Last week I talked about how writers seem like magicians, because we have the power to create something out of nothing. An important point to note about magicians, though: They don’t really do magic. Instead, they study and practice specific behaviors until they can create that illusion of creating something out of nothing. And of
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A component of my publishing philosophy is: “Wanting to write something does not guarantee that someone will want to read it.” And it comes into play when you write the first marketing materials for your business — many new marketers get excited about a type of writing that doesn’t turn out to be engaging. The
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Can I really earn a living with digital products and services? The answer is yes, you can. And you can enjoy the personal and professional freedom that comes along with it too. Already prepared to move forward? Here’s how to start your Digital Commerce Academy membership today, so you can learn the strategy and tactics
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Over the last couple years, I’ve spent an increasing amount of time diving into the possibilities Deep Learning (DL) offers in terms of what we can do with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some of these possibilities have already been realized (more on this later in the post). And, I could not be more excited to see them out in the world.
Through it all, I’ve felt there are a handful of breath-taking realities that most people are not grasping when it comes to an AI-Powered world. Why the implications are far deeper for humanity than we imagine. Why in my areas of expertise, marketing, sales, customer service and analytics, the impact will be deep and wide. Why is this not yet another programmatic moment. Why the scale at which we can (/have to) solve the problems is already well beyond the grasp of the fundamental strategy most companies follow: We have a bigger revenue opportunity, but we don’t know how to take advantage? Let’s buy more hamster wheels, hire more hamsters and train them to spin faster!
Today I want shed some light on these whys, and a bit more. My goal is to try to cause a shift in your thinking, to get you to take a leadership role in taking advantage of this opportunity both at a personal and professional level.
I’ve covered AI earlier: Artificial Intelligence: Implications On Marketing, Analytics, And You. You’ll learn all about the Global Maxima, definitions of AI/ML/DL, and the implications related to the work we do day to day. If you’ve not read that post, I do encourage you to do so as it will have valuable context.
In this post, I’ve organized my thoughts into these six clusters:
There is a deliberate flow to this post, above. If you are going to jump around, it is ok, but please be sure to read the section below first. You won’t regret it.
Ready to have your mind stretched? Let’s go!
I’m really excited about what’s in front of us. When I share that excitement in my keynotes or an intimate discussion with a company’s board of directors, I make sure I stress two especially powerful concepts that I have come to appreciate about the emerging AI solutions: Collective Continuous Learning + Complete Day One Knowledge.
They are crucial in being able to internalize the depth and breadth of the revolution, and why we strengths AI brings are a radical shift beyond what humans are capable of.
The first eye-opening learning for me came from the Google Research team’s post on Learning from Large-Scale Interaction.
Most robots are very robotic because they follow a sense-plan-act paradigm. This limits the types of things they are able to do, and as you might have seen their movements are deliberate. The team at Google adopted the strategy of having a robot learn own its own (rather than programming it with pre-configured models).
The one-handed robots in this case had to learn to pick up objects.
Initially the grasping mechanism was completely random – try to imagine a baby who barely knows they even have a hand at the end of their shoulder. Hence, you’ll see in the video below, they rarely succeed at the task at hand. ;)
At the end of each day, the data was collected and used to train a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), to learn to predict the outcome of each grasping motion. These learnings go back to the robot and improve its chances of success.
Here’s the video…
It took just 3,000 robot-hours of practice to see the beginnings of intelligent behavior.
What’s intelligent behavior of a CNN powered one-handed robot?
Among other things, being able to isolate one object (a stapler) to successfully pick-up a Lego piece. You’ll see that at 15 seconds in this video…
Or, learning how to pick up different types of objects (a dish washing soft sponge, a blackboard eraser, or a water glass etc.).
I felt a genuine tingling sensation just imagining a thing not knowing something and it being able to simply learn. I mean pause. Just think about it. It started from scratch – like a baby – and then just figured it out. Pretty damn fast. It truly is mind-blowing.
There were two lessons here. The first related to pure deep learning and its amazingness, I was familiar with this one. The second was something new (for me). This experiment involved 14 one-handed robot arms. While not a massive number, the 14 were collectively contributing data from the start – with their many failures. The end of day learnings by the convolutional neural network were using all 14. And, the next day, all 14 started again with this new level of collective wisdom.
For a clear way for me to capture this lesson, I call this Collective Learning.
It is very powerful.
Think of 14 humans learning a new task. Peeling an apple. Or, laying down track for a railroad. Or, programming a new and even more frustrating in-flight entertainment menu for Air Canada (who have the worst one known to mankind).
Every human will do it individually as well as they can – there will be the normal bell curve of competency. It is entirely possible, if there are incentives to do so, that the humans who are better in the group will try to teach others. There will be great improvement if the task is repetitive and does not require imagination/creativity/intrinsic intelligence. There might be a smaller improvement if the task is not repetitive and requires imagination/creativity/intrinsic intelligence.
In neither case will there be anything close to Collective Learning when it comes to humans.
Humans also do not posses this continuous closed loop: Do something. Check outcome (success or failure). Actively learn from either, improve self. Do something better the next time.
Collective Continuous Learning. An incredible advantage that I had simply not thought through deeply enough.
Here’s the second BFD.
Machine Learning is already changing lots of fields, the one I’m most excited about is what’s happening in healthcare. From the ability to speed up discovery of new medicines to the unbelievable speed with which Machine Learning techniques are becoming particularly adept at diagnosis (think blood reports, X-rays, cancers etc.).
An example I love. 415 million diabetic patients worldwide are at risk of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) – the fastest growing cause of blindness. If caught early, the disease is completely treatable. The problem? Medical specialists capable of detecting DR are rare in many parts of the world where diabetes is prevalent.
Using a dataset of 128,000 images Google’s Accelerated Science Team trained a deep neural network to detect DR from retinal photographs. The results delivered by the algorithm (black curve) were slightly better than expert ophthalmologists (colored dots)…
Specifically the algorithm has a F-score of 0.95 and the median F-score of the eight expert ophthalmologists was 0.91.
As richer datasets become available for the neural network to learn from, as 3D imaging technology like Optical Coherence Tomography becomes available all over the world to provide more detailed view of the retina, just imagine how transformative the impact will be.
Literally millions upon millions of people at risk of blindness will have access to AI-Powered technology that can create a different outcome for their life – and their families.
#omg
A recent incredible article on this topic is in my beloved New Yorker magazine: A.I. VERSUS M.D. You *should* read it. I’ll jump to a part of the article that altered my imagination of possibilities.
An algorithm created by Sebastian Thrun, Andre Esteva and Brett Kuprel can detect keratinocyte carcinoma (a type of skin cancer) by looking at images of the skin (acne, a rash, mole etc.). In June 2015 it got the right answer 72% of the time, two board-certified dermatologists got the right answer for the same images 66% of the time.
Since then, as they outlined in their report published in the prestigious journal Nature, the algorithm has gotten smarter across even more skin cancer types – and consistently performs better than dermatologists.
Most cancers are fatal because they are detected too late, just imagine the transformative impact of this algorithm sitting in the cloud easily accessible to all humanity via their five billion smartphones. This dream come true: low-cost universal access to vital diagnostic care.
Oh, and here’s a profoundly under-appreciated facet of all this. These health algorithms (including and beyond the one above), are incredible at corner cases, the rare long-tail anomalies. They don’t forget what they have seen once or “rarely.”
This is just a little bit of context for the key point.
A dermatologist in a full-time practice will see around 200,000 cases during her/his lifetime. With every case she sees, she’ll ideally add to her knowledge and grow her diagnostic skills.
Our very human problem is that every new dermatology resident starts almost from scratch. Some textbooks might be updated (while comfortably remaining a decade of more behind). Some new techniques – machines, analytical strategies – might be accessible to the resident. But, the depth and breadth of knowledge acquired by the dermatologist at the end of her career with 200k cases, is almost completely inaccessible to the new resident. Even if they do a residency at an hospital or with a old dermatologist, a newly minted dermatologist will only be a little better than when the old one left school.
Consider this instead: The algorithm above processed 130,000 cases in three months! And every day it will get smarter as it’ll have access to the latest (and more) data. Here though is the magical bit. Every single new algorithm we bring online will have total access to all knowledge from previous algorithms! It’s starting point will be, what I call, Complete Day One Knowledge.
As it gets more data to learn from, as it has access to more compute power, it will get smarter and build upon that complete knowledge. The next version of the algorithm will start with this new high mark.
There is nothing equivalent to Complete Day One Knowledge when it comes to humans.
Combine having Complete Day One Knowledge with Collective Continuous Learning (networked hardware or software all learning at the same time) and it should take you five seconds to realize that we are in a new time and place.
Whatever form AI takes, it will always have access to complete knowledge and through the network each instance will make all others smarter every single instance/moment of its existence.
Humans simply can’t compete.
That’s the BFD.
Stop. Think. If you disagree even slightly, scroll back up and read the post again.
It is imperative that you get this not because of what will happen in 10 years, but what is happening today to the job you have. If you still disagree, scroll down and post a comment, I would love to hear your perspective and engage in a conversation.
Bonus 1: There is an additional valuable lesson related to open-loop grasp selection and blindly executing it vs. incorporating continuous feedback (50% reduction in failure rates!). The two videos are worth watching to see this in action.
Bonus 2: While are on the subject of objects… Relational reason is central to human intelligence. Deepmind has had recent success in building a simple neural network module for relational reasoning. This progress is so very cool. Additionally, I was so very excited about the Visual Interaction Network they built to mimic a human’s ability to predict. (If you kick a ball against the wall, your brain predict what will happen when the ball hits the wall.) The article is well worth reading: A neural approach to relational reasoning. Success here holds fantastic possibilities.
It depends on what you mean by doomed but: Yes. No. Yes, totally.
Artificial Intelligence will hold a massive advantage over humans in the coming years.
In field after field due to Collective Continuous Learning and Complete Day One Knowledge (not to mention advances in deep learning techniques and hardware :)), AI will be better at frequent high-volume tasks.
Hence, the first yes.
Neuralink at the moment is a concept (implantable brain-computer interface). But many experts (like Ray Kurzweil) believe some type of connection between our human brain and “intelligence, data, compute power in the cloud” will be accessible to humans.
I humbly believe that when that happens, over the next few decades (think 2050), humans could get to parity with AI available at that time. We might even have an advantage for some time (if only because I can’t let go of the thought that our brains are special!).
Hence, the no.
As we head towards the second half of the current century, AI will regain the lead again – and keep it for good. I don’t have the competency to judge if that will be AGI or Superintellignece or some other variation. But, with all other computing factors changing at an exponential rate it is impossible that intelligence will not surpass the limitations of humans and human brains (including the one with a version of Neuralink).
Here’s just one data-point from Jurgen Schmidhuber: Neural networks we are using for Deep Learning at the moment have around a billion neural connections compared with around 100,000 billion in the human cortex. Computers are getting 10 times faster every 5 years, and unless that trend breaks, it will only take 25 years until we have a recurrent neural network comparable with the human brain. Just 25 years.
Hence, the yes totally.
I have a personal theory as to what happens to humans as we look out 150 – 200 years. It is not relevant to this post. But, if you are curious, please ask me next time you see me. (Or, sign up for my weekly newsletter: The Marketing < > Analytics Intersect)
AI: A conversation with a skeptic.
Surely some of you think, to put it politely, that I’m a little bit out there. Some of you’ve heard the “hype” before and are deeply skeptical (AI went through a two decade long tundra where it failed to live up to every promise, until say 2010 or so). Some of you were promised Programmatic was AI and all it did was serve crap more efficiently at scale!
I assure you, skepticism is warranted.
Mitch Joel is the Rock Star of Digital Marketing, brilliant on the topic of media, and a very sweet human being. Amongst his many platforms is a fantastic podcast called Six Pixels of Separation. Our 13th podcast together was on AI. Mitch played the role of the resident skeptic and I played the role of, well, the role you see me play here.
If you can think of a skeptical question on this topic, Mitch asked it. Give the podcast a listen…
As you’ll hear multiple times, a bunch of this is a matter of thinking differently about the worldview that we’ve brought with us thus far. I share as many examples and metaphors I could to assist you in a journey that requires you to think very differently.
If you are still skeptical about something, please express it via comments below. Within the bounds of my competency, I’ll do my best to provide related context.
Ok, ok, ok, but what about the now? (Professional)
While I look at the future with optimism (even 150 years out for humans), what I’m most excited about is what Machine Learning and Deep Learning can do for us today. There are so many things that are hard to do, opportunities we don’t even know exist, the ability to make work that sucks the life out of you easier, better, smarter, or gone.
In a recent edition of my newsletter, TMAI, I’d shared a story and a call to arms with specific recommendations of what to do now. I’ll share it with you all here with the hope that you’ll jump-start your use of Machine Learning today…
I lived in Saudi Arabia for almost three years. Working at DHL was a deeply formative professional experience. My profound love of exceptional customer service, and outrage at awful customer experiences, can be directly sourced to what I learned there.
Saudi Arabia is a country that saw massively fast modernization. In just a few years, the country went from camels to cars. (I only half-jokingly say that Saudis still ride their cars like camels – and it was scary!).
Think about it for a moment.
From camels to cars. No bicycles. No steam engines. None of the other in-betweens other parts of the world systematically went through to get to cars. They were riding camels, then they were riding cars. Consider all the implications.
We stand at just such a moment in time in the business world. You know just how immersed and obsessed I am with Artificial Intelligence and the implications on marketing and analytics. It truly is a camels to cars type moment in my humble opinion (it might even be a camels to rockets moment, but let me be conservative).
Yet, executives will often give me examples of things they are doing, and they feel satisfied that they are with it, they are doing AI. When I probe a bit, it becomes clear very quickly that all they are doing is making the camels they are riding go a little faster.
That all by itself is not a bad thing – they are certainly moving faster. The problem is they are completely missing the opportunity to get in the car (and their competitors are already in cars).
It is important to know the difference between the two – for the sake of job preservation and company survival.
Here are a handful of examples to help you truly deeply internalize the difference between these two critical strategies…
If you are moving from last-click attribution to experimenting with first-click or time-decay, this is trying to make your camel go faster. Using ML-Powered Data-Driven Attribution and connecting it with your AdWords account so that action can be taking based on DDA recommendations automatically, you are riding a car.
(More on this: Digital Attribution's Ladder of Awesomeness)
If you are moving to experimenting with every button and dial you can touch in AdWords so that you can understand how everything works and you can prove increase in conversions while narrowly focusing on a few keywords, you are making your camel go faster. Switching to ML-powered Smart Targeting, Smart Creative and Smart Bidding with company Profit as the success criteria, for every relevant keyword identified automatically by the algorithm, you are riding a car.
Staffing up your call center to wait for calls from potential customers is making your camel go faster. Creating a neural-network that analyzes all publicly available data of companies to identify which ones are going to need to raise debt, and proactively calling them to pitch your company's wonderful debt-financing services is riding a car.
Hand picking sites to show your display ads via a x by x spreadsheet that is lovingly massaged and now has new font and one more column on Viewability, is making your camel go faster. Leveraging Machine Learning to algorithmically figure out where your ad should show by analyzing over 5,000 signals in real time for Every Single Human based on human-level understanding (die cookies die!), is riding a fast car.
(To see a delightful rant on the corrosive outcomes from a Viewability obsession, and what you might be sweeping under the carpet, see TMAI #64 with the story from P&G.)
Asking your Analysts to stop puking data, sorry I mean automate reporting, and send insights by merging various data sets is making the camel go faster. Asking your Analysts to just send you just the Actions and the Business Impact from those Actions is riding a car. Asking them to shift to using ML-powered products like Analytics Intelligence in GA to identify the unknown unkonwns and connecting that to automated actions is riding a rocket.
If you are explicitly programming your chatbot with 100 different use cases and fixed paths to follow for each use case to improve customer service, that is making the camel go faster. If you take the datasets in your company around your products, problems, solutions, past successful services, your competitors products, details around your users, etc. etc. and feed it to a deep learning algorithm that can learn without explicit programming how to solve your customer's service issues, you are riding a car.
I, literally, have 25 more examples… But, you catch my drift.
I do not for one moment believe that this will be easy, or that you'll get a welcome reception when you present the answer. But, one of two extremely positive outcomes will happen:
1. You'll get permission from your management team to stop wasting time with getting the camel to go faster, and they'll empower you to do something truly worth doing for your company. Or…
2. You'll realize that this company is going to suck the life out of your career, and you'll quietly look for a new place to work where your life will be filled with meaning and material impact.
Win-Win.
Hence, be brutally honest. Audit your current cluster of priorities against the bleeding edge of possible. Then answer this question: Are you trying to make your camel go faster, or jumping on to a car?
While Machine Learning has not solved world hunger yet, and AGI is still years away, there are business-altering solutions in the market today waiting for you to use them to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
Ok, ok, ok, but what about the now? (Personal)
If this post has not caused you to freak-out a tiny bit about your professional path, then I would have failed completely. After all, how can the huge amount of change mentioned above be happening, and your job/career not be profoundly impacted?
You and I have a small handful of years when we can create a personal pivot through an active investment of our time, energy and re-thinking. If we miss this small window of opportunity, I feel that the choice will be made for us.
This blog is read by a diverse set of people in a diverse set of roles. It would be difficult to be personal in advice/possibilities for each individual.
Instead, here’s a slide I use to share a collection of distinct thought during my speaking engagements on this topic…
In orange is a summary of what “Machines” and humans will be optimally suited for in the near-future. (Note the for now.) Frequent high-volume tasks vs. tackling novel situations.
In green, I’m quoting Carlos Espinal. I loved how simply and beautifully he framed what I imagine when I say tackle novel situations.
Over the last 24 months, I’ve made an whole collection of conscious choices to move my professional competencies to the right of the blue line. That should give me a decade plus, maybe more if Ray is right about Cloud Accessible Intelligence. Beyond that, everything’s uncertain. :)
I hope you noticed I ended the above paragraph with a smiley. I’m inspired by the innovation happening all around us, and how far and wide it is being applied. I am genuinely excited about the opportunities in front of us, and the problems we are going to solve for us as individuals, for our businesses, for our fellow humans and for this precious planet.
In my areas of competence, marketing, analytics, service and sales, I can say with some experience that change is already here, and much bigger change is in front of us. (I share with Mitch above how long I think Analysts, as they are today, will be around.) I hope I’ve convinced you to take advantage of it for your personal and professional glory.
(All this also has a huge implication on our children. If you have kids, or play an influencing role in the life of a child, I’d shared my thoughts here: Artificial Intelligence | Future | Kids)
The times they are a changin'.
Carpe diem!
As always, it is your turn now.
Were Collective Learning and Complete Day One Knowledge concepts you’d already considered in your analysis of AI? Are there other concepts you’ve identified? Do you think we are doomed? Is your company taking advantage of Deep Neural Networks for marketing or analytics or to draw new value from your core back-office platforms? What steps have you taken in the last year to change the trajectory of your career?
Please share your insights, action-plans, critique, and outlandish predictions for the future of humanity, :), via comments below.
Thank you.
The Artificial Intelligence Opportunity: A Camel to Cars Moment is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
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I love digital business. Nothing else can match it for the freedom, the flexibility, the ability to make a living while only occasionally putting pants on. But. Sadly, it just isn’t true that you can wave your hands around, say a few magic words, and turn the internet into your ATM. The internet has no
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48 hrs left…
24 hrs left…
12 hrs left… I’m about to close it!
8 hrs… you’re REALLY gonna miss out
4 hrs… I SWEAR I’m not effing around this time.
2 hrs… this might be your last chance ever!
10 min…. LAST CHANCE… do it now or you’re a terrible human.
Where the countdown timers work overtime.
Where online marketers get more dramatic than Nic Cage in a direct-to-Netflix disaster flick.
And where the urgency and scarcity get spread on thicker than the Nutella on a diabetic’s breakfast sandwich.
You don’t feel good sending those.
Your prospects feel worse getting’em.
And the only reason you still order the Mailchimp monkey to fire them off at your subscribers is cause you’ve been tricked into thinking they’re the best way to maximize revenue in the final hours of your email campaign.
Those last-chance cart-closing don’t-miss-out emails are a necessary evil, right?
Not so fast. Truth bomb time. In the last 48 hours of your promotion:
Yes, yes…
I hear you, dear marketer.
And I’ve read Cialdini’s Influence as many times as you have.
But I’ve also spent the last half-decade engineering 7-figure product launches for world-class coaches, course creators and respectable business leaders who wouldn’t dare let their closing emails look like a K-Mart liquidation bin.
And after helping generate tens of millions of dollars in “final day” revenue for peeps like Amy Porterfield, Todd Herman, London Real and others….
Here’s what I’ve realized.
Urgency is NOT the most powerful thing you should be “pushing” in the final hours of a sales campaign.
Instead, your job is to trigger a far more subtle and powerful precursor that empowers your prospect to say “yes.”
How do you do it?
That’s right.
Decisiveness.
It’s a lesson I learnt when I hired my first business coach, Marc.
I was three days out of the stroke ward, dead broke from my previous 30K/year agency gig, and sitting in the middle of a doughnut shop when my soon-to-be biz coach asked:
“Here’s the investment. Are you to ready to commit to 3 months of one-to-one coaching?”
There was no “deleting” him from existence (legally).
No shoving him to a chrome tab.
No retreating to the safe confines of a funny cat meme.
Just Marc.
My soon-to-be food stamp reality.
And a decision that had to be made.
He didn’t threaten to “close the door” or spontaneously combust if I didn’t make a decision in 15 seconds. Instead, he coached me into a decision I felt confident enough to make.
And therein lies the secret.
If you take a closer look at why 1-on-1 selling boasts a 10X close rate over your overly dramatic “the sky is falling” emails…
…you might just tap into a much more powerful, authentic and value-giving way of leading your prospects beyond their resistance, and into your checkout process.
Obviously there’s a level of responsiveness and adaptability that CAN’t be replicated at scale… no matter how ninja you get with your behavioral triggers and automations. But if you extract a few of the more powerful (and repeatable) principles at play. You can start making profitable strides in bridging the 10x gap between the 2-5% conversion rate your closing emails are probably getting you…
… and the 20-50% that the world’s top enrollment specialists get to brag about.
Ready to make this practical?
Want to see how you can take your next campaign (or an existing evergreen sequence) and coach decisiveness in the final minutes to boost profits?
“I only want you joining my super expensive program if you’re 110% committed”
“Tire kickers can go screw themselves”
“You have to be willing to invest 18 months, your first born child, and your vintage rock t-shirt collection”
Holy commitment batman.
Marketers have this pesky habit of either setting the commitment bar ridiculously high… or non-existently low (looking at you SaaS trials).
Problem is, if humans only took action when they were 110% certain, there’d be like 6 married people in the world – with 5 of them being pre-arranged.
When you ask for 110% commitment, you’re going against billions of years of neural wiring.
What feels safer?
“I know we just met, but let’s hitch a ride to Vegas and get married now.”
Or…
“I like where this is going. Let’s test things out. If they continue to go well, we’ll keep doing them for as long as it feels right.”
Buying your product shouldn’t feel like a “massive step” forward.
It should feel like a natural step forward, propelled by the momentum generated through your previous interactions.
MVC feels most at home In your CTA’s and your risk reversals.
Here’s how we plugged it into the “Perfect for You If” closing email template that we used in our February launch of Copy School. Have a read:
What do you see?
First, actually, let’s talk about what you don’t see.
You don’t see “you need to drop everything in your life to make this work.” And you don’t see the copy creating absurd, unrealistic expectations.
What you DO see is a quick display of empathy around our prospect’s current mental/emotional struggle. What you DO see is a stress-free invite to give things a shot.
On a more subtle note, this allows you to take potential objections like “being unable to dive in for a few weeks” and make that INCLUSIVE in what makes a perfect buyer. When you do this, you set the bar just high enough so that your prospect feels good about their ability to clear it. Yet low enough that they can still make the jump even if they have a 10 pound bowling ball of resistance shackled to their feet.
So try this formula in one of your closing emails:
Maybe you’re [time or value objection]
Maybe you’re [unsure of being a fit objection]
Either way, you totally appreciate having [guarantee length] to put [Product] to the test to see if you can [achieve most desired outcome or overcome most crippling pain]
Oh… and a note about the so-called “tire kickers.”
Stop procrasti-shaming them.
The hyper-committed bought the second you said “go.”
If you’re down to the final 48 hours of your promotion, chances are good that all you have left are the “tire kickers.”
Don’t kick them out of the car lot.
Give them an ice pack for their swollen feet, and show them why driving is more fun than kicking a tire or two.
Ya… ya…
I know your product or service can do some pretty uh-mazing things when used to its full capacity.
The problem is, for many products, the “big win” or “ultimate outcome” won’t come for weeks, months or even years.
aka…when your prospect’s changed their hairstyle, gone keto, and barely recognizes themselves in the mirror.
aka… a reality which is EXTREMELY difficult for them to project themselves into no matter how many senses you engage in your expert level “future pace”.
So how do you get around this?
How do you get your prospects excited about an imminent outcome that they can actually see themselves being an active participant in through your product?
This is a concept I developed as the love child between two brilliant thought leaders.
The first one being world-class performance coach, Todd Herman who suggests that any goal we set outside of 90 days is too far beyond our “horizon line.” In other words, the further out we try to envision a potential outcome, the blurrier it appears – the less we feel connected we feel to it – the less inclined we are to take action towards it. This has immediate implications for any marketer. Cause the further out we need to future pace an outcome for our prospects – the more “out of focus” and out of reach it will feel.
But to counteract that phenomenon, it’s not enough to simply shorten the timeline of the buyer’s experience to what they’ll get to experience in the next 90 days.
We also need to be strategic about which outcomes we choose to future pace.
To do that, we lean on the research of Stanford Professor and behavior expert BJ Fogg, whose concept of “easy wins” suggests this:
For people to be motivated to continue pursuing any action, they need to experience a set of immediate and observable wins.
Not just the low hanging fruit…
But the lowest, juiciest, most immediately satiating fruit.
The combination of both is what I call the “Quickest, Valuable Win” (QVW).
Want a few examples? Happy to oblige.
The QVW for a driver who’s run out of of gas isn’t a full tank of premium quadruple grade nitro…
… but a few drops of WETF will get them off the right shoulder of the freeway.
The QVW for a 40-year-old tech entrepreneur who’s going to the chiropractor to fix an achy back ISN’T being able to do cartwheels on her front lawn – but the quick little spinal adjustment that will allow her to sit for more than 2 hours a day to do her most important work.
Here’s how the QVW played out for our signature program, Copy School:
Copy School includes 3 FULL courses and close to 100 video lessons, with the ultimate goal of turning you into a world-class conversion copywriter with the chops to parlay your skillset into premium rates or high-paying in house gig.
But what about right now?
What about the quickest, most valuable win that you can achieve this weekend while life is still pretty much the same?
For that, we led with the library of 29+ templates, any of which could be written in about 30 mins and cover your ROI on the spot (selling your own product or writing for a client) in a single weekend.
Quick? Check.
Valuable? Check.
Win? Check.
So the question you need to answer is this:
What’s the quickest, most valuable win your prospect can gain from using a certain feature of your product?
Or… flipping that around, what’s the most painful wound you can patch up in minutes?
And while you ponder that, let’s move on to your third trigger…
In 1997, when my mom and now stepfather were 3 years into their relationship, she finally gave him the world’s oldest ultimatum.
“Are you in or are you out?”
A few months later, they were trading nuptials and stomping on wine glasses, essentially putting an end to the world’s longest nurturing sequence.
Cute story, you say, but what does this have to do with bumping up my “final minute” profits?
If you’ve implemented the first 2 parts of this post, then…
… you’ve made the decision feel safe (MVC)
… you’ve made the outcome feel palpable and imminent (QVW)
… and in doing so, you’ve earned the right to get hyper binary.
Yes or no with absolutely zero in between.
Remember, most leads who fail to convert do so NOT because they’ve said “no” but because they’ve said nothing at all. Sales teams estimate that approx 60% of all lost sales are lost to “no decision.” Not to the competition. Not to the cheapest kid on the block. But to no decision whatsoever.
They abdicated their responsibility to act.
They let your cheesy countdown timer hit zero before shrugging their shoulders and saying “whoops, guess I missed it.”
The greatest culprit to your conversions isn’t a “no.” It’s the absence of a decision altogether.
So when the time is right – that is, after you’ve engaged your leads, presented the problem, positioned your offer and given them multiple chances to take you up on it… aka the last hours of your promotion or launch – you no longer need to dance around the issue. Stop dancing. Start closing with real questions that require real answers. And with real statements that require real reactions.
So how do you do it?
Nothing ninja about it.
Don’t throw more sales arguments against the wall to see what sticks.
Instead, position against indecision. Literally call it out. And give your prospect a binary choice, with clear stakes and outcomes for each divergent path.
Because examples help clear this idea up and make it more likely to stick the next time you write an email, here’s how a recent 10x Launches student executed the “binary choice” in his cart-closing-soon launch email. Take a sec to read and see what he’s doing:
So you know how, back in the day, salespeople were told to “smile on the phone” cause the person on the other end could supposedly “hear it.”
Ya, I used to think that was a bunch of BS too.
Until I realized that my highest converting emails were the ones in which I brought myself to feel the pain as deeply as my prospect would.
As if I was right there in the eye of the hurricane with them.
Desperate to solve the problem as if it were my own life or death situation.
Here’s what I’m getting at…
FOMO shouldn’t just be the thing you ask your prospect to feel in the final minutes before your offer or promotion expires. It should be something you feel on behalf of them when you sense their opportunity to overcome a pain or solve a problem quickly slipping away.
There’s no template or swipe file for this last one.
But if you expect your prospect to give a damn about your expiring cart…
Might not be a bad idea for you to take the lead.
These triggers are just a few of the ways you can “coach the conversion” in the final 48 hours of any drip campaign, product launch or evergreen funnel.
If you’re feeling good about sprinkling these triggers in your “final day” emails, by all means… skip “go” and dive straight into your email software so that you can start profiting ASAP.
But if you want to get a new stack of high-converting sales emails written fast.
And I mean… fast…
(by leaning on 25+ high-converting email templates)…
We just pulled our TWO best selling email copywriting programs out of the vault and joined them at the hip to form our craziest training bundle yet.
You can get it here until this Friday
~ry
Featured image by Florian Klauer on Unsplash
The post 3 little-known conversion triggers to Jack Up Sales in the final 48 hours of your email campaign appeared first on Copywriting For Start-ups And Marketers.
I’ve said for a long time … writers are magicians. We make something out of nothing. We take syllables and turn them into dreams, sights, sounds. Calls to action and detailed plans for shenanigans. And as every magician knows, if you want to perform magic … you have to know a thing or two about
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As I’ve said before, overcoming perfectionism is not an excuse to publish sloppy or uninspired writing. Content that works for your business is not only clear, accurate, and educational, it also gives insight into your values. And if it doesn’t contain aspects that make it memorable, it’s not going to work. Of course, memorable content
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Website security has never been more critical. Hackers, ransomware, and denial of service attacks are all concerns for modern business websites. Nothing will erode your audience’s trust in you faster than visiting your website and getting a security warning, or having Google flash a “You can’t trust this site” message in your search results. Even
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This week offers a mix of inspiration, clarity, purpose … and some good, old-fashioned results-oriented copywriting. On Monday, I shared some of the practical, repeatable steps you can use to create an online course that people actually want to buy. (That’s a fun thing to do, by the way, and I totally recommend it.) Brian
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Your headline draws them in, while your opening copy maintains the magnetic hold. The express benefits give them hope that they may have found the solution they desire. And then you ask for the sale with an explicit call to action. A total win, right? Then why are you still disappointed with your results? You’re
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Daydreaming is inherently flexible. You don’t need to set aside time for it or plan how to execute it properly. It effortlessly arises and plays out until you shift your focus back to your responsibilities. Last week, I talked about getting more out of your expectations, and today I’m going to talk about a daily
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After ebooks, online courses are one of the most popular business models for digital entrepreneurs. The tech is easier to put together than ever. Audiences know that online courses are valuable and have shown they’re willing to pay. And courses are a natural showcase for the authority you build as you develop great content for
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The right users may be signing up for your free trials…
They may be activating.
They may be experiencing AHA moments and getting value out of what your SaaS offers. They may be the perfect candidate for a paying customer.
But here’s the problem: too many of them are not buying. They’re not converting from free to paid. They should convert. But they’re just… not.
Could be your free trial is too long. Could be your pricing is wrong. Could be your whole business model is wrong. Or it could be something much simpler – it could be this:
There comes a time when your prospect is actually ready to buy.
The nurturing stops. And the closing begins.
This is where it comes down to what you say and how you say it.
It comes down to copy.
As we work to grow Airstory, we see – time and again – that the biz gets stronger when our copy acts like our online salesperson… and results get crappy when our copy doesn’t realize it’s supposed to be selling. Now I know I’m talking about “selling,” which is a trigger word for a lot of people. (“Don’t sell! Teach, and they’ll convert.“) But the fact is that, eventually, you really do have to try to close your prospect. Yes, you’ve gotta have the right strategy, product-market fit, nurturing content, etc. But once that’s settled, it’s all about copy that closes.
Once it’s time to sell, your copy can triple your business… or cut it in half… or destroy it. Copy is that important.
Not long ago, we worked with Wistia on increasing paid conversions for their trial emails. If you know Wistia, you know:
But something wasn’t working. In spite of all of that. In spite of Wistia being Wistia.
It was a copy problem. Wistia’s email copy wasn’t acting like an online salesperson. It wasn’t closing.
So we fixed that. Here’s how.
I’ve spoken about this study at conferences like Mozcon, and I’m gonna keep mentioning it ‘cos it’s such a good study in closer copy. But I’ve never gone through all 8 emails like I’m about to do here. I’ve never shown the before-and-after for each of them. I’ve never gone much deeper than using these emails to teach folks how to “get specific” and stuff like that.
Today, I’m gonna share the long and the short of this SaaS onboarding email study with you. Consider this a crash course in writing copy for SaaS emails, where the goal is to increase paid conversions.
My hope: you’ll take what you read here and rewrite your emails to close.
To help with comparisons, let’s look at all the Wistia emails (Variation A / Control) and then the Copy Hackers rewrites (Variation B). You can click each to see full-size, with detail.
Control, by Wistia:
Variation B, by Copy Hackers:
So that’s the lay of the land. Now here are the 7 primary ways we edited and optimized this track / sequence, with before-and-afters to illustrate.
Before we dive in, two points.
The first: Wistia’s emails are very well written and smart. We were starting with a strong control. We were also really lucky to be working with entrepreneurs that test risky stuff instead of playing it safe. Swinging for the fence = always the better way to run a copy test.
The second: All the emails labeled Treatment B were part of the sequence that brought in 350% more paid conversions. So when you’re reading through and going “meh, that’s too long” or “there’s no way this would work for us, ” remember: all together, these emails more than tripled paid conversions. So is it worth a test for you? Methinks so.
K, let’s optimize some emails…
When I invited Andrew at Wistia to see my proposed copy to test, his first reaction was this:
“It’s longer than we’re used to.”
But he knew we were testing. And he trusted me. So he rolled with it.
Every single email we wrote used more copy than the control. In 7 of the 8 emails, our versions were at least 3x as long as the control. And that’s not because we’ve got major issues with self-editing.
It’s because we weren’t thinking of an email as an email. We were thinking of an email as a sales letter for a single feature.
More about this in the next point. But for now, when you’re reviewing your copy, ask yourself:
How is the way I’m thinking about emails limiting what this email can do?
How is my fear of losing subscribers limiting this email’s ability to close?
If I didn’t have a nagging voice in my head telling me to play it safe,
how would I actually write this?
And when you start writing longer emails, your worry should NOT be that your copy is “too long.” Your worry should be that your copy “doesn’t sell for shit.” Make it sell. Make it close. Use as many words as it takes to earn your cup of coffee.
A paid conversion happens once you’ve convincingly moved a prospect through the 5 primary stages of awareness, all the way to Most Aware.
Source: Search Engine Land
By the time a trial user started to receive the emails in the Wistia sequence we were optimizing, we had good reason to believe they had strong Product Awareness and were moving toward Most Aware. So the job of the emails was to nurture the prospect the rest of the way. It was to move the prospect from Product Aware to the far end of Most Aware, where closing happens. That was it.
But the control emails weren’t organized to push the prospect along the awareness spectrum.
Instead, they hovered in the Solution Aware > Product Aware space. This is what they were each about:
Email 1: Video analytics (Product Aware)
Email 2: Timeline actions (Product Aware)
Email 3: Wistia vs the competition (Solution or Product Aware)
Email 4: Turnstile case study (Solution or Product Aware)
Email 5: Video analytics case study (Solution or Product Aware)
Email 6: Turn off Wistia branding (Product Aware)
Email 7: Support is available (Product Aware)
Email 8: Player customization (Product Aware)
They needed to be organized to round out Product Awareness and move the prospect to Most Aware. Because we wanted to increase paid conversions. So we reordered them like so:
Email 1: Ego: the vanity play with data (Product Aware)
Email 2: Ease: tweaks (Product Aware)
Email 3: Direct tie to outcome: growth (Product Aware)
Email 4: Differentiator: CTAs (Product Aware)
Email 5: The Pitch (Most Aware)
Email 6: PAS (Most Aware)
Email 7: Incentive: upgrade to annual (Most Aware)
Email 8: New segment: courses
Note that, as we moved the prospect through Product Awareness, we focused not on the features but on the outcome / benefit for the prospect. It wasn’t until Email 4, where the prospect was Most Aware, that we framed our focus around features and incentives.
Emails 1 through 4 were for a Product Aware prospect.
Emails 5 through 7 were for a Most Aware prospect.
And email 8… well, that was our throw-in. We felt confident that emails 5 through 7 would convert, and we hypothesized that, if it didn’t convert a user, it may be that that user had specific needs not yet addressed in the emails. For the test, that unknown non-converting user was a course creator using Wistia. And that’s why email 8 feels more like an offshoot of the sequence than a part of it. By design. Here it is, for your reference:
Takeaway: Optimizing your email sequence may be as simple as reordering your existing emails along the stages of awareness spectrum, finishing always with closer emails for a Most Aware prospect.
In my experience, marketers are happiest with a message when it sounds polished.
But here’s why that’s a problem. What happens when you run your hands over something that’s polished? They slip right off. They don’t stick. Because there’s nothing to stick to.
Same is true for polished copy. If your copy sounds like it’s been reworked until anyone anywhere could say it, that’s a bad thing.
Lemme repeat for the enterprise marketers out there: polished copy is a bad thing.
We want copy that sticks. And that’s almost always going to sound raw. Because it will be pulled from voice-of-customer data and left largely unedited, like in our headline for this email:
The control email features a polished headline. The headline for Treatment B:
Both emails are about comparing Wistia to the competition in order to convert the trialist. But only one of the emails makes you care about – and engage in the act of – comparing the two. Only one of them makes Wistia sound like the better option. Only one of them tries to sell the upgrade to paid.
If you ask a yes/no question hoping for a “yes” answer… what happens if your prospect answers “no” instead? You need to phrase all your questions in such a way that the prospect has to answer in agreement with you. And if you can’t do that, delete the question.
Why? Because you do NOT want your prospect to shake their head at you. That ‘no’ interrupts the seduction. It makes them think you don’t actually understand them after all.
In this control email, the opening line of the body copy finishes with this question:
Ready to dive into some data?
Few marketers and video-pros using Wistia and receiving these emails would answer “Yup, I cannot WAIT to dive into some data!” Instead, they’d answer with a shrug, a soft no or a hard no (i.e., close the email, never to return again).
So our version of this email asks questions with more controlled answers.
The first question is this: People are watching your video. Fantastic, right?
Unless the prospect is using Wistia for private videos no one is intended to watch (in which case this email wouldn’t trigger), the answer to that question is very likely going to be “yes.” Even an eyerolling yes. Even an omg-I-hate-myself-on-camera yes.
The next question our copy asks isn’t a yes/no. It’s a question that requires the reader to think about the answer, and it allows us to help her arrive at the right answer.
The question is this: How can you put your new video data to work for you?
We follow that question with an entire paragraph of questions that agitate or dig deep on the topic, with the idea being that the marketer is unlikely to have thought of all the ways video analytics can help them optimize their video content. We’re showing – not telling – that Wistia is stellar because it arms you with optimization-aiding analytics. We’re nudging the prospect to see Wistia as a powerful data solution.
We finish the email by answering the questions we’ve asked.
Case studies are great. As long as you tell the story right.
And by “tell the story right,” I mean be a good storyteller:
If you don’t have conflict, you don’t have a story.
If you don’t have a hook, who would read?
In these emails, you can see that the control was based around a case study for a business called Zeeblu. It’s a perfectly fine study. But because we didn’t find the story compelling, we dropped the study and put our hero (the prospect) at the center of the story:
Compare the two emails.
The control wants to tell a story.
Treatment B actually does tell a story. (Hell, it’s even got dialogue.) If our version had a working title, it would be “How you can use Wistia to get more leads.”
Wistia’s a brilliant solution, so little wonder they have a lot of case studies. A second case study-based email – this one for MailChimp – appears in the same sequence:
We decided to scrap the Mailchimp story entirely. That’s because we’d already talked about video analytics in this sequence. In its place, we wrote a short closer-focused last-chance ‘offer’ email, where we repositioned an existing offer to sound like a one-time promotion; we scheduled it toward the end of the sequence, when the non-converted trial user is likely to be Most Aware.
