Lesson Content
AoE Workshop: Bride Email Series Reviews
Transcript
Shawn — 0:03
Hey, it’s Shawn and André, it is week five of the art of email workshop. Today, what we thought we would do was bookend the entire experience of the artisan email. So in the introduction, we explained our four strategic strategic upstream decisions. And then in just the nature of how, you know, we’ve certainly experienced this ourselves and nature of going through a course really excited to kind of get into it, see what it’s all about. So we can we imagine some people came through and had an experience where you went through the introductory material, and it was like, Okay, let’s get to the the next thing and the next thing. And now what we’d like to do now that we’re at the end, and we have a vantage point of looking back over the totality of the art of email, we want to revisit those four strategic upstream decisions. And we certainly encourage you to go back and read those, those modules because there’s, we did not, we did not articulate those lightly. And we did not come to those lightly started as a much longer list. And we continue to hone it and to strip away the essential AND to combine things and what was left those four decisions, really, there’s a lot there. So I think what we’ll do is we’ll just take them in order. So decision number one is emphasize relationships before transaction. So André, I’ll hand that to you. And we’ll just ping pong back and forth. And we’ll just go through all of them. Really, it doesn’t, I don’t think it really matters, where it was, what, what perspective we take, we can just share some thoughts about each of those. So I’ll put you in the hot seat and let you start talking about relationships before transactions.
André — 1:36
Yeah, okay. So let me quickly hit the rewind button slightly, and just to reiterate some of the things that you said, leading up to starting this. And, you know, Shawn, and I have have been looking at marketing more broadly. And then within the context of our of our various courses, well, the various things that we do, which are codified in our various courses, so you know, art of email is this lens in which we see the world and how we interact through email and interact with an audience. So this is not just an email marketing course, it is far more than that. And one of the reasons why it took took us so long to to, to to actually birth this thing is, we really had to wrestle with with some of our will externalize some of our, our strategic upstream decisions, put names and, and stuff behind it. And then it was important for us to wrap this up in as you sing it over here, that allowed us that that informed everything else inside of r&b Mel in a way that we felt that we thought would add huge amount of clarity and empower to people that are, you know, on this journey, and don’t necessarily see the world or haven’t in these, and as expressed in these boxes, that then inform everything else in the course. We know people love tactics, and they love to just dive into courses. And, and it, it would have been very easy for us to articulate auto VML in a way that I did in in previous iterations that that weren’t hung on these ideas, for example. So although we’ve always thought about it like this, and it’s our lens, we know that the first time you read this, we know that there were a lot of aha moments, because those have been expressed in the comments already. But now that most of you watch, listening to this have been through idml when you revisit these, these, these, these four decisions, I think everything is going to just look different. And like, you know, once once once the painting has been colored, it can’t become uncolored it’s, it doesn’t go that way. So I think really looking at these things is a really powerful way to just internalize them again, to a point where eventually it’ll be completely automatic and this won’t show up in in your email marketing efforts. It’ll be everything like, you know, marketing more broadly and life in general. And this will just show up every way so yeah, I just I just felt that was important to frame that. Like that. So our first idea is this is this is this main thing which is really emphasize relationships before transactions and yeah, so one of the ideas is, and this is this is not going to be a revelation to many people that it’s easy to overvalue short term goals so that, that, that feeling that I have a prospect coming through this, this, this thing, this, this, this funnel this email series, and I need them to buy this thing to monetize, you know, to, to monetize them, otherwise I’m going to lose them lose the attention and they’re gone. It’s far more difficult to think of the world in, in long term, you know that, if we, if we just pause and think about this as a relationship, and establishing relationships with every single person that that enters our world, you know, as a priority, and through the context of that, everything else downstream becomes easier. Certainly selling, selling just becomes, you know, 10x, or just, I’m just gonna throw a number out there, but it just becomes becomes so much easier. So, but it’s, it’s more difficult to look at the world that way. Because there’s this thing called we need to monetize attention as quickly as possible. So that’s one of the things we try to emphasize in this lesson, which, which really shows up in the entire art of email. And in fact, everything, everything we do, you know, in TLB, and whatever. So I think that’s, that’s the first insight that we want to draw attention to, before waffled on anything else, not even
Shawn — 6:29
so much to unpack here. I was having when you were when you were talking, I was having kind of a trip down memory memory lane, to over two decades running an agency and one of the things that used to used to bother me a lot, and probably still does, I’m just not as close to it. But I’ve been I’ve, I’ve purchased hundreds of 1000s of dollars of training over the years, I really enjoy learning more about my craft, but one of the things that used to bother me a lot is buying training. That was it always felt like it was partial, it was incomplete. And, you know, I certainly let you know, I learned a lot from virtually everything that I purchased. Sometimes I learned how not to do things, but in general, there was there was value in it. But what bothered me was that because I because I ran an agency I needed to have, I needed ideas that were effective across disciplines or in across topics and across business models. And like I was I was looking for some kind of foundation to stand on. Because it’s, it’s very hard to have to reinvent the wheel every time you work with a new client. So I was I was always looking for what, what was something I could stand on that that just made sense for everything. And when I when I always find a lot as we’ve learned, you know, purchase a course on you name it any part of the digital marketing, but it often had the same format, which was it was a thing that worked for somebody at a point in time in a certain way. And it Yes, sometimes it was it could be replicated, often it could be replicated, but what was generally true is that it was it was kind of a point in time type of context.
