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To write a sales letter that does
the job it is supposed to do and generate sales, there are several strategies
you should use in every sales letter you write:
* At the top of your sales letter, use a strong headline that states the most
important benefit you are offering. This headline should be bold and a larger
font size than the font size you use for the body text in your sales letter. A
great headline promises a specific result. For example, “If our skin care
product does not make your face look 10 years younger in 30-days or less, we’ll
give you a 110% refund!”
* When writing your sales letter, always use a friendly conversational style. Do
not try to write “cold and corporate" where you use large words and try to
impress your prospects with your vocabulary. All that does is turn people off.
Instead, write your sales letter using friendly simply language as if you were
talking to your best friend.
* Your sales letter needs to explain the benefits your potential customer will
receive. Understand that everybody cares about one thing in life - "What’s in it
for me?" Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself, "If I was
receiving this letter, why would I want to buy the product or service being
sold? What’s in it for me?"
* Offer quantitative proof why your product or service is better than the
competition. For examples of how to show proof that your product is better than
the competition, your sales letter should make statements that you can prove
such as, your widget lasts 3.7 times longer, it costs 27% less, our company
offers a 90-day 100% money-back guarantee while our competitors offer no
guarantee, our widget is guaranteed to last 5 years or we will replace it for
free, while our competition only offers a 6-month replacement guarantee, etc.
* Include several customer testimonials to give social proof of the quality of
your product or service. Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing
tools you can use, so take advantage of them and always use them in your sales
letters.
* To get your prospects to take action, your sales letter must ask your customer
to purchase by a specific date and give them a bonus for ordering by a specific
date. For example, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get an instant 10% off”, or,
“Buy our widget by March 25 and get a second widget at half price.” This
strategy works like magic and that is why you see it used so often on TV,
particularly in infomercials and other successful direct-response advertising.
* Use a P.S. in your letter and restate your most power benefit and sales offer
in it. Most people will read a P.S. first before reading the sales letter, so it
is important that your P.S. has a very strong sales message and a call to
action.
* To get your sales letter opened, use a standard white business envelope and
handwrite the recipient’s name and address. Yes, this takes a lot more time than
using mailing labels, but mailing labels scream junk mail! The first key in a
successful sales letter campaign is to get your envelope opened, and by
handwriting the recipient’s name and address, you can almost guarantee that your
envelope will be opened.
* Make your envelope "lumpy" by enclosing a small, inexpensive free gift. Make
sure the gift has your company name and contact information on it and that the
gift is something a person would want to keep - such as a nice pen, a good
highlighter, etc. And, the promo gift should have your company information on it
– your company name, phone number, and website address.
* Here is the most important sales letter tip: Use repetition. You will rarely
have success with your sales letter campaign if you only send out one mailing.
Each prospect on your contact list should be contacted a minimum of four times
during a 12-month period.
As a final thought, understand that the national average response rate for sales
letters is a little less than 1%. What that means is if you send out 100
letters, a good response rate is for one customer to contact you. However, one
way to greatly increase your response rate is to use the tips I mentioned in
this newsletter and to make follow-up calls to the contacts you sent your
letters to, especially if you are marketing to businesses.
Peter Geisheker is the CEO of The Geisheker
Group Marketing Firm. Peter specializes in developing and implementing strategic
marketing programs for small businesses. For more information and a free
marketing plan ebook, please visit
http://www.geisheker.com
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