The blog post I just read calls it The Godfather Guide to Direct Marketing: Make Me an Offer I can’t Refuse. Although I’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie (I know, I know) but I can totally relate to the expression and this should be consistently kept in mind while preparing promotional literature. Offer something great and highlight it. It should be bigger than your company name. It should be the first thing your customer or client see as soon as he or she comes to your website or unfolds your brochure.
Not everybody is dying to do business with you or awed at the marvelous things you’ve done with your products or services, but how do you solve my problem? For instance, I’ve been thinking of buying a slightly higher-end digital camera for a couple of months, I don’t want to buy a cheap brand and I don’t at the moment have the needed cash to buy a reputed brand like Canon, Sony, Nikon or Panasonic. This is my problem and I’ll immediately buy the camera if a vendor offers me a good solution. There must be thousands of customers like me and if the vendors are not addressing this problem I think they are losing a big chunk of sales. The answer to my problem would be being able to pay in easy, multiple installments and that would be an irresistible offer for me.
But what if you don’t have an immediate offer?
An offer doesn’t always mean giving something tangible. If it is not a direct consumable then it can be some emotional benefit. The point is, your message should answer the question “What is in it for me?” immediately. We’re all besieged with problems and consciously or unconsciously we’re looking for solutions. I’ll revisit my problem again with a new angle. Diwali, one of the greatest Indian festivals, is approaching fast and such festivals bring lots of moments that you would like to capture with your camera and you won’t miss them for the world. It’s a time when families get together and since we live in different cities and even countries, such gatherings are all the more special. Personally, I’d like to click my daughter enjoying a phooljhadi (a tiny firecracker you can hold in hand). An ability to click such moments can also be an irresistible offer for me. Make it so genuine and enticing that I buy the camera at the cost of another expense.
Of course this means you cannot target every customer or client under the sun with that single offer. There might be many who can spend the money but are not crazy about buying a camera although once they have it they can make good use of it. Then there might be some who despite having the ability, and a flicker of desire to buy the camera, are going to spend the festival alone or are not particularly attached to their families and friends. This is where targeting comes. Narrow down your target and you’ll sell more. Don’t worry about losing sales by not offering everybody something; you’ll compensate that by narrow targeting.
A good thing about online copywriting is that you can always perform split-tests. Prepare different pages for different targets and observe how they perform. With pay-per-click advertising it is even easier to see the results quickly.