The Single Greatest Marketing Secret with Parris Lampropoulos - I Love Marketing Episode #324

There are basically only three ways to increase your sales. You can increase the number of customers you have, you can increase how much they buy from you, or you can increase how often they buy from you. Paris Lampropoulos is universally known as one of the best copywriters today. He's also a face on Brian Kurtz's Mount Rushmore of copywriters for the revenue he generated at Boardroom. If you'd like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links, and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 324. That's ilovemarketing.com 32, 2, 4.

I'm Dean Jackson. He's Joe Polish, and this is the I Love Marketing podcast. Is what I mean. He's known as one of the top copywriters in the world. Thanks for the pressure. It should better be good. No, but any idea of any dollar figure of what your copy is produced for clients? Like, any, even any sort of number? Last time I counted, it was somewhere like over 300 million. Okay, cool, cool. All right. You should keep counting. Oh, I'll go back. Yeah, I'll give you an update. Okay, so what's the name? I can't do it right now, but I'll let you know when. Give it up for Mr. Paris. Thank you, thank you, thank you. By the way, this is, like, the coolest invention ever. Like, people come up to you here. Here's a solution to your life problems. It's, like, awesome. So, Joe, I'm not talking about writing copy today. Sorry. But what I'm gonna tell you guys about is the single greatest marketing secret I ever. I learned it back in 1995 from Jay Abraham. Anybody familiar with Jay? All right, cool. So it just the moment I heard it, I said, this is great. I'm set for life. I know I'll never have to worry about money again. And those of you who are veterans in the direct response, been around the block, been doing this. You probably heard this before, and you're probably doing a lot of it. But hang in there, stick with me, because I promise you, you're going to hear it from a different angle. You're going to get some AHAs that can impact your business. Those of you who are new to the whole direct marketing thing, this is going to revolutionize your life. So I learned it in 1995. Eighteen years later, it's still the number one tool I use whenever I'm building a business, either for myself or for a client. I run everything through framework. We create a strategy when people implement the strategy, they can double their businesses sales very often within a year or two. And in fact, there was one case where we doubled sales every single year, four years in a row. That's a 16 fold increase. So you guys want to hear it? Okay, so this is, by the way, in copywriting, what I just did. That's called salting. Getting you guys telling you why what I'm about to tell you is important, then telling you the thing, then afterwards I tell you why what I just told you is important. So anyway, Jay says there's basically only three ways to increase your sales. You can either increase the number of customers you have, you can increase how often they buy from you, or you can increase how much they spend every time they buy. Right? Pretty obvious, right? Like a lot of things, big ideas, it's pretty obvious. Well, here's how this plays out in the real world. Can somebody do me the honors? I'm going to hand somebody a calculator. How about you, Denise? Okay, so do Denise's, both lawyers. Go figure. So let's say you're like in the nutritional supplement business, right? And let's say you have 10,000 customers, okay? And let's say the average amount they spend when they buy from you, you're selling like $30 vitamins. And they might buy. Some people buy one jar, some people buy two jars, whatever. Let's say the average amount they spend per purchase is $50. 10,000 customers, $50 a pop. And let's say on average they buy five times a year from you. So 10,000 times $50 times five, what do you get? $2.5 million. So you're at 2.5 million dollar a year sales business. Okay? Now if you go up to somebody go, hey, I'm going to double your sales in a year. It just freaks them out. So we don't do that. What we say is, hey, how'd you feel about getting a nice 25% lift? And like, cool. I would love a 25% lift because it's a big enough number, but it's still in their comfort zone. So let's see what happens if we increase each of these by 25%. 10,000. Increase that by 25% and you're going to get. Did I do it right, Denise? 12,500 customers, $50. Let's say we get that purchase up price up by 25%. That'll give us 62.50 if I'm not mistaken. Is that right, Denise? And then they're buying five times. Now you're getting them to buy 6.25 times on average, right? So now let's multiply 12,500 customers by 6,250 times 6.25, and we get what, 4.882, 4.8882, whatever. 812. So we went from 2.5 to 4.8. We nearly doubled sales just by doing a little incremental increase on each one of those things. So this is the proverbial. Was it you who said little hinges who open big. This is the little hinges that open big doors. Swing those doors. So how do we swing the doors? Well, there's a lot of different things we could do. So one thing is something that Joe, raise your prices, right? Raise your prices. You could get that average order up, provided that you're not decreasing the amount of people who respond. What? Another thing we could do, what Mary Ellen talks about, change the channel, add another channel. By channel we mean another medium. So if you're only online now, try radio, commercials, tv, direct mail, space ads, lots of different stuff. Another thing you might be able to do is what we call optimizing. So you optimize your sale page on your website, you optimize your pay per click campaign, you optimize your banner ads, whatever, right? Another thing, upsells and cross sells. You guys know what that is? Anybody who does not know what an upsell or cross sell is, okay, an upsell is when you go to McDonald's and you order a cheeseburger and they say, would you like fries with that? So anybody who's ever bought off an infomercial and they say just 29.95, there's no fricking way on hell you're getting off that phone spending 29.95. They're going to offer you the deluxe package and the this and the. And by the time you're done, you know, they've got you for, you know, 200 bucks or something. So that's what we call by upsells and cross sells. And another way. And so that would raise your average thing, average price. Another way to do it would be just mail them more frequently, sell them more stuff, right? Or as the Internet marketing people say, sell them more shit. So you just contact them more frequently, right? So all that stuff is going to give you the incremental lift you need. And again, the big. The little hinges that open big doors, the sum of the stuff, you've doubled your sales. Now, it's all stuff that you should try. But I'm going To tell you about two other things that are a lot easier than all this because this is a lot of work, a lot of manhunts. But I'll tell you about the two single simplest, biggest bang for your buck stuff. Guys want to hear it? All right, good. The first thing, and this is going to sound ridiculously serving, is hire the best copywriter you can afford. Don't hire me because I'm a pain in the ass and I take forever to deliver the copy. You can ask Brian, but yesterday Michael told the story about two people bombed. Third guy hit it out of the park. So anyway, back to the thing. So you could get from a 27 to a 200. That's like a nine fold increase just because the guy wrote different words. One guy wrote different words on a page than the other guy wrote. Basically you're taking one of your biggest problems and stressors and you're offloading it on someone else. Because these guys get paid on performance. They're a commission. And the only way they're going to make a lot of money if they make you a lot of money. And so instead of you racking your brain, how am I going to sell more stuff? Now it's his problem. Let him figure out how to sell more stuff. So that's number one. Number two, customer retention. There is nothing more important than customer retention. Nothing. Because you could get tons of new people in the door every day. But if you're not keeping the people you got, it's like you're bailing water out of a leaky boat. You're just never going to get anywhere. Right. It makes sense. Right? Okay, so a moment ago I said something about, you know, if you, if you contact more people, people more often to sell them stuff. Thank you. I'm going to suggest that you should be very careful about how you do that. Because if you just keep bludgeoning your customers with one sales pitch after another, over the short term, you're going to make money. Over the long term, you're going to start alienating them and you're going to get a lot of people unsubscribing from your list. Or they don't unsubscribe, but they just don't bother really read anything you ever send them. How many of you get stuff in your inbox that you don't read? Okay, I get stuff all the time. And sometimes it's because like it's a crappy subject line, but more often as I look at it, I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, this fucker's Gonna try to sell me something, right? Or maybe he'll provide me information, but the information's so lame that it wasn't even worth the five minutes that I had spent reading the thing. So here's what I want you to do. Number one, provide information and ask for nothing in return. You got to do that periodically. And if you're already doing it, try doing it more often than you're doing it. Gary Benzivenga said 80% free content, 20% sales pitch. So that's a tall order. But maybe if you're you, maybe you do two to one or three to one, do whatever you could do, right? And the second part, here's the part everybody misses. You want to make your sales emails, your editorial content emails look exactly the same. Not only do you want to make them look exactly the same, you want to make them sound exactly the same. You want to make everybody who does really hypey sales letters tone down the hype. Because when you're hypey, people go, oh, he's going to sell me something. So make your sales pitches sound more editorial in nature and make your editorial pitches, editorial content, sound more salesy in nature. In other words, get the energy in there, okay? And don't just give them useful information, because useful is boring. Your goal should not be just to be useful. Your goal should be to wow the hell out of them. Every time you send them something, just rock their world. So it sounds really hard to do, oh, how am I going to wow? But it's a lot easier than you think, because there's really two components to wowing someone. The first is, is tell them something new. Tell them something they didn't know before. The second is tell them something surprising. When you have novelty and surprise, you're going to cause the reward centers of their brain to light up like a Christmas tree. They're going to get a dopamine surge. So what you are going to do, literally, is you are going to get them addicted to your copy. Every time they see Bab Smith on the front line or Dan Sullivan or John Bowen or whoever it is, they're gonna just click on that sucker and read it. You're gonna get loyal people who love you and stay with you forever and buy a lot more of your stuff and spend a lot more money with you. Awesome. Thank.

Thanks for listening to this episode of I Love Marketing. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you'd like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links, and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 324 that's ilovemarketing.com 324.

Sam.