The most successful copywriters use the following steps to create winning sales letters.

Step 1: Preparation
Learn all you can about competing products and the people who buy your products or services. Know everything there is to know about them and don’t take your current knowledge for granted.

Step 2: Get to Know Your Product, Its Features, AND Its Benefits
First document the features of your products or services. Features are nuts and bolts like the size of the engine on a car or the number of speeds on a kitchen blender. Benefits are the emotional gratification that features deliver.

Step 3: Create An Offer They Can’t Refuse
A compelling offer means different things to different target audiences. Figure out what your target market needs and wants, and then construct the most irresistible offer you can. Fill it up with so much perceived value and such small risk that your prospect will find it hard to say no.

Step 4: Pick Your Communications Format
Are you doing a direct mail packet? An online sales letter? Is your offer a letter or a postcard? Will it have a photo, a graphic, a mail-back tear-off sheet, or a scratch-off code number for your website? Where your message will be used guides how it is written.

Step 5: Fill Your Head With Headlines
This is the critical step where you will (and should) spend 80% of your time. Write lots of headlines…50 to 100…and then test them to pick a winner. And hold on to the also-rans. They come in handy as sub-headlines.

Step 6: Create A “Sticky” Opening
Your opening immediately follows your headline and its job is to build so much excitement that it propels the reader deeper into your copy.

Step 7: Present the Benefits of Your Features
This is where you build an emotional case for your offer because people buy on their emotions first and justify their decision with logic later. Use tons of facts, word pictures, differentiators, and benefits, benefits, benefits, to create an emotional connection with your prospect.

Step 8: Make Your Case with Evidence
A prospect has no reason to believe your claims, so provide solid information that supports what you say. This “evidence” can take the form of testimonials, statistical results, news articles, quotes, celebrity endorsements, etc.

Step 9: Explain Your Offer
If your offer sounds too good to be true, tell your prospects why it is true. Explain what you’re doing and why it’s important for the consumer to act immediately.

Step 10: Give Your Best Guarantee
It’s in your long-term best interest to offer the absolute strongest guarantee possible. If you remove any perceived risk for your prospects, you’ll get a lot more of them to act on your offer.

Step 11: Make An Urgent Call To Action
Ask them to act on your offer immediately. Tell them exactly what to do step-by-step.

Step 12: Include A Post Script
After the headline, the postscript is the most often read part of a letter. “The ask” (what you want from them) and a restatement of your key benefit should be in the P.S. A well-written postscript can substantially boost the response to your letter.