Who is Todd Brown?

Today, we’re jumping headfirst into the mind of Todd Brown, but who is this guy?

Todd Brown is the marketer’s marketer.

He’s widely considered the authority on direct response and customer acquisition campaigns.

And when you take a second to look at his experience and his students’ results, it’s easy to see why.

Todd has a rich history in engineering some of the best marketing campaigns around.

He’s worked in 65 different markets in 33 countries, and is said to have built “more six and seven-figure marketing campaigns than any other expert online today.”

This includes helping Todd Herman make $2.4 million in sales and John Hutchison get $100,280.40.

The guy gets results, simple as that 🙂

And Todd practices what he preaches, building up an impressive suite of products and businesses of his own.

Todd’s Product Suite

E5 C.A.M.P / Masterclass
This is Todd’s life work in direct response, and he sells an 8-module workshop that costs $2,487 (more on this later).

Top 1 Masterclass
This an exclusive group of 40-50 top-tier entrepreneurs who meet about coaching, consulting, and guidance in person with Todd a few times a year.

Acquire & Monetize Academy
Todd releases all of his newest thinking and strategies through a course membership service / academy. This is the newest addition to his services.

Marketingfunnelautomation.com / MFA Live
This is the home of Todd’s blog and podcast, and it’s also what he organizes various events and conferences he hosts which he then sells the recordings of.

His agency
Todd also runs a successful agency, but they aren’t accepting any more clients for the time being.

Todd’s focus lately has been promoting and generating leads for his E5 camp product, which he promotes through both a multi-day webinar and evergreen webinar.

To give a bit more social proof / context to these webinars, let’s take a look at his most recent webinar test’s numbers:

• $296,508 in sales.
• $2.38 per click revenue
• 1,572 leads
• Average cart value of $1,335.62

Keep this scale in mind as we dig into the strategies he swears by.

Video Summary

Listen to the Podcast

What you’re about to learn will shape the rest of your career…

Now, I’m going to level with you.

This article is going to be a bit different than our usual funnel breakdowns.

We’ll be covering a bit on his webinar funnel, but we’re mostly going to focus on Todd’s overarching marketing strategies and how he uses them across his businesses.

Like most of us who work in and study marketing, we all soak up information from different sources and bring our own experience into the profession.

You could argue Todd has cracked the marketing code, and I love understanding how other successful marketers got to where they are today.

I think it’s useful to compare each other’s strengths and try to get to the bottom of what makes us different.

And believe me… If you take this blog to heart, you’ll immediately start making smarter, faster, and more profitable business decisions.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this article:

• The importance of marketing history
• The difference between tactics & strategy
• Using urgency to spur action with scarcity, time devices, and more
• The amazing bond of reciprocity
• The power of a unique mechanism
• How to organize your ad efforts according to the Rule of 7.

Concept #1: Human psychology NEVER changes

For Todd, it all began with the marketing greats.

Understanding what worked in the 20th century is your first step to discovering the underlying truths in marketing. Just because we’ve shifted to digital doesn’t mean the strategies have changed.

People like:

• Master advertiser Eugene Schwartz
• Prolific marketer Robert Collier
• Master copywriter Joseph Sugarman

Studying 20th-century marketers like these three means drawing from a more substantial body of experiments and research.

Marketing has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, but human psychology has not. This intersection of psychology and marketing technology is where Todd Brown (and any marketer worth their salt) operates.

With this in mind, we’re going to take a step back and look at these underlying truths of human behavior and how they apply to marketing.

Many of the following truths were pulled from the greats listed above, and they’re evident throughout Todd’s webinar funnel.

It’s time to think big 🙂

If you want to see examples of Todd Brown’s most effective sales emails, download your PDF below.

Concept #2 – Don’t confuse tactics with strategy

Tacticsare not strategy, and strategy is not a tactic.

Tactics are strategy in action.

In other words, all tactics are driven by strategy.

But… tactics don’t always transfer between strategies 🙂

As you engineer your marketing machine, you need to avoid discarding a proven strategy because a particular tactic failed.

Check out Todd’s example on this:

“If you’re running a new business and notice that someone larger in your space is using a Facebook comments widget, and you decide to steal that tactic without having adequate social proof, it will hinder you instead.”

Todd chose to include a Facebook social proof widget because he has the engagement to back it up. If he didn’t have any engagement, it would hinder his efforts. This doesn’t mean someone without engagement should write off social proof as an inefficient strategy, it means that the Facebook widget tactic isn’t a good fit for this marketing situation.

And it’s not just about strength and size of audience, tactics go in and out of fashion.

Tactics that worked 6 months ago won’t always work today.

Here’s Todd’s example for this scenario:

“Years ago, doodle videos were super useful. They were great for grabbing attention and functioned as a pattern interrupt. Users weren’t expecting them and were intrigued.

But nowadays they are so popular, especially in the fitness industries and sites like Clickbank, that they can’t interrupt in the same way anymore. And that doesn’t mean the strategy of a pattern interrupt is wrong, it just means the tactic or vehicle for executing that strategy is now outdated.”

See how that works?

Tactics are how you execute strategies, and launching tactics without defined strategies will almost certainly fail.

And strategies have longevity, but tactics come and go.

Remember that.

Now, let’s talk specifics.

Concept #3 – Use urgency and scarcity to your advantage

Urgency and scarcity are not the same thing, either.

Urgency is related to time sensitivity.

So think “the cart closes at 11:35 PM tonight!” etc.

Scarcity is related to finite resources.

But… scarcity often promotes urgency too 🙂

And it’s all around us, for better or worse.

Limited time only!
Act fast! Only a few tickets left!
Time is running out! Don’t wait!
From now until we arbitrarily end this sale.

Scarcity is a strategy that can be overdone — it is overdone, all the time.

Fake scarcity is also a contentious issue, dividing the ClickFunnels diehards from the inbound savants and stirring up opinions in every shade of marketing green in between.

Which, I get 🙂

Fake scarcity kinda sucks.

It feels unethical because it’s sort of predatory, right?

It’s an exploitation of fundamental human psychology. Humans hate missing out, and many marketers have no issue alluding to X amount of spots being left or explaining that being close to full capacity justifies price hikes when it’s actually bullshit.

But! If it’s true that you only have so much space or are using time windows as a motivator, then that’s okay!

So to be clear, our team at Wild Audience doesn’t mean fake scarcity when we’re talking about scarcity, and nor does Todd Brown.

Fake scarcity undermines trust. It undermines reciprocity, which may be useful for short-term number spikes but affects your customer relationships, business reputation, and customer lifetime value (CLV).

And scarcity… Real scarcity, now that has a lot of amazing uses 🙂

Here’s how Todd Brown uses scarcity and urgency in his own funnels:

In his E5 Masterclass funnel, Todd has an offer that explains that the cart deadline is Sunday AND the first 50 people get a free call and live strategy session with Todd.

That’s a great example of urgency + scarcity + a great offer = action.

This doesn’t have to be tied to inventory, either. Check out how Todd promotes urgency with a time-bound offer when you try to leave his evergreen webinar:

Or his discounts in his email funnel that reward quick action:

Ideally, you want to strike a balance of both. You need to give people a reason to buy right then. It needs to prevent them from leaving right then and come back tomorrow.

And part of what plays into that decision to buy is determined by what has happened in the past… which ties into a lesson we’ll cover later on, reciprocity.

But first… let’s talk about unique mechanisms.

Concept #4 – The Power of Unique Mechanisms

Todd Brown loves unique mechanisms.

The most important thing you need to understand is that your business’s product is not its unique mechanism.

A unique mechanism is the unique way that your particular product or service delivers its benefit to prospects.

So if you have software that delivers top Google rankings, the benefit or solution is the ranking, the mechanism is the algorithm.

It’s a subtle difference but one that carries wide implications in copy and strategy.

Make sense? Cool.

Every campaign Todd creates begins with identifying its unique mechanism. Without that, you’re marketing commodities. No one buys commodities because they can get that information somewhere else.

For example, if someone just teaches you the first 5 things that benefit you from Facebook advertising, you can get that anywhere.

Instead, Todd would take those benefits and build them into a unique process. His entire message would then by explaining why his unique program for delivering those Facebook ad benefits is the best way to succeed.

This is what Todd did with E5. He isn’t demonstrating the effectiveness of direct response and customer acquisition funnels, he’s explaining why the E5 method is the best way to build them.

His E5 Masterclass is the product, but his unique mechanism is the E5 Camp (Customer Acquisition Marketing Protocol) process.

The Masterclass is simply the vehicle for delivering the C.A.M.P. protocol 🙂

It’s all about marketing your unique mechanism, and what you need to understand is that selling and marketing are not the same thing.

Marketing is telling the prospect why your mechanism is unique. Selling is talking about your product.

Peter Drucker, the famed management consultant, said the job of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

The key is to make a marketing campaign that takes someone’s desire for a result and turn it into demand for a product before even introducing the product.

At the core of that is the unique mechanism.

And the only place someone can get that unique mechanism is your product 🙂

Concept #5 – Reciprocity

rec·i·proc·i·ty
/ˌresəˈpräsədē/

noun

the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, especially privileges granted by one country or organization to another.

As mentioned, marketing and psychology are closely linked. When you boil it down, marketing is just wielding human nature to a brand’s benefit.

The better you are at understanding what makes humans human, the better you’re able to sell your products.

Reciprocity is a fundamental law of social psychology. It’s a social norm to respond to positive action with another positive action, and we’re all familiar with this behavior.

When we were young we let the kid who gave us a seat at lunch cut in front of us in line. When we hold the door open for someone, that same person may hold the next one for us. When our boss gives us more time to recover from the loss of a loved one, we reward them with a stronger work ethic.

But the power of reciprocity extends well beyond simple social interactions.

When used it can spur action exponentially. When we are given something we recognize as valuable for free or little cost, we become socially indebted to that person.

The power of reciprocity comes from the desire that accompanies it. When real reciprocity is reached in a social dynamic, the receiving individual has a legitimate and genuine desire to give back.

But how do you foster genuine reciprocity in online business?

By offering authentic, transparent, and excellent educational content & products.

If you make and achieve those three core tenets, you will succeed.

The most common way is through blogging, video, and email content.

When we approach reciprocity from a marketing perspective, it becomes our job as business owners to give enough value, whether that’s through educational materials, the promise to deliver a solution, the solution itself, or any other offer, to build enough trust to merit a purchase when present the buyer with an “ask”.

Some of you may recognize the “ask” method from our friend Ryan Levesque. He’s built much of his business by capitalizing on reciprocity.

This is exactly what is happening during Todd’s video funnel.

Todd Brown uses reciprocity in every bit of his funnel, but he puts the most emphasis on the beginning when approaching new audiences.

For example, Todd Brown runs a cold traffic, evergreen webinar funnel.

In the webinar, he makes sure to cover a few important bases:

1. He addresses the problem and why the prospect needs to act

2. He explains the unique mechanism and why it will solve their problem

3. He positions his product as the best delivery method for the unique mechanism

Todd delivers so much expertise and help in that first video (or first three when using a multi-video webinar) that new prospects are completely sold on the unique mechanism and are grateful for the product being delivered.

When executed alongside these other strategies, reciprocity functions like the red strike of a match — once a prospect recognizes the value you’re delivering, they appreciate it enough to take that first step, sparking the journey down your marketing and sales funnels.

So how can you capitalize on reciprocity?

It’s simple 🙂

Make better content. Make more content.

Anything you send to your base needs to be excellent.

In effect, what you’re sending should feel like your product. By opening a channel of consistent communication (or value), customers are getting a bit of what it would be like to work with you. They learn your style, what your company is like, how you think.

By anchoring this trust to smart products that tie directly into those thought processes, you can begin to build a base of engaged and paying clients.

For more on tying your products to your marketing funnels, go here.

Concept #6 – The Rule of 7

The Rule of 7:

A prospective buyer should hear or receive the marketing message seven times before they decide to buy.

The Rule of 7 is one of the oldest principles in marketing, spearheaded by the early Hollywood marketing legends in early 20th-century America.

They would organize their efforts around this frequency target.

We can define frequency as such:

The number of times a prospect has been exposed to your brand regardless of medium.

Social media, banner ads, phone calls, eBooks, webinars, — you name it.

The Rule of Seven is exactly what you’d expect. The marketers of old estimated that a consumer needs to see a brand an average of 7 times before they make a purchasing decision.

It seems a bit high at first, but when you breakout how easily (and quickly) these can be accomplished across mediums it makes a bit more sense:

Here are a few example of Todd’s customer touchpoints:

1. Sees a Facebook Ad once

Notice how Todd is already displaying his unique mechanism in his ads 🙂

2. Sees a second Facebook Ad

3. Hears a podcast advertisement

4. Sees an Adwords Ad

5. Goes to your site and signs up for an email list

6. Reads an email

7. Sees a retargeting ad

Etc. etc.

That could happen in a matter of days, even hours with a proper funnel.

It’s worth noting that the Rule of Seven does not apply to individual ads and is and should be treated with careful respect to ad fatigue.

Ad fatigue is when the same prospect is exposed to the same ad too many times and either becomes apathetic when your brand is viewed, or worse, so frustrated that they act out in some way.

So how accurate is the Rule of 7?

Well, that margin is impossible to know, but it’s been reliable for decades. That answer varies based on what you qualify as a touch as well, and not all touches are created equal.

In other words, the quality of your marketing message has a direct impact on the necessary frequency a user needs to make a decision.

No surprises here 🙂

Todd puts a healthy bit of stock and skepticism in the Rule of 7, but still relies on it as a guideline for his advertising and overall strategy.

Download this PDF that dissects a bunch of Todd’s emails and shows you exactly how to employ these strategies in your own evergreen funnel.

CONCLUSION

So where do you go from here? How do you use these in your own business?

Well…

Write them down. Print them out. Internalize them.

You only benefit by referring back to them when creating and upgrading your marketing message(s).

To recap, we covered:

1. The importance of learning from the marketing greats.
2. The difference between tactics and strategy.
3. The importance of urgency and scarcity.
4. The power of reciprocity.
5. What a unique mechanism is.
6. The Rule of 7.

I can’t stress how important these lessons are for establishing your marketing understanding.

At Wild Audience, we’re still finding new ways and uses for these lessons, and part of what makes building funnels so exciting is the chance to discover those latest tactics while using strategies we know we can rely on.

Ready to unlock the power of these lessons in your own funnel?

And good luck 🙂

Summary:

1. [Part 1]: Why ActiveCampaign’s SaaS Messaging & Positioning Is Awesome
2. [Part 2]: ActiveCampaign’s Online Sales Funnel Strategy & Why They Are Killing It
3. [Part 3]: Where ActiveCampaign Is Missing Out & My 6 Suggestions for How They Could Improve
   

This article is for marketers and founders at SaaS startups and software firms — or anyone who works with similar companies.

Sound good?

Let’s jump in!

Quick note before I start…

I have never worked with ActiveCampaign or founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom. Everything I describe in this article is based on my own experience as an ActiveCampaign subscriber and user (I’ve been using their service for 3 years). I expect ActiveCampaign will constantly change its tactics (just like any company). What I describe below is what ActiveCampaign is doing today, which may change in the future.

[Part 1]: Why ActiveCampaign’s SaaS Messaging & Positioning Is Awesome

The first thing to say about ActiveCampaign is that they’re totally killing it.

Just last month they announced they’d crossed 50,000 customers. That’s huge for a B2B SaaS company.

Before we jump into their sales funnel, there are a few things I want to show you about their strategy…

ActiveCampaign Has Great Positioning

Positioning is how a company creates a perception of uniqueness.

I really like how ActiveCampaign positions itself by saying:

• “Cloud” and “integrations” = bad
• “stacks” and “deep data” = good

Here’s how they talk about the “cloud” vs. their idea of “stacks”:As someone who pays for a ton of cloud apps, this resonates with me, especially the part about paying only for what you need.

Everyone just assumes that “the cloud” is a good thing. By showing me how the cloud isn’t automatically good, ActiveCampaign creates a unique position in my mind.

This is an example of a company that’s installing beliefs in the mind of potential customers.

That’s really smart.

They’re doing the same thing with their description of “integrations” vs. “deep data”:This resonates with me too.

Integrations are supposed to be a good thing.

But who in marketing doesn’t know the frustration of trying to connect cloud apps through Zapier or some other integration system?

Main Takeaways:

• Positioning is how you create a perception of uniqueness in the mind of a potential customer
• A great way to position your product is to install a belief that is “against” a mainstream idea (like the cloud or integrations)

Clear Choice of Customer Avatars

ActiveCampaign knows its customer avatars.

Check out how they’ve organized the main menu of their websiteInstead of creating navigation based on features, as many SaaS companies do, ActiveCampaign’s navigation is separated by audience.

Whoever you are, you can click the link designed for you:

1. Bloggers
2. Agencies
3. eCommerce
4. SaaS
5. Higher Ed

You can also navigate the site by team, which is perfect for people working in bigger organizations:

1. Customer Success
2. Marketing
3. Sales

Once you click, you’ll land on a page designed just for you.

You can tell they’ve done their work to understand the needs of the different avatars:

Here’s the solutions page for bloggers:And here’s the one for SaaS companies:See how the messaging completely changes for the different avatars?

It speaks directly to the needs and wants of the person reading the page.

So simple. But also brilliant marketing.

Contrast that approach with what I see most companies do, like this page from AWeber.

It’s a completely generic page to anyone looking for an email marketing solution.On ActiveCampaign’s site, if I’m in one of their target markets, I feel right at home — like they know me and my needs.

I feel like they get me because they’re speaking my language and talking directly to my problems and my needs.

On AWeber’s site, I have no idea.

Main Takeaways:

• Create clear customer avatars, then design your messaging around them. It will make a huge positive impact on your marketing.
• On your website, speak directly to the problems and needs of your avatars. Let them know you get them.

[Part 2]: ActiveCampaign’s Online Sales Funnel Strategy Broken Down & Why They Are Killing It

Now that we’ve covered ActiveCampaign’s high-level positioning, let’s dive into the specifics of their sales funnel.

Real quick, let’s look at their pricing strategy so you have context for the sales funnel.

As you’ll see as we dive into the details, ActiveCampaign’s entire funnel strategy revolves around getting people to sign up for a trial.

Their CTAs reflect this:Their pricing strategy is built on retention.

For newbie marketers, ActiveCampaign is just $9/month, one of the cheapest options available.

As you gain subscribers and need more features, the service (and ActiveCampaign’s revenue) grows with you:See where we’re headed?

ActiveCampaign’s Value Ladder

As a refresher, the value ladder is your big-picture zoomed-out funnel strategy.

As people ascend your value ladder, they’re offered more value — and that value usually comes at a price ($).

ActiveCampaign’s value ladder is actually very sophisticated.

It looks like this:

1. Lead Generation: To get people in the door

• Their blog
• Integration marketing
• Software review pages (that rank on the first page of Google)
• Events and Meetups
• AC Podcast
• Influencers and Third-Party Online Courses

2. Frontend Funnel: To qualify buyers & decrease ROI time

• None (more on this in part 3 below)

3. Core Funnel: To sell your main product/service

• ActiveCampaign’s software (with an awesome business model and pricing strategy)

4. Backend Funnel: To upsell existing customers & increase CLV

• Conference
• Certified consultant program
• Design services
• Marketplace

5. Continuity Funnel: To generate recurring revenue

• ActiveCampaign’s SaaS business model generates monthly recurring revenue

Now let me show you how each step of the sales funnel supports these goals…

1) Lead Generation:

ActiveCampaign has a ton of activity around awareness and lead generation.

Let’s jump into each piece of their strategy.

The ActiveCampaign Blog

Blogging is an awareness strategy.

It gives ActiveCampaign a way to reach people who wouldn’t search for “ActiveCampaign” in Google — and wouldn’t click an ad for the company either.

Remember earlier when I said ActiveCampaign did a great job understanding its customer avatars?

You can see it in their blog topics:

1. Marketing
2. Strategy
3. Product updates
4. General
5. Small Business
6. Insider tips

They publish a lot — 27 articles in March 2018.

These aren’t 500-word fluff articles either.

Here’s an example of a 3,000+ word in-depth resource on copywriting, written for their marketing avatar: The Secret to Writing Great Marketing Copy is Market ResearchTo be fair, not all of their blog articles are this long and detailed.

But many of them are.

As a guy who has spent weeks writing one piece of epic content for a blog post, I can tell you that it takes a tremendous investment of time and effort to produce 27 quality articles in a month.

Once you get into an article, you’re met with two persistent floating CTAs, both inviting you to sign up for the newsletter.When I entered my email to subscribe, I found it was really just another version of their main CTA: a trial signup.

To get on the “newsletter” it seems, you have to sign up for a trial account.

I couldn’t find content upgrades on any of their posts, only invitations to receive content from ActiveCampaign weekly.

(More on that later in the “missed opportunities” section.)

At the bottom of the blog posts, you see ActiveCampaign’s traditional “sign up for a trial” CTA.

Integration Marketing

Integration marketing is a way to reach users of other apps.

It’s big for ActiveCampaign. I found over 150 integrations listed on their site.These are direct integration partners too, not just integrations through services like Zapier or If This Then That.

Software Review Pages (That Rank on the First Page of Google)

Check this out.Customer reviews are a huge part of online marketing.

Reviews are social proof.

People want to know:

• Does your product work?
• Do you treat your customers well?
• Are people who use your product happy with it?

Notice that every listing is from a third-party review sites.

Google doesn’t return anything from ActiveCampaign’s website for the search term “ActiveCampaign review.”

That means ActiveCampaign must:

1. Do a good job providing the value it promises
2. Treat its customers well
3. Monitor the review sites to respond to negative reviews

As you can tell when you click through to the reviews, ActiveCampaign is very active in these forums:Side note: if you haven’t done a Google search for “[your company] + reviews”, you should do that.

