When you spend valuable dollars on marketing materials and activities, you are probably hoping for some kind of response.

But, are you really conveying that urge to respond to your prospects? Strange as it may seem, many campaigns fail simply because the prospect is not told how to respond!

So, the first step in getting more response from all your marketing materials, is to have a very firm idea of what reaction you want those pieces to stimulate. Are you looking for telephone enquiries; walk-in traffic; on-line sales? If you do not have a clear objective in your mind, your prospect is hardly going to develop their own.

With that very simple fact in mind, let’s look at some surefire ways to get more people responding to your print and digital marketing materials.

1. Lead with Benefits

Clever headlines and catchy puns are great, but they are highly over-rated as a way to get people to buy anything.
Try and appeal to the emotional factors behind the purchasing decision – what fears or worries will your product or service help to allay; what frustrations does it solve; in what ways are your clients’ lives easier, better or more enjoyable for buying from you?

Find some aspect of your ‘solution’ that is a real issue for your prospects, and make sure that is up-front in all your communications.

2. Set Yourself Apart

Find a really good reason why people should choose you over your competitor.

Whether you position yourself on price, quality, selection, service or something else, it is vital that you identify some area in which you can promise to excel. If you’re not sure what that is, then consider doing some marketing research – ask your clients why they chose you; ask your prospects what they are looking for.

If you work in an industry where one provider is hard to differentiate from another, then consider promoting yourself as a specialist in a certain field. If, for instance, you are a financial consultant, you could promote yourself as specialising in retirement savings for small business owners. There is nothing like the word ‘specialist’ to give you an edge!

3. Provide All the Information

There is a never-ending debate on whether copy should be short or long, which usually consists of most people claiming that their own clients don’t have time to read long copy.

Well, guess what – long copy outsells short copy almost every time.

If your prospect is going to take valuable time out of their day to even glance at your piece, then they are hoping to learn something. They are hoping to learn what you can do for them. It is your job at this point to give enough information to guide them to a decision that you have something important to offer.

Having said that, your copy will only be read if it is unfailingly interesting and relevant to your prospect, and if it is well written and easy to read.

4. Make Your Layout Easy to Scan

We are all busy, and bombarded by all kinds of messages all day long.

Even if you are successful in broadcasting your benefits and sparking the interest of your prospect, it is still very easy to lose them if your message is too hard to read.

Think about how your prospect will look at your message:

Headline and graphic. These will be the elements that will catch the eye of your prospect and convince them (or not) to look further.

Highlights. As your prospect scans very quickly down your text, they will glance at anything that stands out. Make sure that all your most important points are highlighted using bold or underlined text, sub-heads, bullet-points, colour and so on. This makes your text look inviting, and makes it easy for your prospect to quickly assess your message.

Sign-off. The reason that all sales letters have a ‘PS’ is that this is one of the first parts to be read. After that initial scanning, your prospect will seek the ‘bottom line’ (on the bottom line), so to speak. The end of your text is a very important place for reiterating your main benefit and urging a response.

Text. If you still have your prospect by this point, then they will return and read the text properly to learn the full story.

5. Ask for a Response

Finally, make sure you make it clear to your prospect what kind of a reaction you would like from them, and ask for it.
Your contact details should be clearly visible on every page, and the response mechanism should be simple.
If possible, always give a choice of response vehicles – some people like e-mail, while others prefer the telephone; some people like to buy on-line using a credit card, while some still prefer to mail a cheque. Give options whenever possible.

So, five very simple points, but if you pay great attention to them they will make an enormous difference to the response you get from all your activities.