1514 – Salesmanship in Print with Copywriting That Sells’ Scott Bywater

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0:54Here we go. Three, two, one. With us right now, it's Scott Bywater. Scott, you are a copywriter, a wordsmith, and you are also the managing director of Copywriting That Sells. Scott, you've been doing this for over 21 years. You're based in Australia. Your websites are simpleemailroi.com and copywritingthatsells.com.au. Scott, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, no, likewise, Josh, really, really happy to be here. Excellent. Yeah. Well, I got a lot to talk about. You know, certainly, you know, I think the first thing that, well, first off, would you mind kind of giving us a little bit more color to, you know, who you are, what you do, who you work with?

1:45Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, as you said, I've been doing this since I was, when I've been involved in sales and marketing, really, since I was about 17, started out in like door-to-door sales. and all of that sort of thing. So in a short story, switched to copywriting at about 24 and then have been doing it for the last two decades or so. And I've done it for a lot of the big direct response players, both in Australia and in the USA. So companies like the Learning Annex, Knowledge Source is a massive company over here in Australia. I did some stuff for Jay Conrad Levinson at one stage, the guerrilla marketing guy.

2:36And yeah, so I've been around for a while. Yeah. Yeah. As a matter of fact, it was Jay Conrad Levinson, guerrilla PR that this decades ago. And that's really what one of the things that inspired me when I was launching my other company, savings, Angel, had no money for advertising. But I really just kind of implemented the guerrilla PR stuff, plus some newsjacking and some other experience in it, but grew a seven-figure-a-year company just from that alone. So those principles work because, again, it's providing value. And what you do in copywriting is communicating that value and communicating human connection.

3:22would you mind maybe just kind of start with some definition about like what copywriting is and what it is not and obviously we're yes to our friend that's listening yes we're going to be chatting about chat gpt don't worry we'll get to that but let's first talk about what copywriting is yeah you know absolutely so copywriting is essentially it's it's I think the best definition of it is it's salesmanship in print um so so if you're a and that's probably what gave me an advantage when I entered into copywriting without realizing it because I've been in sales for like seven years. So I'd unknowingly been training to be, you know, to become a copywriter, so to speak.

4:02So it came quite naturally, but it's salesmanship in print. So the way you, the way you sell face to face works just as effectively with the, you know, with the printed word. So it isn't your prose. It isn't being great at English. It isn't having your nouns and your pronouns and your adjectives and all that sort of things perfectly are perfect. It's writing to actually sell. And one of the keys to that, Josh, is having the ability to enter the conversation going on in the customer's mind. And that's why research is just such a foundational part of copywriting. I think Gary Benzavinja, and he's arguably the greatest modern day copywriter.

4:46And what he said, he said is 40 % of your time should be spent on research, 40 % on writing and 20 % on editing. I usually find there's even less on writing and more on editing. And the research component is just so critical because that's where all the gold comes from is from the research. It's a little bit like I once heard the saying in business, like you've got to earn the right to grow. You've got to set up the systems, you've got to do all the framework, you've got to have the knowledge, you've got to, you know, like there's a lot of things you can do before you could have, in your case, grown a seven-figure business.

5:26And it's much the same with copywriting, you've got to earn the right to write. You can't just say, you know, like if you build a house, like I've worked with a lot of builders doing copy for builders over the last sort of 12 months. And you can't just go out there and start laying bricks. It doesn't quite work that way. You know, You've got to find out what the client wants. You've got to do the design. You've got to do all of those sort of things. You've got to get the approvals before you can actually go out there and lay in bricks. And good writing is very much the same. Yeah. All right. So there's a million-dollar question.

6:03Can ChatGPT do good writing? Let's talk about what it is and what it isn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. So ChatGPT has obviously hit the headlines in a big way over the last sort of probably 30 to 30 days, 60 days. It hasn't been long anyway, since it's hit the headlines. I've been using a platform called Jasper for probably close to, would be six to 12 months I've done it. I actually ended up creating a program from Jasper and ChatGPT. So to give you an idea that the issue I've got with ChatGPT, it is brilliant. Like you go in there and you enter, write me an email about, you know, about how to get more podcast guests.

6:56And it'll just punch out that email. Right. But it's not that the issue, and when you see it, if you haven't seen anything like this before, you're like, wow, this is just incredible. But the issue with it is there's no granularity with ChatGPT. So if you want to make changes or if you want to do anything, you can't. Whereas with Jasper, what you can do is you can actually program, you can program it so that you can do all your research beforehand and you can program it with your fears, your pains, your customers, fears, pains, desires, you know, all of that sort of thing. So the copy that it punches out is very granular.

7:45Having said that, I think where it's like the AI is incredible and it's really, really good for a couple of things. It's really, really good for the research component, like because you can go in there and you can do incredible research. You can go in there and you can create commands and you say, write me 10 ideas for blog posts about this or write me 10 ideas for this. And it will punch it out in like seconds, like faster than you can think. So now they might not all be relevant, but you might be able to pull three or four out that are really good. So I was using it yesterday for a company in the pet food industry, right?

8:33And one of the things we were doing is we were going through and doing the research on fears, pains, desires, beliefs, all of that sort of thing. And I'm like, what are your customer's pains? And he's like, oh, you know, and he sort of knew some of them, but it wasn't flowing. I said, let's just punch this into Jasper. And we wrote it in Jasper and 10 pains will come out. And he goes, yep, that one, that one, that one, that one. They're fantastic. I can see that. So it's like it reduces the cognitive load, right? because you've got so much brainpower in a day and we're getting Jasper to take care of some of that brainpower.

9:09And then you're just picking it. So it's super powerful for that. And then if you program it the right way, you can take those fears, pains, desires, put them into Jasper. And then what you're doing then is by programming it, the email actually comes out so it's relevant to your target market. Now, is it going to write copy as good as, let's say a 20 year veteran in, in copywriting? No, it's not. Is it going to be able to tell your stories? No, it's not. But where, where it does, where it does thrive is reducing the cognitive load. So it speeds everything up that you're doing. And there's two problems people have like, you know, I'm, I'm talking specifically with emails because I've talked to so many clients over the years that I just, they don't, they don't know what to write about.

9:56So they're like, I don't know what to write about. What am I going to write about in my emails? like like ai will help you with that you you will have hundreds of ideas to write about if you program it and this is the important thing if you program it the right way if you know what prompts to ask all of that sort of thing and then it also becomes a thing of how do i get started do you know like i yeah i don't know what to write so and i know leaders that i work with right that's the blinking cursor thing. And that's, you know, again, that is invaluable to at least get it going, right? Still start seeing things kind of laid out.

10:34Oh, that part is good. That part is good. And like, I love like editing something much better than I do. Okay. You know, crack my knuckles. Let's come up with something here. Like, again, I know sometimes that fear of just kind of getting started is the initial hurdle that's nice if we could use these tools to kind at least get the ball rolling. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's where Jasper has an edge on ChatGPT because ChatGPT, from what I've seen, is it's just you enter a question and it punches it out. Whereas Jasper's more of a, it's more like a Google Doc. So you can go in there and you can feed it a bit of copy and then you can write a bit yourself so you can write your story and then you might get stuck.

11:22So you can use, let's say, what I call a sentence starter and you can say, I don't know, like I'd say, and that means, and then Jasper will write that sentence for you and then you can go back in there and you can edit it and change it and personalise it to you. So it's more, it's using it as that support sort of thing to speed up that writing process. And I think it's particularly powerful for your non-writer because it just removes those bottlenecks of the blinking cursor bottleneck. Yeah. You know, this is interesting. I'm seeing a lot of these types of posts on social media where they're all about, and I'm seeing they're really good, right?

12:12Where, you know, like someone is sharing a discovery, right? And then they probably have about 18 one to two sentence paragraphs. And it kind of gets to their aha or discovery. And then, of course, they've got like a personal photo of themselves. I wonder if they're using a tool to kind of get, I mean, because they all seem pretty good. Like this is good social media content. Do you know, I wonder, does that sound at all familiar what I'm describing? Yeah, you can. I mean, you can program the AI. Like you can literally say, hey, give me, like, let's say you're doing a newsletter and you're looking for an inspirational quote, right?

