How Professional Copywriters Reverse Engineer Sales Letters

Watch on YouTube! In this episode, Sean walks you through the way he studies long-form sales letters (better yet, this method can also be applied to any ad or piece of content).

• YOU SHOULD READ BELOW IF...

  You’re an aspiring copywriter who wants to understand why some copy works and some copy doesn’t.

• THIS LESSON WILL HELP YOU TO...

  Critique and mark up any piece of copy you read - and make you think more critically about why certain tactics are effective or not.

Only cool copywriters read below

⬇️

Only cool copywriters read below ⬇️

---

So, say you have a promo. You wanna mark it up and you want to actually get something out of active reading.

I actually get a lot of people ask me…

“How do you mark up promos?”

[“Promo” is short for “promotion” and refers to a piece of copy, typically longform sales letters found in traditional direct-response industries like Financial]

“How do you learn something from marking up promos?”

“What is active or close reading?”

I'm going to tell you.

Objective #1 - Determine the “Big Idea”

First thing you wanna do is either read on a PDF or some sort of surface that allows you to make comments or notes - things that allow you to engage with a text.

I personally prefer printing out promos and writing with a pen.

The first thing that you want to do (and which is actually probably the last thing that you're going to end up doing as you're marking up a promo) is you want to reverse-engineer what the actual ordinary idea of a promo is.

You wanna look for whatever the big idea of a promo is.

The big promise…

The big claim…

The argument…

The emotionally resonant argument that the promo is trying to make.

And then you wanna try to find out what the original, actual real investment thesis or underlying idea of the promo is.

For example, if you are looking at a promo and the big idea is about claiming what are called “freedom checks”, you want to read the promo and you wanna note down what the big idea is at the very top.

And you wanna write down the original idea, which is something like:

“You can get dividend payments from master limited partnerships or other dividend paying royalty stocks.”

Objective #2 - Identify the Lead Type

The second thing that you want to do is you want to identify the lead type.

There's a book called ‘Great Leads’, written by Michael Masterson and John Forde - I highly recommend that you read that.

This notion of the lead type is also very attached to the customer awareness spectrum.

(And I'll have another lesson about each individual lead type as well, because you should know all these more or less like the back of your hand).

But for now, here are what the different lead types are.

There are:

• Story leads

• Secret leads

• Benefit or promise leads

• Proclamation leads

• Problem solution leads

• Direct offer driven or invitation leads

Every single one of those has different structures and different tropes that they follow.

So it's important when you're reading a promo to understand what kind of lead it is so that you can understand how this promo is structured differently or the same as other promos that you've read.

Objective #3 - Look for “Coupling”

The third thing that you wanna be looking for is any coupling between claims and proof.

So for example, if a promo says…

“Water is wet”

…you want to look for some sort of corresponding piece of evidence or copy that corroborates that claim.

Major kinds of proof that you'll often see in copy is social proof, which typically comes in the form of testimonials or endorsements.

You'll have academic proof that comes from scholarly sources, academic journals, big institutional reports - things of that nature.

You'll have mainstream media proof - stuff that comes from newspapers and television broadcasts.

You'll have celebrity proof or examples of famous people or people out in the public who have done what is being promised in the sales letter itself.

Then you can have historical proof - stuff that comes from books. Analogies to things that have happened in the past.

And then you have a type of proof that really is more or less logical deduction…

“And if this… then that”

or…

“This happened because X, Y, and Z reasons.”

It's just a corroboration of a claim.

That kind of proof is typically useful when it comes to proving the idea that doesn't have any sort of corroborating evidence out there in the world.

For example, your typical syllogisms like “All bachelors are single” because of the definition of the word ‘bachelor’.

Objective #4 - Examine the use of “Dimensionalization”

The fourth thing that you wanna be looking for are what are called ‘Dimensionalizations’.

Now, dimensionalization is one of the most important things that any copywriter can learn or know.

And it's important in any sort of sales package for dimensionalization to take place.

Dimensionalization really just means finding some way to reframe, re-articulate or drive home a point that a piece of copy is trying to make.

For example, if you have a piece of proof that shows somebody turning a hundred dollars into a thousand dollars, it would make sense to dimensionalize that by saying that this person has 10xd their money.

And you can further dimensionalize that by showing that the same result would have turned a thousand dollars into ten thousand dollars.

And then you can take that and dimensionalize that a step further by saying what you could buy or what you could accomplish with that sort of money in your life.

The copywriter David Deutch says that there are nine kinds of dimensionalization.

There's emotion, where you drive home any feelings of love, grief, sadness, greed, anger or fear.

There's personality dimensionalization, where the writer or guru of the copy emphasizes how they feel about a particular point.

There's dimensionalization involving credibility or believability - ways of driving points home that corroborate or emphasize the believability of a point.

There's sensory dimensionalization - stuff involving sense of sight, smell, touch.

There's dimensionalization that emphasizes interest, fascination or curiosity.

You can dimensionalize a point by bringing in some news article or something that's out there in the world that has just happened.

There's numerical dimensionalization (which is the example that I just gave), turning percentages into dollar amounts or turning dollar amounts into percentages.

But another way to numerically dimensionalize is to turn some figure into something more comprehensible.

For example, if you see a geological survey that identifies several billion barrels of oil and a particular basin…

…you just take that number of barrels, multiply it by the current dollar value of a barrel of oil and all of a sudden you have a numerical value attached to that quantity.

One of the examples that David Deutch likes to give is that there are 2,353 people who die every single day from heart disease, which is the equivalent of five 747 jumbo jets crashing into the ocean every day.

Another way to dimensionalize is to reframe or to change perspective of what you're talking about.

For example, if you're selling a beauty cream, you can say something like…

“Your friends will accuse you of having a facelift.”

And another way to dimensionalize is to come up with some sort of historical analogy, or to come up with some sort of event in history that you can compare what you're talking about too.

If you're talking about something in the financial industry (somebody cornering the market, for example), you can compare it to the ‘Onion King’ who cornered the market in onions.

And it's not since the Onion King cornered the market in onions that somebody has so dramatically affected the options market in America.

(By the way, that's a real story. It's one of the reasons why futures traders are banned from trading futures on onions in particular and practically no other commodity).

So, that's dimensionalization.

It's important to pay attention to how copy dimensionalizes things because you want to internalize all the different patterns and structures and different ways of dimensionalizing something so that you can apply that to your own work.

There's no point in copy that should not be dimensionalized or broken down or driven home in some way.

You want to make sure that what you're saying is communicated to the reader effectively - reading and marking up copy is one way of learning how to do that.

Objective #5 - Identify the “Pivot Points”

The other thing that you wanna pay attention to are pivot points or places, where we moved on to a different section of the copy.

(In another video, I'm going to break down the different sections of copy, like the ingredients that go into a sales letter).

But really, the easiest way to do this is to look for the subheads and then try to understand what that section following that subheads does in the context of the larger sales letter.

For example…

• Is it part of the lead?

• Is it the credibility section?

• Is it a proof section?

• Is it a section that is designed to create an enemy?

• Is it a section that explains a mechanism or a catalyst?

• Is it the pivot to the offer?

• Is it a summary of the offer?

• Is it a close?

These are all things that you wanna mark up, so you can see very clearly how a piece of copy transitions from one section to another.

Objective #6 - Study the effectiveness of the Offer

The sixth thing that you want to pay attention to when you're marking up copy is the offer.

A good offer is one that is always framed or articulated to the reader as being BETTER than others.

An offer always needs to appear IRRESISTIBLE or to have desirable benefits that are articulated for a reader.

And an offer needs to be effectively a NO-BRAINER for the reader.

And so what you wanna do when you're reading the offer section (which is typically the latter half or the last 15 pages of a sales letter), you want to be looking for what the copy is doing to make you feel those three things.

In the financial space, the offers typically involve a lead report, a few bonus reports and the newsletter itself.

But it can also include a number of other things.

For example, a text messaging service to alert you of new trades or a money clip to hold all the money that you're going to make from using the service effectively.

There's all sorts of creative ways to build an offer (and we're gonna have a lesson on building offers sometime in the future).

So it's important for you to look at the latter half of sales letters and understand what is it that makes this offer strong and to write it down on the sales letter that you're annotating.

Objective #7 - Analyze the Design Choices

Another thing that you want to note when you're reviewing copy is any design choices that have been made by the copywriter or by the designer…

…are the charts clear?

…do they communicate or evoke an emotion?

…is the promo using a specific color palette to affect certain emotional responses?

…was there anything that you found distracting, attractive or compelling?

Keep in mind that in direct response, ugly is typically better than beautiful.

Ugly is more eye-catching and more attention grabbing, and we are in both the idea AND attention business.

The big tendency in graphic design and art is to make design invisible - to make any design element seem very frictionless.

But direct response is not that way.

For that reason, I highly recommend everybody start getting used to using the Comic Sans font.

Objective #8 - Study available Data

And one of the other things that you want to note down if you have access to this information, is data about how this promo was marketed or how it performed or what it did in the world.

What traffic drivers led you to that particular promo?

What does the order form look like?

Is it on the page?

Is it on the next page behind the fold?

You effectively want to understand the context in which this particular promo that you're reading was delivered unto you.

You can't always do that, but if you can get a hold of that information, I highly recommend you take note of it.

And that's it.

That's how you annotate and closely read a piece of sales copy.

Those are all the things that you want to pay attention to as you're going through a promo, and all the things that you want to be marking up along the way.

So…

Let's get started.

---

---

Recent Posts…