The BIGGEST Risk With Long Form Sales Letters
Long form sales letters are the best way to sell things. This is inarguable. Direct response, long form sales letters written with conversions in mind are proven to be the highest converting advertising you can have.
Yet I can guarantee most of you guys have seen the average long form sales letter and clicked off it before anything happened. Long form sales letters are also notorious for being scammy and salesy in a way that makes used car dealers blush.
This seems like a contradiction or glitch in The Matrix. After all, how can long form sales letters convert better than anything else whilst simultaneously being the advertising form most likely to get ripped up and thrown out (or, red-X’ed in the corner) quicker than anything else?
There’s one thing that I think is the key determinant of this. Read on to find out.
Long Form Sales Letters: What Are They?
Long form sales letters are what you’d normally call “sales letters.” They’re the things you read with the big red headline that says, “Everyone laughed at me… until I took this protein powder and then they cowered in fear!”
The headline is followed by hundreds or thousands of words of copy which employs everything from NLP to testimonials to everything and the kitchen sink in sales terms.
The most important part of the long form sales letter is the call to action. Long form sales letters are direct response marketing. This means that you’re not going to write a long form sales letter in order to get your brand out there or make people feel warm and fuzzy. You get paid based on the fact that people will read and do what your call to action tells them.
This is why long form sales letters are the most powerful form of marketing: A long form sales letter will give a specific profit based on a specific investment.
You spend £10000 on a sales letter, and you make £1 million.
Companies love long form sales letters for this reason.
Compare that to a television advert, where it’s all guessing and unicorns and brand awareness.
Obviously, copywriters – or, good copywriters – love this form too. If you’re the above copywriter and you return a million pounds for your clients, you basically have a license to print money. For yourself and your client.
So, long form sales letters are the promised land for the copywriter. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though.
The Biggest Reason For Long Form Sales Letters Failure: You Lose The Customer
Most sales copy – direct sales copy, at least – is a case of having a limited time to convince your reader to become a customer.
Say you write a product review. You have 500-1000 words to go through the pros and cons of a product and then convince them to pick the option you want them to.
With long form sales letters, you run the risk of losing your client.
We’ve all seen the ugly sales pages for various products with their red headlines, yellow testimonial boxes and underlined words seemingly appearing randomly. When you engage in this, you’re re-configuring your reader. They know the sale is coming. They’re going to increasingly figure that you’re trying to weasel your way into their wallets.
You have a limited amount of time.
There are two ways to solve this:
- Keep it short. (You might miss that one thing that sells the product though.)
Or…
- Give the reader plenty of opportunity to get out via your “Buy it now” button.
This is something that a lot of copywriters/web designers/businesses fail to do – they’ll make you watch a 40 minute video before hitting the “buy” button or letting you subscribe.
Don’t do this. Sure, have a call to action at the end. But if you sprinkle some quick links or a button further up and continue your sales letter afterwards, you won’t lose the readers that are still interested, you’ll catch some more readers at exactly the right moment, and you’ll also grab some readers who were dithering between staying a minute more or clicking that evil red X in the corner.
Bonus: How To Lose Your Client Before You’ve Started
“But Jamie, I click off the average long form sales letter before I even read any of it!”
The key to this problem is in the name “long form sales letters.”
They’re called sales letters because they were actual letters originally.
After that, the form changed so that it’d appear in magazines. When that happened, the ad designers changed the design so the adverts would look like native content. E.g. you’d have advertorials.
Adverts disguised themselves as articles.
In the internet age, long form sales letters haven’t tended to hide. That’s the reason people can immediately recognise them and click away from them in the blink of an eye.
As the internet matures, copywriters and internet marketers are going to have to change how they approach this. What this means for you is that you need to create long form sales letters that actually look nice.
This might seem daunting, especially if you’re a design/visual amateur. However, it’s not as bad as you might think.
There are plenty of options for people who can write copy but are terrible at designs. For my projects that require landing pages, I use Thrive Content Builder. This isn’t intended as a pitch for them, but it’s a really great software for creating landing pages that does all the hard stuff for you. It’s a drag and drop editor. (You can read my review here.)
If you design long form sales letters that look somewhat native – i.e. they look like any other web pages – they will get all the benefits of being a form of direct response marketing (so, high conversions) and you’ll also get more readers (as they won’t be scared off by your “I’m a Pick-up Guru”-looking web pages.)
If you bear the risks in mind and design great looking landing pages, then long form sales letters are still the best converting marketing technique that’s ever been devised.