I want to take you through an email campaign that I ran during Christmas time, which yielded us $10,000 more in sales than we were aiming for.
I’ll show you the email campaign overview and structure we chose.
I’ll take you through the offer and examples of the emails.
PLUS I’ll show you what happened when I DOUBLED the price of the product, and if that massively helped or hurt our revenue. (shocked looking at stripe sales, with a big smile)
BUT there was one massive problem.
I only had one WEEK to reach our sales goal of $20,000!
The rules were pretty simple:
- I needed to make $20,000 in sales for our business using our email list.
- I wasn’t allowed to create a new product AND the product had to be under $2000.
- I’d be allowed to email from the Monday until the Sunday, but then after that – the campaign stopped.
So with that, let me take you over to the whiteboard where I’ll explain how the campaign worked.
We call this a Sales Storm Campaign.
Here you can see a one week overview of how the campaign is planned.
Monday through to Sunday.
Now this email campaign relies on two core mechanics:
- Daily emails
- Raising hands
Daily emails mean we’ll be sending at least one email per day, sometimes multiple emails per day.
One of the reasons daily emails are so effective is because we’ve seen an increase in email opens, replies, and clicks when we email at least once per day.
Sometimes they’re story-based, content-based emails (almost like a blog post) with no call to action or a soft CTA (like a video share).
But what that means is we’re testing messages, seeing what gets replies, and our audience isn’t just bombarded with sales messages and promotions all the time.
What it also does is flex the “storyteller” muscle that we all have, to make our promotional emails way more appealing and readable.
–Raising hands on the other…hand.
This means that we want people to tell US if they want to hear more about an offer.
Ryan Deiss in his book The Invisible Sales Funnel talks about “Segmentation Emails”.
If we send emails to customers, asking them if they’re interested in hearing more, they need to take action before we continue to sell to them.
Imagine you’re at a huge venue filled with 10,000 people.
Most speakers would try to sell to all 10,000 people.
Instead, what I like to do (because it’s more effective), is to get 1% of that audience to raise their hands, by asking qualifying questions.
“Who here is a product marketing manager? Raise your hands.”
“And keep your hands up if you’re looking for ways to motivate your team?”
“And finally, keep those hands raised if you want to fix this problem TODAY.”
I’ll then pitch and sell to that 1% because I’m working with a more targeted audience.
It helps me figure out how urgent their need is.
A “hand raise email” for example might look like this:
Hey Mike. I’ve just dug up an old email marketing template that I used to generate $20,000 in sales and I wanted to give it to 5 marketing freelancers who are looking to get more clients in the next 4 weeks. If that sounds like you, hit reply and let me know.
Side note – there is no perfect hand-raise email. There are lots of versions (some of which I’ll show you later) and you need to test offers, markets and CTAs.
5S Approach
This marketing campaign is based on the 5S approach: Sneak – Show – System – Sell – Scarcity
Monday is sneak, as in “sneak peek” – we send an email that talks about an offer we have coming up, and if they’d like to join the early bird list, hit reply and we’ll give them a sneak peek at the offer.
Tuesday is Show – we send a case study of someone who got awesome results, usually with a couple of screenshots
Wednesday is System – I take them through a few versions of the “system” I’ll be using and give them an overview of how it works.
Thursday is Sell – these are invitation-based emails that sell the results we get.
Friday through Sunday is scarcity – we have a time limit on this product and a few bonuses, as well as the actual offer.
Where I’m going to start with this, as with all campaigns, is the offer.
The offer needs to be Hyper desirable. A total no-brainer for people to pick up.
But, as I mentioned, I wasn’t allowed to create a new product. So I’d have to reuse a current product.
And…I’m thinking of raising the price.
By 100%.
Specificity sells and the more specific and tight my offer can be, the more likely it is to sell.
The higher the price I can charge for it.
That’s why I’ve taken another one of my products, Apex Campaigns and rewritten the offer for it.
It used to sell for $997 and I want to charge…$2000.
In order to make the program more accessible, I’m going to change the payment structure.
I’m going to offer it for 20 weekly payments of $100.
$20,000 revenue means I need 10 sales.
That will net me $1000 a week for the next 20 weeks.
And the name of the product needs to be the result that someone is going to get.
So I’ve renamed the program $25K Clients.
Because it will literally show you, how to find and land $25K Clients.
Since running this, we’ve had 5 people land $25,000+ clients from following our process. One of them inside the first WEEK of joining.
I’ve re-written the offer and the checkout page.
“$25K Clients” is ready to go.
I’m a little nervous as to how the email campaign will run, but, I am going to bet on myself. So much so that if you take a trial of HighLevel using my link in the description, you can get 30 days rather than 14 AND I’ll include this exact campaign in the snapshot.
Head to sellyourservice.co.uk/highlevel or gohighlevel.com/mike-killen for your 30 day free trial PLUS this exact campaign and a few other bonuses too.
I want to show you the structure of each email – because there are some similarities to each email in order to maximise conversions.
This is a blueprint of how each email is structured.
We have the Subject line and Opening line.
Then the introduction.
The body of the copy.
The call to action.
The signature.
The subject lines and opening lines change, all I’m trying to do is get people to open them.
Measuring open rates is tough, and inaccurate, so I prefer to measure replies and clicks.
I use every trick in the book, from using RE: in the subject, to their name using a <<name_tag>> and click-baity-esque subject lines (think YouTube titles).
I also use the results or problems that resonate, such as “how to land a $25K Client”.
The introduction is super easy – usually something like Hey Mike.
I don’t use lots of HTML or layouts – I pretty much stick to plain text.
The body of the email is where I’ll change the tone.
Sneak, Show, System, Sell or Scarcity.
Sometimes there’s a mix of copy between each email, but the overall tone is based on one of those 5 categories.
The call to action is, in this case, almost always asking for a reply.
“If this sounds like it’s for you, we have a few spaces left. Just hit reply and I’ll send you the details.”
Inside the Sell campaign, I might include a link to the sales document.
Which reminds me – let me show you the super powerful and crazy looking sales page that I designed for this…
It’s a Google doc.
Let me know in the comments if you think it’s impossible to sell a $2000 program with NO sales page (just a google doc), or if you think I’m making a massive mistake.
Finally the signature is just me, maybe my face.
Sometimes I include a long P.S. in my emails (especially if they’re story based content emails) with some CTAs in there.
But for this campaign, I’m sticking to just one action they can take.
And, these are loaded and ready to go.
I’ll schedule these in HighLevel, I’ve got my google sales doc ready to go and now I just wait for replies…hopefully.
Looks like we have our first reply!
So now I’m going to start qualifying the lead and asking them a few questions.
Then if I think they’re a good fit, I’ll send them a link to the google doc and follow up with them from there.
It’s the end of the week, we’re just wrapping up the sales now and making sure everyone is on board.
The goal was to secure $20,000 in sales in a week.
I have a rough idea of how many sales we’ve made, but my team have handled a lot of the work.
And I haven’t checked the numbers to see if we hit our goal.
Remember that we needed 10 sales at $2000 to generate $20,000.
So the target was 10.
And we hit…
16!
Really!?
So that’s $32,000?! That’s $1600 a week for the next 20 weeks?
Pretty good. I’m happy with that.
I honestly thought everything was against us.
From doubling the price, to reusing a current product and just changing the name, I honestly thought we’d miss the mark.
So I can say that the campaign was a big success from our end.
And what’s even more amazing, is that we still have sales rolling in.
We’ve started offering this product to anyone who doesn’t quite reach our qualification criteria for our higher ticket coaching.
Using the exact same campaign.
So now we’re seeing sales on automation, from people who can’t buy our other offers.
We’ve kept the scarcity in there, mainly focusing on how long it’ll be before they secure another $25,000 client.
And of course many of you will be asking about “drop off” or churn.
I can say that we’re over halfway through the cash collection cycle of the campaign and we’ve only had one person leave and one person behind – but after a couple of calls, it all got sorted out.
But even $1400 a week/$28,000 is over our target.
Which means we can now repeat and reuse this campaign in a few months, to continue making sales without loads of effort.
