John Carlton explains how the elements of an offer overcome any reluctance on the part of your client or buyer. This is point 13 of John's Simple Writing System.
His comments:
What you need here is more like bargain, more than fair price, outrageous value. You can’t say that it is $110 worth of stuff for $99. No. You want $5,000 worth of stuff for $99. The overwhelming offer. That is where the tactic comes in of creating free bonus reports. It’s almost always information, or something that’s of value, but the value isn’t like market value because there isn’t a market for information. Information is a subjective thing.
You could say “I could do a report and say it is worth $5,000 because if you paid me for this stuff it would take 3 private sessions at $ 1,450 per hour, which is what I charge for an hour’s consultation”. I can make the case that what you’re getting is equivalent to 3 sessions with me so it’s worth $5,000. I am giving it to you for free, so right there you are getting this enormous value.
When we say “heart-skipping” , one of the problems people have when they do try to add value is that they get irrelevant. Remember why the guy is even paying attention to your offer at all. Why is he there? What does he want? That goes back to the benefits he is getting from the features you have. You want to expand on that. So, “not only are you getting this, this and this, but, what the heck, I’m going to throw this in and this in and this in.” And all of this builds on the thing that brought him there in the first place. Whatever the benefits are that he thinks he’s getting from the main offer is expanded by what you’re adding on for free.
Does that make sense? I know I’m being broad.
“Mooch-pleasing bonuses” means that the free stuff can’t be something that you think is valuable and he’s going to think is valuable after he reads it. It needs to be valuable before he gets it in his hands. So, a lot of times you will rely on the explanation or the title of the thing. It has to be something that, sight unseen, presents value to him. Something he wants. Really, really wants.
In the financial field, it would be “how to get bags of pre-1949 silver dimes for free…(there is a way to write a single, one-page letter to the Fed where they will send you a bag of dimes absolutely for free)” and blah, blah, blah.
And then the paranoia-calming guarantees is one of the big things. It is risk-reversal. The classic offer is that you get all this free stuff, it’s an outrageous value, tons of free material, and you don’t risk a dime. You will get all your money back if you aren’t happy within a certain time period. And then we talked about extending that time period. The shorter you make the time period, the more he is going to think about it. What all my clients have found, across the board, is that by lengthening the guarantee period (rather than having one month you have a 6-month or 1 year or lifetime guarantee) the more you lengthen that out the lower your returns will be. Because it takes away all the risk. The recipient doesn’t think he is under the gun to decide on this. He has some time, and as that time passes he is either going to fall in love with the product, or I guess there is an element of forgetting about it, too.
Reversing the risk and taking away all the elements that make him think “I’m not going to buy this now…I will wait”, you want to make it urgent and calm their paranoia.
The guarantees…you will get your money back. You’ll get all your money back. I’ll even include the shipping and handling. And, you get to keep all the free stuff that I gave. So, you’re not only not risking a dime but, at the very worst, you’re going to come away with $5,000 worth of free information that you won’t find anywhere else.
To get more copywriting and marketing tips from John Carlton go to www.MarketingRebelClub.com
For more information about the Simple Writing System, go to www.SimpleWritingSystem.com