Lesson 7: How candor is the key to a successful connection with Sam
All about the second of the 4 Cs
When I first introduced you to Copywriting Night School, I mentioned that when you’re a freelancer, household industry, or small business, the thing you’re selling is you.
The personal connection Sam feels with you is therefore very important.
And I also mentioned how many of my clients and customers have confided to me that they don’t quite feel “right” about other marketing experts they follow. Not just the gurus — anyone with half a lizard brain can tell they are money-grubbing shysters — but even bona fide experts who, in my estimation, are above reproach.
It is not that these experts come across as sleazy or untrustworthy, exactly. I don’t think it’s really about what they are doing in their writing.
It’s what they’re not doing.
There are some vital components missing in their copy, which together I call candor. It is the antidote to...
Breathlessness
“Our customers have been utterly WRAPPED with this product, and now for only a very LIMITED time I’m offering it to YOU. The best part is, you’re covered by our INSANE 90-day money back guarantee, so there’s LITERALLY no reason for you NOT to act RIGHT NOW...”
Hysteria
“Even though this product is backed by our UNCONDITIONAL money-back guarantee, there are some people who will let FEAR prevent them from grabbing this ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME DEAL! How unfortunate — a decision they may REGRET for the rest of their lives...”
Dullness
“This product is guaranteed for 30 days. If you’re aren’t completely happy, return it for a full and prompt refund...”
Sleaziness
“I want to make this a no-brainer for you, so I’m covering this product with the personal guarantee I reserve for my friends. Because I do consider you a friend...”
These examples are extreme to easily illustrate the point, but even when otherwise good sales copy lacks candor, Sam starts to notice that it is sales copy. He stops treating it as a communication from you to him, stops thinking about what you are saying; and he starts treating it as a calculated effort to get him to act, starts thinking about how you are doing that.
This effect is especially obvious in emails. Since sales emails must most closely mimic a genuinely personal communication, they are the least tolerant of failure. But we don’t need to worry about such high-pressure copy right now. Let’s work where there’s more room for error, so you can master the basics. Let’s look at how candor works in your guarantee.
(Candor isn’t just for guarantees and emails. Like all of the 4 Cs, it is for everything. Just as all your copy must be clear, all your copy must be candid. I’m just using the guarantee to teach candor because it is particularly well-suited to that purpose.)
The elements of candor
As with the other Cs, I divide candor into three main elements. I’m only going to sketch them here, because I think they are the most self-explanatory of the 4C elements. Tomorrow’s lesson will go into my secret sauce for easily writing with candor.
1. Authenticity
You’ve probably heard people say that authenticity is hard to find on the web. Thus it is especially valued.
There’s a lot of truth to this. One of the huge problems with internet communication is how anonymizing it is. Even if people know who we are — indeed, even if we know them in real life — the screen is an opaque barrier that shields and conceals. Behind it, we start acting kind of crazy.
Often that comes out in aggressive or confrontational behavior that we would never engage in face-to-face.
But in copywriting, it tends to manifest differently. It produces a weird, skewed persona, where we downplay some of our characteristics, and up-play others. We start parroting phrases, and patterns of expression that we absorb from other marketers in the internet echo chamber. We start writing puffy, vague prose because we see it everywhere. Or we start trying to be hip, using words like “awesome” in every sentence.
Our message becomes more and more disconnected from how we actually think and express ourselves; it becomes an abstraction, an affectation, a parody of how we suppose people should sound when they write copy.
In other words, it becomes less and less real.
To be persuasive in your copy, to connect with Sam on a personal level that makes him trust you and like you and believe you, requires realness. He easily picks up when you use language that isn’t “you;” when you aren’t presenting yourself authentically. But equally, he notices and responds when you do express yourself authentically; when you do let your personality shine through.
2. Truthfulness
If there’s one thing we expect online, it is that people will bend, twist, stretch, and outright break the truth.
In fact, for many people — especially some marketers — “truth” is really irrelevant. What matters is a narrative that gets the result they want. Whether it’s true might not even occur to them.
Needless to say, Sam hates this. Which means you have a great opportunity with him, if you are capable of being transparently trustworthy.
You cannot toy with the truth. You cannot be the sort of person that Harry G. Frankfurt famously dissects in his treatise On Bullshit: interested only in using words to persuade, with truth or falsehood being of no matter.
We shall all give an account for every worthless word we utter, whether with our mouths or our keyboards. That means, for example:
No inventing trumped-up scarcity — like only offering 10 spots in a program that could take 100 or 1,000 without difficulty;
No dishonest ploys to get more sales — like when gurus claim to have accidentally sent out an email on the wrong day, or that their shopping cart crashed so they’re re-opening it;
No making false claims about your offering — claiming that it does something it doesn’t, or that you will honor a guarantee that you don’t intend to;
No talking about your business partners as your “close friends” — unless they actually are, and you intend to illustrate the fact with a story.
Now, these are general principles; as I say, they don’t just apply to guarantees. But your guarantee is a great place to start practicing truthfulness.
(Here’s something to think about for another time: A powerful implied false claim occurs when you don’t say anything bad at all about your offering. Sam wonders what you’re not telling him. No offering is perfect. This is why deliberately calling attention to a defect, or to some problem that other customers occasionally have with your offering — especially if you can use this to emphasize a benefit — actually tends to increase Sam’s confidence and likelihood to buy. The same is true of allowing negative reviews on your site along with positive ones.)
3. Straightforwardness
This leads directly on from truthfulness. There are other ways to get Sam’s guard up than outright lying, or using dodgy ploys that he suspects are B.S.
You can obfuscate, for example. “When in doubt, mumble.” Well, Sam doesn’t want you to mumble. He wants you to be straight, and to call it like it is. This means getting to the point; not beating around the bush. The less fluff there is in your copy, the less humming and harring, the less waffle, the more he will trust it.
Again, the way that you’ll start learning to write tomorrow naturally produces straightforward copy.
One very helpful way to increase the straightforwardness of your copy is to try removing the first paragraph. You’d be surprised how often the first block of text you write is fluff. It’s like a warmup paragraph; and once you remove it, your copy gets to the point immediately. Sometimes you can remove a couple of paragraphs. In extreme cases you can even remove a whole page!
Candor-breakers
Aside from the practical advice I’ll give you tomorrow, let me quickly describe two major ways that people try to write with candor, but end up wrecking it:
1. Over-personalizing
This most commonly happens when you pretend to be on better terms with Sam than you really are.
Phrases like “my friend” are almost certain to turn Sam off. They call attention to the relationship you’re trying to build. Even though you want Sam to subconsciously feel like your friend, consciously he knows that you’re not.
By the same token, using Sam’s name a lot (in emails) comes across as obsequious and weird. When Sam’s friends write him emails, they don’t put his name in the subject line. They don’t start important sentences with it. In fact, the only time they’re likely to use it is to say, “Hey Sam.”
Marketers will tell you that Sam’s name is very powerful. Yeah. Which is why you shouldn’t shoot yourself in the foot with it.
2. Overusing ALL CAPS
Notice I say overusing. Or maybe I should say, OVERusing. There is a very small amount of room for uppercase words in your copy. People do write that way online to emphasize major points. But it comes across as shouting, and if you do it in every sentence Sam starts to feel kind of shell-shocked.
Better to use italics or boldface in general, and reserve those caps for the occasional time when you really want to make a point. After all, to paraphrase The Incredibles, when every word is special...no word is.
Homework
These exercises will put some useful ideas at your fingertips, to prepare you for writing with candor tomorrow — and well into the future.
Search through your email and find messages you’ve written to friends. Take some time to read a good number of them, and try to pick out specific expressions you use often. Note them down somewhere.
Make a list of things completely unrelated to your offering that you really love, and especially ones that you love to talk about with other people.
In the same way, make a list of beliefs that you hold strongly — things you value, things you think are really important, or things that you think are really bad.
If you’re feeling particularly staunch, ask a friend you trust to have a conversation about one of the topics you listed above, and to deliberately mock you in the process. Seeing how other people imitate you, especially satirically, can be very helpful for noticing patterns in the way you talk or act. Make a note of anything you find. But do make sure it’s a friend you trust. I don’t want to be responsible for unnecessary angst.