Personalizing your headlines to your target audience cansignificantly improve your sales response. You can do this bymentioning a person by name, their city, their career field,their job title, or group right in the headline. You will findthis has become quite common in email marketing.
If you can make the person feel that you are talking directly tothem you will normally win their trust which will in turn lead toa sale.
So, rather than trying to hit the broadest audience possible bymaking the headline of your sales letters, ads, or emailsgeneric, break the group down into small niches and address eachniche individually. This does not need to create a lot of extrawork, many times it only requires changing the name of the groupin the headline of your letter or ad. This can be accomplishedeasily with word processing or mail merge tools.
Some headline examples include (simply replace the squarebrackets and enclosed words with your target audience):
[firstname], Have you seen this yet? {for email}
Attention [Small Business Owners]! Here's How To INSTANTLY GetAll The Customers You'll Ever Want! Discover The Little KnownSecrets Of Getting More Customers In A Month Than You Now Get AllYear…That Your Ad Agency Will Never Tell You! {headline for aclassified ad or sales letter - simply change the target marketfor your niche market and change 'Customers' to Clients,Patients, Recur its, Prospects, Leads, etc. to fit your targetaudience.}
Attention [Internet Marketers]! 'Is Your Marketing Being AttackedBy Time Sucking Vampires?'
'Getting Ready To [Retire]? Hot Tips For Those About To[Retire]!' {For a travel agency this could read, 'Getting ReadyTo Travel? Hot Tips For Travelers!'
...or for a tighter niche market, within the travel industry, howabout, 'Getting Ready To Travel Overseas? Hot Tip For OverseasTravelers!'
...or lets focus on vacation travelers with the following,'Looking For That Great Vacation Spot? Hot Tips On The 10 BestPlaces To Spend Your Vacation This Year!'}
...or how about this one from the cover of Reader's Digest: 'GotBack Pain? New Cures'
Each of these headlines, personalizes the message to a specificperson or group. When your reader scans the headline, if theyrecognize their name or a group to which they belong, they willstop and read more of what you have to say, because it applies tothem.
For those who are not members of the target group, they will justmove on, but that's OK, they were not going to buy whatever youhad to offer anyway. So by filtering out those who are justpassing through, you can more accurately target your message to,and get the attention of, those most likely to respond to yourcall to action, whatever that may be.
The tighter match your headline message has to your audience, thebetter will be your response.
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