How To Emotionally-Charge Your Sales Letters To Boost Sales

by Mike Jezek

Published on this site: February 25th, 2004

Are you frustrated that your sales letter isn't getting results? Do you wonder how you could make a satisfactory sales letter even better? If you said, "yes" to either of these questions then I invite you to read on as you will be richly rewarded. In the next few moments you are going to discover how to instantly amplify the selling power of your direct mail and web copy. Enabling you to potentially break sales records and outsell your competition.

The solution to your lackluster results or desire to improve current sales is found in one word. Emotion. As you may already know buying decisions are based upon emotion and later backed up by logic. Here's how legendary sales letter writer Robert Collier put it: "Appeal to the reason, by all means. Give people a logical excuse for buying that they can tell to their friends and use to salve their own consciences. But if you want to sell goods, if you want action of any kind, base your real urge upon some primary emotion!"

So how do you inject more emotion into your sales letters and thus turbo-charge the selling power of your copy? While there are many ways to 'emotionally-charge' your sales letters, for our time together let's focus on these three shall we?

1. Stir Up Pain - Here's where you want to get inside the heads of your readers. Focus on how they have this problem (that your product solves) and that because of this problem, they're hindered, frustrated, troubled and unable to attain their deepest desires because this problem lingers. You want to agitate their perceived problem and make it seem worse than it really is. You can do this by telling them stories, facts, case histories and linking their problem to bad scenarios to persuade and influence them into believing your product is the solution to their problem.
   
   
2. Mesmerizing Stories - I already don't have to tell you that stories will obviously evoke emotion. Watch a tragedy, you'll feel sad. Watch a sci-fi movie and you'll probably feel excitement. Watch a horror flick and you'll more than likely feel scared. My advice to you, is to weave stories into your sales letters that stir up hope in attaining a goal, avoiding trouble or achieving a dream. You can also craft stories detailing what happened to someone who never took action to solve the problem your product or service is intended to solve. This kind of story will produce fear of loss, which is more powerful than desire to gain in most people. You can also use stories that have a 'human' element to it. Simply tell a story about someone whom your readers can easily relate too, describing their problem and the frustrations that go with it in detail. And then, illustrate how this person used your product and solved their problem. Consequently making their life or business much better.
   
   This kind of story creates a type of "Social Proof." Meaning it cultivates a follow the leader response.
   
   
3. Use Emotional Words Instead Of Logical Words - It's no surprise that some words fire off stronger emotions than others. Words like abortion, pro-life, Soviet or dictator have an immediate effect. Other less controversial words such as mom, dad, family, home, friends sister and brother have strong emotional impact. You need to evaluate your target market and find out what key words your market really reacts too. The key thing to remember is that just about every word has an emotional element to it. If your offer is greed oriented, then words and phrases like "money"; "get rich" ; "six-figures"; and "make money easily" will excite your readers.
   Ideally you want to use many small, one syllable words that your prospects can relate an emotion to. Pick five or six key words that'll stir up the emotion you want in your reader and subtly plant them throughout the sales copy to spark an emotional reaction.

Whether you're vexed by a sales letter that gets poor results or you already have a sales letter that's getting decent results, you now realize what to do to make it sell more. You simply make it more emotionally-charged. As of right now, you know three shortcut ways to make your sales letters more emotional. They are: stir up pain; use mesmerizing stories; and weave emotional words into your copy. Go ahead and start making those changes and if you do this correctly, you should see a rise in sales and profits.

Mike Jezek is the creator of Mega-Persuasion PsychologyT the science behind "Irresistible Copywriting" which employs a powerful combination of results-producing influence techniques and psychologically persuasive sales devices -- proven to increase Web SALES by 30% to 400% or more. Sign up for Mike Jezek's acclaimed "Confidential Psychological Selling Tactics" mini-course today at [email protected] or enjoy more of his articles at www.irresistiblecopywriting.com.