Do your sales letters win as much business as they should do?
A sales letter is an expensive piece of marketing these days. The rising cost of postage means that it is worth thinking twice before sending out a piece of mail. Sales letters need to get good results to be worthwhile.
However, as a buyer, I find that a good amount of sales letters fail to grab my attention.
That is not the result you want. A sales letter should wow me. It should make me sit up, take notice and want to contact you. At the very least, it should make me receptive to a follow up call.
So how do you achieve the right results from a sales letter? As you can imagine, during my career as a buyer I received a lot of sales letters from a lot of printing companies. Here are three things the best letters had that made me more likely to speak with a printer:
- Use Stand-Out Print
We are all members of the printing community. We regularly tell our customers why a great looking piece of print will create better results. So why do so many companies send out communications on standard, boring A4. It hardly makes print an attention-grabbing channel!
I remember one printing company that had invested in a press that could print oversize A3. So they sent out a beautiful mailer in that size. It was printed on a nice, heavyweight stock. The postman had to knock at the office door because it wouldn’t fit in the letterbox. I received this four years ago. But it still sticks in my mind as one of the best mailing pieces that I ever received from a printing company. It achieved success with its ‘wow’ factor, even though it failed dismally on the next point.
- Focus on the Customer
The company I just mentioned used that gorgeous mailer of theirs to only talk about themselves. What’s worse? Their messaging was largely focused on their print technology.
That means a lot of people wouldn’t have bothered to read it. After all, most customers could care less about the printing presses your shop has. What they care about is how you can help grow their business and solve their challenges. But if the mailer had included stats of how large-format mailers increased sales results or case studies of clients using them….bingo! The messaging instantly would have been more effective.
I used to work at a magazine publishing company. One printing company approached me to tell me how I could grow the subscription element of the business. I wanted to understand what we might be missing. So they won a meeting with me.
But however well you focus on the customer, you must remember the third strategy.
- Include a Worthwhile Call to Action
Many sales letters have no call to action. Or they simply ask the prospect to ring the company. Let’s face it, this rarely happens. That is why it is important to incentivize the prospect to take action.
One company targeted educational establishments. They sent out a mailer that showed how one enrollment department had grown their incoming student base through a print campaign. It invited prospects to contact them to receive the full case study. Some prospects rang them as soon as the mailer hit their desk.
Here’s Another Call to Action
If you’d like more practical ideas on how to engage with today’s buyers, download my free e-book “Ten Common Print Selling Errors and What To Do About Them”. You’ll also receive my regular “Views from the print buyer” bulletin, full of ideas on how to sell print effectively.
Make sure you use a similar tactic in your sales letter to make sure that it really does drive as much business as possible.
