Copy Writing Hints

If you’ve ever wanted a way of getting in with those handful of companies that could basically pay your wages for the year then this little secret could change your life.

Let’s say you’re a commercial carpet cleaner and you want to get in with all the largest hotels in your area because you know they’ll probably be worth $10,000, $20,000 or even $50,000 over a year.

How do you do it?

Well, there’s a few ways really. You could just send a sales letter or two. But the key to your success lies with your level of persistence.

After all, you need to remember your potential customer is busy. Very busy. What’s more, they probably already have a carpet cleaner and are hesitant to change.

The key to your success will lie in ‘branding’ your name into their minds through frequent and consistent contact.

Here’s what I’d do:

1. Write down the name of your top 100 ideal clients.

2. Write 12 articles you can send to them (testimonials, case studies, facts about what makes you different, etc) to keep in touch.

3. Schedule these articles to be sent once every month

Now there’s a good chance the first few times your contact receives your information it will go straight to the wastebasket. But after 5, 6, 7, 8 times they will start to notice.

And if…

- Something goes wrong with their current supplier
- They suddenly have a need for your services

Who do you think is going to be their first point of contact. The person they have never heard of in the yellow pages or local newspaper, or the person (you) who has been keeping in touch with them for months?

It goes without saying, doesn’t it?

Now obviously, this strategy isn’t necessarily going to deliver overnight results. But it’s more than likely to pay for itself over time if you have a big enough dollar value.

Let’s crunch a few numbers.

Let’s say your average profit off one of these ‘top 100’ clients is $8,000. If you mail 12 letters over a year it will probably cost you about a dollar a letter.

So it’s costing around $12 per potential client.

According to my calculator $8,000 divided by 12 is 666.66. That means if just one client out of 666 comes off you’re ahead.

But what would happen if you converted…

1% of those 666: 6 sales = $48,000 = $40,000 profit
2% of those 666: 12 sales = $96,000 = $88,000 profit
½ % of those 666: 3 sales = $24,000 = $16,000 profit

Obviously, change my figures and replace them with yours. I hope you’re starting to see how profitable this little process can be if you have high value clients.

Obviously it wouldn’t work if you’re a take away shop selling to consumers. But it would work very well for:

- Any consultant wanting to get a big client.
- Any printing firm wanting to get a big client on board
- Any training company wanting big clients
- Any builder seeking big projects

The key word here is ‘big’ – this is the strategy for getting the ‘big boys’ on board. Don’t make it your whole strategy as it could take a while to come off.

But certainly incorporate it into your marketing mix.

Advertising agencies and newspapers love to talk about the power of building your brand. In my opinion, this is an excuse for actually writing direct response ads and sales letters that actually get results.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a space for brand building type advertising. If you’re a Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonald’s with a multi-million dollar advertising budget then there’s certainly a place for building your brand and keeping your name out there in the marketplace.

But my bet is that 99.9% of the people reading this article are not in a position to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising in the newspaper or on television to ‘get their name out there’ without getting a return on their investment. Why?
Because you’ll end up going broke very quickly.

So what’s the solution?

The secret to using branding as a small business is to:

a) Make sales using direct response advertising so you can continue to advertise again and again and again.

b) Get a strong customer base and deliver an exceptional service so your customers rave about you to others

c) Entice your customers to join your database through offering a free report or other enticement that’s of interest to them. And then communicate with them over and over and over again.

So what does all this achieve?

Firstly, by advertising free information to entice customers to your database, you are actually attracting potential customers to your business who are interested in what you have to offer.

Then you can either build your ‘brand’ for free via email through educating your customer over and over again. Or alternatively, you can spend your advertising dollars mailing to people who are actually interested in what you’re offering.

Doesn’t that beat spending thousands of dollars advertising in a newspaper to every man and his dog? After all, we get hit with thousands of advertising messages every day (whenever you get on the Internet, on the sides of buses, the backs of T-Shirts, train stations, TV, radio… everywhere you go you’re likely to see an ad for something).

So if you want to get noticed through brand advertising to the public, and not focusing directly on results, then make sure you have deep pockets.

In my opinion, the only way to make a small business work is to make more money than you spend. And the only way to do that is to spend less on promotion and other expenses than you are making.

And if every time you invest $100 on an ad, you can consistently get $200 back then you’ve got a good chance of being around to build a strong brand over time.

The alternative is focusing on ‘getting your name out there.’ But if you’re not turning over a profit with promotions that deliver results, you won’t have your name out there for very
long.

So here’s my 6 step system to building a strong brand in a practical and consistent way:

1. Use direct response ads, sales letters, flyers, etc. that focus on the benefit and needs of your customer. And not ‘brag and boast’ company that you notice but nobody else does. (i.e. putting your company name and logo at the top of the ad).

2. Measure your results.

3. Make sure you’re making more money from your promotions than you’re investing into them.

4. Reinvest your profits into more and more advertising. As your budget grows, you’ll advertise more, therefore your brand will grow.

5. Use a portion of your advertising budget to advertise a free report, CD or useful information of some kind to develop a database of interested prospects.

6. Keep in touch with your customers and prospects by using a regular newsletter

And that’s basically it.

After all, where did branding originally come from:

Farmers used it to identify their livestock. By burning a mark on the hide of an animal with a hot iron, people knew who owned it.

And your job is to burn a mark into the minds of your customers and prospects. But not on everyone - just the people who are interested, and qualify for your service.

Earlier this week, I had a consultation with a guy who was quite successful in generating leads, but had a hard time converting them into sales.

What was his problem?

It’s really very simple. He’d take the initial inquiry and then send them a brochure. And perhaps follow up with a telephone call if he could get through to them.

Ok, I can hear you saying “Well isn’t that what most people do? What’s wrong with that?”

Well, there’s actually a lot wrong with that.

Think about this for a moment: He was spending on average, around $50 to generate a single lead. But then, once he’d generated the lead, he was spending a couple of bucks to send out a brochure and a bit of information.

Isn’t that one heck of a waste?

Here’s what I’d suggest anyone in this situation does:

Set up a (minimum) 3-step series of sales letters where you send one letter today, another letter in 10 days, and the final letter 10 days later.

What have you achieved by doing this?

Firstly, by investing an extra $4 per customer on average (2 additional mailings) you’ve managed to put your sales message across to your potential customer three times instead of 1.

So in this scenario…

1 contact costs you $52.
3 contacts costs you $56.

So by spending an additional 7% in each client, you have communicated with him 300% more times.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Sure, writing a 3-step sequence of sales letters costs you time and money. And obviously you need to get organised, and cannot be ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ – but if you can
contact someone 300% more times for 7% in additional costs, it’s worth the effort, isn’t it?

After all, your client may be contacting a number of your competitors… trying to decide whether to go with you or someone else. Or may just be busy, have seen your ad, received your first letter… filed it away… and then forgotten about it.

Have you ever done this yourself? Of course you have. Haven’t we all?

The key to success in any endeavour is:

“Persistence”

As Calvin Coolidge said, “Nothing in the world will take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

And marketing is no different. Providing you’re attracting the right type of clientele (who are part of your target market) you should persist in making multiple contacts with your potential clients.

Few people will do it, so when you do you’ll stand heads and shoulders above your competition. And more importantly, you’ll make a Lot more money.

Throughout this series of Copywriting Hints, we’ve established the fact your headline is extremely important.

I’ve recently seen this demonstrated in a split test I put together on an entry page to one of my web sites.

The highest conversion is 17.92% while the lowest conversion is 10.36% when converting visitors to subscribers. That’s huge – almost a 73% increase in result.

The main difference between the 2 versions is the headline.

So whatever you do, don’t scrimp on the size of your headlines. It’s an ad for your ad. And it needs to be Big.

Just take a look through the editorial of any of the major newspapers or magazines, and you’ll get my point.

In fact, if you really want to understand this concept then pick up a newspaper and look through it to see what captures your eye.

You’ll notice that it’s the big headlines which appeal to you. And they’re much bigger than the body copy.

I’ve seen people try and cut the cost of their ads by using a smaller headline. And that’s a big mistake.

You need to make sure your headline takes up 20 – 25% of the space of the ad.

After all, wouldn’t you rather pay the extra money to have an ad people will actually read?
It’s also important that you model what people are used to. So don’t run your headline on an angle. Don’t try and be clever. Run the ad the way people read – in a straight line, from top left to bottom right.

Following these simple steps, you should be able to increase your conversion rate considerably!

According to the Journal of Safety Research 34, 2003 74% of Americans believe they are above average drivers. Yet only 1% believes they are below average.

And 87% of those that say they are above average drivers are men, compared to 67% of women.

You don’t have to be Einstein to assume from these facts that people are a little biased when it comes to driving, do you?

And it’s the same with accepting blame. I mean, how many times have you seen a child say ‘It’s Not My Fault.’

And as adults, we’re much the same. Most of us don’t believe we are in the wrong.

So what can you do with this knowledge? Well, whatever you do – don’t blame your prospective customers for the position they are in.

Susan Powter, the fitness and diet ‘guru’ of the mid-90’s, and author of Stop The Insanity did this perfectly, by blaming the fitness and diet industry. And not the individual.

Direct Marketing Genius, Ted Nicholas, sold thousands of copies of his book ‘How To Form Your Own Corporation Without A Lawyer for under $75.00’ by taking the side of the business owner and blaming those ‘overpriced lawyers’ who have their secretaries do
everything and hit you with the bill.

It obviously works. But exactly how do you do it?

Let me give you a few examples:

1. If you are (overweight, drowning in bills, unhappy, etc) you can probably blame most of it on (insert the blame here)

Ok, let’s apply this to a few specific industries:

Success: If you haven’t reached the level of success you believe you deserve, you can probably blame most of it on the education system. You weren’t ever taught what it actually took.

Weight Loss: If you can’t seem to shed those pounds no matter what you do, you can probably blame most of it on all those fad diets the industry has been feeding you on.

Financial: If you are staring at a future right now that looks far from pleasant, you can probably blame most of it on the lies we were all taught as kids about finding an employer, working hard all your life, and living on a pension. Because it’s simply not true.

Another way of doing this is simply to come out and say ‘It’s Not Your Fault.’

By bringing up the problem and making it very real in your customers eyes. They know they need to do something about it. And then you can release the pressure by saying ‘It’s Not Your Fault.’

Here’s a couple of examples of how it could be used:

1. For a telephone brokerage service: Bring up issues with how much more a customer is spending on their telephone bills than they could be. Then say ‘It’s Not Your Fault’ followed by a paragraph about how the telecommunication companies confuse people with all their multiple deals. Finish up with your company as the solution.

2.For an internet marketing product: Explain how much money the customer has been missing out on (backed up by proof) by not getting into the internet. Then say ‘It’s Not Your Fault’ and follow it up with a paragraph of how your product can help them.

Are you beginning to get the picture? Nobody likes to take on the blame. So if you’re trying to sell something to your customers, whatever you do, please don’t blame them.