What is familiarity exposure? Also referred to as mere exposure, there's a whole stack of theories around how the psychology of familiarity in marketing works and can help you make more sales. 

That's right. Become a 'household brand', and more people will buy from you.

Want to know how it all works?

Let's find out.

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:19) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(3:18) What is familiarity exposure?

(10:45) Refer to things that your audience is familiar with.

(14:45) Always build familiarity with you, your brand, and what you do.

(21:19) How can you apply familiarity in your marketing?

(23:10) Email marketing campaigns that use familiarity.

(24:45) Don't make the mistake of offering discounts upfront!

(27:08) How to start using familiarity in your email marketing right now.

(29:11) Join The Email Hero Blueprint.

(29:45) Subject line of the week.

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What is familiarity exposure?

The idea is quite simple - we all understand it and have experience with it. Psychologically, you can increase the likelihood of people buying from you when something feels familiar to them. So if you feel like you've heard of something before, or know a particular name from somewhere (i.e. you have a feeling of vague familiarity), you’re more likely to buy.

That’s why people tend to buy household famous brands, even when they’re more expensive. For a lot of products, you could buy the cheaper equivalent, and it might taste, work, or be much the same. But we pick the branded product we know (even for a higher price) because we trust that familiarity.

It’s a bit like going to a restaurant and choosing a dish from the menu that you already know you’re going to like because you’ve had it before (either there or elsewhere). We like our home comforts. We like the feeling of something familiar and comfortable. It doesn’t matter how adventure-prone or how excitable you are (or aren't) – we all find it easier to choose something we’re familiar with. Because familiarity is comforting. And that's why familiarity is baked into pretty much everything we do - email marketing and more. 

So how can you apply this concept of familiarity exposure in your marketing? 

Refer to things that your audience is familiar with

One of the things you can do is to use references in your marketing that your audience is familiar with. For example, for a while, everyone was using famous GIFs from Friends or other popular shows. And it worked because people are familiar with that type of content. Using Friends' references is a safe bet with most demographics. Kennedy isn’t a big Friends fan, but if someone sent him an email with a sofa in the subject line and the word “Pivot”, he'd still get the reference. That subject line would come pre-loaded with a lot of content – whether you love Friends or hate it, you’d know what it's referring to. And you'd probably want to know what the email is about.

You won't be sending famous GIFs, memes, or references all the time, but if you email frequently and regularly, you have plenty of opportunities to do so. And when you use things in your marketing that feel familiar, you immediately activate the psychology that sits underneath your words.

Always build familiarity with you, your brand, and what you do

Another way to use this concept of familiarity is to build trust with your audience by exposing them to you and your brand. This is why celebrities can easily branch out into other products, such as perfumes or clothing ranges. Because we’re all familiar with their name and brand in the first place.

It's also why you have to show up regularly in people’s inboxes to build a relationship with your subscribers. It creates that sense of familiarity. When people think of us or what we do, for example, they probably expect it to be quite funny, cheeky, edgy, and a bit sweary, but also practical, and cut-through-the-bullshit. That’s our brand – it's what we’re all about. But if we showed up offering something super formal at a corporate event, that wouldn’t work as well for our brand.

This is why, when we launched our mastermind Level Up, a few years ago, we sold out two intakes without doing any marketing. We simply told people inside our audience that we were launching this mastermind, and it's all it took to sell it. Because the people who already know us and our style and like learning from us, already knew they’d have a great experience. They already trusted our brand and wanted to join in. And we were only able to do that because of this concept of familiarity.

How can you apply familiarity in your marketing?

One way to build this feeling of familiarity is to involve your subscribers in the creation or building process of your products or services. For example, if you're putting together a new programme, you could ask your audience to chip in and help you come up with a name for it. Or maybe they could vote on the logo or artwork for it. We did this for the original cover for our podcast, for example – we gave people a choice of two, so they'd tell us which one they preferred.

This works because when you then launch that product, people feel invested. They’re already familiar with it because they participated in the voting process by giving you their opinion. They've heard of your product, and they had something to do with it - whether it's creating, naming, or branding.

And if you don't want to go that far, you could simply ask your audience about their preferred time for a weekly coaching call, for example. If you can think of any decisions in your business that you wouldn't mind your audience getting involved in, jump on the opportunity and ask them. 

Email marketing campaigns that use familiarity

Inside our programme, we teach email campaigns that use this familiarity principle. One of them is the Encore campaign, based on the idea that you show someone an offer, take it away, and then come back again with the same offer before you close the cart. When people on your list see the offer the second time (even if it’s months down the line), they experience a sense of familiarity that wasn’t there the first time (when it was potentially a cold offer). This time, they're more likely to buy it.

Likewise, in our Open Day campaign, we run a simple survey where we ask people a quick question. When they fill in the survey, they get into the mindset of thinking they quite enjoy the idea of being able to ask us a question so we can help them. And a few days later, we make them an offer to join one of our Q&A calls and ask us some questions. This triggers familiarity because we’ve already discussed this idea of asking us questions. 

We use this concept of familiarity in all our email marketing campaigns. And that’s the beauty of them. We have these psychological principles baked into all our campaigns already so you don’t have to worry about figuring out how to do it yourself - you just follow the instructions. If you want to know more, we do run campaign workshops inside our programme, where we explain how everything works. But you don’t need to understand it to have it working for you – you can just follow the instructions, and implement the campaigns.  

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Don't make the mistake of offering discounts upfront!

A mistake we see a lot of marketers make is to offer discounts upfront. That doesn't work because you first need to legitimise the offer at full price. If you show up with a discount straight away, there's no familiarity. That's why, if you follow our teachings, you'll know that our SCORE email engine takes people through a sales campaign first and then a content-led sales campaign. You can add a bonus or a discount in the content-led campaign, and that tends to work very well. Why? Because you've built familiarity with the offer in the sales campaign just before. 

Your subscribers trust that this is a discount because you just told them a few days earlier how much the full price was. So now they trust you’re truly giving a discount or adding a bonus because they know it wasn’t there before! You've just legitimised the discount or bonus by creating familiarity with your offer. 

Also, remember that the more your audience continues to see your offers consistently, the more chances you have of them buying from you. Familiarity increases sales. And it's a bit like a spice - you can sprinkle it in everything you do and include it in all the communication you send out. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. 

How to start using familiarity in your email marketing right now 

The first thing you can do right now to build familiarity with your audience is to show up consistently. If you’re absent from people's inboxes, they won't remember who you are - there's no familiarity there. We show up every single day – we’re consistent about that and never disappear. The key is for you to come up with an email-sending frequency you can keep up with and be consistent with it. Do whatever works for you, but stick with it. 

The second thing you can do is to share personal stories. At the start of every podcast episode, for example, we share a personal insight. And we do the same in our emails - we're always talking about things that are personal to us. We do this because it breeds familiarity with us and allows us to take up more space in people's minds. We all have the same amount of space in someone’s email inbox – because an email is an email. But we can take up more space in people’s minds and show our subscribers that we’re more ‘real’ than other people. They get to understand us more. And when it comes to buying something that solves the problem you solve, people are more likely to buy from you because you’re the person who’s taken up more space inside of their minds.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

If you’re a member of our programme already, you don’t even have to learn how to put this principle to work. You just need to know that it does work, and it’s already built into almost every single one of our email campaigns. If you want to check it out, it’s called The Email Hero Blueprint - it's everything you need for your email marketing!

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Shy bairns get nowt! (explained)”. This is a North-East colloquialism that means “if you don’t ask, you don’t get”. Rob cleverly put this expression together with the word “explained” in brackets because if you’re not familiar with the phrase, you may not understand what that means.

If that’s the case, you may just see a bunch of interesting words followed by the word “explained”, which suggests you’re going to find out what that’s all about. The words get your attention because you rarely see that sort of expression in what feels like a more ‘formal’ context, i.e. the subject line of an email.

Wherever you’re from, find something local or colloquial in your language and use those words in a subject line. Add the word “explained” (like we did), and see how that works for you. Check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Template For Email Marketing Campaigns.

9 Psychological Things That We Use In All Of Our Campaigns.

How To Run A Smashing Flash Sale With One of The Best Email Marketing Campaigns In The World.

