Show Me The Goods

The “Google Slap.” You’ve heard of it. You were prob­a­bly affected by it. Essen­tially, Google, the world’s largest search engine, recently penal­ized a whole bunch of sites because they, too, judged them to be of poor quality.

Either they dimin­ished their pager­anks into obliv­ion, or they increased their AdWords costs by jack­ing up the prices if the cam­paigns led to poor con­tent. (And as you prob­a­bly know, this has dri­ven a lot of mar­keters out of business.)

But keep in mind, Google didn’t make this change by pulling it out of thin air or to dic­ta­to­ri­ally decide what’s good for the Inter­net. They’re sim­ply fol­low­ing what peo­ple want and giv­ing it to them.

(In fact, when Google makes such major changes, let it be a good indi­ca­tor of what’s going on in the marketplace.)

Peo­ple want infor­ma­tion. But more impor­tantly, they want good infor­ma­tion, just as much as they want more proof and cred­i­bil­ity. Whether you have a junk site using black-​​hat tech­niques, or a long-​​scrolling saleslet­ter or opt-​​in page that doesn’t offer any­thing of value in itself, it doesn’t matter.

Google is not slap­ping you, peo­ple are. And if Google doesn’t, peo­ple will.

Sim­i­larly, peo­ple pre­fer to buy than to be sold. This is noth­ing new. It’s always been that way, and most peo­ple know this at least to a cer­tain degree.

So why are we still try­ing to sell peo­ple using hard-​​hitting, salesy, long-​​scrolling, poorly writ­ten and clunky-​​looking copy? There are a few rea­sons. One of them is because they worked. (And they still do to a degree.)

One of Dan Kennedy’s mot­tos is that clunky saleslet­ters out­pull clean ones. In my esti­ma­tion the rea­son is, in a world stuffed with fancy design and shiny pack­ag­ing from big adver­tis­ing agen­cies, peo­ple have become some­what jaded. So clunk­i­ness is new and refresh­ing for a lot of people.

But I don’t think they buy from a clunky saleslet­ter because it’s clunky. I think they buy because: a) they know the author, b) the clunk­i­ness catches their atten­tion, c) it’s dif­fer­ent, and d) it com­mu­ni­cates, to an extent, the UPA that the author invested more time and money in the prod­uct than on the packaging.

Dan Kennedy taught us well. Too well, per­haps. Being a men­tor to many copy­writ­ers includ­ing yours truly, Dan influ­enced a lot of peo­ple with his advice.

The results speak for them­selves, too. Clunky saleslet­ters did sell more, but sales are declin­ing. And what peo­ple fail to rec­og­nize is that when Dan made that state­ment, he was essen­tially talk­ing about direct mail, not the Inter­net — and cer­tainly not Web 2.0. (Remem­ber, the Inter­net is different.)

Another rea­son is pure lazi­ness. We slap up an opt-​​in page or saleslet­ter, and we don’t care about what it says, what it looks like or how it’s read. As long as it con­verts, we’re happy. Right? But at how much? And at what cost?

Com­pla­cency often starts at con­ver­sion rates as lit­tle as 1%, as we tend to for­get that 99% never bought. And no mat­ter how you spin it, 99% is still a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber. So rather than try­ing to give what peo­ple want to make their expe­ri­ence more com­fort­able, we often resort to sur­rep­ti­tious tac­tics to boost response.

The prob­lem is, we’re only look­ing at increas­ing the con­ver­sion rate rather than low­er­ing the non-​​conversion one. This is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion, because we tend to focus on how we can get more peo­ple to buy, rather than try­ing to find out what’s caus­ing them not to buy.

Did you know that the high­est increases in response rates, aside from the sales copy, have noth­ing to do with covert sub­tleties? (By those I’m talk­ing about tiny changes, such as dif­fer­ent colored-​​headlines.)

Granted, these things do increase response. But why? Is it because they’re hyp­not­i­cally induc­ing more sales? Maybe. But my think­ing is, they’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing greater cred­i­bil­ity or proof, at least to some degree, for what­ever reason.

Nev­er­the­less, the high­est increases in response I’ve seen are those that resulted from chang­ing the sales expe­ri­ence — that is, from test­ing dif­fer­ent ways of mak­ing the buy­ing process as easy, as com­fort­able and as safe as possible.

If peo­ple want more con­tent, then give it to them. If peo­ple want more proof, then give that to them. If peo­ple want less copy, then give them less. And if they don’t want to be sold, then lis­ten to them.

Let me give you an example.

The Google Slap notwith­stand­ing, opt-​​in pages are no longer as effec­tive as they used to be. My friend John Reese, on that same “online pre­dic­tions” call I men­tioned ear­lier, said to look at the evo­lu­tion of the opt-​​in page, which is a great illus­tra­tion of how the web is grow­ing up.

In the early days, the web was so new for so many peo­ple that offer­ing a free email list was as easy as pie. All you had to do is ask for people’s email addresses, and that’s it. Peo­ple would lit­er­ally clamor to be on your list.

(In fact, when I first started on the Inter­net, I remem­ber being sub­scribed to more email lists than you would care to count. We’re talk­ing thou­sands, here.)

After a while, opt-​​in rates, which were ini­tially quite high, were start­ing to decline. So what did peo­ple do? They cre­ated opt-​​in forms with a bit of copy that asked peo­ple to join. Noth­ing fancy, but opt-​​in rates did start going back up again.

Then, as soon as they began going down, peo­ple cre­ated opt-​​in pages offer­ing a “free email newslet­ter.” They added more copy that per­suaded peo­ple into join­ing the newslet­ter. Signups went back up again, but only temporarily.

