Direct Marketing

No fuss or fireworks: The “duck for sale” principle

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Today I read a clever little ad, which famed copywriter Gary Bencivenga wrote to promote his own marketing agency.

​​True to Gary’s philosophy of advertising, this ad is full of value — useful info that keeps you reading whether you plan on hiring Gary’s agency or not. On page 7, there is a caption that reads:

“THE DUCK FOR SALE” PRINCIPLE. When you have a product with immediate, apparent appeal, present it straightforwardly. For example, if you are trying to sell a duck, don’t beat about the bush with a headline such as, “Announcing a special opportunity to buy a white-feathered flying object.”
You’ll get much better results with, “DUCK FOR SALE.”

I liked this a lot. And I think this “duck for sale” principle applies more broadly than just to products with immediate, apparent appeal.

I’m not saying all ads should trumpet the product in the headline. But I personally often overthink advertising. I try to get clever. Tricky. I want to work in that copywriting mystique sold by copywriting gurus.

But based on what I’ve seen after sending hundreds of emails to peddle truckloads of ecomm gimcracks… all the successful copy I’ve written satisfied the “duck for sale” principle in a way. It was direct, at least about the problem it was solving. It was simple to understand. And it was close to what was on the prospect’s mind.

Gary Bencievenga apparently likes a little book called Obvious Adams. It’s about an unremarkable man who becomes a remarkable marketing success. He gets there by doing something similar to what I’m talking about here:

“How many of us have sense to see and do the obvious thing? And how many have persistence enough in following our ideas of what is obvious? The more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that in our organization there ought to be some place for a lad who had enough sense to see the obvious thing to do and then to go about it directly, without any fuss or fireworks, and do it!”

No respect at home for history’s most famous ad

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In the fall of 1925, a 25-year-old Naval Academy graduate read the 4-Hour Work Week.

The book changed his life. He quit his boring engineering job, took an evening course in copywriting, and started working at a mail-order agency.

In the first few months of his new career, the young man already wrote a string of major winners. Among them was one that became the most famous ad of all time:

“They larfed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play!”

The young man’s name was John Caples. That Christmas, just a few months after starting his new job, Caples headed home to visit his family. He packed some of his winning ads under his arm so he could show them off to his mom and dad.

At home, Caples’s mom started reading those winning ads out loud in the kitchen. She became increasingly concerned. “Baldy?” “Fat men?” This was not what she expected from her son. “You better not let your father see this,” she said to young John.

Fact is, direct response copy is not very reputable. You’re not writing poetry. You’re trying to persuade.

The result might be unreadable to anybody who’s not in your target market. This probably includes your parents (though my mom, an inveterate direct response customer, is always supportive).

But so what? You win either way. If your friends and family are horrified by the schlock you write, at least you have a good story you can use in your next ad. Because like John Caples showed almost 100 years ago, stories featuring embarrassment, self-doubt, disapproval — and eventual triumph — are evergreen sellers.

Second hand news: My 10 direct response fundamentals that work almost any time

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Do direct response prospects still respond to “How to” headlines?

Or is it better to strip off the “How to” and give them a command?

I decided to test this out. The results were instructive, but not in the way you might expect.

Anyways, ​​I don’t have a live sales letter running, but I do have several large email lists that I can send A/B-split emails to.

So I prepared one email with a “How to” subject line and identical “How to” CTA text. The other subject line and CTA were the same, except if you imagine a pitbull came and ripped the “How to” part to shreds.

Result?

The “How to” variant had marginally lower open rates… marginally lower clickthrough rates… and marginally higher total sales.

In other words, a total testing washout. I repeated the test a couple days in a row, and same crabstick.

You might not be surprised. In fact, you might think this is a perfect example of testing “whispers” — irrelevant details that don’t really move the sales needle.

I agree. The only reason I tested this is because I was told, on very good authority by a very successful copywriter, that “How to” headlines, much like a love affair between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, are a nostalgic throwback to the 70s. In other words, second hand news.

Maybe you think I’m wasting your time, but there’s a bigger point here.

After doing this copywriting stuff for a while, after reading a bunch of books, watching a bunch of courses, talking to other copywriters, and most importantly, writing copy and seeing the results of actual campaigns, I’ve come to a couple conclusions.

First, top copywriters really do produce better copy and get better results. But much of the specific copywriting advice out there — “Don’t use ‘How to’ headlines in today’s market” — is really unproven intuition or personal preference.

My other conclusion is that there are just a few direct response fundamentals that really matter, and that really work in almost any context. I wrote down 10 of them. (It was hard to get to 10.)

When in doubt, I will go back to these 10 ideas. If you want, I’m sharing them with you below. You’re unlikely to find something surprising or new here. But you might find a good reminder — and that’s really what the point is. Anyways, here’s the list:

1. Markets are problems. Address problems.

2. Curiosity works to get people’s attention, and to keep people’s attention.

3. Start where the reader is. Positioning is probably the most important decision you can make.

4. Accept that you don’t have the reader’s full attention and that the channel is noisy. Adjust your marketing and your copy for this.

5. What you say is more important than how you say it.

6. Concrete beats abstract. Stories beat sermons.

7. It’s a numbers game. The best you can do is make an educated guess. Or better yet, several educated guesses.

8. Your copy can probably use more drama than it currently has.

9. New sells real well. New product. New mechanism. New understanding.

10. Give people a way to justify making this purchase. Justifications can be proof… or another dimension of benefits… or a risk-free offer.

I’m back. Just to tell you one last instructive thing. I write a daily email newsletter. If you want to read more of what I write as it comes out, then one option is to subscribe to that newsletter. If you want, here’s where to sign up.

Why 30 minutes is better than 2 minutes

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How do you get a penthouse on New York’s Park Avenue, a world famous art collection, and an all-around very good life?

Ask copywriter Gene Schwartz, because he had all three.

Gene paid for it all with his direct mail copywriting, both for clients and for his own publishing business.

Gene’s secret to success?

Hard work.

How hard?

“I work three hours a day,” Gene said, “every single day for five days a week. That’s all I work.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel three hours a day is something even I could manage.

But enough chop licking.

The real reason I bring up Gene Schwartz is because I re-watched an old presentation he gave at Rodale Press.

The presentation was interesting through and through. But what really caught my eye was one of the questions asked at the end.

​​It was very much connected to an issue I’m seeing with the ecommerce emails I write a lot of. I’ll talk about that another time. For now, here’s the question Gene faced:

Back in the 90s when this all happened, Rodale was running 2-minute TV commercials to sell its books. People bought these books in good numbers. But they didn’t buy very many books after, which is where all the profits are made in direct response.

So the question to Gene was, why do these TV customers not continue to buy as well as those who get one of Gene’s monster direct mail packages?

Gene responded:

“Think of what the person has committed who buys your book. If I send them this monster [holds up one direct mail package] or this monster [holds up another], well, this person really and honestly spends 15 minutes to a half hour on this thing. He really devotes a great deal of time to it. So what he’s not doing is just sending you a check for $29. He’s sending you 30 minutes. When you get a person who gets two minutes, he’s not doing anything like that.”

Gene summed it up by saying, “Different type of person. Different type of commitment.”

Here’s what I get out of this:

One of the most common questions by marketing normies is, “Why are those sales letters so long? Nobody will read that.”

The typical answer is that some people do in fact read it, and that’s how long it takes to convince 2% of them to buy.

That’s part of the answer, but it’s obviously not the whole answer. After all, Rodale sold the same books through 2-minute TV ads and 25-page direct mail pieces.

The other part is there in Gene’s response. Different marketing selects different groups of people as your customers. And it actually changes the psychology of those customers, not just in the moment when they order your product, but for the future as well.

You’re not just pushing benefits. You’re training people to be better customers. So if anybody asks you why you write those ridiculously long sales letters (or all those stupid email) that nobody ever reads, tell them the truth:

Because it’s the only way to pay for a Park Avenue penthouse, working just 3 hours a day.

Speaking of stupid emails — I write a daily email newsletter. Since you’ve just spent two minutes reading something I’ve written, you might be committed enough to get on it. If that’s the case, here’s where to go.

Selling without “you”

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There are many ways to flay a feline, and sales copy is no exception:

Today, I read through a part of the Chaffee Royalties promo. This 2008 sales letter is famous for its use of “transubstantiation,” and because it was analyzed in the book Great Leads.

But something else struck me upon reading the lead of Chaffee Royalties:

There’s almost no “you”. There are no direct promises. It’s all intrigue, case studies, historical anecdotes.

In many ways, Chaffee Royalties doesn’t read like “typical” copy. If I looked at this without knowing it’s a sales letter, I wouldn’t be sure immediately that there is something for sale — simply because not every sentence ends with, “and so can you!”

Even so, this sales letter was successful. Not only did it do well enough to get into Great Leads, but Agora ran a version of it again in 2013, just with different stocks.

Here’s what I’m trying to get at:

A while back, I mentioned the most common piece of feedback I kept getting from my former copywriting coach. That was to make more “on the nose” claims in the lead. Meaning, make claims that are so direct and you-focused that even the most distracted reader can’t fail to grasp them.

That’s obviously worked well for my-ex coach. And in many ways, it’s copywriting dogma, which you can see in the majority of big-name promotions.

But even at very high levels, writing to the same financial newsletter market… there are people who have had success selling with a soft, indirect, and camouflaged approach.

And so can you.

Repealing prohibition on multiple daily emails

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Prohibition in the U.S. ended in 1933 with the repeal of 18th Amendment. After that, states could make their own laws about the sale of alcohol.

Some states couldn’t wait to get soused.

But others kept up with prohibition. Oklahoma, for example, kept going with prohibition until 1959.

Today, there are still over 500 “dry” municipalities across the U.S. One recent study even found that prohibition, horrendous as it sounds, might be a good idea. According to this study, crime went up by about 10% in areas that went from dry to wet.

The point being, just because you can stop, doesn’t mean you should. And I’m not talking about prohibition, see? I’m talking about marketing, specifically email marketing.

Over the last few years, it’s become commonplace for companies to send a daily email. But there’s nothing magic about the number one.

You can send your customers more than one email a day. For example, most Agora imprints send at least two emails each day, with one being mostly content and the other mostly promotion.

So two is ok. What about more?

Email marketing guru Ben Settle combines his content and promotion in each email. That’s why he can get away with sending, for example, five emails this past Monday, and over 10 over a recent 3-day promo window.

Old direct marketing wisdom says to keep repeating something until it becomes unprofitable.

Of course, too many emails can become unprofitable. Maybe you do burn out your list after a time. More likely, you get to a point you’re better off spending your time doing something else than writing an additional email — perhaps working on building your list, or creating a new offer.

But most businesses never get to that point of declining email profits. Maybe your business is one of them. In that case, it might be time to start writing an additional daily email — and getting sloshed on all those extra profits.

Of course, this all assumes you make money from your daily emails. I don’t. That’s why I only send one a day. It usually has to do with marketing or copywriting, like what you just read. If you’d like to get my one daily email as it comes out, here’s where to go.

When marketing jiggery pokery backfires

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One time, I stopped a girl on the street, and I unsuccessfully tried to run game.

That means I didn’t ask her any questions like other boring guys would do. Instead, I made observational statements.

“You look like you’re from Sweden,” I said.

“No,” the girl said.

“Really. Because with the blonde hair and the dark clothes and that confident attitude… you gave me a definite Nordic vibe.”

She just stared at me.

“Yep, I can imagine you, walking down a street in Stockholm, listening to Ace of Base, ready to board your Viking ship.”

She started to frown. My stupid assumptions were not getting me anywhere. Should I escape to safety and call it a day? I decided on one last desperate play.

“So… where are you from?”

“Oh, I’m from Slovakia,” she said, brightening up. She started to talk. I listened. A few minutes later, I asked her to sit down for an orange juice with me. She said ok.

I’m not saying that game doesn’t work. It definitely does. But sometimes… you don’t need game. And on rare occasions, game can in fact backfire.

Same thing with high-octane marketing.

Late in 2019, I signed up to Agora’s Daily Insider Secrets. That’s the free daily email newsletter for Agora’s newest imprint, which deals with copywriting and marketing.

They sent interesting emails. I read them on occasion, and I wondered what it was leading to.

And then it came.

A 72-hour marathon live stream… with some of the biggest names in the Internet Marketing world, most of whom I had never heard of… sharing tips and tricks to help you make a million dollars, stat.

At this point, I tuned out.

I wasn’t sure what exactly they were selling. I wasn’t curious to find out. All the emails about the live stream I kept getting didn’t change my mind.

Some time later, quite by accident, I did find out what the offer was.

The main part is like a video newsletter. Each month, Rich Schefren interviews several successful marketers, and they spill the rice on what’s working for them right now.

Then there are several bonuses, including a recording of a 12-day training course that Agora gave its new media buyers back in 2018.

I think there’s more stuff too. And you get all of this for some ridiculous price like $50 a year (the standard Agora newsletter subscription rate).

At which point, I said, “Oh, I’m from Croatia,” and I got out my credit card. I don’t know why they didn’t just start off with that charming and seductive offer, instead of the live stream jiggery pokery.

Anyways, having gone through the past two months’ worth of interviews inside… and going through the media buying training now… I can comfortably recommend Steal Our Winners. It’s worth tracking down and checking out.

But you know what?

Most offers out there, particularly in the Internet Marketing and copywriting space, are just awful.

And if you want to keep an eye out on the bad ones, and get an occasional recommendation for the rare good ones, you might like to sign up to my daily email newsletter. You can join it for free by clicking here.

The Son of 4-Hour Work Week

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“There is an inverse relationship between the value of knowledge and what people are willing to pay for it. The most important things in life you’ve probably heard a hundred times before, but you’re not paying attention. When you’re in the right place and you hear it, you have that ‘aha’ moment and everything changes.”
— Mark Ford

In 2007, Tim Ferris published The 4-Hour Work Week.

The book had great kairos. It hit the New York Times Best Seller list, stayed there for four years, and sold over 2 million copies.

And it wasn’t just 4HWW. Around the same time, lots of marketers were telling you how to make good money online by building lots of tiny niche websites… or publishing dozens of crappy ebooks… or in general making some hit-and-run cash grab.

I’m sure you can still find these kinds of offers floating around the Internet. But my feeling is — and I could be wrong — that the zeitgeist has changed.

For a while now, the pendulum has swung in the other direction.

That’s the direction of building a real business, a personal brand, of creating an asset. Like Rich Schefren said recently (I’m paraphrasing):

“Why would you want to have a job that you hate so much you only do it for four hours a week? Why not build a business that you love to work in every day?”

The thing is, markets get saturated. People get bored of hearing the same message, even if it is completely on-the-money.

And my suspicion is, right now, the pendulum of “Build a sustainable business” is at its peak.

I hallucinate the pendulum will come swinging down soon. People will again be ready to hear the message that you can make passive income, and that money-getting can be reduced to an occasional unpleasant chore, much like going to the dentist.

That’s just my prediction. I’m sharing with you for two reasons:

1. If you haven’t been able to buy into the “Build a business you love” mantra, and you feel guilty about it (as I do), then better times might be ahead.

2. Like I said, it’s been over 10 years since The 4-Hour Work Week was published. Since then, there hasn’t been any money-making book that’s hit the mainstream and had the same impact.

In other words, there might be an opportunity here. If you get going on writing something right now, you might have it ready just as the world starts to emerge from its current months-long delirium. ​​

​​You might even become the next Tim Ferriss. ​​Only trouble is, much like Tim Ferriss, you’ll have to work much more than four hours a week to get there.

