Zac: one of the things I like to tell people is you really want a breakthrough or bust with your content, right? If you send an email out, you’re a vendor going out and trying to talk about a product or you’re selling socks on Etsy or whatever it is It doesn’t matter but if people read your email or they read any of your content and they go, “meh”, you’ve lost right?

You either want them to really react to it or you want to get nothing because you can work with that. That’s good solid hard data to take and make your things better. But if they just give you this Lukewarm…, you know, it’s like, I don’t know, people read the bible, it’s like, “you’re lukewarm, so I spit you out of my mouth,” right?

That’s how people are with your content. If it’s just “meh”, they don’t remember it. It doesn’t strike a chord. Just go minimum viable, right? You know, use tools that make it easy for you to get something out there fast and get it in front of the eyeballs that need to see it.

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

 I know I say it every week, I’m really excited about this guy coming up. Uh, this is Zach Hyde, he’s an amazing copywriter, good friend.

We’re going to be talking about, among other things, why it’s okay to piss off your audience.

I’m excited to be joined by my buddy, Zac. Now I will say I just interviewed a second Joel, so I’m collecting Joels. You, Zac, know that I have a bunch of Zacs in my portfolio, but we’ll call you Zac Prime. 

Zac’s a former Army Ranger, executive level cybersecurity professional, but now he does email conversion strategies and consults for people who use storytelling, world building, and entertainment to connect with humans in their inboxes.

We’re gonna dip into a lot of that. I’m really excited to talk about pissing off our subscribers. Scaring the pants off of them, making them laugh, making them mad. You know me, I’m all about the emotions.

Zac Hyde, thanks for joining.

Zac: Yeah Thanks for thanks for having me and when we when I saw that you were doing podcast, Joel, I was thinking of that episode of The Office where Dwight wins salesman of the year and he and Michael’s so jealous of it and then after he gives his speech, he he tells him a joke at the bar and it makes him laugh.

And he says, “I’m the guy who inspired the guy who inspired a thousand salesmen. So it’s like, I inspired a thousand salesmen.” So when I saw you were doing podcasts. And, you know, bringing me on, I thought of that because you were doing the podcast stuff back when nobody was doing the podcast stuff, right?

So I’m thinking of Joe Rogan and his millions of subscribers now. I’m like, now I’m talking to and entertaining the guy who inspired, you know, inspired…

Joel: don’t pin that mess on me. Enough of my nerd origin story. I’d love to dip into yours. Just open up a little bit with your background. You know, how you got to where you are but more importantly, you know, how you gather this love for this subject matter that you deal with and then helping people communicate it more because that’s what we’re all about here.

Zac: Yeah, definitely. My, my villain origin story in tech is a little unorthodox. I didn’t follow the same path that most did. I didn’t grow up with a Commodore and, you know, typing or playing around in BASIC. I was out, you know, throwing rocks at trees and, you know, climbing on wellheads out in Oklahoma.

And and so I didn’t touch it until I, I think we didn’t even get a family computer until like two years before I left for the Army. And I used it to play like an MS DOS version of X Wing Fighter. But other than that I didn’t have any interest in them. Joined I went the complete opposite when I joined the Army.

I wanted infantry, I wanted to jump out of planes, I went to the Rangers. I just wanted to blow things up and have a good time doing that. But as fate would have it, my first deployment, Landed me smack dab at ground zero of Operation Buckshot Yankee. It was the Asian BTC worm that replicated through the DoD classified network.

It was a huge mess. Biggest DoD military breach in history and it was all hands on deck, right? They grabbed, you know, us lowly guys who were just dragging our knuckles around and, you know, they sat us down and taught us how to, you know, audit the machine, how to quarantine it, how to scan it. And I didn’t really gravitate to that as much as I really enjoyed the the fast paced, high stress situation and if things go down right now it’s bad.

It’s bad juju. So I loved it. Fast forward a couple years, I was in Kandahar, Afghanistan. And my signal officer came and he’s ” hey, like you got an aptitude for it. We’ve got security plus vouchers. Do you want to take one?” And so I did. Passed it flying colors. I actually got audited by CompTIA because I took it too fast and uh, came back, took over what would be our CISO role in the battalion and and managed it at that level for a couple years before I went to Special Missions Unit and then ultimately ended my career advising Forces Command General and SecDef on best signal and cybersecurity practices within my core. Now there was an alternate personality going on at that time. When COVID hit during the lockdown, there was so much free time. And like typical jobs, I was finishing my remote work by 10 in the morning.

So I decided to, to up-skill and uh, really liked copywriting, started writing websites and things like that, doing a little bit of email, and and then, you know, a few years later when I was at Forces Command, I I sent the email heard around the world, I, it was a, it was supposed to go to a colleague of mine, I didn’t clear out the CC line, I accidentally sent it to my chief of staff, and it closed a 4.9 million dollar sale of Motorola radios. And at that point is where my roads intersected.

And I was like, hey, there’s something going here, right? I’m dealing with the most stubborn knuckle dragging folks and trying to communicate tech to them. And maybe there’s something to be said about how I sent this very visceral emotion driven email to get results from a, from an organization at the time that said, “Hey, we didn’t have any funding for this” to, “we’re going to fork out almost 5 million because. You scared the pants off of us with what you said in the email.” So that’s my origin story that’s how they intersected and here I am today trying to help, you know, not just vendors really anybody who wants help being able to create those type of human emotions that make people say “Hey, like I really need this. I really want this. This is a problem that you’re solving, but also a partnership that you’re trying to form with me through the through the inbox.”

Joel: That’s awesome. So you really have been on all sides. You’ve been on the ground, you’ve been, the guy in the chair, as they say and, you know, buying, you’ve definitely been on the buying side of A lot of tech and making the cases for that.

I’m curious about where, from where you sit, because you definitely for those of you who don’t follow Zac especially on LinkedIn, you need to do that. Need to subscribe to his newsletter, which you pump out every single day, and these are not throwaway messages.

And I think, you know, that’s something I want to dig into is there’s some very serious thought behind these very long messages that you’re throwing out. And in a day where we think executives don’t have the time to read and we think that we’ve gotta Capture them very quickly and we’ve got to convert them.

You are a fantastic storyteller. And, you know, I’d imagine that there are times when the pressure is high when you don’t have the luxury of waxing and pontificating. But when you do an amazing job of it. So I’d love to just start with your perspective of that and what makes a really good outreach.

What makes a really good connection to a high level executive?

Zac: Yeah I think really when we start looking at the high level executive the mind, you know, we don’t just settle on, hey, they don’t have time to read this, but we get into this mindset that as soon as you hit this like executive level position, A switch flips and you’re not up for entertainment.

You’re not, you’ve lost your sense of humor. You don’t want any drama in your life. And some people that might be the case. And for me those aren’t the right clients, right? I don’t want to work with somebody like that who just sucks the joy out of everything. They’re just so objective in what they want.

And I think as people, as vendors, as companies, as businesses who send emails, we get so wrapped up with wanting to create some objective lesson and completely foregoing the ability to provide value that is some level of entertainment. Something that takes them out of their world and puts them in a second world state where they see a different outcome.

 Telling my kids stories at bedtime is a prime example of this, right? That is, at the end of the day, you know, we probably haven’t spent as much time together as we should, but at the end of the day, getting to tuck them in and sit down with them and tell stories to them, that’s their, they light up, right?

They want that connection. Now, when I sit down, The best stories I tell them are going to be the ones that I just make up. I’m like, hey, you know, there’s this princess, but she’s also a dinosaur. And this and this, and my kids are like, what? You know, that’s crazy. Tell us more about this. But if I sit down and I say this is a story about a little girl who didn’t do her homework before dinner, right?

Then it becomes an objective lesson. They zone that out, right? They don’t want to be talked down to I guess you could say in that sense And that’s the same thing with your emails or any level of marketing really, right? We feel the need to create these objective lessons and that’s how we provide value And that doesn’t connect us to our buyers.

That doesn’t connect us to our readers. Being able to tell that story and take them out of the reality they’re in and put them in another one that’s optimal to them is the best way to do it. Now you talk about my emails like my emails My best performing email was like 1500 words long, right?

It’s longer than most college essays, but it took me maybe 10 to 15 minutes to write, right? I sit down, I think of how I want to tell this story and I just leave all objective lessons out of it. I give you the option to read it. I give you the option to say, hey, I want to act on this or not. Either way, that’s cool with me.

You subscribe to my world. The inbox is my world and you’re living in it. I’m delivering what value I want to deliver that I think is going to enhance your life, enrich you, but you ultimately have the decision to stay or leave. And being able to separate that ability to tell those stories, to connect on that human level, just the same way as we connect with the world.

But toddlers at story time is really what drives a successful email marketing campaign like that.

Joel: And at the same time, though, it’s not just firing at the hip. I mean, you know, when you take a step back and you look at sort of the macro picture you know, there’s a craft and there’s a skill. You’re giving people those engagement opportunities. You’re using select language to get them to reflect on what you might have just said.

You’re asking them a question and giving them those opportunities. Even in a, we’ll call it long form piece, you’re giving people opportunities to, to engage to decide this is too much opt out, but at least they’ve gotten some bit of value to it. 

When you’re writing some of these, These pieces on behalf of clients, or you’re working with clients and you’re teaching them how to do it. I would imagine you get a bit of pushback and they’re they’re thinking, Oh, I’ve just got to get, I’ve got to, I’ve got to mention these five features. I’ve got to get this in there. I’ve got a, I’ve got this messaging point. And you know me, I’m all about building, grab and go toolbox of messaging points but not to the point where we forego the story.

So, what would you say to a technical practitioner, a product marketer, a founder who doesn’t yet get the value of storytelling?

Zac: Yeah, so typically clients I’ve dealt with that are the same ones who are saying we don’t have enough content to send emails daily. I advocate for showing up daily in the inbox because if you there’s experts and there’s leaders, right? Experts, they have all this great stuff to say, and you’re like, oh, yeah, I’m going to listen to you.

But leaders show up every day. And you don’t necessarily have to be an expert to be a leader. People follow leaders, and the more you show up, the more people are going to see you in your industry as the one that they want to follow. When you say, hey, you know, I have these five things that I want to talk about, that’s cool.

That sounds to me like you’ve got five emails that are primed to go out. You’re actually doing a disservice to your readers by overloading them with this content, right? Like you really want to break down each of these five features. If they are worth talking about, then they are worth splitting up and giving them, you know, sticking with that rule of one, right?

That one idea, that one offer, that one solution that you have to communicate to them

You, your time is better spent. Splitting those up and being able to practice that storytelling and actually get more messages out. I send the daily email out, but there are days I send two or three out, right?

If I feel like I have value to give you, then I’m going to give you more of it. And you can do that. You don’t have to be afraid of of scaring people off. And I think we’re going to talk on that a little bit later, as far as, you know, pissing off your subscribers the right way. But that’s, that is prime you’re set to have content for days if that is your problem right now.

I just have all these things that need to go out. Send them out, just split them up and send them more content, spread out.

Joel: Absolutely. I, you know, I’m a big advocate for building that messaging platform, that messaging system, and, you know, nerds love systems. Have a database of messaging points. When you’re communicating frequently, when you have a large spread of touchpoints, People will think I’m gonna, I’m going to fatigue my audience by saying the same thing over and over again.

And while you can’t be verbatim, I mean, full disclosure, I don’t read your email every single day, man. But when I do, and I dip into it, I am, I’m like, “wow, okay, that’s just what I needed today.” And You may feel, as the person putting the content out there, that it’s redundant and that there’s a lot of repetition, but you don’t know what’s hitting and what’s being opened.

So is that something that you have, your sort of pull deck, your rolodex of major messaging points, and then when you go to write your message? Your daily message, your daily email, you’re looking for that angle or “let’s do it this way. Let’s do it with this emotion. Let’s do it with this anecdote.” Your storytelling is phenomenal, man.

I’ll tell you.

Zac: Yeah, I mean, I hate automation, so I don’t automate, I don’t plan anything out, so when you get an email from me in your inbox, I literally just typed that thing up,

Joel: It feels fresh. Yeah. It definitely feels contemporaneous.

Zac: and you know, I’ll sit down like the night before and I’ll think about I want to talk about this tomorrow, but then between that time and when I sit down on my computer to send it, Something else in my life may have happened that I’m like, oh, I want to talk about this, right?

I want to, you know, today I want to inspire, I want to write something inspirational, but then tonight I want to send them something that just scares the shit out of them and they have to sleep on it, right? And get ready for tomorrow where I’m going to, you know, resolve it. So that, that is, as far as systems go, that I would say I don’t so much as stick to that.

I I like to have some ideas of where I want to go. I don’t, you know, emails are finite, right? You can send a bad email and you’ll see it in like real time how it performs. And that’s a good way to, to, to gauge, you know, what should tomorrows be. I could, you know, I could go a whole week where I could talk deliverability and getting it in the, in, in the inbox, and I’ll see my numbers, you know, those vanity metrics, those opens and those clicks going up, and then I’ll see ’em dwindle down and I’ll know, okay. Now I might have fatigued this topic, let’s move on to something else.

I typically don’t run into that though, right? Because when you get really good at identifying aspects of your life, of business, that you can communicate on a human level, like there’s no shortage of topics that you can use, that you can tie into something that’s going to bring you value.

Joel: Yeah. Let’s go ahead and talk about some of those techniques for showing the value and creating the value. And I mean, we’ve already touched on it. The negative emotions. There’s a big push especially in cybersecurity and in IT. There’s a real leaning into fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

And I think that’s one of the only it’s one of the only negatives that gets used. You do use a lot of other negative emotions to put people in a place to, to build a little bit of pressure so that, you know, and you don’t leave them there. You do release that pressure. How did you come to that, besides that one email that you accidentally replied to all and fired off?

Was that the moment or did you have to come back to saying, you know what, this is just gonna be the thing that works for me?

Zac: What happened in that email that I think set the stage for how I see FUD is the ability to create vision. I talk a lot about the late, great Jim Camp in my emails. He was the world’s most feared negotiator. The guy shaped the FBI’s hostage negotiation process. Jim always talked about creating vision.

Now, when we have text, that is the best place to do it. We have emails, we have, you know, that level of communication. You can, you know, I think I brought this up with you last time, Joel, where you get in my car, right? We’re going to drive to go get brunch. And I want, you’re just like adamantly against wearing your seatbelt, right?

And I say, “Joel, I need you to wear your seatbelt.” You say, “no.” so I’m like, I’m going to Google pictures of car accident, so I’m going to show them to you, right? And you look at them and you’re like, oh, “that’s gross,” but it doesn’t make you want to put your seatbelt on. But if I say, “Joel, what is your face going to look like when you go flying through my windshield and it scrapes on the hot rub asphalt at 90 miles per hour and your family has to see you like that,” right?

Now I’ve created vision. I’ve created something very visceral that you can see yourself in as opposed to this just like objective picture that means nothing to me. And That’s how I did it in that email, you know, completely by accident and that really shaped how I do it now where, you know, we’re talking about vendors specifically and cybersecurity and using FUD.

You try to create, again, that objective picture of what life looks like if they don’t use your product if they don’t secure their systems with what you have to offer, but in reality, you don’t really know if that’s a vision that’s going to draw that that raw emotion out of them. You get that by speaking to them by, you know, really knowing your audience and knowing that, hey, they have these really deep fears and being able to speak to those.

But also being able to like you said relieve it and show them a whole new outcome that “hey this isn’t what you have to deal with you don’t have to get my product to do it, But in case you do here it is right no pressure. We’re eating steak either way.”

Hey, it’s Joel. Just poking my head in here really briefly to say thanks for listening. I’ve gotten some amazing feedback from folks. If you could help me out by heading on over to your preferred podcast platform, engage over there, maybe a little bit, do a share, do a comment, do a review. It’d help an awful lot.

Um, and to say thanks, I am getting ready to announce a series private one on one message sessions and also, uh, some cohort training, um, very limited audience. So if you want more information about that, you can find me over on LinkedIn, or you can follow me at nerdthattalksgood.com, sign up for the announcements.

Anyway, we’ll get right back in here, uh, talking with Zac. 

Joel: I find a lot of, especially technical storytellers, people who try to tell technical stories, approach it antiseptically or a little bit as a hypothetical, you know, they’re “companies that do this, experience this outcome,” as opposed to saying, ” if you’re doing this could be the outcome.”

And I advise a lot of startups and I say, especially when you’re making a pitch very early on, and you want to get people nodding their head you can either say, this is something that I have experienced that I want you to have the benefit of, or have you ever experienced this or imagine if you experienced this, because if it’s me or you, the audience will get the story.

If it’s most companies out there, or hypothetical third party it doesn’t hit as hard, which is why, you know, I don’t think you necessarily have to get graphic all the time, but I think painting a picture of the audience’s experience and acknowledging maybe it’s not a hypothetical, it’s something that they’ve gone through, and then, you know, The FUD doesn’t have to be fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

It can be commiseration. It can be, you know, relating to this and compassion, 

but you’re still pointing to that negative.

Zac: You’re really looking at a lot of folks who are like, you know, don’t be the next Change Healthcare. Don’t be the next Home Depot. Don’t be the next, you know, whatever breach happens at any given time. And it’s very threatening. It creates apprehension. And it’s basically telling me like, you don’t even know what my stack looks like, right?

You don’t know if that’s even a vulnerability that I’m worried about. Maybe we’ve already secured against that. Maybe I don’t even have the equipment in place that’s even at risk. So now it just tells me that you. You aren’t connecting with me. Even if you tell a really good story, it just tells me that you basically just went and made something to try to stir up emotion in me that shouldn’t exist to begin with

Joel: Yeah. And acknowledging that, hey, I could swap out this email and send it to anybody else and it’s the same. And even though you are sending out bulk emails, they do come in and they do feel personal because, I imagine that you do really think about your audience and what they need to get.

 Do you do segmentation? Are you looking at the composition of your audience and the people who are opening and the people who aren’t and tailoring for that? I mean, again you’re a little bit different than a company in a product because this is Zac Hyde sharing insight.

It’s a little bit different than a sell, but are you doing a real deep dive on your audience?

Zac: So I don’t do any segmentation on my list. Now my, how I work on client campaigns and their strategy is completely different, right? When I’m talking about selling something very tangible for you, Yes we do work on very hyperfocused segmentation with me because I sell email marketing, right?

It doesn’t it benefits me. If you buy a service I do say I do a launch for one of my VIP weeks, right? Occasionally I’ll launch a VIP week out, give people, you know, five days of just my time to work on whatever they’ve got going on. And you book one of my VIP weeks, I could tag you and take you off of the next launch, or I could just leave you on it.

And let you read the new email I send out and get a, you know, a grasp of what good email marketing looks like. So my emails in and of themselves is the product, right? That’s my portfolio. Those are my testimonials. That, like what you, when you get into a 2,000 word email and you have to read it all the way through, and like a lot of people who read mine, open them three or four times and reread them and share them, like that in and of itself is my product.

So it doesn’t behoove me. to segment you out and get you away from that content. Now, definitely if I am working for a client, very much we talk about segmentation. We go into that very hyper personalized. solution that you’re sending out. But still, you know, still maintaining that and sending enough emails to be relevant, right?

Not, I’m going to send out the sporadic newsletter of, you know, vague content. Because that’s the other thing. I’m going to step back into the seat of being the buyer for a moment. Like 90, I’d say 97 percent of the time, I’m already aware of what you’re about to tell me. The threat you’re about to throw out and try to scare me with, I already know it exists.

I’ve already talked in my circle. I know it’s a problem. I probably already know how to solve it. So you’re not telling me anything that I don’t know. What you’re telling me is that you haven’t talked with me. You don’t know exactly what I’m looking for when I opted in to you. And that really, I’ll say it, one of the reasons I did swap to the marketing side, is I think there is a this, the stigma, you know, against the vendors,

And it’s hard to compete with all of the opinions on how you should market cybersecurity buyers specifically. I tell people this all the time. Like you could go on and you could sit down with 150 CISOs on how to market cybersecurity, and you’re going to get 342 opinions on how to do it right.

And it’s not going to set you off any better. And you shouldn’t even be talking to them anyway, because as a CISO, I didn’t control any purse strings. I didn’t make any buying decisions. I identified and I reported. That was my job. You know, there’s this idea that we need to market to these folks.

So then we screw up all of our messaging. We screw up what it is that company very well may need what we have to offer, but we’re not talking to the right people and we’re hesitant to even push it because 342 opinions said, we don’t like being sold to, you know, we don’t being pitched to, we don’t want we’ll come to you if we have a problem, right?

Joel: Yeah. And if you’re going after the wrong audience that can, you know, damage your position with them, because ultimately, yes you do want to be in front of the CISO if they’re the ones making recommendations, but that’s not necessarily where to start. And so when I talk with a lot of companies and people, I say, who is your audience?

And they’re targeting those high level decision makers without understanding that sometimes you have to build goodwill. Sometimes you have to build in house advocates and go after, you know, some of the lower level in the hierarchy people and start building some chatter and giving them the stories that they can then take up the ladder, and then make the CISO think it was their idea to reach out to you in the first place.

Zac: yeah. I mean, what, if you’re selling a tool A dashboard to clean up false positives at the SOC, right? Why are you going to sell it to somebody who’s not even concerned with that? Who’s not dealing with that stress? Go to the analysts, go to the engineers and start selling it to them. They take it to the CISO then the CISO has to find a way to justify it, moving it up the channel.

And at that point, if you’re staying in constant communication with them, you’re providing the information before they come looking for it. Then it’s easy for that CISO to say, “Hey, now I want to talk to you. I want to, I need help trying to communicate this in terms of business priorities where the decision makers are sitting,” because, you know, cybersecurity.

Is not one of the main priorities of any business, right? There we can go into like data integrity and HR rep who fat fingers a decimal on the spreadsheet, you know, can cause just as much financial damage and liability to a company as a threat that may or may not happen. So when you go, when that CISO has to go in front of that general counsel before they go in front of, you know, finance, or they go to the CEO and try to advocate for this solution.

They’re coming to you to be able to communicate that at the business level, right? And if you are communicating enough a la emails or other forms of content like that, it’s you’re cutting the time out of what Gartner calls, you know, the long hard slog of The B2B Buyer’s Journey that’s 12 to 18 months long.

Part of why my process took so long, right? I mean, mine was like in a federal position, like my buyer journey for a product was anywhere between 18 to 24 months long, right? And a lot of that was just dead time waiting to get answers. So I could package it up, push it up for it to get pushed back to me for stronger justification.

And if I had to go and find that information and hunt people down, you’re going on the short list of, you know, I’m probably going with another solution. That’s maybe not as good, but they were there, you know, they had the information when I needed it.

Joel: Yeah, so that really speaks to being visible and creating that air cover and being around, not being afraid to share content, to share information and have it there. I see a lot of companies work with a lot of startups who target government and I tell them straight up, I’m like, you have to get some wind somewhere else because if government is your primary customer you will run out of funding and run out of runway before you ever get that sale, or you may get the sale and then wither on the vine.

So yeah knowing your buyer’s actual journey, not the buyer’s journey that we like to put in our spreadsheets and our flow charts, but understanding them is crucial.

I want to pivot a little bit into, you know, tools and resources that you’re finding to be helpful. You and I have talked obviously anti LLM, anti AI content generation for the most part, but there’s a, there are a lot of things coming up that can help maybe lean down your communications efforts.

What do you, what are you playing with and dabbling with or suggesting to your clients if it’s might not work for your newsletter, But what are you counseling some of these companies that you’re working with to look at?

Zac: Yeah, I mean, I follow Dan Kennedy’s mantra that money champions speed, right? So when it comes to something like AI, I do maintain like my chat GPT account, just for the sake of analytics, for gathering data. No content generation, but I liken as a copywriter, I liken chat GPT as to being a junior in my agency, right?

Now, when I have a junior copywriter, if I’m the senior creative director, I go to my copywriter and I say, “Hey, give me a hundred subject lines. And I present them to me and then I’m going to go through and I’m going to find something that works and put it together.” And that’s if I’m really dealing with because most of the time I can sit down and I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to create some crazy subject line and throw it out there because it’s all about generating that curiosity and getting people to want to know what’s happening. 

But I do use ChatGBT pretty frequently when I want to do any sort of like competitor analysis, gathering the testimonials and you know, as opposed to spending 30 minutes trying to throw it into a Google Sheets and make it look pretty I can just be like,” hey, you know, chat, I’m paying you 20 bucks a month, make me a table and give me all the, you know, give me all the features of this and give me all the features for this.And find me some references.”

If I’m writing something and I’m like, I’m a little iffy on it, I could go spend 20 minutes searching for it or I’ll just open up my phone and say, “Hey, find me these references, send them over, put them on my table.” So I’m all about using tools like that. I think a lot of stuff is so bloated.

And I talk, when I talk about like email marketing specifically for vendors, for businesses who want to really get serious with it. A lot of ESPs are so bloated, right? Because they want that money, but they come with so much stuff that is completely irrelevant to you if you want to be effective at email marketing.

Things like those auto responders and those automation tools. If you really want to, if you are big on having that human connection, you want to steer away from all of that. So I typically try to steer folks towards something that is, is lightweight, is a minimum viable solution for them.

Like my ESP, like I can’t send I’m adamantly against designed emails. I’m against images and GIFs and things like that in emails because I think you can create so much vision and create such a visceral reaction in people from words, right? And mine just strips all of that out completely.

When we’re talking about tools and things to make it more effective, I would go more on the minimal side of things. And really looking for tools that help you remove all of that bloat, remove all of that fluff and take out that crutch of, you know, maybe we’re just not good storytellers. Maybe we’re not good at communicating with words.

We’ll remove the crutch completely, remove the tools that are giving you the ability to lean on that and get better at your storytelling. You know how you get better at it? You just tell more of them and it’s going to come. Your audience is going to react. They’re going to have very strong reactions to it.

And you know, one of the things I like to tell people is you really want a breakthrough or bust with your content, right? If you send an email out, you’re a vendor going out and trying to talk about a product or you’re selling socks on Etsy or whatever it is It doesn’t matter but if people read your email or they read any of your content and they go, “meh”, you’ve lost right?

You either want them to really react to it or you want to get nothing because you can work with that. That’s good solid hard data to take and make your things better. But if they just give you this lukewarm. You know, it’s like, I don’t know, people read the Bible, it’s like, “you’re lukewarm, so I spit you out of my mouth,” right?

That’s how people are with your content. If it’s just meh they don’t remember it. It doesn’t strike a chord. Just go minimum viable, right? You know, use tools that make it easy for you to get something out there fast and get it in front of the eyeballs that need to see it.

Joel: Yeah. I was going to say it’s better to be not remembered when you’re not at your best than for someone to go, “Oh, you’ve really improved,” you know, cause, cause they’re remembering where you were. 

So I’d love to, I’d love to hear some case studies or experiences. Some of the headlines or the story points that have really worked for you that you’ve seen a great response to not suggesting that anybody go out there and replicate these, because you definitely have to find your own voice and if this doesn’t work for for you speaking now to the listener, don’t do it.

But you have had some doozies. What are some of your favorites?

Zac: Yeah, so I would say, before I go into something specific, I would go with just the concept behind it. If I had to choose one thing every day to get people to react to my content, to open it, to engage with it, it would be curiosity. When, you know, the, one of the world’s greatest copywriters, Gary Halbert, was out on a boat with his protege, and he asked him, he said, “What is the one thing that inspires people or makes people take action more than anything else?”

And the guy said “self interest. They want to, you know, take care of themselves. They want to meet these goals. These needs.” And he said, “no, it’s curiosity.” And that’s absolutely true. So if I had to choose one, you know, one thing today to stick with, the thing based on what performs best from my content, it is something that invokes the curiosity and makes them want to know more. You could, you know, most emails, I think the ones that perform the worst for me are the ones that are like five ways to, you know, make this and have five ways to improve your click through rate. Like I already know what’s in the email right now. I, now I’m like, “Oh, that’s, I need to do that.

But do I need to do it right now?” It’s going to go into the read later bin. Probably going to get overloaded with, you know, a hundred other emails. It’s not going to get read. But like my email today, I was responding to a thread that I’ve been commenting in LinkedIn, right? And it was like, Dad and Chief and his Zodiac Zealots are out of the cosmos to strike me again.

That’s a long subject line, but people are like, “what the hell is he talking about?” And they go and they read the email. And it just talks about what I meant to talk about today, which is building a list and making human connections with people. That’s the lesson in my email today after this story.

So I would say my best performing emails have always been the ones that have evoked that curiosity in the case of the one that I sent that landed the Motorola sale, it was very, specific to to the fears of what we were dealing with at the time, right? And it was enough to, like I said, evoke that emotion from them, that very raw visceral emotion that they were like, “we got to find a budget for this product.

We have to get this. I don’t care what we have to move to make it happen. We’re going to do it and we’re going to do it in the next 24 hours because he scared the shit out of us.”

Okay? Being able to create those visceral emotions in my emails, I send emails I don’t know if you’ve seen some of them one of the things that people really get fired up about are politics, and current events, and I don’t take any political stance But I do harp on lessons learned from every side of it.

I. Wrote about posturing a few months ago and I wrote about Trump and like Trump, like regardless of how you feel about Trump, the guy postures like nobody else to be able to go and get 34 felonies or whatever it is, and then become the president of the United States and everybody going after you, that’s posturing.

And then I talked about. You know, deepfakes and, you know, Kamala Harris deepfake on Twitter. And those emails got such strong reactions because people see that and they’re like, “Hey, this is evoking this very strong emotion in me. I either, you know, hate Trump or I love Trump or I hate Harris or I love Harris.

And I’m going to respond either way.” And the people I want on my list, they see that. And they get the lesson from it and the people that I don’t want on my list, the ones who I know aren’t reading the content, aren’t seeing what I’m trying to communicate, they get mad and they leave. And that works for me because now I’m not paying to have you on my list.

You came here for something that I don’t know what it was. But now I’ve done, I’ve been successful at, you know, both on both sides. I’ve kept the readers I want and I’ve removed, I’ve pissed off the ones that I don’t and got them off. So those, I would say, you know, the ones that evoke the curiosity, like that one today, like how I most, most of the time I do it.

And if you’re on my newsletter, you’ll see that, that’s really how I segue into my stories is making you say, I have to drop what I’m doing right now to read this. And you know, Joel, what you said you don’t read them every day. I get a lot of folks who will say, I save them up and I read them all at the end of the week, and it’s like a book.

Being able to keep that curiosity going, and you can do it, even if you’re not doing emails like me, right? You’re selling cybersecurity products, you’re selling, you know, coffee mugs, you’re selling, anything. You’re selling financial planning services. You evoke that curiosity through your content.

It doesn’t matter if you send an email today and it goes to the spam folder or it goes to the promotions folder. You stop focusing on that and you start focusing on evoking that curiosity. People are going to go looking for it, right? They’re going to say “where’s Joel’s email today? I didn’t get it.

I didn’t see it. I know it comes, so I’m going to go searchin’.” I get quarantined for language by Google probably like two or three times a month. And I get messages from people like, “I have to go look in quarantine for your email because. You sent an email today that said, what your sex ed teacher wants you to know about good email marketing.

And Google’s this is a spam email, obviously,” but people go looking for it. So if you can evoke curiosity like that the way I do it in in, in a way that resonates to your brand, then you’re going to get good results with your emails regardless.

Joel: I was speaking at this conference and you know, my talk is about the three organs that you can leverage and you can squeeze to, to get, um, response out of your audience. And, you know, I talk about the brain, the heart and the stomach or the gut. And I had this this lunch box.

No one else is going to see it, but this, I don’t know if I showed this to you, this Human Organs for Transplant, and I decided to carry it around for the rest of the conference and it was the best audience qualifier I could find because people would either see it, walk up to me, I’ll put a picture of it on, in the show notes, they’d either see it and see them, they’d walk up to me and go, “what is in that lunchbox?” or they would see it .And they would turn around and walk away, and I didn’t want to talk to those uncurious losers anyway.

So you have to put yourself out there and almost disqualify certain people to find the people who are willing to look for your content and to dig in the spam and go, I miss Zac. I haven’t seen anything from Zac today. What the hell is he all on about?

