A few days ago, marketer Ben Settle sent out an email with the subject line:
“Email Players subscriber does hostile takeover of the UK childcare industry market”
The body of this email was mostly a standard testimonial from one of Ben’s customers. This guy said he used Ben’s marketing methods to capture 25% of the nursery owners market in the UK. To which Ben added,
“Smells like a hostile takeover of the market to me.”
And that’s where the “hostile takeover” subject line came from.
I thought this was clever. It brought to mind the philosopher’s stone, the magical artifact that allows you to take a bunch of dull lead and turn it into a few ounces of sparkling gold.
Except what Ben was doing was taking a bunch of solid and dull content… and transmuting it into a sparkling subject line.
All it took was free-associating a dramatic phrase, somewhat connected to the topic. It didn’t even have to be too logically connected.
Maybe that’s something you too can try if you write emails for sales and profit.
But you can use this same technique not just for subject lines.
It works for writing bullets, too. (You just might have to tweak the underlying editorial a bit, to make sure you’re not cheating readers when you hand them the dull lead.)
I bring all this up because I promised yesterday to tell you about a free online repository of 1) good bullets and 2) the underlying content those bullets were distilled and conjured from.
Well, that resource is Ben Settle’s daily emails.
Not all of Ben’s subject lines and emails demonstrate bullet-writing tactics.
But many do. And any young and ambitious student who just got accepted into copywriting Hogwarts would do well to stay up late, under candle light, and study these magical texts.
I’ve done it myself, and I continue to do it.
And I apply many of Ben’s marketing lessons — along with some I discovered myself — in my own daily email newsletter. If you want to get on board that train, it takes off from platform 9 1/2.