Ted often looks for what he calls the hidden benefit to emphasize. This means it's not the obvious benefit — not the first benefit you think of — yet one that is of profound importance to your customer.

ROI can also be presented in terms of dollars to be saved. For example, this copy: If you paid more than $300.00 in federal taxes last year, I guarantee this newsletter will be worth at least $150.00 to you — and it costs only $29.95! That's a 500 percent return on investment, guaranteed. It sometimes pays to exaggerate our ROI promise, then bring

5. Only Some Can Qualify …

What Excuse Do You Make When Asked for Your Fax Number — and You Haven't Got One? Can you afford to appear “behind the times” to your clients, customers, vendors, and associates? Or is it important to you to be perceived as successful, savvy, in tune with the trends leading the American business scene?

Once the problem is established, clearly and factually, it's time to inject emotion. This second step is agitation. That means we stir up the letter recipients' emotional responses to the problem. We tap their anger, resentment, guilt, embarrassment, fear — any and every applicable negative emotion. We want to whip them into a fervor! We want to

Honestly Assess the Disadvantages of Your Offer and Face Them Every product, service, and offer has some unattractive points. Nothing's perfect, and everybody knows that. By admitting and openly discussing the drawbacks to your offer, your “credibility stock” goes way up on most of your letter recipients' charts. This is called “damaging admission

These people are artistic masters at building high perceived value for each little doodad, each attachment, each part, so that when it's all added up it is much, much more than the price of the whole unit.

the Collier Principle: “Always enter the conversation already occurring in the customer's mind.”

“People do not buy things for what they are; they buy things for what they do.”