Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
April 23, 2009
Issue #166
How Those Lowly Dots & Doodles,
Scrawls & Squiggles
Can Ramp Up Your Response
Dear Business-Builder,
If you’ve been reading The Total Package for any significant amount of time, you’re keenly aware of three of the most important Copywriting Commandments we teach:
- Write to prospects using the language they use every day: Using the same colloquial words, phrases, sentence structure, jargon and figures of speech your prospect uses helps you communicate faster. And because it also helps him see you as a “regular guy” just like he is, it also boosts the credibility of your sales message.
- Never make your prospect work to understand your meaning: Having to read a sentence or paragraph twice to figure out what it says is work. Every confusing chunk of copy costs you readership and response points.
- Always make sure your sales copy triggers your prospect’s most actionable emotions: In direct response, a delayed sale is a lost sale. The last thing you want your prospect to do is “think” about your offer or to “shop” your price. Since the vast majority of purchases are made to satisfy an emotional need, your sales copy must trigger the actionable emotions required to move your prospect to immediate action.
Now, we’ve written reams on the strategy and tactics of writing colloquially … making copy clear and precise … and on techniques for triggering prospects’ emotions. But for years, not a whisper on how the punctuation you use can help you accomplish all that.
And that’s a shame — because I’d be willing to bet that I could take a strong control and cut response by 50% or more just by balling up the punctuation.
And if that’s true, the converse is also true: Improving the use of punctuation in your sales copy could help you keep prospects reading, better activate their motivating emotions and ultimately, put extra dollars into your pocket.
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
April 2, 2009
Issue #37
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How to turn a leisurely visit
to your local bookstore
into the most profitable
three hours of your entire year
Dear Business-Builder,
Good morning, Sunshine! And how was your weekend?
What’s that you say? You’re well-rested … brimming with energy and optimism … and eager to begin making this your best week ever?
Cool beans.
But please – for mercy’s sake – go put some clothes on. We’re going to the bookstore: One of the few places we copywriters and marketing folk probably should NOT work in our underwear!
I know – you assumed this issue would be just another one where I was going to preach about dominant emotion or benefits or some such stuff like that.
But frankly, I don’t feel like it today. Unlike some people I could name, I did not have the luxury of swilling beer and watching Survivor reruns all weekend.
In fact, I spent two full days sweating over every word on seven headline test panels. And I’m so close to this damn copywriting tree, all I can smell is bark.
I need to take a giant step back and get a good, long look at the salesmanship forest.
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
January 8, 2009
Issue #58
In this issue:
- Why persuasion is the most valuable skill you could ever acquire …
- How to seduce prospects without ever explicitly naming a single benefit …
- How acknowledging and validating your prospect’s core beliefs and values gives you an almost unfair advantage in sales copy …
- How to use rhetoric to bypass prospects’ brains entirely – making it virtually impossible for them to refuse the impulse to order NOW …
- And MUCH MORE!
Dear Business-Builder,
Whether you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, marketing pro or copywriter, this issue is going to be extremely valuable to you.
We’re continuing last week’s ramblings on persuasion: Without a doubt, the most valuable skill any human being could possibly develop – and I am not talking about just in copywriting or sales either.
Persuasion makes the world go around:
- Persuasion is at the heart of every government system you can name. In democracies, politicians gain power by persuading perpetually gullible citizens to vote for them. Once elected, the peoples’ representatives debate each new bill before it becomes law, each side attempting to persuade the other.
Even in monarchies and dictatorships, domestic tranquility – and in many cases, the very survival of the regime – is assured as the masses are persuaded that the monarch was divinely appointed … that the dictator is the nation’s destiny … or at the very least, to abide by the law of the land (often at the point of a gun).
- The world’s legal systems operate almost entirely on persuasion. Trials are little more than contests between two sets of attorneys to determine which will better persuade the judge or jury of its point of view.
As the OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson trials graphically demonstrated to many, the guilt or innocence of the accused can be irrelevant: If you have the most persuasive lawyer, you win: You can get away with the sickest behavior imaginable – even murder. On the other hand, if your lawyer is less than persuasive, you can be as innocent as a lamb and as pure as the driven snow – and still wind up on Death Row.
- Every religious movement owes its existence to its abilities to persuade converts that its holy script – and therefore its precepts and doctrines – is authentic, accurate and reliable (and by extension, that contradictory ones are frauds).
- In our personal lives, many (if not most) of our marriages and life partnerships are rooted in persuasion. Whether by passive seduction or aggressive pursuit, one of us persuaded the other to commit to an exclusive long-term relationship.
- Raising children is a Herculean two-way exercise in the art of persuasion. Parents use every persuasion strategy at their command to produce desired behaviors and discourage undesirable ones – and kids are past masters at figuring out what needs to be said or done to persuade Mom and Dad to give them their way.
- And of course, persuasion is an essential component in every business success story. Every day, banks and investors are persuaded to bankroll new businesses … quality employees are persuaded to join their teams … workers are persuaded to perform in productive ways …
… New customers persuaded to make their first purchases … existing customers are persuaded to make new purchases … unions and vendors are persuaded to accept companies’ terms … and executives persuade other businesses to enter into alliances and joint ventures and to concede to mergers and acquisitions.
Heck: One of the greatest business empires of all time began with a simple act of persuasion. Microsoft was born when Bill Gates persuaded IBM to pay him a royalty on every copy of MS-DOS software installed on its machines!
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
December 18, 2008
Issue #55
- 5 Reasons why prospects stop reading your promo before they buy
- 16 tricks for making your copy nearly impossible to put down
- Much more!
Dear Business-Builder,
Couple of weekends ago, I got a wild hair, packed my Harley and set off to try my luck at Caesar’s Palace in Elizabeth, Indiana.
It’s not that I’m a masochist, mind you – I just figured putting 1,000 miles of asphalt under my butt would clear my head.
Plus, losing a few thousand samoleans at blackjack always motivates me: Seems to make me eager to report to work on Monday to begin restocking the larder.
So I gave myself Friday off (me: the best boss in the world), sprang out of bed before sun-up, snagged a quick cup of Joe, fired up the ElectroGlide and roared west on I-40.
The rising sun caught up with me as I careened through Great Smoky Mountains National Park towards Knoxville. I wish I could say I was thinking profound marketing thoughts as I buzzed blissfully along. In truth, my mind was obsessed with how bone-chilling cold the mountains are when it’s dark … when you’re doing 70 … in the wind.
In fact, the only thing that took my mind off of the cold was the army of 18-wheelers that, just after sunrise, began screaming by me on those shoulderless roads and in the dark, winding tunnels.
“Buck up!” I told myself. “It’s not getting any colder. Besides – I’ll be in the lowlands soon – on I-75 with its three wide lanes and luxuriously apportioned shoulders. My two hours of chilly misery — interrupted by moments of sheer truck-inspired terror – won’t last forever.”
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
October 2, 2008
Issue #20
How connecting with your prospects’
DOMINANT EMOTIONS
drives readership and response through the roof
Dear Business-Builder,
When you set out to create a sales message that connects with prospects’ dominant resident emotions, you have no choice but to begin with the prospect.
Specifically, you begin by considering the prospect’s most intense positive and negative feelings about …
- Himself or herself relative to the subject at hand …
- The benefits your product and premiums promise …
- The medium – direct mail, the Internet, print, or any other medium – through which your message is being delivered …
- The offer – the product and premiums, price, payment terms, guarantee, and the process of ordering …
… And then, you devise ways to deal with each of these dominant resident emotions in ways that leverage them in your favor: Get them working FOR you; never against you.
When you get it right, the attention-getting power, readership and response of your promotions skyrockets. When you get your prospect’s emotions working for you …
RESISTANCE is FUTILE!
Here’s a promotion for Phillips Publishing’s Retirement Letter – one of their flagship publications in the 1980s and early 1990s, edited at the time by my old friend and fellow (former) Prescott, Arizona resident, Pete Dickinson.
To make this easier for you to follow, just click the photo of the promotion. It’ll open a full-size photo in a separate window that you can save or print for reference.
This promo could have simply led with a headline that said, “Retire RICH!” – a big benefit to be sure. But that kind of lead can lack credibility and worse, it misses the opportunity to fully activate the prospect’s dominant resident emotions about retirement.
Instead, this lead connects with prospects at a deeper, far more emotional level – and in doing so, accomplishes six major objectives …
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