Whether you’re selling a product or service, the 10 tips below are your keys to writing great copy that communicates and persuades … to get results! These guidelines can apply to most any form of consumer marketing communications: sales letters, brochures, web copy, or direct mail. As long as your goal is to elicit a reaction from your reader, you’ve come to the right place.

1) Be reader-centered, not writer-centered.
Many ads, brochures, and Web sites we see talk endlessly on and on about how great their products and companies are. Hello? Customer, anyone? Think of your reader thinking, “What’s in it for me?” If you can, talk with some of your current customers and ask them 1) why they chose you, and 2) what they get out of your product or service. TIP: To instantly make your copy more reader-focused, insert the word “you” often.

2) Focus on the benefits – not just the features.
The fact that your product or service offers a lot of neat features is great, but what do they DO for your customer? Do they save her time or money? Give her peace of mind? Raise her image to a certain status? Here’s an example: If you go buy a pair of Gucci sunglasses, you’re not just looking for good UV protection. You’re buying the sleek, stylish Gucci look. So that’s what Gucci sells. You don’t see their ads talk about how well made their sunglasses are. Think end results. Now, what does an insurance broker sell? Policies? No – peace of mind. (See? You’ve got it.)

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I have concluded that as online writers we could learn a lot from direct marketers.

In this article I’m going to take a look at just one of those similarities: both direct mail packages and web sites lose almost all of their readers before the ‘task’ is completed. Both media struggle with conversion rates that typically hover around the 2% rate.

Most of us throw out or recycle direct mail pieces almost every day. And most of us know how many of our site visitors leave before buying, signing up, registering or completing some other task.

Now for the difference. Direct mail copywriters work extremely hard to minimize the number of readers they lose, at every stage.

How hard do you work to keep and convert your readers?

Here are three tips taken from the world of direct marketing:

Make a promise

First, your homepage should make it very clear what you do. As in the statement, “We sell printer cartridges”.

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As you know, I’m constantly making the point that the text on web sites is not given enough attention. Which is unfortunate, because the headlines on site pages make huge demands on the skills of any writer.

If you’re writing a headline or heading for a site page, here are four things you need to keep in mind, four elements that demand your attention, four separate ‘audiences’ you need to satisfy.

1. Make the reader feel he or she is in the right place

Every time someone clicks on a link and a new page begins to open, the reader is thinking, in one way or another, “Is this page going to give me what I’m looking for?” This is particularly true of first-time visitors. It is also true of any visitor on any page in your site, even a repeat visitor who is accessing a page for the first.

Matching the headline to the reader’s expectations is central to holding their attention and giving them a high level of confidence.

If the heading doesn’t match the reader’s hopes and expectations, their confidence in finding what they want will fall and your conversion rates will decline.

2. Make the reader feel good and want to continue

This is where a page heading takes on the characteristics of a print advertisement headline. The heading not only has to satisfy point number one, but also has to make a ‘sale’. That is to say, it has to sell the reader on the benefits of reading the page. Just as an ad headline sells the reader on the benefits of reading the body text.

By way of illustration, if I were selling my search engine copywriting skills, I might write a heading that says:

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Sometimes it’s a struggle to figure out what’s the best thing to say.

You’re writing a heading, the first sentence of an email, the introduction to a newsletter, a short description on a homepage.

But what should you say? When you have just a few words, what’s the best message?

One of the ways I employ to help me with this task is to first weed out what I DON’T want to say.

I’ll write a number of different opening sentences for an email, for instance. Then I’ll start hacking away at the ones that don’t carry the right message, or that carry the right message badly.

Knowing you’re going to cut away the bad versions, it’s easy to start a flow of different lines. You’re not under pressure to make every line brilliant, because you know that most will be discarded.

This process also applies a very useful discipline; it makes you write down a large number of different lines, different options.

This, in itself, is a good thing.

Far too often, particularly when under the pressure of deadlines, we make do with the first opening that jumps to mind. Unless you are a full-time genius, that first thought is unlikely to be the best one.

Listing, and then eliminating copy lines makes you think. It makes you stop and really consider what it is you really should be saying.

Better still, it makes you self-critical and more determined to deliver the best line possible.