Writing a great sales letter                                               Home

The best value for money marketing tool available to most business is a simple sales letter. It is not as cheap as email, but it pulls a better response. I describe it as simple, but in fact powerful sales letters are complex in the amount of detail required in their planning and execution. This article is in two parts: the first deals with the planning of the letter and the second part looks at how to construct the letter.

Planning your letter

1 Keep it simple

Too many letters today draw too much attention to themselves. They contain too many graphics and use fonts that are decorative, but do not hold the readers attention. These designs are the equivalent of pop-ups on a website; they distract the reader from your content. A simple hard-working letter will out-perform a pretty one anyday!

2 Format

There is a lot of debate about how long a sales letter should be. In general, consumer letters should be no more than four pages and business-to-business (b2b) letters no more than two. The most common mistake that I see is that writers stick with the convention of one page and they do not give themselves enough space to get their message across.

A4 sized letters, folded to meet sized-based postage pricing should be used. Make sure that the fold is done in a way that the reader can see your headline text when the envelope is opened. I recommend the Courier typeface because it has been shown to be the most readable and the one that best aids retention of your message. Never justify the body of the letter. It makes the body text look daunting and boring. Left align the copy like this article. Never use paragraphs longer than 8 lines and try to vary the paragraph lengths. Your objective is to make the letter body visually interesting. Do not follow these rules if the break up the flow of the copy.

Otherwise follow them. This is marketing, not an English class.

3 Coding

If you are going to make a special offer in your letter assign a specific offer code to this campaign. This will allow you to track orders and measure your response. If this is difficult, assign a separate phone line to this campaign and only put that phone number on your letter.

4 Personalisation

It is vital to personalise a sales letter as much as you can. Customers should always be addressed by name. For prospects, spend as much as you can on getting their details, and when selecting lists, prioritise sources which can provide full information.

5 Critical elements

There have been a lot of studies into how a letter is read when it is opened and this data shows us the elements of the letter that need most attention and that should always be included. Normal eyeflow goes in the following sequence:

                            Headline and addressee
                            The signature block
                            The P.S.
                            The first paragraph

This knowledge means that powerful sales letters are constructed differently from standard business and personal letters. They are not correspondence. Think of a sales letter as a sculpture with writing on it. To work well it has to be visually attractive to draw and keep the customers attention and to make the copy easy to read. The copy is there to present your product benefits and to persuade the customer to place an order now.

Now it is time to look at the copy and how it should be crafted.

Go to part 2

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