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Sales Letters:
Car Salesmen of the Internet?

I think it may be time to change how we sell online.  Long form sales letters don't work very well anymore.  In fact, they may be working against you.  It may be that they've developed such a nasty reputation that they send your site visitors scurrying away in alarm.

Sales Letters may have become the Car Salesmen of the Internet.

My evidence?  It not hard proof.  It's all weak signal stuff.  But it's there. 

Forums Are Full of Warning Signs

For example, on the forums I visit regularly, I've begun to see more and more threads expressing dissatisfaction with sales letters.  Marketers report poor conversions, high return rates and sales running way below expectations. 

One writer, for example, noted his own sales through Clickbank were far below what he used to see.  He suspected that sales through Affiliate Aggregators like Clickbank were just a shadow of what they once were.  He thought it was because all the ebook selling sites looked exactly alike - just one sales letter clone after another.

And prospective buyers aren't shy about proclaiming their distaste.  One said they exit a site the instant they spot a big red headline - the telltale signal of a sales letter.

Then there was the email that arrived the other day.  It was from one of my favorite clients.  I'd written what I thought was a bang up sales letter minisite for him a short while back.  He was about to launch with a significant investment in PPC ads, when he jammed on the brakes.  He'd started getting negative feedback from people who knew him and had seen the site. Their opinion was that it looked like a scam - because of the sales letter format. His email very politely inquired if perhaps there weren't a different approach we might take.

Guilt by Association?

Now I don't write "scammy" sales letters.  Just to make sure I hadn't stepped over the bounds and not realized it, I had other professionals review the copy.  They agreed.  It was a typical example of a sales letter, designed to persuade the prospect - but not to trick them.

So I had to think... where did this reaction come from?

Sales letters employ what is supposed to be a tried and true approach to copywriting.  It grew out of direct mail marketing.  Even the layout and type styles on the page imitate paper sales letters.

The original thinking was that the recipient would think of it as a real letter and start to read it and get drawn in and then you could move them toward a sale. 

Mailed sales letters have worked for many years.  They continue to work - the trades continue to report successful mailings.  But even mailed sales letters are being modified to include magalogs and other hybrid forms as marketers seek improved response.  Though you still see the plain envelope as a marketer tries the old methods, much of the time the approach has swung the other way. Half the sales message appears outside, on the giant envelope printed four-color front and back.

Which is all just to say that even in the original medium, a lot of market forces have led to change and experimentation.

But The Internet is Not The Mail

On the Internet, we seem to have borrowed the format without a whole lot of thinking. The problem is that the Internet isn't Mail.  One major difference between the two media is the frequency of exposure.  You might get a few long form sales letters in the mail over the period of a month or two.  But online, an active searcher could conceivably see hundreds in a single day - if they could endure it.

Add in all the sales emails which often look like sales letters and you start to see at least one source of the rejection problem.  Anything repeated too often becomes trite and distasteful.  People start avoiding it.

Especially when that something immediately identifies itself as a sales message.  Look how we treat TV advertising.  We tune it out because we know it's just someone trying to sell us something.

And isn't that a marketer's maxim?  "People want to buy but they hate being sold."

That's a big part of the problem.  Like commercials, sales letters telegraph that somebody is trying to sell something. 

Shoddy Products Have Played a Big Role

The other part of the equation comes from the failure of many Internet Marketers to deliver a product that lives up to the hype.  Almost everyone who buys information products online can tell stories of buying products that were ridiculously short for the price or had little useful information or that even were shot through with grammatical and spelling errors.

Such experiences have made all of us more cynical about the way-too-common sales letter pitch.  I believe we've started tuning them out just like we do commercials.

It's time the over-use and over-hype comes to an end.  I think it's time to retire the Sales Letter. But where do we go from here?

FINAL WORD

We need to find better ways to communicate sales messages. We need to be more creative, less tradition-bound, more willing to put in the time it takes to test new ideas and less bound to tradition.

And most of all - we need to make sure that when we ask prospective customers to open their wallet and give us money that, in return, we give them something that is at least equal in value.

And if we want our business to thrive, we probably ought to make the product worth more than we ask them to pay.

A customer who is happy with what they buy from us won't need a whole lot of persuasion the next time we ask them to buy.  They'll know they can trust us. 

And isn't trust just about the strongest sales message you can deliver?