In The Ultimate Sales Letter, multimillionaire entrepreneur and direct-response marketing consultant, Dan Kennedy, shares strategies for crafting powerful sales letters that capture customers’ attention and make them want to buy the products and services you’re selling.
Kennedy, who says he found success as a copywriter despite not having a college degree, argues that anyone can learn to write persuasive copy and turn it into profit—you just have to believe in yourself, trust your intuition, and know your product better than anyone else.
Kennedy is the author of 13 business books, including 10 in the No B.S. business book series. Originally published in 1990 and updated in 2011, The Ultimate Sales Letter provides time-tested foundational strategies in the art of persuasive writing that translate and remain relevant across media in the ever-evolving world of sales and marketing.
What Is a Sales Letter?
Since Kennedy doesn’t explicitly state what a sales letter is, further context may be useful. It’s a direct marketing tool designed to attract, build relationships with, and convince prospective consumers to buy your product. A low-cost alternative to television and other forms of advertising, sales letters are typically rooted in the “A.I.D.A.” formula (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), and they’re often used by companies with smaller budgets or those that do “mail-order only” sales.
Kennedy focuses primarily on hard copy, long-form letters that were popular at the time of the book’s original publication in 1990—well before the rise of social media. However, more contemporary direct marketing tools, such as email and video sales letters, are rooted in the foundational elements Kennedy outlines.
The Ultimate Sales Letter is directed toward business owners and copywriters who are starting from scratch, though Kennedy asserts that seasoned professionals can use his tips and strategies as evergreen touchpoints and even learn a new thing or two.
In this guide, we’ve reorganized and condensed Kennedy’s tips and strategies into two parts:
We also compare and contrast Kennedy’s work with updated recommendations from other sales and marketing experts.
In this section, we’ll discuss the background information Kennedy says you’ll need to write a powerful sales letter. First we’ll cover how to identify and understand your target customer, then we’ll talk about getting to know your product inside and out.
Kennedy says that before you write your sales letter, you have to first identify and understand your target customer so you can address their priorities and pitch your product in a way that resonates with them.
Kennedy recommends that you narrow your focus to people who would buy your product (as opposed to taking a mass marketing approach) and try to find out the following things about them:
To home in on your target customer and gather this information, Kennedy suggests immersing yourself in the applicable industry by reading industry publications and websites, subscribing to email groups that prospective customers are part of, attending conventions and trade shows, and talking with people who have insights into your customer base.
New Ways to Identify and Understand Your Target Customer
Since the 2011 publication of The Ultimate Sales Letter, the world of online sales and marketing has expanded, offering new ways to identify your target customer and understand them in greater depth. For example, you can join Q&A forums like Quora and Moz Community to interact with people who are similar to your customers and see what questions they are asking about products and services related to yours.
Once you’ve developed a working list of potential buyers, you can create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which will allow you to home in on your perfect customer base and market your product even more effectively.
Kennedy says that in addition to identifying and understanding your target customer, you should become intimately acquainted with your product so you can highlight its benefits and address its weaknesses in your sales letter.
Kennedy recommends that you get to know your product and how it operates by using it extensively. For example, take it apart, test it, try it out on others, talk with people who use it, and examine competitive products. Going through this process will help you identify your product’s best features and benefits, which you’ll prioritize and highlight for customers in your letter based on their distinct needs and interests.
(Shortform note: Kennedy says it’s important to emphasize the benefits of your product to customers so they understand how it will make their life better or easier. You can practice framing your product’s features as benefits by listing each feature, then describing the specific way it will help buyers.)
Kennedy asserts that in addition to highlighting your product’s strengths, you must also directly address its limitations in your sales letter to defuse customer concerns and keep them interested in buying your product. He recommends two strategies for countering questions that buyers may have about your product:
Kennedy suggests you bolster these strategies with testimonials and stories that highlight your product’s strong points, or provide guarantees and free trial offers that encourage customers to try your product.
(Shortform note: Being upfront about problems with your product is perhaps more important now than ever. The risk of disgruntled customers publicly airing complaints about your flawed product—and of millions of people hearing them—has grown since Kennedy published the 4th Edition of The Ultimate Sales Letter in 2011. Some marketing strategists recommend that you openly display problems with your product to get ahead of online trolls by featuring your product’s flaws front and center in your content headline and on your website, or by joking about and making light of its problems in your advertising.)
In the previous section, we covered the background information you need to write your sales letter. In this section, we’ll go over five steps for crafting a letter that captivates, engages, convinces, and compels customers to buy your product. We’ll then discuss how to get this well-crafted letter into your customers’ hands.
Now that you have all the information you need about your customer and product, Kennedy says the first step of crafting your sales letter is to simply sit down and start writing. He notes that this step is intentionally brief since your goal is only to get your ideas on the page, not to worry about editing or getting things perfect.
How to Draft a Sales Letter
Kennedy doesn’t provide additional or explicit steps on how to write your first draft, but here’s a step-by-step outline you can use to draft a sales letter:
Write a catchy headline that grabs your customer's attention.
Say why your product or service will benefit your customer.
Provide key information about your product using bullet points.
Provide testimonials or statistics to substantiate your product’s value.
Provide a call to action (include a direct link or action button for online sales. For example: “Enter your email and website here, and we’ll send you free information on our product.”)
Say that your product is available for a limited time, or is limited in its availability, to increase the urgency for customers to respond.
Finish with a “PS” (postscript) where you offer a guarantee.
Once you have a rough draft, you need to shape your letter so it grabs, engages, and convinces your customer to buy your product, then compels them to respond immediately. We’ll examine Kennedy’s recommendations for each.
Kennedy argues that your first goal in your letter is to quickly seize customers’ attention by telling them your product will solve an immediate problem. Failure to do this, he says, will result in your letter getting thrown away. Kennedy recommends the following tips to grab customers’ attention:
Once you have your audience’s attention, you need to keep them engaged. Kennedy says you can do this by using a friendly, conversational tone, showing your personality, and repeating your sales pitch in as many different ways as possible. You can also encourage customer interaction by asking questions at the start or end of paragraphs and by writing partial sentences at the end of each page to force buyers to turn it over to find out what happens next.
The Video Sales Letter—A Better Tool for Today?
Kennedy recommends leading your letter with a headline—a brief span of text that grabs readers’ attention and hints at what you’re going to say next. This is a common approach in written and online sales letters because if your customer isn’t immediately interested in what you’re saying, they’ll stop reading.
But some sales and marketing experts argue that an even more effective way to capture customers’ attention―and to keep them engaged and convince them they need your product right now—is to show your product in action using a video sales letter. Video sales letters are a visual marketing tool similar to written sales letters, but in video format. Proponents of this tool (over the written version) argue that video sales letters:
Allow you to use facial expressions, tone of voice, and background audio to quickly establish and maintain emotional connections with viewers.
Are better at engaging and convincing customers to buy your product
The time it takes to watch them (typically two to three minutes) is shorter than what it would take to read a lengthy sales letter.
Watching a person make a sales pitch feels more “real,” and is often more compelling and memorable than reading faceless words on a page.
Psychologist Susan Weinschenck bolsters the idea that video sales letters are more effective than written sales letters, explaining that biology draws us to videos with people for four reasons:
Our brains are wired to look at human faces for information, believability, and emotion.
The tone of the human voice conveys meaning and context.
Emotions are contagious.
Motion grabs attention.
If you want to write a video sales letter script that captivates, engages, and convinces customers to buy your product and compels them to respond quickly, experts say to create a hook, overcome buyers’ internal and external obstacles, and incentivize quick responses to your call to action.
Once you’ve engaged your customer, you need to convince them that your product or service is valuable and worth the price. Kennedy says you shouldn’t worry about the length of your letter—take as many pages as you need to make a compelling argument.
Kennedy recommends providing evidence that highlights the benefits of your product or service to your customer, such as testimonials and photographs that show the product is easy to use or that your service delivers great results.
He also says you must address the tricky subject of your product’s price, which you have to navigate carefully because consumers won’t buy a product without knowing its cost, but they’ll also forgo purchasing that product if they don’t like its price. He recommends two strategies to de-emphasize your product’s cost and turn customers’ focus to reasons they should buy it.
Strategy 1: Shift the conversation from your product’s price to the value or savings your customer will experience when they buy it:
Strategy 2: Move beyond the topic of price by focusing on persuasion techniques that compel your customer to buy your product:
Which Is the Stronger Strategy: Manipulation or Transparency?
Kennedy argues that while consumers may react negatively to strategies that trick or bully them into responding to your sales letter, the benefits often outweigh the costs. But some sales experts counter that a low-pressure sales approach is more ethical and effective, allowing you to build relationships and maintain your reputation with customers. Let’s look at two ways price can be addressed:
Strategies that could be considered manipulative but are often effective:
Contrast your product with more expensive versions to make yours look more affordable.
Reduce the font size of prices and remove dollar signs.
Break the full price of your product into a smaller dollar amount, then turn that amount into a tangible item that customers waste money on (for example: “You can save a baby for less than the price of a cup of coffee”).
By contrast, if you have an established client base and need to announce a price increase on your product, here is what a transparent strategy could look like:
Make sure that everyone in your business knows about the price increase before announcing it to customers.
Inform customers of the price change well before its implementation.
Reassure customers that higher prices mean better quality.
Explain the reasoning for the price increase.
Encourage customers to reach out with questions or concerns.
After convincing your customer that they need your product, your goal is to get them to respond to your letter as quickly as possible. Kennedy says this is crucial because when prospective customers put your letter down to “read it later,” they rarely do. He offers the following tips to compel consumers to respond to your letter immediately:
Craft an Effective Call to Action (CTA)
Kennedy provides suggestions for how to get buyers to respond quickly to your written sales letter. But if you’re looking to craft an effective online call to action (a prompt that encourages customers to respond to you by taking a specific action, like clicking a button to submit their email or buy your product), you can start with these five tips:
Place your CTA near the top of your web page.
Tell people what you want them to do and why (for example, “Subscribe now and you’ll get exclusive access to our best deals.”
Create a sense of urgency using action-oriented language (for example: “Sale ends tonight!”).
Keep your message simple.
Test different versions of your CTA to see what works best.
Now you have a letter that will capture your customer’s attention, convince them you have a product or service worth buying, and compel them to respond quickly. Your last task is to put the finishing touches on your letter, and make sure your target customer receives it. Kennedy recommends the following tips to polish your letter and make sure it gets into the right hands:
Refine, Finalize, and Send a Video Sales Letter
Kennedy’s fundamental processes for refining, finalizing, and getting your written sales letter to your target customer are similar to and apply across contemporary sales mediums, but differences do exist—particularly when you compare written sales letters and video sales letters.
For example, the process of editing a video sales letter requires different skills from editing a written letter. Also, with a written letter, you have to choose physical materials and send your letter by mail, but with a video sales letter, you have to publish and promote your video online.
Kennedy offers some final thoughts on how to strategically use your sales letter, and how to expand its purposes in the future.
Kennedy says that you can improve your brand recognition and increase customers’ response rate to your first sales letter by sending a second (and possibly third) follow-up letter 45 to 60 days after your first.
(Shortform note: Kennedy doesn’t provide specific information on what content should go in your follow-up letter. To get ideas and learn how to boost response rates to email sales letters, consider these templates for a series of follow-up emails. While wording is important, the key is persistence—not quitting until you get a firm yes or no.)
Kennedy says that in addition to using your sales letter to sell products and services to new and existing customers, you can also use it to:
Finally, Kennedy argues that although social media has changed the communications landscape since the first publication of The Ultimate Sales Letter in 1990, the fundamentals required to write a powerful, long-form sales letter translate across platforms—including in online sales letters, TV infomercials, and other advertising. Because of their proven effectiveness, he asserts it would be foolish to abandon written copy sales letters and argues that a combination of offline and online sales letters is the best approach.
The Combined Video Sales Strategy
Kennedy asserts that a strategy combining written and online sales letters is the most effective, but he doesn’t explain why. Other proponents of the approach say it works because it allows you to reach a wider audience, build a stronger brand, reach customers at different points in the buying process, and save money on marketing.
But if a combination of written and online letters is more effective than either technique in isolation, then a combination of video sales strategies may be the best approach. Video commercials, 30- to 60-second ads, can supplement video sales letters by helping you attract customers, create and maintain awareness about your product, and build your brand.
Kennedy says that writing a powerful sales letter starts with identifying and understanding your target audience, then getting to know your product inside and out.
Think about the industry where a product that you want to sell is typically sold. Now think about where, in this industry, you could learn more about customers who might be interested in your product (this might be online resources, events you could attend, or people you could talk with).nnList three to five places where you could gather more information about prospective customers.
Think about a specific product you want to sell. List three flaws with that product and the specific way you’d frame each problem with prospective customers.
Think about Kennedy’s recommendations for addressing the price of your product with prospective customers. Describe three ways you’ll shift the conversation from price to value.