The Answer Is In Questions
One of the best ways to begin a sales letter is with a question. Sales people know that asking their prospects questions not only builds trust but also extracts important information on which to base their appeal.
Consider this opening of sales letter for a fictitious product that restores hair in bald men:
Dear Friend,
Are you worried about your present hair loss? Have you already tried hair restoration products that didn’t live up to their claims? Are you embarrassed to look in the mirror? Are you about to settle for the myth that ‘this is just genetic and nothing can be done about it?
As you read through each question you can see how the copywriter tries to enter a conversation with the reader by showing that he knows what concerns him. The prospect also assumes that since you raised the questions that you have the solutions to his problems.
In the case of a sales letter you cannot ask the prospect questions expecting to get a live answer since the letter is a one way conversational tool. But asking the question that the prospect is already asking in his head helps build rapport and gets his attention.
Some of the greatest thinkers and philosophers asked the correct questions that led them to discover some of the laws of nature that we take for granted today. Asking questions early in the sales letter can also cause the reader to think in the direction you want him going.
Since you are trying to build rapport oat the beginning of the letter you want to asl questions with a definite ‘yes’ answer. Questions such as, “Do you want to make more money than you are making now?” will get the client nodding in agreement with you. The answer to the questions should also be the main benefits that is offered by your product or service.
Questions also help to engage the reader early in the sales process because he is forced right away to think about the answer. The copywriter must assume that readers comes to the letter with a preoccupied mind and the only way to break through this natural barrier is the get the mind onto a different frequency. Questions are therefore great attention-getters.
Another great way to use questions in the sales letter is to raise objections in the form of questions and then answer them one by one. This is one of the ways that I have used the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for clients and incorporate these into the main sales letter. If people keep asking these questions this means that your sales message is not answering them and these questions are really objections to getting your product.
For example, if you are selling a software product that help people create videos to be uploaded to YouTube and people keep asking how large are the video files output from your software then you that is one objection you must meet squarely.
In that case I would suggest that you raise the question: “Does you software produce high quality videos with small file sizes?” I would then immediately answer that question by illustrating the file size inputs compare to the output and comment on the quality versus the file size.
Questions are powerful sales tools that are often taken for granted and not used often enough. Asking a question can often engage a reader more than simply sharing facts with them. And getting attention these days is one of the toughest battles to be fought online.
Filed under: Online Copywriting
