In copywriting circles the battle rages. Which is better long copy or short copy? Getting to the point quickly with short copy, or giving them every possible detail they need to know with long copy.

The debate is actually a false one, and this mistake is why the battle rages endlessly.

The length is entirely irrelevant.

The answer to “How much copy do I need in my sales letter/optin-page/offer?” is…

“Enough.”

In other words, “Enough to get the desired action.”

Even better is “Enough to get the desired action now and in future” because you want your copy to create immediate sales and even stimulate further sales, but you also want to make sure it doesn’t give false expectations that lead to buyer’s remorse or refund requests.

“Enough” can mean short.

I’ve listened to a top-class copywriter who would be thought of as a long-copy advocate, telling someone to switch to a 1-2 page letter. The businessman was sending out an 8-page pitch for a rather complex and niched service but at the end of the letter all he wanted the person to do was send for more information.

“Enough” certainly means that you need to stop at some point.

Any salesman will know that sometimes you can talk yourself out of a sale by mentioning an extra detail that stops the prospect in their buying tracks.

Even more importantly for the amateur copy-writer, aka most business people, the longer you write the more likely you are to confuse people, bore them, or lose them in some other way.

So the true question is “How do you decide when enough is indeed enough?”

Back in 2004 I was a long copy fan.

The original salesletter for “Word of Mouth Magic” was a very good selling tool. It was well-written sales letter in the classic long-copy style. It was widely praised, and more importantly it converted well.

However over the years the conversion from this page dropped. This may be because the look became a bit outdated, or maybe internet users have changed over the years.

Whatever the reason, all I could control was the page itself.

Unfortunately it was going to cost me thousands of dollars to have the sales letter re-written, with little guarantee it would bring me more sales than what I had already. So I stopped looking.

Then in the last few years testing software has become available online, and prices have dropped from the tens of thousands they were originally.

I finally had a viable way to improve the salesletter.

I would keep what I had as a control and test it against new versions.

My next question was what would I test?

I’d already done price testing back in 2005, so the next most important thing to test was probably different types of headline but was that all?

In the end I took a radical step.

I decided that besides testing different headline versions, I would test absolutely everything in the rest of the copy too.

I broke the sales letter down into over 80 separate pieces, each the size of 1-3 paragraphs.

Then I set up the testing software to randomly include or leave out each piece.

I was asking the question for each piece of copy, is this helping me make the sale or not?

Of course the immediate result was that I had a shorter sales letter.

It was a random coin toss whether any particular piece of copy was included when someone visited the page so the sales letter instantly shrank to half the length.

The question was, would the testing slowly add all the pieces back as it found they were needed to get the sale?

Here are my results:

Tests where including the copy was better - 32

Tests where removing the copy was better - 50!

Amazingly, the majority of my copy had been harming my sales, usually only by a little, but sometimes by a lot!

The only good news was that the testing software was automatically holding back the unhelpful copy, and showing the successful copy more often.

As a result my sales page is almost a third of it’s original length.

More importantly, on a like-to-like comparison of traffic, it’s converting twice as many sales as it was originally.

It is still not a short-copy sales letter by any means, and maybe there are some extra paragraphs that I could add that might help sales, but I very much doubt it will ever be as long again.

I have tested 3 different multivariate tools over the years and looked at more, but the one I settled on, MuVar, is the same software I ran on “Word of Mouth Magic”. You can find the latest version at…

http://www.MuVar.com

Test. Test. Test. The final say on your marketing, including the length of the copy, comes from your customer.

-Martin Russell

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