26 Words & Copy Constructs that Instantly Make You More Persuasive

There we go. Thank you very much. And thank you for the introduction and thank you guys for being here. This is like the final breakout session of the day, and I'm just, like, so honored you chose to spend it with me. This is awesome. And I'm going to do my best to make it worth your while. So welcome to 26words and copy constructs that instantly make you more persuasive. So if you write, if you're doing content, if you're doing emails, landing pages, ads, anything where you need to convince people to act, you know how critical your words can be. As a matter of fact, in marketing, as in Scrabble, some words are worth more than others. Right? So those are the words you're going to want to use. Let me share three quick examples with you. The first one comes to us from Cornell University. They went into a school cafeteria and they changed the name of the carrots on the menu to X Ray vision carrots. And they watched as the kids ate twice as many. Right. X Ray vision carrots. Oh, yeah, give me more. Twice as many. Next example. This comes to us from marketing consultant Gary Henneberg, and he explains that when the Collins street bakery stopped calling their fruitcake fruitcake and instead called it Native Texas pecan cake, mail order sales increased by 60%. The last example comes from Robert Cialdini. He's the author of Influence Science and Practice, and he reports that when the American Cancer Society added a single phrase to their solicitations, the donations went from 28% to 50%. And that single phrase was even a penny will help. So clearly, words make a difference. Ironically, the reason is because when people read, they don't really focus a lot on what they're reading. Okay. They don't really focus on each individual word and absorb it and weigh the pros and cons and then make a considered decision about what they've just read. No, in fact, very often what they do is they rely on decision making shortcuts. Social scientists have studied this, and what they have found is human beings have developed these decision making shortcuts over the millennia as a way to conserve mental energy. Because we couldn't possibly weigh every bit of information before making a decision or we'd never get around to making any. So what we've done is we've developed these automatic, instinctive, reflexive behaviors and they're hardwired into us. And so we just kind of cruise along through life on autopilot. And when we encounter a situation, or what a researcher would call a stimulus, we just default to these hardwired behaviors, giving them little, if any, thought. So what I'd like to do for the next 45 minutes or so is share with you 26 different words and copy constructs that trigger these automatic behaviors. Why 26, you might ask. Well, I've organized it so that there's one for each letter of the Alphabet to make it easier to remember. Okay, I'm going to blow through these quickly because we've got to get from A to Z. However, at the end of the presentation, I'll tell you how you can get a free cheat sheet that just summarizes everything. So does this sound good? We're good. Good to go. All right. Excellent. Okay. A. A is for the authority principle. And ever since we were children, we have been taught to recognize and respect authority. So by the time we're adults, it's ingrained in us. So if an authority tells us something, we believe it. And if they tell us to do something, we generally do it. As a matter of fact, there were a couple of guys who dressed up like bank guards, and they positioned themselves in front of a Wells Fargo ATM machine or an atm, and they taped a sign to the ATM that said, the ATM is broken, so give your money to the guards. Then they stood there as people came in, read the sign, and handed their money over. And these guys made off with thousands and thousands of dollars. Nobody questioned them. So now at this point, you might be thinking, awesome, Worth the price of admission to inbound. I. I'm good. Got what I needed. But for those of you who are looking for more ethical applications of the authority principle, let me share a couple of examples from marketing. Here we have an ad from L.L. bean, and they're advertising their ski parkas, and they're saying, trusted and tested by the US Ski Team. So when it comes to ski parkas, we would assume that the US Ski Team is an authority. And if they're endorsing the parkas, that makes us feel confident that they're going to be good parkas. Or here we have an example from B2B. This is from the Citrix website. And on their website, they say lots of good things about themselves, as they should. But at one section of their website, they say, see what the experts are saying about Citrix. And they quote Forrester and Gartner because they know that people put a lot of stock in these experts. They're subject matter experts. Forrester, Gartner, they're third party authorities. So when we see that, we think, okay, I can trust These guys, I. They really know what they're talking about. B is for the word because. Because is a great word for us to use as writers. The reason is social scientists have found that people are more likely to do what we ask them to do if we give them a reason why. People are more likely to do what you ask them to do if you give them a reason why. And using the word because is a great way to tee up that reason why. As a matter of fact. Ellen Langer is a researcher at Harvard University, and she identified the word because as a compliance trigger. She found that when people see or hear the word because, they right away start to nod like little bobbleheads. That is, in fact, a bobblehead on the screen. They start to nod like little bobbleheads, and they start to say yes without fully processing what comes next. They see because or they hear because, and they just assume that whatever comes next is a good, logical, legitimate reason. They just start to say yes. So because is a great, powerful word for us to use. How can we use it in marketing? Well, take a look at what weight Watchers do. They say, weight Watchers works because it's not a diet. Okay. Or here we have a financial e newsletter, and they say, why am I getting this? Well, you're receiving this e newsletter because we thought this information might be beneficial to you. So it's not even a bulletproof, ironclad, you know, reason. It's just, oh, we thought you'd find this information interesting using that. Because just gets that automatic compliance. People like, oh, yeah, good, good. All right. C is for commitment and consistency. And what social scientists have found is once people make a decision, they like to remain consistent with it when future opportunities arise. And they usually do this, giving it little to no thought. So what does this mean to us as