Use Emotional Hooks To Make Your Prospects Take Action
For your marketing to be successful, you need to use emotional hooks to make your prospects take action. As I say week after week it’s all about:
- The market – who you’re talking to
- The message – what you’re saying to them
- The medium – the channels you use to communicate with them
Within the message you have to be aware not just of what you say but how you say it. For your message to have impact, you have to press the right buttons in your readers’ minds.
Now as we know, people only ever buy for one reason and that is to solve a problem. If they have a problem we have to pull on their four emotional hooks:
The pain
The commitment
The cure
The reason to believe
This is probably the most sensible order to address the issues and you will need to address each one if you’re going to make the sale.
The Pain
The pain is simply the effect of the problem your reader is facing. What is their problem and what effect is it having on the reader.
Once you’ve identified the pain, you want to rub it and aggravate it until it’s raw and throbbing.
Say you sell thermal clothing, the pain your customers suffer is the constant discomfort of cold feet, of never feeling warm, spending too much on heating bills and potential health issues. This is the pain you would need to remind them of.
The Commitment
The commitment is the promise you make to solving the problem and removing the pain. So if the pain is that the readers are being made miserable by being continuously cold and even suffering from chilblains, the commitment is what you’re going to do to solve the problem and maybe even how you plan to do it.
In effect what you’re saying is “if you’re sick of being cold, this is my promise to fix it for you”.
The Cure
The cure is simply what they get when they take action to get you to meet your commitment.
If you want me to keep you warm, then you need to call this number or go to this website where you will see my range of toasty warm thermal clothing
Your offer must be clear and unambiguous. You should tell them what to do, why they need to do it, what’ll happen after they’ve done it and the consequences of not doing it.
The Reason To Believe
The reason to believe is the element which gives the reader the confidence to go ahead and do what you’re telling them to.
The good news is that people want to believe. All they need is the reason to trust you to solve their problems.
The two best ways to give them this trust are testimonials and guarantees.
If you see a customer who suffers from the same problem as you, saying that your product solved their problem then this is so much more convincing than if you say it yourself. Try and get video testimonials – they’re the ultimate.
Guarantees simply take the risk away from making the purchase. If I know that I can get my money back if the product doesn’t live up to my expectations, then it’s really easy to make the decision to buy.
So there you have it.
When you build these four emotional hooks into your marketing copy you’ll see your response rate soar.