Hotel Travel NewYork

Successful sales people dress their best when in front of
prospects. And so do successful sales letters. Here are some
tested sales letter design and layout tips, some of them from
direct mail designer Ted Kikoler, and excerpted from The Lead
Generation Handbook by Bob Bly.

FONTS

* Use a serif typeface for the body. A popular choice is to set
the body in Times Roman and the headlines and subheads in
Helvetica bold.

* Type the body of the letter in black. Use an accent color for
subheads if you wish.

* To add emphasis to your headline, make it bold, a larger point
size than the letter, and center it.

* Make sure your typeface is large enough for your readers.

MARGINS

* With a standard 8 ” x 11” letter, set your margins at one
inch on all sides.

* Make the right-hand margin “ragged right” (also called “left
justified”; never justify it).

INDENTATIONS

* Indent all paragraphs five characters.

* For block quotes and other copy that you want to highlight,
indent the entire paragraph by 10 characters on each side.

PARAGRAPHS

* Keep your first sentence and first paragraph short.

* Limit all paragraphs to seven lines.

* Single space the letter.

* Put one blank line between all paragraphs.

* Never end the last sentence on the page with a period. Always
break the sentence in two so that the reader must turn the
letter over and keep reading.

* Do not add “Over, please” to the bottom right. That’s
patronizing.

SUBHEADS

* If you want your letter to look like personal correspondence,
do not use subheads.

* If using subheads, center them and make them bold.

* Do not set subheads in all caps.

EMPHASIS

* Use emphasis sparingly. If you emphasize everything you
emphasize nothing.

* Underline words or phrases that should be emphasized.

* If you have facts to present, render them as a bulleted list.

* If you have a number of points to present in order, render
them as a numbered list.

THE END

* Shorten the first name of the writer to sound friendlier and
to close the gap between reader and writer: Bill sounds better
than William, Kathy sounds better than Kathryn.

* Make the signature legible.

* If you are mailing small quantities (say, a few hundred at a
time), print the letter without a signature, then sign each one
individually with a blue pen. This creates a look and a feel
very close to a personal letter.

* Indent the entire body copy of the P.S. by five characters so
the letters P.S. stand out.

© 2006 Sharpe Copy Inc. You may reprint this article online and
in print provided the links remain live and the content remains
unaltered (including the “About the Author” message).