Customer Questions – Find Out What The Customer Wants Before Writing Sales Copy

The first step to writing effective copy is getting a detailed brief from the client. As every copywriter would know, however detailed the brief from the client, details about the company and product features tell only half the story. Clients love their products and generally a question such as “What makes your product attractive?” will elicit responses like, “our quality is the best”, “we have a worldwide market presence” or “we are one of the oldest companies in the business”. While these sound great, they really don’t answer customer questions to help copywriters produce a great sales letter.
Large advertising agencies can afford to conduct a full-scale survey to find out what customer questions the product or service has to answer, so they can identify customer needs and wants and write their sales letter to address these. However for an independent copywriter, this is not an option at all.
Interviewing customers and prospects
One of the fastest ways to find out what customer questions the product or service needs to answer is to speak to a sample of customers and prospects. The easiest way to get a list of customers is to ask the client for one, and then select a few customers who have used the product or service and ask them questions about how their needs and wants were met by using the product or service. Customer questions of the “before and after” type work wonders for getting answers to write great sales copy.
Spending time speaking to people at shopping centres or retail outlets that sell the product or service is another way to ask customer questions and determine product benefits from a customer’s viewpoint that can help a copywriter produce exciting sales copy.
Researching competitors offline and online
Every marketer seeks to answer customer questions through the features and benefits that their products or services offers. Copywriters can have brochures mailed to them and study the available material or gather information from a website. There are two main reasons that studying the competition is important. Firstly, if the competitor has achieved success in the market, then its easy to find out what’s working, and if an opportunity exists to improve the strategy. The second reason is to identify gaps in the competitors product line or offer that can easily be filled. Customer questions can determine whether it is commercially viable to fill such gaps. The sales copy can easily be tailored to address such needs and how they can easily be met.
Living the experience
Before writing a great sales letter it helps if copywriters can familiarize themselves with the product they are promoting. For instance a copywriter writing a sales letter for a special restaurant offer, would do well to sample the food and speak with the chef to live the experience. This experience of becoming the customer would help answer customer questions that may arise in the sales letter. In this way that objections can be overcome right at the beginning, so customers feel comfortable in trying the product.
Inspecting forums and posting tweets
Customer questions can often be found on online forums, and it is a great idea to check out online forums to see if there are some common objections that can be addressed in the sales copy. Answers to such questions that other readers may have posted also reveal additional insights that neither the copywriter, nor the advertiser may have thought of, which could then be used to craft the sales letter. Twitter is another great tool for customer questions to be answered. By firing away a few questions to a follower list real-time feedback can be obtained for use in the sales copy. Another method is to create an online survey and send out a tweet with a link to the survey, inviting followers to participate.
These are just a few techniques that copywriters can use to identify customer questions to use as a basis for producing a killer sales letter. Most of these and other techniques are free but invaluable for filling in information gaps within the client’s brief before writing a compelling sales letter.