I’ve been thinking a lot about how I don’t feel good about marketing anymore.
I’m starting to find out that I’m not the only one.
Nat Eliason wrote about killing all of his lead magnets.
There is not a single newsletter I was coerced into joining that I enjoy or have stayed subscribed to.
I’m starting to feel the same.
I also discovered a book I had bought in a Humble Bundle, “Rehumanize Your Business,” which is about sending personal emails as a part of your marketing.
It focuses more on building relationships with clients and potential clients, rather than throwing everything out to see what sticks.
Which is where marketing currently is.
Right now, most internet marketing teaching goes like this:
- Make content
- Add a lead magnet/content upgrade to collect emails
- Send weekly emails to newsletter
- Sell to those people.
It’s mostly automated and entirely a numbers game.
It’s inhuman.
I am guilty of teaching this stuff, too.
It does work…but it’s entirely a numbers game.
It’s built on a concept of throwing everything you’ve got out into the internet and seeing what sticks.
And then there’s paid advertising.
We all use Adblockers now, right?
…anywhere from 18% to 79% of your monthly data bucket can go toward delivering advertising…
With social media, we know that it’s killing us emotionally.
How many people are you finding and hiring on social media?
How many are finding and hiring you?
One study reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that liking more posts was tied to worse mental and physical health and “decreased life satisfaction,” while another study by the University of Copenhagen found that many people suffer from “Facebook envy,” the concept of being jealous of friends’ activities on social media.
So here’s what my new plan is:
It starts with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You do keyword and competitor analysis, and then build content out based on that.
Then you direct people to the email newsletter. But without a lead magnet.
This requires decent copywriting skills to work well.
It’s also going to significantly decrease the amount of signups you get.
This is intentional.
We want less sign ups who only want the free stuff. We want quality sign ups.
We want people who sign up because they care about you and what you’re working on.
It’s going to be significantly less. Be prepared for this.
Now we’re going to reach out to each one.
Not an automated welcome sequence. We’re going to look and see every day who signed up.
Since we’re saving time in the content treadmill, we’re going to spend the newly freed time doing this.
And we’re going to send them a video.
It’s a personal video. Eye contact. Say their name. Wave in the beginning. Smile.
Don’t try to sell. Just introduce yourself. Thank them for joining the list.
Ask them what they’re struggling with (in regards to your industry).
After that, you add them to your follow up sequence and newsletter.
That sequence needs to provide value.
No sales. Just straight value.
Don’t make it last longer than a week.
If your welcome sequence is 3 emails, have one go out every couple days.
If it’s 5, space them in a way that makes sense.
For example, maybe emails 1, 2, and 4 have small actions to take. Stuff they can do immediately.
Email 3 has a medium sized action, something that takes 2 days.
Email 5 is going to take them a few days.
So we space out the emails like this: Email1, 1 day later Email2, 1 day later Email3, 2 days later Email4, 1 day later Email5. Then a week before they receive any more emails.
Any time they reach out to you, a reply to your video or any other email with substance, respond with another video.
Keep building this personal relationship.
This will lead high quality sales to you without you having to do anything “icky” or impersonal.
How does this scale? We’ll talk about that next.
How to scale it on up
Just starting out, this shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes per video.
If you’re spending more than 10 minutes on the process of recording, uploading, and sending a video…you’re overthinking the whole thing.
Your video itself shouldn’t be more than 2 minutes.
Personally, I don’t get so many sign ups every week that I can’t block out enough time to send them all.
That’s by design.
But if you do, that’s great too!
Eventually, you’ll get it down under 10 minutes just from repeating the process.
But probably not less than 5 minutes. I just don’t think the technology will move that fast for you.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you never get faster than 10 minutes. Worst case scenario.
I don't have anything free to bribe you with.
If you get 1 signup per day, you can pretty much just knock this out as they come in.
I recommend you block out a point at the end of your day to do this.
Just look in your software (I use ConvertKit) and see who signed up.
- Record video,
- upload video,
- send video.
10 minutes per day…maybe 30 minutes on Monday if you take weekends off but still get subscribers.
Let’s jump up to 10 per day.
This is pushing it to almost 2 hours per day.
If you’re doing the sales part right, you should be getting a pretty good conversion rate from sign ups to clients (or product sales).
At that point you need to figure out, is it worth it to keep doing this yourself?
Only you can answer this question based on how much income each signup is worth to your business (I’ll show the equation later on).
Personally, if I were at that point, I would be hiring help.
Here’s what I would hire them to do:
- Send me info of the signups for the day.
- I would record the videos and them to the assistant.
- Assistant uploads.
- Assistant sends.
That removes me from the aspects that don’t require me.
Because my brand is ME, I need to be the one in the videos.
At 100 or more per day, we’re in the big league.
This is where it might become unscalable for a lot of people.
There are two reasons here why it might be unscalable:
- Whatever you’re selling has too low of a margin to make this worth it.
- Your sales sucks and you’re not getting enough.
Here’s how you figure out if it’s still scalable:
You take how many subscribers you get and see how many turn into sales.
If you get 100 subs per day and 60 result in sales, you’re at 60% conversion rate (that’s good).
Multiply that by the lifetime value of a customer.
Lifetime value is how much value you expect to get out of one customer.
If you sell one ebook at $9.99 then that’s the lifetime value…9.99.
If you sell a $1000 service w/ an optional $100/month package, and you have 60 customers but only 30 of them pick up the optional package, with 15 doing 6 months and 15 doing only 3 months, you gotta do some math.
I’m gonna be a little harsh…this is pretty basic algebra. If you can’t do the math, get an accountant or maybe you shouldn’t be in business.
I almost didn’t graduate high school because I failed Algebra 2 and then I almost failed out of college for failing the same dang class. If I can do this math, you either can or know someone who can help you.
I mean heck email me the info and I’ll do the math for you. I don’t mind.
Anyway the answer to the above equation is that we have 15 customers worth $1600, 15 customers worth $1300, and 30 customers worth $1000. Average them out and we get ((1600 * 15) + (1300 * 15) + (1000 * 30) / 60 )= ((24,000 + 19,500 + 30,000) / 60) = 73,500 / 60 = $1225.
$1225 is the lifetime value of a customer.
Once you figure out the lifetime value of a customer, you can then compare with how long it takes you to make the video, how long it takes your assistant to get it out there and how much you’re paying them.
You figured out it is still scalable. Now what?
If you’re getting over 100 subscribers per day with a decent conversion to sales, you should consider removing yourself as the face that sends videos.
Instead, hire community managers (for products) or account managers (for services) to handle it.
At that point you should have people who’s entire job is to work with your customers/clients directly.
Now, you’re not a solo-preneur with an assistant…you’re an agency.
Put some experienced people in charge of the accounts and train them to send the videos.
Garrett Mickley
I've been working in digital marketing for a decade and a half, and I'm ready for a career change. This blog is my journal.
I don't have anything free to bribe you with.
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