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Hit Pay Dirt with Prospecting Letters
Written by: Andrew WallArticle Overview: Prospecting letters can uncover gold—but only if you observe these tried-and-true rules:
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Hit Pay Dirt with Prospecting Letters
Hit Pay Dirt with Prospecting Letters
Prospecting letters can uncover gold—but only if you observe these tried-and-true rules:
Personalize. Businesses don’t buy from businesses; people buy from people. Address your prospecting letter to people, not to their business—and never to "occupants." Target your letter by using recipients’ names and titles—spelled correctly of course.
Demonstrate expertise. Before prospects will consider you, you need to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing and that you have the track record to prove it. Are you the "largest manufacturer of widgets?" Are you rated highest in Consumer Reports? TELL THEM!
Emphasize. Instead of reading, prospects may just scan for essential points. Make your most important points easy to find and easy to come back to. Use underlining color highlighting, boldface, UPPER CASE—even circle your most important points.
Keep it simple. Brevity and simplicity reduce clutter. Prune your words to their essentials by reading and re-reading your letter before it goes out.
Say what you mean. Choose active, colorful words that say exactly what you mean. Avoid over-used expressions and wimpy words that lack punch.
Appeal to the eye. Today, layout is often as important as content. Place your key points first. Ensure readability by careful choice of typeface, paragraph spacing, margins, logo placement, and color usage. Use your computer to automate and enhance impact, but don’t go "font crazy"—nothing says amateur so much as too much.
Show respect. Don’t waste your recipient’s time through irrelevance or exaggeration. Tell the truth, and relate your service or product to the real world—their world. Address their goals; solve their problems. After all, a trucker’s concerns will differ from a cosmetic surgeon’s.
Make replies easy. Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope or postage-paid card. Emphasize phone numbers and contact names, and be consistent and clear when describing what you’re offering. Unless recipients can easily restate your message, they haven’t grasped the nature of your offering.
Add a postscript. Many sales are made solely on the basis of what comes after the main body of the prospecting letter. Got a special offer to make (trade-in allowance, clearance prices, extended warranties)? Place it at the end, in a postscript. A p.s. is an effective summary—your offer in a "nutshell"—and may be the one item of content prospects refer back to and remember.
Call for action! Tell readers what you want them to do—and remind them of why they should act right away: "To take advantage of this one-time only, 50% discount, reply by December 31 using the enclosed, postage-paid envelope." Few products or services can survive the selling silence of a prospecting letter that omits the call to action.
Go for the hidden gold—put these prospecting tips to work today!
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Article Tags: brevity, careful choice, clutter, colorful words, consumer reports, cosmetic surgeon, exaggeration, expressions, irrelevance, logo placement, margins, occupants, paragraph spacing, prospecting letters, prospects, self addressed stamped envelope, simplicity, trucker, upper case, widgets
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Related Forum Posts
Prime Means of Selling
- Prospecting and Selling aren't the same. Prospecting is finding the few within a target group who are prime candidates for your service. I don't think everyone will agree on what "prime" means but I'd say if the prospects actively want what you're offering and have the ability to pay for what you're offering then they qualify as "prime".
Re: How many nationalities are on the forum?
- Hi there,
It is amazing the languages have come into the posts. Now Jude was asked, how many languages she speaks. Please, come and tell us.
I speak English, German and French. German is my mother tongue. Some thirty years ago I spoke fluently French. Now English has taken that place and I can better understand French than speaking it.
English is now my daily used language. German in second place. However, I never grasped the German grammar very much. Why? The Swiss German Dialect is nothing to be compared with High German. At that time hardly anybody wrote the Dialect. Today it is the 'in thing' to write the dialect. (Letters, stories etc) But we have to be able to read High German, because every book, newspaper etc is in High German.
Finally, I guess there are a few more who can vote for their nationality.
Top 19 Copywriting books
- 1. Ogilvy on Advertising. David Ogilvy. Wiley.
2. Positioning: The Battle for your Mind. Al Ries and Jack Trout. Warner.
3. The New Positioning. Jack Trout. McGraw-Hill.
4. Tested Advertising Methods. John Caples. Prentice-Hall.
5. How to Make your Advertising Make Money. John Caples. Prentice-Hall.
6. Guerrilla Advertising. Jay Conrad Levinson. Houghton Mifflin.
7. Direct Mail Copy that Sells. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall.
8. Sales Letters that Sizzle. Herschell Gordon Lewis. NTC Business Books.
9. Herschell Gordon Lewis on the Art of Writing Copy. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall.
10. Romancing the Brand. David Martin. American Management Association.
11. The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with William Bernbach, Leo Burnett, George Gribbin, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves. NTC Business Books.
12. Confessions of an Advertising Man. David Ogilvy. NTC Business Books.
13. My Life in Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books.
14. Scientific Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books.
15. How to Become an Advertising Man. James Webb Young. NTC Business Books.
16. The Lasker Story as He Told It. NTC Business Books.
17. Advertising Concept and Copy. George Felton. Prentice Hall.
18. The Copy WorkShop Workbook. Bruce Bendinger. The Copy Workshop.
19. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads. Luke Sullivan. Wiley.
This should keep you busy for at least a year.
Enjoy!
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