How “what’s working now” castrates sales copy
Published: Wed, 05/26/21
I’ve done multiple of these kinds of pages over the past 12 months since teaming up with my business partner in software crime — “Email Players” subscriber & Navy nuclear engineer-turned world’s top email marketing automation specialist Troy Broussard. And the way I write software offer pages is probably 1000% opposite of any others I have seen out there.
I do this for several reasons.
And none of them are to be different for the sake of being different.
For example:
A lot of the software offers I see spend more time talking about their mission to change the world or whatever than giving any kind of clear reason to use them. It’s a trend that is probably a result of copywriters doing the whole “look at what everyone else is doing, that’s what is working!” shtick which is total bull shyt in this era of Sixth-generation marketing warfare that I taught back in the April Email Players issue.
“What’s working now” has always been a flawed concept.
This was obvious when I wrote copy for “Email Players” subscriber Captain Chris Pizzo.
Several years ago he was easily the #1 guy in the self defense info publishing niche.
Nobody — certainly not the companies running direct response ads in “Black Belt Magazine” everyone assumed were much bigger than they really were — even came close to the size, scope, and profits Chris’s company did, from what I remember. Yet, at that time, in that niche, it was all the rage for copywriters to fap to certain self-defense ads from Black Belt Magazine. And while looking at those writers' approaches was helpful they were targeting a much smaller market section than what we went after.
The result?
I wrote a series of sales letters that violated practically everything those ads did.
i.e., what was working at the time.
Not because those ads sucked or anything like that.
But because the market research took us into a whole different direction.
Back to software ads:
As soon as I got into the software space I did the first thing I always have done when approaching something new:
An intense study not of other software ads… but of the market.
And that research led me to writing sales pages for our software offers that look, sound, smell, feel, or taste nothing like any other software ads I’ve seen so far. And that, in the case of the first one, did 4x’s the projected sales than even our most optimistic goals were. I suspect it'll be the same with the second one (launching early next month), too. And, I suspect the next one after that (tentatively launching in August) will do even better than those, as will the one after that (launching by Q4 this year)… and the one after that, and so on.
We shall see.
Anyway, here’s why I bring this up:
One of the lessons inside the June “Email Players” issue shows my approach to software pages.
And if you are thinking:
“WTF cares, I don’t sell software”
Think again.
Software is the new info publishing.
In the not-too-distant future almost any marketer or copywriter who has even an ounce of ambition and wants to compete or be at the top of the game will be either writing copy for offers with a software component or even outright creating software offers.
Such is my prediction.
The deadline to subscribe to this issue is in a few short days.
To subscribe in time to get the June issue while you still can, go here:
https://www.EmailPlayers.com
Ben Settle