Yesterday, I promoted Travis Sago’s course 24 Hour FUN Auction, which is the course I followed to run a $31k auction in my own community Daily Email House.
My email yesterday succeeded in making… 3 sales of Travis’s $49 course.
As I always do, even following a 1-day, 3-sale blockbuster like this, this morning I sat down and wrote up my conclusions from this promo.
I’d like to share three of them with you:
#1. Run live tests
On the one hand, a number of people on my list wrote me to express interest in exactly the information in Travis’s course.
On the other hand, I had floated the idea of selling Travis’s course before in my community, and the results were feeble.
How would my entire list react if I ran a promo selling Travis’s course?
There’s only one way to tell, and that’s to put the offer in front of them.
I had all kinds of plans in case Travis’s course sold well:
– A community for running penny auctions
– Extra bonuses on top of the one I offered yesterday
– Valuable and intriguing additional offers to make to people who bought Travis’s $49 training
… but none of that matters much if the core offer, and the way it’s packaged up, is not something people want.
People’s stated interests, or even stated lack of interest, doesn’t matter much until the test is “live,” meaning people either put money down on the table or they refuse to do so.
I have learned this lesson in the past, and I applied it yesterday.
I didn’t spend any time developing other bonuses, or creating a new community, or writing up an upsell page with additional offers.
I treated yesterday’s email as a live test. The email was straightforward. There was no deadline. It was really just the core offer and a bonus I already had lying around, plus my best arguments why you should buy.
If that sold well, it would make sense to invest time in doing all the other stuff I had planned and to run a full promo. Otherwise, even bonuses and upsells wouldn’t have made this promo worthwhile.
#2. Make sure you get credited for affiliate sales
I made 3 sales yesterday. I got credited for 1 of them.
Travis’s 24 Hour FUN Auction is delivered within Travis’s Skool group. Two of the folks who bought yesterday were already members of that group. And even though they bought through my affiliate link, Skool doesn’t credit me for the purchase. Lesson learned.
#3. Don’t be satisfied with a mystery, or with your own best guesses
Yesterday, I watched from the front row as Maliha Mannan of The Side Bloger ran a 2-hour auction in her community of 60 people.
Results:
– The group grew from 60 people to 97 in a matter of hours
– Even though the group wasn’t massively engaged before, the auction post had 249 comments, and people at the end were commenting things like “that was so much fun”
– Maliha made $1,029 from the winning bidder, and will make untold millions and possibly billions more, from post-auction offers she can make to other people who expressed interest
All that’s to say… auctions work, and do all the stuff I promised in my email yesterday, stuff like:
– They make sales
– They identify high-intent leads
– They act as a price discovery mechanism (and the discovery is often shockingly high)
– They create engagement in communities
– They help communities grow
– People find them fun
– etc.
And yet, my promo yesterday of a $49 offer that shows you how to do this drew 3 sales.
Why?
I could shrug my shoulders, and chalk it up to the “mysteries of the mind.”
I could also make guesses about why people didn’t buy.
But better than either of those is to simply do some investigative journalism, and go out into the world and collect data.
So lemme ask you:
If you clicked through yesterday, but you didn’t buy Travis’s course, what was it that made you say no?
Or if you read though my email yesterday but decided to not even click through, what was the deciding factor?
Hit reply and let me know.
In turn I will reply to you with a bit of a thank-you gift.
I’ll tell you the #1 lesson I got from a quick and dirty marketing book I just finished reading. In a nutshell, I’ll tell you how one smart marketer solves the “top of funnel” problem for himself in a different way from most:
– How he converts bunches of hesitant, skeptical, or unaware prospects in 20 minutes or less (and no, sales copy ain’t got nothing to do with it)
– How he gets these prospects-turned-first-time-buyers to upsell themselves (all very natural, no pushing or persuading) so they turn into high-value, long-term customers
– How he gets them to eagerly refer him to others, so his marketing message spreads without him creating tons of content or spending a cent on ads
Are you curious? Then think about your own reaction to my email yesterday and the offer I made, and tell me what about it made you react the way you did. In turn, I’ll share with you the above marketing mystery.