An Entrepreneurs' Guide to Writing Copy that Sells (& A Word of Thanks to John Caples)

by Doug Richard, Founder of School for Startups

Back in the day when magazines and newspapers served as a primary conduit from business to customer, good sales copy was a matter of survival.  Many companies ran ads of every size every month,  from six figure full page display ads in national magazines, to $2 classified ads that ran in newspapers in little towns across the country every day.  And every ad was expected to pull its weight.  In fact, it was expected to make a profit. When 90% of your marketing budget goes into advertising every month, and almost 100% of your sales come from ads, bad ads will put you out of business fast.

It may appear that times have changed.  Websites and search engines have replaced print publications as the primary interface between companies and their customers, and there is a relatively little incremental cost associated with adding another page to your website or running another search engine ad.  Sadly, this makes many business owners believe that what appears on their website or in their ads hardly matters.  What they fail to understand is that while the cost of launching a site and running ads may be low, the cost of failing to close customers is quite high.  A business that can't get customers to it's website and can't close them once they are there, is a business that will pay more for every sale than its competitors pay.  For the vast majority of businesses, good ad copy matters as much as it ever did.

If you don't know how to write good ad copy, or how to tell good copy from bad, it is time that you were introduced to John Caples, an ad copy writer who wrote for the advertising firm BBDO for more than fifty years.  Caples produced some of the most effective ad copy every written, and perhaps more important he was kind enough to document his methods in a book called "Tested Advertising Methods".  If you haven't Caples book, log on to Amazon and buy it now.  It will be the best £9 you ever spent.

A quick, and by no means comprehensive, introduction to Caples methods for telling good copy from bad appears below:

• Whenever possible, base your ad copy on good sales pitches that work face to face.  When you close sales in person, you quickly come to understand much of what drives customer decision-making in regards to your product. You learn what motivates the initial desire to purchase and what phrases close best. You learn how sensitive to price changes your customers are, and what elements you can add to your offering that let you charge more.  Once you know your product and its customers well enough to be able to close sales easily face to face, you are in the best possible position to write the ad copy that will close them on your site, in emails, in newsletters and through brochures.
• Once you know what sells your product, begin writing ad copy that closes sales.  People who visit your site, read your newsletter, drop by your blog, or open your brochure should be able to buy something when they get done.  They need to know, by the time they finish reading, what your company sells and how to buy it.  They need a "Buy Now" button to click on, a phone number to call, addresses for a reseller they can visit . . . They need some way to give you money. Expending the time and effort required to create a copy with no way to actually take money is not a business activity.  Its just an expensive hobby that will eventually put you out of business.  This doesn't mean every word on your site has to be part of a "hard sell". For example, good blogs draw traffic to your site and create a relationship with your customers.  But people who read your blog should still walk away knowing who you are, what your company does, and how to buy something. That way, when they or someone they know needs to buy what you sell, they will know where to find you.
• Test your copy.  You should continuously experiment with your newsletter, websites, blogs, and other media to see what sells best.  Try new headlines, new pitches, new images, new layouts and track the quantity and profitability of customer response as elements change.  You will find, over a period of weeks or months of careful testing, that your copy can earn far more than you ever thought it could.   You will be surprised at just which details seem to matter to customers most.

Through testing, Caples discovered that for print ad copy the following characteristics correlated with increased sales.  Whether these guidelines apply across all media for all products is doubtful, but  if you are just starting out, following some or all of Caple's advice is likely to make your copy sell better than choosing not to follow it.  You should see this tips as a starting point for increasing the effectiveness of your copy not a replacement for doing your own analysis.

• Headlines are key.  What appears at the top of a page matters.  The headline should capture the attention of your target market.  If you are selling vacations to families, its good to get that idea into the headline so someone who is looking to buy a family vacation knows you are trying to get them one. "Take Your Family to the Caribbean!" for example. In general, headlines that very specifically identify your target market work best. This is why so many ads start with words like "Homeowners!" or "Parents". If you have multiple target markets, you'll need to create headlines (and related pages) that speak to to each one.
• Never use negatives in a headline. Negatives do not sell anything.  In fact, they unsell people who might otherwise have purchased from you.  "Don't buy from our competitors because their printers jam and their toner cartridges are expensive" highlights problems with printers.  It reminds people that you ever have to buy cartridges and deal with paper jams. Positive messages like "Our printers are jam free and use refillable cartridges" sell better.
• Add images that depict your target market in desirable situations whenever possible.  Humans instinctively look at faces. Adding faces to your copy will capture a customer's attention. If those faces appears to be the same demographic as your target market, or the people the target market is buying for (kids for example) your copy becomes even more compelling. The right picture is worth far more than a thousand words.
• Use words that sell well. Now, New, Announcing, At Last and Free have traditionally worked best in headlines.  These days, with spam filters interfering with email delivery, "free" is not always a good choice for anything you plan to email. Some spam filters see the word "free" and immediately dump your emails into spam folders. Free may also be a poor choice for search engine ads because it may encourage clicks from people who are not really good targets for your product.  Words like "Low cost" or "Easy Payments" may serve you better when you pay per click.
• Verbs sell better than nouns. Generally speaking "Bad Dog Smells" as a headline will pull worse than "Find out why your dog smells bad."
• Quizzes capture attention and can be used to close sales. If a quiz relates to something that concerns a customer, and the quiz is short, the customer will often take a minute to complete it. By completing the quiz they may well "qualify" themselves as a customer. Presenting your product at the end of the quiz may indeed close the sale. This may seem hard to believe, but if you are worried that you may have heart disease, poor grammar, or inadequate retirement savings, quizzes that let you find out for certain that you do will be of interest. Products that solve the problem you are concerned about will be of interest to.
• Testimonials sell products well if they are short, specific, relevant.  Testimonials from authority figures like doctors are particularly useful. Always ask happy customers to comment on your products and services, and ask if you can quote them.  You can then use their quotes and their names to support future sales. In some cases it may be worth your time to actively contact authority figures in your industry for quotes, even if those quotes do not specifically relate to your product.  A statement from a doctor that "Strollers help new mothers reduce back injuries" even if your stroller isn't specifically identified.
• How To headlines work well. Like quizzes, How To headlines target people who have a specific need to learn something.  This kind of headline targets your market very directly and those who read well designed copy will be open to a pitch for a supporting product.

These tips will prove useful to most business owners, but remember that are no rules that work across all media and all products. You must create and test your ad copy for best results.

The information provided here is a very shallow overview of the information provided in John Caples' "Tested Advertising Methods".  If you purchase the book you'll find you turn to it over and over again.  Even when its tips, tricks and insights aren't directly relevant to your work, you will find they give you ideas that prove profitable year after year.

Follow the link to learn more about my upcoming class on Secrets to Marketing & Sales on the Internet in London on April 6th, please visit www.schoolforstartups.co.uk. You can also find us on Twitter @s4startups.co.uk and @s4stv.com.  We tweet about new articles, online and face-to-face events and other items of interest to entrepreneurs daily.