Entries Tagged 'Words and writing' ↓

I was irrationally exuberant about the Robert California character on the revamped The Office, replacing Steve Carell as the office manager (OK, technically he’s now the CEO of the company, Linda Hunt apparently having bailed on that role). Played by the great James Spader, California first showed up as an interviewee for the job last spring. He seemed like a cube-dweller’s existential nightmare, somebody who had no idea who he was or why he was there but was designed to unsettle the person he was talking to in a very laid back, California way.

The first couple of shows this season were some of my all time favorites on The Office… including a Halloween episode in which he prowled the office gathering each employee’s worst fears, then told a horror story that incorporated all those fears. But that was also the show where he brought his kid to work, and now he’s taken to attending employee off-duty parties and making self aware statements like “you don’t know me at all, do you?” Robert California has jumped the shark.

There’s a lesson in this for marketers. The producers didn’t just decide out of the blue to emasculate the character. They must have done lots of audience testing that told them viewers were confused by “the boss” (and everybody knows that stereotype) behaving in such an unpredictable way. It made them nervous so it had to be changed. Similarly, sometimes our best copy and creative ideas are just too weird for our prospects and we have to bite our tongues and pull back to the tried and true.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Maybe James Spader can be persuaded to do a one man show based on the “real” Robert California.

Here are two very different direct mail efforts that make the same mistake: apologizing to the reader. They don’t come right out and say “I’m sorry”, but the self-effacing entry points have the same effect. And by choosing this approach for their entry they’ve given up the opportunity to have another, much stronger intro.

Waste Management says “We know this is the last thing on your mind… but it’s the first thing on ours.” With the reveal of the opening trash can lid. Well, no. If it’s the last thing on my mind then why are you talking about it? If I don’t care about it then I am not going to read your promo about it.

The Fresh Air Fund sent me an address sticker package to solicit money to send inner city kids to camp. There’s actually some good copy here but not the first sentence of the letter: “With winter fast approaching, it may seem like an odd time to talk about giving inner-city kids a bus ticket to Fresh Air camp.” Well, yes it does. Maybe you should come back and talk to me in the spring.

Or maybe you should lead with the stronger second sentence: “With your help, inner-city children will have the opportunity to leave behind the crowded apartments and dangerous streets they call home and join us next summer.” Or, maybe turn the timing of the appeal into a motivator: “We have to work all year long to make sure that inner city kids have the chance to spend a few summer weeks at camp. That’s why we’re writing you today.”

What’s happening in both these efforts is that the copywriter is implicitly apologizing for the intrusion. But the reader doesn’t care because advertising mail is a lower life form than a cockroach. All the reader wants to do is throw it away. And all you can do to save yourself is to deliver a powerful offer or a truly intriguing proposition that will interrupt that trajectory toward the recycling bin. The Uriah Heep act just doesn’t cut it.

The offer is what readers get when they respond to your call to action. Your success depends on making the offer as clear and appealing as you can. Very often you will be asked by your client to help design the offer. This is a chance to earn extra response points (and brownie points) with a creative concept which is also sound marketing.

In a direct sale, the product or service IS the offer. The prospect is going to respond not by asking for more information but by making a financial commitment here and now. Catalogs and e-commerce sites are filled with many direct sales offers, which can be presented economically because each takes only a few square inches of space. Catalog writers learn to write descriptive copy very efficiently; in a paragraph or two, you will give the reader everything they need to make a buying decision and also to distinguish the product from other similar products, sold by you or by your competitors.

A hard offer leads the reader directly into a sales conversation. Example: “call right now and we’ll set up an appointment with a service specialist at your convenience.” The response rate may be low but the leads will be very high quality, because only those who are seriously interested will respond. Note: your client may want to sugarcoat the sales visit and call it a “free consultation” or some such but most prospects will see the hard offer for what it is.

From a copywriter’s perspective, hard offers are risky. It’s entirely up to the sales force to turn those leads into sales and if they don’t, it will be your fault for not sending them good leads in the first place. If possible, recommend instead a….

