Today’s training though is if you look at that sunshine growth model that we talked about in the intensive freelancing, it’s on the skills side of thing, and this is skills that you sell. So the skills that you sell are copywriting services, whatever, whatever, whatever. These are the skills that probably turned you into a copywriter.

Then everything else, on that sunshine growth model is all business y stuff.

So we rarely need to really talk about this at this level, talk about skills at this level.

However, I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately around optimizing. What do how do I optimize this thing?

And as we’re talking about a retainer offer being built on your standardized offer, the retainer again needs to mat it needs to build on the work that you did in that initial standardized offer, and the way to build on it is not by doing a bunch of new work, but by optimizing the work that you did. There is definitely a desire for that work out there for you to optimize.

So just keep that in mind. Suspend disbelief if you’re like, nobody really wants me to optimize. All they want is for me to keep churning out more work. Well, that might be that you’re possibly doing, working with the wrong clients to begin with. But what I wanna talk about today then is how do we optimize a thing? How do you start optimizing something?

And it’s tricky. Right? So we’re all gonna come at this from different angles, different amounts of experience.

So bear with me if you’re like, this is, obvious, Joe. I’m not trying to start at an obvious place, but I am trying to, like like, level set, like, where just make sure we’re all starting from the same, same place. So before, so backing up for me, when copywriting started to actually really click for me was when we started split testing it when I was at Intuit. Prior to that, it was a big guessing game, and I felt I felt frustrated by that.

I didn’t wanna guess at it. I don’t like that feeling. I don’t like that someone else can guess at my job and possibly win against me. There’s a little bit of competition there.

But if someone else can say, well, we should try it this way instead, and it’s very hard as a copywriter to say, no. Let’s not do it that way. Because then they go, well, why not? And it turns into a bit of a, a challenge I found. And maybe this isn’t your experience, but it was mine when I was in house at a big tech company.

Why are you right was always the question. And then when you could start testing it, then you could build up that, like, this is why I’m right because I’ve been right on these ones, and, here’s what we learned from it, etcetera etcetera. So it turns your job from this guessing game into something that’s really, measurable, and you know. It’s not just that others know, but you know if what you’re doing is performing well.

And that’s really important for a lot of type a’s. If I don’t know where everybody sits, but it’s pretty it’s I think it’s important for everybody. I can only speak as someone who is quite type a. For me, it’s very important to know how it’s working and to be able to say, this is what I did.

I rock. And I wanna have that experience, and I want everybody to have that too.

When I’ve been teaching optimization before, again, it doesn’t have to be experimentation all the time, but in most cases, it should be. There has to be a form of measurement going on that’s reliable, so keep that in mind. I was teaching one of my Boxcar team members, back before she was at Boxcar. She was, still at the other agency as it was wasn’t called the other agency.

It was called CH Agency, but she was there. And she was really frustrated with with testing and how to do it. And I said to her, it got to the place where in our conversation, I said, look. If you start from a place where you understand everything is always a little wrong, if you understand that you’re never right, then you can start optimizing.

Then you can, like, explore what that means, that nothing is ever right. If that doesn’t help you, throw it away. But if it does, just try to keep that in mind that we’re not aiming for perfection.

We are always challenging the thing we did before because the thing we did before was an educated guess. And in control even though it’s never been, like, tested as a control. We just control even though it’s never been, like, tested as a control. We just call it the control because that’s, like, the language you use when it’s really variation a, not a control. A control is typically just for everybody who doesn’t know, and that’s cool.

A control usually has to be, put up against something else and then beat it. You can’t just say my home page that I created on the clear blue sky is the control because it’s not it’s it doesn’t fit into a control. It’s a variation a. It’s a starting point.

It’s a. Now we’re gonna create b against it. The headline on that page is a. Now we’re gonna create headline b and test it against it.

It’s not the control. We just it’s just, like, easy language to say, but what we really do mean is variation. A.

A control is, like, a respected thing. You want to beat a, like, proven control. And when you can do that, that’s a really good thing to, like, to brag about if you’re looking for that. But what’s important to keep in mind is that everything that we’re up against, everything you’re trying to beat, including the own work you did, was likely an educated guess. So So what I want you to do right now, just, like, take a few minutes and chat out to me in chat out to all of us In the most recent project that you did where you wrote copy, what did you guess at?

Just chat it to everybody. What did you guess at?

I’ve listed a few of them here. These are those yeah.

Nobody guessed at anything? Everything was perfect?

Value prop headline over SEO optimized headline on a product page. Okay.

So the headline, what it was about, how it was messaged, what formula to use for it, what VOC to pull in for it, Those are four things that you guessed at.

An SQL sequence without a CTA. They wanted no CTA, and then you gotta talk them out of that shit. That’s bad.

What are you gonna do without a CTA?

Caroline guessed at the biggest reader desire. Johnson guessed at target audience’s main points. Even if you can interview even if you can interview, you’re guessing. Do you you come up with a list.

You get all this stuff out of an interview, and then you go through and go, I think that one. And that’s how we choose. I think that one sounds best. And that might not be true for what you say.

You might prioritize what to say in a way that feels calculated and scientific, but how we say it is almost no. It’s always guessed at. It’s always a guess. Headlines, stage of awareness.

Right? Which stage of awareness do you lead with? Take a guess.

The freebie use? Yeah. What offer? How do we message the offer? What do we lead with in the offer?

What’s the most important thing? What’s the headline for the offer? What’s the cross head there? What’s the call to action?

Is it a call to value? How do we message that? Every single thing. Everything, the format, how you talk about it.

Should we say on the page that it’s a video or that it’s a PDF?

Should we say on the page that it’s a video or that it’s a PDF? You have to say. You have to guess. You’re guessing. So that’s okay. Knowing that that’s true for everybody.

We are data driven and, like, data informed, but we are guessing from top to bottom. We’re better guessers because we’re informed, because we don’t just, like, stare at a blank page and start throwing stuff on. That’s really, really bad guessing. That person shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near marketing. It’s too too much guessing. But we’re still otherwise, we’re there’s still an element of guessing in every single thing that you do.

Jessica has more. Yep. Open loop at the end of email too. Should we do that?

I don’t know. Should we? Okay. Let’s do it. I have a guess.

You might a hypothesis is still a guess. A research question is a guess phrased as a question. So know that. And once you recognize that every single thing that you write is guessed at, and that that’s okay, then you know that if I guessed at it, then there’s gotta be a way to beat it.

Right? It’s gotta be another, possibly better guess out there. I can learn more. I can do more.

There’s a better guess because everything is always a little wrong. Nothing’s ever a hun there’s nothing that’s converting at a hundred percent out there at scale. Maybe a hundred percent one to one, but not not at scale. So and we work at scale largely.

Okay. If you didn’t chat out something you guessed at, I hope it’s because you couldn’t think of it, not because you believe that you don’t guess at things. We all do. We all do. I’ve made a very good living out of guessing at this stuff.

And we can guess better and better as we go, but it’s a guess. Okay.

So this week for this is just one part of what we’re gonna be talking about when it comes to optimization and how to beat variation a in most cases, the control in some cases.

What do we need to start with? So most of the time, copywriters are as guilty as any marketer on the planet of jumping straight to copy. Here’s the copy, and that’s why a lot of us feel imposter syndrome. It’s because you’re so certain that the copy was wrong that you then worry like, oh, that’s gotta be it. Shit. I really blew it with this copy.

We don’t start there. Sometimes you can quickly analyze and go like, oh, who let the f word slip in this headline? Maybe that’s a copy problem. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that.

But it’s that never happens. That literally that never happens. So what else is it if it’s not really obvious report. You don’t have to read the analytics report.

You have to ask for it. You have to say, show me this, or does anybody have the numbers on that? Here’s a data point that we need to see. Here’s the metric that I need measured.

Who can help me out with this? You can guide people. You don’t. Your job is not to be a data analyst either, but you do need to get the numbers.

Before you come up with any sort of hypothesis for what to do differently in the next iteration before you come up with a research question, You need to know what the pages or email or ad or whatever funnel is, being measured on. And there are two parts of that. K? There’s the KPI.

Again, if you already know this, just be like, it’s okay. Some people don’t know this. So just roll with it. KPI is a key performance indicator that’s indicator that’s typically a higher level business y goal, but not so high.

It’s not like grow the business. They’re lower than that. And then metrics are subpoints for that. And, also, sometimes, a metric can be a KPI too.

Just keep that in mind. But we have KPI, key performance indicator, the thing that you are specializing in, the offer that you’re putting out into the world. And I know this is newer to Copy School Pro and talked about more in the intensive, and that’s why you’ve been invited to the intensive so we can talk about the same things the same way.

What you’re putting out into the world has a way of being measured. There’s success metrics associated with it or else the business wouldn’t hire you for it. Businesses have better things to do with their money than just throw it at random freelancers and say, well, I don’t know. Hopefully, something good happens.

They’ve got an idea in their head. Right? So we need to identify what the primary key performance indicators are for the offer we’re putting out into the world. And then what those supporting metrics are for each of the KPIs so that not so we can, like, identify what to do next, but so that we can keep a good handle on how the thing that we made is actually performing so that we’re not busting something that’s not close to or we’re not trying to fix something that’s not broken and in turn breaking it.

So this is the general checklist. You need to identify It’s usually a lot of KPIs the more you think about it, so try to just narrow it down to three KPIs. If there are two, that’s cool. Then two to three supporting metrics for each KPI.

We’ll get into metrics on the next page. You’ll see that there are a lot of metrics, and this is, like, a small list of the many metrics that are out there. So we need to tighten everything up, and that’s why it’s good to specialize and have a single standardized offer that turns into a retainer offer. So you’re always so you’re becoming an expert on these three KPIs as they relate to your offer, and you expertly know how to use the metrics, how to measure them, who you talk to versus having to know everything.

And since copy is everywhere in marketing, in sales, in product, it’s everywhere, the metrics are endless. There’s endless questions you could have if you were a generalist. There are far fewer questions that you’re required to answer if you’re a specialist. So we need to come up with those metrics that matter.

That means the real ones. If it it only matters if it matters.

Keep that in mind as you’re moving forward. When it comes to optimizing anything, it only matters if it matters. You can get a lot of questions thrown at you as you optimize stuff. What about this? What about that? It only matters if it matters, and you know it matters if it ties back to one of your key performance indicators with the metrics underneath them.

Now I have here that you should map the KPIs and MTMs on a triangle simply because we’ve been talking about triangles so far. But the golden triangle, we have your diagnostic that might have looked like a triangle.

It doesn’t have to be a triangle, but I’m trying to just when you see triangle, know it means model. Some sort of model, some way to look at things, in a controlled way that isn’t just a table that feels changing. You need it to look like it is the final version of a thing.

And that’s important as signals to your client going forward that, like, you’ve got this handled. You’ve thought about it a lot. You’ve put in the legwork. They don’t have to think about it.

Here’s the model. Here’s how it works. K? So we come up with that triangle, which we’ll talk about, then you need to educate your client on that diagnostic.

So when they hire you for the standardized offer and the retainer offer, ideally, that follows it, you need to be able to walk them through. Okay. Here are the KPIs that we usually are measuring for when it comes to this offer, this way, this thing that I’m doing for you.

Here’s why. Here’s what we’re gonna measure to make sure we’re on track. Now should we talk through these KPIs and you can, like, walk them through that, get their buy in on it, help them see that you’re the expert because you’re leading with important stuff that businesses talk about, like KPIs and metrics. You’re talking about measuring.

You’re not saying just things around voice of customer data, which is great data, but also the quantitative side of it. So qualitative, cool. You know that in and out. Quantitative is where you’re asking them for that data.

You’re talking with them. You don’t have to go in and run the report. Just as another reminder, if you love data, you can go run the report. Add that in as an extra layer of service.

Cool. Charge more, though. Then you wanna measure those metrics at regular scheduled intervals.

A big mistake people make who have not been coached through how to do conversion rate optimization is they, measure whenever they feel like it, or they don’t have it in their calendar, like, diarized.

And so you’re just like, oh, shit. I haven’t looked at that test in a while. And then you go look at it, but you haven’t been doing it on a regular basis. So it’s very it’s like in a lab, if you put stuff in a beaker and walk away and then come back three minutes later and measure it and then come back three months later and measure it and try to do anything with that, anybody would be like, you just lost your grant.

Like, you don’t know what you’re doing. Please stop. So we don’t wanna do that. We wanna do regular scheduled interviews for or intervals for, the things that we’re measuring.

Okay?

And measuring month over month and year over year, which can be really tricky because a lot of the stuff that we’re standing up doesn’t have a year over year, barely has a month over month.

So know that that’s difficult. But as you move forward in your retainer, you are looking at month over month performance and year over year performance, not hour over hour. That’s that’s really far too narrow. It would do this up and down, up and down like crazy. We don’t want that. We wanna look at things in controlled, disciplined ways because that is what we do as consultants.

And then we wanna report on progress toward KPIs.

So when you do, we’ll talk about this in the intensive freelancing.

When you do present your results monthly to your clients, you don’t have to dig into here are the six or nine, metrics, but rather here’s how we’re progressing toward these three KPIs that we have. And then you can support it. But we wanna stay higher level when talking to our clients because the lower and deeper we get into it, the more murky it becomes, and then people try to draw insights from it. Like, oh, no.

Our click through rate is changing, and it went down. Let’s all go look at the call to action. Like, pause. There’s so many things that could be happening here that we wanna keep the client up, There’s so many things that could be happening here that we wanna keep the client up at KPI level.

That’s where they wanna be. They didn’t hire you for a better click through rate. They hired you for a result, so we keep them at the result level. Is this making sense?

Cool. I’m talking a blue streak, but but, hopefully, it’s okay. Alright. Cool.

So, yeah, I had a whole mind map. It’s already twenty five minutes into this, and there are so many more things to discuss. So we’re gonna we’re gonna finish off this worksheet, which I the page numbers aren’t updating automatically. Sorry about that. So this is not page page two. We’re gonna finish this off and then just know that going forward, we’ll have other sessions on, like, okay. At this level, when there’s a bounce rate happening on a long form sales page, what might we do with that data?

Unlikely. Maybe bounce rate would be important. Anyway, we’ll get into that.

So you need to identify what your KPIs and metrics that matter are for your standardized offer.

You can understand that if you don’t have a standardized offer and just to be clear, a standardized offer gets measured the same way your retainer offer gets measured because they’re building on each other. Well, the retainer offer builds on the standardized, so, of course, your retainer is constantly trying to improve the results that come out of the thing that you did up front, that project.

So they both have the same KPIs. They both have the same metrics that matter. These are unchanging things during the course of your retainer. It’s not like suddenly you see engagement is way up, but that wasn’t a metric that matters.

You don’t start reporting on engagement being way up. That’s cool. That’s nice. Maybe change your model in the future so it it reflects engagement as an important metric, but you don’t start reporting on it suddenly.

Just just know that we only wanna report on things that matter to the client that they agreed on. That’s how they’re gonna see value in you and feel like you’ve got this under control.

Okay.

So I want you to just take a couple minutes. We’re gonna go through this. Try to think of your standardized offer if you’re not there yet. Think about the project that you most commonly get hired to do or that you most want to do going forward, whatever that thing is that you’re going to be creating and then optimizing.

What is the number one goal that your client has or is likely to have for that thing?

Write that in.

I have a question about this.

Can I ask it now because it’s relevant, or should I wait until afterwards when you’re done with the whole Oh, go for it?

Let’s hear it. Okay.

So in the most of the companies that I’ve worked for, they measure things differently, and this is especially relevant for different sized companies. And I would say that the kind of ups more upscale company that I would want to target, they’re definitely gonna have, individual metrics that they use Yeah. That their own data science team, creates, especially if they’re measuring the quality of the lead. And when when I mean qualitative data, I mean, quantitative qualitative data.

Like Sure. Sure. How long they are are around. Right? Yeah. And then also these metrics are gonna go out of date.

Like, I don’t know anyone that I work with that uses CAC anymore.

But, like, ten years ago, everyone was people that still use CAC so completely.

But keep going. Keep going. Just know that there’s a Like, MQL. Gigantic world out there with businesses doing all sorts of things at all sorts times. Okay. Keep going.

So I feel like if I come in and say, we’re gonna measure this, they’re gonna be like, don’t tell us what to do. We measure this because we have our whole, like, we have our whole, like, Tableau set up, and this is how we measure things. And this is what’s important to us us because this is our model.

And, like, you need to adapt. I feel like it’ll come off as very aggressive and, like, not customer serving.

Nope. Okay. Although it depends it depends on how you do it. Right? You go in and use buy in isn’t me telling you clients what to do. Buy in is getting is showing them, like, okay.

I’ve done this. They you come into the conversation knowing where everybody knows that they have, that you’ve done this before. K? You’re not here to guess at it. You’re not here to do whatever the client wants you to do. You’re here to help them get the result that they’re looking for.

You measure the work this way. Now do they agree that the primary KPI for the thing that they’ve just hired you for is x?

If they’re like, no. That’s the secondary KPI. Here is the top one. Then you just turn the triangle for them.

But you have to have the three key, performance indicators on there. You will know what those are. I don’t care how different businesses are. There’s a CMO at the top of it who is doing the right things for their business and is thinking of the same KPIs for their different departments within marketing, the CTO, or the chief product officer, or whoever also has certain KPIs.

And those are not such changing things across organizations that we need to be afraid or, uncertain that we can come in and say, here’s how I measure success.

Here’s why.

What do you think of that?

You need to be able to consult with your clients. And I would say, if it feels too aggressive, try it because that’s how consultants actually come in. Someone comes in. Perna comes in. She’s charging a hundred thousand dollars for a project.

If she comes in and goes, how do you wanna measure it? What do you want this to be like? Now I’m like, what did I hire you for? Why am I paying you all this money if I’m the one who has to make up all the rules as we go? What I want is for you to take this outcome that I’m looking for and make it happen for me in a way where I feel very little effect of it other than smiley faces every time I look through your report at the end of the month. That’s what people are looking for at a higher level when it comes to copy that converts.

Social media posts are another thing. I’m not in the business of social media posts or other ways of creating content.

I’m talking about real copy that people are looking for that does the thing that the business needs it to do. Does that make sense, Naomi?

But, like, even in terms of, like, lead quality. Like, I’ve worked with companies that use lead to sale. I’ve worked with companies that you I don’t even remember. It’s ATV or ACV. They had their own metric. Mhmm.

And so, like, if I use lead to sale, one company would be like, well, we never use that.

So wouldn’t it make more sense to be a little bit less specific and say measure quality, based on how you measure that. Because when I say MQL for one company, they’re not gonna take me seriously because they see MQLs as sort of garbage leads and sort of, like, not super high quality. This is based on, like, my own experience. I’m sure it’s different elsewhere.

It’s clearly based on your experience, and that’s good.

Great. That’s a real legit experience. It’s not reflective of an experience that I go through in these scenarios. So I would say, how is it working for you when you go in and the client does the leading? How is it working? Are you able to close fifty thousand dollar projects, or is that a scary number?

It’s not a scary number for me. And I do go into these organizations and have these conversations, and no one says you’re overstepping.

No one has said that to me since I was at Intuit, and I had to just go into the consulting world where they line up for it. So I would I would say how is it working out for you when they get to dictate everything about how things are gonna be be measured and stuff like that.

Really, like, analyze how it’s working.

And it’s okay if you go into an organization and they’re like, we don’t use MQLs.

Anybody who is, like, laughing about that or thinks it’s outdated, I feel like they’re they’re probably not very professional if they go into a space and go, like, nobody uses MQLs anymore. Like, no. Like, lots of people use MQLs still, like, the vast majority. And whether they see it as a garbage lead is really on, like, them. It’s got nothing to do with and you don’t have to also, nobody’s saying for you that you have to go in and say MQL is the metric that matters here. If you know this, if the people that you’re selling this to don’t it means marketing qualified lead, and then there’s sales qualified lead, and that’s an SQL. So if you go into these and there’s other types of qualified leads that gets it gets detailed when you’re dealing with product led growth versus sales led.

So there’s also just stuff going on there, but just know that it’s okay that you might measure things differently than your client does. This isn’t about trends. It’s not about what the latest thing is that people care about. Cost to acquire a customer is always going to be a critical, metric.

It doesn’t mean you have to call it that. Call it whatever they call it then. You don’t have to fill in the metrics with them. You can say these are the three KPIs that I’m generally measuring for.

Do you agree with these that these are the three outcomes you’re looking for when you’re hiring me for this? Yes. We do. Cool.

I know businesses, measure these things differently. What are the two primary metrics you use to measure this KPI? Me through that. And then you can draw that on the model.

But what I don’t want you to do is shy away from taking the lead and saying, this is what I do. This is how I do it well, and then talking with the client about that. Does that make sense, Naomi?

Yeah. For sure. For sure. I can, like, outline the metrics that I use. But my idea would be to go in and say, okay.

We’re gonna measure leads. Do you measure MQLs? Do you measure leads, or do you measure opportunities? And then have that as one side of the triangle and then say quality.

Do you have a metric or quality that you have, like, as an algorithm? And then have that as one And then ask them specifically, like, do you have a specific metric that you created with your own algorithm, or do you use something in like, what would you use? And then add that later on rather than coming in specifically and using something that’s not actually programmed into their database.

For sure. That’s great. We’re totally aligned on that. Just make sure that you’re guiding the conversation and you go in there knowing what your standard KPIs are, what the most common metrics that matter are so that when you’re guiding them through this conversation, they might also stare at you and go, I don’t know.

Not because they don’t know, but because they’re trying to figure out what you like to connect a dot between what they wanna share with you and what you want to hear from them. So when you’re asking those questions, it’s good to have a backup that’s like so here’s an example of a KPI that we use. Does that match what you use for this or what you had in mind for this? Yes.

It does. Okay. Perfect. And if it doesn’t, then they can say that at the same time too.

Cool. Something wrong.

Because if I’m speaking yeah.

If I’m speaking to somebody who’s more product marketing oriented or more brand oriented, like, sure. I can come in with very specific data and lead the conversation. But if I’m coming into somebody who’s a campaign manager, then I wanna make sure that I’m speaking to them on their level and Sure. Sort of engaging them in the conversation.

Hundred percent. Love it. Awesome. Cool.

Okay. Excellent.

Did we get our primary goal for your offer? Does anybody wanna check that out, what they or just share it?

Everybody timid about this? It’s okay.

Nobody got what’d you do? John said you’re looking down at your page.

K. Naomi has conversion rate. Awesome.

Jessica?

Is it okay to ask a question?

Sure. Katie, you have increased lifetime customer value. Nice.

Web traffic. Yeah. That’s a good KPI.

High level.

Jessica, are you asking it or what’s that?

Oh, yeah. Sorry. I wasn’t sure when you wanted me to ask.

So I was gonna Go for it.

Go for it.

Sorry. Okay. So with the seasonal sale, right, conversion rate? Yes.

I’ve been looking more into the, attributable revenue, but that’s not I guess that’s not the word. But, anyway, the one where I’m kind of struggling, though, is the idea of instead of just general ROAS, which was really big when I was working in house with my ecommerce client Yeah. It seems to me that given my specialty and what I would like to do, that new customer ROAS would be an interesting metric. K.

But where I’m getting kind of stuck is if they have a high lifetime customer value, right, and it’s so a really high one, then they might be able to spend a little bit more with their ads and invest a little so they’re so the ROAS on a new customer may not you know, they may be able to lose a little bit.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah. So I guess that’s where I get a little stuck in the muck of KPIs and all that because given the especially, it seems like it comes back a lot of times to lifetime value. Based off of what they can get long term, you can make different decisions in the short term for the seasonal sale. And that’s where I’m kind of struggling with what how to standardize, I guess.

So that’s where I mean, a lot of experience will help with that. Like, the more you go and try this with different groups, but also your perspective on it. That’s why specializing on the sunshine growth model is right next to thought leadership. Like, the two work hand in hand.

So if you draw a line in the sand and you say, look, I work with clients or with brands that are spending money to acquire new customers and have high lifetime value, or customer lifetime value, that’s who you work with now. That’s what you build thought leadership on. You say you’re gonna lose money on the first one. And by the way, you’re not the only person saying this.

Like, every ad agency we talk to is like, oh, no. No. No. You need something further down the line because you’re gonna barely breakeven on the first ones.

So but that’s cool. Why not draw a line in the sand and say this is this is the case? You need to be willing to lose money on that new customer acquisition in order to upsell them on things later. So you have to have a high customer lifetime value that is realized after that first purchase.

Okay. Okay. So that’s an acceptable option. Okay. I did not even think about that with the thought leadership, so you’re right.

And thank you for pointing that out.

Cool. Awesome. Good question. Okay. So I’m looking at time.

A bunch of metrics listed here, all sorts of them that matter across different things for different businesses. Some businesses will care a lot about some of these and others will not. Some of the work you do, this will matter for it, and some of the work, it won’t matter. The way attention and attraction are written together really mess with my head. Did I spell one of those wrong? I couldn’t.

No matter how many times I read that over, I’m like, there’s something wrong with that. Anyway, it’s messing with my eyes, and has ever since I started working on this.

Then there are conversion sales revenue. So are you working more closely with sales, with the sales team, or more with the product team, or more with the marketing team? That’s gonna vary based on what you’re doing. Obviously, cart abandonment is more for ecommerce than it will be for SaaS. But you may still find some people who work in SaaS and say cart abandonment largely because they came from an ecommerce background, which is very, very normal. So just, like, be ready.

Be ready to not be too shocked by the number of things that you may hear in an organization. Not everybody is running at an expert level. So that’s important to keep in mind when you’re like, what did they mean by car dependent meant when we’re in SaaS? Just like, oh, they just meant this.

They meant that. So keep that in mind. And then there’s way more to this. I don’t work in engagement referrals or necessarily sometimes in retention, but I don’t, like, even consult with people on this side.

So I didn’t have a lot of metrics to list out here, so there’s probably more if this is the thing that you work in. Just keep adding to it and know that these lists are not exhaustive. The reason they’re in here is to help you if you’re like think I know what one goal is.

And I think I know how they measure that, but there are, like, fifteen things that they use to measure that goal, and they’re all listed in here, then you need to decide what the most important ones are, the metrics that matter for the work that you’re being brought in to do. So this is the sort of thing you’d wanna fill out. It doesn’t have to go in any sort of order. Like I said, depending on what their primary KPI is, you just, like, tilt tilt the triangle around until the one that’s number one is, like, up at the top if that even matters visually. But just keep that in mind. This doesn’t have to go in any certain order. It sometimes does go clockwise.

Cool. Sometimes it has the flat part down at the bottom. Whatever. That doesn’t have to be drawn as a triangle either, but what you want to do is be sure that you’re able to talk your client through how you do it.

So let’s say that a standardized offer is for an ad funnel audit. When the ad funnel audit is done, there’s a road map of optimization tweaks that gets produced at the end of the ad funnel audit. So this is an example. Okay?

The example.

What might that person do if that was their standardized offer and the retainer that comes out of it? Great.

They could have and they talk they go into the conversation with their, client talking about this. Right? So the KPIs that are most common when I’m doing an ad funnel audit and then the work to optimize that ad funnel, they are more leads, more calls booked, and greater profitability. Does that match what you’re thinking?

And they look through it, and they might wanna unpack. Okay. What do you mean? Like, how would we even measure more leads?

Great question. There’s lots of ways to measure more leads. We typically use impressions and click through rate. And they’re like, oh, just to your point, Naomi, they’re like, no.

We don’t use that. We use blank and click through rate. Okay. Cool. Let’s do that.

We’re aligned that those are the two ways we’re gonna measure more leads. Yes. We are. Perfect.

Now let’s move on to more calls booked. What we’re looking at, because this is on the landing page in this ad funnel, is bounce rate. Are they staying on the page, or are they abandoning it? And sales demos booked.

Does that match what you would like to how you’d like to measure success for more calls booked? Well, we definitely need sales demo booked. I don’t know about bounce rate, though. Is that the most important thing?

And then you have a discussion with them about why that is. And then we get into greater profitability, cost to acquire, and cost per lead. Those are the key ones that we’re typically working at working with. Naomi, to your point, they’re like, we don’t say cost to acquire customers anymore.

Like, okay. Fine. What do you use then? Great. We’ll use that, but we’re good with cost per lead.

We say dollars spent per lead. Okay. Fine. We’ll call it dollars spent per lead. Are we good with that?

Yes. We are. Cool. This is how we’re going to measure success going forward. At the end of every month, when I report results to you, you’re going to see these KPIs on the page with month over month.

And once we get there, year over year data. How does that sound? So we can actually measure how this is working. Cool beans.

We’re set. Good. Now you’ve walked them through that.

Everybody is on board with it, and you’ve also addressed things that aren’t, that don’t match what they typically do, which is good for anybody who is maybe of a large organization that does have a data team.

Okay.

We’re really low on time here, but what I want you to do is once you’ve completed this this is homework. Once you’ve completed this triangle for your standardized offer with the metrics that matter, it’s not set in stone. You’ll change this. The sunshine growth model has been coming together for, like, four years, so it changes over time.

It changed from the beginning of the, CopySchool Pro. We didn’t even have those four categories. So it will change. That’s okay.

That’s why we use Canva so we can always be editing things. So it’s going to change. That’s okay. Just start with the metrics that you believe matter.

Then this is where we start to think through. We’re not gonna get into it today, but this is where we start to think through. Okay. Now that I know how we’re measuring this, what can I do to start chipping away at systematizing ways to optimize that metric?

So for that metric, I mean. So let me skip ahead. This is the blank one for you to fill in for your own triangle or whatever diagnostic you use. This is what we’ll start to use to identify areas of opportunity for optimization.

So if we’re like impressions, again, if they changed if the client has changed it, then you change this too.

Impressions is how where is one metric. So what are things that could impact impressions? Well, the audience might be too narrow, too broad, or whatever. The image might be impacting impressions.

Maybe it’s a video, and it needs to be a static image or maybe the opposite, a hook or a keyword. Now we don’t wanna list every possible thing. That’s what a full mind map is for. That’s what I’ll share with you down the road.

All we really wanna do right now is start saying, like, okay.

If I implement this, what might be going on when things aren’t performing well or when they’re performing really well? And this will mean referring back to your list of guesses. Right? Like, you made guesses at every stage.

What did you guess at that could be impacting positively or negatively bounce rate, for example. Well, the headline, I guessed at the headline, so it’s maybe that. It’s the I guess, at the formula that we use for it, I guessed at the message, I guessed at how. So headline could be doing it.

Could be trust factors because that’s what bounce rate is largely about. Do people trust you when they landed on that page?

Load time is also another one. Right? So you’ll work through these. And then when you’re going through and doing the measuring and bounce rate is high, now you can say, okay.

If bounce rate’s high, we don’t worry about that or that. We only worry about these things. Let’s look at these things. And that’s how we can start to put together hypotheses for what could be going wrong and what we could do instead.

So you’ll fill that in, and then there’s all these other pages where you can then take every one of these you have. This is a lot of systematizing, but it does mean if you do this work upfront, then when the time comes for you to hire somebody to help you with optimizing, you train them on this. And you say, like, okay. These are the six metrics that matter.

These are the things that are probably going on if that metric is underperforming or if it’s doing really, really well. So if we see that click rate has gone through the roof, it’s amazing, Then we’ll look at offer and CTA and develop hypotheses for those. How do we develop hypotheses for those? We go through and we fill in one of these for each one that comes underneath this table.

I’m scrolling around a lot, but you can see here we have impressions, audience, impressions, audience. We wanna list out all the things that could be going on with audience that is possibly affecting impressions. Is the audience too narrow? Is it too broad?

Is it too new to us? It’s different from what we’ve been doing successfully. Is there no look alike as a starting point? And, again, that’s kind of moving toward towards, like, a new to us.

Too close to our existing list of nonconverters. Like, they’re just bad even though they reflect a lookalike. Too hard to reach, etcetera, etcetera. So we start brain dumping what might be going on there knowing that it usually comes down to these things. Either there’s a wrong x, wrong tone, wrong wrong voice, wrong message, wrong framework, wrong formula, wrong audience, changed all of those things again so the audience we thought it was has actually changed.

Changed seasonality, that’s a big one too. There’s no x. There’s no one upper. There’s no CTA on that one admin that you were men that you’re mentioning.

No CTA, or it’s a weak CTA. It’s get started when it should be more of a call to value. So it’ll come down to wrong, change, no, or weak, and then you fill in anything after that. Then it’s too much of something.

Too narrow, too broad, too many, too few, too clever, too timid, too different, not different enough. And then there’s, like, this kind of bucket of other random shit that could also be true. It’s introducing a new something, a new component to an offer that is unnecessary, new friction in form fields. It’s introducing new anxieties by saying something about trust when nobody was even thinking about trust.

And, oh my gosh, should I trust these people now? It’s swiped, not strategic. That’s what most junior copywriters are going through or guest steps. That’s also what most junior copywriters are going through.

Like, I like this headline, so I wrote it. Well, that’s a guess, and we can really say, like, no. No. That’s probably what’s going on, or it’s ego based.

Someone, the highest paid opinion said this is what the headline should be. You all, like, put your your head down and went, okay. Let’s make that the headline. But you know that that was ego.

Or it was you. You wrote a poem or a email.

Nobody gives a shit about your poetry. So don’t write a poem. Go back and write something that matters for the customer. So that’s what it’s likely to come down to. It’s kind of like an absolute crash course in things that could be going on that are negatively or positively sometimes affecting whatever your goals are or the metrics that matter are underneath those.

I’m gonna stop there because there’s a lot here as I knew there would be, and there’s even more planned. This is this is scaled back. But, hopefully, that is helpful to you. Yes. This is in the Slack under copywriting advanced in that channel if you couldn’t find it. Do you have any questions, thoughts, concerns?

Yes, Katie.

Okay. I’m gonna preface this by saying I have several questions, thoughts, and concerns. So, like, what is the best place and time to like, are we gonna revisit this large topic?

Yes.

Yeah. We’re just scratching the surface. This is, like, intro. Not super intro, but yeah. Yeah. There’s more to come.

So I would say Mike ask now, and then Mike can say, like, we’ll tackle that later.

Okay. So one project that comes to mind that I actually have, like, is a quiz funnel I wrote. It went live about six months ago, and I’ve been putting off, like, checking in the after data, because I don’t know if you remember. I’ve I’ve Slacked about this client’s team. It was a social media manager who really, like, took over a lot of decisions about the email marketing.

So I guess, like, the thing that needs to be optimized is it’s not readable on mobile, and all of their traffic is coming from Instagram.

So how do you how do you navigate the conversations when you think that the thing that needs to be optimized isn’t your yours to own?

