If you would like more information on using the Primacy and Recency Effects in your marketing, read more below…
Using the Primacy Effect to Create Buying States
Imagine prospective customers actually getting charged up and eager to read your ad. How useful would that be to you? Do you think that if more people were more enthusiastic about reading your ad, you’d make more money? How would you like to create a feeding frenzy for your offer? How ecstatic would you feel with your PayPal account filling up or your phone ringing off the hook with delerious customers?
In this article we’ll be talking about using the psychology of Primacy can affect the state of your buyers.
The first impression of anything we come across — whether it be a person … or an article … or an ad causes us to give it meaning. Start off well to put your buyers in a positive state, and it will filter their perception of what’s to follow.
This is the primacy effect in action, and we need to prime our ads with an exciting and alluring first impression.
But before we even talk about the words we can use, we need to talk a bit about the design of your “vehicle”. What are you using to get the message across? A sales letter? A brochure? A video?
What would appeal to your targeted audience? What type of person are they? Here I’m talking about design elements. What different colors represent to your audience. What voice are you using to speak to your audience?
Once you get the design elements out of the way, you need to focus on words and phrases that would excite your target audience. A great way to do that is to do use what we learned in Copywriting 101: Start off with a big promise, lots of benefits, lots of sensory rich words.
If you can do it, start with an interesting story about your product. How you created it, how someone used it with great success.
Start off with potent and brawny verbs and adjectives. Stay away from tired words (“unique”, “important”, etc.) and clichés.
Let’s take a look at how A-List Copywriter John Carlton starts off a sales letter. This is one for an information product called “Jeff McDonald’s Motorcross Secrets: Total Bike Control”:
| Want to start winning motocross races almost immediately… even against stronger, more experienced, and better equipped riders?
Astonishing “Insider” Short-Cut Until now, only a handful of professionals and hand-picked amateurs have been allowed to learn these amazing “win smart/win ugly” secrets that practically guarantee you will always be in serious contention in every race you enter (even if it’s your first one). Now, with the unexpected release of this “top secret” information, you can rocket from raw rookie to respected mega-skilled winner almost immediately! Best of all, you can check it out yourself for FREE if you like… |
See how he starts off with a big promise and how he uses colorful adjectives (“raw”) and unusual turns of phrases (“win smart/win ugly”)? You need to do the same. He’s a great copywriter to model.
What states of mind do you want your prospects to experience while reading your ad? What words are you going to use? What pictures are you going to paint in their minds?
What questions are you going to ask your prospects? As you know, questions are an ideal way to get your prospects involved.
Always start off with a bang and make a great first impression with your ads and you’re sure to be successful.
The Recency Effect in Direct Response Advertising
In an earlier post, I showed you the importance of the Primacy Effect in advertising. Utilizing the Primacy Effect is an important method of making a great first impression, especially with your words.
Of course you need to make a great first impression AND you need to make that impression last. Otherwise, you’ll lose your reader’s interest. Using the Recency Effect will help keep your product in the top of your prospects’ minds if they don’t buy immediately after reading your ad.
SERIAL POSITION EFFECTS
When you see a list of items, the Primacy Effect is what gets you to remember the first few items. The Recency Effect is what gets you to remember the last few items.
So both the Primacy Effect AND the Recency Effect are necessary, especially if you’re using long sales copy. This is where you need to keep reminding your readers of your big promise, pile on benefits-on-top-of benefits, and answer objections all the way to leading them to take action.
THE THREE-WAY PROMISE
What I like to do when I’m writing long sales copy is create a “three-way promise” towards the end to utilize the Recency Effect.
Here’s how I do it. And it only takes a paragraph or so:
I’ll sum up the promise and benefits (Copywriting 101), then I like to use a negative promise (“This is what you’ll avoid…” OR, “You won’t ever have to…” OR, “You’ll never have to…again.”) to appeal to the mis-matchers and the moving-away motivated person, and then I like to create a metaphor (“This product is like a…for your….”).
So for my NLP Language Patterns for Advertising , I’d write something like this…
“When you download this ebook and software package today, you’ll have at your fingertips all the language patterns successful business people use to sell whatever you want, from paid membership subscriptions to luxury yachts. You’ll never be at a loss for the right words to sell your products or services. It’s like having a team of master sales staff at your beck-and-call whenever you need them.”
And of course toward the end, you need to tell your readers about your offer and their call-to-action.
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