Really I should chase them down for numbers.
“Crushing it” just isn’t detailed enough for my nitpicky direct response brain.
But that’s what Motley Fool UK’s marketing director says this landing page is doing.
This 3000-word order form was written in late Spring, and it’s still going strong.
I mentioned recently the debate between long copy and short.
Which is better?
The answer, always, is you should write as much copy as it takes to get the sale. (Though for most people, that means writing a lot more copy than they’d guess.)
Motley Fool tend to have short order forms – probably 200-500 words.They do more of the selling in their emails. I didn’t have any radically new ideas for them off-the-cuff, except to sell the product much harder before asking for the order.
As David Ogilvy said: “The more you tell, the more you sell.”
If you’re a copywriter, don’t let the extra work put you off.
One good piece of long copy can pay huge dividends down the road.
When I did this job for Motley Fool, I didn’t take any extra money for the order form. I was paid for 5 emails. This extra copy was rolled in as part of the deal.
Effectively, I did the biggest, gnarliest part of this project for free.
The payback comes later, when you can fire out entire campaigns of emails – often short, simple copy – and produce big returns.
It keeps happening.
The other day we sent a short email to an adapted version of this same landing page. That one email beat its sales targets by almost 50%.
Want to do the same?
