Your Sales Headline Is Pointless

It’s not a new idea.

Any copywriter or direct marketer worth their salt will tell you…

If you want a sales promotion to be successful, you’ve got to have a great headline and lead.

That big idea up top that grabs attention and gets people excited and open-minded about the opportunity you’re telling them about.

In fact, a lot of pros will tell you to spend 80% of your time on the headline and lead and just 20% on the rest of the pack.

This is wrong for allsorts of reasons and I’ll explain why in a future issue.

But there’s a bigger problem with promotions that we can solve right now…

You see, chances are the headline and lead you’re using right now is pretty much pointless.

I read so many promotions where it’s obvious that the copywriter has spent a lot of time nailing that killer headline and lead.

And in some cases, they’ve done it very well…

As a reader, you want to continuing reading, you want to find out more. So, job done.

But then something happens.

The copywriter suddenly loses all their ability. After a couple of pages it seems they’ve started taking drugs.

Because they forget about the headline and lead.

It’s as though it never existed.

Look, there’s no point putting all your effort and energy in that great idea up front if you’re not going to repeat it constantly.

Constantly? Isn’t that overkill.

No. Definitely not.

What’s better…

Coming up with a load of new angles and complicating your promotion with lots of different ideas…

Or sticking to that one core idea and referring back to it over and over again?

Seriously. You’ve heard of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point… well that whole book is about this. Restating the core idea over and over and over.

It’s so important to the success of a promotion that the main promise, the main claim is repeated throughout – that it is kept constantly in the mind of the reader.

And the thing is: it’s so easy to do!

Whether you’re a copywriter or whether you’re reviewing copy that you’ve freelanced out…

You should be checking that the promise or claim made in the headline and lead is repeated at least once on every single page – minimum.

And I’m not talking about repeating it in clever, ever abstracting ways. I’m talking about repeating that promise verbatim.

If you’ve promised returns of X, Y and Z in the headline… repeat those exact amounts. If you’ve used an analogy up top, use the exact same analogy throughout. If you put a time frame on it, use the same time frame throughout.

If you’re lucky, you’ll probably be able to just copy and paste the headline when you need to restate it…

But if it does jar the flow of the narrative, just be sure you don’t edit out the key elements.

Believe me, if you do this… if you repeat your headline and the principles of your lead throughout any sales promotion that you use… your sales will increase.

In fact, get this right and they will increase dramatically.

Putting this principle in to action myself on one occasion helped increase the effectiveness of a promotion by over 15%… and on another occasion it enabled a promotion to gross £100,000 in just 6 days.

If you or the copywriter you’ve hired has written a breakthrough headline and lead… whatever you do – don’t waste it by forgetting about it.

Category: Copywriting