It will be the hottest marketing promotion of the summer — until it runs out of gas. Companies of all kinds are giving away tankfuls of free gas as long as you buy something: a new car, hotel room, even Calloway golf clubs. With $4 a gallon fuel prices and $50-75 fill-ups becoming part of our auto-oriented lifestyle, gasoline giveaways are a real attention-getting promotional idea.

Expect to see it a lot of them this summer, before they fade away by Labor Day, says a marketing professor at at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

But why bother with gas cards at all? Why not just take $50 off the product price, or give customers the cash as a rebate instead? After all, money is money, right? Shouldn’t consumers be just as excited about a $50 discount as a $50 gas card?

Aha, that’s where the psychology of marketing comes in! Any copywriter worth his thesaurus knows that buying decisions are primarily driven by emotion, not logic, no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Suzanne Shu, a marketing professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, says:

“The more (a) purchase feels discretionary, like staying at a luxury hotel, the more the gas cards have impact because people can use them to justify something they might not do otherwise.”

So if you’re thinking of going down the “free gas” road for your next promotion, just remember those roads are going to get pretty congested. Link

photo credit: pixelnaiad

When is a complaint letter like a sales letter? When it gets the immediate, affirmative response you’re looking for. Take the letter “professional complaint letter writer” Bruce Silverman wrote to the Ritz-Carlton that ended up getting him a week, totally comped, at the company’s Kapalua in Hawaii.

As today’s Consumerist detailed, Silverman has been amazingly successful in getting companies to give him all sorts of free stuff: First class upgrades, hotel room upgrades (how does a free week in the Presidential Suite sound?), hundreds of dollars in cash — all from his way with words.

Silverman has now written a book filled with advice for complaining. The basic technique isn’t too far off from the way to write an effective sales letter. Basically his advice is:

1. Make the opening of your complaint letter personable and personal. Hook their interest.
2. Praise first before you explain why you’re dissatisfied.
3. Keep it brief. The reader is busy and easily distracted.
4. Be reasonable — don’t ask for the moon.
5. Make it clear you haven’t written them off, that you pl;an to be customers again in the future, and that you would welcome some sort of compensation.

As the Consumerist put it, “It’s really just an artful way of demonstrating the basic principle of “it will cost more to ignore me than to take care of my problem.”

Check it out. It’s a fun read. And it may get you what you want next time you’re wronged.

Well, for the search term “b2b sales letters” anyway.

It’s true. Of all the millions of copywriters in all the gin joints in all the world, my modest copywriting site shows up first when you Google that term. That’s way cool, I gotta admit. Even cooler is how I found out.

I got a call the other day from a guy in Austin. He’s seen my work and liked it, and wanted to hire me to write a couple of direct response sales letters for a new financial product his company was introducing in Austin. OK, great.

Like any good businessman, I always ask new clients, how’d you find me? A referral, perhaps? My blog? That outstanding warrant?

No, he said, Google. Do you remember what search term you used, I asked. I didn’t really expect him to remember. Half the prospects who find me via search can’t remember which search engine they used, much less what words they typed in the little box.

But he remembered: “B2b sales letters.”

I was a bit surprised. It’s one of my favorite kinds of copywriting — I love all forms of direct response — but I hadn’t optimized my site for that term. So I tried it myself, wondering how far down the listings I’d appear.

OMG, that’s me in first place, right at the very top of the results page! Whoa. That is very cool.

So remember what they say, folks: Don’t settle for anything less than #1. At least not when you need a sales letter or any kind of direct response copywriting.

(Unless you’re searching on Yahoo. Then you want to demand #3.)

PS: Not to brag, but (ahem) I also show up #1 in both Google and Yahoo for “Maine copywriter.” (SEO? I’ll show you SEO…)