Direct Marketing

Marketing riddles I’m not smart enough to solve

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I was at the grocery store a few days ago and I saw a mindboggling sight. It was there on the shelf, in the coffee and tea aisle.

The local brand of coffee, called Franck, has two varieties:

1) Regular, which comes in a blue bag and costs 29 Croatian Weasels, and…

2) Delicious, which comes in a red bag and also costs 29 Croatian Weasels.

My forehead scrunched up as I tried to compute an answer to this puzzle:

What kind of idiot would choose regular blue coffee when you can get delicious red for the same price?

And yet…

I don’t think this is an example of branding stupidity on the part of the coffee company. Instead, I think it’s been well-tested and shown to increase sales.

One reason I think this is cause I saw something similar when subscribing to a paid newsletter a few days ago. My options were:

1) Platinum subscription: 4 free bonuses + digital newsletter + print newsletter, at the low price of $79

2) Excellent subscription: 4 free bonuses + digital newsletter, for $49

3) Premium subscription: digital newsletter + print newsletter, without bonuses, at a reasonable $119

I remember staring at my options in confusion for a few minutes.

“What am I missing here?” I thought. “Why is the Premium $40 more expensive than the Platinum, when it’s a strict subset of the other offer?”

I guess I’ll never know. But I’m sure this company tested it, and found this kind of customer confusion increases sales. Which makes me think that, like regular and delicious coffee, marketing has two flavors:

The first is intuitive, common-sense marketing. Sell people what they want at a price they can stomach… Make the offer crystal clear… Focus sales messages on benefits from the buyer’s point of view. And so on.

And then there’s the second flavor.

That’s the minboggling stuff that gets revealed through testing. Odds are, we’ll never know why a significant enough portion of people, lying in bed with their phones pressed against their faces, make some of the buying decisions that they do. All we can do is accept it and profit from it.

So what does this all mean for you?

When you’re just starting to develop your direct response palate, you’ll probably prefer the comforting, familiar aroma of common-sense marketing.

But as your business grows, it might make sense to start blending in spoonfuls of mindboggling marketing.

​​After all, you never know if an irrational dollop, mixed into an otherwise deliciously common-sense sales pitch, could increase your sales by 20%, or take an unprofitable offer and make it profitable.

It probably won’t. But it might be worth a test.

Agora finally gets into Internet marketing

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I remember back in 2006, when Amazon announced its new Amazon Web Services.

How clever, I thought. Like Donald Trump selling golden mailboxes at Trump Tower to entrepreneurs who want the ritzy mailing address.

After all, Amazon already had all of the computer boxes and wires and know-how for connecting them together. Other businesses didn’t have this — but wanted it. So Amazon could make a nice business by making its internal IT resources publicly available on a per-use basis.

And what a cash cow it turned out to be. AWS is now estimated to bring in $25B a year — more than McDonald’s — and is one of the main profit centers at the famously profit-free Amazon.

Now here’s a puzzle for the marketers out there:

What’s lying around your desktop (literal, computeral, or mental) which you could sell like Amazon sold AWS?

Don’t just shrug if off, but think for a minute.

Because even some of the most successful marketing businesses out there don’t collect this free money. Case in point:

Agora.

Agora is probably the biggest direct response company, with dozens of subsidiaries, and hundreds (thousands?) of offers, mostly financial newsletters.

You can bet that with all this experience selling high-margin info products online, the people at Agora know a thing or three about copywriting and Internet marketing.

And yet, in spite of its tremendous proof elements and branding, Agora doesn’t have any offers in the profitable and growing copywriting/IM niche.

Or at least… they didn’t.

Right now, Agora is spinning up a new division focused on Internet marketing.

I’m not sure what it’s called, but they have an email newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

On different days, you can read insights from Evaldo Albuquerque, one of the most successful copywriters at Agora Financial in the past few years…

…from Peter Coyne, also a successful copywriter and the youngest publisher inside Agora…

…and finally, from Rich Schefren, a big name in the IM space for the past decade or two.

I’ve been signed up to these emails for a few days. So far, it’s been like they say — IM secrets you can’t get nowhere else.

Except perhaps, in my own email newsletter. After all, my only fun in life is scouring the Internet for new marketing and persuasion ideas, and then giving them away in my daily newsletter. Usually packaged up in some kind of story.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in, then you can try out my (FREE!) email newsletter here.

How to never run out of daily email marketing topics

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I felt like vomiting.

About 15 people were looking at me as I stood there at the front of the classroom.

3 of them were judges, in charge of evaluating my speech.

I looked at them with fear. I was sweating. I was trembling. I felt sick.

Not because I had to give a speech. After all, this was a debate tournament. I had given speeches like this hundreds of times before.

I felt sick because the night before, I’d had way too much to drink (a debate tournament tradition). Even though I’d vomited earlier in the morning and I’d slept a couple hours, I still felt wretched.

Now as you might know, a competitive debate speech is supposed to last exactly 7 minutes. Most debaters have way more to say than that, so it becomes a game of trying to fit their best arguments into 7 minutes.

But not me. Not that morning.

My mind was a black hole. All I wanted to do was to sit and close my eyes. I certainly didn’t have 7 minutes’ worth of persuasive arguments.

So I spoke incoherently for about a minute…

I looked around for help, which didn’t come…

And then, to the shock of the debate judges, and to the dismay of my debate partner, I shut up. And after a moment of silence, I dragged myself back to my seat and crumpled down in the chair.

In case I’m not communicating it properly:

This was a humiliating, borderline traumatic experience. I felt stupid. I felt humiliated. And I knew the whole room had just witnessed my unique failure.

Perhaps you feel something like this when it’s time to sit down and write.

Sure, writing isn’t as stressful as public speaking. But if you have to come up with new ways to sell the same thing, again and again (such as in daily emails), it can be stressful enough.

So what’s the fix?

Well, rather than spelling it out for you, let me point you to a video that illustrates how to come up with all the content you will ever need, at least for daily emails.

This video stars a guy named Mike Rowe, who is now famous as the host of a bunch of TV shows such as Dirty Jobs.

​​But back in the early 90s, Rowe had the 3am slot on QVC (a cable shopping channel). And he had to sell all sorts of shit, which he did in a pretty hilarious and inspiring fashion.

Don’t watch this video if you’re hoping for some sort of magic solution. But do watch it if you want to see a demonstration of all the selling (and non-selling) techniques you will ever need in daily emails:

Andre Chaperon peep show, this way ——->>>

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A few years back, a bizarre sandwich board appeared on a street in Melbourne, Australia. It read:

“Ed Sheeran peep show! $2 ——->>>”

Next to the sandwich board hovered a shady looking spruiker, stopping passersby.

“Get yer Ed Sheeran… Who wants some Ed Sheeran…”

He’d point to an unmarked door leading to a darkened room. Unsurprisingly, people avoided him in a wide arc.

So he got more desperate: “We’ve literally got Ed Sheeran sitting on a stage, waiting for you.”

(Ed Sheeran really was there in the darkened room, waiting behind a red curtain, guitar in hand.)

But nobody wanted Ed Sheeran for $2. Or more likely, they just didn’t trust this shady spruiker and his sandwich board peep show offer.

It’s much like when somebody is strolling along the Internet, minding their own business… and they hit upon your optin page. It reads:

“7 steps to fixing your biggest problem now! Enter your email ——->>>”

Do people want their biggest problems solved?

Of course.

So why do so few opt in — and why do even fewer read anything you send them afterwards?

Much like with that spruiker on the street, they don’t know you. They probably don’t trust you. They certainly don’t like you. You’re just some shady character, pointing to an unmarked door, promising an amazing experience behind it.

But that’s just a fact of direct response marketing, right?

​​Unless you want to spend weeks, months, or years cultivating a brand through blogging or podcasting or whatever… then you have to take this hard stance and lose a few people in the process.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps not.

I’ve been going through a newish course by Andre Chaperon. You might know Andre from his course Autoresponder Madness, where he introduced story-based, soap opera email sequences that suck readers in, build a relationship, and simultaneously create anticipation for a paid solution to a problem.

Fact is, story-based email sequences are not the only big innovation that Andre has created.

