This Email Marketing Strategy Made over $2,400,000 [STEAL IT]
Summary
- I helped a portfolio company make $2.4 million in additional profit from a five-day email campaign.
- The company, Genera, heavily relies on paid ads and has a large email list of 3.3 million emails.
- Our $2,000 product's customer acquisition cost was $1,200, but email campaigns cost $0 to acquire customers.
- Email campaigns can increase enterprise value as email-generated sales drop straight to the bottom line.
- Email lists remain stable, smoothing out revenue volatility, making the business more attractive to investors.
- We launched a 7-day challenge suggested by our marketing director, turning a proven product into a lead magnet.
- Challenges are effective as they provide a clear outcome quickly and are perceived as easy to achieve.
- Value equation: Outcome (What they want) x Likelihood of Achievement / Time Delay x Effort & Sacrifice.
- We emailed 464,000 people, had an 18% open rate, and 10,000 people registered for the challenge.
- Out of the 10,000 registrants, 8% bought the $2,000 product, generating $1.6 million in sales.
- 20% of buyers upgraded to an $88,000 upsell, adding $800,000, totaling $2.4 million in sales.
- We made roughly $6 per email from the campaign.
- You should run similar email campaigns once per quarter for additional revenue.
- Smart and trustworthy people on your team can help generate profitable ideas.
- Make frequent offers to your prospects but ensure you provide enough value to avoid losing goodwill.
- It's okay to ask for the sale again as circumstances change and prospects may overlook initial offers.
- Sell the same product in different ways to reduce offer fatigue and engage different audiences.
- Do a small test (10% of your list) before sending out to your whole list to optimize and improve the campaign.
- Seasonal themes or life event promotions can be effective for wrapping up your offers.
- Once you have a successful annual email campaign calendar, it can run on autopilot, continually generating revenue.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest implementing a few key strategies to make your small business or personal growth project more effective and profitable. Here are some practical steps you can take:
Utilize Your Email List
If you have an email list, start leveraging it immediately. Email campaigns can be powerful and cost-effective. For instance, you can create a 7-day challenge around a product or service you offer. This gives your audience a clear, quick outcome. You don’t need a massive budget to start—you only need a well-planned engagement strategy.
Plan Quarterly Campaigns
Run email campaigns at least once every quarter. This ensures you’re continually engaging your audience and generating revenue. Come up with different themes or seasonal wrappers for each quarter’s campaign to keep it fresh and avoid offer fatigue.
Test Before Scaling
Before you rollout your campaign to your entire list, run small tests with about 10% of your subscribers. This lets you optimize your campaign elements—like subject lines and CTAs—before a full-scale launch. This can double or triple the effectiveness of your efforts.
Trust Your Team
If you have a team, listen to their ideas. They might have valuable insights that you might miss. Trusting your team can result in innovative and profitable strategies, just like how the 7-day challenge idea came from the marketing director in my example.
Provide Consistent Value
Make sure you’re providing enough value to your audience. The more value you offer, the more often you can promote your products without losing goodwill. This is crucial for maintaining a healthy relational balance with your audience.
Vary Your Offers
Sell the same product in different ways. You can use webinars, in-person workshops, or different email formats. This approach reduces offer fatigue and engages various segments of your audience.
Seasonal and Life Event Promotions
Tie your campaigns to seasonal themes or significant life events. These promotions can be very effective in creating a sense of urgency and relevance.
By following these steps, you can maximize the return on your marketing efforts with minimal cost and time investment. This ensures a steady stream of income and continual growth for your business or personal project.
Quotes by Alex Hormozi> #### "$2.4 million in additional profit in 5 days"
– Alex Hormozi
"I make these videos so that hopefully you can grow your business and make lots of money"
– Alex Hormozi
"Email is kind of like your investment account"
– Alex Hormozi
"Approximating a relationship where you would have already had a lot of interaction"
– Alex Hormozi
"As long as you have a clearly defined outcome that they want then that becomes more valuable"
– Alex Hormozi
Full Transcript
$2.4 million in additional profit in 5 days that's what one email campaign that we did in one of our portfolio companies Genera and if you don't know who I am my name is Alex rosi own acquisition. it's a portfolio of companies Des over $250 million a year and I make these videos so that hopefully you can grow your business and make lots of money and then maybe someday I can invest in your business and help it grow too I want to walk you through step by step exactly what we did in this email campaign so that you can use the same thing in your business to get ideally even better results so let me walk through the context of this business number one is it's a business that relies predominantly on paid ads it's a consumer-based business so lots of media to generate lots of volume of transactions and leads so we had a very large email list and for the most part we weren't doing much with that email list besides following up for the initial transaction and then after that they were dead to us which I definitely don't recommend doing but at the time going into this it wasn't a constraint of the business and then it became one because all of a sudden some of our ads weren't performing as well and all of a sudden we thought oh my gosh we might not head our quarterly Revenue goals what else can we figure out enter the email campaign cool so let's walk through the numbers so the email list size was 3.3 million emails now this was over a few years that we collected these emails and it was a traditional think about it like an e-commerce setup so it's was an opt-in and then a sale and then upsells so the next major number that we need to know is that this was a $2,000 price point and we had an upsell on the back end for about $88,000 that a certain percentage customers would take now the next piece that's important for this is that we had buyers and non buyers that were on the list so this was just a total list of everyone that we had ever had now in this business traditionally to sell just this $2,000 item our cost to acquire customer was $1,200 so not a lot of margin there left over now you can do this because it's an automated selling machine so you can just crank on adsen with just this particular business does it's a nine figure company in terms of annual revenue but we're like hey one of the other stats about email that's important is that the cost to a Car customer on email once you've already acquired the lead is $0 which if I can have free customers that means whatever my gross profit is of selling my main thing drops straight to my bottom line and so as a mental contract for this I like to think about email kind of like a long-term investment account and so it's like you run ads every single day or you do outbound or whatever it is to build your list up and that's kind of like your paycheck right like you put work in and you get paid back right and it's just just like a direct relationship whereas the email is kind of like your 401k it's kind of like your investment account that you put you put money into and then over time it starts to compound and compound and compound and if you have an email strategy and I'm going to give you kind of an overarching email strategy that we like to employe in businesses this business just is crushed doing what we've been doing so it hasn't been the main focus but if you have a business like it is one of the easiest ways to just immediately plug in and print money and then the nice thing is is that even if it's late to the game I mean this this business does a lot of money uh you can still employ it and then immediately see the results there's two things about email and having followup Beyond initial followup that makes a business more valuable number one is that all sales that will come from email are going to drop straight to the bottom line in terms of profit and so most businesses 95% of businesses are traded on a multiple of bottom line and so since these sales drop straight to the bottom line it will be a big enhance answer on the Enterprise Value the second point is that if you have consistent email sales that come in that number isn't going to really CH like tomorrow you don't go from 3.3 million to one and a. half million emails on your list unless you know you clean the list or whatever but fundamentally the list size isn't going to change overnight your ads might change overnight but your email list won't so what that does is it actually can smooth out volatility that occurs in a business which would make it more attractive to an investor long term you'd like to have some sort of regular email Cadence because things like deliverability and domain reputation and things like that come into play I'm not going to get into that stuff for this video I'm just going to talk about big picture email strategy that you can employ in your business now to make money great now that we have the numbers in the context let's talk about the campaign so what we did for the list is that we promoted a challenge and it was a 7-Day Challenge and the reason that I think this is interesting and important is that number one this came from the marketing director and I think the reason that I want to highlight this is that this is why you need to have smart people this didn't come from me this didn't come from the founder the marketing director was like hey I think we should do a challenge now we weren't actually super on board for this because we're like hey this might be a distraction but it turned out to be really really good and added over a hundred million in Enterprise Value to the business remember this business is already a multi hundred million dollar Enterprise Value business and so adding 10 or 20% to the Enterprise Value can be a very big difference the second thing is this challenge actually came from the product and so we pulled out something that was already something that we knew work that we were for customers we pulled it out and we made it into a lead magnet and so fundamentally a lead magnet is a very is a complete solution to a very narrow problem and ideally once you solve that problem you create the next problem which you solve with your offer and so