Sales Letter

Your next assignment, to be handed in along with the fact sheet, is to write a sales letter, which requires that you pay close attention to audience, maintaining the "you attitude" so important in business writing (see Kolin's pages on sales letters). Members may write the sales letter and fact sheet individually or in groups of up to three.

This letter will probably require a little role-playing by class members; most of you will write a letter that you wouldn’t write in real life. But subjects must be real; don’t make topics up. The best topics are those you know because you now have or have had personal experience with them. For example, write from the perspective of an organization where you do or used to work. If you worked at the YMCA, write a sales letter from the YMCA to families trying to sell them on family memberships. If you belong to a student organization on campus, write a letter to VSU students trying to recruit new members. If you have volunteered with an organization, write a letter from that organization.

Letters also need to be realistic. You may have worked for McDonald’s in the past, but McDonald’s doesn’t send sales letters; small businesses send sales letters, but not multinational corporations. The best topics are small and local: look for an organization you are familiar with at VSU, in Valdosta, or in your hometown.

A sales letter is written to persuade the addressee to take some appropriate action with regard to a product or service--make a purchase, make a donation, stop by for a visit or a tour, and so on. In brief, writing a sales letter involves (1) selecting a topic about which to “sell” an audience, (2) analyzing the audience’s values, interests, and concerns with respect to the topic, and (3) creating a document that presents the topic with the audience’s values, interests, and concerns in mind.

Here is a brief overview of the sales letter in terms of SCAMP. Kolin deals very well with this document in his chapter on types of business letters.

• Style: Generally, sales letters are written for just the kind of person who would do what the writer wants. So if the writer wants the addressee to come into a car dealer's showroom to look at the latest cars, then the writer uses some technical language of automobiles; the salesperson just assumes that the audience is interested in cars. If the addressee is being asked to donate to his/her alma mater, then the writer lovingly describes the reputation, the tradition, and the current achievements of the school in emotionally charged language. The writer assumes that the reader is the kind of person who is predisposed to do what the writer wants. Then, if the audience is that kind of person, the letter has a chance to succeed.

Style, then, depends on audience and subject matter: so you need to know exactly what it is you’re selling and to whom you’re selling it. A letter selling financial planning, for example, will contain a good amount of wording found in the field of financial planning. But the language will also differ according to audience. Is your audience a younger one interested in “building a nest egg”? Or is your audience an older one interested in “protecting the nest egg”? Language should vary according to audience.

• Chunking: The sales letter does not have much time to get its job done before it is deposited where most unsolicited mail ends up. So it is wise to create an opening that reveals clearly what your subject is but that also emphasizes why the audience should care about it.  This is the first half of Kolin's "four A's": get the reader's attention and highlight the subject's primary appeal to the reader in your introductory paragraph.

Let's say you're trying to sell a younger professional on skydiving.  Why should a professional be interested in sky-diving? That's what you must figure out and highlight at the start of the letter.  Perhaps there's nothing like sky-diving to relieve the stress and monotony of the white-collar job.  A typical opening, then, might be a question: "Wouldn't you like to know the world’s best stress reliever?  You might never guess what it is: skydiving."

The body of the letter describes the subject matter's application to the audience’s values and concerns in more detail. Besides relieving stress, for example, our imagined professional would be interested in sky-diving’s safety, of course, as well as cost and training. Those topics would be taken up in short body paragraphs.

The conclusion requests a specific action of the audience.  Application and action are Kolin's final two A's. Write a full-block letter of no more than a page.

So here’s an example outline of a sales letter:

· Introduction: primary appeal of sky-diving: stress relief, fun

· First body paragraph: affordability/cost of sky-diving

· Second body paragraph: safety and training

· Third body paragraph: friendship, camaraderie

· Conclusion: invitation to visit open house at the sky-diving park

• Audience: The audience is all-important in the writing of a sales letter--not the subject matter. The subject might be fascinating--you might think the newest Dodge mid-sized truck is outstanding--but your audience will not do what you want it to do unless you relate the truck to the audience's values, interests, and concerns. Horsepower, then, is less important than what the audience can do with that horsepower--the appeal of the subject and its application to the audience's life: pull a bigger camper? Haul more stuff? What? Imagine what your audience is interested in, what it values: safety, cost, vacation time, health, convenience, and so on. And then describe how your subject appeals to and applies to what the audience values.
  
  
• Message: The sales letter does not have enough time to be very detailed, and, again, the sales letter is not an informational document. So keep the detailed, technical description to a minimum, although some buzz words and a few numbers can be important to connect with the audience. If, for example, your subject is a line of computers, mention some of the most relevant statistics that computer-wise people pay attention to when shopping for computers.  But keep the letter to a page.
  
  
• Purpose: The purpose of a sales letter is motivational; the audience has to be so interested in your subject that it gets up and goes or writes a check or makes a call--perhaps not immediately, but sometime soon.  Request a specific action at the end of the letter, e.g., "Come in for our special showing of the 2007 Hyundai Sonata next Saturday morning, September 18."