Ah. Financial copy. The niche I ended up in through sheer luck and, to my surprise, a decent grasp of how to write in (and to) this market.
Thanks to my financial copywriting experience, I know a lot more about trading and investing. That’s something I can carry with me forever.
But like I said, this is my specialty based on the clients I’ve worked with. I know what makes financial copy tick even more than many other types of copy.
So today, I want to break down a solid piece of financial copy for you.
About Lance Ippolito and WealthPress
WealthPress is a financial publisher with a wide range of free newsletters and premium trade alert services. This company is one of the biggest names in the financial publishing space.
Lance Ippolito is a professional trader who works with financial publishers WealthPress. According to Lance’s LinkedIn bio, Lance started in the trading business in college (he attended the University of South Florida). He sat in the back of class and traded on his computer.
Lance runs “The Master Indicator” service with WealthPress. According to my research, this is a momentum-based indicator that can be used on all sorts of asset classes and to trade options.
Lance may run other services, but I’m not 100% sure. What’s important, as you’ll see, is that the email is written from his point of view…
The Email: Short and… Counterintuitive?
This email is a “lift note” — a financial copy term for a short email meant to send curiosity into overdrive and push the reader to a VSL (usually).
It comes from the direct mail tactic of writing curiosity-driven copy on the outside of the envelope to get the recipient to open.
Here’s the entire email so you understand what I’m saying:
I know — hard to read that. It was a tall, skinny screenshot I had to shrink.
But you can tell it’s an easy read (which is a good thing) from the structure alone.
Copy, image, copy, image, etc. Each image has a bunch of writing to hype up the secret. Keeps them moving down the page.
Now let’s get into each section:
The Subject Line and Preview Text:
The subject line is an immediate eye-grabber to some:
“Trading garbage stocks” gets the reader’s curiosity going. Seems counterintuitive.
Most people avoid garbage stocks for self-explanatory reasons, so there might be some opportunity if you know how to trade them.
Then there’s the preview text:
More curiosity. What crashed 80%? And how is Lance trading it? This must be one of those garbage stocks.
Onto the body copy…
The Body Copy
Look at how Lance starts this email:
Implicit CTA right off the bat. This helps get the people who
- Read his previous emails and know about the loophole — they want a concrete example of the loophole
- Haven’t read this emails but are instantly curious about an “investment loophole” and thus want to click
Plus, Lance goes with the personable approach in that second line. He knows you’re sick of his emails, but it’s so important for you to see that he’s risking bugging you again anyway.
So Lance gets right into a trade example that closes the loop opened by the subject line:
Lance keeps a trademark “no-BS” tone throughout. I like that. He tells you what the stock does, but he doesn’t give a rat’s behind.
I also enjoy the use of images. This is important in financial publishing (to show trades), but there are applications in other niches.
The image’s most important element (for marketing reasons) isn’t the trade itself, but the big yellow text. The fancy chart offers an air of sophistication, but Lance just needs to show the reader how “garbage” this stock is.
Now, the reader knows 2022 was a bad year for financial markets. Most stocks were fairly “garbage”…
So Lance made it clear here why the stock he’s discussing is different. If he didn’t do this, the reader wouldn’t have a reason to care about this email.
But, at the same time, Lance seeds the opportunity in the reader’s head again. He discusses that his secret little loophole showed him a potential trade setup right when this stock was in the toilet.
And again, another well-placed implicit CTA. Just in case someone can’t hold back their curiosity at this point in the email.
If they don’t click, perhaps they’re still skeptical. They want to see this loophole before investing time in clicking through — so Lance delivers:
The loophole clearly earned returns in this trade example.
What Lance does here is a classic case of showing the thing without revealing it. Curiosity, curiosity, curiosity.
But any good copywriter knows you can’t just show the image.
You want to make things as easy as possible for the reader to understand — so Lance writes out what the image shows and sneaks in another implicit CTA:
By doing this, Lance appeals to people who are more visual and more textual readers. He also gets “readers” and “skimmers”.
The second line contextualizes the trade win even more. He scored a 61% gain in just 24 hours on this “garbage” stock…
While “regular investors” may have to wait years for the same potential returns.
This is powerful for another reason: If you know this “loophole” and know how to use it, you also look smart.
This appeals to the ego/status-desiring part of this target audience’s mind. They don’t just want money…
They want their buddies to say, “wow, how did you make these insane gains? You’re a trading wizard!” They want that exclusivity and that praise.
Which offers us the perfect segue into the final (and explicit) CTA:
Oooooh. I like this. Lance doesn’t say, “check out this video” or anything.
The ambiguous CTA is yet another way to get the curiosity firing on all cylinders. The CTA copy itself is nice and conversational, too.
As a result, Lance can nudge even the most skeptical readers into clicking.
Takeaways
This is a textbook curiosity-driven direct response email. Some of my favorite elements include:
- Curiosity
- Contrast (trading garbage stocks)
- Excellent use of spacing (images and line breaks)
- Plenty of opportunities to click through (implicit and explicit CTAs)
- Personable but no-nonsense voice
- Tantalizing results and future-pacing
Zooming out, the big takeaway here is when you are trying to push an evergreen offer hard, you have to hit every conceivable angle…
And then come up with some more hooks.
That’s how financial copy works. You ideally have one killer sales letter or VSL that runs for YEARS…
And you continually pump out and test new lifts to send more traffic to your winning sales letter/VSL over the years.
The best part: You can apply this concept to any niche once you strike gold with some evergreen copy asset.
I’ll leave you to figure out how to do so in your business (or you can hire me!).
What to Do Next
- Get on my email list using the signup form below.
- Reach out to me if you want help writing emails like this one.
- Check out WealthPress to see if any of their trading services interest you!