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I hate these sales letters

I got a sales email the other day. It basically said “We have a great new product. Click the link below to see the video about it”. That was it — no description, not idea about the market, no cost info. Nothing! I was supposed to click on a link to watch a video of who-knows-what-length. Right. I have lots of time for that, just to see what they might be selling. It might even be that legendary bridge.

I didn’t click the link in that email because I have done it before, when I knew the niche and the sender. And it pointed to a video alright. Sometimes the video works and sometimes not. I’m not sure why it doesn’t sometimes, but that’s the case. Anyway, it is a page of text with a video. The text is black on white with a logo or banner of the seller.

The video is black text (usually) on white so it looks like text on the page keeps changing. There is sometimes an image on a few of the “slides” but it is generally mostly text. Yep, slides of text: PowerPoint-style. And to top it off, there is a voice (always male in my experience) that basically reads the slides. This is “death by PowerPoint” as a marketing tool. To be fair, there is sometimes background music, but not always. I find it tedious. And I cannot even fast forward to the offer, because the player does not seem to have that feature. It must work, though, as I keep seeing more and more pages with these videos.

This format would be massively more interesting if the text went by at an angle Star Wars-style. Or if there were some other visual interest beyond text. Maybe it is because I read reasonably quickly and since the reader is reading slowly I get bored after one or two slides. Do you feel that way, too?

I’d love to see some stats comparing the conversion rate of this style to more interesting uses of video. Couldn’t we see the face of the presenter (or does he have a “face made for radio”)? How about interesting visuals? Yes, the text format is less expensive to produce. But is it enough less expensive and successful enough to justify it? I honestly have no idea. Is there a reason to use this format (it generally uses Flash) instead of just text? If it were just a cost issue, I would expect to see it primarily from novices. But even experienced marketers are using this format.

My final question today is, “when is it best to use video and when is it best to use plain text?”

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