How To Write Effective Sales Letters
 By B.J. Addington

Gifted salespeople can inexplicably become gargantuan flops when they try to put on paper what they instinctively do so well face-to-face.

The most common mistake is to regard a sales letter as something other than what it is. All you need to write in a sales letter is the same stuff you need to say to a prospect in person.

Effective sales letters don’t require Voltaire’s vocabulary or Shakespeare’s shrewdness. You don’t even need to be particularly clever. As legendary direct response sales letter guru Herschel Gordon Lewis noted, “Cleverness too often becomes the end instead of the means.”

The fundamental things apply. Here are a few pointers to make your sales letter achieve its desired end.

Be appropriate
Your sales letter must always be appropriate for its purpose and recipient.

You don’t speak flippantly to people you barely know, so why write that way to strangers? But if you have a long-standing relationship with the letter’s recipients, your tone should be friendlier and less formal. In short, don’t treat strangers like bosom buddies and don’t treat close friends as if you don’t know them.

Get to the point
In person, you can gauge when a prospect is running out of patience with small talk. In a letter, you can’t. Don’t risk boring the reader.

Immediately get to the point. Mention your most compelling sales hook right away. You aren’t writing a mystery that unfolds casually. You’re fishing. Bait your hook with the most irresistible morsels.

Tell them thrice
Don’t risk your message being overlooked or forgotten. Tell your reader what is in it for him. Then expand on the point. Then summarize the point.

Tell readers what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. Repetition, regardless of a letter’s length, is the best way to make your message understood and remembered.

Choose the length
In our sound-bite era, the assumption is that fewer folks read, so a sales letter must be short. But only sometimes.

A letter must be as long as required to effectively communicate what the reader must know. You want the reader to do something – pick up the phone, visit your showroom, fill out an order form, etc. If you don’t give all necessary information to arrive at that decision, you might as well not have written.

You wouldn’t expect to close a face-to-face sale without answering a potential buyer’s questions. Why would you expect to in a written sales pitch? You aren’t going to be there to answer questions. Yet the reader still needs to be persuaded, and can’t be left with significant lingering doubts. The trick, of course, is to persuasively provide everything the reader needs without information overload.

Make reading easy
Give the reader multiple entry points. We read from top to bottom, left to right. But, readers also scan material to see if it’s worth their time.

Use boldfaced lettering, pull-quotes, headlines, sub-headlines, circled words, underlining and other ways to draw attention to pertinent facts. One caution: don’t goop up your letter to the point that it looks like a circus flyer. Keep it appropriately businesslike.

Close the sale
As good salespeople know, you must ask for the sale. Don’t leave it up to the buyer’s initiative.

If your letter covers all the hot-button benefits, features and secondary sales points, don’t leave the reader hanging. Give thorough and unmistakable directions for how to place an order, or if your letter is not intended to be the sales closer, how to take the next step in the process.

Use the P.S.
Every sales letter should have a postscript. The P.S. at the bottom of the last page is one of the first things readers notice when scanning a letter.

There are two approaches for the P.S. For scanners, the postscript should offer one more compelling reason for the reader to enter the letter. For those who have finished reading the letter and are exiting, the postscript should be an offer sweetener, or at least a reminder of what you want the reader to do (buy, telephone, visit, etc.).

(Posted June 2005)

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