David Ogilvy

Why I collect personalization data I never use

by

Bridget Holland, a marketer out of Sydney, Australia, who runs a content marketing agency called NoBull Marketing, writes in with a question:

===

I did a presentation for a business networking group yesterday about email marketing, and I used one of your emails as an example. (Frequency, formatting and results more than content. I was comparing it to a nicely formatted monthly email with stacks of articles, and arguing that either could work but you have to find out what was right for you and your market.)

For the first time ever – oops, embarrassing – I realised that you don’t use those first names you collect when people subscribed. (I had to go check that you collected them!) That you have no opening greeting at all.

So the question is:

* Why don’t you use greetings? Did you ever? If you did and you’ve stopped, has it made a difference? Either for the entire list, or for new subscriber behaviour?

* Why don’t you use personalisation? And since you don’t, why do you collect first names?

===

I never used personalization in my emails because, like I wrote a few days ago in the context of calibration, it feels fake to me.

I don’t like it when people do it in emails I read, particularly in the body of the email. You know what I mean, [firstname]?

In the words of David Ogilvy, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” Or your mom, or your college roommate from UC Santa Cruz, or your ex-flatmate from Budapest, or an ex-girlfriend.

(The only person I’ve seen using personalization well is Daniel Throssell, who gets creative with it. However, in order to make that work, you have to police new subscribers to make sure they put in their real name when they sign up, which I don’t feel like doing.)

So like Bridget asks, why still ask for a name, if I’m never going to use it in an email?

Two reasons:

1. Most people do fill it out, and honestly. I make an occasional habit of doing a bit of detective work on new subscribers, and this bit of info can be helpful.

2. Filling in a first name is a commitment and give for those who choose to make it. It’s a tiny commitment, but I figure it’s important. The work of training strangers of the internet to become dedicated readers and customers starts early, with such baby steps.

With all that said:

I remember the early days of my own marketing education. I put a lot of time and thought into topics like “First name on optin form, or no first name???” I now largely feel it doesn’t matter much one way or the other. Really, it’s just personal preference, and then inertia.

I’m not sure if anybody will profit from this in-depth discussion. But Bridget wrote in to ask, and I figured others might be wondering the same. In any case, I’m grateful to Bridget for sending in her question, and I wanted to highlight it here.

And since I’m busy writing my upcoming and new and still highly unfinished book, and since my self-imposed March 24 deadline is nearing, I would like to invite further reader questions.

Because answering reader questions makes for particularly easy and yet engaging emails.

So if you got small questions, big questions, questions about influence, copywriting, or how to style your hair, then I invite you to hit reply and let me know.

There’s a fair a chance I will answer your question in one of these emails over the next week or so, and will be grateful to you in any case.

Insightful advice from the most famous door-to-door salesman of all time

by

I once wrote an email trying to figure out who the most famous copywriter of all time is.

(I used the number of Google search results as a proxy.)

It turns out several very famous fiction authors previously worked as copywriters. But in terms of people who actually got famous for being copywriters, it was no contest. There was only one option:

David Ogilvy.

Today, I want to write about Ogilvy again, but not as the most famous copywriter, but as the most famous door-to-door salesman.

Ogilvy of course didn’t become famous because he sold door-to-door. Still, I’m giving him preference over other famous people with door-to-door sales experience (Johnny Cash, Mark Cuban) because Ogilvy was actually a star door-to-door salesman, and because he lasted in the profession for years.

At age 21, Ogilvy came back from France where he had worked as a kitchen hand at the Hotel Majestic in Paris. He took a job in Scotland, going door to door and selling the AGA Cooker, a kind of stove + oven + toaster + heater.

Ogilvy was so successful selling this kitchen contraption that three years later, the company had asked him to write a new sales manual for other door-to-door salesman inside the AGA empire.

The result was a 15-page document, The Theory And Practice of Selling The AGA Cooker, which Fortune magazine has called “probably the best sales manual ever written.”

Since a part of my craft is to search within the deep caverns of persuasion and influence, I of course tracked down and read Ogilvy’s manual.

Today, I want to share just one insightful line with you. It comes in the second section of the manual, which is titled “Defence.”

The first section of the manual is “Attack,” which Ogilvy devotes most of his time to, and which he says should be “so thorough that the enemy is incapable of counter-attack.”

Still, in war as in sales, sometimes you gotta defend. And on the topic of defense, Ogilvy says:

“To show that you are completely stumped on any point is fatal, for it stimulates the prospect to attack, puts you on the defensive, and, worst of all, gives the impression that you do not know your job.”

Like I said, it’s an insightful line.

Because if a prospect asks a question or raises an objection, maybe they genuinely care about that point.

Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re just asking because they haven’t fully made up their minds, and are prodding, hoping to have something external make up their mind for them.

The worst thing you can do is to leave that question unanswered, or that objection hanging in the air.

Yes, you allow the prospect a specific line of attack. But it’s much more than that.

As Ogilvy says, worst of all, you put your entire credibility on the line, and you put everything else you have said or might say under suspicion.

Point being:

It’s never really the facts of the case that are the problem. It’s always the interpretation of it. And if you can’t control the facts — or even if you can — you’d better control the interpretation.

You might think I’m telling you to be polite and to politely answer your prospect’s questions or address their objections once they’re raised. And yes, that’s much better than not doing so.

But like Ogilvy says, there’s a better still approach.

But that’s really the topic for another email, or more likely, for an entire book.

For now, let me just remind you of my Daily Email Habit service. You can find more information about it at the link below.

And if you have any questions about it, send me an email and ask away. I’ll answer your questions thoroughly and honestly, because I’d rather have you not sign up, than sign up if Daily Email Habit is not right for you.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Even better than getting rid of cliches

by

“The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bull dog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it.”

— David Ogilvy, The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker

You ever find yourself spewing cliches? I know I do, particularly when I write a quick first draft. But I hate cliches, or rather, I hate being seen as a person who speaks in cliches.

Fortunately, it’s easy to fix in writing. That’s what second drafts are for. You can always take a cliche out and replace it with something less cliched.

But better yet, in my humble opinion, expressed from my humble couch in my humble home, is to take the cliche and somehow extend it, exaggerate it, subvert it. I believe the term of trade is “hang a lantern on it.”

A couple more examples, with the cliches and lanterns highlighted for you. From Gary Gulman’s “the best joke in the world”:

“All you have to know for this is that we have fifty states in America and they each have a two capital letter abbreviation. But that wasn’t always the case! Up until, I WANNA SAY, 1973… [beat] and so I WILL.”

From William Goldman, I believe in the Princess Bride though I can’t find the original quote:

“It had SEEN BETTER DAYS (or at least ONE BETTER DAY)…”

There’s nothing quite so funny as explaining a joke, so I will end this email here without killing yet another funny example for you. But I hope you get the point. In the words of screenwriter and director David Mamet:

“I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.”

Today’s email is brought to you by my Daily Email Habit service. It forced me to write an email I wouldn’t have written otherwise. And it turned out to be useful, for me at least.

Maybe this practice could be useful for you as well? If you’d like more info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

You’re one mediocre, unread sales letter away from charging 40x more than the competition

by

Comes a long but interesting question about magic words that bring you riches:

===

Im asking you this for two reasons: A) Your Course on Bullets and B) You’ve been on Ben Settles List, who I’m going to reference.

Long story short I saw a marketer reference a Book and said he was thinking about summarizing and making a Course, that he could probably charge upwards of $300 dollars for.

I have been re-reading ” Ogilvy on Advertising” and was thinking, it’s $25 New on Amazon and is recommended by virtually every top copywriter, marketer etc… Yet Ben Settle and many other sell their info ( and I’m not saying their info is not good and maybe worth every penny they charge ) for MUCH More Money. But on the surface aren’t even in the conversation with the Ogilvy’s, Hopkins’ and many others whose works are supposed to be the Holy Grail.

In your opinion, What’s the difference? Is it Positioning or could it simply be the use of Bullets to create curiosity and build value that allows them to charge So much more?

I mean back to Ben Settle, do his $800 to $1000 products have more useful info in them than ” Ogilvy on Advertising ” or many of the other so-called classics? Im guessing NO

Could the ability to charge so much more just come down to the power of a Good Sales Letter?

===

That last part of the question is a reference to a supposed quote from famed direct marketer Gary Halbert, which goes something like, “You’re one good sales letter away from never worrying about money again.”

I don’t know if that was ever true, even for Gary.

I doubt it’s true for anybody today.

One thing I’m sure of, as sure as that the moon is in fact made of cheese:

There’s no “one good sales letter” that will allow you to sell a book for $1k in any mass-market way.

I’ve bought Ben Settle’s stuff before, including books he charges hundreds of dollars for. I never once read the sales page when I bought, except as much as was unavoidable to locate the “Buy Now” button.

Why did I pay Ben so much? Particularly since he makes a big deal about the fact that none of the stuff he teaches is secret or new? Without me even bothering to get the full details of what I was buying?

Positioning, if that’s what you want to call it. But not positioning of the product itself. That’s secondary or even unimportant here.

Rather, it was the gradual, patient, and strategic positioning of the person selling. As Dan Kennedy writes, “The higher up in income you go, the more you’re paid for who you are, rather than what you do.”

That’s the psychological effect.

The mechanism to get there was daily emails.

Emails that, day after day, month after month, year after year, built Ben up as somebody to listen to and respect… put him in a marketplace of one and gave him a mini-monopoly… and did enough teasing of his product to allow me to ignore the fact that there’s nothing new or secret in there, and probably nothing that a careful reading of Robert Collier’s book couldn’t give me.

Ben sums it up himself:

===

Don’t get me wrong, sales copy is important.

But if I had to choose between having the world’s best copywriting skills or having top notch email skills, I’d choose email every time. It’s made me (and certain clients who hired me for emails, when I had clients) far more money.

===

Email is how you charge 40x more than the competition.

It’s how you can sell at a premium with a mediocre sales page, or even no sales page at all.

Ben’s done it… I’ve done it… maybe you’d like to do it too?

If you would, and if want my help in getting there, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

David Ogilvy endorses the Daily Email Habit approach

by

This morning I found myself reading “Quotations of David Ogilvy,” put out in 2023 by the Ogilvy agency, on the 75th anniversary of its founding.

Here’s a quote from Ogilvy that caught my eye:

===

Dr. Gallup reports that if you say something which you don’t also illustrate, the viewer immediately forgets it. I conclude that if you don’t show it there is no point in saying it. Try running your commercial with the sound turned off; if it doesn’t tell without sound, it is useless.

===

I’m sharing this with you for two reasons.

One is that it’s a useful reminder, even if you never write a TV commercial. Really, it comes down to effective communication. If you don’t illustrate, the reader will forget it. If you don’t show it, there’s no point in saying it.

Reason two is that I was lucky to have somehow learned that lesson early in my copywriting career. Somebody must have shown it to me, because I also remembered it over the years.

The basic idea above — illustrate, don’t just say — is the underlying idea of pretty much everything I’ve done in the marketing space.

It’s the underlying idea of my Copy Riddles program, and its try-and-compare method of learning to write copy, instead of just a bunch of “here’s how” instruction.

It’s the underlying idea of thousands of sales emails I’ve written, both for clients and for myself, and the way I teach others to do that inside my Simple Money Emails and Most Valuable Email programs.

And it’s the underlying idea of my Daily Email Habit service.

Because on most days — not all, but most — I don’t just send a daily prompt for to help you write your own daily email. I also use that prompt in my own daily email, to show and illustrate how it can be done.

About that, I got the following feedback from Chris Howes, who runs a successful music teaching memebrship, Creative Strings Academy. Chris subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and he had this to say:

===

But more importantly, I now get TWO LESSONS from you every day. And I often learn as much or more from your regular daily free emails. Together, hand in hand, they feel like someone dropped off a shopping cart from Sams Club full of gifts at my front door and said here you go…

===

As David Ogilvy said, “We sell — or else.”

I don’t know what the “else” is. I don’t want to find out.

So if you’d like to buy a month’s worth of daily email puzzles, in order to write your own daily emails, and to get additional inspiration and illustration from my daily emails, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The most famous copywriter, real or fictional

by

On Dan Heath’s new podcast, “What It’s Like To Be,” I heard Dan asking a TV meteorologist, a criminal defense lawyer, a forensic accountant, all the same question:

“Who’s the most famous meteorologist/criminal defense lawyer/forensic accountant, real or fictional?”

This got me wondering who the most famous copywriter might be, real or fictional.

I had a gut feeling. I double-checked via simple Google search, by looking at the total number of results.

As far as real copywriters go, there’s really only one possible option for a copywriter that a rando off the street might know.

​​That’s David Ogilvy.

There’s something about the pipe, the smart suits, the English disdain, the French castle.

Sure enough, Ogilvy was the only real copywriter who has more than 1M indexed Google results about him.

As for fictional copywriters, it depends on who you consider a copywriter.

Don Draper, the creative art director from the TV show Mad Men, clocks in at over 2M Google results.

But was he really a copywriter or more of an idea man? I’ll let you decide.

Meanwhile, the most famous, fictional, 100% copywriter that I’ve been able to find is Peggy Olson, also a character on Mad Men, who only gets around 220k Google results.

Should we stop there? Oh no.

It turns out several celebs out there have a copywriting background… but are not today known as copywriters.

One of these is novelist James Patterson. Before Patterson set out to write 200 books (and counting), he was a copywriter and later the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, one of the biggest and oldest ad agencies in the world.

Patterson has 6M+ Google results to attest to his fame.

And if we’re already going with celebrities who have copywriting in their history, and maybe their blood, then we get to the most famous copywriter of all time, real or fictional, live or dead, even though nobody nowhere would identify him as a copywriter.

I’m talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald worked for a time as a copywriter before becoming the author of the quintessential great American novel, The Great Gatsby, and later a topic of almost 13M Google results.

So there. Now you know. And now you might ask yourself, “What did I just read? Did I really need this in my life? How did I wind up at the bottom of this email?”

If any of those questions is flitting through your head, let me point out that interest in famous people seems to be hardwired into our brains.

Tabloid writers and sales copywriters know this fact well, and they use it over and over and over. Because it works to draw attention and get people reading, day after day.

That’s a free lesson in copywriting.

For more such lessons, including ones that you might not be able to shrug off by saying, “I guess I knew that,” you will have to buy my Copy Riddles course.

The whole big idea behind Copy Riddles is the appeal of famous people — at least famous in the small niche of direct response copywriting.

I mean, on the sales page, in place of a subheadline, what I have is a picture featuring Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Stefan Georgi, and Ben Settle, all of them celebrities in the micro world of direct response, all of them paid off on that page as being integral to the course.

If you’d like to buy Copy Riddles, or if you simply want to read some gossip about famous copywriters, then head here and get ready to be amazed and shocked:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Remembering David Ogilvy

by

Today is November 29th, which is neither the birthday nor the deathday of David Ogilvy. Still, I thought it might be a good idea to take a moment and remember the great man.

Because, as with another copywriting legend, Gary Halbert, the greatest promotion that David Ogilvy ever did was in promoting himself.

Today, more than 50 years after his heyday, Ogilvy remains the most famous ad man in history, and is really the only copywriter that a normie off the street might have heard of.

Why is that?

What lies behind Ogilvy’s enduring fame?

The way I figure, it comes down to three things.

​​Some part of it secret personal charisma.

Some part of it is luck.

And some part is the actual work Ogilvy produced.

Charisma and luck cannot be taught. Well, they can, but this is not that kind of newsletter. This is a newsletter which focuses on work — and how to make the work that you do more impactful, influential, long-lasting.

So what exactly did Ogilvy do? When I think of the man’s work, three snapshots come to mind:

1. The Rolls-Royce ad, “At 60 miles an hour…” That campaign shows you the value of being associated with a top-tier product, which largely writes its own advertising.

2. The man in the Hathaway shirt. The eyepatch. That shows you the power of creating a spectacle, of being instantly perceived as unique.

3. A 7-word soundbite Ogilvy wrote once, which I will not quote here, but which I bet you have heard before.

I bet you’ve heard it because I’ve quoted it before in this newsletter, and so have 99% of people who write about advertising, whether they knew it came from Ogilvy or not.

There’s some magic to this soundbite that makes it stick in people’s minds and that makes them want to repeat it — even though Ogilvy wrote it as just a throwaway in the middle of a 12,000-word ad.

Maybe you know the 7-word soundbite I have in mind.

Maybe you even know the magic that makes it stick in people’s minds beyond the millions of other words that Ogilvy wrote in his 50-year career.

And if you don’t know, but you think it might be in your interest to know, then you can find out all about it during the third call of my upcoming Age of Insight live training.

Registration for Age of Insight closes tomorrow, Wednesday, at 12 midnight PST. But I am only making this training available to people who are on my email newsletter. If you want to get in on the training, then hurry to get on my newsletter and pray that you are in time.

Factual vs. emotional

by

As I so often do, this morning I sat down at my writing desk, took a sip of my coffee, lit my pipe, put on my eyepatch, and started re-reading, for the 114th time, David Ogilvy’s self-promotional ad, How to Create Advertising That Sells.

As you probably know, Ogilvy’s ad is a collection of 38 bits of wisdom that Ogilvy learned by creating “over $1,480,000 worth of advertising.” Number 23 on the list is this:

23. Factual vs. emotional. Factual commercials tend to be more effective than emotional commercials.

However, Ogilvy & Mather has made some emotional commercials which have been successful in the marketplace. Among these are our campaigns for Maxwell House Coffee and Hershey’s Milk Chocolate.

I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like Mr. Ogilvy is saying, “Certainly, emotional ads have been known to work… but it takes a true expert, someone like me, to pull it off. Otherwise, best stick to facts, facts, facts, or your advertising will pass like a ship in the night.”

That goes against a lot of copywriting advice you hear today.

Today, the main advice for copywriters is to agitate, scare, excite, outrage. Pile on the power words. Don’t tell people facts. They don’t care. But stir their emotions and they will buy.

So what gives? Was Ogilvy just writing at a different time? Or do different rules apply you promote Hershey’s Milk Chocolate in Life Magazine than when you promote, say, ProstaStream supplements on Clickbank?

Well, I can tell you a little personal story.

The single piece of copy that has paid me the most money to date, per word written, was a 317-word email I wrote a couple years ago, in 2020. It was full of facts, to support the idea that using hand sanitizer won’t get your hands as clean as washing your hands with soap and water. We were selling “paper soap” — little dental-floss sized dispensers of one-time soap flakes. And thanks to that fact-filled email, we sold, literally, a ton of paper soap.

“Yeah,” I hear you say, “but that was a unique moment. There was a lot of fear around corona, and everybody was in the mindset to keep their hands clean or die. You were just tapping into that.”

You’re right. And in a way, that’s the point.

Facts alone are like pebbles by the side of the road.

They’re not very impressive. Not very threatening. Not very useful.

But take some of those facts, and put them inside your prospect’s shoe. Suddenly, you have him squirming, and twisting, and looking to get rid of that discomfort and pain. And not only that. You have him taking that discomfort and pain with him — unlike power words and emotions, which are like a cloud of smoke that disappears in a few moments.

The bigger point is that, ideally, all aspects of your copy, or anything else you write, should do double or triple duty. Facts are no different.

Sure, facts provide concreteness and believability. But choose the right facts, and you will stir emotions also. After all, who really cares that, at 60 miles an hour, the loudest thing in this Rolls Royce is the electric clock? There must be something else going on there.

And now here’s a fact:

Every day, over 1,050 people are signed up to get emails with little bits of marketing wisdom like what you just read. If you’d like to join them, click here and fill out the form.

Rolls Royce copywriting portfolio

by

You probably know the famous Ogilvy Rolls Royce ad:

At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock

Wouldn’t it be nice to write ads like this all the time?

Wouldn’t you like to simply highlight the classy superiority of the product that you’re selling, instead of teasing people with the amazing secret of the one-legged accountant… or prophesying “The End of America”… or promising a passive monthly income of $5,378… $7,442… yes, even $11,246 — no cash, credit, or skills required?

Well, if that’s what you’re dreaming of, then all I can tell you is, be David Ogilvy. Because even though Ogilvy was a big fan of direct response, this electric clock thing is an ad for a brand.

Back in 1958 when this ad came out, American consumers already knew Rolls Royce well. In fact, they already knew that Rolls Royce was the fanciest car brand around. The electric clock thing was just a dramatic illustration of that.

That’s not to say you couldn’t do something similar in a direct response ad. You just need to have a brand that your audience already knows and likes. Those do exist, at least for very small and tight pockets of people.

But if you ain’t got a brand like this, then you’ll be better off calling out a problem or making a big promise. No cash, credit, or skills required.

But you probably already know this. The only reason I bring it up is in case you’re fresh to direct response copywriting. In that case, maybe you’re wondering why Ogilvy’s ad — celebrated even by Gary Halbert — looks so different than your typical direct response piece.

Actually, there’s a second reason I bring it up.

It’s because it’s relevant to that other newbie question, about creating a copywriting portfolio. Because everything I’ve just told you is basically the best advice I can give to anyone looking to create a portfolio.

Perhaps the portfolio point I’m trying to make is obvious. Perhaps it’s not. In any case, I’ll spell it out in my email tomorrow.

A sales letter with negative traffic cost and highest quality leads

by

“Ogilvy & Mather has had more success with editorial layouts, than with addy layouts. Editorial layouts get higher readership than conventional advertisements.”
— David Ogilvy, How to Create Advertising that Sells

One of the turning points in my marketing career was hearing a talk that Hollis Carter gave at Mindvalley.

Back then, Hollis was already a successful entrepreneur. His venture at the time was a publishing house for Amazon Kindle books.

You can do anything with a Kindle book, Hollis said.

You can rank on Google for a competitive keyword… you can build authority… you can prospect for leads.

Hollis did a reframe to drive the last point home. A Kindle book is basically a sales letter, but Amazon distributes it for you to their huge audience… and even pays you for getting your sales message out.

Sounds pretty good, right?

And it ties into what I talked about yesterday, on how to write a magalog. Magalogs were a powerful sales format precisely because they looked and read like magazines. Camouflage works, just like Ogilvy says above.

Do you want to camouflage your sales message into a Kindle book? If you do, then much of yesterday’s advice on how to write a magalog will apply straight up.

But beware.

With a Kindle book, you’ll want to cut down the sales even more than in a magalog. And you’ll want to stuff your pitch towards the end of the book. Otherwise, you risk a ton of bad reviews.

For example, I once created a Kindle book called The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams. The goal was to promote another book I’d written about aromatherapy.

Inside the “Scams” book, I put a bunch of interesting and valuable content for anyone new to essential oils. I also added three mini sidebars throughout, promoting the second book I was selling.

Result?

Amazon reviewers were ready to lynch me. “Just a shameless sales pitch!”

So I learned my lesson. And when I published the 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters this last September, I put my shameless pitch towards the end of the book.

I also shamelessly asked people just to sign up for my email list, rather than to buy anything outright. A bunch of people signed up for my email list… and I haven’t had any bad reviews yet.

So let me wrap it up for you. A few days ago, a reader of my daily emails named Yusuf wrote in to ask:

“What would you be doing if freelance copywriting made you zero dollars?”

I told Yusuf that if freelance copywriting completely dried up, I’d probably start writing books on Kindle.

​​I’d make a bit of money from the sales of the books themselves… and then get readers to sign up for an email list and sell them something else.

Because people who have read your book will be some of the highest quality leads you will ever find. That is, assuming that you’ve given them unusual value in your book… without scratching their itch all the way.

Speaking of which, I sometimes share things in email that I never put on this blog. If you’d like to be part of my exclusive and valuable email community, click here to subscribe.