17 outrageous ideas
Could your sales could use a boost? Try one of these 17 things:
1. Eat lunch at a diner and write a message to your customers on a paper placemat. Photocopy the placemat (stains and all) and mail it to your customers.
2. Send your customers an empty popcorn bag with a letter inside along with a movie ticket.
3. Mark up your sales letter with hand-written scribbles – whether online or offline
4. Send your customers a handy testimonial form that asks them specific questions about what they liked
5. Turn a brown paper bag into an envelope
6. Send letters in an “X-Ray Film: Do Not Bend” envelope
7. Build a promotion around an oddball holiday, like National Pistachio Day
8. Steal one of the 100 Greatest Headlines Ever Written
9. Go back through the last year and mark (a) the promotions that flopped, and (b) the promotions that hit pay dirt, and decide what made the successful ones work. Re-spin and run again.
10. Look at all your advertising pieces and ask, “What’s the FIRST thing people see when they look at this?”
11. Identify something the media is saying that you disagree with and boldly proclaim to your customers how the newspapers and TV stations are LYING to them.
12. Mail your customers a wallet with money-saving coupons inside
13. Try a fear-of-loss offer instead of benefit-of-gain
14. Identify a project that doesn’t currently have a deadline, and set one
15. Identify an ad that doesn’t currently have a deadline, and create one
16. Mail a letter with a grabber attached to it – some physical item that demands attention. Even a penny or rubber band can boost response
17. Crumple up a letter inside a pill bottle. When unfolded, the letter says, “This is what the doctor ordered…”
I STOLE every single one of these from Bill Glazer’s book “Outrageous Advertising that’s Outrageously Successful” which you can get for $19.95 (CHEAP!!!). You should steal some ideas from this book, too.
*If you buy this book as part of Bill’s $19.95 special, you get an outrageously generous collection of post-purchase bonuses from me. Honestly I’d rather not go into public detail about what they are. You’ll just have to trust me on this one.*
Perry Marshall
About the Author
Entrepreneur Magazine says: "Perry Marshall is the #1 author and world's most-quoted consultant on Google Advertising. He has helped over 100,000 advertisers save literally billions of dollars in Adwords stupidity tax."
He is referenced across the Internet and by The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.
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