Tux, Tails, and Top Hat or Coveralls and Work Boots?
Businesspeople like fancy advertising. They like to dress up their advertising and marketing, in professional or elegant attire, and they are easily persuaded to do so by purveyors of fancy. Business owners love hearing praise for the cleverness, cuteness, or comedy of their marketing. Their egos are not concerned with results, but with feeling good and proud. As direct marketers, we prefer work clothes. We’re not dressing up our marketing for approval by snobs at the fancy dress ball. We’re getting it dressed and ready to do a job.
It Will Look Like Mail-Order Advertising
In the last chapter, copy. Next, appearance. Fortunately for you, direct marketing revolves around only a short list of Rules that I’m presenting here, and Direct-Response Advertising revolves around an even shorter choice list of formats. It is to look a certain way.
This is going to shock many of you to your core. It can, if you let it, simplify your life and make you a great deal of money. This Rule is a great simplifier, because it ends your paying attention to—and trying to emulate—the overwhelming majority of all the advertising you see on TV, in magazines, in newspapers, online; by your peers and competitors. You are to go blind to anything except pure mail-order advertising, which I’ll tell you how to identify, and where to find, to observe, in a minute. But first this is very important: all advertising except mail-order advertising will, from here on out, be willfully ignored. You will resist any temptation whatsoever to borrow from any of it, copycat any of it, worry about differences between it and your approach. You will, in fact, live in utter defiance of its norms.
I am specifically speaking of the formats, layout, and appearance of advertising—whether a print ad or a website or any other item. Classic mail-order ads are typically broken up into one quarter, one half, and one quarter of the page, give or take. The top quarter is for headline and subheads; the middle half for presentation of product or proposition, sometimes aided by testimonials; the bottom quarter for the offer and clear response instructions, often with a coupon. The most frequently used alternative is the advertorial, which mimics an article. If you will stick with these two formats, you can safely ignore all others. Online, the homepage of a website mimics the classic ad: there is a headline and subheads at the top, some product or proposition info in the middle, and a click to order, or a form or email box to fill in, at the bottom. This may be assisted with video. It may not be polluted with top, side, or bottom panels offering a myriad of click options taking visitors hither and thon and putting them in control of an experience full of variables. It will be the start of a single, focused sales presentation leading to a decision, response, or purchase instructions, and an action—just like a print ad.
The other reliable format is that of a letter, from you to the reader, at whatever length is needed to do the job. I have clients mailing 4, 8, 16, 24, and, in one case, 64-page sales letters. One of these, the 16-page one, literally tacked up online as a website, having traffic driven to it, has produced over $1 million a year for nine years running.
To see real mail-order advertising, you need to assemble a diverse assortment of magazines in which many highly successful mail-order companies consistently run full-page advertisements. These include Reader’s Digest Large Print Edition, Farm Bureau journals, tabloids like National Enquirer and Star, and business publications like Investors Business Daily, Entrepreneur, and Small Business Opportunities. Almost all special interest magazines for model railroad hobbyists, gun enthusiasts, horse lovers, etc., have fractional and full-page mail-order ads. The response mechanism won’t, in most cases, be mailing in a coupon, but instead calling an 800 number or going to a website; otherwise the ad might have run in 1950 and will probably be doing fine in 2030. You will also encounter advertorials in the same publications. Tear out and keep these ads; discard all others. Let these true mail-order ads be your only models. If you will respond to some, your mailbox will soon be full of direct mail also following classic formats and architecture.
I also want you to seek out—Google, Amazon, etc.—the following legendary mail-order men: Joe Sugarman, Gerardo Joffee, E. Joseph Cossman. Get their books. Study their ads. These men know how to format a mail-order ad.
As you come to recognize the main mail-order ad formats (and everything else that isn’t), you should build what direct-marketing pros call “swipe files” for yourself, filled with sample ads torn from different magazines and newspapers, downloaded from the web, retained from mailings—only the mail-order style ads. When you go to create something for yourself, you can review these samples for inspiration, ideas, and to keep you inside the box of mail-order ad appearance.
Resource Alert!
If you get very serious about this, a chronologically organized collection of my best and favorite ads, direct mail, and other marketing for my own businesses and clients is available, featuring samples exactly as used, The Dan Kennedy Lifetime of Work Archives Collection, Volumes 1 and 2 at GKIC.com/store. Or call 800-871-0147. Also recommended, available at Amazon, Million Dollar Mailings by Denny Hatch and How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab. Also Hall of Fame: Great Selling Ideas: 50 Super-Successful Direct-Mail Letters and Direct-Response Ads from American Writers & Artists, at www.awai.com.
Understand, what I am telling you to do is “strange.” On its surface, it is akin to telling you to put your automobile in storage and drive a boat to and from work on city streets. Others who see you using mail-order ad formats for your business will think you’re as batty as if you were driving a boat down the highway. That’s OK. There’s method to the madness . . .
First, only mail-order ads actually persuade people to buy things and to do so immediately and directly. Presuming you would like to sell things with your ads, I suggest it’s not really strange at all to emulate only the ads that sell, rather than emulating all kinds of ads that do not sell. Other ad formats and styles may brand-build, please the eye aesthetically, be praised as creative, win critical acclaim and awards, affect market share over time, immeasurably and uncertainly influence, plant thoughts that later influence purchasing. But only mail-order ads sell and sell now.
Think about it this way: if you wanted to succeed as a salesperson in a given field, and there were disdained but highly successful and prosperous group of salespeople, and there was a much larger, more peer popular, more commonly seen group of salespeople suffering from elongated sales cycles, poor conversion rates, barely eking out a living while hoping to build up goodwill that will pay off someday—which ones would you want to be permitted to shadow for a few weeks then emulate? Mail-order advertisers, offline and online, are the first group. Most of the advertising you see is from the second. Beware. Be wary. Be smart!
Second, sticking with mail-order ad formats prohibits a lot of mistakes. I was at a writers’ conference recently and listened to a much published novelist talk about kicking out new books in three different series every six months, as she explained that she put her characters only in places she knew well, confined herself to plots she used repetitively, and basically operated within a small box. Someone asked her what would happen if she let herself out of her box? She said: many, many, many bad things. The same is true for the business owner or entrepreneur who is somewhat the amateur at direct marketing and direct-response advertising. If you let yourself roam outside a small box, you are vulnerable to being led astray in a dozen different directions, to winding up with “cool” and creative websites and ads that don’t sell. You have three boxes: the classic, pictorial mail-order ad; the advertorial; and the letter. Stay inside those three boxes.
As encouragement, let me show you a very simple and straightforward example of mail-order style advertising for an ordinary, local business: landscaping. If you made a point of finding all the Yellow Pages, newspaper, magazine, direct-mail, Val-Pak, and online advertising from the landscapers in your area, it’s unlikely any would look like the one in Figure 7.2 on page 80. Instead, they’d be full of photos, illustrations, the company names, logos, and lists of services, and would look like a professionally prepared ad, like all other ads—a guy in a black tuxedo amid a lot of other guys in black tuxedos at a wedding reception or charity ball. A bunch of penguins. This ad is the lone guy who wandered in, in plaid flannel shirt, denim coveralls, and work boots. Can’t miss him.
Now here’s the story behind this ad (see Figure 7.1 on page 79, reprinted from my MILLION DOLLAR MARKETING LESSON that appears monthly in The No B.S. Marketing Letter.)
FIGURE 7.1
FIGURE 7.2
