PDF Summary:The Ultimate Sales Letter, by Dan S. Kennedy

You don’t have to attend an elite institution to learn how to turn words into money, says multimillionaire entrepreneur Dan Kennedy in The Ultimate Sales Letter. Whether you’re a new business owner or just interested in writing persuasively, you can use Kennedy’s tips and strategies to craft powerful sales letters that will capture customers’ attention and make them want to buy what you’re selling.

Kennedy is a direct-response marketing consultant, speaker, and author of dozens of business books, including 10 in the popular No B.S. business book series. Originally published in 1990 and updated in 2011, The Ultimate Sales Letter provides time-tested foundational strategies in the art of persuasive writing that translate across media in the ever-evolving world of sales and marketing.

In this guide, we’ll cover Kennedy’s strategies for understanding your target customer and product and crafting sales letters that get results. We’ll also compare and contrast his work with updated recommendations from other sales and marketing experts.

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• In your first paragraph, paint a vivid picture of your product using dramatic words, and describe the sights, smells, sounds, feel, and taste that buyers will experience while using it.
• Break traditional grammar rules in favor of unusual punctuation, buzzwords, and exclamations, which build energy.
• Keep sentences and paragraphs short (no more than four sentences per paragraph) to focus customers’ attention on key points.

Engage

Once you have your audience’s attention, you need to keep them engaged. Kennedy says you can do this by using a friendly, conversational tone, showing your personality, and repeating your sales pitch in as many different ways as possible. You can also encourage customer interaction by asking questions at the start or end of paragraphs and by writing partial sentences at the end of each page to force buyers to turn it over to find out what happens next.

The Video Sales Letter—A Better Tool for Today?

Kennedy recommends leading your letter with a headline—a brief span of text that grabs readers’ attention and hints at what you’re going to say next. This is a common approach in written and online sales letters because if your customer isn’t immediately interested in what you’re saying, they’ll stop reading.

But some sales and marketing experts argue that an even more effective way to capture customers’ attention―and to keep them engaged and convince them they need your product right now—is to show your product in action using a video sales letter. Video sales letters are a visual marketing tool similar to written sales letters, but in video format. Proponents of this tool (over the written version) argue that video sales letters:

• Allow you to use facial expressions, tone of voice, and background audio to quickly establish and maintain emotional connections with viewers.

• Are better at engaging and convincing customers to buy your product

  • The time it takes to watch them (typically two to three minutes) is shorter than what it would take to read a lengthy sales letter.

  • Watching a person make a sales pitch feels more “real,” and is often more compelling and memorable than reading faceless words on a page.

Psychologist Susan Weinschenck bolsters the idea that video sales letters are more effective than written sales letters, explaining that biology draws us to videos with people for four reasons:

• Our brains are wired to look at human faces for information, believability, and emotion.

• The tone of the human voice conveys meaning and context.

• Emotions are contagious.

• Motion grabs attention.

If you want to write a video sales letter script that captivates, engages, and convinces customers to buy your product and compels them to respond quickly, experts say to create a hook, overcome buyers’ internal and external obstacles, and incentivize quick responses to your call to action.

Convince

Once you’ve engaged your customer, you need to convince them that your product or service is valuable and worth the price. Kennedy says you shouldn’t worry about the length of your letter—take as many pages as you need to make a compelling argument.

Kennedy recommends providing evidence that highlights the benefits of your product or service to your customer, such as testimonials and photographs that show the product is easy to use or that your service delivers great results.

He also says you must address the tricky subject of your product’s price, which you have to navigate carefully because consumers won’t buy a product without knowing its cost, but they’ll also forgo purchasing that product if they don’t like its price. He recommends two strategies to de-emphasize your product’s cost and turn customers’ focus to reasons they should buy it.

Strategy 1: Shift the conversation from your product’s price to the value or savings your customer will experience when they buy it:

• Pitch the quantity of your product—the bigger the better because people value bulk.
• Highlight the components that come with your product to create the appearance of additional value.
• Talk about the money and effort that went into producing your product to emphasize its quality.
• Advertise the monthly, not full, cost of your product to make it look lower than it is.
• Tell customers that investing in your product will either save or make them more money in the long run than what they’ll spend upfront.

Strategy 2: Move beyond the topic of price by focusing on persuasion techniques that compel your customer to buy your product:

• Say that:
  • You’re about to run out of your product.
  • Smart people are buying your product (implication: If the consumer doesn’t buy it they’re not smart).
  • Only special people understand the value of your product or have been selected to try it—and not everyone ticks these boxes.
• Paint a harrowing picture of a problem your target customer faces, provide an example that will trigger an emotional reaction in them, then say how your product will solve it.
• Repeatedly offer product guarantees (money back, refunds, free trials) or make them the central focus of your sales pitch.

Which Is the Stronger Strategy: Manipulation or Transparency?

Kennedy argues that while consumers may react negatively to strategies that trick or bully them into responding to your sales letter, the benefits often outweigh the costs. But some sales experts counter that a low-pressure sales approach is more ethical and effective, allowing you to build relationships and maintain your reputation with customers. Let’s look at two ways price can be addressed:

Strategies that could be considered manipulative but are often effective:

• Contrast your product with more expensive versions to make yours look more affordable.

• Reduce the font size of prices and remove dollar signs.

• Break the full price of your product into a smaller dollar amount, then turn that amount into a tangible item that customers waste money on (for example: “You can save a baby for less than the price of a cup of coffee”).

By contrast, if you have an established client base and need to announce a price increase on your product, here is what a transparent strategy could look like:

• Make sure that everyone in your business knows about the price increase before announcing it to customers.

• Inform customers of the price change well before its implementation.

• Reassure customers that higher prices mean better quality.

• Explain the reasoning for the price increase.

• Encourage customers to reach out with questions or concerns.

Compel

After convincing your customer that they need your product, your goal is to get them to respond to your letter as quickly as possible. Kennedy says this is crucial because when prospective customers put your letter down to “read it later,” they rarely do. He offers the following tips to compel consumers to respond to your letter immediately:

• Create a deadline by which customers have to respond to get your product.
• Offer incentives, such as premium package deals or discounts, for quick responses, or disincentives, like penalties, for slower responses.
• Provide multiple ways for consumers to respond to you (phone, email, standard mail with prepaid return mail option, even fax).

Craft an Effective Call to Action (CTA)

Kennedy provides suggestions for how to get buyers to respond quickly to your written sales letter. But if you’re looking to craft an effective online call to action (a prompt that encourages customers to respond to you by taking a specific action, like clicking a button to submit their email or buy your product), you can start with these five tips:

• Place your CTA near the top of your web page.

• Tell people what you want them to do and why (for example, “Subscribe now and you’ll get exclusive access to our best deals.”

• Create a sense of urgency using action-oriented language (for example: “Sale ends tonight!”).

• Keep your message simple.

• Test different versions of your CTA to see what works best.

Step 3: Refine, Finalize, and Send Your Letter

Now you have a letter that will capture your customer’s attention, convince them you have a product or service worth buying, and compel them to respond quickly. Your last task is to put the finishing touches on your letter, and make sure your target customer receives it. Kennedy recommends the following tips to polish your letter and make sure it gets into the right hands:

• Add a PS at the end of your letter where you make your pitch one last time.
• Edit your letter for clarity and cut words and phrases that don’t support and move your main point forward.
• Scan and tweak your letter for visual appeal, with an eye toward improving its readability. Emphasize key takeaways (and contact information) for customers using bold font, highlighting, or capital letters.
• Put your letter on trial:
  • Read it out loud to see how it sounds.
  • Read it to others for feedback on what’s effective, and what’s not.
  • Compare it to similar letters to see how it stands up.
  • Send yourself a copy to approximate customers’ experience receiving and reading it.
  • Make final edits accordingly.
• Individualize its packaging: Use materials and packaging that appeal to different customers for the strongest possible chance of reaching your target customer.
  • For executives and business owners: Use high-quality paper and envelopes, put your sales letter in a separate envelope from other materials you package it with, and use language that highlights the exclusivity of the product or services you’re selling.
  • For mass mailings: Choose colorful, interactive materials.
  • To prevent your letter from looking like junk mail that front-line mail sorters are likely to throw out, hand address a plain white envelope, don’t put a name in the return address, and opt for postage stamps instead of metered mail.
  • Choose FedEx or first-class mail to prevent the postal service from filtering out your letter.
• Send your letter.

Refine, Finalize, and Send a Video Sales Letter

Kennedy’s fundamental processes for refining, finalizing, and getting your written sales letter to your target customer are similar to and apply across contemporary sales mediums, but differences do exist—particularly when you compare written sales letters and video sales letters.

For example, the process of editing a video sales letter requires different skills from editing a written letter. Also, with a written letter, you have to choose physical materials and send your letter by mail, but with a video sales letter, you have to publish and promote your video online.

Conclusion

Kennedy offers some final thoughts on how to strategically use your sales letter, and how to expand its purposes in the future.

Use Your Sales Letter Strategically

Kennedy says that you can improve your brand recognition and increase customers’ response rate to your first sales letter by sending a second (and possibly third) follow-up letter 45 to 60 days after your first.

(Shortform note: Kennedy doesn’t provide specific information on what content should go in your follow-up letter. To get ideas and learn how to boost response rates to email sales letters, consider these templates for a series of follow-up emails. While wording is important, the key is persistence—not quitting until you get a firm yes or no.)

Use Your Sales Letter and Its Fundamental Elements Elsewhere

Kennedy says that in addition to using your sales letter to sell products and services to new and existing customers, you can also use it to:

• Identify qualified sales leads (people who’ve shown they’re interested in your product by responding to your call to action).
• Introduce and smooth the path for follow-up telemarketing calls.
• Bring foot traffic into your business (by announcing events and sales).
• Reduce product returns (by reinforcing that they made a good purchase).

Finally, Kennedy argues that although social media has changed the communications landscape since the first publication of The Ultimate Sales Letter in 1990, the fundamentals required to write a powerful, long-form sales letter translate across platforms—including in online sales letters, TV infomercials, and other advertising. Because of their proven effectiveness, he asserts it would be foolish to abandon written copy sales letters and argues that a combination of offline and online sales letters is the best approach.

The Combined Video Sales Strategy

Kennedy asserts that a strategy combining written and online sales letters is the most effective, but he doesn’t explain why. Other proponents of the approach say it works because it allows you to reach a wider audience, build a stronger brand, reach customers at different points in the buying process, and save money on marketing.

But if a combination of written and online letters is more effective than either technique in isolation, then a combination of video sales strategies may be the best approach. Video commercials, 30- to 60-second ads, can supplement video sales letters by helping you attract customers, create and maintain awareness about your product, and build your brand.