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    Sell Me This Pen: How I sold $2,220 of sports training (knowing NOTHING about sports)

    Sell me this pen

    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:

    Neville 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 coachtube logo, 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:

    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:

    coachtubebundle

    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

    coachtubeemail

    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.

    coachtube-stats1

    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

    coachtubeemail22

    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.

    coachtube-stats2

     

     

     

     

    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

    closing email results

    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??


    User Feedback

    Recommended Comments



    Guest Neville

    Posted

    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.

    Link to comment
    Guest Neville

    Posted

    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.

    Link to comment
    Guest Neville

    Posted

    The subject lines were:

    1st email: RPO

    2nd email: Last day for RPO Bundle

    Nothing crazy, just normal subject lines.

    Link to comment
    Guest Neville

    Posted

    Bahhahahaha......the way they suggest you do it is by really high pressure sales tactics, not something I would do :)
    Link to comment
    Guest Robin

    Posted

    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!

    Link to comment
    Guest Raspal Seni

    Posted

    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.

    Link to comment
    Guest Raspal Seni

    Posted

    BTW, did you finally learn what the RPO is?
    Link to comment
    Guest Rg Enzon

    Posted

    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!
    Link to comment

    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!

    Link to comment
    Guest James Lopez Copywriter | Less Is More With Meaningful Content

    Posted

    […] A great example again comes from the Kopywriting Kourse which you can see here. […]
    Link to comment
    Guest titihenry

    Posted

    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!

    Link to comment

    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

    Link to comment
    Guest Julie Spears

    Posted

    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!

    Link to comment
    Guest How To Sell Without Selling (An Easy Formula To Follow) :: Kopywriting Kourse

    Posted

    […] Sell me this pen […]
    Link to comment

    Do me a favor, sign your name.

    I can't I don't have a pen.

    Here you go, brand new pen.  Gimme money.

     

    Link to comment

    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

    Link to comment
    Guest Esat Akan

    Posted

    Hell yeah! Amazing post as always.

     

    Fun experiments like these are one of the major things that separate Kopywriting Kourse (I love the old name better haha) from other copywriting blogs.

    Link to comment



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