Good copy starts by writing (and or finding) the best sales headlines and building on top of them. It's the difference between selling a lot of stuff and not.
Most people think of a sales funnel as a collection of pages. In actuality, a sales funnel ALWAYS starts with a headline. Sales funnels are a whole lot more than just a collection of pages. The copy is on those pages: the headlines, subheadlines, the video, features, benefits, bullets, and everything else. All of it is what drives sales. It isn't just the pages, layout, or how pages are set up or structured. That stuff matters a whole lot less than what you would think.
What matters is how people engage with the page.
How they engage with the page is through the copy that is on the page. Now, we will talk about how to write the best sales headlines. I will walk through the different ways that headlines can be used. Headlines can be used for email subject lines, blog post titles, and sales letter headlines.
Good copy is a good copy and can be used in many different areas.
It's all just a form or a function of this idea of how to write the best sales headlines. That's what we're going to talk about.
For Starters: The Top 25 Best Sales Headlines in the History of Marketing
Sales headlines are the first impression your potential customers have of your offer. They are crucial in grabbing attention and persuading people to read more. A well-crafted headline can distinguish between someone clicking through to your website or ignoring it altogether.
Over the years, there have been countless sales headlines that have stood the time test. These headlines are memorable, persuasive, and effective in driving conversions.
Here are 25 of the best sales headlines in the history of marketing:
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"The $64,000 Question" (1950s game show)
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"Think Small" (Volkswagen Beetle)
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"Where's the beef?" (Wendy's)
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"They're Gr-r-great!" (Kellogg's Frosted Flakes)
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"Melts in your mouth, not in your hand" (M&M's)
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"Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is!" (Alka-Seltzer)
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"Diamonds are a girl's best friend" (De Beers)
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"Breakfast of champions" (Wheaties)
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"Just do it" (Nike)
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"Got milk?" (California Milk Processor Board)
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"Can you hear me now?" (Verizon)
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"Where do you want to go today?" (Microsoft)
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"Because you're worth it" (L'Oréal)
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"The ultimate driving machine" (BMW)
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"Think different" (Apple)
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"Have it your way" (Burger King)
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"Snap, crackle, and pop" (Rice Krispies)
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"A diamond is forever" (De Beers)
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"The cola with a bite" (Pepsi)
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"The real thing" (Coca-Cola)
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"Reach out and touch someone" (AT&T)
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"I'm lovin' it" (McDonald's)
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"Obey your thirst" (Sprite)
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"Because you can be anything" (L'Oréal)
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"The world is your oyster" (American Express)
These headlines are all effective because they are:
- Clear and concise: They get to the point quickly and easily understand.
- Benefit-oriented: They focus on the product or service's benefits to the customer.
- Intriguing: They pique the reader's curiosity and make them want to learn more.
- Unique: They stand out from the competition and make a lasting impression.
How To Write Headlines
Now, today, I want to talk a little about how to write the best sales headlines and show some split-tested examples. There are some straightforward ways to get good at copy or writing copy. You have to put the effort and work into it, which sucks, but it is what it is.
If you want to be a master of your craft, you want to sell a lot of shit online; you must do the work.
- figure out some of the buyer's psychology of what people want to buy,
- what makes them buy,
- what are their triggers
How to write headlines is the easiest way to start to pinpoint that. For instance, the best sales headlines are very to the point. They have a compelling message and a compelling offer. Usually, they have a little bit of urgency, and they convey a benefit in them. One headline encapsulates the entire message of a blog post, a sales letter, and the whole thing. But besides, it also serves as the jumping-off point when somebody reads it.
They read the headline, which helps them understand the offer, page, and email. In addition, it also gets them to read the following line. That following line is usually a subheadline or the opening paragraph or whatever. That paragraph gets them to read the following line or section, which brings them to read the next one down the page.
When you're looking at sales letter-like stuff, we use some screen capture tools and stuff. It records a video of somebody watching a sales video, managing a sales page, or scrolling through a sales page. Most people read the headlines, then return and read the subheadlines. Then, they find the sections that they get into. They read those sections down to the buy button.
They're kind of like, they scroll the page, and then they go back up to the top, and they scroll the page, and then ... They're back and forth, back and forth before they decide to buy it. Oddly enough, it's even more prevalent right now in the pandemic; people are sporadically going through sales pages; they're not looking at sales pages formulaically like they have in the past; they were kind of like, up and down, up and down, up and down, "Oh, I'm going to buy." Then they buy, and then the same thing for the upsell, the up and down, up and down.
1. Hint it to some curiosity
It's interesting how our psyche has changed because of the pandemic and the crisis. At the end of the day, you want to hint at some curiosity about how to write the best sales headlines. Your interest wants to propel, to give some urgency. You want to make sure your headline is as believable as possible. If you can use numbers, numbers are great. But they also engage the logical side of the brain away from the emotional side of the brain.
2. Avoid hype
You want to avoid advertising, which is everywhere right now.
3. Use humor
If you can use humor, make sure to use humor. I am not a very humorous copywriter; some people are in. As I'm saying this, I'm thinking of the Harmon brother's video ads. They're very clever, they're funny as shit. That's what makes them so unbelievably viral.
People want to share them despite them being advertisements. If you can tie humor into it, then that always helps.
4. Add Pre headline, subheadline
Like a qualifying statement, a pre-headline can sometimes precede your main headline. Some of the stuff we use is like a headline, turn clicks into customers, then there might be a pre-headline for coaches or consultants or a sub-headline underneath that qualifies them slightly more.
We use pre-, headlines, and subheadlines to nail our target prospect or demographic. That way, they know that they should continue reading, or if we're offering something for sale, like a lead magnet, we usually try to put the price of the thing and how to write headlines so that they can immediately tune out or tune in, depending on what they're interested in.
5. Make it personal
You want to ensure they know they're being communicated to. In your sales copy, use words like you, make it personal to them, and make it actionable, so everything about the headline.
Copywriting
First, I wanted to share some of my copywriting where I learned copywriting. I didn't necessarily go through any extensive course, but the copy is one thing you must know by doing. There's no other way; you can go through periods, listen to audio programs, buy, go through Udemy courses, and learn what good copywriting is, and it might take years or decades to figure it out.
It's quicker to write the copy and test it live with real people, real websites, real traffic, and see what converts and what doesn't.
Way back in the day, I had a website called Marketing Hacks. One of the top blog posts on this website was a post on slogans; it was like the 30 best slogans.
We have thousands of visitors a day looking up slogans, best slogans, unique slogans, and company slogans; like all of these keyword phrases, we're driving traffic directly to this blog post. And I was like, "Oh my God." This was ten years ago. Oh my God, this is such a great opportunity to create a course on slogans." I created a slogans course, like a six- or seven-module system. I think I priced it for $67 or $27 or something like that.
When I started writing copying, I wrote some long-form copy; this was before sales videos were invented. I wrote some long-form sales copy, then began tracking conversions; it wasn't even conversions; it clicked. Four hundred people came to the sales page, and I'm like, well, shit, I didn't sell anything.
Then you tweak the copy again, wait for another two or 300 visitors, and don't sell anything. And then you squeeze the manuscript again, and then you get one sale after three or 400 visitors. Then, you tweak the document again, and you get three deals. Mind you, we are 1200 visitors into this tweaking process, but we're starting to get some sales. So now, with paid traffic, you can do that much quicker.
Testing To Find The Best Sales Headlines
You can get the traffic, the views, the lead, whatever, to test your conversion process quickly. But you have to learn by doing and writing, so you'll learn how to write headlines by trying other headline variations and figuring out what works and what doesn't.
There's one way that I am absolutely in love with for testing headlines quickly. Last week, we talked about visual website optimizer. This way is a whole lot simpler, so there's a plugin that I like called Thrive Headline Optimizer. Let me start here now; this is a blog post, so you can use headlines differently.
If you know how to write headlines, you can test how to write headlines obviously in your sales copy. You can also test your headlines as:
- blog posts subjects
- email subject lines
You can see where I am getting most of my opens. If I get a lot of opens with this particular email subject line, it must be a great subject line. If I get a lot of blog post interactions from this separate subject line, then it must be a great subject line.
Most like Buzzfeed and all these like super, super crazy trafficked websites, they'll have as many as 25 or 30 subject tests that they run, and then whichever one wins, wins, and then they just let it go, and then that thing is just feeding traffic crazy forever.
Thrive Headline Optimizer
They test everything, and it's an essential part of their work. This is a piece of software called the Thrive Headline Optimizer. It is part of the Thrive Plugin Pack and is my favorite tool for finding the best sales headlines. This is a paid tool; you get a leads tool, and it's lovely, but this particular one is not this page.
Thrive Headline Optimizer is the tool we will be playing with. I found this thing a few months ago, and we've been getting some crazy organic traffic. I credit a lot of it to this plugin, not all of it because we're doing live streams; we're doing a lot of new cool stuff. I credit quite a bit of it to this, but not all.
This headline optimizer works in every blog post you write; you can split-test the subject line. Currently, well, today, I mean, you can see that we had 16 views of the split test subject lines. Now, I have already done this test with 25 blog posts; if we go and we're going to look at the rows per page, these are all of our completed tests.
Content with completed tests: I will look at some of these. Here's one example: how to use data analytics to unlock sales online. That was the winning variation; we can start another test from here, but let's look at the results of the last test. Here you see what we got in total ... It doesn't show how many difficulties we have, but we ran six different subject lines for this blog post. And you can see how they ended up charting out.
We had one that sucked, it was terrible. How to use data analytics to unlock sales? It got no engagements, no content views, nothing. Then, the next one was this dark green one, so this was how you use data to improve sales and conversions. That was a total engagement rate of 42%, which was our control.
Well, now, if you look at some of the winners, the winner was how to use data analytics to unlock sales online. And then the one book below used data analytics to improve online sales. This tells you that it's letting you split-test many different subject lines, and then it goes through and tests them all head to head.
It's testing all of them to tell you which one works. And you can see, we can beat the original 99.5 and 99.97, 99.99. We chose This green one as the winner: how to use data analytics to unlock sales online? That one is boring, but it still shows that more people will respond to certain headlines.
I could use that headline in an ad or an email subject line because I already know it will resonate better than many other combinations for that particular keyword phrase. Let's look at a different one, so there was one here. We've got all kinds of traffic. What's that one, three features from Instagram, Instagram live video, we're going to look at this one, this one got a lot of traffic, it always gets a lot of traffic.
Our winning variation right now is three features: get your free traffic from Instagram, which is odd because there's a misspelling. I mean, it should be you, your free traffic. Here, we've tested a lot of different variations; we tested three features: get your free traffic from Instagram so that one has a 100% chance to beat the original.
Then, we have three free features that get you unlimited traffic from Instagram. And that one had 99.37%. You can see that both of these ended up neck and neck. The red one, which is the one with the misspelling, actually won. That is the one that is currently live on the website, but with this tool, all you have to do is look at an older blog post, and I'm going to show you how to set this up.
We will go to all posts, and then I will find one that my team hasn't set up a headline test for. This one is being tested; these are all being tested; here's one: tricks to effective sales pipeline management. This was the last one I did, so we will go through how to write headlines test using this Thrive Headline Optimizer.
Tricks to effective sales pipeline management, there's an important thing here. The keyword phrase we're trying to rank for is sales pipeline management. We want to ensure that that thing is in every keyword phrase we're working with. Here, under our Yoast SEO plugin, sales pipeline management is the keyword phrase we're looking to optimize for.
Setting up the Split Test
We will add a new headline to set up that split test. We're just going to add three variations of this. Sales pipeline management, how to effectively crack sales. Now we're going to set up another variation, top tips to effectively tracking sales pipeline management, and ... Usually, I throw like a winger in; my last interpretation usually is just kind of like a Hail Mary; maybe it'll work, perhaps it won't.
As sales pipeline management work, find out here. Now, we have three different variations of this test. As soon as we hit update, it will throw that in that Thrive Headline Optimizer plugin. Then it's going to start to round robining those subject lines. We're going to check back in a week or two.
Usually, about a hundred views, we're going to check back and see which subject lines won. We will also check which one's suck. If there is a clear winner already, then we will activate that clear winner. We'll lock that in, and then we usually retest.
Usually, we'll do another test and see if we can beat that winner again. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't, but we're always trying to find a new control with our headlines. How to write headlines, whether it's a sales page headline, whether it is a blog post headline or an email subject line, we always try to find that new control, and then we go from there.
For Questions and Guide
Suppose you have any questions at all. If you want to schedule an action plan, call my team. We will walk through sales copy, sales funnels, and email traffic. Just go to doneforyou.com/start. Book a call with us; we'll happily create an action plan for you. If you have any questions for future episodes, go to doneforyou.com/blog.