People thrive on emotions. If you want to keep your visitors interested in what you have to say, you need make your content more emotional. This is a piece of advice that many copywriters will give you, but they will almost never tell you how to go about doing it.
How do you effectively use emotional triggers to create content that makes your readers want to learn more about you? Some emotions can be tough to latch onto, but if you try out these five techniques, you’ll be on your way to getting your visitors to feel what you feel in no time.
1.) Address Your Visitors Directly
You may have noticed by now that I’m talking directly to you. I’m using a lot of “you’s,” and this makes you feel like I care a lot about you. I do.
When you address your visitors directly, you are in a better position to guide your visitors’ emotions. You can tell your visitor to remember something, or to STOP!
Do you see what I’m saying? You have to get in close if you want your visitors to feel something. Address your visitors directly. Use a lot of “you’s.”
2.) Use the senses
The senses are the gateway to the mind. If you’re selling candles, talk about the scents your visitors will smell whey they purchase your product. Be very specific. Describe an experience by saying something like, “…when you walk into your home and smell the aroma of a fresh apple pie baking in the oven.”
By doing this, you are guiding your visitors through the experience and awakening their memory of the smell. This then activates all of the other feelings that go along with the scent of the apple pie. Just like that, your words have made your visitors feel something.
3.) Tell a personal story
You would be surprised at how much we all have in common. I found myself enthralled with a sales letter about a bartender’s MP3 course because the author told a personal story that resonated with a few of my past experiences. If you tailor your personal story to common emotions we all feel, you’ll have your readers hooked with minimal effort.
Don’t limit yourself to the positive emotions. Feelings of embarrassment and fear have motivated people to take action since the dawn of advertising. If your story is genuine, your emotions will go straight to your reader’s heart.
4.) Be concise and keep it simple
You’ll kill any emotion in your copy the second your visitors stumble on a single word. Keep your message short and to the point. Use smaller sentences, and break up whatever you can. The more time your visitors spend thinking, the less time they spend feeling.
5.) Try to get into your visitor’s head
You might not know exactly what your visitors are thinking, but you probably have an idea. You know, for example, that a person who stumbles upon a site selling a holiday cookie recipe ebook probably has a soft spot for holiday memories. The same person probably wants to impress family members and keep his kids occupied. Were this not so, he wouldn’t be interested enough to have made it to your page.
Investigate these motivations for being on your page. Take them and find emotionally hard hitting content that will get your site visitors even more involved. Use the senses. Tell a story. Remember how proud you felt when you entertained your family over the holidays for the first time. Remember the twinkle in your kids’ eyes when they put the sprinkles on the sugar cookies. Don’t think of it like it’s a game. Find a genuine emotion that you feel and communicate it with your content.
People are masters of mimicry. When we see another person feeling a strong emotion, we start feeling it too.
I’ll tell you a story about a friend of mine who got injured snowboarding in the terrain park. As he lied down on the snow, screaming in pain while the paramedics got him onto the stretcher, I couldn’t help but feel some of that pain too. No, I didn’t feel his physical pain. I felt his emotional anguish at the fact that he’ll have to spend the season in a wheelchair. I realized what he realized.
You already have your visitors’ attention. You just have to describe the emotions you feel, and they’ll start feeling them too. It is human nature to empathize and mimic one another. Take this fact and use it to keep people interested in you and what you’re saying.
And if you’re still having some difficulty, or you need an uninvolved third party to look through your copy, go right ahead and hire me. Just leave a comment below or send me an email detailing your project. I will respond within one day.