Hiring Archives - Brian Kurtz

The back from the dead tour

Brian Kurtz — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 02:04:01 +0000

I’m in the middle of a two week trip (tour) through Arizona proving that I am back (!)…and continuing my obligation to teach what I know…and I am so glad I am still here to do it.

I am also so grateful to all of you who wished me well after my stroke…and those of you who kept reading these Sunday missives through my long summer heading into this resurgence in the fall.

And thanks to all of you for being a student in my online family.

My first stop last week was on the stage at the Genius Network Annual, Joe Polish’s amazing event where he gathers the most impactful 400 entrepreneurs in the world, feeds them wisdom from the most dynamic speakers he can find, and then lets them loose to contribute to each other and connect deeply.

It’s magical.

I sat on a panel on copywriting (I know—if I tell you I am “a copywriter wannabe” you’ll have my head)…but being on this panel with 4 of my heroes in this area, I was clearly “the guy who worked with all the best copywriters” and they were the “copywriters.”

It was a blast sitting with John Carlton, Craig Clemens, Parris Lampropoulos and Richard Viguerie waxing poetic about the industry we have known and loved for a combined 200 years (and that’s 200 years of cumulative wisdom, not one year’s experience for 200 years).

We discussed so many things…and for this week (since I am traveling) I will share with you once again the “7 things that were present in every great copywriter I have ever worked with” with a little editing based on what I learned being on this panel.

Success leaves clues

Copywriting is not a commodity.

That is one of the first points I made at Genius Network last week.

Although if you sit where I sit, you might think that hiring a copywriter should be as easy as putting a listing on craigslist—because I get this question showing up many times per week in my In Box:

“Do you know a good copywriter?”

Of course the answer is “yes”…I actually know hundreds…and I’m proud to say that I had the privilege to work with some of the best ever.

(And I am not being arrogant…see #3 and #6 below).

However, just knowing great (and not-so-great) copywriters is not enough…and asking the question like there is a one-size-fits-all copywriter for any business is the worst way to begin the inquiry.

Ask a novice who has tried writing promotion copy and failed miserably if they think it’s easy.

In fact, ask some of the best copywriters who have ever lived the same thing.

Not only is it not easy, all copywriters know that the secret to success is to master a niche before presenting themselves as the solution to all assignments in all categories.

Copywriters who have been at it for any length of time also know that what they do is not a talent they learned in school.

They also know that it is not a skill they picked up by accident by simply reading some books on the subject which miraculously led them to write successful copy and then make millions in royalties.

The faster things move in the online marketing world—as media gets cheaper and the barrier to entry gets lower—the more worried I get that short term success online with mediocre creative and copy has been interpreted as “copy is not that important” and also that “finding a copywriter” is not worth an extensive search.

In certain marketing circles even though it’s clear that adding great copy (from skilled copywriters) working in conjunction with precise list selection and an irresistible offer has been game changing for so many, there still seem to be too many marketers who look at copywriting as a necessary evil, rather than a core competency (to do or to buy intelligently) that can change the trajectory of their business.

As I talked about in my short video “When 41% is a majority,” if you have the list and offer dialed in, you will probably make some money with workmanlike creative and copy.

But that is not a reason to make copy and creative the “anyhow portion” of your marketing mix.

It’s just the opposite: The biggest breakthroughs throughout my career happened when we found the right copywriter on the right project; and the new copy approach by someone who had the chops and had done it before for many others is how we got 30% lifts in response (and more).

Four years ago I began digging deeper into why copywriting was being viewed as a commodity by too many entrepreneurs and business owners for my taste…so I got my shovel out and identified the characteristics that were prevalent in every world class copywriter I had the privilege of working with in my career.

When I was asked on the Genius Network panel, “What should entrepreneurs know about hiring a good copywriter?” I wanted to go over these 7 characteristics below but I didn’t have the time so I will share those with you below.

I originally titled that first crack at this analysis, “You May Not Know It When You See It”—or how to identify if a copywriter has that “it factor” that all of the greats possessed (and possess today).

I believe that the 7 traits below are what makes the great ones great…and even though most people don’t ask me for this information (they just want a copywriter!), I send them some version of this, tell them they are asking the wrong question, and that we can have a much better discussion of their needs once they understand the complexity of what it takes to be an “A list copywriter.”

I’m hoping this post can be a guide for you to follow if you are a copywriter; and also a guide to ask the right questions when looking for a copywriter.

I also hope that I make the case that hiring this asset correctly might be one of the most important things you will ever do in business.

You’ll see that “knowing it when you see it” is a lot more than just spotting writing talent…although there is no substitute for command of the language.

Here are the 7 traits that go beyond just writing:

1. HUNGER

This is similar to one of my favorite concepts which I have shared with you before–the notion of “outworking everyone.”

It’s not only working more hours, it is also showing your dedication to your occupation.

I’m a believer in Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule,” (despite it being debunked in some circles which I discussed in “10,000 hours or 33 minutes?”).

If you are not familiar with the rule, it states that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in just about anything.

Read the post if you want another spin on it but whether it is 10,000 hours or something less than that, it’s safe to say that world class copywriters are not achieving greatness from an online course or working at it with only a few hours of study.

Another angle on “hunger” and “outworking everyone” is that it is not about stepping on everyone else’s head during your rise to the top.

It is instead about “generosity” and showing by example how it’s done–which raises the bar for everyone who comes after you.

2. INSATIABLE CURIOSITY

Readers of this weekly e-mail have heard me on this one before too…nothing replaces curiosity when it comes to being a great copywriter.

Copywriters I have profiled in the past have showed us why curiosity is the driver to making them the best of the best: Gene Schwartz through “the power of reading”; Arthur Johnson through “the power of specialization”; Parris Lampropoulos through “the power of immersion.”

If you would like to read what I wrote about these three great copywriters previously (and others too on why insatiable curiosity matters most), click on any of their names above.

This may the number one characteristic that makes a great copywriter great…and in fact, I think it also makes a great marketer great too.

3. CONFIDENCE WITHOUT ARROGANCE /FEEDBACK LOOPS

Who do you hang out with and why?

How do you stay accountable (and not just responsible) to your craft?

The communities you align with to become excellent at anything may be the most important career decision you will ever make (e.g. Genius Network) …and there is not one copywriter who “goes it alone.”

Although I always say, “you can’t write copy by committee,” the top writers run their copy past others once they complete their drafts—people they trust to tell them the truth about what works and what doesn’t—based on their vast experience.

And of course they reciprocate.

Also: Like any other field where you are learning and growing, being an apprentice to mentors who can show you the way is critical; and then later on, you pay it forward by surrounding yourself with peers with equal or more talent than yourself.

And then you become a mentor and begin the cycle all over again.

One of the greats, David Deutsch, is a perfect example of this: When I met him he was an apprentice to the one and only Jim Rutz; and now he has become one of the top coaches for up-and-coming copywriters–and a colleague of other writers who are his equals so they can continuously compare notes…and copy.

He never stops improving.

4. PASSION

If you start by writing with a purpose rather than for the money, you are on the right track.

If you have to call it “work,” why not start by creating magic in something you are passionate about first if at all possible? Then your work is your play.

My post “Direct Marketers Saving Lives” talked about this at length.

We should want to hire copywriters who talk about “10X” in terms of impact way before they talk about money.

As a marketer, don’t you want to start there too?

Another angle on passion which I alluded to in my intro:

Going narrow to wide is almost always the better path the best copywriters follow.

That is, going deep in one area or category and becoming proficient there first is the preferred way to eventually learn to go wider and write in multiple categories later on.

I also went deep on this in “Sharks, aliens and dinosaurs.” With an assist to Steven Spielberg.

5. BEING A STUDENT OF DIRECT RESPONSE MARKETING

When I speak about this to copywriters, the feedback I sometimes get is that it seems somewhat “intimidating”- talking about concepts like “RFM,” “LTV,” and the “40/40/20 rule” as necessary for them to know about.

They often ask, “Why do I need to know that stuff if I only want to write?”

I explain that I am I trying to give them an unfair advantage over other copywriters competing for the same assignments.

Going from “copywriter writing for food’ to “trusted adviser being part of a company or enterprise or mission” feels so much better and will be much more profitable—and it is easier to get there being a student of marketing and not just a student of writing.

Yes, I am seeding my new book!

All of those concepts are covered (and a whole lot more in the book and in the thousands of dollars’ worth of bonuses that come with it).

Go to www.OverdeliverBook.com (and I am wondering why you don’t have it yet!)

6. HUMILITY

I strive for humility and I love humanity…and as a writer (or marketer), I believe this is a good place for all of us to originate…and I can safely say that it has served me well when I stay true to this (and you usually call me out on this when I violate this principle).

And it is plain to see in every top gun copywriter I have ever worked with.

Confidence in your message and how you choose to teach it is not arrogance if expressed properly and conveyed powerfully.

I talked a lot about the lesson in grace and humility I learned from Gary Bencivenga and Greg Renker after “The Titans of Direct Response” event in 2014–one of the most powerful things that happened to me as a result of that event.

I wrote about that in detail here.

7. PRIDE/SHOWING YOUR WORK

Having a portfolio is always important…but I purposely put this last when I speak about these traits to copywriters so they can see the other more important attributes they should strive for well before showing all of their previous winners.

(And if you don’t have any winners yet, having numbers 1-6 can still get you hired.)

Knowing who the writer is as important as the writer’s work.

Clearly the more you write, the more lessons you will learn on the field of play–and the larger your “portfolio” will be.

But hunger, curiosity, confidence without arrogance, passion, direct marketing knowledge and humility all come before that beautiful website showing off your samples.

One more thing I want to share now that you have read this post to the end:

Look at each of the 7 traits and you will see what I discovered (hinted at earlier):

They are also prevalent in all of the best marketers you will ever meet too.

Hunger (and generosity) to make your products the best they can be
Curiosity to explore all media and to study successes and failures from others (e.g. swipe files)
Feedback loops to ensure your product is best-in-class and it is easy to differentiate
Passion that what you are selling fits with your life’s mission
Knowing the fundamentals of measurable (direct) marketing
Humility to know what messaging and positioning is congruent with who you are and all you represent
Pride that you can’t wait to show the world what you have created

Warmly,

Brian

The post The back from the dead tour appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

If you did it, teach it

Brian Kurtz — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 22:42:39 +0000

I have a large wooden plaque in my office which was carved for me by a friend, Jason Garber (more about him in the P.S.), that I didn’t even realize were my words (until it was sent to me):

Jay Abraham says that it is our “moral obligation to teach it” for a little more emphasis.

This plaque above is the #1 slide of a list of 22 Ways to Overdeliver in business and marketing—a presentation I am giving at Growth Summit later this week in Denver. I hope to see many of you there.

(This event is the new “Info Summit,” formerly under GKIC and now under Magnetic Marketing).

This quote is #1 because it is the most important element of over delivery (the way I define it)—and it was on full display at the Titans Mastermind meeting last month from four of our members who did “Titan Spotlights,” sharing successes from their respective careers.

Today I’d like to give you a glimpse of one of those presentations…with the other three to follow in the coming weeks and months:

This is not about dry cleaning

Dave Coyle is not just another dry cleaner from Wichita, Kansas…he is THE dry cleaner from Wichita, garnering a 70% market share in a city of almost half a million people.

Now you would think he is able to do this based on offering the lowest price—after all, dry cleaning is a commodity and having the lowest price is the key to gaining market share with most commodities.

But he is actually one of the highest price/highest margin dry cleaning services in Wichita as well.

How does he do that?

First, he realized that in a service business like dry cleaning, if the person tasked with growing the business is the same person responsible for the operations of the business, you can’t scale.

So he freed himself up by hiring good managers and setting up fantastic systems to handle the day-to-day while he dreamed big.

Dave is a special entrepreneur who believes that everything in his business is not a revenue event but everything is a relationship event. (That would be a good quote for another plaque!)

Simply put, when customers leave you (e.g. they refund transactions) you often lose them forever; but they rarely leave you if they have a fulfilling and ongoing relationship with you that is based on trust.

That takes work however to convert all that fulfillment, relationship building and trust into revenue and profit.

He may be running dry cleaning businesses but for Dave it’s all about inclusion and meaningful connecting built into the business.

He spoke for almost an hour–but let me give you a window into this mad scientist of creating relationships—and remember, we’re talking about dry cleaning.

With acquisition, before he starts giving out free offers and “golden tickets” to anyone and everyone, he first gets prospects to raise their hand through various techniques—and then starts with the top 20% to get a profile of their fears, desires and problems.

He figured out what problems he can help solve and then came up with specific, unique benefits that are more meaningful (“what is special about his business”) than simply the products and services offered (“the commodity side of the business”).

He does some neat things in the “appreciation” stage (when they begin their relationship with him):

A big welcome package with a gift (of course with a handwritten card or note) with compelling offers to “stick” with him (by creating a “barrier to switch” something very few commodity businesses have the creativity to do).
An easy one for him is a personalized bag that has all the customer’s data and preferences built into the bag and the system.
Other stick strategies include random complimentary services and special philanthropic offers.
He told us about one philanthropic offer where he put up signs in all of his 12 stores where he offered free dry cleaning (or laundry) to anyone who had recently lost their job.
And a similar offer to vets who had just got home or on specific holidays (Memorial Day, Veterans Day).

Even if you are not unemployed or a vet, wouldn’t you feel good if your dry cleaner were making offers like these? And as a paying customer you are contributing too.

And to keep customers for the long haul, the relationship continues past the acquisition stage and appreciation stage…when his expansion and retention strategies are all under the umbrella of “Trust.”

Most importantly, offering status and treating his best customers like VIP’s with the most exclusive offers, is built into the customer journey.

For example, his “Platinum Members” are 5% of his customer base but 40% of his revenue; and his “Gold Members” are 15% of his customers and 30% of his revenue.

That’s 70/20 (close to 80/20) but you get the idea.

This doesn’t mean you ignore the other 30% either (“Silver” and “Bronze” members)…but you have different work to do with them…and different messaging for them as well.

Dave uses handwritten notes all the time to everyone…and many other techniques that are digital and physical…but it’s never one size fits all.

That’s advanced marketing from a guy who is a student of all marketing media and claims to know little about it.

Yeah…right.

By the way, Dave’s top .5% (that’s “point 5 percent”) are his “Titanium Members” and they are spoken to and treated differently as well.

One other thing he subscribes to that is key to expansion and retention:

Treat customer service and fulfillment as marketing functions.

I’ve spoken about this many times before and it’s an entire chapter in Overdeliver.

In dry cleaning (as in any business), it’s a lot easier to keep an existing customer than to get a new one.

Dave refers to this as “Reducing Friction”:

Gather the most common complaints and address them (and solve them) quickly
Rough edges equals opportunities: A dissatisfied customer made whole is a satisfied customer for life
EASY problem resolution by always making the customer right and giving them more than they ever would have expected (from “Titanium” to “Bronze” to first time customers)

Dave’s Titan Spotlight was illuminating just for the fact that we learned that even in a commodity business, which is usually differentiated by the lowest price or a “laziness to switch,” you can transform that commodity business into a specialty business if you pay close attention to everything available to you.

In fact, the best way for any business considered a commodity to “clean the clock of its competition” (pun intended), is to look everywhere for those differentiators.

The #5 slide in my Growth Summit deck on “Why and how we Overdeliver in business and marketing” simply says:

Advertising opportunities are now infinite

I know that doesn’t seem like it’s a differentiator in itself…but it’s one of the many small hinges that open big doors…you have to know what those are…whether it’s your neighborhood dry cleaner or a state-of-the-art online marketer.

The brick and mortar or physical product businesses need digital solutions and the digital-only businesses need physical solutions—all of which create unique offerings in a world of the same.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. I mentioned Jason Garber at the beginning of this post, the wonderful artist who has carved plaques like the one at the top (and he sent me four smaller versions of it too which I have distributed to other teachers who “did it”).

Here are two others he carved for me (and I never asked him to do any of these):

I thought “why are you doing this for me?”—and I want to share with you the heart of this artist who is also a friend.

When I emailed him a thank you for the plaques, he responded:

You see, I am always teaching people.

I have 7 kids and home-school them all. We were talking about quantum tunneling, hawking radiation, black holes, and the 15 different kinds of ice over lunch today.

Earlier today I was explaining the current draw/dump on 240/120 panel to a friend. Last night I was teaching my daughter how to safely work around the table saw and band saw.

And a couple days ago my son and I were engineering a balcony in such a way it didn’t need support posts, and calculating the tensile strength and diameter of the steel rods needed to make it safe.

To sum it all up, the phrase on the plaques meant a lot to me when I read it on your blog.

I kept a couple of the little ones for myself.

My request of you today:

If you are learning it, doing it, or did it, please teach it too.

The post If you did it, teach it appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

God’s copywriter…(almost) live

Brian Kurtz — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:53 +0000

Jim Rutz was one of the greatest copywriters of all time.

And he was one of the most colorful characters this business has ever seen as well.

If you are a working or aspiring copywriter, you owe a debt of gratitude to Jim whether you have ever heard of him or not…he was a pioneer in creating win-win royalty arrangements for creative talent that many of you use today in your businesses.

About his love life:

Jim was often eccentric and even off color…Ginger told me he needed a “politically correct editor” (her) to regulate him sometimes.

Even with dating he was a bit daring.

Before there was online dating, he searched for years for a “mail order bride.”

He ran a great ad–the headline was:

“Knight in Shining Armor Seeks Damsel…Distress Optional”

The ad was accompanied by a picture of Jim as Sir Lancelot.

(That picture is on the cover of Read This or Die and the ad is in the swipes)

He once sent me a picture of a potential bride he chose but “the deal fell through” for some reason.

I didn’t ask questions.

About decorating his home in Colorado Springs (where I visited a few times):

He had no furniture in his living room…just neat piles of successful direct mail from every significant direct marketer at that time.

Very organized too. He would give me a “tour” when I visited:

“Here’s the Boardroom pile…the Phillips pile…the Agora pile…the Rodale pile.”

He wrote for all the biggest and most successful direct marketers.

He knew and studied deeply every package in all of the categories he competed in. Know your competition is a requirement for all copywriters.

This is a something all of the greats do and it is what can turn a “B copywriter” into an “A.”

Put a different way: He was a swipe file junkie…which most of the great copywriters are (as we learned at the epic event “Titans of Direct Response” in 2014, an event I wanted so badly to have Jim as an honored guest but his health was not great at the time).

Back to his living room: I always wondered why he didn’t have a file cabinet.

I joked with him that he saved a lot of time shopping for a couch and a coffee table by having his swipe file as furniture…more time to write, I guess.

Or maybe there was something divine in what he was doing with his swipes: Jim being such a spiritual man, having those mailing pieces in the open might have allowed their true essence to emit brilliance into the air (and then into his head) without a steel cabinet blocking that part of the creative process.

I repeat…the guy had direct mail as furniture!

How’s that for dedication?

As I mentioned above, Jim was in touch with me in the months leading up to the “Titans of Direct Response” event…we even started planning to have him show up as a surprise guest…but it was not to be.

When he knew he couldn’t make the trip, he said:

“Announce at ‘Titans’ that Jim Rutz is open for business…and I’m ready for an assignment!”

He hadn’t done much for years but in those phone calls, he was getting excited to jump back in.

He loved this business and his craft so much.

I remember feeling re-inspired on those phone calls, not knowing he would be gone a short time later.

I made an announcement from the stage about Jim being ready to reignite… I’m sad now thinking that he never got to fulfill on his comeback.

But Jim’s work lives on and if you’re serious about becoming a better marketer/copywriter, you want to learn from the best. See the P.S.

Here’s a tease from Read This or Die…some packages that were memorable to me:

“What will you do with your $12,000 Tax Cut This Year?” was for Boardroom’s newsletter Tax Hotline (and on this package, we discovered future Titan copywriter David Deutsch who worked on this promotion with Jim)

“Limo Larry and Champagne Cherie” was a big winner for the largest circulation consumer newsletter in America at the time, Bottom Line/Personal

About trying to emulate him:

My good friend and one of the best copywriters in the world today, Parris Lampropoulos, the man with more file cabinets of mailing packages than anyone I know, said of Jim (and I am paraphrasing from a phone conversation):

“Most of the great copywriters are easy to read, study and pick up things that you can incorporate into your own style…but not Rutz. You read his stuff, don’t understand how he came up with the concept or the execution of the concept, and all you can do is sit back and marvel at it.”

But as we spoke further, we realized that there were so many things in Jim’s copy and the way he weaved a story that could be applied despite the fact that we knew no one could ever write like him.

Frankly, if I tried to mail a billion promotion pieces (like I have in my lifetime) without world class copy from the greats like Jim Rutz, I would have been out of business before I mailed a million.

He also trained many of the greats.

John Carlton, one of my heroes, posted this about Jim after he passed away:

“Jim was a brutal taskmaster, an over-the-top great teacher, and one of the most skilled ‘pure’ writers I ever met. Also one of the most eccentric. And while he and I existed in completely different worlds, his advice for me to let my freak flag fly (not his words, of course) helped me create my own global reputation.”

Jim left us with some of the greatest promotion copy ever written…a compensation model that every copywriter today should thank Jim it exists…direct mail formats that he innovated…and dozens of “A list” copywriters who couldn’t easily copy him but were his prized students.

I am not a religious man but I know Jim is even closer to God now…and they were already pretty tight down here on earth too.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. Read This or Die: The Lost Files of Jim Rutz, is available right now, all on one USB thumb drive, in a protective plastic case.

It includes over 200 swipe files, most written by Jim, but some we could not confirm—and those are in their own section called “Jim Rutz’s Furniture.”

These are promotions from the largest direct mail companies in the world…and also pieces of “Rutz selling Rutz” (e.g ads selling Jim’s services, by Jim, to prospective new clients in the early days)…and assorted other pieces for the “Open Church” and some smaller mailers he took on pro bono.

There are selected letters to Jim from some people you will recognize—our “Dear Jim” section.

There is also a “Jim Rutz live” section—an interview he did with the great Clayton Makepeace and an exclusive webinar that I did with John Carlton and David Deutsch (i.e. Jim “almost live”).

The three copywriters who were my partners on the product wrote intros to each of the sections (financial, health, general consumer, business etc) plus an appendix with “The Lost Files Headlines” for easy reference when you are struggling for a subject line, headline or copy platform.

This is a reference tool for a lifetime and I am proud to bring it to you today.

You can order here.

P.P.S. Send me your thoughts on Rutz—whether you just heard of him by reading this today or if you have any memories of him I can share with my online family in the future.

The post God’s copywriter…(almost) live appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

Read this or die (not a chain letter)

Brian Kurtz — Sat, 27 Jul 2019 02:39:22 +0000

I want to share another piece from The Lost Chapters of Overdeliver (one of the eleven bonuses for buying my book at www.OverdeliverBook.com). This one is special.

I found the“10 Commandments” below (makes 20 in total if you are counting) at the bottom of one of the boxes of promotions from the archives of Jim Rutz sent to me by Jim’s sister Ginger—which I have guarded with my life.

These 10 commandments are for copywriters…but they are also for those of us who hire copywriters …and they are articulated beautifully by the most colorful, controversial and successful copywriter who ever put pen to paper.

The swipe file of all of Jim’s work (everything that his sister Ginger accumulated) — including letters, interviews, recollections and more—will be available to you, my online family, within a few weeks.

The product is called Read This Or Die: The Lost Files of Jim Rutz.

And don’t worry–Read this or Die refers to one of Jim’s most successful packages, it’s not a chain letter—and yes it is part of the product.

Below are “Rutz’s 10 commandments of copy.”

And I have added additional info after each one since I last sent this (and since I included it in “The Lost Chapters ofOverdeliver”) based on going through all of those boxes of archives.

I learned a lot from Jim when he was alive and I am still learning from him—I expect you will too.

Rutz’s 10 (11?) Commandments of Copy

Being a movie buff, whenever someone refers to the story about Moses receiving The Ten Commandments, I picture Charlton Heston delivering some pretty good rules of thumb to live by.

What a perfect Moses–and even better commandments.

But wait…there’s more.

