Upsells

Agency clients who don’t stay

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Last week, I was talking to the COO at a health clinic.

The CEO of that clinic — the doctor who heads the clinic — has written a good book, with lots of top endorsements and lots of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

But the book is hardly a best seller. I’m guessing it maybe makes a few dozen sales a month.

“You know,” I said in the voice of a precocious 9-year-old child, “you can run ads on Amazon to promote the book.” I’m smart like that, and I know lots of stuff, so I like to show it off.

“Oh yeah we tried that,” the COO said. “We hired an agency a while back to run ads on Amazon for us. But it didn’t drive that many more sales, and we were paying the agency $1k a month just to keep it going. So we stopped.”

Now, here are a few random facts, which I hope to snap together for you like nuclei colliding and fusing to release a tremendous amount of energy:

1. The core offer for this health clinic is a program that costs $50k a year

2. Rich, successful people tend to read books

3. People who read a book all the way through are prime prospects for an upsell, even a ridiculously elastic one ($5 => $50k)

You see where I’m going with this?

It’s quite feasible that, for this particular business, one good extra client a year, attracted via the help of this Amazon ads agency, would pay for the entire year’s services of the ads agency, and then some.

That would be great for the health clinic, for the Amazon ads agency, and presumably, for the patient who had decided to invest in that expensive year-long program.

And yet, it wasn’t happening.

I’m bringing this up because over the past few weeks, along with talking to health clinic COOs, I’ve also been talking to people who offer services and run agencies of different stripes.

I’ve heard a few of them complaining:

“We can’t make clients see the unique value of our services”

“The clients are never permanent, and I seem like a Chinese acrobat juggling many plates at once”

“Clients are comparing my work to much cheaper freelancers”

A part of this really can come down to having bum clients. Not much to do there, except find better clients.

But what if you have — or have had — clients like the health clinic I wrote about above? Somebody with a solid business… a good product… decent marketing… and still they couldn’t see the value in continuing to pay for your services, which should be plugging up a real gap in their business?

Well, in that case, write me and tell me about it.

I’m curious to hear your story.

And maybe we can figure out a way to prevent this from happening again… and even to profit from those clients who already got away.

A-pile vs. B-pile marketers

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A few days ago, I exchanged some emails with a business owner who was in a bad way.

“At the moment,” he said, “I’m feeling a bit like Halbert sitting in the dark trying to figure out what to write in that sales letter to get the power back on.”

If you don’t know the story of Gary Halbert, he was a well-known direct marketer and a better-known copywriting guru.

In the early days of his career, Gary was not very successful.

He would often spend his family’s utilities money to pay for stamps for sales letters to market some new scheme.

Those sales letters went out into the world. What came back were orders and some money, but never as many orders or as much money as Gary would have liked. Sometimes not even enough to cover the utilities bills.

The story goes that Gary was sitting in his kitchen one night, in the dark, with no water because he hadn’t paid the bills.

He was sick and tired of the stress and the visible signs of failure all around him.

And then — because that’s what makes a good story — the lights came on. Not in the kitchen, but in Gary’s head.

Gary had his moment of genius.

He figured out a new product and a new way to market it.

The result was a major success — millions of new customers and a multi-million dollar company, built on the back of one good, I mean, perfect, sales letter.

Now that I’ve told you this story, I’d like to propose that it’s proof that Gary Halbert was what I call a B-pile marketer.

We know of Gary today because his “sitting in the dark” moment actually produced a success. But it equally could have produced yet another failure. In fact, more than equally, because new direct marketing tests fail more than they succeed.

Had that happened, maybe nobody would know of Gary Halbert today, just like we don’t know the millions of other B-pile marketers who repeatedly failed and eventually disappeared. ​
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Compare this to marketers I’m calling “A-pile.”

A-pile marketers aren’t well-know either, but that’s because their story is not as dramatic. There’s no “sitting in the dark” moment. Instead, they build large, stable, cash-spewing businesses that work year after year, without ever being at risk of having the lights turned off.

What’s the difference between the A-pile and the B-pile?

Hark unto me, Buckwheat:

The difference is a marketing strategy that has the highest chance of being successful — of bringing back lots and lots of orders and lots and lots of money.

It’s a strategy that Gary Halbert must not have known early in his career. Or maybe he knew it and was just unable to practice it. I know for a fact — because I heard Jay Abraham say it — that it’s something Gary didn’t apply even later in his career, when he shoulda known better.

Maybe this proven, stable, cash-generating strategy went against Gary’s romantic and heroic nature.

If that’s your nature, too, then maybe this strategy won’t be right for you either.

On the other hand, if you’d like to keep the lights on, and keep the orders flowing, without having to produce a moment of genius, you can find this strategy described in detail in chapter 3 here:

https://bejakovic.com/a-pile

$90k upsell to a $39 magazine subscription

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I found the following via Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine site. You gotta pay for that site, and I happily do. It clues me in to wonders like the following:

For the past dozen or more years, select subscribers to National Geographic magazine (one-year print subscription: $39) have been getting a unique sales letter in the mail.

The sales letter, which comes with an attractive brochure, is making a pitch for a $90k upsell — and apparently selling out the offer year after year.

I bet you’re curious what this $90k upsell could be. I mean, it’s quite a leap from $39. ​​What could possibly be worth it?

I’ll tell you.

The offer is called “Africa by Private Jet.” It involves:

* 20 days
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* 7 different countries

​* A private Boeing 757, refitted to accommodate just 51 expert travelers instead of the standard 233 budget sardines

​* Visits to the best big game, big ape, and big culture locations across Africa

​* Professional scientists as tour guides, an on-staff physician, and an expedition chef

​* An inaugural dinner with Jane Goodall in London (first stop of the trip) and a farewell dinner in Rome (last stop)

​* A safe, fascinating, hassle-free adventure; a feeling of importance and superiority; interesting dinner party stories for a lifetime; all backed by the good name of National Geographic Society

The sales letter made me want to go.

And it reminded me of Ken McCarthy’s Advanced Copywriting for Serious Info Marketers seminar.

One of Ken’s many messages in that seminar was that if you think a bit, you will find higher-ticket offers — which cost 2x, 10x, 100x, even 2,307x of what your front-end costs — and your best or very best customers will still happily buy.

There’s no shortcut to that bit of thinking.

But perhaps a good starting point is to conjure up an absolutely incredible experience or transformation you yourself would like to enjoy — and then just take others along with you on that trip.

Anyways, my offer today has little to do with the above National Geographic story, except the following:

Before he got to talking about upsells, Ken McCarthy spent the majority of that Advanced Copywriting seminar teaching what he believes to be the “most important, do-or-die copywriting skill.”

He first teased people in the seminar, and had them guess what they thought this skill might be. People guessed:

Stirring up curiosity?

Coming up with a big idea?

Sounding believable?

Nope. Ken had a mechanical skill in mind. And he said this one mechanical skill covers 90% of what it takes to be a copywriter. If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Dr. Bejako the sadistic dentist goes to work on the “mystery box” bonus

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Long-time readers of this newsletter might know I’m a big fan of screenwriter William Goldman. Goldman won two screenwriting Oscars, one for Butch Cassidy and another for All The President’s Men.

​​He also wrote The Princess Bride.

​​And of course, Goldman wrote Marathon Man, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of the sadistic dentist Dr. Szell (“Is it safe?”).

I thought of Dr. Szell because I’ve never before been compared to a dentist, but it finally happened today.

​​Author and copywriter Angie Archer, who not only took me up on my Most Valuable Email offer, but was one of the first to take me up on the free but valuable, time-limited offer included inside MVE, wrote me to say:

This feels like a trip to the dentist.

I know it’ll be good for me, but…

Here, before I talk myself out of it, is [Angie taking me up on my ‘mystery box’ offer].

You might not know what a “mystery box” offer is.

It’s an idea I got from marketer Rich Schefren. Rich once offered a “mystery box” upsell for $29. He didn’t say what was in the box, only that the buyer should trust him, and his claim that the box is worth at least 10x the asking price.

Rich’s “mystery box” upsell converted at a crazy 78% — 2x or 3x what a typical upsell will do. What’s more, Rich says the offer got zero negative chargebacks, and ended up forming a segment of his best customers.

So a mystery box might be worth experimenting with in your own marketing. You just gotta be firm, and not give in, and not tell people what’s inside the box.

That’s what I won’t tell you what my MVE “mystery box” offer is. I will just say it is very valuable, more so than the price of this course, and that it’s something I probably won’t keep up for very long.

So if you are interested in taking me up on the Most Valuable Email and the free but valuable, time-limited mystery box offer it contains, it might make sense to act now.

​​The launch period is coming to an end in a few hours time, at 12 midnight PST tonight. After that deadline, the price will go up. If you’d like to get in before then:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Evergreen “wireless” fears

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Did you ever hear of “radio face”? It was a curious affliction that swept through households in England in 1925.

​​The background:

Radio had started to spread in the early 1920s. It became more and more popular to have one at home. As a result, radio programming started to explode like corn over a fire.

By 1925, many people found themselves leaning in to the loud speaker… straining to hear each crackling word of the news or the radio drama.

Finally, a companion who was ready to entertain all day long!

Radio seemed perfect. Until, that is, some of the female listeners noticed a worrisome thing. From an article I read:

“The strain of trying to catch every word of wireless broadcast constantly puckers the lines around a woman’s forehead, and draws more lines around the sides of her mouth.”

As a result, many women in England started to live in fear of “wireless wrinkles.”

“Concentration at the Earphones Brings Wrinkles to the Brow.”

Who knows, maybe they were right?

In any case, this made me think how evergreen the fear of “wireless” has been. You could use it in 1925… and also in 2021.

For example, over the past couple of years, I’ve written a lot of copy for a team of ecommerce guys.

One of the longest-running front-end advertorials that we’ve had going is about the fear of “wireless pickpockets.” The offer is an RFID blocking card you put in your wallet, to keep these wireless pickpockets from swiping your money… and giving you wrinkles from all the frowning you would do afterwards.

A few years ago, Stefan Georgi and Justin Goff ran a webinar, offering to critique copy. I submitted the “wireless pickpockets” advertorial.

Stefan and Justin looked at the advertorial tweaking the copy wouldn’t produce much improvement… but Justin had some tested-and-proven advice about the rest of the funnel:

* Add a lot of reason why copy for the first upsell — even though it was just more of the same RFID card.

I passed that golden info on to my clients. But as far as I know, they never implemented it. So maybe it will be useful to you instead, in case you or your clients also run some kind of ecommerce offer.

Anyways, Justin and Stefan put out two more webinars over the past few weeks. If you haven’t watched them yet, I might write more about them in the coming days… and tell you about any golden info that I find inside.

Meanwhile, I want to tell you about a cool newsletter. It’s called The Pessimists Archive. It’s where I found the above story about radio face and wireless wrinkles.

The whole newsletter is really just interesting newspaper cutouts from decades past. It shows you how many things never change… how many fears and appeals stay the same… how predictable human reactions can be, even century after century.

And you know what? This can be valuable if you are the type to track trends and profit from them.

​​So in case you want to check out news from the past that’s still news, here’s the link to the Pessimists Archive:

https://pessimistsarchive.substack.com/