Copy writing examples.
Are you struggling to get your point across in your writing? Are you finding it difficult to engage your readers? If so, then you may need to work on your copywriting skills.
Copywriting is the art of persuasion, and it’s a key element of any form of writing, whether it’s for marketing, sales, emails, or even just personal communications.
If you want to learn how to write better copy, then there are a few things you can do.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a great way to connect with customers and promote your business. However, it can be tough to write effective email marketing copy that engages recipients and encourages them to take action.
Do’s
■ Make the subject heading searchable. When your reader wanted to find your email again make sure it’s easy to do so, people are busy at work which is where they are most likely to see your email and won’t always have time to read it straight away
■ Make the subject heading of the email enticing to open. When coming up with copy to entice people to open, use emotionally charged words rather than logic. In both B2B and B2C emotion driven email subject headings, sub headings / bullet points are more likely to make the reader want to open your email. I’ve created a list of emotion based keywords below that will help you come up with better subject headings.
■ Make the first sentence make you want to read the next.
– It will seem obvious after reading this, how ever always make your content compelling to read, no one wants to be hit with lots industry jargon while they are drinking their coffee in the morning, or between bits of work. So make your copy enticing.
– In the first sentence tell the person what they will be getting in the email to entice them to keep reading.
– Try to get your call to action in the first sentence. During my testing with B2C, I created a clickable thumbnail to a video with a play symbol in the middle, my conversion rate went from a single digit %’s to over 50% clicking and viewing my video.
■ Segment your emails. If you’re in B2B then you most likely offer a wide range of services. Say you offer HVAC in building services, and also offer Electrical services, segment each market isn’t interested in the other services. Segmentation won’t not stop there.
For example: If you get your email list through a broker, then you might know that some of your target customer likes cats, if so bring up cats in the subject heading. “did you know that cats know when you’re feeling down” and your more likely to hit those emotional centres of the brain.
Me and Pepper on a sunday afternoon, see those emotional centres were just hit weren’t they 🙂
■ Make sure you use one of the following.
1. Curiosity. Ever read an email subject heading and almost couldn’t resist opening the email.
2. Emotion. As mentioned above
3. Facts. Facts create trust in the reader, even something as simple as stating the current president, a recent historical event is enough to instal trust in the read. Facts such as “Oranges are the next best way to lose weight” I’m just making that up, but facts like this grab people’s attention.
■ Give the reader an reason to fwd. Getting a fwd from a friend or work colleague is much more likly to make them want to read the whole thing email, so give your reader a reason to fwd the email you sent them.
– Is the email educational.
– Is it entertaining?
– Does it have vital industry specific information in?
– Does it have a great offer that you know your reader’s friends or colleagues will want to take advantage of?
– People share online when the content is emotionally driven.
– People share online that is useful.
■ Keep your copy to 1 sentence lines. We’re taught in school to use paragraphs to keep information together or start a new section of information. The people reading our emails don’t have time to read mountains of information, so keep your content short. The average person is flooded with over 100 emails every day, they don’t have time to read long emails.
■ Use bullets in your copy. Much for the reasons mentioned above in keeping to one sentence lines. Not only are bullets easy to take in, but these types of emails have the highest conversion rate for generating sales, above all other types of email format.
■ Use stronger words instead of “!”.
■ Be educational. Although the priority of every email is to ask for a sale in the least sleazy way possible, you should always strive to offer value in emails.
■ Get them to take action.
– Make sure they know what action to take.
– How to take action.
– When to take action.
■ Be entertaining. Have you tried to be entertaining? Don’t try to be funny or over emotional.
■ Try to start with the customer’s problem. When you start with the customers, you’re connecting with them, a cold logical email focusing on the features of your product or service, really will this keep the reader’s attention?
Keeping the reader’s attention with logical feature rich information is fine if the email is what the person signed up for during optin or if the person is right at the buying stage of the funnel. Most of the time your customer is out of funnel in either B2B or B2C marketing, so emotional messaging is most likely to convert.
■ Test when is best to send your email. Generally for B2B its best to send an email after 8am, with 4pm being a close second. People generally get lazy come afternoon and thus stop working as much and start looking through emails. Friday afternoon at 3pm is a good time for a fun email. If you’re marketing to mums, consider things like the school run they simply can’t look at emails.
■ Try telling a story. With one of the last points in mind, starting with the customer’s problem in mind, you can write emails based on a customer’s journey from the problem right through to the solution provided by your product or service. The customer will find it easier to connect with your content.
■ Use the word “because” to persuade. In the book Influence by Robert Cialdini, he talks about a study in which people were asked to do something, with and with out a because statement after the request. In very significant numbers people were more likely to react to the request in a positive way when a because statement was used.
one of the examples used was pushing in line.
“Could I please push in line”
“Could i please push in line because I really need to pick my kids up”
As you can imagine the second line made people more accepting of the request. This is the same case in emails.
■ Make it simple enough for a 9 year old to understand. Your email might not only be going to your target audience member. In B2B sales, it will most likely be forwarded to someone higher up in the decision chain, a CEO might not understand jargon your engineer or sales person gets straight away, and if they don’t understand it easily and quickly, they might not even make a choice on what to do, which in itself is a choice.
■ Put link(s) in the email to increase deliverability. Having links in your content allows the email service provider to ascertain if you’re spamming emails or not. People clicking on your links in the email most likely means you’re not spamming, this means your email is more likely going to be delivered to the inbox and not the spam.
■ Use industry slang. While you have to be careful and remember who you’re emailing, in B2B and B2C this might work in connecting with your audience. However in B2B remember that you have multiple decision makers that might see the email, depending on the slang this can come across as unprofessional.
■ Come across as a friend. While trying to connect with your audience member be aware being a friend in an email helps connect with the reader.
■ Use attention grabbing subheadings. People are skimming and scanning emails even before they read they anything. Having good emotion driven sub headers might be just enough to keep people wanting to read.
■ Explain who you are, and why they should listen to you. How often you do this depends on your frequency of email, is this a cold email, a less frequent email etc.
■ Ask for that sale, in every email. You lose 100% of the sales you don’t ask for so make sure you have a request somewhere in your copy. Your email signature might be a place where you have some kind of call to action.
■ Know your most wanted response. Knowing if you want your reader to take this or that action is important otherwise why are you emailing.
■ Be clear, A confused mind doesn’t buy. Make sure you are clear with what you want your customer to do and why.
■ Create a series of emails. Creating a series of emails has many benefits
– This keeps you in the mind of the buyer, this is vital when they are getting to the stage of a buying decision.
– This cuts down on spam complaints and unsubscribes. When a reader forgets about you or your service, they are more likely to report spam when they don’t receive an email from you in a while.
– Depending on the type of consumer you trying to sell to it will take more than 7 emails for them to make a choice to buy from you, or the decision-making team.
– Brand building in the mind of the business or consumer is built over time as they learn more about you. It’s at the time of the funnel that the customer learns more about you, creating emotion based messaging helps them connect with you or your brand.
■ Follow up post open fail. Sometimes your email isn’t delivered the correct inbox, people don’t have time to catch up on the 100’s of emails people get every day, or the call to action simply wasn’t taken, sending another email has a much better chance of being opened than the first one. It doesn’t hurt to follow up saying i hope that our email didn’t fall through the cyber cracks.
Don’ts
■ Don’t use boring stock images. Using boring stock images is almost as meaningless as me talking about copy and saying “make sure you write good copy that converts” People know picking boring stock images, means you don’t really care about the images and put these images in for almost no reason. Using the right images will create emotion in the reader, it might even make them laugh. Images can help increase communication in messaging and help land the plane.
■ Don’t say sorry for not emailing. No one cares that you weren’t able to email last week.
■ Don’t say “I”, use “you”. This helps you connect with the reader, it shows you’re talking about the person’s problem that you’re solving.
■ Don’t use link shorteners. People aren’t always sure should click on the
Bullets are a great way to break up copy and make it easier to read. They can also be used to highlight key points or information.
