Welcome to Connectable #001 🧑🤝🧑
I am so excited to share my first (new and improved) newsletter with you!
I want to help your business or brand succeed. I want to inspire change. I want you to question your current processes and align yourself with the needs of your community. I want you to attract the right people, solve the right problem and create superfans.
The medium? Email.
Sell, sell, sell! Right?
"Buy, buy, buy, now, now, now is the all too common refrain. Grab your audience's attention and do whatever it takes to "get 'em on the your list!" and make the sale as fast as possible."
"The real problem is that conventional wisdom...says that these hard-sell tactics are the only way we succeed"
- From the legends Andre Chaperon & Shawn Twing over at Tiny Little Businesses ⬇️
Let's start by debunking a common myth.
You don't have to 'act fast' and give leads an opportunity to buy straight away for fear of losing this chance forever. That's not how it works.
Please don't let fear scare you into:
Big, loud, stop-at-nothing tactics to grab an audiences' attention in any way possible
Opting for a sale immediately
Squeezing everything you can out of the customer with upsells, offers or forced continuity
.... and then think that because now you have someone new on your list you should start leading them through all your automations and offers and affiliations to get every ounce of value from this one customer in as short a time as possible.
For this to work you have to keep bringing new names on to your list with greater speed than you're losing them. That requires a lot of energy and ruthless sales tactics.
Have a look at these stats from marketer Dean Jackson based on his own extensive data:
Only 15% of people who buy within 2 years make a purchase in the first 90 days
85% of people who buy, don't make a purchase until AFTER 90 days
So the problem is, while you're try to make a sale as fast as possible, the reality is, the majority of people don't buy in the first 90 days - regardless of what tactics you try.
And while you're attempting to solve this 'problem', you make one of those future sales less and less likely.
"Instead of rushing to make a sale that's unlikely to happen (and almost certainly undermining future sales along the way), we can focus on relationships before transactions"
I will go more into relationship building in next week's newsletter.
Bottom line, don't be like Wix.
Not a community building email in sight…
Q & A with Dylan from Growth Currency
If you are a business or a brand without a newsletter, listen up. 👂
I am signed up to many newsletters and email lists but there are only a select few I actually check out on a regular basis when they ping into my inbox.
Dylan’s is one of those.
Every week, Dylan packs value, support and growth opportunities into his newsletter and with each one you feel more connected to his creator community. His community keeps growing on a weekly basis and is a testament to his skill.
Below he shares some insights into his journey with his newsletter, how integral it has been to his brand’s growth and how you can harness its power too. 👇
I am a strong advocate of the weekly newsletter as part of a business's email strategy - they are instrumental in creating superfans. How important has your newsletter been in creating a community around your personal brand?
It's been integral in building community around my Growth Currency brand. I'm also leveraging Twitter to build a platform, but the newsletter is the more personal and intimate experience.
Newsletters are direct channels to your customers and/or community members. I can't overstate how important they are to a growth and monetization strategy.
Your top 3 tips for increasing connection and meaningful community in a newsletter?
→ Offer personal stories and experiences that show you're a person and not just a business. Tie the stories to lessons you learned that your audience can relate to and learn from.
→ Ask questions with reply prompts. Particularly ones that provide your reader the chance to "help" you out. I recently asked for my readers' experiences with creator burnout and if they had any advice on how to manage it, and I got more replies than any other edition simply by asking that question.
→ I tend to thank all the new readers for subscribing and even name a handful of them at the beginning of each newsletter to foster that welcoming, meaningful community feel.
How do you approach the planning and writing of your newsletter? Any helpful strategies you'd like to share?
→ I have a template that I reuse each week that helps with the organization of the document, so an easy copy and paste gets me started.
→ I use Twitter as an "idea refinery" where I share links, learnings, ideas that I'm tempted to put in my newsletter. The ones that really get good engagement go in the newsletter. The ones that don't get left out.
→ I'm a marvelous procrastinator, so 80% of my newsletter is written the day before it's due. I don't recommend this strategy to anyone and I'm trying to curb this habit by getting a lot of the writing done well in advance. This way I can refine it and iterate better as the deadline approaches.
→ I review previous weeks' editions to see what my readers are clicking on the most so I can provide them with more content that seems to resonate with them. Review your click-throughs!
🌟 Takeaway: If you don’t have a newsletter, start one. If you have one, but it’s not working, try to shake things up.
Article of the Week
In community, consider Lifetime Commitment (LTC) instead of Lifetime Value (LTV)
- by Rosie Sherry
Key takeaways:
Lifetime Value considers how much revue a customer brings in over their entire journey - but Lifetime Commitment “focuses our energy on the commitment of the community journey rather than the transactional business value.”
By looking at community commitment you are forced to think about the things that actually matter (segments, timelines, relationships, community journey, member goals and support options).
Tweets(perations)
That’s all for this week, thanks so much for the support.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, do give it a like or share it with your friends/on Twitter.
If you have any questions, want to say hi, or want to feature in my Q & As - my DMs are always open @LisanneNausner.
Have a fabulous week full of connection!
- Lisanne