An effective sales letter, not surprisingly, hits the same objectives as an effective salesperson. And just as a salesperson wants to be sure to avoid certain mistakes in the selling process, so too the writer of sales letters.

To be effective, your sales letter must be opened, read, believed and acted upon. To do this, it must attract attention, warm the interest of the reader, create a desire for your product or service, and cause your prospect to take positive action.

So today I present "Five Deadly Sales Letter Mistakes." Eliminate one or more of the common blunders described here, and your response will surely improve.

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 1: Writing your letter for the hundreds or thousands of people you will be mailing it to instead of one special person

One sure way to generate an apathetic response to your sales letter is to write for the group or list of people you will be mailing it to. Approaching your letter with a "crowd mentality" instead of focusing in on a single, real, living, breathing prospect will greatly impair the ability of your letter to make a genuine connection with the reader.

The sales letter is the most personal, one-to-one form of advertising there is. It should read as if one person sat down to write to one other person.

Here's a clear example of exactly what I mean. It's from a letter by the brilliant copywriter and nonpareil advertising man, Maxwell Sackheim, and it's more than 80 years old—proof that the more things change, the more they remain the same:

Thank you very much for having written to me for my latest catalog. A copy is being sent to you in another envelope and should reach you in a day or two.

When my catalog arrives I hope you will give it as friendly a welcome as if I were visiting you myself. I've tried to put into it just the words I would say to you if you were to come here personally, or if I were to come to your home and spend an evening with you.

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 2: Thinking that your prospect won't read a long letter

The key question is, What makes for a long letter? To which the answer is, Any letter that is uninteresting is a long letter! Even the one-page letter that many salespeople and amateur marketers arbitrarily limit themselves to can seem long.

For example, some years ago Kevin Costner made an interminably boring, bloated movie titled Waterworld, which the critics panned and audiences ignored. On the other hand, Stephen Spielberg's inspiring and unflinching film about the Holocaust, Schindler's List, was more than three hours long but was a huge critical and financial success.

Here's my point: people read long books, take long trips and watch long movies and plays. And evidence abounds that people read long letters. But people won't read boring letters, dull letters, obviously self-serving I-me-we-product-oriented letters.

Offer the right product or service at the right price to the right audience. If you have enough to say and say it interestingly enough, you can make a five-page letter pull a better response than a two-page letter.

Deadly Sales Letter Mistake No. 3: Being a slave to the rules of grammar

When you were in school, teachers and professors were paid to read your work, and they dutifully corrected your writing according to the formal rules of grammar. In the real world, it's a different story.

When writing a sales letter, you want your work to have a conversational readability. And in most instances that means writing in an informal style. That's how the vast majority of buyers and sellers communicate with one another.

As a result, you'll break a number of formal grammatical rules. You'll start sentences with "and" or "but." Instead of complete sentences, you'll sometimes use a sentence fragment.

But that's OK. And every now and then you'll dangle a participle or end a sentence with a preposition. And that's OK, too.

If all of this seems totally against the grain, consider this true story. Winston Churchill, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1953), was corrected by one of his proofreaders for ending a sentence with a preposition. To which Mr. Churchill replied, "That is the type of nonsense up with which I will not put!"

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Ernest Nicastro

Ernest Nicastro is an award-winning B-to-B freelance copywriter who is also equally adept at crafting B-to-C content. For more information, and to review samples of his work, visit Positive Response.

LinkedIn: Ernest Nicastro

Twitter: @enicastro