Jul
22
Have you ever read the copy on your website?
Does it make perfect sense to you? Have you tried reading the pages as though you were one of your customers?
There are a couple of useful tools you can use which help you to identify whether your efforts at writing sales copy are actually any good. They'll also give you suggestions to help you improve what you've written.
The first is a thing called Gunning's Fog Index. This is a readability index. It determines how easy or difficult your copy is to read. It does so by applying a formula to your text. To cut a long story short, a Fog Index of 6 is the equivalent of a comic book - a score of 12 is about the same as the Financial Times (about the level of English comprehension a first year undergraduate at a proper university would be expected to grasp). The number is the number of years of formal education the reader would have to complete in order to read and understand the copy at the first attempt.
I ran the fog index on a website which was put in front of me this afternoon. It scored 18. 18 is awfully high and indicates that the copy is full of big words which renders it almost unreadable.
I blame the hotel industry for making regular use of big words like "accommodation", "reservations" and "facilities", while the rest of us use words like "rooms", "bookings" and "stuff"...
Hotel managers and owners write bloody awful sales copy, because they tend to use big words. Not having thought about the reader and their needs at all.
The second tool is a bit of fun from those nice people at theGrok.com called the "wewe" index. These guys are considered to be at the leading edge of website copywriting. They are using a technique I first learned from a hotel sales guru called Derek Taylor. Derek taught us that if you're trying to interest somebody in what you have to say, you have to talk about them, more than you talk about yourself (think about the worst date you've ever been on girls, I bet the bloke talked about himself all evening? - you get the idea then...).
This means that you need to use the word "you" a lot more than the words "we", "I" or "our". It's called "you factor", and as I mentioned a moment ago, those nice men in the USA have renamed it the "wewe index". There's no accounting for taste is there?
Still, there's a handy website (if you ask me I'll show you) where you can paste in your URL and the system will return your "wewe" index. This one comes in the form of a percentage. The higher your percentage score, the more "you's" you've used (gosh that was complicated) compared to "we", "I", etc.
The second website I tried scored a zero. It didn't talk about anyone but itself. This makes it the ultimate boring fart website. Curiously, it has a readability score of 8, which means it's very readable, boring copy. Presumably because of all those short words like "we " and "I".
So this afternoon, during the coffee break, we spent some time testing various hotel websites on each index. Only one chain website did well. I haven't come across a private hotel website with an encouraging score yet (apart from the ones I've written of course - got to blow my own trumpet here).
I might start a league table.
This article? Has a fog index of 8.95 and a wewe "customer focus" index of 65% (it would be higher, but I had to say the bad words in order to make my point...)
Does it make perfect sense to you? Have you tried reading the pages as though you were one of your customers?
There are a couple of useful tools you can use which help you to identify whether your efforts at writing sales copy are actually any good. They'll also give you suggestions to help you improve what you've written.
The first is a thing called Gunning's Fog Index. This is a readability index. It determines how easy or difficult your copy is to read. It does so by applying a formula to your text. To cut a long story short, a Fog Index of 6 is the equivalent of a comic book - a score of 12 is about the same as the Financial Times (about the level of English comprehension a first year undergraduate at a proper university would be expected to grasp). The number is the number of years of formal education the reader would have to complete in order to read and understand the copy at the first attempt.
I ran the fog index on a website which was put in front of me this afternoon. It scored 18. 18 is awfully high and indicates that the copy is full of big words which renders it almost unreadable.
I blame the hotel industry for making regular use of big words like "accommodation", "reservations" and "facilities", while the rest of us use words like "rooms", "bookings" and "stuff"...
Hotel managers and owners write bloody awful sales copy, because they tend to use big words. Not having thought about the reader and their needs at all.
The second tool is a bit of fun from those nice people at theGrok.com called the "wewe" index. These guys are considered to be at the leading edge of website copywriting. They are using a technique I first learned from a hotel sales guru called Derek Taylor. Derek taught us that if you're trying to interest somebody in what you have to say, you have to talk about them, more than you talk about yourself (think about the worst date you've ever been on girls, I bet the bloke talked about himself all evening? - you get the idea then...).
This means that you need to use the word "you" a lot more than the words "we", "I" or "our". It's called "you factor", and as I mentioned a moment ago, those nice men in the USA have renamed it the "wewe index". There's no accounting for taste is there?
Still, there's a handy website (if you ask me I'll show you) where you can paste in your URL and the system will return your "wewe" index. This one comes in the form of a percentage. The higher your percentage score, the more "you's" you've used (gosh that was complicated) compared to "we", "I", etc.
The second website I tried scored a zero. It didn't talk about anyone but itself. This makes it the ultimate boring fart website. Curiously, it has a readability score of 8, which means it's very readable, boring copy. Presumably because of all those short words like "we " and "I".
So this afternoon, during the coffee break, we spent some time testing various hotel websites on each index. Only one chain website did well. I haven't come across a private hotel website with an encouraging score yet (apart from the ones I've written of course - got to blow my own trumpet here).
I might start a league table.
This article? Has a fog index of 8.95 and a wewe "customer focus" index of 65% (it would be higher, but I had to say the bad words in order to make my point...)
