Dan Kennedy discusses why sales letters still work. They hold attention better than other media, let you control your message completely, and get closer to a face-to-face sale. His book, first published in 1981, has been updated five times because the format keeps selling.
First published in 1981 as The Million Dollar Sales Letter.
1990, 2000, 2006, and 2011.
No other media replicates the experience, the held attention of sitting down and reading a good sales letter. And so as media has come and gone and the media landscape has changed and my life is divided right about half and half pre Internet, post Internet, very little media has gone away, but some media has shrunk enormously. And you said importance, not the sales letter.
Hello and welcome to this month's masterclass with Dan Kennedy. Dan, we're here talking about some of your books and today we're going to talk about the ultimate sales letter. This book is now in its fourth edition. It was first published in 1981 as the Million Dollar Sales Letter. Sales Letter in 1990, 2000, 2006 and 2011. Why do you think it's had such a long and uninterrupted life? This so important for us.
It has been that for people that don't know, that's kind of a remarkable record. And it's the book that it's one of the books that won't die. It's done that with long periods with very little promotion, hasn't mattered. And I think that first of all, the, the sales letter itself, okay, which, this is a step by step, here's how to write a sales letter. The sales letter itself won't die. Commercial direct mail. Direct mail to sell things is up year over year every year for the past five years. And so you hear all mails going away. Everybody's going to just text, et cetera. That's personal mail. Commercial mail, even as they raise the postage rates yet again, is not going anywhere because the sales letter is the most reliable media ever invented. And so as it stays alive, the book stays alive. With a sales letter, you can get as close to a sale face to face, which is why for years it was called salesmanship in print. That no other media replicates the experience, the held attention of sitting down and reading a good sales letter. And so as media has come and gone and the media landscape has changed and my life is divided right about half and half pre Internet, post Internet, very little media has gone away, but some media has shrunk enormously. And you said importance, not the sales letter. And it is the only media where you still have unfettered control over the content. There are no algorithms built by Stanford gender studies grads catching a word that, oh, you can't say, you are not suddenly having your site taken down. You're not, you know, barring some incredible criminal investigation, nobody is opening your envelopes and judging what's in there. They're just delivering them for you. And so it is the way you can multiply yourself. Number one. Essentially, what you would. What I would say to you to make this sale at the kitchen table, I can say to you now. And I can say it 10,000 times, 20,000 times, 100,000 times by putting it in in a sales letter. And I can communicate with you entirely outside of the swamp of all the other media, almost every place else I'm going to communicate with you. A bunch of other competitors and distractions and price commoditizer, they're all there in the same place at the same time. If I can hold your attention with my letter, it's just you and me, just as if it was just you and me at the kitchen table. So that's why the sales letter itself has never gone away and is never going to go away. And therefore the book has stood the test of time because it helps people use this incredible media effectively.
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