Are You Calling Out Your Best Propsects?

In order to write a hard-hitting, money-making “mega” promotion—one that will mail or run for years—you need to make sure you’re targeting your best prospects.

Your ideal prospect needs to know the direct mail piece, space ad, online promotion or TV spot is just for him or her—like a laser zooming in on one and only one customer.

Space ads pose the incredibly tough challenge of getting the prospect’s attention in literally seconds—that’s all the time you have to see if you can get that prospect to stop—read—read on and call to buy.

Combine the calling out of that prospect with a unique benefit, and you have a winning ad.

Eugene Schwartz is considered one of the greatest copywriters of all time, and time and time again, he had the knack of writing a space ad that did just that.

Take for example his famous ad for the book, How to Increase Your Money Making Power. His headline, seen in the ad below, magically reads:

DO YOU HAVE THE COURAGE TO EARN HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR?





















What man who was ambitious and wanted more money could resist this ad?

Then, this subhead made the ad even more targeted and exclusive: “This is a private advertisement. It is meant for the tremendously ambitious man only.”

Sheer genius.

For a successful ad I wrote that ran in Individual Investor magazine, my target prospect was a frustrated futures trader. In the ad below, the headline calls out:

For Futures Traders Who Hate Losing Money!






















Calling out the prospect’s main frustration was the key to this ad’s success.

The ad promised the reader could STOP LOSING money and START MAKING futures profits, while limiting risk to the exact penny. What kind of profits and risks:

*$975 gain in 2 weeks. Maximum risk: $190
*$3,500 gain in 6 weeks. Maximum risk: $493
*$8,077 gain in 4 weeks. Maximum risk: $1,027

Another very successful ad I wrote that ran in Forbes dramatically outpulled the previous ad by calling out millionaires and a problem many of them faced. The headline:

The 4 Most Costly Estate Planning Mistakes Made By Those Worth $3 Million to $250 Million





















This ad was targeted to the rich—and many of them responded for the FREE Special Report.

The ad revealed four common estate planning mistakes the rich often make, and promised them a FREE Special Report that would help them avoid each one and reduce estate tax costs up to 90 percent. The result? They’d preserve the lion’s share of their hard earned wealth.

How well do you know your prospects? And how well are you calling them out in your promotions?

The Amish Do It Better

At the recent Natural Health Expo, a client and I were talking about successful marketing, and the topic came up about how important is it to “have a story.”

You can have the greatest product or service, but if you don’t have a “story” about it—a story that’s unique, quirky, controversial or attention-getting—nobody will care or buy.

Take the Amish people. You may have seen the full page ads in newspapers offering a “FREE Miracle Heater” if you buy a handmade Amish mantle made from real wood.

Miracle heater ads with handmade Amish mantles have been hugely successful.

The ad even shows a barn where these handmade mantles are made.

Hmmm… a “FREE” heater inside a beautiful Amish fireplace—sounds good right?

Well, I’ve heard from a very reliable source that these have sold like hotcakes—only these sell for about $300 a pop!

This company had a product and created a story to sell it—and people have responded like crazy.
But imagine if the fireplace mantles were built by craftsmen who lived…outside to Topeka, Kansas…or Carson, California…or Atlanta, Georgia. Not much of a story there.

Yet the idea of a handcrafted mantled created by Amish woodworkers …wow…that sounds so authentic, so solid, so beautiful, so long lasting.

Of course you need a great story to sell tons of a product.

Take for example a launch package I wrote for a new breakthrough CoEnzyme Q10 supplement.
The “story” that made this a blockbuster was two fold: One, most typical CoQ10 formulas were hard to digest and therefore worthless and two, a new, scientifically proven form of CoQ10 was three times more bioavailable and therefore three times more powerful.

It was a story based in science and technology, combined with the appeal of a safe, all-natural supplement for strengthening the heart, for keeping blood pressure and cholesterol healthy, for supporting a sound immune system and for flooding the body with natural energy.

The cover drew prospects in with “the truth” angle—like something was being covered-up.

The piece was a runaway success!

One of the greatest challenges as a copywriter and creative director is seeing if I have a “story” that grabs readers. If I do, it can shape the whole piece and make it a big, big winner.

Why People Buy or Don't Buy

One of the biggest challenges I face as a copywriter and creative director is how to tap the “emotional triggers” that cause a prospect to buy what you’re selling.

To be frank, I’m strong on seeking out the unique feature and benefits of a product or service. I love to dig deep into the research to find a story.

But when it comes to finding the “emotion” behind why people buy or don’t buy, I have to work a lot harder.

Yet without understanding and using emotion, sales will be limited.

In this excellent book, Triggers: 30 Sales Tools You Can Use to Control the Mind of Your Prospects to Motivate, Influence and Persuade, direct marketing guru Joseph Sugarman writes that an estimated 95% of the reasons a prospect buys involves a subconscious decision.

And to fire up a prospect’s subconscious mind, you have to hit his emotional buttons.

Two of the strongest emotions that can trigger responses—and a flood of orders—are fear and greed.

Fear is a huge motive, often tied to financial loss, but can also be linked to losing freedom and independence that comes with good health.

Take for example a highly successful piece I wrote for PS—The Ultimate Brain Food™.

The headline was:

The New Pill
For Memory Loss
that helps make sure you
don’t end up a mental “vegetable”

Anybody struggling with memory loss and loss of cognitive decline fears the worse—becoming a “vegetable” and losing freedom and independence.

The inside spread started off with the story of an Arizona woman who was saved from the nursing home with this remarkable natural breakthrough.

This cover and lead-in hit the emotion of fear—and made this piece a big, big winner.

Another dominant emotion that can drive people to read your promotion and order is greed.

The desire for gain can be anything that puts the prospect ahead: Money, health, relationships. To put it another way, people have something good and they want more.

Here’s a good example of a winning piece I wrote selling the book, The Complete Guide to Offshore Money Havens. The front cover featured promises such as…

*How to make, protect and keep MORE OF YOUR MONEY with your own 100% legal offshore wealth haven…

*Make all your dreams come true with profits, privacy, protection and pleasures found offshore…and enjoy tax-free living and secure retirement.

The back cover teased the reader with “greed” copy such as…

*The secret to paying little or no taxes

*A strategy that pays 5-to-1 returns

*“Safe money” yields that are three times higher

*Two ways to keep your assets untouchable from a lawsuit

The theme: How to make more money and keep it from the clutches of the government, lawyers and anybody else.

Both the front and back cover of this wining piece focused on the emotion of greed.

Fear and greed. Greed and fear. Both work like magic to stir up prospects, get them to read and most important, get them to buy.