No, not Most Valuable Email.
The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.
I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.
My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:
An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…
A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…
An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.
I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…
It’s all been cancelled.
Reason why:
Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:
“What do I do with previous buyers?”
I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.
Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.
I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.
But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.
I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.
That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.
You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.
One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”
Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.
Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.
Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.
But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.
I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:
1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.
You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.
2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.
Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.
Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:
* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.
* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.
* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.
* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.
* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.
* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.
* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.
* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.
* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.
* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.
* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.
* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.
So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:
A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.
This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.
If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.
I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.
On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.
If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:
P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.