— El John-o Descartes
Every so often, a new marketing guru pops up and teaches the same, played out formula that you suddenly see infiltrate the adspace.
The formula goes:
X is dEaD!i!
And “X” here usually means a proven marketing strategy—like email, direct response, and advertising—in exchange for something newer, brighter, and shinier.
It happened with chatbots. And now the entire customer service industry at giant tech corporations use AI chatbots which make it a living nightmare to actually ask a question and get an answer.
It happened with social media marketing. And businesses still post lame, unpersuasive social media posts that get all but three likes and lead to no sales.
It happened with SMS messaging. And now, I receive 10 mf texts per day from brands I frankly do not care about.
It happened with ChatGPT. And now some brands outsource all of their copy to ChatGPT to write up some technical, anti-persuasive, and anti-human jargon that leads to no sales but “looks good” … well, only to people who don’t know the first thing about writing persuasive copy.
It happened with providing value. And now every business owner LARPS as Tony Robbins and gives away all their best stuff away for free, not realizing how this snatches sales from the jaws of victory.
It’s even happened with design elements in email. And now every email looks beautiful but persuades nobody because learning persuasion is much harder than learning pretty colors.
There’s always a bright, shiny object that we’re told is going to kill email. Or kill direct response and persuasion principles and the need for paid advertisements.
These alternatives are always hyped up to the T, so you feel an immense sense of FOMO if you don’t adopt the new “best practice.”
And yet…
Behind the scenes, the businesses who are always chasing the next “best practice” are always the ones struggling from month to month, not knowing where their next customer will come from, and on the brink of layoffs because they opted for the sexy instead of the boring and effective.
It’s easy to fall into this trap. Especially because the boring and effective, is well, boring.
Take one of my clients as an example:
Five years ago, when we first started working together, his biz was down bad. I single handedly saved his business with my plain-text, direct response-based approach to email. And over the next five years, my strategy proved to be his most effective way to generate sales. To this day, we still convert around 60% of our monthly sales from email.
And yet… he got duped by the bright shiny object, and I’m currently watching my welcome series I wrote in 2022 “compete” against a heavily-designed, lightly-persuasive email series.
This has a couple of negative effects:
For starters, my series converts better—so anyone going to the other series won’t generate as much moolah.
But the opportunity cost is even higher: Everyone going through the designed email flow won’t get as “indoctrinated” with our brand, our products, and our value as a company as they would’ve if’n they went through mine. It’s too early to tell the full ramifications of this, but I wouldn’t be shocked if folks going through the designed welcome had a much lower lifetime value than the customers who got sent mine.
Not to mention… the opportunity cost of my time: It would’ve been more profitable for my client to have me re-write the welcome series and test it against the proven one that’s cleared at least $10k in revenue every 30 days like clockwork since I set it up in 2022.
The sexy will always be sexier. But that doesn't mean it will be more effective. In fact, the sexier is rarely more effective.
That’s why I “borrowed” Descartes’s popular phrase—to protect you from the sexy and keep you in the boring, yet effective:
I think, therefore I email.
And so should you.
Anywho:
My way of emailing admittedly takes more skill than the average heavily-designed variety. But don’t worry—I can help you there too:
Just hit reply, and let’s chat.
John
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