idea, and those are fine. And we need those in our toolkit. Sometimes it can be strategic, sometimes it can be tactical. But what I what I kept searching for was what’s what’s below that, you know, Elon Musk and others have, you know, popularized this idea of first principles and what I was looking for, like, what are the what are the first principles, because once once I could establish first principles, then every new situation, I didn’t have to start over. So every new client that I worked with every new market, I didn’t, I didn’t have to start over. So over the years, slash decades, but I was I made a very small number of things that I could, that I felt like I could stand on that were foundational. So when we were talking about the art of email, I think that’s just part of my DNA. Now that I’ve, I want things that are true. I want to know, like, you know, for if you’re going to open a grocery store somewhere, I’d like to know, like, like, how did how did those businesses work? What are the what are the main drivers for everywhere for a grocery store? Like it seems like? Those are questions that have been answered. And in our world, these questions have been answered. Sometimes they’ve been answered poorly, and sometimes they’ve been answered in completely. But this is a long circuitous way to get back to this idea that emphasizing relationships before transactions is his foundational truth. That’s a first principle. It’s this idea that it doesn’t matter what the percentages are. But what is seems to be true from all the data we’ve seen in there’s lots of data available about this. This isn’t us just looking at our experiences think Oh, this must be true for everyone. This is us looking at the experience of our customers of people who are working with lots of Clients, my own experience working with clients, and our experience working with clients. And we have lots of friends and colleagues who have concurred, but there seems to be some truth, like capital T truth, that when we look at large groups of buyers, most people who buy don’t buy right away, and not like 5050, most people like 8020, most people don’t buy. And that just seems to be true. And we can certainly look at our own experience, and see evidence of that everywhere. So when I, when we get to something like that, to me, it feels like there’s there, this idea of relationships before transactions is universally true, it rises to the level of gravity, which is the metaphor we’ve used elsewhere in this workshop. And it’s, there’s something really powerful about that, because, you know, I think I’ve said this on a q&a call or elsewhere. And André, and I’ve certainly extended our conversation, like when you jump out of an airplane, gravity doesn’t care. If you believe in it or not, you’re still racing to the ground. If you don’t have a parachute, you know, it’s, it’s what’s the expression, you know, the rest of your life to figure out how, what’s going to happen. So, relationships before transactions, it’s just, it just recognizes the gravity of marketing, that most people who are going to buy from you. And it’s, it’s, it’s funny in the way that we express it, because it’s a, it’s a decision. And that’s what makes these decisions. So important. It’s something that you can choose to do. It’s a place where you have agency where you can make a choice. And that choice aligns you better with gravity. And once you do that, you’re not fighting forces all the time. But if you have a high pressure sales funnel, and you’re you’re really going after a tiny minority of the marketplace, then you have to fill that funnel all the time, because you’re only you’re only able to reach a tiny minority of the market. That’s just that’s just truth. So when when we look at that, we say, wait a minute, what decision could we make, that by making that decision, every decision that follows is better. And emphasizing relationships, before trend transactions, any dimension that you look at it, financial, overall business performance experience, you name it, every dimension, that you evaluate this decision, it’s a better decision than the alternative. And to me that, that that is a that’s something foundational that everybody can rest on. Alright, I’ve set up decision number two, and I like to hand it off to you, and it gives me time to think it’s perfect.
André — 12:39
Let me just let me just add one more thing to the to decision number one, you know, we can still recognize that, that they are, they are a portion of people that they want to back straightaway. And, you know, we can still recognize the fact that that’s part of gravity, or that’s, that’s the truth. But that doesn’t mean you know, that we can we can recognize that and and create opportunities for people that are more inclined to biolog Sean and I we don’t, you know, we don’t need to be put through this long journey yet. But if we know that we want something, we want to be able to get it, ideally. So we can still do that. And this, this doesn’t take away that it’s it’s, it’s and you know, it’s this and that. So within the context of emphasizing relationships, we’re not taking transactions off the table. You know, that’s, that’s not the point of this. I just wanted to mention that, you know, this isn’t about a non transactional, business that doesn’t create transactions, at least until until way later. That’s not the case.
Shawn — 13:53
Yeah, that’s a good point that you just made about, you know, four verses, and it’s, it tends to be presented this way, like you can, you can do the traditional direct response, or you can focus on relationship building. And that that’s it’s a false choice, because you’re behind each of those strategies is a reality. And the a fast sale focused approach, a typical direct response approach. It all I mean, yes, it works. Of course, it works. But it limits the size of the audience that you have to engage with by a factor of four or five. So it’s just again, we say this all the time you sit every day, you sit down to a buffet of consequences. So when you make that decision, you’ve just limited the size of your audience significantly. And what we’re suggesting is that and the way you said it is exactly right. Just choose both. Just Yes, there are going to be people who come into your world and they want to buy the thing when email number one arrives in their situation. where maybe it’s, you know, a PS or a footer or something. But we’re not saying like, don’t you know, prevent people from buying, we’re in the, we’re in the happy customer creation business. And some small percentage of happy customers are created in the first few days. Excellent, let them buy, but just never at the expense, don’t engineer the system to focus on those people, because that’s the, that’s the tiny minority of people we’re eventually going to buy. So if we have to, if we if we need to emphasize one over the other. Or if we want to look at the whole picture, when we make this decision to focus on relationships, we’re capturing the largest segment of the audience with our primary strategy, and not at the expense of the smaller subset who are going to buy anyway. Alright, let’s move on to the second one. This is you want to add something? Are you? Good? Good. All right. So decision number two. Decision number two is funny because we we struggled, struggle, but we came at this from two different directions, and then we eventually put them together. So the first one is an observation. And then the second one is a decision. So the observation is that customers are created before they buy anything. And then the decision really is just because of that treat everyone like a customer. So that that’s it that one, that was an interesting one to create. Because we were really saying, we were really sort of setting things up. And then the decision in response, which again, gets back to this first principles thing, that it’s it’s just true, that customers are created, it’s the Think of a customer only as someone who has purchased. This is the larger point that the buying decision is generally made before someone hands over their credit card. And because of that, because that’s true. It’s just it’s a very effective decision to say, You know what, I’m just going to treat everybody like a customer all the time. All all, actually, I’ll introduce the three E’s here, and then I’ll hand it off to you. Well, this, these were not intended to be the three E’s, but I can as I looked at as I go, that made sense. So the three E’s are really that when do you treat everyone like a customer? It’s easier, it’s more efficient, and it’s more enjoyable. Again, unintentionally, three E’s, but it’s easier and that you don’t have to, you know, when we get an email from somebody, and they’re asking us questions, we don’t pause, and then go look up their their records or like, do they own anything? We don’t, it’s, it’s just easier just to say, Listen, treat everybody, like a cut like a good friend, like a customer. Right? So it’s easier in that sense. It’s more efficient, again, because there’s not this friction of Wait a minute, what do I tell somebody who is a customer to persuade? Or who isn’t a customer, so I can persuade them versus somebody who is. So like, it’s all of that adds friction. So you eliminate that friction, you just treat everyone the same way. And it is more enjoyable, you know, and enjoyable is subjective. But
it’s, at least from my perspective, it’s it’s just, it’s much more fun. When someone asks a question that you don’t try to figure out all the nuances of their context relative to us, you know, it’s just, you know, it’s really nice to be able to look and see the question that’s being asked, or questions that are being asked, think about how best what the value that we could give in response to that, and then do that. Without it that’s just enjoyable, right? It’s just in this in this spirit of interacting with other human beings, it’s just more enjoyable about me. So there’s this decision, I really love this decision because it solves so many potential downstream problems, it eliminates them. And that’s what what’s one of the beauties of strategic upstream decision isn’t that it necessarily solves problems is it prevents them the problems never arise. And that’s the best way. Alright, I’ll hand that off to you in person commentary.
André — 19:05
Yeah. And when you when you zoom out, and you when you really internalize these, these decisions, and these these fundamental truths, as we present as we presented them here, they all mesh together in in such a beautiful way. So this one in particular, I mean, you can observe this yourself by looking at your own buying behavior. And I’m sure that there’s probably many more buying decisions you’ve made that happen way before money has ever been sent, you know, where you’ve, at the moment, you know, in many cases, this has happened, you know, this can happen days, weeks, months, even years prior to actually going there and doing the transaction and we We’ve observed this so many times in our business, because we we obviously always interacting with with people and we, and we love seeing emails come in with people, people essentially stating this slack, Conway Tabas stuff. I mean, normally that’s, that’s on the roll up to a, Tu, Tu, Tu, Tu some sort of pls. But even even more broadly than that, you can see this playing out all the time. And it’s just such a such an amazing thing, when you really understand what’s going on. Aveda habit, a tendency to because behavior, you know, because we were looking at the other side of it, and we can see our email analytics and, and dashboards and whatever. And there’s just so many things that happen that you can see that it’s, you can put your finger on, on on something and say this person is going to get to become a become a customer because of how they interacting with us via email, or whatever. And there’s no you know, no one’s talking about buying anything. In many cases, it’s just the questions that they were asking and how you know, how invested they are in, in trying to solve a problem that they have. And we’re having these these discussions over email, and it’s not this person has is about to make that decision in other people you can, you can totally tell that they’ve, they’ve made their decision already. And it’s just a matter of when is right for them. Maybe something’s closed, maybe something’s open, but you know, everyone’s context is different. But when you really recognize that this happens, it is a very liberating thing allows you to to create marketing, that’s very different to to the typical stuff you see out there.
Shawn — 21:59
This is, I’m hesitant to say this next part because it can be so easily misconstrued, but I’ll provide the context. But it’s the statement is pretty clear, which is that people tend to act like customers when they’re treated like customers. That’s just, that’s just true. Now, the way that can go wrong is it can sound like it’s like sort of this Machiavellian tactical, like well, I just want to treat everybody like customers, because I want them to pay me money. And that’s, that’s not the conclusion to reach from this the conclusion or reach from this decision is that everything is easier and better if you just treat everybody like customers. And now, there certainly are people out there, and probably some fairly credible arguments that you want to have this kind of walled garden that’s attractive to people outside your who are not paying customers who, like they know, there’s something amazing on the other side of the garden wall so that it encourages them to become paying customers. But guess what that happens anyway? Right? That’s just, if when you treat everybody like a customer, and you go above and beyond and you mean it, then the implication is that whatever is on the other side of that walled garden is even better. And of course, that’s true. I mean, of course, yes, our courses are far more complete than the free material that we give out. That’s, that’s, that’s self evident. But it doesn’t mean that we that we would treat people who are interested in that differently, because they don’t, they don’t own the thing. That’s the that’s kind of it that’s that’s an illogical or that’s that’s your, I guess that’s an irrational decision to make is that well, until you’re willing to put your money on the table, I’m not willing to give you the highest level of XYZ, my dad used to tell us a story about the difference between effort and output and that the story was an old man who was sitting next to his wood stove. And he would say to the stove, if you give me more heat, I’ll give you more wood. And of course, that’s anyone who’s ever signed woodstoves knows that’s not how, how things work, right? So this idea of treating everyone like a customer really is recognizing that when we give to other people more and we invest in other people more the right people tend to respond to that. And yes, there are certainly going to be people who you know, quote unquote, take advantage of that. They’re certainly going to people who maximize what they get for free for me, that’s fine. Those people are out there anyway, that that’s that’s going to happen anyway. And they’re not they’re not your customers. They’re not going to be the people who buy your courses. That’s just fact. So it you know, unbalanced. Now if you spend all day with people like that, then that’s a challenge but my Guess you’re not going to they’re going to be one offs here and there. But that’s not we’re not investing in this. And this gets back to the the comment André made earlier about long term versus short term focus. If we narrow our focus to just too much of a short term timeframe, we’re like, oh, man, today I spent 20 minutes creating a screencast answer questions for someone and then they didn’t buy? Well, that automatically like that, that’s not the right timeframe. To look at it. A better time frame to look at is look over 90 days, in a value evaluate how it feels to treat everybody, like a customer over 90 days. And on balance, what effect does that have on your business, that’s a far better timeframe to consider or a year is another one. But when we focus too myopically, it’s easy to see especially easy to see contrast. And we’ll see the ones that will remember the ones because we seem to be hardwired, to be to be more to focus more on the negative. That’s why the news is so miserable. So if we have 10 interactions with people, and nine of them eventually become paying customers and one doesn’t will tend to remember the one who doesn’t. So just don’t pay attention to that, right? Just Just treat everybody like a customer like a friend like and you can because what you can substitute friend here is fine, too, but treat people like customers, period. I mean, that’s it, you know, we could have shortened decision number two, to three words and wait is that forwards treat people like that’s five words, treat everyone like customers is forwards.
And that that single decision eliminates infinite numbers of downstream problems and creates infinite amounts of downstream benefits. So that’s why it rises to the level of being strategic upstream decision. But it’s irreducible it is, it is so powerful. And that’s a how, again, getting back these four decisions are so powerful, that when you make them, everything changes, and it changes in ways that you can’t, you can’t predict you can’t expect what you can predict, in some ways, but mostly, it’s they’re so powerful that you’re just you’re not you, it’s hard to imagine a business on the other side of these decisions when you make them because they’re so profound. That’s why we put them at the beginning of the art of email, because you we make these decisions, they inform what we said. And now that we’re at the end when we look back, and we can say okay, now go back and look at all of the different types of things you can do with the art of email. But do that in think about these decisions now. And you’ll see why they show up everywhere and why they’re so powerful. All right, onto your your feet, well go ahead and move on to your favorite one, I think
André — 27:58
so, you know, our our emergent marketing newsletter. We have one emerging marketing newsletter that goes to everyone. We don’t have an emergency marketing, emerging marketing newsletter that goes out to all prospects. We then have the gold plated edition that goes out to customers have one course. And we have the platinum version that goes into customers or multiple courses. When we write three newsletters every every two weeks, we try and figure out what’s the best stuff we can share with the platinum guys, what’s what can we take away for the gold plated guys? And what can we remove for the for the prospect people? That is That makes no sense in the world to us. And yet, it’s it’s decisions like that. I mean, it’s it’s, it’s thinking like that, that shows up all over the marketing world you see everywhere. Whenever we writing our newsletters, it’s what is the most value we can share in a newsletter that’s, you know, one and a half 1000 to 2000 words, you know, what is the most we can pack into that that’s going to be valuable to every single person that receives this thing, which is a completely different way of way of looking at it. It’s it’s nothing about what can we remove? You know, the what can we remove doesn’t exist. It’s what can we put in, within the constraints of the length that we’re going to be sharing that’s going to be most impactful for? Well, everyone.
Shawn — 29:28
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about like, it would actually, you know, it would probably go the opposite direction, right? If we really wanted to do this. Well. If we really believe this idea of three levels of newsletter made sense. It wouldn’t be we wouldn’t be giving more to each audience we would probably be taking away from me at each level. So it’s that wasn’t Linus Pauling. Whoever said you if I had more time, I would have written the shorter letter. Right. So it’s like, you write you write You can imagine writing an email and then, you know, hacking away at the essential Bruce Lee’s word, stripping it down. And by the time you get to the, you know, the platinum version, it has like four words on it, right? Like this is this week is these four words. But it’s what you just said, it’s, it’s this not to get too intellectual here. But this, this points to something that’s really fascinating. And it happens a lot. I’m sure it happens everywhere. But we’re familiar where it happens in our world, which is something is emergent. And then it gets turned into something deliberate. And when that happens, something is lost. So the the continual ascension of a small minority of people in your audience to higher and higher levels, is an emergent property of large audiences. It just it is what it is, it’s a byproduct of the Pareto principle. It seems to be a power law that shows up everywhere, I mean, even shows up, I was surprised to hear this the other day, which I hadn’t thought about, that even the size of planets, and solar systems and other things seems to follow a Pareto distribution that, you know, some small minority of planets, or have the largest male, are responsible for the most mass, like, it’s interesting. So in any large audience, and a large audience is probably what it really starts to get, the Pareto Principle starts to show really an audience’s like 1000, and in skills upward from them from there. But if you think about, let’s just say, for the sense of art, say, for the sake of argument that we have an audience of approximately 10,000 people, the preponderance of people in that audience aren’t going to buy anything. Right, that’s, that’s just sort of reality. Some significant percentage of that audience will buy something at some small price point. And then you in there’s there’s just a distribution, that’s what a Pareto distribution is. It’s an asymmetrical distribution, meaning that there are lots of people who are in your audience who will spend a little bit of money, and a few people who will spend more money and then a tiny minority who will spend a lot of money. I think the example that Richard Kosh uses is Starbucks, that cautious, has written a ton about 8020. But, you know, in a typical Starbucks, the lowest price item that you can buy is a two hour and 60 cents cup, six $2.60 cent cup of coffee, and the fully stocked, Starbucks also has I believe it’s a $1,500 espresso machine. And that doesn’t seem to make sense. But it is a classic Pareto distribution, that when you are when you put 1000s of customers through a store all the time, most of them will buy something in the $5 range, that’s where most of your action happens. But in a large audience, there is generally there are a tiny number of people who will buy the $1,500 espresso machine like that’s, that’s just what the Pareto Principle says. So getting back to the original point,
the fact that you might have small groups of people who are willing to pay you more and more money for what from their, what they perceive as more value. That’s just an emergent property of any large audience, period. But where it goes wrong, is when we then try to make that deliberate. So what you see happen in the internet marketing world a lot is people build up audiences, and then they create a gold membership, right, and then after that, they have to create a Platinum membership. And then eventually, it’s titanium. And then you know, Stardust or whatever, like, if you just keep ascending and ascending and in the group gets smaller and smaller and pays more and more, right. And that, that makes sense. There’s nothing wrong with an ascension model like that. Because in a large audience, you’re going to have people who are raising their hand who want more, and that more is valuable to them. That’s just that’s fact. But where it goes wrong is when we then make that deliberate. And we say, Okay, well, if that’s true, then I’m going to start treating my audience differently. I’m going to give most of them the free stuff. And then I’m gonna give another group the better stuff, and then another group, and it’s like, that’s not when we make it deliberate. We, we, we blow things up. And the better way to do it is to let it be emergent. And then interact with what emerges with those people specifically. So again, this was a sort of intellectual detour. But don’t this happens all the time, like something and it feels like it’s unique to that marketing. I’m sure it’s not. It’s like the observations are made and then then everything gets broken because an emergent observation tries to be made deliberate. So it can be monetized and the whole thing falls apart. Alright, I’m gonna be quiet. Now we’ll move on to the third one, I think this is your favourite actually, I think, I think relationships before transactions is your favorite. But this is I think in close, close second. So the decision is, the observation is, is worth the power of world building. And this decision is to build worlds for your audience to inhabit. That’s really when you make that decision. Lots of things happen, I’ll make one observation, and then I’ll hand it over to you or just ping pong back and forth. So the real this gets back to this idea of gravity and being honest about what reality is. And reality is that the real world is nonlinear. And it’s messy. And we can wish that’s not true. We can create funnels that, that don’t have links to anything else. And so that we feel like we can then direct traffic into those funnels. And that we feel like we have some sense of control over the experience for the the end user. And then when we look at our analytics, and we see that a leads to B leads to C leads to D, that we can pat ourselves on the back when we think we’re optimizing things, we can do all of that. But that does not change the fact that the world is nonlinear. And that a tremendous number of people are going to start going into a funnel, and then leave and maybe go search the internet to find out you know, your name plus review your name plus scam, like to figure out or they’re, you know, they’re trying to figure out the things you’re not telling them. Or someone might be, you know, checking out the grocery store and see a link to something that you’re selling and click on it. And in that frame of mind, they’re not interested at all, but something piques their curiosity. And then two weeks later, something shows up in Facebook that reminds them of that thing that has nothing to do with you. But then they go back and they search through their email and they try to find, then they find it, then they go back. And when you sit down and you look at your analytics, you see this beautiful, false causality that a leads to B leads to C and you pat yourself on the back. We’ve all done this, about how you know how smart your decisions are, because of all the data you have. And the reality is, most of it is complete nonsense. It’s mostly just fiction that we’ve that is, you know, it is when I say fabricated, I don’t mean deliberately. But it’s kind of a collective delusion that we’ve all agreed to that somehow, we can make a nonlinear world linear, and then improve it in a linear way. And that’s just not how the world works. 99% of the time, or more. Alright, world building over to you. And then I’ll add a couple more things. I’m sure I’ll Yammer about in
André — 37:49
a minute. Yeah, I do love will will building it seems so so intuitive. But then, you know, I also recognize that, whenever I start talking about well, more than two people can they glaze over it is probably not intuitive to the large majority of people. So one of the things, I used to use this analytics tool, I think it’s still around, but it hasn’t changed. It clicky I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it before. But I used it for for many, many, many years. And one of the features inside of it is you could you could look at the real time. So you have like a like a little map of your websites, the current the pages that that people are interacting with. And it’s got a map of the world and you can see people from around the world love it shows you the little dots of them interacting with with the site and then on white pages that they’ve just landed on. And I found this so fascinating. I would just stare at my love view like an idiot and one of the Big Insights was that on a website with hundreds of pages there were little stars shut you know, people interacting with like landing pages like all over the place and so there was no single point point in you know, this is this is you know, websites most websites don’t have even if you think you have a linear funnel people probably aren’t 100% of people aren’t starting on page one. But just just viewing this was was so eye opening to me and even though there was you know, this multi pages on on, you know, within the world most people interacting on on other pages and then you can just see how they how they move along and somebody will like land on a page and move along and then bounce somewhere else and the little the little dots shows up somewhere else. And it was just such a nice visual representation of How nonlinear reality really is. And even though they are linear parts on a website and you know, some web parts, websites may only have a linear path. And that’s it. It just, that was an amazing insight that really validated more than anything, this idea to me. So yeah, that’s that’s well building and out of the sea, out of the purchases are made in the last two weeks. Got it? We upgraded my ordering. I ordered something called Super Sapiens, it’s a CGM ordered an iPhone 13 Pro, and then I was uncertain whether I should go for the Pro or the pro max to pro lions, and enrolled into fiction writing courses, and not one of those purchases. And can somebody who owns those those websites, look at the analytics and, and tar that back to me in some meaningful way that would, they would have, they would have the context that would allow them to make some decision that would be meaningful, it’s it’s not going to happen. Mon Mar decisions were so messy, and came, you know, I became a customer for all of these ones, every single one of them way before I actually made the made the purchase. And there was an element of world building going on here in the sense that I was doing my research and I was bouncing around. And I was reading all sorts of things. And I was interacting, certainly on one of these websites, the fiction writing wine, it’s, it’s a big site. So I spent a lot of time on there to try to figure out which which course, was the most relevant for me and looking at, you know, some videos. And I ended up in writing in two. And that process was, you know, that was world building that that was playing out on those various internet properties. So yeah, I think, do you have any anything else to add to that?
Shawn — 42:17
I mean, I think this idea of an easy place to start, and you just did it. So you open the door, which is about the last dozen purchases you’ve made and ask yourself, and don’t like don’t focus on laundry detergent, you know, it’s not those kind of purchases, but also don’t it’s not doesn’t have to be a new car either. But when we make decisions, when we make purchases, you know, and this is, you know, Clayton Christensen’s work on jobs to be done theory starts to touch on this a little bit. And you can go look at the audience and offer masterclass where we broke that down. Because people, first of all people buy for a lot of different reasons, which is one type of context, it could be a functional reason I just need to get things done. Could be a social, emotional, like, there are lots of reasons people buy. Value signaling is a reason many people buy and no judgment. I’m sure we all do it. But they’re there. It’s an in buying is infinitely complex. And just because we decide to make buying the buying process, more linear, doesn’t mean we actually make buying decision making more linear. That’s just just not like we can it’s I just you know, going to wireless images in my mind, but it’s like the toddler on the floor, banging, banging his fists on the floor demanding that people buy differently, right? That’s like, that’s just like, No, let me react to the way people buy and the way and I think the reason this is such an issue is that was we people want to, we want to have a sense of agency and a sense of control, particularly when you if you’re spending a lot of money to acquire customers, then there, then all of a sudden, this need to have really something that makes you less fearful about that spend becomes really important. So I get it, I understand why I understand why funnels are engineered, I understand why we are all subject to this collective delusion that we can make a nonlinear messy world feel more linear, and we probably can make it a little more linear for a small percentage of people. But the moment you take a step back and you think to yourself, let me think about some things I’ve purchased, and how like what was involved in that purchase. One of the examples I gave it, great detriment embarrassing to myself. In the audience in offer masterclass was the Suunto core military All Black Watch, right? Like that’s if you look at that buying it experience. It was the most ridiculous experience from a, like, analytics perspective. Because there was absolutely no first I’m not a watch guy. There’s, it was a $300 watch, which I never spent $200 In a watch before. I didn’t, I can’t read the damn thing because it’s like it’s gray. It’s like a gray numbers on a black all black watch. It’s so it’s difficult to see and all the functionality it has. I don’t I don’t use it. You know, as an altimeter, and barometer, it has all kinds of stuff. I don’t I don’t use it. I don’t need it. But that was the watch that was in the movie The Equalizer. Right? And when I saw it, I was like, Damn, what the watch is badass, right? Why I don’t know why I heal. And I didn’t, I didn’t get I didn’t go online that day in order it right. A lot of people did, it was sold out, like, I don’t know, 18 months after the movie was sold out their websites dedicated to it. Like it’s crazy. But then I happened to be in a store, a brick and mortar store and they had one. And I bought it. And when you look at that, I mean that to me, that’s like it’s such a ridiculous example. But when, when that like
