Short Copy Outperforms? Heresy!

An inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion is going on in one of my favorite online forums, The War­riors Forum, about short copy win­ning over long copy. And the author of the thread cited a study he con­ducted, where he proved that shorter copy won over long copy.

Some peo­ple are scream­ing “heresy!” Oth­ers agreed.

Per­son­ally, I believe the study con­ducted is indeed valid because it makes sense. In this par­tic­u­lar case, short copy was war­ranted for this par­tic­u­lar mar­ket with this par­tic­u­lar offer.

But is this true in all cases? When you look at his study closer, you real­ize that it lacks infor­ma­tion about the vari­ables involved, which makes the study, and its find­ings, a bit misleading.

Here’s what I mean.

I truly believe that long copy sells bet­ter than short copy. But I base my opin­ion on the aver­age, not the uni­ver­sal. Because, in some cases, shorter copy does sell bet­ter. But there are very spe­cific rea­sons for this, and I want to go over a few of the impor­tant ones that I see all the time.

How­ever, before I give you some of those rea­sons (and there are many, which I can­not go through in the scope of this one arti­cle), I’d like to make a dis­tinc­tion, if I could, so you under­stand the fac­tors that come into play.

When peo­ple often look at short copy, even test it and then real­ize that it works bet­ter than long copy, there are many vari­ables that one fails to look at. The price, the indus­try and par­tic­u­larly the tar­get mar­ket play a sig­nif­i­cant role.

But there are also two oth­ers that I’d like to go over today: a) the prod­uct cat­e­gory or type, and b) the pre-​​selling process (i.e., the mind­set of the market).

First, the prod­uct type.

When I used to teach mar­ket­ing prin­ci­ples in col­lege (part of the Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion cur­ricu­lum at Algo­nquin Col­lege in Ottawa, Canada), my stu­dents learned that there are four text­book cat­e­gories of products:

1. Con­ve­nience products
2. Shop­ping products
3. Spe­cialty products
4. Unsought prod­ucts

Each prod­uct cat­e­gory has a dif­fer­ent sales process and mar­ket­ing require­ment. Why? Because the level of com­modi­ti­za­tion of the prod­uct delin­eates how much mar­ket­ing, pro­mo­tion and relationship-​​building is required to sell the product.

(And when I say “mar­ket­ing,” I mean all types of mar­ket­ing, from brand­ing to pric­ing to avail­abil­ity to distribution.)

To give you some exam­ples, a “con­ve­nience prod­uct” is one often pur­chased to ful­fill imme­di­ate needs. The pur­chase is done at an almost uncon­scious level, too. Pric­ing is often mod­er­ate to low, and brand equity, rep­u­ta­tion and rela­tion­ships do not make a big dif­fer­ence if any.

The prod­uct has pen­e­trated the mar­ket en masse. It is widely avail­able. And more often than not, con­ve­nience prod­ucts are impulse pur­chases. They are also sta­ples, in most cases.

Take, for exam­ple, bread, milk, bat­ter­ies, etc. These are often the types of prod­ucts you find in con­ve­nience stores or in the super­mar­ket check­out lines, where peo­ple just grab them and add them to their orders just because “they’re there.”

No real thought has been given into mak­ing the buy­ing deci­sion. Price may either be low or a non-​​issue, in most cases. And copy, if any is used, will be rel­a­tively short and brief. A small POP dis­play (point of pur­chase stand, card­board ad, logo with prod­uct name and descrip­tion, etc) is all that’s required.

As for “shop­ping prod­ucts,” those are less com­modi­tized prod­ucts. They are a lit­tle higher in price. A lit­tle more thought is required into mak­ing the pur­chase. And peo­ple tend to “shop around” when decid­ing on buy­ing such products.

They either weigh the pros and cons before buy­ing it, or they make the deci­sion to buy rel­a­tively quickly — albeit less quickly than a con­ve­nience product.

