Positioning

The real psychology behind the most famous USP of all time

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A few days ago, I did a poll in my Daily Email House community, asking members what comes to mind when I say, “Most overused marketing case study of all time.”

I had one overused case study in mind, but I wanted to see what others would say. Some of what came up:

Claude Hopkins’s campaign for Schlitz beer…

David Ogilvy’s powerful promotion of the impressively loud Rolls-Royce electric clock…

The Wall Street Journal’s “Two young men” sales letter.

Finally, architect and copywriter Neil Sutton got the one I was thinking of:

“First one that came to my mind was the Domino’s Pizza as the ultimate example of a USP.”

Yes! That in my mind is the most overused marketing case study. It’s famous and has been told and retold, generation after generation, in books, courses, and from the stage:

“Fresh hot pizza in 30 minutes, or it’s free! Nobody said nothing about ‘good’ or ‘good for you’! Haha! Such a great USP!”

So why doesn’t Domino’s use this USP any more?

On May 25, 1990, Susan Wauchop, aged 41, was driving on a local road near Granger, Indiana. She got hit head on by a speeding Domino’s van that was coming from the other direction and had lost control. Wauchop died a few hours later. Her family was awarded $2.8 million in damages.

That didn’t stop Domino’s incentivizing their delivery drivers to speed. But a much larger settlement did. In 1993, a woman who suffered serious head and spine injuries after being hit by a Domino’s driver who sped through a red light was awarded $79 million in damages.

A few days after that settlement, Domino’s CEO Tom Moynihan announced the 30-minute guarantee was abolished, in the interest of public safety and corporate profits.

Today, I wanna tell you about an innovation that Domino’s introduced in the coming years, because it relates to that famous USP, and it relates to what you are doing. Yes, you. Right now.

Whatever business you are in, however advanced or new you are to it, what I’m about to tell you is relevant to you, and is certainly the most valuable thing anybody has told you today… possibly this month (it’s only the 3rd…) or maybe even this whole year (it’s a stretch, but maybe).

Ready?

In the mid 2000s, Domino’s conducted a study of the emotions involved in ordering and waiting for a pizza. From a contemporary article:

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The “high” at the point of ordering was followed by a trough of anxiety. “People have told us that anxiety sets in. They don’t know if we’ve got their order, if we’ll get it right, if it will arrive on time,” said spokesman Tim McIntyre.

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Domino’s described the customer experience of ordering a simple pepperoni pizza as an “emotional rollercoaster.”

It makes sense when you think about it.

You (and yours) are hungry… you have to decide (or agree!) what you would want to eat… you finally do decide… you take action and order… you throw up your arms to signal victory, and then… nothing. You have to wait, and can’t do anything about it. Not only that, but you have complete uncertainty about when, if, by whom, or to what extent you will ever be satisfied.

So maybe the famed Domino’s 30-minute guarantee wasn’t really about speed. Maybe it was just about certainty, or rather, about eliminating uncertainty.

Domino’s took this insight and asked themselves, “How can we use this to make money, without killing or maiming people in the process?”

The answer was the Domino’s Pizza Tracker®. Order a pizza, then go to a webpage that that tracks your specific pizza and how it’s progressing:

Order received => pepperoni distributed => oven being preheated, we should have done this earlier => pizza put on that big flat wooden shovel => pizza burned a little, but ok => cardboard box => out the door

Result?

Well, It worked. Big time.

When the Domino’s Pizza Tracker came out, people love-love-loved it.

Moms, who had been dealing with screaming and nagging children, loved it in particular. “I used to want to throttle my little boy,” one mother said (I’m dramatizing a bit). “Now I just sit him in front of the computer screen to watch the Domino’s Pizza Tracker®. He is hypnotized and more importantly quiet until the pizza arrives. This is the best thing ever!”

The Domino’s Pizza Tracker upped sales, particularly online sales. It led to higher average order values. It led to more loyal customers. Twenty years on, the tracker is still in existence, and billions of people used it to track billions of pizzas.

Point being, uncertainty is a really horrible feeling for your customers to experience. As a result, uncertainty is really horrible for you too — it kills sales, cause refunds, sinks brands.

And vice versa. Eliminating uncertainty is good for business.

The Domino’s Pizza Tracker gives you one simple idea, something you can apply in your own business in some way today, to reduce uncertainty.

Of course, there are different kinds of uncertainty, and different ways to deal with that uncertainty.

Travis Sago, the guy I keep hyping up because I think he is the second coming of Claude Hopkins, talks about 5 kinds of uncertainty or risk you want to reduce for people under the acronym TIMER.

You can’t always eliminate all five. But the more you can eliminate, the richer you get, and the easier the process becomes.

I normally promote Travis’s very expensive Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a member.

Today, no. I want to minimize your uncertainty of joining a new, overwhelming, expensive community, and trying to integrate yourself there.

Instead, I will just point you to Travis’s book, Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You, which you can get on Amazon.

Fair warning: This is not a particularly elegant or well-written book.

In fact, I don’t think it’s really written at all. Most of it is bits of wisdom that seem to be transcribed from Travis’s live trainings.

But the ideas in this book are gold, if you only take a bit of time to go through it and to really hear what Travis is saying, such as the five kinds of uncertainty, the TIMER risks, which you can find in Chapter 3.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/begtobuy

10 things people have copied from me

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1. My “Hello my name is” optin page. (A copywriter I know recently set up a new list and wrote to tell me about it, along with, “I swiped your landing page”)

2. “Announcing” as the subject line to kick off every promo or new offer

3. “Down payment + the rest contingent on success” pricing plans

4. Turning my own current project into a mid-ticket cohort I can sell (I did it with my project of implementing the 1-Person Advertorial Agency program back in May, several people have followed me since)

5. The Most Valuable Email trick (ok, I created a course on that, so little wonder)

6. Using the “Can you do me a favor?” strategy in emails

7. “Bejakovic’s crooked line” (a specific storytelling technique I used in advertorials, which Sam Bradbury-Butler used in his own advertorials and then integrated in his 1-Person Advertorial Agency program, while naming it after me)

8. My personal journaling and notetaking system (ok, I created a course on that too, called Insight Exposed, so little wonder again)

9. “Magic box” CTAs (if you don’t know what those are, then reply and ask)

10. My opening line of copy in emails where the subject line and the body don’t match (you gotta create a bridge)

There’s more, too. I’m possibly the most ripped-off daily emailer south of the Seine and north of the Nile.

Am I bitter about this? You bet your sweet—

No, I’m not bitter. The fact is, few if any of the above ideas are actually mine.

My optin page copy is taken from William Goldman’s Princess Bride. The “announcing” subject line I got from Sean D’Souza who got it from Vic Schwab. The “down payment + rest contingent on success” I picked up from Jeff Walker.

And so on.

All these 10 things people have copied from me I have copied from others as well, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Frankly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Yes, it can be fun to buy and sell secrets and secret opportunities, and that’s part of the game of direct response, both for the customers and the merchants.

At the same time, good ideas are cheap and abundant. You have to apply them, and keep applying them, and not get too distracted by the shiny and the new, in order to achieve success.

The good news is, if you apply and keep applying, success comes. It might take a while, but it comes.

Perhaps you KNOW the value of writing daily emails. Perhaps you even KNOW how to write daily emails.

But in case you’re not actually writing daily emails regularly, and applying that knowledge, I have a service that can help motivate you, keep you accountable, and make your job easier.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Creating value out of things that others would never think of

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I’m at the airport as I write this, on my way to Budapest, my former home, for a reunion with friends I had when I lived there a long time ago.

Right now, I’m sitting on a tiny stool at an airport restaurant, about to bite into a refrigerated airport sandwich, crowded on the one side by a pushy French couple and on the other by cleaning woman with a large broom.

That’s the good part of my current trip.

The bad part is that I just spent 25 minutes waiting in line for the privilege of paying 48 euro to get my boarding pass.

I’m flying low-cost, and I didn’t check in online before the three-hours deadline mandated by this low-cost airline. When I tried to check in online a few hours ago, I was told I would have to do it at the airport, and pay.

It’s annoying when this happens on a low-cost flight, and yet it is instructive.

The fact is, all kinds of things can be turned into value that normally aren’t.

It feels petty when low-cost airlines do it, but it can be done in ways that don’t feel petty, but in fact feel the opposite — generous, exciting, convenient.

Imagine you’re buying a house.

Nominally, you’re paying for the keys and the right to move in.

You can buy a “low-cost” house, which gives you the keys and the right to move in, but which doesn’t have lightbulbs, windows, or running water, and you have to pay extra for those.

Conversely, can buy a “premium” house, which gives you not just the bare keys and the right to move in, but which has been furnished by an interior designer, comes with a concierged security service, and has a fridge stocked with food from Whole Foods.

Ultimately, it’s the same business practice, the only difference is the positioning of your business as upmarket or downmarket.

Maybe you’re munching on your own refrigerated sandwich right now and mumbling, “Right right…”

… but maybe you don’t see how this idea from real estate and the airline industry can apply to what you do, specifically to creating offers that you can sell to your audience.

For that, I’d like to invite you to sign up for a trial to my perennial recommendation, the Royalty Ronin community.

Travis Sago, the guy who runs Ronin, is the best person I have ever seen at creating value out of things that others would never think of.

Right now, Travis is preparing to auction off a year of a SaaS, which he is promoting as an affiliate.

In other words, Travis will ask people how much they would pay… to have him pay their bill for a year of this software service.

How do you possibly auction off something not unique, with a known and fixed value? And how do you auction it off for 5x, 10x, 20x of what it is currently selling for on the website of the SaaS company?

For that, I invite you to sign up to Ronin, and to follow along as Travis proceeds to build up his premium offer, out of elements that might seem like air to you right now:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Do you have a great gig right now? Beware and prepare

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Yesterday, I talked to a coaching client, someone who has a sizeable email list and a bunch of offers he’s been selling for a while.

Recently, he decided to step back from this to take a proper job. He enjoys learning something new at his new role, and he finds the work exciting, and he likes the company and the people, and there’s more money, stability, and free time than with all the stuff he has been doing by himself.

He asked if I have any advice as he transitions from his online business to this new job.

I’ll tell you what I told him:

Over the course of the past six months, I have had a number of people come to me and say, “I used to have this great gig, until yesterday.”

One was a business owner whose business partner screwed him and took everything.

Another was a freelancer whose main client’s business turned out to be shaky, so the client decided to bring the work in-house as a cost-cutting measure.

A third was a salaried employee whose employer decided to simply terminate the role, even though the guy was making the employer more money than he was getting paid, and could prove it.

All these people, and a few others, came to me after their once-great gig disappeared, with the idea to build a personal brand as a way of making money now.

So what I told my coaching client yesterday is, enjoy the new job and make the most of it. But at the same time, even the best, most certain gigs can disappear, overnight.

Businesses go out of business. Partners cheat you or simply step away. Employers get sick, die, or go bankrupt.

For all these reasons and more, it makes sense to have a backup to your great gig.

My coaching client is very lucky, because he’s already got the best backup I know, a personal brand, an audience, and a relationship with that audience.

If anything happens to his current job — the company is sold and the new owners fire everyone, or they slash everybody’s salaries while keeping the workload the same, or they hire somebody else to do the job because he’s cheaper/better/a nephew — then he can go to this list, and write an email or two, and most likely find a new client or a series of clients by the end of this week.

So my takeaway for you is, if you have a personal brand, don’t let it go.

You don’t have to email daily or create new offers or moonlight in addition to your day job. All you have to do is show up on some regular schedule (once a week is good), and let people know you are alive, and give them proof that you’re doing well, and are still worth listening to and knowing about.

And my takeaway for you if you don’t have a personal brand but you have a great gig going… is also to start now.

For one thing, your great gig can give you authority and content ideas and behind-the-scenes data to make it easy to be somebody online.

For another thing, as I’ve been saying, your great gig might not always be there, so it makes sense to beware and prepare for that possibility now.

Here’s one more thing I told my coaching client yesterday:

Just focus on the content. Don’t worry about list growth or about offers or about what form this personal brand might take in the future.

This is true for you even if you are starting a personal brand now.

There’s value in creating content online EVEN IF NOBODY’S READING. For one thing, it makes you better at what you do. For another thing, it can grow your list on its own (albeit slowly), and it becomes fodder if you do want to create offers or lead magnets or books in the future. Most important of all, it becomes a proof element if you are ever talking to someone you want to impress. Compare:

“Why should you hire me? Gee, let me try to sum up the past 12 years of my career for you in the next 45 seconds before I lose your attention…”

… to…

“Why should you hire me? I don’t know that you should. Here’s my website where I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this topic, based on my previous experience. Take a look at it and we can talk afterwards.”

So let me ask you?

Do you have a great gig right now?

Do you want to have a personal online brand, and an audience, and a great relationship with them that you can use as a backup in case your great gig ever vanishes?

Then write me and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But I am curious what you do, and what kind of a personal brand you want to build and how, and what questions you have about the process.

The best piece of copy Dan Kennedy ever wrote

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Thanks to the sleuthing of two members of my Daily Email House community, Robin Timmers (the Netherlands’ largest copywriter) and Maliha Mannan (who runs the Side Blogger), I can bring you the link at the end of today’s email.

It’s a recording of the legendary “Success Tour” speech that direct marketer Dan Kennedy gave hundreds of times across the U.S. back in the 1990s.

Dan, for the record, was at one point the highest-paid copywriter on Earth. And I heard him say somewhere, I forget where, that this speech is the best piece of copy he has every written.

And no wonder:

This speech sold millions of dollars’ worth of Dan’s Magnetic Marketing program from the back of the room…

… it got tens of thousands of people to become prospects for Dan’s paid newsletter, high-ticket seminars, and done-for-you services…

… and it has fed Dan’s stable of racing horses for many decades now.

For several years, this speech wasn’t available anywhere online.

Years ago, I managed to track down a copy using archive.org. I’ve listened to this speech multiple times all the way through, and I’ve started it again this morning after Robin and Maliha clued me in that it’s now on YouTube.

Yes, Dan’s speech is worth listening to for the content, to learn the fundamentals of direct marketing, to be amused by Dan’s jokes and fast-paced delivery and combative approach, and to hear some good stories, told well.

But the real value in Dan’s speech is if you take the time to look between the lines of what he is saying. I’ve done it, and I’ve profited from it in ways I’ve written about before.

I suggest you analyze and model Dan’s speech also, so you can sell, whether from a stage, on a podcast, in a webinar, from a Zoom call with prospects or buyers, or just in an email, book, or sales letter.

If you have a personal online brand, I cannot recommend this enough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNcu27fpfBs

Magic positioning through maddening repetition

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I’m sitting in the Croatian coast town of Cavtat as I write this, under some pine trees with crickets chirping around me, an occasional plane landing overhead, and incredible humidity rolling off my body drop by drop.

I don’t know anything about this town — I ended up here last night due to my usual missed connecting flight — expect one curious thing.

A long time ago, I read a Bloomberg article about a gang of casino sharks who kept winning at roulette in casinos around the world, to the tune of millions of dollars per year.

The entire article was set up in the classic “Cialdini mystery structure,” teasing out the answer to the question of how the gang kept winning.

Was it computers up their sleeves?

Was it glasses that recorded and transmitted to some processing center?

Did they tamper with the roulette table in some way?

After all these avenues were explored and found to be dead ends, the author of the article tracked down the ringleader of the casino shark gang.

The ringleader was a Croatian guy who lives somewhere around… Cavtat.

He said the secret was simply that he bought a specific roulette table for his house and watched it spin millions of times, until his brain caught on to tiny regularities that he could exploit on other similar roulette tables in real casinos.

Point being:

What looks like magic can sometimes simply be maddening repetition and preparation, the kind of work that nobody would believe a sane person would ever do.

Yesterday, I had a call with a coaching client, a bona fide expert in his field, with years of experience and a sizable audience.

He said that while he is having success selling info products and even some 1-1 engagements, he still hasn’t hit upon the exact right positioning that would make it seamlessly easy.

I unfortunately don’t know any magic, rabbit-out-of-a-hat way to create the exact right positioning for established experts.

My best advice for figuring out winning positioning is simply to keep writing daily emails, keep making offers, keep seeing what works, and then doubling down on that.

Yes, it can take hundreds or maybe thousands of tries (millions?).

But it also means you can see the kind of ultimate success others only dream about and wonder at when they see it in you.

And even along the way, life can be pretty good… money can flow… and it can even be kind of fun.

Which brings me to my Most Valuable Offer training, which is happening tomorrow, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST.

This training will show you my process for coming up, selling, and delivering paid live training, which I call Most Valuable Offers.

Most Valuable Offers are easy, fast, cheap. Inevitably, a few might flop. Some will be a modest success. And some will be a big success.

Along the way, you can be making money… building a relationship with your audience that translates into future sales… and zeroing in on the perfect positioning that both keeps you happy and lights up your prospects’ eyes.

All that, and more, tomorrow. If you’d like to sign up for Most Valuable Offer before the casino doors close:

https://checkout.bejakovic.com/most-valuable-offer

What niche I am in, as are you

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A couple days ago, copywriter Svet Dimitrov, one of the content-creating, profit-making partners in my Daily Email House community, asked a question of the group:

“What niche are you in?”

It’s one of those questions I hate answering when asked by marketing folks, much like I hate answering “What do you do?” when asked by non-marketing normies. (My stock answer to the second question is, “Not much.”)

As far as I am able to articulate:

I’m currently in the niche of sharing what’s been working for me, and for the people I’ve been coaching, in order to make money online.

Previously, around the start of this decade, I was in the niche of writing Most Valuable Emails.

And before that, in the first year or two of my newsletter, I was in the niche of quoting Gene Schwartz’s books and seminars.

The fact is, as grandiose as it sounds, I am in the niche of being me.

If you want to have a personal brand online, the same is true of you.

That means YOUR personality, YOUR unique interests, and (as I am doing these days) YOUR results and case studies.

Yes, you typically have to have some sort of core topic to circle back to. But the “core topic” your readers will happily consume from you is surprisingly fluid, and it can definitely change over time (as it has for me).

The one thing that is constant is YOU.

Maybe you’re thrilled by that fact, or maybe it makes you uncomfortable.

In either case, you might as well start writing online now, because you ultimately have everything you need, or will ever need. If you want my help turning that into daily emails that make people buy today, and keep them reading tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to make a $5 offer easy to sell

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This morning, I shut off the cart and concluded my Daily Emails 101 experiment. Results:

* 155 sales

* About 65 first-time buyers

* A sales page conversion rate north of 33%

In my book, that makes this Daily Emails 101 experiment a success.

What done it? Is the usual threesome? An amazing list of dedicated readers and customers… an irresistible offer… my hypnotizing copy?

Yes, yes… but I would like to wager, there’s something else as well.

The price of Daily Emails 101 was just $5.

That alone won’t do it. There are plenty of $5 offers that don’t sell a single copy. So price alone ain’t it.

What is it is that, most of the time, I sell things that are $197 or $997 or $5k.

Yes, $5 is genuinely cheap, particularly for all I was giving away with Daily Emails 101. But $5 is extra cheap if you’ve been on my list for weeks, months, or years, and you’ve seen me promoting other, much more expensive offers with success. Human beings live by contrast.

My point for you today is two-part.

One part is to raise your prices. Once again, people live by contrast, and if you have at least some expensive offers, it makes everything else easier to sell.

The other part is that once you’ve raised your prices, to remind your readers of your high prices regularly, and to justify those prices, so that, whether people buy or not, they know you and your high prices are for real.

Speaking of:

Today, I would like to tell you about my Copy Riddles program. Copy Riddles sells for $997 and has been for years. Several hundred people have bought it and gone through it, some when it wasn’t yet priced at 997, many at $997.

Copy Riddles is the best thing I sell.

I created it 5 years ago, back when I was still orienting this email list to copywriters alone. The sales page for Copy Riddles reflects that.

The fact is though, Copy Riddles is a course in effective communication and persuasion, and it is relevant to if your business involves written communication of any sort.

I would love to repackage Copy Riddles in industry-specific versions tailored to investment fund managers who communicate with investors via reports… to trial lawyers who need to craft persuasive arguments… to carpet cleaners and HVAC installers who do their own marketing.

Maybe one day. For now, if you are interested in learning how to persuade using words, based on hundreds of millions of dollars of tested advertising, in a way that ensures these insights get burned into your brain rather than slip in one nostril and out the other, then take a look at the Copy Riddles sales page.

Yes, you might have to put in a bit of brain work to see how this program targeted at copywriters could be useful to you in what you do.

That’s the cost.

The payoff you can get for that cost is to be the first in your industry to download this proven influence and persuasion knowledge into your brain, and have first-mover advantage for months or years over all your competitors, at least until I create that specific version of Copy Riddles for your industry.

If you’re interested in the full details on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

A non-zero amount of sales

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This morning, I woke up to a ThriveCart sale notification.

“What’s this?” I said. I ripped it open like Dudley Dursley ripping open his 36 Christmas presents.

The notification revealed its secrets, and told me the new sale I made:

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Emails That Did Well – $79

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“Emails that did well” is an offer made earlier this week, in one email only.

After I made that offer and sent that email, I got a reply from expert email marketer and superior fractional CMO Nick “Jolly” Bandy, who wrote:

“Actually laughing my ass off reading this. So you are selling the SAME bonus stack as last week… without the main offer…for the same amount of money…and this will most likely make a non-zero amount of sales.”

Yes, it’s pretty much like Nick says, minus the laughing.

I first offered “Emails That Did Well,” plus all the free bonuses eventually included with it, as free bonuses to an affiliate offer.

After the affiliate offer closed, I offered the same bonuses for $79, which happened to be the price of the affiliate offer.

And I made a non-zero amount of sales as a result. As for how non-zero?

That’s for me to know and you to find out, at least if you have gotten yourself access to my Emails That Did Well document.

But before I send you to a page that outlines all the details of that offer and possibly entices you to buy it, a bit of marketing insight:

The first email I ever wrote to my list on the topic of positioning came in 2020.

In that email, I compared your positioning to a spear, which needs to have a very small and very sharp point, in order to pierce your prospect’s thick defenses (his skull) and lodge in the soft gray matter inside.

The thing is, if you fuse together several very small and very sharp points, they lose their “very small” and “very sharp” qualities.

Your positioning becomes less like a spear, small and sharp, and instead becomes more like an iron, flat and heavy.

An iron will hurt somebody if you throw it at their head, but it won’t pierce anything or create any kind of new understanding.

In short, positioning is not additive. A plus B plus C is not always greater than A alone, and often it is less.

That’s why a non-zero amount of people have taken me up on the Emails That Did Well offer.

If you’d like to get that offer, so you can find out how well that email has done so far, and to keep track of my other successful emails, now and in the future, here are the full details:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-emails-that-did-well/

Intro – You / Me

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A few days ago, I got an email with the subject line:

“Intro – John / Matt”

I’ve gotten emails like this before, and I always open them eagerly. They normally come from one person, who I know, and introduce me to a second person, who I don’t know.

Not so in this case.

This email was from a guy named Matthias, who I don’t know, introducing me to himself (Matthias aka Matt), who I still don’t know.

That was a little subject line trick I wanted to share with you.

It reminded me of how Gary Bencivenga used to get get a great “endorsement” for his offer by having the offer owner say something about his own product, and then having that formatted like a testimonial.

I don’t know if I would use this “Intro You / Me” trick myself, but there’s no doubt it put me into a different, more favorable state of mind, at least right when opening the email, than I would have been in otherwise.

The bigger point is is that it matters immensely how you first position yourself when you try to open up 1-1 conversations with people.

One option is the above approach, to position yourself as a helpful and disinterested bystander, connecting the person you are reaching out to with a valuable new contact.

That’s not bad, but it’s not great either.

What’s much better is to adopt the positioning I talked about during a live workshop I put on a few years ago, called Water Into Wine.

On that workshop, I talked about positioning I had used to open up conversations (and eventually do deals) with business owners who wouldn’t have even opened my email had I come in presenting myself as a copywriter or a service provider.

I charged $197 for Water into Wine when I ran it. I haven’t made it available since. I am making it available now, and as part of my “Hogwarts of Influence” event, specifically in the “Dumbledore” tier. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/core-promise-pwyw/