by Daniel Levis

In this issue:

• How to use interviews to improve your copy …
• How to dig for ultimate benefits and emotional hot buttons …
• A case study in possibilities: 1 feature, 7 ultimate benefits …
• And more!

Dear Web Business Builder,

Human nature is universal. In many ways it’s as predictable as the hands of a clock. People buy things for two reasons, and two reasons only: To obtain pleasure or avoid pain.

Every product and service under the sun is bought with the anticipation that it will yield increased pleasure, or decreased pain.

Now I’m not necessarily talking about pleasure and pain in the literal sense, although sometimes that is the case. I am referring to pleasurable and painful emotions. I am talking about buying as a means of pursuing emotional satisfaction (pleasure), and avoiding emotional stress (pain).

Everything significant about your product can and must be mapped to one or both of these two outcomes if you want to maximize your conversion.

So your first step is to accurately identify the nature of the particular emotional pains your prospects are feeling and the emotional pleasures they wish to obtain.

How do you do that?

How to use interviews
to improve your copy …

One of the best ways is to interview your existing customers. Ask them: Why did you buy?

They’re likely to tell you they bought your product, or your client’s product if you are a professional copywriter, because it had some unique feature they liked. For example, they might say,

“I bought from you because you had guaranteed delivery times.”

That’s a great start, but you need to dig deeper. Remember, people only buy for two reasons, to obtain pleasure or avoid pain.

So you ask them, “Why was it important for you to get guaranteed delivery?”

And they might say, “because I was working against a deadline, and I would have missed it if I didn’t have the information I needed.”

And you ask, “and why was it important to meet that deadline?” And they say, “Because if I missed my deadline, it would have killed the whole project. I would have had to go back to the drawing board and renegotiate everything. It would have cost our company thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of extra dollars.”

We’re still not to where I want to be, so I push on …

“What about you personally, how would having to push the project back a month due to the missed deadline have reflected on you?”

“Well it would have been a source of humiliation. The CEO was counting on this project to meet the quarterly sales numbers. It would have been a real disaster. I would have looked totally incompetent. Maybe even been fired. You guys really saved my ass!”

Now we’re getting somewhere, and so I continue …

“And as things turned out, how did the project reflect on you professionally?”

“Very well, very well indeed. In fact I’ve been promised a raise, and the CEO mentioned my role in a company memo. It felt great to be recognized for my contribution.”

Bingo! Now that’s what I was digging for. When you’re talking to these people, you need to dig deep for the real buying motives. And they are? The pain avoided, or the pleasure obtained.

How to dig for ultimate benefits
and emotional hot buttons …

In the above exchange, you can see how probing questions were used to drill deeper into the initial response. What you’re looking for is emotional content. To be even more specific, you’re looking for things that protect or enhance the prospect’s self image.

Guaranteed delivery dates on their own don’t mean much, but when they’re tied to the prospect of avoiding humiliation, gaining personal recognition, or both … they become incredibly significant.

The key is to dig out those emotional benefits that reflect on the prospect’s self image, and articulate them in your copy. Those are the hot buttons that inspire action.

When you’re interviewing your clients and prospects, it’s never enough to take their answers about why they bought the product at face value. You’ve got to get into rapport and get them to open up to you. They need to feel comfortable enough to give you the deeper information you’re looking for.

You’ll know you’ve got it when you get to juicy tidbits that reflect on their self-image. That’s where emotional pain and pleasure are felt.

Now obviously you have to interview more than one customer.

And if you’re a copywriter writing for someone else, you’re going to want to interview your client as well. Even more importantly, you’re going to want to interview their employees on the front lines, who are actively dealing with the customers and prospects you’ll be targeting.

You’re looking for recurring themes that are likely to resonate with as wide an audience as possible. These recurring themes will guide you to the ultimate benefit(s) you will promise in your copy.

And while you don’t want to put words in your interviewee’s mouths, it helps to have an understanding of the different kinds of pain and pleasure that all humans feel. This is important, because you want to know how deep to dig.

If you don’t dig to the ultimate benefit, you’re going to miss out on a potentially rich vein of emotional expression and phrasing that will come from your interviewees. Content that will prove invaluable to you when you write your copy.

A case study in possibilities:
1 feature, 7 ultimate benefits …

So what are the different kinds of emotional pleasures and pains that course through our collective veins?

Well, in the above situation, our friend’s story could have taken a number of different twists, couldn’t it? He was thinking about a promotion, but a promotion can mean different things to different people.

Some people associate pleasure with power and influence. They take joy in imposing their will on others and the environment. A promotion leads to wider responsibility and power within the organization.

Others associate pleasure with acceptance … A job well done, and recognized as such, makes them feel like they’re an important part of the team.

Increased status, as a result of the promotion, could be another way for this prospect to obtain pleasure from the transaction. For some people, tittles are incredibly important. Society conditions us all to identify very strongly with our role in the workplace.

