Something very strange is happening in the world of marketing right now, and business owners everywhere are feeling it. We have better software, smarter tools, more data, and AI that can create almost anything we need in seconds. Yet despite all these amazing advances, getting new customers seems to be harder than ever before.

How can that possibly make sense?

You would think that having access to better tools would make growing a business easier, but for many people, the exact opposite is happening. Getting attention is harder, standing out is harder, and turning interested people into paying customers can feel like an uphill battle.

The good news is that marketing hasn't stopped working, and it doesn't mean your business is heading for disaster. The real problem is that the way people think, choose, and buy has changed, while many businesses are still following an old marketing playbook.

Once you understand what has changed, you can start doing things very differently.

Useful Episode Resources

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.

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

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then 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 sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

What is going on? Something weird is happening in the marketing of every single business right now. Look, we've got better targeting, we've got better software, AI can write anything that we want, we can produce unlimited content, we've got better funnels, and we've got more data than marketers and business owners have ever had in history. And somehow, marketing feels harder.

It feels so much I mean, just look at me here with this channel. Getting views is harder than at any time at all. So I really wish I'd listened to myself when I had the idea of starting it five years earlier.

But the good news is, marketing hasn't stopped working and your business is probably not on its way into the lake. It's just that the old playbook that we were all taught no longer works. So I'm going to show you what's changed.

I'm going to show you what you need to know and what you need to do to grow your business. So what happened? Well, the two advantages that entrepreneurs like you and me had in their businesses were, first of all, knowledge. They knew things that other people didn't, like a certain ad strategy, or they had a specific funnel, or they had some specific data that they could use that nobody else had.

It was like a moat around their business. But now, anyone can ask ChatGPT for pretty much anything and we all have access to the same information. I'm going to show you how to fix that in a moment.

The second advantage we used to have is volume. As a business was doing better and it was growing, they would hire more and more people until they had teams of people who could produce more and more content, do more outreach, do more follow-up. And that's gone now as well because of AI.

AI can produce all of the emails, all of the articles, all the scripts, all the everything, literally everything that you want. And you can do it all with one VA and a $200 a month subscription to some kind of AI tool. That is crazy.

AI has killed that volume advantage, but there is a solution to that as well. So we're going to get into it. I will say that the solution to that, I don't think you're going to like it.

Going to be dead honest, but we're going to get into it. The model that we were all taught was you get leads and you need to nurture those leads and then you need to make an offer. Leads, nurture, offer.

That's the old model. What we actually need to be using right now is something called the ANTS framework. The first part, the A in ANTS stands for attract.

That's where you're going to get in front of new people. That hasn't changed. That's your posting on your social media.

That's your YouTube videos. And hello, you should subscribe to this channel, by the way. Okay.

Do that. Do it right now. It's also your ads that you run.

It's all of the ways that you attract a brand new audience. It's get people who have never heard of you before to discover you for the first time. We need to do that.

The second phase is navigation. People arrive at your door already pre-overwhelmed, right? They're already overwhelmed. For example, we're currently booking a trip to Japan.

And I can tell you now, there are so many different ways that we could do this 17 night trip around that part of the world. I could fly to Singapore, I could do Dubai, or I could go via London. And then do I go to Osaka first or do I go to Tokyo first? Like, do I want to do Universal Studios? Do I want to do Disney Sea? Do I want to do the Disney? There's so many different ways around of doing that thing.

So what did I do? Well, yes, I've asked ChatGPT to put an itinerary together and have a look at that. And then that got overwhelming. So I asked Claude, and then I asked another ChatGPT conversation, then I asked some friends who've done it.

And eventually, I turned and called a travel agent. I called a travel agent to navigate the whole thing and turn down all of that overwhelm. AI has produced so much stuff.

So producing more stuff is not the play, right? In fact, the play is that everyone is so overwhelmed by the volume that your job is to tune out the volume and give them a clear path. When someone comes into your world, they've already asked ChatGPT, they've already asked Claude, and if they're that person, they've already asked Gemini too. They've looked online, they've been cycling through in their overthinking minds.

They don't need you to come along and teach them anything new and add to that overwhelm. We don't need to teach them new things. What they need is for you to say, hey, I know where we're going, follow me.

Because leadership, leadership is the number one difference between high converting salespeople and those who aren't. When I'm coaching people in sales, the one switch we make that has the biggest difference isn't some fancy objection handler, it isn't some fancy special line, it's the mode of leadership. Are you being a leader? People want someone they can trust to follow down this path.

So that's the first part. Next comes trust, and there's three things that they need to trust. Three of them.

If you miss any one of these, trust is lost. The first thing they need to trust is the obvious one, and that is you. They need to trust that you are telling the truth and that you have got their best interest at heart.

How do you show that you've got their best interest at heart? One is you sell through radical honesty. One of my favourite things to do, if I'm doing a webinar, I did one the other night and I was absolutely buzzing at the end of it because someone asked a question and the answer I could give them was, I don't think you should buy the thing I'm selling right now. What did that do? It showed everyone else around the room that I was being honest and I was only selling with the person's best interests at heart.

I was telling this one person, do not buy this thing. So that means when I turn to the next person and they say, hey, should I buy the thing? And I say, yes, I think you should buy the thing because I think it's going to help you in this particular way. They now believe me because they can see I'm not just willing to sell anybody and everyone.

I'm only selling for a place of integrity that I know this thing is really going to help you. So they have to trust that you've got their best interests at heart and you're not just trying to rake in the money. The second thing they've got to trust is your system.

That is your process. That is your method. Having a system, a process, it might be a seven-step process.

It might be a named process, whatever it is. When you've got a defined process, just by the fact of having it gives people way more confidence because they can see that you're not just winging it. They can see you have a path that is meticulously thought through.

It is designed. And then it's even better when that path has gotten results for other people. And they're like, well, if I follow that same path, then surely I could get results as well.

And it's even better if some of the people who've walked that path are a bit like them as well. And the thing they need to trust is themselves. Do not miss this one out.

They have to trust that they can do it. Even with all of their flaws, with all the things that are holding them back and with their past failures. We have to build all of that in to the trust element.

The final phase of this is to sell. But the question is, what do you sell, right? Information and knowledge has been slaughtered by AI. People flip open their phone and they've got access to all of it, right? We all know that.

But what we want to know is, is there something unique you've got? Is there your unique secret sauce that gets them results for a very specific reason because of how your thing gets result? It's often known as the unique mechanism, right? What is the unique path that you've designed that helps people to get results when in the past they've really struggled? The other thing that sells really well is implementation. What can you do for people? What can you do with people? And if you can't do something for people because maybe your business is not a, we do this for you type business, then what's the level of customization, the level of personalization and personal guidance along that route, right? That's what we need to be doing. You see, and I'm going to have a bit of a rant now.

The problem is that most of the information that they are being fed by the algorithms is not designed to get results for them. It's actually only designed to please the algorithm and get more views. That is it.

And they are not the same thing. Even with this useful and thoughtful content that you're consuming right now, if I just called this video a new way of doing marketing now, it would get no views. I had to put a layer of pleasing the algorithm and getting views on top of this, even to get you to start watching the video.

You see, in general, the most successful people aren't creating content for their YouTube channel, their podcasts in their short form, because it works and gets results for people. The only metric that they are creating for is the reach and the views, and they are completely different things. Like when you see that ad in your newsfeed for that amazing supplement, and they've been running that ad for months and months and months, you think, well, it must work.

No. The only thing we know is that that ad is working to sell the supplement. That's the only thing we know.

It's the same for that new course that you see advertised a month on end. You don't know if that shiny new business model that they're teaching works. We only know that the ad works in selling the course about the business model, right? Because we're now in what is called the AI-assumed phase of products.

So for your products and services, we're now in this thing called the AI-assumed phase. Every new system or concept goes through these stages. The first is the emerging stage.

That's a new idea that is being developed by a really small number of people, usually one person or one company. That's when it's emerging. Then it goes through the next phase, which is called the advantage phase.

That's where a really small number of people are using that new system as their advantage that others don't have. Then we went into the explicit phase, and that's where it becomes a trend. And literally by adding that thing into the marketing message, it's an instant lever for higher interest and sales.

So you remember a few years ago, just by putting AI into the product name or the headline, it was an immediate huge lift in sales. That's a really simple way of thinking about it. Then we go into what was called the implicit phase.

And this is the phase we've just come out of with AI. Because instead of leading with this new novel concept, you just imply that it is used. We are now in a new phase, and that is called the assumed phase.

This is where AI is assumed to be involved in the things, and you don't even need to lead with that in your unique messaging. It is just assumed that your thing will involve some level of AI. So when you're making your offer, you need to make sure that you're very aware of the phase we are in, in this journey of this new concept.

Go check that out.