Direct Response Copywriting Formula

How many times have you purchased something from TV, or via postal mail, email, a magazine ad, or a website? Any time you’ve made such a purchase – especially via TV – you may have passed through the following copywriting formula. The whole point of direct response copywriting, whether used via TV or radio commercials, in direct mail solicitations, for website sales videos, email marketing, etc., is to get you to “respond” directly to the message by purchasing from the advertiser right now.

Copywriting Formula for Direct Response Advertisements

1. Get your attention. Successful copywriting is designed to boldly grab your attention now. The opening message or headline should ideally pull you from your life right into the message in such a way that you will ignore the conversation you are having, or the magazine you may be browsing, or your desire to run to the kitchen for a snack, or anything else you may be doing or about to do. If your are not instantly engaged, the rest of the copywriting will not likely move you to make a purchase.

2. Pose a problem. Whether it’s your weight, your hair, your breath, how you prepare food, personal finances, debt, health, the performance of your car, or countless other issues, you were presented a problem. Such can even include positioning something you hadn’t previously considered to be irksome as old and problematic. The more generally troublesome something can be presented, the more you are likely to relate to it.

3. Solve your problem. Yay! The product you purchased was demonstrated to save the day. On TV or web video, this is often represented by visually showing benefits and results as effectively, quickly and easily as possible. With written text, the words will be woven to create similarly strong visual impressions.

4. Offer you a great deal. This is where you were presented a special price, purchasing instructions, added incentives, bonuses, and anything that increased the value of what you purchased.

You were directed to call a toll-free number by showing and/or repeating it over and over and over. Whether on TV, radio or in a written advertisement, that number was presented so that you would take advantage of it now!

If the copywriting directed you to a website to complete your purchase, the web address was shown, announced and/or featured prominently enough for you to get some paper and write it down (even if you had to run across the street to borrow paper and pencil from a neighbor).

5. Guaranteed! The guarantee was designed to lower your resistance and assure you that you made a right decision to purchase the product or service because you could get a refund for any reason. A “no risk,” money-back guarantee would have been emphasized to ensure you reach for your wallet and make that phone call.

As a bit of counter-intuitive benefit to advertisers, in many cases, the longer the guarantee period, the less likely a refund will be requested. It doesn’t make sense, but I have conducted tests that have shown longer guarantees to be more effective in generating sales and still result in less refund requests (obviously this would not hold true with an inferior product). Better guarantees should be longer than 30 days, and in some case can go as far as offering “Lifetime guarantees.” (Although the latter is less effective for companies that are not well established and might even raise doubts about the sincerity of the guarantee for a new company).

6. Call to action. This is when you were told to “BUY NOW,” “ORDER NOW,” and/or “CALL NOW.” This was likely accentuated by emphasizing that the product or service is available only for a “limited time” and/or “while supplies last.” The success of many direct response offers, whether by commercials, infomercials, website ads, direct mail ads, email marketing, magazines, newspapers, etc, is a result of impulse decision making, which diminishes rapidly with passing time.

Furthermore, successful direct response campaigns have had each of these elements (and more) tested and tested and tested again to refine the copywriting and the presentation for the purpose of generating the most sales or responses.  (For more complex or expensive products, the “response” may not be a sale, but a sales lead or prospect, who has requested information in exchange for their contact details).

#1 Copywriting Tip

There are many important elements and guidelines for effective copywriting. And there are different viewpoints on which would be the most important.

In my experience writing and executing large direct mail and email campaigns, “the offer” is the most vital. The offer is how you are presenting what it is you are selling (product or service). Although some might argue that the headline is the most important element of copywriting because it is the first point of contact with potential visitors, in my experience, no matter how many individuals you drive to your offer through an effective headline, you will not capitalize on that traffic without an effective offer.

Conversely, if you have a weak headline for an email or direct mail piece or print ad, you can still convert the visitors that do arrive to your offer – as long as you have an effective offer!

Of course the headline is very important, and it would not make sense to craft a weak headline and a strong offer. The point is that focusing on and testing different headlines for their value in determining which is the best headline to attract visitors, should be done in conjunction with testing which offer is the most appealing to your visitors. In fact, a heavier emphasis should be given towards testing the offer.

Here are a few traditional components for crafting an offer:

1) Presenting Something New
Rightly or wrongly, consumers are more interested in “new” stuff as opposed to old stuff, even if old stuff might be better. What can you present as “new”?

2) Sale
Positioning any product or service for a reduced cost is the surest way to boost sales.

3) Premium or Bonus
Including bonuses for “buying now” are an effective way to sweeten any offer.

4) Limited Time Offer
Making any offer available for a limited time will inspire some potential customers who are sitting on the fence to “Buy Now,” which is always a good thing, since so many transactions that don’t occur “now” will simply never occur.

5) Free Trial
If you can introduce people to your products or service for free, so they can experience the real value you are presenting, you will eliminate the major obstacle that potential customers have when considering a purchase: “Am I going to get ripped off?” Of course, a percentage of those users who take advantage of your free trial will never become clients or customers anyway, but the percentage of those that DO give you money for your offer will be higher overall.

6) Buy Now, Pay Later
“Multiple payment” options, and “buy now, pay later” also lower the barrier of uncertainty among potential customers. This tends to work best for large ticket items: the perceived cost is reduced by breaking up an expensive purchase into multiple smaller payments.

Of course, the best offer includes many of these ingredients. In fact, whenever I write a sales letter for a client, I will attempt to include as many as possible to craft a number of powerful offers, and then test them to see which is the best!

Effective Copywriting Guidelines

Effective copywriting equates to your “salespeople in print.”

“Print,” in this case, may be a direct mail letter, an advertisement, an email, or web sales pages.

Does your copywriting reflect experienced sales pros who will close the deal?

With the advent of 21st century marketing technologies, including good old email, some businesses get lost in the means of getting a message out, as opposed to focusing on the necessity of ensuring that their messages convert to leads or sales.

Respecting the dichotomy of marketing speed versus marketing investment and how you’re using your resources, can increase the return of your marketing investments – and good copywriting and testing are central to that theme.

One of the advantages of writing offline direct mail letters is the necessity to make every headline, every paragraph, every offer, every guarantee, indeed, every word pay off.  Having spent a number of years paying attention to and testing every detail of direct mail letters has etched that in my marketing psyche for eternity.

“Testing” ever detail by mailing out letters in small batches, with different elements, and meticulously measuring their resulting performance while building larger and larger campaigns is a necessity in generating profit in the offline direct mail world.

Although this requires good organization and detailed metrics, time and time again I’ve seen its importance in making a profitable campaign much more profitable, and/or making a non-profitable test completely turn around to become profitable.

Email is much less expensive and even easier to test than direct mail, and yet, outside of the ranks of true marketing professionals, it is not as frequently utilized.

Copywriting Guidelines

Although not intended to be a complete overview of effective copywriting, the following guidelines should be included in the testing and refinement of your marketing campaigns.  (Many of these points can be incorporated into articles and blog posts, as well).

• Avoid dense copy. Sections with lots of words and very little white space are visually uninviting. Chop dense copy up into smaller sections.
• The introduction of your message should be a short sentence: One or two lines at most.
• Keep most of your paragraphs short, including one-, two- and three-line paragraphs.
• Consider some one-line paragraphs that directly engage the reader’s attention, such as, “Have you ever had that problem?” Or, “What would happen if you tried this?”
• Your copy should be presented in a way that a reader can scan your email or sales page and still get the message. This is accomplished by subheadings, underlines, boldface type and italics. Of course, effective use of hyperlinks also emphasizes certain text.
• “Effective use” of hyperlinks needs to be carefully considered, as it can direct readers away from your sales message. On the other hand, adding hyperlinks that all lead to a shopping cart or sales page can result in increased response.
• Use of bullet points and indenting is another way to break up the presentation of copy, add more white space, and feature important points.
• Adding a “P.S.” is an effective way to summarize the most important points of a message, since more often than not, a reader who is scanning your copy will read the final “P.S.” (This is also another good place to include a link to your shopping cart or sales page).

Copywriting will make or break an offline marketing campaign as well as an email or online sales presentation or marketing campaign. Ideally, you would hire a professional copywriter to assure the best results.

Regardless of whether you hire a pro, or study further on the subject yourself, analytically testing and refining your copywriting elements will lead to better responses.

Isn’t that why you’re reading this?

Writing Email Subject Lines

The subject line of your marketing emails are the most influential way to get your messages opened.

Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind while writing them:

♦ Keep your subject headlines short and sweet – pique your subscribers’ interest and hook them in!

♦ Try to limit the subject line to 50-60 characters so it is not cut-off while being viewed in a subscribers’ inbox.

♦ Offer just enough information in the subject line to introduce your campaign without giving away the entire message.

♦ Refrain from using any words that may have your campaign automatically blocked by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which can be classified as spam: (“FREE,” “As seen on TV,” etc.)

Your ultimate goal of the subject line is to create an open for your campaign where you can hook your subscribers with more products, information, etc. that you have to offer.

For more information, click here for Effective Copywriting Guidelines.