Boost your sales with the power of headlines

I’m not sure exactly which day someone decided that the perfect sales uber-machine involved using the business name as the headline in promotional materials. However It’s become a staple of marketing for many small businesses.

Unfortunately, just a simple point has a huge influence over the success rate of your business promotion (and fortunately from another perspective, such a simple change can improve your sales conversion rate tremendously). However many small businesses (and even large ones) completely waste the powerful ability of the headline and therefore throw extra sales away.

Let me explain.

The headline of your promotional material (ie letter, flyer, leaflet, poster, advertisement etc) is the first gate in the pathway towards turning an ordinary citizen into one of your loyal customers. Now because it’s the first gate, anyone who doesn’t go through it will not even have the opportunity to go through the remaining gates and eventually reach the end of the path and become a customer or client.

Why is it the first gate? The headline handles a number of very important points in the concept of selling via promotional material:

1). It’s wording, colour, font and size seizes the attention of your target audience. This is vitally important for obvious reasons, if they don’t even notice your promotional material or have an incentive to read it, they won’t buy what you offer (probably because they don’t even know about it).

2). It grabs the reader and instantly adds value to the remaining sales copy (if you explain a benefit or ask a question). This gives the reader an incentive to continue reading. 

So, the headline plays two major roles. It grabs the attention of any prospects and then persuades them to read the rest of your promotional material. Now if the headline isn’t there, can you see why it’s so important?

In a nutshell, you can add a couple of percent or take a few percent away from your sales conversion rate just by what you write in your headline. This could mean a difference of 2-5+ extra customers per every 100 prospects your promotional material is in front of. Pretty powerful stuff for one measly sentence.

Unfortunately, almost all small business promotion I see these days simply uses the business name or some other information completely irrelevant to the sales process. For example:

“J. Smithson & Co”
“Excalibur services”
“PLUMBING”
“Computer support service”

Now if you were walking down the street, would any of these grab your attention and entice you into reading the promotional material?

So…

If you want an easy and free way to increase your sales conversion rate, take a look at any of your material which could make use of a powerful headline and have a go optimising it. This includes any kind of promotional items, your vehicle, website (very important), business cards and much more.