The Best Pricing Page, Because It's Honest...

And if you make a cracker for religious purposes, how do you position it?

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

First, thanks to everyone who reached out about last week’s Fish in the Cowboy Hat story. I heard from people all over the world saying how they’ve found themselves in similar situations and never had a term for it. It brings me much joy to hear that it resonated.

With that behind us, today we’ll talk about:

• A very nitpicky complaint about copywriting.

• How do you position matzo?

• An amazing pricing page.

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1 Nitpicky Example of Bad Copywriting, and 1 Example of Amazing Copywriting

The Nitpicky (on my part) but still bad:

I received an email from an eCommerce platform company this week telling me about a half-day event they’re hosting in New York City. Fine. The usual stuff - keynote, customers talking about how great they are, coffee.

If you’re tasked with writing up an email asking people to come to this event like this, I have a quick piece of copywriting advice:

Please don’t over-sell the whole thing. The event is what it is.

Specifically:

I’m sure the CMO is a great guy (it’s a guy, I just removed his name because it’s not about him.). But do I really need to “brace” myself? What does that even mean? And wouldn’t I brace myself BEFORE he “sets the stage.” And “epic day”? I’m fairly certain that day involves someone getting on stage and saying, “this company sure was great, and it increased my revenue 11%.” That’s fine. It’s not epic.

Don’t treat your audience like they’re idiots.

The Good:

I love press releases. They’re a specific type of terrible, filled with many words that say nothing, and fake quotes that say even less. I cannot get enough of them.

Of course, they do not have to be that way. Marketers and communications people CHOOSE to make them like that. Which is why I wanted to share a press release from our friends at Really Good Emails, the email newsletter inspiration site that was just bought by another email-related company called Beefree.

I want to be clear here: the value of having a consistent, recognizable brand voice is not that it’s fun to have a consistent, recognizable brand voice. It’s because if you don’t have a brand voice, your sales team has to do 100% of the selling. The brand does 0% of the work. Optimally your brand does some percentage of the work and the sales team does less than 100% of the work. On the extreme end of the spectrum, for example, the Stanley Cup brand currently does 99% of the work and the channel where you buy the cup does 1% of the work.

For whatever reason, consumer brands understand this and B2B brands do not. Well, let me clarify - B2B brands DO understand this, but they are absolutely, cripplingly terrified of offending anyone for any possible reason, so they remove all humanity from their writing, which is also why B2B marketers are so excited by AI writing tools - since there was no humanity in their writing in the first place, it should be easy enough for generative AI to replace it.*

(*It’s not.)

In any case, here’s Really Good Emails’ press release about being acquired. May your company one day be acquired and you write something this on-brand to announce the acquisition.

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The Various Sects of Matzo Positioning

It is a Gobbledy tradition that we write about holiday-related marketing stuff when that holiday is not taking place (you may remember our deep dive into Maxwell House Haggadahs, which we ran well before Passover).

And now that Passover is over, I wanted to share a quick example of how great positioning allows you to compete in a commodity market. Specifically, the market for matzos.

You may be aware that the Jewish world is splintered (very very very roughly) into 3 groups - the Reform movement, the Conservative movement, and an un-amalgamated (?) mish mosh of Orthodox sects. I’ve listed those 3 groups in order of how strictly members of that group typically follow Jewish law (again, very very very roughly).

It’s notable that there are also 3 main matzo companies. And I found it amusing that those matzo companies also seemed to position themselves along the “more traditional” to “less traditional” continuum.

To wit:

Here’s a picture of a box of Yehuda Matzos:

Yehuda is positioning itself as the matzo of obligation. It’s just stacked on a plate, and that plate has Hebrew on it, and if you can’t read that Hebrew, this matzo is not for you.

It proudly proclaims that it’s imported from Israel, which aligns with the “traditional” positioning, but also makes me wonder why you have to fly flour and water 5,000 miles.

And for some reason there’s a QR code for a contest for kids, and what kid doesn’t see that poorly lit sad stack of matzo and think, “I’d like to win a Yehuda Matzo contest. I’m sure they’re giving away plain socks.”

