Being the modest bunch that we are, copywriters often hate asking for referrals. Normally we’re only brave enough to ask for testimonials because we can do it from the safety of a computer screen.

We’d all love to think that when we put our heart and soul into our writing that it will, inevitably, lead to clients telling friends and colleagues about the wonderfully lucid prose now adorning their website.

But sometimes people need a little nudge.

After all, if you’re confident in the quality of your work then, your clients should be happy to tell others about it (and if they don’t, it’s because they don’t want the competition stealing you away).

So how can you ask for referrals without feeling like you’re waving a begging bowl under your clients’ noses? These tips should help:

Just ask – Sounds simple, but asking clients whether they know anyone in need of a copywriter is the obvious way of getting referrals. Consider adding it as a suggestion to the bottom of your invoices or email signatures. If it saves you from the dreaded cold calling, it’s worth a shot.

Coupons – If asking for referrals is proving ineffective, try sweetening the deal by offering a discount or article in exchange for leads. Try attaching coupons, with an introductory offer, along with your final invoice which clients can then send on to anyone they think might be in need of a copywriter. Just remember to put a different tracking code on each coupon so you know where the new business has come from.

Form alliances – If a business asks for help with a brochure, there’s a good chance they’ll need a designer, a printer and maybe even a photographer as well. So having a list of people you can refer businesses to can enable you to build up a network of preferred service providers. That way, you can scratch each other’s backs and generate extra business in the process.

Referrals can be marketing gold because they give you third party endorsement (a.k.a. social proof) and save you the rig moral of persuading prospects you’re not a cowboy and can actually write.

So, integrate referral marketing into your lead generation strategy and take advantage of the best salespeople around – your clients.

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Copyright © Matt Ambrose at The Copywriter's Crucible Blog.

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With 55 million updates on Twitter every day and several million more on Facebook, it’s no wonder marketers are excited about social media.

Whilst making a message that goes ‘viral’ is more pot luck than a defined strategy, you can certainly improve your message’s chances of being shared by including links to social media sites.

You’d have thought adding links to Facebook and Twitter in B2C marketing emails was a no brainer these days. It doesn’t cost anything to do, and it offers pure, sweet ROI.

But according to dotMailer’s annual ‘Hitting the Mark’ study of 36 leading UK retailers:

• Only 17% included a ‘share on social network’ link
• Half didn’t have a ‘Forward to a friend’ link
• Only 4 linked to their blog
• Only 3 out of 36 had a personalised salutation, which should be a crime

And it gets worse…

Adding sharing links can increase click throughs 55%

According to another recent study (by GetResponse) adding a sharing option to your emails can increase click throughs by 30%. And if you go the extra yard and add another 2 sharing  links you can ramp up click throughs as high as 55%. Not too shabby.

If these findings are concrete, UK retailers could be missing out on millions in sales, simply because they haven’t made their emails to share.

So don’t you make the same mistake. When writing B2C (and perhaps even some B2B) marketing emails include links to Facebook, Twitter and any other social media site your customers might use to increase click throughs and drive up responses.

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They’re often no bigger than a small sentence, a phrase or even a single word.

But they have the power to stop forms being abandoned and visitors leaving; they can even improve what people think about your brand.

What am I talking about? Why, microcopy of course.

It might be the sales letter or landing page copy that gets all the adulation.

But short, punchy lines of microcopy can be just as potent in directing people to take action.

Micro copy has 3 basic uses:

1. Microcopy tells people what to do – Pithy lines of copy used in forms help people to fill them out correctly, provide the information you need and avoid them being abandoned after a flurry of error messages.

2. Microcopy builds trust – Little reassuring messages, reminding people that you won’t share their information or send them a flood of spam, can make all the difference in calming people’s objections and encouraging them to take action.

3. Microcopy builds your brand – The internet can seem a robotic, cold medium. But friendly, conversational copy, with a playful tone, can give your website a personality. Mail Chimp and Flickr are two such examples.

When writing website copy it’s often the landing page and body copy that get all the attention.

But remember that concisely worded instructions, reassuring phrases and witty signup links can dramatically reduce errors and increase numbers taking action.

Ignore them at your peril.

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Ever witnessed ‘death by PowerPoint’? This is the phrase coined by the US military for the mind numbingly dull 30+ slide briefings they have to sit through.

But it’s not just the length of PowerPoint presentations that’s under attack.

According to the NY Times (via Seth’s blog), there’s growing discontent amongst senior brass at how the complex process of winning a war is being broken down into simple bullet points.

The humble bullet point is being blamed for stifling discussion, halting critical thinking and clouding decision making.

But whilst the US military might not be a fan of the humble dotted symbol, bullet points are one of a copywriter’s most potent weapons.

• Bullets halt skim readers in their tracks

Whilst we’d love to think people linger over every carefully sculpted turn of phrase and metaphor, the fact is that many will skim through our copy in seconds.

They’ll often merely glance through a sales letter or landing page, picking out the key points, before deciding whether to read through it properly. And this is where bullets come in handy.

Whether used as a heading or as a list, bullet points can stop skim readers in their tracks.

They can be used to quickly and concisely convey to readers the essence of a concept or the key points of your argument and ‘what’s in it for them’.

Punchy bullet points enable readers to grasp the benefits of your argument in seconds, so you can grab hold of their interest and pull them into the rest of your words.

So whilst they might not be too popular amongst the US military, bullet points are one of a copywriter’s most coveted persuasive weapons.

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Dear Reader,

As you know, I only post when I think I have something worth saying (rather than to feed Google’s spiders) and that’s not going to change.

I’m not going to have time to write a proper post for you again this week (and probably not next week either). So instead you might be interested in reading one of the articles I’ve written for the bda blog:

• What Twitter and Rupert Murdoch Can Teach You about Marketing
• Is the iPad just about clever marketing?
• Why has M&S Changed its Strapline? Just Because

Hopefully, I’ll be back to a normal weekly blogging schedule soon.

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Copyright © Matt Ambrose at The Copywriter's Crucible Blog.

FREE Persuasive Writing Tips eBook

Includes advice on writing headlines, how to seduce buyers with emotion and how to give your words that extra punch:

Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank screen, with your head in your hands, desperately trying to think up the perfect line to open your sales letter with? The cursor hasn’t moved for the last 10 minutes and continues to blink at you, taunting your lack of creativity. Sound familiar?

Writing an opener for a sales letter could, in a mad way, be compared to persuading a reader to open the lid on a can of food. Unless your opener is  enticing enough they won’t want to read the rest of your writing and devour what’s inside (the can/sales letter). Still with me?

So how do you write an intriguing opener that makes people eager to read what you have to say? Well, one idea is to dip into your swipe file for inspiration (you do keep one don’t you?). But to get you started, here are a few common types of openers you might like to try:

Ask a question

• Confused about where to invest your money?
• If you like to [    ] you’ll love [    ]

Even better, ask a rhetorical question they’re going to say ‘yes’ to (getting your reader to start nodding and agreeing with you early is a powerful sales tactic)

• Would you agree with me that you need to make better decisions faster?
• Don’t you wish you could earn millions without having to get dressed or do any work of any kind?

State an interesting fact

• High cholesterol is a ticking time bomb that can cause heart attacks and strokes, and it affects up to two thirds of adults without them even realizing it. Thankfully, your local pharmacy now offers free cholesterol and blood pressure health checks…

Tell a story

• A decorator was suffering from a bad back when they discovered an ingenious new way of lifting heavy tins of paint to the top of a ladder effortlessly, and without spilling a drop.

Tell them what they’ll discover from reading the sales letter

• Over the next few pages I’m going to explain to you exactly how you can increase your income and have more free time to spend on the golf course, to go shopping or do whatever you like in four simple steps…

Refer to something in the news

• Tiger Woods is back to playing golf and many will be wondering if the time off has affected his accuracy. Had he been practicing with our golf net he’d have been able to avoid the paparazzi and improve his short game at the same time.

Tell them why you’re writing

• I’m writing to you because you expressed an interest in our new range of self cleaning dish cloths at the recent ‘Real Homes Spring Cleaning Expo’.

Introduce yourself

• My name is Roy Jenkins. Each day I spend a lot of time looking for ideas and tips on  the best internet marketing strategies around. From my research I’ve developed a one-of-a-kind system that sky rockets your…

Still stuck? Well, check out Pro Copy Tips’ 31 sales letter openers to see if any of those can open your sales letter for readers and get them devouring every word.

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What do you think is the the most important element of your copywriting? The headline? The benefits? Or the product itself?

Well, this was the topic of Eric Graham’s (aka The Conversion Doctor) recent video – ‘My #1 Conversion Boosting Secret Revealed’ – and I don’t think I’ll be sending any shockwaves by revealing that it’s understanding your reader.

In the rush to get websites live, emails sent and direct mail in the post, assumptions are often made about the target audience’s hopes and fears. But this can be a mistake, because copy is read by individuals, not a homogeneous group. And making assumptions about your reader could mean missing a lesser known critical pain point that triggers them into buying.

So how can you build a better understanding of your readers as individuals, and avoid lazy stereotyping?

Eric’s video is packed with useful advice, so I’d recommend sitting down with a notepad and watching it all the way through.

But if you’d like a quick overview, here are a few tips you might find useful:

1. Read the magazines and blogs your target is likely to read. This will help you get inside their head and build your knowledge of the issues they’re dealing with, as well as identify what type of language to use.

2. Visit the forums frequented by your readers. Note down any questions, comments or complaints on common problems they need solving.

3. Interview at least 10 people from your target market. Prompt the interviewee with a few questions and then just let them talk. Record the calls (this free Skype recorder will do the job) and get them transcribed. You should then use THEIR EXACT WORDS in your copy so you can reflect back at your readers their language and mental dialogue so it engages on a deeper level (watch Eric’s video for an example).

4. Create a customer profile of 1-3 paragraphs based on your research. Your profile should describe an imaginary person matching some of the typical characteristics you’ve discovered. This could include their family, education, income, occupation and hobbies. Then imagine you’re addressing this fictional person when you’re writing.

It’s easy to make assumptions about target readers. But often the key to effective copywriting is finding that hidden pain point or desire which unlocks people’s resistance to buying.

The best way of discovering what keeps your target reader awake at night is to actually talk to them, which is why I think tip 3, in particular, could make a big improvement to conversion rates.

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FREE Persuasive Writing Tips eBook

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As you know, there’s an abundance of horribly written corporate websites out there – with too much back slapping self praise and not enough focus on the customer.

For us copywriters, this presents an opportunity: if you can point out to a company why their website’s copy is ineffective, they might ask you to give it a makeover. Many companies complain about how poor their websites are at generating sales - often weak copy is to blame.

Here are a few classic corporate web copywriting mistakes you might want to point out:

Irrelevant copy that wastes visitors’ time – You know the sort, packed with meaningless marketing clichés – ‘paradigm shift’, ‘modular best of breed solutions’, blah, blah, blah…Copy that’s not focused on the reader is more likely to cause yawns and glazed eyes than people hopping in theirs seats about a product’s benefits.

No structure or call to action – Every page should have an point of what it wants the reader to think or do. Rather than endlessly boast about ‘market leading solutions’, the copy should be creating an image in people’s minds of how a product can solve their problem. As you know, hitting people’s emotional buttons is a time proven way of persuading them to respond to a call to action (which is another key element many corporate web page’s are missing).

Copywriting by committee – In theory, asking people from different areas of a company to contribute to what the website needs to say makes sense. But you then often end up with the website’s copy becoming drowned in track changes and amendments. Yes, getting feedback is important. But it should then be one person’s responsibility to pull all the elements together into a concisely written website page.

Copy pasted from the corporate brochure – People skim read online and have the attention spans of goldfish. So web copy needs to use short sentences, short paragraphs, plenty of subheads, bullet pointed lists and provide succinct, usable summaries. The internet is also a robotic medium. So addressing the reader as ‘you’ and writing copy in an approachable tone can help it sound more human. Ideally, pages should be kept to less than 300 words. You can always use arrows or drill down menus to break up long pages into more digestible chunks.

Hasn’t been split tested – Not sure which headline or call to action works best? Try split testing the page to find out. Google’s Website Optimizer will do the trick.

Too many keywords (or not enough) – SEO is a complicated beast, and has evolved a lot since the days of hidden text and keyword stuffing. But you still need enough words in the right places to make sure Google knows what your page is about. Luckily, there are some great tools out there for finding out whether your copy’s on the right track - SEOBugz is one tool I use regularly.

So, if you’ve got a spare window next week, have a look at corporate websites in your area to see which are making these mistakes to drum up some business.

Any corporate web copywriting mistakes you’d add?

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FREE Persuasive Writing Tips eBook

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You often hear about how we’re imminently entering a new era of transparency and authenticity in marketing. Social networking is giving people the power to sidestep and slice through cynical marketing claims; you can’t just drench people in enough messages and hope something will stick.

Based on these two examples, the new era of transparency might not be too far away and has serious implications for the claims you might be occasionally tempted to drop into your copywriting.

‘iPad sucks’ – 644,00 Google hits

Following the success of the iPhone, it’s no wonder people were expecting something special when they heard rumours about Apple’s latest gift to the world of technology. But when the iPad was unveiled many felt Mr Jobs’ use of the words ‘magical’ and ‘revolutionary’ were ill advised.

Within hours a backlash had ensued. The web’s influential army of tech bloggers were up in arms and launched a barrage of critical posts pointing out what, they saw as, the iPad’s ‘backbreaking failures’.

The ‘iPad sucks’ backlash is a lesson to copywriters everywhere on the dangers of hype backfiring when the reality fails to live up to the expectation.

‘Homeopathic overdose’ – 581,000 undiluted search results

UK pharmaceutical chain Boots recently found itself the target of an anti-homeopathy campaign when hundreds of sceptics ‘overdosed’ on homeopathic remedies outside its doors in protest against a range of products they describe as ‘scientifically absurd’.

Whether you believe in homeopathy or not, it’s interesting to note that (according to The Guardian) one pill maker spends more than 16 times (€108m) on marketing than it does on research (€6.5m). A ratio high enough to make any pharmaceutical company blush.

The homeopathic overdose campaign was grown and coordinated by an online community of sceptic blogs and podcasts. It shows how people now have the tools to rebel against, what they view as, misleading marketing claims.

So if you feel tempted to describe a product as ‘magical’, or use a similarly vacuous term, think carefully. Because your customers can now respond (and fill up Google’s search results) with adjectives of their own.

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There are few ways of building customer confidence as quickly and effectively as a well researched and clearly written case study. They have the power to build confidence, credibility and trust by explaining how a business solved a real life problem.

A common mistake (in my opinion) is to write case studies in the self congratulatory, back slapping manner of a press release. This is counterproductive because it hampers its ability to bypass scepticism and deliver a factually based message.

Instead, case studies should focus on delivering a clear, concise explanation on a problem faced, how it was solved and the benefits gained.

Challenge

The case study should open with an overview on the client (their industry, size etc) and the problem faced. Explain why a problem is hurting them, and you could expand to discuss the solutions they tried (without mentioning any competitors).

Solution

In chronological order, go through all the hurdles and how they were cleared e.g. what changes were made to a process to make it more effective.

Don’t worry about explaining every step of the solution in great depth. Just focus on the actual problems and how they were solved.

Dropping in a few juicy quotes from people involved in the project will also give your solution a human voice and ground it in reality.

Benefits

Your conclusion should focus on quantifiable, hard facts and figures on the benefits gained e.g. increased sales, cost savings or extra customers. You can then expand the conclusion to discuss some of the softer benefits e.g. enhanced reputation and development of systems that can be used in future projects.

Closing with a complimentary quote from the customer can be a powerful way of giving your case study third party endorsement and added authenticity.

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Copyright © Matt Ambrose at The Copywriter's Crucible Blog.

FREE Persuasive Writing Tips eBook

Includes advice on writing headlines, how to seduce buyers with emotion and how to give your words that extra punch: