Secrets Of A Successful Sales Letter Part OneOne of the key secrets of a successful sales letter is to construct it with as much care as if you were building a car engine. Miss one tiny component and it will either fail to work at all or -- at the very best -- won't work as well as it could. So, before you put fingers to the keyboard and type a single word, you need to take as long as necessary to really get into the skin of your prospect. This is because you are writing the letter for their benefit, to convince them to open their wallet and give you money -- so you'd better get this part right. Once you do have a clear picture of your prospect, you'll be able to write a compelling letter that appeals to the emotions of your prospective customer. Why? Because people buy with emotion, not logic. So, to appeal to the emotional sweet spot of your prospect, you should build your letter around what the product or service will do for the prospect (the benefit), rather than what it is (the feature), because benefits are what the prospect really wants: unless they are a techno geek, they don't really want a digital camcorder with auto focus, easy to use view finder and one finger operation. What they really want is priceless memories, captured with ease, the instant they occur. Once you have compiled an exhaustive list of features and benefits, it will then be easier to pin-point the key benefit, around which you can start to write your headlines. Notice I said "headlines" (plural), because all serious copywriters write as many as a hundred headlines. You see, the headline is the most important part of your letter, generally reckoned to be 80 or 90% of the whole. That's because the headline has the most difficult job to do: stop the visitor in their tracks and get them to start reading the rest of the letter. If it fails, your carefully crafted letter will never even get read -- it's that important! So, once you have a goodly number of headlines, set them aside for a day or two. By doing this you're doing what virtually all the top copywriters (myself included) do to harness the power of the subconscious mind to help create really compelling copy. Once you've "slept on it" for a day or two, you'll quickly be able to pick out six or seven good headlines and, perhaps with a bit of tweaking, be able to turn them into three or four great ones. Then you should rotate these and test how each one functions: you might be amazed at the different results you get. Another of the most important secrets of a successful sales letter is to be constantly hunting for customer testimonials. You can never have too many of these. You can get a few to start you off by sending out review copies of your product. When the testimonials come in they might give you some great ideas for the theme of your sales page. Because testimonials are so important, many top copywriters, like my teacher John Carlton, simply refuse to begin work on a new sales letter until they see the testimonials -- they're that important! Never simply put your testimonials in one great block. Not only is that totally boring for the reader, it's also a terrible waste!.You should go through each testimonial and place them carefully throughout the text to illustrate a certain point. That way you'll maximize the value you get from them. Whilst you're waiting for the testimonials, return to your list of features and benefits and start crafting as many bullet points as you can. Bullet points are supposedly named thus because of the tiny dots that are often used. But you should think of them as bullets that fire directly into the buying department of your prospect's brain. You can use bullet points to show both features and benefits, like this. This camcorder has a 3CCD chip, just like professional video cameras, costing thousands (feature) -- so it gives you awesome, life-like capture of those precious, once-in-a-lifetime events (benefit). Next, you should work on your post scripts. You should always have at least a couple of these. That's because -- after the headline -- they are the most read part. Tests have shown readers tend to see the headline and then go directly to the post script before deciding to read the letter properly. Naturally you should provide a guarantee, to make it clear your prospect has nothing to lose, but everything to gain. Weaving all this together should be your text, which you must write in a conversational style -- just as if you were sitting down with your best friend to tell them all about this amazing new product you've just discovered. And here's the bad news: most people will only read about 10% of your carefully crafted prose. For that reason you should ensure you have subheadings throughout the text, which act as stepping stones, linking the various sections. The whole purpose of your letter is to create a greased chute from the eye-catching, compelling headline, right down to the "Buy Now" button, without a single distraction to divert the reader's attention from what you want them to do. Finally, you need to tell them exactly what to do to get the product and what they will miss if they don't act right away. Always remember fear of loss is a far more powerful motivator than promise of gain. By using these secrets of a successful sales letter your prospect will begin to realize they would be crazy not to go ahead and seize the chance to buy your product right away.
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