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Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about familiarity exposure and how to use it in your marketing to make more sales) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

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Unknown 0:21

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy. Hello

Unknown 0:22

Today on EVA marketing show we're talking about familiarity exposure. No, not like that. You're not You're rascal so you can get more sales

Unknown 0:30

put me on a Rockaway new fashion Avenue. We don't live video episodes. Anyway, we would love to give you something really, really cool and we'd love to give it to you totally for free because the rock is not made out of. We know that you want to make more sales from your email marketing. That's why you're here and listening to us. But you can't do that if people don't click on the links in emails to go and check out your offers. And that's why we've put together one of our favourite resources. It's 12 super creative ways to get more clicks from every email that you send in this download that we are calling click tricks. We want to give it to you totally for free as a listener of this podcast, all you have to do is head over to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks.

Unknown 1:04

He has started collecting lanyards. It's comedy hypnotist Robert temple

Unknown 1:10

and he makes a smashing Polonaise. It's psychological mind reader Kennedy.

Unknown 1:16

So, what's going on?

Unknown 1:18

So whenever we speak at an event, I'm keeping the landlord's going a little bigger, like you know, you get the speaker lanyards. Ordinarily, I just take all the stuff you get from events and just throw it out the brochures without keeping the lanyard with the speaker thing on the brochure. I've got one as well. My little pat on the back to us that's

Unknown 1:37

nice. Big plans for it you got like some artistic doesn't.

Unknown 1:40

Currently doesn't look in piles on my shelf. Oh lovely. She just use them as the plan is to display them somehow nicely. Like well try these holes. These holes, you do make a good Polonaise might have to say I was quite late to the world of pastures and things I didn't really need that stuff when I was in my 20s but I remember it was at your house probably where I dug into it properly at the time. It's good times now you do make a good one this apart from I think the first time you met Mike. Yes, first time. So you already knew her through a different through a different route. But when me and my ex got together at

Unknown 2:13

sound CD, if you went through a different route.

Unknown 2:17

Me and my ex got together and we came to your house and you already knew her so you hadn't just met her but when we first got together, you came over and you're totally bolstered up didn't you?

Unknown 2:23

Yeah, Paul's gonna raise it up completely. It was it was a bolognese. It was a bollock name. It was absolutely horrible. Anyway, hello, every week on this show we we show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We'll talk about email marketing, strategy, tactics, psychology and share what's working right now to make more sales online. That basically makes you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every Wednesday. Make sure you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player. Right? Get into it. Right let's do this thing. Let's do some content showing Okay. So first of all played what this this familiarity exposure so people call it mere exposure. I want to talk about the holidays.

Unknown 3:06

Yes, nothing do with meerkats. Basically what we know is that there is psychologically and increase the likelihood of people buying from you when something feels familiar, right? So if they feel like they've heard of something before you know that like, like, somebody might mention somebody's name and you're like, I know I know that name from somewhere. I've got that sort of vague familiarity, but I can't quite think what it is. That's all it needs to be. Is it a little feeling of familiarity? A couple of things where this happens. It's one of the reasons why people buy sort of household famous brands, even when they're more expensive, or you know, like the old cynical thing everyone's granddad probably says about, you know, it's the same stuff in the pocket, whether you buy it from the shop or from the Jeep shop, like it's been made in the property being made in the same factory. So in fact, those beans on I'm like, well, it tastes nicer. It's the same

Unknown 3:47

dad.

Unknown 3:48

So it's the reason why people will buy stuff that I think some stuff not all of it but some stuff I think objectively probably does taste exactly the same. I wouldn't go as far as cheap pop right to cheap pop cheap fizzy drinks that tastes crap, but even Pepsi tastes different on the air, but like i like i like i like the knockoffs of those I like like custard cream biscuits and Borbon biscuits, and honestly, if you buy the cheap ones that don't taste that much different so like stuff like that he wants a nicer and stuff like that. But people will still go out and say that I'm going to buy the McVities thing or I'm going to even though it's more expensive, or and this is damned Alfred definitely guilty of this. I'll go to a restaurant and I look at this one restaurant we went to for Rachel's birthday if you remember, there's a massive menu. It's the only place I've ever been to in the world where they'll sell every cuisine you've ever heard of. And it's good like it'll know what you get everyone knows all about. We've got hundreds of dishes, but I got some quite boring like as in something I've had a lot rather than trying something new, because I just know that I like that and if I eat that that's going to be good.

Unknown 4:44

When I go for a curry to a new place, especially to a new place I'll have a chicken tikka masala, right. It's a cliche of a dish, but because if you have a new dish in a in a new restaurant, and it's not very good or it's really good, you don't know it's because it's a restaurant or restaurant because the you got to be careful folks. You got to be careful. So

Unknown 5:03

basically what we're saying is it's this idea of feeling that something is familiar and comfortable and warm. And it doesn't matter how adventure prone you are. It doesn't matter how excitable you are, it doesn't matter how much you are into adrenaline. Ultimately, we all like our home comforts. Yeah,

Unknown 5:21

we'd like to night kind of knew how things are sort of good to be and I think the way we use this is you can anchor familiar things up to what it is that you're doing. I remember I don't know if this was true or not, but somebody told me that the Katy Perry song firework was I think it was firework again this might not be true, so but I was told. So we're gonna we're gonna have a proviso that we're gonna believe it's true for the case of the essence of this I should have gone for an example that was definitely true. But anyway, we've we've now muddy the waters folks who are on this journey together. Well, so far it's true. Katy Perry had a song called firework and you listen to it, right? That happened, right? The bit that I heard, is that that song that Everything about it was scientifically designed to be a huge hit, as in, they looked at what are all the songs that always do well, they have this tempo, they have these sounds they have this instrument. They're about this kind of uplifting topic it goes on I've also realised that I know nothing about song construction. So this is the fucking worst example. Given

Unknown 6:22

the DJ Anyway, well, that was their funnel hack pop music, basically, they hacked

Unknown 6:26

pop music and it was a massive success. Because they took things that were familiar to an audience. There's like That's why so much of music like you listen to like the radio one or like what the music that's going on now. A lot of it is heavily sampled music, even bits you don't even realise are are sampled, you know the song and tipsy. Everybody in the club getting tipsy. You know that song? Well, there's a bit of there's a bit of a sound at the beginning which is like the beginning of the of the track that people want to track with massive just that sound those drums are actually a sample from the the clap sound that's in the song We Will Rock You by Queen. Yeah, right. So by what we do is we lean into these familiar with these familiar things, and we do it all the time with every with everything. We're doing something that sounds like a familiar song that feels like a familiar thing. That sounds like a familiar thing. Familiarity is such a comforting thing

Unknown 7:17

even further than just it sounds a bit like the clap from we will Rocky was when people sample other songs for example, if anyone releases a song that samples Robert Miles is tracking children, just like driving and I just get excited. I like try not because it's such a great tune. And just as a total aside, the TSFs don't ever wants to rule the world. There's a little bit of that that i Whenever I listen to it, I can't help but think of the Postman Pat theme tune so next time we're in the radio, and they've lost a bit of everybody wants to rule the world. Just listen out for the little bit. That sounds like a Postman Pat theme tune if you're in the UK. Well,

Unknown 7:44

it's one of those actually talking about things that sound like things is this a bit of Bohemian Rhapsody when it's like do don't Don't Don't Don't Don't Don't do it and up it I'm always like, Dun dun dun duh, it's cold outside the red dwarf. There's no kind of atmosphere.

Unknown 7:57

But what's interesting is obviously we're making light of those little funny instances where we for some reason I've heard it and I've got loads of people are in the car to go listen doesn't doesn't have it sounds like falls apart and nobody can hear it. But like, but in my head, I've connected those dots, right? And so this is so powerful. The thing doesn't even have to be real. You just have to be deluded, like people will find their own or connections and their own little weird things, which is interesting. So

Unknown 8:18

yeah, so that's how we go about using this stuff. And we can see that this is baked into lots of stuff that we all do when we're the way we all think and we link things. That's what our brains do think about the neurology, the SAT the science in our head. What our brains do is they link things together. And that's what creativity is creativity is not usually inventing anything. It's usually the ability to assemble things in ways or connect things that people have not connected before. That's what comedy is comedy. A lot of other comedians are just taking bits that you've thought, I've never put much thought that was a bit like that. And the reason we can identify with those comedians when we go, oh, well, is that comedian so good, because I just told my everyday life is because of familiarity. So how do we go about doing it? So one of the things that you can do is start using things that are familiar to your audience I think a lot of people do is they'll is they'll grab that was a big trend about them about maybe a year ago, I don't see as many these days maybe don't convert as well anymore. But for a while there was this trend of using famous GIFs and memes on sales pages and in emails. So you might have a friend's GIF or a friend's meme being used if your target audience knows what that is, I mean, friends, one of those shows, which luckily, it's quite a safe bet for most demographics. But there are a whole bunch of people like who would really respond to Buffy the Vampire Slayer memes, right? A whole bunch of people. I think there's a couple of people who even know what Dawson's Creek is gonna mean it could be it could be that to

Unknown 9:34

show you the power of this. Let's go with friends for a second because that's dead easy. If I sent you an email, and the subject line had an emoji of a sofa and just the word pivar with words Oh isn't it Kennedy doesn't famously doesn't really like friends but knows some of the big famous like, I don't want to call that joke because it's not even a joke is it but like references the reference right you knew it right like you know if you could do how you do and somehow to like represent Joyce thing, like

Unknown 9:57

stuff like, even if it was called the one with the right, the

those references if I just put the word pivot and an email and an emoji of a sofa and friends had never existed, then that's one of the worst subject lines in history, but with an emoji of a sofa and the word pivot because the word pivot is like a weird word. Anyway, the word pivot with friends in our world. It's a really good subject line. It's an excellent subject line, because it has like, it comes preloaded with so much stuff. Whether you like friends hate friends, it doesn't matter if you've heard of it, and not everyone would have done like, my parents wouldn't get that. But it's well known enough that a lot of people will likewise I've never seen a lot of famous films and we'll start naming them because you'll ask me there's loads of famous films and TV shows I've never watched Name a famous film you've not seen

Star Wars but

I've seen one Star Wars film in real life, the return of the ones that the return of the things that return delivers a return to the earth as well, isn't it? I don't know. Anyway, so I've seen one of the Star Wars on Sunday birthday when I was in, I

think no, I think that was called Seth who's back back again. Who's back?

Anyway, there's loads of TV shows I've seen for example, I've given a couple of that. I've never seen Game of Thrones, but it's been watched by so many millions of people that you've referenced that episode where they couldn't get the silver up the stairs.

And that's the seat I want to see. I've never seen it right but whatever is famous in Game of Thrones, the

throne up the stairs and he's just there go and

that's how it works. It's just 11 seasons I'm trying to get through and that's the game anyway. Never seen it. But if I if I made a famous Game of Thrones reference wouldn't land with me, but it would land with loads of other people. And so because again, you send emails in quantity, don't you send an email today than another email either tomorrow in a few days time, like you have the opportunity to sort of rotate through these references. So again, just to prove the point of the psychological bias that sits underneath this, this familiarity thing, is just the fact that the minute I put the word pivot and a sofa, you loads of people instantly come into that email in a totally different place from if that doesn't mean anything.

Yeah, I think all of these biases to really think about is not just familiarity with other stuff but familiarity with you and being exposed to you a lot and building that trust. That it's this exact principle that means celebrities can release perfumes aftershaves law, clothing ranges, you know, all this long for these law firms. They can release clothing ranges, the underwear, we've got the laundry over last trip I'll probably be playing around with it, but and they can do all these things because they're familiar with that celebrity that celebrity brings out that new range of whatever and because of that relationship with the person that then they're able to get oh, I might I might even consider buying it. So that's the same for you showing up right? We've got to show up regularly in people's email inboxes like for us every single day, it's gonna be at least three times a week to even build that relationship with them. So again, we've got this sense of familiarity, and it's us and what we talk about the fact that we're going to be there. It's

such a good point. I mean, think about Britney Spears, can you think she sat in the lab without goggles on going? I'm trying to get this perfume right now and it's a bit more like,

I think that's how it came out. I mean, I don't even get rid of the slanderous cases here but I think what happened is the reason she released a perfume is there was somebody like listening to the door and all you hear from the from the inside of the room was Britney Spears going and like what you're doing, I'm inventing a perfume.

Or David Beckham stop mixing his aftershave. Right none of us believe that to be true at all right? None of us believe that to be true. And if you did, I'm sorry to bring it to you. But that's not what happened. Some perfume company made a perfume and paid David Beckham put the name on it is I'm assuming happen. And that's when you think about what's actually happened there. Right? That's like us going to David Beckham and saying, Hey, do you fancy making well do you how do you make it look? Like you've made an email marketing course we'll just call it David Beckham's guide to email marketing. And he says yes, I reckon we would sell some right maybe I'm stretching that too far. But the point is, you can take common garden products like perfume

associated with the brand, right? So it allows us if we showed up and said hey, we've invented a perfume, you might go actually that's gonna make me not want to buy the perfume. Right? But if you take every sort of celebrity Yes, exactly. Or if there's somebody who if there's a I can't think of who we're really good celebrity would be for like the email thing but somebody who like like, like a tech person, like a big a big famous tech person. It might be Elon Musk or some I don't know somebody like that. I know. He's got other things but it's the reason

why Richard Branson in the Virgin brand can do anything and nobody questions it like they can. They can start virgin. Anything like from telecoms in the UK, at least I don't know. But the rest of all, but in the telecoms there in the UK that one of the biggest providers of TV and mobile phone, telecoms, Wi Fi, broadband, broadband, mobile everything and then they've launched a luxury cruise line. And they do hot air balloon rides, you know as like experience days bank, they've closed down more businesses than I'll ever open right just because they will make businesses every three minutes. Some of them work right but the reason why they're able to not be the laughingstock because we've met people at events right, who we meet them maybe this month, and then we'll meet them in a year's time and we'll meet them a year after that at events and we'll go Oh, hi. Yes, we met That's right. What are you still and they go no, no, I'm doing this now. And we sort of laugh about that about it to them and say, you're like you know what, what you're doing this week, like the reason why virgin can get away with that the reason why Branson can get away with that and other brands can't is that they've built up this like reputation for taking stuff disrupted and making it amazing and now they're able to rule out anything they want to and we just got

it's all the relationship and it and nothing about your brand is like any other big logo and when people think of you, what do they expect anything of us they expect it to be probably quite funny, quite cheeky, edgy, a bit swearing and really practical to cut through the bullshit. That's our brand of what we're all about. Whereas if you show it to one of our if we're doing an event, you show up and we're like, in like really serious formal attire and we're telling you about, you know, the corporate What's up, like, what's going on, that wouldn't fit whereas anything we launch, you would imagine is gonna be it's gonna be like that because of that relationship. We've got that left with audience that led a while

ago. So you know, when we launched our when we launched and ran a few years ago, our level up mastermind, which we ran into, we ended up having to take two intakes off because it was obviously kept in order to create good experience, but so many people wanted to be part of it. That only came about because people said to us at the time. We love learning this email marketing thing from you, but like listen, we can tell from our coaching calls and stuff. There are insights that you don't have time to share with us on those calls, because those calls have to be an email about offer creation and funnel stuff and pricing and hiring people. In even more abstract or separate concepts to do with, you know, profit and like, you know, bigger picture things. They were like we can tell there's so much of that you could share. Is there a place where we can learn that stuff from you? And that evolves very quickly into because we went into our mastermind, right and we joined the mastermind and saw that too and takes it in next to no time. And again that only came about because of the familiarity. Like if we taken that and then gone to the market in general, and tried to launch it, we'd have to do tonnes of work to even give it a chance in terms of the marketing and all of that just was with this we just put up a page that this is what it is. This is how much it is would you like it? And people said yes, and it sold out two intakes very quickly. So I think again, even though it was nothing to do with email, so we weren't relying on any of our like, demonstrable knowledge if you like it was all just based on people that seen the seamless teaching email, they've got a glimpse that might be more under the surface. And then they were that was enough that familiarity was enough to drive them to spend $12,000 a year. Yeah.

So let's get into some ways you can actually do this stuff and really practical sense of all the things you could do to build this kind of feeling of familiarity with what you're doing is what we love to do is to actually involve your subscribers in the creation and building process of the new thing. And that could be Hey, what do you need help with? We're gonna put the programme together this year, but want to make sure it's the most valuable thing could be let us know what you want to learn. Build it from that point, you can definitely do that all the way through to if you've already know what you want to teach, but you want to come with a cool name for it or you've got the name for it, voting on the logo for it or the cover for it. We did that when we launched this podcast. We already had the name for it when it was gonna be about email marketing, obviously, we were like which which we kind of knew what the logo was gonna look like, but we weren't sure of the colours. We had one version which was blue. Do you remember that back in the day and what version which was red or like comedy club brick walls, so we stuck it up it online onto our free Facebook group that you were marketing show we started out to our email list and we asked people to tell us which one they preferred. So people became involved invested, because then a few weeks later, when we launched the Email Marketing Show, we we said we people felt familiar people felt like oh, I've heard of this thing. Well, of course. Yeah. Because you're involved in even if they didn't, even if they didn't vote and participate in in that voting process and having an opinion, they still heard about the thing. And that's that's a really cool thing. So not only you do involve people in the creation, the naming of the branding of what time of day do you want to meet for the coaching calls, like any decision point you're making thinking, Oh, can I also ask my audience? Can I also ask, drop an email about that?

There's a bunch of our campaigns that we use where we use this familiarity principle in order to do with things like our encore campaign. So if you're a member of our stuff, go and check out the Encore campaign. Basically, you show somebody an offer, you take it away, you come back and loop around and do a closing bid a bit later on. And when they see it the second time even though it might be a months down the line. This there's a sense of some familiarity that wasn't there when it was a cold offer and for us that works way better than here's the offer and then trying to sell it to them for days and days and days immediately. Likewise, in our Open Day campaign, there's a thing where we will run a simple survey that seems to be completely unrelated. It just seems like a random survey. You've asked them a quick question. And when they fill in that survey, it gets them into the mindset of thinking I quite enjoy the idea of being able to ask Robert Kennedy a question to help me. And then you can move around a few days later and say, Hey, would you love to do that? We'd like to come on a live q&a Call and ask us some questions that come into that email now, which seems unrelated. But when they come into that email, they're thinking, oh, yeah, that

sounds great, because there's a familiarity of having wanting to ask us a question through the survey. Right? So there's this sense of familiarity that we're creating in quite a lot of our campaigns. So members, go and check out the campaigns, you will see it's just riddled through throughout them. The way we park campaigns together is they have all these psychological principles baked into them. So you don't have to worry about figuring out where to the principles go just follow the campaign. Follow the instructions, and the principles are baked into the campaigns by default. We do teach this stuff in the campaign workshops, obviously, but if you don't need to understand that you just want it to work. Just follow the instructions and it just does. It's just baked in. And one of my favourite things is this idea of if you just show up with a discount straight away, be like hey, that's 50% off right, which happens multiple times of the year. The problem with that if you haven't already legitimise the offer like here's the thing at full price. Yeah. There's no familiarity with it when you show up with a discount, right? So that's one of the reasons for example, if you've got a if you've got like we've got our thing that we teach, which is the score email engine in the very first thing we do is have people go through a sales campaign. So you give people a sales campaign, and the second campaign is a content lead sales campaign. But when someone shows up to a hotline, like one of the quick q&a calls and our membership we and they say our sales campaigns not performing that well. Should I remove it and go straight into the much higher converting content lead campaign the next campaign and we're like, whoa, step away from the keyboard Don't touch anything, because the only reason that content lead campaign where you might be giving an additional bonus or you might be giving a discount also the way away. The only reason that works is because of the familiarity you build up with the sales campaign. They already trust that it is a discount because I was just being told about it at full price the last six days or it is a bonus I saw it wasn't included. What beforehand. This is a limited time just by legitimising you got to really legitimise discounts and bonuses, things like that. And you do that by really planting that seed and creating that familiarity. Yeah,

yeah, it's really cool. And the more that your audience continues to see this stuff, and the whole thing is held consistent, the more chances you've got of them buying from you so this literally increases sales and again, because it's like, it's like a flavour or a spice, you can sprinkle in everything you're doing right you can sprinkle it through every communication you put out and the more you do it, the more natural it becomes. So I think one of the one of the challenges with doing this episode for us actually is we really dig deep and go where do we do this because it's everywhere, but it's become such like second nature to us. That actually it just it just does just happen. So let's give some really we've talked about a little cool things you can do like you know, reference, famous pop culture, in terms of subject lines and stuff like that. But the the basis that sits underneath is the stuff that you can easily do starting straight away. That is the most powerful stuff is the stuff where they get to know you through your email. So let's give a few examples of how we're doing this all the time to bring this episode to a close that you can start doing this immediately. And again, you'll see why it works. You'll also see why it's baked into our stuff. If you've just if you just follow our stuff, you'll see you'll be doing this by default. But let's talk through some of those. I

mean, the first thing you do really simply is to keep showing up really consistently if you don't show up. If you're not absent for headend then people are not gonna remember who you are. There's no familiarity. So make sure you show up for us. We show up every single day. So we're consistent about that. We're not showing up every day for a week and then disappear for a week and all kind of stuff. You want to have a sending frequency which you can keep up with and be consistent about so three times a week, four times a week. Five times a week, only weekdays seven days a week, only weekend, whatever is going to be showing up being consistent. The second thing we do is we share personal stories so we do at the very top of one of the every single of these episodes we share a personal insight so in our emails we talk about Rob's dog, we talk about my cats we talk about stuff that's personal, I went to the theatre I did this I'll be on this place. I've never done that before. We're sharing personal stories, which again, breeds a familiarity with us personally. And here's the really big thing. We want to take up more space in people's minds. We all have the same amount of space on someone's email inbox, because every email is pretty much the same size physically right in terms of what before you open it up. But what if we can take up more space in people's minds and show people that were more real than other people, they understand us more. That means when it comes to buying something to solve the problem you solve, that we're more likely to buy it from you because you are the person who's taken up more space inside of their minds. So there's a bunch of things you can easily go and do. And like Rob said, this stuff is baked in already. If you're already a member of our programme. You don't have to learn that this principle exists. You just need to know that it does and it's built into almost every one of our campaigns. If you want to go and check it out, it's called the email hero blueprint go to email hero blueprint.com email hero blueprint.com You can check out all the details of the entire programme. It's everything you need, from A to Zed for your email marketing, right so email hero blueprint.com is the way to go and check all of that out. But let's get into this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. What have you got for us?

This one is the words Shai Ben's getting out. Exclamation mark in brackets explained. So shine but shy burns getting out is a northeast colloquialism. It basically means if you don't ask you don't get shy kids don't get anything. It's the literal translation of it. And so I put that together with the words explained what's quite cool about it is the words themselves if you're not from the northeast of England or England, because I guess people are crossing they could probably figure that out maybe I don't know. Anyway, if you're not from from an area where you understand what that means, it looks like interesting words, and the words explained give you the confidence that oh, I'm gonna find out what that means when I get inside. If you are from the Northeast or you are from the UK and you cultural enough to know what Shai van is getting out means I mean, we've heard it before. That means that you the words get your attention cuz you rarely see that sort of expression in social sort of what feels like a form of context, the subject of an email, and the word explained is what what's that got to do with email marketing, so it's all has a slightly double meaning, but obviously, most people would have heard that before. So if you're from New Jersey or from Indonesia and wherever you're from, find something local, colloquial or in your language or whatever and use those words. Put the words explained and that'll get them

as this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. I like the idea of doing it into the language when you said that that was like that'd be cool like us. We could grab like a nice phrase in German and then explained and then into it, we could talk about that. I mean, that's that's a cool idea of doing it in a different language, loads of food for thought in today's episode this week. Thanks again for listening to the whole show. If you're brand new to the show, welcome. It's great to have you with us. We do this every single email marketing Wednesday, so do make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player, and a brand new episode will download to your device next week. We'll see you then have a good one.