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What are the elements of a good sales letter?

Guest post by: Helen Dowling

Article Overview: Thinking about sending out a sales letter to your contacts this year? Before you do, stop and put in place some things that will prevent you from making some of the basic mistakes that sales letters tend to have in them.

What are the elements of a good sales letter?

Thinking about sending out a sales letter to your contacts this year? Before you do, stop and put in place some things that will prevent you from making some of the basic mistakes that sales letters tend to have in them. 1. Being too short

One of the biggest mistakes sales letters include is being too short - a common assumption is that your letter should be one page max. Wrong! Your sales letter is intended to do the job of a sales person. Would you send in a sales person to a meeting and tell him to stop after 6 paragraphs? Of course not! Your sales letter needs to be as long as it needs to be to effectively sell.

2. Not including pictures

Because your sales letter is now going to be longer, you can include pictures. Pictures (particularly if they show happy and satisfied customers) can really do a great job of convincing people to buy.

3. Leaving out stories

We love stories too! Stories of what people or businesses were like before you met them and what they're like now. Stories can help you build up the problem of why people should talk to you.

4. Forgetting about the testimonials

Testimonials from satisfied customers ideally with pictures can be an excellent selling tool - and yet, they're missing from most sales letters. Even including just this bit can improve your sales letter a thousand percent.

5. Where's the great headline?

Most sales letters go in the bin because quite frankly, they're boring! Use prefixes and suffixes like Warning..., How to..., 7 secrets to..., How I... to make your headlines sound interesting enough to read.

6. Build up the problem

Before you launch into how you can help, build up the problem first. People need to recognise that you understand how they think and feel before you tell them how you can help. Build up the problem first using stories and testimonials and then tell them what you can do to solve the problem.

7. Take out the jargon

Just because you can understand what you've written, doesn't mean that that the people reading it will. Try the 10 year old test. If an average 10 year old can understand your letter, you've cracked it. If not, you need to rework your letter.

8. Test and test some more

So you want to send out 1,000 letters? Before you do, test it first with a small number. Try it with 100 and see what happens. That way, you have the freedom to change and amend your sales letter without having wasted your efforts.

Use some of the suggestions above and watch the different in the reaction of your sales letter!

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Article Tags: exceptional thinking, good sales letter, helen dowling, marketing, mistakes sales letter, sales letter, small business



Related Forum Posts
Review My: e-product sales letter - Hello Forum members! We have a lot of sales and direct marketing expertise in here so I thought I would ask for a review of my sales letter for my newly launched e-workbook on how to write a business plan. I'm working on a round of testimonials to include with the sales letter so I know that's a missing component. I wrote the sales letter myself and I tried to lay the benefits out as clearly as possible but I'm not a professional copywriter so I'm open to suggestions! Thank you in advance!
Re: Review My: e-product sales letter - Hi Evan, I'm not a professional copywriter either, but the sales letter reads and flows very smoothly. I found a few very minor errors, but nothing unsightly or out of place. Overall I think it has great potential. Might not hurt to test different elements to see what will convert the best.
Re: Sales Letters: Do they work?...only if done properly - Someone recently sent me a sales letter via email, which mentioned something about my "website" being good, but could be better with their expertise. However, I didn't even take the time to reply since they hadn't specified which website (Evan's site or mine, which I'm no longer even working on) or offered any value upfront. I just treated that generic sales letter as spam.
Re: eBook Testimonials Needed - And I see it's offered in the form of a long sales letter.... How about an experiment? (We've been having a discussion in a different folder on what sells better, long sales letters or small websites.) Redo that sales letter into a 3-4 page site with all the text above the fold, and see which one sells the product better?
Re: Kevin's Case Study #7 - How do you promote your new book? - Hi Kevin, Normal conversion rate is 2% for me. High conversion rate can be 5-6% or more probably. But if you use Google Adwords techniques properly and have the good sales letter, then it can be 25-30% or more. It depends on books too. If it is exciting and shocking book with great sales letter then it will determine the rate of conversion, too. Orxan


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