In direct marketing, everything is built around offers. In fact, to create a true direct response ad in any medium, you must do 3 specific things:

1. Make an offer.
2. Provide sufficient information to accept the offer.
3. Provide an easy means of responding to the offer.

So, in any direct mail piece or ad, the offer is the heart of the message. But while a rose may be a rose, an offer is not an offer.

An offer is more than a fixed monetary exchange. A 50% discount is not the same as “buy one widget, get the second widget free.” In dollar terms, these are identical. But how you position this deal creates different perceptions and different response rates.

Offer positioning is a vital step in the copywriting process. And businesses should be open to suggestions for more powerful ways to position offers.

Let’s look at an example.

Imagine you have a magazine subscription offer. The magazine sells for $3 an issue and 12 monthly issues are $36. The publisher wants to test a price reduction of 50%. Here are a few ways you can position this offer:

• 50% off
• Save $18
• Only $1.50 an issue
• Save $1.50 per issue
• 6 issues free
• 12 issues for the price of 6
• Less than 5 cents a day

This is more than wordsmithing. Buyers perceive each of these offer positions differently, each with a unique perceived value.

And what’s the value of testing different ways to position your offer? Better response. For example, most tests show that a “buy one get one free” offer will beat a “half off offer.” Why? Greater perceived value. Getting something free carries more psychological weight than saving money, even when the monetary value is identical. “Free” is easier to understand and more tangible that a percentage savings, which is an intellectual mathematical concept.

The takeaway? Don’t accept your offer at face value. Try different ways to position the offer to make it feel more valuable.

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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.

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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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