Well, you’ve made it this far so I thought I’d share with you 5 of my favourite copywriting techniques that are commonly used to persuade customers to act.
Whilst these techniques are based on certain psychological triggers, we’re not using them to lie or deceive our customers, that’s a big no no and not a good path to long term success.
What we’re doing is working as hard as we can to persuade them to try out a service or product that we know they’re going to love and that will benefit them.
If you genuinely believe in the ability of your business to make a positive difference on your customer’s life, you need to convince them in your copy so that they can start enjoying and loving what it is you have to offer!
So let’s dive in.
Embedded commands
Embedded commands are very common in copywriting and advertising. It’s where you include the instruction for an action you want your customer to take, by squeezing it into a longer sentence that doesn’t read as an explicit command.
For example, let’s say that our command is: “download this free report.”
We could embed this in a longer sentence that isn’t an overt command in the following examples:
* By letting you download this free report…
* People who download this free report…
* After you download this free report…
Have a look at other sales pages and advertising, and you’ll start noticing embedded commands such as these.
To increase the effectiveness, bold face is often used for the actual command.
The reason why
I covered this in a blog post, which you may have already seen so I won’t go into too much detail here, but ultimately, at every possible chance, always give your customer a reason why you want them to act.
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Suspense
Powerful copywriting flows naturally, and encourages your reader to move effortlessly through your copy from beginning to end.
Using suspense is definitely one of the psychological techniques you want to be including in your copy to encourage readers to make it to the end. You can use suspense in a number of ways for example:
Casually: “…as well as finding out how to finish an hour earlier every day (I’ll come to that a little later on)…”
Overtly: “Keep reading to find out how you can master any musical instrument in just 3 weeks…”
At the end of a paragraph, use a little cliff hanger into your next subheading:
…and it wouldn’t be a complete guide to creating the perfect garden without….
…The ultimate snail deterrent
The assumed sale
The assumed sale is where you write from a point of view that of course your customer is going to take the desire action and buy your product.
One of the reasons this can be very powerful in persuasion is that it gets your customer to think about the outcome of hiring you / buying your product and that puts them in a frame of mind that is more receptive to making that outcome happen.
For example:
“When we work together, we’ll discuss the best content plan for you and your business…”
Or
“When you download this report, you’ll have instant access to the techniques I’ve used to build up my own work at home business…”
You are basically asking your customer to leapfrog in their mind to the point PAST the sale, so that the sale (or the action you want them to take) seems inevitable.
Linear persuasion
Have you ever gone to look something up on Wikipedia and then had a 3 hour blackout from following link after link after link of related information?
When we’re presented with different options, our minds work to store them and remember them because what we want to do is come back and “complete” the job of following the link and finding out what information is there.
So, whenever you are writing sales copy, you want minimal (ideally none) distractions for your customer. So don’t talk about your product and then provide a link to a related blog post, because you might lose them and not get them back.
The only thing you want your customer to do is read your information and decide whether they want to buy. So make sure it is easy to access the buy button (or sign up link if you’re trying to get them to sign up to your newsletter) but remove links to everything else.
That’s why a lot of sales pages remove the navigation buttons at the top of the website. It minimises distractions and lets your customer focus on the one path that will lead them to the action you want them to take.
Phew!
Well, those are some very important copywriting techniques that you can practice using even in your blog posts, you don’t have to wait for a sales page, you can use these whenever you want your customer or reader to do something in particular.
Try including them in your writing and let me know how it goes! Have a super week and I’ll see you soon. 🙂
Amy.
Find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/littleunred