Five Deadly Sales Letter Mistakes

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 1: Writing your letter for the hundreds or thousands of people you will be mailing it to instead of one special person.

One sure way to generate an apathetic response to your sales letter is to write for the group or list of people you will be mailing it to. Approaching your letter with a "crowd mentality" instead of focusing in on a single, real, living, breathing prospect will greatly impair the ability of your letter to make a genuine connection with the reader.

The sales letter is the most personal, one-to-one form of advertising there is. It should read as if one person sat down to write to one other person.

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 2: Thinking that your prospect won't read a long letter.

The key question is, What makes for a long letter? To which the answer is, Any letter that is uninteresting is a long letter! Even the one-page letter that many salespeople and amateur marketers arbitrarily limit themselves to can seem long.

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 3: Being a slave to the rules of grammar

When writing a sales letter, you want your work to have a conversational readability. And in most instances that means writing in an informal style. That's how the vast majority of buyers and sellers communicate with one another.

As a result, you'll break a number of formal grammatical rules. You'll start sentences with "and" or "but." Instead of complete sentences, you'll sometimes use a sentence fragment.

Your objective is to generate a lead or advance or close the sale. Not one of your prospects is getting paid to read your letter. This time, your "grade" will be determined by how well people respond.

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 4: Giving the reader a reason not to read

Beware of the "so what" reaction of your typical prospect. Simply stated, they don't care about you, they don't care about your product or service and they don't care about your company. Indifference is the order of the day.

So you must grab hold of your prospect's mind with a startling statement, a provocative question—some volley of words that will stir them from their apathy and make them pay attention to your letter.

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 5: Not offering proof that your product or service does what you say it will do

Not only is your typical prospect indifferent, in the vast majority of situations she is also highly skeptical. That's why you always want to offer the reader proof that your product or service will do what you say it will do.

This will serve to validate your claims and minimize your prospect's skepticism. Most important, it will establish your salesperson—or sales letter—as a more credible and believable source of information.