Copy Tip 12: Evaluation

While we’re at the end of the marketing formula … the “E” in MOOVE … by no means is this the least important ingredient … in fact, without this, you could waste incredible amounts of money!

If you don’t track, test, measure and evaluate your marketing … you’ll never have any idea of what works and what doesn’t work.

Evaluation is critical to be profitable!

You’ll be an advertising victim! You’ll keep spending money without any idea of your return on investment.

There is, of course, a better way!

Whether to TEST elements of your copy, or the various Vehicles you use to reach your market … evaluation is essential for success.

What should you be evaluating?

Well, you’ll want to know for each marketing “campaign” you create what value it returns.

So it’d be a good idea to know …

One easy way to track it is to setup a spreadsheet: you could even do that for FREE with online apps like Google Docs.

A spreadsheet is an easy way to track your data

When you include the cost of the campaign (eg, your advertisement cost plus artwork), and know how many responses you get, you can work out your total sales, your average sales and your costs per lead.

Then, if you track WHEN the responses arrive (eg, the publication day of the ad would be Day 1, then each day you can track the responses you get) … you’ll know roughly how long it takes to be profitable, and how long your sequence of contacts should be with prospects to be worthwhile.

(That’s really a whole other topic — but your marketing should always involve a sequence of contacts. You’ll find with tracking that the 2nd, 3rd, 4th (and maybe more contacts in the sequence) really boost your ROI and profits over just 1 or 2 contacts in your sequence).

Evaluation

Once you have this kind of data, you can easily work out what was viable and profitable, and what wasn’t really worth your effort.

You can use this data to plan future campaigns.

If you knew that every time you invested $500 in one particular vehicle that you get back $2500 in sales, how often would you keep on doing this marketing with this vehicle?

As long as it stayed profitable!!

Sometimes, your vehicle/media may SEEM expensive (eg, a $7000 advertisement vs a $700 postcard mailout) — but that more expensive vehicle may have a lower cost per lead, and a bigger profit, because it reaches a much larger number of your prospects.

If you don’t track this data — you’ll never know!

How do you get the information from your prospects to track which “vehicle” is working?

The answer is simple: just ask!

It could be easy as “can I ask you please how you heard about us today?” — and keep track of the answer. You might just have a simple sheet with each vehicle listed, and put a tick next to the vehicle that corresponds to the answer.

Eg:

Etc etc. If for each sale you can link to the vehicle/media, you can work out the revenue that each has returned to you.

If you’re using a coupon, and have more than one in use at a time, you can include a small “tracking code” to keep track of where it was cut out and when you received it.

The Alternative

This is the scary part … if you DO NOT know what works, you’ll keep on responding to whoever shows up at your door to sell you particular media!

You might have a newspaper ad rep who asks you to spend $400 on a small advertising feature. If you’ve been tracking your data, you’ll know of course whether or not that’s a worthwhile decision — and you can control your spend according to what’s already working!

If you don’t know … you’re at the mercy of wasting your money on something you don’t know whether it works. Lots of businesses do this — and it’s a crazy unprofitable strategy!

What if you haven’t used this vehicle/media before?

Now “new” vehicles can be worth testing (especially when you KNOW your market and can evaluate whether this is a worthwhile risk).

Whatever Vehicle You Use, This Is A MUST …

When you do spend money on advertising or marketing — makes sure you include an OFFER. Don’t just “get your name out there” … how long can you afford to do that? Create an offer, based on your objective — and then track it to see if it works.

Testing Copy

When you’re testing your copy, you want to compare whether one version outperforms another.

The only way to compare this properly is to ONLY CHANGE ONE THING in your copy (otherwise you won’t know what changed element made the difference).

There is software (even part of Google’s free package of web tools) that can setup the tests and track the results … so it’s not even that hard to do!

The big thing about copy tests is — according to me — not get too bogged down in testing the minor parts of your copy. Test the things that matter: headline, offers, sub-heads and pre-heads, openings, testimonial placement, variations on urgency, etc.

You might want to try testing designs, but if you get into the real nitty-gritty it’s probably not stuff that makes a big difference.

Also keep in mind other factors outside of your control can also make a difference (eg the timing of economic news, other offers and launches in your market, seasonal factors) — you can’t always assume what YOU change makes the difference.

You also need to be sure the number of test results is sufficient to have some surety about your findings. Eg, having just 10 responses vs 500 responses might not yield a reliable result.

That’s a wrap on evaluation — both on testing copy and tracking your campaigns. Both are critical.

Tomorrow, we start on the juicy elements of persuasive copywriting … I don’t know how I’ll sleep in the meantime!! It’ll be exciting to reveal some great tips!

21 December 2008 | Filed Under 101 Copy Tips, Copywriting | Leave a Comment 

Copy Tip 11: Your Vehicle

Let’s take a quick moment to recap where we are — and why we’re here!

Before we get into our copy … we need to understand and research our market — and plan our strategy!

Famous marketers have their own formula — like Dan Kennedy’s (no relation!) Message — Market — Media formula: match your message to your market and use the right media. It’s a great way to express it, but I like to remember to include the all-important evaluation/measurement — so I coined my own marketing formula!

It’s MOOVE — what we’ve been talking about –

MOOVE

This is the foundation you need to get right before you write a word of copy — it’s like all the preparation and training you do before you go out on the football field and kick a goal.

Once you know your market, your objective and offer, you’re at the point where you can determine what Vehicle (media) you’ll need to use to get that offer to your market.

You can’t afford to get this wrong — otherwise your market — your profitable prospects — will never see or be aware of your offer! Your objective will fail!

You can write the greatest copy in the world — and even know your market “like the back of your hand” — but if they don’t get your offer, all that effort has been wasted.

So you can see the importance of your vehicle, right?

The thing is — the best part — you can of course use MULTIPLE vehicles to reach your market (even with multiple offers and objectives!).

(That’s why the “E” in the formula is so important — so you know what worked and what didn’t work!).

As I mentioned while we talked about the offer, your offer will affect the type of vehicle you use.

High ticket sales may require multiple stages of contact to build the levels of trust, believability and credibility you need to persuade your prospects to take up your offer.

It’s like a relationship — and it IS a relationship — you don’t usually go out on a first date and end up married at the end of the night.

Woo your prospects!

You’ve got to woo and romance your prospect … necessary steps toward your ultimate goal.

Types of Vehicles

A few of the common vehicles used to get your offer to your market are:

Of course, these examples really are a small fraction of what you could use to get your offer across.

Knowing your vehicle as well as your market, objective and offer means you know what type of copy you need to write — while the principles of copywriting and persuasion don’t change — the content and presentation will vary according to your market, your offer, your objective and your vehicle.

For example, copy on a postcard will be different than a teleseminar or direct mail sales letter! That’s pretty obvious … but if you started your copy before you knew your market and your strategy, it’d be like trying to build a house without having a blueprint or plan!

One thing about the vehicle you use: sometimes what seems expensive is really not actually expensive, and what might seen inexpensive is a waste of money!

It all depends on your cost per lead and your cost per sale.

Confused? Don’t worry … we’ll cover that in the post on the final piece of the formula — Evaluation.

20 December 2008 | Filed Under 101 Copy Tips, Copywriting | Leave a Comment 

Copy Tip 10: Headline Grabbers

Okay, this is another copy gem that makes it into the 101 tips earlier than planned — because it’s current news!

Another tip: relating to current news and issues is always a great idea … an example of Robert Collier’s advice for writers to “enter a conversation already going on in the reader’s mind”.

I did exactly that (relating to current news) for one client promotion I created several years back now … and it got an incredible 95% response the same day it was sent out!

(I’ll save that story and reveal the juicy details in a future tip!).

Anyway … back to today …

The Herald Sun (Australia’s largest circulating daily newspaper) put out a list of the 2008 top stories that were viewed on their website.

What a great resource! These are the headlines and issues that have grabbed the attention of readers this year … there’s a LOT you can observe from this: the types of stories, the words used, how celebrities and gossip grab the news spotlight.

Headlines are so important because they account for readership of 70 to 80 percent of your copy! So you MUST get this right to get high readership … and to boost your response.

Now, if you’re not an Aussie (or perhaps if you’re not a Melburnian) — then some of these stories might not make much sense to you. But the stories are a great example of what gets attention, so they’re worth including.

If you want to view the stories, just go the article on the Herald Sun website and click through.

Here’s the Top 50 … count them down …

50 – Fox Sports and 3AW’s Clinton Grybas dies at home
49 – Harbhajan Singh appeal may not be heard before Third Test
48 – Female stripper faces charges of rape after bucks show
47 – BMX death boy Alex Webb a rising soccer star, says mum
46 – Leigh Matthews resigns as coach of Brisbane
45 – Did Eamon Sullivan upstage former flame Stephanie Rice?
44 – The gang’s all here in Underbelly
43 – Driver faces horror smash charges
42 – The AFL draw for 2009
41 – Sam Newman told to take break from The Footy Show
40 – Best and worst dressed on Brownlow Medal red carpet
39 – Michael McLindon rape jail term ‘inadequate’
38 – Footy Show star Sam Newman in trouble over comments about women
37 – Olympic swimmer Stephanie Rice dishes out heartbreak
36 – AFL Trade week: done deals
35 – Plane crashes into Cheltenham house close to school, pilot killed
34 – Eight young people hurt in Melbourne car crash
33 – I always thought I would win Tattslotto
32 – Nikki Webster’s birthday wobbly
31 – High speed train crash in Dandenong South kills woman
30 – Pick-by-pick in-depth profiles from today’s AFL draft
29 – Brendan Nelson comments draw indigenous anger
28 – Wayne Carey subject to criminal investigation
27 – Alan Didak, Heath Shaw suspended for rest of season by Pies
26 – Cabbies in safety victory after stabbing
25 – Toddler found wandering in Deer Park
24 – Frankston mother of two murdered
23 – Club-by-club AFL draft analysis
22 – Mary-Kate Olsen took first call on Heath Ledger’s death
21 – Tania Zaetta denies Afghanistan tour sex claims
20 – Girl defends Oaks Day melee after aiding elderly
19 – Collingwood’s Alan Didak in drink-driving Heath Shaw’s car
18 – Actress Jessica Jacobs in train tragedy
17 – Fevola frock shock
16 – Young mum screamed for help as killer chased her
15 – AFL legend Wayne Carey to break silence after Miami bash charge
14 – World does not end as large Hadron collider switched on
13 – Brendan and Alex Fevola have blow up on Derby Day
12 – Wild brawls in Melbourne’s CBD as clubs fight 2am ban
11 – Parents’ anger at Corey over $20,000 house party bill
10 – Melbourne shootout gunman named
9 – Corey Worthington starts to pocket riches
8 – Big Brother’s Rima Hadchiti appears in nude shots
7 – Alan Didak should be punished: Tony Shaw, Nathan Buckley
6 – All Saints star Mark Priestley dies
5 – Teen-party parents may face $20,000 bill after 500 rampage
4 – Party boy Corey most downloaded
3 – Carl Williams tells of murders
2 – Winds cause transport chaos
1 – Heath Ledger found dead in New York apartment

While We’re On Headlines…

Headlines are always worth studying — for example, yesterday I picked up the latest issues of That’s Life, Take 5, Australian Men’s Health and Australian Women’s Health — to study the headlines on the covers!

Some of the great examples just off Take 5 …

And a few from Australian Women’s Health …

There are STACKS more just from these four covers. Absolute gems.

You can gain a lot from what these masters/pros create to get their publications flying off the shelves (especially at that all-important last minute impulse buy in the supermarket checkout queue!).

And there is a very important headline lesson — the headlines are designed to meet the Objective of getting you to buy the magazine! They’re not the full story … but short, curious and compelling words that make you want to read more — so you buy the copy.

Notice too the “$80,129″ — it’s not “over $80,000″ or rounded down … but it’s a SPECIFIC number. The more specific you are, the more believable you are.

Here’s another example: I re-wrote some copy yesterday prepared by someone else — changing “nearly 6,000″ to “5,415″ — using the exact number again for believability.

Two Ways To Get These Headlines For Free

  1. If you don’t want to buy the copies, just look at them in the store and note the good headlines! Or sit at a bookstore like Borders and write them down — free ways to learn!
  2. You could even use Google’s image search, for example type in “Cosmopolitan magazine cover” to find images from Cosmo — again, free … just requires internet access.

Then just save copies of the images … I have a folder on my computer just for that!

Tomorrow we’ll hit the “V” for Vehicle section of our preparation … so stay tuned!

19 December 2008 | Filed Under 101 Copy Tips, Copywriting | Leave a Comment 

Copy Tip 9: Offer IV

Just like the movie sequels … we’re up to number IV post on the offer!

We’re wrapping up the main considerations and elements today that make up a compelling and irresistible offer.

As mentioned yesterday, today we’re covering urgency and the guarantee (and an insider secret about options you include in your offer).

Urgency

Your offer ideally should include some element to give prospects a reason to act NOW.

You don’t want them going off and not taking the action you want (that meets your Objective)!

Get ‘em to stay … make your offer too good to say no to!

Sometimes — if you cannot create an urgent offer about your product or service, you can make one of your bonuses limited by urgency.

Urgency usually involves limited time or limited quantity (or a mix of both).

For example, “if you’re one of the first 17 to order by 21 December 2008, we’ll include a fast-action bonus valued at $399 designed to ensure your success within 21 days.”

You’ve given a date here (“21 December”) and limited number (“first 17″) to help convince your prospect to act NOW.

Remember to ensure believability — don’t just keep extending your offer past this date or limited number. Make it real.

Make the offer compelling enough that the prospect will feel some pain by not taking it up. But keep in mind two things:

  1. if a client feels too pressured, you may damage your long-term relationship; and
  2. offers that are taken up in the “heat of the moment” may have a bigger chance of refunds

High pressured selling should never be your goal. You’ve done the work throughout the copy to convince your client with the right emotional and logical reasons to buy now (urgency is a great logical reason to justify a purchase made on emotion — “hey, I got the metallic red painted luxury car, but it did come with 3 extra road safety driving lessons when I purchased it before the 19th”).

So make sure there is urgency in your offer.

Guarantee

Many business baulk at the idea of having a strong guarantee as part of their offer — and that’s just crazy!

Four good reasons this is crazy …

  1. You SHOULD stand behind what you sell regardless of consumer laws! That’s just ethics!
  2. There are possibly consumer laws that mandate a refund or repair anyway — so you’re required by LAW to honour your guarantee
  3. In genuine cases, if you had a problem with your product or service, you’d most likely FIX IT ANYWAY!
  4. Your product or service claims should be reliable and genuine enough so that there’s little chance anyway of someone wanting to use the guarantee.

So if that’s just the regular requirements, you can see where beefing up your guarantee beyond this helps make your offer more logical to accept.

What you want to create is “risk-reversal”. That’s where the risk for the transaction is on YOU, the seller, based on your guaratnee. The prospect feels safe (less risk) knowing that your guarantee is strong enough to protect them.

If it doesn’t work out … then there’s recourse for a refund.

Of course, there’s a LOT MORE to your guarantee than what I’ve just mentioned, and later on I’ll rip into the nitty gritty details and tell you more.

Things like how long your guarantee should be for, how to “qualify” it so that it is appealing to the prospect, but doesn’t leave you at the mercy of those who might take advantage of you.

The best thing about a strong guarantee is that it helps get a wavering prospect over the line. It might bump up your refund/return rates (and there’s plenty of argument why that’s a good thing — if you’re not getting refund requests, you’re not convincing enough “fence-sitters” to take action).

But along with the refund bump is usually — with a “fair dinkum” solid product — a much much bigger bump in sales — and therefore more profits.

That’s enough on guarantees for now to know you need a good one, right? I hope so!

You can see here how these two “ingredients” can really help make the difference in creating a compelling offer.

Stack up the value, make it believable, include valuable bonuses, create a good reason to act now and back it up with a solid guarantee.

These ingredients will bake you a masterpiece!

Options

The final element of a good, compelling offer is quite often to have a choice between two options — giving a prospect the chance to say “yes or yes” rather than “yes or no”.

So having two offers starts the prospecting thinking “which one of these will I take?” rather than “will I buy or won’t I buy?”.

There are different schools of thought on how you present the order of your offers and how that affects a prospect’s likelihood of buying. That’s about using “contrast” to highlight the difference in value — eg, demonstrating a high priced product, and then the lower priced popular choice makes that price seem even lower because it’s being compared to the higher price.

But the psychology of selling isn’t what I’m going to cover in depth here!

For now, think about two or three options rather than one.

(Too many options, and it gets confusing. Ideally keep it to two or three).

Here’s an example on confusion out of Robert Cialdini’s recent book (essential reading) called “Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” –

During one experiment in an upmarket supermarket, passersby could sample a variety of jams made by a single manufacturer. With 24 flavours on display: only 3 percent purchases. When that was dropped to just six flavours on display: 30 percent purchased.

That’s 10 times the result from less choice!

So don’t create too many options or you’ll discourage prospects.

An Insider Tip on creating options: the values don’t have to be balanced. If you particular want people to purchase one particular option — then put much more overwhelming value into that “package”. Give them more reasons to take up your preferred choice by making it the obvious package.

That’s offers wrapped up for now. Tomorrow, we’re onto “Vehicle” or media… another area of essential preparation for responsive, effective copy!

18 December 2008 | Filed Under 101 Copy Tips, Copywriting | Leave a Comment 

Copy Tip 8: Offer III

It’s a late one today!

I’ve been at the 2008 Christmas TraveLeague luncheon — table upon table of travel industry folk gathering at Melbourne’s Crown Casino for a big end of year shin-dig. Some even come to visit from interstate and New Zealand… it’s a big event.

Actually, I created all of the marketing and PR for this year’s event, including securing a naming rights sponsor — and that story had a very exciting update today (well, at least for me!) … so it was good to go along and see it all come together. Something to share in upcoming days.

Anyway — oh yes, the copy tips! We’re still on the OFFER and it’s a very important part of your copy, so it’s worth spending a few posts to cover.

Yesterday I talked about how it’s tied in to the vehicle you use.

Today, as promised, I want to mention some essential elements to include in your offer.

Because it’s your offer that decides whether or not you are profitable!

So your offer must be …

… irresistible and compelling!

It must stop your prospects in their tracks.

Grab their attention, make it irresistible!

It must compel them to take action! Give it some “wow!” surprise factor (but there’s a side of this to keep in mind, more about that in a moment).

I read a story once from an old copy pro who talked about your prospect sitting at home, in a snow storm. They see your offer. It’s so compelling they get up off the couch, leave the comfort of their warm home and trudge through the snow to make sure their reply gets in the mail … TODAY!

(It was possibly Gary Halbert or Dan Kennedy or someone like that, but I’m not in my writing “bunker” to look it up!).

So how do you create an offer that is irresistible and compelling? What goes into the offer?

What are the components of a compelling offer?

Your offer should include some effective, proven components …

One big caveat about the offer is this: believability.

Your offer should be perceived as having overwhelming value — but at the same time you must convey a sense of believability about that value (and provide the reason why it’s such a great offer).

So if you’re offering $165,000 worth of value for $7 — do you think that’s believable? Or does it convey hype and wariness about the true value of your service or product?

If your offer doesn’t sound believable — what does that say about the rest of your claims?

So while you want to build up value — the value must have a realistic, believable foundation.

The same goes for your bonuses.

If you can’t give your bonuses away for free, throwing them in to an offer won’t convey much extra value either. Your bonuses should have “real” value and add to the compelling mix of products and services you include.

Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the offer — covering urgency and the guarantee (and an insider secret about options you include in your offer.

17 December 2008 | Filed Under 101 Copy Tips, Copywriting | Leave a Comment 
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