Lessons from the cheese stall: how to make a sale
There’s a farmer’s market just down the road from me every Saturday. I go there to pick up food for the week. It’s a bit pricier than Tesco’s but a lot of the stuff’s better quality, and even when it isn’t I don’t mind paying a premium to buy food that’s locally-grown.
It seems more than a bit ridiculous that food that was grown locally and driven 10 miles to market costs less than stuff flown in from Argentina, but that’s what you get with economies of scale and logisitics.
And as well as buying food, it also gives me a chance to check out the sales patter of the stall-holders.
One of the cheese stalls had a new guy manning it. He was good.
It starts simply, with the same entry point that every stall holder has grasped: the Free Sample.
Most samples are just left on a plate next to a hopeful-looking vendor, willing you to come and look with the power of a limp smile.
Not this guy. He called us out by name as we passed, chopping a lump of cheese off the block, skewering it with his knife and holding it out toward us, making it extremely hard to ignore. “You sir, you in the fantastic hat, try a free sample!”
Compliments don’t hurt, either.
While the first sample is being thoughtfully munched, he’s lining up the next, so there is absolutely no time between your swallowing the first mouthful and being offered another.
And then the same again, with the final block of cheese.
You’ve now accepted three things from him in quick succession, and it’s pretty hard to say no to the next request.
But his next request isn’t for a sale. It’s “So, what one did you like best?”
As soon as you pick one of the cheeses – and they’re all pretty good – that’s it. You just made a commitment. Your consistency responses kick in, and he knows they’ve just kicked in. So he starts rummaging through the packs of the cheese you’ve picked, hunting out the cheapest one. When he finds it: “How about that one?”
And you’re sold.
One thing he never does is ask you to buy anything.
You just do.
I did. And it is damn good cheese.
Writing a JV page – first draft
The first draft is pretty much done, so it seems a good time for a run-down of how I went about putting together the JV page.
What’s often forgotten is that your JV page is still a sales page. You’re trying to sell your offer to potential affiliates, and convince them that your product is the one they want to promote to their list, because a) it’s an awesome product and b) they’ll make money when they do.
Like any sales page, you need to think about the market. Are you advertising your offer to people who have already promoted you, or are you trying to attract new affiliates to the fold?
In this case, we’re going after new people, so I started by focusing heavily on the authority of our front-man. You’ve got to assume that the people viewing this page will never have heard of you before, so you need to give them a reason to listen to what you say.
So in the headline I grabbed attention with an eye-catching offer – a guarantee of a $10 EPC.
Then I backed that up with a big authority play designed to convince the prospect that we can deliver on that promise, using a lot of testimonials from past affiliates and stats from our previous product launches.
Now we’ve put a large amount of money on the table and shown we’ve got the chops to deliver, that’s the perfect time to get into the specifics – what the product is, why their list is going to find it useful, what upsells we’re putting into the chain and all the supporting benefits of the offer.
Finally, we need to make sure we stand out from the crowd. Our big headline offer of guaranteeing a $10 EPC is going to get some people talking, but I wanted more than that.
So we’re turning this launch into an event – the biggest one we’ve ever done. And yes, of course there’s a story around that, because it’s the story that gets people talking.
All will be revealed… soon.
Writing a JV page – first thoughts
Starting a new project is always a good feeling. Uncharted territory, working out how you’re going to approach the product and the audience…
In this case, the product is a sales funnel and the audience are affiliates. My job is to persuade as many of them that they want to promote this offer as possible.
It’s a market I’m familiar with so I already have some idea of the target customer. And that means the first thing I do is think about the story. Why is everyone going to talk about this launch?
A launch is an event, so it can’t afford to be low-key. You need your traffic to REMEMBER your offer. Because there’s a lot of competition out there – you need yours to stick in their brains.
More thoughts on the writing process as I hit them…
In the meantime: Science – it works, bitches
Fly me to the moon
Whenever you write advertising copy, you should be taking your prospect on a journey.
Right now they’re at point A. You want to get them to point B.
So before you do anything – and I grant you this seems obvious, but coming to writing copy for the first time a LOT of people seem to forget it – make sure you know what point B is.
What action do you want them to take? And I don’t mean eventually… I mean right now, directly as a result of reading your copy.
On a sales page, this is going to be about getting a sale.
On an e-mail, it’s all about the click.
On a squeeze page, you want them to opt-in.
On a direct mail package, you may want to get a sale but you might just want a response you can follow up later with a phone call or brochure.
(By the way, don’t be fooled by my frivolous use of the word ‘just’ there. Getting that response can be hard.)
Once you know what you’re doing, don’t deviate from it. Don’t play for the second prize, play to WIN. Focus all your resources on getting the response you’re after. If you want to have a downsell, fine – but don’t spend copy selling the reduced option if it doesn’t make your preferred option sound ten times better.
Of course, this is just the destination. For the JOURNEY you need to know a bit about point A as well.
That’s harder, and that’s a post for another day.
Re: this doesn’t work as well as you’d think
Got a bit of data for you.
Good marketers test. You know this. They’ll try out lots of different approaches to see what works.
In terms of e-mail marketing, this means splitting your list into random segments of equal-ish size, sending slightly different e-mails to each and tracking click data.
From the results, you can tell which variation works best. There’s a neat little statistical tool called a T-test you can use to judge the significance of the test. Roughly speaking, if you run a T-test on the data and it says it was significant at the 10% level, it means there’s a 10% probability the result you see happened through random chance, rather than because one e-mail was actually better than the other.
I won’t go into details here. Maybe in another post if I’m feeling particularly mathsy. But that’s the basic idea. Worth noting is that something normally needs to be significant at the 5% level before you should feel comfortable saying one of your tests is actually better than the other.
Anyhow, that’s the background. Here’s the data.
Not long ago, I ran a 2-email campaign.
On the first e-mail, I split-test 2 different subject lines, neither of which ended up particularly better than the other.
On the second e-mail, I split each of those 2 groups down further. One half of each group had a subject line focused on urgency (because the offer was closing) and one half had ‘Re: [the first subject line]‘.
There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence about the Re:-style subject lines getting a lot of clicks, but in this test it was destroyed. In both groups, the urgency-focused subject outpulled it at a significance level of 0.5%.
I’ve yet to test it against more general curiosity-based subject lines, but the data here’s pretty clear – when you can use urgency, use urgency. It works like gangbusters.
What’s the point of advertising?
You’ve probably had this kind of conversation in the past…
An idle comment to a mate suddenly sends you down the rabbit hole, and what you thought was going to be a one-liner on the way home is still being debated three hours and three pints later.
I had one of those a couple of days ago, inspired by one of the car-ad billboards (I honestly forget which one, they’re all so interchangeable) and it basically came down to this: what is the point of advertising?
Well, what do you think?
It’s not to make money, that’s for sure.
Or, at least, it’s not always to make money. When you advertise to make money, you give your prospect the opportunity to buy there and then.
If you’re trying to make money without giving your prospect the chance to actually buy something, a cursory examination by a five-year-old could tell you there’s a fundamental piece of the puzzle missing.
Likewise, it’s not just brand awareness, which is the other common answer. If it was, the billboards would be full of huge pictures of logos of companies you’ve never heard of. Why spend a ton of cash on an ad agency when you only want people to know your name?
There’s actually 2 reasons for advertising:
1. To make money – if the customer can buy. Which basically means direct response.
2. To help the ads that make money. Brand awareness is part of this but not the whole story.
All those big ads that tell you about a product or a company but don’t actually let you buy… they’re all framing. They’re all part of trying to control how you think about that product, so when you DO have the opportunity to buy – whether that opportunity is a direct mail letter coming through your letterbox or when you see it on a supermarket shelf – that company knows what’s going through your head, because they put that message there.
So a billboard ad for a car with a big image of an open road, blue sky and rolling countryside is designed to support the guy in the showroom who pitches you on the freedom you’ll get by buying this new model.
You can manipulate the perception of entire companies in this way, and people frequently do. It’s what the politicians and their spin doctors call ‘media management’.
