Direct Marketing

If you wish to know what advertising is, read this post

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Imagine a classy and rich office, with two well-dressed businessmen standing side by side, leaning on a desk.

One of the businessmen is old, the other is young. Even so, they look to be equals. They are busy looking over a report the younger one is holding.

Suddenly, a secretary knocks on the door.

“Message for you, Mr. Thomas,” she says as she hands the older man a slip of paper.

Thomas unfolds the paper, and as he reads the short note, his eyebrows shoot up.

He shakes his head and hands the paper to the younger man with a smile. The younger man takes a look at the note. It reads:

“I am in the saloon downstairs. I can tell you what advertising is. I know you don’t know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is, and it will mean much to you. If you wish to know what advertising is, send the word ‘yes’ down by the bell boy.”

The younger businessman, Albert Lasker, pauses.

​​What the note says is true. He’s been in the advertising business for a few years now. He’s had tremendous success. In fact, even though he is only 24 years old, he is a partner at one of Chicago’s top advertising agencies, Lord & Thomas.

​​But he still doesn’t know what advertising really is. He doesn’t why it sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. So he’s been asking around — other agency heads, copywriters, newspapermen. Nobody can give him a satisfying answer.

Well, nobody except maybe the guy in the lobby downstairs.

You might have already heard this story of the first meeting between Albert Lasker and John E. Kennedy, the mysterious man waiting downstairs.

​​Lasker did send the word “yes” down by the bellboy. And after a lot of negotiating and finagling, which included buying out Kennedy’s ridiculously expensive contract as a copywriter, Lasker had his answer.

It was all of three words that Kennedy told Lasker. But these three words transformed the Lord & Thomas advertising agency, and they transformed modern advertising.

What Kennedy told Lasker is that advertising is not about keeping the company’s name in front of the public. It’s not about delivering news, either, though news can be useful. Instead, advertising is simply:

Salesmanship in print

For about a hundred years now, nobody’s been able to improve on that definition. Fortunes have been made by taking this simple idea and applying it thoroughly.

​​But things might finally be changing. Perhaps Kennedy’s definition is not good enough any more. Salesmanship in print is still important. But it’s not enough. And sometimes it can even hurt instead of help.

​​So what’s a better way to think of advertising today?

​​It will mean much to me to have you know what it is, and it will mean much to you. If you wish to know what advertising is today, take a look at the following page.

Huruhuru secrets of writing advertorials

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

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

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

What to say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Converting ecommerce buyers to info buyers with a hot new claim

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

First, a bit of background:

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

Reusable paper towels made out of bamboo fibers…

“Bioceramic” orbs to do away with laundry detergent…

Anti-mosquito sonic bracelets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s where the conjecture part starts:

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

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

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

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

Speaking of which:

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

Two multi-millionaire marketers go into a cigar bar…

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

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

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

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

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

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

That kept the reader guessing.

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

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

I could tell you more.

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

Don’t rape your audience

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Today’s post is on the subject of email marketing, a rather milquetoast topic. The hook, though, is jarring — rape.

I didn’t think of that hook. Instead, it comes from William Goldman, somebody I’ve mentioned often in these emails.

Goldman was first a successful novelist and later a successful Hollywood screenwriter and then again a successful novelist.

Along the way, he also wrote a non-fiction book called Adventures in the Screen Trade. I’m reading it now. It’s a combination of memoir and an insider’s look into Hollywood, specifically as it was in the 60s and 70s of the last century.

Somewhere in the Adventures book, Goldman talks about the most important part of a screenplay — the beginning. And it’s here that he writes the following:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Specifically, Goldman is contrasting movie writing to TV writing. At the beginning of a movie, Goldman says, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

I had never thought about this difference. But it makes sense. And it makes me think of…

Sales copy, which is definitely on the TV end of the seduction/rape spectrum. Just think of some famous opening lines of blockbuster VSLs:

“Talk dirty to me”

“We’re going to have to amputate your leg”

What about email copy? Much of it also opens up in the same aggressive way. Here are a few opening lines I just dug up from recent sales emails in my inbox:

“MaryAnne couldn’t take it anymore:”

“In 1981, a dirty magazine published an article that had the potential to make its readers filthy rich.”

I always assumed this is just the way good copy is — VSLs or emails or whatever. Of course, that’s not true.

When I actually look at some of my favorite newsletters (and even some successful sales letters), they don’t have an immediate and aggressive grabber. Instead, they build up and work their way into their point — without rambling, but without aggression either.

The difference comes down to the relationship you have with your list. Some businesses, including some businesses I’ve worked for, have little to no relationship with their list. Each email they send out is like a random infomercial popping up on TV — if it doesn’t capture attention right away, it never will.

But some businesses have a great relationship with their list. They can afford to take the time to light the candles and sip the wine and stare seductively at their reader across the table. In fact, if they didn’t, things would seem off.

Is it possible to go from one style of email marketing to the other?

I believe so. In my experience, people tend to mirror your own emotions and behavior. That means you’ll have to take the first step if you want things to change. Rather than waiting for your list to have a better relationship with you… start seducing, and stop trying to rape.

Now that we’ve warmed up the conversation:

I also have a daily email newsletter. You can subscribe for it here. And if you do subscribe, I promise to… well, I won’t go there.

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.