Slow The Fuck Down

In Boulder, Colorado, somebody’s been putting up fake road signs that say:

“SPEED LIMIT — SLOW THE FUCK DOWN”

The Boulder government put out a statement saying that they would never actually say "fuck" in a real road sign.

That got me thinking: maybe Boulder should put up road signs that say “slow the fuck down!”

Why? Let’s say you were in a car with your friend, he was driving 130 miles per hour, he had already clipped the sides of 2 passing cars, and he just narrowly missed driving the car into a lake.

In that case, would you say to him, politely, “umm, excuse me, would you please slow down?”

Probably not. You would probably scream something at him like “SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!”

When you say a word like “fuck”, it makes your message hit harder. “Fuck” means urgency.

So maybe the town of Boulder, Colorado should figure out what its busiest, most dangerous intersections are. Then they should put road signs up there that say “SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!”

The same principle goes for marketing copy. Some people try to make their copy sound polite. They write with the goal of not offending anybody.

The problem with that is that when you use PR-speak, your message doesn’t sink in. Saying something controversial can help you stand out.

You don’t need to say “fuck”, if that’s not your brand. But you should probably say something beyond just PR-speak.

You might feel squeamish about saying it. That’s a good sign. Your messaging should be controversial enough to make you uncomfortable.

(I felt squeamish about writing this email saying “fuck” so many times. But I did it anyways.)

-Theo

Taylor Swift

One of my clients just sent a bunch of emails I wrote for her to her list.

One of those emails was about Taylor Swift. That email got a 3x higher click-through rate than the second-best email.

(It even outperformed the “hey, this is your last chance to sign up for this offer” email — which NEVER happens. Usually you make the most sales on launches during the first day and the last day. It was very surprising that this email did so well.)

My first thought was, “what’s the lesson here?” Why did an email about Taylor Swift perform so well?

One possibility is that the Taylor Swift email did well because Taylor Swift has been in the news. In that case, will my client’s audience respond well to other emails about trending news stories?

Another possibility is that my client’s audience responds well to stories about successful women. In that case, would an email about Rihanna do well? Would an email about Oprah Winfrey do well?

I ask myself this question anytime I see any kind of marketing copy working. I ask myself why it’s working. Then I do more of it.

If you want to boost your conversion rates, you should do this too. Go into your email sender and look at what your top-performing emails of all time are.

Analyze them. Try and figure out what they have in common. Then write about similar stuff in your sales pages, in your welcome emails, et cetera.

Want me to do this for you? Reply to this email if you’re interested and I’ll give you more details.

-Theo

Glossy

I spent my birthday this year changing planes at the airport in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I celebrated by buying myself a box of chocolates from Duty Free and watching the Yankees. 

But before my crazy celebration, I had work to do. I had a new client who, to make a complex topic simple, coaches beauty founders to make their brands more exclusive.

I knew nothing about the beauty business, so the first step was to look at her onboarding survey. When you hire me to write for you, I send you a Typeform where I ask you a bunch of questions about your business.

One of those questions is “what’s the best way to learn about your industry?” Most of my clients link to a blog or a YouTube channel, and I’ll spend 20-30 minutes poking around it. That’s usually enough for me to see how your world works.

So imagine my horror when my new client told me to read not 1, not 2, but 3 entire books!

(My reaction: “I have to read THREE WHOLE BOOKS?”)

But — the more I worked with her, the more I realized that the beauty industry is way more interesting than I thought.

I ALSO realized that there are tons of parallels between marketing beauty products and marketing info products. 

The way you build your brand, the way you create hype and exclusivity, the way you create scarcity… they have way more in common than you think.

So I went back and actually bought the books she recommended. I just read the first one. It’s called Glossy and it’s a biography of Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier.

(If you know nothing about makeup, like I did 6 months ago, Glossy basically took over the beauty industry over the past 10 years. It went from being a blog to being a billion-dollar company.)

I’m glad I read it! There’s tons of great marketing lessons in here.

For example. Glossier started out as a blog. Emily Weiss wasn’t selling any of her own products yet. She was just interviewing famous people and asking them how they did their makeup. And she built a huge audience doing it.

Most people who start a business start by making product. They decide what they want to sell. And then they ask, “who should I sell this to?”

Emily Weiss took the opposite approach. She started by building an audience of people she could sell stuff to. And then once she had a huge audience, she asked herself, “what do these people want to buy?”

Pretty much everybody in the direct response marketing world — including Gary Halbert in The Boron Letters and Brian Kurtz in Overdeliver — will tell you that Emily Weiss’s approach is usually better. Find the starving crowd first, and then decide what to feed them.

So what does your audience want to buy? Sell them that!

-Theo

P.S. Glossier took off because Emily Weiss wrote.

And you can grow your business by writing, too. (Or by hiring me to do it for you.)

I’m not promising that your business will be worth a billion dollars, like Glossier. But I can get your audience to like and trust you a lot more, without you having to do the work.

I can also remind them that you have stuff for sale, and that if they’ve got big problems that you can solve, they should hire you.

You can learn about that here:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice