How To Sell More With Fear

Pop Quiz: When will you run faster, if a bear chasing you, or if you’re chasing an ice cream truck?

That’s easy. You’ll run faster for your life than you will for ice cream. Fear is more motivating.

Now for a marketing corollary: Fear motivates more people to buy than pleasure. Examples:

• Listerine was invented in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic. Sales lagged until 1922, when they began selling it as a cure for “chronic halitosis.” Listerine’s sales exploded from $115,000 to more than $8 million within 7 years because it allayed fears of bad breath.
• Healthy Years magazine sold millions of dollars in subscriptions with this fear-inducing headline aimed at seniors: “Should you risk your health on advice intended for 30-year-olds?”
• The NRA mailed a sales letter for years with this opening, designed to frighten gun owners: “Your Constitutional right to own a gun is under attack by anti-gun politicians, global gun ban diplomats at the U.N., militant anti-hunting extremists, radical billionaires and the freedom-hating Hollywood-elite.”

You get the idea. Fear sells.

And everyone has at least one secret fear. Most of us have many.

But how do you find the fears in your prospects’ minds?

Easy. Google these phrases:

• ___ horror stories blog
• ___ horror stories reddit

What goes in the blank?

The name of your product or service, or your industry.

Because you’re looking for posts from people who had frightening experiences that your product or service can solve.

When you find a post, look for readers’ comments -- they’re a gold mine.

Why?

Because when readers of a blog or Reddit post feel strongly enough to comment, you must pay attention. That’s your market talking. The words in those comments will help you write supremely effective promotions. You will tap into fearful emotions that bypass logic. And you will sell more stuff with this technique, which I call The Fear Finder.

Here’s a case study to show how it works ...

I was hired to write a sales letter for a client who buys houses from distressed landlords. To research the project, I searched for horror stories of crazy tenants who made life miserable for property owners.

Below is a screen capture of one blog comment I found doing a "horror stories" search on Google.

Jackpot! When you find a blog post with enough comments like those, you’ve discovered deep, motivating fears.

Using this technique, I wrote a sales letter for my client Ryan. Here’s what he said about the results:

“In the last 7 days, I’ve got $250,000 lined up as a result of the work we’ve done with you. I couldn’t be happier, Kevin.”

(As of this writing, a few years later, that total is well beyond $770,000, for an ROI of over 19,000%.)

Bottom line: When you can uncover the deepest fears in your market, you will never need to guess at what will motivates people to buy. They will tell you, in their own words, with The Fear Finder.

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