What About When You DON’T Want Long-Form Sales Letters?
Many, many people have issues with long-form sales copy. Some of them don’t know what they’re talking about. They’ll say:
- “Nobody reads those long pages”
- “That looks like a scam”
- “It’d never work on me”
- “If the product is good, you don’t need to sell it!”
Some of these things are laughable, but there are some real concerns. The cold, hard fact is that long-form sales letters outperform other marketing materials in pretty much every respect that matters (so, conversions and sales.)
However there’ll be times when you don’t want to use a long-form sales letter. These times might include:
- When a client tells you no
- When you’re writing content like website home pages and stuff
- At times where you’re trying to soft-sell an audience
There’ll be others, but you get the point.
Sometimes, you don’t want to write a long-form, throw-everything-in-there sales letter.
So what do you do in those instances?
Firstly… Don’t Abandon Direct Response Marketing Principles
The absolute key to any marketing is pushing your customer further down the funnel. I don’t care if you’re writing a TV ad or a flyer for your local kebab shop. Direct response marketing isn’t just about creating those ugly looking 10,000 word sales pages designed to sell you penis pills, penny stock masterclasses or “the one secret known only by CIA agents which will make women irresistibly attracted to you.”
Sure, you can use direct response marketing for that, but the key is in the name: direct response.
Many, many copywriters seem to think that if you’re writing short form ads, you can omit the solicitation for the sale.
That’s why most copywriters are underpaid and have no idea whether their work makes their clients profit or not. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Whether you’re writing a long-form sales letter or a flyer, you need to stick to direct response marketing principles.
In other words, you need to make the viewer take an action.
This can be really simple.
“Click here.”
You might read the above two words and think, “That’s hardly advertising gold” but if you have a website, I want you to go and change all of your meta-descriptions to include some variation on “click here.”
Then wait a few months for the search engines to re-crawl all of your posts. Then see what happens to your click-through rates.
Secondly, Do Your Research
I was writing a sales page for a little service business I’m starting just the other morning.
It was one of those, “I can’t trust myself not to browse on the internet and waste my morning” kind-of activities, so I wrote it out with pen and paper.
At least, that’s what I intended to do.
I don’t have a hard copy of my sakes page structure checklist, so I started off with just the research section. I go through it every time I want to make a sales letter, because it ensures I know the product. It contains things like:
- What is the exact product?
- How much is the problem-solve worth in a specific monetary value sense?
- Are there bonuses? If so, what?
- How do you buy it, what are the terms, etc.?
- Any scarcity information
The list is pretty extensive, but at twenty items or so, (Most with a simple value or yes/no answer,) it takes me about half an hour to an hour to write this out.
So, I followed this process for the service I’m going to offer. Then I realised that the research I’d done would probably be enough for web copy. No gimmicks required.
I wrote that sales letter without a structure or anything just by writing what the product is, does and the value of it.
If you really study and know your product, sometimes you don’t need any long-form sales letter trickery. Just write what the product does, and you’ll have the bare bones of a long-form sales letter anyway.
(For the record, the “sales letter” I’m talking about was 890 words. Easily enough for a web page.)
The Platform And Audience Dictate The Length
If you follow the above two principles: direct response marketing principles and researching the product thoroughly, then you’ll have a successful sales message.
I would say you don’t need anything else, but there’s another key thing which far too few people talk about: What your advertising looks like is dependent on two things: 1. Your audience and 2. Your platform.
Most direct response copywriters get this because they live by direct response marketing principles ergo they know based on the data whether their ads are terrible or not.
(There’s a massive overlap between direct response guys and affiliate marketers because of this shared “only numbers matter” principle.)
But general advertising copywriters and other advertising disciples don’t even remotely think about the platform or the audience.
It’s why we get stupid adverts that try and sell a £50,000 new car using memes and appealing to teenagers and broke students. (Hint: don’t put memes in adverts for expensive cars because old executives who buy the cars don’t understand or care about any of that.)
It’s also why you get weird internet marketing stuff that makes sense when you learn about online business through a reddit thread but looks utterly retarded to anyone with a brain. Like starting an Instagram account to sell phone chargers or whatever.
Who are your audience? Where do they go?
Once you’ve determined that, then work out:
Where the audience are, what are they enjoying?
What are the rules of engagement?
To use easy examples… don’t sell high-end business services with long-form copy on a photo-sharing site for teenage girls and the photo-creeping dudes that admire them.
On the other hand, don’t try and sell low end cosmetic products to rich housewives or try and sell hyper-extroverted solutions to guys on anonymous forums.
Final Thoughts
Long-form copy versus short-form copy and direct response marketing principles versus general advertising methods are stupid arguments.
What works, works. What doesn’t, doesn’t.
There’s a lot of data to tell you what’s superior and what’s inferior, but the real issue here is that you can check it out for yourself.
There’s no reason you can’t run a test long-form v. short-form and split-test an ad with a call to action versus one without.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll realise that the whole thing was pretty much a case of common-sense all along.
Further, once you understand the rules of the game and the ways to get people to buy your stuff, you’ll realise that you don’t need to use the stereotypical long-form sales letter format to sell. Sometimes you’ll want to, other times you won’t.
I’m losing my train of thought here, but if you follow the process laid out in this article, you’ll build successful ads without having to worry about whether your writing is “too salesy” or “too long-form” or what some dorks are arguing about on a marketing forum.