Writing to your audience

A letter I received in the post this morning broke the two golden rules when writing to prospects, which are:

1. Target your audience
2. Write to your audience

The sender did successfully use some of the copywriting techniques I share with you - but the fundamental research hadn’t been done. Either that or they purchased an inaccurate mailing list!

After the headlines, here’s the start of the letter…

Dear Carol:

As an active investor, you’ve experienced more than your share of losses.

But did you know that professional traders also have losses? Yet they have skills and understanding of the market that makes them successful while others lose a fortune!

A little later in the letter it said…

This FREE workshop is perfect for anyone with an interest in investing.

So what’s wrong with that?

• I do not trade on the stock market so this is not relevant to me. I am not their target audience.

• If I did trade, the writer is making a huge assumption that I’ve made losses. You could say in view of recent events in the financial world this is probably a fairly safe guess. However it could alienate someone whose trading has been a bit more successful than he is implying, but who would otherwise be interested in what he has to offer.

This was a well written letter and if I had been correctly targeted I would probably have responded.

Learning From Others Mistakes

Why am I sharing this with you?

Because we can learn from the mistakes other people make in their copywriting. And it’s often easier to see these mistakes in letters we receive, whereas sometimes we can be too close to our own material and not realise the trap we’re falling into.

Tell me, how well targeted is your audience? How well do you know them? Are you writing your letters with their circumstances in mind and in such a way that you are not eliminating a good portion of your recipients?

And - just for a bit of fun and practice - how would you have started the letter (assuming it is going to a targeted audience of trade investors).  Share your suggestions using the comments link below.

~ Carol Bentley

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