A few hours after I write this, the Queen’s coffin will be placed on a gun carriage and will lead a procession down a packed Mall, along Whitehall and then into Parliament Square before entering the Palace of Westminster.
Walking in the procession behind the Queen will be her son, the new king, Charles III.
But perhaps more remarkable, Charles’s two sons, William and Harry, will also be walking in the procession.
That’s remarkable because for the two princes, this act will bring back painful memories of when they, aged 15 and 12, walked behind the coffin of their mother Princess Diana in 1997.
What makes this act still more remarkable is that princes Harry and William are embroiled in a bitter personal feud with each other. (I don’t know the details of the feud, and the Daily Mail article I just read didn’t elaborate. So I guess I never will know.)
Whatever the case may be, I think this all just highlight the importance of unity.
Unity of family… unity in moments of crisis… unity when different, individual, tiny elements come together to form a bigger and more powerful whole.
Because after all, isn’t unity really the essence we all strive for, in life in general, and in email marketing in particular?
In particular, I have just read about the first ever email marketer, a man named Mr. Pease.
Mr. Pease sold a product called “Pease’s Horehound Candy,” a kind of cough drop. And since he lived in the first half of the 19th century, he clearly didn’t use email, not the way we know it today.
But Mr. Pease’s remarkable marketing was the essence of what email is about. It would work today as well as it did in early America.
So what did Mr. Pease do to advertise his cough drops? From chapter 8 of P.T. Barnum’s book, Humbugs of the World:
Mr. Pease’s plan was to seize upon the most prominent topic of interest and general conversation, and discourse eloquently upon that topic in fifty to a hundred lines of a newspaper-column, then glide off gradually into a panegyric of “Pease’s Horehound Candy.” The consequence was, every reader was misled by the caption and commencement of his article, and thousands of persons had “Pease’s Horehound Candy” in their mouths long before they had seen it! In fact, it was next to impossible to take up a newspaper and attempt to read the legitimate news of the day without stumbling upon a package of “Pease’s Horehound Candy.”
Mr. Pease got very rich selling his horehound candy with his humbug news item advertisements.
And that’s what I hope will happen for you as well, if you only follow his very smart, very durable, very unified marketing approach.
The good news is, in many ways you have it easier than Pease did. For example, Pease had to pay for advertising space each time he wanted to get his message out. But email today is pretty much free.
Of course, Pease did have some advantages that you today do not have.
Such as, for example, a ready-made and large audience of newspaper readers.
Or the fact that those newspaper readers read their newspaper with a curious and trusting mind, rather than with skepticism and disinterest.
Or the fact that those readers didn’t have Twitter, where they could start campaigns to mock or even shut down Pease’s company because of its misleading advertising.
But fear not!
Because there are simple, quick, and quite specific methods to overcome those problems in your email marketing today.
And if you have a business, and more specifically an email list, and you would like to make like Mr. Pease and market your way to great wealth, then may I advise you take a look at the fine offer below.
What, you want me to tie this offer into the topic of unity, or to princess William and Harry?
Not today. That’s not what I learned from Mr. Pease.
But if you do want potentially business-changing guidance with your email marketing, here’s where to go: