Make customers feel like they won the lottery 💸

My greatest retention trick

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Make customers feel like they won the lottery 💸

Last week, Photo AI told me I was “randomly selected” for free credits.

I’d bet money they sent that to every user. I still felt a tiny dopamine hit → logged in → and burned them.

Now look at this email I got from Canva:

Same situation: free credits for something I’m not using. But instead of “you just won 🎉”, Canva said “looks like you haven’t tried this 🥺”.

The marketing idea 💡

My greatest retention trick:

1. Take a bonus you were already going to give (free credits, a discount, a bonus month, free shipping)

2. Reframe the email so the customer feels like they randomly won a prize. Make them feel like only they won it, not other customers.

That’s it!

I discovered it by accident in 2014 ↓

People don’t want discounts. They want to win. 🎟️

In 2014, I ran my first ever marketing campaign at a translation startup called One Hour Translation. My boss gave me a 5% Halloween discount and wanted maximum redemption.

5% off… it’s not exactly life-changing. 😅

The obvious play was to send everyone “5% off for Halloween”. Instead, I made it look like a mystery prize with three possible outcomes: 3%, 4%, or 5% off.

To find out what you won, you had to paste the coupon code at checkout.

The secret: everyone got the same code, worth 5% (the best possible outcome).

Customer types it at checkout → sees “5% off” → feels lucky → buys.

Best campaign we’d ever run up to that point. That’s when I learned we should make our customers feel like winners.

Copy to steal:

• “Congrats! You’ve been randomly selected for [X].”

• “Your account was randomly picked for [X].”

• “You’re our daily winner.”

• “Mystery gift voucher”

• “Surprise! You just unlocked [X] for free.”

• “You just won…”

One more thing: Add a soft deadline. “Claim by Friday” works great even if nothing actually expires Friday.

See you next week ✌️

Tom