With the headline I’ve also intentionally limited the readers to people who are moving, and thereby limited the response: motivating only the people who are moving to respond. I don’t think the title of the booklet would be interesting to the general reader, unless they live in Nebraska. But we won’t get into that again – I’ve already received my first call from someone in Alabama — unfortunately I couldn’t understand him — he was mumbling and it sounded like he had no teeth.
The objective of the first part of the headline is to elicit a quite high readership – that’s the “FREE BOOKLET” portion of our headline. Then we limit the response by coming up with a booklet title that is of interest only to people who are in our targeted market: people who are moving. Two parts to the headline – the first part invites wide readership, the second part limits response. Nice, huh?
Another example: You’ve sold your moving company and bought a roofing company. Obviously you have a death wish, or you like supporting the insurance industry by paying some of the highest premiums outside the medical community. You take out an ad with the headline, “FREE Booklet: How to Pinpoint Where Your Roof is Leaking!”
Now, with your qualifying headline, people who are moving don’t call or write to you anymore, but anyone who has a leak in his roof does. The reader service card fills up with people who have leaky roofs.
Again, the wording “FREE Booklet” draws the maximum headline readership, and the “How to Pinpoint Where Your Roof is Leaking!” portion limits respondents to your better prospects only, those who actually have leaky roofs and need to find where they leak. You send less literature and enjoy more well-qualified prospects, especially if it’s raining.
This formula for encouraging readership yet limiting response also works with inviting phone calls, which by itself has a 1000% better qualification. The fact that readers can’t respond with just a pencil dramatically limits response by itself, and the necessity of picking up the phone and calling further adds to the validity of the prospect.
While it’s all in the headline, there’s something else, too. When the phone rings, the last thing I ask a prospect for is their name and address so I can send them our free booklet. No, I mean it. That’s literally the last thing I do on the phone. The first thing I do is see if they’re a real prospect, or simply near a phone and saw our toll free number.
When people are getting something for free, they’re in a good mood and very receptive to answering a few of your questions. After all, they’re getting something for free and they wouldn’t want to jeopardize that. So that’s the time for you to dig for information.
If you get me on the phone and in what I hope is a pleasant 2 minute conversation, I ask you things like “You really thinking of buying one of these?” and “How many million are you thinking of buying?” When did you need this by?” “What color did you want?” “Do you want me to see if we have it in stock?” “Is this for you (your company) or a gift?” “When were you thinking of buying one?”
After you’ve failed the Jeff Dobkin 2 minute exam, and I don’t think you’re a viable prospect, or if you’re nasty, or if my secretary has been nasty to me, or if I had a fight with my wife, or… anyhow… if you fail, I point you to our website where an electronic version of our booklet resides.
In this regard, I do exactly what the phone companies do… to all the people they don’t care about – which is everyone. Whoa, talk about lousy customer service, man, they wrote the book! Don’t you just love it when you get put on hold by the phone company and have to listen to a recorded message for 30 minutes hawking their wonderful service while telling you how you could find what you’re looking for (and you wouldn’t have to bother them) if you’d just spend a few hours on their website. Of course, if they answered their phone with a real, live person you could get the information you need in about 30 seconds.
Anyhow, if you successfully pass the Jeff Dobkin 2 minute exam, I declare you a worthwhile and wonderful viable prospect, take your name and address, and send you our FREE booklet of valuable information. This way, you’ll have something more than a vague and fading memory of a website when it comes time to place an order. Hope this was helpful.