How to Write a Powerful Marketing Letter
I’ve written this “how-to” article to give you a competitive edge when writing a powerful marketing letter. The following 15 Tips (and tricks) will give you everything you need to know to write killer marketing letters. Enjoy and prosper –
The secret to writing a sales letter is that there is no secret. A killer sales letter is written to accomplish one of three things.
# 1. Generate interest to qualify (or disqualify) a lead
# 2. Advance a prospect through the sales process
# 3. Secure TOMA [Top of Mind Awareness] for additional sales with your existing client base
Question: What makes writing an effective sales letter so challenging? Here are the top 15.5 reasons why people fail to write effective sales copy and what you can do about them.
1) No clear objective in mind before you sit down to write your sales letter — In order to write persuasively you must have an end in mind, a goal for your reader. Ask yourself, what do you want the reader do when they finish reading your letter.
2) Lack of an attention getting headline or opening sentence — You must hook the reader immediately with a captivating opener in order to get the reader to invest their valuable time to finish reading the letter. 80%+ of sales letters fail to generate attention.
3) Lead sentence fails to extend the theme of the headline into the letter — You must bridge the reader into the sales copy once their attention is captured or risk confusing the reader and losing their interest.
4) Fail to write in a conversational tone — Write like you talk. A letter should be a dialog between you and the reader. The reader should get a sense that you are genuinely concerned with their well being.
5) Copy is boring, fails to keep the reader interested — You must develop a writing style based on your personality, not on antiquated High School grammar practices that are assured to put any reader to sleep. It’s ok for your writing to fail grammatically as long as your don’t lose the focus on your message.
6) Fail to use a proven writing format — In order to be effective you must use an established formula for writing copy such as “story telling” or “problem -> agitate -> solution”. Sales letters are written to produce a measurable result, NOT a creative award.
6.5) No bolding or underlining within the letter — There are a number of things you can do to add emphasis to key parts of your sales letter to direct your readers attention where you want it to go. Emphasis also helps pull the reader into the letter.
7) Me focused, not reader focused — Stop focusing on how great your product is… the reader doesn’t really care. Will your product save money? Time? or generate revenue? Profits? Never forget your reader is tuned into WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) when they read your letter. Always emphasize the major benefits your reader will receive from your product.
8 ) Nix the jargon — avoid industry jargon or buzzwords and stick to talking bout your benefits in plain English. Nothing will turn a reader off more quickly that using industry jargon you think they should know and often don’t
9) Use testimonials — No matter on what stage you are in with your prospect you should always include testimonials. Testimonials increase your credibility and your believability.
10) Feature focused, not benefit focused — You must keep the copy focused on the benefits your reader will receive by owning your product. Example: Your product is made from plastic (feature); you tell the reader that because your product is made from plastic (feature) it will never rust (advantage). Thereby, lowering replacement costs (benefit), eliminate corrosion (benefit), etc…
11) No bullet points or single sentence paragraphs — There are two types of readers. There are those who will read the entire letter once you’ve captured their attention and then there are those who will skim your letter. You must be able to reach both reading styles. Bullets and single sentence paragraphs allow your reader to capture important benefits at a glance.
12) Long sentences — In order to keep the prospects attention in today’s busy world you must write in short sentences. Never use a comma. This includes using incomplete sentences [when necessary] in your letter copy in order to express your point.
13) Lengthy paragraphs — Try to keep your paragraphs to 3 sentences (5 at the maximum). Even though you’ve captured their attention with your opening headline you must write for interruptions that will occur as they read your letter during a hectic business day. Complete your thoughts quickly.
14) Copy does not define next steps — Now that you’ve got your prospect to read all the way to the end of your letter… now what? What actions on your part or theirs must take place? The “next step” is where you psychologically engage the reader into your sales process and tell them exactly what to do or expect.
15) Fail to use a “ps” to close your letter — The “ps” is the second most read section of a letter. The “ps” is a great place to reiterate your #1 benefit from your headline or opening sentence.
Finally, Proof-read your letter — always proof your letter two or three times. If you have someone else proof your letter, explain your goals to them. When they give you their critique, acknowledge their comments; however, any changes made to the letter are your decision alone. If you decide to proof your own letter let it sit for a few hours or a day, print it and then read it aloud to make sure it’s conversational. Do NOT proof your letter on your word processor (unless you’re an experienced editor); make your notes on the paper for easy review.
One final note; in order to become a great writer you must become an avid reader of successful sales letters. I’ve developed a course you can invest in to help you write a killer sales letter on my site http://joeheller.com and click on “programs” to learn more. It’s a great resource from my personal library for yours.
Editor’s note: Joe Heller can be reached at (713) 927-4494 | 1 (888) JHELLER | joe [AT] joeheller.com
(c) 2011 Heller Marketing International, All rights reserved Worldwide.
Your Greatest Competitor — Indifference
Who is your greatest competitor? Throughout the history of marketing, professionals have always faced great adversaries that compete for their highly coveted piece of business. Is yours the large multinational company or the boutique that somehow seems to call on your best customers? No, the most formidable competitor that has haunted professionals for decades is the invisible competitor, the unseen attitude of customer indifference.
Why is indifference such a challenging competitor? Psychologically, indifference is rooted in our belief system. Its endemic, an attitude, a viewpoint held by your customers that you must change in order to close your sales. In addition, while you are more than able to compete head on against the visible products of your toughest competitor, the balance of power shifts when you are forced to compete against the invisible competitor of the human mind.
Indifference is not based in logic, but lies embedded in your client’s perception. Many factors can contribute to client indifference, including familiarity with an existing product, or “may be” false satisfaction with a competitor’s product, or the failure of the buyer to notice additional needs, or their failure to recognize the unique benefits value of your product/service. However, the most prevalent factor by far is simply complacently, the age-old adage, “but that’s what we’ve always bought.” Indifference comes from the client’s opinion that what you are selling is a commodity-like product with relatively no distinction nor value over their existing product/service.
How do successful professionals confront the competition of indifference? You attack the issue strategically, armed with a thorough evaluation of a potential client’s current business practices. Indifference is overcome when a salesperson maps out a plan to resolve areas of customers’ hidden frustrations by uncovering previously unidentified needs. In approaching indifference, the sales professional must understand the psychological considerations that are tied to changing an attitude. Your client needs to be motivated to change.
To combat indifference, you need to acknowledge that indifference affects your customer, gaining permission to ask probing questions that increases your understanding of the customer’s specific needs. By having a questioning strategy, you help the customer gain an awareness of the needs and problems your product can solve. Probing questions permit you to explore problems that may have been lying dormant, and/or hidden; buried for years under by the initial adoption of poor business practices. Analytical probing allows you to understand the customers’ core business; including new business strategies the client is planning, and to define the competitive pressures within a market niche or segment with the goal of helping the customer realize problems or needs of which they were previously unaware.
Having a questioning strategy designed to overcome indifference permits you to discover who the other suppliers are that are currently doing business with your prospective customer. By evaluating how satisfied the customer is with the current suppliers, you uncover business needs they would like to improve. Additionally, strategic questioning provides an opportunity to investigate the customer’s strategies and goals, allowing you to align your product/service with the achievement of their business objectives. Once a customer’s business objective is in the open, you can determine how your product can assist your customer in meeting their stated business goals.
Note: Effective probing that ties questioning and strategy together allows the sales professional to become consultative in their marketing approach focusing on the customers business needs. Probing also allows you to gain insight on how your customers are positioned in the market, allowing you to evaluate how effectively they are competing, identifying who their competitors are, and whether they are gaining or losing market share respective to the specific products and segments they serve.
Raising the customers awareness about their current level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, helps identify the consequences of leaving things unchanged, promoting the cost of a the need to facilitate change. If the questions are carefully crafted by your understanding of their business, the customer discerns the immediate financial implications of not acting in a timely manner, advancing the breakdown of the indifference barriers.
Remember the 80/20 Rule, also known as the Pareto Principle states that 80% of sales are made by the top 20% of all professionals. As a result, the lower 80% make 20% of the sales. One major failing of the lower 80% of professionals is a tendency to introduce an assumed need the customer has not verbalized though probing. When a salesperson introduces a need the customer hasn’t verbally expressed, the customer sees the sales person as “pushy,” destroying any comfort level that’s been built. The professionals poor judgment causes the customer to raise their barrier of indifference toward the salesperson’s perceived high-pressure tactic.
Learning to recognize indifference by applying the appropriate strategy and tactics to combat it will continually advance the sale and lead to greater success in selling. Occasionally overcoming indifference happens immediately, but more than likely conquering customer indifference takes a long-term commitment.
Note: Questions that a professional asks must drive a business solution. Here are a few examples of questions to ask to gain a mutual understanding of a need between you and your prospect.
How do you feel about the results you are getting now? Are you on plan to achieve your 1/3/5 year goals? Are there any competitors in the market that are impeding your growth plans? How does that affect your business operations/sales? What impact is that having on your new client acquisition? Customer retention? Your product quality? Your productivity? Your cash flow?
In summary, indifference is a psychological competitor that lies in the attitudes of our customers. Remember, in a questioning strategy there are more than just using open and closed ended questions. There are questions that are designed to capture account information, help the customer recognize problems and what the problems will cost if not addressed, and questions on how to orient the customer to distinguish that your product is the right solution that will drive results to reach their intended business goals.
Final Thoughts: I’ve been talking about conquering indifference on the buyer side in order to win new customers. However, I’d like to point out that 68% of the customers a business looses are rooted in indifference from the professional. From the customers’ perspective, they believe that the supplier has stopped treating them appropriately with care and empathy, no longer valuing their relationship. Remember, that it takes up to five times more effort/energy/cost to win a new customer verses maintaining a profitable relationship with an existing customer. Indifference is a critical issue faced by all, causing the loss of more client relationships than any other reason. You must take care of your customers because they are the most valuable assets your business has.
One final note; in order overcome this powerful competitor — you must become an avid student of lead generation and marketing strategy. I’ve developed a toolkit that gives you powerful 1-2-3 lead generation techniques that can skyrocket your success. You can find it on my site http://joeheller.com and click on “programs” to learn more. It’s a great resource from my personal library to yours.
Editor’s note: Joe Heller can be reached at (713) 927-4494 | 1 (888) JHELLER | joe [AT] joeheller.com
(c) 2011 Heller Marketing International, All rights reserved Worldwide.
Trust from the Client’s Perspective
One of the most challenging, if not the most difficult piece of the business development puzzle in winning a new client is Trust. Trust today is truly the pivotal point of building a successful business relationship. Trust is rarely tied to a product or service but it is facilitated by the person interacting with the customer. Why is this important? Because everything depends on trust and in this day and age, trust is difficult to come by.
The “trust” question arises more often with the sale of a service, simply because you cannot see or touch the product. This means, there is no visible brand, other than you, so you become the representative for quality. Because of the downward spiral of ethics in business today, it is no longer simply a matter of a product being trustworthy; you must convince your clients that you are trustworthy. What you do and how you are perceived by a potential client sets the tone for how they view your entire organization.
A recent study found that marketing competencies for professional service firms are explicitly focused on defining the element of trust from their client’s perspective. The study also revealed after interviewing nearly one thousand people they found that trust has three essential elements in the eyes of a future client.
Candor: Clients value honesty when dealing with a service provider. They want the person to be straight forward about what will and what won’t work about their solution as it relates to their problem. They respect and appreciate your candor so if you don’t know the answer and let your client know that in fact “you don’t know” it creates a foundation for a solid business relationship.
Competence: Clients want and need to believe that you know exactly what you are doing. They need to feel there is a low level of risk involved in working with you. Remember, because they cannot see and touch your service, your ability to solve their problem becomes the focal point for your client relationship. Your competence truly represents the product in the client’s mind.
Concern: From a client’s perspective, the most important element of trust is concern. Clients want to know you not only understand their problems but you have the ability to empathize with them and feel their pain. They want to know you are concerned about them and the business issues that go beyond the typical sales rhetoric it takes to land a new client.
The importance of candor, competence and concern are essential for developing trust. The absence of any one element can lose a deal. The challenge is that most people when engaged in a selling scenario is that they are not very good at demonstrating each of the three C’s. In both the professional services study and in parallel studies conducted with product sales forces, the element of concern was most frequently deemed missing. Clients felt that while most professionals were competent and/or candid, when it came to concern they fell short. They were interested in making a sale as it related to their service. As a result, they failed to really listen for the prospect concerns; and when a trust breakdown occurred? The sale ultimately broke down as well.
A quick comparison from the study, using a score of 100 as the highest level of trust shows us that service sales people consistently score a 35 on concern verses a product sales person scoring a 53 on concern. As you can see, when compared with product sales, service providers receive an unexpected surprise. They immediately fall 20 points behind a tangible or product sale in the area of concern. Yet, as professionals, they are used to thinking of themselves as deeply concerned about their clients. They are often surprised and offended if anyone suggests they don’t put their clients’ interests first. As the research shows, this is not how they come across to a potential client.
Thus, not only do clients give service providers the lowest ratings on concern, they judge professional service sales people to be significantly less concerned about them than product sales people.
Why do clients see you as unconcerned? There are several reasons: First, service providers listen for what they can solve rather than what is important to their clients. Prospective clients view service sales people including attorneys and accountants as sharks circling for a kill (we’ve all heard the jokes). Second, service sales people are often too anxious to get to their solutions and fail to listen for the client’s real problem.
Service professionals are very seldom seen viewing the problem from the client’s side of the table. What’s needed is an ability to demonstrate their capability, to see the core business issues, and to drive the results that exceed client’s expectations.
To reinforce and ensure success of a service-based sale, the one element of trust where you need to score an A+ is concern. Not only because it is the most important element to clients, it is the only trust element that your client can make a personal valid judgment with. Keep in mind, it’s hard for a client to judge whether you are competent; it is assumed that you should be sitting in front of him/her because your expertise in solving other client’s problems.
Candor isn’t easy to judge either. It is tough to tell who is being totally honest and isn’t exaggerating. No matter what the selling scenario, the client will always decide emotionally whether or not the sale will move forward and support that decision with logic.
Why? Psychologically, if you don’t believe someone is concerned about helping you, you don’t trust them. And, lack of concern translates into suspicions about their competence and candor, which influences all three levels of the trust equation. If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve lost a sale you need to consider how often clients have drawn the same conclusions about you. Trust is not a prepackaged emotion, it is something that has to be earned and it can only be developed through the interactions you have with your clients.
One final note; in order to build trust with your market you must become an avid student of lead generation and marketing strategy. I’ve developed a toolkit that gives you powerful 1-2-3 lead generation techniques that can skyrocket your success. You can find it on my site http://joeheller.com and click on “programs” to learn more. It’s a great resource from my personal library to yours.
Editor’s note: Joe Heller can be reached at (713) 927-4494 | 1 (888) JHELLER | joe [AT] joeheller.com
(c) 2011 Joe Heller Marketing, All rights reserved Worldwide.