Other times, they take a bit of time to decide, depend­ing on the price, the avail­abil­ity and the mar­ket. They will ana­lyze first, and they often require a bit more copy to gather enough infor­ma­tion to jus­tify their decision.

Prod­ucts like cars, appli­ances, com­put­ers, etc are shop­ping prod­ucts. (They can be more or less in price too, such as videos, movies, homes, vaca­tions, even soft­ware and online services.)

As such, a lit­tle longer copy is required, often to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the prod­uct from its com­peti­tors, and sell the unique­ness and the spe­cific ben­e­fits of the product.

Third is the “spe­cialty prod­uct.” This is a prod­uct that def­i­nitely needs more copy and a lot of sell­ing is required. Spe­cialty prod­ucts are higher priced, highly tar­geted and more valu­able — espe­cially for very spe­cific tar­get markets.

(That is, they might not be of any value for oth­ers but of high value for a select group of individuals.)

Exotic goods, lux­ury cars, expen­sive jew­elry, art and so on are spe­cialty items. Take Mont-​​Blanc pens, Porsche cars and Pear­son yachts, for example.

(A pop­u­lar mag­a­zine is the Robb Report, which is a mag­a­zine for the afflu­ent. Take a look at some of the ads in it, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.)

In my mar­ket­ing classes, the exam­ple given was a par­tic­u­lar brand of gourmet bread that was gluten-​​free, cre­ated with an exotic herd of moun­tain sheep’s milk graz­ing on the alpine slopes, fla­vored with rare spices and condi­ments grown in the Ama­zon jun­gle, fire-​​oven baked to very spe­cific tem­per­a­tures, and gift-​​wrapped inside a spe­cial, orna­men­tally carved wooden box shipped directly to people’s doors.

(And yes, a loaf can cost you up to $500 each.)

There­fore, longer copy is def­i­nitely needed in this case. The goal would be not to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from its com­pe­ti­tion (since there’s very lit­tle of it) but to cre­ate value, jus­tify the pur­chase and add rea­sons why.

In other words, why would some­one pay $500 for a loaf of bread? There are very spe­cific indi­vid­u­als who would and very spe­cific rea­sons they would, too.

Finally, “unsought prod­ucts” are exactly that: unsought. Prod­ucts that no one would have ever known about or looked for. Now, this doesn’t mean exotic and fancy prod­ucts, either. This means prod­ucts peo­ple don’t nec­es­sar­ily look for or believe they don’t need. At first.

Pre­ven­ta­tive type prod­ucts fall in that cat­e­gory (i.e., life insur­ance, pre-​​arranged funeral ser­vices, finan­cial invest­ment ser­vices, etc). Almost all infor­ma­tion prod­ucts fall in that cat­e­gory too, by the way. (If not, they prob­a­bly fall in the “spe­cialty” category.)

Con­se­quently, long copy is a must in these cases. And the copy is not only meant to dif­fer­en­ti­ate, add value and jus­tify the pur­chase, but also to cre­ate a need and a desire for the product.

What I mean is, you need a lot of copy to edu­cate the mar­ket on why they need (and sub­se­quently want) this type of prod­uct. You need a lot of copy to really build a com­pelling case for buy­ing it.

Granted, these cat­e­gories are not uni­ver­sal. Because another ele­ment comes in, which is the sec­ond one in my list men­tioned earlier.

And that is, the process.

The process can help iden­tify, iso­late or even cre­ate cer­tain mar­kets (and there­fore cer­tain mind­sets) that will buy a prod­uct with more or less copy. And that process is not lim­ited to words — or to sell­ing itself, for that matter.

Long copy is often attrib­uted to a long copy saleslet­ter. But that is not often the case. Copy is not lim­ited to a saleslet­ter or web­site. It can often take many forms, take place over time, and com­mu­ni­cated and deliv­ered in many dif­fer­ent ways.

When all added, they take the form of, and replace, a long copy saleslet­ter that would oth­er­wise be required if none of these other steps were taken.

