Lessons From Test Advertising Methods by John Caples
I’ve been reading a lot of books on copywriting recently. I’ll discuss the latest of these, Tested Advertising Methods, in this article.
I’m doing this as part of Gary Halbert’s probably impossible Copywriting Challenge. For previous entries in the list, follow the links below:
- Scientific Advertising
- The Robert Collier Letter Book
- The Boron Letters
- The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches
- How To Write A Good Advertisement
- Breakthrough Advertising
In each article, I’ve attempted to write some lessons from the books as I’ve read them… outside the obvious lessons of course. (Like, for instance, your sales letter needs a headline and a call-to-action.)
I’ve also written a quick review of each books, and I’ve tried not to repeat the lessons across multiple articles. I’ll keep to the same theme here.
Some of the lessons we’ve already learned:
- Everything in advertising should be tested. Leave nothing to chance or opinion.
- Headlines are incredibly important.
- Copywriting follows a structure – in this case, AIA – Attention, Interest, Action
- Direct mail might have changed, but copywriting principles remain the same
- Long-form outsells short form
- Advertising won’t make a bad product great, but it will increase the odds that a product sells well
- Specifics are more believable than generalities
- You probably shouldn’t take advice from people who don’t know what they’re talking about when there are plenty of people that do.
John Caples Tested Advertising Methods: A Review
For those of you who are familiar with copywriting and especially those of you who follow the shool of thought that says you should hand-copy articles, John Caples work will be familiar to you. You might not know him by name, but you’ll undoubtedly recognise the headline:
“They Laughed When I Sat Down At The Piano, But When I Started To Play!-“
Even people who haven’t studied copywriting will recognise the format. It’s comprised of two basic elements of human psychology:
- Everyone wants to be popular/adored
- Everyone fears social humiliation
Put those two things together, add in some quick results guaranteed and you have the basis for most
long form sales headlines over the past fifty years.
The book re-treads similar ground to the other books in the copywriting challenge: It talks about direct response being great to get into because of the access to data and direct link to customers. It also suggests that people who don’t use testable advertising methods are defective, and it also states that headlines and structure are important to master.
One thing I do like is the “scientific voice” of the book. It speaks to me in a nerd-language that’s similar to my own mutterings as opposed to the slick narrative of someone like Gary Halbert.
In short, it’s a good introduction to the craft of copywriting – though I’m a bit burned out on these books now, so I can’t tell you that it’s better, worse or different to the others in this series. It’s certainly not bad, but I’m not sure you really need to read all of the books listed.
That said, there are some great lessons which I’ve picked up that you won’t find elsewhere.
Lesson One: It’s Not Enough To Split-Test… Learn From Your Success
In previous articles, I’ve written about testing everything. A common theme from all of the books I’ve read is that to be good at advertising, you have to know where you’re going right and going wrong.
This book is the first that literally tells you that that’s not enough.
This book says to take what works and push that further. Don’t just get rid of underperforming ads. Find the best ads and then find what makes the best ads great. Then introduce more of that and make your great ads perform spectacularly.
In short, split-testing isn’t just a one-way phenomenon where the strong survive and the weak perish. You have to make your strong get stronger.
Lesson Two: Always Create a Pre-Test Pool With A Single Factor
Another science-based advertising method that Caples couldn’t repeat enough is the issue of testing your ads before releasing them.
Instead of sending out a million letters and getting the data from that having spent a lot of money on postage, instead you should send out a test advert to a single city, population or other target. Preferably, you want to have a single goal with that advert that’s simple and hard to get wrong.
This gives you data which you can move forward with on a larger scale.
Luckily, that’s really easy in the modern age. You can run tests for $5 a day on online platforms, and you can target down to a level which the old advertising guys could only dream of.
For instance, I found a guide to Facebook Advertising yesterday. I know I’m not supposed to be reading other stuff on the challenge, so I put it aside. However, a quick sneak-peak showed that you can target cat-loving twenty-year old females who are single, live in a medium-sized city and spend money on expensive handbags.
You’re not telling me old ad-men wouldn’t have killed to be able to target a market that small with a few dollars a day, so don’t even try.
Lesson Three: Don’t Be Afraid Of Multi-Step Selling (Getting People To Sign Up For The Long Haul)
This is something that until recently I’ve had trouble with.
The idea that you spend money to get people to sign up for something free is a bit counter-intuitive, and to me it’s always seemed the short-cut to the long-way around.
That said, Caples – and others – love the idea of returning coupons or driving traffic for enquiry’s sake; thinking that a return – or response – comes with such an increased conversion rate that it’s worth it.
Like I say, I’m not a natural fan, but if it works, it works. It’s time to test and see.
Lesson Four: Enthusiasm Is A Language Thing… So Is Everything Else
A big surprise to me with reading the above books on copywriting has been the attention paid to generating enthusiasm. I’ve simply never thought about it that much.
However, the chapters devoted to it by multiple authors have made me realise a few things, chief among them is that marketers in our age are spoiled for options.
I don’t mean in the sense that we have the insane targeting and cheap advertising and a global audience.
I mean in the sense that our job as copywriters is a hundred times easier.
Picture the 1950’s. You had to pay a ton of money to a newspaper who could only print in black and white. You then had to convince a person to buy something with just the power of black ink on white paper.
That’s a million miles away from today, where we can have amazingly designed websites with images, videos and cross-references to practically every bit of knowledge collected in human history.
But what we can learn – or, what I’ve learned – from realising all this is that you don’t need the technology.
All you need is the words. You can generate enthusiasm by writing in short sentences. Practice this by pretending you’ve got five minutes to write your letter. If it’s not finished in five minutes, a bomb goes off. Use stunted sentences with extra-ordinary detail. Grab your reader.
When you rely only on your words, you’ll find that generating the broad range of emotions that old copywriters captured is a linguistic skill. If you can master this, then writing with all the gadgets and gizmos will probably help, but you won’t need it to. It’ll be icing on the cake.
Final Thoughts
John Caples book, which you can get here, is another great text on copywriting with some great lessons. I’ve only touched on them in this article, but we’ve covered some great ground:
- Testing, testing, more testing
- You can invoke and evoke emotions of all kinds with your writing
- Now is a great time to be a copywriter
- Success builds on success
In addition, if you read this book, you’ll understand the structure and psychology of copywriting, sales and advertising. It’ll make your business better and probably your life better too.
If you read every book in the Halbert Challenge… then you’re going to have everything you need to know about copywriting. Absolutely.