Like, now.

Events and Meetups

Conferences and meetups are a blend of marketing strategies.

They support lead generation by giving a company a way to talk to prospects.

As I’ll describe in a bit, they also support the core funnel and backend funnel.

The challenge with in-person events for lead generation is that they’re expensive and time-consuming.

Despite the cost, however, they can be a very effective way to reach clients — especially enterprise clients.

ActiveCampaign has a variety of event-marketing activities to achieve this.

They have booths at conferences all over the world to engage with people from their target markets.They also have a brand-new 2-day conference this year in Chicago called ACTIVATE. They’re bringing in Ann Handley and other well-known marketers as featured speakers to attract people to the event.A 2-day conference like this is not meant to draw in the $9/month target audience.

This is for enterprise clients. ActiveCampaign target the high-dollar audience by charging $650 per ticket.

A company would need a significant marketing budget to send a manager or an employee to a conference with that high of a price tag.

And that’s exactly who ActiveCampaign is trying to attract.

For smaller businesses, ActiveCampaign also hosts meetups as another way to connect with its customer personas. Why do events?

Because they work. Even with all the online marketing tools we have, there’s nothing quite like talking to someone face to face.

The question is just whether the ROI justifies the cost, something that will be different for every company.

The ActiveCampaign Podcast

Podcasting is usually for cultivation.

It’s a high-engagement channel, one that lets people feel like they get to know you and your company through the stories you tell.

A podcast is very different than a blog article — where readers often just skim down the page and read over the headlines.

The trick — of course — is creating a podcast people actually enjoy.

ActiveCampaign publishes its podcast “The ActiveCampaign Podcast,” weekly.

If the reviews are any indication, people really like it.If you’re wondering how a podcast is part of lead generation, it’s because people who like podcasts search for new podcasts that match their interests.

It can lead to discoveries like this one:Here’s a customer who was using a different email service, wasn’t happy with it, and switched because he found the ActiveCampaign podcast.

That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.

Influencers and Third-Party Online Courses

This one’s important.

If you think that lead generation is only done by people directly employed by your company, you’re wrong.

Influencers and third-party sources are a huge part of modern lead generation.

As an example, look at me!

Here’s a screenshot from a Wild Audience sales page promoting our Relationship Funnel program.That’s us at Wild Audience driving people to sign up for the AC service — with no direct instruction from ActiveCampaign.

This is the impact of influencers.

Influencers are also on places like Udemy, teaching courses about how to get the most out of ActiveCampaign.And on Facebook, running groups with thousands of members talking about the product.None of these people are employees of ActiveCampaign.

But they are all driving leads to ActiveCampaign’s service.

How does ActiveCampaign get influencers to become advocates for its service?

Well, first by having an awesome product.

Second, by running a strong affiliate programAnd third, by offering a certification program for consultants who want to help companies get the most from their ActiveCampaign subscription.Taken together, ActiveCampaign is encouraging people to become more than just customers.

They’re creating a network of brand advocates.

Main Takeaways:

• Lead generation strategies are a direct result of knowing your audience and defining clear customer avatars.
• Employees are not the only people who influence purchase decisions. Influencers and reviews have a huge impact on sales, especially for SaaS companies.

2) Frontend Funnel:

The goal of a frontend funnel is to qualify buyers and decrease ROI time.

As far as I can tell, ActiveCampaign completely skips this step. And I find that extremely interesting.

They don’t have paid frontend products or services.

Instead, they direct all their lead generation efforts directly to their core funnel.

We’ll talk more about what they could do with a frontend funnel later in this article.

I think ActiveCampaign is definitely missing out on some things by skipping this step.

Main Takeaways:

• Don’t skip the frontend funnel!

3) Core Funnel:

All the lead generation efforts ActiveCampaign point here, to the core funnel.

An Awesome Business Model and Pricing Strategy

The first thing I want to point out is that ActiveCampaign has an extremely smart pricing strategy.

I’ve read tons of resources on pricing and seen countless debates about “what should I charge” in various forums online.

The debate comes down to an argument between:

1. Setting a low price to attract lots of new users
2. Setting a high price so you only attract people who will be committed

ActiveCampaign does both.

The $9/month starting price is low enough for solopreneurs and anyone just looking to get a feel for the system.

As you grow, the price goes up, jumping to $49/month and above, levels where you’d need regular revenue from your email marketing efforts to make it worth it.These are relatively high prices for these higher levels of service.

In other words, ActiveCampaign has a pricing strategy that allows both things to happen.

The low-price intro offer is cheap enough to attract anyone with interest.

The higher tiers are for people who are committed to the service and understand the value it delivers for their business.

Educational Content

If blogging is about awareness, educational content is about engaging people once you have their attention.

That’s why educational content is awesome for SaaS businesses.

It’s meant to help business owners and marketers understand:

1. The problems they face
2. Solutions to those problems

These are resources for customer success, not directly for lead generation. It’s a next step people can take if they’re interested in learning more — even before they sign up for a trial.

After they sign up and start using the product, that’s where educational content really fills a need, helping people answer specific questions they have about using the product.

ActiveCampaign gets this, providing a huge library of guides, videos, and webinars.

If you hear about ActiveCampaign and want to hear or see more, there’s a resource for anything you want to know.I really like their webinars — they have this idea of “success webinars” — where they talk about a specific story of how someone has used ActiveCampaign successfully.

Customer Communities

People are going to talk about your product online.

Why not own the forum or community where those conversations happen so you can be involved?

ActiveCampaign has several active communities where they cultivate these conversations. Just to show you a few of them…

There’s a support forum hosted on the ActiveCampaign website.A closed Facebook group with almost 3,000 members.There’s also a Slack chat group, meetups, and the events and the ACTIVATE conference we mentioned earlier.

These all provide channels to engage existing users in addition to prospects.

The Sales Follow-up Sequence

The most important part of ActiveCampaign’s core funnel is its professional sales force.

Using professional salespeople is expensive, but it’s also a great way to increase conversions. There’s really no substitute for one-on-one conversations with a real human being.

It’s been a long time since I signed up for ActiveCampaign, which made me wonder…

What does their sales process look like today? If I signed up for a new trial, what emails or phone calls would I get?

I decided to find out.

I signed up for an account with an email different than the one I already have with ActiveCampaign.

Since I already have an account, I also asked my friend Nathan — who’s based in the U.S. — to sign up for a trial account.

We both kept track of every call and email we received.

The Follow-up Sequence: 4 Phone Calls & 9 Emails Over 14 Days

Let’s take a look at what happened after Nathan signed up for an ActiveCampaign trial.

Day 1

On April 23 around noon, Nathan signed up. He immediately received a welcome email.20 minutes later, he got another welcome message — this one from Jason VandeBoom’s account.10 minutes after that, Nathan’s phone rang with a number from Chicago, where ActiveCampaign is based.

It was Ernie from the ActiveCampaign sales team, who left a voicemail wanting to know if Nathan needed any help with the new account.

Days 2–14

Over the two weeks of the trial, Nathan received a total of 17 emails & 4 phone calls from ActiveCampaign.

Here’s what Nathan’s inbox looked on the last day of the ActiveCampaign trial:When we looked at all the emails and phone calls in detail, they broke down like this:

• 8 drip emails
• 4 broadcast emails (announcement, new content, etc.)
• 4 sales phone calls
• 3 sales emails
• 1 confirmation email
• 1 welcome message

Drip Emails: One Every Other Day

I was expecting something a little more creative in their drip campaign, but honestly it looks like ActiveCampaign is just going with the straightforward “every-other-day” sales messages.

The drip emails started on day 2 of Nathan’s trial. They came every other day after that. Most were topical, encouraging Nathan to take action with his account.There is so much more ActiveCampaign could be doing with this drip campaign. The big miss — in my eyes — is that these emails mostly just cover features — they don’t seek to install buying beliefs that get people engaged and keep them active until they convert.

In part 3, I’ll talk more about what they could do to install these beliefs.

If you’re interested, here are all 11 of the automated emails I received in my account:

1. Email 1: Welcome to ActiveCampaign
2. Email 2: Welcome to ActiveCampaign (from Jason VandeBoom)
3. Email 3: Don’t forget your ActiveCampaign trial…
4. Email 4: How can we help you?
5. Email 5: Why not send a message?
6. Email 6: What can automations do for you?
7. Email 7: Need some help setting up an automation?
8. Email 8: Avoid making this mistake with your marketing & sales solution
9. Email 9: Unleash event-triggered messaging with the ActiveCampaign WordPress plugin
10. Email 10: Let’s “stack” some apps…
11. Email 11: Want to keep going with ActiveCampaign?

Broadcast Emails

The broadcast emails were ActiveCampaign’s “standard” newsletter emails — with topics ranging from product announcements to information about GDPR.

Sales Phone Calls

Ernie called Nathan four times in total, leaving similar messages offering help each time he called.

We were impressed that his first call came less than an hour after Nathan’s signup — a sign ActiveCampaign has a strong lead-follow-up sequence in place.

In sequence, Ernie’s calls came on:

• Day 1
• Day 4
• Day 9
• Day 12

Here are recordings of two of those voicemails (these are actually the third and fourth calls in the sequence).

• Sales Voicemail No. 1
• Sales Voicemail No. 2

Sales Emails

Ernie followed up with a voicemail after the first three emails, giving a very professional feel to the interactions.

That was true even though Ernie’s messages are almost certainly templates he uses over and over with new trial signups.Here are copies of all three messages:

1. Sales Email No. 1
2. Sales Email No. 2
3. Sales Email No. 3

Main Takeaways:

• It’s super powerful to combine an effective drip email campaign with a direct sales approach.
• A professional sales force is a major help in driving conversions — if you can afford the labor cost.
• SaaS companies can create pricing models that “grow with you” to give anyone a chance to sign up.
• Active customer communities = engagement = better retention.

4) Backend:

The point of the backend funnel is to upsell existing customers and increase customer lifetime value.

For SaaS companies, that often means keeping customers activated, using the software and seeing the value of the service.

In a way, reducing churn is part of the backend funnel for SaaS companies.

The support team has as much to do with this as the marketing and sales teams.

Even so, ActiveCampaign has several backend offers to upsell existing customers.

Conference

We talked about ActiveCampaign’s new ACTIVATE conference in the frontend funnel.

It costs $650 per ticket to attend, turning events marketing — usually a pure expense — into a revenue-generating activity.

Certified Consultant

Want to become a certified ActiveCampaign consultant?

It’s a great way to zero in on ActiveCampaign users as potential clients.

Cost: $2,000 (one-time fee).

Design Services

Need help with the design of your emails? ActiveCampaign has design services offering to help for $395.

Marketplace

ActiveCampaign also maintains a marketplace for third-party sellers who’ve created add-ons for the service.

This generates revenue for both the third-party seller and for ActiveCampaign.

Main Takeaways:

• Conferences, training, consulting, and add-ons are other ways to increase revenue and LTV for SaaS companies. They can also help improve retention.

