842 – Widen your target audience: Tom talks Theory of Parallel Tracks

Episode 842 – Parallel Tracks
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 842 of Screw the Commute podcast. We're continuing on our copywriting techniques from my copywriting course, copywriting901.com, the fast track to writing words that sell. Today we're going to talk about the theory of parallel tracks, so you can attract more people or convince more people from one sales letter to buy. We'll get into that in a minute. And I'm not going to read them all off this time. But from episode 836 to today, 842 has been all copywriting little short techniques that can help you increase your sales. And of course, any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. This is 842, but if you want to catch all our training episodes and there's over 430 of them now, go to screwthecommute.com/training and also check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com, and pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:30] All right, let's talk about the theory of parallel tracks and what that means when you are writing a sales letter. First, there are basically two types of buyers. One is a skimmer and the other is an analytical. And of course, that's a broad generalization, but you should always keep in mind that a person can be both, depending on how important the purchase is to them and of course the price range to.

[00:02:01] Now let's first define a skimmer, which most of the time is me. I'm a skimmer. I'm a person who can skim through a sales letter. I don't read it carefully and make a buying decision quickly. And most of the time as the key phrase here. Most of the time I'm a skimmer and I'm going to tell you how I have analytical tendencies after I define that. All right. An analytical person is one that's going to read every single word of your sales letter and maybe read it several times, and maybe go looking for corroboration of your claims from other sources. Most people are skimmers, especially in today's fast paced environment and short attention spans, but there are plenty of analytical people out there too, and their money is just as good as the skimmers to you. So you don't want to write a sales letter that alienates the the analytical or the skimmers. Now, I just told you, most of the time I'm a skimmer. But here's an example of how I became an analytical for a certain purchase. So many of you know I have a protection dog business on the side, and I was driving them around in a Mercedes sedan for years, and I said, man, this is I can't do this.

[00:03:26] So I went looking for a great big SUV and I found the Chevy Suburbans were the largest SUV there is, but I wanted a tailgate that would come up automatically to release the dogs to go. Do you know, to to go take care of business and jump back in while I'm safe in the cab of the vehicle. And I wanted to be able to have the air conditioning or run remotely, while if I had to go into a store and couldn't take them, just all kinds of details, you know, like that and the different gpses and, and all the, all the extras that these kind of vehicles have. Well, I was studying that like crazy because we're talking about 75 grand purchase here, and I don't care how rich I get, 75 grand is 75 grand. And it's going to be a I'm going to have it for a long time. And I was going to put a custom cage in the back for the dogs, you know, to separate them from the cab, but with a door that automatically opens if I needed them in the cab, all kinds of stuff, see? So I turned totally analytical for that purchase. But, you know, I get these emails all the time.

[00:04:37] Oh, here's the newest video software is $17. Well, I mean, I don't read their 48 page sales letter for $17 purchase. I just buy the I skim through it, see what it's supposed to do, buy it, give it to Marc and let him check it out, see if it's any good. All right. So I'm a skimmer in those cases, but I'm an analytical. When it was a high priced purchase that was going to be with for a long time and really had to suit, uh, having multiple, you know, German Shepherds and protection dogs in the vehicle with me. All right. So anyway, that's a that's how I turned analytical. Now that we've defined analytical and skimmers, how do you structure a sales letter so that one sales letter can appeal to both factions? Well here's how you do it. It's really simple. You structure a series of big, bold subheadings, you know, that have claims in them. They're kind of mini headlines. In fact, when we do our headline training, all the ones that didn't make it into the main headline can be subheadings. So we we structure a bunch of big, bold subheadings and guess who they appeal to. Obviously the skimmers in between the subheadings. You put in lots of detail to satisfy who's left the analyticals.

[00:05:53] So that's it. It's a simple idea that can really increase your sales. Now, a slight variation of this is if you know you have an audience of analyticals, and there's usually a lot less of them in the world than there are skimmers. But if you know, you have like maybe engineers or scientists, in that case, I would put in way more detail and less big, bold subheadings. So that's a simple thing that can totally transform your sales because you're not alienating any groups that that the just the look and the feel and the information in the sales letter don't appeal to them. You want to make sure it appeals because you might only get one shot at them. All right. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and go put some parallel tracks, look at your sales process and see if it appeals to more than one group of people. And I think I just said a minute ago, GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com for my mentor program, which covers this and a billion other things you need to know to be successful online, like myself and my students have been over many, many years. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.