The Johnson Box: a simple but effective concept

Anyone who has been writing copy for any length of time will have heard of the Johnson Box. In fact, probably everyone who has ever visited a sales pages has seen these...they just didn't realize they had an actual name. So for those of you who don't recognize the name, here is a Johnson Box.

As you can see, the Johnson Box is simply a way to call attention to an important point or message. This can be used for things like... testimonies, bonus offers, key selling points, highlights of your letter and so on.

Generally, the Johnson Box will be a contrasting color to your background, have a defined border, and perhaps a drop shadow to lift it from the page. You aim to draw attention to it...don't let it blend in with the background.

But these boxes are not restricted to online sales letters. In fact, they first began with offline marketing. Frank Johnson is credited with popularizing their use (although he doesn't claim to be the first to use them).

Even something as simple as this in a plain text email, would qualify as a Johnson box....

Just a simple line of asterix top and bottom, with the keypoint in between. But the effect of this is to lift the sentence out from the rest of the content, and draw attention to it. So while it's not a fancy looking box, like the example above, it's still doing the same job.