OK, one more rant on testing.
I know I’m beating this subject to death this week.
But this tip’s especially important:
Testing CRAZY stuff.
And by that I mean, testing things that completely and utterly shatter all the popular marketing, selling and copywriting “rules” set down by the old marketing masters — like John Caples, Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, Eugene Schwartz, Robert Collier, Bruce Barton… and the list goes on.
All GREAT marketers.
And us whipper-snappers today owe them BIG time.
I mean, these guys paved the trail for us. And many of the best books, eBooks, courses, etc quote these guys chapter by chapter and verse by verse.
But you know what?
Letting yourself be enslaved to their “rules” is no good.
Yes, they make great guidelines.
And yes, it’s good to master the fundamentals.
But eventually, it’s time to break those rules and start testing crazy ideas everyone else would never think to. Take, for example, Gary Halbert’s coat of arms sales letter.
It’s arguably the most mailed sales letter in history.
And yet…
- There’s no (gasp!) headline.
- It’s not long copy.
- It wasn’t even targeted (they pulled names from the phone book!)
Three MAJOR rules ignored.
And yet, that bad-boy mailed to hundreds of millions of people.
Anyway, the point?
All the big marketing rules are mucho important.
But they’re kinda like the Biblical sabbath day.
There’s a story in the Bible where the disciples were collecting corn on the sabbath (when people were supposed to rest and not do any work) and the Pharisees start pointing the finger asking how they should be allowed to do such a thing.
Jesus’s answer?
“The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath”
And that idea applies DIRECTLY to marketing, too.
The old time rules are great and have made FORTUNES for people.
But don’t be enslaved to them.
In fact, every now and then… ruthlessly break them.
You just never know what you’ll find.
Ben Settle
P.S. For dozens of ideas (including some that are a bit on the “crazy” side) you can test in your ads and sales letters (including ideas from some of the world’s highest paid copywriters), check out:
