Lesson 38: A squeeze campaign autopsied, with a view to understanding the numbers

All about what to expect from your emails

This week we’re going to dissect two actual squeeze campaigns that I’ve run. The first we’ll analyze with a focus on numbers; the second with a focus on strategy and messaging.

Squeeze campaign: a short sequence of emails, sent out manually or automatically over the course of a few days, encouraging Sam to buy before a deadline.

I’m going to use the following campaign to illustrate why you shouldn’t obsess over email metrics. In the process, I’ll also set your expectations for how squeeze campaigns tend to play out, and also hopefully correct any misconceptions or assumptions you may have.

Offer & pricing

This campaign was selling an updated version of my Conversion Trunkline Dossier — a mid-priced product consisting largely of back-issues of my monthly newsletter, the Attention-Thieves’ Communiqué, plus a few other special reports. I picked a price of $246.

Why $246? Because it was an even division of the actual value. I don’t always use charm prices — prices ending in 9 or 95 — because sometimes I have a good reason to use something else. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use them yourself. But sometimes contrast is valuable, and sometimes being able to say “exactly one third the original price” can be useful, and so on. I just personally like to add a bit of idiosyncrasy to my campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you have to copy me on this. It’s neither here nor there in the long run, I suspect.

I realize that $246 is a rather higher price than the one I have recommended for your own squeeze campaign. But in the next lesson, I’ll analyze a campaign that sold a $29 product, with a $99 upsell — the exact range I suggest for you. Bear with me; you’ll see the method in my madness soon.

Circumstances

I ran this campaign on the spur of the moment, after I ran into an unexpected shortfall paying for airline tickets. As it happened, I had limited internet access at the time, which was of course far from convenient; yet this also illustrates how simple a squeeze campaign can be to put together.

I wrote most of the emails in advance, and just spooled them up to go out at scheduled times.

Audience & segmentation

I wasn’t expecting very much from this campaign because I had already run a promotion on the Dossier a few months before. I hadn’t added a lot of names to my list since then — I had only around 2,300 subscribers. So I figured my list was fairly tapped out on this particular product, and I’d sell maybe 10 copies or so; which was fine because I just wanted to make up the couple of grand I hadn’t expected to spend on plane tickets.

I did very basic segmentation: I just set up the campaign so that anyone who bought the Dossier wouldn’t continue to get emails about it. The tracking for this is not 100% reliable — a few customers will get the emails even after they buy — but it’s still worth doing. No one likes being sold something they already bought, and you won’t enjoy having to respond to people saying, “I already bought this, stop emailing me!”

Emails

There were just 9 emails in this squeeze campaign, which you can read below. I’ve included some basic comments on strategy, but I’ll get into this more next lesson when we look at another campaign and discuss timing and content in more detail.