The Email
The scene: 5 weeks post launch. So far so good from the client.
Client emails us (paraphrased): ****** and Barry, I just wanted to know how pleased we are with everything and how thankful I am to have you guys guiding us through this process.
Sounds good right? I thought so too.
Cold Email Outreach
After the launch of the MVP of the website, we planned to help get them in sync with their email automations and lead funnels. One of their primary methods of marketing is cold email outreach, which is a science in itself, and they weren’t doing a very good job with it from my perspective.
I don’t like that that was their primary outreach, but that’s what we had to work with.
I asked for an example of an email that they would send, thinking maybe I could fix the wording or the messaging or something like that. Something easy.
Shut the front door. The email that I got was entirely a graphic. Like no text in the email. No Hey [client first name], just a graphic. The graphic didn’t link to anything. It just listed the services they offer, which unless you are in their company, you wouldn’t understand half of the things they sell.
The kicker? The only way to “link” anywhere was a QR code. IN AN EMAIL.
I’m thinking this can’t be real. Surely there’s gotta be a joke or a hidden camera or something.
Nope.
In the days that followed, I dug into their past emails that had been sent via their cold email outreach/crm/landing page/kitchen sink app of choice (don’t get me started). Some of them had a bit of text, but the subject lines were like “Company Name”. That’s it.
No “We saved such and such company $20,000 in 2 months of using our software” or anything that might make someone click. Their open rates plummet with each send, and their unsubscribed percentages are like 10%.
Most of them had a QR code, there was no apparent goal or what they were going to do with it. Almst all looked like PDF’s that had been used maybe as a marketing flyer and just thrown into the email.
The good news is that we can fix these things with a little coaching, right?
Who’s On First?
Back to the website.
The whole reason we had to rush the website in the first place was he had done an expensive list buy in some industry-leading magazine. You know the promise – “we have this cultivated email list that we’ll send out if you pay us X thousands of dollars for this email campaign”.
They were going to send to some 15,000 people and had a decent open rate. I didn’t have much hope for it from a conversion rate standpoint, but it was also to get people to visit their booth at an upcoming conference.
The problem was, the team that he had just hired and fired was supposed to write the html email and copy. On Monday, three days before the email was due to be delivered to the company, there was nothing.
So I get this email:
“We need you to build a landing page in 24 hours and a second one within a few days of the first one”.
They provided exactly zero content, had no budget, and the only thing they sent over was an email from a company they were partnering with and said “use this for content ideas”.
I thought, maybe I’ll do them a favor because we have some more business to come etc etc.
But then, the client sends over what he wants the email to say. And I kid you not, it was like a 3rd grader wrote it from a grammar standpoint.
This was an actual sentence (slightly changed as it could identify the company): *Blank* is an all in one messaging and rid waistband. This was an actual line that was going to be sent out.
Obviously I have changed some of the nouns for privacy reasons, but the gist was – you left out “app” after messaging, and rid should be “get rid of”.
Obviously I can’t stand back and let this guy guarantee that he’s going to waste his $5k or whatever he said he spent on this ad spot.
I decide I will write a very well-written email that highlights their pitch, asks them to come to see them at the booth, and takes them to the brand new conversion-focused landing page on click (no QR code), with UTM’s and all of the bells and whistles.
Client approves my email verbally and in writing, and we send it off to the people to be added to their campaign.
All done, onto the next task.
Hold The Presses
Well, WE thought we were done. On the morning of the email being sent to the list, he suddenly emails and says “the email is wrong and we can’t send it and please stop everything”. Again, I can’t make this up.
He then proceeds to fire off an email that basically says we can’t launch the website either (it launched a month prior), and that it is all wrong and he hates it and we basically failed. Good effort, but you didn’t do a good job, it is all wrong.
I’m completely confused at this point, as we had a plan, a content map, expansion plans, etc, all just waiting on content and for us to get the underlying email automation/funnel perfected before we dumped a bunch of time and money into it.
You know, the whole test, iterate, test, iterate. That’s the way marketing works.
Work For Free
At this point, I have now built him 3 landing pages. Two that I haven’t been paid for, and one as a template that was approved as part of the original site build. He’s yet to direct any traffic to any of them.
He just approves them, and two days later has a new campaign he wants to do, but hasn’t ever started the first one. He’s all over the place.
A landing page that is hidden from Google and is not linked inside the website is absolutely worthless unless you send traffic to it. I am more than happy to remove the no index and add it as a page to the site, but the whole original goal was these were going to be short term landing pages for specific marketing campaigns, and for that, you shouldn’t have them indexed.
He’s like this just isn’t working for me, you guys failed, we haven’t gotten any leads, and all of the things are just wrong. The landing pages aren’t getting any traffic, they don’t have long signup forms like I want, etc.
Before I go any further, we’ve gotta bring back in the team from position 5.
The New (old) Team
We are told that he’s going to bring back in this other team, because we didn’t do what he wanted etc etc etc.
He says on a phone call that we aren’t the experts, and that we only know how to do the backend stuff. He wants the new team to come in and review the backend (mind you, they had already told us that they only had 5-6 websites in their management) to make sure that it was “scalable” and “professional”.
Look – I’m fine with someone reviewing things, and I’m fully open to content suggestions. But every decision was made with SEO and conversion rates in mind with regards to the existing site, and I certainly don’t need someone looking over my shoulder on the back end.
I also as a general rule don’t allow admin access to the site when it is on my hosting. Especially not another development team?
It’s just not a part of my service offering, and I’m hosting your site on my servers. It’s like going to a steakhouse and asking for a hot dog. I’m sorry sir, that’s not something we offer here. But you are more than free to go (host) somewhere else.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It’s still up in the air. I’m going to be somewhat lenient on charges for some of the new sections, but only because I haven’t ever had an unhappy client and I wouldn’t really want to start now.
That being said, I mostly just want to check out of the whole thing and keep my monthly maintenance plan in place. They can send us content, and I’ll post it all they want. That’s fine if he thinks they can do it better.
I prefer to use science and data and A/B testing to prove out things, and that’s what he originally bought into. But now he’s got someone else in his ear and he’s a VERY vulnerable CEO. He’s influenced by a bunch of people.
I don’t think that they are going to focus on any sort of sales process in terms of converting leads to customers. I think they are more concerned with making it a brochure site and making it look like the company is larger than it is. Which is totally fine, but that’s not what the original plan was.
The big site comes over time, as we add content to it.
Lessons Learned
When your gut says don’t take on a client, just stick to your guns. In my example, I told my friend no at least 5-6 times, including an official email basically saying absolutely not.
The client was just too hard to deal with, and was all over the place. He multiple times openly admitted that he didn’t value marketers, and that web developers were a dime a dozen.
At the end of the day, it is his company, and he can do whatever he wants.
If he wants to ignore the fact that the fundamental aspects of his sales process (my expertise) are broken, and he doesn’t have the time to fix it, then that’s on him.
He doesn’t have the time to figure out his marketing. That’s on him.
He just wants a brochure website that makes it look like they are a bigger company so he can get investors. That’s on him.
I even showed him a venture-backed site in his space that has basically a single page website with a call to action to get people to book a demo (same sales process we put together).
They have raised almost $10M from what I can see in publicly available records, and their website cost way more to build than what we built him I’m sure. No dice.
Letting a client walk all over you and taking on a client that you know to be not a good fit? That’s on me.
For anyone else out there – just remember that you can always find another client. Don’t bend over backwards to take on a bad one.