Email Marketing

You never get a second chance to make a last impression

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FBI negotiator Chris Voss has a tip for you:

If you ever have to call the family of somebody who’s been taken hostage by machete-wielding drug traffickers in the Philippines… then save your “how are you” for the end.

In other words, call up the mom of your hostage on the phone. Say, “Hey Mrs. Robinson. It’s Agent John Bejakovic here with the FBI. About your son… I’m afraid I got nothing new to report.”

Give the mom a second to process the info.

And then say, “Mrs. Robinson… how are you and your family coping with this whole situation?” Because…

“The last impression is the lasting impression.”

So says Chris Voss. But it’s not just him. We know today, from decades of experiments on human guinea pigs, that our brains evaluate experiences based on two brief moments only.

The first is the emotional highlight. That can be impossible to control.

But the second is the ending. That’s easy to control.

So it’s your choice. You can first ask Mrs. Robinson how she’s doing… then give her the underwhelming update. “Nothing new!” She will think you’re useless, like all those other FBI idiots.

Or you can switch up the order. Give the update first and end with, “How are you, really?” And Mrs. Robinson will leave off feeling human, like maybe you really care about her welfare and the welfare of her son.

“The last impression is the lasting impression.”

Now about marketing:

A lot of clients I’ve worked with like the idea of warming up a list.

“Let’s not sell anything for a while! Let’s just build a relationship! Let’s give ’em value! They will love us for it!”

I gotta tell you, from personal experience:

You better make your relationship-building material something miraculously good and new. And you better end each email real strong.

Otherwise, you will just leave a dry and chalky taste in your prospects’ mouths. And the next time they get an email from you… they will think twice about biting down on your value-laden content.

But here’s an easy trick, in line with Chris Voss above.

Instead of leaving your prospects with your attempt at value… leave them with an offer.

“The last impression is the lasting impression.”

Make an underwhelming stab at value… and you’ll leave your prospects feeling let down as they walk away.

But make an offer… and your prospects will leave with some tension, mystery, and the feeling of an unexploited opportunity. They might not be ready to buy then and there. But you will make them engaged and ready to listen to you the next time.

And like I said, this all comes from personal experience.

I usually don’t sell in these emails. It’s a moral failing. That’s the only way I can describe it.

Sure, not selling has forced me to get real good at writing emails. How good exactly?

Good enough that I had an Agora publisher find my email archive, and then contact me out of the blue and offer me work.

Good enough that I’ve had a genuine guru in the industry, somebody who’s made tens of millions of dollars for himself and hundreds of millions of dollars for others, reach out to say he loves what I’m doing and that we should connect.

Good enough that, on the rare occasion that I have something coherent to sell, like my last month’s Copy Riddles run, I do fantastic.

But even with all that, my emails are still not good enough to keep up a sustainable relationship with my audience. Not long term. Not without selling all the time.

Because sooner or later I slip up. The “value” I deliver ends up a little dry and chalky. And I can see the effect. Over time, I lose people, their attention, and their engagement.

Selling something all the time would fix that. It would give folks who read my stuff a certain excitement and juice that a regular content email simply cannot replicate. Not every day.

Maybe you don’t believe me. So let me give you a demonstration. See if it convinces you.

I’m putting on a new training. It’s called Invisible Email Manipulation. It features me, in a top hat, pulling back the curtain on some of the main tricks I use to write these emails.

Like I said, I’ve been forced to get very good at writing these emails to keep people engaged… in spite of having nothing to sell most days.

I find I keep going back to the same few tricks, over and over. That’s because my tricks are powerful, and because they are different from the tricks other copywriters are using.

Maybe you’d like to learn my tricks, so you can apply them to what you or your clients are selling. If so, here’s what to do:

1. Write me an email and…

1. Let me know that yes, you are interested in Invisible Email Manipulation and…

2. Let me know one thing you did NOT like in the last copywriting training, course, or program you bought. I’m trying to position myself as being different. And no better way to do it then to be different from crap people don’t like.

So if you are interested, write me and let me know.

In return, I’ll send you the what/when/where/how/how much of this training. Plus, if you write me in the next 24 hours… as a reward, I’ll give you a discount code for 40% off the price everyone else will have to pay.

A critical look at Daniel Throssell

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A few questions for you:

How would you like to triple the size of your email list… while doubling (yes, doubling) your open rates?

How would you like new prospects who are so grateful for your non-stop marketing… that they write in daily to thank you?

How would you like to have people buying your products in unseen numbers… even before you make any effort to advertise those products?

You might this is a pipe dream. But this dream is real. And attainable. In fact, here’s one way to do it:

Get Daniel Throssell to promote you.

Before you throw up your hands in frustration, hear me out. There might be some profit in it for you.

As you might know, Daniel Throssell is a copywriter with a popular email newsletter. A few weeks ago, he and I did an “email swap.”

I wrote an email in this newsletter to promote Daniel’s list. I said Daniel’s writing is funny and entertaining. That’s what I could see on the surface.

But then a wave of people hit my site, following the email Daniel sent to his own audience about me. And I realized something deeper is going on, under the surface. It’s best summed up by a new reader who wrote me to say:

“I’m here because Daniel Throssell recommended you in his emails, and I’m about 50 emails deep into his list and will pretty much do anything he tells me to do at this point 😂”

When Daniel and I first discussed the email swap, he said he could get 10% of his entire email list to click through to my site.

I didn’t say so at the time, but I thought that was nonsense. I know how my own smaller list responds. Even if I’m selling free money, 10% won’t click through reliably. Plus I’ve managed much bigger lists for clients, and I know response only goes down with size.

And yet, I was wrong. Daniel did what he said he would do. Even more than that, in fact.

It wasn’t just idle clicks either.

Like I mentioned above, Daniel’s readers rooted through my site. They found an offer I hadn’t even made public (my Copy Riddles September launch). Some bought it right then and there. Many others bought it over the coming days — many more, in fact, than people who had been reading my newsletter for months or years.

By the end, I got literally hundreds of messages from new and engaged readers and customers. They told me how Daniel sent them and how they are sure they will like my stuff also. And my open rates, if those mean anything any more, are now double what they were before.

You might think I’m writing this as a way of saying thanks to Daniel. That’s not what this is about.

I’m writing this because I want to share something valuable with you. Because I’ve seen first hand the engagement that Daniel’s emails command.

You probably haven’t had a chance to experience that first hand. Instead, you’ve probably only seen Daniel’s online persona. Like a friend of mine who wrote me a few days ag to say, “I just unsubscribed from Throssell’s list. He was starting to annoy me.”

That’s a shame. Because this past Sunday, I promised you a resource. One that shows you how to create a responsive list beyond anything I’ve ever seen.

Well, I was talking about Daniel Throssell and his emails.

Whether you like Daniel’s online persona or not… my advice is to think twice, and look beyond the surface. It’s what I’m doing.

I’m reading each of Daniel’s emails and looking at them critically. Beyond the entertainment. I’m trying to read between the lines, and see what he’s doing. And I’m thinking about ways I could apply it to my own marketing. It’s already bearing fruit.

I suggest the same to you.
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Because odds are, you won’t get Daniel Throssell to write an email promoting you.

But if you do what I’m suggesting, and you look critically at what he’s doing… and you model it yourself… then the pipe dream I described above — including engagement and sales — is still attainable to you.

​​And if by chance you’re reading this… but you’re not signed up to Daniel’s list… then here’s where to go:

https://persuasivepage.com/

An email marketing and business-building topic

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Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash despises his band’s biggest hit, Sweet Child O’ Mine.

​​Slash came up with the famous intro riff as a joke, by playing a “circus tune” that mocked the popular guitar technique of string skipping. But the rest of the band picked up on the joke riff and developed the song.

They recorded it, and in 1988, it became their one and only no. 1 hit. Now, 30-something years later, the video for Sweet Child O’ Mine has over 1.2 billion views on YouTube.

You can file that away as “useless fact #754 that’s stayed stuck in JB’s head for the past 20 years.” Except there is a point to it:

If you create anything, even some bastard form like sales emails or blog content, you might start to get bored. Your taste and interests might evolve away from where your audience is. You might veer off and cover topics that you haven’t covered before, and stop covering topics that your audience wants.

Examples of this:

1. I used to follow a guy online who wrote a blog about picking up girls and self-improvement topics. All right. Then he started writing book reviews of the manly pulp novels he was reading. No. Delete.

2. I recently heard Gary Bencivenga talk about email marketing for his olive oil business. “If we don’t put ‘olive oil’ somewhere in the subject line,” Gary said, “we can’t get people to open up the emails at all.”​​

3. My own email newsletter. It’s mainly about persuasion, marketing and copywriting. Whenever I get away from those topics, I feel the pulse of my list slow down. I never tried pushing it… but I bet that after a week of off-topic emails I’d hear the flat line of no pulse at all.

So my point to you is to beware.

Your audience came to you for a reason. If you don’t respect that, even in spite of your own fancy and evolving tastes, you will miss out on those blockbuster #1 hits… and pretty soon, you will lose ’em altogether. And then you’ll be left singing like Axl:

Where do we go?

Where do we go now?

I’ll tell you where you go. At least if you’re interested in persuasion, marketing, and copywriting. You go to my email newsletter. Available for free here.

Stupid email from: tricks

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A few weeks ago, I got an email with the subject line, “Once in a lifetime sit in….on this?? 😳.” The email was from “Your Official Invit.”

“Hm,” I said. “Who is this Invit and what does he want?” I opened the email.

It turned out to be from Clickbank, promoting their Platinum Summit event. I don’t remember ever getting any emails from Clickbank before.

Then a few days passed and I got an email from “A story you’ll love.” Again more trickery. It was really Clickbank again.

Then more emails. From “Your first sale.” From “Your boss.” And from “Future John.” Clickbank. Clickbank. Clickbank.

I finally unsubscribed.

I’ve never seen these stupid email from: tricks done well. And by done well, I mean done so it didn’t piss me off and so it made me want to buy whatever they were selling. Or even just read the email.

And so I thought I would certainly never try this myself.

But, maybe… maybe I will change my mind.

Because it turns out it can be done well. I saw Dan Kennedy do it well.

Dan of course never sent emails. But he did send sales letters and package inserts from characters like Viva The “Broken English” Cleaning Lady and Oscar The Obnoxious Elephant. The Oscar one starts out with a cartoon of a scowling elephant with boxing gloves on. Then there’s a headline which reads:

John, A Nasty Note From Oscar The Obnoxious Elephant
You might want to read carefully. You’ve already won a prize. Not that I think you deserve it.

This works. Not because it comes from Dan Kennedy. But because it’s entertaining and builds up the relationship instead of tearing it down (not that there ever was one, Clickbank).

I’m not sure I will ever figure out how to do this with made-up characters in email.

But maybe, if in the future you see an unfamiliar email from Casper The Clickbank Camel… consider it might be this guy right here.

Oh. But I forgot. You’re not subscribed to my email newsletter. If you’d like to fix that, so you and Casper can stay in touch, then here’s where to go.

Killing me softly with free stuff

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Last week, while snooping on marketers who sell copywriting courses, I landed on the page of a well-known guy in this space.

He’s got a copywriting course for sale normally. But right now, you can’t buy it.

Instead, you have to sign up with your email for a free mini-course. Which I did, in the hope of getting to see the actual course sales letter.

Instead, I got a bunch of lessons, telling me to do stuff. Videos to watch, and checklists to read, and templates to fill out.

“I don’t have the time,” I tried to argue, “and I really just want to see the sales page.”

No matter. Each day, the emails kept coming. More well-meaning teaching in my inbox, which I didn’t have the time or willpower to absorb.

Eventually I stopped opening them. And then today, I got a follow up:

“I have another free mini-course for you…”

I felt like Lauren Hill when she sings, “I prayed that he would finish… but he just kept right on.”

Now in all fairness, I was never really a prospect for this copywriting course. But even so, I think the following still holds:

A free course, and in general, any free “hard teaching,” is like an earthquake. One is kind of exciting, if it’s small and only happens rarely.

But two or more? Especially if they’re big? You start to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and panting, because you’re still having flashbacks from the last one, when you felt powerless and out of time.

So if you are trying to shake up your prospects with well-meaning content, full of specific steps they have to read and do… stop it. Be a little kinder.

Send them some other stuff. Which won’t overwhelm or cause PTSD.

What kind of other stuff?

That’s a good question.

But you know. I won’t bother you with that here. However, I might talk about it, at some future time, in my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

You, your own copywriting secret weapon?

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Here are two flexible factoids, and a suggestion you might find valuable:

1. A-list copywriter Gary Halbert said curiosity is the most powerful human motivating force.

2. Another A-list copywriter, Parris Lampropoulos, keeps a “Didn’t know that!” file. This is where Parris puts new and interesting facts he comes across during research for copywriting projects.

​​But Parris has spent hundreds of hours doing research on dozens of big projects… so when he comes across something new and interesting to him, you can bet it will be new and interesting to his audience.

So I’d like to suggest you do something similar.

Invest $3 in a notebook… or invest two seconds to create a file on your computer desktop. Write “Hm, I didn’t know that, or, that’s interesting” across the top.

​​And you’re pretty much done. From then on, as you come across something that fits that heading, you just add it to your notebook or file.

The longer your list grows, the more interesting and valuable it will become, by process of elimination.

Eventually, you will have a list of things that stimulate curiosity for almost everyone in your audience. And if Gary H. is right, you will have the most powerful tool in motivating people to action.

​​In effect, you make your own curiosity and capacity to be surprised into your copywriting secret weapon.

I do this exact same thing, and it’s been valuable to me. In fact, it’s how I write these emails each day. Which brings me to my self-serving reason for telling you about this:

A reader named Glenn wrote in to challenge me on some sloppy self-promotion I committed recently.

Glenn pointed out that in the email I sent out announcing my bullets course… I didn’t feature a single Gary Halbert-style bullet.

Fair point.

My answer to this is that emails like the one you’re reading are basically the modern version of sales bullets. The only difference is you’re not restricted by space (like in a sales letter or print ad)… or by having only one shot to make the sale (like when paying for cold traffic).

Other than that, bullets and sales emails are the same.

​​You find some information that your audience might want. You condense it and sexy it up.

​​If it’s really cool and interesting information, you can choose to give it away in your copy… or if it’s meh information, then you might choose to tease it endlessly in your email or bullet, and hide the payoff in your product for sale.

In other words, if you can learn how to write sexy sales bullets… you will be a long way to being able to write emails people will want to read day after day. Particularly if you add in something new and interesting to tell your reader, which is what your “Hm, I didn’t know that” list is all about.

Anyways, that’s part of my pitch for joining my bullet writing course, which kicks off this Monday. If you’re interested in joining, then the first step is signing up for my email newsletter, which you can find here.

How to avoid email copy that’s like a sack of wet eggs

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A UK supermarket named Morrisons became the target of Internet bullying yesterday after shoppers tweeted photos of a bizarre item on sale there.

“This is the most wretched and cursed item I have ever witnessed,” one person wrote.

The item in question is a purse-sized plastic bag of hard-boiled, peeled eggs, swimming in a preservative liquid. Each bag says it has only 5 eggs, but actually has more than 40 — and you can catch ’em all for just 1 GBP.

Morissons tried to joke away the sacks of wet eggs on its shelves. But what can you say? The bags look wretched and cursed. No amount of twitter fiddling can fix that.

These days, along with the Daily Mail, where I read the above story, I’m also re-reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.

One idea that Zinsser beats into your head is that “writing is rewriting.”

No. I don’t agree.

You can rewrite to make your writing tighter… to clean it up… to do away with cliches or vague words.

But if you start out with a sack of wet eggs, no amount of rewriting will get you a final product that’s anything but wretched and cursed.

You have to have something to say at the start. And more importantly, you have to have the right mood to sell it. Matt Furey, who pretty much invented the daily email format, put it this way:

“It isn’t just the words that do the selling. It’s the emotion behind the words. Remove the emotion and you don’t have great copy. So it makes sense to me that you spend as much time learning how to raise your level of vibration as you do learning marketing and copywriting strategies.”

Speaking of daily emails:

I’ve got an email newsletter, and I email daily. No cursed or wretched items here though. At Bejakovic supermarket, we make sure all our emails are fresh and appetizing. If you’d like to try a sample, you can sign up here.

Huruhuru secrets of writing advertorials

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Earlier this month, news broke that a beer company in Canada accidentally named itself “pubic hair.”

Actually what they did is they nam​​ed their brewing company Huruhuru, which they believed means “feather” in Maori and which they thought sounded cooler than a kiwi egg sandwich. But it turns out no.

​A man named Te Hamua Nikora, who looks somewhat like a Maori Rodney Dangerfield, explained on Facebook that huruhuru actually means pubic hair in his language. He also added, “Some people call it appreciation, I call it appropriation.”

What to say?

This is the kind of spanking you can get when you get too clever and want something new and never-heard-before.

I bring this up because I was asked a related question yesterday. I was giving a consult call about my style of writing advertorials (a first for me) and one of the people on the call asked:

“Any online resources or people we should follow that are really sharp on the advertorial side of things?”

I’m sure there are people out there, probably somebody like me looking to make a name for himself, who will tell you all kinds of tips and tricks and best practices for writing advertorials.

But the fact is, advertorials are a long-form piece of copy, intended to sell to cold traffic. Almost everything about how to do this this was figured out over 50 years ago. In other words, rather than looking for huruhuru secrets of advertorials, just go back and read all the standards of the direct response canon.

That’s not to say there is never anything new under the sun. It might really be true, as Incomparable Expert Jason Leister has written, that the direct marketing industry was a historical anomaly, “a period of arbitrage where trust was JUST high enough and information distribution was JUST new enough that things worked.”

What I mean is that a lot of profitable copywriting today isn’t going out to cold traffic any more, but to warm. And that kind of copywriting is a genuinely different beast, with different rules and best practices. But that’s a different kaupapa, for a different wā.

Are you warming up to me? If you’d like to hear from me more regularly, and see how I write to a warm audience, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.

Converting ecommerce buyers to info buyers with a hot new claim

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Yesterday, I sent a surprisingly profitable email to a list I manage. Most of what follows about this is conjecture and hearsay, but it might prove valuable to you anyhow.

First, a bit of background:

The email list in question is made up of buyers of various household gizmos and as-seen-on-TV doodads.

Reusable paper towels made out of bamboo fibers…

“Bioceramic” orbs to do away with laundry detergent…

Anti-mosquito sonic bracelets.

When I imagine the kinds of people who buy this stuff, the phrase “magic button” appears before my eyes.

In other words, these are people who want their problems solved for them… and who are willing to pay a premium to get the solution in the form of a physical product.

That’s why I haven’t had much success promoting information products to this list. Clickbank bestsellers? Not interested. In fact, I’d all but given up on info products — until yesterday.

Yesterday, I didn’t really have a good offer to promote. So I went on Clickbank, searched among the “green products” category, and selected the best seller, an information product about “reconditioning” dead batteries.

I sent this out to my list, not expecting much. But like I said, it did business. In fact, out of the dozens of affiliate offers I’ve tested out, this came out second or third.

What made these “magic button” buyers plop down good money to get information? In other words, what convinced them to pay, not for a done-for-you solution, but for just blueprints to a solution?

Of course, my email talked about the money a typical family could save by reconditioning car batteries. But it did one better.

It also claimed that, with this battery resurrection knowledge, you could actually make money. You could get free, worn-out batteries, recondition them, and then put them up on Ebay for a nice profit.

So here’s where the conjecture part starts:

I feel that, thanks to the current moment of uncertainty and lost jobs and lots of people sitting at home, bizopp or make money online offers are not just blowing up… but are going mainstream.

This is supported by things I’m hearing from people who publish real estate investing products. They all say their businesses are growing like never before.

Like I said, conjecture and hearsay. But if you are a copywriter, or a business owner, it might be worthwhile taking the claim that your offer helps people make money — and bolting it on to your other, standard, proven claims.

If I’m right, and God knows that happens a good 50% of the time, then this bizopp appeal will work even in mainstream, magic-button markets. Markets that would never have responded to make money offers or paid for information, only a few months ago.

Speaking of which:

Have you heard about my email newsletter? I send out daily emails. Things to help you get better at copywriting and marketing. And to make money. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

Two multi-millionaire marketers go into a cigar bar…

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Today I was listening to the newest edition of Steal Our Winners, and Internet marketer Rich Schefren told a quick story.

He said that around 10 years ago, he started writing daily, slice-of-life, Matt Furey-style emails, much like what you’re reading now.

And then, at a cigar bar, he ran into Mark Ford. Mark is a big-name copywriter and one of the main guys behind the direct response juggernaut Agora.

“Look, this is the poor man’s Agora,” Rich said to Mark about those daily emails. (Then, as now, Agora was sending out emails every day, real serious editorial stuff.)

“Actually, I like this better than what we do at Agora,” said Mark. “And let me tell you why.”

The gist of it was, Rich’s slice-of-life emails were sometimes short, sometimes long. Sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a page.

That kept the reader guessing.

The reader could never say, “Oh I don’t have the time to read this now.” That meant each time an email hit him, he couldn’t dismiss it.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in what Mark Ford said. It makes good sense to keep your reader guessing, and not just about the length of your emails.

I could tell you more.

But in the interest of keeping this post short, well… all I can say is, if you want more, you can sign up to my daily email newsletter.