Yesterday, I wrote a sales letter for a product/service hybrid. I was having trouble getting started, so I decided to check out the competitors to see what they were doing wrong.
I’ve written about this before in the Gaps in the Market article. This approach is good because if you see something your competitor’s product doesn’t offer, you’ve automatically got something you can drill down on in terms of benefits.
Anyway, with yesterday’s product, there was an avalanche of things that were going wrong on the first page.
- Crappy websites.
- Shady looking websites.
- “Get Your Quote Here”* Calls To Action
- Obvious Spun Content such as, “Get your [product name] [city] here.”
- Little disclaimers about what you’re not getting in the fine print.
- Outrageous
- Stuff that uses proprietary software to do the job.**
These things (I’ll come back to the asterisks in a minute) are failures from the companies involved. Some of them aren’t even to do with the product itself, like the website design or the calls to action. Some of them on their own aren’t necessarily even negative, but put them together, and you get a pretty irritating experience as a consumer.
Some, like *, or “Get a Quote” calls to action, are possibly necessary, but nobody likes them.
No customer wants to put in their details so that you can call them on your schedule so that you can sell them something. You shouldn’t want it either, because when they hit your website, they’re in a buying mood. They probably won’t be if you ring them in two hours whilst they’re having dinner with their wife or whatever.
But loads of companies do this.
The second asterisks denote proprietary software. This is an unseen pain in the behind that loads of companies do for tech related stuff. Most customers don’t even think about it until it’s too late.
Take for instance a website. You hire a web designer, he builds you a website that looks great.
The only problem is that it doesn’t use WordPress or anything anyone has ever heard of. It uses his own CMS which only he can use to edit your website.
Good luck trying to have a great website if you have to contact your “web developer” every week to update the news page.
Yet companies fall for this all the time because they don’t know any better.
Anyway, tangent over.
We have our list of negatives from above:
- Crappy websites.
- Shady looking websites.
- “Get Your Quote Here”* Calls To Action
- Obvious Spun Content such as, “Get your [product name] [city] here.”
- Little disclaimers about what you’re not getting in the fine print.
- Outrageous
- Stuff that uses proprietary software to do the job.**
Those directly correlate to the set of benefits we can start our sales page with. For instance, we could quickly do the following (and this is basically how I got the first few words of my sales page yesterday.)
“Buying [Product Name] should be easy. But if you’ve spent more than five minutes trying to find a solution to [problem] then you’ll find that most companies have the following…
- Confusing, long winded websites where you can’t access the information.
- Shady looking payment systems or scammy-looking testimonials.
- They want you to contact them.
- Poorly-written pages so you don’t know what you’ll be getting.
- Ridiculously expensive prices when you do find a cost.
- Products whose warranty and upkeep costs are basically extortion.
You’ll be please to know, that we’re not like that. Our product is…”
Then list the opposite.
Essentially, find your competitors and write what they are doing wrong. Think like a customer, because if something has irritated you, then it’ll probably irritate the customer too.
The benefits come directly from that process. If a customer has been trying to get a quote for two hours and had to send off ten emails to ten different people, but your website has a figure right there in front of them, then that is a massive benefit. In fact, it’s more than one benefit – it’s honest, it’s upfront, they know the cost, you aren’t wasting their time.
You could honestly write a sales letter about every negative and every benefit if you were inclined. For instance, scammy looking websites mean that you can write about how trustworthy your company/product is. (To take this a step further, you could A/B test the sales letter to see what motivated your client more.)
An important thing to think of here is you only really need one trigger to work. If a potential customer has been looking for a product that does X for ten weeks, and your sales letter says, “Isn’t it funny how no products do X, but ours does!” Then you’ve created the hook.
If somebody has been thinking, “Gee, these websites sure look like a scam” and your sales page instils trustworthiness, then you are probably going to hook them.
Closing Thoughts
This might seem a little underhanded. If it does, re-read the line about thinking like a customer, because this is exactly where this article came from.
There are things that wind customers up. Hopefully, you (or the company you’re writing for) has addressed those issues. If they have, then that is a legitimate benefit to their product or service.
Imagine a car company that could produce a car that did three-hundred miles to the gallon. Would they be considered underhanded if they said, “Our competitors all produce cars that only do 50mpg”?
Of course not.
To re-iterate, if you’re stuck at where to start for a sales letter, do the following:
- Find your competitors.
- Build a list of all their negatives – including stuff that doesn’t relate to their product.
- Make sure your product/company doesn’t make those mistakes.
- Use those to start a list of why you shouldn’t go with your competitors.
- Then, flip the script and say, “But with our company, it’s different because…”
That’s an easy way to get your sales letter started. It’s an easy way to differentiate your offer and it’s an easy way to ensure you’ve got a list of solid benefits that will appeal directly to your customer.