Eugene Schwartz's steps to build Lifetime Value

Eugene Schwartz and Craig Simpson of Simpson Direct, Inc. offer you time tested steps to a better sales piece.

Eugene Schwartz, one of the greatest copywriters of his generation, generously revealed his best secrets of writing effective sales copy. Here is a list of his most powerful rules.

1. Keep It Simple

Schwartz believed that great copy never called attention to itself. It never made you think about what a great writer wrote it. It made you only think about how much you wanted the product being advertised.

He said, “Copy writing – as well as all effective writing – is simple, transparent writing. It is not literary writing.”

Of course, you should be logical in presenting your case, but you should be aware of the common language of your prospects, and use that language. Don’t use words with more than three syllables. Keep it simple. This is how you keep the interest of your readers and bring them around to seeing things your way.

2. Understand the Real Purpose of Your Headline

In spite of what you may believe, “the headline does not sell.” That’s not its purpose. Its purpose is to capture attention.

As people read through their mail, you have only 10 seconds during which time they decide to keep reading the piece or throw it away (for email, you probably get closer to 3 seconds). The headline’s only purpose is to get people to read the rest of the piece. It just has to get people to read the next paragraph.

How long should the headline be? There’s no universal length that will be right for every piece. The headline just has to be long enough to stop prospects from throwing the piece away, and get them to read the next paragraph.

“The headline sells the first line. The first line sells the second line. The second line sells the third line. And the third line sells the fourth line, etc.”

If you’re not using your headline to sell, what do you want to put in the headline? First, you want to include some kind of promise, which is connected to intrigue – something people find personally fascinating, and with a bit of mystery attached.

Second, the mechanism of the headline is to capture an emotion. If readers are intrigued, and their emotions are touched, they will keep reading.

How do you get your headline? The product itself gives it to you. You should be working from copious notes based on interviews, or going through the book you’re selling (he sold many books for Rodale Press).

Go through your notes again and again until a picture begins to emerge of the problem the product addresses, how it resolves it, and who the audience is. Schwartz used this method to come up with the following headline that sold huge numbers of books:

“Sneaky Little Arthritis Tricks, Natural Foods and Do-It-Yourself Secrets That Pain-Proofed Over 100 Men and Women Like You.”

Read through that headline over and over, and all its brilliance will reveal itself to you.

You will probably have several headlines and subheads throughout a long piece. How many should you have? Again, there is no general rule. You need to put in as many as are needed to make the piecework.

3. Keep Your Audience in Mind

Another important aspect of writing killer copy is to understand exactly who your audience is.

“You are not writing to a private person. You are not writing to a bunch of people. You are writing to a number of people who share a private want. . . . And you are addressing them as if they were the only person in the world.”

Schwartz pointed out that the most powerful word in advertising is not “free” it’s “you!”

Of course, even though you’re talking to a group of people who share a private want, not all of them will be the same.

For example, if you’re target audience is people with arthritis, there are several subsections you can market to. You have athletic men who have been slowed by arthritis, as they get older. And you have pretty women who fear losing their sense of who they are because of their condition.

These different groups share subsections of the want. So you need to appeal to these different subsections with different “hooks” that you sprinkle throughout the piece. You may pick up 5% of your prospects with one hook, and 10% with another hook. This is what keeps each of the subsections interested and reading.

But you need a single headline that pulls them all in – as we discussed above.

4. Building Your Ad

You build your ad, piece by piece, as a tree, or as a mosaic. Each sentence builds on the ones that came before. You make your claim, followed up with proof or some form of documentation. Then you make your next claim.

It’s important to prepare the ground for each claim. Don’t try to sell right away. You have the whole piece to sell. You have to prove them so people will believe what you’re saying. An important step here is to demonstrate claims with examples that show how the reader’s life can be improved by using the product.

Don’t make leaps without laying the groundwork. Everything builds logically, where every sentence is a branch on a tree. Here Schwartz almost gets poetic. He says first comes the branch – the bare outline of the sentence. Then the words are the leaves. The leaves pop up along the branch, giving color and beauty. The whole piece gains strength and power by collecting the energy from its internal structure.

5. “You Channel Demand”

Given Schwartz’s organic approach to writing his sales pieces, his next important point makes perfect sense: you don’t create demand for what you advertise. It’s impossible to create demand where it doesn’t exist. The demand has to be out there. The job of the copywriter is simply to focus that existing demand on the product.

So, you have to know your prospects. Find out what they want, what motivates them, what concerns them. Then take that existing demand and call upon it in your ad copy. Create a piece that focuses not on what the product is, but what it does that meets that demand.

6. “Go for the Touchdown Pass”

A great copywriter always strives to go for the breakthrough (hence the title of his best known work, Breakthrough Advertising). Determining whether you’ve made a breakthrough is always based on ad results.

As a writer, you use everything you know to create the best piece possible, but you can’t judge. Even with a ton of experience, you can’t know how an ad will pull until it’s run. You have to test it. A good copywriter is always looking at statistics and percentage points – and is always striving to do better and better.

In judging results, remember that the first sale must build the second sale. Mail order depends on building sales out of sales - what we call Lifetime Value. You can’t really make money on the first sale.

Final Gems of Wisdom

• First, read everything. Get the language of your audience. Learn what interests them.
• Assume people are wonderful. We all want to be nice, happy, and have friends. Talk to people. Ask questions about what they do. Get them to like you and they will confide their inner secrets to you.

“Write to the Chimpanzee Brain.” We have three brains: reptilian, mammalian, and human. We think logically with the human brain, but we read with the chimpanzee brain.

So keep your writing simple, vivid, and hitting the gut emotions. On the conscious surface the reader is going to look for rational arguments. But it’s that sly part inside of him that has to be appealed to by your sales piece.?

I am a growth resource for the people that work closely with me. Please leave your name in a comment or seek all my contact information in my LinkedIn profile. Thank you for reading this far, George Platt.

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