When To Admit Your Sales Letter Sucks!

Recently I received a request to give some feedback on a sales letter a company was planning to send out to reactivate dormant accounts. The mistakes I noticed tend to be universal so I figured I’d post my response below. That way others can benefit from the feedback too.

First, take a look at the letter they intend to send:

“Dear Mr. Buyer;
Hello, my name is David Banner and I am the current owner of Zephod Asphalts Company which has been manufacturing asphalts for agricultural gutters and farm equipment for 98 years. We offer hyrdrolized tar, smear resistant asphalts for agricultural gutters and landscape barriers that are long lasting plus offer durable protection against the elements. Our smear resistant asphalts and hyrdrolized tars are effective for both indoor and outdoor usage. The smear resistant asphalts and asphalts can inhibit oxidation from forming on your agricultural gutters and farm equipment and if coated over asphalt or concrete that has already started crack, then the smear resistant asphalts or asphalts will stop further destruction of your asphalts. Zephod products are high quality and the fact that the smear resistant asphalts and asphalts dry extremely fastly means you’ll have more time to dedicate to the major portion s of your business. We specialize in “perfect quantity” delivery which means you have the stuff you require when it’s required. The enclosed brochure will outline our best selling smear resistant asphalts and tars that includes a brief description of most of our products.
Zephod Asphalts Company is also a certified dealer for ALS Industries and can offer you their complete line of elevated accomplishment industrial asphalts. These applications can include asphalts for retail, farming, construction plus marine biological equipment and consumer foot wear. We have been providing the agricultural gutter and asphalt fabrication industry with smear resistant asphalts and asphalts that meet your needs since 1903 and remain committed to being your cost effective resource for quality erosion protection for your agricultural gutters or farm equipment for years to come. If you need further information regarding our products please visit www.Zephodasphalts.com for substance security data sheets or product data sheets on our products.
We request you back to be one of our appreciated customers and to encourage you to place an order we are offering a four dollar gift card to Plants-Made-To-Look-Real for each of your first three orders placed after September 20, 2009. Please be sure to refer to this letter when ordering so we can ensure that your gift card is sent immediately.
Thank you for your time and we look forward to serving your primer and asphalts needs now and in the future.

Sincerely,

David Banner
Owner, President
Zephod Asphalts Company”

That is the letter they planned to send. I edited out their company name, identifying facts, and did a thesaurus word-swap on some of the words to avoid copyright issues. Otherwise this is the exact letter they intended to mail. Why? No authorization to hire anyone to help. And perhaps because they don’t see a need for help. No matter. The letter is going to bomb.

Really, if you are a busy business owner, would you read a full page letter that sounded like this letter? No way. I bet you didn’t even read word-for-word what is above. Heck, I typed it and couldn’t read it afterwards. It was just too painful. The first 296 of 379 words were dedicated exclusively to themselves. It wasn’t until word #297 that they got around to talking about what they wanted the reader to do ie. come back. And even then, the incentive was an offer of something valueless and totally unrelated to what the company is selling.

Oh. The grammar errors and shifts from first person to third person and back are theirs. I left them in to illustrate what happens when we are too close to our work to look at it objectively.

Here’s my response:

I looked at your letter. Actually I read it completely. Here’s my observations:

You did a good job of including credibility and authority statements for your company. Kudos for keeping your letter to a single page too. Business owners and decision makers are extremely busy. If you can’t capture interest for your ‘come back’ offer in a single page, chances are you never will. There are exceptions but for folks who’ve already done business with you a single-page letter might work just as well.

But I hope this is only a draft.

1) The layout is bad. Horribly bad. Most business people are way too busy to take time to read a letter they can’t immediately tell in a simple glance what it’s about. Your letter requires too much work to figure out the point of your message. The layout is only one of the causes, though probably the biggest because it’s what’s evident soon as you look at the page.

2) Another problem here is there’s too much talking about yourself. Imagine going on a date with someone and you start off your conversation by talking about yourself, like this letter is talking about your company. How far do you think you’d get? What’s the chance such an approach will lead to a long-term relationship? Or even a short-term relationship? Slim to none.

There’s a phrase in my home town for people who talk about themselves so much: self-centered

People don’t want to hear about us. They want to hear about themselves. Their interests. And how you plan to solve their problems, meet their interests, make them feel better about themselves, or address some other concern of theirs. This letter doesn’t do that. So, how can you restructure this letter so your readers know how interested you are in them, and not so interested in yourself?

3) Third your offer is introduced too late in the game. [Plus there's no justification for offering it.] Most people won’t read that far down to learn ‘what’s in it for me’. They will simply toss the letter soon as they see all that self-interested ‘me me me me me’ stuff at the beginning of the letter.

4) Fourth, your ‘after xxx date’ wording is a bad idea. For how long after that date is this available? A year, two years, a week, three days? The format leaves the door wide open to subjective reasoning and doesn’t add a measure of urgency. This format will actually hinder response…the opposite of what you are trying to achieve :-(

5) And finally, what headline are you planning to use to draw your reader into your letter? You are planning to use one, right? A headline accounts for 90% of your response. If you can’t immediately pull your readers into the letter, you can’t sell to them. It just won’t happen.

I strongly discourage sending your letter as-is. Your best bet is to either study copywriting or hire a copywriter before sending out that letter.

Since your deadline is less than a week away, your best bet may be to talk to the boss about hiring someone to write this letter for you. That way you get this hammered out faster than the months of sleepless nights it will take to get up to speed quickly after studying do-it-yourself copywriting materials.

If time isn’t an issue then by all means study copywriting before sending out that letter. Even experienced copywriters bomb the majority of the time. Without studying human nature, psychology, and persuasion-in-print, your chance of writing a winning letter right now is very low. You’ll improve your chance of getting this right when you know what you’re doing. Why take chances like that when money is on the line? Especially with the types of numbers you are working with.

Hire someone or study first.

If you want help rewriting this offer I’d need to ask you a few questions. Afterwards I’d need to see copies of the following you’ve used in the past:

1. Sales Letters
2. Advertisements - Newspaper. Magazine etc.
3. Editorial write ups
4. Yellow Pages ad
5. Sample of quotes you send to customers
6. Follow up letters to your customers
7. Brochures
8. Any other promotional materials that’d give me an idea of what you’re doing to promote your products or services.
9. Your website address if products or services are marketed through the site.
10. Sales scripts
11. The names and phone numbers of two or three of your best sales people (if applicable). I might “shop” them for uncovered sales opportunities prior to the call.

…then I can rewrite this to help you get closer to your reactivation goal, or even exceed it.

Oh. You may have noticed on my sites I’ve moved away from offering copywriting for single sales messages. It takes just as much effort and research to help triple a company’s overall profits as it takes to do research for a single sales letter.

Still, if you want help I may be available. I do have a client project I’m working on that needs to be completed by Friday. But there will be downtime this week waiting for their private web host to make some changes to the server to accommodate software installation needed for the SEO portion of the project. So I will have a day of downtime just waiting for their web host to do their thing. Otherwise it’d be some time next week at best before I can help. That’s provided a couple proposals I submitted aren’t picked up before then.

Just let me know if you’d like to proceed with this.

Ok. That’s pretty much what I wrote. But here is what I wanted to say but chose not to, to avoid bruising the writer’s ego:

“Whatever you do don’t send that letter! It’s unprofessional, poorly written, and misses the mark by miles. In a nutshell it is just plain horrible. No one is going to read a full page letter that lacks proper paragraph breaks. A full page of text isn’t going to get read. Especially not by business owners. They are too busy for that.

This letter looks like one of those prescription medicine disclaimers the pharmaceutical companies don’t want people to read. One long page of content and no real paragraph breaks.

That bad formatting plus not including a single word explaining why your reader should care about this letter will cause your reader to toss this letter in the trash within about three seconds after opening it. There’s not one word here to explain why anything you have to say is important to the reader.

Dude, you are dealing with orders that could easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars, don’t be cheap. Hire someone to do this right. It’s the only way your letter is going to work without you spending months searching for and studying training materials that will eventually teach what works.”

What’s the point of this post?

It may stroke our egos to claim ownership of a marketing piece we create for ourselves. We take pride in it. Sometimes though we need to bite the bullet and push our egos aside. We need to admit it’s time to do what is most effective instead of what appeals most to our egos.

Our ego may say we can write just as well as the next guy or gal. If that is true then great. But if not, then it’s time to hire a professional and stop lying to ourselves. It’s time to admit that our sales letter sucks.

PS: If you are intent on writing your own sales letters, then at least educate yourself first. Not too many people jumped off the side of a ship and into the deep sea without first learning to swim. The results would be disastrous. The same is true about writing a sales letter without some kind of initial training. Or at least without studying what others have already successfully done before you, then emulate that.

Whatever you choose to do, don’t let ego cause you to miss what is most important…winning sales and being effective. Not stroking an ego, yours or any one else’s.