Streitz is staking a middle ground in the matzo world:

Colorful, nu?

Whereas the Yehuda folks are old world traditionalists, Streitz are “family owned NY,” which I assume means “New York” and not “Not Yet,” which is, as a child, what you’re told when you ask if the Seder is almost over. (Borscht Belt humor!)

They’ve gussied it up to make it look like your grandparents’ house with their fancy seder plate and their plastic tablecloths that they break out on special occasions. Streitz straddles the line between your Uncle Murray, the macher accountant who lives in Scarsdale, and your grandparents, who never left the Lower East Side.

Last, our friends at Manischewitz:

“Original ancient cracker??????????” Oy, we’re just glad your zeyde isn’t still alive to see this.

Manischewitz has staked out a position as the Reform movement of matzos - it’s kind of whatever you want it to be, and maybe it has some religious association, but maybe it doesn’t and either way it’s fine. It’s the original cracker!

But it’s also (secondarily I guess?) “Perfect for Passover.” Like if Manischewitz produced communion wafers and the 3rd thing on the package for it said, “it’s also great at becoming the body of Christ!” I mean, sure, but isn’t that the first thing?

Like Reform Jews in general, Manischewitz is open to bringing non-Jews into the family, hence the “ancient cracker” and not the “worst dessert ever at your second cousin’s house in Staten Island.”

(Thanks to longtime reader, and father of Gobbledy author, Peter B. for the matzo-related heads up.)

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This Is the Best Pricing Page

As my friend and sometime-Gobbledy reader JVC once said about losing weight, “it’s simple, but it’s not easy.”

Which is also how I’d describe marketing for software companies, except that it’s simple, but we make it mindblowingly not-easy by generally trying to do anything that would make us look any different from any of our competitors.

This is how I think of software marketing:

Anyway, if you’re thinking to yourself, “I’d love for us not to look and sound exactly like every one of our competitors, but I just don’t know how to do that,” you’ve come to the right place. Or at least you’ve come to A place, which is really the first step.

Here’s an fun (“fun”) exercise I’ll suggest that will help you figure out where to start:

Take any page on your website that’s not the homepage, and then change it into the voice that you always wished your brand had.

One of the things we talk about here sometimes is that every touchpoint you have should sound like your brand voice. We talked about one of my favorite examples of this back in the early days of Gobbledy where I shared an order confirmation from “multi collagen peptide” (?) provider Vitauthority that’s so great, I’m going to put it right here:

Every touchpoint should be that good.

Which is why as a marketer you have SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES to have your brand voice come through. But almost no companies bother to do that. And sure, I’ll gladly help you with your homepage (hit me up at jared@sagelett.com - also, please don’t say “hit me up”), but it’s easier to start somewhere that’s less visible.

You could start on your Pricing page, for example.

And specifically as an example, I wanted to share the pricing page from testing tool Posthog.

The top part of the page is a regular pricing page, but if you keep scrolling you get this:

“If nothing else has sold you on PostHog, hopefully these classic marketing tactics will.” Love it. The little hog on the bottom right saying, “Please help our conversion rate.” Amazing. “Act now and get $0 off your order.” All of it, brilliant.

I’ve worked a couple of places where someone has said something like, “Developers don’t like to be sold to. Just give them information.” Which I mean, sure? But one way you “don’t sell to” someone is to tell them you’re selling to them. Which PostHog has done here in just an incredible fashion. I’m jealous.

And here’s the best part - you can make something this good!

It’s simple!

But it’s not easy.

(Thanks to possible Gobbledy reader Greg H. for sharing the Posthog page.)

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As always, thanks for reading to the bottom.

I say every week - and I actually mean it - Here’s my Calendly link. I’m always happy to chat for 25 minutes about whatever you’re working on. And if you want to advertise with Gobbledy (our last advertiser got a bunch of actual, genuine leads - for real!), or learn more about our 2-day messaging workshop, I’m at jared@sagelett.com