In this part, we're looking at the sales
letter. It's a very common letter you're
going to use when you're in business.
One of the most common jobs you can have as
a new graduate is sales. Every company
needs lots of sales. So we will be writing
sales letters, putting them inside emails
and sending them out to potential
customers. Of course we need to remember
what's the goal of a sales letter. And
that is to get a customer, to obtain a
customer's interest. Maybe to buy now, but
also maybe to buy later if they're
interested. So a sales letter is an
excellent chance we have to get a
customer involved. They're not easy
letters to write. The more you know about
the receiver, the more chance you have to
succeed. Let's take a look at what is
involved in a sales letter. Usually a
sales letter needs to focus on getting
attention right away. And they do this by
directly addressing the customer or the
receiver. So if your company is fortunate
enough to have a record or a list of
previous customers, then you can write a
letter to those previous customers and
say, "Hey, we have a new product you will
be interested in". That's a great way to
get attention. You may also just have a
list of information of potential
customers. And you may use that to get
their attention, if you know something
about them or you pay for information
about them. In any case, a sales letter is
a difficult one to write if you don't
know anything about the receiver. So it's
best to know something. So if you're
doing business to business, it's
especially important that you understand
the other person's business, the
receivers business. And then you try to
explain why is your product,
why is your service good for their business.
"I know you. I know your business. I have a product, I have a service that's good for
you. It's good for your business, that can help you succeed".
That's the idea of a sales letter.
Let me go off on a little bit of a tangent here and give you
a little bit of a hint of the main kind of strategy a sales letter should undertake.
And that is what I call the A, B, C, D rule of thumb. And what that means is
each one of these letters has a meaning. So let's take a look at those.
A is attract attention,get attention.
B means build interest.
C means create desire,
and D means define action.
Okay, attract, build, create and define.
Sometimes these are a little bit hard for my students to understand.
So let me just give you a quick example. Attract means get my attention. I see
something and "oh, that's interesting." So if you're walking down the street and
you see a big sign or you hear a loud sound or music, then that gets your attention.
Build interest means tell me something that makes me interested more and more
interested. C is create desire, means I actually want to buy something.
And D define action means tell me how to do it.
So these three things are actually quite
different. And they're each a stage along the process of making a sale. So first, I
get my focus, I get my attention and that's the attention. Then I say, "Hmmm this is
interesting, I understand this". That's B, building the interest. And then C is
actually thinking that I might want to spend money on this, because the money
will give me a value back. If I spend $1,000, I will get something worth a
thousand or more dollars, because it's valuable to me. That's that create desire. Maybe
there's a special sale. It's something I kind of thought I would like, but I never
bought it. But today, there's a special price that's C, creating desire, you see.
Maybe there's a kind of phone I wanted to buy, but it was always too expensive.
But this week it's our special sale. It's 30% off. Well, I am interested. I always
wanted to buy it, but I never really had the desire to buy. Why?
Because it was too expensive.
Now it's cheaper, that does it. So you can
get special offers, or special opportunities, special sale prices. That is C,
create desire. Define action is how do you buy? Where do you need to go?
Where do you need to spend your money? How do you do it? So these are the kind of rules of
thumb I like to use to help you understand, when you write your sales letter,
what are the things you need to kind of pay attention to and follow.
The sales letter will have three paragraphs. Each paragraph of course will focus on
one thing. And I'm going to go over how they focus on the A,B,C and D. So let's
look at paragraph one. First, here's an example of paragraph one. For paragraph
one, you need to begin strong. You need to really have a very clear beginning
sentence. And here, we can see this first sentence begins with a question. This is
very common for sales letter, for sales letter, where they can ask, "Do you need
something? Are you frustrated with something? Don't you want to do something
better? Don't you want to look better? Don't you want to feel better? Don't you
want to get your work done faster?" So that kind of asking a question. So here
they're selling a motorcycle. "Is your new x100 sports motorcycle important to you?"
So here we know the customer, because they bought this product before. And now,
we're trying to sell them another product related to that first product. So
this kind of personalization. That is you say something in the letter in the very
beginning that makes me feel you know me, you know something about me, you know
something about a product I bought previously. That's a great way to
begin a sales letter. Let's look at the the second example: "I know you".
That's a good example. Because you bought this magazine before,
"I know you as a reader of world magazine you are interested in learning about
social development taking place at an astonishing rate" So I'm saying something
positive here about the receiver. "You are a person who bought this product before.
And I know that only smart people buy that kind of product. So you must be a
smart person and we have another product for smart people like you". So in the
first paragraph, you really are using the A idea. That is get attention. Get my
attention. What's the best way to get someone's attention? The best way to get
someone's attention is "I know you. I know you. I know something about you".
Now you have to be careful. You don't want to be creepy or weird, and say I know too much
about you. But I know something about you. Isn't that the way so much advertising today
works? That you have some information about the people. You say I know what
you're interested in. So that's the way you open the sales letter, by getting
attention. So "I know you, and I have something really special that
you're going to like. I know you're going to like."