Revealing Ship 30's Million-Dollar Marketing Strategy | Espresso Hour E13

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is, this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are once again hyped up on caffeine. And we're back in our desks today after getting to do that in person one. That was a lot of fun. Having one down here.

That was a lot of fun. I feel like the in person adds a different layer. You get to. You get to see we're real people. We're real people walking the streets of Miami.

We have legs that. I think that was the biggest one is like, we actually have legs. We're not just upper bodies and torsos and, and, and hats. But I think we definitely should do some more in person ones. Whether we rent out a studio, just occasionally get together, and maybe that one will be a little bit longer.

The other benefit of the in person Dickie is everyone gets to see how tall you are with until they see the legs. They think you're. You're short and you're. You're tall. You're a tall guy.

I'm like five foot seven. That's the number one thing people say. I guess my camera, like, faces down, but.

All right, whatever.

Enough, enough on that. We got a lot to dig through today. What do we want to talk about? What are we thinking? I know we jammed a little bit on doing our entire marketing strategy. Should we go with that?

Yeah, I think it'd be helpful for people to see the breakdown of our whole marketing funnel for ship 30 and how we think about stacking free value on the top, how we bring people in, how we educate them, how we nurture them, and then down to these six emails that we send before every cohort. These six emails are how we trust generate. I'd say the lion's share of those signups that happened in that. That last week.

We.

We run these same six emails over and over and over again. So I think it'd be helpful for people to hear that.

All right, cool. Where do you want to start? The top of funnel, the email course. What do you think?

Yeah, so I think the very beginning, you know, we. We talk about this is with ship 30. The biggest upgrade that we made was buying this domain, start writing online, and building a educational email course for it. It's like an ultimate guide plus an educational email course over seven days. And we say all the time, there's life before that asset and there's life after that asset. And the creation of that asset was a huge accelerant on ship 30's. Ship 30 as a business because it allowed us so much easier to capture emails and to nurture people. And maybe we've said this in a previous episode, but our opt in rate on that page is like what is it, 70%?

45 I think is the official number. And if it's relevant to like the opt in rate at the end of a Twitter thread is like 70, 75 because it's hyper specific but like cold traffic, not quite as high. So we've done a little bit of analysis, but yeah, I mean we made that in I think it was August of 21 around like September, October. And then the realization was we didn't want to just create this ultimate guide that people downloaded then never look at again. Like if you look at your downloads folder of the number of content upgrades that you've, you know, downloaded from a website, no one ever looks at them. So rather than just have this ultimate guide that no one ended up using, we made this seven day email course that walked them through that entire guide every single day, right? So they built the habit of revisiting it and everyone drives back to that. And so that was the first thing we did was we built that guide and then we built that email course and we didn't collect emails for the first eight months of ship 30. And then since then it's up to 70 something thousand just pretty much from that single entry point.

A couple things to point out here. One, this has been so valuable for our business that that's why our ghostwriting program is now training ghostwriters on how to build these educational email courses because it has been so effective for us and we think every company should have this second is what most people do to capture emails is on their company site. So this would be us putting this on ship30.com or something. On their company site they have an email opt in and their opt in literally just says subscribe to our newsletter. Which is sort of the equivalent of saying type in your email and we'll bother you. Right? You're not, you're not telling the person what they get. You're literally just saying, give me your name and I will bother you at my leisure. And the second thing that people do to capture emails is they offer a discount. So someone has been on your company page for 5 seconds and then this pop up appears and it's like, hey, before you've even had a chance to figure out what I do or what I'm selling, do you want 10% off? And that also isn't very effective. Because a, at that point point the person doesn't need a discount, they need to be educated. They need to know like what are, what are you even offering here? And those two ways are how most people capture emails. And as a result their email opt in rates are like 10% or less. Like sometimes it's even as low as 1% of web traffic. But when you drive people to an individual landing page with no other information on it, no menu, no, no nothing on its own domain, and you make clear the offer, the educational offer, type in your email. Over the next five days, over the next seven days, over the next 10 days, we're going to show you how to do X, Y, Z. The opt in rate goes up so high. And then what you pointed out Dickie, is relevancy really matters if we're linking to our landing page. Start writing online. At the end of a start writing online related Twitter thread, the opt in rates like 70 or 80%. Whereas if it's cold traffic, the opt in rate's still better than the other ways, but it's lower. So what that shows you is over time, and this is what we're going to build over the next year, is you can create multiple landing pages and educational email courses related to the different content buckets that you write about. So if we're writing about how to start writing on Twitter, we should drive people to over the next five days we're going to show you how to start writing on Twitter versus LinkedIn should go to a LinkedIn specific educational email course versus. So the more that you can make it relevant, the higher the opt in rate, the easier it is to collect customers. The more your CAC is zero, right? Your customer acquisition cost is nothing. The easier it is to nurture those people and sell them on your product, core service, whatever.

Yeah, I think there are a couple nuance points there. The first is people on Twitter. The common way is hey, I just read a valuable thread. I talk about these things in my newsletter. Versus hey, I talk about these valuable things. I just give you a bunch of value. Here's something more educational, right? Immediately bridges them in versus hey, just join the newsletter. I might talk about this sometime. The second is our email course. Open rates are like 60 to 70%, almost 70 on most of them. And that's for over seven days. So what is that doing? It's training people to open our emails from the very beginning. And you can see how like a lot of people will give away something like they've learned that you should have some kind of Incentive for the email opt in page. But it's a one and done and there's no continuing education versus hey, here's download this. They go to the ultimate guide. And then over the next seven days we just strengthen that relationship over and over and over again. It's here's more value, drive back to that page that you probably forgot about. More value drive back to that page. And people read the whole thing. And so a lot of things happen at once. We build trust, we build like a habit around actually opening our emails and reading them rather than just hey, here are like my 20 favorite books that I know like Tim Ferriss has on his. So it's better than hey, just join my newsletter. But it's here's my 20 favorite books and then I don't talk to you again for like three weeks. I just put you in my newsletter and that's it. Right. He has such an opportunity, everyone has an opportunity to build trust over that first week of entering your ecosystem that I think a lot of people are leaving stuff on the table.

Yeah, that, that nuance is really important because a lot of people default to I'll just tell them to join my newsletter. And the reality is a, because it's not as specific.

Right.

Like when you have a educational email course, it's very specific to a certain promise or topic or whatever. That's why the opt in rate is so high. Because when someone knows they're going to get something over those five days, they're more likely to type in their email versus subscribe to my newsletter and maybe it'll be relevant to you at some point in the future. Point A, point B is that, and I'm sure a lot of people listening have felt this is, you know, you need to start collecting emails, but you don't necessarily want to sign yourself up. For now, I'm going to start writing a newsletter every week for the rest of my life. Okay, so how do you start collecting emails without signing yourself up for a weekly newsletter? Point people do an educational email course instead. And what that allows is it you get to begin the email collection process and you can kind of postpone the I don't need to start my newsletter yet. And what you can do, and this is kind of a nice segue into the next step of our funnel Dickey, is you get them in with the educational email course and then at the end of the educational email course, you move them into your evergreen newsletter. So people who go through start writing online end up then being moved into our evergreen newsletter, which is our digital writing compass. And so think of that as like the second piece that you can build so you have a really effective front end that has a really high opt in rate. And then the second piece, which is the retention and it's the nurturing and it's the. You're keeping your list warm over time. Is that evergreen newsletter. You know, every week we send out some sort of digital writing tip strategy framework.

Yeah, we only have this with the benefit of hindsight, but you look at all the threads that we've written on journaling, on general kind of personal growth, we've left a lot on the table in terms of conversion to email from those because we only had one opt in. So if we could go and do this whole thing over, we would have built those. Hey, if I'm talking about LinkedIn, here's how to start writing on LinkedIn. That opt in rate would be even higher than start writing online if I put it on LinkedIn right on Twitter. Same idea. And so that's kind of our next vision is build out all of those specific opt ins for all of our content buckets. And then, you know, so right now when someone joins start running online, let's walk them through the whole process there. So we give them a seven day email course and then over three days after that we recap everything and we soft pitch them on joining the next cohort of ship 30. This just makes them aware, right? We just gave them seven days of value. Hey, if you want to learn this and actually put it into practice, join the next cohort. Often the next cohort isn't for a couple months and so the, the purchase rate and the, the, you know, upgrade rate on that is relatively low. I'd say about 60 to 70% of our new students come during the last week, every single cohort. Because why wait? Why join something early when you could wait till last minute and decide that's just kind of the problem with running a cohort based course. So after, if they don't join, we then put them in our newsletter. But again, our newsletter right now is all about digital writing in general. So if someone comes in from a Twitter thread that was here's how to build a daily writing habit. They take the start writing online course and then the initial emails in our evergreen newsletter aren't necessarily tailored to their exact problem. So that's another way we could improve is if we have these different opt ins, you can then understand where someone came in. And those initial nurture emails are even more relevant to them because right but obviously this is longer term and this is kind of the, the optimization that you can do only once you have all the data that we have. But yeah, right. When someone completes the email course and then doesn't join, we send them a weekly email every Monday on some kind of digital writing topic. And that kind of bridges the gap between someone coming in our ecosystem learning from us until the next Ship 30 cohort, where ultimately the goal is to take every person who's joined, start writing online over the last three months, two months since our last cohort, and then pitch them to join the cohort right before it starts. And so we pull everyone out of the newsletter, we, we send a week long series of emails and then I know we're going to talk about that a little bit, but that's really the full flow. And we repeat that quarter after quarter after quarter, which is why we're able to do 500, 600 students per cohort on average.

Yeah. And there's, you know, six emails that we use over and over and over again in that last week that we'll talk through in a sec. But a couple of things that you said to he that I want to flag. So one is, you know, if you don't have a cohort based business, like we said, the conversion from the email course to the soft pitch to ship 30 the first time, right. Because the cohort is three months out and it's also higher price point, you know, like above 500 bucks. Different sort of conversion, different sort of process. If you have a hundred $150 async product, that would be the place to put it, right. So you bring people in to the educational email course and then at the end you go, hey, here's a recap, here's everything that we just covered. And by the way, if you want the expanded version of this, here's the $150, you know, workbook or mini course or whatever. The key here though, and this is what so many people misunderstand is it's all about relevance. You can't bring someone, you know, you can't write a thread about chat GPT and then drive people to a landing page about, you know, entrepreneurship. And then at the end of your 5 day educational email course about entrepreneurship, pitch them a product on like, you know, launching a CPG brand or whatever. Right. Because those are three different topics there. There's no through line. What you want is, you want, you know, the Twitter thread or the LinkedIn post or the content on the front end. Here's how to start writing with chat. CBT goes to landing page. Here's how to start writing with ChatGPT goes to $99 product. Here's everything you need to start writing online with ChatGPT. Right? You want it just to keep repeating itself. And at each phase all you're really doing and we have, we have a great framework for this, but it's all you, all you're really doing is you're just taking the same topic and you're just expanding it. And how can you expand it? You know, it's the same, it's that same list. Give them more tips, give them more examples, point out more mistakes, give them more reasons, break more beliefs. Right. Point out more benefits, paint more outcomes. You're just give them more examples, provide more templates. You're just giving them more. And I think where a lot of people go wrong with this strategy is they're like I wrote about topic A, subscribe to my newsletter about topic B, buy my product about topic C. And as a result there's no through line. And then they sit there and they go, none of this works. The strategy doesn't work. Nobody's buying. And it's like, no, it's because you're trying to do three different things versus expanding one thing.

In the old days when Chip 30 was really just like a slack channel, that low ticket product was the pitch on the back end of the email course. It was 150, $250 back when a long time ago. Now that the price is substantially higher, we could go and make $150, start writing online. And this might be an idea for us to go do like start writing online mini course. Here's everything you need that we could take the and more than likely what it would be, would be the first module of ship 30 reskinned into the exact way to get started. Because that's kind of the first part of ship 30. What are all the steps you need to do just to prepare to write every single day? And that logical flow of content to email course to low ticket product, to potentially higher ticket product should all be about the same thing, just expanded like you said.

Actually Dickie, that's a, that's a great point. You know what we should do is break out the first module and frame it as a try before you buy. And so it costs, you know, 100 bucks or 150 bucks. And then if you go through it and you, and it's valuable in and of itself but if you go through it and go this is amazing. I want more. You can roll the 150 bucks into the next cohort. That, that would be a great upgrade for us. The other, the other thing you said too, I just want to point out is like, we left a lot of subscribers and money on the table by not having more relevant and different landing pages and educational email courses for people. But, but the challenge is, you know, people can really get in their own way by feeling like they need to build 10 of these before they begin. And the reality is like a good rule of thumb is you should just build one and be able to have the first one cranking before you worry about, you know, trying to build the empire. And it's like, even though in hindsight we've, we definitely left a bunch on the table, I also feel like we, this was really the only way to prioritize it. And now, you know, two years later, now we're at the stage where it makes sense to start building the other ones.

Yeah, I think it's one product, one avatar, one channel like Alex hermosi says, to $1 million. And then I think from 1 to 3, you build some kind of backend to extend LTV on that product that you got to 1 million. And then once you're at 3, it's really a game of taking what you did to get to three and creating new profit centers, which is what we're in the business of doing right now, of finding different ways to take that model and then potentially apply it to a different, like a related niche. Maybe not beginner writers. Now we're doing ghost writing, things like that. But yeah, do not think, okay, now I need to go write five email courses and have five opt ins. It's get one right, understand how to do it, figure out how to extend LTV from that, whether that's raising the prices, having a back end, having community, all those different ways, and then say, now I need to optimize the emails I'm collecting. Speaking of emails, why don't we talk about email marketing, which is really the lion's share outside of referrals, because so many of Ship 30's new students come from referrals from people within Ship 30 who have such a good time. They tell their friends, they tell everyone, they're like, you got to come do this. And it's just better when they come back as an alumni to have new people that they kind of know like, oh, look out for this, or this part's really fun. So outside of referrals, emails are the number one way that we drive signups.

Yeah, there's. I mean, we've written so many emails over the past two years, and pretty much every cohort, I'd say maybe aside from the this one and like the one before it, every cohort, we would rewrite these emails from scratch because we were always testing, you know, could we. What's better? What's more enticing? What's more interesting to people? What's going to work? And we've kind of landed on these six emails that I think categorically do a really good job of priming the person and educating them on why this is going to help them. And so I'm gonna walk. I'll walk through the six emails. And it's worth noting that, like, Dickie, you said the majority of the sales come in that last week or two before the cohort. And I think part of it is because there's urgency. But I also think that a lot, of course, creators lean on that as sort of like the primary reason or almost like an excuse where they go, well, most of my sales come in the last week or two weeks, you know, and that's just it. And in reality, that's like 50% of it. And the other 50% is you need, like, don't be afraid to squeeze your list. Like, don't be afraid to take everyone who you've been feeding free value to and go, I am now going to hard pitch you for 10 straight days. And I think the reframe that has helped us a lot is we don't want people just sitting idle on the list. It's like, we're. We're either actively educating you and showing you how much we know about this topic, or we're pitching you and we either want you to buy or we want you to unsubscribe. Because it's either you're fully bought in and your game for the adventure and you want to learn and you buy ship 30 and you're in the ecosystem and you go for it, or this is not for you, and we'd rather you unsubscribe than just sit on the list. And I think so many times people are afraid to squeeze their list that they're like, no, I want. I want the number and the size of my list to be as big as possible. I'm afraid of unsubscribes. But then you don't realize you're compromising revenue as a result.

Yeah, it's. If you provide value like we do for 12 straight weeks, you have to ask at some point. And. Okay, so let's talk about these six emails. But I also think sharing the sweepstakes tactic that we used would be pretty interesting for people on in terms of how we. So which one do you want to do first?

Okay, let's end with the sweepstakes because that's an awesome, like, mic drop at the end. Okay, so these six emails, I'll go through each one and kind of do like a. Just a quick synopsis of what it is and why it works. So the first one is the transformation email. And the way we frame it is where would you be today if you had started a year ago? And the reason we picked this is because so often when people are thinking about writing or thinking about doing anything, you know, they postpone it over and over and over again. They say, I'm too busy. And then all of a sudden a year goes by and it's not like anything in their life changed. They're still busy. It's just imagine where you would be if you had confronted that busyness and started a year ago. And when we first started ship 30 in that first year, we didn't even. We couldn't really point to anything because ship 30 wasn't even a year old. But now that ship 30 is over two years old, we actually have proof points where we can say, here's where these people are a year later. And so it's cool to use it as a. Here's where these other people are a year later and point to some success stories. But more importantly, frame it for the person like, your life's not going to change. You're still going to be busy. But this is where you would have been today if you had started a year ago. And that mental flip is really, really effective.

I have a funny story about that one. There were a handful of people in our onboarding survey and we should do a whole. We should do a whole episode on onboarding and offboarding surveys and like, gut mining insights from that. But we ask what was the, you know, number one thing that got you kind of over the fence? Like, you before this, you might have read emails like, what ultimately convinced you? And I was reading through them the other day before January, and a handful of people said, I read your. Where would you be if you started a year ago email a year after reading it for the first time. And I thought that was really interesting. So they read it like late 21. And then literally a year went by and they got hit with the same style of email. And we're like, oh, man, this actually just happened. Like, where would I be when I read that email the first time? And I thought that was just a really cool story of you sometimes just have to be reminded to take action on something and to see a come full circle. Like, that I thought was cool.

This. That's awesome. This is also one of the cool benefits of, like, really getting into email marketing and ConvertKit, because, like, Dickie, you've sent me screenshots where you'll see someone who's opened, you know, every email for a year, and then finally a year later, they take action. And that's that sort of compounding you don't really get to see in the first six or 12 months of building a digital business. But when you start getting into year two, three, four, you can literally see in ConvertKit like, wow, this person has opened 78 emails and then they finally bought. And that the leverage on your time from that is so cool.

And they'd been pitched five times in that time, you know, like, there have been five cohorts that they actively said no to, didn't unsubscribe, and then maybe it wasn't the right time, but we've dramatically underestimate how busy people are and that people just put things off. Right. So you have to continue to remind them.

Exactly. So second email. So after the transformation email, the next team, and we send these basically just day after day after day for a week straight. Second email is, yeah, Monday to Friday. And the second email is some sort of proof point of financial outcome. So the email that we send is a case study of a shipper who shared, you know, now they're making $6,000 a month by writing online. And a good rule of thumb is the more you're charging for your course, your product, whatever. So the higher the price point, the more that you need to point to some sort of financial roi. Like, there's a reason why, like, what is college? Even though college isn't this anymore. But, like, the idea of college 50 or 100 years ago was it costs a lot, but it costs a lot because financial roi, you're going to get paid more in society. Right. And the counterpoint is there's a reason why some of the smartest, most interesting material you can buy in, like, a $15 paperback book. And this is what I think a lot of people misunderstand about pricing, is that when someone's buying something, if it's just interesting, you can't charge as much for it because people are like, yeah, that's interesting. But like, there's a lot of interesting things for free on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. I don't, I don't need to pay a lot for that. Whereas the more that you increase the price point, the more you need to point to some sort of your. This is the financial ROI for you. Here's proof that this financial ROI exists. So that's why that second email is really important. Because we want to show people this isn't just interesting stuff. You can actually unlock financial outcomes with these skills.

Yeah, that one works really well because what they do is click on. It's a lease. Right. I think that email is Elise, who's probably making more than six at this point. She probably up in the 1520 because she's just crushing it writing for a ton of awesome people. Like, I think she writes Matt d' Avella's news newsletter. Some other people like Zapier. She does. So really cool to see her that we need to update that email, but. Exactly. People just want to see that there's some kind of person like them. Now if we wanted to get hyper specific with that, like talking optimization, we'd figure out a way to create case studies that were more relevant to the reader, somehow gathering data of their current situation, their current goals, what they're struggling with. And that email should actually be five emails that say, hey, this person is in your exact situation. This goes back to the relevancy. The more relevant you can make every email. But again, not something you need to worry about at this stage. We're still not at that stage. But in the long run, those are the type of little optimizations that you have to make to take things kind of to the next level.

The third email. So after that is then the price anchoring email. So what this does is it educates the person on why you're charging what you're charging. And it specifically does it in a way that makes it appear as a value. And so the example I love using is, what's the easiest way to sell a $10,000 watch? You put it beside a $50,000 watch, all of a sudden the $10,000 watch seems like a steal. Right? And so this third email that we send is, you know, ship 30 should cost $10,000, but we're only charging and then insert price. And the reason that we do this, well, a, because we get that feedback all the time. Like so many times we get messages or emails or whatever from people who are like, I've spent six figures on courses over the past decade. And this is easily a five figure course. Like, and so because we got that feedback, that's how we came up with this idea for this email. And then second is again, you want to frame, you want to create the context for the price in that you are getting so much measurable value here and almost like going out of your way to list all of the things that make it that valuable. So that way when you tell them, and this is what it costs, by the time they hear that number, they're like, wow, that's really cheap relative to all of the value that you're giving me.

Yeah, that entire email is a full breakdown of every single thing they're going to get almost by day. It's very long. It's for someone who is skeptical of like what's actually in here. So those first two emails, we can talk about sequencing, but the first two kind of make them aware of they're more emotional and some people will buy from that. And then the middle is rational, like, what am I actually getting here? And then so you explain that. And the subject line of that one is a quote actually from one of our offboarding surveys. And so that's why we wrote it is as we've raised the price throughout this, we've continued to only raise the price by $100 per cohort, which we did for two years when we added an additional thousand dollars of value. Because we very much prioritize getting feedback. People saying it's a laughably. A laughable. No absurd amount of value at a laughably low price. That was what Jeff said. And when we heard that, we're like, that's our new pricing model. Is, is this providing an absurd amount of value at a laughably low price? Relatively. And so to raise that price, we had to continue to add an insane amount of value. And so, yeah, that I still remember when we got that quote, it's like, that's our new mo.

That's a really good way of thinking about it too. Yeah. Starting with the emotional and then moving into the rational. And then I would say, and then at the end is like full fomo, like you are going to miss out. So then the email after the price anchor, what we send is this is, this is education, but education in a, in a very rational, logical way, which is you're educating them on the challenges and the benefits. So the first half of the email is we know that you're struggling with these things and just you're listing them out like, we know that you're struggling with idea generation. We know that you hate staring at a blank page. We know that you've tried other writing programs in the past, and they weren't able to get you over the hump and xyz, Right. Like, we were just listing out all the things that we know that you're feeling and what this does. And the reason this is so important is because it makes the person who's reading really trust and feel understood. It makes them feel like, if you know those things about me, then you understand how to help me, and that's important. And then the second half of the email is going literally one by one, like, this is the first challenge you're experiencing. Here's how we solve it and the benefit of solving it. Here's the second challenge you're experiencing. Here's the benefit of solving it and how we help you solve it. And you're literally just going 1 to 1, 2 to 2, 3 to 3, 4 to 4. And so what that does is it links all of the things that they're struggling with with all of the solutions and then all of the benefits of those solutions. And you're very clearly positioning your thing as it's not buy my course, it's solve all these problems. And here's how we help you solve those problems, and then here's all the outcomes and that you unlock and all the benefits of solving those problems.

And anyone can do that exercise. And we had them do that in the Captain's table when they're talking about their niche, when you're talking about whatever product or service you're going to offer, very easy exercises. What are the 10 biggest problems that are holding this person back from accomplishing this outcome that can become your content strategy? You just literally go down that list of like, how do I solve each of these? Help them do that. And so when you get inside the reader's head and what's interesting on that, we have written and rewritten that email with the exact words from our onboarding survey, where we ask people, what's the biggest thing that's holding back your writing? And we use those exact words where, as you're reading that email, it's like, how do you know that these are exactly the problems that I'm facing? Well, we've helped thousands of people in your exact situation. And so it's again back to hyper relevance. It just feels like this email is being personally written to solve my problems. I don't know how they're doing it, but they start to trust that this could actually help.

I'm glad you said that. Because just flag for everyone. Such a copywriting hack, like, literally take the words that someone says to you and say them back to them. Copy, paste, write them down, say them right back. And they're going to go, how did you know? Because I'm literally saying the words you said to me back to you. So that email, very, very effective. And then you start moving into fomo. And FOMO is the first email that we send is basically just a long list of shipper success stories. We're just like, here's who's crushing it. And it's like, we want you to see firsthand that people who take action unlock all of these things that we just told you about. The email before this, and it's just hit after hit after hit. This person quit their job and is making money. This person quit their job and is making money. This person's going viral and getting millions of views. This person's going viral. This person's got a huge audience. Like, just over and over and over again, outcomes. And the reason, again, it's. It's just simple human nature. Like, when you see other people succeeding and doing the thing that you want to do, you can't help but be like, well, I want those same outcomes as well. And I think it goes back to, don't be afraid to hard pitch your list like that. The whole point of putting in so much effort, you know, Dickie, you and I put in literally like thousands of hours of giving away free information and education and material. The whole point of doing that is to eventually go, I can help you further. It's just not going to be free anymore. So don't be afraid to say that.

Yeah. And where these all come together in this final day. So we send three emails on Friday. So it's one email per day until Friday, where Friday we hit them three times, early morning, middle of day, and end of day. And the whole framework with that is to make them tangibly see people who have joined. So we do our introduction thread on Friday morning where we have everyone who's joined the course come and talk to each other on Twitter just to kind of get the momentum rolling. And we link to that. So anyone on the fence goes, wow, there are actually other people who are in this right now. And it just makes it more tangible of like, okay, I'm not joining this, like, Internet thing that I don't know if there's anyone in there. It's like, no, they're real people. And then the second one is. So that's like the initial reminder. It's like, hey, you're going to miss out on all the fun. Then it's success, more success stories. And that one is just six. And it's a link to our YouTube videos, links to our testimonial page, links to everything. Again, like, these are real people. And then the most powerful one is the one that comes at the end of the day where we pulled quotes from our onboarding survey asking people why they joined so that they can see that other people who have already joined feel just like them. And so I'm going to read a couple of them. We just go straight through and say we mentioned things like, what's the number one thing holding you back? And we quote in italics, like, seven people saying, you know, I've wanted to do this forever. I've just struggled with getting started. And this felt like the exact way for me to actually get there. And so again, it goes back into, like, how are you having this conversation with me? It feels like you're tailoring this exactly to my specific circumstance. And we just literally run through that. So again, it's like, not only are the real people in it, not only are people having success, but the people joining are just like you, too. And that all coming in one day back to back to back is why there are a lot of people who wait till the very last minute before we shut enrollment, and then they join, like, last second, and then they're off and running.

Yep. And pro, pro tip, because what you just said is so important, pro tip is if you haven't launched a course or product or education product yet, and so you're thinking about, you know, how do I set up all of these things? And you go, I don't know what those those are yet. I don't know those answers. I don't know those reasons. I don't know those challenges. You should do your first cohort for free, or you should give away your product for free. And you should go talk to every single person who does it. Get their language, ask them questions like, give away the whole first version for free so that you can accelerate this whole process. And then you have all the information to play with. And writing these emails is really easy. But what people do is they go, no, I'm going to charge for it upfront, and I have nothing to point to. And I don't even really know or understand the person that I'm trying to help. And I've talked to no one. But you should buy it for a thousand dollars. Like, you can see how backwards that logic is.

Yep, exactly. And the original ship 30 held 35 one on one interviews to get that exact language. All that survey taking copious amounts of notes. But so that's the whole FOMO sequence. What happens from there is we just put them back in their news in the newsletter and so they don't buy. What do they get the following Monday, another valuable educational email. It's like, hey, now wasn't the time. Let's continue this relationship where they're going to get 12 more weeks with the occasional CTA to join ship 30 or some success story or something like that, and then the process starts all over. So anything else on the email side before we kind of talk about the sweepstakes and how that's working?

No, I mean one, one other email that we found that's really helpful is at the end too. You can also just send them like one giant recap. Here's everything you get just one more time. You know, even though we spell it out really clearly on the landing page and we do all sorts of education, like there's just always people that don't read the landing page or for whatever reason and then they email being like, does it include this? Do I get this? So one more easy email you can send is just, again, here's a recap of everything that you get. Live sessions, times, you know, slide decks, products, bonuses. What? Just one long list. Here's everything that you get.

Yeah, just a reminder. Hey, and that's what the very last email says as a reminder. Here's literally the exact thing you're going to get. And then we run it back for the next 12 weeks, providing value and then starts over. So let's share that golden nugget tactic. So we got this from like a old, old Alex Formosi video that I don't think very many people have watched. But the problem when you start to build a large email list is you actually don't know who your hottest subscribers are like. And you want to ideally only pitch those people because the opt in, the open rate's going to be higher, the emails are going to resonate more, and these people have actively told you they're interested. So we ran a sweepstakes this time to take our list and identify all of the people that are interested in joining. How do we do that? We sent two emails that said, hey, for the upcoming Ship 30 cohort, we're going to give away three spots for free. Click this link to opt in. But we didn't just say that because if most people would see that and say you know, very little chance that I actually win. So then we said 50 people who join are going to get 350 or $250 off. I can remember which one we went with 250. And then everyone who joins gets $50 off. So no matter what, you get 50 bucks off if you click this link. What that did was tell us of our entire list who is actively thinking about joining ship 30. Because if you didn't click that and you didn't, you're clearly just not interested in this upcoming cohort. And that gives us a lot of interesting data where our Friday kind of hard pitch emails we don't send to everyone. We only send to that people who have opted in and said, I clearly want to be a part of ship 30. That prevents like the burnout of your list where you know, maybe people weren't interested yet, but they might be in the future, but you sent them too many emails and then you lost them. And we're able to do some analysis of like, okay, of our whole list, only this many people joined. But of the people who opted in this, you know, opted in for the sweepstakes, the conversion rate was much higher. Like we were obviously targeting that messaging better. Another small psychological framing is so we run the sweepstakes and then we send out the email to everyone who won the three spots and we put them with big pictures at the top and then everyone goes, oh man, I didn't win. But then we say, but you won second place, which was $250 in upgrade credit. Not in a discount. That is very subtle. But what's interesting about the upgrade credit is we say, hey, we have credited you $250 to upgrade to the next cohort that is going to expire if you don't join this one. So you could always join again later, but you're going to have to pay full price. And this goes to loss aversion versus gain. People would way rather avoid losing something than get feel like they're gaining something. And so if you're sitting there on Friday with that, you won the 250 in upgrade credit and that's about to expire. And you know you lose that forever, you're more likely than oh, I have a discount, I don't have to use it. And same thing, same coupon code, but works way better in every you, you hear this and you're like no way that works. And then you realize it works on you. Where anything scarcity based or urgency based, that's loss aversion, you end up converting at a higher clip. And we've seen that kind of in the data.

This strategy is so effective. I feel like we're going to use this a lot, you know, because it just, it allows you to get so hyper targeted. And the thing that I want to sort of end on with this idea, it goes back to that Zig Ziglar quote, Dickie, because I think when you explain these things and we've seen this with other creators or other business owners and things is like when you explain how these tactics work, oftentimes the response that I've heard back for years is people being like I don't want to do that stuff or I don't want to be salesy or I don't, I don't want to do insert whatever you know their reason is. And the Zig Ziglar quote is, you know, if you really feel like the thing that you're selling can have a life changing outcome for someone, it is your moral responsibility to do whatever you have to do to help them get across the finish line. You know, and by doing tactics like this, it's what you're really doing is you're just lighting a fire and you're going, I'm giving you a reason to take action. We know it works like we've had 6,000 people go through ship 30. Like we know if you follow the instructions on the box and you do the things that we tell you to do, you will be successful. We know that. So now our job is to help the person however they need to rationalize it for themselves. Help them get out of a place where they just sit there and go, I really would love to do this but right and now we, we give them these different reasons to go, okay, you know what, I'm finally going to take action. And then every time, 30 days later we're on the graduation call and people were like, I was so hesitant. You know, I really, I really felt like I couldn't do this and now I've had this life changing outcome. So I'm just, I want to share that because I think I notice so many creators not FOMO pitch their list. You, you know, be afraid to hard sell people, not create these like urgency related offers all in the name of like I don't want to be salesy. But really you're A, you're lying to yourself and B, it's not that being salesy is like immoral. It's if you really feel like the thing you're selling is that valuable then you should go out of your way to help people get across the finish line and actually do it.

Sales is not about persuasion. It's about empowering someone to make the best decision for them. And so rather than think I need to go use all these tactics just to convince them, it's I need to help them get to that decision point. Because the truth is most people don't want to make decisions because that sets them up for potentially being wrong. So you have to really make it easy for them to make that decision by giving them all the information they need. Make them believe that they can do it. Make them know that you're supporting them. Show them the opportunity cost if they don't take that action. Like all those kind of buying beliefs that someone needs to have. That's the job of your email just to help them get to that eventual decision that you know will change everything for them. And that's what we've seen with ship 30, like very the number of people who say this was legitimately a life changing experience. We have enough of those in our testimonial board where it's like we're going to send emails, a lot of them in that last week because we have verifiable proof that this will change your life. And so we feel good about it. It's a lot of fun too.

And, and just the final, like, I want to just point this out for everyone. A digital business is very simple. I mean, look at the pieces that we just covered. You create content on Twitter, LinkedIn, insert whatever social platform you drive them to a specific landing page. Educational email course. Ours is startwritingonline.com at the end of the educational email course, you soft pitch them on whatever the product is, whether it's Async or an upcoming cohort. You move them into an evergreen newsletter because you want to keep showing them, hey, there's a lot you can learn from us. We really want to help you. And then before every cohort that week, before you run through these six emails, right? The transformation, financial outcome, price anchoring, challenges and benefits, success stories. And here's everything that you get one more time. And then if they buy, great, and if they don't, run it back and repeat. And that flow that we just articulated has generated millions of dollars. I think a lot of times people look at building some sort of product or course or education business as this really complicated thing. And in reality, everything we just articulated is essentially copywriting and a few SaaS, tools that cost like 20 bucks a month. It's really, you know, like it's actually a very, very simple business in that.

Playbook you just laid out. I would have done anything to have had when we just started. So hopefully, if you're listening to this, you had a big aha moment. Kind of take away with that as the exact thing you have to build now you're not going to be able to build that in a day, in a week. It took us two years. I think with the playbook we could have greatly condensed that time. But now this is the whole point of creating stuff on the Internet is people get to learn from your mistakes and your journey. And that's why we're sharing this. That's why I'm having so much fun with the espresso hours, because we get to talk through this journey a little bit and all of the lessons and realizations we've had so that listeners are able to, you know, put that into practice. And speaking of putting into practice, we want to do. If you leave a comment on this YouTube video, time stamping the moments that were the biggest aha's for you. So anything that clicked, if you leave three timestamps with this moment, this moment, this moment will enter you into a sweepstakes to win a free spot to the next Ship 30 cohort. So everyone who leaves a comment will reward one of you with a free spot to the next Ship 30 cohort. Because one, it's going to force you to actually think about what did I just learn so often? And we should say this at the end of every episode. It's easy to listen to something like this and feel good. But write up your takeaways. What did you learn? Share them on Twitter, share them with a friend, distill them. So you actually go from this and take action in some way. Because we shared a lot, a lot of tactics in here that easily just go in one, in, in one ear and out the other. But if you take the time to still share those takeaways with us, we'll throw you in the sweepstakes. But it's really for you. It's really for you to take these ideas, learn them and then actually go and do something with them.

Boom. I think, I think now, first of all, this is, I think going to be really helpful for people. And Dickie, we should just go down the list like all of the pieces of the business. We should do an episode on onboarding, should do an episode on offboarding and survey gathering. We should do an episode on the infrastructure. I think that would just be really helpful for people.

Yeah, leave a comment. Also with a question. And if you're on Apple Spotify, hit a five star review. Subscribe forward this to a friend that you think is in the digital business world that would find it interesting, find it valuable, and we will see you back here on the next episode of the Espresso Hour next week. Have a good one, y'. All.