There are pretty much only two kinds of prospects in a marketer’s universe: (1) casual copy scanners, and (2) inveterate readers.
Hand a sales letter to a dozen people, and you’ll see what I mean. Some of them — the inveterate readers — will read the headline and every page of the copy.
I’m so old, I’ll betcha my tie has gone in and out of style at least five times.
Not that I pay much attention to such things, mind you.
My professional life revolves around marketing trends. And there again, my advanced age means I’ve seen many promotional styles over the years. (more…)
I was down at our new “getaway” digs over Labor Day. It’s a great place. Just outside of Atlanta and two hours from our North Carolina home.
We bought it a few months ago so we could spend more time with my two older kids and three grandkids. They live in Atlanta, less than an hour away.
My plan for the weekend was that we’d all be tear-assing around the lake on our Sea-Doos. Maybe we’d do a little early-morning fishing. In the evening, we’d grill our catch out on the deck, along with an assortment of steaks, burgers, and weenies.
You know. Typical, normal family stuff.
Instead, I found myself sitting there alone. And I was feeling more than a little alarmed — having come to the realization that I am the patriarch of a family of nerds.
My son-in-law and both sons were spending Friday night in Atlanta, preparing to attend Dragon*Con on Saturday.
Never heard of Dragon*Con? I hadn’t either. Until my just-turned-15-year-old son said he wanted tickets for his birthday.
Dragon*Con is where thousands of nerds dress up like fantasy, horror, superhero, and sci-fi characters — and then geek out over each other.
It was enough to make me want to throw on my leathers, fire up the Harley, cruise over to the nearest biker bar, and drown my sorrows in a gallon or three of Absolut.
Don’t feel sorry for me. I actually enjoyed the solitude. Gave me time to think.
What I was thinking about was the impact our fantasies and beliefs have on us.
I saw a documentary on a related subject the other night. Fascinating stuff. It made the point that we are complicit in every lie we’re ever told. Our desire to believe makes deceiving us easy.
Guess that’s why they’ve sold billions of pills that supposedly make your thingy bigger. Or grow hair on your bald spot. Or burn off that spare tire without exercise.
It must also be why Bernie Madoff was able to fleece so many sophisticated investors for so many years.
This simple fact of human nature is so powerful, it is dangerous. As a marketer, simply knowing it gives you the ability to become a superhero or a supervillain.
Superpowers, as any Dragon*Con attendee can tell you, can be used either for evil or good. Please use this one only for good — to promote products that truly benefit your prospective customers.
And the way to do that is to get inside their heads.
Know Thy Prospect
Libraries of books have been written on the importance of knowing your prospect. Most extol the virtues of understanding demographic facts about them.
They drone on about knowing the sex, age, income level, educational level, etc. of the people you’re asking to buy your product.
And they go further, lecturing on the need to ferret out their hobbies, interests, and buying preferences.
However, few suggest that anchoring your sales message to a commonly held belief can have an explosive impact on your response rate and sales.
Case in point:
In the 1970s, a new industry appeared to provide objective news, analysis, and advice to investors. There was a crying need for it. Until then, this information had been parsed out by Wall Street brokers. And because they sold the investments they were talking about, they had a massive conflict of interest.
In the 1990s, another industry emerged. This time to provide news and advice to people who were interested in alternatives to toxic drugs and life-threatening surgery.
Again, there was a crying need. Until then, health information was largely dispensed by drug companies and mainstream experts who were paid fortunes in kickbacks by the drug companies. Every one of them had a vested interest in convincing consumers to blindly follow their doctors’ orders.
The prospects for both of these huge new industries had one, clear belief in common: You CANNOT trust the establishment. Not with your money and certainly not with your life.
Not surprisingly, copywriters for the investment and health industries who began by looking at mere demographic facts about their prospects produced lukewarm results at best.
But every copywriter who used his headline and lead to connect to the anti-establishment belief his prospects shared hit it out of the park.
Like me, for instance. The “Forbidden Cures” promo I wrote to harness my prospects’ distrust of and disgust with the medical establishment mailed in the tens of millions. And I was paid a king’s ransom in royalties.
Time to put on the old thinking cap…
What fantasies are your prospects engaged in right now? What commonly held beliefs do they swear by?
How can you connect with those beliefs in a way that will produce maximum attention-getting power, readership, and response in your next marketing effort?
Food for thought…
P.S. Ready for a marketing and copywriting master class? At Early to Rise’s Info-Marketing Bootcamp in November, I will be making one of my few public appearances. I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned during my decades in the business — at least, as much as I can in three days. And I’ll be joined on stage by a dozen of the most cutting-edge Internet marketing experts working today. Find out more about Bootcamp here.
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If I gave any credibility to what I read in the newspapers or see on talk shows, I’d believe that we are coming out of the Great Recession.
Every day, I hear news about how things are improving. Yet when I look around at the businesses I know, I can count on the fingers of one hand those that are not in trouble.
I am friendly with the owners of half a dozen restaurants in Delray Beach. They tell me sales are down between 30 percent and 70 percent. My brother-in-law is in the retail jewelry business. “It’s a complete disaster,” he says. “Most of the industry will be bankrupt by March,” he predicts.
My friend Mike wholesales furniture. His outlets are down 30 percent to 50 percent. At Joe’s cigar bar, we have plumbers and doctors and brokers — to name just a few trades. They are all crying the blues.
Is it me? Am I hanging out with the wrong people? Am I myopic?
All these hurting businesses mean rising bankruptcies and rising unemployment. And rising unemployment means more bankruptcies.
Yes, the bankers and brokers who have been “bailed out” are doing fine — or so they say. Their numbers are up because they are taking in all these freshly printed dollars. But that doesn’t mean their businesses are getting better. When the Obama administration finally turns off the spigot, we’ll see which of them will be standing. My guess is not many.
I’d like to hear from you. How are your friends and neighbors doing? How are you faring yourself? Let me know at AskMichael@ETRFeedback.com
David Cross copied me on an essay in The New York Times that I had missed.
It was by a woman who had spent 30 years in publishing. She explained how technology has changed the business.
In the beginning, she said, it was “primitive chaos,” with typewritten manuscripts, ringing phones, carbon paper, fountain pens, mimeograph machines, and the smell of cigarette smoke.
Then came electric typewriters, Filofaxes, and copy machines. The antique Royals and carbon paper were trashed.
Then voice mail replaced operators, word processors replaced Wite-Out, and e-mail replaced secretaries.
She ended by asking, “Is the screen the new paper? Will publishing houses go the way of old record stores? Is digital-delivery the new bookstore? Is Google the new library?”
“I can’t answer these questions,” she says. “I am no longer in book publishing”
But in the italics that follow her essay, we learn this about her: Jan Evans, a former book publisher, is now co-founder and CEO of wowOwow.com, a website for women.
If you are in print publishing now, you don’t have long to make the switch. Tomorrow is already here…
Women, and even men nowadays, spend a small fortune on creams and lotions to keep their skin youthful looking.
But there’s something you need to know, says Total Health Breakthroughs Editor Melanie Segala. And you won’t hear it from the billion-dollar skin care industry. Taking care of your skin from the inside with a healthy diet is far more important than using the most expensive anti-aging products.
Vitamin C, for example, helps build collagen, says Melanie. That’s the connective protein that makes up 75 percent of skin. And as you age, you lose collagen. That’s one way you get wrinkles. But you can help replenish lost collagen by eating vitamin C-rich foods. Strawberries, red peppers, citrus fruits, and tomatoes are just a few.
At the same time, you’ll be getting much needed antioxidants that prevent chronic disease. No high-priced skin cream can do all that.
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“I’ve been reading your newsletter for a good while now. Not all of it applies to me, but I read it all nonetheless.
“I’ve always been confident in my capabilities and those of my fabulous husband of 7 years…. 18 months ago, we left an uber-cushy expat job in Asia to partner in some new ventures in order to provide a legacy for our three kids, then all under 3.
“It’s tough going — the recession certainly didn’t help — but we’re not going to give up.
“Your nuggets of information and inspiration always seem to say just what we need to hear, to suggest a different way of considering things, of riding out the storm.
“So, thank you.”
Nadine
Adelaide, Australia
———————————————- Highly Recommended —————————————————
E-Mail Trash or Treasure – Bob Bly wrote an e-mail in five minutes. It generated a $7,449 profit in a single week. Here’s what he said…
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Twenty years ago, if you had told me that one day I’d be able to reach millions of prospective customers without paying a penny in printing, postage, or lettershop fees … and without paying through the nose for print space or TV and radio time … I would have smiled and backed away from you v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
I would have instantly pegged you as a lunatic. But I would have been wrong. Thanks to the Internet, we actually can do it. And that’s huge.
When I write a direct-mail package, I know my client is going to have to cough up an average of $550 to send it to every 1,000 prospects in his universe. That’s $55,000 for 100,000 potential customers. And $550,000 for 1 million.
On the Internet, you can post a website with your sales message for 500 bucks. And then blast a million e-mails to drive folks to your site for next to nothing!
So, yeah. The Internet is huge and cheap. Just like the hypesters say it is.
And, yes, marketing on the ‘Net can make you a bundle. I know lots of Internet marketers who make tens of millions — even a hundred million or more — every year.
But there is a bit more to it than that … (more…)
When you set out to create a sales message that connects with your prospects’ dominant emotions, you have no choice. You have to begin with the prospect.
You begin by considering his most intense feelings about …
… And then, you devise ways to deal with each of these emotions in ways that get them working FOR you.
When you get it right, the attention-getting power of and response to your promotions skyrockets.
Check out this promotion. It’s a magalog titled “Retirement Wealth Builder” for Phillips Publishing’s Retirement Letter. Retirement Letter was one of Phillips’s flagship publications in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was edited at the time by my old friend Pete Dickinson. Pete’s photo appears on the cover of the magalog, with a caption reading “No more Mr. Nice Guy” Pete Dickinson: The Nation’s #1 Retirement Authority Hits Back. Here’s the headline:
(more…)
It’s your lucky day: You’ve found a great product to promote.
Maybe it’s a client’s product. Maybe it’s your own.
And because your discovery possesses the six qualities direct-response homeruns share, you suspect you just might be looking at a grand slam:
In fact, this product is so good, you’d feel guilty if you failed to nag your sweet, sainted old grammy until she bought it. Better yet, you’d joyfully buy it and give it to her yourself. (more…)
Several months ago, one of my favorite clients asked me to create a Web-based promotion for a new investment advisory. But instead of beginning with a series of e-mails – or even a new Web page – I promptly sat down and wrote a 24-page DIRECT-MAIL package.
Once the long copy was finished, I knew the rest would be easy. I could simply excerpt sections of it, over and over again, to create a multi-step campaign…
STEP #1. Pick the low-hanging fruit – cheap.
A respectable chunk of my client’s customers love him to death and will buy just about any product he recommends. For these wonderful folks, I created an extremely simple, low-cost e-mail promotion that we sent out immediately.
STEP #2. Get fence-sitters to a “tipping point” website.
I used about half the long direct-mail copy I had written about the product to produce an “Urgent Special Report” that could be accessed via a little website we created online. And in week #2 of the campaign, we began sending e-mails to the client’s customers urging them to click a link in order to read the free report.
STEP #3. Exploit other low-cost or free media.
Then I simply took the 12 pages of copy from the little website I’d created… wrote a new headline and opening copy… turned it into a printed special report… and had it inserted in the next issue of my client’s print newsletter.
STEP #4. Show up where they least expect you to.
Two weeks after the newsletter insert hit our prospects’ mailboxes, we hit them again – with the full 24-page direct-mail package I had initially created to promote the product. This time, it was formatted as a free special report – a “thank you” bonus for loyal customers.
STEP #5. Get tenacious.
Two weeks after the 24-pager hit prospects’ mailboxes, we stuffed it into an envelope, added a one-page letter from my client asking “Why haven’t I heard from you?” and dropped it into the mail.
The combined effect of e-mail, the website, the inserts in the print newsletter, and two direct mailings had a multiplying effect on response.
When the dust had settled, our multi-channel marketing campaign had sold more than $5 million worth of subscriptions to the new service in just five weeks – about five times more than we would have sold through an e-mail promotion alone!
[Ed. Note: Yes, the Internet is ripe with opportunities for savvy marketers to make money. But as master copywriter Clayton Makepeace just proved, the Internet is only ONE channel for communicating with potential customers. If you're stuck using just one marketing method, you need to get your hands on the bestselling book on multi-channel marketing by MaryEllen Tribby and Michael Masterson, Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business. It's a premier guide to beefing up your marketing efforts to bring in double, triple, even quadruple your current revenues. Get your copy now.
Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.]
Every copywriting or marketing project requires copious amounts of creative, right-brain skull sweat, plus plenty of detail-oriented, left-brain elbow grease.
So when I’m fresh and full of mental energy, I focus on the creative tasks associated with the project. And when I’m running a bit low on creative juices, I use my time to handle the left-brain, detail-oriented stuff.
In other words, I approach my copywriting projects modularly and out of order, much like the way they make movies in Hollywood.
If I’m feeling frisky, I’ll work on my theme, my headline, and my opening copy – or maybe on the first two-thirds of my body copy. If I’m feeling sluggish, I may simply outline the project. Or focus on the research, number-crunching, or the charts and tables I’ll need.
Sometimes, if I’m kind of in between, I may rough out the last third of my copy first – the factual product description, premium description, offer, guarantee, and response device. Or, if I’m further along and have a complete draft, I may spend my time on editing what I’ve written.
This is what works best for me – the approach I’ve developed through trial and error during my four decades in this biz. It fits me like a glove.
It may work for you, too. It might make you tons more productive and improve your sales copy (or whatever else you do) by an order of magnitude.
Or, who knows? My way could prove to be the absolute worst way for you to approach your work.
There’s only ONE way to find out. Test. Analyze the results. Improvise with new ways to work that may fit you better. Repeat.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Staying productive is critical to keeping your goals on track. For specific tips, click here.]
Secrets tease, tantalize, and torment us. An offered secret is irresistible – impossible to refuse.
Once our curiosity is engaged, knowledge that someone else knows a secret that we don’t know is like having a stone in our shoe. It gnaws and nags at us. We can’t willingly rest until we’re in on the secret too.
Since offering to reveal a secret appeals to us humans on so many visceral levels, it’s no wonder that many of the most successful direct-response promotions of all time have used it to boost attention and readership. Nor is it any wonder that offering to reveal more secrets in a free report that is delivered along with the product being sold can drive response rates, revenues, and profits through the roof.
So how could YOU use secrets to hit one out of the park the next time you’re at bat?
The way I see it, there are four kinds of secrets…
1. Simple Secrets. If you haven’t done so already, buy a product – any product – from Boardroom or Rodale. Before long, your inbox and mailbox will be stuffed with promotions that tell simple secrets – and offer to give you thousands more secrets when you buy the book or newsletter they’re promoting.
2. Forecasts. If you think about it, predicting a future event in a promotion is kind of like telling your prospect a secret that very few other people know. If you can show him, in your product or premium, how to use this “confidential, privileged information” to solve a problem or get something he wants, your readership and response are likely to soar.
3. Mis/Disinformation. Lies are, by definition, secrets too. When you show your prospect how “the establishment” or, better yet, your competitors are at fault for his difficult situation, you free him from responsibility for it.
4. Conspiracies. These are big, fat, irresistible bundles of secrets that amplify and broaden their power by an order of magnitude. Show your prospect why and how the deck is stacked against him and you create massive credibility for your product by validating his suspicions and creating an excuse for his current predicament.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Good copy is just one element of a successful business. For a step-by-step guide to researching a niche, finding your target market, and then marketing effectively using search engines, e-mail, and more... check out the Internet Money Club: Independent Learner Edition.]
When we marketers and copywriters approach a prospect with a direct-mail piece, an e-mail blast, a print ad – or any other kind of sales promotion, for that matter – we are interrupting his life.
The simple act of putting sales copy before a prospect brings him to a fork in his road – forcing him to make a decision to either (1) read or (2) not read our message.
And every time his eye moves from one sentence to the next… from one paragraph to the next… or from one page to the next… he reaches yet another fork in the road – and gets to decide whether he’s going to keep reading our message or abandon it.
Writing a kick-butt headline to grab his attention is only the beginning. Our job is to make sure the prospect makes the right decision – the decision to continue reading – at every one of these forks in the road.
So what could make your prospect make the wrong decision and drop your promo into the nearest trashcan?
Off the top of my head? Here are five:
1. Interruption. Your prospect’s kids just shoved the family cat into the dishwasher. He hesitates, but ultimately decides that dealing with the immediate crisis is somewhat more pressing than reading your message.
Remedy: Pray for the cat.
2. Unsuitability. Your prospect already has a computer and quickly decides your computer catalog is of no interest to him whatsoever.
Remedy: Shoot your list broker.
3. Disbelief. Your claims seem so exaggerated or even dishonest, the prospect figures he can’t trust anything you say.
Remedy: Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
4. Boredom. Your copy is so brain-dead boring, he’d rather eat week-old sushi than continue reading.
Remedy: Get a personality.
5. Exhaustion. Your copy is so dense, difficult to read and impossible to follow, he simply gives up.
Remedy: Copy that’s so good it takes no effort to read it.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com
Learn how to boost your skills in copywriting, as well as Internet marketing, e-mail list building, search engine optimization, and more at Early to Rise's 5 Days in July Internet Business Building Conference. Find out how you can build your own fully functioning online business in just five days.]
Now some folks will tell you that beginning sales copy with a question is bad form. After all – any question you ask could be answered in a way that is not helpful to your objectives. And your sales letter could wind up in the trash.
But not necessarily. Recently, Health & Healing sold a boatload of subscriptions under the headline “Is there anyone left we can trust?”
Of course, it really wasn’t a question at all. It was a proposition. That brilliant headline created instant bonding with prospects by placing the spokesperson in the same boat with them. And then it answered the question by presenting the credentials of Health & Healing’s editor.
Still, I try to be careful when I use question marks. Like a good lawyer, I avoid asking questions when I’m not sure I already know the answer.
Like when I’m using a particularly powerful persuasion device called “Socratic Reasoning.” That’s where I ask a series of questions, the obvious answers to which inevitably lead my prospect to the desired conclusion. Here’s an example:
If you really think drug companies are in business to make you healthy, just ask yourself, “If prescription drugs make people healthier…
“Why is there more heart disease in America than there was 10 years ago?
“Why are cancer rates skyrocketing?
“Why is there an epidemic of diabetes, arthritis, and other degenerative diseases today?”
Now, let me ask you: If you were the chairman of a big drug company… if your only responsibility was to make your shareholders richer… wouldn’t you want MORE people to get sick – not less?
… Or when I want to quickly answer a question my reader is probably asking himself about my proposition:
Why don’t doctors, surgeons, hospitals, drug companies – or anyone else in the mainstream medical industry – tell you this?
Why wouldn’t they want you to know about natural supplements that are clinically proven to work better than drugs – and without the high cost and miserable side effects?
Simple: Because when you prevent disease or heal yourself naturally, they don’t make a red cent!
Each question hooks the reader into reading what follows, moving them down the copy and to the inevitable conclusion that buying this product is the only logical thing to do.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Writing powerful copy is just one aspect of making your Internet business a success. Discover how to set up a website, get the search engines' attention, create high-quality products, and more with ETR's Internet Money Club Independent Learner Edition. Get all the details now.]
By the time I met Wilma, she had studied literally thousands of pages of courses, books, and e-zine articles about copywriting. She had all the fundamentals down cold. She could recite Hopkins, Caples, Masterson, and Makepeace verbatim. But when I gave her her first paid assignment, she froze like a deer in the high beams of an oncoming Peterbilt.
Wilma’s problem wasn’t that she knew too much. Wilma’s problem was that she couldn’t stop thinking about all the stuff she’d learned – the techniques, formulas, and marketing philosophies.
My advice to Wilma: Forget everything you’ve learned about selling and especially about writing copy. Don’t worry – it’s still stored away in your brain.
Instead of strategy and tactics, try focusing on your prospect – his fears, frustrations, and desires. Think about how your product connects with his dominant emotions.
Then close your eyes and imagine that you’re in a room with him.
If you had to make the sale, what would you say? How would you begin the conversation? What would you say next? What would you have to prove to him? How would you prove it? How would he challenge your claims? How would you defuse his objections?
You’ll be astounded by how your brain feeds up dos and don’ts from your training to guide you as you work through the process.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com
Learn how to overcome "overthinking" in all areas of your business with Michael Masterson's Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Ready, Fire, Aim .]
Back in The Day, copywriting was a leisurely business – almost a pastoral pursuit.
The client’s marketing folks got you on the phone, described the product, told you what they’d tried before and how it’d worked… what they’d been learning and thinking lately… and you brainstormed the themes you might use for a new promo.
A week or so later, a big brown truck would deliver a box crammed with the client’s product, past promos and premiums, his competitors’ promos, his testimonial file, and anything else the marketing people thought you might need to create a barn-burner for them.
Usually, the box would languish unopened for a week or more as you completed other projects. And when it was time to dive in, you might spend a week or more just reading, taking notes, and planning the assault.
Entire days were dedicated to thinking alone: Ruminating on the prospect’s mindset… his emotional state… what he’d seen and responded to (or not) in recent months… his prejudices in favor of or against the client and/or others like him… the sales objections that would need to be overcome (either explicitly or implicitly)… and most important, of course, the prospect’s resident fears, frustrations, wants, needs, and desires.
Copywriters had the luxury of staring out the window for hours, contemplating the competitive landscape, considering how to lift the client and his product head and shoulders above every other spokesperson and product in his niche. Or, better yet, to position the client in a way that would establish him as the leader of a new niche – a niche of his own.
Then, it was time to write. Actually, to spend a few days getting ready to prepare to begin to write: to list the engagement and credibility elements needed… to sort out the offer… to create the outline and organize notes. And, in doing these things, to allow the work to slowly, almost imperceptibly, seduce you into the actual writing.
Two, three, or more weeks later, a first draft would wing its way to the client for review and comments. Two, three, or four weeks later, the final copy would land on the designer’s desk for a couple of weeks of layout – and more copy nips, tucks, and enhancements. Then, after two more weeks at the printer and lettershop, the promo would be in the mail.
In all, the process took “as long as it takes to create a winner” – typically, anywhere from one month to three. Sometimes more. And that was perfectly fine with everybody concerned. Because just to field a small test of a new promo, the client would have to spend $100,000 or more. And if it bombed, they could lose a bundle.
So “getting it right” was far more important than “getting it fast.” Each promotion was as meticulously crafted as a Rodin bronze and as patiently aged as a cask of fine wine.
Then, something terrible happened… @#$^%@!!! Internet!
One morning I woke up and some darned fool had invented the World Wide Web – and the game had completely changed for not just one but four big reasons:
1. It suddenly cost businesses zero dollars to blast a sales message to prospects. So some clients assumed that, since they had no skin in the game, the response to each individual e-mail mattered less.
2. Clients could easily afford to e-mail their prospects not just once but several times each day. The quality of the copy became less important than getting something “good enough, fast enough.”
3. The speed of the Internet radically changed our prospects’ expectations. Where once, the most successful promotions addressed permanent (or at least longer-term) situations, fears, frustrations, and/or desires, many prospects came to expect sales messages to connect with the day’s – or even the hour’s - breaking news.
Then, as if to make things even more challenging, the world itself – especially the financial world – began changing faster.
4. Where a successful direct-mail, print, TV, or radio promo might be used for many months or even years, daily e-mail blasts served their purposes for a single day, and sales pages often became obsolete in a couple of weeks at most.
So while the copywriter caught in the act of crafting direct mail and other pay-as-you-go media messages approximated a Michelangelo extracting a David from a block of marble – a thoughtful exercise demanding every skill at the artist’s command applied over many months - cranking out online promos required speed: e-mails slammed out in an hour or two and sales pages as long as any magalog ever written cobbled together in a few days to a week.
And to make things even more difficult, the simple fact that a company is promoting on the free Internet – notoriously, the realm of fakes, frauds, and rip-off artists – has made establishing iron-clad credibility in sales messages critical even while the time to do so has shrunk immeasurably.
I’m hoping that some of the things I do to write strong copy in a fraction of the time will help you do it, too…
1. I cheat.
Every weekday morning, I spring out of bed in the wee hours, brew a pot of joe, plop down at my desk, and begin to fortify myself for the day ahead.
I know I’ll have a conference call with my financial client at 6:00 a.m. I also know I’ll have at least two e-mails to write for him and that they must be final and to the Web guys as early as possible. I can be fairly sure that Jill, my production scheduler, has lined up an afternoon full of meetings with other clients, and that my staff has plenty of copy for me to write, review, critique, or finalize. And I know that a single new promotional idea or a breaking news event could blow my entire schedule to smithereens without a moment’s notice.
So I start by thinking: “What could I do with the hours between now and that 6:00 a.m. conference call that will give me a running head start on my day?”
Because much of my financial client’s messaging is driven by the news, I jump on the Web to sort out what’s happening in the global economy and to look for themes I could use to drive the day’s e-mails.
The idea here is to anticipate the work as much as I can before the assignment gets handed to me. I spend time thinking about the research I’ll need… the engagement and credibility devices I might use… and anything else I can do in advance to speed the writing process once the project is assigned.
2. I start with my prospect.
As I begin to write, I think about my prospect. What has been his recent experience with my client’s company? What have I done with him in the last few days that might provide clues as to how this e-mail or sales page should begin?
What are my prospect’s expectations as he opens my e-mail or jumps over to my sales page? How can I make this communication a seamless continuation of a conversation the two of us are already having? Are there recent developments or news events that he’s already thinking about and that I should address? What touchstones can I use to get the conversation off to a fast start?
3.I tell them what I’m about to tell them… I tell it to them… I tell them what I just told them.
Getting an e-mail that kind of begins out of the blue is disorienting to a prospect. Instead, I give them a clear, easy-to-follow roadmap that lets them know what to expect from this communication.
In addition to making my e-mails easy to read and providing structure that makes them easier to write fast, this subtle cycle of promising, delivering, and reminding prospects that you delivered what you promised is a powerful way of programming them to believe future promises you make.
4. I establish my client’s credibility early in my copy.
Maybe I do it with a collection of accurate forecasts he’s made… or big profits he’s helped his subscribers achieve… or new testimonials from the media.
For a non-financial client, it could be with the reminder of a discount coupon or free bonding gift we’ve sent the reader recently… or something about our 24-hour shipping policy. Anything that demonstrates that my client brings value to the prospect’s life and that he always does what he promises is of great help in moving them to taking the action prescribed later in the copy.
5. I use bobble-head copy.
The sooner I can get my prospect’s head nodding – agreeing with my premise – the better. So I look for an idea he can agree with to get the conversation going.
Something like: “If Wall Street was a fair place, mutual funds would only make money when they made you money.” Or, for a health product, it could be something like, “If everyone ate right and exercised, almost nobody would have heart disease” – or any other statement that puts my prospect and my spokesperson instantly on the same page.
“Hell, YES!” says the prospect! “This guy and I are alike! We believe the same things! He has my values. He can be trusted.”
6. I guide my reader to the action I want him to take.
Beginning with my mutually agreed-upon head-nodder, I then baby-step my reader to the inevitable conclusion: that NOT taking the action I want him to take would be self-defeating. In other words, I help him connect the dots between the proposition we both agree upon and the action I want him to take.
If each one of these steps is already agreed upon, all the better. If not, I’ll need to provide a proof element – ideally, a fact sworn to by an independent third-party source – that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the next link in my chain of logic is undeniably true:
“If everyone ate right and exercised, almost nobody would have heart disease.”
“But in real life, it’s not always possible to eat right. And Lord knows, there’s not always time to exercise.”
“That’s why Xnutrient is so crucial. Harvard says it…”
If I’ve done a good job with these steps, I’ve made my case. All that’s left is to tell my prospect precisely what I want him to do. After all, he’s already agreed that NOT coming along with me would be self-defeating.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Writing powerful copy is just one aspect of making your Internet business a success. Discover how to set up a website, get the search engines' attention, create high-quality products, and more with ETR's Internet Money Club Independent Learner Edition. Get all the details now.]
Right now, our prospective customers are experiencing some of the most intense and contradictory emotions they’ve had in their entire lives.
The saner ones blame their financial problems on decisions made by the White House, Congress, the Treasury, and the Fed for the last couple of decades. Others – those with a more tenuous grip on reality – blame “those greedy bankers” for having the unmitigated gall to actually approve every loan and credit card application they ever submitted.
But regardless of who our prospects may blame in broad daylight, it’s not so easy to escape the real villain as they seek the sweet release of sleep at night. In the privacy of their own bedrooms, they’re confronted with the humiliating truth that they and they alone created their own, personal financial crises…
By spending more than they should have.
By saving less than they should have.
And by accumulating far more debt than they should have.
They regret scoffing at old-fashioned admonitions to be prudent with money. To live sensibly, modestly, and within their means. To accept debt sparingly or not at all. And to save extravagantly.
They marvel at how much money they’ve earned over the last decade or two… how fast it vanished… how pathetically little they have to show for it. And they torture themselves, thinking how much better life would be if they had that money now.
They excoriate themselves for plunging into debt to buy more house than they needed, and then borrowing even more to create the illusion of success: the fancy furnishings, the expensive cars, the designer fashions, the lavish dinners, the trophy vacations, and all the crap they bought to impress others.
So every night, in bedrooms around the world, billions are teaching themselves timeless lessons…
They’re learning that the law of personal responsibility is as intractable as the law of gravity. And that when entire societies consisting of billions of individuals lose their way, no government can save them from the inevitable consequences of their actions.
We – all of us – sowed the seeds of this financial whirlwind with profligate spending, with excessive debt, and with a dearth of savings. And now it’s time for us, our children, and our children’s children to reap the inevitable hurricane.
This, too, haunts many of our prospects each night as they think about the pile of bills awaiting them on the kitchen table. They wonder and worry about what will become of their families in the weeks and months ahead. Some are even doing the math, calculating and recalculating how long they could survive if their income suddenly stopped.
How can I know our prospects are feeling all this guilt, regret, and fear? Simple: I’m feeling it myself!
No, I’m not pleading poverty. By working backbreaking hours all my life… enduring the hard times without giving up… and trying to make prudent decisions with my money… I’ve become one of the “lucky” ones.
Plus, I’ve taken my own advice. I’ve focused my business on niches that tend to do well in tough times. So not only is my income still in the top fraction of the top 1 percent of all Americans, I’m actually earning more than I did this time last year.
Better yet, I saw this crisis coming two years ago and began curtailing my spending, paying down my debt, and building up my savings as if my life depended on it.
But now, I can’t help but worry anyway.
Frankly, I often kick myself for self-indulgent purchases I’ve made over the years and for failing to sock away millions more in the salad days of the 1990s and early 2000s. Because at a time like this, there’s no such thing as having “too much” money saved for the rainy days ahead.
And I know in my heart that if I’m having wim-wams – forgoing all but the most essential purchases and saving every dime I can lay my hands on - millions of our prospects are, too.
What we are now seeing take place in the hearts and minds of ourselves, our customers, and our prospects is nothing less than a massive, global reversal of attitudes- a change in the way our customers view reality that will have an enormous impact on the kinds of products we develop and the way we market them.
We are witnessing the rapid demise of the spendthrift mindset that has grown so many companies for so many decades – and the birth of a new generation of far more rational, cautious, thinking consumers…
These consumers have suddenly realized that the “old fashioned” virtues of common sense, prudence, and thrift are time-honored for a reason: They have been proven to be lifesavers over many millennia.
This is the financial Judgment Day my mom and dad so often warned me about – the day of paying the price for scoffing at their stingy ways. When Mom saved every scrap of string and every rubber band in big tangles under the kitchen sink. And when Dad went ballistic when I left the lights on in an unoccupied room or blew my allowance on some useless doo-dad.
The new generation of consumers has learned the hard lesson their parents and grandparents learned during the Great Depression: The only thing that’s more important than saving money for a rainy day is to use money to make more money that will see you through tough times.
Somewhere, Mom and Dad are nodding their heads in grim agreement.
And somewhere, my dad’s gloating: “So what are you going to do if this crisis outlives your money? Huh, smart boy?”
Cool your jets, Dad. I get it!
It’s not going to do me one damn bit of good to cry over spilt milk. What I can do, though, is expend every ounce of energy at my command to make as much money as is legally and ethically possible, every hour, day, and working week. Because only more money can get my family safely through this global financial crisis… no matter how long it lasts.
That means recognizing that every promotion I write must work even harder to prove the value my product brings to prospects’ lives… to demonstrate as graphically as possible that the offer is the bargain of a lifetime… and to create guarantees that make buying that product… from me… NOW… an absolute no-brainer.
I also need to vastly improve how I spend my workdays – to find new ways to get more work done… better work done… more profitable work done every hour I spend at my desk.
And it goes without saying that I need to review my client list – make absolutely sure I’m working ONLY with clients whose products and services are likely to do well if this crisis intensifies.
Most important, I need to find ways to structure more productive working relationships with those clients – relationships that will make them more money so they can pay me more money.
How about you?
I’m willing to bet that if you give the above “financial-survival checklist,” a few hours of thought, you, too, will have taken a big step toward coming through this thing smelling like a rose.
[Ed. Note: What are YOU doing to prove your value to your prospective customers? Let us know right here.
Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.]
Creating first-time customers is one of the costliest things – and the riskiest -
that any direct-response business does.
Consider what’s typically involved in creating a new-subscriber acquisition piece for a health or investment newsletter and testing it to 100,000 prospects…
• Copy (advance to copywriter): $25,000
• Design: $12,500
• Printing/List Rental/Postage & Mailing: $70,000
That’s a total of $107,500. Now, consider the fact that the publisher’s overhead isn’t even factored into this equation. And that he’ll probably have to test two, three, even four or more pieces before he hits upon a powerful new control. And that he’s going to continue to test new pieces against his control every six weeks or so to make sure he’s not caught flatfooted when that promotion peters out.
Bottom line: All told, the publisher is probably risking $1 million or more a year just to keep bringing in new customers. And that’s for each publication in his stable!
Yeah, I know. That’s direct mail, the costliest marketing medium there is. But even at the other end of the spectrum, on the ultra-cheap Internet, there are very definite costs – and, therefore, risks – associated with acquiring new leads and new customers.
Money must be spent to pay AdWords and pay-per-click costs, create and run banner ads, rent e-mail lists, write and design e-mail blasts, write and design landing pages – and more. And because there are no guarantees that any campaign will work efficiently, every test of every new campaign carries with it a very definite capital risk.
Making Secondary Sales to Existing Customers Is One of the Cheapest Things
- and the Lowest-Risk – That Direct-Response Companies Do
Response on promotions sent to existing customers is usually six to eight times higher (sometimes more) than promotions sent to cold prospects. Average sale is substantially higher, too – sometimes as much as two to three times higher.
And so, compared to the breakeven return on investment most marketers get when creating new customers, ROI on promotions to existing customers is off the charts.
In short…
It’s ALL About Customer Lifetime Value!
It amazes me when I see companies that seem oblivious to this simple fact of life. They risk alienating new customers with endless upsells on the initial inbound call, then utterly abandon them, failing to follow up with direct-mail and e-mail promotions. Or they ship faulty, shoddy products that blatantly under-deliver on the benefit promises made in their customer-acquisition promotions.
If they only knew how much money they’re leaving on the table, they’d turn over a new leaf in no time flat!
I mean, what would you rather have – a 50 percent net profit on one sale to one customer? Or SEVEN FULL YEARS of sales to each customer… making four to five or more sales to each one every year… and, because there’s a cost involved in delivering world-class products and stellar customer service, settling for a slightly smaller net on each sale?
It’s a rhetorical question. We both know the answer.
So now the question becomes… what can YOU do in the next five days to begin treating customers like gods?
Ask yourself…
1. “Do my promotions tell the truth, the whole truth, and NOTHING BUT the truth?”
Ask any soft-offer marketer and he’ll tell you: Promotions that create unrealistic expectations for the product invariably result in lower pay-up on the back end. Hard-offer marketers know that over-the-top promises result in much higher cancellation rates and much lower response to secondary sales and renewals.
What can you do to narrow or eliminate the gap between your promotional promises and the reality of the benefits your product or service delivers? Or, even better, what can you do to deliver MORE than your promotion promises?
Could you, for example, add unadvertised premiums to your welcome packages or product shipments? Promise 12 issues of your newsletter a year, but include the previous month’s issue – a 13th – in your welcome kit? Schedule a timeless “Gala Bonus Issue” to hit new subscribers’ mailboxes two weeks after they come on board? Maybe insert a gift certificate offering a substantial discount on something? Perhaps send an unexpected free report or other inexpensive gift to every subscriber or customer before Thanksgiving… “just because” you’re thankful for them?
2. “Do my promotions begin the bonding process with the new customers they create?”
Do you establish yourself or your spokesperson as an advocate who has a greater, higher vision for your prospect than he has for himself? Do you demonstrate this by giving away valuable, actionable information or advice in your promotions? What insights into your spokesperson’s life can you give away that make him feel more human, more like the prospect in his harmless little foibles, loves, and values?
When selling newsletter subscriptions, I avoid saying things like “When you subscribe…” Instead, I say something like “When you join me…” On the order form, instead of calling my product a subscription, I call it a membership.
What could you do to position your initial sale to a customer NOT as a sale, but as the beginning of a beautiful friendship?
3. “Does my product over-deliver on the benefit claims made in my promotions?”
Goes without saying: If the product is faulty, fix it. If it can be improved, improve it.
Then do this: Order a product from yourself, for yourself. Do it by phone so you get the live experience of dealing with the customer service rep. Throw up roadblocks.
I once called a client’s toll-free number and said I wanted a three-year subscription to his newsletter. “We don’t sell three-year subscriptions,” she said. “Just one-year and two-year subscriptions.” So I asked if I could buy a one-year subscription and a two-year subscription and have them run consecutively. That really pissed her off. “I’ve never heard of such a thing!” she said.
Challenge the operator and take notes. When the welcome kit or shipment/first issue arrives, note how long it took. Imagine that you’re a new customer who has been waiting for this delivery, anxiously checking his mailbox every day. Then open it.
How do you feel? What are your first impressions? Are you bowled over by the quality and quantity of what you see? Do you feel closer to the company and/or its spokesperson? Does the experience leave you looking forward to your next contact with them?
Even if your experience was 100 percent positive, get your best people together and spend a day brainstorming how you can make it better for your customers.
4. “Do my people go the extra mile to make customers feel like part of the family?”
Call your customer service number. How many times does the phone ring before someone answers? Are you put on hold? (Take notes.) Have a complaint. Be angry. Be insulting. (Scribble, scribble!) Call back with a gazillion questions. (More notes.) Try telling the rep about your cat. (Still more notes.) Then call with a big compliment. (Getting writer’s cramp yet?)
Now, have a meeting with your reps and set them on the straight and narrow.
5. “Does each promotion to my in-house customer file contain a component that strengthens the bond with them?”
I tell my clients that every promotion sent to existing customers must do two things: (1) It must, of course, produce profits. (2) It must make the customer feel greater allegiance and loyalty to the company and/or its spokesperson.
More important, no promotion should ever produce profits at the expense of the relationship we worked so hard to establish with our customers. When max short-term profits and max bonding go head-to-head, bonding must always win.
6. “Am I doing everything possible to retain customers who complain or cancel?”
A client of mine spends an average of $24 to generate each new customer. Does it make sense to spend less to keep one? That $24 could buy a LOT of tender, loving care for an irritated or disappointed customer. It could easily cover an apologetic telephone call or a FedEx package with a $10 “I’m so sorry!” gift enclosed.
Take a look at the process customers go through to cancel, and brainstorm everything you can think of to keep them in the fold. Think outside the box.
How about a “Hell NO!” letter: “Hell NO, I won’t cancel your subscription. The information I have for you in coming months is far too important to you! I’ve already refunded your subscription – that’s one thing. But denying you the critical guidance in XYZ newsletter is another. So please accept the next three months with my compliments…”
This gets you three more months to win your disgruntled customer over.
[Ed. Note: What do you do to treat your customers like kings? Let us know right here.
Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com. ]
Over the years, I’ve tried to teach lots of folks to write sales copy. Not all of them have gone on to be stellar successes.
One of my most spectacular failures had a PhD in English Lit. Another was a crackerjack newspaper reporter. Still another had penned a best-seller and now wanted to try her hand at copywriting.
All three of these people were great word-jugglers. But as direct-response copywriters, they were hopeless. Not one of them could have written a winning sales letter if you’d held a .44 magnum to his or her highly educated head.
The problem? Though they came to me already armed with impressive writing skills, they had no selling skills. And they just couldn’t seem to acquire the knack of using words to persuade others to take a particular action – to look at their headlines, read their sales messages, and, for god’s sake, to order the doggoned product!
Too little, in my opinion, is written about how to be persuasive. And I mean to remedy that. There are lots of ways to be persuasive – I call them “Suasion Strategies” – and today I’d like to introduce you to one of the most powerful: the Scientific Demonstration.
When your prospects are unfamiliar with the mechanics of how or why your thing works, or why your thing works better than your competition’s thing – and the explanation would be long, technical, and boring – logic alone won’t cut it.
Take the alternative health market, for example…
Consumers of nutritional supplements are savvy about a lot of things. Many can rattle off all the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and herbs that help lower blood pressure, shrink prostates, ease joint pain, even free you from halitosis, B.O., and the heartbreak of psoriasis. But almost none of your prospects really understand HOW these natural medicines work their magic.
Lots of times, it doesn’t really matter. If you can cite a study in which a Harvard scientist or a Nobel Prize winner says a nutrient does its thing, you’ll probably be okay. But a picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. And if you can figure out a way to quickly and easily demonstrate how your product does its thing – or, better yet, how it does its thing better than the competition’s product does its thing – the impact can be palpable and the urge to try it irresistible.
Say a certain nutrient is normally water soluble – it needs water to dissolve and to be absorbed in the body. But the cheaper manufacturing process many of your competitors use makes that nutrient impervious to water and, therefore, undissolvable, unabsorbable, and unusable by the body.
Time to go up into the attic and drag out the old chemistry set you played with in fourth grade. Oh – and get the camera, too, so we can snap some pictures for a super-persuasive sidebar.
Yep, it’s time for a scientific experiment…
Take two laboratory flasks (so much more “official looking” than ordinary water glasses). Add water. Open a capsule of your competitor’s product and pour it into the first flask. Pour your product into the second. [SNAP!]
Observe that your product dissolves instantly, making the water cloudy to the eye. [SNAP!]… But the competition’s product is just kind of floating aimlessly on top of the water, like so much flotsam and jetsam. [SNAP!]
Now, just to prove you’re more than fair, take a spoon and stir the heck out of the competitor’s product. Hell… put it in a blender.
Wow! That worthless crap your competitor sells is still floating at the top of the flask. [SNAP!]
Suddenly, your claim that your product is more absorbable and therefore more effective is persuasive beyond doubt. Seeing is believing. Your prospect has been fully convinced.
Can’t do an actual scientific demonstration for your sales letter? No problem. Conduct a theoretical one.
For example, when promoting EDTA to remove plaque from arteries, I had an illustrator prepare a series of “Gray’s Anatomy”-style drawings:
• a baby’s artery – squeaky clean and free of plaque
• a 20-year-old’s artery – already beginning to grow ugly yellow globs of plaque… already beginning to restrict blood flow…
• a 60-year-old’s artery – nearly closed by plaque… only a drip or two of blood getting through to the heart muscle…
• EDTA moving through the artery, dissolving the calcium that bonds plaque to the artery wall, flushing it away and increasing blood flow…
• the 60-year-old’s artery looking more like the 20-year-old’s… and abundant blood coursing through the newly cleared artery
Now Think: What kind of scientific demonstration – real or theoretical – would best persuade prospects that your product can, indeed, deliver its promised benefits and/or is far superior to the competition’s?
Put it in your next sales promotion and watch response soar!
[Ed. Note: If you can persuade and influence others, you can command top dollar as a copywriter from companies eager to beat a path to your doorstep. Or... start your own business and use your skills to move the masses to buy your own products and services. And now, it's easier than ever for you to master the art of persuasion. Learn how to get the secrets of a man responsible for over $2 BILLION in sales right here.
Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free money-making e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com. ]
Back in the 1980s, I agreed to help the owner of a small company grow his business. Within three years, it was the largest company in its industry.
By combining five key marketing strategies with kick-butt sales copy, we were attracting between 5,000 and 10,000 new customers every month. By 1988, we had more than 120,000 paying customers. Sales revenues and profits quadrupled.
At that point, my client decided to cash out – take his profits and retire – and asked me to help him sell his company. I created a 20-minute video and a comprehensive “company profile” to help attract prospective buyers.
The buyers – who paid top-dollar – turned out to be a team of three Rhodes Scholars with advanced business degrees from Oxford University.
Within a week after the papers were signed, the crackerjack marketing team we had built was placed under an oppressive bureaucracy: an “Executive Committee” made up of the new owners, their handpicked CEO, the CFO, and the General Manager – none of whom knew one blessed thing about marketing.
In days, the company went from being obsessed with marketing to being infatuated with something called “Corporate Planning.” Key marketers were sidetracked in day-long meetings – and, sometimes, week-long out-of-the-office marathons. Scores of crucial sales promotions were put on hold while the marketing staff diddled themselves silly with endless research and reporting tasks.
I, of course, went ballistic. I warned everyone who’d listen (at the top of my lungs) that de-emphasizing marketing was going to drive the company into bankruptcy.
That drew giggles all around.
“You’re overreacting,” said the new owners. “It’s going to be just fine,” chanted the Executive Committee.
It wasn’t fine. Not by a long shot.
The flow of new customers faltered, then plunged. Our active customer file began shrinking. Sales to existing customers plummeted.
Finally, unable to make the new owners see the error of their ways, I fired the client. As I walked out of the office for the last time, I told the CEO, “Now I understand what being a Rhodes Scholar does for you. You’d have to STUDY to be this stupid.”
I told the CEO that his company would be belly-up within six months. I was wrong. He filed for bankruptcy 90 days later.
Okay, I admit it: I’m a marketing chauvinist. And it’s not because I think we’re necessarily smarter and better looking than everyone else. It’s because the only logical place for marketing is out front – leading the charge for your entire company.
It drives me nuts when executives who know nothing about sales and marketing mindlessly parrot phrases about “putting the customer first” – and then relegate the only people who actually talk to customers to an inferior position in the company.
Before the Rhodes Scholars showed up, my client had put sales and marketing first. And because the job of the Marketing Department was to respond to customers’ desires and concerns… it meant our customers were #1.
But the Rhodes Scholars and their preening “Executive Committee” wanted to be first – the masters of all they surveyed, at the pinnacle of the corporate pyramid. So they put sales and marketing in its place – under their thumbs, no more important than janitorial services.
And by doing so, they turned my client’s “Smart Company” into a dumb one in one fell swoop.
In a Smart Company, the Marketing Department exists at the top of the corporate pyramid.
Armed with the freshest intelligence on the desires and complaints of prospects and customers, the Marketing Department directs…
In Dumb Companies, top execs fail to understand the supreme importance of sales and marketing – or, worse, they see it as a “necessary evil.”
And their structure shows it. Marketers are kept under tight rein – slaves to multiple layers of bean counters, bureaucrats, and other self-important gasbags who have long forgotten where the money in their paychecks comes from – if they ever knew in the first place.
Even worse: Dumb Companies make sure that marketers – the only experts in the company capable of boosting sales, revenues, and profits – are frozen into inaction and that crucial sales campaigns are delayed by corporate procedures requiring marketing-challenged morons at the top to approve their every move.
The CEO and top execs spend no more time or effort on sales and marketing than they do monitoring Human Resources, or any other department. Marketing is beneath them. Something the weirdoes down on the fourth floor are responsible for.
• Accounting exists to ensure that the Marketing Department has the financial resources it needs to attract maximum numbers of new customers and to boost sales revenues.
