Copywriting 101 Archives - Page 4 of 11

Why you shouldn’t apologize to your reader

Here are two very different direct mail efforts that make the same mistake: apologizing to the reader. They don’t come right out and say “I’m sorry”, but the self-effacing entry points have the same effect. And by choosing this approach for their entry they’ve given up the opportunity to have another, much stronger intro.

: Waste Management self-mailer

Waste Management says “We know this is the last thing on your mind… but it’s the first thing on ours.” With the reveal of the opening trash can lid. Well, no. If it’s the last thing on my mind then why are you talking about it? If I don’t care about it then I am not going to read your promo about it.

The Fresh Air Fund sent me an address sticker package to solicit money to send inner city kids to camp. There’s actually some good copy here but not the first sentence of the letter: “With winter fast approaching, it may seem like an odd time to talk about giving inner-city kids a bus ticket to Fresh Air camp.” Well, yes it does. Maybe you should come back and talk to me in the spring.

: Fresh Air Fund sticker sheet

Or maybe you should lead with the stronger second sentence: “With your help, inner-city children will have the opportunity to leave behind the crowded apartments and dangerous streets they call home and join us next summer.” Or, maybe turn the timing of the appeal into a motivator: “We have to work all year long to make sure that inner city kids have the chance to spend a few summer weeks at camp. That’s why we’re writing you today.”

What’s happening in both these efforts is that the copywriter is implicitly apologizing for the intrusion. But the reader doesn’t care because advertising mail is a lower life form than a cockroach. All the reader wants to do is throw it away. And all you can do to save yourself is to deliver a powerful offer or a truly intriguing proposition that will interrupt that trajectory toward the recycling bin. The Uriah Heep act just doesn’t cut it.

How to craft a good offer

The offer is what readers get when they respond to your call to action. Your success depends on making the offer as clear and appealing as you can. Very often you will be asked by your client to help design the offer. This is a chance to earn extra response points (and brownie points) with a creative concept which is also sound marketing.

In a direct sale, the product or service IS the offer. The prospect is going to respond not by asking for more information but by making a financial commitment here and now. Catalogs and e-commerce sites are filled with many direct sales offers, which can be presented economically because each takes only a few square inches of space. Catalog writers learn to write descriptive copy very efficiently; in a paragraph or two, you will give the reader everything they need to make a buying decision and also to distinguish the product from other similar products, sold by you or by your competitors.

A hard offer leads the reader directly into a sales conversation. Example: “call right now and we’ll set up an appointment with a service specialist at your convenience.” The response rate may be low but the leads will be very high quality, because only those who are seriously interested will respond. Note: your client may want to sugarcoat the sales visit and call it a “free consultation” or some such but most prospects will see the hard offer for what it is.

From a copywriter’s perspective, hard offers are risky. It’s entirely up to the sales force to turn those leads into sales and if they don’t, it will be your fault for not sending them good leads in the first place. If possible, recommend instead a….

A soft offer is information or a free trial that lures the reader into the sales conversation through an intermediate step. If we are doing lead generation copywriting, this is what we want to recommend because we maintain control. Literally, we are not “selling” the end result but rather the info kit, the webinar, or similar information. All we need to do is convince them that what we have to offer is worth a few minutes of their time in review.

Often the information will come “arm attached” in that it is accompanied by a call or visit from a salesperson. We can’t control what happens in that follow-up conversation, but we can deliver a very interested prospect through the way we set up the value of the information to be obtained.

Limited time offers and add-ons sweeten the pot for the prospect while they allow the merchant to influence buyer behavior. I’ve done some work for a medical alert service (the pendant around the neck, connected to a radio device that alerts an operator when the button on the pendant is pushed) and they are constantly testing such add-ons as a free lockbox (to hang on your door handle with a key inside, so EMS personnel can get into the house) and free coverage for your spouse when you buy today for yourself.

When you are writing about these more complex offers, you need to invest the copy real estate to make the add-ons understandable and appealing. In particular, if it’s a limited time offer paint a word picture of the benefit in responding now and the pain or disappointment to be expected if they wait.

Final tip: if your offer is very rich and involved, you can often build your communication around its components. I’m thinking of a continuity package I wrote for a fan club where you could get regular shipments of the “Highlander” TV series on video. The sign-up offer was a selection of “best of” and “blooper” videos as well as a free t-shirt. I used the components of the offer to pull the reader through the package in a “but wait, there’s more” technique, and then introduced the final premium in the P.S. which explained it would only be sent to readers who found a sword sticker hidden in the package and attached it to their order document.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

Using “magnet words” to make your copy work harder

One way to make a message scannable is through the careful placement of “magnet words”. These are words so laden with implied interest and benefit that they draw the reader’s eye. Here are some examples:

You. (Or, better yet, the reader’s name used sparingly)
New
Free
Save
Guarantee/guaranteed
Easy/simple/foolproof
Proven
Safe (especially for health/personal care products)
Best/better
Solution (this one is overused in b2b selling so I’m not including it in my numbering)

A few years ago “announcing” and “introducing” would have made the list, but today they seem a bit hucksterish. Same with “improved” which in our litigious times, invites a lawsuit from the disgruntled owners of the previous non-improved version.

That’s a starter list; every copywriter has their own and probably calls them “magic words”. (Do a web search and see what you find.) Because you are a persuasive communicator you are using many of these words already. My point is that through the placement of these words you can add attention to surrounding copy that might not be interesting on its own.

Which is more likely to catch the reader’s eye: “Acme Instruments makes measurement devices for cell network technicians” or “Acme Instruments offers a proven solution for cell network technicians”? Of course it’s a solution because otherwise nobody would want it; and it better be proven or it’s worthless. But the magnet words make the copy more appealing. Add on the fact that it’s “guaranteed” and offer a “free” info kit and you’re in business.

The corollary lesson is that sometimes you DON’T want the reader to read your copy and in this case you should scrupulously avoid magnet words. A utility company served up a great example in a privacy notice about sharing their mailing list: “If this policy is acceptable, no action needs to be taken.” That’s a bit convoluted; would have been much clearer to say “If you agree with this policy, you do not need to take any action.” But wow, two magnet words are going to make sure the sentence is read and that’s exactly what this writer did not want to happen.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

How to keep readers on the hook

Nobody’s going to read your sales letter. Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. Nobody’s going to read your sales letter exactly the way you crafted it. They’ll bounce around, clinging on words that attract them like pretty bangles and ignoring your strongest selling points, they’ll go straight to the P.S. and double back in the letter…. And if you’re luck at the end of all this they will pay some attention to your call to action.

Don’t feel bad. You are getting paid to sell, not to write creative prose. And you will be amply rewarded if you apply a few tricks from the copywriter’s quiver of reader retention arrows.

Set the hook right after the opening of the letter. I shared the opening of the Geneva letter inviting business owners to a two-day seminar. The first paragraph flattered them as the owner of a valuable business. The second paragraph suggested they may well receive an offer in a red-hot market.

Now comes the third paragraph, which frets: But what if the offer is too low, even though it may seem astronomically high to you? What must you know to negotiate the sales process? And what is the downside, should you decide not to sell in today’s sizzling market?

So now we’ve introduced a problem which might not have been relevant had we not flattered the egoistic business owner at the beginning of the letter. And we can proceed to introduce the Geneva Business Valuation Seminar as the solution with a call to action.

This is a four-page letter, which is why we can afford to wait so long for the CTA. In a shorter letter it might come in the third or second paragraph. At this point, the DNA of our message is on the page and they have enough information to act immediately, if they wish, or to continue reading.

Guide the reader through the letter with connective words and phrases. “And” lets them know you’re about to add a selling point. Same with “Plus”. “What’s more” supersizes this, telling the reader you’ve headed to a whole new level of benefits. “That’s why” tells the reader you are about to deliver a sum-up selling argument. “But” is a qualifier—you may agree with what I just said, here’s a consideration you need to keep in mind. And yes, I realize the Queen does not begin her English sentences with prepositions. You need to make a choice between getting an A in English, or selling as hard as you possibly can.

Keep your paragraphs and sentences short to make the letter an easy read. When I started as a new copywriter, I was told to keep paragraphs under six lines. Today this seems impossibly long to me. Five lines maximum, please. Sentences should fit on one line if possible, or should be broken with a comma (often used when grammar rules say it is superfulous), em dash or ellipse to give the reader easily digestible chunks of information. And pepper that olio with the occasional one-line paragraph and one-word sentence.

Help out your art director by making layout suggestions in your draft. Indented paragraphs, centered subheads, important words and phrases should be bold-faced or underlined in the body copy. Tell your designer that you’re not doing art direction; rather, you’re making suggestions as to where emphasis should be placed. Then, cross-check the first round of comps to see that you haven’t been completely ignored; Quark and InDesign ignore underlining when a Word doc is imported and your designer may not bother to go back and add it back. (Or at least I’m told this is what happens; the designer may be trying to sabotage my copy by taking out the formatting, but that seems less likely.)

What you are doing with all these efforts is to make the letter scannable. A reader who does not have the patience (or the ability) to read beginning to end can hop from emphasis point to emphasis point like a pebble skipping across a pond, and still understand what you have to sell and what you want them to do about it.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

The Call to Action

In most of our marketing we are trying to get people to do something. This used to be the purview of “direct response” advertising but on the web every page is full of clickable links, and today even the most image-y print ad or TV spot will include a URL or 800 number to find out more.

We want to pay attention to how we craft these calls to action (CTAs for short) because they affect our paychecks as copywriters. If we can prove that our efforts produced more calls or dollars or customers, we will get more work and bigger fees. Here are a few tips:

Combine the call to action with a benefit statement. Are classes limited to 20 students to ensure personal attention? Then say that in the call to action, followed by a request to respond now to avoid being left out. Is the product going to taste great, improve health or make them money? Then add urgency to the CTA: To enjoy the health-giving benefits of royal jelly bon-bons just as soon as we can ship them, call our hotline right now.

Tell the reader early and often what you want them to do. If it’s a direct mail letter you want to cut to the chase no later than the third or fourth paragraph. You’ve created desire or concern through your windup, now tell the reader specifically how they can scratch the itch. If it’s a long letter, repeat the call to action at least once per page. CTAs in web pages and emails are more compact since they are clickable links, so they can be used more frequently, as often as once every couple of paragraphs.

The reason for the multiple CTAs is simply that you never know exactly when your reader will be ready to take action, and you don’t want to take a chance on losing them because they get distracted and wander off the page.

Make the call to action consistent throughout your communication. Don’t invite them to request more information in one CTA, then tell them you want an order right now further down the page. If you have a freebie or a giveaway contest for them, mention it in each CTA or they will wonder, “hey, where is that prize I was going to win?” The reason is that readers are donkeys. They will follow willingly as long as you give them no reason not to, but if you throw in a distracting or confusing element they will dig in their heels and do everything except what you want.

Deliver a complete CTA at the end of a sales letter, or the sidebar of an email invite. This includes everything the reader needs to know about the offer—and all possible response options including mail, phone, email, web link, fax and maybe something else. If you are asking for money or a serious commitment of their time, this CTA should also include a guarantee of some sort for reassurance.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

How to open a sales letter or email

The first paragraph is the most important element of any selling message. If you don’t hook your reader here they will abandon you. (Which is why it’s not a good idea to keep key selling points in reserve, thinking you will reveal them if you go along.) Just like the subject line or outer envelope teaser, these words are worth the investment of a disproportionate amount of your time.

It’s never wrong to open with a strong statement of your offer (I want to let you know about an unusual sale on first quality goods that don’t normally get discounted, but are now 50% off for a limited time) or an explanation why you are writing (because I believe you are among the top 5% of salespeople, I want to share an opportunity that most people would not even understand). But that’s not good enough.

You ALSO need to provide verbal chum for the slow-moving fish who initially are not attracted by your offer, or do not think it applies to them, but can be lured into the net with the right conversational gambit. Let’s talk about a few ways to do this.

Problem/solution open: works with many technology products because technology consumers nearly always have some problem to solve. If you’re looking to maximize the potential of the XYZ platform, then you’ll want to read a new collection of case histories from industry leaders who have done just that.

Picture yourself here: paint an evocative word image of the benefits to be gained as a result of the offer in the letter, tied to the reader personally. My control letter for Online Trading Academy, which educates people to trade stocks and other investments online, does this: “Imagine, for a moment, what investing would be like if you knew you could not fail. Never again would you sell a winning position too soon—or hold onto a loser for longer than you should…”

Flattery: you are writing the recipient precisely because they are a perceptive member of your target audience, and they can justify your confidence in them by acting appropriately. Nice if you can pull it off. The variations on Emily Soell’s classic intro for Vanity Fair belong in this category: “Dear Friend, If the list on which I found your name is any indication, this is not the first – nor will it be the last – subscription letter you receive… [goes on to explain it is a very special list of perceptive readers].”

News: this is the default opening in fundraising and politics, where there is generally an urgent need that your reader is enlisted in helping to relieve. May also work for business to business or personal-interest consumer marketing IF you are confident from your audience research that the reader will be as excited about the news as you are.

Emotion: My control letter for Met Life’s long term care insurance prospecting starts with a paragraph I jotted down in a meeting with the sales team: “Every one of us would like to live well in our later years and leave some money for the next generation. Is that too much to ask?” It fits the combination of fear for the future and indignation at the status quo that the reader is feeling. As with the news approach, this only works if you have a true mind meld with your reader.

Entertainment/escape: Many of the most successful publications promotions start with a “free sample” of the content. People will subscribe to be inspired or entertained or to be lifted out of their quotidian existence, so why not start right now? The Great American Recipes letter does this: “Remember when good food meant the best times you ever had with family and friends? I’m talking about lazy summer evenings serving home-made ice cream on the screen porch….”

An opener that does several of these things simultaneously is the introduction of my four page letter for Geneva, a M&A consultant whose business model was to invite business owners to a two-day paid (not free) workshop on how to value their business:

We’re in the midst of the hottest Mergers & Acquisition market in 100 years and you, as the owner of a middle-market business, have the most desirable property of them all… That’s why, like many of the people who attend our Business Valuation Seminar, you may have already received an offer—and for more than you ever dreamed your business could be worth. And even if you haven’t yet been approached about selling, you probably will be soon.

News, flattery, a bit of picture-yourself-here sets the reader up nicely for the presentation of my client’s seminar as the solution to the problem.

One final tip, after you’ve completed your best effort at an opening paragraph, take it out. That’s what I said. Editors often advise writers to cut the first paragraph of their work because it’s an unnecessary wind-up before the real pitch and the same may be true of your letter. If your copy falls flat with the first paragraph removed, then you know you have a winner for an opening.

This article mentions several examples which can be found in my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

Should you offer a money-back guarantee?

A money-back guarantee is essential to any web or direct marketing offer. It takes care of an enormous concern on the part of the buyer: I can’t see this product before I order… so, what if I get it and I don’t like it?

That’s the simple and unequivocal answer to a question you may be asked by your clients: “Do I need a guarantee?” Yes, of course you do. The next question is how generous is your guarantee, and how scrupulous will you be in honoring it?

One of my early bosses was a master of deception… I don’t think he would mind me referring to him as such because it was a point of pride to him that he could persuade people to buy products at much more than their true value. He tried to show me how to insert wiggle room in the guarantee so it would never need to be honored. But even as a naïve young marketer I knew this was not a good idea.

The people who intend to take advantage of you will find a way to do so. They’ll claim the product was damaged or simply never arrived. They’ll protest their credit card bill. Defending yourself against them is futile and by trying to do so with a miserly or weasel-worded guarantee you’ll cause yourself far more damage among the majority of honest customers who will now be less confident about ordering from you.

At one point in my career, I wrote a lot of promos for investment newsletters. The standard guarantee was “a prompt prorata refund of your subscription cost for all unmailed issues”. What hokum. The cost of the physical issues was negligible and the real product was intellectual property; if the reader no longer values that product why force them to pay for it?

We were able to change the standard wording to something like, “100% refund of your entire subscription price even if you cancel on the very last issue” and guess what? Refunds did not go through the roof because most subscribers do not make a mental note that okay, I can game the publisher a year from now and get my money back. Rather they make a decision about whether or not the product is for them based on their first experiences with it. A generous guarantee simply removes the roadblocks in this decision process.

My favorite guarantee is still Lands Ends’ “Guaranteed. Period.” It’s gutsy that the uncompromising language has been maintained since Lands End was acquired by Sears, but when you think about it this guarantee simply puts in writing what most retailers would offer their customers. If you don’t like it and you take the trouble to bring it back to the store, we are going to give your money back regardless of whether we think it’s justified because we don’t want an angry customer roaming the corridors.

So, copywriters, always include a guarantee—and tell the art director to put it on a fancy safety-paper background to make it look valuable. Maybe your client will protest that “we don’t actually have a return policy” to which your answer is “you should, and you do now.”

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

Copywriting 101: Saratoga Chips

A local company is marketing a boutique potato chip in Saratoga Springs, NY, where that salty snack was invented in 1853. The chips are made with high quality potatoes and taste delicious. They are charmingly packaged in a replica of the “takeaway” box from the 1870s. The company is well regarded and family owned. And as a bonus, they are one of the largest clients of Saratoga Bridges, a not-for-profit that finds meaningful work for mentally disabled adults.

Okay, copywriters. Think you can create some kind of a marketing campaign from that?

Oh, there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned. For whatever reason, Saratoga Chips has chosen to sell at a per-ounce price about the same as Lays. I’m not in love with that decision because price competition is the mark of a commoditized product and this is anything but. In fact, there’s a huge potential audience of tourists who come for the track, the spa and the waters who would love to take something back to friends and family in Jersey or Florida.

Unfortunately, the marketing department of Saratoga Chips is not you nor I. Avoiding history, warmth and local color, their copywriter came up with the Walmart-style headline: “Buy local… why pay more for the national brands?” Doing the copywriter one better, the art director mistrusted the visual appeal of the product and the antique box and subjugated them to a fake newspaper page (“Crum Cruncher” refers to George Crum, the inventor of the chip, but of course the reader doesn’t know this) superimposed on a fake wood background as if, I guess, the fake newspaper has been plopped down on a fake table.

Purely on the basis of missed opportunity, Saratoga Chips is hereby fast-tracked into the Badvertising Hall of Shame.

P.S. I love you

There is plenty of research to suggest that, after the opening, the P.S. is the most-read element of a direct mail letter. Similarly, MarketingSherpa did an analysis of links within emails and that found that the number of clicks goes down with each successive link after the first one in the message—until the link at the very end, which is the second most-clicked link of them all.

We marketers have only ourselves to thank for this phenomenon: we’ve trained our readers to know that the end of the letter will have a recap of the offer and a direct call to action. If they don’t feel like reading, they can cut to the chase by going to the P.S. That’s why you should use the P.S. appropriately to give people what they are looking for.

The classic use of the P.S. is to recap the entire marketing proposition in a paragraph. St. Jude Hospital did that by adding this P.S. which, according to Herschell Gordon Lewis, produced a 19% increase in response with absolutely no other changes in the letter:

P.S. I hope that your own family never suffers the tragedy of losing a child to an incurable disease. At St. Jude, we’re fighting to conquer these killers, and one day someone in your own family may live because we succeeded.

You can also use the P.S. to:

Tease the reader back into the letter, with a phrase that harkens back to something you said previously that of course they didn’t read: “Remember that limited time offer I told you about earlier? Well, here’s one more reason you shouldn’t let this opportunity get away…” Works well if you have a very rich, multi-part offer that you want to reveal in stages.

Bring in one fresh benefit which is so powerful that it deserves its own showcase. Richard Potter did this in a way I love for a letter for AAA. It says something like: “I almost forgot! Respond now and you’ll get a FREE United States Map Book in addition to the member savings I mentioned earlier.”

Fire your twin guns of “act now before it’s too late” and “with our no-risk guarantee there’s no reason not to say yes”. Putting these strong closing statements in the P.S. serves a double purpose: they seal the deal with somebody who has stayed with you throughout the letter, and they make a compelling argument to someone who has just started reading.

Are there letters that shouldn’t have a P.S.? Perhaps. “Real” business letters don’t have them, of course, and if verisimilitude is important then maybe you want to close with the signature. Also, a very short letter has less reason for a P.S. But the P.S. is powerful. Don’t give it up without serious consideration.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

“But all I need is a brochure.”

There’s been a nice thread on LinkedIn recently called “The (surprisingly) best time to quote your price.” Apart from that copywriter-ish tease, the discussion has been about whether you should immediately provide an estimate when you speak with a client, or wait till you’ve discussed the project and put forth a few ideas to demonstrate your expertise.

Copywriter Michael Gorga mentioned a red flag to watch for: the prospective client who says “but I just need a brochure [or site map, response form, landing page, fill in the blanks].” As if all your research and prep can be dispensed with because the client just needs this one specific element.

When people ask me to quote price, I always tell them I am going to do 10-15 hours of prep before I can even begin to give them a deliverable. And that’s the truth. Someone who would generate copy without a fundamental understanding of the product, the market and the competitive environment is not a copywriter, but a typist.

Michael Gorga had another red flag: the client who has never worked with a copywriter before, and would write it themselves except they’re ” too busy”. If they don’t understand the value you provide, they’re unlikely to pay your rate.

The complete thread is available here. It’s within the “Claude C. Hopkins Copywriter” group, so you may need to join the group to see it.