Sales letter styles vary enormously.

Partly it depends on what you’re selling – things like Coca Cola are so ubiquitous now that they don’t really need to create sales letters but in their early days, it was a different story.

I’m going to look at 3 different styles that all produce decent quality sales letters. This post wil concentrate on the actual styles, not creating the sales letters themselves but if you want to delve deeper into the subject I’ll give some book recommendations as well as a plug for my own product.

Video sales letters

These are the new kid on the block on the internet but they’ve been used on television for a long time – just think of all those late night television commercials and even the product sales channels like QVC.

Some video sales letters show an actual person, others have animation and others just have a PowerPoint style presentation with a narrator.

If you go across to sites like Clickbank and search their marketplace for top sellers in most topic areas, you’ll see a variety of styles.

Most of them will have a delayed payment button so that you have to either sit through the majority of the sales letter or click away.

And if you click away, chances are you’ll get an exit pop-up that begs you to stay and often gives you the text version of the sales pitch in the video.

The copy for a video sales letter can be very similar to the copy you’d use in a regular sales letter. That’s probably best done with a script and either a presentation/screen capture style video or a “talking head” webcam shot of you, probably with your computer screen acting as a teleprompter.

My personal preference is a presentation style – I can press pause if necessary and don’t have to play around with video editing software to merge the different cuts together.

It pays to rehearse your script – preferably out loud so that you can figure out where you stumble and fix it.

Incidentally, that’s well worth doing for written sales letters as well because most of us read “out loud” in our heads and if we stumble there, we lose focus.

The fact that so many of the top Clickbank products use video sales letters suggests that it’s a format that works well.

I’ve also occasionally seen a video sales letter with the exact same text below it. But not often, which suggests that other people’s testing has come to the conclusion that it doesn’t work.

Either that or they’re all playing follow-the-leader.

Which is possible.

So if that appeals to you, experiment.

There are plenty of A/B split programs out there that you can use to measure which works best. Or you could be a bit less scientific and use the A/B split built into a plugin like WP Shorties.

If you decide to use the talking head option with your webcam or even your mobile phone, make sure there are as few distractions as possible for your viewer.

Another option involves using a background screen so you just appear in front of a white screen or even a superimposed background video – there are ready made ones available to make it look as though you’re at a news desk (that can be quite effective) and other situations.

Don’t worry about being completely word perfect. So long as you’re not stumbling and fluffing your lines too often, the occasional glitch makes you seem more human. Or you can use your video editing software to get rid of the ugliest parts where you messed up more than you’d like.

Written sales letters

These are still my preference.

Maybe I’m old fashioned in that respect.

But written sales letters work for a lot of buyers as well – I can read or skim a sales letter much easier than I can a video.

Which is why so many products prefer videos as they force you to go through the whole process. Unless you just mute or pause them and open a new tab until the price appears of course.

Written sales letters can take many forms.

A good format is to use a story – our defences come down a lot when we’re told a story so it makes the selling easier.

Maybe the most famous story is the one used by the Washington Post. It the most successful sales letter of all time and was mailed continuously for 25 years. So it’s a tried and tested format.

It tells the story of two almost identical men except that 25 years on (complete coincidence on the time frame here) one of them was a manager and the other was president of the company. The president had been reading the Wall Street Journal and that was the reason for his success.

That letter has been modeled and ripped off countless times.

Because the format works.

25 years in mail order is an incredible length of time – mail order houses play “beat the control” all the time and to stay for that long it would have had to beat all newcomers.

Copywriters like John Carlton regularly use a story format.

If you can tell a story even on a sort-of-OK basis, chances are your sales letter will work nicely.

That’s because (as I said a bit earlier) we drop our defences when we read a story.

Because that’s what we’ve been taught to do since even before we learned to read.

You didn’t start off reading text books as a toddler.

Modern toddlers have books like this read to you and then progress to things like the Gruffalo.

When I was young, we didn’t have quite that range but they were still story books.

So stories are not sales pitches – even though there’s a plethora of merchandise associated with them.

An easier way to write a sales letter is to just explain what’s in the product.

You’ve seen this countless times:

On page 94 you’ll discover how _______ instantly lets you do _____________.

It’s done that way because it works.

Is it lazy copy?

Maybe.

Does it sell?

Almost certainly.

Add in some testimonials – with pictures of the people giving them and preferably their full names and maybe a video part way through to break up the sales page and that works well.

Which also brings us on to the third type of sales letter format.

You might think I’m cheating a bit calling it a different format but I think it’s regularly overlooked as an option so I’ll cover it anyway.

Hybrid sales letters

If you’re in the internet marketing niche you encounter these all the time.

They combine video and text and often infographics.

Sometimes the video will start playing as soon as you reach the page.

Sometimes there will be added urgency in the form of a countdown timer.

Countdown timers aren’t just used in internet marketing – one of the meditation programs I promote uses them to encourage you to sign up for a free audio.

All these elements are used because they work and when they’re combined they work even better.

The video – even if you instinctively press pause as soon as you hear it blaring out of your speakers – reminds you that you’re on a new page and that something is happening.

Probably something quite dramatic if the soundtrack and movie-trailer voice are anything to go by.

So your brain switches gear and either automatically tells the video to shut up or pays attention to it.

Either way, you’re already interacting with the page and that’s a good thing.

Don’t let your own prejudices work against you – it doesn’t matter whether you personally like things like countdown timers or autostarting videos or whatever.

Test.

If they alienate your customers and reduce sales, don’t keep them.

But if you get higher conversions and higher average sale values then it could be time to throw away your preconceptions.

The trick with sales letters…

Do it!

You’ll get better over time.

But only if you actually start.

Sales letter resources

• Easy copywriting – my product to help you write sales letters fast
• The Ultimate Sales Letter – Dan Kennedy’s book. I’ve read it and used it and it applies just as much to the web as it does to printed sales letters (remember that the web is basically just a different medium but all the mind triggers remain the same)
• Scientific Advertising – written in 1923 but still an excellent resource, I’ve read it and got past the olde worlde style. This latest edition has been edited a bit to get over some of that. Or (because it’s out of copyright) you can download a PDF for free.
• Gary Halbert’s letters – free resource and well worth reading when you’ve got a few spare hours. Gary was a master copywriter and it shows.

Above all, do it.

Model sales letters you like without ripping them off.

And practice.

Because practice works!