Copywriting

Five words to get to the heart of why people don’t buy

by

A true story about objections:

A chemical supplies salesman goes into a client’s office. The client used to have a big account with the salesman’s company, but about a year ago, he mysteriously withdrew his business.

“Why?” the salesman asks timidly.

“We decided to give your competitors a shot,” says the client. “They’ve proved to be perfectly satisfactory, so we will stick with them.”

Hmm.

What to say?

Well, one option is to take a page out Frank Bettger’s book How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success In Selling.

Back in the 1920’s, Bettger was a pro baseball player. He then got injured and started selling life insurance.

Very unsuccessfully, at first.

Eventually though, he became quite the salesman. In time, he even teamed up with Dale Carnegie on the self-help lecture circuit, and wrote the “How I Raised Myself” book after Carnegie encouraged him.

That book, although it’s not well-known today, had quite the following once.

Gary Bencivenga, widely believed to be the greatest copywriter of all time, and Marty Edelston, the founder of the direct response behemoth Boardroom/Bottom Line, both credit it for their massive success.

Anyways, one thing Bettger says in the book is he kept a list of reasons why people didn’t buy.

He tallied them all up, across some 5,000 sales interviews.

What he found is that around 60% of the time, the initial, logical objection that people gave for not buying was not the real reason.

Bettger advised first asking “Why?” to get this first reason.

He’d listen.

And then, he’d say, “In addition to that, is there any other reason you might have for not buying?”

In total, those five words — “Why” and “In addition to that” — were usually enough to draw out the real objection.

They worked in the case of the chemical supplies salesman above. (It turned out the client was angry that a special discount had been discontinued without notice.)

All of which is great if you can talk to your prospects.

This is something you do in direct sales. You might even be able to do with copywriting, if you can find prospects to interview.

Unfortunately though, it’s not always possible.

So how do you get at those hidden reasons when all you have is a customer avatar?

Well, you need workarounds.

I have my own — basically how I do research.

I’ll talk about this in more detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. If you want to raise your emails from failure to success in selling, you might be interested in grabbing a free copy of this book when it’s out. Here’s how to do that:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Ginsu knives in corporate boardrooms

by

“In Japan, the hand can be used as a knife. But this method doesn’t work with a tomato…”

— Original Ginsu knife commercial, cca. 1980

In copywriting, there’s something called the “false close.”

A perfect example of this is from the famous Ginsu knife TV commercial.

After showing you how the Ginsu cuts paper-thin slices of bread, how it’s sharp enough to saw through a tin can, and how it can even be used to chop wood, the narrator asks:

“How much would you pay for a knife like this?”

That’s the setup for the false close. You might expect that the pitch is coming soon. Instead, the narrator continues:

“Before you answer, listen…”

And then he tells you about all the incedible bonuses you get if you order your Ginsu knife right now.

A matching carving fork. A versatile 6-in-1 kitchen tool. A set of 6 precision steak knives. And a spiral potato slicer.

It’s only then, once you’ve been wowed with the craziness of the entire offer, do you get to hear the price. In other words, that’s when you finally get to the real close.

So should you use a false close in your selling?

It certainly seems so.

Not only does it work for TV commercials, but you can find examples of false closes in copy from some of the world’s best copywriters, including Mark Ford and Parris Lampropoulos.

And yet, other persuasion experts strongly warn against the false close.

For example, Jim Camp.

Camp was a master negotiator, who coached corporate executives in billion-dollar deals.

According to Camp, if you ever try a false close, you’ll get kicked out of the boardroom. At best, you’ll blow the deal and you won’t be invited back.

So how to square this with the Ginsu knife commercial?

It’s simply a matter of knowing your audience and your medium.

Yes, there are fundamentals of persuasion that work in just about any situation.

But convincing people to buy a $9.99 set of precision steak knives is going to take a different approach to closing a complex, year-long, corporate sale.

This might seem obvious.

But this basic principle — know what works for your audience — is violated a lot. Particularly when people try to Frankenstein copy from one market to another.

Anyways, this is one reason why it makes sense to specialize.

And that’s why, while I do write for different markets, I’m specializing more and more in writing health copy.

And if you want some of the best insights I’ve gained about writing for the health market (including writing winning sales emails for an 8-figure supplement business), you might like my upcoming book. For more info or to sign up for a free copy:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The email that broke the camel’s back

by

A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

 

How to harness the reverse testimonial

by

In his Adweek copywriting book, marketing genius Joe Sugarman described an interesting technique.

He called it the “reverse testimonial.”

Let me illustrate it by talking about myself. Or more specifically, about my persona on my aromatherapy website, Unusual Health.

You see, in the aromatherapy world, the man at the top of the pile is a guy called Robert Tisserand.

​Robert is extremely knowledgeable about essential oils.

​​For several decades, he’s lectured around the world about the science behind EOs and about how to use them safely.

​​He’s co-authored a massive book on the topic, filled with literally thousands of scientific citations. He has a huge following online, and he’s routinely considered to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, expert on essential oils.

So how does this apply to me?

Well, several people have recently asked me what my qualifications are to write about essential oils.

So I wrote an email to my aromatherapy list to answer exactly this question. And I started by talking about Robert Tisserand, and how great he is.

I then said how I don’t claim to be an essential oil expert, and how I never expect to have the kind of EO knowledge that Robert has. But then comes the twist, where I explain why this is actually a good thing for my readers.

You’ll have to be on my aromatherapy list to know exactly how I pull this off.

But how I pull off the twist is not the point. The point is that I used Robert Tisserand and his status as “one of the world’s leading experts in aromatherapy” to work for me.

That, in a nutshell, is Joe Sugarman’s reverse testimonial.

You start off by talking about the unbeatable advantages a competitor has over you — including testimonials and social proof — and then you turn that around to actually work in your favor.

Anyways, this might work for you as well, if you are not yet the man at the top of the pile in your market.

By the way, if you need help with sales emails, you might like my upcoming book on the topic. It distills what I’ve learned by writing for clients in the health space (and for my own aromatherapy list).

For more info, or to sign up for a free copy, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

I get bullied on Facebook, woman comes to my rescue

by

About a week ago, a woman named Alexis came to my defense on Facebook.

The back story is that a growing number of people had started calling me out as a scammer.

I had been running an ad to promote The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams, a free lead magnet for Unusual Health, my aromatherapy mailing list.

The ad was running successfully for a long while.

But eventually, people started accusing me (yes, me!) of being the scam. They said I was trying to charge $10 for The Little Black Book, which I claimed to be giving away for free.

The real issue was that I had a “thank you” page after people opted in for the free lead magnet.

At the top of the page, I had instructions (in regular font) that explained the ebook will be sent by email.

Below that, I gradually worked my way into a sales letter (including a proper, large headline) for another aromatherapy book I am selling, Essential Oil Quick Start Guide.

Now last Friday, I was on a webinar offered by copywriting legend Parris Lampropoulos.

And Parris explained exactly why I was getting bullied and called out as a scammer (and no, he wasn’t talking about me specifically).

Said Parris, people’s eyes are drawn to large text on the page. That’s why he’s against using pre-heads (text before the headline) if they have any kind of critical message. People simply won’t read them.

And that’s what was happening with my thank-you page — the pre-head was effectively the download instructions, and many people weren’t reading them.

Easy enough to solve.

I kept the exact same message, but upped the font of the first sentence of the download instructions to make it clear that is something people should read.

Voila.

The complaints stopped immediately.

And several people, including Alexis, even came to my defense against the angry mob, saying how people should read the instructions and how I’m not trying to scam anyone.

So the lesson is to avoid pre-heads.

And more broadly, it’s to realize how design and overall marketing can completely dominate the copywriting message you might have.

This is something I’ll talk about in more detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info on this book, or to get a free copy when it’s out, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

How to abuse your customers into buying from you

by

There’s a lot you can learn from chick flicks.

Take for example, the evergreen romantic comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary. It’s about a 30-something single woman, a bit fat, a bit messy, not too successful.

Throughout the movie, Bridget is searching for a nice, sensible boyfriend to go out with. She eventually succeeds — by not becoming bitter, by putting herself out there, by picking herself up when she’s down. At least that’s the surface script.

But there’s an underlying script as well.

After all, the guy that Bridget winds up with — Mark Darcy — starts off by cruelly and unironically insulting her:

“I do not need a blind date, particularly not with some verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother.”

Ouch.

Mark keeps this up for much of the movie.

Of course, it turns out he’s not such a bad guy after all. This makes it ok that Bridget winds up with him before the credits roll.

It gets better —  we hope

And that’s the underlying script.

It seems to say, even when somebody verbally or emotionally abuses you, there’s hope that they might actually like you.

I think many people subconsciously hope for this in real life as well. And that’s why abuse can help you make sales — as long as you keep it subtle and ethical.

As an example of this, take Joe Karbo’s famous ad, The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.

I’ve been talking about it for the past few days.

In one part of this ad, Joe says something like, “I will ask you to send me ten dollars for something that won’t cost me 50 cents.”

That’s borderline insulting.

And then he twists it further by calling you a “darned fool” if you don’t take him up on his offer.

At this point, you might be ready to boil over with indignation.

So Joe stops the abuse. He tells you how his offer is so valuable that you shouldn’t care if he is making a profit, because you’ll make a lot more.

This abuse-then-soothe pattern is something you can use on different levels.

At the sales argument level, like Joe did. Or to structure an entire sales letter. Or even across different sales messages — for example, within email campaigns.

Speaking of which, if you want info on how to structure email campaigns, you’ll want to read my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.

You’d be a darned fool not to do it.

After all, I’ve written successful sales emails for some very big businesses, and I’ll be sharing my insights within this book — which you can get for free, if you sign up now. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

How to overcome being nervous, with Neil Strauss AKA Style

by

I once listened to an unusual Mixergy interview.

Andrew Warner, the guy who runs Mixergy, typically interviews successful entrepreneurs for his show.

This time however, his guest was Neil Strauss.

AKA Style.

AKA the guy who wrote The Game, the book that exposed the underground pick up community and made it a mainstream phenomenon.

The strange thing was that Andrew, who had probably interviewed hundreds of people up to then, was nervous during this interview with Neil.

Neil, who is a very experienced interviewer himself on top of being a high-performing pick up artist, had this advice for Andrew:

“If you’re ever feeling nervous, call it out.”

Neil was saying that, in business as well as socially, you always want to beat someone to their objection.

If you raise the objection before it occurs to your adversary, then the objection loses its force.

This relates to what I was talking about yesterday. It was about Joe Karbo’s price argument in his famous ad “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” Joe wrote something like:

“I’m going to ask you to send me 10 dollars for something that’ll cost me no more than 50 cents. And I’ll try to make it so irresistible that you’d be a darned fool not to do it. After all, why should you care if I make $9.50 profit if I can show you how to make a lot more?”

That first bit, about the 50 cents, serves multiple purposes.

One of them is to raise a possible objection.

Try to imagine the ad without it:

You tell the prospect how you’ll ask him to send you $10, and that he’ll be a darned fool not to do it, because this information is worth way more than $10.

Maybe the guy will buy it. But maybe he’ll also say,

“Sounds good, but why $10 exactly? And how much are you making off this? It sounds fishy.”

So that first sentence, about the 50 cents, makes a small but significant difference — it diffuses the objection before it arises in the prospect’s mind.

And this isn’t the only reason to use this argument.

It’s not even the main reason, in my opinion.

I’ll talk about why tomorrow.

For now, if you want more copywriting advice, you might like my upcoming book. It deals with email marketing for the health space, including writing the actual copy. You can find out more about it here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The lazy man’s way to addressing price concerns

by

Have you ever heard of the 1970’s version of Tim Ferris?

His name was Joe Karbo.

Like Tim, Joe started with a successful direct response business.

And like Tim, Joe then wrote a book teaching a mass audience how they too could use modern marketing techniques to get rich.

It sounds a lot like Tim’s “4-hour Workweek.” Except, Joe’s version came out about 40 years earlier, and had an even better title:

“The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches”

Joe sold this book through a full-page, all-text ad he ran in mainstream magazines. The ad is worth tracking down because it’s full of good lessons. The one I want to focus on today is how it addressed the price of Joe’s book.

Very soon into the ad, Joe announced that he will be selling something (without saying what). And he immediately said it will cost $10 (about $60 in today’s money).

What’s more, he freely admitted that it won’t cost him more than 50 cents to make this thing. And then came the kicker. In Joe’s own words:

“And I’ll try to make it so irresistible that you’d be a darned fool not to do it. After all, why should you care if I make $9.50 profit if I can show you how to make a lot more?”

Obviously, Joe was successful. He managed to sell 3 million copies of his book using this approach.

​So what’s going on behind the scenes of this sales argument?

I think there are two crucial parts to it.

One is the provocation (“It won’t cost me 5% of what I’ll charge you, and yet you’ll pay”).

The other is the chance to lay out the benefits (“You get something more valuable than the price because XYZ”).

Now I see a lot of marketers today using just the second, benefits part of this sales argument. They ignore the first, provocation part.

I think that’s a mistake for two reasons. I’ll talk about each of these two reasons in more detail in upcoming emails.

For now, if you need a lazy man’s way to get your sales emails to actually make money, you might like my upcoming book. It deals with email marketing for the health space, and it covers how I’ve written emails that actually tripled sales for big direct response companies.

For more info about this book,  check out the ad on the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The yellow balloon sales principle

by

I saw a tense dog-man standoff at a park near my house.

The dog, a German boxer, was on top of a little hill. The man, the dog’s owner, was at the bottom of the hill, calling to the dog to come down.

The dog stared and didn’t move. The man called again. The dog continued to stare.

Eventually, the man started to walk away. The dog still kept his spot on top of the hill, and didn’t budge.

And then, as the man was walking away, he slowly took out a bright yellow object from his pocket. The dog started charging full speed down the hill. The man put the yellow object to his lips and started to blow. (It turned out to be a balloon.)

The dog was there in a second, bouncing up and down as the man held the balloon just above the height that the dog could reach.

Now for the past few days, I’ve been writing about alternatives to asking yes-seeking questions. So far, I talked about vision-building questions and no-seeking questions — both of them based on what negotiation expert Jim Camp used to teach.

Well, today I have something out of the playbook of email marketing guru Ben Settle. In fact, it’s something I’ve talked about in this blog already. It’s what I called Ben’s “sink-or-swim” close. That’s when you tell your prospect something like:

“If you don’t believe this technology/service/information can help you be more competitive, then simply don’t buy it.”

And then you wait and allow them to make a decision.

Of course, you have to do a good job painting a vision before you do this. And as Ben likes to say, you have to do it on principle, rather than as a tactic. In other words, you have to be confident you’ve got a good offer, and you have to accept that even so, some people still won’t buy.

Not everyone is right for your offer and that’s ok. Because when you find a prospect who’s right for your offer, you’ll see something like I saw at the park.

They’ll think. They’ll stare. And they’ll start to move. Next thing you know, they’ll be charging down the hill towards that big yellow balloon you’ve put in front of their face, and you will soon have a sale.

At least, that’s how it worked with me in the case of the sales letter that Ben sent.

Anyways, if you don’t need sales emails like this written for your business, then, you know, that’s ok. Otherwise, you can get an idea of how to write them yourself, with a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Good Will Camping

by

Yesterday, I ragged on yes-seeking questions.

Today, I want to offer up an alternative — one of four I’ll be covering over the next few days. And to do that, let’s talk Good Will Hunting.

That’s the flick that put Matt Damon on the map in the role of Will Hunting, the supernaturally talented math genius from the slums of Boston who literally mops the floors at MIT.

The relevant scene for us is when Will is sitting opposite a shrink named Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams).

Shrink Maguire is trying to draw Will out of his shell. “You can do anything,” the shrink seems to be saying, “so take advantage of your opportunities.”

Will gets defensive about this. He says how there’s nothing wrong with doing manual labor or with mopping floors — there’s even honor in it.

Shrink Maguire doesn’t argue with this. He doesn’t say, “Yeah, but…” He also doesn’t ask, “Isn’t there more honor in being a world-renowned scientist?”

Instead, he simply asks,

“You could be a janitor anywhere. Why did you choose to work in the most prestigious technical college in the whole fucking world?”

This causes Will to pause. And it slowly but surely sets off something in his head, which leads to the movie’s eventual happy ending.

So what happened?

Well, the point of asking that question was not to one-up Will’s smarts, or to trap him in a lie. At least not if you listen to master negotiation coach Jim Camp, whose playbook this question comes straight out of.

Camp advocated asking open-ended questions. The point of this was to “build vision” — to make the other side clearly see their own dire situation in their own minds.

It’s the only way to convince people of anything, Camp believed. And with his track record of successful billion-dollar negotiations in some of the most competitive business markets in the world, Camp probably knew what he was talking about.

Anyways, this idea of creating vision applies to in-person sales, and it applies to sales copywriting as well. Not necessarily in the form of asking open-ended questions. But creating a vision — such as by retelling a scene from a movie — is a very powerful way to drive home a point and to make the sale.

Speaking of which, if you need help with sales copy, you might like the ideas in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. This lays out the techniques I’ve used to triple (yep, 3x) sales from an email sales funnel for an 8-figure supplement company. To get notified when this book is out, sign up below:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/