Last year I used the WSJ letter at my most recent employer, selling law practice management software. Only change I made was to make them two women lawyers.
It bombed — regardless of the list we sent it to. Every time we ran it, it returned the worst results of anything we tried in my year there. I figured I’d done something wrong.
Wasn’t until Brian Kurtz sent me Confessions of a Direct Mail Guy by Gordon Grossman that I learned why.
In his book Mr Grossman explained that the folks at the Wall Street Journal never tested, never changed, and never measured anything. All they did was run the same (lame) ad for decades. He learned that at Readers Digest when he tried it and got the same results I did.
Everybody who tests and experiments and refines their advertising thinks that because the WSJ subscription folks never changed that ad, it must’ve worked better than anything else. By being bereft of creativity as well as the ability to swipe that you demonstrated in your vid above, they fooled us.
Thanks Drayton,
I offer a subscription based letter and shall adapt the Two Young Men approach. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
Brilliant!
Marcus
Thanx for this lesson, Drayton.
Last year I used the WSJ letter at my most recent employer, selling law practice management software. Only change I made was to make them two women lawyers.
It bombed — regardless of the list we sent it to. Every time we ran it, it returned the worst results of anything we tried in my year there. I figured I’d done something wrong.
Wasn’t until Brian Kurtz sent me Confessions of a Direct Mail Guy by Gordon Grossman that I learned why.
In his book Mr Grossman explained that the folks at the Wall Street Journal never tested, never changed, and never measured anything. All they did was run the same (lame) ad for decades. He learned that at Readers Digest when he tried it and got the same results I did.
Everybody who tests and experiments and refines their advertising thinks that because the WSJ subscription folks never changed that ad, it must’ve worked better than anything else. By being bereft of creativity as well as the ability to swipe that you demonstrated in your vid above, they fooled us.