Your Sales Letter – Get Their Attention And Hold It!

The most important objective with any sales letter, and probably the most difficult is getting your prospects attention. There’s several techniques for doing that, but once you’ve got that attention, you need to be able to hold it, to get them to the bottom of the page, or end of the video to make a buying decision.
The first and most essential part of your sales letter for grabbing attention is the headline. Most copywriters say they spend 80% of their time writing the headline and only 20% of the time writing the copy in their sales letters.
How do you write a great headline?
You need to provide curiosity and/or controversy. Curiosity arouses a reader’s interest enough to keep reading. For example instead of saying:
“Get More Traffic To Your Website”, try “The Tiny Secret That Will Increase Your Traffic By 125%”
Controversy goes against what common sense or opinion dictates. For example a sales letter with the headline “Not Many Doctors Know This…” is dull, whereas “99 % Of Health Professionals Get This Wrong…” is far more powerful and controversial.
Benefits And Scarcity
Your headline should include benefits, what the person is going to gain out of reading the sales letter and introduce scarcity if applicable. Scarcity is where you have limited copies, limited seats available, closing in 5 days, only available to the first 5 people. You get the picture.
So spend a long time on your headline, split test different headlines as it’s the first device to capture a reader’s attention.
Use Sub-headlines
Once you’ve got their attention then you need to keep them on the page. Use sub-headlines. Sub-headlines are just mini headlines, and the same principles you apply to headlines can be used for sub -headlines.
Most people reading on the web are skimmers, so your sub-headlines need to retain their interest to get them to the bottom of the page. All the copy on a sales page is doing is giving supporting information to the headlines and sub headlines.
Provide Proof
Next you need to provide proof. Proof that your product does what it says it does, or provides the benefits and results that you claim. This can be in the form of testimonials. Written testimonials with the persons name at the bottom are good. If you have a testimonial and a photo of that person even better.
But, the huge advantage of an online sales letter is you can use video testimonials also. These are by far the most powerful type of testimonial as not only do you get their words, you get the extra meaning and emotion that can’t be conveyed in a written testimonial.
Use these techniques in your next sales letter. Then think about how to write the actual copy. Keep your sentences short, keep your message concise and break up your paragraphs to make them more appealing to your reader.