Here are nine essential design tips to maximize response with the right offer to the right audience:
1. Plain Janes can win. Design in direct response ads exists solely as a vehicle to make the sale. It's not there to "create a mood", get the reader to exclaim "how clever", or build your corporate image. Sometimes, the best direct response ads have the corporate imagemakers chewing their bow ties in despair. They are homely, "down market", even downright crude - in the best sense of the term, implying simple, honest and unpretentious.
Some of the most expensive items have been sold solely by a letter, typed out on a simple computer, and "instant printed" cheaply in just two colors. For example, one direct marketer made several five-figure sales by sending customers and prospects a photocopy of a "new product" press release. This outpulled response from their glossy brochures, because its modest format bypassed sales resistance and, moreover, gave recipients a privileged "preview" of an item others would not see until magazines printed it weeks later.
2. Photos must support copy and convey benefits. Powerful four-color photographs grab attention, but will only work in direct response if they support the benefit - and the benefit is spelled out in the copy. The photo should show a person enjoying the product's benefits, and not merely show the product. They won't work if they just stop the reader. Their objective is to get the reader to read and respond.
3. Copy is king in direct response letters...and the letter is far more important than the brochure. It can often stand alone. In split tests, a letter and response device alone have often pulled just as well as a more expensive package that includes a brochure. And if there's one rule in direct mail on which most agree, it's that long copy usually outpulls short copy. The more copy the reader reads, the more likely they are to buy. The more expensive (or unlikely) the offer, the more copy you need to do the job. One travel agent sold $5,000 vacation packages - in the Arctic - solely by means of a seven-page letter.
This breaks the rule of brevity, which applies to billboards and press releases. In direct response letters, if what you want to say can be said in one page, take two pages, and say it all twice - but in different words. This doesn't mean being long-winded: your style must be tight, lean and powerful, or you lose readers. But repetition of key benefits, describing the same sunset from many different angles, works.
4. Every component must sell. Put the entire sales message on every item in the mailing package. That means the coupon. The reply envelope. The letter. The price list. As well as on the brochure. You can't predict which item the prospect will read first, or how the items will be separated later.
The acid test is: will every item, if spotted casually by a third party in, say, someone's in-tray, cause them to stop and read it? And give them enough information on its own to order from you?
In particular, the response device is the place to summarize the benefits, the absence of risk, the free gift or discount, the need to respond now or be forever regretful. It should be a mini-ad all by itself. Because here is where the prospect will hover indecisively, pen in hand. It's where he or she needs the greatest encouragement to proceed.
5. Good design in direct response is not achieved by whim...it's a precision-engineered machine. To work, it must follow proven rules. First, gain attention with your headline (and/or photo). Immediately, offer your key benefit. Follow with subordinate benefits. Give proof of your benefits, with testimonials, independent reports, etc. Show why the prospect runs no risk, by detailing your guarantee. Ask for the order, explaining how easy it is to place the order. Tell them what they'll gain by ordering before the cut-off date, or what they'll lose by delaying.
Remember too the order in which readers read, and position each stage of your selling sequence in the reading order. For example, the postscript in a letter (or last paragraph in a direct response ad) is often the second part read, immediately after the headline (or the photo caption). Here is where you repeat your strongest benefit. Or give a reason to reply now. Or repeat the premium offer. Or all three. Don't be afraid to have two PSs.
For the same reason, a sales letter should have odd numbers of pages: three or five or seven. Why? The last page is the strongest selling page, in terms of the "call to action". Thrust it in front of the reader. Make it always a right-hand page, i.e. don't ask the reader to run over. (So if yours is a two-page letter, expand it to three pages. You should more than pay for the extra paper by extra orders.)
Add variety to your letter design by varying the paragraph width. The eye is drawn into and down a page where each successive paragraph is five or ten characters slimmer than the one above, like a reverse pyramid. Varying the widths also lets you highlight separate copy elements, such as a case study, testimonial or list of benefits. And break paragraphs and sentences over each page, to tempt the reader to turn over.