How To Make Your Advertising Outrageous
1 Nov 2024 · 46 min
Bill Glazer walks through 14 outrageous direct-mail tactics that cut through 3,700 daily marketing messages. A prepaid cell-phone mailer hit 1,412% ROI. A dental postcard generated $67,450 in sales. The five rules: make it get opened, use lumpy mail, inject personality, make response easy, and offer a choice of gifts.
Chapters
Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to jump in and listen to Bill Glazer. Now, how often have you thought about, I need to do a marketing campaign, you need to do something, but it needs to stand out and there needs to be something that makes this advertising a little different, a little more disruptive, maybe a little more outrageous. Today's episode, we get to listen as Bill Glazer gives us not just 5, not just 10, but 14 different examples of outrageous Marketing that is outrageously effective. You get 14 examples. This is not strategy. This isn't fluff. These are ideas that have worked and can work for you as you implement them into your business, or will at least get all of the gears working so that way you can start thinking of all the ways that you can start advertising that'll make a big impact. Also, Bill Glazer is going to be ending this episode talking specifically about the big lessons learned from all the examples and the strategy. What are the different things that you can take away no matter what type of business you're in? If none of these 14 examples work for you, these big lessons absolutely will. Let's jump in.
I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.
They're not really lessons.
They're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.
The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.
Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Okay, outrageous advertising that's outrageously successful. The first thing I want to talk about is this whole notion of why outrageous works. And I had a bunch of folks that have stopped me on the aisles here saying to me that they started out with this whole notion of we take an approach of our business is very upscale and therefore this whole thing doesn't— isn't consistent with our upscale thinking. And worse yet is they said to me that I understand it, but nobody back at my business understands it, so I can't even get them to buy into the thing. Well, let's attack both of those issues, which is the upscale image of the company and how you want to portray it, and then also sort of the getting them to understand and buy into it. So that gets to this whole notion of why outrageous works, and it kind of works for 4 reasons that I've identified, and a lot of them are linked together. The first one is, is that everybody is bored. They really are basically bored, which kind of like falls very close in hand to this everyone's overwhelmed. The last time they looked, Everybody is getting 3,700 marketing and advertising messages in front of their eyes or through their ears every week, 3,700 every week. Oh, did I say every week? Every day. 3,700 advertising marketing messages you're seeing or hearing every day and most of them you don't even realize you're seeing or hearing But just when you take your lunch break, when you walk through the hotel, just consciously look at all the different things that you're seeing and hearing and you don't even realize it. Get on the elevator here at the hotel. There's advertising in the elevator. Go to your gas station and as you're pumping gas, you're seeing advertising. Everywhere you're at, it's there. They're looking for all, every place that's possible to grab your attention. I'm gonna show you one today that's just outright Insane. So, so everybody is overwhelmed, and because they're overwhelmed, they're pretty much bored with it because it all looks pretty much the same. And the other thing that we know is the reason why it works is because people are people and buyers are buyers. The— this, I actually am going to turn back one, gentlemen. I'm going to use this just for a second. The most successful direct mail piece that I ever did for my menswear store was the 5-page handwritten sales letter on yellow legal pad. And if we can have— yep, it went out. Sometimes when times are tough, you gotta do some pretty drastic things, and I went on and on and on with this 5-page handwritten sales letter, and I sold and I sold, and I did some takeaway selling, and I said the prices aren't good enough for them, and all this other stuff, and then what I did is I finally ended it up with 4 shameless bribe coupons. Now, you can't get more ugly and outrageous than this. Who responded to this? Presidents of banks came in, presidents of Fortune 1000 companies came in, doctors came into the store, accountants came into the store. I'm embarrassed and ashamed to tell you lawyers came into the store. This is, this is who, this is the people that they're trying to attract with people with image advertising. These are the people that responded to this and they came in saying that, gee, we get so much mail at home and my wife is my filter, she throws out all the junk mail, but she had to save this because she thought it was important that you were writing me a letter. So they came in, where's Bill Glazer? You know? That's who were coming in the store. So people are people and buyers are buyers. I don't care what it is. And then the last piece is this: just like you, just like me, people like to be amused. We like to be amused. We're going through life being bored all the time. We're looking for something to keep us amused. I tell my staff all the time, if I wasn't sarcastic, I'd be dead because everything else I gotta worry about. So you gotta be sort of amused. Okay, so that's why it works. I'm going to show you today 14 new, never before revealed, for the most part. Well, I'm showing you 14 new ones and then I'm going to show you a couple that I have shown before, but it's over and above the 14. Okay, so you're going to get 14 new ones, never before revealed, but then afterwards, tie into this I'm gonna show you the big lessons that they demonstrate, 'cause the big lessons are the important part. It's just not sending out outrageous advertising. That's a mistake. You gotta send out outrageous advertising that's outrageously effective, because just like boring brand-building advertising that can be ineffective, outrageous advertising can be ineffective as well. So you gotta marry together emotional direct response marketing principles with outrageous advertising. So let's get ready for the 14. First of all, the first one I want to show you is getting them to call, and this one was sent in to me by a member, Leo Quinn, who I think is here. Is Leo here? Is Leo— if you're here, stand up. There you are, Leo Quinn, you're there, right? We had a contest, Leo, And the winners of the contest get a $1,000 certificate to the web store, so when we're done, come up and get yours. You won this contest. So— So here's what Leo sent me. First of all, it's a step in his campaign. It's not your first step. I think it's your third step in your campaign. And the first thing he did is he sent this thing out in a FedEx box. Now what happens when you get a FedEx box at your home or your company? You, no, not even open it. I don't care who gets it, they're gonna give it to you. So if the FedEx is coming to you, and when a Fed, I'm telling you a secret that I shouldn't tell you, but when we, I mean you can imagine I get a pile of crap every day like this, but the FedExes, Sherry puts them in front of me, okay? So the FedExes get to the decision maker And they get opened immediately. When Jerry puts the FedEx in front of me, I'm in a meeting and I said, "Who the hell is sending me this? I've got to open it up and look at what's inside." So not only does it get to the decision maker, it gets opened right away. But now what did Leo want to do? He wanted to talk to these folks. He wanted them to call him up. So what did he do? What does everybody else do? Is they give you their phone number to call them, right? Leo didn't do that. Leo sent out a marketing piece with a phone on it. This thing has got a little cell phone attached right to it. It's pre-programmed with Leo's phone number. All you gotta do is push send and you're talking to Leo. You might be interested a little bit about results. Phone is available, by the way, at Walmart. It comes with 20 minutes included. I think it's about— it's not expensive, I think— I forgot what you told me, about $20? Is that about right? But here's the deal, return on investment was 1,412%. Leo Quinn sending out a cell phone. Okay, number 2, personality marketing, and this is coming from Gold Luxury member Susan Greif, who I don't believe she's here, But she sent this in, and Susan owns a place called the Body Wise Massage and Day Spa. And she— this is her letter that she sent out for her day spa, and she sent it out right after Christmas, and she sent it out at the worst time of the year where people were thinking about going to a day spa because they're tapped out after Christmas. So she did that, and inside the letter she sent a letter from her daughter. This is a combination of what she learned from me in my handwritten sales letter and what she learned from Buffy DuPont in the letter from her daughter. Let me read you just a little bit of it, not much. Actually, it's not easy to read because it's in her daughter's handwriting. Dear Santa, thank you for giving me everything that I wanted for Christmas. I really liked the Barbies that I got and the gymnastic classes too. I got everything that I asked for and that made me so happy. But Santa, I worry that there are some people out there that didn't get what they wanted and that makes me so sad. So do you know what I asked my mommy? I asked my mommy to make everyone else happy to since she said her job was done for the year. So here's what she said she would like to do: give everyone else the chance to get what they didn't get for Christmas. She said they could buy one treatment and get the second treatment for 5 cents. So she did the buy one, get one for 5 cents sale. The rest of the letter is brilliant. I don't have time to read it all to you, but here's what happened. After she sends out— mailed it to 500 customers of hers. She sent it out after she sent out a mailing for Thanksgiving, after she sent out a mailing for Christmas. She generated an additional $3,000 in one-day sale by sending this out, by doing buy one get one for a nickel. So I have a question for you. Any of you here— how many of you here has children? Send out letters from your kids. It gets results every time. So that was Susan's piece. Oh, by the way, I wanted to show you this. So this is going back to, like, how you're going to see more than the 14. This is one of the pieces that I did for my own menswear store on the buy one, get one for a nickel sale, and what I did, just to give you an additional idea on it, I actually attached the nickel— well, I shouldn't say I actually attached it. City Blue, who's one of the vendors that's here, attached the nickel to the piece, so it became lumpy mail now. Virgil, who's with Handy Mailing, one of the vendors here, he personalized it with the person's name, so you see this, and we used a big window envelope so we actually showed the nickels. By the way, one of the things— this is a funny stamp story, funny story. One of the things we offer to people who invest in my BGS marketing system is we let them call this 800 number up and you can, like, ask us questions about vendors and where to get stuff. You really want to hear one of the questions we got? How much are the nickels? Some people you're better off just not selling, you know? We told them they come in rolls of $2. Okay, number 3, getting noticed. This comes from Platinum member Ron LeGrand. Most of you probably— who's here heard of Ron LeGrand? Yeah, he's got a big head already. Okay, so this comes from Platinum member Ron Legrand. So Ron Legrand owns a bunch of companies, and one of the companies he owns is a company called Financial Freedom Network. So this is what he did in order to get people to join the Financial Freedom Network. He sends out a frisbee from Make Money Buying Selling Houses, and he's got this sending out a frisbee to them, and on the other side of the frisbee is the mailing panel So he's got the address that's on there, that's where he puts a stamp, you're invited. Tossing this aside is the dumbest thing you can do. And then this panel opens up in the Frisbee, okay, opens up right here. I believe you can get these from Impact Products, which is impactproducts.net, and inside this Frisbee he has here a sales letter, handwritten sales letter. Well, you know, listen, Why not borrow it? And on there it says $86,870 without a gun and in 149 days, 3 hours. Dear Florence, Ron LeGrand asked me to send you a copy of this letter he just got from one of his real estate students and to do whatever it took to make sure you absolutely got the letter because he knew you didn't want to, you'd want to read it. The only way I could figure out to do this was to send it to you in a Frisbee knowing that you wouldn't just toss it out, probably made the mailman smile too. So he tied in the Frisbee to this. Inside this letter, 2-page letter, he also put in the actual testimonial letter that he got from the person who told me made the $86,870. And the other thing he included, what do you think is the other thing he included? Shout it out. What? What? He opened an order form. He let people buy out of the goodness of his heart. So he threw that in there as well. Frisbee mailing, making people, making sure people open this stuff up. Number 4, this one I like. He's here, Tom Carfrae. Tom, where are you? Tom, stand up for a second. Tom, you get one of these certificates also. For some reason we didn't bring yours, but we'll make sure we get it to you. Make sure we do get it to you. Tom, he's in the restaurant— well, he started out being in the restaurant business, actually. I talked to him the other day, met him for the first time, and now he's really kind of like in the marketing business because he's like swallowed the pill, you know? But so he started out in the restaurant business, And he wrote to me and he kind of said to me, if I understood his letter correctly, it's like he didn't like, didn't understand this whole thing about building a list and he didn't have a list to market to. Now he's got this down pat, by the way, but he started out this way. So he figured out how, what's he going to do to use all this great marketing stuff that he's learned from us. So what he did is he figured out, I'm going to read, one thing I got is I got a menu, so I'm going to redesign my menu. So in the front of the menu, here's the front of his menu. Now, there's an important lesson to learn here. When you are looking at this and deciding who is gonna win the prize, and there's two guys in front of the menu who look like they belong in The Sopranos, they're gonna win every time, 'cause I was afraid to not choose Tom, okay? So he's got these two guys, and actually he was much bigger in the picture. Now that I see him, I'm not so intimidated. But anyway, So on the front of this, he's got testimonials that are on there, and then when you go— he's talking about the ultimate pizza offer. See page 4, upper right-hand corner. See that? Smart marketing. Moving people to the place in the marketing piece where you want them to go to. Then he goes to page 2. What does he do on page 2 in addition to his offer on here of the food he carries? Upper left-hand corner, the ultimate guarantee. If we screw up, if we somehow screwed up and can't make it right with you, we will refund your money, every penny, Tom and Nick. Now, who else out there is offering a money-back guarantee on pizza? Pretty much nobody. What do you— 2 people are. That's what I said, 2 people are offering a money-back guarantee on pizza. And actually you do scare me more than him now, okay? But the point of it is, is this is everybody will guarantee their pizza, what do you got to lose? But who else is guaranteeing it? So he's using something that nobody else is doing and making him special, but we don't stop there. Then we go to page 3. We go to page 3 and we do something that we teach and very few people do. He tells his story, the Tommaso story, and it's a great story and everybody's got a great story. Even you, Diana, have a great story. Story over there and you got to tell your story. But then what's the next thing he does? Now he's drank the Kool-Aid, he's got all this stuff flying right now. He's got the inner membership circle on there and you can join for bronze for $20, silver for $50, gold. He's got membership in his pizza business. Then what's the next thing he does? On the bottom he's got his VIP club for your birthday. So he's getting them to sign up so he's building a mailing list. And then what has he got on the back of this thing? Well, he's got 2 money-saving coupons, which you're about to see, but what does he do? He buries you in testimonials. Over 60 testimonials of happy, satisfied people who have eaten his pizza. Great way to— you use what you got. If you don't have a list yet, you use what you got. He used his, his his menu. How about a hand over there for Tom? Okay, when I say use what you got, I mean you really, really, really use everything you got. This comes from Gold Luxury member Mark Riffey. Mark, are you here? I don't think you are here. Mark sends me and Dan a whole bunch of stuff all the time. As a matter of fact, I didn't realize this was going to be in last month's newsletter, so it was actually in there, but I'm going to tell you a little bit more about it now because Dan only told you about it a little bit. But this is when you really, really, really use everything you got. Mark sends me an article about the Wismark Interactive Urinal Communicator. Now think about this thing. Wizmark can talk, sing, or flash a string of lights around a promotional message when greeting a visitor at the urinal. Now, you got to think about this. All the men in the room are going to know what I'm talking about here. Women, you're going to have to use your imagination. You go into a men's room, there's a line of urinals. You walk up to your urinal, what's the last thing you do? Look either way, left or right. You don't do that. You're looking straight. So that Wismarck Urinal Interactor got your attention. This is great. You use everything you got. Okay, number 6. Put it on autopilot. This is from Peak Performers member Joe McVoy, who is also going to be in our, our vendor area. Joe has a complete done-for-you service who understands our kind of marketing. One of the things that I teach, I've been teaching it for years, is people really love getting greeting cards. He does it all done-for-you, and when I show you he uses our kind of marketing, here's what I mean. His envelope Return address handwritten in blue from Joe, does not, does not identify a name of a company. Mailing address handwritten in blue, stamp, live first-class stamp. You get this, you think somebody is sending you a greeting card, which you are. He's got over 500 different greeting cards to choose from that you can choose the one you like. Plus the fact, if you don't like one of the 500, they even customize one for you. And so this particular one I'm showing you of the 500 is, "Do you want your own business and more time off too?" When you open it up, on one side is a handwritten personalized message from you all done for you, and on the other side is telling you about a printed part that talks about the opportunity. And you can customize these any way you want. It's completely done for you and it costs about a buck and that includes postage. For people who are there looking for an outrageous shortcut to add to a step to a marketing funnel or use this as a marketing funnel by itself, smart thing to do. Okay. Angelo, I'm gonna screw up your name, but you're from New Zealand, so you know, it doesn't matter. Angelo Iannidis, you in the room? Angelo's here? Yes, sir, stand up, Angelo. I do have your $1,000 here, okay? So see me when you're done. I like you, Angelo. I never met you. Stand up. But I do like you because you got chutzpah, okay? I cleaned that up. There's another word for it. It's a shorter word. It starts with a B and it ends with two Ls and an S, but I didn't want to go into that. So you got guts, okay? And so here's Angelo. Angelo, are you— by the way, are you a dentist yourself? You are a dentist, but you also do marketing as well, right? Never met before, okay? And let's keep it that way. Okay, so here's the deal. Angelo sends me— I don't even— actually, it didn't even come from you. It came from the person you did it for, I think, if I'm not mistaken. He sends me this postcard. Got dental problems? Here's 10 reasons to smile. Okay, love it. Skinheads with no teeth selling dentistry. Okay, the offer on the front, it's not $152, that's crossed out. It goes to $277.05, and as far as the deal, then it says on the bottom, says this is a big marketing breakthrough. Okay, high, high, high-end strategy here. Turn over to see if you can find all 10 reasons. So what has he done? Not only is he telling them to turn over, but he's making them search for 10 reasons. What does that make them do? Read the whole thing. And when you turn this thing over, it's loaded with copy, all 10 reasons, even gives a map to his place, and also he has tax testimonials that are on there. It didn't do too well. Here's what happened. The cost of production was $853, okay? The leads generated was 48 leads. So I did the math, it was about 1,300 pieces you mailed out if I'm not mistaken. How do you like that? It's pretty good math. We can do math in the United States. 1,300 pieces sent out. They, of the 48 leads, they booked 37 appointments. Of the 37 appointments, now again they spent $853, so they got a big investment here, they only generated $67,450 in sales. Now you can sit down. Congratulations. Don't forget to get your certificate. Okay, by the way, what I showed you here is a very, very advanced strategy or important strategy which is the use of photography to help your marketing pieces along. You see, had he not had the picture of the skinheads on there with no teeth, it wouldn't have been nearly as good a piece. So like, for example, here's a piece that I used once where I was in a straitjacket because our accountant noticed something that nobody else did. The best opportunity to buy menswear was discovered. Prices so low you'll swear that I'm crazy. Now take away the photo of me in a straitjacket, take that away, It's a good headline. Add the photo of me in a straitjacket, the photo line is tripled in terms of effectiveness. Use photos in order to help your marketing. We have a photographer that's going to be in— over there in the exhibit area that brought with him straitjackets. If you want to leave with your own straitjacket photo, you can leave with it. Now, I love this because each Even if you don't want to leave with your own straitjacket photo, he's got straitjackets in all sizes. You can find out what size you do wear when you do need the straitjacket. So you can also, that's an extra benefit for you. So there's using photos. Here's another one I use. Now the straitjacket piece, I've used it many times. I took the photo one time, I've used it over and over again. Here's another place that I use it. For my menswear store, I actually did a combination of the straitjacket mailing and the nickel piece. So I attached the nickel and did the straitjacket. I did them both in there. It was lumpy, it was dimensional. This was again done for me by City Blue and Handy Mailing. Why is this menswear retailer sending Bill Glazer— this was my sample piece, it went to the person's name, it was personalized by Virgil and Handy Mailing— a shiny authentic nickel Has he finally gone crazy? So I tied them both in together. So using again dimensional mail and photographs significantly helps it. Okay, this one comes from Peak Performance member Dr. Ginger Bratzl. I don't think Ginger is here, are you? Yep, I don't think she is here, but we met her at the latest Peak Performance meeting. This is a great example of S&D, and that's what you're really here for. You want to learn how to S&D. Which is steal and distribute. So take good ideas and steal. I'm going to show you a great example of something she did which is S&D. This is, and actually you just saw this from Clayton, but this is the silver platter mailing, silver platter, and this could be used in almost any business. These are available for I think somewhere between a buck and two bucks. You can get them again from Mitch Carson, ImpactProducts.net. He's got them, and this thing, is a genuine silver platter, or at least at some point this thing passed something that resembled silver. So there's some amount of silver here. So this, she sent this out, and what she does is she sends this out to all the people, remember yesterday Dean talked about new movers, she sends this out with a dollar bill attached to it to a sales letter that goes out, and I think I do have the sales letter opened up on the— next— yep, I do. And then the sales letter says, I know you are busy moving, so you might have missed my first letter. So this is the second step in the sequence. Here's another offer on a silver platter. She turns it into the silver platter, and then she wrote a whole letter on why she's sending a dollar to grab people's attention. And then through here, she's got testimonials, she's got an offer in here. And it's a very smart thing to be doing, is to be going after new movers, new New movers once again are looking for a new place to plug into and the silver dollar and the silver platter piece, the dollar putting money on a sales letter are proven winners that you can S&D and that's exactly what she did. Okay. This one comes from Joshua Hellman which he sent me these pieces out which is, which I call don't give up too quickly and that's the big strategy here. This one is an interesting one I wanted to show you because there's a big lesson here. There's actually two. First of all, you're going to look at this and you're going to say, Bill, he's not— he hand-addressed this thing, he's got the first-class live stamp, but he made a mistake. The mistake that he made was it's not a true blind approach because he's revealing in the return address who it's coming from. In most cases, I will tell you that is a mistake. In this case, I would tell you it's not a mistake because he is sending doctor to doctor. So he's using the fact that he is one of them to get through the clutter. So there are times that you do want to identify who you are. Most of the times you don't, but in this particular case you do. He's doing doctor to doctor, then he further enhanced it by putting personal on the outside of it. And then Scott Tucker is going to be happy to hear that what he sent inside was the tear sheet mailing. So what he did is he created a tear sheet and on the tear sheet, so he's sending out a tear sheet which has, looks like a newspaper ad that he sent out with a personalized post-it note on there, Charles thought you'd be interested, Dr. J. And he sent this out to folks to get them to come to his seminar. So he's providing a seminar to other medical professionals. But then of course what he did was he didn't give up too early. He sent out another piece to them and in the second piece that he sent out to them, he again, this time he included a personal handwritten note inside and then with the personal handwritten note, he also included the tear sheet mailing. Tear sheet mailing is consistently, you'll hear a lot about it from Scott today, consistently perform very, very well in terms of getting people's attention because you're living off of the credibility of, "Gee, somebody else wrote this about me, so it must be true." And if you can get credibility in your business, that's 50% of the battle. Oh, by the way, how many people in the room here are doing local seminars in their area? Local seminars in their area. He does something that I've been teaching for a while, which is when— and most of you I'm sure are doing this, but just in case you missed it, I thought I'd show it to you— is when people sign up for the seminar, he sends them a ticket. So now it feels like I'm really signed up for something, and actually what he does, which is pretty bright, he sends them 2 tickets, which is if you want to bring a friend, you also will bring people with you. I know in the InfoMastermind group, I know Lloyd, you're doing that at your local seminars, sending them extra tickets, and they're bringing a lot of extra people with them. Smart, smart strategy to be doing if you're doing seminars. Okay, number 10. When I say don't give up too quickly, I mean it. And this one's coming from Dave Lee, who is Vice President of Infusionsoft. And I thought I'd send this— show you this because it's a great example of not giving up on what we call unconverted leads. So they just, they had a bunch of unconverted leads and they decided that they want, they thought there was money there, so what they were going to do is go back to all their unconverted leads and put them in a campaign using their own software. Go think, okay? So here's what happens. They sent out step number 1, which is an email to folks with a link to go to the sales letter. If they didn't respond, they sent out step number 2, which was a fax with the URL to go to the the sales letter. If they didn't respond to that, they sent step number 3, which was an email with a link to go to the sales letter. If they didn't respond to that, they sent step number 4, which is another fax with a link to go to the sales letter, URL. Step number— if they didn't respond to that, they sent out step number 5, which was an email with a link to go to the sales letter. If they didn't respond to that, they sent out fax— step number 6 was fax number 3 with a URL with to go to the sales letter. If they didn't respond to that, they sent out step number 7 with a, which was an email with a link to go to the sales letter. If they didn't respond to that, they sent out step number 8, which was another email to go to, with a link to go to the sales letter. If they didn't respond to that, thank God they sent a letter out in the mail, number 9. So they finally got to a letter in the mail, but you'll be interested to see results. Here Here's results of the campaign. Interesting. Steps now, there's 9 steps in this. Steps number 1 through 6 went over 58 days, generated 41% of the orders. Okay, now most people would say, "My God, 6 steps. I really milked this baby. I got these orders." They would stop there. Most people will never even get to 6 steps, but what did they do? They did 3 more steps. Steps number 7 through 9 That went over 9 days, that generated 59% of their overall orders. You don't give up too quickly. You keep going and going and going. There's money in there in your old dead leads. Okay, number 11. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Many of you will probably remember the gold an interview I did with my VIP member David Melrose. David, you're here, right? Stand up. I'm going to embarrass you, but you know, you're used to it. You're in my VIP group. So, I'm only showing you a couple of things David does. And like Dr. Nielsen yesterday, I made the point of that what happens is when you get good at marketing, it becomes the most fun fun and most exciting part of your business. And that's what's happened with David. David doesn't even go into his office anymore. He just really does the marketing only because it really is the thing that's the most fun and exciting part of his business. I'm only going to show you a few things. Some of the things I just can't show you because truthfully it's kind of like too proprietary, but some of them I'm showing you even without getting permission from David, so I'll take his wrath later on. So here you go. First thing is, like the FedEx piece. He sends out pieces in a DHL bag. What's going to happen? You're going to get it, it's going to get to the person that's got to make the decision, it's going to get open. So there's another way to get things open. Let me show you some of the stuff he's done. He mails them a real phone. Now the phone ain't connected to nothing, but he's making the point of, I want you to call me. So he buys these phones at some Army-Navy place, and he's sending him out a phone to get him to call. Then inside of this, there's a letter. Let me find that letter. Nope, not that letter. Bill, as you can see, I've sent you a telephone and have done so for a couple very important reasons. One, frankly, to get your attention so you will read this entire letter. Two, see, we recently sent you a fantastic payment reduction program, which is a whole marketing lesson in itself that I don't have time to go into, and I've not heard back from you. Since your payment reduction program approval will expire in 26 days, I wanted to make sure that if your loan application is permanently denied because you waited too long, that you can't blame me. So he sends this out to them. Results are phenomenal. Why do I say in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king? Because there's 500,000 loan mortgage guys out there, and none of them are doing this kind of stuff, or some of them are, but not nearly enough of them are doing this kind of stuff. So, he's probably in, you're in Dallas, right? So you've probably got, I don't know, another 10, 20,000 mortgage guys there. None of them sort of get this whole thing. Let me show you something else he does. Oh, this one, he got this one from, Dan wrote a shock and awe piece from, for Craig Proctor, and in the piece there was something from Craig's wife. So David, being a good student, he stole it, and so now you can't really blame me for showing you stuff because you stole this from somebody else. So on the outside of the envelope, puts this in his piece, "Please open only if you're not going to return this payment relief program. A special message from Erica Melrose." This is Erica Melrose. Now I'm not going to read you the whole thing, I'm going to read you a couple pieces of this. You should see this at some point, but it comes from Erica Melrose. I'm a Neglected Wife. David and I have been married for 5 years and have 2 wonderful kids. It's a good thing I have them to keep me busy because if anybody was ever obsessed with his business, it's my hubby. So if anybody tells you that you're just a number in a big mortgage loan machine and might get better service or a better deal from a big-time bank or some other mortgage company, I say think again. I'm going to read you the last sentence. I don't have time to read you the whole thing, although it's brilliant. Here's the last sentence. I love it. In fact, I dare say the key to a happier marriage while getting your mortgage is my husband handling everything for for you. Kind of ironic. Me he'll neglect, you he won't. This is from Erica. Okay, here's another one of David's pieces. Sends out a message in a tube, right? And we've seen this before, you put a letter inside the tube, right? Except one little thing extra added David does. When you open it up, "Hey, this is David, president of Dallas Home Loans. Hey, this is your last chance. Your loan approval expires on Tuesday. Please send back your package right away. Thanks a lot." He's got a message on this thing that he's grabbing their attention right away. Now here's the last one, and the last one he's really going to be upset about me showing you, but he'll get over it because we taught him how to make a whole lot of money. He sends out this one, which is a picture of one of his guys that works for him looking down with his head down, looking at a bunch of shredded paper. Here's the letter. Dear Bill, my name is David Thompson and I'm the owner's assistant at Dallas Home Loans and I've screwed up big time. My boss recently sent you a tape recorder with a special offer if you sent back your loan application package. The problem is Mandy, the overly tidy temp I hired, accidentally shredded a pile of papers on the floor, including a completed loan package. 12 of the 30 people who got a tape recorder sent their loan package in, but I don't know if yours was the shredded one or not. I don't know if you can tell from the shreds I've included throw some shreds in the piece. I sure can. The boss— David, did you sit down? The boss is on vacation until Friday, October 20th, 2006. This is an old piece. I was the one who hired Mandy, so my boss is going to blame me for the screw-up, and he's not the, um, easygoing type. So what he's saying is, if you want to, you can— I'm not going to read you the whole thing. You can now sit to send in your loan application. Even if you didn't send in the loan application, if you're not the one, because there is no one, you're thinking everybody else is doing it so I should have done it so I'm sending my loan application. Big bump. That's a— Okay, now you can sit down. All right. You like this stuff? No? Yeah, I need a little encouragement. Okay. All right. This one is actually a campaign that I did for a bank. Not the most outrageous piece, but a lot of big, big, very, very, very large marketing message here that I want to share with you. So, hmm, not the one I did for a bank. This is the one I did for, just recently did for the Ford Motor Company, who they all of a sudden decided they need a little bit better marketing after last quarter they lost $18.1 billion. So what they're doing right now is they're going around the country and they're reducing their dealerships by about 500 of them. So what they're doing is they're having dealers buy adjacent dealers in their area so that there'll be— there's adjacency so people still have a place to go. So here's a piece that I did for their first test piece for Ford that I wanted to show you. And the first thing I want to show you is— and Clayton showed it to you, but here's sort of like a down-and-dirty cheap way way to get through the mail. It's not as good as the FedEx, it's not as good as the DHL piece, but it also doesn't cost nearly as much as those do. So if you're looking for something that's going to have that appearance, here's the Priority Express envelope. And inside this, what I did was a couple things. The first thing is I wrote a letter from the dealership that got bought up, which is, I wanted to personally mail you the most important message I have ever sent our customers in the 60 years. So now that comes from the owner that who just got bought up in order to sort of let his customers know that he's— they're now going to be going to the new Ford dealership that's adjacent to them. And then we also put together 3 special offers for them, 3 gifts for them. So that's piece number 1. Piece number 2 is I then created a letter that came from the owner of the new— of the store that bought them. 3 pages on here. And I— because now I needed to to make it sound special, I created this thing called the Ultimate Ford Store. We didn't change the store, we just changed the name. So now it's the Ultimate Ford Store and every department I wrote about in there why it's special. I have the ultimate service department, the ultimate new car department, the ultimate pre-owned car department, the ultimate parts department, the ultimate body shop, the ultimate commercial vehicle department, on and on and on. And then we went in with the free gifts. And then the last thing we did is we included the actual certificates