Copywriting Tips – When Is It Good Enough

Okay, here’s one for you to chew on for a while. When is your sales letter good enough? Is there such a thing as good enough? How much does it matter? Do you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns? Lots of questions, but still no answers. Well, sit tight. The answers are coming. Please note, this is just my personal opinion. I suggest you test this all out for yourself.
Sales letters are funny animals. Sometimes they take on a life of their own. You start off writing one thing and by the time you’re done, it has evolved into something totally different. I have switched gears many times when writing copy because suddenly I came up with what I thought was a better idea. But was it? If I totally scrapped the first letter and didn’t split test it against the second, do I really know for sure? Maybe the first letter would have performed better.
But okay, this isn’t about split testing. Hopefully, you understand that you need to do that in order to determine which version of your sales letter is performing better. So let’s, for argument sake, say that you’ve done all your split testing. You’ve written no less than five versions of this sales letter and have gotten your conversion percent to go from 2% to 3.4%. Is it good enough? Can you do better? At this point, does it matter? This is where I get into what I call diminishing returns.
My time is valuable to me. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to waste it. So if I have to spend another 16 hours tweaking a sales letter to go from 3.4% to maybe 3.7%, is it really worth it? Maybe if your traffic is in the millions of visitors of month it is, but what if you’re getting an average of 100 visitors a day. That’s 3,000 visitors a month. At 3.4% conversion, that’s 102 sales. At 3.7% it’s 111 sales. That’s 9 more sales for the month. If you’re selling a $47 product, it’s an extra $423 a month. If it took me 16 hours to achieve that result, my work got me a whole $26 an hour. Considering I earn $100 an hour consulting, was my time worth it?
Some may say yes because that’s $423 extra each month for the same 16 hours work. And there is something to be said for that. But what if traffic drops off? What if the product is no longer viable. Is an extra 0.3% really worth the effort? I can’t answer that question for you. Only you can determine what your time is worth.
In my opinion, and this is only my opinion, there comes a time when the sales letter is good enough and it’s time to stop tinkering with it. Naturally, if it’s not converting at all, it needs major work. But if you’re already in the 2% to 4% range, it’s time to look to see if your efforts are not better spent doing something else that will bring you a bigger return.