Direct Marketing

How to sell a broccoli-of-the-month subscription program

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One of my copywriting clients has a marketing conundrum:

He sells an app that helps real estate investors track down info on vacant houses. He charges $49 a month for the app. It’s a good product and customers love it. But it’s too practical and too unsexy to sell to people who just click over from YouTube or Facebook.

So what to do?

I had an idea. I told him to create a course on getting hot seller leads… price it at 10x the cost of the app… and put it up for sale on his site.

It doesn’t matter if anybody buys the course. What matters is that he can now legitimately say, “Here’s how to get my premium $497 course on getting hot leads for FREE.” The answer, of course, is that the prospect has to sign up for a trial of the app.

This is not my idea, by the way. It’s been in use in one form or another since prehistoric times, when some Neanderthal started selling a newsletter on mammoth-hunting strategies. But I thought of it because I once saw a Frank Kern VSL that did this exact same thing.

Frank was selling a $397 membership program for consultants and clients. That’s a tough sell to cold traffic.

What wasn’t a tough sell was getting somebody to accept a FREE gift of Frank’s $4k course on getting clients. Of course, the way to get this FREE gift was with a risk-free trial of the $397 membership course.

My point is this:

If you’re in the business of selling a broccoli-of-the-month subscription program, give away a FREE 10-layer chocolate cake to get people to sign up.

You can even offer crazy bribes if you’re giving your broccoli away.

For example, I write a daily email newsletter. It’s totally free to sign up for it. But if you sign up for it here, and you reply to the welcome email and refer to this blog post, I’ll give you a FREE half-hour consult on any topic you may want — such as writing horror-story advertorials… daily emails that bring in the bacon for ecommerce businesses… or getting started as a copywriter and marketer.

The coming brand marketing rapture

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When I first found out about direct response marketing, I felt enlightened.

I’d chuckle when I saw businesses trying to impress with their branding. “Where are the benefits?” I’d ask. “Tell me what’s in it for me!”

I’d shake my head. They obviously hadn’t A/B tested their message.

A big eye-opener came a year or so later (I was still very much a newb). I got sucked in by an ad to plop down $5 for a free + shipping offer:

Frank Kern’s book Convert.

In Convert, Frank revealed the secret to his massive success in Internet marketing. It was precisely that he created a brand around himself… rather than selling nameless benefit-based offers.

So this was brand marketing and direct response marketing… melded together.

Interesting.

And it keeps getting more interesting still.

Because in the past week, I’ve seen two successful direct marketers (Brian Kurtz and Ben Settle) say some pretty apocalyptic stuff. They admitted they don’t track much of what they do… and that, while their marketing should always “pay,” the currency doesn’t have to be sales, clicks, or opens.

In other words, these two masters of direct response seem to be dropping their bread-and-butter… and getting back into the horrible, laughable, ineffective world of brand marketing.

I think more direct response businesses will be making this switch in the years to come.

One reason is that people like Brian and Ben prove it’s possible. Both of them make good money. And they make it seem enjoyable.

But there’s more.

Because in a connected world full of free ways to reach your prospects, it’s hard to know what really created the sale. Was it your slick sales letter? Or was it when the prospect heard you interviewed by his favorite trusted authority?

A big business like Agora can handle both branding and direct response. But many businesses can only do so much. And I suspect some direct response outfits will find their time is better spent creating great offers and making those podcast rounds… rather than tweaking their copy and optimizing their funnels.

And like I said, it might be more enjoyable. Because direct response marketing can get pretty obnoxious, and even bad for your own mental health. I’ll reveal the shocking truth about that is in just a moment, but first…

Let me make it clear I’m not predicting the end of direct response. There will still be straight-up DR businesses… and there will be demand for direct response copywriters.

But I prophesy there will be a rapture. For every two direct response businesses in the field… the one will stay as is… the other will be taken up into brand marketing heaven. And maybe, if you start to prepare now, that business can be yours — assuming that’s what you want.

That’s what I’m trying to do. And that’s why I’m writing posts like this, day after day, for over two years now. They haven’t paid off yet… but maybe they will.

Anyways, if you want to sign up to get my posts by email each day, click here and subscribe to my newsletter.

Selfishly giving away money to a worthy cause

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You may have heard that Chuck Feeney is finally broke.

​​Feeney, who once had a net worth of $8 billion, decided in 1982 to give it all away before he died. This past Monday, the last pennies finally rolled out of Feeney’s now-empty wallet, and his life’s mission was accomplished.

You know what gets me? It took 38 years.

Because giving away money in a way that doesn’t do harm, and even more, in a way that actually does good, is a time-consuming job.

I started giving away a tiny bit of money a few months ago for purely selfish, mercenary reasons. Earlier this year, I broke through a long-standing earnings ceiling. And I wanted to make sure I never fall through the hole in that ceiling and drop back down to the ground floor.

So I took the advice of Tony Robbins, who says to give away some money — as a way of signaling to your brain that you’ve got more than enough. (You might think this is some kooky new age bullshit, but the more I learn about persuasion and human psychology, the more I believe this kind of stuff.)

The thing is though, giving away money to a halfway-deserving cause, where the money will be spent on something other than comfier chairs for holier-than-thou bureaucrats, well, that’s not easy. Some months I don’t give anything away, just because I don’t know where.

But let me snip to the chase: I just signed up to give away $40 a month to some charity. Frankly, I don’t know if the charity is any good — that would take more research than I’m willing to put in.

But the donation was recommended by direct marketer Brian Kurtz, who claims it’s worthwhile. And for this donation, Brian is also giving me (and you, if you want) an ethical bribe: the digital version of his Titans of Direct Response event.

Thing is, I’m not sure whether this will satisfy my need to give away money. After all, I’ve lusted after this Titans product for a while. It’s got recordings of top marketers and copywriters revealing things they’d never revealed anywhere else. I thought about getting this product earlier, but I put it off because it normally sells for a couple thou. Well, I can now get it for much much cheaper, and give away some money too to a charity. (But will my brain believe that?)

I can’t say this is the decision you too should make. You might not believe the Tony Robbins philanthropy/earnings juju, or you might not want the Titans course, even at a fat discount. But if you are interested, or if you just want to see how a marketing master structures an attractive offer, head on over to the following page and read the P.S.:

https://www.briankurtz.net/informationinspirationor-just-lunch/

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.

The aggressive other meaning of “money loves speed”

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“There is absolutely nothing you can ever do or say that is MORE attractive than escalating quickly. Not teasing her, telling stories or having lots of social proof. Nothing comes close. Fast escalation beats them all.”
— 60 Years of Challenge

Marketing legend Dan Kennedy has a famous saying that “money loves speed.”

For the longest time, I thought that meant working faster, producing more content and offers, and getting paid more. It definitely makes sense given that Dan himself was (probably) the world’s highest paid copywriter for a time. His secret? He wrote faster and more than anybody else.

But maybe that’s not all there is to this saying.

Maybe it’s about making more money through fast product fulfillment and customers service… or through the promise of speedy results or relief from pain… or even through concentration-enhancing drugs like Ritalin.

Well, maybe those are a bit far-fetched.

​​But here’s something that’s almost certainly true. I didn’t think of it myself, but I managed to catch it when two successful marketers (Rich Schefren and Kim Walsh Phillips) mentioned it during a recent interview.

What they said was that ascending customers quickly means you will make more money.

And if you don’t know what I mean by ascending, it is standard direct response stuff: you first sell somebody a $47 newsletter, then a $197 course, then a $4997 yearly subscription service.

And what Rich and Kim were saying, as an interpretation of Dan’s “money loves speed,” is that the faster you do this — all in the same sitting is just great — the more money you will make.

Fast ascension. Not waiting weeks, months, or years to push your customers to the next level of commitment with you.

Which is pretty much the same thing you will hear in the pickup niche, where they talk about “fast escalation” as the end-all technique to attracting women.

Perhaps you find this off-putting. Or too aggressive. Perhaps it’s not for you.

But I think it’s good to at least keep it in the back of your mind. Because money — and women — love speed.

Since you’ve read this far, let’s try some fast ascension:

I write a daily email newsletter about marketing and copywriting. It’s not for everybody. But maybe you will like it. If you’d like to sign up, click here.

Scams and losers for your bulging swipe file

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Nasty little scammerses:

A report came out a few days ago about a guy who recently lost over $4k in a Facebook scam. If like me, you start to feel superior whenever you hear somebody has been scammed (“That would never happen to me!”), let me give you the details.

The guy in question is Niek Van ​​der Maas, the founder of an adtech company.

​​Van der Maas saw a Facebook ad that offered $3k of free credit for advertising on Tik Tok. This is a legit program that Van der Maas had read about, so he clicked on the ad, downloaded the required Android app, logged in with his Facebook account, and waited for the $3k credit to land.

Except the credit never did land. ​​Instead, what happened is that Van der Maas’s own Facebook ad account was charged over $4k.

​​The scammers, who ran the Facebook ad to an imitation version of the Tik Tok ads app, used Van der Maas’s Facebook account info to log into his FB ad account… lock the guy out… and spend $4k on Vietnamese-language ads promoting some kind of aluminum gizmo.

A pretty sophisticated way to make (or lose) $4k. And I’m not 100% sure it would never happen to me.

So I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1) Because the Internet is a dangerous place, and as your surrogate email uncle, I want to make sure you keep yourself safe, and

2) Because marketers and copywriters are always told to “Keep an eye out on what’s working now!” and to throw it in their already-bulging swipe files.

But is an ad working because it’s got good copy with a sexy offer and a well-thought-out back end… or because it’s a scam?

You might think scams are rare. But I’ve read plenty of reports of advertisers scamming customers in various ways, from sneakily putting them on autobill… to cloaked “free but enter your credit card for kicks” offers… to sophisticated scams like the one above.

And when I see crazy ads in Newsmax for ED pills endorsed by President Trump and Tom Selleck… I can easily imagine something shady is going on behind the scenes with those same offers, too.

Likewise, sometimes ads run for weeks and months — and never make any money.

For example, ​a few years back, I worked with several companies preparing for an ICO — that was the cryptocurrency rage at the time. There was simply so much money in this field that many of these crypto investors were perfectly fine throwing away a few hundred thousand on Facebook ads for different loser projects, hoping to strike gold with one massive success.

So what’s my point? Don’t click on anything. It could be a scam. And just because an ad is running all over the place, that doesn’t meant it deserves a place in your swipe file.

In case you want more advice from your surrogate email uncle, you might like to sign up to my daily newsletter. No Facebook login or credit card info required.

Super germ ideas for profitable ad formats

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3 years ago, an astronaut on the International Space Station bounced his way outside of the calm and protected interior so he could set up a little experiment in open space.

He left some bacteria on the outside of the station, in the cold, in the dark, only occasionally to be pummeled by murderous space radiation.

It turns out these resilient bacteria survived. I bring this up for two reason:

1) Scientists say this means life COULD have come from somewhere else than Earth, which would certainly explain how the platypus got its beak, and

2) Because I learned about this super bacteria from a stock footage, subtitled video on the BBC site today.

That was interesting to me. I realized this is where the format came from for the Facebook ads I’ve been writing a lot of.

These Facebook ads look and feel the same as the BBC videos. They are made of stock footage, with overlaid subtitles that tell a story. Except the story is not about space-riding bacteria, but about bamboo kitchen towels or silicone freezer bags.

And here’s why this might be relevant to you:

These stock footage video ads are doing very well on Facebook right now. They are outperforming other ad formats my clients are trying (and these guys do a lot of trying and testing).

So if you do any Facebook advertising, it might be worthwhile going on the BBC site and checking out some of these science videos to see what makes them tick, and how you can mimic the same.

And there’s a deeper message I want to leave you with:

If an editorial format is working for a massive site like the BBC, it’s a good idea to try to adapt it into an ad.

Regular articles and these stock footage videos are not the only formats that work for news sites. I can think of other ways that places like CNBC and CNN deliver content, which might be relevant for Facebook advertisers.

The point being, it makes sense to pay attention to your own news consumption. You might find the germ of an idea. That idea can start to spread and multiply… until it forms a colony of money-making ads for your business.

For more biologically inspired marketing ideas, you might like my daily email newsletter. In case you’re interested, put on your space suit, unlock the hatch door, and sign up here.

Making missed opportunities hurt

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I’m at the seaside for a few days. Last night, after the fortieth glass of aperol, the decision was made to go for an “early-morning swim” today.

Today however, thanks to that same aperol, morning came later than usual. And then there was breakfast and some packing and a bit of standing around on the balcony. The early-morning swim plans turned into mid-day swim plans.

And then it started to rain. There would be no swimming after all.

Typical. At least in my life. Because in my experience, you can screw up in two ways:

You can take action and do something dumb… or you can not take action and miss an opportunity.

I’ve noticed in my own life that I’m much more likely to not take action, just like this morning, than to get overeager and get into trouble.

And I guess I am not the only one.

I read in Daniel Kahmenan’s Thinking Fast and Slow that we humans have a reliable bias in this direction.

It’s not just laziness.

But somewhere deep down in our monkey and lizard brains, we believe we will regret a mistake much more if we actively did something to bring it about… rather than if we just sat by, staring out the window, watching the clouds gather.

If Kahneman is right — and why wouldn’t he be, the guy’s got a Nobel Prize after all — then it’s another notch in favor of writing over-the-top, emotionally supercharged, manipulative sales copy.

Because sales copy, in spite of what many people will tell you, is not just like an ordinary conversation. You can’t just present a sober, reasoned argument and have people jumping out of bed.

Instead, you’ve got to create such desperation and fury in your prospect’s mind not only to overcome his natural laziness… but to overcome his fear of trudging all the way down to the beach, and then getting drenched in ice-cold rain. That’s gonna take some hyperbole. It’s gonna take some drama.

Finally, here’s a vision I want to paint in your mind:

I have an email newsletter. Each day I write a short email about copywriting and marketing lessons I’m learning.

If you like, you can sign up for the newsletter here. Or you can just wait. The opportunity will still be there tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.

Why ecommerce list owners should beware high open rates

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Today, I checked the sales numbers for an email A/B test I sent a couple days ago.

Roughly speaking, subject line A had 50% more opens… 50% more clickthroughs… and 50% fewer sales.

Let me repeat that:

50% more people clicked through the email to the advertorial…

But 50% FEWER people actually got out their credit card and handed over their banking ones and zeros.

And yes, in case you are wondering, the subject line was the only difference among the two email versions, and the numbers were big enough to be statistically significant, whatever that means.

This is a dramatic illustration of something I’ve written about before. And that is, for this particular list of about 50,000 ecommerce buyers, we’ve seen an inverse relationship between opens and sales. I even calculated once that each 1% bump in open rates cost us about $100 in sales. But I’ve never seen crazy inverse numbers like with the email above.

So what’s going on?

Who the hell knows. My guess is that different subject lines 1) select different segments of the market and 2) put prospects into different buying/unbuying moods.

Whatever the case, I think this example is good to keep in mind.

I’m not saying that for your market, you will see the same inverse relationship. But it definitely makes sense to be wary of increasing open rates for the sake of increasing open rates.

So what should you do instead?

I heard a good piece of advice once from marketer Travis Sago. Travis has made a lot of money with his emails and is a bit of an expert on the topic. His advice is to write your subject lines as though you have to pay for each open. Qualify your email prospects. Use market-specific language. Do whatever you can so only those people who are most likely to buy will open, and nobody else.

Speaking of most likely to buy:

If you want more tested and proven email marketing advice, well, it’s not something I write about all that often in my daily email newsletter. But I do write about it on occasion. Plus I write about marketing and influence and persuasion more broadly. In case you are interested, you can sign up to my newsletter here.

The trend for the best modern copywriters

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Hidden Nazi treasure — that’s the gist of a video that’s been circulating around the Internet for the past few months.

​​The video starts off with footage of WWII personalities and tells you about a German-Jewish scientist and doctor, whose research was so valuable that he got a personal hall pass, signed by Adolf Hitler himself, to keep working in Nazi Germany.

If you take a look at this video and you squint just right, you can convince yourself you are watching the History Channel or perhaps a roided up version of a BBC documentary. Of course, that’s not what this video is. Instead, it’s a VSL for an Agora health newsletter.

Here’s a second example to illustrate the point I want to make. It also comes from an Agora imprint, Banyan Hill. It’s a short 3-minute video, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Well, unless you’ve ever seen that viral Purple Mattress video. Or the viral video for Squatty Potty. Or the viral video for Poo-Pouri.

In other words, this Agora imprint hired the Harmon Brothers ad agency (which did all the videos I just mentioned). And the result is an ironic, self-referential, Will Ferrell-inspired ad for a stock picking service.

Will it work to get new customers for Agora?

I don’t know. But the trend is clear in both the Nazi treasure video and the Harmon Bros video. And the trend is that, even for hardcore direct response businesses who sell to cold traffic, entertaining is becoming more important than big promises. In the words of Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief:

“‘Aggressive persuasion’ is dying with the Boomers, but Big Tech will kill you for it first. The best modern copywriters spend more time studying Quentin Tarantino than they do Claude Hopkins.”

Here’s some un-aggressive persuasion:

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