So I’ve had this happen. Ari, is it safe for you to talk to your point of contact about this team member taking over on the thing that they shouldn’t have taken over on?

Well, the problem really at the end of the project was that I could not get the client on a call without the team member being there.

Like, I tried a lot. I have, like, a two a one on one call, and he was just always also on the call.

So then it’s not safe too. That’s not possible.

So, I mean, there’s upfront work going forward where you can say you can put the rules around it. Right? Like, if if we’re going to ever measure this, you need to implement as we agree.

They’ll have reasons not to. They’ll always say we’re the one paying the invoice. It’s on it’s our business. We can do whatever we want, and they’re absolutely right.

So it is a matter of them getting on board with you being the deliverer of better performing KPIs for them. If they can recognize that you hold the key to that, then they’d be silly to get in the way. Silly is a big word though because there’s all sorts of internal politics going on. Nobody wants to fire a team member.

Who knows what’s going on? But lots of team members are underperforming out in the world, and that’s why you were brought in in the first place. It’s no offense to them. They go home at four o’clock.

Nothing. You’re like you’re an expert.

So what do you do up front? Try to do things up front to get them to buy in to the idea that and, again, the more money they’re spending on you, the less likely they are to be like, hey, Sue from accounting. What did you think of this? Like, no. No. No.

Katie knows. We trust Katie. That doesn’t mean that’s always true. Charging more isn’t gonna be, like, the the silver bullet, but it helps.

And then I the tricky thing is if you can’t get them on a call to talk to them about that, that’s the kind of thing where I would just, there’s nothing you can do about it. They’ve implemented the wrong copy. If they ever reach out to you and go, why is it working, then you say, let’s hop on a call, and I’ll tell you exactly why it’s not working.

And then you can walk them through. And this is the conversation I’ve had to have have before. It’s like, is so and so a conversion copywriter?

No. What are they? They’re a marketing intern. Yeah. So why are they writing this copy then?

And you can ask that question. And if they’re the CMO, same question. Doesn’t matter where they’re at. They’re not you.

Why are they editing your copy and doing whatever they want? And if they’re if the if the culture of the organization is allowing that, you can’t do anything about that. All you can do is step away and try to do your best to avoid that kind of client in the future. But you’re allowed to have real talks with that person and say, you brought me in for this.

It’s it’s important to me that my copy perform well for you. It’s important for me as important as it is for your team member to not feel disengaged from this. This is my this is my livelihood. Like, this is everything that I do.

And if I’m not getting results for you, that’s really bad for me. So how can we implement my copy? What’s stopping that?

And if they don’t have anything to say, then this call is very likely down to there’s something going on internally.

There’s nothing they can do about it, and there’s nothing you can do about it either in my experience.

Yeah.

And so, like, I I totally understand and respect that as, like, the way forward with this client. I’m curious how you would approach that in general when it’s like you’re the copywriter. You were brought on to to optimize the copy, but you have a hunch that a design component is what’s impacting the performance of that page? Like, do you just provide we’re like, we think we should test button color or something like that, and then and then you put that on their team to implement?

Yeah. So everything that we’re working on, it’s good to align with their designer or design team right up front wherever you can. Always, always, always. And if you can do that, then also share that as they know.

Copy doesn’t live in a silo. Copy and art work together. The creative department is copy and art and now other digital stuff too. But it’s always been art and copy.

There’s a documentary called art and copy. Like, it’s always been art and copy. So you need to work with the artist just like the artist needs to work with the copywriter to get it to its best place. If you the problem is that the designer may not feel empowered to be part of conversion rate optimization.

They’re just like they’ve been beat down over the years by every marketer saying, just change it to this color, and they’re like, they kinda wanna dye a lot of them, just like a lot of in house copywriters kinda wanna dye.

So if you have empathy for that, it doesn’t mean it’s always true, but I would start from that point. Like, I really respect what you do. Have a one on one with the designer, their design team. Really love what you are doing here.

I really wanna be part of making this better. Here’s how I work. How do you work? Let’s let’s figure out how to align on this.

If you can do that, then you can get them on board. Some people will still never be receptive. And in those cases, for me, I get a little bullish, and, take over. And then just say, like, here’s the road map for what we’re gonna do to optimize this.

And you can use data to support that. Right? If you’re like, here’s the email.

I went and I put it on, user testing dot com and had people speak to it, or I did validation, like, a five second test or whatever the hell you wanna do to get that little bit of data to say, like, people are not seeing this button. It’s gray, y’all.

Why is the button gray? But you don’t have to be the bad guy then. You can say people aren’t clicking on it. Let’s hypothesize why people aren’t clicking on it. Do we think they can find it?

Sure. They can find it. Okay. But when they find it, does it look clickable? Well, great things are clickable.

Well, great things aren’t clickable, actually. So you can have that discussion with them. But if they’re if they’re weird about it and you’ve done everything you can to make nice and be friendly with them, you’re the consultant.

Take over. You don’t have to make best friends in this organization.

And a lot of a lot of people are gonna go, does Katie know? And that’s just the way it is.

But they’re probably miserable in their jobs too in my experience. So I don’t know how helpful that is. People are trying to do their best, but they’re also calling it in a lot, like, a lot a lot.

So sometimes you have to kinda be the bad guy if being the good guy didn’t work. Yeah.

Johnson, you have a question, or at least one of the two Johnsons that are here has a raised hand.

I, I’ve got my laptop so I could see the see what’s going on. I was using my phone because it’s got a camera.

Yeah. This isn’t, well, it’s sort of I mean, it’s tied into this, of course, but, you know, we talked last time, about moving towards email, getting to know my market better and the the offer.

And, yeah, I mean, it’s it’s more or less a reiteration of the same thing. In terms of offer, I don’t know what I know. Don’t know. And I do know what I know.

But I don’t know what yeah. And I I know you have a lot of experience in email, and, honestly, I would just love to hear what your thoughts are in terms of offers that fit this model well, and, that that you think are interesting because that would that might be a really good starting point for me.

Okay. So you’re just looking for, like, ideas on what to do as your standardized offer?

Yeah. Basically. Yeah. I’m pretty open to to whatever, and I’m I’m I’m pretty excited. So yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Love it. Who do you like working with? Who’s your target audience? Who is in closest proximity to you that you can reach?

So, I mean, it’s part you you mean, in terms of, like, next client or just in general?

Well, it’s probably that client with my cousin Lee. That’s but that’s gonna be in, financing.

But, I mean, it’s tech financing, so that’s kind of kind of a sort of blend.

K. And that’s gonna happen in q two or q three now. So, that’s the project I’ve done yet, which I’m excited about. Nice. Oh, so that will win. And, Yeah. So that’s probably where I’m going next.

Do you like working with tech?

Well, yeah. I mean, broadly speaking, yes.

But, again, broadly speaking, I mean, aside from, I don’t know, helping our company kill the rainforests, and, I’m I’m happy to work in any industry, as well as I don’t hate.

So yeah.

Love it.

Okay. So the thing that seems to be an unlimited gold mine, is life cycle emails, because of you just problem is you have to go narrower than that because there are so many emails that I’m I’m saying tech, but I really, in this case, mean SaaS. I don’t mean NVIDIA or other more complex behind the scenes things. I mean, SaaS.

I mean, there’s a sign in, there’s a login, and people and users use it, and it’s usually product led growth. Doesn’t mean it has to be, though. So Envision has a sales team, for enterprise organizations. Envision’s not a good example.

They just went bankrupt.

But they were really good for a long, long time.

But point here is if you work with SaaS, there are loads of good reasons too, which I won’t get into because I know I already talk too much as this.

But SaaS life cycle emails or SaaS depends on which part of the life cycle you wanna work on, but that nobody’s doing it. I’ve said this before. Nobody’s doing it when they are they’re inundated with work. They can’t hire fast enough, so that becomes your problem. Like, cool. There’s so much money in work, but I actually can’t hire and train fast enough. So that’s a real like, that’s a first world problem, but it’s legit.

And there’s lots of money. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of money for a life cycle. So just do life cycle, stand up, life cycle of some kind, activation through to revenue, whatever that looks like. You have a standard model in place that you, modify.

So you always know we’re gonna probably have these three box scars, but there might be a fourth or a fifth on there. We’re always gonna do segmentation around this part. We’re gonna try to do if we can do triggered emails, then this is true. Some SaaS companies, you still can’t do triggered.

Everybody on the development team is, like, homegrown stuff, so it gets messy. Point is, you figure that out.

Stand it up. That’s your project. That’s a standardized offer, and then you just optimize it from there on out. And because SaaS businesses need this so badly and have a real problem of a database that is packed with email addresses that they’ve been ignoring hard.

If you can come in and start to untangle that, like, that’s why Boxcar that’s why I started it. Just it’s endless, the amount.

The amount of of need there. It’s directly it’s back to revenue where they have users right there. They’re just not touching.

Is that what Boxcar specialize in then?

Yeah.

Yeah. And that’s what Boxcar so I’ve exited Boxcar. They’re off doing their own thing, and they’ve added in other landing pages mostly because there’s also a lot of demand for landing pages, and things like that. But I continue.

Like, I’m consulting with clients right now, on exactly this stuff, and it’s endless. I can’t even stop the engagement when I try to. When I say, okay. I’m ready to hand this over to others.

No. No. Way. Confused. There’s too much money on the line. Yeah.

Okay. A follow-up question I have then is, when would you recommend looking to, gain a a solid understanding around this area in terms of self education?

Yeah. I mean, given that software companies use intercom so much, I would read through all the intercom resources, watch all the things.

Also, Gong, though, like, Gong dot io, they’ve got a really good resource center and software companies that are using Gong usually have a lot of money to spend. They’ve got a sales team as well, but they’re probably trying to also do product led growth. So check out everything that Gong. Io has.

Intercoms, yeah, really obvious one.

Yeah.

Those are Okay.

Those are Like, I don’t think I English.

Yeah. You can start there and have a really solid education at the end of it. Yeah.

Alright. Great. That’s amazing.

And and just before, is there anything else, just seeing as this is something you’re so passionate about, is there anything else you think I should know about approaching this?

My only pause on doing it at all is that you will have to get really strong at saying no to coming on board as an in house person.

So I would say build out your team sooner. Yeah.

The Right.

You’re gonna make us a a crazy offer to bring you in because it’s so valuable or just right. Okay. Got it.

It’s it’s just so hard to I most people who started an email went off and did something else for god knows why, So there just aren’t that many experts out there. If you become that trusted life cycle person for them, yeah, there will be annoyingly compelling offers that you’ll have to be stronger then because when good freelancers go in house, they regret it. Two years later, they’re like, damn it. Why did I not just keep doing the thing? And I have story after story that I’m not allowed to share, but just know. This happens all the freaking time.

Don’t say yes to that offer. You can make more money on your own and be happier.

Anyway, we’ll get in we’ll cross that road when we get there, but that’s the only thing I would say. Yeah.

No. No. No. I think that just made me wanna do it more, honestly, because I’m never gonna go in house.

So, Never say never.

The offers can be very compelling.

So it’s stupid. Sure. Okay. Okay.

Cool. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Jonathan. Anybody else? Anything else? We’re good. Edna.

Hey. So I was gonna ask you, apart from the click rates or the conversion rates on a pricing page, what else can you track?

Like, the like, the scrolling with the heat maps and That’s a page I took out of today’s presentation.

Easy oh, wait. No. It’s in the tips area at the very end. I didn’t get to the tips page. The last page is full of tips.

Easy on scrolling, and pricing pages are typically not bad. Okay.

I hear you.

There’s the FAQs at the bottom that are, like, expandable too.

You know, I wouldn’t what I would look at on a pricing page, depending on if it’s on the website versus if it’s where people in product lend or lend from emails for users, not trial. So website versus other pricing page would likely have two different ways of like, two different models that you would put together for how to measure success there and what the KPIs are.

Bounce is actually really important, and it might be more at that point, it’s like exit because bounce is, like, when you enter a site and then bounce it versus exit rate is different. So you’d probably call it exit rate. On the pricing page, did they spend less than ten seconds there, which could mean all sorts of things.

And that’s where it’s like, okay. Well, that’s a metric. That’s not a KPI. So you have to first figure out what the KPI is.

Is it, hold more people on the page longer, whatever that looks like as the actual, like, goal, in which case, exit rate would be huge. And then you would go down to the table below and say what’s affecting exit rate on here. Is the price too large, too high? Are we not giving them enough time to scroll?

Like, you’d have all sorts of questions you could ask.

But it really does depend. What you want out of a pricing page is for people to choose an option, but that’s not as important as just starting to be a user. So click a button is gonna be a really important thing. It doesn’t always matter which button they click.

However, if increasing average revenue per user is important to you and if they are the kind of company that starts, that like, a lot of companies, when you land on their pricing page, you don’t have to choose a plan. You’ll choose that plan when you go. Other ones, you do choose a plan. So for the ones where you do choose a plan, it might be that you’re trying to optimize to get more people into a higher tier plan.

So that could be something, increase average revenue per user. It could be both a KPI in this case and a metric underneath that KPI.

But we’re really just looking at increasing average revenue per user, and there’s lots of ways to figure that out and lots of hypotheses you can come up with if you’re like, oh, no. We’re not. Our our poo went down.

So if that’s the case anyway, there’s that to consider.

Okay.

All sorts of things. All sorts of things.

Okay. But start with their goal. So you could also just go out there and do some research on what people want, what business owners want, what SaaS people, or even course creators want out of their pricing table.

Yeah.

There’s Thank you. Loss.

Yeah. Alright. Fun. Cool. Anything else? Anyone else? We good.

Can you just tell me when it I don’t wanna take up more time today. But I am I have some random ideas, I guess, about what might work as a retainer, or may not. And so I guess what is the best time to start discussing and then knowing because I was reading through the workbooks for all this stuff, And at one point, I think I saw something scary like, if you cannot do this, we need to go back to the standard offer and change it. I was like, oh, shoot.

I need to figure this out sooner rather than later. So what is, like, the best time would you say just talk about it in Slack? And if you guys say, nope. None of this works, then I need to look at that.

I’m a little concerned about how much time I’m wasting on seasonal campaign if I can’t figure out a retainer an optimization performance retainer for it. That makes sense.

That’s fair.

What can you I mean, now is a good time. We are in this afternoon talking about standardized offers. And with that, it’s important for you to think about the retainer offer. But next week will be full on retainer offer stuff.

Okay.

So what do you have right now?

Now is a good time?

Okay. Well, the one that to me seems to there’s obviously the seasonal sale campaign, any it could be a product launch campaign, right, where you learn from that campaign, and you can take some of those learnings and apply it to retention strategies and other things like that or just your future campaign. But a future campaign, like you said, is a new project. Yeah. So I’m trying to also avoid that. And so then the major things that I kind of was trying to get it down to was my focus on seasonal sales can also lay a great foundation for ongoing customer retention.

And, so, yes, the average order value that yes. You can do that. And, yes, you can get them to come in during the seasonal sale and buy a second time. That’s all great. But we can also start laying the foundation for increasing lifetime value and all that kind of stuff. So then the only thing that to me made sense in terms of value was ongoing work around their customer retention KPIs.

But what I was still struggling with is I’m not doing enough to opt I’m not doing enough, I don’t think, in the seasonal the standard thing for post purchase experience and all that to kinda make it not a brand new project that almost requires an email audit or something like that. So then I’m like, I don’t know. I just keep hitting the same off. Okay.

Well, I might as well just do an email program audit because they I don’t have the full picture if they bring me on for a seasonal sale. Right? And I wanna keep their customer attention going and doing all those things. It feels like if I don’t see the full picture, how do I say, yes.

We should focus on a win back versus something else. You know? Yeah. That’s what keep kinda coming against a wall of my brain.

I think you’re getting close. I do. Because it feels like okay.

If you have a point of view on standardizing seasonal campaigns Mhmm.

You can start with an audit of their past. That could be, like, your project out of the gate, potentially. Like, we’re just brainstorming here, and it might break. It might not be right.

But, if you were to start with seasonal audit, you go over their last six seasonal campaigns, and you audit them against, like, a rubric, just a some sort of analysis that you come up with. It’s your thought leadership. You own it. You’ve made sense of the best ways that seasonal campaigns work.

And then you could be responsible on an ongoing basis for running their seasonal campaigns against what you found in the audit. Doesn’t mean that’s the thing to do, but there might be if you have thought leadership and a point of view on how to run killer seasonal campaigns, All all you need is that.

Just that, Jessica. You just need outstanding thought leadership on seasonal campaigns.

Right. But that really could be you could build something out of that. You would still have So for every part of the retainer, there is still a certain level of original work that has to be done. Yeah.

But you need to try to systematize.

I say sixty percent of that. That’s not a real number. That’s just to give you a sense for it should be more systematized than custom.

Mhmm. So if you can break it down to here are the templates that work great for these campaigns.

If you could come up with that, if you could own that, then that could be a really interesting retainer where you are doing original work each time, but it’s based on your brand’s hypothesis about what is what to do to make seasonal campaigns work really well so that you attract customers that will pay pay more money to you down the road or whatever that thing is that you’re say that you end up saying in the end. I feel like you could do something, but it would require a lot of, like, really dig into what your point of view is on this.

Mhmm. Yeah. Does anybody have anything to add or any thoughts there?

I would just add that I’m totally in exactly the same boat of wondering, like, the ideas that I have for the retention offer, how do I stop them from snowballing into new projects?

Like, just, yeah, just finding that right, like, golden ratio of what goes in the standardized offer versus what’s the ongoing.

And then kind of adjacent to that, I know we were talking about, like, web copy. Like, so many of us having web copy as a standard project, but not wanting that to be the standardized one going forward.

Like, if I’ve landed on the, like, automated email sequences to increase lifetime customer value, But I’m like, how I don’t know if that’s close enough to the pain point that people like, you know, needing a sales page feels like a strong like, I don’t have the sales page. I don’t feel like it’s converting or, you know, I just feel like the post sales automated sequences feels like an add on to a painkiller product versus, like, a standardized offer in its own right.

Okay. So we were talking about this last time or on Friday. Right? And so if we’re at a so if I’m recalling correctly, it came down to sales page as standardized offer that then gets optimized, emails as standardized offer that then get optimized, or both, a standardized offer that then get optimized. And this is where you’re you’re still working through that. Is that accurate?

Well, I mean, I so I was like, okay. Shut up and make it easy. Choose the emails.

But what I because I’m reading a hundred million dollar lead nice.

Leads right now and just and I really wanna be close to the pain. Like, I wanna be fine. I want people to be like, please help me with this. And I don’t feel like the automated emails is the place where they’re like, we desperately need this support.

Can you then so you’re saying that the pain is the sales page?

No? Well, okay. I acknowledge that I’m talking about working with a different audience that I work with right now, but I was yes.

Because nobody’s ever come to me being, like, give us these emails, but people come to me all the time for the sales page.

Do they want you to continually optimize the sales page, or is it a one and done project?

Well, for my current audience, it’s a one and done project, but I’ve also never pitched sales page optimization before.

Okay. Cool. Great. So if you were to say the pain is closest to the sales page, My target audience that maybe I’m expanding to, feels great pain and wants that page optimized on an evergreen basis. They want to just continually optimize it, I’m going to sell that. That’ll be my thing. That sounds great.

No? What could be wrong with that?

Well, I feel like the sales page is harder to own than the emails just in that there’s more people doing it.

More contractors doing it. More more copywriter in my space talking about sales pages versus the behavior based automations feeling like a more like a bluer ocean.

Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah. I I don’t think it’s red ocean, though. I really don’t like I mean option?

You know best. You don’t You know. But, like, your target audience who is a person that needs a sales page that they’re continually optimizing? What’s the brand that you would want to work with?

Let’s say, like, Jerisha Hawk is a coach that I would like to work with.

Okay. Cool.

Mhmm.

So there are and do you feel like this person sorry. I’m not familiar with them. They’re always being pitched by others, or, like, they’re does it feel like they’re staring at a red ocean of people pitching them on these services?

Well, I’m like, from how engages with hers with her Instagram posts, I feel like there’s definitely at least a handful of other other copywriters, like, circling the wanting to work with her.

Who’s really killing it, though? Like, who in this red ocean is kill is it a red ocean full of sharks tearing everybody apart, or is it, like, a a goldfish pond where there’s lots of little ones in there doing their best, but may like, is there room for you to come in and be the shark?

Okay. I like that. That’s a good analogy for me. That works.

Okay. Good. Then we’ll leave it at that. I’ll quit while I’m ahead.

Alright.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Anybody else?

No? Okay. Cool beans.

Then if you’re sticking around, I’ll see you in an hour and a half for the next training.

And thank you for those who are letting their brains fill up with this stuff. Hopefully, it’s getting you to a good place, but we’ll talk more in a little bit. Okay? Thanks y’all. Bye. Bye. Bye.