Why The First Sentence Of Your Promotion Should Be No More Than Twelve Words

The first sentence of every sales promotion should always be…
No longer than this…
And it should always end with those three little dots, or an ellipsis if you want to be fancy.
OK, OK. Maybe the first line of your promo could be a little longer than that.
I mean, it’s only four words.
But really, it can only be a LITTLE longer – definitely no more than ten or twelve words.
How come? Well, to explain we need to get a bit ‘fundamental’.
We need to consider the actual purpose of that first sentence.
And I can tell you that the key purpose of that first sentence is quite simple: to get the reader to read the next sentence.
Now, some ‘old school’ copywriters (and by ‘old school’ copywriters I mean those copywriters who are no longer right) suggest that this is the key purpose of EVERY sentence in a promotion.
It’s not. It is the secondary purpose of every other sentence in your promotion.
There are a selection of different types of sentence you need for a successful sales promotion and each one has a different primary purpose.
But hey, we’re talking about that first sentence and when it comes to that sentence it really does just have one aim…
To get the reader to that second sentence.
That’s why it’s so important to keep it short and snappy and to give it that unfinished feel by employing an ellipsis at the end. You want to give your reader as big a nudge as possible into that second sentence.
The funny thing is, it’s almost irrelevant what that first sentence says. Or at least, you shouldn’t labour over it too long. A few examples for you:
1. The Scene Setter: “It’s four days since the Wall St Crash…”
2. The Exclamation: “This changed everything…”
3. The Second Person: “You wake up to your alarm ringing…”
4. The Imagination: “Imagine for a moment…”
You can see that all these examples share three things in common: a) they’re no more than a few words eight words; b) they all end with an ellipsis and c) they all create a sense of intrigue in what’s coming next. The first two common factors are technical, the third psychological.
All copywriting techniques can be divided into these two camps; the technical and the psychological.
Technical issues are usually the simplest and most easy to adopt and put into action in your own copywriting.
For example, there is nothing stopping you from limiting the first line of your promotion to no more than ten words and putting an ellipsis at the end. Psychological issues are often a little harder to understand and adopt. But luckily not in this case.
You see, creating intrigue in sales copy is not easy and usually requires a deep awareness of the readers emotional responses. But here the technical resolves the psychological, as the brevity of the first sentence should create enough intrigue by itself.
By stopping short, the reader will naturally want to know more, to hear the conclusion.
So there you go, the first sentence of your promotion should be no more than ten to twelve words long, should end with an ellipsis and create a sense of intrigue, enough to lead the reader to the next sentence.
A lot of effort on half a sentence, right? But don’t worry, it’s just that everything in the first few pages of your promotion are incredibly important.
But by laying the ground work here, you’ll find the rest of your promotion comes a lot easier.
Best wishes