Get More Sales With Effective Web Copy

The layout and position of your web copy is important if you want your website to convert browsers into buyers. Often web text is simply copy and pasted text from a company print campaign or placed into a web page after the design work is finished or at the comp stage.

 

Web copy is mistakenly treated as an after thought and really needs to be though of as part of the design and incorporated into a web page as a part of the whole. Treating web copy as part of your verbal design strategy will maximize your conversion rates. Assuming that is if your copywriter is writing for the web, which is vastly different than writing for any other medium. But lets be honest, most in-house marketing departments or ad agencies take the easy way out and reuse existing copy to save time and effort. Sure this will save you time but this form of laziness will get you no where when it comes to converting your visitors into revenue.

 

The main reason why web copy needs to be thought of in a different way than any other copy is partly due to the motivation of web visitors and partly due to how people read a web page. People read online very differently than they would a book or a brochure or magazine ad.

 

To start with, people scan copy on the web, which is why web copy should use headlines, sub headlines and bulleted copy, which you normally don’t find in print writing. In addition to writing in an inverse pyramid format, putting the most important information up front in the first paragraph.

 

Generally, visitors won’t read your entire web page, in fact they may not even get as far as they would in a magazine article, with the exception is perhaps a blog, that type of reading on the web is rare and will happen in some cases depending on the psychological personality type of the visitor and what stage they are in of their buying cycle.  

 

Moreover, reading print is linear vs the webs nonlinear format. The chief contributor to the non-linear type of reading is encouraged through hyper links. Imagine this scenario. A visitor lands on your web page in search of solving a problem. He’s interested in the page because your headline and sub headline support the problem he’s looking to solve because you chose the right words to use and designed them in the right place. You’ve effectively grabbed the reader, congratulations. He continues to proceed across and down the page, skimming through the copy your writer painstakingly wrote. He runs across a linked word that also cleverly supports the problem he’s looking to solve. He stops reading doesn’t make it any further down the page and clicks on the link, remember he’s on a mission, he wants to buy he just needs help converting. He needs to be sure your product or service will really solve his problem.

 

Your visitor follows this pattern over and over on multiple sites skimming and clicking, skimming and clicking. Your web copy has to support this and be designed in such a way to not only allow this to happen but to strategically allow this to happen, so that your visitor can go down his own conversion path and when he is ready, he will buy. Do you see how a nonlinear writing format is something so different than any copy you may already have someplace else in your marketing arsenal?

 

But that’s only the beginning when it comes to the verbal design of your site to increase conversions. According to most eye tracking studies on the web, visitors consistently read web pages in an F pattern.  (Eye tracking studies are done with “heat maps” which is a graphical representation of visitor’s eye movements. Red areas represent the hottest areas, which is where visitors spent most of their time looking.) Visitors first read horizontally across the top or active window of a web page, this is the top of the letter F. Next visitors move down and then across forming the second horizontal bar of the letter F. Finally, visitors scan down the left side forming the bottom of the F shape.

 

The F shape-reading pattern has many implications when it comes to page layout and conversion.  For example most e-commerce shopping cart checkout pages don’t take advantage of this for cross-selling and up-selling offers. Cross-selling opportunities are usually placed in areas outside the F pattern; so most visitors are not even looking at them much less buying. Imagine how much this would increase the total order per customer if this one element of design were used more effectively.

There’s a lot that goes into designing a site for maximum conversion and we didn’t even get into half of it, perhaps in a future post.