Mental Shortcuts

The best copywriting tactic ever

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Why does a giraffe have the longest neck?

The canned answer is because it’s useful. It allows the giraffe to browse books on the top bookshelf.

The real answer is that giraffes love extremes. That’s according to V. S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist and psychologist at UCSD.

Ramachandran says giraffes, and all other animals, have to know who’s a sexual target and who’s not. Otherwise, they might waste their prime dating years humping couches or human legs or other animals species. (Clearly, something went wrong with dogs.)

So how does a giraffe find love?

The simplest and easiest way it can. It looks for shortcuts.

“Long neck? Gotta be another giraffe! Time to get the cologne.”

But here’s where it gets tricky and interesting:

If a long neck is a mental shortcut for a giraffe to pick out another giraffe… then a longer neck is an even shorter cut.

The conclusion is giraffes’ necks get longer and longer. The longer your neck, the more likely you are to get some giraffe action and pass on your long neck genes. In the end, the longest neck wins.

As I said, giraffes love extremes. Almost as much as humans love extremes.

Because the human brain is like a giraffe’s. We also like shortcuts. And we want to follow these shortcuts to the end. Which leads me to the best copywriting tactic ever:

Go to extremes, whenever you can get away with it.

The most successful direct response copy is filled with the most dramatic stories… the scariest warnings… and with superlatives like fastest, easiest, and best.

The world is complicated. Too many choices. Too much information. That’s why we seek out extremes, to make our lives easier. And that’s something you can use to make your copy not better, but best.

Speaking of which, here’s the safest offer you will ever hear:

Try out my email newsletter. If it doesn’t make the highlight of your day tomorrow, simply unsubscribe.

Experts are baffled: The magic ingredient that makes a hit

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Back when Jim Morrison and The Doors released their first album, they were a bunch of movie school bums whose biggest ambition was to become as big as the cult LA band Love.

Who remembers Love today? Not many. But hundreds of millions know Jim Morrison and Doors hits like “Light My Fire” and “Hello, I Love You.”

This global success might never have happened. But The Doors, bums that they were, spent weeks calling up the local LA radio station, requesting that cool new song, Light My Fire.

​​The song eventually became a local hit… then a national hit… then the album became a hit… and then The Doors became the next big thing.

Maybe you can do the same. At least that’s one conclusion I drew from a mind-opening article by Duncan Watts.

The article is titled “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” You can find it on The New York Times Magazine site, and it’s worth reading from beginning to end. But if you’re pressed for time or attention, let me summarize it for you:

Conventional wisdom says the success of a book or a song or a movie is based on two things. One is the product itself. The other is what the market wants at that time.

And the conclusion, based on this conventional wisdom, is simple. If anybody fails to predict what will become successful, he is either too dumb or too lazy to read the writing on the wall.

Well, Watts had his doubts about this. So he set up a clever experiment to test it out. I won’t rehash the full details of how the experiment ran. The gist was it involved looking at which songs became popular among nine different segments of 14,000 people.

People in one segment had no information about how popular each song already was. People in the other eight segments knew how popular each song was, but only within their own segment.

This setup allowed Watts to test two ideas:

1. The most popular songs will be roughly as popular in the different segments.

2. The same songs will float to the top in the different segments.

Both of these hypotheses turned out to be very false.

First, in the eight “social influence” segments, the most popular songs became way more popular than in the “no social influence” segment. And the losers were more thorough losers.

​​Maybe that’s not so amazing. But get this:

In the different “social influence” segments, different songs became the most popular. And this wasn’t a minor reordering. A song could be no. 1 in one segment and no. 40 in another.

Watts explains this in a blindingly obvious way:

People do not make decisions independently of other people. The world is too complex… we usually don’t know what we want… and we often get more value out of a shared experience than out of the “best” experience.

All this means that small, random differences in initial popularity can have a massive impact in what becomes a hit and what doesn’t. That’s what Watts calls cumulative advantage. The rich get richer. And who gets rich initially? Well, that’s a coin toss.

This explains my Grinch story from yesterday. Chuck Jones had to pitch the Grinch 25 times, not because industry experts are too dumb or closed-minded to see the potential that was there… but because it’s genuinely impossible to predict what will succeed.

Randomness is the magic ingredient that determines a hit.

But what about The Doors? And what about direct response marketing, where decisions are more likely to be independent? And is there anything positive we can conclude from all this?

I believe so. But this post is running long already… so if you’re interested in more on this, I’ll finish it up tomorrow.

Bump your order form bump 15% without changing the offer

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Two days ago, I watched an interview with a successful marketer who currently has several million-dollar funnels. He broke down his most recent success and shared some tricks and tips. Here’s one that got me, about an order form bump.

You probably know what an order form bump is. It’s an impulse buy you can tack onto your order form that doesn’t need a lot of explaining. If you haven’t seen one of these before, you can think of it as asking, “Do you want fries with that?” This can often substantially increase your average order value.

So this marketer discovered (by accident) how to increase his order form bump take rate by 15%, even for order form bumps that cost as much as the front-end offer. The breakdown:

1. The customer goes on the order page

2. He sees an initial two-sentence description of the oder form bump, along with a checkbox that says “Yes, add this to my order!”

3. If the customer clicks the checkbox, the 2-sentence description expands into a slightly more detailed description, which also includes the price.

This marketer’s accidental discovery was leaving out the price out of the initial two-sentence description. All his offers used to show the price there… but he forgot to put it in one time. The take on that no-price order form bump was 15% higher. And once he took out the price out of the initial description in other funnels, he saw similar increases.

Just in case you’re wondering about the legality or ethics of this:

The price is perfectly revealed once you click the checkbox. And for anybody who decides he doesn’t want the order form bump, another click on the same checkbox will remove the order form bump from your offer.

In other words, this is just of one of those human quirks. You might attribute it to the endowment effect or consistency or whatever you like. The fact is some portion of those extra 15% of people find it easier to convince themselves they actually want something they don’t really want… than to click on the checkbox a second time.

And that’s my point for you for today.

Because I don’t normally share these kinds of funnel hacks (though this one is worthwhile). Rather, I’m more interested in fundamental human traits and how we can use them for influence and persuasion.

Well, the trait here is how even tiny obstacles, particularly phyiscal obstacles, can have big effects on human behavior. Like in the example above, you can use tiny obstacles to reinforce the behavior you want. And vice versa.

Because right now, there are sure to be tiny obstacles that are hindering the behavior you want from people. It makes sense to hunt down those obstacles and terminate them with extreme prejudice. As Jonah Berger wrote in his book The Catalyst:

“Instead of asking what would encourage change, ask why things haven’t changed already.”

For example, I have an email newsletter. I could probably help get my optins up by offering some small gift for signing up, besides the pleasure of hearing from me each day.

I should work out what would make a good gift… but in the meantime, I can offer you the following, a special report called Copywriters Hero. It’s my collection of the best free and paid resources for discovering the world of copywriting and direct marketing. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/

WIIFM and other powerful persuasion frequencies

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Two days ago I was in Barajas, an outskirt of Madrid where the airport lies.

Next to my hotel, on a wall separating the parking lot from a dirt field, was a very fancy mural.

It showed a life-sized football player dribbling a ball… and the logo of the local club, Club Deportivo Barajas.

Here’s what got to me:

CD Barajas is not a major Spanish football club. They are not very good at all, and they would probabaly lose if they had to play with the under-16 squad of a La Liga team.

And yet, some patriotic Barajas resident was willing to put in the time and effort to make this mural on an ugly and dirty wall next to an airport hotel.

This connects to an idea that weaves through much of persuasion… but that few places talk about explicitly.

You’ve probably heard of WIIFM, what’s in it for me. That’s the mental radio station that’s playing whenever your prospects hear your sales pitch.

But WIIFM is part of a broader ownership instinct we all have. Because we all have a special receiver that’s tuned into frequencies that report on things that belong to us.

Victor Schwab wrote that given a fountain pen, 96% of college women wrote their own names. Shown a map of the USA, 447 men out of 500 looked first for the location of their home towns.

Think about the music you listened to as a teenager… towns you lived in in the past… the breed of dog you had as a kid… your own birthday… the year you were born.

If you hear these mentioned somewhere, odds are your ears perk up, and you tune in your mental receiver to hear more.

The same is true for your prospect. So start broadcasting on a frequency where your prospect feels some ownership. He will listen, and pay attention. Which is a huge part of what you need to sell him anything.

By the way, were you born in 1980? Or any time after? In that case, you might like to subscribe to my daily email newsletter.

When authority and urgency fail…

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Yesterday, I wrote about a remarkable piece of persuasion:

Assassination survivor Alexei Navalny cold called one of the secret service officers behind the assassination attempt.

Navalny used some standard persuasion tricks to get the secret service officer to reveal all sorts of behind-the-curtain info during a 50-minute call.

So how about those persuasion tricks?

There were some obvious things. First, there were the trappings of authority.

Navalny called from a spoofed phone number, which made it seem he was inside the secret service headquarters. He claimed to be an aide to a high-ranking security official. And he seemed to have a lot of insider knowledge — such as names of people possibly involved in the assassination attempt.

So that’s one thing.

The second thing was urgency. Navalny, in his assumed alter ego, insisted this needed to be done here and now, because the big boss was waiting.

But that wasn’t enough. The guy on the other end of the line didn’t budge in spite of the authority or the urgency.

If you read the transcript — available online — you can hear the secret service officer dodging Navalny’s questions. “I don’t have this information… why don’t you call this other guy… I am at home with coronavirus.”

So how did Navalny finally get the secret service guy to break down?

Simple. He said the following:

“Let me help you. On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you assess Alexandrov’s work? I understand that he is your colleague, but nevertheless…”

The secret service guy said, “I assess him positively.”

Navalny then asked a few more 1-10 questions.

​​The secret service guy answered.

And then Navalny started asking more probing questions. As I told you, he finished some 50 minutes later, having squeezed the secret service guy for a lot of classified, inside information.

The technical term for what happened to the secret service agent is commitment.

You get somebody to commit to a small thing… and they will be more likely to commit to a big thing after.

It’s like a big and heavy chain sitting on a massive ship. The chain is way to heavy for you to lift and toss overboard. But if you start just one or two links down the side of the ship… then the whole thing might uncoil and come hurtling down into the water.

That’s commitment. It’s how you can persuade people to do crazy things.

The Navalny story is one example of it. But there are plenty more, all around you. It’s why the headline and the lead of a sales letter are so important… it’s why a customer who paid you $5 will be more likely to buy a $1000 course than somebody who never gave you any money… and it’s why people who have been burned on a get-rich-quick scheme will get burned on a second and a third.

​So what’s my takeaway for you?

Nothing. I’m just glad you read this email all the way to the end. By the way, would you like to subscribe to my email newsletter for more content like this? If yes, here’s where to go.

How to fake exciting discovery stories

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Tony Robbins once shared a stage with a knight’s suit of armor.

At one point during his talk, Tony got close to the knight. Terrible static appeared on his mic. When he walked away, the static stopped.

The next time Tony got close to the knight, terrible static shot up again. He stepped away. The static stopped.

The third time it was about to happen, people in the audience started shouting. “Don’t get close to the knight!”

It turned out later than an ambulance in the neighborhood was somehow messing with Tony’s sound equipment. Once the ambulance left, the sound problems disappeared. It wasn’t the knight at all.

The human brain needs causation like a hot dog needs mustard. “Terrible sound! What’s behind it? It must be the knight!”

This works really well much of the time.

Sometimes it goes wrong, like in the Tony Robbins story above.

And in rare cases of clever persuasion… it can be used to lead people by the nose. For example:

During a webinar last year, Parris Lampropoulos analyzed a sales letter. It was written by his most successful copy cub.

The lead starts off with a true story of a 104-year-old scientist who won the Nobel Prize for her discoveries related to brain stuff.

The gist was this old lady saying, “I feel sharper now than when I was 20!”

The sales letter goes on to talk about the woman’s discoveries… and how the supplement for sale ties into her amazing research.

Now rewind.

Did you catch that?

It’s the same trick as with the knight above, at least for my hypergullible brain.

Because when I read this sales letter, my brain concluded, “Oh, she feels sharper because of her brain stuff discoveries. And this supplement is a way for me to tap into that, and get back what little I had when I was 20.”

But the sales letter doesn’t say that anywhere. The quaint old lady could have been feeling great because of her genetics… or because of her daily regimen of drinking beet juice. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that, when you’re writing copy, it’s best to have a genuine breakthrough coupled with an exciting discovery story.

But if you don’t have that… you can cheat. Just roll your breakthrough onto the stage… and then bring out an exciting story that’s not really about this discovery. Put them next to each other. Your prospect’s brain will do the rest.

Now rewind.

Did you catch that?

This whole article was a way of eliminating people who aren’t interested in persuasion or copywriting. Since you made it to the bottom, maybe this stuff interests you. In that case, you might like to sign up for my email newsletter.

Nobel scientists stunned to produce must-read news

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“It will change everything,” said Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.

“Stunning,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society. “It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”

You may have heard the news published yesterday. DeepMind, an AI project within Google, “solved” the 50-year-old problem of protein folding. (I say “solved” because DeepMind does a good job, much better than anybody else. But it’s not perfect.)

This is a big deal. It will help scientists unravel the many mysteries still hidden in the human genome. It also means that the singularity is near. If you haven’t yet started building your anti-Skynet bunker, the time is nigh.

But let’s talk persuasion.

My point today is that the human brain looooves shortcuts.

We are giant shortcut-seeking machines.

For example, we rarely try to figure out things ourselves. Instead we look around. “What’s that guy doing? Eh, I bet that’s good enough. I’ll do the same.”

Another shortcut we take is to only look at extremes. So The World’s 50 Best Restaurants wields more clout than the Michelin guide. Why? Because it’s easier. There’s only one no. 1 restaurant among the 50 Best. But there are 135 restaurants with the highest 3-star Michelin rating.

You see my point. As Gene Schwartz said, “there is nothing so astounding as the astonishment of experts.” Particularly if those experts are the very top experts, the ones who got a Nobel Prize.

Because when you 1) take experts and 2) make them amazed, you create must-read news. And news is another shortcut that the brain loves to take, right on down to the order page. But that’s another story, for another time.

If you’d like to read that story when it comes out, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It will appear there first.

Persuasion world: Men wanted for hazardous journey

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A few days ago, I was talking to a successful copywriter. He said he had studied Dan Ferrari’s sales letters in detail.

(Dan, as you might know, is another successful copywriter, with a string of big-name controls.)

So I mentioned a presentation Dan once gave, where he broke down one of his most successful promotions. I offered to send successful copywriter #1 this presentation.

But he seemed reluctant. It seemed he had gotten what he wanted from Dan’s sales letters alone… and he didn’t want or need to hear Dan’s take on it.

And you know what? I can understand.

I liken it to going to see a movie versus reading a review of that same movie. The review might be good, might be bad… but even if it was written by the director himself, it’s certainly going to be a very different experience than seeing the real thing.

It won’t stimulate the same random pathways in the brain. It won’t trigger the same emotions. And it won’t allow for much independent thought.

This applies to you too. Right now, you may be reading books… going through courses… skimming emails like this one. Fine. They can give you the lay of the land when you’re new to a topic.

But the map, as they say in NLP, is not the territory.

Somebody else’s second-order interpretation of what persuasion is all about can only take you so far.

​​The good news is there’s a whole wild and dangerous world of TV shows, movies, current events, tabloids, political propaganda, real-life experiences, and yes, even books and articles, just waiting for you to start exploring and asking — why do I think this is compelling?

If you found this argument compelling, you might like my daily email newsletter. Not for any persuasion lessons it might contain… but rather as an example of content that you can dissect yourself. If that doesn’t turn you off, then click here to subscribe.

Selling fake diamond rings because Christmas

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My client in the ecommerce space is now selling fake diamond rings.

So I just wrote some Christmas-focused Facebook video ads for these fabulous pieces of jewelry, targeting the women who buy fake diamond rings for themselves (yes, it’s not cheap husbands and boyfriends who are the target audience here).

Will this “Treat yourself because it’s Christmas” campaign work?

I believe it’s got a good shot. Here’s why.

You probably know the famous “copy machine” experiments from Harvard University.

They showed you can get people to do your bidding if you just give them a “because” and some kind of reason why. The reason why doesn’t even have to be any good.

Of course, these experiments are not just about the magical power of the word “because.” They are also about fundamental human psychology, which also applies to making sales.

Think of your prospect’s desire like a volcano, lying dormant at first. Your copy — “a gorgeous ring with an optically flawless stone” — gets the magma boiling and bubbling under the surface, inside the volcano.

But all that hot desire still needs to be released.

So you start to drill different tiny tunnels in the cone of the volcano. Some of these tunnels don’t do anything. But finally you drill the right tiny tunnel… and the volcano wall ruptures. All that boiling lava comes pouring out and scorching everything in its way.

In less geological terms, it’s not enough to just stir up tons of desire. You also have to give people a way to justify acting on that desire. There are lots of ways to make the volcano finally explode… but an occasion, even if it really makes no sense, is a good one to try.

Speaking of which:

I write a daily email newsletter about marketing and persuasion. Sign up for it here. You know… because Christmas.

The one weird trick to making easy sales

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Today I listened to an interview with a marketing dynamo called Kim Walsh Phillips. I’d never even heard of her before today, but I was very impressed.

The long of it is, Kim ran a kind of virtual event, which she peopled by running ads to cold Facebook traffic. The result was revenues of $250k on $6k ad spend — a 40x return.

I won’t go through the details of how Kim did this. For one thing, it’s available inside this month’s Steal Our Winners, and is worth your $4. For another, the whole system was so complex that I’m sure I’d miss 90% of the important stuff.

Which brings me to something Kim said during this interview. She said people will often ask her some version of, “What was the one thing that made the most impact?”

To which she answers, “There were 17.”

The fact is, the human brain loves simplicity, and it loves extremes. When I write copy, I always have to catch myself and beat this fact into my own head.

Because people don’t want systems, nuanced answers, or anything that smacks of work. They want tactics, opportunities, and the “one weird trick.”

Maybe your market is more grown up than this. But you’d be surprised.

​​It takes time and discipline to train your customers and prospects to stop being opportunity seekers… to accept the complex reality behind any kind of success… and to not backslide as soon as you turn your back.

​​But that sounds like work to me. And who the hell wants that?

Here’s something that won’t take any work at all:

I write a daily email newsletter. In other words, you just sit there, and my emails arrive to your inbox, to entertain you and show you new marketing opportunities. And all you have to do is press this magic button.