Strategies for advertising, sales and marketing from the Trump University Faculty and Marketing Team
If You Can Verbalize It, You Can Write It
One of the biggest obstacles of writing a sales letter is perfectionism. Too many people feel they have to write flawless marketing copy in order to make the phone ring. They get frustrated because they can’t think of a clever enough headline, a slick enough opening, or they don’t feel inspired. This sort of thinking can stop you dead in your tracks and is more often than not, a waste of emotional energy. Because the truth of the matter is--some of the most effective sales letters on the planet are the ones that are not perfect and read like everyday speech. Think of it this way: how would you tell your best friend about this great book you read, movie you saw, or restaurant you just experienced? I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t tell them in perfect grammar or finish every sentence. If this is the case--then you don’t necessarily need to when writing your sales letter either.
Now, this is not to say that your sales letter should be riddled with sloppy writing, spelling errors or extremely bad grammar. All it means is: write it like how you would speak to a friend.
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6 Comments
So it's one of those Shakespeare things? "to be or not to be" yet in the 21st century, its just ,,,be real.
;D
Yes, the marketing letter should be able to stop the eye of the reader, to make him decide if he should further read or not. But how you make the readers stop their eyes on your marketing stuffs is the different thing. It does not take me a while to find out what is for me and what is not just looking at the subject life of the letter. The more you can write in short and clear more the chance your reader reads your marketing material. And more chance to create his interest to your products or services.
Rajesh Shakya
http://www.rajeshshakya.com
Helping Technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!
Online is a different world, you can make changes in SECONDS and you can split test as well. Online the right way is to write say 4-6 initial versions, quick, fast and not to much heart ache over it.
Then set them in rotation and spit test your results, I wrote about this quite a bit in my post - <a href="http://www.comtechnews.net/search-marketing/the-need-for-web-an... rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to The Need for Web Analytics Part 3">The
Need for Web Analytics Part 3</a>
My belief is that the "be real" approach will become more important as we move forward and our best demographic becomes filled with people that grew up with IM as a main means of communication.
You know kids that communicate with terms like,
u got tbk, tisnf,
I learned that one on a cell phone commercial, what can I say, I am an "old man" in internet years. It is true though our new generations are far more concerned with the message then the form of the message.
Jack Spirko
We never announce that we are laughing out loud in person, we simply laugh. So why people feel the need to announce it in an email or an instant message
is one of life’s greatest mysteries, right up there with where Jimmy Hoffa was buried. But I digress. Sadly that is our communication reality these days. I rarely find an instance where purple prose is needed in marketing: sophisticated nomenclature, literary puns—those fail more than succeed. In the online world, like you said, you can test out that theory more so than in print.
Of course as a general rule, the style of your copy approach must always rest on your TARGET AUDIENCE. So to be clear, I don’t recommend writing all ultra-casual if you are sending a direct mail piece to say …University Professors who specialize in English literature. Everyone else, feel free to SLANG away!
Jack--tried to access the post you mentioned, but couldn't get to the page. Could you resend the link?
Thanks
Cybelle Clevenger
First here is the link
http://www.comtechnews.net/search-marketing/the-need-for-web-analytic...
I tried to insert it as an anchor and apparently you blog does not allow for that so it got messed up with some strange characters.
Anyway to clarify myself. I don't believe that you should write a sales letter with LOL etc, with in it either. It is important to understand of course your target market. It is also simply the case that each generation will care LESS and LESS about things like syntax and structure. They will want it faster and faster, quicker, just tell me the facts and get on with it.
On why people use LOL, well sorry but I think the answer is pretty clear. When two kids IM each other they can't see each other. We don't tell people on the phone or in person we are laughing because it is obvious to them that we are.
Things like LOL are designed to make text communication more personal and more real to the users.
Jack Spirko
because they lack anything else to say or they are insecure about the IM or email statement they’ve just made.
But that’s just my personal theory on it. LOL.
Good post about the need for web analytics—I am all about testing!
Cybelle