Once in a while you will be unexpectedly reminded of an email you wrote because a reader hits the reply button and brings an issue to your attention.
Like a broken link.
That’s how I rediscovered the following email written to promote an anti-aging product. After pondering the message contained within the reader desperately wanted to get a look at the sales letter but the poor fellow could not get the sales page to load.
The interesting bit here is that we were selling anti-cancer prevention strategies…
Why is this interesting? Because in general it is fairly difficult to get people to pay attention to copy written around prevent strategies. And when it’s cancer? Forget about it.
Who wants to read about a serious disease they don’t yet have and which is scary even to contemplate?
Ordinarily, no one.
But this guy did, and it got me to re-read the copy I had written to elicit just such a response. As you will see, at the time I wrote the email this conundrum must have been at the top of my mind, because I did the one thing that can rescue you in situations like this.
SWIPE #1: A Tale Of Two Witches
I told a story using some completely over-the-top characters who undoubtedly knew how to write copy even better than I could. In other words, I lifted the dialog right out of their mouths.
Here’s what ended up in the message that had the reader frantically emailing the vendor for the location of the sales page:
It's really no fun gowing old, as Fiona Goode, the all-powerful Supreme discovers in season 3 of American Horror Story.
Fiona is a witch, but she's dying.
Another victim of that awfully mortal
affliction known as cancer.
In Fiona's case she's absolutely determined
that she won't be "going out bald and
shriveled and... begging for morphine."
Hey, it's Carolyn Hansen again, and I had
thought to try to convey to you the sense
of terror that has invaded Fiona's life.
But then I realized she is more than
capable of describing in her own words her
resolve to withstand the approach of a
truly horrible death:
"Meningeal carcinomatosis. That's what
the doctor called it.
"Tiny seedlings that the cancer planted
in the lining of my spine.
"The little bastards are Satan's diet pill."
At this point we see her kneeling in the
bathroom, retching as a result of her last-ditch
attempts to beat the disease with chemotherapy...
"I used to think I understood pain. A burn,
a cut, a broken bone... Heartbreak.
"But this is as if I've been dipped in the
River Styx and all the suffering of all the
souls that ever were or will be has soaked
my body.
"My body doesn't belong to me - not that
I'd want it in this state."
Fiona Goode is played by Jessica Lange who
in real life is 66 years of age.
Lange doesn't look too bad for her age, but
the true miracle of the flesh in this story
is Fiona's nemesis, the witch Marie Laveau,
who she turns to for help.
That's because Marie knows the secret
to eternal life.
She never ages.
And it is here that the creators of American
Horror Story really strike gold by having
actress Angela Bassett play the role of Marie.
At the of age 56 Basset could easily pass
for a woman 20 years younger.
Photos don't do her justice.
Her creamy complexion, devoid of the usual
tell-tale signs of aging that we call wrinkles,
seems to defy the laws of human biology.
And she has somehow managed to maintain her physique.
Slim and accentuated by taut muscular limbs.
There isn't a woman alive today who could
look at Ms. Bassett and not be convinced
that this lady has something special going on.
Fiona Goode is no exception.
"I want what you have," she tells Marie
Laveau. "Whatever it is that has kept
you young all these years."
Of course, Marie's not telling.
Especially since to her eternal shame
she's had to make a deal with the devil
to cast off her mortal coil.
Luckily, there's absolutely no need for
you to sell your soul to learn Angela's
secrets to peeling off the effects of
aging and rendering powerless the
ravaging effects of life-threatening
diseases like cancer.
In fact I'll have more to say about how
you can put the brakes on "The Big C" in
an upcoming message.
It's a secret that, had she known it just
20 years earlier, might well have entirely
changed the course of Fiona Goode's life
and perhaps extended it for another 20,
maybe even 30 years.
Angela Bassett's secret to longevity?
Nothing more than the very same strategies
of healthy living laid out in my "Reclaim
Your Longevity" program:
This works even better on mortals than it does witches!
Adherring to a Paleo diet is one of those secrets.
Saying NO to sugar is another.
Maintaining a well-chosen set of exercises
to perform nearly every other day is a third.
There's no reason anyone should have to
endure the miseries that Fiona Goode finds
forced upon her at the end of her life.
As she sits in front of a mirror trying to
explain to her lover why she is leaving
him she says:
"A month from now, I'll be a... a balding
and toothless skeleton.
"I don't want you watching me decay.
"I'm not scared of dying.
"I'm scared of living like this.
"The constant pain and the ugliness."
This is the real horror of the third season
of American Horror Story.
Not the macabre goings on at Miss Robichaux's
Academy for witches.
It's the true-life depiction of what lies
in store for roughly one out of every four
people who die today.
Those are the odds of having your life
cut short by cancer.
Assuming of course that you don't act
now to dramatically lower your risk
of disease.
If that sounds like a plan CLICK HERE and I'll show you how to get started...
Or you can be like Fiona, and seek out
the most powerful voodoo at the last
minute to right all the wrongs you have
subjected your body to over the years.
I have to admit - that's at least a
possibility if you're a Supreme like
Fiona Goode.
But for the rest of us?
I'm putting my fate into the hands of
a scientifically solid longevity program.
What's your plan?
To living the longest most enjoyable life you can,
Carolyn "supreme health and fitness consultant" Hansen
Oh, those television script writers, they make us copywriters look like chimpanzees at the keyboard. I would be handicapping myself not to steal from those guys.
Also, it certainly does not hurt that the two women around which this story is constructed happen to be two of the finest actresses of the day. They are completely recognizable even if the reader has never come across “American Horror Story”, the show from which this tale of woe is plucked.
Now I am going to get all copywriter historical on you and paraphrase one of the real A-List copywriters from the “MadMen” era of the 50s and 60s.
Eugene Schwartz, who was best known for writing highly engaging direct mail and print magazine pieces, said that the best way to understand what it is that captures people’s attention is to bath yourself in whatever is considered high entertainment at the time. Blockbuster movies. Sold-out broadway shows. The most-watched and talked about television series…
So all the time I’ve dedicated myself over the years to watching Netflix in the dark of my apartment? I like to tell myself this was all in the pursuit of Schwartzian copy mastery.
But you know what? There’s a little bit of truth to it because otherwise I’d not be able to write pieces like the one shown above. Left to my own inclinations I tend towards curious facts and solidly undeniable truths. But those don’t engage the audience the way the morbid thoughts of a soon-to-die witch are likely to do.
Also it is highly unlikely that I could get away with telling the reader that the pain associated with having cancer of the spine would be as if one were dipped in the River Styx and all the suffering of all the souls that ever were or will be had soaked their body. Not without sounding pretentious. But Fiona Goode can get away with it because she is living the experience.
Of course it is all fiction, but fiction told by a good liar (an actor/actress) is in general a lot more believable than the truth from the mouth of a straight shooter like me.
Let’s take a look at another message from this series.
SWIPE #2: A Bread And Butter Prevention Message
This one is far more conventional and tries to engage the reader using those “curious facts and solidly undeniable truths” I mentioned earlier. I don’t think it works as well as the “tale of two witches” message, but not all your lessons are going to be inspired by well-crafted and emotionally-rich screen writing. Most are going to be of the bread and butter type where you throw in the facts and the figures to demonstrate competence in the subject you claim to understand so well.
Again, the focus of the message is on cancer prevention strategies. Read through it, take some mental notes about what is going on and then compare them with what I have to say on the other side of it…
That's the bad news - in case you hadn't
already figured it out...
If you are older than 40 years of age you
probably already have cancer.
Say what, Carolyn?
Unfortunately I'm not kidding about that.
But there's good news as well, about how
you can keep this unwelcome cancer diagnosis
in check.
In fact, before we go any further I'm going
to give you a valuable tip in the fight
against cancer:
Drink Earl Grey tea.
To see why this is such good advice just
keep reading.
The news that spontaneous cancer cell
generation isn't at all uncommon once you
hit middle age shouldn't be too surprising.
Because it's not long after the age of 50
that we see a huge uptick in the number
of reported cases of cancer.
At some point in our lives cell regeneration
simply starts to go wrong and the result is
small clusters of cancer cells throughout
our body.
These microscopic cancers are usually no
larger than about a half a cubic millimeter.
That's about the size of the tip of a ball point pen.
Luckily most of them STAY that size.
They cannot get any larger because they
just don't have access to enough blood
vessels to support the influx of oxygen
and nutrients needed for their growth.
But have no doubt, those tiny but potentially
deadly precursors to full-blown cancer are
just waiting for an opportunity to begin
their explosive growth in your body...
And there really is NO DOUBT about either
the nature or the existence of these stealthy
but ticking time bombs.
But if you're still skeptical that you may
already have cancer lurking within you,
then consider this...
Studies from autopsies carried out on
victims of car crashes reveal the following
surprising statistics:
[ - - - - - WHAT THE DEAD TELL US - - - - - ]
* Roughly 40 percent of women between the
ages of 40 and 50 years have microscopic
cancers in their breast tissue.
* About 50 percent of men in their fifties
and sixties have microscopic prostate cancers.
* By the time we are 70 years of age there
is almost a 100 percent chance that we have
miscroscopic thyroid cancers.
[ - - - - - /WHAT THE DEAD TELL US - - - - - ]
But most of these cancers will never become
a problem for us because they won't ever get
the blood supply needed to turn malignant.
In other words cancer WITHOUT disease is
an absolutely routine part of aging.
So how do some cancers turn deadly?
That's the other bit of bad news I have
for you today.
Because at some point some of those microscopic
bundles of cancer cells acquire the ability to
release "angiogenic" growth factors into the
tissues around them.
Angiogenic is the fancy way of saying "it
causes blood vessel growth".
That's good news for those previously
harmless cancer cells and bad news for you.
Because now they finally have what they
need to grow like wildfire.
But here's some more good news.
About 90-95 percent of all cancers are
environmentally induced.
That means you potentially have a LOT
of control over your level of cancer risk.
For example, diet accounts for 30-35
percent of environmentally-caused cancers.
Which naturally leads to the following
important question:
Is there any kind of food we can eat
that has an anti-angiogenic effect?
Meaning that it reduces the likelihood
of blood vessel growth so that those
budding cancer cells can be held in check?
In other words, can we eat certain foods
to starve cancer?
Yes. It turns out we CAN!
Red wine has been found to inhibit blood
vessel growth.
Strawberries are also potent inhibitors.
Actually, dozens of foods turn out to be
naturally anti-angiogenic including:
green tea
earl grey tea (remember this?)
blackberries
raspberries
blueberries
oranges
grapefruit
lemons
apples
pineapple
cherries
red grapes
bok choy
kale
soy beans
ginseng
tomatoes
....
The list goes on.
Notice the tomatoes on that list?
A Harvard School Of Health study conducted
on 79,000 men showed that those who consumed
2-3 servings of cooked tomatoes per week had
a 40-50 percent reduction in risk of developing
prostate cancer.
Here's the really interesting thing about
those foods.
They're not in any sense hard to obtain.
You'll find them on the shelf at your local
food market.
They're components of what can simply be
described as a healthy eating plan.
Much like the one you'll find spelled out
in my "Minimalist Nutrition Program" which
is just one of the elements of my "Reclaim
Your Longevity" program found here:
Click here to discover my "minimalist" approach to nutrition
Here's the bottom line when it comes
to protecting your health as you age.
Disease, and cancer in particular, does
not suddenly emerge out of the blue to
threaten your life.
There are processes going on inside you
right now that will STRONGLY influence
both your quality of life in the coming
decades AND the number of years you can
expect to stick around.
But by acting intelligently when it comes
to your physical needs RIGHT NOW you can
dramatically influence how the future
will shape up for you.
That's something I can help you with.
But not if you are prepared to simply
"wait and see" like most people are
happy enough to do.
Because MOST people die well before
their alloted time at birth.
They let life whittle down the time
they are owed and they die without
ever fully appreciating what it is
they have allowed to slip away.
Don't let that happen to you {!firstname_fix}.
Join me today and begin making the
changes to your life that crush your
risk of disease and help to secure the
long and high-quality life you deserve
in the years ahead.
Join me today here to begin reclaiming your longevity
Cheers,
Carolyn "say no to cancer today" Hansen
So the most immediate concern when you are writing any kind of direct mail copy, like the example above, is to say something which suggests you know something the reader doesn’t know, but should, and all will be revealed if they just keep reading.
In this instance I am telling them that they probably already have cancer, they just don’t know it yet, and here is why. This should come as a bit of a shock to most people, and naturally they will want to know the potential consequences of this.
But before proceeding to offer the explanation for the unnerving claim I give them what might appear to be a remedy to this not-so-good news.
I tell them they might want to drink Earl Grey tea. Now they have to keep reading to find out if this is in fact the antidote to worrisome news, the nature of which has yet to be made apparent…
Whenever you can offer your reader a visual for an abstract medical idea it generally works to your benefit. Hence the introduction of the “size of the tip of a ball point pen” imagery. I introduce the idea of microscopic clusters of cancerous cells that find themselves blocked from further growth.
This “present but harmless” claim is likely to be accepted by the reader without the need for further proof because (a) cancers clearly come from somewhere, and (b) because their growth is physically constrained these microscopic tumors have no immediate consequence, so their behavior matches with what the reader knows about the threat of cancer before the age of 50 years – that it’s just not that large…
But to make sure the reader believes me I back up my facts with some figures – microtumor incidence rates by age.
If you are a middle-aged woman reading the message you are going to discover to your dismay that microtumors are already present in your breast tissue.
If you are a man your prostate is at risk because of them.
In other words there is a little in the way of bad news for everyone.
If my reader has made it this far they know what is at stake and now I can dive into the real story I want to tell – the story of angiogenesis (blood vessel growth) and what it means to your long-term prospects of escaping a cancer diagnosis.
This is where the reader gets the payoff for having continued to read. They learn that certain foods inhibit angiogenesis (and thus cancerous cell growth). This includes the specific herbal tea we brought to their attention at the beginning of the message.
Finally, proof of the abiity of food to perform this small anti-cancer miracle is presented before the reader learns that this is just one of the anti-cancer strategies offered in the product this email message was designed to promote.
Let’s look at one last message from this prevention strategies series.
SWIPE #3: An Inevitability Of Success Message
I am not a big fan of self improvement messages. But that does not mean I have not written a few at one point or another. The product being promoted in this series happened to contain a self improvement type title, so when it got to the point where I was scratching around for unexplored subjects the following one came up.
It is a simple “inevitability of success” message – if you take these strategies I am offering you and you faithfully carry them out… then you are eventually going to succeed.
The trick in this one is to convey to the reader the idea that there is a consistent, machine-like regularity to this process and that it can end with only one outcome. Success.
I'm a great believer in the philosophy of
peak performance living.
The idea that you should strive to attain
excellence in everything you do.
Of course it goes deeper than that.
It's about trying to put yourself "in the
zone" and then stay there so that you can
achieve great things in short periods of
time.
The thing is though, it's near IMPOSSIBLE
to do if you don't have the right mindset.
And you don't just wake up one day and
discover you have it.
You have to put in the grunt work to
build the thing.
Put it in place one brick at a time.
That's probably the biggest benefit you
get from joining my "Reclaim Your
Longevity" program.
You get to be slowly indoctrinated with
the peak performance philosophy.
Just a little at a time.
Drip.
Drip.
Until the pool of desire for a decidedly
better life, a decidedly healthier,
wealthier, and longer life, takes hold
somewhere inside you.
Drip.
Drip.
Until you wake up one day and decide the
IDEA of the better life just isn't enough
for you any more.
If until now you'd fantasized about dropping
40 pounds and saying goodbye to the shameful
cloak of fat that has been hiding your true
self from the world...
Well, now you start pinning images of that
ideal body on the wall so that you cannot
fail to be reminded of your goal.
Suddenly your mind is RIPE FOR CHANGE and
it's no longer a question of whether you
have the ability to achieve your goal, it's
simply a question of what you're willing
to sacrifice to make it happen.
That's when the obstacles that had once
blocked your every movement suddenly
begin to seem like mere choices to be
made.
This or that.
Now or later.
Fast or slow.
A lot or a little.
Just choices - and you can make choices.
That's really the KEY to getting what you
want from life.
Recognizing that most obstacles to progress
aren't obstacles at all.
They're just choices you haven't had the
strength to be able to make so far.
But once you've decided that you REALLY
want something bad enough you'll be able
to begin seeing the world in a different
way.
One where most things you believed were
simply impossible to achieve aren't so
impossible after all.
When I first began competing for prizes
at the professional level I would turn
up to bodybuilding contests believing
that I was there to showcase my physique.
It never occurred to me that I could not
possibly win an event without first
achieving the mindset of a champion.
At that point in my life my mindset was
just one more obstacle that guaranteed
someone else would be taking home first
prize.
It was only later, when I could already
see myself as the winner long before the
day of the event, that I could MAKE THE
RIGHT CHOICES beforehand to ensure that
I arrived on the stage the first place
winner I believed myself to be.
Mindset made ALL the difference.
And when you join me in my "Reclaim
Your Longevity" program I'll slowly go
to work on your mindset too.
Preparing you for a life of peak
performance living:
One where every day presents you with CHOICES
Not OBSTACLES.
Doesn't that sound like a better way to
live your life?
Carolyn "it's always a matter of choice" Hansen
Yes, self improvement messages. Not really my thing.
Give me the option and I will go with a story of witches every time.
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