I’m reading book about magic and showmanship by a magician with the fanciful name of Hake Talbot. Old Hake says:
“Attention to detail is the essence of expert showmanship.”
I see you rolling your eyes.
”Oh no Bejako! Please stop with all these profound, new, and immediately useful ideas! No more please, I’ve had enough value for today!”
Bear with me for a second.
Talbot’s advice to magicians is to write out their routine as if it were real, with no tricks, no sleights, and no misdirection necessary. Real magic, not stage conjuring.
And then, says Talbot, compare your actual act, detail by detail, to the real thing.
Any place where there’s a discrepancy from the real to the stage, well, you gotta address that in some way. At least if you wanna achieve “expert showmanship.”
That’s what attention to detail means.
But that’s abstract advice. Maybe an concrete example would help.
Let me use the example of my Influential Emails promotion earlier this week.
After all, I put on a kind of performance every day in these emails. I don’t play the role of a magician who makes rabbits appear out of top hats. But I do play the role of a marketing wizard who makes thousands of dollars appear on command out of daily emails.
Now, in an ideal case, in the case of real magic, what would a promotion for a course like Influential Emails look like?
Here’s an idea:
The offer would sell out before it even became publicly available.
That’s what I was planning to do with Influential Emails.
And I got tantalizingly close, first by having a waiting list, and second by offering the course a day early to the people on the waiting list who had bought something from me before, along with an inducement to buy now.
(In case you’re curious, the reason for this was both to reward those existing customers, and also to only do business with people I have sold to before and know to be good customers.)
But I didn’t make as many sales as I had planned during that secret pre-launch. So to reach my target, I had to open Influential Emails to the entire waiting list, before closing it down 12 hours later, as I wrote about in my email two days ago.
Are you still with me? Good. Because we’ve gotten to the discrepancy:
Even though I managed to reach my target number of sales within just 12 hours of the opening of the promo, I didn’t manage to do the truly magical thing, which would have been to announce that Influential Emails had sold out before the promo even started, and only to an insider circle of previous customers.
Maybe you’re rolling your eyes again. Maybe you think nobody cares, and nobody was expecting me to sell out Influential Emails without even opening up the promo.
Well, in that case, all I can do is refer you to Talbot’s advice above.
I care, and on some level, I believe it makes an impact.
That’s why I sent out the email yesterday about the technical muck-up I did with the waiting list for Influential Emails, which means a bunch of people who wanted to buy didn’t get a chance to.
I opened up the cart again just for those people.
And the fact is, with their added sales, I would have blown past my sales goal during that secret pre-sale period.
So in the interest of showmanship, I’m telling you about it now. I’m also thinking how I can make sure this kind of discrepancy never happens in future performances, I mean, promotions.
Because if you’re putting on a show as a marketing wizard, it’s fine to present yourself as an absent-minded luddite, like I did yesterday. But it won’t do, not at all, to allow even a shred of doubt to form about your wizarding abilities.
Anyways, maybe that gives you some ideas for future promotions you too plan on running.
Meanwhile, as I said yesterday and the day before, all this is an added reason to get my 10 Commandments book if you haven’t done so yet.
At the end of that book, I have a special offer for an apocryphal 11th commandment.
If you take me up on that offer, I will know you bought the book, and in the future, you will be included in the special circle of previous buyers who get in on things that the rest of my list does not.
If you want in, here’s the link:
https://bejakovic.com/10commandments