Do you ever feel like you’re speaking a foreign language when you write copy for your website, email or social media? You’re not alone.
It can be difficult to know what to say to convince people to buy your product or service.
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“But there is a way to figure out what your ideal customer wants to know, and give them the information they need in order to make a purchase. ”
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to find out what your ideal customer wants to know, and give you some tips on how to write copy that sells!
There’s too much focus on things like writing their unique selling proposition, explaining the offer in bullet points, using compelling headlines to keep buyer personas engaged, writing highly appealing subject lines and good calls to action, and not enough on what the target audience wants to learn.
Writing sales copy can sound so overwhelming to many businesses. There’s this expectation that sales copy that converts can only be written by a master copywriter, like David Ogilvy.
You know: the kind that combines pain points, product benefits and makes the email super interesting to get reader’s attention instead of a boring “buy here” copy.
If you want to send your potential customers sales emails but you have no idea where to start writing, I recommend you do three things:
1. Know everything there is to know about your ideal customer
There’s nothing better to do if you want to improve your sales copy, content marketing, email marketing results than to know your ideal audience. And I’m not talking just about demographics.
I’m talking about pain points, frustrations, desires, fears, decision making process, why they procrastinate, what motivates them etc.
If your business doesn’t have a customer avatar and a customer language document, if you don’t run regular surveys and research about why people are buying or not buying, then put that in your marketing plan right now.
Here’s where you can learn more about this:
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Your Secret Business Success Weapon: Define Your Target Audience
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How To Sell More With Copy Tailored To Your Audience’s Motivations, Not Yours
2. Be very clear about the true benefits of your offer
One of the most important things I do when I write sales copy for an online course is to make sure that I understand the exact and true benefits of an offer.
It is shocking how many companies don’t really know how their clients are using their products, what they can obtain with it, what’s the amount of time, effort and commitment that is required to benefit from a service or a product.
It’s important to not try to oversell your offer by promising benefits that only 1% of your buyers would be able to get in very specific conditions, like committing to it full time, being experts at using a tool etc.
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“Start by investigating the minimum viable benefit a buyer could get with your offer with the minimum amount of time, effort and commitment with using what you give them.”
Very few people are committed to putting a lot of work into obtaining something, but everyone is looking for a quick win. So start with the quick wins and build up to the “ideal ultimate benefit” of working with your business.
3. Find out what your potential customers want to know about the problem you solve and the solution you provide
There are a few ways to do that.
But since not all businesses are built the same, it can be difficult to get the quality information.
Sometimes you might just not have the means to get it.
So, depending on your email list size here are two ways to discover what your potential customers want to know so you can use that information to write emails that sell without making assumptions or struggling to come up with big words to fill in an empty page.
A. If you have a big email list
Send a survey. Marketers are using this tool to get a lot of information straight from their readers, clients and prospects.
Example of an email inviting subscribers to participate in a survey, via reallygoodemails.com
Some surveys are very simple.
A one-question type that asks readers “What’s your biggest struggle with [enter problem here]?”
Other surveys are more complex and require readers to spend quite some time answering multiple questions.
For the purpose of this copywriting hack, I recommend a survey that focuses on a very specific problem.
Let’s say you want to know more about what your audience struggles with when it comes to romantic relationships.
So, here are some questions you can use:
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What’s your biggest struggle with your romantic relationship?
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What’s something you’d like to change in your relationship?
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How do you feel about romantic relationships in general?
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On a scale from 1 to 5 please rate the following affirmations:
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Please select from the list below the affirmations that sound familiar:
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Where do you go to find relationship advice?
B. If you don’t have an email list
Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of having an email list. Or your survey doesn’t get enough replies for you to make a list of important points your potential customers are struggling with.
So, you go to Google and you perform this quick hack:
This is a great example of using online tools with no dollar cost to get more insights about the pain point your audience is struggling with.
You can use anything from Google to basically any social media your audience likes to use.
If you’re just a small business or a marketer just beginning, you will need to spend some time researching your audience.
Read books, listen to podcasts, get an industry white paper, interview people, do whatever you can to learn more about how your potential customers are struggling because of the problem you aim to solve.
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Getting this information can sound like a waste of time, but it’s really the secret to writing copy that sells – whether it’s an email campaign, an ad or a sales page.
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With this approach, you don’t really need to be a master copywriter like David Ogilvy or some kind of superstar salesperson.
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What this gives you is the information that makes you relevant, accurate, interesting and authentic.
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And you’re getting customer language which you can use everywhere in your digital marketing copy assets to increase conversions: in ad copy, landing pages, blog post, website home page, services descriptions etc
When you have this part figured out, writing copy that sells becomes a lot easier.
I see a lot of people in the business of online courses who use this approach.
Their courses sell even though they’re not doing a great job with writing copy that sells.
And once we add to their copy elements like a good call to action, a copywriting framework, an example of how other people had success with their courses, and we start focusing on busting objections, their conversion rates improve significantly.
So, for you right now, if you want to write copy that sells in your email marketing campaigns, but have no idea what your audience would like to read relative to their pain point, try this exercise and let me know how it goes.
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