In this issue, I am going to reveal in detail
the most powerful (and little known) money-making secret I
have ever learned in my entire marketing career.
You need to pay VERY CAREFUL attention to
EVERY WORD in this newsletter.
The information I am about to give you has
already made a few people very rich. It can do the same for
you.
Keep an open mind until you've finished
reading this entire newsletter... and... your financial reward
will be humongous.
First, I am going to give you a brief review
of the three primary reasons people do NOT buy whatever it
is you are selling:
1) They do not want what you are selling.
2) They cannot afford what you are selling.
3) They do not believe you are telling the
truth about your product and they are very skeptical about you
delivering on your promises.
The first two reasons are acceptable. The
third reason is not. And that is where almost all "lost
sales" are
lost.
So, what is the best way to alleviate
someone's fears about buying your product or service? Well,
the very strongest way to do this is to offer to let them
have what you are selling and not pay anything whatsoever
until a month or 45-days have elapsed since they received
whatever you are selling... and... they've had plenty of
time to satisfy themselves you are an honest and
reliable vendor with 100% integrity.
Believe it or not, a few businesses in the
United States do this and they make millions of dollars with
this operating model. For example, Rodale Publishing will
not allow you to pay for a book in advance. When they send
direct mail, they include an order card you simply sign
and return to them. This order card says (in essence):
"Please ship me xyz book. I will read it within the next
30-days. And if I am satisfied with the book, I will then
pay for it. If I am not satisfied, I will return the book to
you and not be charged a single penny."
The real
wording of their order cards is slightly different from what
I have just written. But I am pretty sure I have
communicated the essence
of it accurately.
Sources tell me when Rodale sells books
this way, they get something like a 70% or 80% "pay-up"
rate. However, you should remember Rodale Publishing has a
few very powerful advantages most of us "lesser mortals" do
not possess.
For example, they have a very large in-house
list of proven trustworthy customers.
Secondly, they have very deep pockets and
can afford to wait for their money.
Thirdly, they run a very tight ship and
their billing notices go out like clockwork.
And last but not least, they've been
operating in this manner for decades. So they have all the
nuances and little "inside tricks" of doing business this
way down to a science.
I do NOT recommend most of my readers
attempt to do business this way. But here's a thought: You
might want to do your TEST marketing in this manner.
Here's why: When you market like this, the results you're
going to get are the highest which are humanly possible.
Believe it or not, most marketing campaigns... even if
constructed in this manner... will not bring back enough
replies to justify continuing the campaign.
A big secret to success is...
Failing!
And if you're going to fail, you want to
fail as fast as possible so you can get on to your next
project. If your marketing doesn't pull a decent return when
you don't even ask people to send money... it is certainly
not going to pull a decent return when you demand "cash with
order".
Okay, here's an alternative which can make a
lot of you rich. In a nutshell, it is called...
The 30-Day Hold
The way it works is like this: When you get
to the ordering instructions, in your marketing sales letter,
ad or webpage, you write something like this:
"We are so sure you will love this product,
we are not even going to cash your check until at least
30-days after we have shipped your product. That way, you
will have plenty of time to examine our product and discover
for yourself how wonderful it is. If you are dissatisfied,
you can return the product to us and we will send back to
you your UNCASHED check. If you decide to order by credit
card, we will not process your credit card for 30-days. So,
if you decide to return the product, we will destroy all of
your credit card details and your card will never be
charged."
Joe Karbo is the first person I know of to
use this type of 30-day hold on a large scale. He sold 4
million copies of "The Lazy Man's Way To Riches" by
marketing it in the fashion I have just described.
I remember years ago being in Phoenix
shooting an infomercial starring me and Don Drysdale (the
ex-Dodger pitcher) which was being produced by Dan Kennedy.
Guthy-Renker was in the same studio when I was there. They
were having a problem with an infomercial selling cosmetics
starring Victoria Principal. No matter what they tried, all
they could do (at best) was make the infomercial break even.
All they were doing was "trading dollars". Then I suggested
they try the 30-day hold. They did. The infomercial became
wildly profitable and it ran (I believe) for something like
7-years.
I have written two major campaigns
relatively recently. One of these campaigns makes a tidy but
not spectacular profit when the client uses the 30-day hold.
Without the 30-day hold, the promotion is not profitable
whatsoever.
I have a relationship with another client
who is mailing thousands and thousands of sales letters.
These letters would be quite profitable WITHOUT the 30-day
hold. However, WITH the 30-day hold, the profits are
spectacular!
Let me give you some numbers to chew on.
Let's say you spend $1,000 to pay for your
advertising. Let's say you are mailing all the letters you
can mail for $1,000 or spending $1,000 to run newspaper ads
or maybe spending $1,000 to buy Google ad words. Let's say
for every $1,000 you spend, you bring back $2,000. Let's say
your refund rate is 10%.
So we have a $2,000 gross... minus $200 in
refunds... and minus $1,000 for the costs of advertising.
What you have left then is an $800 contribution to overhead.
Not bad.
Now let's add the 30-day hold into that same
equation. Here's what will typically happen: You will TRIPLE
your response rate. And you will DOUBLE your refund rate.
Let's look at the figures again.
We now have a $6,000 gross... minus $1,200
in refunds... and minus $1,000 for the costs of advertising.
What you have left then is a $3,800 contribution to
overhead. Now I'm not positive about this... but... Sir Gary
of Halbert believes...
It Is Better To Have $3,800
Than It Is To Have $800
The math doesn't always work like this.
Sometimes adding the 30-day hold will more than triple your
gross sales... and not increase your refunds. Sometimes
adding the 30-day hold will just double your gross sales...
and double your refunds.
Let's see what the numbers look like using
the worst of the above cases. Okay, so you double your
gross, which now means you take in $4,000 and you double
your refund rate (from 10% to 20%) which is $800 in refunds
and you still have to subtract the $1,000 for the cost of
advertising. That means you've now got $2,200.
Here's another thing that, from my exalted
guru status I firmly believe:
$2,800 Is Better Than $800
Now let's take an even worse case scenario.
Let's say using the 30-day hold increases your sales by 50%
but triples your refund rate. In this case, you will have
gross sales of $3,000 minus $900 in refunds minus $1,000 for
advertising. That leaves you with $1,100.
So, as you can plainly see, using dismal
figures like this worst case scenario, you still have
$1,100... which... at least to my befuddled brain... is
better than $800.
Consider this fact: I have been in direct
marketing since just before George Washington was elected
the first president of the United States. And in all that
time, I have never known anyone who used the 30-day hold to
go back and start doing business again without the 30-day
hold.
Now Why Doesn't Everybody
Use This Powerful
Secret?
First of all, most people don't know about
it.
Those who do know about it, don't know just
HOW POWERFUL this secret is. They have no idea what a HUGE
INCREASE using the 30-day hold will make in their
bottom-line profits.
There are two more reasons people do not use
this technique:
The first is fear. They are irrationally
afraid the 30-day hold will cause all (or maybe 70, 80 or
90%) of their customers to return what they are selling and
decline to pay for it. To my knowledge, something like this
has NEVER happened. I suppose it is remotely possible if you
are selling something utterly worthless. But I want to
repeat something: I personally have NEVER known anyone who
used this 30-day hold without SUBSTANTIALLY INCREASING their
bottom-line profits.
Let me pause here a moment to tell you a
true story.
There's a man named Melvin Powers who owns
Wilshire Books in the Los Angeles area. Years ago he wrote a
book about how to become a mail order millionaire. The
problem was, Melvin, himself, did not know how to become a
mail order millionaire. That's because most of his books
were sold through retail outlets. So Melvin hired me to
write a full-page newspaper ad for him selling his book. I
used a lot of the copy and sales arguments he had already
been using in the ad he had created. I changed some of it
but the main change was the addition of the 30-day hold.
Melvin refused to test my ad. Melvin
demanded his money back.
As you might guess, I told him to go piss up
a rope. I'm not going to deal with anyone who thinks their
marketing judgment is better than mine. So much so, they
won't even test what I've created for them.
Well, it came to pass I was in Melvin's
office while he was sitting at his desk almost apoplectic
with a red face and veins so swollen, they looked like they
were going to rupture and burst. He opened
the top left hand drawer
of his desk and reached in and
grabbed with both hands a bundle of checks. He said,
In a newsletter I wrote a long time ago, I
talked about a man who sold information books on a COD (Cash
On Delivery) basis. I told my readers how he had a 50%
non-acceptance rate which meant he was only making $250,000
per week profit!
Try and understand this: The "game" (if you
will) of direct marketing is all about psychology and
arithmetic. If you understand human psychology (TRULY
understand it) and you understand arithmetic... you will
make a box car full of fungolas.
If you do not understand these two important
elements of direct marketing, you will just limp along
making survival money or perhaps no money whatsoever.
End of digression.
Let's get to the second (and last) primary
reason people do not use the 30-day hold. It is because
they are not well funded.
I'm going to ask you a question and I bet
very few of you get the answer right.
You're all aware of
the sales letter I wrote of which 600 million were mailed,
right? Let's say you wrote a letter today just as strong as
the one I wrote lo those many years ago... and... you could
mail 600 million of them. Let us say those letters would
cost you 70¢ apiece to mail. Here's the question:
How Much Would It Cost You
To Mail Those 600 Million Letters?
Well, let's see: At 70¢ per letter it
would seem it would cost you to mail all 600 million letters
a grand total of $4.2 million.
Right?
WRONG!
It would cost you approximately only $3,500
to mail all 600 million of those letters. Here's why: You
would use your $3,500 to mail 5,000 letters and as the money
started coming back from your orders every day, you would
"re-invest" the proceeds of that day to mail more letters.
In other words, you would be mailing more and more letters
every day and soon, you would be compounding your mailings
with the speed of light. It wouldn't be long until you would
be mailing more letters than your infrastructure could
handle.
For example, in the heyday of the family
crest promotion, we were using a semi-truck to haul our mail
from the Donnelly Corporation in Oakdale, Illinois to the little
town of Bath, Ohio where the letters were actually mailed.
We did this because we thought having the Bath, Ohio
postmark was an important element in the success of our
promotion. But here's the deal: We had to truck those
letters TWICE a week because the Bath, Ohio post office only
had enough room to hold one semi-truckload of mail at a
time.
Now let's suppose I had been using the
30-day hold on that promotion. It would have taken us a lot
longer to mail those 600 million letters. That's because,
instead of using every day's receipts to be able to afford
to pay for the stamps, etc. needed to mail more letters, we
could only increase our mailings once a month after we were
able to cash the checks (people didn't use credit cards back
then) we would have agreed to hold for 30-days.
Now I'm going to make an assumption. I am
going to assume you are not filthy rich. Let's also assume
you have a promotion which is already profitable and you
know it would be a LOT MORE profitable if you could afford
to use the 30-day hold secret I have just explained. So what
you need is money. Where are you going to get it? Try going
to a bank, finance company, mortgage and loan company, or a
credit union, and explaining why you need a large amount of
money. Try telling them you need the money because you have
a hot mail order promotion which will make even more money
if you could use the 30-day hold technique.
They Will Laugh
You Out Of Their Office!
Lending institutions in America only lend
large amounts of money to people who have tangible assets.
If you have a home worth $10,000,000 they will probably lend
you a few million if they can use your home as collateral.
But believe it or not, homes, real estate, and other
tangible assets are not the best collateral a lender could
have.
The very best collateral is the type Las Vegas casinos have. In other words, Las Vegas casinos
always have the odds in favor of the house. That means if 10
million people go to Las Vegas and wager a billion dollars,
the casinos know precisely to the 20th decimal point how
much profit they will make from those gamblers.
Basically what the casinos in Las Vegas are
doing are taking bets from people who are betting against
the sun coming up tomorrow.
What you want to do in this life is
everything possible to put the odds on your side. Once you
get the odds on your side, if you are anything other than a
pathetic loser, you will go full-steam ahead.
Now let's talk about all those hard money
lenders who won't consider helping anyone with a loan unless
the would-be borrower has hard assets (preferably real
estate) to use as collateral. What if you were able to
spend some time with these guys and after talking to a
couple hundred of them you found a few with half a brain?
And you explained to them how they could get a lot more bang
for their buck by investing in reputable, reliable and
ethical direct marketing promotions. And suppose one of
these guys decided to financially back your direct marketing
endeavors. For this he would receive a return of 10% monthly on
the money he had lent to you. That would be a bonanza for
him. He would be making about 800% more per year on his money as
opposed to the approximate 15% he would be making otherwise.
And, it would be a terrific deal for you
also.
Let's go back to the way the 30-day hold
most typically works. It is common for this technique to
triple your results and double your refunds. In the first
illustration I gave in this newsletter, it increased your
contribution to overhead from $800 to $3,800.
Now suppose the $1,000 in advertising came
from your savvy lender instead of out of your own pocket.
And suppose you would pay him 10% per month (that's $100 for
those of you who are really brain dead). Therefore, by using
outside financing, you would have decreased your
contribution to overhead from $3,800 to $3,700.
What this means for you who are
mathematically savvy is, by using the 30-day hold, you would
have decreased your profits from 475% greater than you would
have without the 30-day hold... all the way down to... only
422% greater.
It's A Win-Win-Win-Win Situation
For Everybody Involved!
The question is, where do you find these
direct marketing savvy deep pocket lenders?
I have a great relationship with a few of
these men and they will be attending my Orlando and my Los
Angeles "Root Canal" seminars the first part of December.
It will cost you $897 to attend one of these
seminars. And if you act immediately... RIGHT NOW... you can
bring one guest with you at no additional cost. The