Creative offers, exhibit 1

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I was talking to a friend yesterday and explaining how I’ve been doing well with sales copywriting.

“So what’s the trick to success?” he asked.

“Honestly, I said, “it’s to work with a client who’s got a great offer that people love. Even mediocre marketing will sell a great product easy, while brilliant marketing won’t sell a bad offer.”

I guess I must have internalized that from Gary Halbert, who put it this way:

Know this: Strong copy will not overcome a weak offer but…

In Many Cases, A Strong Offer Will
Succeed In Spite Of Weak Copy Written
By Marketing Morons!

In this vein, I decided to start collecting creative and interesting and effective offers that I come across.

The first of these is from Matt Stone AKA Buck Flogging. Starting with his 180 Degree Health blog, Matt has had a a bunch of successful online businesses over the past decade.

(I’ve been on Matt’s various email lists for a while, and aside from Ben Settle, I think he has some of the best emails, even though he only emails when he wants to pitch something. Unlike Ben, though, Matt isn’t a copywriter by trade. He simply honed his skill by tireless writing of books and blog posts and emails and managing the herds of people who interact with him daily.)

A couple of years ago, Matt made a course where he shared his approach to starting an online business and having it make money. Interesting — due to Matt’s history of success online — but pretty standard so far.

Here’s the creative bit about this offer comes in. Matt made the price of his course flexible. How flexible? It was one day’s wage, whatever that may be for you.

The list price was $300. But right in the email where he was announcing the course, Matt sent a bunch of coupon codes for discounts from 10% off to 90% off. He even had a “BANGLADESH” coupon code, which I presume reduced the cost down to a dollar or so.

Could this possibly work? I remember getting this email and being almost instinctively carried away to buy the course on the spot. I didn’t, because I figured I simply wouldn’t use it at that time.

However, I did buy the next year’s version, in part because I remembered this email from a year earlier. And during that version of the course, Matt shared that this particular offer, and this particular email, were one of the most successful he ever ran. So I’m filing it into my drawer of creative (and successful) offers as example no. 1.

How to nail a wise old doctor’s voice

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I’m currently working on an email sequence for a memory enhancement supplement.

The spokesperson for this supplement is a doctor — male, white, I estimate in his mid-60s, with a pleasant Southern drawl and a wise grandfatherly demeanor.

“I’ve always had a love of nature and natural remedies”

I wrote up the first batch of emails and delivered them to my client (the supplement company owner, not the doctor).

“The angles and topics are all good,” the client said, “but can you work on adopting the good doctor’s voice a little more?”

Honestly, I was a bit miffed at this, because I already had tried to adopt his voice (as I do with all copy that I write). I had gone through the transcripts of an interview I had with the doctor, as well as several videos he had done on YouTube where he talked about health and supplements.

The trouble was, while the doctor did have a characteristic “voice” while speaking, when written down, there wasn’t nearly as much there. He wasn’t really using any unique slang, or technical terms, or telling lots of personal stories.

What to do? I swallowed my pride and rewrote parts of the emails.  Here’s what I did:

1. Use some generic conversational patter

I always try to write in a conversational way. In this case, I amped it up even more using generic conversational fluff, such as:

“You know”
“Well, what I’m talking about here is”
“Now I’ve got to warn you”

2. Search more closely for stories and phrases

I went through all the transcripts a second time, and I did find some phrases that were subtly unique. I wrote them all down, and one by one, I made sure to find a place in the copy to add each of them in. Here are a few examples:

“I’ve had an awful lot of success”
“Boatloads of medicines”
“It’s a jewel” [when describing something valuable]

3. Add parenthetical remarks

These are simply moments to step back from a story, an explanation, or a pitch, and you talk one-on-one, give an opinion, a personal comment, or insert a tiny other story.

For example, when talking about one of the ingredients in this supplement, I took a step back to have the doctor say, “You see, since I was a youngster, I’ve always had a love for nature and natural remedies. That’s why…”

4. Insert consistent stories and illustrations

This is perhaps the most impactful of all of these techniques.

I decided to simply add in stories and illustrations and images that are consistent with the persona of the doctor, even if it’s stuff I never really heard him say, and even if it’s stuff he might not actually ever say.

For example, I told the story of a “beautiful and stately old tree” down the street from where the doctor lives, which happens to be a ginkgo tree, one of the ingredients in the supplement. And I used grandfatherly images like the following:

“His anger issues started disappearing like mist in the morning sun”
“She had a vice-like grip on her intelligence again”

So did all this work? Who knows. But the client was happy, and he wrote back right away to say I had nailed the doctor’s voice perfectly.

A clever persuasion tactic from a 1970s racist lackey

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Here’s a bit of movie trivia:

Woody Allen has won the Academy Award for best original screenplay three times. Twice, he did it alone. Once, in collaboration with Marshall Brickman.

Francis Ford Coppola has also won the same award three times, as have Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Each of them has shared at least one of those awards.

Only one guy has ever won the Academy Award for the best screenplay three times, working entirely by himself.

That guy is Paddy Chayefsky.

Right now, I’m rewatching my favorite Paddy Chayefsky Academy-Award-winning movie. It’s called Network, and it deals with the network TV business in the 1970s.

Halfway through the movie, Diana Christiansen, a heartless new breed of TV exec, meets with a representative of the Communist Party of the United States, Laureen Hobbs, in order to discuss making a program based on live recordings of acts of political terrorism. This is how the introduction goes:

Diana Christensen: Hi. I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.

Laureen Hobbs: I’m Laureen Hobbs, a badass commie nigger.

Diana Christensen: Sounds like the basis of a firm friendship.

Clever, right?

“Allow me to disarm you with my honesty”

This introduction does a few things well. For one thing, Diana agrees with what Laureen already believes (the Marxist idea of “class for itself”). At the same time, the introduction is entirely and brutally honest, almost self-dismissing. It’s also very different from what is expected, immediately stirring curiosity and buying a bit of time.

This kind of strategy is what negotiation coach Jim Camp called a “negative stripline.” A negative stripline is when you go fully negative on some sensitive point, to the extent that the other side feels a bit bad and wants to reel you back in towards more middle ground.

So how can you use negative striplining in marketing?

Well, if you’re sending out cold emails to prospect for new customers, you could try opening with something like:

“Hello, my name is John Bejakovic and all I really want is some of your money. However, since I don’t have the skills to rob you, I have to offer you something you’d value in exchange. In my case, the only thing I know well is sales copywriting.”

If you’re selling an ebook about aromatherapy (as I plan to do soon), you could start off the sales letter by saying:

“There’s been a lot of hype about essential oils, and most of it has zero basis in reality. In fact, essential oils have on occasion hurt people who tried using them. And yet, there are cases when essential oils are not completely worthless, and can even be used safely.”

If you’re selling a probiotic:

“The human gut is enormously complex. Scientists know only a little about the myriad interactions between gut bacteria, other species of gut bacteria, and our own bodies. Odds are, they won’t have a good idea about it for another 100 years, and there’s no way to make any firm recommendations right now. However, if you want to self-experiment as a way of fixing your digestive issues, then this probiotic might be worth a look. Here’s why.”

I’ve never written anything this extreme for any of my clients. I don’t know if it would work. But if you want me to write something brutally honest (and possibly disarming) for your business, here’s where to go.

6 ways to stir up curiosity (cont.)

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Onwards and upwards. Continuing from my post yesterday, here are 3 more ways to create and amplify curiosity:

4 Flaunt the velvet pouch

When it comes to copywriting, the method of the velvet pouch is possibly the sexiest, most effective, and most profitable way to create curiosity. It certainly seems to be very prevalent on the Internet today, particularly in long-form sales letters and VSLs.

In many ways, the velvet pouch idea is a combination of several of the techniques from yesterday’s post. But I also feel like this method is tapping into human psychology on some unique, fundamental level, and that’s why I decided to include it on its own.

I found out about the velvet pouch technique from Michael Masterson’s and John Forde’s Great Leads. Here is the relevant section from the book, which is talking about lesson from a door-to-door salesman named Harry:

After gaining admittance to the apartment, Harry would start his pitch about the quality of our cookware, taking out the pots and pans individually from the case. But they were each encased in plush, royal blue velvet pouches. As Harry described the features and benefits of the cookware, he would gently massage the pots, first from outside over the velvet pouches, and then by slipping his hands inside them but still keeping them hidden from the prospect.

