How to write a sales letter is something that often haunts people who are marketing online.
In this article, I’m going to lay out the basics of writing sales letters.
Here are the common problems in online copywriting:
1. Don’t believe long sales copy works.
While split testing can give you a definitive answer in a specific case, the whole history of direct response marketing and advertising shows conclusively this fact:
Sale letters can NEVER be too long. They can ONLY be too boring!
The reason you see people on blogs and forums saying that long sales letters don’t work is because they don’t! That’s right. THEIR long sales letters don’t work. A marketing letter that bores the reader to tears, doesn’t use proven emotional selling principles, doesn’t follow time-tested and proven methods of sale letters and doesn’t use every secret of persuasion available won’t work.
There’s a reason top copywriters get thousands of dollars to write sales and marketing letters that pull in orders: It’s just as much an art as it is a science.
Having said that, while it is a skill, it’s a learnable one.
2. Don’t hit on deep emotional benefits.
It’s one thing to state the features and benefits of an offer. It’s quite another to dig beyond the surface and hit the emotional nerve that gets the reader to react and respond. Plain vanilla copy you can get for $250 won’t do that.
And neither will the SAME copy in an online video. People mistakenly think there’s something magic about videos as opposed to sales letters. There isn’t. They’re just different media in which you implant your effective sales message.
3. Don’t cover all the features and benefits possible.
I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve avoided buying from a web site simply because the web site didn’t tell me what I needed to know in order to make a positive purchase decision.
Instead of being afraid your reader won’t read, be afraid of NOT telling them all they need to know in order to make a positive buying decision.
Now, the more an item is an impulse purchase, the less the copy is required to sell it. The greater the emotional involvement in the decision, the more long copy is needed to sell it.
A lot of the comparisons between videos and sales letters aren’t fair because they’re dealing with impulse purchase items.
But let’s take a product or service that involves an emotional decision. Long copy will work to sell that item because people want to get all the facts before they make a decision.
Why You Should NOT Use Either Sales Letters Or Videos Alone
The truth is that your best response will likely be obtained by using BOTH a video and a traditional long-form sales letter. That way the people who want to read can read. And the people who want to watch a video can watch a video. And people who just want to listen can listen.
You cover all the bases:
* Readers
* Visual responders
* Auditory responders
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Videos are a powerful selling tool. But combine them with long-form direct response sales letters to obtain the highest response possible.