Asynchronous Selling - What Sales Pages Can Learn From Direct Mail


Hello Reader,

Selling asynchronously is something you can do on a sales page.

  • Synchronous communication = shared present moment.
  • Asynchronous communication = the creation and consumption of communication happens at different points in time.

When you pitch someone across the counter in a showroom, you are selling synchronously. You can respond to objections as they come up, and modify your communication to suit the moment.

Selling on the Internet is mostly asynchronous. You craft your messaging, field imaginary objections, and inspire action from some point in the past, to somebody unknown in the future.

Selling asynchronously is nothing new. Before the Internet, the masters of asynchronous selling worked in direct mail.

A copywriter would compose a message that would be read weeks, months, or years into the future. This message would convince and persuade people in that future time to buy something.

In the digital world, you can see the descendants of these copywriters in long form sales pages.

According to a study by Marketing Experiments, moving the opt-in form below the fold, and converting the page to a long-form sales page can increase leads by 220%.

CrazyEgg used heat-mapping software to track the eye movements of website visitors, and they found that a page 10x in length corresponded to a 363% increase in sales.

Shorter is not always better.

If you're running mobile ads, and all you want is an email address, a short page can serve you well. But if you are making an offer, and inviting a financial transaction, you need to have all of the information available for someone to make a buying decision without having to click anywhere else. A long form sales page can address all the perceived objections, demonstrate credibility, and create scarcity and urgency, all in one scroll.

How?

The 21-Step Sales Letter Formula.

I did not come up with this formula. I learned it from Perry Belcher, a copywriter who learned it from David Frey, a copywriter who learned it from someone else, possibly a mail-order copywriter from Madison Avenue.

This technique is not a hot new flame-out. It's been used and refined over decades, and I've had great experience in using this formula on my own sales pages.

I cover all 21 steps in this 5-minute video:

Video - Sales Letter Formula

If you'd like to use my Google Doc Workbook for the Sales Letter Formula, you can get that here:

AI Coaching Newsletter

Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.

Read more from AI Coaching Newsletter

☀️ “Without exposure people don’t build trust, and without trust the conversation stalls.” - The AI Blueprint for Aotearoa Hello Reader, This week is TechWeek in New Zealand, a festival for celebrating technology in Aotearoa. I'm hosting a lot of AI events. Monday evening I delivered a sold-out webinar, AI Agent Management: The Next High-Value Skill Set When I asked attendees for a 🔥 burning question 🔥 they had about AI agents, answers included: How do I build my own model and agent? How can...

sales vs marketing

🖌️ “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” - Scott Adams Hello Reader, It gives me no pride to say this, but when I look at the many hundreds (maybe thousands) of marketers that I know, there are three common characteristics all marketers share: they're smart they're creative and they're losers. Alex Bogusky took these photos because he learned the hard way. 💡 The Irony of Expertise Expertise is not developed from natural talent. Expertise is...

🌱 “If you aren't growing into the future, you are shrinking into the past.” - David Droga Hello Reader, Have you ever heard of the Diffusion of Innovation? It's a bell-curve distribution of how technology is adopted over time. OpenClaw is not cutting-edge technology. It is bleeding-edge technology. Using it is bloody and difficult. This is what the founder of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, published on his blog this week: When I had both of my OpenClaw agents running on 4.29, they were...