My best advice for writing direct marketing that works

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Getting people to take action, right now, without ever interacting with them face-to-face is really hard. In fact, a response rate of just 3% is considered a great result in many instances. Worst of all, we often make it even harder than it has to be.

That’s why what I’m about to share is my absolute best advice for writing direct marketing that works. If you follow this, you’ll get out of your own way, simplify the task at hand and improve your response rate.

So what is this magical pearl of wisdom?

Sell the offer, not the product or service.

You hear time and again how direct marketing is about selling products. Direct response creatives all talk about their ability to make the cash register ring. Yes, generating measurable sales is the goal. And good direct response creatives can increase ROI. But it’s almost always a process.

Think about offers on all the long-time controls you’ve seen throughout the years. More often than not, they are low-pressure approaches with little or no obligation, such as a free trial, free samples, or a risk-free trial. And that makes perfect sense. After all, if one salesman says, “Buy this” and another says, “Give this a try to see if it’s right for you,” which one are you more likely to choose?

And yet even with these offers, too many efforts still take the “buy this” approach by launching into all the benefits and features of the end sale. The specific offer is relegated to the end of the pitch, as almost an afterthought. It should be the focus all the way through. And it should concentrate only on what you need to get the prospect to respond to the offer at hand.

Consider these two hypothetical examples for a workflow management software solution.

ABC Software is an affordable solution for managing your workflow issues. Robust scheduling and reporting features help keep projects on track, while the shared cloud workspace makes collaborating with team members across locations easy.

As you read this, you already start to wonder, “What does it cost?” But have you been sold enough on the benefits to justify that cost, whatever it may be?

Now for the second example.

You’ll start seeing the benefits of ABC Software from the very first day you start your free trial. You’ll streamline workflow with powerful scheduling and reporting features. And you’ll discover how easy it is to collaborate with anyone on the team, regardless of his or her location. And you’ll do it all before paying even a single penny!

Notice how your mindset differs when reading this approach. By selling the trial rather than the product, cost is no longer top of mind. We’ve essentially eliminated that barrier to response.

Which would you respond to if you were the prospect?