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Do sales letters really make a difference when sending out a brochure or a catalogue?

Read virtually any standard direct marketing text books, or attend almost any direct mail seminar and you will be told that your response rate can be enhanced if you mail out a letter in addition to your leaflet, catalogue or brochure.

And yet a simple test of this hypothesis suggests that this is not always the case. Often a letter has no effect. Occasionally it can even harm the response rate. How can such universally repeated advice be so wrong?

The problem is that a huge number of sales letters that accompany a brochure or leaflet are stunningly dull, boring and irrelevant. As a result potential customers are used to the accompanying letter being pointless and so they barely take a look at it. Sometimes the letter hits the wrong note so totally that it actually interferes with the sales from the catalogue.

In this article Tony Attwood shows how the marketing letter can be rescued from this situation in such a way that it not only grabs and holds attention, it also overcomes all the damage done by all your competitors.

The rewards of creating such a letter can be enormous, because at once an interesting sales letter accompanying a brochure or leaflet singles your company out from the competition and not only ensures readership of your catalogue this time, but heightens expectation when you publish the next edition.

This article, 'The Perfect Sales Letter and How to Write It' thus not only enhances your sales, but also ensures that the customer looks less favourably on the opposition, who continue to begin their covering letter, 'It gives me great pleasure to enclose'.

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