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Most marketing articles fall into one of two categories: Pure process "How-to," and concept pieces that talk about principles and approaches. They rarely cover the most important (and neglected) process in doing business, whether online or off: This series will be more than a little different. It's going to be a story. I don't know the ending just yet, because it's not finished. It's about a marketing campaign that's still going on. I'll tell you how it got started, how it's progressing, and what the good (and not so good) lessons are to be taken from it. I'll give you specific details that you never see told about a campaign that's still running. I'm talking about Mark Joyner's "Farewell Package," of course. I have to admit, I expect a happy ending. The offer turned $600,000 in sales in the first three weeks. We'll start by telling you how we did that. The articles will tell the story. The "cheat sheets," which will be linked at the end of each segment, will outline the lessons. To get the most from this, I recommend thinking about what each section shows about setting up a deal (or making it work) before you go to the "cheat sheet." Make notes. You might be surprised at the stuff you come up with that I didn't. ;) Being able to tell the story is kind of refreshing. Normally, I don't get to talk about my clients' business. For the most part, I write sales copy for high-end marketing types. (What most folks call "gurus.") The products are almost exclusively information products and seminars, with price tags normally in the 4-5 figure range. Most of these folks don't want it advertised that they don't write their own sales letters. There's nothing unusual about that, by the way. After all, it's their story, their offer, and their good name on the line, so the responsibility really is theirs. A good copywriter just explains the offer in a way that helps people to understand why it's in their best interest to buy the product. And makes it clear when it's NOT in their best interest. Think of it as being a story editor, with good motivational skills. There are a number of reasons Mark let me tell this tale. They'll become clear as we go along, so I won't bore you with them now. (I'll bore you with them later, of course. ;) I think you'll find it educational. And maybe, just maybe, even a little entertaining. On with the story. Once upon a time, there a fellow named Mark Joyner, who decided to get out of the Internet Marketing business. He had done well, but wanted to move on to other things. On the way out, Mark put together a package of his best stuff... ebooks, tips and techniques, and the source code for his most useful systems and products, and was going to sell it to a limited group. Makes sense. You don't build those kinds of tools and leave them on the shelf when you retire, eh? You can get the info on the package here. (That link will open a new window, so you can just close it when you're done to come back to this article.) Cool stuff, to say the least. How I got involved was an interesting thing. Serendipity is the right word, I think. I got an email from Virginia Duan, from Mark's office, asking me if I'd be interested in taking a look at the product and consider mentioning it to my subscribers. Worth checking into, at least. I called her up, we talked, and she emailed me the list of products. I got about a third of the way through the list and had my credit card out to order. Then she told me that, if I was willing to do one of the interviews, I could get a copy free. Surprisingly, Ms. Duan didn't have a real hard sale on her hands. ;) I mean, really... would YOU take tens of thousands of dollars worth of software to pick Mark Joyner's brain for an hour? I thought so. "Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Clause." At that point, I mentioned one potential problem that I thought might put a crimp in the sales. My concern was that selling rights to the products to 2000 people would be tough. The potential for market saturation and concern about that problem would be high in many people's minds. I, of course, had some suggestions about that. (I've got a million of them.) Virginia asked if I wanted her to have Mark call me to discuss it. I said yeah, and went back to work. Clickety-clackity-click. Type type. Edit. Type. Something to note here: Virginia had mentioned in the initial email that only about 20 people had received the invitation, and that Mark had chosen them personally. I know. Everyone says that. I didn't worry about it. When I saw the list of people Mark wanted to interview him and introduce the offer, I knew she wasn't kidding. It was NOT the usual "Internet Marketing 'A' list." Most of them were people I knew Mark had personal ties with. One is a marketing genius with a list of less than 1000 people. Another he had known for less than a month, but had impressed Mark with his knowledge and ambition. There were a lot of bigger "Names" that could have been on the list. It definitely wasn't picked for selling power. There were other factors involved. Mostly, history. Mark called later that evening. We talked about the package, and I realised from his explanation that saturation wasn't an issue with most of the offer, because of the way the license was structured. Yes, with the ebooks it might be, but only if you focused your sales efforts in the tiny little market of people who sell information to marketers on how to sell information to marketers. Those people wouldn't "get" the value of the product anyway. We swapped ideas and just chit-chatted about the offer and life in general for over 4 hours. (Neither of us are famous for short phone calls...) As he was getting ready to get off the phone, Mark said "Man, you know, I am just too close to this. I'm seeing all sorts of stuff I missed. Would you be interested in doing the sales letter for this, on a performance basis?" I said "Talk to me." He gave me some numbers, and I said: "Done." He laughed, and said "Cool. We need to have this done by next Friday. Can you work with that?" I said yeah, and we hung up. Neither of us got on the phone expecting that outcome. Neither of us lobbied for it. We just talked, and it happened. The next morning, Mark sent me an email re-covering the points of what he offered and what he expected, and we agreed on the same terms we had discussed on the phone. Changes weren't necessary because we both knew what we were doing when we made the deal. This conversation happened on a Wednesday evening. Thursday, Mark said that he'd like to move the start date up to Tuesday, because his lists traditionally responded better to deals mailed on a Tuesday. That one I had to think about. I normally take at least a week to do a proper sales letter for a $1000 product. The process I use almost requires it. To top that off, it's a totally different type of offer than any I'd done copy for previously. I thought for a while, looking for an approach that would make the fact that the offer was different make the process easier, rather than harder. Once I had that, I agreed. About that time, it hit me how funny this whole deal was. I could just see the testimonial now... "I decided to go out of business, so I had Laughed myself silly over that. ;) Mark had already done most of the legwork in setting up the deal. The most important part, as always, was the offer. Clearly, no product with a $1000 price tag was going to be right for every business. Or even most of them. Most online businesses are run on a shoestring, by people with some practical business experience but little technical skill. For most, it's very little technical skill, and less desire to learn any. Since this offer involved a need for getting programmers involved after the purchase, it had a limiting factor that cut out most of the people who would be interested. So, he beefed up the software side of the offer to the point that those people who would actually be able to use the package would be almost silly not to take it. Then he added other material to the package to widen its appeal and increase its value. This helped to partly alleviate the market limitations that existed based on the original offer. He added the interviews to give even more value, and to help people to see some of the less obvious ways that they could use what they'd purchased to get more out of the package. Finally, he designed the license for the software to protect the buyers against the saturation problem, and to ensure that their investment would retain its value. This part was all done before the sales copy was even started. The hardest part of any building process is digging the hole you want to get out of. That's where you're going to put the foundation. Next, he contacted the folks he wanted to have introduce the package. He offered them a solid commission (50%), and a free licensed copy of the package if they'd agree to interview him. There are a number of interesting points to this. The most obvious is that they'd get $500 for every sale they made. Not many affiliate products pay that kind of commission. It got attention. Then there's the opportunity to grill a guy for an hour or two who's sold millions of dollars worth of stuff online, and built some of the largest lists and most heavily trafficked sites on the net. That's pretty appealing too. A more subtle one is the fact that you'd be seen as one of a very limited group to receive that kind of invitation. Perhaps the least obvious to many is the fact that your name and contact information would be exposed to 2000 people who were willing to spend $1000 on a product. Mark only mentioned the first two in his invitation. I can assure you that none of the people who received it missed the last three benefits. It was a no-brainer. The weekend was pretty hectic. I wrote copy while Mark did the interviews. We fit time in between to go over the various parts of the offer to make sure I understood them completely. Trying to make the schedules work was... interesting. The only real advantage was that I'm very much a night person and Mark is in California, where it's three hours earlier than it is in Erie, PA. (Yes, I live in Erie. Don't hate me because I'm glamorous. ;) Suffice to say, getting the information I needed was a challenge. But, we did it. We clarified the precise aspects of the package that would be of interest to each part of the potential market, and made sure that the license was clear and solidly protected both the buyers and Aesop. I took 15 pages of notes, all "joggers." (Joggers are one or two line comments intended to help you remember longer concepts. I had a small book on my hands...) On Saturday, Mark continued to do interviews and I got serious about the copy. It was clear that doing a full benefit list for each piece of software in a package this size wasn't going to be an option. So, I took a different approach. The most important fact of the offer as far as the software was concerned was that the source code could not be sold to others. From one perspective, that seems like a limitation. The reality is that that "limitation" was there to protect the people who bought the package. It ensured that they would not be facing hundreds of people all selling the software for pennies as part of a membership site. Interestingly, the only people who had any problems at all understanding that were people who wanted to be able to sell the software for pennies as part of a membership site... Funny how that works. There were some "discussions" about that. A few people asked (very professional approach), one offered to make copies of the whole package for "JV partners" found via eBay (!!!), and some simply advertised deals that would clearly violate the license. Not to mention several laws... Proof that the concern about protecting the customer was well founded. Did these people not think that doing something like this with a high visibility offer would be noticed? Hassles like this are part of the deal with any package of intellectual property. The higher the price, the more serious the hassles are. There seems to be a rule of human behavior that says "The more a person thinks they'll benefit from misunderstanding a thing, the more likely they are to misunderstand it." In short: Comprehension is a function of convenience. The central theme of the offer answered the "no selling the code" limitation, by turning it into a powerful advantage for the right people. The theme was simple. It was never precisely stated in the letter, but it boils down to: When you buy most software, you're very limited in what you can do with it. It's built with one function set and, even if it's written in Perl, you're often not allowed to modify it. If it's compiled code, modifying it is normally forbidden. Source code is an entirely different matter. Most people don't understand that, since they have little experience with programming. So, the trick was to commmunicate that difference to people who generally didn't think in those terms. That was done by showing the original use of the product, in language that was easily understood, and then showing alternative ways that a person could use it, tweak it, and make it fit their own business. Or create a whole new product (or business) from it. I'd wager there are thousands of new products, services and techniques that will be developed out of the information and source code in the package. Most of them could be used in multiple niche markets without the slightest conflict. I only needed to show a few examples for each piece of sofware, to get people thinking. After that, I was sure the visitors would come up with as many viable alternatives as they needed to make it worth their while. That technique opens very wide windows - as wide as their own imaginations - for a person to look at the opportunity through. It caught Mark a little off guard. Let's just say it's an unusual way to sell a product. ;) After a few rounds of minor edits to the letter, Mark got the order form ready, and gave his partners the go-ahead to start promoting the offer. That step took up the first week of the promotion. The results were... interesting. Some folks with relatively small lists (10-40,000) sold 20-40 copies of the product each. Others, with lists in the hundreds of thousands, sold fewer copies. Mark himself sold about 90 copies, without going to all of his lists (or even all of the people on the lists he went to.) It's not surprising that Mark sold well to his own subscribers. They know him better than anyone but his customers, right? Remember that in your marketing efforts. The folks who know you best are your best prospects. We looked at who had done well, relative to the size of their subscriber lists, and noticed some patterns. They weren't surprising in terms of what they revealed, but they were very surprising in just how extreme the differences were. It is typically true that the larger the list, the lower the response rate. This is because of the techniques used to build large lists, and the difficulty in staying focused and personal when dealing with huge groups of subscribers. Several very large lists produced very small numbers of sales, relatively speaking. (Again, I'm talking about lists with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.) A more moderate sized list, of around 100,000 subscribers, produced about 35 orders. A very reasonable return for the work. Another publisher had a problem with his list server that week and only about 20,000 of his subscribers got the email he sent... but those 20,000 also resulted in 35 orders. The difference? The very large lists were built using co-registration services. The subscribers had little connection with the list owners. They did bring in sales that more than justified the efforts, to be sure. They just didn't approach the results of the other lists. The 100,000 subscriber group was more focused. They had a specific topic of interest, they regularly got useful information from the publisher and his associates, and they came in large part from his own promotions. The smaller group was comprised mostly of people who had joined because of the publisher's own information, and were more familiar with him personally than the others. There were other surprises, too. For example, one person who has an incredible connection with his 10,000+ subscribers got surprisingly LOW sales. He still did very well for the time involved, but his results just didn't make sense, given the rapport he has with his group. Another fellow, with no list at all, sold as many copies just by mentioning it to his associates. He made about $1000 an hour for that work... All told, this phase resulted in about $300,000 in sales. Not bad for the first week. Note that the number of sales in this example is far lower than in most, because of the price of the product and the requirements needed to use it. This same model would have produced many times the number of sales for a lower priced product. I doubt a lower priced product would have produced $300,000 in sales in the first week, though. Something to think about when you're designing a product, eh? This step took a week because part of the deal was that the original promoters of the package would have ample time to promote it themselves before the offer was opened to anyone else. Ya dance with the folks what brung ya. You can get the "Cheat Sheet" here. Paul Next issue, (in a few days) we'll take a look at week two. If you're not already subscribed to TalkBiz News, and would like to subscribe (and be notified when the next installments of story are released), put your email address in the box below, and click the button marked "The Rest of the Story!" Note: If you're already subscribed to TalkBiz News, you'll be notified when the new segments are ready.
In the meantime, if you haven't checked out Mark's "Farewell Package," click here to get the details. This will make a lot more sense if you've seen the package. |