A week or so ago I posted here about my new venture/experiment called Room Booker.
The original version of my sales email to prospective subscribers can be found in that post. I sent out a few dozen of that iteration and didn’t get any responses whatsoever. Probably because it was so long and boring!
Then I played around with the format a little. The difference in response rates was noticeable immediately.
Sent to the same amount of people, I actually started getting responses…
There were even people emailing back just to say things like (all from different people):
“No thanks I’m happy with the current system at <other company>.”
“Why should I use your system when I have a free one that does the same thing!!!?”
“My current system is much more user friendly.”
And I also had a phone call from someone who was looking for an alternative to his current enterprise system and is interested in customising Room Booker.
Statistically it’s not a large sample size, so we can’t read too much into the results, but to get around 5-6 responses (even from people clearly not interested in the product) as opposed to zero, is more than a coincidence.
So what did I change? I made it much shorter and to the point, with no fluff. The new letter is 282 words, the old one was 970 words. I’ll paste the new letter at the end of this post.
When people see a long email (like the original long one I was sending out) they are immediately daunted and decide they’re not going to read it.
The thing is, if you are giving something away for free, like a download or a free trial of something, you don’t have to do too much to sell it (unlike if you want the reader to buy something). But you doneed them to read it in the first place.
If you want them to actually spend a significant amount of money, time or effort, you need to go into some more detail as to why it’s worth it. That way, you might lose a few readers who find the letter too long, but the ones who keep reading (your actual prospects) will be more convinced the more they read and will be more likely to take action at the end.
So there’s a correlation between how much you’re asking the reader to do, and how much time you should take to convince them to do it. The more you want them to do (e.g. the more money you want them to spend) the longer the letter should be.
Here is the more successful letter. The bold parts were also highlighted in yellow in the original mail out:
______________________________________
Subject Line: New Room Booking System
Hi there,
I saw your ad on PsychOz for rooms to rent.
I wanted to tell you about a new booking system we’ve developed called Room Booker. It was specially designed with busy practices like yours in mind.
You can check out our website here: www.roombooker.com.au
The way it works is that you get your own private installation of the booking system on our web servers, so there’s no software to download. You and your practitioners can access your booking system from anywhere with an internet connection (laptop, ipad, phone, etc), and manage bookings.
You can customise the system to do things like add and remove users quickly and easily, and change the times rooms will be available. It’s also dead easy to keep track of who has used the rooms by generating reports, so you can do things like invoice practitioners without a hassle.
The system has a low monthly fee starting at $19 (with no lock in contracts) for 1-2 rooms, but right now we’re offering a free one month trial to encourage people to try this new state of the art system.
Head over to our website and try the live demo, then sign up for your free one month trial to see if the system is a good fit for you and your practitioners. If you don’t like it, there are no commitments after the first month.
Damien Elsing
General Manager
RoomBooker.com.au
P: 0420 972 797
E: …
W: …
P.S. You can try a live demo (no download required) of the booking system over at our website. We’re sure you’ll find it makes scheduling rooms a whole lot easier and saves you some time and effort.
Its absolutely true that shorter emails means higher conversations. I think that it would make sense to send shorter emails to get their attention. I think its true that too long emails seem to be very boring and tiresome.
Well said, Haily. There is an old copywriting saying though: there is no such thing as copy that’s too long, just too boring! If one can keep it interesting and relevant enough, which is a challenge, then longer copy is fine too.