In 1975, the great copywriter Gary Bencivenga joined an upstart direct marketing agency.
They soon put out a gutsy ad in the Wall Street Journal to hunt for new clients. The headline ran:
“ANNOUNCING A DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING AGENCY THAT WILL GUARANTEE TO OUTPULL YOUR BEST AD.”
There were only two catches:
1) You had to give Gary & co. creative freedom on the kind of ad to write — only legal and factual approval was asked for and allowed.
2) You actually needed better advertising. In Gary’s own words, “If we think your present advertising is excellent, we’ll tell you.”
I thought of this today because I’m looking over the wreckage of several email campaigns I wrote for a client over the past few months.
I put in serious work on these emails, and I thought I did a great job. When I handed them over to the client, he loved them. But apparently, they are underperforming what he was using earlier.
The thing is, I saw the earlier email sequences, and I was confident I could do better. They were dull and too heavy on the teaching, and I was going to make them intriguing and infotaining.
But that’s not enough.
What I should have asked for in addition to seeing the email copy is a breakdown of where the sales were coming from.
Were they all on day 0, and people weren’t even reading the emails?
Did sales trickle in as the relationship was established (which means that people actually liked reading the old emails)?
Was it all about the discounts (and was the copy largely irrelevant)?
Were the emails actually making any sales (the client hinted that they weren’t making any money through email marketing)?
Too late to ask now, because the client seems to have moved on to greener pastures.
However, going forward, I’ll insist on this sales info for two reasons:
1) It will help me decide whether I can in fact write emails that will do better. It’s not just about seeing the copy, but about finding out how that copy performs.
2) If I feel I can beat the emails, this info will give me useful clues about how to best do that.
Maybe obvious. But even old Gary above didn’t think to ask for the results in his gutsy ad — which makes me feel a bit better.