What Your Spotify Wrapped Really Reveals About You

I don’t know about you, but I’m not familiar with too many “offers” that get 50% conversion.

From any company.

Paid or free.

And then there’s Spotify Wrapped.

Fine, maybe it’s more of a feature than an “offer.”

But they package it up, offer it for a limited time and promote the heck out of it.

I haven’t seen this year’s numbers, but 51% of users checked out their Wrapped in 2022. About 14% of them also shared their results on social media.

The whole thing works pretty well. So well that YouTube and Apple have borrowed the idea. (Duolingo, too!)

What makes Wrapped so enticing?

It’s focused on the #1 most interesting topic on the planet: YOU.

We’re all the center of our own universes. So we’re incalculably interested in ourselves. How could we not be?

As an extension to that idea, we’re also fascinated by anything we believe can tell us more about ourselves. Help us understand ourselves better.

With Wrapped, we already know we listened to music all year. Spotify uncovers hidden patterns and tell you what your listening habits really say about you.

Over the years, they’ve diagnosed your music “personality” and assigned you to a city based on your music selection.

All ways of giving you ways to think about and categorize yourself in your own mind… share your (favorable) findings with the world… and compare/contrast/connect yourself with other people.

Genius.

People can get really attached to their categories. Myers-Briggs. Political parties. Astrological signs.

Even a simple dichotomy like entrepreneur vs. 9-5er.

And once they put themselves in a category, they can easily begin using it as the lens they see the world through.

This reality can produce profound influence.

Think about ways you can show your prospects and clients more about themselves. Help them understand themselves in a helpful new way.

And if you put them in categories you define – or give them a way to self-assess themselves into one…

You have an opportunity to shape how they see themselves, their optimal next steps, and more.

It’s a powerful position to be in. Use you power wisely.

P.S. Once people accept their categories, they see things differently. And they see different things.

There are certain ways to “trigger” those individuals with email subject lines.

I share more details about this in the Secret Handshake chapter of Subject Line Science, now available on Amazon Kindle and paperback.

This is one of the concepts David Garfinkel and I discussed on my recent appearance on The Copywriter Podcast. Enjoy!

Give Your Readers Rose-Colored Glasses

Copywriter sunglasses with reflection of a bundle of roses in the lenses.

You’re a reader, right?

I know you’ve seen copy like this before:

I want to point out a few things about this copy device, which I call an identity preframe.

You see them at the beginning of sales pages/VSLs, webinars and occasionally on a website homepage.

Maybe you’ve even used something like this before.

Here’s the thing…

The identity preframe is set up to look like a filter.

A few seconds or centimeters of copy to make sure you’re only talking to ideal clients (and everyone else knows not to waste their time).

The example above even had a STOP hand and explicitly tells the reader to leave if he doesn’t meet the criteria.

It’s not a filter.

When done right it:

  • makes you identify a characteristic you possess (or think you possess) but wish was more pronounced
  • gives you a sense of empowerment
  • heightens the desire for the transformation.

Despite its construction, the copy isn’t designed to make anyone stop and leave. Rather, the idea is to make most readers stay and read more. To think “this presentation/pitch is all about the me I want to be.

The example above goes a step further.

Bullet point #3 adds guilt into the mix. You’re going to fail your loved ones if you don’t step fully into this identity.

This kind of copy frames the rest of the copy in the perspective of “the me I want to be.”

Appeals to (aspirational) identity hit at a deeper level than features, benefits, advantages and opportunities can by themselves.

And certainly deeper than saying “this is for service providers, parents and 9-to-fivers who are thinking about starting their own business.”

How are you getting viewers/readers to see “the me I want to be” in your copy?

Outsourced Thinking (and Why It’s a Good Thing)

Thinking is hard work. Most people avoid it at all costs.

If you can earn someone’s trust, he’ll gladly allow you to do some of this thinking for him.

If you can display deep expertise on a topic he’s interested in, he’ll happily outsource some of his thinking to you.

