Beware of business “friends”

I’ve been having an all-out argument with my client’s business friend and quasi-partner. This argument dates back several months, where, out of the blue and for no tangible reason, my client’s friend decided to muck up the email marketing strategy responsible for… 

* Literally saving my client’s business from the brink of collapse in 2019, where he was getting sub 10% open rates, making zero dollars from damn near any email he sent, and told me, “he’d be willing to try anything to make his business work again” even though he originally scoffed at my absurd fees and wasn’t 100% sold on my plain-text strategy 

* Taking this business on life support and implementing a plain-text strategy that first got my client out of the hole he was in, helped him to retire his wife and hire a team, had a stretch of 42 or so months of making at least $100k in revenue from email alone, and has been the #1 most profitable marketing medium for my client, by a large margin, for 6 consecutive years 

* Helped my client to really dominate the post-covid easy money bubble, where we routinely doubled our revenue - including some of the most popular product launches I’ve written, my secret VIP flow which has generated half a million dollars from a teeny tiny list, and creating a welcome sequence that consistently generated at least 10k in revenue every month like clockwork (even though my client barely did any sort of top-of-the-funnel advertising to attract new leads into our email universe)

* Routinely launching new products for my client that have routinely outperformed what my client expected 

* Positioning my client as an expert to his people - which has led him to not only make far more sales via email, but has also led to him get booked on podcasts galore, and even led to a strategic partnership with a late, but great influencer who unfortunately joined the choir invisible far too young (who sent us tons of traffic, my client’s #1 biggest problem, when she was alive) 

* And all of this happened despite multiple website redesigns and shutdowns, silly A/B tests of highly-designed emails that I only learned about after my client hired an email marketing agency behind my back (because I would’ve told him it was silly, and it’s been proven to be silly), and other mediocre marketing attempts that we’ve tried only to lose time and momentum because they didn’t work (this includes hosting live YouTube shows that never get a ton of traction, hiring a Facebook Group creator who turned out to be a turd muffin, and my endless feints from my client’s friend about wanting to try a “new” strategy based on no solid reason other than “muh feelz”)… 

Let’s riff on this “new strategy” for a bit. 

Before we get started, it’s important to note that my client’s friend is not an email marketer nor a copywriter. In fact, his business simply farms third-world talent and offers it to first-world business owners. Problem is, since my client’s friend is not an email marketer, copywriter, or even a marketer, he can’t tell the difference between effective copy and copy that makes you want to stab your eyes out. 

Well, a few months back, my client’s friend decided that he’d have his team of third-world copywriters write a weekly email for my client. These emails, even after I edit them heavily so they don’t damage the relationship I’ve cultivated with our list since 2019, always perform worse than emails I write. 

Anyway, my client’s friend has now been hounding my client to try his style - which amounts to an image with a discount. 

That’s the entire strategy. 

Where he’s getting his "inspiration" for the dramatic change in strategy is even more laughable: 

He told my client that a company called free ebooks routinely sends images in their emails as proof that images don’t affect deliverability and can increase sales. There’s a couple obvious problems with this… first, free ebooks has worse open rates than us. I’m not a big open rates guy, as you know, but they matter slightly more in the context of deliverability. Second, as you can imagine, free ebooks offers free ebooks - meaning, he wants to base an email marketing strategy for a business that charges its customers off a business that charges its “customers” nothing. (This free ebook company is obviously in the data business, not the email business.) 

More:

He also wanted to shift our email strategy to reflect the typical health and wellness ecom brand style: Heavily templated emails filled with images, formatting differences, hyperlinks, etc. - the whole nine yards when it comes to a “newsletter” style of emails. 

Now, there are a couple more problems with this:

First, we’ve tested the newsletter style vs my plain-text style several times over the years. The most recent test was the aforementioned welcome series test, which I had to turn off the B version after a couple of months of it performing worse than my welcome sequence. (And my welcome sequence is outdated and far from my best work.) 

Second, I actually started working with another person to which my client’s friend forwarded the email to me and my client saying something like, “maybe we ought to try her approach to emails.” 

But you know what?

Since I started working with this person, I’ve seen inside their Klaviyo account - and their “newsletter style” of emails has significantly sabotaged her email results. In other words, my client’s friend wants to mimic the email style of a FAILING business. (Since I started working with her, I’ve been recommending a more plain-text, story-telling, personal email strategy than a newsletter style one, and go figure: my approach to email is, gasp, several times more effective.) 

Worst part about this entire process?

Like I said above, email has been our only reliable marketing channel. That’s not by accident. But, because my client’s friend is so deadset on testing his foolish and downright idiotic ideas, I waste time not writing better emails for my client, but for defending the strategy that’s our #1 marketing channel all because my client’s friend is dead-set on proving that his third-world copywriters can even sniff the flames of my copywriting candle.

And you know what? 

Methinks this situation plays out in a LOT of businesses in the world. 

Sometimes it’s the client himself who wants to cause a bunch of unnecessary fires… 

Sometimes it’s a client’s friend who masquerades as a marketing strategist after watching a few hours of marketing gurus talk about emails… (back to my client’s friend, he once replied to one of my emails with this bit of unsolicited advice, “all emails should have a PS, hur-dur!”) 

And sometimes it’s a client’s wife or business partner or kid… 

Moral of the story?

Beware of business friends. 

There’s a good chance they’re just bullshitting you to make themselves seem smarter (even if it’s at the expense of your team of professionals).  

(There’s a far more nefarious side to this story too where the so-called friends are only using their influence over you to try to steal your business…) 

And if you’re working with an email expert?

It’s better to listen to them than to your friends who don’t know what the f they speaketh. 

Anywho:

Hit reply if you want to invest in your email marketing system. 

John

PS - Yes, I told my client basically the same as what I said above. Even if it can backfire against me, it’s a principle of mine to always be on Team Client, which sometimes means yelling at my clients before they commit a silly and preventable mistake.