"Silver Bullet Quick Fix" campaign

Full story completed from the other thread:

Mark used to sell Version 1 of his metal detector. He sold via distributors and retailers, and had no direct contact with customers.

Mark then came up with new and improved v2. But he didn't have money to advertise v2 or to make enough to get into retailers.

Question: What to do?

Answer: Sit and drink beer.

Mark sat and drank beer until he remembered he had a garage full of warranties that previous customers had mailed in.

5,000 of them.

Mark spent $1,500 to mail a sales letter to all those people, telling them about v2.

What do you think happened?

Let's set up a bit of contrast first. My guess is that not one in 10,000 people in the general public would be interested in buying a metal detector at all.

Fewer still would want to buy Mark's specific v2. Maybe one in 20,000.

But from the list of Mark's previous customers?

One in 10 replied with orders and checks. 10% of 5,000, or 500 of them.

For reference, Mark's v2 sold for $900. It cost him $150 to make one. $750 in profit for each order. and he gets 500 of them.

That's $375,000 in profit ($373,000 once you account for the sales letter costs)... back in 1990s money, in a matter of days and weeks, instead of months, years, or never.

Two points:

1. You gotta have a way to reach previous customers.

That might seem super obvious, but people forget it all the time. Take for example stupid 2014 Bejako, back when I was trying to become a Kindle kingpin.

It was only after I had sold 1000s of copies of my various niche books on Amazon that it occurred to me to put a link at the end where people could sign up to an email list that I had created.

All those earlier book buyers?

Amazon's customers, not mine.

(And it still happens today. I met a course creator a couple months ago who had sold 30,000 copies of her courses via Udemy. Her list size? Zero.)

2. If you wanna make money, run the "Silver Bullet Quick Fix" campaign.

Says sports marketer Jon Spoelstra, the fastest way to make money and fix problems in your business is to contact your previous customers, one-on-one, and ask them to buy more.

Don't run ads to get more leads (or to grow your list). Don't organize a big launch to make a bunch of first-time sales.

The easiest and fastest and most profitable thing you can do today is to make more sales to people who have already bought from you.

If you only have a few clients, it can make sense to reach out to them in person, one-by-one, schedule a call, and see whats going on in their business. Then tailor your new offer based on what they told you.

If you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of customers, that's impractical.

Instead, you can run a poll in your newsletter.

You can get your readers into a community and see what they tell you.

You can use your intuition.

Or maybe can brainstorm a few ideas here.

If you like, post what your customers or clients have already bought from you in the past... and I and everybody else here can chime in with ideas for what you could offer them next.

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"Silver Bullet Quick Fix" campaign