Have you ever had a successful promotion that just stopped working? At some point, for every promotion, market saturation sets in. Your good prospects have already seen your promotion before and don’t even bother to read it or watch it again and your response rate begins to fall off to unprofitable levels.
You need to make your promotion look, feel and BE fresh, new and exciting again – something your prospects won’t think they’ve seen before – something so different your prospects will eagerly read or watch it again.
From my experience in doing this dozens of times, the first tip I’ll give you is to hire “fresh blood” – a new person that did not write the original promotion. You need someone who is not tied down to the old ways of thinking. You need someone who can come up with a totally new concept, and this is usually much easier done by someone who comes at the promotion fresh and not involved with past versions of it.
I recently revived a male potency supplement promotion for Biocentric Health, a long-time leader in the supplement industry. They had mailed millions of direct mail packages over the past five years and the promotions just stopped pulling because everyone had seen them. They needed a fresh approach or else this product would have to be set out to pasture.
The headline I wrote that revived this product was: When ABC-News “Nightline” Interviewed The Medicine Hunter, he said: “You give this to men with low libido and it’s… Chinese New Year’s Fireworks in your pants. It works!”
I think the combination of credibility from ABC-News and this dramatic and different quote piqued mens interest enough to start reading … then the copy convinced them to order. Anyway, my copywriting brought this supplement promotion back to its former glory – and now it is back to being a large “cash cow” for the company.
Another important point: Be bold! Be dramatic! Go Big – or go home! People want to read about BIG news, EXCITING things, GREAT breakthroughs. If you have the proof to back it up, like I did in this case, make your promise big, bold and exciting.
Timid copywriters have skinny kids.