Three Letters to Make Your Marketing Better

Direct response in just three letters

I want to show you how a great deal of Direct Response marketing's successes can be explained by just three letters.

When you understand this, you'll have a real insight into how to move buyers to a final decision quicker, including for long sales cycles, and with higher likelihood of a yes from qualified leads.

To do that, it helps to ask and answer this question first: Why does DR even exist?

Making ice cream illegal

There’s a law in Alabama against having ice cream in your pocket. That sounds bizarre, but there's a reason.

Ice cream in pockets used to be a problem. It was a trick horse thieves used to lure horses away and the ice-cream law was an answer to that problem. That's what direct response is: An answer to a problem (one you probably have). The problem is this:

How do you know if your marketing is working? Not just the whole system, but individual parts and changes you make? Because when you know that, you can invest more into what works and stop paying for what doesn't.

The first part of the solution is attribution and tracking. But that’s only half the story. What do you track?

Turning interest into sales

Think of the last car ad you watched. What do they want you to do at the end? Call a dealership? Go to their website? Talk to your partner about getting a new car?

​They leave that up to you, right? Direct response leaves no doubt about what to do next. It tells you. It points the way and makes it as easy as possible. It explains the benefits of taking that action and gives you a reason to act now.

This matters because people are generally bad at taking action, even when they want to and are motivated. Just look at the $5.63BN productivity market, or the empty gyms in February.

​That’s the real problem direct response has solved for our businesses: Inaction.

​Long sales cycles are largely inaction, not people making decisions.

You want your leads to self-qualify. You want them to learn more about you. You want them to reach out to you or make a direct purchase. And you want that to happen as quickly as possible.

​Direct response tells your leads how to do that. Makes it as easy as possible and gives them great reasons to do so. It elicits a measurable, direct response. An action we can measure.

The three most powerful letters in marketing

The three letters that direct response uses to drive those decisions are CTA (Call To Action). These are buttons on your site that invite readers to opt in, learn more, or book a call. They are the last line in your email suggesting a time for your next call.

(Sales people have a similar rule: always book the next meeting.)

​Effective marketing is built around the success of your CTAs. Because if your leads don't act, if they don't move forward, you don't have a business.

And using them well is not that difficult. Here are some guides.

Call to Value

Joanna Wiebe, the copywriter who developed Conversion Copywriting, teaches copywriters to write CTAs that are Calls to Value. Here’s how that works.

“Learn more.”

_vs_

“Discover three ways CTAs can grow your business”

​Or…

“Submit”

_vs_

“Send us your question and we’ll get back to you in less than 30 minutes.”

​It’s giving instructions vs offering value. It's giving a reason to click and explain the benefit.

There will always be a CTA.

Dan Kennedy, the father of modern information marketing, has ten rules of direct response marketing. The second is…

There will always be a CTA.

​If you have an article, have a CTA at the end. Have one on your LinkedIn profile page. Bottom of your emails. Always tell the reader what you’d like them to do next, how, and why.

As if your business depended on them

In 1971, Gary Halbert was a bills-unpaid, broke marketer.

Down to his last shot, he went to his basement to write a sales letter for an idea he had, and he gave himself this challenge…

​What would I write if my life depended on it?

​He devoted that intensity to every sentence. To the envelope. To the stamp. To where the letters were posted from.

​The letter he wrote was less than 400 words. And it worked.

(You've probably seen what it was selling. My aunt and uncle have it on their kitchen wall in Wicklow. It's a framed scroll with their family coat of arms and a text on the family's name.)

At one point, that letter was reportedly bringing Halbert in over $300,000 a day. He sold that business for a reported $78 million.

That letter has been analysed by marketers seven ways to Sunday since then, but the biggest lesson is not what Halbert wrote. It’s the intensity of his focus.

​That is the biggest failing with most CTAs. They are treated as something you stick at the bottom of the page, like a footnote. 

​Treat them like stars. Devote attention, love, and effort to them. They are the engine of your marketing.

The Rule of One

Another giant of direct response, Michael Masterson, gave us the Rule of One.

​Since Masterson first introduced it, the Rule of One has taken on its own life, but for you and me, it means this:

​Make a compelling case for the one action you want your reader to take and nothing else.

​Keep your copy as narrowly focused as possible and pointing directly at the CTA. You generally want only one CTA per page/section/asset (there are exceptions - home pages and pricing tables are two).

Help your leads self-qualify

Not everyone is a good fit for you, and your offer and part of your marketing's job is to help readers self-qualify. CTAs can do that by helping people who are not suited to your offer to opt out. That will save both of you time and money. An example for an architect might be:

I work with clients who typically have a €150,000-plus budget for their home renovation. If you'd like to book a call to see what's possible if we work together, click here.

This immediately helps people self-qualify.