Tips for Formatting Your Ads So They Pull In More Leads & Sales

How your ads, sales letters and landing pages look matter. In fact, despite how well written and thought out your copy may be, if it looks too hard to read, then no one will read it. The result? No sales or leads are generated and then the marketing piece is deemed a failure. Don’t let that happen to you. Here are a few tips for making your copywriting more compelling.

First, for print ads, especially half page or full-page print ads, you want your ad to look more like an article. Use the same font and formatting style. It’s been said, by doing this, it can boost your response by 500%.

Now for direct mail, you want your letters to have the appearance of a personal letter. You don’t want your letter to look like something sent out by an ad agency. A personal letter is more inviting and will draw people in. Remember, if the appearance of your ad or sales letter doesn’t draw people in, then the campaign will be a failure.

The two best fonts to use for direct mail letters is Courier New and Times Roman font. For website pages, you’ll want to do fonts such as Tahoma, Arial and Verdana.

To make your copy easy to read, you need to make paragraphs short – about 3 to 4 sentences long. For really long sales letters for direct mail or websites or email, you can make the first page or two worth of copy just one sentence long paragraphs. This will make reading easier and faster paced.

You’ll want to use lots of catchy sub-heads to break up your body copy, as well as putting sections of text in boxes.

It’s very effective to italicize, bold, highlight and underline various words and sentences. Two caveats here. For websites, you want to avoid underlining text. And for B2B promotions, you don’t want to use very much italicization, bolding or underlining or highlighting of text.

Some studies have shown that indenting paragraphs will make reading easier. Frequent use of ellipses and dashes are proven to make reading of text easier as well.

For direct mail you may want to experiment with canary yellow paper, light blue paper or goldenrod colored paper to bump up response. For websites, it must always be mostly black text on a white background.

– Mike