Back in 2020, Bryan Starck started 100° Celsius, an agency with a great promise: We’ll take your email & SMS marketing from "crossing our fingers and hoping for the best" to "total clarity."
Not only is Bryan’s agency some of our students’ secret weapon for nurturing a profitable relationship with your customers… Bryan also co-created our most recent course inside The One Percent. It’s called Autopilot Sales: Email Marketing Methods That Double Your Sales.
It’s really good.
Going through it means you can finally cross “get email marketing going” off your list. Seriously. Templates, screenshare, “hold your hand and walk you through the process” make it easy for Bryan to deliver on his promise to help you get some fast wins for your business.
But we wanted a sit-down with Bryan to get his best advice for YOU as a brand owner - especially if you’ve never worked with an agency. The first piece might shock you. It’s this:
Maybe don’t hire an agency (yet).
OK, that sounds odd coming from the founder of an email marketing agency.
But if you’re just starting out, you might benefit from doing your own for a while. By emailing your list on a regular basis (what you’ll learn in the course will make it pretty easy and almost even… fun!), you’ll learn so much about your people and the products they really want you to make for them.
The secret sauce of winning in the grind phase is being able to lavish attention on the people who show up for you at this stage. Outsourcing that means you’ll miss out on valuable interactions and feedback. Plus, your early-on email strategy requires a few strategic autoresponders (flows) and a weekly broadcast email - especially as you document the early days of your brand.
Run if they say this…
When you start looking, what you don’t want to hear is that an agency ONLY wants to run your email marketing. Sounds okay, but it’s not. If an agency only handles your email marketing, they’re in a silo. They won’t have any idea what your paid ads team or content team is doing. They won’t be asking themselves strategic questions about what’ll move the needle.
Instead, you want an agency that’s excellent at email, SMS, direct mail - all your CRM channels. You want one that’s all about growing your brand and partnering with your other agencies, partners, and team to see how email can help support your overall growth… rather than an agency that stakes its claim on your email output.
Avoid the cookie cutter.
“Thou shalt have 8 email flows. This is the way. I have spoken.”
Most engagements begin thusly, and then for the next 6-12 months, it’s a matter of the agency trying to shoehorn its client into a generic box.
Instead, Bryan knows that what really works is having a super robust, customized campaign strategy built for your exact business. That’s why every engagement begins with a deep dive to create the customer engagement roadmap that forms the basis of everything they’ll do.
Slamming discounts? You can do better.
For some agencies, it’s like they’ve got one trick up their sleeve: the 25% discount. With a bit more curiosity and ingenuity, an agency should be able to come up with other ways to spur sales rather than always relying on a significant discount.
Email’s awesome - but it’s not everything.
Email’s a revenue driver… but that’s just one benefit.
There’s also the huge advantage email marketing gives you because it makes it possible to collect data you can use to improve your targeting, messaging, and customer experience.
Plus, TBH… if 50% of your revenue comes from email, that’s a problem. That’s because email marketing is a two-sided coin. It means you’re over-indexed on email and you likely have a problem with your acquisition engine. Don’t get us wrong - email is a great way to create a relationship with your people using a communication channel you own.
Bryan practices what he preaches. Not only has he used the same system he teaches in Autopilot Sales to help his clients generate $8M for his clients… he also uses it for Fellow Living, the pet parent brand he launched with his wife.
100° Celsius currently only has a couple of spots open for new clients. But just going through their Roadmap experience could be rather revelatory 😉 If you’re at the right place for your business to start looking for an agency’s help, that’d be a great place to start.
Can We Help YOU?
Here at Capitalism.com, we LOVE Bryan Starck! He's an active member of our community who's been very generous with his advice and tips. Not only is he a spectacularly talented email marketer, but he's also building a physical products brand. It's a brand that makes his customers' lives better (and their humans, too) and that has the potential to create generational wealth.
We think that's pretty cool.
And did you know?
We're on a mission to make one million millionaires by 2028. We'd love YOU to be one of them.
That's why we created this FREE course that will help you build your first million dollar business. Join us and let's get started!
