How to format website sales letters

A general rule of sales letters is to keep them as short as possible. But of course it is not general sales letters - dealing: we are a very specific type of sales letter, one designed to be viewed and read online. And that brings some additional rules to ensure that your sales letter does not just work to convert readers into customers, but that works within your website taking into account all the possibilities available on the Internet and sales traditional letters aren 't able.

One of these advantages is the possibility to delegate part of the content in different parts of the site. In traditional commerce, your sales letter is your only chance to tell potential clients everything you might need to know your product. One of the advantages of the Internet however, is that you have an entire website worth of space to convince people of the merits of your product by any means necessary. (Bearing in mind that the limits imposed in the chapter on the basic design of the site, of course). But this greater freedom imposes greater responsibility on you to decide what you should include in your sales letter and what you should leave out. A testimonial from a satisfied customer can long make a crucial difference to make the sale, of course - but you do not really want to do all your customers through a reading of 600 words testimonial of the product to get to your last call to action? Conversely, you may be able to write several pages worth of information on the new compression technology in the new digital video playback software - but it should not at least a little 'of what goes into your sales letter?

A simple rule you can use to solve these problems is this: make sure that every long (but convincing) of your sales argument gets a page to itself. But at the same time, you should at least touch on this information in the sales letter in as short and as persuasive as possible. For example: a point of sale software package graphics may be its intuitive user interface engaging. It should show that the interface by entering a detailed gallery of screenshots or videos, allowing customers to see firsthand what the product has to offer. But you must include in your sales letter a mention of this interface: "What's more, Foo contains a more intuitive user interfaces on the market: in just 60 seconds, you can learn everything you need to know about how it works, giving the edge you need to create dynamic charts. "

This rule applies to any product: if you are selling art, talk about some of his most important admirers, as well as link their testimonies. If you sell soap, give your customers a part of its action and sue their foaming power in your letter. This not only strengthens the point of sale that you want to do, but ensures that if your readers just go directly from point of sale for the purchase decision without taking advantage of the rest of your site, do not you left out one of the topics that allow them making this decision in your favor.

A more practical problem of formatting brings the question of the construction and coding your website. A long sales letter can bore your readers, yes, but it can also make your site designed with care to look terrible on any browser, thus changing the text on your images or your own frames.

This is a problem that you and your coder will have to work as part of the overall design and coding process, so make sure you get your first useful project of your sales letter to the coder soon - and make sure you know how to cut down, rearrange, or otherwise allow to fit comfortably in your website design if necessary. (And a small technical point: if you write your sales letter in a word processing program like Word or OpenOffice, you will have access to formatting options like bold, italic, different fonts, or even colors.

Be very, very careful with these, because they often do not translate well from your word processor files to HTML of your website, and in some cases can also create additional costs as a coder tries frantically to incorporate the decisions in real-formatted your site code. Change the formatting is often a crutch weak writers change the style of their characters or text in order to achieve effects that their words alone can not achieve. Save yourself some trouble: keep your plain text without formatting tricks. Your coder thank you - and your sales letter will be better as a result) .......