Read this Article about Headlines Now if you Know What’s Good for You

You can learn an awful lot about how to write compelling headlines from studying your junk mail. I get a lot of it because of a dead relative. Naw, I don’t mean the poor guy is sending me junk mail from the great beyond. He passed away and his mail is being forwarded to my house.

He was a good-hearted man who gave money to just about every charity that came begging. He also belonged to a number of civic organizations, subscribed to a variety of magazines and bought stuff from catalogs. His legacy is 12-14 pieces of junk mail a day. All of it comes with a plea or a pitch for money.

My usual MO is to toss the junk unopened into a recycle bin I keep on the front porch just for this purpose. Lately, though, I started to wonder just what was in all those envelopes. So, I’ve been studying junk mail, which I haven’t done in a long time. I found that not much has changed in the last 100 years, give or take, when a direct marketer lobbed the first piece of junk mail into a mail box.

You would think the Internet would have killed off junk mail but the direct marketing business has been savaging the environment more than ever. Direct mail spending–including preparation, production and postage–reached $58.4 billion in 2007, and may pass $72 billion by 2011, according to a new study from the Winterberry Group. Believe it or not, the industry would have done even better in 2007 were it not for a postage increase that caused some direct marketers to scale back their junkie plans.

Here are headlines (and some subheads) that grabbed me:

1. HOW TO LIVE WELL IN HARD TIMES. WHAT YOU CAN DO TO KEEP YOUR MONEY SAFE
2. Why Hope Never Dies
3. Earn Up To 5.7% Guaranteed
4. How To Get VIP Treatment Wherever You Go
5. How Obama Can Restore Confidence
6. 9 Heroes Who Inspire Us
7. Escape from Pain–Without Drugs
8. Pay Less for Everything
9. How to Turn a $25,000 IRA Into $500,000 or More. And why it’s easier to do it in today’s post-crash market
10. 5 little-known ways to reduce arthritis pain without anti-inflammatories and painkillers. Hint: One is to eat more grapes
11. The biggest mistake you can make when E-mailing your resume
12. Absolutely Amazing Ways to Save Money
13. How to keep a mugger from harming you
14. PROTECT What You Need, RISK What You Can
15. Get retirement income that’s guaranteed to last your entire life
16. Yours FREE When You Reply Within 11 Days
17. Sex. It’s Never to Late to Learn Something New.

I’ll tell you why these headlines command attention. They…

1. Are all about you. It’s: “Here’s how you can save money.” It’s not: “Here’s how we can save you money.”
2. Promise to help you solve significant problems.
3. Intrigue you with the idea of giving you information you might not find anywhere else.
4. Warn you of potential dangers and offer ways to prevent something bad from happening to you.
5. Offer you something free.
6. Call you to action using imperatives and the active voice.
7. Promise to inform you on topics that interest you or you think you must know.
8. Involve making, protecting or saving money.
9. Talk about your getting a little sumthin’ sumthin’.

Did you notice none of these headlines asks questions? The reason is that people already know the questions. What they want are the answers.

Some copywriters chose to use all caps for their headlines; some chose to capitalize key words; some chose to initial cap each word; and some chose to cap the first letter of the first word (writers call that sentence case). A few copywriters emphasized key words in italics or with all caps. They used as little punctuation as possible. Few copywriters ended headlines with a period, for example.

I’ve always believed that headlines in sentence case were easiest to read. I’m going to rethink that one. Headlines in all caps are hardest to read, but can be effective with certain topics (color also helps). Using all caps for KEY words, WORKS very well, I think.

You can learn a lot from reading body copy in junk mail letters, so I’m working on that now.