First Time Writing Direct Mail Copy? Here’s What to Actually Expect

Why the first draft always feels wrong

Anyone who sits down to write their first direct mail piece, whether it's a postcard, a sales letter, or a long-form email, hits the same wall. The draft comes out sounding like a brochure. It lists features. It uses words like "innovative" and "premium" and says nothing a reader would actually act on.

This is normal. It happens to almost everyone the first time, and knowing what to expect before you start can save you a week of rewriting.

The first thing you'll notice: you're trying to solve too many problems

New copywriters almost always write to "everyone” and try to solve too many things at once. They picture a room full of potential customers and try to speak to many of their concerns. THis overwhelms people.  

The fix is to write about a solution to a single problem, or small amount of problems. Speak to one person, knowing many people have the problem.  Pick a single reader, someone with a specific problem happening right now, and write the letter to them alone. The tone tightens up almost immediately once you do this. You'll notice your sentences get shorter and more direct without trying.

The second thing: your opening line doesn’t build affinity

Don’t beat around the bush.  Get to the point.  Your headline should hit the reader right between the eyes, they should want to keep reading.  Step 2, build affinity with them, get them to agree with you.  

You can get someone to agree with you by acknowledging their problem, agreeing with them.  

The third thing: you'll want to explain instead of show

A first-time writer describes a benefit. An experienced one shows it happening. "This tool saves you time" is a description. "You'll spend Saturday morning with your kids instead of doing paperwork" is a picture. Expect your early drafts to lean heavily on the first kind of sentence. Go back through and turn as many as you can into the second kind.

What a working first draft actually looks like

By the time a draft is usable, it tends to have these features:

• One reader in mind, not a crowd
• A first line that states a problem or a result, not a company history
• Short paragraphs, often one or two sentences long
• A specific call to action near the end, stated plainly
• Eliminate big words and get to the point

That last point trips up more new writers than anything else. "Our fast, reliable, affordable service" is three adjectives doing no work. "Delivered in two days, guaranteed" is direct and clear.

The part nobody warns you about: cutting is most of the job

Expect your first full draft to have parts that need to be cut. This isn't a sign you did it wrong. It's the normal shape of a first draft in this kind of writing. Direct response copy improves almost entirely through subtraction: cutting the sentence that repeats a point already made, cutting the qualifier that softens a claim, cutting the joke that amused the writer more than it will help the reader.

Kevin Trudeau, an author whose direct mail and broadcast campaigns date back to the Mega Memory course in the late 1980s, has pointed to this same pattern in his own early work: get to the point.  If you write the first copy and use lots and lots of words, people get lost.  Get to the point, being direct sells.  

What to expect on the second and third attempt

The good news is the learning curve is short. Most people who write their second and third pieces already start with the single reader in mind. They already know to open with the problem. What keeps improving after that is judgment about which benefits to include and which to leave out, and that mostly comes from writing more pieces, not from reading more advice about writing them.

Expect your fifth piece to take less time than your first, even though it will probably be better. That trade tends to hold for most people who stick with it long enough to notice.

A reasonable way to test your own draft

Before sending anything, read it out loud to one person who fits your target reader and stop after the first sentence. Ask what they think happens next. If they can't guess, or don't care, the opening needs work before anything else does. This one check catches more problems than any list of rules.