
How to Write a Title That Gets a Click
If you want attention paid to your marketing, especially on the Web, you’re competing in a gigantic marketplace. You’re also asking for time from a busy prospect or reader of your material. Particularly in a marketing email or a Google search result or webpage title, people these days will spend less than a second or two to make a decision about whether to continue to read what you have to say.
When it comes to the massive traffic on the social sites like Facebook and the short posts on Twitter, the quality of your headline or title can make or break your response rate. Online it’s a quick click to look elsewhere, especially with a long list of search results. What if you could test your titles and headlines ahead of time with an online tool that tells you the EMV, Emotional Marketing Value, of your text? People are emotional, and words elicit responses from them.
The Advanced Marketing Institute, at aminstitute.com, offers a Headline Analyzer that scores your text for its EMV. Though theoretically, the scoring goes from 0% to 100%, scores above 50% are rare and the site says that only the most gifted copywriters will score over 50%. Most professional copywriters score from 30% to 40%. Most of the people writing content for their own sites and social posts usually have scores between 0% and 20% on the EMV scale.
Three components are scored and weighted based on the type of content. You’ll select from a list of business types or topics from Home and Garden to Legal and Financial, and then you enter your proposed title or headline text. The three characteristics for scoring are Intellectual, Emotional and Spiritual. Once you enter your text, you’re given a percentage score and a breakdown of the text and how it rates in one or more of these areas. Just to see how you can move from a headline with a low score to something a professional copywriter would use, here are actual scores for tested titles for an article about making money from home online.
• “Make Money at Home on the Internet” scored 28.57%
• “How to Make Money at Home on the Internet” scored 33.33%
• “When You Need Money, Make it at Home on the Web” scored 36.36%
• “Make the Money You Need on the Web at Home” scored 40.00%
Each headline you test will have the score explained in relation to the characteristics it exhibits. This is where you can see hints like the word “need” is emotional and caused the score to rise. Using “Web” instead of “Internet” also caused scores to rise. The tool explains that shorter words usually have a greater impact.
There isn’t a secret weapon, but there is a tool you can use on the Internet to add impact to your titles and headlines and get a click or a prospect.