When doubling down beats starting fresh | Messaging Case Study

Discover how a seasonal twist on a green smoothie recipe became a high-performing lead magnet

Welcome back to Behind the Message, a series that explains the thinking behind my favorite messaging projects.

By this point, my confidence as a messaging consultant was growing. What started with homebrewers and marathon runners was expanding to bigger opportunities.

That's when I received an introduction to Kimberly Snyder.

Kimberly is a nutritionist to celebrities like Reese Witherspoon and Channing Tatum. She has appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show and published multiple bestselling books, including one co-authored with Deepak Chopra.

She hired me to help her grow sales from her online business, and my experience told me the best source of sales is an email list.

So, I explored opportunities to grow her list.

To do so, I employed a principle I was beginning to learn in marketing: When you find a winning message, double down.

Kimberly has a smoothie recipe called The Glowing Green Smoothie, which has become legendary. (It's delicious.)

At first, she only shared the recipe with her celebrity clients. They began talking about it, and word got out.

She wrote a blog post sharing the recipe, and that page quickly became the most popular page on the website.

Can you guess what I picked as our opportunity to grow her email list?

Yep, the Glowing Green Smoothie.

It would be easy to think the smoothie recipe had no more to deliver, no more gold to mine. But this is where you must employ Fractal Thinking.

When you train your mind on Fractal Thinking, you realize there are "universes within universes."

It's like Russian Dolls.

It'd be easy to see the large doll sitting on a shelf and say, "That's a beautiful doll," and keep walking. But if you pause and explore that doll, you find dolls within dolls.

It's the same thing with your winning messages. When you find a message that hits, stop and explore it. Inside, I guarantee you'll find an entire universe.

One becomes many.

Back to Kimberly's smoothie story. It would be easy to look at her Glowing Green Smoothie and think she had gotten maximum mileage, but I knew it held more.

In studying Kimberly's audience, I noticed she and her readers were advocates of seasonal eating, which involves eating fruits and vegetables that are currently in season.

The lightbulb turned on: "Seasonal eating is the key," I realized.

I had found my universe within a universe.

"Kim, do you think you could come up with four variations of your GGS recipe, one for each season?"

"Of course!" she told me.

Less than 24 hours later, her email arrived with four new Glowing Green Smoothie recipes: one for winter, spring, summer, and fall.

I wrote the following copy:

Her team turned it into a beautiful PDF and added it to the website as a lead magnet.

We announced it on social media and her email list, and the response was immediate. Thousands of new subscribers in the first week.

Not only did it attract new people, but it re-engaged subscribers who had gone silent.

Best of all, when those subscribers were eventually offered a product, we saw a significant sales boost.

It's been over ten years, and that lead magnet is still working, still bringing in subscribers, and still generating sales.

Looking back through the Five Lightbulbs lens, this worked because we found the right insight for Lightbulb 1.

Most wellness brands focus on the obvious problem: "You want to be healthier."

But Kimberly's audience had a more specific frustration. They wanted to eat seasonally but didn't know how to adapt their favorite recipes.

The seasonal smoothie variations solved both the obvious desire (healthy smoothies) and the deeper problem (seasonal eating made simple).

We didn't create something new. Instead, we found the universe within the universe that was already working.

By this point, most of my business was coming from marketing consulting, not my beer website. The transition I'd started in 2014 was nearly complete.

Up next: a Halloween Facebook post that went viral and a business decision that would change everything.

Rooting for you,

Billy