When it comes to getting customers to buy more, it helps to have psychology working for you. So I invited buyer psychologist, Katelyn Bourgoin, to chat with me about the marketing tactics that truly make a difference when it comes to getting customer to open their wallets. This is a great discussion that covers insights like Jobs to Be Done, Trigger Events, and the deep psychology that engages customers and keeps them coming back for more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
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Stuff to check out:
Katelyn’s Newsletter
Wallet Opening Words <— Get this!
The Milkshake Video
Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life?
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Transcript:
Rob Marsh: Why do people buy the products and services we write about? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need this episode. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Before you can sell the products and services you write about, you need to understand why your customers buy in the first place. This includes marketing concepts like market/message match, jobs to be done, market sophistication, clarifying an offer, finding pain points, and finding under-served markets.
My guest today is buyer psychologist Katelyn Bourgoin. She writes the Why People Buy newsletter and focuses on using science and psychology to sell more of whatever it is that you are writing about. Personally, these are the topics I could talk about for hours. If you want to sell more of the products and services you write about, you’ll definitely want to listen to this entire episode. What Katelyn shares about “trigger moments” is in my opinion one of the most important concepts in marketing that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
Katelyn and I also talked about making difficult decisions like shutting down a business that isn’t working, or choosing between taking a real job and doing something on your own, and the mindset shifts required to make these decisions. And I grilled Katelyn on the methods she used to grow her newsletter. If you write a newsletter (or want to write a newsletter), her ideas will help you attract new readers faster.
Before we get to my interview with Katelyn, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us.
The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.
And now, my interview with Katelyn Bourgoin…
So Katelyn, welcome to the copywriter club podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here. I’ve been wanting to have you on the show, literally, for like, a year. I’m not sure why it took so long to make the right connections, but thanks to Jordan for helping to make it happen. But since you’re here, tell us your story. I know you’ve got a great story of, you know, some business success and failure, but you have created an amazingly successful newsletter. I love it. It’s one of those that I wait for it to come into my email box, and probably because the topic is the topic that just rings my bell, which is persuasion. So anyway, tell me your story. How did you get here?
Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a long question.
Rob Marsh: It was a terrible question.
Katelyn Bourgoin: No, it’s a great question. I just feel like I’m, you know, I’m always kind of thinking about the best way to share this story, because it’s long and winding as most entrepreneurs are, and like, to your point, things look great today, but there have been a lot of ups and downs to get to this point. And so maybe I’ll share a little bit of the journey before launching the newsletter, which is why we buy so prior to launching the newsletter, if we go all the way back to like 2014 so we’re talking like 11 years ago, I was running a branding agency. I’d actually just sold the sister company, which was a restaurant consulting agency, and I was having this kind of crisis of identity, like I think a lot of folks do, or I was like, I need to stop selling time for money. I want to sell something that scales, something more scalable.
And at the time 2014 I was under the impression that the online course and online, you know, creative world was too busy, so I should do something else. Now, this is funny, considering that it’s still an amazing opportunity for anybody who wants to get into that world. And that’s, you know, really what the business is that I run today, 11 years later. So I decided I was going to do something else, and I was going to launch a tech company. Because how hard could that be? Really, really effing hard, Rob. Things did not go as planned. We launched an initial product, got some venture capital funding. Inc Magazine was saying we were building the next LinkedIn for women. Everything looked awesome from the outside. It was not going awesome on the inside. We really understood the customer we were going after. And of course, I was good at marketing and PR, but not so good at building the right product. I built the wrong product, and it wasn’t solving the core pain point that the audience that we decided to go after needed us to solve for them. It was janky. It didn’t work very well. And so we’d have 1000s of people signing up, and they would post, and they kind of create a profile, and they did not stick around. They didn’t really maintain their activity. And so in the last dish effort, I ended up pivoting to more of a think tank model.
But at that point, I was so burned out, and we were out of money, and I was just like, I can’t keep going. And so ended up closing down the company, super sad, licking my wounds, trying to decide, what am I going to be when I grow up? Had to go bankrupt because I’d taken a bunch of personally guaranteed loans in the early days before we raised venture capital and trying to figure out what’s next. And I was really fortunate, because I brought on these great investors, and one of the investors that I brought on had a huge portfolio of companies, and was like, Hey, you weren’t so good on the product side. I was like, Yeah, I know. But you were really good at the marketing side. And we have all of these founders that we support that are building incredible products, and they’re not great at explaining them, getting people excited about them, selling them. Will you work with some of our companies? And I said, Yes, are you gonna pay me? It’s like, I really need money. And yeah. So they’re like, Yeah, you can come on as a consultant, and we’ll pay you to work with these companies. And so I started working with all of these brilliant founders who were building world changing technology, their clients were like Boeing and NASA and Tesla and like they were changing the world. And I would go and I would sit down at their boardroom tables, and I’d ask them the question that we want to know as marketers, which is, tell me about your customers. And I was really surprised that most of them could not give me a straight answer. They would be like, oh, you know, like we target, you know, entrepreneurs, or, we target companies like this, but also kind of like this, or the founders would be fighting about who the target customer is in the session. And one time, a founder looked at me straight in the face and he said, our target customers are B to B, online businesses with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees.
