How I Turned a Grouchy Subscriber into $6,696 (Part 2)

Quick recap of part 1:

My business partner John and I were launching a product to our list—a “whitelabel” version of a popular JavaScript course that was available on Udemy for $175.

The wrinkle is that Udemy frequently discounts the course to $10, which made our discount price of $79 look like a ripoff, even though we’d packaged our version with several bonuses to increase the value.

A subscriber of ours connected the dots and lashed out anonymously on Twitter:

Later that day, John and I jumped on a call to do a post-mortem on the launch, and we got to talking about that tweet and Udemy’s practice of offering fire-sale pricing.

And John mused:

“I’m tempted to send one more email and say we decided to match the Udemy price at $10, just to see what would happen.”

Now generally I’m against extending sales beyond your original deadline—you don’t want to train your list to wait, and wait, and wait, hoping for a better deal…

However John’s idea got the wheels in my head turning.

And I said, “If we’re going to do this, we should go all the way.”

So I suggested:

Let’s do one more email.

The subject line should be: “This drunk old bastard called me out”

And we’ll open with a screenshot of the nasty tweet from @DrunkOldBastard.

Then we’ll explain how the Udemy price is normally $175, but they happened to be running a firesale on the course and pricing it at $10…

And even though Simple Programmer’s version is more valuable, because the extra bonuses have a real-world “street value” of more than the $79 asking price…

Since this guy called John out, he’d decided to take him up on the challenge and not only *match* the Udemy price, but BEAT the Udemy price.

And drop the Simple Programmer price all the way down to $9 for one day only.

John is always up for crazy experiments—he loved the idea, so I wrote the email up and fired it off at 3:02 p.m. EDT.

I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Usually I find that late afternoon is *not* a good time for sending sale-related emails.

Not true in this case.

The sales came pouring in—every time I refreshed the browser it seemed like we’d made another 10-20 sales.

And they kept coming and coming…

By the time the dust settled, that one email had generated an additional $6,696 in sales on top of what we’d already made from the launch.

Lots of good takeaways from this little experiment.

One of the most interesting lessons for me was:

Even though we made 8X more sales at the lower price point, our revenue from the higher price was MUCH greater.

So launching at the higher price was still the right call.

However, nearly half of the $9 sales came from subscribers who’d never bought anything from us before.

Many of them were from India, where the relative income differences make it tough for them to afford our higher prices.

In the future, I’m planning to run occasional “fire sales” like this to our $0 subscribers.

90% of any list falls in this category—that’s a lot of untapped revenue just waiting there if the price is right.

 

P.S. Didn’t our customers complain?

A few did, and we ended up issuing a handful of refunds to people who wanted to buy at the lower price.

A greater number replied to express their support.

JC wrote:

I have to admit, I bought this course only for the f*** you udemy sale lol

And Daniel said:

By the way, I have now bought Tonys course both from you and on Udemy.

Keep up all the good work you’re doing!