Guest Post: By Jay Allyson

I was on a call with a top copywriting expert yesterday who talked about the three words that will always make people give you their money.

It really made me think hard about the headlines I’d been using in my ads, email and even on twitter. This guy was talking about using curiosity as a driving force in your marketing.

Let’s name it curiosity marketing.

Before I give you the three words, let me explain a bit more about curiosity marketing, how people decide to buy things and how your headline and buyer keywords can tap into each step along the buyer’s decision making process.

Killer Headlines

For curiosity marketing to work really well, your headline is the one of the entry points into your sales funnel. Your sales funnel should mirror buyer decision-making processes, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

The headline needs to hit a number of buttons. It doesn’t always have to hit them all, so don’t make your headline needlessly complex. It needs to grab attention first and foremost.

If you were marketing on dog training, you might use a headline like “7 Free Tricks to Stop your Dog Barking”.

What makes this an effective ‘killer’ headline?

• Intrigue. The headline is kind of intriguing since you don’t say what those tricks are so people get curious and want to find out what those tricks are.
• Incentive. The information is “free”, which could remove one obstacle to someone taking a look. If you hook people up with a great deal, they like you and trust you more.
• A Solution. It offers a solution through use of the question “how” and the answer “tricks”.
• Tangible. The number ‘7? adds something tangible and definite about what you’re offering.
• Targeted. The headline is focused on one specific problem, undesirable dog barking, so people searching specifically for help with this one problem, will be highly targeted prospects.

If you were into dog training or were a dog owner searching for a solution to why your dog won’t stop barking, you’d probably click on this, right?

Thus the point of your title is what? To take your visitor to the next step, which is to click your ad, open your email, visit your blog post, read your article.

What you do after they get to your page or blog or whatever comes next in your sales funnel, is partly on how you satisfy the original curiosity and sell them on the next step. (It’s kind of funny to think how the marriage analogy would go in those terms!)

The Buying Decision Process

At this point, you are not expecting someone to buy straight out. People buy from someone they know, like and trust.

Would you ask your girlfriend to move in with you after one date? You’d wine and dine her a few times, and ask after the relationship has developed over time. So now when you pop the question … she may surprise you – your most wanted response!

In marketing, your most wanted response at the start of the buying process is simply that targeted prospects click on your ad, open your email or click the link you give in twitter.

OK, so that got me thinking about what would work in our industry – marketing to the home business opportunity seeker. I’ve always known the importance of researching your buyer keywords.

In other words, you have to identify what people who are looking for a home business are actually looking for … and then draw them in using curiosity.

Identifying Buyer Keywords

The killer keywords are always the starting point of course. What is it that people looking for a business opportunity might be searching for – what solution are they looking for? What’s the problem or situation they want to resolve? What’s their most wanted outcome?

I think it was Perry Marshall who said if someone is out shopping for a drill, they are not searching for a drill they want a hole.

If someone is out searching for dog training, they most probably have a specific and immediate problem they are trying to resolve, like “my dog keeps barking every time we leave him alone in a room and it’s driving us mad, not to mention the complaints from the neighbours!”

Your headline still needs to be relevant to your target audience, but curiosity marketing is about taking people to the next step. How can you entice someone to take the next action step in your sales funnel and ultimately towards a buying decision?

Creating Your Sales Funnel

One approach I have found works really well for creating your sales funnel is to mirror the decision-making processes in your buying chain. In my game, I try to identify probable steps that someone looking for a home business would take.

Once you are clear about what is your ‘most wanted response’ from them at each step, you should be able to more easily identify both headlines and buyer keywords according to where a person has got to in making a decision to buy.

The first step in the sales funnel is to get people INTO your sales funnel. And this is where curiosity marketing to a targeted audience can be really effective.

You’re at the top end of the sales funnel where there is the most competition usually so you’re ad or email has to stand out in the crowd – in the search engine advertising or email inbox.

Throw in an incentive on the back of a curious headline and your click rates will soar. Offer your visitors valuable information – the 7 free tricks – and use curiosity to sell them on taking the next step into your sales funnel.

This next step might be to give you their contact details in exchange for your newsletter and/or a free report so you continue to provide them with useful information. As a follow up, you could offer a low cost product like a training guide or video bootcamp or perhaps a basic subscription.

There’s no limit to the length of your sales funnel. People who have bought on one step are your prime prospects. They are buyers.

Upsell – offer them your next product or an upgrade or extra related product. They are now buyers who like your information or your products and trust its value to them.

A buyer is a buyer is a buyer – Not sure whose quote that is (maybe Russell Brunson told me).

So curiosity marketing is all about taking people to the next step in the buying chain.

My headline on this article (and I’ll tweet and email on this too cos it’s fun!)

What three words will always make people give you their money?

Question: Who would I target this one at?

Answer: People looking for buyer keywords, marketing strategies, conversion tactics, sales training.

Oh, and I guess you want to know what are the three words, yes?

STICK ‘EM UP!

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Jay Allyson – Online Entrepreneur & Home Business Coach – GetRichLifestyle.com

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MadViral online since 2005, MadViral Enterprises, LLC can help you market your business with Email Advertising, Professional Unique email design services

Guest Post: By Kimberly Clay

Is your email marketing campaign not as effective as you’d like?

MadViral Specializes In High Quality Leads! High Quality Email Advertising! High Quality Website Traffic.

Here’s what I do for about 90 percent of the email messages I receive: Delete, Delete, Delete… Some days it’s so bad, I think my finger’s going to get jammed from pressing the “Delete” button so much.

The email messages get deleted for various reasons. Since I now send email marketing messages myself, I try to pay closer attention to emails I receive but don’t read, as well as those I do read. I do this in an attempt to discern what compels me to open and read one message versus deleting another either without opening it, or very soon thereafter. The result boils down to this:

The Headline Is Important! The Headline Is Important! The Headline Is Important!

“You had me at “Hello”…Remember that line from the Jerry McGuire movie? If the subject line of your email does not grab your reader by the hair, that reader will most likely delete your message immediately. Period. End of story. Your subject line simply MUST be attention-grabbing.

Now grabbing readers’ attention can be accomplished in a variety of ways. You can appeal to their emotions, sense of curiosity, even their greed. However you choose to do it, the result must be the same. You must command the readers’ attention and get them interested enough to at least open your message instead of hitting the delete button without another second’s consideration.

I could talk about email subject lines all day, because this is such an important part of email marketing, but to make this lesson as brief as possible, let’s put it this way:

To be effective, your email subject line needs to be one or a combination of these:

1. Descriptive “As a reader, I want to know what your email is about before I open your message (see first paragraph above). Using your most relevant keyword(s) within the subject line can be helpful here. For example, if your headline reads “Receive 25% Off Clothes Purchases” my response is likely to be “So,” (yawn) and guess what comes next? Delete. But if your subject line reads “Get $25 Cash Back On Your Next Purchase of Elder Berman Jeans”, and I’m an Elder Berman customer, I’m clicking that headline!

2. Compelling – Appeal to me on an emotional or interest level. For instance, here is the subject line of an actual email I recently received: “I Have Found A Great Traffic System”. My response? “So?” Delete. There was nothing about the headline that remotely galvanized my attention, much less compelled me to take any action (like actually opening the message). Now, had that message headline read “Discover How To Add 10,000 Visitors To Your Website…” or “Kimberly, Don’t Lose Any More Traffic!”, I may have been a bit more inclined to open the message and read further.

3. Purposely Non-Descriptive “ In other words, pique my curiosity. This strategy can be a bit tricky. To be effective, you must give the reader just enough information or a “hook” to entice them to seek more, but not so much that they think they know what your message contains, and decide prematurely that they’re not interested.

For example, I recently used this email subject line: “You Can Delete This, But What If It’s True…”. While I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no great copywriter, I thought this subject line was effective for two reasons. First, I was able to take the reader a bit “off guard” by telling them to delete the message. In effect, I was predicting the action the reader was likely to take. But then, I added “…But What If It’s True”. By including this phrase, I hinted that there might be more that they would be interested in knowing; that they might miss out on something if they didn’t open the message. In addition, I left them most likely asking themselves what “It” refers to, in essence enticing them to open the email to find out what the “It” in the email message was about.

The bottom line is this, the subject line of your email is the fundamental and all-important key to getting your emails opened and read. Are there other elements of effective email marketing messages? Yes, of course there are. But, if you get this one wrong, none of the others really matter. When your email is immediately deleted, your reader never receives your core message, nor can she/he benefit from your information.

Learn to create great subject lines, and you’re well on your way to email marketing success.
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Kimberly Clay is a successful business woman with over twenty years of experience and success to her credit. She is an online entrepreneur with a passion for educating and helping others to develop online success and create wealth. For more information, visit her website at http://www.GetMyWealthNow.com or her blog at http://www.blog.GetMyWealthNow.com

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MadViral online since 2005, MadViral Enterprises, LLC can help you market your business with Email Advertising, Professional Unique email design services