The Graph of Business Agony and Ecstasy (or How to Optimize Things That Matter)

The Graph of Business Agony and Ecstasy (or How to Optimize Things That Matter)

When you work on lots of email marketing projects, you have a special relationship with your inbox.

By that, I mean I read pretty much every marketing email I get—even the bad ones.

(Sometimes you can learn a thing or two from them!)

But it’s always a little disconcerting when you get a not-so-great email from a company you know has a great product.

That’s how I felt last week when I woke up to find this in my inbox:

Screen Shot 2017-01-30 at 6.23.35 PM

love LastPass. It’s a great product I use every day. But this email was definitely off to a not-so-great start.

I’m fairly certain it now holds the record for the most times I’ve been told to buy something before even opening an email.

2017-01-30 at 6.23 PM

Yep—four times.

I had to see where this was going.

I took a deep breath. I tapped the email. Here’s what I saw:

IMG_7637

I was greeted with an image of the same interface I have access to as a free user. It took up the entire screen. I scrolled.

IMG_7638

I was told to upgrade again—this time in big letters! And with a big red button!

The body copy finally provided some details:

“Thank you for trying LastPass Premium. You still have a few days left in your 60 day trial. As you get the most out of LastPass, be sure to check out these helpful Premium features. To learn more about these Premium features click here.”

The intent of this paragraph seems to be to get me to explore the premium features so I’ll want to upgrade.

Without getting into the minutiae of what’s wrong with this paragraph, I think we can agree that it’s bizarrely worded and structured. It even gives me a link to learn more about the features before it even lists them (without really highlighting any benefits).

They round out the email with two typos (which made me think it might be a phishing email) and a puzzling secondary call to action:

IMG_7639

Do I have to tap click “FREE works for me” button to keep getting free access? What will happen if I don’t click it?

So, Why am I Picking on LastPass?

Honestly, I’m not writing this to single out LastPass. When you’re working hard and moving fast to build a great product (as they’ve done), something small like an automated email will inevitably get overlooked, rushed, or neglected.

Every company has something like this email that needs improvement.

That’s why I’m using it as an example—because it illuminates a concept every business can benefit from understanding.

It’s a little something I call the Graph of Business Agony & Ecstasy. Or the GoBAE, for short. It looks like this:

GoBAE

Even though this looks like some kind of millennial-designed board game your parents would hate playing with you, it’s really a framework that can help you decide whether you should kill, continue, or optimize any project / element / initiative in your business.

Let’s break it down.

Breaking Down the GoBAE

As you can see, the GoBAE has four distinct sections.

Actions that have a lot of impact on your business but don’t require much time and money fall here.

GoBAE - highlight 1

Usually the actions and projects that fall in this area are the things referred to with annoying terms like “quick wins” and “low-hanging fruit.”

(Ugh.)

Then there are the things that require tons of time or money, but also have a ton of impact on your business. They leave you sweaty but happy, and they fall here on the GoBAE:

GoBAE - highlight 2

Things you put little effort into that don’t have much impact fall here. These things are annoying:

GoBAE - Highlight 3

And finally, things that cost you tons of time and/or money and provide little impact, fall into the bottom right corner of agony. These are the things that will kill you if you don’t kill them first.

GoBAE - Highlight 4

Let’s take a look at where some common projects / initiatives might fall.

GoBAE - Examples

(Note: I’m not saying any of these things are universally good or bad. Obviously, they vary depending on the context. They’re just examples!)

The idea that some projects cost little money but have a big impact, and that some projects cost a lot of money but have little impact isn’t tough to understand.

But there’s a corollary to this that I think lots of businesses miss—the rate at which impact increases for certain activities.

Let’s look at Steve Jobs for an example (yep, I found a way to drag Steve Jobs into this beautifully designed graph I drew).

He infamously spent $100,000 on the logo and brand identity for his company NeXT. Do you think that logo would have had a substantially larger impact on the company if he’d spent $200,000 on it? Probably not.

Its impact probably would have increased at a rate like this:

GoBAE - NeXT

Now, let’s go back to the upgrade email I received from LastPass.

What do you think might happen if LastPass were to spend just one day rethinking that email?

They’re probably already converting some free users into paying customers simply by sending something to them about upgrading. Is it possible that spending one day creating a new email might do something like this?

GoBAE - LastPass

I think it’s possible. After all, increasing the free-to-paid conversion rate by just a few percentage points could make a huge difference.

Is a leap this big guaranteed? Of course not. But at least it would only take a day’s worth of time/money to find out!

“Give-a-Damn Spots”

As I mentioned earlier, people often call opportunities like this “quick wins” or “low-hanging fruit.” If those terms make you throw up in your mouth a little bit too, let me offer an alternative phrase that could surely become just as revolting if repeated over and over by every self-proclaimed business “guru” for a decade.

I like to call these “give-a-damn spots.” It comes from a quote from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian:

“Founders have to realize the bar is set so low because most companies stopped giving a fuck so long ago…It’s something that I really expect other founders to do, and it ends up being pretty easy. Compared to building out the actual site or architecting the back end, this doesn’t require years of programming expertise. It just requires you to give lots of damns, which not enough people do.”

That quote comes from Alexis’s interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast, where he offered a related challenge:

“Invest that little bit of time to make [something like a notification email] a little more human or—depending on your brand—a little funnier, a little more different, or a little more whatever. It’ll be worth it.”

This brings to mind the story from Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, about the greatest email he ever wrote (which was also featured in Tim’s new book).

The confirmation email customers originally received after placing an order just said something like, “Your order has shipped today. Please let us know if it doesn’t arrive. Thank you for your business.”

Derek spent 20 minutes rewriting it in a super fun, whimsical style that he felt better suited the spirit of the company (you can read the full thing here—it’s awesome).

The result? So many people loved the email that if you Google one of the phrases from it (“private CD Baby jet”), you’ll get thousands of links to things delighted customers wrote about it all over the internet.

So, How Might LastPass Improve This Email?

It’s always tough to make suggestions when you’re on the outside looking in, but here’s where I would start:

1. Fix the subject line and preview text. 🤐

Refrain from telling me to upgrade over and over before I can even open the email. That’s the call to action’s job inside of the email.

The subject line and preview text needs to make me stop scrolling and click. It should also get my mind moving in the direction of the action you ultimately want me to take.

Maybe that’s accomplished by teasing a benefit of one of the features:

Your entire family’s passwords, all in one place

Maybe it’s accomplished by repeating a common question/reaction from customers:

Wait, LastPass stores more than just passwords?

Maybe it’s accomplished by telling me the beginning of a story:

Meet Dave, who hasn’t had to tell his kids the wi-fi password since 2013…

2. Don’t greet the prospect with a meaningless image when they open the email. 😐

Emails need to follow an unbroken flow.

The subject line should get you to open and read the first line of the email.

That first line should get you to read the next one.

The pattern should continue until the call to action, which should get you to take that action.

When you have a subject line that says, “Upgrade to LastPass Premium,” and then you greet prospects with the following, you’ve broken the flow.

IMG_7637

Don’t break the flow.

3. Slow your roll. 😳

Don’t tell prospects to upgrade before providing at least some reason why they should. At least try to warm them up.

My recommendation would be to continue the logical line of thought from one of the styles of subject lines I suggested in point #1.

4. Ask, “So what?” 🤔

Revisit each bullet point in the email and imagine your prospect asking, “So what?” to each one.

Let’s try this with bullet #3, “1 GB of encrypted file storage.”

So what?

You can use that to protect other sensitive information beyond just passwords, like bank account info, social security numbers, sensitive documents, and more.

So what?

You won’t have to rummage through filing cabinets and lockboxes buried in your closet anymore. You’ll be able to access all your important documents anywhere with just a few clicks.

Asking, “So what?” unlocks the information you need to create benefit-driven bullet points that actually connect with prospects’ practical and emotional needs.

5. Let your customers speak. 🙋

Beyond benefit-driven bullet points, one of the easiest ways to tap into the language your prospects use to describe their wants and needs is to simply use testimonials from your existing customers.

Showing prospects how your premium customers use LastPass and why they love it would be more effective than simply telling them they should upgrade because of features that help them “get the most” out of it.

6. Fix the typos. Geez. 🤓

This doesn’t really need further explanation.

What Can You GoBAE Today?

In many cases, there’s some forgotten, dusty corner of your business that you don’t even need to hire someone like me to fix in order to dramatically improve the results you’re getting from it. These are the spots you can fix by simply giving a damn.

Just find one, analyze the size of the opportunity according to the GoBAE, forgive yourself for prioritizing other stuff over it for so long, and then give a damn about making it better.

Sometimes it’s that simple.