Haven’t we all wondered what took us so long after we made some (really great) purchase that we procrastinated on for months or even years?
And this happens with items we’d likely have said we were “almost” ready to buy!
Isn’t it amazing how long most of us can want something that’s well within our financial reach before we actually pull the trigger and buy it?
Well, your Website visitors are doing the same thing! Especially for items or services that cost over, let’s say, $50.
And that ain’t good. Here are the problems with this situation:
- eventually, the buyer will forget about your product or service in order to focus on a new want
- “almost convinced” visitors don’t increase your conversion rate or put money in your pocket
- those customer just might buy from someone else — someone who could convince them to pull the trigger
If you want to increase your conversion rate, you have to help those buyers overcome their procrastination. And this Dumb Little Man article can help you do that. The article tells you how to beat your own procrastination, but the principles apply to copywriting as well:
1) Eliminate Fear
Buyers don’t procrastinate out of laziness. If they’re procrastinating, they’re usually afraid of parting with their hard earned cash and not receiving full value for their money. Re-check your copy to ensure that you:
- Have material that preemptively answers buyer questions and concerns
- Use risk reversals, or at the very least a guarantee
- Employ user reviews, or at least have authentic sounding testimonials
- Provide adequate substantiation and proof for your claims
- Demonstrate that your product delivers benefits despite normal human frailties
- Reveal your company to be solid, reputable, and trustworthy on your About Us page
2) Cultivate Desire
“…start with the end in mind. How will things look when they’re all done? What will you see and how will you feel?
If you can associate strong emotions with the end result, you can cultivate a burning desire.”
Steve Martile wrote this about personal procrastination, but simply switch the “you” to “your reader,” and you can easily apply this to copywriting.
- Are you acting as the movie director of your readers’ dreams?
- Are you helping them see how much your product or service will allow them to kick butt, both immediately after purchase and long-term?
- Does your copy cultivate desire?
It’s not uncommon to find copy that does one or the other well — either cultivating desire or eliminating fear. But copy that does both is much harder to find, which is why those companies and Websites that do manage to do both enjoy a competitive advantage.
* Hat tip to @copyblogger for tweeting the link to the Dumb Little Man article.
While I love, love, love Melissa Karnaze’s Copyblogger post on how to make Writer’s Block a “Secret Weapon,” there’s like 5% 0f the time when what she describes as writer’s block isn’t quite what I experience.
Her premise: if you’re having trouble saying it, you probably aren’t all that clear on what you want to say.
But what if you know what you want to say, but you’re gooning up the emotion? What if you need a scalpel and your pen feels like a chainsaw?
Well, even though the following may not make any sense, it always works for me:
- Go visit PostSecret.
- Read through the secrets till you find 2–3 really juicy ones. Not juicy as in particularly lurid, but as in wince inducing. Your heart should go out to the person. Or there should be a “pucker factor” in reading their secret.
- Now that you have a few of those, pick one and start imagining the person who wrote it. Create a character, backstory, etc.
- Spend about 10 minutes writing the first several paragraphs or page of a short story that starts with the Post Secret statement and that centers around your character. Make sure to set a timer of some sort.
When the timer goes off you’ll be on the other side of the world from the emotional and mental state you started in. And the borrowed wings of your narrative will fly with you when you go back to writing your copy.
* Special thanks to Holly Buchanan for introducing me to Post Secret
Sometimes an audience’s resistance to buying has nothing to do with intellectual uncertainty. They understand what’s in it for them and they “get” the logical arguments, but they’re still not persuaded to act.
In these cases, audience doubt stems from an emotional confusion. The facts may support your claim, but those facts clash with the reader’s known reality. This is when you need a (predominantly) emotional message, rather than an intellectual one.
- Intellectual ads present the audience with new information
- Emotional ads cause the audience to feel differently about information they already know.
Emotional ads work their magic by reconciling your claims to the audience’s self-image and world-view, evaporating emotional uncertainty in the process and leaving your audience ready to act.
The Wizard of Ads Saves Christmas w/ an Emotion-Driven Ad
A masterful example of how to do this is Roy Williams’ ad for Heisenberg’s Jewelers. Before looking at the ad itself, here’s a little background on the emotional conflict Roy had to overcome:
Heisenberg’s Jewelers had been in the same building on Main Street in Cabbage Valley for 105 years. A facelift 7 years earlier had given the store white carpet, walnut paneling and a huge chandelier in a high, domed ceiling. Heisenberg’s was the Sistine Chapel of jewelry stores. Not a problem, except that Cabbage Valley is the turnip capital of the world, a little farming community of about 45,000 people. Even the wealthiest of Cabbage Valley’s farmers felt they weren’t dressed well enough to enter that store. Heisenberg’s was truly an intimidating place.
Now imagine your goal is to get these farmers to come in and buy jewelry. What you’re facing is NOT a lack of knowledge or insight: everybody in town knows that Heidelberg’s is THE premier jewelry store in town. An intellectual perspective would be suicide.
What you’re up against is a clash of images. The farmer already has an image of who he is, and it’s one that involves coveralls, honest work, and maybe a little dirt. In other words, an image that’s in direct conflict with the idea of walking into the ritziest store in town.
So, Roy re-framed the farmer’s self-image and made it 100% congruent with the act of walking into the Sistine Chapel of jewelry stores. In fact, he made walking into that store an absolute must for the farmer who wished to keep his self-image intact. Here’s the ad:
“Ladies, many of you will be fortunate enough this Christmas to find a small, but beautifully wrapped package under your tree bearing a simple gold seal that says ‘Heisenberg’s.’ Now you and I both know there’s jewelry in the box. But the man who put it there for you is trying desperately to tell you that you are more precious than diamonds, more valuable than gold, and very, very special. You see, he could have gone to a department store and bought department store jewelry, or picked up something at the mall like all the other husbands. But the men who come to Heisenberg’s aren’t trying to get off cheap or easy. Men who come to Heisenberg’s believe their wives deserve the best. And whether they spend 99 dollars or 99 hundred, the message is the same: Men who come to Heisenberg’s are still very much in love… We just thought you should know.”
See what I’m talking about? Rather than thinking, “I’m a farmer,” the ad caused men to think “I’m a devoted husband (who doesn’t want to be sleeping in the dog house come Christmas)”
Don’t Mess with Texas: the power of an emotion-driven campaign
Another fine example of this is the Don’t Mess with Texas campaign, as explained in the Heath brothers must-read book Made to Stick.
Texas had a litter problem — and it wasn’t caused by Austin environmentalists driving around in their Volvos. Nor was it caused by people who “didn’t know any better.” Texas surmised that their litter problem was caused by citizens who felt that a modern sensitivity to litter was a little too mamby-pamby-ish for them. It conflicted with their self-image.
So the Ad agency elected NOT to run a typical PSA presenting new facts about the damage litter causes. Instead, they re-framed concern for litter into a matter of Texas-pride, where manly-man Texan celebrities came out against littering, saying “Don’t mess with Texas.” They reconciled the conflicting images, and the incidence of roadside litter decreased 72% between 1986 and 1990.
A 4-step process for creating emotional messaging:
1. Find the source of your prospects cognitive dissonance. In order to do this, you have to see your customer real, having contextualized their need for your product within the entire scope of their lives and self-image. Fully modeling your audience allows you greater insight into how they see themselves and what their preconceptions and concerns actually are.
2. Find an image that reaffirms that preconception. That’s right, reaffirms. Pointing out the limits within which the reader’s understanding holds true and pointing out the limits beyond which they are false are both exercises in defining limits. But the emotional distance between the two approaches separates success from failure.
If you really want to convince a kid that fluids move faster through a narrowing (a la the bernoulli’s principle), acknowledging that toothpaste doesn’t work that way (and explaining why) makes things a lot easier. Similarly, Roy’s ad reconfirms the idea that Hiesenberg’s is an uncomfortable place to shop, and the Don’t Mess with Texas ads reconfirmed the “cowboy” image of its target audience.
3. Now, either introduce a new mental image that re-frames your message & reconciles the conflict Roy introduces a new self-image for the farmer’s in his audience: that of a faithful and loving husband. The State of Texas introduced a new mental image for the “bubbas” watching the TV campaign: that of a Texan’s Texan taking litter as an assault on Texas-pride. Both images re-framed how the audience felt about the proposed action, whether that action was walking into a scary-expensive jewelry store or refraining from littering.
4. Make sure your new image already fits the audience’s self-image or mental model. If you want full conviction from your readers, you’ll have to leave them feeling as though this new way of looking at things is really a confirmation of what they’ve truly believed all along.
You can’t convince farmers that they aren’t farmers or that they’re really sophisticated suburbanites. You have to pick a self-image that they are already comfortable with, like that of a devoted husband. And you can’t convince bubba the cowboy that he’s really a crunchy granola type. But you can convince him that cowbows have always respected and protected their own land.
[Emotioneering is a trademarked word coined by Hollywood screenwriting and video game guru David Freeman. I’ve co-taught with David on a few occasions and can’t recommend his material highly enough, especially his book, Creating Emotion in Games.]
To move the needle on the “who gives a sh**” dial, you need to know what’s at stake.
The needle measures the emotional stakes raised by your messaging, as perceived by your audience. If you don’t address, reference, or touch upon what’s at stake, little else matters.
Getting in shape or getting stronger may be a product benefit for an exercise program, but that’s not what’s at stake for the prospective customer. In order to understand what’s at stake, you have to contextualize the desire for the product within the life of the prospect.
What A Charles Atlas Ad Can Teach You About Moving the Needle
A perfect example of contextualizing desire is the classic Charles Atlas ads created by Charles P. Roman. Getting publicly humiliated in front of your girlfriend while she watches a bully kick sand in your face puts a completely different spin on “working out” than heart-health and longevity doesn’t it?
Now we know what’s at stake: the prospect’s manhood. Hence the power of the famous headline: “The Insult that Made a Man Out of Mac”
Do you see how much more emotionally galvanizing that headline is compared to a garden-variety pitch about the strength building benefits of “dynamic tension” workouts?
This old comic book ad is a wonderful example not only because of the searing mental imagery, but because it provides the first secret key:
Key #1 — The stakes are always about the customer’s self-identity; will he maintain and grow his self-image/ego or will he suffer in the face of adverse reality?
And the second secret key follows on from the first one, because if what’s at stake is the customer’s self image, then:
Key # 2 — The hero of the ad has to be the customer, not the product
If the customer is the most emotionally invested in the outcome and has the power to determine the outcome, who else could possibly be the hero?
Think about that Charles Atlas Ad again: who ended up kicking butt? Mac — the thinly veiled stand-in for the reader — was the star of the ad; he was the one who transformed himself from a 97-pound weakling into a muscle-laden stud — the product just helped him get there.
Back when Charles P. Roman penned his first Atlas Ad, there were any number of muscle men selling courses by mail order, guys like Joe Bonomo. If that name doesn’t ring any bells for you, and you can’t recall any of the others off the top of you head, it’s largely because the other guys either made themselves or their products the star of their ads. The Atlas Ads made the customer the hero and they’re still selling courses to this day!
Want to move the needle?
- Speak to customer emotions stemming from self-image. Contextualize the desire in terms of common scenarios. Understand what’s really at stake.
- The feature might be an easy, learn-at-your-own-pace musical instrument course
- The benefit might be mastering the piano in one’s spare time
- The growth of self image might be the transformation from a musical embarrassment to an accomplished (and admired) musician
- Provide a searing mental image of the customer kicking butt in the role they already desire to see themselves fulfilling. Make the customer the star, not the product.
Stay tuned for the follow-up post on how Temperament Affects Self-Image
Even skeptics believe everything they’re told. We all do, actually.
At least, we believe it long enough to understand the message. Apparently, we’re wired that way.
Since our brains have no neutral parking wherein we can “hold” an idea pending evaluation, we’re forced to believe first and then evaluate. Or so says recent research by the eminent Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert.
All of which is hardly news to (but certainly explains the actions of) politicians using push-polling to sway voter opinions.
So what does this have to do with writing?
Check out how CD Baby puts this psychological dynamic to good use:
Clearly, nobody actually believes the things said in this letter, nor are they expected to, as the claims are all made tongue in cheek.
But the very positive mental images were all vividly played out in your mind anyway, weren’t they? We all accepted the propositions as true for whatever fraction of a second it took to understand and imagine them.
And doesn’t the afterglow of those images still lighten your smile?
Now think of this: those cheery images have now attached themselves to the name “CD Baby” within your mind. Recall the name, and you’ll likely recall these same images and feelings. And however irrational it might be, you’re now more likely to assume this company has higher quality and customer service standards because of this letter.
While most of us like to scoff at “cheesy” Jolly Green Giant-type commercials, when properly executed, the silly, personality-driven aspects of those commercials can still work their magic, even among the cynical.
Just something to keep in mind 
P.S. Full props to Kem Meyer, from whom I stole the CD Baby Letter/Image, and a hat tip to my friend Manley Miller for bringing her blog post to my attention.