Spectacles

Slutty email

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Yes, the subject line of today’s email includes the word “slutty.”

If that didn’t outrage or shock you so much that you marked this email as spam already, then read on, because I will tell you how to turn any shock and outrage you did feel into profits, regardless of what you sell.

I’m making my way through a backlog of old New Yorker magazines that have gathered under my living-room coffee table.

​​The one I’m currently on is from April 2023. The main article is about Pinky Cole, the founder of a fast-food chain called Slutty Vegan.

The Slutty Vegan menu features no-meat burgers such as Fussy Hussy ($13) and Super Slut ($15).

When customers step forward to order, a Slutty employee announces through a microphone, “It’s Slutty Saturday!”

​​If it’s the customer’s first time at the restaurant, and they admit it, then the employee adds over the microphone, “We have a virgin slut!”

There’s a bouncer at the Slutty Vegan entrance, and a DJ plays Drake and Aaliyah inside. On the wall, there’s a bright sign that reads, “EAT PLANTS YA SLUT.”

As one investor in the company said, “It’s this very unusual juxtaposition of veganism, which is often connected to what I’m not allowed to eat, with sluttiness, which is all the things that I’m gonna do even though I’m not allowed to.”

And it’s resonating.

Most people who go to Slutty Vegan are not going because they are militant vegans. In fact, most are not vegans at all, or really going for the food.

Slutty hamburgers seem to be middling — “better than American McDonalds,” as one interviewed customer put it. Or in the words of the author of the New Yorker article, who was trying to quit eating factory-farmed meat when he first went to Slutty Vegan, “Like most people, though, I went back in equal parts for the vegan food and for the vibes.”

You might wonder whether it’s viable long-term business strategy to sell people middling food while calling them sluts.

As of that April 2023 article, Slutty Vegan had 10 locations around Georgia, Alabama, and New York. It’s had investment that valued the company at $100 million (the first location opened in 2018).

Slutty Vegan has since opened a new location in Texas and is opening a new one in Baltimore, one of my adopted home towns.

Pinky Cole, the founder, is also launching an entrepreneurial reality show, and Slutty Vegan has had partnerships with designer Steve Madden and was planning one with Lululemon.

The point I’m trying to illustrate is the power of creating a sense of place around whatever and wherever you sell, whether that’s a slutty drive-through or your own slutty website.

Of course, you don’t have to get all crass and sexual with your sense of place, like Slutty Vegan does.

This idea of sense of place has long been practiced to perfection by another restaurant franchise, Unslutty Starbucks.

As the Starbucks website says (under the “Stories” subdomain), Starbucks is the Third Place, a place of warmth and connection and belonging, a place apart from work (presumably, where coldness and alienation reign) and home (filled with mess and stress).

And if you need reminding how valuable that Third Place concept has been, Starbucks now has 35,000 locations worldwide and is valued at $104 billion.

So if you felt any shock or outrage at today’s “slutty email” subject line, then good.

It will help you remember today’s email, and apply, in your own business, the lesson of creating a sense of place — a gift-box-and-bow around whatever you sell, which elevates your product from a commodity to a price-elastic emotional experience.

You might wonder what kind of sense of place I aim for with my emails, and with the products that I sell.

Or maybe you don’t wonder. Maybe it’s obvious. Because I’ve written emails about it before, and I’ve even created paid courses about my chosen “sense of place” in the past.

But if would like to hear me spell it out, you can do do so on the free training putting on later this month.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

The essence of expert showmanship (prepare to be underwhelmed)

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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

The ONE thing to know about storytelling

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The ONE thing to know about storytelling is that, like cooking, plumbing, and robbing a bank, storytelling is really a collection of skills and strategies rather than a single unifying rule to follow.

I know you probably don’t want to hear that. But look at this:

– How do I know when I’m using too much detail?

– ​How do you know where to stop?

– ​How to add twists to a story?

– ​Making up stories… When might you want to do this?

A few days ago, I asked readers what questions they have about storytelling. Above are a few of the replies I got.

All fair questions. All require separate answers. Any answer that could possibly answer all of them, such as tension! or surprise! or delight!, is so vague as to be useless.

But wait, there’s more.

The real thing I want to share with you in this email is not the discouraging message above.

Rather, I wanna tell you something interesting I read yesterday in a book about magic and showmanship. The author of that book says the best performers, magicians, and showmen practice something he calls conservation.

Conservation: the ability to do more and the will to refrain.

From the book: “If we try to give any routine more importance than it will bear, we destroy the illusion and may reveal the secret.” Hence, conservation. The willingness to hold back the full might of your armory of magic tricks.

Same goes for storytelling.

There are lots of tricks if you really break down what the best storytellers do.

But in order to tell an interesting and effective story, you definitely do not need all of these tricks. In fact, one or two tweaks to what you might normally do are all it takes to turn a bland story into something memorable and exciting.

And on the other hand, making use of more than just one or two tricks per story is likely to destroy the illusion and may reveal the secret.

What secret?

Well, for that (drumroll) I invite you to join me for the free presentation on storytelling that Kieran Drew and I will host on Monday, specifically at 4pm CET/10am EST/7am PST (yes, I know).

This presentation is a bonus for those who get Simple Money Emails before the presentation goes live. After that, no free bonus.

If you already have Simple Money Emails, you should have gotten an email from either Kieran or me with the Zoom link to join Monday’s presentation.

And if you don’t yet have Simple Money Emails, you can get it at the link below. ​​I could try for some callback humor right now to wrap up this email, but instead I will conserve and refrain. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Announcing: The winner of the “Send me your feedback on my Simple Money Emails course” contest

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Two weeks back, I announced the winner of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest, only 3 months behind schedule.

Well, today I have another contest winner to announce, this time for the “Send me your feedback on my Simple Money Emails course” contest.

I told everyone who had gotten Simple Money Emails to send me their feedback, their praise, their blame, their outrage.

The most useful bit of feedback, determined by a select three-part panel composed of myself, plus a Shire hobbit named Bejako Baggins, and top-secret agent Bond Jebakovic, would win a ticket to my upcoming Authority Emails training, valued somewhere north of $500.

I ran that contest a little over a month ago.

Today I would like to announce the winner (fanfares please):

Career coach Tom Grundy. (Tom, if you’re listening, come by the DJ booth to pick up your prize.)

Tom wrote me with the following bit of feedback on Simple Money Emails, specifically about a tiny section at the bottom of page 2:

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I really enjoyed SME. A few parts which were refreshers, a few which were a new take on stuff I’d already come across, and some stuff which was brand new to me.

I actually found the most useful part of the course to be the small section at the bottom of page 2. The eight bullet points to me were gold. I came into copywriting through a Stefan Georgi course, so I learnt his RMBC method and only then came onto daily emails, which I found to be much more my thing. I always struggled to see how daily emails “fit” with other copywriting models (RMBC, PAS, AIDA etc) and this section has made it super clear for me. Now when I sent my daily emails I use this list, and make sure I’m ticking off at least one in each email (and ticking them all off over time).

So if you had pages which delved into each of these 8 bullets in more detail (just like you have already for the openers and closers) I’d also find this super valuable.

===

The reason it’s taken me this long to announce Tom’s the winner was because it’s taken me this long to take his advice and expand this section of the course a bit with some illustrations.

I’ve done that now.

So if you have Simple Money Emails already, you will the find the updates automagically present inside your course area.

And if don’t have Simple Money Emails yet, you can get it at the page below, and start benefiting from it in under an hour from now:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How Edward Bernays manipulated me, and how he might do it again

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I once wrote an email with the subject line, “How I manipulated you, and how I might do it again.”

​​That email was all about the strategic use of inflammatory words — like “manipulated” — to get people reading stuff they might not read otherwise.

Well, Edward Bernays manipulated me, and I guess he manipulated millions of other people, too.

Right now, I’m reading Bernays’s book Propaganda. It’s been in print for the past 100 years, and it’s still discussed today, though I suspect few people who discuss it have ever read it.

Why do people know and discuss Propaganda? Because of that title. Propaganda. It’s like manipulated. On the one hand repulsive, on the other hand fascinating.

Imagine that Bernays had titled his book Public Relations — which is really what his book is about. Would we be talking about it today, much less reading it?

The answer is no. The proof is that Bernays did in fact write a book called Public Relations. Result?

Propaganda: 2,700+ reviews on Amazon
Public Relations: 74 reviews on Amazon — and I bet most of those only came via Bernays’s Propaganda fame

All that’s to say, hooks matter. And unless you hook someone right away, then all the other thousands of words you might have written won’t matter much.

But you knew that. It’s the oldest bit of advice traded around the copywriting bonfire.

What you might not know is how to write a great hook. How to make it sensational and inflammatory — propaganda for the rest of what you have to say.

About that. As Daniel Throssell wrote recently:

​The skill of coming up with a great hook, and the skill of making it sensational, are almost exactly the same as a tiny, mechanical, supposedly “niche” copywriting skill you probably do not yet possess.

​​But it’s a skill you can find out more about, and even acquire quickly, via the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

An evergreen way to create a spectacle

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At 10 minutes before 12 noon today, I hurried down my street and turned to the Rambla del Poblenou.

It’s Sunday today, and people were out and about, strolling down the sycamore-lined street.

​​As I neared the main intersection in front of the Aliança de Poblenou building, which is the very heart of the neighborhood, the strolling crowds grew more dense and then jammed to a stop.

I stood around for a couple minutes, waiting expectantly.

Then at noon exactly, I saw a group of about two dozen men get in a circle, facing the center of the intersection. ​​All were wearing the same uniform — blue shirts, white pants, black sashes tied tightly around their waists, yellow and red bandanas around their wrists.

The men formed two rows. The ones in the outer row were pushing the ones in the inner row towards the center of the circle. The ones in the inner row were holding up their hands into a kind of team salute.

And them, four other men started climbing up — first up the backs of the outer row men, then over the inner row men.

The new climbers scrambled onto the shoulders of the inner row and then stood up, their arms on each other’s shoulders for balance.

Meanwhile, one more set of four was already clambering up the backs of the people on the first storey… up onto the shoulders of the men in the second storey… and then standing up to form a third storey.

This repeated until the team had formed a human tower, six storeys high, with men at the bottom, young women occupying the middle storeys, and kids wearing helmets at the top.

It’s a Catalan tradition, the castell. Since this weekend is the Festa Major de Poblenou, the yearly celebration of the neighborhood, it was a good time to perform the castell.

Today’s performance reminded me of two things:

First, I thought of Harry Houdini, dangling upside down from the building of the town’s main newspaper at 12 noon and writhing to escape a straightjacket… and second, I thought of Claude Hopkins, dreaming up the world’s biggest cake on the fifth floor of a newly opened department store in Chicago.

In a word:

I thought of spectacle, which happens to be one of the more valuable marketing skills you can have.

So how do you create spectacle?

Some of it is operational. Again, today’s castell happened on Sunday at 12 noon, on a central intersection, and was well advertised. A spectacle is no spectacle unless there are people around to see it.

But once you take care of the operational stuff, you still have the “content” of the spectacle.

How do you do that? How do you create something spectacular in content?

​​I will only point out the obvious from today:

Imagine two storeys of human beings… maybe three.

​​Ho-hum.

But six? And kids up top, 30 feet in the air, looking mildly terrified as the whole thing sways and shivers under the human tonnage?

If you think about that a bit, you will be able to extract a reliable, evergreen way to create the intrigue necessary for the content of a spectacle, which will work even if you’re not Catalan and don’t have a team of castellers to form a human tower.

But on to my offer:

If you want me to spell out this way to create intrigue, you can find it inside Round 3 of my Copy Riddles program. And you can find many more such ways.

Because Rounds 3-6 of Copy Riddles are actually all about creating intrigue.

It takes that many rounds, because this is a big part of what marketing and copywriting is. Most things are not spectacular on their own. It’s the marketer’s or copywriter’s job to take mundane elements, combine them in predictable ways, and create something sexy and new and intriguing.

If you go through Copy Riddles, you will start to exercise your own spectacle-conjuring faculties.

​​Plus, you will see how some of the best copywriters in the world dun it, and learn a thing or six from them.

​​For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Bud Light boycott keeps getting worse, but I can fix it

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Bud Light is in a tailspin. You may have heard the news.

On April 1, transgender TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney announced that Bud Light had sent her personalized cans to celebrate her one-year anniversary living as a trans woman.

A boycott of Bud Light started as a result. In the weeks and months since, sales of Bud Light have plummeted close to 30%. The stock price of Anheuser-Busch is down by almost 20% compared to April 1. This fiasco has erased over $22 billion worth of market value.

Brand boycotts normally blow over in a couple weeks. The Bud Light boycott is getting stronger after 3 months. Sales of Bud Light are trending lower and lower each week. Data out In June showed Mexican lager Modelo replacing Bud Light as America’s best-selling beer.

Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth issued a peacemaking statement, saying the company never meant to be “part of a discussion that divides people.”

​​Bud Light continues to sponsor Major League Baseball and has a new summer campaign, “easy to drink and easy to enjoy.”

None of this is making an impact.

At this point, I’d like to step in. ​​Anheuser-Busch is an American institution, as is Bud Light. Also, some 18,000 people’s jobs are directly on the line.

At the same time, it’s clear that this is not an issue of beer or jobs only, but really about values and identity.

Where Brendan Whitworth and the billion-dollar marketing agencies that Anheuser-Busch employs have failed, I will succeed.

