Claude C. Hopkins, the father of modern marketing, back around 1900, was so successful he started out as a copywriter and ended up owning the agency. He wrote that he could successfully market to the common man because he was one.

Most of the time we don’t have that advantage but we can copy the essence of it, by putting ourselves in the shoes of our prospective customers.

It’s not about you. It’s about them. And getting them to reach for their wallets requires understanding what matters to them, what appeals to them.  What is the headline that will make them stop in their tracks and read on, because you just said what they were thinking.

Many people open their mail over a waste basket. If it isn’t a personal communication, if it is advertising, it is their default position to trash it.

People are busy and they are inundated with advertising messages. You have to say something that will make them want to take some of their valuable time to find out more.

The same applies to messages on other channels. I get hundreds of emails a day. Most of them get deleted in about 2 seconds. An email from someone I don’t know with the subject line “quick question for Rich” gets deleted at once. I don’t care about their quick question. An email or bulk mail envelope that says “important”, isn’t. Not to me.

The only reason advertisers send out communications like that is because they haven’t imagined what it would be like to receive that email or envelope.

The failure of most advertising is a failure of imagination. Instead they imitate each other and use AI and try to trick people into opening their mail or envelope or listening to their robo-call.

Automation makes it cheap so they just try and do it with quantity. And you get an even bigger glut of advertising messages.

The next time you need to get a message across, imagine yourself being in their shoes. You might be pleasantly surprised.