Today’s podcast is all about how to engage your customer and keep their attention by evoking their curiosity.
I’ll be sharing the three simple rules that you’ll need to know if you want to use the curiosity gap in your copywriting to make your reader click through. From irresistible headlines to actual content, listen to discover:
- The technique of leaving things unresolved – how this can work wonders for your copy.
- Why it is so easy to get curiosity wrong – how to increase conversions by maintaining this fickle emotion.
- Loewenstein’s scientific discovery – the peak combination for triggering a high level of curiosity.
- Deliberate curiosity ploys you can use to stop your readers thinking that they already know it all.
To demonstrate how to stir up curiosity by poking people in their area of interest, I have thrown in a few sketches to amuse you. You’ll hear my amazing impersonation of a French waiter, a story about a curious cat who should know better, and the advanced technique my mum now uses to hold people’s attention for longer.
As always, this podcast has been created for one reason and one reason only: to help you improve your copywriting skills and make more sales. If you’re not already using the art of cultivating curiosity in your work, or even if you are, there are some great tips and tricks here that will help you.
Links:
- Register for the Write with Influence course
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER: AMY HARRISON
WANT TO TEASE CUSTOMERS INTO TAKING ACTION?
THE SCIENCE BEHIND CURIOSITY COPYWRITING
21:51
Amy Harrison: (00:04)
Hello, and welcome to the Write with Influence podcast, a weird and wonderful mix of copywriting tips and sketches to bring the learning to life. Today we’re talking about curiosity: how to use curiosity to pull people into your copy. Curiosity is a powerful but elusive emotion and if used properly it can entice your reader to give you their full attention and follow your call to action. But there’s a catch – despite its intensity, this emotion is fickle, and it’s often mishandled in copywriting. If you make a mistake with it, your reader’s interest can disappear with the smallest of distractions and even if you’re familiar with using curiosity in copywriting and you can recognize it, if you’re not following the three rules I’m going to share with you today, you might be losing more potential customer’s attention than you can imagine.
So, let’s talk for a minute about one of the reasons why curiosity works. So, as human beings, we like things to be resolved. We like to make sense of the world around us. And so, if there are bits of knowledge or things that we don’t know but we think would be useful to know, it can really drive us crazy. I have a habit that I’m pretty sure drives my husband nuts – I will start a sentence and then I will pause, or I’ll start another sentence. So for example, I might come back from the shops and say, “Oh, hey, I was at the supermarket earlier on and I saw … oh, we should get some tomatoes.” And my husband is left thinking, ‘What? Who did you see? Why don’t you just finish that first sentence and give me the rest of the information?” I’m aware that this is something that I do and I’m trying to work on it because I’m not a naturally eloquent speaker.
(01:56)
I often start saying something and then my mind moves quickly to another four or five thoughts that I want to get through before I can finish that first sentence. Now, when I say my mind moves quickly, that’s not me saying I think I’m a genius – far, far from it. What I’m saying is that, it’s like someone emptying a bag of golf balls onto a concrete playground; it’s just pure chaos in my head. Now, I’m going to show you in today’s episode how leaving things unresolved can work really, really well in your copywriting. It’s definitely a good technique that you want to practice and master, but before we get there, have you ever felt that frustration of say telling a story and not being able to resolve it?
(02:44) [NEW SCENE – Amy enters a restaurant to meet her friend]
AMY: Hey, so good to see you. I am a bit nervous about meeting your friends.
AMY’S FRIEND: Oh, don’t be, they’ll love you. Here they are.
BINKY: Oh, hello, Amy.
AMY’S FRIEND: This is Binky.
{Binky kisses Amy’s cheek}
AMY’S FRIEND: And this is Nathan.
NATHAN: Hello.
AMY: Pleased to meet you.
AMY’S FRIEND: Come on, everyone, sit down.
NATHAN: Sorry we’re late, we had to drop by the supermarket before.
AMY’S FRIEND: Hey Amy, tell Binky and Nathan about that funny story of yours about the supermarket.
AMY: Oh yes. So, gosh, so yesterday I went to Asda and I was doing a shop, just a regular shop and I went to the –
WAITER: Excuse Monsieur, Mademoiselle, can I get you some drinks?
AMY: Right, okay.
BINKY (03:31): I’ll have a vodka martini – dirty.
NATHAN (03:37):
And I’ll have a pint of the Abbot’s Ale.
WAITER: Certainly. One moment.
NATHAN: You were saying, Amy, sorry, you had gone to Waitrose?
AMY: I’d gone to Asda. I’m at the till and I’m expecting it to probably to be around about a hundred pounds.
NATHAN: I hear as to do some incredible rollbacks. You don’t get rollbacks at Waitrose; everything is full price. Go on, so —
WAITER: Excuse me Monsieur, Mademoiselle, your drinks – a vodka martini, dirty and a pint of Abbot’s Ale.
{Nathan sips his beer}
WAITER: Are you ready to order?
NATHAN(04:14): Oh, I haven’t even looked yet.
WAITER: Pas de problem, take your time. I do not want to interrupt your little party.
NATHAN: You were saying Amy, something about a hundred pounds?
AMY: Right. So, I had just done a regular shop and expected it to be about £100, and it actually came to £179 pounds. So, I said to the lady at the till, “Are you sure that that’s right?” She was a sweet, dear old lady. And she says, “Oh, it’s always more than you think my dear.”
NATHAN: Not at Waitrose. I can estimate the receipt within 7p every time – no more, no less than 7p.
BINKY: He can. It’s quite impressive.
AMY: Good. Erm, so I pay it and, as I’m walking out, I think, ‘I’ll just check it.’ Something just didn’t seem quite right, and I looked at the receipt only to see that instead of putting through two packs of gala apples, she put through —
WAITER (05:12): Monsieur, Mademoiselle, are you ready to order your starters?
BINKY: I will have the scallops to start.
WAITER: Ahh, tres bien, tres bien.
NATHAN: I will have the mushrooms.
WAITER: Tres bien.
AMY: 61 packs of apples.
WAITER: Can you point to where that is on the menu Madame?
AMY: No, that was the end of the story, she’d put through 61 packs of apples instead of two. It was the equivalent of 366 apples instead of the 12 that I bought – one for every day of the year, actually, because it’s a leap year … which is the joke that I made at customer service.
NATHAN (05:45): That would never have happened in Waitrose.
[END]
Amy Harrison (05:50):
So, there’s a certain degree of frustration around leaving things unresolved, but when it comes to writing copy, there’s definitely plus side about leaving things unresolved and creating that kind of tension and frustration that makes people desire to get to the finish and resolve the story. But first, before we can get curiosity right, we need to understand why it is so easy to get it wrong.
Curiosity, stems from our need to make sense of the world by gathering information. We want to learn about things around us. We want to understand how things work and curiosity can have us glued to puzzles or games for hours. It can have us finishing books that we don’t enjoy or bouncing from article to article on Wikipedia and, constructively, curiosity has been the driver behind some of the great discoveries in science, medicine, and technology. It’s that need to know, but it’s also a fickle emotion or it can be. (06:51) So, that urge we get to read about the latest celebrity scandal, whether it’s online or looking at magazines in the grocery line, it can disappear as soon as we turn our attention to something else or if we finish paying and we leave the supermarket.
So how do you use curiosity so that you actually get someone to complete that action, to click on a link, sign up for your newsletter or open your email? Well, it boils down to three rules to increase your chances of getting curiosity right. And this was discovered by George Loewenstein, who was a psychology and economics professor. He did a study and discovered that the peak combination for triggering a high level of curiosity included violating the right expectations, tickling the information gap, and also knowing when to stop. So, let’s take a look at each of these three triggers and how you can use them to turn curiosity into conversion.