marketers? It means if we can get someone to say yes once, we're much more likely to get them to say yes a second time, a third time, a fourth time. This is particularly true if our first ask is relatively small. So let me share some of the research that went into this. There were some researchers that went out to a neighborhood in Los Angeles, and they were asking people, you know, how do you feel about safe driving? And as you might imagine, people were in favor of it. It's kind of hard not to be in favor of safe driving, right? So the researchers were like, great, we're so glad that you're in favor of safe driving. How about putting up a billboard on your front lawn saying that you support safe driving. Well, here's people kind of backed off a little bit. Like, what are my neighbors going to think? What's it going to do to my property value? What's it going to do to my view? So only 17% of the people said yes. However, there was a small subsegment, and in that subsegment, 76% of the people said yes. So we have to ask ourselves what was so different about the people in that subsegment? Well, three weeks earlier, researchers had come by and they had asked these people if they would display a small 3 inch by 3 inch sign saying they supported safe driving. So when these researchers came back and asked about the billboard, this group of people wasn't evaluating the billboard the way everyone else was, which is to say from square one. Now, for them, the decision making shortcut kicked in. Saying yes would have been consistent with their previous behavior. It was consistent with how they saw themselves, consistent with their values. So the decision making shortcut just kicked right in and they agreed to the billboard. So how do we use this in our marketing? Well, here's an email from Semper International, and look at what they say. Just in their subject line. They say, thanks for your ongoing support. Want to help out again. So right away they're reminding me, nancy, you've already said yes before. You usually say yes. You don't need to think about us like we're a brand new company that you've never done business with. Right up front. They're saying, look, you always say yes. Just say yes again. They're going for that decision making shortcut. Or here's a company called Ocean Mist Cosmetics, and they're offering a free try me mineral makeup kit. The reason they do this is they know that anyone who says yes to the free samples is much more likely to say yes when they come back and say, all right, now how about making a purchase? Buy your favorite one. Buy the one that you like the best. They get that first. Yes. And then they start to escalate their asks. All right, D D is for deals. And deals can be very helpful in overcoming the pain of paying. If any of you here have ever tried to convince people to part with their money, you know how hard it is, right? It's not an easy thing to do. Science offers a really interesting explanation. Science has found that if you are in physical pain, if I'm hammering a board and I miss the nail and I hit my thumb instead, that's going to register in a particular part of my brain that registers physical pain, right? So Neuroscientists have done studies and they have found that that exact same part of your brain gets activated when you need to reach into your wallet or your purse, pull out your hard earned cash, fork it over to someone else, right? There's literally a pain of pain. And the part of the brain that registers physical pain gets activated when you have to spend money. Fortunately, if you know some of the ways to get around this, you're much more likely to increase the hit rate you have in terms of getting people to buy your products and services. So let's look at a few. One of the things that you should do is try to avoid or at least minimize your use of the words price, cost, pay, spend. These words all remind the brain that they're, you know, that you're about to have to fork over your money and that's painful, right? So when they see, when the brain sees these words, it registers as, oh, there's going to be pain. So minimize your use or eliminate it altogether. For example, instead of saying the cost is only $5, you could say something like, for just $5, you gain product X or service X. Right? Gain is a great word to use. We like gain. We don't like spend. Another thing you want to think about is coupon codes. Now, in marketing, we like coupon codes for a couple of reasons. You know, coupons incent people to make a purchase, and the codes, of course, allow us to track, and we like to track. However, PayPal ran a study and they found a full 27% of page abandonment comes from coupon codes. Why? Well, look at this example. First question they ask is, quantity. How many do you want? Next question is, do you have a coupon code? So I'm like, wait a minute, I'm not an idiot. If other people are paying less, I want to pay less, right? So what I do, I start to Google, find a coupon code, right? And you know, you go off the site and what happens? Maybe you get distracted, maybe you never come back, Maybe you find a competitor you like better. So not a good thing. One study I read found that if you eliminate the coupon code, you can get a 34% lift in sales. But we don't all want to eliminate coupon codes. So I have two suggestions. One is maybe you ask for it further down on the page. Get that momentum going. You know, how many do I want? Here's my shipping address, here's my credit card. You know, by the time I ask for the code, I'm maybe less inclined to go googling but this is a class about copy and copy constructs. So the other tip I have for you is think about what you call it. Maybe don't call it a coupon code, call it a customer code, call it a VIP special, call it something that the person who sees it, who's supposed to know what it is, recognizes it, but somebody else may not think, oh, I can just go and Google this and find it. All right, E. E is for eye magnet words. And think about this. When we write, how do we write? We write in a very linear fashion, right? One word followed by the next, followed by the next. But that's not how people read. When people read, they skim and they scan and certain words have the power to pull the I in. They, they're called eye magnet words because they literally attract the human eye and pull it in. So of course, those are the words that we want to use. And there have been a lot of studies that prove this. There have been in market studies, eye tracking studies, heat mapping studies, they even put people into FMRI machines, flash different words in front of their faces and look to see what parts of their brains light up. And all of these tests, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, have all proven that certain, certain words have the power to pull the human