This Is Personal
Metadata
- Author: Brennan Dunn
- Full Title: This Is Personal
Highlights
When I think about positioning, it’s just this. It’s aligning a need with a product. The mistake I think too many people make is thinking that you need to radically transform your entire business model and go all in on a particular position. (Location 191)
OUTCOME Substantially higher conversions and sales because you’re able to highlight “what’s in it for me?” for each person. When you cast a wide net, which is how most people typically pitch online, you put the onus on the buyer to figure out how what you’re saying specifically applies to their situation. (Location 196)review
In order to dynamically position your offers, you first need to have the underlying data that will help you decide how to best pitch someone. You’ll do this by segmenting your email list based on two primary dimensions: who somebody is and what they’re currently struggling with. This data will then allow you to deliver highly targeted messages, sending the right messages to exactly the right people. (Location 200)review
by collecting zero-party data about your audience, you’ll know what people are struggling with, how they self-identify, and other information that’ll help you deliver highly personalized messages. (Location 209)review
Using what you now know about how to personalize your messaging using zero-party data (data voluntarily given by consumers), you’ll learn how to start thinking, “Why would this person want to hear more from us?” (Location 218)review
Creating customers is all about meeting your new subscribers where they are today, demonstrating empathy using the data you have about them, and then leading them to understand the gravity of the problem, the solvability of the problem, and your recommendations for helping them get rid of it once and for all. The end result is someone who knows they need help and can now be fully receptive to whatever offers you have to help them solve said problem. (Location 241)review
To effectively sell over email, you need to both continuously educate and continuously sell. Focus too much time on just education, and your sales will suffer. Focus too much on selling? Your engagement will drop, your list will tire, and … sales will suffer. (Location 259)review
Besides a willing audience of buyers, your list can also be used to run your own market and product research campaigns. You’ll see how you can use your email list to pioneer new product ideas and build excitement for future products or services you’re working on. (Location 268)review
Different messages, different tones, different examples, and entirely different campaigns can be used depending on what you know about the people on the receiving end. The only real way to accomplish something like that on a firehose platform like social media is to create separate channels or accounts, like what Linus Tech Tips has done with their “Mac Address” YouTube channel, designed for the segment of their viewership who also use Apple products.1 (Location 363)review
This is because email is permanent. It needs to be acted on. You get an email, and you either read it and archive or outright delete it. It hangs out in your inbox until one of those things happens. On the other hand, social media is ephemeral. While you can absolutely scroll back through someone’s Facebook posts, the nature of the algorithm means that the newest stuff from people you follow will always be prioritized. (Location 383)review - Note: Email requires action
To successfully barter crackers for Gushers, I needed to try to convince someone to transact with me. Your Gushers, my crackers. In my own grade school way, this required me to figure out why someone should perceive their snack as inferior and mine as superior. And given my offering (crackers), this was usually a tough sell. (Location 416)review
people are all wired pretty similarly. They’re triggered to do things that they think will make them feel better, experience pleasure, or be regarded by the people who matter to them as a valiant hero. (Location 452)review
What do the individuals you’re selling to at a business care about? –If it’s the owner, or the direct beneficiary of “more profit,” it’s exactly that—helping them inflate their lifestyle and their ego by making their business more efficient and putting more money in their pockets. (Location 460)review
–If it’s an employee/department—that is, someone whose pay isn’t directly tied to the overall profits of a business—it’s to make them shine. If it’s because of them that their department’s output is up 150 percent YTY, or because of them that increased online orders have led to opening a brand-new distribution center, that person or team become rock stars. And rock stars get rewarded, usually with promotions or pay raises. (Location 463)review
When selling to consumers: –How can you help them feel like they matter more to others (more praise, more dates, more sex, more friends)? –How can you help them feel more secure (more resources, a safer house, better at self-defense, better health and longevity)? –How can you help them reach apotheosis (feeling fulfilled, feeling at one with themselves and the world around them, becoming the best version of themselves)? (Location 469)review
The good salesperson knows it isn’t even about benefits, but about the benefits you care about.” (Location 537)review
What creates a sense of connection is a message that takes the individual customer’s needs into account. (Location 543)review
The key to using customer knowledge effectively is segmentation, which simply means organizing your audience according to their needs, identities, and history with you. (Location 548)review
For example, I added a one-click survey to the sign-up form for an online golf retailer’s website: What’s your swing speed? I might have asked visitors to reveal their income level or to tally up how much they spend on golf equipment annually. But those are sterile, company-focused questions that are obviously meant to help the business, not the customer. They don’t translate in any clear way into an improved customer experience. In contrast, asking a simple question about swing speed isn’t going to come across as prying or personal. We framed the question in terms of the customer’s needs: “We’d love to point you toward the right drivers.” In that context, asking about swing speed makes perfect sense because it’s a good proxy for skill level: (Location 554)review - Note: Is there a question I can ask on the website to point users in the right direction or to learn more aboujt them?
Too many options often [leads to] too little action. (Location 609)review
Before you ask a single question, develop a plan for how you’ll use every bit of data to make the customer’s interactions with your site more useful. Unless an answer will help you speak to someone more effectively, don’t ask the question. (Location 664)review
You could make some informed guesses and collect data around those, cleverly excavating the truth. But it’s much easier to just ask people. This can be as simple as sending an email to your entire list: Hi there! We want to be 100 percent positive that we’re giving you exactly what you need from us. If you have a minute to spare, please reply to this email with one to two sentences describing who you are, what kind of business you run, and the number-one thing you’re hoping to get help with from us. (Location 672)review - Note: On Figuring out why your customers use you.
To start, create a new spreadsheet with two tabs: one for your primary who segments, the other for your primary why segments. (Location 699)review - Note: defining why will also help with the what
We all benefit from asking our customers the right questions and then finding patterns in the answers. Though manual and a bit tedious, this is a fantastic way for you to understand in their own words who your customers, both current and future, are and what they need from you. (Location 754)review - Tags: blue
What you’re looking for are patterns. What are people saying again and again and again? And which ones are outliers that you can safely exclude from the big picture? (Location 758)review - Tags: blue
For example, you could do much of this segmentation entirely over email by using special “link triggers” that allow people to self-segment without ever leaving their inbox. They just click the link that represents their answer to a question and your database is updated automatically. (Location 781)review - Tags: blue
Ultimately, every customer wants to know: How can this help me? (Location 802)review - Tags: blue
According to a study done by Sumo (creators of a popular suite of opt-in tools), the average opt-in rate for a website is 2 percent. (Location 813)review - Tags: blue
What you’ll be offering will be: –Contained. “Here’s exactly what you’ll get.” (Location 840)review - Tags: blue
Transformative. “After you go through and apply what I have to offer, here’s how things will be different for you.” –Low Impact. “For the next fourteen days, we’ll send you easy-to-follow, personalized lessons that’ll help you …” –Follow-Up. “If you liked what I covered in this podcast episode on the dos and don’ts of weight loss, you’ll love our free, in-depth …” –Empathetic. “We know that you’ve been struggling …” (Location 842)review - Tags: blue
Your landing page should reiterate the action that brought someone to the page. If they clicked on an ad targeting stay-at-home moms with a special offer on an energy multivitamin, the headline should repeat, sometimes verbatim, the ad copy that they clicked on. (Location 906)review - Tags: blue
When deciding on the landing page you’ll be setting up for each of your offers, it probably makes sense to instead think in terms of pages. You’re probably going to eventually want to have quite a few pages, each sent traffic by a particular set of ads, a particular event you appeared at, a particular podcast episode you were interviewed on, and so on. (Location 947)review - Tags: blue - Note: create hyperfocused landing pages.
Your offer is designed to bridge the gap for someone who is afflicted by a specific type of problem and identifies in a particular way. The job of the supporting copy on the landing page—that is, everything around the opt-in form—is to reinforce the need, urgency, and assurance of reaching this tomorrow. (Location 956)review - Tags: blue
Quizzes Another segmentation and lead-generation technique is creating quizzes. Chanti Zak, the “Quiz Funnel Queen,” has helped a number of companies replace their usual opt-in forms with quiz funnels. (Location 1013)review - Note: This could be an interesting way to get people in on the e-ink side. Ask them about their needs and then recommend a device accordingly.
From the perspective of the person taking the quiz, the benefit is that by giving up a few bits of information, you’ll be routed to exactly what you need. You’ll often find quizzes used on e-commerce stores for helping people find their perfect outfit or whatever else. (Location 1017)review
When set up correctly, a new subscriber will be added with a name and email address, and this new subscriber will also have all the associated segmentation data (i.e., answers to questions) enriching their new record. (Location 1023)review
At RightMessage, we’re doing exactly this. You join our free email course and you’re shown a simple questionnaire that starts with a rather inoffensive question: “If we could help you do just ONE thing, what would that be?” (Location 1033)review
You can also segment someone entirely from within your email marketing software, and without the expense of paying for quiz or survey software or adding a lot of friction, by adding additional fields to opt-in forms. This is done by adding what are called “link triggers.” These are special links that virtually all email platforms support that, when clicked, can further segment a subscriber. (Location 1052)review
Those looking for information weren’t being pitched on something relevant to them. It wasn’t until I started to promote the call to action to join a free crash course on freelancing that I started to see both higher engagement and higher quality. What was being offered was so much more aligned with what the actual people consuming my content were looking for. (Location 1074)review - Note: Give people information when they are looking for information. Selling can come later.
Irrelevant communication leads to people tuning out and thinking they’re at the wrong place. (Location 1092)review
Here’s a general outline of what you should be sending: –Immediately: You’re at the Right Place –+1 day: Here’s What You’ll Become –+1 day: Here’s Someone Like You –+1 day: Here’s What’s Next (Location 1196)review - Note: Steps of a Welcome Sequence
My friend Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers, who is probably the best copywriter I’ve ever met, likes to say that the job of every line of copy is to get someone to keep reading. (Location 1224)review
You want to position your brand as that archetypal mentor who’s going to bring a person from where they are today to where they need to be tomorrow, taking them from zero to hero. (Location 1279)review
By giving someone a vision of tomorrow, you can start laying out the foundation for the problem. (Location 1293)review
You need to make it clear throughout all of your communication, and especially when you go to sell, that there are two outcomes: –To continue what they’re doing now and stay in the World of Today. For Jane, the part-time designer, this means to continue to mess around with night and weekend projects that give her even less time with her family. –To move to the World of Tomorrow. Complete ownership over Jane’s time. More quality time spent with family and friends. The security that comes with knowing that she’s her own boss. (Location 1295)review
The problem is what happens if they continue to remain in the World of Today. The solution is to move to the World of Tomorrow. (Location 1301)review
Lead magnets come in all forms, but here are a few of the most common: –Free reports –White papers –E-books –Checklists –Infographics –Cheat sheets –Automated, “evergreen” on-demand webinars –Email courses (Location 1437)review
The way to do this is to deliver a post-opt-in Accountability Sequence that’s designed to walk someone through the thing you sent them. (Location 1454)review
Cheat sheets: My friend Amy Hoy created one of the first great lead magnets for a programming framework called Ruby on Rails back in the mid-2000s. Many developers who were trying to understand the framework struggled to know how everything worked “under the hood”—and, let’s face it, no one wants to read through stacks of technical documentation. (Location 1487)review - Note:todo. How to choose the right e-Ink tablet for you.