The sales letter (called copy) is made up of four important elements: (i) the headline, (ii) the body copy, (iii) the offer, and (iv) the order form. We will now have a brief look at each…

(i) Headlines

Headlines are considered to be the most important part of any direct mail copy (or mail order advert) that you will write, because it’s the first thing your prospective customers will see and so it has to grab their attention. The headline is like the tasty bait that gets readers hooked into reading the body copy.

90% of the success of your direct mail letter or advert is down to the headline. If your headline doesn’t command attention and force them to read on, then you’ve lost 90% of your potential customers before you’ve even started.

Ted Nicholas wrote 217 headlines for his book on corporate forms before he finally came up with:

“How to Form Your Own Corporation Without
a Lawyer for Under $50″

His persistence paid off though. Through that book alone he went on to make 24.5 million dollars! We don’t know about you, but we could quite happily labor on headlines for that kind of return. Not bad for one book, and the best thing is that 20 years later it’s still selling just as well. That’s the beauty of direct mail – once you have created a great product it will continue to make you wealthy for years, even decades, to come. My own book The Midas Method continues to sell well after 12 years! Headline: How You Can Give Up Your Job and Make a Million Dollars Instead!

It may surprise you to know that if you go over a certain word limit in your headline your sales letter or advert is almost guaranteed to fail, no matter how good the headline and body copy. These seemingly little things can make the difference between a super successful headline that gives you so many orders you can’t open your front door; to ones that do moderately okay, down to those that fail miserably.

In addition, there are certain words in the English language that act as powerful magnets that drag people into reading your copy – they can’t help themselves! These words work like magic! Millions of dollars have been spent on testing the pulling power of these words; we will reveal them to you in this course. We will also share with you other inside secrets so you can create stunning headlines yourself.

(ii) Body Copy

Writing copy is a craft and one that you can master using our step-by-step method for success, disclosed to you in these releases. One of the secrets to creating six-figure income from copy is to have fun whilst doing it, if you do, then it will come across to your audience and they will enjoy it also.

As with headlines there are a lot of rules for writing successful copy and like most rules they can be broken, but not until you have mastered the basics. Until then you would be wise to follow our guidelines to the letter. Millions of dollars have been spent on researching what works best, this means you don’t have to waste any of your money finding these things out the hard way! For example, I’ll be demonstrating in a later release how you can increase your order response rate by 25% for virtually nothing and for no extra effort!

Benefits, not features are the vital components of good copy. As we mentioned earlier, people act on emotion and then back up their decision using logic. Good copy should therefore stir powerful feelings in your readers: anger, guilt, fear, greed, pride are all provocative and can be used to your advantage.

Your copy should lead with benefits and then follow with some features to satisfy the customer’s logical decision and give you and your product credibility. For example, pretend you were selling a car, the features would be its twin cam engine and ABS, these inform your customer’s logical brain that it’s a great car and worth buying. They act to justify his or her buying decision. The benefits that you would weave into the copy, would be how good he/she would feel whilst driving it and how they’d be the envy of all their friends. Notice the emotions attached to this?

(iii) The Offer

The greatest copy in the world will not sell a product if the offer is no good. An example of a bad offer would be “Genuine $10 notes – yours for only $20 plus shipping” I think you will agree that nothing will save that offer – you would get a zero response. So, no matter how good your copy, the offer has to be sizzling – a great product at a super price, plus some extra goodies to tempt them to order. The purpose of the goodies is to increase your response rate and is usually a free gift that is related to the product you’re selling. The gift must be worth something. Never use a failed product as part of your offer; bear this golden rule in mind: if you can’t sell it, you can’t give it away either. Other incentives include free reports or a price reduction for responding early. This latter is known as a ‘speed premium’ in the trade.

(iv) The Order Form

It is essential that your order form is easy to fill out, clear and logical. You must tell the reader precisely what it is they need to do and lead them step-by-step through the process. People often fall down on their order form by making it too complicated to fill-in and so lose a lot of orders as a result. A useful thing to do after you have created your order form is to fill it out yourself and preferably get a friend to do the same, that way you get a feel for its simplicity (or not).

Success in direct response marketing comes from sourcing a good product that sells to people’s wants. Try to avoid selling to people’s needs, as this example illustrates…

Seminar attendees were asked who wanted a BMW/Mercedes/Jaguar; everybody put their hand up. They were then asked who needed a BMW/Mercedes/Jaguar; nobody put their hand up. Any cheap car would fulfill their needs and get them from A to B, instead people desired (and often bought) the car they wanted, despite it being more expensive.

Remember that people buy on emotional impulse and then rationalise their purchase with logic? Well this is really important, because your product must first appeal to people’s emotions and then have credibility to satisfy their logical decision; otherwise they won’t buy from you.

You must ensure that people will want to buy your product before you start creating or sourcing it. If you don’t, you will end up sourcing a product and then wondering who, if anybody, you can sell it to. It is easier to research your market first to get a product people will want to buy, than it is to change people’s spending habits. Profitable direct marketing is always market-driven (giving people products they want to buy), never product driven (selling products you want to sell to them).

Given that your product must be market driven, the more you find out about the kind of products that people want to buy, the easier it will be to come up with successful products yourself. Finding out what your market wants is pretty straightforward; you just look at what they are already buying.