r
"BVFar The Most Imponant Marketing Product" "J got
to know this guy. He's from New Jersey, as street smart as they come, and he has the energy of a shitweasel on amphetamines. He created a business that generated $100,000,000 in 23-short months. Vincent did this withjust apen, apad, and a simple idea.] believe this is by far the most important marketing product ever put together. In it, he reveals a lot of secrets that even I have never before revealed to anyone (except a few clients and my closest friends). If you dare say the information you get from this product was already known to you or it wasn't worth the money, you are much more than a shitweasel. You are a stone-cold, unethical liar. Believe it or not, much of this information is so electrifying; it was unknown even to me. And I am now using these secrets when I create advertising for myself or for my clients. You are beyond all hope if you do not order "The 12-Month Millionaire" as soon as you finish reading this message. Your hand should be reaching for your checkbook or the telephone this very second."
"I Made The DeCision Not To Write Another Word of COpy Until I Devoured Your Book" "It is so blazing hot!!! It's so hot- that in between friends from Germany and LA visiting, 2 hanging deadlines (14 days away), four pages into The 12 Month Millionaire I made the decision not to write another word of copy until 1 devoured your book. Which ] did in four days flat and I still haven't had time to go over the pages of notes- but it's in the double digits for sure. So I love the book! It has inspired roy soul and sparked a couple ofkil1er ideas I'm gearing to test. With the back-end as the apple of my eye! I will let you know how much money J make and get to keep over the next year applying the secrets, facts and hard-nosed insider knowledge your book so easily details." ALL the Best, Carlos Duran
Send Your Testimonial To The12Montlu"\
[email protected]
4
Table of Contents
7
Introduction Chapter One: The Best Business
13 In the World
Chapter Two: Products and Arithmetic
22
Chapter Three: What It's Like When One Of These Things Explodes
36
Chapter Four: All About Mailing Lists
47
Chapter Five: All About Magazine Advertising
56
Chapter Six: Creating Your Swipe File
66
Chapter Seven: The Back End
68
Chapter Eigh t: Auto ship
75
Chapter Nine: Lifetime Customer
81 Value (LCV)
Chapter Ten: The Two Step
85
Chapter Eleven: An Irresistible Offer
95
)
Chapter Twelve: Guarantee Everything
103
Chapter Thirteen: Premiums
109
Chapter Fourteen: Testimonials and Endorsements
113
Chapter Fifteen: Four Reasons Why People Don't Buy From Your Sales Letters and Advertisemen ts
118
Chapter Sixteen: Hire a Copywriter or Do It Yourself?
130
Chapter Seventeen: The Mail piece
133
Chapter Eighteen: Graphics ... Photos and Typography
141
Chapter Nineteen: Copywriting
147
Chapter Twenty: Headlines
163
Chapter Twenty One: Printers
177
Chapter Twenty Two: Letter shops
183
Chapter Twenty Three: Postage
189
Chapter Twenty Four: The Post Office
193
6
Chapter Twenty Five: How To Test
197
Chapter Twenty Six: Whispers and Screams
202
Chapter Twenty Seven: Costs and Steps
212
Chapter Twenty Eight: Bumping Up The Unit Sale
218
Chapter Twenty Nine: Response Rates
222
Chapter Thirty: Refund Rates
226
Chapter Thirty One: Increasing Response
230
Chapter Thirty Two: What I Know About Websites
232
Chapter Thirty Three: Merchant Accounts'
236
Chapter Thirty Four: Call Centers
241
Chapter Thirty Five: Telemarketing
245
Chapter Thirty Six: Television Advertising
247
Chapter Thirty Seven: Radio Advertising
251
.., ,I
Chapter Thirty Eight: The "Suck Out"
253
Chapter Thirty Nine: Employees
257
Chapter Forty: The Only 3 Ways To Grow Your Business
266
Chapter Forty One: Keeping Out of Jail
273
Chapter Forty Two: Blunders That Cost Me Millions
277
Chapter Forty Three: Knock-Offs
281
Chapter Forty Four: In Closing
287
Bonus Chapter Fishing
291
#1
Bonus Chapter #2 How To Lose $48,000,000
293 In A Day
Epilogue: The Millionaire's Library
300
Special Addition Chapter: How You Can Hire Me To PERSONALLY Coach You For Just $13.70 a Day
305
8
Introduction To The i2-Month Millionaire
If you think being educated about a new profession from a guy who plead guilty to Fraud and Money Laundering is a bad idea ... this is not your book. If you think learning how to make millions of dollars from a guy who almost lost $48 Million in a brutal lawsuit- practically making him homeless- is a bad idea ... this is not your book. If you think discovering how to live the "good life" from a guy who was facing 10 years in prison is a bad idea ... again ... this is not your book. But if you are looking for the real ... the genuine ... the no bullshit way to become filthy rich- and at the same time- avoid any of the pitfalls massive success comes with ... this will be the most rewarding book you 11ever read. You see, I've made over $100 Million in fewer than 10 years using the very same techniques 111reveal to you in this book. I've also nearly lost all of my fortune being stupid with my success. I'm going to teach you how to make tons of money- and just as importantly ... I'm going to show you how to keep your millions in your bank by not being stupid like I was. This is my first major book. I am not an accomplished author, so this book will have some flaws. If you read for style, or for literary quality, like I was saying before, this may not be a book for you. But there are paragraphs in this book- ideas in this book- whole chapters in this book that I have never had the balls to put down on paper before! And they will open doors to you- maybe as soon as tomorrow- that otherwise might have taken a lifetime of waiting for you to walk through.
r 9
Right now ... I'm sure you're skeptical as hell. You may even be thinking to yourself that you have bought the diary of a madman. But let me make you a small promise: Give me a few days. Read this book. You will never be the same again. Once you learn what I have to teach you ... unless you somehow lose your entire memory ... it would be impossible for you to ever be "ordinary" again. It would be impossible for you to not know how to make tons of money: starting with virtually nothing as I did 10 short years ago. I hope you'll give me the benefit of the doubt with my promise.
If you do, please read on. But if you can't cast-aside your skepticism, please do not waste any more of your time reading any further. Unless you believe in me- this book will be worth nothing to you. Anyway, before we jump into this thing with both feet... lets get acquainted. Maybe I should tell you a little about myself, how I grew up and where I came from. I was born in northern
New Jersey on January
23rd, 1974.
I grew-up poor- single parent
household. I think I had some sort of learning disability, because as a child, 1 could not retain anything I learned in school. I'd study like hell for an upcoming test ... but as soon as I finished reading a chapter in my school book. .. I couldn't remember what Ijust read. It would not penetrate into my brain. It was extremely discouraging, so 1 gave up. I failed everything ... even P.E. class. I finally dropped out in the 10th grade. Nobody seemed to mind. No matter how hard I tried, it always seemed like I wasn't going to amount to anything real important in life. And this really sucked
10
because I had a passion for the finer things. I wanted the gold Rolex, the sporty Mercedes, and the Million-Dollar Mega Mansion! But when I looked in the mirror, 1 didn't like what I saw. I was convinced the good life I wanted was just a dream. But that was all about to change. Seriously- by the time I was 19, I had a brand-new Corvette. At 20, I had 2 brand-new Mercedes Benz automobiles. And at 21, I was the proud owner of a Rolls Royce Silver Spur! By the time I turned 28 ... I made over $100 Million in gross sales. I profited over $50 Million. I owned two homes- one of them was 14.000 square feet and had a seven-car garage, a billiards room and a resort-style pool with an underwater bar! And I paid cash for the home! In my garage, 1 had a red Lamborghini Diablo, a yellow Ferrari 360 Spider, a white Bentley Amage Red Label, about 4 Mercedes, and a 12-passenger Lincoln Town Car Limo! My checking account had over $10 Million in it. I was earning $400,000 in pay each and every week. That breaks down to $80,000 a day ... or $10,000 an hour! And those figures were if I worked 5 days a week for eight hours a day, which I didn't! In the year 2002, I made more money than the CEOs of Federal Express ... eBay ... Amazon.com Time Warner. .. Apple Computer. .. McDonalds ... Microsoft. .. Nike Yahoo ... Ford Motor Company ... General Motors ... and Goodyear Tire- COMBINED! Yes-COMBINED. In the May 12th, 2003 issue, Forbes Magazine listed their top paid 500 CEOs in America. Of their prominent and prestigious list of the 500 CEOs, I made more money than 483 of them. $17,549,000
MORE than the CEO of Starbucks.
$13,030,000
MORE than the CEO of Target.
1j
$17,225,000
MORE than the CEO of Motorola.
Now, this may all seem like I'm some rich asshole bragging about how rich I am ... and you're partly correct. I am bragging! But more importantly, the reason why I'm telling you about all this is that this book is about getting rich very quickly. If the talk of obscene money makes you feel uncomfortable, or even angers you, maybe you do not really want to be rich. The reason why I'm telling you about all the toys I had when I was just 28, is to prove to you that if an guy like me ... with a learning disability ... a bad childhood ... and no formal education can get filthy rich by the time I was 28 ... you can absolutely follow in my footsteps and build yourself your very own empire of wealth! I remember back when I was 18, I was sitting on the steps of my Aunt's home. A few doors down from her lived a girl I went to High School with. Anyway, while I was out there sitting on her steps smoking a Marlboro, I saw a red Mercedes Benz SL500 pull up at this girl's home. Some preppy geek got out of the car with his sweater wrapped around his neck and went to her front door. He was picking her up for a weekend trip I presumed because she made him carry a small duffel bag to the trunk of his shiny red Mercedes. Things were sure different from when we were both in High School together. Where that girl may have had no problem going out with me back then ... nowadays her boyfriends had to be financially accomplished. When I saw that freaking red Mercedes pull away and drive past me, I remember saying to myself, "I've got to get my shit together!" And I did. About a year later- I had the very same model and color Mercedes Benz SL500 in my garage. How did I get the car? I didn't steal it. I didn't win the lottery. I sure didn't receive an inheritance from some long lost relative who just kicked the bucket. I made the money on my own. I started from scratch with nothing but a pen, a pad, and a crazy idea. I'm now going to teach you how to do the same.
r J
2
Why would 1 teach these incredible wealth secrets to total strangers for the small fee this book sells for? I don't know. Maybe I like to teach people stuff. Maybe I want to be immortal. Maybe! want to leave something behind on this Earth after I die that will last forever. Whatever the reason- you're in for a treat. I named this book THE 12-MONTH MILLIONAIREbecause that's what it's designed to do. It's designed to make you a full-blown, certified MILLIONAIRE within 12 months of reading it. Stop laughing. I'm being serious. And I'm going to guarantee it. If this book fails to make you a millionaire within the next 12 months ... serioualy.T want you to send me a letter explaining what you did in an attempt to get rich ... and I'll send you every dime you paid for this book. Maybe you do not want to become a filthy rich millionaire mogul. .. maybe you just want a better life for your family ... that's alright ... but I do have to tell you this ... It's just as hard to make a "good" income in this business as it is to become filthy rich- earning millions a year. .. and I do not mean this in a negative way ... I mean it in the most positive way possible. It's just as hard to tum one dollar into three dollars one hundred times as it is to do it one million times, so why not do it to it's fullest? I sure do. So anyway, lets get this thing started right away. I'm so excited for you. I remember when I was first leaming these secrets, piece-bypiece over 10 years ago. It was like a mental orgasm. I couldn't stop devouring this stuff from every source I could squeeze it out of... whether it was spending $10,000 on books dating as far back as the early 1900's ... or spending $5,000 to go to a single weekend seminar ... or giving up my entire persona1life from age 19 until 24 ... including women ... just because I was so excited with what I was discovering.
13
Seriously- I envy you. I wish I could experience again what you're about to learn ... but of course I can't. So I have to settle for the joy of watching the light bulbs go off in the thousands of people's minds who read this book. In my head, this book has been begging me to write it for the past five years. I finally gave in and did it. Am I happy with the end result? You bet I am. The very book you hold in your hands is not just a bunch of paper, ink and glue ... it's literally a roadmap ... a blueprint ... a formula for getting rich in America today. These secrets are used equally by the single Mother trying to put her child in a good private school, to the small businessperson making a great living ... all the way to guys who are running ONE BILLION DOLLAR Publicly-Traded Corporations such as The Sharper Image. These techniques are not Mickey Mouse. They are powerful. They are life altering. They can even be dangerous if they are not used properly. So, I'd like to welcome you to the "Best" of your life. I hope after you make your millions you still remember this book and tell everyone you know how it helped you. Enough already- let's get this party started.
14
Chapter One: The Best Business In The World
Before you read this chapter,
get a pen and a piece of paper.
These are the two main tools you need for this business. When you add together the pen ... the paper ... this book. .. and a simple idea for a product or service ... it could literally be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Traditional businesses like retail stores, manufacturing plants, restaurants, etc. require you to jump into the fire, with both feet, risking almost all of your money before you earn a dime ... and what's worse is you will not know if you are going to be a success until after you've risked most, if not all, of your start-up money ... if you're even lucky enough to have start-up money. And still worse, these traditional businesses cannot offer you the rapid forced growth and wild profits of the wonderful business this book teaches about. The business this book speaks of allows you to start small, and only after you have scientific proof and a valid and profitable idea, would you then gradually invest more and more of your money. In most cases, you'll be reinvesting profits. The business I speak of in this book allows you to get rich even when 99 out of 100 prospects don't want your product. The business I speak of in this book is the Direct Response business. Its a business that allows you to discover very quickly if you have a hit or a miss ... usually within 30 days. You can also find out if you have a hit or a miss for cheap ... most of the time you can find out for $2,000 or less.
15
Another plus is that your "offering" is what gets judged ... not youLet me explain .. , You can be of any descent and suffer 0% racism. You can be male or female and suffer 0% sexism. You can be straight or gay and suffer 0% homophobia. You can be a midget... a gimp ... bald ... fat ... cock-eyed ... buttugly ... toothless ... have bad breath ... etc. None of this will affect your chance of success in this business. You can also live anywhere ... even in a urn-bomber-type cabin in the middle of BFE ... 'and as long as you can get your letters to a Post Office and as long as you have access to a phone line ... your location will not have any effect on your success in this business. You can be a high-school drop out, like 1was, and with the right idea you can run circles around the Harvard MBA with the wrong idea ... You do not need any specific expertise in the product you plan to sell. I've manufactured and sold golf clubs while I never played a round of golf once. I've manufactured and sold vitamins, where I am not any kind of Scientist or Doctor. That's the beauty of this business. And guess what is best about this business? You can be sitting in your one bedroom, roach infested basement apartment right now ... but as soon as you craft the right letter, selling the right product, to the right people, for the right price, and at the right time in his or her life... you can be in possession of some intellectual property worth over $100 Million! And it'll take you just 7 to 10 days after you mail your letters to know what you have. Seriously. About five years ago, I was between businesses. I was not earning any money. I was a little discouraged. I created a letter for a product and I tested it and got 6-times my money back. It cost
16
$600 to mail 1000 letters and I got $3600 back, of which all was profit, once I subtracted the $600 mailing cost. Now, what I then knew was that the amount of names I could mail the letter to allowed me to sell 40,000 new people every month for $180. That means I'd make $7.2 Million in gross sales every 30 days. It would cost me $1.2 a month to advertise. So when everything was said and done, ] was looking at $6 Million profit every month. Pretty hard to sleep that night knowing I had 4 sheets of paper that were going to bring me over $70 Million. Twenty months later, I grossed over $77 Million and netted $48 Million in pure profit from this single sales letter. What did it cost me to create this letter? A pen ... a legal pad ... a good idea ... and the skills and secrets revealed in this very book! The Direct Response business is not a new business. Ben Franklin even had a mail order catalog! There are scores of books in bookstores you can buy for $10 or so that can tell you all about direct response ... or mail order as some call it. But what 1want to teach you is how I do it. I do it a little different. Right now, we're going to focus just on mailing sales messages for a product to a qualified mailing list. Later, we'll talk more about magazine advertisements and TV and radio commercials. In 2000, I had an idea for a dietary supplement. Actually I didn't even have the idea. I saw a product selling in health food stores for $60. I thought this was a hot product that was not getting marketed properly, It was buried on the back shelves of the store ... so I bought myself a bottle. Its best to sell products you cannot find in stores ... but since this one was so poorly placed in retail stores, I felt I could effectively sell it through direct response. The good thing about dietary supplements is that manufacturers cannot Patent the ingredients they use. I can come up with a great blend of herbs and spend hundreds of thousands in clinical studies and all it takes is someone to read the ingredient list on
r 17
the side of the bottle- which is required on the bottle by law ... and they can knock-me-off instantly. So, basically I can take a bottle of anything I find in the vitamin store or in any catalog and any local vitamin manufacturer can make the identical pill for $2 a bottle or so ... even if it is selling for $50 to $60 in stores! No need for research. No need for clinical studies (if the other company already sponsored one or there is one in the many medical journals). You can have your very own brand name dietary supplement for a few dollars a bottle. Anyway, back to my dietary supplement. I was quite amazed when I saw these pills advertised and sold for $60 when I could make them for $2 ... and even less in larger quantities! I made up a name for my "new" product and had labels made for the bottles through the pill manufacturer. Viola! My very own, trademarked brand name dietary supplement in less than a week's time! So, I crafted a sales letter for this product and located a few mailing lists to mail the sales letters to. Sometimes it's easier to come up with a product by looking at the different types of mailing lists on the market. For example, instead of thinking of a new product to sell, look at all the different types of mailing lists on the market and their sizes, and then fit a product to the list. I'll talk more in great detail about mailing lists later in this book. Anyway, the pills sold for $60 in my letter, and remember, I made them for $2. It cost $1.50 to ship them to the customer including the bubble bag. I charged $6.95 for shipping and handling, so this fee covered the 1-800 phone bill, the order taker's paycheck, the shipping fee, the credit card processing charge ... hell it even covered the cost to make the damn pills themselves! It's totally legal to do this. That's why it's called a shipping and handling fee. You can charge whatever you want for "handling" ...
18
even if your customer knows it costs just $2 to send his order and you charged him $5 ... the difference is the handling fee. So, basically, when a customer would call me and order these pills for $60, plus $6.95 for the shipping and handling ... all $60 of the selling price was pure eTO. eTO is short for Contribution To Overhead. eTO is what your business will net after you pay for goods sold. Out of this eTO, you still have to pay for advertising, postage, employees, etc. Most people are amazed when I tell them that 50% to 100% of your CTa may go to the advertising expense to bring in the customer! Who pays 50% for advertising? In this business, you'd be lucky if you can pay just 50% of your initial purchase eTO on advertising. Anyway, when I tested this new supplement on a handful of mailing lists, I was pleasantly surprised. This is what happened: At the current time I tested this product, every thousand stamps. It would cost $100 per thousand to.
postage cost $370 for
for names to mail the sales letters
It would cost about $100 per thousand to print and stuff the sales letter we sent to the names on these lists.
When we're all finished, it's safe to assume it's going to cost $600 to mail 1000 sales letters to qualified groups of prospects. Being my product sold for $60 ... I got to keep all $60 of it, as the cost to manufacture the product is covered in the shipping and handling
fee.
Common sense would tell you that when I mail 1000 letters for $600 ... I need at least 10 orders to break even and get my advertising dollars back.
]9
Lets say my product was a new diet pill. Not just any diet pill, but one that actually enlarges in size once it reaches your stomach so it feels like you are full all the time. Now, let's say the mailing lists we're mailing our sales letters to are made up of people who have bought diet pills in the past, so we know they are prime prospects. OK- we're mailing our hot, new diet pill to 1000 people who actually bought someone else's diet pill in the mail recently. Of the 1000, how many do you think would order our pill? Some would say 250 of the 1000. I'd say that they're crazy. Some would say 100. Again, they're crazy. Let's say that 98% of the people we mail our letters to, throw, our sales message right in the trash ... Let's say just 2% of our prospects decide to purchase our new, super diet pill. Let's do some math. Two percent of 1000 letters is 20 orders. Remember, I said earlier that we need at least 10 orders to break even. Since we received 20 ' orders, we just doubled our money ... but that's not the best part. When I sold my supplement, I was amazed when each customer purchased an average of 4.4 bottles over the next 6 months. This figure is called LeV or Lifetime Customer VaIue. 1'11tell you all about it later in this book. Anyway, from me months. compiled customer
when a customer thought he was buying a bottle of pills for $60 ... he was actually spending $180 over the next six He didn't know this ... but from statistical data I've from past customers, I was well aware of what each was worth.
When it was all said and done, each customer was worth $180 in CTO. Lets go back to the 2% who bought from my sales message. We've got 20 orders at $180. That's $3600 in CTO for every 1000 sales letters I mail. It costs $600 to mail 1000 letters, so we can safely say; 111profit $3000 for every 1000 letters I mail. That's $3 a letter on average. What are you going to do when you get a diet pill or a wrinkle serum to pull numbers like this when you test the Victoria'S Secret mailing list that has 900,000 FRESH names a
_,.,
20
month? Can you really make $2.7 Million from just one list? You bet your ass! And that example was for mailing sales letters to just one mailing list! There are many ways to sell products via Direct Response. You can sell products through magazine advertisements direct mail sales letters (like we just spoke about) ... radio spots television spots ... long format infomercials ... internet search terms ... telemarketing ... and many more we'll go over in this book. I used them all ... but only a handful are the ones that really work well. We'll talk all about magazine ads ... direct mail.,; radio ... television spots ... and some Internet promotion in this book. These are the best ways I've discovered to make money in this business. Basically, your ad or sales letter, or radio ad or TV ad is salesmanship multiplied. That's all that advertising is. Salesmanship in print ... or on TV... or on radio ... That's all. Forget all the fancy stuff Madison Avenue ad agencies may try to tell their clients. In a head-to-head, dollar-for-dollar competition, direct response techniques like the ones you 11learn in this book will always out pull the fancy shit these guys are churning out. Are you having a hard time believing you can really strike it rich in this business? Let me give you some examples of what people have done in the past, and how their lives changed. Proactiv Skin Care Solution: Proactiv is an acne treatment you've seen advertised over TV infomercials since 1997. The product was created by a couple of Dermatologists and is sold for $39.95. In their prime, they were selling 30,000 new kits a month. With reorders, I'm sure they were selling 90,000 kits! I'd guess they gross $50 Million or more in annual revenue. Do you need to be some Dermatologist to sell this product? Absolutely not. It does add to their credibility, but for a few cents on each kit sold, you can sure get your own Dermatologist to endorse your product. This skin care product is a good direct response product because the three bottles of cleanser they sell in the kit could cost $6 or so
21
to manufacture, and $2 to ship. A shipping and handling charge of $7.95 could easily be charged, so the $39.95 selling price is pure CTO. And this is a consumable product! Girls Gone Wild: This guy is in his early 30's and is making close to $100,000,000 a year. Yes, that's ONE HUNDRED MILLION. He owns two private jets, Ferraris, numerous homes allover the place ... and from what? Cheaply shot, cheaply produced videos of drunken college girls showing their breasts. What this guy does is offer 2 videos for $9.95 and then a new video every month for the regular price of $19.95. Now, it probably costs $2 to produce a VHS cassette and $1 to ship. To charge a $4 shipping and handling fee is realistic, so the entire $9.95 or $19.95 is 100% pure eTO. And he automatically sends 'his customers a new video every month! Carlton Sheets No Money Down Real Estate: Carlton discovered a way to buy real estate for no money down and instead of running around himself buying homes using his techniques, I'm sure he realized it was far easier and far more profitable to simply make a home study course and sell it via TV infomercials. Carlton has been on TV for over 10 years and I'd bet he's made 100 times more money telling others how to buy real estate for no money down than he has from actually using his own techniques ... which is fine. Remember the California gold rush? I'm sure the men selling the picks, shovels, and overalls made more money than the men who actually were in the mines trying to find the gold. Levis is still making jeans ... but all the miners and their fortunes (if they ever found any) are all long gone. While information products are great., , it is more of a challenge to create "back-end" sales ... that is products you can go back and sell to your customers. When we are selling pills, it's an easy resell. A video series ... again, an easy resell. Still- information products are one of the top direct response products because they are cheap to produce and they can have a limitless perceived value. A simple
22
sheet of paper may cost nothing to produce ... but when that simple sheet of paper is a winning lottery ticket; it can easily be worth $10 Million and more! Tae-Bo Videos: Billy Blanks was a struggling California exercise instructor, as most exercise instructors are. But what happens when you videotape your amazing exercise routine and sell it via direct response? If you were Billy, you'd be looking at selling 5 MILLION copies of your video and more! I'm sure over $100 Million was grossed with this amazing product. But did you know this: Billy was teaching this unique Karate and boxing inspired fitness techniques for years in Southern California gyms ... it took someone with directresponse smarts to say, "Hey, let's get a camera and film this guy. People allover the World would love to do this in their own homes!" Can you come up with a million-dollar idea? I hope so. What I'm here to do is tell you what type of products you need to make for this business to work for you. And once you have that winning idea ... there is no better set of tools you can get than this book to show you how to suck every ounce of money from your idea.
1 23
Chapter Two: Products and Arithmetic
In this chapter, we're going to talk about the types of products services that are best to promote through direct response.
and
,
I really do not care what I'm selling ... as long as it sells at a profit. To me, the product I'm offering is just a means to an end. I'm in this business to make a profit- hopefully a large one. I'm not married to arty "type" of product or service. If I test a sales letter or an advertisement for a product and if it fails ... I'll abandon the idea like a red headed stepchild, and I advise you do the same. Of course, the best products to sell are your own products. You need big margins in this business, and selling someone else's product is never going to allow you to make the large margins needed to cover your advertising expenses. It's so much easier to manufacture your own branded product. If you were to sell dietary supplements or some form of a wrinkle cream or serum, it's an absolute must the product is your own. Especially when it is so easy to do so. If you are seIling information on how to do something, it has to be your own. Buying someone else's book and trying to market it through direct response is the kiss of death, before you even .sperid a dollar testing it. You must have pretty damn close to 100% profit margins; meaning the cost of goods has to be made up in the shipping and handling fees you'll charge your customers. Let's say that you are involved in some Multi-Level Marketing company and they have a super-duper diet pill they'll sell to you for $15 a bottle and you can sell it for $25 or so. If someone were to ask me what I thought of a product like this, I'd tell him or her not to bother. .
24
But if the product is a desired product that could pull 2% or so in orders from your direct response sales letters, I'd advise you to copy their blend of ingredients and make the product on your own, so you can keep all the revenue generated from your customers. My friend and mentor Gary Halbert says if he were given just one thing when he is creating a product for sale through direct response, he'd want a starving crowd. In order for a direct response product to work well, you have to have prospects with passion indexes through the roof. Golfers are nuts ... people who need to lose weight are nuts people who want to get rich in a certain type of business are nuts . Also, I've learned that people will not pay a cent for a preventative ... but they'd give their lives for the cure. Seriously. Let'spretend you have a product that would prevent cancer. Your sales would be minimal and probably not large enough to make a profit. But if you had the cure for cancer and your prospects believed it ... and the group of people you're marketing it to all had some form of cancer. they'd pay an entire year's pay for what you have. Now, of course, there is no cure for cancer. .. especially one you can manufacture. I'm just using this as an example. I like products that lead to continual sales. A consumable product is excellent, because as you'll discover in this business, it is 10 times easier to get satisfied customers to reorder than it is to keep attracting new customers, and the huge profits usually come on the back end ... meaning the continual sales. I had a product I spent $1.2 Million advertising every month. The sales from the initial sale resulted in $2.4 Million. Now, if the business stopped there, I'd make a good living ... but what if the product could be resold to the same customers month after month after month? That's where the big money comes in.
25
Lucky for me, the product I was making $2.4 Million a month with led to $4.8 Million more in back end sales as they reordered every month. Here's a quick way you can see if your idea has any chance of success before you spend an ounce of your time and a cent of your money testing: . This business
is al1 about arithmetic.
Your product has to sell for more than $50. Nowadays, it's so hard to make a profit with a unit sale of under $50. Even if you were selling a video for $19.95 and you got to keep all $19.95. Let's do some math.
Say you're selling this video for $19.95 through direct response sales letters. You need $600 in orders for every 1000 letters you mail. In order to breakeven, you're going to need 3% of your prospects to buy. In order for you to make some serious money, you need 6% to buy. Six percent is not likely to respond. Now, maybe if you can get 3% to buy the video and this video you are selling is a monthly video, meaning your customers will automatically receive a new video every month and you'll rebill their credit cards. Maybe you can get this to work. .. but again, 3% to buy is a high number. Most direct response
offers get 1% to 2% in orders.
Here's some great numbers I try to shoot for with any project I'm looking to test. Let's say I've got a pill that I can sell for $59.95 and all $59.95 is pure eTO. AlII need to get in response (orders) is 1%. That's realistic. Now, let's say that each customer buys an average of 4 bottles from you over the next months. Let's say the three additional bottles they buy will cost $39.95 on an automatic shipment. Your customer life value would be approximately $180. If you got 1% to buy, you're looking at spending $60 to "buy" the customer in advertising expenses. When the customer is worth
26
$180, you're left with a 300% return on your advertising This is realistic.
dollar.
I remember when I had a pill that was getting 2% response. 1 plotted a mathematical equation that would allow me to make $100,000,000 a year. Here it is: If I were to get 40,000 fresh customers every month at $60 and if I could spend no more than $1.2 Million to do so, I had a customer acquisition cost of $30. Now, I'd automatically enroll these customers into an automatic shipment club where they'd receive a fresh supply of my pills every 30 days for a reduced price of $39.95. Each customer bought and the initial bottle at 40,000 fresh customers would peak at 160,000
4 bottles on average. Three bottles at $40 $60 would equal $180. If I could bring in a month, my database of active customers bottles a month being sold.
Now, as long as 1 brought in 40,000 new customers every month to fill in the 40,000 that would fall off every month ... I could maintain the database of 160,000 shipments. When you add up the 40,000 people at $180 ] would make $7.2 Million each and every month ... or $86.4 Million a year. Now, I'm not counting the shipping and handling fees the customers pay. If I were to include this money, I'd gross over $100 Million annually. I got the company to this size in less than 12 months by getting no more and no less than 2% of my prospects to buy. I needed just 1% to cover advertising cost. If you need more than 2% of your prospects breakeven ... I'd forget it.
to buy in order to
You should try to promote products that are solutions to problems your prospects are dying to solve. And when I say dying ... I mean DYING.
How can you discover the magic product to sell? I like to make a list. On one side, I like to write down people's desires. On the other side, I write down problems people have. If I write down 20 desires and 20 problems, I usually can get moving in the right direction. Another tactic you can do is go to your local Library and go to the reference section and look for a book called the SRDS Direct Marketing List Source. This book is the Bible in the direct response business. What this book is a book that comes out every 60 days and it lists the mailing lists that are on the market for rent. This book is the only legitimate place mailing list owners advertise their lists for use by marketers like you and 1. This book will have lists that are from other companies ... magazine subscriber lists ... compiled lists ... etc. In this book, you'll find the mailing lists of Adam and Eve Catalog Buyers, Victoria's Secret Catalog Buyers, Subscriber Lists to almost any magazine, etc. What you can do is sit yourself down with this giant book and just go through it. Look at the different types of lists that are available. It may be easier for you as a beginner to fit a product to a mailing list or group of mailing lists. Here's an example. Let's say there's a list of the men who buy from the Richlee Shoe Company. This is a company that sells Elevator Shoes. These shoes have a hidden "lift" in them so the men who wear them appear to be 1"... 2"... even three inches taller. Now, it's safe to assume, the men who buy these shoes through this catalog are short. .. or at least they crave to be taller. They crave to be taller so much; they'll actually buy special shoes to do so!
Now, I don't know if this company has their customer list on the market, so let's just use this as an example. Let's say they have 20,000 people buying from their catalog every month. That's a decent number of fresh prospects each and every month. Why don't you come up with some sort of product that you think can make these guys taller? I know there are stretching manuals out there on the Internet that show men how to stretch their cartilage and thus, grow taller. Let's say that there are special amino acids that you can take to keep your cartilage healthy and dense. What about if you get your hands on the exercise manual and bring it to a personal trainer and have him perform the exercise and you have it filmed. You can burn the video onto a DVD. You can also then make a dietary supplement that would aid in keeping the cartilage healthy and dense. You can then create a "system" where for $59.95, the customer can get the DVD of exercises ... and a bottle of the "supplement" they need to keep the cartilage healthy. Now, your sales letter can automatically enroll your customers into a preferred customer club where they will receive a fresh supply of pills every month for $39.95. Let's say each customer lets you ship him or her on average 6 months worth of pills. The first bottle will get you $59.95 and the remaining 5 will get you $39.95 each. This all comes to $259.70. Now, when you sell this product, you'll charge a $6.95 shipping and handling fee. This fee will cover the cost to manufacture the DVD and the cost to manufacture the bottle of pills ... plus it will also cover the cost to actually ship the product to them. It should cost you no more than $2 in postage to get the DVD and the bottle of pills to the customer's front door. Being you are doing this, the $59.95 for the DVD and the first bottle of pills is pure eTO. Then for the additional 5 bottles they1l1et you send them, you'll again charge the $6.95 shipping and handling fee... so the entire $39.95 for the additional monthly bottles will also be 100% pure eTO.
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Now, lets say you create a great sales letter with the tips you're going to master later in this book. It's going to cost you $600 to mail 1000 sales letters. Being that you are getting $259.70 ... how many orders do you need to breakeven? You need just 2.32 orders per 1000 letters to breakeven. Let's say you get 2% of your prospects to order. .. that's $259.70 multiplied by 20 orders. This comes to $5194 in CTO. When you divide this figure by the $600 it cost you to get those orders, you're looking at a promotion that yields 8.7 times it's cost! That's a great number! Now $5194 in CTO minus the $600 to solicit the prospects leaves you with $4594 in profit for every 1000 letters you mail. Remember, the mailing list gets 20,000 fresh prospects each and every month. There's 20 thousands in 20,000, so that means you'll make 20 times the $4594 you profit per 1000 letters. Do the math. You'll earn $91,880 each and every month mailing just 20,000 names. And don't forget, this was just one mailing list. Maybe there are ot.her mailing list.s for "short" people. I know I've seen a few clothing catalogs out there for men 5-foot-7 and under. If a man is compelled to actually buy clothing from a catalog like this ... being short angers him ... and when you offer him a solution to his problem ... and if it. really works ... you're going to get filthy rich. I know some of the people reading this book will say that diet pills are huge. It seems like everyone is fat nowadays. But, on the flip side of this ... every other direct marketer also knows of this and even though diet pills are one hell of a powerful product ... there are only so many slices of the pie ... and when there are 100 people mailing to the diet lists offering their products ... your offering for this type of product is greatly diluted. This is a business where success or failure is as thin as a razor's edge. The difference between success and failure is not the difference of getting 1% to buy versus getting 40% to buy. No. It's more like getting .5% to buy is failure ... and getting 2% to buy is
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massive success. We're all competing for the magic two percent to buy. Let's do another example. This one is for a moneymaking opportunity. Let's say that you have assembled a course on Real Estate Tax Deed Sales. I don't care if you're not an "expert" on Tax Deeds ... you can make yourself one by researching the product. This is one of the largest hurdles people getting started in this business face. They feel they are not "qualified" to sell certain types of products. But the last time I checked, if you were to sell a course on Tax Deeds, I do not recall anyone saying you have to have a Diploma of Expertise ... because there's no such thing! Back to the course. It would consist of a few CDs and maybe a directory of the states that have Tax Deed Sales. To create this directory, all you have to do is order someone else's course and copy the information in the directory they offer. I don't think they "own" the addresses, website addresses, and phone numbers for the states that offer Tax Deed Sales ... right? Of course. Now, as for the CDs ... what you can do is order a few different courses on this subject and simply make notes of the important issues in each of the courses ... and when you are all done ... just assemble all the stuff you put together into one super package you can call your own! Heck, you can even locate a few "experts" in Tax Deed Sales and call them and see if they'l11et you buy an hour of their time over the phone. You'll ask them all the questions you would have if you were going into this business. Tape record them and simply turn those cassette tapes into your CDs. Are you providing an expert's information to your customers? Of course you are. Where the expert may say he wants $200 for an hour of his time ... and if you figure you need 4 hours of his time ... for $800 you can create an excellent product you can then sell to thousands of people for $180 or so. This course should cost about $8 to manufacture. This will include the CD duplication, the printing of the directory, and the case to hold everything in place. What you'd then do is get the mailing lists
1--31
of opportunity companies opportunity magazines.
and subscriber
lists from business
What you'll do next is come up with your offer. A good price for a course like this would be three credit card payments of $59.95, plus $9.95 shipping and handling. The $9.95 will cover the cost to manufacture the CDs, the directory, the case, and of course- the actual shipping charges to get the thing delivered to your customer. Basically, all $59.95 x 3 is yours to keep as eTO. If you got 1% to buy ... you're doing well. If you got 2% to buy ... you're doing great. Let's say you learned how to write sales letters from a real pro (ha ha) ... and you got 2% of your prospects to buy this Real Estate course. This is realistic because you'll only be targeting people who subscribe to business magazines ... and people who have shown they are interested in opportunities because they bought them in the past. Two percent buy at $59.95 x 3 ... which is $179.85. You got 20 orders for the 1000 letters you mailed. That equals $3597 in gross sales. When you minus the $600 it cost you to acquire these 20 orders, you're left with $2997 in pure profit for every 1000 letters you mailed. Let's say you mailed the ENTREPRENEUR Magazine subscriber list, which gets 50,000 fresh names a month ... and lets say you tested two other mailing lists of opportunity buyers for a grand total of 200,000 prospects to mail this Real Estate letter to. Now, 200,000 is 200 thousands. You'll make $2997 multiplied by 200. We're talking $599,400 in profit each and every month! You'11get to keep most of the profit. Costs that eat at your profits are customer refunds ... which will not exceed 10% in practically all cases ... You'll have to pay for a few employees to answer the calls ... you'll pay the electric bill, etc. If you were getting $599,400 in profit... it's safe to assume you'll get to put around $500,000 in your pocket to spend as you wish, each and every month!
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This Real Estate course did not have a back end to resell... but you can look at the installment payments as your back end ... because your prospects will not think they are paying $179.85 for the course ... their mind tells them they are paying $59.95 ... three times. But that shouldn't stop you from still trying back end products. You can put together a newsletter. .. videotapes of a seminar ... etc. Another issue you have to take into consideration when looking for a product is how many ways are out there for you to make money from. If there is just one mailing list and it has just 2500 fresh names added to it a month, this product is probably not worth your time. If there are no lists that have even the slightest chance of working for you, there's probably good reason for it- nobody wants to buy that type of product. If there are no publications, or publications that are smaller than 50,000 paid circulation every month or every other month, consider another product. When it comes to selecting a product to sell, your options are endless ... as long as the numbers work and as long as there are people you can promote it to. You have to do your own math. If you need more than 2% to breakeven and if you do not have a killer back end ... or if you cannot locate a large mailing list or lists in the SRDS... forget the idea no matter how much you think it is good. A friend of mine was telling me about his friend who makes these "really cool" clocks. He told his friend about me and his friend was wondering if he could sell his clocks via direct response sales letters. Let's do the math: He made these clocks for $15. It took him three hours to make the clocks. There are no mailing lists of people hot to buy clocks. Even if there were, these clocks would have a hard time selling for more than $50. We have to subtract $15 to make the clocks from the $50 selling price and we're left with $35. Let's say we can
33
charge $10 for shipping and handling, and let's assume it would really cost $5 to send the clock. .. so we can add another $5 to the $35 CTO for a grand total of $40 CTO. When we mail 1000 sales letters as a test, we'll need 15 orders just to breakeven. So, lets say we need to do double over.,; which means we need to make back double what we spent on mailing the sales letters. That means we'll need 30 orders for this clock. THREE PERCENT to buy. Do you really think he's going to get three percent of his prospects (if there were any) to buy his stupid clock, which he could never make in large quantities anyway? Are you crazy? Of course not. So, I had to offend him and tell him "what time it was." Bad product. Bad, Bad, Bad. Another thing I look for in a product to market is that it has to be small and easy and cheap to ship to the consumer. I think computers are the worst product to sell via direct response. They're huge. They're heavy. The profit margin on them is next to nothing. And what's worse than anything is that they depreciate in value by the minute! I could never be in a business like the computer business ... but the software business is another story! Microsoft has the life. It's cheap to copy. It's light to ship. You can sell upgrades to new versions. What I would tell you to do is keep your eyes open for products you have purchased in the past that fit the parameters explained in this chapter. See if you can create your own version of it. You don't have to be an expert or have any "qualifications" that you may have thought you needed. When I first got into the dietary supplements business, I thought you needed some sort of expertise in this field ... boy was I wrong. Most vitamin manufacturers have "house blends" of certain types of products that you can simply "private label". All vitamin companies have their own diet pill blends ... their own arthritis blends ... etc. All it takes is a brand name and a label and you're in the supplements business.
34
Make your products easy to create. Don't come up with some robotic vacuum cleaner that will take thousands of dollars in development. Take the easy road and shoot fish in a barrel. Here are some ideas: 1. A karate instructor creates a video series showing how even a wimp can kick some ass. 2. A video course on how to pick up women regardless finances, your looks, or your nationality.
of your
3. A wrinkle serum that fills in wrinkles making you look 10 years younger in just 60 seconds time. 4. A pill that enlarges a woman's breast size naturally ... without the risk or expense of implant surgery. 5. A sports handicapper offers $39.95 a month access to his special website revealing sports "picks". The sky is the limit ... as long as the mailing list or magazine is there to advertise in and as long as the mathematics pan out. If you really feel you have a great product and it'll cost you $75 to make, and you think you can sell it for $300, plus $25 shipping and handling- even though it goes against the principles I teach of in this chapter ... if you feel strongly about it- maybe go for it. You'll still make $225-$240 in eTO for every order. .. and guess what? If you get 1% to buy ... you'd earn $2250 to $2400 in eTO per 1000 letters mailed. When you subtract the $600 for the sales letters .. l you're still left with $1650 - $1800 per every 1000 letters. I know a lot of people who wouldn't cry about these numbers. And we're not even going into talking about the back end this product mayor may not have. So, please ... NOTHING IS SET IN STONE. Breakthroughs happen when you break rules.
only
35
Anot.her hurdle you may encounter is fear of not "being good enough" to create a product and sell it as your own. If you were a golfer, and you were going to create a few videos about driving and you're worrying the really "great" golfers will be laughing at you ... forget it. Over 90% of golfers cannot break 100 and for the most part are hackers. Or how about if you create a product you feel is not to your high standards ... I wouldn't worry too much either, but let me clarify a little. You should always shoot to sell and/or create the absolute best product you can make, but sometimes this just cannot happen. Reasons may be, in order to hit a certain price point, you have to skimp on a few key parts ... or use a lower grade. There's only one person who has the right to tell you your product is crap ... and that's your customer. If you're getting more than 10% of your customers asking for their money back, maybe you should look into what they are complaining about and see if you can fix it... but even if you cannot, later in this book, I'll tell you how to retain as many customers as possible. Rolls Royce makes one hell of a handcrafted car. Pontiac makes an affordable car. The Rolls Royce's interior is covered in wood veneers, wool, leather, and sheepskin. The Pontiac is cheap plastic that will rattle and fall apart in 50,000 miles. But there are huge differences in price between the two cars. Pontiac could never sell as many cars as they do if they were to make the car the absolute best they can. Any car manufacturer (even the Americans) can make a car to rival a Rolls Royce (remember Dusenburgs?) ... but they choose not to as they cannot do it at a profit, There's nothing wrong with selling an inferior product and I'll probably be the only direct marketer with enough balls to tell you this in writing. Hey, as long as you do not get more than 10% of your customers to ask for a refund and as long as you are not
36
misleading your customers
in your advertisements
... by all means,
sell, sell, sell' Consider this and remember it: Those with superior marketing skills will always make millions of dollars more with an average product than someone with a far superior product and poor or no advertising skills.
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Chapter Three: What Its Like When One Of These Things Explodes
In the last two chapters and in the introduction of this book, I have been "peppering" you with my past successes. And before we go any further, I think I should take you inside one of my largest successes ... step-by-step ... and show you only what a few people on the "inside" experienced. Since 1994, I've been selling all different types of products through direct response- wholesale membership clubs for consumer electronics ... computer software ... how-to books and tapes ... premium car wax ... you name it, I sold it ... but I had my largest success in dietary supplements. Over the years, I've had people try to persuade me to get into dietary supplements ... but I could never really get excited about this type of product- unless it was something radically different. Radically different was on the way when my Fiance told me about a product her hairdresser was taking and that all the women in the salon were hot to try. I'm not going to go into what the product did ... because that is not important right now. Anyway, the product she was telling me about claimed to do some amazing stuff. I was a little skeptical, but when I did some research on the marketer of this product's website, I saw that they had performed a clinical study that proved their product delivered on its claims. I looked around in several vitamin stores looking for this product with no success. I had to eventually go to a different state to buy this stuff! It cost a whopping $60 for a one-month supply. My Fiance was also very interested in trying this supplement for herself. This is a plus when deciding on a product to market ... if
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you or your spouse wants to try it with a passion ... there's a good chance others will feel the same. So, before I even thought about potentially marketing this type of product, I had to see with my own eyes that my Fiance received the desired result the product claimed. Within a few weeks we both noticed the product did in fact just what it claimed to do ... and it did just as wen as their clinical study said it would. This product was getting me more and more excited. At this point in my life, I never marketed or manufactured dietary supplements, so I was a little confused about the manufacturing process. I figured since these things were costing $60 in the store, they had to cost the manufacturer $8 to $15 to make ... boy was I ever wrong! After locating a vitamin manufacturer in our local phone book, I told the man about the product I wanted to manufacture. Turns out he knew of the product and even had a "house blend" with the same ingredients already made. All we had to do is have a graphic artist create some labels and smack them on the bottles. But I would still say the best part about this discovery was that these pills ... the entire one month supply ... in a bottle ... with a label affixed to it.,; didn't cost the $8 to $15 I thought it would cost to make ... it cost just $2 a bottle when I bought them in 1000 lots ... and that price would go down even further when we'd order larger quantities. Now, this product had four things going for it so far ... 1. It was a consumable product- Our customers would have to reorder a fresh bottle every month if they wanted to keep seeing the benefits this product delivered. 2. It was cheap to manufacture, yet had a high perceived value- I was able to make a full size bottle for two bucks ... and the best part was that I could sell it for $60. And of that $60, I got to keep
39
1000/<) of it as 1 made the $2 to manufacture the product shipping and handling fee the customer would pay!
in the
3. It was small and cheap to ship. J think at the time, the Post Office was charging us $1.87 to ship a bottle in a bubble bag. I was charging $6.95 to cover shipping and handling, so the cost to buy the bag, the cost of Postage, the cost of the product itself, was all covered in this fee. And these bottles are small, so they didn't require a huge warehouse to stock them. You could easily stick 2000 bottles in a one-car garage bay. 4. Women had a huge problem with what this product was to help them with ... and there was only one other product on the market at that time offering to help with this problem And like I was saying before, this other product's marketing was Mickey Mouse. A bunch of "granola nuts" as I call them who knew everything about herbs and didn't know a thing about advertising and marketing ... but I sure as hell did! So what I did at this point was get my hands on 1000 bottles of my "new" product. Actually, I didn't "buy" them; I just reserved them with the supplier. 1 sat at my brand new (at the time) orange iMac and just got typing. 1 wrote a really good sales letter and found three mailing lists that I thought were worth testing first. I got 9000 sales letters printed up and I ordered the three mailing lists. I was going to test 3000 names from each list. You can test with as little as 1000 letters, but since I was already an established marketer. .. 3000 is actually being frugal. One thing to remember: In order for response results from a test to be valid ... you must receive at least 20 orders. So, if your goal were to get 1% to buy ... you'd have to mail at least 2000 letters. The key to this business is testing small and then rolling out in larger quantities. If you mail 2000 letters and get 2.4% response, you're looking at 48 orders. That's enough to scientifically sayan a roll out, you'll get between 2.2% and 2.6%. If you were to mail 500
r .c\O
letters and get 12 orders (sti112.4%) ... the 12 orders are NOT enough to scientifically gauge a roll out's response percentage. Let's get back to my story. I mailed 9000 letters to 3 lists of 3000 names each. All 9000 got the same exact letter. .. I had a coding device (which 111 talk about later), which told me which mailing list they ordered from when they were ordering. The orders started coming in, and I always like to sit-in on tests ... as they are the very foundation of a milliondollar promotion. You want to make sure everything is right. I once deemed a sales letter selling golf clubs a failure because 1 didn't get any orders from a test mailing. Little did I know, we had the wrong 800# on the letter. The letter with the right phone number was a success. Nowadays I watch every test as if it were a child fresh off her training wheels. The first few orders start coming in. I vividly remember a lady saying how much she identified with the writer of the sales letter. .. and how it almost made her cry. She busted out her credit card immediately. Sure, a woman may have signed the letter we sent out ... but it was written by me ... a burley ... hairy-chested ... Italian guy. I found this kind of funny. I guess that's when you know you are a good copywriter. Sure, I got a lot of orders, but the final response didn't impress me much ... I was thinking I'd get 2% to buy ... I ended up with a lot less. List #1 got just
10 orders and I needed 30 for breakeven.
List #2 got just 15 orders and I needed 30 for breakeven. List #3 got 30 orders and broke even. This is why you have to test different mailing lists ... you can have a hit on one list ... and a disaster on another list... even if they are in theory the same type of people on them! Logic makes no sense in this business and even seasoned Professionals like me fail to bring in enough orders from time to time.
41
So we had a list that broke even. Many direct marketers say that breaking even is 90% if success is 100%. Now you have to do things to better the promotion. We tried to up sell the customers to larger quantities of bottles. Instead of buying just one bottle for $60 right now ... we tried to get them to order 4 bottles for $139.95 ... but we weren't successful. In the dietary supplements business, we found it hard to sell women numerous bottles upfront- even if they are at a reduced price because they are skeptical if this product will work for them ... so we went to Plan B. I was discouraged the up sells didn't work. But I had an idea to automatically enroll the customers into a Preferred Customer Club where they would "qualify" for future month's supplies at a $20 discount and I went on to say that they would receive these future supplies automatically. I worded this like it was all for their benefit ... while, yes, they got a discount ... but I got an open-ended contract with them.
If a woman tries a supplement,
while she may not want to buy 4 bottles upfront ... when those pills or cream or whatever it is proves to her that it works, she'll be standing in line, begging you to take her money for a fresh supply next month. Here was the wording for my paragraph:
"And if you're one of the first 200 people to order, you'll receive FREE ENROLLMENT into our Preferred Customer Club where you'll qualify to receive a full $20 discount on all your future bottles of (product name). And so you don't go a day without (product name) in your system, you'll automatically receive a fresh bottle every 30-days and your credit card will be billed the Club Member Price of $39.95 plus $6.95 S/H- not the $59.95 fee nonmembers have to pay. There are no minimum amounts of bottles to buy and you can cancel at any time. The number to call is 1-800123-4567, and you can call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
42
The addition of this paragraph was the only difference between the initial sales letter that broke even. I ordered another batch of fresh names from the list broker and had these new letters printed with the magic paragraph. We mailed out 3000 and kept our fingers crossed. You see while a back end is a must in this business ... an "auto-ship" makes the back end 100 times more profitable. Notice how the paragraph was worded as if I was doing them a favor of making sure their fresh bottle was there on time. While it is true, they were getting the auto delivery and a reduced price ... I was the real winner, because I got to rebill their credit card automatically every month until they called and told me to stop. This is super profitable and absolutely legal to do. Anyway ... lets get back to what happened when Lrernailed 3000 sales letters with this added paragraph.
the
I instructed our order takers not to mention the Preferred Customer Club unless the caller asked about it. In the letter, they could not have found the 800# had they not read the added paragraph because I stuck the 800# in that added paragraph. The reason why I didn't want our order takers to bring up the Preferred Customer Club was that if someone called to order and didn't ask any questions about it, my words in the letter did the proper amount of selling. If this club was a turn off, they would have never called to order ... or they would have at least asked if they could opt out of the club, which a small percentage did. And not only all this, but I sure didn't want an order taker to "uri-sell" what I did in the letter. When you roll these sales letters out in large quantities ... you can't answer all the orders yourself. You will have strangers answering phone who don't know how to talk about some things as good as you could. So the new orders started coming in ... and we didn't mention anything about the Preferred Customer Club. The first caller placed her order and hung up ... only to call back immediately. I overheard our order taker saying "Preferred Customer Club" ... and I thought to myself ... "Ah... she's calling back to opt out of the club." Once the order taker was off the phone, I went over and asked her what the lady was caIling back for. I almost hit the floor when she told me ... the lady called back and said ...
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"WAS lONE OF THE FIRST 200 CALLERS? I'M IN THAT PREFERRED CUSTOMER CLUB, RIGHT?~ These women actually wanted to be in the club! Good, good, good! Now while this letter may breakeven and bring back just enough orders to cover the mailing expense ... I automatically reship them ALL a fresh bottle every 30 days for $40! After a few months, I checked back to see how many bottles (months) these women would remain taking my supplement. I was amazed when I saw they were on this product an average of 4.4 months. I rounded it off to 4 months. So, they would call and order a $50 bottle initially, then I'd send them 3 more bottles over the next 90 days for $40 each. Since it cost me $50 to bring in the $50 initial sale (breakeven). _. the three $40 sales added up to $120 ... which was an over 300% return on my initial advertising dollar. Where else can you earn a 300% monthly ROl. .. That's an annual 3600% ROI... and the promotion is just a breakeven ... not even one of my bigger successes! . I went on to build an auto ship database of 10,000 women receiving this product monthly for an annual sales figure of over $5 Million! Had I only tested one mailing list ... I would have not discovered the one that broke even ... Had I not thought of the Preferred Customer Club ... I would not have discovered I could still make 300% ROJ. I was able to build this product to 10,000 sales a month, by bringing in just 2500 new customers each month from a mailing list of 25,000 which I got 1% to buy. The 2500 customers received an average of 4 bottles total ... so 2500 multiplied by the 4 month customer life, we came up with 10,000 monthly sales. While this product was a good one- making me and my 50/50 partner $10,000 in weekly pay for each of us ... it was just a stepping-stone for my next dietary supplement.
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The product I just told you about was my first attempt at dietary supplements and after having a hit with the first product, I was fascinated with this business. I was hot to come up with my next success. This time, 1 thought I'd try to do a supplement that men would buy. After all..; I am a man and maybe 1 can write a better letter because I really know what they are feeling ... where I could only go off what women told me they felt when I wrote the last letter. I immediately noticed there were a ton more mailing lists and magazines to advertise the second supplement. I had my vitamin manufacturer develop a blend of herbs for me- it cost nothing, as I would manufacture t,he product through them. I wrote the sales letter. It was basically the very same offer I had for the first supplement ... the first bottle for $59.95 plus $6.95 shipping and handling and then they would be automatically enrolled into my Preferred Customer Club and receive automatic monthly shipments. I would have been happy if this product brought in the same breakeven response the first one for the women did ... as this product had 10 times more lists to break even on ... thus getting larger amount of club members on the auto ship. I mailed the letter to four different lists in quantities of 3000 each ... List # 1: Maxim Magazine, List #2: Playboy Magazine, List #3: Adam & Eve Catalog Buyers and List 4: Frederick's of Hollywood "male" Catalog Buyers. The end results 30 days later were amazing ... List # 1: We needed 30 orders to breakeven ... we got 60! List #2: We needed 30 orders to breakeven ... we got 60! List #3: We needed 30 orders to breakeven ... we got 90! List #4: We needed 30 orders to breakeven ... we got 90!
-\5
These numbers were phenomenaL.. but the most amazing thing was that I also got these customers to buy on average 4 bottles through the Preferred Customer Club! Each customer was worth $180 to us and each 3000-name test cost us just $1800 to mail! You do the math. Naturally, I rolled this promotion out rapidly. Maxim had a mailing list of 150,000 new names a month. Playboy has the same. Adam & Eve had 90,000 fresh names every month ... and Frederick's was less, so we mailed them every once in a while. But just the 3 lists supplied me with over 390,000 names to mail each and every month. So we mailed 390,000 names. It cost us 60 cents each, for a grand total of $234,000. And we took in on average 2% response at $180 (over 4 months). A whopping 7,800 orders! This came to $1,404,000 in pure CTO. After I took out the mailing cost ... we were left with $1,170,000 in profit each and every month- as faithful as clockwork. After all..; as long as these two magazine keep getting new subscribers (which they will, and this will even increase} ... and as long as the catalog company we mail to stays in business (they've been around for over 25 years already) ... we're going to make almost $1.2 Million in profit a month! Now I thought I was hot shit ... but this was nothing. I immediately stuck advertisements
in all the men's magazines ... full page ads ... and they all pulled the same profit ratio as the direct mail (about 6 times) ... then Iwent to three page ads in each magazine and they all pulled a sales to ad cost ratio of 600% as well. I stuck this product on 60-second radio spots. We were getting a 600% return on our advertising cost. I stuck this product on 60-second TV spots. We were getting a 600% return on our advertising cost.
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We ended up spending $1.25 Million a month on TV, radio, magazine, Internet, and direct mail advertising. We brought in $7.5 Million in sales ... over $4 Million of it was money my partner and I split 50/50. Yes, I was making about $24 Million a year. It took just 24 months to get the company this size. I started it with the 9000 test letters that cost me $5,400 to mai1. I reinvested my profits. I had no venture capitalists. I sold no stock. I did not take any money out of my savings to build this company. It was all self-financed. We ended up employing 100 people. We were the largest singular Federal Express shipper. We were the largest customer of our contract manufacturerwe made up 60% of their sales. These guys were very young and just getting started in the manufacturing business. I think when they built their plant, they were anticipating business to be easier than it was, so they overbuilt this plant and it was literally empty when I first went to visit them. Good thing for them I gave them my business. It saved their company and within a few months, they were driving brand-new Porsche ragtops and BMWs. Even our Federal Express rep was making deep 6-figures in commissions- her husband even retired she was making so much money! It seems as if everyone got rich! When one of these promotions "pop" ... you'll be amazed at what it feels like. I'm serious ... like when a TV spot goes off and you look down at the phone system and you see 200 lights flashing ... these are callers with their credit cards in hand wanting to GIVE YOU their money! I remember being at the office one night and we just picked up a new channel to run our commercials on. I was there that night because I was taking delivery of a brand-new Bentley from an out of state dealership ... so the truck arrived at like 9pm ... and I was out front in the street watching this $220,000 car come ofTthe truck as I was on the walkie-talkie with my night manager as she was saying, "EVERY LINE IS LIT! EVERYONE IS ON THE PHONE TAKING AN ORDER!" What a nice night. New car. Huge success in business. This combo- the car and the phones ringing off the hook, beat sex that night.
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While you mayor may not wish to have this huge conglomerate like I built ... I can tell you how to do it better than anyone else can. I ACTUALLY DID IT. I suffered all the bruises when I messed things up and got careless. III pass along all my successes and I'll pass along all of my pains- so you can avoid them (or at least try to). As for this company ... it went on to gross $8 Million a month until the product eventually lost its luster as it matured in the market as every product does. Would I build another company this big ever again? I don't know. I really didn't like some of the politics that started to develop when there are 100 people under one roof ... but when an opportunity reveals itself to you ... you have to milk every cent out of it. It's orgasmic ... it feels so good ... you just can't stop ... until there's no feelings left.
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Chapter Four: All About Mailing Lists
In this chapter, we're going to be covering probably the most important part of direct mail success or failure. A great sales letter, selling a great product, to a poor list wi11never do as well as a so-so letter, selling a so-so product to a HOT mailing list. If you're going to get ripped-off in this business, this is one of the four places it will happen- on mailing lists (I'll cover all four in deeper detail later, the other three are: at the letter shop, at the Post Office, or in unaudited magazine circulation claims). Anyway ... we're now talking about mailing lists, so lets move on. First of all, never consider a mailing list if it is not listed in the SRDS Direct Mail List Source book. If you're looking to test one of those mailing list companies advertised in Entrepreneur Magazine or Small Business Opportunities Magazine ... I'd advise you to save your money and keep focused in the SRDS book. The mailing lists advertised in the opportunity magazines are usually compiled very poorly and trust me- from my experience, I never got one of them to work, and I don't know of anyone who has. If you're just getting started in this business, and are still looking for a product to sell... I'd tell you to spend a few days in the SRDS book. Flip through the pages and see what types of lists are on the market. Fit the product to the list. You'll have more success going this route rather than trying to come up with a product and then trying to fit the list to the product. Remember, its better to have a good list with bad writing skills and a poor product than it is to be the best copywriter in the world, with a hot product, to the wrong list.
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This business is not about selling "your" product through the mail. .. it's more like selling to mailing lists products that would compliment their past purchases. Anyway, I like BIG lists. I like BIG HOTLINE lists. When you're looking through the SRDS book, you'11 see the counts for each list. These counts will be the Universe (all the names on the list, regardless of how long ago they were added), you'll see the 3, 6, 12 and maybe even the 24 month count- which is pretty easy to understand ... and you Il see the HOTLINE count. The HOTLINE count is the one I'm interested in. Because if I have a hot letter and product that works when mailed to this list ... what good is it if I run out of names in a few weeks once I mail the 12 month count? Or what about if their HOTLINE count were so small... it would get wiped out as soon as you test it in small test quantities? I don't understand why, but every time I ask for a "reco" from a list broker, they always send me these data cards for lists that are 5000 12-month names ... what the hell am I going to do with this list? I'd probably get 4% of it to buy, but even if I got 4% ... its really not going to make me any money because there's just 5000 names a year added to the list. In order to get rich in this business, you need HUGE rollout potential. But on the flip side, do not get misled by some list just because it's huge and can make you millions "if only we were able to get 2% to buy". Before I go any further, terminology .
let me explain a little mailing list
When you get a mailing list to mail your stuff to ... its called "renting" ... you're not "buying" the list... you're just "renting" it for a one-time usage ... unless you pay more or get permission for unlimited usage. A LIST BROKER works like a realtor. He is the agent that represents the BUYER.
f so
A LIST MANAGER also works like a realtor, the SELLER.
except he represents
If Acme Catalog Company has 50,000 new customers a month buying from their catalog; they usually put their customer names on the market. It's a good source of added income and they literally have to do nothing but fork over the fresh names every month to their LIST MANAGER. Now, you are the person who wants to RENT mailing lists to see if you can sell your stuff to their customers, or their subscribers, etc. DATA CARDS are the listing for a specific list. Do you know how a realtor pulls a listing on a home for sale? Well, this is the same thing. The Data cards are not actually "cards", they are just listings in the SRDS book or sheets of paper a list broker will send you. You can get your hands on the SRDS book yourself and contact the LIST MANAGER of each list yourself, or you can call a LIST BROKER and they'll get the same lists for you ... and you won't have to make 10 to 15 phone calls to different LIST MANAGERS. LIST BROKERS are also supposed to help guide you to the best mailing list for your offer. Basically, the way it works is you fax them a copy of your sales message and they'll use their "expertise" to locate you all the lists that have people ready to buy your product. In fantasyland, this is how this works ... but in the real world, if the LIST BROKERS were so good, they sure wouldn't be RENTING lists to you ... they'd be mailing their own shit to the lists they know "work" so well. But still, LIST BROKERS are useful because they don't add any more money to the lists you rent (the list owner pays his commissions) ... and they can make all the phone calls for you to the other list managers ... and best of all, once you start rolling out... the list broker can extend you 30 day credit terms on all the lists you rent from numerous list managers.
:) 1
Now, there are different types of mailing lists. 1. There are BUYER lists: These are lists made up of actual people who bought from the company. Victoria's Secret Catalog Buyers is a list of all the people who bought from their catalog, and you can select them by date. The last 12-month names, the last 6-month names, the last 3-month names, even the HOTLlNES for the past month's buyers. Buyer Lists are the most powerful mailing lists to rent. 2. There are SUBSCRIBER lists: These lists are what they say they are ... subscribers to a magazine ... or to a newsletter. While these lists are great, and they are some of the bigger lists, they are less powerful than the actual "buyer" lists ... part of the reason is that subscriptions are sold numerous ways. Direct mail sold subscribers Sweepstakes sold subscribers (Publisher's Clearing House-types) 3-month free trial subscriptions ... Bill-Me-Later subscriptions, etc. Where a buyer is a buyer is a buyer ... subscribers can come into the list many different ways. Obviously, the best subscribers are DIRECT MAIL SOLD subscribers. So, if you can, sometimes I eliminate all the SWEEPS SOLD subscribers from the lists I test. 3. There's COMPILED lists: These lists are the least powerful of the three, but I did get them to work for me sometimes. Compiled lists are made up of data complied in some way and organized. Year's ago a company RL POLK (now owned by EQUIFAX) had a compiled list I tested and it worked for me TWICE on two separate offers. This list was compiled by way of warranty cards. You know when you buy a computer and the warranty card has a million and one questions on it and you feel obligated to fill out each and every question or else your warranty may be voided ... well, that data went straight to RL POLK. There are many different list-compiling companies out there. I'd stick with the reputable ones like EQUIFAX. But, I wouldn't worry so much about compiled lists right now. These are the LAST mailing lists to test.
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I have somewhat of a systematic Here's how I approach it:
approach to mailing list rental.
I want the big HOTLINES. 1 want to know that I can count on a fresh supply of leads each and every month for my sales letters. I like to test ONLY from companies and/or magazines I've actually heard of. If the list is from a company you've never heard of... and it's a rather large list ... don't you think you would have heard of them since they are so big? Of course you would have. I'm not saying to forget about testing mailing lists from companies you've never heard of... I'm saying don't test them first. I like mailing lists where the customers paid a lot of money to get on the list ... hopefully more than I'm selling my product for. You'll see this stat listed on the AVG. UNIT SALE part of the data card. This is another reason why magazine subscriber lists don't pull as well as buyer lists ... magazine subscriptions are cheap- usually under $20. But I've also made the majority of my money from subscriber lists and this is for at least two reasons. Magazine subscriber lists are usually huge. I'd rather earn a dollar on one million names than earn four dollars on 25,000 names ... wouldn't you agree? There's a difference between powerful and profitable. Also, magazine subscriber lists are more creditable to me. 111tell ya ... probably 90% of the lists in the SRDS book are inflated, hyped up ... maybe even phonebook names! Who's going to police it? And if they did ... how would they do it? How can you prove the name was actually a man who purchased a $400 item ... within the last 30 days? You can't. That's why there are a bunch of liars out there. Usuallv- the business thev. are in reveals the level of their credibility . I tested a well-known adult video catalog vs. one I never heard of. One got 3% to buy ... the one I never heard of got less th an a. quarter of a percent to buy. These are the same type of lists in theory- adult video buyers ... but if this was really the case, why the difference in response? Could the unknown list have phonebook
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names in it so they can scam a lot of money by renting more names to people who are too stupid to actually track their results from mailings? You bet. Something else that pisses me off about subscriber lists, is that you have to beware of the hotlines. Most, if not all of new subscriptions are "bill me later". Did you know that 65% to 80% NEVER PAY UP! So when the magazine company is saying "Paid Subscribers" ... do they really mean they are not given a free subscription, but they have yet to pay up ... or do they mean these are the subscribers who cut a check? Make sure when you are renting a hotline subscriber list; always say you want the ones that are actually PAID UP. Funny thing. I once tested Weider's MEN'S FITNESS subscriber list. The data card said "paid subscribers" ... and I told the list broker clearly I wanted the people who actually got off their lazy ass and cut a check, even though the data card said they were paid subscribers ... I had to pay an extra fee to make sure they were the ones who actually really "paid". Go figure. Something really good about subscriber lists ... is that if you can get your letter to pull profitable in themail. .. it'll be a smash success when you advertise it in the magazine itself. Jay Abraham, another of my mentors ... and probably the man who influenced me the most in this business tells a story of some bodybuilder clients he was working for. They had this manual they were trying to sell to the subscribers of some of the bodybuilding magazine and the letter was just breaking even. What he did was condense the sales letter down to 4 pages and he struck a deal with the magazine to place his ad. Well, where the direct mail just broke even ... the print ad version of the sales letter pulled 200% to 300% over what the advertisement cost to place. He tells of a similar success with his $5,000 seminar. When he mailed the Entrepreneur Magazine subscriber list, it just broke
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even for him. So he got himself a 22-page block of ads and the damn thing made him a huge profit. This 22-page ad in Entrepreneur Magazine back in 1995 was the ad I responded to and bought his $5,000 seminar. Just imagine what will happen when you get a winner on a subscriber list and then you take it over to print ads ... I had a product that was pulling six times cost on the subscriber list, but when I placed the ad in the magazine on four pages ... I got not six times our money back. .. we got back nearly ten times our money! The point of all this, is if you're interested in advertising in a certain magazine, but the advertisement will cost a lot of money, and you're nervous ... before you spend a dime on a space ad ... test the subscriber list (if its available) ... if it is and you can at least breakeven ... feel free to go for it (as long as you negotiate a good rate- more on this later) because if you can breakeven on the subscriber mailing list you can do very good on the actual pages with a print ad. Most books on direct mail will tell you about the RFM guidelines to keep in mind when you are selecting a mailing list. I think they're worth going over. R
F
M
Recency: The most important. This means how recent the name is. People have a habit of buying in surges. You want to get them while they're in that surge. It may last 30 days ... it may last 6 months. Obviously, the fresher the better. This is where logic makes no sense. You'd think if someone just bought a diet pill last month ... they wouldn't be ready to try your brand for at least two months. But it doesn't work this way. The same goes for opportunity seekers. You'd think if someone bought a book on how to make money last month ... they wouldn't buy another book on how to make money for at least a few months ... or until they realize they don't want to ... or can't do what the product says they have to do. But it doesn't work this way. If they bought a diet pill last month ...
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you'll have an easier time selling them another than you would if it were 12 months later.
pill 4 weeks later
Frequency: This is the second most important. Frequency means how many times this particular customer bought. MULTI-BUYERS are what they are called in the mailing list world. Multi-buyers are twice as likely to buy as one-time buyers. So, the more times they bought, the more powerful they are. Monetary: This is the least important of the three, but it is important. Monetary means how much this customer spent to get on this list. I was just telling you about this a few pages back. Obviously, you'll have an easier time trying to sell your $60 product to a list of customers who all paid $500 to buy something, rather than trying to sell the same $60 product to a list of people who put out $10 to buy the product that got them on the mailing list. Maybe they cannot afford your $60 product, where you know for a fact the list of the $500 buyers can afford your $60 gizmo. Now, in the perfect world, you'd rent only mailing lists of people who bought similar products as yours ... and the last time they bought it was last month ... and they bought the same thing seven times in the past ... and they put out five times more money on it than what your product is being offered to them for. I've never found a list like this one. If you did, by the time you slice it down ... you'd be looking at a just few thousand names. But you should strive for as close to perfection as you think you can get. You'll never find the perfect list like I was saying before ... but why not try to get as close as you can to perfection? Usage Reports: Something you can request from a list manager or a list broker is the USAGE REPORT for a particular mailing list you are looking to rent. This report is broken down in two sections. One is "Continuations" and the other is "Tests".
Basically, when someone tests a list, the manager should add it to the report ... when someone is continuing to use the list after a test ... they get added to the report. Obviously, a continuation only occurs when a marketer tests a list and it works. So if you get a usage report for a list you're interested in and it has a huge amount of Tests and few Continuations ... that should tell you something. A lot of people test the list ... only to find out it sucks. I always ask for a usage report before I come to a firm decision. What I like to do is get a list to work for me and get the usage report. Then I pull the usage reports for similar companies and see which reports have the same companies on them as the list that works well for me. It really can narrow down some lists to test in the future. But there are errors in usage reports as well. I remember being a continuing customer for a certain catalog company. I saw a copy of their usage report and I was not on it. Not that I even want to be on it ... I like to operate in silence ... but if I wasn't on it ... how many other companies are not on it ... and is it even accurate? Everything in this business has to be questioned numerous times and in numerous ways, as nothing is as it seems- especially in mailing lists. Don't call a list broker until after your sales letter is crafted. Go to the library and look through the SRDS book yourself and open your mind. The ideas will just start flying in, one after another!
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Chapter Five: All About Magazine Advertising
The last chapter, we focused on mailing lists- the different types ... how to fit products to them ... and how to gauge the "good" ones from the bad ones. This chapter is going to focus on magazine advertising. How to know ahead of time if advertising in a particular magazine is going to make or lose you money. Basically that's all that matters. Now, where I told you about selecting a mailing list then fitting a product to it ... I would not advise doing this with magazine advertisements. And if you're testing a new product ... Buying magazine space for testing can be a lot more expensive than testing a few thousand sales letters in the mail ... and the response you'll get from the direct mail will come to you a lot faster than results from a magazine ad, as it'll take three months from when you send off your artwork 'till you can see your ad on the magazine racks. But, I still think magazine advertising is a whole lot easier to get to "work" than sales letters ... for one simple reason- the mailing list you select is a huge variable to your success. I'd say there's a 40% to 50% chance the mailing list you select will cause your test to fail. It's easier to get ripped off or simply rent the wrong mailing list than it is to pick a poor publication to advertise in. It's very possible to send out 3000 sales letters and not receive one single order! I mailed a test of 4000 letters a few months ago and I didn't get one single freakin' order! On the other hand ... as long as you advertise in a magazine that you can actually find on the news racks ... I'm sure you'll at least get some orders. The trick is to see if you can get more money in orders than you have to put out buying the ad.
1
5X
That's another good thing I like about magazine ads is that you can negotiate your price. In direct mail. .. it's hard to get a huge discount on printing ... it's hard to get a huge discount on mailing lists ... and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get any discount on postage. With magazine ads ... I feel like the publisher is ripping me off if I can't get at least a 50% discount from their "rate card". Here's pretty much everything particular order):
I know about
magazine
ads (in no
Stay Away From New Magazines. If a general circulation magazine is new and has not been on sale for at least a year, I wouldn't advertise in it. Now, I say "general circulation", and that means magazines like FHM, MAXIM, COSMO, etc. If you have a product related to a niche market like car stereo and a new car stereo magazine comes out, I'd say it was worth a test as that magazine is a "specialized" magazine. The people who picked it up at the newsstand were probably car stereo nuts. And they were not ordinary guys picking up a copy of EDGE ... a MAXIM knockoff. Magazines have a huge chance of failure in their first few years. You sure as hell do not want or need to take an unnecessary gamble on a new publication ... you already have enough to worry about with your own product's success. Here are a few examples of new men's magazines went in less than a few years' time: GEAR STUN EDGE RAMP CONTROVERSY RADAR
that came and
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I could go on for an entire page. When you're unsure about your product's pulling power ... stick ONLY with ESTABLISHED magazines, so you can at least put one of the worries out of your head. I have tested a few new magazines with great success ... but only after I knew I had a successful advertisement. I had a car stereo membership club that I advertised in two new car audio magazines, CARSOUND and AUTOTRONICS. Both books were new and both books failed, but I did have great success advertising in them. The same goes for MIND AND MUSCLE POWER. This was a magazine by the Publisher of Penthouse. I was in their first issue. I needed 1000 orders to breakeven, and I ended up with 500! Unfortunately, MIND AND MUSCLE POWER is also out of business. Bottom line: NEW MAGAZINES DO NOT MAKE IT TO YEAR TWO. Now, if there's something eating at you to test a certain new magazine ... and you have some indicator from other magazines that tell you have a successful ad ... here is the only way to test it: Tell the advertising rep that you are skeptical as hell because they are new. Tell them to run your ad for free and if it works, you'll give them a full 12-month contract. If they are not game ... forget them. Cost Per Thousand. All magazine space is sold on a CPM basis. That's how us Pro's gauge what we're buying space for. I'll tell you ... in the early 90's, I could buy full-page ads in magazines like MOTOR TREND for $10 per thousand. Nowadays, if you can beat them up and pay $20 to $30 per thousand, you did well. Here's how CPM is figured out: Magazines count how many subscribers and how many newsstand sales they get for a singular issue. Say they have 500,000 newsstand sales and 500,000 subscribers. That means they have 1 Million paid circulation. Remember the word PAID CIRCULATION. Anyway, they have a million people buying the issue. If you were to place a full-page ad in their magazine, you'd want to pay no more than $20,000 to $30,000 for every million paid readers.
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If you have a full page ad working very well for you in Publication A and you are paying $25/M for a full page ad ... when you go to advertise in Publication B... you'll want to pay $25/M or less. Always try to pay less. The less you pay, the more cash you get to keep, and that's the name of this game. Audited Circulation. Magazines can lie about their circulation. Many new publications do. In order for businesses to fairly gauge the different magazines to advertise in, there are two 3rd party circulation-auditors magazines hire to validate their readership numbers. ABC is the one most magazines are audited by. What this company does is stick their nose in the magazine's numbers. They check their subscriber counts, the price they're paying to subscribe, their newsstand sales, the percentages of the two, the pass-along copies, the free distribution, everything you 11 ever need to see the "inner workings' of a magazine's circulation figures. When you request a media kit from a magazine, the ABC audit will be on a pink 11xl 7 sheet of paper. In my opinion, any magazine saying they have over 250,000 paid circulation should have an ABC audit done. If they are bragging they have more paid circulation than 250,000 per issue and they don't have an ABC audit ... chances are, they're full of shit. The real important figures you need to look at on the pink audit sheet are the paid subscribers and the paid newsstand. Add these two together and then gauge your CPM from this count. The "Total Readership" Scam. This scam is a funny one and I hate magazines that try to pull this one on me. As soon as they do, I tell them to stick their entire magazine up their ass as if they are going to lie about something this bad. Here's what it's all about. Magazine A claims to potential advertisers they have 500,000 readers. The key word is "readers". Most advertisers would assume the magazine is selling 500,000 copies each issue. WRONG!
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If you're lucky enough to have a magazine tell you about their total "readers" ... tell them that's nice ... but you are interested in how many PAID CIRCULATION they have each issue. PAID CIRCULATIONis the only number you care about. When you ask this question, Magazine A, who was just raving about 500,000 readers will have to tell you they sell 100,000 copies each and every month, but a survey they performed says their magazines get read by 4 other people, other than the guy who originally purchased it. This is also called "pass along" readership. No matter what name you put on it, it's a scam. If a magazine is correct, and their survey honestly is true ... that is only to be viewed as a plus ... but not something to pay additional for. CPM is to be based ONLY from actual paid circulation. Frequency. Magazines come out in all different types of frequency. Some come out every month ... some every two months ... some every quarter ... some EVERY WEEK! Here's what I can tell you about frequency. Monthly publications are great. Bimonthly publications are good and they give you a little more time to make your money before their next issue comes out. Quarterly publications are not worth advertising in, and weekly's or biweekly's come out too fast for you to recoup your advertising dollars from the previous issue. A magazine ad must bring back a profit before the next issue comes out. Monthly's and Bi-Monthly's are good. Anything else either is too fast or too slow to recoup advertising dollars and make a profit. Enough said about frequency. Newsstand vs. Subscribers Ratio. Magazines should have a 50/50 balance between subscribers and newsstand sales. If a magazine has too many subscribers vs. newsstand, your ad is going to "burn out" quicker as the readership is static- subscribers are the same readers every month, where newsstand may not be ... plus a newsstand buyer actually has to get off his ass and go and buy the magazine every month. You can be sure he's going to read the damn thing from cover-to-cover. A subscriber gets an issue in the mail ... he paid a lot less for the magazine than the newsstand buyer paid ... the
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subscription could have been a gift from someone else ... hell, he may not even check his mail for months on end. Newsstand readers are better quality. Look for 50/50 ... and if there is a higher percentage of newsstand, that's good. But, just understand if a magazine is 90% subscribers and 10% newsstand, your ad may burn out quicker. RHP and Upfront As Possible. When you are running an ad, always make sure you get a right hand page ... and ask to be as up front as you can. But definitely get yourself a right hand page. If they want extra money for it ... look for a different publication to advertise in ... that is unless they are still offering a killer CPM. You will get better results if you are on the right hand side of the magazine. It's as simple as that. Many magazines may not want to guarantee you a right hand page ... but make sure you get your point across that you want a right hand page. Don't be fooled by magazines ... they want your business. If you're going to walk away over which side they put your ad on ... they'll make sure they don't lose the sale. I don't even like to mess around with this stuff anymore. Nowadays I place three pages ads that are right, left, right. I'm guaranteed my right hand page. If you are doing an ad smaller than a full page, you 11 still want it on the right hand page and as far up front as you can get it. Fractional Advertisements. Maybe you don't have the big dollars to place full-page ads just yet, and that's fine. You can place fractional ads. These ads are 1/3 page ... 1/2 page ... 2/3 page ... even 1/12 page. Here's my theory. I'd rather have a full-page ad in a smaller circulation magazine than a smaller ad in a bigger publication. Remember, you have to still sell something in your ad. Most products need a full page if they are planning on selling right off the page.
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If you do fractional ads, choose a vertical 1/2 page over a horizontal 1/2 page ... try to keep the ad to the upper right hand corner of the page. If you're looking to sell your product right off the page ... you're going to need at least a 1/2-page ad. Negotiating Ad Cost. Here's some proven ways to get the Publisher way down on his prices. First of all, tell the ad rep you are your own in-house advertising agency. These words will save you 15% right off the top. Advertising agencies get 15% commission on all ads. Next, make sure to tell them you are a direct response advertiser. This could get you an entirely new rate that will be as much as 25% lower. The reason for this is simple. Publishers know if you are a mail order advertiservyou are going to be counting the sales from your ad. General advertisers do not do this, so the publisher knows he can gouge them. The general advertiser's ad agency doesn't care about this too much, because they earn a commission of 15% for the entire cost of the ad the company runs. The more the magazine charges, the more the agency makes in commissions. Ad agencies are useless. In fact, by the time you are finished with this book, you could probably go to Madison Avenue in Manhattan and create better ads than 75% of the chumps in their fancy offices high above the city. Another technique you can use to get the rate card price down is to tell them you want the "pre-pay" discount, if they have one. You can save an additional 3% this way. Also, tell the advertiser you want the 12-time rate. Obviously, if the ad works for you, you're going to run more and more magazine ads, right? If the magazine does not allow you to make enough sales to cover it's cost, you can call the publisher and renegotiate your ad rate. If they are stuck and you can't get a better rate, you don't have to run any more ads- even if you told them you were going to run 11 more times. No magazine has ever sued me for breaking advertise the remainder of my 11 months.
a contract
ifI failed to
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When you add up and use all these techniques ... you should shave 50% off the one time rate card price, Spreads Suck! Spreads are two page ads, one on the left and one on the right. They look good, and make you feel good because your ad is twice as large, so it has to be twice as powerful..; but it's not. Let me explain. Success in this business, either in direct maiL. or in space ads, is just getting people to see and read your ad. A spread does not pull 100% more readers to it... yet it costs 100% more. With a spread, you're lucky to pull 50% more readers- because of its added size ... but you're still stuck paying 100% more. If your advertising copy runs over into another page ... put your first page on the right hand ... then the second page on the back of the first page. This way, you can attract a potential reader on two separate page tums ... and if a reader wants to rip out your ad, all he has to do is rip out the one page and he's got the front and back of your ad in one rip! By doing your two page ad this way, instead of a spread, you'd be looking at getting 200% more orders for 200% more advertising cost ... this you can live with! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER do a 2-page spread. They never worked for me. What a Magazine Ad Really is. A magazine ad is basically your sales letter formatted to look as if it was an article in the magazine. A magazine ad is not meant to look fancy. It's not to look at all like an "ad". You want to "borrow" some credibility from the publication, so make your ad mimic the editorial format of the publication. And so they don't slam ADVERTISEMENT across the top of it in 20 point type ... when you are creating the ad ... have the graphic designer put the word, "Advertorial" or "Special Advertorial" on the top or on the bottom in reverse type. If you add these words ahead of time, the publisher will not have to do it himselL. and do it his way ... which of course, will be larger than it has to be. People read and trust magazines. You automatically get some credibility by just having your ad in the magazine ... but you can
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get extra credibility by having you ad look like a page in the magazine. This is called "Pub Setting".". setting the art like the publisher. It has been proven that 500% more people read editorial-style advertisements over flashy, glossy, slick advertisements ... and remember- this business is first and foremost all about getting prospects to see your message. To get 5 times more people reading your ad will probably get you five times the orders. Pub Set your ad for each individual magazine you are advertising in. MIMIC THE PUBLICATION. Condensing. When you are wrtting.your ad, you may run into a little problem where there is too much text and not enough space. Instead of buying another page and instead of eliminating potentially powerful selling copy what I'd advise you to do is shrink the size of the copy. If you have an interested reader, he'll read 8 point type if he has to. So, if I had to choose between buying another entire ad page ... and doubling the cost of my advertisement... or editing potentially powerful and needed sales copy ... which wi11lose me. the sale entirely ... or simply shrinking down the copy to fit it all ... I'd choose the latter. Something funny is that a crammed-looking ad appears like it has something important to say to the reader. Controlled Circulation. Earlier in this chapter we talked about paid circulation. Some magazines, especially TRADE PUBLICATIONS are what is called CONTROLLED CIRCULATION. This means that the readers have not paid for their subscriptions, but they all had to qualify in some way to receive the magazine. A trade magazine may go to 100,000 CPAs. In order to get this magazine you must be a CPA. If you are a CPA and if you requested this magazine, you'll get it for free. Now, advertisers pay a little more for these controlled eire. magazines as the publisher is not making a dime from their readers ... their only source of income is from advertisersso they have to charge a little more.
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I never had remarkable success advertising in a trade magazine. Partly because I usually only stick with consumer mass marketing. I honestly cannot tell you any more about controlled circulation publications or my successes or failures in them, as 1 have not explored them too much. Stick With The Black and White. Color ads cost more. Black and white ads are cheaper. The initial job your ad has, is to stick out from the other ads. Black and white ads stick out, get better response, and cost less. Color is good if the publisher were throwing it in for free ... otherwise I'd never pay a cent for a color ad. Also, if you are going to use your "free" color. .. use it sparingly. Seriously. Everyone Has Eyes. One thing 1 hate about magazine advertising is that knock-offs and other scum are looking at your ad and if you are running it month after month. Trust me, if you're lucky enough to get a winning advertisement, as soon as you run it three or four times, you may see some knock-offs copying your idea and running it among the very same magazine pages. They may even go as far as to pick on your price, or your offer, or your guarantee and then have the balls to brag how theirs is superior. So, not only will they steal your idea ... but also they'll talk shit about you at the same time. Now, there's numerous ways to deal with knock-offs I'll cover in greater detail later in this book. While this is a drawback of magazine advertising ... magazine ads are still extremely powerful and are needed to succeed in this business. Going to the bookstore and picking up a magazine on a news rack with your ad in it sure feels good when you are first getting started. It's easier to get magazines to "work" for you.
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Chapter Six: Creating Your Swipe File
Every successful person in the direct response business has what's called a "Swipe File". A swipe file is a collection of advertisements and direct mail solicitations that they appreciate. Even if they do not appreciate a particular sales message, if they continue to see it advertised in magazines ... or continually receive it in the mail, they collect them, as they must be working for their owner's. If these ads and sales letters were not working, their owners would not keep spending money to run them or to mail them. Something that works is always worth collecting and dissecting to see what makes it tick. If you are selling a particular product, it is a must to collect all your competitor's sales messages. Try to order them all, and see what their up sells are ... see what their back end products are. You're going to make the same offers to your customers.
As you read further in this book, you're going to learn how to be a master on spotting great advertising. I'm going to show you how to recognize other marketers with supreme skills. This is not a business of reinventing the wheel every time. For example, a skin cream company may be offering a free 14-day sample in their ads. All they ask is for their customers to cover a nominal shipping and handling fee, which has to be paid with a credit card. Now, to the blind eye, you may think they are really just giving away the free sample of their product ... but when you actually call them and order their sample, they'll have a script the order taker will read to you. It'll say something like this: "Your free 14-day sample of (product name) will be shipped out to you today. Once you get it, use it as directed. If you are not
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absolutely thrilled with what (product name) does to the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines, simply call us within 14days and tell us. But if you are thrilled- looking 10 years younger with our product, do nothing and a fresh 30-day supply will be sent to you automatically every month and you'll be billed just $29.95 plus $4.95 shipping and handling for each month's installment. You can cancel anytime. Again, thank for you for trying (product name). You should receive your free 14-day sample tube of (product name) within the next 10 days, so look for it. Again, thank you for calling!" Now, had you not responded to your competitor's ad, you would have never figured out the method behind their madness. An ad that gives away a sample supply will almost always pull more orders than if you just tried to sell the customer right off the page. You have to keep an eye on what others are doing in your related field. Great copywriters recognize great copy. You simply have to collect. A swipe file is also great when you are looking for new ideas or for great paragraphs to use in your own sales letters or advertisements.
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Chapter Seven: The Back End
The back end is where all the real huge profits come in. I sold a product for $60. I got 40,000 new customers to buy it every month. I paid $1.2 Million in advertising every month to get those 40,000 people. Had I left well enough along, I would have grossed $2.4 Million on the $60 sales to 40,000 people. But I never leave well enough alone. Before I even decided to test the product I'm talking about, I made sure it had a strong back end. Now, in my sales letters and magazine advertisements, I automatically enrolled my customers into a "Preferred Customer" club where they would receive a fresh supply every 30-days. Just this simple paragraph sold four units to every customer instead of the one they would have originally purchased. Sure, I had to lower the price on the follow-up units to make being a member of the "club" something to desire ... but I was able to turn a $60 sale into a $180 sale on average. So, where I would have been making $2.4 Million if I was an inexperienced direct marketer. .. I was instead making $7.2 Million. Did I spend an extra dollar in advertising? NO. Yet the back end for this product was worth $4.8 Million EXTRA in sales. Practically all of that money was pure profit. Now, you don't have to force your customers into buying as I usually do with my "clubs". You can simply have two ... three ... five or more back end products to go back and sell to your customers. You can sell them while they are on the phone ordering the initial product, you can include a back end offer in the product's
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shipment, you can go back and mail your customer days ... or every 14-days ... or even every week.
list every 30-
Do you know when you stop mailing? When you stop profit. Your customers will not get annoyed receiving advertising from you. Remember, they did want your why wouldn't they want additional products to make purchase better or more rewarding to them?
turning a so much product... their initial
I sold my first direct response book in 1995. I sold about 20,000 copies myself through magazine ads and sales letters. While sales were strong, I was just breaking even. For example, if I placed a $20,000 full page ad ... I would sell $20,000 worth of books. If I didn't have a strong .back end, there would be no point of running the initial ads. Most businesses only breakeven on their initial purchase, so a strong back end is what makes 90% of direct response businesses profitable. As for my $20 book, as soon as I got a customer to buy, I first sent out their book. About a week later, I sent them a sales letter offering them a product related to the book for $200. I'd get 5%, to buy. When you do the math, that's $10 on each back end letter I'd send out. Remember, the initial sale was for just $20, and my first back end product got another $10 in my pocket. Then, three weeks later, I'd, send the same names another offer. Again, it was a $200 product, out a different one from the first offer. I'd get another 5% to buy. Here's another $10 in my pocket. At this point, I turned every customer who bought a $20 book into a $40 customer. Was I done? Not a chance. A few weeks later came back end offer #3. Another product for $200. I again got 5%. Now we're up to $30 on the back end of a $20 book purchase. We're now at $50. Another few weeks came offer #4. This time it was a $1000 product. I got 1% ... but since the product was a $1000 product, added yet another $10 to my back end profits.
I
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Now we're at $60 in sales per customer. And I kept this going and going. When 1 finally ran out of related products, I'd remail the first, the second, the third, etc. offers. So, when most people would wonder why I was thrilled to sell $10,000 worth of books from a $10,000 ad ... I would chuckle. I knew after a few months, that a $20 book buyer would make that $10,000 ad bring me $40,000 in sales. Its 10-times easier to get an existing customer to buy again and again from you. You see, in this business, the # 1 reason why people do not buy from you is the simple fact that they do not believe what you are telling them in your ads and sales letters. Once you sell them your initial product, if they are somewhat satisfied with what you sent them ... they'll buy again, and again ... 10-times more powerfully because they are familiar with you and believe you more than a "cold" prospect. Your customer list is the most valuable asset you'll own. You can remail it time and time again and it'll never wear out. I don't even look to market products unless they have a great back end potential. Back end sales can come from reselling the identical product you first sold them. If you were selling a pill or a cream ... this would be resold to them. If you sold a book, you can offer an advanced course on the principles taught in the book, you can put on a seminar for several thousand of dollars, you can offer your services to your book buyers in the form of consulting, you can even market other people's products to your list and split the money with them! My friend and mentor Jay Abraham calls this "Host Parasite" marketing. I'll get into this below. Here's a great back end strategy for a skin care product reduces the appearance of wrinkles.
that
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A sales letter or magazine ad offers customers a free sample of your product. Better yet, your sales letters actually have a sample of the product enclosed in a small packet. The customer tries the sample and orders your product so. The sales letter the customer enrolls them into a "preferred a fresh 30-day supply of your reduced "club member" price
for $60 or
responded from also automatically customer" club, where they'll receive miracle cream every month for a of $40.
Now you have your first back end set up- the automatic shipments. While your customers are enjoying the product, you send them a sales letter for a complete moisturizing and cleansing kit. It has 4 or 5 different products in the kit, that if they were sold separately, would cost $300 or so ... but you can offer them this "kit" for just $139.95 plus $10 shipping and handling. If you've been paying attention, the $10 you charge will cover the entire cost to manufacture the 4 or 5 bottles and the entire cost to ship the whole thing to them. Since your customers love your initial wrinkle cream, they believe your claims for the moisturizing and cleansing kit. You end up with 5% buying this kit. Five 'percent response adds $7 to the customer's lifetime value. You do another "kit" for a different purpose next month ... and another the next month ... and so on. If you find out your customer keeps receiving the initial wrinkle cream for six months (or six shipments), you should make six different "kits" to go along with the six-month customer life. When doing back end products, with the exception of an automatic delivery club where you have to do a reduced price to make it worth their while ... the back end "kits" should be four to ten times the price of their initial purchase. Don't mail sales letter offering customers who initially bought a $60 product a $15 product. You
already won their trust ... so you can hit them for a larger price point. Now remember, all this will fall on its face if you are selling your customers junk. If a customer bought something from you and they were not satisfied, they are not going to rebuy in a large percentage as they would if they were at least satisfied with what you sent them. While your product does not have to change their lives ... it does have to at least satisfy them somewhat. Here's another great example of the back end. A video is sold for $9.95. If you order with a credit card, you'll receive a bonus video for free. But in order to receive it, a credit card is needed. No check orders get this 2nd video. The purpose of this is to gain the credit card numbers, so you can automatically resend them a new video every month and you don't have to go through the "bill me" headaches. You simply bill their credit card. Of course, you have to let your customer know you're going to do this. Since the videos you're going to be sending to your customers are going to be different every month, you can do a low initial purchase price- just to get as many people in the door as you can. The new videos you're going to send every month are going to be $19.95 plus shipping and handling. You can spend $10,000 on an ad and bring in $10,000 worth of $9.95 sales and be thrilled, because each customer may allow you to send them 4 videos at $20 a pop. Wow- that's $80 in back end sales from an initial $10 purchase. I know a guy who does this and makes $90 Million a year. When the auto ship product is different every shipment- like the videos, you can have a lower initial sales price ... but when the product is the same every shipment- like a bottle of pills ... you have to offer the lower price on the future shipments because there will be no advantage to being in the club. If you're selling a bottle
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of pills for $20 to attract a lot of customers and then go to tell them you'll automatically send a fresh supply every month for $60they'll tell you to buzz off and just reorder as they see fit for the initial $20 fee. They wouldn't do this on the video club ... because they'd just be ordering the same video every month instead of a fresh one as the videos are different each shipment. Understand? It took me a long time to understand
that you can get rich very quickly with a product that leads itself to back end sales ... especially when the product is a consumable- and you can automatically reship a fresh supply when the consumable is finished. A few minutes ago, I was talking about my mentor Jay Abraham's "Host Parasite" or "Endorsed Mailing" technique. Let me explain this in full as it as another powerful back end technique. Let's pretend I was marketing the sale of this book. I'd rent mailing lists ... advertisements in magazine ... buy Internet search terms, etc. But what about if I went to my buddy who has a newsletter with thousands of readers. If he allowed me to mail his subscriber list, I'd maybe get the regular 2% to 4% response I'd get from any targeted list I'd test. But what if I went to him and said, "Buddy, you ready my book and you know it's great. Instead of me mailing your subscriber list, why don't we rewrite my sales letter as if it came from you? You'll endorse my book to your subscribers and we can do some sort of a profit split? I'll still cover the entire cost of mailing the sales letters, so there is no cost out of your pocket and only pure profit for you." If he says yes, instead of me getting 2% to 4% to buy my book. .. I may now get something like lO% because he is endorsing it to his readers. Even giving up the slice of the profits to him, I'll still earn a Whole lot more money than promoting the book myself. And this technique works on the flip side as well. Say I sold 20,000 copies of my book through direct mail sales letters and magazine ads and my buddy wants to get more subscribers for his newsletter. I can go to him, or he can come to me and we can
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strike UP some form of a deal where either he or 1... or both of us can cover the marketing expense to mail his sales letter to my list of 20,000 customers and we'll spit the profits. I would make money from make money from gaining orders as I wrote the letter great newsletter my buddy
a product that I don't own ... and he'll new subscribers with a huge influx of to my customers telling them what a puts out.
If you're a savvy marketer. .. you can do deals like this with 5 or 10 different products and profit share on all of them. Obviously, the best case would be having the other guy pay for the marketing expenses ... but this is not always the case ... especially if you are an unknown. Either vyay, work out some sort of fee arrangement that allows you both to make a killing. I don't know how many times I can attempt to drill this in your head. The back end is where all the real profits are. If your product or service does not have a huge back end potential ... forget itunless your upfront response is huge. It is so much easier to resell an existing customer than it is to attract a new customer, it'll make your head spin. Back end products should always cost more to buy than the initial product they've purchased- unless it is the same product they are buying over and over again- like a bottle of pills. The entire trick to this business is to attract as many customers as you can for the lowest advertising cost... and then resell the hell out of them ... more of the same product ... upgraded, more advanced versions of the same product... related products ... other people's products ... the sky is the limit. The only bad back end product is one that fails to bring back more in orders than it took to mail the sales letters. Bottom line: Back end products are products you can go back and sell to your customers after the initial sale. Back end products can also be sold as up sells or "bumps" while the customer is on the phone ordering ... but that's an entire chapter on its own we'll cover later in this book.
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Chapter Eight: Auto ship
Auto ship is probably the most powerful direct response marketing technique I discovered my entire 10 years in this business. It took a company that would have grossed $2.4 Million in sales monthly to one that grossed $7.2 Million without spending a single dollar more in advertising. Only certain types of-product can lead themselves to an automatic shipment arrangement, but if your product calls for it... you'd be a fool not to implement it immediately. Auto ship goes by many titles. "TILLFORBID ... AUTOBILL... AUTO DELIVERY... etc. The greatest examples of auto bill are utility companies. You sign up, and they'll keep your power on and bill you ... 'TILL YOU FORBID their services- usually when you move. Auto ship is a favorite for "of-the-month clubs" ... Wine-of-themonth-clubs ... book-of-the-month-clubs ... etc. You Il get a fresh supply or a new supply ... every month ... or every other month ... or every six weeks ... whatever you want it to be. I was telling you a story about my pill company a few chapters back where the product initially broke even ... but then I added a single paragraph and I was able to get 4 bottle sales out of each and every customer. If I didn't do an auto ship, I wouldn't have been in business for long. Back end sales are great. chapter. Your customers to 25% or so- depending But auto ship gets every and tells you not to.
We talked all about them in a past will rebuy things from you at a rate of 5% on the product and their satisfaction level. customer to rebuy unless he or she calls
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Auto ship days. Ten guarantee shipment. shipment
will get 90% of your customers to reorder within 30 percent will either take you up on your satisfaction or simply call and tell you not to send another But that 90% who get a 2nd ... a 3rd. a 4th ... etc. will make you rich very quickly.
When 1 do an auto ship promotion, 1 like to phrase it as if the customer is getting enrolled into a "club" ... a club that sets them apart from the "regular" customers. A club member qualifies for a lower price a regular customer off the street cannot get. It is also wise to enforce they don't have to pick up the phone and order every month. If you put a spin on it as if all the benefits are for the customer. .. they'll actually want you to rebill them every month. Sure, from the customer's point of view ... they'll qualify for a lower price ... and they'll automatically count on the product arriving in their mailbox- even when they are far too busy to call you when they're out of product ... but the real benefit is for you- the marketer. You11make every $1 in advertising give you $6 worth of sales ... where it would get you just $2 without the auto ship club. Are there some drawbacks? Sure. You have to word it properly in your ads and sales letters. If you fail to word it right, customers will not know why they are receiving more products every month and dispute the charge with their credit card companies. Credit card companies are a pain in the ass on their own. We'll speak deeply about them in a later chapter. Furthermore ... if you word the auto ship policy wrong, the customer will see that you are just looking to get more forced sales out of him and he'll tell you not to enroll him in the club. You have to have a certain balance to word the auto ship paragraph to get it to work. Lucky for you, I'm going to give you the exact paragraph and even give you permission to use it word-forword in your advertising. I consider it a $60,000,000 paragraph. That's what this paragraph added in annual sales to my companywithout spending a cent additional in advertising.
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Anyway, here it is: "And if you're one of the first 200 people to order, you'll receive FREE ENROLLMENT into our Forever Trim Club where you'll qualify to receive a full $20 discount on all your future bottles of (product name). And so you don't go a day without (product name) in your system- destroying fat, you'll automatically receive a fresh bottle every 30-days and your credit card will be billed the Club Member Price of$39.95 plus $6.95 S/H- not the $59.95 fee nonmembers have to pay. There are no minimum amounts of bottles to buy and you can cancel at any time. The number to call is 1-800123-4567, and you can call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week." As you can see ... this paragraph almost makes it sound as if the customer's will hinder his or her results if they do not have the product in their system every day. It kind of implies a fear that if they do not have the product ... they're losing what they gained. They want to put the delivery logistics in your hands to make sure they always have enough product on hand to keep their current results and keep getting more. This simple paragraph took an ordinary business it to 9 -figure status. Use it as you wish.
and skyrocketed
Some direct marketers don't even reveal the auto ship club in their sales letters or advertisements. What they do is have a script the order taker reads to them when they place their orders. I had to do this when we were running TV and radio spots. You only have 60seconds to sell the product itself ... not enough time to sell an autodelivery club. So, we didn't speak of it in the commercials ... but AFTER we got the entire order ... only then did we read the script word for word. Did a lot of customers balk about their credit card being billed automatically? Some did. And for the ones that did, I offered a special 4-pack of the product they were buying for a great price. The majority who didn't want the auto-delivery did take the special 4-pack. .. so at least I made more money than the $60 one bottle sold for.
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It's funny, but I sold 40,000 fresh people a month. The initial bottle sold for $60. But maybe 5%) of the callers actually got off the phone with just a $60 sale. One thing about this .auto ship concept is that it will only work on customers who buy with a credit card. You cannot rebill a checking account off a check that was mailed to you. Now don't get me wrong ... I'm not talking about just rebilling a customer's credit card without their knowledge. All my customers were either told in the advertisement, the sales letter, or through a script read to them on the phone. Even my website told them when they were ordering. How are you going to rebill all these credit cards every month? I'm glad you asked. Later in this book, I'll tell you all about the software you Il use to process credit card transactions. The software provided by the banks will allow you to set up each customer's account to rebill at any price in any interval ... rebill every 23 days ... 45 days ... 30 days ... however you work your promotion. I'd stick with every 30 days. This auto ship concept worked so well for me that once I saw how well it worked ... I stopped taking orders for my product with checks or money orders! I didn't even give the customer an option to pay this way in our ads. If a customer did want the product I was selling and said he didn't have a credit card, only then would we give them an address to send a check to ... but we still made sure to tell them about the special4-pack offer. What I liked about the auto ship club was that I didn't have to drum up sales from scratch every month. What I mean is this. I was selling 160,000 bottles of pills every month. Since my customers stayed in the auto ship club for an average of 4 months ... I had 40,000 people canceling their shipments every month. To remain at the 160,000 mark ... I didn't have to go out and bust my ass getting 160,000 new sales ... I just had to bring in the 40,000 that fell off to stay the same size.
so
Let me tell you this. I slept computer file with 160,000 to charge their credit cards month- until they call and
so well at night knowing 1 had a people on it that are going to allow me between $40 and $60 each and every tell me to stop.
I once sold a dietary supplement to 400,000 people. To these 400,000 people ... I sold I ,600,000 bottles. Many products
can be auto shipped ... or auto billed.
Jr. Chefs Club:
Each month, you'll receive a new video showing your child how to prepare easy meals that taste great. Each video contains four snacks, four entrees, -and four desserts. Initial offer: First video free, just pay $5.95 shipping and handling with your credit card. First 200 people to join will receive a Jr. Chef's Club apron. Each month's video is 60 minutes long and costs $19.95 plus $5.95 shipping and handling. Cancel membership anytime. (Customer life on a promotion like this one can be 4 to 10 shipments or morel) Girls Gone Wild: Get first video for $9.95 plus shipping and handling. Order with your credit card and get bonus video free. Then be the first to preview future Girls Gone Wild videos for $19.95 each plus shipping and handling. Cancel anytime. Money back guarantee. (Customer life can be 3 to 6 shipments
or more!)
Proactiv Acne Treatment: Kit contains 3 or 4 bottles of different types of masks and cleansers. The "sold separately" price would be $60 or so. Special offer for kit is $39.95 plus shipping and handling. Every 30 days a fresh supply will be mailed and you can lock in the low TV price of $39.95 plus shipping and handling. 60-day money back guarantee. (Customer life on this product should be good. I kind of have a problem with the auto ship price being the same as the initial purchase price. There's really no benefit except for the delivery. If
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this were my promotion, I would try to give the customer an ever better deal as a club member. Obviously this works for them because they have been selling this kit allover TV since 1997 and it's now 2004.) NOTE: While we haven't touched on money back guarantees yet ... I would advise you this: If you're reshipping a product every 30 days ... I'd make my guarantee for 30 days. This way, you don't get zapped with a customer looking for two credits at a time ... one for his first shipment and one for his second. Try to keep your guarantee period 'till the length of the 2nd delivery.
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Chapter Nine: Lifetime Customer Value (LeV)
As a direct marketer your customers.
it is imperative you know the lifetime value of
Of course, you will not be able to "know" your lifetime customer value by guessing it. You can figure out this number only after a few months ... or even a year of mailing back end offers to your customers. It is important to know your LCV to establish how much you can spend to attract a new customer. By attract, I mean how much you can spend on advertising for each new customer. Let me give you an example of a past promotion. I was selling a bottle of pills for $60 ... and my customer bought an average of three more bottles in the next three months at $40 each. Now, my LCV was $180. So I knew I could spend as much as $180 to attract a new customer without losing money. Of course, we're not in the business of losing money ... or even breaking even. We're here to make a profit- hopefully a large one. So I was very satisfied when I was able to bring in 40,000 new customers a month spending $1.2 Million in advertising every 30-days. If you take $1,200,000 and divide that by the 40,000 customers I was able to attract, you'd get $30. That is the cost it took me on average to acquire a new customer who I knew would spend $180 over the next 4 or 5 months. I figured out. my LCV by going back to a panel of customers who were pretty much not buying anymore. It took about six months to get a good measure. I went back the six months and measured how much these customers purchased, and then divided the gross amount by the number of customers I measured. This was my average LCV.
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So I had pretty good LVe information when I tracked the orders I got from a particular advertisement. If it took $45 to attract new customers ... I would be happy, because I knew I would get $180 in eTO (contribution to overhead). As advertisements and sales letters started to decline in response, I knew I could run the ads until it cost $90 or so to attract a new customer. Remember, my first sale was for $60 ... so to the average business owner, it would look as if I was losing money. Which I was ... on the first sale. But I knew I had $180 coming my way from each customer on average in the months to come. Lev is a measurement of the gross sales you will make on the front end sale ... the ~p sells ... the back end offers ... the automatic shipments every dime your customer will spend with you over a six month one year. .. or even two year period. Now, company's like HBO can spend several thousand dollars to attract a new subscriber, knowing from their past research, they'll make several thousands of dollars on your monthly fees in the years to come. Now, they may be fine with recouping their acquisition costs 12 ... 24 ... maybe even 36 months out. But, I do not advise you to extend yourself past three months or so to recoup your advertising expenses. I always try my hardest to recoup and even profit on the first sale. Only companies that are financially strong can hold out for extended periods of time to recoup their money and profit.' Here's another example. Lets say it's costing you $120 to bring in a customer. Lets say your initial sale is $60, which all $60 is eTO. So, you're losing $60 on every sale that comes in. If you didn't have a back end ... you'd be out of business pretty fast right? Oh , yes. But you do have a back end ... because if you learned anything from this book so far. .. you need to have additional products to resell to your customer to really make this business payoff. I look at it like this. If you have just one product you sell to your customer. .. you do not own a business ... you own a "promotion". In
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order to own a "business" ... you have to resell to your customers again ... and again. Anyway, back to losing $60 on every sale that comes in. First of all, to operate with these kinds of numbers, you either have to remain small. .. or have some form of investment money to help cover expenses until the database of customers really starts growing. So, a few weeks after you lose $60 on the initial sale ... you resend your customers a fresh supply of whatever you were selling for $40. Now, you're $20 in a hole instead of the $60. Next month, they get another supply for $40. Now you're $20 in the plus. Next month you send another and you're up $60 ... the next month you're up to $100 ... the next month you're up to $140. That's five shipments after the initial. The Lev of this type of customer would be $260. If you didn't know this, when you lost $60 on the initial sale, you may have deemed this effort a failure ... but if you have enough cash to get you through the lean months ... you can be on top. Companies like Nightingale Connant send out thousands of direct mail sales letters offering a cassette series for $39.95 or so. Obviously they are losing money on this offer. But they know and understand an average customer of theirs will spend several hundreds of dollars on other cassette and CD courses they sell in the months and years to come. Sometimes in order to get large ... you have to lose some money on initial sales. Sure, you may be able to get some smaller mailing lists and magazine advertisements to profit right off the bat... but the amount of customers they bring in may be small. In order to get thousands of customers every month ... you may have to mail to lists and run advertisements that are not the most profitable right off the bat. Like I was saying before ... making upfront profits depends on your productj service, selecting the right groups of people to advertise
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to ... and of course- your ability to persuade them with direct response techniques like the ones I'm teaching you. The more desired the product... the more you'll be able to profit up front. Products that are less desirable will cost a little or a lot more in advertising dollars to attract. When I was selling my dietary supplements, after six months of selling, I went back to the people who bought the first month and measured how many of them were still customers on auto ship ... how many canceled ... and when. I added up all the money I made off them all and divided it by the amount of customers I sold that first month. At the six-month mark ... I figured out from the customer data that from the first month of sales, 1 got an average of four bottles sold-, which was four months. Three bottles at $40 and the initial at $60 equaled $180. This was my LeV.
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Chapter Ten: The Two Step
The Two Step ... no, I'm not going to teach you a dance. It's another way to find targeted customers for your products. There are certain times you want to use a 2-step approach. 1. When you cannot afford to place large ads in magazines. 2. When you need a lot of space to tell your full story and sales pitch and it would be unprofitable to run all those pages in a magazine. 3. When you want to operate in silence ... under the radar of your competitors and anyone else you want hide your offer from. 4. When there is no mailing list and/or for your product.
magazine targeted enough
5. When your product is very expensive- usually over $400 and where it would be difficult to sell people in one singular shot. 6. When you're just starting as you possibly can.
out and want to make success
as easy
Let's go over what a 2-step is ... and then we can go over each of the examples in great detail. A 2-step is an advertisement you place in a magazine or a TV or radio spot that offers prospects a solution to a desire they have in a free report, video, tape, DVD, etc. they can request by calling a recorded message on an 800#. It can also be a TV or radio ad ... or print ad that refers people to your website for more information. I don't like this approach as
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well... but it is another variation. But what we're going to talk about now is the ad that offers a free report. Say you're selling a product that explains to people how to buy Real Estate at Government Tax Deed Sales. While you can sure place full page ads for a course like this one in almost any men's magazine ... and mail it to many mailing lists of business opportunity seekers ... lets say you want to do the 2-step ad. So what you'll do is run a small ad in a magazine, usually a 1I 12th page ... 1 16th page ... 1 14th page ... or a 1/3rd page ad. The headline would look to attract everyone looking to make money. The headline may say something like this ... "Free Report Reveals How I Bought This $60,000 Home For Just $345.28 Free and Clear!" ' Now, under the headline, you may have a photo of the house and a paragraph that will tease the reader. It will NOT spill the beans as to how or where you were able to buy the home so cheap. You're going to have to tease like your girlfriend in the 9th grade did. After you tease them with the paragraph you'd then say something like, "To claim your free report simply call this recorded message and tell us where to send it. You can call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is no obligation," Now, everyone likes free stuff ... and since they do not have to deal with any salesperson hounding them when they call..; you'll get thousands of people requesting this free report... which is basically ... YOUR SALES LETTER! Of course, the report won't be all sales pitch ... you will educate a little on the Tax Deed process ... but the main thrust of the report will be ... here's this fabulous opportunity you may not have known about... here's proof it is really true ... I am an expert ... and I'm the best person to teach you ... so here's how I can help you make a lot of money.
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This sales letter jfree report can be a larger format piece ... because you will not be mailing it to the masses. The people who responded to your ad will self-qualify themselves as prime prospects. Here's when and why you should use the 2-step approach: 1. When you cannot afford to place large ads in magazines. Full-page ads cost a lot of money. If you want to get yourself in a large magazine but the price is too high for a large enough page to actually "sell" your product ... go with a smaller ad and 2-step it. 2. When you need a lot of space to tell your full story and sales pitch and it would be unprofitable to run all those pages in a magazine. . Some products- especially new ones sometimes need a lot of space to tell your entire story. And if your product needs four or five pages to "sell" itself... that mayor may not be profitable. A 2-step ad can get you prime prospects and the sales letter/free report you send them can easily be 12 ... 24 ... 48 pages or more! 3. When you want to operate in silence ... under the radar of your competitors and anyone else you want hide your offer from. Knock-offs are a part of this business. People will notice your fullpage ads running month after month after month. As soon as they see this ... it will take about five or six issues (maybe less) and you'll start to see copycats sneaking into the magazines you advertise in. usually trashing your product... cutting your price ... taking your conservative (and true) claims and doubling them, etc. It's frustrating. But, if you have a simple 2-step ad ... unless potential knock-offs are willing to call your 800#and request a free report ... they will never know what you're up to. Knock-offs are known to be lazy ... after all; they're too lazy to come up with their own ideas. Another reason why a 2-step approach is good, is that you fly under the radar of anyone looking to critique anything you're doing ... like the authorities. As long as you're selling something that is not a total fraud ... you should not have to worry about the authorities too much. But, this is another reason why some
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marketers prefer 2-step ads. Their entire sales pitch and offer and product claims are not out there in the open for all to see. 4. When there is no mailing list and/or magazine targeted enough for your product. Sometimes there is no qualified mailing list to mail to. And sometimes there is not enough people reading a magazine who'd be interested in your product. If this is the case, your sales won't be enough to cover a full-page ad. In a case like this, you have to build your own mailing Iist.,; and/ or pick the interested prospects out of the millions of general circulation. I'm sure you're seeing all these TV commercials for The Inventor's Help line ... and Inventec ... and others. The commercial usually has people saying that they thought of ideas before some large company and if they had a Patent, they'd be rich and so on. These commercials are looking for people just like this ... people who have an idea they want to protect. Now, these commercials offer callers an Inventor's Kit... which is basically a sales pitch for their company ... which is probably a bunch of Patent Attorneys. For a few hundred bucks, they'll protect your idea for you. Now, the last time I checked, there were no mailing lists for people with good ideas (and bad ones) who are looking to get protection in the form of a patent. Well, actually, the commercial says nothing about a Patent..; but you know what I mean. Being there are no mailing lists, they went to the largest general circulation media ... TV and placed these 2-step ads. The people who call these places probably do have some form of an idea ... and everyone thinks they have the greatest idea ... so these company's will feed off this and offer protection so big corporations will not profit from their ideas first. Even if the inventor does not wish to market and manufacture their idea ... they feel assured they are protected with a Patent... hoping a large company will contact them and look to buy their idea or give them a royalty fee. Whatever. The would-be inventor gladly shells out $500 or more for the protection of their idea. A great 2-step example.
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5. When your product is very expensive- usually over $400 and where it would be difficult to sell people in one singular shot. Sometimes the product you are offering costs a lot of money. It's all right to sell things that cost several thousands of dollars ... in this business; there in no limits as to how much you can charge for something. Software programs for $1000 ... financial newsletter subscriptions for $2000 ... seminars for $5500 ... etc. Now, a ful1page ad may not be able to sell such a high priced item. Maybe even two ... or three ... or even ten pages may not be enough to sell in one shot. Sometimes your prospect needs to be nursed into a large purchase like this. That's OK. A 2-step ad is needed. Your ad would describe the item you are selling and you'd offer them free information. Nowhere do you tell them about the price in the 2step ad. I'm sure you've seen the Tempurpedic Sleep System. It's a foamlike mattress that is made out of some high-tech material invented by NASA. Anyway, these mattresses are several thousands of dollars ... as most quality mattresses are. What this company does is run 2-step commercials and infomercials offering free information and a sample of the mattress material. Basically, you'd call the 800# and give them your name and address ... and probably some other information, like what brand mattress do you currently own ... when are you looking to purchase a new mattress ... etc.
They'll then send you the information and the mattress
sample ... and they'll probably remail you sales literature every so many weeks ... and maybe even call you on the phone. Only in the information package they send you will there be a price sheet saying these mattresses cost like $2000. They built a mailing list of people interested in their mattresses, where a qualified mailing list did not exist before ... and they eased potential customers into a purchase of several thousands of dollars.
Another example of this is Bowflex. I believe the same company that does the mattresses markets this product. They run 60-
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second commercials for their weight-training contraption and offer a free video and free information. They'll build a mailing list of prospects and hope to sell a machine that costs about $1000 and more. 6. When you're just starting out and want to make success as easy as you possibly can. Success with 2-step ads is the easiest way to do direct marketing right. The 2-step technique is advised for beginners by many direct marketing pros- including myself. First of all, you're building a mailing list of prime prospects. The prospects will respond to your 2-step ad should be 10-times as likely to buy your product than people you'd mail to on a cold mailing list. After all ... they did come forward and self-qualify themselves as prospects. Now, there are a few guidelines I would advise you of. The 2-Step Works Best In Print, on TV, and on Radio. If you are going to do a 2-step ... do not use this technique in direct mail. Do not go fishing for prospects in mailing lists. It is best to go fishing in a huge pond ... like a large circulation magazine or newspaper. .. on TV... on the Radio ... etc. You're probably just starting out in this business ... so I'd advise you to stick with the newspaper or magazine ad. The entire purpose of the 2-step is to solicit a huge group of people and fish out the interested prospects efficiently. Direct mailing to request an inquiry is not efficient. Only Use A Phone-In Response Device. I would not have your prospects mail in a coupon ... or go to a website ... in combination with a call-in. Tests have proven that you can get 300% more people to request your free report or free information kit by having a phone-in option only. And when you do this ... make sure to use the words, "FREE RECORDED MESSAGE". Prospects do not want to be bothered by a sales person at this point. They are slightly interested ... but in no way ready to be "sold" anything. Make sure you stress they won't have to talk with anyone or you'll hurt your response. Also, you can run one ad with a toll number. .. and one with a toll-free number and see which one pulls more requests. A toll call will qualify your prospects even more, because they have to pay for the phone call..;
'--_/
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but you want to make sure it doesn't hinder response too much. Also, if you can get the toll number to work ... you're saving a ton of money on the phone bill you're going to have to pay every month. Price Point Must Be At Least $60. Don't waste your time with 2-steps if your product is selling for less than $60. Remember. we're all working on a mathematical scale. If your selling price is not high enough ... you won't be able to cover the cost of running the 2-step ad in the first place ... and then the mailing of all the sales letters. Most 2-step products are $300 or so. But don't let that stop you if you have a $60 product. Here's an example of a $60 2-step offer. I was flipping though.a men's magazine the other day and I saw an ad that gave away a free "Sex Pill Guide" that listed all the top herbal-Viagra-type pills on the market these days. The product they were giving away said nothing about this company actually selling any form of pill themselves. All it said was that they published a guide and it was free for you to have and it was meant to help guide you to the best product as they tested them all. Anyway, I called and got myself the guide, as I wanted to see the mechanics of this offer. Why would they advertise a free guide? Where are they making money? So, I called a recorded message and left my name and address with a fake middle initial, so I can track everything I receive from this company in the future ... as I'm sure they're going to mail the hell out of me. A guide arrived a few days later. It had a dozen or so products in it, and of course the # 1 product in their guide also had a stand-alone ad in their envelope. Obviously, this company made a supplement, then made-up this guide, which was basically biased as hell to sell their own $60 bottle of pills ... and they persuaded you to buy the # 1 rated product ... which said nowhere it was manufactured by them ... but any experienced direct marketer would know.
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This is a good idea ... not the most ethicaL. but it is good. I'm sure it works for some products. The secret to success is acquiring enough leads to justify the advertising cost. You Have To Attract Enough Leads. The biggest hurdle with 2-step ads is you have to attract enough leads to justify the cost of the ad. I'm sure selling the people with the sales literature you send out is not going to be the biggest hurdle. Say you place an ad for $1000, the more prospects you get to request the free info ... the lower your lead cost is. The secret is to attract enough leads to get the cost per lead way down ... but you don't want to get too vague in your ad, as you will attract a lot of leads .._ but they will not be as qualified. And you don't want to hype up things too much as when they receive your literature, they'll be turned off. 2-Step Math. Here's how to do the math on a 2-step promotion. Lets do the math on a 2-step ad I just saw and responded Entrepreneur Magazine.
to in •
This guy ran a 1/2-page ad and it probably cost him $10,000. Entrepreneur Magazine is a rather large magazine and a 1j2-page ad for his 2-step was quite big. You'll obviously run a smaller ad ... maybe in a smaller circulation magazine or newspaper. Anyway, this 1/2 page ad received 5000 responses. a lead.
So, he paid $2
He then mailed a sales letter/free report, which cost him $1 to print and mail. Now, he's invested $3 in each prospect. He has $15,000 invested in the ad and the sales letters/free reports. His product is selling for $500. He gets to keep all $500 as eTO as it is an information product. He needs to sell $15,000 worth of his products to breakeven. He's got 5000 interested prospects- just 30 people need to buy to recoup his entire cost. I like these numbers.
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Lets say he gets 250 to buy. That's 5%. He's looking to gross $125,000. That's 8.3-times his initial $15,000 gamble! Even if he got just 90 people to buyout of the 5000 ... he still increased his money by 300% and grossed $45,000! He can then look to run this ad in numerous other magazines ... as long as he continues to attract leads at a similar price ... and these ads can be ran each and every month. He's going to get rich very quickly with numbers like this. What is the major task at hand for you to replicate an offer like this? You have to attract prospects for $2 on average and you have to sell 5% of them at $500. Selling the 5% is not the biggest problem ... its getting the 5000 people to request the free information, the free report and paying $5000 for the ad. Kill Your Competitors With A 2-Step Approach. My friend Gary Halbert says if you run a full page ad in a magazine and get lOOOorders ... the same full page ad offering a free report ... or a free guide for the type of product you are offering ... will get you 10,000 requests for the free information. He says you'll get 10-times as many people to request the free literature as you would to order right off the page. Sounds realistic. Then he goes on to say that of that 10,000, you'll get 30% to actually buy from you. So, effectively, you'll end up with 300% more orders than if you just ran the one page ad and sold right off the darn thing. This approach is great when there are many, many advertisers selling the same thing in a magazine. Say, it was a diet pill. Instead of being just another ad, selling another diet pill ... you can offer a free diet pill guide instead. People will call your phone number and leave their name and address on the voicemail. You'd then mail them your sales letter/free guide ... and you will then sell the customer. .. and your competitors are nowhere to be found.
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Let Your Competitors Pay For Your Advertisements. Here's an idea. If you are acquiring leads for $1. .. go to 4 of your competitors and get them to each buy the leads from your ads for 25 cents each. You mail the leads first ... then sell them to your competition. Four guys at 25 cents each gets you $1 per name ... just what it cost you to acquire them in advertising! Hey, this chapter on 2-steps got me so excited ... I'm going to create a hot 2-step otTer for a business opportunity course I'm working on! And remember, you can interchange and add other concepts and techniques I've taught you on top of this 2-step approach ... like the auto ship ... the back end ... etc.
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Chapter Eleven: An Irresistible Offer
Before we even consider writing a word of advertising have to first decide the best offer to promote.
copy, we
This book is not going to talk about actually "writing" any sales copy until the deep chapters. Before we paint our masterpiece ... we have to have a clear vision of it in our heads. An offer is the "deal" you're going to make to your prospects in an effort to get them to part with their hard-earned money for your idea. The better the offer. .. the more appealing your sales pitch will be. Your offer has to also be simple and easy to understand. As soon as your prospect does not understand what you are trying to give them ... you lost them forever. Here are a few examples success:
of offers I have used in the past with great
Free Gift With Purchase: This is the most obvious. Offer your customer a free gift ... or a free bonus when they buy. Information products are great for this type of bonus. They cost next to nothing to make ... and can have a perceived value of $30 ... all the way up to $200 or more. Most of the time, you can cover the free bonus in the shipping and handling fee you charge for your product. I've been noticing a lot of commercials lately, the merchant is selling a knife set or whatever ... and they'll double your order for free ... you just have to pay the shipping on the 2nd set of knives. What a deal! But in reality, the shipping fee you are going to pay
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for the second set of knives is actually the cost for them to manufacture/buy the knives and the cost to ship them to you. Feel free to give away a bonus and ask for the customer shipping and handling fee. This fee covers the cost you to buy or make the item ... and you can usually include bonus gift in the shipment the customer is going to get no additional cost.
to pay a have to pay the extra anyway for
You can offer a free gift that the customer has to claim after he gets the initial order. For example, if you buy a car wax kit and it comes with a free bottle of tire dressing ... some companies will include a coupon in the wax kit that the customer has to send in to receive the tire dresaing. Not everyone will request the free bottle, but you can still offer it to everyone. I really haven't done this one for at least 10 years. With a product I was selling, I offered a free gift that I requested the customer pay the 8/H on ... but instead of including it in the initial order, I simply included a coupon the customer would have to mail with the shipping and handling fee. Maybe 70% of the customers requested the free bonus. $9.95 30-Day In-Home Trial. This is popular offer nowadays! I'm starting to believe you cannot sell a product on an infomercial anymore. In order to get a customer to call you, you may have to offer them an in-home trial for a nominal fee, plus shipping and handling. Here's how it works: Let's use Carlton Sheets' Real Estate Course we've all seen for the past 10+ years on TV as an excellent example. Nowadays, he's not selling the course like he always was for several hundreds of dollars off the bat ... he's offering a 3D-day in-home trial for $9.95 plus a shipping and handling fee. The ad says nothing about how much the product actually costs. In order for this to work, you have to take orders only with credit cards. A customer calls and orders the trial. He pays the $9.95 trial fee and the shipping and handling fee. Carlton will offer you a rush shipping upgrade, which of course there is a profit for him on. Then only after they got your credit card number .., only after
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they have your shipping address ... only a few seconds before you'd say "goodbye"... you hit the caller with a script that goes something like this, "OK-you qualify for Carlton's $9.95 30-day in-home trial. Your credit card will be billed just $9.95 plus $x for shipping and handling. Preview the course for an entire 30-days and if its not everything you hoped it would be send it back to us within the 30day trial period and you'll owe nothing more. Otherwise, if you decide to keep the course and make money with Real Estate, your credit card will be billed in four easy monthly installments of $59.95. Your shipment is going out today and you'll receive it in about 10 days, so look for it. Thank you for calling!" Its going to be 10-times easier to get a customer to take a 30-day trial for under ten bucks. This fee can or cannot be refundable- its up to you. You can even cover the shipping and handling charge for your customers ... or not. Either way, you'll get 5 times the people to order the trial ... and even if you got 50% of the people to send back the shipment, you're still looking at selling 2.5 times more product than had you just sold right off the ad or commercial. I seriously doubt 50°1<> will send back the course ... maybe you'll get 20% to send it back. .. but even if you get 20%... who cares? The $9.95 fee is non-refundable ... as is the shipping charge. You lost nothing. Resell the course to someone else. There's a fitness guru promoting an exercise gizmo for a $14.95 30-day in-home trial and $34.95 shipping and handling ... but they cover the shipping fee. So, for just $14.95, you can try out this exercise machine for an entire month. But on the flip side ... do you really think people are going to disassemble the darn thing and put it back in the big box and send it back to the marketer for $30-$50 in UPS fees? Not that many will. This marketer will make increased sales from skeptical people who only after the trial realized he sold a good product- so it's a win-win. AND,the marketer will also profit from the lazy people who may have returned the product but are too lazy to send it back. .. so their credit cards will get billed in 5 payments of $60.
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We Won't Cash Your Check For 30-Days! Here's a great example of reversing risk. Offer your customers that you won't cash their checks or charge their credit cards for 30 or 60 days. You have to be strong to do this. You will not get money in the door for a month or more if you go this route. What's worse is you better have a product that costs you next to nothing to make. If you're trusting people's checks or credit cards to be good and they are not ... you're going to lose on scumbags. But, if the product is a book or whatever, that cost just $4 to make and ship ... you're not at too much of a loss and all the added sales from using this technique will always cover the extra "deadbeat" losses. This technique is said to add 300% to the pulling power of an ad or sales letter. It may be worth a test. Offer Installments. Like the trial offer, this offer must be used only with credit card customers. You cannot accept checks or money orders with this type of offer. If you're selling a high-ticket item ... it may make sense to offer your customer an installment plan. You see this all over TV nowadays ... "JUST 5 PAYMENTSOF JUST $19.95!" Breaking up the fee is a surefire way to get more sales. How many homes would sell if there were no such thing as mortgages? Not too many, right? The same with new cars? Without financing ... a dealership will have a tough time selling a high-ticket car. It's no different here. Ifyou're ..selling a $180 item maybe you can do 3 easy payments of $59.95 ... and better yet maybe you can do a combo offer... $9.95 for a 30-day in-home trial plus S/H ... and then you can do 3 payments of $59.95 instead of billing an entire $180 on the trial offer. Like I was saying before in a past chapter ... you can combine these techniques sometimes and multiply their power. Now, when you offer installments, there are a few risks. First of all, you do not get all your money upfront. You have to wait for it.,; sometimes as long as 4 or 5 months! Another thing is credit cards may go bad ... or they may be declined for a month's billing and you either have to double up on next month's billing or call them and get a fresh credit card.
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C.O.D Cash On Delivery. It is not used too much nowadays. I never used it. There's really no reason to use it. There's an extra fee. Many people reject the shipment and you lost the shipping costs and all the lost time. But if you want to do this, make sure to send your customer a postcard a few days before they are to receive the package and tell them that you have included another special free bonus in their order. This will help make the customer actually take the C.O.D. when it arrives. Still I think Cash On Delivery is more of a pain in the ass. If your customer does not have a credit card ... or at least a debit card- which almost anyone can get..; maybe you do not want them as a customer. Bill Me Later. This is a specialty for magazine publishers for one reason ... if they had to actually get people to pay up first ... they'd get 50% of the people they'd get to respond ... probably less. Billing later is risky. You don't really know the people you are sending your products to. Nightingale Connant makes their entire business from a "bill me later" promotion. That's how they attract new customers in the large quantities they do.
You have to have a billing system set up for you to mail out 'the invoices. You can include an invoice in the shipment saying when the money is due. If you're selling a subscription that you can stop when they don't pay up ... it's better than if your product was a one shot and they got it all in their possession. Think before you do this offer. While I'm sure you'll get more orders, it all boils down to this ... Track how many orders you get when you ask for the money upfront. Then offer the "bill me later" option and track how many orders you get... then track how many paid up in 30-days or whenever the bill was due. If the profits were significantly larger with the "bill me"... even after you subtract all the lost product (your hard cost- not the selling price) and all the added time to bill people- go for it.
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Example: Pay upfront offer= ]00 orders at $100 $10,000 in sales Bill Me Later=
400 orders (275 paid up) 125 didn't pay - $1250 loss - $10 each 175 more $100 orders= $17,500 275 orders at $100 $27,500 in sales $1250 in losses from non-payers $26, 250 in sales
If you can get your "bill me later" offer to work like this ... it's worth doing... but again ... you have to wait to get paid- you'd better have a few bucks in the bank ahead of time. First Bottle Free or First Video Free. If you're doing an automatic shipment product like a monthly video... or a monthly supply of pills... you can give away the first bottle or first video... and just ask the customer to pay the shipping and handling fee of$4.95 or $6.95 with their credit card. You can only do this with a credit card customer. The secret is the automatic delivery club. If the customer is not satisfied with the product, they have to call within 30-days to cancel further shipments. You'd be ~:urprised when 10% or so call and cancel..; and you get 200% more customers! Of course there is problems with this type of offer as well. If you are selling a product like a bottle of pills, where the product will always be the same ... you have to make sure you do not get the scammers calling in and ordering a free bottle to one address and then another address and then another address ... only to cancel all the shipments the next week after they got 4 or 5 bottles out of you. Now,my direct marketing common sense tells me not to worry about people like this because you did get the shipping and handling fee out of the person and that did cover the actual product and the shipping fees so there's no money actually
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"lost" ... but the bigger problem comes next month when this person is calling you irate if they didn't call and cancel their auto delivery in time and they have 5 billings on their credit card for $40 or so each. The credit card companies may start to think you're up to some kind of no good and give you heat. Make sure you say in your ad, "LIMIT ONE BOTTLE PER CUSTOMER AND PER HOUSEHOLD". You won't have to worry about this too much if your monthly product is a different product ... there's really no advantage scamming additional copies of the same video. Only Sell One Product At a Time. I see jokers selling 2 or 3 or 4 different products sales letter. Fools.
in a single ad or
Marketers sometimes think they can justify the high cost of mailing sales letters ... or running advertisements if they offer many, many products. They actually think they'll have a better chance at success this way- but they won't. Burn these words into your brain- when it comes to creating a singular sales letter or a singular advertisement ... SELL ONLY ONE PRODUCT AT A TIME. Joe Sugarman- the master behind BluBlocker Sunglasses even tells a story similar to this. Before he had BluBlocker, he had JS&A (the Sharper Image of the 70's). He was selling Navy Seals watches. The supplier of these watches wanted him to sell all the different color versions of this watch ... and the women's sizes. Joe wanted to sell just the men's black version. The watch manufacturer was puzzled why he would want to do this. Joe knew something they didn't. They really wanted him to sell all the watches at the same time. Joe offered to do a split test, where one ad would have just the one black, men's watch and one ad would have all the colors and the men's and women's sizes. When the sales results came in ... they chose to run the ad with just the black, men's version of the Navy Seals watch. Now, this was an extreme example ... the watches
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were all the same. But definitely, if you're selling a weight loss pill... do not also offer an herbal-Viagra at the same time! PEOPLE CAN ONLY BE SOLD ONE THING AT A TIME.
If you want to give an unrelated product away for free with the purchase of your main product ... that's fme... just don't try to sell two things at the same time.
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Chapter Twelve: Guarantee Everything
Do you know when a customer decides if he's going to return your product? When he's buying it. In the 1980's and 1990's having a satisfaction guarantee could have given you a competitive edge. Nowadays, It's a requirement ... and the more "risk" you can take off your customer's backs ... the better. If you are greedy andj or petrified to offer your customers a guarantee ... maybe you are not too confident of what you're selling. Maybe you are confident ... but are scared a huge percentage of people will take you up on it. I have two words for you- DON'T WORRY. Here's how guarantees work in regards to response. If you did not offer a guarantee, you may sell 10 people out of 1000. When you offer a guarantee, you may be looking at 20 orders ... and out of that 20, two or three will request their money back. Even giving the money back on two or three people ... you're still looking at 7 to 8 more orders. You'd still be on top. In this chapter, we're going to be covering the most popular guarantees I've offered in the past. Unconditional 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. This is the standard guarantee your customers will expect. If your ads don't say that all sales are finaL. you have to offer a standard 3D-day guarantee anyway. Not offering a guarantee makes your product look shady ... so at the obsolete minimum, you have to offer a standard 30-day money back guarantee. Feel free to add the words "Less SjH" ... which means your customer can have their money back ... less their shipping and handling. Now remember, your product and all its order processing costs are covered in the SjH fee you charge. Even when a customer wants his money back,
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you can keep the fee it cost you to ship the product... product ... take the cal1... etc.
create the
60-Day or 90-Day or Longer Money Back Guarantee. Also an unconditional guarantee. People work on deadlines. When do you pay your rent? Your car payment? Your credit card bills? When do you return movies to the movie store? If I know anything about people, I'd say you pay the bills and return the movies on the absolute last day. All people do this. Now, the longer you stretch the time frame to get their money back. .. the longer it will take them to actually call and ask for it. As times goes on ... they forget. So to say that the longer time period you give your customers to get a refund on your product, the less refunds you '11 actually have to give ,would be absolutely true. Conditional Guarantees. This guarantee only permits the customer their money back if a certain thing does or does not happen as your productj service claimed. "If my sports picks are not at least 90% accurate for the next 30 days ... 1'11refund every dime of the money you paid me!" Now, unless you under-perform and unless your customer actually calls and takes you up on that guarantee, you don't have to give money back unconditionally. Double Your Money Back. Obviously, this type of guarantee is conditional; otherwise you're going to be losing some serious money! Entrepreneur Magazine actually started as a bunch of reports and home study courses on starting certain types of businesses. From what I've read, when they first came out, they were plagued with a large percentage of refunds. To cut down on these unconditional refunds, they decided to offer DOUBLE your money back. .. but it was conditional. The buyer of these kits had to show some form of proof they actually tried stuff taught in the course. Sales soared ... refunds dwindled. A DOUBLE your money back guarantee for a bodybuilding supplement- Claim in sales letter: Double your money back in 120days if this fails to add 20 pounds of rock hard muscle. Conditions explained in literature included in shipment: "This product is guaranteed to add 20 pounds of rock hard ... granite muscle within
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the next 120 days or we'll give you DOUBLE your money back! Simply take 3 photographs, newspaper in hand the very day you start the program and take 3 more photographs, newspaper in hand on the 120th day. If you cannot honestly say that you took this product faithfully, as directed, worked out regularly ... and didn't see an added 20 pounds of muscle, send the empty bottles back. We'll send you DOUBLE what you paid." Do you really think they're going to take three before photos, three after photos ... a whopping four months later. .. and keep all the empty bottles? A few will ... but not all. And these are not out of this world conditions. All you're asking the guy to do is document his success ... work out... use the product like directed ... and keep 3 or 4 empty bottles. Keep The Bonus! Remember you threw-in some free bonuses in your offer? Remember, these bonuses were paid for in the shipping and handling fee you charge your customer? Remember, you do not refund shipping and handling fees? Well, you can offer an unconditional 30 or 60 or 120 or whatever-day guarantee and let your customer keep the free bonuses you gave them. My mentor Jay Abraham calls this a "better-than-risk-free-guarantee". And it is. Think about it like this: If you gave a few free reports, maybe a video ... and a cassette tape all as free bonuses, and they had a "perceived value" of $200 or so. If a customer wants his money back for the initial product he ordered, you can tell him he'll still come out with $200 worth of merchandise regardless if he's happy or not. This is not just "risk-free" ... it's BETTER than risk-free. Here's a great example. I was selling some really high-end car care products in 1995. I sold a pint size and a quart size kit. To stir-up some larger quart size kit sales, I found a supplier of some really high end looking Orbital Polishers. These things looked like they cost $100 ... but I was buying them for under $10 in quantity. Now, the shipping and handling for the all the waxes and the buffer was $19.95 or something close to it. I covered the cost to ship the entire kit, the cost to manufacture the waxes, and the cost to buy the orbital polisher in this $19.95. I told my customers, if they weren't blown away with the wax products, they could rerur n them
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in 30 or 60 days and they can keep the orbital polisher for their time and faith in my products now. Customers who asked for their money back actually felt like they were taking advantage of me ... keeping the polisher that looked like it cost me $100 ... but all the costs were covered in the shipping and handling fee 1 charged them initially. They were not to get back when they requested a refund. When I made such a powerful guarantee like this one, prospects knew this polish had to be something special- otherwise I'd be one crazy (and bankrupt) guy! Refund Shipping and Handling. Sometimes you can even go out on a limb and offer to refund not only the purchase price ... but also the shipping and handling fee as well. I sold 1.4 Million bottles of a supplement and I included a guarantee like this. The reason for it is simple ... Sometimes a customer will not only want his money back from you, but even after you give it to him- he still disputes the shipping and handling fee with Visa or Master Card. Sometimes, you don't want to have anything from a dissatisfied customer- even a shipping and handling fee. Unconditional 100% Money Back Plus 10%. This is a play on numbers. If your product sold for $69.95 ... and you ask $6.95 for shipping and handling ... you can refund the entire thing and instead of saying that you give shipping fees back as well you can say, "You'll receive a 100% refund of your purchase price and I'll even throw-in an extra 100/0 for your time and trouble!" In reality, it's just the shipping fee you're refunding ... but it sounds better this way. Bottom Of The Jar Guarantee. This is used in the supplements business. What it means is use the entire bottle or jar or tube and if by the time it's finished you are not thrilled, send the jar or tube or bottle back EVEN IF IT'S EMPTY... and you'll receive a full and complete refund of your purchase price. It sounds nice to the customer that the entire supply can be used up and you'll still give them their money back. .. and it works well for you because you get them to use the entire supply and you get them to keep the container ... and they have to send back the container to you. These are all three
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hurdles. One, they have to use the entire thing. That takes 30days. Maybe results will take this long to manifest ... Remember what I told you about stretching the time frame out in the beginning in this chapter. Two, they have to remember to hold onto the container. Many people throw things away by accident. Of course, if a customer calls you and says they threw the container away, you're still going to give them a refund ... but you'd be surprised how many will not call just to avoid the confrontation. And three, they have to send the bottle back to you. That takes a bag ... postage ... and people are lazy. Of course, if a customer calls and wants their money back. .. and they do not want to send the bottle back to you- by all means give the damn refund. But again, you'd be surprised by how many people will not call. The Lesson Is On Me. This is a great way to word a guarantee on a product where they'll learn something either in a video ... a cassette tape ... a book. .. etc. Say if it was a golf video that taught how to drive the ball further. .. the guarantee can say something like this, "Watch the video, and if John's teachings don't have you driving the golf ball like a CANNON... adding 50 yards ... and hitting as straight as an arrow ... as accurate as clockwork ... the golf lesson is on me. Send the video back for a full refund of you purchase price ... " This is basically a way to state a guarantee that sounds cool. You're not buying a video ... you're buying a lesson that just happens to come on a DVD or a VHS cassette or whatever. The information is retained in the customer's head. You're just requesting the physical product (the video) back ... but the memory of what he learns remains in his head. We'll Send UPS To Pick It Up For A Refund! I remember seeing an ad for Malm's Wax where their headline said, "Discover the liquid camauba wax that will make you car so shiny, if you don't think it's the absolute deepest shine you've ever seen, call us and we'll send UPS to pick it up for a refund!" This headline knocked me on my ass. That's powerful! But beware; you're going to lose some money here. Call Tags do cost some money. The shipping charges to come back to you cost
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money. If you word in your ad or sales letter, the guarantee is for the purchase price and less SjH, you can keep the initial shipping fee. You11just have to pay for the call tag and the shipping back to you. So, if you have some money in the initial shipping fee to play with ... if it is enough to cover the shipping back to you ... maybe you can offer this. Oh, and one more thing- you better have a remarkable product ... or your warehouse will be full of boxes from dissatisfied customers. What I like to do with the Call Tag idea, is just tell the customer he can keep your product or give it to a friend he thinks may be interested in it. We'll still give the credit. A half-used bottle of cream or pills is worth nothing to me. Some notes on the guarantees listed in these pages: Some of them mayor may not rub you the wrong way. Some are more ethical than others ... and it all depends on what makes you feel good. I do not promote or deter you from using any particular guarantee ... but one thing I do demand- you must offer some form of a satisfaction guarantee!
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Chapter Thirteen: Premiums
It's nice to get a free bonus or a free gift when you buy something. I've taken products that only broke even and added a premium and saw response greatly lifted. Premiums must cost you little or nothing out of your profits. Now, I do not mean premiums should be worthless- they must have some form of worth in order for them to work. I've even increased my selling price to offset a free gift I wanted to include ... and still saw response lift. I'm going to give you a few examples of free gift offers I've used in the past and how they helped or didn't help. Many times, you'll add a premium and you will not see response your sales letter or advertisement increase.
to
For example, I once had a bodybuilding supplement which gave two additional bottles of different supplements as gifts. I knew the two extra bottles cost me an additional $4 or so, so I increased the shipping and handling cost billed to the customer. Response was the same with or without the premiums. Go figure. I once sold a car wax kit and gave away an orbital polisher. There were two versions of the kit ... a pint and a quart size kit. I gave the polisher with the quart size kit. I was able to get the polishers for under $14 from a manufacturer. To offset the cost of the polisher, I had to increase the shipping and handling charges ... and response for the quart size kits went up. I recall mostly all of the purchases were for the larger size kit. I benefited two different ways. I first of all sold a more expensive version of the product ... and secondly I was able to increase overall response. This is what I call win-win.
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In the information products business, premiums can be extra reports ... recordings of seminars or interviews with experts in the field ... etc. These types of premiums can have a high-perceived value and yet cost you nothing to include. Premiums can be used to encourage customers to use your products for a longer period of time. I remember offering a dietary supplement on an auto ship basis. I told customers I'd give them a free DVD Player if they were able to do a little survey for me. Once the customer got the package, they got a diary they had to fill out as they used my product, and if they can complete the diary in its entirety ... I'd send them a DVD Player for free! I was getting these DVD Players for $40 or so. My monthly shipment of pills cost the customer $40. I got my customers to use the product for an average of four months. Thesurvey was a six-month study. If the customer completed the diary I included with their order, they had to be on the product for six 'entire months. Now, I got two extra months worth of sales ... one of the month's revenues, 1 had to use to buy the DVD Player- but I still got an entire extra $40 sale as profit ... plus the diary from my customer- which I could use any way I wished. The customer got a free DVD Player- for using a product he enjoyed. This was also win-win for all parties involved. I used this same offer for a CD-ROM club I had a few years back. I was getting huge quantitiesof software for $1' each from companies who needed to clear out the warehouse for the next version of the software. For example, one of the products we had in the CD-ROM club was a popular typing software. Version 4 was on store shelves for $50 ... version 5 was coming out in a few months, so the manufacturer was selling me the entire remaining version 4 software for $1 or so. I sent the customer's two software titles a month for $20 ... and these programs were worth $50 or so each, so it was a good deal for them. To encourage customer to stay in the club for 6 months ... I gave them a hot software title I was buying for $20. My customer data showed me members were in my club for four months. If I could get them to stay until month six ... I'd give them the $20 bonus program-, which was worth $40+ in stores. Initial response
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from my mailers was increased because of the free software ... and I got the customer to stay a little longer. I made more money on both ends- increased members ... who would stay members longer. I've also used premiums to persuade customers to buy a certain way. If I'm looking for an increase of customers to pay by check or money order- over a credit card ... I'd give bonuses when they paid with a check or money order. If I wanted customers to pay with their American Express cards over Visa, Master Card or Discover ... I'd give them the bonus when they used their American Express card to order. I'd call it the "American Express Cardholder Bonus". Customers felt special if they had the American Express card and used it. In reality, I had a cap on my Visa and MasterCard sales figures ... but no limit for the American Express sales. And since I was hitting my limit every month, I wanted to sway a portion of my sales to a credit card in which] had no limit as to how much business I could run through the account. I know of several merchants who use a premium to persuade customers to buy with a credit card over a check or money order. A good example of this is Girls Gone Wild. They offer one video for $9.95 and if you use your credit card, they'll give you an extra video for free! The real reason behind this is Girls Gone Wild wants to send you automatically a new video every month and rebill your credit card. They cannot do this with people who order with checks and money orders, so they'll give you another video- for no additional charge ... just to get the credit card number. Many companies will even let you keep the free premium even if you ask for a refund. And why shouldn't they? The additional cost to include the premium is usually made up in the shipping and handling charge they make you pay. And shipping and handling is usually not a refundable fee. Magazines like Sports Illustrated are famous for giving away the football clock ... or whatever with your "paid SUbscription". They key word is "paid". To get a subscription, you just call the 800# on the screen or mail in the order card. They'll send you an issue with a bill for the subscription. When and only when you send them a check or credit card number is when they'll send you the free
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clock. .. or football phone ... or whatever that particular year.
sports
gift they're offering
Premiums can or cannot be relevant to the product you're selling. What you have to do is test the offer with and without the premium or with several different premiums. If a premium pans out ... by all means you should include it. I'll go more into "testing" in a later chapter, the direct response business.
as it is the Holy Grail of
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Chapter Fourteen: Testimonials and Endorsements
One of the main four reasons why people won't respond to your sales letters and your magazine ads or your TV and radio spots ... is they do not believe what you are saying. Testimonials, when used correctly can take away some of their skepticism. I said in the last paragraph, testimonials WHEN USED CORRECTLY can take away some of the fears your prospects When used correctly is the key.
have.
Do you know what 1 hate? When I see a paragraph from a satisfied user that goes something like this, "1 love this product!"- JA, NY. This testimonial is all wrong. First off all, it is a vague statementwhich does nothing for your sales pitch ... and second, the person's name is in initials as is his location. When I see testimonials like this, they say "hullsh it", Testimonials must have a full name and a full city and state ... and they must be more in depth than "it's great!" I like a testimonial like this, "I started using XYZ three months ago. When I first started using XYZ, my breasts were barely an A cup ... but now, I am a full B and my breasts no longer disappear when I put a shirt over them!"- Mary Brown, Houston, Texas.
This is a bare bones testimoniaL I like to add even more data to prove they are from a real person. Here's a few things you can add to make them appear more real and genuine: 1. Use a full nameThis is not hard to use at all. Nobody is going to track down the writer and point to them in the street.
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2. Use the writer's professionThis adds more credibility to the statement they make. If a testimonial is from a Police Officer, an Attorney, a Doctor, etc., it just makes the statement even more powerful. 3. Use the writer's age and sexAgain, adds to the credibility. 4. Use the writer's phone number and/ or email addressThis is a little trickier. An email address is real easy to use nowadays ... and they're really not a hassle on the writer. Maybe they'll get a few people writing them and asking them about the product... but not many. If you're mailing 1 Million letters, maybe they'll receive a dozen people writing them. A phone number can go directly to the writer. .. or you can set-up a voice mail for them in their state for $10 a month. The user will put a message on the voicemail that says something like this, "I've been getting a whole lot of calls regarding my use of XYZ, so I hooked up this voicemail. Now, I may not be able to answer everyone's calls, I can attest the statements I've made regarding XYZ are my own and are absolutely true." 5. Use the writer's photographAdds to creditability. 6. Use before and after photosThis works in cases where your product will give its user some sort of altering. Weight loss products, age reduction products, bodybuilding products, etc. How to get users to give you testimonials: You do not have to sit and wait for users of your products to decide if and when they are going to sit down and write you a nice letter. Wake up. What I like to do is offer your customer a bonus if they can tell you their candid comments about your product. A few days after they receive their order ... or right in their order. .. include a letter saying you are looking for testimonials for your next mailing. Tell them if they send their testimonial in, you will give them a bonus. The bonus can be whatever you wish. Then go on to tell
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them if you decide to use their story in your ad, you 11give them $500 or whatever. I once sold a book and told my customers if they were to send me a testimonial about my book, I'd send them a free report. I was amazed when I was receiving letters from 50% of my customers! I was sending out 1000's of free reports! The stories I was getting from some of these people were amazing! Bill Phillips of EAS did something radical in 1998. EAS was a company, which made bodybuilding supplements. Bill had a red Lamborghini he was going to give away to the person who used his products as recommended and had the greatest transformation using his products. He made an entire promotion out of this car giveaway. First of all, he got more customers to try his products. Second, he got thousands of before and after photos and stories to use in future advertisements. Third, he got customers to use his product for a longer period of time. When you pencil out the numbers, he may have given away a $150,000 car ... but he probably sold millions more in product from people wanting to win the car. .. got millions more in added sales from people who remained faithful to the regiment of supplements they had to take to enter the contest ... and finally, he got millions more in sales from the amazing testimonials and before and after photos. We'll go in deeper detail in a later chapter about building believability. That's our # 1 priority. If people really believed all ads ... people who send out letters saying they have a "plan" that will make you a millionaire would be swamped with orders from 99% of they people the mail to. But they don't! What, 99% of people do not want to be rich? Absolutely not. People do want to be rich ... it's just they do not believe what you are telling them. People are getting hammered with sales pitches all day long promising them the world ... you have to gain their trust to get their money. Testimonials can help this process.
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How to get permission to use Testimonials: Insert a special form for testimonials. It can ask for all the information you seek to receive. There should be fields for age, profession, name, city, state, phone number, etc. Make sure to include a large box with enough lines for their story. You don't want these people to write you a book. On the very bottom, ask for a signature allowing you to use their story in future advertisements if you choose. Also, I'd put a second box that they have to check off if they will allow you to use their phone number and/ or email address. You cannot have prospects contact them without their signed permission. Now, including a phone number in the testimonial is extreme, and not a lot of people do this ... It would be fine for you not to include a contact method to the user. I
Celebrity Endorsements. I once ran commercials on Howard Stern's radio show every morning. We had a sexy Penthouse Pet do the voice-over and results were very good. After we ran the commercial for several months, response dropped and it was no longer profitable to run. We told the sales rep at the radio station we were looking to pull the ads as they were not pulling for us any longer. Howard didn't want to lose the business we were giving his network, so he did the voice-over for our commercial for free. He endorsed the product and said how he's hearing from users how well it works for them, etc. I agreed to test his commercial for a few weeks and agreed not to pull the ads until I got the results. We ran Howard's new spot, and found it didn't add to the response at all. We did pull the ads in the end ... but we did put the commercial on our website and the link said, "Listen to what Howard Stem Says About Our Product!" The point of all this- Celebrity endorsements response. Another time, I was mailing a car Results were good. In an attempt a letter from the Publisher of the product was. I included his letter response was no better.
don't always add to
stereo magazine's subscriber list. to increase response, we received magazine saying how great our along with our sales letter, and
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Another time, one of our products received a very favorable writeup in a leading magazine. We included the review in our ads, but again ... no measurable increase in response. Don't misunderstand me. Do not confuse endorsements in your letter with endorsed mailing or "Host Parasite" offers as we spoke about in a previous chapter. Bottom line: Celebrity Endorsements are not cure-alls, They will not double your response ... but they do add some believability to your offerings. If you can get them, great. Add them. But don't think theyll save the promotion from losing money. Testimonials are a standard-fare to your offer and you should use them.
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Chapter Fifteen; Four Reasons Why People Don't Buy From Your Sales Letters and Advertisements
Getting a profitable response from your sales letters and advertisements can be complicated ... but when you break it down, there are only four reasons why your prospects won't buy from you. I'll go over each one of them ... and reveal techniques how to overcome them. The Number One ReasonThey Don't Notice Your Sales Pitch. If you're sending sales letters in the mail, many things can happen that prevent your prospects from receiving, seeing, and/ or reading your sales letter. If you're mailing Standard Mail- which I advise against ... the Post Office may throw your letter in the trash. The Post Office is not supposed to throwaway maiL. but time after time we all read stories of some mailman who gets caught with ten tons of "Junk Mail" buried in his backyard. His response when he got busted was something to the effect that "people didn't want this kind of mail anyway". A few years ago, in the Bronx, there was an abandoned building Postal Workers used to dump their advertising mail. Instead of delivering it, they just dumped it in this building. It wasn't until the damn building caught on fire that the authorities discovered what was going on for years! I've dedicated an entire chapter later in this book on the Post Office and how to ensure your letter gets delivered. My Fiance's Father used to work for the Post Office. I remember when he first got the job, asking him if he knew of any instances where Postal Workers were throwing advertising mail in the trash. He looked at me like I had two heads and was like, "What are you crazy? Of course not!" A few years later, do you want to know what
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his job description at the Post Office was? MAKING SURE NOBODY THREW ADVERTISING MAIL IN THE TRASH~ If you're mailing Standard Mail- your prospect may have moved and Standard Mail does not forward to his or her new address. People move around a lot. When you mail First Class Mail-, which I advise, mail will be forwarded to the new address as long as the person put in a Forwarding Order. If you mail Standard Rate-, which used to be known as "Bulk Mail" ... there is no forwarding. If the guy moved ... the mail piece goes in the trash! If you're sales letter screams JUNK MAIL, your prospect may throw it away before ever giving it a chance to get opened. In later chapters, I'm going to show you how to make your sales letters get opened by your prospects. I'll tell you this right now; if you send out a sales letter- or worse a FLIER ... even worse, with an ADDRESS LABEL on it... it's not going to get a second of your prospect's time. In the garbage it goes ... and you could have been offering $1 Million FREE inside ... your prospect will never get to that point because the letter you sent them looks like trash. You may have the wrong headline on your sales letter or advertisement that fails to suck your reader into the body copy. Again, later in this book, I've dedicated an entire chapter to Headlines alone! If you are not flagging down the proper prospects for your offer ... they will never get to read what you say in the body copy of your sales letter and/or advertisement. You've simply got to attract the right people your product is purchased by. If you are running a magazine ad, your ad may not look appealing to read, therefore your prospect keeps flipping pages- overlooking your entire advertisement. I know it sounds like a broken record, but I've included an entire chapter on crafting magazine ads later in this book. If you've got a bad ad, laid out wrong ... and not eyeappealing ... the reader will keep on flipping and flipping until something does fmally get their attention. If your ad does not go "against the grain" as far as what an "ad" is supposed to look like, it won't get all the readers it should be getting.
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The Number Two ReasonThey Don't Want What You're Selling. Nobody has a product that everyone wants. Even for the most beautiful women in America, there are men who will not have sex with them. Not every person you mail to will want your product. But in this business, we make our money from the 2°;()that do. If you target the wrong list... or if you run your ad in the wrong magazine ... or simply have a product that is not that desirable ... you're going to have a hard time getting enough orders to cover your advertising costs. Its simple- You have must have a product that appeals to a large group of your prospects and you have to make sure you are getting it in front of the right prospects- and if you're running a magazine ad, or a TV or radio sport ... you have to do this for the right price. Pay too much for an ad, and you just made it that much harder to cover your advertising cost. It is imperative you negotiate the absolute best media cost when you run an advertisement. If all ads were free, every product would be a hit. There will always be someone who wants your product... the trick is having enough in your prospect list or magazine readership to buy and bring back more in sales than it cost to promote. The Number Three ReasonThey Can't Afford What You're Selling. I know tons of people who would love to own a Ferrari. I'd bet good money, if they cost $20,000 brand-new, 9 out of 10 people would pick the Ferrari over a Honda Civic. The reason why the streets are not littered with these Italian works of art is because only the richest of the rich can afford them. The same goes for other products. Sometimes they simply cost too much. I remember when I was first getting started in direct response; I wanted to go to a seminar that cost $5500. I didn't have that kind of money ... nor did I have any kind of asset I could "hock" to get the money. If there was a scale of 1 to lOon how bad I wanted to go to this seminar ... I would have rated my desire a 10. I really wanted to go ... badly.
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Now, there were two other options to purchase the seminar. First, the seminar offered a payment plan. It was like $500 a month for 11 months. And the second option was a home study version of the seminar. It was basically a tape recording of the seminar before the one being offered. It cost just $2200 ... and they also offered payment terms of $200 a month for a few months' time. If you're selling something over $100 ... it may be wise to test a payment plan to attract more customers. Remember I was saying earlier in this book, if there were no finance companies to give mortgages to people ... no homes would sell. How many people have enough to buy their home in cash? Maybe 1%? The installment terms makes people pay their home off over the course of 30'years or so. You're a smart person. You can figure ou t other ways to make your product seem more affordable. The Number Four ReasonThey Don't Believe You. I'd probably say this is one of, if not THE most important reason your prospects will not buy what you are selling. The funny thing is, when a mailer gets a poor response, they usually think they didn't sell hard enough, so they inflate their claims and promises even more. This is counter-productive. The reason why they didn't order in the first place is because they didn't believe your sales pitch. Making your claims even more hyped-up is only going to make them even more skeptical. Response may go up a little ... from people who are gullible. But the at the cost of the increased chance of regulatory attention. Here's what I believe. There are more people who would buy your product had you made your pitch more believable than people who would buy if your offer and/or claims were more powerful and exaggerated. Give it a shot in your next sales letter or ad. I learned something important about believability and I want to teach it to you. Right before you make a claim for your product ...
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give a flaw. The admission of a flaw makes your claim seem more believable. It works like this: "This is my first major book. I am not an accomplished author, so this book will have some flaws. If you read for style, or for literary quality, like I was saying before, this may not be a book for you. But there are paragraphs in this book- ideas in this book- whole chapters in this book that I have never had the balls to put down on paper before! And they will open doors to you- maybe as soon as tomorrow- that otherwise might have taken a lifetime of waiting for you to walk through." Or something like this: "Our new wrinkle eraser is not a permanent fix. The results you achieve with this product will only be temporary. But even if the results last eight to ten hours, this product will enable you to hide every fine line and wrinkle on your face. The results this product provides, even if they are temporary, are absolutely amazing!" Or something like this: "But don't think for a second this product will work if you do not participate in a healthy diet and exercise program. If you sit on the couch and continue to eat large portions of the wrong food, this product will do nothing for you. But on the other hand, a recent clinical study did show this product could burn 930 extra calories each and every day when you eat and exercise properly. That's nearly half your caloric intake for the day ... ZAPPEDl" Do you see how the admission of the truth ... or a flaw right before a claim is made makes the claim seem more believable? Here's how I think of it. If you put a -2 fact right before a +4 claim ... that +4 claim will have the believability power of a +8 claim. Understand? Good.
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Here's a few more ways you can make your sales pitch more believable to your prospects: Increase belief with ... A STRONG GUARANTEEWhen you can offer them a money back guarantee, they feel you believe in what you're selling and if you were selling crap, you'd go broke pretty fast. DOUBLE YOUR MONEY BACK GUARANTEEEven more powerful than the standard money back guaranteeEven if it is conditional or tied to a performance claim. TAX RETURNIf you're selling something on making money ... its best to prove you're not full of shit. Include a tax return showing you made over $2 Million last year. Also, if you're selling some form of a Tax Reduction service, include a copy of a few tax returns showing the best savings you had for your clients ... of course with their names blacked out for privacy! CPA'S SWORN STATEMENTIf you're making a claim as to how much money you have or how much you're worth if you're promoting something of a financial nature, like a Business Opportunity, this can help. ENDORSEMENT FROM A MUTUAL FRIENDThis always helps. If you want to go out with Michelle and Michelle's friend Jessica not only knows you ... but thinks you're the greatest guy ... how much faster do you think you can get a date with Michelle- even if she's never seen you- when her trusted friend endorses you? Pretty darn quick. TESTIMONIALSPeople really do read testimonials.
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TESTIMONIALS WITH A PHONE NUMBEREven more powerful and believabJe. And the number of people who actually have the balls to call the testimonial are small. It's included more for the fact that if the reader wanted to call, he could. CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTEspecially when the letter actually comes from the celebrity. People think they know the celebrity they see on TV. If you get a letter from Jennifer Anniston talking about a new product that she uses to keep looking younger. .. you're going to read it ... believe it ... and probably buy it. FREE TRIALNothing beats a free trial. The customer can check out what you are selling for free and only after it lives up to its claims will he then decide if he's going to buy it or not. This is powerful! WONT CASH CHECK FOR 30-DAYSSimply hold your customer's check or money order. If he sends back the product within the 30-day trial period, you'1l send him back the same identical check or money order he sent you. This puts his mind at ease knowing the money is not out of his account just yet. WONT CHARGE CREDIT CARD FOR 30 DAYSAgain, the same benefit as above ... just with a credit card. LIST PATENT NUMBERIf your product is patented, you can include this number and say something like, "This product is so amazing and unique, the United States Patent Office even granted us a Patent. The Patent Number is 1234565644." USE PAYMENT TERMS OVER TIMENot only does this help the customer afford what you are selling, it tells him you believe in your product or else you'd want all of your money upfront.
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USE A REAL STREET ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBERIn a sales letter or an ad, the worst thing to do is use a PO BOX for your address. It's so cold, and it almost looks like you're hiding where you actually are. Now, there are many private Mailbox companies that actually offer a street address ... or if you wish you could really use your address and phone number. I've never had anyone actually come to a location from the address listed in a sales letter. Its there to give the reader the comfort that he knows just where you're sitting. TELL HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENTAl1products have a history of development. remarkable ... use it in your sales copy.
If yours is
USE SPECIFIC INFO tHAT CAN BE CHECKABLEIf you're the ReMax #3 Realtor of the year ... it could be real simple for someone to punch this question in Google and see your name. NOTARIZED STATEMENTIf you're willing to put your claims under oath ... it seems more believable to your prospects. USE SPECIFIC TEST RESULTSIf your product has been clinically tested to burn 930 more calories over doing nothing ... say so ... but tell them how you came up with the data. "In a 60-person, 60-day, Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled clinical trial performed by Dr. Johansen at the University of Florida, he found that the ingredients found in XYZ burn 930 more calories than the people taking the placebo!" USE A PERSONAL STORYJoe Karbo's famous ad for "The Lazy Man's Way To Riches" starts something like this: "I used to work hard ... real hard. 60 hours a week. .. just to barely get by. But I didn't start making real money until I did less ... a lot less ... " A personal story about your pains ... your angers ... your frustrations you had before you discovered what you are selling ... and then how you solved your problems with this product ... and how it can do the same for them.
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USE DATA FROM A MAGAZINE ARTICLEIf a magazine did an article about your product, get permission and reuse it in your ad. This data does not even have to be about your specific product. For example, if you're selling a pill that helps you stop smoking ... you can go on to tell of an article revealing the risks of smoking that was published in Lady's Home Journal, etc. A BEFORE AND AFTER PHOTOIf you're selling some form of weight loss ... hair restoration ... body building ... etc. product, before and afters are quite powerful. Make that EXTREMELY POWERFUL. A COPY OF A LICENSEIf you're licensed to practice add credibility.
something,
a copy of the license can
PHOTOG RAPHS OF OTHER USERSAlong with testimonials, it makes it all the more powerful reader can put a face with a story.
if the
REFLECTED GLORY- Past history of successes. If you're revealing a new product, and you created a huge, popular product in the past, you can say something to the effect of "I first created XYZ back in 1999 and over 8 million people swear by it... now I'm just as excited about this new product!" If you did something huge in the past, free ride on it! NUMBER OF SATISFIED USERS345,342 Satisfied Users Cannot Be Wrong! AMOUNT OF PRODUCT SOLDAnd be specific. Don't say "9 Million Sold". Say "9,123,432 SO FAR!"
SOLD
EMPATHY- Push "Me-Too Feelings". "Hey, I was just like you. I was in my 50's and found it harder and harder to achieve an erection. It made me feel..;" WRITING IN THE FIRST PERSONYou and me.
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r ENCLOSE A FAVORABLE MAGAZINE ARTICLEReprint the entire thing and enclose :-BETTER-THAN-RISK-FREE GUARANTEEThis is where the customer will come out ahead ... even if he asks for a refund. Usually free bonuses they get to keen for free. NUMBER OF YEARS IN BUSINESSHelping Women Lose Weight Since 1983 CV INFO (DDS, ESQ, PhD)If you're a PhD, DDS, etc., when signing the sales letter. .. include your CV info. AS SEEN IN ... If your product has been advertised or written about in Entrepreneur Magazine ... you can say, "as seen in Entrepreneur Magazine" TELL HIM HOW TO DEMONSTRATEIf you can describe in writing how the reader can demonstrate some result right now ... do it. "Take three buckets. Put warn water in one; .. room temperature water in the other. .. and cold water in one. Submerge your right hand in the cool one. Your left hand in the warm one. Then plunge both hands into the room temperature bucket. One hand will feel cold and one hand will feel warm ... and they're in the same temperature water!" MEMBERSHIP TO THE BBB OR OTHER SOCIETYProud member of the NNFA. COPY OF BANK STATEMENTIf you're bragging about a financial product, a big fat bank statement can be a powerful believability device. A SAMPLE OF PRODUCTObviously, if a customer can sample the product first... especially it is included with the sales letter. .. like a packet of a wrinkle serum ... before she buys ... that is powerful! But you better make
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sure you're product is good ... or you'1l get less results left well enough alone!
than if you
YOU'LL BILL THEM LATER FOR THE PRODUCTBill Me Later is a powerful believability technique. If your product is junk. .. they're not going to pay up. And make sure you don't take too much of a beating if they don't pay up. Don't offer this on a diamond watch. If you're doing some tapes or CDs, maybe you can ask them to pay the shipping fee upfront ... which will cover your hard costs to manufacture and ship the product. PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS FOR QUESTIONSThis comforts prospects that if they have a question, you'd be there. Now, many may email you; so make sure you keep on top of the responses! IN-HOME TRlALThis is a powerful technique that practically every infomercial marketer is using nowadays. I explained how it works in an earlier chapter. Remember? ADMISSION OF FLAWSI was speaking of this earlier in this chapter. People will think if you have the balls to tell the flaws ... you're not exaggerating or lying about your positive claims. PHOTO OF PERSON WRITING LETIERSometimes I advise this ... sometimes I don't. If you're a slick New Yorker ... the cowboy in Texas may not identity with you. If you look too young ... the older, wiser man may not believe you. But if you feel you have the look that may add believability, use it. I like to use a photo of my little girl and me sometimes. It makes me appear to be a family man who you can trust. FREE-STANDING PHOTOA replica of a real photo is used sometimes. The way to make fake photos is to print them and trim them, then on the back, have a rubber stamp made that says "Acme Photo Labs" or something like it and stamp each and every fake photo.
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DO NOT EVER USE HUMORNo two people think the same comedian is funny. Some people love Dice Clay ... and some people hate him. What you think is funny ... someone else may not think is funny. And hey, we're here to sel1. .. and they're reading to buy. This is serious business. Don't fool around with humor. WOW! That was one hell of a chapter! My fingers are on fire from typing! Again, some of the techniques listed in this chapter, 111go into greater detail later in this book. Your success boils down to your ability to persuade strangers to see things your way. Master and overcome the four reasons why prospects don't buy. Try to make your offer go with the current and not get snagged on any of the four reasons.
NOTE: Since writing this book, I have discovered yet another reason why someone may not respond to your offer. You can cover the 4 main reasons why they don't buy ... but they still may not respond even if they want your product. They may not want it enough to exchange the dollar amount you're asking (or it. Sure, they can have all the money in the world ... but just because they have enough money- it does not mean they'll pay whatever you ask. For example ... I had several millions of dollars in the bank, and J wanted this new Lamborghini. The only thing was that I did not want to pay the $50,000 over sticker price the dealer was asking for it because it was such a hot car. Sure ... your prospect may want your new diet pill ... but if you were asking $100 a bottle... some people may not want it BAD ENOUGH to exchange their money for it. You could even price the damn thing at $30 and there may still be people who will not want to exchange the $30 in the bankfor these pills. THIS IS WHERE EXCELLENT COPYWRITINGSKILLS COME IN. You have to do a goodjob of convincina them the orice uou're askina is iust a fraction of what he or she is to gain in RESULTS using yo;;'_r product: Make sure to read the next chapter.
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Chapter Sixteen: Hire a Copywriter or Do It Yourself?
By this point, you should have an idea of the product or service you wish to manufacture and market. You should have a full understanding of the mathematics of direct response products. You should have an understanding of the back end sales your product will get. You should know all about mailing lists and magazine ads. You should know all about offers, guarantees, premiums, and the reasons why someone won't buy your idea. At this point, you have enough data to actually start crafting a sales letter or a magazine ad for your product. You can create your own sales material or you can hire a Professional Copywriter to do the job for you. Now, I look back at my first sales letters and I cringe. No wonder they didn't work! They were really poorly written ... had poor layouL. and just didn't know how to "sell". If course, I didn't have a book like this one to guide me through ad creation process ... but you still mayor may not be ready to actually "write" your own thing.
the
I guess only you can be the judge. If it were up to me, and if you had a few thousand extra dollars to have even a low-grade copywriter create your sales letter or ad, I would advise it. But on the other hand, if you barely have enough money to put out a 2,500 mail piece test ... or if you're simply a hands-on type of person who wants to do the entire thing yourself ... you've got to study the next five chapters that are all about crafting the sales letter or magazine advertisement. If you want to go the safest route and hire a copywriter to do the deed for you ... you can spend anywhere from $500 or so ... all the way up to $15,000 and more for top-shelf copywriters like myself.
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If you were to come to me and ask me to craft your sales material ... if our schedules do not conflict... you're looking at $15,000 plus a cut of the gross sales if the letter or ad gets rolled-out. Too much money? To some, yes. To some, no. I'm not trying to "sell" you into hiring me, so do not get the wrong idea here. But this is what I think: A full-page ad in Maxim Magazine will cost you $BO,OOO. Think of this ad as the lot you want to build your dream home on- it's an oceanfront lot with lBO-degree views of the Pacific. Are you going to ruin it by parking a trailer on it ... or do you want to build yourself a mansion? The cost you spend on advertising- either in magazines or in the mail costs the same regardless if your "pitch" pulls 100 orders ... or 1,000 orders. Why not get your advertising dollars to work as hard as they can for you? I believe 80% of copywriters can produce "good" advertising ... 15% can create "great" advertising ... and 5% can produce absolutely "PHENOMENAL" advertising. While the guys in the top 5% will charge the $10,000 and more ... you can hire a guy for $500 to $1,000 that will create at least a "good" sales pitch for you ... and at this moment in time ... you may not even be able to create a "good" sales pitch. Do you know how to find out if you're as good as one of the 80% who can create "good" advertising? Read the next five chapters ... study them ... then write your own mail piece or advertisement. Are you confident in it enough to print it and attach 37 cents postage to it? If so, go for it. If not, this chapter is for you. But before you hire a copywriter. .. there are some experts in this field who will give your sales letter or ad a "critique" for a small fee or even free. I know Denny Hatch will give a FREE critique. Denny is a direct response pro. He's a consultant and freelance copywriter, founder of Inside Direct Mail (a trade newsletter), and he's also the former editor of TARGET MARKETING- a trade magazine for direct
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response professionals- like you now are! In a recent ad, Denny has agreed to give free critiques. You can email him at
[email protected] find out how you can get him to give you a critique. Or even better, get in touch with me- since you bought this book. .. 1'11critique your sales letter or advertisement for free as well. Either way, you'll get a list of the things you're doing right and the things you're doing wrong- so you can fix them before you spend any money running or mailing anything. My latest contact information can be found elsewhere in this book. But even if you do not want to give "writing" a try- even with a free professional critique .. : you're left with no choice but to shop for a copywriter. Writing great copy comes with experience. Even if you have a little money to invest, a cheapo copywriter can at least produce "good" copy ... otherwise, he'd be working at McDonalds. Here's what you should do if you're looking for a copywriterSearch the internet ... do a Google search for copywriters ... but make sure they are DIRECT RESPONSE copywriters- ones that actually have samples of other sales letters and magazine ads they can send you to review and judge their skills. Make sure to ask the copywriter if he or she has had any experience writing for products similar to yours. If they have, make sure you get samples! If you like what you see, talk price with them. After you read the next few chapters, even if you decide not to write your first sales letter or ad, you can at the very least have enough skill to "recognize" good, great, or horrible advertising copy. If you've got the money and want the best copy ... call on me. Maybe if you make me feel bad for you, and if I got some space I need to fill... maybe we can work out some "discounted" deal.
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Chapter Seventeen: The Mall piece
Before we even think about writing a word, we have to have a rough idea of the pieces your sales letter will consist of. First of all..; it's best to start with a standard # 10 package that will weight 10z. or under ... which will qualify you for 37 cents First Class postage which is the standard cost to mail a letter at the current time. I have two different # to templates I usually use. One is for an offer that takes orders by way of phone and / or website orders as well as mail in orders. The second template is for offers that require only a call in order or a website order. What I mean by this is, for some offers, you do not want check orders as your product may be an auto shipped product where you need only credit cards orders ... and allowing check orders will hurt your back end. Some offers do not matter if you accept payment in check, money order or credit card. Anyway ... Here they are: OFFERS THAT REQUIRE PHONE-IN, WEBSITE, AND MAIL-IN ORDERS: This package consists of the following parts: #10 Envelope: The envelope in which you're going to stuff your marketing material in. I do not like to use "window" envelopes. Window envelopes are the envelopes with the clear plastic window that allows you to see in. I like to use a closed-faced, plain-old, standard size # 10 envelope. 11"x17" Sales Letter: When this sheet is folded down, you'll have enough space to fit a 4-page Jetter. This is enough copy to sell most products ... and is a standard size I always use.
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7"xlO" Brochure: This piece can either be a vertical brochure or a simple "Questions and Testimonials" piece. It's usually printed on the same type of paper as the 11"xl?" sales letter. 8.5" x 3.6" Order Card: This is the card the customer will fill out and mail back to you. It is usually printed on a stiffer cardstock paper. This sheet will have enough space on it to resell the offer, capture the shipping information, contact information, credit card number, etc. This card gets inserted by the customer into the 6 3/4 envelope listed below. 63/4 Response Envelope: This is a smaller envelope that will be addressed to you- or where you want the orders to go to. Do not worry about postage being "pre-paid" by you ... you should have your customer apply his or her own postage stamp. Tests have shown that there is no lift in response by paying for postage. Some people do not like receiving direct mail sales letters- some people will tear-up your sales letter, stuff it in this envelope and mail it back to you- and you'11 get stuck paying for the postage! This mail piece will weigh less than one ounce and it will have enough space to do. the entire selling process. Now, let's talk about the mail piece you'll use when you do not want people to order by check or money order. This package consists
of the following parts:
# 10 Envelope: This envelope does the same as what the envelope will do in the first template. 11"x17" Sales Letter: This sales letter will do the same as the 11"x17" in the first template. 8.5"x5.5": This is usually where I'd put all the testimonials. 8.5"x5.5": This is where I'd usually list all of the questions answers prospects may have.
and
8.5"xl1": This piece should be a brief version of the sales letter ... which goes over the top benefits of your product. It can look like a
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full-page magazine ad ... or an editorial write-up. This piece is basically for the people who do not go directly into the 11"x 17" sales letter, so it has to "sell" on its own ... only quicker than the main 4-page sales letter. This mail piece also weighs in less than one ounce. This is a great template when you do not want mail-in orders. Say you were selling a pill that you wanted your customers to order with a credit card for an auto ship program ... if you give customers no other alternative to order. .. other than the 800#, that's what he'll do. If you give him two options ... you're going to get a lot more check orders ... and if you want to reb ill automatically, getting check orders will kill your chances totally. Folding: If you have a choice, you want to "Z-Fold", instead of "letter folding" your sales pieces that need to be folded. It will not alter your chances of success at all... but it is easier for the reader to open your sales material when it is folded in a "Z" technique than a "letter fold". Insertion Order: The order in which your pieces are inserted into your envelope can actually alter response! This is how I like to have my pieces inserted in the envelope. All the fronts of the pieces should be facing the REAR of the # 10 envelope. If you are looking at the back of the # 10 envelope, this is the insertion pattern for Template Letter # 1: From the inside back of the # 10, you should see the 11"xI7" sales letter facing the rear, behind that, the T'xIO" facing the rear, then the order card- facing the rear, then the 6 3/4 envelope- facing the rear. So if you were to stack these four inserts on top of each other on a table, the 6 3/4 envelope would be on the bottom, front facing up, and on top would be the 11"xI7" sales letter, facing up ... then this stack would be inserted in the # 10 facing the rear of the envelope, so if you were to look through the rear of the #10 envelope, you should read the headline on the 11 "x l ?" sales letter, and the front of the # 10 envelope, where the prospect's name will be ink-jetted on, should see the rear of the 6 3/4 envelope.
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Template Letter #2: From the inside back of the # 10, you should see the 11"x 17" sales letter facing the rear, behind that, the 8.S"xS.5"" facing the rear, then the next 8.5"xS.5"- facing the rear, then the 8.5"xll"- facing the rear. So if you were to stack these four inserts on top of each other on a table, the 8.S"x 11" piece would be on the bottom, front facing up, and on top would be the II"xI7" sales letter, facing up ... then this stack would be inserted in the # 10 facing the rear of the envelope, so if you were to look through the rear of the # 10 envelope, you should read the headline on the 11"x17" sales letter, and the front of the # 10 envelope, where the prospect's name will be ink-jetted on, should see the rear of the 8.S"xl1» piece. It is a must that your inserts get inserted the right way. If a prospect opens your envelope and sees an order card first... or if the sales letter is upside down ... or if it's backwards ... it will alter the experience your prospect will have when he opens the envelope. Everything in this stage of the game is crucial. Insert the pieces correctly ... and make sure they are all inserted correctly! You'd be surprised how easy it is to screw this up. Paper QUality: Don't be fooled into thinking you need to use high-quality paper. Just plain-old standard white 20 pound paper. Heavier paper ... or glossy paper only adds to the cost to print and the cost to mail, as it is heavier. Stick with standard stuff. Use of Color and Photographs: Do you want to know something? My most successful sales letters have been one color (just black ink), and usually had no photographs! I can tell you this- my two most successful sales letters had no photos and were all printed in just black ink! Getting too elaborate actually can hurt response. Keep it simple. Graphics: We're going to go into graphics and layouts in a later chapter. But, I'll give you a preview of what you'll learn- KISS. This stands for Keep It Simple Stupid!
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Addressing: When it comes to addressing your # 10 envelope with your customer's address and name ... do not use a mailing label. The trick here is not to make this look like junk mail. You're going to want to print the addresses right onto your # 10 either through your computer printer ... or you want a letter shop to ink-jet the names on for you. Postage: The last thing you want to do is prin t a bulk mail permit box on the upper right corner of your envelope. The second to last thing you want to do is stamp the mail with a postage meter. What you want to do is apply a real, live, First Class Stamp. The same ones you use to mail your phone bill. You're NOT going to do "presorted" First Class Mail ... you're going to pay FULL PRICE for a REGULAR First Class Postage Stamp! I'll go more into this in a later chapter. Less Is Not Better: By thinking you can save a few dollars by eliminating certain pieces of the direct mail package, you're being stupid. If you cut the sales letter from 4 pages to 2 ... you're going to cut your response as well. If you leave out the order card in Template # 1... you're going to hurt response. What the Post Office is allowing us to do is mail up to one ounce for 37 cents ... and we want our direct mail piece to weigh-in right at .9 ounces or even one ounce flat. Maximize what you can send for one ounce! Before I write even one single word of copy, I have an idea of what the mail piece is going to look like- meaning its components. Now that you have an idea of the components, you can start gathering ideas for headlines gathering questions and answers you think prospects may have gathering testimonials ... etc. But before we go on to the use of graphics and typography in the next chapter. .. let's talk about the first thing your prospect and Postal Worker are going to see- YOUR MAILING ENVELOPE. This is a crucial part of your success
in direct mail.
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The sole purpose of the # 10 carrier envelope is to get it delivered and get it opened- that's all. It's not there to "sell" ... it's not there to tell your prospect what you're selling ... it's not there to talk about price ... it's just used to keep the sales material inside from spilling out in the gutter. It should not be fancy. It should not be cute. Here's the only two ways it should look like: It can look official. It can look like a letter coming from the IRS or a Government Agency. It can look like it is a credit card bill. It can look like a letter from an Attorney ... or a Doctor. .. or a Medical Lab. or it can be vague, with only a return address in the "cornercard" and no company name! No other words on the envelope other than maybe "First Class Mail". Here are a few great examples of official envelope ideas I've used in the past with great success. I was selling dietary supplements. I had the logo of the company in the corner card along with the address. It said, PharmaCeutic Laboratories in logotype and under the logo, it had the address: 4055 Industrial Blvd. Lyndhurst, New Jersey, 07071. I printed this in Process Blue ink, so it looked medical. In this sales letter, I had results of a clinical study on the product I was selling, so on the envelope, in the lower left corner of the envelope, I added the words: "First Class Mail- Important Test Results Enclosed" Now, to the Postal Worker handling several thousands of these letters, he thought it was results of some testing the addressee needed as soon as possible. It looked important. Now, there were test results enclosed ... for the product I was selling ... but I need the sales letter to get delivered and opened. If it said, "Lose 23 Pounds By Summer!" Mr. Postman would have took it as junk mail and treated it as such ... and the recipient would have looked at it as junk mail as well- maybe even throwing the entire thing in the trash without reading a single word of it. Our only goal right now is to get the damn thing delivered and opened.
__
-------------------------_
..
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It's funny. Sometimes, when you mail in large numbers, the sealing machine sometimes runs out of water and some envelopes do not get sealed properly or at alL When this happens, the contents of the envelope may fall out. I remember some people we mailed to actually writing us saying they got an empty envelope and they wanted to see what the test results were! They thought it might have been about them! One time, I used an official-looking envelope. It was supposed to look like a Government envelope. It had just a return address on the corner card, and a black line under the address. Under the line, it said, "For Official Use Only, Penalty For Private Use, $300". This is the same wording the IRS uses and I even went as far as to copy their layout! I bet this envelope got delivered and opened. I'm looking for the day when I do some sort of promotion with an Attorney. Boy am I going to have fun with this one! I know an Attorney that sells a course on buying Real Estate at Tax Deed Sales. Wouldn't it be great if he sends out sales letters in his Attorney envelope? I'm sure every person who gets one of them will open it as soon as they get it! An envelope can look personal. A simple plain envelope with a return address that reveals only the address and not the name ... either typed in "courier" font or even handwritten ... or simulated handwritten ... with the prospect's name in the center. The postage will be a regular stamp. This letter looks like a personal letter you'd send your Mother or Brother. This is a simple envelope and it always gets opened. Don't worry about not looking "Professional", but don't get me wrong- certain types of product may not call for this personal envelope ... like a diet pill. But then, I gave you such a great example of a diet pill envelope before, why would you use anything else? As for these personal envelopes, I remember mailing a test with simulated hand-written addressing. I took it even one step further and had these little green stickers made up that looked like Certified Mail Stickers ... except mine said "Verified Delivery" and had a neat little fake number across them. I stuck them right on the top center of the # 10 envelope with the hand addressing and a
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real stamp. It looked as if it was a Certified letter and 1 was sure it would get great response. Well it did ... but unfortunately, the Post Office wrote me a letter asking me never to do this again as the Postal workers were getting fooled into thinking it was Certified Mail and were asking the recipients for signatures! It clearly said "Verified Delivery" ... but Postal Workers are not the smartest I guess. My friend Gary Halbert says people sort their mail over a trashcan. If it looks like junk mail. .. with advertising copy allover the envelope screaming claims ... with a mailing label affixed instead of a stamp ... sent to them bulk rate ... into the trash it goes. So, make it look personal... or make it look official. Later on in years- once you have a winning sales letter, you can experiment with teaser copy on the envelopes ... but right now, let's play everything on the safe side. Remember, the # 1 reason why people will not buy from you, is they do not receive or they do not notice your sales material. Personal and Official letters always get delivered by the Post Office- with respect ... and opened by the recipient!
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Chapter Eighteen: Graphics ... Photos and Typography
Many people new to this business waste way too much money when they are at the graphic artist, at the printer, or when running a magazine advertisement. Novices think the prettier a sales message looks ... the flashier the graphics ... the more colorful.. , the glossier the paper ... the better the response. Nothing could be further from the truth. I remember once my assistant messed up and told my printer to use a heavy, glossy paper stock for a test mailer. I wanted a regular 60-pound offset paper- as I always do. I was a little mad. After all, this paper blunder was going to knock my mail piece over the one-ounce mark. .. and that means 23 more cents I'd have to add on every sales letter! Regardless of that, 1 mailed the test mailer and it did well. When I rolled-out the mailer in a larger quantity, of course I used the correct paper. I even took away the 2nd color I used for the headline, and made it all black ink. Did response suddenly go down? NO. It was the exact same. Think about it- when you are offered something you want, are you going to care if the sales letter was on fancy paper? If anything, the fanciness of the paper would take your attention away from the sales message. Even with magazine ads. I remember I ran an ad that used a second color and an artistically written headline. The headline was something like "Make your car vibrate the asphalt for cheap". This was for an audio membership club I was running. The headline was all "vibrated"-looking and the graphic artist was very proud of herself. This was just a year or two after I got into this business, so I didn't know any better. The ad broke-even and failed to bring me any type of profit.
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A few weeks later I was reading about headlines and I wrote a great headline for this ad. I went back to the graphic artist and told her to remove the fancy lettering on top ... knock the colors down to one (black}... and she looked at me like I was crazy for "uglying" her beautiful graphics. The next month when the ad came out... we tripled the results it got. An ad that broke-even was now bringing in three times its cost ... and it was uglier ... less colorful... and cheaper to run as it used one less color! I was happy and learned a very valuable lesson. The secret is in the message and getting the message noticed and read- not by looking pretty. Many copywriters sayrugly works", I believe it. They advise using ugly color paper stock for inserts and sales letters. I'm not talking dark, hard to read paper colors ... just weird colors, like mango. They sure stick out from a sea of white paper. I say you should worry about getting the sales letter to work first before you start experimenting with paper colors. Let's keep it safe and use white or cream-colored paper. Even with magazines. I do not ever pay for color to be added to my ad. Actually, for a magazine to charge for a color ad is a scam. The entire magazine is printed in large "signatures" or groups of pages at a clip. And nowadays, magazines are all full color. So it's costing the publisher not a single cent more to run your ad in color. They just want to charge you for it. Its kind of bullshit. But we shouldn't care, as we never want to worry about running color ads- even if the publisher will give us the color for free. Now this may sound crazy, but the secret to successful advertising in magazines is to get noticed. If the entire magazine were full color ... if the publisher is even giving away color to all the other advertisers ... it would be a great advantage to you to do a black and white ad. You'll have the "sorest-thumb" in the magazine! Now as for the actual graphics and the typography, I have a very strict set of rules about the fonts you use, the sentence length, the paragraph length, etc. I will go into deeper depth below.
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Headline Fonts. When creating headlines, I like to use Ariel..; Helvetica ... Franklin Gothic ... Eras ... or Times New Roman for the font. Now there's a difference in fonts- there's Sans Serif... and there's Serif. As you can see, I wrote Sans Serif in Sans Serif type. This type is missing the little extender on the ends of letters. There have been studies that show Serif fonts have a better comprehension level. But for headlines, where it's just a few simple words, fee free to use SANS SERIF type. If it were up to me, I'd tell you to stick with Helvetica. Subhead Fonts: When creating sub-headline text, you can use the same font as the headline ... just smaller. .. not as bold ... and maybe in italic type. If you do not want to use the same font, feel free to use Times New Roman. . Body Copy Fonts: When creating body copy never use a SANS SERIF font. Always use a serif font such as Times New Roman or Courier. (Courier is to be used only in sales letters and not in magazines. Magazines should always use Times New Roman.) Courier is a great font that looks like a typewriter. It's super easy to read ... but it does take up more space than the Times New Roman font. So, if you've got room ... go for Courier. If not, Times New Roman is fine. Paragraph Headers: For paragraph headers, if you are using Times New Roman for the body copy, you can use the same font ... just BOLD it. lfyou are using Courier for the body copy, and you want to use it for the paragraph headers, you'll want to underline it ... as bolding Courier is not too pretty in my opinion. I sometimes use Helvetica in bold for my paragraph headers ... regardless if I'm using Times New Roman or Courier for my body copy. Bottom line: Keep it safe. Headlines should be Helvetica ... or Times New Roman. Body Copy should be Times New Roman or Courier. (Courier for sales letters only). Subheads and Paragraph Headers can be any of the three fonts I advise to use.
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Colors? I don't know how many times I should say it... but I have never had a color ad pull it's additional cost for color. I've never even had a color ad where I got the color upgrade for free out pull the very same ad in black and white. This is the same for sales letters in the mail ... or in magazine ads. I think black and white is a great advantage in magazines ... especially ones with a lot of color ads. You want to get noticed! Fancy Graphics? Now, I do not want you to go and create ugly ads and sales letters ... but they do not need a top-dollar graphic designer either. I remember I went to a new graphic designer and had him create an ad for me from scratch ... just to get a different look than the ones I've been creating. Do you know what this guy did? First of all, he used a scan of brushed aluminum and put that behind the headline. Now the headline cannot be read as easily and it sure doesn't stick out as well with the background image. Then as a screen behind the body copy ... he ran TEXT! This ad looked like a train wreck. He thought it was a piece of art. Do you think The New York Times worries too much about making articles look like works of art? Hell no- and either should you. The theory you should have is that you just want to get your test read and noticed. That's all. What gets an article read in The New York Times? A good headline that sucks you into the body copy. Graphic Designers always want to show-off their skills of making things look pretty. That's fine. But tell them to use their skill on your letterheads and business cards- not your advertising! When it comes to magazines, a trick you should use is to have your ad "Pub Set". You bring your sales copy to the graphic designer. .. if you're using one ... and you bring him a copy of the magazine you are placing your ad in. Replicate the editorial layout as best as you can. On the bottom of the ad ... make sure to put the words, "Special Advertorial" in italic ... maybe even in 60% black ... so it's there ... but not too noticeable. I advise you to put this on your ad ahead of time because if you leave it up to the magazine ... they'll smack the words ADVERTISEMENT right in dead center on top of your ad in huge, bold type. If you beat them to the punch
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and add these words, but not as boldly as they would ... you may get away with it. Why would you want your ads to look like an article in the magazine? Well, a magazine's readers trust the magazine they're reading. That's why they buy it... subscribe to it... and read it. They trust it. And trust and believability is one of, if not THE biggest reason people do not buy your product. It's been proven that 500% more people notice and read "editorial" style advertisements than pretty, fancy, graphic-overdosed ads. You're not here to be pretty ... you're here to get attention. Editorial formats get more attention. Photos: Most of my direct mail never has photos. My magazine ads usually have a photo of someone's face in the upper right hand corner with a caption. A photo could be a great grabber in a magazine ... not so much in direct mail sales letters. Here's my opinion of photos of products. Unless it's designed by Apple Computer ... as sexy as a Powerbook... or an iPod... or a new G5... I wouldn't include a photo of the product you're selling. Why? Chances are it's not going to be as pretty as the image your reader will have of it in his imagination. I once sold a golf driver in a sales letters. We didn't have the image of the actual driver ready when we were printing the sales letter. .. so we mailed the letter without the image. The letter pulled good results. When we finally got the actual driver from the manufacturer, we had it photographed and made a nice, full-color insert for the sales letter showcasing the driver. Even though the driver was a good-looking, rather large, beautiful club... we pulled less orders! We removed the image and response was back up! We weren't misleading people by not including a photo of the product ... but we did do better when we let the advertising copy paint the image of the product in their imaginations. Captions: In magazine ads, the first thing people see is an image, then the Caption under the photo ... sometimes even before they read the
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headline! It is a must to have a killer caption under any photo you use. The caption is a huge part of an ad and 1 laugh when 1 see a caption and it's the damn photographer's name! A caption is the PS: in a sales letter (I'll talk about this in a later chapter). Paragraph Length: 111speak more about this in the next chapter. .. but you should keep your sentences to no more than seven words ... and you should keep you paragraphs no more than seven lines long. Americans read at the 6th Grade level. You've got to keep the sentences short .... seven words or less. Coupons: I want my magazine ads to look like articles ... I want my sales letters to look like actual letters. If my offer does not require a check or money order payment option and I'm just taking credit cards, I never coupon. But for some promotions that do take checks, I use an order card in direct mail ... and in magazine ads, it's really your call for order coupons. If you're going for the editorial look ... editorial copy does not have order forms.
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Chapter Nineteen: Copywrltlng
So you're going to take the challenge and write your own advertisement or sales letter? Good for you. That's the way I did it... unfortunately for me... I was unaware there were tons of books written long ago that could have told me a lot of the things I had to figure out on my own. I've only made a few chapters in this book about writing copy. I've done this for a reason. The last thing the World needed was another book about copywriting! What the World needed was a book that would teach you how to conceptualize, strategize, and implement techniques you need to sell products and services through direct response. I'll teach as best as I can about writing copy in this chapter. .. but if you want to get a super education on the fine art of writing copy... there are many books that can really go into depth about the subject. I'll list a few of my favorites towards the end of this book. The level of your ability to convince people will tell you how rich you are going to be ... not only in this business ... but every business. The entire World goes round on people buying things ... and people selling things. The people who can sell the best, make the most sales ... and make the most money. And to sell, you have to make people see things your way. They have to agree with you. They have to feel you have their best interest at hand. I'm going to teach you how to do this. Before we actually start talking about writing copy, here's a great example of top-notch copywriting for a bodybuilding supplement that pulled extremely well. ***
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Amazing New Pill. .. Tested and Clinically Proven In Russia ... MAKES EVERY WORKOUT GIVE THE MUSCLE GAINS OF THREE! Imagine- Every rep ... Every squat... Every press ... giving you the explosive shirt-ripping results of three ... outperforming even the most powerful - and illegal Anabolic Steroids! Don't believe it? The popular bodybuilding magazines like Muscular Development didn't either ... but after they knew the facts, they're now saying, "Steroids Are Obsolete!" Dear Friend, Is it true? Has modern science finally created a pill that can make you look like a Professional Bodybuilder ... without killing yourself in the gym? My name is Benjamin Bergin. I'm not a professional ad writer. But what I have to share with you is so extraordinary and so powerful; I decided to write you myself. So bear with me a little. The company I work for, MedEx Laboratories, is manufacturing a new pill that has just been clinically proven to increase your muscle mass by 310%- without investing the usual 3-5 years it takeS the average bodybuilder to get "burley". In fact, 1 believe our new pill makes every other synthetic or natural anabolic steroid on the planet literally obsolete! I'm so excited about our new discovery that I have to get this off my chest before I EXPLODE! Just imagine
this ...
Popping a few easy-to-swallow pills and experiencing 3 to 5 years of "gym results" in just a few short months. You'll have arms 3 full inches beefier ...tearing your shirtsleeves at the seams.
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You'll add so many inches to your upper body; you'll have to give all your suits to the Salvation Army because they just won't fit anymore! And as for your leg s...forget about it. They won't squeeze into those jeans you have- no matter how baggy you wear them! But what may excite you most is that women will be lusting after your "beefcake" body ...even if it currently resembles a flabby "cheesecake" or even worse, a scrawny "cupcake"! That would be something ... wouldn't it? Can One S~ple Pill Ready Do All This Without Spending As Many Hours In The Gym? Look- I know what you're reading contradicts everything you've always thought about building muscles_ I know it sounds unbelievable ... I didn't believe it at first either. But all I want you to do is read this letter and when you're finished, make your own well-reasoned conclusion. Fair enough? Scientists at Johns Hopkins University Figure Out How To Manipulate The GDF8 Gene (nicknamed the Schwarzenegger Gene) Through research, we've uncovered the primary gene in your body that controls muscle size. This gene makes a protein that prevents muscle growth and increases fat storage. It's called Growth and Differentiation Factor 8 or GDF8 for short. If You Want
To Get Ripped-Up and Pack-On GDF8 Is Your Worst Enemy!
Muscle,
GDF8 is the one protein in your body whose purpose is to STOP you from getting H-U-G-E!
sole
Everyone's body produces GDF8 naturally and it's the primary reason why it is almost impossible to make dramatic increases in muscle size and performance naturally. That's because every time you do something
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that stimulates burst of GDF8!
improvement,
your body
stops it with a
If You Were Able To Suppress Your Body's GDF8 Production, Your Muscles Would SWELL So Fast, Your Friends Will Swear You're On Steroids! Like I was saying before, Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered suppressing GDF8 production in animals permitted them to achieve STAGGERING levels of muscularity! Mice that produced little or no GDF8 were 300% more muscular than normal mice! And of course, the mice didn't lift weights to get 300% more muscular! And now, we're bringing this amazing GDFS suppressor to the market for humans. It's called DynaBolics and it seems everyone who is using it is achieving results that are hard to believe! DynaBolics is completely safe and natural. Its main ingredient is actually derived from a rare and exotic sea algae, which has been shown to bind to the muscle-fighting GDF8 protein. It's pretty simple to understand ...In order for GDF8 to perform its function of limiting muscle' growth, it must first find it's way to your muscles. DynaBolics is designed to bind to the GDF8 protein, preventing it from ever finding its way to your muscles. When GDF8 is disabled or reduced, there is no limit to your muscle growth! In The Past, Bodybuilders and Professional Athletes Would Have Crawled Across Broken Glass To Get Their Hands On Such A Radical Supplement ..But Thanks To Modern Science, DynaBolics Is Just A Phone Call Away! DynaBolics delivers a muscle-building advantage never before available to the general public. It's not just a little better than protein powders, growth hormone, or anabolic steroids_ it makes them OBSOLETE!
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Look- even if you're the typical "hard-gainer" or even if you're already BIG but feel like you've "maxed out" or even if you never lifted a weight in your life and want to get H-U-G-E fast, DynaBolics may transform your body so radically, not even your pets will recognize you! Not Only Has A Reduction In GDF8 Shown To Explode Muscle Size ...It Has Also Shown To Burn Fat Like Butter Dropped In A Hot Frying Pan! In studies, a decrease in loss of 35% to 50%! This means so fast and furious, your skin "Shrink-Wrap" to show-off your
GDFB resulted in fat you may shed body fat will literally act as bulging muscles.
Is DynaBolics the perfect supplement_. you know the "magic" pill we've all dreamed about? Some of the most popular bodybuilding magazines seem to think so. But here's how you can decide for yourself ... EXPERIENCE For Yourself Why Muscular Development Magazine Says ... "Steroids Are Obsolete!" If you're interested in trying DynaBolics, you're in for a pleasant surprise_ instead of paying tbe retail price of $99.95 per bottle; your first 30-day supply of DynaBolics can be purchased for just $59.95 ... but only during this unusual promotion. (more on that later) Is A New, Muscular, and Hulk-Like Body Worth $59.95 To You? It sure would be worth it if you're single and after taking DynaBolics, you start to attract beautiful women, twice as hot as your previous lovers. Could you imagine the new sex-life that is waiting for you? It sure would be worth it if you were ever in a violent confrontation with one or more men. When
your
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safety is on the line, your brute strength is all you have to survive., If you were H-U-G-E, do you really think it's going to be easy for men to kick sand in your face? I don't think so! It sure would be worth it if you were a businessmanespecially if you have to negotiate high-stakes deals. Trust me-- you'll always dominate the deaL. leaving the conference room with everything you want. Those pencil-neck geeks would be too scared to tell you "no" ... They'll think you'd hit them over the head with one of your cannons! Just imagine how good you'd look if you had 15 to 25 more pounds of rock-hard, USDA Prime Filet muscle? And a L the same time, was much leaner...Women will SWARM around you ...You'll instill FEAR and INTIMIDATION in the hearts of every man you come in contact withboth personally and professionally! DynaBolics was designed to totally people "see" you in their eyes!
change
the way
Who Else Wants To Start Experiencing Mind-Boggling Growth In Just A Few Weeks? DynaBolics may work so fast, .in just a few weeks, you may start noticing your shirt sleeves and pant legs getting tighter, and the longer you use DynaBolics, the BIGGER and B-I-G-G-E-R you may get! I'd bet you'd want to continue taking DynaBolics for years ... Why would any sane man want to discontinue its use? DynaBolics is probably the most amazing innovation to ever hit the bodybuilding world! Instant
Muscle
For Couch
Potatoes?
DynaBolics is designed to bind to GDF8, which keeps your muscles small. Most users are not bodybuilders. But like anything in life, the more you put into this, the more results you'll experience. If you are "into" working out...your results will only be
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faster. It's possible about 12 to 16 weeksusually takes! Imagine
to gain championship size in instead of the 3 to 5 years it
What You May Look Like
In Just A Few Months ...
Week by week ...you'll be standing in the mirror, tape measure in hand- with a smile on your face that just won't go away. Arms, chest, and stomach so ripped up, you'll think it's not really "your" body ...You'll have to pinch yourself to prove its really "All You"! DynaBolics Was Created To DOUBLE Your Current Strength ... DOUBLE Your Current Size ...and Can Make Your Definition So We~l Chiseled; You'll Look Like A Greek Statue! Take DynaBolics for 16 weeks and if you don't "FEEL" your arms growing ... don't "FEEL" your strength increasing ...and don't "SEE" fat starting to evaporate ... send the empty bottles back for a DOUBLE YOUR MONEY BACK refund of your purchase price. I can offer you such a no-risk guarantee because I KNOW an overwhelming number of men who are using this product are experiencing results that almost defy belief! I challenge you to tell us these pills do not change your life. So what you should do right now is order DynaBolics. We're currently having a special where you can get your first months supply for just $59.95 a bottle. So, have your credit card ready and call 1800-123-4567 or send it in the mail. The address is 7500 West Lake Mead Blvd., Suite 9-482, Las Vegas, Nevada 89128. Supplies are limited, and every day that goes by is just one more day you'll have to wait to have that muscular, strong, sexy body you've always craved! And remember, you'll get DOUBLE YOUR MONEY BACK if DynaBolics fails to impress you after 120 days.
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But you got to hurry- I only have 2384 bottles in stock- that's enough of a supply to last me 7 days or so. And at this low price (65% off), they'll surely be gone in a week. Plus, so you don't get stuck paying our $99.95 retail price on future bottles (if you can even get your hands on them because our supply is so limited), you'll receive FREE membership into our Preferred Customer Club- usually reserved for Professional Bodybuilders, where you'll save $60 on all your future month's supplies. And so you don't go a day without DynaBolics in your system- even when our supplies are sold out to the general public, you're GUARANTEED a fresh 30-day supply every month- sent automatically and you'll pay just $39.95 plus $7 shipping/handling. Cancel shipments anytime .
....-,
Id~)~1)~ Benjamin Bergin for MedEx Laboratories To Order Call: 1-800-123-4567 ps: What man wouldn't want DynaBolics? Just a few pills a day and in minimal time you may "OWN" those muscles that were always too darned hard to buildwithout countless hours in the gym! The bottom line ... if you block the effects of GDF8 long enough, you may literally attain a muscular physique so enormous, it was once impossible to obtain- but The Future Has Arrived! pps: The active ingredient in DynaBolics is a rare sea algae called Cystoseria Canariensis, which was first discovered by researchers at Las Palmas University in Spain. Production of this ingredient is impossible without the use of a precisely controlled, hydroponic farm Lo maintain ideal growing conditions. This means only a small amount of this ingredient can be produced at a time. So to guarantee you'll be able to reserve
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DynaBolics, you'd better order now. Once we are sold out of DynaBolics we'll be forced to turn away new customers until the next batch is available which may be 120 days from now. So again, our phone number is 1800-123-4567 or if you can send your card info in the mail. Our address is 7500 West Lake Mead Blvd., Suite 9-482, Las Vegas, Nevada 89128. And don't forgetyou're protected by a full 120-Day DOUBLE YOUR MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. ..so there s no risk on your part! You have nothing to lose ... it's that plain and simple. J
Make sure to read the CLINICAL STUDY RESULTS PPPS: from Zakir Ramazanov, PhD, Musa Abidov, MD, and Miguel Jimenez del Rio, PhD. It's SOLID PROOF this is REAL. *** Let me ask you a question ... after reading this, even if you weren't a bodybuilder ... did it stir you up a bit? This was a great example of some killer copy. You should want all your sales letters to sound this compelling. There are a couple of things I want to cover that are "golden rules" of writing copy. YOU... not WE. Do you know what pisses me off? When I get letters in the mail from a company that sounds like this, "We're so pleased to announce our new facility. We pride ourselves on having the best service, best prices, and widest selection. We feel our customers are very important to us, and we treat them like family, we, we, we, we, we, yadda ... yadda ... yadda ... snore ... snore ... "- then in the trash it goes. You cannot write copy like this. The reader does not care about you and your plant ... or what you feel..; "we" is as bad as saying FUCK in your sales letters. The right way to write copy is from the reader's viewpoint. You're going to want to say "You" a lot ... and for every 5 times you say
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"you", it's all right to say "1". Here's an example from the sales letter I've reprinted for you earlier: Is A New, Muscular, and Hulk-Like Body Worth $59.95 To You? It sure would be worth it if you're single and after taking DynaBolics, you start to attract beautiful women, twice as hot as your previous lovers. Could you imagine the new sex-life that is waiting for you? It sure would be worth it if you were ever in a violent confrontation with one or more men. When your safety is on the line, your brute strength is all you have to survive. If you were H-U-G-E, do you really think it's going to be easy for men to kick sand in your face? I don't think so! It sure would be worth it if you were a businessman-
especially if you have to negotiate high-stakes deals. Trust me- you'll always dominate the deal ... leaving the conference room with everything you want. Those pencil-neck geeks would be too scared to tell you "no" ... They'll think you'd hit them over the head with one of your cannons! Do you see how the entire thing was focused on the reader of the letter? Nowhere does it say "we", or "us" ... it's all about the reader. Write In The First Person. This is pretty easy to understand. Write in plain-old conversational talk as if you were really talking to the person you are writing to. Just as if it were a script you were going to read out loud ... you must write in the first person ... the way this entire book was written ... the way the sales letter I've reprinted was written. Urgency. When you get to the "close" of your letter. .. you're going to want to get them to order right now. If you allow them to put the letter down and think about it later. .. or even order later ... there's a chance they'll forget to ever order! You want to compel them to order on the spot ... as if they are lucky they received your sales
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letter or read your ad in enough time to "get-in" on this deal! If you have a limited quantity, say so. If your price is going to go up ... say so ... If the special free bonuses are only for the first 250 people to order ... say so. But most importantly, make sure it's believable. Give them a reason why it's a rare product... and the quantity is limited ... like I did in the sales letter I've reprinted earlier in this chapter. Here's it is again for you to review: The active ingredient in DynaBolics is a rare sea algae called Cystoseria Canariensis, which was first discovered by researchers at Las Palmas University in Spain. Production of this ingredient is impossible without the use of a precisely controlled, hydroponic farm to maintain ideal growing conditions. This means only a small amount of this ingredient can be produced at a time. So to guarantee you'll be able to reserve DynaBolics, you'd better order now. Once we are sold out of DynaBolics we'll be forced to tum away new customers until the next batch is available which may be 120 days from now. Do you see how we made it believable that this ingredient was rare? I had a story behind it. It makes sense to the reader. Even if you have to "manufacture" your urgency technique ... Gary Halbert told me about a furniture sale promotion he was working on with a client. He actually went to the warehouse with his client and put a hole in the roof of the warehouse, then did an ad saying all the furniture must be sold- even at a loss, because the store owner's wife had the truck put a delivery in the wrong warehouse. Since it's going to rain in a few days ... and since the warehouse has a hole in the roof ... everything has to go- even if they lose money on the sale ... or else the furniture is worthless! Did they really make a hole in the roof? Who knows ... but you get the "point" I'm trying to imply. The "IFjTHEN" First Sentence. A proven way to open a sales letter is to use the If/Then first sentence. It goes something like this, "If you're looking to pack on 19.7 pounds of rock-hard USDA Prime muscle within the next 30 days ... then this will be the most important letter you'll read all week!"
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I use all different kinds of opening sentences ... but this version is proven to work ... and at this point in your writing career. .. you want to play it on the safe, proven, reliable side ... right? Captions. If you are using a photograph ... you absolutely must use a caption under the image. In a magazine ad, the first thing a reader sees is the image ... the second thing he does is read the caption ... sometimes even before he sees or reads the damn headline! ALWAYSUSE A CAPTION UNDER A PHOTO IF YOU ARE USING A PHOTO! The -r.s.' The PS is the second .most read thing in a sales letter. The first thing they read is the headline, then they go right for the PS. It would be wise to restate the entire offer in a nutshell for the PS of any sales letter. Pretend the PS is being read all by itself- without the sales letter. .. you want to get the entire offer across to your reader. The Length Of Copy. The amount of copy to write can be compared to a woman's dress. Short enough to keep your interest. Long enough to cover all the essentials. Usually a full page in a magazine ... four pages in a sales letter. .. unless you're selling a product everyone already knows about- like Microsoft Office software. A simple postcard advertising a price break will out pull a 4-page letter talking all about how Microsoft created it. The 6 Parts Of a Sales Pitch In Your Sales Letter or Ad: 1. The Headline or Opening Thrust. The headline is the most important part of your sales letter or advertisement. David Ogilvy said it was, "The ticket on the meat", in his book "Ogilvy On Advertising". Five times more people will read your headline than will read your body copy. I've seen a headline out pull another headline by 300% to as much as 1900%. Same copy ... Same product ... Same price ... Same media ... the only
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difference was the headline. The next chapter is going to teach you all about headlines and how to write them. Eugene Schwartz's book, "Breakthrough Advertising" spent an entire 50% of the bookthe entire first half of the book on teaching how to find and write the headline! It's that important! 2. The Basic Story or Pitch. This is where you're going to write about your frustration, the pains of it, how you dissolved it, what you dissolved it with, and how it works. 3. The Proposition. This is where you're going to go into how the product reader, and why he or she should use it.
can help the
4. The Exact Offer.
This is where you're going to talk about price and what he is going to get for his money ... what does the purchase come with ... and free bonuses ... etc. 5. The Guarantee. This is where you are going to remove all of the risks your prospect is scared of. Anything that may leave him thinking there's a chance he Il lose his money if this does not turn out to be what you said it was going to be. You got to get rid of this feeling. You got to assure him in a powerful way, he is not at any financial risk for going with his gut and ordering this thing through the mail- from a total stranger- without even seeing it! 6. The Call To Action. This is where you tell him how to order. What numbers to call ... where to send a check or money order. And maybe even a little push. Here's a version of one I "copied" from a Joe Karbo ad, I love it to this day ...
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"Look-30-days from now you can be nothing more than a month older, or you can be on your way to financial freedom. You decide. You have nothing to fear, because you're protected by a full 30-day DOUBLEYOURMONEYBACKGUARANTEE.So, have your credit card handy and call1-800-123-4567 right now, before the limited supply of 327 are sold out forever." I fit this closing to almost every product I'm selling. The 5 Components Of a Winning Ad or Sales Letter: 1. Command Attention. You need a strong visual appeal to your ad or sales letter. A killer headline ... a photograph ... an appealing layout that does not "blend" with other magazine ads in the magazine. 2. Show People The Advantage Of Using Your Product. The body copy will show the prospect why your product exists. Why people are buying it. What it is going to do for the person who uses it. 3. Prove That What You Are Saying Has An Advantage. There are tons of weight loss aids. But the one you are selling has been clinically proven to burn as many as 930 calories in a given day's time. That's nearly half a woman's 2000 caloric intake for a day's time. This study result has to back up your claims ... otherwise the claim will go in one ear and out the other as all direct response product claims automatically get discounted 50% from your reader- and that's at a minimum. 4. Persuade People To Grasp That Advantage. You're going to have to tell your prospect why he should grasp the advantage your product delivers. You already got his attention. You already told him what your product could do for its users. You then proved it was true. Now you have to persuade him to grasp
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this advantage. You can entice him with a great price ... a great guarantee ... BOTH. The sky is the limit. 5. Make a Call To Action. Now you have to close the thing up and get them to reach for their wallet and call you right now. If you have a poor closing ... he may put the letter down and go on with his life. You have to close correctly. Here are 4 steps 1 use to ask for the cash: A. Create an offer no sane person could refuse. Pile it on. All the bonuses you can include. Make it such an awesome offering; he_'dbe a total jerk not to grasp it. B. Erase all the risks from your customer's
mind.
People are scared they're going to lose their money. Scammers are allover the place. You're not the first sales letter or advertisement he's read in his life. He's seen it alL. and read it all before. He's been ripped off in the past. He knows your sales copy is probably full of hyperbole. Put him in a position where he "thinks" he'd really fuck you up if he wanted his money back. C. Light a big, fat fire under his ass. If your prospect procrastinates ... you lost an order. He's got to order right now! Right this very second! No thinking about it! And the way to do this is to let him know if he snoozes ... he's not going to get the free video ... he's not going to get the low price ... he's not going to even be able to get his hands on the product. You see this on infomercials all the time ... "Order within the next 14 minutes and you'll receive John's Quick Start video- where you'lllearn step-by-step ... yada ... yada ... yada ... a $30 value- yours absolutely free!" Of course, the order takers are not sitting there with a stopwatch ... counting the minutes ... or counting until the 250th order comes in ... but it is a technique that works ... as long 2.~ you make sure it's believable. Obviously, if you're writing this in
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a sales letter or a magazine ad, you're not going to say "14 minutes" ... you'd say 5 days ... first 250 people ... etc. D. Make it as simple as possible to order. Some people love to make things complicated. Dumb people make simple things complicated. And smart people make complicated things simple. Placing an order should not be hard to do ... but you'd be amazed by how many marketers really mess it up. Simple. Simple. Simple. An 800# ... 24 hours a day ... 7 days a week. .. even if you have an answering machine on! A simple order form to fill out ... an easy to use response envelope to stick the order card in and mail. SIMPLE. Keep it SIMPLE. I go to websites, that before I can view anything, they want me to register. .. or they want me to download some sort of software I do not have ... or do not have the latest version of. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I go to another website.
Chapter Twenty: Headlines
In his book, "Breakthrough Advertising", Eugene Schwartz dedicated the full first half of his book. .. an entire 50% of it.,; tc creating the most powerful headline for your advertisement. Why would he do this? The answer is simple. When you pick up a newspaper and you're browsing through the pages ... the only thing that makes you read a particular article is the headline. If the headline does not do it's job of attracting the proper audience ... the ad will fail. ' Do you know what's even funnier than having the wrong headline? Having NO HEADLINE. Most advertisers use either a poor headline ... or no headline at all. This is why they fail. This is why they say, "Advertising Don't Work". Now, you don't always have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to creating headlines. Once you get better at direct response writing, you may want to explore creating more original headlines ... but like I keep saying throughout this book- let's keep it safe. We're going to mold our new headlines off old headlines that have been proven to work. .. time and time again over the past decades- selling millions of products and services. 1 have a few guidelines when creating headlines1. Try not to use negatives ... 2. Avoid humor at all costs ... 3. Avoid trying to be cute ... 4. Always try to have the reader's 5. State your products
self-interest
most valuable benefit...
in the headline ...
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One headline tested against another can result in increased orders by many, many multiples. Here's an example Jay Abraham tells about a simple headline swap that tripled an ad's pulling power. Jay was doing consultation work for a financing company for gold and silver. This company was offering 2/3rds bank financing on gold and silver as long as they got to hold the actual gold or silver. They were running huge ads in newspapers was ... "2j3rds
and their headline
Bank Financing On All Silver and Gold"
Now, their ads were breaking even at this point. The ad was brining in enough sales to cover running the ads ... paying the commissions to the salespeople ... and basically keeping the lights on. This company called upon Jay and within a few minutes he changed the headline to this: "If Gold Is Selling For $300 An Ounce, Send Us Just We'll Buy You All The Gold You Want"
$100 and
This simple headline swap resulted in an immediate 300% increase in the selling power of their advertisements. And this company had another headline for Silver ... "If Silver Is Selling For $6 An Ounce, Send Us Just Buy You All The Silver You Want"
$2 and We'll
Jay's new headlines were saying the same things ... it was just making it more clear and telling the reader how the 2j3rds financing benefited him. I swapped a headline and saw an ad increase in pulling power by 300%. Others claim they have seen as much as a 1900% increase in sales from one headline to another.
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..
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The point of this chapter right now is not to talk about testing headlines against each other. .. but how to create the best headline for your ad or sales letter off the bat. I'm going to list over one hundred of my favorite headlines. you go to write your headline ... simply insert your product offer into them. Here's an example:
When and/ or
The old, classic headline: "They All Laughed When I Sat At The Piano ... But When I Started To Play!" Your new version: "They All Laughed When I Said I Was Going To Lose 37 Pounds 30-Days ... But When.They Saw Me Four Weeks Later!"
In
This was just a quick, off the cuff exarnple. .. but for you to insert your own product is not too hard to do- even for a beginner. Here's this list of my favorite headlines own products or services:
you can adapt
to fit your
1. THE SECRET OF MAKING PEOPLE LIKE YOU 2. A LITTLE MISTAKE THAT COST A FARMER $3,000
A YEAR
3. ADVICE TO WIVES WHOSE HUSBANDS DON'T SAVE MONEY -BY A WIFE 4. THE CHILD WHO WON THE HEARTS OF ALL 5. ARE YOU EVER TONGUE-TIED
AT A PARTY
6. HOW A NEW DISCOVERY MADE A PLAIN GIRL BEAUTIFUL 7. HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE 8. THE LAST TWO HOURS ARE THE LONGEST -- AND THOSE ARE THE TWO HOURS YOU SAVE
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9. WHO ELSE WANTS A SCREEN 10. DO YOU MAKE THESE 11. WHY SOME FOODS
STAR FIGURE?
MISTAKES
"EXPLODE"
IN ENGLISH?
IN YOUR STOMACH
12. HANDS THAT LOOK LOVELIER IN 24 HOURS MONEY BACK 13. YOU CAN LAUGH AT MONEY WORRIES THIS SIMPLE PLAN 14. WHY SOME PEOPLE STOCK MARKET 15. WHEN DOCTORS
-- OR YOUR
-- IF YOU FOLLOW
ALMOST ALWAYS MAKE MONEY IN THE
"FEEL ROTTEN" THIS IS WHAT THEY DO
16. IT SEEMS INCREDIBLE THAT YOU CAN OFFER THESE SIGNED ORIGINAL ETCHINGS -- FOR ONLY $5 EACH 17. FIVE FAMILIAR SKIN TROUBLES OVERCOME?
-- WHICH DO YOU WANT TO
18. WHICH OF THESE $2.50 TO $5 BEST SELLERS WANT -- FOR ONLY $1 EACH?
DO YOU
19. WHO EVER HEARD OF A WOMAN LOSING WEIGHT ENJOYING 3 DELICIOUS MEALS AT THE SAME TIME? 20. HOW I IMPROVED
-- AND
MY MEMORY IN ONE EVENING
21. DISCOVER THE FORTUNE SALARY
THAT LIES HIDDEN
22. DOCTORS PROVE TWO OUT OF THREE MORE BEAUTIFUL SKIN IN 14 DAYS 23. HOW I MADE A FORTUNE
IN YOUR
WOMEN CAN HAVE
WITH A "FOOL IDEA"
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24. HOW OFTEN DO YO HEAR YOURSELF SAYING, "NO, 1 HAVENT READ IT: I'VE BEEN MEANING TO!" 25. THOUSANDS DISCOVER IT!
HAVE THIS PRICELESS
26. WHOSE FAULT WHEN CHILDREN
GIFT -- BUT NEVER
DISOBEY?
27. HOW A "FOOL STUNT" MADE ME A STAR SALESPERSON: 28. HAVE YOU THESE
SYMPTOMS
OF NERVE EXHAUSTION?
29. GUARANTEED TO GO THROUGH WE PAY THE TOW!
ICE, MUD, OR SNOW -- OR
30. HAVE YOU A "WORRY" STOCK? 31. HOW A NEW KIND OF CLAY IMPROVED 30 MINUTES
MY COMPLEXION
IN
32. 161 NEW WAYS TO A MAN'S HEART -- IN THIS FASCINATING BOOK FOR COOKS. 33. PROFITS THAT LIE HIDDEN
IN YOUR FARM
34. IS THE LIFE OF A CHILD WORTH $1 TO YOU? 35. EVERYWHERE NEW SHAMPOO!
WOMEN ARE RAVING ABOUT THIS AMAZING
36. DO YOU DO ANY OF THESE 37. SIX TYPES OF INVESTORS
TEN EMBARRASSING
-- WHICH TYPE ARE YOU?
38. HOW TO TAKE OUT STAINS ... USE (product FOLLOW THESE EASY DIRECTIONS 39. TODAY ... ADD $10,000 OF A NEW HAT
THINGS?
name)
AND
TO YOUR ESTATE -- FOR THE PRICE
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40. DOES YOUR CHILD 41. IS YOUR HOME
EVER EMBARRASS
PICTURE-POOR?
42. HOW TO GIVE YOUR CHILDREN DELICIOUS WAYS 43. TO PEOPLE STARTED
YOU?
EXTRA IRON -- THESE
3
WHO WANT TO WRITE -- BUT CAN'T GET
44. THIS ALMOST-MAGICAL BEFORE YOU MAKE THEM 45. THE CRIMES
LAMP LIGHTS
WE COMMIT
HALLWAY TURNS
AGAINST OUR STOMACHS
46. THE MAN WITH THE "GRASSHOPPER
MIND"
47. THEY LAUGHED WHEN I SAT DOWN AT THE PIANO -- BUT WHEN I STARTED TO PLAY! 48. THROW AWAY YOUR OARS! 49. HOW TO DO WONDERS
WITH A LITTLE LAND
50. WHO ELSE WANTS LIGHTER TIME?
CAKE -- IN HALF THE MIXING
51. LITTLE LEAKS THAT KEEP MEN POOR 52. PIERCED
BY 301 NAILS ... RETAINS
FULL AIR PRESSURE
53. NO MORE BACK-BREAKING GARDEN CHORES FOR ME -YET OURS IS NOW THE SHOWPLACE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD! 54. OFTEN A BRIDESMAID, 55. HOW MUCH IS "WORKER COMPANY?
NEVER A BRIDE TENSION"
COSTING
56. TO MEN WHO WANT TO QUIT WORK SOMEDAY
YOUR
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57. HOW TO PLAY YOUR HOUSE TO SUIT YOURSELF 58. BUY NO DESK -- UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THIS SENSATION OF THE BUSINESS SHOW 59. CALL BACK THESE GREAT MOMENTS AT THE OPERA 60. "I LOST MY BULGES ... AND SAVED MONEY TOO!" 61. WHY (brand name) BULBS GIVE MORE LIGHT THIS YEAR 62. RIGHT AND WRONG FARMING METHODS -- AND LITTLE POINTERS THAT WILL INCREASE YOUR PROFITS 63. NEW CAKE-IMPROVER GETS YOU COMPLIMENTS GALORE! 64. IMAGINE ME ... HOLDING AN AUDIENCE SPELLBOUND FOR 30 MINUTES 65. THIS IS MARIE ANTOINETTE -- RIDING TO HER DEATH 66. DID YOU EVER SEE A "TELEGRAM" FROM YOUR HEART? 67. HOW ANY AUTO REPAIR JOB CAN BE "DUCK SOUP" FOR YOU 68. NEW SHAMPOO LEAVES YOUR HAIR SMOOTHER -- EASIER TO MANAGE 69. IT'S A SHAME FOR YOU NOT TO MAKE GOOD MONEY -WHEN THESE MEN DO IT SO EASILY 70. YOU NEVER SAW SUCH LETTERS AS HARRY AND I GOT ABOUT OUT PEARS 71. THOUSANDS NOW PLAY WHO NEVER THOUGHT THEY COULD
171
72. GREAT NEW DISCOVERY KILLS KITCHEN ODORS MAKES INDOOR AIR "COUNTRY -FRESH" 73. MAKE THIS ONE-MINUTE KIND OF SHAVING CREAM
QUICK! --
TEST -- OF AN AMAZING NEW
74. ANNOUNCING ... THE NEW EDITION OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA THAT MAKES IT FUN TO LEARN THINGS 75. AGAIN SHE ORDERS ... "A CHICKEN SALAD, PLEASE" 76. FOR THE WOMAN WHO IS OLDER THAN SHE LOOKS 77. WHERE CAN YOU GO IN A GOOD USED CAR 78. CHECK THE KIND OF BODY YOU WANT 79. "YOU KILL THAT STORE -- OR I'LL RUN YOU OUT OF THE STATE! 80. HERE'S
A QUICK WAY TO BREAK-UP
A COLD
81. THERE'S ANOTHER WOMAN WAITING FOR EVERY MAN -AND SHE'S TOO SMART TO HAVE "MORNING MOUTH" 82. THIS PEN "BURPS" BEFORE AFTERWARDS!
IT DRINKS -- BUT NEVER
83. IF YOU WERE GIVEN $20,000 TO SPEND -- ISNT THIS THE (type of product. but not product name) YOU'D BUILD? 84. "LAST FRIDAY ... I WAS SCARED! -- MY BOSS ALMOST FIRED 1\.,.'[;'," 85. 76 REASONS WHY IT WOULD HAVE PAID YOU TO ANSWER OUR AD A FEW MONTHS AGO 86. SUPPOSE
THIS HAPPENED
87. DON'T LET ATHLETE'S
ON YOUR WEDDING
FOOT "LAY YOU UP'
DAY
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88. ARE THEY BEING PROMOTED RIGHT OVER YOUR HEAD? 89. ARE WE A NATION OF LOW-BROWS? 90. A WONDERFUL TWO YEARS' TRIP AT FULL PAY -- BUT ONLY MEN WITH IMAGINATION CAN TAKE IT 91. WHAT EVERYBODY OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT THE STOCK AND BOND BUSINESS 92. MONEY-SAVING BARGAINS FROM AMERICA'S OLDEST DIAMOND DISCOUNT STORE 93. FORMER BARBER EARNS $8,000 IN FOUR MONTHS AS A REAL ESTATE SPECIALIST 94. FREE BOOK -- TELLS YOU TWELVE SECRETS OF BETTER LAWN CARE 95. GREATEST GOLD-MINE OF EASY "THINGS TO MAKE" EVER CRAMMED INTO ONE BOOK 96. $80,000 IN PRIZES! HELP US FIND THE NAME FOR THESE NEW KITCHENS 97. NOW! OWN FLORIDA LAND THE EASY WAY ... $10 DOWN AND $10 A MONTH 98. TAKE ANY THREE OF THESE KITCHEN APPLIANCES -- FOR ONLY $8.95 (VALUES UP TO $15.45) 99. SAVE TWENTY CENTS ON TWO CANS OF CRANBERRY SAUCE -- LIMITED OFFER
100. ONE PLACE-SETTING FREE FOR EVERY THREE YOU BUY! 101. IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL TO MAKE MONEY THIS EASILY!
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102. IF YOU'VE PURCHASED A NEW CAR IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS ... DON'T READ THIS. IT'LL BREAK YOUR HEART! 103. WHERE THE MONEY IS, AND HOW TO GET IT 104. WHO ELSE WANTS TO MAKE BIG MONEY IN ELECTRONICS? 105. THE AMAZING DIET SECRET CLEVELAND HOUSEWIFE 106. HOW TO BURN-OFF
OF A FRUSTRATED
BODY FAT ... HOUR BY HOUR
107. AN OPEN LETTER TO EVERY OVERWEIGHT PORTLAND 108. FINANCIAL COLUMNIST 109. HOW THE EXPERTS
PERSON
IN
MAKES UNIQUE DISCOVERY
BUY GOLD AND SILVER
110. THE AMAZING FACELIFT IN A JAR USED BY HOLLYWOOD STARS WHO DON'T WANT PLASTIC SURGERY 111. WHICH OF THESE END?
5 SKIN TROUBLES
112. THE MACHINE THAT PEELS-OFF BACK AND ENJOY IT
WOULD YOU LIKE TO
POUNDS
113. HOW TO WAKE-UP THE FINANCIAL GENIUS 114. HERE'S BANKRUPT
WHILE YOU SIT
INSIDE YOU
HOW TO FIND OUT IF YOUR BANK IS ABOUT TO GO
115. THE AMAZING BEVERLY HILLS WRINKLE ERASER DISCOVERED BY TOP ORIENTAL CHEMIST. 116. IS NOT HAVING YOUR HIGH-SCHOOL DIPLOMA KEEPING YOU FROM MAKING THE MONEY YOU WANT?
174
117. IS YOUR HAIR-LOSS PREVENTING WOMEN FROM DISCOVERING WHAT A GREAT GUY YOU ARE? 118. WHAT DO WOMEN SECRETLY SAY BEHIND THEIR LOVER'S BACK? 119. IMPORTANT NEWS FOR WOMAN WITH SMALL BREASTS 120. RECENT FDA STUDY ON BREAST IMPLANTS REVEALS SHOCKING INFORMATION 121. MEN- BE TALLER! 122. AMAZING NEW DIET PILL BURNS MORE CALORIES THAN RUNNING 3 HOURS ON A TREADMILL! 123. HOW TO WIPE 10 YEARS OFF YOUR FACE IN 60 SECONDS OR LESS: 124. WE'RE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO WRITE CHILDREN'S BOOKS 125. THIS IS THE AD WE HAD TO CANCEL LAST MONTH BECAUSE WE SOLD-OUT SO FAST Quotation Marks. When you add quotation marks arourid a headline its pulling power. So when you get the opportunity marks.
it increases use the quote
"They All Laughed When I Said I Created a Pill That Burned 930 Calories a Day ... But Now They're All Asking Me For Samples!" Johnson Box. A Johnson Box is a box placed around a headline to make it stand out more. Give it a try in your sales letters and see how it looks. I wouldn't use one in magazine ads.
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Proven Starters. "HOW TO" headlines: How to make $2,000 a week ... without leaving the house: How to win friends and influence people: How to make every work-out give the results of thrp.f': "WHO ELSE" headlines: Who else wants a whiter wash ... without hard work? Who else wants a screen start figure? Who else wants to drive a Ferrari ... for $340 a month? Two Most Powerful Words In a Headline. FREE and NEW Questions In Headlines. I really do not like to ask questions ... unless going to get me the answer I want.
they are 99% sure
How Many Words To A Headline? The New York University School of Retailing did a test and found that headlines with over 10 words usually sold more product than headlines with less than 10 words. Basically, there is not limit. I've seen headlines with 3 or 4 words work. .. I've seen 10 words work ... I've seen 17 words work. Grabbers. Grabbers are a specialty of my friend and direct response guru, Gary Halbert. Instead of a headline ... hell stick a dollar bill to the top of a sales letter. The letter will open like this ... "Dear Friend, Why did I attach a genuine, US Currency $1 bill to the top of this letter? The answer is simple. What I'm writing to you about concerns a lot of additional money your restaurant can start making as soon as today ... and I thought a little financial eye-catcher would get your attention."
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And the sales letter will go into the sales pitch. Grabbers can be almost anything ... Band-Aids ... Photos ... Currency From Another Country ... A Sample Packet of a Wrinkle Cream ... Here's how the "packet" grabber would work ... "Dear Friend, Why did I attach a little packet to the top of this letter? The answer is simple. Enclosed in that packet is $3 worth of our most advanced 2-Minute Fine Line and Wrinkle Filler.
If you've been noticing a few fines lines and wrinkles ... and want to keep them a secret- I believe this product can help you in less than 2 minutes time. Here's what you should do right now. Remove the packet from this letter. Tear it open and apply a small drop of the clear serum to your index finger. Go to the nearest mirror and apply a small amount of the serum to the right side of your face where you want to hide a wrinkle or fine line. DO NOT APPLY TO THE LEFT SIDE! Leave the mirror. Now, remain still and give this amazing formula 60 seconds to dry. Then go back to the mirror... Amazing isn't it? Wrinkles and fine lines are gone!" Now you'd go on to your sales copy and sell a ton of this stuff. Sometimes a grabber can be a great visual attractant ... even better than a wordy headline ... but it does cause other problems such as
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how are you going to attach thousands of these things when you are rolling-out? If you're using $1 bills... you almost tripled your mailing costs ... are you sure it's worth it? You got to test different ideas as you go. There are many books on copywriting and headline writing ... I think you should read them all. I've done a pretty good job here ... but there are tons of other books that are dedicated only to writing copy and headlines.
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Chapter Twenty One: Printers
If you're going to be in the direct response business and if you were going to be using direct mail... you'd better get familiar with using printers. After all, this is a "paper" business. All direct mail pro's should have a network of printers to submit their printing needs to for bids. Printers are usually broken down into two different categories ... Big Roll-Outs and Small Testers. The big printers you're going to worry about only after you have a winner in the mail. The larger print houses usually cannot do smaller jobs at a good price- nor do they want to. They're all about large multi-hundred-thousand piece print runs. The smaller guys could never handle the larger jobs ... even if they say they can ... but they are needed when you have to print small test jobs 0[2,000-10,000 sales letters. Since I usually use the same format for my mailers, I do not have to go and get it re-quoted every time I do a new letter. But if I do something different for a particular mailer ... I always get it quoted out from three or four different printers. You'd be amazed how different their prices are ... sometimes 50% cheaper than their competitors! Even if I have my favorite printer, I still get quotes- even from a printer I do not like ... because if the guy I don't like is cheaper, I'll make my guy bring his price down. And they'll usually do it for me. To get bids, simply prepare a simple one-page sheet and put across the top of it, "Quote Needed A.S.A.P" and fax it to each printer. Within a few days, I'll start getting phone calls with the prices. One thing I like to do is tell the printer how much I'm looking to spend on a particular print job on the fax. Of course, it's a price
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I'm looking to pay ... minus a few bucks- just in case I'm a little high and can squeeze a few bucks out of them. In my area, I pay about $700 to $800 to print 2,000 complete sales packages and $1,200 for 4,000 ... and $2,000 for 8,000. Now, this is for the complete "mail-in" package as I described earlier. If I'm just doing the "phone-in" mail package, my price will be a few hundred dollars less as the 6 3/4 return envelopes are quite expensive. This is the ballpark of prices in current day. This price does include the folding ... but not the inserting. When you are looking for printers, do not go through your graphic designer. If you're using a graphic artist, he'll try to get you to get your printing done through him. All he's doing is bidding out your job and tacking on unnecessary money. Do it yourself... but if you want to ... you can let him quote the job if he asks. Who knows? Maybe he can get a lower or at least an equal price and it's easier to keep everything under one roof. But if you contract your own printing ... make sure the designer doesn't try to hit you for some bulls hit pre-press charge or some kind of massive "collect for output" and "disc burning" charges. People will try to get money out of you in some of the craziest ways when they feel you don't know what you're talking about. And you'll soon learn not too many people even know what they're talking about! Anyway, here are some terms you're going to need to understand when dealing with printers ... The standard paper weight is 20-pound. plain old "photocopy-grade" paper.
Basically, you want the
Printing is described in "overs". What 1 mean by this is if you were printing a single-sided sheet with one color ink ... it would be called 1/0. If you were printing on both sides, it would be 1/ l. If you were printing 2 colors on the front and one color on the back. .. it would be 2/1. Four color on one side and one color on the other would be 4/1.
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One color= 1 Two colors= 2 Three colors= 3 Four colors= 4 Here are some common terms: Bleed: This is when the ink goes right over the edge of the paper. Most of my pieces do not have bleeds. Screen: This is when a solid color is screened over a white sheet of paper. For example, if you're doing the 7"xlO" brochure I talked about in an earlier chapter and you want the inside of it to be blue ink on the white paper. ... and the outside you want full covered in blue ink ... with black words ... it would be a 2/1 sheet ... with the 2color side screened blue. Most of my jobs do not involve screens ... but they do look coolon the brochure. Monarch: This is the term for a 7"x 10" sheet. Lift Note: This is a little folded note that sometimes gets included in a sales package. It basically says something like "Read This Only If You're Skeptical" on the outside and then the reader would lift it open and read the inside ... which would be additional text, usually going over the guarantee or another free bonus on top of the stuff you offered in the main sales letter. I usually do not use lift notes. Buck Slip: This is an 8.S"x3.66" sheet that is basically a 1/3" sheet of regular size paper. I used to use a lot of these slips as you can fit three of these sheets in a sales package and it'll take up no more than one single sheet in weight ... yet you can have three totally separate sales messages on them. I really do not use them any longer now that I have two templates. Here's some things that add to the price of printing that you do not really need ... You do not need glossy paper stock. You do not need flashy 4-color photos.
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You do not need custom-sized
envelopes or paper.
When you are looking for a printer, here is the quote you need to send to them for each of the packages I spoke about in an earlier chapter: Template for offers that require mail-in orders as well as phone-in orders: *************** (Your Name) (Your Address) (Your Phone Number) QUOTE NEEDED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! Dear (name), Please quote this job and get back to me no later than (insert date here). When you are finished with the quote, or if you have any questions ... my number to call is (000) 000-0000. If you have the quote and you get my voice mail, please leave the breakdown on my voice mail.,; or fax the entire thing to me at (000) 000-0000. Thank You, (your name) QUANTITYOF EACH: (insert quantity) 1. 11x17 std. white stock.
1/1, z-fold to fit # 10
2. 7x 10 std. white stock, white stock, 1/1, letter fold 3. # 10 std. envelope, 1/0 4.63/4
envelope, 1/0
5. 8.5x6 order card, I/O (on decent grade card stock)
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***************
Now here's the bid sheet you'll use for the "phone-in" only mail package, that will not permit the mail-in check orders as described in an earlier chapter. (Your Name) (Your Address) (Your Phone Number) QUOTE NEEDED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! Dear (name), Please quote this job and get back to me no later than (insert date here). When you are finished with the quote, or if you have any questions ... my number to call is (000) 000-0000. If you have the quote and you get my voice mail, please leave the breakdown on my voice mail..; or fax the entire thing to me at (000) 000-0000. Thank You, (your name) QUANTITYOF EACH: (insert quantity) 1. 11x17 std. white stock.
1/1, z-fold to fit # 10
2. 8.5x5.5 std. white stock, 1/0, letter fold 3. 8.5x5.5 std. white stock, 1/0 letter fold 4. 8.5xll
std. 601b. offset, white stock, I/O, letter fold
5. #10 std. envelope, I/O *************** Maybe your sales letter will need to have one or more of the 8.5x5.5 sheets printed on both sides ... or mavbe the 8.5xll will be printed on both sides ... as I have stated above, it's just for one-
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sided printing. If you were to have any of them printed on two sides ... you'll simply change them from 1/0 to 1/1 in the description above.
Another thing your printer may be concerned with is how they are to receive the graphics. Most printers prefer it on a CD-ROM in a program called Quark Xpress. That's the industry standard. Check with the graphic designer as to what format he'll be providing the artwork on. Make sure the printer as well as the designer have the same formats for easy transferring. We spoke more than enough on printers.
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Chapter Twenty Two; Letter shops
Letter shops ... or mail houses are very important which you will hopefully be very soon.
to large mailers-,
What a letter shop is, is a separate company that's job is to stuff, seal, address, apply postage ... and actually deliver your letters to the Post Office. Sure, you can do all this work yourself... but when you're mailing 100,000 pieces each and every week. .. you're probably not going to be able to handle it. And for the price a letter shop charges ... it's worth it. Letter shops usually charge one cent or less for each time they have to "touch" your sales material. For example, if they have to stuff four pieces in your envelope, that's four cents ... then apply the address of your prospect... that's another penny. One more penny to seal the thing. If you're going to have them apply the postage ... that's another penny. Here's what I like to do. I like to get a quote from several elders hips making them think they are going to do everything for me- even drop the letters at the Post Office after they've applied the postage I'll provide them with. I'll make sure to have them breakdown each and every fee... the insertion ... the addressing ... the postage application ... etc. Then, I'll back out the fee to apply the postage. Why do I do this? Simple. To avoid getting ripped-off. If you let them think they're doing the entire job, they'll sometimes quote the job low, just to get the job ... and then they'll "steal" a little of my postage on every job. That's where they'll make the
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difference of the money they had to lose to get the job in the first place. You see, it's next to impossible to prove in a court of law that a letter shop stole a percentage of your postage. When the letter gets mailed, and you get 30% less response than you thought you were going to get from the initial test results ... there's so many things it can be blamed on, you can never prove the letter shop did it. And that's a huge scam letter shops do. It's just too tempting to steal some of the postage. And if you 1et the letter shop know ahead of time that they are not going to be applying postage, your quote will be much higher because they know they can't steal any of it. So I let them think they're going to get the entire job. After 1 get the quote, only then do I tell them I'm going to be applying the postage and dropping off at the post office. If they do not want to honor the quoted price ... find another letter shop because this one is a bunch of scurnbags. One person can apply 10,000 stamps in a given eight-hour shift if he's quick. What I like to do is have the letter shop deliver to me the stuffed, sealed, and addressed letters. I'll then have one of my guys apply the postage that I bought and we'll stick it all in the .'back of a pick-up truck and drop it at the Post Office ourselves. Trust me- this is the way you want to do this. You may be thinking how can the letter shop rip you off if they have to show you a postage receipt directly from the Post Office? Trust me ... to dummy a postage receipt is easy ... and they have numerous ways of doing it. If your sales letter is a standard # 10 envelope and it is under one ounce, the letter shop can mail 75,000 of your letters instead of the 100,000 you paid them to do ... and stick another company's 25,000 pieces in your mail trays. The Post Office guy on the loading dock is not going to look through every tray and make sure all the envelopes are yours ... and even if he did notice there are
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two or three different types of envelopes ... he's not going to know if there's any funny business going on. I can tell you numerous happening.
horror stories about acts like this
I remember back when I first started in direct mail, I trusted a letter shop to do the entire job for me- including applying the postage. Before I did the large letter shop roll-out, I did test the letter in smaller quantities in-house and got 2% ... then when I did the roll-out using the letter shop ... I got just 1.5% and sometimes even less. I thought this was normal because a roll-aut's response wi11be slightly different from the test results. I suspected the list broker sold me better names for the test to reel-me-in ... and then fed me the real names on the roll-outs. I assumed that was the case and left it at that. But, when I noticed this little letter shop's owner had a nice, shiny, new Mercedes Benz ... I got thinking there was something going on. I had him then do everything for me-except apply the postage. He got squirmy but dropped the letters off at my office without the postage. I applied the postage and dropped the letters off at the Post Office myself ... and wouldn't you know ... back to 2%! Once I found this out, I called the letter shop's owner and told him what I thought was going on. Of course, he denied it. I did owe him about $30,000 from past letter shop jobs ... and I didn't pay him. Did he sue me? No. Why not? He knew I knew what he was doing. If he were honestly applying all the postage I bought for him to apply, he would have sued my ass for the 30-1arge. Ever since then, I'll have the letter shops do all the work, except the postage application. I do this not only for the stolen postage ... but also for the simple fact that I can drop all the pieces myself in the same day. It is important to drop all the letters the same day ... I'll tell you why in a later chapter ... but they all have to drop in the same day.
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Many letter shops are lazy and take their time dropping your letters at the Post Office in small quantities over a few days' time ... even when they tell you they are all sent.
They'll drop 12,000 one day ... 15,000 the next day ... and so on. It's easier for them to do it this way ... and they do not understand why you want to drop all in one day. But trust me, you have to drop in one single day. I think on top of the lazy factor, letter shops do not want to drop in one single day, because your response will be staggered allover the place and you will not be able to gauge the "flow" of orders a few days later. Another reason why I like to have everything delivered to me, is that I get to see all the pieces one last time, before I apply 37 cents to each one. You'd be amazed how many letters are not stuffed properly ... how many are missing important pieces- sometimes even the main sales letter! You want to be the "final filter" before they are actually sent off to your prospects. One time I dropped 200,000 letters and I had the letter shop drop off the letters to me. I was looking at the envelope and noticed all the pieces were inserted upside down and backwards. It was too late to reprint the entire thing ... nor would they eat the cost to redo it ... all they would do is credit me the few thousand dollars they charged to do the inserting. Had I not inspected the pieces, I would have never known of this error. If you're dead set against applying postage to thousands of letters what you can do is have the letter shop apply all the postage but you better make sure you are on the loading dock at the Post Office when they are delivering the letters. Inspect each and every tray. Make sure it's all your sales letters ... make sure they are inserted correctly ... make sure the drop is complete and has all the total count being dropped in the one singular day.
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Let me tell you about a horror 1 had with a letter shop in 1997. I was doing a 500,000 letter mailing. 1 was doing 250,000 one week. .. and 250,000 the next week. Mailing one went out, and initial response was great- just as the test told me. Then came week two and the next drop was getting no orders. What the hell was going on? Then, some of the people who were ordering were asking why we sent them two sales letters a few weeks apart. I let the first few calls go- thinking there were a few duplicate names on the mailing list we got from the broker. Then we started getting more and more calls. By this point, I knew something was horribly wrong. In one of the back rooms I had unoccupied in my office, I started playing a match game' of sales letters. What we were doing was getting all the letters that came back to us for not having a valid address-, which is normal. As we got new letters back, we started laying them on the floor. A few days later, we were getting the same bad addressed sales letter again. In the end, we had two bad addresses for almost each of the letters that came back. The first thing we did was look at the disk of names the list broker sent us. They were fine. No duplicates at all. What happened was the letter shop fucked up big time. The guy they had addressing the envelopes, who probably couldn't speak English ... did the first 250,000 envelopes week one ... and then on week two, instead of remembering where he left off (at 250,000) and starting at 250,001. .. he addresses the same 250,000 names again! Multiply 60 cents by 250,000 pieces. That's what we lost- just in our hard costs ... forget about the 2% in orders we never got ... which was about $1.20 for every letter. This mess-up cost us $150,000 right out of our pockets and $300,000 in lost sales! Do you want to know the funniest thing? The damn letter shop thought they-were going to get paid the $40,000 we owed them for the stuffing the 500,000 pieces at 8 cents each!
If you know me by now, I surely didn't pay them a cent. I ate the loss, and never used them again. What really sucked was the sales rep I used at this letter shop was a friend of mine. We went out to dinner. .. to the movies ... and to the bars a few times. It was a shame they didn't want to make good for their error. .. but they knew they couldn't... it would take literally millions of letters they would have to stuff for me for free to make the loss back to me. Unfortunately, it would be really hard for this not to happen again. What I now do is send the letter shop only the names they are to mail that particular drop. If I got a list of 500,000 names and I was going to mail 250,000 this week. .. and the rest next week. They'll get just the 250,000 we're going to mail now ... and the next 250,000 when I'm ready to mail again. This letter shop error would bury most businessmen ... I pray nothing like this ever happens to you. 1 guess a good rule, is to make sure you're using a professional letter shop ... and not the guy in his garage with an inserting machine.
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Chapter Twenty Three: Postage
Do we really need an entire chapter on postage? Yes we do. As a friend, 1 always advise you to use a straight First Class stamp. The same stamp you apply to your mortgage payment ... your credit card bill ... your Birthday card to your Mother. I do not like Pre-Sorted First Class ... I do not like metered postage ... I do not like Standard Rate postage ... I only use a real, genuine First Class stamp. This is what I've leamed. If I'm getting $1.20 in sales back from a mailer that cost me 60 cents to mail out with a First Class stamp ... I'd get back just $1. 00 in sales ifI Pre-Sort my postage and save a dime ... paying 50 cents. You get what you put into this. If you're going to double your money you're still going to double it when you Pre-Sort your postage but you're going to get less orders. I laugh when I hear novice direct mailers think they're going to save a ton of money by mailing their sales letter Standard Rate or even Pre-Sorted First Class. Sure, you're going to save money ... maybe even a lot of money if you are going to use Standard Rate postage ... but you're also going to get a lot less orders. It's just not worth it. Let me tell you a funny story about a Pre-Sorted mailer I once did. What Pre-Sorted postage is is when the letter shop puts the zip codes in order by carrier route for the Post Office. The letter shop will do a little of the Post Office's work and in return the Post Office will give you a few cents off the postage. First off all, letter shops will not do this for free ... they'll charge a few cents to Pre-Sort. You may save 7 cents or so ... but you're
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paying the letter shop 2 cents to do it ... and you're not going to get as many orders as you would if you were mailing First Class with a First Class stamp. Well, the letter shop Pre-Sorted my letter and then combined my mailing with a few other mailer's jobs ... effectively sorting the mail even further- saving a few more cents which they like to keep for themselves. There's entire businesses that do nothing more than compile many business's mail and Pre-Sort them and put them in order for the Post Office as one very large group of sales letters. They charge money for this and save businesses a few cents per letter they mail. I actually had a letter shop who had enough balls to offer me the first level of Pre-Sort postage pricing ... only to Pre-Sort it deeper with other mailers ... and where they were charging me 27 cents postage, they were actually paying something like 22 cents! Oh sure, you can have a nickel for every letter I want to mail. I don't think so. I told you before; I did save a few pennies by Pre-Sorting But when the orders came in, I got less orders.
my mail.
If you can put 60 cents into something and make $1.20 ... would you rather put 50 cents into it instead to recoup $1.00? I sure wouldn't. This is the same as getting good results from your sales letter and thinking you can save money by cramming the entire offer on a post card and mailing it instead of the costly sales letter. It's not going to happen. If you're doubling-over on 60 cents mailing the letter ... you may double over the 40 cents it'll cost to mail the post card- if you're lucky. Don't do it. If you got a sales letter to pull good response ... don't think of cheapening the cost to mail-it- either in postage costs ... or in the actual letter's size. What you should test is this. If a # 10 sales package is getting you $1.20 in orders for every 60 cents it costs to maiL. you should try turning the sales letter into a 9"x12" package ... adding a few extra sales pieces as your letter can now
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weigh more. See if you can get a $1.00 sales letter to get you back $2.00 in orders. You should always try to go up the ladder ... spending more and not going down the ladder.ithinking you could save money. Now don't get confused. I do not mean increase the sales letter's paper quality or color or graphics ... I mean keep the postage always at the best it can be- a straight First-Class stamp. I also mean, if you are getting a 200°/0 financial return on a standard # 10 package ... up it to a 9"xI2" package and see if you can retain the 200% return on your investment. Do not try to go down to a post card in an effort to save money. That's a prescription for disaster. I remember in a past chapter- the one about mail pieces ... I told you to keep your initial test package to a standard # 10 size envelope and I told you to keep it at or under one ounce. This is absolutely true. Once and only once this # 10, one ounce package pulls great numbers ... like doubling its cost to me ... then and only then should you experiment with testing upping the package to a 9"xI2" package and seeing if your profit percentage remains the same as it did for the # 10 package. But until this happens, keep the package in a # 10 envelope ... and keep it at or under one ounce. Period. Why should all of your mailers have a real, live First Class stamp on them? You need the respect of the Post Office for one. When' Postal workers see bulk, or Standard Rate mail, they know its junk mail and they treat it as that. They feel they do not need to rush it out as fast as First Class mail. You do not need this unnecessary headache. Of course, this is only my opinion. I do not know for a fact or have solid proof the Post Office respects real stamps more than metered mail. .. or printed permit number boxes. I have never, ever had a mailer's response go up or even stay the same when I thought I could save a few pennies using a Pre-Sort technique ... or using Standard Rate postage.
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J hate Standard
Rate postage for several reasons. One, is it takes longer to arrive in your prospect's mailbox. And two, Standard Rate postage does not get forwarded to your prospect if they move. Sure, the prospect can put in a change of address with the Post Office, but Standard Rate postage goes in the garbage- even if the Post Office has a new address for the prospect. Trust me, there's a trade-off for a savings when it comes to postage, and you don't want any of them.
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Chapter Twenty Four: The Post Office
One of your main business partners in direct response is the Post Office. Unfortunately, they are not the most pleasant of people to deal with. This chapter is going to teach you to get the most out of the Post Office and how to avoid potential problems. First off all, the Postal worker on the loading docks is not your friend. He usually hates his job ... hates his life ... and surely hates you when he see all the "crap" you're bringing him to sort and mail. . When I'm doing a drop, if it's a test or if it's a roll-out, I always drop the mailers at the main hub. If you drop the mailers at a smaller sub-station, you may be adding an entire day 'till your prospect gets your offer. When you drop it off at the main hub, make sure a Postal worker sees what you're dropping off, so it doesn't sit out on the dock. I tell you many times in this book, your biggest priority is getting you're mailer's envelope respected and delivered by the Post Office. You do not earn any respect with teaser copy printed all over the front of the envelope. You do not get any respect with mailing labels instead of typed or hand-written addresses. Your envelope must look either official or personal. It cannot look like junk mail. If it does, it loses any respect as a First Class document ... and thus loses First Class treatment. Another thing you absolutely have to do is "seed" your drops. You've got to mail a few letters to your friends in different states ... the same state ... and mail even yourselfl This will prove the Post Office is actually mailing the stuff. If you do a drop and seed the mailing with five "seed" names and you do not get any of them .., there's a big problem.
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I did a 40,000 piece test a few months ago where J seeded the drop with four dummy names ... three friends ... and my own home address. Wouldn't you know ... the three seeds got their letters and I never received my letter in the mail! My own seed! You absolutely have to keep a few seeds in the mailings. I'd say at least one seed letter for every 10,000 you mail..; and if you're testing a few thousand ... like 5,000- and it is a test, stick five or so seeds in there. Tests are important. The last thing you want to have is a winning sales letter- but you'11 never discover it because your letters were never mailed. My Fiance's Father is a retired Professor who now works for the Post Office. When I first met him, I was jokingly asking him if he and his co-workers throw direct mail in the garbage. He looked at me like I was crazy and goes into some speech saying every piece of mail has to go out by the end of the day and how every piece gets delivered. If this were true ... where was my seed I mailed to myself? A few years after I joked about this with him, guess what his job duty now is at the Post Office? To make sure nobody throws the damn mail in the garbage! Seriously it happens! That is why you need to have a smart envelope a real First Class stamp ... addressed correctly ... and delivered at the main station and not a local sub-station that's closer to your home. Everything else is out of your hands ... so you have to then seed the mailing. Another thing I cannot figure out to this day ... after ten years in this business ... is how I get better response mailing from certain states and worse from others. What I mean is this. I had a business in Nevada. I was mailing a sales letter and I was getting 1.6%. This was very good. It was a promotion that was getting me six-times my mailing cost. I then
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moved the company to Arizona, and when I mailed the same letter, just in Arizona this time ... I got just 1.2% response. I lost .4% just mailing it from a different state. And it wasn't just one time ... it was every time I mailed this letter. I had to hire a letter shop in Nevada and have friends see the drops at the Post Office for me. Response went back to 1.6% in no time.
I mailed out of California with great results ... Upstate New York with great results ... but mailing from Arizona always pulled less results. I can't figure it out. Also, the Post Office can change their mind at any time. Once I was mailing my IRS-Style envelope successfully 2 million times. I was sending out 400,000 pieces every few weeks and they never gave me a problem ... then all of a sudden, I was dropping off 250,000 pieces and the jerk on the loading dock gave me a problem. They were actually refusing to deliver the 250,000 sales letters because of the envelope! I had 60 cents tied into every one of these 250,000 pieces. That's $150,000 just in paper, printing, mailing list, and postage! And that was just the cost for me to mail the stuff. If we were talking about how much money it was to bring my company, we'd be talking over $300,000. The 250;000 letters had to sit on the loading dock 'urrtil we came to some form of a resolution. I finally got them to understand this was $150,000 worth of mailers they were messing around with and I did in fact mail it over 2 million times before- without problems. Why now? Anyway, they made me agree in writing that I was never going to use that particular envelope design ever again and they agreed to deliver the 250,000 pieces. I simply signed their letter and used a different Post Office and mailed the letters with the IRS-style envelope for many, many years.
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I probably got some guy on the dock who had a fight with his 300pound, bald wife that morning and he wanted to give a hassle to everyone and anyone who gave him a reason to. Or maybe it was because my envelope actually tricked them into doing their jobs and they didn't want to be tricked into doing their jobs. If I clearly made my direct mail envelopes look like junk mail, they could identify it easier as junk mail so they wouldn't have to deliver it ... or deliver it with such priority! If you have an envelope in question ... make sure to see the Post Master and get him to approve it. You never know what may happen.
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Chapter Twenty Five: How To Test Testing is the Holy Grail of the direct response
business.
Testing is needed to find the most powerful version of your sales message or media selection. You can test pricesI once did a three-way test of three different prices for a software program I was sellin g..I used the same mailing list ... I used the same graphics and wording. I mailed the three different sales letters at the same time at the same Post Office. The only different between these three different priced offers was the part in the letter where it revealed the price to pay. Everything else was the same. I tested these prices- $149.95 ... $169.95 and $179.95. The lowest price pulled 30 orders. The middle price pulled 30 orders as well. The high price pulled just 15 orders. Had I not tested the different prices ... and went with the $179.95 price ... 1 would have left a lot of money on the table I could have harvested had I just not been so greedy.
Now, the higher price may pull more orders sometimes. This is a win-win foryou! More orders and at a higher price. How could you go wrong there? You can't. Sometimes people measure a product's quality and performance by its price. When this is the case, maybe a higher price will out pull a cheaper price. Other times, when you test price, you may pull 30 orders at $10 and 10 orders at $30. Sometimes, the lower you can sell something for, the more orders you get. Sometimes, it's the middle price like I experienced with the software program I price tested.
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Seriously, if you got an offer to work for you ... wouldn't it be great if you can double your orders by simply taking $10 less ... or $10 more? You bet it would. And that's why after you get a mailer to at least break even in sales response ... you have to do a two or three way price test. Simply change the price in the three different versions of the letter ... code them somehow ... mail them to the same list all at the same time ... and see what you get. It's crazy and almost magical ... but if you get more orders at a higher price ... you'11 be grateful you tested. I've heard stories about people selling financial newsletters. They tested $69.95 versus $79.95 and the higher price doubled the response. You can test media selectionsThis is especially true in direct mail. An offer on a list can be a smash winner and on another list be a total bomb ... even if the description of the mailing list on the data card is practically identical! Magazines will vary only a little in pound-for-pound response as long as they are all quality publications that meet or exceed what I told you to look for in the chapter on magazine ads. Mailing lists are a totally different story. I once tested an herbal supplement for male potency. It did great on one company's customer me. It was a list of adult video buyers. I figured this product I was selling would do great on all adult video-buyer lists. I was wrong. Where one video mailing list would yield a 2% response ... others would get a half a percent to one percent ... and one list even got three percent. They were all basically the same in description ... but their quality and responsiveness was worlds apart. Why is this? Many list owners fabricate the actual numbers of customers on his list to sell more names and the names you're mailing are fake. Maybe the quality of the names or the way they
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are handled and compiled are different. Maybe the buyer of each of the companies is different. Who knows? The answer to 9 out of 10 questions in the direct mail business is "TEST". You can test offersA different offer can make huge differences in response. I was once mailing a sales letter for a consumer electronics membership club. I was selling the membership for $40 or so and was breaking even. I then upped the cost of the membership to $60 and included a really killer free bonus. I immediately quadrupled response ... yielding a fat profit- even at the higher price I had to charge to cover the free bonus. You can test headlinesAs we spoke all about in the chapter on headlines ... a headline is the ticket on the meat. A headline is the single most important item used to flag down your prospect. If the headline is wrong ... or if it doesn't attract enough prospects or it attracts the wrong prospects for what the copy is saying you will fail. But, on the other hand, if you have a killer headline, one modeled after the 125 or so I've listed for you in the headlines chapter. .. you can triple ... quadruple ... or increase your orders even more. You'd simply mail one group of letters with the one headline and one group of equal quantity with the other. What you experience may amaze you. In 1995, I ran a magazine ad and it broke even. I swapped out the headline and it tripled its results. The only difference was the headline. I never saw such dramatic results from one simple change. You can test envelopesOne envelope can be an official-looking one and the other can be a hand-addressed personal-looking envelope. Mail equal quantities and see which one works best. Maybe you can even experiment with some teaser copy once you get a little better at writing advertising copy.
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You can test guaranteesSometimes offering a DOUBLEYOURMONEYBACK guarantee that is conditional will increase response. Testing variables is what makes us professionals come up with an absolute killer sales letter or advertisement- sometimes 300% or 400% more responsive than the one we first came up with. There are several main rules you have to abide by when testingTest only one thing at a time ... Make sure test quantities are equal ... Make sure test mailings are mailed all at the same time ... Test only profound things like prices and headlines and lists. Do not waste your time testing blue paper vs. white paper. And here's how to obtain valid results from testing: 1. You can use a different phone number and have the prospects for each different variation call a unique phone number. 2. You can use different extension numbers on your phone. Did you ever see ads that say, "Call 1-800-000-000 and ask for extension 45"? The extension number is the way they are testing a variable. 3. You can code coupons customers have to mail in. If I'm doing a price test ... I sometimes leave the main sales letter alone and simply insert coupons for different amounts of money off. The sales letter will say to include this coupon to receive $X off their purchase. For phone orders, you can put a bogus code number on your coupon and ask the caller for the coupon code. If it's CJ2081. .. than can mean it's a coupon for the $20 off promotion. 4. You can have different printed color 6 3/4 response envelopes. I usually print the return address in black ink for my response envelopes ... but you can print one red ... and one blue and one black for a three-way test.
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5. You can have the caller ask for a certain Promotion Number. You can say something in the letter like, "Just call 1-800-000-000 and tell the operator you're calling for Promotion #23 and he'l1...". Even if the customer does not mention the promotion number. .. you can ask him for it. Just make it easy for him to find ... like where the letter was signed by the author of it. 6. If a customer cannot give you anything to tell you what offer or list he is responding from ... keep your database of mailing names on your computer close by. Ask the caller how his or her name appears on his envelope and look him up in each file. If you're testing two different lists ... you'll find him 9 times out of 10 by simply plugging his name in and hitting the "find" key. The great thing about testing variables in your sales efforts... is once you find the winning headline ... you can then find the winning price ... then the winning offer... etc. You can keep perfecting your offering and the more you test, the more responsive it is going to be. If you better the response with a new headline by 20%... then another 20% with a better offer... then another 20% with a better guarantee ... and on and on. The difference between a package that was breaking even may now be doing triple its advertising cost! I've gotten to the point where the only things I can test with radical differences in results are prices and mailing lists. I don't know what it is. I can do two totally different sales letters ... or two totally different headlines ... or two totally different offers ... I always seem to pull the same amount of orders +/ - a few orders. 1 guess this means I have gotten so good at crafting copy and sales letters, I suck out all the people who would buy my product. The only way I can entice more people to buy is by using a better mailing list or a different price. In the next' chapter, we're going to talk about differences in your offers that either whisper and ones that scream. You're only going to want to really test the ones that scream.
Chapter Twenty Six: Whispers and Screams
There are many factors, which will affect the response of your sales letters or advertisements. Some whisper. .. and some scream. 1:-. this chapter, you '11 learn what these response factors are ... and if they're worth testing or not. Screams I would classify a scream as something that will make a huge difference in the response of your sales letters or advertisements. These screams-which are listed in no particular order of importance ... are the first things you should test to increase the pulling power of your sales letter or advertisements. Copy: The copy in your sales letter will make a huge difference in the pulling power of your promotions. My friend Gary Halbert makes all his seminar attendees perform this exercise before they get going. He makes his attendees write two different letters to their Mothers. One starts off saying how great she is, and how she has been so good to them ... and the second letter says how she is a wrinkled old bitch, and how she makes them miserable ... and that she should drop dead! Now, the attendee gets nervous when Gary makes them actually address and apply postage to these two letters. He makes them actually send them out ... but to their own homes (not their Mother's)... and they are to serve as reminders as to how powerful copy can be and how a letter that costs the same to mail and the same to produce, can have such a radically different effect on its reader. The sales copy in your ads and sales letters can have wildly different effects on its readers. One approach can make you millions and one approach can make you go out of business. It is
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the copywriter's job to find the right approach and get the selling job done. Mailing Lists: If I had to say what the strongest, most powerful part of your direct mail success is, I would say it was the mailing list or lists you are going to mail to. I've had offers that made me over $8 Million in a month's time flop on many, many mailing lists. Seriously, I could be rolling-in 600% returns from certain direct mail lists ... then I'd go to test another list- even a list that appears to be identicalabsolutely flop. Sometimes not even getting more than three orders on a 5,000 piece test! I look back at many of my successes, and if I didn't test a certain list, I would have never found out I had a winner. For example, I did a three-way test ... three lists ... three thousand pieces each. Two lost money and one profited. If I didn't get lucky and test that particular third list... I may have deemed the product a failure and dropped it. This very same product later went on to make me $5 Million in sales a year. I'll say it now... I'll say it later ... I'll say it one hundred times; the mailing list is the most powerful variable to your success in this business. If I had a choice to have a great product with great copy or a decent list ... or a marginal product, with so-so copy on a hot list... I'd choose the latter every time! Prices: Aside from mailing lists, once an offer shows some form of life... meaning it brings in at least close to break even... the next most important thing to do is test pricing. I remember a few years back, I was waiting for a new software program to market and when it first came out... my price was a little high, so I had to offer the product at $199.95. My results we not too great- I simply broke even. I then put this offer on the shelf and forgot about it for six months or so. A few months later, I re-tested the offer with three different
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prices. I was a little too high on the initial offer price ... so I came down a bit. I ended up turning this promotion into a $2,000,000 a year paycheck. 1 would have never discovered this had I not priced tested. This $2 Million bought me a new Bentley ... a second home in the Desert ... and a shiny, new $100,000 Rolex. Good thing I price tested. Headlines: Headlines are pretty powerful as well. I'd say they are the third most important factor to your direct marketing success. I'm sure many direct marketers would disagree with me and say the headline is more important than prices and mailing lists ... but I haven't had this proven to me. That's what this book is all aboutnot what I learned in other marketing books ... it's about what I learned doing this business myself for over 10 years. I'd say that headline testing is more important in magazine advertisements where a headline needs to flag down prospects from the millions of people flipping past it. It's not so much true with direct mail sales letters. I have honestly never had one headline out pull another headline in a direct response sales letter. If some pro wants to argue this with me, it's probably because he cannot create powerful headlines. If you're running magazine ads, the headline test is a must ... but not so much so for a direct mail sales letter. Now this does not mean use a weak headline in your sales letters. Always shoot for the best possible. Magazines and Magazines CPM: You cannot always assume a magazine publisher is totally honest. They may lie about the number of readers or subscribers ... or newsstand sales etc. I know I've placed ads in 250,000 circulation magazines and got phenomenal results ... then I'd place an ad in a similar magazine with similar readership ... and even pay the same price ... only to get 1/ 3rd the results. Why? Many reasons. The magazine may have a different kind of reader- one may be a casual reader and one may be a hard core reader. The magazine's subscribers can be compiled differently and thus their quality is worlds apart. Most of the time, the publishers are lying about their
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readership numbers. This is why I like to have ABC audit information before placing ads and I like to deal only with magazines I've heard of for at least a year's time. Offers: What you're offering can also make a huge difference with response. Many direct mail pros would say, if you want to increase your response ... increase your offer! It's true. I always like to offer as much as I can without upping the shipping fees too much. Remember, I like the shipping and handling fees I charge my customer to cover the entire cost of the package and the postage. How much can you get the shipping up to before the customer starts to balk? I had 4 bottles of pills and it was $15. Some people complained, but it isriot really as steep as Carlton Sheet's Real Estate course. They have a $9.95 30-day trial offer plus shipping and handling. They conceal the shipping and handling fee until the prospect calls and orders. Do you know how much this guy is charging to deliver 13 CDs... 4 or 5 VHS cassettes and a few booklets and plastic CD case? He gets $24.95! And then he goes on to say it'll take 2 to 4 weeks to get the course. And of course those callers are hot to get their hands on this course as soon as possible, so when they hear 4 weeks ... they want it quicker. The company then pitches their rush delivery service, where you can get the course in about a week's time ... for an additional $15! So, if you want to get this course within a week... you'll have to pay $40 on top of the $9.95 trial price. Now if you have learned anything from this book, you know Carlton is covering his cost to manufacture the CDs, the videos, the shipping, etc. in his shipping and handling fee of $24.95 to $40. You can increase your offer's pulling power by adding bonuses to it. To cover the added expense, add a few bucks to the shipping and handling fee you charge.
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Premiums: This goes back to the offer. This is not rocket science. The better the offer ... the better the gifts ... the more compelling the reason to order ... the better your results will be. I had promotions that broke even when I tested them, only to pull thousands in profits once I added a killer premium. I did this with my car wax company- I included a free orbital polisher with a quart size purchase. I did this with a car stereo membership club- the customer free car alarm when he joined the club.
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Postage: Now, your offer will riot profit or fail based on the type of postage you use ... whether it be Pre-Sorted ... or straight First-Class ... or even Standard Rate. But your results will be greatly different. I find the better the quality of postage ... the better the quality of the delivery. The better the delivery, the better the results. In my experience, if you think you're going to get a deal with the Post Office ... you're going to pay for it on another end. Product: The product is king. If you have a great product mailed to the right people ... even if it has bad copy ... you will pull in orders. This is why the opportunity for knockoff-artists is so lucrative. They do not have to know how to create the best ads ... hell; they can copy and borrow a lot from yours. It's the product that makes them survive. If they didn't have a hot product to steal from someone .. they'd be out of business. I genuinely believe ... no matter how well you know how to create advertising ... if you have a bad product... your results will be bad. I snicker when I hear a lot of direct mail pros saying that the product really doesn't even matter. They like to sell some story that their copywriting will make anything sell. I don't believe this to be true. 1 do believe you need a product that has some use to its users ... and the amount of users has to be large.
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Back End: This is huge. If I didn't one of my sales letters month. Can it be true nothing to add can be ABSOLUTELYl
add my auto ship paragraph to the end of ... it would have cost me over $5 Million a that a paragraph that costs absolutely worth $5 Million a month? The answer is
Many, many direct mail professionals are thrilled to break even on their sales letter and ads because they know they are going to sell these customers a shitload of goods in the months and years to come. They know, from past experience that these customers may buy $100 or $500 or $1,000 worth of goods and services from them. Businesses that simply break even cannot survive in this world without having a back end business. And having a back end should just not be used for businesses that break even. All businesses, even if they are making 5 times their advertising cost back on the initial purchase should still have a strong back end business. Guarantees: Your prospects want to be assured they are not going to be at any financial risk buying your product or service. You have to take away any risk of loss they may have in their minds. Some guarantees will add or take from your response. Sometimes you may find that a conditional, double-the-money-back guarantee will . out pull a traditional guarantee. Test this stuff out when the time is right. Who's Answering The Phones?: This is something a lot of business-owners don't even think about. Yeah, sure, the prospect may call the toll-free number and look to order. .. but if you've got some illiterate answer the calls ... you may lose some orders. This happened to me on two different occasions. 111tell you about both off them. First, I was selling a dietary supplement. These types of products are naturally more complex than people ordering a book or a video. After all, the people buying these pills actually
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have to ingest them and there may be side effects or allergic reactions ... so they are going to want to have some of their questions and concerns answered before they buy. I hired a huge call center in Omaha, Nebraska called West. These guys are huge and employ tens of thousands of people and they actually answer about 90% of the infomercial 800#s you see on TV all night. But their size killed the sales for us. Sure, this company has created elaborate scripts the order takers can read from, but when a customer is ordering a complex product, he does not want important answers to be read off a screen! If he was ordering a pasta maker. .. maybe he'd be fine ... but for an ingestible product... or even any complicated product for that matter, he may need an experienced order taker to assist him. When my calls were at West, I'd look at the sheer volume of calls my advertisements would bring in ... but the ratio of sales they actually were able to capture from all these calls was shit. I'm serious. I was running TV spots and West was answering the calls for me. I was getting 250 to 500 calls per 60-second spot. How many orders did they get from these callers? Maybe three or four! I pulled my account as soon as possible and brought the calls in house. Response went up immediately. I think about all the TV infomercial companies that can make 200% ... 300% ... or more in added sales by just taking their calls in house. Order takers that do not know you ... do not care about your product ... and do not care about you, are not going to project a positive attitude to your callers. It's that simple. When you are testing a sales letter or an advertisement. .. make sure you answer the phones yourself... or at least have someone you know answer the phones you can trust... but always make sure you are right there watching over everything.
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Whispers I would classify a whisper as something not really worth too much of your time when it comes to testing variables. I'd advise you to test some whispers only after you got a successful ad or sales letter and you have tested all the factors that scream. Paper Color: Don't waste time thinking your sales letter can pull more orders if you use a fancy, colorful paper you've had your eye on. Fancy paper ... glossy paper. .. color printing and the like will have absolutely no effect on your sales letter's response. Your prospects do not care if an offer was or was not on a good quality paper. Do you ever remember yourself saying, "I was going to order this product, but since they printed their sales letter on regular paper. .. I'm not going to go for it." or "1was not really interested in their product ... but since they printed it on such a nice paper stock. .. and since it was such a nice color ... I'm compelled to buy right now!" This does not happen- Period. Toll-Free vs. Toll Lines: A toll-free order line for your customers to order from is nice ... and it may increase your response a little ... but it's not something that will turn a loser into a winner. I think you should test a toll-free line at first, then and only then, if the response is good and you want to continue ... maybe you can test using a toll line and seeing if response stays the same. With the advent of cellular phones ... there is no such thing as long distance anymore for a lot of people. If you can prove through testing that customers will still order in the same quantity, even if you have a toll line ... you just saved yourself a huge phone bill every month. Some direct marketers actually think the use of an 800# makes you look like some large corporation and that is not a good thing. Whatever. I'd first go with the toll-free and then if your letter is even worth anything to you, then test a toll line to see if you can save a few bucks. Additional Order Forms: I've heard this from several direct mail pros but have yet pan out for me. These direct mail pros seem to think that sales letter had 2 or 3 or 4 order coupons instead of just pull more orders. I guess they figure the customer would
to see it if your one, you11 hand out
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order forms to others and encourage them to order as well. I don't know. I know many magazines do not include just one subscription card in their magazines- they usually stuff five or six into each issue. Does this work in direct mail? Some say it does. I have yet to have it pan out for me and I've tested it twice. Againonce you get a successful sales letter and if it is a promotion that takes mail-in sales, and if you can afford the extra weight in your piece and still remain under or at one ounce ... give it a shot and see if it helps you. Z-Folding vs. Letter-folding: This is when your letter shop folds your sales letters. I like to have them fold them in a z-pattern so it is easy to come open to full size. When you fold in letter-fold style, the one fold is tucked and has to be un-rolled to unfold completely. The difference is not going to make a whole world of difference between each other. 1sure wouldn't test folds... but since you have your choice ... z-fold the sales letter. It costs no more. Fancy Art vs. Plain Art: Fancy artwork will actually take away from your offer and actually get you fewer orders! Graphic artists are huge on showing off their talents. Don't let them do this. Plain old artwork will always out pull fancy, slick artwork. Now, there is a difference between looking appealing and being fancy. I always advise your artwork to look appealing to the eye. Short paragraphs. Short sentences. Paragraphs broken-up to make it look easier to read. In closing: This is my opinion. Make the best sales letter or ad you can make right off the bat. If you get promising results ... or successful results ... then test a few screamers. Every question can be answered quickly, and inexpensively by a simple split-run test. If you're wondering what the best price to sell your product at is ... test a few prices. If you're wondering what the best mailing list is for your sales letters ... test a few lists. If you're wondering if you can get more orders by using a premium ... you have to test it.
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Testing is what makes direct response the best business in the World. Once you find the best price for your product ... you can then take this increased response and test offers. Once you then have an increase in orders from the better price ... and then again a boost from finding the best offer. You can just keep adding to the profitability week by week. Even when I'm rolling-out a successful sales letter or magazine ad, I'll keep running the "control" package while I am testing in the back room. As soon as 1 get a better answer as to how to do something, 111update the "control" package. The "control" package is the best package you have. As you test variables, and find better ways to do things that add to more money for you, update the "control" package with the new price ... or the new offer ... or the new guarantee.
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Chapter Twenty Seven: Costs and Steps
One of the first questions I'm always asked by people first getting started in this business is, What's it gonna cost to start up?"- I've got the answers for you right here. The cost to Incorporate$400-$500
OPTIONAL FOR TESTING
It's wise to incorporate in Nevada or Delaware for tax reasons. I am not a financial advisor, so I think you should contact one of the many corporation companies to get your business official. Do not use an Attomeyl Google search "incorporating in Nevada or Delaware" and find who can do it for the lowest price. Getting an EIN Number and Resale LicenseUnder $100 (only if you incorporate now) Once you get your corporation formed, you 11 have the paperwork needed to get an EIN# and resale license (if you need one). The corporation company will have all the info you need to obtain these two items. You need the EIN number to open a bank account. Opening a Bank Account- OPTIONAL FOR TESTING Usually a $100 opening deposit You're going to need a business banking account. Once you get your EIN Number you can go and open one. The cost for the phone line and 800# Varies Get the phone company to hook up a phone line and add an 800# to it. You may just want to add an 800# to your home phone and take the order calls that way. Just make sure, if you have any "privacy block" on your phone ... remove it.
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Printing Cost to print test quantities $700 for 2,000 sales letters You're going to need to print your sales letters. The letters should cost about $700 for 2,000. The Letter shop fees to stuff the test mailers $140 Or so per 2,000 (you can do this yourself and save the money) I like to stuff my own sales letters for the test quantity. You may need the letter shop to address your envelopes if you cannot do it yourself from your home computer. Postage to mail your letters $370 per 1,000 letters This is the current price the Post Officecharges for First Class postage. Start-Up Supply of Product This mayor may not be needed You may want to "dry test" your initial sales letters. This means you take the orders as if you are going to ship the product, but if you do not get a good response or enough orders to justify actually producing the product, you simply send the customer's check back. .. or send them a letter saying you are not going to charge their credit card as the product is no longer available or not available at this time. If you get three orders from your sales letter, I'm sure you'd rather send the three people back their money than create a test batch of product. If you have an info product, and you can produce them in quantities of fewer than 10, go for it. But if your product is a dietary supplement where you have to make 2,000 bottles ... you may want to "dry test". Graphic Design Under $200 If you are handy with Quark Xpress ... you may be able to layout your own sales letters or ad. If not, go see a graphic artist- but make sure you keep them in your control. Nothing fancy. Give him a few examples of what other winning sales letters and ads look like.
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List Rental $550-$650 per list in test quantities Mailing lists have to be rented in minimum quantities of 5,000 names- even if you are going to mail just 1,000 to 2,000 letters. Website Creation- OPTIONAL FOR TESTING $500 to $1,000 I usually add a website to my sales letters once the letter proves to be responsive. The entire point of web sites is to take some of the load off the telephones. Testing does not get much phone call traffic. Test without a website. Roll-out with a website added. Magazine Advertisement- OPTIONAL $2,000-$75,000+ I advise most people to start in this business with either a 2-step ad and a direct mail follow-up or a direct mail test to a few lists. Magazine ads to sell from can get expensive- so I wouldn't advise it. .. unless you're financially able to risk it. Merchant Account- OPTIONAL FOR TESTING $200-$700 Depending on your offer, you mayor may not want to actually fulfill on your initial test orders. If you are simply "buying information", you're probably not going to need a merchant account. But if you do want to get the merchant account hooked up, I've included a future chapter on merchant accounts. Most people can get this thing started for $2,000 to mail 2,000 letters to $3,500 to mail 4,000 letters. You can get away with just printing the sales letter, stuffing it yourself and mailing it yourself. You can answer your own calls. A mailing list or two needs to be rented. The sales letter can be "dry tested". Step-By-Step From An Idea To A Test Mailing STEP ONE- EVALUATE PRODUCT IDEA: Is the product a valid product? Would people really want to buy it? Does this product really serve a need or fill a desire? Are there other people marketing it? How many? If so, how long has the
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product been out on the market? Does this product lead itself to back end sales and maybe even automatic deliveries? STEP TWO- EVALUATE COST TO product be produced and shipped you can charge your customer? If and make? Is it small and easy to in small quantities?
PRODUCT AND SHIP: Can the in the shipping and handling fee not, how much will I cost to ship warehouse? Can it be produced
STEP THREE- EVALUATE LISTS AND MAGAZINES: Are there many magazines and mailing lists out there you can test? STEP FOUR- PUT TOGETHER OVERALL "OFFER": Put together on paper the price, the guarantee, the premium, the back end sales offers, etc. . (if you are hiring a professional copywriter, skip STEP FIVE) STEP FIVE- CRAFT SALES MATERIAL: Get out your pen and pad ... or go to your computer and give it your best. Then let it simmer and cool-off for a few days. Go back to the letter and edit and make changes. STEP SIX- MAKE A SMALL TEST SUPPLY: If you plan on fulfilling on your test quantity orders, you have to make a small test supply of your product. STEP SEVEN- BUILD A WEBSITE: If you want, you can create a website for your product and insert the web address in your sales letter, but I really do not advise the additional cost to create the web site. The only reason why I use web sites is to take some of the stress off my toll-free order lines. When testing, you're lucky to get three or four orders a day. STEP EIG HT- LAY OUT SALES LETTER: Bring a copy of a winning sales letter layout to your graphic designer. Do not allow him to get all fancy on you and do not be afraid to tell him what you want. Sometimes these people think they are the "designer" so they can do what they want. They sure can- but with their own money and with their own projects.
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STEP NINE- PRINT SALES LETTER: Shop around for the lowest price you can get for printing your sales letters. There are many variables from printer to printer and their prices reflect this. We're trying to get the lowest price. STEP TEN- OBTAIN MAILING LIST: Order the mailing list last. The last thing you need is a list getting stale sitting on your computer's hard drive waiting for the damn printer to get you the test sales letters. STEP TWELVE-MAIL 2,500-5,000 LETTERS: If you're going to do the stuffing, sealing, addressing and mailing, great. If you want to hire someone ... that's also fine. Just make sure they are inserting the pieces properly. Make sure the envelopes are sealed properly. Make sure the sales .letters are addressed properly. And remember, even if it is a 2,000 quantity test- always apply your own postage and drop off at the Post office yourself. Or at worst case, have the letter shop affix the postage, but have them deliver the letters to you so you can drop them off yourself at the Post Office. STEP THIRTEEN- MEASURE RESPONSE: This is the way I evaluate results. I give my sales letters 30 days from the first day they brought in an order. That 30th day is my cut-off day. The percentage I get on this 30th day of response is the results you're going to get. Here's a little tip that is worth the entire cost of this book. Drop your sales letters. Wait for a few days to get the first order. If it takes you three days to get your first order, make a note of this. Then count 7 days from the first order. By this 7th day, if you broke even by this date ... it's safe to assume you're going to do double over by the 30th day. This is a winning sales letter! And if you use this technique, you can get a good idea if you're holding a winner just 7 days into this ... instead of waiting the entire month. When you are mailing thousands of sales letters every week, you do not have the ability to wait the entire month to see if the last week's mailers are doing well and keeping their response percentage. You need to use this 7-day trick. Drop 100,000 sales letters, by day 7 as long as you broke even, drop the next 100,000 ... then wait another 7 days ... you should have double the
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amount you had on the 7th day ... if so, drop the third 100,000 and so on. STEP FOURTEEN- EVALUATE RESULTS: If you broke even and want to better the results ... you need to test the things that scream. If the thing is a smash hit... you may want to start rollingout right now and test variables on the side. If results are horrible, you may want to see if there is another reason why the letter failed. Was the phone hooked up? Were the letters delivered? A few chapters ahead, I did an entire thing about bettering response.
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Chapter Twenty Eight Bumping Up The Unit Sale
When a customer calls you and buys your product, he is in the "buy" mode ... and that's a perfect time to see if he wants to buy something else from you. Let me tell you a funny little story. A few years back, I was doing a large-scale promotion that was beginning to lose its pulling power at the cash register. I was getting less and less response. This happens at the end of a product's life cycle. I had tons of employees and didn't want to lay anyone off, so I had to figure ways to get more money out of the advertisements and sales letters I spent money on. My average unit of sale was originally $69.95. This is the straight cost of the product J was selling, and of course, all $69.95 was eTO (contribution to overhead). By writing a few up sell scripts ... I was able to boost the $69.95 average sale price all the way up to $100 without spending a cent on more advertising. Here's how I did it: The customers were calling to join an annual club for $69.95 or a two-year club for $129.95. We asked the caller his name, address, phone number, credit card info, and then we'd ask him if he wanted to join for two years or one? If he said "two" that was fine ... but if he said "one" ... we'd then offer him the two year at a discounted price of $119.95. Many would take us up on this- just to save $10. An additional year cost us nothing to give the customer. Regardless of what they said, we then went on to the next up sell. We then asked them if they wanted to use their membership status today and purchase a $500 piece of software we were selling for just $50. We paid just $5 for this program. A large amount said "yes".
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Regardless of what they said, we then went on to the third offer, a CD-ROM that had an entire set of encyclopedias on them. This was back in 1996, so this was an amazing thing to imagine ... and encyclopedias cost several hundreds if not thousands of dollars. We were selling it for $40. It cost us $2. A large percentage took us up on this deal. We then went on to offer the customer membership into a different annual club where they were able to buy a different type of product at severe discounts. It sold for $39.95 ... cost us a few quarters for a catalog, and lots of people joined this club as well. This was four up sells. Did some customers get annoyed? Yes. Did a lot buy? Oh yes ... More than enough in added sales to put up with the occasional guy we annoyed. A few things to remember: Test out your bumps and up sells one at a time on groups of 20 to 30 calls all with the same order taker and see what offers are the most powerful. You will then put the scripts in the pattern from the best selling to the least selling. You want to use the same order taker for this test. You're going to need to commission the sales people- or else you're not going to get a high percentage of "sells" ... unless your employees really like you. I've seen things sell at a 20% rate go to 80% with a commission added. Another thing is to make sure you get the customer's name, address, phone number and credit card information before you start selling additional stuff. For one, you have to sell what they were calling for first... and second, if you hammer the customer without having his information first, he may be more prone to hang-up. If you have a lot of his info ... like ALL of it..; he's not going to hang up in the middle of your sales pitch.
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And after you sold him a few additional things, you can then say, "OK, you will receive your order in about 10-14 working days. Do you want to upgrade to express shipping for $5 extra to receive everything in 5 days or less?" You can make the rush delivery charge anything you want. Regardless of what the delivery costs from the shipping company ... you still have to pull his name out of the regular line up of orders and give it special treatment. This means you have every right to charge whatever you wish to do this. Carlton Sheets charges an additional $15 for rush shipping and it still takes a week to get to you! He's making $120 Million and more every year- these techniques work. Anyway, I was able to save my company for a period of time. I was able to keep employees happy with the commissions. The customer got a good deal on other products and services. And it's amazing how much the sales percentage will vary depending on the person answering the phone. Our night ordertaking service couldn't up sell for their lives. Maybe 10%. Ordinary order-takers the orders they took.
could sell at a percentage
of 30% to 40% of
My fiance and Mother (who both worked for me) could up sell 90% and 96% of their orders respectively. They liked me the most, so they did the best. Also, if you are not going to give the order-takers a little prize for selling people ... you're going to feel it in lost sales. Give them something. I gave my order takers $2.50 for each up sell they could sell. If they got a customer to take a 2-year at the reduced price ... they'd get $2.50. If they got the customer to buy the CD-ROM. for $50 ... they got $2.50. If they got the customer to buy the encyclopedia CD for $40 ... they got $2.50. If they got the customer to enroll in the second discount buying club for $39.95 ... the order taker got another $2.50. In the end, if they could sell everything ... they got $10 in commissions. If they were only able to sell two
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things ... they got $5. This was in addition to their hourly pay of $10 or $11... and they could sell $20 worth of up sells (8 up sells) in an hour easily. Order-takers off the street were making $1200 and more a week in pay. I even had the phones ring in a row. Line one ... and if line one was busy ... line two ... and so on. I put the # 1 up seller in position one ... the second in position number two. This way, 1 was able to extract the maximum out of all our callers by using the best performing reps first. If you couldn't up sell ... you got the last phone on the list. And they didn't care ... they took a lot less calls. They got paid to sit there and do nothing!
I'd limit the up sells to three or four at a time. More will annoy the callers. But trust me ... none will tell you to forget their entire order. That's a fear most marketers have. Just recently, I did a 4-pack up sell to customers. Callers would call in for a bottle of pills at $60. I knew I'd make $180 off them in the months to come with the automatic shipments ... but we were in a little cash crunch, so I offered 4 full month bottles'for $139.95 plus $15 shipping and handling. We were able to up sell 40% to 50% and get some much-needed cash in the door. When up selling, it has to be done by a well-crafted script.
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Chapter Twenty Nine: Response Rates
I giggle when I hear novice marketers say something like this, "This magazine has 2 million readers, .. I think I can get 4% of the readers to buy from seeing my ad!" or ... "When I mail my sales letter, I think 1 can get 20% of the people to buy off my sales letter!" ... If it were only that easy. Here's the deal. In direct maiL. I do not like to go by percentages. like to gauge success of a promotion in a "times-cost" ratio. For example if a letter costs me 60 cents to mail..; of $600 per thousand I want to get $1,200 in eTO when I mail 1,000 sales letters ... or 2-times my cost.
I
Depending on the price of your product, this can mean a 2% response- if the product was $60 ... of it can mean .2% if the product you are selling is $600. Response rate really means nothing ... its the multiple of your cost to mail. As for magazine ads, we do not use percentages either. We go by "times-cost". If a magazine ad costs $2,000 ... and you get $4,000 in eTO ... you did "double-over". You can still make a fortune if you bring back just what you spent as long as you have a huge back end. You can make millions of dollars when you double your initial advertising cost as long as you have a strong back end. I did. I had a pill that I was selling for $60. I needed 1% in orders from my sales letters to break even. I got 2%. So, I was profiting 60 cents from each letter I mailed. This is good. But the real profits came in when the automatic shipments kicked in a few months later. I got an average of 4 bottles. sold to each customer. This brought my gross eTO to $180. Remember, it cost me just $30 in advertising costs to attract a new customer. That's six-times cost! I
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was able to do this to 40,000 new customers real quick.
a month ... 1 got rich
The same for magazines. I knew I could double my money if I bought magazine advertisements for $20 CPM. This CPM figure represents the COST PER ONE THOUSAND PAID READERS. If a magazine had 1 million actual, paid readers ... I'd gladly pay the publisher $20,000 for a full-page advertisement in his magazine. If I bought my ads right ... I was able to maintain ratio even on my print ads. Which I did.
this 6-times cost
Here's how to figure out the cost to acquire a customer: If you're mailing 1,000 sales letters or 2,000 sales letters, measure how many orders you get: If you get 40 orders mailing 2,000 sales letters, you'd divide the cost to mail the 2,000 letters by 40 and come up with $30. To mail 2,000 letters, it'll cost $1,200 ($600 per thousand). As long as your product has a $30 or higher CTO, you're going to make a profit. The same thing with magazines. If a magazine costs $20,000 to place an ad in and you get 2,000 orders ... divide $20,000 by 2,000 and get $10. As long as you have a higher CTO from each sale that exceeds $10 ... you're going to make a profit. Good initial response end ...
rates should be l x- ·i.f you have a killer back
Response of 2x cost can make you rich if you have a strong back end. Response of 3x cost is even better ... especially if your back end is strong. When all is said and done with back end sales ... you're looking to achieve 3x to 6x cost. I made $100 Million with 6x cost.
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If you mail a sales letter and it breaks
even, you should be happy. Now resell the shit out of these customers with other offers! Mail these customer every freakin' week if you can. Mail and mail and mail until the list is no longer bringing more back in sales than it costs to mail. Here's how I gauge if I'm going to be successful where others wait for weeks:
within a few days ...
I only mail First Class, as you should. When I mail First Class, I wait for two or three days to get my first order, then I count how many days it takes me to break even and make back the money I just spent mailing the sales letters. Let's say, it cost me $1,200 to mail 2,000 letters. My product sells for $60 plus S/H. I need 20 sales to recoup the initial mailing cost. If I can get these 20 orders by the 7th day of response, I'll do 2x cost by the 30th day of response. This has proven itself to me many, many times and is what I go by to see within 7 days what takes others 30 days to figure out. As for magazines ... if I can break even within one week of it being on the racks ... I'll do 2x over by the time the next issue comes out. Magazines are printed way in advance, so you don't get enough time to evaluate your first issue ... as a second one comes out when you just get your 30 day results. If you break even within the first week of seeing the book on the news racks ... youlI double over by the time the next issue comes out. House File. Your house file or house list is the list of customers you sold your products to. This is the most powerful mailing list you will ever possess. No other group of names will be more responsive than the list you compile. Would you believe, I sometimes hear from marketers that they do not retain the names of the customers who buy from them? Are they crazy? My house file can pull 5x cost for new products I'd be testing while an outside list would get l x cost.
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If you want to be smart in the direct response business ... you have to build a customer me. This is a gold mine for additional sales. My friend and mentor, Jay Abraham used to make a fortune by simply going to businesses that did not know anything about mailing their customer list. He'd say to them, for every dollar I bring you in sales, I want a quarter. I knew he got very rich doing this. The bottom line is this: You want to gage how well you are doing in this business by a times-cost ratio. If you're pulling 2x cost... you're doing well. Anything more than that ... and consider yourself King!
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Chapter Thirty: Refund Rates
No matter how great your product or service is ... you have to offer your customers a money-back guarantee ... and no matter how good your product or service is ... people will take you up on your guarantee. Don't take it personal. You know the saying, "You can please all of the people sometimes ... or some of the people all the time ... but never all of the people all of the time." I think that's how it goes. But anyway ... You11always have people ... some correct ... and some insane ... who felt your corporation and your product have wronged them. I'm sure there will be people who bought this book that will absolutely love it- probably 95%. And there's going to be 5%)who think I'm wasting trees. You cannot take it personal. I remember back in 1995 when I published my first book, Direct Mail Trade Secrets ... I got one reader to write me and demand his money back as he said he found better information in his library. You can never satisfy everyone- and you don't. That's right ... YOU DO NOT WAN'I"TOSATISFY EVERYONE! If you satisfy every one ... even if you could ... it means you're not selling hard enough in your ads and sales letters. You actually want 5% or 7% of your customers to ask for their money back. And this 5% to 7% is what you can expect in refunds. I've been involved with products that have had 10% ask for a refund and we still made millions of dollars ... so as long as you're not giving back over 10% ... you're probably doing a great job at selling ... and you're still satisfying 90% of your customers- which is a lot more people than the 50% the President of the United States satisfies.
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Here's my rule of thumb: If you're getting less than 10% to ask for their money back ... you're not selling hard enough. If you're getting more than 10%, you're overselling your product. Try to keep it around 7% and you'1l be fine. You'll get five times more credit card buyers to ask for a refund than people who ordered with a check or money order. I've noticed this for the past few years. I guess the credit card buyers see their credit card bill later and feel the money "gone" a few weeks after the check orders. The check orders feel the money gone the instant they mail their order to you. Also, credit card buyers know they have certain levels of protection with Visa or Master Card or whatever they used. When you do get a refund request, make sure you resolve all legitimate refund requests within 30 days ... or as soon as you can. I was running a $100 Million company with a half of a million customers ... and I was just 5 to 7 days behind on consumer credits. You should have no problem offering credits the same day they are requested. But do make sure the credits are legitimate. Customers can cause you some real headaches. If a guy is 15 days over his refund period ... still give him the refund. If a customer has 4 bottles of your product he's received over the past few months and didn't call and stop his automatic deliveries ... and now he wants all his money back. .. I'd give him the damn money back. It's your call, you can do as you wish ... but if you're making thousands of sales each and every month ... you can afford to lose a dozen or so unreasonable requests. If you're finding that you have a lot of refund requests but you want to continue to sell the product as you are because response is so good ... or the people who are returning the product are losers ... here's some stuff you can do: In the last paragraph, I said, "If the customer is a loser" ... yes, customers can be losers. When the founder of Entrepreneur Magazine was first getting started in the publishing business ... he sold these "kits" on how to open certain types of businesses. They still have these kits in the back pages of Entrepreneur Magazine.
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Anyway, opportunity seekers purchased these kits. And opportunity seekers are usually money-for-nothing ... get-richquick ... lazy people. At least a good majority of them are. That's why get-rich ads selling books or courses should "money-making-technique" in the ad. The secret has to course or book. You'll sell more by concealing the actual it's sure to turn some people off, as opportunity seekers "work".
hide the be in the "task" as hate to do
Anyway, the founder of Entrepreneur Magazine was selling these kits before he started the magazine and these kits were plagued by high percentages of refunds. To keep promoting these kits, as they were profitable ... he introduced a "conditional guarantee". He offered to give the customer double their money back if the kits he sold them could not get him in the business he wanted to be in and do well at it or whatever. Now, the customer had to prove he actually tried doing something taught in the kit to get double his money back ... or any of his money back for that matter. They ended up selling more kits, as the guarantee was super strong ... and they got less people to ask for their money back, as they had to prove to the publisher that they actually did something with the information in the kit. . The people who were killing this company earlier with the high refund requests were lazy and they didn't even want to read the information in the kit. The info in the kit was of quality and could help someone looking to get in that particular business. If they wanted their money back, they had to prove the publisher was selling junk- which they couldn't. And those that could ... were so little, he'd gratefully give them 200% their money back. There are tons of hurdles you can put refund requesters through ... you can tell them to call and ask for a RA# (return authorization number) before sending back any product. Some companies will
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refuse shipments without this RA# on them! You can make customers send back the empty bottle if it is a supplement you are selling. Not so much because people throwaway empty bottles ... but because people are lazy to ship back an empty bottle. It's pointless for the marketer to have an empty bottle ... but there's a reason for it. Your customer service reps can have some kind of retention script they can use to try to get your customer to keep the product. I know dietary supplements sometimes do not go to work on the body within the 30 day guarantee period ... so, I used to have my reps offer to extend the guarantee for another 30 days to go to 60 days and a minimum of 50% of the people who would have asked for a refund would agree. Their results would come in the next few weeks and they were-glad they gave the pills more time to work for them.
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Chapter Thirty One: Increasing Response
So you mailed out your sales letters or you placed your advertisement and you got your results. Were they better than you expected? Worse then you expected? Right where you expected? Regardless- you're going to want to improve them, right? And here's how: If your results were poor: 1. Make sure your ad' or sales letter had a correct phone number and address for customers to respond to. 2. Make sure your sales letters got delivered to your prospects. 3. Make sure the mailing list broker sent you the right list and didn't send you another one in error. If all this checked out, try these tactics: 1. You can lower the price you're charging.
2. You can raise the price you're charging. 3. You can add a premium. 4. You can add an expensive premium and raise the price. 5. Test a different mailing list, as this would be the # 1 reason why a direct mail promotion would fail. 6. If you ran a magazine ad and you want you can call the publisher and renegotiate you cannot run the ad every month if the If they want to keep you in their magazine find it in their hearts to eat a little less.
it to make more money, your ad cost. Tell them price cannot be lowered. every month ... they'll
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7. Test a different magazine to run your ad in. 8. Maybe your product is just a poor idea that nobody wants. Don't take this too personaL You cannot find winners and you cannot create breakthrough products unless you gamble a little. I try brand-new products all the time that either fail miserably ... or become huge national successes. If I played it safe all the time ... I'd be a lot poorer. Now this does not mean market anything you can think of. You're just starting out. Let's try to stick with winning types of products. And always remember; fix only one thing at a time. You cannot try to test a different price with a different mailing list. One at a time! Otherwise the test is useless.
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Chapter Thirty Two: What I Know About Websites
Websites are great to assist my order takers. Ifl'm taking 1,500 orders a day ... for one, I've got to hire an employee, which costs money. Two, I have to have the phone lines and pay for the 800#. Three, with each caller there is a chance of human error and a loss of a sale. When orders are being taken over my website, I do not have to hire an employee to take the order. I can take orders all day long ... all night long ... in any weather. I do not have to worry about phone lines being busy ... and I don't have to worry about employees saying the wrong stuff to the prospects and losing the order. But of course, you cannot have just a website to place orders. And you cannot handle all of the orders yourself if you get large enough. People seem to think the Internet is a cure-all that totally replaces direct response ordering through the mail or through the phone. That's not true. Websites are an aid. Before websites, I used to take orders through the phone and through the fax. I used to have customers fax us their orders. But since the introduction of the web ... I got rid of the fax-in option and replaced it with a website. And as for the website itself ... it's nothing more than a sales letter on a screen. Graphics that take forever to load ... forget them. Special Flash Players or other software that is required to see the site ... get rid of them. People are not going to go and download software to view your site. I usually breakdown the site to five pages or so. This helps in the search engines as well. The pages are as follows:
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1. Home page-, which is basically a teaser. It usually states the headline to my offer with a click here to continue button. 2. More Info page- this is the page the home page will go to when the viewer clicks on it. It will have the entire body copy of my sales letter. 3. Frequently Asked Questions page- this is a carbon copy of the questions 111 include in my sales letter. 4. Testimonial/Validation page- this page will have results of studies ... articles ... testimonials ... any kind of proof the viewer can click on to help him make his decision to try my product. 5. Order page- this is a page that asks for all the information needed to place an order. This can all be inputted into a shopping cart for processing. These five pages and what they are to have on them is all you need to know about websites. The fonts ... the headlines ... the paragraph lengths ... the sentence lengths ... everything I taught you about writing copy is the same on the screen of a computer. Here's ways to promote your website: Web banners ... forget about them. Enough said. Spam ... forget about it. It got us sued three times from people we sent it to! Paid search ... do it. It works best for the trademarked name of your product ... or of your competitors. If you're selling a product that has a huge competitor. .. free ride off his trademark. Try to buy search terms that have your competitor's product name in them. Everyone that clicks on his trade name ... you can get your product's name in front of him or her as well. Free advertising! I remember I was having a huge knock-off problem. These guys were free riding off my trademark on paid search engines like Overture and the like.
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I complained to Overture. They came up with some loophole that permitted these knock-offs to still buy my trademarked product name ... but they had to say "Compare XYZ to Product Name" in their headline. XYZwas their product name and Product Name was our product's name. This trick allowed the knock-offs to piggyback on my $1.2 Million I spent a month in print, radio and TV advertising. When people forgot my domain name ... or wanted to do a little research on my product ... they were bombarded with people saying their product was better and cheaper than mine. Some customers were fooled ... but many were brand loyal and wanted the real thing. I hated these knock-offs when they free rode like this ... but If I was the small guy ... like you are going to be ... free ride your ass off buddy! I think paid search is a great idea. People have to bid on certain search terms. The highest bidder gets the top positions ... and thus, gets more clicks. I know there are guys paying $6 per click for search terms like Viagra! Crazy! But they are not going to be paying $6 each and every time a different computer clicks on their search result ... they've got to be making money. I remember with one of the products I created, I used to bid on search terms. I was paying 7 cents for my product's trademarked name. Once I got up and going and making millions of dollars ... people were paying $3.50 to $4.00 for each and every time someone entered my trademark and they clicked on their link. I never really had any success with affiliate programs. There are thousands of people that say these programs work. .. and I'm sure what their vision of "works" is different than mine. Mine is making $10,000,000 a year ... theirs is making $600 a week. Do affiliate programs work? I'm sure they make several hundred bucks for their owners ... but are they going to make you $5 Million next year? I don't think so.
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Websites are also great for keeping in touch with customers and prospects. If you can find a way to capture an email address and a name ... you can send offers to these people, as many times as you wish and you pay nothing. Web marketers are doing this with newsletters. You go to their site and subscribe to a newsletter. You write a few pages of text and send it to them every week. .. or month ... or whenever. You can also send them offers for other products as you see fit. 1 remember back in 1998 or 1999, I was selling computer software and I had a pretty big email list of my customers. Every time a customer would order over the web, I'd ask his email address. I had something like 20,,000 addresses. I went to Office Max and bought a program that would send an email to my email list at the rate of one every 5 or 10 seconds. This program cost me $10. I sent out the emails offering a great deal on a new software program I was selling. I recall getting phone calls to place orders within 30 minutes of emailing. 1 don't even know if you can do this anymore. But the point is, websites are great as tools for direct response- they are not the be-all, end-all as many wished they would become.
NOTE: Here's something I may have forgot to include in this chapter. When you are designing a website ... especially the Home Page ... make sure you do not make your body copy in HTML and your headline in a JPEG. The reason for this is simple ... if your customer has a dial-up connection ... your body copy will load before your headline. This is BAD. Make your headline HTML... just like the body copy.
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Chapter Thirty Three: Merchant Accounts
In order to survive in direct response mail order in this day and age, you have to be able to accept credit cards as payment for your goods or services. ] think you need to take credit cards in any business. Just yesterday, I stumbled upon an Italian bakery I wanted to check out. I had the girl behind the counter put together a one-pound box of cookies, but when I handed her my credit card, she said they didn't accept them. I usually don't carry cash, so I asked her where was an ATM. She pointed to a Wal-Mart across the parking lost. I got in my car and went over to the crowded Wal-Mart. I got so disgusted; I just drove away- leaving the cookies behind. There's two different ways to get a merchant account. One is the traditional way going through companies like Cardservice International. They claim they'll approve 99% of their applicants. Look in your phonebook to find a local branch office. The second w_ayis through third party Payment Solution companies like PayPal ... or CCBill ... or Multicards International. These companies are easier to get set-up than a traditional merchant account. The only thing that is different is that they usually charge a higher percentage of your sales, and your company name will not appear on the "descriptor" ... which is what appears on the customer's credit card statement. It'll say for example, if you were using Multicards ... Buy Secure, LLC. This is fine. I'd just let my customer know when you're getting off the phone with him that he will see a charge on his credit card billed as "whatever". This will eliminate any confusion.
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I've used both types of merchant accounts in the past. The ones directly from the bank are great... but they take longer to get. .. and they are a little harder to get. You have to show them some good paperwork. .. tax returns ... and other stuff. The third party guys don't really care for all of that. Guys like Multicards will hold your money for three weeks where regular banks deposit daily into your bank. What I would do is try to get a merchant account through Card service Intemational or another traditional credit card processor. If they are taking too long ... or if you are denied service, go to one of the third party people. Anyone selling something on eBay can get themselves a merchant account through Paypal ... and they can get set up in a few minutes. Hopefully traditional credit card processors will loosen-up their procedures and make it easier for entrepreneurs to process credit cards. Here's some terminology you need to know dealing with merchant accounts: Discount Rate: This is the fee the credit card company will charge for you to process your orders. I wouldn't pay anything over 3% if you were dealing with a traditional bank. Fees for the third party providers can be 5.9% ... all the way up to 15%. Don't pay anything more than 6%. On many businesses, the owners are lucky to make 10% of gross sales ... and they got to bust their Asses for it! Why would anyone give this much to some guy who is doing nothing but processing your credit card order? Reserve: This is a fee the merchant mayor may not want to collect. This is an insurance policy the bank will hold in case your company goes belly-up. This fee is refundable 180 days after you terminate your account with that bank. This reserve can be collected as a "rolling" reserve, which is usually 5% or worse, 10%. This means the bank will collect an additional 5% of your gross sales and put them in a non-interest bearing account in case they are ever financially harmed by your company.
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I think of it as a forced savings. These accounts can sometimes add up to big bucks ... I had $2 Million in one once! Sometimes you can get away without having a reserve on your account... but if the bank wants one ... what are you to do? Negotiate. Try to get it down. Try to make it a six-month reserve, where they collect the money only for six months ... or until a certain dollar value is reached ... instead of being a forever rolling reserve. This reserve fee is also known as a holdback. Charge backs: A charge back is when a customer contests the charge you put on his or her credit card. This usually happens when a customer does not recognize the charge or what he ordered ... sometimes the customer was not happy with the product and it is easier for them to call the 800# on their credit card statement than it is to dig-up your phone number. Maybe you placed a charge on your customer's credit card without their permission and they are pissed off. Maybe the customer knows you sent him your product without requiring him to sign for it at the door. All he has to do is say to the credit card company that he never received the product. The merchant account will ask for you to provide them with proof the customer got the order. .. and you don't have anything ... so you have to give them back their money. A very few people will do this, so it may not be worth getting signatures for every package you deliver. To obtain signatures, it may cost an extra $3 or $5 per order. If you got one person out of 100 ripping you off... it's cheaper than adding $3 to $5 on top of every order to get signatures. You can fight a lot of charge back requests with the credit card company. Before they actually suck the money out of your account, they usually give you the opportunity to speak your end of the story. This is called a "retrieval". 111talk about them next. Retrievals: This is when a customer contests a charge on his credit card and before the credit card company charges back the purchase, they sometimes give you the opportunity to fight the charge back.
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I advise you to contest each one, as if you let them go, sometimes the bank will take this as some form of guilt. And you'd be surprised, you can win many of them. If you got a signature at the door from your customer. .. make sure you show this to the bank. As soon as they see you got a signature, they'll usually rule in your favor. But like I was saying before, it may not be financially smart to get a signature from every customer. And you also run the risk of the customer not signing for the order and it comes back to you and you have to credit the purchase. TMF. This is the black list. You're dead if you're on this list. TMF stands for Terminated Merchant File. You're supposed to get listed on this list when you commit some kind of fraud or if a bank gets beat. By fraud, I mean you went crazy with your customer's credit card numbers and took-off never to be heard from again. But this is not always the case, if your charge back percentages exceed 1% for more than three months ... the bank can and will terminate your merchant account and you may even get placed on the TMF. If you're a business owner and get placed on the TMF ... you have to have a partner or silent partner in order to get merchant accounts ever again. So be careful and make sure you do not exceed 1% in charge backs. In certain circumstances, you're going to hit 1% charge backs. Say you get .75% and in December you get 25% less orders, you're going to hit the 1% mark for that month. What you need to do is make sure you bump a lot of your sales that month to a higher unit of sale. You need to send out sales letters to your customer base and get additional sales that month. The added revenue that month will offset the less sales you'll get and you will not hit the 1%. I've heard that a merchant account hooked-up through a Canadian bank. .. like Surefire ... gives a 2% charge back limit ... which is double the American banks. This is something to look at. If I had
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my choice, I'd go through a Canadian bank. Everything is processed through your computer nowadays ... so the damn bank can be in the Bahamas and you'd never know. Limits. Sometimes, especially on new accounts, the bank will put a cap or a limit on how much you can charge. This is usually fine when you are just starting up. I remember many times when we had an $8 Million limit and we were bumping it every month! We had to put more money in reserve to get the limit increased. Look- if you get a bad deal from a traditional "bank" merchant account, you can take their deal and work with them for three months. Once you have three months worth of charging statements, you can go to any bank and you'll have a much easier time and a much better deal. So, if you have to take a high discount percentage fee, take the damn thing and shop for a new one in three months. Discover and American Express credit card processing will not come from the same place you '11get your Visa and Mastercard account. For the Discover and American Express, you '11have to go through them directly. And these guys are a lot easier to work with. I know American Express does not give you a limit on how much you can charge like Visa and Mastercard may. If I had a $100,000 charging capability with Visa and Mastercard and I was getting $150,000 in sales ... I used to give my customer a free bonus for using his American Express card to sway some customers to use that card if they had one. I'm sure this will probably be the first chapter to get outdated in this book. So this information is current at the time of writing, which is June 2004.
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Chapter Thirty Four: Call Centers
When you finally get a winning sales letter or advertisement you have to make the decision to use caller cen ters or not. I'm going to tell you what I feel about these services, my experiences with them, and how to decide if you want to use one or not. First of all, there are large caller centers like West in Omaha, Nebraska ...and then there are smaller ones you can find in your local phone book. Let's talk about large call centers first. I once tried to outsource the headache of employees and hired a huge call center in Nebraska. I went to visit them and they were huge. It looked like they employed most of the town. As I walked around one of the phone rooms, I saw they were handling calls for most of the infomercials on TV at the time. They were doing Carlton Sheets ... Ronco... The Ab Rocker. Their client roster was impressive. I figured if this call center can handle these company's order calls, they could sure handle ours- an herbal supplement I was doing some consulting work for. I was wrong. This large company had over 10,000 people answering the phone. With all order takers, they get better the more familiar they get with the product. When there are 10,000 people answering the phones ... in order for a rep to get their second call for your product, you'd have to sell 10,000 people! The reps at these large companies will never get familiar with your product. So if it's a high-tech product or a supplement, where customers may have a lot of questions, a large call center may not be the best fit for you.
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Another thing that bothers me about call centers is that they are horrible on their up sell percentages. If you can up sell 40% of your customers when you're using your own employees ... chances are you'll get just 5% from a call center. The reps just don't care. And they sound too obvious they are reading a script. Again- because they cannot get familiar with your products. Another thing that annoys me about large call centers is that you cannot "see" the people answering your calls. I want to see with my own eyes what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. You cannot do this with a large call center where the client is not allowed in the call rooms. I remember getting several hundred calls when we'd run a TV spot and I'd be so mad when we got under five orders from all those calls! Now there are some pros about using a call center. They have reps ready to answer your calls 24 hours a day 7 days a week. You don't have to worry about who cannot find a baby sitter. .. who is sick. .. whose Mother just died. That's the call center's problem. Another thing that is good is that if the phone lines are not busy, you don't have to pay an hourly wage. If you were to take calls inhouse, you'll have to pay for your employees even if they are sitting doing nothing. Also, if you are running TV spots, it's pretty costly for you to get 100 phone lines in your building. That's how many people call in at once when a TV spot hits the air. When you are using a large call center, they have thousands of lines. They can take 1,000 calls for your product at the same time. You could never take 1,000 calls at once. And even if you did, what happens for the next half hour until the next commercial comes on? Nothing- your people just sit and get paid for doing nothing. Large call centers like WEST actually pay for the toll-charges through the 800# they'll give you. All you have to pay them is 80
cents or so a minute. For some it will work out cheaper than hiringyour own employees ... for some it1l cost a few dollars more. Something WEST did for us was credit us $2 for every order call that came in. Remember, they were charging us around 80 cents a minute. And if we would allow them to "Ditch" our callers with 3issue trial magazine subscriptions, they'd pay us $2 per pitch regardless if they sold the customer or not. This worked out OK and offset some of the costs. Then there is smaller, Answering Services.
local call centers-
usually
known as
They are a little smaller, so their reps can and will get used to what your product does and what the up sell script is going to read like. They'll get more of the callers to buy and they'll get a higher percentage of callers to up sell to something else. Again- because they are going to get more familiar with your offer. Then there's a flip side to the smaller call centers. They usually are understaffed. The owners want to maximize their profit margins and if they run lean, they'll do better. What they don't realize is that a call may now sit on hold until the order rep gets off the phone with his last order. A lot of people will just hang up ... even if it an 800# they are calling. If I had to give you my honest
advise, here it is:
Large call centers are great if you are running ads, letters, or commercials that are capturing caller's addresses to send them information ... like a free report or info package. They kind of suck when it comes time to sell something. And they really suck when the product you are selling is complicated and may lead to many questions being asked by the caller. I remember calling the large call center and asking them a question about my own product- I was pretending 1 was a customer. They gave me another 800#- this time for my customer service department. It was actually still the call center as they handled my customer service as well. The customer service rep
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couldn't answer my generic: questions either. They gave me the phone number of our acti d.~ 'ruilding. The question I asked was an easy, no-brainer question ... and they lost the order. I could only imagine how many orders they were losing. Like I was saying before, if you are just having customers ask for an info kit or a free report, a large call center should work just fine. If you're rurming national TV spots, a large call center may be needed as well to handle all the call volume. This is what I used to do. I used to have a small call center answer my calls over night and on the weekends. During regular business hours, we'd answer our calls in-house. Once our company grew, we took our calls all day and all night ... we'd open at Sam and close at 1am. If you are looking to build a list using TV spots to request information ... you can use a large call center, as they do not have to actually "sell" for you.
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Chapter Thirty Five: Telemarketing
Telemarketing is when a marketer calls his prospects and verbally pitches his offering... instead of soliciting through the mail, .. or in a magazine ... or on TV or radio. In these days, there's "do not call" lists where consumers add their names and numbers to national lists and if a marketer calls these people, he can be in some serious problems. In certain states like Arizona, telemarketing is practically illegal. I know of a lady who works at a mortgage company in Arizona that offers mortgages through telemarketing. The sales people are working on cell phones from different locations every few weeks. While telemarketing is annoying to its prospects ... is it really a crime? Now, this does not mean I like telemarketing. Actually I hate it. I tried it once to a cold prospect list a few years ago and the results were horrible. The only way you may be able to get telemarketing to work for you is if you have an offer and you want to call your customer list and offer it to them. That's fine. Trying to get cold prospects that are not your customers to buy though the phone has never worked for me- ever. But what has worked for me was outbound calls to my existing customers offering them something related to the product or products they've bought from me in the past. Probably the most profound revelation I've ever had with telemarketing was when 1did follow-up calls to my new customers. Let me explain how this works. For a while we were using an answering service to take our order calls overnight and on weekends. Now, since they were so bad at
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up selling products, I asked them not to offer my customers any more up sells. So the answering service simply took the straight orders. What I then did the next morning was have my best up seller call each and every new customer from the previous night and say they were calling to "verify" their information. My up seller would go over their name, the spelling, their address, their phone number, their credit card information, etc. The customer was impressed to think we were taking the time to call him and verify all his information. And right before our up seller was going to hang up ... they'd say, "let me tell you about a few of our specials we have going on right now..." and they'd go right into the scripts. Guess what. Callers that could not have been sold anything if I let the answering service do it the night before, were now buying like crazed animals when we'd simply "verify" their information. Other than these two ways ... I've never had any form of telemarketing actually produce profitable results for me. I'm sure there's millions of businesses making telemarketing work ... otherwise the Feds wouldn't make "do not call" lists. I never was able to figure it out.
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Chapter Thirty Six: Television Advertising I create 60-second TV spots the same way I create 60-second radio spots. I write a script, which sells the product as hard as I can. I make sure to add an 800# and website address early enough in the spot to make sure the prospect has enough time to get the number. What I've been noticing now is that companies are using a widescreen format commercial, where they have black space on the top of the commercial and black space on the bottom. This is the perfect place to place an 800# and website address throughout the entire 60-second spot. I keep referring to 60second spots because I have never felt a 30-second spot gives you enough time to do some form of a selling job. In a 60-second spot, you want to have the phone number and/or website address displayed for at least IS-seconds before the end. Now,TV spots are just salesmanship which came to life where a sales letter or advertisement is salesmanship in print. They are really the same. The commercial has to open up with a headline ... or an opening thrust. Then once the opening statement or statement is said and gets the attention of the watchers who are prospects, you'd go into your body copy- but instead of it being in paragraph form... it's read to them. TV is a very powerful medium. Put it this way ... I was bringing in 40,000 new customers a month. To get this volume, I was advertising in dozens of magazines. But when I advertised on the Howard Stern Show on the E! channel I took in 10,000 of those
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40,000 monthly orders in just one hour a night... week!
six nights a
TV is very, very powerful. I was selling a really hot product a few years back. I remember my commercial was to appear on the Howard Stern Show on a Tuesday for the first time. I was so nervous to see how TV would do for me. It just so happens the Tuesday my commercial was to break ... two crazy terrorists smashed two 767s into the Word Trade Center towers. Thinking of the company was the last thing on my mind ... I was wondering if this was the end of the world- as most of America was thinking. But wouldn't you know ... when the Howard Stern Show aired that night ... and my commercial was run two times ... I actually broke even. lwas thinking, "Are these people crazy? They're worrying about buying my damn supplement when we suffered the attacks this moming?!" TV advertising is powerfuL. very powerful. You just want to make sure you are not advertising with local cable ... and you are advertising Nationally with channels like Spike ... CNN... Comedy Central ... E!... etc. It's not as expensive as you think. A 60-second spot on the Howard Stern Show ran Nationally was running us $2500 each spot- maybe even less. And then there are infomercials. Infomercials are 28.5 minutes long. They are long-form commercials that are basically little "shows" selling different products. Infomercials usually run on cable channels starting at midnight or so. They are not as expensive as you think. I know of people paying $2,000 - $4,000 for the entire half-hour. A good infomercial with a good product should get 1,000 people to call on average. The order takers should be able to sell about half of these people.
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An infomercial can bring in 500 orders. If you're running one every night ... on four or five different channels ... that's 2,000 to 2,500 orders. I brought in on average 1,500 orders a day at a measly $59.95 and had an auto-delivery program every customer was enrolled into. I made $100 Million a year. TV is powerful. Very powerful. One thing that is different about TV is that it takes a week or so to get the spots fully ramped up ... where they need a little repetition. That is not true with print ads or sales letter. The more you run them, the response does not get better. With TV spots this is true ... and not so much as true with infomercials, Infomercials bring in a lot of their response the first time they are ran. The short form 60-second spots need to run a few times for the watcher to get his pen handy and actually get the phone number down.
----
.
Producing the spot or infomercial is where some big bills come in. I've shot 60-second spots for $14,000 and I've shot 60-second spots for $114,000. The differences in response were no different . One commercial, I shot in video (which is cheaper than film), and it was a woman on a lounge chair at poolside reciting a script. The expensive commercial was a western. We rented the Paramount Studios western town set for two days- this was the set Dr. Quinn and Bonanza were filmed on and we sure spent some serious money on production ... we had cameras attached to cranes for overhead shots ... we had genuine cowboy actors that appeared in Tombstone and the Wild Bunch. The commercial looked great ... but did it pull more orders for me than the cheap $14,000 spot did? Nope. This business, whether it be in print... or in the mail. .. or on TV does not depend on how fancy your message is. This business is not about having the prettiest letterhead or brochure. Hell, I didn't
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get business cards made until I was making $50 Million and felt stupid when people were asking me for a card. If I had my choice when producing a short form commerciaJ, made it a script read by an attractive man or woman. That's
I'd it.
1nfomercials are a different story and way beyond the scope of this book and surely this chapter. There are many formats for infomerciaJs ... there's talk show format, which is the cheapest to produce and may cost $25,000 ... then there's the high-dollar productions that can cost as much as $200,000! Do you know what is funniest? When the infomercial appears to be a live talk show when they clearly are not... and they are taking callers! "Bob from Dallas is on line one. Hi Bob, what can we do for you?" and Bob actually asks a question about the product!
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Chapter Thirty Seven: Radio Advertising
Radio advertising is the same as TV advertising- just without the images. The way I create radio and TV advertising is basically the same ... the same script ... the same offer. .. the same wording ... everything is the same. I like my TV spots to actually be radio spots just with a visual added. If the watcher is not in front of the TV, he can still get the entire offer. I laugh when J see TV commercials with no voice ... just music. If you place radio spots ... do not get upset with the results from the first three or four days. Radio spots do take a few days to get up to full speed. They need repetition to start generating the orders. I remember when I first started a radio campaign and the first few days the results we less than impressive. 1 had to go on a trip to New York and a day or two after I left, I got a call from one of our managers saying the radio spots were generating orders like crazy. I'm talking 400 orders in a single day from a single radio show! Now, when it comes time for radio spots ... I like to advertise on talk shows and not so much music stations. If I'm having great success on certain talk show stations, then I can try some music stations ... but the last time I tried the music stations, I did not do so well. In radio, a vanity 800# may be good, so listeners can remember my number easily. "Simply call }-800-ABCDEFG", Simply call, 1-800MATTRESS and leave the last S off for savings!" You want to advertise during drive times ... this is when most of the listeners are in their cars. That's when people really listen to the radio ... not so much at work or at home.
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Radio stations are tough to hold to particular time slots. I remember bickering with stations that wanted to give me S spots a day on rotation. Some spots would run a Sam and my office was not fully staffed until 7am. Scheduling was a pain in the ass. This is why I like to stick to certain shows that I know !Lm at a certain time on certain days. Usually the radio station will do the voice-over commercial for you. They already have the personalities with great radio voices and they have the full-blown studio to record the thing in. But if you're looking to run commercials on different stations, the one station is not going to give you a copy of the spot to run on a competitor's station. I did very little radio advertising in my heyday ... and while I was successfuL. I'm not a know-it-all as I am with direct mail and print. So, if you're looking to place advertisements on the radio ... It may be wise for you to go and seek further education on this topic in other books or consultants.
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Chapter Thirty Eight; The "Suck Out"
Before I attempt to tell you what the "suck out" is, I want to illustrate two different stories for you. Both stories deal with running magazine advertisements can just as easily be TV ads or radio ads.
... but they
I was once running ads in large magazines selling some expensive car waxes. I was advertising in leading automotive magazines and was doing quite well. The first time I ran the ad ... it did great. .. the second time ... it did well.,; the third time I ran the ad ... it did okay ... the fourth time, it broke even. Any ad placed after that lost money. A few years later I was running an ad in a bodybuilding which had 150,000 paid copies, sold every month.
magazine,
I had three pages of advertisements in that magazine and they were bringing me 1,500 orders! That's 1% of the magazine's readership ordering my product every issue. Trust me- a percentage this high will never happen for any other direct marketer. But this cannot last forever. If I were to get this 1% to respond each and every month, after a year, I'd have 12% of the magazine as customers. That's pretty dam near to impossible. After five or six months of advertising in this bodybuilding magazine the ad that bought me 1,500 orders was now brining me 250 order. What happened? My advertising was too good. What happened was the magazine delivered only a certain amount of "new" readers a month ... and my magazine ads were pulling more in orders than they were generating new customers. So in
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other words, my ads would go great for a few months ... but once 1 sucked out all the hot buyers ... if the magazine didn't replenish their readership with fresh names fast enough- my ads would soon be worthless. Gary Halbert says the same thing. He makes ads that were so powerful; they'd only work once or twice. Sure, they worked great once or twice ... but they pulled every potential customer out of the readership in one or two insertions. This is not a bad problem. Many ads have to be run month after month for a customer to finally decide to buy from it. But when excellent advertising is created, it may suck out more customers than the magazine can replenish. This happens especially when you run large multi-page advertisements. Sure a 1/ 8th page ad, if it is profitable in a large magazine can pull orders forever and never lose it's pulling power. After all, a small ad like this is not sucking out as many new readers as the magazine is generating. And then you have guys like me who, once their one page ad pulls like mad ... I then go to 3 or even 4 page ads and suck out every single freaking prospect interested in my product. Of course, if you say you wouldn't mind making the steady orders for years placing small ads instead of larger ads that suck out too fast... you may get knocked-off by a larger competitor and he11 place larger one page ads and steal all your profits ... or even run you out of business. But on the other hand, if you got a winning advertisement, and you place full page and multi-page advertisements, you may take orders like crazy and profit like mad ... only to burn-out your ad in three or four insertions. Obviously if you asked me what you should do- run the smaller ads that may last longer or run the larger ads that may burn-out quicker ... I'm going to tell you to run the larger ads.
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Here's what to do when your ad starts to lose its magnetic customer-pulling ability: First, you can you run your main ad for a few months and once it starts to decline, you can run an alternative ad that sells its customers from a different point of view to attract different customers. When you are creating this new ad with a new slant, make sure you do not borrow much from your first ad. Now, run this new slant ad and it should bring in new customers that are turned on by different claims and different desires. Run this ad one month; run your first ad the next month, and so on. Or you can run your first ad until it pulls no more then run the second ad until it pulls no more and then go back to the first ad. If the response is restored, great. If it's not ... you have to create a third ad with another slant. If you can get away with this and keep recharging your product with new ads, you're in a great position. The second thing you can do is instead of running your ad each and every month (which I advise you to do when you have a winner); you can place your ad every other month. If your ad is a break even when you run it every 30-days ... what would it do if you ran it every 60 days? Your ads will always have "1ag"- which is sales that come in after the ad is stopped. If you were getting 1,500 orders a month from your ad when it was fresh ... and after three insertions, it was pulling just 500 ... and you needed that 500 orders to break even ... and if you're not making a killing on the back end ... maybe you can pull the ad and run it every other month. Now, you'll get 500 orders when this issue is still out ... and once the next issue comes out- without you in it ... you may get 250 or 300 orders. I'd rather have the first situation work for me, when I just recreate the ad with a new slant ... instead of the advertisement running every other month.
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Obviously, if you are running radio spots or TV spots or infomercials and they start to slide in response ... the techniques in this chapter are to be used the same- re-do the commercial with a new slant to attract new customers ... or run it less often hoping some fresh prospects will grow in the time you take off, so when you return, you reap all of them again until they're all gone. Then repeat again ... and again ... There are other ways to boost the sales of an old or worn ad ... look in the past chapter that talks about improving your response by improving your offer. Maybe you can do a new ad with a premium ... or a gift ... or adding some up sells ... or increasing your back end. What a marketer does when his ads no longer pull as well as they did shows his true character. You have to be innovative. You must get the response back to where it was. In this business, you're either growing or dying.
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Chapter Thirty Nine: Employees
Once your company grows you're going to need some employees. You may need some help immediately ... right after you get positive results from your tests. The thing I'd tell you to do is first find some family members that can help you out. I'm sure you're nervous to actually hire a stranger and be someone's "boss" so quickly. And another thing is you probably don't want to go and rent office space just yet. It'll be kind of uncomfortable-for strangers to come and work from your kitchen with you. When I first got started in this business in 1994, my Uncle was a partner with me. We handled our own calls, shipped our own product, basically did everything ourselves. It was easy, because we weren't all that good at this business the time, so the business remained small. In 1995, we office- 3,000 warehouse. warehouse,'
at
moved into our first office complex. It was a small square feet, 2,000 of it was office, the other 1,000 was I remember I didn't have anything to put in the so that's where I parked my car!
Our first employee was a lady named Joyce and we hired her from a temp. agency. I remember getting my first employee ... boy was it strange ... especially since she was in her mid-40s and I was a 21year-old high-school drop out! As I got better at writing direct mail sales letters and magazine ads, we hired Leah ... our second employee ... then Marcia ... our third employee. I had two of these three ladies working for me until 1999, when I was doing several millions in revenue and had 25 employees.
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Here's all I learned about employees in my lO years ... employing and firing over 500 people: 1. Keep It Professional. I don't mean you have to be a robot. But try to keep the wall there between employee and employer. Do not go to happy hour with them. Do not ask them to go to the movies with you. They cannot be your friends outside of the office. I remember there was a kid working for me named Tom. I went to the clubs with Tom on the weekends. I always told him, if he fucked up at the office or ever embarrassed me, I'd still fire him, and he understood. Things were fine until he showed up once late and I guess he wanted to show-off to a pretty girl sitting next to him. She said, "You're late again? You're going to get fired!" and he said to her, "I'm friends with the boss I can show up late and he won't fire me." Now this put me in a very compromising position. The rumor of what he said flew around the customer service department in a few hours. Everyone was looking at what I was going to do. Had I kept him, nobody would have respected me and the office would slowly turn into Anarchy. But if I fired him, I may have lost a friend ... and even if we were still to hang out ... it would never be the same. I remember my Grandmother's words, "You don't shit where you eat." I fired him and while we still did hang out, it was never the same and he always asked me if he could come back. I never rehired him. Another time, one of the married women in the office was asking me what bar I hung out at on the weekends. Remember, I was in my early 20's! I told her, and she said, "Oh! My friends and me are going there tonight! Maybe we'll see you!" I thought nothing of it. What she was really doing was stalking me. I saw her at the club that night ... I didn't see any of her friends. I had a couple of drinks in me and was fairly loose. A few moments later, she came and sat at my table ... and was talking in my ear because the music was so loud. Would you believe this girl started kissing me? I pulled backeven though she wasn't bad looking ... and the next day around the office ... I heard the rumor. .. "She and Vince were at a club making out! And she says he's a good kisser!" Talk about embarrassing.
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Just remember this: There's a wall between you and your employees. It's invisible and you set it as high or as low as you choose when you first hire them. How you treat them is how they'll treat you. Treat them professional- and they'll be professional. Be friendly, and they'll be friendly- which is fine ... but if you get to be chums ... they'll be chums ... and when you need to go back to professional mode ... they won't be able to. Once the wall is broken down ... it never goes back up. 2. Don't Show Off: Sure, once you get successful, it's hard to keep "new money" quiet. I was once "new money" and I wore the diamond Rolex to the office and I drove my Rolls Royce to the office- it was a mistake. The people working for you may become seriously jealous. Jealous employees are cancer, and they affect the entire work force. Lookthe people working for you, unless you are commissioning them in some way, are stuck at the job they are in. They are there to either answer your orders or take your customer service calls or ship your orders. The key word they see is YOURS. They think everything is yours. They think if you get 300 orders a day at $100 ... all the $30,000 is yours to keep and you're at home in some mansion lighting up cigars with some of those hundreds. Trust me- they are not happy for you. They are happy they have a job to pay their bills. And if you ever fire them, all they'll remember is how rich you are and how they can destroy you. 3. Make Them Sign Non-Disclosures and Non-Competes. This is if you have a product that can be knocked-off or if the employees see a lot of intellectual property that they can either steal from you and start their own business or bring to a competitor. I usually have all the employees sign an agreement saying they cannot go into a business or work for a business dealing with a related product for a period of years after their termination or the demise of the company. I've had one employee quit and his friend still worked for me. His friend was working overtime one night and made a copy of our entire database of customers. They stole 500,000 customers and
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we knew it when our customers were calling us and asking why we sold their names to a competing company. When we asked the customer to fax us a copy of the sales material they received, we traced it down and saw it was the former employees! The sales letter had an address on it that was just a few moments from the office, so I had someone sit at the Mail Boxes Etc. and see if they saw any former employees going into the place ... sure enough ... the one who quit went in there and got his mail! We fired his friend immediately and made all employees sign non-competes and nondisclosures. 4. Fire Cancer At Once: I was saying a few paragraphs ago, when you have a bad employee, they are like cancer. And when a body has cancer what do we do with it? We cut it out before it spreads and if we leave it unnoticed too long, we're dead. I think of my business as a finely tuned engine. If I had a bad piston ring on that engine ... what am I going to do drive around with poor performance because I like the bad piston or am I going to go to the dealership and have a new piston replaced at once? I'm going to get the engine fixed. What makes your business any different? Fix the damn thing and cut out the cancer because it does spread ... and if you wait too long, you may be firing three or four people or even more. lance had to [ire an entire night shift of people. The supervisor was a friend with all the workers before she worked for us. She kept it a secret. When we fired three or four of the workers ... the entire room had an attitude because they were all friends- including the supervisor. I had to literally fire 9 out of 10 people on that night shift and rehire everyone. And if you keep cancer working for you- they'll cause you huge problems the longer you wait. What they do is wait and wait for you to slip up and once they have something on you ... you're dead. I remember I had a woman who was begging for additional hours to work, as she needed money. Our company did not offer overtime because I'd have to pay them time and a half. She went on to say that she would forfeit any rights to time and a half and she just wanted straight pay. I was not involved in this decision. We ended up giving her the extra hours at her flat pay. A few months went by and this lady turned into cancer. She must have been on drugs.
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Her performance was slipping. And when she was fired eventually. she was vindictive and went to the Labor Board and complained she was working past 40 hours and never got overtime pay. All those hours we gave her out of the kindness of our hearts, we had to go back and pay her the half time. It was like $2,000. 5. Don't Favor Anyone! We had a rather large shipping room. Fourteen employees dedicated to just shipping out orders to customers. We were shipping 7,000 orders a day. We were getting behind. For some reason, they could not get the orders out in a day's time. And I knew this was bullshit because I knew one person could easily get out 1,000 orders as I didn't hire my 2nd shipping room employee until after I hit 1,000 orders a day. Fourteen people should be able to ship 14,000 orders ... and they couldn't even get out 7,000 ... and were realistically shipping just 5,000 or less! What was going on? Well as it turns out, my partner had an affinity for one of the employees in the shipping room. He had him doing personal tasks for him ... like going to the pharmacy for him ... putting up Christmas trees for him at his home and at the office ... and other things- like picking up lunch for the owners. He was obviously favored. While my partner just saw the shipping room as one man down ... which was already bad as we were backed up on getting the orders out... but the entire room had an attitude. They felt why were they going to work hard or work fast when this guy is getting everyone's lunch and doing personal favors? Remember, this was the shipping room ... not the laboratory ... to the employees in this department; this was a big deal to them. What made it worse was this favored kid would go and show-off to his co-workers. When my partner made him pick up a prescription from the drugstore, he gave him his debit card to pay. Well, this kid went to all his co-workers and showed them the credit card and told them that my partner actually gave him a credit card and he can buy anything he wishes. Of course, these workers saw the name on the credit card and became jealous.
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Performance just suffered ... and suffered ... and suffered. We were getting further and further behind on shipping. I wanted to fire this kid but he was my partner's friend. It was just a wreck. Don't favor anyone- even your girlfriend if she works for you. 6. Check References: We had to hire people so fast; we didn't get to check their references all the time. You've got to do this. Most of the references on what turned out to be bad employees were bogus. And a simple phone call or two to the references would have helped us before we hired this employee. I even wanted to give my new hires drug tests ... but so many people were on drugs, we'd have no employees. 7. Avoid Hiring Friends and Family Members: I mean this two different ways. First, I have no problem hiring your own family members. Sometimes they're the only people you can trust and you can cuss them out when they fuck up and not worry about them suing you. I advise against hiring your personal friends, because their employment may last just a few months ... and he won't be your employee and he won't be your friend any longer. Trust me. But what I mostly mean by this #7 entry is not to hire employees that are friends or family members prior to working for you. If you hired Jim and Jim is a good worker and he wants you to hire Jack, his brother. .. and if you hire Jack and his work ethic is shit and you fire him, Jim, that once great employee will resent you. Also, if you hire Paul who refers three or four of his friends to come and apply, if they tell you they are friends of Paul, you should not hire them. When Paul is with his friends, he thinks he's rolling deep and is more prone to becoming a bad employee. When you fire Paul, .. you lose the three friends as well and nobody is there to answer your orders! And even if his three friends stick around, their performance will be shit because every day they'll be hearing it from Paul, saying I got you that job ... it's a shit job ... fuck them ...
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you should quit. Even if he doesn't quit, he'll think it is a bad thing to come to work for you. You don't need this. Say if you hired Paul's Mother and she messed something up. It's going to be weird bringing it to her attention, and what's worse, if she's a disaster, and you fire her, Paul's feelings will be hurt. One time I had an employee AI. He was an all right guy. He said his brother-in-law needed a job badly and we hired him. This was way back in 1998 before I had my "rules". Al turned into a bad seed and was looking to attempt to take-over the company by stealing its clients along with another employee. We fired him immediately as we did his friend. Now, Eddy, AI's brother-in-law still worked for us because he was a good worker and he did need the money- he had a little girl to take care of. But his sister, AI's wife was giving him shit ... and Al was giving him shit ... and I saw it in Eddy's eyes ... it was killing him. He didn't want to quit. He needed the money. But his family forced him to quit. It was a mess. Make it clear up front. WE DO NOT HIRE FRIENDS AND RELATIVES OF CURRENT EMPLOYEES! 8. Never Talk About Personal or Important Business News In Front Of Them: I remember I once had a problem with a merchant processor and they were cutting off our service. My partner and I were speaking of this too loudly and it got out to the workers. While this was no big deal to us, we got a new processor in a day or two; the employees were in a panic. This panic came through on their voices as we got less orders for a few days and we got a lot lower up sell percentages. Ordinary workers cannot be privy to core business news and issues. They cannot handle it. And they should not be privy to anything outside the scope of their job. They are hired to answer order calls- that's all they should know about. 9. Let Them Think You're Poor or Just Getting By: I never like my employees to think I am wealthy. I like them to think I am a hard worker and I work so hard, that they don't even want my life. They'd rather work by the hour and get paid by the
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hour because at Spm, they don't have to think about work until tomorrow. If an employee ever makes a comment about how you must be rolling in money, make sure to defuse it. Make sure to say something like, "Yeah, once I pay back my investors, I'm left with less than you make in a week." or something like that. If they say, "Wow, that's a nice Mercedes.", You say something like, "Yeah, and the lease payment is more than my rent!" or something like, "I live in a dump so 1 can have a decent car." 1O. Respect Your Product or ServiceIf you Don't, They Won't: Always make sure you never speak down about your products or service in front of your' employees. Even if you think the product is bad, keep it quiet. The second they hear you mocking your product; they'll think it's okay to think less of it. If they are answering your order calls, this will show through to the callers and you're going to get less and less orders. Your product is the best for the price you ask. 11. Monitor Your Phone Orders: I remember I was selling a product on an auto ship basis. I was checking the orders from the previous day and I was noticing a large percentage of the customers were not being placed on the auto-delivery club. 1 looked deeper and found all the non-auto ship orders were coming from our TV spots. I called the Supervisor in that department and asked him why his department was having a hard time keeping TV callers on the auto-delivery package. He was like, "What Auto-Delivery Package"? Now, this was the new Supervisor and the new crew I hired after I cleared house as I spoke about a few pages back. It turns out, the Office Manager who trained him forgot to tell him about a script to read to the people who placed orders off our TV ad. This script was the autodelivery script. He knew nothing about it, so he didn't have his employees read it. It was the office manager's fault. Had I not kept an eye on more than just how many orders came in the previous day ... but how many of them came from each source and how many opted-out of the automatic-deliveries ... I would have never discovered this costly mistake.
20ti
Always make sure your order takers are reading properly and monitor every thing they do.
their scripts
When companies get to a certain size they need employees. I once had over 100 at one time. It's sometimes frustratingespecially when you have partners- like I did who wanted to voice their own opinions (which will usually be wrong) and you have to fight him on firing certain "bad seeds" because he liked them as friends. Kill cancer before it spreads. Check references and make sure you're not hiring any axe murders. Do not hire friends of employees or their Mother's ... and make sure they cannot rip off what you created. Employees can be a much-needed asset as long as you know how to train them right and keep them in line. They are like wild animals in a way. If you're a poor trainer, they'll run wild and fuck up your entire place. If you have a friendly, but firm hand ... and treat people right ... and try not to be an asshole ... they'll work hard for you. If you treat them badly. If you treat them unfairly. If you make them jealous of you ... they'll look for any way to bring down your business ... with either hate websites slamming your company ... complaints to government agencies ... or even worse. This is why many business owners go to call centers, so they don't have to put up with this shit. These business owners ship their products through mail houses so they don't have shipping rooms. While this is all nice in theory, the quality of your response and the quality of your customer service will suffer.
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Chapter Forty' The Only 3 Ways To Grow Your Business
I'm not gonna take credit for this chapter. My Mentor Jay Abraham broke it down so beautifully- There's just three and only three ways to grow any business. We're going to go over the three methods and dig deeper into different tactics in each of the three methods. First, You can get more new customers Second, You can get customers Third, You can get customers
to buy.
to buy at a higher price. to buy more often.
That's it! Go ahead; think of another one as hard as you can ... you're not going to discover another method. Here's some ways you can get more new customers buy your product or service:
in the door to
1. Referral Systems: You can put into play referral systems where your existing customers can refer new customers to you for a bonus. Let's say if you send a letter in your orders ... or if you send a letter to all your existing customers and tell them for every customer they can refer to you, you'll send them $30 or so. All they have to do is have their friend call this special 800# to order. When the guy calls to place an order, you ask him who referred him to you. You take note and send the guy the $30 or whatever you promised him. 2. Acquire Customers at Break-Even and Profit On The Back-End: I was selling a pill a few years back that made money on some lists and broke-even on some larger lists. Sure, I could make some good money mailing the smaller lists and actually make a decent profit on the front end ... but the sheer volume I needed was if I used the
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lists that broke-even. These lists were much larger ... but I was not able to make a profit on the initial sale. But since I knew customers would buy a certain amount of times on the back-end, I was able to acquire these new customers at break-even and bank on the fact they'll buy a lot of product from me on the back-end. Jay Abraham tells a story about a company that was selling "fluid transmission" goods- like PVC. The company would have sales people calling on others to make sales. The initial sale had a profit of $250 or so and they gave the sales people 10% of that. The company owners knew that these new customers would buy a lot more over the course of the year and they would be worth about $1,000 more in profit over the next year. What Jay advised this owner to do is instead of commissioning just 10% to his salespeople ... he should give them 100% of the profit on the first purchase. The company owner would really fire-up the sales staff and the owner would make 3 or 4 times the profit on the back end sales because he'd have 3 or 4 times as many new customers! 3. Guaranteeing Purchases With Money-Back Guarantees: I've told you numerous times in this book, you cannot sell anything direct response mail order without offering your customer a money back guarantee. It's the industry standard and people are expecting some form of a satisfaction promise nowadays. But if you insist you do not want to offer a money back guarantee ... and you're looking for a way to grow your new customer intake ... this is one method to help. 4. Host Relationships: I talked about this is in a past chapter. A Host-Parasite Relationship is where you can have other businesses solicit their customers on your behalf and split the proceeds. Let's say you owned a film company and you knew of a guy who owned a camera company. What you can set up is a deal where he solicits his customers and tells them all about how great your film company is. And since his customers need film, as they are all camera customers ... it's a shoe-in and response should be great. Now, you would normally pay postage and printing in circumstances like this, and you'd probably split the profits 50/50. Nothing is set in stone ... you can alter this offer any way you and your host wish.
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Sure, you may be able to rent his customer list ... but the response will be many, many times more powerful when the sales letter is coming from the camera guy to his customers endorsing you. There's a big difference than you mailing them yourself. 5. Advertising in Magazine, on TV, on Radio: If you're mailing sales letters only and if they are profitable, maybe you should look into doing some space ads ... or radio or TV spots. Maybe even an infomercial! 6. Doing Direct Mail: The same as above ... if you're placing ads in magazines, on TV, or on the Radio ... you can increase the amount of new customers by doing some direct mail. 7. Increase Perceived Value of Your Product By Educating: I'm so tired of telling this story, because every direct marketer tells it. But its example is so powerful, 111 tell the story to you. Many years ago, advertising pioneer Claude Hopkins was hired by Schlitz beer to increase their sales. We're talking the 1920's. Claude Hopkins went to the Schlitz beer factory and saw some remarkable things. First, the bottles had to be steam cleaned several times before beer was to be inserted in them. They had several techniques they had to do before their beer was bottled. Claude asked the beer maker why don't they talk about all these steps in their advertisements. And they replied, they're nothing special... all beer makers have to do the same things. But the customer didn't know this. So what Claude did was create new advertisements for Schlitz explaining all the amazing steps their beer had to go through before it reached the lips of the consumer. Even though these steps were all standard-practice amongst all beer manufacturers, the consumer didn't know this. So, when the consumer read all about these amazing triple-cleaned bottles and the such, they had a higher value of the Schlitz product. Sales skyrocketed. Rolls Royce, for example can do this by explaining how their Connelly Leather Hides inside the car are nothing like the leather the consumer would find in Mercedes or BMW. The Connelly leather is actually raised without being fenced in by barbed wire
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like other cattle. The end result is flawless hides that do not have markings in them from when the cattle bump against the barbed wire. If your dietary supplement uses a super-potent extract that is above and beyond the ordinary ingredients you can use ... tell them all about how the ingredients you use are better. 8. Increasing Your Offer: This is as simple as adding a better premium ... adding more bonuses ... basically giving the customer more when he places an order. Just make sure it does not cut too much into your eTO. (contribution to overhead). Here's some ways you can get your customers to buy more on average: 1. Up sells:
We just talked about up sells and bumps a few chapters ago, so this should all still be fresh on your mind. I was able to jump the average unit of sale from $70 to over $100 just by adding some up sells and commissioning my salespeople to sell, sell, sell! Going from $ 70 to $100 on an initial average unit of sale is an over 40% increase in average unit of sale. Later, I'm going to show you how to explode your business, just getting a 20% increase on each of the three growth methods. 2. Improve Your Team's Up selling Skill: Up sells are great, but if you have bad or un-motivated salespeople answering the calls and doing the script reading ... it's useless. Bad salespeople are bad for business. You would not have a business if it were not for "selling" stuff. I get a kick out of people who say they want to be in business, but are bad at selling stuff. Even if you are writing sales letters, you are selling! A way to increase the up sell percentages, is to commission your salespeople ... if that only produces a few superstars ... fire the deadbeats or give them nonsales positions in your business and have nothing but up sell superstars on the phones!
