Seven Types of Email Subject Lines For Improving Open Rates

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we get to listen into something a little different. Now, traditionally on the podcast, we talk a lot about business principles and marketing principles that are general. They're not just for the online space. These are things that work across the different experiences that are available inside of the business world. However, today we want to focus specifically on online and whether you have an online business or you're realizing that you need to have online as an arm in your business. This episode is key because it holds fast to one of the tried and true rules that Dan Kennedy holds on to and is a part of Magnetic Marketing, which is building your list. And when you build them, how do you make sure that you reach out to them in a way that they respond? So in this episode, we get to listen to Dave D as he reveals 7 styles of subject lines. And subject lines are key. They are the reason people open an email. Just because they see you, that you've sent an email, is not the reason they're going to open it. They open for curiosity from the subject line, and that is the key. Number 1, how do we get them to open? And then Dan Kennedy is going to come in and teach you how you imbue your personality and all the basic marketing principles into your email in order to ensure that they read it, that they take action, that they only become a bigger fan for life. Plus, if you stick to the end, you get to have a unique Q&A with Dave D and Dan Kennedy and the audience.

Let's listen 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 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. In this session, you'll discover how to write compelling subject lines that get your emails open, including a powerful, albeit controversial, email subject line strategy that literally compels your prospects to open your emails without fail. We'll also discuss some other things to make sure your emails actually get read. Let's talk about subject lines. In direct response marketing, old time, we say that the headline for your ad is the ad for the ad.

Right.

Just talk a little bit about that and subject lines and the importance of them.

Well, so it is the same essentially as is teaser copy on the outside of an envelope, or the complete absence of anything on the outside of an envelope revealing that it is commercial. So a pure sneak-up approach. Right. It is really the same as that. It is the same as you say, the headline for the ad itself. It is the one, the front, the address side of the postcard.

Right.

We're really playing in, you know, in the same arena. And while I tend to write a lot of it, I don't tend to write specifically for email subject lines. It all gets picked out of the same little harvest of bullet points and headlines that I've written. But the one thing I would say about it, that relationship, of course, trumps just about everything.

Absolutely.

So the catch-22 here is, is that This gets easier when you are emailing to people who want to receive your email.

Right.

And will open your email because it is from you.

Right.

Then a lot of cleverness about subject line becomes unnecessary.

Right.

So the personality, the authority, the relationship, the some level of communication— it is not always asking somebody to buy something.

Correct.

All of that starts to become important, right? You know, in being able to get them open.

But let's go over some subject lines here. There are— there is actually more than 7 that you can write, but what I've done is these are the ones I rely on the most at GKIC and that I've relied on the most in my career. So let's go over the 7 different types of subject lines that you can write to. So the first one I call the intriguing question. And the reason I like the intriguing question is it creates that open loop in the person's mind. And if the question is good enough, Dan, they want to find out the answer to that question. Talk about that, because it's a really powerful psychological technique.

Well, so the reason we use questions in advertising rather than overt statements First of all, one is that you can sometimes bury a claim in a question that you cannot make as an assertive statement. Right. So do nitrous oxide supplements really replace Viagra?

Right.

Well, you can ask that as a question.

Right. You can't say it.

You cannot say it as a claim.

But you're still planting it in their head, though. Of course. Right. Right.

Of course.

It's beautiful.

And wanting to know that may in fact, to your point, have a higher intrigue factor than if I did say it as a statement.

Absolutely.

Right? Because the reaction to it said as a statement is bullshit. Right. Right? BS. Right?

Right.

The reaction to it stated as a question is, hmm, well, hmm, who is saying, is a doctor saying this? Did some new study just come out? What the hell is this all about? Right. So now I want to look.

Right.

So, so it's used for both of those, right? Both of those reasons.

It's very powerful. So for example, the subject line that I sent out, the email that I sent out today, in your voice by the way, the email I sent out today—

It's okay, I never see them.

Yeah, I know, I know, I know.

You're safe.

So, but the subject line was, and this, this goes to the point that you made just a few minutes ago about the power of relationship. So the subject line was simply the person's first name and the question, "What's going on?" Dave, what's going on? With a question mark, from Dan Kennedy. All right, great open rate on that subject line because it was almost like you're pissed at them. All right, now that doesn't work if you don't have that relationship, but it does work. They want to know what the hell is Dan asking me, what's going on? Huge open rate on that type of thing. Let's go to a really, really basic one. Which is the standard how-to. Whenever in doubt, a how-to works. Why does how-to work so well?

Well, to be fair, it doesn't work as well as it did 30 years ago. Melvin Powers' old rule about book titles was you could improve just about every single one of them by sticking the words how-to in front of them, right? And so Thinking Grow Rich automatically becomes better if you made it How to Thinking. Right. Given a decline of willingness to do things, it's interesting, it's not as powerful as it once was. So the real variables here are application by audience, right? Are you talking to do-it-yourselfers? Are you talking to ambitious individuals? Are you or not, right? The audience and the thing that the how-to is being attached to. But the reason that it works is because it concisely, in two words, it makes a specific benefit claim. It says by reading this, you're not going to know about something, you're going to know how to do something.

Yeah. One of my favorites is the next one. I love the secrets. 3 Secrets, 7 Secrets, The Secret. Here's a really nice one: 7 Unusual Secrets to Better Sex. I could not remember for the life of me the marketer that all of his things had unusual in it. Do you remember that guy?

Yeah.

You know who I'm talking about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is— and now you're going to get me. Yeah.

I couldn't remember it either.

He built this whole business with a typewriter and a tent, started at the— George Halix.

George Halix, that's right.

George.

Yeah.

Yeah, and George's whole deal was 1,052 unusual somethings.

Right.

Ways moms are making money from home, right? 612 unusual, and they were usually big numbers, by the way. George was unique, right? He didn't use the 3s and the 7s and the 14s. He used 618, right? I mean, look, the secret, okay, it— people are very willing to believe that it exists. A, they've sort of been conditioned to believe it. There's a let them off the hook factor in it.

Right.

So if you're fat and you know you're fat, or you're having crappy sex and you know you're having horrible sex, or none at all, or you are broke, or any of the conditions that you might cure with information, with medical treatment, with psychotherapy, with whatever, right? What the existence of secrets does is it immediately relieves you of the responsibility for the condition that you're in. So in, again, in a very concise way, it says it's really not your fault you're fat. Somebody's been ganging up on you and keeping you fat and keeping from you the reason why thin people are thin. It's really not your fault you're broke. People have been keeping from you the secret reason why people are rich. It's really not your fault that you don't seem to attract anybody who is willing to get into bed with you. Right? People have been keeping from you a secret. And now we can sell just about anything, right? So we can sell pills, we can, we can sell— what's the stuff, the smell stuff?

Oh, aromatherapy?

No, no, no, pheromones.

Pheromones.

You know, you just don't activate— you know, you're missing a pheromone in your genes that activates the sex impulse. And if you just had this glop It can be information. It doesn't make any difference. So what it does is it lets the person relieve themselves of responsibility for the problem that they have that you are not going to cure. That's chiefly why it's so powerful. It also, of course, arouses curiosity, which is always a good thing from an open rate standpoint. Curiosity gets the cat to go and pry at the door until it could get into the other room.

Yeah, that's exactly right. What a lot of people who don't— not, I don't want to say novices do— is that they answer the question for, or the secret, whatever it is, too early in the email. So the person— so this is like a really big mistake. When you— if you're going to do the secret thing, let's say the secret, well, you don't want to answer the secret in the first couple lines of the email, because the point is to get them to read down into the email and keep them engaged throughout the entire process. We'll be talking more about that, but I don't think I was going to talk about this, so I wanted to mention it. Here's a really powerful one which gives marketers today, Dan, a huge advantage, which is a current event tie-in. In this one, I also— the subject line here is Kim Kardashian, which also brings in celebrity. But talk about the power of the current thing, the thing that's happening. And in the past We couldn't do that as marketers. We couldn't act upon something in the news and send out something immediately.

To capitalize on it pre-internet, pre-email, you had to be sure that the current event news story, you had to feel strongly it had legs, that it had a 2-week to 4-week life cycle. Conversely, of course, the internet has helped destroy the life cycle of news events. So there's a circular effect here. But you had to really feel that this thing was going to be a water cooler conversation for 2 to 4 weeks because you were going to mail. About the only really current adjustment you could make is to inbound or outbound phone scripts. Right? That's about the only way you could use, or mobilizing a sales force to a geographic location. Fire alarm salespeople mobilized to a house burned down last night and that was in the news. But you now have, with email, you have an opportunity to do it literally on a day-by-day, even an hour-by-hour basis. You can be there right when people are talking about that particular thing, and because news, a current event, is going to be the dominant conversation. So, and it almost doesn't matter, the proportionate seriousness of the event is quite irrelevant. So, in the last week, 30% of all televised newscasts in America, the lead story and the lead tease story has been Deflategate, right? The supposedly deflated footballs that made it easier for Brady to throw. And kind of like with the O.J. trial, they have moved their way from trying to interview people directly related to that story, down to the guy who works at the drive-in window at the McDonald's that Brady stopped at 5 years ago, who might want to comment on this situation. That's right. So this is—

he had trouble gripping his cup, right?

So it's— this is the news. This, this is a news event, right, that you could react to immediately, and that also has some legs. It's predictable legs, right? Right. The time period between when it happened and the Super Bowl is going to be its life cycle.

Sure.

Right.

Sure.

So the— so this is what— this is the Call You principle. You enter the conversation already occurring in the person's mind. So what's one of the 5 things that they're, that they're thinking about and that they're talking about with buddies, spouse at dinner, coworker, whatever, and you can jump on it with email. In many cases, it does. It hands you the subject line.

Yeah, absolutely.

It hands you the subject line. Now, it's best if you can make a relevance tie-in, right?

We're going to teach them how to do that too.

So, Kim Kardashian sells her baby, which really now the story is about how much money she got for exclusive pictures and stories.

Correct.

She didn't actually sell the kid, right? Not that that would be above her, but, but right. So better if we're using that to lead into a conversation about some making it in some way.

You tie it in some, right? Right. Yeah. And again, we're going to share with you how to tie them in. And but a lot of times, as you said, the subject line suggests the link in the email as opposed to, I want to write about this. Now let me come up with a subject line. Oftentimes I'll come up with a subject line and then write to the subject line first. Also, what you were saying is really important. The reason we've got 7 examples here is because a tactic known is a tactic blown. So you don't want to be using the same type of subject line every single time.

You have at least got to be in random rotation, right? So if you've got 7, right, and better you got 17, right? If you've got 7, you need to use them in random rotation. So you can't use them in regimented rotation.

No, because then, right.

Well, you get back to the same place, right? I know I get this one, I get this one, I get this one, I get that, and then I get this one, then I get this one. And it just delays the point that I stop opening your email because I know the game. Right. There's no mystique to the game at all. Right.

Right.

And so you need random rotation.

Let's look at another one. This one is one that's overused a lot, which is the personalized one. And this one is— it does work, but again, tactic known as a tactic blown. The problem with this one also, by the way, is sometimes people will not necessarily put in their actual name into the opt-in box. So for example, and I've had— if the person puts in, say, their first name, they say that their name is Shithead, so then your subject line says, "Hey, Shithead." Not the best way to open up an email.

By the way, there's a story in the news yesterday. So Comcast, the cable company, a complaining customer agitated a Comcast person who changed their record from whatever her real name was, Barbara Hershey, to Hershey.

You're kidding me.

No, no, no, no. So her monthly statement now is addressed to Hershey. Her emails coming from them are addressed to Hershey. And when she calls up to fix it, no, we can only speak to Ms. Hershey. This is what's going on, right?

So you got—

so that's the point here. If you can't get personalization right, don't do it. And in B2B, a lot of us get fairly sophisticated about using different variations of our names, right? To, you know, so I'll test— use Daniel for some things, Dan for others, right? And I know instantly if it's addressed in this particular way what it is. So this is touchy, right? This is very touchy.

Yeah, I use it very, very sparingly.

And And I do believe you need to be sure. Your VIP customer list, perfect. Prospect list, questionable.

And if you notice here in the example, I have it as, hey, because if I'm writing personally to somebody, if I'm writing to my friend, that is something I would put in a subject line. So you can't— it can be seen as very, very phony and blatantly manipulative if you put something that doesn't seem like it's personal. It's kind of like if you go back to the direct mail example, right? So you've got a what looks like an A-Pile envelope. And for those who don't know, A-Pile envelopes look like a plain personal envelope.

Personalized, right? It's personalized, right?

It's personalized, right? But then the person opens it up and there's a coupon, there's coupons, there's a brochure, right?

Yeah.

Of course, I've just been scammed. So you got to use that one sparingly. I used it today, worked great. But again, Don't use it all the time. One of my favorite ones, one of my favorite ones is the bizarre, the National Enquirer type of subject line. And by the way, this is an actual subject line that I created, the Larry the Leprechaun. This, we're going to talk about it later when we get to holiday promotions, how I created an entire promotion around St. Patrick's Day. But talk about why the National Enquirer type of headline works, and then we'll address an issue that people are going to have.

So people find circus freaks, for example, almost irresistible. People find epic car accidents, even though they're at the opposite side of the freeway with the center strip dividing and there's no reason to slow down, everybody slows down and gawks over, you know. When there's a fire in a building in an inside an urban environment, people rush out and gather around to watch the fire, or if somebody's on a ledge threatening to jump. So there's certain things that if we're not hardwired to react to them, we might as well be. Why that is, so the question you posed, I don't know. I don't care.

Right, good.

That's right. The Freudian, the whole psycho shrink conversation at that level of why people—

It doesn't matter.

—want to line up at the tent and see the bearded lady is— I only want to know— How much money. —that they want to line up. Right. Right? Yeah. And so we know that 1,682-pound man runs the 5K marathon and wins is a virtually irresistible headline, teaser copy on envelope, subject matter on— people are gonna have to know the rest of that story. Correct. And then the trick is not to have the, oh, coupon effect that you just described with personalized. So, you know, Barnum was brilliant at this technique without getting people mad at him, and that's really the trick if you're going to do this, is how to do it in a way that everybody finds it fun and is not mad at you for using it. Right. So it too is relatively tricky.

Right. It's a more sophisticated— it's absolutely more sophisticated strategy, and for this one you really do need to tie it in. So there's got to be a— for me, I think that there has to be a logical tie-in to the subject line with the body of the email. What a lot of people—

you've actually You said bizarre, but in my opinion, you actually showed a different example. So, okay, talk about that. This really— your Larry the Leprechaun thing, see, I would put this in, in from characters, right? Okay, call this a from. Excellent.

So there's another strategy for you, from character, right?

Which is excellent. Again, it works better with customers, right? Sure.

Well, this will all go into customers.

Larry the Leprechaun is going to customers. So, you know, the— my Oscar the Obnoxious Elephant Elephant, and who I just trotted— I just got back off the shelf and used for a client, by the way. Named for a very obnoxious uncle of mine who used to pee in the kitchen sink rather than bother walking upstairs to the bathroom in their summer cottage.

Thank you for sharing that. There you go.

But so the, you know, these characters— S. Mouse, the famous S. Mouse Things from characters get opened. And so again, if we're playing that game, the person that owns, like Steve owns 6 pet stores, an email from Steve's dog may very well have a higher open rate than an email from Steve, particularly if Steve's dog has a weird and interesting name. So from Steve Adams' dog, Mortimer J. Five Paws, right? That may very well have a higher open rate. And I put this in that category. Excellent. In the bizarre category, I would put the 1,682-pound guy wins marathon. Excellent. Right. Excellent. So really, I think those are two categories.

Fantastic. So, hey, that's a bonus category. No, that's a bonus category. That's fantastic. Now, the point is to go in depth here. The final one is a benefit-oriented headline, which pretty much says it all. It's a benefit-oriented headline.

Well, so are you going to ask me about positive versus negative?

We're going to talk about that just right now. We were going to get to that just now. Oh, yeah. So let's talk about that because there's a lot of people disdain this idea, which is that— and here's the truth, folks— Negative subject lines almost always, that we have found, that I have found, get a higher open rate than the positive subject line. That's a fact, okay? It's kind of like the car wreck that you were saying. A lot of people though will say, well, I'm positive and I, I don't want to send out negative sounding subject lines. Let's talk about this because it's so big.

There's two sides to this coin, right? Benefit or fear, pain, disaster, tragedy, whatever. And you're absolutely right, if you are purely going to play the odds, you will almost always win with whatever the thing is, the negative, scary counterpart, tragic version of it, rather than the benefit side of it. Now, some consideration has to be given to where do I go from there? How do I bridge back to being able to sell solutions after I have scared or depressed somebody? But if you are going to play the odds, I mean, I brought— so this is an actual split test. So one version, and it's two sides of the same coin, is the end is near of chiropractic practice as you know it. Will your practice survive the crash? The benefit side, a new dawn of a new kind of chiropractic practice. Will you profit from this opportunity? Right, there are two sides of the exact same coin, right, is what they are. So in a split test, the first, the end is near one, outpulls the second 3.5 to 1, right? More importantly, the conversion rate on leads from the second is 3 times better than the first, and the full-year value of the customers from the second is 7 times better than the first. So if all you looked at was raw numbers, the negative one is the winner. If you track by source all the way through to customer value, the positive one is the winner. So you really have to know what you're trying to accomplish. And what you are willing to invest, because the positive one suppresses response on the front end. Right. Back to a conversation we had in segment 1. Right. Suppresses response. The negative one lifts response. But in terms of 12-month customer value, right, that whole equation is entirely— now, it wouldn't always be, which also says test. Right. And these are— this is the most easy easiest test variable there is, right? Two sides of the same coin, right? Half the, half the people get email number 1, half the people get email number 2. It's that simple. Now the only thing you have to be careful about that is if you repetitively test the same variable into the same list, you have to do it in random breakouts. The same group can't get positive all the side, right? And the same side can't get negative, right?

So again, uh, testing is, is so simple. You just take portion of your list, you split it up. And with email, I mean, this stuff is so easy now, is that— which most people— we're going to talk about sloth and things like that in another segment, but most people, they won't even do that. I mean, split it, take a portion of the list, and as you said it, and the numbers come in automatically.

Your test matrixes, when they are done purely, right, online this way, so a list divides in 2 or 3 or 4, and they get a different sub-subject line, right? And maybe first paragraph in order to make the email work. Then each one of those drives them to a site where half see VSL number 1, half see VSL— all this has no cost, right? It has no cost. And the unwillingness, as you say, of people to do it is stunning.

Absolutely. So, Dan, now we've, we've talked about subject lines, we've talked about negative subject lines. Let's talk about— we need to— we got— we've got it open, but now we need to get it read. Okay, so we've got the email, but we need to get it read. How do we go about getting it read? One of the biggest mistakes I see from our members and from people I've worked with is, man, they make it sound like I'm Mr. or Ms. Professional. And I'm a big corporation. Especially the little guys, or the small business owner wants to make it sound like he's a big company, and it doesn't sound personal. Talk—

address that, because it's a big problem. Well, it's not just an email mistake, right? Sales copy mistake, right? And you're right, you see it, you see it as a common mistake. It is in the context of the mistake of being uninteresting and boring. Right. And it is much easier to be uninteresting and boring in a corporate institutional voice than it is in a personal voice. So there's times when you must. There's some companies that I guess have no choice. But other than that, you are almost always going to do better when you are conversationally communicating. That's right. As one human would to the next. And see, readership is about both a sequential agreement and a constant agreement. And the person is predisposed to try and not stay with you. They got 6 million things to do. Email is by its nature disruptive. It's not as bad as a cold telephone call because I click to open it, but still it is disruptive. Most Most people let it disrupt their day. So therefore, their predilection is, how quick can I get rid of this? How quick can I get rid of this? If I was compelled by the subject line to open it, but if the first 2 sentences I can get rid of it, I'm getting rid of it. Right? And so there's a sequential agreement, I'm going to read some more, I'm going to read more, I'm going to read some more. And there's a minute by minute, word by word, line by line, am I going to read any more? That's right, right. So this is not much different than the almost bygone door-to-door sales guy, right, who his opening line that he said while the chain was still on the door had to get the chain released and the door opened a little wider, at least wide enough to shove his foot in it so it couldn't be closed. And then he had to have 3 or 4 things to say that would get him invited in. Perfect analogy. Right? It's a great analogy. And so the speaker who comes out on stage has people leaving, has people burying themselves in their devices, so they're leaving even though you don't physically physically see their bodies get up and move anymore. So in every selling situation, right, there is, will they stay and proceed long enough that I can get anything done with this person? And so one very quick way to lose them is corporate speak. So if you buy the analogy that the email is akin to the door-to-door sales guy, is akin to the speaker walking out on stage, is akin to the first 10 seconds of a television commercial, okay, if you buy that analogy, then try putting corporate speak in any one of those other environments and see how you do. Corporate attorney to the door and have him start with the disclaimer statement and see if he gets the chain off, right? Right. So, and even kind of stuffy corporations. So if you watch Fox Business News, I saw both the president of Ferrari and the president of Rolls-Royce. Fox US on the afternoon, the end of the day show on Fox Business News. And neither one of these guys is Mr. Charisma, right? But he's also not standing there being stuffy and professional and stodgy. He's not a corporate brochure coming out of his mouth. He's a human being having a conversation as best he can with another human human being that might be interesting to human beings watching. That's what the email has to be.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's go over some elements that you can put in your email and to make it sound more personal, to make it actually interesting so people want to read it. One of the keys to doing this, as you just mentioned, is to make it personal. And the analogy, even go to big companies, companies. It doesn't have to do with email, but when Wendy's stock was plummeting, who did they roll out, right? Dave Thomas, right? Same thing with Lee Iacocca. They made this into personalities.

