Attract More Customers

When is a complaint letter like a sales letter? When it gets the immediate, affirmative response you’re looking for. Take the letter “professional complaint letter writer” Bruce Silverman wrote to the Ritz-Carlton that ended up getting him a week, totally comped, at the company’s Kapalua in Hawaii.

As today’s Consumerist detailed, Silverman has been amazingly successful in getting companies to give him all sorts of free stuff: First class upgrades, hotel room upgrades (how does a free week in the Presidential Suite sound?), hundreds of dollars in cash — all from his way with words.

Silverman has now written a book filled with advice for complaining. The basic technique isn’t too far off from the way to write an effective sales letter. Basically his advice is:

1. Make the opening of your complaint letter personable and personal. Hook their interest.
2. Praise first before you explain why you’re dissatisfied.
3. Keep it brief. The reader is busy and easily distracted.
4. Be reasonable — don’t ask for the moon.
5. Make it clear you haven’t written them off, that you pl;an to be customers again in the future, and that you would welcome some sort of compensation.

As the Consumerist put it, “It’s really just an artful way of demonstrating the basic principle of “it will cost more to ignore me than to take care of my problem.”

Check it out. It’s a fun read. And it may get you what you want next time you’re wronged.

You could practically hear poor Seth Godin’s teeth grinding Sunday when he wrote about a recent agonizing encounter with corporate voice mail. You know the drill: you finally work your way through four or five menus, then end up with a recording, “Sorry, we’re closed.”

No human employee could get away with that kind of behavior. It’s like slapping a customer across the mouth, then slamming the door in their face.

Suppose an employee pulled this kind of stuff every day? asks Seth:

• Puts up a sign indicating which of five doors customers should use.
• Locks that door.
• Randomly unlocks another door.
• When someone figures out which door to use, he runs out and kicks them in the groin, then locks the door.”

How long would it take you to fire that clown?

But hiring human beings to answer the phone isn’t always the best answer, unfortunately. A few years ago a company I worked with decided to go “customer-friendly” and finally got rid of their (terrible) voice mail system.

Result: It took 3-5x longer to get through to your party with the human operator than the old VM system.

Like they say, be careful what you wish for…

Clean up, fix up, paint up” used to be the springtime motto. After a long winter of laziness and neglect (or was that just me?) the air is warm, the sun is shining, and everyone feels energized to spiff things up.

For the past day or so, I put a scaffolding around this old blog and started making some long-needed repairs and and improvements. Have you noticed? Let’s see…

• I finally got around to putting rounded corners on the top image. Now it matches the graphic below it.
• A drop cap (i.e., an oversized first character) has been added to the first word in each post, thanks to a nifty plugin by Rodney Campbell (Remorhaz). Elegant, no? Like a magazine… (Update: Hey, it didn’t show up in this post!) (Update #2: Got it!)
• I changed the body font to Calibri and bumped up the size one click. I liked the font that came with the theme, but this one is much easier to read. And hey, this blog is all about your comfort!
• I finally got the Photo Dropper plug-in working. This is a terrific blogging tool that lets you to search for Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr by keyword, right from your Wordpress post page. Highly recommended!
• Technorati tags now grace the footer of this and all future posts, via Will Garcia’s plugin. (I installed and auditioned about five others before finding this one. Nice work, Will!)
• Finally, I added a Share this button so you can email my posts, or send them to any of the big social networking sites. Ahem. Of course, that’s assuming I ever write something worth sharing.

And that’s coming, too. Buckle your seat belt. I’ve got big plans for this old blog home!

Photo by… me!

Well, for the search term “b2b sales letters” anyway.

It’s true. Of all the millions of copywriters in all the gin joints in all the world, my modest copywriting site shows up first when you Google that term. That’s way cool, I gotta admit. Even cooler is how I found out.

I got a call the other day from a guy in Austin. He’s seen my work and liked it, and wanted to hire me to write a couple of direct response sales letters for a new financial product his company was introducing in Austin. OK, great.

Like any good businessman, I always ask new clients, how’d you find me? A referral, perhaps? My blog? That outstanding warrant?

No, he said, Google. Do you remember what search term you used, I asked. I didn’t really expect him to remember. Half the prospects who find me via search can’t remember which search engine they used, much less what words they typed in the little box.

But he remembered: “B2b sales letters.”

I was a bit surprised. It’s one of my favorite kinds of copywriting — I love all forms of direct response — but I hadn’t optimized my site for that term. So I tried it myself, wondering how far down the listings I’d appear.

OMG, that’s me in first place, right at the very top of the results page! Whoa. That is very cool.

So remember what they say, folks: Don’t settle for anything less than #1. At least not when you need a sales letter or any kind of direct response copywriting.

(Unless you’re searching on Yahoo. Then you want to demand #3.)

PS: Not to brag, but (ahem) I also show up #1 in both Google and Yahoo for “Maine copywriter.” (SEO? I’ll show you SEO…)

It’s ironic, because it’s spring. The azaleas are blooming and the forsythia are absolutely blinding in the sunlight. Nature is busting out all over, so you’d think this would also be a time of soaring creativity and output.

Maybe it is for you, but not for me, I’m afraid. I’m only just plodding along. After a very long, cold winter, the work and the words are coming slowly. I’m working on several larger- than- usual projects simultaneously (including a couple of information products that will be of great use to small business marketers like you and me. More on that later.)

But the creative work is taking a lot more time than usual. A lot more time than I’d like. But now I think I’ve finally figured out the problem.

Mental exhaustion. I haven’t had a real vacation in years. I’m self-employed, so I work every day. I love what I do, so sometimes it’s hard to push myself away from the computer. I desperately need to take some time off and just. have. fun.

It’s easy to forget that relaxing, recreation and fun are essential ingredients in a balanced life. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, calls the process “refilling the well.” Our storeroom of creative ideas and images eventually runs dry and must be replenished regularly. I haven’t been doing that. All work and no play, etc.

As the great George Bernard Shaw said:

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.”

So let me ask you… how do you stay refreshed and effective? What kind of leisure activities would you recommend? I really need a kick in the butt to get started.

Look – up in the sky. It’s a bird, it’s a plane. No, it’s a corporate logo!

An Alabama entrepreneur and former musician has taken product placement to new “heights.” Francisco Guerra has invented a cloud machine that creates clouds in the shape of corporate logos, then floats them off into the sky.

His “Flogos” machine produces tiny bubbles filled with air and a little helium, forms the foam into shapes and then pumps them into the sky. A single Flogo can travel as far as 30 miles and as high as 20,000 feet, Guerra says. It’s environmentally safe because the flogo is mostly water, air and a soapy agent that creates bubbles.

First in line to try out the new promotional medium is Disney, which will use one of the machines next month to send clouds shaped like Mickey Mouse heads into the air above Walt Disney World in Orlando.

Does that mean Mickey will soon fade into the sunset? Not likely. When it comes to advertising and promotion, I guess the sky is no longer the limit.

Photo by WTL

Seth reminds us of the first rule of b2b selling:

“If it gets to the RFP (Request for Proposals) stage, you lost.”

In other words, you should already have dazzled the prospect with your knowledge and ideas and closed the deal — long before it ever reached that point. As Godin put it:

“The RFP is an organizational punt, it’s a way of saying, ‘it’s all a commodity, we can’t decide, cheap guy wins.’”

And who wants to compete on price?