It is still very common to go to a sales page for a product and find what marketers call a “long copy sales letter.”
The term is self-explanatory and if you have seen any of these pages yourself, you will know that long can mean very long indeed.
The reason that such pages have been so successful for internet marketers is that they work and quite often they can work very well.
However don’t make the mistake of thinking that this technique will translate quite so well into the email you send to your subscribers…the majority of times it really won’t.
For a start, if we are on some sales page for a product or service it is generally because we actually want to be there and want to read about the offer being made to us.
It follows that we may have time to read many thousands of words, or perhaps we will just read the headlines and bullet points and skip to the “buy it now button” as many people do.
Email is different. It is different because we can get so many of them on a daily basis. They just land in our inboxes at random times and invite us to read them.
We may be at our desks or or at home and have time to go through all our emails one by one but, increasingly, we read them on tablets or smartphones when lots of other things are competing for our precious time.
So when it comes to writing email, for example using an auto-responder like RocketResponder, the general rule is to keep it short. Email size matters and small is generally better than large.
Grab your subscriber’s attention with the subject line, then say what you need to say in a few sentences and include a link for people to click to get more information.
That is the general rule and there always exceptions. You might do an email newsletter for example which is packed full of content and that is totally fine.
However when we are competing for the precious time of our increasingly busy subscribers it really does help to keep the message short and to the point.
