Speaker A
When you've got a waitlist and somebody joins a waitlist, there's an expectation, okay? What they—the, let's just say, what's the worst experience for somebody who joins a waitlist to be notified? Is nothing.
Learn how to maximize the value of your waitlist by creating demand through personalized communication, data enrichment, and targeted outreach.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Waitlist communication should create desire and demand, not just inform.
- Personalized and segmented outreach based on data enrichment is most effective.
- Building rapport through direct, authentic communication fosters trust and conversion.
- Avoid spamming or irrelevant outreach to prevent alienating your audience.
- Use multiple channels (email, text, social media, ads) to nurture waitlist members.
What the video covers
- Ignoring waitlist members after signup leads to lost interest and missed opportunities.
- Sending educational newsletters is better but insufficient to create real demand.
- Effective waitlist engagement includes personalized emails, texts, social media posts, and exclusive content.
- Building personal relationships with waitlist members increases affinity and readiness to convert.
- Data enrichment and identifying ideal customer profiles (ICP) are crucial for targeted outreach.
- Segmenting and personalizing communication based on enriched data improves response rates.
- Over-communicating without strategy can annoy potential customers and damage brand reputation.
- Using job posting data and other external sources can help identify qualified leads.
- Running nurture ad campaigns exclusively for waitlist members can boost engagement.
- A strategic, data-driven approach to waitlist management builds pipeline without alienating prospects.
Chapters
- 00:00The Problem with Ignoring Your Waitlist
- 00:28Better Communication: Newsletters and Education
- 01:05Creating Desire and Demand for Your Product
- 01:32Using Email and Text Messaging Effectively
- 01:53Building Personal Relationships with Waitlist Members
- 02:26Leveraging Social Media and Ads for Nurture Campaigns
- 03:32The Importance of Data and Lead Qualification
- 04:27Using Data Enrichment to Identify Ideal Customers
- 05:16Personalized and Segmented Outreach Strategies
- 07:06Avoiding Over-Communication and Building Pipeline Wisely
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
They literally—they joined it, they—they—they saw something, they joined it, they haven't talked to anybody, and it's months later and all of a sudden they get an email saying, "Hey, remember us?" And they're like, "No, archive." So,
Speaker A
that's horrible. And then you might say, "Well, what's better?" Well, better is I'm going to send them an email, maybe like a newsletter that educates them about the product and the service and the market we're in. Better, but
Speaker A
that still doesn't create demand. See, the question I would want to ask everybody, should ask themselves, is what information leads somebody to create desire, create—because that's what demand is. Demand is I have desire to use your product. Okay? So not talking to them
Speaker A
not good. What's a list of things that would get them to want to use my product?
Speaker A
Case studies, results, innovation, access to things other people can't have. Um, deep personal relationship with the founder, uh, education of any sorts around the problem, um, education around the market, how big it is and the opportunity. So, there's—there's a lot
Speaker A
of things. And then you go, well, the messaging could be email-based, of course. Yes. It could also be text message-based. You have their cell number. The text messages could be a little bit—they should be a lot
Speaker A
different because if I'm getting a text message from a friend and again it's the setup of the friend. When I built Clarity, okay, we had a waitlist. I launched it publicly to like 500 people but I only
Speaker A
made it available to a geography because marketplaces require compression. So I said, here are the 250 experts, here's the market geography base, everybody else gets on a waitlist. And what did Dan do? Text them or emailed as Dan from Dan.
Speaker A
DanClarity.fm. Dan messaged them. They replied, I replied. I built affinity. I built a relationship. They called the 1-800 number. Guess whose phone rang?
Speaker A
Who's got two thumbs and wears a [ __ ] blue shirt every day? This guy right here. Dude, I used to—they were like, "This is not Dan." Well, pretty sure it is. Well, how do you have time to answer
Speaker A
all the calls? Turns out people don't [ __ ] call 1-800 numbers that much. And then I would just talk to them and I would—I would build that rapport. And I did that for years and I would just pour into them and
Speaker A
value and connect with them. And so like when I finally let them in, they were—they were like, "Oh, yay. I got it." Right? Social media posts. You post wins. You post people using the product.
