Words matter Archives - Page 11 of 12 - Otis Regrets... or not

How to get your envelope (or email) opened

David Ogilvy said that the only function of the copy and art on the outside of an envelope is to get it opened. As a corollary, Herschell Gordon Lewis (I think) said that the majority of the creative energy on a project should be lavished on the outer envelope. Same goes for subject lines in email.

Is this the most effective possible outer envelope teaser?

All of which makes me wonder what was the process by which today’s example envelope got into the mailsteam. You can see it here: the plaintive muzzle of a loveable dog, with the teaser “When your pet dies, will you know what to do?”

It’s from the Olivet Memorial Park, presumably not a huge outfit to whom this project was so trivial they chose the first headline that came to mind. I imagine there was quite a debate. There might even have had a presentation from a copywriter who came up with this head, and told them why it was really good.

There are many motives to get people to open an envelope. Guilt, for example. “Your pet gave to you all her life. Now it’s your turn.” Or just love between a person and pet. “Now there’s a place to share forever the love you have.” But instead Olivet’s advisory board chose the practical way: “When your pet dies, will you know what to do?” There will be a body to dispose of, probably some health laws to follow, hmm. Yet I would bet if you did an A-B split against virtually any emotional headline, the emotion will win every time.

letter and other elements of Olivet package

And on actually opening the envelope, I find that there are indeed some emotional appeals. “Losing a pet is as painful as losing any other family member”… and an offer of a “Pet Memorialization Planning Program”. Putting one of these messages on the outer would certainly have boosted its effectiveness but, like a canny minor league pitcher, Olivet wanted to save its best stuff until last… after the crowds have departed.

As I was writing this, I happened to come across the example “if you died today, who would take care of your family?” web banner and wondered if this was the inspiration for Olivet. But look at the differences. It’s a very clear and specific concern vs “what would you do?” Plus, people trump animals every time.

Work hard on your outer envelope or subject line. Work on everything, but especially on that. If you don’t, you may end up in the pet cemetery.

3 tips for more effective copywriting in a recession

When economic times are bad and marketing budgets are tight, every promotion has to work harder than ever to pay back its investment with increased sales, leads or visibility. The good news for copywriters is that often we can improve return on the marketing investment with better response at no increase in costs, simply by wringing out every last benefit and bringing it home to the reader.

But how do you deliver a positive message when the news all around you (maybe even including the news you need to deliver in your copy) is bad? Here are three pointers.

Rule #1: Don’t go negative. Stick to a positive message in your copywriting.

At several points in my copywriting career I’ve felt like I uncovered a powerful “warning” or “caution” theme that outweighed anything positive I could say. And every single time this approach was tested, I’ve been blown out of the water by a bland and generic benefits-oriented message that handily defeated my negative scalpel twist.

The reason, I think, is that readers go through a filtering process before they get to your copy. Themes like “how to survive the coming depression” may be fine for best sellers, but people volunteered to read those books or watch those TV shows. You, on the other hand, are one flick of the finger away from the recycling bin or a click to the next web page. You have to earn a reader’s acceptance before they will permit you to market to them. And if you scare them on your initial approach, they’ll simply run away.

Tip #2: Be nurturing. Write copy your readers want to read.

Today’s consumers, even business people, are hurting and they want coddling however they can get it. If you can take them to a quiet and reassuring place even for a few minutes, chances are they’ll stick with you till you get to ask for the order.

One of the most successful promos I was associated with was a subscriber acquisition package for Great American Recipes during the early 1990s recession. It became the first non-sweepstakes control for this marketer by delivering a message of comfort and nostalgia:

Remember when good food meant the best times you ever had with your family and friends?

I’m talking about lazy summer evenings serving home-made ice cream on the screen porch. The fine feeling of knowing everything was cooked just right, and there was plenty to go around. The warmth of neighbors sharing recipes, in a cozy kitchen on a cold summer night…

We haven’t even gotten to the product yet, but this was already outpacing “you may already have won” even in tough times. And an extra benefit is that the product I’m selling is depicted as taking them back to happier days… so not only are readers more likely to order, they’re also more likely to keep the product (the initial pack in a recipe card continuity program) instead of sending it back when it arrives in the mail.

Tip #3: Be specific. Believable copywriting is effective copywriting.

Readers are extra-crabby and hyper-sensitive when they feel threatened. Even more than usual, they’re on the alert for flabby generalities and statements that are not supported by facts. The truth is your antidote, but you also need to be very clear in your writing so readers know you’re telling the truth.

Non-profit fundraising writers know about this challenge because for them, times in are always bad which is why they are raising money. Herschell Gordon Lewis shares a great example of bad fundraising copy, a letter that stars with a sentence something like “Around 2 million people in the western Sahara will go hungry this summer”. The word “around” is the deal breaker. If the writer didn’t care enough to find a more exact number, why should the reader care?

The other challenge is that huge negative numbers seem overwhelming. It’s terrible if famine threatens a region, but what can I as an individual do to help? On the other hand, if I understand that my $100 contribution saves 40 children with diarrhea, that’s that is something I can manage. Apply the same rigor to your benefit statements or descriptions no matter what the product or service, and you’ll be better off in bad times.

A promotion that follows all these rules is a lead generation letter for a major insurance company. It’s about long term care insurance and it starts with the “bad news” that Medicare is not going to cover your expenses in retirement like you thought it would. The lead sentence of this letter is what makes it work and it’s actually very close to something I heard from a salesman during a brainstorming session:

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?

Unfortunately, this modest dream could be shattered if you one day need assisted care in a nursing home… in fact you have a 40% chance of being in a nursing home after age 65. A nursing home stay can be expensive, averaging more than $180,000 nationwide. And it can be demeaning, robbing us of our choice and dignity.

Fortunately, Long Term Care Insurance is now available from ((client name)) that helps retain the very options that expensive long term care takes away…

This delivers one specific jolt of bad news (and carefully modulated outrage) but immediately provides the solution for it and proceeds to coddle and nurture the reader for the rest of the letter. It’s been the control for going on 10 years and I expect it will only do better in the current economy. Try the same formula in your own writing and see if you don’t succeed, good times or bad.

NOTE: I’m in the process of installing the contents of my DMA “Copywriting that Gets Results” course on this website. Watch for more articles and pointers coming soon.

Copywriting that Gets Results!

The first time I taught my copywriting course for the DMA, I called it “Direct Response Copywriting”. After the initial semester I realized I should be practicing what I preach and I retitled it “Copywriting That Gets Results”—a description that, like all good direct response copywriting, contains a benefit for the reader.

RESULTS can be measured in orders, sales dollars, leads generated etc. But they can also be measured in success in landing a job or convincing an audience of your political views, among many other potential examples. And one of the best reasons to develop the skill of “copywriting that gets results” is that it helps you become more successful anytime you want to use words to convince someone.

Robert Collier put it this way in his 1930’s classic Letter Book: “Little Willy wants an extra slice of bread and jam; sister wants 15 cents for the movies; Dad is scheming how to get out of the house for lodge that night, and Mother is planning to have Dad sweep out the cellar–while around the corner the Preacher is planning a visit on the household to make it more church conscious and one and all, have their own pet ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ they plan to use on one another!”

This is the first of a series of posts in which I’ll reprise the DMA copywriting class which I’ve taught for several years in the bay area, most recently at UC Extension. Please check back often, or just subscribe to the RSS feed.

Words matter… in election materials too.

I’m working to elect Barack Obama as President, so I found myself grinding my teeth when I found this self-description of Barack in the “Easy Voter Guide” produced by the California Secretary of State and containing content produced, I suspect, by well-meaning interns and volunteers:

STATEMENT: Now is the time for our country to come together and bring real change to Washington and bring an end to the policies of the Bush Administration. I am in this race so that we, as a unified nation, can be a beacon of hope for the world again.

TOP PRIORITIES:

End the war in Iraq and refocus our efforts in Afghanistan.
Sign universal health care legislation by the end of my first term.
Put America on the path to a clean and secure energy future.

MY CRITIQUE: There were two things that made my teeth hurt. First, the choice of the word “race” in the statement. No reason to bring that word front-and-center people who are already thinking about it. Would have been just as easy to say “I am running for President so that we…”

Second, the priority to “refocus our efforts in Afghanistan”. What does this ambiguous and jargon-y statement mean? Transfer our troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and fight a big war there? Or just take a fresh look at what we’re doing in Afghanistan? And what about the rest of the world? Why not something like “End the war in Iraq and focus our nation’s efforts on mutual respect and peaceful resolution for conflicts throughout the world”?

You may say that nobody reads voter pamphlets. But what if 1 in 100 voters actually does, and 1 in 100 of THOSE voters are affected in some way by this or another statement? If there are 10 million voters in California that’s 1,000 votes! Words matter, even in election materials.

Winning the control

Winning a “control” is a holy grail for direct mail copywriters (this old-school term has not morphed to the web and email as far as I know). The control is the standard mailing that others are tested against; it’s the one that has consistently performed best over time. Win a few controls and you can start raising your hourly or project rate.

But here’s the problem. Apart from publishers who mail millions, clients can be a bit flakey about “awarding” the control. One client in financial services told me a package could not become the control unless it beat the old control by 20%. That’s a huge edge in a regulated industry. But he was limited by his tight operating budget: a 15% lift in response might produce profits, but changing over all the forms at the printer and tracking cost money and he had to draw the line somewhere.

This month I’ve “won” two controls win a way that shows how quirky this process is. The first was a #10 envelope package for a Long Term Care insurance company that beat the old control by 100%. But what I did was to take the existing control, a self mailer that was also written by me, and change the copy slightly and put it in an envelope for better stage management. I’d been advising my client we should do this for years so my win is nice, but not a creative breakthrough.

The second win was for a company selling education in how to be a financial success. I’d written a package and they tested it and the results didn’t reach their threshold. A year later they discovered 10,000 unmailed copies of my package at their printer and decided to test it again. It beat everything. Voila, new control.

What makes a good advertising slogan?

If your business was here you'd be home now

When I was a cub account guy long ago, I got a presentation from the radio advertising folks. They played a reel with a bunch of familiar jingles and then delivered the punch line: all of them had been off the air for at least 10 years. The good jingles had the original “stickiness” (a term which, today, means a website or other communications vehicle where you’re compelled to stick around and spend extra time)—you couldn’t get them out of your head.

Another evidence of a good slogan—that’s a jingle that doesn’t necessarily have a soundtrack—is seeing it get morphed into variations by someone who knows the audience will remember the original and recognize the relationship.

This photo of a roadside sign was taken on Route 30, a rural route that runs through the Adirondacks in upstate New York. The sign’s writer is using a variation of the advertising slogan “if you lived here, you’d be home now” which many suburbanites have seen while idling in traffic and passing a close-to-town subdivision. I’m pretty sure it is a piece of boosterism for the village of Speculator, a couple of miles north. Changing “home” to “business” makes it nonsensical, and putting the sign in this remote, tranquil and totally noncommercial location adds a rich helping of irony. I’ve just inducted it into my outdoor advertising hall of fame.

Lost in translation

Every writer has a story about the manuscript left in a taxi, or the memoir lost in a hard disk crash. Mine is a virtually complete ecommerce website where, instead of transitioning from the development site in Brazil to the live site in the US, the developers did the opposite and overwrote all my hard work with the existing site that was already there.

This is not a fun thing to discover in the wee hours and since the transition was still in progress, the first thing I did was grab as many pages as I could before they disappeared like Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future”. Then I got lucky because it turned out they could restore most of it from a backup…. all but about 15% of the content which were the first pages I’d written at the start of the project. So, of course, those were in need of revision anyway.

In rewriting, I’ve been surprised by how much I “remember”, either because I’ve got good notes or because the content I wrote is still lodged in a recess of my brain. And this is a not atypical story. Robert Benchley had a vivid sleep experience where the details of a story were fleshed out and he scribbled furiously for hours and woke to find this note on his bedside pad: “write book”.

In my case I was seduced by a “front end tool” which allowed me to type in copy which was immediately reflected on real live web pages…how cool is that? But now I’m backing it all up to Notepad (actually not, since I use a Mac, but an equivalent) as I write. Klunky, but appropriate.

Incidental Marketing

Contact lens wearers are a savvy lot. They know that once they’ve found the lens for the right eye, the other lens will inevitably fit the left eye. Thus there’s no reason to label the two sides of the contact lens case “L” and “R” as in the top example. You could call the second lid “not R”, or you could leave it blank… or you could use it for MARKETING, like the smart folks at Alcon in the lower example.

This example gets 100 points for incidental marketing, in which we use an available medium to communicate with consumers where otherwise an opportunity would be lost. Contact users see their contact lens cases every time they put in their lenses… what a great reason to remind them of the contact lens cleaner to buy next time. Unfortunately, this example gets 0 points for branding because the name of the brand actually isn’t Alcon. It’s “Opti-Free Express”. Oh well.

