Last week MarketingSherpa had a great article on email design tips, but what I most enjoyed reading, as a copywriter, was the section on subject lines.

When you’re a freelance copywriter, you don’t always get to be as involved with email marketing as you want to be. For me, that means we don’t usually get to play a role in testing. The We Know Words team provides the copywriting then the client moves forward with the email marketing campaign without our involvement. That makes copywriting subject lines a real challenge. And since subject lines are key to getting people to open your email, it’s even more of a challenge.

The problem is, there’s no right answer on subject lines. I’ve seen one study that seemed to prove boring subject lines to work better than compelling ones. Yet as a copywriter that’s really hard to believe! Subject line length is another challenge. This MarketingSherpa article proves there’s no right answer, as different lengths have worked for different marketers. The only thing marketers can really do is test, test, test.

My takeaway from this? To encourage clients to test. Seriously, I’m going to be more proactive about it, to push them to do it, even though I’m not involved in it. I’m enjoying my current copywriting project, an email marketing campaign, because they were completely willing to test when I suggested it. So for each email I’m copywriting, I’m doing 2 to 3 different subject lines.

Now to remind them to do the testing and share the results with me. J

It’s often my job as copywriter to figure out what the benefits are; clients are too close to their products and services to see clearly.

This week I’ve been working on an email marketing campaign for a series of whitepapers. It’s much easier for me to play the role of customer and distill what the benefits of each whitepaper are. The existing messaging emphasizes the so-called features, what the whitepaper “is.” The outsider (i.e. copywriter or marketing writer) can much more easily figure out the benefits, what I call the “so you can” parts: “Read this whitepaper so you can…” What is the end result of downloading and reading a whitepaper? That’s what the customer wants to know, not the content of the whitepaper, but what she’ll be able to do if she reads it.

And it makes me laugh how often I walk into a situation where the marketing team is just scratching their heads, trying to come up with the real benefit, and I can sum it up right away. That’s because I have the outsider’s view.

Too many companies pay too little attention to their copy. They keep it in-house, they trust the marketing people to do the copywriting. They end up with me-too Web sites and ineffective marketing campaigns. Then they wonder why their marketing does such a poor job of generating leads! Hint: It’s probably talking at customers, not to them, because it’s too subjective.

Maybe that’s why I’m becoming such an advocate for blogging as a marketing tool? Blogging by its very nature is more focused (or should be) on information that’s useful to the customer. It can unintentionally sell just by being real and authentic and objective.

I really do love small businesses and small business owners, but they can make me crazy…

My best example right now is the small business owner who is pissed at me because they put up their new Web site and aren’t getting any hits. This is apparently my fault because my copywriting agency did the writing for the Web site. Never mind that their Web developer neglected to use the title tags and other meta tags we’d written. Never mind that it’s poorly coded and designed. Never mind that they chose not to do all of the pages we’d suggested for more content. Never mind that it only went up three weeks ago. Never mind that no sites link to it yet. Never mind that they have no content management strategy for updating the site. Never mind that I had explained all of this to him months ago when we first started on the project.

Just because someone is running and marketing a small business doesn’t excuse them from educating themselves about marketing. I’m not saying they should be an expert. (I joke that I don’t want to know about taxes, that’s why I have an accountant. But I still know what taxes get paid and when, I just don’t have to know the nitty gritty.) But they should know something.

Not all are like the client described above. I’ve worked with plenty of small business owners who took the initiative and learned enough to have a dialog about their marketing, whether it’s an email newsletter, web marketing, blogging or direct mail.

And thank goodness for those clients! Copywriters and marketers can’t do their jobs with clients who don’t know anything and aren’t willing to learn is the lesson I’m learning this week. Sadly, it’s usually the small business that falls into that category.

And for any small business owners who now feel compelled to know it bit more about web marketing and SEO based on this gripe, start here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.

This morning as I put on my copywriter hat and started on a project for a new client, I first reviewed their brand guidelines…and have been itching to blog about it ever since. In my opinion, your brand is more than your logo. Your brand--your marketing--is everything you say, do, wear. It’s how your employees act, how well your product delivers on your marketing promise…everything.

And as a copywriter, I firmly believe that your words are part of your brand, in all your marketing communications: your email marketing, your web writing, your print collateral. Yet in all the brand guidelines I’ve reviewed in my eight years as a copywriter, only once was voice addressed.

This particular brand guideline even says in there “Our Brand, Our Voice” yet there’s no mention of voice. It offers up 9 pages on the logo, typeface and colors, showing exactly how to use, not to use, going into details of file formats and more. But no examples of messaging or voice other than describing the brand personality with words like “agile” and “synergy” but without any examples of how to do copywriting that fits the brand. Which is akin to telling someone how to bake a cake and telling them to use eggs, flour and sugar…with no more direction than that.

Your logo alone won’t tell your story. You need words that work.

Earlier this week, I attended a stellar WTIA event on Web 2.0. The panelists were entertaining and informative, and the whole dialog around monetizing Web 2.0 fascinating.

But the message that most resonated with me as a copywriter was that content still matters. I don’t mean the user generated content (UGC) that people typically think of when they think Web 2.0. I mean the content that your company and marketing team puts out into the world.

And that’s good news to me, because it means copywriters have a place in making Web 2.0 marketing work!

Done right, the content you generate as email marketing, email newsletters, and blogging can be viral, can start a dialog and engage your customers. So you still need great copywriters, relevant content, and even a strategy.

The best news is that small business marketing can involve Web 2.0 because all of these tools and mediums can be used by small businesses to engage their customers.

Yeah, rest easy, copywriters. Content is still queen. :-)

Maybe this is sacrilege coming from a copywriter, but it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what your customers say that matters.

From clean uniforms to a usable Web site, from friendly service to great product…what your marketing promises better be delivered in the actual experience, start to finish, or your marketing is lying.

Check out the “Trusted Sources of Information” table at http://www.bridgeratings.com/press_08.01.067.Influentials.htm. Note that family, friends and acquaintances are the most trusted but a close second is strangers with experience. This group rates second overall as a trusted source. Strangers are trusted over religious leaders and teachers even. That’s how important your customer’s experience is. All the marketing in the world won’t replace a bad experience because people will talk, or blog, or post a review online.

OK, then, why do you even need marketing? Why do you need a copywriter? Because marketing gets people in the door, to the Web site, or on the phone in the first place. Then the experience either seals the deal or kills it.

Speaking of the customer experience, I want to share a nice email I received recently about this blog:

“I definitely enjoy your blog. I can only assume that this type of thing comes naturally for you in your line of work, but yours is one of the few blogs I always look forward to reading.”

Tim Oten
Chukar Cherries

Thank you, Tim! If you find this blog helpful or not, speak up and let me know! I write it to share my opinions and musings, but want it to do some good in the marketing world too, hoping to change how marketers look at messaging!

Last night I was skimming through a marketing research magazine while waiting for my kids. I joke that if reincarnated I’d like to come back as a market researcher (or gospel singer!) because as a copywriter and consultant, I don’t get to work with numbers. In the marketing world, people like me are usually brought in when the researchers are done. But I wanted to see the articles on name research because as I’m sometimes asked to help come up with company or product names.

It was interesting to read about all of the research that can go into a naming project, but what most struck me was one author’s assertion that the name should to specific to the customer that it sells the product.

What he was saying about customers tied in exactly with my mantra about talking to customers not at them. That applies to naming too! I hadn’t considered that before, but reading his comment gave me a flashback to a few years ago, and it’s such a great example of this, I have to share.

We were asked to help rename a company that copied and delivered legal documents (or something like that, my memory is a little fuzzy). The pain points we were addressing were accuracy and speed, an also a specialization in the legal field. So the name ideas we were coming up with were all meant to tell this story (plus we were doing domain name research at the same time to make sure the URL would be available).

In the end, the graphic design firm that had hired us to do the naming decided to do it themselves. As part of the rebranding of this company, they had come up with a certain color box that all documents would be delivered in. That box would be the company’s brand.

So they decided to rename the company ColorBox. (Not “color,” a specific color, but I don’t want to say.)

Now, if I’m a potential customer and I’m shopping around for someone to do legal document reproduction, how in the heck am I going to know that ColorBox can meet my needs?

It’s a classic example of talking at the customer. “We’re going to have this really hip, cool name, but you won’t be able to figure out what we do based on the name, so you’ll never know that we can meet your needs.”

I guess as a copywriter and marketer I should be glad, because decisions like that simply scream for great copy because at some point someone is going to have to explain what that company provides.

But wouldn’t it have been easier to have a customer friendly name to begin with?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on email marketing and Web 2.0 marketing for small businesses. By small, I mean a wide range from hyper small, like mom-and-pop shops, up to mid-size companies. The reason I’ve been (let’s use a more accurate word here) dwelling on the topic is two-fold:

First off, I see far too many small- to mid-size businesses doing a poor job at email marketing.

Second, I see far too many of these same businesses not taking advantage of Web 2.0 marketing.

In the first case, I blame the ease of email. Email marketing is easy to do, and therefore easy to do wrong. Despite all the talk about segmentation and relevance and one-to-one marketing, most of the calls I get as a copywriter and marketing consultant are from businesses doing batch and blast email. Or they’re not using email at all. Not sure yet which is worse…

Regarding Web 2.0, there’s one incredibly easy way for these businesses to take advantage of Web 2.0 marketing that has nothing to do with podcasting or Facebook or Twitter. And even though it’s easy to do, unlike email marketing, it’s easy to get it right.

I’m talking about blogging for small business. Blogging is one Web 2.0 marketing tool that business owners can put to work right now, today. Seriously, if you’re a small business owner reading this blog, you could be writing your own blog within the next 30 minutes depending on which platform you choose. Ditto for the marketer for the mid-size company reading this blog: your company should be jumping on the blogging bandwagon too.

That said, the whole idea of blogging for business stymies most clients I mention it to. OK, it stymies all of them, I admit it. That’s why I started making up a guide for getting going. It’s still pretty rough right now, although I’ve given it out to a few people, but if you’re thinking about blogging as a marketing tool and you’d like to see it, email me at sharon@weknowwords.com.

If you’re not thinking about blogging as a marketing tool, definitely email me at sharon@weknowwords.combecause we need to talk!

My corporate and personal taxes are finally done, yay! Thanks, Rick!! And I now have two bills to pay, one for each. Rick is a doll and keeps his costs down for me, but still his rate is $200/hour and he’s worth every penny because I know my taxes will be done right. I’m paying for his time and knowledge, but also his experience…which is hard to price at all!

As I work through my divorce, I am paying my lawyer $175/hour. (Don’t tell the lawyer what the accountant is charging or else his rate will go up to match it!) As my “ex” and I navigate the complications of a “dissolution of marriage” in the county we live in, where people with kids jump through lots of hoops to get divorced, I know my lawyer’s also worth his hourly rate. He knows the system, and he knows how to work with couples who have lots of difficult discussions to work through. Again, I’m paying for time and knowledge, but also 20+ years of experience as a family law attorney.

And that’s what copywriters sell: their time and their knowledge, but ultimately their experience. In a word, their expertise. And the more experienced and knowledgeable the copywriter, the higher the hourly rate should be, whether you’re paying her for email marketing or Web writing, a case study or an online press release.

About half the time we are asked for a copywriting estimate, we don’t get the job because the prospect doesn’t want to pay the price. (Note: We’d prefer to know the budget upfront so we can just tell the prospect what we can do within that budget, but somewhere it is written that budgets are to be guessed at, not disclosed! Silly people.) For me, it’s a filter. If someone doesn’t recognize the value in what we’re selling, I don’t want to do business with them anyway. Every freelance copywriter I’ve ever talked to agrees it’s the clients spending the least money who take up the most time!!

For those businesses who choose to scrimp on the copywriter, and plenty do, the results are typically less than stellar: email newsletters that don’t deliver, Web sites that don’t convert, direct mail goes directly into the recycle bin. That’s because you get what you pay for.

Just like my accountant, lawyer and saddle are all worth the money they cost, so is a great copywriter.

Thanks to my annoying friend Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware, I finally saw the light about blogging back in July. He had been after me for two years to blog, but it wasn’t until I got the whole search engine optimization part of it that it made sense to me to do so. I stopped writing my email newsletter and started blogging instead. (Side note: I have recently decided to do both because they are different mediums and I like delivery my copywriting message both ways. Email me at sharon@weknowwords.com if you want to get the newsletter, I’m aiming for a June start.)

Once I started blogging though, I found myself going back and forth between blogging for SEO and blogging as a means of putting useful, relevant information out into the world. The latter is always my primary goal, to further my cause of convincing marketers to talk to customers not at them, but then I want people to find the blog too, so they get the message which leads me back to keywords and SEO and…can you see where I’m going with this?

It has been like a flip flop, until I finally realized that it was no different than writing Web copy for a client. When the copywriters at We Know Words take on a Web writing project, we first write the copy regardless of the keywords so we can master the tone, message, voice, length, etc. Then after the client and the copywriter are both happy, we go back and optimize the text using keywords. (We also get more natural sounding Web writing that way. I can usually tell when a Web page was written with keywords and SEO top of mind.

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve definitely seen how it can help one win search wars. (See other blog posts on “soap is dumb.”) But to really create a win win for all, the blogger’s challenge is to find the balance between the search and the reader.

As a copywriter, I had to laugh when I read the following comment in Email Insider yesterday:

“44% of marketers surveyed believe the biggest challenge in email is providing relevant content. - eMarketer (2006)”

That’s hilarious to me because any copywriter worth her salt can serve up relevant content on a daily basis. Really what these marketers are probably saying is they don’t know how to not talk about their products or services. Relevant content means simply information that’s useful to the recipient, not a sales pitch.

Take the email newsletter as an example: I’ve yet to sit down with anyone thinking about doing an email newsletter and been at a loss when we started talking topics and articles. Quite the opposite! My brain typically goes into overdrive.

Maybe it’s my magazine editor background, maybe it’s because I’m a writer, or maybe it’s because I’m not stuck in the company mindset meaning I can think like a customer: What would be interesting to me, the customer, not you, the marketer?

And this should be true of any copywriter.

So if you’re a marketer who thinks “relevant content” is a challenge, I challenge you to bring in a copywriter who doesn’t eat, drink, breathe it like you do…and relevant content will be a breeze.

A while back, a company called We Know Words looking for a copywriter for an email campaign. I asked a ton of questions, as I always do, and found out this company was sending their email newsletter to a list of 80,000 people who had never requested it. At the same time, they had a list of 1,500 people they’d had contact with in the last two years, and a list of 500 from the past six months, but they weren’t doing anything with either of those lists.

Pop quiz!!!

Which list should that company focus on?

a)    The 80,000 people who don’t even want to get their newsletter

b)    The 1,500 from within past two years

c)     The 500 from within past six months

If you answered c or both b and c, good job!

But they didn’t want to, because all they can see is the numbers. Yes, 80,000, that’s a lotta prospects, baby! In real life, however, they’re not prospects, just victims of an overzealous email marketing effort. The smaller lists were the prospects, they were the people who had raised their hands and said “tell me more.” And they were ignored.

It’s a mentality I run into a lot: Companies choose quantity over quality when marketing. “Better to market to thousands who’ve never heard of us than concentrate on the few who actually expressed an interest!” And we wonder why direct mail averages a 1½ % return rate.

I was telling this story to my friend Jim Rosemary of New Tech Web, and he put it so well: Marketing to the masses is just that, mass marketing. Marketing to a specific audience is direct marketing.

Mass marketing vs. direct marketing. How many marketing managers know the difference? Not just in how they’re marketing but in how they’re impacting their potential ROI?

The biggest irony here is the job title of the person I spoke with: Manager of Direct Marketing. Sigh…

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about marketing and dating, here’s another argument for being more targeted in your marketing, in this case, with your direct mail…

Time and again we copywriters run into clients who choose the quantity over quality approach to marketing via direct mail. They’d rather spend the same money to send out a lot of boring, likely-to-be-tossed-right-away direct mail pieces than to spend the same amount of money on far fewer but much more impactful pieces.

It’s like shooting a bunch of arrows into the sky hoping one will hit a target vs. taking careful aim with one arrow and shooting straight at the target.

If you can spend $25 a pop to create, produce and mail a killer package to 100 C level executives that are your ideal prospects, for a total cost of $2500, why would you instead choose to spend that same amount of money to mail a plain postcard (OK, maybe it’s over-sized) to 1250 people who either won’t notice or even get the postcard? Seems silly, but that’s the route so many marketers take, I guess reasoning they are getting more bang for their marketing bucks because they are spending less per piece…

I ran into this with a copywriting client a few years ago who confessed that winning one customer from a direct mail campaign would equal $15,000 a month in revenue. But that company was unwilling to page for a campaign that would have cost just $1,500 because the cost per package was so high ($15), never mind that it was so targeted and likely to get noticed too.

If—after reading this blog post--you’re rethinking your quantity over quality approach to direct mail and seek inspirational, unique ideas, I highly recommend “Design for Response: Creative direct marketing that works” by Leslie H. Sherr and David J. Katz. I just got a copy and love it so much, I’m keeping it on my coffee table for now.

Newly single, I find myself the recipient of much dating advice. Imagine my surprise and delight last week as one of my clients turned friends turned my marketing advice back on me as dating advice! It’s such a great analogy, I’m using it here…to make the marketing point once again.

Over lunch I was lectured on casting too wide a net, and told to be more selective and targeted in my dating efforts. Just like I tell clients to be with their marketing efforts. If you market in a generic way to a general audience, you’re a lot less likely to connect with a perfect prospect because your message is watered down and doesn’t speak to anyone in particular. If you market to a narrowly defined, targeted group, your message can be very specific to their needs and pain points and you’re a lot more likely to make that connection.

Think of your marketing like dating: Do you want to do Match.com and hear from all kinds of potential suitors who don’t interest you at all? Or do you want to be strategic and meet people you have something in common with? (Not sure yet fulfills that means in the online dating world; I’ll keep you posted.)

Quality is better than quantity, in marketing and dating both.

In the March issue of Deliver magazine, I read an interesting article on big businesses marketing to small ones.

Funny, I’ve been so focused lately thinking about small businesses being found online and the growth in numbers of people using search engines to try and find local businesses, that I didn’t even think about the small business owner searching online for products and services that they might want to buy from the bigger guys. And sure enough, one of the pieces of advice in the article is to be found online, meaning big businesses have to follow the same practices as small businesses marketing on the Internet. Search engine optimization using relevant, keyword-rich, updated content!

No matter the size of your company, search engine optimization is where it’s at because search engines are where your customers look. Make sure your SEO writing gets you found.

My head is swimming with blog topics this week, all around email. First I went to the StrongMail email marketing conference Monday morning, then yesterday downloaded a fantastic report from MarketingSherpa on common email newsletter mistakes. So bear with me, but there are so many topics to take on…and so many seem like they’d be no brainers but I see our copywriting clients make email mistakes all the time.

Heavy on my mind right now is how many times marketers forget to make use of their non marketing emails. For example, I’ show the Welcome email can be the most often read email. So after someone subscribes to your email newsletter, for example, you’d send them a welcome email. But are you using it to reinforce your voice and brand? To remind them of all the benefits they’re going to get as a subscriber? To confirm for them that they made a smart choice when they handed over their email address? Or is your welcome email (if you’re using one, and you should be) generic and dry and dull?

Another missed opportunity is the transactional email. For example, yesterday I posted a press release (about our upcoming talk on online press releases) at PR Web, and received just a straightforward, boring confirmation that thanks me twice and has the order details in it:

Dear Sharon,

Thank you for your recent order of $80.00 with PRWeb.

Order Summary

Invoice/Tracking Number: xxxxxxxxx

Date Paid: February 05, 2008

Payment type: Credit Card (Visa)

Paid to: PRWeb

Order Details:

- PRWeb Press Release - $80.00

Order Total: $80.00

Again, thank you for your order.

Sincerely,

PRWeb Staff

Excuse me, but that’s it? I just spent 80 bucks on this, and yeah, I want a receipt, but how about something more? Something like:

Dear Sharon,

Thank you for entrusting your news to one of the Internet’s most popular press release distribution sites. After the release date (noted below), be sure to keep an eye on the useful metrics so you can track how well your press release is doing. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at ….

Then give me the order details. (And can we just outlaw the word "sincerely"? There are so many other wonderful ways to sign off!)

That’s not so hard, is it? To be a bit human and to reinforce their marketing message?

Last night I heard an NPR piece about a publishing company called Twelve that only publishes 12 books a year . Six of their 9 books so far have become best sellers. Jonathan Karp, the man behind Twelve, explained that by only publishing one book per month (in a world that publishes 33 books every hour of every day of the year), they can really focus on an author and his or her book, to edit it, shape it, and publicize it.

Earlier that day, I attended an email marketing conference in Seattle put on by StrongMail. According to analyst Julie Katz of Forrester, the first presenter, 77% of consumers say they get too many email offers and promos. And 72% delete the emails without reading them. Why? In my opinion, it’s the publishing equivalent of 33 books published every hour: Marketers just keep sending out emails, believing quantity will win out over quality, which leads to lots of duds and only a few best sellers.

Consumer trust of email has gone down dramatically as a result. And that’s bad for everyone.

There’s a lesson here for marketers: If you target more selectively and send to fewer people—those more likely to respond--your response rates will go up and your boss will be happier with you.

And your copywriter can do a better job. No matter how well written your email marketing is, no matter how hard your copywriter tries, if you’re sending out too many emails to too many people who don’t care, all your copywriter’s hard work is simply being deleted.

Go to www.strongmail.com to download the Jupiter Research report “The Maturation of Email."

Here at the Seattle headquarters of copywriting agency We Know Words, we’ve notice a pervasive problem in the marketing communications of our clients. It’s called…the testimonial.

Huh? Why is a testimonial a problem? Because people (i.e. your customers) hate writing them!

The best endorsement is a third-party endorsement, all copywriters and marcom people know that (or should). But it can also be the hardest to get. That’s because so many people freeze up when asked to write something, even something as simple as a testimonial. It’s so bad, we tell our copywriting clients to offer to write the testimonials themselves (or have us do it) and then just have their customer approve them.

In reality, though, it shouldn’t take but a minute. But people over think it, they try too hard, put too much pressure on themselves, don’t know what to say…OK, I’m guessing here, I don’t actually know what the problem is, but then writing is kinda easy for me.

But I offer up a shining example of how fast and easy and real a testimonial can be…

Here I am raving about 37 Signals being real in communicating to their clientele while suffering downtime, and that same day I get an unsolicited testimonial. And I just laughed because it was real! Yet it still works as a credible testimonial. It tells you about us, that this client is happy with our work, and even what it’s like to work with this crew of copywriters:

"The company I work for has been using Sharon Baerny and her crew for quite a while. I first laid eyes on her as a speaker at one of our Sales and Marketing Roundtables. Man, is she FUUNNNEEEE!!!! But she has some great marketing tips! I signed up for her newsletter. Her style is breezy and concise. And I know she's a witch, because she spreads magic everywhere she goes! You can also tell by the long, red hair thrown over her shoulder! Anyhow, she and her marketing wizards do a GREAT job!"

Thanks, Sam, for making my day and for demonstrating that even a simple testimonial can be real.

Maybe with UGC and the ever-growing number of reviews available online testimonials will get easier to solicit in the B2B world? Or maybe we just call them reviews instead? Maybe a simple name change will generate a whole lot more of those third-party endorsements that work so hard to help us market?

As copywriters, we try and push our clients to be real, to have a distinct voice and sound like real people rather than generic, corporate boringness. We don’t always succeed. It’s scary to be real, to be different. It’s much more comfortable to just sound like everyone else. We’ve even had clients flat out say they want their Web site written to sound like a competitor’s. I guess I get it. I mean, I have a teenage son who would hate to stand out from the crowd. I guess when it comes to copywriting and marketing communications, most businesses have a teenage mentality and prefer to blend in. Kind of hard to get noticed that way, in my humble copywriter opinion.

So what a treat I had last week when 37 Signals demonstrated how being real can make a real impression. They had a down day and they were perfectly honest about the problems. They didn’t hide behind any generic, corporate speak, their copywriting said exactly what was happening and expressed their apologies. Below are just a few snippets to give you a taste:

As they announce all systems were offline due to a problem, we users got an explanation and a simple “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

When they located the problem, they stated what it was and said “Again, we're terribly sorry for this disruption of service.”

As the day went along, they kept us users posted. This was my favorite when talking about the technicians working on the problem: “We're breathing down their neck as heavily as we can. And we profusely apologize for this unacceptable interruption of service.”

And finally:  “We should be in the home stretch now. Again, we're incredibly sorry for this disruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.”

There were undoubtedly some customers annoyed that they couldn’t use 37 Signals service that day, but for me, seeing this personal language, this willingness to be honest and apologetic, well, it more than made up for any inconvenience. It made this copywriter’s day.

You might be surprised to hear a copywriter say this, but: Pain is what sells! Here’s my proof:

I love my car (a black Audi Quattro) but don’t take care of it the way I should, mainly because my life is so hectic and busy (some people would say surreal, my father called it chaotic) that I can’t seem to find a day to leave it at the shop and go without.

So things happen and I ignore them. The check engine light comes on. Well, the car still getting me to Seattle for client meetings, right? No problem. A funky warning light comes on, a circle thingy with two parentheses around it. (Obviously I know a lot about cars.) But again, all I have to put up with is a little nagging doubt that maybe I should be working harder and getting it to the shop, a doubt I can easily ignore by thinking about something else.

But then yesterday, yesterday one of the windows stopped working. I rolled it down to say one last thing to a friend I had just dropped off, and it wouldn’t go back up. Well, it would, but then it would go halfway down again. I tried and tried and finally had to give up and get on the freeway to drive home from Seattle in 44 degree weather with the passenger side window halfway down (and the heat cranked). And what am I thinking? “I wonder if I can get my car into the shop tomorrow.”

I tell this story because it illustrates where your customer’s mind is often at when you’re marketing to them. Unless you’re pointing out a pain that they have, they aren’t necessarily listening. Find their pain point, get their attention. That’s why emotions work in copywriting. A potential customer cares less that your product has a high antioxidant rating and more that it might help prevent cancer. What’s the pain point? Fear of cancer.

So don’t let your copywriter talk about antioxidants until they’ve first gotten the attention of that prospect by talking about cancer. Feel their pain!