Sales Letter Shark

What’s your product’s biggest benefit? Hmmm, are you SURE?

You might be just a bit too close to your product to see it the way your customers see it.  And that means you might actually be blind to your product’s BIGGEST benefit!

You’ve probably seen this problem on other people’s sales letters.  You start reading a sales letter.  It’s kind of boring.  Actually, the product seems kind of mediocre.  The benefits are ok, but nothing to write home about.

Then you find this amazing benefit, hidden deep inside the letter.  You buy the product based on that one benefit.  (Though you can’t believe the product creator and copywriter “hid” this benefit!)

This happens all the time.  The copywriter doesn’t even realize what the biggest benefit is, so the benefit that’s most important to the customers gets hidden away like an ugly baby!

In fact, I just ran into this today on a sales letter.

The biggest headline at the top of the page was this:

“Available for Immediate Download.”

No kidding, that’s where my eyes were drawn to first, because that line was in big, bold print. (Let’s not even discuss the fact that the bolded text doesn’t even tell you WHAT is available for download and who would be interested in ‘em!)

You see, this marketer is selling gardening manuals that used to only be available in print.  Now they’re available for download.

But guess what?  The fact that they’re available for download is NOT the biggest benefit of these manuals. And that means the line about them being available for download should NOT be the biggest headline on the page, AKA the first thing that draws people’s eyes in.

See, the biggest benefit of these gardening manuals is still all about the problems these manuals solve.  The gardener wants to know what these manuals will do for her gardens… and for her.

The fact that she gets an instant solution is a bonus.  But since this isn’t a very desperate market (you can’t grow a garden overnight any way), the “instant download” is a nice benefit, but not the biggest benefit.

Make sense?

Ok, so here’s what I suggest…

If you’re about to tweak an existing sales letter, talk to your customers first. Ask them what they liked best about your product. Ask them what they think is the “best thing” or biggest benefit of your product.

You might be surprised to learn that you and your customers have different ideas about your product’s biggest benefits!

Now, this doesn’t mean you should take these reviews as gospel. But certainly you should take them into consideration when crafting your sales letter.