Three Factors For Sales Letter Orders part 1
Welcome back!
Think about what a sales letter actually does. Your sales letter is responsible for three things:
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Introducing the customer to your product.
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Arguing persuasively about the merits of that product.
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Inspiring the customer to actually purchase the product.
This seems like a simple structure, but it requires you to use three distinct modes of writing throughout, and to seamlessly transition from one into the other. It also requires you to do this in a fairly brief span of time.
The first section of the sales letter is your introduction. Within the introduction, you want to state clearly exactly what your product is. This is not the place to get persuasive about your product: this is simply the place to describe its essential nature so that any customer knows, right up front, what it is that you’re selling.
After you have expanded on their most pressing problem or desire and how you can offer the solution.
Our third basic principle of direct response site design holds true here: keep it simple, stupid. Online customers have millions of other websites that they could be visiting, and if your sales letter starts off trying to dazzle your readers by going into the long history of woodcarving in order to promote your handcrafted wind chimes, you lose them straight away. You can not educate the prospect until they have BOUGHT the product.
Your first line should NEVER read something like this: “XYZ is a new type of Widget from the brilliant designers at ..”–where XYZ is the product, Widget is its description, and LLC is your company’s name. Immediately your customer knows what you’re selling, how that product might fit into their life, and who’s doing the selling. You’ve laid your cards on the table–and with this level of simplicity, your customers will be no more willing to pick them up and play.
THEY want to know what is in it for them, ie save, gain etc much sooner than knowing who you are. Yes it is important but many in the offline print media do this – and the results are much poorer.
The second part of your sales letter–the argument–is where you can start getting fancy, introducing some dazzle into your presentation of your product.However you must be building a picture in peoples’ minds whether your offering solves their issues or desires. Ultimately the buying decision is emotional.The same principles apply online as in the offline world and that of course is direct marketing.