If you can minimize the perceived risk or difficulty of changing perspectives/approaches, you may find you have a loyal convert… and a paying client.

[I took this picture earlier this month after speaking at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the city’s largest university.]

This may all sound kind of negative or “manipulative,” but there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing brain work. In fact, most people are craving this kind of leadership.

Nobody can know everything, and even if we could, it would take a lifetime to learn it.

Why do that when we can just plug into someone who’s already an expert?

With that in mind, you may want to:

1) Build your trustworthiness.

2) Demonstrate your expertise.

3) Think about how the person you want to persuade perceives risk as it relates to the topic you want him to think differently about. Can you minimize the risk or reframe it to make it less frightening?

Take these steps and you’ll amp up your persuasive abilities in a major way.

4 Copywriting Triggers for Instant Sales

There are 4 triggers that instantly turn someone into a buyer:

Trigger 1: His wife says/implies “Bring home X and you’ll get… something special.”

Or on the flip side, “Bring home Y or I’m going to cry.”

Trigger 2: He sees your offer as an easy way to step into the identity he craves or amplify the part of his current identity he’s intensely passionate about.

You can make your reader connect the dots between your offer and his identity on his own…

Or you can make it more obvious.

Not enough copywriters intentionally appeal to identity. Most are too busy thinking about features and benefits.

I encourage you to be one of the elite few that leverage its power.

Trigger 3: When your copy reframes his problem in such a way that he realizes he’s been looking at it all wrong… but now that he understands, the solution (your product/service) is obvious.

Trigger 4: The Stack. There’s a lot of focus on what’s known as a value stack. I’m a fan of the lesser-known desire stack. Both work.

In the following video clip, I discuss these 4 triggers with copywriting expert Maria Lloyd.

Maria has written six-figure email campaigns for more than two dozen brands (you’d definitely recognize more than a few of them), with an average boost to ROI of more than 400 percent.

And now, for a limited time, Maria is teaching copywriters and ambitious entrepreneurs how to create and launch their own six figure email campaigns in her program, Crash Course to Cash.

To be more specific, the deadline is Friday, March 31 at 11:59PM Central.

When you sign up (for as little as $75 down), you’ll get access to a collection of deep-dive trainings to help you sharpen your copywriting sword and leverage those sales triggers we just talked about.

The, starting April 7, you’ll get 8 weeks of live, hands-on training with Maria and her team. She’ll work with you to help you learn the skills you need to write effective email copy AND you’ll actually be working as you go.

There’s no doubt in my mind this will be a life-changing training.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve partnered with Maria to help make Crash Course to Cash even more valuable. When you become part of this first cohort, you’ll also gain access to my Inbox X-Factor course.

Inbox X-Factor gives you 365 days’ worth of email ideas and inspiration… 100+ subject lines… and 10 video training modules revealing my personal strategies for writing emails with maximum selling power.

When I do make it available for sale again, I’m planning to charge between $200 and $300 for it. That’s a value stack for you.

You can’t buy Inbox X-Factor anywhere else right now, so if you’re interested in getting access, sign up here, plus get all the details about Crash Course to Cash.

Have a productive day!

Don’t Let AI Do This to You

What’s up, my friend?!

I should’ve said it sooner: happy new year. Hope you’ve been able to kick off 2023 with gusto.

After guzzling all that sparkling grape juice, I realized I left out an important point in my previous email about my 3 predictions for the year.

The major distinction I need to add pertains to the first part of Prediction #3:

The value of real expertise will increase.

Here’s how I see this playing out in 2023…

There will be an avalanche of mostly mediocre AI-generated content published.

Quantity will likely increase every day, but quality will lag for a while. It’ll be at least 6 to 12 months before folks get over their giddiness and notice the diminishing returns.

That means two things:

1) High quality human-generated content will become rarer relative to speed-focused stuff spit out by AI… and

2) Human buyers (because bots have no money) will be increasingly impacted by marketing that feels authentically personal and/or delivers entertainment as part of the interaction.

