Sales Letter - Writing Headlines

The most important part of any sales letter is the headline. The rest of the sales letter can be excellent, but if your headline sucks, your ad will fail. It's as easy as that.

Why are these few lines of a sales letter so important? Well, the headline is your first (and often last) chance to impress the reader. A good headline entices the reader to read the rest of the information. The simple fact is, if you have a bad heading the rest of the page won't matter because it won't be read.

The first purpose of the heading is to obtain the readers attention. Having said that, it is important to note that you don't want to attract everyone's attention. You want to attract the attention of people who would be interested in what you offer. This is called target audience.

What you don't want is lots of readers that is not interested in your offer. They'll realize this as soon as they get past the headline and you'll quickly lose them.

While you are attracting the wrong readers you may also be losing valuable readers that are interested.

You have to know your target audience, know what they want, and know what would grab they're attention. This is a vital part of writing your headline. You really have to walk a fine line to get it just right, this can only be achieved trough practice and testing.

Let's quickly look at how Claude Hopkins uses newspaper headlines to demonstrate the importance of targeting your audience through your headline:

"Suppose a newspaper article stated that a certain woman was the most beautiful woman in the city. That article would be of intense interest to that woman and her friends. But neither she nor her friends would ever read it if the headline was 'Egyptian Psychology' ".

For a more contemporary example, we can look to Google AdWords.

Let's say you have a website that sells specialty teas and you want to drive traffic to a product on special, let's say a delicious Earl Grey.

You can only use a limited number of characters so you have to be very careful of the words you use. You see, if you use a very general headline like "Specialty Teas", the traffic you would receive won't be very targeted.

You would likely get a lot of "tire-kickers" who are just browsing or looking for free stuff. Since you pay for traffic by using AdWords, you would be spending good advertising money on bad traffic.

Instead, a heading like "Earl Grey Discount Ends Today".

This, off the top of my head example, shows how you could target someone who are looking for earl grey tea.

Someone who sees your ad will immediately know:

1.    You have exactly what they are looking for
2.    They can save money because of the discounted price.
3.    The discount ends today so they have to act fast

The power of 5 simple words can't be emphasized enough. See how tightly targeted it is? The people who click on the ad will be very likely to buy.

While people who are only interested in free information about chamomile tea will know not to bother.