• Human Resources exists to ensure that the Marketing Department has the best talent available and that supporting departments have what they need to help the department be more successful.
• Information Technology (IT) exists to give the Marketing Department the daily reports it needs to monitor and analyze the effectiveness of its strategies and tactics.
• The Legal Department exists to help marketers create promotions that are as effective as is humanly possible within established ethical and legal boundaries.
In a Smart Company, the business owner/CEO occupies not one, but two positions:
1. Leading the charge with the Marketing Department – setting goals… monitoring key costs and response rates… helping them innovate new products and sales approaches… breaking logjams… and providing the quick approvals needed to kick winning sales campaigns into overdrive.
2. Taking up the rear – constantly driving everyone down the line to make supporting sales and marketing efforts their #1 priority.
BOTTOM LINE: Dumb Companies think that the Marketing Department exists to sell products. Smart Companies know that the only reason to have a product is to give the Marketing Department a vehicle with which it can attract new customers and produce revenues and profits.
My advice…
• If you own or run a Dumb Company, changing how you and your employees think about your business – the simple act of redefining it as a marketing business and ensuring that your corporate structure and procedures make sales and marketing #1 – is the first step to explosive growth.
• If you’re a marketing exec with a Dumb Company, you’re never going to be as successful as your peers at Smart Companies. If you can’t raise the company’s IQ, pack your bags!
• If you’re a marketing consultant or copywriter for a Dumb Company, finding a better class of clients will send your income skyrocketing.
[Ed. Note: Marketing is CRITICAL to the success of any business. You can discover the ins and outs of dozens of marketing channels - from search engine marketing to e-mail marketing and beyond - as a member of ETR's Internet Money Club. Our team of Internet marketing experts will guide you step by step through building and growing an Internet business. Space is limited, so find out now if you can still enroll in the "Class" of 2009.
Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free money-making e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com. ]
In the 37-plus years since I created my first direct-response sales copy, I’ve written considerably more than a thousand direct-response ads, television spots, and mail pieces. And over the years, as I studied the results of those efforts, my approach to strategizing and creating sales promotions began to evolve.
Today, my work process is very different than it was in the early years. My first thought is no longer about product benefits or even the product’s USP (unique selling proposition). Nor do I begin each project by thinking about all the rational “reasons why” my prospect should buy.
Please don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’ve discarded any of these techniques. They still have prominent places in every promotion I create. But something else has risen to the top of my list – and that change has produced the closest thing to sales miracles I have ever witnessed.
What Could Possibly Be BETTER Than Leading With a Tangible Benefit?
Early in my copywriting career, I held down a part-time job in a printing plant. But this wasn’t just any printing plant. Its forte was printing and mailing appeal letters for a national fundraising organization. And since I worked alone on the night shift, I had plenty of time to read every one of those 8-page letters.
They amazed me. At the time, I had no way of knowing the letters were being written by Richard Viguerie, Steve Winchell, and Jerry Huntsinger – top copywriters in the direct-mail fundraising industry. But I did know that they worked. They convinced people to donate tens of millions of dollars each year.
Poring over those letters while my folding machine thunked away all night long was a real eye opener. Whether by instinct or trial and error, these geniuses had figured out that to get a donor to write a check for a good cause, they needed to go beyond the intellect – beyond rational, “reason-why” copy and beyond a snappy USP.
In short, they knew that they needed to stimulate powerful emotions – emotions that their prospects already had gurgling around inside them. And to do that, they had to begin at a different place: Not with the product, but with a clear understanding of the prospect’s state of mind and how he already felt about the subject at hand.
Armed with this understanding, Viguerie, Winchell, and Huntsinger began every appeal (”sales”) letter with a headline and opening that instantly activated their prospect’s emotions and made it impossible for him to look away: A shot to the gut… a kick to the groin or a right hook to the Adam’s apple. And once those copywriters had the prospect’s resident emotions working for them, all they had to do was keep those emotions on their side until the prospect had become as passionate about the cause as the writer was – and the check had been written and mailed.
As I studied their letters, I realized something else:Viguerie, Winchell, and Huntsinger could have chosen the “easy” way – to get rich by selling widgets that gave them dozens of tangible benefits to offer their prospects. But these geniuses had intentionally chosen to specialize in the fundraising field instead. Why?
Could it be that they believed starting with the prospect instead of the product – setting out to first identify and then activate the strongest emotions the prospect already has – might be a better way to go? And if so, I asked myself, “What if you could do both at the same time?”
Instead of beginning with the product and merely trusting the prospect to respond positively to its benefits… what if I began by thinking about the prospect and how he must feel about the subject at hand – and then carefully crafted every part of my sales message to get those resident emotions working for me?
What if I began by selecting themes that connected most powerfully with those emotions? What if I added a kind of “emotional overlay” to every headline, every opening, every credibility device, every product benefit, every offer, and every call to action?
Wouldn’t the response be substantially better?
“Hmmmm…!”
The Outcome of a Struggle Between My Left Brain and My Right Brain Put Millions in My Pocket
A decade after I left that printing plant, the 30-something version of myself sat down at a typewriter in a musty basement bedroom in Minneapolis. My mission: to write a promotion that would sell rare Morgan silver dollars to subscribers of The Money Advocate investment newsletter.
The Money Advocate was published by a coin company; Security Coin & Bullion. And until I came along, they were doing just fine, using rational, left-brain, reason-why, benefit-oriented copy and a pretty good USP to sell about $360,000 worth of rare coins per month.
So there I sat, staring at a blank page, wondering how to begin.
My left brain, tuned into the classic advertising approach, wanted me to begin logically – by headlining and then focusing on the benefits of investing in rare coins. Meanwhile, Viguerie, Winchell, and Huntsinger were doing their dead-level best with my right brain to convince me to begin with the feelings my prospect most likely felt relative to my product: Lead with “emotion… Emotion… EMOTION!”
So I sat there, turning that old Morgan silver dollar over and over in my hand. “What is this, really?” I asked myself. “Where did it come from? Where has it been? What does it symbolize?”
Suddenly, I was reminded of the movie Somewhere in Time – in which Christopher Reeve was magically transported through time after seeing the date on a coin. I thought… “This isn’t a coin, it’s a TIME MACHINE!”
So I wrote…
“If these coins could talk, what wonderful stories would they tell?
“They would speak of a time gone by. Of the hardy prospectors who mined their silver. Of smoky saloons, honky-tonk pianos, raucous poker games, and painted ladies.
“They would speak of freedom. Independence. Honor. The code of the West.
“The Morgan silver dollar was there with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday at the gunfight in the O.K. Corral. And it was on the poker table when Wild Bill Hickock drew his “dead man’s hand” and succumbed to an assassin’s bullet.
“They only look like beautiful and potentially profitable ‘rare coin’ investments. And while they are, they are also more: Each is a touchstone with our colorful, uniquely all-American history that you can hold in the palm of your hand.”
Then, just to appease my left brain (and to give my prospects’ spouses a plausible reason why their significant others had succumbed), I included plenty of “reasons why” buying those coins was the smartest thing they could do. After all – they were great investments!
That copy, a two-page flyer, mailed on January 1. Thirty days later, it had brought in $3.6 million in sales – 10 TIMES MORE than my client’s purely rational, logic-based, greed-driven approach had ever generated in a single month.
And that was just the beginning. Within one year, my new approach had my client selling $16 million worth of rare coins each month, making him the single largest rare coin dealer in America – by far.
Flash-forward 10 more years…
I had just completed my second promotion for Health & Healing. The first had done gangbusters, generating eight times the response of any health package Phillips publishing had ever mailed. Now, it was time to write my headline (yes, I do it backward) – a way to “grab prospects by the eyeballs” and compel them to open and read my sales copy.
Just to humor my left brain, I tapped out the word “CURES.” After all – that was what my copy was packed with and promised more of.
But what kind of cures were these? Which strong emotion do these kinds of drug-free, surgery-free remedies trigger in my prospects?
“Well,” I thought, “the medical industry doesn’t want us to know about these alternatives, and even tries to silence people who recommend them. So they’re… let’s see… ‘prohibited’? No… ‘banned’? No… ‘censored’? Not quite… ‘forbidden’? No… wait a minute…
“YES! That’s it! That’s my headline! FORBIDDEN CURES!”
I loved the word “forbidden.” It felt like a mischievous child trying something naughty for the first time. It also made me feel resentment toward the self-appointed, supposedly superior, paternalistic establishment that believes it’s a better judge of what’s right for me than I do. It made me feel bound and determined to not just break but shatter their stupid prohibitions!
And, of course, my right brain loved it, too.
When it mailed, the package beat my control so handily that Phillips’s mail quantities reached six million pieces in each 60-day mail cycle. The royalties were so good, I took the rest of the year off and played on the beach.
Adding the right-brain/emotionally driven copy techniques practiced by the great fundraising copywriters to the left-brain benefit/reason-why/USP approach espoused by the world’s greatest classic advertising copywriters… was, quite simply, the single greatest breakthrough of my career.
Maybe I would have caught on sooner if, early on, someone had shaken me by the shoulders, slapped me a couple of times, and said…
“If you want people to act on your copy and buy your product, first determine how your prospect is likely feeling right now. Then, use your benefits as bridges to activate the emotions that will compel him to buy!”
Put Dominant Emotion Marketing to Work for You NOW!
My work process changed forever.
Instead of beginning like I once had (and as many copywriters still do) – by identifying product benefits – wouldn’t it make sense for you to put the prospect and his most compelling emotions FIRST? Wouldn’t it be better, for example, to…
1. Begin by figuring out what the prospect’s resident emotions are regarding the things the product addresses…
2. Figure out which of those resident emotions are the strongest, most compelling, most “dominant” in his or her life…
3. Identify the benefits your product offers that will most effectively enhance his strongest positive emotions and/or resolve his negative ones…
4. Address those benefits in ways that keep the prospect’s most dominant emotions working with you – and never against you…
5. And, as you review and edit your sales copy, wouldn’t it make sense to keep making this kind of emotional connection at every opportunity?
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free money-making e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Copywriting is just one skill you can master to help your business grow. Learn the ins and outs of copywriting, marketing, search engine optimization, and more from some of the best experts in the business at ETR's 2008 Info Marketing Bootcamp. Find out how to reserve your spot right here.]
If you’ve ever felt like the Earth cooled in less time than it takes you to crank out a respectable first draft of your sales copy, listen up. I’m going to tell you about some of the things I do to tear through the process.
Here are six little tricks that help me a lot…
Trick #1. Compartmentalization.
Writing an out-of-the-park grand slam promotion is a process that consists of many steps, hundreds of actions, and thousands of tiny decisions:
Now if you have a lick of common sense, you’re going to feel overwhelmed when you contemplate all the steps you have to complete in order to perfect the project at hand. And that’s okay. It just means you’re in touch with reality.
But you’re going to have to get past “overwhelmed” and on to work. And the only way I know to do that is to mentally chop the job into little, tiny, manageable pieces. So you tell yourself something like this: “I do NOT have to write a promotion today. All I have to do is the research. Or part of the research.”
Thinking about the work this way does more than just relieve your anxiety. It blows all that procrastination you’re usually guilty of at the beginning of a project right out of the water.
Trick #2. Something my pal Rich Schefren calls “getting into a flow state.”
Ever have a day when you sit down to work and the next thing you know it’s time for dinner… you have to force yourself to stop… and when you reflect on the day, you’re amazed by the quantity – and, more important, the quality – of what you accomplished?
That, my friend, is the flow state Rich talks about. And getting into that flow state is my goal every time I sit down at my desk.
Fact is, flow state equals money. Because the more flow states you experience during a project, the faster the project goes and the better your work output is.
But flow states don’t “just happen.” They’re kind of like hummingbirds: They show up naturally if you just create an environment that attracts them. For me, that means a light dinner and a good night’s sleep. An enclosed work space. No interruptions. No distractions. And every tool I need to do that day’s job readily at hand.
That’s just me. You’ll have to figure out what works for you.
Trick #3. Constantly visualizing success.
Yes, I know. What could possibly be more hackneyed than dusting off the decades-old concept of “positive thinking”?
Thing is, like all laws that survive the test of time, positive thinking works.
My fantasy is the phone call I’ll get from a wowed client when he sees my copy for the first time… the call telling me he had to put on three shifts to handle the orders… and, of course, all the great cuddling I’ll get when my wife sees the royalty deposit on our bank statement.
Whatever your motivation, try keeping it in mind as you write.
Trick #4. “Know thyself.”
Feelings are more intense than thoughts. So they can have a way of blanking your mind and freezing you like a biker who just spotted a grizzly in his headlights. That’s why you have to understand how negative emotions affect your work. For example, you may feel overwhelmed at the beginning of a project. Discouraged when a solution doesn’t come fast enough. And then your inferiority complex kicks into overdrive when you see how others have done it.
It helped me when I realized that 99.9 percent of all negative emotions are probably not caused by objective truth. And, therefore, the vast majority of all bad feelings are baloney.
So when I experience a negative emotion while I’m working, I pause for a moment and ask myself, “What thought zipped through my mind just before I got bummed out?” After recognizing how ridiculously wrong that thought was, I can almost instantly dismiss the negative emotion and dive back into the work.
Try it. It works.
Trick #5. Screw the rules!
You’ve learned too many copywriting rules. And, frankly, they’re getting in the way. So instead of worrying about the rules, focus on your prospective customer and be a salesman in print. Think, “If I were in a room with my best prospect and needed to get his attention, engage him, present the reasons why he should buy and close the sale – what would I say to him?” Then let the conversation flow naturally out of your fingers to the keyboard and into your document.
There’ll be plenty of time in later drafts to think about which rules you broke or didn’t follow. The first draft is about speed.
Trick #6. Do some bedtime reading.
Let your last action each day be to read what you wrote that day. File it away in your subconscious mind. And go to work the minute you wake up in the morning so the connections your brain made overnight find their way onto the page.
Take advantage of the above six “tricks” religiously on your next project, and you’ll be surprised by how much more quickly it goes and how much easier the writing feels.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free money-making e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Copywriting is just one skill you can master to help your business grow. Learn the ins and outs of copywriting, marketing, search engine optimization, and more from some of the best experts in the business at ETR's Internet Ultimatum Bootcamp. Find out how to reserve your spot right here.]
New copywriters write me all the time, asking how to get a high-paying gig. A desperate few just want to know how to get any assignment.
Sometimes I have to resist the urge to leap through the computer screen at them. I want to grab ‘em by the shoulders, shake ‘em till their eyes rattle, and shout, “Hey! Wake up! You’re one of the chosen few. You’re a COPYWRITER! You’ve been blessed with the gift of persuasion, the greatest super-power on the planet. Compared to you, Batman and Wonder Woman are wimps! And YOU are the most exciting product you will ever write for!”
Throughout my 35-year career, I’ve been asked to write copy to sell conferences and water heaters… golf magazines and exotic pastries… investment diamonds and buttless pants… Holy Land tours and sex tapes… rare coins and junk furniture… tons of books and newsletters on finance, investing, and health… and, once, an entire company.
The single best product I ever promoted? Clayton Friggin’ Makepeace!
I don’t have to do it these days, of course. My name and past successes are well-known, and I turn down far more assignments than I could ever accept. But there was a time when I was a virtual unknown, struggling to make ends meet. I had my chops, of course – I had written some strong promotions for small-ish clients on the West Coast – but I couldn’t even get the big boys to answer the phone.
What did I do?
I sat down at my trusty old IBM Selectric typewriter (the state-of-the-art writing instrument in 1979) and wrote a sales promotion – about myself! I mentally put Clayton on the desk just as if he were any other product, and I pulled out all the stops. Then I used that copy in a six-step campaign designed to make all the best clients call me.
How’d it work? Like a charm. Within a week, my phone was ringing off the hook, and I was schmoozing with the big boys. Within two weeks, the advances began rolling in. And a few months later, a major mailer offered me a six-figure retainer plus 5 percent of his gross sales, plus perks out the wazoo to take him on exclusively.
I’m not that old. I still remember the days when I was trying to break into this business, hungry to put everything I’d learned to work for a real client. And I remember when I was a pretty successful “B” writer whose fondest dream was to fill my schedule with “A” clients. Both times, I did the only thing that made sense to me: I mounted an intensive sales promotion for yours truly.
Here’s how I did it, and how you can do it too…
First, I created a mailing list of 400 prospective clients. Since I was focusing on self-help publishers, I picked the biggest companies, starting with firms I already knew about (including Phillips, KCI, Agora, Boardroom, and Ruff Times), and then using the Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters to select the rest. (Now, with the advent of the Internet, this research is even easier.)
If I knew the name of the person in the organization who hired writers, I included that with the address on my list. If I didn’t, I called and said, “I need to send a letter to the person responsible for creating your direct-mail promotions. Could you please tell me who that is?”
I wrote a short, one-page personalized letter saying that the following Tuesday would be a Red Letter Day. The FedEx guy was going to deliver a very important package to him/her on that date – a package that would bring a big bump in sales and profits. And I asked my prospect to take a quick look at it, saying that it could be the most profitable few minutes he/she’d spent reading in years. (You may want to do this with an e-mail. It should work even better.)
I created a second short letter to go out with my sample kits. I introduced myself, and briefly listed my accomplishments… said that in two weeks, I’d be filling my writing schedule for the second half of the year… that I had some intriguing ideas for boosting his/her revenues and response… and asked the prospect to take a look at the enclosed material and call me to discuss it. I told him/her I’d be waiting for his/her call – and if I hadn’t heard from him/her by a certain date, I’d give him/her a ring.
I spent time thinking about exactly what I would do and say when anyone responded…
I would answer the phone on the third ring – not too eager, not too nonchalant. I would be polite, friendly, and excited that they had called. And I would compliment them on the stuff I’d seen coming from their organization. If they asked, “How much do you charge?” I would say “Depends on the product and the promotion. We can discuss that later.”
I knew precisely what I wanted the next step to be – to schedule a call a few days later to discuss potential projects. And I knew that I’d ask the prospect to send me a “Care Package” – samples of their best promotions, premiums, issues of their newsletter, etc. – that I could study in the meantime.
Timing was crucial. Every Monday, I mailed 100 introductory letters… so those prospects would get them before their sample kits arrived via FedEx the following Tuesday. At the same time, I overnighted 100 sample kits to the prospects who’d received my introductory letter the week before… so they would get my sample kit exactly when my introductory letter said they would – on Tuesday.
I waited by the phone, not really expecting anyone to call. But a few did.
Some politely told me they had all the writers they needed at the time. I’d say, “Cool! Maybe we’ll have a chance to work together some other time.” Some said they liked what they saw and wanted to know more – in which case, I told them a little about myself, asked what they were looking for, requested the Care Package, and scheduled a call to discuss it all with them in a few days.
I set aside at least one full day each week to bang the phones, calling all the prospects who should have called me the week before but didn’t. I started with the ones who were the biggest mailers, and worked my way down.
If the person I wanted to talk to wasn’t available, I left a voice message: “Hey, Bob, it’s Clayton Makepeace. I sent you some samples of my work last week and promised to give you a call about them. I’ve got some ideas to boost your response, and can’t wait to share them with you. Give me a call?” I left my number, and said I’d be in all afternoon.
If they answered, I said, “Hey, Bob, it’s Clayton Makepeace. I sent you some samples of my work last week and promised to give you a call. Did you have time to take a look at them?”… and things progressed naturally from there.
Every penny I’ve earned since can be traced to this simple six-step campaign. Scrupulously following this plan filled my schedule with new clients. It also made my name recognizable at the companies I wanted to work for – a fact that paid dividends in later years. And work I did for some of the companies that responded created key turning points in my career, enabling me to hit grand slams that made mine a “household name” in this industry and earned me millions.
IMPORTANT…
1. Everything you write to sell yourself to a potential client reflects upon your ability to sell that client’s product. Take time to make sure each self-promotional communication is also a sample of your copywriting skill. Pull out all the stops.
2. Never let them see you sweat. Coming off like you’re desperate for work only makes you look… well, desperate. Clients assume that if you were any good, you’d already be booked solid. So be ready with a reason why you have gaps in your schedule. Maybe it’s September, and you’re making your reservations for the first six months of next year. Maybe you’ve seen the client’s mail piece, and are so convinced you can do better you’re willing to make room for them on your calendar.
Whether you’re just starting your career or are going great guns, you can earn more – LOTS MORE – than you do now. Put my six-step campaign to work, and you’ll be on your way to a six- (even seven-) figure income as a copywriter in no time.
[Ed. Note: Now, you can get access to a vault full of persuasion and marketing knowledge that can launch your career not only in sales but in any field you choose. Get the details here.
And be sure to sign up for direct-marketing consultant and copywriter Clayton Makepeace's highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package. It's designed to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Check it out here and claim four free money-making e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response rates.]
Let’s say you own a business and you’re trying to decide what kinds of products you should be developing. Or you’re a copywriter trying to select the clients and projects most likely to make you a bundle over the next year or so.
Right off the bat, you know it isn’t going to be easy. Just take a look around…
Sorry, Boobalah, but them’s the cards you’ve been dealt.
What’s that? Did I hear someone say “This article isn’t for me… I’m not in the U.S.”?
Uh – sorry to break it to you, my foreign friend, but with America on the ropes… with Eurozone economies slowing, stock markets softening, and inflation rising… and with Asian nations fighting their own inflation demons and Pacific Rim stocks swooning as much as 60 percent so far this year… these ain’t exactly salad days for you either.
So – given the fact that we’re all marketers here – what do you do to make max money in miserable times? What kinds of products should businesses be launching and which kinds of assignments should copywriters pursue?
Right now, I see five big areas of opportunity for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing folks, and copywriters…
Opportunity #1: Anything that helps consumers or businesses function better for less – products and services that…
Opportunity #2: Things that help consumers or businesses make more money – products and services that …
Opportunity #3: Little luxuries and guilty pleasures
Did you know that the entire global makeup industry was founded during The Great Depression?
It’s true! When money’s tight and jobs are hanging by a thread, inexpensive products that give us a sense of normalcy… help us connect emotionally with “the good old days”… boost our self-esteem or hope… give us pleasure or a few moments of respite from worry and want… tend to sell like hotcakes.
Opportunity #4: Products and services for the richest one-quarter of one percent
You won’t see Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or Al Gore in a breadline anytime soon. High-net-worth folks have money to burn.
Even in tough times, being in the business of selling luxury products or services to the super-rich can be very, very profitable. They’ll still be spending good money on fashion, jewelry, antiques, art, travel, high-end estates, exotic cars, yachts, private jets, and more.
Opportunity #5: Products we all need, no matter what
No matter how bad the economy gets, we still fall in love, have sex, have babies. We still have to eat and drink… still have medical needs… and, of course, we all, eventually, croak. Products and services that help us do these things well and cheaply tend to be stagflation-proof.
What have I left out? Probably a ton of stuff!
So chime in. Let’s hear your ideas for growing rich no matter what happens next in the economy…
[Ed. Note: The truth is, no matter how bleak the economy looks, there are ALWAYS opportunities to make money. And if you start your own business in one of the areas Clayton Makepeace mentioned today, you can accelerate your journey to massive wealth. With help from ETR's business-building experts, you can get the exact steps, shortcuts, and insider secrets to building your own business from the ground up.
Direct-marketing consultant and copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Check it out here and claim four free money-making e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response rates.]
Without hope, there would be no second marriages… no cheering crowds behind Obama or John on the six o’clock news… and, of course, no Las Vegas.
No matter how cynical, negative, or worldly-wise we want the world to think we are, all of us want to believe. Desperately. And the simple fact is, hundreds of billions of dollars are earned each year by marketers who do little else but:
Take Vegas, for instance. We all know it’s the world’s greatest fleecing machine. We know that there are no games of chance there – that the odds are heavily weighted in favor of the casinos. And yet, even those of us who never expect to beat the house, happily fork over thousands for travel, lodging, and food – and then blissfully lose thousands more at the tables, knowing from experience that we’re being played for suckers.
Now I ask you: Is this anything a sentient, self-respecting, intelligent creature would do? No. And that’s the point.
We are NOT sentient, self-respecting, intelligent creatures. We only tell ourselves that we are. The truth is, we are driven by emotion. We only use our thinking brain to rationalize those emotional decisions after they’re made.
Think that’s an overstatement? Don’t tell me, tell Deanna Blanchard – one of my crackerjack copywriters. She’s working with me on my bookstore book, The Emotional Sale. The other week, Deanna found a medical study you should consider…
Seems some people who suffer minimal brain damage retain their cognitive ability – their ability to reason – but lose their ability to feel any emotion. And when a major medical institution studied these poor souls, they found something fascinating…
When deprived of their ability to feel emotion, these still-intelligent, rational, thinking people were incapable of making ANY decision. They couldn’t even decide which shirt to wear… what to order in a restaurant… or how to manage their money!
I’m thrilled Deanna found that study. Because it proves beyond the shadow of a doubt something I’ve been talking and writing about for years:
If we made our spending decisions on the basis of logic, nobody would buy a new car and suffer the massive depreciation that slams us when we drive it off the lot. Heck, we wouldn’t buy any kind of car – new OR used – for that matter. We’d all be riding the Metro. Or the bus. Or a bicycle.
The same is true about designer clothing… makeup… expensive watches… high-calorie food with low nutritional value. And who in his right mind would spend more than a few hundred bucks a month on a place to live – especially in these days of plunging home values?
Frankly, I’d be hard-pressed to think of much that we spend money on that makes any logical sense at all. We buy things simply because we want to believe. We want to believe – so desperately – that these things will make us feel more confident… more successful… more secure… more fulfilled… happier… that we spend our entire lives mindlessly pursuing them.
Get up early tomorrow morning and turn on just about any cable channel that runs infomercials in the wee hours, and you’ll see what I mean.
Put on your thinking cap now…
If I told you there is a non-prescription pill – made entirely of vitamins and minerals – that will grow hair on a cue ball… would you believe me? Preposterous, right?
How about "the size of a certain part of a man’s body"? Would you believe that a few vitamins and minerals can magically transform a water spout into a fire hose?
What? You don’t believe this stuff? You know what? Nobody does!
But you know what else? There’s an infomercial on TV that’s generating millions and millions in sales for an all-natural hair-regrowth product and another that’s making some scam artist rich selling vitamins that make your thingy bigger.
Why would anyone with an IQ larger than his shoe size buy such obviously stupid products? Because we desperately want to believe. We want to believe so much that a few simple testimonials and/or a floozy batting her false eyelashes at us causes us to suspend all disbelief and crack open our wallets.
So… what do your prospects want to believe? And how can you tap into that desire to increase sales?
Specifically, you need to:
1. Identify the fears, frustrations, and desires that are present in the greatest number of your prospects…
2. Identify which of those emotions are most active – most dominant – in the greatest number of folks who’ll read your sales message, and…
3. Craft your theme, headline, and opening accordingly.
[Ed. Note: Selling is one of the most financially valuable skills you can develop. The best way to learn? From two men who know more about marketing than almost anyone on the planet. Get the details here.
And for more money-making marketing strategies, sign up for direct-marketing consultant and copywriter Clayton Makepeace's highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package (www.makepeacetotalpackage.com).]
I’ve learned a few things in my two-score and 16 years – stuff that some other pretty smart fellas figured out a long, long time ago…
"There’s nothing new under the sun." - King Solomon
"What is past is prologue." - William Shakespeare
"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayana
Now, keeping those quotes in mind, consider this…
Have I left anything out?
What’s that you say? "Hannah Montana is breaking all box office records?"
What? Wait. You think I’m talking about TODAY’S headlines?
Sorry. No. I was reading the above headlines 30 years ago – in the mid-1970s!
The debt from the Vietnam War was hitting home. The term "stagflation" was being coined to describe the new environment of slow (or negative) economic growth plus inflation. Washington was printing money out of thin air to pay its bills. Inflation was accelerating. And oil, gas, food, and just about everything else under the sun (especially gold and silver) were roaring higher.
And, of course, in 1976 – with both houses of Congress already firmly in Democrat hands – disgusted voters abandoned the hapless and clueless Ford (remember the "WIN" button?) and installed an equally clueless and soon-to-be one-term Democrat peanut farmer in the White House.
So sorry if I misled you. Maybe I also should have mentioned "Disco is all the rage."
Nevertheless, here’s why I say some of the life experiences I’ve had in my 56 years on this planet are beginning to come in handy:
I know how to make money – a LOT of money – in times like these, because I’ve been there before. All you have to do is hit the history books, figure out who got richest the fastest the last time around, and then do what they did. Only better.
I was there. I remember how the realization that Washington was out of control… that the government was incompetent and incapable of governing the economy… that even harder times were most likely ahead – and that in such times, prudent people take responsibility for their own financial and personal security – made a bunch of us a huge pile of money.
I remember how my old pal Howard Ruff built The Ruff Times into a 180,000-subscriber behemoth telling people to buy gold and guns and stockpile food. I remember Investment Rarities, Security Rare Coin, and Blanchard & Co. exploding sales as much as 43 times over in as little as a year.
I remember how just about everybody and anybody who promoted information or three-dimensional products aimed at helping people become self-sufficient and prepare for hard times raked in huge bucks.
Most of all, I remember how marketers who recognized and then tapped into the public’s widespread and growing disgust with the establishment, fear of the worst-case scenario, and desire to take matters into their own hands created the greatest profit explosion in the history of the financial information business.
And I remember how, years later, those self-sufficient investors turned out to be every bit as distrustful of the medical establishment as they were of the political establishment. And how they went on to create the multi-gazillion-dollar alternative-health publishing and supplement businesses we know today.
And this time around, the smart money is betting that the profit opportunities will be even greater.
Because last time around, there were no food riots around the world. No countries cutting off exports of wheat and other foods and stockpiling agricultural commodities to make sure they could feed their own people.
There was no China with its $1.3 trillion foreign reserve war chest buying up resources and resource companies like there’s no tomorrow. And there certainly weren’t three billion new consumers on the planet in a bidding war for everything that makes middle class living what it is.
Last time around, our home equity – the #1 source of retirement money for the vast majority of Americans – wasn’t evaporating before our very eyes. Nor was there a credit catastrophe hammering and even destroying lending institutions and making it next to impossible to borrow money.
Oh – and we also didn’t have a way to get our message out for free. Today, we have the Internet.
So before you do that next promotion, why not take a moment to crawl inside your prospective customer’s skin a little bit? You don’t have to be writing about investing or health to make this work for you. The fact is… understanding your prospect’s disgust with the establishment – the status quo – and then giving him a way to take control of his own life is likely to pay you huge dividends.
[Ed. Note: As a direct-marketing consultant and copywriter, Clayton Makepeace has helped four major direct-marketing firms at least quadruple sales and profits to well over $100 million per year each. Clayton publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package (www.makepeacetotalpackage.com) to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Check it out.
The best way to position yourself to take advantage of this groundswell of anti-establishment feeling is to start your own Internet business. Learn how to build one - from the ground up - with the help of ETR's team of experts this July. Get the details here.]
I don’t have to tell you that the U.S. economy is slowing precipitously… unemployment is rising… and consumers are spending less on the discretionary products and services most of us sell. But you can create explosive growth in your business – even in the face of these economic realities.
I learned the following principles the hard way: through nearly four decades in the trenches. They have served me very, very well – and if you abide by them, they’ll do the same for you…
I. Everything can be improved.
The three most idiotic things any marketer can say to a new idea are:
Ignore the idiots: Test everything. Let your prospects and customers give you the right answers.
II. A dollar delayed is a dollar forfeited FOREVER.
Every week, day, or hour a sales promotion is delayed during the year pushes more money OUT of the year. Those dollars will never be recovered. They’re gone forever.
Look at it this way: Let’s say your mission is to send 12 promotions to your customer file in 2008 – one at the end of every month. But your January promotion is a week late. It doesn’t go out until the first week of February. February’s promotion is a week late, too. It goes out March 15. And every other promotion takes just one week longer than you planned.
By the end of the year, those delays add up to 12 weeks. Which means three of the promotions you planned to send to customers in 2008 won’t happen. That’s 25 percent of your revenues and profits gone with the wind.
Creating procedures that move promotions through conception to creation to execution as quickly and as efficiently as possible is absolutely critical.
III. "Optimal" response and "maximum" response are two different things.
Marketing strategies, sales copy, and offers that compel prospects to buy – but leave them annoyed with or distrustful of your company or your spokesperson – only produce new customers who will avoid your future promotions like the plague.
And using overly aggressive or coercive or deceptive tactics with existing customers is the best way to destroy the bond you’re trying to build between them and your company.
A great rule of thumb: Think about every promotion – whether to prospects or to customers – first and foremost as a bonding tool.
Then, do whatever you can short of weakening the good will you’re creating to get the sale and maximize the size of the purchase.
IV. Every customer contact is an opportunity to make a sale and increase customer lifetime value.
Take a long hard look at every scrap of virtual or actual paper your customers get from you. Every order form… every thank-you page or letter… every package insert… every renewal or customer retention letter… and every telephone conversation they have with your customer service people.
At the very least, every one of these events gives you a great opportunity to strengthen the bond with your customers. At the most, it may offer you the opportunity to introduce a complementary product in a way that makes customers feel special.
V. Every sale is an opportunity to make another sale.
The simple fact is, customers are most likely to make another purchase immediately after they’ve made a purchase.
You offered them a product they’re excited about. Ordering was quick, easy, hassle free. The order confirmation/thank-you letter or e-mail answered every question about the delivery of the product and reminded them of your guarantee. The product was delivered in far less time than the customers expected. The product itself surpassed their wildest expectations. And, of course, you threw in an unadvertised freebie or two as icing on the cake.
You now have some very happy customers on your hands. So wouldn’t this be a great time for a follow-up mailing to every customer who ordered this month? Wouldn’t this be the ideal moment to send them a customer satisfaction survey along with a discount coupon for a complementary product?
VI. Every customer complaint is an opportunity to engender lifetime loyalty.
Something went wrong. Your customer is dissatisfied. And his experience tells him that setting things right is going to take forever and be a royal pain in the neck. So before you even hear from him, he’s already ticked off.
And then, you surprise him! You apologize abjectly and issue an immediate refund. You give him a discount coupon for a future purchase. You have the head of your customer service department (better yet, the owner himself) CALL the customer to ask for his help in trying to figure out what went wrong. And you send him a nice letter with a questionnaire to make sure the matter was handled fairly and efficiently.
RULE OF THUMB: Be willing to spend at least as much to keep a customer as you spend to create one. Better yet, be willing to spend double, triple, even quadruple if the customer has a long buying history with you.
It’s what you do at a time like this that proves your company’s character… and proves that he can trust you implicitly. Your customer will never forget how you handled his problem, and will never cease being grateful for making this easy for him.
VII. Never shoot in the dark.
Direct response is all about measuring and reacting to results. But you can’t do that if your IT department is doing a half-fast job of capturing or reporting the response, average sale, and ROI (return on investment) for every promotion.
Other numbers matter, too. Like who’s on your customer list. Where each customer came from. How long each has been with you. How many times each one orders per year. The average and largest purchase each one has made from you – and the cumulative value of those purchases. How long each customer continues buying from you. And, of course, average customer lifetime value.
Study your promotional history. Look for messaging/product/offer/price combinations that typically yield the highest ROIs for each segment of your file. Determine how the timing of the promotion and the delivery mode (e-mail, snail mail, overnight mail, etc.) affected results.
Think about the best ways to handle each file segment in order to progressively increase recency of purchase, frequency of purchase, and average sale – and to retain each customer longer. Then, determine how you can best stratify – carve up – your customer file in order to extract optimum response, average sale, and ROI from each segment.
If you can internalize these seven simple commandments, you’ll have the power to transform yourself into a world-class business builder.
[Ed. Note: As a direct-marketing consultant and copywriter, Clayton Makepeace has helped four major direct-marketing firms at least quadruple sales and profits to well over $100 million per year each. Clayton publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package (www.makepeacetotalpackage.com) to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Check it out.
For dozens of proven strategies that can help you achieve your marketing, personal, and health goals, sign up for ETR's Total Success Achievement program. Learn more here.]
To achieve entrepreneurial success, you need five things:
Now you can do all that with a product that has already been proven to appeal to prospects, and where you’ll go head to head with well-established competitors. Or you can attempt to be a pioneer with something completely new.
If you decide to become a pioneer, you can do items 2 through 5 brilliantly and still fail miserably if your product misses the mark – if it doesn’t deliver a benefit your prospect intensely desires at a price he’s willing to pay. And when you’re a pioneer, your chances of missing the mark are substantial.
Pioneers are famous for winding up with arrows in their keesters. Given the choice, I’d rather compete in an established area.
[Ed. Note: Clayton Makepeace has spent the last 35 years creating direct-mail, Internet, and print promotions that have sold well over $1 billion worth of products. He publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits.]
Our customers are changing.
The customer who was 65 when I began writing marketing copy in the 1970s is 98 today. The 65-year-old who bought the rare coins I sold for Blanchard in the ’80s is now 88.
Today’s 65-year-old customer was born in 1942 – way too young to remember World War II, let alone the Great Depression. More important, he turned 18 in 1960 and proceeded to acquire his skills as a financial decision-maker and consumer smack-dab in the middle of the "Don’t-Trust-Anyone-Over-30" and "Question-Authority" era.
What’s more, that generation did an excellent job of passing their skepticism on to their children. Those hyper-cynical, ultra-skeptical "Generation Xers" are now your 26- to 47-year-old customers.
And as if that isn’t challenging enough for marketers, two additional sea changes have given our customers even greater reasons to distrust anything they see, hear, or read in the media – including our ads…
First, The National Enquirer made its appearance at supermarket checkout counters, packed with stories of alien encounters, Bigfoot, and other such horsepucky.
Soon, more publishers figured out they could get rich by appealing to our baser instincts with stories of the lurid and bizarre – and tons of "me-too" tabloids began springing up like crazy.
Finally, the national media figured it out too – and most TV news programs began spending less time covering news that matters.
And now, a new and even less responsible medium has taken center stage. Despite my spam filters, I’ll get between 20 and 50 unsolicited e-mails today, and most will be obvious rip-offs.
Many websites can be equally hazardous to our financial health. Since you can pretty much say whatever you want on the ‘net – whether it’s true or not – many people do. And so, for anyone whose IQ is larger than their shoe size, online advertising claims are taken with a grain of salt.
What does all of this mean to marketers? Well, for one thing…
Everything you think you know about attracting new customers and keeping existing customers is starting to become obsolete. Overcoming today’s pandemic of skepticism is your single greatest challenge.
The good news is… it can be done. Because despite the fact that our customers are radically different than their parents and grandparents, they do have one thing in common with them: They like to spend money.
The desire to feather our own nests… to purchase products that can make us richer or healthier… to buy things that save us time, effort, or money… to spend money on things that assuage our boredom or loneliness or improve our status… is every bit as powerful as it ever was.
Nevertheless, if we are to enfranchise these new generations of ever-more-skeptical customers, the way in which we deliver our "gospel" – the "good news" that our products can, indeed, satisfy their desires – must change.
Here at my agency, Response Ink, we see the effect this new skepticism is having on our marketing efforts every day…
1. One-shot customer-acquisition promotions are going the way of the dinosaurs.
Today, it’s all about the relationship between your company and your customer… and building credibility and friendship over time. While marketers who deliver value, invite involvement, and create a sense of community among prospective customers before expecting a sale are growing by leaps and bounds, those who cling to the old models are losing ground.
2. Bombastic "big promise" headlines are not working as well.
Today’s prospects are more likely to ignore sales communications that look and sound like sales communications. Instead, topical, newsy, and intrigue leads that key on something they are already thinking about often work best.
3. High-octane sales copy is losing its power.
Today, lower-key, value-added advertising copy (advertorials) that reward prospects for reading by delivering valuable, helpful, actionable information is leaving the language of the high-energy carnival barker in the dust.
Though the "in-your-face," high-energy marketing model is still working well for some companies, I’m moving in another direction. For me, it’s all about persuasion. Climbing inside your prospect’s skin… fully understanding what he must first know and feel before he’s likely to purchase your product… then presenting that information in a way that’s engaging, lively, entertaining, and credible – and doing all that without having your sales copy sound like sales copy – is hard.
It’s worth it.
Not long ago, I wrote a series of personal, warm, friendly, low-key e-mails inviting prospects to attend a free teleseminar on international investing. More than five thousand people signed up. The call delivered valuable, actionable advice to help investors profit in foreign stock markets that are jumping as much as 144 percent a year.
This friendly, low-key phone call sold somewhere north of $1.5 million in subscriptions in a matter of hours.
Meanwhile, we blasted a high-energy "obvious" promotion to prospects.
It barely even registered on the response-rate Richter scale.
Worth thinking about…
[Ed. Note: Clayton Makepeace has spent the last 35 years creating direct-mail, Internet, and print promotions that have sold well over $1 billion worth of products. Plus, as a direct-marketing consultant and copywriter, he's helped four major direct-marketing firms at least quadruple sales and profits to well over $100 million per year each. Clayton publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package (www.makepeacetotalpackage.com) to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Check it out.
For dozens of proven strategies that can help you achieve your marketing, personal, and health goals, sign up for ETR's Total Success Achievement program. Learn more here.]
Despite all the great things going on in my life, I began feeling a little down in the dumps last week.
That’s not good. For creative folks like me – and for all marketing pros – depression can be a career killer.
When you’re depressed, your energy flees, your focus fuzzes up, your creativity goes AWOL – and if you don’t do something about it (and quick!), your income craters and your reputation and career chase it right down the tubes.
In short, depression is one of the costliest business problems any of us ever deal with!
Conversely, the ability to identify and neutralize depression quickly are two of the most valuable skills any entrepreneur or marketer could possibly acquire. They empower you to add scores more productive and profitable hours, days, and weeks to your year.
In my experience, depression comes from three places…
1. Too many drugs, so little time
When I say "drugs," I’m referring to my three personal favorites: (1) Grey Goose, (2) Starbucks, and (3) Marlboro Lights.
Once upon a time, I could pretty much party for 48 hours straight and never pay the piper. I could do Friday and Saturday at Sloppy Joe’s, ride the 14 or 15 hours home from Key West, and still show up for work bright and bushy-tailed first thing Monday morning.
These days, not so much. My 54-year-old body demands at least 72 hours to get over a weekend like that. And it puts me through a period of pretty intense chemical mopery before my wife, friends, total strangers, the local constabulary, my lawyer, and my creative muse begin speaking to me again.
Goes without saying: Losing 72 hours of creative time each week would make it nearly impossible for me to continue living the comfortable life to which I’ve become accustomed. And so I’ve been forced into a life of relative abstinence – punctuated, of course, by the occasional not-so-graceful swan dive off the wagon at vacation time.
Caffeine and nicotine are something else altogether. I can’t walk, speak, or think until I’ve had a couple of mugs of Joe in the morning. Problem is, it’s 2:00 p.m. before I know it, and by then, my get-up-and-go has got up and skedaddled.
And of course, it’s even worse if I’m inhaling nicotine – an infamous depressant – with all that coffee.
What’s the solution? The dreaded "M" word: Moderation.
On the plus side, there is a mood-brightening drug I can’t recommend highly enough – one that I absolutely hate getting.
I’m talking about endorphins. You get them by doing exercise: swimming, walking, running, that kind of stuff.
Work out for two weeks in the morning before you go to work, and you’ll be absolutely amazed at how much happier you are, how much more productive you become, and how much more moolah you rake in!
2. Lies your brain tells you
Has some terrible thing happened that gives you the right to be depressed? The promotion you just knew would make you a gazillion bucks flopped flatter than a flapjack? You’re broker than a sailor after shore leave, and the bill collectors are calling non-stop?
Hey – I’ve been there. It sucks.
But it doesn’t mean you have to suffer from depression-related brain-block, too!
The fact is, you get to choose how you feel in response to just about anything that happens to you.
See, everything that happens to you passes through a little "belief filter" in your brain – a conviction you’ve come to hold about yourself and/or the world around you.
These filters can be positive – as in "I’m brilliant," "I’m a winner," "I always come out smelling like a rose"…
… or they can be negative – as in "I’m a dope, a fraud," "I’m a loser," "Everything I touch turns to crapola."
Here’s the golden key: Nearly all the belief filters we have are utter nonsense.
The objective truth is, nobody is always a winner or a loser… creative or dull… brilliant or a dunce.
So the next time depression has you creatively hog-tied, try this…
First, identify the negative thought that triggered your lousy mood.
Then, ask yourself, "Is that thought valid?" (99.9% of the time it is not!)
And then ask yourself, "Is the belief filter that triggered that negative thought valid?" (Again: Almost never.)
Finally, ask yourself, "How should I change that belief about myself and/or the world to bring it in line with reality?"
You’ll be amazed at how quickly even the lousiest mood evaporates in the blinding light of the objective truth.
3. Self-obsession
I learned this simple fact of life many years ago – and re-learn it all the time. In fact, you could say it was my guiding principle for launching The Total Package e-zine last year.
The simple fact is, when my focus is on others’ well-being, I’m happier.
Conversely, I notice that when I’m trying to find things that will make me happy – new toys, vacations, etc. – I’m actually less happy.
So where’s your focus? Are you obsessed with your own feelings and the state of your life? If so, there’s a good chance those feelings are not positive ones.
Try doing something to improve someone else’s life today. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your mood lifts!
[Ed. Note: Clayton Makepeace has spent the last 35 years creating direct-mail, Internet, and print promotions that have sold well over $1 billion worth of products. Plus, as a direct-marketing consultant and copywriter, he’s helped four major direct-marketing firms at least quadruple sales and profits to well over $100 million per year each. Clayton publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package (www.makepeacetotalpackage.com) to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Check it out.
For dozens of goal-setting strategies that can help you bypass stress and other obstacles to your success, sign up for ETR’s Total Success Achievement Program. Learn more here.]
I’ve never seen short marketing copy win in a heads-up test against long copy.
Just this year, I’ve tested several #10 envelope packages with 8-page sales letters against 8.5" x 11" self-mailers with 24 pages of text. The long copy beat the short copy by 50 percent to 70 percent each time.
However, the cost that goes along with longer copy plays a big role in this debate. If your profit margin is smaller, you may have no choice but to go with shorter copy. And if your market is best reached with print ads, TV, or radio, you’re also limited.
My philosophy: Write about the benefits of your product until you run out of things to talk about. Then go back and make your copy as tight as a drum. Then let the sales message TELL YOU how long or short it wants to be!
So long as you’re speaking to your prospective customer’s self-interest… so long as you’re deftly stroking his dominant emotions about the subject at hand… and so long as the copy is clear, concise, even fun to read, he’s going to stay with you and give you a chance to make the sale.
Copywriters, marketing professionals, and business owners often ask me, "How do I tell the difference between good sales copy and bad sales copy?" It’s an important question, and getting it right can make the difference between a mediocre response rate and hitting an out-of-the-park homerun.
To start, it helps to understand that consumers almost never buy things because it’s logical. The vast majority of purchases are made because they satisfy an emotional need. So, great sales copy must connect with your prospect’s most powerful emotions – positive or negative – and demonstrate how reading the copy and buying the product will fulfill or assuage those desires or fears.
Your sales message is like a chain designed to meet the reader at the point of his need, and then lead him, step by step, link by link, to the order form. This chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The minute you lose the "tingle factor," the reader gets bored and the chain breaks. Your sales copy is only as strong as its strongest link. The more compelling you make each section of your sales letter, the greater your response and average order will be.
Sales copy has the power to make or break a direct-marketing campaign, a product launch – and a marketer’s career. That said, here are 21 tips to make your copy stronger, your ads more effective, and help you create winning direct-mail and Internet promotions.
[Ed. Note: Clayton Makepeace has spent the last 35 years creating direct-mail, Internet, and print promotions that have sold well over $1 billion worth of products. Plus, as a direct-marketing consultant and copywriter, he’s helped four major direct-marketing firms at least quadruple sales and profits to well over $100 million per year each.
Clayton publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine, The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Click here to check it out.]