I woke up last night at 2:30am in what felt like a fever.
My forehead was wet and my body was burning. “Why is it so hot…” I mumbled as I threw the covers off me.
Turns out I didn’t have a fever. But my A/C did die.
Some time after I’d gone to bed (11pm, nice and cool), the A/C stopped doing its job. Immediately, the Barcelona heat, along with my nighttime panting, brought the temperature in my bedroom up to about 990 degrees.
I promise to get to the marketing moral of this email very soon. But before I get there, I have to share one more personal detail:
I’m kind of done with traveling. The packing, discomfort, displacement — I’m getting more and more resistant to it. I can’t be bothered to take even a half-hour trip out of town.
And yet:
Last night, around 4:30am, as I sat wide awake in my sauna of an apartment, in a mild panic that this is how my life will be until the A/C gets fixed (and who knows when that will be — last year it took two weeks), I started fantasizing about traveling.
Somewhere… anywhere, as long as it was cool, or at least had A/C.
And that’s the marketing moral I promised you. Imagine if in that moment, or really even now, because it’s still very hot, I had come across an ad that said:
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Did your A/C just die?
Get away from the heat with our special “while your A/C gets fixed” hotel package!
Beautiful getaway in the cool Pyrenees mountains, only two hours’ drive from Barcelona. And yes, we do have A/C in all our rooms, just in case!
To book now, call 1-800-HELLA-HOT
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… had I seen this ad, I can tell you, I would have called. In fact, I might even go to the trouble of researching such a hotel and calling it now, even without the ad.
The bigger point:
Nothing ever gets done without a deadline, right?
Right.
That’s why marketers have invented a million tricks and tactics for amping up the fear of missing out — countdown timers, 10+ emails on the final day of promos, disappearing bonuses, etc.
All that stuff’s necessary when you’re trying to motivate people who are not internally motivated at that moment.
But there are people who are internally motivated at that moment. And the way you find them is by asking yourself, or better yet, by asking your buyers,
“What just happened? Why did you buy, now?”
Often, it won’t have anything to do with your specific offer (continental breakfast, stylish wood paneling, friendly staff).
Instead, it will have to do with your buyers, and their life circumstances. The A/C that died in their apartment the night before, and the three hours of sleep they got as a result.
Useful info. Because once you know it, you can use it to pick these people out easily from among a huge crowd… to make them a premium offer… and to do them a huge service.
That’s my free advice for today.
But if you’d like to contribute to the Bejako “while the A/C gets fixed” fund, and learn techniques used by A-list copywriters to rope in just the buyers from among a huge audience, you can find that in my Copy Riddles program.
For more information on that: