?? How a Slight Adjustment Got Us an Extra $6K for Christmas ??

People much smarter and more experienced in email marketing told me that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are not good for sending emails….

? People are busy with their families, organizing the celebrations, catching up with relatives and finally getting off their phones.

They’re not really interested in buying stuff, plus they spent a lot during Black Friday and on the actual Christmas promotions, which, of course, must occur earlier so products can get delivered by the 25th. 

? I even heard experts saying it’s safer not to send emails on 24th and 25th to avoid possible spam complaints. ?

But as all curious cats, we just had to try it…. ?

And guess what… the store made an extra $6k those 2 days, from 1 email and 2 follow-ups.?

As a reference, on average, we send 3 emails per week, earning about $4k from them in 7 days, so this was definitely worth the risk. 

Plus, no rise in spam complaints at all. 

? So why did it work?? ?

• Good Offer
• The Right Recipients

• Fresh Angle (context & copy)

1. Good Offer:

• Instead of the usual X% off on anything and everything, we try to make the value more clear and specific for our readers.
  
  We bundle specific products and product lines to present compelling offers to the prospect.
  
  We find experimenting with different BOGO combinations, rather than discounts, works best.
  
  We found that our target group buys more if they have a clear and specific picture of the offer’s exclusive value. Testing revealed a Buy 2-Get 1 generated the greatest revenue.

2. The Right Recipients:

• If you’re even a little into email marketing, you know that segmentation is its foundation. You can’t just blast your whole list and expect people to stay engaged, let alone for you to stay out of the spam folder. 
• We took only the recent openers and excluded all the addresses from certain problematic email services that haven’t opened in the last 10-20 days. 

3. Fresh Angle (context & copy)

Context:

• For me, an angle means how you present something to a person based on their needs, desires, world views. This is essentialy how you think they would present it to themselves. 
• We examined the Buy 2 Xs Get 1 X Free offer and thought about how our recipients would sell it to themselves. Why buy 3 pairs of shoes for example? 
• Well since it’s Christmas, we get into this giving spirit and like to believe that the generous do get rewarded for their noble actions. And that if you give a gift, you start a gift-giving chain reaction. 

Copy: 

• So let’s say we angle it as “Hey, buy 2 pairs of these problem-solving shoes (for a specific niche) as gifts for someone, and you’ll get a pair for free!” That almost feels right, but something is missing. It sounds a bit regular and plain; they’ve seen that offer a bunch of times before.
  
  We all get curious when we something is presented for free, but it also raises our guard a bit. There’s a lot of internet scams and fishy dropshipping offers that give you something for free. It’s even in human nature to doubt those free things and expect you’ll get a surprise request after you take them. Skepticism is natural and healthy to a degree, and we don’t want to go against human nature. Also, if something is free, how good can its quality be?

• And that’s where I went back to the teachings of our good friend Claude C Hopkins and found his discovery. He wrote: instead of saying “You’ll get free…,” rephrase it to “I will buy you….” This subtle change made a significant difference in conversion testing. 
• So we adapted that angle and decided to add a challenge to our readers.

Key: we wrote a plain-text personal email as the store owner.

We said in our subject line: “Now Open: An Xmas Bet” with the pre-header “I bet I can prove to you that Christmas spirit is real and….”

This leads to us saying that we’ll prove to the customer that the Christmas Spirit is real by continuing that chain of good deeds. Speaking as the store owner, we explained that we will personally buy the recipient a pair of shoes.

This makes it more real. Because quality products can’t just be given away, we don’t describe them as free. Plus, we’re actually going to pay for it, as a Christmas gift for the customer who bought two other pairs for other two people.

After that, we spiked emotions with a few picture-painting paragraphs depicting how happy certain people in their life would be to receive this specific, problem-solving product as a gift. 

The Result: A Christmas Miracle

Original Email: Open rate of 23.4% & $1,668

Follow-up #1: Open rate of 20.3% & $1,539

Follow-up #2: Open rate of 25.7% & $2,084

What Christmas Eve and Christmas Day promotions have you tried? Comment below to compare notes!

Stanislav Miljanović and Thomas McClintock, Hustler Marketing