fundamentally that is what a good lead magnet does and this is why challenges I think are very strong lead magnets for a lot of businesses because they also satisfy all the elements of a value equation which I talk about in my first book $100 million offers which has sold almost a million copies so far now the value equation works like this you've got the out which is the thing that people want and so as long as you have a clearly defined outcome that they want then that becomes more valuable now you multiply that by low risk or the perceived likelihood of achievement How likely is it that when I buy this thing I'm going to get this thing if you have an outcome you want and it's guaranteed to get it you're this is going to be really valuable but there's two other elements the thing is is how long is it going to take so if it takes a really long time then I'm be like okay sure I have this outcome which is I get really rich and the guarantee is is that it'll definitely happen but I got to wait 20 years of investing my money to become really rich well it's not as attractive anymore right then you do uh ease which is how hard is it so effort and sacrifice that are associated with this outcome and so these are the four elements of value and so a challenge is a really clear outcome that everybody wants it has high likelihood of actually happening it happens really fast because we get attach of time to it and because we're going to say hey we're only going to do this one thing and we're going to give you all the steps it the perception of the Prospect is that it's easy which makes these very strong lead magnets if you want to go through the experience of what going through one of these challenges looks like and you are somebody who wants to start a business already have a business either way you can go join the school challenge for free it's for 14 days we walk you through everything that we have I take calls in that Community to help people get their first business online started we have everything down step by step once a month I drop a full day Mastermind training of all the people who are starting communities and making them uh we've got it down like we're pretty good at helping people get to that first dollar and so you can for free go to school.com games and I'll see you in there so for this particular business it's a business that helps people achieve an outcome that actually takes a little bit of time and so what we did was say okay is there a smaller mini version of this big outcome that we can just kind of give them a taste so if I was in weight loss I'd probably have them do some sort of like 7-Day cleanse or something like that again I'm not going to get into what's good what's bad here I'm just saying that I would have some person that gets you know they lose 7 lbs in 7 days a lot of that's going to be water but they're excited about it they're like great now let's talk about your long-term goals right because now they have a element of belief they they've taken action they've gotten some reward for their behavior they've interacted with us all of these things align with them making a purchase what challenges do is they approximate brand and so this is how it actually works the reason the direct response internet marketing world does a lot of these things is because none of them have Brands and so like for me for example if someone's already consumed a gazillion videos of mine or podcast of mine then if I say hey do you want to check this thing out a lot of people are like yeah you've already given me a gazillion other things and so sure but if you're brand new then what you do is you basically approximate a relationship where you would have already had a lot of interaction so you basically try and cram you know a six-month relationship into seven days so it's kind of like one of those dating shows where they say will you get married in 30 days and they like try and cram a whole relationship into that period it actually kind of is the same thing when you come from a marketing perspective you're just rapidly warming up you're like microwaving the prospect rather than slow cooking it which is kind of the normal branding right and for example in the school games that's our version of a challenge right we just call the school games the cooler rapper we have leaderboards and prizes and like that and so we walk people through how to start a business online and so we get one out of three people just under to get their first dollar within their first month which is pretty cool we put a lot of time into getting that kind of outcome and then once someone makes a dollar then they're like shoot I can see how I could make more dollars and so that's the idea is like you want to approximate you want to do it really fast you make as easy as possible make it as guaranteed as possible and an outcome that they care about so now that you know what the setup is let's go back and add a couple of numbers to this campaign and then I'll walk you through it happened so we sent the emails only to a small sub segment of the list so we had 464,000 people that we sent it to and that was because we wanted to test it out we didn't want to blow our load on the on the whole list and so we just set it to like 15% of the list and the reason we did that is cuz like hey if this thing bombed we didn't want to like piss off the entire list list and so we sent it to 15% of the list a lot of them were non- buyers and from there what we saw is we had 10,000 people who registered for this thing which good or bad whatever for us in an absolute number 10,000 people shows a a pretty decent amount of Interest so in order to get this 10,000 we had an 18% open rate meaning 18 you know just about one out of five people opened the actual email okay great now from there we had about five % of those people actually click to join the thing and then the rest was the optim percentage on the page to register that got us to 10,000 so it went from 464 to 83,000 uh that opened it from the 83,000 10,000 of them actually registered so a pretty good percentage actually uh who did click wanted to do it and as you get into a Cadence of this which I'll explain at the end in terms of how to implement this ongoing as an email strategy to make more money is that as soon as you really nail what that that lead magnet is or what that challenge is or whatever it is that you're going to get your leads to engage again or re-engage these funnel metrics will always improve you're going to split test the subject headlines you're going to split test the opening on the email you're going to split test the ctas and the links that you're going to use the landing pages that you send them to the offer that you that you attract them with the headline of the the naming of the challenge which by the way is a great way to vary this up if you do it like once a quarter which I'll talk about later like you can do the same play but you just put a different wrapper on it so for example in the gym World cuz I came from this world it's like I might have a six week uh you know six we challenge I might have a 42-day fix I might have a 42-day transformation I might have a six we booty blast I might have a six week uh slim for Santa I might have a lean by Halloween like I've done a lot of these accountabil buddy you know challenge like I've done a lot and you know slim for summer all of these things work um but fundamentally what are we going to do we're going to eat you're going to eat less you're going to move more and so even though the deliverable of the challenge or the lead magnet might more or less be the same you can just wrap it seasonally or you can wrap it based on a specific pain point that happens at that time of year so let me walk you through the the results math right so we'll do a clean page so we had 10,000 people who registered I actually don't have the data on how many people uh attended live and watched throughout the whole seven days I can get this but I'll just I know that the high level and so from 10,000 we had 800 people who actually bought all right so we had about 8% of people who made the purchase which is pretty good not unhappy about that at all do I think we can improve it yes but fundamentally this was to a list of plenty of people who hadn't bought they knew who we were so I'd say it was a little bit warmer than true cold uh but a lot of them had never bought anything from us before and so that resulted remember this is a $2,000 price point in $1.6 million in new sales that we did just from this email campaign you're like wait a second I thought you said you did 2 million or more than 2 million let me explain what happened from there so from there we had 20% of people ascended into the AK product which allowed us to make an extra 800k from the ascensions and so that gave us $2.4 million in total from this 7-Day email campaign now I want to break something very cool off for you which is that you see 2.4 million now that was derived from a list that was 464,000 emails and so that means we were making roughly six bucks per email in this campaign and so if you know that you do this call it four times a year which I would recommend you do when we get into the takeaway section meaning one time per quarter you do a cleanup we say great we're going to take all the leads that we had and we're going to run them through a conversion mechanism in this way it's not like oh shoot I have to do this all the time it's like all right I'm going to do this big thing we do it once a quarter and we clean up our q1 we clean up our Q2 we clean up R Q3 by running all of our leads through this High converting funnel that we've structured purposely for non- buyers so we have different hooks different front ends that has different messaging that might not have been the primary message that converts the most people which is our first you know whack at it but this is our second and third whack at it and by varying the titles that you use in each of the quarterly things that you do so q1 will have a different name than Q2 you'll still be able to attract people without necessarily fatiguing or tiring the list and in between those times you can then simply provide value to the list and so you've deposited some Goodwill that earns you the right to be able to ask for the sale so let me walk you through the takeaways that we had from this that you can use for your own business to make more money so there's four main takeaways that I would recommend you take from this that I take from this number one is smart people all right so you have to be able to trust your people to make recommendations now neither the CEO nor I so I like to say this like I also am not always in favor of ideas that make lots of money cuz I mess up too um but we were like you know what they're a little closer to it we will trust that they're super excited about it cuz the flip side is if you bash every idea that your team comes to you with then they're not they're going to stop thinking about ideas and then all of a sudden you're like why doesn't my my team ever think of anything it's like well because you turn them down every time and so there's kind of like what Hills do I want to die on and what times do I want to say hey give it a shot I don't think like is this going to do damage to the brand no I don't think so we're currently not doing anything there and if you're really passionate about it sure let's do it so one having smart people two which is trusting them all right so I say this is still his first kind of people related for this is you still got to trust those people and make a bet with them and part of the reason I say trust them obviously you want to trust them because they're competent they're intelligent and they're well-intentioned but the other thing is that they sometimes just have data that you don't have because fundamentally in a business there's data that's happening all over the place and you are only going to get Snippets as a CEO especially the bigger the company is right this is the business of almost 10 million a month like it's a very large business there's lots of things going on and so that person is going to be much closer to the data have a much closer pulse uh than sometimes the founder or CEO might have and so sometimes they have data that you're not working with and that's why extending a bridge of trust is is is important so the second takeaway is offers to money all right so the amount of offers that you make to any Prospect is directly correlated with the amount of money that you'll make with the single caveat that every time you make an offer you lose Goodwill and so what you want to do is make sure that you're depositing sufficient Goodwill that you can earn the ask and so make as many as you can while also providing as much value as you can which means that if you want to make a lot of offers you just got to provide that much more value now with this particular instance we were going to a list that we had emailed but not a lot but we hadn't really emailed any offers to in a very long time and so even though we weren't putting a ton of value our give to ask ratio was still okay because we hadn't asked at all and so I talk about the give to ask ratio in the content section of this book and the reason that I actually consider email a form of content is that it's one to many distribution to people who know you now it's just free which also is just like when you post on social media the only difference is that you control 100% of who gets this whereas on social media algorithms and things that distribute your content but fundamentally you're Distributing one message to many people and it's free and so that is what makes email so profitable just like organic and I want to add a little caveat here which is that it's okay to ask for the sale again and so all these people or the majority of these buyers hadn't bought bought this thing and so when we asked again some people are afraid of making the second ask but people get busy you know they they leave a shopping cart up and then they you know their their kid screams and they forget about it like it happens and so you can't get too bent out of shape on the fact that like you're going to offend people by asking them it's okay to ask as long as you earned the right and you've given until you've deposited enough Goodwill that there's enough demand there surge there that you can let loose the valve of money and it can come on and then you can close it again so the third takeaway is that you can sell the same thing in a different way and so I can sell a product on a webinar I could sell it on a phone I could sell it via a live Workshop in person I could sell it via email and so you can have less offer fatigue by selling the same offer in a different medium and so you can get more hacks or more at bets because people will judge their Goodwill with you based on the medium that you're communicating in and so this is something that I have found it also by the way is a great way to vary products up and so for example if you're an educator I'll just use this because it's simple uh if I have content on the internet that's free if I make a course you could charge for it or you could make it free if I deliver that same course in a book format it's not going to be able to sell for the same amount that a course could if I deliver that same format in a live inperson experience that's going to be probably charged significantly more than it would in a digital format if I did a live format but virtual it would be a different price point than the live and in person and so for each of these mediums even if the same commun same information is being taught you price it differently it's the same reason that when you go in person in college they charge you a arm and a leg for it but digital College almost ubiquitously is way way way lower priced even though it's the same information it's simply being delivered through a different medium and so you can sell in different mediums and deliver in different mediums and from my experience people will apprise or judge the decision based on that Medium exclusively so the fourth takeway is what I'll just call the quarterly cleanup so this is probably the most tactical recommendation that I can give you that I alluded to a little bit earlier which is I would recommend that you do this once every quarter you do this conversion mechanism whether you do some sort of challenge or some sort of defined outcome or some sort of lead magn that you use to re-engage your list and put them through some sort of conversion event with a deadline with a big promise that you know you can deliver on and so if you do this once a a quarter and you weren't doing this you could almost immediately add like you saw the the numbers there we had $6 per email from that $450,000 sub segment now to prove that this worked what we did was we just did it again by the way one of my favorite business strategies do something that works do it again do more of it and ideally do it better and so we ran the exact same play again to a different Subs segment of the list and boom we hit 2.2 million we didn't even wait a quarter we just did it the next month and so I say this because this stuff works and once you know it works you can keep duplicating it over and over again and guess what we're going to do next quarter now that we know that we tested it on two subse segments we're going to do it to the whole list and we're going to use the learnings that we had from the first two tests and so if you are going to run this as the corner cleanup I would recommend using 10% of your list or a smaller percentage because believe me as soon as you learn the things that you messed up on the first try you're going to be really grateful that you didn't run into the entire list so do one two or three test runs before you blow the the whole list up with this new uh promo that you've already tested the messaging the subject head the ctas the landing page those little tests that you can run in the meantime that can sometimes double or triple the throughput of the campaign and so with every one of these campaigns I would recommend always testing some elements of it so you can always make it a little bit better and so one you're doing this every quarter two you can test it with a small portion of the list three is that in order to make it seem and appear different to the non- buyer who doesn't buy on the first hack or the second hack we change the naming of it or the wrapper of it so change the landing page change the subject head of the email change the name of the challenge or the lead magnet even if the core components are the same fundamentally your business isn't going to change right but the way that you position it or the reason why that you have the promotion can and I recommend doing something that's seasonal or doing something that's a life event for you I talked about this in the the last chapter of the offers book which this is ESP specially important for local businesses because you have much smaller audiences and so fatigue happens much faster with a tiny audience and so you actually have to have a lot more variety and I know this cuz that was the world I came from and so that's why I have all these these isms in the back of my mind of how I had to wrap and rewrap the same thing which is fundamentally Fitness and Nutrition right like how many ways can I slice it turns out a lot and I will say that once you have one annual calendar you can pretty much stick with it so you don't need to come up with another thing next year once you have your four big promos that you're going to run throughout the year that you know are tested those just become autopilot and they just become cash printers and if this type of case study deep breakdowns on business interesting you I have another one where I doubled one of our portfolio companies in 60 days check that one out