Four Elements of a Successful Sales Letter
Your sales letter should only ever be doing one of four things, enforcing your expertise, enticing with benefits, crushing fears and doubts about your product, or asking for money. When you’re done writing, take a read through your sales letter and see if you can spot the points at which you may have deviated from your original objective, and wipe them out. Contrary to some very strange examples I’ve come across in my time online, there is no reason for any other text to exist other than to distract, confuse or get in the way.
We saw this example earlier, but it applies here too. See your sales letter as kind of a bridge. The opening point on one side is its headline, and anybody who successfully crosses the bridge to the opposite side has hit your order link and purchased your product. All those little niggly bits that have no place, all those distractions, and problem areas are giant dirty holes that customers that should have been yours, are falling through on the way to your order link. All you’re doing is plugging those gaps by removing the unneeded areas and distractions, and giving the best chance of a safe crossing, which of course means money in your pocket.
So here’s the deal. Keep focused, rip out all those irrelevant parts of your sales letter. If it doesn’t enforce your expertise, entice with benefits, crush fears or ask for cash, it plainly doesn’t need to be there. Plug the gaps. Remove the dead wood. Stop losing customers through the holes.
No Assumptions
Never assume anything about your readers. There are so many renditions of this, and I’m guilty of doing this, too, in draft versions of texts. It’s only natural if you’ve been around something for a long time that seems simple, obvious, or the norm to you. Remember it’s not necessarily the norm for others. Depending on the market you’re going after, there’s going to be some degree of variation in the type of visitor you get and their previous experience on the subject.
There’s so many variations of this, but let me give you a few examples. “Inverted commas” is a good one that seems to be taking sales letters by storm recently. When you’re talking about something in a focused way, coming out with something contained in inverted commas may mean something to you, but could well mean something different to someone else, and is very easily misunderstood, along with sarcasm, irony and slang.
Spice-Up Your Sales Letters
Spice it up a little. Your writing style doesn’t have to be hard sell all the way, but don’t make it boring. Make it colorful, especially when you’re talking about your products benefits. Remember your product isn’t good. It’s not cool, or nice. It is astounding, amazing, rock solid, laser targeted, and unconquerable. Become a little emotional and supplant some of your descriptive words with something a bit juicier and fascinating.
It may sound like hard sell, but not so when coupled with my favorite writing style, which couldn’t be easier for anyone to do, and that’s just typing as you’d talk. It goes from hard sell TV ad sounding, and changes instantly to have a personal, but excited and confident feeling about it. There’s nothing wrong with injecting your own personality either if you want to, in fact this actually adds to your sales letter. Just remember to head off the pitfalls we discussed earlier when making your benefits sound a bit more spicy and enchanting.
Keep It Structured
Don’t lose your structure. We already talked about the four aims of your sales letter, but if you take a closer look at what we’ve just been discussing there’s a particular structure about it. We started off with the headline, and the sub headline pulling the readers into the letter, then we went on with an intro and some reinforcement, proof and testimonials, then benefits of your product, guarantees, damage limitation making the price seem less significant, and then the PS’s.
Similarly to the customers coming over the bridge example we used earlier here, notice how at each stage you’re piling on the weight at an ever increasing rate, culminating in the climax and purchase of your product. The look of your product just gets better and better, and faster and faster and faster, picking up the pace and piling on those benefits, crushing those fears and doubts, and then taking your well deserved rewards in the form of a sale.
Never lose that, and never get it upside down. I’ve seen some backwards sales letters that pile it on for the first screen full, and by the time I’m half way down I’m bored out of my skull because they’ve run out of stuff to say, and I’m leaving to do something more interesting. It’s the snowball effect of your sales letter, and it works like a charm.
Track & Test Everything
Most importantly test and track everything. Every single word you’ve just read has been tried and tested. Imagine what would have happened if I decided not to test and track. I guarantee you this report wouldn’t be here today, not least because I’d have nothing to tell you, but also because I’d most likely be back selling stuff for other people, or taking a course somewhere on how to get a good job making someone else a bunch of cash.
There are all kinds of add-ons to sales letters that have been cropping up for as long as I have been online, the “Yes! I comprehend that I am getting…” pages that replace order hyperlinks, the “click here if you have selected not to order in the postscript area to the end of the sales letters”, even a whole bunch more innovational means to increase sales and convert added sales, but for now, just remember not to try anything new unless you’re tracking it, because you’ll go broke without knowing what’s destroying your sales, and you’ll go broke not knowing that the sentence you just deleted was responsible for 99% of your sales.
So there we have it, a absolute template and framework for producing winning sales letters for a multitude of assorted products. One other thing I’d like you to remember is no matter how good your sales letter, if your traffic isn’t quality, it won’t sell. If your product isn’t selling, your sales letter may not be to blame, and no amount of changing it will do any good.
Either way, you can be a lot more confident in your sales letters now. Even if you find your sales letters are a carbon copy of what I’ve written above, you don’t have to wonder if you’re going about this the right way or not. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the ability all of us as marketers have to turn a black and white page of text, into something that through only the power of the words, can receive something that’s near and dear to people, money from someone that doesn’t know us, and that’s never met us, and from a page that an hour earlier was blank. On a most basic level, that’s very powerful and why you should always feel real proud when you make a sale, no matter how small.
© 2009, Work At Home Covert Opps!. All rights reserved.
Shared Post
Unique visitors to post: 1
Related Posts - No Distractions - No Constraints Don't distract and confuse visitors. The biggest problem that seems to pop up in people's sales letters is that they're confusing, or have the user...
- Completely remove value from your products Now one thing I don't want to do is let you think that there is only one bad way to add value (or completely remove...
- Profitable Info Products You've got some ideas for products already, and it's quite likely that you've drafted ideas that while they may not originally have been for info...
Related Websites - Tips on Collecting Memorabilia If you have been thinking about starting a Entertainment memorabilia collection, then there are some very important guidelines you should keep in mind. Remember whether...
- Amazon Friday Sale: L.A. Clippers For the Win Edition A hummus recipe yesterday and an Amazon Friday Sale today?!?! If this site hadn't jumped the sharked so long ago, this would surely be a...
- The money making blog writing No matter what field you are in, writing is very important. It is even more valuable when you are doing business online. If you are...
Comments
Leave a Reply
