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The Kentaro Sono Letter 2024
〒600-8846 京都府京都市下京区朱雀宝蔵町44番地
協栄ビル2階 京都朱雀スタジオ
H-209
2024-W39-1 | Monday | Bonus: ENG
No. 267
From:
Kyoto-shi, Kyoto, Japan
Monday, 10:00 A.M.
September 23, 2024
Dear Friend,
In The Robert Collier Letter Book, in chapter I What Is It Makes Some Letters Pay?, the author Robert Collier writes:
To a Merchant:
"She didn't buy anything."
How often is this little tragedy repeated in your store?
Your time is valuable your overhead expense runs on — and it costs you real money when a prospective customer walks out of your store without making a purchase.
Roughly speaking, you can break down crafting sales letters into 5 modules.
- Creating the best deal (What do you offer? How much do you want to charge your customers? How do you guarantee the customer satisfaction? How do you protect the customer from unhappy shopping? etc)
- Creating bullets (bullet means a sentence which ignites readers' curiosity badly enough to make readers keep reading)
- Creating the opening (opening means the first paragraph of the sales letter)
- Creating the headline
- Fixing the sales letter with Readability Enhancement Toolkit (Readability Enhancement Toolkit means space, short sentences, short paragraphs, subhead, shuffle, etc...)
Among these five modules, Module 1. Creating the best deal is the most important part of all. What do you want sell anyway? The deal itself is the basis of your sales letter. If you are trying to sell a garbage, even world-class copywriters can't do anything about it. World-class copywriters can bring out the potential appeal of your products or services to the fullest, but they are not alchemists, or con men.
Caution: Creating the best deal does not mean you must lower the price to the limit. But I talk about it in later issues. (Hints: Sometimes, lowering the price leads to lowering the perceived value. To sell status, or not to sell status. It's the problem.)
In the next issue, I create a new service from scratch right in front of you!
Today's Pearl of Wisdom #1:
World-class copywriters can bring out the potential appeal of your products or services to the fullest, but they can’t sell a garbage because they are not alchemists, or con men!
Sincerely,
Kentaro Sono
Bonus 1:
In The Newyorker (September 30, 2024), in the article The Art of Taking It Slow, the author Anna Wiener writes:
- In the past forty years, cycling has increasingly been branded as a form of exercise, one that emphasizes speed, optimization, and competition.
- Most new, high-end bikes are compact, lightweight, and hyper-responsive, with carbon-fibre frames, drop handlebars, and disk brakes, some of which are hydraulic.
- Petersen believes that the bike industry’s focus on racing—along with “competition and a pervasive addiction to technology”—has had a poisonous influence on cycling culture.
- He dislikes the widespread marketing to recreational riders of spandex kits, squirty energy gels, and workout apps such as Strava. He thinks that low, curved handlebars contort riders into an unnatural position; that bicycles made of carbon fibre and aluminum have safety issues; and that stretchy synthetics have nothing on seersucker and wool.
- The bikes have playful names—Roadini, Atlantis, Hunqapillar, Susie W. Longbolts—and run roughly from two thousand to five thousand dollars, depending on the build.
- Rivendell frames are generally outfitted with upright handlebars, leather saddles, manual shifters, platform pedals, and lush, chubby tires. They are designed to accommodate racks, baskets, fenders, and bags—whatever is useful for cross-country touring, local bike camping, and running errands.
- “Bikes are turning ugly,” Petersen recently wrote. “I personally have more respect, tons of respect, for somebody who rides around town, to work, for shopping, and for fun, than somebody who does front-flips on handrails with a fifty-foot dropoff on one side.” He is an advocate of pleasurable, unhurried riding—alone, or with family and friends—and is obsessive about comfort.
- Through the years, Rivendell bicycles have amassed a devoted following. People take portraits of their bikes in stunning natural environments and post them to social media; they “Riv up” non-Rivendell frames; they pore over Petersen’s writing, and adopt his preferences. Adam Leibow, the publisher of Calling in Sick, an “extreme alternative cycling magazine,” told me, “Some people call Rivendell a cult.”
You should remember Anna Wiener. This article is the ideal example of raw material to create the world-class sales letter for Rivendell. This is why:
- This article explains the general problems of cycling industries. (Too technical, too speed-oriented, ignoring ordinary people, neglecting safety)
- This article presents Rivendell as the solution of the problems .
Point out your competitors' problems, then offer your solutions immediately. It's the simple, beautiful, almost elegant flow.
Listen: Having competitors is not necessarily a bad thing. If there are many unsatisfied customers, it's your business chances.
Today's Pearl of Wisdom #2:
Having competitors is not necessarily a bad thing. If there are many unsatisfied customers in the industry, it's your business chances!
Bonus 2:
In The Washington Post, in the article First, she called herself Elizabeth Arden. Then she built a beauty empire, the author Amanda Vaill writes:
Florence Nightingale Graham, the third daughter and fourth child of an itinerant Ontario peddler, lost her mother when she was 6. She left her rural high school to work at a string of jobs — factory machinist, nurse, receptionist, dental assistant — before emigrating to New York in her mid-20s, where she found her calling in the salon of Eleanor Adair, a proponent of facial strapping and the use of oils, tonics and even electrical impulses to rejuvenate the skin. After mastering her employer’s quasi-scientific treatment repertoire and taking elocution lessons to sound more like the upper-class women who were her targeted clientele, Graham struck out on her own. She opened her first Elizabeth Arden salon on Fifth Avenue in 1910 — the name, Cordery surmises, may have been a nod to the popular novelist Elizabeth von Arnim and to Tennyson’s poem “Enoch Arden” — and soon adopted her business name for personal use.
Review: What element do you find in this paragraph which hooks readers? Let's see...
Before:
- lost her mother when she was 6
- left her rural high school
- factory machinist
- nurse
- receptionist
- dental assistant
After:
She opened her first Elizabeth Arden salon on Fifth Avenue in 1910!
Yes, High contrast between Before and After! Elementary, but it still is important and effective.
You may be in a lucrative position now, but from the start? Statistically speaking, probably no. You must have got it the hard way. Then, how did you get the position? It may be quite a story.
Today's Pearl of Wisdom #3:
Take advantage of the gap between Before and After!
