Posted by: Clayton Makepeace
April 16, 2007
Issue #100

The Total Package Centennial Celebration

It’s My Birthday …
It’s The Total Package’s  Historic 100th Issue …
… And YOU Get the Present!

Dear Business-Builder,

On Friday, I turned 55 – and today, we’re publishing the 100th issue of The Total Package!

To celebrate, I want to give you a valuable, no-strings-attached gift …

Startling, Heretical and PROVEN…
NEW Recipes for Maximum Response

In this eye-opening 80 minute teleconfernce – hosted by direct response superstar Bob Bly – I challenge copywriting rules you only think are carved in stone – and show you how strategically breaking the rules can often give you the biggest breakthroughs of your career.

No strings, no gimmicks, no pitches,
just a full hour of startling,
response-boosting insights on …

• The New Art of the Irresistible Headline: Throw out the tired, me-too headlines everyone’s using and discover EIGHT headline and opening approaches that are exploding response RIGHT NOW online and off…
• 3 Surprising Reasons Why Benefit-Oriented Headlines Are No Longer Enough: The sea change in customer attitudes that’s making everything you think you know about headline writing obsolete – and how you can USE these new realities to create bigger winners, more often!
• Why USP Headlines Are Yesterday’s News: Unique Selling Proposition based headlines were revolutionary…30 years ago. See how to know when they’ll still boost response… and when they’ll virtually kill your promotion…
• 7 Challenging Realities of Today’s Changing Online Markets: Understanding these seven trends in human behavior caused by the internet gives you the master key to unlocking profitable markets. Ignore them and you damn your promotions to mediocrity…
• Irresistible Offers for Challenging Times:  The seven crucial components of every successful offer – and how to use each one to create breakthroughs even in today’s tough marketing environment!
• Modern Premium Offers: Yesterday’s premium selection guidelines can get you creamed in today’s markets. Here are premium offers prospects are panting for… 
• And much, MUCH MORE!

Now, to celebrate my 55th
and The Total Package’s 100th,
the recording and transcript of this
80-minute event are yours absolutely FREE!

Just click here to download the MP3 audio recording …

And/or click here to download the unedited transcript as a PDF file! Or read the transcripts below.

Hope this helps…

Bob Bly: Welcome folks to the New Recipes for Maximum Response Tele-Seminar with Clayton Makepeace. And we had promised in the Total Package in our announcements and I’m reading a quote, “A fascinating guided tour of your prospects brain, beliefs and buying preferences as of March 15, 2006 noon.” What you must do now to seize prospects attentions, what you must say to get them to listen and what you must offer them to close the sale.

And the premise of this is something interesting. Lots of people almost universally listen to the buzz in the industry saying response rates are down. ROI is down because not only are response rates down but in print stuff is more expensive. Lists costs more. Postage always goes up never down. So it’s harder to get a winner today. You hear everyone say that. And yet in copyrighting seminars and in marketing seminars we teach the same stuff or most people teach the same stuff.

And in our DM news ad, Clayton wrote "Benefits, Headlines and Shouting at USP Guarantees Success, right?" And he said, "wrong". So the techniques that – and this is I think a lot – most of the people in the business have known this for a long time. The stuff that worked five or ten or twenty years ago does not work today. And if human nature is unchanging the answer is why is that.

So the first thing I want to ask you Clayton – and we have on the call with us I should have introduced Julie McManus from the Total Package. Hello Julie.

Julie McManus: Hi there. How are you doing?

Bob Bly: And we have Daniel Levis who is the new Total Package Internet staff expert. Hey Daniel.

Daniel Levis: Hey. How’s it going?

Bob Bly: Good, how are you doing?

Daniel Levis: Doing well.

Bob Bly: And of course we have Clayton. So Clayton the first thing we want to ask you is why is this? How did the direct response universe change that the old – the standards what we know and love and been taught doesn’t work any more? It’s very upsetting.

Clayton Makepeace: Well, you’re right Bob it doesn’t. We’ve seen the universe for investment newsletter shrink from somewhere around twelve thousand – twelve million active subscribers just a few years ago to as low as one million active subscribers today. And that’s an indication that as people are dropping off they’re not being replaced. And a lot more people are dropping off; a lot more people are becoming disenfranchised.

And if you think back over the last few years; well, I remember for example in 2000, Julie will bear me out on this because she worked at Weiss Research at the time, but in 2001 and 2002 when I wrote a new promotion package for promoting an investment newsletter I would routinely get a three hundred or four hundred percent ROI on our first mailing of that package. If I got a two hundred percent ROI we’d sit around and try to figure out what was wrong. In other words, for anyone who’s not familiar with the term for every dollar it cost us to mail the promotion we would get between three and four dollars back on our first test.

And those first tests were to list. And of course ultimately our goal was to mail down to break even to expand the size of our mailing universe to the point where we were mailing less profitable and even unprofitable lists and subsidizing them with the profits we were making on profitable lists. But on that first mailing, that first test, we were getting those kinds of returns. Nowadays in that same market what’s happening is when you write a promotion if you get an eighty-five percent ROI on your first mailing that –

Bob Bly: You got a control, probably.

Julie McManus: You’re rolling.

Clayton Makepeace: You may well have a control and to get a hundred and fifty percent of cost is unheard of in today’s market. And so if you think back over the last few years and ask yourselves what has changed. What’s different? Well, we know that we’ve gone through a very trying time in the country. We know that we had 911. We know that we had the beginning of two wars. We’ve had anthrax in the mail which didn’t help us much there in 2001.

Those of us who were in the mail big time when that thing hit. And we know that people had been glued to their television sets more often. Instead of coming home and really focusing on what we’ve sent them in the mail they’ve tended to flip on the TV to see what the latest blockbuster news is. And so that hurt us. But that’s been fairly much over with now for awhile. In other words, we haven’t had any major take your breath away news on any of those items for many, many months.

Although those events cause that kind of televisionitis – television – you know there’s a song television killed the radio star. Well, television has killed some star direct mail packages too because when those events are happening people don’t read their mail.

But again those things are pretty much self contained and they’re not happening now.

Bob Bly: Right. They’re not happening now but you said they were – when we talked there were some long term syndromes in the market that are responsible for changing the direct response universe and how they respond to –

Clayton Makepeace: Right.

Bob Bly: – promotions.

Clayton Makepeace: That’s where I’m going now. The one other major change in the last few years has been the advent of the Internet. Obviously, it began before that but in the last few years more and more of our prospects have really gotten connected with the Internet and are much more net savvy. And they’re getting their e-mail particularly in our older markets the health market where the average age may be seventy-five to eighty years old or in the investment markets where maybe sixty-five or seventy years old.

It took these older people a little bit of time to actually get on the net and begin using it daily. But as they have we’ve seen real changes in their buying habits. And there are seven syndromes that I’ve identified that are changing our market every day. And those of use who are trying to sell either through direct mail or the Internet really need to be aware of what they are and think about what their impact might be on the promotions we’re writing or the products that we’re trying to sell.

Bob Bly: So give us an example of one of these syndromes if you would.

Clayton Makepeace: Well, the first one is the clutter syndrome. Every great advance in copyrighting and marketing has come as a response to a proliferation of advertising. You can go back to the 1800’s and see how Kennedy and Lasker and Wannamaker and all of the companies and copywriters that brought advertising along were responding to the fact that everybody was advertising all of a sudden in the newspapers. And then came radio and we were exposed to more advertising than TV. And – but now the Internet has like doubled the total amount of advertising each one of us sees every day.

We did a little exercise not too long ago where we figured out that the average American consumer is now getting over two hundred – I think it was two hundred and forty advertising impressions a day. And that’s the average American – three hundred million Americans; it counts everybody. If you figured just adults it would be much larger. If you figured in or looked at the people who live in major cities or who spend a lot of time on the Internet the numbers get truly astronomical. The number of impressions you may be getting per day may be as high as a thousand.

Bob Bly: Yeah, you walk through New York City you see an ad on every bus stop.

Clayton Makepeace: That’s right. And every bus that drives by –

Bob Bly: And every subway.

Clayton Makepeace: Billboards are everywhere. And so we’re just besieged by ads and with the advent of e-mail we’re besieged with direct response promotions with subject lines which are in essence headlines. And they’re yelling benefits at us and they’re trying to get our attention. And so to kind of protect ourselves from that clutter we as consumers have these kind of mental anti-advertising defenses that just kind of go up. And we immediately identify things as advertising; usually correctly, and say well I don’t need to read that or I don’t need to look at that. And so it’s just out of sheer self defense. We’re trying to reduce this glut of advertising.

Another one of the syndromes that the Internet has brought us is the freebie syndrome.

Bob Bly: This belief that grew up on the Internet because it was a culture of free information exchanged between the scientists and government and universities the idea was everything should be free and then all the marketers jumped on the Internet and wanted to sell stuff which was clashed with the culture of everything on the Internet should be free.

Clayton Makepeace: Absolutely. And I remember the old days we had to –man if we had to research a project it meant a day at the library.

Bob Bly: Absolutely.

Clayton Makepeace: Now you can get so much free research right off the net. They have these huge databases, pubmed, the National Institutes of Health, medical databases, huge financial databases, just about anything you want to know is available on the net. And so –

Julie McManus: I just read something recently; a study that showed that the Internet is actually killing the directory business.

Clayton Makepeace: Sure. I mean why would anybody pay for information today when it’s free. Unless you want real-time streaming quotes on stocks you can get just about any other kind of information that you want from big charts or from your own broker – your own online broker. If you’re looking – let’s say your like Wendy; Wendy has allergies to Parabens. Parabens are preservatives that they put in soaps and shampoos and things like that and in makeup. And so you need to find a source of paraben free cosmetics or whatever.

I’ll just type paraben free into Google and the next thing you know you’re buying your product. Any allergies you have any problem you have in life you can find solutions on the Internet. You can find information about that problem that you want to solve or the goal that you want to achieve and it’s all free.

Bob Bly: Now you mentioned Google, what’s the Google syndrome? What you’ve talked about.

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, the Google syndrome is Double Click does great surveys. If any of you are marketing on the net and you’re not reading Double Click regularly I strongly recommend you to surf on over there and take a look around. But they do quarterly surveys of Internet marketers. And they’re finding that as high as sixty to eighty percent of all people who purchase a product online Google it first. They’ll go to a search engine it could be Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, any of the search engines and they’ll look it up. And they’ll compare prices. And they’ll shop.

So the days where you go to somebody and you say well we have the greatest widget in the universe and our price is $99. And you tell them it’s a great price the days when everybody will take your word for it are gone. People – a lot of your prospects will look at your ad and you’ll wind up selling a product for one of your competitors because your prospect will go online and he’ll do his –a little bit of research and he’ll save some money.

So the Google syndrome is also having an effect on all of us whether we’re selling information or three-dimensional products or services.

Daniel Levis: I wonder if I could interject with a question that I think some people might have on their minds. When you say free sources of information there are a lot of people selling information on the Internet and they’re doing pretty well with that. And they’re also selling information that on a commodity basis for much more than what people are buying information offline, how do you explain that?

Clayton Makepeace: The convenience factor and if – the convenience factor makes buying information online a good deal for a lot of people. I mean I pay for a few websites in order to get a very specific type of niche information from them. But the fact of the matter is unless you’re a professional in a particular area where you need a constant stream of information on a very specific subject paying for information on the net just doesn’t make sense.

As I was saying earlier, if you’re an investor – let’s say you’re a day trader and you need streaming, real-time quotes then paying for that service makes sense. And that’s – all it is just simple information. There’s no opinion attached. There’s no attitude or advocacy attached. It’s just straight information. So – but by in large the vast majority of what’s on the Internet today is – in this area is free.

And the point here is really twofold. Number one if you’re selling information you have an uphill battle now where you didn’t have quite so much of one before. Secondly, if you are – no matter what you’re selling the Internet gives all of your prospects the opportunity to keep you honest by double checking your prices and double checking your competitors. And there’s nothing sadder in the world than spending five hundred bucks, a thousand to drop a big, direct mail campaign and then find out that you’re selling a bunch of product for your competitors –

Daniel Levis: Yeah, I hear you.

Clayton Makepeace: – which is happening today. Another one of the syndromes I call the skepticism syndrome.

Bob Bly: Now is that new? One could argue that people have always been skeptical of advertising.

Clayton Makepeace: Not to the degree they are today.

Bob Bly: So it’s intensified you say?

Clayton Makepeace: Excuse me?

Bob Bly: So you think it’s intensified over the last few years?

Clayton Makepeace: Oh certainly. I mean the thing is that in the old days if you’re doing – let’s say you’re doing print ads in Barron’s –

Bob Bly: Uh-huh.

Clayton Makepeace: – and you make an outrageous claim about your investment approach; Barron’s would simply refuse to run the ad. If you made outrageous claims in direct mail you’re doing so at great risk because you have to – you’re paying big dollars for the direct mail and for your promotion. So – and because there was a lot less of it going on it was much more easily policed I think by the authorities. And so the claims – I mean you wouldn’t see a direct mail piece coming to you making just outrageous claims. You have the Federal Trade Commission all over everything. You have the U.S. Postal Service all over everything. And they were watching for that kind of thing.

But the Internet is totally free. And you can live in Malaysia or the Philippines or Brazil or anywhere else in the world and you can spam your brains out; sending out millions and millions of e-mail’s to everybody in the world at a cost of next to nothing. Making the most outrageous claims, promising a guarantee, promising to refund everything else and with total impunity. And you’ll make money doing it.

And we all see those e-mails in our boxes all the time. And we also see websites – and not the majors – but not Amazon and Ebay but you see websites that people have put up that have made just totally outrageous, unfounded claims as well. And so more and more we’re in kind of a caveat emptor society where it’s more up to the individual consumer to exercise discretion and wisdom when making purchases. People have seen so many huge claims for so long that they’re becoming immune to them.

And we see it on – in a much smaller way for example in the health marketing marketplace where we’re selling alternative newsletters or supplements. For the last fifteen years or so, our internal market place has been receiving these promotions that promise if you just try chondroitin and glucosamine your arthritis pain will go away. And they try it and it doesn’t work. And so next month they get another promotion for something else. And maybe it’s capsaicin. And they try that and that doesn’t work. And then it’s Emu oil. And it’s just one thing after another. And pretty soon it becomes an IQ test for the consumer. At some point, they just shut down.

And we’re seeing a lot of that skepticism and frustration today in the health marketplace especially. And I have to believe also that that’s been a major component in the financial marketplace as well.

Bob Bly: Absolutely. Now you also say that in addition to be being very skeptical people want instant gratification. How so?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, again the Internet has been a huge part of this. But when I buy a product now there are two components to the purchasing process. Okay. There’s the actual purchasing of the product and then it – there’s the receipt of the product. Now, I can drive over to Asheville – I can drive thirty minutes and be at a nice bookstore and I can pick up two or three books and come home and it’ll take me probably two hours to do. Or I can get in – on Amazon and literally in thirty seconds have ordered everything I wanted. In the first case, it’s going to take me two or three hours of my time but I’ll have my books today, right?

Bob Bly: Uh-huh.

Clayton Makepeace: If I go on Amazon, it takes me thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes whatever it takes and if I need the books quickly I can have them usually tomorrow.

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: And we’ve taken it even farther where a lot of the Internet products that you buy are instantly downloadable. I mean I bought Dream Weaver software the other day and downloaded the program. It’s a thousand dollar program. I downloaded it directly off the Internet. I didn’t have to wait at all. I had instant gratification.

Bob Bly: Yeah, people don’t want it on CDs anymore. They just want it download it.

Clayton Makepeace: That’s right. On Daniel’s recommendation, I bought another program called WYSIWYG. And it was ninety-nine bucks; downloaded it immediately. We’re doing it ourselves with our PDF’s and our e-books and MP3’s of conferences and these kinds of things. And so our prospects are being conditioned to – they were already fast food people. This was already a fast food society but with the Internet it can track that with what we were doing with direct mail with these people.
We would send out a direct mail promotion by snail mail, some percentage of them twenty, forty percent or more would return their order by snail mail and the old mantra was allow four to six weeks for delivery.

Bob Bly: Right. And the old – when I had my old mail order business in the seventies when all the reports were done on an IBM Selectric and run off on a photocopy or everything was four to six weeks delivery. And people were quite happy with that.

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, well the reason we all said four to six weeks delivery was that was the maximum the Federal Trade Commission would allow. It was six weeks between the order and the delivery of the product. So they came out of that environment and now all of a sudden you can buy pretty much anything on the Internet and get overnight shipping.

So at the shortest, I have a client that if you go on his website or call his toll-free number and order supplements today they’ll ship tomorrow and you’ll have them in as few as three or four days.

Daniel Levis: Now when you say instant gratification when it comes to downloadable product, are there ways to instruct your copy to take advantage of impulse buying and to create an analogy in the offline world? When you go to buy something at the store they have the impulse items right at the checkout, how could we parallel that and boost up the power per copy?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, that’s kind of going back the other way. That’s where you’re saying okay well here’s a model that works well in the real world; the impulse sale, the point of purchase sale. And that’s really going back the other way where we’re saying okay well I’ve got my shopping cart open and I’ve just bought your product. This is a real aside by the way. But I’ve got my shopping cart open, I just got your product, I hit submit; the impulse application on the Web would be to have the very next page come up and say oh by the way here’s a special for just an extra twenty dollars you can have – add this to you order if you add it right now. Normal price is X. And you just click yes or no and that product can be added to the shopping cart without the prospect really having to deal with the fact that he’s spending money at that point. So it can work that way too.

Daniel Levis: So we could turn these challenges to our advantage in other words?

Clayton Makepeace: That’s where I want to go with this. The – another one of the – the sixth syndrome that the Internet has really caused here is the entertainment syndrome. Years ago, all of our promotions were pretty much deadly serious. I mean we use some humor now and then but very rarely. And the maximum direct marketing was that humor will kill a sale. When you try to do something humorous or fun or entertaining in your promotion piece you risk offending somebody and so most of us avoided doing it.

I remember back in ‘91 when we launched Health and Healing. I had a small cartoon that I wanted to put in the package. And I had to really fight for it. The cartoon basically was BC Comics, the caveman.

Daniel Levis: Yeah.

Clayton Makepeace: And one of them says hey I find an herb that’ll cure cancer. And his buddy goes oh that’s great. Now how do we make a drug out of it. (Laughter) And so the point was drug companies don’t want to give you things that’ll cure you unless they can make a profit at it. And I thought that’s humor but it’s humor as revenge. It’s when you can get people laughing at the people that are ripping them off or hurting them in some way it evokes a good, strong emotion. And so I fought for it and I eventually won. And of course the package when on to great success.

But today on the Internet involvement is everything. The people who are finding new ways to get consumers to become involved with their sales message are doing extremely well. And consumers are beginning to be conditioned to say – to look for humor or to look for some form of entertainment. On the web right now, for example, there are flash games. I remember as an outlet after 911 they had this one game that was the Bin Laden shooting gallery. And you – Bin Laden was behind a cash register at K-mart and/or a – the Circle K, the convenience store, and he would pop-up every once in a while and you’d shoot at him with your mouse. And it was a good emotional outlet. But I – people sat there and played with that thing for many long minutes on end.

Today it’s things like IQ tests. Classmates.com has a great IQ test. You might go over there and take a look at it. You talk about involvement; it’ll keep you involved for probably close to an hour. And at the end of the process you’ve given them all of your pertinent information not just your e-mail address but you’ve given them your street address, your age, your sex, everything. And –

Daniel Levis: Your IQ.

Clayton Makepeace: And your IQ. (Laughter) And then they proceed to attempt to sell you an aptitude profile that will help you find the job – the kind of job that’ll be most –

Bob Bly: Well, that’s a great example of entertainment. What about the last syndrome, the risk syndrome? What do you mean by that?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, people are more concerned than ever now about identity theft. And anytime you put your credit card on the Internet – you put your credit card number on the Internet you’re taking a risk. And so when we’re promoting on the Internet, and I think it spills over to direct mail as well, I think there’s a component of caution there. Even if someone says we have completely secure ordering. If you don’t know who the company is you’re cautious. And I think it would be naive to believe that that concern doesn’t also kill response.

Bob Bly: Okay. So now we know these syndromes that are changing the direct response marketplace. But how does this affect the prospect in how they buy it or how they read?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, we’ve touched on some of these things. But if you think through it the clutter syndrome, the sheer number of promotions you’re receiving each of whom was probably written by somebody who read Caples and Ogilvy and those to put benefits upfront. Once you see your ten thousandth benefit today it’s going to stop having an affect on you. And so straight benefit leads are working less and less well.

The information explosion is cheapened the value of information. So if you’re in that business you need to be aware that you’re not just –you can’t succeed as wildly in these niche markets especially selling plain vanilla information as you used to be able to. Today the information has to have a strong viewpoint, a strong perspective, in many cases a strong attitude. I know one letter that’s doing very well that’s by a guy named Bob Livingston. And he’s a irascible, curmudgeonly, fun, opinionated, person. And he’s selling subscriptions. Now, he’s giving me information but he’s giving me leadership and he’s giving me some entertainment with it as well.

The commoditization of products because of the Google syndrome where people are always shopping for the best price is costing us money in terms of our average unit of sale or even our basic price point and in some cases response. The skepticism of the big promise that we’ve all been told for years that we needed to use right upfront in our promotions; skepticism is killing that. We’re seeing an erosion. We’re not seeing a collapse in it.

I have some promotions out there right now with big promise or benefit oriented headlines that are working reasonably well. But almost every time I test against them another type of headliner, another type of lead that’s more – that’s better suited to this environment, I get a substantial lift.

Timeliness of delivery; we just talked about this instant gratification syndrome. Timeliness of delivery is something that none of us really think about very much. I just went through a stack of promotions for health and investment newsletters and there wasn’t a single one of them there that said anything about how quickly I’m going to receive my premiums or my first issue or my welcome package or anything else. There wasn’t a single one there that offered me the opportunity, jump on the web and download my premiums or my first issue instantly.

Marketers still really – marketers in the mail have one hat on and they’re just not thinking about the fact that this delayed gratification is costing them sales.

Daniel Levis: I think you bring up an excellent point that applies very much to the Internet as well. There’s a tremendous amount of negativity that goes through people’s minds. And when you give them step-by-step, I think they call this future pacing an NLP. If you paint a picture of what’s going to happen and you make it so dead simple and leave no step out, leave nothing to the imagination, you’re essentially crowding out all of those bad things that people naturally have going around in their minds when it comes time to buy.

Clayton Makepeace: That’s the slide of hand approach. I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday about that. And if your overriding theme is so compelling that it totally rivets the reader and in – then he won’t be capable or he won’t be likely to ask some of the tough questions that might expose a flaw in your argument or a weakness in your product. But that’s absolutely true.

Bob Bly: So we’ve got a – the fact that timeliness of delivery is important. What about this idea of entertaining that you talked about and fun?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, I’m seeing that on both sides actually. And I think it’s – I’m seeing that on the direct mail side but I’m also seeing it on the Internet side which is really kind of sad. The Internet – for years we all knew that direct mail was a great mental medium. In other words, you go to people with cogent selling arguments and you can make a sale while television was the great emotional medium that was the one where you could involve people much better on an emotional level. In a direct mail piece, you can show a picture of a starving child in a fundraising appeal. On television, you see the children living in squalor in the streets and the emotional intensity is an order of magnitude higher.

The Internet though is a combination of both. It can be a static medium like direct mail or it can be something that moves and that evokes emotion and that involves people. And most of the Internet marketers that I see especially the at-home business people and the entrepreneurs that are doing – starting businesses or doing small websites or selling information on the web, and I am guilty of this, are treating the Internet as if it were just an electronic version of direct mail. Our promotions are static. Our products are static. There’s no movement. We’re missing out on half of the power of the Internet.

Bob Bly: That’s a good point. But let’s get to the core of the issue. The core of the issue seems to be that benefits headline – benefit headlines don’t work. So if we take a stereotype benefit headline for a financial newsletter, make nine hundred percent profit barring this little known company, and that doesn’t work. Well, one of the reasons you said it doesn’t work is because if they’ve seen over the years three hundred of them it – and yours is the three hundred and first enough already. They’re not interested. But why else won’t a big benefit – big promise, big benefit headline work today?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, one of the biggest reasons I think is just that it says hey this is an ad. You want to read an ad. Well, I’ve already seen my two hundred ads today; no thank you, I don’t think I want to read another ad. When a headline is about a product or in any other way gives away the fact that this is an ad the sheer saturation of your market is going to be working against you.

And of course I already addressed the skepticism thing that Gary Bencivenga has a way of writing things that stick in my brain. One of the things he said was that – early on was that the emotional or mental reaction to most headlines today is yeah right. You read the headline you go oh okay whatever.

Bob Bly: So we’re in a world where everything we learned big, unique selling proposition, big promise, benefit headlines don’t work, so what do I have to do to now make my direct mail and internet marketing work in this new environment? [Crosstalk] This is what I think we really want to know.

Clayton Makepeace: Well, one of the things that we’re doing right now – well, first of all you don’t want to send ads. You have another tool available to you that’s much more potent in this environment.

Bob Bly: What’s that?

Clayton Makepeace: It’s called the advertorial.

Bob Bly: Can you describe that?

Clayton Makepeace: An advertorial is something that offers the prospect of benefit just for reading it. And it can work whether you’re selling garden tools or whether you’re selling investment newsletters or health products or whatever. And so the advertorial basically goes to you let’s say it’s a garden implement. It says how to have the greenest lawn on the block. And it’s seventeen ways –

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: – to have a richer, fuller lawn.

Bob Bly: So an advertorial promises a benefit not for buying a product but it promises you’ll get a benefit just for reading the promotion?

Clayton Makepeace: It can. They also sometimes lead with much the way a Time Magazine cover would lead with – we just did one that was The Case for Two Thousand Dollar Gold was the headline. Daniel and I did it for Weiss. It’s a web initiative. And it doesn’t say you’re going to get rich. It doesn’t say we’re going to get eight hundred percent profits. It just says pretty much the way Time Magazine would what’s the case here for two thousand dollar gold.

So it involves people on a whole different level. The anti-advertising defenses don’t go up. The person who’s promised that he’ll learn certain things by reading this article. And so I guess my response Bob is the headline doesn’t have to be a benefit – doesn’t have to be screaming a benefit read this or die. Or –

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: – that great Jim Rutz’s headline. It doesn’t have to be a quantified monetary benefit. It just simply has to engage the reader by promising information that will somehow make his life better.

Bob Bly: So to overcome that – this overflow this – of ads you write something that doesn’t look and read like an ad that reads like an advertorial?

Clayton Makepeace: Right.

Bob Bly: What about the idea of the fact that you said the Internet encourages information to be free. It cheapens information. How do you overcome – what can you do to overcome that?

Clayton Makepeace: The cheapening of information is overcome by adding something to it. Anytime a product is commoditized you can overcome it by redefining the product in some way. I ran into this years ago in California when I had a sound stage in Los Angeles and I was producing videos. Now you talk about trying to sell coal in Newcastle or snowballs to Eskimos. I was in video production capitol of the world with a three camera video truck and a non-union crew. And I couldn’t get it booked. I couldn’t rent the facility no matter what I did. And so I redefined my service.

I went and got a sound stage at Sunset Gower Studios and hired a guy that had a laser light show and I started bringing rock n’ roll stars in and videotaping them singing with these effects. And I turned it into a nice little business. So I redefined what I was doing, what my product was.

The same thing is true with information. If you’re selling information you’re fighting the trend here with the Internet. But if what you’re selling is advocacy, a unique opinion, controversy, intrigue, excitement it has to have other elements added to it in order to make the sale today. We were brainstorming a package with a client not to long ago and the client made the great point every product – every package we’ve ever mailed had somebody – had the doctor or the advocate on the front cover angry about something.

Bob Bly: So to address or overcome the cheapening of information have an expert behind it or a viewpoint, is that the technique?

Clayton Makepeace: It has to be personalized. Think about it in terms of newsletters versus magazines. Let’s say you go down to the B. Dalton Bookseller and you look at a copy of Forbes Magazine. And what is it going to cost you? It’s going to cost you a few bucks, right? And what do you get in it? You get a lot of different experts and a lot of nonexperts a lot of just non – just editorial people sharing their opinions. Right?

Bob Bly: Uh-huh.

Clayton Makepeace: There’s no unified direction. There’s no advocacy. There’s nobody saying here’s where I am right. There’s nobody saying here’s my track record. So it’s not a leadership or an advocacy situation. It’s just information. But when we sell material in the – and again my primary markets are investment and health. When we sell information in those areas we have to make sure that our advocate, our expert, the figure head, the newsletter editor has a unique position on – a unique and surprising position and solution on something that the consumer is already either concerned or excited about. So again it’s just like the video truck in Los Angeles. We’ve addressed commoditization as a product by making it different from the bland just the facts ma’am information –

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: – that’s available on the web.

Bob Bly: Now we’ve got – you’ve mentioned a bunch of other problems and it seems to me the way to address those are pretty clear. You talked about skepticism and wariness of the big promise. Well you can get through that through third party endorsements and proof elements.

You talked about instant gratification and you mentioned letting someone download a premium. You talked about the idea of involvement and entertainment on the web and you mentioned earlier surveys, tests, contests, stream – motions, streaming video and audio. And you mentioned people are concerned they’re buying someone they don’t know – from a company they don’t know. And you build the credibility of the company.

You put service and customer testimonials and third party endorsements but what people I think on this call are really wondering are how do you write a headline or a headline and a lead that’s going to work in this new – to solve all these problems? And you told me you came up with I think four or so new headline writing techniques that you’re using and we’d like to hear them.

Clayton Makepeace: Sure.

Bob Bly: We’d like to steal them from you.

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, absolutely. Let me just – I want to touch on one thing before I get to that though. I just wanted to mention that on the Internet look – if you’re marketing on the Internet be looking for these kind of involvement advices. We hired a speaker for the Power Marketing Summit. And we had to go to Premier Speakers Bureau. They had us type in our name and e-mail address when we first entered the site. And we got a flash presentation using our name in the presentation explaining all the reasons why we should hire a speaker for our event. Flash media, they call it rich media, streaming audio and video are more than quadrupling response rates for the people who are using them. So before we moved on I just – I think that it’s very important that we think beyond the Internet just as another form of direct mail.

On headline strategies, I have eight lead approaches that are just perfect for this environment that don’t have anything to do with screaming benefits right off the top. The first one I’ve written about in the Total Package a couple of times it – I call them skeptical or validation leads. The people who – everyone on this call received premiums – your premiums hopefully. We had some technical glitches early on but I hope by now everyone’s received them.

One of them was a direct mail package that Carline Anglade-Cole wrote. The headline was Why Bilberry and Lutein don’t work for Eyesight. And that package was just absolutely the perfect connection for people who were skeptical, who had seen it all in a mature market place. They had seen the big promises the big benefits. This didn’t say anything about benefits. It just basically says hey you’re right to be skeptical. These things don’t work half the time and there are ways to either make them work or there are other things that will work for your eyes.

I did a similar lead for a newsletter called Your Money Report for Weiss Research that was a validation of the prospect’s frustration with Wall Street. A couple of years ago when I wrote the package, and it’s still true today by the way, the Dow Jones had gone nowhere since 1999. It was still trading at the same levels it was trading back then. And so our anticipation was that our investor customers and prospects were feeling really frustrated about this lack of growth. They’d wasted four or five years of their lives or six or seven now and have – and risked their money for that period of time and had nothing to show for it.

And so our headline on that one was Thanks for Nothing Wall Street, I’d rather do it myself. And the package was about using your money in other ways to grow your wealth; real estate collectibles, other things. So that’s a skeptical or validation lead. You acknowledge how the prospect is already feeling about products like yours about offers like yours and then you give him an advertorial that gives him valuable information that he can use. In the case of bilberry and lutein it was information they could use for their health; things that really do work.

In Thanks for Nothing Wall Street, it was, I forget, seven or eight things I think that they could do to make money without ever touching another stock.

Bob Bly: So that’s the skeptical validation lead and that’s your – new headline method number one of the eight. What’s the second one on your list?

Clayton Makepeace: The second one is confirmation of suspicions. I’ve used this over the years to grade affect. All of us have these little questions pass through our minds from time to time. I wonder if cancer researchers really want to cure cancer because the drug companies make more money off of it than anything. Or the American Cancer Society is the richest charity in the world, what would happen if they actually cured it?

We wonder about the supplements we’re taking if they’re pure. If I was a supplement company we think I could put sugar in here and nobody would even know the difference.

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: So anytime you can identify a little, sneaking suspicion that your prospect may have that’s great fodder for an advertorial. It’s a great way to engage them – ah-ha, I knew it. It connects with them immediately. We all think that these are little, secret thoughts that only we have but the fact is we all have them.

And another one is the bullet proof proof lead. The – this is in a case where you want to go with the big promise. You haven’t been able to come up with anything that you think has greater, visceral strength for your market. The bullet proof proof lead uses some device whether it’s something that the prospect already knows or something that a very credible third party person may have said or something else. Like for example, right now all of my clients have one question in their minds and that is, should we do a promotion on the bird flu? Okay?

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: No matter who I talk to they all have the same question. Financial companies, health companies they all want to know is it time to do a bird flu promotion. Okay? Well, we’re at one of those strange moments in time where we know that this major news event is coming. And we know that there will be a time when everybody is going to be devouring every piece of information they can possibly get on Avian Flu. And we know that everyone from George Bush to Kofi Annan to the leaders of Germany and France and England and all over the world are issuing these very public warnings. Oprah Winfrey is doing television shows on –

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: – this is going to be big. It’s dangerous. It’s scary. You’ve got to stay on top of it. But the public isn’t quite there yet. And so – but the people who will make a product or a promotion for the bird flu based on the bird flu topic work are going to be the ones that make it absolutely bullet proof right from the top that this is a big deal and this is something that you should concern yourself with.

Bob Bly: So the third method is the bullet proof proof lead. Now, let me – Clayton, let me just interrupt. People are concerned that we’re this far into the call and we’re not quite – we’re a little behind in our outline. So with your permission and we’ve done this before I’d like to extend another fifteen, twenty minutes, would that work for you?

Clayton Makepeace: Absolutely.

Bob Bly: I think to really give these points – and I think this list of eight by the way is the core of the whole – really the core of it. And to get through it all we’ll go a little longer. So go ahead.

We’ve now done the third one the bullet proof proof lead. What’s number four?

Clayton Makepeace: Number four is testimonial lead. I just – I used this approach not too long ago for a product that most people didn’t know much about. It’s called EDTA and it’s taken orally. A lot of people know what intravenous chelation therapy is. But not a lot of people knew that there was anything – any such thing as oral kelation. A pill that you could take that would remove plaque from your arteries and lower blood pressure and lower your risk of a heart attack.

And I could have lead with all kinds of big promises but instead I found a testimonial from a gentleman who had even sent us his photograph. And his testimonial started out heart surgery may be a thing of the past. And he went on to tell the story of how his doctor wanted him to have a bypass. He started taking this product instead and a few weeks later he was reexamined and told that he didn’t need a bypass after all.

There’s nothing that cuts through the skepticism in today’s market like a testimonial. And there’s nothing that engages and even entertains as well as a story. And good storytelling is really another one of the approaches I want to discuss. I used it a few years ago with great success in a promotion for Dr. Martin Weiss in his newsletter Safe Money Report.

And Martin and I were sitting out by his swimming pool one day and he happened to tell me this little story about this insurance company that was very upset that Weiss had given them a poor rating and so they flew down to try to talk him into raising their safety rating. And Martin said I’m sorry I can’t do it. And so as they were leaving the office the receptionist heard one of them say Weiss better shut up or get a bodyguard.

Daniel Levis: I remember that.

Clayton Makepeace: So do you want to guess what my headline was on the package?

Daniel Levis: I think so but tell us the headline.

Clayton Makepeace: It was Weiss better shut the blank up or get a bodyguard. And the package started with that story. Immediate engagement, immediate interest, and then the story made the point that you need an independent third party source of advice, of guidance. And so it was a perfect setup for our direct mail piece.

Daniel Levis: Storytelling’s a tremendous interest to copyrighters. I wonder if before we move on if you could just give us like three quick bullet point tips on story writing –

Clayton Makepeace: Well –

Daniel Levis: – storytelling.

Clayton Makepeace: Sure. When you become a storyteller it’s – you need the same skills that a novelist would have. You have to have characters that people care about and you have to make them care about them. They have to be dimensionalized enough that you know something about them and you’re rooting for them.

In the heart attack – in the heart story heart surgery may be obsolete. In that one, we talked about this guy named John and how twenty-four hours ago this harmless looking white powder that you see now was plaque built up in an artery. And we build this story so you care about John and you want to see him win.

And I think that’s the key for us copyrighters when we’re telling stories. They need to be personal in nature. They need to involve somebody that’s much like them and they need to care about this person. Now there’s another kind of story that copyrighters will quite often use at the beginning of packages; actually, two others – two other types that are really excellent. The first one is the ironic story. How a bald headed barber saved my hair.

Bob Bly: Right. And what’s the second type?

Clayton Makepeace: How – or how a one legged golfer took three shots off of my game. Those are ironic. And so you just have to read it. I mean what would a one legged golfer know about playing better golf and what would a bald headed barber know about saving my hair. So you have to read it. And on that one you may not care at all about the principals but you’re just intrigued with the story. So you have that approach.

And then the other one is the fascinating story. There was a promotion a few years ago where on the outside of the envelope, it was a six by nine envelope, and on the outside of the envelope a guy starts telling the story of a direct mail piece he had received. And not unlike the one you’re holding your hand right now. And on the cover it said, “The Winner of this Week’s XYZ Football Game is Known to Me,” details inside. And it was sent just to a list of gamblers. People who like to bet on the games.

And so the package went on to tell that story of how – and so that week I got a correct answer and so I paid two dollars and I got the name of the winning team and I won my bet. And so the next week I got another mailing and the same thing happened. And – but now the price was ten dollars. And by the time the Super Bowl rolled around the price was ten thousand dollars to get the name of the winner of the Super Bowl.

Daniel Levis: Awesome.

Clayton Makepeace: And – so then he revealed the magic trick behind it and he showed exactly how these people had correctly called one hundred percent of the games that this guy had read about and how they had correctly called the Super Bowl for him.

Daniel Levis: What a great lead.

Bob Bly: Okay, so we’ve got the story lead pretty well covered what about the – you call it the official notification lead. What does that mean?

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, the – one of the problems that we have – well, on the one hand if we’re working with an unknown company, a company that isn’t well known to the people we’re promoting to it was just the credibility thing whether it’s on the outside of the envelope or whether it’s on the subject line of the e-mail or on the landing page that you’re sending them to.

And I have a client that I’m personally convinced is going to be absolutely huge within a year but right now not a lot of people on the outside know who he is. So I did something a little sneaky. And – I’m a big believer in what Mark Victor Hansen says that you want to do everything you can get away with and still get into heaven. I think I can get into heaven over this one but a lot of the material in this package was taken from the National Institutes of Health. And the package is about diabetes and blood sugar imbalances in people. And I wanted to get maximum readership. It’s a component package with a carrier envelope. And I knew with just our corner card up there in the corner it’s not going to get the package open.

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: And so I did a very – official looking envelope and it just says Plague Warning; underneath it says, Important Notification from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Okay?

Bob Bly: Uh-huh.

Clayton Makepeace: And then it says seventy-two thousand Americans will be struck down in the next twenty-four hours; urgent, self defense inside.

Daniel Levis: That’s brilliant.

Bob Bly: So that’s the official notification lead, that’s great. What about the lead, I’ve heard this one before, the dominant emotion lead?

Clayton Makepeace: Let me just back up.

Bob Bly: Sure.

Clayton Makepeace: On that official notification, it could – you have to be careful. You can’t go so far with it that it becomes fraudulent or anything like that. But any official organization whether it’s a branch of the United States government, it could be the IRS; it could be any group in the United States government or any acknowledged group of experts like the American Heart Association or so forth. If you re writing about something that they are writing about then it’s perfectly legitimate to use their name in your teaser copy on the outside of your promotion.

Dominant emotion leads; we’ve talked a lot about this in the Total Package and if – and we’ll continue talking about it because it’s a major point – a major tool for increasing response. It tends to be a layer in headlines. You begin with a basic premise but then you write it in such a way that it connects directly with the strongest, resonant emotions that your prospects have. My all time favorite right now is still Arthur Johnson’s Had Enough headline for Dr. Williams.

I think it’s just perfect in that it connects with another source of frustration that our prospects have right now which is the – this feeling that every piece of health advice is telling you to give up something that you love. The sun’s going to kill you. Alcohol’s going to kill you. A great cigar after dinner’s going to kill you. A big old juicy steak is going to kill you. Everything you love is going to kill you. And only the stuff you really can’t stand is good for you.

And so this package was just like – if you’ve had enough of this idiotic advice let me tell you the truth about these things. And it was absolutely brilliant and it really resonated well with our marketplace. A lot of other people have tried to get theirs simply with negative or just – yeah, just negative headlines. And they’ve missed the mark. What was going on here was – in that package, Arthur was freeing you from the health Nazis’. He was freeing you from these people who are always making you feel guilty, always trying to scare you into the kind of lifestyle they want you to lead.

Bob Bly: Okay. So we’ve got the dominant emotion lead and the example Had Enough. And then you have the one called the topical lead. What’s that?

Clayton Makepeace: We’ve found working with Weiss that anything that people are reading about they’re thinking about. And anything that they’re thinking about they have feelings about. And connecting with those feelings is a key to winning. So this is a topical lead. Anything that’s in the news and looks like it’s going to be there for some period of time if you can connect with that, with what your prospect is thinking about those things, you could have a very big winner on your hand. Much bigger than simply yelling – shouting benefits or a unique selling proposition.

We’ve – there’s some dangers involved that I’d like to mention but overall the idea of saying – well, let me back up just a second. One of the keys to doing really hot direct mail promotions in the financial field and also in health and I think pretty much in anything is to enter the conversation the prospect is already having with himself. If you come to him with a problem he doesn’t know he has he’s going to shut you down because he’s already encountered too many problems today. And the last thing he needs is you to give him another one.

If on the other hand, you come to him and say look I know you’ve been worried about this or I know you’ve been thinking about this and now here’s – here are the answers that you’ve been wondering where you would go to get. Now –

Daniel Levis: Essentially confirming the fear that he has.

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, it could be fear. It could be a desire for something. But the key is that he’s already having the conversation. At the Power Marketing Summit, I’ve got a whole bunch of great slides showing times when I violated this rule and got spanked pretty good.

We went out with – in promotions where our forecasts were one hundred percent right. We forecasted the federal deficit would explode. We forecasted that banks would crash. We forecasted interest rates would climb. We forecasted gold would go up. We forecasted fuel prices would go up. Oil was at ten dollars a gallon and now it’s at sixty. We were one hundred percent right on these forecasts. But they weren’t conversations our prospects were already having with themselves. And so they missed the mark.

Clayton Makepeace: But the point here is that this is a very different marketplace. You need to acknowledge what the Internet has done to your prospect, how it’s changes his expectations and how that affects everything you do whether it’s in direct mail or whether it’s on the web or in any other medium. And it even affects how you deliver your products.

Bob Bly: Well, it seems like the number one lesson we’re learning today is that the prospect has seen so much of this over so many years that yesterday’s approach no longer works just because it’s worn out. Does that sound accurate?

Clayton Makepeace: That is accurate. And the reason that I wanted to do this call was I’m dealing with a lot of copy cubs now. And these are people that have taken great courses and read great books on direct marketing. And – but they’re coming to the table with these very elementary tools of just leading with benefits. And I walked into a seminar that somebody was holding and there was one of the top experts in the field and he was literally yelling and pounding the podium benefits, benefits, benefits.

And the fact is that people who are following that advice now are losing some faith because they’re trying it and they’re not getting the blockbuster results that they were promised. And that’s why it’s time for some deeper thinking. It’s time to go to school on this kind of thing and to really think about where your prospect is now. The benefits have never been more important than they are when presenting your product later in your promotion. But nine times out of ten you go with an advertorial it is essentially a bribe. You’re bribing the prospect to read this by giving him information that will make his life better right now today.

And then after you have him engaged on that level you can – you’re no longer a salesman. Now you’re his advocate. You’re his friend. You’ve gotten up from behind the little salesman table and walked around front and now you’re sitting next to him. And you’re his guide. You’re his helper. And when you’ve done that now there’s not an adversarial relationship here any more. This is not a sales pitch. This is an offer to help.

Bob Bly: Although – even though it’s an advertorial as we close we’re going to have to get to a sales pitch and we’re going to have to present an offer. Now you say that just as the headlines and the copy approach and the lead have to be different that today offers are different. And I’ve always thought of them as unchanging. Like they all have a guarantee and a price and a premium so aren’t those elements the same and what’s the difference between a guarantee today and ten years ago?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, I think many of the elements are the same but I think we’re guilty of sleepwalking through these elements today. And when we – when we’re in an environment of declining response because of the front end of our packages one of the opportunities we have – in addition to employing some of these techniques that we’ve talked about today to help the front end out; one of the other opportunities that we have is to strengthen the back end or the offer copy.

Bob Bly: So what’s – how would you strengthen a guarantee? That seems pretty straightforward; you read it for sixty days and if not return it and you get your money back. What should we be doing different?

Clayton Makepeace: (Laughter) Well, the – if you think about it a guarantee can be a lot more than just simply hey look if this sucks I’ll send you a check. I’ll send you a refund which is essentially what basic guarantee copy says. Entrust us with your money, we’ll send you the product; if it stinks you get your money back. And that’s essentially what most guarantees say. But when we present a guarantee we really have opportunities to do a lot more than that.

For example, we have the opportunity to establish a benchmark performance for the product. In the financial field for example, we can say that within twelve months you will have a fifty percent return on your money or all you have to do is let me know and I’ll send you a full refund. Okay?

In the health area, I’ve just gone through major repositioning of a health company where we wanted to remove faith from the proposition. And basically say look if you don’t feel the results of this supplement within sixty days or any supplement you buy from us – if you don’t feel measurable differences within sixty days then just let us know and we’ll send you your money back.

Now we even went farther with one of them which was a product that balances pH levels in your body, the acid alkaline balance in your body. By providing them with a set of test strips and saying take your pH balances before you start taking the product and then every week for the next four weeks take them again. And if your pH doesn’t move back to normal from highly acidic to normal then just let us know and we’ll send you a full refund.

Bob Bly: So tying the guarantee into the performance; although you do have to say in your guarantee if you do that – if you’re not satisfied with how it makes you feel or you want to return it for any other reason you’ll want them to think that they have to meet that condition or they can’t return it, right?

Clayton Makepeace: Right. We’ve even done multiple guarantees in packages where we had one that was nothing more than a quality guarantee, a freshness quality of ingredients, absorbability, all of that kind of stuff which is not really an actionable guarantee because there’s no way anyone knows that but you.

But still presenting those things as guarantees raise them to the level of this is our corporate mission.