(07:54):
- Violate the right expectations.
This is really about challenging relevant and common beliefs. For example, a headline which reads, ‘Increase sales by making more calls than other people,’ doesn’t really turn our world upside down. The headline makes sense, yes, more sales calls probably equals more sales but, it leaves nothing to the imagination. However, if we had a headline such as, ‘How to increase sales by 50% in just 15 minutes a day,’ I’m not saying it’s a great headline, but I’m showing you the curiosity aspect of it. It violates expectations because it suggests that something small can create dramatic sales results, and that might be something that the target market is not expecting. One of the reasons why curiosity headlines are some of the hardest to write is because simply saying something unexpected, isn’t enough for someone to take action. To create a real desire, to find out what that information is that you’re holding back, you’ve got to lean into George Loewenstein’s second trigger, which is to tickle the information gap.
2. Tickle the information gap.
So, Lowenstein discovered that curiosity increased when he highlighted a gap in someone’s knowledge, particularly when it related to a topic that interested them. So, for example, let’s say you want to be a better copywriter so that you can attract more traffic, links, subscribes, and profits, etc. The curiosity headline for you would need to have value. Now, if I had a headline that said, ‘How your copywriting is like a 7ft banana,’ it may violate expectations, but most readers could probably feel like, ‘We can live without that knowledge -I don’t need to know how my copywriting is like a 7ftbanana.’ There’s no information gap that is valuable. That’s the key thing. That information gap has to feel valuable. Your reader has to feel like, ‘I will extract value by knowing this unknown.’
So, a headline such as, ‘Why bad copywriters are stealing your clients and what to do about it,’ may be more effective because we’re violating expectations – we’re suggesting that bad copywriters can be successful. That may be unexpected, but it also suggests that writers who are worse than you could actually know something that you don’t, which is stopping you from being successful. And of course it is implied that if you read on further you will find some information as to why these other people are having success who don’t deserve success as much as you, and then you can use this knowledge to your advantage. So, the information gap isn’t just something they don’t know now, it’s got to be something that they would also really like to know.
Something else to remember when using curiosity is that you have to stop your reader from assuming that they know the answer.(10:58) You don’t want them to think, ‘Oh, that’s probably going to be about X, Y, or Z (pronounced ‘zed’).’ Or if you’re in the States, ‘That’s probably going to be about X, Y, or Z (pronounced ‘zee’). You don’t want them thinking, ‘I bet I already know that.’ Most people assume that they probably know more than they actually do, so you definitely want to make sure that you’re not losing readers who think they know or think they can guess what you’re going to tell them. For example, if you saw this headline, ‘Five online marketing lessons that you can learn from small businesses,’ you might assume that you already know what those five online marketing lessons are. You might think, ‘Oh, it’s probably to do with: have a customer profile, network, publish valuable content, have calls to action, talk about benefits, etc.’ And as a result, if you saw a headline like that, you may not feel compelled to read the article. (11:47) But if you had something like, ‘Five unusual online marketing lessons that you can learn from the bricks and mortar business,’ that might work better. For one, there’s this curious mention of the word ‘unusual,’ which is very common in copywriting. We see ‘unusual,’ ‘strange,’ ‘odd.’ These are all deliberate curiosity ploys because, as stated in trigger one, it’s all about violating expectations, turning things on their head and saying, ‘Hey, this is not what you thought.’ You’ve also got the contrast between ‘Five unusual online marketing lessons you can learn from bricks and mortar businesses.’ And so, we’ve got this contrast between, ‘Huh, I operate in the online space so maybe I don’t know that much about bricks and mortar businesses, but if there’s something that they’re doing that could help my online business …’ this is all about tickling that information gap. There is something that you don’t know, and it’s not just that you don’t know it, but if you did know it, you are more likely to get the results that you want and you are more likely to succeed. In other words, it’s only when you close the information gap that it will be valuable to you. I mean, ultimately what we are doing is, we’re directly poking people in their area of interest, their area of expertise, and we’re saying, ‘I know you know a lot about this subject, but you don’t know this.’ And that can really encourage the curiosity gremlin to start wreaking havoc. And it goes without saying that you have to make sure that what you’re saying is true. So, curiosity headlines are not about writing clickbait, where you make an outlandish promise about, ‘Five things you never knew about chicken, and number three will blow your mind…’ when number three is something like, ‘Chicken is the most popular food on the menu.’ My mind is not blown. So, we don’t want to be clickbaity. You have to deliver the implied value that you’re promising.
(13:52) Finally, trigger number three is:
3. Knowing when to stop.
So, Lowenstein discovered that curiosity doesn’t intensify indefinitely, rather, it peaks, and it declines if it’s left unsatisfied for too long. This can be a problem in your copywriting if you’re overdoing curiosity, believing that your reader will just stay hooked and interested forever. So, let’s say you have this great curiosity headline, now, it’s true that your headline is important in getting the attention of your reader, but just because you get your customer’s attention at the headline, it doesn’t guarantee their continued interest. The headline gets them to read the first line of your copy, and the first line gets them to read the second line, and so on and so on. So for example, when you start a sales page or a landing page, or your blog posts, or your opening paragraph, if you’ve used a curiosity headline to pull people in, you need to acknowledge the curiosity you’ve highlighted. (14:47) Don’t introduce something new and unrelated, hoping that your reader’s curiosity from the headline will cause them to power on through your copy looking for the answer that was promised to them. And you don’t have to reveal everything straight away – telling them to read the article to the end in order to discover what they want to know (the promise of your headline), can nudge them sufficiently further into the body copy. And from then on, once you’ve got them into the body copy, you can start relying less on curiosity to pull people in, and you can start showcasing benefits using rich imagery and strong storytelling to keep their attention and encourage them to take action. So, it’s not really good practice to make this big curiosity promise and then string people out and string people out and string people out, hoping that those stick there until the end. That may succeed a couple of times, but then people will start to get wise to it (15:42) and it loses its effect. I have experienced this on a personal level … I mentioned before about how my mind works and how I tend to want to get four or five things out at the same time. One of the reasons why I think that is, is because of my upbringing – my family are very quick and they’re very funny and they get distracted easily, so we would all compete for attention by telling good stories. It wasn’t always easy for everyone to be heard and I noticed that my mum developed a technique where she wouldn’t reveal the key part of a story until the very, very end, and she also learned that if that story had dramatic undertones, she kept our attention for longer.
(16:32) [NEW SCENE – phone ringing]
AMY: Hello.
AMY’S MUM: Amy, have you spoken to your cousin?
AMY: No. Is everything all right?
AMY’S MUM: He had to go to hospital.
AMY: Is he OK?
AMY’S MUM: It happened while he was at work.
AMY: What happened?
AMY’S MUM: He had a salad. He didn’t feel well Amy, he didn’t feel well at all. His heart was just racing.
AMY: Where is he now?
AMY’S MUM: His boss just took one look at him and, Amy, he was just ashen.
AMY: Is he Ok?
AMY’S MUM: His boss said to him, “You are going straight to hospital.” His boss never takes time off site. I mean, he must’ve thought it was serious there and then.
AMY: But–
AMY’S MUM: His boss took him in his car, and they went straight there but they got caught in traffic and his boss said, “If this traffic doesn’t clear, I’m going to get out this car and I will carry you on my back and I will race all the way to the hospital.”
AMY: But—
AMY’S MUM: His boss would never normally do that, Amy. So, he obviously—
AMY: Thought it was serious. Yes. Look—
AMY’S MUM: The traffic finally started moving and they got to the hospital.
AMY: Mum. Is he okay?
AMY’S MUM: Yes. So, it turns out he is allergic to tomatoes. He was fine, it wasn’t like anaphylactic shock or anything serious. It was, I guess, you know what …you’d probably call it a tomato attack!
AMY: Unbelievable.
AMY’S MUM: Anyway, you’ll never guess what happened to Mrs Green down the road.
AMY: Let me guess … she heard a noise in the night and got really spooked, so she went down to investigate and, I don’t know, grabbed a baseball bat, flicked on a light, and it was her cat knocking over a plant pot. Something like that happen?
AMY’S MUM: No, Amy. She died.
AMY: Oh.
AMY’S MUM: I don’t know what’s wrong with you sometimes.
[END]
Amy Harrison:
And since then, I’ve cottoned on not to panic when mum opens with a curiosity pitch.
(17:58) So, to summarize, curiosity can be very powerful and I do encourage you to experiment with it, especially for short copy, email subject lines, headlines, and also bullet points – Facebook ad copy and things like that, where you’re trying to get someone’s attention and get a quick conversion of that attention into action. And the three elements that you need to remember to make curiosity work are:
- Something unexpected.
- Something of value.
- Knowing when to stop.
That’s all for today. Don’t forget, you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, just search for Write with Influence and if you want to really sharpen your copywriting skills, why not check out the complete course at www.writewithinfluence.com/course.
Until next time, keep believing and hey, have you ever wondered where the phrase ‘curiosity killed the cat’ comes from?
(18:52) [NEW SCENE – BAR]
BAR PERSON: Hey Felix, come in, take a load off.
FELIX: Oh, thanks.
BAR PERSON: How’s tricks.
FELIX: Not sure, it was a fuzzy night. Why don’t you tell me what … what’s left on my tab?
BAR PERSON: Okay. You have three drinks available and you’re down to five lives.
FELIX: I thought I was down to six.
BAR PERSON: Yeah, but … the Clickbait Kitten was in again last night.
FELIX: Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember now, I’m getting a flashback. Uh, he said that if I followed him outside, he would do 10 things that I’d never believe and number one on the list would really surprise me.
BAR PERSON: What happened then?
FELIX: He pushed me off a cliff, dammit! I woke up wedged in a tree, one life down, and I never found out what the other nine things were.
BAR PERSON: I don’t know why you don’t just tell him no.
FELIX: Uh, because he’s just so compelling and just gets right through to my curiosity and I just have to know.
BAR PERSON: Felix, you’re a cat, you know what curiosity can do to you.
FELIX: I know. Just give me one of my drinks.
BAR PERSON: Hey, don’t look now but here he comes.
CLICKBAIT KITTEN: Ah Miss Amigos, que tal?
FELIX: Why are you speaking Spanish?
CLICKBAIT KITTEN: Oh, it’s a really interesting story FELIX, muy interesante – it will blow your mind. Would you like to know?
FELIX: Yeah. I mean, no.
BAR PERSON: Leave him alone Clickbait.
CLICKBAIT KITTEN: OK. OK. Just a drink. Please? God, I need one, you wouldn’t believe what random thing just happened to me in the car park.
FELIX: What?
CLICKBAIT KITTEN: Why don’t I show you? It’s incredible and it’s the last thing you would expect to happen in a car park.
FELIX: Stop it.
CLICKBAIT KITTEN: This stranger ran up to a nun and then what she did next was totally shocking.
FELIX: Why? What, what happened?
BAR PERSON: Felix! Just ignore him. Think of your lives.
CLICKBAIT KITTEN: Why don’t you come with me, Felix? I will show you. I won’t even charge you full price.
BAR PERSON: You pay him?
FELIX: You don’t understand there are so many open loops and everything he says sounds like something I really need to know – who was the stranger? What happened next? Why was it a nun? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve got to see this. I’ve got to see this.
[Felix exits]
[Sound of Felix falling]
BAR PERSON: What happened to him?
CLICKBAIT KITTEN: The nun may have pushed him off a cliff – it was the last thing he was expecting to happen in a car park. Look, just put another drink on his tab and take another life off.
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