| Bullets in an email, in a letter, or on your web site are fast at getting the point across to a busy reader. The reader appreciates them. They convey your main points in an organized fashion and are quick to read.
To get the most out of bullets there are a few tricks to using them that you’ll want to apply to email and web sites.
The purpose of bullets is to draw the reader’s attention to your most important points. They should not be used as your entire message. I’ve seen a few web sites that give a bulleted list, and then never explain anymore. The reader is left hanging, and wondering where the rest of the story is.
Bullets are useful when you are writing a list. Otherwise you’ll be writing a long, unwieldy paragraph full of compound sentences. And of course, in sales copy, compound sentences are not effective.
Anne Holland, Content Director of Marketing Sherpa, wrote a revealing article about bullets. Compiled from years of research of landing pages, email copywriting and eye tracking tests, this information will boost your results.
Most writers will list the most important time first and end their list with the least important. Most of us were taught in school to do it that way. But, research has discovered that the human eye doesn’t play by the rules.
It will register the two top bullets, and then skip to the last one. Then, the eye will wander somewhere else on the page. This means that the bullets in the middle get ignored completely.
Happily, if you have more than three, then reprioritize your bullets this way:
- Most important point
- Second most important point
- Not so important point
- Not so important point
- Third most important point
A second and subtle hint to ensure your bullet points are easy to read is to never start each bullet with the same word. For example:
- Notes on growth
- Notes on nutrition
- Notes on maturity
You can see, it looks boring in a hurry! Your eye wants to blur right over it. Along this same line, Ms. Holland suggests you should not even use a word starting with the same letter to list your points.
For people who’ve taken speed-reading courses, this information will be understandable. When reading, your eye sees in large blocks. Your mind translates only word by word.
When you craft a bullet list, and you want it to be “fast,” write it out in your usual way. Then edit and re-write with this information in mind. You’ll be pleased with the increased response.
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
“Faster Than A Speeding Bullet!”
-- Published in “Get Great Clients” ezine, by Marketing Copywriter Chris Marlow, June, 2008
Get Attention with a Flashbulb Moment
Do you ever envy movie stars and famous dignitaries? People crowding around them for a chance to catch a glimpse of someone famous. Flashbulbs going off, and turning night into day.
Postcards have high impact, they’re quick to read, and inexpensive to produce. You never have to worry about whether your recipient will open an envelope. And because they’re direct (snail) mail, they carry an aura of importance.
Gatekeepers will almost always pass them through to your reader. And because they’re so quick to read, they will get read before hitting the wastebasket. Your message will be imprinted on the reader’s subconscious mind instantly.
More often than you might imagine. Here are a few occasions when a postcard would be perfect:
- New product or service announcement
- Trade show invitation (Visit our booth # ___)
- Teaser for up-coming information
- Special sale or limited-time offer
- Reminder notice for presentation or seminar
- Anytime you want to create curiosity
You only have an instant to capture their interest, so the formatting must be really sharp. The objective is to deliver a short, powerful message to a reader whose mind is open and curious.
One subject is all you can sell in a postcard. If you have more to say, you’ll need a letter. You need to keep the copy short, crisp and powerful. Be sure to stress the benefits of learning more about the product or service you’re showcasing. The copy needs to be very “you” focused.
As with all marketing projects, be sure to include a “call to action.” Ask them to call, email, read your web site, or whatever it is you want them to do.
You’ll need great graphics and emotion-laden color. Graphics can be a subject-related photo, or an amusing cartoon, Think of picture postcard when you do this, the kind where people write, “wish you were here.”
It may be tempting to display your new warehouse, or product container, but I’d shy away from that. You might find your new warehouse beautiful, but to the reader, it’s just another building.
The size of your postcard can be the standard 4 by 5, but you can also go over-size for impact.
Once your copy is written and the graphics are in .jpg, you can ship the whole thing off to your printer, and they’ll take care of printing and mailing at a very reasonable cost. In fact, a full service printer can even help with the graphic design.
Be sure to test and measure responses. You can do it by using a code number for responses, or if there’s to be a phone response, simply ask them how they learned of your offer. This test will help you calculate ROI for the project.
About 8 to 10 days after your mailing has gone, upload your postcard to your email host and send it again. You can use a subject line like, “Did you get this?”
The subject line will spark their curiosity and they’ll open your email. When they see the post card, they’ll remember the first one and now you have a double impact.
Change the code slightly so you can measure the response from the email against the snail mail card.
You’re a star! Oh, oh. Here comes the Paparazzi with their cameras and they’re looking for you!
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
For thousands of years, emotions have been used as an effective way to stimulate people, and to control them This is because, in general, humans are strongly motivated by their emotions.
The most talked-about emotions are the Seven Deadly Sins: Fear, Greed, Vanity, Lust, Envy, Pride, and Laziness!
