09.13.07
Posted in Writing Action-Based Copy at 10:55 am by Steve
How One Client Recovered His $1,500 Copywriting Investment Several Times Over In the First Year
He didn’t think it was possible. A real estate client came to me just over a year ago. His Web site just wasn’t producing the leads he had hoped for. Visiting his site the first time, it took less than a minute to find out why his site was sucking wind.
The opening page was attractive. It showed a large picture of an attractive home, with the real estate agent photoshopped in. The page contained a few graphic links to other portions of his site, but that was about it for the home page. He was right. His site needed help… badly. It was a definate "fixer-upper."
What was conspicuously missing? Content. This client had his site rubber-stamped out by a company that created hundreds of sites with an almost identical look as part of a special real estate agent package. They also sold leads at a premium that turned out to be almost completely worthless. Their "all-in-one" solution had so far netted him zero dollars in sales, but the service cost about $1300 per month.
"This Old Web Site"
The way the provider put the site together was unfriendly to search engines. Worse yet, it didn’t trigger a single emotion. It provided no logical arguments in favor of his service over any other. It didn’t entice one into reading more. Before working on a paid search or search engine optimization campaign, I convinced him to give me a shot at increasing the conversion rate of the site.
I get about $1.50 per minute for consulting services. Let me give you some free advice. Before pouring dollars into bringing additional traffic to your site, make sure the site converts visitors into traffic. Even with "non-paid" search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, don’t be deceived into thinking that it doesn’t cost you.
If you have an SEO expert optimize your Web site, expect to pay $75-$125 per hour for their services. Besides, if they optimize content which doesn’t convert visitors to leads or sales, you’ll just have to pay them to optimize new content when you later replace your old content with more effective sales copy.
When your message presents the most compelling reasons to do business with you in a way that gets measurable results, only then does it make sense to pay to bring traffic to your Web site.
You Can’t Get Your Audience to Do Anything Before You Know What Keeps Them Up at Night
Before writing a single sentence of Web content, I must understand my audience… better than they know themselves. I began by doing what we call an "audience analysis." For each major audience we want to speak to (and get action from), we determine their primary emotional buying triggers.
In short, we root out their past frustrations when buying a similar product. For this client, his product was real estate. But understand, only on the surface are homes what someone buys from a real estate agent.
My wife and I had just been through the painful process of buying a new home and selling our old one. We had a bad experience buying our present home. We knew all to well how frustrating it was dealing with agents who try to work both sides of the deal, yet present themselves as fairly representing both parties. We had experienced the pain of agents who would not respond in time to make a deal happen, and so on.
We then compared the frustrations and basic needs of real estate buyers with the services and personality of this client. Alan (the agent) is an older gentleman with a grandfatherly nature. His personality is disarming. His style is a little more laid back than other real estate agents. Some home buyers wouldn’t like Alan’s relaxed approach, but others would find it a breath of fresh air when contrasted to the more typical cut-throat agents.
Messaging Laser-Targeted at Your Most Profitable Audience
This brings us to a main point. Your content MUST match the product and services you’re selling. If I had written content with a hard-hitting feel, it might have produced more leads (the goal of Alan’s site). However, they would have been the wrong leads. Once they met Alan, they would have found a complete disconnect between the aggressive tone and message that attracted them in the first place and the gentle man they met. This consistency is absolutely vital if you want sales, and not just leads.
We determined that once a home met the basic needs of the family (number of bedrooms, how many bathrooms, etc.), that typically the wife decided which home to buy. The husband normally was most involved in the practical decision of whether the home would fit the family’s needs. But once husband and wife had narrowed their choices to a short list of options that made sense, the wife had the most influence over which one they selected.
With this knowledge, we designed the site to appeal primarily to a woman. We found that often, the wife did the initial work of choosing a real estate agent to work with, so we targeted our message at her.
If You Attempt to Speak to Everyone, You Reach No One
All effective marketing begins by creating a profile of the most likely audience to buy your product and speaking to them. There are generalizations that must be made, because you’re not speaking to a single person. You speak to an audience. For women, those generalizations include that they are more in touch with their emotional side. Men also act from emotion, but they feel more need to justify it with logic.
Don’t let yourself get upset by these generalizations, even though they aren’t always true. For example, my wife typically makes very logical choices, while I make more decisions based on how I feel. But when I craft sales messages, I create content which targets the greatest percentage of my audience I can.
So I created sales messaging for Alan’s Web site which targeted emotion, with enough logic not to turn off those who make decisions more based on logic. Here’s a portion of one page I wrote for the site:
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Finding that Elusive “Perfect Home” For Your Family
How do you know when you’ve found just the right home? You know you found the right home when you’re just as happy in it years after you purchase it as you were the day it became yours. When you put down deep roots and would never consider moving again, that doesn’t come by accident.
Because a home is so much more than a house, you need a realtor with a bigger goal than just making a sale. To find just the right place your family will be pleased to call home long into the future, your realtor must have as his first goal finding a home that meets not only your needs, but the way you want to live life.
How can a realtor find your perfect home? First, he must get to know you personally. It’s about the relationship. Pretty much any realtor will ask you how many bedrooms you need. They focus on what a home must have to fit your needs, but selecting the right home goes so far beyond that. The right one matches your personality, your style, who you really are. Whether contemporary, upscale, or the perfect place to hang a tree swing from, your realtor must know YOU, not just your needs.
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Alan’s Competitive "Unfair Advantage" - Effective Sales Copy
Effective sales copy is a cost-efficient way to differentiate your business from your competitor’s on the Web. In fact, if you’re reselling a product, as with real estate, you likely have few ways to stand out from your competition. Often, you’re limited to these factors:
- Price
- Selection
- Service
- Messaging
Here’s your second free piece of advice. Nothing will kill your profit faster than competing on price. Unless you’re Walmart, and can afford to buy in huge quantities and sell at deep discount, cutting your price hurts your profitability.
Let’s say that you sell retail products at 20% margin. When you offer a 10% discount, you didn’t lose 10% of the profits you make at full price. You lose a full half of your profits. And how often do jump off the couch and excitedly burn rubber on the way to the store when you find a 10% discount? Besides, you don’t have to compete on price. You can differentiate yourself in other areas.
For Alan, he couldn’t discount his prices. After all, it wasn’t his own home he was selling. Any agent would get about the same price. He also had about the same selection as every other agent out there, selling homes off the multiple listing service. His service would likely not be that different from his competitors. He would show homes and write up offers, the same as they would. He might respond more quickly or be more friendly, but his services wouldn’t differ fundamentally from his competition.
So the only way for him to stand out as significantly different in the sea of real estate agents (I can find a half dozen at most networking events I attend) is in his message. In planning Alan’s marketing strategy, I gave crafting an effective message top priority. I expected it would give him an edge. What I didn’t expect was how his customers would identify the message on his Web site as the single deciding factor that led to their choosing him as an agent.
How This $1,500 Investment Turned Into $11,000 in Less Than a Year
Over the course of one year, four separate clients specifically said that the reason they chose Alan was what they read, his sales copy. In two of these, they read his bio alongside many other agents in the area and chose his service. In fact, perhaps the strongest indicator that his sales copy was spot-on for his target audience was plagiarism. Real estate agents stole his sales copy outright to use in their own promotions.
In an industry where selling a home nets $2,000 to $4,000 for the selling agent, I conservatively estimate that the sales copy Alan invested in yielded him $11,000 in his first year. He spent under $1,500 for Online Marketing Advisor to write his sales copy. I wish I could get his one-year 730% return on investment on my retirement portfolio!
What Is "Copywriting" Anyway?
So if you’re looking for ways to make your service stand out, consider improving the quality of your sales message. If the person writing your email campaigns, Web content, and direct mail doesn’t have extensive training in copywriting, you’re not getting the results you could have. "Copywriting" is a term that is not widely used, much less understood. I spoke with the head of the communications at a major university and he didn’t know exactly what the term meant either.
Copywriting is simply persuasion in writing. It’s purpose is not to entertain. It’s not meant to inform, though it may educate during the process of persuading. Copywriting’s sole purpose is to bring a prospect closer to an action which has value to you, such as generating a lead or producing a sale. When your writer knows this language of persuasion, you’re way ahead of your competition, who likely invested little in a specific strategy to reach their audience with a targeted message.
On the upside, most competing Web sites, email campaigns, and direct response mail stinks. Use a qualified copywriter, and you’ll reach your audience in a way that generates leads, response, and sales.
-Steve Myers
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03.06.07
Posted in Writing Action-Based Copy at 2:35 pm by Steve
You’ve been there. You go to a web site and immediately you’re bombarded with a blatant sales page. Don’t get me wrong. Many sites only exist to sell something. Your customers understand this, but they respond better when you warm them into the sale. Let me explain.
Think about it. When going on a first date, how do you begin? You go out to dinner or a movie. You try to get to know your date. What you probably don’t want to do is try to begin the evening with a kiss.
Why at the end? Rest assured your date probably knows you might want some sign of affection if things go well. They know this at the beginning of the date.
Warm Into the Sale
The same applies to your web site. Does your site go for the sale too early? It comes as no surprise to your web site visitor that you’re likely to ask for a sale. Just make sure you warm them up first.
A sale is the natural result when you present your product or service in such a way that you show more value than cost. That’s "Sales 101." So don’t ask for the sale before at least some segment of your readers are likely to be ready to buy or take some other desired action.
First Impressions
As with a date, you begin by showing yourself in the best light possible. Don’t show up in tattered jeans if you’re going out to a nice restaurant. You’re probably thinking, "Well, duh!" So how does this relate to your web page?
It continues to surprise me to find even well-funded corporate sites with unattractive designs that look like a high school student’s first web page. For many of your future customers, your web site is their first contact with you. It’s their first impression.
So why do so many web sites practically scream to their viewers that they were done "on the cheap?" Sometimes there just isn’t the budget for a nice corporate look… or so one might think.
You can get great site templates at Template Monster. The templates include all the web programming and images you need for even the most junior of webmasters to make your site look great.
Most site templates cost between $60 and $150. If you’ve worked with a professional designer before, you realize many of them will charge that much for a single hour of work. In short, you can afford a great looking web site on almost any budget.
Get to the Point
OK, so now that we have first impressions out of the way, we move on to conversation. On your web site, you can’t afford to waste time on "small talk." You have your reader’s attention. Don’t waste it.
Few people would walk out on a date in the first few minutes because they didn’t say anything interesting. Don’t count on that courtesy from your web site visitors. There’s absolutely NO pressure to hang around if your site doesn’t speak to their needs right away.
Studies have shown time and again that if you don’t get your web visitor’s attention in the first three seconds, they’re gone. But who can really blame them? After all, they don’t even know you yet.
Most visitors come to your web site the first time directly from Google or some other search engine. Consider the context. They viewed a very brief description of what your page is about among hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other options. Grab their attention before they’re gone!
Capture Their Attention
Getting your reader’s attention is simple when you understand your audience. Ask yourself, "Why are they here? What are they trying to learn or what problem do they want to solve?" Make sure they see a headline, graphic, or other element that speaks to their needs right away. Remember, three seconds… the clock is ticking.
Describe the Problem Your Product or Service Solves
Before going for the throat and asking for the sale, describe the problem or challenge. Why? You’ll come across as siding with your reader. It’s your chance to play to their emotions, especially their past frustrations.
As my experience has made undeniable, "People buy on emotion and justify the purchase with facts." You can really only sell on one of two benefits, both of whch are more emotional than mental:
- Avoidance of pain
- The promise of enjoyment
Of these two, the first is the strongest. People work far harder to avoid pain than they do for enjoyment or pleasure. So describe for them the discomfort or inconvenience they now experience without the solution you offer. In words, make them play out in their minds past frustrations they experienced without your product or service.
Present Your Problem as the Best Possible Solution
Now that you have their full attention, make your case. Put your best selling points forward as soon as possible. Give compelling reasons why your product can solve their problems better than your competition even could.
Keep in mind that you’re building up to the sale. Each sentence should make it more and more clear that your product or service is the best one to solve their problem. Once you have presented your most compelling reasons and built value in your reader’s mind, you’re ready to ask for the sale.
Ask for the Sale
If you’ve engaged your reader’s emotions and given them your best reasons to buy, they’ll be looking for your call to action.
Make it easy for them to buy. Show them what they’ll get and how much they’ll pay for your product or service.
Above all, make it crystal clear what you want them to do. If you want readers to click on a link, make that obvious. If they are to sign up for a newsletter, give them a form to fill out.
The Wrap-Up
If you’ve successfully made a good first impression, called out to your audience, engaged their emotions, presented your case, and provided a clear call to action, you’re way ahead of the majority of web pages out there. Follow this natural progression and you won’t come across as pushy. Your sales pitch won’t be unwelcome.
Whatever you do, don’t waste your readers’ time with your mission statements, company history, or any of the useless information that drag so many ineffective sites down.
You have one chance to make your first (and only) impression. Use it wisely and you’ll have a much better chance for a "second date" with your customer.
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02.20.07
Posted in Writing Action-Based Copy at 2:22 pm by Steve
The true power of testimonials is often misunderstood and underestimated.
Why should you solicit a testimonial? The most obvious reason is to help convince others that your product or service is exceptional. Half right.
Yes, it’s true that when you see favorable opinions about a person or a company, you tend to think better of them. It’s natural. But that’s only half the story. The second part is more subtle, and more powerful. Let me illustrate.
During the Korean war, the Chinese communists running American POW camps were extremely effective. They could get patriotic Americans to do and say things they never would have thought of doing at the start. How did they get them to crack?
They got them to write. Robert B. Cialdini explains how in his book, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." At first, the Chinese asked innocent-enough sounding questions like "Is America perfect?" The obvious answer came quickly. "No, America is good, but not perfect."
"OK, write it down then," they’d be told. Here’s where the first chink in the American’s armor was exposed. Writing it down makes three crucial things possible:
- Writing (as opposed to just saying something) creates an undeniable record of what was expressed.
- You can use what was written to convince others (how testimonials are traditionally used).
- People come to believe what they themselves write.
The third point is the one which I didn’t fully grasp about testimonials. We judge ourselves based on our actions and what we state to others about ourselves and what we believe.
Have you ever been in an argument you felt you were losing? I have caught myself justifying my opinion, even when it was clear the evidence wasn’t in my favor. Why? We want to act consistently with what we have said. It’s even more powerful when we write it down.
So how does this apply to testimonials? Simple. When someone writes a testimonial about your service, first they have created an undeniable record that they feel a certain way. Second, you can use this testimonial to convince others you have a great product or service.
The third, and most important point is that those who write the testimonial convince themselves you have a great service even more by the very act of writing it down. They commit themselves to the statement.
When the Chinese communists coerced American POW’s to write down that America is not perfect, it was powerful. The Chinese took this statement and showed it to other Americans.
When asked why they wrote that America wasn’t perfect, the coerced POW would say, "Because it isn’t!" Because there was an undeniable record of what they said, there was no backing out. They found themselves defending "their" position. The act of writing it down made it not a position, but their position.
This powerful knowledge must be used ethically and responsibly. In getting a testimonial from a customer or client, understand how you effect their attitudes. You strengthen their commitment to use your product or service.
It’s your responsibility and mine to make sure we provide a service worthy of their praise. When we do so, it’s not manipulation. We are engaged in spreading the word about an excellent product or service. It’s a lot to live up to.
Businesses cheat themselves when they underestimate the power of testimonials to promote the excellent products and services they provide. If you haven’t harnessed the power of testimonials up to now, commit to yourself to it. Better yet, write it down. 
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02.01.07
Posted in Writing Action-Based Copy at 6:25 pm by Steve
You send out a mailer and get no response. Your Web site doesn’t convert traffic into sales or new customers. What’s going wrong?
Getting action online or off happens naturally when you:
- Reach those most receptive to your message
- Speak to their emotional triggers (what they care about)
- Give them a reason to act now
Target Audience
Before you can begin to create sales copy that gets results, start with your audience. Know who they are. Know what they want.
Get personal. Before you begin to write sales copy, try this. Picture in your mind your ideal target customer. If you’re selling life insurance, maybe your perfect contact is a middle age man with 3 kids.
You want your writing to sound like a conversation between two friends. You can’t really picture some nebulous "audience" in your mind. You can picture an individual. As you write, speak to this person’s needs.
Speak to Readers’ Emotional Triggers
What’s an emotional trigger? It embodies the emotional reasons you can use to move people to action. Here’s the 3 most important you’ll use in effectively reaching your audience "where they live."
- Frustrations - In dealing with competing services offering your product or when doing without your product or service, what has frustrated or angered this person?
- Fears - What things is this person afraid he or she will lose if they don’t buy your product or service?
- Ambitions - What goals does this person have which you can show your product or service will help make happen?
It’s a simple truth none of us want to admit to. We buy what we want, not what we need. Want is emotional. Need is mental and practical.
If your writing sounds like some dry list of features, you keep your readers on a detached mental level. Benefits, on the other hand, embody why they should care.
If you’re selling computers, a feature might read, "3.0 GHz Dual Core Processor." To a computer fanatic, this means something. To you and I, it only has any meaning in comparison to another computer with only a "2.6 GHZ Dual Core Processor." Yawn!
Now compare this with "The fastest processor on the market today - so you can play all the latest games." For the average computer user, which has more meaning? The specific speed of the processor gives a feature of the computer. But the second example tells you why you should care. Effective copy is based on benefits, not features.
Call to Action
Lastly, effective copy calls to action. Make it clear what you want your reader to do. Maybe you want them to pick up the phone and call. You may want them to buy something online or sign up for your newsletter. Whatever it is you want your reader to do, make it crystal clear.
In short, don’t make them have to think about what to do next. When they have to consider options, they almost always choose something other than your most desired action. Never rely on your Web site’s navigation to provide direction. Lead your reader by the hand. You’ll convert far more site visitors into buyers, customers, and leads.
Many salespeople will tell you that for most sales presentations, you have to attempt to close the sale more than once. The Web is no different. That’s why successful Web copy has calls to action all through the content.
I’m a huge fan of long copy. Not all my readers are. So when I create a long sales piece, I’ll put a call to action about a third of the way through, one at the two thirds point, and one at the end. I tracked the results of where on the page people clicked and got a real shock when I tallied up the results.
I assumed most people would read all the way to the bottom. I figured that if I kept putting good reasons to buy and made it interesting, they’d keep reading. What I actually found was that on my sales letter, a full 40% clicked on the first link. 10% clicked on the second. Only 50% of those who clicked on my call to action read all the way to the bottom of the sales piece and clicked the link there.
Wrapping It All Up
To get the most measurable action out of your writing, you must:
- Reach those most receptive to your message
- Speak to their emotional triggers (what they care about)
- Give them a reason to act now
Follow this pattern and you won’t believe the improvement in how people react to your message. Learning all the specifics of how to do this in your writing is certainly beyond the scope of this article. I’ve studied this process for years and I’m still continually learning.
Online Marketing Advisor has helped many clients to increase their sales by 50% to 400%. The number one thing that makes the difference is the quality of your conversation with your customer. Online, that conversation is dramatically improved with effective copy.
Attractive or Effective?
A prettier site won’t speak to your audience as well as better sales copy. Yet when many clients come to us wanting to improve their online presence, they focus first on the look of the site.
OK, if your site looks like a high-school student created it, you may need a new look. But I’ll go so far as to say that some of the best-selling Web sites I have seen out there have a very simple look, but a deadly-accurate message.
Go to a famous art museum like the Louve in Paris. I guarantee that as someone looks at a famous painting like the Mona Lisa, you’ll never hear them exclaim, "Nice frame!"
On your Web site, the look of the site is just the frame. Your content is what people have come to see. So give them content that speaks to them and their needs, greeds, and fears of loss. You’ll see dramatic results.
-Steve Myers
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01.30.07
Posted in Writing Action-Based Copy at 9:03 pm by Steve
You’ve seen it before. You visit a corporate Web site seeking answers. What you get is a mission statement. "We at XYZ company believe that…. snore!" You lost me at "mission statement."
But once in a while, things are different. You stumble across the occasional site by the rare company that "gets it." Gone is the impersonal, almost robotic tone. The conversation is inviting. It sounds like one friend talking to another.
The Starbuck’s Principle
Let me introduce a priceless test I run my content through. I call it "The Starbuck’s Principle." It simply states:
The Starbuck’s Principle of Writing Compelling Copy
"If the copy you write doesn’t sound like something you might overhear at a Starbuck’s, it isn’t personal enough!"
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99% of the sites out there don’t sound like a conversation. They may sound like a sales brochure. It might have the tone of a corporate meeting or press release. But they certainly don’t sound like two humans engaged in natural conversation.
Break the Rules
You may have noticed my writing style would call down the wrath of most English teachers. I begin sentences with "and", "but", and "because." You may even find a sentence ending in a preposition.
When do I break the rules? Simple. If doing so makes what I write sound more like a conversation than a more formal style would, I toss aside formal style guides. I risk the painful looks of my editors. I speak from the top of my mind as if speaking to a friend.
I force myself not to go back and edit my writing much. The more careful planning you put into each sentence, the less natural it will sound. I’m sure I ruffle the feathers of academic writers and journalists.
I’ll risk that, because the only way to never offend with what you say is to say nothing. And I’m guessing your message is too important not to be heard.
-Steve Myers
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