Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
Persuasion in print is largely structural. When I explain it here it’s going to seem abstract, but when you study good salesletters in the future look at the structure.
There are obvious things of course: headline, subhead, testimonials, and so on… and those are elements and by default some of them occupy specific places in the letter… but these are not what I mean when I say that persuasion is a structural challenge.
When you understand the role structure plays in written persuasion you can then start to deploy persuasive elements intentionally for precise effect at specific points in your copy.
In short, when you understand how structure in copywriting works you start to grasp not only what to write, but where to write it in your letter.
Learning any skill is awkward at first, then it becomes comfortable, and when you become highly skilled it starts to feel natural and even works at an unconscious level.
Salesletters are structured, generally, with a bold headline making a claim or otherwise attempting to capture attention from the target audience: the people most likely to have the problem the product solves, the desire to do something about it, and the means to buy.
When I was building high-end custom furniture I would send out postcards to designers in my area. The simple headlines I used were like this:
“Designers: Are You Frustrated With Your Current Cabinetmaker?”
The postcard says who it’s for, designers. Then it asks if they have a problem – and from experience I knew that problems usually had to do with poor quality work or late delivery. The body copy of the postcard mentioned those issues ane encouraged designers to call for a free report.
I got tired of working wood for a living, but the direct-response marketing I do today is similar in many ways, even though my products are different. I try to get the salesletter in front of the right people who MIGHT have the problem, ask if they do (sometimes not directly) and offer my solution. It’s all common sense when you study direct-response a bit – but the writing itself has a huge affect on response and there is arguably both an art and a science to the writing.
Structural persuasion usually takes the form, after the initial problem is stated or implied, of making a claim, getting your reader to agree the claim may be valid, then moving on to another claim which – if you can pull it off, is a little more outrageous than the first claim. The reader, because he has already agreed with the first claim, is psychologically invested in your sales message already. This is a little hard to believe but it does really work this way. The structural copywriter then proceeds to build a series of agreements that “X is a problem” and “here’s the solution and it makes sense, right?” (Of course this is not the way real copy reads, I’m just explaining it in unsubtle terms to make the structure clear).
The reader agrees in his head that the problem is real and the solution seems plausible. There is generally only a glimmer of desire to buy at this point however. As we progress through the copy we restate the problem from different perspectives and try to intensify the reader’s internal experience of the problem. If the reader does not get stirred emotionally with a mental image of himself suffering from the problem the sale is not made… but when you hook him in and get him to OWN the problem by visualizing himself having it you have him partially sold.
Even when you have the reader (who could be a woman but I’ll use the masculine pronoun here throughout) experiencing and visualizing the problem as a “mind movie” you still need to build a hot desire for your solution and to that ideally you have to get the guy to embrace some wild claims that he wouldn’t have at the start of the letter, because they seem too far out. People are skeptical these days, and if you make the big claims that will get the sale while they are only involved on a mental (and skeptical) level you will find it hard to close the sale unless the price is super-cheap, which is usually not a good thing for your bottom-line. If you want to make some real money at this stuff you need to get an emotional involvement from your prospect so he feels the pain of his problem intensely and is motivated to solve it immediately. When he accepts the plausibility of all your claims (and he wouldn’t if he were not emotionally involved) then the sale almost “closes itself”.
There is an art to closing the sale as well, but emotional involvement is absolutely necessary if you are to get some big dollars with your marketing. In the close you may have to justify a price which is higher than the guy would prefer to pay, but he’ll pay more than you might think if he is solidly persuaded with the structural method I’ve outlined here.
Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.
Nice post, thanks.
Ok, when can we read a continue?