He also invented something he calls “multi-page presell sites.” These suckers build a relationship and trust quickly, before asking people to opt in (or buy).

Andre’s been using them for years, and he claims they are the bedrock of his business, along with his Autoresponder Madness email approach.

(I’ve also seen some serious direct response businesses switching over to this “presell site” approach — both for getting people onto their mailing lists, and as a replacement for traditional sales letters.)

In case you wanna know more about Andre’s presell site system… or if you wanna see it in action… then you’re in luck. ​​Cuz I got it ready for you, in a darkened room hiding behind the link below. You won’t even have to opt in:

https://tinylittlebusinesses.com/manifestos/product-launch-marketing/

[3-Min DR News] The end of protein, $1M+ email drops, DJ Trump ad spend

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My local radio station has these short, punchy 3-minute news segments.

I like them. So I thought I would do something similar on occasion, but about direct response marketing. Here’s the first edition:

The end of protein?

I just listened to a new interview with Dr. Steven Gundry. Gundry is the face of Gundry MD, a Golden Hippo company. (Golden Hippo one of the biggest direct response health businesses.)

Anyways, Dr. Gundry says in the interview that you should limit your protein to 20 grams a day because that’s all we need and because “protein ages you.” So we’ve come full circle. First fat was bad and carbs were good… Then carbs were bad and protein was good… And now protein is bad and fat is good.

Will a low-protein longevity diet be the new fad for the 2020s, spawning hundreds of new direct response offers, like keto and paleo did before it? Here’s the Gundry interview if you wanna decide for yourself:

https://jamesaltucher.com/podcast/508-dr-steven-gundry

A multi-million dollar email

Justin Goff’s “Wife saves husband — doctors stunned” email drop started running several years, or at least that’s when I first heard about it. In any case, it’s running still. I see it on average twice a month in Newsmax alone. In fact, it ran again today.

Who knows how many millions of dollars worth of business this single piece of copy has brought in? Here’s a version from Glenn Beck’s list is in case you wanna read and study:

https://newslettercollector.com/newsletter/wife-saves-husband-doctors-stunned-by-military-fountain-of-youth-drink(2)/

DJ Trump in 3rd place with ad spend

I wanted to see which advertisers are spending the most on FB ads. Foolish, it turns out. There’s no way FB is sharing that data. But, thanks to Trump and Cambridge Analytica, FB is sharing very clear data about which political campaigns are spending how much.

Looking over the past 30 days, the top spender, at around $4.3 million, is one Tom Steyer, a billionaire Dem candidate for president I had never even heard of. No. 2 is Mike Bloomberg who entered the race only two weeks ago, but already spent $1.5 million. In 3rd place, we have DJ Trump, with around $1.4 mil in ad spend.

If you wanna see the full list, which links to the ads for all the candidates, and also includes other high-integrity advertisers such as Goldman Sachs and Planned Parenthood, here’s where to go:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/

Got a hot tip?

3-Min DR News wants to hear from you. You can submit your industry news or gossip, on the record or off, by clicking here and writing our editorial team (of one) an email.

How to make friends on Twitter

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A while back, Ben Settle wrote that if you go on Twitter right now, you can find pockets of people sharing really good ideas and trying to improve themselves.

So I created a Twitter account. I followed some people who seemed intelligent and reasonable. And after watching them bicker and henpeck each other for a few days, I gave up and closed down my account again.

I’m not sure what pockets of positivity Ben Settle was talking about, but Twitter ain’t it. Or so I thought, until today.

I was reading an article, which linked to another, which finally led me upon the site of one Alexey Guzey. I don’t know the guy from a hole in the ground, but he seems intelligent and reasonable. He writes well. And he’s very enthusiastic about the power of Twitter for meeting good people, learning interesting stuff, and improving yourself.

I’m not 100% convinced yet, but I might give Twitter another try. If I do, I’ll start by following Alexey Guzey.

If this has got you somewhat curious, then take a look at Alexey Guzey’s guide on how to make friends on the Internet. It includes pointers about using Twitter in a smart way, as well as a bunch of motivational case studies of valuable relationships he has made through the Great Twat. Here’s the link:

https://guzey.com/how-to-make-friends-over-the-internet/

My biggest email mistake of 2019

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A couple of days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “How is your vagal tone?”

​​It was a dumb subject line. I should have used “Agora’s new health blockbuster” instead.

I say this because that email did worse than average in terms of opens. And yes, I know that sales are a vagillion times more important than opens. But since I’m not selling anything with these emails at the moment, then even open rates are interesting to look at.

And that’s one thing I’ve noticed with email opens throughout 2019 — they tend to be consistently lower with bizarre headlines like “How is your vagal tone?” I’ve also noticed that pure curiosity subject lines underperform as well.

And yet, such subject lines are as common in marketing emails as broken ankles are at the Walmart entrance on Black Friday.

No surprise there — these kinds of subject lines are easy and lazy to write. But I think it’s time to change.

I’m personally throwing out pure curiosity subject lines and  bizarro angles — RIP 2019.

​​In their place, it’s time come up with subject lines that are clearly of interest to people on the list. It’s not rocket surgery, but as my “vagal tone” email shows, it’s still easy to screw up.

2020 Prediction: FB ads will get scammier

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This summer, I wrote a unique piece of sales copy for a client.

​​It was a video ad, telling a story over 3 or 4 minutes, using stock footage and text overlays. The goal was to have this run on Facebook and then link to an advertorial and then an order page.

The product in question was “eco-friendly bags” — basically, reusable produce bags to replace the ones you get at the store. People are crazy about the dangers of plastics these days, so I wrote up an inspirational story about how one brilliant inventor saw the need to help the planet and presto, eco-friendly bags.

Anyways, about a week ago, I remembered this project. And I followed up with the client to see how the video ad performed.

​​Here’s what he wrote back:

“We unfortunately ran into some issues with that product – Facebook now flags and doesn’t allow ads that address political or social issues. Since the ad talked about pollution / the environment it was, unfortunately, flagged.”

Wow. It didn’t even occur to me that talking about pollution or dead seagulls could be a compliance issue. Sure, I heard from many different sides that FB is cracking down on ads. This summer seemed to be the high point. Anything that looks ugly, scary, or is too full of hype couldn’t run. But I guess “social issue” ads became a problem also.

That’s rough. Things are getting really strict out there…

​Or are they?

Because let me tell you a second FB ads story:

A few days ago, I saw an ad, written in English (I live in Croatia), featuring some Croatian celebrity, with a classic clickbait headline along the lines of, “He went on TV to reveal how anyone can make 54,319.44 Croatian Kuna in just minutes — and it’s got the National Bank terrified!” The actual advertorial page promoted some Bitcoin trading platform.

Several other versions of this ad, run by other FB pages, also appeared on my feed that same day, and for several days after. There were dozens of comments on each ad. Some were by people simply talking about the Croatian celebrity (“what does this moron know about making money”) while a few pointed out this is clearly a scam.

And here’s the staggering thing:

​​All of these ads had been running for several weeks. It got so bad that the Croatian celebrity gave a newspaper interview to explain he has nothing to do with this Bitcoin scam. Nonetheless, the ad continues to run, in various iterations, right there on Facebook.
​
I think this is a sign of things to come.

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has made a show at regulating ads. And it will probably continue to censor ads that push certain hot buttons or that target certain markets.

​​But the moment has passed. Nobody expects any integrity or accountability from Facebook any more. And at the same time, scammers as well as more legitimate businesses figured out how to run edgy FB ads, or downright duplicitous FB ads.

As this year wraps up and we enter the glorious 2020’s decade, I expect this will continue and intensify. And if I’m right, this means we’re all in for a wild show.

A creative way to justify a continuity product

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I wanna quickly dissect an email I got today from one Chris Masterjohn, PhD. Two reasons why:

1. It describes a creative offer that’s interesting if you’re into marketing

2. It offers a lesson in halfway-there copywriting

First, a tiny spec of background. Over the past 10 years, I’ve spent a lot of time reading alternative medicine sites, both for work and for my own own hypochondriac reasons. I’ve become jaded and skeptical because most of them are junk, and because most of the “doctors” who promote them aren’t doctors at all, but chiropractors, podiatrists, or at best, English literature PhD’s.

But not Chris Masterjohn, PhD.

