It's the Market, Silly!

Not too long ago an associate of mine asked me to look at his website's sales copy. He had been struggling with tweaking and testing, and his latest salesletter to beat his previous control only ended up bringing in an additional 0.02% response. With all the marketing he was doing, his site was barely profitable. He even hired a decent copywriter to craft his latest salesletter, the new control.

Well, I took a look at his site, and I gotta say the salesletter didn't look bad at all to me. Great headline, great lead, decent offer with plenty of quality bonuses. Pushed the right hot buttons, used takeaway selling, good call to action. Overall a very good sales letter (to me, at least). So why was it doing so poorly?

I asked him about his target market, and how he was getting them to his site. Uh oh. It turned out he really wasn't going after the right market.

Listen, you can have legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga write your copy for 5 figures, plus a chunk of royalty payments, but if your target audience is chiropractors and you mail your letter to lawyers, it's going to perform poorly, no matter how brilliant the copy.

So let's examine the three things, in order of importance, that contribute toward response rate:

1) Your market
2) Your offer
3) Your copy

So if you mail your letter to the wrong list, it doesn't matter how great your offer or your copy.

If you mail your letter to the right list, but the offer is weak, your copy is only going to go so far.

But if your market and offer are both right, only then should you look to your copy to boost response.

What do you think? Got a story or comment to share?