Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a 15-hour power outage.
Over 1000 apps were shut down, and millions of businesses didn’t have their websites running.
Pretty crazy, right?
When stuff like this happens, it always reminds me how fragile our day-to-day life is.
A similar thing happened to me earlier this year when Spain and Portugal suffered a massive blackout.
It was noontime in Barcelona, and I was writing a similar article when, all of a sudden, I heard a strange noise:
*PING*
The screen on my laptop went dim.
“Did the electricity go out?” I asked my partner, Melani.
“I don’t have internet…” she replied.
“I’ll go check outside.”
When I opened the front door, I saw hordes of people standing around, staring at their phones, looking just as baffled as I was.
I immediately realized this wasn’t exclusive to our flat.
No one had access to the internet or electricity 😨
“Don’t worry, it will come back soon,” I told Mel assuringly.
But the crazy part was… it didn’t.
For the next god-knows how long, we didn’t have any access to basic services.
No groceries. No cooking. No public transport.
You couldn’t even call the emergency line because there was no service.
And it was kinda scary because no one knew what was going on, or why it happened.
That day I was also supposed to do our weekly groceries.
For lunch, we managed to get one last baguette from a bakery around the corner that was just about to close.
At some point around 8 pm, the sun set and it got pitch dark.
All we could do was sit around in our flat, listen to the news on the radio, and anxiously wait for this situation to end.
I’m not joking when I say it looked like the start of The Purge.
But then a few hours later, the announcer on the radio said:
“We’re starting to see electricity come back to certain areas of Spain.”
And about thirty minutes later, as we were sitting on our sofa, it happened…
I heard the same strange sound from our refrigerator that I heard before:
*PING*
The light flicked back on.
Everyone around the neighborhood started clapping and screaming.
A sense of relief was in the air.
It felt like sitting inside a Ryanair plane that had just made a successful landing.
Iykyk 😉
Days like that remind us that even when we think we have everything, it can be gone in a snap.
All you can do is prepare well for those days, which we certainly didn’t.
Anyway, today I wanted to show you how you can use global events like these and turn them into a lucrative sales campaign.
I found this campaign by Mini.Katana on X.
This brand was recently affected by the AWS shutdown, and I thought what they did was super smart.
Let’s get into it:
What is Emails That Sell?
Each week, I break down an email from a DTC e-commerce brand. Some of these brands are absolutely killing it when it comes to email marketing.
My goal with this series is to challenge conventional email marketing. Expect to learn different copywriting techniques, sales psychology, and consumer behavior — everything that moves you away from hard-selling discount campaigns and other mass-market tactics.
If you have an email you want me to break down, send it over to me on LinkedIn or at marketing@siimpettai.com.
Let’s get into it now:
You may look at this email and be like, “WTF is this?”
A fifth grader could write something like this…
Well, that’s the whole point!
Email marketing really isn’t that complicated.
All you need is:
- Context
- An offer
- Urgency
And you’re good to go.
Don’t let marketing midwits tell you that you need pretty emails and all that other BS.
You don’t. Trust me. I’ve done this long enough…
Anyway, let’s have a look at the subject line of this email:
“We went offline… but came back sharper (Here’s 15% off!)”
This is an A+ subject line, and here’s why:
It’s written in lowercase. It feels human.
When I receive an email like this as a subscriber, I know it’s NOT written by AI just by looking at the subject line.
This may sound like I’m reaching, but I’m not… check this out:
Every subject line ChatGPT generated for this campaign is uppercase and absolutely terrible.
“The Samurai Have Returned”
Another reason why this is a great subject is that it teases an offer. This sells the click really well.
Now, what I like about the body copy is the conversational tone. It feels like an actual human talking to you, one-on-one.
This campaign also does something really important, which you should remember every single time you run a sale:
A successful sales campaign has context.
If you don’t have a compelling reason to give a discount or an offer, your sale will lose its meaning.
That’s something I learned from Daniel Throssell.
You can’t run a sale every Saturday and expect to be a profitable business because you’re conditioning your list to never buy at full price.
In this case, the context… or the reason for the sale is the AWS outage.
The brand’s website was down for a couple of hours, and the people who wanted to buy during that timeframe weren’t able to place an order.
So to give them a discount code the day after is a really simple (yet smart) angle.
One last thing to point out about this email is the urgency.
It mentions the 15% discount offer but also states that it’s only valid for the next 12 hours, which brings me to my final point:
You need to give customers a reason to buy now.
Because if you give subscribers time to decide, they will take it every time.
Some of them will move on with their day and forget you’re even running a sale, although they wanted to buy.
Always use urgency in your sales campaigns.
To recap:
TL;DR
Key takeaway #1: Turn real-world events into sales opportunities.
Key takeaway #2: A great sales campaign has context, an offer, and urgency.
Key takeaway #3: Use lowercase subject lines to pass the AI test.
Key takeaway #4: Write to one person.
Key takeaway #5: Every successful sale has a compelling reason.
Key takeaway #6: Use urgency to give customers a reason to act now.
What’s next
Send a plain-text sales campaign. Tie it to a personal story or event, and use urgency to drive conversions.
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