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Long Vs. Short Copy: The Debate Continues
By Michael | June 11, 2010
Greetings,
It’s been awhile since I wrote something on this blog. I’ve been swamped between personal life and business commitments, so please accept my apologies.
I’m going to make a stronger commitment to writing and posting more often on this blog in 2010, so stay tuned because I have some topics to cover and share!
One of the most frequently questions I get asked by clients is the same basic one that stirs up raging public forum debates: Does sales letter size matter?
Well, let me make a very public stand on this debate.
Ready?
My answer is… it depends.
Some stand, huh?
Let me explain before some readers send me flaming emails.
Honestly, it depends on the media you are using. If you are writing a product description for a print catalog, space is at a premium. So you need to use very short, powerful copy to do this, often times less than 100 words of text.
If you are writing a direct mail piece, then there are times where the mailing cost will dictate how much copy you can use. Case in point, I recently wrote an offline direct mail piece that I thought was killer.
Except that it was 16 pages… 17 pages with the order form included. That would have bumped the mailing costs up by 50% for my client which they wouldn’t approve. I don’t blame them so it was back to the cutting board to get the mailer between 10-15 pages of even tighter copy.
I think one of the reasons why many copywriters enjoy writing online sales copy so much is space is rarely an issue. Most online sales letters are just one long scrolling webpage and it can be as long as you feel it needs to be.
Here’s a great example: In August 2004, John Reese’s Traffic Secrets launched using an 80 page sales letter written by Michel Fortin. Now I’ve never asked Michel this directly, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t sit down thinking to himself “I’m bored. Let me write 80 printable pages for this sales letter”.
Not hardly.
Michel sat down to write a sales letter to sell a $997 home study product (at the time an unheard of price for a home study info-product for the IM niche) and it took him 80 pages to tell everything that was in the product… include client testimonials… include video demos… and so on. It took him 80 pages to ethically make the sale and in that case, it was 1.08 million dollars in sales for the first 24 hours alone!
I’ll paraphrase legendary marketer Dan Kennedy, who I think says it even better: “There isn’t too long. Only too boring.”
If you bore your reader, then the copy is probably too long or need reworking.
When I sit down to write a sales letter, I deliberately write more copy than I need to ethically sell the product or what the mailing budget is dictating. So if I need a 5 page direct mail letter, I’ll write 6-8 pages. If I think I need 12 pages to sell an ebook, I’ll write 14 or more pages.
Then I edit ruthlessly to cut out any excess fat. Any text that isn’t carrying its weight or doesn’t help ethically move the prospect towards buying is cut. By the time I take that 6-8 page “draft” and edit it (usually several rounds of editing), it’s 5 pages of copy tighter than a military bootcamp private’s made bed.
So that’s my take on it. The length of the letter rarely matters. It’s making the sale consistently that does.
What do you think?
Until next time,
Mike
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Topics: Copywriting - Offline, Copywriting - Online, Direct Response Marketing | No Comments »