for this, which is these things right here, which you can see up on the screen. So there's 7 pieces of paper in here. Now I didn't have to do this in 7 pieces of paper, and I could have attached it all, but there's a big lesson here to learn, which is the more stuff, the better. That's why when you get from the Publisher Clearing House every year the thing which usually, before Ed McMahon used to send me out, I don't know who sends it out anymore, You open it up, all this crap falls on the floor because the more stuff the better, the higher the response. Always look at putting more stuff in your marketing pieces. And then the next thing we did, by the way, is we also sent out a voice broadcast at the end reminding them of the deadline to come into the place. And we got 278 of their customers to come in, take advantage of the offers, generated a little bit under $90,000 $1,000 in sales plus we got 278 people to come to them so the bad news is they've now hired me to do 2 more campaigns for them. So, but the lesson I wanted to show you is the more stuff the better. Okay, next one is a real big pet peeve of mine. Number 13 is it ain't over until you say it's over. Lost customers. A lot of you have heard me say this before. Some of you have never heard me say it before. I don't care. It's worth drumming into your head. In every one of your businesses out there, you've got what we call lost customers. These are people that have bought from you and, by the way, customers is interchangeable with patients and clients. So I call them customers, you can call them whatever you want. People that have done business with you in the past, you expected them to continue to do business with you and they didn't for whatever reason. You maybe marketed to them really well, they didn't respond to your marketing. You gotta now, once they hit this part where you call lost customers, you gotta treat them differently. I've developed tons of campaigns for them. One of them Diana showed you in the Royalty Rewards program she showed you. I developed that campaign for Royalty Rewards.
All—
every business has got them. Here's one I just want to show you about how powerful this whole thing is. The first thing is, on this particular campaign, this is one that I did for my menswear store, I sent out the first piece, which is we really do miss you piece, and on the back of it I had an offer for a discount. And then I go in there and say, and this is important, the wording is important, it says, our records indicate it's been too long since you visited Gage Menswear. So we're giving you a free $10 gift certificate. It even doubles to $20 with your purchase of $100 or more. It triples to $60 with your purchase of $200 or more. I just taught you two big marketing lessons. Marketing lesson number one is you've got to let them know that you know that they are missing. You got to talk to them in that way. You got to let them know that you know it. And number two marketing lesson I taught you was if we can get them to respond to the $10 certificate. Well, now we can increase their transaction size with the $60 certificate. Very few people that ever responded to this did not spend the $200. So we increased transaction size to this with a free offer. We got it actually increased to the transaction size. We gave them 2 weeks to respond. If they didn't respond, we sent them out postcard number 2, which is shall we send out the search party. And this is basically the same offer with one exception. We added to— we let them know that we know We're missing. We gave them the same offer, but we also mentioned here that, that you should— that 2 weeks ago you got a postcard from me. So we're— we are mentioning the previous card to have the familiarity built in on it. They didn't respond to that in 2 weeks, we sent them out the last postcard, which is last chance, we quit. And in this we did the exact same thing. We mentioned the fact that we sent them out 2 previous postcards. And the offer and also the offer to increase transaction size and then we tell them this is absolutely the last chance we're going to communicate with them except for the fact that we did send them out a voice broadcast right after that, which is step number 4, reminding them of the deadline that's coming up and consistently in my business it generated over 13% of return of our lost customers to return. Now 13% may not impress you. Some business— it depends on the business. In the restaurant business, this thing is over 40% return. In menswear, we were delighted with it. It added hundreds of thousands, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional volume to our business every year, and these are people that were lost customers not responding to our regular marketing pieces, and everybody should be using them. Okay, let me show you the last one. The last one is to engage the prospect in your irresistible offer. This is a really big lesson and I saved it for the end. This is a campaign I did for a bank. And here's the deal. In meeting with the client prior to writing anything and interviewing the client, which is what I do to try to find out where's like the hidden places that we can capitalize on things, they told me something that was very interesting. They told me that He said, "If we can get one of our associates to be in front of the business owner, we close them 80% of the time in doing business with us." So I said, "If that's true, I can fix your problem for you." So now my objective was not to sell them on doing business with the bank. My objective is now to get the associate in front of them. They'll do the selling of doing business with the bank. So what I did is I developed a campaign for them. The first step of the campaign, since this is coming from a bank, you gotta use the bank bag, 'cause it's coming from a bank, right? So this is going out to, we bought the 2,000 business owners in the immediate area, and what we did is we sent them out a letter from the manager of the bank. Why is a bank manager sending Victor Rodriguez, which again, the person received this, a letter in a bank deposit bag. The answer below might surprise you. And in there we included testimonials from real customers of the bank. We talked about the different services that the bank had. But then we get to page 2. And on page 2, at the bottom of page 2, I say, plus, just for taking your valuable time to fill out the form that we asked them to fill out before a deadline, we will deliver to you a choice of free gifts. What could be fairer than that? Choose one of these 6 shameless bribe-free gifts. And then we showed them 2 of the gifts on this page, and on the next page we showed them 4 more. Average retail— retail, by the way, I use the word retail very loosely— average retail value of the gift was approximately $100. Average cost was under $20 for any of the gifts. What is the real, real big marketing lesson I just shared with you? Very advanced strategy. I didn't offer them a gift. I offered them a choice of one of 6 gifts. What do you gotta do? You gotta in your mind say, which one do I want? This isn't about do I want a gift. This is a shifting, this is a psychological shifting of thinking of which one do I want. It's irresistible. You gotta be thinking, I mean I'm looking at all this stuff, I'm now spending my time on thinking of the one that I want, not do I want. And then after that we just had them move to a no-risk free business evaluation form which we didn't ask them any confidential information at all. Interesting thing about it is we also said to them in the letter, that once you choose your gift, we will deliver it to you. Who do you think delivered the gift? The associate. The sales force they got. This gave the associate the opportunity to be in front of the prospect, and now they could go into their close, which was— they didn't do 80%, but they got it about down to about 60% on this thing because these people thinking they're getting gifts, and they did. But there's also the law of reciprocity. If somebody comes and gives you a $100 gift, you just can't say, "See ya." You gotta talk to that person. Like, "You just gave me a $100 gift." It's a huge strategy. What we did is we followed it up with a second piece if they didn't respond, which in this one was the same letter, but this time just changed the headline to the name of the business, "Why is the same bank manager who's sending you a letter in a bank deposit box?" Now sending you real shredded money, and we sent them a packet of real shredded money in here, and same offer, and if they didn't respond to that, then I sent them my pop-up envelope, which City Blue really kind of created this for me. This is when you open up the flap, there's an offer right there on the flap, so this is like what I call in-your-face marketing. You can't miss the offer, and this is last chance to join hundreds of business owners in the Owings Mills area and claim your free free gift. They did as much business in doing this campaign as they did in the entire prior year showing 3 steps doing this kind of thing which is just getting the free gift, using that for an excuse to get in front of the person. Hey, how about a hand for that? I was pretty proud of it. Okay, big lessons. I told you I got big lessons for you. I want to go over the big lessons with you now. I'm gonna do it fast because I'm running low on time. Number 1, make— must always think about what do I need to do to make sure my marketing gets open and read. So I showed you a bunch of examples: FedEx, Frisbee, big window envelopes, Rush Priority Express envelopes, pop-up envelopes. This stuff will get your pieces open and read. Number 2 big lesson is dimensional lumpy mail increases results. I showed you a cell phone, Frisbee, real nickels, silver Platter, tubes, telephones, bank bags, shredded money, lumpy mail increases— will increase results. Number 3 big lesson is this: personality drives response. It's a great resource for you here, 30% off in the back there, Dan Kennedy's course on personality and copy. The handwritten letter from Susan Grief's daughter, personality in there. The Tommaso Pizza menu, Full of personality. A bunch of these other ones, the shredded money, the shredded application thing from David Melrose, full of personality. You gotta add personality to your marketing. Big lesson number 4, make it easy to take action. Include an order form. Always include an order form if you want them to do that. The bank mailing, easy response form. Ron LeGrand's piece, easy response form. The cell phone, boy, you can't make it easier than that to take action. All you gotta do is put push the button and boom, you got it. Everything you do is marketing. So always think in terms of where are the places that I can communicate with my customers that I'm not already thinking of as traditional ways. The Tommaso pizza menu, people aren't thinking about their menu as marketing, it's marketing. Certainly the Wismark interactive urinal communicator, baby, that's marketing. Okay. Next big lesson is don't forget testimonials. The most— it's the biggest mistake I always see is people don't have testimonials. On the menu from Tommaso's, got testimonials. Ginger Bratzel, the dentist, testimonials. Farmers and Merchants Bank, testimonials. Do them everywhere you got. Look for easy ways to get it done for you. You had Joe McVoy's send out your cards for you. Infusion, easy for you, does it all for you. AMS, they are a done-for-you service. They will be in the vendor area as well. Next, use photos to grab attention and get noticed. Now I would say testimonials is the biggest mistake I see. I would say the use of photo— of not using photos is the most underutilized mistake that I see. The dental office skinheads postcard, not nearly as good without the photo of those two great-looking guys. My straitjacket piece, the David Melrose owner's assistant piece, you take away that, that guy looking at the shredded money, it's not nearly as good as with a photo of it. Next two lessons is keep going deeper and deeper and deeper into the funnel. Dr. Hellman's Funnel to Fill seminar in Fusion, look out, 9 steps, they pick it up more in the last 3 steps than in the first 6. The gauge lost customer The reactivation campaign, 4 steps. The Farmers and Merchants Bank campaign, 3 steps. Use multiple media. Infusion, they used email, they used fax, they used snail mail. Ford, they used direct mail, they used voice broadcast. Gage Law's customer piece, used direct mail, used voice broadcast. So those are big lessons that I showed you. Of course, the one I didn't put up there, which is the really secret big lessons, is how to get people involved with the free gift thing. So you want to get them thinking, from a yes/no decision to a which one do I want decision. Okay, you see my sign here which is the biggest difference between average income and financial freedom is implementation. So now what I want you to do is you all got ideas here, now we just need to implement them because that's what's going to make it all happen.
Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. And this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.
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