Alternative medicine practitioners and marketers in the United Kingdom have been bracing for this for a while.
The Belgian bureaucrats are putting the clamp down on sales of herbal products across the board.
Herbalists, Chinese medicine practitioners and supplement sellers will now have to obtain a “license” for each herb they sell. All this loveliness starts on May 1st.
And the cost?
A mere 100,000 pounds for each herbal component. Of course, this is going to spur a massive black market of unsafe product.
Marketers and writers in the States complain about compliance copy — seems like we’ve got it easy.
Here’s an article on this from The Independent last week.
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Welcome to 2011!
It’s not only the start of a new year, as well as a new decade, but 2011 is a mathematically loaded year.
1/1/11 is a week away, 11/11/11 is a mere ten months from here.
2011 is also the first prime number year since 2003.
The definition of a prime number (in case you were out smoking during math class) is a number that can be divided evenly only by 1 or itself.
The number 2011, it turns out, is the sum of 11 consecutive prime numbers: 2011=157+163+167+173+179+181+191+193+197+199+211.
Exciting news if you’re into prime numbers or have an eleven fetish, but what’s this New Year really mean?
More on 2011: Your Not To Do List
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How many direct mail packages in the alternative medicine market can boast two decades of mailing?
This one, written by Eugene Schwartz and first mailed in 1979, had more stamina than the Energizer Bunny.
It finally stopped mailing in the early 1990s, but not before it raked in untold millions.
The ad sold the book by Dr. Stephen T. Chang: The Book of Internal Exercises.
It’s not to be confused with the ad he wrote for Rodale’s The Encyclopedia of Natural Healing, which sold two million copies of that $25 book — though I often confuse them myself.
If you want to really understand what it takes to create a winner, then this package is worth your while examining. Here it is in all its glory with the teaser copy on the front and back of the envelope, 6-page sales letter, lift letter and reply card. (10-page, 2.2 megabyte PDF)
A big thank you to my friend in Switzerland, Christian Godefroy, for sending it to me. Christian was a colleague and confident of Eugene Schwartz’s for over a decade.
To many, this package looks like a barrage of unbelievable claims:
- “How Modern Chinese Medicine helps both men and women BURN DISEASE OUT OF YOUR BODY Using nothing more than the palm of your hand!”
- “Flushes Fat Right Out of Your Arteries”
- “How To Rub Your Stomach Away”
Throughout his career, there have been a fair share of critics who attacked Gene’s advertising approach. The main criticism was he “hid” under 1st Amendment protection offered to authors of books by deriving their claims in his ads. Though his ads may have been challenged, I don’t know of a single instance where even one was judged to have been anything other than legal.
Gene not only believed in Dr. Chang and the ad he wrote for his book, but credited him with saving the use of his arm after suffering a massive stroke. As he mentions in this interview from the now defunct publication, The Capitalist Reporter, he never wrote an ad for a bad product and even turned down a huge fee when he was flat broke because he did not believe in the promotion.
I doubt the ad would do so well today.
Schwartz’s style of “giant claim” copy has been mimicked so often, the market is less sensitive to it. Additionally, the alternative medicine market has mushroomed many multiples more than where it was in the 1980s and 1990s.
Christian Godefroy has been one of the top marketers and copywriters on the European continent for some time.
I first met him at Gary Bencivenga’s retirement seminar in 2005 and he continues to blaze trails in the French speaking market. I’m actually waiting for him to translate to English, a blockbuster product he released over the summer.
Here is one of his successful ads from the French speaking market, which was translated to English, and had insertions in newspapers like The New York Times about 12 years ago.
“We were heavy smokers for 20 years. Then an amazing discovery eliminated our desire to smoke in just 9 days, almost effortlessly, and without any drugs or weight gain.”
Here is Christian’s well regarded Positive Club.
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A client consulted with me recently about an online sales letter and autoresponder campaign.
He told me the sales letter used to convert like gangbusters but now it was on life support.
Usually, it takes some probing to get to the cause of such a change in events, but a quick glance at his sales letter revealed the problem in moments.
His product looked good.
Copy respectable.
Offer enticing.
But the sales page had a bad case of a common malady called bonusitis.
Never heard of bonusitis?
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Exactly seven years ago, I was holed up in a military barracks in the far flung Andean city of San Cristóbal, Venezuela.
To this day, whether you’re in downtown Caracas or an Andean village, Venezuela is not the place you want to walk around the streets wearing a t-shirt with the American flag…unless you’ve got a giant chip on your shoulder.
And in those days, our cuddly President of the time, “Dubya,” had just botched a coup attempt against the colorful, Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez.
No, I wasn’t engaged in some risky “import-export” operation, though I can imagine professions less conducive to interned life than copywriting. 
So, what was I doing there?
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Imagine a world in which big banks actually had to create good advertising — a world where they didn’t sit high above Uncle Sam’s perpetual safety net.
Today, it’s accepted that certain banks are “too big to fail.”
The big banks have it made.
They get endless rivers of cash from Sugar Daddy Sam while facing no risk or consequences from their actions, like continuing to load up on toxic derivatives.
If they “win” they reap the rewards. If they lose, they can always fall back on Joe Tax Payer and Uncle Ben Bernanke.
Meanwhile, banks continue to squeeze the life out of small businesses by cutting their credit lines to the bone.
This wasn’t the way it always was, though it’s hard to remember a time before this.
This ad from a quarter century ago is proof that once upon a time, banks actually gave the appearance of caring…both about their customers and their advertising.
Anyone who lived in the New York Metropolitan area will remember the television ads for the Bowery Bank, featuring New York Yankee Hall-Of-Famer, Joe DiMaggio.
Here’s a print ad that’s just as memorable for copywriters.
It’s certainly something you wouldn’t see in 2010 — a long copy ad that pushes the product and plays the role of helpful adviser by demystifying the process of choosing certificates of deposit.
I really liked this copy from the middle column.
The other day, an ad in this paper promised CDs so rich that we had to read every word. Had a competitor gotten the drop on us?
Not at all. We had a lawyer decipher the 125-word footnote, written in the teeny-weeny size ad people call “mouse type.” The big numbers up above didn’t look so big after that.
Look before you leap. Read the footnotes first and ask lots of questions at the bank.
The Bowery would rather see you walk away from a deal you didn’t like than sign you up for one you misunderstood. The Bowery’s promise: the whole story every time.
The Bowery was gobbled up long ago by a chain of ever larger acquiring banks but good advertising remains timeless.
The info premium, “10 Ways To Make Your Money Worth More,” was offered countless times in their print advertising.
Click here for the PDF of “A Bill Of Rights For CD Buyers.”
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Bill Steinhardt was at the center of direct marketing and mail order copywriting for 60 years.
He was not only one of the highest practitioners of our direct response craft but a lifelong “amateur” in the truest denotation of the word: he loved direct response advertising, persuasion and learning in all of its forms.
He passed away on July 28, at Menorah Medical Center in Overland Park, Kansas at the age of 83. He told me, less than a month ago, that he wanted to make it to his second Bar Mitzvah and that he did. He knew his days were numbered and he gave such an address after the ceremony that he received an ovation — something usually never done in the synagogue.
Bill began his career in 1950 as a copywriter with the mail-order advertising firm of Huber Hoge & Sons in New York. He worked arm-in-arm with the legendary copywriter, Eugene Schwartz, and numerous other mail order luminaries.
Like his friend and colleague, Gene Schwartz, Bill became intensely involved with spiritual matters at the end of his life and wrote several world-class ads related to the role of faith in everyday life.
What I learned from Bill was if you love your craft — really love your craft — money, friends and fulfillment will come in abundance.
Here’s a passage from his address of June 4, 2010.
At this point, my time is running low while standing before you. Anyway, my wife kept reminding me to keep my comments short . . . short . . . short — and then, to hammer in a final exclamation nail, added that — for my remarks to be immortal, they need not be eternal!
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How do you sell $50 million of a single, self-published book?
First, you float an offer.
Then, you wait for the market to to tell you you’ve got a winner.
Once you have that winner, you pull out all the stops and sell it every way you can: direct mail, space, Internet and TV.
That’s exactly what Gene Schwartz did in these pre-Internet days and the result was a $50 million take by the time the offer ran dry.
The book was Dr. Stephen T. Chang’s “The Book of Internal Exercises.”
And the space ad above was condensed from a package that mailed over 100 million times, from the early 1980′s all the way into the 1990′s.
(Click on the image to download the PDF and get a feel for the copy that compelled such astronomical sales.)
More on $50 Million In Sales From This Self-Published Book
Next sales letter that crosses you path, take a close look at the testimonials.
Most likely, they’ll be the wishy-washy variety that makes you feel apathetic, indifferent or just plain blah about whatever product or service is being hawked, even if you have half an inclination to buy it.
These are the kind of testimonials that presents the promoter in a positive light or make her “feel good.”
Their correlation with sales is loose at best.
Now, see how Moneysworth does it.
You won’t find a feel-good or tepid testimonial in the lot. That’s because they’re all about one thing: results.
The testimonials which follow were published again and again, and vetted with millions of dollars in ad insertions.
They reveal that there are only four kinds of testimonials that really make a difference.
The four testimonials are ones that: More on How To Write Results Based Testimonials That Pull Orders
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