Hands down one of the greatest if not THE greatest books on sales writing. If you had to read one book and one book only it would have to be this one. It’s really a step-by-step guide without the fluff. And what I mean by fluff is the crap that most books put in to fill their stuff. This book doesn’t have any of that and for good reason. On we go.
You can use copywriting even when you're planning out your flyer distribution service.
Step-by-Step Sales Letter Writing
Understanding your customer is the first topic of the book and probably because its the most important. The mailing lists that you use should have several pieces of information such as age, income, hobbies, and even political affiliations.
The next step is to try and get into the head of the customer. What do they want the most? What is the most pressing issue in their life?
Once you find this out, you have to fully understand your offer better than anyone. This should almost go without saying but thinking that you already know enough is a flaw.
Know the benefit of your product. Your customer doesn’t really care about how your window cleaning services use specific types of cleaners.
They want to know that it’ll make the storefront more presentable and give it a cleaner look for the pedestrians passing by.
After you’ve found out what your product/service can do. It’s time to find out what it CAN’T do and address it. The reason why is you want to talk about any and every objection a customer might have. We’ve all heard that saying “if it’s too good to be true..” you know the rest.
Direct Mail Formatting
There’s things that must happen for someone to be converted from unknown prospect to customer.
- The message you send must be delivered. There’s a few things that can go wrong here. Post office might screw up. Dog ate the mail. You name it.
- Now the recipient is sorting through their mail. Whatever looks like junk will probably be thrown in the trash, where it belongs! Here’s where a lot can go wrong and the design of your letter can play a huge role in whether your letter gets opened.
- They’ve decided that your letter can be of importance or use. They open it and take a 5 seconds MAXIMUM glance and it’s at this point we have to hook them.
People say that a hand addressed envelope looks more personable and less likely to be thought of as junk mail. It also changes with the target market. Marketing to a doctor is completely different than marketing to a homeowner. Strategy plays a huge part.
The process below is how to convert your prospects and it can easily transfer in person sales as well.
- Attention: You grab their attention by speaking about something that they value and benefit from. There’s really no other way. Most bad sales letters start talking about the features that their product/service offers but it doesn’t relate back to the prospect. Using headlines is the number one way to grab attention and any sales letter or advertisement should have a good one.
- Interest: You create the interest right after you grab their attention. Give them just enough information to want to learn more and keep reading the letter.
- Desire: You create a feeling of desire when you create an emotional image for the prospect. Get them to connect emotionally to your offer and you have a small window of opportunity to push them through.
- Action: Always have a call to action. They might have to call in, visit a website, or send a letter back. Whatever it is maybe it has to be urgent and addressed clearly.
Going deeper into the methodologies, we can talk about what will ultimately motivate someone to take our desired action.
Selling Strategies
Dan Kennedy outlines three strategies that you can use that will motivate a prospect to buy. We’ll outline them below with a brief description of each. Keep in mind this isn’t the be all and end all of the selling strategies but if they work for one of the greatest copywriters of all time then they should work for us too.
Strategy 1: Fear motivation
The first strategy that Dan talks about is seen through a lot of sales and psychology literature. Its because it works. There’s a consensus that people move away from pain and towards anything that benefits them. It's a basic human principle. Here’s the step-by-step as detailed by Dan Kennedy:
Step 1: Identify the problem.
It doesn’t matter whether the prospect knows they have the problem. What matters is that you present it in a way that it affects them.
Step 2: Inject Emotion
Now that they’ve identified with the problem, you have to get them riled up about it. This can be fear, anger, resentment, embarrassment, or a whole other slew of emotions.
Step 3: Now that they are in an emotional state, we have to present our solution. Your customer is furious right now and wants the answer to the problem. This is when we ask them to take action and if we do it at the right time, they will.
Strategy 2: Painting a Vision
The second strategy is based on telling the future. It isn’t what you’re thinking, fortune telling. If you can clearly paint a picture of the near future for a prospect you can get them to make some purchasing decisions. If you had to sell solar panels for homes you can talk about how electric bills will rise in the future and provide enough facts and statistics to back this up. In essence, you’re creating a problem and offering a solution in the form of a vision.
Strategy 3: Winners vs Losers
The third strategy is the winners and losers strategy. Basically, you outline statistics of people prospering or “winning” as opposed to a larger majority that is “losing”. No one wants to be a loser and no one wants to fall behind simply because they don’t know what they should be doing. In this case, the small minority “winners” are doing something related to your product or service which is giving them success.
If you want an introduction to advertising please click the link!
Advertising : Art or Science?
Advertising and marketing have been studied for so many years that they have been boiled down to a science. The goal is to test different variables and then adjust accordingly so that it is a continuous improvement.
One ad is created and then compared to another. The one that loses gets replaced by a more optimized version of the successful ad. What you get is a compounding effect on results.
The main point of advertising is to make sales. It is either profitable or not. It is a digital/print version of a salesman working at your company. Don’t cut it any slack and be sure that it performs to its highest potential, otherwise scrap it.
Targeting
If you were advertising lab coats, you wouldn’t be sending ads to a restaurant owner. Naturally, you’d be targeting doctor offices and laboratories. To make this process easier, think of your prospective buyer as a single person. Craft your ad around that person, not a collection of people you think are your buyers. By doing this you can rest assured that the ad will hook its intended audience.
Every single ounce of space on an ad is critical and the best ads leave no wasted space. Every single word has earned its place on that ad. The headline itself can increase or decrease an ads performance many times over. The headline should be the most important piece on an ad. It should be very clear and specific. Someone who comes across the ad should know just from the headline whether it pertains to them. Psychology plays a huge part in this because you can disqualify or qualify people from the headline
Law of Reciprocity
The best performing ads and salesmen do something that the average ones don’t. Simply put, they offer extreme value before they ask for anything in return. For example, if someone came to your door selling seafood and pressuring you to buy on the spot, wouldn’t you be defensive? On the other hand, imagine if someone came to your door and told you “try this seafood for dinner tonight on me and I’ll come back in a week to see if you liked it”. You’d feel obliged to reciprocate because you’ve been essentially given a gift.
The law of reciprocity will take effect in this part of the ad. We will offer extreme value that will be hard to pass up. In return, we gain the business.
Structuring an Ad
The length of the ad doesn’t have much to do with its success. There are buyers who like to know absolutely every excruciating detail of the product/service. Then there are buyers who act impulsively and on less information.
The takeaway from this is that you have one chance to get your reader. No one rereads an ad. Once someone decides the product/service isn’t for them, its unlikely the same ad will change their mind even if it appears in front of them again. Knowing this, our ads are targeting new customers in the hopes that they are the ones who would find some value from them.
Using Images in Ads
Photographs and art have their place in advertising. Whether it be to grab interest or spark curiosity. The mistake is that advertisers spend a ton of money to get the right image. They learn the hard way that the same space that you’re using for the picture is the same space that you can utilize to deliver a message in text. People say a picture is worth a thousand words. In advertising, a picture can sure say a lot but then you leave it up to the reader to grasp the meaning you’re trying to portray. Words leave no room for misinterpretation and for this reason we have to carefully consider every image.
If we don’t know whether we should use an image in our ad we should stick to some sounds principles. We should not try to entertain or amuse our readers. Our goal is to get them to become buyers in the most cost effective way as possible. Cost effectiveness being the secret ingredient. Lowering our cost to acquire a customer is advertising’s number one focus.
Pain vs Reward Psychology
When it comes to ads, we want people to feel the confidence that our product/service will deliver exactly what we advertise! For example, if we are selling a new brand of skin care products, we want our ad to show the benefits. Clearer skin, less wrinkles, etc. On the other hand, if we position our ad around a specific problem like psoriasis or acne, we might deter people who are looking for clearer skin and less wrinkles. Hence, we limit ourselves by the type of ads we put out.
Tracking Campaigns
There are tons of things that can go wrong with a campaign. Buyers may be attracted to a superior item. There might be a cheaper alternative out there already. We can try to guess where trends are headed but its not guaranteed that we’ll be right all of the time.
Testing a campaign is the part where you determine exactly how much you are paying to acquire a customer. Additionally, you can see which ads are performing higher and then adjust.
When you’re just starting, its always best to start with a smaller sample size. The law of averages will hold true and we can expect similar results when we decide to increase our ad spend.
Conclusion
Billions on billions are being spent on advertising because the wise entrepreneur knows its value. They will test their ads and continue to improve them. Sure enough, their cost to get a new customer decreases and their ads continue to produce.
To learn about Push Vs Pull Marketing click the link!
Every business out there is a marketing company. It goes hand in hand with sales. You can't lose weight if you just exercise and not eat healthily. These two things must be happening together.
Same with marketing. If customers don't know about your business, they can't buy from you. As blatantly obvious as that is, we often push aside marketing in order to spend our money in other areas of our business. However, when marketing is done right, we'll be able to tell exactly how much it costs to acquire a new customer.
Most marketers throw crap on a wall and see what sticks. This might work in the long run but we'll lose out on small opportunities in the short run. Well crafted marketing campaigns are measured, tweaked, and improved.
Push vs Pull Marketing
Push marketing: Push enough advertising material out there so the goal is to reach as many people as possible and use our advertising dollars to bring in as many new customers as possible. It is very interruption based. We stop people from doing what they're doing in order to deliver our brand message.
Pull Marketing: Creating content on the internet and allowing the customers to be pulled into it or find it on their own. In a sense, they're already looking for a solution to their problem and our job is to be able to be found easily.
The number one objective is that we want them to go from our social media page right into our own website where we can either subscribe them to our email list or buy something from us.
Step one: Choose your Niche
Millions of websites, millions of businesses. There's no shortage of products, services, or information on the internet. Therefore, we have to niche down as much as we can so that we can only get the customers that would buy from us.
Map out your target market and make sure your website caters to that specific crowd. We should be able to tell exactly what your business is about after a few seconds of stumbling onto your website.
Step two: Become an expert
No one wants to buy from a novice. We all want to work with an expert and get the best quality we can for our money. We use marketing dollars to build our brand and reach more customers. What use is it if we reach our customers but they don't buy from us because they're under the impression that we may be inexperienced or unprofessional.
Authority develops trust and confidence in your services and products. Hence, we want to communicate that we're experts and that they can feel safe working with us.
Step three: Developing Media
Media is any type of content. Whether it is a blog post, youtube video, or infographic on Pinterest, it should be useful and relevant to the audience. Most social media marketers try to engage with their audience by sharing viral content.
What are we gaining by sharing a popular picture? We might get attention, but for all the wrong reasons. Our content should be unique and packed with value. The goal is to have our content go viral and be shared many times over.
Step Four: Use Social Proof
Word of mouth brings in a ton of customers. What other people say about your business is more important than what YOU say about your business. No one wants to be the first person to buy something. They want to make sure they're making the right choice.
Any good sales letter will have comments from happy customers. The more the better.
Social proof comes in many forms. From Facebook posts, comments, likes, and shares all the way to Instagram posts. It gives you more authority which is what we ultimately want.
Step Five: 80/20 Rule
New businesses don't spend enough time on their marketing, especially early on. The best strategy is to use the 80/20 rule. You'll find, generally, 80% of your profits come from 20% of your marketing efforts. That means one of your marketing efforts will be responsible for a majority of your profits. Good. We want that.
On the flip side, in the early stages of any business, you should be spending 80% of your time and resources on marketing efforts. This is so that we get the ball rolling and build some momentum for ourselves.
Pitfalls to avoid
Feast vs Famine cycle marketing: Some companies explode with their marketing and then get enough work to hold them over for a little while. Once that well dries up, they explode again with another marketing campaign. This causes a cycle where one quarter you can be really busy and one where it slows down. The solution is to have a continual marketing system in place.
Continuous marketing should be seen as a business in itself. The blog posts, videos, and other types of content you create are your ground troops. They are the first contact with your customers and we want them to bring them back to our website. We want to be constantly putting out valuable content in order to maximize our reach. Eventually, it becomes a snowball and the marketing starts to produce compounded results.
All in marketing: All in marketing is when we distribute most or all of our advertising budget into one campaign or channel. For instance, only using adwords to promote. The problem with this is that we've seen websites go under because of a Google update. We don't want to put all of our eggs into one basket. Try out as many marketing channels as possible and then scale up when you hit a winner.
Conclusion
One of the most important parts of any business is what you communicate to your customer. The best way to accomplish this is with a marketing funnel. Whether it is an online or offline campaign, the goal is always the same. We want new customers to learn about us and eventually buy from us.
What is Copywriting?
Copywriting is the skill of writing an ad. The goal of the copywriter is to set the bait for the customer. They communicate and transfer an emotion from their words to the minds of the buyer.
In today's modern society, internet users are bombarded with ads everywhere they go. Companies are vying to get in front of their customers and they're paying big bucks to do so. With this in mind, we want to make sure that the ads we're spending money on are actually effective.
Step One: The Headline
A person won't read every single line of every single advertisement that they encounter on a daily basis. What they'll do is to skim the headlines and see if anything peaks their interest. That's why the headline is often the most important piece of any ad.
Flyers, brochures, and other ads have about a 5-second window before the viewer decides to toss them out. This means the headline has to hook them in. Ogilvy, a renowned advertiser, says that if you aren't selling in your headline, you're wasting 80 percent of the ad budget. He also suggested that swapping headlines in ads had increased the effectiveness by 10 times!
Qualities of a Good Headline
There are a few qualities that can be found in the best headlines. The first step of any sales process is to grab the attention of the customer. Most ads do it with images but they don't send as good a message as plain text.
What's in it for me?
The best headlines answer the question "what's in it for me?" that the consumer is always wondering. It should address exactly what the buyer can expect from making a purchase.
Extremely Targeted
Headlines can also be extremely targeted so that the right buyers can identify themselves. For example, a headline for a post-pregnancy weight loss program might read "How to lose 10lbs in 3 months after giving birth without a gym". Not the most glamorous headline, but you get the point.
The 5-second rule
We have to deliver a sales pitch in about 5 seconds. People won't read entire ads. They'll skim the headlines, and we better make sure they bite the bait. Think of it as a 5-second elevator pitch. We don't have the luxury of conversing with our customer and so we'll have to cover all of the details pretty quickly.