Rob Marsh: Pretty much every business?
Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. So I was like, Okay, there’s clearly a problem to be solved here and helping people to better understand their customers. And so I got really nerdy with this problem started, like, hungrily consuming all of the literature that I could. I’m like, why are so many people having this issue where they don’t understand their customers? They don’t understand the demand that customers have.
And that led me to discover Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta work around jobs to be done, which is kind of a whole other conversation we could get into. And it led me to thinking, I’m going to start an insights agency. I want to build an agency that helps companies understand their customers. Will do customer research on the graph, will feed them insights. They need this information to build successful companies. Well, around this exact same time that I have this big idea like, I want to start generating demand for this. I was doing a lot of consulting work. I was running workshops and training for mostly companies in the innovation space, helping them to better understand their customers. And so I started thinking, okay, I need to start priming people for when I eventually launched the agency. And so I created Why We Buy as a newsletter, basically to build pipeline for a future agency. And that was in 2021 and we’d come through the pandemic. We were figuring out the world again in person. Stuff wasn’t happening. It was mostly still virtual. And I found out that I was pregnant, which was exciting, because we’ve been trying, and so we ended up having a baby. And shortly after, within four months, my husband broke his neck. It was like, Oh, crap, what am I going to do? I’ve got this newborn baby. I am, you know, trying to figure out how to build this business. I’m doing it all by myself. And around that same time, sponsors started reaching out to me, being like, we’d like to pay to promote our stuff in your newsletter. And I was really weirded out by that, because, like, what is that a thing? I didn’t even know about this world. And so initially I started just saying, no, it’s not worth my time for like, 200 bucks to promote your thing.
I eventually ended up having a couple calls with some of these brands and realizing it was a big opportunity, and that there was really an opportunity to build a business around the newsletter. And that’s when I decided to hit pause on the agency idea, and go all in on building a media and education company. And that was the start of what I’ve built today.
Rob Marsh: It’s an it’s an amazing story, and it’s got me thinking… but we kind of skimmed over shutting down the business—bankruptcy. Yeah, it was bad, but when people go through that, it’s really bad. How did you deal with the emotional weight of that happening to you and to keep going? And the reason I’m asking this is there are a lot of people who are starting their own businesses that get into that dip and they get stuck, or they struggle and they have to give up and have to quit, or they have to move on to something else. What was the thing that got you through that?
Katelyn Bourgoin: It’s a great question. I would say that there were two things that happened at that so, funny enough, after closing out that company, I was trying to decide, what’s next? What am I going to do when I grow up? And I actually had a company that would have been my dream job reach out, offering an executive role in their marketing team, and I was at this crossroads. So it was like, you know, I’ve just had to go bankrupt. I’ve built my own thing. I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last—this was 2018—I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. I basically had never had a real job, and I was under the weight of this. Like, you know, do I go and get a job or do I keep going and continue to build a company?
And if I’m honest, the reason that I said no to the job was I felt like an imposter. I was afraid I would not meet their expectations. I didn’t think that I deserved the role that was being offered to me, and so I passed up on it, thinking I’m going to get in there and they’re just going to see that I don’t belong. And that turned out to be the greatest thing ever, because I’ve since gone on to build a company that I really love. I do really feel confident my abilities as a marketer. But it was one of those low points in my life. But the thing that I look at now, and I see it as a bit of a gift, is, once you’ve been that low as an entrepreneur, like once you’ve basically lost everything, the company fails, you go bankrupt. I had a bunch of friends and family who had invested in our round that I had to tell we’ve lost your money. It wasn’t a lot of money, fortunately, but it was enough that it was many, many months of sleepless nights. Once you’ve gone through that, you realize there’s nowhere to go. But that’s the positive about being on the bottom, there’s really nowhere to go but up. And for me, once I identified the problem that I saw these startup founders making, I was like, we made that problem too. We just made it on the other end, like, we also didn’t understand. We understood who we wanted to sell to. I’d bought into the whole idea you have to niche down. You have to be super specific. And we were like, we were going after a very specific persona. They were early stage female entrepreneurs building online businesses. Most of them were in the very early stages. That was a huge mistake for many reasons. You know, early stage entrepreneurs don’t tend to have a lot of money to invest in solutions, which I am now, in retrospect, aware of, but, you know, we’d taken that advice to niche down and to focus on the customer, and I realized that I was so focused on that customer, but I didn’t really deeply understand the problems that that we needed to solve for them and building the right solution. And so that experience my on my own end, and then seeing that rippled out through these other companies, it became really clear to me that we’ve got a lot of people out there building stuff that people don’t want and or they’re building stuff that people do want, there’s doing a terrible job of explaining why they should want it and what it is. And that’s a problem I want to solve. That’s an exciting problem, because you’ve got these great entrepreneurs who are trying to build these world changing solutions that can’t get traction.
So ultimately, I feel like I had to hit that bottom and feel that pain so that I could see that opportunity, because otherwise I never would have seen it. We’d be having a very different conversation today. Had that company been successful.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, we probably wouldn’t be having a conversation at all, because I conversation at all, because I wouldn’t be
on your newsletter list.
Katelyn Bourgoin: Exactly.
Rob Marsh: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how we figure out the message that matches up to that deeply felt pain point? Because you actually touched on it twice, as we’ve been talking for the last 10 minutes or so. Obviously this is a big problem that a lot of people have. So how does somebody go about—I’m thinking of copywriters, content writers, who are trying to figure out—what is my… how do I match my message to the pain point that I’m working for my clients? But also, every business struggles with this. So how do you advise clients or people to figure that out?
Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a great question. I would say, first of all the answer is that you need to be able to step back from what it is you want to sell and start thinking about what people want to buy. And I think that that takes a real shift for a lot of people, because we often have a motivation that’s personal and selfish around the thing that we’re selling. If you’re you know, for entrepreneurs, our motivation is we want to build this cool internet company where we can work 10 hours a week and make millions of dollars. Our motivation is often coming from a self centered place, and then we try to find a market for that thing. And that’s just not how it works. It’s not effective that way.
So I’d say that the most important step is starting with this is the way that we you know, I’m working on a workshop right now to help people through this whole process. It’ll help them to basically clarify their offer, figure out the painful problems that they’re like, uniquely qualified to solve, and who wants to pay them a lot for that in two hours. And so this, I’m figuring out the exact step by step process, because I went through this in a organic way. But then when I sat down to be like, how do I actually help other people do this?
I figured out there is a specific process, and it starts with first identifying the trigger events that lead people to be interested in an offer like yours in the beginning, in the first place, right? So people don’t just wake up one day and go, oh, I want to buy this, like, B to B CRM software, or like, oh, I want to like, come to Katelyn’s workshop. That’s not the way that the world works. Something happens in their life outside of our visibility that pushes them to realize they’ve got a problem that they need to solve, right? Because if they could do it on their own, if they could just figure out what the next step is, they wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t be looking for a solution. They’d already be doing it. So a trigger event happens that makes them move into looking for a solution, because they have a job to be done. Right?
Next step, identify the job to be done. Most people are really bad at this, right? They’re again, they’re creating a solution and then searching for a problem to solve, as opposed to understanding what is the actual thing that people are trying to accomplish? What are the nuanced details around that so that I can create the right solution? So figure out what job it is those prospective customers are trying to get done next. Ask yourself, who are the people that are likely to have that job to be done and willing to pay for a solution because they’re underserved by the existing solutions, or there’s things that are out there, but they’re not right in their use case. So narrow it down. Figure out, like, Who are these potential target markets that have this job to be done?
And then do what I call pain storming, and this is really fun, which is basically, you just go through, you look at those, those potential buyers. Let’s say you narrow down to three potential segments that you might be able to solve problems for. And you look at, what are all of their problems, right? What are the functional problems they have when they’re trying to get the job done? What are the emotional problems that they have? What are the social problems, the things you know, the way that they worry about being perceived when they’re doing it, and what are their kind of risks? And it’s like, you know, a perceived problem thing that they worry is going to happen. And you figure all of that out for those, you know, let’s say, three potential personas, and then you start to look for the overlap, because I bet you there are problems that are overlapping across those different audiences. And in doing that, you can go, Okay, I’ve identified some very painful problems that you know a particular segment of the market has.
Now I can work backwards and figure out an offer that actually solves those problems and the messaging to communicate that to those people, because I think again, it’s like we often go about this backwards. We start with what we want to sell, and then we try to figure out where to sell it. And that’s the reason why so many people are struggling.
Rob Marsh: Love that you share that, and it rings true. In fact, listening to you just talk about that process, I hear a lot of Clayton Christensen coming through not just the jobs to be done, but identifying those opportunities where people are underserved is one thing that he talked a lot about in his various books. Can we talk a little bit deeper about jobs to be done? Because I think this is a framework that’s really useful, but also sometimes hard to wrap our brains around, because you’re thinking, Well, of course, the course that I’m selling is teaching people the thing, right? Or the template that I’m selling is helping people get the thing, and that’s not really what jobs to be done, at least that’s only part of the JTB framework. So you talk a little bit about that?
Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been so blessed that I got to connect with Bob Moesta, who was the co-creator of jobs to be done with Clayton Christensen. So if anybody has watched… Google: “jobs to be done, milkshakes” and you will watch a four minute video where Clayton Christensen, who, for anybody who’s listening, Clayton, he’s sadly passed away, but he was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation. The top CEOs of the world would come to him with their problems, and they say, we want to innovate. We want to create solutions. People buy we keep running into problems where we put stuff in the market. Nobody buys it. Why do we keep doing this? How do we stop and he basically with, with the help of Bob and I think two other people, ended up creating the jobs to be done, theory and framework. And when, in the video, he talks about why people buy milkshakes, and he’s explaining, one of his colleagues went out and started interviewing people and asking them why they bought their milkshake. That colleague was Bob Moesta. And so I’ve been fortunate enough to get to spend time with Bob, to have him participate in work shapes that I’ve been hosting. And like, he’s just blown my mind as to understanding the depth of this, but this is where things get tricky.
