Category Archives: Ultimate Sales Letter

  • what benefit to me justifies the cost
  • who else has done this?
  • how do i get the money to pay for it?
  • what keeps them awake at night
  • what the carrot is on the stick
  • whats the hidden benefit
  • acknowledging the flaws

 

address the prospects priorities in order

what benefit to me justifies the cost

who else has done this?

how do i get the money to pay for it?
what other expense has to be reduced
or what promotion or fundraising event
(fundraising event with your employees.. bowl a thon..

directly address the interests of the recipient

what keeps them awake at night

what the carrot is on the stick

industry publications
forums
websites
seminars
tradeshows
play prospect


teens, parents of teens, and young
women — to critique my copy.

investment of time and energy in
crawling inside their psyche, tribal
language, daily experiences.

Collier Principle: “Always enter the
conversation already occurring in the
customer’s mind.

”“What will your
customers be thinking about and talking
about the day they receive or see your
sales copy?

”swim-with-current-rather-than-against
strategy.
Do not arrive as an interruption
or disruption, attempting to divert your
reader’s attention from the object it is
focused on, fighting to interest him in
something different from what he is
already, at this moment, interested in.

Instead, align yourself with the subjects
already possessing his attention, the
matters already garnering his interest,
the self-talk conversation already
occurring in his mind, and the
conversations he is already having
around the water-cooler at work or at
the kitchen table at home with peers,
friends, and family.

“Study your
reader first — your product second….

The reader of your letter wants certain
things and the desire for them is,
consciously or unconsciously, the
dominant idea in his mind all the time.

He is also engaged by the news or
events or public conversations of the
day. Put yourself in his place.

If you
were deep in discussion with a friend
over some matter and a stranger came up
and said: ‘Mister, I have a fine coat I
want to sell you!’ — what would you
do? The same thing happens when you
approach a man by mail. He is in
discussion with himself. If you just butt
in, will you be welcome? How would
you do it if approaching him and his
friend in person? You’d listen and get the
trend of the conversation. Then, when
you chimed in, it would be with a
remark on a related subject. Then you
could gradually bring the talk around
logically to the point you wanted to
discuss. Study your reader. Know what
interests him. Listen to the conversation
he is already having with himself. Enter
where he already is.

”Seasons and holidays, and linking to
these — regardless of whether your
business naturally links or not — can be
extremely helpful. You need not be a
florist, jeweler, or restaurant to utilize
Valentine’s Day, for example. Beyond
that, and deeper than that, every
customer group has some shared item on
their minds. Know it. Start your
conversation with them with it.

If you’re writing a letter
to promote a service, use it yourself if
possible. Go talk to those who do use it.
Talk to people who use a competitive
service. Either way, the idea is to
list every possible feature and benefit,
then organize them by importance.

“People do not buy things for what
they are; they buy things for what
they do.

”Ted often looks
for what he calls the hidden benefit to
emphasize. This means it’s not the
obvious benefit — not the first benefit
you think of — yet one that is of
profound importance to your customer.

Even though the
attendees had paid a very high per-
person fee to be there, most had traveled
great distances, and the subject was of
critical importance to them, we both
noticed that on breaks, what most of
them were talking about was where they
were going to go play golf that evening
when the seminar let out

the headline: “Puts Recruiting on
Autopilot So You Can Go Play Golf!”it sold the system we devised for
insurance agent recruiting, but it did so
circuitously, by emphasizing the hidden
benefit: you’ll get the job done with less
time invested, so you can spend more
time on the golf course.

STEP 3: Create a Damaging
Admission and Address
Flaws Openly

By acknowledging the flaws, you
force yourself to address your letter
recipient’s questions, objections, and
concerns. You also enhance your
credibility.

try to think of
every possible objection, concern, fear,
doubt, and excuse someone might use to
keep from responding.

I knew he had the financial
ability to buy. So why hadn’t he? He told
me that he felt the offer was too good to
be true, and that made him skeptical
about everything said about the product.

If the marketer had anticipated that
reaction and answered it somewhere in
his letter, he would certainly have
increased the response to his mailings. By
admitting and openly discussing the
drawbacks to your offer, your
“credibility stock” goes way up

If you want waiters in tuxedos with
white linen cloths over their arms,
menus with unpronounceable words all
over them, and high-priced wines served
in silver ice buckets when you go out for
Italian food, our little restaurant is not
the place to come. But if you mostly
want good, solid, home-cooked pasta
with tasty sauces made with real
vegetables and spices by a real Italian
Mama and will trade white linen for
red-and-white checked plastic
tablecloths, you’ll like our place just
fine. If you’re okay with a choice of just
two wines, red or white, we’ll give you
as much of it as you want, from our
famous bottomless wine bottle — free
with your dinner.

This restaurant owner took
competitive disadvantages and turned
them into a good, solid, “fun” selling
story.Instead of
looking at them as problems and
obstacles to a sale, look at them as
building blocks in a believable,
interesting, and persuasive message.

 

  • fool the gatekeepers

     

This is one of the
premises behind outer envelopes
designed to fool or at least influence the
postal carriers, such as good, fake
“Express Delivery” envelope faces or
official-looking or personal-looking
faces.

the gatekeepers

In most situations, I
advocate using first-class mail if you can
possibly adjust the economics of your
business to allow for it.

Envelopes
actually addressed by hand often
outperform all others in controlled split-
tests.

A plain white envelope with no
business name, only an address with no
name or a person’s name as the return
address; no teaser copy; individual or
ink-jet addressing; and a live stamp —
all this makes your mailing look like a
letter, not advertising or junk mail

Intimidating Imprints
“Audited Delivery … Verified
Delivery … The Information You
Requested Is Enclosed … Important
Documents Enclosed ….” Imprints or
affixed gold seals with this kind of
wording seem to work well.

2 OUT of 3
consumers say
they prefer
print catalogs
to online catalogs.

I have had
and have a number of clients who mail
extensively to chiropractors, dentists,
cosmetic surgeons, and medical doctors,
and, over the years, I’ve tried every kind
of envelope look you can imagine. By
far, the mailings that pull best are sent in
“plain Jane” envelopes without a
company name on them, but, instead, a
doctor’s name and return address. Staff
do not screen these envelopes. The
doctor opens them. The response to
these mailings versus the same letters
sent in different, more “honest”
envelopes is sometimes as much as 300
percent higher!— and note the personalization. Each
recipient’s name appears on the license
plate of the car!

PHOTO ENCLOSED: DO NOT
BEND

YOUR TICKETS ENCLOSED:
PLEASE OPEN IMMEDIATELY
REFUND ENCLOSEDOr: Rebate Enclosed.

  • from unwelcome pest to welcome guest
  • say it with a headline
  • root for the underdog
  • lumpy mail
  • “believability” is even
    more important than “credibility.
  • Facts and credibility only support
    persuasion.
  • answer the question: why
    should the reader bother?
  • Demonstrate the value!

 

In case you had illusions to the
contrary, no one is sitting around
hoping and praying that he will receive
your sales letter. When it arrives, it is
most likely an unwelcome pest. How
do you earn your welcome as a guest?
By immediately saying something that
is recognized by the recipient as
important and valuable and beneficial.

Gimmicks too
often fail. Saying something of genuine
importance and interest to the recipient
usually succeeds.

You say it with a headline.

our natural tendency
to root for the underdog. When this
headline refers to something you have
thought about doing, but talked yourself
out of, you’ll want to know if the
successful person shared your doubt or
fear or handicap.

Who Else Wants

?
I like this type of headline because of
its strong implication that a lot of other
people know something the reader
doesn’t.

In many cases, a multidimensional
object is used to intentionally make the
envelope “lumpy,” to arouse the
curiosity of the recipient.

You’ve got to
reach out and grab the reader where he
or she lives — immediately — then do it
again and again and again.

One or two
sentences of less-than-compelling
interest, and your reader will abandon
you.

Re. #2: You don’t necessarily have to
hire photographers and get photos taken
for you. Stock photos can be purchased
or licensed from many different sources,
such as Google.

However, “believability” is even
more important than “credibility.

”The facts about your business, such as
years in business, clients served,
proprietary methods, and so on are
important, but not nearly as persuasive
as what clients have to say about their
real-life experiences with you, benefits
realized, and skepticism erased.

Facts and credibility only support
persuasion.
Consider offering a free initial
consultation or a free package of
informative literature; this may break
down barriers of skepticism and
mistrustA

answer the question: why
should the reader bother? Similarly, you
should work at making the intangible
benefits of your product tangible. This
can be accomplished with before/after
photographs, slice-of-life stories, case
histories, or other examples.

Demonstrate the value!

gotta-break-a-few-eggs-to-make-an-omelet school.

If you are operating
in a tiny or limited market where people
talk to each other a lot, you may want to
be especially cautious about this.

  • Sell Bulk
  • Price Paid to Develop
  • Parts Worth More Than the Whole
  • Conceal the Price
  • more likely to avoid pain than to
    get gain
  • Problem-Agitation-Solution
  • see the hearse backed up to the door
  • triggering emotional responses

 

No B.S. Price
Strategy,

Sell Bulk

If you are selling an information
product like books, courses, or
subscriptions, remember that one way to
convey bulk is with a list of the 1,001
(or some other huge, specific number)
pieces of information contained in your
product.

we might list every
vitamin and mineral provided by the
apple, then list every health benefit
delivered by each of those vitamins and
minerals. We might then show the huge
bulk of other foods you’d have to
consume to get those same nutrients and
benefits — all to turn that little apple
into a huge “bulk” of benefits and value.

Discuss the Price Paid to
Develop the Offer
Is this relevant to the consumer? Maybe
not, but that doesn’t prevent you from
making it relevant.

No
expense was spared

With over $3 million
worth of research

as reliable as God’s sunrise.
Make the Parts Worth More
Than the Whole

when
it’s all added up it is much, much more
than the price of the whole unit.

its core
concept is the building of very high
value, then offering a substantial
discount.

Conceal the Price
“Just three small monthly installments of
$11.95 charged to your credit card.”
The typical doctor saves
thousands of dollars with our
Full-Service System Concept for
practice promotion and
management. Consider the value
of everything you get as a System
Client:

Each two-day Seminar focuses
on a different aspect of practice
success:

If you sought out
individually offered seminars
covering these same topic areas,
you would pay at least $995.00
to as much as $1,995.00 for each
one. So this is at least a
$4975.00 value.

we are able to
get higher prices by disguising them in
payments.

The higher-
priced item has a lower monthly
payment than the lower-priced item —
and 72 percent of his buyers opted for
this lower monthly payment choice!
understand that people are
more likely to act to avoid pain than to
get gain,

Problem-Agitation-
Solution
It may be the most reliable
sales formula ever invented.

The first step is to define the
customer’s problem.

a good sales letter avoids
assuming knowledge on the part of the
recipient.

the letter sets forth the
problem in clear, straightforward terms.
You need to say here only enough to
elicit agreement.

Once the problem is established,
clearly and factually, it’s time to inject
emotion. This second step is agitation.

That means we stir up the letter
recipients’ emotional responses to the
problem. We tap their anger, resentment,
guilt, embarrassment, fear — any and
every applicable negative emotion. We
want to whip them into a fervor! We
want to make the problem larger than
life, worse than death.

to sell life
insurance or cemetery plots, you have to
make your customer see the hearse
backed up to the door. That may sound a
little grisly, but it’s true.

but if you insist on just wearing any old
pair of ordinary shoes, here’s what you
have to look forward to in your so-
called golden years: fallen arches …
intense lower back pain …
extraordinary discomfort in golf or
tennis shoes … even pain from just
walking around a shopping mall! You’ll
be asking your friends to slow down so
you can keep up. You’ll be futilely
soaking your feet at night like some old
fuddy-duddy. You may even need pain
pills just to get to sleep.

After you’ve clearly stated the
problem and after you’ve created
tremendous agitation about the problem,
you should have readers mentally
wringing their hands, pacing the room,
saying: “This has got to stop! I’ve got to
do something about this! What can I do
about this? If only there were an
answer!” And that’s right where you
want them!

It’s at that point, that crucial moment,
that you whip out the solution. The third
step is to unveil the solution, the answer
— your product or services and the
accompanying benefits.

