The first thing before you write a sales letter is getting to know your target market and what they want. Many agencies conduct surveys and tests so they know exactly what their market is saying. They know their needs, their objections, and their desires and hope to provide adequate solutions. Also, you have to know whether it is worth the cost of advertising in pursuing certain customers. For example, if you have a product for college students and your advertisement lists the price too high, it may disqualify your target market from buying and in the process costing you a lot of potential sales.
Now, before you begin to write your sales letter, you would be wise to come up with a game plan. This game plan is essentially delving into the minds of your customers. Address any objections that may come to their minds. Just like in face to face sales, customers have buying resistances which are holding them back from taking action and buying your product. If you are able to squash away these objections, you'll be one step closer to the sale. One customer might be worried that the product won't work out as good as you say it would. Another customer might be worried that a competitor's product is superior and that they'd be making a wrong decision. People never want to accept that they've made a wrong decision. Hence, it is imperative to make sure that we address all objections in our sales letters.
A sales letter must appeal to the emotions of people. We've often heard that people are motivated to buy based on their emotions and then justify the purchase through logic afterwards. Therefore, its crucial that we inject some emotion in our writing. People are either motivated to gain or motivated to avoid pain and reduce suffering. Between these two states of mind, the latter is the most commonly sought.
We've just covered some important psychological tips which if implemented in sales letter writing, would greatly improve the conversions and response rates for your old letters. The following section will outline the exact steps you need to take from start to finish.
The steps for writing effective sales letter
1. The very first thing that needs to get accomplished is to grab attention. Readers see your headline before anything. Hence, the most important part of a sales letter is the headline. The reason is that if you can't grab the attention of the target market that you want, you might get a lot of clicks but no targeted customers. Success with sales letters is determined by how many of those clicks become paying customers. Results is the king of all advertising. Without results, its money down the drain.
2. The next step is defining the problem. You have to outline the problem that your product solves. Since sales is an emotional game, you have to remind your customers of how it feels to experience the problem again. Our job is to paint the clearest picture of the solution we can offer with our product/service.
3. Introduce the solution. After outlining the problem, we want to WOW them with our offer. This part is crucial because we have to establish ourselves as THE authority figure on the subject. No one wants advice from someone who is good. We'd rather get our advice from someone who is dominating in their field, someone who is at the top. So, the moment we introduce ourselves is the moment we make it or break it. Establish authority and WOW them and you'll soon get the sale.
4. How to establish authority? We can usually easily accomplish this with positive feedback. People want reassurance from others before they dig into their wallets. Also, talking about why you're the qualified person to help can create that authority image in their mind. Just by teaching someone something that they don't know, we can begin to position ourselves as the leader in our fields.
5. Testimonials. This part of the sales letter is where we gain the most credibility. The more quality testimonials you have, the better your results.
6. The close. Just like in every sales situation, there has to be a close involved. As obvious as it sounds, we don't put as much effort as we can into the close. Because of this, we lose out on sales because the offer doesn't sound as good to the customer as it does to us. Hence, we have to craft our close carefully. Our offer should guarantee something because we feel we've made a better decision when something is guaranteed. The customer can't walk away feeling like a loser in the deal. They have to walk away feeling they just made the wisest decision in their life.
Sales letters act as our virtual salesmen and so we want to tailor them in the same way we would tailor a face to face pitch. Selling can really be broken down into an exact science and the same can be said about sales letters. Hence, we want to make sure we put in as much effort as possible when it comes to writing them.
Now, before you begin to write your sales letter, you would be wise to come up with a game plan. This game plan is essentially delving into the minds of your customers. Address any objections that may come to their minds. Just like in face to face sales, customers have buying resistances which are holding them back from taking action and buying your product. If you are able to squash away these objections, you'll be one step closer to the sale. One customer might be worried that the product won't work out as good as you say it would. Another customer might be worried that a competitor's product is superior and that they'd be making a wrong decision. People never want to accept that they've made a wrong decision. Hence, it is imperative to make sure that we address all objections in our sales letters.
A sales letter must appeal to the emotions of people. We've often heard that people are motivated to buy based on their emotions and then justify the purchase through logic afterwards. Therefore, its crucial that we inject some emotion in our writing. People are either motivated to gain or motivated to avoid pain and reduce suffering. Between these two states of mind, the latter is the most commonly sought.
We've just covered some important psychological tips which if implemented in sales letter writing, would greatly improve the conversions and response rates for your old letters. The following section will outline the exact steps you need to take from start to finish.
The steps for writing effective sales letter
1. The very first thing that needs to get accomplished is to grab attention. Readers see your headline before anything. Hence, the most important part of a sales letter is the headline. The reason is that if you can't grab the attention of the target market that you want, you might get a lot of clicks but no targeted customers. Success with sales letters is determined by how many of those clicks become paying customers. Results is the king of all advertising. Without results, its money down the drain.
2. The next step is defining the problem. You have to outline the problem that your product solves. Since sales is an emotional game, you have to remind your customers of how it feels to experience the problem again. Our job is to paint the clearest picture of the solution we can offer with our product/service.
3. Introduce the solution. After outlining the problem, we want to WOW them with our offer. This part is crucial because we have to establish ourselves as THE authority figure on the subject. No one wants advice from someone who is good. We'd rather get our advice from someone who is dominating in their field, someone who is at the top. So, the moment we introduce ourselves is the moment we make it or break it. Establish authority and WOW them and you'll soon get the sale.
4. How to establish authority? We can usually easily accomplish this with positive feedback. People want reassurance from others before they dig into their wallets. Also, talking about why you're the qualified person to help can create that authority image in their mind. Just by teaching someone something that they don't know, we can begin to position ourselves as the leader in our fields.
5. Testimonials. This part of the sales letter is where we gain the most credibility. The more quality testimonials you have, the better your results.
6. The close. Just like in every sales situation, there has to be a close involved. As obvious as it sounds, we don't put as much effort as we can into the close. Because of this, we lose out on sales because the offer doesn't sound as good to the customer as it does to us. Hence, we have to craft our close carefully. Our offer should guarantee something because we feel we've made a better decision when something is guaranteed. The customer can't walk away feeling like a loser in the deal. They have to walk away feeling they just made the wisest decision in their life.
Sales letters act as our virtual salesmen and so we want to tailor them in the same way we would tailor a face to face pitch. Selling can really be broken down into an exact science and the same can be said about sales letters. Hence, we want to make sure we put in as much effort as possible when it comes to writing them.
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