It’s one of my favorite “email copywriting” techniques.
It will sound like hocus-pocus nonsense. But it’s not. It comes from the branch of linguistics known as Pragmatics.
And it’s super-slick (and powerful) because of how effective it is at conveying the most compelling benefits of your product or service to prospects… without actually coming out and being explicit about it.
I guess you could say it’s a real “under the radar” method for getting prospects to accept that your product or service can deliver the goods… without you having to claim it.
It’s a specific type of question, worded in a specific way. And you should include it in every email follow-up sequence for every marketing funnel you have.
Look: As a marketer, it’s no secret that your focus, when communicating with prospects, needs to be on them and the benefits they stand to gain from your product or service.
However, simply rattling-off the benefits of your product and how great it is… is not enough to make a convincing argument for why prospects should buy. Because this is exactly what prospects expect to hear from you. They expect you to make all kinds of positive claims about your product. They expect you to come-out and explicitly rave about how great it is.
This is why, when being explicit about the benefits of your product or service in your marketing, you need to back up every claim with proof. Without proof, all the good stuff you say about your offer is just that… a claim.
But, there’s another way to convey the benefits of your product or service… without coming-out and explicitly claiming it.
It’s a way to bypass the “salesman filter” prospects have when consuming your marketing message.
I call it the Benefit-Embedded Question Technique (BEQT).
It uses the power of the “presupposition” in question format to get prospects to automatically accept the benefits of your product or service without consciously contemplating it or even being fully aware of it.
(I know… it sounds like some hypnosis, New-Age mumbo jumbo. It’s not. I’m totally NOT into that. It’s a language thing. Not a mystical thing.)
First, let me give the Wikipedia definition of presupposition and a couple of examples. Then I’ll break-down the Benefit-Embedded Question Technique (BEQT) and show you how to use it.
First, the definition:
Presupposition: an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse.
Okay, so in simple terms, a presupposition is something you say that implies and assumes the listener or reader already believes something else.
Here’s an example:
“Basketball players can dunk because of how tall they are.”
That is a presupposition because it assumes you already believe and accept that basketball players can dunk.
Here’s another example:
“South Florida might have the nicest palm trees.”
That is a presupposition because it assumes you already believe and accept that South Florida has palm trees.
Okay, so how does this idea of the presupposition translate over to the Benefit-Embedded Question Technique (BEQT)? And how does the BEQT allow you to convey the benefits of your product or service without explicitly coming right out and claiming them?
Here’s how:
The Benefit-Embedded Question Technique (BEQT) is simply a positive presupposition about your product or service stated in question form.
For example, let’s suppose you sell a piece of software that blocks SPAM from your inbox. An example of the BEQT in action might look something like:
“How is SPAM Sniper able to block over 96.6% of all incoming SPAM into your inbox, you might be wondering?”
You see: In the above example a prospect can’t begin to wonder about how the software works to prevent 96.6% SPAM without first accepting that it DOES work to block 96.6% of SPAM. Even though the above example proposes a question, it does so in a way that assumes it’s a given that the software works. Instead, it simply questions how it works. Not if it works.
Here’s another possible example:
“What does SPAM Sniper do that allows it start blocking SPAM right away, you’re probably curious about?”
You see: In that example a prospect must accept that SPAM Sniper starts blocking SPAM right away… before they can begin thinking about what it actually does to do the blocking.
You see what I’m saying?
The Benefit-Embedded Question Technique (BEQT) allows you to “implant” beliefs in your prospects mind about the benefits of your product or service by proposing a question that forces the prospect to accept the benefits as true before they can contemplate the answer to the question. All without you having to make a claim or be explicit about it.
Pretty cool, right?
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If you liked this and you like these sort of advanced email copywriting techniques, you’ll love the Secret Email Persuasion and Conversion Triggers.
It covers 24 tactics used by many of the best and brightest email marketers on the planet that radically increase prospect COMPLIANCE, ACTIONS, and CONVERSIONS. The Benefit-Embedded Question Technique (BEQT) is just one of those 24 tactics.
