Answer to Question #294356 in Marketing for Tia

Question

How could bad copy prevent someone from signing up to a valuable free service like the trial offered by encyclopedia britanica?

Answer 1

Bad copy people come across it, all day, every day. In email inbox, in sponsored posts on social media, on websites and even infiltrating the news. It’s every writer’s, marketer’s, and business’s worst nightmare. Copy so bad such that one can trash email before he/she even get to the third line. Copy so bad one can close the website before he/she dare look at another page. Copy so bad one wishes he/she could never hear from that company again. Even copy that’s not terrible but not good, can be maddening. Reading bad copy feels like, at best, a waste of time, and, at worst, proof that a company is misleading or thoughtless. It’s actually annoying and always a negative experience. Sometimes ignoring some bad copy can make someone loose a big opportunity. What if, instead of a daily annoyance, one could turn those spam emails into a daily learning experience? What if one could analyze bad copy in order to figure out how to write great copy? Yes, it’s totally possible. To start turning a nuisance into a revelation, there are several lessons one can learn from reading bad copy and start writing better copy than ever before. 

Know the Audience-The first step to writing effective copy should be figuring out exactly who the audience is, what their needs are, and what they want from the writer. Unfortunately, it’s something that many copywriters tend to overlook. If a writer wants a reader to be interested in what he/she writes, he/she has to know what they want to read and why they’re reading it. If he/she over-generalize things, they’ll risk boring readers who lose interest in what they are saying.

Avoid Over-saturation- For example, one finds a store he/she loves or watch a webinar of someone he finds truly inspiring. So he signs up for email alerts. He gets a welcome email right away, and then get the first update or sales notice the next day, and the next day, another okay, the next day, another they end up not reading and finally unsubscribe.

Clickbait is the Worst- For example, “10 facts about ladies, Number five will shock!”. No one wants to see headlines like these again. They’re tacky. They’re misleading. And they can even be dangerous. The sub-par headline is almost always just the first sign of trouble, content that uses a clickbait headline is almost always shallow, empty, or spammy itself. Great content doesn’t need a gimmicky headline. As a result, most people avoid anything that even smells like it could be clickbait, which defeats the entire point of an attention grabbing headline in the first place.

 

Bad copy is always going to exist, there’s no way to get around it and there’s no way to avoid encountering it. But with the right attitude, one doesn’t have to let it frustrate him/her or be a headache.