The Secrets Of Email Marketing Masters with John Carlton and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #212

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish. And this is the I love marketing podcast.

Everybody. It's Dean Jackson. Today we have my longtime friend, world class copywriter and sometimes golf buddy John Carlton. So welcome, John.

Hey, Dean, how you doing? And thanks for, thanks for bestowing that honor of actually saying that I am a golfer because when I played you, I don't think I've come within 20 strokes of your score any of the.

Times that played, so. Oh, that's so funny.

But you know what?

We have fun.

We got humiliated by the Heat. The Miami Heat strength coach.

Yes, exactly. That's funny. The whole, you know, that golf is such an equalizer that one of these guys. I don't. It doesn't matter to me that, you know, if you're. Or maybe it's a different experience being, you know, knowing that I'm going to win versus experiencing it from your side. So maybe you have a whole different experience of it. I find it quite enjoyable. So, you know, thank you so much for coming to talk. You just got so much to share. I'll just share a little bit about how, you know, a little context for who you are and I'd love for you to kind of fill in a little bit of the, the backstory. But, you know, John Carlton, I've been John now for probably close to 20 years and you know, we've hit it off right away. John's just a super bright marketing mind and he's one of these guys who's a legend in the copywriting world. You know, he's hung around Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham. And what was the thing about Jay Abraham? You traded Jay Abraham, you know, free work for being able to hang out in his office. Is that what it was when, you know, in the 80s? Yeah.

What happened was just real briefly, I was a slacker until I was 33 years old. And I had this epiphany. I was sleeping on somebody's couch because I had lost my girlfriend, my job and my place to live all within a month and was literally living out of my car, sleeping on friends couches. And I just had this epiphany that if I wasn't going to change anything, nothing was going to change my life. That started this trajectory that got me into being a freelance copywriter, which is essentially an entrepreneurial position. You start your own business. And I was in Southern California just looking around for anybody who could share anything with me. Became an information hound. I took a speed reading course and read everything in the, you know, Torrens Municipal Library about marketing, salesmanship and psychology and all kinds of stuff. And Jay Abraham happened to be nearby. And through a confluence of events, I found him and made a deal with him where I would write for him in exchange for free run of his office. And he just shrugged. He said, sure, fine. So I got to be a fly on the wall watching him do what was then an outrageous thing, which was people would fly in from all over the country for a one hour consultation, which back then there weren't. There weren't any gurus out there, and there were very few marketing experts who would give you the time of day to a regular entrepreneur or a small businessman. So he was charging, I think $2,000 in the mid-80s. Back then I would just sit in the back room and watch him consult with these guys, kind of break things down. Jay is the guy who kind of invented or co invented the hot se, the entire idea, just bringing the people up on stage and then saying, what's your marketing problem? And then solving it right there. And Dean, you and I have talked about this quite a bit. In fact, folks, I'm trying to talk Dean into doing a book with me about the way we dissect people's marketing problems and then solve them. And it's not magic, but it's just from years of experience and being in all kinds of different situations and being able to figure things out on the fly. So JJ was just huge in breaking down that whole idea that everything is solvable. Every business problem is solvable. You may not like the solution, but there's always an answer. There's always a way around whatever the obstacle is. And that is a mindset change that just can. Can alter your entire life, your business life, your outside of business life, everything. Mm.

You know, I imagine that it's amazing that if you were to look back and chart the trajectory of your career from. From then, if you. I mean, what a. What a great intro into that world. Right? Your first thing is you're. You're at what you like to call it, action central. You're there in the. In the mid-80s. There's nowhere other, you know, nowhere like Jay Abraham's office in California if you're in direct response marketing or.

Well, I.

That whole world.

Right. Yeah. I was working in agencies at the time too. I was freelance. I became this kind of go to freelancer for the agencies which were the big New York, Madison Avenue agencies. They all opened direct response offices in Los angeles in the 80s. For some weird reason, they only lasted about five years. And then they all closed them. But at that point I just happened to be there and I became the go to direct response guy because I had done all that research over the course of six months, reading everything, literally reading everything, because I thought I needed to catch up to where these guys were because I was in my 30s and these other guys had been advertising their trials. Turned out that by doing any studying at all, I was light years ahead of everyone else. So I was seeing how inept the advertising agencies were which were getting all this money. And then I got it through Jay, this glimpse into the entrepreneurial world. I met Albert at Jay's office and it turned out there was this whole secret group of people doing essentially street level direct response marketing who worshiped guys who had been dead for 60 years, like Claude Hopkins, John Caples, you know, got guys like this. It was like, it was like secret knowledge. And it was, it was just an amazing time. Now, of course, it's all, it's, you know, a lot of the books that people now take for granted were out of print. Then when I was, when I was with Gary Halbert, he paid $1,000 for a mimeographed copy of one of these letter books, the Robert Collier letter.

Robert Collier letter book, Right. Yeah.

Which had been out of print for like 10 years. It's now back in print. But a thousand dollars for a mimeographed copy, you know, it even stank a little bit of the, of the alcohol with, with mimeographs. And it was worth it because it was just. This was. You know, we were like Harrison Ford in, you know, after the Lost Ark. You know, a lot of it was finding these treasures and then trying them out in newspapers and in direct mail and, and, you know, when, when infomercials first arrived through cable in the, in the mid-80s, we're right on top of it. You know, we. It was just, it was hilarious the way we were making up things as we went, because there were no prototypes, there were no models to work from. And then when the weather came, I was primed to just walk into and say, oh, okay, here's another vehicle for reaching people, you know, with ads, for finding new audiences, for developing lists, for doing. I totally, you know, groped the, the capacity of the web right off the.

Bat, which, which a lot of old.

School marketers did not. They were kind of wary of it. And, you know, they saw what I was saying.

Yeah, that's what I was saying to you before we were talking as one of the guys who's really bridged successfully You've taken, you know, been there and gotten such a great offline foundation and now has had great success online too. And I think, you know, the big thing is that, that, you know, the grounding is really in the psychology, isn't it? The behavioral psychology of how people respond and why people do things and what motivates people and really understanding all of that.

Well, there's two sides to that. One is, as you say, the discipline that was needed to write direct mail and infomercials and print and other things because you had to fit a certain number of words into confined spaces. It's like you could literally write a 10 page email today and send it out. Web pages could be a hundred. And people have done 100 manuscript pages worth of copy for a web, you know, landing page. I mean, there's no limit to it. You can use video, you can do all these things. Back then, space was a confining issue. Deadlines were very real. If you missed a deadline for a magazine, you know, for an ad in a magazine, they would run a blank page or they'd run another ad. Your ad didn't make it. So the discipline was very, very good. The other side of that is something you and I have talked, which is.

The fact that we're, we're introverts.

And you know, as introverts growing up, we had to observe the humans around us because, you know, the, the way that you and I can get on stages in front of 30,000 people and, and be fine on stage and talk, you know, we get off and we're terrified the whole time because we're introverts. We're not extroverts, but we know how extra extroverts work. We observe people. We are students of human behavior. And I actually have a degree from a California university in psychology. Now, none of what I learned then, you know, is helpful to me. But the, the doors that it opened, the idea that there were certain types of personalities, that people did behave in certain ways, that there were ways to study that, how people behave, that there were certain categories that people went into. All of this opened the doors that then later, outside of academia, I continue to steady people both. Every time I go to the mall or I hop in a car and drive somewhere or go to a party or meet people at a seminar, I'm observing and I'm looking and I'm cataloging this stuff and I'm paying attention because that's how you communicate with people. That's how you sell to them. Extroverts have A disadvantage in that they don't need to mimic what introverts do so they can go their whole lives without understanding what goes on in the head of an introvert at all. To me, that's a disadvantage. The advantage is that you and I can go to a party and people will think, God, those guys are outgoing and wonderful and an amazing, extroverted, funny guy. We're winging it, man. We're playing a role as we go there. When we get back from the party, we're exhausted. We need two days to recover. How, yeah, we understand how people work that that's how you can tell if you're an introvert or an extrovert. If you don't know, nobody is pure one or the other, but you know you're going to be mostly one or the other. And the way to tell is when you go to a party and you come home, are you exhausted or are you still thrilled? Extroverts come home from a four hour party and still want to, you know, still want to, you know, the after party. Yeah, yeah, go to the after party. Introverts leave me alone for a couple of days, you know, I need to read and think and stare at the wall.

So, yeah, so, so in any way.

This, you know, it was great that I was doing this all my life anyway just to survive, you know, to. Introverts are very much an oppressed minority in the culture, especially in an extroverted culture like, like the United States. And you know, so when I got into copywriting, it was like, wow, this is great. The first thing that you do as a copywriter is you figure out who you're writing to and what, what motivates them, what turns their knobs, what excites them, what is it they want, they need? What do they know that they want, need? And what don't they know that they want, need yet? And how can you get their attention? How can you keep them riveted on you as you go through the motions of presenting a sales angle and then close the deal? How can you get that conversation going, that just you and me talk and conversation that is so magical in the marketing world?

What were your, like, practical. Do you recall the insights that are like vector changing? If you look at the trajectory of your time from you're brand new and you're reading everything and you get an intellectual understanding of, of, you know, all the book knowledge that's available that you did, and then you go into Jay's office and you're exposed to that entrepreneurial world and you're, you know, hanging around guys that are reading thousand dollar, you know, bootleg copies of a book from like you said, guys that were dead for 60 years. You know, do you remember any of the insights and the things that you were to that you applied and got confirmation? Because an experience of something, experiential understanding of something is very different than an intellectual book understanding of it.

Yes, and that's a brilliant question. I mean, I could write an entire book just based on that one question that you floated. But to be succinct and pithy about it, the big breakthrough was when I started. I was writing for the agencies which wanted, who wanted very bland copy. You know, no personality, no titillation. They certainly didn't want to use slang. They wanted grammatically correct, nice little tidbits of, of copy to go out to mass insurance mailings and things like that. The most boring crap on the planet. And by realizing that the entrepreneurial world was a little more of like the.

Wild west, I left the, you know.

I was one of the up and coming writers for the largest direct mailers in the world. The guys who sell health magazines and financial newsletters and things like that, which is a little more wild. These are some of the best copywriters. What I call the A list are the guys that work for these largest mailers. Because there's a lot of money there. It's also boring as hell. And when I discovered Halbert, and this is one of the great epiphanies I had, Dean Halbert would never be able to write for the largest mailers in the world. Or if he did, it'd be a very short gig because he insisted on injecting massive amounts of personality slang. Just an attitude, just, you know, the writer became a part of the paradigm there of the entire thing that was going on for the big, for the agencies and for many of the largest. It was like Reader's Digest versus Screw Magazine, you know, it was that wild. And it was like I didn't even think twice. I turned my back on a million dollar career with the big mailers and just went off into the wilderness with Albert. Going after the entrepreneurial world where everything I knew about human behavior, everything I knew about getting past the sensors, everything I knew about getting past the governors we all have in our head, you know, to get right down to it. And that's when I developed what you and I have been talking about, what I call just you and me talking copy, which is every piece of copy I wrote. I wanted it to seem like even if it went to 100,000 people, whether in direct mail or in a magazine or a newspaper or later online, I wanted the person reading it to have that experience that it was just me and him sitting in the corner of a busy room leaning forward. You know, that urgency that when you see two people talking and they're fa. You know, they turn the chairs around and they're facing each other, leaning forward and talking urgently and they're very focused and they may even be looking at each other or they're, you know, but, or they're turning their head so their ears closer to the other person's mouth. That kind of urgency, just you and me talking, that, that was an epiphany for me. That sense of you're not writing to a, I'm not writing to everybody who's, who's a golfer. I'm not writing to every businessman, you know, in a certain market. I'm writing to one guy at a time and then we're going to multiply that. So, so you, you know, so if you can find the essence of the person in that market, you know, we call. Evan came up with the idea of the avatar, which, which I think is very good. The whole, you know, it, it doesn't matter how you name it or how you describe it. You, you know, most markets do not have one single person that everyone else is exactly like. But there is this essential character to the thing. In certain businesses, everyone that you're going to be writing to is concerned with the bottom line. They're in a changing industry, a lot of competition. You know, it's, it's, you know, there's, they're going to be concerned with the bottom line and with immediate results. For example, in other markets, it may not quite be that way. It may be that they're more concerned with keeping the high end clients. You know, they're going after a certain segment of the market. So it's, it's a, it's, it's a whole different paradigm. Other people are involved. You know, I deal with people who have, you know, who run accounting services for trucking lines, for example. You know, it's just, and to get into the head, what do they need? What, what is different about the world than say the guy who runs a hamburger stand in, you know, Nairobi, in the Nairobi desert. I mean, there's, when you start breaking all of this down, you start to get to the essence of the humanity who you're talking to, who this other person is, even though he may be one of a hundred thousand and you'll never see him face to face. So.

Right.

What we basically call that, Dean, is salesmanship. But it's such a lost art and it's such a. So many people have such a confused idea about what salesmanship is that it's a great advantage. Once you realize, wow, you know, just getting inside someone's head, walking a mile in their shoes, and not trying to talk at them, over them or through them, but talk with them and really. And really give them the sense that they've been listened to. Even though technically in email and direct mail and Ryan, I can't hear what they're saying, but if I can predict what the conversation is in their head, if I can get into that, as Dan Kennedy called it, the conversation already going on in their head. Yeah. Conversation that may be keeping them up late at night. The conversation that, you know, they've had because every guy you've met in this industry or this particular market you're after has this conversation going on in his head. How do I reach more people? Why? Why are people returning my product so much? Why? You know, why is it so hard to be in business right now? Why? You know, why does everything go wrong at once? Why can't I get good employees? You know, why. Why is the competition winning with an inferior product to mine? You know, all of these things. And once through experience, once you start understanding that, then it's, you know, it's super easy to get the conversation going because it's the same as meeting somebody face to face for the first time or the ninth time if you're going to somebody on your list and it's like, right. You know, if you're meeting them again, remember they're their damn name, you know, and. And remember that they're married to Susie and their kids in. In a special music class, you know, and, you know, it's not hard to do. You know, I learned with salesmen, including Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert, who started their careers going door to door, you know, talking about old school stuff. This is where if they didn't make a sale that day, they didn't eat, they were sleeping in the car, and they may not have dinner. They. They had to sell. They had to find a way to sell. I think Gary sold encyclopedias.

I forget what Jerry sold, but it was everything. Shavers and vacuums and billboards, all kinds. Everything.

Yeah, yeah. So you have to learn. And one of the things that I learned from those, you know, streetwise salesmen that you don't learn from the intellectually, you Know the guys who learn from books, which. There are a lot of gurus, so called gurus out there who just learned everything from books, which is fine, they can share you information, but that, but that human to human stuff has to come from dealing with humans. And one of the things those guys, one of the stories that all those guys told over and over again was having thought they made the sale and watching in horror as the person maybe had. The one guy talked about, excuse me, having a client across from him at a table, have the checkbook out with the pen hovering over the checkbook. And then he decided, I got the sale. So he relaxed, he started talking about baseball and stuff, he said, and before he knew it, the pen was gone, then the checkbook was gone, and then he was being ushered out the door and he realized, you got to close the sale. The sale ain't close until it's actually closed. These kinds of small things. It's relatively easy, Dean, in any market to get somebody to say, huh, you know, that's a, that's a pretty nice thing you got. That's a nice product, or that's a nice, a nice service that you offer. And you know, maybe someday down the road when I really need it, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look, you know, look you up and I, I think I may buy that down the road. That's easy to do. What's hard to do is to say, is to say, okay, I got it, I need it right now. You know, I, you know, I wouldn't. I want to get it right now because I want to make sure I get one and they're not gone by the time I make up my mind, I'm done. Let's do this. Can you get it to me faster? I'll pay, I'll pay extra for, for fast.

Right.

But all that kind of big difference between those, those two points. And that's where a lot of marketers get tripped up.

You know, it was really like it taking. It's almost come full circle in a way, the way I look at it now that, Excuse me, you're saying that all of that copywriting knowledge was all founded in salesmanship, right? In real being person to person, one person at a time, belly to belly, as they say, and getting the immediate feedback and being able to adapt on the fly and know where to go and how to direct the conversation or steer it towards the sale. And then when you're tape, when you're taking that and say from when real, when you were doing all the copywriting in the 80s and the 90s without the Internet, what you really had to do was almost create that whole conversation, create that whole arc within the sales letter. Right.

You couldn't get the feedback.

You had to. That's why it was so important to really do your, the thinking ahead of time. Like they say, you know, measure twice, cut once. That you're really thinking through what is going on inside the mind of my ideal prospect here and what I say. Yep.

Let me, let me interject here. This is just like that book that you and I are talking about writing together, which is there are only a few marketing answers or solutions in the entire world. In a conversation with somebody, if you're selling vacuums door to door, they may say in a hundred different ways, essentially, how much is this going to cost me? But they won't say it that way. They'll say so. So the experienced salesman knows that there's only a couple of things that are bugging them. Now there may be a dozen what we call objections to actually closing the sale. But, but the individual person may voice them differently. They may not say anything. They, that may be their way of having an objection is they're, they're just, they're so lost. They just, they're scared. They're scared of being taken. They're scared their spouse is going to be mad at them for having bought it. They're scared. They're know it all neighbor or brother in law, you know, is going to make fun of them if it's a mistake. You know, there, there's a lot of terrifying stuff. So in that copy that I was writing, what seemed like, you know, reading someone's mind was really just knowing that all of the objections to human, to the human experience of being sold something or being persuaded comes down to a handful of very, very common things that humans do. And again, they're, they're, they're either scared, they're, they're scared of their own sense of greed. The fact I really want this, therefore I better be really, you know, you know, sensitive about buying and maybe I better put it off, you know, and what's the wife going to say? What's Joe going to say when he finds out? You know, they're going to laugh at me and a dozen other things. So you can actually kind of predict. So in the ad you might say, I'll bet you're wondering how much this is going to cost. Right? Y. That's what I would do if I was, if I was in your shoes, you know, so, so here Here, right here. Here's why it costs what it is, blah, blah. And you start to handle these and you'll, you'll counter 90% of the, of the major objections. You may not, you may not counter them all. And that's why we operate off of, you know, 5, 10%, you know, response rates in direct mail, things like that are just, you know, that would be astounding. A lot of the classic guys were getting 2% on, on large, on large lists, but that was enough to make it, you know, to represent a fortune. But you know, you're still, you're still dealing with the human condition. And the human condition, as varied and wonderful as it is, can be broken down into knowable traits, habits, predictable actions or behaviors. And it's not, we're not, we're not Sven Gollies, you know, we can't persuade somebody who refuses to be persuaded. You know, there's no magic to it. There's, you know, people latched on to nlp, neuro linguistic programming, for example, which I did, which did not exist when I was in school studying psychology. So I understood it from the ground up. And I did everything, I followed down every rat hole in psychology, all the pop psychology asked and, and all of this stuff. So I know how these things are created. You don't get a special, you know, you can't hypnotize large numbers of people into doing what you want. You just can't. But you can reach other people in way where they feel the connection is real. And if you're an ethical marketer, it is real. If you have, you know, I like to say, Dean, if you have a great product that your, that your prospect really can use and it will make his life better, easier, will make him some money, will do the things that you are saying and his life is less happy or less profitable or less whatever because he doesn't have this, then shame on you if you don't use every persuasive right known to the marketing mind to get that product in his hands at the fair price that you're asking. That's what capitalism is all about. You know, I'm a, I'm a, I, I'm a former hippie, you know, anarchist, you know, free thinking beatnik kind of guy. But I embrace capitalism. I think it's, it's a wonderful way to get, to get information out there. And of course one of the things that we do in direct response is we offer these, these incredibly generous guarantees. You know, the bottom line is once I persuaded you, after you Decide later you change your mind or whatever, return it for a full refund. I almost never write ads where that's not the case.

Right.

The only time I wouldn't have that is if I was doing coaching, for example, and I've already invested a lot of time. And then he says, ah, you know, thanks for the 10 hours of coaching, but I want my money back. You know, then, then we, then we got to have a conversation, conversation about that. But if it's delivering a product or an information or, or a single service or something, yes, absolutely. You take away all the objections the person has and one of them is, I'm afraid I'll get taken. And of course that's where the guarantee comes in.

I'm going down rat holes here. No, but you're, I mean, you know, that's one of those things that I've really discovered that same thing. And I mean, I remember each one of these, like real insights have come from an experience that I see how it actually applies. You can hear and understand intellectually that a guarantee is a good thing. And you can hear words like risk reversal. And Jay was real big on, and still is on that. That's where I first heard that word, risk reversal. But what I really understood is there's a difference between risk reversal and risk reduction. And that a lot of people say risk reversal, but what they try and do is reduce somebody's risk, you know, and it's, it's the, the, the other.

Thing that, that you get it. Most people don't have to deal with large numbers of people in their life. You can get a job, I can't even say the word anymore. You know, work for somebody and, and have very limited contact with, with people, which may be dozens of people in your life. You know, contractors, you deal with suppliers, clients, things like that. But, but in general it's, it's a smaller number of people as a, as a, as a broad based marketer or a writer or a guy who runs, runs a marketing business, you're going to deal with a lot of people and your experience level is going to shoot through the roof as far as how you deal with people. And you start learning these lessons that matter, like just what you said about the difference between risk reversal and risk reduction, you know, saying that you understand that, but a lot of people don't understand their own actions. They don't understand that they're not reversing risk. They're actually trying to give a, what we call a conditional guarantee, which is fine if you know what you're doing. There's you, you. I've explained multiple conditional guarantees, and Jay was one of the masters of that, too, so he called it. He would say, here, here's the deal, and I'll give you, I'll give you the most generous guarantee possible. However, there's one caveat. And, and the caveat would be you have to read everything or you have to, you know, you have to agree to actually be on one of the. Do this. Yeah, yeah. Do one thing that's called a conditional guarantee. You've heard of the unconditional guarantee. I don't even care what your reason is. Just, just ask for your money back and you get it. No, no arguments, no, no nothing. It just happened. And that's the best kind of guarantee there is. But it's quite reasonable and in fact can add to the credibility of what you're selling when you put some conditions on it, when you just say, look, this is a reasonable, thoughtful condition that we put on this because we, because we're, we know that if you don't do it, it's not going to work. You know, all of these reasons, and this is, this is all great stuff that helps cement the relationship that you have with the person. You're a real person. You're asking something reasonable back from them. There's, there's communication going on and, you know, it's real humans talking to real humans. It's not some machine, you know, corporation that, you know, is essentially run by robots. Yeah. You know, it's, you know, it's just the more you can bring it down to the human level, people want to deal with people. They want to be listened to, they want to be heard, and they're quite willing to spend money to get things they want because on a visceral level, they understand how capitalism works. And they know from experience that they've been screwed time and time again by large corporations by making bad deals, by both them making a mistake and buying a refrigerator without looking for, without seen if it was cheaper at Sears, you know, and.

Right.

And they carry these wounds forever. You know, they'd never heal. And so you're dealing with, you know, the more experienced a person is in capitalism, as, as, as a client or as, as a prospect or even a customer, the more objections you're going to have, which is why the relationship is so very important. And a relationship means, hey, you know, if you're unhappy, I'm going to do what I can do to make you happy again. And that, that resolves a lot of the Issues that people have both for the first time buyer and for the longtime buyer who is a part of your house list.

Yeah, well, I think that that really goes back to, I mean, the things that you're saying there, thinking through the risk reversal, thinking through how that's all going to work. And you know, I had this clarifying question that I started asking several years ago, which was, you know, what, what would you do if you only got paid when your client gets a result? And that question, that's what I ask people often in like a consulting situation. That's the question I'll ask, you know, is to see, I want to see how certain are you in your ability to actually deliver the result that you, that you would be willing to put your. You getting paid ahead of time, you know, and if you've got something that you can, you're absolutely certain that can deliver that result, then some magic things happen because then you can make an incredible offer like that. And you know, what I always find is that it's less expensive sometimes to get the result for somebody than it is to convince them to give you money to get the result for them. And so that opens up a whole new world for you. And I say this like I'm really enjoying this conversation. And I think that this is really valuable for people to understand how real like copywriting legend thinks about the situation, because even though we're talking about email, we haven't really even talked about email yet. But it's just illustrating the point that it's way more important what you're saying than the medium that you're using to say it or how you're actually saying it. And that's what you're.

Yeah, I think one of the important things for people to realize. And let's, let's talk about email. It's still a relationship that, that you have and you have to decide who you are or who you're going to represent yourself as. And it's fine. You know, I used to tell, you know, people who wanted to be, you know, I've coached thousands of people to becoming copywriters and to write their own copy for it for whatever business they have. I've done, you know, 20 years of coaching and one of the things I say is that, hey, in real life you can be Elmer Fudd. You can be this boring, dull person who never engages with people. But when you write to your list, you have to be able to share the excitement that you have, get in touch with what, excited that what got them on your list in the first place, what their needs and their wants are. And usually if you're in the market yourself, if you're selling tires to truckers and you were a trucker for 20 years and you understand the trucker life and stuff, then that's easy. You can really get inside their head. If you're doing that and you've never been a trucker, then you better find out what those guys are doing and understand what drives them, what the passions are, what the emotional content of the decisions that they make are. I think most people you're dealing with probably here who are listening to this podcast or probably came to the markets that they're in organically. They, they shared it, they understand it, they've helped build it. They, you know, it wasn't a cold blooded decision to get into the market. I, I think that that's a fair thing to, to assume in most. When people, you know, really care enough to listen to podcasts, to go after coaching, to, to, to try to try to get better, and that makes it easy. But sometimes you think, you know, it's, you know, you know, let's, let's say you're an accountant, for example, or a lawyer. You know, a lawyer got into it because of some reasons at first and you got into it. You, you were a lawyer for. Now you're teaching other lawyers how to get their businesses going and do all this stuff. But your wife is, is bored with it or your spouse, your friends don't want to hear what you have to say about, about lawyering and business and stuff. There's nothing really exciting about your life that they care about, they don't want to hear about. They want to talk baseball. So you start to incorporate that when you talk to other lawyers, but you forget those guys are excited. You know, one of the best things you can do is to get together. Accountants. When accountants go to a convention, they get together, they're, they're, they're laughing so hard, they're spitting up their coffee and they're, and they're roaring and they're telling war stories, you know, at the bar and doing all this stuff, things they can't do when they're home because the family doesn't want to hear about it.

Yeah, I love that you could just see them when you say that. That is true, right? They're laughing. So I told them you said you needed 24B. I filled out 24A and every.

That's, and that's the magical element of being able to get into the conversation that goes. If you Are that guy who has something that these guys can use that may be a secret knowledge, knowledge that you've gotten over the years that they just haven't had the time to get. Or maybe you had a couple of lucky breaks in your life and you had some mentors who helped you get to a point where you now possess knowledge, skills or resources that you're willing to share for a certain amount of money to help these people get from where they are now to where they are they want to be, or where they think they want to be. Or maybe they don't even know where they want to be, but they want to be something different. Then you're off to the races. Then you can. Then that relationship becomes one of the most important ones in their life. And that just you and me talking, that sense of being off in a corner, facing each other in chairs, leaning forward and talking urgently about this really starts to make sense to both the person initiating the conversation, which would be the marketer, and the person on the other end of the conversation. Even if they're of the part passively reading because you're actually asking the questions that are popping up in their mind when they pop up, because you're actually going down that path of that conversation that's already keeping them up late at night. They feel they're participating in a conversation even if they're just reading an email.

Have you ever read the A Millionaires Notebook by Stephen Scott? Steven Scott, you may have heard that name. He was with American Telecast. They did the Total Gym with what's his name, Chuck Norris. And they did Richard Simmons Deal A Meal and Laurie Davis hair Care, all these big hits in the 80s and 90s. And so he is the guy who wrote all of those. And he wrote a book called A Millionaire's Notebook. And the book is worth getting just for the chapter on his explanation of how he writes an infomercial script and an actual script that he used it for. So he talks about Laurie Davis hair Care, for instance. And what he does is he will make a list of every feature of the of the product. Then he'll turn that into a benefit. You know, look at all the benefits of these things. Then he makes a list of all of the possible objections that somebody could have. And then he answers all of those objections like gets all of his best things. He does all of that before he writes a word of the script. And it was kind of like seeing the structure and the magic that he uses take place. Because if you know, for instance, that one of the things that somebody might be saying in their mind is, well, I've got really dry hair, so this probably doesn't work for me. If you know that that's an objection that somebody's have without sort of doing it in a clunky way like a Q and A, you know, which are always sort of poorly done and kind of setups for, you know, we ask a question and then you get to answer it is he'll know that that's the thought and then script things that will remove that objection without even addressing it as an objection. So he'll say something like the, you know, the formula in Lori's hair care is, you know, PH balanced so it releases just the right amount of moisturizers whether your hair is really dry or whether it's really oily or whatever. You know, addressing that in a way so that, that's going on in their background and that suddenly removes that objection from their mind. But that, that's an incredible, that was a great chapter in that book even.

Just to read that. That, that brings up a really good point. Some people listening may think that's a cold blooded way to go after a sale. And in the wrong hands it can come across kind of cold blooded. You could have just a, you could actually program some software to say, you know, do you have dry hair? Check yes or no, you know, yeah, you know, do you understand what PH balance is? Yes or no? And you know, it could be very, very cold. And nothing to do in the hands of a experienced salesman though. That's where the humanity comes in. That's where the conversation comes in. That's where the sense that yes, I do understand where you're at. And one of the more common ways to say is that I was there myself, maybe I didn't have dry hair, maybe I had the other problem, but I had a hair problem or. Yeah, that's why, that's why in so many direct response companies you get this, you know, the, the hero's journey. You know, I was broke. Yeah. And I had an epiphany and then I became. And, and there's. There's two reasons why you see that so much. One is that, that is the entrepreneurs journey almost. You know, so many entrepreneurs get so very good at what they do because they have no plan B. If they don't make it work, they're going to be living in the street, you know, it's unimaginable. So they're going to do the, they're going to go the extra mile, they're going to do the extra thing. They're going to stay up for two days, right in the ad. They're going to, you know, they're going to, you know, they are literally facing the lion in the jungle, you know, and they're. They've got to make good decisions. They've got to. And they're going to test and risk and fear go right out the window. It's like, yes, I'm afraid I'm doing it anyway. And those people sometimes rise to a position where now they're ready to share what they've learned with other people. And that's, that's the classic model for, for a lot of people who are sharing information, products or sharing services, they become consultants or they become coaches, or they have. They have something that's going to make someone else who is in a, you know, in a. In the same business they're in, but further back in the experience level. So they're going to help shortcut it. But that personal voice, that sense of, here's a person who's been there, that's an easy way, if it's true for you to connect. I can't tell you how many people I've. How many clients I've coached who had that experience but hid it because they were ashamed of it or they thought, nobody wants to hear my story. And you just tend to forget who you're talking to. To you. Two years ago, with a lot of your clients, if they just had that one or two or three clues that you stumbled upon for whatever reason, they too could then have the resources, the tools, or the motivation to be able to go to the next level or, you know, to solve the problems they're having or to, you know, to change things in a very positive way. So, you know, it all comes back to the humanity of, of the conversation. It's just, you know, it's okay to sell to somebody. It's okay if, again, if you have the product that's going to help them use everything you have, including the fact that they may come away thinking, wow, I want to go find, you know, I want to go find where Dean lives and just hang out with them. Because we have so much in common that, you know, and Dean, you know, I've been stocked in my career. I know you have most of the guys, and it's like, you know, I can't have a thousand friends. Yeah, I can only have a, you know, even 5,000 Facebook friends. I. My actual friends are only, you know, a dozen or so. Again, because I'm an introvert. But, you know, I don't mind branching out. And, you know, it's like I tell people, no, you can't come by. We're not gonna have coffee. But, you know, just enjoy the relationship that we have through the emails, through the blog posts, which are free, through the. Through the Facebook stuff. Enjoy that. That's our relationship. And it goes very, very deep. And people think they really know me, you know? Yeah, it's. You know, and I know it's the same with you.

So do you have, you know, do you have a thought or a memory of the first time or, you know, a time where you were. You had this thought about being that authentic voice and really doing. Getting inside their mind and that, you know, it's just you and me writing. Do you have, like, a memory of the letter or the situation that the ad or the letter that you wrote was your, like, confirmation of? Yeah, I'm really onto something here.

I will tell you. I have a disadvantage because I'm a natural writer, and writers always think whatever they've written is pure, unadulterated crap. And one of the interesting things about becoming a freelance copywriter is that my writing had to be done by a deadline. It was going to go out into the mail or into the mag or, you know, as, you know, on the radio or whatever, whether I wanted it to or had second thoughts or not. And then the results would come in. And I like to say, you know, for a copywriter, money is applause. The success of a piece is equal to a, you know, a guy who isn't selling anything, getting a standing ovation at a. At a seminar. You know, if you are selling something, you don't want a standing ovation. You want to rush to the back of the room, right? And, you know, if you're writing novels or something, what you want is to be a number one, you know, on the New York Times bestseller list. You know, and you may never meet any of the people. There may never be a second shoe that drops after you've written that novel. You know, you may be the next, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird. One novel and out, but in copywriting, you're looking for something other than a wow, that's a great ad. It's like, here's my credit card. And. Yeah, and that's a different thing. So. So that moment that I felt that I had done that kind of, you know, I kind of realized, wow, I'm. I. I'm in a zone. I've been in a zone for a few years. I. It's It's a level of confidence. It's a level of I don't care what you've got or who you are, what market you're in or what you're selling. I can sell it, and I can make people respond. You may not like what I do because my bag of tricks is deep, and the tools that I use, such as an outrageous headline, actually bringing you, the client to the forefront here, putting your picture on this stuff, you know, changing your offer, you know, slashing the price, you know, you may not like what we do to make this a success, but I can make it a success. And now it's, you know, it's got to be your choice whether you want to do this or not, and a lot of things. So there's a lot of things going on there. However, when I was writing my rant newsletter, I think I started in 2002, and I wrote for until about 2008, 2009, I was writing a newsletter a month to a very small core of people who paid a lot of money for it. And about the sixth newsletter I wrote, Halbert called me and he says, I have just turned over a glass because you just hit that stride where your voice has become, you know, your voice is now like. Like butter melts in. Into the brain. And it took me six issues to kind of get in that groove. So there is a point where that happens, Dean. So that's a really good, A really good question. And it's a. It's a benchmark, but I think it's different with each, with each person. And, you know, but again, that's why it's so much easier. Just think about what would you say to somebody? You know, we talk about, in my coaching, we talk about the elevator pitch. What would you say to somebody in the time an elevator goes from the ninth floor to the first floor, if they just turned around and asked you, you know, and let's say they're in their market, you're selling accountants. You know, how to make an accountant business, you know, first at the seams, and the guy's an accountant, and he says, so what? What do you do? What do you say in that short time the elevator is going down that gets him interested, that makes him think that you have some credibility, that wants him to further the conversation because you haven't got a lot of time. And most people can't do that. They wander off and they're. They're on tangents and they can't stay focused. And you don't understand how the process Goes. So once you understand these things that just you and me talking, that conversation, that works in, in a short email, that works in a long blog post, that works an ad that repeats itself in magazines and newspapers, that works on the radio as a little, you know, 15 second, you know, burst. All of, you know, it always comes back to that, to that sense of one human to another, that the closer you can come to that, the more the person hearing it can think that that's a real person, the more successful you're, you're going to be. This is why corporations, you know, sometimes pretend to be, you know, they have a face of the corporation. Comcast has a very delightful woman talking about how wonderful Comcast is. You know, Comcast is a monster. It's a seven headed beast. But they put a human face on it. They really try to counter, you know, they're not trying to fix the objections, they're just trying to have their PR be a little better. So that's a, that's the example a lot of people come away with. You know, as they said, well, you know, salesmanship is trickery and stuff. No, it's not. It's really just channeling the human need that I know something you don't know or I have access to a resource you don't have, I want to share it. Hey, you know what? Because we're in a capitalist system, I'm going to charge you for that resource or for access to me, or for the product or whatever. Don't get your panties in a twist about this. This is how it works. As long, you know, this is how I make my living and it's a fair and equitable, you know, trade of money for resources or product or whatever. Get over that. It's astonishing how many marketers, you know, have trouble with that, asking for the sale, actually trying to close the deal. It's just. Get over your bad self. You're in this business to make money. If I have to spend $100 to get what you have and it makes me a thousand dollars, why in the world are you being jittery about this? Right.

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's really, when we look at this, I mean, the different ways that we articulate it and you, you know, you use the example of, you know, you're in an elevator, so you've only got, you know, the time of the elevator thing. And I've heard you explain getting into the mindset of, imagine you're sitting at a bar or a counter and you hear somebody at the, you know, next table or beside you explaining his problem to somebody. And it's just so happens to be a problem that you have the answer for all those things. The common element is that it's one person, is that you're, you know, you're. How do you articulate that to one person? You spend a lot of time imagining how that conversation goes. I say to people, oh, you've been to my office here in Florida. So I sit upstairs looking at the glass door coming into my office, and I imagine that door as the opt in page on my website. And imagine that when somebody opts in, they're, you know, opening that door and there they are. What would I say to them? And that's how I start that conversation. The thing that is really fascinating for me about these times, about what we have the ability to do right now, is I have to respect so much what you had to do in the 80s and the 90s when you were sending direct mail that you had to basically you pick this list of people. You have to pick the person who represents most of those people. And you had to zero in on that and make your best, you know, you and me conversation just to them. But what we have right now is you've got the opportunity to really break down the process, to throttle it, you know, to kind of go through a process where you're incrementally checking off the, you know, even if we talk about the AIDA principles, right? Attention, interest, desire, action, that you can get somebody's attention and interest and only continue with the people who are interested. And you have that ability where you can use sort of intrigue or curiosity or, you know, I mean, the, the thing that started this all off, everybody who's in the email mastery program, it started with, you know, a nine word email that revived dead leads. Sending somebody an email, are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? And you know, those simple nine words, no way, they say so much, you know, are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? Implies that I know that you were at one point, and it's invalidly because you came to my website several months ago and left your name and your email address. But to be able then to only continue the conversation with the people who respond and say yes. Now you're. It really is where email more is the perfect meld between those copywriting skills and sales skills. You know, because you get to now shape the conversation, you could kind of create your own adventure based on what people on, based on what people say.

Dean, Let me, let me add one thing to that the whole thing that you've accomplished with the nine word email and knowing that each word, you know, matters when you start stripping stuff down, adding the word still implies this whole deep psychological thing that's going on possibly unconsciously in the reader's mind. But my whole thing with whether I was writing something like a 15 second radio spot, a four page magazine ad, full page newspaper ad, a 24 page direct mail piece or something, the one rule that I kept in mind is that I wanted to be the one thing that he reads today that gets his blood moving. He's going to get, he's going to read a lot of that. He's going to hear a lot of things on the radio, he's going to, he's going to see a lot of commercials on tv. He's going to get, you know, a stack of mail. This was back at, back then. And today he's going to get a lot of email. It's going to stack up and he's going to add, watching his email inbox, it's, you know, stuff's going to come in, be that one thing that just nails them right, right in the sweet spot. If you, if you can do that, if you, you know, if you can hit him right in the sweet spot of his most dire need or his dire fear or his sweet spot of greed, what he, not what he just wants and desires, but what he desperately needs, what, what his life is incomplete without. If you can start the closer you can get to that and we tend to forget in our various markets that, you know, if, you know, I go off on the nail idea. If you're building a playhouse for your daughter in the backyard and you can't finish because you're out of nails, then the most exciting thing you can hear right now is that, hey, nails are cheap and I can get, I'll deliver them to you. Your house, you know, guaranteed it's the right nail you want, you know, you know, within an hour. I mean, there's ways to get into that. So what seems like a boring detail to someone else becomes very important to you because it's not about the. Yeah, it's about finishing the treehouse out back for sorry can start to play in it. And once you understand the psychological implications of this, nothing in marketing is ever boring. It's, it's, it's an exciting. It's the marketplace. Think of the marketplaces that you've seen in movies of the middle age, the medieval town scenes, you know, people selling stuff of ancient Roman marketplaces or even the mall. If you've ever been to the mall, you know, just, just the, the hustle and the bustle and the, and the search and the discovery that goes on. Oh my God. Look, this is, you know, my grandmother used to, to cook with one of these things. I didn't think they made them anymore. And you want to buy it. You know, all of that stuff comes into play and you're only dealing, as you just said with this. The more, the more refined, defined and, and set aside, you can do you, you can get the people you're after. So you're only dealing with the people who are excited, who do need it. You're not dealing with the looky lose. You're not dealing with the people who are trolling or just looking for something to do. You're doing, dealing with, you're dealing with a hotter and hotter and hotter audience. Then the conversation really gets to that point where it's urgent and it's necessary and there's going to be some action taken.

Yeah, I mean I could talk forever. John.

Yeah, we've reached the hour. I see that. So you said, I hope we didn't bore anybody. If anybody's interested in making tons of money and using email to do it, I think they should have been riveted to the entire call.

So I think you're absolutely right. But listen, how can somebody get more from your world here? What can we.

Oh, that's easy. Yeah. I've got one of the oldest blogs, marketing blogs on the, on the web. In fact we called it a web blog when I first started it and it's john-carleton.com j o h N-C-A-R-L-T o n.com over 10 years of free archives, lots of articles, lots of stuff going on and it's a one stop place where you can find out everything I've got going. I've got a book on Amazon, I've got Mastermind.

I'm gonna put a link up to your, link up to your book too, which is just fantastic.

Yeah, I have a lot of joy coming coming from that book which is actually a compilation of those newsletters I was talking about that I wrote. It's the best of and it's timeless stuff and it's very, very, very, very interesting stuff. You know, it's stuff that wasn't available when I started my career. So it's the number of resources to people just like unbelievably rich and confusing. So find people that you trust, find people you connect with. Like like, like Dean, like me. Like, like you know, somebody connects with me and somebody connects with like Jeff Walker. Probably going to be two different types of people. So you have choices at the. Find somebody you connect with and then kind of go deep with them.

That's the whole thing that.

Yeah. You know there are p. I've seen I. The eyes and people when they walk into Dean's private office down, down in Florida, it's like their eyes light up and it's like they've just broken into the biggest candy jar in the world and they're going to spend some time with Gene, with Dean, mining his mind and you know that's. There are so many options out there for people. Find somebody you connect with and you know, go. Go deep with them. That's.

That's a wonderful.

Yeah.

I, you know, I appreciate you doing spending the hour. This was the whole. My intention here was to you know, introduce people to you know, to all the coolest people that I know that you know, everybody.

Well, that's.

Well there's the thing is that you know, you're in a very. You know I hand selected the just the right people for this situation. I mean, you know I'm actually.

This is.

You'll find this funny but I'm. I'm speaking at super conference at the end of April. Dan Kennedy's event and so I'm gonna. I gotta break up the fax machine. I'm gonna send him a fax and see. I would love to have. Have Dan on this email mastery series. Having a guy who's so, you know, not who doesn't personally use email but makes a lot of money from email and have his insights on it too.

So that is funny.

That is funny. So there we go John. Thank you so much. John-carlton.com that's where you'll find it all. And I'm going to put up a link to both the blog and to John's book on Amazon and I think you'll enjoy both of them. So thanks for tuning in and we'll be back next time. Sam.