An Email Mar­ket­ing Strat­egy That Gave Very Sur­pris­ing Results

… with just a few tweaks of a nor­mal campaign.

If you aren’t doing so already, you should start run­ning a seri­ously com­pelling email cam­paign to your list(s) every few months. If exe­cuted and timed cor­rectly, these efforts can cre­ate enor­mous spikes in your rev­enue that will have you ask­ing why you weren’t doing it all along.

We recently tried this strat­egy for one of our prod­ucts and in under 1 week the cam­paign gen­er­ated that product’s aver­age monthly profit. Here’s how we did it.

It’s a one-two punch email tac­tic. The first email is there for cre­at­ing antic­i­pa­tion and a desire for more infor­ma­tion and the 2nd one then relieves that antic­i­pa­tion as well as grants the desired information.

As such, the first one is basically…

… an Appe­tizer.

Appe­tiz­ers, when done cor­rectly, should make you hun­grier than you already were. You get a lit­tle bit of food and fla­vor in your sys­tem and you can’t help but NEED MORE NOW. That’s your intent with this appe­tizer email, cre­at­ing that sense of NEEDING MORE NOW.

In our appe­tizer email, we told them:

1. We would be shar­ing a free advanced sales eBook that Fri­day (use an exact date) that would help with their hol­i­day sales efforts.
2. That inside the eBook would be another hol­i­day gift.
3. The down­load link would only be live for a few days.

There are sev­eral forces at work here. First, they know they’re get­ting some­thing free and that it’s advanced. Sec­ond, if they inter­act with (read) this free item they’ll get some­thing else for free. And lastly, it is lim­ited in its avail­abil­ity. Dou­bly lastly, it helps them with an imme­di­ate need, which is boost­ing hol­i­day sales.

Com­bined, these char­ac­ter­is­tics should have your audi­ence aching for your next email, which you can think of as…

… Deliv­er­ing The Main Dish.

As you know, the main dish is why peo­ple came to your Meal, and should fin­ish what the appe­tizer started. Thus, your 2nd email should arrive exactly when you told them it would and do exactly what you said it would.

Here’s what ours did:

1. Gave them the link to the eBook.
2. Reminded them of the lim­ited avail­abil­ity and gift included within the book.
3. Showed a hol­i­day spend­ing sta­tis­tic that pre­sented an eCom­merce oppor­tu­nity… which read­ing our eBook could help them take advan­tage of.

And that’s it. With this sim­ple tech­nique, our eBook was down­loaded a ton of times in just a few days and led to a huge spike in sales. Com­bined with a pric­ing pro­mo­tion, this effort gen­er­ated nearly an aver­age month’s worth of profit in just 5 days or so.

The key is to build antic­i­pa­tion with your appe­tizer and then deliver the main dish. With a lit­tle cre­ativ­ity, you should be able to use this to get sim­i­lar or even bet­ter results than we did. If you’re inter­ested in learn­ing more email, con­ver­sion, and other inter­net mar­ket­ing tech­niques, check out Chain Reac­tion Mar­ket­ing — our inter­net mar­ket­ing trea­sure chest.

Last 5 posts by

• VIDEO: Max­i­miz­ing Traf­fic Marks Results and Get­ting Back Links Fast — August 11th, 2008
• 150% More Traf­fic and 133% More Sales From A Few Tweaks. You Can’t Be Seri­ous… Can You? — May 26th, 2008
• The More You Give, The More You Get: How To Get Inter­views With Experts In Your Niche — May 13th, 2008
• The Beach Bum’s Guide to Land­ing Pages — May 5th, 2008
• The Future of AdWords for the Small Busi­ness — May 2nd, 2008

About the Author

Mike is an internet marketer at MindValley responsible for running marketing tests, designing product launches, and leading an eCommerce project.

Check out other posts by Mike W.

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.