#38 This Man Will Make You a More Effective Writer and Presenter

Issue # 38 - Tuesday,  January 15, 2019
http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2019/01/38-this-man-will-make-you-more_15.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

This Man Will Make You a More Effective

Writer (and Presenter)—GUARANTEED! 

Mel Martin: The First and Only Pioneer of Subject Lines

The only effective emails are those that get opened.

For an email to get opened, it must arrive with a provocative and relevant subject line.

76 out of every 100 emails are immediately trashed and never read.

That's 55 Trillion Unopened

Emails per year Worldwide

• In a typical scenario the average writer spends time working on an email message to make it absolutely clear and perfect.

• Next task: the subject line. Actually that is easy. The first idea that pops into the brain is immediately typed into the Subject Line box and the user hits SEND.

• The two 100% important elements in an email are:

     —From Line (name of the sender)

     —Subject Line and Preheader

• If the email does not get opened, all the work that went into it is lost forever. It is deader than Kelsey's nuts.

• In the subject line and preheader, you have at most maybe 65 characters (10 or 15 words) to grab your reader by the throat and not let go until the message is clicked on.

Mel Martin—an advertising copywriter—discovered the power of subject lines. Some of Mel's space ads and direct mailings were made up entirely of subject lines.

Although Mel Martin died in 1993—on the cusp of the Internet Revolution—he has become the preeminent influence in digital communications.

Mel Martin's Riveting Story

"Mel Martin was the world's slowest copywriter. It would take him three to four months to write a direct mail package. He could get stuck for a month on a letter opening.

"He was a very gentle man who did not like interacting with people. Rodale wanted him, and they just couldn't come to terms. He worked in his apartment at 81st Street and First Avenue in New York. We talked a lot—mostly on the phone on weekends. He had a huge terrace and several thousand plants; he was an accomplished gardener and an aficionado of classical music." —Martin Edelston, Founder of Boardroom Publishing and Mel Martin's employer 

Mel Martin was also a very sick man—for years. "By my count, he had over a dozen doctors aside from his internist," Edelston once said to me. "One specialist for each thing that was wrong with him."         Brian Kurtz, Edelston's brilliant young vice president, added: "Mel was an incessant smoker. In fact, if he ran out of cigarettes he had to quit writing and run out for a carton."

The image that Kurtz and Edelston painted was reminiscent of French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) who suffered terribly from tuberculosis and resided in a cork-lined room. Only in the cool of an occasional evening when lower humidity did not aggravate his delicate lungs, would Proust venture out into the demimonde of Paris.

The difference between Mel Martin and Proust: Proust produced torrents of prose.

Mel Martin's Two Signal Accomplishments

• With his overpowering design and bold gut-wrenching copy (which you'll see in a moment), Mel transmogrified Boardroom Reports—a boring, buttoned-up business newsletter publisher—into a $125 million cash cow with 200,000+ subscribers.

     Okay, in the world of today's gazillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, $125 million is relative peanuts. 
     But Marty Edelston was producing dinky newsletters (Boardroom Reports and later BottomLine/Personal) along with books. His basic expenses were minimal—paper, printing, postage and a relatively tiny staff of hardworking people. His enterprise was a cash cow.

• Mel's specialty was the one-line Attention-Getter. Stoppers. Grabbers. Headlines. Teasers. Mel dubbed them "Fascinations."

     Today, "Fascinations" are Subject Lines with Preheaders.

Below is Mel's lede for his seven-year 

control letter for BottomLine/Personal

Dear Fellow American,

  This letter is about information that's "none of your business."

   Did you know that... blah, blah, blah... 

Evolution of a Legend

The direct mailing that put Boardroom in business was written and designed by Eugene Schwartz, a bean pole thin mail order book publisher who made so much money he amassed one of America's great modern art collections.

     Below are Schwartz's envelope and letter that generated enough cash to start up the publication

 (Sorry for the muddy reproduction.)

Here are the Johnson Box and lede

you see at the top of the above letter

In terms of copy and design (in comparison to Mel Martin's later wild and woolly visual explosions), the kindest thing you could call this dreary effort is "serviceable." 

Marty Edelston first hired Mel Martin to write editorial material on a per diem basis for his fledgling newsletter. Quite simply, Mel detested the work. 

So Edelston went along with Mel's idea to create a Contents Page.  From 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. one day every two weeks, Mel would boil down the contents of the newsletter into a one-page table of contents, which ran on the cover. 
     In Edelston's words: "Each contents page was a glittering jewel—far and away better than the rest of the publication." These contents covers were the birthplace of "Fascinations." A sampling: 

Adviser....................15

Advance warning on longer lead times in major areas.

Consumer discontent: How management misjudges it. A four-step program for keeping out of trouble.

Which U.S. and foreign cars hold their value longest.

Danger to executives using company lawyer.

When a pay raise is not a pay raise. Why young executives are unhappy.

Turnaround strategy.

When a customer list can be classified as a trade secret.

BRAINSTORMING..........19

Premiums women want.

Inducements to move your business.

What office colors work best.

Easy way to speed letters.

Useful book for retailers.

How to handle sales call reports.

CORPORATE STRATEGY....14

How to stay out of court: Part 2 of Fred J. Halsey, Jr.'s series on avoiding litigation; The mistake that is the biggest single cause of business lawsuits; how you soften a potentially damaging statement made on the phone; ways to diffuse an angry customer.

The front page of a single issue of Boardroom Reports might contain 60 to 80 of these teasers. You had to take a look!

Moving Into Direct Mail

Edelston proposed that Mel Martin try a direct mailing to get subscribers for his publications. The writer did not have a clue where or how to begin; he had only written ads—never a full-dress mail package. So Mel created an ad and the two of them converted it into direct mail.

Here's is Mel's very first #10 envelope for Boardroom's BottomLine/Personal:

In the beginning, Mel would do pencil sketches of how he wanted the mailings to look. Eventually he taught himself to use the computer and, in Edelston's words, "became a first-rate, second-rate computer artist."

He would design each mailing with tiers of "Fascinations," the most powerful ones appearing in the largest type.

Note the airbags warning: This envelope was sent out in 1992-1995. Fast-forward 20 years to 2014. The horrendous Airbag Scandal—recall of millions of cars and bankruptcy of Takata—came true.

Sometimes Mel Martin would put a single giant "Fascination" on the front of an envelope.

Or Mel would dump a bucket of gore into the reader's lap, piling "Fascinations" on top of "Fascinations"—not only on the envelope, but also throughout the letter.

When he wasn't writing copy, Mel would read all of Edelston's newsletters—Boardroom Reports, BottomLine/Personal and Tax Hotline—and turn the various stories into "Fascinations." He maintained a massive archive of "Fascinations," including full annotations of which article appeared in which newsletter on which page—where on the page—and what date.

When it came time to create a book made up of past newsletters, Mel would go into his archive of "Fascinations" and cook up a mailing; Edelston's editors would then create a book based on Mel Martin's mailing package, not vice versa, as is the usual case in publishing.

Why Mel Martin is "The Greatest"

For Today's Email Communicators 

• Marketing and Communications coins-of-the-realm today are Twitter, Texting and email.

     Tweets (280 characters) and texts (160 characters) are bite-sized paragraphs easy to comprehend by all readers. They are effective because:

• "50% of adults cannot read at an eighth grade level." —Literacy Project Foundation

• "Currently, 45 million Americans are functionally illiterate and cannot read above a fifth-grade level.  —Literacy Project Foundation    

  

• "The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds—the same as a goldfish." Dr. Ted Selker, MIT Media Lab

Takeaways to Consider

• The two most important elements of email are:

     —From Line (sender's name)

     —Subject Line with Preheader

• If the email doesn't get opened, the message is lost forever—a total waste of the sender's time.

• Mel Martin was the world's first and only pioneer of powerhouse subject lines.

• The subject line is the equivalent of the teaser on a direct mail envelope and the headline of an ad.

• "The headline is the ticket on the meat." —David Ogilvy

• "The writer of this chapter spends far more time on headlines than on writing. He often spends hours on a single headline. Often scores of headlines are discarded before the right one is selected. —Claude Hopkins (1866-1932)

• "Avoid the 'hard-to-grasp' headline—the headline that requires thought and is not clear at first glance." —John Caples (1900-1990))

• Email is the most efficient down-'n'-dirty testing medium ever. Instead of waiting six week to see the results of a mailing, you can run A-B-C-D-E split tests and know which subject line/preheader is the strongest.

• "Short Words! Short Sentences! Short Paragraphs!" —Andrew J. Byrne, Freelancer

• "Mel Martin was one of the world's greatest copywriters, and nobody has ever heard of him." —Brian Kurtz, VP, Boardroom Publishing

Final Takeaways: Subject Lines and PowerPoint

• At business conferences I find myself staring at giant screens with a series of slides, bulleted points, charts, graphs and long wordy paragraphs—all of them in unreadable artsy-fartsy mouse-type.

• Not even those of us seated in the first row are able to read what the hell is onscreen.

• Whereupon the dreary dweeb speaker—eyes glued to the screen—reads the mouse-type in a halting monotone making zero eye contact with the audience and generating zero enthusiasm.

• When preparing a PowerPoint presentation it is imperative to create one-liners—Subject Lines—that everyone in the room from front row to highest seat in the balcony—can read with the naked eye.

• Each slide—one or two lines in giant bold type—should be the memorable Subject Line of what you are currently talking about.

• The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint: No more than 10 slides. No longer than 20 minutes. Only use type size 30 point bold or larger.

• "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." —Edward Tufte

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