One of the stories/lessons in my new bookOverdeliver (from the chapter on “Creative & Copy”), is a portion of a blog post I am most proud of since it profiles and memorializes the “mad scientist” of all copywriters, Jim Rutz (who was also a great friend and marketing partner).

The piece was titled The copywriter closest to God and I will share that with you when I launch the new Jim Rutz product.

(Note that I am not being sacrilegious when I say that he had a “writing partnership” with God…but you’ll have to wait to hear more about that.)

But today I want to share Jim’s 10 Commandments–violating any of these won’t have the same repercussions as breaking one of the original Ten Commandments…but if you want to be a great copywriter or marketer, ignore them at your peril.

After each one, I have made some notes of my own (in italics)—Jim taught me so much. As I read through Jim’s rules, I realized how much he lives on with these commandments–and with his body of work.

The best living copywriters and trainers and teachers of copy, many who call him a mentor like I do, have passed it on…and I am playing my part with these commandments and in the upcoming Read This or Die product.

1) The #1 sin in ad mail is being boring, and over half of it richly deserves its quick death by wastebasket. What is “always boring?” The predictable. You must surprise the reader at the outset and at every turn of the copy. This takes time and toil.

I’ll add a corollary regarding length and boredom…no sales letter can be too long or too short…just too boring.

And in Overdeliver, I talk about writers who were trained by Jim who were never satisfied with what was in the product they were writing about…they wanted to know what isn’t in the product that is surprising, unpredictable—and can be researched so there’s backup, leading to better sales copy.

“What’s on the cutting room floor that can be revived?”

That is what takes time and toil…and makes the top copywriters the top copywriters.

2) Never write to a crowd. Crowds don’t write checks, or even read. Individuals do. Write to your brother, sister, or best friend, never to a targeted prospect.

I think Jim would have loved to “toil” in the world of online marketing (which he never really got the opportunity)…being able to slice and dice his copy to more sub-segments economically and efficiently than he ever could in direct mail…and write to individuals rather than a crowd.

However, even in direct mail, he was able to “write to individuals” even when direct mail made it more difficult to do that–that was part of Rutz’s genius. The swipes in the “Read This Or Die” product will prove this time and again.

3) Don’t be a jerk. The GOLDEN RULE as applied to ad mail: It’s more important to do the reader good than to get his money. Yes, getting his money is what you do for a living. But when his money becomes more important than his welfare, you’ve turned into a hollow shell and declared war on the human race.

Once again, Jim would have had a field day online, giving away lots of stuff and doing “…the reader good…” while being patient for the money.

He was one of the first writers to perfect the magalog (a direct mail piece that was 16-24 pages and looked like a magazine)—and with that format, he was able to give away some of the steak with the sizzle, something that was not done so for the most part before.

One of my other mentors, Gordon Grossman, used to lament that with direct mail being so expensive, anything you did in physical mail had to “sell something.” Jim attacked that notion with his long and fascinating copy.

Living in the world today of inexpensive email and other online media, this rule reminds us of the need to make sure everything we send, in every medium, “achieves something.” That is, you can give away your best stuff for free because you will have more “best stuff” in the future.

Jim understood that as well as any copywriter in history, even pre-Internet.

4) Spend half your writing time on concept, teaser, offer, headline, and first paragraph.

Up to 90% of your rejections will be caused by those elements, not the many pages that follow.

All of the great copywriters I have ever worked with knew how to write “teasers” (what we called “fascinations”) well before they learned to write full blown sales letters.

Read this if you want to learn more about this technique. It’s a profile of someone else I call a “mad scientist” and might be the most successful copywriter you never heard of.

And we can add “subject lines” (as part of that 90%) to this commandment too.

Then there’s what David Ogilvy said about headlines: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar”

80 cents or 90 percent…it’s important.

Bill Jayme cut right to the chase when he said that the outer envelope (i.e. headline) was like the “…hot pants on the hooker…” –and I am sure he would say the same today about subject lines.

More about Jayme in the P.S.

Rutz would agree on all of the above and you’ll have to trust me on that.

5) Your reader is not stupid. He or she is as smart as you are…

…they are just not paying attention! So make sure you get that first, then talk to them like adults.

Ogilvy waxes poetic about this too: “The consumer isn’t a moron, she is your wife.”

Get their attention intelligently and then build a case. That’s a much better way to communicate than tricking them into buying by some gimmick or impulse which will lead to higher dissatisfaction…and returns.

6) Competence will make you a living. Creativity will make you a fortune.

Why? Because few other writers are willing to sweat any more than is absolutely necessary. Truly creative perspiration is rare.

Gary Halbert could chime in on this one with a technique to “sweat” profusely: “Get yourself a collection of good ads and DM pieces and read them aloud and copy them in your own handwriting.”

It’s a start to get to what Jim is talking about.

Jim always preferred pen to paper to fingers on a keyboard–and in the words of his sister Ginger (who is the reason we will be able to bring you all of Jim’s work since she saved it all): “Picture Jim, sitting on the floor, his back against the sofa and feet under the coffee table, with a legal pad and a green pen, to later on in his career, peering into a CRT. He fought it all the way…”

He is not alone…even today.

7) Light humor and wit are terrific salesmen.

Without them, some products are sunk. With them, you will soon be sitting in your very own beachside condo in Belize.

In a video that will be part of the “Read This Or Die” product, copywriting legends who were also mentored by Jim Rutz, John Carlton and David Deutsch, talk at length why Rutz is so hard to emulate…and how he got away with “light humor and wit”—what we labeled as his “whimsy”—and he used it more successfully than any copywriter we have ever studied.

You often hear that there is no place for humor in direct response copy…Jim broke that rule more than any other writer.

Dissecting how he got away with it is worth our time—that’s a big reason why I want to get all of his archives in one place and then make them available to you.

Here’s a whimsical headline Jim wrote when writing an ad looking for a bride, dressed as a knight in shining armor:

“Knight in Shining Armor Seeks Damsel…Distress Optional”

8) Any hack can make a product look desirable. If you aspire to greatness, make it look irresistible. Of course, that means you have to pick and choose your clients. Some products are sow’s ears. But given a decent product, you must, prior to writing, answer the question: “What could make this thing look irresistible?”

All of the great copywriters, including Jim, talk about the clients they “refused to work for” like it’s a badge of honor.

Jim also taught all of his copy cubs to assess opportunity cost with every assignment and never check your ethics at the door. If it doesn’t feel right to you, it’s probably not right.

As a client, keep this in mind too—you know what is ethical and what is not—and if you or your copywriter try to make something irresistible with false claims or promises you can’t keep, beware of the curse of customer service calls, unhappy buyers, and refunds.

9) Learn to stand up to your clients. Even the most sophisticated clients in the world may be too close to their product to understand it. You will frequently find it misnamed, wrongly positioned, poorly offered, incorrectly priced, or intrinsically flawed and needing revision. Tell ’em. The truly great clients will agree—and love you for it!

Jim’s view here is similar to what Dan Kennedy teaches—that is, don’t just “write copy for food”…be a trusted adviser in addition to writing kick ass copy. And tell your clients the truth.

In addition, as a copywriter, interview your clients like a detective; and as a client, spill your guts because you actually have all the answers in your head and you know your avatar best– and the best copywriters will then turn your words into poetry.

10) God will not let you starve because you refused to promote a product that is unethical, harmful, or at odds with the greater good of society.

This is an extension of #’s 8 and 9:

Never compromise your ethics since you didn’t leave them at the door.

I hope these insights from one of the world’s most prolific copywriters will whet your appetite to read and study everything Jim Rutz wrote (and admired).

In Read This or Die, we will not only have packages and promotions he wrote himself but also the packages and promotions he admired most which he used as “furniture” in his house (when you read “The Copywriter Closest to God” you will appreciate that even more).

And now an 11^th commandment:

11) Be bold, take chances, and stay crazy (and brilliant and “ballsy”) like my good friend and mentor Jim Rutz.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. Before the Jim Rutz product is released, grab one of the last copies of The Bill Jayme Collection.

Like Jim, Bill is worthy of an archive of his work and I have 7 left in inventory.

If you don’t know who Bill Jayme is, read “Deeply and irrevocably personal.”

And if you want to order The Bill Jayme Collection, 210 individual direct mail efforts in PDF format for 138 different mailers in all categories (on one USB drive), you can order here.

P.P.S. And stay tuned for Read This or Die, coming in a Sunday blog to your email soon.

The copywriter closest to God will soon be close to you too.

The post Read this or die (not a chain letter) appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

If you can’t make it, buy it

Brian Kurtz — Sat, 13 Jul 2019 02:58:14 +0000

(Excerpt from Overdeliver, Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing. Check out the P.S. for a special offer to get the e-book for $1.99)

During my first decade at Boardroom, creating offers and products—mainly for books and newsletters—was relatively easy.

We were publishing some of the most useful newsletters in the world at the time, including Boardroom Reports, Bottom Line/Personal, Tax Hotline, and Health Confidential. We created best-selling books by taking the “greatest hits” of our newsletters and putting them into huge volumes, indexed and categorized, and sold millions of copies of those “new” books.

I never lost sleep over not being on the New York Times bestseller list . . . we were much happier selling millions of books and helping millions of consumers without needing to get involved with bookstores or anything that resembled trade publishing.

We had a wonderful formula for creating these books and then had the best copywriters at the time (including Gene Schwartz, Gary Bencivenga, Jim Rutz, Mel Martin, Clayton Makepeace, and others) work their magic on each one.

We priced our books higher than anything similar you would find in a bookstore; we also created higher value than anything we could have done in a traditional bookselling environment.

It worked like crazy for years.

But then we were faced with a moment of truth in the late 1980s: we started running out of content doing these greatest-hits volumes.

Our bestsellers were often over 500 pages. They were encyclopedic, and we joked that we sold books by the pound. These kind of books sold much better than our niche titles (although we had a lot of success with some large niches, such as our diabetes book).

Simply put, books by the pound was what our core customers wanted . . . but it was getting tougher and tougher to deliver those kinds of books without duplicating content.

The Book of Inside Information, or what I called Bottom Line’s Greatest Hits, sold vast numbers of hardcover copies over many years, at $30 a book. We had offshoots of that book, including The Big Black Book and The Book of Secrets, and they all sold well.

There was also our book Healing Unlimited, which sold over two million copies; our big tax books; and even a title on estate planning, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Even “vertical” books, including the estate planning book and the diabetes book, became a little more “horizontal” when direct mail targeting was involved.

But how were we going to expand this formula?

We had a hungry database waiting for more big books and nothing to sell them.

Enter Gordon Grossman, the man who was the architect of Reader’s Digest in the 1960s and 1970s, and who I hired as a consultant in the 1990s.

He looked at what we were doing and said, “Brian, what makes you think that all the content for your books has to be your own stuff?”

That simple question changed everything for us.

I realized at that moment that I could buy our new books instead of having to make them all.

Gordon had been involved in the practice of buying trade books and converting them to direct mail books at Reader’s Digest and also for his other big consulting client, Rodale Press.

I put this lightbulb idea, invented by others, into action—and added my own twist.

It started with a trip to Barnes and Noble when I asked to borrow a hand truck. Thus armed, I trundled around the store to every category that fit with the interests of the millions of names in our database.

I got a good workout running all over the store, piling the hand truck higher and higher with books. I visited every category that made sense, including health, fitness, finance, investing, taxes, personal development, food and nutrition, retirement, and so on. There were so many amazing books in those categories, most of which had an inch of dust on them because no one was picking them up. I knew many of them just needed a marketing makeover.

I also realized that if any of those dusty volumes had sold 10,000 copies in their lifetime, they would have been considered bestsellers by the trade at that time. Although most of them had not hit anywhere near that level, I was confident we could change that with our direct mail formula.

Thinking ahead, I knew I could propose a windfall opportunity to some old-school trade publishers, who knew we were better equipped to take their books from the store to the mail. My master plan was to approach those trade publishers and secure the direct marketing rights, then blow their minds with how many books we could sell with direct mail when the title was selling virtually nothing in bookstores.

Five or six trips to my car later, after purchasing 40 or 50 books and weighing down my 1985 Toyota Camry until my tailpipe was almost dragging on the ground, I had the candidates to rival our current direct mail bestsellers.

