"Does it really need to be this long?"
Photo by Melanie Dretvic on Unsplash
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Last week, I asked my friend to review a Kickstarter sales page I’m working on.
He’s a potential customer for the product, so I wanted to hear his thoughts.
When we sat down to talk through his feedback, he had a question:
“Does it really need to be this long?”
(For context: The page was somewhere around 3,000 words.)
That’s a great question. And the reality is…
“Probably not.”
Most people aren’t going to read all the copy on a sales page…
Especially if it’s a Kickstarter.
They’ll probably watch the video and have a pretty good idea whether or not they’re interested in the product.
Even for normal sales pages, people are probably going to read the headline, then skim straight to the bottom to see how much it costs.
If the price is in-line with what they’re expecting…
They’ll scroll back to the top. Then they’ll scroll down the page, skimming and looking at subheads to see if anything catches their eye.
If it does, they’ll read that section. And if it’s compelling, they’ll continue to read down the page…
Or they’ll rinse and repeat the scrolling/skimming process I just described.
As much as I love writing sales pages, I’m not delusional enough to think that someone is going to read thousands of words from top to bottom.
It’s just not feasible for most people.
And if they’re in your target market — they might not even need that much copy to be convinced anyway (… which is the situation my friend was in).
But here’s what I told him:
“Different parts of this page are gonna appeal to different people.
Some people will need very little convincing in order to buy this. But other people will need a lot more information before they’re ready to buy.
The reason it’s so long is to make sure we give people all the information they could possibly need in order to make a purchase.”
That’s why sales pages are as long as they are.
If a sales page is your main (or only) touch point with potential customers…
You want to make sure you’re making the best case possible for why they should buy your product.
And that can take a lot of words.
Btw, if you’re looking for some guidance on how to write a sales page…
Here’s the “Sales Page Survival Kit” I put together a while back.
It details the process I followed during the 29x29 Project to write 1 sales page per day in about 3–4 hours.
It’s totally free.
I made this thing about a year ago. And I’d probably make some changes to it if I were to re-do it right now.
But if you want some info about how to put a sales page together…
This could be a good place to start.
Robert
P.S. My friend has also been working on a Kickstarter project recently. We were talking about it the other night and he pointed out one of the most important concepts in copywriting… even though he isn’t a copywriter.
I’ll share it with you tomorrow. Stay tuned!