The Power Of The ‘You’ Word In Copy
When communicating with visitors to your web-site, remember these two rules.
The 1% Rule - this is the tiny percentage of people who, on average, take some form of ‘action’ when visiting your web site. By ‘action’, I mean visitors who subscribe to your newsletter, contact you about your service or directly place an order. This means that you may be losing 99 out of every hundred visitors to your site.
The 8 Second Rule - research shows that on average, 50% of visitors to a typical web-site make a decision about whether to stay on that site within 8 seconds.
Not very encouraging statistics are they? The good news is that there are a number of ways to decrease the likelihood that these numbers apply to your own site. The first is to make sure that what you write is relevant to the needs of your visitor. Most corporate web-sites like to talk about themselves, what they stand for and how successful they are. They have the mistaken belief that they are communicating with all of the World Wide Web. In fact, the very opposite is happening; they are communicating at a one-to-one level. Therefore, their copy needs to reflect this.
The ‘You’ Word
Surfing the web is all about self-gratification. If what we read is not relevant and does not address our immediate needs, we move on. This means that warm welcomes are often superfluous as are sophisticated graphics and animations. More often, all that is required is a simple statement or paragraph at the top of a page that contains the magic ‘you’ word within one or two sentences.
The power of the ‘you’ word cannot be underestimated. As soon as you start to write copy containing ‘you’, you change the language, tone and impact of what you write. You are engaged in a one to one conversation with your reader making sure that what you write applies directly to them and to no-one else. It is an old copywriting trick but one that most web-sites fail to adopt.
If you are in doubt, and you don’t do this already, take a piece of text on your own-website and re-write it using the ‘you’ word. At the same time, keep the tone slightly conversational as if you were telling a friend in a relaxed and informal way. You’ll then start to move away from corporate jargon and communicate more relevance and directness.
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Joe Hi
Thank you for continuing to send me your articles and advise, I always find them interesting and thought provoking.
My question is this: when writing general website copy (I am about to re write / re design my own website) should it be written in the first person or third person - if I remember my English correctly that means should it be me talking or someone talking about me? Bearing in mind I am a small company trying to sound ‘bigger’ than I am!
My current site is a bit of a mixture really and I wonder if there is a psychological advantage one way or the other.
Regards
Graham
Hi Graham
Try to avoid using ‘I’ or ‘We’ although it might make you sound like a large organisation. Instead, say what your video services do for those who use them (benefits) as opposed to what they are (features). How do you help people? In the end, everyone is thinking, “What’s in it for me?”.
Hope that helps.
Joe