Emotional Direct Response Copywriting How to Write It

In this article, I’m going to go right back to my favourite part of marketing: copywriting. In fact, this is where I began in the marketing industry, as a copywriter.
Quite simply a copywriter is someone who writes copy. Words, in other words. But…
Emotional Direct Response Copywriting
Is a little different.
So don’t confuse us with freelance writers and journalists, because while we all write for a living, we do it for different reasons. My own niche is in direct response copywriting, which is basically the art of writing stuff to get people to take action (which is ultimately to give me and my clients money!). Freelance writers write chiefly to inform and entertain.
Now, effective sales copy is not necessarily the same as “good writing”, and writing it calls for a different set of skills from freelance writing or journalism. At the risk of incurring the wrath of my friends in those industries, you’ll find most copywriters can write perfectly acceptable articles, but freelance writers and journalists usually can’t write sales copy to save their lives.
Similarly, website designers and graphic designers are (usually) not sales copywriters and you shouldn’t let them write your sales copy unless they’ve been trained in writing sales copy. Sorry if this offends anyone, but it’s true.
You see, you’re not trying to please an editor or win any awards for soul-wrenching prose. It’s not about writing something entertaining, informative and readable (although it has to be all of those, too). Your intention is to make money. That’s all you care about. That means you have to use some tricks of the trade untrained and inexperienced writers simply don’t know. And the simplest ‘trick’ of all is writing to stimulate the emotions of your reader, rather than appealing to his or her logic. Everyone tells you they buy for rational and logical reasons, and they may even believe it, but real-time MRI scans have shown we decide in the limbic system before it even hits the neocortex.
Fortunately, though, it we can apply and stick to some pretty solid formulae handed down the generations from copywriting master to apprentice since old Caxton first put ink to paper. Writing persuasive and compelling copy is actually fairly simple, because it’s a formulaic process. It’s skill, in other words; and that means it’s something YOU can learn to do. Better yet, the really important bits are already hard wired into you
I promise, you can without too much effort learn to write much better copy than any of your competitors, and thus reap the reward of higher sales figures and at higher prices. It doesn’t matter if you were terrible at English at school or haven’t written anything more demanding than a shopping list for the last 20 years. If you can speak well enough to string words together to make sentences, and you know about your products and services, you can write effective sales copy.
And the easiest way to start?
Write like you speak. Write every letter or marketing piece as if it were a note to a beloved aunt or a favoured uncle, and you won’t go far wrong.
Yes, I know you wanted something complex, funky, and new… but that’s the secret, I’m afraid. And sticking to it is how I’ve become one of the top copywriters out there.