Sales Copywriting with AIDA

AIDA is an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It describes the stages a person goes through whilst deciding to do something. This could be picking up an apple or buying a new car. It has been applied to sales copywriting for many years successfully. People make a living with this principle at the core of all their work. The technique started being taught in the late 1950's when sales and copywriting training became more widespread.

As mentioned AIDA can be used in many different situations, over the phone, in letters, billboards, TV and radio, emails, and the thing I have used it for - webpages.

The copywriting of an ecommerce site is perhaps the most important single aspect of making a sale. All the hard work of getting people to look at the site can be crippled at the final hurdle if the copy is wrong.

Attention

In a web page the attention is normally drawn by the title tags or description appearing in search engine results. Getting high in the search engine results is a good way to get attention, but what if a page below you in the list has a more exciting title? This is one reason why I think SEO of title tags should not outweigh the need to make the page appealing to a human. While grabbing the attention with a page title think about how you can pull the strings of whoever is reading. This is where knowing your target market comes in handy.

Using Power Words To Grab Attention

Power words can be used to grab reader's attention in a title tag or description. If over used they can sound like a bit too much like "hard sell". Using them discreetly can improve the impression of a product, some examples include:

Free
Sale
Special
Huge
Luxury
Unusual
Quality
Guaranteed
Expert
Now
Stop

Interest

Once you have somebody's attention it is necessary to keep it. Failing to provide some interested once the visitor reaches the page will have them hitting the back button. To maintain interest more details of the product should be discussed, why is it useful and advantageous to the reader? To maintain interest you should talk the language of your target market.

Desire

To create desire for a product you must connect with the reader's emotions. This could include real world examples of how the product has been enjoyed by somebody else. Any testimonials from previous customers are useful to create desire. The experience of imagining how another customer felt is more powerful than some dry explanation by a salesperson.

To desire a product there must also be a realistic opportunity of buying it. This is where the trust factor of your ecommerce site kicks in. Think about every little worry a potential buyer might have and cover it either in the sales copy, or on clearly visible links.

If the product will save them money, make them cooler, increase their enjoyment or do anything great spell this out for them. Just make it so irresistible you want to buy 10 of them yourself.

Action

Assuming all the previous stages have worked, the reader could be ready to take action. Simply placing a 'buy now' button at the bottom of the page, might work on someone who has researched the market, knows what they want, and realise your product is worthwhile. These kind of people would probably buy the widget regardless of what the sales copywriting says.

By writing a great call to action you are targeting the people who are interested but may stray to other sites, or forget about your product and spend their money on something else. In most people there is natural caution when parting with money, this means encouragement is needed before they are willing to purchase.

Successful call to actions could include a limited special offer, 'buy now to receive free shipping' or 'buy now and receive and receive a free widget'

It may simply include some of the themes from Interest or Desire, 'Take this opportunity to save money on widgets' or 'Have the fastest widget available'.

There will be less effort required in writing the call to action when the previous stages have been very successful.

Sales copywriting in the real world

AIDA is a nice theory but if it was blindly followed in all marketing departments and worked every time, robots would be doing sales copywriting not humans. I think it generates some interesting ideas but can't be followed too ridgidly. It depends what market you are selling to but in the U.K we don't like the U.S type hard sell. It just doesn't work.

There are some other important things to consider when copywriting. Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. I am terrible at these as you have probably guessed. For this reason it really helps to have somebody else read your copywriting. Be clear and concise, avoid using very long sentences or tricky vocabulary. Kept it stimulating and as short as possible without loosing necessary information. Don't be a faker, don't promise what you can't deliver, stay as professional as possible.

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Posted by Tom on Wed 28th Jan 2009