The Robert Collier Letter Book

by Robert Collier

Study your reader first—your product second. If you understand his reactions, and present those phases of your product that relate to his needs, then you cannot help but write a good letter.

"What is the bait that will tempt your reader? How can you tie up the thing you have to offer with that bait?"

The reader of this letter wants certain things. The desire for them is, consciously or unconsciously, the dominant idea in his mind all the time. You want him to do a certain definite thing for you. How can you tie this up to the thing he wants, in such a way that the doing of it will bring him a step nearer to his goal?

There are certain prime human emotions with which the thoughts of all of us are occupied a goodly part of the time. Tune in on them, and you have your reader's attention. Tie it up to the thing you have to offer, and you are sure of his interest.

Study your reader. Find out what interests him. Then study your proposition to see how it can be made to tie in with that interest.

Bait—all of them. Find the thing your prospect is interested in and make it your point of contact, rather than rush in and try to tell him something about your proposition, your goods, your interests.

Before you put pen to paper, before you ring for your stenographer, decide in your own mind what effect you want to produce on your reader—what feeling you must arouse in him.

Appeal to the reason, by all means. Give people a logical excuse for buying that they can tell to their friends and use to salve their own consciences. But if you want to sell goods, if you want action of any kind, base your real urge upon some primary emotion!

Tell a man something new and you have his attention. Give it a personal twist or show its relation to his business and you have his interest.

Do you know how Wells' "Outline of History" was first put across? On its news value! "The Oldest Man in the World," "Was This the Flood of the Biblical Story" "The Finding of Moses," and so on. Newspaper headlines, all of them.

News interest in every one of...

So if you want his attention, go after it as the newspaper paragrapher does. He knows he has to compete with a thousand other distractions, so he studies his reader and then presents first that side of his story most likely to attract the reader's interest.

Folders often lend themselves to such attention-getting stunts even better than envelopes, for their size gives more room for illustration. In effect, they are advertisements sent through the mails, and they have to compete for their readers' interest in the same way as advertisements in a magazine. And their success or failure depends upon the same factors of attention-winning illustration and headline, interest-arousing start, clear description, logical argument and clincher, with coupon or card that makes ordering easy.

Something to keep in mind while writing

These are minor details, of course, and not to be considered in the same breath with the start of the letter, the description, the argument or the close.

That done, your next problem is to put your idea across, to make him see it as you see it—in short, to visualize it so clearly that he can build it piece by piece in his own mind as a child builds a house of blocks, or puts together the pieces of a picture puzzle.

The mind thinks in pictures, you know. One good illustration is worth a thousand words. But one clear picture built up in the reader's mind by your words is worth a thousand drawings, for the reader colors that picture with his own imagination, which is more potent than all the brushes of all the world's artists.

Thousands of sales have been lost, millions of dollars worth of business have failed to materialize, solely because so few letter writers have that knack of visualizing a proposition—of painting it in words so the reader can see it as they see it. Yet the ability to do that is perhaps the most important factor in a successful letter, for it means describing your proposition in terms of things the reader knows. Westcott gave a good example of this when he had David Harum tell some "horsey" friends about The Lost Chord.

You see, your sale must be made in your reader's mind. Before you can get his order, it is necessary for you to register a sequence of impressions in his mind, the combined result of which will be to make him want the thing you are offering more than the money or trouble it costs him. And the method of registering those impressions lies in first picking something with which he is familiar, and building on that.

To describe apples, for instance, as "like those with which Eve tempted Adam" is to use a simile that will strike a familiar chord with everyone. "Honey such as Cleopatra served to Antony," brings in another familiar allusion that almost anyone would recognize.

Put life into your descriptions—life, and when possible, a smile. Give your reader something that will stir him out of his indifference, arouse his emotions.

What is persuasion? Nothing but finding the motive that will impel your reader to do as you wish, then stirring it to the point where it is stronger than his inertia, or his economical tendencies.

To do that, you must show how he is going to benefit, and you cannot do it unless you have the faculty of putting yourself in his place. Would you be richer, healthier, happier for having done the thing you ask? Would it help your standing with others? Would it enable you to do anything, write anything, say anything better than you could before? Is it something everyone should have? Would it gratify any passion? Would it enable you to help those you love? Would it prevent loss of money or the respect of others?

Questions to find the right motive to persuade readers to buy

There are six prime motives of human action: love, gain, duty, pride, self— indulgence and self—preservation. And frequently they are so mixed together that it is hard to tell which to work on more strongly.

No matter what the product or service you are writing about, first put yourself in the place of your prospective customer. Think of every property you could possibly desire in such a product or service. Think of everything you would like to have it do for you. Work out the ultimate ideal, then write a letter that stresses every desirable point of that ideal product.

So your job is to build a picture in his mind's eye of what he will get from your product or service. Build it with bricks he can handle, i.e., with words and mental images that are familiar to him.