Copy Tip 26: Persuasive Sales Factors
Several years back I completed a multi-day Tony Robbins sales training event called Power To Influence. It was a very valuable investment in sales training and I loved every minute of it.
The overall approach outlined in this training really is congruent with good copy: when a sales situation is approached the right way … when you stack up massive value for your prospects … there’s no need to “hard sell” because you’ve established and properly qualified your prospect well before the “end” of the sale (which is in fact not an end at all, but instead the beginning of a long-term client relationship).
In terms of getting a prospect to respond — to meet your Objective — you need to combine the following two approaches:
EMOTION and LOGIC
Customers need Emotional Reasons to Buy Now (ERBN) and Logical Reasons to Buy Now (LRBN).
You might have heard this another way:
People buy on emotion and back it up with logic.
Tony Robbins describes it as a seesaw — on one side, you have your Emotional and Logical reasons to buy now (predominantly Emotional reasons), and on the other side is a client’s Dominant Reasons to Avoid Buying (DRAB).
I’m away from the office (and all of my graphics tools!), so here’s a really basic hand-drawn sketch I’ve scanned in to show you what I mean:
The drawing above shows how you need to stack up the emotional and logical reasons to buy now, outweighing the dominant reasons to avoid buying.
It’s a really simple formula to get someone to buy:
Give them MORE ERBN’s and LRBN’s than they have DRAB’s!
In other words, once they feel that there are more reasons to buy than avoid buying, you have a sale… the balance of the seesaw tips to your side.
It might be an easy way for you to help discover the three lots of “reasons” you need to know — the emotional and logical reasons that help convince your prospect to take the action you want them to take, and the objections they have that are their dominant reasons to avoid buying.
You need to know ALL THREE.
Each then needs to be illustrated with proof and other credibility elements to make a convincing and effective presentation to your prospect.
So here’s what you need to do …
All of these (emotional and logical reasons and objections) are then incorporated into your copy to persuade your prospect to take the action you planned in your Objective.
Quite often, objections are overlooked or avoided in copy. I think this is the wrong thing to do, for two reasons.
Firstly, it sends a message to your prospect that you don’t really understand the situation from their point of view. Otherwise you’d be more empathetic towards them, knowing what both attracts them AND their potential objections.
Secondly, if YOU raise the objection, you also get to provide an answer – an answer than can help demonstrate why that objection shouldn’t dominate the decision to act. You can put the objection in perspective, and show how it is outweighed by the positive emotional and logical reasons to buy now.
There’s more also going on here — by admitting a perceived fault with your product or service, and raising it as an objection, you are perceived as being more believable in what else you say because you are being truthful (you should always be truthful of course, but this shows you both being truthful and being seen to be truthful).
I wanted to mention this formula as we go deeper into our copy tips … yesterday we talked about what motivates buyers, and today is more on how to get a prospect to go from “not buying” to “buying” — tipping the seesaw in your favour — which means reasons to take the action you want them to take, now!
Copy Tip 25: Motivation
We’ve wrapped up headlines, but there’s one area I want to cover that I haven’t yet touched on.
It’s all about what motivates people to take action.
What gets them to respond to your compelling offer.
Copy superstar Brian Keith Voiles points out a quote from Napoleon on motivation:
There are two motives to action: self-interest and fear
When I’ve been at Tony Robbins’ events (Unleash The Power Within as a participant and crew member in several countries; Power To Influence sales event plus Mastery University — Date With Destiny, Wealth Mastery and Life Mastery) the driving force of human behaviour, as Tony would say, is the desire to either avoid pain or gain pleasure.
The “avoid pain” behaviour or the “fear” motive of Napoleon are the dominant drivers of human nature.
Knowing that helps make your copy more effective — you can help motivate your prospects by highlighting problems, frustrations, fear, anxiety, lack of something (money, freedom, time, family, love) or anger … in fact, there’s a great formula for writing your copy that does this for you.
(I’ll reveal this in a future copy tip!).
When you KNOW your prospects and their fears and pain … you can demonstrate how your product or service solves their problems — ideally in a quick and easy way (people LOVE quick and easy).
When you can combine the appeal of quick and easy with solving a prospect’s fear/pain … and guarantee your product or service (using a risk-reversal strategy we’ll cover in more detail) … then your chances of success are maximised.
You’ll be able to use the fear/pain of loss (a greater motivator than gaining pleasure) — and demonstrate specifically how you can help your prospect.
Knowing this … and incorporating it in your copy … is a great strategy.
Tomorrow, I’ll share with you a sales acronym that I discovered many years ago that I use to help boost response. It’ll help you focus on the type of copy you make sure you include in your own messages.
Copy Tip 24: Headline Wrap
Today I want to wrap up everything we’ve covered on headlines.
There’s a lot!
As I mentioned early, it’s worth getting into headlines in depth because they often account for 70 to 80 percent of your readership.
If you get this wrong, and only get 20 percent of your prospects, you’ll have to work 5-times as hard as you could with an effective headline.
Ouch!
Conversely, get this right and you’ll get 5-times the result of a poor headline!
Now that’s something worth achieving!
So here’s what you now know…
Copy Tip 10
- Relating to current news is a great way to capture attention. I gave you a list of 50 top news headlines of 2008 — published here in Melbourne, but a great list to study themes that grab attention.
- Magazine covers contain some stellar headline examples for your swipe files
- Using accurate specific numbers (eg “5415″ instead of “nearly 6,000″) makes your headline more believable
- You now have two ways to get magazine headlines for FREE
Copy Tip 13
- Headlines can work in ANY size campaign, whether with a low or high budget. I gave you some examples of fantastic results for three campaigns spending (1) less than $400; (2) $109.90 and (3) less than $100
- The inside secret about headlines: the headline is the “ad for the ad” — its only purpose is to persuade your prospect to keep on reading (or watching/listening) … and nothing else.
Copy Tip 14
- The absolute critical role your headline plays: it must get the attention of qualified prospects
Copy Tip 15
- The power of leverage: how to instantly create your own headline swipe file resources for free
Copy Tip 16
- A free, must-have marketing resource (for headlines and lots lots more)
Copy Tip 17
- The power of personalisation: including an example that resulted in a 95 percent same-day response (and what to avoid when using this technique)
Copy Tip 18
- How to use your headline to qualify your prospects: who it attracts, and who it turns away (and why that’s a good thing)
Copy Tip 19
- An example of copy that didn’t use a headline (and the surprising results it created)
Copy Tip 21
- A free resource on headline formulas (previously only published exclusively for paid members) … plus another free way to get live examples of what’s working from one of the world’s top marketers (you can also apply this strategy to other top offline and online marketers)
Copy Tip 22
- How to use your free resources for your maximum benefit. Includes a specific example of how to borrow and adapt a headline. Also reveals how value is much more important than price.
That covers a LOT of ground about headlines!
Some of this information took me YEARS to learn from my mentors and from working on hundreds of client and my own projects … here you have a fast-track to the winner’s circle.
To wrap up headlines, I want to reinforce a couple of major points …
“Big Benefit” Promises
If you include a big benefit or claim in your headline about what your product or service can do for your prospect, you’ll want to address their likely response: “yeah sure”. Another very successful marketer, Gary Bencivenga, expands on this superbly in his Bencivenga Bullet:
The Two Most Powerful Words in
Advertising.
(No, they’re not FREE and NEW.)
The Bencivenga Bullets are yet ANOTHER must-have resource. I share these resources with you to save you the time and effort digging through the internet to find the expert brilliant content for yourself!
As Gary alludes to in his Bullet, your qualified prospects nowadays are a lot more attuned to hearing big claims in advertising (and being quite sceptical about those claims). They have their “BS-detectors” turns on and — rightfully — question everything you promise or say.
That means you have to work hard to back up what you claim: prove it! Proof can come from many elements: there are lots of ways to boost your believability and credibility. You’ll need to use them to get effective results.
Gary also reveals a very effective formula that smacks “yeah sure” for a home run … using the “If/Then” formula. It’s worth reading this Bullet!
Actually — along with “yeah sure” — you’ve also got to address other similar “resistance” going through the mind of your prospect … “so what?” “big deal!” “who cares?” … your copy needs to address and answer these concerns quickly so they’ll keep on reading.
The big lesson, as Gary concludes, is this: never make your claim bigger than your proof.
