The camera zooms in through a window of a high-rise apartment and onto the bed.
On the bed, there’s a topless blonde woman. She’s wearing white stockings and a negligee, and writhing in drug-fueled lust.
The next thing you know, she gets up.
She stumbles over to the balcony.
She climbs onto the railing.
And then she takes a dive, falling some 30 floors down, onto the roof of a parked car.
So begins the original Lethal Weapon movie.
I bring this up because Gene Schwartz, one of the greatest copywriters of all time, called this movie “the greatest training for any merchandiser in the world, especially copy people.”
He advised copywriters to see it at least three times, preferably in the same day.
Why? What could possibly be so great about Lethal Weapon?
In Gene’s own words:
“You’ve got to pick up the rhythm, and you’ve got to see how Silver, who is an absolute genius — Spielberg and Silver are the two communication geniuses of our country at this moment — every timing, every three minutes he throws another blast at you. There’s another head being smashed against a windshield. There’s another fifty people being blown out of an airplane. And then there’s a few minutes of dialogue which means nothing.”
This is the same structure that Gene advised for sales letters as well.
Explosion… Fight… 3 minutes of conversation… Another explosion…
Headline… Cautionary tale… 3 sentences of explanation… Another shocking story…
You might think this structure is just for hyped-up sales copy.
I don’t agree.
At a fundamental level, this is how humans prefer to communicate, or at least how they prefer to consume information.
This same structure works for everything from hard-core sales letters to technical webinars.
Of course, you have to adapt to your market.
For example, if you are in fact doing a technical webinar (as a friend of mine might be doing soon), you wouldn’t start with a coked-up topless hooker jumping to her death.
But you would want to shock and startle your audience a bit — in the appropriate dose. So you could start off the webinar with a dramatic case study, or a cautionary tale from one of your existing customers.
The key is to shake up and disturb your audience a bit, before you get to the more reasoned, serious, and boring content.
At least that’s my opinion.
Of course, technical webinars are not my forte. However, sales emails are. And if you want sales emails that shake up and disturb your audience, then Riggs, here’s what to do:
Click on the link below. And see whether you want to sign up for a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing, specifically for the health space. Here’s where to point your lethal weapon: