CONVERTDon't make it hard for customers to give you money! To use the car analogy, if
you walked into a dealership, told the salesperson which specific car on the lot
you were ready to buy, and you had the cash on you to pay in full, what would
they do? Insist that you take a test drive first or ask you to read some brochures?
No! They would write up the sale and take your money as fast as possible before
you could change your mind.
There is no magic length for a video sales letter, but for most offers, I suggest
something in the 5-10 minute range. Offers that are more complicated or higher
priced are worth a longer sales video than low-ticket offers. For example, a
$1000 course with 30 modules should usually have a longer VSL than a $27
ebook. However, the VSL for the course doesn't need to go in depth about every
module, or your sales video is going to be an hour long.
Upsell and downsell VSLs can be even shorter than that, since the customer has
just made a purchase, and upsell/downsell offers usually don't need much
explanation.
If you truly think your VSL needs to be 30 minutes or longer, I would strongly
encourage you to do a webinar instead. People expect webinars to be 45-60
minutes or longer and won't get upset if one runs over an hour. However they are
much less patient when it comes to VSLs. Part of that is that usually with a VSL,
there is no easy way for viewers to tell how long the video will be. When the
video starts playing, they don't know if it will be a minute long or an hour long.
Another reason why a webinar is better for longer presentations is simply that
people have different expectations for a webinar. They often sign up days in
advance, they put it on their calendar, they get reminder emails about it, they set
aside an hour or longer, and they look forward to it. Some people register just
hoping to catch the replay, though when a replay is ready, they know in advance
to set aside an hour or so to watch it.
Think about how people will find your VSL. Maybe they just clicked on your
ad. Maybe they did a search and your site came up. Or they got an email about
your offer that linked to the VSL. Or they were already on your site poking
around and found the VSL. In all of those cases, the visitor is not generally
prepared to spend an hour watching your VSL. They might be ready to sign up
for your webinar or watch a short VSL, though.
The Format of a Video Sales Letter
As I said above, a VSL is really just a video version of the traditional text-based
sales letter, so most of the elements are the same.
A text sales letter needs to start with a great headline to grab people's attention.
A VSL doesn't have a true headline, so you need to say something at the
beginning to grab their attention and get them to watch.