Using the almost mystical influence powers I have gained through repeated use of my Most Valuable Email Trick trick, I will realign Bud Light’s public positioning so it once again fits its core market’s values and identity. At the same time, I will do so in a way that leaves the progressive community impressed and content.

If I were to start now, I could have Bud Light back on top, ahead of Modelo, getting more Americans slightly buzzed without feeling bloated, well before Labor Day. All Anheuser-Busch has to do is get Whitworth to write me and ask. My email address is publicly available.

In other news, I have a disappearing bonus for you for today.

This morning I came across an incredible resources, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice.

It comes from a man I’ve actually 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.

Among a dozen or more great ideas in that resource I found today, one stood out to me.

So here are the details of my disappearing bonus offer:

1. Get a copy of my Most Valuable Email training at https://bejakovic.com/mve/

2. Then reply to this email and say you want the disappearing bonus offer.

3. I will write you back and tell you 1) That resource I found this morning, and where you can get it for free 2) the particular idea that struck me, and how you can apply it in your own marketing and 3) why the man behind this resource has been so influential to me personally.

4. This disappearing bonus offer is good until tomorrow, Tuesday July 11, at 8:31pm CET.

5. And of course, if you’ve bought MVE already, this is open to you as well. Write in and ask away, and I will tell you. But the same deadline applies.

Sexy firefighters running around for nobody’s entertainment

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It’s 8:45am as I start writing this email. Right now, off my balcony, I can see a tremendous show.

I live next door to a fire station, and the firemen are doing a public demonstration on the street in front of the station.

​​They are dressed up in their sexiest firefighting suits and they are running around two smashed up cars, one of which is burned to a crisp. The cars were placed there earlier in the morning, inside of a fenced-in area, so the firemen could show how they cut a car open and rescue somebody inside.

Like I say, it’s a tremendous show. Spectacular. My 6-year-old self would have given up a year of eating KitKats in order to see it.

And yet, as I watch this show off my balcony, there’s a total audience of about a dozen adults gathered on the street.

I mean, it’s 8:45am. People are either at home or on their way to work or stuck in the prison of school. Besides, it’s not a busy street. And as far as I know, this demonstration was not advertised anywhere — again, I live right next door.

You’ve probably heard the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins said, “No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

True, but:

The most famous example of a dramatic demonstration was Elisha Otis. Otis changed the landscape of American cities when he demonstrated his crash-proof elevator — to the masses milling about the New York Crystal Palace Exposition, which attracted 1.1 million visitors.

When Claude Hopkins himself created the world’s largest cake to promote Cotosuet, a kind of early margarine, he made a deal with a giant new department store which had just opened in Chicago.

​​The cake would go smack dab in the middle of the grocery department on the fifth floor. ​​Hopkins then ran big ads in all the Chicago newspapers to advertise the fact.

​​Over the course of a week, 105,000 people climbed the four flights of stairs to see that cake.

And when master showman Harry Houdini did his straitjacket escapes, while hanging upside 150 feet in the air, with only his feet tied to a pulley on the roof of some building, he made sure to hang off the building of the town’s main newspaper, guaranteeing a front page story the day before his show. Houdini did all these public escapes at exactly 12 noon, when lunchtime crowds could assemble.

Point being, as Gary Halbert might put it:

Advertise your advertising.

But maybe you say, “Yeah yeah but how? How exactly do I advertise my advertising?”

I gave you three examples right above. If that ain’t enough, here’s a fourth:

The waiting list for my future group coaching program on email copywriting. The waiting list serves as a waiting list, for sure. But it also serves as advertising for the actual advertising I will do when I do make that group coaching available. Very meta.

If you are interested in writing emails that people actually like reading and that they actually buy from, then you might be a good fit for my future group coaching. Or you might not. ​​In case you’d like to find out more about it, the first step is to get on my daily email list. Click here to do that.

Fully patented Most Valuable Email

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I’d like to announce I have just drafted and am about to submit US patent application 16/573921.

​​My patent application only states the proven and the incontestable, which is that my Most Valuable trick fulfills the three main criteria for a patentable invention. Namely, my Most Valuable Email trick is:

Patent Criterion #1: Novel

​​While the underlying persuasion idea I write about in Most Valuable Email is as old as magic, my use of this idea in daily emails is novel. As copywriter Van Chow wrote after going through Most Valuable Email:

“I love this course, I bet some money to see if it still talks about boring stuff like AIDA or PAS. But I was surprised, I had never heard of this concept before.”

Patent Criterion #2: Non-obvious

​​I have used the Most Valuable Email trick hundreds of times in my newsletter and yet it continues to surprise. For example, copywriter Cindy Suzuki wrote after learning the Most Valuable Email trick:

“You know that moment people get epiphanies and the entire world looks different? I’m feeling that way about your writing now. You’ve helped me unlock something I didn’t know existed. So incredible.”

Patent Criterion #3: Has a concrete, practical application

​​The Most Valuable Email trick produces interesting emails, but it also produces more concrete, practical results, such as money. In the experience of copywriter Ivan Orange, who went through Most Valuable Email:

“I want to take the opportunity to tell you that the day after I read MVE, I sent my list a first [MVE trick] email, using an idea from one of your swipe file emails. That day I sold one of my courses, which made me make 5 times more the investment in MVE, so I’m looking forward to keep improving in this technique and make many more sales.”

As soon as my $900 application fee is accepted and my patent application is approved, I plan to vigorously prosecute any and all copywriters, marketers, or small business owners infringing on my Most Valuable Email patent and writing Most Valuable Emails without a license.

​​Fortunately, I will have the full force of U.S. government and their thousands of patent lawyers on my side in that fight.

Of course, my goal is not to stop the spread of the Most Valuable Email trick. Most Valuable Email is most valuable for a reason, and it’s not only most valuable for me.

​​At the same time, I do want to control the spread of this powerful and novel idea, and I want to be rewarded properly for this invention. That’s the reason for my imminent patent application.
​​
​​Anybody can buy a license to learn to safely and legally use the Most Valuable Email trick, and the license fee is very reasonable, $100.

If you would like to buy a Most Valuable Email license, you can do so at the page below.

​​I also have a special offer, good for 24 hours only. Buy a Most Valuable Email license and also reply to this email, and I will tell you how this email relates to the Most Valuable Email trick, beyond just promoting my Most Valuable Email course.

You have until Tue, Apr 11, 2:31 EST to do so.

​​If you’ve bought a Most Valuable Email license already, of course this offer applies to you as well. But you do have to write me and ask, and before the deadline.

To get your own Most Valuable Email license:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How to increase your average open rate by 1.95%

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My average daily open rate for the last week of February was 33.89%. My average daily open rate for the last week of March was 35.84%. That’s a staggering increase of 1.95%.

Well, it’s not really staggering. It’s not really anything.

Open rates don’t tell you much, and what they do tell you is often bad. I’ve written before how for one large list I was mailing with daily offers, I found a mild inverse relationship between open rates and sales — on average, each extra 1% of opens cost us $100 in sales.

But my sales are up as well. Like I wrote a few days ago, this past March was a record month for me. I made plenty of sales in that last week of March, many more than in the last week of February. I won’t say how much more, but it’s enough to go to Disneyland with.

What gives?

I can tell you my impressions. The jump in both open rates and sales very clearly came after March 6, when I ran an ad in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter. But — about that.

The staggering increase in open rates might be due to new subscribers who came via that ad. I don’t know, and ActiveCampaign gives me no easy way to figure it out.

But I do know that the bulk of new sales I saw in the whole of March compared to the whole of February did not come from new subscribers who came via the ad. The bulk came from my existing subscribers.

Many of those sales came from people buying new offers I had made in March, such as Insight Exposed and Copy Zone. That’s normal.

But one thing that struck me is how many existing subscribers, some of whom have been on my list for months or even years, decided this March to buy offers like Copy Riddles and Most Valuable Email, which I have offered dozens of times before. These readers successfully resisted all my previous pitches, but they found themselves curious and willing to buy now.

It wasn’t just one such person. It was lots. I asked myself what made the difference.

My best answer is this:

There’s a lot that goes into the success of email marketing beyond the actual email funnel and copy. At least if you’re doing something like I’m doing, which is a long-running, personal, relationship-based email newsletter.

I’ll leave you with that for today. And I’ll just remind you of my coaching program for email marketing and copywriting.

I have to include the email copywriting in the coaching program, because it’s what almost everybody wants to learn and believes is most important.

But in my experience, email copy is rarely the thing that really makes the biggest impact in the results of your emails. By results I mean sales, as well as soft stuff like retention, engagement, and influence.

Anyways, if you are interested in my coaching program, you’ll also be interested to know this program is only open to two kinds of people:

1. Business owners who have an email list and want to use email to both build a relationship with their customers and to sell their products

2. Copywriters who manage a client’s email list, and who have a profit-share agreement for that work

If you fit into one of the two categories above and you’re interested in my coaching program, write me an email and say so. Also tell me who you are and what your current situation is, including which category above you fit into. We can then talk in more detail, and see if my coaching program might be a fit for you.