for that purchase, it’s to me, it’s such a microcosm that the so the the person who owns the brick and mortar store could be to try to decipher like, oh, did you see our flyer we sent out this weekend, it was like had no, nothing to do with your advertising. Like, there was no way to explain that. And that time, I think that’s how most people are traversing the world, when they buy stuff, they might, they might be become aware of you at one point. And this is this is why we get back to this idea of relationships before transactions as well. But these all interrelate because when you establish relationships with somebody, particularly relationships that are that emphasize empathy, first, and credibility and authority later, like we all want to know the person to go to score in a certain area of our life, right? We want to know that person. And when you emphasize relationships, you build worlds around these areas of expertise that you have or experience, you become the person who represents the solution, when somebody decides that they want that solution. That’s just kind of how the world works. Now, you might be one of several. But by by emphasizing these relationships, and by building worlds with, with content, and particularly content in a digital sense, when you do that, you stack the deck so much in your favor, that when someone is ready to buy, that they’ve already in their mind positioned you as the person to buy from, like this is how the all these things interrelate. And when we try and this gets back to this idea of emergent versus deliberate, when when we try to be deliberate about making the buying system, versus recognizing that for most people buying is emergent, it happens when it’s right for them. It could be you know, there could be a situation where they think they want it now they choose not to buy now their life context changes, six months later, something else happens, they see something and then they come back and they buy at that point. And we can’t, we can’t engineer a linear system to do that. So this idea of building worlds, that positioning you as an empathetic, credible authority, and emphasizing the relationship with your audience, before trying to make any sale in engineering, any deliberate way to extract money from them, and then treating everybody like they’re already a customer, you start to see how these things all interrelate. And what we’ve described as four things really are for their four lenses on the same, like central idea that we just don’t have a name for. So this is you know, these are approximations of the name. It’s something about hey, this is how the world works. So work like the way the world works. Alright, and the last one, do you want to add anything to the world building?
André — 49:23
Yeah, let me add one more thing actually, just to just to turn to this this thing that doesn’t have a name, you know, there’s a reason why our our newsletters called emergent marketing, right. You know, much of what we do is emergent, and you know, it just happens if when you when you do things in this way. So, you know, there’s an argument against wealth building. If you if you’re really trying to hear if you heard what we said were that the buying decisions are very nonlinear. And people will bounce around and then they’ll just make a buying decision. And then make a purchase. And that seems like there’s there’s no agency from, from our perspective, someone’s just gonna land on our website, and either gonna bow they’re not. But that’s that’s not the case, you know, Shan Shan drew attention to the fact that if you have lots of content on a site, you stacking the deck in your favor from, from multiple perspectives, you know, one of which is, is Google, you know, we can’t get around the fact that, you know, Google ranks websites, and it’s, it’s, it’s a lens on what, what’s trustworthy, and what’s less trustworthy, what’s more trustworthy, in its ranking algorithms is all tied down to the content. And if their content is valuable, people are going to link to it, blah, blah, blah. So having that there that around your world, and people are, are essentially living like they’ve, they’ve made a home on your website, for example. You know, that’s, that’s a huge signal. As opposed to a website, that’s just a single sales letter, you know, if you want to look at the extremes, the so when I, for example, when I, when I bought these, when enrolled in these two writing courses, I started doing it doing web searches. And I just ended up on this site, in particular, and many others. But this one was just there was there was more there, there was still something that I could sink my teeth into, I could see things that made sense, and interacted and I spent lots of time many hours interacting with the website, watching some videos and reading because it’s, you know, it’s writers, and it’s, there’s lots of long form content. And it was completely different to many of the other sites that were really more trying to force force a sale here, you know, here’s, here’s my thing, sign up for my webinar. And I know what’s gonna happen, that’s not what I wanted to interact with. So there is this huge amount of value in, in building actual worlds, slowly, but surely, over time, to a point where people want to essentially, live on this, you know, live in the space and inhabited. So that’s my, that’s my final, my final thoughts on world building.
Shawn — 52:23
And I’ll just add one last sentence here, which I think about a lot. when I’m, when I’m, when I’m, if I’m working on content, or writing an email, whatever it is, the thing I remind myself a lot is that everything happens in context, we know very little about every visitor who comes to your website, every person who reads your email, every person who checks out your Facebook page, your YouTube channel, whatever it is, they are having an internal dialogue. And they’re subject to context that we have very, very little insight into. And once you recognize that you stop trying to you stop trying to play God essentially, right, it’s really, you know, it’s easy to feel like with all this technology we have on our side and for marketing, that we can we can engineer an experience for somebody in play god to their experience, but the reality is, we can’t, we can certainly engineer experiences, but they’re still just part of a much longer, much larger experience that we know very little about. And to me, for some reason, that’s just freeing, right? That it just that and I’m a practicing stoic, which means that, you know, when you boil stoicism down to its bare essentials, the essence of stoicism is to focus your energy and attention on things over which you have control with let everything else go. So I don’t I don’t have control over the internal dialogue somebody is having when they come, when they when they interact with our material. I don’t I don’t have control over their content and their context at all. But I do have control over what value I’m able to contribute, and have some influence over the types of value that we co create, and how we share that value. So it’s just it’s very freeing to just, I mean, yes, we still think about our audience, we ask ourselves question, help me How could this be valuable? Who do we think this could be valuable for? But it’s that’s different than trying to, to figure out the unfamiliar routable. It’s just easier to say this is this is how I want to show up in the world. I think this is valuable, or it’s interesting, or it’s entertaining for my audience, that I’m going to do that and trust that when I do that consistently, that in measured over the appropriate timeframes, like 90 days to three to a year, not hours and days that when I do that, my business is going to grow. My experience of that is going to be better. Like everything’s going to move in the right direction. That’s why these decisions are so powerful. All right. That brings us to the last one Decision number four permission before promotion? Have you answered this one first, and then I’ll take a shot at it. I love this one, I think this might be my favorite.
André — 55:09
Yeah, this is, you know, this one is fundamental to everything we’ve we we do. In fact, every single person in any of our courses have been subjected to this multiple times all the time. Everyone’s seen it, nobody hasn’t seen it. If, if they’re in our world. I’ve tried to, I’ve tried to think back to when, when the started for me, and I’ve not been able to get there. There was a point in in 2006, that was very memorable for me, because it was my, I did something that that shocked me in a way that that was my biggest promotion. And as a result, Ma Ma, biggest earning month ever. And in that moment, there was so many revelations, and when I tried to unpack what impossible what I’d done, this was one of the things but I can’t remember before that, so this may, I may have done versions of this before, then I don’t know. But it’s this idea that, you know, we have an audience, and just because we have the permission of an audience to you know, they’ve, they’ve raised their hand to be on our email list. And, you know, that’s, that’s a fundamental thing, you know, we we we ask for permission.
Shawn — 56:35
Is,
André — 56:36
that doesn’t mean that we always have permission to, to expose them to stuff to promotions, you know, being relevant is a superpower. And it’s very, you know, it’s an honor to be relevant. But it’s, it is very, very hard to be relevant all the time. Because, you know, people’s interests change, I mean, you know, people on an email list for for some broad reason. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be interested in every single promotion you’ve got. So this is a mechanism that you can use to be respectful of people’s attention. And the fact that, you know, 100% of people are never going to be interested in any one thing at any point in time. And for, for reasons, you know, environmental other reasons that are, it’s just, you know, it’s gravity, it’s, it’s reality. So this is recognizing that, and then, every single time there’s a permission, I mean, there is a promotion, it’s asking for permission, and it does, it doesn’t matter. It does a bunch of really powerful things when you ask for permission. So maybe we can, you know, I don’t want to raise your head. Yeah. And and ramble on about this. If you want to interject, before, continue down the rabbit hole.
Shawn — 58:00
You’re talking I was thinking about this, you know, this is my nature could go back and try to figure out why somebody? First of all, why would somebody choose permission before promotion? And then why would the overwhelming majority of people choose the opposite? That’s the thing that fascinates me, because the case that’s made this is this isn’t the case that’s been made since really day one of email marketing is that what the send, essentially sending emails is, quote, unquote, free, right? You, you send, you know, 100 emails a week for most service providers, email service providers, or 10,000. The idea has always been there’s no incremental costs, so why not send more emails to more people. And then, but this is where it’s such a, it’s such a false choice, because it’s not. It’s looking at one dimension of cost, and not thinking about all the dimensions of cost. So there’s the one end to the this is where I just find this when my rational mind takes over. And it makes me like, some righteous indignation, where I’m like, what, that’s such a short sighted view is to say, well, it doesn’t cost you the sender more money to send more emails. And in general, when you send emails people will buy, therefore, you should send more emails, or just and then when it gets more nuanced, you’ll have people think, well, you know, of course, you send every promotion to everybody, it doesn’t cost you any more. And when you send more emails, you get more sales, okay? But that’s one dimension of cost. That’s not all the dimensions of cost. So, when we when we first when we could, we could look at this two different two additional ways. One, what is the cost to the customer? Or what is the cost to the recipient? Because they’re paying with the only resource they have? That’s, that’s fine. The most precious resource your audience has is their attention. So immediately, we see there’s a, there’s a tremendous asymmetry in costs, like, yeah, I can send people emails all day every day. But the thing that they need to consume my emails with is the only thing they can’t get more of, which is time and attention. So there’s tremendous cost to them. And then when you take a step downstream from that, and you say, Okay, well, what are the consequences? To me and to them, If I continue to send them things that are not relevant to them at this moment? Well, it’s a natural human response, to pay less and less attention to things that we’re less and less interested in, when demands are made of our attention all the time, right. And then other things have to happen, we have to shout louder to get people’s attention, because we’re shouting all day, every day. So when we really need them to pay attention to something, we have to shout louder, like all of these things happen. They’re all downstream consequences of this one really bad decision, which is just to assume that there’s no cost if we send everybody everything all the time, and it’s so easily disproven. But that’s not true. What I think the reason for me is that permission before promotion is, is at the core of what makes the art of email so unique is that it it solves so many problems without creating any new problems.
I mean, think about that, how often we have to, you know, my least favorite word in the English language is compromise. Which sounds like I’m just a miserable asshole. But I’m it’s not. Because it’s not that I don’t want other people to get what they want. It’s that I don’t want other people to get what they want at the expense of what I want. Right? So I am not looking for compromise. I’m looking for solutions where the other person gets exactly what he or she wants. And I get exactly what I want to that, to me is that, and that’s inspired, le Goldratt work and theory of constraints. But it’s a powerful idea. So if we ask ourselves, How could my audience just and we’ll just for the sake of argument, say we have an audience of 10,000 people? How can my audience get exactly what they want from me all the time? And I can get what I want from my audience all the time. Well, what would that solution look like? Well, that would be a solution where I, you know, like, it’s almost like I could if I could interview in a perfect world, every single person and say, Hey, this is this thing that’s about to happen. Where are you at right now. And they’re like, Oh, I’m facedown at work, I have these projects, they just don’t have any time for great, I’ll take you off the list. Right? You could imagine doing that with 10,000 people doesn’t scale well. But you can imagine those conversations on a smaller scale. Because most people, at any given point in time, are not interested in something that you are selling. That’s just truth. So I if, if I recognize that, I haven’t lost any opportunity, because those people aren’t going to pay attention anyway. So the moment we introduce this idea of permission before promotion, we get in, I think this is why it’s such a powerful upstream decision. Everything that follows as a result is uniquely positive. And that’s such a rare thing. Maybe that’s why it gets so lit up by this decision, because it’s so rare to find something that doesn’t have costs, like you’re not paying some price, in exchange for a larger benefit. This is a decision where the recipient benefits because we’re respecting their attention, or we’re respecting their inattention. And we’re rewarding and respecting their attention. At the same time, we’re not compromising our results, because the people who are not going to pay attention are not going to pay attention anyway. So we’re not losing anything. And you know, the critique of this is that there’s someone listening to this, or someone will look at this and say, Oh, that’s not true. Because if you send out a bridge, email, and people aren’t paying attention, and then they find out later, and they would have purchased or maybe someone didn’t think it was right for them, but because you’re so good at selling, that you you know, you could convince an extra one or 2% of people to purchase. That’s a red herring or I think it’s a straw man because you’re basically you’re basically saying that in exchange for an incremental gain here and there. Once in a while. I might get an extra 1% of sales if I really amp it up. The cost for doing that is that I train my audience to stop paying attention to me a lot. That’s a terrible trade. Right so what this decision to me you can tell them to so enemy and I love this decision. Make the moment somebody wraps their head around this decision. It’s it’s shockwave in their marketing, because it takes away fear Right, like it’s if the people you want to pay attention to want to pay attention, people who aren’t aren’t respecting that, like that, you don’t have to be fearful, like, oh, I have to send everything to everybody all the time or they won’t buy you don’t. And when that fear goes away, like what emerges in the place of that fear is power, it’s personal power, it is a, it’s a recognition that marketing can be extraordinary. And it doesn’t have to hit everybody in the face 24/7 365, like a sledgehammer, it can be a scalpel, or a laser, or whatever you want to think for a metaphor. And it can be even better. When we do that. And this, this decision opens up that possibility, and I absolutely, absolutely love this. So it’s, we’ve got an hour and eight minutes already, so I’m going to hand it over to you to wrap up decision number four, and I’m going to do my best to keep my mouth shut because I love this decision so much.
