Somewhere in the Middle East, there’s an area called the Black Desert.
Apparently, it’s a horrible place, dry and barren and inhospitable to life.
The Bedouins who knew this area best even called it Bilad esh-Shaytan — the Land of Satan. (It rather sounds like Mordor.)
Anyways, deep inside the Black Desert, there are these strange formations:
Low walls, made up of loose stones, which stretch out for miles at a time.
They were first discovered about a hundred years ago, by aviators flying overhead, who named them “desert kites.”
An ancient sales funnel in the Black Desert
For a long time, nobody knew who made these desert kites, or when, or why.
Scientists now believe they were used for hunting large herds of gazelles and antelopes.
The gazelle herds would come upon these walls.
And unsuspectingly, they’d keep walking along.
And walking.
And walking.
And eventually, they would fall into a man-made enclosure, where the locals would have their grisly way with them.
So what’s the point of all this?
Well, let me explain it with an anecdote from negotiation expert Jim Camp:
“According to family tradition, my great-grandfather used to say about one of the mules on his farm, ‘To get his attention you have to hit him between the eyes with a two-by-four. When you have his attention, he can see what he ought to do.'”
Jim Camp taught people how to win negotiations.
And one of the pillars of his approach was the idea that you have to create a vision of pain in your adversary’s mind in order to get a real decision or action out of them.
The trouble, however — according to Camp — is that people are not mules.
Meaning you can’t just blind them with the pain, the way his grandfather would do to the mule with the two-by-four.
Instead, you have to guide them along gently, allowing them a little bit of emotional respite, while still using pain to move them along to your intended destination.
So to sum up:
Yes, people aren’t mules.
But they might just be gazelles.
And in that case, your sales copy becomes a desert kite built out of your target audience’s pain, gradually leading them where you want them to go.
If you want to see how this can be done in practice with email, specifically for the grisly goal of selling health products, here’s where to go: