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How to Write a Good Sales Letter

by Peter Geisheker, CEO, The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm (920) 592-9595

To write a good sales letter, 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.

If you would like help writing a good sales letter, please call (920) 592-9595 or email me.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker
President & CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm
(920) 592-9595