You’ve spent days fine-tuning the sales pitch (buyer psychology copywriting strategy) on your product page. It’s been a heartburning experience but the finished product looks good.

Don’t celebrate just yet, we need to nail one more thing: your opening.

To illustrate the power of the opening let me share a personal story.

This morning, as I got onto the treadmill I started scrolling through Netflix to see what I’d like to watch during my workout.

Happened to stumble on Smurfs 2

My rational side said, “This is going to be bad”.

My irrational side said, “Don’t you remember enjoying watching Smurfs as a kid?”

Even though I hit play I was thinking about all the other things I could be watching. I pretty much had 1 foot out the door. By the time the opening scene was done I was pretty sure this was a waste of my time. But then, somehow, I must’ve heard a joke that got a chuckle and bought 2 more minutes.

Shortly thereafter I was hooked. Sunk cost❓ had set in, and now I was in too deep to pull out. Also, the universe of Smurfs was gradually coming alive for me.

How this relates to eCommerce

What happened is a classic scenario that plays out between the marketer and the consumer. When the consumer first encounters a marketing message he isn’t committed to it. He has a whole bunch of thoughts floating through his mind (you know, life). But, if the ad is enticing the user will click on it to “quickly see what all the fuss is about.”

In my favorite book on copywriting by Joseph Sugarman, the author talks about the idea of the “slippery slide”.

The idea behind “slippery slide”: the copywriter’s job is to get the user to read the headline. The headline should be written so well that it compels the reader to read the opening sentence. The opening sentence should be crafted so well that the reader is sucked into the next sentence. This chain of events creates, what the author calls, the “slippery slide”.

According to the book once you get the reader to read 25% of the ad they will end up reading the entire ad.

This is exactly what we need to do as copywriters. Our opening should be so strong, so enticing, so filled with mystery and intrigue that the reader is sucked into the wormhole as soon as they start.

This is at the heart of buyer psychology copywriting.

If I can get the reader to read my whole pitch I am 8x more confident I’ll get them to pull out their credit card.

Next Steps

Now that you see the importance of the opening and setup of our marketing pitch you have 2 paths:

Path 1: take a step back and learn about crafting buyer psychology marketing content. But if you arrived at this article from there then path 2 is for you.

Path 2: deploying marketing content across the buying journey.

A little about us

Thank you for reading this Buyer Psychology Copywriting Strategy. We are Frictionless Commerce and over the last 11 years, we’ve thought about just one thing: how do we get online shoppers to convert? We’re fascinated by buyer psychology. And once we understand how your site visitor thinks we use our 9 point copywriting process to convince and convert them.

If you’re on LinkedIn much you can should definitely connect with me. On LinkedIn, I post ecommerce conversion ideas every day, multiple times a day.