ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Episode Summary:
The day I found out I was an Enneagram 6, I cried for three days.
I sat with it and went, "oh, so I keep people close because I'm afraid of being alone." Cool. Love that for me.
But then I got to the other half of it. The loyal part. The bubbly part. The part that makes friends with strangers in the grocery store checkout line. And I realized that's not a bug I need to manage — that's just me. I'm an excitable person, and if I had to show up every day as a stoic, buttoned-up "professional," I would shrivel up and die on the inside.
Somebody else gave me language for how I already was. And I felt so much relief.
Which is exactly what Kristin Lawton does for solopreneurs, and it's what she built her entire welcome sequence to do.
Kristin is the chief brand mixologist behind District Brand Bar, and her brand isn't cocktail-themed — it's a bar you walk into. In email form. New subscribers choose how they enter the room, then a base spirit, then a flavor, a cocktail type, a garnish. They come out the other side with a sharper read on their own brand AND an actual drink recipe they can make.
There are somewhere between 60 and 100 emails behind it, running on liquid tags/conditional content. It's wildly complex, but so worth it.
Her click rate went from 1% to 4% when she turned it on. And the people who play the whole way through? Lifers.
Don't worry — Kristin says you don't have to have a crazy theme like she does. (I don't. I have puns and jazz hands.) A welcome sequence can be five emails that introduce you, hand over your best resources, and ask a question you actually want answered. That's most of what we build, and it works — because somebody sat down and decided, on purpose, what a new subscriber should experience. That's the part Kristin and I actually agree on. Sixty emails or five, the intention is what makes it work.
What she has me thinking about is the layer on top. What if new subscribers got to DO something in there?
In this episode, you'll learn about:
- Why picking gin over mezcal tells Kristin something real about your brand
- How you end up with a drink you can actually make
- The one piece of advice from a friend that sent Kristin back to rebuild everything
- What happens to the subscribers who don't play along (don't worry, there's a default option)
- The reason there is no vodka on the menu
- The Kit buildout in detail, so you can build something like it yourself
Check out this episode's blog post Connect with Kristin Lawton:
- Take Kristin's Brand Marketing Style Quiz
- District Brand Bar on Instagram
- District Brand Bar on YouTube
Episode Resources:
