Agatha Christie

This email is fresh and I can prove it, but if it weren’t…

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Today is October 4, which marks the 139th anniversary of the first trip of the Orient Express, on October 4, 1883. I’m telling you this for two reasons:

Reason one is that there is something magical about the name Orient Express. It captured the dreams and imagination of the world for the better part of a century.

The mystery train from Paris to Istanbul, stopping at exotic locations like Vienna, Budapest, and the Black Sea port of Varna, featured in Bram Stoker’s Dracula… the James Bond book and film From Russia, With Love… and most famously, in Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express.

So it might be worth thinking a bit about what it was about that name, and the train that bore it, that made it so impactful and sticky.

Reason two is that I want to prove to you, as well as I can, that I’m actually writing this email today, October 4 2022. It’s valuable for readers to feel your content is fresh. But I will make you a little confession:

I don’t always write fresh content. Sometimes, when I am too rushed, uninspired, or simply hung over, I will go and reuse an old email. It’s one of the benefits of having written 1,300+ of them for this newsletter alone.

Whenever I do that, I will select an old email that I still like reading a year or two later. And then I’ll update it. Rewrite it slightly to take out the no longer relevant, and to add in the now relevant.

Whenever I do this, I find I get lots of engagement and positive reactions from readers. And I’ve never once had anybody point out that I’m rewarming last year’s supper.

It turns out I’m not the first to hit upon this idea. Back in 2015, the people at Vox did an experiment. As Matt Yglesias, then editor at Vox, wrote:

“For one week, we asked our writers and editors to update and republish a number of articles — one each day — that were first posted more than two months ago. This is hardly a brand-new idea in digital journalism. But we did it a little differently. Rather than putting the old article back up again unchanged, or adding a little apologetic introductory text to explain why it was coming back and was possibly outdated in parts, we just told people to make the copy as good as it could be.”

Result?

Over 500,000 readers for those rewarmed articles… engagement and exposure to good content that had previously gone unnoticed… and not a single reader writing in to say that Vox was reusing content.

That’s something else to think about, at least if you have a stockpile of old content. Don’t apologize for reusing it. Instead, make the old content as good as you can, today, on October 4, 2022, and then serve that up to your audience.

All right, my mystery train is about to leave the station, so let me say:

This email you just read does not use my Most Valuable Email trick. If you know the trick already, you will see why the content you just read would be 100% incompatible with trick teach in the Most Valuable Email. And if you don’t know the trick yet, and you’re curious to find out more about it, you can do that on the following exotic and mysterious page:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Murder on the sales page

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I started reading Murder at the Vicarage a few days ago. It’s written by Agatha Christie, the first of 18 Miss Marple books.

The story starts out with the middle-aged vicar and his much younger, chatterbox wife. They’re having a discussion at breakfast. Then some guests arrive. There’s more talking. There’s a quick location change to the den, and other characters come in. More talking, some gossiping.

This goes on. There’s characters, light dialogue, then more characters. 20 pages in, and there’s still no murder, not even a darkening on the horizon. And yet, I keep reading, like millions before me.

Why?

I guess a couple or three reasons:

1) There’s the promise of a murder mystery. It’s right there on the front page, in the title of the book.

2) It’s all written in an easy, fun, and yet clever way.

3) It’s got something that I, and all other people, want to hear more about. In this case, that’s human faces, and the unique quirks behind them.

Maybe you won’t agree with me, but I think you can apply all 3 of these points to sales copywriting as well. 1) and 2) are pretty obvious, in terms of how you can port them from Agatha Christie to a sales message. Although it might be surprising,  you can also port the tabloid appeal of 3) to a sales message directly.

For example, there’s this giant promotion written by Dan Ferrari. It has the headline,

“The Stars of Silicon Valley and Hollywood are using this ‘Millionaire’s Secret’ to Look, Move, and Feel Like They’re Aging in Reverse”

The lead paints a scene, involving Goldie Hawn, Sergey Brin, and Moby, all lounging around a cliffside Los Angeles mansion, listening with rapt attention to the talk of a mysterious doctor who is revealing the secret of eternal youth.

And you know what? This promotion killed. It literally tripled the response compared to the previous control (and this promo is for Green Valley, an established direct response company, so the previous control was certainly solid). The end result was that the company ran out of inventory and had to stop running the promo until they could restock. I think that qualifies as murder on the sales page.

What’s that?

You want a light and breezy mystery for your Tuesday evening?

​​And you’re tired of Miss Marple?

Say no more. I got you. Check out this million-dollar Dan Ferrari page-turner instead:

https://greenvalleynaturalsolutions.com/GEN/CA/Genesis-B-telos95.php