Testing your sales letter

17 January 2009

40 WAYS TO BOOST RESPONSE TO YOUR SALES LETTER

Marketing with a sales letter is all about testing, so don’t be afraid to make mistakes. This section will help make your mistakes small ones and avoid some common errors with your sales letters.

What follows is a review of results of tests carried out over the years. Each of the actions listed lifted response to a sales letter significantly when tested against a control promotion, or measured against previous promotions not incorporating the change.

One word of warning though. What works for one product at one time may not work for another, so don’t be afraid to re-test these sales letter ideas.

When testing two different treatments within, say, a mailshot, there are various formula that you can apply to find the number of sales letters to mail out to make sure that the test is a valid one. If you get more than 50 replies from each cell you are testing and the difference between the two is more than 20%, you can be reasonably confident that the test result is valid.

Response to your sales letter
The three aspects of a mailing that have the most influence on response to your sales letter are:

1. Media: the list, newspaper, website, magazine etc

2. Proposition: the prime benefit, unique selling proposition, offer

3. Price

Changes to anything else will only marginally increase
or decrease the response to your sales letter.

Go here for more about creating your sales letters