Headlines are one of the most important factors to the success of your sales letters. It is without a doubt going to make or break your marketing campaign, especially when it is the first thing that your visitors will see. This means, your headline will be the one to greet your customers, they will be the one who will leave a good strong impression and they are the one to help your visitors decide if they will stay on your website or leave.
Obviously we will want your site visitors to have a good strong impression and stay on your website to read your entire sales message. In the perfect world, they will read everything that you have on your sales message and then proceed to make the purchase. However, in reality, there are many factor involved and hence, you can only hope that your sales message does its very best to sell your product. Many marketing experts would explain that your headline needs to be the one to sell your product right there when people arrive on your website. This means your headline needs to solve a problem that you visitors have and promise the best results for your visitors.
The only problem however is that, writing the best headlines aren’t an easy task at all. So how then can we improve our headline writing skills? One of the best ways to do this is to actually learn from the best. We can always take a look at some of the best headlines ever written and learn from it and try to write something in similar fashion. These headlines that were written in the past are proven to work because of its strong and proven track record. Let us now take a close look at some of these great headlines written by legendary copywriters.
Headline #1: A little mistake that cost a farmer $3000 a year!
This headline is my absolute favorite. One of the first things you will notice about this headline is that it is directed to farmers. This kind of headline is very useful if you are sure that you will be getting a much targeted audience. For example, if you place this headline is a farming magazine where most of the audience will be farmers, they will notice just how relevant this article is going to be to the readers and that’s when they will take notice.
The next thing at play here is a clever little line where it creates a sense of curiosity and mystery of a little mistake that a farmer made. This thus mattered to most of the farmers because they would want to know what this mistake is. The next element in this headline is that it indicates that this farmer’s little mistake has cost him over $3000 a year which is a huge sum of money. This then tells the readers that this ‘little’ mistake should be avoided at all cost. So if they wish to know more about this mistake of the typical farmer (just like themselves) they will need to read on for more so that they could avoid losing money every single year.
If you take a good look at the headline above, you will find that this headline is written in a non-annoying manner. To explain things in a little bit more clarity, you should understand that if you approach any farmer and tell him to purchase a new equipment, he will slam his doors shut at you very fast, however, if you approach them subtly as if you are a friend trying to save them from a certain loss, they will treat you like a friend and listen to you. This is the exact kind of psychology at play here.
This is a wonderful example of a simple headline that isn’t too long but does exactly what is it needs to do to get people to read the entire sales letter to find out more. Needless to say in the body copy of the sales letter, the writer will have to highlight the problem and suggest a possible solution to solve this problem once and for all in order for the ad to make money.
Headline #2: Do you do any of these embarrassing things?
This kind of headline isn’t directed to anyone. In fact it is more of a headline that seems to speak to just about anyone. Hence if you are selling a product that is marketable to the masses such as the weight loss niche, or in the make money niche, then this headline would work wonderfully because people in these niches would want to know more about what you have to offer that will help them.
Another way to use this kind of headline is that you are entirely sure the exact kind of audience that will be reading your headline. What this means is that if you are using this headline on a specific kind of magazine with the right audience, you would be able to pull in a great amount of response. Another thing about this headline is that it is full of mystery and it will certainly get people curious as to what is going on and why are these embarrassing things that you are going about.
The word embarrassing here is a very powerful emotional word. It is connected to fear because most of the people in this world know the dreaded feeling of embarrassment and they will certainly want to avoid embarrassment at all cost. By using the word embarrassing you are effectively getting the attention of the readers. Some readers would read your message because they want to know who else is making these embarrassing mistakes out of curiosity.
Another point to notice here is that the copywriter specifically used the word ‘ANY’ here which certainly indicated that there is more than just 1 embarrassing thing at play here. This thus increases the chances that the reader could be one of the people who are affected by the problem that will be addressed here in this sales message. When this happens, you will be sure that you will get a large amount of readership to the article due to the power of the headline alone. Again you will notice that this headline is short and simple but gets the job done just the same.
