June 9th, 2010 
admin Statistics are powerful numeric weapons that can persuade prospects to take action on your marketing materials.
But generating responses isnt as simple as just dropping in some data.
The mind thinks in pictures, so numbers especially large ones are difficult to comprehend. To ensure the significance of your statistics is understood, you must match your data to experiences in your prospects lives.
For example, here are two sentences from a recent ad for The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority:
With two people per room, Las Vegas 140,000 hotel rooms could host the entire population of Boulder, Colorado.
Las Vegas has more than 10 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space, the equivalent of 175 football fields.
Notice how the descriptions after 140,000 hotel rooms and 10 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space made the facts easier to comprehend and visualize. Without anything to reference, your mind would have trouble grasping each numbers significance.
In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, authors Chip and Dan Heath, tell the story of Art Silverman. In 1992, as the communications director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Art wanted to educate the public about the unhealthiness of movie popcorn.
He began by sending a dozen medium-sized bags of popcorn from random movie theaters to a lab for nutritional analysis. Tests revealed a typical bag of popcorn had 37 grams of saturated fat an enormous amount when you consider the United States Department of Agriculture recommends just 20 grams of saturated fat in your daily diet.
The culprit was the coconut oil theaters used to pop their popcorn.
The problem Art faced was that few people understand how bad 37 grams of saturated fat can be for your body. After all, who memorizes the USDAs recommended fat allowances? When youre dealing with grams, does 37 really seem like a high number?
Arts solution was a press conference where he presented a message almost anyone could understand:
A medium-sized butter popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings combined!
Brilliant!
The media ran with the story. Popcorn sales at movie theaters plummeted. And, before long, all the major theater chains announced they would stop using coconut oil.
The next example is from an ad written by copywriter Drew Eric Whitman for a brand of mattress covers and pillow cases. Drews statistics are made more compelling by his ability to paint a mental picture with written words.
No matter how often you wash your sheets, your bed is an insect breeding ground, teeming with thousands of hideous, crab-like dust mites aggressively laying eggs in your pillow and mattress, causing you and your family to suffer year-long allergy attacks. While you sleep, they actually wake up and start to crawl … eat your skin flakes … and drink the moisture on your flesh.
It gets worse. Did you know that 10% of the weight of a two-year-old pillow is actually dead mites and their feces? This means that every night you and your family are sleeping in the equivalent of an insects toilet, actually covered in a mlange of both their living and dead bodies and oceans of their bitter excrement.
How could you not rush out to buy new bed linens after reading that copy?
Tom Trush is a direct-response copywriter and marketing strategist for Write Way Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona. You can view more free copywriting and marketing articles on his blog at http://www.writewaysolutions.com/blog, or get his free special report, Marketing Materials Made Easy: 8 Secrets for Attracting Attention, Creating Customers and Building Your Business, at http://www.marketingmaterialsmadeeasy.com.
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