Adam Street's Blog
The spiritual and practical path to freedom to do your art

What Claude Hopkins has in common with Costco

I’ve been married for over 20 years and apparently I have date night all wrong.  

My wife needs to forget movies, concerts, and snazzy restaurants.  We’re going to Costco, baby!

Penn (of Penn and Teller) used to take dates to Costco.  https://www.costcoconnection.com/connection/201003?search_term=&pg=79#pg79

It could be the beauty of concrete flooring, those cuddly boxes, or perhaps the delicious free samples.  

People love free samples and sampling is a great marketing tool you should swipe and deploy from our good friends at Costco.

A lot of businesses don’t like to give away free samples though  Samples are a great way to find and hook customers.  Even if you’re offering a service.

I harp about not giving away your services too but there’s a difference.  On the surface it may appear the same.  Like bodies of water.  Most of them look great from a distance but when you get close you see all garbage, ick, and debris.  

Offering your services whilly-nilly hoping something can come of it and strategically offering a limited freebie as a marketing device is totally different.  You get different results too.

The company that runs Costco’s free samples said sampling boosted beer sales by 71 percent and frozen pizza by 600 percent.

In My Life in Advertising Claude Hopkins said, “the hardest struggle of my life has been to educate advertisers to the use of samples.  Or trials of some kind.”

And lemme tell ya, it’s a helluva lot easier to ‘close the sale’ too.  

Why?

Because you’re not asking someone to buy you’re asking them to try.

How easy is that?

One word of caution though.  Don’t think you still don’t need an irresistible offer.  In many cases it’s just as hard to get someone to take the free thing as it is the NOT free thing.  So don’t rest on your marketing laurels.

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Adam

The rarest thing in business and marketing

When I started marketing to the wedding niche I thought it was going to easy.  I didn’t need any cutting-edge ideas because my niche was spelled out for me. 

Um, people getting married…  Bam!  

I just had to find highly-interested and motivated prospects that I could email market to.

I subscribed to several marketer’s lists to learn how.  

I picked up tips here and there but I didn’t have any major epiphanies, other than.…  

How were these peeps boasting such big sales with email?  I could barely get anyone to call or email me back.

I stumbled on Eban Pagan’s work and he told me the term that changed my life.  He said he practiced direct response marketing.  Finally, I learned the term that I needed to research and study.

I was obsessed with figuring out how to send an email or mail a flyer to get people to buy.

I finally got the hang out it.  The good news is technology may change but direct response fundamentals don’t.  What Robert Collier and Claude Hopkins wrote about nearly 100 years ago are still applicable today.  

This morning I read a blog post from the great Ken McCarthy and he said something similar.  McCarthy was the marketer who created Internet marketing as we know it and his System Seminar from 20 years ago is world famous.    

He said his primary message is the same today as it was 20 years ago: “This is direct response advertising. Nothing more. Nothing less.”  

He added something else that you need to arm yourself with.  

“Original ideas”!   He called original ideas “the rarest of all things in business and marketing.”

So you can learn the the principles.  You can learn the fundamentals but if you don’t strive for good original ideas you may still struggle.  

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Adam

Don’t hype, fascinate

When I think of ‘hype’, for some reason Flavor Flav comes to mind.

Not the newer more slightly grown up ‘Flavor of Love’ Flavor Flav (if you’ve seen the old VH1 show).  I’m talking about the super obnoxious young Flav.  Like back when he rolled with the group Public Enemy.

When he never shut up like a neurotic chihuahua near a creaky screen door.  

So when you write email subject lines (or any headline), hype can hurt you.  Why?  Cause too many people don’t believe the hype.

Take email subject lines these…

How to make wrinkles miraculously disappear overnight!

Or

You won’t believe what my client did after his first session.

You will get people to click, that’s not the issue.  The issue is they’ll click once.  Maybe twice.  A few times if you’re lucky.  And before you know it, they… Can’t truss it.  

That’s why you should fascinate instead.  

The word “fascinate” comes from the Latin fascinare which means, “to bewitch or hold captive so others are powerless to resist.  

I’m not saying go all full-blown Harry Potter Imperius Curse on them.  

To fascinate you want to be less Flavor Flav and more Scarlett Johansson.  Make your copy tease a bit and be a little tantalizing.

Like this old classic headline:  “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

Doesn’t that just invite you in?  Don’t you just wanna read more?

Or this email subject line from Ben Settle:  “Marketers escaping the U.S. like it’s the Titanic”

If you’re a marketer (or need to hire one), you’re probably going to want to read more.

It’s interesting.  It makes you curious.

Better to consistently do THAT instead of…

DANGER! Why marketers  are escaping the U.S. like it’s the Titanic

To learn how to fascinate and tantalize your list with your emails (without sounding like the National Enquirer) join my free daily email tips at https://adamstreet.net .

Adam

Flip your freebie

Most of us love free stuff!

When you give your course or service away as a promotion that’s really nice.  I’ve done it before too, but it’s not always buzz-worthy.

It’s like free samples at Costco.  You know they’re there but you rarely talk about how awesome they are.  “Ooow look…chicken”.  

“Look there….chicken on a cracker.”

“OMG crackers!”

To add some Blockbuster or what Disney might call “show” to your promos, sometimes you just gotta flip your freebie.

Bill Veeck is a minor league baseball team owner and author of the book Fun Is Good said…

“To give one can of beer to a thousand people is not nearly as much fun as to give 1,000 cans of beer to one guy. You give a thousand people a can of beer and each of them will drink it…You give 1,000 cans to one guy, and there is always the outside possibility that 50,000 people will talk about it.” 

Think about that.  

Instead of saying you’re going to give “a scholarship” to one person to take your one course for free.  How about you give one person your next three courses for free?  Or free courses for life?  

Instead of a free strategy session how about a promotion where one person can win 12 months of free coaching?

Like baseball, marketing can be a fickle game.  You can do promos the way ‘everybody’ does it or you can give Veeck’s way a try.  A helluva lot more people will talk about it if you do it his way.

Try it.

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Adam

Scumdog [wanna-be] Millionaires

Over the years I’ve picked up a variety of skills.  One is the ability to spot a Scumdog [wanna-be] Millionaire.  I met one this week.  Scumdog [wanna-be] Millionaires are narcissistic and almost always men for some reason.  

Their playbook is to charm you with flattery and drone on and on about ALL the famous people they know and how big an opportunity it is to work with them.  And then they make you a ridiculous offer to work on their art project. 

I met a Scumdog [wanna-be] Millionaire this week.  Even though hype and b.s. was oozing from every pore in his body, I decided to do a test sketch for him.  He was in a hurry and I figured it was something I could knockout fast.

In the end, my drawing wasn’t a good fit.  He tried to give me edits but the smell of scope creep started kicking in like fresh cut onions.  I sent an email and bounced off the assignment.  

Like a true Scumdog [wanna-be] Millionaire he never responded.  No thank you.  No nice to meet you.  Nothing.  I even offered a referral (which I now regret).

So what’s to be learned from the Scumdog [wanna-be] Millionaire?  

Too many people say one thing and mean something else. Most aren’t as nefarious as Scumdog but you want evolve how you speak to your prospects.  For example…

When Scumdog [wanna-be] Millionaire said:  Adam you’re so talented and fast…

What he really meant was:  You can do this quickly so you won’t mind me trying to screw you over on price.

Before you may have said:  “My course isn’t expensive, it’s an investment.”

Now you may want to say: “Yes, my course is expensive. I did this to offer the best quality and value so my students get big results.”

Like a smart phone we constantly need to update ourselves.  If not you’ll be a Ford Edsel driving among newer, faster, and better cars.

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Adam