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The Two Most Powerful Words
in Advertising.
(No, they’re not FREE and NEW.)
Dear business owner:
In this article you’ll discover the two most powerful words in advertising and how to use them to explode your response fairly easily and consistently.
WHICH HEADLINE PULLED BEST?
First, to illustrate the secret, can you guess which of these two magalog headlines was the big winner for a financial newsletter?
HEADLINE A: (next to photo of financial guru, Charles J. Givens): If you’ve got 20 minutes a month,
I guarantee to work a financial miracle
in your life. (caption under photo) Charles J. Givens, the self-made $200-millionaire,
entrepreneur and best-selling financial author of all time. HEADLINE B: (same photo and caption): The Millionaire Maker (subhead) Can he make YOU rich, too? * * *
Which of these headlines absolutely smashed the other in a split-run test, out pulling it by a huge margin and becoming a profitable control for years?
Rather than just tell you the winner, let me describe how you could know in advance, once you understand the two most powerful words in advertising today.
By the way, no BULLET you will ever read will give you more sheer power to boost your response consistently, beat existing control packages easily and create your own blockbuster products than the simple yet profound secret I will now share. Yet I doubt if you have ever read this anywhere, even if you have been a lifelong student of advertising.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM THAT’S WRONG
First, you must understand why some of what you have been taught about direct marketing is wrong, or at least outdated and incomplete.
Most of the few great books on direct response were written more than a generation ago by legends such as John Caples, David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins and one or two others. Most of their response-boosting secrets remain valid, as we will see in future BULLETS.
Their main teaching: benefits, big benefits, are the key to high response.
Makes sense. But there’s a problem. These giants wrote this advice long ago when, compared with today, prospects were under-marketed. So, yes, back then, flat-out big benefits and words like FREE and NEW got people excited.
But today, more often than not, these same words and super-sized claims instantly trigger rejection. The problem is, words like FREE and NEW and the big-claim style of advertising they reflect, have been so overused, they have become bright red flags that instantly scream to your prospects, throw me away!
As proof, if I were to send you an e-mail with the words "new" and "free," I must misspell them, or your spam filter may bounce my message.
Best proof: just ask yourself, do you get overly excited when you encounter an e-mail or direct mail package trumpeting free or new or some fantastic claim to make you rich, change your life overnight or grow body parts bigger than you ever dreamed?
Of course not.
You have heard such claims too many times. Your own exquisitely sensitive mental spam filter rejects all such messages instantly, as you think to yourself, YEAH, SURE.
And those, Top Gun, are the two most powerful and influential words in advertising today. Yeah, sure.
They are the near-universal response of a too-busy world awash in marketing.
These two words are merciless tyrants, mass murderers of response, because they are exactly the words your harried prospects think every time they must slog through the daily, ever-rising tide of advertising claims.
Get rich quick! Yeah, sure (toss it).
Lose weight fast! Yeah, sure (toss it).
Make $1,000 a week stuffing envelopes! Yeah, sure (toss it).
Elect me and I will make the world safe, cut your taxes and give everyone universal health care. Yeah, sure.
And so on, including almost all of the big-promise messages you were taught to trumpet by the direct response scriptures.
A SIMPLE SECRET FOR EXPLODING YOUR RESPONSE
As a result, the vast majority of B level copywriters spend most of their days dreaming up ways to pump up ever-bigger claims which is why their mailings are almost always beaten easily by the tiny handful of A level copywriters who know this simple secret of successful selling in an over-marketed world
Never make your claim bigger than your proof. And always join your claim and your proof at the hip in your headlines, so that you never trumpet one without the other.
There is no more powerful nor consistent way to explode your response. Surround your claims with stronger, bolder proof and watch your response soar.
And I am not talking just about testimonials, which do help but have become so overused themselves, they have lost some of their magic. I am talking about every method you can possibly find to bolster your proof and credibility.
There are many ways to do this, as I will teach you in future BULLETS.
One of the easiest ways is simply to avoid like the measles phrases so overused, they instantly trigger the Yeah, Sure response, phrases such as get rich quick lose weight fast and, yes, become a millionaire.
Another way is to sandwich your big promise inside an IF THEN construction in your headline.
When you say IF (followed by a requirement your prospects have to meet), it seems to magically switch off and bypass their Yeah, Sure alarm and usher you right in their front door to sell.
Surprisingly, it even works when you make the requirement easy to meet.
And now you know the winner, headline A:
If you’ve got 20 minutes a month,
I guarantee to work a financial miracle
in your life.
I know, the promise still seems so big and hard to believe. But that is the power of the IF THEN construction. For some reason, it seems to put the universal Yeah, Sure alarm to sleep, like punching in the alarm code when you enter your home.
The formula: a reasonably easy requirement, followed by a strong promise. Think up ways to use this for your own product.
Of course, be sure to pay off in your body copy why and how the benefit can be achieved by such an easy requirement. And if it is not extremely easy, but only moderately easy, that is even better, as it is more believable. Surprisingly, candor is gloriously effective in boosting response.
Anyway, test this IF THEN idea sometime soon, measure the results, and you may be startled by how much it out pulls the typical big-promise headline most ads rely on.
In fact, the headline above was so successful for Givens, his publishers asked me if they could adapt it for another of their products, a weight loss newsletter by Richard Simmons. Against a strong control package that had beaten off all comers, they tested this headline, keeping all other elements in the package the same:
(Next to photo of Richard Simmons)
If you’ve got 20 minutes a month,
I guarantee a thinner, healthier you.
It worked like a charm and handily beat the previous champ. (BTW, notice the absence of exclamation marks, the overuse of which increases the aroma of hype and a resulting Yeah, Sure response.)
THE BEST EXAMPLE I’VE EVER SEEN
The most effective use I have ever seen of this IF THEN technique was a famous ad for a speedwriting course.
I saw it when I was a copy cub, commuting to Madison Avenue by subway. It was addressed to secretaries and ran for many years. As you were standing there, hanging on your strap and swaying with the motion of the train, you’d read this poster just above eye level. The headline was a sentence handwritten in script across a spiral, steno-type notepad. It read:
F u cn rd ths msg,
u 2 cn dbl yr incm
w spdwrtng. When I figured it out
I flt lk a blumn gnys!
So did legions of secretaries who responded to this ad for many years.
Sincere wishes for a good life
and (always!) higher response,
Gary Bencivenga
Guest Editor, The Total Package
Businesses are missing out on the huge potential that social networks present, a leading information technology company has warned.
Firms 'miss' social site success
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By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
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Researchers for Gartner found that huge opportunities for improving the management of large firms exist.
"Businesses which harness how employees use these sites stand to increase savings, productivity and profits," said Gartner researcher Jeffrey Mann.
He told the BBC the challenge was how to apply this to the corporate world.
The Gartner survey discovered that social networking sites, instant messaging email, chat and file sharing are attracting significant levels of interest online.
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_______________________________
MAKE THE OFFLINE TO ONLINE MINDSHIFT....
IT'S "INFORMATION, INFORMATION, INFORMATION."
From Theresa Coffey, TNT Editor...
The key to success in "e-tail" (electronic retail) for the small business person is to master a niche. The Web, when properly used, is the ultimate niche marketing-and-selling vehicle. It is literally the ideal situation for small business e-tailers... if you start with the right approach. Unfortunately, 99% of e-tailers fail to do so.
Success on the Net (whether you are selling hard goods or e-goods) all begins with a critical offline-to-online mindset shift. This means replacing that well-known strategy of "location, location, location" in your mind with...
"Information, information, information."
Let's see why this shift in thinking is so essential...
In the offline world, traffic is relatively easy to achieve -- it's all about "location, location, location." An attractive, nicely merchandised store in a mall or on a high-traffic shopping street usually means instant traffic -- and sales, of course!
However, in the online world, no one just happens to walk past, see your product and enter. Surfers on the Net are not looking for you or your business. People search for information, for solutions. After all, if they knew you existed, they would not be searching. They would already be customers.
Online, you must generate your own traffic to be successful. Therefore, your primary task, well before you make your first sale to a customer (often well before that person is even aware that s/he is shopping!) is to provide the information that people are searching for, in a way that Search Engines like.
Information is what surfers want.
What kind of information? As an online retailer, anticipate two kinds of information-seekers...
1) Shoppers looking for product information -- provide information related to the products themselves. But not the short, sales bits of sales copy, picture and price -- that's for your shopping catalog/cart. Create real content... reviews, experiences, "the history of," and so forth.
Real content gets found. Product listings don't get found at the major engines like Google. And they get buried among thousands of similar listings in the "comparative shopping engines" (ex., Froogle, shopping.com, etc.), which only send dribs and drabs of traffic compared to the major engines.
2) Surfers looking for information about a related topic -- these people don't even know they are shopping... yet! They seek information about topics related to the niche/theme of your business. This approach converts surfers into interested visitors because SBI! helps your pages score highly at the engines which makes your site easy to find. As trust and credibility grows, your content converts visitors into warm, PREsold customers.
That all-important first purchase, of course, may not happen on the first visit. However, the excellent content on your site and in your regularly published e-zine (see Day 9 in the Action Guide) will encourage repeat visits and foster a deeper relationship between you and your visitors. And because people buy from people they like and respect, you'll make that sale... and then another... and the purchasing trend continues.
Bottom line?
Product selection and sourcing will always be important for your e-tail operation. Of course, if you sell many types of products, it's critical to aggregate them into a creative, appealing store (best if it's a themed store that fills a well-defined niche). And it goes without saying that you will have to be able to clear credit cards in real-time.
But, before you do any of that, before you collect your first dollar in sales, you need to build a Web site that generates traffic. Traffic must always come before monetization.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of beautifully designed e-tail sites that are crippled, dying or dead by a lack of traffic... "the lights are on, but no one is home, and no one's visiting." That is the sad reality of 99% of e-merchants who followed the wrong process when they first started out. They prepared to sell and collect money, before they built content to deliver what their PRE-customers really want... information.
If you don't attract free, targeted visitors via the Search Engines, if you don't convert them into warm, willing-to-buy customers, if you don't build that into your site from Day 1, you are going to end up working for your site. You will have to pay for advertising to build traffic, more than you can afford... and when you stop paying for advertising, your traffic will stop.
High-traffic portals are not a solution either. While they can provide small business retailers with a few visitors at a high price, this should only be seen as a supplement. Why? Because you build a dependency on the traffic of others. And because there are limits to how many visitors even the highest-traffic portals can send to hundreds of thousands of different businesses.
However, you can easily belong to the 1% of e-tailers who are generating profitable sales by following the process carefully, as outlined in the Action Guide. You will build a site that will be searched-and-found by prospective new customers -- a number that will increase steadily as your site gains in reputation and relevance at the engines. Simply put, you will build a site that works for you.
This process will help you generate targeted traffic that will steadily build in momentum...
STEP 1) You choose or create a great product to sell, understanding that this product will be an extension, "the logical next step," of a Theme-Based Content Site.
STEP 2) You develop your own site in the niche that you know and love (a "Theme-Based Content Site").
STEP 3) You fill that site with high-value content -- this is the foundation.
STEP 4) A prospective customer finds one of your content pages during a search for information or a solution. You OVERdeliver that sought-after info, which starts the process on the right foot...
STEP 5) The surfer is PREsold (i.e., you gain trust and credibility).
STEP 6) The surfer wants more information, surfs your site, and signs up for your specialized e-zine.
STEP 7) The visitor may not have even been looking for a product (the majority, most likely). But whether s/he is or isn't, this pre-customer is being steadily PREsold on you, your passion and knowledge, and business. So...
STEP 8) It's a matter of time before that surfer buys a product... and then another one... and so on.
STEP 9) You diversify your revenue plan to include other sources of income (ex., AdSense, affiliate income, services, finder's fee, etc.), all related to your theme. (See the other monetization articles in the TNT HQ for more details.)
As this process repeats itself over and over again, you are well on your way to building a business with hundreds of new lifetime customers who generate substantial profits... and just importantly, a buzz about your business.
The key to your online success is to put the e-horse of traffic before the shopping cart. You must first build your own targeted traffic... your own clientele, from the ground up.
When you own your traffic, you own your business. And what builds traffic? Quality theme-focused content.
It's all about following the SBI! process...
- doing your homework -- creating or sourcing a great product to sell
- carefully picking your approach/theme of your site
- building content before you start "collecting the money" (of course, you have planned your monetization models ahead of time, so you can work towards those ends).
- building future traffic right into your content, from the ground up, as you create that content.
So leave behind the old offline way of thinking and make the following your new business mantra...
"Information, information, information."
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