The 4 Different Types Of Email Promotions

Running promotions is the exciting part of email marketing. It’s the part where online marketing in general gets EXCITING. Monetizing your list of subscribers. The problem is, most email marketers have no idea how or when to run email promotions.

The general consensus is to do a product launch a few times a year & promote every single ‘guru’ launch that crosses your path with the same swipe files every other affiliate uses.

Fortunately for you, I’m going to reveal my 4 ‘top secret’ email promotion strategies.

Making money from your list is all about building trust and adding to your bank of goodwill. Your bank of goodwill is like your ‘promotion currency’ in the form of imaginary points. You get the points by building trust (via sending free content, etc.), and you burn through the points when you send out a promotion.

With that in mind, you can’t send out promotions before adding to your bank of goodwill. If you continually send out promotions without building trust first, you’ll burn through your subscribers as a result.

Just a few ground rules:

• Never do a ‘full-blown’ promotion more than once a month.
• Never “recommend” something more than once a week.
• Don’t promote stuff you haven’t tried or KNOW works.
• Sell recurring products.
• Always Pre-Sell First.

I’m going to talk about running affiliate promotions, but if you launch your own products, you can get to the point where you only promote internally. Promoting affiliate products works, but it burns through more ‘goodwill’ than selling your own products.

If every product you launch brings in 500+ new buyers, launching a new product every 3-6 months can generate enough revenue to pay for an excellent lifestyle as well as replace/build your list of buyers at a steady pace.

As I’ve said before, you have countless ways of monetizing your list. You can directly promote affiliate links (which kills responsiveness). You could promote offers through content, webinars, review sites, or solely through email.

Fundamentally, you have 4 types of promotions:

• One Time Email Promotions (Recommendations)
• Long Term Promotions
• Short Term Promotions (Around 1 Week)
• BBOE’s (Big Bursts Of Energy Promotions 1-4 Weeks)

They all work very well, and for each individual offer you want to promote, you should use one of them.

1. One Time Email Promotions

First, you have what I call one-time email promotions, otherwise known as ‘warm recommendations’. Whenever you stumble across a cool new product or service that you genuinely like, it’s acceptable to tell your list about it. OTEP’s are barely even promotions.

It’s just you letting your list know about something that’s worked for you. It could be a book, a guide on traffic generation, a piece of software, or a service.

Whenever you come across something really cool, write a quick email about it and send it to your list. As long as you can say “hey, check out the results I’ve been getting from this,” the promotion is completely harmless and won’t damage your list responsiveness – it will only increase it while putting commissions in your pocket.

2. Long Term Promotions

Over time, you’ll find offers that convert surprisingly well and have global appeal. Meaning pretty much every subscriber who joins your list would benefit from purchasing it. When you find such offers and they convert incredibly well; why only use them one time, to your current list of subscribers?

It could be a course, PDF guide, tool, service, or membership site. It’s best to use something with a recurring payment for a long-term promotion. Long-term promotions should be inserted into your main subscriber follow-up sequence. This way, every subscriber who joins your list will be hit with the promotion.

The idea is to continually promote this product throughout your follow-up sequence or sequences. Ideally, your long-term promotion products should be your own. Being your own, they are a lot easier to promote in all of your marketing. Via your blog, emails, and other content.

3. Short Term Promotions

Short-term promotions last no more than one week. You’ll want to run short-term promotions for product launches, services, and membership sites.

Short-term promotions should last around one week or less. They should consist of at least 3 emails. Sometimes I’ll send them all in the first 3 days or spread them over a week.

If there’s a new product launching with high EPC’s, a big affiliate contest, and you want to get in on the action, this is the strategy to use. 99% of launch affiliates will write a single email broadcast or use a generic swipe file.

Using the principle of always pre-selling; create a piece of pre-sell content to send out first. This could be simply an email, or an email as well as a blog post, a free report, or anything else that pre-sells the product.

Your first 1-2 emails should pre-sell the product, and the remaining emails should directly promote the product. With launches, you can throw in a lot of scarcity and offer special bonuses to subscribers who purchase within a certain time frame. Most people’s ‘short-term promotions’ are merely single email blasts or pasted swipe files for product launches.

Instead, create a short email sequence with some pre-sell content before pitching the product.

4. BBOE’s

BBOE’s are short for big bursts of energy. You should use them carefully as they are powerful and they burn through “goodwill” like fuel in a rocket. I run them for 2-4 weeks for my own product launches and other MAJOR launches in the industry. BBOE’s are used to build hype and make tons of sales.

Similar to short-term promotions, but longer. Simply create more pre-sell and promotional content over a longer period of time. If you’re promoting your new SEO software launch, you could create several pieces of pre-sell content (this can be adapted for anything):

• A series of blog posts teaching SEO and pre-selling your launch.
• A free SEO report.
• A series of videos (works the best)

You could craft a 3-day blog post series on the importance of SEO sending your subscribers to one post every day. By day 3, they would have learned a ton about SEO and be warmed up to purchase the product. Pre-sell content is like marketing lube.

A free report is an excellent piece of pre-sell material. You can easily give away a lot of value in a report while pre-selling your product at the same time.

Lastly, a video series. Videos work better than anything else. If you look at the biggest marketers in the industry, they all do this. They create a few high-quality professional videos leading up to their launches.

One video is released at a time and is used to teach something as well as pre-sell the product. Every few days you can release a new video giving away a few more hints as to what you’ll be launching/promoting while delivering awesome content.

After the pre-sell emails, you need to hit your subscribers hard with promo emails. These can be:

• Video Sales Page
• Video Landing Page > Sales Page
• Webinar
• Follow-up Webinar Recording
• Last Chance Email > Sales Page

If you use the video series model to pre-sell your launch/affiliate offer, the best thing to do is to first send an email directly to a video sales page of the product. Continuing the videos, the sales video should have a little pre-sell content, but directly pitch the product post-pre-sell content.

After sending directly to a sales page, you can send subscribers to a video landing page. You can quickly create a video landing page of yourself talking about the launch/product and some exclusive bonuses you’re offering to the next X amount of people who purchase the product.

Next, you could send subscribers to a webinar. The webinar takes a lot of effort to create and stream, but it’s more than worth it. It should deliver some content and sell the product with a strong call to action towards the end.

After the webinar, you can send subscribers a follow-up replay link for those who missed the live stream.

Lastly, you can send a final email saying “Last Chance: The Doors Are Closing.” Use this email when the launch/product is nearing its end of sale. That just about wraps up how to use BBOE’s to sell the product launch.

Those are the 4 essential types/categories of email promotions. Every promotion you run should be classed into one of the 4 categories.

In Prosperity,
David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, questions, and comments below.

Comments

Liora

This is exactly what I needed to hear! I’ve been struggling with balancing promotions and content, and your tips are going to help me a lot! Thanks, David!

Sarah

I’ve tried a few of these strategies before, but didn’t realize how important it was to space out my promotions. I’ll definitely work on building more goodwill with my audience before running any new promotions.

Isabella

I absolutely loved this post! The breakdown of the different types of email promotions was super clear and helpful. I’ve been doing email marketing for a while, but now I see how I can better categorize my promotions. Thanks for sharing!

Markus

Wait, are these strategies really that effective? I’ve been using one-time promotions and haven’t seen significant results. Do you have any data or examples to show how long-term promotions work in practice?

Emily

This post was a game-changer for me. I’ve always been confused about how often I should promote products to my list. Your suggestion about building a “bank of goodwill” makes so much sense. Can you elaborate on how to determine the right balance between content and promotions?

Nathan

I agree with most of your points, but I feel like the short-term promotion strategy could be expanded on. In my experience, launching a product for just one week might not be enough time to build up enough momentum, especially with a smaller email list.

Lena

Hey David! This is great advice, as always. I’ve been using some of your tips and have already seen an increase in engagement. By the way, how have you been? We should definitely catch up soon. Let me know when you’re available!

Olivia

I remember when I first started using email promotions, I had no clue what I was doing. I wish I had read this sooner! Your suggestion about building goodwill really hits home for me since I’ve seen the negative impact of promoting too often without providing value.

Lucas

Have you heard about the XYZ Email Automation Tool? It offers some really cool features that could complement the strategies you’re discussing here, especially for automating long-term promotions. I highly recommend checking it out!

Sophia

This was a fantastic post! I’ve learned so much about how to better manage my email marketing campaigns, especially when it comes to balancing promotions and value for my subscribers. Thanks for the insights!