r is ahead. Just wanted to get your attention. Hope I did.Some rules on headlines:
1. The purpose of a headline is to get you to read the next line. Therefore, the headline is the most important sentence in your announcement, advertisement, flyer, etc. And you can guess what the second most important sentence is. Right. The second sentence. And what is its purpose? Yes, you’re right. To get you to read the 3rd sentence and so on.
2. Never write a headline with space in mind. If you think you have cramped space you’ll start parsing your words before you start. Bad idea. The best things is to write out, without regard to space, whatever you think is the MOST important thing that will benefit your customer or compel him to read on.
Sub Point. Don’t limit your headline to a few words. One of the best selling headlines was
“ THEY LAUGHED WHEN I SAT DOWN AT THE PIANO --- BUT WHEN I STARTED TO PLAY!”
But, that’s not long enough to prove my point.
Try this one:
As you can see, I have attached a nice, crisp $1.00 bill to the top of this letter. Why have I done this?
Actually, there are two reasons:
1) This letter is very important and I needed some way to make sure it would catch your attention.
2) And secondly, I wanted to give you your first dollar that you can give a man who really needs your help. And...
This Is Going To Be The Most Important Message You Will Ever Read!
As you can see it is six sentences. It started off a letter that I put a dollar bill atop. I did this in 1981 when I was asked to do my first direct mail piece. I had seen offers that put a penny and even a nickel in a mail package so I figured, “Why not put in a dollar bill?” Everyone thought I was nuts except my immediate boss. He loved doing strange things because he understood the principle of “Zig Zag.” When everyone else is zigging, you’d better zag. He also understood that if the headline didn’t make you a little queezy or sick to your stomach when you were deciding if it was good, it was probably too ordinary and thus bad.
So, he took a chance on me. Keep in mind I knew practically nothing about direct mail except that I knew I could write and could sell. Advertising is just salesmanship in print and you’d better follow sales rules.
After telling people about Hatch I closed with, “Remember the $1 bill I gave you. Would you please write Orrin Hatch a check for $24 and include the $1 bill I gave you so you can get credit for a $25 donation...”
The check flew in and so did our original dollar bills. Some with very nice words written on them. A few wrote nasty words (nasty for Provo... something like “Oh my heck I can believe you sent me this freakin’ letter.)
Back to my ignorance. I mailed the phone book. Yep. Pulled 1000 names out of the phone book in Provo, Utah and sent a nice personal fund raising letter out for a guy running for the Senate for the first time – tall lanky lawyer named Orrin Hatch. We raised a ton of money and had no business being able to do so because it was such an unqualified list. But, I wrote a great letter and had a great headline and eye catcher that compelled them to read on.
I went on to use that headline in various forms along with a dollar bill attached in more than a couple dozen campaigns. One campaign raised $120 for every letter we sent out. It also broke a lot of silly rules people create. The letter was 18 pages long. But, it raised $120 for every letter we mailed and we mailed more than 100,000 letters. You do the math.
Like all good ideas, this one got copied. Others started taking credit for it. I didn’t care about credit, I just cared that they used it so much it began to lose its effectiveness. I had zagged and then they zagged with me so it was now so much clutter. I stopped using it.
Pick out all the little rules I’ve just given you and now go out and create your own new headline with one thing in mind – make it so compelling someone has to read the next line and so forth until they’re lined up begging you to take their money.
One last word. I am not a slave to writing long headlines. Just effective ones. I once wrote this headline advertising a one week adult education course.
We Don't Sell Fish
That was it. We had lots of space, but, that was the headline. We sold more than 5000 people a course that they had to leave their home and fly to Salt Lake City, Utah and spend a week with me and my educators as we either taught them investment strategies or came for a one week course on entrepreneurship and marketing. They paid different amounts for each course from between $2,000 and $5,000. We varied the headline from time to time, but, essentially that was the theme: We Don't Sell Fish.
3) Don't worry about what people tell you is "the right way to do it." Make it work. One of my biggest errors in headline writing was when I listened to people tell me what an awful headline this was:
Come visit the country that's been trying to kill you!
I ran it one time in one newspaper. My staff objected. Thought it was too crass or offensive or something. I got hateful letters published in the Letters to the Editor for that newspaper. Like a cheap tent, I folded. Even when we got one of the highest number of trips sold to visit the Soviet Union from people reading this headline and ad and calling to buy our tours, I didn't use the headline again. Dumb. Stupid. Makes me mad right now to think I let my staff and some mentally constipated people influence me. And to think people wrote Letters to Editor and re-publicized my advertisement FOR FREE and I didn't run it again. OHHHH that hurts to remember that.
So, write a headline that gives you butterflies and weak knees and if it works... do it again and again and again until it stops working.
Ciao.
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