Long Copy Sales Letters-Do they really Work for marketers today?

I'm not a personal fan of "long copy" sales letters that I believe are a hallmark of Dan Kennedy proselytes, that go on and on and on. It's my personal belief that this type of sales copy is ineffective, yet I see a large majority of marketers churning out long sales copy like they have nothing better to do than write copy all day long in their attempts to hook new customers.


I own a brick and border business and I write the sales copy myself, my longest sales letter is on the front page of my insurance web site including only 1 real testimonial.


To me I'm inundated with marketers attempting to sell me products and services each week and half if not more are the inevitable 5-12 page Dan Kennedy type of letters. I read the headline and skip to the end to see the offer and don't even bother wasting time reading the fluff in the middle.


Here's my theory on why long sales letters are a complete waste of time in our day:


Business owners are super busy, so your sales message needs to be concise and to the point. As some one mentioned previously if you don't "hook" them immediately they will spit out the bait and swim after other tasty morsels.


What do you all think? Long sales letter copy thumbs up, or thumbs own?

Thumbs down with the long sales letter. I'm all about the long pitch just in a video format. I have done some split testing with this and found the my bounce rate was around 80% with long sales letter and around 65% with video sales letter. Their could have been may facts to play apart in this could be the niche, copy or graphics. Me personally I would rather listen/watch a sales pitch then reading it.

Both is good it depend how u use it

I hate long pitches, and videos are a million times worse. At least I can scroll to the end of a sales letter and get to the point.

If someone has the gall to try to force me to waste a 15 minutes of my time to get to the bottom line, I'm hitting the back button. Just the fact that they expect me to sit through all that drivel tells me they're not the type of person I want to be dealing with.

Still, that's just me. Beauty is in the bank account, so the best way to determine what kind of pitch to use would be to split-test it. Not against a video, but against a short pitch that gets right down to business after concisely hitting the high points.

And the fact that you don't even read something that may solve your problems show that you're not the right customer...

people dont have such time to read that long sale letter or video unless you are selling product to IM marketer.

I agree Bizzman, long sales letters is a blast froml the past, ,not effective in our short attention span world we live in now.

I think the answer here is to split test. A good long form sales letter will convert more people if it's more convincing than your current page. A good page will convert more people if it's less convincing than your long form sales letter. A good video will convert more than both if it's more convincing.

Try, try, try, try again. Fail better. You'll learn more about your customers and make more money in the long run, but it will take work--that's the only real answer to this question.

He's the thing. I also hate long sales pitches, because as a business owner I also want to get right to the offer and then maybe I'll skim back to try and find a few answers to any specific questions I have. Other than that I NEVER read those things. BUT, my/your target audience might read them. Most people aren't entrepreneurs that see this stuff everyday so some actually read through the whole pitch and others still might even prefer that style. Point is just like others have said, test both on a statistically significant sample size and see what works best for you.