Getting What You Want Through the Power of Persuasive Writing

Finding persuasive language is tricky. You want to be encouraging, but not pushy. You want to be convincing, but not belittling. Whether you're meeting a potential client in person or sending an email to a prospect, you know you have to get across as much information as possible in very little time. Their attention span is finite, and they have to like what they hear immediately before they're willing to hear more.

As so much business is handled electronically now, persuasive writing has become more and more important.

Four persuasive writing strategies

Sometimes we get caught up in providing every detail when it’s not necessary, at least not at that particular moment. Of course we want to be helpful, but too much detail at the wrong time can lead to confusion. Not every situation is going to be the same, so when giving information to others, here are some helpful things to consider when deciding exactly how much they need:

1. Why is it compelling? When you’re communicating with someone, lead with what’s going to grab their attention. Tell the other person how what you're offering will benefit them. Once you’ve used that hook and piqued their interest, then you can get into the details of how it will benefit everyone else involved and what will need to happen in order to execute your idea. 
2. What do they need to know? What information do they need about what you’re telling them? You want to be clear and concise. Let them know what you’re proposing and what you want to discuss. It's not how it's going to be done, it's not the rest of the details. It's just a description of what it is.
3. How will it be accomplished? This is particularly important if there’s a few steps to carrying out what you’re proposing. Bullet points and sentence fragments can make the information easily digestible when communicating over email. This is where you can start to gauge their interest, because if you’ve gotten this far, they likely are intrigued by your idea but need to know more. 
4. What questions could they have? Try to anticipate what areas of your proposal might require more detail. Be prepared to respond to just about anything. So you might ask, “what questions do you have?” or, “what are your initial reactions to this?” Keep your follow-up questions open-ended so that they can fully explain their thoughts.

In person, you have the benefit of paying attention to their tone and body language, and the conversation is usually more free-flowing. When writing, you’ll want to craft your message a little differently.

• Get to the point early, ideally in the first paragraph. Start at the end and work backwards. Usually, this is the overall goal of your proposal. Once you’ve given them this, then you can start to give more details about what your idea is and all the steps necessary to accomplish it.
• Write shorter paragraphs and sentences. Less is definitely more when it comes to written communication. Avoid the run-on sentence, as it's not clear and it requires people to read it again to understand it. Sentences should be somewhere between eight and ten words, and paragraphs should be no more than four sentences on average.  
• Make it easy to skim. This is where it’s most helpful to use the bullet points mentioned earlier. You can also make some words bold, or use italics to highlight the critical information. Try your best to make it easy for the other person to digest your message in a clear way.
• Make your purpose is clear throughout your message. So, one idea per paragraph that ties to your subject. Don't run off on a tangent, and if you have something else to discuss that's not related, save it for another time.
• Give them a call to action. Make it easy for them to know what you want them to do. Don't make them guess, tell them what you want to happen.

One of the more important things to remember when communicating through email is to try to be conversational in your tone. Overly stuffy or formal messaging will just distract from your main message. Be clear, concise, and direct and you'll find success in persuasive writing.