Brand Killer

A long time ago email marketing was explained to me using the analogy of a bank account.

When you deliver great content, you’re making a deposit.

When you try to sell, you’re making a withdraw.

I adapted this analogy to the relationship marketing that I talk about so often…mainly because I’ve found it to be almost 100% true.

Well, this week a presenter used the same analogy to talk about branding.

He said Branding is anything that makes a deposit in the relational bank account and selling is anything that makes a withdraw.

You know why this way of presenting this concept is so powerful?

It’s simple.

It’s easy to understand.

We see people pound our inbox with sales messages.

Maybe it’s a mix of hard sell and soft sell…or maybe it’s entirely ‘Sale, Sale, Sale…everything 25% off’ with no soft sell mixed in.

Do you have a relationship with those businesses?

Sure – you may buy something if it’s cheap enough or if it fills a big enough need…but do you know, like and trust them?

Compare that with the business that gives, gives, gives…and then makes an offer.

Does that business have your trust?

Are you more likely to buy – even if you’re not sure that you have a huge need or if the price isn’t drastically discounted?

If you’re like most people the answer is yes.

If you want to kill your Brand – one of the fastest ways to do it is to screw up the ratio of adding value and extracting value.

If you’re selling via email…are you sending awesome content and connecting with people via email too?

You should be.

I feel that this is one of the most important things I do…but before you think I’m going to just sit back and pat myself on the back about it, hear me out.

See, I’ve long believed that I share enough content for free to allow someone to build a tremendously successful business – if they just apply it.

That’s my ‘adding value.’ It’s me ‘making deposits.’

And it’s probably why I’ve had a bit of success when it comes to getting fitness professionals to work with me in VFM, invest in courses and even join Masterminds.

But in my family’s other business…Fit Yummy Mummy, this was a huge strength for a long time, but it actually became a weakness for a couple of years.

Holly used this same formula…give great content really frequently…then sell periodically…and it worked even better than it had worked for me in many ways.

Then, along the way as she was busy with other things and as I was helping her prioritize how to invest her ‘work time’ – almost all of it went into adding value for the members of her paid community…but not enough focus was given to adding value to the people who had yet to join that community.

So maybe 600 of 50,000 people were getting the type and number of relationship deposits that they should have.

Over time this showed…lower conversion rates when there was a promotion.

Fewer opens when a content email did go out.

All because the ratio of adding value and extracting value wasn’t where it should have been.

Holly has done a great job in fixing that once we recognized it – and because of it her business is thriving…and I felt like a big dummy for not catching it sooner since that was my role in her business…but here’s the scary part:

At it’s worst in that business, she was still delivering 10X the value that some of the marketers and business owners…many of them ‘leaders’…are giving. If this were a bank account many of the ones I see would have been overdrafted to the point the bank would have closed their account.

If you’re falling into this trap of making too many withdraws without making enough deposits…fix it.

Start giving some of your best stuff…and do it more than you think you should.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but here’s what I’ve found to always be true in my own business:

If the free stuff is really, really good…they’ll have no problem paying for the products, services and programs where they’re a fit because they know that:

1. They can trust that you’ll deliver and they already know and like your approach.
2. If the free stuff is good they (correctly) assume the paid stuff will be awesome.

That approach will build your relationships, build your brand and grow your business.