Persuasive Copywriting: Using Psychology to Engage, Influence and Sell

by Andy Maslen

Character, emotion, argument: the three Ancient Greek components of a successful sales pitch.

I am sure you will be 100% satisfied with product X and its triple-tested internal widget. But to give you complete peace of mind, I want to offer you my PERSONAL guarantee.

Ethos – the speaker’s character; Pathos – his appeal to the viewer’s emotions; and Logos – the intellectual force of his argument.

Much of the debate about copywriting for the web

rests on the false assumption that people’s behaviour has been changed by the channel, most notably in the oft-repeated assertion that people have shorter attention spans.

If you send somebody a badly written direct mail letter there’s a chance they will scan it, edit it, resize it and then post it on Twitter.

If you tell a joke to one person, one person laughs. If you tell it to a crowd, the crowd laughs. That feedback is like a one-hour full-body massage for your ego.

It’s pleasurable. Chatting is so much more fun than working. Watching cat videos or reading blog posts is easier than doing chores. Getting ‘liked’ or ‘followed’ makes us feel good.

Social media posting and responding is tied up with

ideas of self-worth, social status, belongingness, admiration, adoration, being lik...

Don’t shop on eBay when you’re drunk, and don’t engage in slanging matches on Twitter when similarly inebriated.

The golden rule is an old one: if you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing it on a poster outside your office, don’t say it at all.

If everyone else is posting photos of their products, post one of your dog.

If the market is saturated with cool infographics, create an ad in the style of an 18th-century engraving.

If the people you follow all blog about ...

lives, start blogging about your holidays, home-yacht-building project...

if you see social media as just another ‘channel’ or ‘route to market’ you’re going to have a hard time making it pay – or even enjoyable.

If people reply to your posts/tweets, get into a conversation with them. Look at what other people are posting and reply, in turn, to them. Necessarily, Twitter demands economy, but don’t let that dictate your tone, which should always be respectful.

brevity is key.

And for social media there is licence, if not outright demand, for a less formal style.

Let’s start with subject lines. Depending on whose research you read, the ideal length for a subject line is somewhere between 29 and 39 characters (why not 40 I have no idea).

If you look in the mirror and think you could stand to lose some belly fat, come to MB Fitness this month.

If you look in the mirror and think you could stand…

If you look in…

Lose belly fat at MB Fitness this month

Lose your belly at MB Fitness Lose your gut at MB Fitness Flat tum month at MB Fitness

The trick is to keep slicing away at the fat until you have the bare minimum of ‘valueless’ words such as and, it, if and by.

line. Over time, I have run dozens of first-name tests, and including first names gets higher open and clickthrough rates.

Here’s a conundrum. How do you write commercial copy in a medium that’s named for its non-commercial ambience? Social media is supposed to be just that. Social.

Humour, for example, can be an effective way to build rapport in social spaces. Although I still cleave to my basic point that a laughing customer is rarely reaching for their credit card.

clicks do not equal conversions.

if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve you won’t know how well you’re doing.