Tim: Hi, this is Tim Paulson. I’m delighted this day to be with Mr. Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy is a marketing guru. I’m saying that. You’re not saying that, Dan. So it doesn’t sound like you’re bragging. Dan has taught me almost everything I know about being success in business. When Dan Kennedy talks, I listen, and you should too. So I’m delighted to be here with you today, Dan. And I appreciate you taking the time.

Dan: Glad to do it.

Tim: Dan, first of all, some who are listening to this tape perhaps have seen you at live events. The Success ’98 seminars with Zig and some of the others. Others, perhaps, are unfamiliar with you. If you can just kind of give us a thumbnail sketch of who you are, your business and so forth.

Dan: Hard to imagine that anybody would be unfam…

Tim: That’s true.

Dan: I tell people I’m one of those famous people that nobody’s ever heard of. You’re famous within your own customer base or circle of influence. I do several things. I speak, as you know, some 35 to 50 times a year. The last handful of years, 50+. And about half of those are the large events you eluded to: Success ’98 this year, Success ’97 last year, etc., etc. And those are public seminars, usually 10 to 12 speakers in a day. We’re mostly in sports arenas, audience size 15,000, 20,000, 25,000. I think the largest audience size in the last several years has been 38,000 and change in Tampa.

But we’ll typically be like at the United Center in Chicago or America West Arena here in Phoenix. Zig Ziglar, business speakers that would be known to some people in your industry anyway. Certainly Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Tommy Hopkins, great sales trainer, Jim Rohn, great personal development speaker. And then they’re intermingled with former United States presidents, former military leaders, General Colin Powell, General Schwartzkoff, on a lot of programs, former astronauts, former professional athletes. The key word is former.

Tim: You’re the only current one, aren’t you? I like current things.

Dan: And I’m last. I talk about marketing at the end of every day. About half of my speaking dates are those, and then half of them are trade associations or corporate clients, what I would call normal gigs. And then I do a lot of consulting in every kind of direct response advertising and direct marketing. Last 3 years, 136 different businesses and industries, including yours. Worked with a couple of clients in your business over the years, and certainly have some, have subscribers to my newsletter, some who attend our seminars. Then I’m also an author, 7 books in bookstores. We publish, as you do, a lot of my own material for our customers and have my own catalog of things and so forth.

Tim: Great. Now the Success ’98 or ’99 or whatever these are, where you’re speaking with Zig and the others, just let the listener know the first time I saw you was in Washington, DC, and it was 4 or 5 years or so ago. And you weren’t even on the list of speakers. And I got up and started to walk out as soon as Colin Powell finished, and you got up and… Tell the listeners what you say at the beginning of yours.

Dan: Well, you know, it’s an interesting selling environment because it is such a difficult selling environment. At those events, the celebrities, the President Bush’s, the Johnny Cash’s, the Chris Reeves’ and Larry King’s are fee compensated, of course, to be there. The speakers like Zig and Brian and myself, although we’re paid a fee, it really is just accounting. We’re there to sell books and tapes at the back of the room. So it really is kind of like a… For us, it’s like a giant Tupperware party, except there’s 25,000 instead of 25 in a living room. But the job is the same. So we’re there to sell.

That end of the day time slot, which got added to the programs because of me and now has proliferated there for 9 years, is a very tough sales situation. In most of the arenas, people have been there since either 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning. Which means, depending on where they live and traffic and all that, they got up at 6:00, they got up at 5:00. In some cases, they got up at 4:00 a.m. in order to get there. They’re now getting me coming onstage at 5:30, 6:00 in the evening.

Tim: They’re hungry, they’re tired.

Dan: They’re sitting on bleachers all day. Their butts are sore. Their brains are full. Their stomachs are empty. The cell phones haven’t worked, because on every break 18,000 try and use a cell phone simultaneously. They’ve been waiting in line for bathrooms, people got babysitters to get home to and spouses to get home to, and all of that. The sound in these things is not all that great to start with, the lighting is bad, etc., etc. So, you know, it’s been a long day for everybody and they understandably want to get out of there. The last speaker before me is always the last famous person of the day. So I’m typically following… This year, I followed Colin Powell a lot. The year before, Norm Schwartzkoff a lot. Followed President Bush, I don’t know, 5, 6, 8 times.

And so there’s a certain mentality in place of "We’re going to wait until Colin Powell finishes, and then we’re heading for the doors." And you can’t blame them. So there is a stampede, as you noticed. And that hasn’t changed in 9 years. There’s roughly two-thirds of the audience remaining for the last celebrity leaves as I start. And if I didn’t… And if we didn’t do everything we do to counteract that, three-thirds of them would leave.

So there’s all sorts of things done. There’s the… There’s "The Top 10 Reasons To Stay And Hear Dan Kennedy" promotional sheet that’s packed in with their tickets. There’s announcements made during the day. In some of the cities we show a video… a little 3-minute video a couple times during the day about me to encourage them to stay. The last speaker typically says, "Be sure to stay and hear Colin Powell," very gracious about it, does it a lot. And then as that stampede starts, as you said, you’re heading out the door and then stopped and turned around.

Essentially, what I’m doing is what we teach people to do in print. We call it headlines. Just as the function of the headline and maybe the sub-head and the first sentence on an ad must compel readership, and in many cases stop someone as they’re leaving. They open the envelope, and now they’re ready to throw the whole thing in the trash. Or they’re flipping through the magazine or the newspaper, and they almost flip the page, and then they come back because that thing grabbed them. That’s what, in an environment like mine, in a speaking slot like mine, that’s what I have to do orally. What I must do verbally is I’ve got 15, 20, 25 seconds to deliver the first few sentences that serve as headlines and stop people, and make them now uncertain. "Gee, do I want to leave? Do I not want to leave? Should we stay and pay attention to this person," and so forth.

And so specifically what I do when I get up there, if that’s what you wanted, is first of all there’s a slide, because people are watching monitors. As you get 25,000 people in a stadium, they’re not looking at me on the stage because I’d be this tall. They’re looking at the monitor. So the slide comes up on the monitor at the same time that I say… about this time… "About this time of day, you have a decision to make," then the slide comes up with big question marks all over it and says, "Why should we listen to this guy?" And everybody gets kind of a laugh out of that.

Then I say, "Well, first of all, if you leave now, you’re not going anywhere." And everybody gets a laugh out of that because they were in a traffic jam coming in. They know there’s a traffic jam out there leaving. And of course, we’re ending like at rush hour in most cities, so they’re not going anywhere. And then I say, "But seriously, if you run a business for a living or sell for a living, and you want to stay stuck to the seat for the next 55 minutes, then I have some promises for you." And then I make 3 specific benefit-driven promises about the speech, about what’s going to happen in the next 55 minutes.

David Ogilvie said that the heart and soul of advertising is a giant promise. And one approach to marketing is making huge promises, huge, exciting claims. So that’s what I do there. I… Another industry where I do a great deal of work is the TV infomercial business. And that, too, is a difficult selling environment for different reasons. But because the viewer sits there with a remote control in their hand, and the millisecond you bore them, they leave. So we’re constantly worrying about this particular 10-second image and what’s being said. Does it hold them? Does it grab them if they click in now?

This kind of working these very difficult selling environments has been very useful to me in making me sensitive to treating the task with great respect, with great understanding of how difficult it is. A lot of people fail with their advertising and their marketing, because they assume that what they print or send out will be read just because they put it in a publication or they sent it. Very bad assumption. They assume that just because they’ve got an ad in the Yellow Pages in the right section, that everybody’s going to read every ad. Well, very poor assumption. They assume because somebody calls in in response to one of their ads, that they’re going to make and keep an appointment. Very poor assumption. It depends on what’s said on the phone when they do call in.

So I think a lot of people just woefully underestimate the difficulty of the marketing and the selling task, whereas because I experience it under very difficult conditions on a day-to-day basis, I view it as a very formidable task, as a very difficult task, and try to do everything possible to facilitate getting that job done in everything that we do.

Tim: Right. Very good. Very well said. So you made a good analogy, and I like this. You talking about what you do at these Success 90-whatever events. You’re doing the equivalent of a headline to get people to sit down and stay. So when I’m talking to individuals within the industries that I’m dealing with, sometimes they don’t quite understand the importance of the headline.

So if you… If you get up there in front of the 25,000 people and you say, "I’m Dan Kennedy. I’m from Phoenix, Arizona. My office is at 7th Avenue…"

Dan: It’s over.

Tim: They’re gone.

Dan: It’s over. And television. You know, if they click in, even say at the beginning of a show, and you start a show with some person standing there saying, you know, "Welcome to an infomercial. And for the next 30 minutes, we’re going to talk to you about a fitness device. It’s a wonderful fitness device. It’s name is the XYZ Fitness," they’re out of there.

Tim: Yeah.

Dan: And so, most of the principles of advertising/marketing/selling are… a success principle is a success principle is a success principle, and they’re 80% transferable and they’re 80% universal. So what a… We don’t even really call ourselves professional speakers. We often call ourselves platform salespeople. What… what… what a great platform salesperson does in front of an audience, be it 25 people or 25,000 people, in order to be effective, is exactly… is largely the same thing that a great salesperson says and does in the same order, in the same way, one on one, in an office, a showroom, a salon or a home. And that’s largely the same thing done in the same way, in the same order that a direct response copywriter does when they write a sales letter or an ad. The principles are the same.

Tim: Great. Now, when I stayed there, I sat down and heard you speak. And then when you were offering your Magnetic Marketing Tool Kit, there was a stampede to the table. There were a couple of hundred, I don’t know, 300, 400 people that were actually getting that. But here’s my point and here’s the next question. You actually came down from the platform, you finished your speech. You were around the table. There’s a couple of hundred people around you. And you actually are taking questions. "Hey, do you have any questions? Do you have any questions?" And I remember one guy looking at you, and he said, "Dan, my industry’s different." Now you said earlier that you have consulted was it 168 different types of industries. So individuals in my market, individuals I deal with, I hear them from time to time. "Tim, this industry’s different. The things that work out there in other industries don’t work here. Please tell us what the deal is."

Dan: Well, the most common biases. Probably in the environment you just described at these success events, where the arena’s full of people from all different kinds of businesses and all different occupations, probably 1 of the 3 most common ways that they begin their question to me is, "I’m in a very unusual business."

Tim: Right.

Dan: And of course, they’re not. Because everybody believes that their thing is dramatically different from everything else. People have certain biases that get in their way a lot, and this is one of them. This thing that my business is unique or my customers are unique, or a bias that often exists is my customer… my customers buy only on price. And those are the 3 like ingrained mental blocks that are most commonly drug around by people and really interfere with their ability to be successful. The truth is there is no unique business, there is no unique customer, nor is there a customer who buys predominantly on price. So all of the biases are invalid.

Now, if you take your business or your industry, for example. And what term would you like to use, the hair replacement?

Tim: Uh-huh.

Dan: If you look at the hair replacement industry and you look for commonalties with other businesses, then the first thing probably to identify is that you are operating largely in a vanity-driven business. If you want to summarize maybe the reasons why people would seek out a hair transplant, it would be vanity, ego, concern about their app… for maybe any number of reasons. Just got… Just got divorced, just got remarried, just got a younger mistress, their buddy is not going bald and they are, whatever. But if you summarize it all, it’s a vanity-driven business.

Well, if you identify that, then you can certainly begin to take a look at other vanity-driven businesses. And yours is not the only such industry, and you’re going to see commonalties there. You’re in what we call a high transaction value business. And so there are other high transaction value businesses. You are in a… a… what I would call an educational sale business. There are other products and services that require explanation. You know, they’re not commodity items like everybody knows what a hamburger is, but not everybody knows what a hair transplant is. And there aren’t enormous differences between one hamburger or the other, but there are enormous differences between one hair product and another. So it’s more of an educational sale.

So you begin to identify these things that are comparable to other industries and other types of businesses. And that tells you that unless you are really stupid stubborn, that you can look to these other industries in search of things that they have figured out how to do that are effective for them, that for one reason or another have not made their way into your industry.

One of the things that we teach is that, every industry commits the same sin, is that everybody in your industry belongs to 1 or 2 trade associations of your industry…

Tim: Right.

Dan: Which are run by people in or from your industry, exclusively for people in your industry. Everybody in your industry reads 1 or 2 trade journals or magazines or tabloids that are exclusively about your industry. All of the columnists and contributors are in or from your industry. They go to seminars and conferences run by people in your industry. They get help from franchise owners and manufacturers in your industry. If they go to a strange town on vacation, they probably look at a Yellow Pages in the hair replacement category, to see what everybody in their industry is doing. My term for all of this is marketing incest, because it works like real incest. Over a period of time, everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber.

Tim: Right.

Dan: Because it’s a very implosive process. And the best that can ever come from that, from everybody in a closed community observing each other, is incremental improvements. Breakthroughs have to come from going outside the closed community and getting ideas, strategies, techniques and opportunities from somewhere else and bringing them back.

Tim: Right.

Dan: You know, the… the Amish, a very closed community. And so, if all the Amish ever do and ever did was turn to each other to learn how to farm, you would never have seen a tractor anywhere near an Amish farm, let alone would you have seen new… Forget tractors. You wouldn’t see improvements in the blades that the horses and the mules are pulling. You wouldn’t see… These kinds of things have to come from outside the closed community. And typically, whoever brings them back early on, there’s great resistance and there’s great controversy and there’s great skepticism. "Oh, that will never work in our business." And then gradually, as they are proven wrong and it does work in their business, ultimately it becomes a norm. But early on, the success comes from bringing it back and bringing it in from outside. So the business is not unique. The customer certainly is not unique.

Tim: Right.

Dan: People have only a handful of fundamental driving, buying motives. They’re not hard to learn. They all pretty much respond the same way, with slight personality type differences. And… And if they’re buying based on vanity, they respond. It doesn’t matter, for example, whether we’re going to sell them a Vanna White perfect smile tooth whitening kit on television infomercial, which is one of the shows that I worked on, or we’re going to get them to respond to a hair transplant ad. The same emotional responses are involved in both of those story-telling tasks.

And so the smart person doesn’t isolate themselves with this attitude that our business or our customers are enormously different from everybody else. Instead, they seek opportunities to… to borrow and adapt from situations where there… there is comparability if not commonalty.

Tim: I think one of the best things I did was subscribe to your No-BS newsletter. Because in each issue, it has examples from a variety of different industries, how they’re applying the million dollar bill letter or a variety of things. Guarantees. How are they doing guarantees in this industry and how we can apply it here. One of the best things that I ever did, I think, was resign my position as Vice President of Hair Club For Men, because I was really in that box. I was looking at what everybody else was doing within the industry. Then when I broadened my perspective and horizons and found you, it’s just been wonderful.

Dan: Well, you know, it’s a very interesting thing. Whereas you work with all of these people in one niche, and a lot of my other clients are niche marketers and niche trainers, where there’s the equivalent of you for insurance agent and the equivalent of you for photography studio owners and a Tim equivalent for carpet cleaners and so forth, I teach generic marketing principles.

So the subscribers, for example, to my marketing letter are butcher, baker, candlestick maker. They’re from all walks of life and all occupations and all businesses. We have, that I know of within the subscriber base, the CEO of a $2 billion a year company, and we have people just starting little home-based businesses and everything in between. And we have professional salespeople and we have people in service businesses and retail businesses and wholesale businesses and manufacturing businesses.

And what’s always interesting to me is how maybe we will deal with guarantees in an issue or I’ll do a makeover on a particular ad in a newsletter, and I’ll get mail – or faxes these days – from 2 subscribers in the same business. And one will be telling me how what was in the last issue had no application to their business whatsoever, and I sure hope in the future we discuss this, that or the other thing. And from somebody in another part of the country, in that guy’s same business comes, "Here’s how I used that idea and I got 133 customers in 2 weeks by doing a mailing, and here’s how I twisted that guarantee and used it in my business." So the one guy got it and the other guy didn’t get it. That has nothing to do with the strategy presented. It has to do with their 2 mental attitudes, the filters that they saw it through.

Tim: Right. Very well said. One of the things I learned at the last super conference, you did that in February…

Dan: We do one a year.

Tim: Do one a year. So next February will be another. Maybe there’s quite a few people listening to this tape who will want to attend that. Best money investment you’ll ever make. But anyway, I remember 2 or 3 times, individuals saying, "If there’s nothing else you take away from this seminar, get the free recorded message. Do the free recorded messages in your marketing." So I’ve taken that back to the hair replacement industry and told that to hundreds of people. And only a handful are using that. Now, that’s just an example of one thing where an individual can really make a huge impact on the success of their business and marketing. And, "It’s different." "We’re not used to that." "I don’t think it will work here." And indeed, it does. You’ve seen… That’s something that you have advocated throughout, right?

Dan: Yeah. Well, first of all, specific to people using stuff, I mean you assign your materials to one person per area. Of course, we’ve never done that. Even when I’ve been niched, I did a lot of work years ago in chiropractic and in dental. And we would have 35 or 40 doctors from the same community in a seminar room. One of the questions obviously would be, "Well, if everybody gets this material and we all use it, that’s no good. We’re all going to be stepping on each other." And my answer always was, "Don’t worry about it. Because if you’re the one out of the 40 who uses it, you’ll be the only 1 out of the 40 who uses it.

So first of all, a lot of people just never use anything. Some people appease their itch just by acquiring information from guys like us. And then they feel like they’ve done something. And that pacifies the little frustration they have going on at the moment, and then they put it on the shelf and they forget about it. That’s very good news for the small percentage of people who actually do do something with ideas and strategies and information they get. Not an enormous amount of true competition out there. There may be competition in numbers, but there’s not a great deal of true competition out there in any business.

Specific to the recorded message technique, it is… it is one that for very small dollars can have enormous impact on improving response to just about anything, from the back of a business card to a Yellow Pages ad, to a direct mail piece, to whatever. And the reasoning is very, very simple. It provides, particularly when it’s used as an alternative, as in here’s our regular number to call if you’re ready to schedule an appointment or here’s a free recorded message to call to get more information to hear from 5 of our happy customers and what their experiences were like or to get a free report or to get a free book or a free video or whatever.

The reason why it’s so effective is because it provides timid people with a non-threatening way to take a baby-step forward. They know that by the very nature of free recorded message, means there’s no live person on the other side. So no one is going to convince them to do something they’re not ready to do. Nobody’s going to grab a hold of them by the neck and pull them through the phone wire and sell them something. And in fact, they can bail out at a moments notice without being rude. They can hang up, and it’s not impolite, it’s not rude, it’s discourteous, nobody even knows who they are, they’re anonymous, they can run and hide.

And the reason why it boosts response is – and I think a lot of people don’t even understand this – that for example when you run an ad, be it your ad in the Yellow Pages or your ad in the newspaper or your commercial on TV, for every person who goes and actually picks up the phone and dials the number and calls you for whatever your primary offer was, let’s say it’s a free consult or come in for a free exam, that sort of thing, there’s a multiple of that person who almost calls, who was interested in what they read, saw or heard, did respond to it on an emotional level, and may even have physically headed for the phone. But then their fear stops them and they don’t call. Now, a lot of people don’t understand it, because they don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of about them. Dentists will say to me, "Well, I’m a nice… Why would people be afraid of me?"

Tim: Right.

Dan: And to him, everything he does is common. It’s routine.

Tim: Yeah.

Dan: I mean, dentistry has been around for 100 years. Everybody knows what a dentist is. They all know technology has improved dramatically in recent years, so it’s not painful to go to the dentist. They all know that stuff. Well, they don’t know all of that stuff. And in fact, there’s any number of people who are terrified of going. So just the act in your business, for example, because there’s a certain amount of embarrassment, there’s a certain amount of ego involved in even admitting that you care about balding, etc., so that person, there’s a multiple of those who complete a call that almost call, but quickly talk themselves back out of it.

Tim: Right.

Dan: So if they have another option, what we call a non-threatening response option, they’ll take that. And so they’ll take a smaller step forward than the other person, but it’s fine as long as they take any step forward. And then you can let them come the rest of the…[end of side 1] …and it’s also important to understand that it doesn’t take away from the primary response.

Tim: Right.

Dan: If, as a result of this TV commercial, 4 people were going to call and schedule appointments, 4 people will still call and schedule appointments, but maybe 12 more will call the free recorded message, and half of them will leave their name and address and telephone number in order to get something sent to them free in the mail, in a plain brown envelope. So you got the 4 you would have got anyway, but you got 6 more that you can now develop as viable prospects.

Tim: I think some would be afraid that the 4 who would have called – and I’ve heard this before – 4 would have called for the appointment. When they have the free recorded message option, that maybe they call that instead.

Dan: No, that won’t happen. That person who is at that level of need and desire and confidence will act the same way they would act otherwise. If anything, they will call that, listen to it, and then hang up and call back on the other number. We know, for example, with testing very recent in the refinance your home business, the home mortgage business, that taking an ad with only a primary response number to call and talk to a loan counselor, that ad in a particular paper in a particular community draws X number of calls. Same ad the next week, same newspaper, same community, same position, same ad, everything the same except adding a free recorded message option to get more information and a free kit sent to you by mail, the same number call and opt to talk to a live loan officer as called before. Those who opt to go to the free recorded message are plus numbers. They’re not traded numbers, they’re plus numbers.

Tim: And is it a significant plus, as well?

Dan: It’s a significant plus. It’s a multiple. And even… There’s even an argument to be made that even if that were not true in a particular instance, let’s say you did trade some who went instead to the free recorded message. In a sense, that’s okay because it further automates your business and further qualifies the prospects, so that by the time a live individual is using their talent, skill and time to talk to someone live, they’re talking to a high-probability prospect instead of a low-probability prospect that they’re trying to move to being a high-probability prospect.

Tim: Great point. I like that. Another thing in this particular industry. People are having a hard time with direct mail, if you can believe that. They’re concerned about that being effective, they’re concerned about, also, the length of some of the things that I advocate, long form sales letters. Would you comment on that area?

Dan: Well, let’s work backwards. Length is they don’t have an exclusive on that argument. That debate’s been going on in direct marketing for longer than I’ve been alive. And just about everybody who is exposed for the first time has a problem with it. When we start to use 16-page sales letters and 24-page sales letters and 64-page sales letters, and 60-minute audio tapes that accompany them and so forth, you will always hear, "It’s too long." And the 2 addendums to that are, "I would never read all…" Or, from the advertising people, "It’s all ugly and we need white space, and we need to relieve the reader eye." So those are the addendums that you’ll hear to it.

The truth about long copy is that, first of all, there’s abundant, legitimate, statistical research, split-testing research, to indicate that virtually without exception, long copy outperforms short copy. There’s some significant research has been done in space advertising for consumer products, car, electronics, etc., that indicate that readership falls off dramatically at 300 words but does not again drop off until 3,000 words.

Now, the conclusion you draw from that is this. People with a low level of interest in the particular topic, product, service, problem, answer, offer bail out quick. And it really doesn’t matter whether you say 6 words to them with a whole lot of white space around it and a corporate logo, or whether you try and say 60, or whether you try and say 600. It doesn’t matter. They’re leaving anyway because they have no interest in what you’re talking about.

The people who do have a significant level of interest in whatever it is that you’re talking about would prefer to have more information, not less information, and they will read it. They will even squint to read it to get it. A great translation of that is the infomercial industry. When you think about the idea, which now today is commonplace, of doing 30 minutes of television, the same length of time as a program, to talk about a food dehydrator or a vacuum cleaner or a can of car polish or a fishing lure, what you heard early on in the infomercial industry, of course, "Remember buddy, nobody is going to watch 30 minutes of TV about that. Not going to happen."

And it’s only been since the Reagan administration that we’ve had infomercials. Reagan re-deregulated the airwaves. If you go back into the 1950’s, you could buy 30 minutes of time. And then it stopped. The FCC put an end to it. And only since Reagan have you been able to go buy 30 minutes.

And so this is a relatively new media. And yet, it’s a billion dollar a year plus industry on the front end, just that which is sold on television is over a billion dollars a year, not to mention everything that happens with the customers after TV.

And so, people are sitting there tonight, on their couch, and watching 30 minutes about a skin care product or a weight loss product. Some people in your industry, they’re sitting there watching a 30-minute television program about hair replacement or about the most mundane thing. But if you happen to be interested in that… Now, like I’m not going to watch 30 seconds about a fishing lure. The only fishing I’m interested in doing is I want to see it wrapped in plastic, on ice at the supermarket and pick one.

Tim: Right.

Dan: But I ain’t putting on rubber boots and going out in a boat and swatting mosquitoes. None. Zero. You couldn’t get me out there. With naked women in the boat, I’m not going. So I’m not going to watch 20 seconds about a fishing lure, nor am I going to watch 60 seconds. I’m not going to read one sentence, one paragraph, let alone one page. But the person who’s passionate about fishing or who has just gotten involved in fishing, or has just gotten into a relationship with somebody who is avidly involved in fishing, or came home today after discovering that their number one client is avidly involved in fishing, the person who for some reason has… has heightened interest in the topic of fishing, yeah, they’ll read 3,000 words. They’ll read a 16-page letter. They’ll watch 30 minutes of television. They’ll get all the information they can get, and consume it about that particular topic.

So that’s the explanation for what is, in fact, empirically true. Now, the person who says, "But I would never read all that copy," makes the mistake of thinking they’re their customer, and they are not. We’re never our own customers. We may at one time have been a customer for what we now sell. That happens. But as we get divorced from the customer experience by time, and become involved in the sale experience now as our profession, we lose compete memory of what it was like to be a customer discovering this for the first time. So we are not our customers.

The person who says, "Well, I would never read all of that," is probably true. But that same person, there is something, if you quiz them enough, there is something that they have an incredible level of interest in that they do get direct mail that’s 16 pages, and they read every word of it. That they do watch a 30-minute infomercial about and respond to.

Tim: Golf, for example, or something.

Dan: Sure. Yeah. I’ve a lot of clients in the golf product business that sell to golfers. Golfers are nuts. They’re rabid. They’ll do anything that they think will take a… In the Tin Cup movie, the scene with the person with the 56 golf gadgets hanging from them, well, that’s golfers. You know? And so, I have one client who mails a 28-page sales letter to sell 3 instructional videos for golfers. And the response rates are consistently in the double digits. And of course, the first thing the client said is, "I’d never read a 28-page."

I have a client you know, Joe, who is like you are to the hair replacement industry is to the carpet cleaning industry. He has a product for carpet cleaners that we just introduced, that are little white throw-away surgical booties that you put on over your shoes if you’re a carpet cleaner when you walk around on carpets, so that you’re not tracking dirt in on either the carpet you’re about to clean or the carpet you just cleaned. So the carpet cleaners buy these booties and put them on to impress the clients. And they leave a couple pair with the clients so they don’t have to wait for the carpet to dry, and so forth.

In order to sell these booties to the carpet cleaners, which cost 13¢ a pair, we’re mailing an 8-page sales letter. Now, on the surface you would say, "What the hell can you say for 8 pages about a 13¢ paper bootie?" But then beyond that, nobody’s going to read 8 pages about 13¢ booties, and no, they’re not. But they will read 8 pages about how to build their business. They will read 8 pages about how to get more referrals from their customers. They will read 8 pages about a revolutionary, new, incredibly simple strategy that wows all their customers, so their customers can’t wait to tell their neighbors about them. That, they will read 8 pages about.

There’s a thing I teach in copywriting called "message to market match." When your message is matched to a target market that has a high level of interest in it, then not only does responsiveness go up but readership goes up. The whole issue of interest goes up.

Tim: Very, very good. My goodness. So direct mail is a good thing? Why is direct mail a good thing?

Dan: Well, direct… direct mail gives you a long list of benefits that hardly any other marketing media gives you, one of which is it’s just about the only intimate method of non-manual labor marketing. The process of reading a sales letter that has arrived in an envelope and I’ve opened the envelope, I’m taking the letter out and I’m reading it, is a one-on-one thing. And it’s the closest thing to one-on-one selling that you can do. In fact, the term "salesmanship in print" is selling in print. It essentially allows you to sell in a vacuum. As long as you keep their attention while they’re reading the letter, there’s no other ad on the page next to it. There’s no commercial coming on right after it. You’re in an exclusive attention environment, and that’s relatively exclusive to the letter.

Secondly, from an economic standpoint, in most cases it’s hard to beat the bang that you get for the buck from successful direct mail. Often, you can be in the 100%, 200%, 300%, 400% return on investment range, which incidentally is far more important than a discussion of response percentages. And a lot of times, and I’m sure you’ll have it in your industry, people whine, bitch and moan to you, "I did a mailing and I only got a half a percent response, so I’m not going to do any more." Well, in a business like your people are in, a high transaction-value business, let’s say… What’s an average case, $3,000?

Tim: Sure. $2,000, $3,000.

Dan: Okay, if an average case is $3,000, and we mail to 1,000 people and we mail to them 3 times, so we spend $3,000, and out of the whole 1,000 we get 1% response would be what? 10% would be 100, so 1% would be 10. If we get half a percent response, we get 5. So that’s $15,000 in gross against our $3,000 in expenses. My question for you would be, "Let’s not talk response percentages, let’s just talk common sense. If you could go down to the bank today and give them $3,000, and they would give you a gray bag back with $15,000 in it, how many trips can you make to the bank before they close?

Tim: Right.

Dan: See, that’s the common sense question. So people get all hung up about the wrong measurements. The only measurement that counts is the return on investment, not response percentages. Direct mail allows you to test in small little cells. It allows you to target market, because privacy in America is dead. So the commercial list community for those who are not lazy and will do the work to seek out lists, pretty much allows you to be ridiculously precise in your targeting, if you choose to be.

If you say to me, "Our ideal client is a 35-year old industrial engineer, who’s got a midget as a next-door neighbor and drives a Chevrolet automobile, and subscribes to National Geographic and Playboy, and bowls every Wednesday night, we can get a list of just those people in your zip code. Now, it’s not going to be a very big list and it’s going to be a fairly expensive list to get, but it will be cheaper to spend the money there than it would be trying to find those 8 people any other way we would find them.

Tim: Right.

Dan: So direct mail allows you to be very precise in matching your message to your target market. So you can talk… If you do television, for example, you have to talk in big, broad brush terms because you’re talking to everybody. And you are inherently buying enormous amounts of waste, because you’re talking to a lot of people who would not, could not, will not respond at this particular point in time no matter what you say. But in direct mail, if, to be practical for a minute, if for example your ideal prospect is a single male between the ages of 35 and 48, who is in any one of 5 occupations we might name and who bought a new sports car sometime within the last 3 years, and who subscribes to either GQ magazine, Men’s Journal or Men’s Health, we can get that list. And we can get exactly those people. And now, we can tailor a message specifically to that person. And therefore, we will get an enormous response, because we will have perfectly matched the message to the market.

So direct mail allows us to do that, when virtually no other media allows us to do that. Direct mail allows us, as I said, to test. Test different headlines, test different offers, test different price points, test different guarantees, test different ways of saying "free consult" for example, what pulls better. It allows us to do all of that very efficiently. It allows you to market in small numbers if you have a small budget. It allows you to make mistakes cheap, figure them out and fix them. Yellow Pages, for example, how do you test Yellow Pages?

Tim: Right. You can’t.

Dan: You make a commitment and you’re writing a check every month for 12 months before you can make a change. So there’s enormous benefits to direct mail that virtually behoove the intelligent businessperson to learn how to do it effectively. And the answer is not, should never be, "Well, we tried that and it didn’t work." Because again, there’s abundant empirical evidence that direct mail is an effective, efficient and profitable way to market all sorts of goods and services, including those in your industry.

So to be the stubborn guy who’s standing around still claiming the Earth is flat is not particularly productive. I mean, the correct response is, "We tried it before. We didn’t do it right. And now we want to figure out how to do it successfully," not, "It doesn’t work."

Tim: Right. Very well said. Individuals in the hair replacement industry, Dan, a lot of times they get their leads from television advertising, newspaper advertising, radio advertising. They get the leads, and about 10% of them actually come in and purchase, 90% are just sitting around and they don’t do anything with them. I provide them sales letters to follow up those individuals. It’s interesting how there’s a large percentage who don’t use those letters, or they’ll send out one letter.

There’s one guy in Minnesota, as a matter of fact, he sent out to just 100 of his leads a letter that I wrote. Then he followed it up a week later with a second letter to the same 100. Then a week later, the same 100, the third letter. And it was after the third letter that he got multiple sales, over $8,000 worth of business just like that, on $96 worth of investment because of 300 letters, 32¢ stamps each.

So comment, if you would Dan, about the sequence. Is it just a one-letter type of a deal? Is it important to send the second and third letter and so forth?

Dan: Well, the first thing I say is, if 10% of their leads are turning into customers, that’s a very good number, by the way. And everybody should be real happy.

Tim: They don’t get many of them, though. That’s the problem.

Dan: But the second thing is, is that those leads that are not immediately responsive have very real, very tangible value. The only way to determine that value is to do a thorough, comprehensive, effective marketing campaign directed at a reasonable number of those leads before you determine how little or how much value that they have.

To presume that you can deliver one message to a group of prospects, and from that get everybody who is getable, and determine that the rest of them are just bad leads, it’s just completely against what I said at the very beginning of our time together. It underestimates the difficulty of the task.

You know, there’s… People today lead very complicated lives. You know what I say to people is, "Here’s how people don’t live their lives. The last thing Harry says to Marge before he leaves the house in the morning is not, ‘Marge, watch in the window for the mailman. And when the mailman gets here, be sure to go out there and get your hands on that letter from the insurance guy offering the free road atlas if he comes to our house and makes a presentation before anybody steals it.’" That’s not how people go through their lives. I mean, they’ve got a lot going on.

People respond maybe impulsively to a TV commercial. So that indicates that there’s a certain level of awareness and interest. It stimulated them at the moment. But since then, they’ve thought of 562 other things. And the day your particular mail piece arrives, car broke down, argument with the boss, lost a big client, kid got in trouble at school, fight with the spouse, whatever, 7 million things could happen that are sufficient in distraction power that that mail piece doesn’t even get opened, let alone read. The guy that day takes all his mail and throws it out. He takes everything that isn’t a bill and throws it out. I have those days, and I’m sure you do too. And I’m a student of junk mail.

Tim: I even toss the bills.

Dan: You know, I don’t do it very often, because I keep my mail to study because of the business that I’m in. But even I, I’ll have a day where there’s just too much going on, I’m too busy this week, I’m not even going to sort it into 2 piles and set the pile aside to look at it later. Just anything that’s not clearly a check, a bill, what I call white mail, a letter I have to respond to, voom, in the trash. And if I have those days, you know ordinary folks, if you will, have them more often obviously than I do. That day, you don’t get the mail. The spouse gets the mail and throws the thing out. He reads it, but that day his hair stylist talked to him about some new glop. We can go on and on and on and on and on.