Earl Nightingale

The best argument against money-back guarantees on the Internet

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I was just listening to an interview with Vic Conant, the president of Nightingale-Conant.

As you might know, Nightingale-Conant is a big info publishing company. For decades, they dominated the self-help and sales audiotape market, with lots of big-name gurus on their roster. Their original guru was Earl Nightingale, who influenced Dan Kennedy and everyone on down.

One question posed to Conant was about the most profitable idea he’s used to market his products online or offline. Here’s what Conant replied:

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It’s been this ‘open accounts’ idea. When we advertise, we typically say, “Try this product for 30 days on ‘open account,’ or at our risk for free, basically. We’ll send it out to you, you try it, and we have the risk on our side.”

My dad came up with that idea back in about 1978. We were asking at that time for people to send in $50 and we’d send them the product. And that just wasn’t working to a great degree. We tried this and it worked very well and because of that our business exploded.

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The interviewer, Michael Senoff, asked a clarifying question:

“When someone orders, do they put a credit card down, but it’s not charged until 30 days later?”

Conant shook his head. “No. Typically it’s nothing. Just strictly bill-me-later.”

I thought this was very interesting. Because I don’t offer money-back guarantees on my expensive courses, like Copy Riddles.

​​I certainly don’t give them away for free for 30 days and then work to collect my money.

So should I start? For that… let’s go on with the interview.

Michael Senoff asked the obvious followup question. “They responded well, but how is it on the side of your collections? What percentage have you found you have to go chase money?”

Vic Conant replied:

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We have a very sophisticated collection effort, but it’s basically using guilt. And we’re very sophisticated in picking lists.

In direct marketing, in mail, you pick a list and you test that list. And if you test a list that returns all the products or doesn’t pay, then you don’t use that list any more.

So we tend to use very strong lists like Business Week subscribers, or people that don’t have time to screw around.

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So there you go. That’s the best argument I’ve heard against money-back guarantees on the Internet, at least the way business is typically done.

On the Internet, you’re not testing in slowly to very strong lists of buyers.

Instead, most businesses, including mine, have an open-door policy. Pretty much anybody can find my website, join my list, have the opportunity to buy. There’s no way to know if that’s a serious business owner with no time to screw around… or an unserious opportunity seeker with all the time in the world for screwing both me and himself around.

But still.

If you’re anything like me, your ears perked up at that original question, “most profitable idea,” and Conant’s reply “open account.”

I thought for a bit. Is there any way to do something like that on the Internet?

I realized I already am doing it.

Really, that’s the point of free daily emails such as these.

​​My courses such as Copy Riddles are very expensive.

​​The point of my free daily emails is to demonstrate — expertise, trustworthiness, valuable or interesting ideas. That’s the open account. And then, once you feel comfortable, you have the opportunity to buy into the next level.

I realize that might take a while, maybe much longer than 30 days. That’s okay. I have time, and I have additional arguments and email ideas. Here’s one I will close with today, from automotive copywriter Kevin Cochrane, who bought into Copy Riddles a while back:

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Copy Riddles was a measuring stick for me as a copywriter. John charted a course through the persuasion pathways that separate the pros from the posers. The structure is clear. The examples tie direct response history to present applications. The exercises offered a practical way to test and implement the lessons.
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I write for the automotive retail space, which is watered down by legal teams, compliance guidelines, and plenty of regulation. The course has helped me plunk the guts of what makes a solid bullet into more and more of my work.​​

If you’re hemming and hawing about whether to join, read a week’s worth of John’s daily newsletter as a trial run. You’ll know what to do after. (Hint: the paid stuff in Copy Riddles is even better somehow.) This is the kind of course you’ll refer back to again and again.

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For when you’re ready:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Hollywood tear-jerker: Billion-dollar psychology lesson for cheap

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“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”

You recognize that? It’s from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of the biggest movies of all time.

When I was a kid, the main movie theater in my town for some reason kept the marquee for E.T. long after the movie had stopped playing.

I was too young to see it when it came out. And I suffered for years, seeing that marquee. I wanted to watch the movie so badly — a real life alien, and cute too! On Earth! Makes friends with a little boy and gets the boy’s bike airborne!

It’s everything my 5-year-old self wanted in life. But the movie was no longer in theaters, and there was no VHS either.

So a few weeks ago, I downloaded E.T. to finally heal this childhood wound and to see why this Spielberg fantasy is called the #24 greatest film of all time.

Unfortunately, the moment has passed.

I couldn’t really get into E.T. But I did get some use out of it. That scene above.

That’s when E.T. dies, about nine-tenths of the way through the movie. And the boy, Elliott, who had a psychic link with E.T. and who has felt everything E.T. has felt, suddenly cannot feel anything any more.

I can imagine that when E.T. played in movie theaters, both the kids and the parents choked up at this point. The kids, because the cute little extraterrestrial is dead. The parents, because they felt on some level how this scene might be about their childhood dreams, hopes, and capacity for joy and wonder… which have been drained out of them as they grew up and became adults.

And then of course, E.T. comes back to life and everything works out just fine. Which is the insight I want to leave you with today.

I recently re-watched Dan Kennedy’s Titans of Direct Response keynote speech. In one part of this amazing presentation, Dan tells an Earl Nightingale story. Two farmers each thought the other guy’s farm had the greener pasture. And when they get their wish and swap farms, it turns out the other pasture is no greener.

Dan: “Earl didn’t tell that story to be a marketing lesson… but I got the marketing lesson out of it.”

And you can too.

If a story reaches mass popularity — greener pastures, E.T., Bad Santa — it’s because it makes people vibrate. The thing is, social order must be maintained. That’s why each mass-market story either has a happy ending (if the characters were deep-down deserving) or a moral to be learned (if they were not).

Don’t let that fool you.

Market-proven tear-jerkers like E.T. can really show you true human nature — if you don’t wait until the end. The end is just tacked on to muddy the waters. But the psychology lesson is all the emotional buildup that happens before the turnaround.

That buildup shows you how people really are. Those are the real problems and desires people respond to, and that’s what you should speak to. Everything else is just Hollywood.

By the way, Brian Kurtz generously made Dan Kennedy’s keynote speech freely available online. If you haven’t watched it yet (or in the past month), it’s time to fix that.

But in case you need more convincing about the value hidden inside this speech, you might like to sign up for my email newsletter. In the coming days, there’s where I’ll be sharing some more Dan-inspired marketing ideas, like the one you just read.