When is the Right Time to Pitch Your Product?

Love this one:

“Ask me, ‘What is the secret of comedy?'”

“OK, what is the secret -”

“TIMING!!!”

That’s from one of my all-time favorite writing books, Wired for Story.

This question of timing comes up with email courses too.

Namely:

When should I pitch my product?

Timing is a HUGE factor in making sales—and unfortunately it’s a factor that you don’t have a lot of control over.

Sure, you have some control over when your customer first encounters your pitch.

But what you can’t control is what’s going on in your customer’s life.

Some people urgently need your product, and they’re ready to buy RIGHT NOW.

And for those people, your main job is to stay out of their way as they stampede to the cash register…

Others are close but not quite there, and just need a little breathing room to deliberate, along with some extra encouragement.

And for a big chunk of your audience (actually the vast majority) your product hit them like a bolt out of the blue. They still might buy someday—IF you can hold their attention long enough.

I design my email courses to cater to all three of these groups.

Let me give you an example:

With the email course I created to sell our “10 Steps to Learn Anything Quickly” product, the first thing you see after you sign up is a landing page with free bonus video lesson and a link to the sales page.

A shocking number of people are willing to drop $97 on the spot—no long, drawn out “nurture” process needed.

If I didn’t give those people the chance to buy right now, I’d be losing sales.

Then, starting on day 2 of the email course, I start to nudge the subscribers who are “almost there, not quite.”

Every day I tap them on the shoulder and remind them to check out the product—with increasing urgency.

The majority of our sales come from this group of subscribers, who buy between day 2 and day 14 or so.

If they don’t buy within the first 2 weeks, they’re not likely to buy anytime soon—but I don’t give up.

Instead I’ll come back in another couple of months and try again.

And again a couple of months after that.

Because sooner or later my email will just happen to hit their inbox on a “payday Friday”…

And as they sit there flush with cash, it’ll also just so happen that they’ve recently discovered that their favorite programming language is going the way of the dinosaurs and they’d better adapt PRONTO…

And the UPS guy just showed up that morning with a hand truck stacked high with programming books…

And suddenly, a proven system for learning quickly sounds a LOT more interesting.

When that happens, just make sure you don’t get caught between your customer and the BUY NOW link.

See? Timing.

Related posts:

  1. How Soon Is ‘Too Soon’ To Pitch In Your Email Course? How soon is too soon to pitch your product? That’s a raging debate among email marketers. On one extreme, there are experts who claim that new subscribers need an “incubation period.” And like fragile baby chicks, if you expose them to a cold-blooded sales pitch too soon, the budding relationship...
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