Start learning about marketing and one of the first things you’ll be told is the importance of knocking down objections. Leads will always have reasons not to buy. The salesman’s job is to listen to those reasons, then explain why they’re false. If the salesman manages to remove all of those objections, he gets the handshake. If he doesn’t get the handshake, it’s because he missed an objection.
That’s salesmanship in a nutshell and it applies online too. Those long one-page sales letters give copywriters room to address every objection they can think of. The FAQ pages on websites should really be renamed “Frequently Raised Objections.” Smart copywriters will use those pages to state objections that leads would raise, then knock each one down in turn.
For email marketers though, the objections — and the way you need to deal with them — are unique.
Because everyone who reads your email messages has chosen to accept them, you know you’re dealing with a selected audience. Your readers already trust you. They like your products and believe they need them otherwise they wouldn’t have agreed to continue reading about them.
In theory then, with an audience that primed, you should be receiving a 100 percent conversion rate instead of the single figures you might expect from a mailout.
So what are the objections getting in the way of your sales, and how can you deal with them?
The biggest is urgency. Readers will see a product in your email message, and recognize that they’d like to buy it. They might even feel they need it. But those who don’t feel they need it right away, are likely to ignore it and wait until they feel they do. “That’s interesting,” they’ll say. “I’ll think about it.”
The easiest way to deal with that objection is to create urgency. Tell your readers that while they can buy at any time, if they buy in the next day or two they’ll save money, and you’ll have gone a long way towards dealing with that objection. It’s easy enough to do.
The other major objection though is much more serious. When you’re selling a range of different products, not every item you offer will meet the needs of every reader. A lead who says, “That’s nice but I don’t need it” needs a longer answer, a reply detailed enough to push sales points, highlight benefits and generate desire. You don’t have the space for that in an email newsletter which needs to be kept short if it’s to be read.
If you don’t have need then, you can counter by building interest. Make the picture look enticing, explain briefly the biggest benefit and suggest that the item is new, revolutionary and that there’s much more to know about it. To satisfy that interest, the reader will have to click through to the website where you will have the space — and the FAQ page — to deal with the objections in detail.
About the author
Dean Shanson is a professional marketing writer and a New York Times bestselling business book ghostwriter.