Lesson Content
AoE Workshop: Review of Julie Angel’s SOS
In this conversation, we discussed three different topics/questions, including:
- Product Launch Series (including an SPP-PLS hybrid).
- Customer Onboarding Series.
- Putting it all Together: our perspectives on how to implement AoE for your business.
Transcript
Shawn (00:00):
Hey, this is Shawn and André. It’s week four of the Art of Email workshop. Today, we are going to be talking about the Product Launch Series, Customer Onboarding Series and putting it all together, module in the Art of Email, and start off with Product Launch Series.
This week might be a little bit different. Rather than ask very specific questions, this is more like week one where we just have some placeholders, and we’re just going to riff about some ideas for each of these modules. Every module in the Art of Email is important, but these are three really important modules that the conversation that we’re both kind of curious to see where the conversation is going to lead. We’ve been talking about this for about 40 minutes already this morning, and realized that we probably should click record. So, André, where do you want to start on the PLS? It seems like a good place to get going.
André (00:58):
Yeah. Because it can be quite nuanced. I like the idea which we’ve mentioned before, I think, the bullets to cannonballs idea where it’s a perfect vehicle for testing out bullets, for exposing segments of an audience to an idea and seeing if that idea has legs, if it resonates and if it’s worth doubling down and actually turning it into reality, which is the cannon ball component. We’ve done a number of these, at least during our collaboration. Yeah. They’re always slightly different, but they’re always fun, because we’re always learning something. Maybe that’s a good jumping off point.
Shawn (01:55):
I know that we talked about this in the past, but if someone is just jumping in here at this point, we’ll just do a quick overview. The bullets to cannonballs is an idea from Jim Collins, a business author. I think a metaphor he uses. If you’re on a ship, and you have a certain amount of gunpowder and the ship was approaching, you have just enough to fire a cannonball. If you think the other ship, you’re safe, and if you don’t, you’re going to get sunk.
The metaphor that Collins uses is that rather than just load up the cannon, fire the cannonball, hope for the best that you fire a few bullets first, use a little bit of the gunpowder. Fire a few bullets to orient where the cannon is going to fire. And then once you get to orient it, it will get your aim right, then you put the rest of the powder behind the cannon ball and you fire and sink the other ship. That’s the metaphor of bullets to cannonball.
We embraced this. And if you think about from a PLS perspective, bullets to cannonballs could be … If you have an idea for an offer, which we did earlier in 2021, we had this idea for something we called the Momentum Builder Workshop, lean addition. It didn’t exist prior to the promotion itself. We were very clear about that. It was just an idea.
A cannonball version would have been to create the entire workshop, cross our fingers, hope that our audience was interested in it, and then try to sell it. And if we were wrong, then we would have put all of the effort into creating the workshop and would have missed.
What we did instead, and this is a way to use this metaphor, think about using the PLS, is we were very clear with cohort one that this did not exist, it would be delivered in a live environment. Very much like this Art of Email workshop the first time was delivered as a live workshop. We had no idea. I don’t want to say we had no idea.
We suspected there was a segment of our audience interested in a live workshop or a workshop companion to the Art of Email, but we didn’t know that for certain. So, rather than create all of it in advance, that’s the cannon ball. We sold it first and then and we sold it with everybody’s eyes wide open that it would be delivered over five weeks. That was the bullet that then gave us a signal back and said, “Okay, this is something that makes sense and as part of our audience that’s interested in it.”
The PLS is a really great tool to test the bullets versus cannonballs idea, the bullets to cannonballs. Again, As long as you’re honest … You’re saying, this thing doesn’t exist. This is how it’s going to exist over this timeframe. A PLS is a really great way to test an idea.
Anything to add to that? This is probably a good segue into talking about the Momentum Builder Workshops. We’ve run two cohorts for it now. We’re on a third cohort early in 2022. We want to riff on that a little bit and sort of how those things differ. I know that’s going to open the door to this idea of a hybrid. There’s just lots to talk about on the PLS. I want to kind of follow your lead on where we go next.