You're reaching back, but you don't have to reach back that far. Okay, go ahead. All right, so, uh, when Apple was in the toilet, right, and they had to go beg Steve Jobs to come back— that's right— one, they didn't just put him in a back room and have him fix the company. They put him back out front as a spokesperson talking to people excitedly about— you know, Bezos goes on TV and does the Barnum drones are going to bring your shoes to you and drop them on your head nonsense. But he does it because it gets media exposure. It gets publicity. It fascinates people. It affects stock price, et cetera, et cetera. So you don't have to reach back that far. It is a contemporary thing in B2B and B2C that humanity and personality wins. Yeah, absolutely.

So here are just some things that you can include in your email. The thing to remember is that Part of what you're doing is you're selling you, depending on the business. In many cases, you are actually selling you. But you can write about your hobbies. But again, the beauty is if you can tie all of these into a message which is relevant, you can write about things that are happening in your family. I think a lot of people think, well, no one wants to hear that. My readers don't want to hear that. What would you say to that?

Well, so I think there's two things. 2 things about that. If it is true that your audience has no interest in you, if that actually is true, then A, you have made a whole lot of mistakes. Up to this point. Up to this point. And perpetuating that mistake rather than digging in and fixing it. Is a very costly, at best, dangerous at worst, mistake, because the absence of interest in you translates to an absence of preference for doing business with you, which then destroys price and profit margin. So when Warren Buffett talks about a business with a moat around it and not wanting to be invested in businesses that don't have a moat around them, there are different kinds of moats, but one of them is this. So if you reverse engineer backwards, price, premium price, or the ability to even sustain price, profit and the ability to sustain profit has everything to do with preference for a brand, a place, a person. And that preference, more often than not, has to do with an interest in the person or persons attached to that brand, product, or company. It's why nameless, faceless corporate institutions with executives they don't dare put out there go and buy celebrities. The reason they go get them and pay them astronomical sums of money, right? The reason Nationwide Insurance has Peyton Manning and a created character, et cetera, the reason Progressive has Flo, that they created, so they either buy them or they make them, is because they don't dare put their CEO or their VP out there, 'cause he will drive people away as if he had the plague. But they know this formula exists, so they have to now dip in their pockets and spend money to make the formula work. Denying the formula is brain-dead stupid. You've got to make it work for you one way or another. It really needs to work for you in all your media, but the media that is least easy not to read is most sensitive to this.

That's correct. I just want to give you an example here of how I did it from an email. This just shows the tie-in and the personality. If we could do the monsters. There's a email I wrote got one of the best responses. This is before I came to GKIC. A ton of sales. It was actually sales of magnetic marketing, by the way. A ton of sales of magnetic marketing, huge open rate, and the subject line was, "There are monsters in my bed." So again, that kind of goes into the bizarre, the weird, what the heck is he talking about. And so—

Well, no, most people leapt about you to a very different Easy now.

Easy, easy. Okay, this is touching now. This is a touching one. Okay, okay. So it says, last night at 3:00 a.m., my 4-year-old son David comes into my room and says, Daddy, there are monsters in my room. After he and I go on a monster hunt, albeit a short and groggy one, we both concluded that there were no monsters and he could go back to sleep. What does that have to do with marketing a business? A lot. You see, marketing has to come from our customer's perspective, blah blah blah blah blah. So very simple premise, all right? So the whole thing wasn't about my son, the whole story, but makes me human.

The structure is very simple. So the first paragraph is the engaging story.

Yes, that's how you tie it in, right?

The second paragraph is the justification bridge, right? How we get from the story to being able to talk about what we want to talk about. And then the third paragraph begins. Now, most people, by the way, and most corporate people would omit the first two things, right? And they would just start with, uh, our marketing has to come from our customers' And everybody would immediately go click, right? See, so the structure is very simple.

It's very simple. That's how you tie it in. Yeah, that's all. So this isn't rocket science, right? You just got to think it through a little bit, and the more that you do it, the easier it becomes. It just, it just happens. So that's, that's a way to do it. So I guess one of the things, Dan, the people, even though we've talked about this ad nauseam, is Mr. Ehrman's profession who says, I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer, I can't do this. So can I tell you a true story about Ms. Professional? I actually met Ms. Professional at a super conference, and she was the first big private client that I had. She paid me $40,000 to help her with her law practice. You know who we're talking about. And very good lawyer, very, very brilliant woman. And so So she hired me, she came to Atlanta, and I took her out to dinner. And we're at a vegetarian— this is when I was a vegetarian back then. I fixed that problem since then, by the way. So we're at a, we're at a, this vegetarian Chinese restaurant, and she shows me, she says, I send out an email every single week to my, to my, to my list, to my prospects, and to my clients. And she says, here's the email. And I start reading this email, and it's all about the newest tax slaw and the whole— I literally put it down and said, this is the most boring email I've ever read in my life. And so I went through like a little tutorial like what we did here, nowhere near as in-depth as this. And I said, I want you to write a personal email. So she sat down there at the table with her yellow pen and she wrote an email. The subject line was Fake Lamb, because that's what we were eating, Fake Lamb Atlanta in You. All right? And she wrote an email which tied it in, everything that we just talked about. Somehow she figured it out, tied it in. I say, okay, that's good, that's a great email. You're gonna send it out tomorrow. She's like, no, I can't send it, I'm a lawyer. I said, no, you're gonna send out tomorrow, right? So the next day I'm with her and I say, let's send out that email. So she sends it out and I'm like, wait, watch this now, watch this, this is gonna be something, right? And so that email goes out and like 5 minutes later she gets a response. Now she's never gotten a response from any of her emails. I'm like, "See? See, look at that." She opens it up and the person says, "Why the eff are you sending me this kind of crap? You're wasting my time. What the hell, are you insane?" Like that. I said, "At this point, I'm glad I cashed the $40,000 check, right?" So the next email comes in though and says, "Oh my God, Alexis. Oh my God, I haven't heard from you in forever." This email made my day. Wait a minute, I haven't heard from you in forever. Meaning she's been opening— it hasn't been opening to be reading or reading, deleting. Of course, the next one says, oh my god, that was so funny, great to hear from you. The next email is, you know what, I came in 2 years ago for an estate plan and I didn't, didn't get it then, but now I'm ready, please give me a call. $5,000 sale. So the point is, when you do some of these strategies, Dan, First of all, they work, but also you are going to piss some people off.

