Introduction To The Symbiotic Ascension System (Part 3): Overview & 3-Step Email List Building Process

Welcome to Part 3 of this introduction to The Symbiotic Ascension System, a marketing methodology designed to provide creative entrepreneurs - with a resistance to pushy sales tactics - a route to monetising their knowledge, skills and experience without selling their soul.

Part 1 introduced symbiotic marketing as a way for both you and your prospects to get what you need, without you having to do anything you’re not completely comfortable with, or them feeling pressurised into a sale.

Part 2 demonstrated how a strategic symbiotic mindset can help deliver a more natural journey for prospects when based on building ascending levels of awareness and knowledge as they go. 

Part 3 (this part) provides an overview of how all the infrastructure, content pieces and offers from first contact to completed sale fit together, with specific focus on a process that can help you get started building your email list with least possible delay.

Quick Catch Up

If you’ve just joined us, don’t worry you didn’t miss much, well maybe a bit, but you can jump back to beginning or here’s a quick recap…

In part one…

We discussed how symbiotic marketing can…

Be a good fit for anyone with a resistance to marketing, as it’s based on building mutually beneficial relationships through helping, guiding and informing which more naturally leads to sales.

Strengthen trust, loyalty and relationships with potential customers by helping them solve problems, achieve outcomes and provide information they need.

Allow you to utilise your expertise, experience and skills to create content and products that naturally and logically help your prospects achieve results they seek (without in your face marketing techniques).

In part two…

We segued symbiotic marketing into a customer journey designed to combine the ascension of price points, customer value, awareness, engagement and trust in the most natural and frictionless way.

We covered why trying to sell a premium product to someone who know’s little about you, usually fails. And why you should take it slow for more natural relationship building instead.

And finally, we looked at how 3 levels of products, offers and information you provide can be designed as strategic stepping stones on a relationship building path that presents more of the right things, in the right way, at the right time to more naturally lead to sales…

Level 1 being where your lead magnet lives. The objective of which, is to attract subscribers to your mailing list with the promise of valuable information or a quick process that can deliver a specific outcome they seek.

Level 2 is where your transformer comes in. This is your first low cost high value product, strategically placed to provide a natural levelling up in the shape of new information, action steps and the promise of a tangible outcome. Main objective being, to transform your subscriber into a customer, which can in turn, transform their mindset to one where they’re much more likely to buy from you again.

Level 3 is your core product; the end objective of your funnel; the thing you’re ultimately looking to sell. But also something that - with the aid of some repurposing - can be utilised to provide lead magnet’s and transformers that can…

• More strategically advance interest, awareness and engagement
• Provide a more congruent, relevant and natural journey through your funnel
• Deliver more relevant outcomes that generate a more natural sense of progress

And all, while saving time, money and headspace along the way.

Which is nice.

The DJ’s Guide To Funnel Building…

Did I mention I used to be a DJ?

 "Nobody cares Nick”

Bear with me, while I shoehorn in another lame analogy…

If you’re idea of a DJ is the bloke (it’s almost always a bloke) who plays random records at a wedding, that wasn’t me.

I’m the bloke (it’s not always a bloke) carefully curating, selecting and beat mixing a - too heavy to carry - selection of 12” vinyl into what I’d - pretentiously, admittedly - call a journey. It is a journey - or at least intended to be so - because the objective is to keep the majority of the audience (the clubbers, ravers and dancers) on the floor, by smoothly taking them from track A to B to C. If I don’t get the beats from one track to another in sync the rhythm will be off. If I follow a downtempo track with a high tempo track, there will be an obvious disjoint. And if I randomly jump from one genre to the next, there’ll be more confusing looks than natural bobbing along.

The opposite side of the coin is that if you were only to play one style, one tempo, one genre you wouldn’t hold the audience’s attention for long either (unless they’re all off their faces of course). So the way you do it, is through a gradual progression one track naturally leading to the next track, gradually building the energy up, creating tension and drama, before dropping things down again to create some light and shade.

So the audience on the dance floor, is not that different from the audience in your funnel really. If you curate the contents of your funnel carefully and you join them up naturally, you get to keep their attention and subtly move them from cold visitor to warm subscriber to red hot customer. And of course if you choose to implement a symbiotic ascension funnel, they may even enjoy the journey, learning, growing and developing as they go. And the point of creating a natural journey is so there’s less friction between levels. If you can pull off a seamless transition between levels, you can take your audience “higher and higher” (sorry) without noticing the joins along the way.

Which brings us to the engineering, the creation, curation and building of all the parts that go to make up the customer’s journey from lead magnet to transformer to core product and beyond. 

