The Death Of The Sales Letter? (Maybe!)

Every day it seems like someone else is declaring long copy doesn’t work — or that it’s stopped working… That attention spans are fractured, and nobody reads long sales letters anymore.

“My sales message needs to be short, because my customers don’t want to read all that. Maybe we could do video… But… No long sales letter they have to READ.”

Really? So long sales letters are dead now, in the post-MTV, YouTube generation?

NO WAY! With one important caveat…

First. Long sales letters are far from dead. My client’s appears-to-be-record-breaking launch this week was driven by a short email that told almost nothing about the product, followed by a 14-page hard-hitting sales letter. The email itself didn’t make any sales, I guarantee that. The sales letter did.

The long sales letter is what did the work. The long sales letter made the sales. Why? Because it takes a long sales letter to make a full sales argument that grabs the prospect’s attention, gets them interested in the opportunity you’re offering them, stokes the fire of their desire, and demands they don’t do anything else with their day before they take action and hand over their hard-earned money.

The long sales letter makes the sale.

Here’s my caveat. If your sales letter sucks, yeah, it’s dead. If it doesn’t focus from start to finish on the prospect and the benefits they’ll receive by responding, it’s a no-go. If it’s not about THEM, they won’t read. Listen, people read news, books, novels, and tons of other content every day — in the dozens or even hundreds of pages — because it is somehow enriching their life.

Create a sales message that they have to read because it’s compelling and laser-targeted to what your prospects dream of and desire, that saves them from their frustrations and failures, and you’ll hook ‘em and have them reading beginning to end… And responding with an order.

That type of long sales letter is alive and well. And will never die.