It can be hard to say no to using a case study – especially great ones from known names. But if it’s not a compelling story, you will bore your prospect. So don’t waste a sales email on a non-converting email.
Remember: Every email your subscribers open but don’t care about is an email that widens the gap between you and them.
What does your brain see when you read this line:
Customize the color of your video player appearance.
And what does your brain see when you read this line:
The Wistia video player defaults to grey. Which is nice. But grey. Why stick with grey when you can go with hot pink… or dollar-bill green… or, well, Wistia Blue?
Each of those statements is conveying the same message. But your brain has an easier time grasping one over the other. Is the vague first one easier to grasp… or is the more specific one more likely to form an image or two in your brain?
Okay, let’s try another one.
K, tell me how your brain makes sense of this statement:
18% is a lot.
Now how does your brain make sense of this:
Getting 18% more views is pretty major. Videos that used to get 100 views a day now get 118 views a day. In a month, that’s an extra 500+ views.
One is a statement that leaves the reader to figure stuff out. (And maybe even argue that 18% is not a lot.) The other is so specific, it removes the burden of thinking, calculating, pausing, trying to make sense of the numbers. The prospect can just absorb the info. No work required.
The specific copy outperformed the vague copy.
That didn’t happen in just one email I wrote. That happened in all the emails I wrote.
Here’s another example:
As you can see in the two emails above, this control copy wasn’t as specific as it could be:
You can add annotations, create calls to action or collect emails through turnstile – all within the video player!
We unpacked the significance of each of the important points the control was glossing over. That turned into a bullet list filled with specifics about annotations, CTAs and turnstile.
This all goes back to Steve Krug’s old “Don’t Make Me Think” principle. Use specificity to bring concepts, product features, outcomes, benefits and more to life in the mind of your busy reader. When you tell yourself your reader is too busy to read a lot of copy, remember that specific copy is going to engage more than short, vague copy will.
Perhaps (or of course) Don Draper said it best:
“The greatest thing you have working for you is not the photo you take or the picture you paint. It’s the imagination of the consumer. They have no budget. They have no time limit. And if you can get in that space, your ad can run all day.”
Your first draft will be crap.
It should be.
This is always true.
You should never expect the first draft of anything you write or someone else writes to be great.
The real magic happens once the first draft is knocked out. Without Wistia’s control emails to work with, we would’ve had to go through God knows how many iterations to get a strong first draft ready to optimize. Thankfully, Wistia’s got stellar marketers and copywriters on their team – so it was easy for us to ‘edit in the awesome.’
With these lessons, it should be easy for you to edit the awesome into your email sequences, as well.
And if you feel like this post is just scratching the surface of what you can do with your email copy (because it is), click here to be notified when our copywriting program 10x Emails reopens
FINAL NOTE: There is no such thing as optimized copy.
The very term “optimized copy” suggests a finality – but optimization is an ongoing thing. It’s never done. Wistia is still optimizing these emails.
That said, when you A/B test your copy, you have the benefit of data to tell you if your optimization efforts paid off in that one moment in time. Did your new copy work? Should you push harder on a new focus in your messaging? That’s what testing can tell you – not necessarily which message is best but where you should keep applying energy…
~jo
PS: When I present this study, I often hear that we didn’t just change the copy – we changed the design. People say I should talk about the design changes, too. That’s cool… but our philosophy is that copy leads design. So when copy changes, design changes. We can’t separate the two. But what I can say, as a copywriter and the lead on this project – as the person who typed the copy into the HubSpot email templates – was that copy changed, and what you’ve seen above are the copy changes.
The post We did these 7 things to a SaaS onboarding email sequence, and it tripled paid conversions appeared first on Copywriting For Start-ups And Marketers.
We all know the potential trouble associated with expectations:
If you expect something to turn out a certain way — and it doesn’t — you likely end up disappointed.
Subsequently, traditional wisdom has advised that we let go of our expectations to soften the blow of disappointment and train ourselves to be content with the outcome we get.
Even though I hold that outlook to be true most of the time, I wanted to explore how we could use expectations to our advantage in certain situations, rather than try to (unsuccessfully) forget about them.
If you struggle with letting go of expectations for your business, I have three steps you can follow to put them to work in your marketing instead.
During this step, you examine each expectation you have and turn it into a goal.
When you don’t deny or downplay what you hope for, you’re free to get specific about what you want. Those specific details can then help you uncover and perform the work you need to do.
This step can be tricky because it requires a critical evaluation of your current work routines to see if they support your goals.
You want to be open to different options you may have not considered before.
A topic I find fascinating is the difference between people who work hard and meet their goals and people who work equally hard but don’t experience the type of success they want.
If both types of people work hard, why don’t they both see satisfying results?
My hypothesis is that people who succeed are more flexible and acknowledge when something isn’t working for them. They reassess their methods in a timely manner and move toward a similar goal that may be easier.
They keep setting and meeting new goals … until they eventually reach the one they originally wanted or achieve something even better.
The work they perform every time they adjust their focus moves them closer to that initial expectation they hoped for.
On the other hand, people who work hard but don’t meet their goals may get stuck working hard on the wrong things and ignore their great potential in other areas.
Let’s go back to the expectations that helped you set your goals.
Rather than strive to have something you don’t currently have, commit to working like your expectation is already a reality.
When you create your next piece of content, ask yourself:
You may decide to write a content series that also educates them about your business or an ebook that becomes part of your business model.
The idea is to shift from focusing on what you don’t have (yet) to putting out meaningful work into the world. You get to where you want to go by helping other people get to where they want to go.
You have to create content on a professional website as if you already have the audience you want to engage — it’s how to attract the right people to your business over time.
This perspective on how to use your expectations could be summed up with the widely known phrase: “Fake it ’til you make it.”
I find that saying a little trite, but it’s essentially the mindset I’m talking about. 
It may not be as concise, but let’s refer to it as:
Your expectations can drive excellent work and direct you to your next milestone as you move closer to your ultimate goals.
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