Sales Letter
Almost everyone can write a sales letter these days. Anyone with a good command of English and paired with a few benefits of a product, you can easily write a sales letter. This is why we see a lot of copywriters out there where some are charging an extensive fee while some are getting peanut pays for their job. What sets a good copywriter apart from those that are useless are letters that gets read and letter that produces results or sales.
If you can write a sales letter that consumes your readers and at the end of the day, your letter has the ability to convert your readers into buyers, then you are doing the right thing. Now… while writing a sales letter is easy, writing a killer sales letter that works and gets read does takes some skills. Below are some short pointers to help you write a sales letter that gets read.
Headlines.
No surprise here. The headline is the most important part of your sales letter. Without a proper headline, no one will be motivated to read a wall of text. A bad or boring headline won’t cut it either. You have to be able to come up with a good headline that get the attention of your readers and make some interesting promise to get them curious enough to want to learn more about what you are offering.
To write a good headline, you will need to understand your target market well and what motivates them to learn more about your product. You need to find out what is the ‘main’ problem or pain that the users are experiencing and how your product can serve to help them solve that problem. For example, in dieting, people don’t care if your headline is about general dieting and why they need to diet or any of that usual boring stuff.
However, it will be a different story if you tell them how many people actually died while doing the wrong diet or how many people gained even more weight for ignoring this message that you are about to tell them. See what I mean here? Now we are talking. When you have a powerful reason for people to read on, you can be sure that no one has a choice to but to read your letter. The power of fear is a great motivator and of course you can also make use of other emotional triggers that can help you get the attention that you deserve for your copy. People won’t listen unless whatever you are about to share actually affects them.
You can go on and on about how ‘healthy your diet it’ or how ‘big your organic farm’ is… no one cares until you tell them the consequences of pursuing a bad diet or ‘starving’. And don’t just put your empty words out there. Back it up with some hard solid statistics and the next thing you know, people will want to hand out their money to you so that you can help them solve this ‘giant’ problem of theirs.
Do be too pushy.
People naturally hate being sold to. And by using the word ‘hate’ here is a huge understatement. The resentment toward being sold to is unavoidable so the only thing you can do is to try and sound like you are one of them. Place yourself as if you are one of them and not a seller. Make sure to position yourself as if you too are a victim and show them how you solved the problem for yourself and the people closest to you, and now you are honestly recommending the product to those who are less fortunate to know about it sooner.
Avoid asking people to buy your products or even mention about the price too early. You have to be able to show them that you are doing it for their sake first instead of doing it for the money. In fact some marketers actually found a lot of success by helping their clients out first for free and then funnel them into their more expensive products later on. When you can show people that your stuff works, and that they indeed will have a better life after using your stuff, the selling process becomes a breeze.
Proper formatting.
Now this is a widely neglected aspect of copywriting. People get frustrated and tired of reading a lengthy sales letter that ‘looks’ boring and feels like it’s never ending. Therefore in your sales letter you must absolutely place sub headline in proper places and give enough white space and paragraphing so that people can take a breather once in a while when they are engaged into your sales letter. An overly overwhelming sales letter can tire out your readers and burn them out too early before they decide to act. What you need to do is that you need to ensure that your overall sales letter looks neat, easy to read and that your fonts are big enough and easy to the eyes of your readers.
Nothing kills readership faster than a boring and eye straining letter. You need to place proper graphics to keep the attraction going and if you do not use fancy graphics then your sales letter formatting has to be done with the sole purpose of making it easy for the readers to read and helping them spot your important messages by highlighting the benefits that they will most likely want to know should they make the decision to purchase. Make sure that you are using the right color theme that is relevant to your sale letters theme. For example, if your sales letter is about some secrecy that you accidentally found out, you might want to use a color that can enhance this mysterious and secrecy that surround your sales copy.
When the mood is set up properly, you know you have your readers caught immersed in your letter and this is exactly how you can slowly guide them toward the buy button. You can never get them to buy if they are just not that into your letter. Hence, make sure that your sales letter gets read and you will find yourself what is known as a Golden letter.
