The Honey Trap

the hook

The feeling arrives before the product does.

A subject line puts a small hook in you before you reach the second line. One of mine went like this: “The hidden reason you’re so tired.”

You were not thinking about being tired until you read that. By the fourth paragraph there is a $58 bottle that fixes what the first line planted.

That email also sold you the version of you who finally has it together.

I wrote those lines for years. I know which insecurity each one was built to press.

the sell

A lab coat. A timer that never reached zero.

I picked the pink because it read as clean. We spent three weeks on the packaging and one afternoon on the claim.

I once dressed plain magnesium up as a proprietary calm complex. We cast the woman in the before photo to look like you on a rough morning.

It was good work. I still admire whoever wrote that timer.

the useful part

Turn the bottle around and read the blend, because those ingredients are listed heaviest first.

I have written ads for an ingredient sitting second from the bottom. In the trade we called the ones parked down there fairy dust.

Some of these bottles genuinely work. When one does, I say so happily.

Then I tell you where the same active ingredient sells for a third of the price.

Buying from an ad was never the mistake.

The people writing to you are extremely good at their jobs.

I sat in those rooms for years. I can still hear the meeting that decided which word goes in your subject line.

You can stop feeling silly about the $58 bottle at the back of your cabinet.

Reading a pitch the way its writer reads it is the whole pleasure of this letter.