So next, they started brib­ing peo­ple. They offered mul­ti­part courses and email series instead of just newslet­ters. They offered free reports and bonuses as gifts for sign­ing up. They used long copy to tease them about what they’re getting.

Same thing hap­pened: opt-​​in rates went up, then down.

Today, what we’re see­ing is a flip-​​flop. We’re see­ing bet­ter results by offer­ing peo­ple the con­tent upfront (which is what they want in the first place), whether it’s an arti­cle, newslet­ter issue or free report, or even an audio or video, and then ask­ing them to join our mail­ing list.

This is called the “Reverse Opt-​​In Process.”

You sway them to join your email list with the qual­ity of your con­tent rather than the effec­tive­ness of your copy — let alone the value of your bribes. Hope­fully, your con­tent is good enough and entic­ing enough that it makes them want more, which they can get by join­ing your mail­ing list.

A great exam­ple of the reverse opt-​​in process is Brad Fal­lon and Andy Jenk­ins’ Stom­per­Net launch in 2006. Stom­per­Net, if you don’t know, is a coach­ing pro­gram that teaches spe­cific strate­gies for cre­at­ing top search engine rank­ings, result­ing in mas­sive traf­fic, and of course, more sales.

Now, SEO (or “search engine opti­miza­tion”) is a highly com­pet­i­tive indus­try. So try­ing to get peo­ple inter­ested in an SEO saleslet­ter let alone sub­scrib­ing to a mail­ing list about it is a rather daunt­ing task.

But at the onset of their cam­paign before the launch, Fal­lon and Jenk­ins offered a video. It not only offered a deeper under­stand­ing of the power of “nat­ural search engine traf­fic,” but it also gave a few inside tips along with actual search engine results, which they did by show­ing a live demon­stra­tion using Google.

The video was only the first one in a series of three, but the other two were yet to be recorded. So they gave peo­ple an oppor­tu­nity to join their list to be noti­fied not only when the other two videos were ready but also when the actual prod­uct behind it would launch.

While the videos did offer some action­able tips and ideas (which added more valu­able con­tent to the videos), they focused pri­mar­ily on the proof of their SEO strate­gies than any­thing else. (There we go with that “proof,” again!)

In other words, they gave peo­ple the “what” and not the “how.” And the more pow­er­ful and valu­able the “what” was, mean­ing the more proof they pro­vided, the more entic­ing and com­pelling the “how” became.

(Need­less to say, his­tory shows that their attempts were tremen­dously suc­cess­ful, result­ing in mil­lions of dol­lars in sales on launch day.)

Nev­er­the­less, this is just one exam­ple of sam­pli­fi­ca­tion and where we’re head­ing. You need to focus on con­tent. You need to show your prospects more proof and cred­i­bil­ity. And one way is to give them the goods upfront.

After you estab­lish a cer­tain level of trust, you have their per­mis­sion to sell them. Some peo­ple say this is no dif­fer­ent than Seth Godin’s “Per­mis­sion Mar­ket­ing,” or Dan Kennedy’s “Gath­er­ing of the Herd.” That’s true to an extent.

The impli­ca­tion is not so much to bring atten­tion to the process but to put it in per­spec­tive in light of Web 2.0, and the need for copy­writ­ers to hone their chops more effec­tively than ever before because of it.

In fact, let me share with you a few tips to give you some ideas on how all of this applies to saleslet­ters and copy­writ­ing in general:

• Turn your saleslet­ter into a non-​​salesletter (or at the very least reduce the appear­ance of a saleslet­ter as much as possible);
• Be more newsy rather than ben­e­fit– or sales-​​oriented, or make your saleslet­ter more article-​​, edi­to­r­ial– or press-​​release-​​like;
• Give more great con­tent first (even if it’s a saleslet­ter), and sell them on the power of that con­tent, not on the value of your tease or bribe;
• Tell more sto­ries, and learn how to tell bet­ter, more cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ries that, in them­selves, offer pow­er­ful con­tent beforehand;
• In fact, use copy to con­nect with your reader and empathize with them more, on dif­fer­ent lev­els, rather than think­ing lin­early or unilaterally;
• Be dis­creet in your sell­ing effort, and try to focus more on the news­wor­thi­ness and value of your infor­ma­tion, rather than on the hype or hormone-​​pumping claims that seem too good to be true;
• Focus on build­ing cred­i­bil­ity, believ­abil­ity and, above all, rela­tion­ships with your read­ers, rather than sell­ing them too hard, too fast;
• Turn your sales process into a sales expe­ri­ence by adding inter­ac­tiv­ity through the use of pro­grams, con­trols, forms and dynamic content;
• Use brevity, cut down on your copy’s length, and edit your copy to be stronger, pithier, and more to the point;
• Incor­po­rate mul­ti­me­dia and audio­vi­su­als in your copy, even if it’s as sim­ple as giv­ing the same copy but in dif­fer­ent formats;
• Offer more proof, whether it’s in the form of copy, audio, video, demos, sam­ples, reviews, or what­ever (remem­ber, you want to give them the “what” but sell them on the “how”);

This is far from being an exhaus­tive list by any stretch. It’s just what came to my mind right now as I write this. I hope it stirs some new ideas for you or at least gives you some new things to test in your salesletter.

Bot­tom line, never stop learn­ing how to write great copy, never stop using saleslet­ters, and cer­tainly never stop test­ing. But while you should stick with the tried-​​and-​​true, don’t be afraid to try new things and go against the grain, too.

If you see a lot of saleslet­ters using red head­lines, surely this tells you that they’re work­ing. But if too many peo­ple are using them, their effec­tive­ness will even­tu­ally wane. So try some­thing else. Test a new color. Test a new head­line. Or even bet­ter, test a new way to expe­ri­ence your salesletter.

You might be pleas­antly surprised.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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