The Master Wordsmith Revisits Claude Hopkins

Marketing Notebooks Of A Master Wordsmith
By Jo Han Mok, Managing Director, Midas Touch Marketing
www.MasterWordsmith.com
Copyright (C) 2005 All Rights Reserved.

If Claude Hopkins understood one thing better than any other salesman before or after him, it was the purpose of advertising. He understood advertising through eyes of the only person that matters: the customer.

Hopkins' wisdom bears revisiting today, as much of it applies to effective copywriting tactics for print media. Let's review some of the major principles of scientific advertising and discuss their application in direct marketing sales letters.

Advertising is Quantifiable

Advertising is a quantifiable activity. In other words, it can be measured. The effectiveness of any advertising campaign can be measured by the return on investment. You are always testing, tracking and measuring each advertisement to determine what factors bring you the largest number of sales for the least expense.

You have a large pool of experience to draw upon if only you will search for it. Others before you have tested and measured their campaigns. You can purchase books full of proven headlines and proven sales letters from which you can model your own copy. This allows you to start with a winning formula, tailored to your product, which you will then run through further testing.

The most important lesson in all of this is that there is no guesswork in advertising. If you don't know what works, you test it. If you have no model of your own to start with, swipe one that has already been put to the test.

Any area of blindness in your advertising campaign is an area where you stand to lose money.

Write for the Customer

This is a direct quote from Hopkins that you should print out and place in front of you somewhere so that you'll keep it foremost in your thoughs when you write your copy:

“Don't think of people in the mass. That gives you a blurred view. Think of a typical individual, man or woman, who is likely to want what you sell.”

This is really important. Too often ego gets in the way of the writing process. You might be tempted to show off your wit or expound upon some feature of a product that only you find interesting. You may not even realize you're doing it!

You can avoid this mistake by holding to a clear image of your potential customer. Who is he? What is he most likely to care about? Write to him just as if you were talking face-to-face. If you aren't sure, then you need to go back to your research. You should know ahead of time what appeals to your market, what their attitudes are and what factors influence their buying decisions.

This is really the only way to write the kind of copy that penetrates their resistance. If you don't have a customer profile in front of you, you'll end up “writing to the masses” or, worse, writing to your own needs and desires. This is no good because...

The Customer is Selfish

The customer has his own self-interest at heart. Why shouldn't he? It's his money. Your job is to convince him that parting with that money in exhange for your product is in his own best interests. You can't do that by going on about how wonderful your company is, or how great he should think your product is.

The right approach is one which is service oriented. Keep the focus on the customer's needs and on the fulfillment of those needs. Better yet, take every possible step you can to make buying easy. This means putting the customer at ease and minimizing risk. You can accomplish this with the effective use of testimonials and gurantees.

One common method to employ is the “trial offer”. The trial offer can be anything from a product sample to a 30 day test drive of your product. Previous tests have shown that response rates increase dramatically when the customer is given, in a sense, an opportunity to sell himself on your product.

It's also been shown that the majority of prospects are honest. Any potential losses you incur from offering a 'test drive' on the honor system are more than made up for in increased sales.

The Headline Is Still the Most Important Thing

Hopkins stated this principle quite simply: No one reads advertisements for amusement!

It's true. Think about it. The huge volume of information each of us has coming at us daily requires that we filter out most of the incoming data in our environment. Even when we read the newspaper, we tend to browse only those stories with headlines of interest to us.

The same goes for advertising headlines. You headline is actually the first pre-qualifying element of your sales copy. Anyone who reads your ad does so because their interest was first attracted by your headline.

It's very easy to write a headline that attracts a lot of general interest. This is not what you want, though. You need to find the exact headline that calls out to your target market, and only your target market. You need to write, test and re-write your headlines until you attract only the most promising prospects to your sales letter.

One of the best places to learn how to craft 'dragon slayer' headlines is at: http://www.MasterWordsmith.com

How will you know when you've achieved this?

Well, most of the time, the numbers for your page views or click throughs will go down, but your conversion rate will go up. You won't have as many eyeballs viewing your sales copy, but the ones you do have will be qualified prospects. This is another one of those quantifiable elements you should track. It will save you hundreds in the long run.

Final Thoughts

Although the principles we've covered here might seem really basic to you on the first read through, I encourage you to give them careful consideration. These ideas are fundamental to your success. Your customer can be identified, researched and profiled. Your advertising can be targeted to that profile, and continuously refined through testing and measurement. In either case, the hard data brings you the desired results. There can be no guesswork in advertising, only the proven and scientific approach.