How to Help Your Customers Decide to Buy, Part 1
When you’re writing sales copy, your job is to help customers decide to buy.
But you don’t just want them to act quickly.
Much of the talk around copywriting is about conversions and clicks. Those are important, of course — but you also want your customers to think clearly.
You want them to be able to make the right decision for themselves, not just a decision.
When you help them make the right decision, that builds brand equity and trust.
As you write copy, there are a few techniques that will give customers a stronger, clearer understanding of your offer so they can decide.
The first one is to make it measurable.
When you’re selling someone a product, you’re offering them a certain type of result. We call this the transformation.
As a customer, I want a product to do something for me. I want to achieve a particular outcome because of the product. But that idea needs to be clear for me. I need to be able to see the difference it will make in my life.
Quantify the Change People Will Experience
So when you make that difference measurable, you’re quantifying the change that people will experience. You want to use numbers, percentages, and dollar amounts. Here some examples:
- Sylvia lost 30 pounds on this program.
- Eight out of 10 people experienced natural regrowth of their hair after using this product.
- Mark made $6,000 after implementing the strategies in this course.
- You’ll see the difference after 7 days of using this fertilizer on your lawn.
- In just 4 weeks of using this language app, you’ll be able to have short conversations in Spanish.
Rather than simply saying that your customers can “lose weight,” “learn a new language” or “have greener grass,” you can state how much time it will take for them to see the difference, exactly how convenient it is, or what kind of results others have gotten in quantified, concrete terms.
(It should go without saying that your statements need to be true and representative of a decent sample size or typical results, otherwise a disclaimer of “results not typical” should be stated somewhere.)
What happens when you make the transformation measurable is that you set expectations and help people see that their change is doable. It’s on the calendar. They’ll see it in their bank account. They’ll see it in the mirror.
If you’re able to do before-and-after case studies or testimonials, those are a great way to help people see that their desired result is possible.
Here’s another way that you can do it. You want to be clear about what people will learn. You want to say, “Here’s what this will allow you to do.”
Here are a few examples of that:
- You’ll learn how to make a healthy, delicious meal in 30 minutes or less.
- You’ll discover how to level up your career in just 3 days at our workshop.
- You can reduce your monthly electric bill by up to 20% with these lightbulbs.
Making it measurable is just one way to help customers decide to buy. (Stay tuned to learn two more ways as this series continues!)
