Discovering Relevant Permission Offers

In this lesson, I want to underscore the importance of everything we’ve been doing up to now and explain what it’s all been for.

Way back at the top of this training, I explained what parts of the Buddy System we’d be operating within. If you remember, I said that this training would pick up where the Introduction phase left off, and deliver us right up to the Permission phase.

To reiterate, this means that this training would be able to take incoming fans and warm them up to eventually giving us the opportunity to communicate with them directly via email or text (usually).

The thing about this direct communication is that we don’t want to be too on-the-nose about asking for their email or phone number.. In fact, rather than simply asking for their contact information, the BEST way to gain this info is to actually offer the fans something in return for doing so.

We call this a ‘bribe’ (which admittedly sounds a little intense). We have a whole training on creating a great bribe called “Grow Your Permission List” which I’d encourage you to check out next if you feel that you’ve truly given this training a fair shot.

Everything you’ve been doing up to now is innately valuable. It has given you data that you can use to inform a brand voice, it has allowed you to stay relevant in your fans’ minds post-discovery, and it has allowed your fans to see you as an authentic person worth supporting. All of this has been in service of gaining your fans’ trust!

...But the MOST valuable thing we’ve earned from our efforts in this training is the ability to design the -perfect- email or text generation bribe.

Now this is an advanced skill that is just a little bit outside of the scope of this training, but it makes sense for us to take stock of everything we’ve learned here and come up with some preliminary bribe ideas that we can take into the Email Marketing for Musicians training as well as the Grow Your Permission List training.

So, let’s do just that.

There is a tab in your Data Hub - the last one - entitled Potential Email Bribe Ideas.

We can look at each of our main takeaways from our qualitative data generation efforts and use them to create the most relevant bribes possible to help pull this newly nurtured audience into the Permission phase.

Our bribe is typically composed of exclusive content or experiences that we can offer digitally. So, this will take a little creativity! For each takeaway, imagine an experience or set of content you could offer that would be relevant to the topic.

Then, fill out the chart to report what content you already have on hand that could fit the bribe concept, or what you could imagine creating to fulfil it.

Typically, the bribe is delivered across a number of days. For example, a typical ‘Ultimate Album Launch’ style bribe delivers all of the content in pieces over the course of 4 - 8 days.

Consider imbuing a ‘live’ component to your bribe if it makes sense. In one of my examples relating to my ‘gamers’ takeaway, I noted that I could host livestreams where I play through my favorite games.

Finally, come up with a potential title for the bribe. Think of something short yet descriptive that could act as a good headline for the offering.

These are your IDEAL bribe concepts that you’ve been able to source directly from fan interactions. While this exercise may seem simple, it is key for us to make note of these concepts before leaving this training so that you can take them with you into future email efforts.