Persuasive Copywriting: Using Psychology to Engage, Influence and Sell

Are you promoting products that primarily make bad things go away or make good things come closer?

You need to find an emotional connection with the customer, not with the product.

Making them sufficiently interested to read about and, we hope, buy it, quite another. Holding part of the pitch back is the simplest and the most powerful way to do this

As long as we continue to be relevant to our reader, they will favour us with their attention.

an ‘assumptive close’. In other words, we aren’t talking about whether they will buy, merely what will happen afterwards.

copy itself is more interesting, describing life with the product, rather than the product itself.

‘Why should I?’ That is what the person you are trying to persuade is thinking. They don’t necessarily know you. They don’t necessarily trust you. (They almost certainly don’t trust you.)

stop them in their tracks and make them want to read the next sentence. Which Joseph Sugarman, another garlanded US copywriter, claims is the single job of the headline.

Are your customers’ brains wired differently to every other human’s? Because unless they are, their brains are just the same as smokers’, boozers’, gamblers’ and philanderers’ brains. They all have the limbic system. And that means that emotions play a dominant role in their decision-making.