The Magic of Personal Marketing Letters

How to Get Interviews Using Market letters

A proven, more efficient approach to reaching decision makers

If you are looking for a job hunting method that will not only get you interviews with top executives, but make them sit up and smile at the thought of hiring you. Then stop mailing dozens of resumes and cover letters and try a more practical approach – the market letter.

The market letter, also called the broadcast letter or confetti letter, is a brief one-page description of your accomplishments sent directly to the person with the authority to hire you.

The market letter is, a personalized strategy of targeted direct mail. It should be constructed with the same care, over a period of several days or even weeks, as one would for a major new product campaign.

While resumes and cover letters have lost much of their effectiveness as job-hunting tools, company executives who make hiring decisions increasingly prefer market letters.

Studies have shown that even at the top, decision-makers like to retain the prerogative of reading their own mail. In contrast to resumes and cover letters, which frequently draw no response at all, the response rates from employers to market letters are markedly better, sometimes reaching 20% or more for a finely crafted letter. I recall one client whose market letter underwent six different drafts but paid off with a whopping 30% response rate. I.E Requests for a meeting.

How to Start

While it is important to maintain all your job search strategies such as; meeting with Executive Recruiters, answering advertisements, posting your resume on Career sites and Networking, Market Letters offer the fastest and most cost effective way to access the “hidden job market”.

This booklet will provide a guide to developing your own Market Letter including the “magic formula”, sample market letters, a list of action verbs, steps to set up a simple database in Word and a guide to converting existing data bases into a mail merge file.

Good luck, and if you would like to forward your drafts to me for comment, I can be reached at jim@tellsell.com .

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