Pattern Interrupts And How NOT To Use Them
Not so long ago, I was learning about video sales letters. I watched an example of one that was selling a subscription to a penny stock investor magazine. This video has stuck in my memory because it started up with an image of a miniature submarine, and the narrator was talking about how Iran was smuggling drugs and weapons into the US using these submarines.
If your brain works anything like mine does, you’re probably thinking, “What does that have to do with penny stocks?”
That’s certainly what I was thinking. In fact, I had to keep watching the video sales letter just because I didn’t know how the video was going to sell anything, let alone the product it was trying to sell.
Your Brain On Attention
Our brains wander along on various trajectories throughout the day. We’re trying to get our work done, do our household chores or wander around the shops looking to buy our groceries.
When we’re in this state, we shut out the world around us. In terms of processing power, it’s been estimated that our brains can process as much as one hundred trillion actions per second. That means that at any given moment, your senses are overloading your brain with data, and your brain is shutting nearly all of it out – just so you can go about your day.
The brain’s tendency to shut information out is the reason it’s so hard for pesky salespeople to get you to open your wallet. You’re not in buying mode the majority of the time, and thank God for that! Otherwise, you’d be penniless after your first five minute TV ad break.
Any piece of copywriting has a first crucial job: It has to snap you out of your current state of not paying attention to anything in particular.
Usually, this is done with a snappy headline that really highlights something you want. Something too good to pass up paying a few seconds of attention to.
There are other ways to get a person to snap out of their concentration though.
What Is A Pattern Interrupt?
A pattern interrupt recognises that you’re in a certain state. It might be looking to buy only the most organic of foods at your local store. It might be that state where you’re watching TV because you’re bored out of your mind. It might be the state you go into when you’re looking for information on something online.
The pattern interrupt does one thing: It hijacks your current state and pulls you into a new narrative. Essentially, I interrupt you to tell you a story, and that gets you hooked. You want to find out more.
(Weird NLP Gurus will give you all sorts of mystical mumbo-jumbo about pattern interrupts, but it’s no more complicated than the above.)
When you’re talking about a video sales letter, your pattern interrupt is the little hook at the beginning. The thing that makes you say, “How did a mystic from the Orient teach you the secret to weight loss?” Or, “What do Iranian submarines have to do with penny stocks?”
Depending on the length of your sales letter, you might have to sprinkle in the story at various points because there’ll be people who don’t care about your product, only the answer. These people might not make it to the end of the letter without a little carrot-and-stick action.
You’ve probably seen this before if you’ve ever looked at online products or gone on news sites with the native advertising “related content” links at the bottom.
Where Most Copywriters Go Wrong With Pattern Interrupts
Tons of copywriters know about pattern interrupts. Even those that don’t understand the concept because creating pattern interrupts is very similar to how you’d go about writing a good headline.
A lot of copywriters go wrong with them though, and the reason is that they think of pattern interrupts as some sort of magical thing. (That’ll be the NLP influence, then.)
A pattern interrupt is designed to get attention. If you have a strong sense of storytelling, then you might build a little interest, but only if your pattern interrupt is coherent with the product you’re selling.
Essentially, you can’t use a pattern interrupt as a bait-and-switch method.
“Did you know that some fish have both eyes on one side of their head? Cool fact isn’t it. Anyway… I’m going to sell you some protein powder now, and it has nothing to do with that fish fact.”
The above is a complete red flag, but I’ve seen quite a few people doing it.
On the other hand…
What Does A Submarine Have To Do With Penny Stocks?
I can’t remember the exact narrative from the sales video, but it went something like this:
- Iranian submarines are sending drugs and guns to the USA via miniature, undetectable submarines.
- Needless to say the military are well aware of this.
- There’s a company that has developed a new technology that is many times more efficient than sonar for detecting stuff in the ocean.
- The military are currently in a bidding war with this tech company for the sole rights to use this technology.
- This company’s stock has gone up by thousands of percent over the past few weeks.
- If you’d have this knowledge you cold have turned $X into $Y
- Imagine if you had access to a resource that constantly gave you information like this, every week? How many $X deals would it take you to become financially free?
You get the picture.
The point is, despite being an “interrupt,” in the above example the pattern interrupt isn’t a quick attention grabber that has nothing to do with the subject. It’s a big idea that then continues, creating a whole narrative which takes the curious listener through the whole sales process without letting up.
The submarines have nothing to do with the newsletter, but there isn’t a moment where the reader could say, “I’ve been duped, I’m out of here!”
If you use pattern interrupts, then you need to have the whole story lined up, not just a silly little anecdote.
Final Thoughts
You have to grab a reader’s attention. However, when you do that, you need to make sure you’ve got the whole thing planned out. Once you have a person’s attention, you’re on a countdown to losing it – and them.
If you’re going to use pattern interrupts in your sales letters, then it can’t be a one-and-done joke or anecdote. It needs to take your reader all the way through the AIDA process in a coherent way, dropping them off at your product with a frame of reference.