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3. Offer Larger or Greater Units: When we sold our car waxes, we offered a pint size kit and we offered a quart size kit. Same product... just more of it at a discount. Companies like Costco and other warehouse clubs make a billion-dollar business out of selling consumers larger quantities for a better pound-for-pound price. Think of it this way, you may never sell the customer again ... so get as much as you can on the first sale. 4. Raise Your Price: Even a small bump in shipping and handling fees. Sometimes you can raise your price and not effect the order quantity. If you're selling a $60 product ... you may try to get $3 extra. That's 5%. This is probably the last and least popular method I've used in the past. Here's some ways you can get your existing customers to buy more often: 1. Have a Strong Back-End So You Can Go Back and Re-Sell: I was teaching you from the first chapter in this book ... if you do not have a strong back-end to go and re-sell over and over and over again ... I'd look at different products. I've had a strong back-end make the difference between a $2.4 Million a month company and a $7.2 Million a month company. And all of the added millions over $2.4 were basically all profit, as I did not need to spend a dollar on additional advertising. $4.8 Million in pure profit a month from simply having a kick-ass back-end is what makes this the best business in the world. . 2. Endorse Other People's Products To Your List: This is the same as the Host-Parasite Relationship I was speaking of earlier. .. but on the flip side. Instead of getting businesses to endorse your products to their list ... you're going to endorse other people's products to your customer list. What you'll have to do is go to other companies and see if they want to do a deal like this. Obviously, if companies are coming to you, you can get them to pay the entire postage and printing fees to solicit your database ... but if you're looking for them, you're
2~') I~
lucky to get a 50/50 ... and maybe you'll end up paying the entire postage and printing. If this is the case, don't cut them in on the profits ... See what they want to sell their product to you on a wholesale basis for. You'll know what it needs to be. If it's lower to get the product at wholesale than it is to split profits ... go the most profitable route. This is a powerful marketing concept and win-win for the other business ... but you'd be surprised how many businesses will not be interested in doing this with you! 3. Program Customers To Buy At Certain Time Intervals: Before all this Free Scheduled Maintenance carmakers are offering these days ... remember when they wanted you to come in every 3 months or 3,000 miles for an oil change? Now, you really may not have needed an oil change that often ... but they were programming you to come in every 3 months or 3,000 miles. Dentists have check-ups that may be annual ... or quarterly ... or whatever. If there's some way you can try to program customers to buy again ... that's always a plus ... unless it's less often than they would re-buy on their own. 4. Offer Price or Bonus Inducements For Frequency: The Smoothie store by my house does this excellently. When you buy a smoothie they stamp a card with 10 boxes on it. Every time I go in with this card, they stamp it once. If I forget the card, I get a fresh card stamped, as they'll accept 10 stamps even if they are on numerous cards. Anyway, once the card has 10 stamps on it, you get a free smoothie. I've seen this done at car washes ... coffee houses ... and a few other places. If there is some way you can use this on your direct sales ... you're doing well. You can also offer a free bonus with a certain purchase frequency. Remember I was saying about the free DVD players when a customer stayed on my product for six months? I was making $40 each and every month they took my herbal supplement ... I was getting four months on average. I could buy DVD players for $40 ... and I would give one to the customer once they took the product for 6 months. Now, the 6th month's revenue paid for the DVD player in full., , and I got the fifth month's revenue, when I wouldn't have gotten it as I had a 4 month customer life. When you're selling 40,000 people a month, that extra 40,000 people buying at
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$40 for the fifth month is $1.6 Million in free cash every month. The sixth month's revenue of $1.6 Million went right to buying the DVD player. And I d idrr't j u.st-serid the DVD player automatically to the customer. They had to remember they were on the product for 6 months and they had to call and request it. A good 30% never took us up on the DVD player because that was not the reason they were taking our product. Had they requested it, it was theirs. If they didn't, we profited even more. Now if you can get a 20% increase on the first method ... a 20% increase on your second method ... and a 20% increase on the third method ... you're going to blow the door off your business. Lets go back to my las~ company. I was bringing in 40,000 customers at $60. Then each customer bought three more times at $40 each time. That was it. This brought-in $7.2 Million a month. $2.4 Million from new customers ... then $4.8 Million from the back-end sales over the next 3 months. Now, if I was to increase the 40,000 orders by a humble 20% and bring-in 48,000 and instead of the $60 unit of sale ... if I was able to up sell them 20% to a $72 unit of sale ... I'm not looking at $2.4 Million anymore. I'm now looking at $3,456,000 in sales. Then instead of these customers buying three more times. at $40 ... lets say they're buying 20% more at the sarne $40. Now we've got $6,912,000 instead of the $4.8 Million. When you add up the 20% increase in sales ... at a 20% higher unit of sale ... and the customer buys 20% more often on the back end ... we're looking at $10,368,000 in monthly sales versus $7,200,000. And we'd get this extra $3.16 Million by increasing each of the three growth methods by a humble 20%.
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Chapter Forty One: Keeping Out of Jail
If you do not know what you are doing ... you can end up pissing off an Attorney General ... the Federal Trade Commission ... the Postal Inspectors ... or any of the other numerous Government "alphabet" agencies. Here's how to avoid the most common business mistakes that get direct marketers in trouble: Rule One: Ship Products Within ,30 Days Or Sooner! From the very day you charge the customer's credit card, or from the very day their personal check clears the bank ... you have 30days to get them their order. Most customers will caIl and bicker within two weeks if they have yet to receive their order. So if the product is going to take the full 30-days to get to your customer, make sure to tell them when they are on the phone placing an order. Now, you can ship products later than 30 days as long as you let the customer know. That's why you see some commercials saying, "allow 3 to 6 weeks for delivery" ... and sometimes even longer! If you cannot deliver the product within 30 days, make sure you tell the customer when they order. I like to ship my orders within 4 or 5 days max. Sometimes things are out of your control, like when you have a spike in orders and run out of pills or whatever, and the manufacturer says they're going to need 4 weeks to fill your purchase order. If this happens and it is after you spoke to a customer on the phone ... what you're supposed to do is send your customers a post card letting them know their order is going to be delayed a little bit and tell them you'1l give them a free bonus or something for their patience once you ship their order. This will keep many people from canceling. And on this post card, you have to give the customer the option to cancel his or her order.
r
This oost card is to be used for what we call "back orders". It1J read something like trus"I'm sorry, but it's going to take a little longer than I anticipate to ship your order of (product name). It seems we've had a massive sales spike, and we sold out faster than we thought. Our supplier is telling us the earliest he can have more product to us is (date). So, to make up for this delay, once we ship your order on (date), I'm going to include a free bonus worth (price). Here's what it is: (paragraph about free bonus). Of course, if you simply cannot wait until (date) to get your order, you can call us at (phone) and we'll issue a credit immediately. Again, I'm sorry for the delay. I understand you're anxious to get (product name)." Sounds good? You canuse
those words if you ever need to.
Rule Two: Give All Legitimate Credits Within 15 Days! Now, the key word is "legitimate". If someone is trying to rip you off, you can make your own judgment call. Most of the time, it's better just to give the money back- even if it's past the guarantee period by a few days. Trust me- if you're being too strict with credits and most of your customers place their order with credit cards, you're only asking for charge backs from the credit card company. And remember, if you jump over 1% in charge backs, there's a good chance you can lose the merchant account and where are you going to then process your orders? My advice ... Don't be a dick. .. but don't be a fool. Rule Three: Don't Lie To Your Prospects! If you hype your product in your ad- that's fine. If you use hyperbole ... that's fine. If you lie ... you're screwed.
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Sure, you may be able to get away with it for a little while ... but once an alphabet agency is sticking their nose all in your business ... it's nothing but a headache. Sometimes you may just be enthusiastic or over-enthusiastic when writing your ad ... and that's something all direct marketers do. Just don't push it too far. I got a new rule for myself. Unless I can get an expert such as a Doctor to say my product can do what I said it can ... and unless this Doctor can be a total stranger ... and would be able to go on a stand in a courtroom and tell the prosecution what I say is true ... I'll refrain from saying it. And if you want to make some crazy claims, make sure you get the back-up proof ahead of time. If you're saying this cream reduces cellulite by 36% ... you'd better find some scientific data to prove this ... and keep copies of it in a safe place other than your home or office. Key words to remember: An Ounce Of Prevention is Worth a Pound Of Cure. Get it ahead of time ... it's so much easier to get proof earlier than it is to get it later. Rule Four: Sell Products You Know Will Work As Claimed!
how
Or at least real close to you claim. I once read a story in a book by Joe Sugarman about a very popular infomercial marketer who once wanted to sell one of his products through Sugraman's company. Joe said fine but wanted to actually try the product to see how good it works. The popular infomercial marketer didn't want Joe to test the product and he told Joe about a story that I found funny: It was about this father and son. The father had all these cans of tuna and they were trying to sell the tuna- the only thing was the tuna was expired. They bought the tuna from someone else, and now they were trying to "unload" it on someone else. The kid said
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to his father, why don't we just eat the tuna?. and the father told the son, that an't eatin' tuna ... that's sellin' tuna. Joe declined to sell the product ... but the story is funny. Carlton Sheet's Real Estate program is sellin' tuna ... not eatin' tuna. If it were eatin' tuna ... he would not be selling the information ... he'd be using it to buy real estate. Most product I see on the market are what I call "sellin' tuna". Try to sell only what you feel at least works somewhat. Remember, your opinion of the product is your opinion. What matter is can you get in trouble for selling what you're selling? And do more than 10% of your customers ask for their money back. If you can honestly answer NO to those two questions, you should be fine. Of course, I'm no Attorney and in no shape to give you any legal advise, so I'd advise you to have an Attorney look at anything you may have questions or concerns about doing or selling. Also, if there are any "skeletons" in your closet ... make sure no employee, vendor, or customer ever knows of them ... because if there comes a time when you piss them off... or even if you don't... they can and will use this "skeleton" against you- and in some cases ... it can ruin you.
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Chapter Forty Two: Blunders That Cost Me Millions In this chapter, I'm going to tell you some of the top blunders that we've had over the past 10 years ... some which cost me MILLIONS of dollars. You1l make the same mistakes if you're not careful, so read this chapter and make sure you do not mess-up like I did. Having the wrong 800# on a direct mailer or ad: I remember once I was coming off a bad business, which lost me much of my fortune, and I tested a new sales letter than brought in great results. When I went to roll it out in a large quantity of 150,000 letters, either I misunderstood ... or my partner gave me the wrong 800# to put on these sales letters. We printed and mailed the letters and were wondering why four days after we dropped, we had just a few orders. It wasn't until one of the order takers came to me and said a lot of people were saying the 800# on the letter was wrong, so they had to call the 800# directory to get our correct number! When she came to me and said that, I knew that was what's wrong. I called the 800# in the sales letter and it went to some carpet cleaner's answering machine. Now you got to understand, if this mailer lost me money, I would be finished and out of business at least for a little while. I had to get it to work. One of the guys who worked for me got the carpet cleaner's 800# to forward to our lines. We were getting orders. What did he do? Did he cut some kind of a deal with these carpet cleaners? Turns out he called the phone company and simply forwarded the 800# to our number. This was wrong, and I'm not even sure if that was what he did ... but it got the orders coming back to my phones and while results were not as great as they should have been ... at
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least we made a little money and were able to come back and play another day. We fixed the 800# and my partner and I used to joke about this every time he was to give me a new phone number to add to a sales letter or advertisement. The carpet cleaner ended up finding out we took his 800# and kind of pissed off. We made him feel better when we gave him $5,000 for the 30-day usage of his number plus pay his phone which we did. We also gave him a bunch of software to donate the church he was a member of. Turns out the carpet cleaning business was out of business ... so we were lucky. Had it have a thriving business, he would have told us to screw-off.
was billto been
When you have an 800#, or phone service, or electric company accounts for your business ... make sure to add a password, which is needed in order to make any changes. Competitors can call the phone company and pretend they're you. They'll shut the phone lines off and you11 be wondering where all the orders went. Can this really happen? Yes. I even once had a competitor cut into the phone junction box in front of our building complex and pull our phone wires out of the connector! It took the phone company hours to figure out what was going on! We lost a ton of calls! Website Down: When we started using a website to aid in order taking, I had a big fear of these large companies offering hosting. I thought we'd have better up time hosting the site with our computer programmer. But was I wrong. There were many times the site would go down and I'd have to call him to reboot the server. One time, he lost power and instead of having a generator, he thought the server would be okay on the back-up battery. When that went dead a few hours later, I insisted he go and get a generator. He did, but not without cursing me out behind my back. I really didn't understand too much about web hosting back then ... and I wanted a single server to handle my website alone ... so I had my programmer put just my site on it's own server with it's own Tl line. So here we are paying $1,000 to host a simple 5-page site ...
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and we had so much down time, this guy lost me easily $200,000 in sales. Bottom line- only deal with professionals. If some one sucks, either a vendor or a customer. .. take the lesson and get rid of them. Phone Lines and/ or Phone System Down: When you get large, you're not going to simply have a few phone lines in an office. You're going to have a major phone system. Ours cost over $100,000 ... closer to $150,000. Now, I remember a few times when this big black box went on the fritz and no servicemen were available to come immediately. I'd have 50 order takers and 30 customer service reps looking at me with nothing to do ... knowing every secon~ that went by I was losing money. Seriously, I could take an easy $180,000 phone orders only.
in one day's time from
Call Centers That Don't Care: I once hired a call center in New Jersey. They promised me they were fully staffed and were able to handle my order calls overnight while we were closed. The first night they had the phones forwarded to them, I got 1/2 the orders I usually get. They were telling us that's all that called and I just remember thinking to myself, "Don't these assholes know how many orders I get? The next night I called and some "ignant" woman hung up on me after ringing the phone 8 or 9 times ... then when I went to call back, it was off the hook for at least an hour. I never saw anything like it. We immediately took our calls away from these jokers and they actually wanted to get paid for their time! Make Sure The Call Center Is Hooked Up Right! I remember I once tested a golf club and left all the calls at the call center. I was wondering why we didn't get any orders a week later. I called the num ber listed on my letter and nobody answered the phone! I called the call center and nobody in my office alerted them
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to look for calls on this number I used in the sales letter. My office screwed this up. You have to nip blunders in the bud. If you don't catch them fast enough ... they can run you out of business. If your phone lines are down... the customers are not going to call you back. If you're lucky, you'll get 40%. The same with the website. If it's down ... you're losing orders forever. Do not deal with unprofessional call centers or website hosting companies. The first sign of shit with them ... get rid of them. Also beware of these computer people. They like to put passwords on things in the system and they like to hold those passwords as a sense of Job security. Fuck this. If they want to get paid ... they have to hand over all the passwords.
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Chapter Forty Three: Knock-Offs
Once you run an advertisement a few times or run an infomercial a few times ... it's a sign to other marketers that you have a winner. Many direct marketers do not come up with their own ideas ... they steal other's winning ideas. One direct marketing pro told me once you see an infomercial run two weekends in a row ... it's a sign that it's a profitable show and other direct marketers will soon steal the idea. Now, I've had about a half dozen huge successes in direct marketing over the last 10 years. I've been knocked-off at least four times. One guy who stole one of my products makes over $200 Million and even is the majority sponsor of a Nascar! Another knock-off brags in his infomercial that he's sold a quarter of a billion dollars worth of "his" product. Good for him. May he choke and die. But I really cannot hate them for what they've done. My fiancee Suzanne gets so mad when she sees one of the knock-off's TV commercial on TV. I tell her this: Say we were broke or doing poorly. If we saw this product that someone else was marketing that was making him millions. If we can copy that identical product and market it ourselves and make ourselves millions, so we can buy the mansions ... the Ferraris ... the dream vacations ... would her morality keep her from doing it? It takes her about a second to say she'd do it. I then say, well how
can we be mad at someone who'd do the same thing we'd do?
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Maybe I'm fooling myself with this bullshit. .. but it does sure work to calm me down. It's a form of a compliment right? Well, lets not push it. If you're selling a dietary supplement, it can be knocked-off in a few minutes. A book on a particular subject? Sure, you can copyright the book, but if I know the "topic" is hot, I can just create my own book. But while it may be impossible to prevent knock-offs from stealing your ideas on most products, you can try to prevent them from succeeding. This chapter is going to tell you how I held some of these copycats on the ground, while I rocketed to the moon. Direct Mail Is Most Secret: When you advertise in magazines or run TV commercials, they are for everyone's eyes to see. When you have letters in the mail.Tt is very secretive. But, if you have a hot promotion in direct mail, why should you hold yourself back and not run magazine ads? You shouldn,'t. What I like to do is build-up enough money in direct mail that I can ron-out on a big scale in magazines. It would take a knock-off months to catch up and gain the market-share 1 have established. This of course comes with some risks. You'd better pick quality magazines and you better not pay too much. Direct Mail is much harder to get to work than magazine advertisements. So, if you're making money on direct mail, it's pretty safe to assume you can make money in print ads as long as they are in quality magazines and you do not pay too much. Remember, $20/M to $30jM for full-page advertisementsthat's all. And if you can get them cheaper- do so! Magazine Ads Awake Knock-Offs In 3 to 4 Issues: As soon as I see an advertisement running in a publication 3 or 4 times, especially if it is a full page ad ... and especially if it is an expensive magazine ... I'll know the damn thing is working for them. Your competitors will come to the same assumption. What they don't know is how much you are paying for the ad ... so you've got to get ads for the lowest price you can. I'm sure there are direct marketing pros reading this book who think I'm crazy to buy space for $20 per thousand paid readers. If they can buy space for
f 2R4
cheaper, maybe they should contact me and become my media buyer because I can't get it any less. EXCLUSIVES: This is a tactic I've used for years and it's worked like a charm. I pissed off all my knock-offs with this tactic ... and I loved every second of it. What I do once I know I have a winner in direct mail and want to expand into magazines is get exclusives. An exclusive is when you go to a magazine and first negotiate a price. Then tell them you want to be the only marketer of whatever you're selling to be allowed to advertise in that magazine. Now, this is not going to work if the magazine already has advertisers selling similar products. This is meant for original products. The magazine may have no problem with this because they are not being flooded with marketers wanting to place ads for the same products you're selling at the time. But the key words are "at the time". Once you get going and the knock-offs come out of the woodwork. .. they'll be hounding every magazine you advertise in. You've already done the research and proved that magazine works. If you wait to try to get exclusives until after knock-offs are flooding the magazine, it's going to be a lot harder. .. a lot more expensive ... or damn near impossible. Why would the publisher revenue from his business just to help you? He's not.
cut
So, if you've got a hit and want to expand to magazine ads, get exclusives right after you negotiate price. If the magazine wants you to pay $21,000 and you want to pay $20,000 ... the dealmaker for them could be the exclusive. I remember I placed ads in Maxim Magazine a few years back. Maybe you remember me ... I was giving away a Lamborghini? Anyway, I got Maxim down to $50,000 per page in black and white. They had 2.5 Million paid copies sold ... so that's $20 per thousand paid copies sold. Good! Then I wanted an exclusive to keep knock-offs from coming in the same pages I ran. They said they wanted $10,000 extra per page.
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That's a 20% premium ... but since I was getting the pages for $20jM or $20 CPM ... 1 budged ... but made them throw-in full color. .. which I used sparingly just to mimic their layout. Did competitors hate it? You betcha! Did I keep them out? Yup. Sure, they could have copied my product very easily ... but if they couldn't solicit large volumes of customers like I could ... they stood no chance. Some magazines would not offer me an exclusive and I found out I really didn't need them in some situations. Like FHM ... They would not offer an exclusive to me, and let 3 or 4 of my competitors in the pages with me. Month after month, they all fell out. Within three months, they were no longer advertising in FHM. But this would have not been the case if these marketers were good at creating advertisements. Lucky for me, they weren't. The publisher should have taken the exclusive. You Can Negotiate Position When Renting Lists: Say you're renting a certain mailing list and it's working good for you. Let's say there are four other marketers mailing this list with similar offers as you have. You can increase your response by going to the mailing list manager and telling them you 11 pay a premium to get the monthly hotline names before ariyone else. Check this out ... if someone stole or "copied" my sales letter and got their hands on the lists I rent before I do ... I'll get horrible response when I go to mail my letter to this list. If you want to try to get the list first, get a relationship with the manager and ask them if they can call you the very day the list is updated ... and see if they can rent you first- without paying. If they want to make a little extra money ... grease them ... as long as it's more profitable to you. In magazines, if you do not get an exclusive, do you know what the publisher or advertising rep is going to do as soon as he gets your ad? If there's a lot of people selling similar products as yours ... He's going to call all your competitors and tell them, "Look, Vince just gave us 4 pages! You should get in here as well. We can offer
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you a better deal!". The deal is no better you can be sure of that ... but they will call your competitors and try to egg-them-on to run ads. Keep in mind, they're a business. Remember ... the answer to 9 out of 10 questions is MONEY. you can always get what you want for enough money. 2-Steps vs. I-Steps: If you run 2-step advertisements in magazines instead of I-steps ... you can keep a lot of the "workings" to your offer in the dark. Remember like I was saying in a previous chapter, knock-offs are usually lazy. They do not have it in them to go through all the steps of your advertisements to see if there is something behind it all. A 2-step ad can keep your "secret" a secret a little longer. Sue If You Have a Case: If you have a case, like when someone totally violates your businesses advertisements, trademarks, etc., try to resolve your differences between yourselves before you hire an Attorney. But if that goes nowhere, and it usually will not go anywhere, go and see an Attorney. But make sure the Attorney is not telling you that there is a case there just to create some work for himself. Attorneys are scumbags and I haven't met one I like. Milking money from misery scumbags. But if you need to use one ... you need to use one. Just make sure you don't get milked too much. Don't Slump To The Knock-Offs Level In Print: Do you know what's funny? Knock-Offs steal your idea and probably 50% of your ad ... just hyping the claims a little. You say 66% ... they'll say 67%. But what's worse than anything, is that they'll actually talk shit about you and your product in their ad! Maybe they'll even call themselves the original! To the new reader of the magazine ... what does he know? He didn't see your ad first. What I usually do is go to the publisher and tell them I was an advertiser for a long time and see if they can get the advertiser to refrain from talking shit in their ads. If the publisher helps, great. If he doesn't, what are you going to do ... pull your ad and leave all the revenue to this knock-off? If you do, he's got everything he wanted!
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Now, an inexperienced direct marketer may look to immediately slam the other advertiser back in his ads. Don't do this. The consumer does not care about your pis sing fight with this knockoff. Take the higher road. Seriously. When the consumer sees this guy slamming you and talking all this shit, while your ad piles on creditability ... the customer is going to call you. Maybe the knock-off comes in with a lower price. That's their specialty. Who cares? Do not lower your price to meet theirs. What you need to do is add creditability to your ad. More testimonials ... a larger ad favorable magazine articles ... better guarantees ... a free bonus an endorsement ... etc. You want to be more creditable and you'll win. Don't Let Web Marketers Free Ride On Your Trademark!: Keep an intellectual property person on this. If your product is www.Skinceuticals.com, they'll register www.Skinceuticals.net ... and www.buySkinceuticals.com. These pages will just forward to their pages with their products. Once you get large enough ... if you're lucky enough to get large enough ... fighting off scum will be a full time job. Just don't make it yours. Hire someone. You must keep focused!
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Chapter Forty Four: In Closing
I cannot believe I was able to squeeze this book out in 17 short days! I sure hope it doesn't read like it took 17 days. I hope it was an experience you'll never forget for the rest of your life. I hope I was able to alter your life at least in a small way. Hopefully you become a multi-millionaire! I sure gave you all the tools I used to get there 48-times_ over! This book may take a few times to read for everything to absorb into your brain. 111tell you one thing ... it's easier for this information to be understood if you have an idea for a product in mind while you are reading it. Trust me. People have copied what I've done and made themselves $200 Million empires ... and they were not taught like you were in this book. There's no reason why you cannot make your dreams come to reality with this book. If you're having a hard time changing the way you think ... go and get Napoleon Hill or Bob Proctor's book as I talk about in the epilogue. What they teach, you cannot put a price on. The basis of their work is this: • Your mind has two parts. The conscious and the sub-conscious. Ask yourself to create an idea of your "dream" life. No matter how crazy some of the things sound, write them down in bullet-form. I don't care if you'd wish you'd own a Rolls Royce and a $20 Million Estate ... and you're famous and you're going out with a beautiful celebrity ... whatever you dream- write it down. Pretend you still have the wild imagination of a child. That imagination we used to have was God's greatest gift to us and our teachers, our parents, our friends all told us to "kill" it. How stupid they were!
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Now vou have this list of 20 things or so you wish you'd have in you; life. Now, write them down in present tense as if you already have them. So, it won't be, "1 want a Rolls Royce Phantom" ... it'll be "I own a Rolls Royce Phantom. It's black with a red leather interior." Now make a list of the good things in life you want and write them in present tense. This is called your list of affirmations. Now, write down your perfect life... , which would include many, if not all of the things you've listed, you already "had". It should take a page or two.
On the top of this page, write the date in which you want the goal to materialize. Don't set it too close ... but don't set it 10 years away either. Maybe six months away ... maybe a year away like this book's title, "The 12-Month Millionaire". Now, everyday ... sometimes twice a day ... sometimes three times a day, rewrite the perfect life over and over again. The more "impressions" you make on your sub-conscious mind, the quicker these results will materialize for you. I'm being serious. This is the "secret" of the rich and famous. This is the "secret" they've used to build their fortunes. Now you can use it yourself. Does it work? Let me tell you a personal story of what I wanted back in 1994, when r was just 20 years old ... without a business ... or riches of any kind. Look at what I dreamed ... and look what I gotI wanted a black Rolls Royce. Black with a black Everflex roof and a cream interior- under 20,000 miles and it had to be a 1991 or newer. I ended up with a 1991, black Rolls Royce, Cream interior, Everflex roof. 17,000 miles, 1991 model year.
Black
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a
1wanted business that was clean and long lasting over $20,000 a week in gross sales.
that grossed
Within 60 days of doing this, I had a $20,000 a week business that was clean and long lasting. It eventually made me $40,000 a week. I wanted to have a funny personality and be a "good talker". I currently was out of the loop for a few years studying and lost my "personality" . I was immediately funny, ou tgoing and was meeting women almost instantly, where I had a dry spell for three years while I studied. ] wanted my Mother who has a terminal disease to be healthier. She used to live in New Jersey and always called me telling me how she didn't feel so good. She ended up moving out west with us a few years later and her health is good. I wanted a $500,000
home with a maid to take care of me.
When I wrote this, I lived with my Uncle. A few years later, I had a $4 Million Home and a $2 Million Home at the same time and I had full time maids that kept the place clean and picked up my child from school and even babysitted on the weekends if we needed her. I could go on ... I listed a few more things that all came true. And while they may not seem like big deals to me right now, they were written in 1994 ... and in 1994 I didn't have too much. This stuff was HUGE for me to be thinking about back then. But they all came true. Trust me HILL... PROCTOR. .. KARBO. You need to read these books. This stuff sounds freaky ... and it is. But this is the way we were wired as humans. This is how we get ahead in life. When we have a success, we do some of the stuff these guys teach ... it's just we
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didn't know we were doing it. Once you know how to do it at will ... the World is yours! Once you plant the stuff you want into your mind ... the mind makes your body change its vibrations. And everything you want in life is attracted to you through the law of vibration. You've got the best book on direct response ... the best book that can teach you how people make millions of dollars- fast ... now you've got to go out and get one, two, or all three of these self-help books I've listed in this book. If you ever need to contact me, my contact this book. Feel free to email me.
information
is listed in
Let's get going! You've got to be a millionaire within the next year ... or else I'm a fraud. Get cracking! Good luck, my friend.
THE BEGINNING
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BONUS CHAPTER ONE: Fishing.
I am a fisherman. But not in the ordinary way. J do not go on a boat with a fishing rod. I send direct mail sales letters to pools of prospects and wait to see how many "bites" I get. Now, the "product" I'm selling is just a means to an end. It's the "bait" on my hook, so to speak. I really do not care what I'm sel1ing as long as it makes the fish bite ... and bite well. . You'd never hear a Professional fisherman saying, I'm not using a particular type of bait because I'm not "interested" in it. .. or it's "gross"... or I'm "embarrassed" by it. NO. As long as the bait makes the damn fish bite ... it could be anything. I feel the same way about products. You shouldn't care so much about what they are, as long as they pull in the orders. And that's what this entire business revolves around ... you having strong enough bait to pull more revenue in orders than what it cost you to mail the sales letters in the first place. You also have to make sure you're fishing in the right pool of water. If you're looking for a certain type of fish, and they are not known to be in the stream you're fishing in ... get the hell out of it! 111repeat it again. Forget everything about copy ... guarantees ... headlines ... etc. These are just things that make your selling job more powerful. What it's all about is having the right product, with the right appeal. .. to the right group of people. You could be the greatest copywriter in the world, and that is not going to guarantee you'1l make millions every time you mail a new
l
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letter for a new product. If that were true, I sure as hell wouldn't waste my time writing this book, I'd be writing sales letters! The right product will and ears open. Listen you'd be amazed what magazines ... all types
come to you. You just have to keep your eyes to everyone. By listening to other people ... you pick up. Read everything. All types of of books ... newspapers, etc.
Try to find a huge wave and ride the damn thing. If you're seeing that low-carb stuff is in, make some sort of product that piggybacks off the demand for low carb stuff... a low carb diet newsletter ... a carb-blocker diet pill.,; etc. Look for these waves and ride them. Look at the iPod from Apple. Do you see how much money these after market accessories manufacturers are making? You want the best bait. In order to find it ... find a huge need or desire or pain and make it all better for your prospect. You can find and create hot products by riding the waves.
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BONUS CHAPTER TWO: How To Lose $48,000,000 In a Day
In the first paragraph of this book, I asked you if learning a new business from a guy who pleads guilty to horrible crimes, lost millions of dollars, and was even facing jail time was a bad idea. Remember? Well, I knew you wouldn't let me finish off this book without explaining what the hell I was talking about. I'm sure a lot of people reading this book said, "Why the hell would this nut start his book with a paragraph like that?" The answer is simple. 1 don't fucking care. I'm not embarrassed by anything that has happened to me in the past. Why? Because I was a victim of corrupt Government. Look- I wouldn't want to learn anything from a guy who has lived the pampered life. I want to learn from the guy who has seen the top of the mountain ... as well as the basement of the jail. That's the guy who has the "right" information for me. You see ... I was pretty darned successful. I had over $10 Million in my checking account alone. 1 had mansions allover the place. Dream cars. Everything. What people do not realize is that once a product is successful and you're mailing letters or running ads in large quantity ... you have to keep an eye on every aspect to make sure you keep your aircraft "floating" . For some, running the business and keeping it "floating" is a huge responsibility. As it was for me.
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Anyway, here I'm worried only about running the business and keeping the numbers right. I'm not focused on being a "target". My business partner had some sort of an altercation with one of the employees- a limo driver. Anyway, I knew nothing about any friction between these two guys until it was too late. So, the limo driver ended up getting fired or quitting- I don't know. He was so pissed at my partner for whatever reason, and instead of just letting it go, he went to the local Police Department and said my partner fondled his son! Yes. So, the Detective had to investigate this serious allegation, and he did. And it went nowhere. The Detective told the limo driver to buzz off. Was the ex-limo driver satisfied
yet? Not in a million years.
What this guy then did, was go to the Attorney General of the state I was operating my business in. He went in and told the prosecutors a story about how my partner and I were in the mob and how we were paying off the mob ... and how we laughed at the customers who bought our products, because they were bogus ... and how we never gave customers credits, etc. Nice guy. I thought the saying was a "woman" scorned ... not a limo driver. So anyway ... Instead of the State doing a little research into this guy, his false "fondling" story and maybe even giving us an opportunity to respond to these allegations ... they created Forfeiture for Seizure Warrant and got a Judge to actually "help" them polish it! So, one day my partner and I was at the bank and the Manager of the branch (who wanted to work for us) comes over and asks, "Why are all your accounts frozen?" We looked at him like he was crazy,
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so we rushed back to the office to call our Attorney. Well, wouldn't you know ... as we were pulling up. tons of men with shields and guns blazing were storming our building. I kept driving. 1 had to get to the Attorney to see what the hell was going on. Turns out, the State with their "witness" are suing us for fraud and money laundering and a list of other horrible things. That was fine. But what they did was forfeiture. A forfeiture is when the State comes in and takes all your assets- your cars- your homes- your bank accounts- even the engagement ring off my Fiance's finger! Now, how the hell can you fight a case with no resources? In a way, I wish I were doing something wrong when they seized everything. If I were doing something wrong, I would have stashed millions of dollars and had Passports ready to flee. But I had just $2000 in my pocket and a Rolex on my arm. I got a friend to lend me $]00,000 for the Attorney. The Attorney ate through this in two or three months. Gary Halbert says it best ... You're innocent until oroven broke. The State locked up all our records so we couldn't review Merchant Statements that would have shown we fully gave credits. They withheld so much information, and fought so unfairly. my Jewish friend said, "It's Nazi Germany!" On top of taking all your money and assets, they also stack Criminal charges sky-high. But they never file them ... they just threaten you with them. Why did they do this? They wanted the $48 Million my partner I had.
and
Let me tell you, when you're being threatened with 10 or 20 years in prison, .. even if you are 100% innocent, there's still some element of risk. Especially, w hen you have no money to hire a good Attorney. Not only that, but who's going to pay for all those experts you have to hire? They do not work for free.
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The State knows if YOLl cannot afford to fight the case, and if they stack the threat of Criminal charges deep enough, you'll probably just forfeit all your assets to them and go away. A windfall. You see, when they seize all your assets, the only way they can actually "keep" them is to have you sign them over (usually in some sort of a plea bargain deal) ... or if you get convicted at trial. And then of course, your ass is going to jail as well. 1 always had the belief you can make money, and you cannot make time. But I was not ready to give up just yet. But maybe 1 should have ... because the State started looping in other people into the criminal charges. My Fiance, who was nothing more than a girl who handled payroll and Human Resources. The State was looking for me to buckle. They could charge whomever they wanted, and the charges mayor may not stick. .. but the punishment is in the process. All the pressure took its tali a year into this. My partner and I struck a plea deal where we'd forfeit $47 Million in cash and assets and plead guilty to money laundering and fraud schemes. In return, we'd put this behind us, and keep family members out of the hot seat we were in. The State just wanted the money. So, the lesson to be learned here: If you make a ton of money in this business ... or in any business ... keep it protected. Do not have visible, seizable assets. The Government
will rob your ass.
What to know something funny? After we entered our pleas, that ex-limo driver called our Attorney and told him he wanted to talk. Turns out the investigators told him when they first met him that they would give him as much as 10% of what they seize from us. That would have been like $4.8 Million. Hell, T know people who'll make up shit about people they like for the chance at $4.8 Million ... let along some guy who hates us!
The reason why he came forward? The State never paid h im l And he was pissed and wanted to get back at them the same way he wanted to get back at us. But it was too late. We erite red the plea already wouldn't let us out of the piea!
and the .Judge
I'm not going to reveal the state J was in ... but 1 will ten you that it is a "good old boy" state and it is very corrupt. I ended up getting sentenced former partner.
to 6 months
in ja ii. .. as did my
The $48 Million the State seized was s'uppo sed to go to all the victims we created with our products. While 1 was in the joint, I was reading a newspaper article about us. The State claimed they received just over 5000 requests for refunds from our customers. Our products
sold for $50. Do the math. That's
$250,000
in
refunds ... which is just what we would have given back in two week's time. But Vi/hat is the State going to do with the other $47,750,000 they seized from us? Windfall profits! Hell, even the building our business was in ... it was supposed to be liquidated for the "victims". Well, The US Customs Office is in it. They just decided, "Hey, we like this building ... lets take it." It's really that easy for these guys. Don't have seizable assets. If you have nothing for them to take, they do not care about putting you in jail. All they are after is the money. And your Lawyer will make back office trades with your money! Theyll make deals with the State where theyl1 make sure you give the State all your seized assets in exchange for the State going light on one of their "Violent" criminal clients. Believe me ... It's true.
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One of our Attorneys has a friend, who had a son. This son got into an argument with someone and while the guy was walking away. the kid shot the guy in the back! Now, two bad t h irigs here: One- the guy was walking away ... and two, the gunshot was above the waste! The guy was almost dead ... but pulled through. Somehow, our Attorney got this kid got off with just six years of probation! And I went to jail! Go figure. if I could go back in time, this is how I would have prepared this better: 1. i would have had two million dollars in cash buried other than my house or my office.
for
somewhere
2. I would have had clinical studies for any dietary supplement I sold. I would have had all the experts saying how well it worked, before it required them to say it in a court of law. 3.1 would have never had any of my assets seizable . My house. my cars, my bank accounts. My bank accounts would have had a little money in them ... but all the real "pot of gold" would have been protected - pro ba bly in some other country. 4. i would have had Passports for all my family involved. It's easier for you to negotiate when you are not under US law. 5. I would have looked over each one of my ads with a magnifying glass. I would have had the ads critiqued by an Attorney. I would have made sure I have solid proof of every claim, and I would have kept all this solid proof off site. Not in my home or office. Somewhere hidden. 6. This was out of my control, but 1 would never make an employee quit or get fired mad. Now, when this guy cannot get a new job and is having financial problems, the fir st thing he wants to do is make you have financial problems.
3UO
7. Have a back-up copy of your complete database on one of those new flash memory key chains. jf things get horrible, you can always count on making a ton of money with your house file. If 1 had mine, 1 could have reaped an easy $4 Million. Keep the database on your key chain. 8. Try to lease at least one of your cars and make sure you have enough money hidden away to pay the entire time of the lease. For example, a $] 000 a month lease for rhree years- Have $36,000 buried. And don't forget about insurancei The Government cannot seize "leased" assets. Maybe do the sa-me for your home. i mention
the guy who created Girls Gone Wild a few times in this book. He recently ran into a problem in Florida. Agents seized his Ferrari and his private jet. But they had to return the jet as it was leased! In the long run, he beat the case and all charges were dropped. But the jet did come back to him immediately. 9. I would have had copies of all Merchant Statements and other important documents in a location other than my home or my office. important information you need to prove your innocence will be "lost" by Prosecutors. Always have your own copies. These 9 things are worth a million bucks. Over a million bucks. If you see yourself getting huge ... make sure to listen to them. Don't learn the hard way like I had to. Politicians, Prosecutors, and ALMOST EVERY GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE are scurnbags. You have to be a certain type of person to do these jobs. You have to be a scumbag. Seriousiy, had 1 obeyed these 9 things 1 had to learn the hard way ... I'd be sitting on an extra $40,000,000 and more. There are probably only a handful of direct marketers that can tell you as much as I can. I've seen it all. The good ... the bad ... the ugly. When you make your millions, make sure to protect them.
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E·piingUA' 'IV
"'_
Ttle rYiillionaire's Library
Tested Advertising
Methods- John
Caples
This is a great and classic book that really taught advertising. I think this book is a must-read!
me about testing
The Lazy Man's Way To Riches- Joe Karbo Joe is the man. His book was one of the first books I've read on direct response. The first half of the book teaches about DynaPsych. The first few chapters of this book changed my life for the better and a more powerful and profound level than just learning how to do mail ord er , It taught me how 1 can rely on myself to get anything in life I need or want. Once you're finished with my book you should go and read Joe's as soon as you can! Breakthrough
Advertising-
Eugene Schwartz
1 looked for this book for over eight years! it was fir st published
in 1966 and then again in 1984. And finally again in 2004. When it was first published in 1966, the author claims it sold only a few thousand copies! The new publisher of it said he brought this book hack to the rnar ket because he found an older copy selling for $900 on the Internet! Was this book worth the eight years it took me to finally find it? Yes. Eugene taught me many things. One of them is that if I put a potential drawback or negative claims before a positive claim, it Blakes the positive claim four to ten times as powerful as the claim presented by itself. And where most marketers add hype to their ads and sales letters when they do not work ... and get no better results ... when the real reason why the ad failed is that the prospect didn't believe the claims. Hyping the claims in the second attempt does not make it better. Maybe going in the opposite direction will produce better results ... water down some claims ... or add some negative facts about the product to make the good stuff seem more believable. This book was written
r 302
by a scientist more than a copywriter. Schwartz was Doth. it's not a light read and requires two or three readings or more to grasp what he is saying. Scientific Advertising/My
Life in Advertising-
Claude Hopkins
This is the classic book which David Ogilvy said that nobody should have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book 7 times. I believe it. Hopkins was one of the first guys to teach about advertising techniques being scientific- meaning they can be based on scientific principles. This is an old book. .. but it is a must read.
Ogilvy On Advertising-
David Ogilvy
I like David Ogilvy. 1 was upset when right after he died a few years ago, I saw his most recent book on the "deep-discount" table in Barnes and Noble. You can learn a lot about his two layout formulas- which I have borrowed many times. 2239 Test Secrets Don Jackson
For Direct Marketing
Success-
Denny Hatch and
if 1 had just one book to advise you buy regarding direct marketing success ... I'd say for you to buy this one. It's really not a "book" ... but more a listing of many) many expert's opinions regarding different aspects of direct marketing success. Want info on envelopes? Flip to the envelope chapter and read what a few dozen professionals have to say. It lists all their opinions. SeriouslyDenny Hatch and Don Jackson put together one hell of a book here. I've had a copy sitting on my coffee table since 1999 and I refer to it almost weekly. You've got to get this book now! Think and Grow Rick- Napoleon
Hill
I envy people who do not know about Hili's teachings and are about to learn it for the first time. Hill changed my life. I was able to figure out how people are successful. This is a classic book. A must read!
Money Making Secrets Of Jay Abraham Wizards- Jay Abraham
and Other Marketing
1 first got this large 400-page book in 1995. 1 still have it within five feet of me right as I'm typing this. Jay Abraham was probably one of, if not THE biggest consultants who inspired me the most. I remember first learning some of the stuff in this book and j was floored. It'11 set you b ack <3 few hundred ... I thin k like $400 .. _ hut if you have it ten years later and can still refer to it, it's a good investment. The Robert Collier Letter Book- Robert Collier I looked for this book for years. I finally got a copy from TWI Press when they re-issued it. A great book that really explains how to write copy and how to make copy seem "real". Your copywritirig ability will be greatly improved after you read this rather large book. A gold mirie! How to Win Friends
and Influence
People- Dale Carnegie
This classic teaches you how to get what you want by giving others what they want. Not really about mail order, or direct response selling ... but it is a must read for anyone looking to "sell" either in person or through print media. You Were Born Rich Seminar
Tapes- Bob Proctor
I love Bob. Seriously, when I'm feeling down or in a bad place, I always pop on Bob's VHS cassettes of this seminar from the late 1980's and it turns my life around every time! Bob basically teaches what guys like Karbo and Hill teach, but he does it in a current-day way. Bob Proctor has worked with many famous corporations and to learn what he has to teach is a blessing to the way you think for the rest of your life. You've got to understand, once you learn what Proctor teaches ... you can never be the same. You'll have the "blueprint" for success. These tapes are priced around $600 ... but again, worth every penny.
You Were Born I.(_ich-Bob Proctor if the seminar tapes cost too much, you can get his book that inspired the seminar. The book will run under $20 and it's a powerhouse! The Gary Halbert Letter- www.thegaryhalberttetter.com This is a free site of my pal and mentor Gary Halbert. He's the selfproclaimed "Best Copywriter In The World" who's made hundreds of millions for the people he's worked with over the years. This site is basically copies of his famous newsletter dating back to 1986. It's free and it's a must read. You're going to want to get on his list so you can get alerte~ every time he posts a fresh newsletter. Advertising Secrets of the Written Word- Joe Sugarman Marketing Secrets of a Mail-Order Maverick- Joe Sugarman Triggers- Joe Sugarman All three of these books are great. in my opinion, The Sharper Image would not exist today if it were not for Joe. Joe also created Blu Blocker sunglasses. You've got to read all three of these books. Joe is a fabulous marketer for 30 years! How To Write A Good AdvertisementThis book is professionals I'd definitelv~ after reading
Vic Schwab
published by Wilshire Books. Many direct response say if there is just one book to read ... this is the one. sav~ this book is MUST READ and ~ vou will be smarter it.
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"How You Can Hire Me- a One-MHtion-DoHarPer-Year rViarketing Expert (to PERSONALLY coach you through every step towards massive success) ... For Just $1.3.70 a Day:" ask me <:lJlthf_: time" how much it wo uld cost for rnr: to and work for their company and help them sec their way to .~n~t.ssiveStlc:cess,
People
f tell them 1wouldrit eve n consider it for a cent under dollars per year. .. and that may still not be enough!
CUITIe
a million
, .. B.nd. E.t· \/0 I_I ve' re.allv read the thing and got this far. .. you know I am one of (if not) "The" best direct marketer s o u t rigrlt n ow. i
But no matter how good i am", I have
fl.
strtaH problem:
I've kind of realized something a few years ago. I really do not care for "running" a business. The day-to-day shit is not for me. What I do love to do 1'5 think up riew profit strategies". create killer copy ... and maximize profits. Also- I've made more than my fair share of millions of dollars in this business. For me, I now get my kicks helping other marketers to m akc themselves R fortune. 80- considering
what I've discovered about myself ... and. considering how much of a value I could be to an Entrepreneur like yourself who cannot round-up an extra million bucks to pav me ... I think I have created a solution that can add millions to your bottom line and still keen me inter-ested in hFininp' V()\ 1- t-'vFn r -- considering its really small dollar amount. .l-
-
--
-
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-
-
-
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~~~
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Like I was saying above." I'd demand H million bucks in annual pay to sit under your roof..; in an office ... and to be there for every
question or concern business.
your pretty little
mind may have about
YOU.!
In realitv- even if yo u D.':l.id me that million bucks. you'd probably speak with me maybe once a week. .. twice tops. So I got thinking.
What I did was come up wit h '.1 m.unber. This number was the amount of clients or projects I can handle if I were a consultant hire, I'd nul myself H "Hired. Gun". The number I carrie up with 200.
for \vB.S
So that m ean s I can handle 200 different clients at a time and still be able to answer every phone call. .. every email... and every letter with mind-boggling, p rofit-eh att ering answers, \VhRt J rh en did wes divide S 1,000,000
hy that 200. I came IIp with $5,000. That would be the fee I would need to be paid by 200 clients to make ITl.Y erie mil1i8I1 do llar s in arirrual pa:,".
Five grand is a pittance- especially when you consider marketing experts such as .Jay Abraham charge $5000 for one sing1e hour ... and I think you may have to book him in 2-hour blocks. That's
TEN GRAND for 2 hours. Even R novice dircct ma rket ing expert would chnrgf' $500 TO $1000 an hour to te1l you stuff you may already know ... or even worse ... that may be abaol'utcly INCORRECT! !want JUST S5000 for the whole frl$:r~in' year. . ~ For this $5000 ...
YO'Ll'!!
receive
8.
"special" business
card ..
Here's what this card has listed on it ... 1.
j'1/fy
office nurnber.i ,
connects
you right into my office phone
2 .. Af!! home nurnber.. . corinecte you right into my residence 3. l'vly cellular number to get a hold uf me uihereuer I am ... arid
,Ii
4. 1;1l1.1:)c·r.~:()n(Il crnud (.!Jlclress reserved f?_-:(c-.luslur.:-lI.:,f for ttLe 2()() clients ... This way ... before uie actually speak- you can shoot me an etriai! first if you cfwusc urid then I can loo): ouer eueruthiruj and think about it for a second and [hen i can call you back with the
answer,S. This entire
thing
is a re al good id.e~_.
You get to pester me- pro b ably the best direct marketer in the county right now- with all of your questions. 1 can help you guide ariu firw_nces. to the etratosrihere! -your - business -
-
.._
-.
Seriously- could. you image how successful you would be with ME in YOUR corner? What about if I found a way to guide you to a 100 Million Dollar idea? 1've done it before. The best parr about this is you're going to get rvlE in \'OUR corner for under $14 a day. FOURTEEN FUCKING DOLLARS! 1 don't mean to cuss right there ... but that is how much of a opportunity this is for you. You can have me as your personal marketing slave ... as long as I'm not currently working with 200 clients already. If I am, you'll be placed on a waiting list. Every year ... you can renew if you wish. Now here's how this thing works: If you have questions or need. advise regarding anything for your business whether is be a direct mail letter ... an ad ... a script ... a headline pricing ... etc., just call or email me and I'll give you my personal opinion and consult you on what I would do. It's like having a $] OO-Million-DoJ1Br ma rket ing guru by you r sideguiding you all the way to success ... basically getting a million dollars worth of expertiee each and eVery year. .. and you're paying just $13.70 a day. I spend more on my daily cigar. Hold your horses ... there
are f01J, terms
you have to ag-ree to:
1, Payment is d ue in full upfrontThe fee I'm asking for is so small considering what you are to gain and also I do not want to deal with wan nabe s. 1 do not want your mortgage money ... or the money your family needs to use for dinner tonight. I ill going to need real players who can afford all the money upfront.
2. There is no morrey back guarantee on my servicesIf you are still skeptical even after reading this 300+ page book. .. do not even consider contacting me. If you don't kriow 'by now that I can be worth my weight on gold to you ... you're too stupid of a person for me to work with. Th)8 book is the ultimate res urrie.
3. Your volume of calla and/or emails to me must be within reason and not border on harassmentI'm talking 5 calls ur erna.ils a week tops. If we're working on something ... obviously we may exceed 5 calls andjor emails-, which is fine. But if you're some weirdo who is going to call me In times a day and wake me out of bed at night to talk about some half-cooked idea ... again do not consider contacting me.
4. You can only qualify for a slot if y ou+re one of the first 200 astute business owners to grasp this opportunityI feel 200 people is just enough to keep me busy and at the same time- make me the million bucks J need to keep "interested". 200 is the limit! If I took in more than 200 clients, I may be biting off more than I can chew ... and I don't want to do that. So ... ifyou feel it is worth $13.70 and calL. shoot me an email at:
a day to have ME at YOUR beck
MrVincr':nt\.Jame!".((~iVahon.com (this email address is different that the one for comments regarding this book I've listed on page two.
r
WhRt I ,)}il1 de; ie, r hr.n r1')l ynl1 where to send The ('heck fo r $5000 and who to make it out to. Maybe I'1i ask a few questions about ~iC'UT bu sin ess arid yOUI' goals. If I'rn under 200 and. h ave the room ... and as long as YOLtr check
clears the bank ... 111 send you out the secret business the cr itical contact inform atiori to reach me
card with all
Another thing thnt you may like.,. is that for all 200 clients who join this "club" ... you can receive 50%) off any copywriting work you m av decide to hire me for in the future. I'm cu rr-enr ly charging S;! :=1;000for ::1 f11]i-b!own SRleS p8ckage or advertisement (in crudirig artwork in Quark on CD-ROM). You can
do the math and See your savings. Also- my 200 clients will receive email updates for FREE ACCESS whenever I'm doing a Tele-aerninar with other experts I feel you can learn something from, In case you're not familiar with Tele-Serninars , this is what they are: basically you'll call a number and input a special "code" that'll patch yon into a call between myself and one or two other marketing experts. You (and 199 others) will be able to listen in on every word we say. Sometimes I'll even do questions and answers with listeners. Like I was saying before- after reading this book, unless vou're brain dead ... you can see that I am well worth the $13.70 a day I ask, To sign up- send me an email at MrVincent. Jarnp~a)vahoo.rom and 111send you the address for you to send your $5000 check or money order. Remember- more than 200 people are smart enouch to pay me $13.70 a day for my expertise. one of them be yo~?
wui
Thanks! Vincent .Jarries Author, Direct Marketer,
Consultant,
Copywriter
So there
vou have it
To some ... this book is nothing more than 9'2..625 word s ... 408.210 characters ... 2,473 paragraphs ... or 5,564 sentences. To some, this will be a life-changing experience. IT ALL DEPENDS
ON HO\V YOU "(.ISS
rr.
Don't discount for a second the teachirig in this book- as some of them are really simple. They have made many men and women MILLIONAIRE. AND MULTl-TvIILLlONAIRESEVEN BILLIONAIRES. A man from Ohio named Steve has "borrowed" one of my product ideas, applied my teachings, and in less than 36-months, built a QUARTER OF A BILLl()N DOLLAR business with 900 employees. HOW BIG AN EIvlPIRE
ARE YOU GOING TO BU1LD?
Good Luck. Vincent James March 29th, 2005 8:59 PM
Las Vegas, Nevada
