Breaking Down Ryan Reynold's Billion Dollar Marketing Strategy for Mint Mobile | Ep 844
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What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to the game. Today, I'm going to do a very in-depth breakdown of Ryan Reynolds' Mint Mobile. Now, this will be different than the Rihanna collab by Fenty. I don't know. A bunch of people corrected me in the comments. I don't know how to say it. I'm obviously not a buyer of the lingerie.

but I am a consumer of business models. And so I am gonna talk very little about big picture stuff that they did, distribution, brand deals, any of that. I'm just gonna be talking about like what ads are converting, what pages are they pushing to, what's the offer they're running, how are they packaging it, and how are they following up via email to maximize conversion? And I think there's a ton of stuff in here, super tactful, that any business owner can use. I certainly am. And at the end, I'll give you some things that I think if I were the CMO of the company, I would consider at least testing

that might show some performance improvements over what they're currently doing. Ryan Reynolds acquired over 2 million customers from Mint Mobile with paid ads. And I'm going to break down the best paid ads these run and how you can model the structure for whatever it is that you sell in your marketing. I'm Alex Ramosi. I'm the founder of Acquisition.com. We spend millions of dollars every month on ads. We make tons of money and no one cares. Let's start with the first ad. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot,

we charge you a little. They put their names on arenas, we put ours on my lower back. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. And if this were one of their ads, they'd end it here with a happy customer. So we'll end ours with an angry goat. Oh, look at the angry goat.

So let's break this down frame by frame. Now notice though, that this is a 30 second ad. And so 30 second ads, as a side note, there are some placements that you would be able to get all over the internet that are helpful. And before I break down the actual structure, I think what's important to note is that Ryan Reynolds, despite having a very large personal brand, still used paid ads as the primary acquisition strategy.

And so think about it like this. If all he did was just post every day, just be like, bit mobile, bit mobile, like people would just not really care. Right? So instead it's like he provides value via movies and things like that. That's where he gets his mass distribution. That's where he builds his brand and his goodwill. And then he monetizes through the paid ads as basically almost like a retargeting, but his warm audience is everyone.

So the hook is basically a contrarian hook. So there's a little bit of curiosity here because you're like, okay, well, one, you recognize Ryan Reynolds right off the bat, and he's got brand placement behind him. So he's making the association between him, the thing you like, and the thing you might not know, which is Mint Mobile. And so that's a 101 strategy. And there's a reason that I wear this hat and why underneath of my shirt, which normally is unbuttoned for those of you who are you wild fellows, because of my 90% male audience, I

The reason I rep my brand is to make that same association. If there's stuff that you use for my content and it makes you money, then hopefully you associate that value with me and acquisition.com. All right. So here, this is a contrarian hook and the curiosity is, okay, well, what's opposite about this thing versus what my current carrier. So this is

a clear setup for an us versus them strategy. All right. And so this strategy is best employed when you are not the market leader. All right. So obviously Mint Mobile is kind of the underdog. They're going the small guy. They're trying to face Goliath. Obviously, they're not even close to as big as Verizon or I was about to say singular. I was about to date myself. Well, Verizon and AT&T. Right. So this strategy makes sense.

If you're number one, you don't want to do us versus them. If anything, if you want to use an us versus them structure, you would use us versus the alternative. So rather than another brand or other companies, you'd be like,

us versus your couch, right? If you were like the top fitness brand or something like that. Obviously he's weaving in humor because that's part of his personal brand. And so he's basically weaving in his kind of like his brand sub bullets as he's going through. Now, every ad has three parts to it, right? You're going to have the hook, which we covered right at the beginning. There's the meat of the ad, which is typically going to be the value. And then at the end of the ad, there's usually going to be either some sort of call to action or payoff. When you're thinking about value creation in an ad, there's at the most basic level, more good stuff,

less bad stuff. All right. And so when you're writing your ads or you're writing your copy, you're scripting them out. I think first from those two buckets. And so if we pull out our handy dandy textbook for advertising and you go to 134, so this is the leads book. All right. So there's the steps for running paid ads. So first you have to know where to advertise and

He's advertising everywhere because everyone already knows who he is and everyone already has a cell phone. And so his market is everyone, right? Now that part's straightforward. The second part is like, okay, how do I get the right people to see it? That's via targeting. So I'm sure there's different audiences that do better and it might be for discount providers rather than people who are maybe at premium. They might have found, for example, that,

you know, switching someone from Verizon might be more difficult than switching for someone from like maybe a pay on the pay as you go type phone, especially given the price points. Now, the third part, which is right here, step three, what should my ad say? And so this mirrors that three-step process. You get your call out, which is the hook. You got the value, which is the meet. And then you got the call to action, which is the end. All right. So

Besides the kind of general points that I start that are more common hooks, obviously there's not exhaustive. You can have unlimited types of hooks that could fit in the book. But in terms of concepts, he's using contrast here. Contrast in two ways. One is that there's contrast visually. Like this is a bright color. This is something that's going to pop out. But then also he's using contrast us versus them. That's kind of the theme here. All right. Now, from a value perspective...

we get into the interest step. All right. And so the interest step is the best ads make benefits look as big as possible and the costs look as small as possible. Right.

right? And so from the benefits and cost perspective, what we're basically doing is a reverse value equation. And so the good stuff is what's the outcome they want, which would be phone coverage, right? People would want it fast. They would want easy and they would want it to be likely. Okay. Now the negative side is going to be what is a nightmare scenario? The

And so as he's describing the benefit here, which is less bad stuff, the nightmare scenario is that you pay a lot.

right? And you get basically the same thing. And so before this, he said, and we do this due to not hating you, right? And so again, he's talking about the nightmare scenario. They charge you more and they don't like you. And so he's saying, we charge you less and we do like you by implication. And then he adds in more humor. And to be clear, he doesn't actually show an angry customer. He shows a sheep, right? And so it wasn't actually like showing a negative review, which I

Other companies like Liquid Death, which is a water company, which took the market by storm with cans of water that looked like beer. They actually had ads that were one-star reviews of their product because they kind of went, again, contrast, that contrarian angle. Now, here, we finish with what? The CTA, right? So they make the offer, and they tell people, midmobile.com, and what do I get? Unlimited. Now. Speed.

just relative to the cost low done fundamentally sound ad and obviously brought lots and lots and lots of customers in so if we're thinking about this ad in three slices right we've got our hook we've got our meat or value and

and we've got our CTAs, all right? And so we cover the hook, we cover the CTA, let's talk about the meat. And so here we've got more good stuff or less bad stuff. Now on the good stuff, what we're thinking through here is how can we make it faster? So we want to describe speed if we can, how can we make it easier and how can we make it risk-free?

Now, if we wanted to improve this offer, it would be month to month, not just monthly, right? Now, there's some disclosures at the bottom. What does it say there? Limited time only offer, new activation, and upfront payment for three months. There we go. Promotional rate for the first three months only. Again, so now we get to understand, oh, it's only $15 a month for three months, and then it will go to who knows. Maybe it goes to $30. We'll find out. Taxes and fees are extra, so there is more on top of that. And what are these fees that they haven't disclosed?

And unlimited customers using 35 gigabytes per month will experience lower speeds. Okay, so they do slow you down. And video streams at 480p, see full terms at midmobile.com. All right. And so that is the fine print on this. Now, that's because he's being a compliant advertiser, and that's wonderful. But big picture, though, if we wanted to make this more compelling, we would actually flip those things. We would say, okay, well, your dream outcome is to have unlimited...

Fast, right? Internet. And you're not going to worry about getting overcharged or getting your rates turned down in terms of the speed that you're getting downloaded. That would make this offer significantly more compelling, right? Now, the thing that a lot of people don't do in their advertising is they don't cover what I call the don't, right? Which is like, what's the negative side? All right. So here, less negative is the, what are all the things that suck? So paying money sucks, which would be, and the opposite of this is slow, hard, right?

and risky, right? Now in this ad, obviously they don't really have that offer because a lot of the things they have are, they will slow you down. They probably made signing up easy. They might not make canceling easy. And then the risk is that obviously you don't get what you want. Now on top of this, this is the real don't. This is the 201 version of ads.

is that we say, okay, well, plus minus, so more bad stuff and less good stuff, right? That happens in your life. These are still the same categories. But when we sell against the don't, we say, well, you could also not do this. And instead you say, you will have more delays by not buying Mint Mobile. It'll be harder for you to use your phone stuff and it will be riskier for you to do it. That's

more bad stuff. And also you'll experience less good stuff. So you can think about these as mirror images of both

both sides. If you do it with us, then you're going to have less slowness, less hardness, less risk, which means that it's risk-free, it's easy, and it's fast. These just give you different ways of more or less saying the same thing. And on the alternative side, when we're marketing against someone or something or some idea or some competitor, then we're saying basically the converse of that. All right, so next ad up is actually an ad that ran as a Super Bowl ad, but the results weren't what you expect. All right, play it. Wireless for 20 bucks a month.

That's not right. It's right, all right. Now, chunky-style milk, that's not right. I choose chunky-style milk because it has the wholesome chunks growing kids need, unlike smooth-style milk. Hey, guys, save some chunks for me. Oh, that's not right. Kind of like your wireless bill. Mint Mobile is easy, online, and just $20 a month. Right now, buy one month and get two months free at mintmobile.com.

So what's interesting about this is they began not really with a hook, but they began with the offer. And so me right off the bat, I'm not like, oh, now I'm paying attention. I would be like, all right, there's an offer here. So the good part that they have here is I do think that they have a reaction, which I think is overreacted.

overall like a good thing. I wonder if I were to split test this, I would probably lop off the offer and start at the reaction and then flip the order so that then you see the offer just so that there's something interesting there. Now, here they have a mascot which shows up in the next frame. I think what the intention here was to take...

Ryan Reynolds' face away from stuff and transition it more to a mascot. But my guess here is that his goodwill and his positive brand is probably what drives a great deal of the advertising return above par, because many people might not know Mint Mobile if it weren't for Ryan Reynolds. They might not even know that this is the same company as his.

Right here, what they're actually doing is a pretty clever advertising tactic. Whether or not it was effective is predetermined by the fact that they didn't have as many sales as they wanted. So I'm giving you a little bit of a foreshadowing here. But what they did is they actually just drew an analogy between other people's service and chunky milk. So this is another contrast style ad. They're saying, we are a Ferrari. They are a clunker, right? They're a Vespa or whatever, some small scooter, something that's a huge contrast that basically

paints an analogy in someone's head to say, we are good, they are bad, and we keep going. And the way that branding works is that you don't actually brand in the negative. I can't say, hey, don't think about pink elephants and me. Well, of course, you're going to think about pink elephants. And now I forever am associated, for those of you who see this, with a pink elephant. And I will just cry myself to sleep every night because of it. But the point here is that they said, we don't want smoothing. We want

Chunky milk. And we started the video starts with the actual brand itself and then subsequently follows with chunky milk. And almost the entire ad is talking about chunky milk and that it's disgusting. Right. And so people now just simply associate mobile disgusting thing.

So now they complete the loop and say, that's not right. Kind of like your wireless bill, which is a simile. If you want to use a kind of like sort of is basically drawing an equivalent between two things, which by the way, is one of the key ways of educating and advertising. So they hit the three here, right? It's easy.

It's online, which to me would be it's fast. Like it's not something that you have to talk to anybody. So that's taking away some of the pain associated. Now, they don't really hit risk-free, but I guess they kind of lower the risk again with the small price here. And you have clear call to action, which is the end of the ad. And then obviously the call to action is just simply go to the website. All right. So I think that the mistakes in the ad are that branding works, whether you like it or not. Associations occur. And so they branded themselves with Chunky Milk and they took out their biggest brand

star, which was Ryan Reynolds. And so unsurprisingly, the ad didn't perform as well. All right, let's go to a good one. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds, owner of Mint Mobile. It's the holidays and the big wireless companies are busy spending billions on advertising.

At Mint, we're not into wasting money. So we bought this spiffy stock footage for $500. Our footage also came with another hand, so we can let you know if you switch to Mint, you'll get three months free on all of our plans, even unlimited. Feels like that deserves an exclamation point. Whoa, easy, easy.

All right. So because what we have to think about when you're advertising here, because I don't actually think this is an effective hook from a hook perspective, but because this is fundamentally not going to strangers, this is going to people who already know who Ryan Reynolds is. And so the equivalent to that would be if I'm in a local area and I run an ad and I say, hey, Towson locals, which is a suburb in Baltimore, which is where I'm from, then I'm

People are going to be like, oh, this is for me. I recognize something. One of the four elements of getting influence with someone is likeness or relatability. You're like, oh, I know this guy. Yet again, he continues to hit on this us versus them concept. And obviously it's working. So when you do have something that works, keep doing it.

And so he's drawing this parallel between us and them yet again. He delivers one core brand message here, which is that we're not into wasting money. Now, they're a budget option. And so it makes sense for this that this ad did significantly better. One, they have their main person. Two, he's the focal point. Three, the scripting itself. It's like, oh, you know who I am. And I'm not like these guys. My value is cheapness.

And so we made this ad cheaply because we value money. That's kind of like, I would say, the implication of the ad. He obviously weaves in humor to then transition to the offer. And so these ads are super short ads. But when you have an ad that's this short and it's going to audiences who know who you are, you pretty much just make an offer. And so from an advertising perspective, Eugene Schwartz has something called the levels of awareness.

And so the levels of awareness kind of are like this reverse pyramid. All right. And so you have unaware at the top, and this is about the problem. So unaware, you have a problem aware. So they know that they have the problem. You have solution aware, you have product aware, and then you have most aware. Now, when you make your hooks for ads, you actually make your hooks depending on what

part of this funnel, you're actually finding people. And so the colder the traffic, the more different the ad will be. Now, when you have an unaware ad, if you've ever seen something that's like Texas homeowners are getting reimbursement checks for up to X, X, Y, Z in this area or something, that's going to drive curiosity.

And so curiosity is usually that very top of funnel for people who have no idea what this thing could be about. And so it has nothing to do with what the, with the solution. If you've seen like five weird foods that, that help you lose stomach fat, it doesn't say whether they're going to sell you a detox tea, they're going to sell you a Zempik, they're going to sell you a gym membership. It starts all the way to the top with curiosity. Now here's the massive advantage that

branded ads, people who are already recognized. This is what The Rock, this is what Ryan Reynolds has, et cetera. Now, every business can do this. Every influencer business you see who has 50,000 followers and then begins to run ads, for example, you still use the same exact strategy that Ryan Reynolds is doing. The thing is, it's just that his warm audience is like everyone, whereas your warm audience might be like a million people. And so what he's running actually is an ad that's targeted at most aware. And so when you're targeting most aware consumers, you actually just make an offer.

That's it. And so that's fundamentally what this ad does. He just draws a contrast and says, by the way, we're cheap and you can buy three months free and get three months free. That's it.

That's the whole ad. So in my next book that is coming out, I talk about this particular offer structure, which is a buy X, get Y, right? And so he's got a parallel structure, buy three, get three. I would say that I found that buy one, get two, or buy three, get six. If you can contrast that you get more free than you pay for, it will typically convert better than a mirror structure. So I would test...

buy one, get two versus three and three, because you would probably end up getting, you would save money as a business and you might end up still converting more because the discrepancy between what people pay and what they get is higher. I mean, if I wrote this ad, I'd probably have the CTA. This is yet another joke that he weaves in.

you could say that this is on brand for him. So what's one of the nice things I think Ryan Reynolds does for his own personal brand is that he does weave in direct response advertising, which is what this is with what some people might consider branding. And so he does very much kind of brand himself in these ads because the ads are funny.

And he kind of like, if you literally look at this ad, it pretty much alternates humor, moves the ad forward, humor, moves the ad forward, humor, moves the ad forward. And it's a pretty simple structure in terms of how he's making this. And so what we're doing here as we're looking through this in terms of tools is that one, obviously he's a, he's a celebrity. So we just looked at his YouTube video and ranked the videos that had the highest views, but I can guarantee you virtually that the ads that are doing the best are the ones that are being pushed out every single day on Meta.

on YouTube, et cetera, from ads, not organic. Like sure. He might get some signups from the six and a half million views, but believe it or not six and a half million views for an ad, not that much. So right now we're pulling up the Facebook ads campaign. So if you don't know how to do this, by the way, you just go face, just Google Facebook ads library, and then you sort, and then you type in the account that you're looking at. And it's because Facebook is trying to be transparent. They show you every ad that is running for an account. And sometimes also ads that are running in the past. Now the rule of thumb here in terms of looking for ads, cause you're like, well, how do I know which one's working? Well,

The easy way to do it is just say which one of these ads has been running for a long time. And so the longer the ad's been running, the more likely that that ad has worked well. And so let's say you put out 100 pieces of creative. Anything that's new will always do better than something that's old. But if something is old for a while, then it means even though it's old, it's still performing really, really well. So here's some of the oldest ads that they're running. So let's pull it up. Despite the fact that...

I think this ad fundamentally from a creative perspective kind of sucks. It's been running for five years or six years, so it's probably doing okay. Now, I will bet that this is a retargeting campaign. And so this is probably converting very well for people who have already seen some of the top of funnel ads.

And so if you think about this levels of awareness that I was just talking about, retargeting ads are always going to be targeting people who are bottom of the funnel here, which is why it makes sense to retarget simply with the offer. So it's like, hey, you saw one or two ads or three ads because we don't know what the audience selection for this ad is. But I would make a guess that retargeting ads, because of

the audience that enters into the retargeting bucket, basically the new people that see the new ads and watch past a certain point or click to the site are a much smaller subset and change frequently. You actually keep the creative the same because the bucket of eyeballs changes. Whereas when you're hitting a mass market on a regular basis, everyone's seeing the ads. So you actually have to have far more creative top of funnel than you do bottom of funnel.

So if we just look at this, this is an offer recap essentially. So it starts with the price, tells you what the dream outcome is. If we're looking at our original framework, we're reversing risk, right? So we're just hitting through the buckets of value. It's cheap, it's fast and it's guaranteed. And this is a humor thing at the end there. And then again, they'll restate the price.

Hey guys, this podcast only grows because you guys are amazing. And so you guys have been bros and shared the show and you guys have been pals and told your gals. And so I want to say thank you for doing that because it's the only way that more business owners create wealth and ultimately provide value in the economy, which is, in my opinion, the point. Because ain't no government saving us no matter who's in charge. All right. So please share this with your friends and family.

Let's get back to the show. What's that? You guys want to see where all of this traffic is pushing? Fine. We'll also look at the landing page. Let's do it. Okay. So this is mintmobile.com, which is their CTA in every ad. All right. And I do think big picture,

If you have all your traffic pushing to one page, then you want to make sure that it's all congruent. And actually, it's a huge mistake that I think a lot of marketers make is that you have all these different creative hooks and stuff, but then like you don't actually go for congruence. And one of the easiest ways to drop conversion is have someone click somewhere and then not get what they think they're getting. And so a lot of the elements here are

Look, okay, let's just look at this page here. All right, so right on the top, time is literally ticking. So they're showing true urgency right at the top, big banner saying like, you need to act now. Now on top of that, they have a banner across the top that is probably also something that moves forward in the funnel. And

If you look at acquisition.com, for example, we have a banner across the top because it's actually one of the most clicked buttons. And so you can have the same CTA with multiple buttons on the page. And in general, rule of thumb, not frivolous.

forever. But if you only have one CTA on a site, if you add another, you will increase conversions. If you add a third, you'll also probably increase conversion. At a certain point, you have too many referees on the field and no one can see the actual offer. But in the beginning, two, three, sometimes CTAs in terms of button for someone to take action will usually increase the conversion of the page. All right. Now we're hitting, they're basically just slamming over the head with urgency. Now they don't have scarcity because it's unlimited customers. So that's not where they're hitting. They're

Big picture for those who don't know, scarcity is limiting quantity. Urgency is limiting time. And so people talk about scarcity and urgency interchangeably, and that's not how it actually works. All right. They're separate things that can be combined, but they exist separately. All right. Now, they do have a caveat. It's new customers. All right. So it's not all customers, but new customers get three months of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. All right. So let's, I mean, it's pretty clear what they want us to do here.

Okay, so two plants for the price of one. So if you switch from one of their primary competitors, they have a separate offer for you there. All right, now let's look at the secret sauce.

I'll bet you this is optimized for mobile too. All right. So 5G for free. We're online. Flexible payment plans. Okay. Bring your own everything. Fine. So what's really interesting about that BYOE, another budget provider, which you may have heard of, which is Spirit Airlines, has the same thing. They call it your ass and gas. So they say like, we give you nothing. And they kind of lean into how cheap they are. And they are the cheapest provider, but they do nickel and dime people. So let's scroll back up and let's actually, let's go like we're going to convert.

So because this is actually like dev work that they'd have to put in. So there's probably a reason they added this bar in. I would imagine the number one concern, which they also talk about in their ads, is what's the service quality, right? And so if someone's like, I'll switch to it if there's really good coverage in my area. And so they're probably resolving one of the biggest concerns. So let's just do acquisition.com zip. So there we go. Man, they make this a problem. All right, so there we go. So they tell us that our device is compatible and they have excellent coverage. Now,

I'm going to be real with you. My question would be is like, what's excellent? Now they do have a map so they can visualize it. Okay. So they've got some towers that looks like it's right there at the corner, but all right. If I'm trying to make a decision, I might say, well, they said it's excellent. So I guess I'm going to consider it. So now we go view plans. So let's do that. Okay. So this was actually leads us to the same place as the original button. So if someone takes a detour and then goes there pretty, basically you handle the objection and then they go back to the sale. All right. So choose your plan.

All right, so let's see what we got here. We got three months, six months, 12 months. They obviously want, you know, they're drawing attention to the three-month offer. But I would be super curious to see what their conversion rates by offer are here. And so what's interesting is that they have the same starting fee, but just different ongoing fees after the fact.

Now, to me, the six month offer is a dummy offer. I'll bet you they have their split between the three and the 12th. And so look at why they would do this. So it's like, okay, well, I can only commit to three months and then it's $30 a month, or I can pay $35 a month with 210 upfront. I'm like, I don't know. Like for me, if I look at this, I'm either three or 12. And I'll bet you that that's how most people are looking at this. And so when you have three tiers, by the way,

you almost never want the three tiers to be evenly split. So we're going a little bit into pricing, but YOLO, we can do what we want. It's our video. So where you move the middle...

on a three-tier offer determines where you want to nudge the customer, okay? So if I want more people to take my 12-month offer, I will make my six-month offer really close to the 12-month offer. And so I'm like, oh, well, shoot, this is so close. I'll just do that one, right? So this is the typical small, medium, large, soda play that movie theaters has done for ages, right? So if you have a... I'll explain it to you real quick. So let's say that you've got...

between sodas, okay? So let's say that this is 10 ounces, this is 15 ounces and this is 20 ounces, okay? So that's what,

that's what these sodas are. Obviously, at a movie theater, it'd be like a gazillion ounces, and they just give you a gallon of whatever soda you want. All right, here, you're asking someone to make a logical decision, and it's proportional to how much they buy, and they're not really saving anything by buying more. So, functionally, this would incentivize people to go here, because there's no savings for buying more, and if you wanted to just get some more later, you take on less risk by buying a smaller purchase, and you can always just double up again later, if you so desired. Now,

What does this next pricing tier tell you? So let's say we keep our $5 and then we have $6 here and then we've got $10 here. What does this tell you? That tells you here that this is the best value option. The first is here. Now let's look at a different pricing scheme. So if we have $5,

on the low option, but let's say that now we've got $9 on this option and $10. What is the pricing tier that we're pushing towards? We're like, well, dude, for an extra dollar, I'm getting another five ounces. This is not a bad gig. Now, because of this, basically dichotomy between the 10 and the 20,

we would probably realistically what this would probably be priced at. Like if we were in the movie theaters, this would probably be eight bucks. This would probably be seven. And so this would then push more people to hear it. Right. And so how you price your three options, you can tell what offer a smart business owner is trying to incentivize you to take. We're getting into a little bit of advanced pricing, but you're an advanced person. So let's talk about it. All right.

So if I have this $6 option, what does it really communicate? We think like for a dollar more, I'm going to get 50% more soda. That's a pretty good deal. For here, for a dollar more, I get another five ounces of soda. And so these prices are always taken in aggregate. Now,

If I have a lot of people coming in the door and everyone's buying smalls and I want them to upgrade, then I'm going to put my price here. If everyone's coming in and they're getting mediums and I want to push them the larges, then I'm going to move my price of mediums up to make the large more appealing. So what you're ultimately trying to do is maximize revenue per soda buyer, right? And so it'll depend where your average customer is actually entering the business to determine which of these you would actually push.

So this is a sales page, all right? And so sales pages are different than landing pages. So the first page was relatively short, just wanted to get people to take the next step. And they have probably tested pushing people straight to the sales page, and it probably doesn't convert as high. So they have the intermediary step to get more qualified people to the page. Why does that work? No idea. I can just tell you that it often does work. When you have too much traffic going and not enough conversion, you add a step, you add friction, and then it sorts the right traffic. All right.

So let's look at the actual page structure here. Boom, big thing. We have our urgency yet again. And then we have our offer right there in bold so that everyone doesn't miss the thing. Last chance yet again, 50% off. Cool. Okay. They're restating the offer multiple times and then they restate the benefits underneath high speed. So if we're looking at this, you've got headline, subhead, and then three bullets, which is a really common structure. It's interesting because above the fold, which is when someone loads on their phone, you'll see a very common structure.

So if in the paid ad section 147, I talk about three different landing page structures that work really well. And so what they have here is they're using layout three above the top. All right. So they've got headline subhead, right? So unlimited premium is headline subhead is last chance. And then the three bullets right here. Now they have, I have mine below, below the button. They have there's above minor difference, but fundamentally they're using this structure. Now notice I have attention avatar at the top. What do you think that is? That's top

Time is literally ticking. And it says new customer offer. So avatar is right there. Attention, new customers. All right. Like these are timeless advertising principles because they work. This is how you convert traffic.

All right. So we've got the button. One tiny tweak I would consider on this page is I think the button is not visible enough. And so I would consider making that more, I would make it jump out more because I think you could easily miss that. It says choose your plan. So now it's telling you what to do. Okay, great. This is just all plans include this. Are you new? Great. And then just restates the offer yet again. And then we see our three, six and 12 month plan. Now they made it user-friendly for mobile so that you can toggle between them.

which I think really interestingly. So imagine the user experience here. So if I'm looking at this, I'm going to see $15 a month and I go to six, six months up, it goes up. And then I go to 12 months, $15 a month. Huh? What is that telling me to do? Well, I came for the three, but man, this one for 12 isn't bad. And so what's interesting about this is that the intro offer is, is 15 a month and then it bumps up, right? But the 12 month offer is 15 a month and then it stays 15 a month.

And so if someone has a sensitivity to that price point, then they basically make it available to them. It's like, hey, if you want to stay at 15 a month, you can. You just got to make the commitment. So this is if you can't decide right now, don't worry. You can change it later, which is a great risk reversal. All right. So facts. So now they're getting into features here and they're probably going to show speed because what's the biggest concern everyone has? Coverage and speed.

All right. So they're going through these things. And for us, we already checked our zip code beforehand, which they helped observe. Now, I don't think anyone's going to know anything about this. Like,

Like I honestly, and maybe this is a compliance thing they have to show, which is very possible. So that one, I don't know. It might be a legal thing. All right, let's scroll down because obviously this is not going to cover anyone. Okay. Bring your family. So this is an upsell potential. So it's like, okay, not while I've got you. Cause what's another concern someone has? Well, I don't want to switch on my own. I want to bring my whole family over because I don't want to be a separate plan now. Cool. So they give a family plan. All right. Now, yet again, we scroll down to the bottom. If you missed it, because

Let's say you think about click journey, right? So someone clicks over and they didn't, they just went straight to the offer. Now that they're actually in consideration. So they're thinking, am I going to, am I going to take this offer? Am I going to take my credit card out? They might now this, the coverage device checker is what I consider a buying question. And so sometimes on a sales call, this is obviously doing this in a virtual setting. There are questions that are kind of more open-ended like discovery questions that a customer would ask. And if someone says like, talk to me about payment plans.

Right? That's a buying question. They're strongly in consideration. And so this is something to help overcome any obstacles around purchasing. So they were like, okay, the price makes sense if...

you have it in my area. I'll attend your gym. How far away are you from me? That's going to be a real consideration. And if you're close enough, they have some line in their mind that if it's over it, it's acceptable and they'll make the purchase. All right. So scroll down. And this last section is super common on a sales page, which is FAQs. All right. So almost always,

having an FAQ on a sales page will increase conversion. Because just think about every one of these questions as a couple percentage points of customers that haven't gotten all their questions resolved yet and either want a deeper explanation for some of the sentences or headlines from above, or they have some unresolved concerns that didn't really make sense to weave into the page because it would overall lose some people. And so you basically stack those at the bottom. And you've probably seen this on a lot of pages. Even if you look at like

an Amazon purchase page. They're going to have their FAQs at the bottom where the seller will answer some of the questions that people are asking. All right. And so if you, by the way, if you want a really great way to study like how to make sales pages,

study Amazon. Think about how they structure their pages and how many elements of persuasion are woven in that are real and actual. Now, they obviously, you know, they're a trillion dollar company and so they have a lot of resources at their disposal, but you can still use the elements of persuasion that they have, right? And fundamentally, that's what they're harnessing here. And at the very bottom, I see this as a, if you haven't decided to buy yet,

Why don't you enter our long-term nurture sequence where we'll send you emails to hopefully get you to buy later, right? And so that's basically what we're doing here. What's that? You want to see the emails that they send to ConvertWarp customers? Fine. We'll look into them. Okay. Big picture. This is their actual email sequence. So we looked it up. You'll notice that these are very visual. So these are very picture-driven. So I want to make a clear point here.

It's, I would say it's very split in the types of products that are being sold, what types of emails convert. And so I've seen, this is just me, Alex's point of view, pictures do really well with physical products and low ticket items. So people just like click and buy, right? If you sell services or complex services or complex products or high ticket products, oftentimes

basically almost the exact opposite perspective of this, which is lots of text that's plain text, maybe one hyperlink. That's all not formatted to basically make it look like a real email that someone might send to you. That tends to be the best deliverability, which will ultimately convert more people for those more complex things. So if you sell services that are complex, I would lean towards that. Here, if you're e-commerce, which fundamentally this is e-commerce, it's just a phone service that you're getting.

It makes sense. Now, one last point here is that notice that they don't offer phones. Remember the BYOE? So...

they're able to sell at a much lower price point because most of the other carriers include the phone in some sort of payment plan with your service. And so a big portion of what you're paying for is the $1,000 smartphone that they're subsidizing for you over X period of months with a decent markup. All right. So let's look at the offers they have. So email one is they just say, they just restate the offer. Cool. Let's go to the next one.

All right. Now they say it's easy. So let's think about the elements of value here. Right. So first they restate the offer. Then they say, by the way, it's easy. Now the makings of Mint Mobile. So now they're saying, OK, someone didn't take the first two. So now let's just give them a little bit more information. Right. Let's talk more about the value that they're getting. That's the next email.

Yeah. And so here they're also telling a little bit of the story of the founder or at least the spokesperson. And so this would be more common if someone hasn't made the purchase for you, purchase with you yet. You're explaining more about yourself. Basically, they're trying to build some trust, build rapport with the prospect. All right.

All right. So now they're hitting the family people and they're like, maybe you didn't buy because of this reason. You might've missed it on the site. And so what they're really doing is they're chunking down a lot and just focusing on one obstacle at a time, which is what I would encourage you to do in email follow-up is there's going to be, let's say 13 reasons people are going to buy. And instead of saying, here's 13 reasons, let's handle them all. You just hit one email at a time that hits each reason in order to

of prevalence, meaning the more common the concern is, the earlier on in the email sequence it should be. Now, here's the 411 on SIM. So this is going to be a concern question. This is a detailed question where someone's like, well, what about SIM cards? What about my use case? I'm a special snowflake. So they're covering the special snowflake scenarios in this. And I would imagine that it continued on this process. Now, if I had to rate this email follow-up,

Um, I would probably rate it like I'm being real, probably a five out of 10. Main reason here is, uh, you know, they're just hitting base. They're just restating the offer and over and over again. Um, I think that what could make this better is if they made it feel a little bit more tailored, right? And so if they could expand in personalization, now, I don't know what segmentation they have in the background, but personalization, their marketing and, um,

And thinking about onboarding a customer before they're a customer is a great way to take people, get, get people to do those first steps. Like that coverage question that they have, it's like, can I get someone to take a micro step towards me? Right. And so I'd be thinking what other things are kind of micro steps that get someone who, who is going to get further along the road of consideration before they make a purchase.

Another one would be like, okay, can we give, can we deliver them some sort of lead magnet? So once we have their zip, it's like, here's other people in your area who have said that this is really good. That would probably be really compelling. Another type of testimony might read someone who's like you. Another one might be someone who considered buying at the same time as you and is now already enjoying the benefits, right? And so

people thinking cohort. So it's like, if I considered buying this last week and it shows someone else who did buy last week and is enjoying the benefits, it becomes more compelling because you double down on likeness. That person's just like me. Additionally, you can reference my Rihanna video on some of the things they did for their offer. But in this offer, having birthday and anniversary offers is just

It's one of a reason why to extend personalized offers to people that will increase their specific urgency. But the thing is, is that you know that every month you've got one twelfth of people returning a certain age. And so you've got basically one sixth because you've hit anniversaries and birthdays every single month that are getting a special offer. And so if you do that on a regular basis, it's like every month you get this kind of lift to one sixth of your audience that's getting a special offer specific to them.

All right, let me hit some of the big takeaways that anybody can use on their site that we can take from how they're converting a lot of traffic, obviously. So number one is website optimization. So if you haven't tested your page load speed, just do it. And then most tools will tell you some of the things, images that need to be compressed so that you can decrease file size and ultimately load faster. Now, this may not sound interesting, but for every one second saved, you get, I think, I think Neil Patel had this, he's already studied this one, but I think it's something in the neighborhood of like a

two and a half or something like that percent increase in conversion per second. And so sometimes I've seen some of your pages, you have nine seconds, 13 seconds of load time. And it's like, if you can get that down to like three seconds, you've got two plus percent times 10, uh, in terms of improvement on a conversion, right? If you click and it's like changing a channel on a television, you're going to convert more people.

The next one is using side-by-side comparisons. I'm surprised that they aren't really hitting on this heavily. So they talk about it really heavily in their advertising, but they're not showing what other people are doing comparatively. And so this is one where like Progressive kind of pioneered this in the insurance industry, where they were showing what other plans...

cover and prices associated. And I think if you are the underdog, then it's okay to do that. If you're the top dog, you don't show anybody else's. But if you're making a budget as your primary sales point, then using side-by-side makes sense because they can see the delta. One of the other things here that I think is probably worth mentioning is hidden fees. I think one of the big

concerns with budget providers like budget airlines is that they will charge you for each piece of luggage. They'll charge you for drinks. They'll charge you for everything. And it's like, are they going to charge me for anything else? And I think being explicit about that somewhere would probably increase conversion. So if I'm them, I would be looking at the same plus good stuff away from bad stuff and

If you don't work with us, so selling the don't, you're going to keep having bad stuff and keep not having good stuff. And that's where having the juxtaposition of the other providers could prove for very good fodder for ongoing emails. And so like one email would just be more good stuff. Next email would be less bad stuff. Next email would be, uh,

If you don't do this, you'll keep having bad stuff. If you don't do this, you'll keep not having good stuff. And then each of the good stuff and bad stuff, you have three vectors that you can look at across all four of those, which is risk, speed, and ease. And so showing the visual of the step-by-step process of what it takes to sign up, it could de-risk someone's concern about how easy it is.

from a speed perspective i would probably hit on more points of like well how quickly can i get activated right like could i be using my phone within a few minutes if i could i would want to know that so i would talk about speed

From a risk perspective, they do have commitments associated. And so I'd want to know what are my cancellation policies and what does canceling look like? So believe it or not, if you actually just show someone how to cancel before they buy, sometimes they're just more likely to buy because they're like, oh, I understand how I can get out of this. It reverses the risk of the purchase. Now, the big obvious one is that price is another thing that they do, but I wouldn't say that's an area of opportunity. I think they already hit their price pretty hard. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast.

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