A Gentle Rain Reader writes…

Hi Mark,
I’m confused. How long should a sales letter be?
How about for a lead-generation email? Thanks-Tim Long

My reply:

The first thing to keep in mind is that length is secondary to content. If you bore your readers, two sentences can be too long. However there are some general guidelines to keep in mind.

First about sales letters…If you’re writing in the B2C market (business to consumer) there is truth to the adage ” The more you tell, the more you sell.” As direct marketers and top copywriters Dan Kennedy, Clayton Makepeace and Denny Hatch all point out, a 2-page sales letter out-performs a 1-page letter, a 4-page letter gets a better response than a 2 page.

Where’s the top? I honestly don’t know. In theory a book should outperform a letter and a
l-o-n-g book should do better than a short one. But keeping reality in mind, if you’re marketing to consumers, don’t worry about length. I once wrote two sales letters for a fitness studio. One was 4 pages, the other 8. The longer sales letter did in fact pull a greater number of leads by a factor of 3.

However in b2b marketing it’s a bit of different story. My opinion is that length does matter. In order to get through the various screeners and anti-promotional mindsets, our sales letters need to look very much like business correspondence. The copy should convey the tone of easy familiarity from one executive to another.

Length? I’d keep it to no more than 2 pages.

With emails, I would as a general rule keep them short and link the rest of the copy to your website. (As I’ve done here.) That’s one of the things I really love about WordPress sites. They enable you to add blog pages with the content that you “tease” in your emails.

Hope that helps. I’m interested in what others think so let me know.

Thanks
Mark