“Good afternoon?” the man asked me with a faint smile.
The normally busy cafe was empty except for one table. As soon as I walked in, the people around this one table stopped talking to each other and turned to face me.
There were five women and the one man with the smile. He seemed to be in charge. He repeated his greeting, which was really a question.
“Good afternoon?”
I looked around. There were plates of food laid out. No music was playing. The lights were dim.
“Is there a private event going on?” I asked. He nodded.
So I excused myself and stepped out of the cafe back into the rain. And then, on the door, I saw a dainty sign on a piece of A5 paper:
“Cafe Lav is closed to the public until 9pm today.”
A nice, clear message. But who has time to read all the notices, warnings, announcements, and advertisements out there?
Nobody.
And maybe that can be a lesson to all the copywriters out there. You might spend days and weeks and even months crafting your message perfectly. But if it doesn’t catch your prospect’s eye, he won’t read it, regardless of how good your copy is.
So how do you catch somebody’s eye graphically? I’m hardly an expert on direct response design, but here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way:
1. Don’t put crucial information in the pre-headline (aka “eyebrow”) because people will read that part of the headline complex last, if they read it at all
2. Don’t use reverse type (white letters on black background) unless you want to hide the message (“This is a paid advertisement”)
3. Don’t use highlights other than yellow
4. Use arrows, circles, and “handwritten” notes to draw attention to important elements
5. Use photos of faces looking at the viewer to draw attention
6. Use photos of faces looking in the direction of an important element you want to draw attention to (eg. an offer or headline)
7. Don’t be afraid to make your headline enormous even at the expense of cutting down body copy
Maybe this last one would have helped at Cafe Lav today. Or maybe they should have just locked the door.
Anyways, if you have other direct response tips, please send them my way. After a long layoff, I’m getting back in the groove of working on my own offers, and that means I act as designer as well as copywriter.