“The two keys to unlimited media
attention and publicity are being
predictive and being provocative.”

good, solid, time-tested sales/sales letter
strategies do not wear out or become
obsolete. What worked in a sales letter
in 1950 will still work in 2050, with
only slight language modification. This
is, in fact, one of the advantages of sales
letters — as assets, they can have much
more sustainable value than other kinds
of media assets
according to the Social Security
Administration:

5 percent successful, 95 percent
unsuccessful.

it
works. People understand it. It creates
fear — fear of being in the 95 percent
group. It creates motivation —
motivation to be in the 5 percent group.

last spring, two neighbors reseeded
their lawns. Now it’s June. One has a
beautiful, lush, thick green lawn. As
perfect as the best golf course in the
country. A lawn to be proud of. His
neighbor, though, has a different lawn.
With little brown patches. Uneven
texture. Crabgrass and weeds fighting
for territory.
What made the difference?
It’s very important to recognize that
none of this copy has to do with either
investment or insurance products or
financial services. It is all about the
reader and her interests and concerns.
The copy is also not factual or
analytical, but is very emotional.
Connecting with people via ads, sales
letters, or any other means is best done
by triggering emotional responses.

  • selling is manipulative
  • Intimidation
  • ROI – Sell Money at a Discount
  • ego – keep up with the Jonses
  • Strong Guarantee
  • Be a Storyteller

all successful selling
is by nature and necessity
manipulative, and must apply pressure
to get decision and action. The only
things people buy entirely of their own
initiative and decision are basic
commodities like soup, cereal, and toilet
paper at the supermarket, and goods or
services that respond to emergencies,
like plumbing repair. Even then, toilet
paper makers use labels, size variation,
and price gimmicks, and plumbers often
sell good-better-best options of toilets,
pipes, and water heaters. Even their
selling is manipulative. Certainly all
other selling is.
The sales letter is handicapped by
having to apply sales pressure from a
distance with no interaction with the
prospect, but is assisted by having the
best possible pressure crafted and
delivered perfectly without human
variables. The sales letter writer needs
to put as much pressure as possible on
the reader to buy and buy now, because
it is easy for that reader to do otherwise
— there’s no salesman sitting across
from him staring him down and blocking
his escape route!
Technique #1: Intimidation

intimidation = take away selling

I consider Robert
Ringer’s bestselling book Winning
Through Intimidation to be one of the
most useful business books I’ve ever
read.

that the hardest
deal to make is the one you desperately
need or really, really want to make.
Somehow, the other person always
senses that, and it scares him or her
away. On the other hand, the easiest
deals to close occur when you feel that
you don’t need them and really don’t
much care whether they come to fruition
or not. This is called “taking a position,”
and it applies equally well to selling in
print.
Limited Number Available
… if your response is received after our
supply is exhausted, it will not be
accepted and your check will be
returned uncashed.
Most Will Buy
the “band-wagon
effect,”

You Will Buy Only If …
challenge to the reader’s ego and pride.
it takes a very special
individual to fully appreciate the value
You Can Buy Only If …
Many use an
“application process” to make people
qualify to buy.
Only Some Can Qualify …
It appeals to the person’s
desire to be part of an elite group, for
approval and recognition.
These five applications of
Intimidation Technique are part of a
broader context I teach as Takeaway
Selling. It does what its name suggests:
show the prospect something interesting,
appealing, or desirable, then snatch it
away and have it play hard to get.
My
entire lesson on this can be found in my
book No B.S. Sales Success in the New
Economy.

Technique #2: Demonstrate
ROI — Sell Money at a
Discount
in business-
to-business sales letters, it’s very
important to talk about, promise, and if
possible, demonstrate ROI.
Demonstrating ROI puts you in the
position of “selling money at a
discount.”
would assume you
were a counterfeiter, so you’d need
experts there to attest to the authenticity
of the product. Then you’d need to make
it easy to buy, maybe by accepting Visa
or MasterCard.
It sometimes pays to exaggerate our
ROI promise, then bring the reader back
down with copy like this:
… and even if I’m only half right, you’ll
still pocket over $ …
This creates a feeling of
reasonableness, conservatism, even
objectivity — all reassuring to the
reader.

Technique #3: Ego Appeals
“keep up with the Jonses”
offer is convincingly portrayed as a
status symbol
What Excuse Do You Make When
Asked for Your Fax Number — and
You Haven’t Got One?
Can you afford to appear “behind the
times” to your clients, customers,
vendors, and associates? Or is it
important to you to be perceived as
successful, savvy, in tune with the trends
leading the American business scene?
It has been used to sell
car phones when they were new, cell
phones when they were new, websites
when they were new. And whatever the
next, new technology is that comes
along, it too can and will be sold at
some point based on Ego Appeal. Again,
this is not limited to tech products.
Again,
this is not limited to tech products.
You’ll see it used, for example, to sell
the newest innovations in golf clubs or
tennis rackets, automobiles, etc.

Technique #4: Strong
Guarantee
practical experience continues to prove
that, one, a guarantee boosts response,
and two, the better the guarantee, the
better the response.

Skepticism,
cynicism, fear abound
Basic Money-Back Guarantee
You might say
“delighted” or “thrilled” or even use
fancier language, rather than “satisfied.”
You could opt for a folksier approach:
“return the widget for a full refund — ho
hassles, no hard feelings.”
Refund and Keep the Premium
Redundancy
Say the same
thing twice or even three times! For
example: “Receive a full 100 percent
refund of every penny you paid.”
Free Trial Offer
Make the Guarantee the Primary
Focus of the Offer
Income tax savings guaranteed — or
your money back! If, in the first three
issues of my newsletter, you haven’t

Restaurants guarantee lunch served in
fifteen minutes.
Often, we’ll offer $10.00, $20.00, or
$50.00 if the recipient reads the entire
sales letter and feels his time has been
wasted.

In this case, I
paid out less than $200.00 from mailing
to nearly 4,000 prospects, but I brought
in over $100,000.00 in profits.

Technique #5: Be a
Storyteller

I usually incorporate interesting
stories in the sales letters I write and
encourage others to do the same.

they tell his personal life story, a
dramatic, classic rags-to-riches story.

  • writing is rewriting
  • conversational English and popular slang
  • Internal Repetition
  • a “yes momentum.
  • Entertaining not funny.
  • a vivid mental picture
  • your own personality

 

writing is rewriting

“Who’s going to read all that copy?”
The answer is: those people most
likely to respond.

Most research shows that the vast
majority of readers never go beyond a
quick glance at an advertisement, and the
same is true about most sales letters.
Shortening your
copy to a length everybody will read is
counter-productive. Instead, you need to
focus your energies on the relative
minority of the letter recipients who will
be interested in the message.

In other
words, write for the buyer, not the
nonbuyer. Real prospects are hungry
for information.

use
conversational English and popular
slang.

Schoolbook grammar is irrelevant in
the sales letter.

Increase Readership with the Double
Readership Path
divide our recipients into two
personality extremes: the impulsive and
the analytical.

The impulsive one will rarely read
long copy
They want to skim

create an
impulsive readership path through your
letter that consists of big, bold headlines
and subheads; photos with captions; and
boxed, circled, or highlighted short
paragraphs.
analytical prospects will read long
copy — in fact, they almost require it!
They want lots of facts, figures,
statistics, charts, graphs, and hard
information, wanting to feel that they are
making an informed, considered
decision.

TIMING IS URGENT
secret is beginning
to leak out now … thus
eliminating your chance of big
profits. Don’t wait until the cat’s
out of the bag! Buy now!!
Next
week or next month could be a
red letter profit day for many
astute silver investors who heed
our advice today.
“Internal Repetition.”
a time-
honored axiom:
tell ’em what you’re
going to tell ’em; tell ’em; tell ’em again,
a little differently; tell ’em again, a little
more differently; then tell ’em what
you’ve told ’em. In fact, I try to tell ’em
seven times.
In the same sales letter, you can
convey your basic sales message and
promise:
1. In a straightforward statement
2. In an example
3. In a story, sometimes called a “slice
of life”
4. In testimonials
5. In a quote from a customer, expert, or
other spokesperson
6. In a numbered summary

a basic principle of persuasion:
building a “yes momentum.”

never end a page
with a completed sentence. This gives
your reader permission to stop reading
right there.

A teaser blurb is
essentially another headline. In fact, it is
a headline for the next page!

appears easy to read, is easy
on the eye, uses everyday language, and
doesn’t require you to be a Harvard grad

stick mostly to short
paragraphs (ideally, those only three or
four sentences long).

Be Entertaining
don’t be funny.
you may not want to be funeral-serious either

lighthearted — not comical, but not dead
serious.

there’s no such thing as too much
interesting copy — the problem’s not
with the length. The problem is being
boring.

the reader’s “whole
mind” can best be stimulated by playing
on as many of the five senses as
possible.

your
sales letter copy needs to make the
reader visualize pictures and feel
experiences.

Serious as cancer
Stronger ‘n onions!
Savage wind
So overcome with frustration, he
leans against the closed door of his
office and silently screams
Crawl across broken glass on your
naked knees to ….
So powerful (so good; so tasty; so

__) it should be illegal
Why You Should Put On a Ski Mask,
Lower Yourself from the Ceiling On a
Wire Like Tom Cruise in Mission
Impossible, To Steal Bill’s Blueprint

creating a vivid mental
picture.

Resource
Reference books that copywriters
use to find and create colorful,
descriptive phrases:
Words That Sell by Richard
Bayan (Contemporary)
More Words That Sell by
Richard Bayan (Contemporary)
Roget’s Super Thesaurus by
Marc McCutcheon (Writer’s
Digest Books)
Roget’s Descriptive Word
Finder by Barbara Ann Kipfer
(Writer’s Digest Books)
Let your own personality come into
your letters. Sell in print as you would in
person.

  • questions and objections
  • Responding is inconvenient.
  • use of premiums
  • urgency-building

Potholes – questions and objections.

Unanswered questions and unresolved
concerns sabotage sales letters! By
carefully countering every possible
question and objection, you put the
ultimate sales presentation on paper.

Third, they can “box in” the
customer to turn the objection-answering
process into a sure sale. There is, for
example, a selling tactic known as
“draining the objections,” in which
salespeople list the objections on a pad
before answering any. They keep asking
“Anything else?” until the customer runs
dry of objections. Then they ask, “If we
can take care of all these concerns to
your satisfaction — and I’m not sure that
we can — but if we can, you will then
want to go ahead with the XYZ tonight,
right?” When the customer says “yes” to
that, he or she is boxed in. There’s no
way I’ve found to duplicate that process
in print.

Our sales letter does not have the
luxury of responding to only the
objections each recipient thinks of. The
letter has to respond to every possible
objection. Our letter does not get any
feedback making it clear when “enough
is enough,” so it must do more than
enough.

While I avoid overestimating a
customer’s intelligence, I try never to
underestimate skepticism!

If they are going to think of
anything, they are going to think of all the
reasons not to buy.

the answers to most
objections or questions should include
most, and, in most instances, all of these
items:
1. A direct answer
2. A verifying testimonial comment, case
history, or story
3. A restatement of or reference to the
guarantee/free trial offer

But quite
probably, the biggest group of
nonrespondents are those who get the
letter, look at the letter, read the letter,
and intend to respond to the letter — but
set it aside to do “later.” All too often,
“later” never happens.

Responding is
sometimes inconvenient. Usually, your
letter’s recipient is busy and
preoccupied with other matters. There is
tremendous temptation to stop at a
“conditional yes” — setting the letter
aside with the intention of responding
“tomorrow.”
Your letter’s job is to get the reader to
respond right now.

It is rare for the basic offer to be
strong enough in and of itself to inspire
immediate response from a satisfactory
number of people. Because of this, I am
a strong advocate of the use of
premiums, and usually prefer a premium
over a discount or rebate.
he usual urgency-building techniques —
like an ordering deadline — no longer
worked on those people. They became
immune to those offers.

1. I knew and trusted the company
(Vegas World).
2. I liked the product (the Vegas World
package).
3. I believed the urgency-building story
(only 1,000 Hawaiian vacations
available).
4. I found the premium exciting and
desirable.
Duplicate those four factors in a sales
letter, and you’ll have a winner, too.

Discounts for Fast Response,
Penalties For Slow Response
could be applied
to advance-order offers tied to new,
soon-to-be-released products; any kind
of event tickets or passes; subscriptions
or subscription renewals; and other
offers.

  • your PS
  • CHECKLISTS
  • CopyDoodles
  • enthusiastic personality
  • the number one sin – being boring

 

By properly summarizing
the offer/ promise in your PS, you can
inspire the recipient to dig in and read
the entire letter, or simply add an extra
incentive to respond.

CHECKLISTS
So, go back to the beginning and
revisit Step 1 and the “10 Smart
Questions” in it, and Steps 2–14 to be
sure you’ve covered all the bases. Here
are questions to help.
1. Did you answer all 10 Smart
Questions about your prospect? (In
Step 1)
2. How many of the ten were you able to
use?
3. Which of the ten did you decide to
emphasize?
4. Are you writing to your reader
about what is most important to
him/her (not you)?
5. Did you build a list of every
separate Feature of your
product/offer?
6. Did you translate the Features to
Benefits?
7. Did you identify a Hidden Benefit to
use?
8. Did you identify the disadvantages of
your offer and flaws in your product?
9. Did you develop “damaging
admission copy” about those flaws?
10. Did you make a list of reasons not to
respond?
11. Did you raise and respond to the
reasons not to respond?
12. Did you give careful thought to
getting your letter delivered and/or
through gatekeepers to its intended
recipient?
13. Did you look at, compare, and
consider different envelope faces?
14. Did you picture your piece in a stack
of mail held by your recipient, sorting
it over a wastebasket? … and take
care to survive the sort and command
attention and pique interest
immediately upon being opened?
15. Did you craft the best possible
headline for your letter?
16. Did you craft the best possible
subheadlines to place throughout your
letter?
17. Did you make careful choices about
your presentation of price?
18. Were you able to sell money at a
discount?
19. Were you able to incorporate
intimidation into your call to action
copy?
20. Were you able to appeal to the ego of
your buyer?
21. Did you develop and present a strong
guarantee?
22. Overall, did you tell an interesting
story?
23. Did you use an interesting story about
yourself?
24. Did you write to the right length? (Not
longer than need be due to poor or
sloppy editing, but not shorter than
necessary to deliver the best
presentation?)
25. Did you use Double Readership
Path?
26. Did you use Internal Repetition?
27. Did you keep the reader moving,
with yes-momentum and end-of-page
carryovers?
28. Did you bust up paragraphs, keep one
idea per paragraph, and make the
letter easily readable?
29. Were you interesting and entertaining?
… Is the letter enjoyable to read?
30. Did you use five-senses word
pictures?
31. Did you choose words carefully,
consider options of one word versus
another, and create high-impact
phrases?
32. Did you make your copy personal
and conversational (not
institutional)?
33. Did you go back through your copy
and think of the possible questions or
objections it might leave
unanswered? … then find ways to
ask them, raise them, and answer
them? (Leave no unanswered
questions!)
34. Did you choose and use devices to
create urgency and spark immediate
action?
35. Did you write at least one PS at the
end of the letter for a strategic
purpose?
developed an amazing software system
for applying the Copy Cosmetics to the
copy, called CopyDoodles ® . His name
is Mike Capuzzi.

Use selective emphasis. Not every
word of your copy has the same level
of importance, so you must draw the
reader’s eye to critical areas, such as
a benefits list, call-to-action, phone
number, or website address.

Resource!
For a more detailed presentation
of my “27 Copy Cosmetic
Techniques,” including the color
examples found at the end of this
step, and my commentary on how
each uses these powerful
techniques, visit
copycosmetics.com.

I don’t care what
business you’re in or who your prospects
or customers are, they buy by emotion
and then justify their choice with logic.
“Cold fish” sales letters rarely
work. The purely factual approach fails
almost every time it’s used. A sales letter
needs an enthusiastic personality — and
because it is ink on paper, not warm
flesh and blood, the letter has to work
harder at being enthusiastic. That means
that what will seem overly expressive
when you write it will still wind up
understated when it’s read.

the number one sin in
marketing in general (and sales letter
writing in particular) is being boring.

no matter what your business may be,
you can find something to get excited
about. If you can’t romanticize your
product or service or its direct
benefits, you’ve got to be able to
create excitement out of the feelings
of owning it or using it, or the
enjoyment of the money or time it
saves. Find something for the reader
to get excited about! It doesn’t matter
what your topic is: there is a way to give
your sales story a passion injection.
Aggressive
editing means cutting out every word or
phrase that fails to advance, strengthen,
or reinforce your basic sales story.
You’re not editing to shorten. You are
editing to clarify, and that will
automatically shorten the letter.