How to Format Your Take-Home Literature

Those of you who have had me train with teams know how I dislike six-panel (letter size) fold-up brochures in your take-home-materials. It isn’t the information that I have a problem with, and if you are sending something in the mail, this style is appropriate. However, when dealing with a pending decision, it is the manner in which these items are formatted that concerns me.

In many cases your take-home packet – your one opportunity to persuade the absentee spouse – is being handed off at home to an Economic Buyer (decision-maker) who has just finished a long day at work and isn’t terribly interested in poring over the contents of your folder to begin with. Since getting their attention is your primary objective, including brochures with six sides that this person has to unfold and try to follow laterally is not the best way to engage them, not to mention the fact that these mailer-size pieces do not fit well into the pockets of your presentation folder. Personally, my first inclination when I see these in a folder is to discard them without looking at them, and then look through the remaining materials that remain, with an eye out for your fee sheet. I suggest that this behavior is common among many, if not most, of your current recipients.

For these reasons, a better idea for formatting your materials is to re-organize the information that you want to impart to your reader from the panels into a single (one-sheet) format that reads from top to bottom, with only one main idea per page. The reason for this is that if the recipient can see a beginning and an end to the document when they first view it, they are more likely to read it, as they know that they can do so quickly and easily. Other tips that will make these one-sheets more interesting:

• Only one primary idea, or topic, per sheet
• Use of color photography relevant to the main idea
• Use of bullets to highlight benefits, as in

Treatment at our office offers the following unique benefits to you and your family:

• Break-up of text, and judicious use of it
• An action step suggestion to conclude the text

Lastly – and this is a common mistake in practices I work with – don’t include items in the take-home packet that aren’t relevant to the pending decision process. Remember than in this situation, the family has not yet said yes to treatment.  For that reason, “How to Care for Your New Braces” and “Directions to Our Office” is, at this point in the decision process, irrelevant information. It does not add value to what you are sending home, nor will it unless and until the decision is made to start. In other words, it is taking up space and watering down the impact of your pre-decision marketing message.

Once treatment has been decided upon, those items become appropriate and therefore useful. Keep things simple and relevant, and when deciding what to include and what to exclude remember to match information to its relevance in your decision process.