Writing For the Web (Sales)

On “Writing For The Web” you’ll find a substantial amount of material about optimizing online pages for readability and usability. These are good as far as they go, but e-commerce site designers would do well to bear in mind an important fact. Just because users will uniformly indicate a distaste for “marketeese” and sales writing does not mean that it doesn’t work.

Back in the early days of pop-up ads (which first hit their stride on the “adult internet”), the lesson was learned time and again — people complained furiously, but they still bought 25% more with the pop-ups on than they did with them off. Thus the pop-ups got to stay, and eventually ended up everywhere.

Sales copy does not have to be pleasant in order to work. Any decent direct marketeer will tell you that. The same direct marketeer will also tell you that he does nothing to his copy without testing it.

In the direct marketing approach, a mailing list is divided into control and test groups, and ads are sent to groups large enough to be statistically significant, and the responses tallied.

You can, of course, do the same thing on your web site. The simplest approach is to split your incoming traffic into multiple groups, and test your changes against your control. This can be done by something as simple as a little JavaScript to rotate different links each time a page is loaded; if you’re not sure how, speak with your web developer or technical resource.

This is not to say that there are not some good tidbits in the “writing for the web” guide.

Some of the ideas about site organization are very worthwhile (as long as you take into account how they will affect your search engine ranking), as are comments about having solid page structure and short single-point paragraphs.

But before your throw your effective sales copy out with the bathwater, be sure you test any changes you make.