André — 1:05:56
Actually, we haven’t even, we haven’t even engineer engineered it this way. But the week week five review is is somebody that’s that’s done a bridge email for the very first time. You know, in a world where they’ve just never done it, they’ve always done it done it the typical way of just everybody gets in email, everybody gets every operation beginning to end. So it’d be worth watching that review, because we’re going to be recording that next. And this is this has it and they the metrics have gone through the roof. So that’s interesting. But yeah, I think a final word on this is, is, you know, when you when you really frame something in a powerful way, which is, you know, which is the whole idea behind behind bridge emails. And then you frame that click, and you You’re really asking people is this something that you want to pay to pay attention to for x long, you know, this is going to last a week, this is gonna last two weeks, whatever that is, or three days. If you’re interested in this thing, and it’s been framed in a way that’s, that’s broadly valuable to everybody on the list, if everybody on the list is getting the bridge email. So it’s not an interruption, it’s somebody where you can quickly you know, think you know what, but see that this isn’t for them at it at this point in time. But the way that the email is written, and that framing is still interesting, and it’s valuable, that doesn’t take something away from them, they’ve seen something, and then they’ve seen that you’re respectful enough that you asking people to raise their hand, and they just don’t click, and they, you know, and they’re thinking, what, that’s cool. And then those people that do, it’s, it’s really focusing in their attention, and they extend it amping up their excitement about this thing that’s about to happen, which doesn’t exist when it’s just done in the other way, where it’s just like, everybody gets everything, whenever anything goes out. And you kind of got to catch people in this in this weird email, new stream of stuff happening all the time. It’s how do you pay attention to that? I mean, nobody can pay attention to the to every social stream that they that they’re a part of, including email which email for for most internet marketers, look, I’m I’m starting to go on a rant. Now. Email for for most internet marketers is like a social stream. It’s it’s a Facebook newsfeed or Twitter newsfeed but it’s, it’s, it’s powered by email. It’s, it’s terrible. So, yeah, so you know, asking people for permission, this is the holiday about this, it gets them excited about something that they’re that they want to hear about, that they want to help, you know, if it’s something tied to them solving a problem, you know, it’s it’s going to be extra, extra valuable. And it’s going to create some some sort of tension in them. And they’re going to want to see with his guys. So I think that’ll be Yeah, rents over. And that’s my, that’s my last word.
Shawn — 1:09:18
Usually the one who rants. So I think I’ll wrap up today with just a suggestion for everybody listening to this, which is, I mean, first of all, we’re assuming that when you went through the art of email, you went through it in a linear way you read, beginning to end. If you haven’t done that, once, we encourage you to do that. You don’t need you can skip chapter of the module 11 with the advanced ideas if you want to for now, I mean, those are we call them advanced for a reason. Right? So if you don’t feel like you need those yet, and those will be added to over time. But if you haven’t done that yet, please do that. Just go beginning to add and take it all in, when you get to putting it all together in module 10, then there are there’s a way to, to approach how to then implement it. And many of you in this workshop have been implementing, so we get it that you may have, may have stopped at a certain place done the work, that’s great. But the reason I’m mentioning this is that there, there’s a real opportunity, once you’ve gone through the art of email to go back again and reread the strategic upstream decisions, because you will see them with new eyes, right. And that’s, in really, every time you do this, and this is a course that’s meant to be, it’s meant to be a couple of things. One, it’s a beginning to end course, it’s a reference course where you can go back when you do your next PLS, and you can reread the pls section. It’s also an emergent course where the more you go through it, the more you will see the nuances of it that are not necessarily visible the first one to 10 times through at the most certainly at the module level and at the higher systemic level. But bookending, your experience of the art of email the first time with a strategic upstream decisions, I think it’s a very valuable use of your time because these decisions don’t, they’re not just about you now they’re about marketing period. And when you see them with when you saw them with the with fresh eyes, when you first went through it with the excitement of why this course is being released, and I’m going to go through it and I get it now I’m excited to go, you were inclining forward a little bit, I’m sure like all of us would be in going through that and you had a certain effect. But now that you’re on the other side of the course material, revisiting those strategic upstream decisions will have a different effect. You will see it with new eyes new, a new perspective and more nuances available to you. So I highly encourage everyone to do that. Alright, shall we call it a wrap for today? This is a wrap for the whole for the whole workshop. what a what a treat. It has been to be with everybody on this journey. It’s been an amazing experience. One more thing to record, which is a review for a couple of bridge emails and then that will be that’ll be a wrap yard of email workshop. It’s been quite a journey. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everybody.