How do you put together a sales letter?

The sending of traditional sales letters is a slowly dying marketing activity. In the past, direct marketing professionals would send typed out or printed letters via the post to a prospective customer’s physical home or work address. Today, the majority of sales letters are either sent out via email or on other digital platforms. If you like to write your own sales letters (instead of just copy and pasting generic information), here’s how to pull one together:

Channel the customer

When writing your sales letter, try not to think like the company owner, manager, or marketer. You want to look at things from the customer’s perspective, and ask yourself: what would I like to read if I was an individual in the target audience receiving this sales letter. Say what you think the customer wants to know, and not merely what you want to say to them.

Keep it organised

Have you ever received a document where the author has just typed everything in one paragraph and without any headings or structure? Not only is it difficult to read and understand dense, unorganised copy – it’s also more boring than watching ice melt. Ensure your sales letter has headings, legible fonts, multiple paragraphs, and follows a logical order.

Keep it easy to read

Ever heard of the Flesch-Kincaid readability test? It rates a piece of text as either easy-to-read or hard-to-read (for the average person) based on a number of factors. These include how many words each sentence contains, the number of syllables words feature on average, and the length of paragraphs. Be sure to keep positive readability by keeping sentences short, words simple, and multiple paragraphs to break up the text.

Make them want it

Another important characteristic your sales letter should feature is the ability to make the reader want whatever it is the letter is promoting. How do you make someone want something? Well, before they want it, they should feel like they need it. Include in your sales letter why the reader should take action and inquire, book or buy. In other words, how will your brand and what it has to offer improve the lives of the readers?

Include an action to take

Lastly, you want to make sure that your sales letter prompts the reader to take action and do something. If there is no next step to take for them, a reader will most likely crumple and dispose of the sales letter – or delete the email with a click of a button. A call to action (CTA) can take the form of a button to click, in-text links to follow, or a contact form to fill in, and should encourage the reader to engage with the brand and open a two-way communication channel.

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