Emotional Headlines
Using an emotional-based headline captures attention because it goes much further to “resonate” with your prospects on “what’s in it for them”.
You turn a feature into a benefit into the feelings they’ll get from that benefit.
Or you could focus on a fear your prospect has (and the promise of your product or service to bridge that fear).
Rather than me outline all of this again … I’d be only repeating the content available to you — for FREE — that I mentioned in Copy Tip 21. That gives you 8 ways to use your headline to engage your prospect and dozens of great headline ideas.
Remember, you don’t need to “reinvent the wheel” — find what works (I’ve done this for you) and adapt it for yourself!
Later in this Copy Tip series I’ll cover some very important formatting issues — but for now, that covers the topic of headlines!
Copy Tip 23: Online Usability
Did you enjoy your celebration welcoming in 2009? We had a ball — a 360-degree view of the city of Melbourne, from a high vantage point around 5km north of the CBD. Not only did we see the main fireworks over the city and the Docklands area, but dozens and dozens of fireworks in every direction at private homes — some going on for a couple of hours into 2009!
So after a long night (this pic above is from flickr by Vermin Inc, from the earlier 9:15pm fireworks over the Docklands), it’s a late day today!
One of the things I’m doing today is related to copy — but isn’t directly “copy”.
It’s about online usability.
I have a tip to share about a mistake I’ve been making myself!
How does this relate to copy?
It’s all about USABILITY … making it EASY for your readers to keep reading.
As you’ll see later in the Copy Tips series, formatting and design, and things like online navigation all contribute to the effectiveness of your message to do the job you want it to do.
In my case, when I launched my 101 Copy Tips last month, one of things I forgot to do was think about navigating through the tips once there got to be quite a few of them.
Mea culpa!
Even when I’m only in the 20′s in terms of the number of tips, I’ve already noticed that there’s no easy way to read through them all.
The last handful appear in my “sidebar” on the right — and there’s a list under the 101 Copy Tips in the “Blog Categories” in the sidebar, but that’s it.
And even that list isn’t very user-friendly — it just shows 4 posts per page, with a very hard-to-find “Next Page” link at the bottom of the page to the next four tips.
I can’t expect readers to find that easy to use!
On this website I use the WordPress platform, which is an open source blog platform (also good for non-blog sites). WordPress has improved since its first launch as a “Content Management System” — a way to manage your site online (and in technical terms separate the content from the design/structure).
Now the internet has come a LONG WAY since I first got online in 1994 … 15 years ago!
Back then, my first web browser was Lynx — completely text based, nothing graphical. Internet Explorer didn’t even exist back then! (Well, only as Mosaic, the graphical browser I first saw when I was using Lynx).
I remember advancing to Netscape Navigator in 1995 — not even at version 1.0 — and wow, it was a huge change (I think it was version 1.1 where backgrounds of web pages could finally be colours other than gray!). Now of course, that all looks virtually prehistoric compared to the current web, as it looks in Firefox or Internet Explorer or one of the other modern browsers.
One little story before I continue …
It used to be really exciting going to a website like http://www.whitehouse.gov (one of the first sites I visited after Nasa’s image library) … and seeing a picture of the White House either to be daytime or night-time, and a message that reflected the time of day (either “good morning”, “good afternoon” or “good evening”, welcome to The White House). That was about as exciting as it got. I went there of course as I was involved in political marketing and campaigning at the time, so it was pretty exciting to see a site like that (for me, anyway).
But I digress. The point I’m making is that it is NOW a LOT easier to add in the usability improvements to make the Copy Tips easier to navigate.
And that’s what I’ll be doing over the next day or so while it’s a quiet time of the year.
Here’s what I’ll be adding and customising:
- Under the “Blog Categories” there’s be lots more Copy Tips per page, using the “excerpt” of the tip (my hand-written mini summary), plus a link to the full article, rather than the full article on the actual category page. This makes it easier to scan through the tips than having 4 full articles per page.
- When a 101 Copy Tips article is displayed in full, there will be additional navigation surrounding the article to make it easier to find the previous tip, the next tip and the list of tips in the series.
I’m also making other general navigation improvements that are more relevant now there are a lot of articles on this site.
Now, back in the “prehistoric” internet days, this would have been more time-consuming than it is today. All of the navigation was added manually, and had to be manually updated when new content was added.
That wastes a lot of time (and in turn money) — time you can’t afford to waste!
Now, with something like WordPress, I get to add the changes quickly and easily to “templates” — so that when the articles are displayed, the template performs its technical magic to make sure the navigation is always up to date.
Best of all, the code I used was pretty easy for me to find and adapt from the WordPress documentation (although I’m a direct response copywriter and designer, and marketing strategist, I do have quite a few website skills built up since 1994).
If you’re a non-technical person, you can skip this next paragraph!
In this case, I used a page navigation plugin, a drop-down category post list and a template using the in_category variable template tag to add the navigation just for the 101 Copy Tips articles.
Now back to the article!
So that should make the readability and usability of these Copy Tip articles much more effective … and it should improve the number of Copy Tips that each website visitor views.
That helps build my relationship with my website visitors, which is a good thing (one of my objectives in my website MOOVE-based strategy).
Copy Tip 22: Using Your Resources
Well it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re getting ready to celebrate our nephew’s first birthday and then to welcome in 2009 … should be lots of fun!
First … time for the last copy tip of 2008!!
Today I want to remind you about:
IMPLEMENTATION.
USING the free resources at your fingertips to maximise their value to you and your success.
Like yesterday’s headline gift … one of the best things I can do is to point you in the right direction towards the goldmine.
But you’ve gotta dig for and claim the gold yourself!
(You did download it, didn’t you? Free, high-value opportunities like this are worth taking advantage of immediately!)
Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, the resources I’m including here aren’t under some sort of affiliate arrangement (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). They’re 100% FREE for you, and the “return” I get is knowing that you’re getting the best content there is (which helps in turn make you feel good about our relationship). I don’t earn a cent from point you to these resources … I earn much more than that (in you knowing the value I can provide you).
(Hint: there’s a lesson in their for your relationship with your own “tribe”).
So what did you do with yesterday’s gift?
Going through that content, here’s some of the things you should now know:
- Four essential “sales” your headline must make;
- The 4 U’s: Urgency, Uniqueness, Usefulness and Ultra-Specific;
- The 4 phases of prospect “resistance”;
- Engaging your prospect: Collier’s “join in the conversation he’s already having”;
- 7 more ways to instantly engage your prospect;
- 21 Questions to ask before you write your headline;
- Lots of examples;
- 31 more great headline ideas;
- John Caples’ 35 Headline idea starters;
- David Ogilvy’s 5-question “acid test”;
- 15-point headline checklist.
Aside from the tips I’ve already given you — you’re now fully armed to create great headlines!
Here’s an example of what I’d do.
Let’s say you’ve got a printing business.
You could take this headline example from page 53 of the pdf:
THE 23c LIFE-SAVER
Heart Surgeons NEVER
Tell You About!
and use this headline for your own business! Just ADAPT it to suit.
So it’d be for you:
“The 15-cent business life-saver
your competitors
never hope you’ll discover!”
And then use effective copy elements to describe how a low-cost marketing tool (in this case, a business card) can literally be a business life-saver. Your message will resonate especially in harder economic times.
You could build a whole marketing campaign around that headline. With a story, with credibility and believability, with a persuasive, compelling, irresistible offer, and backed by a risk-reversal guarantee.
And that’s just ONE SINGLE HEADLINE adapted to another situation!
See how easy it becomes when you’re armed with the right tools?
But that’s not all!
There’s a whole lot more you can learn too from yesterday’s gift.
Things like the content you “give away” that helps build solid client relationships … the way that kind of content positions you as an advocate and an expert … you could use the same elements in your own business: free webinars, pdfs and audio files … valuable content for your Market.
Best of all, when you build these relationships and increase loyalty, your customers are better customers … they’re less price-sensitive (because they’ve seen first hand how VALUE is much more important than price alone). And it’s a fact: only 10% of customers choose to do business on price alone — yet most businesses act as if it’s 90%. So this kind of value is attractive to 90% of your market — well worth taking notice of!
Well … our nephew’s party is about to start … I’ll see you again tomorrow, when it’ll be 2009!