The “Buffer” problem

Our San Francisco Chronicle TV critic, Tim Goodman, recently urged us to watch a new show on FX called “The Riches”. It’s about a family of “Travelers” (think Gypsies, without the ethnic implications) and how they outsmart and rip off mainstream Americans who are called “Buffers” in the show.

I like the acting, but I signed off about halfway into the current show, when Doug Rich BSs his way through an introductory speech to his new staff at the firm where he’s pretending to be a lawyer, then the family fails to BS its way into a private school. The problem is that we viewers don’t know whose side we are supposed to take. We don’t identify with the Riches who are not a particularly attractive or likeable lot, and we are smarter than the real estate office that Doug Rich BSs with his nonsense speech that is supposed to be a tour de force.

Aristotle figured this out a while back, by the way. Dramatic appeal in tragedies comes from the “tragic flaw” in an otherwise heroic protagonist, while the protagonist in a comedy, our representative in what can be a very chaotic tableaux, is an essentially good person of modest abilities who is striving for something better. (Thanks to the nice De Paul University syllabus notes I found to refresh myself on this topic. )

Ineffective advertising is often bad because of this very failing. Who are we in this scenario? What problem of ours is being solved? The audience is not given anything credible or of sufficient weight to identify with. A straw man problem is presented and then solved, but we don’t care because we never got involved in the first place.

What does it taste like?

I’m finishing up a project that had me writing web product copy for over 150 different cuts and preparations of beef, pork and lamb. I need to describe each one in a way that makes the reader understands how it’s unique. A lot of this has to do with taste. Or does it?

So much great food writing is about the experience surrounding the eating—the origin of the ingredients, the way they’re prepared, the environment in which they’re consumed. Tasting itself is when all these elements come together—it’s the payoff for being in this place, at this time, eating this food. And if it’s good, that first bite and the flavor released becomes a time capsule or shorthand for remembering the entire experience.

Prepared dishes are easier to describe because the flavors play off against each other. The other day for lunch, for example, I had the Pork Bacon Sandwich at Cam Huong in Oakland’s Chinatown. The crunchy baguette lends crispness while showering my lap with crumbs. Mayonnaise adds sweetness and lubrication. Cucumber sliced and pickled daikon and carrot shreds provide coolness, crunch and slight acidity. Jalapeno means more crunchiness plus the anticipation of a delayed reaction mouth tingle from the aromatic chili oils. And all this is a backdrop for two meats. The “bacon” is one of those Asian special-pork concoctions that has very little taste but the slippery mouth feel that we love from fat. And the other pork, shredded, is cooked with salt and red spices and ends up with a gamy intensity which we recognize as the essence of meat. The day laborer who’s grabbed the seat opposite me asks how is it, and I say “great”.

By comparison, how does a New York steak taste? I find myself writing about musculature and where the beef comes from on the animal in part to make the reader an expert so they’ll feel comfortable presenting this expensive meat to their guests. And when it’s time to deliver an institutional message it comes through sounding like this:

“Eating dry-aged beef is as sensual and satisfying as drinking well-aged wine. The flavors have deepened and mellowed. The taste is concentrated, an effect brought about by moisture loss and by changes in the meat itself. Natural enzymes in the meat break down the fibers, enhancing the taste with a delicious nutty flavor and tender texture.”

So, science and nature come together to make magic which translates to user satisfaction. Appealing? I hope so. One of the greatest challenges, I found, is that there are actually only two words that describe this experience—“taste” and “flavor”. Can you tell me some others? Another word, “tenderness” which is universally used as a compliment for really good steak, is more closely related to the amount of fat than anything else. While “texture” is a promise, that when you bite into this stuff it WILL be tender, or perhaps crunchy, or maybe it will coat your tongue with the eggy creaminess of a rich sabayon.

Food writing may be hard, but it is easy and fun to read because it is so experiential and suffused with the joy of life. My personal favorite example, and in fact a book that was mentioned by many of the chefs I interviewed, is Heat by Bill Buford (that’s an Amazon.com ordering link). Buford, whose day job is an editor for The New Yorker, decides to see what life is like as a line cook at a Mario Batali restaurant. Before we know it, he’s made a lifelong commitment to a summer job carving meat in a Tuscan village. Go get it, and read it. But be sure you go hungry.