By Kristin Zhivago on Feb 2, 2007
Here's the first sentence of a website selling an email security solution:
"In today's business world, email has become critical to daily commerce. But, it also contains serious threats, threats which have increased dramatically over the last few years. You can't afford to ignore those threats."
Whoever wrote these words has obviously never spoken to a real IT person, who has been fighting an endless battle against spam for years. Actually, even a technophobic grandmother who does nothing but email on her computer knows that email contains "serious threats" which have "increased dramatically."
This copy tells the prospect nothing useful, insults his intelligence, and is a barrier to the sale. The copy went on like this for several more paragraphs, then finally spent a few paragraphs describing the product being sold and touching lightly on the product's specifications. That was unfortunately the only useful copy on the web page. The copy then shifted into benefit mode, which is also useless.
In all high-tech pieces and pages, the benefits section is where you will normally find some or all of the following phrases:
Increase productivity
Spend more time focusing on business
Accomplish more with fewer IT staff
Increase efficiency
Run your business efficiently
Increase utilization
Optimize your environment
Smaller footprint
More performance
Real cost savings
Highly integrated
Lower costs
Enhance security
Improve reliability and performance
Take better care of your customers
Stay more connected
Look and interact more professionally
Manage your customer relationships more effectively
Easy to configure, deploy and administer
Easy to use
And, of course, there are all the "-able" words:
Manageable
Scalable
Flexible
Capable
Expandable
Affordable
Reliable
There are two problems with this typical approach. First, only a couple of paragraphs were devoted to anything even close to useful copy. Second, since everyone writes the same copy, using the same old tired words and phrases, customers have learned to ignore it. Instead, they skim quickly, trying to find out what the product can do to help them and how it works.
How can you make sure your copy is useful?
Here's how to avoid useless copy and start cranking out useful copy:
Retire those old useless phrases. No one's reading them. They are a complete waste of your writing time and their reading/buying time.
Replace those vague, useless phrases with crisp, action-oriented copy that answers every single question, and your copy will sell more for you.
Great advice. It would be so nice if websites started getting rid of all those tired phrases that say nothing!
Posted by: Jill Whalen on February 4, 2007 7:15 PM
8. Spell check. "...serious treats..." I want my email to contain "serious treats."
Posted by: David on February 13, 2007 11:56 AM
Thank you, David. Good catch. I have corrected "treats" where it appeared in the italic paragraph. Too bad my spellchecker thought "serious treats" was legitimate! Must have been hungry when I wrote this article...
Posted by: Kristin Zhivago on February 13, 2007 2:26 PM
Guy Kawasaki author of The Art of the Start