I received an email from a member of my online family in response to a P.S. two weeks ago about my interaction with the greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga.
You can read the full post here with the P.S.
Here is that email exchange:
Hey Brian,
Loved this Email and I think I like you even more now.
The way you showed your own character through a simple exchange with Gary Bencivenga, was just astonishing to me.
I was thinking about buying the Overdeliver book but had my doubts.
Why would he give away so much value?
Is his book so bad he needs to sell me through the bonuses?
Is he just giving me “leftover” products to sell his book?
Now that has changed.
I can’t believe someone with your kind of character and copywriting/marketing skills would even think of tricking people.
Your Overdeliver book just went to #1 of my ‘going to buy’ list.
P.S. 11 BONUSES?!? This goes beyond salting the oats, instead you are making me lick salt crystals that vaguely resemble oats!
Obviously I loved the way he sized me up and came around…but his conclusion not to buy the book immediately was a problem for me…so I needed to respond:
My response to him:
I’m glad I got you to like me. 🙂
I hadn’t thought through the idea that the incredible bonuses I “overdelivered” with my book could cheapen the book’s value…but it’s a conclusion you could make.
I plan to reprint your email in an upcoming blog post (I won’t mention your name) to talk extensively about the power of bonuses and “ethical bribes” …why they work so well…and the “counter argument” you expressed here.
“Over-bonusing” can hurt you too…I guess.
Thanks so much for your email…and giving me a wonderful idea to write about.
And of course I’m relieved that you saw that the bonuses at OverdeliverBook.com were not simply “leftover products to sell my book.”
In fact, they are tributes to my mentors…and much more.
Hopefully you went from “to buy” to “buy”…hey it’s only $20 after all and I make nothing on the sale. 🙂
Appreciatively,
Brian
His response to my response:
Hey Brian,
Thanks for the reply, this kinda made my day
Just bought the book, and yes, it was just 20€ … but…. that’s like 5 meals for me!
(I’m broke)
But I guess you just can’t go wrong with buying this kind of bang-for-your-buck deal.
No one can call me the “Director of Sales Prevention” ever again since I “sold” a $20 book (which I made nothing on) through this exchange…and I only had to write and send two emails, read and engage with two emails, which calculates my hourly pay for that “sale” just below minimum wage.
But at least I got an idea for this week’s post. 🙂
So…the question becomes…when can too many bonuses be overkill?
And not only that, can giving away too much not only cheapen your main product or service but also cheapen your reputation?
Growing up in the world of direct mail in the 1980’s and 1990’s, there was virtually no limit on the number of premiums or bonuses we could give away (as long as the promotion was the most profitable)…and in fact, the notion of selling the premiums while paying less attention to the core product became a way of life…almost a rule of thumb.
And here’s a shocker for those of you who never heard this about direct mail before:
Using bonuses and premiums is an idea that was not invented by an online marketer.
Believe it or not, bonuses and premiums have been part of the best direct response offers since the beginning of time.
In his “31 Rules of Thumb,” direct mail guru Dick Benson devoted two of those 31 to this concept alone (and remember he did his thing before the Internet):
12: “Dollar for dollar, premiums are better incentives than cash discounts”
17: “Two premiums are frequently better than one”
Digital/online delivery has made these rules even more powerful by making it easier to offer additional premiums and bonuses without adding to our costs.
As an old school marketer, giving away our best stuff digitally is so liberating.
I got a big dose of that liberation when I created the resource page for my book, Overdeliver.
It contains 11 (which is “one more than 10” for fans of the movie Spinal Tap) hard-to-find, exclusive bonuses just for buying my book through the site.
To the online family member above who thought I was hiding something by offering so much with my book (i.e. the book must be so bad that I needed to overcompensate by making the bonuses worth more than the book) …
…I say, how many books have as their premise as “overdelivery?”
I guess I could have titled the book “Overcompensate” but it doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I felt my reputation was on the line to overdeliver with the bonuses for fear I could be uncovered as a fraud.
Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, and I still got accused of being a fraud anyway (by at least one person). 🙁
Let’s talk about how Benson’s two rules of thumb on premiums (which can be defined for today’s purposes as “ethical bribes”) apply universally.
When you are sitting in a brainstorming meeting cooking up irresistible offers (regardless of the medium), you should never leave the room until you spend a considerable amount of time talking about what bonuses and premiums will be part of those offers.
That might sound obvious but let’s dive deeper using the two “Benson Rules of Thumb.”
Premiums are better incentives than cash discounts
When you are selling to an audience who you know and love (and who knows and loves you), you want to always treat them like family.
Giving them a discount is nice…but giving away more of what they love about you will always have a higher perceived value than cash…especially in a direct marketing environment.
That’s not to say that cash or early bird discounts or discounts on multiple orders are not effective inside of your best offers (and those should be tested rigorously); but offering more of the material they came to you for in the first place is where the offer becomes irresistible.
Let me add my own corollary to Benson’s rule here:
“If your audience is buying information (e.g. editorial content), premiums that are additional information (e.g. editorial content) are better than “hard premiums” (e.g. hard goods, gifts).
The core audience of the company I helped build, Boardroom Inc. (which published books and newsletters for affluent consumers), were “information junkies” of the highest order (which makes them mail order junkies and therefore, royalty).
Because of that, we always had our biggest successes offering additional content as premiums.
Our subscribers and book buyers couldn’t get enough of our stuff.
We often joked that we sold our content by the pound.
And when we tried to simply add in a calculator, a magnifying glass or the hottest new gadget that we could offer that cost us less than $10, those offers never did as well as when we just kept giving them more free content related to the topics they were most passionate about.
Irony: The stuff they wanted most (e.g. books, special reports, pamphlets, information) not only worked better in terms of creating higher response rates and profit, but those kinds of premiums were much cheaper to produce and fulfill than more expensive hard goods.
That’s even truer today when the content is digital and for the most part, free to fulfill, with no printing and postage necessary…with hard goods not having the same advantage.
One exception occurred with our Tax Hotline newsletter.
The control promotion for that publication offered a calculator as a free bonus with a subscription…but even there, the calculator by itself as a premium was never a winner.
The best package was always some version of the calculator along with a 200-page special report on new tax law (or some other additional special report or book).
Interestingly, when we removed only the calculator from the offer, we had better results than when we removed only the special report.
Having both was the best version but we wanted to know that each premium was pulling its weight.
We always did “single variable testing” to make sure we knew precisely which element(s) were lifting response and profit.
Conclusion: The editorial premium was much more important to the offer than the calculator to this audience. But we needed both for maximum profit and lifetime value.
And maybe even more important, if we just had the calculator, my guess is that the lifetime value of new subscribers coming in on an offer like that (i.e. without an editorial premiums) would be lower.
That is, we would run the risk of the offer looking more like only a “bribe” rather than a “bonus”; and we would also run the risk of attracting new subscribers who were only interested in the free calculator (” tire kickers”) rather than potential long term subscribers.
While the calculator was part of a winning offer, it was BOTH the calculator and special report that was the best offer.
Lesson: Understanding your audience and how you can be super generous and still create the highest lifetime value, with the highest upfront response on the initial offer, should be your goal as you construct offers with lots of bonuses and premiums.
Two premiums are frequently better than one
I’ll add on to Benson’s Rule of Thumb here too:
“Two premiums are better than one; four are better than two; 50 are better than four; 100 are better than 50”
You get the idea.
Benson stopped at “two” because he was a direct mail guy who always had printing and postage costs on his mind.
I think it’s safe to say that Benson would have also loved the lower cost of digital content. 🙂
Case history from Boardroom: We had an offer for an annual book called, The Bottom Line Yearbook…and our copywriter created a new package with two “special reports” (and yes, they had to be printed on paper and sent in the mail).
I know that makes you 100% digital folks break out in hives.
When that worked, we created four special reports under the copywriter’s direction.
When that became the new control, we created 50 special reports with each one being approximately 2 pages in length, on 50 specific topics we knew our readers were most interested in.
To keep our costs down, when we fulfilled this premium, we had the 50 premiums printed and bound into one 100+ page book.
The offer then revolved around the “50 special reports” much more than the yearbook itself; and every report title was listed and described in the promotion, creating many more entry points for potential readers and buyers.
Once that became a huge winner for us, and the fact that our copywriter was no dummy, the next test became 100 special reports as the premium (in a single bound book of 200+ pages).
Note that the presentation of the 50 or 100 special reports were fanned out inside the magalog promotion showing “bulk” (i.e., content by the pound) …with readable titles of each one.
Read more about the history of magalogs in last week’s post, “How online marketing was invented.”
If we could offer 100 bonus reports (printed on paper!) in a direct mail package and make it pay out (which we did), I encourage you to think bigger and bolder regarding your premiums and bonuses when you construct your offers.
Quantity can be your friend as long as there is relevance.
And “more for the sake of more” is not what I am talking about here.
Some version of that package was the control for years…and the printing and fulfillment didn’t cost a lot more compared to the cost when we had only two special reports.
It got even more economical when we created the online version of that promotion, and 100 special reports cost the same to fulfill as two.
That’s why I am so excited about this “digital content thing”—I believe it will eventually catch on. 🙂
This reminds me of a funny (but profound) quote from a public speaking coach, Joel Weldon (a member of the Speaker’s Hall of Fame), when I worked with him to prepare a speech.
My PowerPoint slides had way too much copy on them, and he encouraged me to take my 20 slides and turn them into around 50 slides with only one image or only a few words on each slide.
He said:
“Slides are free!”
Premiums and bonuses can be free too.
But free with increased value to your audience.
I could have titled this post “Ethical bribes” …even though I haven’t even hinted at anything that could be construed as “unethical” in the examples.
I love bribes that are used for good and not evil.
Creating premiums and bonuses for your family (i.e. your list) is always about giving them more of what they want, not just giving them “more free stuff” to get them to say “Yes” the first time.
And when it’s the “right stuff,” they will stay in your family a lot longer.
I also always found it fascinating that our best offers always emphasized the premiums and bonuses above the main product being sold.
In direct marketing, if you can make all the free stuff worth more than what folks would pay for just the core product, selling the core product becomes that much easier.
I wrote in my afterword to the new edition of the classic, Breakthrough Advertising, that human behavior has not changed since Gene Schwartz penned his classic book in 1966…and frankly, human behavior hasn’t changed since 1066…or even way before that.
Another simpler way to say this is to quote Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas), who was the lead character in the movie Wall Street.
Gekko famously said:
“Greed is good.”
In direct marketing, it is especially good when the existing and potential greed of your customers matches your ability to make them customers for life…with an offer that is ethical, robust and relevant (and full of awesome bonuses).
Overdelivery is a kissing cousin of greed…when they are both done elegantly.
Warmly,
Brian
P.S. If for some reason you don’t have my book, Overdeliver, I encourage you to at least check out the page for it here to see how I executed an offer that over delivers based on my successes…rather than overcompensates based on my failings.
Sigh. 🙁
And if you actually buy a copy, know that I make nothing (i.e., cash) on the sale…but I will receive something much more satisfying… that you understood what I was talking about in the post above.
With hopefully no damage to my reputation either. 🙂