One of the rare daily email newsletters I read more often than not is by Jason Leister.
Jason used to be a direct response copywriter. He used to write about getting and managing copywriting clients. He’s since moved into stranger waters, where he talks about raising his 10 kids, living off the grid, “unplugging from the matrix,” and manifesting your desires.
All right up my alley, minus the 10 kids.
But let’s talk turkey:
Each Monday, Jason sends an email called Monday Hotsheet. It’s a bunch of curated resources — interesting articles, tech, videos that Jason has come across.
That’s pretty normal.
What was weird is that Jason used to send the Monday Hotsheet as a PDF that he’d link to in his email. Even weirder, the PDF was formatted in two columns, like some insurance brochure.
I liked to read through Jason’s Monday Hotsheet but I always chuckled at the experience. Who does PDFs any more? And in two columns like this?
Well, I guess I manifested something myself, and I should have been more careful about what I asked for.
Because Jason for some reason recently switched Monday Hotsheet to be simply delivered in his daily email, and in just one measly column.
I found myself disappointed. From one week to the next, Jason’s Monday Hotsheet looked cheaper, much less valuable and interesting.
Suddenly, I asked myself if I need another weekly email the curates useful and interesting resources online? I feel like everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger on down has one of those. I ain’t got time for all these curated valuable resources.
A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos once got a tin pot and a wooden spoon. He then started banging on the tin pot with the wooden spoon while jumping up and down on his couch and chanting, “Format beats copy! Format beats copy!”
(Fine. The part with the wooden spoon and the tin pot I made up. But all the rest of that story is true, except the jumping up and down.)
Parris was specifically talking about the format of sales copy.
Once upon a time, you could take a proven sales letter, format it to look like a magazine or an article or a newsletter issue (the print kind), and you might get a 2.5x bump in response. Format beats copy: Ain’t no copy in the universe that’s gonna get you that kind of a bounce, not when you already have top copywriters working for you.
This holds just as well for info products, whether you give ’em away or charge thousands of dollars for them.
Yes, people should only want the truth, and nothing but the truth. Yes, it shouldn’t matter whether you deliver the truth on a 3×5 index card, or in a 3-ring binder, or a never-to-be-repeated secret performance in an amphitheater in the middle of some remote forest.
It shouldn’t matter, but it does matter.
So my point for you today is, think about the format in which you will deliver your truth.
And if you’ve already delivered your truth, and nobody much cared, or they cared at first and then they dropped off… then think about format again.
Rather than coming up with a new message, you might be able to keep the message and simply deliver it as a 2-column PDF, or whatever else feels unique and different and valuable in your industry.
And sometimes, simple word choice is enough to change the format. Or at least be a major part of it.
Take for example my Daily Email Habit service. At bottom, it’s delivered as a daily email. I could have simply said, “Hey, would you like to sign up for a new set of daily emails, and pay me $30 a month for the privilege?”
Maybe some forward-thinking people would have taken me up on this. But i don’t think it would have worked nearly as well as calling Daily Email Habit a service, which happens to be delivered by email, for your convenience.
Speaking of Daily Email Habit, if you’d like to find out more about this valuable service, or even try it out yourself: