I get around 300 marketing emails a week. After a while you develop a sixth sense. You see the sender. You see the subject. “Nope.” Delete. Next.
But this one I read twice.
It came from an online store for music producers. The first thing that caught me off guard was… nothing. No giant hero image. No grid of glossy boxes. No “MEGA SUMMER SALE” headlines.
Just a guy. Typing. Plain text. Like he sat down, opened Gmail, and decided to write to another producer instead of broadcasting.
I love that.
“Finally, someone who gets it”, I thought.
Then my bad habit kicked in. Whenever something impresses me, I’m curious to see the rest. So I start snooping.
I pulled his last 30 days of sends into a spreadsheet. Date, sender, offer, price, deadline. One row per email. Boring work. But this 20-minute exercise has paid for itself.
And just 4 rows in, my smile was gone.
Even if every word was flawless, it wouldn’t matter. His problem sat way above the copy, and it costs him 5 figures a month.
Here's what I found, why it happens, and how I'd fix it
1 drummer, 6 drummers
Picture this: you walk into a club, get on stage, and hit a snare drum. Exactly once.
BANG!
The sound slices through the room like a razor. Glasses stop halfway to the mouths. A couple of heads turn. Then people shrug and go back to their drinks. Nobody starts dancing, because one loud hit only creates a mild heart attack, not a groove.
That’s email mistake #1.
Founders send one promo, get a trickle of sales, and declare email dead. Of course it didn’t work. One blast rarely changes anyone’s mind.
Now put 6 drummers on the same stage and tell them all to play a different song. Nobody agrees on tempo. Everybody plays louder, because apparently volume makes it better.
Now people cover their ears and walk out.
That’s mistake #2. Offer Overdose.
It shows up in about half the active promotional calendars I audit. Happens when a business works hard. Seriously, this is pure enthusiasm with no conductor in the room.
Every new idea feels exciting. Every product deserves attention. Every promotion feels urgent. So they stack offers until their subscriber opens a chaotic salad of discounts.
I wouldn’t blame them. I’d leave too.
So I lined up 14 days
On the surface, everything looked busy. Emails went out on schedule, copy was decent, and the offers weren’t bad either. Look at any single promo in isolation and you’d give their marketing team a pat on the back.
That’s what makes this dangerous – nobody reads emails one at a time.
Here’s a composite snapshot of his calendar over 14 days:
- Tuesday: Summer Sale. 3 bundles. 3 price points. Deadline… “sometime this summer.” Sender: the founder.
- Thursday: Everything is suddenly 60% off. Ends Sunday. Sent from support@. Okay…
- Next Monday: Here’s a “special $150 voucher” for their flagship product. Didn’t we just have a sitewide discount? Sender: orders@. I don’t remember ordering something before.
- Wednesday: A random $19 percussion pack from the founder again.
4 marketing emails. 4 unrelated offers. 3 overlapping discount structures. 3 different sender names. At that point I was trying to reverse-engineer their strategy like a puzzle.
3 things jumped off the screen.
First, offers kept overlapping.
Offer A hadn’t finished before Offer B barged in yelling “Forget him, look at me!” Why would I buy your $149 bundle today if yesterday you hinted something cheaper might be around the corner?
Now I have a reason to wait. That’s the opposite of urgency.
Second, the sender name kept changing.
One day the email came from the founder himself. The next from support@. Then orders@. It’s like meeting someone 4 times and getting a different name every time.
Subscribers work it out eventually. Inbox providers won’t. They see 3 senders and split your reputation 3 ways.
Before I read a subject line, I check the sender. If I don’t recognize the name, you don’t get your 2 seconds. Neither does anyone with an inbox with 300 unreads and a meeting in 10 minutes.
Consistency builds familiarity → familiarity builds trust → trust builds opens.
I know. Sounds too simple. That’s usually how good marketing works.
Then my favorite. Fake deadlines.
Deadlines exist to force decisions. So nothing makes me roll my eyes faster than “This offer ends sometime this summer.” Really? So… before Halloween?
It’s just like that “Going Out of Business” banner hanging in the rug store downtown for 3 years. First time they believe you. Second time they hesitate. By the third campaign they know another sale lands next week anyway.
When I point this out…
The defense is always the same
“We give them options. Whoever wants a deal will grab one.”
No, they won’t.
Human brains don’t love endless options. They love EASY decisions. The more comparisons people have to make, the less likely they are to make any.
(Behavioral economics calls this choice overload or decision fatigue.)
Let’s not pretend I know their numbers. I don’t. These are my numbers, so look at % instead.
Let’s say they have a list of 10,000 producers. Take his summer sale, the $149, $49 and $39 bundles, blended out to a $60 average order.
One focused week. One story, one sequence, one deadline, nothing else competing in the inbox. 0.8% of that list buys. A solid number, not a miracle.
80 sales x $60 = $4,800
Compare it to the Offer Overdose version.
Someone opens your bundle email. They’re interested. Then they remember that 60% coupon from 2 days ago. Does it work on bundles? They open another tab to check. Then they remember the $150 voucher, and start stacking coupons that probably don’t stack.
5 minutes ago they wanted fat snares. Now they’re doing taxes.
They stopped shopping and started evaluating. Every coupon is one more reminder that this thing costs money. Look at a $149 price long enough and the question changes. “Is this pack worth it even with the discount?”
Nobody survives that question.
So they close the tab. Their track remains unfinished, but now it’s cheaper.
Two things happen at once, and nobody ever counts the second one.
- Fewer people decide. Confusion eats decisions, so call it half. 0.4% instead of 0.8%. 40 buyers instead of 80.
- The ones who still buy spend less. They waited for the deepest coupon in the pile, so the $149 bundle becomes the $39 one. Average order slides from $60 to $40.
40 sales x $40 = $1,600
$3,200 gone in a week. Two thirds of the revenue, on the same list, with the same products, in the same 7 days. Only because confused buyers have a favorite decision – they buy nothing.
(I’ve repeated this line so many times I should print it on a T-shirt.)
Flip it around and it’s +200%.
Take whatever your last campaign made and multiply it by 3. That’s what’s sitting on the table.
So what would I do?
Probably not what you’d expect from a copywriter.
In a perfect world, we’d break this addiction to discounts. And addiction is the right word. Because every time revenue dips, somebody cuts price. It’s a reflex. Nobody planned it.
But that’s not the world we live in.
If you came to me tomorrow, chances are your business would still need discounts. Maybe investors expect short-term growth. Maybe payroll doesn’t care that we’re trying to improve positioning. Maybe your audience expects promotions because that’s how you’ve trained them for years.
So let’s accept that.
I’m serious. Let’s assume we can’t change the strategy this quarter.
How do we make the current one print more money?
1. Stop making discounts fight each other
That’s where I’d start. With a rhythm.
I call it Deal of the Week. You can call it Flash Weekend, Friday Drop, or whatever fits your brand. I don’t care about the name. I care about the habit.
Every Friday. One featured product. One discount. One deadline, Sunday night. One sender, and it’s you. Then it’s over.
Next Friday we do it again.
Watch what disappears.
Nobody wonders when the next offer arrives. Nobody collects coupon codes like Easter eggs. Nobody opens Excel to work out which combination saves another $4.
Instead they ask one simple question: “What’s THIS week’s deal?” That’s it.
Maybe it’s a vocal pack they don’t need and they move on. Maybe it’s the exact synth bundle they’ve wanted for 3 months. And they buy.
Now they have a reason to open EVERY Friday, because it might be the one they’d hate to miss.
Notice what I didn’t touch.
You’re still discounting. Nothing changed. Same business model, same promotional strategy. The only difference is that your customer can actually keep it in their head.
And humans love patterns.
We know when Netflix drops new episodes. We know Taco Tuesday. We know Black Friday. We know Spotify Wrapped, and every December we line up to share screenshots of our worst musical decisions.
Predictability creates habits → habits create opens → opens create sales.
Funny how often marketing gets complicated trying to avoid simple truths.
Okay, weekly deals solve one problem – they create rhythm and give subscribers a reason to keep checking in. But they aren’t where you make the big money.
2. Make the campaign sell, not the discount
That’s where most brands waste their biggest opportunity. They treat those Summer Sales like 7 identical emails that say:
“50% off.”
“Still 50% off.”
“Still 50% off.”
“…just in case you missed it… still 50% off.”
I swear some campaigns feel like Groundhog Day with countdown timers.
A seasonal campaign has one job. Make people WANT the product. 60% off removes the last bit of friction.
If the only reason someone buys is a lower price, your product sold nothing. The discount did all the heavy lifting
Instead, I’d build one story across the entire week:
- Monday. Show me why this bundle exists.
- Tuesday. Show me how other producers use it.
- Wednesday. “Isn’t this just another drum pack?”
- Thursday. Play before-and-after examples. Talk about inspiration. Talk about recording process. Talk about Ableton sessions. Teach me something. Make me picture myself using it.
- Only then do you remind me the sale ends on Sunday.
See the difference?
The markdown no longer carries your campaign. Your product does. It gives me a reason NOT to wait.
Weekly promotions build a habit, seasonal campaigns build desire. One earns the open, the other earns the purchase. Mix them and they cancel out. Keep them apart and they feed each other.
That’s the whole calendar. Weekly rhythm, seasonal drops, nothing overlapping.
52 Friday emails, plus seasonal campaigns. Each one a multi-part story that has to make somebody want another folder of 2,000 snares they’ll audition for 40 minutes before picking the same one. (As always.)
Our music store guy sends plenty. Volume was never his problem.
His problem is that no email had a single job. Every one of them carried 3 products, 2 discounts, a vague deadline, a different sender and a different design, then asked his reader to sort it out.
I made The Revenue Letter course for that. To assemble a promotional copy that points at ONE thing and lands on the beat. Which product, which reason, which order, which deadline. The writing is the last 10 minutes.
The calendar gives you the rhythm. Now get the words to make everybody move.
Anyway. That’s about a month of work, and most of it is deleting.
Now the part I parked at the beginning.
3. Then we start weaning off discounts
Discounting hurts every business that leans on it. Walmart gets away with it because Walmart sells to everyone with a pulse and a wallet.
You don’t. You sell a niche product to niche audience. Your market isn’t infinite.
People love throwing around phrases like “millions of producers.”
Sure, millions of people have downloaded FL Studio. Millions have made a beat once. Millions collect free samples like Pokémon cards.
Now filter them.
Cut the hobbyists who never spend money. Cut the pirates (hello Audionews). Cut those who don’t speak your language or don’t fit your market. What’s left? Maybe 50,000. Maybe 100,000. GLOBALLY.
That’s a microscopic pond. Very profitable if you respect it. Very empty if you keep dumping 60% discounts every other week.
Because you spend years teaching your audience one lesson: “Don’t buy today. Wait. It’ll be cheaper next Tuesday.” Then sales dry up and everyone wonders why.
Niche businesses win on the opposite math. They compete on trust. On quality. On workflow. On becoming somebody’s favorite tool. And a discount is just one wrench in the toolbox. Not the whole toolbox.
That takes time. Price by price, campaign by campaign. That weekly rhythm buys you time to do it without punching a hole in your revenue.
But none of it is possible while 4 offers are still stepping on each other.
Ever heard a recording of your own voice and thought: “no way, I don’t sound like that”? But you do. (I hate mine.) You’re just used to the version that travels through your own skull.
Same with offer overdose.
The more audits I run, the less I believe businesses have copy problems. Instead of asking whether everyone plays the same song, they bang harder on the drums.
Everything feels urgent. Every promotion feels important. You hear your own volume, effort and hustle. Your customers hear the noise.
That’s where I come in with fresh ears and pull your calendar apart. I find where your offers steal sales from each other, then tune the whole thing until it grooves.
But your calendar isn’t this music store’s calendar. You have different products, different prices, different reasons your list learned to wait.
So I’d do the same thing I did here, on your business. I read your last 90 days of emails, your prices and your sales numbers. You get back 3 things: where you’re losing money, what to stop sending this week, and the exact calendar I’d run next quarter with the reason behind every call.
Sounds familiar?
Email me with “Audit” in the subject. Tell me what you sell and what your last month looked like. I’ll tell you whether it’s worth doing.
P.S. It’s paid work and it isn’t cheap. It also isn’t a Zoom where we discuss the weather for 20 minutes before anyone mentions marketing. Compared to the $3,200 that just one campaign cost him, the arithmetic lands in your favor.