Articles from Overnight Marketing

Four "hands-on" articles on how you can make your direct marketing more effective.

How to Instantly Double the Response of Any Ad, Letter or Web Promotion

How to Guarantee Your Way to Greater Direct Marketing Success

7 Secrets of Money-Making Direct Mail

The E-Factor: Two Ways to Get More Back from Every Promotion

How to Instantly Double the Response of Any Ad, Letter or Web Promotion

By David Garfinkel 

Great marketers know a secret that most business people don't. I'm going to share it with you now: You can go from losing money to making a fortune just by changing a few words.

What words are those? The first words… in any letter, ad or Web page. The words that make up the headline.

Recently I was speaking to a business group, and to make my point, I took that day's edition of USA Today and covered up all the headlines on the front page with inch-wide white correction tape. I asked them what was wrong with the newspaper.

"No headlines!" they blurted out, almost all at once. 

"Then why," I asked, "do so many of your ads not have headlines?"

It's a fact: We have been conditioned to decide what to read based on the effect a few choice words have on our thoughts and our feelings. With books, it's often the title. With articles in the newspaper, it's the words in a headline. With a magazine on the newsstand, it's the headlines on the cover. 

Whether you know it or not, we decide whether or not to read ads, letters and Web pages the same way.

So, if that's the case, how do you write headlines to make people want to read your copy, and get interested in doing business with you?

• Make your headline create a vivid picture and/or stimulate a strong feeling

In your business, many of your conversations are logical and factual. That's the nature of business--and to do otherwise would be considered "unbusinesslike."

However, about the worst thing you can do for your promotion is to have a strictly factual, logical headline at the top of your Web page, letter, ad, flyer or postcard. Oh yes, the headline has to be believable and make sense. And what your headline says has to be supported by logic and facts later in your promotion. 

But remember that the purpose of your headline is to stir the emotions of your prospect in the direction of buying what you have to sell… and to get your prospect interested in reading what comes next in your copy. 

Here's an example for a hypothetical product that helps children do better at school.

First, an ineffective headline:

Children who don't do well at school will have many problems later on in their lives

Now, a more effective headline: 

"Daddy! Daddy! I got straight A's!" he said proudly.

Suddenly my son's future was looking much brighter…

Notice how the first headline states a fact but does not stir emotions in a big way. The second headline, using the same number of words (17), conveys

1) excitement

2) pride

3) hope for the future, and

it also creates a beautiful scene in the reader's mind of a happy parent-child situation. 

Action: When you are preparing or revising a promotion, take the time you need, or get the help you need, to write a great headline that creates a vivid picture and stimulates strong feelings in the mind of your prospect.

• Use headlines that make your prospect instantly understand your most important benefit. 

One of my favorite pieces of advertising is a headline (and slogan) for a plumbing service. I'm not that big on plumbing, personally--it's the kind of thing you wish would work perfectly all the time so you never have to think about it!

Why, then, am I so fond of an old plumbing headline? Because it's a great example of making your prospect instantly aware of the benefit of your service. 

The company is Roto-Rooter.

The headline is as follows:

Call Roto-Rooter--that's the name--

And away go troubles, down the drain!

Wow-- is that perfection in a couple of lines, or what? You get

1) a call to action

2) company identification

3) and a visual description of the benefit.

That's hard to beat! If you've ever had a stopped-up drain, you know exactly why this would be of benefit to you!

Action: Show your headline to people who are unfamiliar with your product and company, but who would be good prospects for what you are selling. See how slowly or quickly they understand what you are saying--especially, what would be the benefit to them. Keep rewriting your headline until these people instantly "get it!

• Make your headline pass the "Shortcut Test"

Imagine all you were allowed to do was run your headline plus a toll-free number… as a classified ad. Ask yourself this question: Would it generate inquiries for you in that form?

I'll give you an example from my own business. I'm taking the headline and subheadline from a long-copy print promotion for my product called The Money-Making Copywriting Course:

Money-Making Secrets Every Business Owner Needs.

For years, sales copywriting experts have quietly made millions with these little-known secrets. Now you can use this information yourself. Call (415) 564-4475.

In reality, there's plenty of information about this course right here on the Web site. I used this example only for purposes of illustration. Read it again, though, and ask yourself if these words alone, printed in the right location, wouldn't prompt qualified prospects to call for more information?

Action: Put your headline and subheadline through the Shortcut Test. Make sure that these words alone plus a toll-free number are likely to generate a response from qualified prospects.

The art of writing headlines is a special skill well worth the time and effort it takes to develop. There are many known statistics in direct marketing that bear repeating here:

- Five times as many people read the headline as read the ad or letter.

- Changes in headlines have produced documented increases in sales of 200%, 500% and, in one extreme case, 1,850% more sales!

- It's a good idea to write 15 or 20 headlines for your letter or ad, and use the "leftover" headlines as part of the selling copy itself.

Become a student of headlines and a connoisseur of great headlines. Collect them, think about them, practice writing them. The reward for your efforts will show up every time you get another order or inquiry that you never would have gotten if you didn't make the effort!

How to Guarantee Your Way to Greater Direct Marketing Success

By David Garfinkel

You know what happens before a client pulls out their wallet or checkbook? They hear a little voice in their head asking, "What if something goes wrong?"

It doesn't matter whether that prospect is just about to buy a cheap paperback novel or a million-dollar yacht--the question is always the same. But the impact of the question will be different, depending these three factors:

- Factor #1: How much money is involved.

- Factor #2: How important the purchase is.

- Factor #3: How many other people will be affected.

The greater these factors are, the more troubling the question "What if something goes wrong?" will be inside the mind of your prospective client.

Wow-- that really puts you--as a direct marketer-- in a corner, doesn't it? Like the corner at the intersection of Nervous Customers Avenue and Stalled Sales Boulevard. But I'll show you a way to get things moving again--a number of ways, in fact.

Start with this proven balm to calm your prospects' jumpy nerves:

• Provide more reassurance to your prospects.

It's human nature that your prospects are worried, especially if they're buying by mail, phone or over the Internet. They need reassurance that what they're doing is not risky. Of course you know this, but, have you ever thought what would happen if you increased the level of reassurance you offer your customers?

I'll tell you what would happen. Sales would increase at the same time.

So it might be worth considering. But how do you increase the level of reassurance you offer your customers?

Two of the easiest ways to do this right away are to strengthen and lengthen your guarantee. Here are the details:

• Make your guarantee stronger.

Just as with headlines, guarantees aren't nearly as powerful in attracting additional customers when the guarantee is stated in a merely factual and logical fashion.

Of course, a factual, logical and explicitly stated guarantee will be more effective in promoting sales than no guarantee at all, or a guarantee that is merely mentioned but not described.

However, a guarantee that is both clearly explained and vividly dramatized is simply the best of all. Here are two examples for a hypothetical product, the Soothie-Lounger Massage Chair, to show you the difference between the two ways of stating a guarantee.

Example 1:

"The Soothie-Lounger Massage Chair is fully guaranteed for one year. If you are not satisfied for any reason, let us know and we will arrange for return shipping and refund your entire purchase price."

Factual, logical, descriptive--that's good. But compare it to the following:

Example 2:

"The Soothie-Lounger Massage Chair is fully guaranteed for one year. Use it at the end of a rough day to gently massage away your tensions. Turn watching TV into a relaxing stress-reduction session. Take a nap in the Soothie-Lounger and wake up refreshed like never before.

"Try the Soothie-Lounger for a full year. If for any reason you are not fully satisfied, all you have to do is give us a call toll-free and we'll take care of the rest for you. We'll even arrange for return shipping as well as refund your entire purchase price. That's your no-hassle, unconditional one-year money-back guarantee."

See the difference? By dramatizing the guarantee, it becomes more memorable and more compelling. In short, stronger.

Action: First, make sure you've explained your guarantee clearly and completely in a factual way that's easy to understand. Then, dramatize the guarantee by suggesting uses of your product the customer can measure through experience to determine their personal satisfaction with, and/or the performance of, the product.

Make your guarantee longer.

A friend of mine sells unique, very powerful specialized business information by mail order, and he offers a lifetime guarantee. His product is a good value for the money, and his customer service is first-rate. He's sold over 2 million products and he says he can practically count the returns on one hand. He also says experience has shown over and over that the longer the guarantee, the fewer the returns.

Will this work in your business? Probably. Better guarantees typically increase response rates. The percentage of total orders returned usually either stays the same or in some cases actually declines. If you were selling 100 units for every mailing before and getting 5 returns, you might sell 200 units with a greatly improved guarantee and get perhaps 10 returns, or less, for the same size mailing.

What you should focus on is not doubling the returns. Those returns were going to happen sooner or later anyway. What you should focus on is getting twice as many sales for the same mailing cost--and getting more than twice the profits, since your fixed mailing cost stayed the same.

Action: Test a longer guarantee on a portion of your promotion, and track returns. The odds are very good that returns will stay even on a percentage basis. They may actually decrease.

To sum up: As an entrepreneur, you might believe that the last thing you should be worried about is the fear your customers feel right before they buy. But, in fact, taking the time and making the effort to calm that fear--before it can ever become a problem--is one of the smartest business moves you can make.

Why? Because as people grow to trust you and feel more comfortable about you, they will buy more from you, refer more of their friends to you, and even involve you in opportunities you probably never imagined could happen. And it all starts with the reassuring manner in the words you use and the actions you take.

7 Secrets of Money-Making Direct Mail

By David Garfinkel

If you send out marketing letters, you may be familiar with the agony and the ecstasy. You know what I mean? The agony when letters don't work--money down the drain-- and the ecstasy when they do. The money that comes in from a good letter is almost like manna from heaven.

The sad reality, though, is that too many direct mail letters fail. A large number of letters don't get any response at all, and most letters that get response don't get nearly the response they could.

Fortunately, the next time you do a mailing, it doesn't have to be that way. You can put the odds on your side by following seven simple steps.

I've examined the successful letters I've written for clients, and reviewed the letters of others, including entrepreneurs' letters and some of the best work of other highly skilled copywriters. What I've noticed is that the letters that work have the following characteristics in common:

1. Successful Money-Making Letters are personal. These letters read as though the writer of the letter is having a conversation with you. When you read the letter out loud, you see it comes across as spoken language, not the stilted English of formal business correspondence

Nor does the letter have the "stickler" language of a by-the-book school assignment. (I've advised many clients who feel compelled to use "proper English" in their sales letters… to "fire your English teacher!") The word that always seems to describe the tone and feeling of these letters: relaxed.

Action you can take: Become a professional eavesdropper! Not to invade people's privacy, but rather to learn how people talk in informal conversations. Listen to talk radio, watch movies, pay closer attention when you're having a chat with friends. By doing this, you will learn to write more the way people talk, and this will improve the effectiveness of your letters.

2. Successful Money-Making Letters are focused on the wants of the reader. If you've ever had a great business idea that went nowhere--or, if you've ever watched someone else start a business that flopped because no one would become a customer--then you have observed the following principle in action: People buy what they want, not what you think they should want!

This is a very hard and expensive lesson that gets learned over and over every day in business, usually in the form of lost sales and in extreme cases, bankruptcy. How to prevent this problem? By asking people what they want and listening very carefully to what they say and how they say it. How to profit from this information? By taking what people tell you and addressing it directly in your letter.

Action: Get to know your customers well enough personally so you know what they really want when they buy from you.

3. Successful Money-Making Letters are written in the reader's language. Maybe you've noticed that every business and social group has its own buzzwords and its own way of talking. For example, recently I wrote a letter to CEOs of multi-million-dollar corporations. Though they are in charge of businesses just as smaller entrepreneurs are, CEOs are a far more objective, fact-focused group.

As emotional as some of these CEOs may be at times in private, they need to maintain a very reasoned and clear-headed public presence as part of their jobs. So of course they tend to talk logically. Small-business owners, on the other hand, have more freedom to express emotions. So they tend to talk more emotionally.

Why does this matter? It matters because on the face of it, CEOs and small business owners would seem to have a lot in common. Yet research showed me the everyday language of the CEO was different from the language of entrepreneurs, a group I know well (and belong to myself). To make the CEO letter effective, I had to tone the emotion way down, and build up the logic.

You need to have the same kind of awareness about the language your prospects use. Here's why: When your letter sounds the way the reader talks, barriers go down and the reader opens up emotionally. Therefore, the likelihood of a response to your letter is increased.

