Ask the Experts
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For our web-based copywriting service simply paste your sales letter copy into the message box for review.
I answer all emails personally and I’ll come back as soon as possible.
Many thanks
Peter Hobday
How to get better response
Dave Smith asked “How can I get a better response from my marketing?”
The key to attracting better response to a promotion does not rest simply on how many replies come in. ‘Better response’ demands two principle components:
1. Reaching your financial targets
2. Ensuring repeat business
Your financial targets will be based on volume (number of replies) and revenue (the cash that you receive). You could, for example, receive twice the number of replies you expect, but fail to reach your money target. This can happen when sending out a ‘bill me’ promotion, where three months down the line you discover only 50% of orders have paid up when you need 70% to make the promotion worthwhile.
Ensuring repeat business means getting your new subscribers to renew when the time comes. This is where most promotions fail – they have not taken into consideration what renewal rates you are likely to achieve. The whole matter has been overlooked. A seemingly highly successful promotion can turn into a disaster if most new subscribers fail to renew.
It’s crucial, therefore, that whoever creates your promotion does so with renewals in mind and that figure is built into his or her brief. The two areas you need to watch are the copy and the offer. Your coupon is therefore all important, and an expert (us for example) can see at a glance if your promotion has been constructed to attract long-term subscribers.
Repeat business is a major principle of any successful publishing venture. Unless you have taken steps to ensure new customers will become long-term ones, you don’t really have a business, do you?
Peter Hobday
Creating emails
how can I write great emails?
Gavin
Gavin – a very good question! Creating an effective email is the same as creating an effective sales letter for a direct mail pack. The main difference, for me, is that instead of having an order coupon, it has links to the landing page. The landing page has the same function as the coupon, containing the same elements.
Most email promotions have links throughout the copy to enable the reader to place his order. That usually means one link per screen view.
However, one of the most successful email promotions I have written was of the story of a great veteran athlete, Sylvester Stein, who took up sprinting at a late age and won two gold medals. The story is a strong one and I wrote it to advertise the Peak Performance letter.
I took the view that to break the story up with links offering a subscription to the publication would not be right – the reader would be diverted from the story, which really needed the whole letter to tell — around six pages of A4.
It turned out I was right, and the letter became one of the top performers in the subscription building programme. You can see the promotion by registering with our confidential area.
But for most email promotions, links should run regularly throughout the copy. And the copy should follow the same principles as a direct mail sales letter. See our article on how these are constructed.
If you go to the wizardwordz.com website, they have softeware that guides you to producing effective copy: