I was meandering around the internet (as one does) and found an article on a direct marketing news service (source details at the end). This is how part of it reads

When was the last time you received an uninspiring sales letter that was a front and back page of text, text, text? No bold. No italics. No imagination. Just gobs of information on white paper.

With sales letters,, subheads can be the key to turning a scanner into a potential customer. Use subheads in your sales letter to break up the sections of your copy.

Later there is an example of what the writer means…

Dear Mr. Smith,

You’re tired of working for someone else. The boss gets all the glory while you’re stuck in your rut waiting for 5:00 to roll around day in and day out.

Don’t be someone else’s lackey anymore.

Become Your Own Boss
Most people dream of being their own boss but you can turn that dream into a reality today. The only boss you’ll ever have again is yourself.

Flexible Work Hours
Say goodbye to punching time cards. Once you get started, you’ll work when you want. No more putting in a request for vacation!

Make Money at Home
You set your own hours so it’s up to you to decide how much money you want to make each month. Bring home the bacon one month and live it up the next.

You get the idea. This is in fact the way many people are taught to write – with sub headings. About 15 years ago I started to do some research with the sales letters of Hamilton House, and I compared the results I got from writing with the standard sub headings, and without. Writing without the sub headings won (in terms of response rates) hands down – as long as I obeyed some other rules.

What I found was that if I kept the paragraphs short (two or three lines each), had big margins each side (about 1″ or a bit more) and opened every paragraph with a phrase that seemed to suggest that this was the paragraph that was going to give you all the inside information, I got the best results.

In fact what seems to happen is that people receiving such cold call sales letters skim down the paragraphs looking for something that is going to be the key to the offer. With short paragraphs with interesting openings (such as “the solution comes from” or “the real reason is” or “However what really improved the situation was”) even if they just read the openings, they somehow got the hang of what the rest of the paragraph was about.

In short it is the closest direct mail advertising ever gets to the subliminal.

Such improvements in response rates that come from taking out the sub headings and instead writing the opening to each paragraph in a certain way, are less than the improvements you can get from writing a really good headline and a PS that throws the reader back into the letter. But that they are still interesting and still worth doing.

If you would like me to comment on any particular direct mail campaign you are or have been involved with, just email it to me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony

There’s more on direct mail writing in the How To guides on www.hamilton-house.com Here’s the link to the original article that I found on the internet…

http://advertising.about.com/od/directmail/a/subheadsdirect.htm