MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Email mar­ket­ing plays a very big role in what we do; it con­tributes sig­nif­i­cantly to our rev­enue and prof­its. Despite that, I’ve real­ized that no one really talks about email copy­writ­ing. The few peo­ple who do are Frank Kern, Yanik Sil­ver, maybe some of the mate­r­ial con­tained in many email swipe files, but given its impor­tance, not many peo­ple really talk about it enough.

No one has actu­ally quan­ti­fied or qual­i­fied email copy­writ­ing as a way of mak­ing sales, nor as a cat­e­gory of study or to cham­pion. I took a stab at actu­ally try­ing to reverse engi­neer emails from some top email copy­writ­ers to see what kind of tech­niques they are using.

The first per­son that came to mind was, of course, Matt Furey. Dan Kennedy and Michael Mas­ter­son, the head of Agora, have rated Matt Furey as the best email mar­keter in the world. In fact, last year he charged $5,000 per head for an email copy writ­ing boot camp for one of Agora’s copy­writ­ing off­shoots. He must be doing some­thing right.

He also came to mind because his emails are really enter­tain­ing. Mind you, I’m not even the tar­get mar­ket or audi­ence but some­how, I actu­ally I want to open and read every sin­gle email he sends. It shows that he is actu­ally doing some­thing right. I Googled him yes­ter­day to see what he actu­ally does. I’ve found that he has an Inter­net mar­ket­ing prod­uct out as well.

Matt Furey is a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire, purely on email copy­writ­ing. His emails take him about 20mins or less to cre­ate. I came up with 5 dif­fer­ent things I think Matt Furey does that have made him who he is today.

5 obser­va­tions on Matt Furey’s Email Marketing:

1. He is as aggres­sive as humanly possible

What I mean by that is this: if you thought Armand Morin was insane by send­ing 20 simul­ta­ne­ous mails, this guy has a 100-email sequence. Per prod­uct. I signed up for 4–6 of his lists, and gives 50–100 tips in a row. You receive a con­stant bar­rage of emails from him every day. Some days, he even emails twice a day because he has spe­cial pro­mo­tions in between. In every tips/lessons email, he squeezes in an offer to buy some­thing and often it’s not even the list’s prod­uct –either an affil­i­ate prod­uct or one of his other products.

If you sign up for his fit­ness prod­uct, he’ll push you towards his Carpal Tun­nel Syn­drome prod­uct. He tells one long story that has noth­ing to do with any­thing, and then at the bot­tom he inserts “PS. This story is related to my prod­uct, please click here to buy”.

It’s also really inter­est­ing that at the end of every email, his sig­na­ture is a col­lec­tion of links to his 6 Web­Pages. It actu­ally works because after read­ing his story, you do want to see what else this guy has to offer.

2. “It’s all about infotainment”

Matt Furey wrote this to Michael Masterson’s copy­writ­ing list, and added that it’s not about edu­ca­tion. Often­times, we try to give value to the cus­tomer by pro­vid­ing them with edu­ca­tion, tips and tricks. But, Matt Furey says, edu­ca­tion is bor­ing! Peo­ple DON’T want to scroll through a long bor­ing email just to gather a few nuggets of truth wedged in between long bor­ing words. Matt Furey says it’s about inform­ing in an enter­tain­ing way.

And how do you pro­vide infor­ma­tion in an enter­tain­ing way? You make a story out of every­thing. I’ve observed that this is one of obser­va­tions Matt Furey’s tech­niques –he makes a story out of the small­est things – from the ben­e­fits of using his prod­uct, to case stud­ies dis­guised as elab­o­rate sto­ries of peo­ple who have suc­cess­fully used the prod­uct, to processes and even the prod­uct itself.

Exam­ples include his ‘Farmer Burns Stom­ach Flat­tener’ exer­cises, on which he wrote 3 emails. He wrote in an attention-grabbing way, giv­ing sto­ries on who Farmer Burns was and what will hap­pen when you use these exer­cise. He includes tes­ti­mo­ni­als in his sto­ries as well, and this is how he can write 100emails –by micro-focusing on one ben­e­fit, fea­ture or case study and ampli­fy­ing it. I can even remem­ber his sto­ries by head because they really were good.

One of his best sto­ries was about a monk, one of only 46 monks to have ever run 1,000 marathons through the ter­rain of Mt. Hiei in seven years. That’s right, 1,000 marathons through the moun­tains in seven years! More­over, fail­ure to com­plete the course requires sui­cide! It is actu­ally a true story, by the way.

He used it for one of his fit­ness sem­i­nars, where he was plan­ning to invite the monk to talk about how he used to be a loser until he started run­ning these crazy marathons. Matt Furey uses sto­ries like these and although you may not be the tar­get audi­ence, he draws you in. You don’t delete any of the 100emails because each of them is so entertaining.

3. He creates some­thing to champion

We often talk about cre­at­ing busi­ness cat­e­gories to cham­pion; Matt Furey has done this really well. He decided that hav­ing used weight train­ing for body build­ing in the past, he would now be anti–weight train­ing. He came up with a prod­uct called Com­bat Con­di­tion­ing, involv­ing Hindu Squats and Hindu Pushups etc, which he uses to cham­pion body weight train­ing. He also cham­pi­ons the ‘Farmer Burns Stom­ach Flat­ten­ing’ exercises.

Matt Furey is the cham­pion of the micro-cause. He makes every process and ben­e­fit a cause. He makes the ‘Farmer Burns Stom­ach Flat­ten­ing’ exer­cises THE exer­cise, THE secret weapon that all stom­ach flat­ten­ers use.

When done in this way, this tech­nique cre­ates a halo effect. If you amplify one key ben­e­fit in your prod­uct and spread it out, the ‘good­will’ gen­er­ated around that one cause or ben­e­fit will cas­cade down to your entire product.

This is what Apple did with iPod, for exam­ple. They focused 80% of their mar­ket­ing on the iPod, and every sin­gle Apple prod­uct has ben­e­fited from the cool­ness of the iPod. Matt Furey does the exact same thing. He takes one prin­ci­ple that seems novel or cool, ampli­fies it, and the ben­e­fits cas­cade down.

4. He main­tains a very high level of energy in his copy

Even his lead-in has very good per­son­al­ity. When most emails begin, “Do you have a prob­lem with surgery?” Or “Do you have a prob­lem with this ail­ment?” Matt Furey says, “Aller­gies suck! Now, what are you going to do about it?”

Well, not really. Actu­ally, he says stuff like “Start Your Day With a Donut, Cof­fee and a Smoke” or even, “Pain, Pain Go Away”, and his emails main­tain that high-energy pace through­out. His emails are fast and catchy, and none of them are more than 500-600words long; they’re very short. He calls it zero resis­tance writ­ing –don’t care what peo­ple may say and just write what you feel. It makes peo­ple more drawn to you because this way, you write with pas­sion and energy.

5. He builds towards a mythology

Mythol­ogy is a sys­tem of sto­ries and beliefs. I define mythol­ogy as a net­work of sto­ries, per­son­al­ity, expres­sions and causes, chan­neled through a sense of secrecy to con­tribute towards the aura and brand­ing of the product.

Obvi­ously, Matt Furey has a lot of sto­ries and all of them are inte­grated into his mythol­ogy DNA. He has sto­ries on how he ‘dis­cov­ered’ kung fu sex, and he writes a Chi­nese phrase which loosely trans­lates to ‘on the bed kung fu’ or ‘kung fu on the mat­tress’. That par­tic­u­lar sales let­ter was all story, bul­let points and the close.

Although he repeats some of them, he has dif­fer­ent kinds of sto­ries includ­ing one on how he met the Japan­ese pro wrestling cham­pion who taught him Com­bat Con­di­tion­ing. His per­son­al­ity shines through in every­thing he does –even his Inter­net course is called “51 Bull­shit Ways to Make a For­tune on the Inter­net.” –that’s the real title of his mail­ing list. His causes can also be found through­out his sales let­ters, and there is a con­sis­tency to the way he writes.

Matt Furey say: sell secrets –very good advice. Chan­nel your prod­uct through a veil of secrecy, so for exam­ple, you wouldn’t say you’re sell­ing ‘The Hard­work­ing Man’s Way To Earn A Liv­ing Online Using PPC Opti­miza­tion.’ No. You’d say, ‘This Is The Secret To Boost­ing Your Lifestyle.’ Sell secrets and make every­thing seem mysterious.

In his Chi­nese kung fu sales let­ter, he threw around Chi­nese words which, to the Chi­nese, are very sim­ple, every­day words like stom­ach ache, headache, trans­lated lit­er­ally. But, he uses them bril­liantly to cre­ate aura and mythol­ogy. Again, per­son­al­ity, expres­sion and zero resis­tance writ­ing play an impor­tant role.

Lastly, your prod­uct should come out the world of sto­ries and expres­sions you have created.

One last thing. Matt Furey is very timely. If it’s Spring Break, he’ll have a Spring Break story. He’ll begin, “This reminds me of the last Spring break…” and he’ll tell a story which has noth­ing any­thing to do with the pro­duct… yet. And unsur­pris­ingly, as in every sin­gle email he sends, right at the end he’ll say, “PS. This kind of relax­ation can also be found with my prod­ucts, click here to buy.”

Matt Furey always writes and closes his emails this way. And per­haps, all of the above con­tribute, in vary­ing degrees, to his knack of clos­ing sales.

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• 3 For­bid­den Twit­ter Mind Con­trol Tricks to Explode Your Mar­ket­ing — Octo­ber 1st, 2008
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• An Intro­duc­tion to Tro­jan Horse Mar­ket­ing — July 2nd, 2008
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About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

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