Use And Abuse Of THIS Famous Headline

Recently invested in “The Secrets Of Emotional, HOT-Button Copywriting” by Denny Hatch.

Highly recommended by copywriting giants such as Drayton Bird and David Garfinkel and so far I can only agree with them.

Now, in the introduction, Denny revisits the famous headline written by Maxwell Sackheim for the Sherwin Cody School Of English…

“Do You Make These Mistakes In English?”

What single word in this headline makes it so powerful?

Well, it’s…

…the word “These”.

If you’re wondering about this, compare…

“Do You Make Mistakes In English?”

…with…

“Do You Make These Mistakes In English?”

The power of a single word, eh?

The headline works because it hooks the reader with curiosity…

…but amplifies that emotion by focusing that curiosity on specific mistakes.

Now, over the years, this particular headline has been recycled and swiped many times.

Used correctly, it’s still very effective.

But not everyone understands how to to use this style of headline…

…even so-called professionals.

Here’s a recent example in Australia…

“Do Your Investments Have A High Change Tolerance?”

Answer…who cares!?

This is from a funds management group, Perpetual Investments.

Two big problems here…

1) They’ve lapsed into using funds management jargon that most people will not understand (heck, I worked in finance for many years and it’s not clear to me what specifically they mean…could be a number of things).

2) Secondly, leading on from the first error, who cares? It’s not immediately obvious to the reader why this should matter to them.

Another recent example is more a case of not quite hitting the mark (and hence losing effectiveness).

It’s from persuasion expert Kenrick Cleveland, this subject line from a recent email…

“Do you NEED to get people to say yes?”

On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with this, but on closer inspection there’s an element of ambiguity here.

You can read this subject line 2 ways.

The first is along the lines “Are you in a life-and-death situation and have to get someone to agree with you?”

The second is more “Is it really necessary that people agree with you?”…

…which is far less compelling than the first.

So be careful when using question style headlines.  Avoid questions that might elicit a “No” type response in the reader and aim to  harness the power of curiosity in the same way that Maxwell Sackheim did to such great effect.