How Effective are Long Sales Letters?

From the research while surfing and using Google to search, I’ve found out that most people admit long sales letter reeling in more business than short, straight to the point stuff. This just baffles me from all sides to who really spends more than 10 minutes actually reading a letter trying to get you to buy their product.

Well, I hope to share with you my research findings and together we’ll sniff out the clues of getting a more concrete answer on why more business comes from a long sales letter.

One writer from One Vision wrote the article, Who wants to spend 14 minutes to read a long sales letter?

Though this was published in June 2004, one of the reasons he gave didn’t need rocket science to understand the human mind. He said that if the person was interested in the product, then they’ll read the copy once and probably numerous times to make sure they didn’t miss any juicy information regarding the product.

So, nothing really special there.

Next article I found to help with my research was by Jim Edwards whom answered a reader’s question with an article, Does long sales letter copy *really* work?

Jim explained the best logical reason why the a long sales letter works better than the previous article. At the beginning, he clarifies:

A long form sales letter is actually a complete sales presentation in print.

Now we’re getting somewhere as to why a long sales letter needs to be that long. Jim’s single phrase explains the need of a long sales letter to answer whatever questions an interested buyer might have in your product. The long sales letter is to help instill confidence into your buyer and to prove that you’ve covered any holes of your product.

The other advantages as mentioned in his comments of having a long sales letter is so that you’re able to close the deal quicker sometimes.

For instance, instead of taking 15 minutes to go through the copy and have the purchase button below, you could insert a Buy Now option floating in the middle of the content.

Personally, I think that long sales letters don’t have to be all copy though the writer made sure a reader doesn’t get bored with it. But imagining ourselves as a reader, we would know best that a long content only talking about the product and it’s benefits might just bore you continuously.

That’s why I’d like to suggest the idea to design the sales letter in an innovative manner. Have quotes presented in a more graphical way. Highlight the content. Make the bullets look more interesting.

After all, CSS is one helluva thing to use when it comes to copy.

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