The Nine Headlines

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the whole lesson turns on a single line of text, changed nine times, with everything beneath it left exactly as it was.

Two brokers sell one policy,
Same cover, same indemnity.
One writes to all, in language wide,
One names the trade on every side.
Same paper, postage, price, and pen.
Why did the second sell to ten?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two brokers selling the same insurance to the same sort of small business, and the cover, all together now, was equally good. Same underwriter, same premiums, same terms to the comma.

The first wrote one message and sent it to everybody, and he had thought about it hard. Comprehensive business insurance for small companies. Competitive premiums. Tailored to your requirements. Speak to an expert today. Every word of it accurate. It went to four thousand businesses and it brought back almost nothing, and he put that down to the market being difficult, which is the phrase a trade reaches for when it does not know what else went wrong.

Consider what happened when it landed in front of a carpet cleaner on a Tuesday morning. She reads small companies, and she is one, in the way that a woman with a van and two staff is technically a small company, and none of it is aimed at her. Nothing in it mentions water damage to a client's floor, or the fact that her whole trade is being trusted alone in other people's houses. So the message is filed where all such messages go, which is nowhere, and not because she disagreed with it. She simply never felt addressed.

The second broker did something almost embarrassingly small. He sent the same policy, at the same price, on the same paper, but he wrote nine versions, and the only thing that changed was the opening line. Carpet cleaners: what happens when you damage a customer's floor. Then one for opticians, one for landscapers, one for heating engineers, and so on.

Underneath, the offer was identical to the word. He was not lying to anybody, and he had not invented nine products.

What he had done was answer the only question a reader ever asks in the first two seconds, which is not is this any good but is this for me. And a person who has been a carpet cleaner for eleven years, and has never once seen her own trade in print in an advertisement, has that question answered before she has finished the line.

Then he did the other half, which most people skip. Having named her trade, he named her particular fear, the one specific to that work rather than to business in general, and gave the testimonial from another carpet cleaner rather than from a builder in a different county.

His response was a multiple of his rival's, not a percentage better. Same product, same price, same postage. The difference in cost between the two campaigns was an afternoon spent writing nine headlines instead of one.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A message addressed to everybody is received by nobody. Not disbelieved, which would at least be a reaction: unfelt. The reader is scanning for evidence that the thing in front of them concerns their own life, and the words small businesses or homeowners or busy professionals provide none, because nobody has ever thought of themselves in those terms. They think of themselves as a carpet cleaner with a van, an optician with two branches, a woman whose mother has just moved in.

So the cheapest improvement available to most trades is not a better offer, a lower price or a cleverer argument. It is the same offer, addressed. Naming the trade, the situation or the moment costs an afternoon, changes nothing about what you sell, and reliably outperforms months of work on everything else, because it is doing the one job that must be done before any of the rest can be read.

Two things this is not. It is not a promise to build nine different services, and you should resist that instinct: one product, several doors. And it is not narrowing your market to a ninth of its size, which is the fear that stops people. You are not refusing the landscaper by writing to the carpet cleaner; you are writing to the landscaper next, in his own words. The sign nobody read failed for the same reason as the general letter, and both were cured the same way: by saying something specific enough to be checked, or in this case, recognised.

And there is a limit worth naming, since this is easy to do badly. Naming the trade buys you the first two seconds and nothing more. If the fear underneath is still generic, the reader has been flagged down for nothing, and you will have taught them that being addressed by you is not worth stopping for.

Three questions, and use real customers rather than categories:

1. Who were your last twenty customers, in their own words? Not sectors: trades, situations, moments. Look for three or four groups that come up repeatedly. Those groups are your doors, and you already have the list, since it is sitting in your invoices.
2. What is the fear that belongs to each group? Different for every one of them, and specific: the damaged floor, the missed inspection, the week with no cover. Write each one in the language that group uses about it, which is nearly always plainer than the language you use in your marketing.
3. What is your one general line, and what would three versions of it look like? Take your current opening sentence and rewrite it three times, once for each group, changing nothing else. Send them out this month. You will know within a fortnight whether an afternoon's work was worth more than the last quarter's.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did the second sell to ten?

Because he wrote to somebody. His rival wrote to a category, which is a thing that exists only in the mind of the person selling: nobody wakes up as a small enterprise, and every letter addressed to one arrives at an empty house. The policy did not improve, the premium did not fall, and no argument was strengthened. One man simply made it possible for a carpet cleaner to know, in two seconds, that she was the one being spoken to.

The verse:

Address the world and none reply,
For no one lives beneath that sky.
But name the trade, the street, the fear,
And one in ten will say: that's here.

Until next time. Go and take your opening line, write three versions naming three real groups of customers, and send them before the month is out.

P.S. The instinct that resists this is worth naming, since it stops so many: it feels like turning work away, and like admitting you are not for everyone. You are not for everyone. You never were. The only question is whether the people you are for can tell.

Also in the archive: The Unsubscribe Button, One of Their Own and The Bootmaker's Handbill.