4-Day Special Offer Sales

cialdiniMy passion for direct sales began before the web even existed. Back then, I studied the mail order business and came across a master of direct sales, Joseph Sugarman. He wrote an amazing little book called “Triggers” that examines and explains 30 powerful persuasion techniques for marketers. He also wrote a classic training manual for copywriting called “Advertising Secrets of the Written Word”. Continue reading “4-Day Special Offer Sales”

Mass Control – 4 Day Cash Machine Experiment Part 3

My 4 Day Cash Machine experiment has run its full course and I’ve got the results.

Much to my disappointment, Frank Kern’s 4 Day Cash Machine is not magic (my results might have been better if I had implemented it like this!) The cold, dead, untargeted list I used it on did not suddenly start beating new life and buying products as fast as I could process the payments. But, there were some surprises that give me confidence that it will be useful in the future when I am better prepared to take advantage of it. (My list building efforts are underway!)


Download The Exact Email Sequence That Generated $8260.51 in 5 Days…


Before I give you my detailed assessment of the 4 Day Cash Machine in action, let me break down my results.

Mailing # 1:

  • 377 emails sent in total
  • 34 emails bounced giving an effective delivery of 343 emails delivered
  • 7 people unsubscribed from the list
  • 2.6% open-up rate based on delivered emails* (open rates are highly unreliable measures these days, but I decided to go ahead and include them)

Mailing #2:

  • 361 emails sent in total (I did not remove bounces but did scrub out some duplicates I found)
  • 35 emails bounced giving an effective delivery of 326 emails
  • 2 people unsubscribed from the list
  • .6% open-up rate based on delivered email*

Mailing #3:

  • 359 emails sent in total (I continued to leave in the bounces)
  • 40 emails bounced giving an effective delivery of 319 emails
  • 2 people unsubscribed from the list
  • .003% open-up rate based on delivered emails*

Mailing #4:

  • 356 emails sent in total (I continued to leave in the bounces)
  • 39 emails bounced giving an effective delivery of 317 emails
  • 0 people unsubscribed from the list
  • .0% open-up rate based on delivered emails*

Final Results after 4 mailings:

  • 1305 total emails delivered
  • 11 unsubscribes – 3.2% based on initial deliverable list size of 343
  • 6 page views on the special offer sales page – 0.46% based on total emails delivered
  • 0 orders
  • $0.00 earned

My Evaluation of the Results

While I was disappointed not to make any sales with this promotion, I was not surprised by the result. This was a very cold list that hadn’t heard from me in many months and wasn’t particularly responsive in the first place. The vast majority of the names had come from JV Giveaway events where everyone is signing up for dozens of lists in order to get freebies. A significant portion of the names you get during these events are either temporary accounts setup for the event, or secondary accounts that don’t get checked very often (and usually just mass deleted.)

Surprising Positive Outcomes

I was braced for massive unsubscribe rates with every email. This list was full of people who probably had no idea how they ever got connected with me. Before I even said hello, I hit them with a bunch of sales pitches. I was sure the number of unsubscribes would climb with each mailing (specially the last one with a ‘FINAL NOTICE’ subject line), but that didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, the unsubscribe rates went down over the course of 4 days. I’m confident that a promotion like this will not have much negative effect on my list sizes (I always worry that intense promotions will scare off the subscribers, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue. Other markets may have different results.)

The other thing I noticed was that the page views for the sales page tracked with the first and last mailing. I got a couple after the initial mailing in the promotion (as one would expect) and then the rest came on day 4 after the ‘FINAL NOTICE’ email went out. This demonstrates that the urgency created by the promotion’s deadline does have an effect on response rates.

Overall Analysis

I think that the ‘4 Day Cash Machine‘ approach would generate a spike of sales in a well targeted and maintained list. The persuasion tactics employed are founded in the fundamental principles of human decision making – a reason why, urgency, scarcity. The materials provided would certainly help to assemble one of these promotions quickly and the training provided helps you to resist the urge to ‘fiddle and fine-tune’ the promotion and just get it done.

Since first learning the details of this promotional strategy, I discovered someone doing an amazing version of the process. He automates everything (so each new visitor gets their own unique ‘mini promotion’) and ties in some powerful tactics to amplify the psychological tactics used. Check out this video – it explains the whole process in detail.

The sample webpage content I got from Frank Kern was provided in HTML and was relatively easy to modify. The sample emails, however, were provided in a PDF file. That made them a real pain to cut and paste. I wish they had come in a simple text file – I have them that way on my hard drive for future promotions.

If you have any specific questions about my experiment with ‘4 Day Cash Machine’, leave a comment below and I’ll post a reply.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, please visit us on the web at: www dot go to guy enterprises dot com.

Mass Control – 4 Day Cash Machine Experiment Part 2

Today is the second day of my ‘4 Day Cash Machine’ test promotion. ‘4 Day Cash Machine’ came as a bonus module when I purchased Frank Kern’s Mass Control course (check out this video of a wicked automated implementation of the 4DCM).

The second email in the 4 email sequence went out just after midnight last night (eastern standard time.) Continue reading “Mass Control – 4 Day Cash Machine Experiment Part 2”

Mass Control – 4 Day Cash Machine Experiment Part 1

In an earlier post I mentioned that I planned to put the ‘4 Day Cash Machine’ bonus module (check out this video of a wicked implementation of the 4DCM), that came with Frank Kern’s Mass Control training program, to a hard test. Well, that test started in the early hours of this morning. Anyone who has signed up for the updates list on this website should have already seen the first email in the sequence (the sign-up box for the list is in the right hand side of this page.)


Download This Email Sequence That Generated $8260.51 in 5 Days…


I’ve made this a very hard test. I’m mailing to a small list of people and the majority of them are from a ‘very cold’ set of names that I haven’t contacted in months and who have already received a promotion for the featured product about 8 months ago. These leads came mostly from a couple ‘Fire Sale’ events (not sources of high-quality email leads.) To give you a sense of how cold they were, I had 34 hard bounces out of the main list of 360 – that’s a bounce rate of 9%.

Part of the reason I went with this list is that I wanted to really test the capabilities of this technique to motivate sales. If it works with this group, it should be a huge success with higher quality lists that I have a better relationship with. The other reason is that the primary list I’m building right now is for my first big product launch. I’ve had successes with the pre-launch and I don’t want to hit this list with tangential promotions until after the launch.

It took me a few hours to set everything up. Even though there is a cut and paste template to use for the sales page and the emails, I still had to pick 5 bonus products and write blurbs about them, and customize the emails before loading them into my email broadcast cue. In addition, I had to do some maintenance work on the older list to make sure that everything would go out smoothly (I have switched to Aweber for my email marketing since the list was created, but didn’t move this list due to the low quality of the leads.)

My immediate results are 34 bounces, 5 unsubscribes, 1 page view on the special sales page, and 0 sales. But, it is important to remember that the email only went out a few hours ago and many people have not had a chance to open it yet. I’m expecting that a significant number of the people on the mailing list gave a secondary email address to begin with – so they might not check it as frequently. There are 3 more messages in the email cue ready to go out before the end of the promotion.

My ‘4 Day Cash Machine’ promotion ends at midnight EST, February 14, 2008. Given the quality of the list, I’ll consider the experiment a success if I get even 2-3 sales. More than that and I’ll be stunned!

Look for a full debriefing when the promotion ends and additional updates when I have more results.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit our website at: www dot go to guy enterprises dot com.