Few things about advertising get my heart racing faster than headline split testing.
All the more so if it concerns email subject lines.
Like traditional headline testing, subject line testing can lead to dramatic increases in response rates. But without the sloth factor.
With email, you know almost instantly whether you’ve got a barnburner, a dud, or something in the lukewarm middle.
Here’s a killer email subject line I came across the other day and the author was… my wife.
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Here’s a howler of a headline that surely hails from a martini soused agency person.
“Everyone has opinions. We have convictions.”
Turns out this platitudinous ad writer was a pretty good forecaster, if jail time isn’t simply a matter of opinion.
The drivel continues.
“Proclamations are common on Wall Street. But they’re meaningless if you don’t stand by your words. Particularly if you’re a broker-dealer. At MF Global, having convictions is a big part of our culture.”
Speaking before Congress today about the missing $1.2 billion of account holder’s cash, MF’s illustrious CEO and former New Jersey Governor and Senator, Jon Corzine, had this to say:
“I simply do not know where the money is.”
Okay, Jon, fair enough. Why don’t we just drop the whole thing then? Probably enough people have forgotten about Enron and WorldCom by now.
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The Winstons aren’t trying to save the world. Just a little piece of it.
There are Apaches on the reservation in Clear Fork, Arizona, who can remember the last, hopeless Apache uprising in 1900. But for Della Alakay, a seven-year-old Apache, the enemy is not the U.S. Cavalry.
She and her people are fighting another kind of war. This time the enemies are poverty, disease and despair. And for the first time in generations, there’s a chance that the Apaches might win: thanks to the courageous efforts of her own people and other Americans like the Winstons.
Anne and Stan Winston and their two daughters live in a New York suburb 2,000 miles from the reservation. But it’s another world. The Winstons live in a big, old house and complain about a big, new mortgage. Their girls have a closetful of clothes and “nothing to wear.” They have bikes, skates, games, books, records and “nothing to do.”
Della and her seven brothers and sisters have none of these problems. Her father spends as much time looking for work as he does working. Sanitary facilities are almost non-existent. Electricity has yet to reach them. Water is hauled by hand. Even the barest necessities are hard to come by.
Through Save The Children Federation, the Winstons are helping Della. The cost is $15.00 a month. It’s not a lot of money, but certainly the Winstons could have thought of a lot of other things to do with it. Fortunately they thought of Della first.
More on Fundraising Ad: Save the Children
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Has reality finally caught up with financial direct mail?
Here’s a sampling of the covers from the latest promotions going through the mail.
* The End of America from Stansberry and Associates
* American Apocalypse from Martin Weiss and
* Checkmate, America! from the Sovereign Society.
Gloom and doom has been the zeitgeist of financial direct mail for quite a while for the simple reason that it’s nearly impossible to get someone’s attention in this market without the two key drivers of fear and greed.
But with the fiasco (an apt Italian word for failure) now unfolding in Europe, nothing seems so far fetched these days in the financial markets — both here and in Europe.
Last week, The Mail Online published a piece by historian, Dominic Sandbrook, entitled:
“Europe at war 2018: German troops storm Greece. Putin’s tanks crush Latvia. France humbles the British Army. Unlikely, yes, but as Angela Merkel says euro meltdown could endanger peace, a historian’s imagination runs riot…”
As I was reading the piece, it struck me that it was little different from the average financial direct mail promo but for the fact that it didn’t sell anything.
Too bad because it’s classic direct mail ad copy — facts plus imagination plus taking a firm position… even if it turns out to be wrong.
And you can glean as much or more from the guts and raw emotions in the comments as you can from Sandbrook’s story.
"The End of America" was one of the juiciest email subject lines I've tested in a while. It helped catapult this floundering site into the top 20,000 in the U.S. recently. If you're an email marketer, check out this collection of winning email subject lines here. |
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How to create advertising that sells by David Ogillvy & Joel Raphaelson
The advertorial format used to announce a new product
What is an advertorial?
Straightforwardly, the word advertorial is the combination of the words advertisement plus editorial.
Here’s the skinny. People are used to reading editorials and often averse to reading ads, so if you format your ad to look like valuable editorial content, you’ve instantly gained credibility with your audience and will get a bump in readership.
20th Century advertising legend John Caples (and later his greatest disciple David Ogilvy) was the first to advocate and rigorously test the advertorial format.
One of his earliest split-run tests, in which one version of an ad was formatted as a traditional ad and the other as an advertorial resulted in the advertorial format getting 81% more orders. More on What’s an Advertorial?
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Who are the Crypto-Nazis and what in the world do they have to do with copywriting?
It started with a conversation some years ago with a marketing colleague who proclaimed: “my customers are crypto-Nazis.”
“They watch Fox news, read Newsmax, and are influenced by the loudest voices with lightest intellects.”
Intrigued with this topic, I said, “tell me more.”
Though I’m a political and economic centrist and reluctant to cast myself as a member of a group, marketing-wise, I’m fascinated with the behavior of extremes and extremists.
- Why do people choose and maintain their allegiance to certain groups?
- What are their core beliefs?
- How are they influenced… and who are the influencers?
- Which products do they fawn over… and are prepared to pay almost anything to get?
Get someone like this going for ten minutes and you can pick up a lifetime’s worth of education to ply in a relevant market.
Back in my New York days, my next door neighbor was a French communist film director who could rail for hours about his pet causes. I remember him most for his habit of rolling a bowling ball down the long hallway of his railroad apartment after a few glasses of his beloved bordeaux.
More on Crypto Nazi Copywriting
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Makes me nostalgic for my years back in old New York.
These 10 Safety Rules for Halloween by Julia Waldbaum saw annual insertions and added an interesting advertorial style twist to the usual, “white bread” approach to supermarket advertising.
Happy Halloween…and Boo!
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This ad is a time machine stretching back to 1966 and a reaction by David Brower of the Sierra Club to the intellects in Washington (on par with today’s incumbents) who proposed flooding vast portions of the Grand Canyon in the name of profits.
The creator of this ad, Howard Gossage, believed that advertising justified its existence only when used for social purposes.
The time line that appears in the center of the ad, combined with the sardonic punch of the headline, makes the point brilliantly.
This ad pulled 3,000 applications for club membership and stopped the hydroelectric project from happening in the Canyon.
(You can download the 138 kb PDF by clicking on the image.)
SHOULD WE ALSO FLOOD THE SISTINE CHAPEL SO TOURISTS CAN GET NEARER THE CEILING?
EARTH began four billion years ago and Man two million. The Age of Technology, on the other hand, is hardly a hundred years old, and on our time chart we have been generous to give it even the little line we have.
It seems to us hasty, therefore, during this blip of time, for Man to think of directing his fascinating new tools toward altering irrevocably the forces which made him. Nonetheless, in these few brief years among four billion, wilderness has all but disappeared. And now these:
1) There are proposals still before Congress to “improve” Grand Canyon. If they succeed, two damns could back up artificial lakes into 9 miles of canyon gorge. This would benefit tourists in power boats, it is argued, who would enjoy viewing the canyon wall more closely. (See headline.) Submerged underneath the tourists would be part of the most revealing single page of Earth’s history. The lakes would be as deep as 600 feet (deeper for example than all but a handful of New York buildings are high) but in a century, silting would have replaced the water with that much mud, wall to wall.
There is no part of the wild Colorado River, the Grand Canyon’s sculptor, that would not be maimed.
Tourist recreation, as a reason for the dams, is in fact an afterthought. The Bureau of Reclamation, which has backed them, calls the dams “cash registers.” It expects they’ll make money by sale of commercial power.
They will not provide anyone with water.
2) In Northern California, during only the last 115 years, nearly all the private virgin redwood forests have been cut down.
Where nature’s tallest living things have stood silently since the age of the dinosaurs, there is, incredibly, argument against a proposed park at Redwood Creek which would save a mere 2% of the virgin growth that was once there. For, having cut so much and taken the rest for granted, the lumber companies are eager to get on with business. They see little reason why they should not.
More on Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer The Ceiling?
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How’d this junk mail writer amass one of the largest modern art collections in America?
Working just 4 hours a day from his oak desk, he sold over a billion dollars worth of products in every conceivable market.
These 8 Persuasion Patterns are keys to understanding how he did it.
Persuasion Pattern #1:
The Try-Before-You-Buy Proposition
There’s nothing subtle about this since it’s the backbone of just about every ad Gene Schwartz wrote.
- “Prove it to yourself entirely at our risk.”
- “Read it cover to cover entirely at our risk.”
- “Read this book from cover to cover. Then decide whether you want to keep it.”
The try-before-you-buy proposition or the risk-free-trial-offer works like a charm in home study course marketing today, just as it did for book advertising decades ago. Other marketers’ vocabulary is worth noting here, like Joe Sugarman’s “satisfaction conviction,” as well as “risk reversal,” popularized by Jay Abraham. They mean essentially the same thing, yet the differences are subtle though important.
How do you sell a high priced, around-the-world adventure, including the North and South Poles, on a shoestring budget?
Simple.
Lead with a great idea, then persuade the world’s best mailing list expert and copy talent to jump on board.
This seven-page sales letter was mailed in 1968 on a budget of $5,000 to owners of yachts, Arabian horse breeders and owners of private two-engine airplanes. The price for this round the world voyage was $10,000 or $61,000 in 2009 dollars.
The promo was a smashing success and pulled in 72 respondents who ponied up $10k each.
Dick Benson was the “grumpy genius” behind the marketing and Hank Burnett wrote the copy.More on The Admiral Byrd Society Sales Letter (Copywriter: Hank Burnett)
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