Copywriting Surviving A Sales Letter That Bombs (For Marketing Realists Only)

It sounds like a big deal but every once in a while you’ll get started with a new sales letter and it won’t perform.
It has happened to me in my businesses; it is not a pleasant feeling. I still get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when a sales letter I’ve written bombs. Recently I tested a postcard drop and that is exactly what happened. 1 response. We needed about 6 for the test to work. But the important thing is not the fact it bombed but what you do next.
It is a fact of life. Not everything works perfectly the first time – especially marketing.
Here are my Survival Tips for surviving a sales letter or any other piece of copy that doesn’t work the first time.
1. Relax, remember you haven’t bet the farm on this ‘failure.’ For us it wasn’t as bad as we thought. We had only committed to a small test – we could afford to lose the money. If it worked we could quite happily have rolled it out. That is why you test – to see if your marketing works and warrants roll out. It wasn’t a nice feeling but that made it easier to swallow.
2. Go back and look at what you’ve done with cool and detached eyes and do a debrief. Get everyone involved to give their feedback. Did you send your promotion to the right people? Was it really the best copy angle you could use in your target market? Was there anything in the research we missed? How could you improve what you’ve done? A simple debrief gave us lots of good ideas to test with our next mailing and we got a much better response the second time around.
3. Never Give Up. If you are determined to make a particular way of selling work for you, such as the postcard mailing for us – keep going. Know that you can fail your way to success. Keep your losses small, so you can stay in the game until you find a winner you can ride to the top.
4. Not every piece of copy you or your copywriter writes is going to be a winner. If you have a copywriter who tells you that you won’t ‘bomb’ once in a while they are lying to you. Don’t hold it against them. And plan your marketing with that in mind – test everything before you roll it out. There is a difference between how any product or service is sold and the reality of it. Exercise equipment is sold as though you don’t have to use it to lose weight. Copywriters are not going to publicise their failure rate either. But it is there and you need to have to factor it in.
5. Test. Test. Test. Remember you have to test. If you don’t test you aren’t going to succeed in direct marketing regardless of whether it is online or offline. Testing takes time. Not as long as it used to but it still takes time. So be patient and willing to test, otherwise you’ll not last in the long term.
Having a promotion bomb shouldn’t be the end of the world, unless you let it. You are entitled to feel bad about it. It was what you do next that is important. So keep your chin up and keep moving towards success.