So for most of us, especially people who I think are in the who are building very malleable products, right? So if you’re building a physical product that’s in the world, you kind of get one opportunity to get that right, right, and then you need to think about all of your marketing and everything. But if you’re building everything. But if you’re building a service business, or you’re building a online tool, or you’re building an online course or community, you can really adjust and modify things. So I think that the jobs to be done method of first understanding why people buy solutions like yours or your thing. So the way that they recommend doing this is by going out and interviewing customers and running what Bob calls a switch interview. And what that basically means is, why did those people if Why did they switch from what they were doing before to buy from you and what they were doing before might have been nothing. You might have been the first thing that they bought, or it could have been they were using this other tool that had been working okay for them, but then stopped working because something in their life changed. And when you understand the real details of the buying journey, that’s where all of the insight can come from to figure out, well, what are people actually trying to get done.
So, funny enough, when I launched the Why We Buy newsletter, it was because I’d zeroed in on the job to be done. Nobody in their right mind, and remember, we were trying to build an insights agency where we would actually go out and conduct this research for our clients. Nobody in their right mind actually wants to do interviews. That is not the job to be done. Nobody wants to do interviews. Nobody wants to do research. Most leaders of companies are allergic to the word research. They don’t want to do it. They don’t want to pay for it. They see it’s often been a huge waste of time. But what they do want is they want to understand why their customers are buying, so they can get more of them right. They want to understand what’s how their buyers are making decision. That’s the job to be done.
Now, there’s a lot of different ways they can do that. They could go out and, you know, hire my theoretical agency that had ever launched, or they could hire us to do research for them. They could run a survey with their with buyers, right? They could do a bunch of AB testing, run ads and try to test different messages and see if some clarity comes into it. The problem with a lot of the other methods for you know deeply understanding how your customers make decisions is that they don’t actually get to the root of it, because a lot of them are by observing customers or by asking customers to answer these kind of short servers, you don’t get the in depth stuff that you can get in an interview.
So when I was thinking about a newsletter, I was like, there’s no way I’m going to write a newsletter on research, because research is a project for most companies, right? It’s not an ongoing job to be done. It’s something that they do once and or they do it on a quarterly basis, or whatever they want to be new. And so if they were to sign up for my newsletter, they might read the first few issues, and then when you know research isn’t a priority for them, maybe they’re not gonna keep reading it. I was like, I want to create something that we’re gonna open every week. So if people want to understand what drives buyer behavior, what are other things other than research that I could theme the newsletter around?
And that’s where the idea for buyer psychology came from. Because I was like, this is another way to understand your buyer’s decision making process. It’s another way to get that job done. And if I can get people to sign up for that newsletter, they’re going to be the kind of people that are probably going to actually be interested in an insights agency that helps them do research. So that’s a long winded answer, but essentially it’s like getting down to the real root of what is the what is below the demand? What job are they trying to get done, taking your solution, thinking out of it. It wasn’t doing research. It wasn’t, you know, running interviews. None of that was what people actually wanted. What they wanted was to understand how their customers make buying decisions so that they could, you know, market smarter.
And so by understanding that I was able to come up with an idea for a newsletter that would, in theory, attract the perfect people for the insights agency I plan to build pre neck break.
Rob Marsh: Who knows, if you were to launch that agency now… you’ve got 80,000 people on your list who are ready to buy, right? So… I love talking through that and thinking through that process, especially from the standpoint of the listeners to this podcast, copywriters, content writers, marketers, who are doing a lot of these freelance type things. Oftentimes, we’re selling things like websites or sales pages or emails, and we don’t always recognize that our clients actually don’t need websites, sales pages and emails. I mean, they do, but what they really want is the thing that the website, email and sales page gets them, right? Which is a new customer or revenue or in some cases, it’s psychological benefits like, Oh, my spouse respects me, because they can see that I have a real company, at least online, it looks like I’m doing something real and I think we forget that a lot, and we focus so much in on that deliverable.
Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, and I think the other thing that we do as marketers, that is that we have to be cautious of. Because I think this is why, when you look at a lot of markets are very saturated, and us as copywriters or marketers are trying to find ways to create a differentiated message. And oftentimes, I think what we do so going back to jobs to be done, the simple way of explaining it is basically the job is the progress that a person is trying to make in a very specific circumstance. So it’s about understanding what is, what is it that they’re trying to achieve? That’s the kind of the job, and then why? Why does achieving that matter? And I think as entrepreneurs, we often will kind of go really heavy into selling. The why, which is off the big rhetoric in marketing, you know, sell the life, sell the life, sell the life with and then our stuff just sounds like everybody else’s. Because, guess what? As humans, we all have the same core goals. We want to survive and we want to thrive, right? We want to make more money, we want to have more time. We want to be more attractive to the other sex.
So if you jump too much into the why, and you focus your message there, then you end up selling sounding like everybody else who’s selling this big dream, this glitzy dream. So I think it’s really important to understand what the job is, because that’ll allow you to differentiate your messaging and make sure that you’re speaking to that. And part of understanding the job, a huge part of it, as you know, in my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, is it’s about understanding the struggles people have when completing that job. That’s the opportunity in our messaging.
And so as I work on this, this new workshop, and I’m using, it’s very meta, but I’m using my own creation of the workshop as an example in the workshop, because, you know, everybody who will be attending that workshop will have bought that product, so it’ll be very, very relevant to them. But as I work through it, it’s like figuring out what the specific job is that people are coming to that workshop before they’re coming there because they want to design a scalable digital offer that they can build on their own without growing their team to scale their service based marketing business. It’s very specific, right? And so when you think about that, once you kind of, like, wrap your hands around that, it’s like, okay, I know that, that I know what this what the trigger is. It’s about, you know, them struggling with growing their existing service based business, feeling stretched, feeling strained, wanting to offer something that’s more scalable. I know what it is they’re wanting to do. They want to figure out what that offer is. Chances are, get digging into the pain points they’ve already tried. They’ve probably launched things before that didn’t really work. They didn’t know why. And there’s the kind of the key context which is really important, which is that they want to be able to do it on their own without hiring more people.
And so this needs to be something that they can actually when I create a solution for them and I try to sell them that solution, those are always really important things to do. Now I could have my message be, you know, work three hours, like, a week from the beach, and, like, make money while you sleep. That’s a great dream to sell. That’s kind of the why. But that message doesn’t work anymore with people because they’ve seen it too much, and it doesn’t really speak to the real job that they’re trying to get.
So I think it’s really important to balance that kind of like aspirational why messaging with really getting clear on your differentiated value when you understand the job your customers are trying to get done and the nitty gritty details, you can get clear on that.
Rob Marsh: That’s an incredibly valuable look into what we all need to be doing with our customers and our clients that we’re attracting to us. I would love to shift our conversation a little bit and talk more about your newsletter. There’s a thing that’s happened around newsletters over the last couple of years where creators are growing, tools have emerged—Beehiiv and Substack and Kit—are creating great tools for, not just growing newsletters, but serving clients. How have you grown your newsletter? Because I think everybody does it a little bit differently. I know you have been on social media and Twitter quite a bit in the past, and showing up in various places, but we talked about how we all start with no one reading our newsletter. How did you go from zero to where you are now? And I think it’s like 80,000 something.
Katelyn Bourgoin: So we’re now down to like 63,000. And I’ve been really fortunate. So I’ll share the things that are now available to anybody starting a newsletter. I actually got fairly early access to some of these. So we built from zero to 10,000 based on promoting basically through my social network and through some collaborations with other newsletters. So us promoting them, they promoting us. That was from zero to 10,000 we got there within, I think, probably a year and a half, you know, about 18 months from zero to 10,000 so that was very much like not being super. I think it was like 89,000 but not being super, you know, tactful about it, but what I did do that was smart, and I’ve stopped doing and we’re going to start redoing, was every, um, every Monday, before the newsletter would go out on Tuesday, I would plug, kind of like, tease what the issue was going to be, and I would share a screenshot of, like, some kind of like, unsolicited praise of the newsletter. And that was, I think, the smartest thing that I did, because a reminded people to sign up. So I think a lot of newsletter creators don’t do they don’t remind people to sign up. And it showed that other people were liking the newsletter, and it created this kind of like virtuous flywheel, because then other people would see that post, then we’re reading the newsletter already, and they go, Oh my god, this is my favorite newsletter too. And so I could get more screenshots.
So that was one smart thing that I did in the beginning, but because we had gotten to about 10,000 I was on a call with Nathan Berry from Kit, and I was actually on his podcast, and he told me about some cool things that they were doing over at that. It was then ConvertKit, now Kit to help newsletter operators to grow their list faster. And I was on a different platform at the time, and it’s like, super exciting. And so I moved over to Kit, and I was an early user of a platform called Sparkloop, which Kit has since acquired. And the Sparkloop team, it was this great new like feature, and they were the first to release it. And it was something that a lot of the big newsletter brands had been doing very manually, but spark made it easy, which was after somebody would sign up for my newsletter, they would see a recommendation of three to five newsletters that I also recommended, and they could choose to then, with one click, sign up for those newsletters too. So we got early beta access to this before it was available to the public, which helped us to grow a lot faster than we would have had we not had access to that early. And so we partnered with a number of other newsletters and promote promoted each other, and that made a big difference in our growth.
And then, since then, a lot of the growth it still comes from, you know, plugging the newsletter, consistently doing it. We had been testing different Facebook ads to grow the the audience. It worked, but we didn’t see that those readers became buyers within a window of that made sense. So we kind of scrapped that. We might go back to that and then Sparkloop has a paid partnership program in addition to the organic ones, the organic one is, I promote you. You promote me. Nobody pays. If you want to take advantage of their paid program, you can actually set a rate for I will pay X amount of dollars for every subscriber, and then other newsletters will send you subscribers that’s been hit and miss for us, because there’s definitely some folks out there that think have found ways to game that system and spark group. Of course, had to tamper down on that. But again, when we would look at the purchase behavior from some of those subscribers and it come from the paid campaigns, it just wasn’t making sense to continue to grow through that channel. So we were not doing that right now.
