Measuring the impact that content marketing has on your business can be anything but straightforward. Not to mention the multitude of things you might be doing that undermine the profitability of your content.
This past year, I started experimenting with short cash-injection campaigns as a way of giving my business (and those of my clients) a little income boost each quarter. The plan was simple, each quarter, in addition to my main promo focus or launch, I’d run a 2-5 day special offer campaign.
Even though it was an experiment where I was just interested in seeing what happened and I didn’t feel overly attached to the results – I was thrilled by the outcome. The average revenue generated by each campaign blueprint was just shy of $10K and in my business that meant an extra $37, 740 in 2017 that I wouldn’t have made without this low-pressure experiment.
In this post, I’ll be diving into one of the cash-injection campaign blueprints:
The Secret Sale: Blueprint #1
The Secret Sale Cash Injection Campaign is a campaign I ran in August during my first coupon of days on my honeymoon in Europe. The great thing about this one is that you can schedule everything ahead of time and have some common scripts for an assistant to answer any customer service questions (or just field these yourself).
There were a few extra tours and things my husband and I wanted to see (like the Moulin Rouge show, a helicopter tour of Barcelona(!)) and instead of fretting about what budget category these extras should come from, I decided to run a small campaign for this. That’s one of my favourite things about these cash injection campaigns is that you can run them anytime you need a little extra income to do the things you want to do (like signing up for a new program or mastermind, going on a trip or to a conference or buy a new tool or hire someone.
About the Secret Sale Campaign
This campaign works best for a product-based business or an online business with at least a few digital offerings. It also works best for business with an email or past customer list of at least 1000 (don’t worry if this isn’t you though – I cover plenty of other cash injection campaign blueprints that will work even with small lists in the webinar!)
For the secret sale, I chose 3 digital products of varying prices to offer for one standard price (in my case $49 per product) to my list as a way of thanking them for being in my community. I wrote and scheduled 3 emails to send over a period of 72 hours).
The Cash Injection Campaigns Process – Step-By-Step
Offer Preparation
- Choose 2+ products to offer as part of your secret sale (or if you have a store, it can just apply to everything)
- Create checkout pages or coupons that discount all the products to the same price.
- Optional – Add upsells into the checkout process. In my case, when the purchased one of the three items, it reminded them about the others too.
Email #1 – Announcing the Campaign – Sent in the morning of day 1 of the campaign to your entire list
- Announces the secret sale and thanks them for being a part of the community (see my email image below)
- In my email service provider, I’ve also set up tags that get applied to any contacts who click on any of the three links (Secret Sale 2017 | Clicked). I’ve also set up tags for anyone who does purchase any of the three offers.
Email #2 – Reminding them about the Secret Sale – Sent the morning of day 2 of the campaign to your entire list (excluding anyone who’s purchased already)
- Reminds them about the offer that expires in 24 hours, showcases any feedback and clears up any questions/misconceptions about the offer that you’ve heard (see my email image below)
Email #3 – Last chance email – Sent 6 hours before the sale ends to anyone who’s clicked on email 1 or 2 (excluding anyone who’s purchased already)
- Reminds them that the the sale is ending in 6 hours (see my email image below)
In my case, this resulted in 206 units sold and just over $10,000 in under 2 days. If I were running this campaign again, I would add in some retargeting Facebook ads for anyone on my list and anyone who visited the salespage. Plus, I would also promote in my Facebook group.
How to Use These Blueprints // Cash Injection Campaigns in Your Business
These cash injection campaigns are a great way to help you close the gap between your current revenue and income goals.
The best place to start with these cash-injection campaigns is to incorporate them into your overall content strategy.
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