July Update:

Here’s a dangerous way to begin an article…

Most people who write about copywriting and why the PS works have no idea what they are talking about...

Intrigued?  Read on...

A PS, for the sake of completeness, is the last few lines at the end of a sales letter.  It starts with the letters PS:.  This stands for “POST SCRIPT”.

Most people today think postscript is some weird language to communicate with a laser printer...

Bah!  Kids today, I tell you.  

Before laser printers, before inkjets, before dot-matrix and daisy-wheels, we had typewriters.  Manual, hunt-and-peck typewriters that made a satisfying clackety-clack.   And, back in the days of typewriters, you couldn’t just cursor up and change a paragraph, unless you wanted to go steady with a roll of correction tape.  This meant you had to plan your letters!

Imagine that! Plan a letter!  Well, no matter how well you plan a letter, you’re always likely to remember something important after everything is done...

This is the sales letter equivalent of your 5 year old having to go to the bathroom after you’ve encapsulated him in a snowsuit.  Never fails.

PS = Post Script.  That means After the Script...

Since the script or main gist of the letter is over, the PS is often written in a more friendly tone.  This is the spillover that didn’t have a spot in the planned letter.

And yes, it’s common that people jump to the end, and read the PS: before reading the main part of the letter...People read sales letters differently than, say, a novel.

Some people throw out your envelope unread.  (What is with these people anyway?)

But, of the ones who read, there are two different types:

The Readers and the Skimmers.

The Readers are the easiest to figure out.  They basically read from start to finish.  Headline, opening sentence, opening paragraph, bullets, subheads, next paragraph, bullet, and so on, till the end, where some of them send in their coupon and order your product.

The skimmers are much more difficult to figure out.  Everyone who skims, skims differently.  This makes the skimmers very frustrating to rationalize and write for.

One of the only things that has been discovered about skimmers is they are all roaming over a sales letter or ad copy looking for words that jump out at them.

Want to know what those words are?  Okay.  Those  words have great importance to your target market.  You’ll know what those words are if you’ve researched your target market enough...These words describe the solution to the problem they have.  They are the words used to describe their problems.   You can’t “make these up” or try to guess at what they are!  It doesn’t take a big difference in terminology to totally lose rapport with your customers...Whatever you do, GET THIS RIGHT, because without it, not even the best PS will save you!

I like to think of these words as “hooks” embedded in the copy.  Little Velcro hooks to trap the reader into reading the entire letter. 

Bullets, for the most part, function like hooks.  Because they are so short and to the point, it takes only a little longer to read them than skip over them.

Some skimmers just jump to the Order Form to see what they are being sold.

But, most of the skimmers are the people who will read the last chapter of a book before deciding if they want to read it, or even buys the book itself!

Now, there’s nothing you can do about this.  You can engineer the brightest prose this side of Shakespeare, and a skimmer will skim over the whole thing if it’s not to his liking.

Your last chance to make a sale is in the PS.  It’s your last chance before the trash can.  If there is a critical spot in the sales letter, it’s here.  Here’s where you have to convince the prospect that it’s in his best interest to read it now, or at least put this letter aside and read the whole shabang, while he has time.

PS’s as a rule, are too short to sell anything on their own.  It would be a rare letter that could sell a product with people only reading the Headline, a few bullets and the PS.

That’s why I like to create a “Knowledge Gap” in the PS.

Remember: a reader who skips to the PS knows it won’t be coherent. He’s skipped stuff, he may not understand everything. 

So, if you say something juicy in the PS, you’ll force him to go back and read the whole letter, bit by bit.  Your reader doesn’t want to miss out on something juicy.  It’s like catching the last few seconds of a juicy conversation.  You wish you could rewind time and hear what you missed.

Some insanely curious people open the letter, having NO interest in the product, read the headline, a few bullets, and then get to the PS.

The PS then makes a cryptic statement.  A statement they don’t understand, but want to.

The prospect goes, Huh?  I gotta find out about this.

So, then, he reads the whole letter.  Then, he gets hooked.  And he orders.

Been there.  Done that.  Got the t-shirt.

Postscript Exceptions and Weird Cases

Well, there’s only two I know of.

There’s a weird, weird little magazine called the Utne reader.  It’s an interesting journal, full of, well, interesting stories.  Pick up a copy.

The subscription control letter is famous for two things. 

1) Being a rather soft sell.

2) No PS.

What?  No PS?  Yep.  Now, I know that when you talk to a pro copywriter about PS’s, if you discuss the fact it may be better to not have a PS, most direct marketers will back away from you slowly, avoiding eye contact.

Look:  There ain’t no rules to this game.  Personally, I would always include a PS if I had a choice.

And the other exception?

Well, it’s not a good one.  It’s EMAIL.

Some net-wits and webbersnappers seem to think that direct marketing rules have flown out the window since they are on the web.

Some, crassly violate these rules by putting disclaimers at the end of their emails, unsubscribe info, or, incredibly, affilliate programs at the end of each email.

Confusion isn’t selling.  Think rationally for a second...If you’ve been mailing to your customer base regularly...and you should...do you really need to have a disclaimer on the zillionth email?  Do the people who’ve seen your stuff so many times need to see how to unsubscribe again?

Now, I’m all for economy.  When sending out certain direct mail packages, it does make sense to test certain “ride alongs” to enhance the total order from each customer.  No one argues with that.  But in that case we have a skyrocketing postal and paper and printing cost to contend with!

Email, last I checked, is almost free.

So, if you do have the snazziest affiliate program, whatnot or do-hickey, put it in a separate email.  Don’t be lazy.

If the affiliate pitch is any good, there will be a sales letter.  Use THAT in your follow up email.

Old time direct mailers knew that response rates were as high as 3 to 1 for separately mailed offers as for ride alongs.

Problem was, some offers were so cheap or took so long to break into the black that it required ride alongs or subsidized media. 

Well, wouldn’t you like to triple response for free?  Send a separate email!   That’s it!

Y’know, because email is such an immediate medium, naturally using such short messages, I’m totally convinced that two short messages, spaced, will do better than one long message, having two objectives.

Email is fast.  Short.  Bursty. People rarely get on a soapbox in email.  Personally, I hate it when I have to scroll down my VIEW pane to see what else someone wrote.  Can’t they write it in one screen?

Next month:  The conclusion of this article.  An idea that, when added to a PS gets me responses from 100% of CEO’s.  And...It’s the PS!

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