Force your readers into action.
On Twitter this week I wrote about what I’ve been learning about copywriting from Dan Brown’s Masterclass.
Brown is the author of The Da Vinci Code, Inferno, Origin…etc. He’s a master of the page turner, and back in high school I read every single one of his books.
Brown says that suspense novels start with three things:
A CONTRACT, which promises the reader that you’ll tell them something, if they just turn the page.
A CLOCK, which puts pressure on the characters to act within a certain time frame (and add urgency).
And a CRUCIBLE. Which I think is one of the most interesting aspects of this whole formula.
The crucible comes down to the setting or situation that you create in your writing. Essentially, you have to make the setting high stakes, and you have to force your characters to follow one path towards the conflict.
Take Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I just finished re-reading. At the end of the book, Ginny Weasley is captured by the monster and taken to the Chamber, where, according to a threatening message painted on the walls of Hogwarts, her bones will lay forever.
Who has to go in and save her? Harry. At this point, he and his sidekick Ron are the only two people who know where the opening to the Chamber is. And as a parseltongue, Harry is quite literally the only person who can open the gates.
When he and Ron and one of their teachers enter the tunnel that leads to the Chamber, there’s an unfortunate accident which results in a cave-in. Ron and the professor are stuck on the side of the rubble that leads out to the outside world, while Harry is stuck on the side that leads into the Chamber.
What Rowling did here was force Harry to be the character that entered the Chamber. He had to go alone, face the Basilisk by himself, see the memory of Lord Voldemort, and save Ginny. Rowling put Harry in a crucible—and it pushed the story forward.
Put your reader in a crucible
Of course your readers have free will. Unlike fictional characters, you can't make a reader do whatever the fuck you want.
When you want someone to convert, you need to give them a reason why. Nobody’s going to hand over their email address just because you ask them nicely.
BUT you can build a crucible-like situation that forces the reader into action.
How? Three steps:
Show the reader what they want.
Explain that the path to their goal is difficult to walk alone.
Provide a simple call-to-action that solves an immediate pain and moves the prospect closer towards pleasure.
The trick is to build a LOT of desire. You have to make the reward of getting the thing your reader wants worth more than the action necessary to achieve it.
Take a look at this sales email, written by Agora. You’ll see that it has all three C’s:
The contract is the promise of knowledge that will protect your wealth.
The clock is the time-limited offer. You have a copy on reserve, but you need to act fast.
And the crucible? The reader just has to be brave enough to fill out the form and start taking control of their financial freedom. If they don’t, they run the risk of financial ruin.
More than anything, the prospect wants to protect their financial wealth. The step of providing an address for more knowledge seems minuscule in comparison.
