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The Direct Mail Solution — Chapter-02: Direct-Mail Basics and Creating the Perfect Sales Piece
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Direct-Mail Basics
and Creating the
Perfect Sales Piece
IRECT MAIL IS ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE METHODS I KNOW TO
take a small business and make it grow fast. You can quickly
and easily reach out to large numbers of people, telling them
all about the great features of your product or service and giving
them instructions on exactly what they need to do to start improving
their lives with what you have to offer.
Yes, it’s true that there are other forms of advertising you can
use. But direct-mail marketing offers a huge advantage over most
advertising media, and that advantage is that you can use it to target
very specific groups of customers or prospects.
Of course, it can also be used to reach a broad range of prospects
with your mailings—as broad as you would reach with TV—if that’s
your wish. Think about those ubiquitous Publisher’s Clearinghouse
D
CHAPTER
2
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Sweepstakes mailings. I remember those arriving in the mailbox when I
was a kid, and you probably do too. They worked, or they wouldn’t still
be doing them!
But it’s the ability to zero in on your specific audience that makes
direct mail so cost effective—especially when you’re starting with a
specific product or service that won’t be of interest to everyone in the
world. You want to know your advertising dollars are being used to
reach the right people.
With direct mail you can target people by age, sex, income, hobbies,
and interests. You can narrow down the people you mail to by what
they have bought in the past and how much money they’ve spent. In
other words, you can make your mailing specific to the type of customer
you’re looking for. This increases the probability that you’ll get the
response you want.
For example, if you are selling a special golf driver for $400, and
you want to mail only to buyers who have spent $400 or more on
golf equipment, then you’ll be able to identify and then mail to the
exact type of prospect you want to reach: individuals who are golfers
who have spent $400 or more on golf-related products within the
past year.
What other advertising medium allows you to be this specific?
Direct mail gives you the option either to mail to a broad universe
of prospects or a very specific, targeted, narrowed-down, niche
population.
Then you can send a message that’s carefully tailored to appeal to
the group you’re sending to. Targeted sales pieces allow you to grab
your prospects’ emotions, and then you can motivate them to respond
by presenting a special offer.
You can give your prospects the option of responding in many
different ways. You can direct prospects to call a phone number, have
them come right down to your storefront, visit your web page, mail
something back to you, or even send you a fax or email—whatever works
best for you and your type of business.
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As you can see by now, direct-mail marketing gives you lots of
flexibility in the kind of prospects you can reach, the kind of sales
material you will send them, and how you will ask them to respond.
But even with all that flexibility, a basic direct-mail campaign
always involves these three basic elements:
- Sending out sales pieces with a targeted message . . .
- To a select group of people . . .
- And asking them to do something very specific—a direct call to action that motivates and tells prospects how to respond. This book is all about designing and running a direct-mail campaign around these three elements. But before you can send something out, you need something to send! You need a great sales piece. It All Starts with a Sales Piece In this chapter we’ll focus on the sales piece and how to get one that will do the job. With the right sales piece you could see your phone ring off the hook, your mailbox overflow with orders, or your web page receive hundreds or even thousands of hits. Having an excellent sales piece is a critical part of the success of any campaign. When I first started out in this business, I worked for a man who built a multimillion-dollar company on an unusual sales piece he wrote himself. It worked so well rival companies copied his methods for years. This man knew how to write a sales piece that appealed to a very deep need in people. I’ll never forget something I heard him say again and again about advertising: “It’s not the product that’s important. It’s the sales piece.” Of course, you need a great product, too. You need something to sell! But unless you have an appealing sales piece, you won’t be able to sell your product, no matter how wonderful it may be. Writing an effective sales piece requires a real understanding of the product or service you’re selling, and then putting all your enthusiasm
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for it into the piece. You want to make your audience as excited about
it as you are.
In addition to your knowledge and interest in your product—
that only you can bring to the process because nobody knows your
product as well as you do—you have to know some simple copywriting
techniques that have proved successful over the years. There’s no
reason why you can’t be the one to write the next million-dollar sales
The Sales Piece That Created a Millionaire
Ken Roberts was a young man who was deter-
mined to become rich. He tried several different business-
es with modest success, and then he discovered commodity
trading. A natural-born teacher and motivator, he developed
a course to teach the skill to others. And that’s when he dis-
covered he was a natural-born copywriter as well.
Ken wrote a sales piece to sell his course that was so effec-
tive it set him on the path to the wealth he’d always dreamed
of. Over the years he sold so many courses that Worth maga-
zine said he taught commodity trading to more people than
anyone else on the planet. One feature of this unique sales
piece was that he wrote it in the first person, telling his own
story, but in such a way that any reader could identify with
him and think he could accomplish what Ken did. The copy
was many pages long, but because it was so compelling, the
reader couldn’t put it down. Finally, the piece was published
as an attractive booklet, making it fun to read.
There were probably other qualities that made this sales piece
work as well as it did. Whatever they were, it was the perfect
combination, and it made Ken a millionaire, many times over.
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piece. (Or at least direct a professional copywriter who will write it for
you.)
The following information should help you get started.
AIDA
There’s a famous formula for writing excellent sales pieces that has been
part of the copywriter’s bag of tricks for many years now. It’s called the
AIDA formula, an acronym for:
A = Gain Attention
I = Create Interest
D = Build Desire
A = Request Action
Pick up any sales piece that you like, and analyze it for these four
elements. Chances are you’ll find that they’re all there.
In some way the piece first grabs your attention. It may be
with a great headline or a graphic element. Whatever it is, the piece
immediately catches your eye, and you can’t help but pick it up to find
out what it’s all about.
Once it has your attention, the piece intrigues you with the
promise that something is about to be revealed that will be of benefit
to you. Now your interest is aroused. You just have to learn what the
big secret is.
Then it builds a desire in you to obtain the product. Often it will
do that by showing you that you have a problem (maybe a problem
you didn’t even know you had until you read the piece) and then
offering an easy solution that only the person sending the sales piece
can provide.
Finally it will have a very clear call to action: step-by-step instructions
for what you have to do in order to get all the benefits you’ve been
promised. A sales piece that doesn’t have a clear call to action is almost
worthless.
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Without all of these elements, a sales piece may not give you the
results you want. Before you send out any direct-mailing piece, make
sure it at least follows the AIDA formula.
How Long Should a Sales Piece Be?
There is much debate about how long a sales piece should be. I’ve tested
and seen over and over that, in general, the longer the piece, the more
success it will have. Once you get the reader interested, you just have
to drive your point home with tons of benefits, proof, and convincing
arguments. And the more the better.
Possibly you’ve read somewhere that shorter copy is better—that it
is better to just get to the point rather than ramble on with a long letter.
Just before I started writing this chapter I talked to a client who said, “I
think we just need to tell people what we are selling within the first few
paragraphs. No one has time to read through all those words.” This was
his first reaction to an eight-page sales letter to his existing customers.
He only wanted to mail two pages.
I bit my tongue and politely dis agreed with him and explained that
there is an art to selling. You can’t just tell someone to buy something
and expect them to buy it. If it was that easy, we’d all be broke from
buying everything offered to us.
The fact is, research shows again and again that it’s the longer copy
that sells. This is especially true for products that people don’t really
need. People don’t need to be convinced to buy things they need, like
washing machines or snow tires. When you buy these things, you’re
happy with a bulleted list of features in a catalog.
But when it comes to things you don’t need, and never even
thought about before, like a new set of golf clubs or a new miracle diet
and exercise program, you need lots of information to convince you—
and the more the better.
But now you’re thinking, if I have no interest in going on a diet,
I’m sure as heck not going to read a 36-page sales piece about it. Well,
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maybe yes and maybe no. But one thing you can be sure of is that
someone who does feel like it wouldn’t be a bad idea to lose a few pounds
might eagerly read every word of the long sales piece. And research—and
sales figures—back up the efficacy of longer pieces.
One of my favorite direct-marketing quotes is “the more you
tell, the more you sell.” I’ve never seen a direct-mail (physical mail)
campaign where a shorter sales letter worked better than a longer sales
letter.
My first real direct-marketing job was with one of the most
successful financial pub lishers in the business opportunity niche. I
sent out millions of sales pieces for him. We constantly tested, and the
results led us to increase the page count. The sales piece we were mailing
grew from 56 pages to 64 pages to 72 pages to 80 pages. Each increase
in page count increased our response rate.
One of my clients sends out an oversized, 11 x 6-inch PURL postcard
each month. (A PURL postcard sends people to their own “Personal
URL”—for example, simpson-direct.com/craig.simpson). I convinced
him to test a four-page self-mailer because it would include more copy
and cost about the same to mail. The results were significantly better.
More proof for “the more you tell, the more you sell.”
I’ve tested long and short copy many times, and I’ve always seen a
higher response rate with the longer copy. Now, there are times when
the increased print ing and production costs offset the higher response.
If the longer piece bumps you into a higher postage class, then you’ll
need a significant lift in response in order to offset the higher price. But
90 percent of the time, you’ll find that it’s well worth your time and
extra cost to increase the length of your copy.
It’s also true that many people have had successful campaigns with
a two-page letter or even a well-written postcard. Important factors in
determining the length of the sales piece are what it is you’re selling,
how much explanation is required, how much the item costs, how
knowledgeable your audience is, what is the call to action, etc. For
example, if you have a list of steady customers and you just want to let
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them know a popular product is on sale, a quick postcard that makes it
easy for them to see that information may be the perfect vehicle.
I’ve directed extremely successful campaigns with sales pieces of
every length. I’ve sent out invitation-style mailers, “newspaper reprint”
mailers, four-page self-mailers, digest-size sales pieces that ranged from
16 to 80-plus pages in length, postcards—just about anything you can
think of. (We’ll be describing all of these formats and when and how to
use them later in this book.)
There’s a famous story that someone once asked Abraham Lincoln
how long a man’s legs should be. His answer was, “They ought to be long
enough to reach from his body to the ground.” That sums it up for me
too when it comes to the question of how long a sales piece should be.
One final thought on this topic: whenever I’m working with a
copywriter on a sales letter, I never give a specific page count that
must be fulfilled. The writer always asks how many pages are needed,
and I always answer, whatever it takes to get the job done. When you
are writing copy, never set a specific page count you need to achieve.
Instead, write what you think will work best. Write as much copy as you
think is needed to convince the prospect to respond to your campaign.
Don’t limit yourself by setting a page count.
The Elements of a Sales Piece
You may be thinking, “How am I going to write a sales piece?” If you’ve
never done anything like that before, it might seem impossible. But let
me tell you why you would be the perfect one to write—or at least be
the one to consult on the creation of—the sales copy for your business.
You understand your product or service. You know its strong points
and its weaknesses. You know what makes it unique and better
than anything else out there.
Hopefully, you love your product or service. You have great enthusi-
asm for it. You probably think about it every waking hour, and
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maybe you even dream about it at night. It is that positive energy
that readers pick up on that makes them want to know more
about the product and what it can do for them.
You are familiar with your competition. You know their strengths
and weaknesses and why what you offer is a superior product.
You understand your prospects. You know why they need your
product, what problem they have that it can solve for them,
what they’re looking for specifically, and how your product is
designed to meet their need.
You know the story of the product. How you got involved with it. How
it changed your life. How your passion for some idea drove you
to create it or get involved with it. Stories make great sales pieces.
They grab people’s interest and get them hooked so they’ll keep
reading all the way to the end and finally place the order.
In other words, you are the best resource for all the information
that is going to be the basis of your winning sales piece.
And good sales copywriting is often informal and comes from the
heart. If you can talk about your product to other people, there’s no
reason why you can’t jot down your ideas and turn them into a written
sales piece.
And once you get started, it can actually be fun. Every time you
come up with a great idea to add, like a new benefit, and every time you
come up with an exciting new way to describe your product, you’ll feel
like you found a pearl in an oyster. You’ll quickly jot it down, and the
more you do, the more ideas you’ll get.
Then all you have to do is gather together all your notes, and it’s
just like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. You start putting all the pieces
together in the right order, and before you know it, you have a sales
piece! Once you have the main pieces stitched together, you just have
to polish it up a bit, and you’ll be ready to go.
Just start writing down points as they come to you throughout the
day. Think of some of your customers who used your product or service
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and had a good experience so you can throw in some examples. You may
already have the makings of a fantastic sales piece inside of you, just
waiting to be expressed on paper.
If you’re going to try creating your own sales copy, a good way to
start is to put together a collection of sales pieces that appeal to you.
You probably receive mailings every day from companies. Which ones
grab your interest or have a tone that appeals to you? What are the
elements of the piece that really capture your interest or make it seem
convincing? What is it that clinches the deal for you? Spend some time
studying them carefully.
Also, think about the following elements that will influence how
you write the piece.
The message: What is your product about? What does it do? What
makes it special? Why would someone want to buy your prod-
uct? What’s the benefit to them of buying it?
The audience: Who will be receiving the sales piece? What are they
after? What do they already know and what will you have to
explain to them? What do you believe will appeal to them about
your product?
The offer: What is the specific offer in the sales piece? Are you
offering a special price or an added bonus? What will people
receive if they order now instead of waiting? It’s usually good to
have an irresistible offer with a time limit to encourage a quick
response. You want them to order NOW! Give them an incentive
to do so. And make sure you have a clear call to action—step-by-
step instructions for what you want the reader to do next.
The voice: Every sales piece has a “voice.” It may be a personal voice
or an impersonal, expert voice. It may sound like it’s coming
from the owner of the company, or it may sound like it’s com-
ing from a third party. It can sound urgent, scary, encouraging,
humorous. It can say “I’m just like you,” or “I know how to help
you.” The more you know about your audience, the better you’ll
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know what voice to use in the piece. Above all, you want the piece
to make you sound believable and trustworthy.
The lingo: You want the piece to speak the language of your audi-
ence. If there are certain buzzwords that should be used or cer-
tain specific expressions, use them judiciously; you don’t want to
overdo it. You can make a list of these words and expressions and
refer to it while you’re writing. But if you’re writing to a general
audience who will be put off by buzzwords, don’t use them.
In general, if your sales piece makes your potential buyers feel that
you are talking directly to them, that you understand their needs, that
you have a unique solution to their problems, that you will deliver on
what you promise, and that you have a great offer, you will be well on
your way to receiving a great response from your sales letter.
Make the Most Out of Every Part
of Your Sales Piece
If you were building a model airplane, it wouldn’t be any good to make
most of it great but to leave off the left wing or connect the rudder
upside-down. You would completely undo all your good work by being
sloppy in even one area. If the airplane is going to be worth anything at
all, every part of it has to be perfect.
It’s the same with your sales piece. You want to get the absolute most
out of every one of its parts. You don’t want to skimp on anything. The
success of your business is riding on your piece doing its job. That means
you have to do your job and give each section all the attention it deserves.
Every sales piece has exactly the same elements, no matter how
long it is. Whether your sales piece is a postcard, a two-page letter, or
a 36-page booklet, it will have all or most of the following parts. Make
sure you give attention to each one you include.
Headline: You have to grab your reader’s interest in just a few
seconds. And the way to do that is with a great headline. It can
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be just a few words long, or it can be several sentences. But it has
to capture interest and make or imply a promise that you are
offering something that will be of great value to the reader—and
they’d better read the piece right away to find out what it is.
Getting the right headline is job one!
Benefits: The one question every potential buyer is going to ask is,
“What is this going to do for me?” So throughout your piece you
have to keep piling on the benefits.
And keep in mind that it’s benefits, not features, that sell. That new
car may have the most advanced engine, but the buyer wants to hear
that he’ll be able to drive fast and impress the neighbors. That new diet
supplement may have an impressive list of ingredients, but the buyer
wants to know it will make her husband love her and her friends envy
her.
Always stress benefits that will appeal to your audience. If you’re
selling a money-making opportunity to a novice audience, you would
want to stress that it’s easy to learn with no experience needed. If your
audience is a group of veteran traders, you would want to stress that
this is a new and profitable trading technique they’ve never seen before.
The Offer and Call to Action. By the time your reader comes to the
end of the sales piece there should be no doubt as to what to do
next. You want to create a sense of urgency by providing a call to
action. As we say in the business, “always ask for the order.”
And you want people to act right away. If they put the sales
piece down, even if they’re interested, they will soon forget. All
that enthusiasm you worked so hard to develop will fade out.
To avoid that happening, you can encourage people to act
immediately by offering an incentive for buying within a certain
time period. It could be a special reduced price, a bonus gift, or
any other extra you want to throw in if they will just “act now.”
Another way to encourage action is to make it clear how easy
it is to respond and that with your toll-free number, they don’t
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have to pay for the call. With today’s calling plans, many people
don’t pay for individual calls anyway, but there’s something
about a toll-free number that is very appealing. It’s a psychologi-
cal thing.
The PS. Research shows that one of the most important parts of
a sales letter is the PS. Very often people will look at the opening
of the piece, and then turn to the back to see what the offer is. If
there’s a PS there, they’ll often read it before anything else.
So make sure you always put an appealing PS that reiterates the
most important points of your sales pitch. Remember, you want
every part of your piece to work hard for you. Make sure your PS
is doing everything it can to clinch the sale.
The Order Form. If you’re using an order form with your piece,
this is your last chance to sell your product and convince your
prospect to go ahead and make the purchase. Always include
brief, attractive copy about the product, its benefits, and the
offer.
The Guarantee. OK, this is optional, but it can be very powerful.
Your potential buyer may be very tempted but still afraid to lose
money. If you put in a satisfaction guarantee, it can convince
prospects sitting on the fence to go ahead and try your product
because they “have nothing to lose.”
The BRE. This is also optional. If you would like your prospects
to respond by mail, you can consider inserting a Business Reply
Envelope (BRE) into your mailing package. The BRE is pread-
dressed to you, and the prospect does not have to put postage
on the envelope (the post office bills you postage for each enve-
lope mailed back to you). By making it easy for your prospect to
respond, you may increase response rates.
Again, just as it pays to point out to prospects that they can call
using a toll-free number, make sure your prospects know they
can send in their order form postage paid. Not only is it free, but
they don’t have to go to the bother of finding a stamp!
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Use all the parts of your sales piece to full advantage. Don’t be
satisfied with any part of the piece that just “gets by.” Put as much
care into each aspect of your piece as possible, and it will work hard
for you.
Adding Spice to Your Sales Piece
Good copywriting creates exciting pictures in the reader’s mind. Here
are some easy tricks to producing copy that sells.
Make It Easy to Read
When people pick up a sales piece, they will start by quickly glancing
through it. To grab their attention your copy must be interesting, and
at the same time it should be easy to read.
Keep paragraphs short.
Don’t use convoluted sentence structure.
Use bullet points so they can easily see your main benefits and
features.
Keep repeating the main point in different ways. That way the
message is sure to sink in.
Guide the reader with subheads that tell a story.
Use Images and Magic Words
Draw pictures of how the reader will feel with that beautiful new
car in the driveway or driving it. How they will feel on their luxury
vacation and how relaxed they will be. What they will look like with
fewer wrinkles and youthful skin. Be specific in the images, but not so
specific your readers won’t be able to tailor the images with their own
fantasies.
Also, certain words are proven to sell: Free, New. Use them wherever
you can.
Again, stress benefits, not features. Tell readers how their lives will
be improved with your product.
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And testimonials can be extremely effective. Presenting proof
that other people used the product and benefited from it will be very
persuasive to your reader.
Have an Angle
One day you receive two sales pieces in the mail. The headline on one says:
“My Course Will Teach You Everything I Know
About Trading Stocks”
The headline on the other says:
“Learn the Stock Secret I Used to Make Six
Figures in Six Months”
Which piece are you more likely to read? I’ll bet it’s the second
one. Why? Because it has an angle—a clever way of presenting
the information that makes it clear what the unique advantage
is that the seller has to offer the reader. The first one just says
“I’ll teach you how to trade stocks.” But who am I, and why should you
care?
In the second headline the angle is that the information I have to
share is “secret,” and it made me a sizable amount of money in a short
amount of time.
What other angles could you use for this same product?
If you’re sending your piece to people with no experience trading
stocks but who just want to make money, you might play up the angle
that anyone can learn this, even if you’ve never traded a stock in your
life.
Or, let’s say you’re writing to commodity traders, and you want
to convince them to try trading stocks with your method. You
might promise them they can enjoy the same returns as they do with
commodity trading but with one-fourth the risk.
Or suppose you’re writing to a group of people nearing retirement.
You know they may be focused on building their nest egg and are
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worried they may not have enough time to build their account before
they stop working. Then you might promise this is the ideal method to
fund a retirement account: It works quickly with relative safety.
You need a hook that will get attention and will appeal directly
to your target audience. What is it about your product that makes it
of special interest and value to them? That’s the point you want to
stress throughout your piece. That’s your angle. With the right angle,
everything else about your piece will fall right into place.
Have a Story
Long sales pieces can be great. Long, dull sales pieces can be a complete
waste.
Think of it this way. You’ll happily read a 300-page mystery novel,
but you’ll toss aside a one-page legal disclaimer. Above all, to be
successful your sales piece has to keep the reader’s interest.
When you look through your sales piece, ask yourself, if you
found this in your mailbox, would you read it? Yes, you have certain
information you have to get across, but if no one will read it, you won’t
get anything across.
One technique many copywriters use to make a sales piece
interesting is to play up “the story.” It could be the story of the person
who developed the product. Or it could be the story of someone who
used the product and whose life was changed as a result. The idea is
that the reader identifies with the person in the story, becomes involved
enough to keep reading to find out what happened, and comes to the
conclusion, “I’m just like that person, and there’s no reason I can’t have
the exact same experience using this product.”
People especially love a rags-to-riches story. “I was poor (sick, lonely,
etc.). Then I learned this secret, and now I’m healthy, happy, and rich.
And now I will share everything I learned with you.” Some of the most
effective sales pieces ever written have taken exactly that approach.
Only you know your story and how it relates to your product. How
you saw a need and worked hard to find a way to fulfill it. How you
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struggled to arrive at the answer. How you overcame obstacles to reach
your goal. How the answer you found was unlike anything anyone
has come up with before. This is your opportunity to sell yourself
(or whomever created the product). Why are you an expert? Why are
you the one to provide the solution to the reader’s problem? Often a
personal story about the individual who created the product makes for
a very compelling sales piece.
Of course, the story isn’t really about you. It’s about the product
and what it will do for the reader. So always bring it around to that.
What is it about this product that is so unique and so much better than
anything else out there?
If you’re writing your own sales piece, now’s the time to start
thinking about everything that brought you to this moment. And if
you’re working with a copywriter, it’s up to you to be open and share
your experience. Give the copywriter the material needed to create a
moving, compelling piece that will grab the reader’s attention and
convince him that you are real, that you are sincere, and that you truly
have the solution he is looking for.
Keep Them Guessing
It always helps to add a touch of “intrigue.” You want the reader to feel
compelled to keep going, wondering what great revelation is coming next.
The copywriter’s task is to first get the reader interested and then
keep him moving through the piece, all the way to the close. You don’t
want to lose the reader anywhere along the way. One method writers
often use is to keep hinting at what is about to be revealed next, so the
reader keeps following the “trail of crumbs.” For example, maybe you
want to make sure the reader gets through a relatively boring part, so
you keep him involved by saying, “I’ll tell you about how I had my big
breakthrough in a minute, but first I have to give you some background
information so you can understand the genius of it . . .”
Another technique is to structure the piece around a series of
subheads. The proper use of subheads can act like that “trail of
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crumbs” and will pull the reader along nicely. Before the reader sits
down to read the piece word for word, he or she will likely flip through
the piece and read the eye-catching subheads which, by themselves,
will tell a story. If that story sounds interesting enough and related
enough to the reader’s interests and goals, the motivation will be there
to read the entire piece.
Don’t think your product is too dull or practical to have some
intrigue associated with it. How did your construction firm resolve
the mystery of the dissolving sheet rock to create a new sealant? How
did your natural dry cleaning solution solve the mystery of the itchy
sweater?
A Little More About That All-Important
Call to Action
I’m constantly amazed at the failure of a marketing message to make
a clear call to action. If you don’t put a strong call to action in your
direct-mail campaign, you are wasting your money. You want to make
it abundantly clear what you want your prospect to do.
You may even want to list the call to action more than one time
within the sales message. Make it as easy as possible by outlining the
steps the prospect needs to follow in order to respond to your offer.
Recently I received a postcard from my local hospital. I’m still
scratching my head trying to figure out why they wasted advertising
dollars on this direct-mail campaign. Basically the postcard has a
picture of two smiling young men. The copy on the card indicates that
two new doctors have arrived at the hospital, and they are looking for
“consultations and surgical care” patients.
When was the last time you received a postcard from a hospital
or surgeon and decided, “Great, I’m so glad I got this reminder. I’ve
always suspected I could benefit from knee surgery. I guess I’ll call this
new surgeon, who is fresh out of college and has little experience, to
schedule my surgery.”
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Thankfully marketing isn’t that easy or else I’d be out of a job.
The thing I find humorous about this postcard is the fact that it’s
coming from my local hospital. The small town I live in has only one
hospital. There is no one else in town to compete with them. If someone
in my family is injured and needs immediate medical attention, I only
have two choices. I can either drive a few minutes to my local hospital or
I can drive 40 minutes to the hospital in a nearby town. Hmmm—what
should I do? I know, it’s an emergency, so I guess I should go to the
nearest hospital. Wow—that’s brilliant!
The hospital could have done a much better job spending its
advertising dollars.
Instead of mailing to everyone in town, it should have narrowed
its list down to those who are older and more likely to need
surgery. Or, even better, they could have rented a list of names
and addresses featuring people who have filled out a survey and
specifically noted they have an ailment of some sort.
The hospital should have told the story of the new doctors. As far
as I can tell, they are fresh out of college with no experience. Who
knows? Maybe they just look young, but they are actually super
experienced and have done thousands of procedures. The hospi-
tal needs to tell us why we should have confidence in these new
doctors. If they are fresh out of school, they could say some thing
like, “Dr. Martin has just finished studying the latest procedures
for modern medicine. He is one of only 30 doctors who are certi-
fied to use XYZ Method, which shortens the recovery time for
most patients. He has two young kids and picked Grants Pass as
the perfect place to raise his family . . .”
It should have used a legitimate call to action. No one is going
to schedule a consultation from the postcard it sent me. There
are many different calls to action it could have used. It could
have offered a free report, “7 Things You Should Know Before
Having Surgery.” Or, it could have hosted a reception to meet
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the doctors and listen to a short presentation on “7 Things You
Should Know Before Having Surgery.” Or, “Call for a FREE con-
sultation to determine if surgery is right for you!”
I could list more options and suggestions for a bet ter direct-mail
promotion, but I’ll stop with just those three. In the end, the postcard
failed because it didn’t contain a legitimate call to action that is
motivated by strong copy.
Always Write to an Audience of One
One mistake I see copywriters make again and again is that they write
to some nameless, faceless audience. They think of “prospects”—in the
plural—rather than about individual buyers.
If you get a letter that opens with a salutation like “To Fly
Fishermen Everywhere,” you can be pretty sure the writer was not
approaching the job with the correct mind-set. If I see “To Fly
Fishermen Everywhere,” I’m not personally engaged. I don’t like being
lumped into big groups. I figure the writer just wants to sell as many
of his gizmos as he can, and he doesn’t know anything about me and
my personal needs.
But if I get a letter that opens, “Dear Craig, I know you enjoy fly
fishing like I do . . .” it feels a little more personal, and I’m more likely to
want to read whatever follows. (And with today’s printing technology,
it’s easy to personalize pieces in this way.)
It’s the copywriter’s task to make the reader believe that this letter is
coming directly from another human being right to him or her. We all
want to feel that we are recognized as individuals—even if it’s only in a
sales letter that we sense is going to thousands of other people. At least
we want the illusion that the material in this letter is meant to fulfill
our personal need.
And it’s important that the copywriter have this mind-set, too,
because this is the key to writing compelling copy that answers the
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needs of the reader. The writer must put himself in the reader’s place
and ask, “What would I want to know that would convince me that this
is the product for me? That it would be worth it to me to spend my
hard-earned money on this product?”
Some of the best copywriters I know tell me that they always only
write to one person. They’ll picture that person in their mind, sitting
across from them at a kitchen table, listening to what they have to say.
Groups don’t buy your products. Individuals do. And you have to write
to individuals.
What If You Don’t Want to Write
Your Own Sales Piece?
Okay, maybe becoming a writer is just not something that appeals
to you. You may be too busy running your business to become a
copywriter. Or maybe you don’t enjoy writing, or you don’t think it’s
something you want to spend the time to learn.
That’s no problem. There are professional copywriters who will be
happy to write your piece for you. A simple search online and you’ll find
dozens to pick from.
One excellent place to start your search online is on the Direct
Marketing Association of America (DMA) website at the-dma.org. It
has an extensive list of vendors, including copywriters.
When you’re considering hiring a copywriter, determine whether
that person is familiar with your product and audience, and ask
for samples of his or her work. Many copywriters specialize in a
certain niche, like educational products, financial programs, or health
supplements. Try to find someone who knows your field.
Of course, another important aspect of your sales piece is how it looks.
An attractive layout is the first thing that will catch your reader’s eye.
A well laid-out piece will guide the reader through the copy with
color, headlines, and subheads. And it will be inviting: attractive and
easy to read.
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It should be easy for you to find a graphic designer who can design
your piece for you. Again, you can search online to find a designer,
perhaps starting on the DMA site.
Once you have your sales piece created, it’s time to plan your entire
mail package. That’s what we’ll look at next.