Increasing Return on Marketing Dollars

A Newsletter Published by
Lee Marc Stein, LTD.
May 2006 Issue

Contents

• Is This Where I Came In?
• Selling Self-Improvement Products by Mail
• My Visit to Uncle Giuseppe's (or Lester Loses Some Luster)

Is This Where I Came In?

One afternoon during this past month, I dialed into a teleconference on headline testing conducted by Marketing Experiments. This teleconference was specifically for improving web site results.

Some of the conclusions:

• Specificity is a key to winning headlines and to higher conversions – "Dental Plans for $8.33 a month. Acceptance Guaranteed" far outperformed "Low Cost Dental Care for the Uninsured"
• Among headline types, promise, question and claim headlines do well
• To write a good headline, you must truly understand its objective

Guess what? When I was launching my career in 1964 writing direct mail copy for Prentice-Hall's textbooks, that's what I learned. My bible was the recently-deceased Dick Hodgson's Direct Mail and Mail Order Handbook.

Being clever still doesn't work: it may attract attention, but it doesn't get the response. Question headlines shouldn't be able to be answered with a "Yes" or "No". The whole meaning of and response to a headline can be changed by a single word… and by what type size, font and color you use. And testing headlines was then, and is now, the most important way to improve results.

If this is where I came in 42 years ago (I started when I was six), why did I stay glued to the phone for the entire hour? Because the web has changed testing itself dramatically.

Online, you can test headlines for almost no cost. That's a very different situation from what we face in direct mail or print advertising. Given that, Flint McGlaughlin, Director of Marketing Experiments, urged that eternal testing go on. Testing, he said, is a process and not an event.

Once you have found a winning headline, don't stop there: play with individual words until you beat your control. Once your headline is perfected, start testing variations on the subhead. If you have a decent number of visitors to your site, you can test virtually every day. Imagine if we could have done that with direct mail. How much smarter we would all be.

By the way, if you're primarily an offline direct marketer like I am, you'll be interested to know that MarketingExperiments' online headline tests project direct mail and print results quite well. Direct is direct.

Selling Self-Improvement Products by Mail

Recently, I wrote my second book for the American Writers & Artists Institute. This one was on writing direct mail for the self-improvement market. It contained analyses of 13 control packages. For information on the AWAI Course "Secrets of Writing Copy for the Self-Improvement Market, call Barb or Scott at 866-879-2924. The PDFs are from the Who's Mailing What Archive.

Direct mail packages that sell self-help/self-improvement products and services have always been a showcase for great, long reason-why copy. In the "Age of Disbelief," in the "Age of the Nano-second," how does such copy fare? Rather well, it would seem. Many of the all-time super controls identified by the Direct Mail Archive are still being mailed today. They're so counter-trend, they're trendy.

Example: where the clear (or perhaps purposely opaque) trend in envelopes is to be "official" --that is contain no promotional copy and fool recipients about the nature of what's inside -- self-help product pitch envelopes are 180- away. They're not trying to fool anyone; they sell from the get-go.

Nightingale-Conant is the world's largest producer of inspirational and educational audio programs, and certainly one of the premier marketers in this arena. Most of their packages are gems. Let's look at their Conversation Power package, mailed at least a dozen times since 1997.

To view this package as you read the analysis, click here for the PDFs.

Outer Envelope
Simple questions have worked well as envelope teasers. The copywriter here takes that premise to the max with a whole riddle – "What is it?" You get three clues, and each one pre-sells the need for the product described inside. What builds the tension to solve the riddle is the writer's brilliant ploy of using contradictory phrases within each clue. Thus, in the first bullet, we learn "It's one of today's most critically-important success skills" – and then, "it's not taught in school." Use of the bridge word "Yet" in each clue is so much more provocative than the equally correct "And" or "But."