A soft offer is information or a free trial that lures the reader into the sales conversation through an intermediate step. If we are doing lead generation copywriting, this is what we want to recommend because we maintain control. Literally, we are not “selling” the end result but rather the info kit, the webinar, or similar information. All we need to do is convince them that what we have to offer is worth a few minutes of their time in review.

Often the information will come “arm attached” in that it is accompanied by a call or visit from a salesperson.  We can’t control what happens in that follow-up conversation, but we can deliver a very interested prospect through the way we set up the value of the information to be obtained.

Limited time offers and add-ons sweeten the pot for the prospect while they allow the merchant to influence buyer behavior. I’ve done some work for a medical alert service (the pendant around the neck, connected to a radio device that alerts an operator when the button on the pendant is pushed) and they are constantly testing such add-ons as a free lockbox (to hang on your door handle with a key inside, so EMS personnel can get into the house) and free coverage for your spouse when you buy today for yourself.

When you are writing about these more complex offers, you need to invest the copy real estate to make the add-ons understandable and appealing. In particular, if it’s a limited time offer paint a word picture of the benefit in responding now and the pain or disappointment to be expected if they wait.

Final tip: if your offer is very rich and involved, you can often build your communication around its components. I’m thinking of a continuity package I wrote for a fan club where you could get regular shipments of the “Highlander” TV series on video. The sign-up offer was a selection of “best of” and “blooper” videos as well as a free t-shirt. I used the components of the offer to pull the reader through the package in a “but wait, there’s more” technique, and then introduced the final premium in the P.S. which explained it would only be sent to readers who found a sword sticker hidden in the package and attached it to their order document.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

I saw this on a poster at my local purveyor of Indian goods and had to check out its veracity:

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

The quote is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Ludicrous. Or is it? A search turns up both corroboration and skepticism. My money is with the denier who reports the quote actually came from Zig Ziglar, who says Gandhi said it.

Gotta love the internets.

Nobody’s going to read your sales letter. Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. Nobody’s going to read your sales letter exactly the way you crafted it. They’ll bounce around, clinging on words that attract them like pretty bangles and ignoring your strongest selling points, they’ll go straight to the P.S. and double back in the letter…. And if you’re luck at the end of all this they will pay some attention to your call to action.

Don’t feel bad. You are getting paid to sell, not to write creative prose. And you will be amply rewarded if you apply a few tricks from the copywriter’s quiver of reader retention arrows.

Set the hook right after the opening of the letter. I shared the opening of the Geneva letter inviting business owners to a two-day seminar. The first paragraph flattered them as the owner of a valuable business. The second paragraph suggested they may well receive an offer in a red-hot market.

Now comes the third paragraph, which frets: But what if the offer is too low, even though it may seem astronomically high to you? What must you know to negotiate the sales process? And what is the downside, should you decide not to sell in today’s sizzling market?

So now we’ve introduced a problem which might not have been relevant had we not flattered the egoistic business owner at the beginning of the letter. And we can proceed to introduce the Geneva Business Valuation Seminar as the solution with a call to action.

This is a four-page letter, which is why we can afford to wait so long for the CTA. In a shorter letter it might come in the third or second paragraph.  At this point, the DNA of our message is on the page and they have enough information to act immediately, if they wish, or to continue reading.

Guide the reader through the letter with connective words and phrases. “And” lets them know you’re about to add a selling point. Same with “Plus”. “What’s more” supersizes this, telling the reader you’ve headed to a whole new level of benefits. “That’s why” tells the reader you are about to deliver a sum-up selling argument. “But” is a qualifier—you may agree with what I just said, here’s a consideration you need to keep in mind. And yes, I realize the Queen does not begin her English sentences with prepositions. You need to make a choice between getting an A in English, or selling as hard as you possibly can.

Keep your paragraphs and sentences short to make the letter an easy read. When I started as a new copywriter, I was told to keep paragraphs under six lines. Today this seems impossibly long to me. Five lines maximum, please. Sentences should fit on one line if possible, or should be broken with a comma (often used when grammar rules say it is superfulous), em dash or ellipse to give the reader easily digestible chunks of information. And pepper that olio with the occasional one-line paragraph and one-word sentence.

Help out your art director by making layout suggestions in your draft. Indented paragraphs, centered subheads, important words and phrases should be bold-faced or underlined in the body copy. Tell your designer that you’re not doing art direction; rather, you’re making suggestions as to where emphasis should be placed. Then, cross-check the first round of comps to see that you haven’t been completely ignored; Quark and InDesign ignore underlining when a Word doc is imported and your designer may not bother to go back and add it back. (Or at least I’m told this is what happens; the designer may be trying to sabotage my copy by taking out the formatting, but that seems less likely.)

What you are doing with all these efforts is to make the letter scannable. A reader who does not have the patience (or the ability) to read beginning to end can hop from emphasis point to emphasis point like a pebble skipping across a pond, and still understand what you have to sell and what you want them to do about it.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

In most of our marketing we are trying to get people to do something. This used to be the purview of “direct response” advertising but on the web every page is full of clickable links, and today even the most image-y print ad or TV spot will include a URL or 800 number to find out more.

We want to pay attention to how we craft these calls to action (CTAs for short) because they affect our paychecks as copywriters. If we can prove that our efforts produced more calls or dollars or customers, we will get more work and bigger fees. Here are a few tips:

Combine the call to action with a benefit statement. Are classes limited to 20 students to ensure personal attention? Then say that in the call to action, followed by a request to respond now to avoid being left out. Is the product going to taste great, improve health or make them money? Then add urgency to the CTA: To enjoy the health-giving benefits of royal jelly bon-bons just as soon as we can ship them, call our hotline right now.

Tell the reader early and often what you want them to do. If it’s a direct mail letter you want to cut to the chase no later than the third or fourth paragraph. You’ve created desire or concern through your windup, now tell the reader specifically how they can scratch the itch. If it’s a long letter, repeat the call to action at least once per page. CTAs in web pages and emails are more compact since they are clickable links, so they can be used more frequently, as often as once every couple of paragraphs.

The reason for the multiple CTAs is simply that you never know exactly when your reader will be ready to take action, and you don’t want to take a chance on losing them because they get distracted and wander off the page.

Make the call to action consistent throughout your communication. Don’t invite them to request more information in one CTA, then tell them you want an order right now further down the page. If you have a freebie or a giveaway contest for them, mention it in each CTA or they will wonder, “hey, where is that prize I was going to win?” The reason is that readers are donkeys. They will follow willingly as long as you give them no reason not to, but if you throw in a distracting or confusing element they will dig in their heels and do everything except what you want.

Deliver a complete CTA at the end of a sales letter, or the sidebar of an email invite. This includes everything the reader needs to know about the offer—and all possible response options including mail, phone, email, web link, fax and maybe something else. If you are asking for money or a serious commitment of their time, this CTA should also include a guarantee of some sort for reassurance.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

The first paragraph is the most important element of any selling message. If you don’t hook your reader here they will abandon you. (Which is why it’s not a good idea to keep key selling points in reserve, thinking you will reveal them if you go along.) Just like the subject line or outer envelope teaser, these words are worth the investment of a disproportionate amount of your time.

It’s never wrong to open with a strong statement of your offer (I want to let you know about an unusual sale on first quality goods that don’t normally get discounted, but are now 50% off for a limited time) or an explanation why you are writing (because I believe you are among the top 5% of salespeople, I want to share an opportunity that most people would not even understand). But that’s not good enough.

You ALSO need to provide verbal chum for the slow-moving fish who initially are not attracted by your offer, or do not think it applies to them, but can be lured into the net with the right conversational gambit. Let’s talk about a few ways to do this.

Problem/solution open: works with many technology products because technology consumers nearly always have some problem to solve. If you’re looking to maximize the potential of the XYZ platform, then you’ll want to read a new collection of case histories from industry leaders who have done just that.

Picture yourself here: paint an evocative word image of the benefits to be gained as a result of the offer in the letter, tied to the reader personally. My control letter for Online Trading Academy, which educates people to trade stocks and other investments online, does this: “Imagine, for a moment, what investing would be like if you knew you could not fail. Never again would you sell a winning position too soon—or hold onto a loser for longer than you should…”

Flattery: you are writing the recipient precisely because they are a perceptive member of your target audience, and they can justify your confidence in them by acting appropriately. Nice if you can pull it off. The variations on Emily Soell’s classic intro for Vanity Fair belong in this category: “Dear Friend, If the list on which I found your name is any indication, this is not the first – nor will it be the last – subscription letter you receive… [goes on to explain it is a very special list of perceptive readers].”

News: this is the default opening in fundraising and politics, where there is generally an urgent need that your reader is enlisted in helping to relieve. May also work for business to business or personal-interest consumer marketing IF you are confident from your audience research that the reader will be as excited about the news as you are.

Emotion: My control letter for Met Life’s long term care insurance prospecting starts with a paragraph I jotted down in a meeting with the sales team: “Every one of us would like to live well in our later years and leave some money for the next generation. Is that too much to ask?” It fits the combination of fear for the future and indignation at the status quo that the reader is feeling. As with the news approach, this only works if you have a true mind meld with your reader.

Entertainment/escape: Many of the most successful publications promotions start with a “free sample” of the content. People will subscribe to be inspired or entertained or to be lifted out of their quotidian existence, so why not start right now? The Great American Recipes letter does this: “Remember when good food meant the best times you ever had with family and friends? I’m talking about lazy summer evenings serving home-made ice cream on the screen porch….”

An opener that does several of these things simultaneously is the introduction of my four page letter for Geneva, a M&A consultant whose business model was to invite business owners to a two-day paid (not free) workshop on how to value their business:

We’re in the midst of the hottest Mergers & Acquisition market in 100 years and you, as the owner of a middle-market business, have the most desirable property of them all… That’s why, like many of the people who attend our Business Valuation Seminar, you may have already received an offer—and for more than you ever dreamed your business could be worth. And even if you haven’t yet been approached about selling, you probably will be soon.

News, flattery, a bit of picture-yourself-here sets the reader up nicely for the presentation of my client’s seminar as the solution to the problem.

One final tip, after you’ve completed your best effort at an opening paragraph, take it out. That’s what I said. Editors often advise writers to cut the first paragraph of their work because it’s an unnecessary wind-up before the real pitch and the same may be true of your letter. If your copy falls flat with the first paragraph removed, then you know you have a winner for an opening.

This article mentions several examples which can be found in my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

At this moment I’m sitting in #DMA2011 listening to Biz Stone and trying to follow the stream on his tool… wait, that sounds odd. What I’m doing is watching the tweetstream on my preferred reader (Hootsuite) which though it does not say so is only bringing me the Top Tweets as defined by Twitter’s recently instituted algorithm. And then I have my twitter.com open manually reset to “all” with the #dma2011 hashtag and I’m getting so many more tweets and it is so much more interesting.

The irony of Twitter filtering our results, so only the cool guys show up, is that it’s exactly the opposite of the behavior that caused Twitter to catch fire at SXSW 2008 (or was it 2009?)… people in a session tweeting that there was a better session next door and everybody gets up and leaves because everybody is tweeting and following the same hashtag. If only the Top Tweets were permitted those folks would probably still be sitting in that room at the Austin Convention Center.

Just sayin. You can find a less instantaneous, more well-thought commentary on Top Tweets here.

A money-back guarantee is essential to any web or direct marketing offer. It takes care of an enormous concern on the part of the buyer: I can’t see this product before I order… so, what if I get it and I don’t like it?

That’s the simple and unequivocal answer to a question you may be asked by your clients: “Do I need a guarantee?” Yes, of course you do. The next question is how generous is your guarantee, and how scrupulous will you be in honoring it?

One of my early bosses was a master of deception… I don’t think he would mind me referring to him as such because it was a point of pride to him that he could persuade people to buy products at much more than their true value. He tried to show me how to insert wiggle room in the guarantee so it would never need to be honored. But even as a naïve young marketer I knew this was not a good idea.

The people who intend to take advantage of you will find a way to do so. They’ll claim the product was damaged or simply never arrived. They’ll protest their credit card bill.  Defending yourself against them is futile and by trying to do so with a miserly or weasel-worded guarantee you’ll cause yourself far more damage among the majority of honest customers who will now be less confident about ordering from you.

At one point in my career, I wrote a lot of promos for investment newsletters. The standard guarantee was “a prompt prorata refund of your subscription cost for all unmailed issues”. What hokum.  The cost of the physical issues was negligible and the real product was intellectual property; if the reader no longer values that product why force them to pay for it?

We were able to change the standard wording to something like, “100% refund of your entire subscription price even if you cancel on the very last issue” and guess what? Refunds did not go through the roof because most subscribers do not make a mental note that okay, I can game the publisher a year from now and get my money back. Rather they make a decision about whether or not the product is for them based on their first experiences with it. A generous guarantee simply removes the roadblocks in this decision process.

My favorite guarantee is still Lands Ends’ “Guaranteed. Period.” It’s gutsy that the uncompromising language has been maintained since Lands End was acquired by Sears, but when you think about it this guarantee simply puts in writing what most retailers would offer their customers. If you don’t like it and you take the trouble to bring it back to the store, we are going to give your money back regardless of whether we think it’s justified because we don’t want an angry customer roaming the corridors.

So, copywriters, always include a guarantee—and tell the art director to put it on a fancy safety-paper background to make it look valuable. Maybe your client will protest that “we don’t actually have a return policy” to which your answer is “you should, and you do now.”

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

You, a freelance creative, buy a plane ticket to go and see a client. You rebill the ticket at cost and your client pays you back. So, if you need to state a number when you’re applying for a credit line or some such, should you include the value of that ticket in your revenues?

Of course not. That pass through expense has nothing to do with your business; it’s just money that appears on your balance sheet on its way from one place to another. Or to quote the wonderful though wonky Grumpy Old Accountants website, “SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin 101 on Revenue Recognition, Question 10 specifically, is congruent with EITF 99-19.  The SEC stated that firms should report revenues on a net basis if they did not take title to the products, did not have the risk and rewards of ownership, and acted as an agent or broker.”

Groupon did not get the memo. They have been booking the full value of their coupon sales as revenue, not accounting for the fact that a large percentage of what they are collecting is going to go into the pockets of retailers and they are just a conduit. As a result, yesterday Groupon had to restate its revenues and reduce them by 50%, while incidentally announcing their recently hired CEO is on her way back to Google.

So much for that IPO. And perhaps much of that money that Groupon collected on the premise that its copywriters are worth $6 billion will have to be returned, since it was based on the misstated revenues. As I mentioned in that earlier post, retailers like the results that they get with Groupon but resent the charges which are higher than with other social couponing sites. It would be a lot of fun to be a LivingSocial or BlackBoardEats rep calling on your prospects next week, would it not?

I hope Groupon does not go down in flames because I think the quality of its creative expression (along with excellent, rock-solid marketing) has been the decider. You may have noticed that the Groupon “Voice” now extends no further than the opening sentence or two of most offers; after that it is straightforward, though good, marketing copy. But this is offset by the wonderful temporary insanity of the “Groupon Says” feature at the bottom of the offer page.

Google copywriters: if you guys get laid off, give otisregrets a call and let’s talk about some mutual opportunities.