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Hook Your Direct Mail Sales Letter Readers With Good Transition
Sentences
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By Alan Sharpe
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Anglers in Maine catch trout using dry flies with barblesshooks. Unless they keep tension on the line all the way to thenet, they lose the trout. Your sales letters must do the same.But how?
One secret to keeping busy business readers hooked is to useirresistible transition sentences. Transition sentences come atthe end of one paragraph and the beginning of the next. Goodtransition sentences leave your readers hanging in a number ofways.
One of them is to tell your reader that a number of things arecoming up, forcing your reader to transition to the nextparagraph to learn what some of those things are. If you¡¯ve everlistened to a person with a pronounced stutter, you know howhard it is to wait while that person completes a thought. Yourprospects are the same. If you almost complete a thought at theend of one paragraph, they will begin reading the paragraph thatfollows to complete your thought. But that¡¯s not all.
Another way to keep your reader hooked throughout your copy isto end one paragraph with ¡°that¡¯s not all¡± or a similar phrase.Or to start your next paragraph with the word ¡°another.¡± Eachdevice shows the prospect that you have not finished, that theprospect has more to learn. And so the prospect keeps reading.And yes, there are some other hooks you might want to try.
You can start a paragraph with the word ¡°you,¡± the one word thatprospects and customers never tire of seeing in print. Or youcould try another proven tactic.
And that is starting a paragraph with the word ¡°and.¡± Read theGospel of Mark in the Bible sometime. It¡¯s one of my favouritebooks. You¡¯ll find the narrative almost impossible to stopreading, it¡¯s so exciting. That¡¯s because the writer begins somany of his sentences with ¡°and¡± that you are compelled tocontinue reading to discover what comes next. (I won¡¯t give awayhow the book ends. Read it and find out.) But there¡¯s anotherdevice that¡¯s just as powerful as the word ¡°and.¡± Do you knowwhat it is?
It¡¯s the question mark. Put one at the end of one paragraph,with the answer at the beginning of the next paragraph, andyou¡¯ll keep your readers headed towards your net.
So here¡¯s the one thing you need to remember. You¡¯ve figured outby now that the secret to effective transition sentences is tokeep your prospective buyer in a state of suspendedsatisfaction, one where they must keep reading your letter tothe end before they feel gratified. And there¡¯s only one sureway of doing that.
? 2005 Sharpe Copy Inc. You may reprint this article online andin print provided the links remain live and the content remainsunaltered (including the "About the author" message).
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