Remember: TikTok gets more visitors than Google for a reason. Humans crave entertainment. They DEMAND it. That won’t change anytime soon.

AI is great at putting together information. It’s nowhere near ready for prime time when it comes to entertainment, especially in smaller niches.

Here’s the takeaway. Two things.

First, I encourage you to get familiar with AI tools. There’s some incredible stuff out there. I’m especially fond of HelloScribe for writing purposes.

But don’t let AI do all the work for you. I’ve had too many conversations with entrepreneurs who are overly optimistic about the copy-pasteability of AI output. 

Don’t fall for it.

It’s true. You can get decent content/copy from AI. It will continue to get better over time.

But it’ll be a long time before it’s great. A long time before it’s authentically personal, especially in certain situations…

Secondly, the time of being Switzerland and playing it safe is over.

Work on adding personality and, yes, even entertainment into your content and copy.

Copywriting is no longer “salesmanship in print.” It’s SHOWMANSHIP in print.

I’ll be talking more about this in the coming days and weeks.

For now, I’ll point you to a conversation I had with copywriting legend John Forde on the topic. (The video should start at 32:01.)

Have a productive day!

P.S. Even as artificial intelligence platforms improve their copy-pasteability, it’s still going to be a LONG time before they’re able to tap into the pure creativity of human copywriters.

Here’s a quick illustration using curiosity-drenched bullets:

AI can’t touch copy like this for multiple reasons.

Firstly, these bullets draw on context not included in the content itself. Particularly the one about the curse.

Secondly, AI still has a way to go into understanding why people use language the way we do. The bot is programmed to predict what word will follow the previous word, based on a bank of words it’s been trained on.

But it doesn’t understand what it’s saying, let alone why we say what we say or how to phrase copy/content for a particular emotional effect.

That’s why, for now, copywriters can still do what AI can’t do.

Long live the humans!

Is It Really True that “Facts Tell, Stories Sell”?

How many times have you heard the sage advice that “facts tell, stories sell”?

Now, how many times have you heard it stated as a fact… instead of illustrated with a story?

Maybe you’re luckier than me. Maybe you’ve heard some good stories “proving” the fact that stories sell.

But here’s what makes it really interesting: “facts tell, stories sell” is both true and false.

Not that it’s bad advice. Quite the opposite. But something important is missing.

With one simple statement, a 10-year old Jeff Bezos made his grandmother burst into tears during a road trip in Texas…

He wasn’t trying to be mean. He wasn’t even trying to be persuasive.

He was trying to show off his intelligence.

The story goes something like this.

During this trip, Little Jeff heard a commercial on the radio saying that every puff of a cigarette takes 2 minutes off of your life. Nana Bezos smoked cigarettes, so Jeff thought he’d do the math to impress and inform his grandparents.

When he came up with his number, he tapped grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

That’s when the waterworks started.

We don’t know if she gave up smoking on that day, but we do know this: that “fact” struck a deep nerve.

Why?

Because stories DO sell… and sometimes the right facts make a person tell himself an emotionally charged story.

Back to the Bezoses:

When Jeff said “hey Granny, you’re going to die 9 years early because of those cancer sticks,” here’s what happened…

Grandma Bezos told herself a story. Could’ve been:

  • This habit of mine is stealing time I should be spending with my grandson
  • My grandson will be so hurt when I’m gone. No more summer road trips… no more birthday cards… when we should have had so many more
  • My behavior is making this sweet boy imagine me dying. How could I be so selfish?

You get the picture.

Little Jeff didn’t have to tell any of those stories. Grandma did that on her own… automatically.

So here’s today’s lesson:

Keep in mind that your clients and prospects are prone to telling themselves stories based on the facts you tell them.

Choose which facts you share and how you share them wisely. Because the facts may lead your audience to draw different conclusions than you think, as illustrated in this video clip:

And YES, tell more stories.

Make sure to tell the stories that tell the stories you want to tell.

The good thing about telling a story (versus stats and facts) is that you have more control over the story that plays out in the other person’s mind. You can more skillfully guide him as he draws his own conclusions.

I may write about how to structure stories for maximum control over your reader/listener’s conclusions.

If you’d like to know more about that, stay tuned. My next article will dive into that.

David Deutsch Learned This From Me

Maybe you’ve already seen this…

But just in case you haven’t, I want to make sure you don’t miss it.

I gave a mini-training for Agora Financial on creating intense curiosity in your emails.

Lots of great feedback, including this from copywriting legend David Deutsch:

We talked about neurology and clinical studies, but we weren’t just bookworming. We had some fun, too.

At least David Garfinkel (the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest copy coach”) thought so…

Check out the mini-training the Davids were talking about below.

Enjoy and learn. And hopefully laugh out loud.

P.S. You don’t have to be a professional copywriter to get ton of value from this video!

The 2nd Fastest Way to Make People Care

My friend Golibe made a great video this week exploring the power of a compelling story.

He briefly highlighted a point I haven’t heard too many gurus talk about:

How “unfair injury” connects you to a story character.

Golibe’s video just touched on the concept briefly, and it inspired me to expand on the idea a little more.

Because it’s a subtle but hard-hitting persuasion tactic.

It’s a key reason we form emotional bonds with characters (even if we don’t realize it) in countless books, movies and even marketing material.

In The Story Solution, Eric Edson says:

“After courage, the second quickest way to bond an audience to your hero is to place that character in a situation where blatant injustice is inflicted upon her.”

This isn’t necessarily the same thing as the “rags to riches” story arc. There are levels to this.

Let me share an example.

I worked with a few years ago who was paralyzed from the waist down as a teenager.

We occasionally mentioned that fact in sales copy. It was the catalyst that drove him to learn the skill he turned into 3 multimillion-dollar business.

One day, the client had the idea to take the story to another level.

He talked about how a group of older teens beat him so badly that he’d never walk again. Then the medical bills crushed his family financially. And that series of events forced him to do something different…  

Fleshing out the unfair injury kept people glued to their screens and practically forced viewers to root for my client.

Sales on that webinar were off the charts. (I don’t remember the stats, but I get there were fewer returns, too.

You can use unfair injury to draw readers/viewers into your copy and keep them emotionally engaged.

Share painful stories — and especially of injustices — against your main character. The more vivid the better.

Maybe your boss gave the promotion you deserved to someone else. Better yet, she gave it to the new guy the one who always wears tight shirts — the guy YOU TRAINED.

There are a thousand variations.

As long as the story is believable, your reader/viewer’s heart will go out to your character, which advances the sale.

That’s your homework: Spend some time thinking about how you can use unfair injury in your own marketing.

It’s not the only trick you’ll use. But it’s a good one to have in your repertoire.

Have a productive day!

P.S. Presenting a perfect picture of yourself in your promotions is less persuasive than you probably think.

I know, it’s a little scary to tell your darker stories.

But it works. It can help you with sales now and retention/ascension over time.

Your ideal clients will feel even more connected to you. They’ll be even more excited to hear from you.

Isn’t that worth a little discomfort?

(Guess that’s up to you to decide.)

This Is Who Will Win 2022 (and Beyond)

I don’t often do this, but I’m going to share a “shocking” prediction for 2022 that I believe could have a significant impact on your business.

But first, let me tell you a quick story.

It’s actually one of my favorite stories. My own Michael Jordan in Game 6 vs. Utah Jazz moment.

When I was a junior in high school, I was captain of an intramural basketball team — and I predicted my team would win the championship before the first game of the season.

I’ll spare you most of the details and get to the good stuff.

My team marched to the semifinals… and I caught mononucleosis. The doctor told me I could absolutely NOT play basketball. Any rough physical contact could rupture my internal organs.

I canceled prom… and my date never spoke to me again.

But I couldn’t miss the semifinals game. Especially after guaranteeing a championship.

