Dif­fer­ence between good copy and great copy

The dif­fer­ence between good copy and great copy are in the results achieved. In direct response specif­i­cally, results are based on the num­ber of actions the copy generates.

The more actions the copy dri­ves, the greater the copy is.

John Reese, a mas­ter at sim­pli­fy­ing what we often tend to unnec­es­sar­ily com­pli­cate, says it best. He says the only met­ric you should ever really count on is this:

How many said “Yes” or “No.” And that’s it.

Sounds sim­plis­tic, I know. But here’s the key point: your copy may get read­ers and it may get great feed­back. It may enter­tain and it may edu­cate. It may inform and even inspire.

But if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter.

Now, what makes copy nudge peo­ple into action requires a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent things. So let me share with you three pow­er­ful ele­ments that can help you turn your not-​​so-​​good copy into good copy, and your good copy into out­stand­ing copy.

1. Give Rea­sons Why

You’ve heard it before. Above all, great copy pro­poses a series of ben­e­fits the prospect will enjoy once they respond. But this is the area most peo­ple strug­gle with. What makes a good ben­e­fit? Heck, what makes a ben­e­fit in the first place?

A fea­ture is what the prod­uct has. An advan­tage is what that fea­tures does. But a ben­e­fit — a true ben­e­fit — is what that advan­tage means to the reader. And that mean­ing comes from the spe­cific motive or motives to which that fea­ture caters.

A ben­e­fit is the rea­son why the fea­ture exists and why it’s impor­tant to the reader. Stated dif­fer­ently, a ben­e­fit is what a per­son inti­mately gains from a spe­cific fea­ture — and not what you think the cus­tomer will gain from it.

Granted, try­ing to fig­ure this out can be a lit­tle chal­leng­ing. So when­ever you describe a fea­ture, or what you may think may be a ben­e­fit, say this: “What this means to you is this,” fol­lowed by a more per­sonal ben­e­fit your reader gets from the feature.

Keep ask­ing until there are no fur­ther rea­sons to give. Here’s an exam­ple — and keep in mind that I’m repeat­ing myself in this exam­ple, on pur­pose, for the sake of illustration…

“This stereo has a 14-​​band equal­izer. What this means to you is, you can adjust the fre­quen­cies of the sound. What this means to you is, you can add depth and dimen­sion to your music. What this means to you is, you can adjust the music the way you like. What this means to you is, you can make your music sound as soft and relax­ing dur­ing those nice quiet evenings to cre­ate the per­fect ambiance while enjoy­ing a deli­cious din­ner in the com­pany of your friends, or as rich and lively as if you were at a con­cert lis­ten­ing to your favorite band and feel just as if you were right there, in the audi­to­rium fully immersed in the expe­ri­ence. What this means to you is…”

Here’s another exam­ple. My wife Sylvie Fortin often tells the story of one of her clients, a nutri­tional sup­ple­ment com­pany, who was once giv­ing out free bot­tles of a spe­cific sup­ple­ment from their web­site. Their head­line clearly indi­cated, “Free Bottle!”

Aside from a form to fill out in order to request your free bot­tle, that was pretty much it in terms of copy. The response was so-​​so. Not bad, but not great, either. How­ever, in just one extra para­graph, the owner added the fol­low­ing state­ment to his copy…

So why are we giv­ing away a free bot­tle? Because we’re so con­fi­dent that, once you give us a try and start see­ing the amaz­ing improve­ments in the way you feel after a sin­gle bot­tle, you will come back to us for more.

Just adding that sim­ple state­ment more than tripled response.

Whether it’s because peo­ple are skep­ti­cal and don’t want to be scammed, or whether they’re con­fused and don’t bother tak­ing action due to the lack of infor­ma­tion, the rea­son is not as impor­tant as the fact that giv­ing peo­ple rea­sons why boosts response.

Tell read­ers why they must read, why the prod­uct is impor­tant, why it is per­fect for them, why they must buy, and why they must buy now. To help you, think of the “5 Why’s:”

1. Why you (the reader)
2. Why me (the author)
3. Why this (the offer)
4. Why now (the urgency )
5. Why this price (the value)

Give as many rea­sons why as pos­si­ble for any of the above five, if not all of them. Doing so qual­i­fies the reader, cre­den­tial­izes the author, adds believ­abil­ity, builds per­ceived value, backs up the price, jus­ti­fies the need to act, and injects a sense of urgency.

For the more rea­sons you give, and the more spe­cific and per­sonal those rea­sons are, the more believ­able you are and the more com­pelling your copy will be.

2. Tell a Good Story

Good copy makes a good case. But great copy tells a good story. Sure, a great copy­writer is also a great sales­per­son. After all, copy is sales­man­ship in print. How­ever, all great copy­writ­ers and all great sales­peo­ple also have one thing in common…

… They are also great sto­ry­tellers.

At a sem­i­nar I was attend­ing, copy­writ­ing leg­end, the late Gary Hal­bert, was one of the speak­ers. On a topic that at the time seemed totally unre­lated to copy, sales, or Inter­net mar­ket­ing, he began to talk about this new­fan­gled anti-​​wrinkle cream he came across.

He went on to talk about how the prod­uct came about, how it was made, and even how the prod­uct worked. Not only was the story itself quite fas­ci­nat­ing, the way in which he told the story made us hang onto the edge of our seats. He cap­ti­vated the audience.

He wove an expla­na­tion of the prod­uct into his story, link­ing fea­tures to ben­e­fits, such as the fact that an acci­den­tal dis­cov­ery led to the cre­ation of the cream’s key ingre­di­ent, which con­tained spe­cial hydrox­ies formed dur­ing the crys­tal­liza­tion process.

The story — specif­i­cally, the anal­ogy — was that these hydrox­ies were like mil­lions of micro­scopic prisms that reflect light. He went on to describe that it was those prisms that helped to make your wrin­kles invis­i­ble. It was a ter­rific story.

And while some peo­ple missed it, Gary indi­rectly pro­vided the great­est les­son of the entire sem­i­nar. Because his story was a pow­er­ful les­son itself.

Why? Because the mind thinks in rel­a­tive terms. A key com­po­nent of telling great sto­ries is to relate them to the reader in terms they can under­stand. Often, this can accom­plished with the help of analo­gies, exam­ples, metaphors, and case studies.

One of the most well-​​known users of this tech­nique is Drew Kaplan, cre­ator of DAK.

DAK sells elec­tronic equip­ment, and some of their most pop­u­lar line of prod­ucts are stereo speak­ers. But to illus­trate the depth of the sound these speak­ers cre­ate, Drew doesn’t call them speak­ers. He calls them “Thun­der Boxes.”

Here’s another DAKon­ian exam­ple. If you visit the DAK web­site and click on the wire­less head­phones, a pop-​​up will appear with the name and the fol­low­ing description:

WIRELESS MARRIAGE SAVER
It’s late at night. Your spouse is asleep. And you’re watch­ing the late, late, late show with­out both­er­ing her. That’s why I called these ‘wire­less mar­riage savers’. These wire­less head­phones were an infrared break­through. Now, I’ve also found them in 900MHz and 433MHz so you can even roam from room to room while you lis­ten to your favorite music, even MP3 or TV sound. The prod­ucts get bet­ter and the price gets cheaper. Pretty neat!

Here’s another exam­ple, which actu­ally came from a reader of this blog. As a com­ment to one of my blog posts on cre­at­ing men­tal imagery, she made this pow­er­ful comment:

I used to work in cor­po­rate finance. When I gave pre­sen­ta­tions the audience’s eyes would glaze over in about 30 sec­onds because most peo­ple find num­bers bor­ing, really bor­ing. Once I started paint­ing pic­tures with my num­bers I sud­denly found peo­ple pay­ing atten­tion. When peo­ple knew how many plasma TV’s a mil­lion dol­lars would buy or how many years the aver­age per­son would have to work to recover the money the com­pany lost that quar­ter they sud­denly under­stood what I was saying.

But what if a story makes the copy too long?

When peo­ple object to long copy, I often argue that long copy is like a good Stephen King novel. (Notice my anal­ogy, too.) If you were a diehard King fanatic, and if his lat­est book was, say, over 600 pages, would you stop read­ing it because it was too long? No.

In fact, most Stephen King lovers I know often read his books in one sit­ting. They tell me they sim­ply can’t seem to put his books down. Some even re-​​read them sev­eral times.

Dan Kennedy calls this “message-​​to-​​market match.” Like a Stephen King fanatic, when your copy is tar­geted and your audi­ence is inter­ested in your offer, they will want more infor­ma­tion, not less. They will read it. All of it. No mat­ter how long it may seem to you.

3. Think For The Reader

Sales are largely based on faith. Faith in the com­pany, faith in the prod­uct, and faith in the deliv­ery of the promised ben­e­fits. And sales train­ers often tell you that, to get read­ers to have faith in your “story” you must get them to tem­porar­ily sus­pend disbelief.

But belief, on the other hand, requires more. It requires “the sus­pen­sion of crit­i­cal think­ing,” as my friend and copy­writer Peter Stone would say. Not just disbelief.

Peo­ple first buy on emo­tion, then jus­tify their deci­sions with logic. Even ana­lyt­i­cal types buy on emo­tion, whether they express — or are aware — of their emo­tions or not.

The ear­lier com­men­tor used men­tal imagery to con­vey strong emo­tional feel­ings when relat­ing bor­ing finan­cial fig­ures to her audi­ence. I sub­mit that even the most ana­lyt­i­cal types appre­ci­ated her approach more than just a bunch of monot­one data.

Con­versely, crit­i­cal think­ing causes the sus­pen­sion of feel­ings. If your reader starts to think too much, then fun­da­men­tal fears, doubts, inse­cu­ri­ties, and con­cerns take over, lead­ing them to make false assump­tions and, even­tu­ally, to the great­est killer of sales:

Pro­cras­ti­na­tion

If we focus on logic first, we think about all the “what if’s.” We fix­ate on the neg­a­tives. We think about other needs, con­cerns, and pre­oc­cu­pa­tions at that time. And more impor­tant, we may think about other, more impor­tant things we can do with our money.

You must do the think­ing for your prospect.

Don’t stop short of describ­ing the ben­e­fits, offer­ing rea­sons why and telling sto­ries sim­ply because you’re afraid of insult­ing your audience’s intel­li­gence. You’re not.

Clients often say, “My clients are not idiots,” “the ben­e­fits are obvi­ous,” “they can think for them­selves,” “it’s pretty intu­itive already,” or “they can fig­ure it out on their own.”

Tech­ni­cally, that’s true. But leav­ing the copy to the reader’s own devices will also open up a can of worms, since they will also think of all the other things that may be irrel­e­vant, untrue, or unnec­es­sary, which will negate any pos­i­tive emo­tions and there­fore the sale.

They may mag­nify the small­est of neg­a­tives and exag­ger­ate cer­tain aspects that may be per­ceived as neg­a­tive, even though they are not, and pos­si­bly come up with erro­neous con­clu­sions that will cost you in per­ceived cred­i­bil­ity — and ulti­mately, the sale.

Unlike a face-​​to-​​face sales pre­sen­ta­tion, you’re not there to guide any reac­tions, answer any ques­tions, or han­dle any objec­tions. So your copy must do that for them.

In fact, copy­writer David Garfinkel says it best:

You must do the think­ing for your reader and tell them why your offer is so valu­able. Of course, they may ‘get it’ in the abstract. But going from the abstract to the reader’s spe­cific sit­u­a­tion requires think­ing on their part. A prospect con­sid­er­ing your offer wouldn’t dare do that thinking.

You have to do it for them.

So here’s a tip: use the “so-​​what” acid test. If at any point in your copy your reader says, “So what?” then that part needs to give more rea­sons why. It needs to tell a bet­ter story. And it needs to pre­vent crit­i­cal think­ing and guide the reader in the right direction.

Oth­er­wise, rewrite it or delete it because it’s irrelevant.

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