Be bossy in your copy!
If you want to improve your copywriting, read this article now.
I’m going to give you one of the most powerful secrets for making your words work harder in any promotion. And it’s about as simple as copywriting tips get. Ready?
Tell people what to do.
That’s it.
I told you it was simple. But it works. You see, for the most part, people do what you tell them to do. You can’t make people do what they don’t want to do, but if the request is reasonable they’ll comply.
Do a little experiment. At the grocery store, walk up to someone and tell them to hand you something off the shelf. “Excuse me, sir. Hand me that box of Cheerios.” You can soften it if you like. “Excuse me, sir. Will you hand me that box of Cheerios?”
Every now and then, you’ll get a cantacerous old fart who will tell you to “buzz off,” but most of the time the person will do what you tell them to do. People respond to commands. Read more
How to add oomph to your offer
Offers are the heart of direct marketing. So if you want a powerful way to improve response to any direct advertisement, look at your offer.
That’s the gist of a recent article I wrote for Target Marketing called Energize Your Offer.
I determined a long time ago that there are 3 essential elements of any direct response ad. You must:
1. Make an offer.
2. Provide sufficient information for acceptance of the offer.
3. Provide a means of easy response to act on the offer.
If you leave out any one of those elements, you not only will end up with a failure, you will be doing something other than direct response.
You can read the entire article over at Target Marketing. I provide a simple definition of “offer,” take a look at the guts of an offer, reveal the world’s best offer, and discuss how to test into offers the right way.
This is really all part of my simple “big picture” approach to effective copywriting. While little tweaks can sometimes boost response for giant promotions, and occasionally a small headline edit can make a difference, generally little changes produce little results. To get big improvements, you should concentrate on the big picture. In direct marketing that means the list, the offer, the format, and then the overall copy approach.
If you want to know more about offers, have a look at my list of 99 proven offers. You can also read a detailed explanation of the 3 elements of direct response.
-
Recently Written
- Be bossy in your copy!
- How to add oomph to your offer
- Yogi Berra: Master Copywriter?
- 5 tips for more creative copywriting
- Duke University offers vintage print ad library
- E-mail marketing tips from the pros
- The great “click here” debate resolved
- How much choice do consumers want?
- Speedwriting: 12 tips for writing faster
- SEO Copywriting: How important is it to you?
-
Categories
-
Monthly Archives
-
Blogroll