Writing To Sell - 7 Guidelines

Diana Schneidman (formerly Diana Cohen Harris) Chicago (Bolingbrook), IL 800.660.1874 Diana@DianaWrites.com Home Writing To Sell Writing Your Sales Story Insurance/Financial Writing About Diana Representative_Clients Contact Diana		http://www.DianaWrites.com Writing to Sell: Seven Guidelines *Tell a story.* Once upon a time, people loved a great story. They still love a great story today. Aesop’s fables, Jesus’s parables, and Native American lore all illustrate the power of a story to involve the reader and communicate the message. At a more prosaic level, when I am confronted with a self-help book, I scan the stories and frequently read little else. *Tell enough to sell more.* Prospects want to be convinced; they want to know as much as possible before they decide to buy. Long copy can be successful—if it is interesting to the reader. <>Postal marketing campaigns continue to prove that long copy works. To this day we open our mailboxes to find multiple sheets of white paper apparently typed on an old IBM Selectric and all folded into thirds in a business envelope. Though experts claim that everyone now expects instant gratification and has an attention span measured in milliseconds, direct marketers report that long letters still sell. That’s why we continue to receive them. In fact, the traditional direct-mail motto is "Tell more to sell more." *Avoid cute and clever.* At their worst, cute and clever can even detract from the message. The reader may chuckle, but this doesn’t mean she buys. Take this slogan I momentarily considered for my writing business: "When you care enough to write the very best.” Potentially cute, but I would have had to twist the website around to accommodate this burst of creativity. It would sound trite over time, and furthermore, others have probably adapted the same idea. I had to be brutal. It went. *Sell the steak, not just the sizzle.* A lot of today’s marketing gurus have it all wrong. They place too much emphasis on benefits without identifying the process. I’m sorry, but if you’re blocking my path to the cocktail weenies, I don’t want to hear all about how you “help companies achieve more with less” or how you “lead companies in improving the bottom line by streamlining work processes.” Please help me translate this babble into a concept I understand. Like “sales training” or “computer programming.” I practice what I preach. I scribbled pages of taglines for my business before I narrowed them down to one, and all serious contenders had some form of the word “write” in them. Yes, I’m a writer. Specifically, I Write Your Sales Story. *Write in conversational style.* What works in sales copy would most likely flunk the SAT writing exam.Back in school we were taught that a proper paragraph has at least three sentences and the best have about five. The first sentence introduces the points made in the paragraph. The intermediate sentences expand upon these points. The final sentence summarizes these points. The first and final sentences also transition between paragraphs. No sentence begins with “and,” “or,” or “but.” Not so in sales today. Short paragraphs enhance readability. They are more inviting to the eye than big chunks of solid text. Also, marketers write for reading aloud even though most people read silently to themselves. A run-on sentence flows fine, but it doesn’t look readable. So cut it into parts and make two or three sentences. Like this. OK? And yes, a single-sentence paragraph is just fine. *Punctuation and spelling do count.* They require intense personal attention since the computer’s spell checker often misses glaring errors. (Take the incorrect usage of “to,” “too,” and “two,” for instance.) I pay attention to these matters because I want your company to look its best. *Tweak e-mail to avoid spam filters.* We know what turns people on: words like “free!” “Money.” And “secrets.” However, that’s exactly what spam filters weed out of e-mail inboxes. Test sales e-mails ruthlessly. Check out this website to test your copy: www.enetplace.com/spam-checker.html