Appointment Letters – Small Business Tips to Get Your Foot in the Door

Many small businesses struggle with writing letters to potential clients trying to get an appointment with them. But it doesn't have to be as difficult as it may seem. As a professional copy writer, here are my top 10 tips for effective appointment letters

1. Know your response rate. Let me start by saying people are not waiting by the post-box eagerly anticipating your letter. You have to prove to them why they should read (and not bin) your letter and why they should give up some of their valuable time to make the time to see you. Lets put some reality into this discussion. The direct mail industry average is approximately a 2% - 5% OPEN rate. That means only 2-5% of all of your letters will ever be read. Out of that tiny pool of people, direct mail industry statistics tell you you can anticipate between a 1%-20% actual response to your offer.  Of course there are things you can do to improve these statistical rates, but remember up to 98% of all people will not open or read your letter, let alone action it. 
2. Use the right list. A good mailing list will help you get better responses. If you already have a great relationship with the people you are mailing to, you can expect a much better response rate. If the people you are mailing to are a cold list of names you have gathered from the Yellow Pages, or just delivered to PO Boxes, you will get a much lower response rate.
3. Headlines and subheadlines. Many people scan letters for the good bits before reading them. By having clear and enticing headlines and sub-headlines you will make them want to read more.
4. Spelling, grammar and layout are important. If your letter is full of typos, is poorly laid out and looks unprofessional – you will get a low response. If you have a great layout, and make clever use of bold, colour, underlining, larger fonts and “copy doodles” - you will boost your response rate.
5. Make sure your letter flows. The copy contained in your letter must flow logically and consistently. It needs to build your story and prompt people to action in the correct order. You need the reader to be excited by the features and benefits of your product or service – and how these will make their lives easier. You need to take your audience through a gradual build up of ideas, building on each foundation to the point where they know whether or not what you are recommending is for them.
6. Reinforce your credibility. You need to be credible for people to buy from you. People will want to know your experience and expertise in the area. They want to know that other people have used your services or product and are happy with the results. One of the ways you can do this is by including testimonials or case studies.
7. Call to action. You need to be 100% clear on what you want the person to do. You need to tell them if they are to wait for your call to make an appointment, to call you to make an appointment or to contact you for more information. If you tell people clearly enough what you want them to do, generally they will do it.
8. P.S. People read PS's - even before other parts of the letter. Use your PS to reinforce a key point or call to action. PS’s increase your response rate dramatically.
9. Follow up. All letters should be either followed up with a phone call, or a second mail out sent a few weeks later. Following up significantly boosts your response rates.
10. Test & measure. All marketing needs to be governed by testing and measuring the response. This is not rocket science - start by knowing the number of responses you got to each letter. Now send out the same letter to a different sample of people but this time use different headlines and sub-headlines and compare the response rates. You can try changing the call to action with a third sample of letters. The top direct mail companies tweak their mailings until they settle on a “control” piece – one that consistently performs well compared to all other letters. Once they have a control piece they keep using it, although every now and again they will test a sample with a new letter to see if it beats the control. Small business can do the same thing. By using sample sizes of 100 minimum you will have some indication of trends (Big business uses about 10,000 as their minimum but few small businesses have the budgets to work with those numbers).

Ingrid Cliff is a Brisbane freelance writer and the Chief Word Wizard of Heart Harmony - her writing services studio that helps put your business into words. Visit her website www.heartharmony.com.au for a free copy of "Seven Secrets of Compelling Copy and Powerful Words".