But when your letter is written differently from the way the reader talks, the letter is read at a distance. The empathy the reader feels while reading goes down. The likelihood of a response becomes much less.

Action: Before you write, spend some time talking to the kinds of people who will be receiving your letter. Analyze the way they talk. If you can, get permission to tape record several conversations and transcribe the conversations. In your letter, write using similar words, phrases and modes of expression.

4. Successful Money-Making Letters are easy to read. Would you like to know a secret of highly-paid copywriters? Two words: "eye appeal."

It's a known fact that if a page has "eye appeal"--if, at a glance, it "looks" easy to read--the chances are far greater that a prospect will venture into the first sentence than if it looks hard to read. And what looks easy to read? Three things: Type, short paragraphs and variety.

"Type" in this case means the type is big enough to read! For your main letter, you want it to be at least 12 point. "Short paragraphs" means usually no longer than four lines. And "variety" means bolding, underlining and indenting whole paragraphs to emphasize key words and points for the skim-reader.

Action: Check your letter for type, short paragraphs, and variety. Then, have a customer or qualified prospect read your letter before you send it out. If that person gets stuck anywhere, or complains that the letter is confusing or difficult, fix the problem until the letter is easy to read.

5. Successful Money-Making Letters are convincing. To be profitable for you, a letter has to do more than make a good impression on the person who is reading it. Your letter has to be convincing. Only if it is convincing will the reader respond.

To make your letter convincing, you must know your product or service, know your customers, and--most important of all --know the actual, real, live way to make an effective sales pitch out loud, in person. Once you know those three things, you need to translate that sales pitch to paper. Do that successfully, and your letter will be very convincing!

Action: Before you write your letter, outline the structure and contents of your successful sales pitch. Then, weave the pitch into the text of the letter itself. After the letter is written, take an uncompromising look at your letter to see if it's as convincing as you are when you make your sales pitch live and in person.

6. Successful Money-Making Letters are clear. A little-known fact about good writing is that it does not take a simple mind to write a simple sentence. It merely takes clear thinking. Sometimes clear thinking is easy, and sometimes, it takes a lot of hard work!

Here's how you know if your writing is clear: anyone who is a prospect will understand everything you've written, the way you intended it to be understood. If not, it doesn't mean the prospect is dim-witted. No. What it means is, you need to make the writing clearer.

Clarity in writing often comes through refinement. More often than not, this takes time. Trying to meet an arbitrary deadline to complete a letter is often a bad thing to do, because you sacrifice clarity for promptness. If people get your letter on time but they don't get what you're trying to say, you've "won the battle but lost the war." That's an unfortunate position to be in.

Better to be late and make the sale!

Action: Take the time you need to get your letter to the clearest, simplest expression of what you have to say, in the fewest number of words possible. When you do this, it will pay off handsomely in the improved response you get.

7. Successful Money-Making Letters are motivating enough to make prospects call you or send in an order. I once wrote a sales letter for an autobody shop in an upscale area. The letter was for a special on detailing cars. The business owner was stunned by the response we got to the new mailing.

"99% of the people who call up are 100% sold, and all we have to do is set up a time that's convenient for them," he said in a voicemail message to me. "I've never received such a dramatic response to any form of advertising before."

One of the things that made this letter work was how well it pushed the hot buttons of the car owners who received it. We warned them that summer heat could "bake" flaws onto the finish of their nice cars. And we offered them a free bonus to extend the protection of the detailing for months (when it would be time for their next detailing).

Action: Get to know what motivates your prospects. When you write, remember and apply the old sales rule: "People buy for their reasons, not yours."

Well, there you have it--seven secrets that will make your direct mail make more money for you. You can use this article both as an action plan before you write… and ask a checklist to get your letter in great shape after it's done. I know you're in a rush to get it in the mail and get back some business. But take a little time and effort to turn your letter into a real winner--because the rewards can be huge!

The E-Factor: Two Ways to Get More Back from Every Promotion

By David Garfinkel

Allow me to introduce you to the mysterious "E-Factor." It's mysterious because it has two meanings.

Both meanings will help you get more business from any promotion you do. So without further ado, here's how you can use the "E-Factor" to make more money:

• Put "E-Factor" in your testimonials and copy

Did you realize the very best source of new business is almost always a prospect who has been referred to you by a friend or trusted business advisor? It is. Think about this in your own life. When you need an accountant, or an attorney, or a doctor, or for that matter a hardware store in a new town, you'll probably turn to someone you know, whose judgment you trust, to refer you to the service or product provider you're looking for.

OK. But what does that have to do with direct mail and Web promotions?

A lot. People are always on the lookout for sources of advice they can trust. However, since you can't always rely on giving every prospect for your business personal recommendations from the prospect's friends, neighbors and advisors they actually know and trust, you do the next best thing: You give them copy with recommendations from people who seem like the people they know and trust.

How? By putting testimonials and case studies in your copy involving people who will fill the role of trusted friends and advisors.

Many marketers do this but they don't get the desired effect. Why? Because they haven't put enough productive effort into the research that pays off. This is in-person research --especially one-on-one "casual" research, as opposed to formal focus-group research--with their actual customers, and people who are a lot like their customers.

This high-payoff research gives you in-depth working understanding of how your prospects think and act in the world--and how they look at things and make decisions. When you have this understanding and you weave it into the language of your descriptive copy and your testimonial quotes, it's called "empathy."

"Empathy" --that's the first meaning of "The E-Factor." Increase empathy in your copy and you'll increase sales.

• Profit from the second meaning of the "E-Factor" as well

There's another, equally important meaning. Before I tell you what it is, let me give you a big, fat hint. In his book The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives, author Michael J. Wolfe points out that American consumers put 8.4%--about one dollar out of every 12--into some form of entertainment. Currently, that adds up to $480 billion a year.

As a side note, Hollywood productions--films and TV shows --bring in the second largest amount of money from overseas back into the U.S. economy, after aircraft sales.

Yes, the other meaning of the "E-Factor" is entertainment. It's huge. And it applies to marketing and selling. As the late (and great) David Ogilvy reminded us, "People will not be bored into buying."

But beware. Many a copywriter less talented and, more importantly, less thoughtful than Mr. Ogilvy has made the fatal error including humor, fantasy, drama or thrills in a promotion in such a way as to not specifically move the sales process forward.

And that's dangerous. Even deadly, sometimes. Here's why: When you include entertainment, people's attention will invariably be drawn to it over anything else. And when entertainment does not directly support moving the sale forward, then it automatically detracts from the sale.

There are dozens of examples. The lying Isuzu salesman. Sales went down. "Plop-plop, Fizz-fizz." Sales went down. I'm sure you have your favorites of entertaining ad campaigns that bombed. Now you know why.

Entertainment isn't bad. But not painstakingly linking the entertainment to the forward motion of the sale is bad. Very bad.

So… how do you add entertainment value in such a way as to increase the sales effectiveness of your promotion? Several ways:

• Tell a dramatic story where your product is the hero and saves the day for the human involved. My favorite example of this is the newspaper ad for Joe Karbo's legendary book "The Lazy Man's Way to Riches."

In the ad, Mr. Karbo talks about his "Lazy Man's Way" which he promises to reveal in the book he's selling. He tells how, before he knew the "Lazy Man's Way," he used to work 18-hour days, 7-day weeks and was still perpetually in debt. But after he learned the "Lazy Man's Way," he became financially independent by working less and in fact became very wealthy.

This incredible ad combines drama with sales power in an unbeatable way. And it worked! The ad sold 3 million books by mail order!

• Use humor that adds emphasis to the value of your product or service. When you get past the laughter, most humor in ads just shows off the cleverness of the creative team who created the ad. (You might say it also shows off their lack of concern for creating sales.) A positive example, where the humor shows how the product is so worthwhile, is the old (and very successful) series of Seinfeld commercials for the American Express Card.

• Use exciting, colorful language in testimonials when customers are talking about the virtues of your product. But make sure it's believable. And don't make fun of the fact that you're selling something, any more than you would go to target practice and fire the first shot into your own foot. At all times, keep your eye on the target--increased sales!

So let's review. How can you use this information to make more sales in every promotion? Take stock of its Empathy and Entertainment Value. Be single-minded. Take out everything that takes away from the sale, and keep in--or boost and strengthen--everything that furthers the sale. Build the strongest possible promotion at every point along the way… and watch your response rate soar!

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