Secrets of a sales campaign

Whether your business is a product or a service, you are selling it and selling yourself and you won’t make any profit unless you know how to sell. Whether it be a product or service, you cannot sell without ‘talking ‘in some way or other with prospective customers, you have to get your message out. This may be by email, telesales, sales letters, newsletters or other means.  

Whichever you use, a winning script has the aim of convincing the potential customer that you have what they need, it creates this image in their minds. You convince the potential customers that what you have will improve their lives

While there will of course be some personal touches, a winning sales script follows basic principles. …..get attention, get people interested and wanting to see what you have got for them , make them want it, and make them do the necessary to get it …sign up and press the button right away, so that they get the deal you are offering .  

Of course, if you circulate your sales literature online, then you don’t have to pay for postage, but you may well have to pay for a bulk mailer that permits you to send enough emails for a business, though I have used free bulk e mailers with ease and success. Some would say that on the internet, using email for sales, you don’t have to worry about letterhead stationery, but even so a good email sales template can really grab attention and can be found for free. A general guideline for your sales page on your website is that it should be the length of a mailing. A sales letter should always use headed paper, including your logo and a slogan or motto if you have one for the business.

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Whichever method you use for your sales, the aim is to sell, i.e. to close the deal. You actually do the selling and sealing the deal with your sales talk in your sales letter, whether you send it by email or snail mail.

There can be a lot of debate about just how long a sales letter should be, do people even take the time to read them, or do they go straight in the recycling bin or the trash file if sent by email? But…people do read sales material, there is a natural curiosity in humans to know if you have something that will benefit them.

Make your sales material visually attractive and the script interesting and persuasive. Emphasize the benefits your product or service will give the reader, and grab attention so that the reader wants to read to the end …and buy the product.

A lot of whether or not people read to the end of what you send them depends on its visual appearance and if it is easy on the eye. Use paragraphs, make the sentences short and have lots of white space. Good appropriate use of images helps a lot too.

Use your name, address or whichever other contact details you wish, email certainly and phone number, either landline or cell phone but increasingly cell phone numbers are used for business and a company logo. The aim is to have you look like a business, especially when you are starting out and need to build business, you want to look professional, not just another person selling something from home. You need to inspire confidence by looking like an established business.

Many people starting a business from home, understandably worry about using their home address. One solution if affordable, is to use the services of the organisations if you have them in your area, which help startup businesses. You can often at low cost get a desk space, internet services and a mail address. This also solves the problem that your household insurance or lease may not permit the property being used for business purposes. A problem with using a box number as an address is that it can give an impression of being a temporary location and that your business is not stable. Apparently, you can get a box number from a supplier that has a street address, and then your box number address would read like the number of e.g. an apartment. If your sales letter is purely via email and not a postal campaign, then put the contact details you want to use at the bottom, more often than not you will be contacted by email or your contact box on your website, but it makes you look reliable if possible customers see that you are willing to supply an address, at least of some sort.

Of course, you also need a means for customers to place orders, or request your services. Make it as easy to complete and return to you as possible whether this be online or via a marketing letter  and in the case of a book that is delivered as an e-book , or software to download then there aren’t too many necessary options anyway , just pay and receive the link . Keep it simple and make paying as easy as possible with several options, PayPal always works well as a popular payment system online and do try to set yourself up to take card payments. Make your ordering system too complicated and potential customers just won’t bother, they will look elsewhere …have a successful sales campaign…sell yourself and good luck!! . 

Valerie Hedges