“Scroll Forever” Sales Letter Wins Hands Down
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Ladies and gentlemen, the jury is back from deliberation.
They haven’t been influenced by emotions or personal preferences, only a hunger for money that led them to the truth.
They’ve based their verdict on rigorous testing and scientific fact.
Fancy graphics bit the dust. Creative arrangements were purged from the competition as unceremoniously as boils are photoshopped off a cover models cheek.
Some of the competitors took the soft approach, calling selling words and principle hype behind their back. They can think about their mistakes while they rot in shallow graves.
Yes, if you were expecting different, there is an important lesson to be learned here:
The long, seemingly infinite scrolling sales letter with shitty graphics always wins. And that’s what happened yet again when SEOmoz, the sexy, sleek Web 2.0 Blog had a contest to find which landing page would sell more memberships. You can read the full report onsite…
Here are some of the arguments I heard against it. They seem convincing but they are BUNK.
1) We are a Web 2.0 site. We need to look like the other Web 2.0 sites and none of them use long sales letters (Editor’s note: idiots)
2) Our customers are too smart for that. Too smart for what exactly? Do they have superhuman attention capacities? Can they read your mind in the search for benefits and hooks? Are their brains wired differently so that they prefer clicking to scrolling? What’s that? You “thought this was different?”. Nostrils, time to meet coffee. Take a good smell and wake up, k?
3) Long form sales letters are ugly. So’s your mom, yet here you are reading this.
4) If we make the navigation perfect, the customer will go through exactly the same material at the same time, thus eliminating the need for a huge long page that looks like it wants to sell. Put down the crack pipe Johnny, it ain’t gonna happen.
5) Long sales pages look scammy. Says who, Mr. EggSpurt, your engineer / programmer / designer intuition? Survey (customers pulling out their credit cards) says otherwise. Deal with it.
6) But none of the “big companies” are using long sales letters. Who are you talking about exactly? Coca Cola? And yes, there are legions of big egocentric companies that wouldn’t know good advice if it pulled up in a Ferrari and bitchslapped them across the face.
Get it in your head: your company is not special. Your customers are not different. Don’t be an idiot.
on September 17th, 2007 at 7:06 pm ¶
Yes, big companies do use long sales letters, Agora is a big company, right?
on September 17th, 2007 at 10:06 pm ¶
Hey Samuel,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, they are, but that’s different. Or, err, not
on September 18th, 2007 at 10:21 am ¶
Alex,
You have an interesting take on the results. But, I caution you that long copy advertising is only one tool. It has its place and should be used in certain situations, but is not the best option in every situation. All companies should do testing to determine the best solution for their business.
on September 18th, 2007 at 12:00 pm ¶
#3 forced me to laugh out loud!
By #5, tears were rolling down my eyes!!
Alex! Stop wasting time, finding urine deposits in the strangest of foreign locales (inside joke), sit your a** down at the computer…
…and write *MY* pre-sell pages!!!
:-)
on September 18th, 2007 at 10:20 pm ¶
Hey Ray,
My jokes: funny.
Your jokes: not funny
on September 18th, 2007 at 10:49 pm ¶
Hey Inflatemouse,
I can’t say you’re flat out wrong but it’s dangerous to ignore principles.
For example, the runner up landing page was a plain Joe squeeze page, another proven winner.
Another reader, that did not post his comment here unfortunately, noted that most of the entries, to put it bluntly, *sucked*.
I have to agree there too. But in this case, as in many others, I’d be willing to be that the best long from sales letter will out pull any of the other options.
It might not *always* be true, but it’s the rule rather than the exception.