A few weeks before Christmas, I bought Daniel Throssell’s course Campaign Conqueror. I’m currently on my second pass through the course.
If you’re curious why I would buy Daniel’s course now, two years after he put it out, well, that’s something I might talk about in the coming weeks.
For now, let me just bring you back to November 2021, back when Daniel had his massively successful Black Friday campaign, which was the impetus for his creating this course.
I won’t rehash the history of that campaign — odds are, you know how it went down.
And if not, let me just say that it was an affiliate promotion/competition, involving a dozen email marketers (not me), including some with big guru status and much bigger lists than Daniel.
And yet, Daniel came out on top in that affiliate promotion. And not just on top, but I believe he made as many sales as all the other expert marketers combined.
Why was Daniel’s Black Friday 2021 campaign so successful?
My answer at the time was Daniel’s relationship with his list, and the quality of his offer. And no doubt, those were both a big part.
Daniel has a much more detailed answer inside Campaign Conqueror, including things I didn’t realize he was doing.
But there’s something extra I still haven’t heard anyone talk about, including Daniel in Campaign Conqueror. (I might be wrong, and I might have missed it. That’s why I’m on the second pass through Campaign Conqueror. But since this is my own observation, I’ll go ahead and share it.)
I first noticed this extra something in my own reaction during that 2021 event. It has been sitting in my head ever since. It’s influenced how I write emails inside promotions and during off-promo periods. It’s summed up in the phrase:
“Make it feel real”
The 2021 Black Friday affiliate event was a confluence of unusual, extreme events. There was genuine bad blood, public callouts, a never-before-seen and never-to-be-repeated offer on Daniel’s part, all in the middle of a time-limited, seasonal promotion, with everybody else in this small space observing, commenting, and firing shots back and forth.
This led to drama, yes. And to high stakes. But in my mind, it did something more.
Jay Abraham said in one of his trainings that the biggest reason sales fail to happen is that people are afraid of looking dumb. Of making a mistake. Of being played for a sucker.
Daniel’s offer and copy during that 2021 Black Friday promo cut through the usual manipulation techniques and marketing automation that people in this market normally experience. It made the event feel real. It made even skeptics, jaded and guarded, say, “Ok… it’s time to act.”
“Make it feel real” might sound vague to you.
If so, it’s worth looking at Daniel’s emails from then, and remembering the campaign if you witnessed it live, to note down what made this event a unique and real occurrence rather than a repeatable promotion that could be done every Black Friday.
And in case you’re wondering:
This “make it feel real” stuff is not something that’s only useful once in your career, when all the stars align.
It’s a valuable daily practice you can start right now.
For example:
Over the past week, I polled my list a few times. I asked if readers had any good offers they would like to promote to my list… I asked if readers would like to hire me for list management.
I got responses to both of those emails. But since I didn’t want to share anything publicly about those responses, I didn’t write any followup emails about either of these polls.
After couple days of this, I realized this is a problem. If I poll my list, and then never say anything about the results of that poll, my readers might start to feel some kind of disconnect… wonder if my emails are written by a living, thinking person… or suspect that they are interacting with a malfunctioning autoresponder.
That’s why, after I got an unusual number of replies to my email on Tuesday about the “zero-handclap unsubscriber,” I knew it was time to feature a bunch of those replies publicly.
So I did so in yesterday’s email.
Sure, featuring all those replies served the purpose of recognizing those readers, and of helping sell my Simple Money Emails course.
But the bigger reason in my mind was to make it clear that a live person is on this end of these emails, that I’m actually interacting and responding to readers, that I’m writing each email new every day, including today, Thursday, January 11 2024.
This is just one easy way to make it feel real.
Ultimately, what matters is that you keep the idea in mind, and that you do things consciously and regularly to make it feel real for your readers.
And now, time for a real offer:
I’m putting on a free training on Zoom. The plan is to do it in 10 days time, around Jan 21. But I will have the full info on the time and date tomorrow.
As for the content, this training will be an overview of how I do what I do: write emails about what interests me, get people to sign up to my list, buy stuff from me, hire me, recommend me, interact with me, in a way that contributes to other parts of my business and even my life.
I’ve done a lot of stupid things over the years with this newsletter, and it’s taken me a while to get to where I am.
So this training will be framed as advice to myself when I starting out this newsletter back in 2018, still a fresh and wriggling copywriter.
This training can be relevant to you if you work with clients right now, and you’re looking to create a second stream of income, or you want access to better clients, or more stability, or amazing opportunities you can’t even imagine now, or in case you simply want to do something for yourself rather than for others all the time.
I will be promoting this training over the next few days. If you want to join, you will first have to get on my list. Click here to do so.