Why use pain points, and why are they so effective?

It’s really easy to be status quo when everything seems to be going fine. 

It’s scientific, really – “Objects in motion will stay in motion and objects at rest will stay at rest.”

I’m a great sleeper. I don’t have trouble falling asleep, and normally I don’t wake up unless one of the dogs has to go out.

But one night about a month ago, I was restless. I was still asleep, but kind of in the half-conscious state where you’re not really all the way asleep or all the way awake. 

I stayed in bed, half-awake and half-asleep until I was brought fully awake by a horrendous case of heartburn. It was so uncomfortable it made it impossible to stay lying down. I HAD to sit up because it was too painful not to.

Pain provides the impetus for change. Long story short, pain wakes people up. 

Being awake isn’t enough to really move someone though. 

After all, a person can know they HAVE a problem without knowing WHAT the problem is. 

I woke up in the middle of the night only knowing I was very uncomfortable. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, so I did what everyone does when they wake up feeling sick in the middle of the night.

I asked Dr. Google. 

I typed in my symptoms, and after reading a long list of symptoms and some online forums, I had a pretty good idea what I was dealing with – heartburn. 

Only then could I start thinking about how to treat it.

Using pain points in copy works much the same way. First, it wakes them up. Then it show them what the source of their pain is.  

A raging case of heartburn had woke me up in the middle of the night and sent me straight to Google to figure out what was going on. 

Now I was ready for the next step – action. 

Heartburn is horrible. If you’ve never had it, it feels kind of like an acidy elephant sitting on your chest. Trust me when I say it was a top priority for me to figure out how to make it go away. 

I was ready to take action.

That’s how it works with pain points in sales copy too, and writing with the 3A’s of pain in mind is so powerful.

Awake. Aware. Action. 

Create sales copy with those three objectives in mind in that order, and you’ll have a direct progression that logically takes the person from dead asleep to ready to do whatever it takes to ease the pain.

Want to watch the live training on Awake, Aware, and Action? Visit my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/christanicholsmessaging. You can also grab the worksheet that goes with the training here.