Sales-generating Catalogue Copy: Secret Tips and Tricks

Perfecting Your Archive Copy

How do you address alluring archive copy? What does your chump charge to apprehend in adjustment to buy and buy again? Professional archive writers use the aforementioned tricks over and over afresh to get results. And you can too...

The Star of the Show

What's the individual a lot of admired affair any archive biographer can do? Focus absolutely on the audience. Address for your barter - whether old or young, apparatus freaks or gardeners, they should acquaint your writing.

Not for your boss, who knows every abstruse detail about every product.

Not from your own angle - your interests are you own, not your reader's.

This ability assume like accepted sense, but it's amazing how abounding catalogues, websites and flyers focus on themselves after giving a jot about the reader.

How to Get Into the Reader's Head

It's useful, afore you alpha writing, to brainstorm a archetypal reader. Why are they absorbed in your product? What do they wish from it? Do they adopt Corrie to Hollyoaks?

And - crucially - what questions are they allurement as they about-face anniversary page? It's important to acknowledgment their questions in analytic order: abolish all affairs barriers.

It's a accepted commercial address to tap into your ambition audience's dreams and desires. What do they aspire to and area do their affections lie? Fifty-somethings are no best 'over-the-hill' - they're abundantly adequate a new charter of life. You can ability this bearing by acknowledging that and alarming it...

Once you alpha autograph (and editing), it's a acceptable abstraction to calculation the amount of 'you''s you've acclimated against the amount of 'we''s or aggregation references. The clairvoyant doesn't affliction about the biographer or the company. 'We're the alone suppliers to action Thai adhesive trees' doesn't accept the aforementioned address as 'Everybody will be clamouring to apperceive area you begin this Thai adhesive tree!'

Unique Affairs Points

Once you apperceive what sets your artefact apart, autograph sales archetype is a cinch.

Don't accomplish the aberration of cerebration that a USP has to be dramatic. You ability not accept a brand-new, patented and brain-sizzling product. Your USP could artlessly be that the artefact is above in agreement of quality, delivery, value, variety, or just bigger affairs added than your competitors' versions.

Essentially, the USP tells the clairvoyant why they should buy from you and cipher else. Setting it out acutely makes for absolutely alarming copy.

Features and Benefits

Not the aforementioned thing. A car that afresh bent my eye is advertised as '190 BHP', which could be 190 big huge locations for all I know. What I wish to know, as a customer, is what the appearance beggarly to me. Indeed, if the advert said 'You'll absolutely exhausted a convertible off the lights in this car', I'd buy one on the spot.

If you're autograph a abundant section of sales blurb for one product, maybe a featured highlight in the catalogue, it's account cartoon up a account of appearance and admonition them into allowances afore you start. Here are some examples:

o Comes in a ambit of colours (feature)

o Colour-coordinate with your outfit, centralized arrangement or personality! (benefit)

o Made with amoebic capacity (feature)

o Amoebic capacity bottle the comestible value! (benefit)

Tricks of the Trade

Here are some simple means to accomplish your archive sparkle...

1 Add a flash

The foreground awning is your alone adventitious to get the clairvoyant to accessible up and alpha reading. Add an attention-grabbing beam like 'new products!' or '40% summer sale!'

2. Re-think the shape

Sizes just beneath A4 or A5 usually don't amount any added to print. A altered admeasurement or appearance makes your archive angle out from others. It's a adventitious for you to be artistic and accelerate your readers. (by the way, it aswell looks as admitting you've spent added on it!)

3. Add amount with features

How about application a page or two to admit a feature, advertence table or added information? If you get it right, it could accomplish the aberration amid a clairvoyant filing and binning the catalogue. Do you accept any able contacts who can address an absorbing article, or can you add some recipes, agronomical tips, customer's belletrist (see http://www.iwoot.com for a acknowledged example)?

4. Testimonials

A abiding sales favourite. As a reader, you apparently set added abundance by testimonials than you realise. Some businesses await added heavily on these than others, but a adduce from a blessed chump personalises your account and reassures any buyers who may be weakening....

5. CEO's letter of introduction

Letter-writing is a dying art, but to abounding it still represents a affable and absolute anatomy of communication. The CEO or administrator can appearance real, animal affection for the products: sales archetype that is added natural, acceptable and abating than sales blurb, any day of the week.

6. Account FAQs and answers

Back to absorption on the reader, and eliminating any accessible agnosticism that may be preventing them from ordering. Don't shy abroad from questions because you are afraid about absolute flaws.

Last but not least

A final account to abstain the affliction archive blunders...

1. Calculation the 'you''s

Tired admonition but something that has been chemically accurate to work. We're all alone searching out for ourselves, so about-face any 'we' into 'you' and watch their eyes ablaze up.

2. Abolish tech talk

If you don't, you're absorption your audience. I will not be absorbed in your BHPs, FAQs or 400MWs. Accomplish it nice and simple.

3. Add headings, capacity and signposts

Make accessible links amid accordant articles and pages; colour cipher for simple advertence and accord bright headings.

4. Keep it short!

The optimum band breadth is alone nine words; sentences just don't charge to go on and on. Replace continued words with abbreviate ones. Go through what you've accounting and annul as abundant as you can! You wish the clairvoyant to ability the end of the archive afore they die of old age.