It’s cute when they think they’ve invented something new, isn’t it?
Not only that, it’s something you should be actively involved in. I don’t necessarily mean billboards – but everything your company puts out into the world will affect how you are seen by your potential customers. It’s all advertising, and you should treat it as such. Work out what message you want to give, and start claiming hearts and minds.
“All story is manipulation. And that’s a good thing.”
Ken Burns on story, via the phenomenally good BrainPicker blog.
Check it.
On Paralympians, John Lewis and a game you have to play
A friend of mine (@randomnine, indie coder extraordinaire, part-time musician and constructor of intricate and mutated boardgames) just tweeted this:
“Easily the most emotionally powerful video I’ve seen all year, and it’s… an ad spot. Amazing.”
The ad in question is Channel 4′s Paralympics spot. I can’t embed it due to copyright restrictions on the soundtrack, but you can take a look here:
I don’t deny this has got some emotional punch. It’s alternately inspiring, touching and jarringly shocking, and brings home just how incredible the achievements of these athletes are.
But it’s a bit of a shame that he was so surprised that an advertisement can be that powerful. If your advertising doesn’t touch people’s emotions, then you’re doing it wrong.
Emotions make an experience sit with you. An advert that makes you stop and think is going to stick with you, an advert that makes you stop and feel will be in your head for an age.
(Bet you can still remember last year’s John Lewis Christmas TV ad. How many other ads shown then can you think of now?)
And talking of emotional punch, go over to Randomnine’s site and check out Beacon. It’s a freebie, and I defy you not to be a bit choked up once you’ve played it through.
Gooseberry marketing
Despite the fact that it’s far too hot, I love this time of year.
Because it’s gooseberry season.
Gooseberries are one of the last truly seasonal foods. They’re only available for a few weeks every year, so I’m forced to stockpile.
Forced to, y’hear?
Generally I try to eat a pretty balanced diet. It’s part of my endless desire to optimise everything. But for these few weeks, 95% of what I eat will be gooseberries.
Because they’re amazing. The idea that not far away there are gooseberries I could be buying when instead I’m writing about them is actually painful.
Thing is, I’ve read Cialdini. There’s every chance I like gooseberries so much precisely because they’re not around for very long.
Even in these weeks only some grocers stock them. Soon, they’ll be out of season again and finding a gooseberry will be as rare as finding a cuckoo’s nest.
And maybe… just maybe… that’s the real reason I stockpile.
Two things here help you sell.
- Scarcity: if something’s not widely available, the desire to take it is far stronger.
- Urgency: if something’s only available for a limited time, people are far more likely to grab it quick. Limit your sales to 200 units, and you’ll sell more copies quicker than you would with no cap.
Both of them are reasons to act NOW. Ways of telling your prospect that if they wait, they’re going to miss out.
No-one likes missing out. Particularly on gooseberries.
Recognise this?
I’m an arrogant sod.
That doesn’t mean I can’t admit I’m wrong… just that I don’t like doing it.
You can relate, I’m sure.
But we – and by we I mean all of us who always know best – need to remember there’s absolutely no shame in getting something wrong, realising we got something wrong and making a U-turn.
This can be hard to do, because we all love to be consistent. Consistent in how we see ourselves, and consistent in how we see other people.
That’s why politicians make a point of never changing their minds (even when it’s become clear their policies are utterly batshit) – because we’d hate them if they did.
Never mind the fact that we all know it was never a good idea in the first place. They’re flip-floppers. No backbone.
But it’s really important we’re capable of admitting when we’ve got something wrong, and that it’s time to do something new, in any area of life. I could witter about profit and throwing good money after bad here, but really this is true for anything: love, money, or pleasure.
Something you can do (and something I’ve been doing recently, though I forget where I got the idea) is try to remember, every morning, one thing you’ve been wrong about.
Write it down.
And don’t be ashamed when you build a long list. It only becomes foolish when you make the same mistake twice (though I’ve done that too, many times).
Having a record helps you not mind so much when you realise there’s another item to add to it.
That’s my first thought for the day.
Here’s the second:
If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.
– Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO
Clearly I try to live by that one too.