eye in. So what are they? Well, one of them is the word easy. As a matter of fact, Robert Levine in his book the Power of Persuasion cites in market research that proves that the words easy, quick and improved have all separately increased product sales. You don't even have to use them all together. Easy, quick and improved have all individually lifted product sales. Another great eye magnet word is the word secret. And the reason for this is social scientists have found that we are more persuaded by information we believe is not readily available. We're more persuaded by information we believe is not readily available. As a matter of fact, using the word secret in your subject line alone can get a 11% lift in opening rates. But you have other words and phrases at your disposal besides secret. You can say the inside story, a behind the scenes look, a sneak peek, confessions of the real reason why any of these phrases indicate that you have information that's not widely available. And people respond to that. All right, F is for the word framing. And what social scientists have found is the words that we use to describe our company, our product, our service, our office. No, not our office, our offer is what I'm trying to say. Our company, our product, our service, our offer. The words that we use to describe those things influence how people respond. Okay. They influence how people understand the information and most importantly, how they react to it. So let me give you a few examples. There's a psychologist, her name is Elizabeth Loftus. And she ran this really interesting experiment. She had a video of a car accident, and she had people watch the video of the car accident. And then she divided them into two groups. And she asked one group, estimate how fast you think the cars are going when they contacted. And she asked the other group, estimate how fast you think the cars are going when they crashed. So the contacted group answered 31.8 miles per hour. The crashed group said 40.8 miles per hour, difference of over 28%. Everyone saw the same video. Everyone was asked the same question. The only difference was the verb. But that verb colored what they saw and how they responded to it. So maybe you charge a shipping fee, not a great idea, because people don't like to pay them. But sometimes in marketing we have to, right? And it's only $5. That's not a lot. So you can say you charge a five dollar fee, or you could frame it as a small five dollar fee. It's the same $5. Right. But according to research that was reported in the Journal of Consumer Research, framing it as a small five dollar fee can get you a 20% lift in sales. It just affects how people perceive that $5. Yes no buttons are really great opportunities to use framing. And there are a couple of reasons for this. One, human beings, by nature, we're very agreeable. We don't like to say no. As a rule, we don't like to say no. So if there's a single button, you either click it or you don't. And if you don't click it, it's like a passive way of saying no. But if there's two buttons, we feel like we have to choose. And now here's where it gets interesting. So you can take the copy that's on your no button and you can use it to flip frame the consequences of not saying yes. So here we have yes get the free case study now versus Nah, I'd rather not know how my marketing is performing. It's like, wow. Well, when you put it that way, I guess I better get the case study. Right. So according to research that was published in the New Neuromarketing Blog, which is out of the Netherlands, you can expect anywhere between a 40 and a 125% lift in conversion by using yes no buttons. But again, the key is to make the no button frame the consequences of not saying yes. All right, G is for the word guarantee. Guarantee is a very powerful word for us because guarantees remove risk. And one of the major things that stops people from making a decision, particularly a purchasing decision, is the idea of risk. So if you can avoid risk, if you can remove it or eliminate it, that's a very good thing. L.L. bean is one of the granddaddies of the guarantee. When they started their company about 100 some odd years ago, they rolled out a 100% satisfaction guarantee. They stand by it to this day. But you don't have to be that extreme. You can make guarantees work for you in other ways. For example, here we have Nutrisystems and they guarantee that you'll lose 5 pounds in 1 inch or you get your money back. So they tie the result to the guarantee. Or here we have a time limit. It's a 60 day unconditional money back guarantee. But you don't spend so much time on the 60 days because you're drawn to the idea that it's unconditional and it's money back. Those two words help temper the time limit. Whether it's 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, you know, an unconditional money back guarantee, that's a great thing to have. Guarantees remove risk. All right, H is for herd mentality. And what social scientists have found is if we're not certain what decision to make, if we're not certain what to do, what do we do? We look to others because particularly others like ourselves, and we follow their lead. That's known as herd mentality. Another name for it is social proof. But we have a tendency to follow what other people do. It's a very common decision making shortcut. As a matter of fact, there are a couple of researchers in South Carolina who proved just what a common decision making shortcut this is. They posed as solicitors for fictitious charity. They went to this neighborhood and they were going door to door collecting money for this fictitious charity. And what they found is when they would ask someone to make a donation, they would show the list of other people who had already donated. The longer that list was, the more likely the person in front of them would be to donate. Right? So imagine you're the person standing at the front door. The charity sounds great, but you've never heard of it. You couldn't because it was fictitious. And now you've got to make a decision, you know, do I donate? Do I not donate? You need to look at God. It looks like a lot of people around here like me, right, have donated. I Think I will or not so many, maybe I won't. Very common decision making. Shortcut. Lots of different ways we can use it in marketing. And here's Staples, they use it twice. They say, customers like you bought. And then they say popular categories and services. Both of those are hits of herd mentality. And here's one of my favorites. This is from a online shopping club called beyond the Rack. And they were having a sale on coach bags. They had three of them for sale. But as you'll notice, I could only buy two because the one on the left was reserved by others. So which one do you think I wanted? Of course, I want the one everyone else has. But they held out some hope. They said, check back in 12 minutes. Not 10 minutes, not 15 minutes, 12. Very exact, right? They were like, maybe, maybe. And you know, if I got back there and there was a one of those bags was available, I'd jump on it so I could have the one everyone else had. Right, Good, good use of herd mentality. All right, I is for information gap theory. And the term information gap theory was coined by a neuroeconomist named George Loewenstein. And this is how he defines it. He explains that if there is a gap between what you know and what you want to know, you'll take action to close that gap. There's a gap between what you know and what you want to know, you'll take action to close that gap. And we're in marketing, we want people to take action. So this is very important to us. One of the best ways, the easiest ways to tee up information gap theory is the five W's and the one H. And if anyone here went to journalism school like I did, you're going to know exactly what I'm talking about. Five W's and the one H are who, what, where, when, why and how. And in journalism school, they teach you, you know, write your stories, write your articles and answer these questions because people want the answers. So if you lead off starting to answer these questions, you're going to attract eyeballs. You're going to attract readership. It works for the journalists. It also works for us in marketing. So you want to use who, what, where, when, why and how in high read pieces of real estate. What do I mean by that? Your headlines, your subject lines, your content titles, the captions on your photos, because that's where the words are going to do the most good for you. That's where they're going to be the most powerful. So here we have who are the year's best loved brands. What's your MarTech IQ? Where's the birthplace of wine? When not to ab test your mobile app? Why an online marketing suite is a game changer. And finally, how to give a killer presentation. Who, what, where, when, why and how? All right, J. J is for jargon and generally speaking, we want to avoid jargon. Okay? Sometimes we use the acronyms and the technical terms and the big complicated phrases and we think, ah, it's going to make us sound really intelligent. And the truth is it doesn't. It can sometimes actually make us sound pretentious. We can also lose readers, right? And we don't want to do that. If someone reads something they don't understand it, they move on. No one wants to feel stupid, right? We don't want to make people feel stupid. So we want to use easy, accessible language. We want to avoid jargon. So my rule of thumb is don't use a 75 cent word when a 25 cent word will do. However, I do have two exceptions to that rule. One is if you want to suggest more value and two is if you want to imply insider status. So what exactly do I mean by this? Well, here we've got a dentist, he's trying to get people to come in for a tooth whitening treatment and so he's offering a coupon. But he doesn't call it a coupon, he calls it a saving certificate. It just sounds a little bit more valuable. When I did some work for American Express as a young copywriter, they always made us use certificate and not coupon. So just sounds a little bit more valuable, but it's still understandable. Here we have the can't miss CRO event of 2017. So if you happen to be a conversion rate optimization marketer, you see this and you think, beautiful. These are my people, they're speaking my language. This is my tribe, my squad. I'm going to go to this conference and I'll be with like minded people. It's a conference for me. But if this conference were trying to attract a broader range of marketers, they would have done better off eliminating the acronym because if you're not sure what it is, you're going to think maybe the conference isn't for me. All right, K K is for knowledge. And the thing that we have to remember is no matter what we've written, whatever the subject is, people are going to bring their own level of knowledge to it. There may be a lot of knowledge or a little knowledge, it may be correct or incorrect, but people are going to bring their own baggage to whatever the topic is. So we need to remember that. As a matter of fact, social scientists talk about something known as availability bias. And what they have found is people are more likely to predict. People will predict the likelihood of something happening based on whether or not they can recall a relevant example. People will predict the likelihood of an event happening based on whether or not they can recall relevant example. So here we're looking at somebody who's reading about airplane crashes, right? If you're someone who doesn't fly, you probably would come to the conclusion that flying is more dangerous than it is. Why? Because the information that's available to you comes from the news media. And the news media doesn't report about the millions and millions of safe flights? No, they talk about the crashes and the casualties. So you would likely come to the conclusion it's not quite as safe to fly. So what does this have to do with marketing? Before market, you ask somebody to make a purchase first, get them to tap into relevant information. Get them to think about a time in the past when they could have really used your product or service. Or even get them to think about a time in the future when it would come in handy in their work life or in their personal life. Get them to tap that relevant knowledge. For example, the American Dental association was trying to sell disability insurance to dentists. The problem is when you're feeling healthy, when you're able bodied, you, we don't think you need disability insurance. So what they did is they said, hey, have you heard your colleagues complain about low back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome? And next thing you know, you're like, oh, yeah, the last time I was at an ADA meeting, you know, Dr. Smith from across town wasn't there. Someone said he'd been in bed for two weeks with back pain. Wow. I guess it could happen to us, right? You know, it allows people to pull in that relevant information. Or here we have the Boston Globe. And they wanted their subscription to buy gift subscriptions of BostonGlobe.com for people that they knew. So they said, Digital access to BostonGlobe.com is an incredible gift for your. And then they listed 10 different descriptors. Your avid reader, your political junkie, your sports fan. And as you read each one of those, you would slot in the name of the person you knew that matched that description. Ah, my grandfather's an avid reader. My uncle's a political junkie. My daughter away at college is a spirit. Next thing you know, you have come to the conclusion that, you know, 10 people that would really like a BostonGlobe.com gift subscription. Very powerful use of relevant knowledge of availability bias. All right. L is for loss aversion. And what social scientists have found is we are twice as motivated to avoid the pain of loss as we are to achieve the pleasure of gain. And this can be counterintuitive to us as marketers because in marketing, we're all about the gains, the benefits, all the wonderful things that will happen if you do what I ask you to do, if you buy my product and service, and that's fine. And I would never say to walk away from benefits. However, a little well placed loss aversion can go a long way. Think of it this way. You're in Vegas, you're playing the slot machine. You've just won $100. On a scale of 1 to 10, maybe that feels like a 5. If you lost that same hundred dollars, it wouldn't feel like a negative 5. It would register as a negative 10. We feel the pain of loss twice, twice as powerfully. So we're twice as motivated to avoid it. So how do we do that? How do we use that? How do we put it into practice in marketing? So here's Target Market magazine, and they're asking people to subscribe for their newsletter. But they don't say, sign up for your daily dose of marketing goodness. They don't say, take advantage of your daily dose of marketing goodness. They say, don't miss your daily dose of marketing goodness. Those two little words, don't miss, are just enough to trigger loss aversion. And here's a really good example. This takes loss aversion, and it couples it with something known as the Endowment effect. And the Endowment effect holds that we place greater value on things that are ours that we own. So look at what they're saying here. They say you have $15 of unused credit in your account that will expire tomorrow at $11.59. So they could have just said, hey, make a purchase by tomorrow and take $15 off or save $15 if you make a purchase by tomorrow. But instead, instead they told you that they placed $15 in your account, but it's only going to be there until tomorrow. Suddenly, it's in your account, it's yours, right? It's not like they're giving you $15 off when you make a purchase. You have 15 bucks in your account that you're going to lose unless you use it. Very powerful. All right. M M is for mental energy. And the thing you have to remember about mental energy Is you want people to expend as little of it as possible, understanding what it is you're talking about and figuring out how to do what you want them to do. So a good rule of thumb is always kiss. Keep it simple, stupid, or keep it short and simple. Social scientists have a larger, more complicated term for this. They call it cognitive fluency. And basically what it means is people prefer things that are easier to think about and easier to understand. They judge those things to be more truthful, more accurate, more factual, and they feel more confident in their ability to make a decision about them. And that's what's so important for us as as much marketers, because we want people to make decisions. Copy Hackers ran a study. They have a fashion client that wanted to get people to sign up for their fashion newsletter. They tested two buttons. Sign up now. Show me outfits I'll love. Show me outfits I'll love. Outperformed sign up now by 123.9%. And I think the reason is they made the benefit so plainly obvious. If I sign up for the newsletter, I'm going to get to see outfits I love. That's the benefit. I don't have to think about it. It's simple, it's easy. Another company called Adlucent has a pet supply client. They had a landing page that was working really well, but they thought, all right, is there anything I can do to remove extraneous copy to make it clearer, to make it more simple? They adjusted it. They saw a 233% better conversion rate. So keep it simple. N is for new. The human brain craves news and novelty which constantly on the lookout for the next new thing. And the reason for this is when we find it, it activates the pleasure center in our brains. It releases dopamine. And that feels good. So we're constantly jonesing for that next hit of dopamine. We're constantly looking for the next new thing. So what you want to do is you want to leverage news. If you have news, roll it out. Even if it's not new news per se, maybe it's a new use for an existing product or a new market or a new list you that you've refreshed for the spring or the fall or for 2018, have the opportunity for the use of news. Use it. You also want to use new in the family of new words. So you can say new, you can say now. You can say introducing, announcing, finally, soon. New, now, introducing, announcing, finally, soon. Those are all words that signal to the human brain that there's something new on the horizon. And that's what the brain craves, right? O is for overcoming objections. And the thing that we have to remember as marketers is when we put our messages out there, some people are going to be like, awesome. This is just what I was looking for. Terrific. And they're going to engage right away. There's going to be another group of people that are a little more reticent. They're not entirely sure they have some reservations. You know, can I really believe what the marketer is telling me? Is it as good as the marketer says? Is it worth my time and effort to check it out? Is it better than my current solution? Is it worth the money? These are all the things that they might be thinking about. What we need to do as marketers is we need to acknowledge those and flip them around. We essentially need to take lemons and turn them into lemonade. We need to acknowledge that doubt somebody has and explain to them why it really isn't a valid thing to worry about. So, for example, Target market magazine was selling Denny Hatch's ultimate 83 point marketing checklist. And that sounds great, but if you happen to follow Denny, you might have thought, oh, gee, he's more of a direct mail guy and I'm totally an email person, so it's not going to be applicable. So look at what they said. No matter if your message is running in email or direct mail, online or on tv, you know, this is going to ensure a profitable bottom line for you. So they acknowledge what the reservation is and they counter it. Or maybe you've got an order form and this is where the rubber meets the road. People have to decide, do I want six months, three months, one month? And they might be thinking, I don't even know if I want one month. What if I don't like it? So if you have the opportunity to say you can cancel at any time, that removes that objection. All right. P is for personalization. And people love their names. When people are skimming and scanning, if they see their own name, they go right to it. Okay. Social scientists talk about something known as the principle of liking. We place greater value on people, things that remind us of ourselves and what reminds us of ourselves more than our names. So if you can use somebody's name, do that, because our eyes go right to it. But it goes beyond that. Actually, the data shows that you are more likely to donate to a hurricane relief fund if the first letter of the name of the hurricane matches the first letter of your first name. Telling you, the data doesn't lie. Now, if I had asked you, why would you donate to a hurricane relief fund? You'd have all kinds of great reasons, but I doubt many of you would be, like, jumping up and down going, well, it's the first letter of the hurricane's name. But it's true. It goes beyond that. You are more likely to do a favor for someone if they share your same first name or even have a similar first name. You are 12% more likely to choose a spouse whose first name begins with the same first letter as yours. All documented. Okay. The data doesn't lie, so it's very interesting. So what do you want to do with this? Okay, assuming you're already married, what do you want to do with this bit of information? We're full service here at inbound. Okay. So definitely personalize. If you can personalize, that's a wonderful thing. Experian found if you can personalize a subject line, you can expect a 29.3% lift in your opening rates. But don't just stop there. Personalize your graphics. Personalize your body copy. Don't just stop at names. Here's Neil Patel. He says, I'm determined to make a business in Newtonville success. Well, I live in Newtonville, so right away, I feel some affinity to that. Using somebody's name, the name of their company, where they live, geographically, where they went to school. These are all things that will trigger the principle of liking personalization points that will make people pay attention. Q is for questions. And questions are great. They're great devices for us because they're involving. Okay, they pull people in. If you use a question in your subject line, World data finds you can get an 11% lift in your opening rates. But you. It gets better than that. Bi Norwegian School of Business found that questions outperform declarative sentences if they're in a tweet or an ad headline by a 140 to 150% margin. So let's rocket back to English class for a second. A declarative sentence would be something like, wine may improve your memory. And the question version, of course, would be, does wine improve your memory? Questions are more engaging. They lift the engagement rate by 140 to 150%, according to the BI Norwegian School of Business. So two things to think about if you're going to use questions. One, try not to phrase the question as a simple yes or no, because if somebody answers no, you lose them. So here we have Matt Hines. He says, scale of 1 to 5, how bad, your sales presentations suck. So, I mean, he could have said, do your sales presentations suck? Simple yes or no. But by pulling you in with this scale of 1 to 5, it's more involving, it's more engaging. The other thing questions are great for is if you need to talk about something that's not a real popular topic that's maybe a little touchy. For example, here's Vanguard, and they pose the question, how many people have opened a retirement account by your age? Now, the simple truth is most of us have not saved enough for retirement. Okay, but who wants to hear that? So instead of telling you that, they open it up with a question, they open the conversation with a question, they kind of pull you in, and then that provides the opportunity for them to say what they want to say, which is, you know, you probably should save more. Here are some different ways to do that. All right? R R is for rational and emotional. And what we have to remember is people make decisions for emotional reasons, and then they later justify them to themselves as well as to other people with rational reasons. So what that means to us as marketers is we need both rational and emotional selling points in our copy, in our content. And that is true whether you're B2B or B2C. There's a researcher named Antonio Damasio, and he did some research among people who had sustained injury to the parts of their brain that controlled emotion. What he found was these people were virtually incapable of making a decision, even a decision as simple as, what do you want to have for lunch today? Right? Like, virtually incapable of making a decision. So we need both the emotional and the rational. So here we've got an email for BMW and they say, drive a brand new BMW to the beach at your next barbecue. So they're laying on the emotion. You're just thinking, God, I'm going to feel good pulling up to the barbecue, you with all those admiring glances, you know, and then they provide some rational, you know, only 2, 37amonth, so you kind of need to know the price to see if you can afford it, but they lead with that emotional. Or here's an ad, this one's for presentation skills training. But they don't talk about all the rational reasons why it's important to be a good presentation, why it's important to be able to give a good presentation. They lead with some of the emotion, they say, become the presenter. Everyone listens to nail your next presentation. And then they talk about, you know, it's important to be an effective presenter for these reasons. So they balance the emotional and the rational. S is for storytelling. And we talk a lot about storytelling and marketing these days. And there's a very good reason for it. Okay, Storytelling is very effective. Back before the written word, stories were how information was passed on from generation to generation. Science today offers a really good explanation as to why storytelling is so effective for us as marketers. What social scientists have found is if you're just dealing with facts and figures, if I had nothing but bullet points on the screen here, it would activate two areas of your brain, Broca's area and Wernicke's area. They're the two areas that process language. However, if you're listening to a story or if you're reading a story, other parts of your brain get involved. So if you read that somebody ran across the stage, that would activate your motor cortex. If I told you that I woke up to the smell of fruit, fresh brewed coffee this morning, that would activate the olfactory cortex in your brain that controls smell. If I told you that I was chilly and I put on my wool blazer, but it was so itchy, that would activate the sensory cortex in your brain. The net net here is the more parts of your brain that get activated, the better you understand the information and the longer you retain it, the better you remember it. Those are two really good reasons for why storytelling is so effective for us as marketers. If you had popped over to the JetBlue website at one point, you would have found four different videos, four different testimonials or stories, customer stories that you could listen to. And if you happen to click on the one on the left, you'd hear from a woman named Ariana. And she would tell you that she's someone who flies a lot, she does a lot of cross country travel. She would also tell you that she's a woman who happens to be 6 foot 3 inches tall. And she talks about how painful it is to fold yourself into the seat and have your knees jammed up against that tray table and the seat in front of you and to fly across country like that. And then she tells you how happy she is that JetBlue introduced Greater Legroom. When you hear her tell her story, you remember that information so much better than if you had just gone to JetBlue and to their website and saw a bullet point. That said, we now have greater legroom. Stories help you better remember the information. Stories also do something very interesting. They add value. They add value to the product or the service that you're telling the story about. There were a couple of journalists who became researchers, and they launched something known as the Significant Objects Project. What they did is they ran around to tag sales in flea markets, and they essentially bought stuff that people wanted to get rid of. And then they hired writers to write stories about these objects. And then they took the object and the story and they put it on ebay. And they were very upfront about the fact that the story was a story, it wasn't meant to be. And then they got this incredible return on their investment. This is a Utah snow globe. They bought it for 99 cents. They sold it for $59. Huge return on their investment. Now, they weren't in it for the money. They donated the money to charity. They were doing this to prove the value of stories, that stories can add value to products and services. All right, T is for time. And the thing that we have to remember about time is people are going to spend far less of it reading what you've written than you're going to spend read writing it. Okay? People multitask. People are distracted. They often have several screens open in front of them. They just read slower online. That's another thing we have to think about. Nielsen Norman Group ran a study. They found that on the average webpage, only 28% of the words are even read. Okay? So that means that we as marketers, as copywriters, as content creators, we need to take this into account. So don't bury your lead. If you have something important to say, say it right up front. Don't do this long wind up and finally get to it in the second or the third paragraph. You're going to lose people. They may not get there. You also want to be clear and concise. Being clarity will trump cuteness and cleverness every time. If you have something to say, say it. People aren't 100% focused. Also, you want to use bold subheads, bullets, lists, make it easy and organized for people to obtain the information that you're trying to give them. All right, U is for urgency. And what social scientists have found is if something's readily available, we may or may not be interested. We're interested. We take advantage. We're not, we don't. But just let people know that that something is only available for a limited time or it's only available in limited quantities. That changes everything. It's like a switch flips on us and we want it, and we want it badly. Urgency is one half of something known as the scarcity principle. And it's very, very motivating as A matter of fact, some of you might remember when Hostess announced that they were going to stop selling Twinkies, right? There was actually a box of Twinkies on sale on ebay. A starting bid of $200,000. $200,000 for a box of Twinkies. They ended up. Hostess ended up putting them back on the market. Same thing happened with the Concorde. When the Concorde said, we're going to stop flying the Concorde because we don't have enough business, every remaining seat sold out. So letting people know that something is in a limited quantity or only around for a limited amount of time, it just makes people respond. Here we have Expedia. They're like, only seven tickets left at this price. Doesn't mean you can't get one of the tickets. But there's only seven at this price. And that motivates you. Or here we have Neil Patel. For just a very limited time, you can enroll in this class. If you have a deadline, if you have an expiration date, use that. Pop that. That will motivate people. But sometimes we don't. So then you want to use things like for a limited time or this week only, or no guarantee this offer will be repeated. These are the kinds of phrases that trigger the response to the urgency principle. All right, V is for the Von Restorff effect. And what social scientists have found is human beings are hardwired to notice what doesn't belong, to notice what stands out. Okay, this goes way back to our caveman days. We'd get up in the morning, kind of poke our head out of the cave, scan the horizon, and if everything looked the way it did yesterday, that was a good thing. But if something new were there or if something that had been there were missing, that could be a problem. It could pose a threat. And back in the caveman days, it could be a life threatening threat. All these years later, we are still hardwired to notice things that are different, things that stand out. For example, when you look at this ad, your eye goes to the kid's smile, to the tooth that's not there. It's supposed to be there and it's not there. Something's missing that should be there. Our eye goes right to it. Gonna give you two ways that you can use the Von Restorff effect just in your emails. One is to consider using emojis. According to world data, you can expect anywhere between a 31 and a 34% lift in your opening rate using an emoji. Now, this will change when everyone starts using Emojis. Right. If every one of those had an emoji, they'd cancel each other out, essentially. But because only one has that red heart, it draws your eye to it. The even more interesting way of using the Von Restorff effect is the I'm sorry, oops with made a mistake email. Okay, Going to World Data, they're currently pulling a whopping 47% opening rates. These are the inbox equivalent of rubbernecking on the highway. Right. You're driving on the highway. Oh, there's an accident. I got to see what that is. And we slow down, you get one of these. You're like, oh, yeah, I didn't open the first email, but I'm opening this one. I want to find out who screwed up. How badly did they screw up? What did they tell me I wasn't supposed to see or know. Right, Right. It's human nature, but unbelievable. These are. People are. People are sending them out. They're making mistakes so that they can send them, which is not a very good practice, but incredible in terms of opening rates and a good example of the von Restorff effect. You know, it's unlike all the other emails in your inbox because someone's trying to basically say, oops, I screwed up. If I could recall it, I would. Okay, we're up to W, and W is for wordplay. And the thing that we have to remember as writers is we have various literary devices that are available to us, and they will help us either better communicate or get people to better remember or make it more likely that people will act. And so we want to use them. And there are a number of them today. I just want to share three with you. Rhyme, simile, and surprise. So Matt McGlone is a university of Texas researcher, and he did some research into something known as rhyme is reason, bias. And he found you could have two sentences that essentially say the same thing. One of them rhymes, the other one doesn't. People will believe that rhyming version to be the more truthful, more accurate one. Why? Because rhymes are easier for the brain to process. They're easy to process. They feel right. And if it feels right, it must be true. Think about the O.J. trial. If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit. Right? It rhymes, it must be true. And then we talk about Simile. Okay, Simile is a comparison using like or as. And similes are great if you have a more abstract concept that you want to make more concrete. Or maybe you're introducing a new product that people don't have a frame of reference for. So here we say crazy egg is like a pair of X ray glasses that let you see exactly what people are doing on your website. So I don't know what crazy egg is, but I understand what X ray glasses are, so it makes it more understandable. And if I better understand it, I feel more comfortable making a decision about it. The last one I want to share with you is surprise. This. This I find particularly interesting. Researchers at University College of London found that the human brain is hardwired to predict what comes next. Human brain is hardwired to predict what comes next. So in this particular subject line, it says dress to chill. But the common phrase here, at least in the States, is dressed to kill. So as you're reading this, you read dress to, and the brain kind of leaps in and says, kill. And then you go, oh, it says chill. How about that? Surprise, right? So when you get surprised, I mean, something wonderful happens, though. It focuses your attention. And when it focuses your attention, that's a very good thing. Something really interesting happens here. They got a twofer on their subject line because your brain has already filled in kill, but it says chill. And so you come away thinking that these clothes are going to be, you know, really comfortable and great to chill out in, but you're going to look really great. You're going to look killer in them because your brain is deleted. Delivered both of those messages, and you were really surprised, which focused your attention. All right, X is for the X factor. I know some of you are thinking, is she ever going to get to X? And if she does, what is she going to say in this particular context, since we're talking about words, the X factor is visuals. 90% of the information the brain receives is visual. The brain has an easier time processing pictures because pictures and images were around long before words were. So two ways that you can use images and to help strengthen your copy. The first has to do with eye gaze. Human beings are hardwired to follow the gaze of others. So in this particular example, the woman is looking at the form field. That's because that's where chemistry.com wants you to look. You will follow somebody's gaze. So if she were looking down, she would take eyes right off the page. If she were looking to the right, she'd take you to that quote, which is nice, but it's not as important as getting you to the form field. So use the eye gaze to direct people to the headline or the price or the form that you want them to Fill out. Use the eye gaze to direct people where you want them to look. Charts and graphs have this very interesting effect on people. Cornell University ran a study. They asked people to read some text. They asked them, do you believe what you read? 67% said yes. They repeated it, only this time, same text, but they added a chart. The number went from 67% to 97%. It wasn't that the chart added additional information. It wasn't that the chart made the information easier to understand. It was the mere presence of the chart. It suggests scientific veracity, truthfulness, believability. I don't really have time to look at the chart, but the chart is there. It must be true is essentially what happens. So I'm not suggesting that you make up charts, but so many times we have text that allows us to pull something out into a graph or a chart. Use it. It's going to work for you. Y is for the word you. We talked about personalization, the power of people's names. If you can. You can't use someone's name. Use the word you. It's a great substitute. It's considered one of the top five persuasive words in the English language. We need to remember wifm. What's in it for me? People don't care about your product or service, but they might care about what it does for them. So avoid overuse of we our, our company I and instead focus on you. Look at these three bullet points. Each one either begins with you or you and your employees. Compare that to the subject line. We've never looked better. I don't care how you look. I'm concerned with how I look. Right? So we gloss over we I, our we zero in on you. So use the word you. Finally, we're at Z. The Zeigarnik effect. Social scientists have found that human beings are hardwired to finish what we've started. We're hardwired to finish what we've started. It's why cliffhangers do so well in the media. Right? We couldn't wait for the next episodes of House of Cards, the next episodes of Game of Thrones. You know, we started, we wanted to finish. How do we use it in marketing? Well, here we have snapfish. They say, ready to finish your photo card? You're almost done. Come back to the site, finish it. They plant that seed that you started it, and now you've got this nagging feeling that you need to finish. Or maybe finally, you want to run a loyalty program online or offline. Doesn't matter. And you think to yourself, all right, nine boxes. You get the 10th for free. So you can have nine blank boxes, or you could have 10. 10 boxes. But the first one has a check mark. According to research that came out of Wharton, if you have that first box already checked, 79% greater likelihood people are going to complete the action you're asking. So we've blown through these 26, but if anyone wants a free cheat sheet that quickly summarizes them, give me your business.