André (05:20):
Yeah. As Shawn said, we put out the Momentum Builder Workshop, cohort one early in the year. We then did a cohort two. So, we really knew that this is something that people wanted. Cohort two, it was still open and close, and we had made changes to the course, upgraded certain components of it. It lives in this world between evergreen and open and close, whereas the course itself is created that we keep adding to it and upgrading it. But it’s an open, close deal.
The PLS is a perfect vehicle to get people that are interested in whichever one is to raise their hand and then come into it. We have an idea of what we need to say at this point within the PLS. There’s less learning that we need to do and more just making sure that our PLS is as good as it possibly can, and maybe try and figure out a few new things, components.
But then there’s also an opportunity for us to take that PLS and turn it into something that’s more automated, yet still open and close. You can head down that avenue at some point. This isn’t explicit inside of auto email, because auto email, once you understand the building blocks, what you build from it can almost be infinite. There’s just so many different varieties of expressions, things that we probably never even thought about before. One of them is this is kind of hybrid between a story-powered promotion and a PLS that bridges evergreen and open and closed for a product. That is open close though. Yeah. Do you have any idea to that?
Shawn (07:34):
Two thoughts come out of that, what you just said. First thought is that if you look at the Art of Email and when you look at a story-power promotion and then PLS, it’s two discrete things. I mean, sure, that’s true. So, in the general distinction between the two was that story-powered promotion, or to think it’s something that’s evergreen, and then PLS is for something that has a hard open or close.
But rather than seeing those as two discrete things, I think there’s value in seeing them as ends of a spectrum. Where you are on that spectrum can mix and match elements of the two. I’ll have you talk about that in a second. I’m going to hit one other point before we jump into that, but I think that’s a really interesting way as we get into more advanced thinking about the Art of Email is to realize that rather than thinking like, “Okay, here’s a Product Launch Series, and I just go through this module if the certain criteria are true.” There’s a hard open and close, so it’s always a PLS, versus it’s evergreen, and it’s always a story-powered promotion.
Once you understand the basics, you realize that those are two ends of a spectrum. You’re going to blend some of these things. We can give an example. But before we do that, I just want to mention that a PLS is also … It’s the vehicle for businesses that have open and closed enrollment along with a hybrid that André is going to discuss in a moment.
This is important. It’s some of the things we were talking about before we click record was how the Internet goes through cycles, and always have, and I assume it always will. Early on, when Jeff Walker, even before he released product launch formula, and product launch became a thing, it sort of became part of the vernacular.
Even before that happened, as it was happening, there was just a lot of excitement around the product launch idea. And then of course, like any situation, there’s a lot of excitement about it, there are a lot of courses sold. There are a lot of people who spoke about the product launch like it was gospel, and then everybody and product launches.
And of course, then the pendulum started to swing back the other way. Because lots of people who’s built their businesses around the product launch model wanted to get off the product launch train. And it’s because those things, if you just open and closed enrollment once or twice a year, or three times, four times, there’s a lot of work. It creates a set of demands and lots of people wanted to do less of that.
And now, we’re seeing it. Then we move to a much more emphasis on evergreen. Certainly, several years ago, that was the buzzword. Everybody wanted to move all of their offers evergreen. And now, we’re starting to see the pendulum swinging back again. There are a lot of platforms that offer this, and there are a lot of courses available now where the emphasis is on the cohort model.
So, that’s an open and then a close enrollment, and there are cohorts who go through each model. Now, depending on when you’re listening to this in the future, the pendulum may … It’s never absolute, but it’s sort of the zeitgeist, the gestalt of the market, like where it’s leaning.
And right now, it’s starting to swing back toward the open and closed cohort based model. Because of that, if you’re entering the Art of Email and your business is based on an open and closed enrollment model, the PLS really is where to focus your attention. It doesn’t mean you don’t get the benefits of the storyteller promotion. When André starts talking about how you can use a hybrid of those two, that’s part of it.
If you’re listening to this and your business has open and closed enrollment, start thinking about your next PLS. Be specific to your business, their duration, all of those things, but that’s really where to focus. That’s the primary mover in an open and closed enrollment business. And I hope that sets the stage for this hybrid model. So, why don’t you give us the overview of the hybrid model? I’ll just ask questions as they come up.
André (12:09):
Yeah. A hybrid could be … It’s using the leverage that you get inside of an evergreen. So, instead of a story-powered promotion, but still recognizing that the thing that you’re promoting is still open and close, which means there’s a specific date the door is going to open, the cut is going to open, and you take orders, and then it’s going to shut down.
I think most decent ESPs, we use ConvertKit. You can specify dates. You can have a story-powered promotion that is triggered at certain … Emails are sent out on certain days. If we know that Monday is a certain day, and that’s … Let’s just say that enrollment is going to open on a Friday, and it’s going to close on a Monday. Well, you can have a follow-up sequence that knows that. And so, it’s triggered on a certain date. So therefore, all the emails inside of it are delivered on the correct days.
You kind of get the best of both worlds. But again, this really needs to come later. I wouldn’t start off doing an evergreen PLS, because that defeats the object of why you do these things live so you can learn all this stuff. It’s a learning process when you’re doing these PLSs. It’s the bullets. But at some point, you’re going to have a cannonball, because you’ve done it enough times for a certain offer. So, at that point, it’s possible to do an evergreen version.
When we do the Momentum Builder Workshop in 2022, so we may create our first story-powered promotion version. Although it’s still open or closed on the exact dates, we would have pre-written all the emails. It allows us to free up resources and do other things while that thing is playing out. We’re still interacting with people that are receiving the emails, if they hit reply, and those emails go into a support place. Well, we still see those and interact with those, but the sequence itself has already been pre-written, and it’s just going out. Do you have any questions on that?
Shawn (15:01):
No. There’s so many nuances to this, and something you just said I want to really draw attention to, which is don’t try to do the 10 times advanced version first. This is a mistake we all make. There’s that whole idea, when you point a finger at somebody else, four are pointing back at yourself kind of thing. This is me pointing at this problem and pointing it at myself as well, which is really easy to take something like the PLS or story-power promotion, and then really complicate them to the point of making it challenging. So, don’t do that.
I mean, really get comfortable with a PLS first as written, and get comfortable with a story-powered promotion as written before you start thinking about how these hybrids over overlap. And really, the Hybrid is probably the natural evolution of the two. And certainly, when we think about all these, the Momentum Builder Workshop as an example here, if we … So far, we’ve done two PLSs for that. One was very short, because it was a weekend promotion for André’s birthday, so there wasn’t a lot there, but there’s material in that, that was useful. How we describe it, there’s the story of creating it that’s embedded in it.
There are parts of it that are useful that we don’t want to have to reinvent when we do the next one. When we did the second one, cohort two, I think we borrowed a little bit from that first one. Of course, because we’re describing, and we’re telling the story of the original one. There’s a natural story there. But what I would imagine could happen at some point is that the … This true. If you think about when this would be true, ideally …
I don’t want to shock some people, but there’s a pretty good chance that the first thing you write is not going to be the best thing that you write. I know, everybody is stunned when they hear that. That’s true for us certainly. PLS version one. You do it at some point in time, you get a certain result. And there things that you look back on that you thought, “Nah, it was pretty good.” And then there are things that didn’t work as well.
And then version two, you make it better. By versions three and beyond, you begin to have a sense of what worked, what resonated, what didn’t resonate, perhaps. And that’s when you can imagine starting to craft. I don’t know percentages, and I don’t think that’s really what matters, but you could imagine a hybrid model where it’s a PLS in the sense that it is. There’s an open and close, and it’s a story-powered promotion in the sense that there’s this theme and this narrative arc. You’re bringing people through this experience.
Instead of having it either or, it’s both and, and that you load up, I don’t know, 80%, 90% of the “PLS.” It’s loaded up in your ESP. Maybe your first email sort of you write to frame things that has some moment in time kind of stuff with it, or references, whatever the lead in was to the specific one. And then maybe there are places throughout the remainder of the PLS that as you’re getting feedback, you make an adjustment to.
The bulk of the work is already done, so it’s both and. To me, that’s such an important idea to get from the Art of Email is that these things begin … It’s the way they’re interacting that’s so important. And when you have created two, three, four PLSs for the same course, or the evolution of a course, by the time you get to the fifth, and the sixth, and the seventh, it’s hard to reinvent the wheel each time. The most important things to say have been said. Say them the way that you said them. Just one last thought.
I’ll share on this and I made a note when you were talking about this. We’ve approached this in two different ways. Sometimes, we link to things that we’ve already written. Previous emails, for example. And other times, we embed what we’ve already written into an email and we reference that this was written for something in the past. We might say something as simple as we’ve said it in a previous email, and we just put the text in there. There are lots of ways to do this.
I think when you Write something that resonates, pay attention to that signal, and keep reusing it. Don’t set yourself up for a situation where every time you’re creating a PLS, you’re trying to come up with some new way to resonate with your audience, unless you have it yet. But once you start to, that’s a good place to borrow liberally from yourself. Because that’s valuable to your audience. It’s been shown to be valuable the previous audiences. So, continue to extract the value that you’ve already created. That’s how I think about it. I don’t know if I wandered around too much there at all.
André (20:41):
Yeah, I’ll just add one more thing, and then I suppose we’ve murdered it. It’s worth doing a post mortem once your hybrid has played out. Then the doors close, people are in and it’s going to be something. You’re going to have good results and you’ll have context based on previous times when you’ve run one of these things. Maybe it’s really good, but there was a few things that could have been done differently, or done differently, I guess, that would have perhaps a different effect.
Well, you can modify that thing that’s just played out now, because now it’s played out. No one is going to go through it again until it gets modified and then made live for the next time you run a cohort based enrollment. So, you can modify that thing on the postmortem where it’s the most fresh in your mind. Bear in mind, you didn’t have to interact with a complete PLS, which that’s a huge time resource. So, you’ve freed up time, because it’s now mostly automated.
But then once people are in and you think of a few ideas that you can use to improve it for next time around also based on feedback, you can make those changes right there and then when it’s most fresh in your mind, and it just save them, because those emails are created ready. For next time around, you’ve got something that was made better modified slightly. So, it’s not the exact same thing, should somebody decide to raise the hand and go through it again.
Well, in fact, if somebody has gone through it already, at least this is how we do it. People get lifetime access, so they’ll never have to go through another hybrid, or PLS, or STP of an open and close, unless they didn’t respond to it and join.
Shawn (22:59):
Let’s move on to the Customer Onboarding Series. I feel like we’ve talked about this a lot, but I can’t remember if we’ve already talked about it and recorded it, so there may be some duplication there. The marathon Q&A sessions, maybe where some of this shows up too. I’ll kick this one off, just a compare and contrast. I won’t name the products. They’re both sitting on my desk here. The experiences of buying both of those, these are both hard goods.
I think there’s a lesson in that purchase that to me, it really speaks to this idea of a Customer Onboarding Series. This is sort of a what not to do versus what to do from my perspective as a customer. One of them, when I made the purchase, I immediately … Before it was even delivered, I was getting the, “Buy the next thing, 20% off. Buy, buy, buy, buy.”
I completely tuned out all of their communication very quickly, because I had just purchased. It’s funny. This is not at all uncommon, and I’m sure I have some vague memories of hearing different times when someone has made a purchase, they’re more likely to make a purchase soon after. That to me seems like bad advice. Maybe this is true in some cases. Again, I’m just speaking about my own experience.
This one product, buying it and then getting hammered with discounts to buy more, and especially in a way that it didn’t really make sense for me to buy more and I hadn’t received the … I was being encouraged to buy more before I even had the initial purchase in my hands. It felt really gross. I just very quickly tuned out all communication from that seller.
Now, I have this other thing on my desk where I think I signed up. I guess I purchased that first. And then after purchasing it, before I got it … But the email, I got a what to expect email that sort of talked about where it was made, the materials that it’s made from. Why they chose those materials. Before the thing arrived, I was really looking forward to opening it because I knew the story about it, and was excited about it.
I think it was after I received it, I got another notification that essentially said that because I had made this purchase that I could get a … I think it was a 20% discount on future refills or something, whatever it was. It was just mentioned in passing at the end. You don’t really have to do anything. And then also mentioned that each month there was a customer only offer that was sent out, but that email didn’t have the customer only offer. Just kind of let me know that, that was coming.