Below the riddle, the writer states the offer – "FREE-TRIAL INVITATION." In a sense, that removes a bit of the mystery of the riddle because now you know there's a product or service to be sold. It's a good trade-off, however, because now you also have the power of the word "FREE," and there's no more appropriate milieu for that word than self-help/self-improvement mail packages.

Letter
The Johnson box is a classic balance of negative (fear) and positive (control) copy. In the "eyebrow" the phrase "never again find yourself at a loss" manages to pack in both fear and control, and the word "encounter" underscores the tension most people feel. The main head is assertively positive: "magic" connotes selectivity if not exclusivity; "control" in itself is a magic word in our anomatic times. The 30-day free trial offer is repeated below the title.

In the text, the first five paragraphs are all one sentence… and they are all situational. Each situation reminds readers of what they are likely to encounter in their lives on any particular day. The writer is casting out lots of hooks in the hope that, to turn the metaphor on its head, one of them will bite the reader's emotions. By keeping the paragraphs short, the writer also increases the chances of getting the recipient far enough along in the letter to keep reading.

Now let's go back – to the Johnson box and to a headline written over 50 years ago. The headline by immortal Maxwell Sackheim was "Do You Make These Mistakes in English?" I bring it up here because the word that made the headline brilliant was "These." You had to keep reading to learn what "These Mistakes" were.

Here, given that the first five paragraphs are situational, how much more powerful would the eyebrow of the Johnson box be if it said: "Now, never again find yourself at a loss in any of these verbal encounters!"? Or, alternatively, would we be able to catapult more readers into the letter if we changed the main head to "Learn the magic words and phrases to control any of these situations in…"?

When we get to the second and third pages of this four-page letter, look at all the specifics we find. Page two starts with three brief introductory paragraphs, then launches into examples in both paragraph and bulleted form. Here's self-help copy at its best:

"You'll learn, for example, one magic word that you should keep repeating, over and over and over again, when you're trying to discover a verbal opponent's motives.

"(It will act almost irresistibly to force your opponent to reveal his or her true goals – and with them, the "buttons" that you'll have to push if you want to win the opponent over.)"

Each of these little gems or fascinations are almost enough to get recipients to the order form; taken together they are very powerful. The copywriter works from the little gems to the big picture:

"Your whole life, in fact, can become far richer, far more rewarding, far more successful in every way when you master CONVERSATION POWER.

"It's no wonder, either, considering how important the skill of CONVERSATION POWER can be in your business and social life today…"

Almost the entire last page of the letter talks about the FREE trial offer. It urges the reader to "play each one over and over again and make new discoveries each time you listen."

One of the great copy ploys that works particularly well in self-help dm packages is the "Play us for a sucker" approach. Look at the P.S.

"Just in your 30-day FREE-trial period alone, you'll learn dozens of invaluable tactics for winning your way with others through CONVERSATION POWER. And these tactics will be yours to use for life, even if you decide to return the program after trying it…"

You're saying to the reader: "If you're smart, you'll take advantage of us. You send for the program for 30 days, get all sorts of great things from it, and then return it so it costs you virtually nothing. Yes, go ahead and be larcenous." You're saying to yourself: "First, the program is so good no one will want to return it. Second, inertia will set in and even those few who want to return it will forget or not bother."

Brochure
This is, without question, the weakest part of the package. The front panel of this "fat jim" plays the riddle again. The cat has already been let out of the bag and so there is little motivation to open the brochure.

The overleaf has no head of its own. The 7 bullets of copy are fairly powerful, but follow no structure. Some begin the accepted way, with a power command – e.g., "Calm and defuse an angry person." But then you get "The #1 Success Secret in selling anything to anybody."

The big inside spread is half-wasted. The top has too big a shot of the product – it is about a motivational shot as a photo of a sand dune. The major headlines are amateurish and certainly lacking benefits: "It's the towering 'sleeping giant' of success skills" and "'Why didn't someone come up with something like this before?"

Narrative text below the heads and photo is well-written, but is essentially a re-hash of the copy in the strong letter. The best thing about the brochure is the section headed "6 Challenging Situations That You'll Be Able to Handle with Ease When You Have the Help of CONVERSATION POWER." The situations are different than those in the letter and they're well-presented.

The back of the brochure, because of the format, may be skipped over by recipients and that's a shame. There's a well-done mini-bio of the creator of the program. Accompanying it is a summary table of contents – what's in each of the 12 lessons. While some of this material is repeated elsewhere, it's a good idea to have an ordered summary like this.

Lift Letter
The lift letter is signed by the author. The outer panel is well done – "The first step in becoming a more powerful person…" It gets away from the strictly "conversation power" theme and also presents a much fresher face than "If you're hesitating about accepting this free offer…" Inside, copy stresses the importance of taking the initiative, then talks about how easy it is to take the first step. The FREE trial is stressed in a number of different ways.

Response Form
On the keeper portion, we again see the unmotivating product shot. How much better it would have been to show two people talking, or one person talking to a small group. Rightfully, the left side copy stresses the FREE trial. In place of the "sleeping giant" head, however, the headline of the letter might have been repeated.

On the return portion, language is purposely kept simple. Almost as strong as the head "FREE-TRIAL ACCEPTANCE CERTIFICATE" is the statement half down the form "SEND NO MONEY NOW." That reinforces that free trial promise.

BRE
How to create a great BRE in one easy lesson: look at this! They were able to get away with making "30-Day Free Trial" really big so it dominates this component. Then, just below that, we note the envelope is going to the "PRIORITY Order Processing Center." In one glance, you get two benefits communicated.

My Visit to Uncle Giuseppe's
(or Lester Loses Some Luster)

One Friday, after a particularly grueling week, my wife and I had dinner with friends at a local Greek restaurant. It's 8:00. I'm tired and I want to head home. "No," my wife says in chorus with my friend's wife, "we have to take you on the grand tour."

In we walk to Uncle Giuseppe's Market. This is not a supermarket, but a super-size specialty food store, the kind you might find on Manhattan's West Side, or in the Italian neighborhoods of Boston or San Francisco. Now I have absolutely no sense of smell, but I am blown away by the sights and sounds. Beautiful displays of prepared foods, more kinds of asiago, fontina, provolone than I ever knew existed, chocolates, meat and fresh fish, vegetables and fruits rivaled only by what I saw in the open markets in Siracusa.

In between listening to the Sinatra/Jerry Vale/Dean Martin music*, I stopped to talk to a few of the people working behind the counters. You felt the love they had for what they were doing jumping out at you, telling you this is as good as it gets.

Then I start noticing prices. With the exception of a few specials, everything is high compared to ordinary supermarkets – tuna nearly $4.00 a pound more, and so on. But Uncle Giuseppe's is no ordinary supermarket; it is an unforgettable experience.

So what the Helvarti does all this have to do with DIRECT MARKETING? Absolutely nothing! Despite Godfather Lester Wunderman's pronouncement that all marketing would become direct marketing, Uncle Giuseppe's needs direct marketing like Sinatra needed elocution lessons.

It's all word-of-mouth that brings new shoppers in by the droves. It's the scope, the sights, the smells that no catalog or web site can duplicate that bring customers back, lead them to conduct "grand tours" for husbands, friends, relatives. I hear women talking about Uncle Giuseppe's in my gym which is a good 10 miles from the store. It's the employees' enthusiasm that no letter can capture, no drtv can make real enough.**

Oh sure, Uncle Giuseppe's could capture shoppers email addresses and let them know about specials. Oh sure, they could test direct mail to local subscribers of Food & Wine, Gourmet, and La Cucina Italiana. But if I'm the store manager, I'd get more from taking 50 teachers (nobody spreads the word faster) through the store and letting them sample food from every department.

* They left out Louis Prima!
** Not that Lester Wunderman needs praise from me, but beside coining the term "direct marketing," he has talked fervently about the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

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