How To Write The Ultimate Headline

The headline is probably the most difficult (and the most important) part of your sales copy. At this point, your reader has no commitment to your sales piece. They haven’t dedicated any time to reading about your product, and it is very likely that you won’t get them to either if your headline is not spot-on.
In the popular sales writing acronym AIDCA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Conviction, and Action), the headline facilitates the first A, Attention.
Your headline plays the role of grabbing your reader’s attention in less than 5 seconds. Write a headline that fails to do this and you lose your reader. It really is that ruthless.
In fact, the headline becomes even more important when we place it in the online environment where people can move on at the click of a button. There is no great physical action required of them to disregard your sales piece. Unlike a physical direct mailing where they are burdened with the effort of screwing it up and throwing it in the bin, all they need to do is click. Just one click. Gone.
So how do you write a headline that grabs the reader’s attention in such a short period of time? Use benefits.
Find the most prominent benefit of your product through the eyes of your target market profile and present this in your headline.
Often, people try to induce curiosity in their headline at the expense of mentioning the major benefit of their product.
There is, in fact, solid evidence that mentioning your product’s main benefit in the headline is the most effective way to grab your readers’ attention.
When a big US advertising agency tested three headlines, one mentioning a benefit, one delivering news, and the other arousing curiosity, they found that the benefits headline outperformed the other two. In fact, when they took this a step further and began to test a combination of these three elements in their headlines they found that the headline with ALL THREE elements performed the best. Although this may be hard to achieve, it is what you should strive for in your headline.
Stuck for ideas?
Try starting with ‘how’ or ‘now’. For example:
o How you can save money on your energy bills WITHOUT cutting back on your electricity or gas usage o Now, lose at least 10lbs in under 1 month without doing one bit of exercise
Try to use ‘power’ words in your headline like:
o Love
o Cash
o Die
o Hate
o Sex
o Huge
o Chop
o Fizz
o Crash
o Win
o Lose
One of the most successful headlines in the life insurance industry was:
“Cash if you die, cash if you don’t”
This was largely because they used three power words out of the eight words in the headline.