script

A script answers what to say next. That is a different question from how she sounds, which belongs to a voice guide, and a different question again from what gets sent automatically on a timer, which is a message sequence. The three get bundled together in most agencies and then blamed for each other’s failures: a script cannot fix voice drift, and a voice guide cannot tell anyone when to introduce a price. Keep them as separate documents and each one stays short enough to be used.

What belongs in a script?

Stages, not messages. A script is organised around the moments a conversation passes through, and each stage carries four things:

• What the stage is for, in one line. Get a reply. Find out what he actually wants. Introduce a number.
• What has to be true before you leave it. The exit condition matters more than the wording, and it is the part most scripts omit.
• Two or three phrasings, in the creator’s voice, so nobody sends the same sentence to two hundred people.
• What not to do here, kept to one line per stage.

The obvious stages (opener, qualifying, tease, offer, after the answer) are enough. A script with fourteen stages describes a conversation nobody has ever had.

Why is a script a starting point rather than something to send as-is?

Because a fan writes back. The moment he does, what the script is for changes: not the next sentence, but where the thread stands and what still has to happen before an offer makes sense. A chatter reading down a script line by line reaches the sales line within the first few messages, and our data puts an offer before the sixth message at roughly a third of conversion lost, with the optimum after about ten real exchanges. The script did not cause that. The absence of exit conditions did.

The practical rule: a stage advances when its condition is met, never because the next line is sitting there.

What should a script forbid outright?

Three closers, all of them measured, all of them things a well-meaning writer produces naturally.

Never	Why it is in the script as a ban
An ellipsis at the end of a sales message	The worst-performing terminator in our corpus
A closed question at the moment of closing	Costs several points of conversion
A personal callback inside the message carrying the price	Costs points despite feeling like the warmest move available

The third is the one that needs the explanation, because it contradicts instinct. Referring back to something he told you works earlier in the thread. Placed on the offer itself, it reads as a lever. Put callbacks in the qualifying stage and leave the PPV message clean.

How often should a script change?

Whenever a real thread proves a line wrong, and never wholesale. Scripts rot by accumulation: lines get added after every bad week and nothing is ever removed, until the document is too long to open mid-shift. Cap it at what fits on two pages, and when something new goes in, something old comes out. The longer treatment of stages and testing sits in the guide to fan chatting scripts.