I considered this question while doing some research into sales letters recently. I am a traditional Internet marketer and understand how well long sales letters convert traffic into customers. When I decided to look into the auction of providing a video in place of a long sales letter I knew it was going to take some convincing and some hard evidence to sway me away from the long sales letter formats.



In other words, I wanted to see if the video component will follow the same proven AIDA or attention interests desire action type of sales letter flow and if it would in fact prompt the prospect to take action and order the product upon closing the video.

I tested this new hybrid sales letter format on a site where I successfully sold athletic products using a scrolling sales letter format. Guess what? It worked and it worked big! It works so well that I actually quadrupled my sales conversion rate. I was as shocked as I could be when I saw that sales increased 400% with this new hybrid sales letter format.

Being a skeptical Internet marketer, and never trusting first impressions, I wanted to make sure that the results I had were not a fluke slide continued testing my new hybrid sales letter format with different markets and on different websites. To my delight, it works every time. It did not increase the sales conversion rates 400% every time but it increased my conversion rate a minimum of 75% every single time I implemented this new hybrid sales letter format. This new hybrid sales letter format increased sales for every test I implemented except for one side selling one product.

What this means to all Internet marketers and people selling products or services on the Web is that the new Web 2.0 marketing applications are becoming more mainstream and promised to convert traffic into customers with much higher rates of return. It also means that if you're not using this hybrid sales letter format you are absolutely losing sales using only a long sales letter type site.

The results for me were phenomenal and I look forward to having other Internet marketers and advertisers talk about how successful they were using this new hybrid sales letter model.

The basic structure of the pace I tested is as follows.

Headline at the top center, video block in the center of the page, with the following bullet points and supporting content below the video in the following order.

Product components

Offer summary

Statement of guarantee

Ordering instructions

Using just the video and headline without the additional information could not convert as well in my testing as it did with the additional information included. But also appeared in my server logs that people took time to scan the brochure portion of the page before they actually watched the video.

The shorter version of this hybrid video sales page format does not exceed two to 2 1/2 pages in length.