A few years ago, I was hired to lead email strategy for a big outdoor apparel company.
If I told you the name, you’d probably recognize it.
Big name celebrities like The Kardashian’s have been seen wearing this brand’s products.
Anywho…They weren’t anything like my usual clients.
The brands I worked for before, and the brands I still prefer to work with, are small, sometimes one-man operations (which is why I love working with authors).
So, when I walked into the marketing department and started asking questions about what goals we were trying to accomplish…
The VP of Marketing said, “We want our emails to look like Patagonia.”
I knew right then we were in trouble.
It’s natural to want to emulate the people at the top. I’m as guilty of this as anybody, however, if you’re just copying what others are doing, thinking they know what they’re doing when they’re just copying someone else, you’re not going to get anywhere fast.
However, success leaves clues and every successful ecommerce brand I have ever worked with has focused on these 4 things:
- Ads
- Offers
- Store front (product description, optimized checkout, etc. to increase AOV)
- Emails
Most authors have #1 and #3.
However, #3 might not be as good as they like because they don’t have #2.
And because they don’t have #2, they have a small #4.
You could be the best paid media buyer on the planet but if you’re sending all your traffic to a bad offer, you’re not going to get any sales.
I read somewhere that 40% of all successful marketing campaigns come from how good the offer is.
I’m willing to bet it’s even higher than that.
That is why before you start running ads, you have to first understand your goal, beyond just making a lot of moolah, because we all want that.
For me, it’s building the biggest email list of buyers as possible.
Why?
Because I know that it’s easier (and much, much cheaper) to sell more of my books to an existing reader than it is to acquire a new one. (I want to become my own BookBub damnit!)
When I first started selling direct, I pointed my ads at a landing page where people could get a free book in exchange for their email address.
Then, everyone who signed up would get an exclusive one-time offer to buy the complete series at a big discount.
But it wasn’t just any offer.
It was an offer that people would feel stupid saying no to.
And guess what? It worked!
My list grew quickly. I was making sales. I was in the black. And for every person who didn’t buy immediately, I put them through a rigorous onboarding sequence, putting more offers in front of them and didn’t stop until they either said yes or unsubscribed.
I’ve since stopped that strategy and am now testing another.
This time I’m pointing my ads at a paid offer so good that if you passed on it, you’d feel stupid saying no.
Starting to see the pattern?
Then I’m putting these readers into an upsell flow to sell them the rest of the series. And guess what? It’s another deal that’s too good to pass. And when they buy that, I’ll put them into another flow and make them another crazy good offer to purchase my other series.
In both instances, my goal was the same – to build my email list quickly.
And the bigger my list gets, the more money I make.
So, for me, when I think about strategy, I think about how I can grow my email list as quickly as possible and build everything else around that goal. Because the truth is, no one else is going to send people to my store, and if people aren’t visiting my store, I’m not selling any books.
Want me to help you increase your attributed revenue to 20-30%? Apply to work with me.
