Should a Prospecting Letter Use Long or Short Copy?

When you write prospecting letters, should the copy be long and thorough OR short and to the point? Which gets you the most opens and clicks, do you think?

The knee-jerk reaction is to answer, “Short!” After all, we live in a 140-character world now, thanks to Twitter!

But, there’s a laundry list of considerations that contribute to the right answer, such as…

Are you targeting prospects or customers (are you known or unknown?)
What’s your message’s purpose: Website visit, opt-in or sign-up, download, take an order?
Is your message urgent (to your reader), important (to your reader) or educational?
Is your story new or original or familiar with a twist? (I truly hope you’re not just spewing product features and leaving it to your readers to see the value.)
Is your business transactional or a considered purchase?

(Did you ever notice how marketing consultants answer a question with a question? Doesn’t that drive you crazy?

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Long vs. Short Prospecting Letter Strategy

Using drip marketing to send prospecting letters is a long-term strategy that leverages your one-to-one selling time. Every email address in your database is precious–it represents a future buyer. When someone does opt-out, it’s a cause for a follow-up to find out why. Opt-outs should never be given up without a fight!

Opt outs are one way to gauge whether your messages resonate. We’ve had success with both short (1-2 sentence) and long (like this one) prospecting letters. But we know before we sit down at the keyboard which kind we’re going to write. We’re deliberate. And consistently, over many years now, our opt-out rate has been under 1%.

If you’re like most people, your biggest challenges to getting a drip marketing campaign off the ground are:

What to write about
How to write long vs short sales letters or emails
Finding time to write when you don’t know how to do 1 and 2

Left to the default, what most will do is:

Nothing
Continued sales harassment of their customers
Rambling on with no point or purpose (we call it barf prose)

Which is a shame because drip marketing is the most powerful marketing and positioning tool ever invented for small businesses–when done properly.

(Just last month we got a new client out of the blue who said, “OK, I’ve been on your list for 4 years, reading your stuff, and I finally decided, ‘I’m never going to do this on my own.’” We had to go look her up in our database to remember who she was.

We never would’ve followed up with her in our regular course of phone-call follow ups. She was too remote a prospect. But it cost us nothing in time or money to keep her on our drip marketing program all these years. And–note–she never opted out in all that time!)

How To Write Sales Letters

If you’re fascinated by, yet still perplexed about how to integrate drip marketing into your follow-up system, join our DripMarketingCamp. We take you from struggling with how to write sales letters to launching a live drip campaign right out of your own customer database.

Camp comes with a 2-part, no-questions, 12-month guarantee: First, if you do the homework, we guarantee you will launch at least one live drip marketing campaign out of your customer database. Second, you must earn 10X your registration fee within 12 months of Camp, or we refund your money. We hold your hand through the entire process…including creating the right length long copy or short copy sales letters.

Tagged as: how to write sales letters, long copy, prospecting letter, prospecting letters, short cop0y