Should Your Sales Letter Be Long or Short
There are no statistics available that I know of to prove it, but from the length of most sales letters on the internet, one would think that long sales letters were the most successful. How many sales letters have you seen that went on for twenty paragraphs extolling the product or service and then… But wait, there’s more! Read on for another twenty or so paragraphs and you probably haven’t learned very much more about the product or service in question. The concept is that if you are a good writer (or hire a good writer to do your sales letter), your words, regardless of how lengthy will continue to draw the consumer further down and down on the page to the “Buy it now” button. Does this really work?
Statistics are understandably difficult to come by, since one product may have many sales letters, some long and some short. Some products that sell well may have no sales letter, and simply sell because they are in demand or the current fad. As a consumer, I would vote for the short sales letter just because I don’t want to waste that much time reading about it. But what is a sales letter supposed to be all about, anyway? Selling the product, of course.
This is why I believe a short sales letter is the most productive. In the world of online consumer search today, most consumers know a great deal about your product before they can get to your site and read your sales letter. There are just so many ways to learn about the product, many of them considered much more valid and objective than the opinion of the product marketer or creator, that those are probably the information sources the consumer has already looked to. He has probably googled it, looked for tweets on it, found a +1 on Facebook for it, and is already primed to buy. A short letter with perhaps more descriptive details, the mechanics of the sale and a big thank you will probably have more value at this point.
Where a long sales letter may have its proper value is the undecided customer. He has gone all the way to your short sales page but is leaving. A well written, friendly popup asking him if he needs help deciding, or wants more information can invite him to a more heavily marketing oriented long sales letter to convince him. He probably truly wants this additional information in order to make his decision, but at the prior stage, if he was not interested, the long sales letter would be an annoyance, and if he was interested, a long sales letter would be a waste of time.
If you have to write a sales letter, you might want to ensure whether or not you need a long or a short one. Why don’t you start with http://www.findermind.com for more information about this subject.

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