For exam­ple, if you have an affil­i­ate pro­gram, then your affil­i­ates can and should “pre-​​sell” the prod­uct for you. Their “copy,” in other words, is part of the entire sales engine. When they hit your site, and if they’re highly tar­geted and qual­i­fied from moment they hit it, then you need less copy to sell them.

In fact, if your affil­i­ates did their jobs right, they’ve already sold your prospects even before they read your copy.

Even if your affil­i­ate (or even your­self, when you sell to an estab­lished list of pay­ing clients) doesn’t use a lot of copy to pre-​​sell, the “uncom­mu­ni­cated” copy was deliv­ered in the form of build­ing the brand (and that brand can also be you and your exper­tise), trust, cred­i­bil­ity and relationships.

For exam­ple, when you pro­mote a new prod­uct to an estab­lished audi­ence (or if your affil­i­ates pro­mote your prod­uct to their estab­lished lists), a rela­tion­ship already exists. The process didn’t start with that pro­mo­tion but a long time ago.

How many times have you already sold this audi­ence in the past? If you have done so, par­tic­u­larly sev­eral times, the like­li­hood that lit­tle copy will be required for the next promotion.

You don’t need copy to build cred­i­bil­ity or edu­cate your mar­ket, in this case, because that job has already been done.

In other words, copy was already used, albeit indirectly.

How much copy in other pro­mo­tions have you used? How many times did they read your arti­cles, web­sites and blog posts before they bought from you? How great is the rela­tion­ship you cre­ated with them before you sold them any­thing? How much did they read about, learned from and edu­cated them­selves on: you, your exper­tise, your busi­ness or even your affil­i­ates’ businesses?

That’s copy. All of it.

It’s all part of the sales process. And “copy,” in the case of sell­ing to an estab­lished, qual­i­fied mar­ket, didn’t start with that saleslet­ter. It started a long time ago through other means.

Try to sell to a brand new mar­ket for the first time, one who has never heard of you, and you’ll need copy. Lots of it.

Hire a sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive to sell for you, and that’s copy too, albeit deliv­ered incre­men­tally, in dif­fer­ent ways, over time. For exam­ple, include all the prospect­ing steps, qual­i­fi­ca­tion ques­tions, needs analy­ses, phone calls, sales pre­sen­ta­tions, writ­ten pro­pos­als, objec­tions han­dled, and clos­ing attempts the sales­per­son did.

But it’s still all one big piece of copy. Remove all of those steps and start fresh with just a saleslet­ter, and you will def­i­nitely need a long copy saleslet­ter. With­out question.

In other words, if you had to replace all those steps with just one, the process would have taken the form of one long-​​copy salesletter.

Finally, there’s also a cor­re­la­tion between my two points, i.e., between prod­uct cat­e­gories and processes.

Because a prod­uct, which may at first be an unsought prod­uct — with a bit of copy, aware­ness, brand equity and cred­i­bil­ity built over time — can change and be pro­moted to another category.

They can go from unsought, to spe­cialty, to shop­ping, and even to con­ve­nience, after a spe­cific point in the sales/​life cycle.

Take bot­tled water, for instance.

Bot­tled water was once unsought when it was first intro­duced. Over time, it became a spe­cialty prod­uct. After a while, it then became a shop­ping product.

(And in some cases, I’d even ven­ture to say that bot­tled water is now a con­ve­nience prod­uct, espe­cially in cer­tain mar­kets such as gyms, schools, offices or cer­tain locales where water qual­ity is known to be poor.)

So when you really look at it and think about it, long copy always wins. Always. It’s just not a long copy saleslet­ter every time. Granted, after a period of time, it’s not always needed when the audi­ence is pre-​​sold, or when the prod­uct is a low-​​priced con­ve­nience product.

Bot­tom line, copy doesn’t need to do a job that’s already been done. So the ques­tion is not “how long should your saleslet­ter be?” But rather, “how qual­i­fied, tar­geted and sold is my tar­get mar­ket before they even read my salesletter?”

And therein lies the key: the mar­ket, not the copy.

About the Author

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