If your sales letter is going to be successful, here are some strategies you can implement to boost your response rate…



First, at the top of your sales letter, you should be using a strong headline that states the most important benefit of your offer. It should be in bold font, a larger font, and very different from the rest of the text in your sales letter.

Next, when you are writing your sales letter, you need to converse as you are speaking to a friend, not trying to sell anything. Don't use corporate language in an attempt to impress your prospects with your domination of the language. They don't care, they just want to know “what's in it for me?” Talk to them as you're speaking to your best friend.

Of all the direct mail ideas, here's a good one that I use all the time… it's a P.S. The post script. Here, you want to restate your strongest benefit and sales offer in it. A lot of people read the P.S. prior to reading the actual sales letter, so you need to make your P.S. have a very strong message on it and a specific call to action.

You need to explain the benefits your customers will receive. Again, they are thinking “what's in it for me?” Just think like you are the customer, what would you want to hear? What would you expect?

You need to ask your prospect to take action, such as “order now” or call you for more information, visit your site, or to complete an order form and mail you a payment, etc. If you don't ask them to follow through, they won't do it on their own. Just ask!

Now that we have some of the fundamentals of the sales letter down, here are some more direct mail ideas…

Use a standard white business envelope to get your letter opened. Write the addresses by hand or at least use a hand writing font to put the addresses on the envelope. Don't use mailing labels as that will tell your prospective customer that it's just another sales offer, they will throw it in the trash.

I would also recommend that you make your envelope somewhat lumpy. You want to enclose a small, inexpensive free gift that will make them want to wonder what's in it. A pen, highlighter, etc, something that has your company information on it, phone number and website.

Perhaps the most important of all direct mail ideas is repetition. You won't succeed with direct mail or implementing these direct mail ideas if you only send out one mailing. Each prospect needs to be approached several times before making that final purchase. By mailing to them more than once, you are reminding them of what you have to offer and your strong offer still stands.

In closing, the national average for a direct response mail piece is only 1%. So basically what that means is that when you mail out 100 pieces, you can expect that only one customer will order or contact you back. However, following the direct mail ideas that I have presented to you above, you can surely increase that rate, therefore increasing your profits and bottom line.