The music school marketer did not stop there with emotional triggers. She also included copy such as:
- You’ll be playing Christmas songs by the Holidays!
- Can you imagine playing a duet with your child?
The emotional triggers hit with these lines of copy include EGO, REWARD and PARENTAL PRIDE.
All told the email that went out for this promotion – pitching parents of already enrolled piano students to take adult lessons, was probably on the order of 300 to 400 words. Yet it included at least a half dozen emotional triggers.
This is the task of marketers. To identify the emotional triggers of the audience and figure out how your product can pull them.
And it is vital that you identify multiple triggers and then include them in all your messages. There are a couple reasons for this:
- Not every customer will respond to the same emotional triggers in the same way. Every human being responds to them, but some are more important and affect the prospect differently.
- Multiple emotional triggers, when included in your messaging, have a cumulative weight that will eventually push the customer to pull out their wallet (this is when the minor ones especially come into play, when the customer is at the point of talking themselves into the purchase).
I would also say this task should be done before you write a word of copy, either headlines, emails or blog posts. Once you have a menu of emotional triggers assembled for your product or service, well then, the “copywriting” becomes easy.
I know that copywriting has been elevated to a mythical level among the trainers and promoters on the Internet over the last 15 years. It makes sense because it is a valuable skill in itself and also because it’s obscure sounding enough to bamboozle people looking for the magic beans of how to make money selling stuff to other people.
My premise is that the emotional triggers come before the copywriting. That they are the real source of how sales are made. Once you work with emotional triggers long enough, the act of copywriting gets reduced to the mechanical process it actually is. Adding emotional triggers to your repertoire will also help you avoid the phenomenon of writing “empty copy” that looks like a sales pitch but doesn’t have enough energy to move the customer.
Stacking emotional triggers in your messaging – even your product name – is not only a guaranteed path to success but also essential.