Professional salespeople never forget they are selling to a human being, because that person is right in front of them. Copywriters, though, can become confused. They satisfy the requirement of filling a technical need, and forget there is a person signing the purchase order or keying in the credit card number. Unless personal emotional gratification is delivered, the sale may fall through because your solution is not perceived as relevant or important.

Why do buyers buy? Bob Stone, in his classic Successful Direct Marketing Methods, details the two categories of human wants: The desire to gain, and the desire to avoid loss.

Robert Collier, the “Giant of the Mails” who was at his peak in the 1930s, lists  six prime motives of human action:

1. Love
2. Gain
3. Duty
4. Pride
5. Self-indulgence
6. Self-preservation

And here are Roy Chitwood’s six buying motives:

1. Desire for gain (usually financial)
2. Fear of loss (again, usually financial)
3. Comfort and convenience
4. Security and protection
5. Pride of ownership
6. Satisfaction of emotion

Note that every one of these is EMOTIONAL…people buy emotionally, not logically. This is true even when selling business products to people in a business setting, because people are still people.

Next time: features, advantages and benefits.

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

Copywriters are at their most creative when trying to wriggle out of doing the work at hand. As with the professional salespeople I talked about in my last post, applying a system or methodology to an informal process can help you stay focused. It can also insure that you are not overshooting any decision points in the mind of your reader.

Advertising guidebooks are full of acronymic checklists to verify your copy has a logical flow, such as these three taken from Bob Bly’s excellent The Copywriter’s Handbook:

AIDA = Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
ACCA = Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction, Action
4 Ps = Picture, Promise, Prove, Push

In each case the process is to make a connection with your audience, then present your selling argument, then go for the sale or other action. If you look at failed advertising, often the problem is that the copywriter got the sequence mixed up—for example, leaping to a sales pitch before you’ve hooked the reader in, or asking for the order before you’ve demonstrated the value of what you have to sell.

My favorite checklist is the one taught by my old client Max Sacks International, and it is something I regularly use in auditing my own work. Since this was developed for use by professional salespeople, I’ll add a translation for copywriters.

1. Approach. How are you going to open the dialog? What will you do to engage your audience?
2. Qualification. Make sure the prospect does have buying authority; for copywriters, hopefully the media department has done this job for you.
3. Agreement on need. Make it clear what you’re talking about, then define a problem to be solved. Easy to do in a face to face environment where you can see a head nod, much harder in the remote medium of copywriting where you have to visualize audience reaction.
4. Sell the company. If the prospect doesn’t find the salesperson or the company credible, they aren’t going to buy no matter how appealing the pitch. That’s why you sell the company before presenting your offer. For copywriters this is done with presentation and tone as much as with specific statements.
5. Fill the need. Here is the meat of your selling proposition, presented only AFTER every other requirement has been met.
6. Act of Commitment. Ask for the order. Tell your reader specifically what you want them to do, and emphasize how easy and risk-free it is to do it.
7. Cement the sale. A salesperson will reiterate the commitment that has been made so the new customer does not cancel as soon as they leave the office. A copywriter will do this throughout the message.

Next: why people buy.

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

One of my earliest clients was a guy named Roy Chitwood who owned Max Sacks International, a sales training organization. In working with Roy for several years I attended so many workshops that his catch phrases became drilled into my brain. On the value of training: “School is never out for the sales professional.” On the role of the sales department in the organization: “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”  On the importance of planning: “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which road you take.”

Unlike copywriting, personal selling is a contact sport. Salespeople have to psych themselves up to get over rejection and put on their best face for the next appointment. Having an organized system to apply to what may appear an informal activity helps them stay on task (“Once selling becomes a process, it ceases to be a problem”).  This may why there are so many sales training courses and methods; most of the students I met in Roy’s classes had taken several courses from different trainers and used them agnostically for inspiration.

Very much like copywriters, salespeople have the job of getting prospects excited about and desirous of a product or service they may not have realized they needed until a moment ago. That’s why it is so helpful to apply the “rules” followed by professional salespeople to your own work as a copywriter. In my class, I spend quite a bit of time on the copywriting/selling analogy and I’m going to do the same here, over the next several posts.

The relationship between copywriting and selling should be seamless in a well-run company: your lead generation efforts serve as the front end of the sales effort, and serve up a steady stream of prospects (or “suspects” as another mentor, Ray Jutkins, used to call them since they have not yet entered your sales process). The better you’ve done your job, the more interested they will be in learning more about your company’s product or service.

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

Optum is a new entity cobbled together out of previously separate entities for medical billing, online pharmacy, health newsletters and other services to “help navigate the health care system”. The name was trademarked in February 2011, but I just came across it last week in an expensive inside front cover spread in the New Yorker prescribing “to improve the health care system from A to Z, start with O”.

The pharma industry has a way of coming up with invented names that sound like they mean something but actually don’t. “Abilify” and “Boniva” being a couple of my favorites. I expect the naming committee at this company must have had a chest bump moment after they realized they could create a new word simply by chopping the middle out of “optimum”.

But I think there are reasons that “Optum” remained available long after “Humana” and “Zoloft” had been gobbled up. First, two-syllable words that end in “um” tend to sound mundane, downbeat and occasionally risible when spoken, instead of soaring. Try pablum, problem and yes, rectum.

Second, as we’ve mentioned previously, the lazy or hurrying reader often misplaces letters and sees in one word another similar word that isn’t there. In this case my eye immediately placed the missing “i” where “t” was written in the ad, making for a most unfortunate result (at least for a medical company).

Words have the power to sell, but also the potential to hurt your marketing efforts. When one of those words is the name of your company, that’s an extra big problem.

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.

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.

I have been working with a client who is really selfish and manipulative. His name is Rabbi David Toledano and we’re developing a website for his marriage consulting practice called The Toledano Method. I don’t usually call out clients by name but this guy is really over the top. Here is an example in an email he sent me today:

“YOU ARE THE MASTER OF WRITING!!!!!!!

“I can not tell you how happy I am reading it and truly feel you are the most amazing person I could ever pray for to help me in my dream.

“I want to tell you simply thank you with all my heart.”

Can you see the problem here?

I can tell what he is up to because I helped him write an article on the website called “Be Selfish”. The article gives the example of the relationship in which one spouse comes home from work and the other spouse blows up at him/her. The offended spouse could of course stand up for their rights, answer point by point and “declare war” but that is not Rabbi David’s strategy. Instead he says you should agree with everything that is being said because a lifetime at peace is preferable to getting the upper hand in an argument. Get rid of “I” statements and be truly selfish by achieving something that will make you happy.

I’ve had other clients recently complaining at me about shorten the deadlines, do more for less budget etc etc. And here comes this guy who only wants to tell me how great I am. What a manipulator!

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.

A local company is marketing a boutique potato chip in Saratoga Springs, NY, where that salty snack was invented in 1853. The chips are made with high quality potatoes and taste delicious. They are charmingly packaged in a replica of the “takeaway” box from the 1870s. The company is well regarded and family owned. And as a bonus, they are one of the largest clients of Saratoga Bridges, a not-for-profit that finds meaningful work for mentally disabled adults.

Okay, copywriters. Think you can create some kind of a marketing campaign from that?

Oh, there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned. For whatever reason, Saratoga Chips has chosen to sell at a per-ounce price about the same as Lays. I’m not in love with that decision because price competition is the mark of a commoditized product and this is anything but. In fact, there’s a huge potential audience of tourists who come for the track, the spa and the waters who would love to take something back to friends and family in Jersey or Florida.

Saratoga Chips Advertising

Unfortunately, the marketing department of Saratoga Chips is not you nor I. Avoiding history, warmth and local color, their copywriter came up with the Walmart-style headline: “Buy local… why pay more for the national brands?” Doing the copywriter one better, the art director mistrusted the visual appeal of the product and the antique box and subjugated them to a fake newspaper page (“Crum Cruncher” refers to George Crum, the inventor of the chip, but of course the reader doesn’t know this) superimposed on a fake wood background as if, I guess, the fake newspaper has been plopped down on a fake table.

Purely on the basis of missed opportunity, Saratoga Chips is hereby fast-tracked into the Badvertising Hall of Shame.