Carol Bentley

Your sales letter is extremely powerful when you use the proven science behind good copywriting . Simply adopt this 8-element structure to give you a head-start:

When selling (and remember you are selling in your letter or advert) most professional sales people tell you to follow AIDA; no I’m not talking about a person called AIDA; I’m talking about the acronym AIDA which stands for:

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.  Add an extra sprinkling of A for Attention and your sales letter sparkles.

Let’s go through the copywriting techniques that match these elements:

1) Grab ATTENTION with your headline – spend the majority of your time on this. Use eye-catching words such as You/Your; Who Else; Which; Now; New; Bargain; Free; How/How to; Hurry or Breakthrough.

2) Whatever your headline promised your first paragraph must reinforce. Keep it short and to the point. Resist the temptation to ramble. Keeping it focused keeps your reader’s INTEREST.

3) Draw your reader on - describe exactly what you are offering, what it does for him, how he benefits. If there are a number of steps to a process describe exactly what they are so you start to create his DESIRE.

4) Remember human nature. Something’s good? We want it too! Give your reader feedback from your delighted customers. Make sure the testimonials are descriptive and identify the problem your customer had or the result he wanted and the solution or outcome you delivered. You keep your reader’s DESIRE high.

5) Lose – It is your job to make sure your prospect understands why he cannot possibly ignore your offer. Make absolutely sure he understands exactly how much less his life is if he does not respond to your valuable proposition. You are harming him by not doing everything possible to clearly show the loss he would experience.

So tell him what he loses if he doesn’t taken up your valuable offer. How he’s missed out on key benefits or results, how his life will never be the same again…

OK, so I’m exaggerating , but I’m sure you get the picture. As I’ve said before, people make buying decisions based on their emotions and then use logic to justify the decision. If we weren’t influenced by our emotion, people would never buy expensive cars, designer clothes or larger houses. After all a small, cheap car gets you from A to B, just as a more expensive car does.

Appeal to your prospect’s emotional wants and desires – the detail of features you provide helps him justify the logic of buying from you.

This is still part of his DESIRE – his desire not to lose what you have already created an interest in.

So, having ‘depressed‘ your reader with what he might lose if he doesn’t take your offer, now you must…

6) Repeat the benefits – raise the desire again to own or experience your service or product. Get your reader excited about what he can expect to enjoy.

And then…

7) Action – tell him EXACTLY what to do now. This is where many sales letters fall down. There is no specific ‘call to action’ describing, in simple to follow steps, how to get what you’ve been promising throughout your letter.

So go on, tell him to send the completed request form in the envelope provided. Tell him to call the Freephone number and place his request NOW. Tell him to send the email confirming his interest. Don’t let him ‘cool off’ by not leading him through the steps he needs to take immediately.

And finally add the P.S. – your second headline (and the final sprinkling ‘A’ of the AIDA-A acronym). Having spent so much time preparing your main headline you have already discovered your second strongest – and that is probably a natural P.S.

Make your P.S. as compelling as your headline. Its job is to get your prospect to read your letter and remind him of the most important reason why he should respond.

These - and other - insights are described in my book. If you haven’t already got a copy why not invest in yourself and go to http://www.carolbentley.com/offer or give it as a business gift to a colleague or friend.

You might not want to give it to a competitor though, after all you do want some advantage, don’t you?

~ Carol

Date: Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 11:06 am | Category: Copywriting, Selling Techniques | RSS Feed: RSS 2.0 feed.

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