Supercharge Postcard Response by Anticipating Customer Questions
When you receive a marketing postcard or brochure in the mail, what questions pop into your mind? Marketing copy often raises as many questions as it answers, which makes answering your offer’s FAQs in advance a powerful marketing tactic.
This technique isn’t particularly new – in fact, it’s been a major part of sales for the last century. Salespeople for a wide range of products and services have anticipated their prospects’ questions and prepared their answers well ahead of time.
As, like advertising legend Albert Lasker used to say, “Advertising is salesmanship in print,” sales techniques like identifying frequently asked questions (FAQs) for your offer before preparing your campaign can have a huge effect on its results.
In this guide, we’ll explain how you can identify your offer’s FAQs before launching a campaign and transform them from points of ambiguity or confusion into powerful marketing advantages.
Read your copy from the perspective of a customer
An important part of sales is anticipating objections. Expert salespeople don’t just go into a new deal headfirst – before they begin, they look at their pitch from a buyer’s perspective and spot potential questions and objections.
Before you launch your small business postcard marketing campaign, put yourself in the place of a prospective customer and read your copy. Go through the motions and pick up your postcard as if you were a customer checking his or her mail.
What questions immediately pop into your mind? Does your heading encourage you to read further? Does your copy leave certain key details out? Is your offer too good to be believable and appealing to prospects?
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and read your postcard as critically as you can. By asking yourself the difficult questions, you can spot weak points in your campaign and fix them before it launches.
Write your copy as if you’re answering a prospect’s questions
Documentarians and interviewers often use a simple technique to improve clarity in their interviews: they ask their subjects to respond not with direct answers, but in a statement that provides background and answers the question at hand.
This technique is great for writing copy that directly speaks to your target audience and answers their questions. Before each line of copy on your page, imagine there’s a question. The purpose of the copy is simple: to answer the question above it.
List five to 10 FAQs about your product and write your copy to directly answer each of them. This way, your copy will be both persuasive and informational – giving your audience information about your product and answering their common questions.
Use a question and answer format in your postcard copy
In certain cases, using FAQs in your copy can improve your response rate. Over time, your business will be able to identify the most common questions prospects ask and preemptively answer them in your postcard or brochure copy.
Be direct and use a Q&A format in your direct marketing postcards. An example of a common question and an effective answer is as follows:
“What if I’m not satisfied?”
“We offer a 30 day money back guarantee on all of our products to make sure you’re 100% satisfied. Contact us today to learn more.”
Each answer isn’t just an opportunity to solve a question for prospects – it’s also an opportunity to encourage them to take action. Using a FAQ format often gives you a larger amount of opportunities to include calls to action in your direct mail piece.
What are the most frequent questions about your offer?
No matter how perfect your offer might seem, it will undoubtedly result in questions from at least some of your prospects. Knowing what these questions are before your campaign launches lets you preemptively answer them for a better response rate.
Do you know your product or offer’s most common questions? Study your postcard from a customer’s perspective before you launch and make sure it answers the five to 10 most common and important questions prospective customers may have.