Zac: And if you really set yourself to eliminate the dilettante level something for everybody BS up front and you really own who you are as a brand, as a company that makes it so much easier. You know, people look at, you know, who you are and how you represent yourself and they’re like, “I really want nothing to do with that.”

And that’s okay. Okay. You’re a you’re not for everybody. There’s really this 30 to 35 percent chunk of the pie that’s your perfect target audience. And if you are focusing on talking to the rest of them, you’re watering down the messages that really need to go to them. And and so being able upfront to say, ” I’m going to own this, I’m going to own who I am and I’m going to be whatever I need to be for me and for the people who would benefit from my services, from my products.”

They’re going to flock to you, and they’re going to come looking for you, whether that’s in your emails, your blog, your posts. I advocate for email because you own it, right? You can post something on LinkedIn that’s great. You can spend two hours planning this post, you can make a carousel, and whatever the algo gods decide to do that day, you may be seen by a thousand people, you may be seen by fifteen.

Being able to own yourself, who you are, your brand, and scare off the wrong ones, you’ll attract the ones, the more you lean into that, the right ones will come. If you build it, they will come. Isn’t that the saying, like when they’re building the baseball field, they’re like, if you build it, they will come.

Joel: right. Yeah, and you know, I feel like we’re getting to a point of somewhat social media fatigue, video fatigue, I mean, the whole nonsense that was going back and forth with TikTok and, you know, the Meta platforms and I think we had a moment where we really wanted to connect and we wanted to see people and we forgot how to spend time to slow down and read.

Spam is definitely a problem in the inbox and you’re competing with that. And, you know, I get a ton of newsletters. I have them all filtering into separate little buckets so that I can go and look for them. Almost like the daily paper. I want to open up, I’m going to crack this open and see what’s going on.

You know, it’s a reminder to me to slow down. I almost wish I could get my emails. printed every day as a newspaper and sit there with my coffee and take the moment to slow down. Because I think text does, like you said, you spend time with it. 

 What are some of the other things that you’re doing to slow down?

Personal favorites how do you keep yourself engaged and juiced up? You write about your kids a lot. But what other things? I mean, I know some of the stuff that you’re into. But what are some of the things that that, you know, how do you how do you slow down and get that copywriter on?

Zac: Yeah, I mean, I definitely fall into the category of the lot of folks who get, you know, as soon as you like, see a video, you get sucked into that brain rod of scrolling, doom scrolling through it. If you read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. He talks about, you know, when they did a, they did MRI scans and CAT scans of folks as they were using Instagram and things like that, and the chemicals that are released in your brain when you have an actual social engagement were not being released when people were using them. You know, Instagram and Facebook and talking to people on TikTok. It just doesn’t exist. There is no social connection there. So for me, I’ve had to do a couple of things. I separate from social media as much as possible. LinkedIn, I make it a joke that like, I’m, I try to make enough money that one day I can just leave LinkedIn and not have anything to do with it.

Joel: Oh, the dream! 

Zac: I read a book called Stop Reading the News. I gotta find it. I can’t yeah. But basically, I had to stop. I had to step away, ’cause I’m a big, I’m a big news buff. I like to know what’s going on in the world. I like knowing what’s happening. It just comes from being my previous career of being so involved with the international community at that level.

And being able to see it, but I get so swallowed up in it that I come back to my own content and what I need to do, and I’m just, it’s so much noise and it sticks with you, right? So for me in the mornings, typically is when I write my emails and when I do most of my stuff I’ve dedicated, you know, two hours in the morning to just me and my content.

I don’t do any like client work. I don’t book any calls. I booked that two hours to do anything I want to do. So I’m writing the Pulp Novel right now, getting ready to publish it this year. I work on that or I read or I just brainstorm. I do what I want to do and typically involves me sitting here with a cup of tea and my pipe.

And I tried that meditation. I tried like mindfulness meditation and sitting there with my thoughts and my silence and trying to quiet it. And I realized I hated it. Like my thoughts are like a fever dream a lot of times. And that’s where I get most of my good content. I just spit it out and what sticks, I shoot it out into the nether and see how people react to it. 

So I had to really steer clear away from all the self help stuff and you know, all the guru, like this is how you get more productive and just own really how I function and and spend time in it and and really separate myself from the world for a good portion of my day.

And then, you know, afterwards, if I’m free and I don’t got anything going on, sure, I’ll dive in and see what’s going on. Sometimes, you know, I’ll read a funny story that’s going on in the news. And I’m like, you know what? I think I’m gonna write an email about it and send, you know, how can I relate that to something that would benefit my audience?

Joel: Yeah. A lot of inspiration strikes when you’re not trying, when you’re not tasked with with doing something, when you let your brain roam and wander. We’ve talked about this. I’ve thought about taking up pipe smoking. I have mine as my little fidget. And I have read that, that the drawing in of breath.

We’re either holding our breath with a lot of stress or we’re exhaling to release stress. But the thoughtful, mindful, slowing down it’s in the inhale where a lot of relaxation takes place. So I can imagine that’s really therapeutic. 

Zac: You have to realize like meditation and like being able to silence things and benefit from that, it takes all different forms. Like for me, it didn’t work to do the sit in silence and try to quiet my thoughts. For me, it was just spit them out on a piece of paper. And whatever comes out in the next like 30 minutes or however long I choose to do it, that’s it.

Maybe it turns into something really cool I can do something with, maybe I just throw it in the trash. But, you know, being able to to own that and be, you know, just like everything else, taking that ownership and being able to have that level of control, it does wonders for you, which then in turn does wonders for your audience.

Because now you’re not trying to be, you know, You know, all these, all this noise you gathered on what they want me to be. Now you’re being you, which is what they came to your list to get in the first place.

Joel: Yeah, I’m a big advocate for, and the reason I invented my MessageDeck was to help people offload their thinking process. Literally, I say, get your thoughts out of your head and onto the table so that you can take a step back and look at them objectively. And, you know, it’s great with teams, but just doing that, slowing down, is crucial.

With some closing thoughts. You know, you’ve been in the trenches literally and figuratively. You’ve done tech, you’ve taken a step out to help and advocate for technical people and help them do their communications. Maybe speaking to somebody out there who is maybe that SOC/NOC analyst or that person who, you know, feels like they can step out and make a go of communicating. You obviously discovered the love of like copywriting and things like that. I mean, we talk Ogilvy all the time and, you know, I love that stuff. What are some resources, some places they can dip their toes in, maybe some great books that you’d recommend people start learning about the craft.

Zac: So I would say first and foremost, in that sense, a lot of folks lean too heavy on the marketing stuff. They lean too heavy on the sales stuff. I would say start reading some more fiction, you know, put down Dan Kennedy who I’ll advocate for every day and pick up Tolkien. And read how he tells stories, right?

 What resonates with you, you know, maybe it’s a Pulp Novel like the Maltese Falcon, or you like Lovecraftian dreadful, you know, existential dread, right? These things connect with you. They connect with the people you are trying to communicate with as well.

So put time aside to. To enjoy your content, enjoy what you’re reading rather than trying to learn something from it. Now, with that being said I really advocate Gary Halbert wrote the Boron Letters. I read it like two or three times a year. It’s great. 

I actually am going through four or five books right now.

I don’t know if we’ve talked about this. I read Dune. I read two books every year at least once and that’s Frank Herbert’s Dune and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Um, so I’m really big on my fiction but as far as what I do if you want to get better at communicating, I would recommend Gary Halbert, The Boron Letters. The System Club Letters by Ken McCarthy is really good.

Things like that are just, that help you kind of step outside of traditionally what you’re seeing that’s being recycled. Most of that stuff is not being spoken about, right? Jim Camp. Jim Camp’s Just Start With No. That’s a great book because it really, It goes against everything that the gurus are trying to recycle and tell you on LinkedIn and all these courses, these masterclasses they want to sell because it’s telling you, Hey don’t really push the sell, right?

Don’t push the pitch. Give them the opportunity up front in every single engagement to not negotiate, to just say no. And if you invite the no, you eliminate all of the stress, you eliminate the neediness. And you at that point, it really resonates even outside of your business relationships, right?

Dealing with your friends and your family and how you approach them. And and so find it, but ultimately I would say finding that balance between, the kind of self help marketing and selling stuff and just reading stories and learning how humans for millions of years, all the way back to, you know, I say it, when Zug Zug and Wompa Wompa were around a fire talking about killing a saber toothed tiger, right?

Humans connect with stories. So maybe just step away from what the gurus are trying to teach you and find your storytelling ability. It doesn’t matter if you are working for an enterprise B2B selling cybersecurity stuff. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling socks on Etsy, you have a story, your company, your brand has a story.

And ultimately that is going to be the best way you can communicate via email, via your website, your eBooks, your blogs, You know, a personal , old school letter. That is the way to do it. And the best way to do it. Find a story that resonates with you and do the same thing. Replicate it. Tell your own story.

Joel: That’s phenomenal, and I would highly advocate not to poo all the gurus, because I do consider you one of the gurus of email storytelling. How can the people listening connect with you, learn a little bit more about your work? Obviously the newsletter is a big one to sign up for, tell them where to get it.

Zac: Yeah, so if you just go to ZacharyHydeWriter.com, that is gonna take you to my website. The only thing you can do on my website is sign up for my newsletter. I don’t sell on LinkedIn. I don’t sell on my website. I don’t do anything except funnel people to my newsletter because that’s where I’m going to be able to give you the most content, the best content that’s not being, you know, cycled through social media and everybody else who wants to dictate if you deserve to see it or not. 

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I am a completely different, you know, I’m big on world building, so who you see me as on LinkedIn is going to be completely different than who you see me as in my newsletter versus who you hear me as on a podcast.

LinkedIn is very It’s very stiff. You know, we talked earlier about like people, you get to those levels of leadership and you like, you seem like you flip that switch and you lose that humor. You lose that entertainment. I very much go contrarian in that on LinkedIn. So most of my stuff there is to just piss them off and get me in LinkedIn jail as much as possible.

Occasionally I get stuff through and it goes viral and I get people on my list, but ultimately if you want to talk to me, get on my list. I do respond to people. I keep my list very tight. I don’t allow people on it who are just there for taking up space, which means it makes it easy for me. If you get on my list and you have questions, you can email me and I respond to those personally.

Usually within, you know, 24 to 48 hours. And that’s, that is solely because I keep it so tight. So yeah that’s, you know, you want to talk, hit me up on LinkedIn, send me a DM or shoot me an email after you get on my newsletter.

Joel: Awesome. I can’t wait for us to get together in person over some bourbon and and the pipes and and reminisce and do some storytelling. We got to do some ghost stories because I bet you’re amazing at that too.

Zac: Yeah. Just just look for your Seinfeld moments. Just exaggerate things. Make them dramatic. People love that. That’s, you know, that’s how people connect. And it’s a ghost story or you telling somebody to buy an endpoint, right? That’s how they’re gonna connect with you. 

Joel: Fantastic. Thanks for joining me today, man.

Zac: yeah.

Thanks, Joel.

Joel: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.