Posted by: Kim Krause Schwalm
July 21, 2009
Issue #719

In Praise of Second Chances …

I recently attended a milestone-year college reunion (I won’t say which one), and was recounting to some old friends how I met my husband.

It was Labor Day weekend 1988, and I was hanging out with a group of other 20-something friends with whom I had rented a beach house for the summer. We were kicking off the weekend at a bar called the Rusty Rudder in Dewey Beach, Delaware. A reggae band was playing and the joint was jumping.

I broke off from the group to chat with a girlfriend of mine who flew in from Chicago for the weekend. Next thing I know a good-looking guy comes up to me and says, “Dance with me.” Well, that seemed a bit presumptive to me and not quite the right approach, so I responded, “Not now, maybe later.”

About 5 minutes later (with a shot of tequila stuck in the middle of that somewhere), the same guy approaches me again and says, “I’ve been watching you all night and I think you’re gorgeous. Will you dance with me?” Of course, the second time around, the answer was a resounding “Yes!”

I’m so glad I gave my husband Bruce a second chance after he flubbed up the first time. Twenty-one years later, we’ve built a wonderful life and have two beautiful children together — plus the cutest Goldendoodle puppy ever!

So what does this have to do with direct marketing? Plenty!

Some of my greatest successes as a copywriter have resulted from clients giving me a second chance. These second chances turned out to be a “win/win” for everyone — for me, a second chance to prove myself, plus pile up six-figure royalties, and for the client, a big fat new control that brings in millions of dollars. 

Now, after flubbing up the first time, I could have slunk away feeling like a total failure and given up. And my client could have been short-sighted enough to trash my business card, block my e-mails and phone calls, and put me on their permanent copywriter “blacklist.”

But the smartest people I know in this business don’t work that way. They know, from years of experience, that none of us know for sure what’s going to work and what isn’t. Sure, we’ve got some tried-and-true approaches and cookie-cutter rules we can rely on.

Yet we’ve all seem a promo everyone LOVES — up to the company president — fall flat on its face once it’s mailed. Meanwhile, promos that everyone may have been lukewarm about can end up blowing away the current control. It happens all the time!

So to give a copywriter who has produced copy your marketing team liked well enough to invest tens of thousands of dollars on postage and printing to mail — or sent out as an e-mail to their very best customers — just ONE chance to prove him or herself, seems to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

After all, we all know a simple headline change, or new format, or offer tweak can bump response up 30%, 50%, or even more — plenty to declare yourself a new control.

Fortunately for me, one of my earliest clients, KCI Communications, had the foresight to give an “unproven” writer, whose first effort failed, a second chance. And it paid off big for all of us.

Back in 2001, KCI hired me to write an acquisition direct mail promo for their flagship Personal Finance newsletter. I had written several highly successful renewal inserts and mailings for them in previous months. But for me, this was a huge opportunity — my first shot at writing an acquisition promo for a financial newsletter that could bring in actual royalties.

Not only that, I was going up against the legendary copywriter, Jim Rutz. I felt excited and nervous at the same time, but dove right in with a totally fresh approach and wrote what I, and the KCI team, thought was a pretty decent package.

It bombed. Not a total abject failure, but nowhere close to where it needed to be to beat the Rutz control.

I felt like crawling under a rock. I figured I’d spend the rest of my copywriting career writing $1,000 renewal letters and never get a piece of the big royalty action.

So what does KCI, in their incredibly brilliant foresight, do? Hire me to write a second package for Personal Finance about six months later. This time I went with more of a “tried and true” approach: an issue log-style magalog format.

It ended up blowing the Rutz control out of the water. The promo went on to mail for three more years as the control, adding tens of thousands of new subscribers for KCI to market their more pricey financial products to, and earning me well north of $150,000 in royalties and fees.

But more importantly, it put me on the proverbial map as a copywriter. Next thing I know, Brian Kurtz at Boardroom is ringing me up, asking me to write a package for their Tax Hotline newsletter. And practically the same thing happens.

I write a promo everyone loves. It drops in the mail against their seven-year control written by A-list copywriting great Parris Lampropoulos. And it doesn’t beat it, although this time at least I come close.

So while the wise folks at Boardroom could have just hit “delete” on my promo and never looked back, they decided to retest it with a different cover. I came up with a new headline and lead, and we got ourselves a big winner!

They saved themselves the $30-40,000 they would have spent on hiring another copywriter and designer to produce an all-new package — not to mention the dozens of hours of employee labor needed to guide it through the process from scratch.

Meanwhile I spent a day or two on a new headline and lead (of course I didn’t charge them) and in return got a new control under my belt. Not just any control, but a BOARDROOM control. And I’m proud to say I’m the first female copywriter to do so!

So to all you marketers out there: don’t be miserly with your second chances. They can pay off big — for your company AND for your career. You can be smart with your budget and rework promos that performed reasonably well and come up with huge winners.
 
And you can give undiscovered copywriters an opportunity to really show their stuff once they get more familiar with your products — and add them to your stable of copywriting stars before other companies find out about them.

The smartest companies I’ve worked with in this business — the KCIs, the Boardrooms, the Healthy Directions, the Soundviews, the Nature Trade Centers, all know this.

And for you copywriters who may have tried and failed before, please know that we’ve ALL been there. Don’t give up. If you’ve written a halfway-decent performing promo, you’re already way ahead of the pack.

Let your client know you’re ready and willing to give it a second shot. A free headline or lead test (or three!) Or a deeply-discounted total reworking of the promo. If they’re smart, they’ll take you up on your offer. If they need further convincing, show them this article.

Here’s to second chances. We all deserve them. Who knows where I’d be without them!

Kim Krause Schwalm
Guest Contributor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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5 Comments »

1. Comment by Beau Smith — July 21, 2009 @ 11:03 am

   I had considered making it a policy to do a free rework for promos that don’t beat a control. It seems like every time I think of something good, someone else has already done it. I guess that’s a sign I’m on the right track!

   Thank you for the insight.

   Beau Smith

   BTW, I also had to give my wife a second (third, etc.) chance when we were dating. And she probably gave me as many. It definitely paid off.

2. Comment by John Klein — July 21, 2009 @ 2:37 pm

   I don’t understant this at all. If all one learns from a multi-thousand $$$ dm test is “It didn’t work”. What insights do you have for a subsequent test.

   So,just before mailing the first mailing, couldn’t we have said - hey, if this doesn’t work - WHY isn’t it working; and develop the 2nd mailing to go out the a subportion of the list along with the initial mailing.

   To carry this further, why not split up that first big bang into several tests (multivariable testing??) and really learn which elements are working best. - John Klein

3. Comment by Kim Krause Schwalm — July 21, 2009 @ 9:00 pm

   Great point, John! Ideally I love it when a client gives me the opportunity to do two or more tests for an initial mailing–i.e., at least 2 headline tests, maybe an offer test to boot. But unfortunately, that doesn’t happen too often except in the case of a new launch. That’s because the client typically only allocates a certain number of names for tests–they need to make sure they’re mailing the known performer, the control, to enough names to ensure they meet their revenue targets–and often they’re doing a test on the current control at the same time. So most of the time, you end up with just one shot!

4. Comment by Marilena Paolucci — July 22, 2009 @ 12:21 pm

   Hi Kim,

   Thanks for this article. Persistence really does pay off in the end. We just need to reminded of this every so often by a trusted colleague or a friend.

5. Comment by Mikhail Trishin — July 23, 2009 @ 11:15 am

   It’s Great Example!

   Bravo Kim!

   There are so much such things around us in casual which we must tru and test in our marketing!

   Good lesson for increase our advertence.