TCC Podcast #53: The 7 deadly email funnel sins with Ryan Johnson

Ryan Johnson, Head Copywriter at IWT (short for I Will Teach, Ramit Sethi’s company) steps up to the microphone with Kira and Rob for the 53rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. This interview covers a lot of ground, including: •  how after a grueling interview in his car, Ryan failed to get a job with IWT only to get hired a few months later (never give up) •  how to get inside the head of your client so you can speak with his or her voice •  his process for laying out all the moving pieces of a launch, and •  how he maps emotions to his launch plans so customers can’t wait to respond •  the 7 deadly email funnel sins •  two reasons to use long-form sales pages •  the “leap stacking” technique he uses to help his writers uplevel their skill (and what doesn’t work when trying to improve) Plus Ryan shares the “copy levers” that Gary Bencivenga used to get better at his craft, how he avoids writer’s block, and the one thing he would do if he had to start his career all over. Lots of good stuff packed into this episode. To hear it, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Ramit Sethi The Briefcase Technique Jay Abraham IWT AIDA Gary Bencivenga Abbey Woodcock Justin Blackman The Headline Project Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, and then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 53 as we chat with in house copywriter, Ryan Johnson, about he became a copywriter and landed a job writing for Ramit Sethi, how he tackles a massive launch, capturing the voice of your client, and how long it takes him to write a 50 plus page sales letter. Ryan, welcome. Rob: Yes, welcome Ryan. Ryan: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. Kira: Yeah, it’s great to have your here, and I think a great place to start is just with your story of how did you end up becoming a copywriter? Ryan: It was kind of a circular process to copywriting. I didn’t even know what copywriting was at the very beginning. My original interests were in film and creative writing, which led me into a delightful career waiting tables. After a few years of that, my first real job was in instructional design, and I was editing textbooks, and building training programs. I actually ended up designing an associates degree in business. I packaged and edited textbooks on business, and economics, and entrepreneurship before I realized that doing that was with no experience was totally crazy. But it was a good baseline. But while I was doing this, I can still remember. I was in the middle of editing this 500 page textbook on economics, which is about as exciting as it sounds, and my wife was working as a creative copywriter, and she was getting paid much, much more than me to edit this glossy one page ad. It looked like so much fun and so much easier than what I was doing. I’m like, “I’m doing something wrong, ‘cause there’s clearly a cap on where I am, and there’s no clap over here.” So shortly after I figured out how I could transition into marketing, into copywriting. It’s been a race every since. Rob: You’re working as an in house copywriter, but what does that look like today? What is the day to day ... How do you spend your time? What are you working on? Those kinds of things. Ryan: Yeah, so with Ramit at IWT / Growth Lab, I am the head of the sales team and the editorial teams. I oversee all of the in-house copywriters in all these different facets, all the material that we produce. All the blog posts, emails, sales pages, up sale pages, all the little copy that you don’t think about, but ties all this stuff together. Rob: And how did you connect with Ramit? Ryan: I was a longtime reader, I’ve been with Ramit for over six years now. But back in the very beginning, I was just reading his blog, and he had an advertisement for a case study writer, just a freelance position a few hours a week, and I applied for it. It was the most grueling application that I had been through. There was multiple rounds of tests I had to go through, samples I had to do, interviews. Actually, I took the interview, I took it on a lunch break at work, it was in the middle of the summer. I’m in my car, it’s 100 degrees, and I’m just roasting in the car. And he asked me, “Hey, give me an example of somebody that’s doing copywriting well, content marketing well.” And my mind totally blanked, and I knew instantly, I just lost this, it’s over. And sure enough, I didn’t get the position. But I had been reading Ramit for a while, and I knew about his briefcase technique and a lot of the great material he had, so I called in sick the next day, spent the whole day preparing a briefcase to sell Ramit on why I was the right guy. And I ended up doing that twice with two different proposals for Ramit. I still didn’t get the position, he hired someone else. But that person fizzled out. He called me a few weeks later and said, “Hey, you still interested, you want to give it a shot?” Absolutely. So I started writing case studies for him, and that quickly turned into other types of blog posts. And yeah, six years later, taking on more and more. Kira: Wow. Okay, cool. So I’d love to hear more about the path copywriters can follow - and I know it’s different for everyone, but for a copywriter that’s listening that wants to become a top, high-performing copywriter, or even potentially in-house managing a team, where should they start early on? Ryan: I don’t think there’s one path that you can take. There’s definitely threads that a lot of the successful writers have in common. My path is a bit unusual, because I started in literature and film and storytelling, and then I was in instructional design and product development. And it was only after years of that, that I moved into copywriting and direct response, and I was writing ads and sales letters and brochures. That foundational experience has really impacted how I approach copy. And most copywriters don’t come in with a foundation in product development, really thinking about the product. They look at it, and think okay, what are the benefits of this? But not the impact on the person actually using it. And I did sales copywriting for a while, and I kept running into blocks. Challenges like man, it would be a whole lot easier to sell this if the product was a little bit different. Or, if our brand had a slightly different position. Setting things up to make it harder to sell. And I could see this in other businesses as well. And that led me into brand and into strategy, really trying to get to the root cause of a lot of these things. And those in turn were very powerful in the copywriting that I was doing as well. So I became a Swiss army knife, where I could come in and look at a piece of copy, as direct response. I could look at it as editorial. I could think about the brand implications of it. It allowed me to be versatile in a way that a lot of copywriters aren’t. A lot of copywriters are very, very specialized. “I write sales letters for the financial industry, in this one format. And if you want that I can do a pretty good job, but if you want anything else, if your brand is different in any way, eh, it’s going to be hard.” So what I think helps a lot of writers who really make it to that top level is, yeah, be good at what you’re doing, but also try and get out of that bubble that you’re in. Look at different types of copy. Build that versatility, because the best can take those core lessons and apply them to other things. Rob: Let’s talk about that just a little bit more. Obviously a lot of the stuff that you’re writing on a daily basis is not in your own voice, you’re working for somebody else, and it’s in his voice, it’s his products or at least the brand he’s built around himself. How do you get yourself into another person’s shoes in order to create copy that reflects, like you’re saying, their brand or their personality? Ryan: For me, a lot of it is acting. With my background in screenwriting, one of the things I had to do was write a lot of screenplays. There’s a lot of different characters in a screenplay, that means I’m writing dialogue for different people. I’m writing dialogue for the husband, dialogue for the wife, dialogue for the villain, dialogue for the hero, dialogue for the child. To do that, I would literally stand up, pretend to be that person, and act it out, and try and even do it in their voice. That’s hard at first, but it gets easier and easier, and pretty soon you can start to feel what that person is feeling, think what that person is thinking. The same is true in copywriting. If you have a client with a particular voice, it’s about getting into their mindset and being able to pretend that you’re them. Reading all their material, watching all of their videos. How would they think through this problem? How would they express this? And you can shortcut it, but looking at what they say over and over and over again - what’s the phraseology that they would use to describe x? And you can collect some of those things, start to build a map for how they think about it. Kira: I like that idea of acting it out, I can say I have never done that and I really need to do that to embrace the voice of my clients. And it could be really fun, right? Get costumes, wigs,