A few weeks ago, I joined JK Molina’s email list. You might have heard of JK — he’s kind of the marketing coach to all the coaches who coach coaches.
Anyways, in between the steady flow of familiar promises – “make $100k per month with just Google docs and email” — I found an interesting persuasion idea in one of JK’s emails. Says JK:
“You get better leads by offering to take something they ALREADY HAVE into something they DON’T.”
Huh? The first time I read this, I had no idea what JK’s on about. But an example helped:
Bad ad: “How to make $30,000”
Good ad: “Turn the old car you’ve got parked in your garage into $30,000.”
A-ha. A dim, flickering light came on in my head.
And thanks to that flickering light, I could once again see Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullet #3. Gary asked which of these investing headlines won:
A:
The Millionaire Maker:
Can he make YOU rich, too?
B:
If you’ve got 20 minutes a month,
I guarantee to work a financial miracle in your life
As you can probably guess by now, the answer was B. Gary says it “worked like a charm and handily beat the previous champ.”
Gary’s explanation for why B won is that we’ve all gotten jaded by big promises, but the if-then structure somehow manages to disable normal critical faculties.
Maybe that’s really it.
Or maybe it’s what JK says above.
Maybe it’s that we don’t respond to promises unless we feel they are concrete and real. Unless those promises are anchored to something we can touch, taste, or in case of 20 minutes, simply know with 100% certainty that we have on us, right here, right now.
So try it yourself and see.
Use the if-then structure, or promise to turn the junk in your prospect’s garage into a stack of $100 bills.
I guarantee this will increase response to your offers. And if it doesn’t, come back tomorrow, and I’ll give you a new idea, for free, and keep giving you new ideas, until one of them does increase your response.
Also:
If you’ve got two thumbs and a smart phone, then I promise you a new way to fascinate your email subscribers every day. For more information on that: