Tips For Commercial Success: Writing Sales Letters

For many marketing specialists, writing sales letters can be difficult. In a few paragraphs, you need to sell not only a product or service, but the company as well. You need to convince the recipient that the company is in the best position, and has all the credentials to produce the best product or service to meet the needs of its prospective customers. If there seems to be no need for the product or service, you have to create the need for it. Moreover, you need to do all these to sell a product or service to a potentially saturated market that has little or no time to read sales letters.

What constitutes a great sales letter? A great sales letter should not only be brief, it should also be rich in content and easy to understand. It should also be properly formatted and addressed. Not only should a great sales letter have all these traits, it should also translate into actual sales for the company.

Why should a sales letter be brief? Few people have time to actually sit down and understand every single word of a sales letter. You might want to rave on and on about how much research your company has conducted so that it could produce the best product or service. You might want to enumerate all the prizes that your product or service has received. All these can be good in backing up the credibility of your company and the reliability of your product or service; however, you should give more attention to your customer.

Use this rule of thumb when writing sales letters: customers do not care about what you know, until you let them know that you care. This means that your credentials mean nothing if you have a product or service that no one will need. Your sales letter, therefore, should emphasize your customer's urgent need to purchase the product or service.

Customers, moreover, do not want to be pushed into a pile of random names; customers do not want anonymity, and most of the time, they want to be recognized. When addressing your sales letters, address your customers by name, and avoid using generic salutations such as "Dear Sir" or "To Whom it May Concern." Such greetings can make people feel lost in a crowd of other customers, and chances are, a sales letter that begins like this can also be lost in the pile of junk mail.

If possible, have your CEO or a major player in your company sign the sales letter personally. This adds a special touch to the letter, and can make it appear that the CEO himself or herself is appealing to prospective customers, and aims to meet their needs. If mass signing of thousands of sales letters is not possible, you can affix a scanned signature, or include a picture of the signer on the letter itself.

The language of the sales letter should also be exciting, but not sensational; and understandable, but not condescending. In general, you can lose or win a customer within the first few words of your letter, so choose your words carefully! You do not want to annoy customers by a prospective deal that sounds too good to be true, and neither do you want to alienate them or make them feel small by talking to them as though they were children. Practice your letter writing tone by making sample letters for your friends to read and critique.

Lastly, make your sales letter attractive but simple. If you are selling a product, show not only the product, but the product being used. If you are marketing a service, show people availing of the service, and, if possible, show a few testimonials of people who have already availed of the service before. Use only high resolution pictures: low resolution pictures are not only unattractive, they show a low level of professionalism, and can make you appear less reliable and credible than you claim.

Writing sales letters can be difficult, but with more practice, and with market studies to back you up, you can find yourself writing them without a hitch. Study sales letter formats and employ them, and make your sales letters always appear neat and professional. Use good language and be brief: say all that you can as soon as you can, and soon, you may find the profits coming your way.