The use cases email for a product people only use one way

A second use is worth more than a discount

Somebody finds a second use for the thing they bought. Watch what happens next. They need it more often, it runs out sooner, and they start wanting another one for a different room, a different car or a different person.

That's real new demand. A discount only moves next month's revenue into this one. This doesn't expire either, because a use somebody has worked out for themselves stays worked out.

Your customers have already invented the good ones

You invent use cases in a meeting. Your customers invent them because they needed something and improvised. Theirs are better, and they're sitting in your reviews and your social mentions right now, waiting to be picked up.

• Reviews that open with I actually bought this for something else
• Photographs where the product is somewhere you didn't expect it to be
• Support questions asking whether it'll do a job you never intended
• Anything a trade or professional customer does with it, because they use products harder than anybody

Where the answer to can I use it for that is no, say so in the same email. Put in one thing your product isn't for and the reader believes everything else on the page. Costs you a line.

Four uses, one photograph each, no explanation of the product

They already own it, or they've already looked at it. So don't sell it to them again. Four pictures of it doing four different jobs, a line under each, and nothing else in the email.

Photograph the use, not the product. A flask on a white background is a catalogue image. That same flask on a scaffold, in a hospital bag or propped beside a fishing rod is a use case, and it's the context doing all of the work.

This is a customer email, not an acquisition one

• The least obvious use first, because that's the one that gets read
• One that only works in a particular season, so the email has a reason to arrive now
• One a trade customer taught you, credited to them
• One that's a stretch, flagged as a stretch, because being honest about the edge sells the middle

Sent to customers, this is the honest version of a cross sell. It earns the recommendation by being useful first, and that's why it beats a direct cross sell send to the same list.

Ask for the next one in the email itself

Close with a question, not a button. Ask what they use theirs for that you haven't shown. The replies are your next campaign, and they arrive from people who've just spent a minute thinking about your product.

Run it twice a year per product family and the archive builds itself. In the homeware and outdoor accounts we run the fourth or fifth of these is usually better than the first, because by then every use in it came from a customer.

Search your reviews for the word also

Also. And. Another. Those are the words that turn up just before an unplanned use, every time. Search your review export for them and you'll find the situations your product has been quietly recruited into.

Pick the four least obvious, photograph them properly, and send it to everybody who's bought once. Cheapest second order campaign there is. And it's almost always missing from the accounts we take over.