The other day I was asked the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “Should I use active or pas­sive voice in sales copy?” My answer may sur­prise you.

The premise behind this ques­tion is sim­ple. Tra­di­tional rules of good writ­ing state that we should use active voice. When it comes to copy­writ­ing, it makes per­fect sense.

For instance, active voice engages the reader and makes it easy for them to quickly under­stand the copy. They don’t have to sort through a sen­tence to under­stand it.

For those rea­sons, writ­ers are told again and again to focus on using active voice. But I’m telling you that, in some cases, you shouldn’t. And here’s why…

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I cov­ered head­lines many times already. You can find posts about head­lines here. But here are some addi­tional tips.

There are two huge mis­takes peo­ple make when they write head­lines. Either they are too bland and don’t say enough (such as when they attempt to sim­ply sum­ma­rize), or they say too much to cover all the bases.

In both cases, you will lose readers.

1. The True Purpose of The Headline

The head­line is more than a mere sum­mary of the sales copy. Unlike the title of a book, for instance, it’s not meant to sum­ma­rize, encap­su­late, or intro­duce the story. And most head­lines I’ve seen seem to list all the of the great­est ben­e­fits from the copy.

No. A head­line is meant to gen­er­ate read­er­ship and pull peo­ple into the copy.

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When writ­ing direct response copy, a few things can max­i­mize the respon­sive­ness of your mes­sage. The first and most impor­tant ele­ment that can turn any web­site, saleslet­ter, or adver­tise­ment into an action-​​generating mech­a­nism is, with­out ques­tion, the head­line.

But lately, I’m see­ing more and more head­lines that are limp, bloated, or sim­ply dead wrong.

A head­line is meant to do two vital things.

No more and no less. First, it needs to grab your reader’s atten­tion. That’s the pri­mary and most impor­tant job of the head­line. It’s not meant to sum­ma­rize an offer or be a para­graph in and of itself. It’s not meant to make a sale, either.

You know what I’m talk­ing about, right? Head­lines like these make me twitch…

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In my cri­tique con­sult­ing ser­vices, I’ve found the most com­mon mis­take clients make is the igno­rance of, or indif­fer­ence to, split-​​testing. Lit­tle do they know this under­uti­lized mar­ket­ing prac­tice can be one of the most profitable.

Split-​​testing is the sim­ple process of split­ting your audi­ence into read­ing two or more ver­sions of your copy — whether it’s your web­site, saleslet­ter, email, etc — to deter­mine which ver­sion pulls the best.

I’m a big fan of test­ing. And I teach it as much as I can, and if my cri­tiques are any indi­ca­tion, I also believe 99% of mar­keters out there do not test at all. It’s a shame, because they’re leav­ing so much money on the table.

I applaud those peo­ple who do test. The prob­lem, how­ever, is that some of them reveal their test results, share their insights, and make claims, which can be a bad thing.

Sure, test results are cool. Per­haps even insight­ful. But some may be mis­in­ter­preted, and doing so also feeds into this lack­adaisi­cal mind­set of those non-​​testers, think­ing that such test results are uni­ver­sally applic­a­ble and there­fore test­ing is unnecessary.

Tak­ing any test result as gospel, with­out val­i­da­tion, can be an expen­sive proposition…

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Sci­en­tific Adver­tis­ing by Claude C. Hop­kins is a time­less clas­sic writ­ten many years ago but a book whose pow­er­ful prin­ci­ples still ring true to this day.

It con­tains 21 chap­ters of time­less strate­gies you don’t want to ignore in your adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing efforts.

In fact, David Ogilvy once said: “Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have any­thing to do with adver­tis­ing until he has read this book seven times.”

I highly rec­om­mend that your read this book, which is brought to you free, before you spend any money on other copy­writ­ing books.

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One of the most ven­er­a­ble and com­mon ele­ments of good saleslet­ters, fol­low­ing the head­line, is the post­script or “P.S.” at the end.

The end of every great sales let­ter should be capped with a strong P.S. We are often told that the P.S. is the sec­ond most read part of a saleslet­ter, because after read­ing the head­line many peo­ple tend to scroll or jump to the bottom.

It’s like the “sec­ond head­line,” so to speak.

This is par­tic­u­larly true when we know that most peo­ple tend to read the head­line or the “Dear Friend” salu­ta­tion, then turn to the clos­ing of the let­ter to see who signed it or who is it from. Partly out of curios­ity. Partly to jus­tify read­ing it in the first place.

Includ­ing a P.S. in your copy may not always be nec­es­sary. I’ve seen some great, proven saleslet­ters that did not have any post­scripts at all. But if you do include one, don’t add it just for the sake of adding one. Make sure it does the job.

In fact, you shouldn’t use a P.S. the way it’s sup­posed to be used…

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When a sales page is not per­form­ing or if it’s not per­form­ing up to your expec­ta­tions, the worst thing you can do is… nothing.

By tak­ing action and mak­ing changes, you can strengthen your copy quickly and improve your sales con­ver­sions. In most cases, there are rel­a­tively sim­ple steps you can take to alter the copy to improve your results immediately.

The key to this process is test­ing to boost your outcome.

The sad truth is, the vast major­ity of mar­keters don’t test. But if you are test­ing or about to, then con­grat­u­la­tions. Because you’re miles ahead of most peo­ple in this industry.

How­ever, when most peo­ple start test­ing, they imme­di­ately think of some­thing they can add or change. Or they’re con­fused as to what to test, par­tic­u­larly what to test first.

In my expe­ri­ence, I’ve found that the best and most effi­cient ele­ment to test is to actu­ally first remove the things that are stop­ping peo­ple from order­ing. In other words…

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