Rob Marsh: That’s interesting, that there’s so much power in organic. Obviously what you do when you’re working organically and putting out the content that you know resonates or whatever results in the people who are going to continue following you and buy from you, which I guess that makes a lot of sense, but also makes you just maybe look a little bit of chance at some of the paid tools. I think I need to make sure that the stuff actually brings buyers into into my audience.
Katelyn Bourgoin: Well, I’ve seen a lot of newsletter operators, and I hate to say that’s a lot of folks who have really, kind of like, gotten high on their own supply when it comes to, like these paid subscriber channels. And I suspect that some of them are not doing the evaluation to see. Are these valuable? Are these folks? Because the thing of the way that spark loop works now, other tools are different, but the way that spark loop works is that people are auto enrolled, rather than needing to click to choose which newsletters they want to like they want to subscribe to when they see that pop up, and my assumption is a lot of people don’t even realize they’re signing up for newsletters. A pop up happened. And we’re used to seeing pop ups, not processing them, closing them, or clicking the button that looks like the button to close it without really, like, analyzing it. I know that that’s totally the way that I navigate the Internet, so I think that there’s probably a lot of folks who sign up for a newsletter that they were excited about signing up for and inadvertently end up on a couple more. And of course, the goal is, if you can create a lot of value, you can show people why you should earn a spot in their inbox. They’ll stay subscribed. And we have a very special sequence when we were running this for those people to make sure that if they you know, that they would know how they got there, that they’d have to make it really easy for them to opt out, and that we would provide a lot of value in the welcome sequence that they’d want to stay engaged. And if they didn’t engage with a certain amount of emails within their first I think, like 14 days, meaning that they’d open and click and things like that, we could then auto unenroll, unsubscribe them and not pay for those. So that was not something that spark that initially heads had released, which is why we ended up doing this big culling of subscribers who probably had no idea that they got on our list, and we didn’t do a good job of actually warming them up at the time. So we got better at that over the years.
Rob Marsh: So speaking of that initial welcome sequence, I could be wrong, but I’m thinking you actually offered a secret gift at some point, right where you didn’t promise the gift up front. There was no expectation from anybody who signed up, but it was one of those wow experiences, where, as a subscriber, I’m like, oh, suddenly, you’re giving me something that’s way better than what I even requested when I signed up. Tell me a little bit about that.
Katelyn Bourgoin: So I went into this not really having a name for it, but Chennel Bastilo, who has the newsletter that’s all about growing newsletters, which is called Growth in Reverse. She coined this as being the reverse lead magnet strategy. So I’ll use her language.
It’s a reverse lead magnet. But essentially, my thinking was, you know, being a buyer psychology nerd, one of the fastest ways to build trust with a, you know, with somebody in your audience, is to delight them. And to delight somebody means that it’s something that’s unexpected, right? If we know that we’re going to get some we’re going to get something, then it’s not delightful. It’s just you know what the expectation was fulfilled, and therefore we might be content and satisfy it, but it’s not delightful. Delight is when something happens that you don’t expect. So it’s when they sign up for a lead magnet and it’s so much better than they expected, which is so often not the case, right?
We all have a folder somewhere on our Google Drive that’s full of the lead magnets that, like, were super hyped and really shitty. So people have an expectation that things probably aren’t gonna be that good. If you actually deliver something really good, they’ll be delighted, and you’ll have a great experience. So I thought with, again, knowing that we were investing money, particularly into Spark glue and ads at the time to get this cold audience that didn’t know me, had not signed up because they discovered me on social to kind of create this great experience with them. I was like, How do I delight them at the gate? And that was where the idea came from. And, you know, selfishly, the way, there was a strategy behind this too, because we had then gone back and we ended up creating these journey based welcome sequences.
So one of the first things that we’d ask people is like, what’s your current problem? And we would they had two options to pick, and if they depending on which one they picked, we created a really great onboarding for them, each with a surprise gift, each with like, really value packed emails, but also subtly mentioning our too big products. We don’t, it wasn’t aggressive, there was no promotion or anything like that. But that was, you know, part of the goal is, yeah, we want to be able to delight these people and add them. We also want to remind them this is a pain point that you have, and we want to help them to overcome that pain point with the freebie that they didn’t expect to get, and with, you know, a couple of really insightful emails that people love, and then we want to tell them also, there’s a solution to help you with that problem. And we’ve got, like, if you’re interested, so that we kind of revised things from our initial which was just, here’s this one freebie, and then they would just start getting the newsletter to creating this kind of like mini welcome sequence, depending on their pain points.
Rob Marsh: I love that strategy. When I heard of that, I thought that’s just brilliant. Just the surprise that you get and the trust and immediate liking that it engenders is just a really great tactic. So I guess congrats on inventing that, or discovering it, or, you know…
Katelyn Bourgoin: I’m sure I didn’t invent it… I feel like, should I have anything coined? A great phrase, and I hope the laws will use it.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s a great idea. Okay, so your newsletter is really about persuasion. You know why we buy all these cognitive biases that we have tendencies that you know, I would love just to. Talk a little bit about some of these now, copywriters, content writers, marketers, we’re all familiar with the pretty typical, you know, six or seven of the theinfluence techniques that Cialdini writes about. So, you know, urgency and scarcity and liking and consistency, right? We get these drilled into our heads all the time. But there’s not just seven or six. There are literally hundreds of these, and you read about a different one each week. So I’m curious, like, what are your favorite three or four?
Katelyn Bourgoin: I’ll give you two, and then I might give you a third one. Okay, so I’d say that my favorite that I’ve discovered was what’s known as the pratfall effect, which is as somebody who is a perfectionist and, you know, toils over making mistakes and being seen as uncredible, this was like a huge relief for me. So the pratfall effect is essentially this idea that when we are evaluating a person or a brand, small imperfections can actually make us like and trust that thing more, because we don’t trust perfect, because we know that it’s not real, right? When something seems too good to be true, our spidey senses start tingling, and so as a create the idea, the study that was one of the ones that started to identify this effect in people, was they would have people interview for a job. I think it was like for a job application. But they’d have these interviewers interviewing these people, and they’d have actors go and they were instructed to actually mistakenly spill a bit of coffee on themselves, like at the beginning of the interview. And that, you know, that mistake that they made actually made the interviewers feel ingratiated to them, and made them rank them more highly on characteristics. And this is the important thing, that there’s a caveat for this. If you’re going to be making a mistake, and people will like you for it, it shouldn’t be a mistake that makes you seem uncredible in your expertise. So if you’re a mathematician, and somebody asked you, what’s two plus two, and you say seven, that is not going to initiate this effect. But if you’re a mathematician who’s great at the math stuff, but then, you know, again, you like to be example, you spill a bit of coffee on yourself, or you have, you make kind of a mistake or a typo or something like that, that can actually make people like you more. So pratfall effect is one of my favorites.
Another that’s powerful, and I think not doesn’t get enough credit, is the Fresh Start effect. So as marketers, when we are planning our promotions, one thing that you need to be aware of is the psychological brain of your buyer, and the idea that there are moments, there are these temporal moments in time where we start to think that things that we didn’t believe in the past, or things that we might have been skeptical about, kind of all wash away, and we’re open to making kind of some bigger changes. And these are these fresh start moments. So the mother of all fresh start moments, New Year’s Eve, right? Like, ah, it’s the beginning of a new year. You know, last year I might have been all of these things that didn’t help me achieve my goal, didn’t get me where I want to go. But this year, I’m going to be this completely different person. This year, I’m going to be able to change all of that, right?
And so when you can put a message in front of somebody, when they’re likely to have experienced one of these fresh starts, they’re going to be way more open to your message. And fresh starts aren’t just that once a year. You know? It can also be Mondays, right? We all enter the new week being like this week will be different. It can be at your birthday. It can be a, you know, the beginning of another quarter. It can be after getting a divorce, like there are so many of these moments that happen in the lives of people, and if you can get your message in front of them at the right time to take advantage of the fresh start, they’re going to be far more open to being receptive to your message. So those are two that I love.
I’ll give you one more, because it’s kind of aligned with giving a bonus one. And that’s the Peak/End rule. So the way that we remember and experience something basically comes down to two things, what was the peak, and whether that’s good or bad, and how did it end? And so if you want to create a really good memory for your customers, right, you want to make sure that the peak is high and positive, then at the end is positive and high, right? And so they did this interesting study where there was this, this colon exam that they were they were doing, and they’d have people, after they went through it report how, like, you know, how much they you know, what their experience was with one to 1010, being not a pleasant experience, in the least, right? And one
being, yeah, it was okay. And what they noticed was that there was this painful part of the examination, and then it would just end, right? People were ranking it really high on the unpleasant like stage, they’re like, What happens if we do the unpleasant part? Because the unpleasant part has to happen. It’s it’s the peak. It’s unpleasant, but it has to happen. But then, instead of it just being over, we actually kind of did a few other things. So we’d like maybe take their blood pressure, or we’d like do an abdominal exam, or like something beyond that, and then it would end with, like, something more pleasant. Then people actually ranked it not being so bad. So this idea that if you do have to deliver bad news, be careful about how you deliver it. Don’t just end abruptly, try to, like, smooth it out, and ideally have a very positive peak.
This happened to me the other day. It’s a great example of a mistake that a company is making around us. I went to the a great spa. It’s a beautiful Nordic Spa here in Quebec City, and when you like, you know, you come into the place, they’re very quick to greet you, and it’s lovely, and the service is excellent. And then you go and you have your day at the spa, and there’s these beautiful plunge pools and all these different things. So everybody would have kind of different peaks of their experience. But then at the end, they made this massive mistake, which is the people who are waiting to check out, they serve all of them last they pay more attention to people who are waiting to get in. It doesn’t matter when those people arrive. Some people that are waiting to check out are sitting here and they’re watching all of the like staff ignore them and instead greet the people who just arrived even later than they’ve been waiting. And I thought, this is strange, like we’ve been here longer. There’s kind of the rules of society, which is that you see people as they as they cued in the line. And my mom, she’s kind of less patient than I am. She’s starting to get frustrated. And ultimately, I’m like, I just had a great day at the spa. I’m going to be chilled with this, but yeah, that’s a little bit annoying. And then I went to tag the spa in a picture later that day, and in doing that, I went on their Facebook page, and I saw all of these low reviews, and the common thing they were complaining about was the checkout experience. So it’s like you’ve just created this amazing day for your customers. And their thinking is probably, you know what? Let’s make sure that when they first get here, they feel so welcome and support, it’s going to create a great first experience. But what they don’t realize is that they’re actually hurting themselves way more by creating a bad end experience. And so the peak end rule is one of my favorites, and I think that we should all think about it. If we’re doing anything that is, it’s an experience that we want people to remember positive.
Rob Marsh: As freelancers, anytime we’re handing off a finished project, oftentimes we’re handing somebody a Google Doc, it may even still have correction marks in it, or whatever, you know, compared to the kid glove, or the white glove service that we provide, you know, when we’re doing an onboarding interview. Yeah, so, so many applications there.
And even when you were talking about the Fresh Start effect earlier, you mentioned understanding trigger events. And trigger events are another opportunity for a fresh start. Anytime that you know a customer or somebody that you’re talking to has one of these experiences where it’s like, wow, I am never doing that again, or I this is the last time I go a week without a client or like, that is the opportunity for a fresh start that’s not triggered by, say, a Monday or a new year, right?
Katelyn Bourgoin: Yes, yeah, absolutely. I think that being a marketer, and, you know, I write a lot of copy, I don’t know what I would call myself. I would say I feel I lean more into the identification as a marketer than a copywriter, because I feel like there’s so many better copywriters in me. But I think that we get to have the coolest job, which is we basically don’t get to be these very curious like, we just get to examine humans and try to understand them. And I think that getting to do that is cool because, like, ultimately, we all kind of want to understand ourselves too. So the more that you understand other people, the more clarity gives you on yourself. And so I just think we’re very lucky that we get to spend our time thinking about this stuff. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. And how to help people solve their problems, or move from you know, the before to the after, from you know, the problem to the solution. In some ways, it’s a gift to be able to do this thing that we all get to do.
Katelyn Bourgoin: It absolutely is, and there are so many great products out there and great entrepreneurs out there that they deserve to be better known. They deserve for their work to be recognized. They deserve to get customers that they can help. And so I think that it really sometimes, there’s been periods in my life where, as a marketer, I’ve felt a little bit, I don’t know, I guess, a little bit frustrated, that I don’t feel like I’m making a difference in a meaningful way, right? There’s been times where I’m like, Oh, I just like, help B to B. Software companies sell more software. But like, then when I kind of like, reframe it, and I remember, no, like, those people are selling real solutions that are going to make their individual customers lives a lot better. That might mean that person’s more productive, and I get to hire another team member, and that means they get to go on the big. Peace with their family and their marriage doesn’t break up. But there’s all sorts of positive things that can come from helping people to solve their problems. And I think that sometimes when I get stuck in this, like, it just feels like I’m gonna, you know, that I I think a little bit about, like, should I just, like, get into, like, political marketing, like, I have moments, and then I’m like, No, you’re, you know, as long as you go back to helping people figure out what problem they’re solving and how to solve it better and to promote that and communicate that better, it’s a great day.
Rob Marsh: This feels like a really good end note. Again, thinking about Peak End, that’s maybe a really good way to finish up here. You have some really cool products, I’ve mentioned them in our email, the wallet opening words is a download that you have, that I’m definitely going to link to in the show notes and share when we share this episode in our email. But if people want to get on your list, and learn more about all of this stuff, the cognitive biases, persuasion, how we get people to actually buy, and do it in a way that’s ethical and serves their needs, Katelyin, where should they go?
Katelyn Bourgoin: They should go to learn whywebuy.com.
Rob Marsh: Perfect. So hopefully we’ll have everybody who’s listening jump in there and can they’ll see why I’ve become such a fan of your work, what you do,
Katelyn Bourgoin: Thank you for letting me get introduced to your people.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, this has been phenomenal. I appreciate your time.
Thanks to Katelyn for talking so deeply about the techniques we need to undertand in order to sell more… if you’re listening to this the week it goes live, Katelyn is teaching a buyer breakthrough workshop on Thursday at Noon Eastern Time. If you get on her list, you may be able to sign up for that workshop… go to learnwhywebuy.com.
I also mentioned Wallet Opening Words… this is a PDF full of tactics like the Peak End Effect, the Pratfall Effect, and the Fresh Start Effect that you can put to work in your own writing and sales efforts. In addition to those three, I think there are like 67 more psychological tactics you can use in Wallet Opening Words. I’ve linked to it in the show notes, but if you go to thecopywriterclub.com/wow you can get that resource from Katelyn. I have it. I refer to it often. It’s great and probably belongs on your virtual shelf too.
And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.
