Words that Sell
Words Sell Only When They Persuade By Design
Pick any sales venue. It won't matter if you sell in person, in a sales letter, or on the web. When you make a sale, it's because the words you use are effective. If the sale didn't happen, chances are, the words you used failed to connect emotionally with your prospect and didn't convey more benefit than the price of your product or service.
Under-dress your best salesperson and you've still got a chance at making the sale. But put a salesperson who lacks the courage or know-how to close the sale in the best suit money can buy and you don't have a chance. Presentation certainly helps, but your success in any area of business communication comes down to using the right words to convey benefit to your audience.
So who writes the words you use to sell in emails, brochures, or on your web site? Here's a few people NOT to use and why your message will under-perform if you do:
- Traditional Writers
- The President of Your Company
- Your Webmaster
Strike One - Traditional Writers
If the person writing your sales message graduated with an English degree, when it comes to writing results-based copy, they've got some unlearning to do. In college, they'll teach you to write for one of two purposes:
- To Entertain
- To Inform
When you send out a sales letter, you certainly aren't aiming to entertain your reader. In fact, even informing your potential customer doesn't mean a thing to you unless it takes them one step closer to becoming a customer.
Sales letters have a single purpose... to sell. If they don't sell, they failed. So when selecting someone to write results-based sales messages, you don't really want a writer. What you want is a salesperson, one who can convince your prospect to take an action that has value to you. This salesperson just happens to sell in print or on a web site.
It's the results you're after. It could be a direct sale you want, collecting a prospect's information for a follow-up contact, or even getting them to pick up the phone and call you. But you have some business objective in mind when you send out a sales letter or put up a web page. Unless you achieve an objective you value, why should you care whether you entertained or informed your prospect?
Traditional writers simply don't have the sales know-how to get results. I've never found a skilled copywriter yet who hasn't done a great deal of in-person sales.
"Copywriting" refers to writing sales copy that effectively calls to action. And the sad truth is, they don't teach it in school. I know. I tried to find effective copywriting courses in many colleges. I didn't find a single university teaching to sell in print. In speaking with English professors, most of them didn't even know the meaning of the word "copywriting."
Strike Two - The President of Your Company
If you're the president of your company, let me apologize in advance. But the fact is, you're probably too close to your subject matter to speak about it in a sufficiently objective way to get results.
Besides, odds are, writing sales copy isn't what you trained for. You know how to run your business and make it profitable. You probably know your product or service better than anyone. If on top of all that, you have extensive copywriting training, you don't need me at all.
But if the fact that this sentence began with a conjunction bothers you, this just illustrates how the rules of effective sales copy have nothing to do with the rule of writing they taught you in school. Far from it.
Sales copy breaks old rules at times and contains countless rules of its own. Copywriting that gets results would gray your English teacher's hair. But then again, I'll bet when you send out a sales letter, you'd rather make money than use "proper" english. After all, it's not literature. It's marketing.
Strike Three - Your Webmaster
This one hits close to home, because I've done a lot of web work. In fact, here's a bit of irony for you. Several years ago, I worked a traditional job as a webmaster. When started working there, I told my boss that I don't "do sales" and I won't write sales copy. "Put me in a quiet place and let me do my work," I told my boss. Then they did something evil to me.
My boss offered me commission on online sales and turned me to the marketing "dark side" forever. Suddenly, I cared a lot about how effectively my sales message turned readers into buyers.
I looked everywhere for courses, training, or books that could teach me how to write persuasive sales copy. Even more frustrating was how everyone who claimed to know how to sell things online had only sold one thing... the very course they wanted me to buy!
When I couldn't find reliable instruction on writing persuasive online copy, I looked to the only proven authorities who make their living selling with words... direct mail. Some call it "junk mail," but the truth is, those sales letters you toss into the trash every day consistently make billions of dollars a year for the companies who send them. If they didn't, they'd stop paying to fill your mailbox with them.
I began to implement the concepts developed over the last hundred years of direct mail to content I created for the web... and it worked! Not at first, of course. I wrote hundreds of articles, most of them "stealth" sales letters posing as informational articles (people don't want to feel like you're pitching them on the web).
Some of these messages increased sales through the roof. Others fizzled. I applied the principles I learned to improve my sales batting average until the successes far outnumbered the failures.
But the likelihood that your webmaster will put in the hundreds of hours to learn to write sales copy that dramatically increase sales isn't good. But don't blame them. It's just not what they're trained for.
Copywriters - What Makes them Different?
Effective copywriters come from a sales background. They know how to write well, and know when to break the rules. More importantly, they know persuasion architecture. Good sales letters follow a predictable pattern that's been fine-tuned over decades of testing and measuring results. You simply can't afford to learn by trial and error. The cost of a failed promotion is just too high. It can cost you not only sales, but your very reputation.
Great copywriters live by this fundamental rule: "People buy on emotion, and justify the purchase with facts." They activate the emotional and cognitive triggers that put readers on a slippery slide that pulls them almost uncontrollably towards the offer. They know how to close the sale, so your reader gives their contact information, picks up the phone, or opens their wallet.
Sales letters that cause your phone to ring off the hook and fatten your wallet are no accident. When Joseph Sugarman began to sell Blue Blocker sunglasses by mail, people thought he had lost it. How could you paint a mental picture of what you'd see with words alone? Yet he sold hundreds of thousands of them in magazine ads, millions of them on television.
The magic was in the words he used, whether written in an advertisement or described on television. Joseph Sugarman didn't sell the sunglasses. His words did.
Consistent Sales Success Stems from Proven Patterns
Your best salesperson doesn't reinvent their message with every client. They discover powerful words, quotes, and closes that they learn to use effectively to push a prospect closer to a sale. They use the same basic sales presentation, adapting it to their audience. And your product or services is probably not the first thing they learned to sell.
According to Zig Ziglar, successful sales is 10% product knowledge and 90% sales knowledge. In other words, proven sales strategies will outsell knowledge of the product by a factor of nine to one.
Then it probably won't surprise you to hear that selling with the written word depends far more on the ability to write compelling sales copy than the knowledge the copywriter has about the product. Of course, you can't sell a product without knowing a fair amount about it. But what I want to stress is how proven techniques for selling with the written word is key to making the sale.
The formula for writing effective sales copy isn't a secret... when you know where to look. In fact, I'll give you a few of the techniques I use in writing sales copy that gets results.
Writing Winning Sales Copy
First of all, you must begin with a strong headline. It has to capture the reader's attention. It should convey a benefit. The best ones also arouse curiosity.
Then you'll make a bold promise, which the copy proves you'll deliver. Use testimonials, statistics that support your claims, and case studies. Research extensively to find interesting facts to keep your reader interested. Use a "false close" to tease the reader. Finally, close by summing up how your product makes good on the bold promise you made at the beginning.
Ok, now that you know the secrets to successful sales copy, do you feel ready to write your first sales piece? Are you confident that it will turn readers into buyers?
Let me put it another way. I'll wager that you know how each of the pieces on a chess board move. A king can move one space in any direction, a bishop can only move diagonally, and so on. Does that knowledge fully prepare you to compete in a chess tournament? Of course not.
Knowing how the pieces move doesn't tell you which one to move or where to move it to win. Chess masters learn the opening moves that millions of chess games played over the centuries have proven to work well. They study hundreds or even thousands of games played by the masters. Finally, chess masters learn end-game strategies that lead to "checkmate."
Chess masters learn by actually playing thousands of games, learning from each one. When they win, it's the culmination of countless wins (and almost as many losses). It doesn't happen by chance.
It's the same with copywriting. I don't need to hide the rules of the game because what you get when you hire me to write your sales copy goes way beyond the basic principles. If you've got the time and patience to learn the craft yourself, email me and I'll happily give you the sources I learned from.
But you may not have time to spend hundreds of hours writing, testing, and measuring your sales copy. Considering the time it takes to teach one of your employees to write effective sales copy or to learn it yourself, I suspect you'll find our fees very reasonable.
Call Your Readers to Action
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