IN THIS ISSUE
- The front ends and back ends of businesses
- What the heck is a back-end agency?
- Get a piece of the pie with performance marketing by building water mills
- The $38,000 per month hypothetical, but a completely real example
- A book recommendation to get you off your ass
For those with a sophomoric sense of humor, I’ll just let you know it’s not what you think or what you want it to be.
But I see you. Points to you.
The Ends of the House
When businesses market to get new customers, they are trying to get more of them into their front end.
Their so-called funnels where prospects are nurtured until they become customers.
It’s also common for the front end to be where entry-level products and services are offered and sold.
For some businesses, that’s all there is.
For other businesses, there is a back end of the house.
This is where existing customers are up-leveled, upsold, or put on a continuity plan.
This is usually the land of higher ticket offers and sales. It’s where you want your customers to eventually be.
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Marketing Energy
For many companies, the entire focus of their energy is on their front end—get those new customers!
And they may sometimes employ marketing agencies to help them with SEO, online advertising, offline advertising, and so on.
But who are the easiest customers to get?
The ones you’ve already got.
The ones who should live in the back end of the house!
Enter the Back-End Agency
A different kind of marketing agency is emerging that focuses on helping companies increase their back-end customer revenue.
This is the business I referred to last week as I talked about water mills.
To be clear, the Back-End Agency is not the water mill—it creates water mills.
While the Back-End Agency could be the usual service-based business, the advice here is to do it slightly differently.
The Performance Marketing Back-End Agency
Here’s how you do it.
You approach it as a micro-investor; investing your time, skills, process assets, and funds into the marketing efforts needed to pull customers from the front end to the back end.
What you’re looking to accomplish are the following outcomes:
- A piece of the revenue stream (think affiliate marketing)
- Marketing intellectual property; marketing assets that reliably convert sales.
But what about those water mills?
Once you figure out how to move customers from the front end to the back end, you leave the mechanism in place to run forever, hopefully.
The mechanism is the water mill.
The client’s transaction flow is the river.
The energy you harvest is your piece of the revenue stream.
Then you find more clients and you build more water mills.
A Hypothetical Example
Just because this is a hypothetical example does not mean this isn’t really happening. I am aware of real examples, but do not know or cannot share those details.
Say you’ve found a business coach that has a $500 entry-level clarity session (the front-end).
And they also have a $6,000 90-day immersive plan and even a $20,000-per-year mastermind (the back-end).
They may try to attract customers to all of those offerings through front-end marketing activities; usually through email.
You see this and you approach them about partnering to add more people to their mastermind; usually with a 20m Zoom call to get to an agreement.
You find out that they use email marketing, so you mostly stay out of their way.
I said mostly.
You get an agreement to send a few emails outside of their sequences and make offers, but you make it so the replies go to you—and your virtual team.
From there, you iterate to find the marketing message required to close sales.
Then you use the same message through direct mail—an advertising channel they aren’t even using.
You may still iterate, but you eventually get to an optimized flow that converts sales.
Say your share is 40% of what you sell and you sell 6 90-day plans and 3 mastermind memberships per month; $14,400 and $24,000 respectively and a total of $38,400 per month!
It sounds too good to be true, but I’m here to tell you people are doing this.
Once you’ve got this dialed in, you leave your direct mail marketing in place through automation that continues to run.
You pay the costs and manage any virtual staff that helps; or you put a project manager in place to practically take yourself out of the loop altogether.
That’s a nice little water mill you’ve got yourself there!
Did you create a course? Did you deliver any plans? No, you just tapped into the river of energy.
You helped the business owner add $57,600 (per month!) to their revenue that they might not have had.
The best news?
You learned a lot and you can move on to the next thing.
If it’s a similar thing, you’ll do less iterating and potentially get to your profitable goals much sooner.
For The Non-Believers
I realize I mentioned words like marketing and direct mail and automation or whatever words triggered disbelief in you.
For some people, almost everything that could be good is unbelievable.
I recommend you read the book, Straight Line Leadership.
Then read it again.
But for now, here are some thoughts:
- You don’t have to know the how, sometimes the who is more important
- If you wait until you have everything you need, you might not ever get started
- You probably have most of what you need, just find a way to find the rest
- Taking some action builds momentum
- You didn’t learn to ride a bike by thinking about it.
A techie person and a marketing person would make a great team for this. Or, just look for something you don’t have.
It seems like there is enough to go around.
And there always has been.
— Bill
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When you are ready, here are some next steps…
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