Some other powerful emotions are Generosity, Curiosity, Love, Compassion, Regret, and the human need to "belong" or be part of a group.
Marketing and advertising people rely heavily on the use of emotions to sell their products. Politicians smother us with these emotions during campaigns. Parents use threats (Fear) and praise (Pride) to raise their children.
You do it by turning your features into benefits. Those benefits can be filled with the emotions you choose. Paint a word picture, supported by graphics that will appeal to the desires of the reader. Put in enough details that your prospect can visualize himself in the picture.
If you're a clothing manufacturer, talk about how meticulous you are in finding and using the best fabrics, the most up-to-date, flattering fashions, or the feathery softness of your silks, the unbeatable comfort and endurance of your cottons. Describe the stunning beauty your dresses bestow on the wearer. Paint pictures with the lively colors of the fabrics. Show them the cloud of downy softness that will surround their customers…
If you manufacture a unique ingredient, paint a word picture describing how your ingredient will transform your customer's product. Tell how it will give their product an irresistible flavor, or make it smooth and creamy, mouthwatering. Make the unique ingredient the one thing they can’t do without.
If you’re in the restaurant business you can paint savory, mouth-watering picture in your reader’s mind by describing some of the aspects of creating a dish: “The Master Chef then gently adds a splash of fruity wine to the golden sauce, bringing a hint of summer days to delight your palate and tickle your senses.” Or, “When our steaming dishes are placed before you, your eyes will be bathed in the eternally delightful combination of earth-brown mushrooms, golden garlic, and glowing green peppers – all of it caressing the mouth-watering sirloin nestled beneath…”
Remember: Benefits support features. You can illustrate the benefits by painting word pictures with the features. When people can envision your product, the features magically transform into benefits!
Repetition locks your company into a buyer's memory. The real secret here is to
As a Clinical Hypnotherapist, I knew that if a client could evoke the desired emotions to go with a desired behavior change, the awesome power of the subconscious mind would almost always guarantee success. Emotions, combined with repetition, helped people lose weight, give up smoking, recover from panic attacks, sleep better, and deal with chronic pain.
When you evoke an emotion, coupled with a repetitive idea, you sell more products. Emotions super-charge the subconscious mind, and drive it to achieve it's strong desire. Repetition locks the desire in memory.
Emotions, plus repetition, are an unbeatable combination.
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
ensuring your marketing messages have the greatest impact possible.
Are you testing all your marketing projects? Every email, space ad, brochure, direct response letter, even your newsletter (You do have one don’t you?) is a golden opportunity to TEST.
Test headline response, test email subject lines, test graphics, and test your offer. (You do have an offer, don’t you?) It’s easy to test, and the information coming back will greatly improve your response rates.
As your response rate goes up, your cost per lead goes down, and that improves your ROI. There’s simply not much economic practicality in sending out a big marketing project that isn’t going to get maximum results.
You can test with a Promotion Code, Offer Response code, or you can count clicks. But one of the simplest, and most effective, ways is to do an A/B Split Test.
Let’s use email subject lines as an example. Creative subject lines improve your open rates. With testing, we can take it a step further and refine the project.
You want to send an email blast to your list of 1000 people or companies. You brain storm the subject line and come up with. “New Product Announcement.” Call this one “A.” It’s not bad, and it’s straightforward enough.
Then, you write “Product X has a surprise for you.” Well, that certainly will tweak their curiosity. Call this one subject line “B.”
At this point there’s two ways to test the subject line:
- Send subject line “A” email out, and then a little later, send the same content using subject line “B”. Within a few hours or the next day, go to the Reports section of your email server and see which one got the better open rate. You can also see who opened both.
- The second method is similar. Send the subject line “A” to 10% of your list. At the same time, send the subject line “B” to 10% of your list. Then check your open rates in your email host report.
When you determine which one pulled best, send the one with the best open rate to the balance of your mailing list, and be sure to track your results.
You can refine it further, testing a few more subject lines, if you have time. You can also do this with headlines A and B, graphics A and B, or lead paragraph A and B.
As you do this, you’ll also be learning what type of language your unique audience responds to best. You’ll be learning to “speak their language.” This information can be shared with the sales team, and your response rates will soar.
If you are sending email blasts in-house, this will be a bit more complicated to do. There are many great companies who will host and track your mail marketing. I use Constant Contact, A Weber is a good one, and Silver Pop is good. Check them all out and find one that fits your needs. The benefits of a good service far outweigh the small expense.
Testing will make you a professional emcee for your company message. Make sure everyone hears your news.
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
Remember the words to a favorite song, a poem you had to memorize in school, the name of your first girl friend. These were all things you repeated until they became part of the "fiber" of you. You probably still remember the address of the house you grew up in and the answers to a Biology final exam you wanted to ace. You easily remember telephone numbers and your social security number. This is evidence of the limitless recall of your subconscious mind. The capacity of the subconscious mind is so huge it makes computers seem as archaic as storing data on rolls of papyrus.
Savvy marketers know this and capitalize on it whenever they can. Most of the time, they're focusing on branding with their logo, and a good tag line. When you apply the secret of repetition to all of your marketing projects, you'll see your response rate jump.
When you plan your marketing projects for the year, create an image, a tag line, a color theme, or even a story. Make that your theme in every project and campaign for the next six months and test your responses against a period without this theme. You'll be amazed at the difference. Then, if you want to see even more response, use the same theme for an additional six months (12 months in all). Your message will be indelibly stamped in your customer's subconscious mind. Just like "7 X 7 = 49."
When you watch TV, pay close attention to the advertising. Geico Insurance is doing a great job of repetition with the gecko and cave man campaigns. The big Pharma companies do it well, too. Who can forget "the little purple pill?" You see repetition in action in advertising jingles. Oscar Mayer has a great one both you and kids know by heart.
These examples are in the retail sector, but the secret works just as well in business-to-business marketing. The reason is that you are marketing to human beings, not entities. Your audience might be a CEO or a Vice President of Marketing, but she has the complex emotions and powerful subconscious mind only humans have.
Note: I mentioned emotions. Your emotions are an indicator of relative importance. Based on your emotional response, your subconscious mind determines how to file and thereby "anchor" data.
Repeat, repeat, repeat your message. Use the same theme in your print ads that you use on trade show material. Customers might not read your ad word for word, but their subconscious minds will register it and recognize the theme.
Capture the power of the subconscious storehouse. Impress your customer with a main point you want him to remember. Then repeat, repeat, repeat your message like the theme song of a great movie. They'll never forget your herbs are the freshest, your electronics have cutting-edge technology, or your service is superior.
When you understand how the mind works, your marketing projects will yield results you've never had before.
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
NO! None of those items will work for a lead-generating offer, on your website. They might pass for trade show give-aways, but, an offer on your website needs to have real, inherent value in the mind of your prospect. It needs to be something special. Something only you can give them.
Obviously, it's not financially practical to offer an IPod to everyone who responds to your offer. It wouldn't be a good idea, anyway. When something of too much dollar value is given away, free, your prospect immediately wonders, "What's the catch?" They get suspicious of you, and your offer.
According to a May 9, 2007 article in Marketing Sherpa, http://www.marketingsherpa.com, in the B 2 B market, a white paper is the most desirable marketing tool to use, for offers. This is followed closely by Case Studies.
In a survey of 427 marketing executives, and 2.394 content users, the ranking of white papers was 79% by users, and 82% by vendors. Case studies came in at 62% for both categories.
The advantages of using white papers ("Manufacturing Efficiency Improves With New X_Y_Z Process.") are clearly there:
- White papers are filled with valuable content;
- The white paper can be tailored to the prospect's interests;
- The recipient gets in-depth information on a subject of interest;
- They can be sent to recipients in a PDF file, at little or no expense;
- The recipient can download the paper to 'Save," or print it out;
- They provide real, physical evidence of your company's efforts and successes.
If you've done your homework, you should have a good understanding of who your customer and potential customers are. You should know what his ambitions are, and what he worries abut. Knowing these two things will guide you to the subject of your white paper.
These days, most executives have advanced education degrees. This tells you they're people who value information. They seek it out--the hows, the whys and the wherefores. They place a high importance on information. This is why white papers and case studies are so popular.
A white paper is usually a treatise 10 to 25 pages in length, covering a specific topic. It could be a new process your company has developed, or a report on clinical research into the efficacy of a new ingredient. It might be about a revolutionary distribution system that could be used by a wide range of companies.
A white paper is not a selling document. Respondents will request your white paper for the content. They do not want, nor will they appreciate, a sales pitch from you, in the middle of a discussion of functional results. At the end of the paper you will, of course, give credit to, and a brief bio of the author, and the sources. And you'll include contact information for those who'd like to learn more.
Case studies are also excellent offers for prospective clients. These are short (two to three pages at most) studies done on a product's efficiency, effectiveness, or popularity, for example. A case study presents the initial problem or challenge, then details the steps taken to find the solution, and concludes with the results of the solution.
If neither of these two 'products' fits your needs, there are other products which have proven effective, as offers.
Free samples are always winners. The drawbacks include expensive packaging, postage and shipping expense.
Some companies offer Webinars, or demos – particularly is they want to demonstrate a new process or procedure. These can be effective, but reside at the bottom of the list, in Marketing Sherpa's report.
You could develop CDs or DVDs, covering a wide range of topics – how you find and select the elements of your products; how your products are manufactured, or whatever you feel would illustrate and highlight the uniqueness of your company. Again, though, you're facing added expenses, plus another 'inventory' list.
Try a discount or 'two-for-one' coupon for their first purchase. Be aware that this type of offer works best only to establish customer loyalty, and for customer retention.
I've seen companies offer smart, attractive Day Planners, or, through affiliate marketing, offer gift cards to a related business enterprise. ("Order our Smart Saw today, and we'll give you a $50 gift card to Home Depot!") These can work very well, on many positive levels.
Give these ideas some thought, then, implement one. You'll only have to do this about once a year, for your regular marketing schedule, and for any trade show you attend.
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone responds to an offer.
In the nutraceutical/functional foods industry, I’ve noticed very few companies feature an offer on their web site. If your web site is one of them, give some serious thought to changing that. Develop an offer for your web site. You’ll be amazed at how your leads and sales will increase.
Think of an offer as an incentive, an extra nudge to encourage someone to act. You are willing to give something away free in exchange for them giving you their contact information and/or buying a product from you. An offer sweetens the deal.
It’s the same thing as giving away gifts at a trade show. You’re hoping to make a business friend. You have a chance to meet them face-to-face, learn a little about their business and give people something with your name on it—a free gift that they’ll remember you for. In an earlier newsletter, I wrote about the law of “reciprocity.” This law is as old as civilization itself. If you give something to me, I feel honor-bound to give something to you. Another way to think of it is an offer is a thank you gift for doing business with you.
With electronic marketing; email, web site, on-line newsletters; you don’t have the opportunity to meet someone in person. But, you’d still like to get to know them. An offer will help open the doors.
If your goal is to generate leads, a good offer will give you names and contact information. The sales team can then follow up on this information, and in time generate more sales.
If you want to increase sales, an attractive offer can be the thing that turns a looker into a buyer. You can use an offer to encourage a larger quantity purchase, or increase the frequency.
An offer is also a reward for a company that’s willing to give you their contact information
Remember the old days when Cracker Jacks came with a little toy inside? Maybe you’re not old enough to remember that, but children begged Mom for a box of Cracker Jacks, just to get the toy inside. As a result, the company’s profits soared.
The little Cracker Jacks toy won’t work in the big world we’re in now, but the psychology of wanting something is still part of our makeup. Give your potential customers something they want or need. Give them something they will value.
A good offer can often be the deciding factor in a buyers mind. If your offer is attractive enough, sometimes they’ll order, just to get your free offer. They want what you’re offering. If they are undecided between two companies selling similar products, they’ll order your product because your offer was so enticing.
In the next issue, I’ll write about the types of things you can develop which make an attractive offer in the nutraceutical/functional foods market.
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
you need to realize you're not just selling to one person.
In an excellent interview conducted by copywriter Clayton Makepeace, Bob Bly reveals this challenge, and the secrets to overcoming the committee process. In his introduction, Makepeace describes Bob as, "one of the few acknowledged masters of B2B copywriting – with 25 years of successful promotions for IBM, Intuit, Swissbank, Nortel Networks, Praxair, and a lot of others under his belt." Bob is also the author of many books, including The Copywriter's Handbook, the Bible of copywriters everywhere.
The actual interview runs 27 pages -- far too long to quote here. But one of the points I appreciated is this: In B2B marketing, you are actually selling to a committee, not an individual. In B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing, you only need to convince the individual with the credit card, and you've made your sale.
This is an important distinction, and one we should keep in mind when planning marketing projects. You must know who your customer is. Does he have time concerns about getting what you offer, in a timely fashion? Does he always have to battle the CFO to maintain his budget? Are the scientists jaded or broad-minded in their search for better ingredients or materials? Just as in B2C selling, once you know your customer's chief pains, you'll be able to address those pains and show him how your product can "make them all go away."
Now, let's think about the committee aspect of your customer. You need to convince the Purchasing Manager with the quality of your product or service, the financial officer needs to be impressed with your great pricing, and the CEO needs to believe your product will be good for his company's future growth. You might also have to wow the lead scientist in the laboratory. Now, we're up to four individuals, each with a different agenda. There could even be more on the "committee."
Obviously, you won't be able to persuade everyone at once. Your promotion would be too cluttered to be effective. The shotgun approach is great for duck hunting, but we're not hunting ducks.
Instead, focus on one major benefit, with a few secondary benefits. Impress one person, the CEO, or the purchasing director. In turn, that person will carry your message to the other decision makers. If you know your customer well enough you'll know who you have to please.
Note that I said benefit, not feature of your product or service. People buy benefits, and features support the benefits. A great example of this came from another highly accomplished copywriter, Chris Marlow. Chris said, "You're not selling grass seed, you're selling a greener lawn." That makes the distinction crystal clear.
© Copyright 2008 Pam Magnuson Copywriting
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