This week, we’re going over some of my favorite and most profitable online sales and marketing strategies. These are techniques I’ve learned and implemented from well-known marketing personalities (or “gurus” if you prefer) over the past 16 years.
At a high level, these are the strategies that have made me the most money with the least effort (which also means that they’re fun strategies to implement).
There’s nothing quite like seeing sales notifications roll in when you’re trying something new or unusual.
Strategy #1: Frank Kern’s 4-Day Cash Machine
“Back in my day,” Frank Kern’s 4-Day Cash Machine was a legendary strategy for running a sale.
All the cool kid marketers were using it. In fact, I just went back through some old emails from 2010 and found this message from best-selling author Mark Manson responding to me about his own results using the 4-Day Cash Machine:
In my first online business selling ebooks, I used the 4-Day Cash Machine at the end of each month. It consistently allowed me to bring in an extra couple thousand dollars each month (which was a big deal for me at the time).
Now, Frank’s 4-Day Cash Machine has morphed over the years. If you try to find it, you’ll run into version 2.0, which is a lot more complicated than it used to be.
When I ran the 4-Day Cash Machine, there were 3 simple parts to the strategy.
Part One: Offer special pricing. And that pricing should be “half off”.
The first part of the 4-Day Cash Machine was to take one of your products and offer it at a special price (i.e., a discount).
That special price was, specifically, “half off.”
Why?
There is something deeply psychological and motivating about that “half off” phrase for most consumers—especially consumers buying digital products and courses.
Other industries have “magic” numbers like this too. For example, when I was helping my wife run her beauty business, we were offering a coupon code for 10% off. I had a friend with a much bigger business than us tell me that 10% off wasn’t a great number to use. “It needs to be 15%,” he told me.
10% just doesn’t feel like enough. 15% hits people differently.
And the same can be said about “half off” for digital product consumers.
“Half off” feels like more than most percentages you can name, even percentages over 50%.
My belief is that “half off” is clear and tangible in someone’s mind. The math is easy and straight-forward and makes sense as something a business would offer. Something like 60% or 75% off requires some mental math—and actually damages the view of your product in a more dramatic way than just “half off.” The consumer might find themself asking, “What’s wrong with this product to discount it so much?”
Long story short, “half off” works best.
Part Two: Add (Lots of) Bonuses
The second critical element of the 4-Day Cash Machine was layering in bonuses.
So you were discounting the price to half off and adding in extra value in the form of bonuses.
Now, here’s the crazy thing about bonuses that I’ve learned.
You’d think that there’d be some sort of limit to the amount of bonuses someone would accept as being reasonable. But there doesn’t appear to be a ceiling. The more bonuses you can add (without boring someone trying to read through them all), generally the better.
You’ll likely get bombarded in a week or two with the sale of a “Bundle” offer that has an endless amount of bonus products. And as long as the main promise of what the bundle will do for you is strong and congruent, the more products in that bundle, the better it’ll sound to you.
In my opinion, I don’t think you should buy those bundle products—because you’ll never use them. And most of the contributors will provide their lowest value bonus to a bundle, but I don’t want to go too far off-topic here.
If you want to make a lot of sales during a sale you’re running, discount the price to half off and throw in several bonuses (the more the better). 5 bonuses is the minimum, and I’ll be honest… again—I don’t know if there’s a maximum as long as the bonuses are congruent and attractive and don’t fully distract from the main promise of a sales letter.
(See below for more thoughts on how many bonuses to include.)
Part Three: Run The Sale for 4 Days Only
This part is right in the name: the 4-Day Cash Machine.
Most “sales” should have an end date – because if you don’t then there’s no urgency. 4 days gives people enough time to become aware of the sale while also getting them to take action quickly.
And that’s the 4-Day Cash Machine in a nutshell: The consumer gets a half-off deal and extra bonuses, but those things disappear after the 4th day.
Now, as you can see, this strategy is still highly relevant and usable in today’s day and age.
You could use any of these three parts for your own sale, perhaps even for your upcoming Black Friday sale if you haven’t planned one yet.
The only suggestion I’d make would be for those people that don’t want to discount at all (which is understandable)…
Instead of taking half off—you need to make the bundle of the main product and all the bonuses have at least a value of 4x the core product price.
- Core product = $500 value
- Core product + bonuses = $2000 value (Charging $500)
If you’re not discounting to half off the core product, you need to have an “insane” offer to make up for the lack of discount.
In my experience, 4x value seems to be the minimum value that creates an “OMG this is an insane” moment for consumers.
Tomorrow I want to give you a deeper view into how to make your offer irresistible using a strategy that I learned from Eugene Schwartz.
Talk then!
— Derek
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