Writing articles, blog posts and even content for your email is an activity that requires time, attention and creativity. You need to keep people’s attention, engage them and make them fulfill the goals of your measures. It is a difficult task that requires a lot from marketers responsible for campaigns.

With the rise of content marketing, some techniques for writing better texts have appeared, and one of them is PAS – Problem, Agitate, Solution. This formula has appeared in a few posts and is considered one of the best and most powerful ways of thinking about content, whether it is product descriptions, text for a website or the copy of your email.

PAS

Problem: Identify the problem – what is keeping your target audience up all night? It can be in the form of a question or an assumption. Say, you’re sending a campaign offering an ebook about responsive design. The problem that is troubling your audience could be the fact that your pages aren’t converting because they are not accessible on mobile devices. You can start with:

“Are you losing visitors on your site because it isn’t responsive?”, “Don’t you hate to see the number of conversions through your page decreasing?”

Agitate: This is the moment in which you must elaborate on the proposed problem, explaining how people can apply it in their context, whether business or personal (check out the difference between B2B and B2C emails here). Let’s carry on with our example of an ebook about responsive design, in this case, the question you can include could be:

“There is no denying the importance of mobile devices today, and being prepared for this audience is absolutely essential. The experience of accessing a page that is not adapted to these smaller screens can be quite frustrating and you may lose customers and leads.”

Solution: The third step of this formula is to propose a solution. After drawing attention to the problem, explaining it, showing how it can impact the lives of its recipients, it is time to propose a solution. In our example, this would be the moment in which you could offer your ebook:

“To please and retain this important portion of your audience, see how to implement a responsive design strategy with our ebook Responsive Design in 5 Steps. Download your book now!”

Benefits of Using the PAS Formula

Using the PAS formula for planning posts and articles can benefit your everyday life as a content developer: it’s a good way to save time and organize the day to day production of posts to social networks and promotional emails, subsequently increasing their efficiency. According to Copyblogger, this gives “consistency, precision and persuasion” to your text.

Applying this formula to email marketing – think about how to apply it by considering the elements of your message. You can think of the Problem as your subject line, the Agitation as the text of the email, and the Solution as the part that precedes your call-to-action. This is just one of the possible applications. Bear in mind that an organized email can help your metrics for opens, clicks, and conversions.

How about putting that formula into practice? Do it, test it, and track your results over time.

References: Copyblogger and Email on Acid