Copywriting Skills and Sales Letters

Copywriting Skills and Sales Letters

How to Create "Knock Your Socks Off" Offers
that Will Generate a Flood of New Business

I'm going to show you how to craft one of the most crucial components of your marketing piece --- a compelling offer. After the headline, your offer is the most important element of a successful marketing message. In fact, I'll take it a step further. I know this might sound overly simplistic - but you can virtually write your own ticket by becoming better at creating more powerful, compelling offers that are so exciting, people who have even a mild interest in the topic will read your entire ad or marketing piece. Here’s how:

There are basically three types of offers you can use. The first two will get you mediocre results at best. The third, if used properly, can become a virtual gold mine for your business!

Copywriting Tips
Passive offers are those that don’t seem to promise much of anything. "Buy Now During Our Big Pre-Easter Sale!"; Announcing the Opening of our Main Street Bank!"; "Join us Today!"; or "Sign-up Now!" There may be an offer there, but somebody forgot to state it. The reader is not motivated to DO anything. There’s no strong call to action with passive offers like these.

Negative offers have a way of threatening loss from inaction. "Renew Now and Keep Your Subscription Current"; "Don’t Lose Out on This Offer That Can’t Be Repeated!"; or "Don’t Risk Financial Disaster--- Get This Health Insurance Today!" I’ll grant you that people will do more to avoid loss than to gain something--- but these types of statements are clinchers that only help motivate an already interested reader to action reader. They’re not generally enough by themselves to cause prospects to reach into their pocket or purse and pull out their hard-earned cash.

When properly constructed, positive offers will definitely boost response rates. Positive offers build on the attractive promise of your headline. They tell the reader once more how they will benefit by responding to your message.

Positive offers take your proposition out of the realm of being a "sales pitch" and instead makes it more like an upbeat agreement between two friends. They make it easy for the reader to say yes, and almost impossible to say no!

Marketing Strategy
Positive offers give rather than take. Consider this typical tired, worn out offer for a vacation package that includes the usual hotel, air fare, activities, and ground transportation at a stale sounding "Special 25 percent discount!" Readers think--- 25% off of what anyway? They have no point of reference from which to determine if this is a good deal or not. Boring!

Instead, the offer can be recast to significantly increase response: "Book by March 31st and we’ll pay for your hotel room--- a $470 value based on local rates." Now the reader understands exactly what’s in it for them. Now you have their attention, but it’s not enough yet.

Here’s the secret master direct marketers understand--- You can get even more response by adding what I call "Bonus Pile On." PBO works by piling on bonus after bonus until finally the reader has to say "OK! Enough! Stop!" and whip out their charge card. The old Ginsu knife commercials used this technique perfectly to sell millions of dollars of cutlery. The announcer would say "And if you act now you'll also get..." and then about 15 different knives and kitchen gadgets would pop up on the screen. It made you think about how much value you were getting for such a little price. That's the power of the "bonus pile on". Think big value, little price.

With our travel package example, you could add a free wine and cheese party AND a free T-shirt, AND free sailing class, AND a free beach towel. Then you could make deals with other businesses where they'd let you give away a product or service from them to your customers. If you really use your imagination here you'll come up with lots of ways to create your own "BPO". You get the picture--- it’s an offer your prospects can’t refuse--- and gets your phone ringing!

One last thing--- "Knock Your Socks Off" offers don't leave anything to the reader’s imagination. Every aspect must be spelled out completely. Confusion or complexity will kill your offer faster than readers can say NO! Compelling offers may take a whole paragraph or two or even more to spell out in crystal clear detail. I often work them in immediately following the headline. In fact, many times my headline is merely a lead-in to the offer. Then, the remaining copywriting is simply a process of elaborating on and giving factual and emotional support to the offer!

-- Jim McCraigh

Copyright 2003 J. McCraigh.
May be copied and distributed freely if author credited and a link provided back to this site.