Glengarry Glen Ross

How dirty is your underwear right now?

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Seriously, how dirty is it? I’m asking because it’s a personal question and borderline insulting. And if my guess is right, it got your attention. Here’s why I need it.

I’ve been thinking about pattern interrupts and how to do them. Here are a few examples, in case you’re not familiar with this term, of what I mean by “pattern interrupt”:

1. Tony Robbins once threw water in a woman’s face. Repeatedly.

​​She was trying to talk through her marriage problems with Tony. But each time she started talking about her husband, she started to get negative. ​​So Tony threw water in her face, shocked her, and got her laughing.

​​”What is wrong with you?” she asked each time he did it. But she stopped being negative when talking about her husband.

2. “Coffee’s for closers only.”

​​You might know this famous scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. Alec Baldwin comes in to give his “Always be closing” speech to a bunch of real estate salesmen… but they aren’t taking him seriously.

​​So when one of them goes to get a cup of coffee, Baldwin stares and says, “Put that coffee down. Coffee’s for closers only. You think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.” The salesman puts the coffee down and starts to listen.

* Shooting the apple out of the pig’s mouth.

​​In the first Hunger Games movie, Katniss is supposed to show off her archery skills to a bunch of rich sponsors. But she misses the target. The sponsors laugh and start chatting among themselves.

​​Katniss next hits a bullseye… but the sponsors aren’t paying attention any more. ​​So she turns towards the sponsors, takes aim, and shoots an arrow through the apple stuck in a pig’s mouth in the middle of the banquet table. All the sponsors shut up and look at her.

I bet there are a bunch of different ways to create an effective pattern interrupt. The three situations above all do it. And though they might seem very different, I think they share a common element:

They cross private boundaries, whether physical or of personal sovereignty. They are intrusive, threatening, or borderline insulting.

So if you too need to get somebody’s attention, and change their set ways of thinking, try such a “personal sovereignty” pattern interrupt. Just make sure you have a good reason for doing so — otherwise you might get slapped in the face.

Anyways, since I still have your attention:

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The beautiful future of text sales letters

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“All train compartments smell vaguely of shit. It gets so you don’t mind it.”
— Ricky Roma, Glengarry Glen Ross

Right now, everybody’s so in love with copy.

In certain circles, this love even goes further, to a certain pride about ugly websites and ugly emails and ugly sales letters. “Who cares? If you’re interesting, if you write well, people will read your message even if it’s written on used toilet paper!”

There are even people who claim they’ve tested this. They claim that ugly, because it stands out, outperforms beautiful.

I can believe this. But here’s the thing:

If everybody’s making an ugly website in the hope of shocking people into handing over their attention… then ugly stops being different.

It gets so you don’t mind it, like Ricky Roma says in the quote above. And at that point, ugly loses its selling power.

I bring this up because I’m listening to an interview right now that Rich Schefren did with a marketer named Sean Vosler.

Rich spends the first five minutes of the interview enthusing about Sean and his work. Rich thinks this is the future of marketing.

He even gets so excited that he pulls up his text messages on screen, to prove how he just had an exchange with Jay Abraham, and how he invited Jay to join this interview. Rich thinks Sean’s stuff is so revolutionary that even Jay needs to see it.

So what exactly is Sean doing?

Well, he is selling a book about copywriting. That’s not unusual. What is unusual is that the book and its sales page are very professionally and beautifully designed (by Sean himself, who has a a background in design).

The point, as Rich puts it, is that “different is better than better.”

And in a world where many marketers are taking pride in making garish-looking sales pages… or sending boring and plain-looking emails (like the ones I send out in my email newsletter)… in that world, a beautiful design like Sean’s looks different. It gets attention. And that’s half the sale.

By the way, this is part of a bigger trend.

Last autumn, I wrote about a similar move to higher production values in VSLs. And now text sales letters seem to be headed in the same direction.

So if you are a marketer or business owner, this beautiful design stuff is something to keep in mind.

And if you are a copywriter, this is something you can bring up to your clients, and make yourself seem well-informed and cutting-edge.

But wait, you might say.

What exactly makes for beautiful design in a marketing context?

I can’t say. I’m not a designer. But if you want to see Sean’s sales page, the one Rich Schefren was so enthusiastic about, here’s the link so you can judge for yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/sean-vosler

Higher open rates = lower sales?

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“They like to talk to salesmen, something. They’re lonely. I don’t know. They like to feel superior. Never bought a fucking thing.”
David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

I’ve been writing a lot of emails in the ecommerce space lately. This is for a client who’s constantly launching new products.

A few days ago, the client wrote me with a question:

“I’m curious with all the recent launches, which have looked most promising from an open rate and revenue standpoint?”

I could tell him right away which of the products were most successful in terms of revenue. But I wasn’t sure about open rates. So I decided to dig into the data.

It turns out the relationship between open rates and sales in our case has been negative. In other words, the more people opened up our emails, the less money we made. I even ran a little regression on it. On average, each extra percent of opens cost us $100 worth of sales.

How could that be?

Well, for one thing, we keep promoting different products, and at different price points. Higher-priced products might have less overall interest, but can result in more sales.

But there are other possible explanations, too.

For example, different subject lines will select for different segments of the market.

Maybe one subject line gets you a lot of opens. But like in that Glengarry Glen Ross scene above, maybe you’re just reaching a bunch of bored leads, who like to click on sensationalist ads, and who have no intention of buying anything.

Whatever the explanation is, the message is clear:

All those millions of blog posts by email marketing experts telling you how to increase your open rates could actually be hurting your sales.

A. B. C.

Always be checking your sales numbers. Sales numbers are for closers. Open rates? They’re for bums.

Speaking of open rates, I write a daily email newsletter with very high open rates. If you’d like to get on it so you can bring those numbers down, here’s where to subscribe.