It seems like there are so many sales letter and landing page themes and plugins popping up everywhere. One of the latest to join the fray is WP Sales Letter.

What attracted me to it is

• The headline, guarantee, opening text, PS suggestions. You won’t believe how much I struggle with these
• It can work with my existing theme (or most themes)

Pre-Written Copy Suggestions

The moment I got my hands on it, I ran a quick test and managed to cobble up a landing page in 15 minutes. Obviously, I’d need a lot more time when writing a real opt-in or sales page. However, I can already see how much it will speed up this process for me. You need to understand that for me, writing a sales page even a simple landing page is like asking me to jump off a cliff. The result – big time procrastination and that’s never good.

With copy suggestions, the plugin helped me start and re-start my thought process as I work through the different sections a landing page should address. It is like a little nudge to keep me going. That is just as important as getting started – to keep going until the task is done.

Works With Any Theme – Really?

Next thing I did was test the landing page on several themes. I ran it on a Builder child theme and a Genesis child theme since these are almost the only themes I use anymore.

Overall, the landing page performed consistently. The features and benefit bullets, testimonials box, guarantee box, order form, order button and credit card icons all worked nicely on every theme. The page width adjustments also worked well. So did the font headings.

Here are some screen shots of the same landing page on three different themes without doing any kind of style sheet editing at all.

Visual Elements

On my first use, I completely missed visual short codes that’s built right into the text editor. Using it, you can simply select a block of text and tell it to style the text as an attractive highlighted box or button. Really love this feature.

What Could Be Better

Like everything else, there are a few things I’ve noticed. Perhaps because I build so many WordPress sites so it might be I’m extra critical.

• Page width – you can edit the page width of your landing page which is awesome but the most narrow you can specify is 800px. A little too wide for my tastes. I would like to see options down to 650px or even custom defined.
• The video player is set to autoplay by default. It would be better if the user can define this.

What It Does Best

I’ve only ever worked with three other sales letter themes/plugins. Optimize Press, Premise and MarketerCMS. Even so, the encounters have been brief and in the capacity of a developer, not writing copy – with the exception of MarketerCMS. I’m certain, sitting in the copywriters seat would influence my outlook on all three greatly.

When it comes to features like landing page layouts, opt-in form integration, funnels, SEO, membership site integration and pretty graphics – Optimize Press, Premise and perhaps even MarketerCMS will win. They are more fully featured.

And that brings me to the point, WP Sales Letter is somewhat in a sub-class of its own. As it is at time of writing, it does one job really well – get you writing your sales copy as well as thinking in a structured, step-by-step method to make sure you’ve covered your bases.

This makes the plugin ideal for those who are perhaps a little – or a lot – intimidated with the idea of writing copy. After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty a sales page looks if it is not finished, it sells nothing.

If you are a seasoned and very experienced copywriter, this could still work very well for you by making the process go faster.

The other great thing going for it is the fact you can keep your existing theme and you won’t have to set up a brand new WordPress site just so you can use a sales letter theme – that doesn’t make sense at all to me.

The Bottom Line

The plugin is perfect for me. I’m a developer not a copywriter. It helps me keep my thoughts and ideas focused. If there are a few things that don’t play well with the theme, the developer side of me can fix it up quick and easy.

If you’d like to see a real life example of a sales letter created using WP Sales Letter, check out our RSSBrander plugin page. The only thing I tweaked was adding bullets which I needed to do anyway because the theme doesn’t support bullets.

WP Sales Letter is also very affordable. Certainly something to get when working on an existing site where a theme change is not possible or desired. Keep in mind, this is the first release. As with any software I’m sure improvements are worked out as we go so I consider this a worthwhile addition to your toolbox.