Ben Settle’s Weird Copywriting Tips – Part 3
Welcome to Part 3 of my 4-part Q&A series with Ben Settle.
In today’s installment, you’ll discover:
- How often you should email your list. (And how to minimize spam complaints and unsubscribes in the process.)
- How to test new ideas that your market may not be familiar with.
- How to write copy for high ticket products when you haven’t seen the product yet.
- And mucho, mucho mas.
Go ahead and read the Q&A rap session now… and don’t forget to check out the limited time offer I’ve put together for you at the end.
8. Is it really better to send emails every day to your subscribers, rather than less often?
There was a time when I thought mailing every day was insane.
After all, wouldn’t I get a bunch of unsubscribes? Wouldn’t people start accusing me of spam? Wouldn’t I be making my list mad and less likely to buy?
Then, I decided to try it anyway.
And guess what happened?
Yes, I got more unsubscribes… but my spam complaints went down to almost zero, and even more importantly I got a TON more sales. When I first went daily back in January 2009, I looked at the sales figures and pretty much wanted to throw up when I realized all the money I’d left on the table listening to goo-roos and other email “experts” saying to only email once per month or when you have something worth saying, yada yada yada.
There are a LOT of reasons to mail daily.
The sales are an obvious reason.
But here are a couple more that come to mind:
1. Positioning
If you’re REALLY an expert or (even better) a leader in your niche (and you should be striving to be seen as a leader, right?)… and you don’t have something (anything!) to say each day about whatever it is you’re trying to convince everyone you’re an expert at… well, what kind of expert or leader are you?
Real experts can’t shut up about their business.
They OOZE their expertise all over the place.
And people love to listen to them because none of us can hear enough about our passions and/or pains.
So if you mix the two together… boom!
You almost can’t lose.
Plus, if you’re only mailing once per month or whatever, and your competition is mailing 3 times per week or 5 times per week, well, good luck. Because unless you have some kind of “rock star” positioning going for you, chances are you’ll always be second, third or fourth fiddle behind those who are keeping in touch with your prospects.
On the other hand…
When you’re in someone’s inbox each day with something interesting, fun and relevant to their pains and desires, your positioning goes WAY up.
Certainly higher than the once-per-month emailers.
2. Procrastination
Here’s something else to think about:
Nobody can make a decision anymore. There are probably people on your list right now who are on the fence about buying from you or hiring you.
But guess what?
Unless you go after them, they’ll never pull the trigger.
They’ll forget all about you.
And they’ll go on with their busy lives, thinking, “yeah, I’ll get to that…” and never follow through on it. Instead, they’ll probably buy from your competitor who IS emailing them more often. This is especially true since, due to spam filters and the hectic nature of peoples’ lives, they aren’t even reading all your emails.
So who do you think is going to “win”?
The marketer who mails once per month or once per week…
Or the person who’s there each day with a fun, intriguing email?
Who has more of a chance of being seen at all?
If you’re life was on the line, and you HAD to get the highest sales for your product, and you had 30 days to do it, would you mail once, twice, 4 times… or every single day (or as often as you could)?
The key is to write emails correctly.
Don’t do what everyone else is doing — most people only mail their list when they have something to sell or whatever. Learn how to write subject lines that make peoples’ pupils dilate (from excitement, curiosity, anger, whatever) the second they read it. Learn how to write email body copy that people enjoy reading, and it’s not a chore or an imposition.
Do that and you can’t mail your list enough.
9. When approaching writing copy with a niche that already knows and trusts you but which is not familiar with the ‘new concept/vision’ you’ll be taking, what are some of the things I should keep in mind?
I am not 100% clear on the question, but I’ll take a stab at it anyway.
First, realize your new approach may fail.
And it may fail BIG time.
But it may succeed, too.
You just never know until you test it.
I don’t know if this is what you are asking or not, but what I’d do is survey my list and see what they think of this new vision/concept.
If it’s a product, here’s what to do:
Put up a capture page.
Tell your list what you are creating and tell them if they want to be alerted when it comes out and get it at a discount to go to that capture page and opt in.
If you get zero opt ins, it’s probably DOA.
If you get a lot of people opting in, you may be on to something.
It’s still not a guarantee of anything.
But it could save you lots of time and energy.
10. Do you put yourself in a particular type of environment when you sit down to write copy? For example… do you listen to music, go to the beach, search for D.B. Cooper clues etc…?
Not really.
Usually I listen to some jazz or movie soundtracks, set my timer, and then let the “hounds” out.
11. Can you write a solid sales letter for high ticket products without actually owning the product yourself?
A couple years ago I was hired to write an ad for a product that was still in production, for a brand new market I’d never sold to before. And the ad ended up not only kicking gluteus assimus, but it also beat the control that was written by a well known copywriter.
I wrote the entire ad (sans the product details) without seeing the product.
Later, I wrote the bullets after seeing the product.
But most of it was written without seeing the product details.
How is that possible?
Because 90% of the ad was written just based on market research.
The story was crafted around their pains, desires, and problems. You don’t really need to talk about your weed killer all that much — what is far more important is talking about their “crab grass.”
You cannot bore someone if you talk about their problems.
So to answer the question, yes you “can” do it, if needed.
But in order to write the strongest ad possible, you’ll need the product details. Especially if it’s an info product or something where there are lots of moving parts.
Also, here is something else to consider:
Not long ago, I was hired to write an ad in a very competitive market where there’s a lot of CPA advertising going on.

Very cut throat market.
And it was also a cesspool of marketing incest, too.
Everyone was just copying each other — like each ad was just a bad carbon copy of a copy of a fax of another copy.
So what did I do?
I asked them to scrap their product!
And then the client and I did an intense case study of the market. After that, I took that market data (no product data — we didn’t have one now) and I “created” the product as I wrote the ad, in my head, via the benefits and promises.
I remembered hearing that big mailers do this.
They sometimes write the ad BEFORE creating the product.
And what you do is, you pretend you have unlimited super powers and can create the best product possible with all the hottest benefits and then write it. Then you use your ad as an outline for the product and try to fulfill all the benefits and claims. Whichever ones can’t be fulfilled upon, you remove from the ad.
In that case you are creating sales letters without seeing the product, too.
So, just something to think about.
Again, it’s ALL about the market first.
The product is secondary.
This is the end of Part 3 of 4. More tomorrow (including how Ben got into the markets he’s currently in, how long it takes Ben to write a sales letter, and more).
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