Throughout the time of your business, it is important that you use some degree of marketing to influence the continuous sale of your product or service. Due to low funds, small businesses can often be restricted by the level or amount of marketing possible, and consequently turn to methods that accumulate little cost. It is not to say that those methods that are considered less costly, are not effective: in fact, they can often be more successful than those that require extremely high costs.
A business should therefore focus on the media that is not only best suited, but will also give a return for the investment that they can afford.
The aim of this article is to introduce the sales letter that can be included as part of a mail shot. A sales letter is a letter (not solely a leaflet, brochure, etc) that sells your product or service ultimately to provoke a sale by gaining the interest of the reader. As you will learn from reading further, a successful sales letter requires quality content, design and delivery.
Of course, sales letters can be written by professional services, but to be truly cost effective, it is beneficial to understand how to write them yourself. Anybody is capable of writing a sales letter, even if your past experiences have failed. The message is to try, try, and try again: learning from your mistakes is all part of getting it right.
Benefits of a Sales Letter
Firstly, a sales letter is cheap to produce and using a mail shot to deliver the information will further keep costs to a minimum. Using targeted mailing lists to reach your audience is the more effective way of sending a mail shot as it may encourage a higher response rate, say, around 5 - 10%.
Further, do you ever show interest in a TV advert only to be let down by the short time to acknowledge key information such as a telephone number, web site address or terms and conditions. In which case, a sales letter can be kept and referred to at any time to retrieve such information.
A sales letter can also accommodate for as much content as you believe necessary, where other media such as newspaper advertising may have limited space. The extra space to advertise in newspapers/magazines will significantly increase with content: an extended sales letter will only cost you the price of the extra printing and paper (if needed).
Types of Sales Letter
Sales letters can be used for a number of reasons which are highlighted below:
a) Product/Service Awareness
The first and main reason for issuing a sales letter is to make the consumer aware of your product or service by providing sufficient details to interest the reader.
b) Preparation for Future Contact
A sales letter can be used to prepare the consumer for future contact, for example, a personal visit or a phone call.
c) Enquiries
If at an earlier date, the consumer requested further information about a particular product or service, a sales letter can be sent to answer their queries. The answers can then be written to help sell the product or service.
d) General Product/Service Information
A sales letter can inform the consumer of new offers, products, services, sales, etc that you believe will be of interest to the recipient. The consumer may have specifically asked to be informed of such information and/or you may target consumer groups specifically.
Objectives of a Sales Letter
To help determine how you will write your sales letter, it is important to identify your objectives. These are highlighted below:
a) To Sell a Product or service
Are you trying to encourage the consumer to make a purchase by convincing them that they need the product/service? This approach will often require the use of persuasive language.
b) To Inform a Consumer
Do you aim to give the consumer all the necessary information concerning your business, product or service? When we aim to 'sell' a product/service (above), it is common to miss out the details of how things work, prices, etc. Such sales letters are therefore commonly accompanied with leaflets and other inserts to illustrate this information
c) To Get a Response
Apart from hoping the consumer will respond by making a purchase, it is common for a sales letter to be used to create other responses such as a response for further information, a free sample/trial, a personal visit, etc. Often, consumers do not like making a purchase without physically seeing or trying the product/service. By allowing them the opportunity to do so, they may respond so that they can make a confident purchasing decision.
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