4. Why Stay: Remaining the Status Quo

In the last content marketing strategy, I outlined the most effective framework for how to tell your marketing message based on research by Stanford and Corporate Visions.

The premise was simple. When you’re marketing to new prospects, you’re asking them to change—to do something different than what they’re currently doing. Unfortunately, people don’t like change. Social psychologists even have a term for it: status quo bias.

Stanford and Corporate Visions studied status quo bias and found a powerful framework for combating it, wherein marketers need to disrupt the four root causes enforcing the brain’s resistance to change.

Go ahead and get the full framework here.

(I highly recommend reviewing that post before continuing with this one.)

The previous research—the “Why Change” study—validated a framework for what companies need to say in order to defeat status quo bias.

But what do you do when you ARE the status quo?

What do you do when you’re the incumbent? When your success depends on protecting customer relationships? Is there an ideal messaging approach for keeping customers, too? The answer is yes.

Spoiler: If you’re more of a visual person, here’s Tim from Corporate Visions explaining the strategy in Phoenix. It’s fantastic. Highly recommended watching it.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Tim says. “You can statistically, significantly improve the intention to renew by actually reinforcing status quo bias.”

To defeat status quo bias, we learned that you need to defeat these four things:

But to remain the status quo, you need to reinforce those four things:

The following are the five key steps for reinforcing status bias, as well as the actual scripts that were used in the stuy so you can see how the messages were framed and the structure that provides the best results.

Step 1: Document results

Whenever you start a renewal conversion, you should begin by documenting the results and successes you’ve had. This comes before any of the status quo stuff.

Open with the recap that revenue has improved X%, satisfaction has gone up by y%, certain goals that were set out have been achieved, etc.

List anything and everything that’s good.

Step 2: Validate prior decisions

Now we get to the good stuff—the brain science.

Your first step to reinforcing status quo bias is to reinforce preference stability, because (hint hint) their current preference is for you.

Corporate Visions says: “Make a point of reminding customers of the long, hard process they went through to make their original buying decision. This will reinforce their natural tendency to keep their previous decisions and preferences stable.”

Step 3: Mention risks of change

The next step to solidifying status quo bias is to show customers that changing something at this point is risky, which reinforces their anticipated regret and blame.

Remind them how much effort it took to ramp up. How much time was spent onboarding everyone, managing the changes, and getting the implementation done.

Again, the message here should be that changing anything at this point risks stalling or taking a step backwards and once more leaves them vulnerable.

Step 4: Highlight cost of change

The second-last step to reinforcing status quo bias is to highlight costs of change.

Walk customers through the start-up costs that were invested and have now been returned through improved performance. Plus, point out that you’re now part of the ongoing operating budget.

People believe change costs more than staying the same—confirm that.

Step 5: Reinforce selection difficulty

The last step to reinforcing status quo bias is to reinforce selection difficulty.

Corporate Visions says: “Let your customer know you’ve continued to update your program to keep pace with other competitive offerings in the market. People struggle to change if they don’t see sufficient contrast between alternatives. And though it may seem counterintuitive, there is less pressure to prove competitive differentiation during a renewal discussion. In fact, it may be optimal to demonstrate that you are more alike.”

At the end of the day, the smartest thing you can say is that you’re more or less the same as everybody else.

“When all our life we’ve been taught to be different,” Tim says, “potentially in this moment the most important thing you can say is ‘We’re not.’ Because if you’re not, why would [the customer] take the risk of change?

Summary: How to stay the status quo

When you’re delivering a Why Stay message, it is the opposite of the Why Change story. It deliberately needs to reinforce status quo bias.

What if you want to get your customers to adopt something new? When should you talk about that?

“Talk about it in the middle of the contract when the renewal is not on the line,” Tim says. “Go in there and have a QBR, talk about the new things you’re working on, share some new insights and ideas. But the moment of renewal is NOT the time to introduce insights or provoke your customer or challenge them to do something different. It actually increases the likelihood they’ll leave.”

Full Script from the Why Stay? Study

6. Lead Magnets That Convert Like Fire

The cardinal rule of any content marketing strategy worth its weight in leads is that every piece you publish should have a call to action promoting an irresistible lead magnet.

A lead magnet is an incentive—usually some sort of free template or ebook or tool—someone receives in exchange for their contact information. As the name implies, this magnet generates leads that marketing can nurture into sales.

This strategy sounds simple, and yet marketers mess it up every day.

Why?

Laziness.

Instead of going through the trouble of making a new magnet for every blog post—along with fresh landing pages, banners, UTMs, and the rest of those necessary evils—we tack on an old lead magnet (or worse, a generic CTA like “Subscribe to our blog”) and then sit back and scratch our heads wondering why conversion is only .5%.

The formula itself is simple:

1. Write content about a relevant topic based on good keyword research.
2. At the end of the content, say: “Did you like this content about XYZ? Download ________ that we published on the same subject!”
3. Link to a landing page where they can download the content in exchange for their contact info.

Step two is the make-or-break step. Your articles should have a lead magnet that’s directly related to the topic at hand—preferably a tool or template that helps the reader with whatever they came looking for in the first place.

Take HubSpot’s article, Email Marketing Best Practices: How to Send Emails Your Subscribers Will Love. At the end of the article, this is the call to action:

The post is about email marketing and the lead magnet is a guide to email marketing.

Bingo, bango, bongo. That’s how it’s done.

Unfortunately, HubSpot has gotten lazy in recent years, too.

Of the top posts currently on their blog, none of them have a relevant CTA.

1. “9 Secrets to Getting a Response From the CEO in 2018” >> CTA = Click to apply to the HubSpot Sales Partner Program.
2. “How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value” >> CTA = Subscribe now to the HubSpot services blog.
3. “The Sales Manager Job Description Template That Will Help You Find the Perfect Candidate” >> CTA = Get HubSpot’s free CRM.

I understand different posts have different purposes and HubSpot might have good reasons for sometimes omitting lead magnets, but c’mon? NONE of the posts I checked have anything good. For shame.

Instead, the lead magnets and CTAs should be something like these:

1. “9 Secrets to Getting a Response From the CEO in 2018” >> CTA = Cold email templates for reaching out to CEOs. Download now.
2. “How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value” >> CTA = Download our Customer Lifetime Value calculator for Google Sheets.
3. “The Sales Manager Job Description Template That Will Help You Find the Perfect Candidate” >> CTA = Download 10 bonus job description templates for sales managers and start using them now.

The last two examples are so obvious it hurts. The words “calculate” and “template” are in the titles, so people searching for those terms are already expecting calculators and templates. Give the people what they want!

That leads me to the next piece of advice…

Use tools and templates!

Ebooks and white papers are good. Templates and tools are better.

Webinars and checklists are good. Templates and tools are better.

Case studies and infographics are good. Templates and tools are better.

Capisce?

Your mission is to make lives easier and be as helpful as possible. Sending someone to an ebook or white paper or webinar usually requires them to do more thinking and figure out a solution themselves.

On the flip side, a tool like an ROI calculator or social media scheduler says, “Hey, we’ve done most of the work for you. Check it out and save a ton of time.”

Saving people time is the best source of value. Even if that means putting in more effort yourself to develop tools and templates, it’ll pay off in droves.

To hammer the point home, here’s the most successful post on my blog.

Post: Blueprints for a $20 Million Webinar Funnel, Inspired by Sam Ovens.

Topic: How to build the funnel for Sam Ovens’ consulting webinar.

Lead magnet: Templates for the Sam Ovens funnel.

Not rocket science, right? And yet this post has generated more leads than all my other posts combined thanks to following the simple formula:

1. Good article with good keyword optimization (“sam ovens templates”)
2. Call to action with relevant lead magnet (Sam Ovens templates)
3. Landing page with free lead magnet in exchange for contact info

In fact, this particular post got so popular it was noticed by Sam himself, who then began a campaign with the message “Get off my lawn.”

Can’t say I’m not a little proud about that 😉

Sometimes the basics are better than the best growth hacks. This is one of ‘em.

8. Emmy Award-Winning Content Marketing

A while ago I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a sponsored post with Anthony Bourdain’s face on it and the headline, “Anthony Bourdain Does Not Want to Owe Anybody Even a Single Dollar.” Being a Bourdain fan, I clicked on it.

What followed was a great article about Anthony’s financial situation growing up and his philosophies on saving—complete with trademark Bourdain humor and all.

At the start of the article, it said: “Wealthsimple is a whole new kind of investing service. This is the latest installment of our recurring series “Money Diaries,” in which interesting people tell the unvarnished truth about their financial lives. We believe being honest about money is always valuable, even if it isn’t always good investment advice.”

And so began my love affair with Wealthsimple’s content marketing strategy.

First off, kudos to Wealthsimple for hacking Hollywood like champs. Swear to God, someone over there poached Horace Slughorn from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and made him their director of influencer marketing.

Take one look at their Money Diaries series, and you’ll see an impressive list of interviews with A-listers discussing their finances.

Anthony Bourdain.

Kim Kardashian.

Elijah Wood. Margaret Atwood. Gary Numan. Woody Harrelson. Kevin Bacon. Jon Hamm. Kylie Jenner. Spike Lee. Awkwafina. Maria Bamford. Abbi Jacobson. French Montana. Tegan and Sara. Paul Reiser. Iman Shumpert.

The list goes on.

And on.

And on.

How in the world did a fintech company manage to execute better influencer marketing than most agencies in a long, looong time? I reached out to Davy Rothbart, the producer of many (most? all?) of their Money Diaries posts to find out.

Davy Rothbart’s CV is extensive—although I didn’t know that when I emailed him out of the blue and asked to chat about Money Diaries. I had seen his name at the bottom of the articles and decided to drop him a line.

Turns out the guy is an Emmy-award-winning director, Wikipedia page and everything.

Further proof of my ignorance arrived when I asked one of our content marketing strategists to hop on the call with me, and he Slacked back with this:

Ok, Patrick. Calm down. We’ve got an interview to do.

Fast forward to the call.

Davy shows up to the Google Hangout with his fricking Emmy Award perched on his shoulder like a golden parrot. How cool is that?!?!

Anyhow, Davy is a great guy. We had something like twenty minutes blocked off, but I think he ended up giving us over an hour of his time.

He prefaced the call by saying, “I don’t know if any of this will help, but here’s what I do.” Turns out, there was tons of advice that marketers should hear.

For the sake of structure, I’ve broken it into three parts: recruiting A-list influencers, the process of interviewing, and the critical elements of storytelling.

Without further ado, here’s how an Emmy-award-winning filmmaker executes a powerful content marketing strategy.

How to recruit A-list influencers

You’d think that having Hollywood connections would help you with influencer marketing…

Well, it turns out it does.

Davy straight up said that a lot of the interviews he has done for Wealthsimple have been set up because—true to Hollywood fashion—he knows someone who knows someone who knows someone.

So yes, it helps to have connections.

BUT—and this is a big but—not knowing people has never stopped a hard-working chump from getting what he or she wants. And even though it helps to have Elijah Wood’s cell number kicking around, that doesn’t mean Mr. Wood’s publicist will say yes when push comes to shove.

In fact, Davy said when they started the Money Diaries series he had to approach publicists with little more than the promise that “this is going to be cool some day.”

“Riiight,” they probably thought. “I’ve heard that one before.”

But the wild thing is, they actually bought it. They bought the company’s vision.

“Exposure was enough,” Davy said. “I wasn’t asking for a lot of their time, and the upside was that they could get a lot of publicity through the company’s future campaigns.”

So as far as I know, Wealthsimple didn’t have to pay a single celebrity for their Money Diaries posts. They were happy to do it for the exposure.

And you know what? I’ve noticed a similar effect myself from producing podcasts.

There’s a weird imbalance right now regarding the perceived value of different marketing channels. If you ask an A-lister to talk at your conference, you’ll be spending God knows how much on their speaker fee and travel and hotel. But podcasts? Totally the opposite. If you say, “Hey Mr. XYZ – any interest in recording a quick podcast remotely? Only takes twenty minutes and we’ll promote the heck out of it.” They’ll usually reply faster than a dude on Tinder in a small town. Even better if they’ve got something new to promote.

People—especially influencers—don’t realize that their name is as valuable (maybe more) in the headline of a blog post as it is on a conference screen.

Here’s the other thing Davy said, though. It’s not all about celebrities. It’s about people who are interesting—about the story they tell—that can be powerful.

This part I sorta agree with.

On one hand, I hear what he’s saying. Wealthsimple has written great stories on the finances of nuns and sword swallowers and crack addicts. If you can tell engaging stories for your target market day and night, knock yourself out.

But here’s the thing…

Margie who runs the cupcake stand on your corner doesn’t have a following.

The Rock does.

And if you happen to get an interview with The Rock, you can use cross-interest targeting to promote that piece of content, for example, to CEOs who are fans of Dwayne Johnson and digital marketing.

My two cents? Swing for the fences. Seriously.

[Months later, I took my own advice and asked Rand Fishkin to appear on our company’s podcast, which he agreed to. I’m telling you, go big or go home.]

The other benefit of swinging for the fences is that if you interview someone well-known, other well-known people are more receptive to it.

Davy says, “If you get a big name up front, it’s soooooo much easier to get other big names. It’s also smart to hire a well-known documentarian or film person, because then a lot of people just want to work with that person.”

Moral of the story: don’t be shy. Leverage your current connections and friends of friends to secure your first big name, and if you can’t do it that way, start reaching out with cold emails that emphasize the exposure the influencer will get. Hire someone that influencers will want to work with, or go after the ones who have something to promote at the moment (new books, Netflix specials, etc.). Above all, get creative and don’t give up.

How to structure your interviews

Davy says he typically conducts interviews over the phone and then transcribes the results into a 6,000-ish word transcript. (Sidenote: If you need to do any transcribing, I recommend Speechpad.)

In terms of the interview itself, he prepares 10 pre-written questions and then tries to go with the flow of the conversation.

What are the best questions?

For Wealthsimple—given that they’re a finance platform—the questions are mostly (obviously) about money. “What was your first job? How much did that pay? How has your career evolved?”

Whatever your business is, follow the same formula. Run a marketing agency? Ask about the most desperate thing they’ve done to get a client. Building a SaaS product? Ask about the most costly software mistake they’ve ever made.

Davy said exact dollar figures are key.

Articles that specify how much people spend on X or how much they made doing Y outperform everything else, especially if you lead with those figures.

That’s good advice for all bloggers. Readers love data, and people are inherently interested in how much things cost or how much people make. Use it to your advantage.

If you have problems getting people to open up about such things, let the interviewee know what others have shared. That’ll get their gears going and make it more likely that they’ll share something similar. Follow your natural curiosity and don’t stick too rigorously to your pre-written questions.

Critical elements of storytelling

There are countless books on the elements of storytelling, but when it comes to creating a content marketing strategy, here are Davy’s three biggest tips:

• Start your post with an engaging, notable, or funny excerpt that sets the tone.
• Segue into something relatable. It could be the voice of the person—are they known for being funny, conversational, open?—or maybe a personal email from a friend or something on social media. Anything relatable to the reader’s life.
• Get as specific as possible. Again, use as many dollar amounts as you can.

What about keyword research and subheadings and all the other technical stuff that SEOs and bloggers get caught up with? Sure it’s important, but story is king. Davy even admitted (somewhat bashfully) that he has no idea who Wealthsimple’s audience is. He just tells the damn story and doesn’t worry about selling.

“The audience matters,” Davy says, “but good storytelling is universal. Write what you’d want to hear, what you’d find compelling, and go from there.”

10. Thought Leadership Committee

In his book The Sales Acceleration Formula, Mark Roberge—former CRO of HubSpot—outlines the exact tactics that HubSpot used on its journey from $0 to $100 Million.

In the demand generation chapter, he explains that the best way to build an effective content marketing strategy is to hire full-time journalists and use them to establish an internal thought leadership committee.

Here’s the excerpt from pages 117 to 120 where he explains the process:

There is one key resource of the content production process—the journalist.

Journalists hold the keys to the future of demand generation! Nobody recognizes this opportunity, not even the journalists themselves. Take advantage. Your job as an executive is to develop this journalistic capability within your company to drive the modern demand generation process.This can be tricky. Developing this journalistic capability is the hardest, but most important, part of your journey. There are a number of options here. On one end of the spectrum, you could hire a full-time journalist. The good news for you is that many journalists are extraordinarily gifted and, unfortunately, their traditional professional opportunities are becoming scarcer every day. Newspapers and magazines are on life support. Exceptional journalists are struggling to find work. Find them and hire them.

On the other end of the spectrum, you could hire an intern. Go down to the university near your office with the best journalism program, find a great student, and have them come by your office for a half day every Friday morning to write. If you are extraordinarily budget conscious, you may even be able to pay them through course credit.

Of course, there are many options in between these two extremes. The journalism industry is very open to freelance lifestyles. You can find a freelancer to write for you. Alternatively, do you have an office administrator? Traditionally, these folks have exceptional written communication skills. Could you eliminate a mundane five-hour task in their week to free up time for valuable content production time?

When hiring this journalist, do not obsess about domain experience. This hire does not need to have deep knowledge of your product, your industry, or your buyer. It is helpful, but it is less important than great journalism skills. A great journalist can sit down with a PhD neuroscientist, pick her brain for an hour, and write a beautifully interesting piece of content. They do not need to be experts in the space.

Once you have found the journalist, the next step is to form a thought leadership committee. The thought leadership committee provides the journalist with a continual source of domain knowledge. Anyone at the company who understands your industry, your product value proposition, and your customer’s needs should be considered for the thought leadership committee.

Certainly your executive team should participate. If you sell a technical product, some engineers should be involved. If you have relationships with partners or external thought leaders, they can contribute as well. Your salespeople on the front lines are valuable resources here because they understand your buyers. They hear the questions buyers have at the beginning of their buying journey. Salespeople have well-rehearsed answers to those questions. They understand which answers resonate with the buyer. These questions and corresponding answers make for beautiful blog articles. In fact, check the “Sent Items” folders on your salespeople’s email server. Salespeople often send the same canned responses to their prospects as they address questions that arise throughout the buying journey. These canned emails make for exceptional blog articles.

With both the journalist and thought leadership committee in place, the final step is to put the two functions together to produce content on a continual basis. I refer to this step as defining the content production process.

Let’s assume you have 10 people on your thought leadership committee. An example content production process would look like this. Every Tuesday at 9am, one member of the thought leadership committee will sit down with the journalist for a one-hour interview. The interview should be on a niche subject. Don’t choose your product as the subject. The interview should be about a trend in the industry, a question buyers have early in their buying journey, a phrase that likely resonates with an individual your business can help, and so forth. After this one-hour interview, that member of the thought leadership committee is done for 10 weeks, as the other members will cycle in.

An hour interview can generate a lot of content. From that one-hour interview, the journalist can write a three- to five-page ebook on the discussion topic. The journalist can write three or four short blog posts around niche subjects in the ebook. The journalist can generate dozens of social media messages for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook about the quotes, stats, and trends mentioned in each blog article. Although this content is created within a day or two, it can be scheduled for release to the public over an entire month. Each day of the month, one of the social media messages is published. It links to the corresponding blog article, driving interested readers to the blog. At the end of the blog article is a call to action to the reader that states, “Did you like this blog article on XYZ? Perhaps you will like the ebook we published on the same subject.” Many readers click the call to action and are brought to a landing page, where they find out that the ebook is free. They simply need to provide their name, email, phone number, and company URL, and they will have access to the ebook immediately.

This process can be repeated each week. If you’re feeling enthusiastic, you can repeat it twice per week or even every day. The result is a stream of high-quality content, developed with minimal budget and minimal time from the executive team and other high-value employees. You have now extracted the brain power of the company and promoted it to your buyers on the digital page. As more and more content is published, more and more potential buyers follow your business on social media. More and more people link to your corporate website and blog. As we learned earlier in this chapter, this rise in social media following and inbound links drives exponential growth in the number of buyers finding you via Google searches. Thanks to the landing page and free ebook offer, a high percentage of these website visitors self-identify themselves to your business in exchange for the complimentary content. This is inbound marketing at its best. This is a formula for predictable, scalable demand generation.

I love this format for scalable content generation. It pairs well with Gary Vaynerchuk’s Document, Don’t Create strategy, and it makes total sense to lean on the thought leaders in your company to help with marketing.

When in doubt, it’s always a good call to take content marketing advice from HubSpot.

12. The Copywriting Bible

There are a lot of good templates out there for content creators. Keyword: good.

But good isn’t good enough.

If you want your content to pop—to convert at the highest possible rate—you need to employ incredible copy. Here is the best guide I’ve seen in five years of how to do that.

Dubbed “100+ Viral Outlines to Build Your Brand”, The Copywriting Bible is a collection of Josh Fechter’s most successful posts and templates that are ready to use and recycle.

The best part of this book is that Josh breaks down his most successful social posts AND provides worksheets to help you make them work for your business.

Upfront, here’s how Josh says you can use these templates to your advantage:

From there, you’re thrown into 480 pages of templates that teach you exactly how to replicate Josh’s winning formulas.

Each post starts with the original copy followed by a workbook-like format that breaks everything down line by line and leaves room for you to fill in the blanks like homework.

The format is easy to follow, and your results will be unique to your company instead of cookie-cutter posts that anyone can copy. Plus, if opening up and putting emotion into your content marketing strategy doesn’t come easy, this is a Godsend.

This guide is by no means the be-all-end-all of copywriting, but it’s a hell of a good start.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t sit in front of a blank page and break a sweat.

Take these posts and templates that are already proven to be successful and make them work for you. Now go forth and publish.

14. Data-Driven Blog Design

Here’s an oldie but a goodie from 2016.

[Side note: the fact that a piece of content from 2016 is an “oldie” is ludacris but true these days. I remember doing research in college and getting excited when I found sources from people who were still alive.]

The topic? Data-driven blog design.

Justin Brooke says he spent $30,000 on Facebook ads testing different blog designs and came up with a winning formula.

I know the suspense is killing you already, so here it is:

I know what you’re thinking…

“That’s it? This dude spent $30k on the obvious…”

Not so fast. Put down your pitchforks and keep reading, because there’s actually some interesting science behind it and a few details that may surprise you.

Takeaway 1: Take advantage of premium real estate

Brooke’s background is in writing and optimizing sales letters.

He says he spent a lot of time focusing on the above-the-fold areas of these letters (the part of that’s visible when your page loads without having to scroll), so he figured the same should go for his blog.

Lo and behold, out of everything he tested in this experiment, he says that optimizing the above-the-fold area had the biggest impact. By moving his opt-in box from the sidebar to the header, his conversion rate went from 2% to 5% conversion.

The offer hadn’t changed! It had simply moved.

Then he changed the call to action in the opt-in box from “Get free updates via email” to a piece of content that people could download immediately.

What happened next? Conversions doubled, from 5% to 10%.

Placement and calls to action matter. By making these two simple tweaks, he improved conversion 400%.

Takeaway 2: Put your sidebar on the left

After moving his opt-in offer to the header and changing his call to action, Brooke took a look at the Facebooks and Amazons of the world for more ideas of what to test. To his point: “They have way more resources than I do for testing optimum performance, so I wanted to borrow from their experience.”

He noticed that a lot of big companies put their navigation on the left.

“Think of your Facebook newsfeed,” he says. “Think of Amazon. You almost always interact with the left-hand side of the screen. When I dug deeper into this, it was confirmed by the Nielsen Norman Group.”

Nielsen had conducted a study that showed that the left part of the screen is viewed a lot more than the right. It’s called the F-pattern.

Eye-tracking study results by Nielsen Norman Group

By moving his sidebar from the right side of the screen to the left, Brooke says conversion improved from less than 1% to 3%.

The more important change that might have led to this increase, however, came from the next takeaway, which is…

Takeaway 3: Use sidebars strategically

Most people stuff their sidebars with junk. Social media widgets, most-popular articles, archives, and other miscellaneous cruft.

Very few people interact with those widgets. Plus, think about it. What would you rather someone interact with: a recent article or a conversion opportunity?

We’re talking about a content marketing strategy for lead generation…that question is rhetorical. If you want leads, it makes sense to eliminate distractions and clutter and focus entirely on getting people to convert.

Brooke says, “I removed everything from my sidebar that tried to get them to visit multiple pages. I replaced it with a call to action on one of my lead magnets because my highest priority was converting visitors to leads. Optimizing my sidebar combined with moving it to the left is what I attribute the 300% increase in performance. Today, my sidebar only has three things in it: a CTA, a way to become a fan, and a search box.”

Takeaway 4: Include a CTA at the end

I’ve covered this at length in other posts, but it’s worth repeating again.

If you want to optimize a blog post for conversions, you need a call to action at the end of the post for a downloadable piece of content that relates directly to the post.

Take a page out of Hubspot’s book. If you’ve written a post about email marketing, stick something like this at the end.

BONUS Takeaway: Use welcome mats

A year after this blog post was posted, someone asked in the comments if the Justin had any new revelations. Check out his response.

I’d echo his advice 100%. While I’ve personally had mixed results with SumoMe, I recommend implementing welcome mats if you haven’t already.

16. Long-Form Sales Letters

Remember infomercials? The long, drawn-out sales pitch. The dramatic voiceover. The cheesy black-and-white reenactments of customer problems and the call-today-and-get-one-free-for-a-limited-time offers?

Brings back memories, huh? I’m choking on nostalgia over here…

Of course, the infomercial never died. Along with direct mail, it made its way online in the manifestation of the long-form sales letter.

What is a long-form sales letter?

You’ve definitely seen one before. They’re one-page websites that are usually a mile long and uglier than sin, featuring web 1.0 styling and more exclamation marks than a teenage girl’s Whatsapp messages.

Yes, this look like garbage. But here’s the thing…done well, sales letters can be an effective content marketing strategy.

“What makes them so effective,” says Jeremy Reeves in an interview with VWO, “is that, if set up the RIGHT way, you can hook all types of readers.”

Specifically, he goes on to segment prospects into three types of readers:

1. Skimmers – People who skim a page up and down to get a quick overview of what you’re selling. They’re usually fast to act and have already made up their minds before they even get to the page.
2. Jumpers – People who spend more time on the page than skimmers but less than readers. They will skim the page, and if something catches their attention they’ll dive into the copy and read it thoroughly.
3. Book Worms – People who read the whole damn thing, top to bottom. Every. Single. Word. They’re typically slower decision makers and tend to think things over and want every single detail before making a decision. Or sometimes they just like to read.

“What makes sales letters so effective,” says Reeves, “is that they appeal to all three types of readers. The best thing you can do is turn skimmers into jumpers and jumpers into bookworms. That’s why it’s important to have fun, exciting, and engaging copy.”

How do you go about creating one that converts like crazy and doesn’t look like ass? Follow this winning formula.

How to format a winning sales letter

It all starts with bold statements at the top of the page, including the pre-headline, main headline, and subheading. After that, segue into a captivating intro.

The point here is to tease the solution. Tell them you’re going to reveal the secret to solving their pain point below and tee it up as a really, really big deal.

“This is where I like to get in touch with them emotionally,” says Reeves. “Depending on the market, product, and hook I found when doing my research, this could be any of the major emotions such as anger, guilt, fear, pride, etc.”

After the intro is established, it’s time to dive into the body.

In the body, reveal your solution—why it’s special, how it works, how it’s better than others—and why readers should listen to you.

Third comes the offer. Explain exactly what you’re selling, from price to value props to guarantees. Lean into why it’s worth more than what they’ll be spending on it.

At the end of the offer section of the copy, put a summary of everything you just said in a box. That way, skimmers can see the “whole package” at a glance.

How to design a sales letter that doesn’t look like crap

Now that we’ve run through copy, let’s talk about design.

Contrary to many designers’ beliefs, sales letters don’t need to look like crap. I only used the previous example to illustrate best copy practices—not design.

Peep Laja on the CXL blog says, “So you’ve got good copy. Congratulations? Not so soon. If it’s not structured and designed well, people aren’t going to read it.”

Here’s how you structure your text according to Peep:

• Large font size (minimum 16px)
• Short lines (40 to 80 characters per line)
• New paragraph every 3-4 lines
• Use lists, quotes, tables – mix it up
• Sub-headlines every 2-3 paragraphs
• Leverage responsive design

“Design is half the marketing and sales battle,” Peep says. “It’s about bringing out the important information and minimizing the secondary. If your site looks like crap, the perception of your product is also crap.”

Here’s an example of a sales letter that doesn’t look too shabby.

There are more and more templates on Themeforest every day to build one-page websites with aesthetically pleasing elements. Find them, use them, test them.

Personally, I can vouch for the effectiveness of well-designed long-form sales letters. The last campaign I A/B tested between this medium-form page vs. this long-form page saw the long-form page perform 8x better. No contest.

Summary: Long-form sales letters

“The biggest lesson,” Reeves says on VMO, “is that no matter what you think or what anybody tells you, PEOPLE READ WHAT THEY’RE INTERESTED IN. Trust me. If people are interested in your product, they’ll read for a long time before making a decision.”

Is long-form copy always the answer? No.

If the product is simple, brief can do. Impulse purchases don’t need a ton of fanfare. On the other hand, if you sell insurance or houses or software, consider long-form.

Reeves says, “Tell them everything that you think will push them one step closer to buying your product…and not a single word more. If people aren’t reading your copy and feel it’s because it’s “too long”, try hiring a great copywriter and look at the difference. The difference isn’t that it’s “too long”, it’s that it’s not engaging.”