Once when I was a little boy trying on shoes at the mall, the sales lady slipped a shoe on my foot and asked me to tie the laces.
I was pretty young. And very happy that I had learned to tie laces. So I tied them proudly, but apparently not well enough. The lady looked at me and said…
“I said TIE your shoes not go through the ACT of tying them.”
She then undid my laces and retied them extremely tight. (Later after we bought the shoes and left the store, I had to untie the tight laces to let circulation back in to my feet.)
Now, the point of this story isn’t to point out what a witch this woman was for mouthing off to a little boy learning to tie his shoes (or maybe it is… 🙂 …
…but instead to apply her mean spirited line to the P.S.’s I see these days. Hopefully in a more encouraging way.
It seems when people write their own copy they always add a P.S., probably because they’ve seen others doing it. But they don’t apply effective strategies.
They don’t write a P.S., they go through the ACT of writing a P.S. Which results in valuable real estate being completely wasted.
I’ve written a couple posts on effective strategies for P.S.’s in the past: Here and here.
Read them and use them. But here’s another.
A hidden treasure in your P.S.
The P.S. can sometimes be a great place to reveal for the first time an extra bonus, sales argument or clarification.
An Extra Bonus
You can use a P.S. to thank the visitor for reading the entire letter, and offer a special bonus for buying now. For someone who has read the letter from top to bottom, this might help to push them over the edge and buy.
For someone who has skipped to the bottom of the sales letter, maybe searching for the price, they’ll not only see the extra bonus… they’ll also see you thanking them for reading the entire letter, which might encourage them to actually do so.
Also, since you thanked them for reading the entire letter (which they haven’t done yet), they might feel like they just “gamed the system” and discovered an extra bonus. To reward themselves for being so clever, they may feel an OBLIGATION to buy.
Sales Argument
Sometimes an additional sales argument may fit well in to your first P.S.
My best example of this would be a “Breaking News” type message. If current events have given the customer an extra reason to buy, say that…
“Breaking News: Just last week Gold went up in price by $40! Now may be the perfect time to invest before the gold soars in value.”
Clarification
A while back I wrote sales copy for a product that was guaranteed to make the user cash if they followed the instructions. I didn’t want to make this claim up front, I was afraid guaranteed cash was too unbelievable.
Instead I started off the letter by saying 13 of 14 test subjects made more than $200 from using the product. A seeming admission that 1 person had not made money actually gave the claim credibility.
But the truth was, all 14 people DID make money.
So in the P.S., I made a confession.
“There’s something I need to tell you that I couldn’t reveal earlier. I had said only 13 of 14 people made more than $200 with this product.
“What I didn’t tell you was that the 14th person made $180 using this product with just 3 hours work.
“I was afraid that if I told you this product had a 100% success rate, you wouldn’t believe me. But now that I’ve explained why it works, I’m confident you’re ready to hear that YES, this product does work for everyone.”
This could be the final proof that really puts the reader over the edge and forces them to push the order button.
…
Now that you have three more tools for writing an effective P.S., please do it! Write a P.S. that would make me proud.
If you want, copy and paste your P.S. in to a comment to this post and I’ll critique it.
Good luck!
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