Marketing your bankruptcy practice with direct mail is tricky.  In order to do it right, you need to be able to sell using nothing more than pen and paper.  After all, direct mail is nothing more than a replacement for an in-person meeting or phone call where you can tell a prospect all the reasons to hire you.

Direct mail is a tough area for bankruptcy lawyers, but one that can be tremendously profitable if done correctly.  Sadly, most lawyers don’t do it right.  And one way they fail is by making the letter the wrong length.

How Long Should a Direct Mail Letter Be?

There are two main schools of thought regarding the length of direct mail letters:

1. The shorter, the better. Some marketers believe that the most effective letters are concise and to the point. They argue that consumers don’t have time for lengthy marketing letters, and they’ll quickly become bored and move on to something else… instead of taking you up on your offer.
2. The longer, the better. Other marketers feel that the best way to build interest in your products and services is to provide as much information as possible – even to the point of repeating yourself. In fact, many believe that repetition is necessary to drive home the benefits of your offer – these marketers will tell you that a consumer usually has to read something seven times or more before they will be compelled to act on it.

Which one is correct?

The answer is simple: neither.

A direct mail letter needs to be as long as it needs to be.  OK, that doesn’t make any sense.

So let me clear this up for you.

The letter needs to take as long to tell the story and make the sale as is necessary to get the point across, but not a word longer.  For some markets that might mean the letter will be as short as two pages – and for others, as long as 10.

10 pages for a direct mail letter?

Sure.  Think about it.  When you’re writing a direct mail piece to a total stranger who has never heard of you or your office, you need to do quite a bit of selling in print.  You need to introduce yourself, your service, why it’s good, why the other options aren’t good, how much it costs, how it works, why it works, social proof, build in trust and rapport … the list goes on and on.  Remember, you’re not standing in front of the prospect and so you need to cover all the bases.

When a reader finishes your letter, he or she will ask these questions:

1. What is the service being offered?
2. Why do I care?
3. What will this lawyer do for me?
4. Why would I possibly hire this lawyer rather than someone else – or nobody at all?
5. How do I know this isn’t some rip-off?
6. Will this lawyer make my life better than it currently is?
7. If I do not respond to this letter this minute, will my life get worse?

If the reader can answer these questions, then your letter is the correct length.  Miss the mark, however, and your phone will remain silent and your investment will go down the tubes.

Scared of writing too long of a letter?  Think someone’s going to toss it out because it’s too much work to read it?

Let’s say you were diagnosed with an incurable disease that would take your life in short order.  Now someone sends you a book in the mail.  It’s 250 pages long but it contains the secret to curing your disease forever.  Would you read it?

Of course you would.  And if your prospect is interested in what you have to say – and you say it in a compelling way – you can be sure they’ll read every word on every page no matter how many pages you send out in that envelope.