Sales

Sales Letters That Actually Sell

Do you draw a blank when you try to write a sales letter? Do your ideas sound good in your head but don’t come together on paper? You’re not alone.

These seven tips can help you write more effective sales letters:

Be the customer as you write. This is the most important aspect of a good sales letter, but it’s often overlooked. Imagine yourself as the reader of your letter, and write what the customer wants to know–not what you want to say. You have one page to attract a customer; you’ll lose the opportunity if your sole emphasis is on your business. Remember, your customer’s main concern is fulfilling his or her needs and desires, not increasing the balance in your bank account.
Organize your letter. Sales letters, just like high school term papers, need an introduction, a body and a conclusion. In the introduction, tell why you’re sending the letter. The body is your “sales pitch,” where you’ll explain why your offer is irresistible. The conclusion wraps it up by briefly bringing your points together and asking the customer to take advantage of the offer.
Make it easy to read. Many sales letters are thrown away without being read simply because they appear too complicated. Don’t let this happen to you. Use the following guidelines:
- Write in a conversational style. Write exactly as you normally speak; formal tones are usually unnecessary in sales letters.
- Use short sentences. Once you start writing more informally, you’ll notice your sentences will get shorter.
- Compose short paragraphs. People like to have breaks in their reading. If it doesn’t flow smoothly and sound natural, rewrite it.
- Edit and then re-edit your letter. Besides being difficult to read, misspelled words and grammar errors destroy the credibility and effectiveness of your letter.
Capture your reader’s attention. Headlines are not limited to ads. They can also be used in letters to tell readers something they want to know in a bold way that grabs their attention. You can also use longer headlines–up to three or four sentences–to present important information. In either case, always make the headline compelling so customers want to read the rest of the story.
Get your readers interested. Involve the reader in the letter by bringing it to life with a steady flow of interesting information. Write in an active voice.
Build on your sentences and paragraphs so the reader is encouraged to continue reading. Every sentence needs to be interesting; a reader can become bored quickly.
June Van Klaveren, owner of Compelling Communications, a copywriting firm in St. Louis, recommends including a handwritten note or an arrow in a different color ink to highlight an important fact and retain your reader’s interest. “I also include a `P.S.’ at the bottom of the letter,” says Van Klaveren.
“You can count on this and your headline being read because you’ve piqued the reader’s curiosity.”
Make your readers want your product or service. This is best done by answering the reader’s question, What’s in it for me? People are bombarded daily with billboards, commercials and direct mail–all trying to sell something. Your letter can stand out by not selling, but offering benefits.
Ask your readers to take action. Potential customers won’t know what you want unless you tell them what to do next. If you want them to call you, say that in your letter and provide your phone number. If you want them to visit your facility, invite them to stop by and give them clear directions and specific office hours.

It’s also important to urge your readers to take action right away. The longer it takes them to respond, the less likely it is you’ll hear from them. If you’re running a promotion, offer the special for a limited time. If you only have a few units available, be sure to state that quantities are limited. This generates urgency to follow up on your letter.

Great Online Customer Service Surveys

Online surveys are very effective and affordable. They’re a great way for you to obtain the feedback you need. Through online surveys, you can better understand your customers. Then, you can hone products and services accordingly, build customer loyalty, expand your customer base and better fulfill your potential.

But obtaining the quality and quantity of feedback you want means you need to ask the right questions. Here are 10 tips that will help you create effective surveys:

Clearly define the purpose of your survey. Effective surveys have focused objectives that are easily understood. For a survey to be successful, you need to spend time upfront to identify, in writing, the following objectives:
- What is the goal of this survey?
- What do you hope to accomplish with this survey?
- How will you use the data you are collecting?
- What decisions do you hope to be able to provide input to from the responses to this survey?
By answering these questions now, you’ll be able to more easily identify what data you need to collect later in order to make these decisions.
It sounds obvious, but a few minutes of planning upfront could mean the difference between receiving quality responses-responses that are useful as inputs to decisions-and uninterpretable data.
Consider the case of the software firm that wanted to find out what new functionality was most important to its customers. Their survey asked “How can we improve our product?” The resulting answers were anything from “Make it easier” to “Add an update button on the recruiting page.”
While interesting information, the data wasn’t really helpful for the product manager who wanted to take an itemized list to the development team, using customer input to prioritize his list.
Spending time identifying the survey’s objectives might have helped the survey creators determine if they were trying to understand their customers’ perception of their software-that is, hard to use, time consuming, unreliable-in order to identify areas of improvement or if they were trying to understand the value of specific enhancements by asking respondents to rank the importance of adding new functionality X, Y or Z.
Fuzzy goals tend to lead to fuzzy results, and the last thing you want to end up with is a set of results that provide no real decision-enhancing value. Upfront planning helps ensure that the surveys ask the right questions to meet your objectives and therefore that the data you collect will be useful.
Keep the survey short and focused. Keeping it short and focused helps with both the quality and quantity of the responses you’ll get. So it’s generally better to focus on a single objective than try to create a master survey that covers multiple objectives.
Keep the questions simple. When crafting your questions, make sure you get to the point and avoid the use of jargon. If you’re asking something like this: “When was the last time you used our RGS?” you’re probably going to get a lot of unanswered questions. Don’t assume your survey takers are as comfortable with your acronyms as you are.
Use closed-ended questions whenever possible. Closed-ended questions make it easier to analyze results and can take the form of yes/no, multiple choice or a rating scale. Open-ended questions are great supplemental questions and may provide useful qualitative information and insights. However, for collating and analysis purposes, close-ended questions are best. One warning: Make sure your closed-ended questions don’t force survey takers into choosing a “less bad” answer.
Keep rating scale questions consistent. Questions that offer rating scales-for example, rating something on a scale of 1 to 5-are a great way to measure and compare sets of variables. But if you elect to use rating scales, you need to keep them consistent throughout your survey: Use the same number of points on the scale for each question, and make sure the meanings of high and low remain the same. Switching your rating scales around throughout the survey will only confuse survey takers, leading to untrustworthy responses.
Make sure your survey flows in a logical order. Begin with a brief introduction-don’t reveal the survey objective. Next, start with the broader-based questions, later moving to those that are narrower in scope. It’s usually better to collect demographic data and ask any particularly sensitive questions at the end (unless you’re using this information to screen out survey participants). If you’re requesting contact information, put those questions last.
Pre-test your survey. Before launching your survey, be sure to pre-test it with a few members of your target audience to help you uncover glitches and unexpected question interpretations. Also, to make sure it’s not too long, time a few of your test subjects as they take the survey. Ideally the survey should take no more than 5 minutes to complete. Six to 10 minutes is acceptable, but you’ll probably see significant abandonment rates occurring after 11 minutes.
Schedule your survey by taking the calendar into account. When you’re planning your e-mail blast date#151;the e-mail that asks people to visit your site to take the survey-keep in mind that Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to do it-you’ll generate more responses than if you send it out on one of the other four days. You want to catch people’s attention, and you won’t do that on a Friday, when your survey respondents are most likely gearing up for the weekend, Saturday or Sunday, when the last thing on people’s minds is a customer survey, or a Monday, when most people are wading through a loaded in-box.
Offer an incentive for responding. Depending on the type of survey you’re conducting and your survey audience, offering an incentive can be very effective in improving your response rates. People like the idea of getting something in return for their time-incentives typically boost response rates by an average of 50 percent.
Consider using reminders. While not appropriate for all surveys, sending out reminders to those who haven’t yet responded can often provide a significant boost to your response rates.