next 10 months, I went through the most personally grueling battle I’d ever experienced.

Eventually, though, I achieved a level of success far beyond what I ever imagined possible, and certainly in the top small fraction of 1% of all traders in the world.

I’m writing about this today because over the last several months, I’ve realized that what I learned as a top-performer on Wall Street is the same kind of thing that’s required to succeed in business.

The Missing Ingredient

In fact, I’ve come to believe that what’s at the root of top-performer’s success in ANY area is something that we - businesspeople, marketers - need to be looking at and studying and working on.

And I believe there’s a vacuum of information and attention here. We hear motivational speakers at our conferences, and we may walk away inspired. But those experiences rarely change our behavior, let alone our results.

What is the difference between top-performers and the rest?

The answer, I think, is the same whether you’re talking about Olympic athletes or Navy Seals or top traders or successful businesses.

In business, we all have competition.  But they’re not throwing grenades at us, and they’re not actually kicking us in the face from the next lane over. So it’s easier, I think, to relax.

But the top performers are still going to eat the breakfast, lunch, and dinner of the folks who aren’t playing at their best.

The Secret Sauce

But, what is is that separates the best from the rest?

Well, I’m sure I don’t have the whole answer. For me, the fundamental different between being a losing trader and achieving wild success was one thing: discipline.

After ten months of pain, one day everything was different. I’ll write more about that in the next installment here, but for now I’ll just say that - for me - between success and failure was one week. And in the week I didn’t learn anything new or take any mood altering drugs or find God.

What happened was that I just started ACTUALLY DOING what I already knew I had to do (but previously hadn’t been able to).

The Disciplined Marketer

While I probably should be making this blog about marketing automation software and best practices, I’m going to try something different.

I’m going to use this space to talk about peak performance specifically as it applies to running our businesses. The reason is that I think most of us already know what to do. Our problem isn’t about what to say, who to say it to, how to do market research, how to use social networking. Our challenge is to execute.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to learn. They’re always a vast and ever expanding universe of new knowledge to deal with. But it’s my contention that getting the knowledge isn’t the hard part. If we’re already entrepreneurs or sales people or marketers with any small level of success, we already know how to figure out what to do.

Our challenge, more often, is to STOP learning and to get into disciplined action.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ve got more Wall Street stories to tell. But better, I’ve got a very interesting lineup of folks that are going to share their thoughts about what it takes to perform at the highest level. That’ll probably end up being a podcast series that you’ll be able to get here.

We’ll also explore the huge body of knowledge on the subjects of self-discipline, high-performance, and getting things done.

Of course, I’ll always relate back to how we business-folk can actually put this stuff to use in our own daily lives.

I invite you to participate and begin to kick more butt everyday.