More Conversions From An Alternate Sales Letter

One time I wrote a sales letter, and like I write most sales letters, I banged it out in a couple of hours. And then I went to go and upload it to my site, and I realized I already had a sales letter there. So I had this product, and about a month or two prior I had written a sales letter for it, and I totally forgot about it.  

But then when I was ready to launch it, I wrote a new sales letter unaware that I had the original one finished. And so I had these two different sales letters. It was the exact same product, but they all hit on totally different benefits, and they had totally different stories. So it might help sometimes to just rewrite your sales letter with a fresh mind. If you’re really devoted to a product and you’re really devoted to making it convert better, write it with a fresh mind. Or if you don’t like to write copy, pay someone else to write it and don’t show them the original sales letter. List all the benefits, give them the product, maybe even rename the product to prevent them from going out and doing a Google search, and just write it with a fresh mind.  

And these four questions are what I like to ask myself. I learned this from Jason Fladlien’s bare essence talk copy. You ask yourself these four questions:

What will the reader do? So when they’re viewing your page, what do you want them to do? Do you want them to buy your product? Do you want them to opt into a list? What is the call to action? And if it’s a book make sure you mention what the book is. So it’s like, “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to click my dog- training guide and figure out the 12 ways you can teach your dog to run twice as fast without any work at all. You just follow these simple directions and they will work on any breed of dog, no matter what age, no matter what time of the day, no matter how impatient you are or how difficult your dog is.”

Then you ask, “What do these people want and desire?” So you kind of said that in the call to action, but you think what do they want and desire?  They don’t necessarily want to do the training of the dog. They want the dog to already be trained, so you want to skip over that. You want to skip over the work, and just skip right to the result. The result is that the dog can run super fast and will get tired out more quickly; so he will require less upkeep because he’ll run faster, and when it’s playtime he’ll tire himself out quicker. And he’ll have more fun because he won’t just be moping around the house. And he’ll live longer because he’ll be working his heart and his muscles and everything. So what they want and desire is a dog that’s very happy, that’s always exercising, lives twice as long, and is as low maintenance as possible.  

Then you write down what are the top objections. So you have this dog training system: How do you make your dog run faster?  What are the top objections? Will my dog run too far away from me? You can say, “No, your dog will not run too far away from you because your dog will still be the same person. You’re not brainwashing or hypnotizing the dog. You’re just teaching him a few techniques on how to run faster.”  So he’ll run faster, but he’ll still be loyal to you. And if you play catch, he’s not going to run twice as far. He’s going to run and go and get the bone and bring it back to you twice as fast.  So that’s objection #1.  And then you can have another objection like, ”What about my Chihuahua? He’s really tiny and I’m afraid that if he runs really fast then he’ll have a heart attack and die.” And you can say, “Well, I’ve tried this on all kinds of tiny little dogs and big dogs and middle-sized dogs. And they all liked it, and none of them died of a heart attack. In fact, many of them lived two or three extra long lives. You might even segue into a personal story of a dog. Like maybe you saved some dog off the street and he was really tired, but then you tried this system on him, and he got right back into good health. I don’t know, but you just think of some real objection that people are asking for. And you know these objections either by looking on forums and seeing what common questions are, or maybe you’re a dog trainer yourself because you have this dog-training product. So you answer the top objections.  

And then you finally say, “Why should they order right now?” You can say, “This is an introductory price, and I’m going to double the price very soon from 20 bucks to 40 bucks because a lot of people are getting their hands on this. And I want to add more content later so I’m going to have the high price to justify it.” Or you can simply just say, “You should order right now because your dog isn’t going to live forever. It’s tough, but it’s true. And you want him or her to be around for as long as possible, and you want to have the most amount of fun. So you should order right now so you can put these tips into action today. Maybe if you see your dog in the same room as you and he’s sitting over there on his little bed and he’s just not feeling good, well you can give him a big smile on his face and turn his life around right now.

So those are the four questions you ask. You ask: What will the reader do? What action will they take after reading your letter? Like ordering now? What do they want and desire? So what is going to be the end result What are the top objections to fulfilling that desire? And why should they order right now? What’s the urgency?  

So you just take your existing product and you write a totally new sales letter. And if you only answer these questions, the rest of the benefits will write themselves, and you’ll have a style that’s way different than the original letter. And you can just take the benefits in the new sales letter and merge them into the old one. So you’re just thinking up more benefits that you didn’t think of the first time around that you wrote the copy.  

And like I said, you don’t have to write this yourself. You can have another copywriter write the letter. And maybe you want to integrate his benefits into your old sales letter. Or maybe you want to take the benefits of your old sales letter and integrate them into the benefits for your new sales letter. There’s lots of things you can do to tweak this alternate letter.