This article will show you the importance of direct marketing through sales letters. If you have any kind of small business you will want to keep reading to find out the top 5 benefits for using sales letters.

Here are the top 5 reasons why sales letters are one of the best ways you can improve your sales in your small business:

1. You are having a conversation with the prospect, just one person at a time. This is the closest you can come to face-to-face selling without having to be there. If you can get yourself in a position where your prospect is reading your letter, you have their full attention for a few minutes and can now begin the selling process.

2. A sales letter is personal. It’s not just a generic ad that someone will skip over in a magazine. A sales letter will give the prospect some valuable information and will help guide them towards a solution for their problem.

3. You can pin-point a target market with different versions of the same letter depending upon who you are talking to. You can modify your sales letter to fit different niche markets. All you have to do is change a few words and you can multiply your efforts by focusing your product or service on very specific niches.

4. Sales letters help move your customers to take action. Sales letters coax people out of the house and into your business, by offering something in each letter that you can use to promote your product and get people to move, such as a limited time discount. Every letter you send out should create some kind of action in the prospect.

5. You can’t change the channel or click off a web page with direct mail. If your customers have opened you letter, then you have entered into their lives. The letter may sit on a table for a few days, go up on a bulletin board as a reminder, or many other ways. Of course your prospect won’t keep your letter forever, but if you create it correctly, you can give a resource that will make it hard for people to get rid of immediately.

Joshua Black is an on-line infopreneur, marketing consultant, copywriter and educator dedicated to helping the bootstrapping small business owner succeed.

Now that you’re building your list of customers effectively, what do you do with this valuable information?

Don’t sell them, whatever you do!

When you gather this information, in the back of their minds they are just a little bit worried. This customer list is to build relationships, not to up sell them! Don’t confirm that suspicion by trying to sell to them. (This is one sure way to turn your customer off.)

Begin a proactive step in building relationships with your customers. You are gathering data so that you can send them direct mail pieces, call them on the phone and even email them. Here are at least three avenues of contact to use. You may even have their anniversary date or some other personal information. If done with the attitude of “caring for your customer”, all of these can be used effectively.

People are so sick of being sold!! It is estimated that the average person gets 3000 marketing messages shoved at them each and every day. This makes your potential customers jaded and savvy. If you try to sell them with your interest at heart they will know it an respond negatively.

You need to get to know them, and the best way to get to know them is to let them get to know you. Send them Information about you that is important to them. If you care about your customers in a more substantial way than just because they can buy from you , they will sense this too and be very loyal to you. This one fact is what separates the amateurs from the pros in business marketing. the real challenge in this area comes in the change of mindset. You see, you can’t fake it. If you still believe in your heart that people are just customers, here to put money in your hand, they will always sense that. As a professional business person it is vital to your business to put the interests and concerns of your customer ahead of your, when you do that business will flourish.

What is one tool that can be used to show your customers that you care about them?

Let’s start with direct mail, which has actually gained some credibility in recent years. With more modern and cheaper methods of contact, people are getting less junk mail so when your message comes to their mailbox. If done right, your direct mail will have a huge impact. You can have meaningful contact with your treasured customer for as little as $2 or $3 per person. Imagine the loyalty that is built with an anniversary card sent by you to your customer! When you consider the Lifetime Value of that customer, it’s a pittance to invest.

The online designer menswear market is said to be the place to head nowadays, whenever searching for any type branded men’s clothing. To find out the truthfulness of this statement, we set out exploring the online designer menswear market; to find out just exactly what it has to offer, and whether it really matches the publicity it has been receiving since shopping for clothing online came to be accepted into the mainstream at the beginning of this decade.

To get started in our exploration of the online branded menswear market, we entered a Google search on the simple search phrase ‘menswear’ – which is the equivalent of entering into the ‘market gate’ in a traditional brick and mortar market shopping expedition.

The Google search on menswear, however, yielded 4 million plus ‘hits’ as Internet search results are also referred to as, and this was clearly more than we could cope with; because if we were to explore what each of the four million plus hits gave, it could probably take a lifetime doing so. To be sure, not all the 4 million plus hits given by the search on menswear was directing to a store dealing in such clothing, as some were ‘information hits’ – directing to sites that were offering information on how to go about shopping for menswear, the different categories of menswear, the evolution of menswear (from when men wore tunics to today’s designer jeans age) and so on. Still, even after making provisions for these ‘information links’ the hits yielded by the search on menswear were still overwhelming.

As we came to realize later, is that when you are overwhelmed by the results an Internet search reveals, what you are supposed to do is to ‘narrow’ it down; but using more specialized searching words. In our case, seeing that trying to shop with the simple term ‘menswear’ was giving overwhelming results, we decided to narrow down our search to a specific menswear label, Lyle and Scott. Even doing this, however, still resulted in 2 million plus hits, clearly more than we could cope with individually, but at least much more focused.

Unlike the results returned by a general search on ‘menswear’ most of the results returned by the Lyle and Scott search were direct hits to stores running Lyle and Scott sale offers; stores it would have taken ages to get to if we were to attempt to peruse through the results that the general ‘menswear’ search gave till we came to them (if we ever did, that is). Narrowing the search further with just a single extra word – to say Lyle and Scott sale – would have given even more specialized results, in this case those of the specific stores not only stocking Lyle and Scott, but also running a sale on it.

To avoid falling into conclusion that the observations we were making were specific to Lyle and Scott only, we decided to try a different designer clothing brand, this time Fila Vintage; and this too, tended to direct us to sites running one or another Fila Vintage sale, with the specialized search for Fila Vintage sale giving even more specialized results on sites running such sales.

Advice relating to affiliate marketing can be found on literally tens of thousands of blog sites. Just how serious you are to improve at this aspect of marketing it will be decided by the sort of information you try to find. Always remember, time is precious, in the same way as your efforts, both of which will profit by applying the primary rule of identifying which advice will be profitable to your business. As soon as you accomplish this, you will find a worthwhile internet site that will invariably guide you in selling correctly and update your knowledge so that your ability is continually getting better which will obviously increase revenue.

Just what advice are you supposed to be seeking?

1. Advice on studying: There is always something changing with web marketing so any ideas you have will also have to be adaptable, it doesn’t matter if you are engaged on your solo or have linked up with an associate program. A professional website will offer you angles and must-knows that will enhance the methods you are using for marketing as well as the plans you have in place. Neglecting to regularly determine the effectiveness of any campaign you are running means you will never know how how good it is and this is where teaching courses really come into their own.

2. Plans: Affiliate marketers are constantly on the hunt for other techniques in advertising their product. Any decent website will provide you with tips on the latest trends and strategies that will help boost website traffic and the reaction to your website.

3. Remain a convincing source: Steer clear of some traffic systems that might make you appear needy and like an amateur. Your members belief in you is essential for your long term success and by adopting|following|embracing|sticking with] those techniques observed before, this is more likely to occur as they will trust your grounds for promoting any particular product or service. If you maintain your direction and supply a sound service, it will help you retain your members for many years to come as both you and your internet site become a dependable source of information for them to use.

4. Lots of strong content: This is what you are what you should be looking for from the site you are using as a the main source of information for your own business enterprise – one that will show you when you do things the right way and not only where you are doing it incorrectly! It may take a little while to reach – when you reach a particular stage you could discover this website you have been employing can point towards other directions you haven’t yet looked into like SEO techniques and other other ways to use networks.

There is helpful affiliate marketing information you can feel comfortable with, using at various informative websites which will lead you in the right direction on how to sell effectively. Often affiliates will still enjoy an income from their efforts even when they are on vacation, but this usually means hard work in the early days of the project so there isn’t a problem leaving it to run on it’s own for short periods of time. Often it takes quite a while to become a professional affiliate but lessons can be taken from from experts who have a huge amount of knowledge within this subject. Your marketplace will certainly notice and have faith in you for your past performance.