The next step was to go through the books to see which ones had the most useful information from the most credible sources.

Many books got nixed by the editors: “We can’t put our name on that!”

Others got nixed by the copywriters:“There’s not enough juicy information for compelling copy.”

But the books that got through this gauntlet were put into the new product pipeline.

We also had to come up with an amazing pitch to the trade publishers for the direct marketing rights (which took some doing), and we had to create a system to reposition any appropriate trade books to direct mail. Now, this was before we had started doing surveys to previous buyers so fortunately our approach worked well.

The books we added to our direct mail lineup were often in paperback in the bookstore already, selling for less than $20. But our direct mail version of the book would always be hardcover (which has a higher perceived value), and we would add bonuses and premiums to make the new version drastically more appealing than the one in the bookstore.

This repositioning made the offer for direct mail unrecognizable to what it was before. It was this “apples to oranges” comparison of offers that also got all the trade publishers to give us the rights to sell the books, and justifiably so.

They saw the book as a single title on the shelf at a bookstore; we saw the book as part of a treasury of information (in hard cover, branded to us).

Our price points, which started at $30, eventually rose to $40 plus shipping and handling. All the while the same book was still sitting on bookstore shelves at half the price and with none of the attention.

That’s how we created a whole book division with content we didn’t have to produce.

I didn’t invent the idea of buying the rights to books to sell in other channels. But without these direct mail offers, these books would have died on the vine (or shelf) without helping an enormous number of people who needed that information.

The way we did it enabled us to both bring fantastic content to the world and have multiple outside titles that sold in the hundreds of thousands. A few even sold more than a million copies.

There are a few lessons here for any marketer, offline or online:

Look everywhere and anywhere for undersold or underutilized assets or products right under your nose that could be of interest to your audience. I’m not talking about doing another affiliate mailing—I’m talking about buying the rights to those products and making them your own. This same principle applies to digital products as well, not just books and physical products.
Know the power of your name and your brand to your audience and look for products that you would be proud to put your name on.
Nothing gets sold without a great sales message, regardless of your medium, but the offer has to have legs of its own. Think about whether it has real credibility before you fall in love with your new product idea. Have seasoned copywriters look at everything you are considering so you can get an objective view on it before you try to get them to write anything.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. My publisher extended the offer for the e-book of Overdeliver at $1.99 …get your copy today at any one of these vendors:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Apple

The post If you can’t make it, buy it appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

How to write so you are never forgotten

Brian Kurtz — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 02:31:38 +0000

In the Broadway show Hamilton there is a song that resonates with me, especially in light of my recent stroke.

It is titled “Why do you write like you are running out of time?” (This link has the tune and an anonymous blog post from someone else who the song was meaningful for.)

Despite dying in a duel with Aaron Burr when he was only 47, Hamilton left us an archive of his writings that would have rivaled someone double his age.

Whether he knew he was going to die young or he was just driven to write as much as he could as fast he could, no one can be sure.

But what we are sure of is that he was super productive in the years he had.

I have thought about this in the way we all write (and what we leave behind) and it occurred to me that if we can’t be as productive as Alexander Hamilton, we can still be as effective in our own niche with the right tools.

Making sure anyone and everyone can understand you instantly (and they can also remember more of what you say or write) should always be your highest priority.

One way to be more memorable is using images which your listener or reader can de-code for themselves; another is to remember that “grammar is overrated”; and another is to choose the right words to craft your story or argument.

Where is all this coming from?

Gene Schwartz of course.

I hate to sound like a broken record but there is no one in the history of copywriting or marketing who understood the power of using images that create words…along with the power that comes with not caring all that much about grammar in the process…and to always choose the right words.

“Grammar is overrated” was the subject line I used when I first told you about the second “Gene Schwartz lost classic” that I re-published (after Breakthrough Advertising) which is called, The Brilliance Breakthrough, How To Talk And Write So That People Will Never Forget You.

I am not the only one who saw the huge value in bringing this book back to life (which I did just about two years ago)…not only for its value but also because of the outrageous prices people were charging for used copies on Amazon and eBay:

When copywriter David Garfinkel, (who is also one of the top coaches for copywriters today), released an awesome podcast last year titled, “The Secret to Instant Understanding” based on Gene’s work and specifically The Brilliance Breakthrough, , it was just more justification for re-publishing this hidden gem of a book.

In it, David goes deep on how you can make anyone you talk to or write to understand you instantly–and completely–and therefore remember more of what you say or write…or, as Gene put it, “How to talk and write so that people will never forget you.”

David credits the lessons he teaches in this podcast to a core concept from The Brilliance Breakthrough…and I encourage you to give a listen here. (It’s one of two giveaways in this post…the other is in the P.S.)

Calling The Brilliance Breakthrough a “lost classic” is far from hyperbole.

When I released Breakthrough Advertising a few years ago, many of you who are Gene Schwartz enthusiasts asked me about The Brilliance Breakthrough, knowing that it was so rare and so good.

I realized reading those emails that you, my online family, were students of the craft…and I had to deliver The Brilliance Breakthrough to you as well.

I also needed to do it affordably since at the time I started putting this new edition together, there was only ONE used copy available on Amazon for $4,000. (That copy is now $2,000):

________________________________________________________________________

$2,000.00

+ $3.98 shipping + $127.25 estimated tax

Collectible – Like New

Author inscribed to former owner “Marty” (Martin Edelson publishe… » Read more

Arrives between June 28 – July 5.
Want it delivered Monday, July 1? Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout.
Shipping rates and return policy.

griffin_book

5 out of 5 stars 97% positive over the past 12 months. (7,391 total ratings)

Add to cart from seller griffin_book and price $2,000.00

______________________________________________________

Well…that one copy was signed by Gene Schwartz to my mentor Marty Edelston…however $4K (or $2K) seemed like a lot of money for an autograph…although I think the book is worth that much (actually more)…and of course I am not objective.

So after you listen to David Garfinkel’s podcast, if you are interested in obtaining a copy of this game changing book, I will not only save you as much as $1,805, but I will give you a workbook too.

(More on why I created a workbook at the end of this post.)

And for the hundreds of people who have discovered this gem already, drop me an email and let me know how you are applying it to your verbal and written communications.

I’ve heard from many of you already and it’s been rewarding to hear how much the book has helped you.

I have shared (and will continue to share) all of your feedback with Gene’s wife Barbara, my partner in bringing Gene back to life for a new generation.

Note: The Brilliance Breakthrough is a very different book than Breakthrough Advertising…with The Brilliance Breakthrough, Gene wanted to teach everyone to write more powerfully…and it didn’t matter whether you were a marketer or a copywriter.

I mentioned in a previous post that someone recently bought a copy of The Brilliance Breakthrough and then bought three extra workbooks, not for his copywriting team, but for his kids.

Then there is Breakthrough Advertising, which is the “advanced text”…and as you know, it goes much further than just being a road map to talking and writing more powerfully.

Those of you who have Breakthrough Advertising—and there are now over 2,000 of you who have bought the Titans edition (and thousands more who own a previous edition)—know that it is as much about human behavior as it is about copywriting and marketing.

My second giveaway for you today (in the P.S. of this post), in addition to David’s podcast, is the foreword to the Titans edition of The Brilliance Breakthrough, which will give you a flavor of what it is all about (and how important it is) even if you can’t afford to buy a copy yet.

You will also read about how “lost” it really was–and I think you will enjoy the story.

And if you would like to order one (with a workbook), please go to:

www.TheBrillianceBreakthrough.com

Feel free to forward this blog post to your own online family if applicable…and on social media…so we can tell many more folks that this book is now readily available. It’s been a long time coming.

And please listen to David Garfinkel’s podcast whether you order the book or not…and share it too.

I know you will find it very valuable.

A final word on “grammar is overrated”

I received a few angry emails the first time I published this from some linguists and purists of “grammatical correctness.”

But when you read The Brilliance Breakthrough you will see that Gene is not giving everyone permission to mangle the language.

Rather, what Gene is teaching is that starting with perfect grammar is not the most important consideration when you write or oversee any promotional copy.

And of course it is not a justification for all of the bad grammar I’ve used in my weekly blogs in the past either (even today).

If you have been part of my online family for a while, you know I have written a lot about Gene Schwartz in the past…he was a true Renaissance Man in our industry and I even profiled him with five other legends of advertising in my book, The Advertising Solution.

As a friend and mentor, Gene was so influential in my life and in the lives of countless others.

His wife Barbara cannot believe the appetite for his work today, among so many young writers, marketers and entrepreneurs…much more than when he was alive.

And I take being the shepherd of his books very seriously.

The podcast and the foreword will give you a sneak peek into this lost classic…why it is so important…and also why I thought it was critical, with my publishing partner Jim DiCola, (more about him below) to create the accompanying workbook (which was Jim’s idea).

There are exercises Gene created inside the book and having the workbook will make it easier to complete them without writing in this sacred text.

I have books and workbooks in inventory…and they are ready to ship today. Just click here.

I appreciate your continued enthusiasm and support for all I am up to…sharing classics like The Brilliance Breakthrough is a big part of my mission and thank you for being on this journey with me.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. Foreword to the Titans Marketing edition of The Brilliance Breakthrough: How To Talk And Write So That People Will Never Forget You :

This masterpiece you now hold in your hands, which has been a lost classic from almost the day Gene Schwartz wrote it, might be the most influential book you will ever read assuming you plan on communicating with other human beings in the future.

It is for me…and it has taught me more about communicating verbally and through the written word than anything I learned in my four years of college as an English major.

Back story on that: When I returned home from my sophomore year of college and told my parents I would be majoring in English, I came dangerously close to being cut off from my “college funding”; and even worse, I thought my parents would kick me out of the house.

But things worked out (or so I thought).

I was able to graduate with a degree in English and I believed that by sticking to my guns and not changing my major (and convincing my parents I would use my English degree for good rather than evil), I learned how to read and write and I was destined for greatness.

But everything changed when I got to know (and learn from) Gene Schwartz just a few years after graduating from college.

This book will forever change the way you think, and have been taught, about expressing yourself and your ideas.

It’s the next best thing to having Gene Schwartz as your personal copywriting coach.

From the outset, Gene makes it perfectly clear what you need to know about this book with the opening sentence of Chapter 1:

“The first thing you have to do with this book is forget everything you were ever taught about grammar!”

Gene’s thesis (and subtitle of the book) of teaching us, “How To Talk And Write So That People Will Never Forget You” has less to do with grammar and “proper English” and more to do with choosing the perfect words to make up the sentences we speak and write for maximum impact.

And yes, this is a marketing book at its core so “maximum impact” means “maximum sales.”

One more thing: Please don’t tell my English professors from college that grammar is no longer relevant to me…they might just take back my diploma…although I think I prefer the “graduate degree” I received from Gene rather than the undergraduate degree those professors gave me…

Why have I been obsessed about bringing The Brilliance Breakthrough back to life?

I think the main reason is that everyone practicing copywriting or marketing today needs as much Gene Schwartz in their life as possible.

I believe he might be the most important figure in the history of advertising when it comes to the merging of human behavior with copywriting and marketing.

And since I like to say, “marketing isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” (in the context of how to get your mission or vision out to as many people as possible and as powerfully as possible), learning how to write like Gene (which you will from this book) is your ticket to creating the most powerful messaging possible.

As Gene says at the conclusion of chapter three:

“…from words, you have generated images. And now from these images you will generate sentences. And from these sentences you will then generate entire discourses. Stories, reports, instructions, poems…a universe of shared emotions and thoughts.”

Despite the fact that Gene never wrote anything for an online promotion, what he is talking about here—and throughout the book—applies to all media and forms of communication: Sales letters, space ads, email, video scripts etc.—any written communication that has as its main purpose to get the reader to respond…and buy.

Online or offline.

I think you will also be struck by how simple Gene’s writing approach seems to be and his willingness to peel back the curtain on that approach…word by word, sentence by sentence.

The exercises at the end of each chapter—almost like “Mad Libs” for copywriting (but way more productive and with “correct answers” in the book!)—will guide you through a process that will make you a better writer. Guaranteed.

Also, please follow Gene’s instructions on how to use this book best.

He emphasizes the importance of applying the lessons from each chapter immediately. So if you can, please attack the book as Gene recommends…you won’t be disappointed.

And since I was always taught to never write inside the pages of a book (until I got to college!)—especially one as valuable as this one—I wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to apply Gene’s techniques.

That’s why I created the accompanying workbook which includes all of the exercises which appear at the end of each chapter.

The workbook will also make it easier to toggle between the book and the exercises in the workbook.

These exercises will enable you to write in ways you never thought possible.

I firmly believe that when we are working inside our passion—when our work is truly our play—you can become the best copywriter for your business.

That’s not to say that if you ever have an opportunity to hire a copywriter of Gene Schwartz’s caliber you shouldn’t jump at that opportunity—but most of us will not be given that opportunity in our lifetime.

However, this book, and the process Gene lays out for us step-by-step, is the best way for you to bring out what is inside of you…enable you to write incredibly powerful copy…with the possibility of needing only a proofreader when you are done.

And remember…the proofreading will have little to do with proper grammar…

So that’s why this book needs to be brought back to life…and it is no accident why the price of used copies of this book have been offered online for as much as $8,000…and as of this printing, the cheapest used copy I’ve seen is around $4,000.

Only a select few have been able to applyThe Brilliance Breakthrough…until now.

What makes this book different from Gene’s other masterpiece, Breakthrough Advertising?

In a perfect world, I would have preferred re-publishing The Brilliance Breakthrough before Breakthrough Advertising since this book, while not a primer for copywriters, is not nearly as dense as Breakthrough Advertising–and it is immediately usable and practical to many more people.

I think if you read The Brilliance Breakthrough first, you will get more hands-on training before diving into what is clearly Gene’s “advanced course” (i.e. Breakthrough Advertising).

But no biggie if you have already read Breakthrough Advertising and you are now beginning to read this treasure.

I would highly recommend, however, that you re-read Breakthrough Advertising after you have been through The Brilliance Breakthrough.

The fact is that neither of these books can be read just once to garner their full impact anyway.

In short, The Brilliance Breakthrough is all about execution on the theories Gene Schwartz penned as copywriting rules of thumb (and universals about human behavior) in Breakthrough Advertising.

You need both of these books in your library…they complement each other beautifully…and this is the first time in decades that both are easily accessible to all generations of marketers and copywriters.

How lucky are you to have easy access to The Brilliance Breakthrough?

Well…luckier than when I was a lad…

The stories I have heard over the years about smuggling copies of this book out of libraries are legendary.

Publisher and direct marketing historian (and my partner in getting this new edition printed), Jim DiCola, told me this story:

I went to my library [many years ago] and requested an interlibrary loan. After checking across the country, the only copy they could find was from the Library of Congress.

A month later the book showed up at my local branch.

However they had strict instructions that they would not let the book leave the library due to restrictions from the Library of Congress and that it was only on loan for a short period of time.

So every Saturday morning (and some weekday evenings) I would trek a mile to my local library, go to the front desk and request the book, and then a staff member would have to personally go to some secure part of some back room and bring me the book to read on the premises only.

And as the due date approached for when they had to return the book to the Library of Congress, I had been successful in my secret mission to photocopy the entire book, one chapter at a time over many months, unbeknownst to them.

And Brian, I will not tell you where this library is located…ever! They will take away my library card for sure if they find out!

Of course I asked Jim if I could make the story richer by saying he walked 12 miles each way to the library, in the snow, and barefoot as well…however, what he told me above was the best he could do.

But you get the idea.

I’ve heard other stories from folks who had to leave significant “collateral” at the front desk at their library in order to read The Brilliance Breakthrough on site.

I was frantically looking for someone who might have forfeited their Rolex to sneak out of a library with the book…hey $4,000 could buy a pretty nice watch, right?

Sadly, I couldn’t get that story and decided not to make one up.

But the good news is that the book is no longer rare.

And congratulations that you now own a copy.

Are you ready to become your own best copywriter?

I want to thank Gene for being such an incredible mentor to me and so many others during his lifetime.

And I also want to thank his wonderful wife, Barbara Schwartz, for being so generous with Gene while he was with us…and to this day.

Her generosity is the main reason this book is now available to you.

When I approached her about re-publishing this book, she only had one copy of the original text herself…which I have not let out of my sight while using it to print this new version.

Yes…I did a little photocopying myself…

And I made a very cool discovery which was clearly a message from Gene to me (and to you): There were a couple of notes from Gene inside Barbara’s only copy with changes he wanted to make to some of the chapter titles should the book ever be reprinted.

Of course all of those changes have been incorporated into this edition.

And seeing those notes made it abundantly clear that Gene also wants to be part of getting this book back into circulation…and to share his wisdom with all of you.

Like Barbara, Gene was very generous too…and I am so gratified seeing the appetite for Gene’s work today, even among the youngest copywriters and marketers…but I am also not surprised.

And this book in particular, while on the surface looks like it is targeted at copywriters and marketers, is really for anyone who desires to speak or write more clearly.

I know of quite a few people who want to give it to their children…one friend is buying a copy for his 11 year old son.

I also know Gene is also smiling down on all of us, seeing the impact his work has had on multiple generations already…and also how much more impact he will be making on generations into the future.

It’s obvious that Gene practiced what he preached:

He knew better than anyone how to talk and write so that people will never forget him.

Brian Kurtz

May 2017

P.P.S. And don’t forget…there is only one more week to grab my e- book Overdeliver for $1.99…at any of the vendors below:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Apple

The post How to write so you are never forgotten appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

Positionless basketball

Brian Kurtz — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 00:29:19 +0000

With the NBA Finals beginning this week (and for those of you outside the U.S. that’s the championship series of basketball), I want to talk about a concept that I’ve heard a few times recently:

Positionless basketball

In the past, basketball had five positions:

Point guard (for the short guy who could dribble and distribute)

Shooting guard (for another short guy who could score)

Small forward (bigger guy who could score)

Power forward (even bigger guy who could rebound)

Center (biggest guy who could take up space, block shots and also rebound)

Over time, the lines have been blurred: For example, the seven footer who can shoot from the outside and handle the ball is commonplace as is the six footer who can rebound with the best of the best.

All players on the basketball court can play multiple positions, they can all play offense and defense against anyone else and they all know everything about everyone else’s position so they can play it if necessary.

It’s confusing…but I guess it was necessary. Basketball players have gotten bigger and stronger and size does not diminish their dexterity which it seemed to in the past; and if you have the deficiency of being short, you can make up for it with athleticism and leaping ability.

In today’s game, the biggest guy on the court who can dribble and shoot as well as the smallest doesn’t get shortchanged by being pigeonholed into a position…nor does the smallest guy on the court who can go inside with the big boys.

I bring this up today to talk about “positionless marketing”…that is, knowing everything about your marketing whether you are directly involved in it or not.

In the introduction to my new book, Overdeliver,I lay out “9 things every business owner needs to know about marketing” and I’d like to share that with you today. Consider it a preview if you haven’t bought the book yet and a reminder if you have.

And if you haven’t picked up my book with all the fantastic bonuses, go to www.OverdeliverBook.com.

1. Be Involved in All Your Marketing Efforts, Even If You Outsource Everything

Most people with a background in direct response probably won’t need more encouragement on this one—we’re all data junkies who love getting our hands dirty on every kind of campaign. But if your role also demands that you focus on other things outside of marketing (product development, finances, hiring, etc.), make sure you never let go of the marketing reins completely. Keep an eye on everything that everyone is doing, both inside and outside your organization.

The best people I ever hired internally were the people in operations, analytics, and finance who understood and recognized the value of direct marketing. Being on the same page meant we could move so much faster than our competitors. When everyone on your team is on the same page, you don’t get slowed down by red tape. It might sound like a big ask to be hands-on with marketing when it’s not your core competency or to only hire people who love marketing, no matter their job title. But remember that every marketing message is a representation of you and your brand. Look after your marketing like you would your own child—it connects you to your customers, and that relationship must be protected at all costs.

2. Marketing Is Not Evil

I totally understand mission-based businesses and the need to be “elegant” or “classy” with all marketing and sales messages. But marketing your product, especially when it is mission based, is about serving your customers, not taking from them.

Always remember this important premise, drilled into me by one of my mentors, Jay Abraham (still one of the world’s biggest thought leaders on business and marketing, and author of the foreword to this book): it is irresponsible to bring your product or service to the marketplace without the same passion with which you created it.

There’s an ethical line each of us won’t cross (which comes down to your personal perspective), and that’s important to define clearly. But there’s nothing to be ashamed of in bringing your life’s work to as many people as possible if you are doing it in a way that’s congruent with your ethics and overall philosophy. To do this may require copy platforms and creative that you consider aggressive; but as long as you are working in the spirit of making a big impact, sell hard. The more people you reach, the better.

3. No One Spends Enough Time on Lists

You’re going to hear that no one spends enough time on lists a few times throughout this book. Take it to heart. Dick Benson (another mentor and the smartest man I ever met on the science and strategies of direct mail) said this to me the day I met him, circa 1985, when we were comparing lists. I never forgot it, particularly since he later revised the comment to say that the team I led at Boardroom was the only exception.

I can’t emphasize enough that you must pay close attention to your customer list, your prospect list, and how you approach list building at a very detailed level. The real live people who make up those lists are truly the lifeblood of any business driven by direct response (and even many businesses that wouldn’t identify themselves as being in direct response).

Ignoring your lists is like ignoring your family. It’s a prescription for disaster. Making sure you talk to different segments of your list based on their relationship with you is critical to maximize success, and we’ll talk about this at length in the following chapters.

4. Customers Refund Transactions . . . Not Relationships

E-mail is probably the most prevalent sales and communication medium in the world today, and it is also the most effective and efficient way to market any product or service when used properly. But just because e-mail is cheap doesn’t mean it should be used indiscriminately or without careful thought about every message you send. The care that you take with your e-mail list (what I would call your online family) might be the most important thing you do as a marketer, both now and in the future.

If someone recommends that you mail every day, don’t take it as gospel . . . take it under advisement. But here’s better advice: mail when you have something really worthwhile to say. Blogging every day with purpose is effective; throwing out random thoughts or sending pictures of last night’s dinner might be counterproductive. You wouldn’t want your own family to start ignoring you because you were sending stuff they didn’t care about. Think of your online family the same way. If you are just throwing out whatever you can think of every morning, including unrelated or insignificant content, you run the risk of burning out your list, causing your online family to ignore you when you really want them to pay closer attention.

Always look to build relationships for a lifetime, and deliver huge amounts of valuable content before you ever try to sell something. Because e-mail is cost-efficient, this is so much easier than in the past, when we only had offline techniques. Understanding lifetime value (which has its own chapter later on) gives all marketers real leverage and the maximum chance for success in multiple channels. It’s this focus on the long game that you need to develop in your customer relationships.

5. Credibility & Transparency Trump All

Respect your customers. If they’re following you, don’t insult them with anything but transparency. Showing proof of your approach through testimonials, case histories, and professional endorsements is about building your case, not bragging. And when you make a mistake or want to show vulnerability, people always appreciate transparency.

Isn’t the cover-up always worse than the crime? There are countless stories in the world of marketing where a business confessed to something they were not proud of or failed at and came back stronger than ever. But once there’s a cover-up, you’re doomed.

6. Always Think Direct Marketing

Remember—direct marketing is not just direct mail. It’s measurable marketing in any channel. Measurable and accountable advertising is always what you want, and don’t let anyone sell you a brand and image advertising “campaign” without being able to show a clear return on your investment (ROI).

I’ve been saying for years that the Internet is the ultimate direct marketing medium . . . and while that won’t change anytime soon, allmarketing is direct marketing in my world. Expecting an acceptable ROI must always be standard operating procedure. Just because a lot of stuff is cheap to do online doesn’t mean you should allow sloppy campaigns out the door or skimp on requiring tangible results.

7. Use Your Personal Brand in Your Marketing When Applicable

Many marketing superstars understand their personal brand deeply and always keep it totally in sync with their products and services. They’re confident talking about their achievements and know that their information is valuable to their customers. However, many entrepreneurs and business owners are squeamish about putting themselves out there for fear of sounding boastful or disingenuous. In response to that, I will quote baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean (and I think John Wayne and others have used this one too): “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”

8. Advertising Opportunities Are Now Infinite

There are endless ways to market your products and services today. None of us can master them all, because there’s simply too much to know. This is why now the best time ever to be a marketer . . . is but this is also what makes it dangerous.

Having spent my entire career buying à la carte from the best experts across multiple marketing niches, I can assure you this approach will pay for itself. I tell entrepreneurs to run—not walk—away from anyone who claims they can be your one-stop shop for all marketing, creative, and media buying.

Remember that when you have more choice across channels, you also see more specialization and therefore more experts. I don’t think I have to convince you that experts are much better to work with than generalists—and certainly better than generalists posing as experts. In today’s supercharged, multi-channel and technology-rich marketing environment, no one can be an expert on everything. Make sure you’re always searching for the expert who is the leading specialist in the channel you want to use.

9. SingleChannelMarketingIsSoBoring.com

Feel free to go to this website because it just redirects to my website, www.briankurtz.me. I really do own this URL, just to prove a point.

No business should rely on a single marketing channel, because you never know when the landscape might change. If Facebook shuts down your ad account, or Google changes its search algorithm, or your e-mail provider slaps you for an infringement, you must have other channels dialed in to keep your business solvent.

This is not about one channel being better than another channel. That is, it’s not an “or” but an “and.” Not only is buying your media on a single channel boring, it’s also dangerous. And the danger is easily avoided when you’ve committed to working with the best of the best across the different marketing disciplines, as I mentioned in the last point. You would expect the people who manage your money to diversify your financial risk, and you should expect the people who manage your marketing to do the same.

Remember, you have to meet your customers where they are, and there’s not a single industry where buyers use only one channel. Meet them everywhere they spend time. And you can only serve your customers if your business stays afloat, so diversify your marketing to ensure you can provide for them over the long haul.

* * *

With all the tools, case studies, and information at our disposal, today’s marketers have more opportunity than ever to leave an indelible mark on the world. While I can’t guarantee what the market will do or which platform will take off next, if you approach direct response marketing with a spirit of service and healthy competition, your business and marketing can be a force that changes countless lives for the better—and pays off for you too.

The nine fundamentals listed above were originally written for entrepreneurs and business owners who are not marketers but who I believe must embrace these principles to build their businesses for a lifetime. This book will dive deeply into all these principles, giving you valuable understanding whether or not you are an experienced marketer.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. I know many of you have bought Breakthrough Advertising for which I am very thankful…I am so glad I have been given the privilege of bringing that classic back to life.

And many of you have shared wonderful experiences you’ve had exploring this book–and please keep writing to me with your thoughts and insights.

Gene Schwartz’s other classic, The Brilliance Breakthrough, is a book that you may not know as much about but you should.

Read the background here.

Consider it Gene’s manual for writing (and not just copywriting).

You can get your copy here:

www.TheBrillianceBreakthrough.com

The post Positionless basketball appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

Marketing by walking around

Brian Kurtz — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 05:39:08 +0000

If you are a CEO, president, owner (or in any senior position of your company), being your own “boots on the ground” in the office is part of your job no matter how much you delegate to others.

From Wikipedia:

The origin of the term [“management by walking around”] has been traced to executives at the company Hewlett-Packard for management practices in the 1970s. However, the general concept of managers making spontaneous visits to employees in the workplace has been a common practice in some other companies as well. Also, the management consultants Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman had used the term in their 1982 book, In Search of Excellence. Historian Stephen B. Oates asserts that Abraham Lincoln invented the management style by informally inspecting the Union Army troops in the early part of the American Civil War.

This is clearly an idea worth paying attention to if both Tom Peters and Abraham Lincoln thought it was something worthwhile.

It’s also much more than simply “visiting” with your employees (or troops) regularly. Asking detailed questions and showing you care will go a long way as you build your business for the long run.

Another great author and patriot, Dan Kennedy, takes this concept a step further by specifically applying it to marketing.

He calls it, “marketing by walking around”…and he is also not talking about simply “visiting” either.

Applied to marketing, you need to do lots of walking around inside your company and outside your company as well.

There’s lots of exercise (and knowledge) to be had by CEO’s walking around a lot more, for both management and marketing purposes.

Chapter 8 of my new book, Overdeliver: Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing is titled, “Customer Service and Fulfillment” and asserts that these crucial “back end functions” of your business are essential elements of marketing…and they need to be a key focus of the business at every level, from clerk to CEO.

I open the chapter with this quote (which I came up with after being lectured many times on this subject by Dan Kennedy):

“Marketing by walking around is a requirement, not a choice”

Throughout the chapter I discuss many concepts and techniques to make sure this part of your business is top priority including:

The importance of listening in on customer service calls regularly
Using “secret shoppers” effectively
How to plan for disasters in advance
The best ways to create “barriers to switch” from your brand

I hope you will pre-order the book right now at www.OverdeliverBook.com (and snatch up some incredible bonuses)…and then let me know what you think of this chapter in particular once you have the book after April 9^th.

While I can’t send you the entire chapter today, what I would like to share with you is an excerpt (and how I open the chapter) from “customer service and fulfillment.”

Many of you have heard versions of this before at this special time of year–the opening of the baseball season in the United States.

Here is how I tell the story in Overdeliver:

In the early 1980s, baseball writer Thomas Boswell wrote a book called How LifeImitates the World Series. As a lifelong, diehard baseball fan, I loved this title. Baseball, like direct marketing, is a big part of my life, and I often look for ways where my two passions collide. It happens surprisingly often.

I am not just a casual fan of the game (or of this direct marketing thing either). I was a pretty good catcher in Little League—a legend in my own mind at 12 years old. But in youth baseball, when you turn 13, you go from a miniature field to a much bigger one—the same size field major league players play on.

Being a fat kid (“husky” to my family), that big field was a problem for me. I was quite slow, and navigating all that real estate just to get on base was a problem. And while I could still catch, the distances to throw the ball were too far for me as well. But I still loved the game and wanted to be part of it even if my body type (and ability) was standing in the way of my future baseball career.

How could I get on the field competently? That’s when I became an umpire, often the most hated man on the field, but in my mind, I could be the savior, creating order out of chaos, especially with little leaguers. I knew they needed me, even if they didn’t know it. I loved the game, I knew the rules, I had a loud voice, and being a little husky and slow was not an issue. In fact, it seemed like all the umpires I ever saw on TV were fat.

But umpiring gave me much more than just a hobby (inside a passion) and, as it turned out, a way to avoid obesity—it is also related to my passion for direct marketing in more ways than I ever would have imagined.

HOW BASEBALL IMITATES DIRECT MARKETING

Back to why I love the title, How Life Imitates the World Series. I became an umpire at 16 years old and have done it my entire life: Little League, high school level, men’s and women’s soft- ball. My dream is to umpire at the Little League World Series. You probably also have passions in your life that, on the surface, have no relationship to your “work” . . . however, ask anyone about their hobbies, interests, exercise routines, etc., and they will tell you how the things they do outside of work give them more focus when they are back at their desk. I maintain that—as it said on the back of [my mentor] Marty Edelston’s business card—“the master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play.” But for this part of the discussion let’s assume there is a distinction. At least a little one.

As with all the activities in your life, the concentration required to do something well is demanding—whether it’s being a lawyer, an accountant, or a dentist, or if it’s mountain biking, skiing, or yoga—and in all cases and situations, distractions will lead to failure. In the case of your livelihood, you could lose a client, have a downturn in business, or even get fired from a job; in sports, it could lead to physical injury.

With umpiring, while you could get hit in the head with a baseball if you are daydreaming, the real injuries come when you get yelled at for missing a call. I know you might get a correction during an imperfect downward-facing dog in a yoga class, but missing an obvious call in a baseball game will have a coach loudly arguing with you—in your face and possibly kicking dirt at you—while the parent of the kid who was the victim of your awful call will be screaming from the stands about what a despicable person you are.

Maybe I should take up yoga.

A copywriter friend once asked me, “Why would anyone want to be an umpire?”

There had to be something motivating me to be abused so much, and I came up with three answers. The first two I have already touched on:

I love the focus required to do it well.
I love creating order from chaos by applying established principles (in this case to the game of baseball).
I love that underneath it all, umpiring is about customer service and fulfillment.

This chapter is about #3, and when I say fulfillment here, I am not talking about my personal fulfillment but rather fulfillment for the customer. No one comes to a baseball game to see the umpire, just as no one goes to any sporting event to see the referee or official of that game. The best an umpire can get at the end of the game is “Nice game, ump.” But the moment an umpire makes a mistake, all hell breaks loose.

If you have ever worked in customer service, fulfillment, or any part of a business that is all about making the behind-the-scenes stuff seamless, I think you might be getting the connection. Most customers don’t interact with a company just to experience their customer service and fulfillment. They are buying, receiving, and enjoying their product (sort of like playing in a baseball game on a beautiful spring day); but if something is not right with the experience, it will be time to get satisfaction for the wrong that has been inflicted upon them.

No one wants to feel wronged—and if you don’t make it right for them (quickly), I guarantee that the lifetime value of this customer will decrease significantly, maybe even to nothing, or less than nothing. This is the marketing after the marketing—and when we screw up on delivering for our customers, it is absolutely the worst thing we can do in business. As I’ve said in other ways throughout this book already, it’s much easier to keep a customer happy (and increase their lifetime value) than to get a new customer . . . although it does feel sexier to get new customers all the time.

Saving a loyal customer after they feel you have not fulfilled your promise (at any point in the relationship) is your most important sales function. You do this by making world-class customer service your highest priority. While I worried about the title of this book being Overdeliver, worried that potential readers might think it is only about delivering impeccable customer service, I decided to go with it because it is such a core principle of marketing. And now you know that “over delivering” is also much more than this.

The fact that so many marketers today put up with 30 per- cent to 50 percent return rates on an initial sale (I guess because keeping 50 percent to 70 percent of new customers is good enough) makes me cringe. And even if accepting that return rate on the initial sale is the prevailing philosophy, these marketers still don’t spend enough time caring for and nurturing the folks who don’t return the product initially, losing them later by not being laser focused on doing everything to keep these customers happy and coming back for more.

Having a total commitment to the highest quality (and integrity) on the initial sale is the most important first step…but that same mind-set needs to be in place with all customers throughout the lifetime of their relationship with you. And when you are thinking about customer service and fulfillment, it’s even more important to have this maxim front and center all the time, one that I made up and one that I try to live by (and which you have seen at the opening to Chapter 1): “Everything in business (and in life) is not a revenue event, but everything is a relationship event.”

Here’s another way I like to put this as it pertains to customer service: Lifetime value increases the longer someone loves you and wants to buy from you in the future like they have in the past; but this requires you to take care of them like they are family, even without any exchange of funds.

Unfortunately, too many entrepreneurs and business owners treat their customer service and fulfillment as afterthoughts, and not just the function but the people they hire for those jobs too. These shortsighted executives act as though the actual real-world interaction with real-life people who buy from them doesn’t matter once a sale is made. This is a big mistake. Alas, the fulfillment manager, or customer service rep, on their best day, will get the feedback equivalent of “Nice game, ump.” If there are no problems, these folks remain invisible. But when they blow a call (i.e., make a mistake) they become the least popular employees in the company.

It takes a certain kind of personality to umpire . . . or to be a fulfillment manager or customer service representative. Taking pride in giving exquisite service—and being willing to do it without being noticed—is extremely rare. These are the people who over deliver at the highest level. Pay close attention to people you hire for these roles, and pay them well too. They are your first line of defense in protecting against leakage of your existing and potential customers; and they are your last line of defense against customers leaving you forever.

The wonderful telephone operator who solves a customer’s problem behind the scenes and saves an order or avoids cancellation feels like they are part of sales and revenue creation (or what we can call revenue saving). And the delighted customer, who receives a positive outcome, will have their day made and might just become a customer for life. The folks I know who are the best at customer service receive satisfaction in saving the day, whether it’s noticed by one or by many. But while they may not be looking for positive reinforcement, go out of your way to applaud them. Give them accolades for their excellent skill at keeping customers; they deserve this just as much as the sales rep or copywriter deserves praise for figuring out creative ways to add new customers.

Make sure you look after every part of your customer service and fulfillment, because the only way to stay in business for the long haul is to focus relentlessly on keeping your customers happy. And that includes keeping your employees happy too. Even if things go wrong, if you are committed to making things right and saving every customer with every interaction, no matter how negative or potentially damaging, you will build resilience into your business—because, as we know, all businesses thrive on repeat purchases.

You can even base your entire differentiation strategy as a company on how you treat your customers. Look at such well- known retail businesses as Nordstrom, Stew Leonard’s, Ritz Carl- ton—they are differentiated in extremely competitive industries due to their unrivalled customer service. I love tracking what companies have done to create superior levels of service for their best customers, especially with commoditized products. Premium services such as Amazon Prime and the American Express Black Card over deliver and create customer experiences like no one else.

The rest of the chapter in the book on customer service and fulfillment is not about baseball—I promise—but it is about the importance of servicing your customers at the highest level and not just selling them.

And whether we are talking about management by walking around or marketing by walking around it’s always about leadership by walking around.

And that’s what I really mean when I get out on the field over the next 5 months and begin each game with “play ball!”

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. I hope most of you have at least taken a look at the bonuses I am offering with my book, Overdeliver…and if you pre-order today (the book launches April 9^th), you can still get everything at www.OverdeliverBook.com immediately.

Please pre-order now and also feel free to share the link above with anyone else who might benefit from these incredibly useful resources from the greatest direct marketers ever, past and present.

P.P.S. As I continue to talk about all of my mentors and friends mentioned and discussed in the new book, I have been getting inquiries about some who are not represented at www.OverdeliverBook.com– marketing royalty known for their genius (and their own form of “overdelivering”).

One of those is Bill Jayme. He just had too much material to add!

“The Bill Jayme Collection,” a swipe file of 210 monumental control packages written by one of the most prolific copywriters ever, is now available in a new format.

I was out of stock (of the 12 disc set) but based on the demand for the content (and your feedback on changing the format), I created a small quantity of this priceless collection on one USB thumb drive in a protective plastic case (rather than on discs).

If you would like to hear more about the legend of Bill Jayme and why he is considered one of the best and most beloved copywriters ever, please read “Deeply and Irrevocably Personal.”

To order one of the limited edition Bill Jayme Collections in stock now, click here.

The post Marketing by walking around appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

Marketers or politicians: Who really has the power?

Brian Kurtz — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 02:06:35 +0000

“No mailer [or marketer] tests enough”

-Dick Benson

Growing up in the world of direct mail in the 1980’s, I had many role models.

Most were personal mentors; but many were actually companies who I paid close attention to and watched everything they did.

Combined with that, I also feared being one of those “mailers or marketers” who didn’t test enough (according to Dick Benson above).

Benson—along with Gordon Grossman and Richard Viguerie–were the men who taught me direct mail (and in effect, direct marketing); and companies like Agora and Phillips Publishing were the ones I followed most closely to guarantee I never got lazy about testing…or for that matter, lazy about anything regarding marketing.

As many of you know, Agora is still going strong and you can read about them in my post, “Don’t just make money…deserve it.”

But today I want to talk about that other pioneering company from the same era, Phillips Publishing.

Many of you might never have heard of this legendary company but I believe there are lessons for a lifetime we can learn from them, even today, long after their glory days as the top newsletter publisher and supplement company in direct marketing.

But first, I need to tell you a story to give you some background on the founder, Tom Phillips:

I go out of my way to never get “political” in these weekly posts…and I won’t start now…but this story took place in Washington D.C. and there were politicians involved–but they are only the supporting actors and actresses in this tale.

I attended a gala dinner circa 1994 in the nation’s capital which on the surface seemed like it was all about politics…but for me, it was about best-in-class direct marketing.

The dinner celebrated the 50th anniversary of Human Events magazine, which at the time was as “right of center” as any publication in America and quite influential in conservative politics.

I was invited because a good friend of mine was a key player at the magazine…and I found myself that night in a room filled with the most outspoken and enthusiastic Republicans and conservatives in the country.

Now I’m a Jewish kid from the New York…not affiliated with either party…and I have to admit that I felt like a fish out of water…yet I was still very excited to be there.

For the record, I flip-flop registering Democrat and Republican depending on which primary in my state is more exciting and where there is some kind of competition (i.e. usually the non-incumbent party).

You see, I’m more a sports fan than a follower of politics so when voting feels more like an evenly matched sporting event, I’m all in.

Anyway, the speakers at this gala included Phylis Schlafly, Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, Oliver North, and Jack Kemp (considered the “liberal” of the group) who introduced a video from none other than “The Gipper” himself, Ronald Reagan.

Also in the crowd were some celebrities:

Judge Robert Bork who almost became a Supreme Court Justice; and none other than Sonny “I Got You Babe” Bono (at the time the former Mayor of Palm Springs, California and a future Republican Congressman).

He did some singing before the Palm Springs gig too.

As each speaker came to the podium, they were greeted with a rousing standing ovation.

Not being a fan or foe of the speakers, I sat in my seat and politely clapped with each introduction.

I have to admit that I was a little nervous that I would be found out as an imposter in the crowd (i.e. just not as enthusiastic given by apolitical nature).

But my continued politeness (and excellent table manners) kept me from getting evicted.

One other thing you need to know:

Human Events was published at the time by the previously mentioned Phillips Publishing…one of the truly great direct marketing companies ever; and the founder, Tom Phillips, is one of my marketing heroes.

The final speaker of the night was none other than Tom Phillips…and when he was announced, I was the first person who jumped out of my seat to give him a standing ovation.

As far as I was concerned, Tom was the true rock star of the evening…everyone else served as a warmup act for a man who is direct marketing royalty.

My buddy looked at me incredulously and said:

“You’ve been sitting on your butt all night as one all-star speaker after another came to the stage…and now you stand up?”

I replied:

“I am not necessarily standing up for Tom’s political influence but I am standing up for his direct marketing prowess.”

With all that power in the ballroom of The Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. that night, there really was no one more powerful than Tom Phillips.

Direct marketers trump everyone in my world, I guess.

It should be noted that at the time, he saved Human Events from going under by buying it when it was struggling—making it his own labor of love.

He was able to do that because he had spent his career creating and building some of the most iconic publications and businesses in the history of direct marketing.

Some of the reasons why Phillips Publishing was a best-in-class direct marketer:

Copy

They worked with only the best-of-the-best copywriters…the folks we call “A listers.”

They also understood that with all the work and research they did on lists and offers, to leave the copy to amateurs would be the biggest mistake they could make.

Another quote from Dick Benson, this time from his “31 Rules of Thumb”:

#30 Test-mailing packages are best when they come from independent creative sources.

They were also always willing to pay top dollar and regularly had those “A listers” compete against other “A listers.”

Since we had the same philosophy at my company (Boardroom Inc.) at the time, Phillips (along with Agora) were my biggest competitors to get the best creative talent to write for us.

And most importantly, Phillips never saw copy and creative as an expense but rather as the most consistently successful way to create marketing breakthroughs.

Making sure they were always mailing the best promotional copy was seen as paramount for the company to grow and expand their reach.

They never compromised in this area and I know this because when I couldn’t get an “A lister” to write for me it was because they were tied up writing for Phillips.

In addition, they also required their entire marketing staff to become students of copy and the result was that many of those folks went on to become top level freelance copywriters themselves.

I will tell you about one of those Phillips business builders in the P.S.

Lists

Phillips understood at the deepest level that once they invested all that money in creative, they better be mailing to the right lists.

Again, from Benson’s “31 Rules”:

#23 Lists are the most important ingredient to the success of a promotional mailing.

To that end, they were committed to list research more than any direct marketer I have ever known.

They asked more questions about a list before putting it in the mail–to the chagrin of every list broker and list manager in the industry.

But they knew that spending over $500 per thousand pieces mailed (direct mail was not cheap, especially at the level they did it) came with huge responsibility and discipline…and risk.

They mitigated that risk with precise and exhaustive list research.

Watching Phillips and emulating them in this exhaustive part of direct marketing (i.e. list segmentation and research) is why Chapter 3 of my new book, Overdeliver, is titled, “How paying postage made me a better marketer.”

Testing

I opened this post with a Dick Benson quote, which is not one of his “31 Rules of Thumb,” but rather a call to arms for all direct response marketers; and something that is more critical to success than any other rule on his list as evidenced by how many of his rules refer to testing.

Phillips would not be one of those marketers Benson could ever call out as not testing enough.

They tested offers (in addition to copy and lists) aggressively but intelligently.

They followed the rules of scientific A/B testing and also single variable testing.

They only tested big things that could yield big results; and more importantly, they knew how to act on those results (which were always reliable) since they understood statistical significance and could call every winner with confidence.

They also invested in the best analytics which was as important to them as investing in the best copywriters and selecting the most appropriate lists. Without reliable numbers, they knew they would be lost.

I have covered all of these core issues in previous posts and they are all included in my new book…much of which was inspired by watching Phillips.

Diversification

Phillips also diversified into multiple product areas innovatively but always based on their expertise and existing assets.

This led to success in specialized niches in both consumer and business-to-business marketing which was rare back then…and I think it is even rarer now.

They had a philosophy and strategy behind everything they did and not just tactics.

They were also able to succeed with information products and hard goods/physical products…while always keeping an eye on their core audience…and never going too far from what they knew best.

And they never drifted away from what their customers wanted most.

Simply put, the Phillips Publishing secret sauce was that they merged their expertise, skill sets and knowledge with what was working best in the marketplace already…and then followed anecdotal evidence every step of the way while never trying to be something they were not.

And all with unwavering discipline.

That’s why they ended up as leaders in so many different categories including health (newsletters and nutritional supplements), personal finance and investing, business-to-business niches and, yes, even politics.

Phillips Publishing was the gold standard in direct marketing for over two decades.

And they followed yet another Benson rule:

#21 Direct mail should be scrupulously honest.

Benson never worked online but of course this rule applies to all media, offline and online.

I encourage all of you to study Phillips as a direct marketing case history for the ages.

At their peak, they were the envy of the newsletter publishing industry and many other industries as well; and at their peak I believe they approached $300 million in sales…maybe more.

Also notable: Phillips perfected a model to sell nutritional supplements under a doctor/guru, using content as the anchor, well before it became a business model for so many others.

That one division alone, re-named Healthy Directions, was recently sold by the folks who bought it from Tom for $195 million.

So many of today’s most successful marketers in this category owe a huge debt of gratitude to the pioneering efforts of Phillips.

People

Getting a job at Phillips was not easy…and Tom is often credited with the line:

“Hire the best and cry only once.”

And as mentioned before, he not only “hired” many of the top copywriters on a freelance basis—but then he incorporated ways to train many of their own staff to become expert copywriters as well.

They also treated their employees with love and appreciation…ask folks who worked there about the time Tom took a few hundred people to Disney on a “company retreat” to reward them for amazing results.

History will show that the number of superstars who came out of Phillips to become some of the most successful copywriters, marketers and entrepreneurs is testament to their unique culture and philosophy.

The lives that were changed for the better because of Tom Phillips and his powerhouse company–his ability to communicate as a world class direct marketer–put him on the same stage as Ronald Reagan…literally.

And whatever your politics might be, there is no arguing that the impact we can make as direct marketers is mammoth.

Tom Phillips proved that many times over.

The products and promotions the company produced live on in every swipe file worth collecting…I can’t wait to share many of those promos in my Overdeliver Copywriter’s Toolkit (a 400+ page PDF that will be free when you buy my new book); and also in the Jim Rutz product my expert team has almost completed (Rutz was a major writer for Phillips).

Kidding aside about how I ended up at that dinner that I had no place being at, I really wanted to emphasize what real “power” is all about.

The more we think about it–and the longer we work in this wonderful industry–the more we should embrace the power (and responsibility) to make a huge impact in the world no matter what we sell or how we sell it.

We are also lucky to have a skill set that transcends every industry…and one that works in every medium.

To bring it full circle, ask any politician how important direct marketing is to them in order to get re-elected (direct mail, TV, radio, Facebook, Twitter etc.).

(And while you’re at it, ask them why they get the lowest postage rates for their direct mail)

But here’s the good news for you no matter what media you use and even if politicians won’t admit that marketing is as important to them as anything:

You never have to run for re-election!

However, your customers will let you know regularly and not every 2 or 4 or 6 years in no uncertain terms whether you can “stay in office” (or not)—as their trusted adviser– based on the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

They will vote with their loyalty…and their wallets.

Regardless, our reward as marketers will be that we can change lives for the better while still being financially successful…Tom Phillips proved that time and again and in a wide variety of markets.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. One of the greatest copywriters and marketers that Phillips Publishing ever “produced” is Kim Krause-Schwalm, a member of my Titans Master Class and a great friend.

I love that Kim started on the marketing side of things and then learned copywriting from some of the best copywriters who have ever lived, both internally and externally, while at Phillips—and then became one of the greats on her own.

As a freelancer, she wrote some phenomenal control packages for me at Boardroom (and so many others), beating controls from some of the most prolific copywriters in the process.

She is hosting her own event at the end of March called Copywriting Velocity which is a one-of-a-kind, two-in-one event—a Copy Intensive and a Mastermind.

And as part of my online family you will receive a $700 discount if you would like to attend…see below.

It’s happening March 29-30 in Washington, D.C.

It will be a small, intimate setting where everyone will receive personal attention with no more than 24 attendees in the room.

Day one is a full-day Copy Intensive led by Kim where she’ll share her complete soup-to-nuts system for writing million-dollar promotions—plus she’ll break down some of her most successful controls.

Day two is a full-day Mastermind with special guests Carline Anglade-Cole, Richard Armstrong, Lori Haller, and Big Jason Henderson sharing their secrets—all “A listers” in their areas of expertise (copywriting, design, and email marketing).

Go to: www.CopywritingVelocity.com

And as you know I never take an affiliate commission so I have arranged with Kim to give you a $700 discount…just put this code in at checkout:

TITANS700

Hope you can make it.

The post Marketers or politicians: Who really has the power? appeared first on Brian Kurtz.

Phone a friend…or maybe the CEO?

Brian Kurtz — Sat, 02 Mar 2019 14:08:50 +0000

My Mom is a spunky 94 and she loves to talk.

I know that she would think I was a much better son if I called her more often too.

When I tell her that email is the “new thing” and if she participated she’d hear from me more often, she isn’t buying…if it’s not a phone communication or an in-person visit, it doesn’t count in her world.

Although if she was on email she’d hear from me more often, that’s for sure.

At least every Sunday like you!

But I am glad she is mostly “offline” since she would be angry with me if she read this—she hates telling anyone how old she is—but as you can see, 94 is the new 74 in my family!:

No matter how angry she gets with me regarding “not calling enough,” my Mom, whether she knows it or not, is in synch with me as it pertains to multi-channel marketing.

While she might not embrace Instagram or Facebook, she loves snail mail.

Case in point: I regularly send her the prettiest postage stamps I can find since she seems to think the electric company and cable TV provider will be kinder to her if she sends in her payments with a beautifully stamped envelope.

She’s got my back on the power of direct mail, that’s for sure.

But her favorite offline medium is the telephone…one that is often forgotten as a powerful tool in the direct response marketer’s toolkit…but not by my Mom.

I find this ironic since most of us are attached to our smart phones all day long but we rarely see it as a “phone” (as opposed to being a vehicle to post vacation pictures, food photos and participate in political rants).

Using the phone for marketing purposes seems to elude many of the smartest marketers I know.

Maybe my Mom is on to something and we should pay more attention.

Besides laying on the guilt re: how infrequently I call her with “inbound” telemarketing, her “outbound” operation is quite extensive.

When she gets a can of tomatoes that seem to be less than the freshest they can be, rather than simply return the can to Shop-Rite, her first plan of action is to call the CEO of Del Monte.

And every time I see her, she always has a story about how she got “satisfaction” calling anyone who will listen, at any company or store who has stepped out of line (in her opinion), responding to her tales of woe.

She’s relentless and won’t stop until she gets what she needs.

Does that sound like any of your customers?

Or more importantly, do you have any idea how your customers really feel about you?

When she tells me about her “adventures in telemarketing,” all I can think about is the person she gets on the phone with for an hour about the new step stool she bought that’s missing a screw…and how that person better satisfy her…or else.

And even at 94, she sees herself as someone worth staying a customer for life with every company she deals with—and she becomes that with those who take the best care of her issues.

The fact is, I have been on the other end of those calls when working at Boardroom for the first 30+ years of my career…I’m still serving my clients and mastermind members in the same way today…and dealing with consumers like my Mom in my early days was the best marketing education I have ever gotten.

I talked about the “return on returns” in the past–and my Mom has inspired me to talk about this critical topic once again…that is, customer service and fulfillment are marketing functions and we should never lose sight of that.

Note that I affectionately called my Mom’s practice “telemarketing” rather than “complaining.”

In fact, I dedicated an entire chapter to this topic in my new book, Overdeliver.

It’s based on the premise that it may take a lifetime to win (and keep) a customer but you can lose that customer in a heartbeat (with one misstep).

How this played out for me in the past:

You all know the phrase, “No one lying on their death bed wishes they spent more time at the office”

And despite loving my work, I guess that’s true for me too.

Of course those of you who hate your job, and are at the office right now, are probably running for the door.

But being dedicated to your work, your craft, and the stuff that may not be so obvious to the success in all you do, might involve staying late at the office once in a while.

And until one evening in the 1980’s when I was at the office way too late, I didn’t realize that being there when no one else was there would lead to some insights that have stayed with me my entire career.

The best thing about being in the office at 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening (in the 1980’s) is that if the phone rings, you have to answer it.

I’m talking about the days when we didn’t even have a nighttime or automated attendant–and there was no caller ID either.

The phone would not stop ringing unless you picked it up…someone on the other end wanted something…and at that time in the evening, my experience was that what they wanted was “satisfaction” (which often included yelling at a real person).

My company, Boardroom Inc., had millions of customers (mostly subscribers to our newsletters and buyers of our books)…and at any one point in time, about a million of them were “active” with the company…currently subscribing to a newsletter–or they had bought a book fairly recently.

I didn’t know it the first time I did it but answering the phone after hours and speaking to dissatisfied customers is actually the best way for me to meet some of those millions…and it is also the best ”customer research” you can do in the trenches.

It may also be the most valuable thing you can do as a marketer.

I know that one phone call is not representative of the entire customer base…but if you do it enough times and get similar complaints, you then realize that you are smack in the middle of doing critical qualitative research (like a focus group, one-on-one).

Of course the next step might be to go deeper into those complaints you hear most often and then do some quantitative research (surveys, questionnaires etc.).

Regardless, all of the information you gather will help you with selling better up front…and retain better on the back end as well.

I said it above and will emphasize this again here:

Customer service and fulfillment of products and services are MARKETING functions.

No matter what the problem—from missing an issue of the newsletter to annoyance that their book had not arrived yet, or to their concern that their dog ate page 17 and 18 of the special bonus that contained the most important secret regarding treatment of their Type 2 diabetes…all complaints are relevant to how you deal with your customers now…and in the future. Nothing is too small.

Listening and interacting with your customers will give you insights beyond any spreadsheet or report on the makeup of your database.

You’ve probably heard about the CEO’s who get this concept…the ones who spend time every week (or maybe once a month) listening in on customer service calls to get a real sense what the end user is feeling and needing and also complaining about the most.

I also know some insightful entrepreneurs who hire “secret shoppers” (i.e. people on the payroll but outside the company to go through every aspect of their sales and marketing operation) to find out where there might be a broken link or a hole in the operation that no one would ever see without this kind of anonymous yet monitored buying.

One brilliant entrepreneur I know had his secret shopper answer one question–and one question only–at every step of the process as they experienced the organization’s sales funnel:

“How does that make me feel?”

His secret shopper bought everything, returned a lot of stuff, complained at every turn and basically made as much trouble as possible for customer service reps…and then the secret shopper reported on how they are dealt with at every step of the process.

And most importantly, how they felt.

It’s a great exercise for any organization.

Back to my late nights at the office:

When I picked up the phone it was usually an angry customer (or my wife asking me when I was coming home). We will focus on the former, not the latter.

I risked so much abuse, throughout my career, by intentionally staying late to answer the phone as the “last line of defense”…but it was always worth it for what I learned.

I’ve got the scars and the knowledge to show for it.

I learned the valuable lesson, first hand, that paying closer attention to the bad news you hate hearing (at least at the time) may be the key to making positive changes to your business.

When I picked up the phone and heard that angry customer, I was ready to play the game that every direct marketer must master:

“Give the customer more than they would ever expect”

Saving a cancellation was only a minor victory…and it was irrelevant financially since in most cases, I was “saving” a $39 order.

The ultimate goal: Make them a customer for life after they called to complain, cancel or curse (or all of the above).

Making that happen taught me valuable lessons about marketing that I could never read in any book.

I even came up with ideas for new products, bonuses and premiums as I loaded the complainers up with hundreds of dollars’ worth of products.

I also always learned stuff I didn’t know about our products and our customers during these interactions.

The ideal situation was always when the person on the other end began:

“I am very unhappy and I want to return the product.”

That’s when I knew I was just getting started…and it was time to get a return on the return.

So whether it’s you, your secret shopper or a friend who happens to be a customer and tells you the truth about how they feel about your company, the key is to put yourself in situations so you can hear information about your business “on the ground”—react to it—and to just keep saying YES until the customer is satisfied and you learn what holes need to be plugged.

And if your evening automated attendant doesn’t allow you to talk to real people…or if your home office number is never used by customers (i.e. all customer service is outsourced)…make it a practice to spend some time listening in to what your customers are telling the folks you have entrusted to be on your front lines.

All of this ties into one of the most important direct marketing rules of thumb.

It is always easier to keep a customer than to get a new one.

This is what links new customer acquisition to customer retention and/or renewals.

If you think everything is all just about great “front end marketing” (i.e. “getting the sale), think again.

To repeat for the third time: “Customer service and fulfillment of your product or service is a marketing function.”

The selling part is sexier but the retention part is how you stay in business for the long haul.

Gordon Grossman, the man who built The Reader’s Digest in the 1960’s and 1970’s, once told me:

“Marketers sell subscriptions; editors sell renewals”

While he was talking about magazine subscriptions here, the lesson is universal:

If you don’t truly “deliver” the product or service you sold in the initial promotion, you can re-sell until you are blue in the face and you won’t get the renewal (or repeat order).

Let’s now add in customer service and fulfillment to the equation:

Even if you deliver what you said you would deliver content-wise or product-wise, I still defy you to completely satisfy a customer who didn’t get the bonus you promised or to delight them after they received your amazing product 3 weeks later than you said you would deliver it.

It’s all connected.

Bringing new customers into the fold is often more a function of our ability to persuade than to actually deliver; keeping customers for life is always about coming through in the clutch on all of the persuasiveness you used to sell them in the first place.

Of course be ready to answer the phone when they call and need something more.

And if it’s my Mom, please tell her I will be calling her soon.

Warmly,

Brian

P.S. I just found out that my new book, Overdeliver, is in the warehouse in hard cover, ready for the April 9^th launch.

And I am putting the finishing touches on the resource page of free gifts for all buyers (which I hope will be ready for you to access in a few weeks).

The good news is that the book is consistent with my post today—after all, how could a book called Overdeliver not…well… over deliver?

Note: “Overdeliver” is not a word…I made it up…but it’s too critical a concept for marketers to make it two words…so hopefully Webster’s will make an adjustment once the book is out.

At least marketing dictionaries need to make it a word.

If you pre-order the book here, you will still be able to access the free resources when they are available.

There will be videos of and interviews with some of the greatest direct marketers who have ever lived, some no longer with us and many who still are…and there are keynote speeches, over 600 pages of swipe files, PDF’s of classic, out-of-print books…and much more.

And I hope you will leave a review on Amazon for the book once you read it…and of course you are encouraged to email me feedback anytime.

No phone calls please…unless you are dissatisfied, of course.

And in those instances, please call after 8:00 p.m. so I know it’s you.

The post Phone a friend…or maybe the CEO? appeared first on Brian Kurtz.