It was 11pm on a Friday night, at a party, having a few drinks….when I checked my phone and thought “Oh fu*k.”
Something just HAD to be wrong with what I saw.
I was looking at my iPhone and saw 120 orders for my site HouseOfRave.com (a rave company I owned). That’s a lot of orders for just a few hours (and a lot of money)!!! Giggity.
Normally this little drop-shipping company I had made about 10 orders per day. So when all of a sudden I got 120 orders in one night, this was a sign that SOMETHING BIG had happened which would change my income level forever.
Two hours earlier at 9pm on Friday night, I had pushed the “Send” button to an email list of 7,500 past HouseOfRave customers.
I was really afraid of this flopping, because it was COMPLETELY different from all the past emails I’d ever sent out.
Here’s what some of the previous HouseOfRave Newsletter emails looked like:
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LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL EMAIL!!!
I took all the pictures myself, Photoshopped them myself, and did all the work to get those newsletter-style emails out at least twice a month. I was soooooo proud of them.
But you know what the results were? Here’s the actual number statistics for a snapshot of 2009 if you wanna see:
These numbers were alright. Not stellar, not horrible. On average 700+ people would open each newsletter. And at first I thought that was great!! I mean more than 700 people would look at what I had created each time I sent out to the email list. Cool!
But there was one MAJOR MAJOR problem I started to realize after putting in all the work for each newsletter:
NO ONE BOUGHT A DAMN THING!!
I would send these hard-to-make newsletters out, and the next day there wouldn’t even be a slight uptick in sales!! Ughh.
I thought I could just smash pictures and products in front of someone’s face, and they would be like, “WHHOOAAAA NICEEEE I’M GONNA BUY THAT WHERE’S MY WALLETTTT!!!”
Oh stupid stupid Neville….
This approach rarely works, yet it’s the only way most people know how to sell something. Till this day I see people doing this everyday.
But it was around this time I started learning about a little marketing concept called “Copywriting”.
I learned simply pushing stuff into someone’s face was NOT a good strategy for selling, in fact it was pretty awful, unreliable, and makes people not want to hear from you.
So after devouring the works of famous copywriters like Gary Halbert and Joseph Sugarman and talking with friends who were great copywriters, I tried my hand at an email that was psychologically designed to sell.
If you wanna see it, here it is. If you click the image below and type in the password you can see the full email.
Post: www.nevblog.com/the-house-of-rave-quick-sell-experiment/
Password: giggity
You can see the full email here:
Post: www.nevblog.com/the-house-of-rave-quick-sell-experiment/
Password: giggity
Now this email was heavily influenced by a friend, so it doesn’t really sound like me. BUT, the results of it taught me the extreme importance of learning to sell properly.
It was the complete opposite of my previous emails that had little text and lots of pretty pictures.
I started understanding that selling was more about hitting certain psychological spots in someone’s brain to make THEM desire the product…..not just trying to smash it into their face and force them to buy.
My previous emails made 0 sales.
This properly written email made 120 sales in two hours!!!!!! :-O
I then repeated this successfully over and over (not every email would make 120 orders each time, but I would ALWAYS make money on every email promotion I did from that day forward).
I realized I could type words and make people want to buy stuff.
I thought to myself, “I’m gonna be alright in the future if I can do this.”
Till this day learning how to write copy is the most valuable skill I’ve ever developed.
Tomorrow I’m gonna show you how I started finding my own voice to write in, and started sending out emails to 50,000 AppSumo customers…...all the way to over 700,000 AppSumo customers….and had people look FORWARD to reading them.
P.S. Leave a comment with one of these two things:
1.) Do you actually look forward to any emails you get? Which ones?
2.) Do you send out emails to an email list….or are planning on it? What products are you trying to sell?
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