Starting a Small Home Business

3 Strategies If Your Sales Letter Doesn’t Work

July 15th, 2010 Filed under: Small Home Based Business — Small Home Business Author

If you’ve been in marketing for a while, you’ve probably had that sinking feeling when you realize that the sales letter you worked so hard on, isn’t working. No matter how you look at the numbers, the sales just aren’t there, and no amount wishing or waiting is going to make it any better.

So what do you do?

In this article we’re going to discuss three specific strategies that you can use on an underperforming sales letter. And just to make it catchy, I made sure that each started with the same letter!

When a Sales Letter doesn’t work, you can:

1. Transfer it

2. Tweak it

3. Trash it

Transfer it

By “transfer” I mean that you can use the exact same sales letter but transfer it to a different market. The problem may not be with the letter itself, but rather with the audience that you presented it to.

For example, that financial sales letter that you thought would be perfect for bankers, may instead transfer well to a group of stock brokers. Or if it fails there, you may try it on a list of individual personal investors.

Within each niche there are sub-niches that you should explore, breaking down your target into smaller and smaller segments until you find just the right audience.

Tweak it

A second strategy you can use to boost and underperforming sales letter is to tweak it. That is, change one or more small elements in an attempt to improve the results. What sort of things should you tweak? Here’s a list to get you started:

1. The Headline

2. The Opening Paragraph

3. The Photographs and other Graphic Elements

4. The Charts and other Supporting Data

5. The Offer

6. The Coupon (or response mechanism)

7. The Bonuses

8. The Guarantee

9. The Font

10. The Colors

11. The Background

The best strategy is to test no more than one or two of these elements at a time, constantly playing “beat the control,” keeping anything that improves response, and getting rid of anything that does not add to the bottom line.

Trash it

Sometimes there is nothing that can be done to save a poor sales letter. No matter how hard you worked on it, or how much you paid to have some hotshot copy writer craft it for you, sometimes the best solution is to just trash it and start again.

Fiction writers have a philosophy that says “You must not be afraid to kill your babies.” In this case, your “baby” is your letter, and if it’s not performing, it has to go. And the sooner you come to that realization, the better.

Save the letter in an archive on your computer, and add a few notes to record what you tried, and what the results were, then move on to the next thing. Start with a fresh sheet of paper (or a fresh Word Processing file), and get on with it.

Now, if you sometimes have trouble dealing with that “blank slate,” I’ve spent years as a fiction writer learning to do exactly that, and as quickly as possible. If you’d like to test drive some of my best tips, simply go to http://www.FictionSecrets.com and let me know where to send them.

Kevin Franz is a successful fiction author and online marketer. For more than twenty years he has made his living putting words to paper, and he has helped thousands create their first written works. He is currently showing internet marketers how to incorporate the techniques of great fiction into their online sales efforts. You can find the details on his blog – http://www.kevinfranz.wordpress.com.