Chris is not a medical doctor but he has a legit doctorate — in Nutritional Sciences, from the University of Connecticut — and that’s relevant because he mostly talks about the latest science behind nutrition and healthy living. And these days, he’s one of the few people I read and trust when it comes to matters of, which vitamin, which diet, etc.

So Chris Masterjohn, PhD sent out an email today to his list, and he announced an interesting offer:

If you’re part of his $15/month continuity program (monthly Zoom call + other stuff), and you buy any of the products that Chris endorses (supplements, mail-order beef, blue-blocking sunglasses), he will, via PayPal, refund you the affiliate commission he gets.

In other words, his continuity program acts like a discount club for the health-obsessed. If you’re already buying dung heaps of pills and powders and sleep optimization gadgets, you can now get between 5%-50% off their regular price, assuming you buy the ones that Chris recommends (and why wouldn’t you, since he’s smart and he digs through the research for you).

I thought this was a great idea. People love discount clubs to begin with. For the right kind of person, this can easily pay for the monthly subscription fee, even several times over. And even for the non-right type of person, it might be a sufficient reason to justify joining Chris’s continuity program.

In fact, I think that with a bit of massage, this discount club idea could be positioned as a standalone product. That might be something for you to think about, in case you’re looking for a continuity program to add on to your existing business.

But there was a second thing in Chris Masterjohn, PhD’s email, and that’s a copywriting lesson. But my one-track mind can’t handle that different direction today. So let’s talk about it tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you wanna save money on your Wild Salmon Subscription Boxes or your $600 chiliPAD, here’s where you can find Chris and his health-conscious Costo club:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/

Jumpcut and the future of video sales letters

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A few weeks back, top-shelf copywriter Dan Ferrari sent out an email with 35 direct response lessons he’s learned in his 35 years on the planet. At no. 29, there was the following:

29) The best copywriters are able to work in really high-production formats. You’re now a creative director. Get used to it.

Honestly, I didn’t really know what the hell Dan was talking about here. But fortunately, I listened to a podcast a few days later, with another copywriter, and it all became clear.

The second copywriter is named Brandon Shrair. Brandon is all of 23 years old. In spite of that, he has a nice, deep, resonant voice and more importantly, he also has high-level marketing experience as the Director of Marketing at Jumpcut.

Never heard of Jumpcut?

They are an online training portal, started by the guys who ran the popular Simple Pickup YouTube channel. They sell $1k+ courses that teach people how to become successful YouTubers.

Anyways, the interesting bit is the kind of marketing that Jumpcut is doing. That’s what Brandon is responsible for, and that’s what he talked about on the podcast that I listened to.

Jumpcut is using long-form video sales letters to sell their courses. This, in spite of the fact they are targeting 20-something-year olds, who grew up on the Internet, who are supposed to have the attention span of a horny goldfish, and who are immediately allergic to anything that has a faint whiff of salesy stank.

So how does Jumpcut do it?

How do they sell 8 figures’ worth of information products to broke millennials who don’t wanna watch ads, much less a 45-minute VSL?

Well, they use the fundamentals of copywriting and direct response marketing. And they wed this to high-production formats, just like Dan Ferrari wrote above. Here’s what I mean.

If you listen to a Jumpcut VSL, it will sound much like any other bizopp promotion. “I was broke… I was doubting myself… then by accident, I discovered a powerful secret that I’ll tell you about in a moment… and good God, look at me now… so much freedom it’s practically pouring out of my pants.”

But here’s the thing. If you watch that same Jumpcut VSL, it won’t look anything like your run-of-the-mill bizopp offer.

There are actual people talking on screen, and not just a series of typed-out sentences. It’s professionally edited, with multiple camera angles. Most importantly, it’s shot on location, such as a fancy villa or a yacht, giving credibility and color to the big claims in the VSL script.

So is this the future of video sales letters? I think so, at least if you want to work with big brands or with businesses that have the potential to make lots of money.

Of course, Jumpcut isn’t the only company that’s already using this style. But they are a good example of it. And if you want to see what the direct marketing of the future looks like, you can get it delivered to your inbox by signing up below:

https://jumpcut.com/viral-academy