What's Better Than 20% Off Discounts?

As we’re in the thick of the holiday season, most of our inboxes are stuffed with 20% off, BOGO, and other promotional emails. Most of these emails are noisy blather relegated to the junk folder.?

To be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with offering a discount. There’s a time and place for it. If you have reason to believe there’s a bevy of people ready to buy your product and are waiting for a reason, a simple discount often works.?

However, most companies tend to overestimate just how many of those people exist. The overwhelming majority of those emails fall on deaf ears. And on top of that, it’s the lowest form of copywriting.?

It takes zero skill or salesmanship to give someone a 20% off coupon. That’s why our inboxes are littered with them.?

But there is a better way.?

Now, it takes a little creativity and hard work (which most people are allergic to), but it’s not rocket science either.?

The first task is to write a better headline. A quick way to do this is to find the list of 38 ways to strengthen a headline in Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz.?

Some of my favorites include:

Measure the size of the claim: “I am 61 pounds lighter…”

Metaphorize the claim: “Melts away ugly fat!”

Dramatize the claims results: “Here’s an extra $50, Grace–I’m making money now!”

Tie authority to the claim: “Here’s what doctors do when they feel rotten!”

Offer information in the ad itself: “What everybody ought to know about this stock and bond business!”?

And that’s just 5 of them. The reality is that if your headline sucks, it doesn’t matter what else you do. You’re not going to sell anything.?

Moving on.?

The next most important component of your ad is the offer. Most people’s offers suck. And that’s not a personal dig at anyone. But in our pursuit of improving our lives, we must be willing to call a spade a spade.??

Let me give you an example I shamelessly stole from an online “goo-roo.” Even though I think the goo-roos are mostly full of garbage, a broken clock is right twice a day.?

Imagine you walk into a local used electronics store and see a used cell phone for sale. You might pay a few hundred bucks for that cell phone, tops. You certainly aren’t going to pay thousands of dollars for any cell phone, even the latest model in mint condition.?

Now, let’s suppose this same cell phone belonged to the President of the United States and still had all his contacts, private messages, and top-secret information on it.?

There would suddenly be a line from New York to Miami of high-dollar bidders trying to get their hands on that cell phone.?

The principle I just laid out applies to any offer you’ll ever make.?

There are no lines out the door for ho-hum products like used cell phones. And it’s because of abundance. You can go to any electronics store and buy a brand new smartphone for $100-$200. Sure, it won’t be an iPhone. But it’ll work just fine.?

There’s no scarcity in the offer.?

For some of you, this probably prompts the question of why we see lines out the door to buy the new iPhone when cell phones are so plentiful. That’s because of novelty, the other aspect of strengthening an offer.?

And all of this makes sense when you consider how humans have survived for most of our history. Being attuned to scarcity and novelty in the environment is mandatory for the survival of a species. If you want people to notice your ad, it’s no different.

So, let’s recap real quick. To create a winning ad, you need 1. a great headline, 2. scarcity, and 3. novelty.?

Great. So how do we do that? We already briefly talked about the first. Let’s talk about 2 and 3.?

The best way to add scarcity and novelty to an offer is what we might call offer stacking. If we go back to our example about the cell phone that belonged to the President, it isn’t just stacked with offers. It’s also novel.

When has a cell phone like that ever been on the market? The answer is never. It would be completely novel if it ever showed up.?

The way you add scarcity is the same way you add novelty to an ad. “We’re going to give you X, and we’re also going to give you Y and Z, which provides ABC benefits on top of that, a $300 value, for free.”??

I get it. Several of you reading this will scoff at this technique. So I’m going to give you an indisputable case study to drive home my point: JCPenney.?

Several years ago, they made the boneheaded move to make their sale price their everyday low price. And then they decided to stop using $X.99 prices, meaning every price was an even dollar figure.?

Guess what? Sales plummeted. Multiple stores closed and the company has never fully recovered.?

The core of JCPenney’s offer was the ridiculous sale prices and showing you how much you were saving when you bought there. Even though everyone reading this knows those “retail prices” were always complete bologna, it didn’t matter.?

They screwed with the offer that worked for them and paid the price.

The psychology of getting a good deal far outweighs the reality of the matter. It’s irrelevant if your offer is really a good deal. All that matters is the customer feeling like they got a good deal.?

Sincerely,

Sean Ryan