How to Make $8,000 on a random Tuesday with no discount, no flash sales, and no bundles.

If you’re trying to get all the revenue and engagement you can without constantly running sales, bundling random products for some promo you made up so you could hit your revenue goals, or discounting yourself right out of profitability, remember this…

Unexpected. Right Segment. Right Content.

Unexpected

It’s called Squalane. It’s in Shark livers, but the company I was writing for gets theirs from olives.

It’s the biological fraternal twin of Squalene. Your body naturally makes a boatload of Squalene when you’re a child. Ever wonder why babies have beautiful skin? Squalene.

Ever wonder why you’re starting to look like Jack Palance? A lack of Squalene.

Your body stops making as much as you age.

You can’t just force your body to make more Squalene, though. Where do you turn to, then, if you don’t want your face to resemble a used catcher’s mitt by the time you’re 40?

Squalane.

And it’s the reason why a tiny segment of a 300,000 person list comprised mostly of men 35-45 produced $8,000 in revenue in less than 4 hours.

Do men care about Squalane? Not really, but that’s because men don’t know about it. If you’re a man and you’re reading this, you now know more about it than 99% of men, even the ones who take care of their skin. The guys who read that email probably know more about it than first year med students who think they’re going to be dermatologists but will absolutely bottom out and be aestheticians.

Do you need Squalane to make money? Nope. Not unless you’re pursuing modeling as a career.

So, who the hell cares about it?

No one really.

I didn’t until I was making the content calendar for that brand and needed something new to write about.

I was tired of throwing different selling angles for their hero product at their non-customer segment trying to figure out which one was really going to hit. (more on that strategy later and how you can use it to create ads, organic content, landing page content, home page content and increase your whole site’s conversion rate.)

So, I was digging through everything on their site. I was the page for their moisturizer, reading through the ingredients and saw Squalane.

This brand isn’t a skincare brand, but they’re turning into a full-stack men’s grooming company, so moisturizer and other skincare are part of their product offering.

Most men don’t care about moisturizer. They don’t think about their skin until it’s burned or their significant other points out their wrinkles.

I kept asking myself “how do I get these guys to care about moisturizer?”

When I read Squalane and thought “what the hell is that?”

I dove down the Google rabbit hole and came away with a few pages of notes, links, and quotes.

I needed some longer content for the email, so I took what I had and wrote a blog. I wrote the email and sent it to the designer.

I wasn’t sold on it. I was looking at it as filler content. I needed to send an email that day, because that’s the schedule, but I thought about just leaving it alone.

Right Segment

I knew the whole list wasn’t going to care about it. There were thousands of guys on the list who hadn’t bought the hero product, yet. I doubted they would convert on email about some random ingredient in a moisturizer they had never seen before.

But the men who had bought the hero product and already spent hundreds of dollars with the brand, btu hadn’t tried the moisturizer yet… now we were onto something.

I made the segment, scheduled the email and prayed I wasn’t an idiot for doing all this research, writing a blog, writing an email and schilling moisturizer to VIP customers.

Watching the email in real time was the stuff dreams are made of. It was hot right out of the gate. Hundreds of clicks turned into thousands. A few hundred dollars in revenue steadily climbed into the thousands, eventually peaking at just over $8,000.

The email was well-written, concise, a little funny (if I do say so myself), and clearly laid out why this weird ingredient they’d never heard of was an essential in their non-existent skincare routine.

And they bit on it. And they’re better for it. It’s a solid product that I use every day.

But why does this matter for a copywriter, email marketer, brand owner?

Right Content

Because you’re never really out of ideas and you never know which one is going to land with your audience.

If you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for content, ask yourself these questions:

• Does a product have a random feature that somehow sets it apart from other players in your space?

• Is it something that no one else is talking about?

• Is there something my product or service does that my audience has never heard of before?

Ask me how many emails I’ve seen about Squalane? 0.

Take that feature, that ingredient, that weird thing your product does other products don’t do and turn it into a 600-word blog and 200-word email. Send it to your most engaged customers and watch what happens.

If they click and buy, clone that email and send it to your less engaged customers.

That’s a mistake I made in my early list managing days and I see brands make over and over. They send a profitable email once to one segment.

Clone that thing and send it to a wider segment. It might not produce the same CTR and Revenue as it did the first time, but there’s no reason for it to gather dust on the shelf of your sent campaigns. Squeeze everything you can out of it.

Then find the next random thing, the next obscure product, the next weird 5-star review and turn it into an email your audience isn’t expecting.

You might just make $8,000 on a random Tuesday without having to eat your margin.

If you want to know more about how I did this and how I can do it for you, book a call. I’d love to talk to you.