Daniel Levis: Well, this is another place that – such a perfect place for the future facing again the recent promo that we did for Weiss in the guarantee it talks about give it a try. And it goes through every single step of what happens when you make your purchase. Plug your – plug my recommendations into the asset tracker. Step two, do this. Step three, do that. And basically you’re crowding out all of the opportunities for negativity at that pivotal moment right there in the risk reversal.

Clayton Makepeace: Absolutely. And – now your guarantee is a selling device.

Bob Bly: So one thing in our offer we can make the guarantee a selling device. Now another thing that’s traditionally part of the offer is the price and the discount. Software is four hundred dollars but if you order now you get it for three hundred. You save a hundred. That – how does that have to be different today? That’s pretty much the same, right?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, in some businesses in some industries it maybe but I see an absolute dearth of testing on offers today. And the fact of the matter is if all of a sudden information is free on the Internet then we need to start thinking about what your charging for the information that you’re selling.

Another thing, if all of a sudden your universe is one tenth as large as it was before what does that say about your universe? You’re talking to the most adamant, die hard people out there.

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: If you’re doing investment promotions right now you’re talking to the one million guys who refuse to give up on investment advisories when everyone else did. So they find tremendous value in investment advisories. So does it make sense to test higher prices?

Bob Bly: I see what you’re saying. But yet you also see them testing lower prices where they’ll have a one year subscription, two year and they’ll say hey do you just want to kick the tires? Get eight issues for eight weeks for a real low price.

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, that generally does not work well.

Bob Bly: Does not work well.

Clayton Makepeace: And the reason for that is especially with the periodical publication there’s not sufficient time for bonding to take place. In order to get a good renewal rate on a newsletter the person who’s taking the newsletter has to first take some step or action that’s recommended in the newsletter. So now he has a vested interest in continuing to follow your advice. Right?

And in those shorter trials, historically, they’ve been tested time and time again over the years. And the people who come in on those – yes, you’ll sale them. And yes because they’re low price you’ll get a lot of names in the door. But the quality of those names is substantially lower and there’s a huge question as to whether they’ll be with you in six months to a year. And especially today when so much of this business is the back end sale –

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: – where they buy the newsletter but the profits center for the company is making the next sale which would be a trading service or a supplement product or something else. So –

Bob Bly: So the bottom line is more price testing?

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, well more testing at every level of the offer – every single level. Test your guarantee. One of the things that we tested early on about – on guarantees was the client had a sixty day guarantee. And I was looking at his refund curve and I was seeing that he had this huge bulge right at sixty days where all of these people are writing in for guarantees. And so it took about a year in a half to do it but we finally talked him into testing a one year guarantee. And his refund requests fell by almost half.

Bob Bly: So you got it tested. Now we literally have Clayton, even though we’re fifteen minutes over, we have literally five more minutes. So I want to ask you things that I see are on peoples’ minds.

Clayton Makepeace: Absolutely.

Bob Bly: What’s working in premiums today?

Clayton Makepeace: On the premium side, what I’m seeing working best are just very nitty gritty how to do it step by step premiums. I’ve seen people do things; in fact, one of them came out of our shop that attempted to position a special report for example as a encyclopedia or a physician’s desk reference. Okay? That stuff just doesn’t cut it. What people want is cutting edge, opinionated, emotionally driven and exciting, new solutions.

And people – it’s important when writing premiums and in crafting them. People don’t want – really want solutions. They want miracles. They want effortless, push button profits. They want effortless, miracle pill cures. They want – they don’t want to learn anything. When you’re selling a premium you say you’ll discover this. You’ll learn that. That’s just bad copy. The premiums need to be animated. They need to actually do things for the prospect. And they need to have that fresh cutting edge feel to it.

A client of mine had a run away, grand slam control and decided, because he had just been published by a major publisher and had a hardcover book in bookstores, decided without testing to change his main premium from a printed – a cheaply – a cheap looking printed report to a hardcover book. And his response fell by like seventy-five percent. It just cratered.

Bob Bly: Yeah and I found that a lot of people think I’ll offer a best selling book and that’s even worse because if it’s a best seller so many people already have it.

Clayton Makepeace: A printed book – a hardcover book as a perceived value of twenty-nine bucks.

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: What’s it worth to you to cure your arthritis?

Bob Bly: Exactly.

Clayton Makepeace: It’s priceless. And so it’s all about perceived value when it comes to premiums. It’s also very important to make sure that the premium supports or expands on the main USP for the company or for the product. You don’t – if you’re selling a book on personal finance don’t give away an alarm clock. Those – or a calculator. Those things are – the perceived value is zip. People know they cost a few cents or a buck.

If you give away something though that could help him save thirty dollars a month on his electric bill –

Bob Bly: We’re just about out of time. But any concluding thoughts or final thing you’d like to add that we didn’t get to today? I know it’s been very richly information packed but we went fast.

Clayton Makepeace: Yeah, I would ask what I asked the last time we had a teleconference. Please drop us a line at feedback@makepeacetotalpackage.com and let us know how we did. I know there were a lot of questions we didn’t get to. I am – the redhead’s always accusing me of being overly optimistic as to what we can get done in a period of time. But we will do our best to answer any questions we didn’t get to today on the call.

Bob Bly: And we have all of those.

Clayton Makepeace: Yes, we have them all. And we’ll be answering them either by direct e-mail back to you or in the next few issues of the Total Package.

Bob Bly: Well, on that note I want to thank Daniel, Julie and especially Clayton for being with us today. And you guys for listening. Thanks folks.

Clayton Makepeace: Thanks so much.

Julie McManus: Thanks.

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE™

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No Comments »

1. Comment by Jason Leister — April 16, 2007 @ 4:42 pm

   Aren\’t we supposed to be sending you a gift?

   Much appreciated.

2. Comment by Mike Staskiewicz — April 16, 2007 @ 5:03 pm

   Jason,

   Rich people just need more love, not more gifts. :p

   Right Clayton? Happy Birthday.

3. Comment by Robert Lehrer — April 17, 2007 @ 11:01 pm

   Thanks for that powerful birthday gift that you gave to, er, all of us!!
   Belated Happy Birthday!

4. Comment by Andrew Cavanagh — April 18, 2007 @ 12:07 pm

   I found it interesting that the direct mail world are all asking if it\’s time to feature the bird flu.

   If you search on Google for \”prevent bird flu\”, \”how to prevent bird flu\”, \”bird flu history\”, \”bird flu suit\”, \”bird flu pandemic tamiflu\” you\’ll find I\’m number 1.

   And I\’ve been number one since either late 2005 or early 2006.

   What\’s interesting is the sales in this niche have no correlation to the traffic.

   It\’s all about the current level of hysteria around the bird flu.

   I can even track where the hysteria is at based on where the sales are coming from.

   And you\’re dead right…at present the bird flu is NOT a hot topic.

   If it were to jump to a genuine human to human flu it would be the hottest topic on earth.

   Kindest regards,
   Andrew Cavanagh