Overdeliver: Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing

As David Ogilvy famously said, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” He knew that talking down to customers, patronizing them, or doubting their ability to make sound decisions would just hurt a campaign.

I remember an old-time legacy publisher who would not rent their mailing list of book buyers to other mailers offering books in direct mail. They foolishly thought that every customer had a set budget to spend on books per year, and they wanted their customers to spend that budget only with them. It’s no surprise that this company is no longer in b

KEY TAKEAWAYS Multichannel marketing is a critical element in maximizing your business growth, protecting yourself from unexpected downturns, and getting the kind of payoff you really want to see for yourself and your customers. As Dan Kennedy says, the most dangerous number in business is 1. If you are only marketing on one channel, you are riskin

KEY TAKEAWAYS We’ve talked about LTV a lot in this book, and I hope you see that I’ve beat that drum so relentlessly because it’s such a fundamental part of building a thriving business. A product is not a business. A promotion is not a business either. LTV is much more than just a number. Keeping LTV top of mind all the time will save you from mak

KEY TAKEAWAYS Success in business is not just about the numbers. It’s also the result of surrounding yourself with remarkable people who lift you up—and being that kind of person for others. The more proactively you build your connections with other great people, the more growth you will see, both personally and professionally. Be a strategic contr

But the customers I dealt with in the past and the ones I deal with today always know one thing: they can count on me (and whoever is on my team) to be proactive and reliable.

Once upon a time, back in the dark ages called the 1990s, one of the greatest copywriters of all time, Gary Bencivenga, wrote a lucrative front-end promotion for BL/P that we called the survey package. By “front end” I mean it was to attract new customers who were mostly unfamiliar with the newsletter and the brand. The survey package was a fairly

But when you bring 100 percent to any relationship, the payoff of having those people on board is almost always worth the extra effort.

If you picked up our financial reports and just looked at the numbers for the first year of a customer’s relationship with us, it would have looked like we were losing our shirts. But the key was calculating how much those first-year subscribers would contribute over the entire time they were subscribed. Renewals were the biggest part of that total