12:57So you can do a command, let's say, into the AI. And I'm sure you can do this in ChatGPT as well as Jasper. But you can say, find me 10 inspirational quotes that relate to, let's say it's a surfing newsletter, that relate to surfing. And it'll come up and it'll give you all these famous quotes like that. So you can program it. And so it's very good from a brainstorming perspective. I mean, it's incredible because it can think so much faster. Like, let's say you write an email, like your emails that you write, Josh, you can plug that email into, like, even if you write it yourself, you know, like, and you don't use any of the AI, you plug that email into, well, I know you can do it in Jasper, you plug it into Jasper, then you put a command underneath it.

13:49And you say, write me 10 curiosity subject lines related to the email above. And within like three seconds, you'll have 10 curiosity subject lines. And then you go, okay, let's come at this from a different angle. Write me 10 tabloid style subject lines related to the email above. And it'll come up with 10 more. Write me 10 angry subject lines related to the email above. You'll have 30 subject lines literally within 30 seconds, let's say. And then you can go through and you can pick the best subject lines. So that's where it's very powerful. So I use it for subject lines all the time. Now, that being said, it's very rare I will use the subject line that the AI gives me, but it will give me ideas and angles I wouldn't have been able to think of as quickly.

14:38Yeah. All right. So, Scott, I want to talk about the opportunity. So for someone that's listening to us, like say for me, for example, so I've got a really good email list. I don't sell and spam at it. And at the same time, like I certainly don't overwhelm it, but I shared with you before we chatted, I mean, we've got a better than 50 % open rate because again, when I send an email, like it better be valuable for me to interrupt their email box. Like I'm not going to just send musings, you know, thoughts or whatever, like it better be like what's in it for them. And so I, so I think because of that, we've earned a little bit of trust with, with our email audience.

15:23And then secondarily I always try to inject a lot of, like I, what I'll do and, and by the way, someone's listening to us, you feel free to critique what I'm describing here. But to someone's listening, I would encourage you to, I mean, what we're doing is working, but I'd love your take on this. What I'll do is I will include something very personal generally at the top. Like, so it might be just a photo of me and Levi, my doggie, right? Or, you know, just like my wife and I at Disney World or something like this. So I'll include a small photo up at the top, you know, just a little brief, little one sentence saying, hey, you know, here's a photo.

16:06My wife and I were just at Disney World, sent you an email because, you know, here's da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, right? So just a little bit of personality, like the kind of stuff that I like to see on social media is just, you know, that sort of stuff. And what I really do is I'll just kind of like browse through my phone's photos and like, okay, what pictures have I taken recently? And that's what goes at the top. I love it. I think that's great. You know, I mean, I mean, well, one thing I read, or I listened to years ago was Dan Kennedy's personality and copy, which is exactly what you're talking about, right?

16:41Bring your personality into it, because it's the same one-on-one, Josh, like in a sales situation. I mean, if you're a salesperson, and you want to build relationships with a potential client, the best thing you can do is get personal let them let them to let them know who you are right because then then then a deeper bond happens a connection you know you go out to the football and you you find out that they love this team or they love that team or they've got three kids or yeah who are who love cricket or whatever whatever the um whatever the i'm showing my aussie heritage with the cricket right baseball baseball so so so you've got the um but but once you once you know that there's like there's a much closer bond so the same applies in in print and one of the things I I encourage and I've only ever had one or two clients actually do this but is um like go go to google look at biography questions and yeah and you'll find them where there's like a hundred of them right and then just on the audio answer all those questions one day just go through and it's like, where did you go to school?

17:50You know, what did you do that you got in trouble doing as a teenager? Or all of these biography questions you wouldn't think of. Answer them on audio, okay, and then, or have someone interview you, and then get them transcribed. And that can be like the foundation of your copy, where you're pulling from all of this interesting content that has part of you in it and part of your personality. Yeah. So I want to talk about email specifically, because obviously one thing that, you know, I'm on your website, copywritingthatsells.com.au, and then you have another website, Simple Email ROI. What is specifically the opportunity, like what, who have you worked with?

18:38What outcomes have you created? And who ought to be paying really close attention to what you're saying right now? Yeah, no, absolutely. So yeah, there's two sides to what I do. One is the copywriting, which is generally anyone who wants, they want more leads, they want more clients, that's where I can help. And that's very bespoke. So that's really identifying where a business is at and then applying that to them. So maybe they need to create a Facebook ads funnel. It may be that they've got a big email list of 50 ,000 people and they're not leveraging it. And we need to leverage it. So it's identifying where they are on the chessboard and then strategically working out what actual copy is recommended, is needed to get them to go from where they are to where they want to be.

19:34Because a good copywriter is a good, is first a good strategist because you've got to know, you've got to know where to put the, where to put the copy. It's not just, it probably, it's more important to be a strategist than a great at copy in many ways. So that's. Yeah. I mean, because you could use good copy, but it's just an awful offer. And you're not going to make any money at that. Yeah. Or it's a wrong target market, right? It's just, you're going to the wrong target market. You've got the wrong offer. Like there's so much that goes into the whole process. or you haven't got trust. So I was talking to someone the other day and they wanted to send out an offer to their client base.

20:19I think they had 5 ,000 or 10 ,000 subscribers, but they hadn't emailed them for a year. I'm like, you need to develop trust. Go out there and pitch them, right? So it's a real balance. And then the other side of the business, which I'm quite excited about at the moment, is the simple email ROI side of things because system, because what I've developed there, and this was before AI got sexy. Do you know what I mean? Like this was starting back last year is like a whole system which shows people how they can actually implement AI in their business to get, you know, to book appointments in their calendar via their, you know, via their email database.

21:08So it works through and it goes much deeper than just, hey, go on AI and start writing stuff. It's like it starts with the research. It talks about how to create open loops and you copy. It refers to where do you send them to at the end of the email? So you actually book appointments and you don't become like that football team who gets the ball down to the five yard line and then drops it all the time sort of thing. So you actually get, you know, move people over the, you know, over the line. And I've got this thing called the third way, because what most people tend to do is they either write love letters to their list where their list loves them, but they never make any sales.

21:48Or they have the scorched earth approach, right, where they're just like pitch, pitch, pitch. And eventually, and I've seen this happen, their list just gets burned and it's not worth anything, right? So it's very short-term thinking. But what I'm a big believer in is, if you can imagine a Venn diagram, is that the middle of those two, it's called the third way. So every email goes out is delivering value or, you know, the vast majority of emails are delivering value. And then you have a soft segue to where you want to push people using an open loop. And an open loop is something that we see everywhere, right?

22:32We see in, people don't so much use it in emails, but if you look at every morning show, right? It's like, come back after the break and we're going to show you a somersaulting dog who eats chocolate, you know?

22:47It's like, I've got to stay till after the break to see that somersaulting dog. So it's very similar, like in an email, let's say you've got a book on, let's say you've got a book on podcasting, right? So you start off the email and the email is very much about, let's say how to grow your podcast. And then at the end of it, you go, but there's one thing I did to grow my podcast beyond anything. And this thing allowed me to do this and allowed me to do this and allowed me to do this. And you'll find it in my Grow Your Podcast book. Click here to get more information. And then they click on it and then they go and buy your book because they want that one thing that was in the open loop.

23:31And then I like the idea of doubling the open loop. So then at the end of that, you go, P.S. in my next stay tuned for my next email where I'm going to show you how to get the hottest guests on your podcast. And then that opens up and then it's like I've got to open the next email. Right. So we're doing two things. where adding massive value within the content, we're segueing into an open loop to get the sale and then we're segueing into another open loop to get the next email opened. So, yeah, and you could even have in, let's say in yours because it's personal. P.S. Stay tuned for my next email and I'm going to share with you, yeah, this crazy thing that happened when I was in Disneyland last month or something like that.

24:19And people are like, oh, you know, and they start to follow your story sort of thing. And that is leveraging off. Yeah. It's, it's, it's every morning show. It's every TV series, you know, like game of Thrones, you know, it's always, they don't end you with some boring thing. It's like they end you with something where you're like chomping at the bit to either click for the next episode or in the old days, you know, wait a week and come back in a week and watch the next episode. Scott, is there an ethical way or, you know, or maybe kind of best practice of a client says, well, look, you know, know, we've only got a thousand people on our email list.

24:54I really wish we had about 5 ,000. Is there, what advice would you get? I mean, obviously emails are, I mean, you can get emails from anywhere. I mean, it's super easy to get permission. On the other hand, you know, you want to make sure you're playing by the rules on that, or at least have a path to make sure that we're, you know, again, being as ethical and now in salesy as possible. Any tips or guidelines for that? I mean, you know, again, I, you know, you could spend, you know, five minutes on Fiverr Upwork and you've got everybody promising to sell you, you know, hordes of email addresses, you know, for pennies on the dollar.

25:33Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of things to keep in mind here. Number one is don't think that a small email list isn't valuable because a small email list can be incredibly valuable. And I'll give you an idea. Like I know a guy, he does a lot of joint ventures with people. And he had, like he's sent out to email lists, which have tens of thousands of people and got virtually no sales. He sent, there was one guy, he sent out to 33 people on it, but they were all people he knew well and close clients. Eight people registered for the webinar, four people turned up, three people bought a$3 ,000 product.

26:14So it was$9 ,000, which was generated from a list of 33 people. So don't think that a small list isn't powerful. And this is like goes back to Joe Girard, right? If we look at old school, Joe Girard, greatest salesperson in the world. He's got a book, How to Sell Anything to Anybody. The number one thing that really the message that I took away from the book is if you become his client, he stays in touch with you. And he didn't have email back then. So he's sending letters, but like forever. every month forever, he's sending him a card, you know, you know, I like you, Joe Girard. And so people, people never forget him, right?

26:53So that's, that's very powerful in a small list. Now, in terms of growing the list, because obviously growing the list makes sense, right? If I'm sending to all things being equal, if I'm sending to 1000 people, and I can instead send to 10 ,000 or 20 ,000, then my time writing that email is 10 or 20 times more, more leverage. So to grow the list, I think there's number one, and this is where the research comes in, is if you know your prospect's number one pain point, you can create a simple report on that and you can advertise it. You could advertise it on lead pages on Facebook. You could do joint ventures and get people to do it and send an email out and offer that report.

27:38You can drop it in the bottom of your social media posts. So I mean, one thing I do in each social media posts, I'll go like I'm doing this headline hack series at the moment. And at the bottom of the social media posts, I'll say, PS, if you enjoyed this post, then there's 100 more in my 101 headline hacks report, go and grab it, link in comments. Do you know what I mean? So you can add, so you can create a report because what I see is some people get incredible social media following, which is great. but email is for the ROI is that's where you can control the relationship like according to litmus.com 36 to 1 return on every dollar that's spent on email marketing which is far far higher than than social media so if you can use your social media to pull people across into your email list that's also a really you know a really good idea but there's so many ways to grow at these days, just because, you know, like it is easy to get traffic.

28:45You know, you can go on Facebook, but you've got to have the right offer, the right report that appeals to their fears, pains, desires, or beliefs. Yeah. Scott, your website's again, copywritingthatsells.com.au and simple email ROI.com. Go ahead and, you know, someone's been to listen to our conversation, like, okay, I want more Scott. Where do they have more Scott? Like, what are the best kind of next steps for someone that's just kind of starting, you know, just kind of getting to know you here? Yeah, you know, absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, so if you go to simpleemailroi.com, you can go, you can basically go there, you can check out the product, which I've just released, which is the Simple Email ROI system, which is all the AI email copywriting sort of formula.

29:34And there will be some reports on there as well that you can, you know, that you can go and download that'll show you, you know, things like how to turn a blog post into an email or how to turn a, yeah, how to basically the formula for writing, you know, nurturing emails or a cheat sheet for actually writing, you know, writing copy via AI, including the exact prompts to use and how to create subject lines. And I've got one formula where it's like, it shows you the problem prompt. So how you bring someone in, like a problem solution sort of format, and then the solution prompt. So that's really powerful.