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How a “perfect 10” can make your life a lot easier…

Posted byIan Brodie on January 13th, 2021.

Last email I talked about concentrating your forces to win high-value clients.

In other words, going for fewer opportunities but investing more time on each one. Because coming first in three out of six opportunities you go for is infinitely better than coming second in twenty out of twenty.

I've found the best way to do this for most people is to create what I call a “Perfect 10” list. A shortlist of a handful of absolutely ideal clients for you that you'll proactively focus your efforts on winning.

It doesn't have to be 10. It might be 5 or it might be 20 depending on your resources.

But it's not 50 or 100 or 200.

With a small number of very high-value potential clients on your list you can afford to tailor your marketing for each one:

• Study them and their business to know what's a priority specifically for them
• Create a tailored lead magnet that hits all the right hot buttons for them
• Use the marketing strategies that are the most likely to connect with them
• Use “high touch” approaches like referrals and presentations that have a big impact
• Follow-up personally and consistently in ways that add value to them

One of the biggest mistakes I see people making is using “mass market” marketing strategies to try to win high-value clients.

Or conversely, to use “high touch” marketing to try to win mass-market clients.

I've summarised the different approaches that work well for different types of client, including the Perfect 10 in a quick “Client Value Pyramid” map you can download here:

>>> The Client Value Pyramid <<<

I think you might find it helpful.

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The 100-year-old military strategy is the key to winning high-value clients

Posted byIan Brodie on January 10th, 2021.

If you're looking to win high-value clients you could do a lot worse than listen to the advice in Frederick W. Lanchester's 1916 book “Aviation in Warfare”.

It's advice that was taken up by Deming after the second world war and used to great effect by Canon to enter and dominate key markets.

Lanchester's observation was that in battle (and in business), advantages are typically exponential rather than linear. And that in military terms a smaller army is therefore far better off concentrating its forces to attack a small outpost where it can have superior numbers locally than it is to try to take on the enemy head-on.

When it comes to winning high-value clients the same thing applies.

You're far, far better off concentrating your “forces” on a small number of high-potential clients than spreading yourself thinly pitching for a large number of projects.

Firstly, high-value clients take a lot of winning.

The stakes are higher so they need more convincing. And that means more time spent building credibility and trust.

And often there are multiple people involved in the decision-making process and official hoops and processes to go through. Again, more time needed.

And secondly, you're likely to be up against more competitors aiming to win the same big prize.

You can't just do a little bit for a lot of clients and expect to win a percentage of them in this situation.

You have to be selective and go “all in” on a few.

Make sure you invest the time to stand head and shoulders above the rest.

And the great thing is that by focusing your efforts you can beat much bigger competitors. Because no matter how big they are, they still divide their resources “efficiently”.

It means that you can spend much more time and energy on your selected prospects than they do.

You can be the one that's top of mind with a stronger relationship and better credibility.

But only if you focus and choose to spend time with some prospects and not others.

It starts with picking a “Perfect 10” and I'll cover that in our next email.

PS Credit to Paul Denvir and Kevin Walker who were the first to talk about “Lanchester Strategy” for winning clients in their book Growing Your Client Base.

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This one thing builds relationships by email more than anything else

Posted byIan Brodie on December 20th, 2020.

There's a lot you can do in emails to enhance your relationship with your subscribers.

Honesty and openness is a good “trick”.

Telling stories that share a bit of your life and personality. Actually having an opinion about stuff. Admitting to your mistakes. Showing empathy for their challenges.

But the very best thing for building relationships is something you'll rarely see advised.

It's simply to write emails that get replies. Either because you ask for them, or because you write on topics that people are interested in replying to.

Most email marketing works on the principle of trying to reduce human interaction. That way you can reach thousands of people efficiently.

And that works for Amazon, or online marketers pitching products where people are buying the thing, rather than the person behind the thing.

But when we're marketing high-value services, the relationship is vital.

And relationships aren't about efficiency. Relationships come from human beings interacting with each other.

So the thing to do in your emails isn't to try to automate the heck out of everything. It's to use your automated emails to trigger more personal interaction.

An email reply from a subscriber turns into a personal reply from you and then an email conversation. Maybe even a call.

And then that person feels much more like they have a relationship with you. Because they do.

They'll find it much easier in future to shoot you an email or give you a call if they're looking for help. You're no longer a distant information provider. You're a responsive connection. A friend even.

And really, it's not all that inefficient to do this.

If you have a few thousand email subscribers, only a handful will email you back each time. It's perfectly manageable.

But each email you get back is a new or enhanced relationship

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The scary P word

Posted byIan Brodie on December 16th, 2020.

Persuasion.

There. I've said it.

A lot of people really don't like the P word. They worry that persuasion means something underhand and manipulative. Getting people to do things you want them to do rather than what they want to do.

But the reality is that adults spend rather large chunks of their time persuading – whether we want to admit it or not.

If I want the kids to do their homework, I have to persuade them. The alternative is just to hope they'll be inspired to do it themselves which never quite worked with our kids.

If I want to watch the Newcastle game on the big TV tonight I have to persuade Kathy that it's a better option than watching a Christmas movie (again). Newcastle games usually beat Christmas movies by the way. But Christmas movies beat everything else I might want to watch.

If I want you to join Momentum Club I have to persuade you that it's in your interests. Usually by telling you about the benefits you’d get from being a member. Or maybe by showing you what other members have got from it. Or maybe offering some kind of incentive.

Persuasion is something we do hundreds of times a day whether we realise it or not. And it's nothing to shy away from, as long as you do it ethically.

And it's something you need to be able to do in your emails if you want to actually help people.

You've spent all this time getting the attention of your audience. But unless you actually get them to do something different, it won't do you or them any good.

There are a million different models of persuasion and how it works. But I like to simplify it down to three big factors which I'm going to cover in the next emails.

Firstly, people are more likely to do what you ask if they have a relationship with you. If they like you and trust you.

Secondly, people are more likely to do what you ask if they see you as an expert or authority in the area you're trying to get them to do something in.

Or put another way, you're more likely to follow the financial advice of a qualified and experienced professional than someone you just met in the pub. Or at least I hope so. And if you like them and think they have your best interests at heart then that's doubly true.

Both those factors are contextual. You build relationships and establish authority in advance of the act of persuasion. When it comes time to ask someone to do something, all that work you put into building credibility and trust then pays off.

The final factor is more immediate.

I don’t have a great phrase for it, but it's to use persuasive strategies and techniques.

Not tricks. Not deception. But simply making your case in the best way possible to persuade someone.

Telling them about the good things they'll get if they follow your advice. Pointing them to others they respect who followed the same advice and got great results. Showing how following your advice is consistent with their previous actions. Making it easy for them to say yes.

Nothing underhand.

But techniques which can considerably increase your chances of getting a yes.

At least I hope so as I now have to tell Kathy about that match tonight…

See you next time with ideas on how to establish relationships in your emails.

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The interest payoff

Posted byIan Brodie on December 13th, 2020.

If you want people to pay attention to you over the long term, there's got to be some kind of payoff for them.

Otherwise they simply stop reading.

The obvious payoff is the value and results they get from your emails. But there's also a payoff for your readers in your emails simply being interesting.

I hesitate to use the word ‘entertaining' because it's not like they need to be laugh-a-minute or great works of drama. In fact, I think that can be counterproductive.

But by spicing up your emails a little you can maintain interest and ensure people get the messages you're trying to send.

Ultimately, how you make your emails interesting is a function of your personal style and how you want to come across.

Some people are loud and controversial. Others are funny. Others are thoughtful with deep insights. You have to kind of grow into your own style.

But here are some thoughts on different ways of making your emails interesting that might give you a good starting point.

• Firstly, try to focus on making one main point per email
  – otherwise your emails get confusing and boring
• Use stories. You could do the whole email as a story in parable/fable style. Or my preferred style is to use a “micro-story” as an introduction to your main point – a few sentences to set the scene.
• Use interesting analogies and comparisons your audience won’t have seen before
• Include surprising or contrarian ideas
• Share “behind the scenes” information and “what’s working now” from what you're doing in your life and how that relates to what you're teaching
• Hook into current events (though avoid the overused “5 leadership lessons from the Olympics” every 4 years)
• Write a series of related emails so that readers look forward to the next email in the series

You don't have to use all of these different techniques. I tend to tell personal stories, use series of emails, and throw in the odd quirky reference that happens to grab me at the time and make me smile.

Play around with different approaches. See which you enjoy. See which get a response from your readers.

No matter how valuable your emails are, your readers can only take so much raw information. That's why the most popular non-fiction books aren't textbooks – they're written by people like Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Bryson and Ben Goldacre who know how to tell a good tale.

We don’t have to quite hit those levels. But we do need to keep our emails interesting if we want people to keep tuning in, hearing our messages, and eventually being ready to buy from us.

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Two powerful ways to be different

Posted byIan Brodie on December 9th, 2020.

At the end of my last email I asked you to write down the ways in which the things you do and the advice you give is different to others in your field.

Being different is vital when it comes to email marketing.

No one is suffering from getting too few emails. So if you want people to pay attention to yours they need to stand out.

One way to do it is to have different ideas.

They don't need to be Einstein level different. They can be your own twist based on your practical experience. Or you can combine two complementary approaches. Or bring in best practices from another industry into yours. Or apply research and new ideas from other fields to yours.

All of us have half a dozen things we do differently that would be interesting to our subscribers. Or we could come up with them with a bit of application.

But that's not going to keep you going with different and interesting emails forever.

Often an easier way to stand out is in the way you present your ideas.

That might sound like a bit of a cop out. Won't people see through it and recognise you've just dressed up old ideas in new clothes?

But it doesn't work like that in practice. Nobody watched Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen's adventures on Altair IV and said “hang on, this is just The Tempest set in space”.

Even though you know the plot, the new interpretation is interesting and feels new and different. 

And when you're sharing ideas, a new presentation of something your subscribers already know often sheds new insight or at the very least reinforces a lesson for them.  

So using your own stories or being imaginative in how you explain things keeps people tuned in and keeps up the perception of difference.  Like quoting 1950s sci-fi for example, or correcting a common misquote of a greek philosopher ;)

And it also keeps your emails interesting – which is the topic of our next email surprisingly enough.

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Aristotle applied to email via Durrant

Posted byIan Brodie on December 6th, 2020.

I'm sure you've heard the famous Aristotle quote “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Except it turns out that the quote is actually from English Philosopher Will Durrant in his 1926 book The Story of Philosophy where he artfully combines a couple of Aristotle's rather longer and differently-worded passages into the quote.

But pedantry aside, the quote is very true when it comes to email marketing.

If you want people to open your email you have to establish a reputation for your emails to be valuable.

And that means they need to actually be valuable. Consistently.

That doesn't mean each one has to be a work of genius or you have to slave over it for days.

Just that each one (or at least the vast majority) must have something useful for your readers, and it needs to be different to what they've heard before.

Being useful is probably the easy bit. As long as your writing is based on the big problems, challenges, goals and aspirations of your ideal clients then you're on safe ground.

And when I say “big problems” that means both objectively big and psychologically big. If something really annoys them it’s worth addressing even if it isn’t actually a big issue in the grand scheme of things.

Making sure it's different to what they've heard before is perhaps a bit more challenging. So I'm going to devote the entire next email to it.

As an exercise before then, try thinking about and writing down where your advice and ideas are different to the mainstream in your field. We'll use it later.

PS Thanks to Caelan Huntress for the insight into the real source of the Aristotle quote.

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5 “off the beaten track” techniques for baking curiosity into your emails

Posted byIan Brodie on November 29th, 2020.

As I said in our last email together, if your emails don't get through to your potential clients, they don't do you any good.

And it's the same story if they get through, but they don't get opened.

I've found over the years that the number one factor that determines whether people open your emails is your reputation.

If you regularly send useful and interesting emails, people will open them when they see your name.

And obviously, the reverse is true too. If you send nothing but sales pitches, or your emails just don't have enough value and interest in them, then people will stop reading them.

All that said, you can get a “bump” in open rates by using a good email subject line. And especially through the use of curiosity.

So here are 5 techniques for building curiosity into your subject lines that you might not have seen before:

1. Schadenfreude. It's human nature to be interested in someone else's misfortune. Some of my best open rates ever have come from subject lines like “My WORST sales meeting ever” or “My email disaster”.
2. Curiosity adjectives – e.g. “The surprising secret of great leaders”. Hint that what you're about to reveal is something they won't have seen before with words like surprising, unusual, weird or “off the beaten track” (ahem).
3. Use demonstratives – e.g. “Do you make these mistakes in English?”. Words like this, these and that immediately make you wonder what they're referring to. Which mistakes in English? What fatal flaw?
4. Surprising links – e.g. “Leadership secrets from Charlie Chaplin”. We've all read a million articles on leadership secrets from Winston Churchill so we don't expect to learn anything new from them. But Charlie Chaplin? Bring it on…
5. Hyper-casual language – e.g. “Oops” or “How you doin'?”. Using subject lines that are much more like emails you'd send to a friend sneaks in under the radar and makes people wonder what's inside them.

Any one of these techniques can give a little shot in the arm to your open rates and boost them above their normal level.

Don't overuse them: too many clickbaity “One weird trick” and “Hey” subject lines and people will begin to start ignoring them.

But used sparingly they can be very powerful.

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Open this for vital but boring technical stuff

Posted byIan Brodie on November 25th, 2020.

Probably not the best subject line, but it amused me :)

We're going to go on a quick detour today before we resume our journey into writing effective emails.

Because there's an area of email marketing that's massively overlooked yet has a huge impact.

Deliverability.

Us marketing types tend not to talk about deliverability much because it's not very glamorous. But the fact is that if your emails don't make it through to the inbox it doesn't matter how great they are, they won't have any impact.

And these days deliverability is getting increasingly tough. Email providers like Gmail and Outlook are determined to make sure that only the most important emails that their customers want get through to the primary inbox. And often commercial emails end up being filtered out.

