When writing sales copy, it’s very important to use several mental triggers in order to swirl emotion and produce an event-based story that your reader can convey with. This builds trust and responsiveness with your reader and you become ‘their friend’ not only someone selling a product to them. It’s about creating lasting relationships with your list and perspective followers. Here are 7 of the best mental triggers. Use them in your sales copy to create outstanding sales copy.

Social proof: This is all about proving you know the “in” people that you know your stuff and are the leader in your industry. You can highlight this by throwing in a few “industry expert” names with the sales copy. This triggers a response called “heard” which is the ability to convert a large number of people into doing what you ask them to do because of who and what you know. Robert B. Cialdini explains this well: “People will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, in one experiment, one or more confederates would look up into the sky; bystanders would then look up into the sky to see what they were seeing. At one point this experiment aborted, as so many people were looking up that they stopped traffic”.

Authority: If we can get experts to confirm our credibility (such as our clients through testimonials, word of mouth etc), it gives us authority and proves we have an exceptional, even comprehensive understanding of our subject. People do like to be told what to do by the experts and the more you can prove this, the more authority you have (and this plays on building social proof).

Anticipation: You can create anticipation by gradually revealing more and more about your product as you progress with your sales copy. When you have a compelling story, you are moving your audience forward bit by bit. They begin to identify with that story, and think that the character you are talking about is them. Then you lead them to the resolution of solving an issue, pain or need they have.

Common Enemy: This is powerful stuff because if you can create a common enemy and talk about them in your sales copy (such as the tight arse boss, or the colleague from hell). By doing this you will trigger the viewer to create motivation from that common enemy and enable you to “influence them” in some sort of way. Give it a go and see the effects for yourself.

Commitment & Consistency: This is about getting your prospects to make little commitments along the way. Constantly getting a “yes” from them (as many as possible) then leads them to saying a big “YES” to a larger commitment (such as purchasing your online membership rate)

Interaction and conversation: Everyone loves REAL interact and they enjoy reading other peoples life stories. This keeps the conversation moving, seeming real, genuine, and emotional. You definitely want to steer away from the static, boring dialogue.

Reciprocity: This is the idea that if you give something someone, they are compelled and driven to give something back to you. So give lots of content for free, all the time to your prospects – such as a free months subscription, or a free e book, interview, something that would be of value and is relevant to them.

I trust these 7 steps will trigger a nice little real life story for your next sales copy project. Weather it’s for your own material, or for clients, these effective mental triggers really assist you to make an impact with others. Try them out and let me know how you go