Story time:
One of my clients rarely offers discounts or runs promos. I personally prefer this approach to business: It’s much easier (and more fun—both for me and for our readers) to write a bunch of emails each and every month when they aren’t the same exact “promo energy” type emails where you hype up your claims, add a bunch of urgency, and bore your audience to sleep with last chances.
Not saying there’s no place for emails like that. But when that’s the only style of email you send, then, well, you’re not only leaving moolah on the table, but you’re playing with fire. The more you bore your audience, the more they tune you out, ruin your deliverability, mark you as spam, or become the bane of your existence.
Anyway, this client is so strict about his “no promos” rule that we don’t even offer our own Black Friday deals. We exclusively use this massive holiday for affiliate promotions.
But a few years back, I had an idea for a promo: Bundling up one of our most popular product and giving our customers a slight discount for ordering several at once.
I first ran this promo around Christmas in 2022.
The first iteration of this promo generated $36,619.37 in revenue.
Not too shabby.
In fact, the success surprised my client so much that we decided to do this again in 2023.
We made $43,899.59 from this promo in 2023—a number I knew would be tough to beat.
And so, as we promoted affiliate offers come Black Friday, and continued with our usual email strategy afterwards. But as December got closer, I started racking my brains about how we could outdo last year’s promo.
My solution?
It was an obvious one, especially for me, but sometimes we all need to be reminded that the obvious solutions work best: Send more emails.
Funny how simply sending more emails is the great equalizer for sales. This was something Stan Lee learned early in his career at Marvel—and why he was such a prolific comic book publisher. He knew that whenever he needed more money, he could write more.
And write more he did.
Well, the same is true in ANY business (given that you “get” email marketing in the way I teach).
And it was no different here:
This year’s promo (offering the same bundled product at a similar price point) generated $44,323.27 in revenue. It wasn’t as big of an increase from 2022 to 2023. But it was an increase.
And an increase was my goal.
Now, it’s important to note here, that while I could probably copy and paste the emails from the previous year’s promo and generate similar results, that’s not what I did. Instead, I wrote brand-new emails each year for this promo.
Why?
Simple: The bundle we’re promoting has so many success stories, so many unique angles, so many use cases that writing new emails just makes more sense. It lets me share new stories, give our audience new ways to think about this product (and a brain stretched never reverts back to its original size), to handle objections, emphasize the USP, etc. etc. etc.
In total, in the three years I’ve run this promo, it’s generated $124,842.23.
That’s more than many businesses make in an entire year. And while, yes, this was spread out over three years, the promo only ran for about a week each year.
Moral of the story?
If you’re not generating these kinds of numbers with your email marketing strategy, mayhap I can help.
(This current client is sitting at 65% of revenue generated came from email marketing as I type this…)
Wanna find out?
Hit reply, and let’s find a time to talk shop.
John
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