Could you sell dollar bills for 75 cents each? Of course you could, but it’s not that easy to sell your products or services, is it?
Well maybe it is. Let me introduce you (or more likely, re-introduce you) to Return-On-Investment (ROI) selling. Once you master this approach to your copywriting, everything you sell will be dollar bills at a discount price.
Anyone who has even brushed up against a marketing book understands the importance of selling value, which means to demonstrate how the merits of your produce outweigh the price you are selling it for.
But pardon me if this sounds too fuzzy. I don’t believe this kind of value selling means much to the average person who reads our ads, websites or sales letters.
A much better way has been articulated by Jeffrey J. Fox in his wonderful book, How To Be A Marketing Superstar. In this book, Fox uses the phrase, “dollarize” to give more substance to the whole idea of value.
“Value is only expressed as a number,” urges Fox. “Every benefit for every product can be expressed in the dollars and cents it delivers to the customer. Every benefit for every product can be calculated to show the economic value to the customer.”
Dollarization gives value a number. It is a way of expressing how much a benefit will make or save for a customer. Here’s an example: “This copier will save you 3 cents per page. So if your office makes 5000 copies a week, you will save $150 per week by owning this copier.”
Dollarization can also show the cost of not doing business with you. “Every week you do not own this copier is another $150 you are flushing down the toilet.”
But if you want to sell dollar bills at a discount, you must take dollarization one step further and show its ROI. When you compare a benefit’s economic value to the price you charge, you show the cost as an investment which yields the dollarized benefit.
Or, you can show how small an investment will stop the dollarized bleeding of not doing business with you.
So now you are a very dangerous freelance copywriter. The concepts of dollarization and ROI really do allow you to sell those dollars for cents on the dollar.
COPYRIGHT(C)2006, Charles Brown. All rights reserved.
