Most businesses spend hours upon hours writing, designing and generally fiddling with the copy (the words), layout and sales messages in their promotional flyers, brochures and web pages. But what they fail to recognise is that the old-fashioned sales letter can outpull these other marketing mediums by up to ten to one.

Why is this the case? The main reason is that when a sales letter is written it addresses an individual, whereas the vast majority of flyers, brochures and web pages try to address everyone or, in other words, no-one in particular.

A good sales letter suggests to your prospect that someone is writing them a personal message. So it immediately gets their attention. And by achieving this initial objective, it makes them up to ten times more likely to read your sales message.

The result of this? You massively increase your response and sales conversion rates. People who have read a sales message that suggests it was written for them personally will be more likely to send back a reply card, pick up the phone and ring you, place an order by credit card, opt in to your newsletter and so on.

Considerable market testing using both online and offline marketing mediums has shown that sales copy used on leaflets, flyers and web pages that is written in the style of a personal letter, is by a long way the most effective in terms of generating higher response rates.

If your business sells a product or service using direct response selling methods either online or offline, then start testing this concept and see if writing your sales messages in the form of a letter makes a difference to your response rates.

from Enterprise Quest