An alternative to long sales letters is the sideways sales letter, developed by Jeff Walker, for his product launches, a few years ago. The idea may not be well-known but as I describe it you may realise you have encountered it!
This approach is hard work. I am not trying to promote it here but do take care if you’re tempted to try it out. It is not a get rich quick scheme and requires a lot of work to carry out properly.
You need three things:
- make your offer a good product, service or cause. (I don’t see why this approach should not work for a cause, although I have never seen anyone attempt it. I may return to this later.) Whatever it is, your offer needs to be something people would be willing to buy or respond to in the way you ask. This approach depends upon trust and so make your offer credible,
- an email list is your most valuable asset and without one you can do very little. (It is possible to launch without a product or a list but that type of launch is outside the scope of this post.)
- a launch sequence, which is where the sideways sales letter comes in. (There is more to the sequence than the sideways sales letter but my aim is to cover general principles here.)
Sideways Sales Letters
So, what is a sideways sales letter? It is an email sequence sent to your list (and perhaps other peoples’ lists) that links to squeeze pages on your website. These pages will usually link to high quality content, your best material, after the visitor has contributed their email address. The content should not include anything about sales. It can be long copy or video and people will read it because it is useful information. There are usually three of these followed by a fourth which is the sales letter.
The point is you can’t scroll down to see the price or indeed you may not at first know what the product is! You read or view because of the value of the content. By the time you get to the sales (in the final email/webpage of the sequence) you’re hooked. Whilst some people who sign up will make a purchase, most will not but take away valuable information and maybe make a purchase at a later date.
This seems to work for a range of businesses, particularly small businesses. I’ll discuss how it works in my final evaluation. Before I get to that there are some other approaches to online marketing and so next time I’ll progress onto traffic and conversion.