If you’ve ever had mono, you know it drains your energy like leaving your car’s headlights on overnight. So the game was a hard slog. Probably the same way Jordan felt like in Game 6.  

You’re going to think I’m making this up, but it’s 100% fact.

My team was down by 2 and I knocked down a 15-foot buzzer-beater to send the game into overtime, where we dismantled the other squad. Then we went on to win the title. Just as I had predicted.

Today, I’m going to make my biggest prediction since the beginning of that basketball season 21 years ago.

If you’ve been skimming til this point, this is where you want to pay attention. I’m going to tell you which…

Entrepreneurs & Marketers
I Believe Will WIN in 2022

More importantly, how you can be one of the big winners.

Here it is:

The entrepreneurs who win will be the ones who:

1. understand their core buyers at a deep level

2. communicate that deep understanding to their core buyers — not just use the data for targeting/segmenting purposes (although that’s important)

AND

3. demonstrate that they are “in this together” with their core buyers — whatever that means in their particular industries.

At first glance, this may not seem like a shocking prediction after all. But I urge you to think about this with me for just a minute.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve seen a flood of new businesses, new technologies, new options… and rapid adoption of all the newness among consumers.

More than ever before, there is something for everyone online.

At the same time, we see increased polarization of people around the world. Politically, scientifically, socially.

Folks are cliquing up and forming profound bonds with their “groups.”

In 2022 and beyond, you’ll see this trend impacting commerce more and more.

People will gravitate toward, spend money within and pledge undying loyalty to “micro-communities” where they feel understood… appreciated… even SUPERIOR to outsiders.

I don’t have statistically significant data to prove this, but I am confident that having the “best” product or service won’t be enough in 2022.

Having the “best marketed” offer won’t do it, either.

If you want to win the future, it’s going to be essential to work on developing the best connected” offer — specifically tailored for your core clientele and obviously repellent to “outsiders” (real or imagined).

I think it’s going to be trickier than ever to be a “faceless” impersonal company. Even if you’re a plumber or contractor.

Think about it. Everyone knows Tesla’s CEO. Who’s the CEO of Toyota again?

Even Zuckerberg is trying craft a more likable public persona.

This is the way the wind’s blowing, my friend.

Take it from a guy who calls intramural championships like Babe Ruth calling home runs.

P.S. I know what you’re saying.

I can’t bring up all this micro-community stuff and skip out on helping you figure out how to actually DO IT.

Well, if you’re curious, you’re just going to have to stay tuned.

P.P.S. Shout out to Justin Winthers, co-founder of REIRail who made this prediction at least 3 years ago. One of the brightest brothers I’ve ever met.

Why You Should Be the Least Expensive Option in Your Space

I can’t count how many times potential clients have told me “you’re too expensive.

After a while, it can make you doubt your strategy. And yourself.

In my case, I had 2 factors working against me:

1) Much cheaper competition. (Not that every copywriter charges less. But enough do to create a lowered expectation in the minds of many prospects.)

2) More significantly, lazy positioning on my part.

Because the way you position your pricing is just as important as the dollar amount.

We don’t have to get into the weeds here (We may go deeper in a future email. That’s a good reason to subscribe now)…

But I’m going to make an off-the-wall suggestion.

You should be the least expensive option in your niche.

That doesn’t mean you should have the least expensive price tag…

It means you have to flip the script for your would-be buyer.

It’s not about how much he’s about to spend. It’s how much he’s going to SAVE when he buys from you instead of the other guy (or doing nothing at all).

  • Save money on buying a higher quality option instead of having to keep buying replacements
  • Save time because your product/service works and doesn’t break or breakdown
  • Save energy because he has a more complete solution
  • Save embarrassment because he doesn’t have to explain why things aren’t going according to plan
  • Save frustration because he’s FINALLY getting what he wants

When you buy from or hire the best, it only hurts once.

Show your target audience how much they can save and price becomes much less of an obstacle. 

P.S. Set your prices like your life depends on it. Because in a way, it does.