Yesterday I watched a movie, Local Hero, which finished around 9:17pm my time, some 32 minutes after my daily email went out.
In those 32 minutes, I had 21 sales of the offer I introduced yesterday — “give me $10, and I’ll make you a ‘beta-tester’ for my new book.”
Since I only wanted 20 such beta-testers, I closed the shopping cart, and I updated the checkout link to point to a page that said “Thanks but this offer is now sold out.”
You might think it’s not much of an accomplishment to sell out 20 spots (actually 21) at $10 each.
And true, it’s not a lot of money.
But it’s very important anyhow. Not just for my own morale, but for public perception.
And on that note, I would like to share with you a quote from sports marketer Jon Spoelstra.
Spoelstra worked with some of the losingest and least popular sports franchises out there.
In spite of the lousy sports records of these teams, Spoelstra repeatedly managed to turn the teams into cash-cows. Here’s how:
“At the Nets, we spent all of our energies in trying to sell out games. This started with the games that people most likely would want to go to — the games with the marquee players on the opposing teams. You might think it was easy. It wasn’t. If we hadn’t committed all of our resources and manpower to selling out our best games, we wouldn’t have. A funny thing happened on our way to sellouts. Our attendance picked up in the other games where we weren’t even trying.”
I was planning to promote my beta-tester offer today to make sure this offer sold out, just like Spoelstra advises.
But since the offer sold out with just one email last night, that plan’s out.
So let me remind you of my most popular program, Most Valuable Email.
I can tell you that today’s email does not use the Most Valuable Email trick, which is what this program teaches you to perform in less than an hour.
And yet, the Most Valuable Email trick in a way underlies this entire newsletter, whether I use it in a particular email or not.
I can imagine that doesn’t make much sense without knowing what the Most Valuable Trick is. In case you’d like to find out, and better yet, to profit by using this trick yourself: