Why are you arguing with me?

Nick: I liked your email, but I felt like I missed something near the start. What would I do about what?

Cass: Like, what would you do in my situation? Would you rig your KPIs to make more money or not?

Nick: Rig, how? There was no rigging mentioned.

Cass: Encouraging the customer to fill out the NPS based on their experience with ME rigs the result for the company. That's why I said it was my first experience with how easy it is for companies to game the system.

Nick: I didn't realise that was even gaming the system.

Cass: You're telling them to answer a different question to the one they're actually being rated for?

Nick: ...That's not very clear in your email

Cass: Scotty is literally telling the customer "hey, rate CASS as an individual" and the company is then holding that score up to the wider market saying "look how RECOMMENDED we are"

Nick: Why are you arguing with me

Me: Why are you arguing with ME

Goddamnit. That email was meant to be a MASTERPIECE.

Legit, earlier that same day as I was writing it I texted Nick saying it was one of my BEST.

THE ABOVE IS NOT THE CONVERSATION I EXPECTED TO BE HAVING WITH HIM ONCE IT WAS SENT. 😅

...If you read my last email, you'll remember that the story was from my call centre days. My old boss told the customer that, while the end-of-call survey was TECHNICALLY about the company, the score affected MY bonus—so they should answer based on how they felt about ME, not the company.

And if you read the above exchange, you'll now understand that this is not how NPS is meant to be done lol.

I'm still not entirely convinced Nick wasn't being thick, tbh. But at the end of the day, whether he was or not isn't the point.

The point is I'd fallen into a classic copywriting trap: Making a logic leap.

Because I spent years in that call centre, living through the scramble to hit arbitrary targets, the connection between "asking for a good rating" and "gaming the system" was glaringly obvious to me. I assumed my readers would instantly connect the dots.

But we all know what they say about ASSUME, don't we?

You look like a fucking dickhead.

When you’re writing marketing copy, be it a newsletter, a social media post or a sales page, it’s insanely easy to do this. You know your topic so intimately that you maybe skip steps 2, 3 and 4 and jump straight from 1 to 5.

To you, it's a tiny step. To your reader, it's a big bloody leap.

Truthfully, I am the WORST for it in IRL* conversations. I'll be chatting with my husband about what we should have for dinner, and suddenly I've made three leaps in logic and my next response has absolutely NOTHING to do with dinner.

*Yep, bit of RAS syndrome there—but the sentence looked weird without the "in" lol

"Cass, your ADHD is showing"—how Steve responds to these moments now. 😅

And look, nothin' wrong with being one of the many ADHDers on the planet these days—but YOUR COPY DOESN'T NEED TO SHARE YOUR DIAGNOSIS.

If your reader has to stop and think, "Wait, how did we get here?", you need to go back and do some editing.

For example, if I were to rewrite that last email, I'd probably do something like this:

While I don't specifically call out leaps in logic in Brief #1: Write to Persuade, I DO bang on throughout the whole thing about the importance of a clear argument.

That being said, reading about it in a guide and catching yourself doing it in real-time are two very different things.

...Which brings me to the BONUS I promised Brief subscribers last week.

It ended up being a little bigger of a project than I originally intended (classic me), but it's BLOODY ACTIONABLE. In fact, it's a diagnostic app designed to help you catch these kinds of misfires in your own copy before your audience—or an annoying mate—points them out to you.

No, it doesn't hook up to anything in the background. Yes, you CAN input your diagnostic into AI if that's what you want to do... but the ultimate goal of it is to apply everything I teach in Write to Persuade in a step-by-step way.

I'm super excited to share it with you. If you're already a Brief subscriber, you can access it either by going back to Brief #1: Write to Persuade and scrolling to the bottom, where there's a link to a video of me using the tool on a friend's landing page... or you can just skip straight to the tool here.

If you haven't subscribed yet, why the hell not? lol. I kid, I kid. But also, here's me dangling a diagnostic tool in front of your face... sign up here, and you'll get instant access to Write to Persuade AND the diagnostic app. 🥕

Cheers,
Cass

PS. Actual footage of mine and Nick's faces during our above conversation:

PPS. More from our convo:

Cass: I'm going to write about this in my next email though
Nick: The email: "Nick is an annoying cunt."
Cass: HAHAHA

PPPS. Link to the diagnostic is here.