MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

We opened an email swipe file account recently and I’ve been going in daily to observe the var­i­ous emails.

It’s inter­est­ing and eye-opening, almost like a “sur­vival of the fittest” exper­i­ment with the best emails ris­ing to the top and the ones not cut­ting the mark sink­ing to the bot­tom (sim­ply because I sub­scribed to 140 mar­ket­ing mail­ing lists).

All 140 mar­keters pro­claim them­selves the ‘best expert’, throw­ing all kinds of free infor­ma­tion… and yet there were still only 2 or 3 that really impressed me. Every sin­gle time these guys send me an email, I open it.

I’ve tried to reverse-engineer how and why these emails are so amaz­ingly effec­tive at cap­tur­ing my atten­tion, and even in some cases, my heart. I call this sin­gle most pow­er­ful con­cept ‘SOS’: Set­ting Off Sparks.

Set­ting Off Sparks

This finds its basis in the anal­ogy of a for­est fire, where all it takes is a spark to some dry wood to set alight 1000 acres.

In the same man­ner, sparks hap­pen in every­day life. It’s like the tip­ping point from being acquain­tances to becom­ing best friends. It’s the tip­ping point at which best friends sud­denly become lovers, because of that one spark.

This is our role as mar­keters: to cre­ate those moments for the sub­scribers’ list to become fol­low­ers, and ulti­mately, loyal customers.

How do you embed sparks in your emails?

How do you cre­ate the con­di­tions for ‘love’ to hap­pen? I’d say there are three dif­fer­ent ways to set off sparks.

1. Daz­zle them with revelations

What I mean is, don’t just give infor­ma­tion: give infor­ma­tion that will rock their socks off, shake their world, and change the way they do things. You can accom­plish this in 2 ways:

1. Give out brand new infor­ma­tion that no-one else has. Fail­ing that (because there’s no such thing as brand new infor­ma­tion anyway),
2. Trans­late old infor­ma­tion in new ways. Accord­ing to Joel Bauer (the best pub­lic speaker in the world accord­ing to some), when you name some­thing it becomes more real, more cred­i­ble. You could take some old con­cepts, string them together, put a label on them, and kaBOOM…it seems like a rev­e­la­tion and looks like some­thing new.

Why give revelations?

Because you can keep giv­ing out infor­ma­tion to your list and they won’t appre­ci­ate it because there’s a lot of free infor­ma­tion avail­able out there. But, when you hand them some­thing that sud­denly strikes them deep in the core and changes the way they do some­thing, they will remem­ber you.

And every sin­gle email you send there­after is an open door for you, every word you say has more weight, and every tech­nique you share has more value. That’s how it works.

For exam­ple, even I fol­low the peo­ple who’ve daz­zled me with rev­e­la­tions. Even if, after­wards, they don’t give me ‘good’ infor­ma­tion, I still fol­low what they’re up to because of that one daz­zling revelation.

That list includes Eben Pagan, for exam­ple, when he said to move the free line and make sure every­thing you give away is of value and can be monetized.

There’s another guy, Stu McClaren, a JV expert who spoke dur­ing the JV por­tion of Jeff Walker’s prod­uct launch work­shop. (I sub­scribed to 140 mail­ing lists so nat­u­rally I’m on his list, too.) I clicked through and his newslet­ters had a cou­ple of point­ers that daz­zled me.

I thought to myself, “Wow… I will never look at entre­pre­neur­ship the same way again.” Because of that, I now fol­low him and am a fan. Why? Because he daz­zled me. It works.

The thing is, you only need to ever daz­zle them once and they’ll fol­low you. BUT, of course, at the same time you always need to remem­ber that it’s a num­bers game. You need to keep giv­ing out as much new infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble because some of it will hit, and some of it won’t. But it’s worth it because once that one idea hits, they’re yours.

Like Vic­tor Hugo said, there’s noth­ing more pow­er­ful than an idea whose time has come.

2. Touch them with stories

Not just any sto­ries, but your stories.

Touch them with your auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sketches, your snap­shots of your­self. Why? Because that story will cre­ate iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and empa­thy between you and your prospects.

For exam­ple, again Stu McClaren cap­tured my atten­tion because of his story about his fiance and the trou­ble they had get­ting money for their wed­ding, and that was some­thing I could iden­tify with because, you know, wed­dings are expen­sive these days.

There is sud­denly a moment of empa­thy with that guru or with that per­son, and you start fol­low­ing his story. Now, it’s not so much about the rev­e­la­tions he can give you any­more as much as it is about who he is, to you.

3. Tease them with Cliffhangers

There’s a famous say­ing in mar­ket­ing that ‘curios­ity killed the cat but made the mar­keter rich’. As humans, we are always curi­ous to dis­cover new tech­niques and  strate­gies, and new ways of doing things.

Mark Joyner describes this as the Zeigar­nik effect in his book, Mind Con­trol Mar­ket­ing, where the use of the Zeigar­nik effect keeps peo­ple ‘glued in’ to dis­cover what’s going to hap­pen next. It basi­cally says that all human beings have prob­lems with unfin­ished stories.

Even if they watch a ter­ri­ble movie, if they’re three-quarters of the way in, they’ll want to fin­ish that movie, they will not walk out of that theater.

Why? Because unfin­ished sto­ries are tor­tur­ous to your mind because they cause such a dis­rup­tion to your thoughts.

So, one of the keys to build­ing ado­ra­tion is to tor­ture them. You can achieve this by plac­ing a cliffhanger in the sub­ject line or body copy, e.g. “This involves some­thing called the BK effect…find out in the next seg­ment what it is!”

Even CNN does this, by the way. They give you a use­less trivia ques­tion, and then you stay through the com­mer­cial so that you can find out what the answer is.

The most impor­tant thing about this point, though, is this: your answer had bet­ter be sat­is­fy­ing! Don’t throw some­thing out and build to an anti-climax. If you can give an answer that will blow their minds some­what, you have a friend for life –a friend who’ll lis­ten to you and when you say ‘open your wal­let’, they will.

I always try to say ‘old stuff’ in a new way, because some­times it’s the only way to be heard in a sea of com­peti­tors. In your mar­ket, how can you begin to trans­late your infor­ma­tion into daz­zling rev­e­la­tions? If you are inspired specif­i­cally by the ideas I’ve shared, let me know by post­ing a com­ment or just say­ing hi.

Last 5 posts by

• Are You a Direct Response Gazillionaire-In-Waiting? — Octo­ber 28th, 2008
• 3 For­bid­den Twit­ter Mind Con­trol Tricks to Explode Your Mar­ket­ing — Octo­ber 1st, 2008
• Email Mar­ket­ing Demys­ti­fied — July 24th, 2008
• An Intro­duc­tion to Tro­jan Horse Mar­ket­ing — July 2nd, 2008
• The Paprika Effect: The Brain-dead Sim­ple For­mula to Instant Cus­tomer Delight — June 25th, 2008

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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