A few posts back in “Stop Press! Australian Copywriting Genius Attacked By Crazed Online Marketing Guru…” I talked about attention grabbing headlines.
I also mentioned that there was another “hidden” copywriting and marketing lesson in that post. What I was referring to is what’s called the “Zeigarnik Effect”. This is, put simply, the need for people to complete unfinished thoughts. Or, more simply, to know what happens next.
There is something deeply ingrained in the human psyche that drives us to want to know how something works out or what happens next. You can see this effect in action most clearly in soap operas. The attention of the audience is captured and retained by the desire to know “what happens next”? (“Who shot JR?” for readers old enough to remember “Dallas”!)
In copywriting, it can be a very powerful device when used properly. If you capture your reader’s attention at the beginning of the letter with a story and then break the story before the conclusion, there is a very powerful drive for the reader to keep reading to find out what happens.
As an example think about the classic “Wall Street Journal” sales letter that begins with the story of “Two young men”. What was the difference? You have to read to the end of the letter to find out. (Note: For readers not familiar with the letter and to avoid the psychic torture of not knowing what happens (!) the answer is that the successful guy had specialised knowledge that he got from the Wall Street Journal, of course!)
This technique is also known in NLP as a “loop” and you can use multiple loops together. That’s a topic for a different post.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you start a story or open a “loop” you must finish it or you’ll drive your readers nuts. I don’t have hard data to back this up but my guess is that unfinished stories or loops will adversely affect the response to your sales letter.
And this post is a lesson in itself. I left it too long to finish the story. Well, I concluded it now so we can move on. And in the next installment…
(…tune in to the next exciting episode to discover more sales boosting secrets!)