Often, what is at the top of their minds is covered in news media. I learned this from Paul Hartunian:

First, you go to USA Today.com, especially if most of your target audience is predominantly in the United States and other western countries. USAToday.com summarizes what is at the top of people’s minds – be it a school shooting, a politician’s sex scandal or a football team victory – in the following categories:

• Most read
• Most commented
• Most recommended
• Most e-mailed

When you look at the Top 10 news stories on USAToday.com, you know what is influencing people’s feelings at this point:

…it’s about General David Petraeus’ testimonial

…it’s about the fall in sales of existing homes

…it’s about the baby born with two faces in north India

…it’s about the Women’s NCAA Tournament

This is what’s going on in their minds, and your role is to bridge the gap by speaking to them at their point of need.

Our role as marketers is to find a hot story – it doesn’t even need to be that relevant – and connect the product to the story. However, this technique can only be used on the day or the day after the news is released because that’s when it’s still hot in the minds of the prospects.

One of the best examples I’ve seen was when Shameless Shamus Brown, a sales guru who does really good email marketing, used this technique after Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution scandal was covered by the press.

The day after Eliot Spitzer’s story was out, the subject line of his email read:

‘Did Eliot Spitzer ask for a discount?’

Anybody would click on that immediately. You see, I believe that the open rate for that email really shot up that day. Why? Because it was connected to a current event.

In that email,  he talked about sales technique; he explained that there are some clients who are not price sensitive at all, and Eliot Spitzer could be one of them.

The prostitute charged $5,000.00 dollars an hour…did Eliot Spitzer ask for a discount? Maybe a 20% 30% discount? No, he didn’t. The high price… the price insensitivity… the high premium gives these kinds of clients a sense of power and worth.

The same goes for press releases. As Paul Hartunian says, there’s a difference between ‘hot’ stories and ‘non-hot’ stories. A hot story means that it is urgent at that point in time. And the only way to ensure that your story is urgent at that point in time is to be in sync with current affairs of that time.

If there’s a new tax law coming up, you come up with a new Internet marketing product or press release that says, ‘if you buy my product you can beat the tax law’, or ‘this tax law will not affect you much if you buy my new product’. Chances are, people will listen to what you have to say because that’s what’s in the prospect’s mind at that point in time. 

If you run a multinational company, try to cater to other hot locations them as well, although most importantly, look at your key demographics and key geographic space. More often than not, however, US news is world news.

This secret, when implemented at the right time, will get more of your emails opened, your sales letters read, and your press releases quickly picked up by the press. This is only a small fraction of what this secret can do for you.

However, what “Sure-Fire” Headlines are going to get you the highest click-through-rate and help you succeed with your AdWords campaign? 

Well, we put 4 Sure-Fire headlines to the test.  They were:

• Mind Power Secrets
• The Art of Mind Power
• The Key to Mind Power
• Free Mind Power Couse

The first three are all “proven” headlines that you have found on numerous products.  No matter what niche you operate in, you will allways find people using these time tested headline formulas.   The 4th headline is a proven formula for Google AdWords because the word “Free” can often attract lots of clicks. 

The results were quite surprising (see image below):

It turns out that “Mind Power Secrets” outperformed all of the other headlines by a significant margin.  In fact, “Mind Power Secrets” did 37% better than “The Key to Mind Power” and 12% better than “The Art of Mind Power.” 

Surprisingly, the headline “Free Mind Power Course” had the lowest click-through-rate.  The second surprise is that the headline “The Key to Mind Power” has a very poor conversion rate.

What should you take away from this?

First of all, test different “Sure-Fire” headlines because not every “proven” headline is going to get you the same response.  Testing everything is always the key to success because you don’t know ahead of time how visitors will react. 

Take a look:

Winning headline:

Losing headline:

The results:

Sign-up rate of winning headline: 16.22% (641 visitors)

Sign-up rate of losing headline: 13.15% (502 visitors)

Gain = 23%

The only difference between the two headlines was that in one sub-headline we added the words “Starting Today.”  That’s it!  However, that alone dropped the sign-up rate from 16% to 13%!  So, the next time you write a headline, be cautious and don’t be too pushy, and the results may surprise you.

My first hunch was that any testimonial anywhere on the page would work great.  That, however, is not how it goes.  Adding a picture with a testimonial might actually decrease the conversion rate of your landing page but more to that in another test that I will be writing about later.

I did, however, stumble upon one technique that turned out to work incredibly well.  I started to use my sub-title as a place for testimonials.  Not only did I put the sub-title into quotes, I actually used a sentence that one of our customers had emailed us. 

In the test below, we were able to boost the sign-up rate of our page by over 100% with the new sub-headline!  Ok, ok, you might say that the other headline is very poor but the results are nevertheless so encouraging that I wanted to share them with you.  This test definitely shows that adding a short customer testimonial into the subheadline might work wonders for your site. 

It is true that the testimonial is not qualified (i.e. in this case we don’t show who this testimonial is from since we don’t have room for that in the sub-headline).  However, it does show that often your customers have a way of speaking and writing about your product that seems more authentic and sincere and adding that touch into the sub-headline can have a very big impact on the conversion rate of your site.

Here are the details of this test:

Winning sub-headline:

Losing sub-headline:

Detailed Results: