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The sad reality is that too many direct mail plans fail. A large number of the letters or post cards don't get any response at all, and most that get a response don't get nearly the response they should.

Fortunately, the next time you do a mailing, it doesn't have to be that way. You can put the odds on your side by following seven simple steps.

I've written for clients, and reviewed the letters of others, including everything from letters written by inexperienced entrepreneurs to letters written by highly skilled copywriters. I've noticed that the most successful letters have the following characteristics in common:

 

1. Successful moneymaking letters or post cards are personal. These letters or post cards read as though the writer is having a conversation with you. If you read them out loud, you hear spoken language, not the stilted English of formal business correspondence.

Nor does the letter have the "stickler" language of a by-the-book school assignment. The word that always seems to describe the tone and feeling of these letters or post cards: relaxed.

Action you can take: Become a professional eavesdropper! Not for the purpose of invading people's privacy, but rather to learn how people talk in informal conversations. Listen to talk radio, watch movies, pay closer attention when you're having a chat with friends. By doing this, you will learn to write the way people talk, and this will improve the effectiveness of your direct mail materials.

2. Successful moneymaking mailings are focused on the wants of the reader. If you've ever had a great business idea that went nowhere -- or, if you've ever watched someone else start a business that flopped because no one would become a customer -- then you have observed the following principle in action: People buy what they want, not what you think they should want!

This is a very hard and expensive lesson that gets learned over and over every day in business, usually in the form of lost sales and, in extreme cases, bankruptcy. Listen carefully to what people say and how they say it. Take what people tell you and address it directly in your letter.

Action: Get to know your customers so well that you know what they're really seeking when they buy from you.

3. Successful moneymaking mailings are written in the reader's language. Maybe you've noticed that every business and social group has its own set of buzzwords and its own way of talking. For example, I recently wrote a letter to a number of CEOs of multi-million-dollar corporations. Though they are in charge of businesses just as smaller entrepreneurs are, CEOs are a far more objective, fact-focused group.

As emotional as some of these CEOs may be at times in private, they need to maintain a very reasoned and clear-headed public presence as part of their jobs. So of course they tend to talk logically. Small-business owners, on the other hand, have more freedom to express emotions. So they tend to talk more emotionally.

Why does this matter? It matters because on the face of it, CEOs and small business owners would seem to have a lot in common. Yet research showed me the everyday language of the CEO was different from the language of entrepreneurs, a group I know well (and belong to myself). To make the CEO letter effective, I had to tone the emotion way down, and build up the logic.

You need to have the same kind of awareness about the language your prospects use. Here's why: When your letter sounds the way the reader talks, barriers go down and the reader opens up emotionally. Therefore, the likelihood of a response to your letter is increased.

But when your letter is written differently from the way the reader talks, the letter is read at a distance. The empathy the reader feels while reading goes down. The likelihood of a response becomes much less.

Action: Before you write, spend some time talking to the kinds of people who will be receiving your letter. Analyze the way they talk. If you can, get permission to tape record several conversations and transcribe the conversations. In your letter, write using similar words, phrases and modes of expression.

4. Successful moneymaking mailings are easy to read. Would you like to know one secret of highly-paid copywriters? Two words: "eye appeal."

It's a known fact that if a page has "eye appeal" -- if, at a glance, it "looks" easy to read -- the chances are far greater that a prospect will venture into the first sentence than if it looks hard to read. And what looks easy to read? Three things: Type, short paragraphs and variety.

"Type" in this case means the font must be big enough to read. For your main letter, you want it to be at least 12 point. "Short paragraphs" means usually no more than four lines. And "variety" means bolding, underlining and indenting whole paragraphs to emphasize key words and points for the skim-reader.

Action: Check your letter for type, short paragraphs, and variety. Then, have a customer or qualified prospect read your letter before you send it out. If that person gets stuck anywhere, or complains that the letter is confusing or difficult, fix the problem until the letter is easy to read.

5. Successful moneymaking mailings are convincing. To be profitable for you, a letter has to do more than make a good impression on the person who is reading it. Your letter has to be convincing. Only if it is convincing will the reader respond.

To make your letter convincing, you must know your product or service, know your customers, and -- most importantly --know the actual, real, live way to make an effective sales pitch out loud, in person. Once you know those three things, you need to translate that sales pitch to paper. Do that successfully, and your letter will be very convincing.

Action: Before you write your letter, outline the structure and contents of your successful sales pitch. Then, weave the pitch into the text of the letter itself. After the letter is written, take an uncompromising look and see if your letter is as convincing as you are when you make your sales pitch in person.

6. Successful moneymaking mailings are clear. A little-known fact about good writing is that it does not take a simple mind to write a simple sentence. It merely takes clear thinking. Sometimes clear thinking is easy, and sometimes it takes a lot of hard work!

Here's how you know if your writing is clear: anyone who is a prospect will understand everything you've written, the way you intended it to be understood. If not, it doesn't mean the prospect is dim-witted. It just means you need to make the writing clearer.

Clarity in writing often comes through refinement. More often than not, this takes time. Trying to meet an arbitrary deadline to complete a letter is often a bad thing to do, because you sacrifice clarity for speed. If people get your letter on time but they don't get what you're trying to say, then you've "won the battle but lost the war." That's an unfortunate position to be in.

Action: Take the time you need to get your letter to the clearest, simplest expression of what you have to say, in the fewest number of words possible. When you do this, it will pay off handsomely in the improved response you get.

7. Successful moneymaking letters or post cards are motivating enough to make prospects call you or send in an order. I once wrote a sales letter for an auto body shop in an upscale area. The letter was for a special on detailing cars. The business owner was stunned by the response we got to the new mailing.

One of the things that made this letter work was how well it pushed the hot buttons of the car owners who received it. We warned them that summer heat could "bake" flaws onto the finish of their nice cars. And we offered them a free bonus to extend the protection of the detailing for months.

Action: Get to know what motivates your prospects. When you write, remember and apply the old sales rule: "People buy for their reasons, not yours."

Written by Brian Ratty