Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
December 26, 2005
Issue #23
Dear Business-Builder,
Merry Christmas!
Happy Hanukah!
Kwanza Greetings!
(For any of you who happen to belong to a religion without a holiday this time of year … or a sect that never celebrates any holiday ever … or if you’re an agnostic or atheist and/or a total Scrooge – allow me to simply wish you a “Happy Monday.”)
Can you believe 2005 is almost gone? Seems like only yesterday I was awaking from an Absolut-induced fog on the first day of 2005. Now here we are on the day after Christmas – and if all goes as planned, I’ll soon be awaking from an Absolut-induced fog on the first day of 2006!
I love New Year’s Day. Come to think of it, it’s probably my favorite holiday of them all. It’s a kick to see how far we’ve come in the last 12 months … and to begin dreaming about all the great things we’re going to do in the next 12.
A year ago for example, there was no eLetter called THE TOTAL PACKAGE. And since I had spent my entire career studiously avoiding the limelight, I was known only to a few dozen people who work for some of the biggest mailers in America.
Since launching this eLetter in June, we have published twenty-three value-packed issues, including in-depth interviews with direct response greats like Arthur Johnson, Parris Lampropoulos and Carline Anglade-Cole. And I don’t know about you – but the two-part interview with the legendary Gary Bencivenga we finished up last week was one of the best things I’ve ever read.
The week before the first part of Gary’s interview graced these pages, we looked at how identifying the dominant resident emotions regarding your major theme or the benefits your product offers can kick your headlines up a notch.
Today, I want to answer the question I get asked most often about dominant emotion copywriting …
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
December 19, 2005
Issue #22
Glad you’ve joined us for Part II of our interview
with Gary Bencivenga. Let’s jump right in where we left
off last time.
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
December 12, 2005
Issue #21
In this special interview issue …
-
USP Heresy: Why your obsession with the “Unique Selling Proposition” could be lowering your response …
- Winning the Mind Game: How to quickly and easily program your mind to automatically create grand-slam ads for you…
- No Pain, No Gain! The painful (and enormously profitable) secret for honing your sales copy to razor sharpness – and driving response rates through the ever-lovin’ roof!
- “Yeah, Sure!” The two most dangerous words in your prospect’s mind – and the single best way to neutralize them…
- The New Magalog: The next great direct response format breakthrough is already here – are you making the most of it?
- Beyond Benefits: Why prospects don’t give a hoot about what you think you’re selling … and what to offer them instead to drive response rates sky-high…
- And way too much more to list here!
Welcome, Business-Builder!
If the thought of an extended interview with Gary Bencivenga doesn’t already have you quivering with anticipation, you are obviously in desperate need of a quick course in direct response marketing lore.
Three decades ago, when I was just beginning my journey in this fascinating business, eagerly devouring everything by John Caples, David Ogilvy, and Dan Rosenthal I could lay my hands on, Gary Bencivenga had already served a personal internship with each one of them.
When I was barely scraping by as a freelancer – writing ads for water heaters and local banks and dreaming about breaking into the super-lucrative financial publishing business – Gary ruled the roost, writing one blindingly brilliant control after another for the biggest mailers in the industry.
Gary doesn’t know it, of course, but in a very real way, he was my mentor. I spent a fortune I didn’t have at the time subscribing to every publication he promoted just to make sure I got samples of his promotion packages.
Whenever one of Gary’s inspired promotions arrived in my mailbox, it was a red-letter day: Like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day all rolled into one. Studying those Bencivenga controls taught me more – and made me more money – than all the books by all the great masters who had gone before combined!
So let’s dispense with hype and horsesh*t: Right now, the Internet is crawling with charlatans claiming to be the greatest copywriter alive – and then urging you to pay them a fortune for their books and courses. Many are complete frauds – scam artists who have never had a single hot control for a major mailer – looking to make a quick buck off of you.
Other self-proclaimed experts really have made millions writing copy – most of it aimed at selling their own books, courses and conferences, but rarely if ever competing against top writers in the real world.
Only a handful of copywriters in our generation have ever competed at anywhere near Gary Bencivenga’s level over the long haul. And if our little fraternity held an election today, Gary would be unanimously elected King. Gary showed us the way and we worship the ground he walks on.
And as a bonus, Gary is the nicest, sweetest, most humble, and the most generous guy you could ever hope to meet.
Yeah, I admit it: I genuinely love Gary. I want to marry him and have ALL his babies.
… So as you can imagine, it was an absolute thrill to spend a full 90 minutes picking his massive brain for ways to help you get bigger winners more often.
Here’s how it went …
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
December 5, 2005
Issue #20
How connecting with your prospects’
DOMINANT EMOTIONS
drives readership and response through the roof
Dear Business-Builder,
Last week, we looked at 10 fears, 11 frustrations, and 8 desires we all share …
… and I promised I’d spend three of the next four weeks showing you how being aware of and directly addressing each of these 29 major resident emotions ramps up my sales copy’s attention-getting power, readership and response.
So let's get started!
When you set out to create a sales message that connects with prospects’ dominant resident emotions, you have no choice but to begin with the prospect.
Specifically, you begin by considering the prospect’s most intense positive and negative feelings about …
- Himself or herself relative to the subject at hand …
- The benefits
your product and premiums promise …
- The medium – direct mail, the Internet, print, or any other medium – through
which your message is being delivered …
- The offer – the product and premiums,
price, payment terms, guarantee, and the process of ordering …
… and then, you devise ways to deal with each of these dominant resident emotions in ways that leverage them in your favor: Get them working FOR you; never against you.
When you get it right, the attention-getting power, readership and response of your promotions skyrockets. When you get your prospect’s emotions working for you …
RESISTANCE is FUTILE!
Here’s a promotion for Phillips Publishing’s Retirement Letter – one of their flagship publications in the 1980s and early 1990s, edited at the time by my old friend and fellow (former) Prescott, Arizona resident, Pete Dickinson.
To make this easier for you to follow, just click the photo of the promotion. It’ll open a full-size photo in a separate window that you can save or print for reference.
This promo could have simply led with a headline that said, “Retire RICH!” – a big benefit to be sure. But that kind of lead can lack credibility and worse, it misses the opportunity to fully activate the prospect’s dominant resident emotions about retirement.
Instead, this lead connects with prospects at a deeper, far more emotional level – and in doing so, accomplishes six major objectives …
-
It transforms passive emotions (guilt and frustration) into active ones (anger and the thirst for revenge): Most people begin planning for retirement far too late in life and whenever the subject is raised, the first feelings they have are a) fear and b) guilt.
By putting the blame on others (politicians, bureaucrats and brokers), this lead instantly assuages the prospect’s feelings of guilt – saying, in effect, “It’s not your fault!”
Plus, by making others responsible for the prospect’s predicament, this lead transforms his fear into anger – a far more actionable emotion – and offers him a way to act on it.
And, it validates this newfound righteous indignation by having Pete express it for the prospect in a personal, emotionally charged “declaration of war” that instantly makes Pete the unchallenged leader in this fight.
- It eliminates the “salesman/prospect” dynamic:
Recognizing how we all feel when confronted by a salesperson – uncomfortable, skeptical, guarded – is also a powerful “dominant emotion” technique.
In this lead, Pete is not presented as someone who wants to sell the reader anything. Instead, he’s in the same boat the prospect is – fighting for his own retirement – and prepared to lead the prospect into a comfortable, financially secure future of his own.
Pete is positioned as a powerful ally and champion who is unapologetically on the prospect’s side – the first step in making Pete and the prospect fast friends.
- It offers the prospect an instantaneous emotional bribe for reading this: After activating the prospect’s feelings about the enemies of his retirement, he is offered the emotional satisfaction of “striking back” and getting “sweet revenge” against the scoundrels that are cheating him.
Again – a great dominant emotion technique: You deliver an emotional reward – a kind of vaporware “premium” – instantly and completely free of charge. The prospect doesn’t have to buy a thing; gratification is instant.
- It delivers Pete’s “Big Promise” as a Unique Selling Proposition: Pete’s vision for the reader is bigger and better than the prospect’s own vision – “a richer lifestyle in retirement than you have now!”
This promise works well on two levels …
FIRST, it raises a fascinating proposition. Most of us just assume that we’ll have to make compromises when we begin living on a fixed income.
Pete says, “THAT’S WRONG: You can actually live better in retirement than you are now.” Who in their right mind wouldn’t feel eager to hear more?
SECOND, it works by calling out the two major types of prospects for the Retirement Letter: a) Folks who are speeding toward retirement, and b) People who are already retired. No matter which category you fall into, this lead tells you that this message is for YOU.
- It includes a powerful credibility element: Dominant emotion selling considers all of the emotions the prospect is feeling when reading the message. And to our over advertised-to prospects, skepticism is definitely resident – especially after the presentation of a “big benefit” or USP.
This cover addressed prospects’ skepticism head-on in just 9 words: “197,000 successful Americans over 40 have already done it!”
Not only does this line suspend the reader’s disbelief, it suggests that an elite group of people are actually living the high life he only dreams about … and that this is his invitation to join them.
- It includes a second bribe just for opening the package: Earlier, the prospect was told that Pete would deliver a powerful and instantaneous emotional benefit if they would only read this. He would help them get “sweet revenge” and “set things right.”
Now, Pete is also promising to deliver a tangible benefit right in this magalog – a “free gift” just for reading this – a “CENTER PULL-OUT SECTION: Retirement Lies That Could Cost You Everything You Ever Worked For.”
Again, this banner at the bottom of the page pulls double duty by also presenting the “horrifying alternative” – the consequences of failing to listen to what Pete has to say.
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