A talent of a great copywriter is the ability to sell almost anything, even if they currently know NOTHING about the product.
There’s this famous scene in Wolf Of Wall Street where the star of the movie (a scammer named Jordan Belfort) says to someone at a conference:
“Sell me this pen.”
He hands them a pen and expects them to sell it to him.
I personally think it’s kind of stupid, and the techniques used to “sell the pen” are very high pressure sales tactics. It’s personally not how I would want to be sold.
HOWEVER, it doesn’t matter what the object you’re selling is. The point is knowing HOW to sell. Then instead of learning just how to sell a pen, you can:
Sell me this pen.
Sell me this bowl of cereal.
Sell me this life insurance policy.
Sell me this 400 watt industrial tract lighting system.
So without knowing ANYTHING about sports, I was able to extract the information needed to sell advanced football training to football coaches.
For this experiment I had a team of radiologists scan my brain, and here’s the scientific results of how much of my brain is dedicated to knowing things about sports:
As you can see the Neville Brain knows nothing about sports. HOWEVER, the Neville Brain knows copywriting, and therefore can figure out the exact information he needs to sell.
I sat down with the owner of CoachTube (a site that sells training for sports coaches and their teams), and in exactly 1 hour together we made a quick promotion and emails that generated $2,220 in sales from sports coaches.
This is a common thing I tell people: If you learn proper copywriting, you can sell anything no matter which industry.
Experiment:
Can a copywriter who knows ZERO about football successfully sell to a group of people who are obsessive about football? Let’s find out.
Below, with the help of the owner of 
, we will craft an offer, write an offer email, and write a Closer email.
Step 1.) Figure out the offer:
I asked the owner of CoachTube what a “hot topic” was at the moment. He said he went to a football coaches conference recently and pretty much all the buzz was about how to do R.P.O. plays and how defend against R.P.O.’s.
I asked him if a coach wants to fully learn about R.P.O. plays and teach his team about them, which are the MUST HAVE trainings we could bundle together on the topic.
He named 5 different training courses:
- RPO’s & Spread Offense Concepts from FCS Champs JMU by Jason Hahnstadt
- Quarterback Runs and RPOs by Coaches Clinic
- Bubble Screen Package & RPO’s by Jason Hahnstadt
- Installing Tempo and RPOs by Coaches Clinic
- Run Pass Options (RPOs) in the Spread Offense by Coaches Clinic
We took these training courses and put them in a package called the “RPO Domination Bundle.”
At this point, I still didn’t even know what the hell an “R.P.O.” was…..but as the copywriter, it didn’t matter JUST YET. I was going on the instincts of the owner of the company who intimately knew what sold well, and what the best courses were.
Sidenote: I hate the name “RPO Domination Bundle”, but after hearing what football coaches respond well to and how everything in their career is about competition, I agreed “domination” would fit well.
Here’s the landing page they whipped up in a few minutes. Nothing special. It was literally just the images of the trainings with copy/pasted descriptions of each:
This was an extremely simple page with essentially no design or fancy sales page stuff…..just a list of the trainings in the bundle.
STEP 2: Write an email for the offer:
At this point I still had no idea what an “R.P.O.” in football was. However I’m about to speak to a group of football coaches through email, so I better learn SOMETHING about it quickly!
I proceeded to ask the owner of CoachTube some key questions which would help me fill in my email:
Neville: “What are the main benefits for coaches to learn RPO’s?”
Loyd: “Right now all the top teams are winning because of RPO’s. It’s also crazily hard to defeat an RPO, so if you are coaching a team, you DEFINITELY want to know how to pull these moves.”
Neville: “Is it dangerous for a coach to NOT know how to run RPO’s?”
Loyd: “Oh yeah….all the coaches in every district are studying up on RPO’s now, and if a team doesn’t know how to defend against them or run them, they’ll pretty much lose.”
Neville: “So an RPO is just a single play?”
Loyd: “Well there’s a bunch of different types of RPO’s like Inside Zone Bubble Screens, Y-Sticks, POP Concepts, Man Beaters etc). ”
I continued to ask questions as I was typing on my laptop.
Although I (Neville Medhora, Copywriter) know zero about football….I tapped Loyd’s extensive knowledge of football to write this email. From just a few pointed questions, I ghost-wrote this email for CoachTube:
Subject Line: RPO
From our quick discussion about how these football coaches act and talk, I found out they talk quite aggressivelyu. The tone of the email almost had an “internet market-y” quality to it.
The email took about 1 hour to write together with the owner of CoachTube, and it got sent out the next day. Here were the results of that email:
Email #1 Stats:
- Sent on Feb 6th, 2017 (Monday).
- 2,545 Emails Delivered.
- 1,136 Opened (44.64% open rate).
- 147 Clicks (5.78% click rate).
- 11 Sales (.43% total conversion rate), (7.5% conversion from clicks).
- $660 Revenue.
So after hastily creating an offer and quickly writing an email together, we shot out this email to 2,545 football coaches who were already signed up to CoachTube.
CoachTube had NOT been regularly sending offers like this to the coaches, and therefore we were working at a disadvantage from a “warmed up” list of emails.
From the 147 people who clicked on this email, 11 people bought the bundle (7.5% of the clicked). We brought in $660 from this so far. Not bad for such a quickly written and created bundle! But we’re not done……
STEP 3: Write a “Closer” email:
When you introduce a new deal or product, most of the sales will come from the CLOSING email. By this time people have had time to mull over if they want the offer, and the “Closer” email notifies them the offer is going away.
Already 11 people bought the bundle. So 6 days later on a Sunday we sent the Closer email notifying the coaches the special price of the bundle (normally $125, but for now only $60) was about to end.
Here’s the “Closer” email we sent, it took about 10 minutes to write and format for sending:
Subject Line: Last day for RPO Bundle
Email #2 Stats:
- Sent on Feb 11th, 2017 (Sunday).
- 2,539 Emails Delivered.
- 849 Opened (33.44% open rate).
- 87 Clicks (3.43% click rate).
- 26 Sales (1% total conversion rate), (29.9% conversion from clicks).
- $1,560 Revenue.
Final Results:
So with a very limited amount of time and effort, we were able to drum up $2,200 from existing CoachTube customers
- Total People Emailed: 2,545
- Total Sold: 37
- Total Revenue: $2,200
Email #1: Monday, February 6th. Bundle starts.
Email #2: Sunday, February 11th. Bundle ends.
Economic Breakdown of Bundle Profits and Revenue Shares:
- Sales: $2,220
- Coach Mike Rowe: $925
- Coach Jason Hahnstadt: $629
- Stripe Fees: $66
- CoachTube: $300
- Expert Kopywriter: $300
I told CoachTube if I was allowed to publish this experiment (including all numbers) I’d just take 50% of the after-expenses profit. This deal was put together so quickly there was no time to negotiate better rates and such.
This was a small deal for just a single promotion. For much larger deals a 50% split can mean A LOT of money.
However even a newbie copywriter could arrange to write deals like this for a split of the profits.
Instead of waiting around and hoping people buy from you….a skilled copywriter can craft an offer that brings in money…..even if they know nothing about the subject!
Hope you enjoyed this experiment and learned something!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora – Kopywriter
P.S. A special thanks to CoachTube for letting us publish these numbers. I do a lot of client work and get to see juicy numbers all the time, but very few places will allow those numbers to be released in public….so those cool experiments never meet the public eye.
P.P.S. I still don’t know what the hell a football R.P.O. play is.
P.P.P.S. Is seeing experiments like this useful? Would you like me to try another subject I know nothing about….like maybe tennis??
Neville,
I just found your blog today and this article is gold! I would love to see more of these if you get the chance.
Kara
Thanks Kara!
Then you might like this post about Kyle’s bar creating a digital bar school:
https://copywritingcourse.com/increase-revenue-bars-restaurants/
Or maybe this post about sending out powerwashing flyers and making a buncha money from them:
https://copywritingcourse.com/powerwashing-flyers-copywriting-case-study/
Neville,
This was a great post! I especially like how you mention how quickly you were able to put the emails together. I just finished the Sugarman book and am looking for my next steps in learning copywriting. This was an awesome read while I was digging around for more copywriting information. Thanks!
Hi Neville,
I just wanted to thank you for these amazing content about copy writing. I’ve been mastering copy writing for a month now and really wanted to know how to really learn different styles and find my own style. We’ll I’m still reading the Boron Letters but I will surely hustle this hard to get better.
PS : I printed it like you’ve said :)
Thank you for your guidance,
Chester
The Filipino Freelancer
hi Neville,
stumbled on this post and this blog pretty much randomly, very cool. Love those stats.
I suppose it’s hard to ever get to do ‘control e-mails’ if you do this for a living, but have you ever done this? meaning, you deliberately send badly-written e-mails or anyway not quite using your whole arsenal of sales techniques and you compare the results with what you get when you do use all your knowledge. I’d love to see something like that. (the closer e-mail thing is along similar lines because you get to see how much better it does when compared to regular ones)
in your case-study above for example it sounds like RPOs were very fashionable already, I wonder if pretty much any e-mail that looked even barely professional looking would have worked equally well.
more generally and going back to The Wolf of Wall Street: in the movie they make it out as if selling the pen (or anything) is a matter of CREATING demand. but in your case study it seems more like it’s question to IDENTIFY what’s in demand, eg, RPOs are all the buzz. I suppose in the end it’s often a bit of both (would like a comment from you on this), but anyway comparing against control e-mails would be interesting for this as well
btw, I’ll surely follow your blog if you do this kind of experiments!
Hey Neville, great write-up! I was just starting to write a copy for a client that I don’t have any idea about what to write about. Anyways, thank you for breaking down the process you did and what type of resources and technique you used to accomplish making sales!
I am also sort of in the same boat as Rg Enzon! I just recently started a dad website and struggle with copy ideas as well as the copy itself. As a parent, the ideas for articles are endless, but selling has never been my strong suite. My site talks about making your way through the mysteries, maladies, and everyday adventures of being a parent. It would be great to see any ideas you have for a site like this!
I really love your write-ups! keep up the great work!
BTW, did you finally learn what the RPO is?
A few days ago, when I saw your email about this post, I thought this guy is going to ask us to write a copy to sell a pen. I won’t have time for that, will read the post some other day.
But, something else brought me to your site, and I happened to check your blog yesterday. (An evil) writer that you are, you got me hooked into reading the full post. :D
Enjoyed reading all the comments too. Each such post makes me a better writer, in addition to your kindle e-book. (I go back and read it from time to time and still find some gems.) Thanks to That Brown Guy.
I like the approach of receiving a percentage of the net profit but I’m curious, are you going off the word of the person who hired you or is there a way to protect yourself from being short changed?
I get the impression some of these jobs, especially the smaller ones, are more casual and might not involve a contract.
Please continue sharing your examples, strategies, and insights!
Good article. Say, it’s RPOs not RPO’s. You need me as your Kopyeditor!
Bahahaha, good catch :)
Do me a favor, sign your name.
I can’t I don’t have a pen.
Here you go, brand new pen. Gimme money.
Outstanding post, Nev!
It seems like this is a great way to become an instant ‘expert’ in an industry.
But it also seems like you also have to ask the right kinds of questions.
Got any advice for asking the right kinds of questions that get to the heart of the matter?
Thank you, Sir!
Mark
Hey Mark, I’d say you should:
1.) Figure out how people in that industry talk.
2.) Figure out what’s popular and “all the buzz” in that industry. For example when I was writing every single AppSumo email, any resources or software dealing with iOS apps was GOLD. Nowadays stuff like “Machine Learning” and “Artificial Intelligence” and “Chat Bots” are gold.
3.) Make sure you teach them something, and give them a great deal.
If you run into Belford’s straight line persuasion videos for a reasonable price, they’re very good.
The pen example in the movie doesn’t really capture it at all. Its definitely high pressure, but seeing how it works is really interesting. Very systematic, relies on scripting and split testing.
Yeah I’ve seen clips. I’m not a huge fan of high pressure selling. I know it works, but I think it’s getting harder and harder as the consumers nowadays have more ways of retaliating and telling the world about how they got scammed.
Sales stuff from the 70’s is interesting because it was CRAZY high pressure a lot of times.
Nice, your campaign also had great open rates fpr a list lacking warm up. What were the subject lines?
Thanks!
The subject lines were:
1st email: RPO
2nd email: Last day for RPO Bundle
Nothing crazy, just normal subject lines.
Great writing, as always Neville.
A great followup will be an experiment about selling pens :)
“Sell me that pen, Neville”
Bahhahahaha……the way they suggest you do it is by really high pressure sales tactics, not something I would do :)
The case study was AWESOME!! I loved the detail and the brainstorming between you and the owner.
I would love to see one on the health/supplement industry.
Thanks Neville, LOVE these case studies. Can you do golf next … please?!???
Glad ya liked it Dee, might consider doing golf next!
Definitely useful, totally loved it (like always)!
Please more of those.
Thanks Djamel, I’ll be doing more like this if I can freely publish the results (for obvious reasons most of my clients don’t want their results openly published like this).
Great! I would love to see more case studies like this. Love your blog and your writing style.
Thanks Vahida, I’ll be doing more similar experiments, people really loved this.
Enjoyed this post. Do you normally contract your copy services?
Thanks Neville, definitely want more examples like this one!
More coming Lara!
I love these experiments! They are very helpful.
I found it pretty cool that one of the coaches follows your blog too. I think it is very rewarding when things come full circle.
Besides your awesome copywriting skills what other factors do you think help make this experiment a success?
Thanks Jared!
Well the fact that CoachTube already had products available and a healthy list of customers greatly helped. Obviously without an audience or product this experiment would’ve taken vastly longer.
We sold a good product (a discount deal on RPO trainings) to the correct group of people!
How did you manage to sell the Domination bundle at $60 while the individual courses are priced higher on the owners site? You didn’t cover that part of the copy process.
1. Did you contact the owners and ask for a discount?
2. How did you get the courses delivered? Did you have to have possession of the material to sell it and immediately deliver it via email?
Ummm…..Andy, this was sent out through CoachTube itself, I just wrote the email for them. I mentioned several times through the post I worked directly with the owner of the company.
Love it, Neville, really helpful! Would love to see more of these kinds of case studies! Both niche subjects like this, or even commoditised subjects like “affordable web design” (I know someone in web design who is seeing ridiculously slow traction. He finds it tough to make a dent in a world where you can get a site up on Weebly yourself in an hour)
Thanks for the suggestion Tim! Did you see this post where I detailed exactly how someone could generate some money doing web design?
https://copywritingcourse.com/how-to-make-100-dollars/
Really good stuff, thanks for sharing!
Quick question: Are these the final emails that actually launched, or just drafts? I noticed several typos in each. I doubt they affected click-through rates, but still, a final polish never hurts.
I took screenshots of the early drafts. The final emails were cleaned up (5 courses, not 4….and 1 week not 48 hours).
Hi Neville,
Awesome stuff – thanks! I’d like to see you try something in, say, the maternity field. (Something which I think it’s safe to assume you have pretty limited knowledge about :-)
BAHAHAHA, now THAT would be a challenge!
However with an expert I could still knock out an email in an hour. With my own research maybe 2 hours.
I would love to see a B2B email, selling a physical product, wholesale.
Hey Jonathan, checkout this B2B case study I did here:
https://copywritingcourse.com/b2b-email-marketing-tips-from-yelp/
As for selling a physical product I did a similar case study that sold a bunch here!
http://www.nevblog.com/wp-content/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2013/08/Quick-Sell-Experiment-1.pdf
Great example, Nev, and thanks to CoachTube for allowing their numbers to be shared – brings a realism to the case study that we rarely get to see!
Would love to see you write on another topic you know nothing about – maybe something technical instead? For those of us who sell to bigger businesses, I’d love to see copy for B2B sales…
Good stuff freely shared – thanks so much for this!
Thanks Mary!
I might try B2B stuff in the future. Have you seen this post where we did a case study on Yelp’s B2B emails?
https://copywritingcourse.com/b2b-email-marketing-tips-from-yelp/
Great write up! Very useful for sure!
I’d like to see an experiment on a service. House cleaning, mobile car wash, dog grooming, whatever.
Thanks!
Good idea Travis. I already have one for a powerwashing business in case you missed that one:
https://copywritingcourse.com/powerwashing-flyers-copywriting-case-study/
Love it Nev!
Your rate was insanely low for the skill you bring…but anyhow, CoachTube scored.
What I love about posts like this – is it has a more real-world feel to it. It’s a small enough gig to make it feel like any of us can pull it off :)
Well yeah, but they agreed to let me publish (also the owner is a friend) :-)
Hey Neville,
Thank you a lot for this great content.
Two quick questions:
1. What were the subjects you used in both emails?
2. How did you convinced Phil to do this and get him on board?
Thank you,
Pedro
1.) First subject line was “RPO”….I’ll fish up the other one. Nothing special.
2.) He’s a friend :)
Thank you for taking the time to answer… and to create such case study! Looking forward to a few more like these.
Awesome, this does help, now how would you do something similar without access to an expert in the topic?
I’d have to research it myself through books, Amazon reviews, or YouTube videos. I could do it, but it would take longer than an hour without an expert sitting near me.
Hello, it seems like you have used part of your salary to pay for our kopy-writing education haha that is great, thanks a lot, your teaching are really usefull, artificial inteligence will never do this kind of work, so, so you will have a good job in the future, best regards.
Bahahah…..I made less money than a half-hour consult with me costs…..the reason was:
1.) The owner is a friend.
-and-
2.) I agreed only if I could publish all the numbers publicly!
Superbly done, awesome result. Would like to see more case studies like this, I mean this is gem and everyone can learn a lot. I’d even willing to pay to see a bundle of this (HINT HINT!!)
Hey Neville, saw your consultation offers in the link.
Keen to take one of the deals in the future. But, I’m not sure which one to buy.
Can I confirm that you write copies for that specific timeframes?
Yup, we write copy on all the calls together!
Hi Neville,
Huge fan of your work and loved the detailed breakdown. It was nice to see AIDA in practice again (I bought your book a while back). Your emails get more useful as the week’s go by – please keep them coming :)
That’s great to hear Sam, will try to keep up the high quality for ya :)
Very helpful Neville. Thanks for sharing. Yes, please do more like this.
Love how you ramped up FOMO on this promotion. One thing that stuck out as not so good is the 6-day delay after a 48-hour promotion – was that intentional or…?
Nah, I screenshots from an early draft I posted. They slightly vary in time from the actual one that went out. My bad.
This was a great case study!
You make it seem possible for a newbie to do this. Building your portfolio & bring in some money, win, win.
Brick & mortar businesses, or B2B without online transactions would be intersting.
Yup, I wanted to show people you can create money out of nothing with a little skill :)
Great blog on how to write conversationally as well as the successful case study. Thanks-great job!
“How to sell a public speaking course” is my pick. It’s hard to get people to take the course & overcome fears, but the ones that do are over-the-top enthusiastic, newly skilled and waaaaaay more confident.
There aren’t any bundle options either; not sure what could compel them to enroll right away.
Thank you Carolyn, and appreciate the recommendation!
Hi Neville,
Nice post. But, I see a weird in the first email:
“…and it has 4 courses inside:” (you show 5 in the bullet list)
and:
“This RPO Domination Bundle this is only $60.” (weird sentence)
I like the urgency feeling you use in this mail. You are afraid of missing out and there is time pressure.
Best, Alex
Like the above comment response, the screenshot was from an early version. Slight differences in the finished email (like 5 trainings instead of 4).
The first email said that the deal was only available for 48 hours…
Email #1: Monday, February 6th. Bundle starts.
Email #2: Sunday, February 11th. Bundle ends.
That seems like a deliberate lie, are there any laws or regulations that you could have tripped up on? In the UK where I am based I think someone could report this to the Advertising Standards Agency (not that it’s likely they would).
Also I understand that this is a tough question, I’d appreciate it if you face into it head on rather than delete my comment (I won’t be the only reader who notices this). Love ya work! Oscar
I noticed the same thing – I’m about to close a course, and wanted to find out if anyone else noticed that also — I like “closer” emails, but was curious about why it didn’t say “extended by popular demand”, etc. after the 48 hours…
Same, wondering if Neville can clear this up.
Geez chill out people! I had early screenshots of the original email I wrote. It was modified since.
Really cool stuff Neville,
I’d really like to see one about TENNIS. And as Alison, the subject lines I am curious about too.
Thank you very much for this breakdown!
Hey Peter, the first subject line was simply: RPO
….and I might go ahead and try a tennis email next :)
This was fantastic. I will definitely use the copywriting technique you used in selling products. thanks
Awesome, glad you learned something and can model a campaign after this!
Hey Neville,
Love the Coachtube team! They’re awesome! Curious as to what your subject line was?
I’ve been asked a bunch via email what the subject line was, somehow just forgot to include it. The subject line for the first email was simply:
RPO
This was helpful Nev!
Thanks! I love these case studies.
I’d love to see you do one for mom and pop services like restaurants, dry cleaners, auto repair places, etc…
Oh that’s a good idea, I might give that a try. Thanks for the suggestion Hoo!
Hi Neville,
Thanks so much for this detailed exposure on how copywriting can help in our business.
I second Hoo Kang, and would love to see a crafted sales copy for a restaurant launch.
Yes, this is extremely useful.
Thanks Steve, glad you got something out of it, I’ll likely do more case studies like this :)
Hey Neville! Thanks for writing this up…if you can’t tell, I’m the coach of a few of those courses! It’s great to see a step by step write-up for my exact niche. Really helped open my eyes to how the copywriting process is applied to what I’m selling. Can’t wait to learn more!
Oh wow…..literally just published a draft of this before the big email, didn’t expect anyone to see it yet (nevertheless the creators).
I’ll throw you some links in the updated version of the article for your transparency! A lot of people never get to see the inner workings (and numbers), so thank you :-)
Thanks and your welcome! I’m happy to help any time. This has really helped my own copywriting.
Well glad to hear it helped Jason!
Great write up and details!
Just wondering… Aren’t these conversion rates quite low? Being a “hot topic” and all, would make you think many coaches would jump on it without too much thought.
To be honest, I’m not experienced at all, but other case studies and statistics would point to this as a rather low conversion. Was it a dead e-mail list?
Maybe I’m completely wrong and these are actually high or moderate conversion rates. You’re the expert and would love if you could give insight if these are common results.
Thank you, Neville!
Hey Cris, it’s hard to say for SURE, so I’ll give you my “broad numbers” explanation:
Generally only 1% of a general traffic audience will buy in an ecommerce situation. This was an email list that’s existed for a while, but no offers have been made.
So considering we just randomly hit these people up with an offer, I’d say this was a resounding success!
Even with a targeted and loyal audience, something like only 11% of people will be in the right state, right financial situation, and right timing to buy your product.
So based on the number of clicks the emails had a 7.5% and 29.9% conversion rate. That is REALLY high.
Hi,
I’m french copywriter (so, excuse my english ;-)
Fundamentally, the conversion rate don’t matter ! The thing more important is final revenue… But yes ! Here, conversion rate is very high. 7,5% then 29,9% : WOWWW ! Congratulations Neville :-)