In other news, I have an email newsletter where I write about marketing and copywriting. Topics like what you just read. So if you want a regular daily diet of such essays, here’s where to go.

Higher open rates = lower sales?

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“They like to talk to salesmen, something. They’re lonely. I don’t know. They like to feel superior. Never bought a fucking thing.”
David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

I’ve been writing a lot of emails in the ecommerce space lately. This is for a client who’s constantly launching new products.

A few days ago, the client wrote me with a question:

“I’m curious with all the recent launches, which have looked most promising from an open rate and revenue standpoint?”

I could tell him right away which of the products were most successful in terms of revenue. But I wasn’t sure about open rates. So I decided to dig into the data.

It turns out the relationship between open rates and sales in our case has been negative. In other words, the more people opened up our emails, the less money we made. I even ran a little regression on it. On average, each extra percent of opens cost us $100 worth of sales.

How could that be?

Well, for one thing, we keep promoting different products, and at different price points. Higher-priced products might have less overall interest, but can result in more sales.

But there are other possible explanations, too.

For example, different subject lines will select for different segments of the market.

Maybe one subject line gets you a lot of opens. But like in that Glengarry Glen Ross scene above, maybe you’re just reaching a bunch of bored leads, who like to click on sensationalist ads, and who have no intention of buying anything.

Whatever the explanation is, the message is clear:

All those millions of blog posts by email marketing experts telling you how to increase your open rates could actually be hurting your sales.

A. B. C.

Always be checking your sales numbers. Sales numbers are for closers. Open rates? They’re for bums.

Speaking of open rates, I write a daily email newsletter with very high open rates. If you’d like to get on it so you can bring those numbers down, here’s where to subscribe.

How to avoid disappointing readers and burning yourself with “secrets”

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If you go on Amazon right now and look at the top 15 bestsellers in the Internet Marketing category, you will see a curious thing:

6 of those 15 books have a title of the form “[Topic] Secrets.” So there’s Traffic Secrets, YouTube Secrets, Instagram Secrets, plus three others.

Obviously, “secret” is a powerful word in direct marketing. It goes back to Robert Collier at least, who published a book called The Secret of the Ages back in 1926.

In the decades since, you had Gary Halbert with his sequence of “amazing secret” ads… Boardroom’s collection of “secrets” books… and today, Agora’s newest imprint in the IM space, which has a newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

Like I said, secrets obviously sell. Then and now.

And yet, I’m writing this email to warn you about “secrets.”

For one thing, “secrets” can make you sound like everybody else. 6 out of 15, remember?

For another, “secrets” might attract the wrong kinds of buyers. They might also put the right kinds of buyers into the wrong frame of mind.

For a third thing, and most important, relying on words like “secrets” can allow you to coast instead of coming up with better content. For example, here are some of the secrets from one of those Amazon best-sellers:

“Secret #1: What is copywriting?”
“Secret #13: It’s all about them — never about you”
“Secret #31: Polish your sales copy”

I don’t know how chipper you would have to be to avoid getting down in the mouth when this treasure chest of secrets is opened up.

But what’s the problem? The book is a best-seller, right?

In my experience, being on an Amazon best-seller list doesn’t mean much. But even if this book were a legit best seller, putting out generic content and calling it a secret leaves you wide open to competition. Your only defense is this thin mist of curiosity, which can dissipate in a moment.

Maybe I’m digging myself into a moralizing hole. So let me finish up by telling you what I tell myself, because it might resonate:

Put in a bit of extra work to come up with unique content and a unique perspective. Once you’ve got that, if it warrants being called a “secret,” then sear that on its rump and let it run.

But odds are, once you’ve done that bit of extra work, you’ll come up with a better, more interesting title or headline for your content. Maybe you’ll even start a new naming trend. One which half a dozen Amazon best-sellers will copy for years to come.

By the way, I’ve also got a daily email newsletter. It’s called John Bejakovic’s Newsletter of Secrets. You don’t have to sign up. But if you want to read all the secrets inside, here’s where to go.