Category: Words and writing

Why copywriting is like selling (Part 1)

One of my earliest clients was a guy named Roy Chitwood who owned Max Sacks International, a sales training organization. In working with Roy for several years I attended so many workshops that his catch phrases became drilled into my brain. On the value of training: “School is never out for the sales professional.” On the role of the sales department in the organization: “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”  On the importance of planning: “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which road you take.”

Unlike copywriting, personal selling is a contact sport. Salespeople have to psych themselves up to get over rejection and put on their best face for the next appointment. Having an organized system to apply to what may appear an informal activity helps them stay on task (“Once selling becomes a process, it ceases to be a problem”).  This may why there are so many sales training courses and methods; most of the students I met in Roy’s classes had taken several courses from different trainers and used them agnostically for inspiration.

Very much like copywriters, salespeople have the job of getting prospects excited about and desirous of a product or service they may not have realized they needed until a moment ago. That’s why it is so helpful to apply the “rules” followed by professional salespeople to your own work as a copywriter. In my class, I spend quite a bit of time on the copywriting/selling analogy and I’m going to do the same here, over the next several posts.

The relationship between copywriting and selling should be seamless in a well-run company: your lead generation efforts serve as the front end of the sales effort, and serve up a steady stream of prospects (or “suspects” as another mentor, Ray Jutkins, used to call them since they have not yet entered your sales process). The better you’ve done your job, the more interested they will be in learning more about your company’s product or service.

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

Marketing in an Optum haze

Optum is a new entity cobbled together out of previously separate entities for medical billing, online pharmacy, health newsletters and other services to “help navigate the health care system”. The name was trademarked in February 2011, but I just came across it last week in an expensive inside front cover spread in the New Yorker prescribing “to improve the health care system from A to Z, start with O”.

The pharma industry has a way of coming up with invented names that sound like they mean something but actually don’t. “Abilify” and “Boniva” being a couple of my favorites. I expect the naming committee at this company must have had a chest bump moment after they realized they could create a new word simply by chopping the middle out of “optimum”.

But I think there are reasons that “Optum” remained available long after “Humana” and “Zoloft” had been gobbled up. First, two-syllable words that end in “um” tend to sound mundane, downbeat and occasionally risible when spoken, instead of soaring. Try pablum, problem and yes, rectum.

Second, as we’ve mentioned previously, the lazy or hurrying reader often misplaces letters and sees in one word another similar word that isn’t there. In this case my eye immediately placed the missing “i” where “t” was written in the ad, making for a most unfortunate result (at least for a medical company).

Words have the power to sell, but also the potential to hurt your marketing efforts. When one of those words is the name of your company, that’s an extra big problem.

Don’t be that guy!

Check out “that guy” on Urban Dictionary. It’s a meme for our YouTube centric times. Whether you’re Rick Perry who can’t count to three or the graduate who still attends high school dances, now your boneheaded moves are up for review and we can all shudder, and deliver bromantic advice, by saying “don’t be that guy”.

Another phrase which I thought was local in upstate NY is “I like me some….” It’s usually delivered in a self-deprecating way, as in “I have a Ph.D in Nanotechnology but I still like me some wings with Buffalo sauce.” A scholarly article suggests it is from the south but that’s in general referring to usage of an extra and unnecessary pronoun. I say “I like me some…” is a 2011 way to endorse something while simultaneously disavowing in case it turns out not to be cool.

Language is a moving target. These phrases might make it into long term usage or they might be the next “you’ve got mail”. (Remember? If you don’t, thanks for reading an oldster’s blog, young padawan.)

My father was a book editor and we used to argue, almost to the point of coming to blows, about the placement of periods within quotes. As in, Steve Jobs turned to Bill Gates and said, “My OS is better than your OS”. I say the period goes outside the quote unless we know that the speaker delivered a complete sentence vs. a phrase quoted out of context. My father said that the period always goes within the quotes, regardless, because otherwise it was impossible for the typesetter to keep track of the tiny slivers of lead.

Now that type is set on the computer, we can evolve. I am claiming the “acceptable usage” if not the “correct” badge on this one. And by the way, typesetter working with tiny slivers of toxic lead all day long? Don’t be that guy.

Robert California jumps the shark on “The Office”

I was irrationally exuberant about the Robert California character on the revamped The Office, replacing Steve Carell as the office manager (OK, technically he’s now the CEO of the company, Linda Hunt apparently having bailed on that role). Played by the great James Spader, California first showed up as an interviewee for the job last spring. He seemed like a cube-dweller’s existential nightmare, somebody who had no idea who he was or why he was there but was designed to unsettle the person he was talking to in a very laid back, California way.

The first couple of shows this season were some of my all time favorites on The Office… including a Halloween episode in which he prowled the office gathering each employee’s worst fears, then told a horror story that incorporated all those fears. But that was also the show where he brought his kid to work, and now he’s taken to attending employee off-duty parties and making self aware statements like “you don’t know me at all, do you?” Robert California has jumped the shark.

There’s a lesson in this for marketers. The producers didn’t just decide out of the blue to emasculate the character. They must have done lots of audience testing that told them viewers were confused by “the boss” (and everybody knows that stereotype) behaving in such an unpredictable way. It made them nervous so it had to be changed. Similarly, sometimes our best copy and creative ideas are just too weird for our prospects and we have to bite our tongues and pull back to the tried and true.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Maybe James Spader can be persuaded to do a one man show based on the “real” Robert California.

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
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.

Mahatma Gandhi on customer service

I saw this on a poster at my local purveyor of Indian goods and had to check out its veracity:

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

The quote is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Ludicrous. Or is it? A search turns up both corroboration and skepticism. My money is with the denier who reports the quote actually came from Zig Ziglar, who says Gandhi said it.

Gotta love the internets.

UPDATE: the reference to Zig Zigler is oddly gone from the skeptic link above, replaced by one attributing the quote to L.L. Bean. Also, several people have mentioned that the quote universally ascribed to a speech Gandhi made in South Africa in 1890, but he didn’t actually arrive in South Africa in 1893.

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.