Direct Marketing

The “daily email marketing” starter pack

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There’s a popular subreddit called starterpacks where people post made-up starter packs like…

“Every cheap Italian restaurant” starter pack
“1960s American scientist in a film” starter pack
“The “every Chevy commercial” starter pack

So here’s one for daily sales/marketing emails. Some of the following starter pack items are genuinely stupid practices, others are just overused. In any case, I’m guilty of having exploited all of them at some point. So I’m not pointing fingers. I’m just putting this starter pack together for your use and abuse.

The first daily email starter pack item is perhaps the most obvious. In fact, a friend who reads these emails called me out on it just a couple of weeks ago. So let me show you:

Daily email starter pack element #1. VSL formatting

You know what I’m talking about…

Or maybe you don’t…

But in any case…

The point is…

That a line in an email…

Can’t hold…

More than a sentence fragment.

Even a short sentence…

Is apparently too much.

Daily email starter pack element #2. Outlook 1997 styling

A daily email has to look just like a friend sent it to you, right?

Right. And that friend is writing to you from a murky past, back when email couldn’t contain html, certainly no embedded images, or any colors or markup. But even though you’re hearing from a close friend, he still feels the need to include a…

Daily email starter pack element #3. Mandatory signature

There is a girl I know who got her name tattooed on the back of her shoulder. I guess to help out one-night stands in case they forget her name. There must be some similar reasoning for people who sign each email they send out, day after day. And if signing your first name and last name isn’t enough, then you can always spice it up with…

Daily email starter pack element #4. Your made-up nickname in quotes

I first saw Andre “Whatever happened to ya?” Chaperon writing his name with a nickname jammed halfway in between. It’s a cool trick. Made less cool each time somebody copies it.

Daily email starter pack element #5. Stupid deliverability tricks

Now that I’ve got your attention, here are three things I want you to do right now:

1. Add me to your contacts
2. Drag this email out of the spam folder and into your inbox
3. Hit reply so I know you’re getting my messages. No need to write anything, because I won’t read it anyhow.

Daily email starter pack element #6. Telling it like it is

Look, unlike all the other bozos out there writing daily emails, I’ll be straight with ya. I’ve seen other people do it, and I like how tough it sounds. So even if I really have nothing to say, you can count on me to dispel myths. As soon as I actually spot one.

And there you have it. I got more of these, but these are the most widespread ones. If you want more, just hit reply. But don’t write anything.

And I’ll be right back…

In your inbox…

Same time, tomorrow.

And in just in case you forgot…

My name is…

John “Starter pack lover” Bejakovic

How is your vagal tone?

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“Well I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?”
– Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

Gary Halbert once wrote that if you’re in the marketing business, you always have to do two things:

1) Keep the fundamentals in mind
2) Keep an eye out for what’s working right now

Well, right now, one specific health offer seems to be working like crazy. I’m assuming this because I’ve gotten dozens of emails promoting this offer over the past two months.

Many of these emails came from various Agora health brands (the offer in question also seems to come from an Agora brand). Others came from 3rd party newsletters that I suppose are affiliates. And I’ve even seen email drops in Newsmax promoting this offer.

I’m listening to the VSL right now, and two things stick out as possible reasons why this offer is doing so well at the moment.

First, it has a unique “problem mechanism” (that’s a term that I first heard from top-flight copywriter Stefan Georgi). In this case, the problem mechanism is “low vagal tone,” which as the VSL will tell you, will do everything from shriveling your nuts to corroding your cells and even burning out your brain. Do you have a health problem right now? Maybe it’s time to get your vagal tone checked.

But how do you check your vagal tone? Well, the VSL has an answer for you. It’s even got a solution in case you find that your vagal tone is low.

And that’s the second possible reason why this VSL seems to be killing it right now. The “solution mechanism” (your run of the mill, Gene Schwartz mechanism) is not a pill, not a supplement, and not even a newsletter. instead, it’s a special sound, or as the VSL says, a “healing frequency discovered between 85-255 Hz.”

Maybe that’s the secret chord that David played to increase the vagal tone. Anyways, if you’re in the marketing business, and you’d like to see this offer that’s working so well right now, here’s the link:

https://pro.donovanhealth.com/p/OV6SSSPKG1I/EOV6VB48/

Dainty copy killer

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“Good afternoon?” the man asked me with a faint smile.

The normally busy cafe was empty except for one table. As soon as I walked in, the people around this one table stopped talking to each other and turned to face me.

There were five women and the one man with the smile. He seemed to be in charge. He repeated his greeting, which was really a question.

“Good afternoon?”

I looked around. There were plates of food laid out. No music was playing. The lights were dim.

“Is there a private event going on?” I asked. He nodded.

So I excused myself and stepped out of the cafe back into the rain. And then, on the door, I saw a dainty sign on a piece of A5 paper:

“Cafe Lav is closed to the public until 9pm today.”

A nice, clear message. But who has time to read all the notices, warnings, announcements, and advertisements out there?

Nobody.

And maybe that can be a lesson to all the copywriters out there. You might spend days and weeks and even months crafting your message perfectly. But if it doesn’t catch your prospect’s eye, he won’t read it, regardless of how good your copy is.

So how do you catch somebody’s eye graphically? I’m hardly an expert on direct response design, but here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way:

1. Don’t put crucial information in the pre-headline (aka “eyebrow”) because people will read that part of the headline complex last, if they read it at all

2. Don’t use reverse type (white letters on black background) unless you want to hide the message (“This is a paid advertisement”)

3. Don’t use highlights other than yellow

4. Use arrows, circles, and “handwritten” notes to draw attention to important elements

5. Use photos of faces looking at the viewer to draw attention

6. Use photos of faces looking in the direction of an important element you want to draw attention to (eg. an offer or headline)

7. Don’t be afraid to make your headline enormous even at the expense of cutting down body copy

Maybe this last one would have helped at Cafe Lav today. Or maybe they should have just locked the door.

Anyways, if you have other direct response tips, please send them my way. After a long layoff, I’m getting back in the groove of working on my own offers, and that means I act as designer as well as copywriter.

The FTC strikes again

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A couple days ago, the news around the marketing and copywriting water cooler was that the FTC, the club-wielding government body in charge of stamping out deceptive and prohibited marketing practices, had sued several Agora companies.

Agora and its offshoots are some of the biggest players in direct response space, so this has the potential to be big news. Or not. But in any case, it got me curious about what the FTC is up to, so I signed up for their newsletter.

And only yesterday, while I was in the middle of hacking away at my current real estate VSL, I got an FTC email with the subject line, “Yet another real estate seminar scam.” The email reads:

“For the second time in about a month, the FTC sued a company that falsely promised it would show people how to earn money in real estate to get them to pay thousands of dollars for seminars. […] If someone says you can earn a lot of money on an investment with little or no risk, that’s probably a scam.”

So how does this affect the real estate promo I’m writing, which pretty much says you can make money in real estate with little or no risk, and also has an $1k+ upsell on the back end?

​​Well, I’ll tell you about that another day.

​​For now, I encourage you to head over to the FTC site and sign up for their newsletter. It’s entertaining reading, and might be a lifesaver if you’re doing work in edgy markets like bizopp, investing, or health.

Yet another clickbait subject line

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“I was furious…”

“Did you get a chance to see this?”

“I almost forgot to tell you!”

I’ve seen an uptick recently in flat-out clickbait subject lines like these. And by “clickbait,” I mean subject lines that have little (or nothing) to do with the actual content of the email. They are simply tacked on as an afterthought, and could work just as well with any other content.

But what’s the problem? The more the merrier, right? People can’t read your message unless they click on it, and if a subject line gets them to click, then it’s done its job.

Perhaps. But like salt, curiosity rarely makes a filling meal on its own. That’s not my conclusion. Instead, it comes from one of the greatest copywriters of the last century, John Caples, who wrote about headlines:

“Avoid headlines that merely provoke curiosity. Curiosity combined with news or self-interest is an excellent aid to the pulling power of your headline, but curiosity by itself is seldom enough. This fundamental rule is violated more often than any other.”

And then then we get to the very other extreme. You might call this “the fewer the merrier.” It’s an idea promoted by the likes of marketing expert Travis Sago, who has made himself and his clients millions of dollars, often solely through email. Travis advises that you “write your subject lines like you have to pay for every open.”

So what to do? Who’s right?

Well, I think there’s actually no single right answer. There might be situations where clickbait headlines (“Whoa!”) make sense and make sales. Cold emails to businesses might be one example. Personally, I don’t like these kinds of subject lines, but that’s just a matter of artisanal pride.

I also think that if you’re looking to play the long game with your marketing, meaning you want an ongoing relationship with your readers, then it makes sense not to piss those readers off. Will they click on your email and feel like they’ve been scammed into reading something irrelevant? Then maybe it’s time to consider making your subject line less clickbaity, more transparent, and more specific.

5 sources of entertaining inspiration

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Email marketing guru Ben Settle says the cornerstone (at least one of them) of his successful strategy is something called:

Infotainment.

(That could be either a combination of “informal” and “attainment,” or “information” and “entertainment.” Take your pick.)

The thing is, if you look around the great email marketing landscape, you will see that most businesses and marketers have a much easier time with the information part of this formula, than with the entertainment bit.

And no wonder.

Teaching stuff, or at least appearing to teach stuff, is easy. That’s why teachers don’t get the big bucks.

On the other hand, entertaining, while it might seem trivial, is actually hard. It takes thought and practice. And nobody gets any credit for “appearing to entertain.” You either do or you don’t. That’s why people who genuinely entertain, like Eddie Murphy and Rob Schneider, get the money and the chicks.

So what to do?

Well, if you are not naturally entertaining (and who is?) then you will have to study, practice, and try to improve.

The good news is, there are lots of examples of entertaining content out there. In fact, we’re swimming in it. For example…

Syndicated newspaper comics, such as Garfield or the Far Side.

Or shock radio and entertaining podcasts, like the Howard Stern Show or the Joe Rogan Experience.

Or actual comic books, and their monstrous movie imitations.

Or late night talk shows, with their recurring characters, skits, and familiar format but ever-new content.

Or even newspapers. Particularly tabloids, and their incredible headlines (“Headless Body in Topless Bar”).

So if you’re having trouble crafting infotaining emails, try studying some of these sources, and see what you can copy, model, and mimic.

Or just get in touch with me and hire me to write for you. Because, while I’m not Rob Schneider-level yet, I’m actively working on it.

Avoiding the Facebook ban hammer through Personal Power

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This summer, one of my clients ran into some trouble with a Facebook ads campaign.

The product they were advertising was a plastic ball, filled with ceramic beads, which you’re supposed to throw into the washing machine and use instead of detergent.

I was in charge of writing the advertorial, so I wrote a first-person confessional with the headline:

“How I wash blood stains out of my clothes WITHOUT laundry detergent”

Facebook didn’t have a problem with my blood-stained headline. They also didn’t have a problem with the questionable product (I still don’t understand how or if it works). But they did have an issue with little things like:

* The use of words like “magic,” “crazy,” and “trick”

* Specific claims such as “it saves me hundreds on laundry detergent”

* Before-and-after pictures of clothes washed with this breakthrough technology…​​

In short, Facebook didn’t like anything that gave this ad the unpleasant but familiar odor of an old-school infomercial.

But wait a minute.

Maybe that comparison is not really fair.

Because right now, I’m hand-copying a very old and very successful infomercial.

It’s for Tony Robbins’s Personal Power tapes.

This infomercial looks like a segment from 60 Minutes. It opens with Tony and Fran Tarkenton, a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, boarding a helicopter, and then flying around Southern California.

Once they land, Tony and Fran go inside a fancy house, smile and nod at each other, and chat about the good results people are getting from Personal Power.

The rest of the infomercial is punctuated by lots of testimonials, most of which are saying, “This system works really well, and it’s helped me.”

When you get the chance to buy the tapes, there’s no massive price anchoring, and there’s no “But wait, there’s more!”

If all this is starting to bore you, that’s kind of the point.

Because this infomercial was pretty classy, really not sensationalistic, and would have fit in perfectly into a Facebook advertising campaign today.

(And like I said, this infomercial was immensely effective. It helped launch Guthy-Renker Corporation, which at that time was just an experiment between a couple of guys, and now has revenues of over $2 billion a year.)

The point of all this?

Maybe these Facebook compliance requirements don’t have to hamstring sales…

Maybe direct response copywriters have just gotten into too much of a Gary Halbert and John Carlton groove…

And maybe there are plenty of other effective ways to sell stuff without !!! and crazy/amazing/jaw-dropping before-and-after.

Or maybe not.

But if you get the Facebook ban hammer, it’s something to keep in mind, and maybe something to comfort yourself with.

Anyways, if you need help with writing Facebook-compliant advertorials that still make sales, you might get some ideas here:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

“Nobody Died at Sandy Hook” and Facebook ads

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A few days ago, a jury in Wisconsin awarded $450k to one Leonard Pozner in a defamation suit.

The defendant in the suit was James Fetzer, the author of the book “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.”

The gist of this book, according to what I’ve seen online, is that the Sandy Hook shooting never really happened. Instead, much like the moon landing, it was all faked.

​​(In this case, it was Obama and his lackeys, coming after your guns in a roundabout way.)

Pozner, the guy who got the $450k, is the father of a boy who was killed at Sandy Hook.

He sued Fetzer, the author, and won. But Pozner didn’t get these damages because of the insulting or hurtful claims in Fetzer’s book.

Instead, the jury awarded the damages because “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook” claims that Pozner fabricated his son’s death certificate.

In other words, in spite of all the outrageous content that Fetzer put in his book, it was really a technicality that brought him down.

(BTW, Fetzer is a retired university professor. It’s another bit of proof that intelligence has little to do with having an accurate or useful view of the world.)

Anyways, I bring this up because “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook” is just like a direct response promotion.

A direct response promotion can make all sorts of outrageous, ridiculous, or even offensive claims. And that’s quite ok, and even encouraged in some circles.

But you have to watch out for technicalities.

For example, I just got some feedback from one of my clients, about a campaign we ran on Facebook this summer.

The promotion in question was nowhere as inflammatory as “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.”

Still, our campaign was a bit ridiculous, and it promoted a slightly suspect product.

“No problem with any of that,” says Facebook. “But we do have some issues with a few technicalities.”

I’ll give you some examples of the issues we had in my post tomorrow. It won’t be terribly shocking, but it might be instructive, particularly if you’re running ads on Facebook to cold traffic.

Chlamydia-ridden cuties

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I saw a video just now of a baby koala that somehow mounted a small dog, thinking the dog is its mother.

The dog keeps turning around in confusion, trying to get this thing off its back.

But the baby koala (aka joey) holds on for dear life and stays put, regardless of how much the dog spins and frets.

Such a cute video.

In fact, koalas as such adorable animals.

​​Or are they?

Because while reading the comments of the koala video, I came across an apparent koala expert, reddit user u/jonthecloser, who shared some shocking facts. Such as for example:

1. Koalas have one of the smallest brain-to-body ratios of all mammals, and they are immensely dumb as a result (they will literally starve to death even when surrounded by food)

2. When a koala joey transitions from eating milk to eucalyptus leaves, it has to first nuzzle its mother’s anus to retrieve the appropriate gut flora

3. In some areas, over 80% of koalas are infected with chlamydia, which makes them incontinent

4. Male koalas often engage in rape, that is, non-procreative sex with unwilling females

The koala expert wraps it up by saying, “Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute.”

Whaddya know. You learn something new and dispiriting every day. And that brings me to my point:

If you are writing daily emails to your prospects or clients, you don’t need to have something monumental to say.

In fact, it’s better to say something slightly surprising or new about a familiar thing.

E​​ven if it’s not immediately related to what you’re selling.

Think koalas and email copywriting.

Speaking of which, if you need some help writing shocking, amusing, and sales-generating emails, then I have just the right cute offer for you. Go here to check it out:

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

The counterintuitive secret of effective positioning

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Today, I ate a handful of jujubes.

These are little fruits, kind of like dates. I grabbed some from a bowl and as I went to wash them, one jujube fell, hit my foot, and rolled off under the counter.

“No matter,” I said to myself, “I’ll get it in a second.”

A second later, I looked under the counter. The jujube wasn’t there.

I kept looking. Nothing.

I reached under the counter to see if it was there but I couldn’t see it. Nothing.

I changed positions to see if I could see it better from a different perspective. Nothing.

Maybe you know this maddening.

W​​hen you think you know where to look for something, but it’s not there.

Maybe it’s your keys, which should be at the bottom of a bag… except they’re not.

Or somebody’s name, which almost certainly starts with the letter “A”… except no “A” names sound right.

Or maybe it’s even a marketing situation.

Such as, for example, deciding on how to position a product, a brand, or even a person.

Many business owners think they know where to look for such positioning intel.

After all, it seems very intuitive that the positioning for their products must be hidden somewhere in the product itself.

Similarly, the positioning for their personal business must be lying somewhere inside their own person.

So they keep looking and looking…

And even though they are sure they are looking in the right place, they never find the positioning answer they’ve been searching for.

Why is that?

Simple. Because the positioning they are searching for won’t be found inside their product, or even inside themselves.

Instead, it’s found in a rather counter-intuitive place.

Maybe you know what I have in mind.

And if you want my help in searching in this counter-intuitive place, and helping you come up with a winning positioning strategy for your business, brand, or even person, then simply write me an email and we can talk.