Although 80% of visitors to your landing page will not read all your copy, it still needs to be well written—different visitors will read different parts of your copy.
Copy is important to communicate your message to visitors. The copy should repeat the title and content of your other creative, but also provide additional information that is both useful and convincing. There is no single right way to write copy; each product, circumstance, and customer (persona) is unique and should be approached differently.
There is an ongoing debate among conversion experts and copywriters regarding the merits of different lengths of copy. Some say that the more copy you use, the better you can explain the product or service. Others believe that short copy is better since it reduces the risk of losing your visitor. The reality is that there is no single right answer. Sometimes long copy works more successfully than short copy, and vice versa. The copy length that works best for you will depend on your situation, product, industry, audience, and the call to action.
There are a couple of general guidelines to follow when determining appropriate copy length. Short copy is usually better for giveaways or free offers. If visitors want what you are offering, they don’t want to read too much—they just want the freebie. Long copy works better if you are selling big-ticket items. Visitors want to know as much as they can about something before they part with their hard-earned dollars. So, to summarize, the greater the investment required in a product or service, the more copy you will need to provide.
MarketingSherpa and Marketing Experiments conducted tests to determine which had higher success rates: long copy or short copy. They found that on average, websites with longer copy outperformed websites with short copy. However, although this may be true for some sites, it certainly is not true for all of them.
The more important question to consider is, how do I decide, based on my target market/personas and product, when to use long copy and when to use short copy?
The best way to create copy is to start by developing personas for your website. Once you know your site visitors, you can implement changes to your current copy or create new copy to appeal to that persona. For instance, a more logical person would like to know details about the product or services you offer. For this person, long copy would do, but someone who is more impulsive wants to get in and out as quickly as possible. So, how can you balance the two? You need to design your copy so that the impulsive person can see the information he is looking for instantly, yet still maintain the long copy format for the more logical person to continue investigating the product or service.
Step 2: Categorize Your Product
Are you in the business of selling paper or providing information on complex medical procedures? A customer looking to buy paper will not be interested in scrolling through pages of copy to determine what type of paper she should buy. Categorizing your products is not always straightforward, so spend some time thinking about what your product or service is, and how much information is really needed.
What does this mean for you? It could mean that having long copy will attract a smaller percentage of your traffic. However, that small percentage is more likely to convert if they read through the copy you provide.
Step 3: Test
It might still be tricky to see which copy would be more suitable for your site, so invest some time and resources in creating trial pages of both long and short copy.
Step 4: Revisit Your Copy
Regardless of whether your copy is long or short, as your product develops and your business grows, make sure you revisit the copy and update it accordingly. You can always tweak your writing in one way or another. A work of writing is never perfect and can always use some type of revision. So, it is crucial to always review your copy and see what can spice it up to attract your personas.