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Time and time again I see sales copy with one essential element that is completely missing in action. Any guesses as to what that might be?

It’s something that proves what you say is true. It’s the little thing that makes a believer out of a skeptic. Sometimes it’s off to the side, and sometimes it’s featured front and center. And the better it is, the more you need to show it off. It’s crucial for making sales.

Have you guessed it?

It’s PROOF.

Proof that what you claim is true. Proof that your customers get the results you claim they will get. Proof that your product works. Proof that you won’t disappear in the night with your customer’s money.

It’s the difference from almost making a sale to MAKING the sale.

Here are seven different types of proof you can use in your copywriting, regardless of whether it’s an email, blogpost or sales page. Anytime you’re talking about your product, remember to include some proof.

1. Case studies – These are also known as customer success stories, and they tell a brief story about a customer who got results from your product or service.

For example, “Joe Smith uses this software, and in the first 30 days he saw a 22% increase in conversions.”

It’s best to keep your case studies short and concise, focusing on measurable results whenever you can. Remember, numbers are more persuasive than adjectives.

2. Testimonials – These are written statements from your customers or clients, explaining why they like your product or service. They’re typically quotes from people who’ve used your products or services.

The best testimonials don’t just sing your praises, they also explain details of why they customer endorses you or your product. For maximum impact, use testimonials that include numbers or quantitative results.

3. Endorsements – An endorsement is like a testimonial from someone widely recognized by your prospects.

If a well-known blogger or expert in your field endorses your product, by all means add this to your sales copy. People who trust this well-known individual will then trust your product by association.

4. Research studies – If there are any research studies that clearly show the effectiveness of your product or a component of your product, then use this data in your sales copy.

For example, if you sell an herbal supplement that contains 6 different ingredients, and the effectiveness of each ingredient is backed by research studies, you might include each study in your sales letter in the appropriate places.

The key here is to deliver the information concisely and in layman’s terms. Don’t use scientific lingo – you’ll lose your readers.

5. Visual representation of results – An image is truly worth a thousand words, if it’s the right image. You’re familiar with this technique from weight loss products. They use before and after photos of their clients to show the changes in their body sizes and shapes.

If you can use charts, photos, screenshots or other visuals to prove your product or service works, then by all means do it.

Place captions on your visuals. Studies show that captions are read more than almost any other element on a sales page (other than the headlines.)

Make your captions – well, captivating and self-explanatory. For example, a caption that says, “Janet Smith” doesn’t tell the prospect anything about the product. But the caption, “Janet Smith, after losing 42 pounds in 67 days on the XYZ diet” tells the whole story.

6. Press coverage – If you’ve received praise from a media outlet, then let your prospects know about it.

Quotes from well-known sources are best, since your home town paper might not hold much credibility with the rest of the world.

But if a well-known publication or media outlet has good things to say about your product or service, include that in your sales copy.

7. Social Shares – This is useful if you want to show you have a large audience.

For example, if you have a track record of writing blog posts that get thousands of social media shares, you might make the case that you are a trusted source for information in your field.

Next time you write any sort of copy that promotes a product or service, be sure to include at least one powerful element of proof in your copy.

Advanced technique: Use your proof as part of your headline or sub-headline.

For example, “Ex-Beautician Gets Four $100,000 Job Offers thanks to Our Job Getting System.”

I don’t know about you, but if I was in the market for a new job, I would be super excited to read that sales letter!

It used to be that when I went to the doctor, I would find my favorite magazine in the lobby and read it until the doctor was ready to see me. But this last time, I couldn’t find a single issue. I asked the lady at the desk about it, and she explained that the magazine was so popular, patients were taking it home, so the doctor stopped buying it.

Now there’s a business strategy I don’t recommend – find out what your customers want and then don’t give it to them…

Personally, I would have ordered more subscriptions, not less. Because not only do his patients like the magazine; it also keeps them occupied instead of watching the clock when the doctor is running late (and he is always running late.)

Many businesses do this – they find out what customers want and then don’t give it to them.

I used to have a restaurant I really liked, and one of the things I liked best was they would swap one side dish for another. Then one day they told me they couldn’t do it. It was too difficult to swap baked potato for French fries, or broccoli for green beans, even though they had all four in the kitchen.

I figured if they couldn’t swap sides to give me what I wanted, then I couldn’t eat there. And I don’t.

Another restaurant used to cook their ahi tuna all the way through if you asked. Then they got a new chef who insisted that patrons only eat food the way he liked to prepare it. In other words, I could eat raw tuna or I could go elsewhere. Now I go elsewhere.

The trick to a successful business is to truly understand what your customers want and then give it to them, and keep on giving it to them.

It’s not that difficult. Yet so many marketers and business people get this wrong.

And when in doubt, just ask. One time I was going to consolidate all of my courses into one big course and actually ship out a physical product, because I’d heard this was the thing to do.

But first I asked my customers how many thought they would buy it. The answer was, only about 1% would even consider it. Thank goodness I didn’t do it.

One last tip – develop your products or services based on what your customers really want, and not what they should want. Maybe your customers should want to learn how to do an easy task in their business, but they’d rather hand the task over to you to do.

Ok, so your customers have told you about another product they want to buy from you, and you can be obliged to sell it to them!

Giving customers what they actually want may be the greatest business secret of all.

I’m going to try and NOT go on a rant here about how, “These days” no one in marketing is telling the truth, everything is exaggerated or an outright lie, lies of omission are so common they’re expected, and so forth.

Okay, maybe that was my rant.

My point is, there are plenty of marketers out there streeeeeetching the truth until the truth is completely lost. And yes, these marketers often do experience short term success. If a person wanted to make money and run, this is the method they would use.

But they better keep running, because government agencies are getting a lot better at not only monitoring what happens online, but also apprehending and charging people when they out and out lie to customers.

In my opinion, a far better strategy is to look at the long picture and tell the truth.

Marketers and businesses who tell the truth might not make as much money up front, but in the long run their businesses will survive while so many others fail.

They’ll get recommended by their clients to other prospects. They’ll get more repeat business. And their proprietors can sleep at night, too.

“The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.” – William Bernbach, cofounder of international advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), director of many breakthrough ad campaigns.

I don’t know when William said this quote, but I do know he died in 1982. Yes, truth has been scarce in advertising and marketing for a long time – perhaps as long as its been around.

Yet people want the truth. They crave the truth. And when they find someone who will tell them the truth, they will do one of two things: Either look elsewhere for the “quick fix,” and eventually come back to the person who told the truth, or recognize the truth as being what they need in the first place.

Either way, if you’re in it for the long term, the truth is the way to go.

Here’s a classic example: You teach people how to make money online. You tell them it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work. There is a learning curve. They’ll need to invest both time and money. They’ll make mistakes along the way and get discouraged, and that’s okay, because it’s part of the process. But if they stick with you, and they do the work, in a year’s time they’ll have a very real, viable business that replaces their current income.

Or, you tell them they will make a gazillion dollars by Tuesday with no work… But they don’t make a gazillion dollars, or whatever you promised them. And they’re mad. They want their money back.

Hopefully at that point you’ve pulled up stakes and you’re running (just kidding) or you still have their money and refund it (that’s the right answer.) And when they get their money back from you, where are they going next? To the person who told them this takes time, effort and money. Because that person told them the truth, and they realize that’s exactly what they need.

Look, I understand how tempting it is to stretch the truth, to lie by omission (yes, that is a lie when you don’t tell them something they need to know) or to make things “rosier” than they are. It’s all a part of marketing and advertising.

But should it be? Only you can decide.

… And see what your best competitors are doing, too. When you look at a marketing campaign from the outside in, you miss a lot. But when you join competitor’s lists and let them sell to you, you’ll get to dig beneath the surface and see what’s REALLY happening.

Read their emails, subscribe to their membership sites and buy their products. Take note of their entire selling process from start to finish. You might do screen capture for upsells, download pages and so forth.

I am NOT advocating that you copy what they’re doing – at least not blatantly. But if you notice a step they take that seems to be working, you might add that step to your own funnel as well.

For example, I bought a product the other week that had sales offers on the download page. There is nothing new about additional sales offers in general, except these offers were increasing in price by a penny every 7 seconds, right on the download page. It was instantly clear these products were being sold, and the price was going up.

I forgot about downloading my product and instead went immediately to the sales page of one of the products, where I found the same thing – the price was increasing by a penny every 7 seconds.

The counter wasn’t obnoxious, but it was in plain view in the upper right-hand corner the entire time as I scrolled through the sales letter. And I never would have seen this if I hadn’t purchased the product.

So if you want to increase your own sales and profits online, find the top selling products in your niche, enter their sales funnel, buy the product and learn everything you can along the way that you can apply to your own business.

Do this, and instead of re-inventing the wheel, you’ll leverage the experience of other successful campaigns and businesses for your own benefit so you can grow your business faster, and help more people by ensuring your products and services are sold to the most buyers who will benefit from them as possible.

You know what a lead magnet is – something given away for free in exchange for an email address. You join their list, you get their free report / video / book / software etc.

I recently ran across a lead magnet that blew my mind. And I didn’t even realize I was being set up to join a list – or that it WAS a lead magnet – until I was hooked like a prize fish at the end of this master marketer’s line.

Here’s what happened:

I was on this marketer’s site when a headline caught my eye. This was a headline you might find on a book or a paid product – in fact, if it had been a book, I probably would have bought it on the spot. It promised a big benefit and had a curiosity element to it that immediately got my interest.

The headline was on an article and I started reading it. It was giving me methods to accomplish a certain task, but it was doing it in story form. I didn’t even realize until later that it was telling me what to do, but not how to do it. And the story was captivating, as good as any fiction you might read.

I was fully engrossed in the story when it was about to come to a climax and it suddenly – stopped.

It just stopped. There was no more to read. I was left hanging. But of course, there was a subscription form, and a note that said only subscribers of this website would be given the secret information contained at the end of the story.

Yes, I filled out the form. By that point, I would have paid money to get the rest of the story.

I’ve purposely kept this vague because it’s probably not a good idea to copy this marketer’s story. What he wrote works for him and his site. What will work for you and your site is likely to be far different.

But what I can tell you is that no matter who your audience is, they love stories.

And if you can weave the information they want inside of that story and insert a cliffhanger point that compels them to join your list, then I suspect a very high percentage of people who read the beginning of your story will subscribe to your newsletter.

Be sure to have a title so good, people would pay for a book with that title, even if you didn’t give them a book description.

Keep the story intriguing and entertaining, while giving the lessons promised.

And in the portion they read prior to subscribing, only give them the secrets of what to do, not how to do it.

For that, along with the story ending, they’ll need to join your list. 😉

For those of you who remember or have heard of Earl Nightingale, you may recall his recording about “Greener Pastures.” He made the point that every patch of grass, or pasture, looks greener from a distance.

When you’re standing on your own lawn, you see every weed and brown spot. But when you look across to your neighbor’s lawn, it looks lush and green like a golf course.

But the fact is, grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence – it’s an illusion. Just as it’s an illusion that the next customers you get will be the best customers who spend the most money and so forth.

This might be one of the greatest secrets of making money via marketing of all time.

Nearly every business owner fails to fully mine the gold in his own customer list. They’re running around trying to get NEW customers, instead of focusing on their current customers.

Jay Abraham made a fortune simply by going to existing businesses and showing them how to fully utilize their most under-valued and neglected asset – their own customers.

Here are some ideas for extracting maximum value from your own customers.

• Offer more products and services.
• Make offers to your list more often.
• Communicate consistently.
• Create VIP groups and memberships with special privileges.
• Let your list know you reward frequent purchasers as well as high volume purchases (if applicable).
• Identify and focus on the hyper responsive customers and give them more opportunities to spend money with you.
• Create and sell continuity programs, or sell affiliate continuity programs.
• Sell renewable products or services.
• Learn about your customers and tailor offers to match their needs and wants.
• Communicate frequently with information, education, and even fun stuff.
• Incentivize greater usage.
• Analyze your customers and separate them into A-B-C groups based on their responsiveness. Then develop strategies to upgrade the C’s to B’s and the B’s to A’s.
• Become the resource in your niche for your customers, offering discounts on other people’s products through joint ventures.
• Ask your customers what they want and what you can do for them as well as what they want to buy right now.

You could even take this one business idea – extracting maximum value from a customer list – and help local businesses to increase their own incomes while paying you a nice percentage of the additional profits.

In marketing, your target market must be small enough that the resources you’re able to commit will have a big impact.

Imagine carrying the heaviest rock you can hold and dropping it into a small pond. The splash would be huge, loud and noticed by anyone around, and the ripples would cover the entire surface.

Now imagine dropping that same rock into the middle of the ocean. No one would even notice. Imagine dropping a rock 100 times that size in the middle of the ocean. Again, no one would notice a thing.

The rock, of course, is your resources.

When new marketers come to me looking for advice, I ask them who their target market is. Nine times out of ten, it’s, “Everyone who wants to ___.”

It might be everyone who needs to lose weight, make money or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Their market is too big and they’ll never get noticed.

But if they target teachers who want to make extra money online, or nurses, or fast food workers, they’ll probably make a killing.

Still not convinced? Think of the pond versus the ocean, and the rock as being your marketing. How much marketing will you have to do to get noticed in the ocean? You’ll need the resources of a Coca-Cola to do it.

Now imagine getting noticed in the pond. Heck, if you just stand up and say, “I’ll teach everyone in the pond how to lose 10 pounds this month, or how to make $1,000 a month online,” you’ll get noticed right away.

When someone describes their market too broadly, I know they’re going to fail. But when they know exactly who their audience is and how they’re going to reach them, I know they’ll do fine.

Gary Halbert once said at a seminar, “If I offer to set you up in the fast food business with a hamburger joint, and you can have any one special advantage you want, what will it be? A clown? Special sauce? Great burgers? A big ad budget?”

This is the point where the audience was shouting out their answers. I don’t know if anyone got the answer right, though.

Did you? What special advantage would you want?

Gary’s answer was, “A starving crowd.”

If the people are starving, and you’re there with burgers, do you really need any of those other things?

Look at a roach coach – those food wagons that come around to factory parking lots, special events and so forth. Their food is often bad, overpriced and unhealthy. Yet they get swarms of eager customers. Why? Because they go where the starving crowds are.

What is a “starving crowd?”

It might be people with a pressing problem, like a certain health crisis or being overweight.

It could be a market in the midst of change and upheaval, with people looking for answers and help. Health care and insurance in the U.S. might fit this category, since the rules keep changing.

It could be a market in pain, like retail stores trying to survive against internet shopping.

It could simply be people who are hyper-passionate about their particular interest, such as horses, or golf, or investing.

Ideally, you want either one of these starving crowds:

1. A group of buyers with an aggravation that gives them sleepless nights, anxiety, ulcers, rage and so forth, where you can solve their problem or provide something to help. For example, tax problems, health problems, childcare problems and so forth.

2. Or a burning desire for something you can provide. For example, a way to make money, better a golf score, achieve a high mark on an entrance exam, etc.

The two categories can, of course, overlap, which is even better. Worrying about bills or hating a job overlaps with making money from the internet.

Your goal as a marketer is to identify one of these markets and build the right offer for what that market wants right NOW, versus developing an offer and then figuring out who might want to buy it from you.

Yes, I know you might have heard a version of this before, but it’s so crucial to your success, that it bears repeating time and time again.

Choose your market, find out what they want to buy today, and offer them exactly that. When you do, your marketing is already halfway done.

It’s all about fancy copywriting and Jedi mind tricks to make the sale with your copy, right? After all, that’s what most copywriters will tell you.

However, at least half the battle is won via selection of your audience, rather than how good your message, your copy or your offer is.

If you’ve got mediocre marketing aimed at a highly targeted and well selected audience, you’ll get great results.

But if you’ve got exceptional, world-class, you-hired-the-best-of-the-best copywriter kind of marketing aimed at the wrong market or even a poorly targeted market, at the very best you’ll get mediocre results.

And odds are, you won’t even do that well.

You need to know who your customers are and where to find them. Who is your ideal client? What do they want, what do they need, what are their objections, and what do they look for in your product or service?

Here’s an easy example – not all targeting is this simple, but it gives you the idea:

You have a pet-related product and so you target all pet owners. That is sloppy targeting, and yet I see it daily.

Or, you have a cat product for senior cats who have chronic kidney disease.

Now you know exactly who your market is – no, it’s not cats with kidney disease, it’s their humans. Talk to them, find out their struggles, fears, worries, problems and so forth with dealing with this disease.

Ask them why they try so hard to keep their kitties healthy rather than go get a new, younger cat (if you’ve ever loved a pet, you already know the answer to that one.)

When you have a product that can help these particular cat owners, you can have a sloppy marketing campaign and it won’t matter a bit – they will buy if your product helps solve their real problem, I guarantee it.

Spend half your marketing time finding out exactly who your market is and targeting those people. Spend the other half crafting your marketing message, and you will have a marketing campaign that meets the mark.

Let’s talk about human nature for a second.

If I were to offer you a succulent, moist, still-warm-from-the-oven piece of triple chocolate cake…

…while simultaneously slamming my heel into your toes…

…which one would you notice? Which one would you react to?

And which one would you still be thinking about tomorrow?

People will spend an enormous amount of time, money and energy to avoid pain. They’ll avoid confrontation with bosses, neighbors, spouses and kids to avoid emotional pain. They’ll take drugs to suppress physical pain.

Your job as a successful marketer – whether you like it or not – is to use this pain to help them find a solution.

Some might call this exploitation – digging around in the pain and agitating it to motivate people to take action. You’re making the pain worse before you finally prescribe the cure.

But it’s the pain that makes people take action. And if you can help people, then it’s your job to do it. And to help people, you’ve got to use the best method possible to motivate them to take action – which is aggravating the pain and making them feel it until they cry ‘uncle.’

I know what you’re thinking – you won’t make their pain worse to sell them the solution. Instead, you’ll motivate them with a positive picture of what their life will be like once they have the solution. Well, you’re half right.

Understand this – Humans will do far more to avoid pain than to receive reward. They’ll run as fast as they can away from the stick, but they’ll creep up on the carrot and many times never even reach it.

Most people cannot clearly describe what they want, which is why they never get it. But they can tell you exactly what they don’t want. By rubbing their noses in what they’re trying to avoid, you momentarily make the pain worse until it’s unbearable. They want to take action now. They NEED to take action NOW.

And then you motivate them with the positive picture of all the benefits they’ll receive from doing this thing you want them to do.

The niche doesn’t matter, either. Whether you’re selling software, information, washers and dryers or stocks and bonds, agitate the problem, then offer the solution.

Examples:

Software – How much work are they having to do, and how much business are they missing because they don’t have your automated solution? They’ve already wasted tons of time and lost a fortune. Their competitors are ahead of them, and soon their business will be on the scrap heap. Unless… unless they grab your software now, because then they can get x benefit and y benefit and z benefit, etc.

Health Information – They’re overweight, tired, catching colds and at risk for serious disease. From here, it only gets worse – much worse. Sick, in pain, bed ridden, in the hospital, heart attacks, chemo and drugs and … but wait. They can turn their health around, starting right now.

Washers and dryers – Think how much extra they’ve already paid in water bills because they don’t have energy efficient models. Plus, the wear and tear to their clothes from inferior washers and overheating dryers, their shoddy appearance wearing these clothes, making a lousy first impression at work because of how bad their clothes look. But you can solve it all today…

Investments – They’ve already lost a fortune by not using your services. Just look at the returns your clients have been getting, look at how much money they started with versus what they have today. If only they had started with you sooner, all the time and money lost. But right now you have perhaps your best investment advice yet, and timing is critical…

Okay, you get the idea. No matter what you’re selling, you can agitate the problem and then offer the solution.

Remember, in movies the hero doesn’t arrive to save the day until things look completely bleak and desperate and the cause is all but lost. Effective marketing is no different.