I only have a half-dozen print books in my apartment. The print books I do have are there because I feel the book is simply so important that I want it around me, available even if the grid goes down, sitting there on the shelf, catching my attention from time to time, inviting me to pull it down and open it up and look inside once again.
One of these half-dozen books is the Robert Collier Letter Book.
If I were ever stranded on a desert island… if for some unlikely reason I wanted to get off and rejoin civilization… and if my only hope of rescue was to write an effective sales letter that I would mail to millions of homes around the country… then I’d want Collier’s book next to me under that palm tree.
Collier’s book has got everything — rattlesnakes, beheadings, genies in the lamp, war heroes, romance, adventure, silk stockings, wagons of coal, dinosaurs.
But let me get to the point of this email:
Collier at some point was selling an O. Henry book set by mail. He sold literally millions of copies of this book set, in a single year.
How?
Well, prices of paper, binding, and labor were increasing (it was during World War I). Collier’s sales letters all emphasized that future editions of the book would have to cost more, and people saw that it must be true. In fact, Collier found that his most effective headline was:
“Before The Price Goes Up!”
But when the price eventually did go up, sales of the O. Henry dropped to such low levels that it wasn’t profitable to mail out any more sales letter.
Testing out different copy produced no improvement.
What then?
Side note:
One trick I practice (I think I got it from John Carlton) is to stop when I come across a puzzle like this. Rather than reading on to find out the answer — and there is an answer — I ask myself, what would I do here?
If I were selling something, using scarcity language to knock in a bunch of golf balls that are close to the hole… what then?
Time to move on? Or time for a new product? Or for more leads? Or what?
Think about that for a moment. Really, try it, now.
And once you’re done…
Then read on to find out the answer, in Collier’s words:
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So we decided to try another kind of hurry-up, and the one we hit upon was: “Last Chance To Get Jack London free!” Mind you, we had been giving Jack London (or Oppenheim or the mystery and detective stories, or some other premium) for six years, and people had come to expect it. They had grown tired of hearing of raises in price, probably no longer believed further raises possible, but the threat of losing the premium was something different.
Strange as it may seem, putting in that one line changed the results over night. Back went the sales to the previous year’s figures. Ads pulled again. And circulars — how they pulled! For the second time we sold $1,000,000 worth of O. Henry books in a single year!
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Point being, when one kind of scarcity wears out, move on to another kind. From price… to free bonus… to a special limited edition… to an event at a given time, happening only once…
There are lots of aspects of an offer that can become scarce, that you can focus on. As one more example, take my Daily Email Habit service. I’ve repeatedly gotten variations of the following question about it:
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Looks so good, if I subscribe do I get access to the previous daily prompts from when you started this service?
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The answer is no, and to emphasize it, I even number the daily email “puzzles” that go out, much like daily Wordle puzzles are numbered. (Today’s daily email puzzle, based on which I’m writing this email, is #18.)
It seems reasonable to me to only give access to those “issues” of Daily Email Habit that go out while somebody is subscribed, much like with a magazine subscription.
I think this is a way to respect people who signed up earlier… it’s a motivation to sign up now, rather than later, and avoid missing out on any new puzzles… and in my mind, it assigns greater value to each puzzle that goes out — it makes each puzzle feel more unique. You either get it, or you don’t.
If you’d like to get tomorrow’s daily email puzzle (#19) before it flutters away, or to find out what Daily Email Habit is all about: