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My Digital Farmer Podcast
334 The Anatomy of a Great Email Offer — A Deep Dive Audit
00:36:07
Every once in a while, an email offer lands in my inbox that stops me in my tracks. It's not just well-written... it's strategic. It makes me want to forward it. Study it. Steal from it. In today’s episode, I’m auditing one of those unicorn emails...
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This week I got an email from a company that I buy from, and the offer inside stopped me in my tracks. Have you ever had that happen? It was one of the smartest promotions I've ever seen and I thought, wow, I need to share this with my farmers. So today I'm going to do a quick audit of that email and break down why it worked so well on me and show you how you can take the same principles and apply them to build your own great offers. Let's get started. Hey there, this is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers and increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 334 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business, too. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Happy October. Big shout out to all of my regular binge listeners. Glad you're here. And if you're new to the show, I'm glad you've checked it out. Make sure you go and subscribe to the podcast. Go look at my first 10 episodes. I always send new people there because they were designed many years ago to be kind of like an on ramp into the marketing lingo that we talk about on this show. An introduction to the space. It'll teach you kind of the key principles and fundamentals. You can also get onto my email list and that's going to do the same thing, probably faster and even better. Do so by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. It's free. You need to get on that list because I'm sending you a weekly email that points to this podcast and kind of pulls out the principle. But I'm also initially just going to send you three months worth of content about every five days, and I really map that out in a very specific order and sequence to help each email build on the next and teach you the ropes. So I hope you give that a shot? MyDigitalFarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends @Localline. If managing orders, customers and inventory feels chaotic this season, it might be time for a better system. Localline is the all in one sales platform built for farms and food hubs. Whether you're selling direct to consumer or managing wholesale buyers or running a CSA with tools like E commerce, automated inventory management, subscriptions, barcode scanning, box builder, and pos, localline helps you simplify operations and grow your sales. In fact, farmers using localline increase their annual sales by 23% and boost their average order size by 9.5%. Switching is easy. No setup fees, no sales commissions, and your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront for free. No joke, so that you can get started without missing a beat. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use my code MDF2025 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline use that coupon code and you'll be on your way. Start selling smarter this season with localline. And now back to the show. Have you ever gotten an email in your inbox, an email offer that actually made you stop what you were doing and sit there and think, who could I share this with? Yeah, that's really rare when you want to hit the forward button. Most marketing emails that have promotional offers either get deleted or get skimmed by me. But every now and then an offer comes along that is just so good, so well crafted that it makes me pause and feel something and want to take action. And this week I got one of those emails and as I read it, I thought to myself, this is really brilliant. This is like a masterclass in layering different strategies inside of a single offer. And I want to share this as a case study with my farmers. And the product that it was selling me is not a farm product, but the strategies going on inside of it are something you can replicate with your business. And so I want to use it as an example and I want you to think through the lens of your farm business and this kind of the principles I'm going to pull out here and think, what can I learn from this? How can I apply this? So I really want to unpack today what made that offer work so well, and we're going to look at some of the different psychological levers that it pulled. You're going to hear familiar themes that I've brought up before on this podcast, like scarcity and urgency and social proof, even how it made the customer, AKA me, feel special. And then I'm going to try to translate those principles into kind of some simple farm friendly examples so that you can see how you might start using them in your own promotions. But I hope that you'll be able to get creative and see my line of thinking here and extrapolate and move the pawn forward on your own after you hear today's episode. So the first thing I'm going to do is read the email to you and then we're going to break down the offer. So I actually printed out that email. I'm going to read from it here. And this came from a company called Function Health. I might have to give a little bit of background here. So Function Health is a on the line membership for people who want to get their own medical testing done. That's sort of beyond what the conventional medical world recommends. If you were to go to your doctor and say, hey, I'd like to get the thyroid panel test taken, they would write a prescription, you would go get it tested, and only three different markers would be actually tested, like your TSH and your free T4. But there are other markers that functional medicine doctors like to look at because they can give hints for some of the other things going on. Those aren't typically in a basic panel, but you can request those as well. And so when you get the full picture of all the different tests related to thyroid, you can see a few more things. And so that's kind of what this particular membership offers. You pay a annual fee, it's like 500 a year. And then that gets you two different rounds of testing panels where you can basically show up to a testing site of your choice. They run the basic set of more advanced blood panels and urine tests, testing for all these extra biomarkers. And then that gets sent in to Function Health. There's a clinician that reviews it and gives you kind of a summary report and things that you have to be concerned about and next steps. And so I'm paying for that for two different tests every six months. So it's a total of 12 months. This allows you to get a baseline of what your readings are and then get the results, try to make improvements and, and then go back and get tested again. Okay. So I was very interested in this kind of a product. If you know my backstory and my history for the last year and a half, I have been dealing with some health issues. I have pretty successfully healed my gut and so I was kind of Curious. You know, where, where are my biomarkers? Is there anything I need to be concerned about? And that's kind of why I wanted to join. But I wanted to be in a community where I knew that I would be getting some of the more fringe tests taken. Okay, so that's the context. So this is the email that came to me about two months after I've joined and it said this 100 hours only gift a one time $300 credit to function hi Corinna. You're one of the first to believe in function, that people can own their own health. Because you've been here from the start, we are gifting you something special now. For the next 100 hours you have a single use $300 credit to share with a loved one that they can put toward their first year of function. Not a discount, not a promotion. A true gift reserved for you to pass on to someone who whose health you care about. How to share Your gift number one forward this email to the person you choose. 2. Have them sign up@functionhealth.com founding member by 10/3/2025. 3. They'll use your gift code at checkout and then it has the gift code what you're giving access to 100 plus lab tests annually. A deeper, more complete look at their health than any annual physical actionable insights, clear results and clinician notes about what their data means and results tracking over time. One secure place to see their health evolve across the years. This is a one time only gift solely for new members to apply to their first year of membership. The credit expires at 2pm Eastern on October 3, 2025. Two 100 healthy years the function team now I want you to imagine that you are the ideal customer for this kind of product. A person like me who's gone through a traumatic health scare and had to go the conventional medicine route, didn't find solutions there, had to seek out alternatives and this tool ended up being a vital tool to help me get better. So the first thing I want to point out is that this offer works so well because it is being sent to their ideal customer. They know their ideal customer, what their pain points were, what their common experiences are and they know how powerful and helpful this particular resource is. They know exactly how to speak to me, to make me connect with the offer. So that's sort of the first principle I want you to take home is that a really great offer is partly great because it knows its audience and it speaks directly to our pain points and our desired transformation. And I want you to be thinking about that as you look at your farm business and how you're putting together products and offers and specials, even like building your, your signature offer, where you're taking people eventually on your ladder of products, you want to be thinking through that lens of like, is it. Is this what my ideal customer wants? Like, do they long for this? Is this really helpful to them? Because it shouldn't be hard to talk about this product. If it's a really good product and you've got it dialed into the right customer base, it's going to be easy to build offers around it. The first kind of marketing principle that I want to point out, that was at play in this email, which I have a feeling you probably spotted because it was pretty obvious, is the Scarcity Urgency card. Did you notice that at the very top of the email, it said you have 100 hours to act? That's not a lot of time. And it immediately sets the stopwatch ticking in the prospect's mind. And I began to think through, do I know anybody? This is an amazing offer. Do I know anybody? I don't have a lot of time. I need to take action on this now or in the next couple of days. And anytime you build an offer, if you can add an urgency or a scarcity element to it, it will cause more people to decide sooner. And that's what you're trying to do. You're. You're not trying to manipulate people or get people to say yes to something that isn't for them. You're just trying to speed up the process and the timing of the conversion. You're coaching the conversion to the yes. If this is a good product for that person and you feel confident that it's going to help someone, then you're just trying to say, hey, like, don't take five months to say yes. Like, if you think it's good, like, just make the decision now. And that's what building these offers with scarcity and urgency will do for you. The next thing I want to point out is that the discount, the offer itself was just really, really strong. The membership costs, I want to say it's either 4.99 or 5.99 for the year. So a $300 off discount or gift to give to someone is 50% off. That's a really good deal. So, you know, I'm thinking about other people that I know who have similar health stories. Like, I too, and I've been, I've been running into a lot of them because I've been telling My story. And immediately there were several faces that came to mind. When I read this email, I'm like, oh, I wonder if so and so would like to get their levels checked, if they would be curious to see what a test like this would reveal. And I could send this email to them, I could forward it to them, and it would end up looking like a really good entry point. Instead of saying, hey, you have to start at $600, which is a fair amount of change to say, well, it's $300 off. Now, that person is going to think of that as like a really good deal. Like, wow, how often do you get a 50% off thing? Now, how is it that this company can offer that? Well, this is where we get back to that discussion about what is the lifetime customer value of their typical customer in their sales funnel and Function Health. I'm sure knows the raw data on this. They can actually look at their sales, the customers that have come through the doors, how long they stay, what tests they upgrade to. Like, you don't just. I ended up not just buying the $600 test, but when I was going to actually choose the test that I wanted. There were several that weren't in the basic package that I decided to add on. And so it was another six, $700 that I spent for additional testing. So they have data like that to see, well, how many of our customers typically upgrade and they can see, like in one year, this is how much someone will spend with Function Health. And they look at those numbers and they can do the math and say, yeah, we are willing to offer something like this. That's $300 off. Because we know that most people who enter the funnel who take that offer will probably end up spending this much extra and will make up that money on the back end. I'm sure they would not make this offer unless they knew that they were going to make enough on the back end. So that's where, as you're thinking about, hey, would this work for me to do something like this, you have to know your numbers and if you can see what your average order values are, the order frequency of your customers, how many new customers you typically bring in every quarter, you'd be able to extrapolate and see what is the amount of money that I could spend to acquire a lead. And that's what this would be, right? This is a lead acquisition email. This is an email that's getting their customers to find new customers for them and making an offer that's so irresistible and so shareable that I go out because I know people like myself, and I will go out and pitch this offer on, on their behalf. But this only works if you know your numbers. So I just want to make sure I point that out. And, and you know, when they stare at their numbers and they see, well, gosh, you know, we're making an average of $1,500 in, in one year on a customer. Well, yeah, then we're willing to give them $300 to get in the door, especially since many of them will probably turn into customers that stay 2, 3, 4, 5 years. And we're making that $1500 every year off of them. That's a, that's a very good deal. Okay, so that was the other thing I wanted to point out that just the, the offer, the dollar amount was very generous. It felt very generous. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. All right, farmer, let me ask you something. Is marketing your farm something you actually enjoy, or does it feel like a constant struggle? If you are like most farmers that I talk to, you are wearing all the hats, and marketing always seems to slip through the cracks. Can I get an amen? That's exactly why I created Farm Marketing School. It's an online membership designed to help farmers like you build a simple, repeatable marketing system that actually works. Inside. You'll get bite sized, step by step projects that make marketing easier. Each month you pick what to work on, like writing better sales emails or improving your website copy, or setting up your online store. And I walk you through exactly how you should be doing it. And you're not doing this alone. Every month we have a live Zoom meetup where you can ask me questions, meet other members of Farm Marketing School, get coaching, and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a farm marketing mentor in your back pocket. This isn't some long, overwhelming course. The projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days. So you're making steady progress without it taking over your life. So if you're ready to stop winging it and finally build a marketing system that brings in steady sales, come join Farm Marketing School today. Sign up for your first month and see what a difference it makes. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com fms to get started. And now back to the show. This idea of gift versus discount, did you notice they worded it as a gift? I love that. It feels more generous. It feels more personal. I'm not being sold to. I'm being empowered to give. And so when I look at this I'm not thinking, oh, I can get to take that 300 discount for myself for the next time I want to buy. I'm actually being challenged to share the goodness and the generosity with someone else. And then when I send it off to a friend and I say, hey, here's a gift I want to share with you, then I also end up looking good as the person who shared it. Right. So the company Function Health is making me look good as I help refer this product and help them spread their customer base. Super brilliant. That's just a semantics thing, calling it a gift versus a discount. The fact that there is a referral mechanism going on here, we've sort of talked about that. But let me just state the obvious. This is forcing me to share with someone else. This is like word of mouth built right into the offer. They could go out and try and run ads to acquire new customers through Facebook or whatever, but instead they're using the clientele they already have. People who know other people like them, who probably are in community and are attracting other people who are also sick and dealing with stuff like this, that they're tapping into that network and saying, you know the people. Why don't you share this with people? You know, this is an irresistible offer, so use your own customer base. I'll do an entire podcast just about referral marketing because it's so powerful. But oftentimes the beginning stages of building your business is built on referrals. It's a very common type of strategy and it works. And Function Health is a fairly new software system or a new tool. And you could hear that in the language of the email, like as one of their founding members. Right. And that kind of makes me feel special that, oh, I'm considered a founding member. I got in early when this was just an idea, and I'm helping them build this really cool thing that makes me want to join in and continue to be a customer and help them create this strong foundation and this new product. Right. So it's encouraging me to jump in and become the word of mouth engine for them. Social Proof and testimonials are baked into this process as well. We've talked a lot about that in this podcast in other episodes. Social proof is a key part in the customer sales journey. Somewhere in your sales process, you need to have testimonials baked in. You should have them on your website page. You could have them on your product description for some of your products. You could have them regularly in your social media channels. People, when they're first checking out a product, they often will not take action until they see that it works for someone else. And so they're looking for the testimonial, they're looking for the reviews before they decide to buy your product. Sometimes they're not even aware that they're doing that. But it's usually a step that's. I mean, it's almost always in the buyer process. And so here's another way to use a testimonial or to get me to make a testimonial as a customer. They send me an offer that's so irresistible, I can't personally use it for me because it's being called a gift for someone else. But they're inviting me to share it with a friend that I think could use it. And in the process, when I forward it to someone, I'm going to tell them how I am currently using this product, how I have gotten my first set of test results back, and it was really, really helpful. I have since learned that I have a food sensitivity to coffee and to egg whites and to cod liver oil and all kinds of other things. Some of some of these things were things I was still eating, and I cut those out as soon as I saw these results. And I've seen another dramatic shift in my health, right? So I can like tell a story like that and say, this has been really helpful. This is gonna shortcut some of your waiting in your exploration process. Cause you're gonna see, you're gonna learn some data. And when that comes from me, a person who's actually using the product, it will help sell it. It will help, especially because I'm a trusted authority in the space, right? So anytime you are getting a customer to implicitly endorse the brand, you're going to remove friction for new people to join. So this is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. So it's leveraging the whole social proof piece that is instrumental in causing someone to decide to buy. And it makes that element fire. And then I sort of referred to this. But there's the customer lifetime value logic that's going on underneath this offer. So the company knows that once someone joins Function Health, they will likely upgrade. They won't just spend that 599 for the basic tests that they get twice a year. They will upgrade and say, you know what? I do want the food Sensitive sensitivity panel. And yeah, I want to get the hormone testing done because I think I'm going through menopause and I want to see what's up. And, you know, some of those things aren't included in the basic basic panel. And so they already know, based on their data, roughly which, you know, how much a person in addition is going to spend. And so they are willing to spend $300 to, to acquire a high value customer that, you know, if they look at their, if they look at their data, is probably going to spend this amount in upgrades and they're probably going to renew their membership two, three times before they drop out. They know this number, okay? And that's why they're willing to make an offer that goes as high as $300. So those are some of the factors, some of the sales psychology things that were going on in this offer. And what's so cool is that they were layered on top of each other. It wasn't just one that was being one card that was being played. There were several being played at the same time. And that's why when I read it, I just was in awe. My jaw dropped and I was like. I found myself wanting to send this email to someone because I'm like, wow, this is so good. I wish I had had this offer. I would have saved $300 when I first came in the door for this company because it's been such a great service and I love it and I, I want to tell other people about it already. And then to get this offer, I'm like, oh my gosh, I want to give this away. Who do I know that's currently dealing with stuff like it made me want to do the thing for all of these reasons we just went through. So it made the customer feel valued. Right? You're special. You get to give this. You're one of our founding members. It turns me into a brand ambassador. The sky scarcity element makes me want to take action on this offer fast. It doesn't feel like a promotion. It it so it doesn't really cheapen the brand. Instead it, you know, it's positioned as a gift and it's built to attract the right, the right leads, right people who are connected to me, who probably value and care about the same things, who have a similar story. And I'm going to help them vet their future clients. So I just think it's a really awesome offer. One of the things that I want you to think about in general, this is kind of an aside that I wrote here in my notes is anytime you get an email like this because they come across my inbox once in a blue moon. But if you ever get a really good sales offer, you should file it away in a special doc in your Gmail inbox, like call it swipe file or great offers or just something like that where you can store it and just save it. And that way when it comes time to actually build your own offers, you have a place to go where you can just reread them and be inspired by them. I have a folder like that on my Gmail and this one is definitely going in there because I just thought, wow, this is really good marketing. That's because I'm a marketing geek and I like to study them. But there's something to think about. So I was trying to think about, what does this look like for, you know, a farm business like yours? And I tried to look through the lens of those different marketing angles. You know, the scarcity, urgency play. How can you pull that into an offer? You know, can you create a birthday week only coupon that would be an example of an offer that expires in seven days. Or maybe it's for that entire month that they get to come in. Is it a free bundle add on bundle for the next 48 hours when you buy your signature product, right. And you have a time clock there that starts ticking. The gift language, instead of discount, you could talk about like, we're gifting you a $10 farm credit to use on your next order, or we're gifting you one week of a CSA share that you have to give to a friend so you can't use it yourself. But it's like, hey, I'm going to give you a gift certificate so that you can share this gift certificate with someone, you know, who you think would like your share. And now you basically make them look really good. The referral and share a shareability card. You could have something like give your VIPs a $10 coupon, but they have to give it to a friend. So it's again, helping them share the love on your behalf. Or, you know, will gift your friend their first loaf of bread if you bring them to the market with you. And they know that knowing that this person, when they get that free loaf of bread, will probably decide to buy at least one other thing because the law of reciprocity is, you know, at play there. Or maybe they'll come back the second time and, you know, spend an average order value of 30, $40 on bread. Who knows, right? So again, this is something that at first you sort of take a leap of faith on and gather data, but eventually you start to see patterns and say, you know, when I do this, this kind of offer, yeah, there are some People who take me for a free ride. But most of the people do end up coming back and spending about this much. And you can begin to measure that data, that customer lifetime value logic. So you can be willing to give away or deeply discount your gateway product just to get them into your funnel. Because again, you know your numbers, you can see the data, and it makes sense to be willing to take, you know, a 10, $20 hit on the front end. Because 85% of the people that take that offer do end up turning into people who have a lifetime customer value of $500 or $1,000 or whatever it is. And that totally like, I would do that deal every single day. So, like a meat producer giving away a free bacon with their first order, knowing that it hooks them for life. Now, if you test that and you find out that most people are just taking the free bacon and never buying again, well, then, yeah, stop doing that. But you can test that for a while and see if that works, right? That's a little bit of a faith jump. But many times you end up finding what is that perfect lure that attracts your ideal customer and keeps them hooked. And then finally, that social proof via a testimonial. Like, you could bundle the referral with a testimonial request. You could say, hey, we'll give you $10 in credit if your friend shares a photo of their first veggie box. I was trying to think outside the box on that. So those are just some examples. But what I really want you to do, try to figure out how you can play around with these principles like, you don't have to be a health membership company to do this kind of stuff, right? Functions 300 gift email works because it layers all of these different elements. It layers the scarcity, the generosity, the social proof, the talking to their ideal customer, knowing their customer, the lifetime value, thinking it's all in one. And so as farmers, we can use these same levers to create offers that, that don't just sell a product, but they end up creating energy. They end up creating buzz, loyalty around our brand story. And so that's, that's what I loved about this, this offer. It's why I wanted to do a special audit of it. There were so many cool things going on at play. And maybe you heard this today and it's just gotten you thinking. So my challenge to you this week is to come up with an offer like, go play in the sandbox and come up with an offer that would be irresistible. Maybe this just spurred, spurred an idea and, and really have a spirit of curiosity around it and play. Don't feel attached to the results. Just throw it out into the world and say, I wonder what would happen if I did this and put some, you know, a container around it. Like, I'm going to do this for two weeks with no judgment, and I'm just going to see what the data shows me. Inside of Farm Marketing School, we have an entire project called Build a Better Offer. And for four weeks during that month that you're doing the project, every week, you are challenged to test a new type of offer that's kind of in our offer deck on your audience. And the idea is just to play in the sandbox and to. To have this spirit of play and exploration. And some of them are not going to work so well, but you're going to find a few winners and you're also just going to get exposed to some of the different ways that you can build an offer in the first place and how to move people through offers. So if you're interested in kind of going deeper with this, just know that there is a project inside of our marketing school that you can jump into at any time. If you subscribe, you can decide that's going to be my first or my second project, and I just want to get exposed to the different kinds of offer formulas. I want to play around in the sandbox, test them out in kind of a safe space, and see what I learned. Just be be aware that that is a resource that's in there. I'm probably going to actually run that one live again this winter because I just think it's so good. And there are some things I want to add to the project, the. The teaching course element. So if you come in this winter, you'll. You'll probably even get a chance to do that. That whole training session live with me as I reteach it to put the new version into Farm Marketing School. We're always updating stuff. All right, well, there you have it. That was the episode. If you want the show notes, I'll put a copy of that function health email into the show notes just in case you want to see the wording of it again. That will be@mydigitalfarmer.com 334 and if you like today's episode, share it with a farmer friend. Would you let them know that podcast exists and you can just go swipe the link for the show and share it with them? Or go to mydigitalfarmer.com podcast and find it there? Remember, you can also get onto my email list. I just really want to encourage you to do that. There's so much good stuff. Every week I send you a weekly email with a marketing tip, but you'll also get subscribed to that initial kind of nurture sequence that teaches you the ropes and shows you the principles for the first three and a half months. Going to get something like every five days, so file those away. It's so, so good. I walk you through the jungle and you can do that by getting onto mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. Just go subscribe on that form there and it'll start instantaneously. All right. All right. Thanks for joining me today, you guys. This was really fun. And I'll catch you next time. Have an amazing week. And remember, I believe in J.