5) Continuity

In almost every SaaS business, continuity comes from the month-to-month structure of the core offer — and ActiveCampaign is no different.

Even so, what I really like about ActiveCampaign is what we mentioned before about its business model.

As you grow and gain more subscribers, your business is probably doing well and making more revenue.

Which means when you need a bigger ActiveCampaign account, it won’t be difficult to justify the new $49/month fee.

Or the $129/month, or higher.

Main Takeaways:

• In SaaS, continuity comes from the month-to-month structure of the business model.
• Retention is the ultimate goal of continuity for SaaS companies.

[Part 3] Where ActiveCampaign Is Missing Out & My 6 Suggestions For How They Could Improve

With all that ActiveCampaign gets right, I still think they have room to improve.

All you have to do is look at what some of their competitors are doing to see what’s working in a similar space.

Specifically, I looked at:

1. InfusionSoft
2. MailChimp
3. ClickFunnels
4. Drip
5. ConvertKit

I also have a few suggestions from my own funnel-building experience working with SaaS companies and online course businesses.

Here are 6 sales funnel changes I would make if I were to work with ActiveCampaign…

Change #1: Content Upgrades

I love content upgrades.

They’re a simple, effective way to double, triple, or quadruple (or more!) opt-in rates from content marketing (blogs, guides, etc.).

I use them in almost every piece of content I create (including this one!).

Here’s one from one of Wild Audience’s most popular blog posts on sales funnels:The fact that ActiveCampaign isn’t using content upgrades at all was one of the first things I noticed when I started looking at their strategy.

Blog posts should have the main goal to get people to sign up with their email. The best way to do that is a content upgrade.

That doesn’t mean ActiveCampaign has to take away its trial offer. It could still include a trial sign-up in the top navigation or in the right banner.

Reason is that people are in different stages. Some are ready to try a new ESP like AC and this will sign-up for the trial. Others are not in the need of a new ESP as they use a different one or are just not there yet in their business journey.

Regardless of where a person, you want to start building a relationship so that once the person starts to consider ESPs, ActiveCampaign is top of mind.

A content upgrade extends the blog post with further educational content and acts as the entry point to a sales funnel. Once someone signs-up for the content upgrade, the marketing funnel kicks in and starts installing beliefs.

Change #2: Original Research

Original research is both rare and valuable.

Done right, it’s the kind of thing that gets covered in the press and linked to over and over again by people in your target market.

They’re great for lead generation, authority building, and backlinks.

One of my favorite resources is MailChimp’s annual report on email marketing benchmarks.

It’s a huge report with benchmarks for email open and click-through rates across dozens of industries — making it a fantastic resource for marketers.It’s one of four deeply-researched resources currently available for free on the MailChimp website.

Drip uses a similar strategy with its reports on entrepreneurship and small business marketing.As far as I can tell, ActiveCampaign isn’t currently doing original research — or at least nothing close to the scale of MailChimp and Drift.

It means they lack the big, substantive resources MailChimp and Drift have to collect email addresses and earn backlinks.

Change #3: Respect-Based Marketing (RBM)

Respect-Based Marketing (RBM) is a term we coined to describe the process we use to engage people once they’ve become aware of our brand.

It combines tried-and-true business elements like respect, relationship, trust and authority — with modern and advanced sales funnel automation to increase conversion rate. 

It looks like this:

1. Segment new leads into buckets by asking them 5 questions during the sign-up process.
2. Use this data to personalize and customize your emails, website and bot messages (and any other channels you might use)
3. As you are more personal, people will perceive you as more relevant.
4. If you’re more relevant, people will engage more.
5. Getting the right people engaged will always result in higher sales conversions and more revenue.
6. Automate the whole process and turn it evergreen.

Here’s an article that was just published on Forbes that describes Respect Based Marketing and I was also interviewed by more than 20 podcasts to talk about Respect-Based Marketing. Here’s one interview I did with Ash from Productive Insights.

I have also recorded a video to walk you through the process..

To do RBM effectively, we’d need new ways to increase email signups…

Change #4: Relationship Funnel

Something ActiveCampaign is completely missing right now is any kind of content that is focused on installing buying beliefs.

All of their lead-generation work drives people directly to a 14-day trial. Once someone signs up for a trial, the email and phone call follow-up sequence kicks in.

If you look closely, the messaging in those drip emails is almost totally product focused.See how this is all about what ActiveCampaign can do?

A Relationship Funnel is different, and — I believe — would have a big positive impact on ActiveCampaign’s results.

Relationship Funnels are based on a belief system. We buy stuff based on beliefs… and that’s how we decide between right & wrong.

For that reason, when I help SaaS companies build Relationship Funnels, we spend a lot of time teaching those beliefs to their marketing leads, trial leads & paying customers. If we do that well, conversions go up in all stages of the process.

Here’s a simple example of how I would build a Relationship Funnel for ActiveCampaign optimized for organic traffic:

1) Create Content:

Create blog posts with content upgrades (targeted at their customer avatar) and distribute them to drive organic traffic.

2) Get Them To Sign-Up:

ActiveCampaign should be interested in two things at this point:

1. Getting marketing leads (people who are not ready yet for the trial)
2. Getting trial leads

I would use two different call-to-actions to get people to sign-up. I would always place the call-to-action for the trial visible on any page of the website.

What I would add is a content upgrade to drive marketing leads. We can then start an email sequence to install beliefs to move them towards marketing qualified and then sales qualified. See next steps..

They could also use personalization software like RightMessage to personalize the call-to-action on their blog based on what they already know about the website visitors.

Example: Show a trial CTA if visitor is marketing qualified but show a lead magnet if visitor is a first time visitor.

3) Retarget Non-Sign-Ups:

The majority of people won’t sign-up at the first time. That’s not a problem if you have a retargeting funnel installed. Two simple ways to retarget blog post readers & website visitors is through Facebook & Adwords (GDN they already do).They can drive visitors to their trial and to lead magnets. Currently, they only drive leads to the trial as far as I saw. Lead magnets can easily be created by turning blog posts into PDFs & guides and is a great way to capture people who are not ready yet for the trial but are interested in marketing automation.

4) Relationship Building & Installing Buying Beliefs:

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Marketing Qualified: What does the perfect customer avatar needs to believe before she can sign-up for an ActiveCampaign trial?
2. Sales Qualified: What does the perfect customer avatar needs to believe before she can become a paying customer?
3. Customer Success: What does the perfect customer avatar needs to believe to stay an ActiveCampaign customer?

See how beliefs are part of every part of the sales cycle?

Pretty interesting, I know.

Now, how do you get people to believe certain things? You need to communicate the beliefs to them.

At Wild Audience, we build multi-channel Relationship Funnels to install beliefs. Here are some of the channels you can choose from:

1. Evergreen Email Sequences
2. Evergreen Ad Retargeting Funnels (Facebook, GDN, YouTube..)
3. Bot Sequences
4. Communities (like Facebook groups)
5. Phone calls
6. Customer Success Webinars
7. Etc..

Pick your channels and start communicating your beliefs to move people towards your desired outcome (marketing qualified, sales qualified, NPS scores, CLV etc..)

Installing beliefs is not about selling per se. It’s about setting the stage. Establishing a relationship, creating trust, establishing yourself as the authority and getting people to accept the desire or need of ActiveCampaign’s marekting automation software.

The bottom line: You prepare leads for the conversion event.

5) Conversion Event:

The conversion event is all about monetization. The better you do your job during the relationship builder stage (4), the higher your conversions will be on sales calls, sales pages and webinars.

What we have seen work really well, is to use evergreen conversion methods as your foundation and spice them up with timely promotions.

You could run an evergreen webinar and have a regular sales page. You jump on calls with qualified leads. And every quarter you could run a promotion (discount, free product, free onboarding coaching sessions etc..) to qualified leads (use lead scoring).

This is Relationship Funnel in a nutshell.

There is way more to it (especially in the relationship builder stage or what you do with leads who don’t initially convert) ..

But enough for now 🙂

Change #5: Frontend Product

This point builds on the Respect-Based Marketing step (change #3 above).

I’d create a $10 educational product and promote it to attract buyers. I would attach an upsell funnel to increase average order value:

• Frontend offer: $10
• Upsell 1: $50
• Upsell 2: $150

For Wild Audience’s funnel, I did a quick check on how our frontend product is doing. For today, our average order value is $42. That means I can spend $42 to acquire one single customer. I can then send them over to my core offer at zero cost.

If my cost to acquire one single lead (lead CAC) is below $42, I would even get paid for people just testing out my core offer. If my lead CAC is $20, I make $22 for people just giving my core a try.

That’s the magic of frontend funnels. And ActiveCampaign could do the same. They could produce educational products on how to use marketing automation to drive more revenue.

Once a prospect becomes a frontend buyer for one of ActiveCampaign’s educational products, then I’d offer them an ActiveCampaign software trial.

They could even create a frontend product that incorporates ActiveCampaign to help solve the problem the frontend product solves.

If you do this well, you breakeven on your frontend product (or even make a profit). This means you’re getting paid for people to sign up for the trial.

This is the opposite of what normally happens — where SaaS companies pay to get people to try the trial product.

Educational products work extremely well when used together with software trial signups.

Want an example?

Let’s look at ClickFunnels, which does an amazing job at this.

This is a page that offers their book — Expert Secrets — for free if you pay $7.95 shipping and handling. It’s a physical book, not just an eBook download, so the perceived value is extremely high.That $7.95 is the first “level” of ClickFunnel’s frontend offer.

The next offer is a $37 upsell that appears after you enter your contact information, email, and address.

At this point, if you get the book or one of the three upsells, you’ll be added to their funnel to get you to try ClickFunnels’ 14-day trial.

In that way, ClickFunnels has turned its trial sign-up process (usually a money loser for SaaS companies) into a profitable step in its funnel!

Change #6: Email Sequence to Install Beliefs (Respect-Based Marketing Style)

By using tactics like content upgrades and epic research reports, I’d start collecting emails from people who like ActiveCampaign, but who aren’t yet ready to sign up for a trial. (I’d also pixel them and retarget them with ads to get as many email signups as possible.)

I’d segment people who signed up by using the same interview ActiveCampaign already has in place. We use a similar segmentation survey here at Wild Audience.Based on that data, I’d send them customized emails based on their answers. It would look similar to this, which is a zoomed out view of our email sequence at Wild Audience.I’d also personalize the emails based on customer responses. The secret to an email sequence built in the respect-based marketing style?

It doesn’t try to sell a product.

Instead, it seeks to install beliefs.

When you do this well, you create an audience of readers who are crazy-engaged.

Here are a few real-life examples showing the results people have seen using this approach.

Example 1: Example 2:Example 3:For ActiveCampaign, I would create an email sequence to install beliefs such as:

• Belief 1: “Email is proven to have the highest ROI”

• Belief 2: “Email automation doesn’t require computer science knowledge”

• Belief 3: ..

• Belief 4 ..

• etc.

With those beliefs installed, people would be much more likely to accept an offer for a trial — when I finally offered it to them.

If you combine that with email engagement hooks like I describe in this article you will have a winning email sequence.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

I could say a lot more about ActiveCampaign, but to respect your time, I’ll bring this article to its end.

If you want to move on (& go deeper), take a moment to download all the resources that come with this article…Know Jason VandeBoom or want to let him know via email or Twitter that he should check out this article? You can do that here…

1. Email Jason VandeBoom from ActiveCampaign (Click Here!)
2. Tweet Jason VandeBoom from ActiveCampaign (Click Here!)

Thanks!

Summary:

1. [Tip 1]: Gary Vaynerchuk’s 100 Million Business Strategy Reverse-Engineered
2. [Tip 2]: What VaynerMedia’s Online Sales Funnel Would Look Like If They Hired Me
3. [Tip 3]: Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crazy Content Marketing Plan Explained

This article is for online business owners and marketers who want to figure out how Gary Vaynerchuk uses content to fuel his multi-channel, entrepreneurial machine that ultimately brings in over $100 million in revenue each year and learn how to apply those same funnel principles to their own products & businesses to increase conversion rates and revenue.

Side note:

I have never worked for or with VaynerMedia or Gary Vaynerchuk. Everything in this article was created from my own experiences and research with Gary’s brand and company. Also, Gary’s brand and marketing changes often and rapidly, so keep in mind that by the time you read this some of this may be dated.

[Tip 1]: Gary Vaynerchuk’s 100 Million Agency Strategy Reverse-Engineered

In order to understand how Gary builds awareness and revenue through his sales funnel, you first need to understand why GaryVee does what he does.

You need to get the big picture…

I got this from an interview on Impact Theory:

“I want to be the poster child of the person who built the biggest, baddest empire and did it by being a good dude along the way.”

Gary wants to turn entrepreneurship into something cool, and he wants to inspire current and future wantrepreneurs to take risks and try to build billion-dollar businesses while being the kindest person on the block.

He wants to be the rockstar of good-guy business — to trick the business world into being a kinder place. To leave a legacy.

Got it? Great.

—

Next up is figuring out how he is fulfilling and funding his mission, and that question can be difficult to answer.

GaryVee does a lot..

He’s a serial entrepreneur, motivational speaker, agency director, content creator, angel investor, and more. He has mastered diversification.

But, I’d argue his true differentiator lies in his ability to produce and distribute content. GaryVee creates multipurpose content that brings in leads to every part of his “empire.”

In other words..

Gary Vaynerchuk is the KING of Repurposing Content

Gary is the master of taking content and spreading it around to a multitude of different outlets with appropriate context. It’s viral lead generation at its best.

GaryVee is all about approaching attention as a precious commodity, and he’s going to do his damndest to get it.

But how does he manage to do that without getting burnt out?

He chose his best medium and stuck with it…

Gary is really good at video content. He recognized this and hired a videographer to follow him around all the time to record his life and general awesomeness. They find viral moments, edit them down, and repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.

Here are just a few of the platforms Gary is active on:

• facebook.com/gary
• instagram.com/garyvee
• medium.com/@garyvee
• youtube.com/garyvee
• youtube.com/askgaryvee
• linkedin.com/in/garyvaynerchuk
• twitter.com/garyvee
• pinterest.com/garyvee

Gary takes videos and sends them to all of his platforms while keeping the platform’s style and personality in mind. He changes the caption or thumbnail to better fit the medium, and that’s the key…

He also lets people find his content on whatever platform they prefer.Crazy, right?

It doesn’t matter what you use. If you want to find GaryVee, you can. And after you’ve engaged with any of his awareness, viral content, he pulls you into his retargeting campaigns via paid social advertising, continuing to bring you into Vayner’s world and maximizing the exposure of each piece.

We’ll cover more on his distribution and repurposing and how you can apply it to your online business later.

Gary Vaynerchuk Always Promotes Virality

Every single piece of content GaryVee puts out is built for sharing. Every post, link, blog, podcast — you name it. Instead of pointing people toward email signups or additional content downloads, GaryVee always asks for the share.

While there’s no doubt this strategy has helped him get to where he is today, there are definitely opportunities for growth… which I’ll cover in a bit.

How Gary Vaynerchuk Monetizes His Audience

GaryVee wears a lot of hats, and his revenue streams are diversified. With this in mind, Gary’s monetization strategy and value ladders (for an overview of value ladders check out my VideoFruit case study) depend on the customer avatar, but he has 3 main segments & value propositions:

1. Wantrepreneurs or current entrepreneurs (books, events, and consumer products like shoes)
2. Small to medium-sized businesses (SMB consulting services at 10k a pop w/ an exclusive community “VaynerMentors”)
3. Fortune 500 Marketing Clients for VaynerMedia (multi-million dollar marketing projects & retainers)

All of the marketing GaryVee does fits into each of these three verticals in a pretty fascinating way..

By tying his personal brand to VaynerMedia and demonstrating his expertise through his own business, he’s able to attract massive companies that are searching for the best while training people under him to help the multitude of current and future SMB entrepreneurs he inspires and reaches with his viral content.

Everything sort of blends and swirls together, and once a customer identifies themselves as a particular avatar they are directed to the appropriate channel.

GaryVee’s Value Ladder:

With this framework in mind, let’s focus in on his SMB business value ladder

Here’s how GaryVee approaches SMBs:

1. Lead Magnet = His free entertaining, educational, and motivating content via social media.
2. Frontend = Books (essentially repurposed blogs & talks at $10-$30 a pop).
3. Core = VaynerMentors (10k consulting a mentorship program)
4. Backend = Vayner Experience (Events & Conferences)

By focusing almost all of his attention on his lead magnets, he brings in consistent inbound leads to his other, more lucrative services by expanding his personal brand.

Smart, right?

How Gary Vaynerchuk Continues to Build His Legacy

As you’d expect from Gary, he doesn’t stop with the revenue he’s generating from VaynerMedia. Instead, he chooses to reinvest that cash into projects he cares about. From investing in tech startups (Facebook, Uber) to buying companies like PureWow and sponsoring musicians & influencers, Gary aims to build a legacy that lasts by diversifying his portfolio and interests. He wants to create his own distribution network that is uniquely GaryVee.

Main Takeaways:

• Pick your business’s best content medium and focus on that.
• Tie your personal brand to your business if applicable.
• Establish your value ladder.
• Grow your brand through complementary diversification to reduce content load.

[Tip 2]: What VaynerMedia’s Online Sales Funnel Would Look Like If They Hired Me

Okay. Now that you get GaryVee and know what he stands for, let’s get a bit more specific on what I think he does well and what he could do better. There is no arguing that Gary is one of (if not the) best in the world when it comes to viral content and high-level brand awareness content. As we talked about, GaryVee does a great job repurposing and spreading his viral content around, and there’s nothing I (or anyone else) could teach him.

But, GaryVee optimizes all of his content for maximum exposure — possibly to a fault.

Everything is built around sharing at the moment, and he has only a limited amount of places for leads to take the next step.

As you know from running or working in your own business, capturing an email address is often the key to building a sustainable audience, and Gary’s opportunities for an email capture are pretty limited.

You can sign up for his weekly newsletter (sent out every Monday) on his homepage:You can sign up on the sidebar of blogs:Or you can sign up for his First in Line VIP messaging service:That’s it. No content segmentation or upgrades.

For example, this is how he ends a recent blog post:Sure, it’s on brand and inspirational, but he could be growing his brand insiders faster.

Suggestion #1: Include more specific content upgrades to increase opt-ins.

Considering the sheer amount of people who read and interact with GaryVee’s content, it’s amazing they don’t take advantage of content upgrades more.

The first thing I would do is link every blog post with a relevant content upgrade.

By pointing people toward a lead magnet directly related to the blog, we can capture their email and send them specific content based on the problems they’re facing and goals they want to achieve.

Once we have an email address, we can control the conversation.

Gary wouldn’t have to depend on Facebook’s algorithm to share anymore, and we could target specific segments directly with advertising and email.

If your funnel conversion rates are lower than you want, I guarantee lack of specificity and context are part of the problem.

Suggestion #2: Build a two-step segmentation process.

Gary is building an empire, and he needs to know exactly what types of people are responding to what types of content.

Sure, you can guess based on the content they converted on. But why not ask and qualify people at the same time?

Without customer information, your content is running blind.

Let’s define his segments in a bit more detail.

Gary’s customer segmentation buckets:

• Students who don’t know what to do with their lives.
• Wantrepreneurs who want to start a business but don’t know how.
• People trapped in a 9-5 and are unhappy with their job.
• Business owners who want to grow their business to next level.
• Brick & mortar businesses (restaurants, etc) who want to get started with digital marketing.
• Fortune 500 enterprise businesses.
• The hustlers and make money fast people — making a quick buck online.
• Marketers interested in learning social media (since he’s the king).
• Large companies wanted to modernize their digital presence.

Now we should add a lead bucketing option during sign-ups using condensed versions of these segments.

For example, if someone is on one of Gary’s blogs coupled with one of our new and relevant content upgrades, they could decide to download the accompanying materials.

The next two screenshots are from the last case study we did on VideoFruit.Once they click, a segmentation form appears.The key to creating a good form survey is to create the survey to be focused on their goals and common problems.

For Gary’s avatars, these could be:

“I want to accelerate my small business through viral marketing but I don’t know where to start.” (for his SMB audience).

Or..

“I run a multi-million dollar company and am looking to work and learn from the best marketing minds in the biz.” (for his enterprise clients).

You could also create a survey that segments people based on the services they are trying to sell like so:Make sense?

Cool.

Suggestion #3: Enroll segmented audiences into a multi-channel, evergreen funnel.

Once someone opts-in to the GaryVee community and automatically segments, themselves, we need to establish a relationship and trust.

We can build this trust and install beliefs with a multi-channel, evergreen system:

1. Channel #1: Evergreen Email Sequence
2. Channel #2: Bot Sequence (separate from Gary’s First in Line)
3. Channel #3: Facebook Ad Retargeting Funnel.

Email is the key to controlling Gary Vaynerchuk’s audience. He can use these emails to install the most critical beliefs before asking for a sale or upsell.

What is the most important belief to install with this evergreen sequence?

That Gary Vaynerchuk is the baddest badass entrepreneur of them all.

People need to want to be like Gary.

By sending the best content Gary has to new subscribers in the form of 7 evergreen emails and triggering more engagement opportunities through bots and retargeting ads as they move through the funnel, new leads will understand who GaryVee is and why he does what he does in the context of their specific segment (SMB vs. Enterprise vs. Wantrepreneurs, etc.).

Enterprises won’t want to hear “start your own hustle” inspiration. The same way wantrepreneurs won’t find “How viral marketing grew this $10 million dollar business to $100 million” as interesting as startup marketing. It works both ways. The beauty is with segmentation we can send them the exact content we know they’ll like.

With this information in hand, we can begin to control the conversion timing and sell moment based on dynamic engagement tracking, or lead scoring (offered in most CRMs).

The goal is to get people’s lead scores in your CRM up high enough to be ready for the conversion event.

Once we know who they are, what they want, and how engaged they are, we can begin the next step.

We use ActiveCampaign for all of our tracking & funnel triggers and love it.

This is our funnel tools stack to build a sales funnel that converts at 8%

How I Would Further Monetize Gary’s Audience:

Once they hit a certain score based on actions (opened 4 emails, watched 3 videos and listened to two podcasts, etc.), we can dynamically trigger the next step using our ESP and/or CRM.

E.g.That next step is to aim for a sale using the same multi-channel configuration.

In other words, I would sell specific products based on funnel engagement & customer type using the same tools we’ve already set up.

By using the bot sequence, Facebook advertising, email, etc., we can say things like: “Hey, I noticed you were interested in learning how to hustle a business from $0 to $10,000 in revenue in under 6 months. I actually wrote a book about exactly that. It’s only $10, and it was a New York Times Bestseller. You should get this book if you want to take things to the next level.”

As long as you show social proof, touch on those beliefs installed in the emails (most badass ever etc.), and speak to their specific problems identified in the segmentation process, it will work.

For example, check out this excerpt from the first email in an automation sequence we have set up:Try thinking and writing out 3 beliefs you need to establish from the get-go with your own audience. Then take those and implement them into any of the early funnel experiences someone has with your brand.

We can also turn these funnel pieces off or on based on whether they buy or don’t buy etc. using custom audiences in Facebook and more.

And then, depending on their avatar, we can continue upselling the next piece. So with GaryVee, if they’re a SMB I’d offer the VaynerMentors or Enterprises consulting services.

Even though Gary acts like he hates selling, he sells all the time — he has to. And selling is a good thing. Gary helps his customers make more money and build the lives they want, and I’d approach those sales with that in mind.

What happens after Gary’s Evergreen Funnel?

I would…

1. Continue optimizing for maximum exposure (encourage shareability).
2. Use an evergreen newsletter (not broadcast style) with a mix of old and new content (increase frequency above more than 1 per week).
3. Retarget existing audiences with new or unbought offers via TruView & Facebook.

Main Takeaways:

• Establish beliefs and answer objection questions early.
• Match your content with a relevant content upgrade.
• Allow your customers to segment themselves through a two-step form.
• Send your customers specific content based on their avatar.
• Let their engagement determine the speed at which you sell.
• Always offer the next step you’d like customers to take after they complete an engagement action.

[Tip 3]: Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crazy Content Marketing Plan Explained

We talked about how GaryVee is the king of content marketing and repurposing. He’s everywhere, or at least it seems like it. But, once you break down the processes he has it becomes much more realistic to replicate in your own business.

He basically has a bunch of content habits and tricks he and his employees use all the time.

Habit #1: Gary Edits Video Content Differently Across Platforms

Gary always fits into the platform for better engagement. Even if the content is the same, his team changes the cropping and copy to better fit the medium. In his words, it’s “context”. For Instagram, these videos are short, bright, and inspirational.Facebook is a bit more forgiving and engagement for longer videos depends on the audience, but Gary tends to make videos that are slightly longer than Instagram and always have captions for better engagement.Youtube gives Gary the most freedom. This Close Your Eyes Till You’re 29 video is actually a compilation of other videos he released on Youtube, and he generally reserves his longer-form content for Youtube & Facebook. Notice how he always adds in a personal description to make it feel like he’s speaking directly to you.The idea is to experiment with each platform, figure out what works best for you and your audience, and fit your content into those models.

It’s also worth noting that he repurposes image content across platforms as well, for example:

Instagram to Pinterest:

So remember this works for any type of content, not just video!

Habit #2: Gary Takes Video and Translates it to Audio Platforms

Gary excels at public speaking. In order to capitalize on that content, he almost always strips the audio from his videos and puts them out as podcasts or on Soundcloud with a brief intro.

Take his Business Squared Keynote for example:Gary hits this keynote from all angles — the event itself, a version on Facebook in its entirety, and the same audio on all of his audio platforms. Now, that may be a bit long for Facebook audiences, but people also know what they’re getting into when someone says, “Keynote”.

That term carries prestige and immediately conveys a longer time commitment. Without that distinction, this would not do nearly as well.

Here’s that same Keynote on his podcast:Pretty cool.

Habit #3: Gary Makes Mashups Based on Common Themes

As mentioned with the, “Close Your Eyes Until You’re 29” Youtube video, Gary and his team love to repurpose content by making new content out of old content.

Take this podcast short for example:This release is 14 minutes and 17 seconds of GaryVee being inspirational as hell all based around a theme, “No excuses.” There was nothing new shot or recorded for this segment. It’s just Gary being Gary, and these opportunities compound the more content you put out.

Then, once the mash-up is finished, he puts that material onto ALL platforms imaginable.Again, Gary wants to be EVERYWHERE.

He wants to meet you where you’re at…

Habit #4: Gary Cross Promotes Content on Different Platforms

Some content is restricted by medium. For example, you can’t have long videos on Instagram, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t promote that video on Instagram.

That’s where cross-promotion comes in, and Gary does a great job of it.

Youtube to Pinterest:

Gary will embed his Youtube videos into his Pinterest account with a link going back to Youtube. This allows Pinterest users to choose their preferred platform.

Youtube to Instagram:

One thing that GaryVee does ALL the time is take stills from his popular Youtube videos and slap a caption on the image before sending it out to his social feed. With the amount of video content GaryVee puts out, this is a really common tactic of theirs.It’s simple but really effective.

Instagram & Facebook to Youtube:

Here’s an example of Gary taking a shorter edit of his new Youtube video and using Instagram to push traffic to Youtube.He also includes the link in his bio, and since GaryVee fans know how often he puts out content, his audience gets used to checking there for quick links to the latest videos.Gary also uses Instagram stories to push traffic to his podcasts & Youtube videos. By including the link in the Swipe Up option, he can pull people directly to Youtube or his podcast to get them more involved.And here’s him doing the same thing on Facebook. Notice it’s cropped appropriately & includes captions (Facebook specific habits).

Habit #5 – Contests for Comments/Engagement

If Gary has a big launch or charity he’s interested in promoting, he knows he can motivate his audience to help something go viral by running contests.

Here’s an example of him launching #FirstinLine. He uses Instagram stories to explain the rules and pushes people to his new Messenger Bot with the promise of winning prizes.It’s not Gary’s Facebook or Gary’s Instagram… It’s this giant social hub of content that all connects to each other seamlessly.

Habit #6 – Retargeting for Maximum Exposure

Once you view almost any piece of GaryVee content, he’ll keep sending you more — even through ads on his own videos!

For example, I was trying to watch a GaryVee video, and I got an ad for another GaryVee video.

By taking his most popular videos and cross-advertising them on his other videos, he makes sure new viewers see him at his best (another form of establishing belief!).

Main Takeaways:

• Fit your content into each platform’s culture. A.k.a. context.
• Develop ways to repurpose your content in a way that’s both fresh and not super labor-intensive.
• Direct traffic to the best platform for viewing that particular piece of content.
• Use retargeting to bring people to your best content.

WHAT’S NEXT: Okay, online business owners and marketers, here’s how to start taking advantage of this for your brand or business right now.

1. Take a look at your mission, your passion. What makes you, you? What’s your end-game? How would you need to diversify to get there? Think top down here. Figure out what makes your business tick and envision your future. Be bold. Be brave.
2. Find your medium. Is it video? Audio? Text? How is your voice best represented and what’s the most fun/motivating type of content for your business to create? If you have no idea, try EVERYTHING and go from there. Let the data make the decision for you.
3. Once you have one piece of content you’re really proud of, think about how it should change from platform to platform, and then release it around to as many channels as possible.
4. Take a look at your own sales funnel and compare it to the suggestions. Where are the holes? Do you always provide a next step? Have you established the right beliefs at the beginning? Are you segmenting appropriately? Can you be more specific toward your customer avatars?
5. Establish a good lead scoring system and pair that with retargeting to always supply your leads with the appropriate next step at the right time.
6. Enjoy the process 🙂

—

That’s it!

I hope this helps you crush it like GaryVee.

He does even more than what I cover in this article, but this should at least get you in the mindset and give you some ideas on how GaryVee approaches marketing/how you can apply it to your own business.

If you want to take the next step and learn even more about building this style of sales funnel, you should download all of the resources I’ve included.And if you know GaryVee or think he should see this. Hit him up!

1. Email Gary Vaynerchuk: (Click Here!)
2. Tweet @ GaryVee: (Click Here!)

Thanks!

Until next time.

Summary:

1. [Tip 1]: The 5-Step Value Ladder VideoFruit Bases Its Business On (& How You Can Too!)
2. [Tip 2]: Step-By-Step Walkthrough Of VideoFruit’s Sales Funnel & Why They Are Killing It
3. [Tip 3]: Three (Out Of Eleven) Suggestions I Would Implement For VideoFruit If I Would Work For Them

This article is for entrepreneurs who want to learn how an extremely successful online business – VideoFruit – operates to attracts 1000s of customers, generates millions in revenue and became an international role model for many inspiring entrepreneurs.

Interested?

Let’s go!

But before I begin, let me say this..

I have never worked for or with VideoFruit or Bryan Harris (CEO of VideoFruit). Everything below is based on my own experience as a VideoFruit email subscriber and VideoFruit customer. VideoFruit is updating their marketing constantly, meaning what I share with you below might not be their most recent version.

Video Summary

This is a Facebook Live I did to showcase how VideoFruit operates

[Tip 1]: The 5-Step Value Ladder VideoFruit Bases Its Business On (& How You Can Too!)

Before building a sales funnel, you should understand the concept of the “value ladder”. I learned this concept from Russell Brunson.

The value ladder is your big-picture zoomed-out funnel strategy.

As people “ascend” your value ladder, they’re offered more value. However, this value comes at a price ($).

A value ladder usually looks like this:

1. Lead Magnet = To get people into the door
2. Frontend Funnel = To qualify buyers & decrease ROI time
3. Core Funnel = To sell your main product/service
4. Backend Funnel = To upsell existing customers & increase CLV
5. Continuity Funnel = To generate recurring revenue

If you’re just starting out, only focus on Lead Magnet & Core Funnel. Everything else comes later.

How does VideoFruit’s value ladder look like?

1. Lead Magnet: Blog & Free Tools
2. Frontend Funnel: Rapid List Building
3. Core Funnel: Get 10,000 Subscribers
4. Backend Funnel: 10ksubs Elite
5. Continuity Funnel: Slingshot

I took a screenshot from their Product Page which gives an almost perfect insight into their value ladder (only Continuity Funnel is missing).

Let’s talk about their offer structure real quick.

I’m sure you have noticed that VideoFruit is all about growing an email list (aka helping businesses to make money online with an email list).

There are multiple milestones to reach when growing an email list:

1. 0-100 subscribers
2. 100-1,000 subscribers
3. 1,000-10,000 subscribers
4. 10,000-100,000 subscribers

And their offer structure reflects that as well:

1. 0-100 = Email Course ($0)
2. 100-1,000 = Rapid List Building ($450)
3. 1,000-10,000 = Get 10,000 Subscribers (Starts at $997)
4. 10,000-100,000 = 10ksubs Elite ($4,950)
5. Launching your product = Slingshot ($750/year)

Each milestone leads to the next one. And each product leads to the next product. That is how VideoFruit can offer the right product to the right person at the right stage in their business journey.

Very smart.

Let me now walk you through their sales funnel.

Main Takeaways:

• Align your offer structure with your value ladder and journey of your customer
• Help people ascent your value ladder by offering more value and in return generate more revenue per customer

[Tip 2]: Step-By-Step Walk-Through Of VideoFruit’s Funnel & Why They Are Killing It

Now that you know their zoomed-out funnel strategy, it’s time to zoom in a little and explore VideoFruit’s sales funnel.

Let’s go!

1) Lead Magnet:

A lead magnet acts as a magnet to attract your ideal customer. It’s important to understand that a lead magnet acts not only as a magnet but also as a filter. It filters wrong people out and pulls the right people closer to you. A lead magnet is usually a PDF and can be downloaded for an email address in exchange (it doesn’t cost anything).

You drive traffic to your lead magnet with the goal to get people to enter their email address in exchange for the lead magnet.

VideoFruit seems to base their traffic game mainly on free traffic (SimilarWeb).

So how does their lead magnets look like?

VideoFruit Blog:

They write awesome & actionable blog posts to attract people from Google, Referrals & Social Media.

This blog post for example.

With exact 8,000 words & 99 comments, countless of screenshots & awesome takeaways, this article seems to perform well.

If I search on google “how to launch an online course” (which is one of their main customer avatars), I can find their article on page 1.

Here are some traffic stats I pulled from SemRush.

Not too bad.

The most important part of the article is their content upgrade though..

The content upgrade is a piece of content (PDF or tool for example) that extends the blog post. Someone who actually reads the article & is interested in its content, will naturally sign-up as the content upgrade is the logical next step.

It looks like this..

Once you click that big “Download” image and sign-up, an automated email gets triggered & you get access to the blog post’s member’s area..

This marks the entry point into the VideoFruit world and their funnel will play out..

It could look like this..
(but if it really does is what I will write about in a bit..)

Blog -> Free Email Course -> Rabid List Building Course (Paid) ->  Get 10,000 Subscribers (Paid) -> Slingshot (Recurring Payment) -> Coaching (Recurring Payment)..

As I said, more about this in a bit.

What else does VideoFruit do to get people into their door?

They engineer lots of free tools to generate leads.

Free Tools To Generate Leads:

What’s the idea here?

Build free online tools that solve problems your ideal customers have.

Companies like HubSpot, Shopify or Buffer play the same game. They all engineer free tools to generate leads for their core products.

For example: Buffer sells awesome Social Media software. They decided to create a free but helpful tool called Pablo to create beautiful social media images.

When building your own free tools, make sure to follow these simple rules:

1. Give users an immediate payoff. It should only take seconds for them to actually get value from your tool.
2. Make your tool relevant to your core business. Your goal is to turn the people using your free tool into paying customers later on. If you build tools that attract the wrong people, you will end up with a problem.
3. Give people something of real value. Even though the tool is free, people should see actual returns from using it.

So, what tools has VideoFruit engineered to generate leads for their business?

They have created a few free tools over the last few years:

1. ListGoal
2. SmartBribe
3. Email Service Picker
4. And a few more..

Let’s talk about ListGoal real quick.

Bryan Harris (CEO of VideoFruit) wants to sell his core offer which is (at the time I write this) Get 10,000 Subscribers (which is about growing an email list)

ListGoal is a chrome extension that monitors your email list growth & health. It also keeps track of your progress. Quite cool.

VideoFruit uses ListGoal to attract new people into their world (by launching ListGoal on ProductHunt for example) but also to engage & monitor their existing user base.

What I like the most (from a business point of view) is that in order to make ListGoal work, the user needs to connect the tool with his/her ESP (email tool).

This means that VideoFruit knows exactly the email list size of all their ListGoal users. This allows them to segment their user base and offer them the right products or service based on list size.

They can also use ListGoal to track the progress & success of their customers. Here are two things they could do with that:

1. Monitor list growth of their customers and reach out to customers who reach certain milestones to create customer success case studies.
2. Reach out to people who are not progressing and try to proactively help them to reduce refunds & churn.

Let’s continue with the frontend now..

Once someone enters the VideoFruit world through one of their lead magnets, what happens next?

Main Takeaways:

• Create content upgrades that extend your blog posts to get people to enter your sales funnel.
• If you have engineering power in your team, build small but useful free tools to solve annoying problems your ideal customer is experiencing. The goal of the tool is to attract the right kind of people (customer avatar) into your world so that you can then later sell them one of your products or services.

2) Frontend Funnel

A frontend funnel that sells a frontend product/service is not a must. In fact, if you’re just starting out, you should not focus on having a frontend funnel.

Instead, just create a lead magnet and build a core funnel to sell your core offer. That’s it. Only once this is working, introduce your frontend.

So, does VideoFruit have a frontend?

Well, VideoFruit chose to sell their core product (Get 10,000 Subscribers) through an open/close product launch model. This means they only allow people to buy their core product two times per year (spring and autumn).

The main problem with this decision is that they need to find a way to generate revenue between these launches.

And that is where their frontend product comes into play 🙂

Their frontend product is called Rapid List Building and costs $450.

This is the sales page.

How do they sell that product?

Bryan created a free email course called “Jumpstart Your Email List”.

This email sequence consists of 6 emails to teach people how to grow from 0-100 email subscribers.

The goal of that email sequence is to establish a relationship, create trust and “ready” people to sell then Rapid List Building ($450) – which is their frontend product.

It’s important to understand that this free email course is 100% aligned with VideoFruit’s frontend product & core product.

Where does VideoFruit sell their frontend product?

Unfortunately, only through their Main Squeeze.
(I will comment on what they are missing out on in [Tip 3]..)

If you decide to opt-in on this page, the frontend funnel will get triggered. If you’re interested, you can have a look at all 6 emails here:

1. Email 1
2. Email 2
3. Email 3
4. Email 4
5. Email 5
6. Email 6

That’s it for now. I will feedback Bryan’s email sequence in [Tip 3].

Main Takeaways:

• If you sell your core product through a product launch model (PLF style), you need to find a way to generate revenue between the launches. One way VideoFruit solves this problem is by selling an evergreen frontend product.
• A frontend allows you to qualify your buyers. Some people need less time to make buying decisions. We want to give them the opportunity to pay us money through an evergreen frontend.
• A frontend enables you to generate your ROI back faster. Depending on what you sell, sales cycles of core funnels can be quite long. Since frontend products are low-priced, you will be able to sell quantity which allows you to re-invest that money into growth again.

3) Core Funnel

How does VideoFruit sell their core offer (Get 10,000 Subscribers)?

That’s what I will reverse engineer now.

The core product is targeted for people who want to start growing an email list.

As I mentioned before, Bryan uses a launch-based sales process to sell this product. This means that two times a year, VideoFruit organizes a huge launch party for a couple of days. Only during that period, people can buy his product.

The reason he does that is because it creates a massive amount of urgency. Bryan has a big email list. Some people are true fans, some are customers of his frontend products, some people are active blog readers and some don’t have a relationship at all with VideoFruit & Bryan Harris.

Let’s assume Bryan’s email list is 100,000 email subscribers big. The questions Bryan was asking himself were something like:

• Should I launch my product to my entire list?
• Should I add someone who just joined my email list to my launch event?
• Should I launch my product to a smaller segment of my email list?
• Am I missing out on sales if I don’t launch to everyone?

So, how does Bryan solved these problems?

He created a free introductory course called “Audience From Scratch”. The goals of this course are:

• Prepare people for the big launch event so that once he launches his product people are ready to buy.
• By offering this free course he can identify the engaged people on his list. This segment will then be the segment he will launch his core product to.
• “Audience From Scratch” (AFS) is the introductory product to “Get 10,000 subscribers” (Get 10k). Someone who is interested in AFS will automatically qualify as interested in Get10k.
• This allows him to be hyper-relevant as he only promotes his core product to people who actually show interest. People who’re not ready yet, won’t be part of that sales event (launch).

Bryan sends out six AFS emails to set the stage:

1. AFS Email 1 (Lesson 1)
2. AFS Email 2
3. AFS Email 3 (Lesson 2)
4. AFS Email 4
5. AFS Email 5 (Lesson 3)
6. AFS Email 6 (Live Office Hours)

These 6 emails prepare people for the real launch event which included a few emails:

1. Email 1 (Open Doors & 15% Discount)
2. Email 2 (Features)
3. Email 3 (Webinar Invite)
4. Email 4 (Closing Doors)
5. Email 5 (Final Call)

If you’re interested in learning about their entire launch, you can read Bryan’s blog post here.

The question now is: How does VideoFruit communicate with its audience between the two launches? How do they establish relationships & create trust?

VideoFruit uses a very cool 4-part communication strategy..

Every Friday VideoFruit sends out a newsletter to its email list. This results in one email a week and around 4 emails a month. Friday is VideoFruit email day and I, as their subscriber, know this & expect an email from them.

This is VideoFruit’s newsletter strategy:

• Week 1: Test Result Email
• Week 2: Asset Bundle Email
• Week 3: Free Tool Email
• Week 4: Webinar Email

Every month, VideoFruit announces a new topic to talk about.

In the first email of the month, Bryan announces the topic of the month and shares some cool stats & results (based on their own experiments).

Check out email 1: Test Result Email

The second email is all about giving value without asking for anything. This usually happens in form of a free PDF or video to teach something cool.

Check out email 2: Asset Bundle Email

The third email introduces a new free tool that helps to solve the problem VideoFruit is talking about that month. They build & launch new tools every single month and they offer them for free. Not everyone has the resources to build their own tools. You could also link to other tools on the market instead.

Check out email 3: Free Tool Email

The fourth email is an invitation to a webinar. The webinar has a pitch at the end to sell a product that is related to the month’s topic. By looking through their emails of the last couple of months, I can tell that they didn’t run a webinar every single month. If they don’t, they usually link again in email 4 to their new free tool.

Check out email 4: Webinar Email

If you want to learn more about VideoFruit’s content strategy, you can watch this video.

Main Takeaways:

• As VideoFruit sells their core product through open/close launch model, they needed to find a way to engage the audience in between launches. They use a very cool 4-part content strategy to communicate with their audience on a weekly basis.
• To find the right segment to launch your product or service to, you could create a small introductory product and then only launch your product to people who show interest for that pre-launch product.
• A pre-launch product allows you to find “hot leads”, become more relevant and decrease email unsubscribe rate.

4) Backend

The goal here is to increase revenue & profits from existing customers. It’s always easier to sell to an existing customer again than selling to a person who has never bought from you before.

That’s why you want to cross-sell related products/services or offer upsells in form of upgraded features or packages.

VideoFruit runs a coaching service for people who want 1:1 attention to grow their business.

This is a high-ticket service with lots of value positioned at the top of their value ladder. With higher value comes also a higher price.

1. Lead Magnet: Blog & Free Tools ($0)
2. Frontend Funnel: Rapid List Building ($450)
3. Core Funnel: Get 10,000 Subscribers (around $1,000)
4. Backend Funnel: 10ksubs Elite ($4,950)
5. Continuity Funnel: Slingshot ($750/year)

VideoFruit sells their coaching service for $4,950.
(according to their product page..)

This means they need to change the selling environment. It will be hard to sell that service through a simple text-based sales page or a webinar as this service costs a lot of money.

People who consider purchasing this service want to talk to a real person. That is why the sales environment gets changed from a sales page/webinar to a “Strategy Call”.

This “Strategy Call” has two goals:

1. Qualify the prospect
2. Close the prospect if it’s a good fit

There are two ways how VideoFruit promotes their coaching service:

1. Personal upsell email
2. 3-Part Email Sequence

The personal email they send looks like this..
(click here to see the full email..)

The content of the email is personalized to existing Get 10,000 Subscriber customers and the call-to-action is to jump on a free strategy call.

The second way is a 3-step email funnel. It looks like this:

• 3 Emails
  • Email 1 (Story that leads to videos)
  • Email 2 (Case Study #1)
  • Email 3 (Case Study #2)
• 2 Videos
  • Video 1 (Intro)
  • Video 2 (FAQs)
• 2 Case Studies
  • Case Study 1 (text-based)
  • Case Study 2 (video-based)
• Call-To-Action: Free Strategy Call

Main Takeaways:

• Send personalized emails to existing customers to upsell a backend product. VideoFruit sends these emails from their ESP. What we do at Wild Audience is to send these “Free Strategy Call Invite Emails” via a Gmail Zapier Hack. You can learn more about it in this article.
• Use case studies to sell your high-ticket services or products.
• Change the selling environment from a standard sales page to a personal 1:1 call. Qualify first to see if the prospect is a good fit or not. A strategy call or sales call works well to handle objections.

5) Continuity

Recurring revenue is the holy grail of business. It’s probably one of the best business models ever invented.

The goal of the continuity funnel (I learned this term from Russell Brunson) is to generate recurring revenue.

This could be in form of:

• Software (SaaS)
• Service Container (if you run an agency or if you’re a coach/consultant)
• Subscription

VideoFruit generates recurring revenue with two of their offers:

1. Slingshot ($750/year)
2. Coaching Services

Let’s talk about Slingshot.

Slingshot helps you plan & run a launch to sell your product or service. The product is the logical next step for everyone who is a Get 10,000 Subscribers customer. Because once you know how to grow your email list, you – of course – want to monetize your list and make money.

I will show you two different ways how VideoFruit sells Slingshot to generate recurring revenue:

• Discount Funnel
• Webinar Funnel

Discount Funnel

The discount campaign is a 2-step email sequence to sell Slingshot and offers a 50% discount to all Get 10,000 Subscribers customers. Here’s a summary of the funnel:

1. 2 Emails
   1. Email 1
   2. Email 2
2. Video
3. PDF
4. Checkout Page

The idea here is to first provide value through Bryan’s video about automated email sequences and then lead to his product Slingshot which actually helps people to build such an email sequence and then launch their product.

To make it a no-brainer decision, Bryan offers a 50% discount offer for a “limited time only”. This is actually a lie. It’s fake urgency as this offer is still available here.

Webinar Funnel:

This is how the webinar funnel looks like:

1. Blog Post
2. 4 Emails
   1. Email 1 (Intro to the blog post)
   2. Email 2 (Webinar Invite)
   3. Email 3 (Webinar Reminder)
   4. Email 4 (Pitch + Discount)
3. Webinar
4. Offer: $500 instead of $750 plus some other resources for free

Main Takeaways:

• VideoFruit uses two different conversion methods to get people to buy Slingshot. This is a great approach as some people prefer to watch a webinar and others prefer to read emails.
• VideoFruit uses discount codes quite heavily (especially for existing customers) to cross-sell more products.
• VideoFruit uses fake-scarcity to sell their product. I’m not a big fan and would not suggest doing that as this will impact your trust status with your audience.

[Tip 3]: Three (Out Of Eleven) Suggestions I Would Implement For VideoFruit If I Would Work For Them

It’s time to share what I would do differently if they would hire me. I have discovered 11 improvement ideas VideoFruit could consider. But in order to not explode the length of this article (& respect your time), I will only share 3 suggestions for now.

Let’s go!

Suggestion 1: Add A Segmentation Process

VideoFruit offers all kinds of products/services from email marketing to hiring and copywriting.

Being relevant and personal is a prerequisite of getting the right people engaged. Getting the right people engaged will always (always always) result in higher sales conversions and more revenue

You can read my article “7 Engagement Techniques To Increase Sales Funnel Conversion Rate” to learn more about how to get your audience engaged.

In order to be relevant & personal, you first need to know your people. This is done through a segmentation process.

Here’s how VideoFruit could do that..

Lead-Bucketing Opt-In:

Instead of just asking for email + first name, they could ask a question first to get to know the new lead better: “What’s your biggest problem?”.

I first saw this being implemented by Ryan Levesque (Ask Method). Here’s a screenshot of how we implement this at Wild Audience..

A person has to answer the first question first to then be able to enter their email address.

Onboarding Interview:

After someone signs-up, this person will arrive on a sign-up confirmation page. On this page,e we have embedded a second segmentation interview. It’s five questions long and has the goal to collect data so that we can personalize the experience inside our emails, bot messages & on our website pages.

We get around 50% of the people to also complete this survey. Here’s a screenshot of our data of an onboarding survey for cold leads that came in through a Facebook ad (cold audience).

Suggestion 2: Add People Who Opt-In Through A Blog Post To A Frontend Funnel

VideoFruit adds people who read one of their blog posts and then signs-up through a content upgrade directly to their weekly newsletter (at the time I write this).

Here’s what I would do instead:

Segment people (lead opt-in bucketing & onboarding survey) after they sign-up through the content upgrade (as I suggested above) and then add them into an RBS (Relationship Builder Sequence) to establish a relationship, create trust and install buying beliefs.

Once this is accomplished, you would add them to a conversion event (sales page, webinar, VSL..) to sell a frontend product based on data they collected during the onboarding interview. This allows you to systematically establish a relationship (through an RBS), generate revenue and make your ROI back faster.

Only after they went through that mini-funnel I would add them into the weekly email newsletter.

Suggestion 3: Four Ways How VideoFruit Could Improve Their Email Automation & Rock It

I will now feedback VideoFruit’s evergreen email automation called “Jumpstart Your Email List”.

No Images & Social Proof :

VideoFruit’s first email doesn’t have a single image (link to email 1). I tell my clients to add one social proof image per email. This is especially important in the first email as this sets the stage for everything that comes after. I, for example, place three social proof images in email #1. Have a look at two out three social proof screenshots..

And here’s the second one..

That’s how you set the stage.

VideoFruit has amazing social proof but they don’t use its full potential in my opinion. Here’s how they do it (I took a screenshot of their social proof in email #1)..

Micro-Investments & How VideoFruit Could Use Them:

The goal of micro-investments is to increase the lead’s investment into you over time so that once the prospect sees your offer (which is your big request), they have already said “yes” a few times via micro-investments.

You want to increase your request over time so that your big request (offer) doesn’t seem that big anymore once presented.

VideoFruit asks people to fill out a worksheet at the end of their emails. Bryan borrowed this technique from Brennan Dunn I believe.

When it comes to requests, I always lead with the question..

“What’s in for the reader”?

You want to make it as easy as possible to complete the request and at the same time make the ROR (return of request) as big as possible (value they get).

In my opinion, the worksheet seems pretty “boring” as there is not enough in for the reader. Here’s what I would do instead..

In the first email, I would place a small micro investment: Get your people to respond with one single word. We ask our people to respond with “ready”.

If they complete this step and respond with “ready”, you want to reward them. Here’s what I do..

People who respond “ready” are getting rewarded with three welcome gifts & have higher chances to engage throughout your sales funnel as they already micro-invested into you.

In email #2, VideoFruit offers another worksheet.

People can submit an answer but then that’s it. It doesn’t have much of an exciting element. What they could do instead is cliffhanger from their email into a video and continue the story there.

Email -> Video (that extends the email) -> Button to go a level “deeper”.

Here’s how I implement that..

Email -> Video -> Bot.

This process is something that I call Funnels In Funnels (FIF). It allows people who want to engage with you to go deeper.

Add Personality To Every Email

What I’m missing in Bryans’ emails is personality. Don’t get me wrong. Bryan has a very “Bryan way of writing” and I love it. But what I have seen is that people have an eye for details.

They love if you put a picture of yourself at the end of the email. Like I do for example..

They also love to discover Easter eggs in the P.S. section of an email. Or laugh if you have a funny quote in your email footer..

Let’s Spice Up Those Cliffhangers

The cliffhanger is one of the main vehicles to get people to open & engage with your next email. Just think about how your favorite TV series ends.

Yes, exactly. That is called a cliffhanger. It’s the reason why you can’t stop watching House Of Cards.

You want to use the same mechanism at the end of your emails. Because if you do, you might end up getting people to respond to your emails like that..

Let’s look at the cliffhanger of email two of VideoFruit’s email sequence:

“In the next lesson I’m going to show you how to start building your list by using the Testimonial Hack. This strategy can get you featured to thousands of potential subscribers and single-handedly jump start your list.”

Hmn. Not bad but a little boring if you ask me 😉

Instead, try this..

I’m sure you can relate..

You buy this really cool new product and you love it so much that you tell all your friends about it..

Right?

Well, I don’t.

This one day I gave the product creator direct feedback instead..

.. And this changed everything.

Here’s what happened..

I surprisingly got 780 new email subscribers in just 3 short days and made just over $10,500.

I know crazy, no?

Well how I did that and how you can do the same is what I’m going to show you in my next email.

Talk soon!

That’s a bit better, no?

🙂

Next Steps..

There are a few more things I would improve if I would be in charge of VideoFruit’s evergreen funnels..

1. I’d add Frequency Selectors at the end of each email to decrease ROI time & increase engagement
2. I’d create email lessons that cliffhanger from the email into a video on a landing page on the VideoFruit website (some people like text, some video)
3. I’d use Funnels In Funnels (FIF) more often so that people who want to engage have the chance to go deeper and an offer can be made faster
4. I’d add a different conversion event at the end of the evergreen email sequence to give people another medium (instead of text-based emails I’d use a video-based webinar) to increase sales conversions
5. etc…

And with that, I would like to end this article.

I hope you found it valuable & educational.

I tried my best 🙂

If you want to move on (& go deeper), I’d suggest to downloading all the resources that come with this article..And if you know Bryan or want to let him know via email or Twitter that he should check out this article, you can do that below..

1. Email Bryan Harris from VideoFruit (Click Here!)
2. Tweet Bryan Harris from VideoFruit (Click Here!)

Thanks!

And talk soon.