7
THE SALES LETTER
The sales letter is at the heart of any good direct response website. As we
touched on in the chapter about basic site design, your website always needs a
good front page--and your sales letter should always be the bulk of that front
page. Without a good, prominent sales letter, you may have the best website on
the Internet--and if you follow our advice in the previous chapters, you'll certainly
have a good shot at making that claim--but you won't be able to effectively
convert website traffic into actual customers. And that fails the basic purpose of
direct response site design: selling the product. So, make sure that your sales
letter is prominent--and using the techniques and theories in this chapter, make
sure that it's good.
SALES LETTER FORMAT
Think about what a sales letter does. Your sales letter is responsible for three
things:
Introducing the customer to your product.
Arguing persuasively about the merits of that product.
Inspiring the customer to purchase the product.
This seems like a simple structure, but it requires you to use three distinct modes
of writing throughout, and to seamlessly transition from one into the other. It
also requires you to do this in a fairly brief span of time (about which we'll talk
more in just a moment.)
The first section of the sales letter is your introduction. Within the introduction,
you want to state clearly exactly what your product is. This is not the place to
get persuasive about your product: this is simply the place to describe its
essential nature so that any customer knows, right up front, what it is that you're
selling. A new type of corkscrew should be described, right up front, as a new
type of corkscrew. A new online fantasy novel should be described, right up
front, as a new online fantasy novel.
Our third basic principle of direct response site design holds true here: keep it
simple, stupid. Online customers have millions of other websites that they could
be visiting, and if your sales letter starts off too fancily, obscurely, or densely,
they're going to leave your site for one of those other millions. So, don't try to
dazzle your readers by going into the long history of woodcarving in order to
promote your handcrafted wind chimes, and don't sermonize about the history of
art and information in order to promote your web design software package. Your
first line should always read something like this: "Foo is a new type of Widget
from the brilliant designers at Acme"--where Foo is the product, Widget is its
description, and Acme is your company's name. Immediately your customer
knows what you're selling, how that product might fit into their life, and who's
doing the selling. You've laid your cards on the table--and with this level of
simplicity, your customers will be much more willing to pick them up and play.
The second part of your sales letter--the argument--is where you can start
getting fancy, introducing some dazzle into your presentation of your product.
Your customers know what you're selling: now they're waiting for you to sell it to
them. Use whatever tools are appropriate to your product. For a mechanical
gadget or appliance, you might talk about how your product's specifications
outperform many of the leading brands in your market.
For a piece of art, you might talk about the high level of training and
craftsmanship on the part of the artist, or about the prestige and delight that a
piece of well-made art can give. For a piece of software, you might discuss the
benefits your product gives in terms of compatibility, efficiency, and usefulness--
all while emphasizing your cutting-edge technology and your company's history
of innovation in software marketing. Anything goes, as long as it's persuasive--
and as long as you don't get too long-winded at any point. You want to convince
your readers, not to lecture them-and you certainly don't want to bore them into
leaving your site.
Once you've said your piece, it's time to move smoothly into the third and final
part of your sales letter: the conclusion, which turns your reader from a passive
admirer of your product into an active consumer of that product. Like the first
part of your letter, don't get fancy with this. A simple call to action will do:
"Don't wait. Try Foo today by clicking here." Should you use the imperative
voice: instead of telling your customer that "You can click here to try
Foo", command them to "click here in order to download/order/whatever."
That switch from the descriptive to the imperative--from telling to commanding--
is often all that's necessary to decide the issue in the mind of an undecided
customer. You can--and should--dress it up a bit, of course: you might close
with a pithy line, reiterate your product's slogan or motto, or simply fall back on a
standard closer like "Try it today!" If you don't bore your reader or spend too
much time distracting them from the business of clicking on your "purchase" link,
anything goes. (You might also direct them to the other sections of your website
in order to learn more, if it's appropriate to your product--if you followed our
earlier advice and made it simple to order the product from any point on your
site, of course.)
Sound simple? It is, and it isn't. As long as your sales letter takes into account
these three basic points, it'll be somewhat effective-but if you can not only give
your customers persuasive arguments but interesting expressions, if you can
seamlessly transition from one section of your sales letter to the next without
alerting your customers, and if you can use your language to activate your
reader's emotions without making them aware of it, then you'll delight and
persuade your readers still more--and they'll respond by clicking on your
"purchase" link more. So, it's worth taking some time to make your sales letter
all it can be--or it's worth spending some money on a good marketing copywriter
who can do the same. Your sales letter is the heart of your site, after all--make
sure it beats.
FORMATTING ISSUES FOR WEBSITES
A general rule of sales letters is to keep them as short as you can. But of course,
we aren't dealing with general sales letters--we're dealing with a very specific
type of sales letter, one designed to be viewed and read online. And that brings
with it some additional rules in order to ensure that your sales letter not only
works at converting readers into customers, but that it functions within your
website while considering all of the possibilities available on the Internet that
traditional sales letters aren't capable of.
One of these advantages is the ability to delegate parts of your content to
different parts of your site. In traditional commerce, your sales letter is your one
chance to tell potential customers everything they might need to know about
your product. One of the advantages of the Internet, however, is that you have
an entire website's worth of space to convince people of the merits of your
product by whatever means necessary. (Bearing in mind the limits we imposed
in the chapter on basic site design, of course.) But that greater freedom imposes
a greater responsibility on you to decide what you should include in your sales
letter and what you should leave out. A lengthy testimonial from a satisfied
customer might make a crucial difference in making the sale, of course--but do
you really want to make all of your customers read through a 600-word product
testimonial in order to get to your final call to action? Conversely, you might be
able to write several pages' worth of information about the new compression
technology in your new digital video playback software--but shouldn't at least
some of that go into your sales letter?
A simple rule you can use to resolve these problems is this: make sure that any
lengthy (but persuasive) section of your sales argument gets a page to itself. But
at the same time, you should at least touch on that information in the sales letter
in as brief and as persuasive a manner as possible. For example: one of the
selling points of your graphics software package might be its intuitive, attractive
user interface. You should show off that interface by including a detailed gallery
of screenshots or videos, allowing your customers to see for themselves what
your product has to offer. But you should also include in your sales letter a
mention of this interface: "What's more, Foo contains one of the most intuitive
user interfaces currently on the market: in just sixty seconds, you can learn all
you need to know about how it works, giving you the edge you need to create
dynamic graphics."
This rule holds true for any product: if you're selling art, mention some of its
most prominent admirers in addition to linking to their testimonials. If you're
selling soap, give your customers a picture of it in action and mention its
lathering power in your letter. This not only reinforces the selling points that you
want to make, but it ensures that if your readers just proceed directly from the
sales letter to the purchasing decision without taking advantage of the rest of
your site, you haven't left out any of the arguments that allow them to make that
decision in your favor.
One more practical formatting issue brings back the question of building and
coding your website. A long sales letter can bore your readers, yes, but it can
also make your carefully designed site look terrible on any browser by spilling the
text over your images or out of your frames.
This is going to be a problem that you and your coder will have to work out as
part of the overall design and coding process, so make sure to get your first
useful draft of your sales letter to your coder early--and make sure that you know
how to cut it down, rearrange it, or otherwise allow it to fit comfortably into your
site design if the need arises. (And one minor technical point: if you write your
sales letter in a word processing program like Word or OpenOffice, you'll have
access to formatting options like bold text, italics, different fonts, or even colors.
Be very, very careful about using these, because they often don't translate well
from your word processor to your website's HTML file and can in some cases even
create additional charges as your coder tries frantically to incorporate your
formatting decisions into your site's actual code. Changing the formatting is
often a crutch: weak writers change the style of their fonts or text in order to
achieve effects that their words alone can't achieve. Save yourself some trouble:
keep your text simple and free of formatting tricks. Your coder will thank you--
and your sales letter will be better as a result.)
MUST A SALES LETTER BE BORING?
To return to the TV analogy: when many of us think of infomercials, we think of
the same basic structure: a desk, a host, a product demonstration, a few
arguments in favor of the product, and then ordering information. We tend to
think along these lines because most of the infomercials we see never reach
beyond this basic, safe format. And when we think of typical sales letters, we
tend to think of basic, safe letters: letters that get the job done without
necessarily entertaining the reader.
But there have been other infomercials on the airwaves. For example, a popular
"adult" infomercial in the 1990s tried to sell a male enhancement cream to
customers not by offering a product demonstration--a dicey proposition on any
channel or network, considering the product--but by making their infomercial into
something entertaining. The infomercial producers hired adult film stars, built
sets, and turned what could have been a boring (yet salacious) infomercial into a
quiz show, complete with innuendo, double engenders, and genuinely engaging
content. The result was a memorable infomercial--which meant a memorable
product and increased sales.
Your sales letter can aspire to the same level. If you keep to the three basic
parts of any good sales letter--inform, persuade, convert readers into customers-
-you have infinite freedom in terms of content. You might present your sales
letter in comic strip form, for example, or you might write your sales letter in
engaging verse. You might write your sales letter in dialogue form, or you might
write about a new piece of software as if it had come through a time portal from
a technologically advanced future.
Don't bore the reader, of course, by getting too cute with your sales letter--but
don't bore them by keeping your sales letter bland, either. What your readers
think of your sales letter will be, if you do your job right, what they think of your
product. So, if you can pull off a unique, entertaining sales letter--or if you're
willing to pay for the services of someone who can--do it. A simple sales letter
will get the job done, yes--but an entertaining sales letter will get the same job
done better.
Once you have your sales letter, your website, and of course your product, your
work is almost done. It's time to take a look at the last (and from the point of
view of selling products, the most important) component of your successful direct
response website: your commerce system and managing the overall revenue and
costs of your site both online and offline
8
MANAGING COMMERCE
Up to this point, we've always talked mostly about the design and presentation
issues of direct response website building--with an eye kept on the bottom line
of converting viewers into customers, of course. But now, it's important to
remember one vital fact: the business of direct response website design isn't
ultimately design, but business. In this chapter, we'll talk about the money side
of that business: how to integrate and manage your website's commerce system,
how to keep your account books in the black, and most importantly, how to
bridge the gap between the online portion of your business and the offline
portion--how to translate web sales into a healthy revenue stream, and hopefully
healthy profits to go with it.
ONLINE COMMERCE AND OFFLINE BANKING
The basic premise behind online commerce systems is simple. You sign up for
the service and the service creates an account for you, much like a bank. You
can then add funds to your account by any number of methods: transferring
money from your account, charging a credit card, or selling products and
receiving payments. In order to get your money offline, you can either use a
debit card linked directly to your account on the commerce system, or you can
link your online account to an offline bank account, allowing you to transfer
money freely between the two accounts--with a necessary time delay, of course.
(This model of commerce won't be followed in exactly this way by every
commerce system, of course--check the policies of your commerce system to get
specific information for you. If you coded your own commerce system, it'll be a
matter between you and your bank, of course.)
The basic premise is simple, yes--but in terms of actual implementation, there
are some complicated details. Being aware of and working around these details
is going to be the key to success for any good online commerce operation--and
as we've said, if you're going to sell products online you need a good online
commerce operation.
One important issue is the time delay in transferring your money from your online
account to your offline account--not a major issue much of the time (the actual
delay is anywhere from one to four business days), but at certain critical
moments--if you need your money close to the end of the month in order to pay
rent on office space or to pay bandwidth costs, for example--it can become a
problem. So, make sure that you take into account the time delay when you're
scheduling payments or purchases according to your business plan--or make sure
that you have a debit card or other payment option from your commerce system,
eliminating the time delay altogether.
Another issue (that hopefully won't be an issue in the future) is the problem of
online security. We talked about this in terms of your website earlier in the book.
But it's also vital to think about it in terms of your commerce system bank
account--and your bank account in general. Again, we talked earlier about how
commerce systems that you design yourself need to be secure enough to protect
you and your customers from hackers, which not only give your business a bad
name, but could wipe out your entire balance in minutes. Commerce systems
that you design yourself don't have as much of a problem in this regard--usually
a large staff of people exists to protect the integrity of online accounts.
Depending on your protection policy, however, this can create new problems that
you'll need to be aware of.
Certain online commerce systems take extremely harsh measures when dealing
with compromised accounts: not only is your account locked and all the balance
within it seized, but the balance of any bank account linked to your online
account is seized as well. This makes some amount of sense--if hackers can
access your online account, they can just as easily access any linked offline
accounts through bank transfers. And if you follow up with your commerce
system on any identity theft or hacking issues, you can often get the balances
returned to you. But following up takes some time, and in some cases--serious
identity theft cases--you may not be able to get the money back at all.
So, you'll need to integrate your bank account and your online account in such a
way as to protect yourself from disaster--a rare event, of course, but one that
can wipe out your business if you aren't careful. The simplest measure is this:
set up two offline bank accounts for any online commerce system you're using.
Link only one of those bank accounts to your online account. Whenever you
receive payment online, transfer it to your linked offline account immediately--
and then transfer it from your linked offline account to your other account, which
has no direct link to the online part of your business. Even if your account is
compromised and your accounts locked or seized, you can keep your money safe
so that it can keep your business running. (Better yet--check out your online
commerce system and its account integrity policies thoroughly before you sign up
and commit your business to it.)
SHIPPING ISSUES
One of the problems that online businesses face is the problem of product
shipping. (If your business doesn't deal with physical products, skip to the next
section.) It's one thing to sell a product in a store, of course--the customer sees
it, looks it over, buys it, and takes it with him. But selling products online
introduces a whole new range of concerns: how can you make sure that the
product remains undamaged from your warehouse to your customer's door? How
will you handle shipping costs? And how will you communicate with your
shipping employees (if you have some) whenever you get a new sale to minimize
the amount of time between the customer's order and the receipt of the product?
The first concern is more a function of the shipping method you choose than
anything else. Choose a reputable carrier and be willing to pay any necessary
money for secure shipping if your project is in any way fragile--furniture or hand-
blown glassware, for example, need an extra level of security that something like
a CD or a new hammer doesn't. Whatever the fragility of your product, you'll
always want to pay whatever it takes in order to track your shipments as they
make their way to your customers.
The key to online commerce is trust: trust that your product is valuable to
customers, and the customers' trust that you'll give them value for their money--
and that you'll get the product to them in a timely, secure fashion. It's inevitable
that problems with shipping will happen from time to time, and the more
successful your business gets--the more products you ship--the more likely it
becomes that you'll fall victim to one of these shipping problems. So, pay to
track your shipments--make sure that if the worst happens, you can find the
product, get it back on track, and maintain that level of trust with your satisfied
customer.
Handling shipping costs is another important matter. Many online commerce
systems give you the option to automatically add shipping costs onto any order,
either by adding a flat fee onto the purchase price of any product or by adding a
percentage of the total price of the product. The better option is almost always
the first one: that way, you can figure out exactly how much it typically costs to
ship a product (with tracking paid for) and charge customers only that amount.
This protects you from charges of "hidden costs", makes sure that you're not
losing money on product shipments, and simplifies your ultimate accounting
procedures--instead of having to determine what percentage of each transaction
is devoted to shipping, you can simply deduct the shipping fee from all products
when you enter net revenue into your accounting system. (For overseas
make sure that you deal directly with customers on a caseby-case basis--
overseas shipping is wildly expensive, and there's simply no way to program even
the most complicated commerce system to take into account variable rates to
every country on Earth. Make sure that overseas customers know to deal with
you directly by mentioning it on your main page before the customer even clicks
the purchase link--don't waste their time by making them start the transaction
and then cancel it once they realize the prohibitive overseas shipping costs.)
The problem of communicating each new sale to your shipping department is
obviously easy if you're the shipping department. If your business is large
enough that you have an actual warehouse or shipping employee, however, you'll
need to make sure that they're notified as quickly as possible of each new sale as
it gets processed.
One solution is to set up an automatic message forwarding system to send all
order receipts from your commerce system to your shipping department as soon
as they come into your mailbox--or simply to make all order receipts go directly
to the shipping department, who are then responsible for forwarding them back
to you so that you can do the accounting. There are other methods, and the one
you choose will depend on what works best for your specific business
organization--but it's crucial to have some method for communicating orders to
the right people as soon as they happen. It improves the overall efficiency of
your business, makes customers happier, and in the long run allows your
business to grow.