As the DJ needs to put time and effort into finding, curating and testing the music; practicing the mixing; mastering the tools of the trade. You have a backend journey, where the planning, creation and publishing of all the content, products and offers, as well as where the building, integrating and testing of all the infrastructure required goes on. This is the creative and technical journey that you take behind the scenes to ensure your funnel actually can ascend your audience from A to B to C in the most natural, effective and hopefully satisfying way.

The Backend Journey (From The Top)...

Now, whereas in part 2 the customers journey was described as having three levels of
ascension...

Level 1: Lead Magnet

Level 2: Transformer

Level 3: Core Product

Just to confuse things, your backend journey as the funnel curator has three levels of ascension too...

1. Top Of Funnel (aka TOFU)

2. Middle (MOFU)

3. Bottom (BOFU)

At this stage, if you’ve been following along, the following will sound familiar to you, because, the front and back end of the funnel journey have to integrate.

Top is where you’re dealing with turning cold traffic into subscribers (which is where your lead magnet comes in).

Middle is where you warm subscribers up towards a high value, low risk sale (which is where your transformer comes in).

Bottom of course, is where you lead your nicely warmed up customers towards a Core Product sale.

However, within each of these three stages are many more content assets and moving parts - other than your lead magnet, transformer and core product - that need put in place for the journey to run smoothly. I’m talking about both the delivery infrastructure (email automation, landing pages, pdf’s, forms etc) and the content (words, images, video, audio etc), required to nudge hearts and minds towards something they need that you can provide.

But...

Tools, Templates & Tech Don’t Make Sales

If you’re just getting into this, then from technical point of view, your timing couldn’t be better. It wasn’t always so easy - I had to learn html back in 1999 - but these days there is a multitude of affordable tech, tools and templates that make building the infrastructure of a funnel - at least - a lot easier to do.

But easier, doesn’t necessarily mean easy. There’s still plenty of time consuming work to do. It’s just that 90% of that work is achievable without any coding or backend technical expertise. Anyone can do it - more-or-less. But herein lies the problem - imho - for anyone new to the art of funnel building (yes, art), there’s far too much emphasis on the tools, templates and tech and not enough on the fundamentals of marketing content, copy and design. Things like effective audience targeting, clear and relevant communication and effective strategy for a start. Infrastructure doesn’t make sales, it’s the content of that infrastructure that builds relationships and makes sales.

So, as necessary as the tools, templates and tech are to get your infrastructure in place, and as useful as the advice may be on which tools to choose, the differences between tool A and tech B is not what matters most. What matters most - and will make most difference to your conversions - is what you say, to whom, where, when, why and how. Your visitors don’t care whether you’re using Lead Pages, Clickfunnels or Thrive Architect. What they care about is whether or not what you’re selling is legit and if it can bring value to their lives.

So, once you’ve got all your infrastructure in place, using off the shelf templates and hastily hacked together copy, you may be good to go - in theory. But unless you’ve got some foundational grounding in basic copy and design principles; unless you’ve got an innate knack for knowing exactly what to do and say, in the right way, at the right time - there’s a good chance the majority of your visitors will take will shake their heads, hit the back button, erase you from their mind and never return again.

A slower, steadier, more considered approach to building email lists and funnels may not resonate or make sense to you if you’re looking to “get rich quick” anytime soon.

But if you care about the things you create and put out into the world and the people you put it out there for, what follows is a philosophy and funnel building methodology that may be of interest to you...

The Symbiotic Ascension System Blueprint

We’re now going to take a closer look at what a Symbiotic Ascension System designed to grow a quality-over-quantity list, develop relationships with subscribers and transform subscribers into loyal customer more specifically involves.

The SAS is broken down into a series of processes, each designed to ensure the content (products, offers, emails, articles, videos etc) and the infrastructure required to deliver them (landing pages, forms, email automation etc) can be created to a higher than average standard in the most efficient and effective way.

What you include in an SAS and the order you create things is not set in stone, you can pick and mix or add and subtract, but typically, for info products such as courses, we’d be looking at something like this...

1. Awareness Content.
2. Lead Magnet.
3. Squeeze Page.
4. Welcome Email Sequence.
5. Action Guide Email Sequence.
6. Transformer Email Sequence.
7. Transformer Sales Page.
8. Consumption Sequence
9. Core Product Sequence.
10. Core Product Sales Page.

Download a more detailed overview of the SAS Blueprint in PDF format here (it’s free)

You may notice that many of the steps involve email sequences. That’s because email is the core medium of delivery for our ‘showing, helping, informing’ marketing strategy. For simplicity, each sequence is just one piece in the blueprint, but each email sequence also requires...

• 2 to 4 or - should you choose - more, individual emails of various lengths.
• Click-thru destination content pieces for each email (generally blog post/video/landing page) although each destination doesn’t have to be unique.
• An email automation set up via a service such as Active Campaign.

There are then additional infrastructure assets such as forms, pdf’s, delivery systems etc.

Point being, we have 10 items above for simplicity, but there’s more than 10 items to create or build. Which is a bummer I know, but it’s also a good reason to have a step-by-step reliable, repeatable processes to follow.

As you can see the full process while not technically complicated - promise - does involve the creation of a significant number of parts. Meaning, if you set out to build the full funnel in a sequential manner, it could take quite a while before you start seeing results. Which might suck and so increase the odds of you giving up. But, before you throw your computer across the room, screaming “it’s all too much” the beauty of the system is this...

You don’t need all the parts built, connected and published before you start seeing results.

You can, in fact - core product ready or not - get to work building your email list with just 3 of the assets above. The infrastructure of which could be set up in just one weekend. You still need to create the content of course, not something I recommend rushing at all. But if you’re repurposing from your core product, you could still be good to go in a week or so.

Cough, cough.

Ok so, if we take the process list above and layer it onto the top, middle and bottom funnel structure we introduced earlier, we get something like this...

A. Top Of Funnel (aka TOFU)

1. Awareness Content.

2. Lead Magnet.

3. Squeeze Page

4. Welcome Email Sequence.

B. Middle Of Funnel (MOFU)

5. Action Guide Email Sequence.

6. Transformer Email Sequence.

7. Transformer Sales Page.

C. Top Of Funnel (TOFU)

8. Consumption Sequence

9. Core Product Sequence.

10. Core Product Sales Page.

And so the quick win is quite naturally to begin - and crucially complete - just the TOFU assets first (let’s call that level A for simplicity) to get your email list building funnel up and running and collecting subscribers, before moving onto level B.

Result being...

You can get started.

You can begin to build momentum

You can deliver a quick win

And you can begin building your list while avoiding overwhelm, procrastination or getting stuck.

Wait, but, level A has 4 parts not 3 right 

Ok, got me.

Just ignore that bit. 🙂

Well one part of it.

For now.

Remember I said the order of events is not set in stone? Well item A.1, the awareness content is - conveniently for my pre-disposition to 1-2-3’s - not strictly necessary to get the list building part of your funnel up and running.

So my advice would be to go: A.2 > A.3 > A.4

Pause for breath.

Then optionally, create your first piece of awareness content.

I say optionally, because awareness content is that first touch piece of content, a means of introducing yourself, creating some awareness - duh - and a means of warming a cold audience up, before you make an offer or ask them to sign up. That’s the ideal anyway. But while you work on your awareness content, you can still send traffic to your brand spankin’ new conversion optimised squeeze page - should you choose to.

We Need To Talk About Traffic...

I will dig into this in more detail in future updates, but traffic 101 is in theory, not that complicated, if you break it down to a choice - or combination - of just three things...

1. Paid

2. Content

3. SEO

Tough love time: non of which comes free unfortunately, with all requiring an investment of time and/or money to varying degrees. And unfortunately if you don’t have enough of one, or the other, it will be a slow uphill struggle to say the least.

With each being a major subject in it’s own right, I wouldn’t be doing you any favours by leading you down this particular path at this stage in the proceedings. That said, rather than completely ignoring what is after all one of the most important factors in any marketing plan, let me give you some pointers for context as it pertains to our scension funnel at least... 

Briefly then, in the current SAS funnel it may appear that content marketing - in the form of the aforementioned awareness content - is the key traffic strategy, which it could be, but it could also show up and be utilised in various different ways, such as...

• A guest blog post generating traffic from a third party site or platform such as Medium or Linkedin or a video on YouTube.
• An SEO post optimised for a specific keyword on your site to generate traffic via search engines (with a lot of work and time).
• The click-thru destination of an ad on google (based on a specific keyword query), a video ad on YouTube or a boosted post on Facebook.

Which ultimately means, there’s plenty of potential crossover and flexibility between paid, content and SEO.

Ok, we’re now going to move along to the ‘how-to’ of the 3-part fastrack TOFU list building funnel, but don’t forget, for future reference you can download a more detailed overview of the SAS Blueprint in PDF format for free here.

Click here to continue reading now...

PS: If you do want to dig deeper into traffic strategies, here are some recommended resources... 

Paid Traffic
Ben Heath (FB Ads Expert) Youtube Channel

Content Marketing
Copyblogger

SEO
SEO Sprint Course