Monica Froese [00:00:00]:
Hello, and welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. Today you have me for a solo episode, and we’re talking about something that completely changed how I sell and honestly, how I email. In 2025, I realized the old ways of running flash sales and promo blasts weren’t cutting it anymore. Open rates were down, clicks were slowing, and my audience wasn’t unresponsive. They were just tuned out. So I decided to try something radically simple. Instead of shouting into the inbox, I started a conversation. And that one shift from broadcasting to connecting turned into four live email experiments that reignited my list and brought in over $23,000 in organic revenue.
Monica Froese [00:00:44]:
Yes, you heard me right. With zero ads, zero affiliates, and zero new funnels, today I’m breaking down exactly how I did it and how you can run your own inbox experience experiments too. So let’s rewind to early 2025. For years, my Friday flash sales worked like a charm. Every Friday at 3pm, I’d send an email, run a sale, and watch the orders roll in. Like, seriously? For two years, I would send an email every Friday at 3pm and make thousands of dollars. But then it seemed like everything suddenly changed. Between personal challenges, a static list, and the rise of AI, I realized people didn’t just want a deal, they wanted connection.
Monica Froese [00:01:28]:
So I decided to make a pivot. I replaced my Friday flash sale emails with a new newsletter format called the Empowered Edge, a weekly email that focuses on connection, community, and conversion, not just promotion. It worked, and people started replying to my emails again. They shared what they were struggling with, they told me what they needed. And those replies got me thinking. If genuine conversation boosts deliverability, builds trust, and gives me real marketing data, what would happen if I engineered that on purpose? And that’s where the inbox experiments began. Now let me tell you a little bit about the Empowered Edge newsletter and what made it different from my Friday flash sale emails. So my Friday flash sale emails primarily led to the Empowered shop.
Monica Froese [00:02:15]:
It was a way to get eyes on the Empowered Shop and to drive traffic to the Empowered shop. So I would pick one of the 130 products that I have in there to highlight for the weekend for a 48 hour flash sale. And basically, I really didn’t do a lot of storytelling in these emails at all. It was, hey, your Friday deals here, here’s what’s on Friday, here’s what you how much money you can save, and the deal ends Sunday night. And like I said, for two years, that strategy worked really well. And then it seemed like it really started sliding backwards. It wasn’t just that my attention had been shifted into my personal life. It was also that at the same time I wasn’t proactively bringing in new leads and I wasn’t creating new products.
Monica Froese [00:03:00]:
And the one thing I will say is anytime I launched a new product in the shop, just the way that people are, of course new is exciting and those would be my best performing sales. So when those literally became crickets, I thought, you know, I used to email my list and tell them stories, let them in on my life, give more strategy based emails and I still have calls to action in those emails, but they weren’t so sales focused. And so I changed how I was sending those 3pm Friday emails and I named it the Empowered Edge newsletter. And it’s broken down into five different sections. Basically, I tell a lesson. I still have a flash sale, I have a strategy section, I have a what’s working well section. And then I kind of all bring it together and people loved it. People were like, wow, it’s, I feel like it’s been so long since I’ve heard from you now at the same time that it was actually very true because I took back all the emails in my business.
Monica Froese [00:03:55]:
So for years, Haley wrote the majority of our emails and she wrote probably almost all of our Friday emails. And when I took back all the emails, it literally was not AI doing it for me either. It was my voice. People were talking to me and they loved it. And then if you listen to episode 100 of this podcast, I had a friend of mine, Cheryl Rarick, come on to discuss email deliverability in the age of AI. She is a deliverability specialist. And one of the things I realized was I wasn’t getting a whole ton of engagement in my emails. I was, my open rate looked fine, my click through rate was kind of meh.
Monica Froese [00:04:35]:
But I wasn’t getting a lot of replies and I used to get a lot of replies and I thought, you know, that’s like one of the most important signs to an email service provider like the Yahoo Gmail outlooks of the world in order for us to land in the inbox. And she was telling me on this podcast, which you should totally go back and listen the importance of how of landing in the inbox, especially in the age of AI. And so that was when everything started clicking and I was like, I have to try something different and incomes these inbox experiments. So in the month of September 2025, I ran four experiments over four weekends and each of them had a simple Structure, prompt, reply bonus. So, let’s start with experiment number one. This is where I was giving my magic app Mapper GPT. I invited my list to reply, yes, I want the GPT and I would send it back to them. And it was meant to help them map their first no code app.
Monica Froese [00:05:34]:
In other words, come up with an idea for a no code app that they could either use as a legion in their business, as an internal tool, or a standalone app that they could sell. I had 125 people reply to that email that they wanted the GPT. And then I offered them a special into my Monetize your magic workshop, which, yes, that workshop is how to create your first no code app. And from that, two people went on to buy that workshop. Now, really, believe it or not, the intent of these experiments was not actually to make sales, it was to spark conversations in my inbox. Where I went wrong with the first experiment was I gave them the GPT when they responded. So I got that initial response. So that did signal to the email gods that, oh, people are responding to this email.
Monica Froese [00:06:21]:
But I didn’t actually ask them to take any further action. So that led me into experiment number two, where I thought, hmm, let’s experiment with giving a free GPT to the first 50 people who responded. Well, that didn’t really actually make all that much sense because this is not a GPT that I sell standalone. And really I wanted as many people as possible to respond and I didn’t really have to use the urgency of a limited quantity because I just had to say, hey, the, the if you respond within a certain time period. So I initially said it was going to be limited to 50 people, but 103 people ended up responding on that second experiment. And I decided to make this experiment be my GPT idea finder. So I was running another workshop called Monetize youe Edge, and I wanted people to get their idea sparked of what kind of GPTs they could create, both internal and external in their business. But this time I did something a little bit different.
Monica Froese [00:07:18]:
I asked people to actually use the GPT and respond back with their output. And what happened next amazed me again. And this was not about the sales because I think we sold three or four copies of Monetize youe Edge from this. What ended up coming back was not only all of these validated GPT ideas that people could create, they were using my product, they were super excited about it and they were giving me very natural testimonials that I didn’t even have to ask for on top of that, people were responding back so excited they were asking me questions and I started engaging in actual conversations with my audience again through email. So basically this became getting my audience to use my products. They were validating the ideas for me that these workshops were something people wanted. And I, I was getting testimonials without even trying. So then we moved on to experiment number three.
Monica Froese [00:08:13]:
And experiment number three was a week that was leading into a free training that I was going to have on my signature course called the empowered business lab AI. And I was hosting a free training called your AI content engine, where basically I demonstrate the six GPTs that make up the EBL AI system. And the call to action for this was respond, yes, I want the GPT and I was going to send you my reverse idea finder GPT. Now that helps people validate their digital product ideas by using a process I call reverse engineering that I have taught for a lot of years now. Here’s where it gets cool. I had 135 people reply to get the reverse idea, find your GPT. And I told them if they responded back with their output, that is the digital product idea that would be validated, that I would send them a bonus. And the bonus was going to be another GPT that’s part of this larger system which is priced like a pro GPT.
Monica Froese [00:09:16]:
Now, when people responded to me and I sent them the bonus, they were so excited about their digital product ideas that they came up with or the roadblock that it finally helped them eliminate in terms of what they should create next, that my call to action was actually to send them to the free training. However, 17 people out of the 135 that replied ended up just jumping right into the complete system, the EBL AI system, which was 497 a piece, which means this email experiment directly made me $8,500 in 24 hours. Then I decided to spice it up a little bit. I didn’t want to give another GPT away for experiment number four. And we were going in to a large event that I was going to be running in October of 2025, which I called potion a day. And it was where I was going to drop 21 new GPTs and every 24 hours. And for the first 24 hours you could get it for $9. And then the price of each GPT was going to go up to $29.
Monica Froese [00:10:20]:
Now, believe it or not, this was not intentional, but I had just spent three weekends getting people to use my GPTs. Hundreds of people ended up using these GPTs. So it really showed them the power of what GPTs can do for them, that my GPTs actually help them. Which meant I was getting a lot of positive momentum going into this launch. So you would think on experiment four, right before I was about to kick off this event, that I would give another GPT away for free. But I thought, nah, let’s change it up and let’s showcase another skill, which was I decided to take my audience on an Easter egg hunt. And thank you Taylor Swift, because she happened to release her 12th studio album that weekend called Life of a Showgirl. And she loves to drop Easter egg hunts for or Easter eggs, I would say, for her audience, in other words, like she’ll say things in songs and in interviews and it’s meant to allude to something that will be happening and her audience, her swifties work to piece those clues together.
Monica Froese [00:11:17]:
And I thought this is such a fun, a fun theme that I could do for experiment number four. And I decided I wanted to send people on an Easter egg hunt. And then I thought, well, how am I going to do that? Well, I decided to build what I called a spell portal. So part of the Potion A Day event is we had an all access pass that we were selling for the first week in October before the event kicked off. And we called it the Spellbook All Access Pass. And essentially it allowed people to lock in the price of $9 per GPT ahead of time so that they didn’t have to wait or check every 24 hours for what the new GPT was going to be. And this actually proved to be a very successful launch. So at over this weekend I’m selling the Spellbook All Access Pass.
Monica Froese [00:12:03]:
So I went to Lovable, which is the no code app builder that I use, where basically you chat with it just like you would chat with ChatGPT and you tell it what kind of app you want to create. Now this is going to be a web based app and I said basically, hey, I have these 21 GPTs. I am going to ask my audience to respond to my email this weekend to get the hint and, and they’re going to have to find which GPT I’m hinting towards. So when you landed on this portal, it basically listed out all 21 GPTs. They were like, on these little like tiles. And when you responded to my email, I gave you the hint of what the secret GPT was essentially like, what’s the Easter egg? And I made it very easy to do. So basically, if they chose the wrong GPT. They could just go back to the beginning and keep selecting the GPT till they found the hidden egg.
Monica Froese [00:12:55]:
And the hidden egg was a very rare coupon for the Spellbook All Access Pass. And actually so rare that that is the only coupon I ever offered on it because I was already offering it for 189, which is the equivalent of $9 times 21 for the GPTs. That was the only way you could get those GPTs for less than $9. And we had 90 people visit that portal in the first 24 hours. And we went on to make, I believe, four sales of the Spellbook All Access Pass. So here’s what these experiments taught me. 1. People crave connection.
Monica Froese [00:13:34]:
AI is everywhere, but authenticity stands out. 2. Replies drive deliverability. Every time someone replies, your next email lands higher in the inbox. Number three Conversations build proof. I now have pages of real testimonials written in my audience’s voice. Number four Sales happen naturally when you listen to your audience, when you engage in conversation. And five Small experiments create big data.
Monica Froese [00:14:03]:
And that data drives smart decisions. This was about building a repeatable system that makes my emails valuable again, both for my reader and and for my business. If you’ve been feeling like your emails are falling flat, this is your wake up call. You don’t need to burn everything down. You just need to run your first inbox experiment. Start small, Send one email, ask for a reply, reward it and get them to use your product. And watch what happens when you treat your inbox like a conversation that it’s supposed to be. It is a two way street and if you want my exact framework and the swipe files and even a GPT tracker I use to log all my replies and testimonials, it, it’s all inside my new workshop called the Quick Win Workshop.
Monica Froese [00:14:47]:
Inbox experiments that transform replies into revenue. You can head on over to empowered shop.com right now to go grab it. Because one good email doesn’t just sell a product, it literally can transform your entire business. As of 15 days into the GPT event that I’m hosting, the 21 GPTs I have made over $10,000. Which means collectively I can attribute over $23,000 in new revenue to these inbox experiments. Truly, people just want to be heard, feel heard and know that you care. And when you show that to them and then you systematize it, but you are still showing up with that genuine connection, you’d be surprised on how fast you can turn things around. So head on over to the Empowered shop to get this workshop.
Monica Froese [00:15:38]:
I’m telling you, it was one of my favorite. Favorite workshops to present. Probably my favorite workshop ever, but definitely my favorite workshop in the last two years of all the things that I’ve done. And I know that this can help your business as well. All right, I’ll see you back here next week.
