Hey, Jo.

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’s 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 to 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 why I keep kinda coming against the 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 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, a 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 hundred million dollar lead nice.

Leads right now and just and I really wanna be close to the pain. Like, I wanna be I 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 or more people 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 her with her Instagram post, I feel like there’s definitely at least a handful of 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.

So my question is regarding, the retainers.

Yeah.

So I was thinking, when so I’ve come I’ve come to the client. I’ve I’ve created a sales page for them. The first month after the sales page launches, I’m not really sure what there is to optimize because I don’t have any data or anything yet. So I’m thinking for the first month that I offer a sales script, offering or look at their, you know, sales process or something like that. And then for five months after that, optimize month after month. Is that how I should be thinking, or should I go straight into optimization?

I know that the nicer idea is that you will wait a month to start making changes.

But the reality with most clients is three days later, they’re like, not seeing as many sales as I thought. Oh my gosh. You have to be patient. So I would prepare to, do one basic optimization. And usually when you’re putting a project together like a sales page, you go out with your best guesses. Right? They’re educated guesses, using BOC, using frameworks, using all the better practices, etcetera, etcetera.

But you’re still there’s still a lot of guessing that happens there to make that happen.

So while you’re putting this page together for the ten thousand dollar project, you should be making notes about, like, I don’t know if this is the right headline for our audience, or we have this video that we put here because it was the only video that they had available.

But this video is a key to shoot that VSL or whatever that could be. That’s a that’s a three hundred minute project to script to VSL. That’s an easy thing to do that month. So you don’t have to wait for data to roll in.

You can act just like they expect you to. There’s a there’s one group of people who want you to wait for all of the data to be clear and beautiful and wonderful, and there’s the other who are like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But how are you, like, making the page work better? And it depends on the client, but most are really secretly thinking, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But how do you make it work better? Like, how do we start getting more sales?

So you can just start just have a list of your here are the things that I wish I hadn’t guessed at, or here are the things I wish I hadn’t had to rush through in order to hit a deadline or because the client didn’t wanna prioritize doing that thing. So I would do that in the first month or even two months.

Okay. Yeah.

And I know that, obviously, the retainer should last twelve months. I just don’t know whether they would optimize the my client would want to optimize every month for twelve months or whether it’s just for six months.

I could so I when you’re talking to a client about this, you will say, hey. We should be going into this because they’re only doing I just wanna back up. They’re only hiring you for this work because it’s valuable. If it wasn’t valuable to them, they wouldn’t hire you. If it’s like, oh, I’m just gonna write your little social media post. They’d be like, uh-huh.

It’s not very valuable. Right? But you’re saying you’re selling them on a sales page as the thing that’s going to sell units in this expensive condo they just invested in building or whatever the thing is. So knowing that, if they’re going to put all that work together, to actually get this page up Yeah. I just yeah. I’m just thinking through how yeah.

I guess the only thing might be is that I extend it to, you know, any gaps or gaps in there, like you’re saying, you know, if they need a video updated or they need I mean, I don’t wanna obviously go into blogs and lead magnets and stuff, but maybe there’s gaps in their marketing something already.

When you’re doing that sales pitch, it’s just that you’ve sold them on something already.

When you’re doing that sales pitch for it, though, the pitch, really, you’ll tell them you’ll explain to them, hey. We already know this is valuable. So you’ve already had that part of the conversation where it’s, like, it’s high value. Here’s how much money could be against just having the sales page out there, etcetera, etcetera.

You invite them to think of this as an ongoing engagement where you should expect that we’re gonna work together. We’re gonna partner on optimizing your sales page, this key sales tool.

We’re gonna optimize it over the next twelve months or until the units are all sold out, etcetera.

If we feel really good about it six months in, that’s cool.

But I want you and me both to look at this page as the thing that we’re going to be making amazing, so high performing that from this point on, after you’ve got this page out into the world and you see that we can optimize it and make it perform better, better for the ads you’re driving to it, better for organic social stuff you might be driving to it, better for everything.

Once you see that, you can then use it as, like, a template from that point on for your other projects, or you can bring me in because you’ll see how awesome it is for this project to be done well over time. But point is that we want to work together. So if you don’t wanna partner with me on this over the next twelve months, if you want a one and done, I’m not gonna be a good fit for you because that’s not actually how this work works. That’s not how you do it. So you can share that with them. And if they still say, well, we can give it about six months, I would honestly, I would take that as a red flag.

Like, they’re they’re really not bought into it yet. So it’s either a red flag for the client or for the way that you sold it or for the, like, the actual ICP itself. Like and that goes back to the client as well. But there there are things going on there.

If they’re not down to engage you for twelve months, they don’t have to sign a thing that says yes for twelve months. It says they can cancel any month. Right? You can cancel at any point. If they’re hesitant even there, I would imagine they would cancel within three months because they’re gonna expect to see weird stuff from you.

So I would back out of that. Try to set everything up so that when you’re having the sales conversation with them for the standardized offer, for, like, the first part even, you are already establishing in their mind reinforcing just how high value this page is, this deliverable is for them. And if you question how valuable it is, now is the time to optimize the offer as well to make it like I’m only going to work on the thing that rich property developers highly value. You get to choose that right now.

You get to because now you’re, like, taking everything down to the studs and rebuilding it the way you want it. So choose exactly what they highly value, and then just be I know it sounds oversimplified, but then just be the expert in that thing, and then it’s easy to sell that. Whatever they value in the realm of what you do with copywriting, that’s the thing that they will keep buying if they’re the right, business. Does that make sense?

Yeah. It does. It does.

They should be excited that you’ll be working on it for twelve months, and you should be excited too. And that will be a mindset shift that you haven’t seen yet because you haven’t done it yet. Right? But once they start seeing, woah, results rolling in, you’re reporting the results, you’re making sure they can see the clear story there of just what you’re doing here, then you’ll be excited. They’ll be excited.

You just in between now and then, you need to take a leap of faith yourself to believe that you can actually deliver this high value work. And that can come down to other strategies like an alter ego if need be. Right? Yeah. If you’ve read alter ego or just know the concept, of course. Yeah. Yep.