Everything I write starts as a letter. Here's why that's not as odd as it sounds.
The oldest format in the room is still the most effective one
Regardless of what type of copy I write, I seem to start with a letter.
Sounds gloriously inefficient. It isn’t.
Allow me to explain. It will make more sense as you read.
A letter is personal. When we write one, we tend to think about a specific person – a friend, perhaps? Our tone is warm and we certainly don’t make any salesy announcements every other paragraph.
It’s the difference between copy that opens with “Individuals with high cholesterol should consider the following lifestyle changes…”
And one that opens with “Look, I know you’re not going to give up the pies entirely, so here’s what we do instead.”
Same goal, yet completely different effect. Because only one feels personal.
Writing a letter reminds me to have a clear idea of who the audience is, and helps me learn as much about them as I can.
My market research days certainly help me here. Particularly the segmentation studies where I spent weeks running cluster analysis, eventually emerging with a small set of audience profiles that are meant to represent thousands of people.
The whole point was to make a large, faceless audience feel specific. Specific enough that someone in the room would lean forward and say “that’s just like my aunt Jenny.” When that happened, I knew the profile was real.
That habit of writing to one specific person didn’t just come from market research. It was reinforced every time I studied the writers who’d been doing it longest, and doing it in the most literal sense possible.
Most of what I know about copywriting comes from following John Carlton’s work. If you’ve spent any time in direct response circles, you’ll know the name. If you haven’t, he’s the writer who could sell you something you didn’t know you needed, and have you feeling good about it afterwards.
His training programmes are built on sales letters. Long ones. But in those letters is a masterclass in something that never goes out of fashion: identifying raw desire, amplifying the stakes, creating trust, and making the solution feel like the only sensible move.
You might call it old school. I call it classically trained.
Old school implies it stopped working. Classically trained means you went back to the source and the principles underneath the formats, before the formats had names such as funnel, or email sequence.
The technology changes the delivery. It doesn’t change the person receiving it.
Behind every modern metric is a person, and that person responds to the same things their grandparents responded to: honesty, relevance, and the sense that someone is speaking directly to them.
The format might be a funnel, a VSL, or an email sequence, but the psychology is a letter. It always has been.
The best copy your audience will ever read won’t feel like marketing. It’ll feel like someone finally saying the thing they’d been thinking, but couldn’t quite put into words.
That starts with sitting down, thinking carefully about one specific person and writing to them.
Writing a letter.