“The most important thing — you can know every copywriting technique in the book, you can read every book — the most important thing is to understand your audience.”
– Parris Lampropoulos
At the start of this year, I got a job to rewrite a VSL for an upsell of a successful offer.
A bit of background:
The offer was in the real estate investing space. It basically showed newbie investors how to get their leads for free using a secret resource.
Once people bought the frontend offer, they were shown the upsell. The upsell was about how to hire virtual assistants to automate much of the work involved in the frontend offer… so you can make more money in less time.
The question was how to position this upsell VSL.
My copywriting coach at the time said something like, “This training is the quickest way to become a millionaire real estate investor.”
That might be true. But my feeling was, for this audience, it was not believable. Most of these people had never even completed their first deal. Lots of them were retirees, or people who just wanted to quit their crap jobs and spend more time at home.
If these folks heard “You can be a millionaire,” my gut feeling was they would say, “No, that’s not me.”
And so I wrote that VSL around the promise of, “Get your first deal faster by doing less.” And that positioning turned out to be a winner. It beat out the control by 50%.
Here’s why I bring up this story from my client annals:
Copywriting wisdom is full of sweet inconsistency. Many top copywriters will tell you to make the biggest promise you can — and they will show you million-dollar ads to back up their case. Here’s a famous one from John Carlton:
“Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks And Slices… And Can Slash Up To 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight”
But then you have other top copywriters, who will tell you the opposite — to make modest but believable promises. They will also show you successful ads to back up their case. Here’s one from Gary Bencivenga:
“Get Rich Slowly”
So who’s right? The “biggers” or the “modests”?
Neither, of course. Instead, it’s Parris who’s right.
As he says in the quote above, you’ve got to know your audience. Some audiences will believe any promise, so the larger it is, the better for you. Other audiences won’t. So make the biggest promise you can — as long as you’re sure your audience will find it believable.
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