Because of that, improving deliverability can often have a much bigger impact on your results than anything clever you can do with the content of your emails.

I don't claim to be the world's greatest expert on deliverability. But I've found 4 things that make a real difference:

1. Get the technical stuff right.
   Email systems use stuff like Sender ID and DKIM to authenticate that emails coming from your email marketing system are genuinely from you. If you don't have these set up correctly you can really damage deliverability. Your email marketing system provider will have details on how to do this in their help files.
   
2. Get your email address whitelisted.
   Getting your subscribers to add you to their address book and other steps to make sure your emails get through can definitely help and it's easy to do. My whitelisting instructions are here. They were created using Chris Lang's free whitelist generator.
   
   By the way – if you haven't done so already, adding my email address to your contacts list and dragging my emails to the primary tab if you're on gmail would be super helpful – thanks!)
   
3. Write Engaging Emails that get Opened, Read and Replied.
   Easier said than done of course, but the more your subscribers open, read and take action on your emails, the more email providers like gmail or yahoo think that your emails are worth sending to the inbox for everyone using their systems. And conversely, the more people ignore your emails the more likely they are to get sent to spam or just filtered out across the whole system.
   
4. Actively Manage Engagement.
   This is really the corollary to point 3. If you have subscribers who don't open your emails for a significant amount of time, then there's a good chance they're never going to open them and they're simply sending signals to the email providers that your emails should go into spam.
   
   Most email marketing systems have engagement management features or the ability to create automations that let you manage this.
   
   Of course it's not quite black and white. Some may spring back into life – especially if you have a long sales cycle. So my preference is to reduce the frequency of sending to them rather than delete them completely. But either way, you need to do something to prevent building up a big rump of unengaged subscribers who drag down your deliverability.

Hopefully that wasn't quite as boring as I made out :) And it's certainly something you should be looking at if you want to succeed with email marketing.

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This key step brings your value proposition to life

Posted byIan Brodie on November 11th, 2020.

I left you on a bit of a cliffhanger last email – sorry – just not enough room in a single email!

So we'd got up to rating the different areas of value we provide to clients and how different they were to what our competitors offered. All based on feedback from clients and our own assessment of our strengths and weaknesses.

And I said there was one key step you need to do before deciding on your value proposition.

And that's to take a step back from all this data on the value you currently provide and how different you currently are…

…and think about what you want it to be.

And not only is this a crucial step, it's immensely liberating.

(Thanks again to Sean D'Souza's book The Brain Audit for this idea).

You don't have to worry if you're not quite bringing enough value or if you're different enough and how you'll somehow wordsmith that into sounding great.

You decide the value you want to deliver and the difference you want to have.

Now obviously you have to ground it in reality. Build it on the strengths you've already identified rather than conjuring it out of thin air.

But just look at where you are and think about where you could be in 3 months or 6 months time if you really put your mind to it.

And then make that your value proposition. Something ambitious and truly valuable.

To give you a practical example, I've been thinking about the value proposition for my website in the last week or so. It's essentially the same process.

What I've heard time and time again from clients is that the blog posts and tutorials on my site are really practical and more in-depth than they've seen elsewhere.

And they're more “real world” – they're things a typical consultant who's not focused 100% on marketing can actually do.

They also like the human side of me being honest with what's worked and not worked for me – there's a degree of trust there because I don't pretend to be some all-knowing guru.

And when I benchmarked my site against other sites that cover marketing for consultants what I saw was that a lot of my articles (in particular the “ultimate guides” and my value-based marketing guide) were indeed much more in-depth and comprehensive that the shorter blog posts I see on other sites.

And those posts are where the majority of my website traffic comes from too.

So I found myself thinking “Could my site realistically become the ‘go to' reference site for marketing for consultants (or coaches or trainers)?”.

The place you would go to for in-depth, practical guides to the major topics.

And the conclusion I came to was that yes, it could.

It's ambitious.

I'd have a lot of work to do to go from a handful of really in-depth articles on topics I just happened to get inspired to write about to much more comprehensive coverage.

But I could get there over time.

Going back to our two key value proposition criteria, it would be immensely valuable to potential clients and it would be a huge differentiator.

The value would stand out a mile. No need for clever wordsmithing.

Most likely it would do very well in Google search too.

Perhaps most important of all, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got about the idea.

It was something that would really be valued. And something I could get my teeth into.

In addition to all the logical stuff about value propositions, that's something you want too.

Something that gets you excited.

I don't think you can get that from just playing around and evaluating your existing strengths and offers.

I think you need to come up with something that's a stretch for you that you can work towards.

Then you have a value proposition that's both powerful in terms of its ability to attract clients and in its ability to motivate you to action.

Does your value proposition do that yet?