FREE To You For You To SELL

SALES LETTER Your sales letter is your make or break effort Your brochure is your ‘Fact’ document. Your letter pulls the ‘C’ out of that word and is rich with the ‘Fat’ of the matter. Here is where you will serve up the fat, the dressing and the meat and potatoes upon which you will generously ladle the gravy. You will pull out all of the stops and really hammer on the wonderful and delicious values to be had by buying your product. Whatever you do, don’t skimp on the length of your sales letter. Yes, I know there have been reams of words written and spoken about the importance of making your sales letter short and to the point. ‘Never, EVER let it go beyond one page. BALONEY! That is one of the oldest and most misleading and baseless pieces of advice ever written. Some of the most successful and order producing sales letters ever written have run to many pages. The key isn’t the length, it’s the content. If you lose your customers’ interest, you've lost them. You simply have to hold and, hopefully, build, their interest as you tell your story. That is the basis of a successful sales letter. You have a story to tell. Tell it. Tell it all. Don’t condense it! You have to tell the entire story, not part of it. How long does your letter need to be? That’s the determining factor: Needs to be. Start with the strongest points and go from there. Your letter needs to be as long as it needs to be to get it all told. If that’s a couple of pages, fine. If it needs to be several pages long, that’s fine too. Just get it all told. Now don’t get carried away and just go on and on and on. Your mother would stop you, wouldn’t she? “Will you get to the point, please?” You may doubt that you have the ability to write that sales letter. Worst case is that there are services out there that you can pay to write one for you. I don’t recommend that. You are still the single best person to do it simply because no one knows your product as well as you do. Therefore, no one can convince someone else to buy it as well as you can. There is one place where you can learn a tremendous amount about writing sales letters that won’t cost you one red cent. I refer to the dozens of letters that you get in the mail trying to get you to buy things. Stop throwing them away and start learning from them. Study those letters. What makes the good ones good? Which ones connect with you? Why? What impresses you about which ones? Learn from them. It costs you nothing. Begin your letter with your product’s strongest and best points. What will benefit your customers most? Explain how it will make their lives better, richer, more fun. Continue on down the list of benefits and values that your product has to offer. Don’t overlook a single good point. Cover them all no matter how minor they may seem to you. Something that is relatively insignificant to you may be of extreme importance to that person half-way across the country living in an environment different from where you live. Does your product include something ‘Special?’ I want to tell you a story about my Mother: I’ve tried to not wander. But you will understand. Pansy was in her prime as a housewife and mother in the middle part of the last century having already raised four kids ahead of me and was as typical an American Mom as you could imagine. Never worked as an adult except for being an Avon Lady. She was always active, however, in the PTA, neighborhood get-togethers that were common in those days, Sunday school and church activities and many other charity and other social functions to name a few. She was a prolific baker and her bread, dinner rolls and cinnamon rolls were legendary. (My mouth is watering as I’m typing this!) Usually her baking days yielded far more loaves and rolls that we could possibly take care of before they began to lose their freshness. So she regularly shared with our neighbors and others. Mom developed a reputation for the unsurpassed quality of those baked goodies. Cakes and cookies, too, were made regularly and generously distributed. Her friends were constantly after her for her ‘Secret’ that made everything that she made so heavenly. These pleas only elicited her warm smile and her laughing insistence that there was really nothing magical to it. Her baking and sharing continued well into her seventies as did the persistent attempts to pry her ‘Secret’ out of her. One day she finally relented and admitted, when asked once again, that she always did, indeed, use a ‘Special flour’. A hush fell across the room. All eyes and ears were suddenly focused squarely upon my Mom. Finally someone asked, “What is it, Pansy?” “Well,” she replied with that familiar twinkle in her eyes, “Whenever I know I’m going to be baking during the week, I go to the condiment aisle when I do my weekly shopping. The store will always be running a ‘Special’ on some brand of flour or the other. That’s my ‘Special’ flour for that baking day.” Not a sound came from the crowd at first until everyone realized that Pansy was just pulling everyone’s leg. Then there was a mixture of groans and laughter as they all gave up and conceded that they had been had. The point is that everyone is eager to learn someone else’s ‘Secrets.” Use that. Everyone wants to know the ‘Special’ you have to offer. All you have to do is capture the interest of your potential buyers and set your hook of interest. Use it to your fullest advantage.