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One question people always ask me is, ‘How long should my copy be?’ They ask this about brochures, sales letters and even web sites. Along the same line, when they see or receive those long sales letters, or scroll down lengthy web pages, they also ask, ‘Do you really have to have so much copy?’

Some ‘experts’ answer this by saying, ‘long copy gets better results than short copy.’ Like most truisms, you need to take that with a grain of salt. Long copy doesn’t get good results just because it is long. It works because it does everything it has to do, and nothing more. In fact, high-quality short copy will out-pull poorly written long copy every day of the week.

So in my opinion, the right length for every piece of copy is the exactly the same. It should be as long as it needs to be to get the job done. If it takes eight pages to get the response you want, then that is the length it should be. If you can get as many readers to take the same action in a single page, then one page is sufficient.

Avoid The Pressure of Squeezing It All In

My original job was as a salesperson. In all the time I sold face-to-face, I never had a sales manager say to me, ‘Bernadette, I want you to go into that office and get the order. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got you on a stopwatch. You have to do it in five minutes.’

No sales manager would ever do that. A few might feel the urge from time to time, but it would be very rare to find a sales manager that would actually put a sales team or their customers under that type of pressure.

And yet, you do hear people saying things just as impractical when it comes to sales materials, such as ‘I need to write this letter, and I’ve only got two sides of an A4 sheet to cover it.’ Why would you deliberately put yourself under that kind of pressure?

Length Is Not Really The Issue

A better approach is to forget about length entirely. You need to write the copy first, using enough words to convince the reader to do what you want. Once it is written, then you can see how long it is.

This is true not only when you are writing for a web page, but also when you are getting something printed. You have got to first see how long it needs to be, and then make the decision about how many pages you are going to get printed.

Yet how many marketers go to a printer first, get a quote for a certain brochure size, and then try to squeeze all of their sales messages into the available space? They have simply got it the wrong way around. It really is putting the cart ahead of the horse.

So if you remember only one thing about how long copy should be, let it be this: Your copy needs to be as long as it takes to get the job done—not a word more and not a word less.

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