What you know that just ain't so

My new client lied to me.

He told me that about 60% of his audience had worked in sales before...

And 40% had never worked a sales job in their life.

Last week I sent a survey to his buyers.

Turns out, he was wrong.

Everyone who responded to the survey except for ONE person said they had a sales job before.

I don't know where 40% came from. Maybe that's the people on his email list... but it's not his customers.

Now, imagine you were this client, writing content for people who had never worked in sales before.

That would have been a complete waste of time...

Because those people don't actually buy my client's offer.

Marketing is a game of knowing who you're talking to.

You win by relating to your audience...

Talking about things that are relevant to their lives...

Speaking directly to their pain points...

And overcoming their objections.

(Whoever is least "hello, fellow kids" wins.)

But the problem is, people don't just tell you what their pain points, objections, and innermost feelings are.

You have to find these things out for yourself by listening to them.

If you find the WRONG pain points and objections...

Then you don't make money.

Best,

Theo

P.S. If you want to learn valuable stuff about your audience in 5 minutes...

Check out my new market research GPT.

Tell it everything you can about who your audience is.

It will come back to you with a giant list of your audience's fears, pain points, hopes, dreams, goals, objections, and everything that relates to how to write copy for them (in their own words).

(Heads up, you need GPT Plus to use it... the $20/month paid subscription.)

It's not a perfect tool...

And in an ideal world, you supplement this GPT with your own market research (which you painstakingly do by hand, the old fashioned way).

But painstakingly doing it by hand takes hours...

And this GPT can do it in 5 minutes.

I will probably charge for this in the future...

But right now, I am giving it away for free:

>> Learn your audience's deepest, innermost feelings in 5 minutes with this GPT

Radical honesty

There's an idea in dating that instead of trying to hide stuff you're insecure about from women, you should just say them and own them.

I have a new client who uses the same approach in his marketing. Instead of hiding the fact that he's selling something, he'll come right out and say "yeah, this video contains a sales pitch."

It works. He's tested this approach against other stuff. It converts better.

Marketers tend to assume that the people they're selling stuff to are stupid. I think largely because a) marketers don't actually see the people they're selling to, b) spammy tactics dowork for a lot of audiences, and c) people always underestimate other people's intelligence, because we can vividly see what's going on in our own heads but not in other people's heads.

But the truth about people (including me) is that they're part dumb and part smart. 

We use bad heuristics to make decisions, which spammy marketers take advantage of. But then people get wise to those spammy marketer tricks, and learn to sniff them out.

That's where you can get an edge from using higher trust tactics, like radical honesty.

High trust tactics work really well in dating because women have learned to sniff out low trust dating tactics. They've seen them all before and they don't appreciate them.

When you're selling stuff to smart people who have seen all the marketing gimmicks before, the same principle applies. (Especially if the people you're selling to are much smarter than you.) No spammy tactic that takes advantage of their perceived stupidity will work, because they will have learned to spot that tactic. You just have to put yourself out there and hope for the best.

If you sell to smart people, give radical honesty a try.

2 screenshots

Check out these 2 screenshots:

These are from inside one of my client's ESP's. 

The first screenshot shows email campaigns he sent on his own. The second shows an email campaign I'm sending for him right now.

The biggest difference between these screenshots is the open rates.

The first screenshot shows open rates around 5%, which means my client was probably going to Promotions, and maybe even Spam sometimes.

The second screenshot shows open rates around 25%. 25% usually means no deliverability problems.

The other thing you'll notice is that the emails in the second screenshot are getting sent to far fewer people. The first screenshot emails got sent to his entire email list over the course of 3 days. My emails are going out to just a few thousand people per day.

The emails in the second screenshot are part of my campaign to improve his deliverability.

I'm doing that by sending high-value content emails to his list, a little bit at a time.

Next week we're going to ramp it up to around 15,000 per day. Then 30,000, then 60,000, et cetera — until we're mailing the full list.

This little by little approach works because it makes you look less like a spammer.

If you start sending lots of emails out of nowhere, then you'll hit Spam. 

But when you send a few at a time and then slowly ramp up how many you send, that tells Google that you're legit, and they send you to the main inbox.

Bonus points if you send extremely valuable content that answers your audience's biggest questions. That trains your audience to open and engage with your emails, making you look less like a spammer!

If you have a deliverability problem, try this yourself. (Or send me an email and I can do it for you.)

-Theo