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You are here: Home / Marketing / Can Bonuses Actually Hurt Sales?

Can Bonuses Actually Hurt Sales?

September 19, 2017 By Josh Leave a Comment

I spent the first half of 2017 on a massive project:

Launching The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide, written by my business partner, John.

Overall the launch went great—we hit #2 on all of Amazon for non-fiction (actually it was #1, since we only lost out to a John Grisham novel that was *ahem* completely fictional) and even made the #6 spot on the Wall Street Journal's electronic non-fiction list.

Still, there are things about the launch that didn't go as planned.

One place I really missed the mark was with our paid email promotions.

I invested about $15,000 buying email blasts and sponsorships to other sites' lists.

The results were mediocre—about half the clicks I was anticipating, across the board.

Now there were several factors to this.

For example on one list, I didn't realize who the audience actually was until late in the game. (I might have passed on this one altogether if I'd realized this critical bit of info.)

However one of the most important issues was this:

I overcomplicated the offer.

The “offer” in this case was pretty outstanding.

For the launch, we priced an 800-page career-and-life-changing book that retails at $9.99 on Amazon all the way down to $0.99.

That's, like, what you'd pay for a pack of gum.

And I should have focused all of my copy on selling the value of the book to make it clear what an incredible steal this was.

Instead I got distracted.

The conventional wisdom on book launches like this is to give away a bunch of bonuses worth 10X the price of the book to get more people to buy.

So in my copy I talked about how book buyers would also get $175 worth of bonus video courses and tools, and I spelled out in detail what all the bonuses were.

Normally this is probably a good idea.

When you're selling at a higher price, bonuses help the customer to rationalize the purchase.

In hindsight, with the $0.99 price point, bringing the bonuses into the picture just gummed up what would have been a simple and compelling message.

Instead of just hammering home all the valuable lessons in the book and how we were practically giving it all away…

I got sucked into trying to sell 8 or 9 different things at once.

$0.99 is an impulse buy.

And all the bonus talk was like me jumping in front of them and waving my arms while they were reaching for the pack of gum.

Lesson learned.

Related posts:

  1. Can an Email Course Hurt Sales? Word to the wise: Whenever a marketing “expert” starts talking about their solution *before* they understand your specific situation—your business, your customers, your previous marketing efforts… Hang onto your wallet. Cuz “one size fits all” is a myth. I talk a lot here about tactics like list-building giveaways and email...
  2. Does Offering a Low-End Version of Your Product Hurt Sales of Your Premium Product? Don't you hate when you ask a “marketing expert” a question— And they reply with something like, “That might work, but you'd have to test it to know for sure”? Sometimes that IS just a copout. Many times, though, it's just the honest truth. Case in point: Last week I...
  3. Do Email Courses Hurt Your Open Rates? This always makes me smile: Every so often I'll check my page views in Google Analytics and see that dozens of older blog posts have each gotten a single page view. Usually that means that someone stumbled across my site and is digging back through the archives to read everything...
  4. How Sensational Email Subject Lines Can Hurt Your Open Rates Last week an email with this bombshell subject line detonated in my inbox: That time I almost hired a Baby Snatcher…THIS is why recruiters research you I have to say, after years of following the best email marketers in the biz, I'm pretty jaded when it comes to subject lines...

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: Advertising, Copywriting, Email Marketing

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