I'm not sure how familiar this sub is with the term 'lift note.' I suspect some of the financial copywriters or grizzled veterans know what they are, but with the constant flooding of this subreddit with newbies fresh off the turnip truck, I figured this would be a helpful post. It's on the lengthier side, but if you plan on doing anything with email marketing, read on. An Introduction to Lift Notes Lifts are an important part of direct mail promotions. They're small inserts packaged with the sales letter to (broadly speaking): Get and hold the prospect's attention. Increase readership. On the web, that translates to traffic-generating copy... i.e. PPC ads or emails. No matter what style or length of copy you specialize in — if you specialize at all — writing lifts is an invaluable skill. They easily translate to website copy (beyond just landing pages) just as they do to email or social ad copy. I've seen lifts utilized as order form bumps and even exit intent-popups in funnels. I've also seen lifts become short-form advertorials. Although I recognize the value of copy frameworks in short-form advertising, I won't be harping on any one like PAS, DOS or AIDA. The primary reason for this also explains the purpose of lift notes: you should be approaching your lifts with an idea of the "core selling points" of your advertisement. Meaning, if your prospect could only see that handful of points without ever clicking through to your sales page... what would they be? How to Write Lift Notes With lift notes, your job is to select the most important talking points of your sales page. Those are, generally but not always, the most persuasive aspects. For instance: the best testimonials, images, benefits, guarantees, or even celebrity endorsements. The first thing to understand is that your lift notes don't sell the product; they merely grab attention and build readership. You can almost think of them as pre-frame sales messages to put your reader in a receptive state of mind as they begin reading your sales copy. And in order to do that, you need to know how lifts are structured. Most lift notes follow the simple structure of DIC: disrupt, intrigue, click. It's not a copywriting framework or formula in the traditional sense — it doesn't tell you what to say as much as it tells you what your lifts should be doing in sequential format. Ben Settle writes some of the best emails in the world this way. The subject line is almost always a strong pattern interrupt, followed by an entire body of email copy that intrigues the prospect (typically with a story). The 'click' component is the close of the email. As you get on more email lists and read more email copy, particularly in the financial niche, you'll start to see how professional copywriters approach DIC. Again, there's no singular way to do it; you should be approaching DIC from as many angles as you possibly can. And that you'll learn how to do so as you simply read more copy on a daily basis. Given how to write lifts, below you'll see just a few methods for figuring out exactly what to say in them. I organize lifts by three broad categories, each with their own sub-categories. Type #1: Benefit-Driven Lifts Before you go wedging benefit after benefit after benefit into your emails or PPC ads, remember that it's generally good practice to keep your lift copy confined to a clean selection of benefits — the ones that the are, above others, most important to the prospect. There are two types of benefit lifts that you'll most frequently see: Dimensionalized Benefits USP Expansions An easy way to dimensionalize a benefit is to gradually build it up with a "landslide" effect. For example, if your prime benefit is that a supplement boosts energy, you may say: "Boosts your energy... and improves your mood... and even reduces the amount of stress you're subjected to... also clears your mind." Each benefit builds on the last, and that momentum you bake into your list of benefits is the dimensionalization of the primary benefit of boosted energy. Crude example, but hopefully you get the idea. You'll be doing this with, once again, only the prime benefits that are most important to your prospect — intentionally excluding every other tangential or indirect benefit. In the case of USP-based benefit lifts, your job is to reinforce and emphasize how new and different your product is. You may also find it helpful to include a list of unique accomplishments of the product's seller. For instance, have they sold over 10 million copies of their book? Have they given speeches to audiences including Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham? These lines of copy not only convey how unique the product is, but also simultaneously build its credibility before your prospect arrives at the sales page. Type #2: Proof-Driven Lifts Proof is perhaps the most persuasive element in all of copywriting, and it's also the least-correctly-utilized. You've probably heard that good copy speaks to the emotional center of the brain rather than the logical one. Proof elements hit two birds with one stone: when you write good proof copy, you get the reader excited by speaking to them on an emotional level... and you also satisfy the logical filter that tells them not to concern themselves with your advertising spam. In DotCom Secrets, Russell Brunson speaks of 'the pre-frame bridge,' which is a pre-sell message that puts the prospect in a frame of mind conducive to the sale. Meaning, they're primed and excited for the coming sales message. Proof-driven lifts will do that for you. There are three overarching types: Testimonials Visual Proof (demonstrations, charts, etc.) Authorities' Approval Testimonial-based lifts are perhaps the most fundamental type of lifts. The trick is to deploy the most specific testimonials in terms of the concrete benefit the satisfied customer speaks of. Due to the inherent scarcity of these ultra-specific testimonials, you'll find it extremely helpful to include a subhead for each one. In the subheads, you should try and capture the essence of what the testimonials say. Not only is it persuasive (by way of reinforcing the benefits), but it also renders your copy far easier to scan. Compiling visual proof elements is another handy way to approach proof-driven lifts. In this, you're taking your strongest claims and corroborating them with charts, step-by-step demonstrations, and even video demonstrations. Remember the cardinal rule of limiting the number of benefits / claims / proof elements you use. The more you add, the more diluted your lift becomes, and thereby, the weaker the traffic-generating capability it sports. Showing the approval of expert figures is another immensely persuasive way to write lifts. "Experts" could range from celebrities to PhD-holders and everyone in between. Simply showing the endorsement of respected authorities in your industry to your prospective customers drastically boosts the selling power of your main sales message. Just be sure that the notes of endorsement are engaging; if you find that they're not — and many of them won't be — then simply pull verbatim quotes from the endorsement that you believe the prospect will find intriguing. Type #3: Objection-Driven Lifts If nothing else, you could absolutely just write lift notes the way you'd write sales copy. There are two ways to approach this: Reason-Why Arguments FAQs In the case of the first type, you'll string together a series of logical reasons that explain why your product delivers all the benefits that are important to the prospect. This is called 'Reason-Why Advertising,' a term coined by legendary adman John E. Kennedy in 1904. It is nothing more than providing a structured argument for purchasing the product. Here's an example: "Most aspiring copywriters have no idea what a lift note is... despite that, they wind up becoming email copywriters without a solid foundation... while lifts remain one of the most important parts of a direct marketing campaign... and they could lift your response up by as much as 2.4% on average... and the guide you're about to read contains a very simple way to write world-class lift notes... so click this link." Laying out your argument that way should give you an idea of whether or not it's targeting the primary benefits that your prospect is concerned with. As for FAQs, you'll simply take the biggest objection you expect your prospect to throw up as you pitch your product to them, and then address them in the same way you would in your sales copy — usually with Objection, Claim, Proof, Benefit. Here's a specific tip: frame your proof in three different ways. You'll see this plenty in financial promos, but Gene Schwartz talks about it in chapter seven of Breakthrough Advertising: the more ways in which you can show that your product satisfies a desire, the more compelling and believable it becomes. If the first proof element for one claim addresses how the product helps save time, the second one may be about how much time it'll save you six months down the road. And the third one may be about how all the time you've saved up over half a year could've been redirected to a more enjoyable habit of theirs. In a way, you're dimensionalizing your proof elements. Congruence in Funnels Before wrapping up, there is one more concept I want to expound on just a little bit because I believe it's more important than ever in 2026 and beyond. That concept is 'congruence.' Congruence is simply the harmony between a series of advertisements, typically relating to the format of advertising you employ in a funnel. If, as an example, you use YouTube Ads to deliver your traffic-generating message, then you wouldn't send your prospect to a text-based advertorial or sales page. In just the same way, you wouldn't send somebody watching a TikTok short-form video to a long sales page. The format of your ads should match the format of content that your prospect was consuming when they first came across it. Your ads should have a continuous link that pulls them all together. It's not an absolute must, but it is good practice for funnel-building that I suspect will become increasingly important in advertising as the years go by. And that's about it. I hope this guide serves as a very high-level, primitive introduction to writing lift notes. Any questions — just drop them below.   submitted by   /u/Remarkable-Bobcat168 [link]   [comments]