I noticed myself as emails were coming in, I was curious, what’s the customer offers this month. There was a very different vibe between those two. The point I’m making here is not so much to look at either one of these as the right way versus the wrong way, but to point to this larger truth that how we interact with our customers after a sale is very impactful.
Someone just did the thing that we want them to do. They became a paying customer. It’s so tempting to just go, “Oh, shoot, good. Now, let’s go see if I can get another one.” That’s very short sighted. “Or let’s see if I can get some more money out of this person. They just bought, maybe they’ll buy more.” That mindset, there are consequences to that mindset.
The question that we have to ask ourselves is, “Do we want a business that subject to those particular consequences? Or would we rather create different consequences?” If we have this long term focus, and we’re not concerned about getting every sale, and striving for every sale at every moment. And we can relax a little because we know that the sales will emerge as a result of the relationship that we’re building that it suggests, at least to me that once someone has become a customer, a place to put most of our attention is on how their experience as a customer can be improved, how that can be excellent.
By drawing attention to the decision that they just made and how they can get the most value for it, and really treating that relationship very, very well. It’s part thank you. There’s so much there. But the last thing that feels right to me, and that is to try to hammer away at another purchase as the default. There seems to be an undercurrent of that, that we run into. I’ll hand it over to you to say something smart on that one, rather than just me [crosstalk 00:28:15] my experience.
André (28:18):
Yeah. I see this a lot with an e-commerce. I suppose this isn’t a place to poke sticks at certain people’s business models. It’s certainly easy to do, I suppose, with e-commerce where reasons to send emails are discounts, and pushing discounts all the time every month.
I suppose people that are selling information, like we do, although I’m sure it’s not exclusive for this. I haven’t got an econ business, but I can think of how I would perhaps do something. I don’t see why narrative based emails can’t … Like sending out these Customer Onboarding Series that takes somebody on a little journey about this thing that they’ve just purchased, even if it’s not information, which is probably easier to do.
Just thinking. I mean, there’s so many products that I get, stuff like creamers and MCT oils and stuff like that. There’s no reason why you can’t make that experience an enjoyable one as opposed to just being a transaction. Otherwise, I think that module is fairly straightforward. Someone just made a purchase. You want them to have the best possible experience they can have and doing it in that moment is the best time to do it.
Shawn (29:57):
That’s when their attention is piqued. And someone just made a purchase. In general, they’re interested right now. I mean, I’ve certainly purchased things when I wasn’t interested right now, but certainly around Black Friday and other stuff and all the discounts happen. Sometimes you make a bunch of purchases. It’s not always true.
In general, I think it’s true that you have somebody’s attention right now, and it’s yours to lose and yours to screw up. It seems like there are infinite number of ways that based on my inbox, to screw it up, and only a few ways to do it right. It just seems to me like if you strip away, if you look at all of the things that can screw it up have in common. And then you compare that to the few ways not to screw it up, look at what those few ways have in common.
It seems like the two ends of the spectrum are something around this assumption that because someone just purchased you could squeeze another purchase out of them right now, versus recognizing that someone just purchased. That’s really important. They just like a step toward you. And focusing on rewarding that, knowing that in the short term that will reduce refund rates, so there’s an economic reason to do it.
And in the long term, we tend to buy from companies that we feel good about, and enjoy the relationship with. There’s no downside to building a relationship after somebody becomes a customer. I can’t see any downside. Unless we have this fear based mentality that if we don’t get that next sale as fast as possible, we’re going to lose the opportunity forever. That’s just not true. I don’t know, that’s sort of how I think about the Customer Onboarding Series.
André (31:59):
Yeah, totally. Broadly speaking, when somebody makes a purchase, their level of excitement is at the highest. They’ve just made that purchase. We all love buying stuff. Yeah, I don’t know if we’re getting close to murdering that now.
Shawn (32:26):
Interesting choice of words there. And I guess we’ll wrap it up today. We’ll talk about module 10, which is putting it all together. We talked about this earlier, and I hope we can recreate and expand on the conversation that we already have. Let’s do a little ping pong. I’ll hand it off to you. Why don’t you talk about how you think about going through the Art of Email? Because we know it from the inside out? Knowing what we know, how would you approach going to the Art of Email? Wherever you get to with that, I’ll run with it, because I have no idea what I’m going to add to that yet, which is always entertaining for me.
André (33:14):
We all learn slightly differently, but I think one thing is in common. If you don’t understand something, like you don’t have that understanding of the big picture, and how all the parts fit together, how they can interact, and how they can produce the result, which is an emergent property of making this thing a reality.
We think that the optimal flow to go through Art of Email is from module one all the way through to module 10, in order. Maybe some modules you would have to reread a few times, but not to the level where you’re trying to think about how to put something last. What is the underlying technology required to make this thing, how to put it into my system.
I think the better way to do it is just to get that initial understanding of how the whole thing works. And then the putting it all together module, module 10, I think that’s where the main focus would be, because I think most people, no one is going to have the same path into this as to what they’re going to build for themselves. Maybe most people will build a Relationship Building Series, but that’s not going to be the case for every single person.
Just figuring out what your priorities are in that putting it all together module, and then that will then kick off, “Okay. So now, I’ve decided I’m going to do a Relationship Building Series and then to the newsletter.” And then it’s like, “Okay, now, I can deep dive on those modules required to bring this into life, and then go from there.”
It’s so easy for people to get hung up on something that’s not relevant in this moment, because it may not be something that you need to build in this moment. I think the story-powered promotions can seem overwhelming when you look at it. Maybe most people aren’t going to need to build one of those for a while, so don’t worry about them. I feel like I’m leaping backwards and forwards. Do you have any response to that?
Shawn (35:48):
First thing I should probably do is unmute myself. I mean, the thing that struck me with putting it all together, and this continues to be something that I … It’s ephemeral, because I see it with such clarity. But then when I try to grab a hold of it, I can’t quite get my hands on it.
It’s really around two things. I know we’ve talked about these in the module itself, but it’s really around an experience I had with complexity, with systemic complexity, that I think we shared in the module itself. And then it’s knowing that the Art of Email was designed where all of the parts are … They’re all part of the same system.
That sounds obvious, but it’s not obvious, because it’s entirely possible. We could have written and created an email marketing course that had modules on parts, and that you could pick and choose the parts, and get a result from the parts. When you put the parts together, the result might have been incrementally better.
The Art of Email is different in that the parts actually emerge from the whole. The parts are the ways to express the whole. I realized that sounds like we’re hyper intellectualizing something, but it’s really at the core of what makes the Art of Email so powerful, is because when all of the parts are based on the same principles, and they’re crafted from the same systemic ideas to produce. They’re based on the same foundation.
Because that’s true, every time something gets added to it, the whole system changes. The whole system reacts to that, or is improved by that. And at first, it’s not really noticeable, because the effect size is small. So, if you have a Relationship Building Series, that’s going to change things dramatically for your business. We’ve already had people submitting their initial results and they’re stunned.
We know that’s true, but that’s creating one thing. That’s not really a system. That’s dropping one part of the Art of Email into an existing business system, and it’s having these sort of seismic effects. If you assume that after your Relationship Building Series, you add a value newsletter. Those two things now interact together in ways that are obvious and ways that are not obvious.
The obvious way, when someone goes through a Relationship Building Series, and then they get this newsletter, and the newsletters are framed by the building of the relationship first. Some of those things are obvious. But then somebody may get a value newsletter for 12 months, and not explicitly remember anything about the Relationship Building Series, but their opinion of the newsletter was improved right from the beginning because of that. There’s all this weird stuff that happens.
But where it gets really fascinating to me is that because the parts are designed to work together, each time we add something to it, we increase the likelihood of an exponential change. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner called these Lollapalooza effects. All of a sudden, something massive happens with the addition of something small, seemingly comparatively small. But the addition of the comparatively small things happen to be in line with lots of other things, or a contact, or something happens. And this one small thing creates this massive effect. But it’s not the small thing that created the massive effect, it’s the small thing dropped into the right context, in the right systemic output.
The Art of Email, that was the thing that really struck me as we kept digging in and tearing pieces apart, and reassembling them, and structuring it the way that we did. It seems like in retrospect, it was always in service to this idea that this needed to be the irreducible expression of email marketing. You can’t take anything away without it causing significant damage to the whole.
If you just pulled something out of the Art of Email … It doesn’t mean you have to do everything, but it means that there’s people out there who they … When we look at the audience as a whole, everybody needs all of it. There’s nothing that can be removed, and the Art of Email is okay. You don’t necessarily, in your context, need all of it. But all of it has to be there. And at the same time, there’s nothing more to add to it that would improve it. If we added something else, we would likely make it worse. Striking that balance.
This isn’t sort of a long, circuitous description. And I think the other thing that really … I referenced the personal experience I had with working on a team of 16 that had scaled from a team of four. We joke a lot that five out of four people are bad at math. André and I are not mathematicians, but it’s funny how our brains deceive us. I remember thinking to myself like, “Why is this going so sideways? 16 is only four times bigger than four.”
I don’t remember who drew my attention to this idea that it’s not … But I do remember being part of that team when someone pointed out, or I somehow stumbled onto this idea that because teams are about the number of people on the teams who you can interact with, it’s the interactions that matter, not the parts. A 16 person team is four times more complex than a four person team. But when you look at the interactions, it’s 20 times more complex, because that’s just the way the math works.
That metaphor has been stuck in my head as we’ve been working on the Art of Email, because what it points to is that every time you add a layer to your Art of Email inspired email system, you’re creating the opportunities for exponential complexity to emerge, because of the relationships, which gets back to this foundational idea that it was designed to work together.
I haven’t figured out a way to express this any more succinctly than that, but it’s those two forces working together to me that, that’s so profoundly powerful. And getting back to what you said, André, about functionally, go through all of it, understand that all of it is there for a reason. Although you may not need all of it, but you will probably need most of it. And your responsibility, once you understand all the different pieces is to then get in module 10, get some perspective and try to decide where’s your entry point. What do you do first? And then just continue to reorient.
Now that you’ve done that, what do you do next? Now that you’ve done and that, what do you do next? At some point, the effect size begins to change dramatically. That you do one thing, you get a small result. You do another thing, you get a small result. To do another thing to result is a little more significant. But at some point, you do something, and then the result is far outsize what you would expect, because the whole system is now producing that result. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all. Makes sense in my head, which scares me. Just tell me if that makes any sense.
André (44:17):
I suspect that there’s no business that can’t implement Art of Email in its entirety. Even if they think that their business doesn’t need all the parts as we describe in the course. For example, the first thing that comes to mind is if somebody has a cohort based business, and open and closed affair. That’s it. To a small business, they do open and close a few times a year, that’s everything.
I think it’s easy to come to conclusion that maybe you don’t need to do any story-powered promotions in their context. I think there’s many opportunities to do in this example, story-powered promotions. You could do them around affiliate offers, for example. Again, just thinking out loud here for a sec. Shawn and I could write an entire story-powered promotion around the hosting company that we’ve decided to use. And then we can reflect back on previous hosting companies that we’ve used in the 40 plus years jointly.
We could probably jump on a call with the company that we use and ask them to do a Zoom call with us for 40 minutes and unpack certain things. And we could really make that story-powered promotion world class, and maybe it plays out over seven emails, over a week.
Well, once we’ve created that asset, it’s an affiliate thing. Every single company needs hosting if they’re operating online. And at any point where it makes sense, even in the footer of your newsletter where it says, “We are proudly hosted on, insert name.” And that could trigger, that could be a doorway into a story-powered promotion. That then triggers the sequence that the series plays out, or like a bridge. And then it says, “Raise your hand if you’re interested in sharing this one week thing about the hosting company that we use.”
That’s an affiliate relationship. Even though your business is not an affiliate business based business, and hosting commissions add up, because they’re recurring. That’s just an example of just one story-powered promotion that you may have thought. Our business doesn’t need story-powered promotions. And you can look at this from all different angles. The Product Launch Series, I don’t do open and close. There’s still ways to use a PLS as a bullet, for example, to learn something about an audience before it’s turned into the cannonball version and something else happens. It’s worth mentioning the fact that I think most people could implement or can implement the amount of email in its entirety over time where it makes sense based on priorities.
Shawn (47:47):
That reminds me of the Michael Lewis book, The Undoing Project. I think it’s a reference to Danny Kahneman. He’s a professor. In my previous career, I traveled to the Middle East a lot. Traveled to Israel many times, and the economy describes sort of the confrontational nature of Israeli intellectual thought in the university.
One of my dear friends is Israeli, I just remembered in graduate school a very similar, like this. It’s almost combative. It’s not a mean spirited, combative, but it’s a combative, intellectual jousting that happens. Kahneman said to his graduate students something to the effect of, “When someone says something, don’t try to figure out what’s wrong with it. Try to figure out what ways it could be right, and what situations it could be right.”
It’s an interesting way to think about the Art of Email too. It’s very easy to look at something that, “Oh, it doesn’t fit in my business and try to move on.” Take a page from Danny Kahneman’s book. Take a step back and say, “Okay, and what situations could this make sense for me? In what ways could I use this?” I think what you just described is a perfect example of that.
When you ask that question, it’s a better question, you get better answers. I think that question is a really powerful one. You might look at something. We have our newsletter. Or our business just doesn’t do a newsletter. It doesn’t benefit from that. It’s different because of XYZ. In what ways could a newsletter be helpful? Because when you ask that question, it doesn’t mean the answers you get are going to convince you to do it, but at least it’s going to give you better answers. I think because we didn’t …
It’s not just enough to say that we didn’t include any fluff in the Art of Email. That’s an understatement. It’s precise in a way that it’s systemically precise. We agonize over a lot of decisions. What exists in the final product is not what it look like in its original form, because it was a constant hammering against how could this be better, and how could we … Some parts of it now are separate, and other parts are kept together in ways that was different than the original because of that mindset, that desire to make it so precise.
I think that will be my last thought on putting it all together is we realize that the parts are all there because of how they relate to one another. If the part itself, you look at it and think, “I don’t know that this really fits for my business.” Recognize that it’s not just the part that matters, it’s the relationship of that part to everything else. And there’s no better example of that than the Relationship Building Series. That has such profound effects on everything else. And embracing that mindset of building relationships before transactions is at the core of everything that the Art of Email is about.
It’s very easy to misinterpret that to be a decision that we made, because that’s just the kind of business that we want to have. That happens to be true, but it’s not. That’s not the only reason that we made that decision. It happens to be true that we want to have a relationship based business with our audience, but it also happens to be true that most people who are going to buy from you are not going to buy from you immediately, first 90 days or so. That’s fact, that’s gravity.
Knowing that those two things exists simultaneously and independently. We want to have a business this way, and we’re lucky because it just so happens that we want to have a business that lines up perfectly with how reality works. But if we didn’t want to have a business to emphasize relationships, it would not change the fact that most people who would buy from us wouldn’t buy from us in the first 90 days. We can’t change that reality. The Art of Email, it’s based fundamentally on that reality.
And you can approach that reality from a touchy feely perspective like, “This is the way I want to have my business.” Or from a hard nosed economic decision, financial perspective where the financial opportunity in your audience is past 90 days. That’s between 90 days and two years is where overwhelming opportunity is financially. If you just want a hard nosed financial look at email marketing, that’s where to focus your attention.
You’re not giving up anything in the Art of Email by embracing its philosophy. When you put it all together, it simply is an expression of the reality of the way the world works, and the way that we believe is the best to take advantage of that reality. That will be my closing thought. I’m putting it all together?
André (53:00):
Yeah, I like that on that bombshell. I think we’ll be going for about an hour now.
Shawn (53:05):
Nice. It’s every everything we do, we seem to go longer. We knew that going into this, I suppose.
André (53:11):
Yeah.
Shawn (53:12):
Cool. I guess we can check the box on that one too.
André (53:16):
Cool. Thanks for showing up and giving us your attention. And if you have any questions, put them in the comments.