Who Says Email Marketing Is Dead?! Massive Sales Boost with this...

Hi marketingfool,

There's nothing inherently wrong with this method, but at the same time I think it depends entirely on what type of business model you are pursuing.

For example, you mention email marketing being 'dead' in your title and you follow up with explaining that you find it hard to get your emails read - therefore this method may be more appropriate in this circumstance.

But it's also worth noting that there is a cost to this - if there wasn't, then every marketer would use this method with every email they send out - 'son's birthday sale', 'Aunt Mabel's coffee morning sale', 'Fred the pet lizard's sale to celebrate his new lizard tank arrival.'

You can only do this so many times and you also have to consider how many others are doing the same. For example, look at High Street stores that have a seemingly permanent 'closing down' sale. Eventually they poison their own brand in the prospect's mind, they expect cheap items but consider the company to be unethical liars.

Sometimes it's better to differentiate and simply offer damn good value as a rule but avoid making a song and dance about it (let the prospect come to the decision that it's a great deal by themselves) along with tenuous links with improbable events - not least because if others do it too, the prospect isn't always going to remember exactly who had which sale when. Instead they will just see a group of marketers who seem to be having far too many engagements and discount sales based on a plea for 'needing money' - which is incongruous with the rest of their 'I'm loaded' marketing messages.

If you're having no trouble converting prospects into buyers anyway then it wouldn't automatically be wise to offer a heavy discount, when one isn't required.

Going even deeper, it's better to keep marketing material focused on the prospect themselves, by using an event that's happening for them - 'Thanksgiving sale' or 'Christmas sale' as opposed to focusing on a happy event in your own life such as engagement or buying someone a present for Christmas.

If you position yourself as successful and your market is likely to be less successful than yourself, but wanting to join you, psychologically you are creating resistance by talking about happy events in your own life and creating incongruence by mentioning that you don't have enough money to buy a ring in the first place.

For clarity, I'm not criticising your valid points, but rather adding to them by looking at this from a different and possibly deeper perspective.

In other words, if you are successful and sell memberships regularly anyway, is there an overall gain from doing this, or are you in fact losing out in some somewhat hidden areas purely to get an ego-boosting rush from a glut of discounted sales?

Personally, I prefer to focus on differentiation every time and in most internet markets, it seems that people fail to properly consider whether there is actually an increase in profits in the long term from methods like this (rather than just a glut of sales which would have occurred organically over time anyway - at full price), they fail to consider any hidden cost or damage to credibility, they contribute to increased buyer weariness across the market from overused calls to action and they fail to see the incongruences because they are so focused on 'more quick sales' above all else that they forget to put themselves in the prospect's shoes.

LOL ha... yeah every now and then you hear people complaining here that email marketing doesn't work anymore... :-p clearly they're wrong!