The Freaking Formula to Printing Money (Even Though I Hhh—aaayyyyy—teeee Formulas)

Well, here’s a fun fact to start your day!

Customers are 127% more likely to purchase within 24 hours of a deadline.

Wuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttt?! That’s right, Stu. A human being is 127% more likely to buy yo’ thang if you have a deadline happening in the next 24 hours. ⏰

Can you believe that shit?

I can believe that shit—because deadlines are my jam. And I don’t even like jam. But I do like doing business, and therefore, it naturally follows that I must also like imposing deadlines. The two are so connected, there is no difference. If you wanna make money, you’ve gotta make deadlines.

This is a fact.

So I thought I’d—swirls hair—swing by and have a little talk about this today, because it can be a REALLY BIG REASON why your offers might be falling flat and you’re wildly disappointed. (Which is seriously the worst.)

This week, I wanted to go behind-the-scenes of a recent promotion and show you what’s working to produce a 10% conversion rate (which, for a frame of reference, is pretty damn good).

The answer? Two things:

1. Anticipation.
2. Deadlinesssss!

This is the magic formula. 🪄 Even though magic is bullshit and so are formulas. If ever one were to exist, this is it.

You could literally take every business class under the sun and it won’t matter: your success comes down to your ability to execute these two items well. While the offer itself does obviously matter, I’ll argue that these two items are what give your offer legs. To run. Into the sunset. With a lover. Named Alejandro Sanz in the Shakira video “La Tortura.” (I still swoon SO HARD when I watch this video.)

You’ll notice that most businesses lack both of these. (Including their own Alejandro Sanz.)

Most either:

1. Email their email list completely randomly and hope that someone will see their offer & buy.
2. OR, they put an offer out there and never apply any deadlines because they think that without limiting it, they’ll get more people in the door. ← NOTHING has ever been less true.

I wish I believed in god because if I did, I would tell you that I SWEAR TO ALL OF MY RELIGIOUS DEITIES THAT if you put something out into the world without much fanfare or a deadline and just hope that “people will see it & buy it” (like we all have done!), the good news is that you’ve relieved yourself from the extra work, but the bad news is that your offer will always perform significantly worse.

And by significantly, I mean: it’s pretty much going to bomb.

This might seem like an exaggeration, but I promise you: unless you’re Oprah, you need to give your audience a reason to take action today instead of some far-off, distant date in the future. (Or never.) Since you’re not Oprah, that reason is: excitement + a deadline. The deadly combo.

What do I mean by excitement? What do I mean by deadlines?

I mean this:

Before you even run a promotion, you should be getting your audience hyped for the promotion. To be clear, this is a lot of work: but it’s less work than begging for bread on the street because you’re broke.

With respect to excitement, you should be:

1. Sending teaser emails 1 - 2 weeks out.
2. Running a massive, fun public countdown before your thing launches.
3. Making a big stink out of THE DAY (when you launch).
4. Making a big stink out of THE WEEK (making it feel like a special event).
5. Writing emails that are focused on what your customer gets (not what your thing is).
6. Writing way more emails than you feel comfortable with.

A recent promotion I ran contained thirteen emails over the course of 10 days—and that was me feeling like I shoulda coulda written even more. I sent one each day, and three on the last day—which is pretty standard. By doing that, I give the sale its own spotlight: I don’t try to hide it in the corner, at the bottom of an email, as an afterthought. One of the concepts I preach is the power in believing in what you are actually selling. If you believe in what you’re selling, you will have no problem shouting it all over the world. This makes it easy to put YOUR THING in the spotlight. On the other hand, when you’re insecure about what you’re selling & you haven’t really given it your best effort, then you’re always going to feel that hesitation…and that hesitation is reflected in your sales numbers.

You want your sale to feel like the event of the year.

The key word, of course, is “event.” You don’t need to bring Madonna, but you do need to call attention to yourself and say, “Hey! I’m making this special thing for you! Here’s the date, and here’s the time, and we’re gonna ROCK IT.” And then you need to continually follow up and remind people and add your own hype to your work.

This is maybe one of the hardest things, adding hype to your own work. It can feel really uncomfortable, promoting yourself with such abandon. You’d feel much better if other people talked about your work—which is totally possible, of course, but the people YOU’RE talking to are on YOUR email list, and they’re in YOUR audience. So YOU need to talk to them. You need to hype your own stuff up.

You don’t need to scream and shout: all you need to do is write a dedicated series of emails designed to get a customer excited about what you’re offering. The fact that you’ve written a dedicated series of emails will do wonders for your sales alone: it elevates it all and makes it feel more timely and exclusive. In other words: don’t just tack a cute little P.S. to the bottom of an email about another topic and say something like “Oh, and by the way! I also have this other thing over here. Click to check it out!” It might snag a few hardcore fans, but the rest of the world is going to gloss right over it. Do. Not. Do. This. Make sure you turn your pitch into something that feels like an event.

Then, once you do that? Then we get into the deadline phase. Deadlines are the second secret ingredient in any successful sales promo, and that’s because, as humans, we simply need other people to focus our attention. There’s way too much happening at any given time: way too many competing wants, needs, oohhhs, ahhhs, eeeehhhhs, yayyysss, whatttts, whooossss, that even if they’re slightly interested in your thing, they’re going to be distracted by something else in 5 minutes flat—and then your sale just went bye-bye.

When you impose a deadline, however, you ask your customer to pay attention, right here, right now, and make a decision: is this something they’re interested in? Or not? Decide, because the clock’s ticking.

Chances are, they’re already interested because you’ve already been pumping out some fanfare, there, and they’re already curious to see WHAT THE THING IS THAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. But then, when you combine that with a deadline? With an actual countdown? With an actual time in which sales will close?

Total game changer for life.

You can’t tell someone “it’s good!” and make them want to buy. You’ve got to give them an ultimatum: you in, or you out, boo—here’s what this will do for you, and here’s how much longer it’s available. Then they can experience all that you’ve made for them. But before that, they’re going to do that thing that all humans do where they completely and entirely procrastinate, ignore, and tell themselves they’ll get to it later.

I promise you this has already happened to you 100 times. That person who was totally going to become a client or a customer? Got distracted.

And how much does that suck for you? After alllllll the work you put into getting them there and getting them hyped? Then it all falls flat—boo!

So, you want to have open and close windows whenever you can, as this also helps to frame attention. If you’re thinking “but what about products, they’re just available all the time,” they’re actually not: this is why stores have collections. This is why they launch new collections all the time. This is why you can’t buy your favorite sweater every season. It’ll probably be back, but it’ll take on all-new packaging.

So instead of making products available all the time, anytime—which reduces demand—carefully curate windows of opportunity during which people can purchase. Outside of the window, however, they’ll have to wait.

This seems so counterintuitive, because most people are under the impression that you’d make more sales if you COULD SELL 24/7, 365. But this is flawed thinking: the opposite is true. If I can draw your attention to this specific window of time, then I’m creating an event out of my sale, and this feels special, and clients will act now because they don’t have an opportunity to do so outside of the window.

Even if you only make sales during a one-week period, it’s still going to be more overall profit than if you try to just keep things hanging out there alllllllllll the time, whenever anybody wants. This only works if you’re a big brand with a big marketing budget who can afford to spend millions on advertising year-round. If you’re not? You’ve got to create attention. You’ve got to engineer it.

So, those are the two holy grails!

1. Anticipation.
2. Deadlinesssss!

Give your promo its own stage to shine.

Go ahead and flout your stuff, baby! Do not be shy or scared or feel like you’re annoying people or making a big deal out of nothing. If you don’t do this for you, ain’t nobody gonna do this for you.

Happy October from Spain—woo! ❤️

Ash