If you are a plumbing expert and you have just created the latest and greatest plumbing tool since the lead pipe, you may decide that a sales letter is the best vehicle to get your product to market. So let’s say you write ten pages explaining what’s wrong with plumbing tools today, you remind them of all the frustrations and time wasted using conventional tools, and most importantly… you offer them a way out!

Imagine for a moment that you have crafted a compelling sales letter for your plumbing panacea that is worth it wait in GOLD. If you handed it to me, my reaction would probably take a quick glance at it and then throw it in the trash, because I am not in any way-shape-or-form interested in plumbing. But that does not matter! What matters is only the reaction of those who are interested in plumbing.

If your letter causes them to stop what they are doing, call a 1-800 number and BUY, BUY, BUY… then you have yourself a winner. Of course even with a great hook and a knock-em dead finish you are not going to sell them all… and that’s ok. Your interest lies in that portion that will hear the siren call of your prose and be compelled to act. If your conversion rate is .05% (1 out of 200) when sent to pre-qualified leads then your copy is pretty bad. If however, with the same group of leads you develop a piece that converts at 4% (8 out of 200) then you have got yourself some solid copy. Anything over 4% and your sales letter is worth its WEIGHT IN GOLD.

The process of developing your final copy usually involves a good amount of testing. If you have a list of 10,000 prequalified leads you may want to break off 1,000 of those leads at random to sacrifice for purposes of testing. This thousand can be broken up into ten groups of a hundred and used to test ten separate versions of your sales letter. Testing a version of your copy on a list of size 100 should give you a fairly accurate idea of how good a particular sales letter is. And of course lists of size 100 come with the added benefit of an easy to calculate conversion rate.

So as to the question of sales letter or junk mail, well it all depends on who’s reading.