The Jasmine Star Show

Old School Marketing Tactics, New School Results

• Jasmine Star

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Wanna know what makes people stop scrolling and actually pay attention to your business?

This episode is like sitting front row in a marketing masterclass—with real examples that made me go, “Dang. THAT is good.”

I share 3 real-life examples of irresistible marketing—from a PayPal email that stopped me in my tracks, to a blog that made me want to hire the writer immediately, to a customer service email that turned into a sales lesson.

And the best part? You can use all of them today in your own business.

Here’s what you’ll hear:

  • A genius way to turn an old-school flyer tactic into digital gold 💸
  • How one cold email stood out using just $0.02 (yes, really)
  • Why idioms, pattern interrupts, and cognitive fluency matter in your copy
  • How a writer earned my trust—without a pitch
  • What a SaaS company taught me about challenging assumptions and using data to sell smart
  • How customer service teams can secretly become your best sales channel

This episode is filled with copywriting gold, marketing psychology, and strategy you can swipe for your next email, launch, or brand campaign.

Grab a notebook (you’ll want to write these down) and press play now.

Click >>PLAY<< to hear all of this and:

[00:28] Why what worked last month might flop today (and what to do about it)

[02:47] Marketing move #1: “Show Me the Money” — how a $0.02 email cut through the noise

[07:07] Using idioms and neuromarketing to build familiarity and trust fast

[10:54] Marketing move #2: “Thank You, No Thank You” — how a blog reader turned into a hot lead

[13:34] Marketing move #3: “No, But Here’s Something Better” — how smart SaaS email turned a no into insight + upsell

[21:27] Why challenging assumptions and asking for feedback is the future of growth marketing

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For full show notes, visit jasminestar.com/podcast/episode545

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  This is old school marketing done in a new way. Using an idiom. Using psychological components. Using neuromarketing. Using conversational tone. All the reasons why that piece of marketing worked. Do you want to cut through the noise? Do you want to get attention on what it is that you're doing? How do you stick out in a saturated market? Welcome to the Jazmin Starr show. We're going to get question answers to all of your questions right about now. Now I think about these questions all the time. And I create content to document what I'm learning and to document what I'm doing. And I'm also creating content today to share with you what I'm doing and what I'm learning, and how it's impacting the state of my business. Now, I recently had a conversation with my seven figure mastermind, and I had explained that the nature of marketing is intended to change what worked for you yesterday or last month. There's a good chance it's not going to work with you today. It is constantly evolving, and so I'm always on the look for how other companies have really traversed this new territory, things that they're doing to cut through the noise, how they caught my attention.

Jasmine Star 00:01:01  And I would say I'm a pretty savvy marketer. I understand business in a way. So for something a piece of content or a way that somebody is doing it to catch my attention, it means that it's man, that makes me sound like this is like a humblebrag. It's like I could see good marketing and I could see great marketing, and I could see marketing that just cuts through it all. And when it does, I'm like, wow, my barometer is pretty high. And so props to you and I want to share three great real examples that all I received in the last month that I thought was really amazing. And I want to use them in my business, and I want to share them with you so you can use them in your business. And I think that I am a better entrepreneur because of it. Now, before we do, I want to start off by saying thank you to Astra Johanna, who left a review five stars and it said life changing from personal development to business strategies, Jasmin Show has been so impactful in my life.

Jasmine Star 00:01:50  Astra Johanna, thank you so much for leaving that. And for those of you who leave a review, it really does change the game in so many ways. And so I want to say thank you. I look forward to reading one of your five star reviews in the future. Now let's get back to our examples, real life examples from real businesses that have impacted me in the last month that I will be incorporating into my irresistible marketing as I move through this year and into the next. So, example number one irresistible content marketing, what I call. Show me the money. Now, recently I was listening to a podcast called My First Million, and they were talking about old school marketing and how old school marketing can make a comeback. It should make a comeback. They were talking about how they were like 90s songs that are trending on TikTok that are having like a renaissance, and they're like, we should be doing this with marketing. And they talked about this old school marketing idea or ad. And so the idea was, if you have like a local based business, let's say you're a landscaper or you have an HVAC company, they're talking about how old school marketing you would print out flyers.

Jasmine Star 00:02:47  And yeah, everybody gets a lot of flyers. But what one really ingenious entrepreneur did was he paper clipped a $1 bill to every single flier that he had placed on somebody's door. And. Well, number one, the dollar got attention. Number two, it was a real dollar. And then the copy on the flyer had said, if this caught your attention, imagine how much money you could save using my services. Okay. Super old school, super greedy, a little bit cheesy, but what did it do? It cut through the noise. It caught somebodys attention. It made somebody think twice. And that's what marketing is. Marketing is different from sales. So marketing is just capturing somebody's attention and getting them to pay attention in a different way. So I realized that it had happened to me, except it happened to me in a digital form. That old school marketing idea of paper clipping a dollar to a flyer. It happened to me, but in my inbox. Here's how. I'm sitting at the Austin airport.

Jasmine Star 00:03:44  I am getting ready to fly home, and I'm just scrolling through my emails, getting caught up, and I get an email from PayPal, which, okay, that's our that's how we that's our merchant. That's how we process our payments. So getting an email from PayPal, I wouldn't actually open it. And the subject line, I'm not going to talk about what this company is because more on that in a second. But I'm just going to say I'm gonna call it X company. X company.com sends you a note. And and then I see a dollar sign. And I was like, oh, this company sent me money and it's from PayPal. Legit PayPal. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to read the email that I read at the Austin airport to give you an idea of what I saw, but I'm blanking out that company's name. x.com has sent you $0.02 USD. Here's the copy. I really hope this isn't bothering you. There's a link at the end of our note.

Jasmine Star 00:04:30  If you take the time to demo with us and it's not worth your time, we'll buy you Starbucks. Really? I was like, what is this, Jasmine? I know this is untraditional, but we're really hoping to get your attention. I saw social curators in LinkedIn yesterday, and I had to send you my $0.02. If you're trying to reach customers, there's a better and cheaper way than spending $5,000 on meta Google or booking one podcast ad. Here's a secret if you and social curators send the right emails with. And then I'm going to go to, we'll just say X company. Then what happens is you're going to get results fast are $0.02. Jasmine, do you have 15 minutes to see how it could work for you? We just want to show you how Blanc X company could help you. If you're intrigued. Go to this link to grab time with us you guys. They literally sent the digital version of paper, clipping a dollar to a flyer and posting it on my virtual front door.

Jasmine Star 00:05:22  My stinking inbox. So their marketing was really spot on. They said, my $0.02. What is this? This is an idiom. These are like language. These. These are things spoken in a specific language that in our nomenclature, in our culture, we understand what that means. I would have never have opened a cold email from this company. Not in a million years. I never open any anything that is not from a company that I already know and is reputable. So I thought to myself, wow, this cut through the noise because we're using a trusted third party to send me in and it said they had sent me money, but I couldn't see the amount of money in the subject line. I think that was very calculated. So I want to take a moment here, and I want to point out the difference between marketing and sales. Marketing is getting somebody's attention. Marketing is asking you to have an opinion. Marketing is awareness. Sales is actual signing on the contract. Those are two different things, and I have two different approaches.

Jasmine Star 00:06:14  But why this caught my attention was I thought it was highly effective marketing. I did not become a customer, but I became aware. I became aware of their business. I became aware of what they did. I actually distinctly created an opinion. Now, because I did those things, I'm one step closer to a sale. Have I become a sale at the time of this recording? No, but I'm one step closer to it now. I want to make sure that we're pointing something else here, that the copy and the way it just worked so cleanly together, because they made a reference to an idiom. My $0.02 when somebody says that, well, here's my $0.02. What we're actually implying is I'm saying it in humility. It might not matter too much. So what they're saying is I'm sending you a marketing message in all humility. This is what our business does. So this idiom captured attention and created familiarity. So I was like, man, why did this email hit? So I wanted to go down and run it through a couple of things that I know about marketing.

Jasmine Star 00:07:07  Why? Why did using this idiom create awareness and familiarity? Number one idioms create pattern interrupt. So I want us to focus here on what they used as a neuromarketing way. Somebody that attached to my brain and made it easy for me to understand. These pattern interrupts break the expected flow of a sales email. Imagine if they had said use our company to get X. That would not anything. But what did they do? They sent money. They presented it with humility. They sent it to a third party. What did it do? It triggered curiosity. That's what a pattern interrupt does. This is classic marketing. If you can interrupt the pattern. Now, this is based on a book that I read from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. I was like, what happened here in this email? Why did it work so well? That was number one. Idioms. Create pattern interrupt. Number two idioms create cognitive fluency. Now I want us to focus here not just on the neuromarketing but on the psychology of persuasion.

Jasmine Star 00:08:09  Because once I knew what was happening, I had to be persuaded. Now there are familiar phrases, and whenever you hear like familiar phrases like cool as a cucumber. My $0.02. The early bird catches the worm. Well, they're easily processed by the brain. I don't have to say you should wake up early. I can say the early bird catches the worm. What am I saying? Here? I am saying something in a way that's soft and familiarity. And this makes your message persuasive and trustworthy. Now, the third reason why this was like a really cool pattern interrupt the really cool. Why? I thought it was like cognitive fluency is when they used a third party, they used PayPal, they used a workaround. They got my information using PayPal. And then this idiom is a perfect example to go through with their $0.02. So this is more conversational marketing. When somebody can market to you in a conversational way, it builds trust. It just is. When you use fancy word or prose, you aren't really attracting a person to say, hey, you're the kind of person I want to have a conversation with.

Jasmine Star 00:09:10  Conversational marketing has a great impact. So cold emails. This was a cold email, but a cold email that feels casual and conversational is a perfect way to build trust. So getting an email from PayPal, third party credibility in a way that was really conversational, well, then it increased engagement and it might likely increase the replies that they get to that email. So that is a perfect example where I thought to myself, this is old school marketing done in a new way, using an idiom, using psychological components, using neuromarketing, Marketing. Using conversational tone. All the reasons why that piece of marketing worked. Okay. No, I will not be sending you an email from PayPal. I'm just saying. I am just saying there's got to be a creative way for me to do this kind of stuff. All right. Example number two of irresistible content marketing. I call this one. Thank you. No thank you. Okay. A Saturday morning and JD took Luna and he said, hey, I've noticed that you've been doing a lot of things.

Jasmine Star 00:10:07  I want you to have a morning to yourself to catch up on a little bit of work. I said, thank you so much. So I got a cup of coffee. He's out with Luna at the park, and I am on my laptop, and I am working and I'm writing, and I come across a conversation and it's a link of a link of a link. And I happen to stumble across a blog, right? Like, who's blogging these days? I mean, your girl is still blogging, but it's not necessarily that front forward medium. It was a link that I had read somewhere else, and I ended up on a blog of a copywriter. And I will tell you that I spent 90 minutes reading this blog post after post, and these posts were old. But as I'm reading this copy, I thought to myself, this is pure magic. This person is a writer. This person gets the game. This person. I just wanted to know this person based on the way that they wrote.

Jasmine Star 00:10:54  I was like, you, my friend, are a magical unicorn. I was reading something a unicorn wrote and I know this because I know good copy and this brother had it down pat. So I found his email address. Yes, I am a creeper. It was listed on his website. I just did some googling. Okay, basic googling y'all. So I found his email address and I sent him an email and it was just encouraging. Note I basically said I came across your content. I think you're amazing. And his response caught me off guard. Here's why. And this is where the marketing piece comes in. His response built likeability. How did he do that? I'm going to get to that in a second. And his response shows how he moves as an entrepreneur in the world. So I read thousands and thousands of his words. I spent 90 minutes having a one way conversation. I'm just reading. Reading his thoughts. I email him and in the email, I'm making references and subtleties to the things that I read as a signal to him, hey, I've done my work on you and you're really incredible.

Jasmine Star 00:11:52  And I introduce myself. I said, I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I'm an entrepreneur, and I love good copy, and I know good copy when I see it. And you, my friend, are chef's kiss. They sprinkle some salt chef's kiss. And he had made references to a few of these things that he added in the email. What was I doing? I was signaling to him, I went deep with your work and you are very talented. Some people wouldn't respond. Some people would say, oh, thank you that so much. But what did he do? Let me go back and I will read the email that he had sent. Wow, thank you so much for reaching out. Such a funny, nice note to read this morning. Much much appreciate your Seth Godin interview. Mind blown. Cheers. Thanks again for reaching out. What did he just signal? He signaled that he had done the work. In response, I sent him an email making references that I went back to really old blogs and I read and they had an impact.

Jasmine Star 00:12:41  And then what did he do? He signaled back by citing a podcast that I had done with Seth Godin. He said, who is this person? So why do I think this marketing worked? It was anything but cold. It was anything but random. He could have just said thank you, but it worked because most people would just say thanks. And he didn't. It worked because he did his homework. And if this guy would spend ten 15 seconds on the web, he would understand that I'm just not a random person emailing. I'm a lead. He's a copywriter, an independent copywriter. Guess what I am. I'm a lead. And lastly, he signals that he studies people. He took the time to listen to a 45 minute conversation with Seth Godin. That, my friends, is good marketing. That my friends had me put that email away in my inbox and say, I'm going to work with him. I don't know when and I don't know how, but I am working with him.

Jasmine Star 00:13:34  All right, let's get into example number three of irresistible marketing. Now as review. The first example was show me the money. The second example was thank you. No thank you. And the third example of irresistible content marketing is what I call. No, but here's something better. Okay. So I'm going to ask you a question. Can you use your customer success team to grow your business? Yes, we see it happen quite often, but what I normally see is I see a customer success team and their version of sales is to upsell a customer. It doesn't really go beyond that. Like the Customer success team is separate from the sales department, and the only kind of selling that they would be doing would be like, oh, you have a renewal coming up. Oh, there's a discount. Oh, we can bundle something else and get you in. Those are like basic tenets of selling through way of CSD. I think I was marketed to in such a better way. So what if your customer success team used education and data gathering to close bigger and more sales? Yes, please.

Jasmine Star 00:14:35  So we use a company called spiffy. Now we use spiffy as part of our checkout process. We use them as pages on the inside of social curators. So we have our own tech stack. And so we can integrate with companies like spiffy. Now we consider creating a high ticket offer. And in the process of us creating our high ticket offer while we have our own platform and we want to integrate with spiffy. Now, as we were building up this offer, a lot of consultations and a lot of different perspectives, people had said the more expensive your offer becomes, it would be an added benefit to closed sales. To overcome objections by using third party software that helps people pay for what it is that they want. So examples would be like Klarna or Afterpay, where a buyer would buy through Klarna. Klarna pays you or Klarna pays me the full amount and then Klarna does the financing with that person depending on their credit score. Afterpay will take care of the payment plan with that person, so you get paid and then they get the interest and all of the other payment plan.

Jasmine Star 00:15:33  Okay. That's what people had said. Now, we reached out to spiffy and said, do you allow us to use some things like Klarna or Afterpay? So what they call buy now, pay later, so BNPL. I'll make references to that in a second. No, the answer was no, they didn't. But they didn't just say no, we don't integrate with buy now, pay later platforms. They, number one used my email to challenge an assumption. Two, they use the email to share their insights and have me think in a new way. And number three, they asked for user feedback. Now I want to pause here. As the founder of a tech company. What we want is users. What we want our people giving us feedback about what they don't like, what they need, what they want. Because then we can create a platform that serves them really well. That's what we want, but it's actually really rare. It is very rare for people to tell you what they like or what they don't like, or what they want more of it, because it takes time and they're like.

Jasmine Star 00:16:32  Of all the things in the world, I don't need to tell you all of these things. So what did spiffy do? They challenge my assumption. They share their insights to change my opinion, and then they used it to get user feedback. So I want to read this email, and I want to show you the process that they used. Because y'all, it was a long ish email, but I wanted to carefully dissect the email as to why it was no longer a customer success email. It was a sales email. Let's dive in. Alex here with spiffy. Thanks for reaching out. Currently, the only buy now, pay later option that we support is PayPal credit via PayPal integration. We don't currently support any of the buy now, pay later options like affirm after player Klarna. At the moment, BNPL is definitely on our roadmap and is often requested. However, it's a lot more hype than it actually is useful. What we found is that people tend not to be fully educated on the negative aspects of implementing other options, they just hear all about the great things, which is only half of the picture.

Jasmine Star 00:17:31  So they just said we don't offer it. But do you know about the downside? So leads to let me explain. Let's dig into that right now. We're currently in the education and gathering phase. We would love some more insight and perspective on how and why you're wanting to use BNPL. Based on the tests we've run. The BNPL platforms actually don't increase conversions over our native payment plan settings, and although you can collect the money upfront, you don't collect more money overall. BNPL can be a great solution for physical products where an extra friction is in buying. The experience is justified to mitigate the risk of shipping a physical product with real Cogs before it's been fully paid for. Spiffy is designed for digital products and services where there are no cogs, and there's really no risk in someone not completing their payments, they simply remove access or stop service. The added friction in the buying experience is hard to justify as well. You will convert more sales by making it easy for customers to check out the payment plan that doesn't take them through a credit approval process and away from your checkout experience.

Jasmine Star 00:18:34  You will lose 10 to 15% of buyers who would have otherwise purchased, and maybe 2 to 5% of customers who never complete their payment plan. So there's at least 5 to 10% of revenue. They're just not from using BNPL, which is substantial at any level of scale. Okay. What did they just do? They said it's so much more complicated using the third party. Hey, why would you ever do that? And what do they do? They back it up with stats and statistics. They're challenging an assumption. Let's go back into the email. Also, there's quite a big hurdle to overcome with breakage and other features. Upsells most likely come if somebody chooses a BNPL option at checkout. It won't work with one click upsells. Other solutions that have BNPL actually skip all upsell offers not ideal checkouts with subscription line items. 50 is super flexible, so you can have a subscription and payment plan at the same checkout. Subscriptions can not be included. BNPL and can cause confusion, refunds, chargebacks. Okay, they will go on and they will explain why it is not a good fit.

Jasmine Star 00:19:39  And then lastly, they close it out with hey, a couple questions for you. How would you want one click upsells to work? How you would you think that customer would expect it to work? Do you think customers would expect their upsell purchase to be included in the current pay over time? Or do you think it would be clear that it's not? Or would you rather just skip all upsells to keep it clean and simple like other solutions? Thanks in advance for your insight and perspective. Okay, okay, that was a lot of words, but let me tell you, I'm reading this and I'm sitting there. I'm like, mind blown, mind blown. You literally use data and analytics to challenge an assumption and show me a different way. Then you came in and gave me proof that it might not be as good as as an option, as many people have led us to believe. And then thirdly, you ask.

Jasmine Star 00:20:26  How might we.

Jasmine Star 00:20:28  Make our product exactly what you need and what they did is they create a distinction.

Jasmine Star 00:20:31  If you're not familiar with Klarna or Afterpay, it started off very much in the influencer game, where if you wanted to buy an expensive jacket or if you wanted to buy hair care and you couldn't afford to buy it all like two, three, 400, $1,000 at a time, you can use after play. And the reason why you wanted to use Afterpay or Klarna was because if you shipped the product to that person and they stopped paying, well, then you're absorbing the cost of the physical items, spiffy says. Hey, we focus on digital items. If somebody doesn't pay, just revoke access from the digital item. But you haven't actually lost hardcore money from it. Y'all. Y'all. And then they said, okay, fine. If you wanted us to build this, what would you want it to be? Really stinking smart. So why did this work in terms of marketing? Number one, they gave you awareness of options and their offer as marketing. And at number two, they ask for what's wanted so they can build it on their own.

Jasmine Star 00:21:27  Based on what digital creators want. And they're actually looking at, hey, if we built this, would you pay more? Because if you'd pay more, then we would build it exactly as you want it. So I save this as a masterful example of content marketing to paying customers. This would not work anywhere else, but where are they paying? Spiffy. They're saying, hey, there's a better a different way about it. Do you want to give us more feedback? Would you pay us more for it? I just thought it was really, really, really smart. Okay, so in review we went through three types of get yo attention content marketing. And the first one was show me the money. We're using idioms to create trustworthiness and conversation, and we're using a trusted third party to break through the noise and get attention. The second irresistible content marketing would be thank you. No thank you. And this type of marketing builds likability, and it returns a compliment with a compliment to show that you've done work.

Jasmine Star 00:22:23  And number three, it signals how people work. I signaled, and he made a signal in response. What is he cultivating? A hot lead. The third was no. But here's something better. So why does this type of irresistible content marketing work? Well, it educates options and offers new insights using data and analytics. It challenges assumptions, and three, it's marketing to build out a possible upsell as their alternative. So I look forward to adding these marketing aspects into my business. And it would mean the world to me if you passed this on to somebody else. You care about somebody who is really needing a marketing jumpstart or a marketing elevation. What we want to do is we want to make sure that we're all sharing these conversations so that collectively, we grow and blossom and thrive and scale together. I want to say thank you so much for watching and listening to The Jasmine Star Show.