How long must a sales letter be?

Just long enough to make the sale, and no longer.

For sale, the end. Two words.

Actually, the longer the better.

No, longer doesn’t necessarily mean better. I agree with @CyanoticWasp and they will also teach you in Marketing 101. As concise as you can make the letter to hit the sale, the better.

It depends on your product. The better the product (more desirable) the shorter your letter will need to be!

Three paragraphs or approximately 200 words.

I meant my first answer to be sort of tongue-in-cheek, but as I think of it, I feel more strongly “don’t say more than you need to” in order to make the sale. In our business, when our sales people start over-promising more than we have committed to 100%, then we can kiss our margins goodbye.

All of you short letter people are wrong:

“In direct response marketing, tests that use net response as the success factor, long copy beats short copy in every circumstance.

People who want to buy your product want to know about it. This is where long copy works best. If you haven’t grabbed their attention in with other parts of the mailing, then you’ve lost them anyway (or they are not intersted in buying). the copy length is only material to people who want to know more about your product. Why make them work for the data by asking them to go to a website or (worse) call.

There are guidelines though, and I encourage you to Google for direct response and the for copy within the results. Most pundits agree that the copy should repeat the offer at least once. Examples for web copy http://tinyurl.com/dahgw and The Copywriter’s Handbook by Bill Bly http://tinyurl.com/chwwr

As always, there is more at www.the-dma.org" Source