“Just keep your eye on the customer,” he told me. “In the beginning they’ll be looking at you. But as you go on, you’ll notice that they will shift their focus to the pots and pans. That lets you know they are getting interested. Keep hitting them with the benefits while they stare at what you’re doing. And never, ever tkae the pots out until you know they have the prospects’ full attention.”

Masterson and Forde use this story to kick off their chapter on what they call the secret lead. In other words, the velvet pouch is all about the mystery and intrigue that builds up when a secret is hovering around in the air.

In some ways, this is similar to a combination of the open loop and the teasing from yesterday. But like I said, there also seems to be a fundamental human hunger for secrets, even if they aren’t clearly associated with any benefits. I think that also explains why “secret” and “mystery” are marketing power words that can in many ways make a headline on their own.

By the way, I think trying to disqualify yourself (or what you’re offering) can sometimes work in the same way as a secret. Once something is taken off the table, people suddenly become more intrigued by it. That’s why I think the start of my post from two days ago is in some ways also a secret lead:

Fair warning: the following post contains some sexual, politically incorrect references. It might offend some people.

It’s ok to click away. But if you insist on reading, here goes:

5 Be different

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 Be new/Share news

The new kid on the block

When Gary Halbert died, Gary Bencivenga wrote a post explaining why Gary H.’s newsletters were so interesting. The number one thing, according to Gary B.?

1. Gary shared news. Sometimes he was the news, sometimes it was a dramatic turn of events in his tumultuous life, but often enough, he shared news of a technique or strategy that would make your response and profits soar. You couldn’t afford to miss even one of these gems, so you had to open every issue.

Many times, being new is sufficient unto itself, even if there’s no implied benefit, and not even anything clearly different. Novelty seems to directly tap into human psychology. Remember being in elementary school when a new kid appeared in class? Like in the photo above, that new kid was automatically interesting, at least for a while.

About number 5 above…

I tried to be different with the “be different” section above, so I didn’t expand on it at all. Maybe I should have just left it at that, because being different can be pretty straightforward. Still, here are a few examples:

First off, there’s the picture from yesterday’s post: “WORLD’S ONLY FEATURE DANCER WITH 3 BOOBS.” Is it a benefit? Hardly. A secret? Not at all. Just morbid fascination and curiosity with something different.

Second, there’s the story I started with two days ago, about a guy named Yad sleeping with a girl only a few hours after meeting her — just because he was different enough from other guys to make her very curious.

Finally, a copywriting example from my own essential oils list. At one point, I was promoting an online video series about longevity. The promise of the series was “How to live to a happy and healthy old age.”

That’s a fine benefit, but everyone is already pushing the same. So I simply switched it around to be different. I retold an ancient Greek myth about a Trojan prince who gets eternal life but not eternal youth, and how it turns out to be a curse rather than a blessing. The subject line for this inspiring email: “How to reach a frail and unhappy old age.” It worked pretty well.

6 ways to stir up (and blow up) curiosity

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Local business successfully employs curiosity

No time to dilly-dally today. Straight into the meat of this post, which is about how to create and amplify curiosity:

1 Use an open loop

I know of a fantastic way to stir up curiosity. It works particularly well with skeptical prospects, because it can be go completely under the radar.

But before I talk more about that, let me tell you about a guy named Andre Chaperon. Andre is famous in the copywriting world for a course called Autoresponder Madness, which teaches people how to write successful, story-based autoresponder sequences.

Some big Internet publishing companies, such as Mindvalley and Velocity House, have based much of their sales funnels on Andre’s teachings in Autoresponder Madness.

(Andre’s email methodology was the first I was exposed to when I started to learn about email marketing. I thought it was great then, and I think it’s great still — only surpassed, or rather complemented by,  the stuff that Ben Settle teaches.)

Anyways, one clever trick that Andre uses throughout his email copy, and that he teaches people in Autoresponder Madness, is called the “open loop.” You just saw an example of it four paragraphs back. It’s when you announce something intriguing, and then you completely drop it to talk about other things.

In my example above, the effect was probably not great, because you knew the suspense would be relieved after only a few paragraphs. But Andre frequently uses it across emails that will be sent days or even weeks apart.

Of course, the open loop is a standard technique in any story-telling medium. An extreme example is a cliffhanger in old comics or TV shows (more on this at the end of this post).

2 Tease/Intensify

Do you know why teasing is so great? It’s simply this: it will make your readers itch with curiosity, to the point where they’ll do anything to get the answer from you. And the thing about teasing is that it’s simple to do. Many people have used even without knowing anything about persuasion.

I’ll tell you all about how to do it, in just a second. Or maybe two. All right, here goes:

Teasing, by my definition, is simply dragging things out without actually giving anything away. The section above is one example.

You might find my teasing above annoying and transparent. But teasing can and should be part of good copy, both to build up anticipation and to “intensify” whatever is being talked about.

Here’s a less hokey example from my post yesterday:

But I believe there is another big pillar of influence that Cialdini left out. It’s in the story above. My guess is that it also drives about 90% of Internet traffic today. And according to famous copywriter Gary Halbert, it might even be the #1 reason that people buy stuff from advertisements.

I’m not really giving anything away here. I’m just restating and intesifying the benefits, and buying a bit of time in the process.

3 Tighten the knowledge gap

Here’s a puzzle for you. Why would a headline such as:

“Battery technology may emerge as a trillion-dollar threat to credit markets”

stir up more curiosity than a headline such as:

“Battery technology may emerge as a huge threat to other sectors”

After all, the second headline actually withholds much more information (Which sectors? How huge?) than the first. Shouldn’t that cause more curiosity as well?

The answer to this lies in the concept of a “knowledge gap,” a term I first read in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. A knowledge gap is what ultimately creates curiosity — it’s the bit of knowledge we don’t have and we want to have so we can complete the picture.

The thing is, if the amount of information that’s withheld is too great, you don’t create curiosity. You create indifference. That’s what’s going on in the second headline above.

The way to create curiosity is to tighten the knowledge gap as much as possible without giving the farm away. Some well-known copywriter (Ben Settle? David Deutsch?) talked about good bullet points as giving away nine-tenths of what you need to know, but keeping that last bit so people have to buy your product to find out. That’s the right attitude to have with the knowledge gap.

Tightening the knowledge gap isn’t just about combatting general disinterest. It can also be used to hook skeptical, jaded prospects. Compare a subject line such as:

“The forbidden food you should be eating”

(which, by the way, is a real subject line from an email I got yesterday, and did not open) to a more specific subject line:

“The forbidden breakfast food you should be eating after workouts”

To me, it seems that the second subject line (which I just made up) might get me to wonder, “which breakfast food” and “why after workouts,” which might be enough to overcome my skepticism of reading yet another sensationalist health blog post.

4 Flaunt the velvet pouch

This blog post has run on longer than expected. And I’m getting sleepy. I’ll pick it all up tomorrow — starting with the secret of the velvet pouch.

“Until tomorrow — same time — same channel!”

The 7th pillar of influence

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Fair warning: the following post contains some sexual, politically incorrect references. It might offend some people.

It’s ok to click away. But if you insist on reading, here goes:

A hairy English man named Yad once shared the story of an out-of-body experience. It wasn’t his experience, actually. Rather, it was the girl he was with who had this strange thing happen to her.

Now in case you don’t know, Yad is one of the world’s great masters of stopping a girl on the street, in broad daylight, completely sober, to chat for a minute and ask for her phone number.

Well, most of the time, Yad asks for the number. Sometimes, he pushes it, and asks the girl on a mini-date right away.

That’s what happened in this case. Except, the mini-date went well, and turned into a maxi-date. In fact, even though they had just met on the street a few hours earlier, Yad and this girl wound up back home in the evening, and found themselves in bed together. And that’s when the out-of-body experience supposedly happened.

You see, the girl was amazed by Yad’s seemingly irresistable confidence at every step of the way, from approaching her on the street, to asking her out, to moving her from bar to bar, and now getting her naked and in bed.

She was wondering how much further this would go, and whether she was really willing to sleep with a guy she had just met on the street only hours earlier.

In the end, she said something like, “We were having sex, but at the same time I felt like I was just having this out-of-body experience, floating around above the bed, watching all this unfold and asking myself, ‘Who is this guy and how is he so relaxed about this whole thing?'”

Well, I’m not here to plug Yad or his pickup skills today. Instead, I want to talk about the 7th pillar of influence.