There are a few things to keep in mind when using bullets in your copy:
– Use short, concise sentences or phrases.
– Keep the same level of detail for each bullet point.
– Use bullets to highlight key points or information, but be sure not to overuse them.
– Make sure the bullets are visually appealing and easy to scan.
So here are some to get your going for when you need to write them
The wrong bullet
Eating salt is bad…wrong
The theme sequence bullet
The deadly signs of foods that make you fat
The two step bullet
What to do with your business card and why
The Giveaway bullet
Give away the best info
The reverse hook bullet
31% of your keywords in your ad words accounts are hurting your campaigns
This is an interesting fact that brings about a great benefit
The naked benefit bullet
How to effortlessly create ideas and make them do X
The Transactional bullet
Give me 1 hour and I’ll teach you how to create great copy
The if then bullet
If you have £50 I can show how to do X
The truth about bullet
The truth about carbohydrates
The single most bullet
The single most effective way to lose weight
The how to bullet
How to grow roses that are bursting with colour
The number bullet
3 ways to reduce your x
The better than bullet
This medicine is better than
What you should bullet
What you should do when checking into a hotel
What you should never do bullet
You never install x software
The probing question bullet
Do you know the 7 secrets to save money on x
What persuades people?
Most of the following is taken from the book Influence which is all about human psychology into how we can be persuaded, our automatic behaviour etc, very eye opening. I’ve done all the hard work for you and taken the main components from the book and listed them here.
■ Events that happen prior often have an influence over the decisions that come later. For example, right of passage rituals in University fraternities, and also tribes in developing countries, create a much stronger sense of belonging to the group than individuals who never went through these rituals. How does this phenomenon translate into the world of sales and marketing?
If a customer has just paid a big sum for a purchase, they will find another non essential item that compliments the original purchase will be more of a no brainer to the customer. For example when I worked in sales, I would sell electrical items such as TV’s, HiFi’s etc. After closing the sale, we would then try to sell scart cables, RGB cables, perhaps even a DVD (omg I’m old). We actually made more profit from these items as they were so cheap to make and the margins were so high.
■ Ugly people versus beautiful people. The site hot or not found that when people were presented with a series of ugly people prior to seeing the next target person, would rate them much more favourably than if they saw a series of beautiful people. So I guess hand around with your most ugly friends on a night out then huh.
During the sales process, comparing lesser items, or lesser competitors to your own product or service can have the effect of persuading the buyer to purchase from you.
Many of the fast food / fast drink services will target the size or type of food they want you to buy, simply by strategically placing similar priced items together to make you buy the one they want you to buy, sneaky.
■ More expensive items can make cheaper items look desirable. During negotiations sometimes the target price you want the customer to land on isn’t the most expensive item, it might be the mid range cost, and if the customer the goes for the more expensive one then it’s a bonus. Likewise asking for a lower cost purchase decision from the customer can initiate a purchase if the higher prices item isn’t desired.
■ Ethical bribe. The Hare Krishna movement found that when asking for donations they received much more when they started giving out flowers prior to asking for a donation. When we receive something for free the rule of reciprocity says that we should give more, or be more inclined to give more.
■ Liking someone. Being able to like someone that is selling to you increases the chance of a sale
■ Scared of dogs/dentists. Studies show when children who are frightened of dogs are shown video of other children of the same age playing and enjoying time with dogs, the child begins to be less scared of dogs. A similar phenomenon is seen in situations where the child is scared of the dentist.
When you’re trying to sell something, showing off testimonials from happy customers can be a great way to boost your credibility and close the deal.
In conclusion.
Writing copy doesn’t come easy, the best thing you can do is to test your copy with other people get them to take a vote on your writing, Do you subject headings make people want to click through, is it attention grabbing, like with all marketing
test
test
test.
References:
Book: Proven b2b copywriting 2021
Book: The new rules of Marketing and PR
Book: Become a marketing manager and earn $100,000+
Course: Linkedin learning: Writing emails people want to read