Sales Approaches for the Left Brain and Right Brain

Selling to both the left brain and right brain can make all the difference in your sales outcome. The left brain is customarily considered the area where people process information logically. The right brain is considered to be more creative. But when writing direct marketing copy, you must appeal to both hemispheres. This is my topic at Target Marketing Magazine titled Copywriting for the Left Brain/Right Brain.

After all the effort to get attention and deliver your message, ultimately it’s in the closing where you make your logic-based sales pitch and move your prospective customer to an emotional place where they give themselves permission to buy.

The left hemisphere of your brain does, in fact, have more of a logic and mathematical focus. But to be creative, research finds both the left and right brain hemispheres are used. As marketers, we strengthen our message when we appeal to both the left brain and right brain with a formula to move our message along to our end goal of generating a lead, sale or contribution. 

In any successful direct mail letter, landing page or other selling channel there are certain attributes that work well for the logic side of how we process information. Importantly, you need to bring your prospect back to emotion for the final close.

You should always interpret information for your readers, listeners and viewers. It’s the nuance of interpretation—not just throwing out information and letting it sit idly by—that is transformational in generating response. Here are some ways to appeal to logic:

• Features versus Benefits. It’s easy to talk features of a product or service, but they need to be translated into benefits. Taken a step further, you need to spell out why those benefits are important.
• Guarantee. Make it specific—not some fluff language that gives you wiggle room that doesn’t assure the prospective buyer. Give your customer 30 days, maybe 60 or 90 days to get a refund. Or how about a lifetime guarantee? 
• Pricing Presentation. Break down the price. Cost per day or month. Another approach: relate price to the cost of not buying the product.

Then when you’ve made your logical left brain appeal, you must move your reader to the emotional right brain. It’s ultimately emotion that will convert to a sale. Bring your prospect to becoming a customer with these conclusions:

• This is Good. You must lead your reader, listener or viewer to conclude “this is good.”
• This is Smart. If it’s good, then show them how “this is smart for me.”
• Open the door to Permission to Act. When in the closing of your message, your copy leads your prospect logically and emotionally, take them to a place where in their mind they give themselves permission to buy.

Using a journey from the logical right brain to the emotional left brain, you give your prospect permission to respond. Do this and you will have done your job as a marketer.