Speaker A
They're winning with the tool. I want the tool. OH MY GOD. I SEE IT AGAIN.
Speaker A
You're creating—you can even run ads that create like a nurture campaign only for the people on the email list.
Speaker A
Like you can run ads to the people on the email list. Only they see it. And it could be like behind the scenes [ __ ] Look at the brain. Look at my AI brain.
Speaker A
Look at my—look at my team. Look at these calls. Look at the client wins.
Speaker A
Look at these calls we do with our clients. You're sharing it behind the scenes. You're trying to solve a problem through brute force. I'm just going to email them and call them, which may be the right answer now because you didn't
Speaker A
do any of the stuff that I shared or very little of it. So yes, that might be the answer. But I want you to understand that if you don't know what creates desire, creates demand, you might go and
Speaker A
do a bunch of calls that will just piss off the market because they're like, "Bro, I—I signed up for you three months ago and I didn't hear anything and now you're like messaging me and calling me and blah blah blah. I didn't sign up for
Speaker A
that." So then there's that. So, I just—I just want to encourage I'm a big fan of data. Like, if the problem is that we're talking to people that are unqualified, you need to get clear of who you need to be talking
Speaker A
to, right? And if you say, well, it's an early adopter. What does that mean? I'm not like my problem is when people like it's an innovator. Tell me what is an artifact, a characteristic, something I would see in their life. They would tell
Speaker A
me they're that. Okay. They have multiple pro accounts for AI chats. Hm, interesting. How about you add that to the signup page for the registry? Like you got to figure out what is the characteristic of an ICP to then set up
Speaker A
all collection of data too because then you could just see if there's a data enrichment process that could take your waitlist and add that data append to it so that you can then qualify and start at the top again. Right? And I
Speaker A
want—I want you to know how nerdy this can get. I remember there was a company that was trying to figure out who are all the businesses that use this like really nuanced financial software inside the company, but they didn't have a way to take an
Speaker A
email address to find out if that company, this big enterprise, had this nuanced software. And then they found a company where they could buy the data.
Speaker A
And here's what the company did. A brilliant idea. They literally indexed all the job postings for all the companies to figure out what those companies said were mandatory software or nice-to-have software that the people would know and
Speaker A
then use that to sell that data to the companies that are trying to do data enrichment on the leads on the waitlist. So they could be like nuanced like let's make it up like 4R some weird 4R
Speaker A
financial connector. It's like boom. Out of the 5,000 Fortune 5,000 companies, there's only 57 that probably those are the ones you should get your salespeople calling on. So like there's even nuance once you understand what you're really looking for, which my gut tells me
Speaker A
you're still trying to figure that out. Then you can use a data enrichment process and then you personalize and segment the outbound. Right? So, imagine you get an email and it says, "Hey, I noticed you have three AI accounts, paid
Speaker A
accounts. Curious why you have three instead of just signing up for one." That's a great email. I'm going to probably reply to that because it's super personalized, super specific, and you segment. Once you get the data, you can do these hyper-personalized,
Speaker A
segmented outreaches. If not, you're just spraying and praying and your sales team are going to go scorch earth. And then you got 25,000, 50,000 leads and then all of a sudden the market's like I can't believe I signed up for this
Speaker A
because then I got these calls and these emails and blah blah blah. So no, I'm—I'm a fan of like trying to solve the actual problem and then fixing it then adding the next problem, the next problem. Yes, you got to build pipeline
Speaker A
but there's a problem within the problem you're saying that might not be solved. So you can think you're solving the problem, but you're just making a bigger problem. Real quick. You've made it to the end. Let me tell you what I know
Speaker A
about you. You're not somebody that's looking to do self-help. You're not somebody that's just doom scrolling on social media. You're here 'cause you want to build, build a real business and you're sick and tired of not getting the
Speaker A
real insights to grow inside your business. So, I want to help you avoid all the pain trying to figure this out the hard way like I did it. That's why I put together everything I've ever learned into the Scale Workbook. It's
Speaker A
the internal document that I use with every founder I work with that turns a chaotic business into a money-making machine,
Topics:waitlist managementcustomer engagementdemand creationdata enrichmentpersonalized marketinglead qualificationnurture campaignsfounder communicationsales pipelinecustomer segmentation
