Today we’re going to focus specifically on optimizing “long-form” ad-copy.
Long-form sales copy is a term that represents a long, linear style of sales letter originated by Direct Marketers to increase sales from postal mail, and more recently the format has been translated to the web.
You’ll see long-form in play today selling eBooks, weight loss products, financial advice, and nearly anything where the inclusion of testimonials, a product description, and good old SELLING are applied.
In most sales letters, you’re asked to fill out a brief lead page, and then redirected into a long second page (or multiple long pages) before you’re ultimately asked to enter in a credit card to buy the product.
The potential problem with this? You might be talking too much and forcing the user to read your ad copy after they have already made their decision to buy your product.
For example, one of our clients had a long form buy page that was a whopping 6 pages long (though formatted for one long scrolling page).
By dramatically clipping content, we increased conversions
Our client hired us to increase their conversion rate, but was married to the idea that the long-form copy was the best format, and suggested that we make it longer and help them “add some meat” to the page.
As always before we begin experimenting, we started by doing a full analysis of their sales funnel.
One of the most interesting things we learned came from a full page heatmap. Turns out that huge 6-page ad copy that our client was in love with was over the top!
Users that made a purchase read only about 27% of it on average!
So we did the next logical thing.
We cut out all the ad copy that users weren’t reading so the page ended up looking far more compact and concise!
What happened after our clipping?
Their conversion rate increased by 16.8%!
Not only did we increase their conversion rate but it allowed us to better optimize their site going forward.
With less components to test, we were able to better focus our experiments.
So if you’re using long-form ad copy, shutting up might be the key in increasing your revenues!
P.S. – Contact us today to increase your conversion rate!
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It’s great to make decisions based on datas, such as a heatmap,you know exactly what you are doing and can espect some results from it, and not just hoping for good results: trial and error tests. nice article
I was smiling reading this, because personally I cannot ever be bothered to read those super long sales letters. If anything they put me off buying the stuff. But I’ve also always heard that the long copy format works, so your experiment with the heat map was great. As I thought!