Romance might even find its way into the story. If the prospect envisions a raise as a result of a successful implementation, the extra money makes him a hero in the home. The thought of being seen as a good provider by his wife – a powerful aphrodisiac – may well be another source of pleasure that maps back to your product.

And believe it or not, many business decisions are motivated by vengeance. There’s no sweeter emotional pleasure than showing somebody else up by coming through in a clutch when they thought you couldn’t … or pulling something off that they derided you for even considering.

As you can see, a single product feature can map to many different kinds of emotional pleasure for your prospect. The same holds true for pain avoidance …

Perhaps the attractiveness of guaranteed delivery dates had something to do with the prospect’s desire to maintain order in his life. Predictability gives people a sense of stability and control. Its absence can be upsetting (emotionally painful) because it implies uncertainty.

Stress avoidance could also be a factor. Guaranteed delivery dates mean one less thing for the prospect to worry about. Less anxiety and fear of having the project go awry could be a highly motivating factor.

And on and on …

Without understanding prime human motivations first, and then taking the time to find out which ones are dominant in the target market, it’s very difficult to create compelling, genuine sounding copy that resonates emotionally with the target market.

The interview process is essential.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
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Write Like Ernest Hemingway

Throughout his career Hemingway experimented with style and, like any professional writer, constantly learned new techniques. For example, his later writing has a more ornate sentence structure and delves more deeply into character than his early work. Despite these additional discoveries and experiments, however, the core Hemingway style persisted in most of his prose and today it is recognizable worldwide. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 it was “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

SENTENCE LENGTH

True, Hemingway wrote short sentences. And true, he is known for simplified, direct prose.10 But what most writers don’t realize is that he worked hard for these effects and that there was a reason for them. Primary among those reasons was the issue of clarity. When he wrote for newspapers, clarity was the objective. Even today newspapers are known for their clear, direct style. Hemingway wrote sentences that were straightforward and clear so that readers could understand the points he made even if they were skimming quickly through his articles.11 You can achieve a similar clarity by writing shorter, more direct sentences. This is especially helpful to keep in mind when rewriting your work. Don’t hesitate to break up long complex thoughts into bite-size morsels for added readability. But clarity was not the only reason for Hemingway’s brevity.
Another reason for short sentences is dramatic effect. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) when the protagonist is nearing death because of a gangrenous leg, Hemingway writes: “All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain.” Here the short sentences have a cumulative effect, pounding home the idea that the hero is nearing death. Try to achieve a similar effect in your writing by stringing together a series of short sentences when you want to stress a point or add dramatic punch to your prose.

Still another use for short sentences is to add variety and music to your writing. Hemingway often mixes longer and shorter sentences for a euphonious effect. In The Old Man and the Sea (1952), for instance, he tells us the thoughts of the old fisherman: “Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed? he thought.” The first sentence contains two conflicting thoughts: the old man’s sorrow for the fish and, in contrast with this, his continued determination to kill it. The next sentence suggests the old man’s motivation for fishing, namely to get food. The change in sentence length lends a musical quality to the writing and adds pleasing variety.

SENTENCE SPEED

One of Hemingway’s most recognizable stylistic traits is a fast sentence speed. A writer’s sentence speed refers to how quickly his sentences can be read, either aloud or silently. It’s as if Hemingway’s prose flies along at a rapid clip while the writing of other authors putters slowly in comparison. If you want to write like Hemingway, imitate this signature stylistic move. You’ll be writing in the fast lane.

How does Hemingway manage to speed up his sentences? He uses two methods, the first of which involves choosing shorter words for simpler diction. We’ll deal with that in a moment. The second method is to omit commas.
Joseph Conrad used to retire to a room to write every day and he would have his wife lock him in so that he could concentrate. When he emerged for lunch one afternoon his wife asked what he had done. “I took out a comma,” he said. After lunch she locked him in again and when he emerged for dinner she asked what he had done. He told her, “I put back the comma.”13 If Joseph Conrad struggled for an entire day over the placement of one comma, might it be worth your while to devote a few minutes to this mark of punctuation? Undoubtedly it would be time well spent. Hemingway waged a war against commas, and although he used them in his work he often achieved his greatest technical innovations by omitting them in compound sentences. A compound sentence contains two or more independent clauses. The clauses are usually joined by a comma and a coordinating conjunction, such as and or but. By far the most common coordinating conjunction is the word and.

Consider the sentence: “Often Miss Stein would have no guests, and she was always very friendly, and for a long time she was affectionate.” It is composed of three independent clauses: Often Miss Stein would have no guests. She was always very friendly. For a long time she was affectionate. But the sentence plods along at a slow pace. The three commas slow it down and give it a choppy feel. Here’s how Hemingway actually wrote the sentence in chapter three of A Moveable Feast (1964): “Often Miss Stein would have no guests and she was always very friendly and for a long time she was affectionate.” Punctuated like this it zips along.

Let’s look at another example, from The Sun Also Rises (1926). The narrator is hoping to see the bulls at Pamplona. Joining a crowd of spectators he rushes ahead with them to the bullring. At this point Hemingway speeds up the pace: “I heard the rocket and I knew I could not get into the ring in time to see the bulls come in, so I shoved through the crowd to the fence.” The absence of a comma before the word and increases the tempo, conveying some of the feeling of being in the crowd.
Omitting commas can be a tricky business because such omissions can sometimes make sentences confusing, so this is a technique you don’t want to overuse. But when you come to a section of your story where the action needs to move at a quicker pace, you may wish to try Hemingway’s trick of speeding up the sentences. You’ll leave other writers in the dust.

Learn more about Write Like the Masters

Internet sales letters sell billions of dollars of goods –
why not have one for your business?Think and Grow Rich Action Step #8)
Control Your Enthusiasm

To be enthusiastic – act enthusiastically!

22 Laws #8 – In the long run, every market becomes a two horse race.

The Business Sales Message Letter is an offspring of the Internet Sales Letter which is a child of the Direct Response Letter which comes from the original Salesmanship in Print

The founder of the Ad Agency once got his job by telling his new boss that Advertising is Salesmanship in Print

Imagine if a world class Advertising firm could write an advertisement for you – for your company – for your business

Many ads on TV, to put it politely “stink” or start with “s” and end with “k” – so having a lot of money to spend does not always generate sales or business

You want to tell your prospects who you are and what you do – wnem you have Step #5 completed this will ne easier, also Steps #6 & #7 will help

We are deluged with advertising and marketing messages – we tune them out – so how do you get your message through to your customers?

One way is through Permission Marketing – a phrase coined by Seth Godin – where you ask permission to contact your customers

The phrase “Advertising Industrial Complex” is also by Seth Godin – born of the post World War II economy and the birth of Television – this is dinosaur marketing

How do attract customers rather than chase them?

What is the Get Slightly Famous marketing strategy and how can it work for you?

What are the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and how can you use them to your advantage?

What is Positioning – the phrase often attributed to the team of Al Reis & Jack Trout – where you position your product in the mind of the customer

Direct marketing legend and copywriter Joe Sugarman has a book and a list of Triggers – emotional hot buttons.

Joe Vitale defined marketing – the enthusiasm to share what you have and offer with others

Mark Joyner claims the Irresistible Offer can work in 3 seconds to convince your customers – how did this work for Dominoes Pizza

Marlon Sanders has a 12 Step copywriting formula – just plug in the pieces and you have a sales letter.

Internet marketing has become famous for the (Really) Long Sales Letter – that goes on for several or many pages – and the most common question asked is “Does anybody read that?” The answer is – Yes, if you are interested.

What is niche marketing and the long tail and tribes – these are new terms in marketing and all can be used to your benefit.

If it is true that “When your marketing is done well, Your products virtually sell themselves” – just in case you are like 99% of American who do not like selling – wouldn’t it be great if you could work “once” to create a message – a sales letter that will sell over and over again without you having to do anything?

Internet marketing has been called the “New Cable TV” with infomercials and Topsy Turvey tomatoes and Sham-wow towels and you name it – perhaps your product or service is actually useful to a customer that wants or needs it – what IM (Internet Marketing) techniques could you use to help your sales – without becoming hated like Vince of Shamwow?

________________________________________

The 12 steps are:

1. Get attention
2. Identify the problem
3. Provide the solution
4. Present your credentials
5. Show the benefits
6. Give social proof
7. Make your offer
8. Inject scarcity
9. Give a guarantee
10. Call to action
11. Give a warning
12. Close with a reminder

“You’re Only One Sales Letter Away”

The late, great Gary Halbert said

“There is no problem to which a great sales letter is not the answer.”

When you have one good product with one good sales letter in one hot market,
you can send traffic to it and make sales all day long.

Great companies are built with one great sales letter!

Do you have a printed version of your website sales page that you can copy at Office Depot – or any place with a color printer or copier and then handout?

The thing is – some marketer made the insightful comment – write the sales letter first – then – create the product.

This is counter intuitive – but it works – and is a “secret”

Do you have a sales letter?
You know – an Internet commercial
that answers
these 10 questions
about yourself
and what you do?

Here is the template that you can fill out –
just answer these questions –
I will re-write them
and make your presentation sound professional.

What is your online Sales letter –
all Internet Products start with a sales page –
why not start your offline business –
your brick and mortar business
with a sales page.

A sales page can be broken down
into a number of parts – from 8 – 23 –
here is Marlon Sanders version of The Formula.

[12 Steps to a Sales Letter – by Marlon Sanders]