A Short Primer on How to Write Copy (Part 9: Putting It All Together)

I'd like to preface this post with saying congratulations to those reading. 90% of the people who start a course like this give up before finishing. If you're reading this, then you're one of the few who will likely prosper in your business. My support goes out to you. Having said that, let's get started...

Technically, once you've gotten to the call to action, you're done. If you've done your job, your prospect responded to your call to action and is taking action to buy from you. So what more is there?

Well, after you've gotten together a great sales letter, you usually have a lot more you can do. Much of the extra stuff is details with focus on pushing up the conversion rate as high as possible. In today's post, I'll focus on some (talking about everything you could do would take a book to explain) of the most useful things you can do to make your conversions increase.

In short, they are

1. Ordering of copy content
2. Post-call to action content
3. Images

The Ordering of a Sales Letter

Through this 9-part series, I've laid out what a good sales letter contains. In general, I stuck with the order that will work best for most sales letters most of the time.

However, this ordering isn't necessarily the best for you and your product. The best thing you can do to assure your conversions are optimal is to split test (I'll explain this in a later post). But barring that, there's really no way to know what order is best for you.

Based on pure psychology, however, I would recommend the general order as follows.

1. Image (see below for why)
2. Headline
3. The problem
4. Your story on conquering this problem
5. Your solution (i.e., the benefits of your product/service)
6. Credibility/proof
7. Price
8. Call to action
9. Post-call to action stuff (see below)

In general, the above order is a safe order that is basically in sync with what most prospects have going on in their heads. As to why, you can refer to the concept of AIDA, a psychological theory for marketing applications:

• A: Attention
• I: Interest
• D: Desire
• A: Action

You grab their attention with points 1 and 2. You get them interested with points 3 and 4. You create desire through points 4 through 6. And finally you call them to action by presenting a desirable price and reason to act--points 7 through 9.

After the Call to Action

Although the ideal situation is the prospect buys as soon as he sees the call to action, this is not always the case. Sometimes you need to push them a little further toward action even after the CTA. In the sales letters of old and in the internet marketing field, people have taken a liking to using P.S. lines. Many people use the P.S. incorrectly and end up driving prospects further away from their decision to buy. Other marketers find it useful to add extra information, a coupon, or a guarantee of some sort at the end.

I'm here to say that it doesn't really matter what or how you add on to the end of a call to action, as long as it makes the offer more appealing. So when I mentioned many internet marketers using the P.S. line counter-productively, I was mainly referring to P.S. lines that simply repeat stuff that was higher up in the sales letter, not adding anything new. Here are some real examples that I've seen:

P.S. You won't succeed in your field without this program.

P.S. If you're serious about your business, I urge you to join now!

P.S. Please contact us if you have any questions.

All these above P.S. lines fail in that they offer nothing new, while simultaneously occupying the attention of a prospect that was, immediately prior, thinking of purchasing.

The first P.S. essentially says "trust what I say," which is better done through the credential part of the copy.

The second P.S. is basically another call to action after the call to action--pointless!

The third P.S. is priming prospects to think of questions they might have. Why would any good sales person deliberately try to make the prospect hesitate before making a buying decision? Let them ask questions after they buy, for god sake!

Here are some good ideas for after the call to action. Remember that these are totally optional, and, if you have a strong call to action, rarely needed.

1. Screenshots of the product in action.
2. More testimonials.
3. A P.S. line that offers something new, such as a guarantee or extra offer (however, it's usually better to put this stuff in the actual copy).
4. A time limit on the purchase.

Images in Sales Copy

The image-less sales letter is a thing of the past. People just don't have the attention span that they used to have. Today, you've got to brighten up your sales copy. To what extent? That depends on your audience. In general, the SES (social-economic status) of the prospect, the more attention-grabbing images help. However, disregarding your audience, there are a few images that you really should be putting in your sales letters:

1. An image before or after the headline. Research has shown that putting an image close to your headline gets more people to read your headline.
2. Images of you or your company (e.g., logo, team, etc.). Prospects who know who they're buying from are more likely to buy.
3. Images of the product. The less mystery as to what your product appears to be (not what it actually contains), the better. Show your prospects what they will be getting.

And a few tips for what kind of images you should use:

1. Images of people that are not you should not be professionally taken. In other words, you just want average pictures of average people. This is important for pictures in the testimonials section, in which many prospects might question the legitimacy of whether these people are real.
2. For your own picture or for your company staff's picture, make sure you're looking at the camera. Also, make sure you're smiling. You want to appear like a salesman wishes to appear: normal, friendly, and confident. People can spot a fake smile, by the way, so don't fool yourself into thinking your smile looks genuine. Ask your pals for their honest opinions.
3. Consider the colors in your picture. It seems like a detail, but certain colors work better together. I'll write a post on this in the future.

This concludes this beginner's series of How to Write Copy.

If you're interested in learning more about copywriting, please read the copywriting blog.

If you're interested in becoming a copywriter yourself, please read how to get your first copywriting clients.