The Amazing 5R Formula
That Plugs Profit Leaks
In Your Online Copy
& Supercharges Your Sales!
Part 4
Dear Web Business Builder,
So here we are at the 5th and final step in the 5R process. You’ve covered a lot of ground.
- You’ve thoroughly profiled your audience to weed out poorly targeted traffic and better understand your right audience …
- You’ve addressed the key questions, problems and goals that are most important to that target audience. And shown them how to seize their dreams, and vanquish their fears with the promise of your product …
- You’ve identified your ideal spokesperson, and built a strong bond between that person and your ideal prospect, thus maximizing the believability of your promises, and the acceptance of your proofs …
- And you’ve carefully sequenced it all in such a way as to prepare your prospect to accept each one of these elements as they’re encountered with a minimum of critical thought or resistance …
You’ve put a great deal of consideration into what your spokesperson is going to say to your target audience to get them to buy, right from your headline to your P.S. In this final section you’re going to edit your copy one more time with a focus on how he or she is going to say it. You’re going to make your copy as clear, captivating, and credible as it can possibly be:
How to Improve the Clarity of Your Copy …
Clarity in sales copy means never making your reader struggle to figure out what you’re trying to say. Every time you force your reader to mentally pause and consider the meaning of what your spokesperson is communicating to them for more than a split second, a strike is counted against you. Reading should be fluid and effortless.
Go through your copy now and look for opportunities to sharpen it. Here is a checklist for you to follow:
Word Choice – Look at each sentence you’ve written, and single out any words that may have an unintended double meaning. Iron out these potential points of confusion. Here’s an example.
PS: If you, your family or friends are loving dog owners then you must read the SHOCKING TRUTH behind the Commercial Dog Food Scams!
Do you see how the word “loving” can be construed as both a verb and an adverb? A certain percentage of people will read “loving” as a verb, and trip over this sentence momentarily as a result. They’ll see themselves loving dog owners. Kinky!
Here’s the fix …
PS: If you, your family or friends love dogs, then you must read the SHOCKING TRUTH behind the Commercial Dog Food Scams!
Perplexing Pronouns – Take a look at all of the pronouns that appear in your copy. Words like “they”, “them”, “it”, “their”, “he”, “her” etc. These short-cut words help you to avoid repeating a particular noun over and over again, and give your copy a conversational tone. But they also require your reader to deduce which noun in the preceding copy you are referring to. Look for ambiguities that could momentarily trip up your reader.
Here’s an example:
The pronoun "those" turns this sentence into a riddle -> Because we take care of all the management and tracking of your telecom expenses, you will save an immeasurable amount in time, frustration and wages for those who would otherwise be responsible for this tedious but vital process.
Edited for clarity …
Breaking up your sentences often solves the problem, bringing power, and precision to your copy -> Stop getting hosed on your long distance rates. Stop wasting precious staff wages trying to keep your service provider honest. We take total care of the management and tracking of all your telecom expenses. You save time, frustration, and money!
Clunky Transitions – Your copy is written in sections. You make a point, and then you move on to the next one. The reader must sense a connection between one point and the next, or you risk losing him.
Look for paragraphs where the reader may not immediately see the connection to the preceding paragraph. If you find any, try writing a bridging sentence that solidifies the connection between the two paragraphs. The easiest way to do this is to simply include the subject of both paragraphs in the connecting sentence.
Connectivity – As you wrote your copy, you made assumptions about your readers. As you moved from one thought to the next, you did so based on the assumption they knew certain things. And so you didn’t bother to explain those things.
Read your copy over now, and look at those assumptions to see if they’re reasonable. It’s very easy to assume your target audience knows things they do not. Fill in any gaps in the chain of logic where necessary.
Also check to see how well you’ve tied each supporting point back to your central selling idea. You have many supporting proofs, and you’ve explored your main promise in many different ways, but at the end of the day, people will buy based on the strength of a single idea built up in their minds. Be sure to tie each point back to that central selling idea.
How to Make Your Copy More Captivating …
Each line of body copy – from headline to call to action – must maintain the reader’s interest. There must always be a reason to keep reading, and the momentum should build with each passing sentence toward the close. Here are some techniques to help you to do it.
Aesthetics – At each new section, your reader makes an unconscious decision. He’s thinking, “Am I going to tackle this?” To help your reader make a positive decision, make your copy look easy to read.
Keep your paragraphs short, no more than five or six lines. Break long sections of copy up with sub-heads and bullets to relieve the monotony.
Try to always refer forward with your sub-heads, rather than backwards, offering your reader a reason to read the copy that comes next.
You may be tempted to use a sub-head to underscore the copy that precedes it, and that may be perfectly satisfying to someone who is reading your copy line by line. But a backward referenced sub-head is meaningless to someone who is skimming your copy. It does nothing to draw them in.
Brevity – The fewer words you can use to make a point the better. Reading is work. People hate work. This is particularly true of your headline. Want a headline that’s impossible to ignore? Write a short one, five words or less. By all means support your short headline with a pre-head, a post head, and bullets, to flesh out your promise. But try a short “stopper” as your main head.
Go through your copy now, from top to bottom, and see what you can cut without harming the message you’re trying to convey. Chances are you’ll find quite a few words, sentences, even whole paragraphs you can trash.
Pay particular attention to descriptive passages. Because the mind thinks in relative terms, you can save dozens of words by using a clever simile.
Want to impress upon your reader how easy something is? Tell him it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Want to explain how futile something is? Tell your reader it’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. How unwelcome someone is? As welcome as a skunk at a lawn party … How lucky? Luckier than Brad Pitt in a Mexican brothel! You get the idea.
Used tastefully, similes can add a lot of color and imagery to your copy.
Metaphors also have the effect of compressing a lot of meaning into just a few words. Look at the vivid mental imagery they create in these headline examples.
"Slaughter Of The Stock Market Lambs!"
Doesn’t that beat the heck out of “How Naïve Investors Are About To Lose A Lot Of Money In The Stock Market”?
Or how about this beauty …
What Leading Experts Are Saying About The "Year 2000" Bomb:
"Blood Will Run In The Streets!"
Far more captivating than: “Leading Experts Predict The Year 2000 Problem Will Cause Widespread Disruption”, don’t you think?
Metaphor and simile are also extremely powerful when it comes to adding spice and excitement to your body copy. I’ve singled out a few examples in the following passage.
Note how the metaphorical verbs and similes I’ve highlighted work together to bring the copy to life, infusing it with picture and action.
Before landing on Wall Street – an idealistic graduate of Brigham Young University in Utah – I believed, as you may, that America’s stock markets provide an essentially equal opportunity for all.
But as an industry insider, I soon learned they’re more like rigged casinos, teaming with twenty-four-hour-a-day manipulators … round-the-clock schemers … and compulsive liars who’d tell their widowed mothers to bail out of a hot stock if they wanted to buy her position.
Like a secret subway under the streets of Manhattan, runs an old boys network into the very heart of the investment banks and brokerage houses you trust and depend on to make markets for the shares you trade.
Once material news about a given stock becomes public knowledge, the insiders have been whispering about it for weeks or months, and the real profit has already been skimmed off the top.
Worse, top brokerage executives and analysts have been caught red-handed taking what amount to multi-million dollar bribes in return for urging you to buy the stocks of companies they know full well are cooking their books and recklessly inflating their earnings.
Next, look at each sentence and cut anything that isn’t relevant to your prospect’s self interest.
Here’s a very dry piece of bloated sales copy:
The Quick Start Program is your first step and is crucial to the level in which you will benefit from this program. It will not be long until you will look back on this phase of the program and admit that the concepts you are about to learn are simple and easy to use. This first phase has been designed to assist you in maximizing the use of The Q Solution to Memory.
After over 20 years of using and applying the concepts presented in the book, this Quick Start Program has been developed and designed to be a springboard for you into the realm of memory mechanics. As you begin, remember … this could be the most important learning tool you have ever utilized … this learning tool could assure your personal success and assist you in realizing your dreams. A little effort now will provide you a lifetime learning tool … a Photographic-Q-Memory.
Before you start, relax. This is going to be fun and easy.
Look how much livelier it becomes when I chop off the blubber, leaving only the points that appeal directly to the self interest of the reader …
The Quick Start Program is a deceptively simple way to begin developing a photographic memory. But don’t let that fool you. 20 years of practical application and ongoing refinement make it the most important learning tool you’ll ever use. It makes building a mind like a steel-trap fun … even easy. And gives you an almost unfair advantage at school, in business, and in life!
Go through your copy and look for areas where you could have done a better job of staying focused on your reader’s self interest. Use every last inch of real estate to impress upon your reader the magnitude of the benefit available to him.
In your guarantee, for example, don’t just guarantee satisfaction, guarantee specific outcomes that appeal to the prospect’s self interest. On your order pages, tell your prospect what he gets out of carrying out every little instruction, right to the very last call to action that consummates the sale.
Storytelling – There are six little words that almost never fail to captivate people’s interest, Here they are: “Let me tell you the story.” Immediately your audience’s eyes open up like saucers, and you have their attention. We’re all conditioned to respond that way. Storytelling and listening to stories is in our blood. It’s the most powerful structure you can possibly hang any sales argument on.
When you sell with story, you disarm your prospect’s natural aversion to being sold. You engage them in a way that “ad speak” never can. This in turn dramatically increases the odds of them staying captivated by your message.
If your story is a good one, your prospects will be actively considering the reasons why they should buy your product that are implicit in that story, getting you that much closer to making the sale.
Here are two workhorse story structures for you to use:
The Hero’s Journey – This quote from well known mythologist Joseph Campbell pretty much sums up the typical sales application of the hero’s journey, "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."
The hero’s journey lead is typically a first person narrative. Your spokesperson plays the hero. He articulates a story of his pursuit of an opportunity of some kind (The target audience’s biggest goal). The pursuit of said opportunity initially leads to failure and frustration (Due to the target audience’s biggest problems). At the lowest point, a solution emerges (The genesis of your product), a great boon is realized (Your target audience’s biggest dream), and the hero makes its attainment available to the world (Through your offer).
You don’t have to be George Lucas or John Grisham to use this. In the sales context, you tell the story very simply, as though you were talking to a friend across a coffee table. The magic is in the structure.
Here’s how a typical hero’s journey lead begins:
Ever since high school, and then dropping out of four colleges, I sought success. That meant more than money to me. It meant working for myself and doing something I loved doing. The only trouble was I didn’t know what that was. My Dad called it finding my "right place". I finally did find it, but only because I stumbled upon something that obviously is very hard to find, since so few ever find it and attain what they yearn for.
For years and years I read all the books, attended the seminars, sought help from counselors, answered the ads, went to the meetings, and took people’s advice. Finally I had to admit to myself that nothing was paying off and I was running in circles (and losing energy, spirit, and money with each go around). Those are days I don’t like thinking back on. Do you recognize this picture?
Since then, everything has changed …
Winner/Loser – The Wall Street Journal’s Two Young Men Letter, which mailed for decades, is a winner/loser story. You may already be familiar with it.
On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike these two men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both – as young college graduates are – were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.
Recently these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.
They were still very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation, and were still there.
But there was a difference. One of the men was a manager in a small department of that company, and the other was its president.
What Made the Difference?
Martin Conroy, who died recently, wrote the famous Two Young Men letter. It’s said to be one of the top grossing sales letters of all time. What makes it so powerful?
The winner/loser story works on a variety of levels. First, it elicits envy in the reader, which is a powerful motivator.
Second, it’s very subtle. The third person narrative allows you to convey a HUGE ultimate benefit to your prospects without ever having to state it directly. Because people had to infer the benefit for themselves, it became much more powerful. They feel they own the conclusion, and therefore accept it at a much deeper level.
And third, winner/loser leverages the law of contrast. The desirable becomes that much more desirable when compared with the undesirable. This is the same concept you used in your value build up – where you made apples to oranges comparisons that minimized the perception of price.
Remember, the mind thinks in relative terms. Your prospects will compare and contrast everything your spokesperson says regardless of whether you do so in your copy or not. So why not make the comparisons for them in a way that advances the sale?
Interestingly enough, Conroy may not have rattled this wonderful winner/loser narrative off the top of his head. Do you think he might have been exposed to this winner/loser story written decades earlier?
From a certain little town in Massachusetts, two men went to the Civil War. Each of them had enjoyed the same educational advantages, and so far as anyone could judge, their prospects for success were equally good.
One man accumulated a fortune. The other spent his last years almost entirely dependent on his children for support.
He has "had hard luck", the town explained. He "never seemed to catch hold after the war".
Whoever wrote this winner/loser lead was well aware of the power of contrast to strengthen the point he was trying to make. He drew comparisons again and again throughout the piece, with sub-heads like “After Every War Come Great Successes – And Great Failures” and “Weak Men Go Down in Critical Years – Strong Men Grow Stronger!”
Now that you’ve seen two of the most powerful story telling formulas in action, go back to the situations you identified in part 1, and that you articulated in story form in part 2, and see if you can’t strengthen those stories by incorporating the hero’s journey, or the winner/loser story structures. You should have all of the raw data there that you can just plug into the most appropriate format.
How to Make Your Copy More Believable …
Beyond the presentation of proofs … such as testimonials, third party expert endorsements, implied endorsements, before and after pictures, specific facts and figures, etc … that we’ve talked about so much in the previous steps, there are several more techniques you can use to enhance the believability of your copy.
There is a language of logic. The appearance of this language sends a subliminal message to your prospect that allows him or her to feel justified and validated in their decision to buy your product, beyond the actual presentation of proof.
Words and phrases like “because” … “The reason being” … “Why?” … “The truth is”… “The facts are” … “If_____ then_______”, “proven to” … “Scientifically tested and validated”… “Born out by research” … ”studies prove” … etc all increase the believability of your copy. They lend believability to even the most absurd claims.
Go over your copy again, and see if you can strengthen its credence with the language of logic.
And finally, make sure you’ve offered reasoning for all of your claims. If you’re offering a discount… tell your prospects why. If you’re asking your prospects to buy right now, give them a reason for doing so. If you want your prospects to believe your product is the best there is for their particular needs, tell them why.
So there you have it. Your online sales process should now have the right person, communicating the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, and in the right way.
You’re now ready to go forth and achieve amazing, eye-popping success, while others continue to gnash their teeth and struggle.
I hope you enjoyed working through this 4 part series as much as I enjoyed creating it, and that it helped you. Please feel free to leave your comments below.
Until next time, Good Selling!
Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
P.S. For a limited time, you can now cram your hard drive full of control busting copy at a $100 savings with the Steal These Secrets Swipefile. Stop racking your brain needlessly for creative ideas when you can have a treasure trove of proven winning concepts at your fingertips – guaranteed to open the profit floodgates – or your money back! Check it out!
Daniel Levis is a top marketing consultant & direct response copywriter based in Toronto, Canada and publisher of the world famous copywriting anthology Masters of Copywriting featuring the selling wisdom of 44 of the "Top Money" marketing minds of all time, including Clayton Makepeace, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman, John Carlton, Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Richard Armstrong and dozens more! For a FREE excerpt visit Sellingtohumannature.com
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6 Comments »
Join the Discussion!
Let us know what you think. Or ask us anything. Or offer your own sage advice.
The only rule: RESPECT THIS HOUSE! Postings that contain abusive language and/or personal attacks will be cheerfully VAPORIZED. One cross word and – POOF! – your well-thought-out post will be gone in a puff of smoke.
– Clayton
Comment by Tapan Sarkar — June 20, 2007 @ 8:08 am
I have read many books, e-books and articles on copywriting but never came accross anything like your four part article.
It\’s like core of a $10,000 copywriting course.
Awesome Daniel. You are a hero in my book.
Regards,
Tapan
Comment by Zack Fogarty — June 20, 2007 @ 8:54 am
That\’s one of the best articles I\’ve read on copywriting. Top 5, certainly.
Rival\’s the finest from Makepeace and Bencivenga.
Thank you. I feel like I should mail you a fruit basket.
Comment by Mark — June 20, 2007 @ 11:35 am
\”Rival\’s the finest from Makepeace and Bencivenga.\”
I totallly agree…perhaps Clayton needs to discover the definition of overdeliver from Daniel. : )
Comment by chuks — June 21, 2007 @ 3:38 am
awaesome.i print your articles and file it. Fanastic letter about the wall street journal.pls keep it coming.
chuks uwaechia
ceo winstondale luxury retailer
chuks@winstondale.co.uk
Comment by John Manley — June 21, 2007 @ 6:43 am
I totally agree with you about the short headlines. They are getting ridiculously long the internet these days. Almost guarantees they don\’t get read.
I did one recenlty:
\”McLiver Attack\”
That was it. The target audience knew exactly what it meant. Just in case it was followed by:
\”What Has McDonalds Done To Your Internal Organs?\”
John
Comment by Joey Atlas — July 7, 2008 @ 1:03 pm
Daniel - just want to send a sincere thanks for this 4 part series - for those who put it to use - it’s worth hundreds of thousands, over and over - again and again and again…
I’m implementing this ‘condensed course’ as we speak…
THANK YOU!
Joey Atlas