Friday, March 13, 2009
10 Recession-Busting Sales Letter Tips!
1. Highlight all the important keywords and phrases in your ad copy. You could use bolding, underlining and color to highlight the important words. 2. Highlight buying incentives like free bonuses and money back guarantees. You could place them in boxes or in front of a different colored background. 3. Use short sentences or sentence fragments in the body of your ad copy. A short burst of words can catch a skimmers eye with one quick glance. 4. Place colorful graphs, pie charts and other charts in your ad copy. Use charts that will grab a person's eyes and also support your product claims. 5. Place attention grabbing pictures above and within your ad copy. A powerful technique is to use before and after pictures of people using your product. 6. Use a headline that catches the attention of your target audience. One of the most effective ways is to use a free offer as your headline. 7. Make your ad's keywords and phrases standout by enlarging the text. This technique works wonders with headlines and sub headlines. 8. Make your product's list of benefits and features stand out by using a symbol in front of each of them. The symbol could be a dash, solid circle, star, etc. 9. Use sub headlines to break up your ad copy and to capture a skimmers eye. You could make them even more powerful by highlighting them with color. 10. Use attention grabbing adjectives to describe your product. For example sizzling, incredible, high power, ultramodern, killer, eye popping, etc.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A few more tips to remember when writing a sales letter, which I hope will prove to be useful to your readers. Some of these points you have already covered to an extent, but repitition for emphasis never did anyone any harm.
ReplyDeleteWhilst it is true that the beginning and the end of the sales letter are the most important parts of any sales copy, but that does not mean that the rest of the sales letter is any less important.
The first part of your sales letter, generally speaking is not the headline, it is the preheader.
The purpose of the preheader is purely to get the reader, to read the headline.
The purpose of the headline, as well as getting one’s attention, is to have this person/s read the first sentence.
The purpose of the first very short sentence, is to get people to read the second sentence and so on and so forth (a slippery sales funnel).
The introduction to the sales letter is all about setting the tone of the sales copy, otherwise referred to in the trade as creating the buyers or buying environment.
You can do this by getting the potential buyer to say YES! - as much as possible in their subconscious mind.
You might ask questions which also empathize with the target audience feelings of frustration and pain.
Realize that most people do not buy for rational reasons, they buy to satisfy their emotions.
It is your job with any sales letter to move the prospect from a feeling of frustration or pain to the emotion of pleasure. If you do this well, you will get the sale.
The main offer you should make as irresistible as possible, giving the prospect every reason to want to buy from you and you alone over your competitor’s in the same niche market.
Do not underestimate the use of scarcity, testimonials and bullet points to draw attention to your benefits.
There is a vast difference between benefits and features, another good point to bear in mind.
Keep your language simple, do not use overly complicated long words. They might help you to think that you look intelligent but in salesmanship in print, they are always best avoided.
Offer a darn good guarantee, usually longer is better. 365 days sounds a lot better than 1 year.
Never underestimate the power of the PS points, these should once again draw attention to your main benefits.
Bonuses, make sure they are related to your product or service and use no more than 3 of them. If you pay too much attention to the bonus items and not the offer itself, your main offer will lose it’s credibility.
Finally - On the point of the guarantee.
If anyone is selling an informational product, for example an eBook or information system and you write a sales letter for that, in order to get more sales….don’t be afraid to offer a longer guarantee over a shorter guarantee.
What you’ll find is that a longer guarantee your offer will have more credibility in the mind of the reader if you employ this tactic.
So, rather than offering a 30 day guarantee, extend that guarantee period up to 365 days instead.
In doing so you take away any urgency to get a refund if any reader is not perfectly happy with the information ordered and received.
They’ll put it off, asking for the refund, telling themselves, ‘Hey! I’ve got all year to ask for this refund’. And they will never get around to it in the vast majority of cases.
It works a treat this strategy. It makes your offer look more valuable and you retain more money in your pocket as a direct result of employing this strategy on your sales letters.
In a nutshell if you can offer a longer guarantee over a shorter guarantee, do so!
Here is to everyone’s continued success, writing their sales letters!
Best regards.
Mark Andrews
http://IMCopywriting.com
Internet Marketing Copywriting