R3 Applied to Email - A Case Study - Yoga Academy
R3 for Email I guardianmarketing.substack.com I ExperienceR3.com
This is a case study for my work building out an email marketing strategy for Vikasa - a yoga teacher training academy based out of Thailand.
I'm going to be walking through this email project, which spanned 13 months, through the lens of R3 as it's laid out in the book. (You’ll see some R3 notes and analysis woven in throughout the Case Study)
If you don't have it yet, you can read a chunk of it here and find links to buy the full book if you’re interested:
NOTE: There is a Resource Section at the end of this article which is available to paid MBD+ subscribers only (which is why this post appears paid) and contains email swipe files and diagrams of the work discussed - the rest of the article is free to read. Enjoy.
One of the foundational concepts in R3 is that of expectation and relationship management. That is, we want to be highly cognizant at every step that a prospect/customer/fan could take through our business what the experience and expectation is like for them, and how they feel about their connection with us.
One of the reasons I like working with email is that it is one of the best ways to intentionally craft that expectation management as well as the relationship in a seemingly 1 to 1 intimate way while doing so at scale.
The only thing better than email at doing this is, in my opinion, physical mail. If you take out the need for doing this automated at scale, then it's in person.
Here I'm going to break down a client project of mine based on application of R3 principles in a real life scenario with as much surrounding context and data as I can provide.
Stealth Influence, Allegiance Capital, and Rocky Road Communication.
Each of these concepts are considered at every level of communication.
This client project I'm walking through today produced the following results:
Doubling the 90 day conversion rate from 1% to 2% (On a $3-6k sale)
At least doubling the 2 year conversion window from 2% to 4% (although short term window comparisons showed a 4x increase in long term, avg 2 years, conversions, I didn't gather enough data to be certain that would hold).
Adding over $500k revenue contributed from email to the business in the year I worked with them (data tracking was tricky on this one, as you'll find out), increasing the revenue email contributed to the business from about 20% to at least 50%.
Where we started
I came into this project because the client was experiencing significant problems trying to jumpstart their business after the pandemic, struggling to connect meaningfully and grow through email.
Prior to the pandemic, they conducted the majority of their business by word of mouth and social media. They had slowly grown over 10 years and then the pandemic closed them down completely.
Their business as a certified yoga teacher training program was up to that point entirely in person out of necessity. The pandemic forced the yoga international certification committee to approve online YTT certification.
This led them to create an online version of their training program.
They launched it to their list, to an initial solid launch, but then sales dropped off a cliff and they started experiencing other significant problems and inability to grow.
R3 Notes - Black Holes become apparent, but what do they mean? This is one of the major factors I look at as I'm analyzing a business's challenges and where I might be most effective.
This is where I came into the picture.
The aggressive email promotion strategy and tactics they went with ended up providing initial surge of buyers, but it was ultimately unable to be consistent in the long term. In addition that aggressive style of copy they chose ended up angering a section of their long term list. They received many reply complaints and the owner received personal messages of distaste (something they'd never experienced in the past).
From a data perspective, aside from not being able to sustain any sales growth, their email open rates dropped from around 25 to around 15, and settled in that range.
R3 Notes - Rocky Road and Allegiance Capital -- they had communication breakdowns due to the Rocky Road and they failed to build Allegiance Capital which would have meant growing trust. Instead they completely drained their bank of trust in one fell swoop without the ability to maintain it, let alone swiftly rebuild it)
A failure of Allegiance Capital - it's difficult to point out when there is a lack of something. When a particular outcome is actually due to a void that can't be seen. As an example, prior to joining and working on their email, they did not have good application of Allegiance Capital. As a prospect you'd end up on several pages and receive emails but it wouldn't ever be clear why you were receiving the emails or what the expectation was going to be both in the emails you received as well as the emails you may or may not be receiving in the future.
It seems like a small thing when you're the business owner or the marketer because you are able to see the whole picture that you're trying to lay out. But your prospects can't. They see very tiny parts of the whole, and if you don't make explicit the expectation they should adopt going through your systems, they will imagine anything other than reality, and in time your communication will just turn into annoyance as it won't meet whatever expectation they've come up with on their own.
Always remember. People stop moving when they are uncertain. Every time something shows up from you in front of them, if it's not explicit why they are receiving the thing, what it is, and what they should expect next, you've introduced uncertainty and increased the likelihood they stop moving, which means a lost prospect/customer/fan.
A Note on open rates:
Any discerning email marketer will likely say "but open rates are worthless!" This is because continuing efforts toward data privacy are resulting in that information becoming more and more unreliable.
As an example, any email served through Apple will automatically show triggered open if the email is simply loaded by the app itself (not necessarily opened).
Active Campaign (the software this client uses) has the ability to filter for segments of your audience you know are accurately trackable - so you can remove the automatic open triggers and get relatively accurate assessment of how the engagement is going.
Still, it's worth noting the unreliability and inaccuracy of open rates on a specific level. Triggers and automations that rely on opens becomes less reliable.
The best decision, not just for privacy issues but for email list health and activity overall is to force link clicks to prove you’ve got a living breathing engaged person. It's not always the best answer, but if you force your readers to click to stay active, you'll preserve a much MUCH higher level of engagement and activity that is verifiable, and that will lead to greater list health overall (providing best deliverability and such).
If you run automations based on opens, you'll just either end up filtering out people who are untrackable but may be active, or end up keeping active people who are not (depends on the ESP and how they handle that data). In that case, you might use a combination of opens/clicks to measure "engagement" and make your segmentation decisions from there.
There’s no right or wrong answer.
Engage the Field1 and collect your own data.2
As an example of this, in The Guardian Academy, when you sign up for TGA+ (our paid membership), you receive a welcome email series. But you only keep getting those emails if you open. In addition to the open tracking, we include a link option that assures you'll get the next email if you click (and also sends it right away).
R3 Notes - It's better to send email to fewer people, but to those people who are expecting email from you, and want email from you, and read email from you because that means you are building a system which is reliably going to move people through an entire experience - they won't drop off due to uncertainty.
To add on one more note for this client, this work was being done primarily in 2022 into 2023 - now over a year later, open rate reliability has continued to decrease, as more and more service providers are making a tighter grip on their data and veiling information.
The data that really matters:
The open rate and other engagement metrics are useful related signals (we can create inference and other useful observations).
But what matters most is the conversion to sale data and how much email is supporting the goals of the business.
When I started my work with them, they were having about a 1% conversion rate over a 90 day period (from a new lead), and only at best 20% of their overall sales were coming from email.
Even those numbers alone are not all that bad and could be worked with, except that they were starting to run into significant problems with reader complaints in addition to technical challenges.
They started hit hit spam more and more, and had rapidly dropping engagement.
R3 Notes - More sign of problems in all 3 major components of R3. Not just passive disconnect, but active negative reaction, alongside rapid decrease in engagement, and hitting spam means your emails aren't just not hitting, they are unwanted. Problems managing expectation, or sticking to the outlaid expectation. Problems with Rocky Road communication. In this case, not just a lack of Stealth Influence but full on overt attempts at influence breaking trust and belief past a certain point.
And just as a note, these are common mistakes most businesses make at some point. No judgement to this business.
So step one was to turn that all around.
We had several other challenges associated with this project:
Tracking to conversion was difficult. There are two ways to look at this. In a robust marketing system, direct tracking is not going to be entirely useful. It becomes helpful at greater numbers with ad spend for example so that you can know when to shut off something that isn't working.
But your components that DO work don't always direct track to the result.
R3 Notes - One of the major changes you'll start making as you implement R3 for Email is your perspective and relationship to tracking and data. Most people don't need to track as much as they think they do. There's a minimum level of tracking which helps you assess a certain level of efficacy for system components, and then there's a maximum level of tracking which is only really useful when you're at the level of business growth where a tiny percentage increases in a single component of a single email or a single page is worth the hassle. There's no hard line on that. But none of the sub - 8-figure businesses I've worked with have been in a situation where that's critical.
There are two reasons for this. The major one is that you can't just perfectly track human behavior. As you'll see in the analysis of this business, it follows a common pattern where a prospect or customer is influenced to purchase by an email but doesn't click through from that email to purchase. You've got to become adept at looking over larger swaths of your system to see the change being impacted across the board by individual component adjustments.
So you have to be adept at understanding the system in place, how that system contributes to the end result and what to look for in terms of the behavior of components in the system to properly tell whether something is working or not.
In this case, we couldn't track directly to conversion on any level because of the systems they had set up for doing this (which involved an application and various ways of conversation through phone call, messenger, whatsapp, etc).
What we could do, in order to tell the relative impact of email, was observe people's engagement behavior with relation to their buying behavior.
So for example, I could tell when someone read an email, clicked a link, and then purchased by matching up their invoice with their record in the email system. Looking across entire segments of email readers and cross referencing with buyers made the impact clear.
(PITA but a useful exercise)
I'm sharing all this because I find many businesses discount effective systems they have in place simply because they really feel like they need direct attribution, or more likely, since they don't see the directly attributed conversion they assume the email has much lower value than it does.
Do you consider email to be only valuable if someone clicks a link in the email, buys, and you can track that?
This isn't an accurate view.
If someone reads 50 emails from you, and then separately goes to your store and buys ...
Does that make the emails worthless?
You'd be foolish to not include ALL the communication in your consideration of how someone is lead towards becoming a customer, a repeat customer, and a fan.
Additionally, consider this: The same business owner who feels a need for direct results attribution from an email will usually also require a direct result attribution from paid ads, from video, from social media. And now you suddenly have all these different components competing for the same direct sale attribution without any consideration of both the combined value as well as the actual independent value contribution of those components.
For example, if someone watches a video you share on Facebook, doesn't click, but then goes to subscribe to email on your website, doesn't click links in the email, and then goes on to purchase ...
What is valuable in that system?
The answer is every part they interacted with.
The trick is understanding what they interact with and building a way where you can reasonable assess the usefulness and value of system components over time as you grow.
It makes more sense for most businesses to approach data tracking from a broader scale, and then backwards analyze which components are effective. That is, if you spent $5000 on a marketing campaign that produced $50000 in revenue, your system is working pretty darn well. You might have some components of that system which aren't useful, but its not the direct tracking which is going to tell you the answer.
More on that another time.
For this project, tracking was a challenge. They were seeking direct data and I had to educate them on the awareness of different systems components and their contribution to the end result.
I also leaned more into steps which would provide directly tracked data (like setting up unique pages and opt-ins to isolate user data to projects I influenced).
R3 Note - System Reliability is a big concept to understand. But it's one that is easily misunderstood in the context of specific strategies as well. It's not just about the surface value of the components of the system, but how the components all work together to achieve the outcome being aimed for.
A Bump in the Road
Building out email systems is never straightforward, nor isolated from the other components in the system of the business.
For example, if ever there's a step where you involve a conversation with a sales person to make a sale, and the people who arrive at that sales person go through your email first, there are many seen and unseen variables and interactions to consider.
Not the least of which is that the sales person speak with continuity with respect to the experience the reader has had thus far - knowing what their expectations are based on the email system and manually guiding them in the next steps is necessary for an effective handoff. Incongruence in this kind of flow and transition can result in poor outcomes but if your sales person is effective taking direct calls from say messenger, and they aren't from email, you might think your email is the problem.
That's just a single example.
In the project with this client, we had a separate issue which caused a lot of problems in ways which were difficult to illuminate.
Namely in a website update, the ad tracking and email opt ins broke and were non functional for at least 2 months. This had deleterious downstream effects over time, but in many ways were countered by the beneficial results of my work with the email system (in short, I ended up converting a lot more prospects already on the list and bringing back old customers who'd been sitting doing nothing for several years, this counteracted the fact there were no new leads for about 2 months).
Let's try to unpack this
Website kerfuffle leads to ad strategy spinoff
About 6 months into our project, they completely overhauled their website.
The new version of the website was more visually appealing and had better user experience, however, in the update a couple key things broke - namely all the lead gen forms and the ad tracking. For about 2 months there was no lead gen, and the ads stopped functioning because there was no conversion being registered.
(You might be thinking, well Joseph, you're the email guy, why didn't you fix it? The answer was, I had no access to the website and it wasn't part of my contract, so the only thing I could do was point and say "hey dat broke")
However through existing email, we still managed to maintain revenue without a noticeable drop, and from this I ended up building out a new ad strategy for them.
We also still lead into their best year of sales every for their YTTs, topping their previous best by 20%
The ad strategy got the most engagement they'd ever seen on the ads, and it lead to a 32.5x ROI over the 90 day period of the test - This included a lead into their list where I built a specific strategy around selling their online course, while also guiding active email readers into the rest of their ecosystem.
The theory was, even if the ad spend is break even on the online course - which would be $1k per sale, they'd make ongoing sales to their in person YTT essentially for free after that.
We ended up spending $80 per sale conversion up front, averaging about $2500 revenue per conversion (between the online course and their in person YTTs).
On the back end it was messier than I was hoping for, but I had contingencies in place to aggressively filter inactive people. What ended up happening is we made an incredible amount of leads at a really cheap price. Leads were being generated at 20 cents per lead to the email list, and after filtering for the right kind of reader, we still spent less than $2 per lead - and of course the conversion to sale speaks for itself.
Let's look at all this through an R3 Lens.
Let's start from the end, with the Raving Fans (4) and Established Customer (3) phase.
Most businesses don't have good systems for this and my client was no exception. It's an unfortunate irony. In my experience working with clients the reasons they don't have long term Raving Fan and Established Customer strategies center around ideas like "it's too complicated to set up these systems" or "we don't want to bother our fans too much" or perhaps most commonly "we really just need to focus our marketing budget on the front end."
Its an irony because, even though you can make really elegant and fun systems for Raving Fans and Repeat Customers ...
This is the lowest hanging fruit of any business and it's simple to get started. As long as you have something that your customers would find value coming back to, and ideally a way to be a part of their life on an ongoing basis ...
All you need to do is just keep being with them in their everyday life.
In the case of Vikasa, this is a yoga academy. People who attend a month long Yoga Teacher Training there may not go on to become teachers, but they certainly have cemented yoga as an important part of their life for the long term.
And yet,
After the initial 2-3 week burst of value added nurturing and engagement, their standard operating procedure was to email once a month with offers to their programs.
Hey buy this.
Hey buy this.
Hey buy this.
This is a common approach for many businesses with their email, and it's one of the fastest ways to lose people's interest. Every time you ask something from people you take from the account of trust.
So as a part of rebuilding their front end email automations, I also built out a long term experience for readers which would keep the right people engaged.
It's not complicated.
We just emailed weekly, with emails that spoke to the philosophies and principles of the school and it's founder, giving people guidance and support in their everyday life with yoga.
You can see an example of this in the resources at the bottom of this article (available to MBD+ subscribers)
There’s almost never anything being sold in those emails. Often times I’ll weave in opportunities for people to click through and learn/practice yoga. Sometimes I’ll include open doors to learn more about the programs.
Never hard selling, just open doors and possibilities.
We sent these out weekly.
And we ended up with such a surge of buyers from prospects and customers who'd been on the list for years that we completely made up for the drop of new sales caused by having no leads for 2 months.
R3 Notes - If I were to approach this project now, with a stronger R3 perspective, I'd start as we do in the book, with Raving Fans to celebrate more their graduates, operating from the social norm - not just giving discounts - and doing some really cool things.
My long term email approach is a good base to start with The Continuance stage (3) of R3. This is where the customer knows likes and trusts you (has obviously purchased), but isn't sure what to do next. Rather than keep pointing them at what to buy, I like to bring them on a long term journey understanding that as long as I make the steps of their path clear, when they are ready, they'll take them -- in other words, when it's obvious to them when to buy, they'll just buy, no need to sell.
Once you have them engaged and moving on a long term path, you can give them opportunities to show their loyalty and participate without asking them for anything - all R3 tactics.
This all comes down to one of my personal principles when it comes to marketing, copywriting, email, etc. ...
People buy when they are ready to buy
This is not explicitly an R3 Principle, but R3 is about leading people down a path with clarity and understanding such that their next steps and expectations are always clear. So R3 takes advantage of this dynamic.
You don't need to convince people to buy. You just need to make it clear and for whom buying is the obvious choice.
What most often happens is people 'buy' in their heart with their emotions first. If the purchase is easy and low enough, they'll actually just buy given the opportunity.
Think about a snickers bar at the check out counter.
If it's not easy and low enough, they'll decide they want it and will buy when they can.
Ever see, say, a car that you really want?*And you think "man if the stars align, I'm getting THAT."
Exactly.
What I've observed over the years working as a copywriter is that many people adopt the perception that "getting someone to buy" is a force that you enact upon them.
And while you can emotionally manipulate people into a position where they are more likely to give you their money NOW,
You can't escape that it is still their choice to make.
And since I don't like manipulating people into giving me their money (for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my moral stance, but also that makes for a terrible long term strategy), I choose an approach which leans into the dynamic in a way that benefits everyone involved.
This brings us to another of my personal principles - this is not a part of R3 but is my way of executing on R3 across all stages most effectively no matter what you are doing ...
People will say "yes" if they believe what I believe
That's a short version of the following:
If I'm sending emails written largely in terms of philosophy and principle, as well as strategic application of those principles, then the person who *resonates* with what is being said will say "heck yes give me more" and the person who doesn't resonate will leave.
This does several highly effective things for your email and marketing as a whole, not the least of which is the following two key points:
People who stay engaged and read your emails naturally evolve into your ideal customer and raging fan in time. If they didn't take that path, they would just leave.
The longer you enact this approach, the greater the relationship connection gets built over time. In other words, someone who follows your principled teaching for several years and still believes is more and more likely to listen to you about it over anyone else, and more and more likely to buy anything you do that aligns with their interests.
So in addition to the ongoing emails, which you saw an example of above, I built this "new lead" email series designed to filter to an active readership of people who bought in on the fundamental philosophies and principles of the business.
You can see the full new lead email series in the resources section at the bottom of this article (available only to MBD+ subscribers)
We put everyone through that, and this is a key component in starting people down the long term path.
R3 Notes - Continuance is not the only aspect of Stage 3, you also have Achievement and Familiarity - both of which are also served by what I described above, though if you dig into the tactical implementations of R3 there are specific details you can focus on. More on this in the upcoming book "R3 for Email."
Now we get into the afore mentioned "Ad Strategy Spinoff."
By the time I figured out there was something significantly wrong as a result of the website change, I had already come to the conclusion that I needed to have much more influence on the entire flow of the customer journey - from awareness all the way to fan (that's all the stages of R3).
(As a side note, as an external freelancer - initially the only thing I had control over was writing, setting up, and sending emails - I didn't have the back end access to see what else was going on, nor fix it. It was about 2 weeks into nearly all the new leads disappearing that I figured out the problem and started putting together a solution)
I had already built a good 'broad' new lead nurturing flow which seemed effective no matter where the leads came from (engagement was more than doubled across the board by this point), but I still had no control over how the leads were sold to, nor how they got on the list in the first place.
As an email marketer, having no control over the before/after significantly diminishes my ability to bring impact to the table.
This should be clear, if you've noticed this theme of "expectation management" which goes through everything.
Every time you have someone take an action, have them transfer from one place to another (such as email to page, email to form, form to email, messenger to form, etc), you introduce the opportunity for there to be a Black Hole.
That's where (unsurprising to the name), your prospects/customers just disappear seemingly into nothing.
Every time you generate a new lead, you have multiple transitions in play. From ad to landing page to opt in to email. No matter what you do, each transition will have a chance of losing someone. So at each step we do everything we can to make the expectations clear. Remember these questions:
Am I in the right place?
Why am I here?
What do I do next?
(And then what?)
If I go into a business and am tasked with creating a new lead email sequence but have no control over anything else, then I have very little ability to manage the black holes created before and after the prospect/customer reads an email (though I can subvert some of that disconnect with a few clever email tactics, another detail to read about in the upcoming "R3 for Email.")
Bringing this back to my client here - in order to efficiently and quickly bring a resolution where I could control every handoff, have access to as much data as possible, and engineer the outcome desired (basically, a positive ROI on new leads into their business), I created a campaign which gave me that control from awareness (the ad), to lead gen (the landing page), into the nurturing emails, into becoming a customer - I didn't have control over the retreat packages, but I did have control over the digital course version of the YTT, so I anchored my plan around that.
This campaign encompassed Stage 2 and Stage 1 of R3 - with Stages 3 and 4 already being covered by the long term plan I'd established and was executing on.
So, let's dig in
On to Stage 2: New Customers
Knowing where these new customers were going to go after becoming customers, as well as where they were coming from and why, made this really simple.
What's happening when someone becomes a New Customer?
Again let's walk through this backwards from delivery.
In the case of my client, I had been wanting to work on this aspect of their marketing since the beginning. Email is an excellent tool for bridging gaps of understanding, managing expectations and guiding people through a new purchase.
If you've ever purchased something and even just received a simple 'walk through' series of what you just purchased, then you know how much better it feels to experience that then it does to purchase something, get nothing and be left in a void of ...
"well ... now what?"
We don't want our customers to ever think "well ... now what?" And when we DO find those spots where they think or feel that, it's a Black Hole we want to eliminate.
For this ad project, my goal was to have the prospect follow this path:
Ad -> optin -> email nurture -> purchase -> course walkthrough -> handoff to long term
I decided to anchor this around the online version of their YTT - primarily because it had direct tracking attribution and I could control every step of this path (as I previously mentioned) from initial exposure all the way past the sale.
You can see a diagram of this plan in the resources section below (available to MBD+ subscribers)
The "course walkthrough" is one of those points in the marketing strategy as a whole where you can't directly see the benefit. There's no direct ROI on giving someone a smooth new customer experience (in the sense that they aren't then buying more stuff usually). It can only be "directly" measured in their relative engagement after buying.
What I can say for this project is we did get multiple positive responses and feedback, and the batch of leads walking through this flow showed a higher level of initial engagement with the product after purchasing compared to the typical amount, AND they had higher level of email engagement going into the long term.
That all translates to greater trust and greater long term relationships.
And if you can't see how that benefits your bottom line, your "ROI", in the long term - you'll probably struggle with R3 in general.
The other aspect of Stage 2 which the "course walkthrough" manages is ...
Buyers Remorse.
There are actually two points where I handle Buyer's Remorse.
The obvious is right after the purchase,
The other is before.
Buyers Remorse is nothing more than a significant drop of emotion following a purchase. This is typically a thing because of two key dynamics:
all buying is a choice, and all choice is emotional -- you can rationalize a choice with logic, but the choice is still made in the emotional part of your brain
Most marketers will build people up to a height of emotion in making that choice because that kind of tactic does increase the likelihood of purchase simply by overflowing people with positive emotion.
The problem is that on either side of a peak - in this case an emotional peak - is a valley - in this case an emotional valley, aka Buyers Remorse.
Handling Buyers Remorse after the sale is all about taking actions which help prevent their fall from emotion, or more accurately slow down/soften their fall from emotion (the slower the fall, the less you'll feel it).
Giving buyers immediately a series which hand holds them through the product they just purchased, how they can get the most out of it, and gives them bonus extras which they weren't expecting are all excellent tactics you can use in email to soften that emotional fall and counteract Buyers Remorse.
All of those things were accomplished in my 'course walkthrough' series.
BEFORE the purchase, is another opportunity to soften or prevent Buyer's Remorse.
Because as opposed to buying at a peak, where you have an inevitable drop into a valley, if you buy in the valley your only move is to go up.
No drop.
No remorse.
The ideal position to sell from is in a valley because that means your new customers are only ever going to rise up after purchasing from you. It's the ultimate power position to be in.
It's also the hardest position to engineer (it takes time).
And even when you do attempt to engineer that position, if you're doing awesome stuff people want to be a part of, excitement and other emotions (fomo) are going to influence people to buy anyway, so you still have to contend with Buyers Remorse no matter what.
Bringing this back to my client:
Ad -> optin -> email nurture -> purchase -> course walkthrough -> handoff to long term
During the email nurture portion of this campaign, the prospects are all in a free trial for the product.
The way I structured this is counter to how most people would, but I did it in order to create a valley which would draw the right people forward.
The course was a digital version of their in person Yoga Teacher Training program. A 4 week, 200 hour long video course. Most people would give a 3 or 7 day long free trial to explore the course.
Instead of giving people a time limit, I gave them the 1st of 4 weeks free. I did this because I knew the people who were likely to buy were absolutely still going to buy because they needed the other 3 weeks. The first week alone was ultimately not useful to them (outside of deciding whether or not to buy). And doing it this way removed the time constraint which lowered the emotion more into a valley.
From there, as long as I led people naturally, those who were likely to buy and it was right for them to buy, would do so in time. Those who weren't would disappear.
It's a harder approach for most to swallow because I'm not trying to convince people to buy. And when you spend money on ads, you really want to try to convince people to buy.
Because people want that control, that certainty.
Feeling like you’re leaving the decision up to the buyer (it’s always theirs anyway) feels more uncertain.
You've got to let go.
Let people settle in a valley.
And then just say "hey, if you want to continue, here you go."
That also covers The Sale portion of Stage 2.
The sale is easy if it's just an open door to those for whom the purchase is an obvious next choice.
When making that choice, people are subconsciously looking for all the reasons not to buy. I like to up front give people reasons not to buy.
This does two things.
For those who identify with the reasons not to buy, you actually don't want them to buy anyway. At least not until they sort their stuff out.
For those who read the reasons not to buy, and don't identify, they'll immediately feel like they have no reasons not to buy.
In the case of the YTT course, I was up front about the amount of work you'd want to dedicate, how you'd want to schedule your life, if you were going to get the full value out of the course. No sense in buying a 200 HR Yoga Teacher Training if you can't set aside 2-4 uninterrupted hours of practice and study at least a couple times a week.
(Again, I'll go more in detail on various ways you can implement tactics like that in your email in the upcoming "R3 for Email" book)
We make it obvious who should buy, who shouldn't, and then let people select themselves in the valley.
Now we arrive at Stage 1, which is everything that happens before that purchase.
In R3, ultimately what we want to do is consider this question the buyer is subconsciously asking themselves:
“What is going to happen to me or how am I going to be treated once I lose my leverage?”
Read all about the concept of leverage and The 5 Adoption Decisions in the R3 Book.3
In short, leverage is this: they (the prospect) have the money, we (the business) want the money. Once the customer gives us the money, we end up with the power.
Again, most marketers try to use force in the opener. Try to push people towards a purchase. Whether that be through emotional manipulation of words, or structured manipulation through something like a funnel and tactics like fake scarcity ...
That's how most approach the prospect marketing.
The Ad into Opt In Page into Email (and then the purchase as fast as possible before they lose the emotional peak).
In R3, and in my own work, we approach this differently.
Everything we've talked about thus far applies here. The emotional peaks and valleys. The communication. The expectation management.
We're building a bridge from someone having no idea who we are, to thinking "maybe this is where I want to be" and taking the action to find that out.
How did I do that in this case?
Well,
I built out Laurel Portié's ad strategy.4
Which, once you figure out the messaging and the content, is totally busted.
For my client this was easy. They already had an amazing product and message. Their philosophies and principles connected really strongly. They just struggled in connecting the dots for people.
Our power content videos were so rapidly effective that I got overwhelmed with comments and messages (hundreds every week).
Once I started running the ads to that warm audience, to get the free offer (the first week of their online YTT course), we had floods of people opting in.
I'm taking 20 cents per opt in.
Granted, these were not optimal opt ins. When you use a "freebie" to get people to opt into an email list, it's not the most effective in the long term because you're buying their email essentially (well, trading for it with the free thing). Transaction complete. A huge percentage of people walk away from that transaction with their thing. They gave their email, got their thing, goodbye. And then they either unsubscribe or most commonly just ignore you forever.
Personally if possible I prefer opt in scenarios that aren't "here's a free thing give me your email." But those are more challenging to figure out, and in the context of getting something established, in this case the "free trial" was the easiest and quickest thing to implement.
In order to mitigate the effect of a lot of people signing up to the email and not engaging, I enacted strict engagement filters through the series, and ended up removing a large segment of inactive readers to keep the email list clean and tight.
(Again, another subject for "R3 for Email")
All of the above set the stage for me to answer this question:
“What is going to happen to me or how am I going to be treated once I lose my leverage?”
Because by the time they get to the decision to buy, they've already experienced a much higher level of value and service than they'd get anywhere else. From the ads themselves to the emails they receive after signing up, I built in as much positive "in the valley" type relationship building as I could in order to subtly communicate this:
"When you buy, your experience with us is only going to improve from here."
I want the prospects to feel like not only are they not losing leverage, they are gaining leverage by moving closer to us. I want them to feel like we are in service to them.
The outcome, of the FIRST VERSION of the campaign, was a 32.5x ROI on the ad spend over 90 days (with 4x ROI in the first 30).
(We never built a second version, as the project ended)
Final note
This note is perhaps really only interesting to other freelancers, copywriters, marketers, etc.
A little behind the scenes transparency.
This project ended up contentious, in large part because the data tracking was so tricky AND the client was looking for direct attribution - which was by and large not possible outside of one circumstance, and even then it wasn't infallibly accurate.
Another contributing factor was the downside impact of the site changeover which neutered almost all their marketing efforts for nearly a full quarter -- even though we sustained revenue during that time period from my efforts, they weren't growing overall and couldn't reconcile all the different moving parts to understand what was valuable to them and what wasn't. It took another quarter (where I ran my ad test) to get back up and going to roughly where they were 6 months prior (in terms of new leads coming in). So the ultimate perspective they held was that the project was a wash.
The above and other factors I can't speak to led to me backing out of the project.
I was paid over the course of 13 months $26k.
During that time I produced the following results:
- Fixed their email deliverability (they were hitting spam when I showed up)
- Increased their average opens and clicks 2-3x
- Increased 90 day conversion rate from 1-2% (on retreats that range from $3-6k)
- Built a paid ad campaign which resulted in 32.5x ROI over a 90 day period (it was around 4x ROI after 30 days)
- More than doubled the revenue contribution from email adding an estimated additional $500k, a close to 20x ROI on their investment in the short term, with valuable evergreen assets that continue to serve them in the long term.
Email is seriously powerful when done well.*
When not done well, it's just an annoyance.
Do email well.
Keep an eye out for “R3 for Email” where I'll go into deep detail on tools and tactics to implement each stage of the R3 journey in the environment (strategy) of Email.
And in the meantime, go pick up a copy of the foundational book, R3 - Retentions, Referrals, and Raving Fans.
(And see the Resources below for swipe files and diagrams from this article)
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson, CMO Man Bites Dog
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Resources
Below you’ll find many of the emails I wrote for this project as well as the outline of my plan for the ad campaign as referenced in the article above.
(This is available to MBD+ subscribers only)