How foolishly inconsistent of me.
On April 7 of this year, I wrote an email promoting the idea that you should give your prospects a menu of options. I quoted from Jonah Berger’s book The Catalyst:
But give people multiple options, and suddenly things shift.
Rather than thinking about what is wrong with whatever was suggested, they think about which one is better. Rather than poking holes in whatever was raised, they think about which of the options is best for them. And because they’ve been participating, they’re much more likely to go along with one of them in the end.
Reasonable, right?
Except, only a short while earlier, on February 28, I sent out an email with the exact opposite message. The subject line for that was “The best copywriting tactic ever.” It was inspired by an article I’d read in Scientific American by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. The email concluded:
The world is complicated. Too many choices. Too much information. That’s why we seek out extremes, to make our lives easier. And that’s something you can use to make your copy not better, but best.
So one email is basically telling you to give your prospects a choice… the other email is telling you to give them no choice.
How to reconcile these two ideas?
I don’t know. Maybe you can do it. I haven’t tried. And I won’t, because I’ve got better things to do. Like preparing for the second call of my Influential Emails training.
The first call was all about writing and persuasion techniques that I use regularly — and that anybody else can use and profit from as well.
But this second call is more personal. It will include some of my own writing and thinking quirks.
Such as for example, the contradiction in my two emails above. The reason I’m ok with this contradiction is because of a third email I wrote.
That third email was about David Bowie and an infuriatingly inconsistent interview he gave to Playboy magazine in 1976. (1976 was the height of Bowie’s cokehead era. A big brouhaha emerged after the interview because Bowie said during it, “I believe very strongly in fascism.”)
This Bowie email is the most influential thing I’ve ever written.
Not because it got me any sales… or any interest from important people in the industry… or even any engagement from readers on my list. In fact, as far as I remember, nobody even commented on this email.
But the ideas in that email had the biggest influence on how I personally write. And not just emails, but influential writing more broadly.
You might think I’m just advocating being provocative in your thinking and writing. It goes deeper than that, at least in my mind.
In any case, if you want to read that short email about David Bowie, so you can see if it will have any influence on you, here’s the link: