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.
David Ogilvy on the Power of Direct Response Advertising
David Ogilvy called direct response advertising his “secret weapon.” When he started out in the advertising business, direct response wasn’t exactly a respected form of selling. It was in the red light district of the ad world.
But he was smart enough to know its potential and built his agency, at least in part, with the principles of direct response.
I’ve found a video of Ogilvy addressing a group of direct response advertising professionals and laying out the advantages of direct response over general advertising. This is a treat to watch.
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