Have you ever heard of the 1970’s version of Tim Ferris?
His name was Joe Karbo.
Like Tim, Joe started with a successful direct response business.
And like Tim, Joe then wrote a book teaching a mass audience how they too could use modern marketing techniques to get rich.
It sounds a lot like Tim’s “4-hour Workweek.” Except, Joe’s version came out about 40 years earlier, and had an even better title:
“The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches”
Joe sold this book through a full-page, all-text ad he ran in mainstream magazines. The ad is worth tracking down because it’s full of good lessons. The one I want to focus on today is how it addressed the price of Joe’s book.
Very soon into the ad, Joe announced that he will be selling something (without saying what). And he immediately said it will cost $10 (about $60 in today’s money).
What’s more, he freely admitted that it won’t cost him more than 50 cents to make this thing. And then came the kicker. In Joe’s own words:
“And I’ll try to make it so irresistible that you’d be a darned fool not to do it. After all, why should you care if I make $9.50 profit if I can show you how to make a lot more?”
Obviously, Joe was successful. He managed to sell 3 million copies of his book using this approach.
So what’s going on behind the scenes of this sales argument?
I think there are two crucial parts to it.
One is the provocation (“It won’t cost me 5% of what I’ll charge you, and yet you’ll pay”).
The other is the chance to lay out the benefits (“You get something more valuable than the price because XYZ”).
Now I see a lot of marketers today using just the second, benefits part of this sales argument. They ignore the first, provocation part.
I think that’s a mistake for two reasons. I’ll talk about each of these two reasons in more detail in upcoming emails.
For now, if you need a lazy man’s way to get your sales emails to actually make money, you might like my upcoming book. It deals with email marketing for the health space, and it covers how I’ve written emails that actually tripled sales for big direct response companies.
For more info about this book, check out the ad on the following page: