Effective Headlines – A Must For Your Next Promotion

My Friends Laughed At Me When I Said “I Will Write An Ad Headline That Will Make $10,000 A Day”, They Stopped When I made $100,000.

Pretty good headline, eh? Did I get your attention? Well if you are in business or just looking to make extra money – then you’d say – “hmmm, interesting tell me more…”. You are curious now and I got maybe 3-5 seconds of your attention, if my sales copy is good – there’s a good chance you will read it and if I have a strong call for action you might even take that action.

The importance of headlines can’t be underestimated! When you open a newspaper (yes they still exist ) – do you read every article? Of course not! You scan left upper corner to bottom right corner to see if anything catches your attention. Let’s consider an example – the brochure on the left – if your nose is blocked or you are suffering from hayfever – would you read  the first promotion? I guess you would.

The sole purpose of the headline is to sell you on reading the content, to grab your attention, to qualify you as a target market for that ad.

If you don’t have either of these symptoms you wouldn’t even look at it, would you?

The above marketing piece has a long play purpose – 3 ads crammed in a single A4 sheet – it’s a risk to lose a customer but also an opportunity to capture wider audience. If you ask me I would never mix more then one message/one offer in a marketing promotion! Why? Because you want your prospective and targeted customer to take one action and one action only.

What could be that action? Do you want them to remember the name of your company and then through repetition of the promotion build the brand awareness? Well how deep are your pockets. The above form of institutional advertising (promoting a brand) is unattainable by a small to medium business owner.

Let’s get serious! Here’s what you want them to do:

1. Pickup the phone and call your office/call centre to place an order – this is a direct action, you’ve put a lot of effort to excite your prospective customer with your sales copy – make it easy for them to contact you with a toll-free number. Also remember to use the tracking system to see which marketing promotion works better. In the case of an ad – you can say ‘quote W23 to get this special deal” – this way you will know which ad works and which doesn’t.

2. Complete an order form and fax it to you or call your toll-free number as on the Direct Response Ad listed below:

This beautifully crafted Direct Response Advertisement is targeting someone who wants to lose weight, suffering from diabetes and other medical conditions.

Please pay attention to the order form at the bottom – you can order any of the mentioned remedies by either:

• Calling a toll-free number;
• Completing the form and mailing it with free postage;
• Completing the form and faxing it to the conveniently provided fax number;
• Visit the seller’s website and place this and other orders online.

Pretty good – off-page selling!

3. Go to website and place an order – a long winded method – ask your prospective buyer to act/buy now – while it’s fresh in their memories;

4. Cut off the coupon and physically bring it to your place of business in exchange for something special or just to buy your advertised product or service – don’t we all love this one?

5. Cut off the coupon and post it to you in the mail to get something special;

6. Go to your website, read more about the offer – a good sales copy, complimented by video and graphics (before and after, how your solution solves their problems) will get your prospective customer to take action.

Have you noticed that the key word in all of our desirable outcomes above is – ACTION!? You don’t want them to cut off your ad and stick it on the fridge, you don’t want them to smile or laugh at what you said, you don’t want them to skip your ad because the headline is not compelling enough – NO you want them to notice your promo and to take action.

Here’re the classes of actions:

1. Call/physical visit and purchase – BEST OUTCOME ***** ( that was 5 stars);

2. Call/visit your office/shop/website – no purchase – make sure you ask them for ALL contact details – so you can market to them later – you need phone, mobile, email, address. OK OUTCOME **** (4 stars);

3. Call/visit your office/shop/website – no purchase – they gave you partial contact details – so you can market to them later – phone or mobile or email or address. SO-SO OUTCOME *** (3 stars);

4. Call/visit your office/shop/website – no purchase – no contact details but a promissory note to come back later/bookmarked your page – NOT GOOD OUTCOME ** (2 stars);

5. Call/visit your office/shop/website – no purchase – no contact details no further way to progress the sale – BAD OUTCOME * (1 star).

That’s all that your customer can potentially do. So, which outcome are you aiming to achieve? In my experience, most operators, unless they’ve got No1 – will give up or wouldn’t know what to do with No2 and No3. As for No4 and No5 – there’s no much hope there!

Actions 2 and 3 represent Money On The Table – most businesses will leave it there, not maximizing their sales potential. How would you go about following up with these leads that cost you money but you didn’t convert them at first? I will be covering this and a few other topics on the upcoming webinar “Online Lead Generation and Conversion Systems For Your Business” – register here to attend the webinar and discover the simple ways to followup and convert your class 2 and 3 leads.

Successfully,

Dmitri Stern

ShareTweet

d12d9ac20e1438f342a08d2855ccfac1

Buffer