Double your response rate with “reason why”

Something I hear a-list copywriter David Deutsch rattle on about in interviews, podcasts and more…

Probably one of the most important things you can do to improve your emails, your opt-in pages, your sales pages, even your sales calls and more, that’s relatively simple to do, but requires you to do some work up front.

Whether that’s talking to people in your target market…

Or simply surfing the web…

Or scanning the surface with your favorite LLM…

Either way, it requires you to sit down and think a little bit, and to get creative. To really use your empathy and your imagination to try to understand what life is like for your leads, customers, clients, prospects, and what-have-you.

Even if you’re just a few steps ahead of your ideal clients…

And they’re struggling with the problems you were struggling with just a few months ago, you’re going to need to search your experience and try real hard to remember what life was like back then in order for you to really do this well.

But what’s interesting is…

Even if you do this poorly, it’s likely to increase your response rate anyway.

And this is just because of how people tend to rely on shortcuts in their day-to-day decision making process in order to avoid getting bogged down by all the details.

In Robert Cialdini’s award winning book, Influence, he writes:

“A well known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do is a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason.”

And like I said before, what’s interesting about this is…

It works even if you do it poorly.

In their experiments, they nearly doubled their success rate when asking for a favor even when no new information or real reason for compliance was provided.

For example:

“Can I cut ahead of you in line to make copies because I need to use the copier?”

Was nearly twice as affective as:

“Can I cut ahead of you in line to make copies?”

No real reason is added, no new information is provided, but because there’s a “reason why”, people are more likely respond favorably.

Now of course, this is taking advantage of the “decision making shortcut” I mentioned earlier, where people generally think that if someone provides a reason it’s usually a good one, therefore we should accommodate…

But basically what’s happening is, you’re slipping people into that automated decision making mode just long enough for them to be like “sure…”

But I’m guessing, 9 times out of 10 the person stops and thinks, “wait a minute… that doesn’t make any sense” even if they don’t say it out loud. And my guess is, if you make a habit of doing things like this, people will stop trusting you… and my other guess is that if you try to do this in writing, people will be far more likely to catch it, and it won’t do you any favors.

Which is why I mentioned this is going to require work on your part.

But again, even if you’re bad at…

It will still probably improve your response rate, just don’t be intentionally manipulative about it (by purposefully providing a non-sense reason).

Instead, always provide a real “reason why”.

And like I said, I hear David Deutsch talk about this often in interviews, and since he’s one of the world’s most successful living copywriters, I imagine that not only is it really important, but it’s probably something people tend to overlook or get wrong a lot of the time in their copywriting.

You always have to provide a “reason why”…

And in my experience, the more vivid, specific, and accurate, the better.

Whether your goal is to promote a product, or to teach a technique, you’ll always have superior success if you give your reader a “reason why”.

That said, if you want to write emails that give you readers a “reason why” so that you can double your response rate (possibly even more), and make more sales for your products, services, and more…

Then click the waitlist link below to get lined for the next openings I have inside the Email Sales Accelerator.

https://kevinhood.me/accelerator

Best,
Kevin Hood