I’ve written a few ads that sold a few things over the
years, and I’m getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t. It occurred to me to write some of these
things down to share with others, and save you the time and trouble of learning
the hard way.
First, a bit of philosophy:
We sell things for many reasons.
Maybe we don’t like that thing anymore, or it doesn’t fit, or we bought
a newer, better one or we stole it or whatever.
Once the decision has been made to sell something, we are immediately
faced with two questions: How fast do we
want it to sell, and how much do we think it is worth? Most of the time, the answer is, “I’m in no hurry,
and I want to get the most I can out of this thing.” That’s the best position for you to be in as
a seller.
How much it’s worth is a whole nother essay that I’m not
going to try to slip in here. Two
things, though: Forget NADA or Kelley
blue book for car values, check the WA DOL website for access to the official
state valuation service, called Price Digest.
The numbers you will get from them are lower than NADA or Kelly because
they are based on sales reports from every sale reported to the state, both
private and dealership, where the NADA guys are just reporting dealer sales. Kelly’s Private Party values are estimates, I
believe. The other thing is that
Craigslist will only tell you the asking price for a thing, but EBay, if you
have an account, will tell you actual sale prices in most cases. The difference between asking prices on
Craigslist for cars and bikes and actual sale prices on EBay are dramatic.
Then you have to ask, “Am I willing and able to ship this
thing to a buyer, or do I want them to come lay cash in my hand and take it
away?” A related question is, “how much
does it weigh, and who gets to pay for shipping?” The answer to these questions defines your
sales approach, as in EBay vs Craigslist, or some other venue. It’s a given in this day and age that print
advertising is pretty much reduced to little old men and women browsing the
back pages of the Little Nickel with their reading glasses on, and not worth
your time or money as a sales outlet, generally. The various Auto Trader magazines are better,
because people pay for them, meaning they are more likely to be a serious
buyer, but even they have driven their cost up and dropped the
run-till-it-sells approach that facilitates my favored reverse auction pricing
strategy. Even if print ads are your
chosen method, though, good wording is still, if not even more, critical, since
you’re paying by the word and each one must work for your money.
So, now you’re ready to sell, and you have the item all
cleaned up and presentable, because you know that good pictures are everything
in online advertising. Clean cars sell for more than dirty cars. Craigslist used to allow hosted pictures in
their ads, the ones that filled the screen with nice full color pics of
whatever it is, but they got tired of sending customers to Photobucket or one
of the other hosting services and cut that out.
Now most pictures on Craigslist and EBay look pretty much the same. I used to think that cell phone pictures were
a bad way to go, but even those have been getting better and better as camera
quality improves with each new generation of phone.
So you have to clean things up to sell them, and you need a
good clear picture set that is taken against a neutral background so your
pictures have no competing images to distract the buyer or confuse the outline
of the thing. The last thing you want is
someone trying to figure out what part of town you’re in based on the
territorial view behind your car for sale.
I like to use the closed garage door or a hedge or something that is
uniform in color. For indoor pictures I
use a pastel bedsheet hanging on the wall, or a sheet of tissue paper on a
table to blank the background as much as possible.
Ok, now it’s all cleaned up, you’ve taken your pictures, and
now you have to sit down and write the ad.
So here’s what not to say:
1. Price is firm. –
This is a dangerous thing to say, unless you are absolutely sure your asking
price is low enough to attract a buyer.
Typically, in a barter transaction, which a private sale most resembles,
even though the thing being bartered is cash, you have to leave your buyer some
wiggle room, and you need to reward them for taking the time to actually show
up and look at your thing. When you say
the price is firm the message becomes, “Don’t even bother me if you are willing
to pay $50 less than the $9000 I’m asking, because I’m telling you in advance
I’m not willing to take it, so don’t waste your time.” Variations on this theme are, “I’m in no
hurry to sell, or I don’t have to sell”, all of which may be true, but the
buyer doesn’t need to know that. So
that’s the first principle of ad writing:
Only tell the buyer what they need to know to make a
decision to buy your thing, and no more than that. I take that one step further and try with
each ad to tell the whole story of the thing for sale, but that can lead to
verbosity and an overload of superfluous detail, as in this sentence, so
observe restraint as much as possible.
For example, the following, while true, could actually
reduce your chances of selling the thing, in this case a motorcycle: “…Owned by an 1%er motorcycle club member who
only rode it back and forth to his lawyers office, and to and from the
clubhouse on meeting nights, and the drags on weekends.” The foregoing sentence can be entirely
replaced with the words, “low mileage”, and that’s all the buyers really need
to hear, isn’t it?
2. Another thing that’s the kiss of death in ad copy is, in the case of a vehicle, “No title”. No title on a motorcycle means you’re trying to sell a pile of parts and call it a bike. The state patrol is going to want to inspect the bike before they will allow you to get a title, and they won’t do that until you’ve spent the time and money making it road-worthy, and why would you do that only to take a chance that it was stolen, and you lose it? If it’s a car or truck, without a title it is a liability to you that you can’t even donate to charity or scrap it out legally without a bunch of effort. So get the title before you try to sell anything that needs one, or be ready to accept bottom dollar, rather than top.
3. “…or trade for whatever.”
Now the message is, “I want to buy a whatever-it-is , but I don’t have
the money, so I gotta sell my whatever-it-ain’t to buy my new whatever, which
tells you something about my general approach to life, which is, always look
for the easy way out, so rather than sell my whatever-it-is for as much cash as
possible, then searching for the best deal on a new whatever-it-ain’t, now I’m
gonna restrict my potential buyer list to only those who might have one of the
whatever I want, and they also want
whatever I’m selling, and their whatever is worth way less than my whatever,
otherwise why bother, so now I need someone who fills all my conditions, plus wants to give me a helluva
deal.” Yeah, right, you can count the
potential customers for that deal on the smaller toes of one foot, probably.
It is always, always better to sell your thing outright and
use the proceeds to buy a new thing. Trades
and swaps always devalue the item, unless one of the traders is a fool, and
cash talks better than any line of patter.
This is especially true when trading in a vehicle at the dealership. By the way, did you know that the average
markup on a used vehicle sold off a car lot is $2500.00?
4. “… must sell, or desperate, or getting divorced, or
married, or having a baby, or all three at the same time…” All bad wording choices, for sure. “Must sell” is code for “I’m ready to give
away this piece of junk, sock it to me, daddy”.
If you’re really up against it, just drop the price, and say
nothing. Drop it a little bit every day
or every week, and you’ll quickly find out what the bottom dollar is. Any personal information included in the ad is
too much information, especially the getting divorced one. That scares people off because they’re afraid
they’ll say the wrong thing and set you off on a tantrum about your ex, or go
postal all over them, and who needs the drama?
Keep it about the car, or the T-shirt, or whatever you are actually
trying to sell.
5. “I know what it’s worth, don’t bother to lowball me, Blue
Book says it’s worth x amount…” Here’s a
great recent example from Craigslist: “I
have this beautiful bike, it's in great condition but the clutch handle needs
to be replaced, not the clutch itself, the handle needs replaced because i fell
on it in my garage. It's a total of like 15 or 20 dollars and 5 minutes of
work, all you need is a wrench. Anyways I'm selling/trading because I don't
have the time for it anymore and it's just sitting in my yard rotting away.
never laid down or wrecked and she's a beast. Call or text anytime, im down for
a trade or just straight sell. This bike books for over 2 grand in the
condition it's in. Just want it gone. $800.”
Heh, heh, looking
at the picture on Craigslist, it’s a thoroughly thrashed twenty plus year old Kawasaki
Concours of indeterminate mileage (he doesn’t say) with all the fairings and
saddlebags removed, making it into a very strange looking naked bike, and he
knocked it over in his garage but now it’s rotting away in the back yard,
probably for the last several years, but it’s worth 2 grand because the book
says so. “All you need is 20 dollars and
five minutes of work” is the most obvious bit of disingenuous mendacity you
would expect, and the natural reaction is to turn the page. Not a good way to sell anything.
Even if the
whatever-it-is is really nice, and the price is good, and all is well, save all
discussion of price till you have a buyer standing in front of you with cash in
their hands. That’s when you lay it on,
whatever it takes to close the deal, but that's another story... :-{)}
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