Vanilla Vs 99 flavors Sales-letters

August 2, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Copy Writing

The Plain Truth About Sales Letters That Work

If you’ve been on the Internet for any amount of time you would have noticed that sales letter seem to come in all kinds of varieties and presentation formats,… but lets take a look at the conventional sales letter for a moment.

While most Internet Marketers are prepossessed with the importance of flashy graphs, fancy borders and background, flashing .gif order buttons, creative images, custom headers and so forth, there are a few people that are approaching the task of sales letter creation a little differently. You could call them the "vanilla marketers" I suppose.

What these guys are doing in my opinion is quite brilliant because they’re relying on content and copywriting skill rather than flashy graphics that capture attention and tend to subtly play on hidden emotional triggers to assist in the sales objectives.

I can give you two examples of guys that have mastered this process. The format and presentation of their sales letters always tends to look the same. There’s nothing flashy,… just a plain background and then the headlines and a bit of highlighting does the rest. To me, that tells me from the outset that these guys have something really worth reading about because they’re so confident that they DONT need a bunch of flashy graphics to win the day.

Let me give you a couple of examples: Robert Plank,.. is a programmer turned developer and excellent Internet marketer. During the past couple of years I have watched him go from virtually nowhere to being a highly successful Internet marketer. He produces lots of products, most of which are really great,… and all of them are promoted using the same sales letter graphic presentation format that he’s been using since day-1,.. "plain vanilla". There are no fancy headers and footers, no visual graphics, just headlines and copy and a call to action that gets results. Although there are some graphics used such as letter body borders (gives the sales letter a shadow effect) and order buttons that change color on scroll-over, the only other mechanisms being used are colored headlines and dashed-border boxes. The other thing that’s becoming more prevalent on Robert’s sales letters lately is the use of video,.. but again that’s presented very simply in the sales letter.

The other guy that my hat goes off to for the plainest (but truly excellent) sales letters is Paul Myers. On Pauls sales letters you won’t see any graphics at all. Even the borders of the sales letter body are plain black lined shadowless borders. He uses black and white text without even any colored headlines. The headlines of course are larger and emboldened but no color separation at all. Occasionally he’ll take a phrase or sentence and highlight it (usually in grey),… and when you get to the end of the sales letter the order button isn’t a button, it’s just plain text that says something like GET STARTED TODAY. Now THAT"S selling with confidence! I love the approach and it just absolutely proves that all the focus and emphasis on flashy graphics isn’t so important as having something really worthwhile to offer and then presenting it powerfully using sales copy that sells.

In conclusion, I’d have to say that the thing that both Paul and Robert have got going for them is that while everyone else is throwing fancy graphics at their page visitors, Paul and Robert are catching their attention (even if at a subliminal level) with the fact that their sales letters are noticeably different in the absence of graphics and therefore that alone makes them distinctive. It’s very clever and subtle,.. but most of all I just really admire the raw talent and confidence that goes into their highly effective sales letters.

Cheers,

russell-signature

PS… the links to these sales letters are not affiliate links (nope…not even cloaked links).. just there to show you exactly what this article is talking about