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Selling on the Web:
How Long Should Your Marketing Copy Be?

Updated Feb 2006
If you're selling on the web, you want marketing copy that will entice potential customers to buy. There are two schools of thought on effective marketing copy: one advocates long, detailed, and chatty copy, the other favors copy that's short, objective, and to the point. Which approach is right for you?

Who's on First?

It's useful to understand how these two schools of thought came about. People with strong backgrounds in paper-based marketing tend to favor long, detailed copy because it mimics the direct-mail packages they're used to working with. You know the kind—the envelopes are filled with several pages of copy, special insert letters from the company president, booklets of anecdotes and testimonials, etc. Over the years, the direct-mail format was developed and fine-tuned to maximize sales response.

By contrast, web marketers who advocate the "lean and mean" approach tend to base their ideas on web usability studies—studies that clearly show that web users detest marketing hyperbole and prefer short, clean statements of objective fact over long, flowery prose.

Web usability studies also show that users don't read, they skim. These studies would seem to indicate that the longer you make your marketing copy, the less likely it is that web users will read it all. As a result, usability researchers advocate short, clear pages written in objective language.

Some Differences Between the Web and Direct-Mail

One reason that techniques that work well in paper-based direct mail may not be as effective on the web is that the two kinds of transactions are quite different.

In paper-based mail, the marketer has a certain amount of inertia to overcome in order to make a sale. This inertia occurs because:

1. the prospective customer is not, at that moment, actively looking for that specific product. The pitch simply arrives, unsolicited, in the mail.
2. after deciding to buy, the customer has a great deal of work to do: fill out a form, perhaps find a stamp, then take the purchase request to the post office.

One purpose of long direct-mail copy is to create a strong enough emotional response in the customer to propel the customer through the "work" phase of the transaction.

By contrast, anyone who is actually reading ad copy on the web is likely to already be focused on getting that specific product or service. (Studies show that when people encounter random banner ads—the equivalent of unsolicited direct mail—on the web, they ignore the ads because they're intent on doing something else.)

What this means is that any web user who's reading a marketing pitch is probably actively seeking that product or service. With the exception of users who've landed on a site because of misleading links or redirects, most web users pretty much plan to be on the page they're on, looking at what they're looking at.

Another reason that web-based marketing differs from direct mail is that reading on the web is harder than reading paper-based print. Screen resolutions of 72 dpi (dots per inch) just can't compare with the 1200 dpi or 2400 dpi of print ads. Since the web is harder on the eyes, people read more slowly, and read less. Thus, short copy becomes more attractive.

And finally, web buyers have less work to do than people buying via direct mail. Yes, they probably have to fill out a form and provide a credit card number, but there's no envelope to seal or take to the post office. Psychologically, buying on the web feels much easier than direct-mail buying, so there's less inertia related to the buying process.

There is, however, the inertia induced by the prospective customer's reluctance to part with money—and it's this inertia that web marketing copy has to address. Which leads back to the central question: which type of copy is best for your product or service: long and detailed, or short and direct??

Finding the Right Copy

Which type of copy is best? The answer is simple: the copy that generates more sales.

The easiest way to determine what's right for you is to create the web-based equivalent of the "split run", a technique traditionally used to test paper-based direct mail. In a split run, two distinct marketing packages are created and sent out, and the response rates are compared.

For a website, split-run testing is relatively easy. Just prepare two versions of your page: one short and objective, the other a long version in direct-mail style. Then, for a six month period or so, switch between the two versions every month or two and keep track of page hits and sales.

Note that for your comparisons to be truly valid, you'll need to keep track of page hits as well as sales. For example, which of these pages is more effective?

• a page that was seen by 1000 people in a month, generating 110 sales
• a page that was seen by 10,000 people in a month, generating 1000 sales

On a views-to-sales ratio, the first page is more effective, because 11 of every 100 viewers made purchase, compared with only 10 of every 100 for the second version.

In this case, the challenge would be to ascertain why the first version got only 1000 viewers, while the second got 10,000. The difference may have to do with search rankings, but remember that rankings often don't change for some time after site content changes, so the picture may be more complex than it looks. It could be that the number of hits is simply increasing over time, and that the next time you put up page #1 it will draw 20,000 hits. You'll need to test to find out.

For your tests to be truly valid, you should optimize both versions of your copy to rank as high as possible in searches, then alternate between versions several times before drawing any conclusions.

So experiment, and let your customers be the judge.