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•Powerful Openings For Ads & Sales Letters That Get Your Prospects To Buy or Respond Now—The Secret Of The 4 Magical Openings!

Brian Keith Voiles, author, copywriter and consultant

Selling starts from the first word your prospect sees. If you don't grab his attention right off the bat, then chances are you've lost him for good. That's why I've written this tutorial. In here you'll find the basic true and steadfast rules for opening your ads with powerful words that will grap your prospect and throw them into the document. Opening your documents properly is one of the most important things you can do to successfully sell your products and services.

The headline to an ad is the most important element in a document, and in this tutorial you'll learn the four most powerful openings you can use.

Realize that you prospect is only interested in what you have to offer to the degree that you can solve his problems and give him the benefits that he desires.

If this is true, then why don't marketers focus their sales materials on the prospect. Most every document that hits my mailbox daily, opens up talking about the company, who they are, what the features are that make them so great.

I don't care who they are or what their features are...I want to know one thing right from the beginning:

What's in this for me, and why should I keep reading?

And this is exactly what your prospect wants to know too.

You must answer this question clearly right off the bat. You see,

Winning advertisements are about prospects and their desires, not about sellers and their products and services.

Winning advertisements are always focused on buyer benefits, rather than seller features.

Winning advertisements are packed with excitement, they are interesting and must be easily understood by the prospect.

Winning advertisements must open strongly and offer enough of a reason to buy so that the prospect will want to keep reading and then ACT NOW!

If your documents don't do this then you need to master the techniques of The Magical Opening: ways to open your documents so that your prospect will buy what you're selling.

Magical Openings That Work

Openings that will work for you include these four basics and their variations:

• An Offer
  
• A Strong Testimonial
• Focusing On Your Prospects Major Pain
• Focusing On Your Prospects Major Benefits
  

Let's start with

• An Offer
  
  We all know that offers work. Don't you? Tell me, have you ever gone into a store and bought something just because it was on sale? Of course you have... we all have. And if you bought it because it was on sale, you bought it because of an offer, a special condition that induces you to buy NOW, RIGHT AWAY!

Open your advertisements by giving your prospect a special reason for buying now. The offer, as much as (if not more than) the product or service you're selling is what gets your prospect to buy.

Consider the following reasons for your prospect to buy NOW:

• Free demonstration

• Free video demo tape

• Extra product or consulting time for paying with cash

• Money back guarantee

• Free phone consultation

• Seasonal sale

A couple of things should be obvious from reading over this list:

There isn't a business in the world that couldn't make some kind of special offer to induce your prospect to buy now.

People buy all the time because of the offer, rather than the product or service it's attached to.

Consider starting your advertisements with an offer. Don't just mention the offer once and expect your prospect to remember it. Beat them over the head with it time and time again... gently.

Put the offer in the postscript of your letter. Highlight it again in the body text. Put it in a call-out box on the side or in a star-burst.

Don't forget too, that your offer is much more important to your prospect than your company name or logo. Offers sell, features don't... your company name or logo is a feature.

• Opening With A Strong Testimonial

It's true that people buy from you because you've done a good job for others, similar to your prospect. That's why you should consider opening your advertisements with a proper, strong testimonial.

For now, let me mention that you should never use a general, vague testimonial. The strongest testimonials are not general, but specific, and talk about specific benefits.

You should always use a testimonial that tells the prospect specifically what the satisfied buyer has achieved by buying from you.

Your testimonial should be from a person that is like the prospect that you are approaching, with the same desires, passions and fears.

Your testimonial should include the person‘s name, title, and how to get in touch with them.

• Opening Your Advertisement By Focusing On Your Prospects Major Pain

Focusing on your prospects pain is a major motivater. Pain, or the fear of loss is always stronger than the hope for gain.

Hitting your prospect square in the eyes by opening with their strongest fear, or their worse pain makes for a powerful opening.

A good opening is a pain opening, because pain and the desire to get rid of it SELLS!

People that are in pain are desperate for help. They want to know what you can do for them. They are interested in having you get rid of their pain.

The power with which you open with the prospects pain is the power to which you've gained his attention and begun to persuade him to solve his problem by buying from you!

• Opening Your Advertisements By Focusing On Your Prospects Major Benefits

Focus on prospect benefits, not on seller features. This is fundamental to successful advertising.

Then why do so many companies focus on themselves in their ads?

Remember: A feature is a fact about your product or service. A benefit is what the buyer derives from your features. Knowing this, what do you think is more likely to get your prospect to buy: a fact about what you're selling, or a clear indication to what he'll get when he buys from you? Put like this, the answer is obvious isn't it?

Thus, open with a benefit!

You should lead with the strongest benefit that your market wants. If several benefits are equally important, don't hesitate to use them all.

To introduce them use short, action-oriented sentences that capture your prospects attention. Let your prospect know that buying from you will gave him benefits that are meaningful to him.

• Different Types of Headlines

You can create powerful openings by combining any of the above:

Try an offer + pain + benefit.

Try testimonial + pain+ offer +benefit.

Or try using some of the different types of headlines. Headlines must draw attention. A headline is a failure unless it captures the attention of your prospect.

Your headline must scream to your prospect, "HEY...I"M TALKING TO YOU!"

Your headline must pull the prospect into the copy and must compel him to read on. Here are the basic types of headlines that you should consider using.

• Direct
• Indirect
• Command
• Question
• How-To
• News
• Reason-Why
  
  

• The Direct Headline

Direct headlines aren't subtle at all. They tell your prospect "Save $25 on the best curtains you'll ever have if you call by June 1!"

• The Indirect Headline

This is also known as the "Curiosity" headline. It creates intrigue. It makes the prospect want to read more to find out what the headline means exactly.

I must caution you to avoid this headline. Unless you have a certain understanding of your market and your prospect, you can really blow-it with this headline. Too many people use this, and try to be clever... it doesn't work! (Voice of wasted money and experience!)

• The Command Headline

This headline tells the prospect exactly what to do. Here you leave nothing to the imagination. You command them to take the action that is in their best interest.

• The Question Headline

One of my favorites to use. But, it can be easily misused. To make this headline work for you you've got to focus on the prospect by asking a question that interests him sufficiently to read the answer, which is in the body copy, or on a payoff panel elsewhere in the brochure.

The best type of question headlines are involvement-headlines. By answering your headline question the prospect gets involved with your advertisement and is on his way to calling you! A good opening question for me has been:

Do you make these mistakes when writing an ad?"

Stay away from self-centered questions like "Don you know what President Bush said about my product?" Who cares? You must always focus on the prospect.

• The How-To Headline

This is the real workhorse of headlines. This is a good one, to be sure. Any time you are stuck on trying to come up with a headline, the "How-To" headline is one of the easiest to come up with, and will get your creative juices flowing.

This headline engages the prospects interest by promising to reveal important information he can use to get the benefit he's after. Some examples:

"How to guarantee your next trade show is the most memorable one ever!"

"How to eat like a pig and still lose weight!"

If your prospect wants what the headline promises, then he'll read the rest of the copy. But you'd better deliver!

• The News Headline

This type of headline should present the prospect with something new-something that will make his life better than other things he can get.

Too often this headline is misused by focusing on the seller and not the prospect.

But you know better than that, don't you?

With this type of headline remember to lead with the benefits and follow with the feature. This headline can be another tough one to put together just right.

"Attention! Hot New Diet Pill Melts Body Fat While You Sleep!"

• The Reason-Why Headline

Another easy one to write, (as long as you're focusing on the prospects interests FIRST). Here you are telling your prospect specific reasons why he should act NOW to buy your product or service.

"Three reasons why you should schedule your most successful holiday party ever before April 15th."

You don't have to use the words "reason why."

"7 Reasons To Get Your Copy of Money Magazine NOW."

Reason why headlines are very good and effective because they are packed with facts: specific numbers and dates. They suggest that you know what you are talking about and that your prospect had better "listen up" or they'll miss out.

It's one of my favorite types of headlines to use.

There are the basic types of headlines. They can be combined to make effective hybrids, but are good on their own.

Some key questions to ask yourself every time you go to write a headline are these:

• What do I want to communicate to my designated prospect?

• What is the strongest benefit I have to offer?

• What is the strongest offer I can make?

• Have I written a headline that will motivate my prospect to act?

• Am I focusing on my prospect and his wants desires, fears or anxieties? Or am I being selfish and talking about myself?

• Am I really talking to my prospect, or is the headline so unspecific that any marketer could use it?

• Will may headline be interesting to my prospect, or does it bore him?

•Have I thought about the headline, what I want to say and what I wish it to accomplish, or have I just written something because I had to?

Answer these questions each and every time you write an opening headline and you'll stay focused on writing powerful headlines that will work.

The extent to which you open your documents in a way that gives your prospect an immediate reason to take action (offer), reassures them about the results you offer based on what other people like them have achieved (testimonial), reminds them of the pain they are in and the fact that they hurt (pain, and excites them with what they'll get by buying from you (benefit), is the extent to which your documents will be read and your business will succeed.

About Brian Keith Voiles-

Brian Keith Voiles is considered by most serious direct marketing businesses to be one of the top copywriters in the country. He's written winning copy for dozens of smaller companies as well as some household names; such as Ted Nicholas (Author of "How to Form Your Own Corporation"), Robert Allen (NY Times best-selling author of "Nothing Down Real Estate") , Jay Abraham (Renowned marketing genius and consultant), Ted Thomas (quick turn real estate expert), and more

Brian is also the author of "Advertising Magic," an excellent and best-selling course on copywriting that is very popular with direct marketers and information publishers.

You may reach Brian at (801) 255-5548 or fax him at (801) 567-1180 for more information on his products and services.

The information in the above article was taken from the publication "Direct Marketing Hotseat." by Bob Serling. This publication is a collection of articles by leading direct marketers explaining real-life marketing campaigns from the inside out, in great detail. Included are interviews and articles by Don Bice, Brian Keith Voiles, Ted Nicholas, Jeff Paul, Dan Kennedy, and others. For information on this package, CLICK HERE!
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