McGraw-Hill calls Bob Bly “America’s top copywriter” and his Copywriter’s Handbook is known as a classic. With three decades of writing experience for companies like IBM and Forbes, Bob Bly knows how to use words for maximum persuasive impact.

SuccessTrack: How can business owners increase the response rate to their direct marketing offers?

Bob Bly: The simplest and the easiest way is to offer a premium – a free gift given as an incentive to respond. For example, if you’re selling enterprise software to IT professionals, you can say ‘sign up for our online demonstration of our software today and you can get a free UBS drive’. People love free gifts. It can work for any type of business. There’s a famous guy – Joe Polish – who was a carpet cleaner and to generate leads for his carpet cleaning business, he put together a little booklet called A Consumer’s Guide To Carpet Cleaning which educated consumers about what to look for when hiring a carpet cleaning company. He built his business and became very successful through that appeal.

As a rule of thumb, offering a premium as a way of generating leads can easily double the response, and as a way of generating sales, can easily increase response by up to 25 percent. On the internet, the premium can be free reports, for example. There are two basic types of premium: information (or content) or merchandise.

SuccessTrack: Do you think people are becoming sceptical about premiums?

Bob Bly: Claude C. Hopkins (author of Scientifc Advertising) said human psychology has not changed in a thousand years. People have always been infuenced by free stuff. They still want it. They are now more savvy to what I would call ‘deceptive’ free offers. Is the offer truly free and are there truly no strings attached?

SuccessTrack: How do you suggest business owners overcome that scepticism and caution?

Bob Bly: Scepticism and caution are two completely categories… People in today’s world are more sceptical. Yet they are inundated with advertising. This puts marketers in a dilemma: if we make small promises in our ads no one is interested because all the other ads shout and scream big promises. We need to make a big promise to get their attention and to get their order. But when you make a big promise, they are sceptical. How do you overcome that? If you make a big promise, you need to back it up with big proof. You need to find all the facts and the statistics and the track record and the testimonials that absolutely back up your claim so you make it almost impossible for anyone not to believe it.
If you make a big promise without that proof, you get attention but you don’t get the order because no one believes you.

Caution is different. People aren’t sure they want to spend a lot of money because they’re very worried about the economy. I don’t think you should fight that. I have an online business where I sell information products. Our buyers are more conservative about spending money right now so we’ve focused on putting together offers that are more affordable. Instead of heavily promoting our $200 DVD sets, we’re promoting the cheaper version – a transcript of the DVDs – and it costs $50. We’re selling that instead because we’ve found people still want the information and advice but they feel their budgets are more limited.