Neville Medhora obsesses about copywriting at Hustle Con

So as I was saying earlier, you guys have probably been bombarded with email from me. And I actually learned about it from our next speaker, Neville Medhora. So if you've heard of AppSumo, he's one of the guys who have made that so popular. They send out about 10 million emails a month, and he's the brains behind it. And it's been working pretty well. In fact, he has— he's actually created one of the top-selling copywriting courses in the whole world. 2 years it's done about $2 million in revenue just from one single copywriting course. So Neville's gonna touch upon copywriting and how he's been able to use that to grow his business. So let's welcome Neville Medhora. Alright, so what I'm gonna talk to you today is this formula. It sounds really scammy, but like this formula that everyone in your company will write better, but it's actually true. So I'm gonna give a little background on this. So at AppSumo and a lot of the other companies I'm involved with, we send out a ton of emails. I do a lot of consulting for this for all sorts of companies just like yours, big companies, mid-sized companies, and we see their email and their copy every day, and they all make big mistakes. So let me, if I could figure this stuff out. Alright, so this is a typical kind of email that you'll see in the morning when you're taking a dump, checking your phone, and you'll delete it pretty quickly, right? Now the weird, that is by the way how most people check their email. And so the funny thing about this is they have really high click-through rates because look at all this. There's like view deal, there's images everywhere, there's text, there's enough things on this page to probably grab your attention at some point, right? So probably click it, but the problem is with these kinds of emails, low engagement. Like there's nothing really to do with this email other than click out of it and get out of it as fast as possible. The other thing is people are really quick to unsubscribe, and if your business is dependent on email, or you know how hard it is to get white label email delivery, all that kind of stuff, then that's money lost. So I want to talk to you about a different style. The total opposite of this kind of newsletter style email is the more personal looking. Yo, y'all update my slides? I don't think y'all did. So this is a very personal looking— sorry, this is going to be a little interesting. So this is a more personal-looking email. It's just text, it's like from a single person, so it'll be like at the end, "Sincerely, Neville," you know, it won't be from AppSumo, it won't be from your company necessarily. And so the thing about these is they have pretty good click-through rates. It's not bad, it's just a very small decline from the newsletter style, but very high engagement, very, very high engagement. And the cool thing is people hang on to every word that you write if you write cool stuff, right? So if your copy is educational foremost, that's the number one thing that we put in. So I had this business called House of Rave. Up until 2011, I owned a rave company. I've never been to a rave in my whole life, but I owned a rave company, so light up and glow stuff. And so here everyone told me like, "Dude, you have to send out emails, like the money is in the email list, like it's like your personal ATM." They say stuff like that. So I'm like, "Okay, I'll make some emails." Basically what I did is I had all these people opted into an email list already that were paying customers, okay? So here were the old emails, and check this out, look, I was so proud of these, by the way. I can't tell you how ecstatic I was to send these out. Look, it had a date on the top, I designed that logo myself in Photoshop, I made all this shit in Photoshop myself. I took all these pictures, I made those big buttons, right, just very clickable. Like I said about these newsletter styles with lots of images, What happened? Well, it was like this. So the list size was 7,500 of previous customers that have already bought from me. Lots of opens, that's much above industry average because people click on them, but here's the thing, no fucking sales. So what difference does it make? Like it didn't matter. It didn't matter if I got a ton of opens, it's just no sales. And the profit, because I would put discounts at the end of these, I would do everything that you were supposed to. Put a discount at the end, I would make like $40 in profit. Meanwhile, Vertical Response, my email service provider at the time, cost $80 a month. And well, you just do the math, that was negative $40 every time, like I sent out an email every month, it was stupid. So then we went to this, oh, let me do something else, I think I kind of screwed up my slides here. So let me demonstrate for you the power of copy, okay. So I've got two envelopes over here, and they're both addressed to my mom, or we can say our mom for this situation, right? Mom, okay? So we're going to send her a little letter, and all we're doing is just putting a little piece of paper, stamp, address, and sending it off. This first letter is going to say, "Dear Mom." "Mom, I'm very busy right now. I don't have time to call, so I'm writing you with this letter. You know, Mom, not only are you responsible for my very existence, but you are the nourishment that has made my life sparkle." Aww. "I'm under a lot of stress right now, and it occurred to me that lately, I haven't let you know how much I appreciate and love you. Sincerely, Neville." Aww, very sweet, right? You just fold this up, put it in the envelope. Send it off. Now we'll take the other identical envelope, addressed to mom also, and we're going to write this. Same piece of paper, same stamp, same address, same envelope. "Dear Mom, if I wasn't such a long way from home, I probably wouldn't have the guts to tell you this, but the following has been true ever since I was born. You have made my life a complete living hell. I'm jealous of every person on earth because they all have better mothers than I do. You are nothing but a wrinkled up old bitch and the biggest waste of skin God ever created." 'Eat shit and die. Sincerely, Neville. P.S. Dad sucks too.' Then, we put this in the envelope and send it. Now, as you can imagine, there's going to be like a slight variance in those two envelopes, right? One, your mom will be crying and happy in tears. The other should be crying and never want to talk to you again, except maybe Sam's mom, because she probably hates him anyway. Sam, I hope you can hear that. So anyhow, that's the power of copy. Just a little bit rearranging the words completely changes the outcome, and we've seen this on split test after split test after split test. It makes a huge difference. And for those engineers in here, like listen up because sometimes I'll write really shitty copy, but we'll teach you how to fix that today. So the next thing I did with that House of Rave, remember these like these crappy newsletters, they looked cool, but they didn't perform well. Check this out. This is the next one. I started learning how to copyright from a guy named Gary Halbert. He's dead now, but he's had all this cool stuff. I started obsessing about copywriting. Every time I flew in a plane, I'd look at SkyMall and be like, "Ooh, I bet I can improve the copy on that one. I bet I can improve the copy on that dog bed." Like, it was really fun to do. And so I went through, and with the help of this formula that I'm teaching you today, I wrote This email, it doesn't really matter what it says right now. I'll give you all this stuff later at the end of the presentation. But basically, this single email, zero formatting, it wasn't even in a table or anything. No real customization whatsoever except a few bolds, and there was only really one link. It says, "Get your finger lights." I was selling light-up and glow stuff. "Get your finger lights." That's all. I had run this promotion through a regular style newsletter before, and it sold nothing. I ran the same promotion like this. The results, same size, opens were slightly less than the 35 before, but 120 sales in the first 2 hours. So I was very happy that day, like I made a lot of money that day. We sold out of all the product and people were ecstatic to try to get more. So the only difference was I just wrote good copy on that one, and I followed a style of copy and this formula that I'm about to teach you right here, and I just followed it exactly. Filled in the blanks, and then fleshed it out, and that was the whole thing. So does anyone know what this is already? AIDA, has anyone ever heard of that? A few of you? Kim, nice. Okay, good, so then everyone's gonna be surprised. Well, the magic formula is AIDA. Ah, y'all fucked up my slides, dammit. Okay, we're gonna have to roll with this. So here's the AIDA thing. A-I-D-A. So, what that means is attention, interest, desire, action. You may have seen this on that movie Glengarry Ross where he's like, "Ada, always be selling, Ada," right? But this is actually a formula that copywriters for like 80 to 100 years have used successfully over and over and over. And here's the thing, I hate using stupid formulas like this, but every time I try to divert from it, it fails. Every time I use it, it works. So, just of probably over the billion emails like I've written on that have actually gone out, This always works. It's unbelievable how well this works. Take a picture with your phone or whatever, and like I said, at the end I'll give all this to you. So what you're supposed to do is next time you sit down to write copy, have you ever done this? Like, you sit down, your boss or someone is like, oh, write this email or sales or pitch this person, and you sit down and you get like this like shitty computer typing-itis where you're just like, uh, dear sirs, we would like to introduce our product. It is very technical. It's like No one cares, right? So instead, if you just use this AIDA formula, it will solve that problem for you. So you get their attention, grab their attention, interest them with interesting facts, uses, stats, examples. Numbers work very well, testimonials work very well there. Desire, make them come to the conclusion that I want this. Like, don't try to like sell them, let them like be sold and then come to you and be like, "Ooh, that's really good." And then at the end, A lot of people don't do this. Tell them exactly how to buy. Do you have to click a PayPal button? What's gonna happen after that? Are you gonna get something in the mail or get something in the email? Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's gonna happen? So that's the basic outline of the formula. So in 1 minute, you can fill this out and have a basic structure of a sales page. So this can be used for an email, it can be used for a long-form sales page, it can be used for any sort of pitch to an investor or anyone. This is the scientific way that you hit people's brains to make them sell. Attention, interest, desire, action, okay? So for example, I'm trying to sell you this AIDA formula right now. I'm not trying to sell you anything for money, I'm just trying to sell you a concept, right? So what would I do for this? Well, this is the structure I use for everyone, no matter how big the company, this is the formula we always use. This is the formula they end up copying, and 2 years later when I check on how they're doing, everyone in the company is using this formula still, 'cause it's so good, this format. So what we do is write a couple of subject lines over there, the AIDA formula. Subject to, a formula that will make you and everyone in your company write better. So forth, so forth. And then for attention, I would just tell you, I can make you sell anything better with a small formula. Interest, when this formula is applied to everything, it usually has between a 60% and 300% increase in everything, emails, anything. Desire, every great copywriter for the last 80 years has stuck to this simple formula to sell, and it works because it's been time-tested. And then action, take out a sheet of paper and write the acronym AIDA. AIDA on it, or at least snap a picture with your phone, okay? So that's how I would sell you, and I didn't really have to like do a lot of brain stuff over here, it's just, you just follow the formula. So let's try to sell someone a concept using AIDA. Let's get someone to drink more water. Can I bring my water bottle up here? No, I had a prop, but I forgot to bring it. So if I was trying to get you to drink more water, I could just say like, hey man in the leopard skin suit, I could be like, hey, drink more water, it's good for you, right? And you'd probably be like, okay, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like big whoop, right? Now let's apply ADA to this situation. God, y'all really fucked up my slides, I'm sorry, they were way better than this. So one of the things I could tell you is like, hey man, do you work out at all? Oh, so you work out. So you go to the gym for like an hour each time or something like that. Well, did you know that like if you drink more water in your system, you actually get 30% more gains? Like the way your muscles work is they tear, right, whenever you lift really heavy weights. So whenever they rebuild, what do you think they're rebuilding with? That 70% water weight they're always talking about. So the amino acids react with the protein and the water to form muscle fibers. And if you have more water, an overabundance of water in your system, You actually get 30% more gains. This is like a proven fact, OK? So the next time you go to the gym, all you have to do is chug like a liter of water before, and you'll get 30% gains extra for the same workout, right? That's like if I filled up your gas— your tank of gas in your car and took away 30% of it. You'd be pretty pissed at that, right? Well, if you go to the gym and work out for an hour and I take away a lot of that time, you'd be pretty pissed also. So just drink an extra liter of water before the gym. And that's how I would sell it using the AIDA formula. Now, that's actually total bullshit. I don't know if that actually works, by the way. I just made that shit up. So don't go drinking a lot more water in the gym. I'm sure it can't be bad, but I don't know if it works. I took this slide out, but whatever. This is about length of copy. Copy is like a woman's— whatever. Grabbing, okay, so now, so a lot of people have this trouble, so especially in companies, big companies, like these older people will be like, "Oh, but you're young and creative. You could come up with these things. We can't come up with them." Engineers will typically give me that example, right? And so, here's the easy way to come up with, here's another formula to get writing really well. Also, how many of you have like startup kind of companies where you have like a webpage? You spent time putting up a webpage. Yeah, a lot of them really, really suck. And if you notice like the design, the trend in design is to put a really killer headline and then like enter your something here or whatever. This is the way you find those. So a specific result a customer wants, specific period of time, and then address the objection. That's it, that's the whole goddamn formula, it's super easy. So check this out, we'll do some examples. Kinda running out of time. So the end result customer wants, specific period of time, and adjust objections. Feel free to move these around and mix and match, or even try it out on your own company right now as I'm doing these examples. Feel free to write it out, whatever, don't pay attention to me. So for example, if you're like a consultant or something, the main headline, like the little quote-unquote elevator pitch, here's a one-sentence pitch, okay? Increase the conversions on your Shopify store in 3 days or I'll refund your money. Okay, that's pretty simple, right? Like, there's really, really no misunderstanding that statement. Otherwise, if you were just like, oh, I'm a consultant on e-commerce and we try to— it's just like use a bunch of buzzwords and stuff, you lose people. And frankly, it's also boring. So the other way is wipe away your debt before your tax return is due so the IRS won't call. That sounds like a really scammy ad. Then another one is link up your social media account in 5 minutes so you can post in one place but share on all. I think that's like Buffer basically. And then track where your customers click so you can increase conversions by this week. That's kind of a crazy example. So that's how you get these headlines. Like this is a really helpful formula. End result, customer wants specific period of time, address the objections. I don't know what slide they have next, so we'll see how this talk goes. Oh shit, you took out the other good stuff. Alright, so I guess I'm almost out of time anyway. If I helped you with one thing, I wanna tattoo this in your brain, AIDA, okay, A-I-D-A. It's like AIDS, but AIDA. It's really, really simple. So the next time you sit down and write an email or something like that, for example, Sam made an autoresponder for this place, which happens to be packed today, and he used AIDA on all those emails. I don't know if you noticed that. You probably didn't if you didn't know this formula, but that's how he wrote them. He had to write a bunch of emails in a row, just use AIDA on every single one of them and it turned out great. So AIDA template, oh God, these are all old versions. Okay, so if you want all the stuff I sent over here, you can share it with your company or yourself or steal this presentation, whatever you wanna do. You can text NEV to 5500, it's not gonna collect your email or anything like that. I had a link other here, it's copywritingkurse.com with K's/hustlecon, you can also just download it directly from there. And that's it. So thank you, everybody. Appreciate it. Am I supposed to stand up here by myself? What happens? We got Q&A right now. So maybe 10 minutes of Q&A if there is questions for Neville. Come on down. I've taken this course, by the way. Oh, thank you. And it's very good. So I'm a happy customer. You will be too. Oh, first question. Here we go. Hey, so I've been trying to learn this stuff for the past couple months, and one of the things that I'm a little bit concerned about is that, you know, no offense at all, but like, I feel like a lot of the emails I get that are like in this style just sound like, like really weird and like douchey and like annoying. It's like, like the voice is just like, I hate this person emailing me. But it works. So like, where's the subtle cues as he's looking at me? So like, we get this objection all the time. Keep going. Yeah. So like, what do you think about like, I mean, we just got this talk from Chubbies about like being authentic to your brand voice and like, so how do you, if your values aren't around like this sort of attention-grabby BuzzFeed type stuff, like how do you, how do you balance that with wanting to write great copy? Obviously. Okay. So that's the number one thing that any company comes up to me and says. They're just, they'll see like AppSumo, which is It's written in the voice, it used to be written in the voice of this 500-pound sumo, and we make fat jokes, and quite racist jokes actually, all the time. Oh. Oh, sorry. I heard 3, sorry. That was kind of a bad execution of that. Did no one see that thing on the bottom? The first 3 people to bark like a dog get a free book? Ah, nice. I guess it's too small. So anyways, what the thing is about that, Is whenever— so people think you have to write goofy, right? They associate this with like goofy, like attention-grabbing kind of shit like that. This isn't about linkbait type stuff like Viral Nova or something like that. This isn't about that. So a lot of times, the stuff I write is actually very serious. I don't think a lot of people see that. For the banking sector and everything like that, that stuff is serious. But the underlying thing about it, I told you the number one thing and Sorry, my slides are all messed up, but the number one thing is educating the customer in those emails. So if you have a boring style, but you have a really, if you're really strongly passionate about something, you can be boring and still sell this in that same format. So the AIDA formula doesn't mean act like a stupid jackass all the time. It means you're hitting points in a customer's head, like the psychological points to help them sell a little bit better. So if you go to appsumo.com/prey, P-R-E-Y, Wi-Fi, it's tracking software for your Mac. I actually got robbed a long time ago, and we were trying to sell, we were trying to promote this thing, and I was like, "How do I do this?" It's not a very funny story about like how I got robbed, and they stole my Macs, and it actually made me go a little bit insane, right? Like, you walk in your house, and you're always like, "I'm looking through every room," and like I would close my windows at night. I'd get really paranoid about everything. So I wrote a whole story of how that affected me so much, like I felt violated. When I got robbed. I was just like, this is like a pussy thing to feel, but that's how I felt. And so I wrote about that, and it was completely serious and vulnerable, and that sold like crazy also. But it was a real story. There was no humor, there was no kind of like, it was just a story. So you do not have to act crazy or like some of the old direct response marketers that are, I know what you're talking about, scammy and douchey, or like the whole IM marketing field. Avoid all that bullshit. Yeah, I got you. Thank you. Anyone else? How much time do you spend a week on your email marketing campaigns? A lot of times I find with my marketing mix it falls to the bottom 'cause it can be so time-consuming. Email marketing campaigns, what are you trying to do? Like what? It varies, it depends on what I'm working on, but pretty much anything. Like writing an entire email marketing campaign, you do it all at once in a couple of days and then Okay, so normally what I try to do is I try to break up the broadcast as they come in. So if it's just like a one-time thing, you write it as it is. I literally start with the templates I gave, subject, blah, blah, blah, purpose of this email, ADA. If I'm doing a big autoresponder, I use Google Docs for everything. I use Google Docs for everything actually. And then I make that same template, subject line, blah, blah, blah, and then I paste it like 8 times. Let's say there's 8 emails in that autoresponder, I post the whole thing in a Google Doc. I write the first email, And then I think, how can I tie this into the second email? And so forth. And that's how I write it. And then I load those all up at one time. Yeah. So then when people read them, they're like, oh, these flow together very well. But if you wrote them individually and uploaded them to your email software or whatever, it would be kind of complicated. Yeah. And it usually takes like between an hour and 2 hours to write an email. Yeah. Or sometimes shorter if I know exactly what I want to write. Hey, how's it going? Yo. I have a question for, it seems like a lot of what you do is B2C, I'm guessing? Mostly, yeah. So how do you do that for business to business? 'Cause I— This same thing works for business to business, same thing. We help people with the same thing all the time. Really? And they're always like, "Oh, this only works for B2C." Think about it, B2B means business to business, there's still like a person at the end, okay? Yeah. It's not like some business entity, there's a person at the end reading that shit boring email, okay? And they don't like to be bored also. So you don't have to be wacky, but at the same time, instead of just talking about your company all the time, what we've seen with salespeople, little side note, salespeople in the B2B industry are the people who've used my course and increased their income the most. I was kind of shocked by that, but then I realized these people email or call 10 people a day, right? They're like, "Hey, we're from Acme Bricks, and we make the best bricks, and we've been around since 1970." and we're based in Cleveland, and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, that's not interesting, okay? But if they just send one simple email that kind of engages the other person in terms of like, hey, we see that you're using our competitor Strawberry Bricks. We actually sell our bricks for 40% cheaper. Interested? And they don't even write their company name. Or maybe they write like Acme or something like that. That has the highest response rate and highest business-getting rate that we've ever seen. And so this stuff definitely works in B2B very, very well. So you think it's more short copy than long? If you're trying to just do that first introduction email, you don't— if someone introduces you theirself, think about it in real life, okay? That's how you communicate with your email list in like in real life. If I came up to you and I was like, "Hey, my name is Neville and I grew up in Austin, Texas," and blah, blah, blah, and go on and on, you'd eventually get tired and move away, right? Unless I was really hot, in which case you might come closer. But other than that, like you just wanna say like a quick hello. It's just quick and then something of real interest to them. That's all. It's quite simple. Thanks. I already gave the books away. Hi, it's a quick question about the templates. One of them had like 4 subjects. Yes. What was the purpose of that? To get your mind jogging. So if I was gonna write like, "How to sell ADA," or like, "Come to HustleCon, it is awesome," that might not be the best way, the best angle to look at selling HustleCon, right? It might be, there might be something different. So I write 4 subjects just to like get my mind jogging, and honestly, you can write a lot more. So it's like a brainstorming, just kind of to get going. Yeah, and even at AppSumo, we made a plugin called KingSumo that has a headline plugin that you put into WordPress, and instead of just typing in one title on WordPress, you type in as many titles as you want. So I'll type in like 10 titles, and it'll automatically split test in a smart way the right one. And oftentimes you'd be surprised. And I'm not talking about, once again, like, not, not linkbait kind of things like, oh, number 7 will blow your mind. Sadly, that does work temporarily in this day and age, but not for the long term. And so, so yeah, you can do that. And I write different subjects because I get different ideas. It's really helpful. Very quick follow-up. Do you ever do A/B testing in email, in emails? Yeah, all the time. Yeah, it makes a huge difference. So do you use software for that or? Yeah, well you can use, I mean if you use Infusionsoft, Infusionsoft has it. If you use AWeber, you can use AWeber. You could do ghetto forms of split testing. We don't spend too, too much time doing that because if you build up goodwill with your whole email base, they tend to open your emails all the time. And so even if it's a crappy email, you get some leeway. Like if, like I like Sam and if he tells me something, if it's bad, bad one time, like he sends me a bad joke, I don't just like get rid of him as a friend. He has a whole like, he has a whole repertoire with me, right? So I'll still look at his stuff and be like, okay, forgiven for that one. But then we move on. So we do subject line test a little bit, but we don't go like super overboard with it. Yeah. All good? I have a question for you actually. Yeah. My name's Eric. Hey. So I'm really curious to hear how long it takes you to write an email, because earlier today we had Rohin Dhar from Priceonomics, He said that a blog post takes him 40 hours. He's talking about the data collection. Yeah, the data collection. So kind of my question is related to, you know, your thoughts on including things like data because you're kind of more of a storyteller in your style. Oh, but data is great. If you have data, use data by all means. Yeah. And I mean, what's your process? I mean, in terms of like start to finish and time and, you know, how you start thinking about writing the copy and so forth. It completely depends what you're talking about, right? If let's say we have a deal at AppSumo and I want to promote Optimizely, right? What I'll do is I'll download Optimizely. I'll use some of the things. I'll install it on my website. Usually that stuff takes way longer. Or like we've tried to promote Wistia before and we're starting to use Wistia, the video provider. And I had to, I used Wistia, I uploaded my own videos, I liked it, I used all the features, I embedded it on my website. That was all the data that I was looking for. So that's data in my case. Thanks. We have one last question. Alright. Hello, thanks for the talk. Quick question. If I wanted to do a test, what would be the smallest sample you would take of emails to try something like this? You can send a newsletter-style email? Yeah, like one of those handwritten following your formula. But how many delivers, how many emails would you send just for one test? Are you just starting out or you have like a big thing going already? I've never done something like that, but it looks really interesting. But you have like a large email base already to go? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, huge, yeah. Oh, okay. So then, so I mean, at AppSumo we'll do tests of 10,000 people each. Well, I wanted to kind of just try something small before it's, you know. Yeah, I've done small tests on my own list where you send 1,000 people one email. Okay. And then 1,000 people another email. So you'll send one of those newsletter style emails where it's just like a Groupon looking email and say, "Click here." Okay. And then you'll see the difference between that and then you also see the difference between just like writing a properly formatted email out. Here's the problem with testing. A lot of people get really into this testing thing like, oh, what can I— it's like short-term gains, okay. So one of the things we noticed whenever we started, we started split testing the shit out of our headlines and our prices. And the problem is, it worked temporarily, temporarily. There was like this time where it went like this, but then people just started getting tired of it, right. When they start seeing different prices all the time for it, like you open up an email one time, you see a different price, then you see on the website it's a different price, people get— people don't like feeling cheated, right? And so if you build up goodwill over time, you don't need to do as much split testing. And so while the numbers show that you might get slightly higher click-through rates on just like a newsletter style thing, that's great if that's all you're going for. But if you want people to read your emails and interact with them, and also like there's a cool trick that if you get people to respond to your emails at the bottom, right, hey, respond to me, let me know what your issue with Optimizely is. When they respond, it kind of whitelists you. So it goes more into the inbox instead of the promotions box on Gmail. That was actually a slide I had, thanks for fucking it up guys. And so yeah, so just try small tests like that. Quick follow-up, if you were gonna do a split test, would you try 2 subjects or maybe 4? Like from 1,000? It's just 2 versus 4, I don't fucking know. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. You got another one? Oh, OK. No, I said you had another one. Oh, no. Thanks a lot, Neville. I think we're out of time. Thank you. Appreciate it.