Well, especially if you are sort of making a very sharp right turn, which I had to do on purpose. Right. Because the people who— the small percentage of people who are paying attention to your boring, you know, institutional stuff. Right. Right. Are like shocked, right? And some may have the same predilection she does about professionalism and so forth. But the good will outweigh the bad, as in your example. And in this or in a broader conversation of advertising, marketing, selling practices, et cetera, you cannot allow yourself to be governed or significantly affected by those who disapprove of you, pretty much for any reason. You gotta focus on the people who are responsive and can be reached and can be influenced and can be persuaded and can be kept. So you will very often hear those kinds of complaints. I've heard them my whole life from the non-buyers. So ironically, we tend to attach high importance to the least important squeak that we hear, right? And many people don't even— in businesses unlike hers where there's more frequent purchasing data to look at— many people don't even go bother to go look at the squeaker's spending contribution. Right. Right? If they did, they would often find that the loudest squeaks are coming from the lowest value customers. So the American Sniper movie is, you know, the big conversation, of course. And there are people strenuously objecting to that movie, most of whom have not bought a ticket and have not seen it, right, and are not going to buy a ticket and are not going to go see it. So for, for the movie studio to make decisions about the next movie they make based on that squeaking would be brain-dead stupid, particularly when you look at the fact that it is now the within a day or two of being the highest-grossing R-rated movie in the history of the movie industry. It had the biggest opening. It's got the biggest spread between cost and gross of anything that's been done in a decade, etc. No, you would go replicate this, right? Right. That's why Stallone is currently filming Rocky whatever number it is, Rocky 48, Rocky vs. Irritable bowel syndrome, and he's talking about doing Rambo 32, right? He doesn't care about the critics. Don't want none of that. It's the people that buy tickets to go see Rocky. That's exactly right. And that's what matters here. That's exactly— so often the Mr. or Ms. Professional is all constipated about peer approval/disapproval opinions who pay none of the bills. Staff approval/disapproval opinion who pay none of the bills. Squeakers who are the worst customers or clients of all who pay damn few of the bills, and they let that affect them very disproportionately to how the market response.

Absolutely. All right. So let's get some questions here from the chat. This comes from Stas Ray. What if you have a list that you've never sold to? How do you test to see if the list is hot? Do you test to see if this is hot? I'll let you handle this one.

So first of all, my sympathies that you have a list you've never sold to. Right. Right. You know, the the greenies say that the best time to have planted a tree was 20 years ago, but the next best time is today, right now. You are undoubtedly going to do damage. Absolutely. Because if that means you have a big list and you haven't sold anything to them, that means you have been, you have been feeding them for free, and you have been entertaining them, informing them, whatever it is you've been doing for them and you've been doing it for free. You are going to create some damage when you change that relationship with them. In most cases, so what? Because the ones who run from now being offered an opportunity that costs money are an illusion for the most part anyway. However, if you want to play carefully, A, you carve off— if it's a big enough list, you carve out only a segment of it and you try different— you try an approach with that segment, you try a different approach with another segment so that you do do your damage in a smaller, confined, and more controlled space. If you have hard addresses, you attempt the sale offline rather than online, so you are not changing the thing they're used to getting. You're only changing the relationship. If you have a big enough list and you, um, are going to sell something at a good enough price point, then lead generate into your own list, which again does not change as abruptly or blatantly what you've been doing with them. So now you offer them a lead generation magnet that they have to ask for, right, that gets delivered via a separate email sequence, digital delivery, or the mail. And that is now where you do your selling. You invite them to a content-driven presentation and then literally give them the option, right? So we're finishing up in 5 minutes. Those of you that want to hang around, we are going to talk about a resource that I have put together for you that I will warn you in advance involves a financial investment, which is fully guaranteed. If you don't want to hear about that, fine, and watch for the next email on Tuesday. If you do, you know, we operated for, well, I was on the tour for 9 years, the Success events tour, physical, live, 30,000 people in an arena. At a certain point during every day, The owner of that show did a 20-minute optional presentation on what the Bible says about your sales career. So program stopped. For those of you who don't want to hear it, you have an elongated 40-minute break. Up and leave now. For those of you who do want to hear it, and it included a Bible call and, you know, all that, stay put. So there's ways to approach this that will minimize—

won't jar them as much. It won't jar them as much.

But ultimately, well, even if you are— so Facebook is wrestling with this at this moment with Instagram. How do we start getting money? We got a billion users. We got a billion, but how do we get money? Because Wall Street is kind of impatient at some point with there being no money. So everybody really has this problem. It really is not a position you want to be in. You do not want to have a list that you cannot— can't at least periodically bring an offer to, right, and have them give you money.

Yeah, I mean, so again, strategies are absolutely spot-on. The other thing you could do, final thing on this one, is you could lead up to it to create anticipation for the thing, right? So, so start talking about the subject that you want to sell the product for ahead of time. That's another really good thing to do here.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. 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. 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.