"After more than 800 years of faithful service,
the sales letter is dead."
On the night of June 10, 1197, fire destroyed the cathedral in Chartres, France. Bishop Regnault de Mouçon sent letters to the nobility of Europe, requesting funds to rebuild it.
The first sales letter in the history of the world, and a resounding success it was.
Since then, the venerable sales letter has provided 800 years of reliable service.
But it is now dead.
The sales letter of yesterday could only speak – it could not listen. It could not think, could not write itself. But the sales letter of the 21st century does all these things. It opens up entirely new realms of customer magnetism and sales effectiveness.
Unless you’re using the full interactivity of the web, most of the money that would be yours stays right there on the table. The customers are not buying from you, they’re buying from somebody else, or more likely, nobody at all.
The symptom is buying traffic from Yahoo or Google and spending pretty much all your margins on clicks. 1% buy, but 99% leave without buying a thing.
Brick-and-mortar would be bankrupt in a week, but somehow most online marketers still think this is acceptable.
It’s not. It might be fine for some people to give all their profits to Google but surely that’s not good enough for you.
The way most people write copy is:
They sit in a cave for three weeks or three months and somehow guess what their customers might want. They write it all down.
They stick it up and start sending traffic to it. If it doesn’t work, they sit in their cave for three more days and guess again. Then they stick that up. Throwing darts in a blizzard.
Meanwhile, the most important resource of all – your customers’ wants and desires – is being tossed in the dumpster and carted off to the landfill. (Like Junk Mail.) Because as many as TWO THIRDS will personally interact with you, if you engage them properly.
If 2/3rds of them will gladly tell you what to say, why would you hide in your cave and not listen? Why would you hand over your cave money to Google and let the rest of it walk away outside?
It’s dark and lonely in that cave.
Ari Galper and I have raised the sales letter from the dead, injected it with new life and unprecedented effectiveness. How is this possible?
- – Because if you ask people to tell you about their problem, they’ll tell you
- – If you put a chat box on your sales page and introduce yourself with the right language, they’ll chat with you
- – If you ask for a phone number, as many as 90% will give it to you
- – If you want to know what’s the best thing to say, they’ll show you
In the age of stamps and envelopes, you had no choice but to guess. But people are on your website at this very moment, you’ve paid for them to be there, they’re not hearing what they need to hear, and they’re leaving without buying.
Those very people will lead you right to the gold, if you let them. They’ll tell you exactly what you need to know, no guessing required. The copy writes itself. Even you use the interactive tools only temporarily, you make quantum leaps because they tell you exactly what to say.
I personally attest that this is like having X-Ray vision and psychic powers of marketing intelligence. Having spent over a year now perfecting this, In Monday’s teleseminar, Ari Galper and I will introduce you to this revolutionary process.
Perry Marshall
