The Choice Is Yours
“Will you be having our Tropical Sunrise Margarita or a glass of our Strawberry Lemonade?”
The waitress looked at me expectantly. For a second, it felt like those were my only two choices – and I almost said, “Margarita please.”
But then I shook my head and asked for a water.
I’d almost given in to a classic sales strategy. Expert copywriter John Forde calls it the “Foregone Conclusion” technique. And you might want to put it to work in your marketing efforts.
The idea is not to offer your prospective customers a choice between buying or not buying. Instead, you offer them a choice between buying one thing… or another.
“The door to deciding whether or not to buy at all is already closed,” says John.
With this technique, you make the assumption that the customer has already decided to buy something that you’re offering. Then only decision left for him to make is whether to choose option A or option B.
[Ed. Note: You can get weekly insights into the world of copywriting and marketing from John Forde just by signing up for his e-newsletter Copywriter’s Roundtable. And you can learn a dozen of the most effective marketing strategies around just by picking up a copy of the Amazon.com best-seller Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business by Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby.]