You might already know something about the first 6 pillars. They were identified and written up by Robert Cialdini in his book Influence. These are the 6 golden rules that  persuaders of all stripes supposedly use — stuff like reciprocity, liking, social proof, etc.

But I believe there is another big pillar of influence that Cialdini left out. It’s in the story above. My guess is that it also drives about 90% of Internet traffic today. And according to famous copywriter Gary Halbert, it might even be the #1 reason that people buy stuff from advertisements.

Have you got it yet? Here’s a hint. It’s the common thread in all of the following headlines:

“Grains puffed to 8 times normal size”

“Its reputation and its odor precede it”

“The amazing money-making secret of a desperate nerd from Ohio”

“Why whales got so big”

I’m sure by now you have it so I’ll stop teasing. That 7th (and possibly most important) pillar is plain old, tried and true…

Curiosity.

Yep, curiosity. Curiosity can drive clicks. It can sell products. And as you can read in the story above, it can even get a girl to sleep with a hairy English man only hours after he’s met her.

Yad on a good day

Which is all good, but how do you go about creating curiosity? Good question. And it’s something that I plan to answer in detail. But not today. If you want to get my take on it, you might want to sign up to my daily email newsletter.

Stuck on the emotional rollercoaster with nowhere to go

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On May 28 of this year, many visitors to the Cedar Point amusement park, “The Rollercoaster Capital of the World,” got a special thrill.

They boarded the Millennium Force “giga coaster” — the biggest rollercoaster in the world at the time of its debut in 2000 — expecting a fast and gut-wrenching ride. Full of expectation, they started climbing the initial 300-foot ascent, and were preparing themselves to rush down the other side at 93 miles an hour.

Instead, what they got was a long wait. Halfway up the climb, the power went out. A car somewhere hit a utility pole, knocking out one third of the rides at Cedar Point. The folks on the Millennium Force sat up there in the air for two hours, cooking in the 90-degree heat.

Now a few days ago, I made a case against indoctrination emails, meaning emails that aim to build good will without trying to sell anything. My argument in that post was that people don’t read all your emails, so when they do actually read your emails, it makes financial sense to give them a chance to buy from you.

Today, I have a second argument against indoctrination emails (and other emails that don’t sell). This second argument has to do with the situation of being stuck on a rollercoaster, ready to scream and laugh — but not actually going anywhere.

“WOOHOOO!!! A way to resolve emotional tension!!!”

The rollercoaster I’m talking about is an emotional rollercoaster. In my experience, the best emails stir emotion. This emotion can be curiosity, frustration, anger, disgust, fear, greed, outrage, inspired benevolence, whatever.

Why emotion in emails? If you want people to open your emails day after day and to read them, you have to give them an emotional jolt, and do so frequently. I don’t have a much better way of explaining it than saying it’s simply what people want. I guess emotion gives color to an otherwise drab day.

(Interesting and useful information is great once or twice. But without a little emotional color mixed in, useful information quickly becomes a burden rather than a gift.)

Of course, emotion also makes sense from a different perspective. That’s because when people get emotional about something, it’s much easier to get them to take action. Meaning it’s much easier to get them to buy.

And here’s the thing. Getting people to buy when they are emotional isn’t just good for you. It’s good for them. The act of buying resolves the tension that the emotion stirred up. And it replaces it with a sense of purpose, hope, and resolution.

If you don’t believe me, think about the feeling you yourself had the last time you made a sizeable purchase online. I know I’m usually relieved that the indecision of shopping has been resolved, and I’m optimistic about what my new purchase will alow me to do.

So emotion + selling = good. But emotion without selling is like being stuck high up on a rollercoaster, not moving and not being able to finish the ride. At first it might just be puzzling, after that it becomes annoying.

What’s the alternative? Well, one option is to send out bland and boring emails that don’t stir anybody up. A better option, in my opinion, is to get people a little emotional, and to then give them a chance to buy a product or service that allows them to complete their rollercoaster ride.

My checklist for email copywriting

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In 1935, Boeing demonstrated its new plane, nicknamed the Flying Fortress, to military observers.

The demonstration was a mere formality, because the plane, a four-engine behemoth, exceeded the army’s requirements in every way.

Except for one problem. During the demonstration, the plane took off, climbed steeply, stalled, and crashed, killing the two pilots inside.

An examination determined that nothing mechanical had gone wrong. The crash was due to pilot error. It seemed that the Flying Fortress was simply too much plane for one man to fly. Nonetheless, the air corps purchased a few Flying Fortresses and tried to figure out what to do.

Their solution was very low-tech. Instead of changing anything about the plane, or insisting on more training for the pilots, they simply came up with checklists to handle the complex procedures for each operation: takeoff, landing, cruising, bombing…

Thanks in part to these checklists, the Flying Fortress eventually wound up playing a key role in World War II, and became the third most produced bomber of all time.

I thought of this story today, because I came up with my first checklist for email copywriting.

Even though I’ve written hundreds of sales emails by now, I haven’t systematized the process, and sometimes, I find myself crashing and burning for no good reason. Today, I became aware of how the process goes when it goes well, and I want to write it down to make sure I don’t ever forget it ever again.

So here it is, along with an example (one of the emails I was working on today, for a home fermenting kit):

STEP 1. Get an idea for an angle or topic

I normally do a lot of research for the emails I write. This includes going through the sales letter, testimonials, transcripts I did with people from the company, examining the product itself, digging around on forums online, etc. As I do this, I write down possible topics and angles for emails.

For this particular project, I also went through a few hundred customer surveys. A lot of customers mentioned that they were interested in fermenting because they wanted to lose weight.

My first idea was simply to try to connect fermented foods to weight loss. While I had a good testimonial on this topic, the science seemed fairly vague and tenuous (more on this in step 2 below). However, a related and relevant topic — antibiotics and weight gain — seemed very solid, so I decided to go with that.

STEP 2. Search around for more details

If I know a lot about a topic, or I have a personal story I can share, I can skip this step.

However, I can’t simply riff about antibiotics and weight gain. It’s not a topic I know enough about, so I needed to do more research. In particular, I wanted to find some kind of supporting scientific study that actually made the connection. And ideally, I also wanted to find a story to kick off the entire email.

I have a few go-to places for both kinds of resource. For scientific research, ScienceDaily seems to have reliable summaries of recent research. For stories, articles that appear in The Atlantic and The New Yorker tend to be good sources. Beyond this, a bit of googling will usually solve all research problems.

For this particular email, I found a study from Johns Hopkins University that effectively said, “the more antibiotics, the more weight gain.” The story I found was about a woman who went to the doctor to get rid of her hormonal acne, but wound up with an extra 14 pounds, thanks to the antibiotics he prescribed her.

STEP 3. Write up different subject lines

Keeping In mind the topic I want to cover, and the details of the research I want to include, I start to write a bunch of different subject lines.

At this point, I have a fairly large stack of index cards with good headlines that I can use as templates or inspiration. These aren’t “classic” direct response headlines (eg. “They laughed when I sat down at the piano”).

Instead, they are the titles of articles I’ve found myself clicking on over the past sevreal years (eg. “De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds”). Most of these are general-interest articles that originally appeared on the front page of Hacker News, so they are vetted for being curiosity-inducing.

I force myself to write down 10-15 of these subject lines, even if I think they sound stupid. Then I just pick the one that I think sounds the best, ties into the content I want to share, and ideally, gives me a bit of edge I can use in the email (I can’t describe this any better right now).

For this particular email, the subject line I ended up with was “Antibiotics are shockingly good at causing weight gain”.

STEP 4. Write the body of the email

At this point, all that’s left to do is to tie the pieces together. That means starting off with the story, developing this a bit (in the example I’ve been using, that means talking about the supporting science study), and then tying this in with the product I’m promoting.

I won’t include the entire completed email here. But it looks something like this:

Smooth sailing thanks to a checklist

The “Rule of One” applied to email copywriting

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In the 2006 version of Casino Royale, there’s a classic James Bond pickup scene.

Bond is talking to the beautiful wife of one of the bad guys. After a bit of flirty banter, Bond looks her straight in the eye and says, “What about a drink at my place?”

He stares at her. She stares at him. The tension builds.

“Your place,” she says breathlessly, “is it close?”

“Very,” says Bond.

Now imagine if Bond couldn’t play so cool. Instead of throwing out that one proposal, imagine if he threw out three:

“What about a drink at my place? Or maybe some nachos? How about breakfast tomorrow in case you’re busy now?”

Even with his ice-cold stare, odds are he wouldn’t get the same response.

“Bond. James Bond. You can call me Jim. Or James. Whichever is easier.”

A while ago, I was reading “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath. This is the best book I’ve come across  on how to present ideas clearly and in a way that people will remember. One of the things the Heaths say is, “Say one thing. If you say three things, you end up saying nothing at all.”

Michael Masterson and John Forde’s “Great Leads” emphasizes the same concept, which they call “The Rule of One – One Big Idea.”

In fact, the book opens up with the story of two speeches that were given by two Agora copywriters. One speech focused on one idea, the importance of clarity in writing. The other was something like “12 rules I follow when writing copy.”

The audience thought both speeches were terrific. But at the end of the night, people were only talking about the single idea in the first speech.

I’ve recently been working on some emails for a cool product. The product helps people make their own fermented food. And the emails I’m writing are specifically for people who’ve stated that they want to ferment for health reasons.

I’ve been going around in circles writing these emails. I need to get across a few ideas. One is that fermented foods are important for your health. The second is that fermenting can be a hassle. A third is that store-bought fermented foods aren’t a great choice compared to fermenting food yourself.

The problem is I’ve been trying to do this in the same email. This breaks the “Rule of One.” No wonder I’ve been re-reading the emails and thinking they are somehow weak and unconvincing.

The fix is simple. Pick one idea. Develop it in detail. Present it clearly. And then do the same for the other ideas, but in separate emails.

The parable of the marketing apprentice

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Do you know the parable of the sorceror’s apprentice?

The sorcerer leaves the tower for a bit, and his apprentice uses what magic he’s learned to get the broom to come alive and start fetching pails of water. Except the stupid broom, once it has gotten the command, won’t stop. The apprentice hasn’t learned this magic incantation yet.

So more and more water keeps being sloshed into the tower. The apprentice starts to panic and decides to chop the broom in half. Not smart. His problems are now doubled — two brooms are bringing twice the water.

This is akin to what happens when people start learning about marketing and copywriting. For example, the very first bit of marketing advice you’ll hear is to focus on how your offer benefits the prospect.

“Don’t make it about you, make it about them!”

It’s a solid piece of advice. And it should be used, when and where it’s needed. But is it the only incantation a marketer needs to know?

I thought of this a few months back when I got a promotional email from a health coach named Ari Whitten. Ari runs a very popular online course called the Energy Blueprint, and he was sending an email to his list to promote his new book. The subject line? “My New Book is HERE!”

Who cares, right? Where’s the benefit? What’s in it for me, Ari?

Well, apparently, much of Ari’s list cares. Through motivating his own loyal followers — and probably with a lot of affiliate help — Ari’s book shot up to the #2 spot in the health category on Amazon, and within the top 40 of all books on Amazon.

In a way, this is reminiscent of what Gene Schwartz calls the “most aware” state of customer awareness. From Gene’s Breakthrough Advertising:

The customer knows of your product — knows what it does — knows he wants it. At this point, he just hasn’t gotten around to buying it yet. Your headline — in fact, your entire ad — need state little more except the name of your product and a bargain price.

At the same time, this isn’t really about awareness of the product. Instead, the awareness is about Ari himself. People know him and want what he has to offer, without taking too much care of what his offer actually is.

But let’s tie this back to the sorcerer’s apprentice.

Wouldn’t Ari have been more successful if he had pitched the benefits of his new book right in the subject line? Maybe, at least for selling this one book. That’s like telling your broom to go fetch the water.

However, for the long term, always shouting benefits might not be the best strategy. If you keep writing to the same people, and all you do is talk benefits, without doing other things to build a bond with your readers (like entertaining them, teasing them with curiosity, or relating to them on a personal level), then you eventually lose their attention and you make your job harder — or impossible — for the long term.

That’s when you try chopping the axe in two. In the marketing world, that usually means making more and more extreme promises and claims. When that doesn’t seem to work, you chop again and again, making still more extreme claims.

That is, until the sorcerer comes back from his afternoon walk. He surveys the mess, throws the sleeves of his robe back, and  finally casts the magic spell (called “relationship”) to drive all these marketing problems away.

“My new book is HERE!”