The 1 Email Component Which Makes Your Entire Marketing System Reliable
R3 for Email I guardianmarketing.substack.com I ExperienceR3.com
Before we get into the meat of this article,
I want to preface by saying that this is just one piece of a larger puzzle.
The concept I talk about here is an important one, and one you can apply in many ways to other strategies (environments), but in the context of Email and R3, this is just one component of a much larger picture.
I am currently writing through my entire approach to Email through the lens of R31, and this will culminate in a special R3 for Email collaboration.
As I work through the details, I'll share segments here on Man Bites Dog.
Sometimes I may have examples, swipe files, and strategy frameworks to share as well - if so, they will be made available only to MBD+ members (as will the conversation in the comments).
Now,
Let me introduce a Systems Theory approach to designing your email strategy by Backwards Engineering from your Ideal Outcome.
Over the past 10 years, I've worked with dozens of clients in long term, in depth email systems strategy consultation. I'm talking far beyond "here's your email series, g'day" - I'm talking full on strategy build out which takes many months just to complete setup, and can then string on indefinitely.
Aside from the client's who've directly hired me, I've also had discussions and provided guidance and clarity to more people than I can count (I don't accept most people as clients, so it usually ends there, but I always try to be as useful as possible).
By far and away, in my observations, the most common perspective when it comes to engineering an email marketing system for business growth centers around optimizing the front door.
Get as many people in as possible.
Get them in as efficiently as possible.
From a 10k foot view, this is not a terrible idea. After all, if you get 1000 people in and convert 10% to customers, you get 100 customers. But if you get 100,000 people in and convert 1% of them to customers, you get 1000 customers.
So, just get as many in the front as possible right?
Unless you're lucky,
Or you're in a position to make a bonfire out of truckloads of cash a-la Heath Ledger's Joker ...
It's unlikely to work out for you.
This is the thing about systems.
Every system is perfectly engineered for the outcome it produces. People often think their marketing system is broken because they aren't seeing the growth they want, or not getting the customers they want.
That's not exactly true. It would be more appropriate to say the system isn't broken, it's just not designed to produce the outcome you want.
Sounds like semantics perhaps,
But it's a useful framework for understanding how to intentionally get the outcome you'd desire.
If you start with the outcome you want in mind, you can backwards engineer the system which will produce that outcome.
And this is counter to what most people do.
They start with the front. Or even if they by happenstance (intuition is powerful) begin with the end result they are after, they will usually hamstring themselves because intentionally creating a system that provides your ideal outcome with a high degree of inevitability takes time.
It's not a short term move.
So when you start from the end and you aren't getting your results fast enough, a need to instill certainty by making things happen faster leads you to screw it up.
Let me try to make this concrete so it can make sense with context.
The problem often manifests as a struggle to create customers, a feeling of being stalled in growth, a dynamic of initial success and then plateau and rapidly diminishing audience interest outside of 1-3 months.
Most of the clients I've ended up accepting have been in that position, and I always turned it completely around by asking variations on these questions:
Who are your best clients and why? Who do you want more of and why?
This is the ideal outcome for your business.
For email marketing systems, here's how I like to approach it:
I figure out the ideal customer my client wants to create, and then I step back through their journey and experience to figure out the paths that ideal customer is likely to take.
What communication did they receive? What experience did they have with that communication? Why did they stay engaged and keep following long enough to purchase everything (often a several year journey)?
As an example, one of my past clients was a yoga academy in Thailand. They have several yoga teacher training programs, where you purchase a 1-2 month long retreat (there you stay, practice, and learn). There's an entire market for these. The initial retreat most people do is a 200 HR YTT over a 4 week. They also have an online version.
When I first started working with them they were trying very hard to sell the 200 HR YTT. All of their up front marketing resources were going into this effort.
I asked my questions,
And discovered what they really ultimately wanted - their best customer - wasn't someone who just bought the 200 hr YTT, it was someone who got the 200 hr, the 300 hr, the 100 hr, possibly also the online stuff, and then booked regular shorter retreats and vacations with them for years to come.
They had quite a lot of customers who matched this profile.
The answer most people give is usually some variation on "super fan who buys everything" - it's kind of a 'duh' moment, but it's also important to acknowledge.
Now,
To get more of these people, doesn't it make sense to try to sell the first 200 HR YTT?
After all, to get all of their programs and then attend retreats, you've got to *start* with that one. So naturally, the more people who buy that, the more people who are likely to buy all the other things.
But there are two dynamics which make this answer wrong.
One has to do with systems and reliability, which I'll get into in a moment.
The other has to do with resources ...
We all have limited resources.
Money is the obvious one. There's only so much money you have available to spend on marketing and the growth of your business.
Time is another. There is only so much time you have to spend in order to create growth. But also, you likely need to produce certain results in a certain amount of time. This is, by the way, why people tend to lean into short term thinking, because they are myopic about their time as a resource and don't understand how to extend that time.
More on Short Term vs Long Term soon.
Reputation is one people don't think about. You can think of this as your relationship currency if you like. The more you build this up, the longer lasting and stronger your relationships will be. But if you start taking from people (which is what happens in most Short Term Thinking), you will unknowingly (or knowingly) deplete this resource. If you run out of Reputation ... good luck selling anything.
Another way of looking at Reputation, from a technical standpoint in email, if you tank your Reputation you're going to end up further buried in your readers inbox if not all the way in spam. Your personal reputation and technical reputation play off each other in email - the greater your relationship with your reader, the more likely the emails are to end up in their primary inbox, and visa versa. You can actually naturally grow Reputation using systems like Email (you'll see how this unfolds in R3 For Email).
Influence is another. This one is related to reputation in my eyes because I focus on it as a factor of relationship. The stronger your relationship with someone the greater your level of influence. But you can also measure influence on a broader scale - the more people following you and paying attention to you, the more Influence you have. In my experience Influence can often be directly impacted by Reputation ... that is, if you have a high level of Influence and you start depleting reputation, your Influence will also drop. (It doesn't necessarily have the inverse impact though, you can have low Influence by high Reputation due to other factors like reach and awareness). Influence can also substitute for other currencies (If you have a great deal of Influence, the money you spend on marketing may go much further for you).
And then we have Energy. This one everyone is aware of but most don't think of it as a resource to manage for their business growth. How much energy do you have to put into this? There are ways to replenish your Energy of course, but regardless the amount of Energy you have will impact all the other resources as well, at least indirectly.
So
When building a marketing system, if I focus on trying to sell the first thing, the introductory thing, and then after that try to pull people along to all the other things I want them to buy, it's very easy to end up in a situation where I'm spending a lot of Time, Money and Energy, and possibly also Reputation in order to make that first thing happen,
When that's not even ultimately what I really want to begin with. That's just usually the way people do it because our minds like to think linearly. We want someone who buys everything and is a huge fan so focus on selling the first thing.
But if I want someone who buys everything, then I should focus on creating an environment and a system where the emergent property is the person who buys everything, and THAT's how I should focus my resources.
So,
I could build a system that requires less resources on the front end, but those resources are put into people who are most likely to match the kind of person who buys everything, AND we take them on a path that inevitably leads to those people sticking around.
For my client,
I started with the people who had already purchased everything, followed the paths they took, and from them figured out that we didn't need to "sell" anything, all we needed to do was create the same level of "obvious alignment" those biggest fans had with the business. Instead of trying to convince new people to buy, I found the common denominator with their best customers, and replicated the experience in a way that naturally pulled new people forward.
That common denominator was an undeniable emotional resonance and connection with the people who made the academy and, critically, their beliefs and how they talked about and taught yoga.
I built a front end strategy that wasn't sale focused, it was belief focused, anyone who was hooked through wasn't being sold on a program, they were coming to a point of saying "holy crap I have to do my YTT HERE" and then after that experience they were absolutely hooked for more.
They might not have purchased right away. In fact they may take 2-5 years before they first buy (especially with that product because of the compounding resource constraints of time/money/relationship it takes to do that kind of retreat).
THAT was the end result my client really needed AND wanted.
The short term impact of my implementation was a doubling of their 90 day conversion rate, and every paid ad we ran produced a positive ROI.
Of course, it helped that their product and service were outstanding. But that's a conversation for another time.
This brings us to Systems Reliability and Email ...
The "Thing" Is Not What You Think
Start from the end, invert, whatever you want to call it.
Ask yourself, "who is the absolute best customer?" and "how do they become the best customer?"
In my experience, the answer is usually underneath everything you think you see.
Because if we're looking at the structure, which is very easy to do when you're asking yourself how they become the best customer, you might think it looks like this:
They clicked on an ad,
Which had a landing page with a free download optin that they signed up for,
On the next page they got the opportunity to buy the book which they did,
They skipped the upsell,
And then a few months later after receiving several more emails and a letter in the mail they purchased.
And then after receiving followup emails on that purchased they bought a few more things, and over the next couple years they kept buying until they had bought everything you had.
So you might look at and think,
"Damn that's a great funnel."
But you might be missing out on the fact that those people were watching you for 2-3 years before they ever stepped foot into the "funnel." They saw your posts, your ads, your videos. They tried other similar people, but kept finding themselves looking back at you.
Until one day something clicked and they felt like YOU were the place they needed to be.
It wasn't the structure you think they went through,
It was the internal alignment/connection/belief they found.
The "funnel" more often than not tricks you into thinking its the structure that does the work - (this isn't to say that structure has no use, but again, that's a conversation for another time)
That's why they ended up buying everything, because it all made perfect sense to them and fit into their world better than anything else.
That's much harder to grasp though because there isn't one singular "thing" you can point at. There's no one funnel, no one series, no one sales page, no one video, no one letter, etc ... no singular THING that you can focus on to make the outcome you desire.
But if you figure out the path that draws people forward with obvious alignment or resonant connection or whatever you want to call the situation where they say "holy shit THIS is the thing I need to do" - where they know the next best action for them is to do whatever they need to do with YOU and they can't fully explain why - then every time you bring someone onto that path you have certainty that some of those people are going to end up as your best customer.
That last part might sound simple,
Because in many ways it is,
But think about it. If you build a path leading back to the beginning from your best customers, a path which is designed to draw people into obvious alignment, then by definition anyone who sets foot on that path has a high probability of fitting that alignment and become your best customer.
UNLESS ... you start trying to shortcut or speed things up by focusing on getting as many people as possible onto that path to begin with.
Systems Reliability says, in short, this:
"The reliability of a system is a product of the reliability of the components that make up the system" - Garret Hardin, Filters Against Folly.
Mathematically it looks like this -
A system of two components that are 90% reliable is 81% reliable (90% x 90% = 81%)
A system of three components that are 90% reliable is 73% reliable (90% x 90% x 90% = 73%)
No component is ever 100% reliable, so every time you add a component it reduces the overall system.
You can get a more in depth explanation on The Guardian Academy.2
Here's how I use this understanding to elevate my Email strategies ...
10 years ago when I started building my understanding and my approach to email marketing, I recognized that the one component of email that mattered more than ANYTHING ELSE ...
Was the relationship.
The email itself is not a valuable asset. It's the relationship the email gives you access to.
This is why businesses which focus on establishing relationships on a level of principle and belief are able to transcend the seemingly valuable system components of email, social media, direct mail, video, etc ...
Because they build their system around the one component that matters more than anything else. The value and depth of the relationship.
One of my favorite examples that has nothing to do with email is Laurel Portié3, because she's applied these principles to a different strategy (environment), and because she's held the value and depth of relationship and connection with her audience over all other components, she can lose the entire platform asset most people value (her facebook ads account), and thousands of her customers will hunt her down elsewhere on the internet.
Bringing this back to my example with the yoga academy.
When they focused their resources on selling the initial month long program (200 HR YTT) as much as possible, they weren't focused on building the relationship, nor were they particularly focused on the quality or type of individual who ended up buying the YTT.
That meant two things.
Their "customer" was less reliable. Without the deep belief based connection, there was no telling if someone who bought the 200 would buy more. They had to rely on the person having such a good experience with the 200 that they'd even start to think about doing more with them (rather than having someone buy the 200 already dreaming of buying every other offer they had).
Their long term ROI was diminished because of the above.
Just think about it for a moment.
If the first time they sell someone on their initial month long program, that person is already thinking "hot damn I've got to learn everything I can about yoga from these people," and they are already dreaming of doing more ... there's almost built in extended ROI with this customer.
Even if not every one of those goes on to buy more, there's a much higher likelihood of that happening than say ...
The person who is convinced to buy, but doesn't come in with that preconceived notion.
And this is why it's a short vs long term game.
Because in order to get the person to the point where they are saying "wow I need everything they do," you've got to lead them on a path of understanding and growth that allows them to arrive at that point when it's right for THEM.
You can't force someone to love you.
You can trick them into a date.
But it's not going to go much further than that.
To bring it back to systems reliability,
I built my own model of systems reliability in email by reducing the vital components of my email system to virtually ONE ...
Lukas Resheske4 dubbed it for me "Mindshare," which you can use if the moniker helps to compartmentalize the following:
I know in an email strategy system all I need to focus on is growing an audience of people who -
A) believe what I believe
B) are hungry to apply that belief to their life
Because it's that pool of people who are most likely going to follow, listen, and buy everything from me which makes sense for them to buy.
I call it a vital systems component, because there are other technical components. If the email you receive from someone doesn't work, your marketing won't do anything. If you end up in spam, it's the same. Etc.
There's an entire technical depth I can get into with systems reliability for email,
But 'Mindshare' (to me) is the important one that informs the build and application of strategy.
Because the only reason someone is going to read your email every time you send it and take action is if they are looking forward to getting email from you and are looking for ways to take action.
It’s also the one thing you can consistently focus your resources on which has certainty of producing the outcome you desire.
Sound simple and obvious? Welcome to Man Bites Dog.
In time we'll show examples of tactical applications which can engineer this in different ways. I’ll also update this article as appropriate (or possibly replace it in the future when R3 for Email is complete), including examples of my particular tactical applications of these concepts in email.
For now, you can see a great example here:
Nic and Laurel use a structure which focuses on building an audience of people who read every email that is sent to them.
If your ideal customer is one who reads every email you send, that might be a way for you to engineer that particular outcome.
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