Effective Web Copywriting – from copywriting 101 to the latest research

We all know that web copywriting needs to be brief to be effective (although AB testing will sometimes prove otherwise...). But if you are a marketer experienced in writing copy for print or direct mail, in which other ways should you change your style? In this interview, Anne Caborn of digital consultancy CDA takes us through the main issues experienced print copywriters need to consider.

Q1. 1. What are the main differences in successfully writing for web compared with print

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

There are a number of key differences but there are two critical ones when you"€™re talking about web (as opposed to email). The first is you are having a conversation online. It"€™s auditory both in terms of delivery speed and interactivity. It"€™s not inert text on a printed page.

And this interactive experience involves highly motivated users who are searching out what you have to say on a given subject: such as do you stock the widget I"€™m looking for, or do these red spots mean I have measles? This isn"€™t idle chit chat.

Therefore the currency of the conversation must be useful: yes, we stock widgets in these colours at a cost of £x; here"€™s a quick symptom checklist for measles along with useful phone numbers for all night chemists and out of hours doctors"€™ surgeries.

Our recently published research on Online language pathways illustrates what searchers expect as they transition from searching to scanning as they arrive on a landing page.

The answers contain more than the minimum requirement posed by the question. Online you can only create the website-side of the conversation but you have to anticipate the totality of your users"€™ needs. Good conversation is all about listening.

The second critical difference is the point of origin for the conversation. You don"€™t start it, the user does. Online is a very active environment and people go online to get things done: book holidays, buy goods and services, get information.

So online content is a reply-focused medium. Anyone involved in visualising content for web should start by posing this question: Do we "€˜sound"€™ as if we"€™re responding to user needs or simply pushing out what we want to say? Save the push for your brochures.

While still conversational, there are exceptions in the case of email, for example, when it comes to the initiation point. You may well have a clearer idea of where you are in the conversation, ie you"€™re sending an email confirmation in response to an online purchase. You may also initiate a conversation by sending someone their regular copy of an email newsletter they signed up for. (But don"€™t forget they asked you to send it in the first place.)

Q2. What are the secrets of keeping your web copy customer-centric rather than copy-centric?

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

If you constantly have user-usefulness and reply-focused communication front-of-mind you"€™re a long way there.

If you"€™re a content creator it can be very useful to read your content out loud, particularly if you"€™re still establishing the style and Tone of Voice for a new website. Do you sound warm, friendly, engaging - human?

It"€™s also worth looking at the processes needed to set up to control content creation, commissioning and assessment. I recently put together a SMART benchmarking tool to assess how well this process works.

It"€™s also important to think about customers as real, flesh and blood people, with all the inconsistencies and foibles that come with that. We"€™ve been developing a persona-scenario approach for clients. This involves defining a series of personas engaged in real-life activities as they touch on a website or email programme, it"€™s about the context of what we do as well.

Q3. How should you deal with writing for multiple audiences on the same page, e.g. male/female, different company sizes, different levels of seniority in a business.

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

This is tricky but not impossible. Technically you can distinguish returners and registered users from new and unknown users. You may want to serve up elements of conditional content based on what you know.

But even without technology"€™s helping hand you should be able to address this. After all, if you invite people to a dinner party you don"€™t expect them all to be landscape gardeners called Rodney. Conversation thrives on multiplicity.

But you do need to know who all your dinner guests are. This helps with positioning and those all important conversational gambits necessary to get the communication flowing.

First of all, flesh out these multiple audiences using a persona or scenario-based approach. Look for points of overlap and mutuality and then for points of differentiation. Can you use a pathway page to send different audiences on different journeys? A prime example of this is a financial website splitting audiences into financial advisers and investors.

Then look at how you use the page real estate "€“ all of it. Most content creators focus on the juicy paragraphs in the centre of the page. Be aware of the ambient texts, such as driver text links to other pages, supporting right hand panels and even your labelling.

Your core vocabulary should reflect your largest possible audience, so should be warm, friendly, engaging, but slightly vanilla in approach. Use driver texts, ambient texts, labels and navigations to show the breadth of your offering and to "€˜talk with"€™ small segments individually. And don"€™t forget images. These can be powerful creators of user empathy (they can also put people off... big time, if used thoughtlessly).

Q4. Could you point to a couple of outstanding examples of web copywriting (links please) with a short critique.

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

This is a trick question right? My first impulse is to send you towards a couple of sites we"€™ve been working on recently and where we"€™ve overseen content training or commissioning. Then your readers can crawl all over them and say why the hate them. I"€™m a vulnerable soul and might never recover.

The site we have been heavily involved in that I would like to point you to hasn"€™t gone live yet. But the project was great from our perspective because the orgnisation got CDA in right at the outset. We helped them visualise the content, the shape of the site itself and its functionality, the organisation"€™s relationship to digital content per se (and what needed to change about that) and the processes needed to sustain the content going forward.

A site I love is Innocent Drinks. It"€™s visually creative and the Tone of Voice is spot on for the audience. They deliver a slightly-wacky-but-wholesome approach without losing any clarity or usefulness.

Q5. What would you see are the trends in copywriting for the web?

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

The most important thing right now? It has to be auditing what people previously thought was unauditable. Online we can measure so many things: who visits what page, where they go next, now many people opened our last newsletter and what links they used...

But it"€™s always been assumed that "€˜experience"€™, "€˜delight"€™, "€˜satisfaction"€™... were soft, subjugated qualities of online content, that could only be teased out using focus groups and surveys and were difficult, if not impossible, to benchmark across multiple sites.

But CDA are taking a broad, unfettered approach to Web 3.0. There are some interesting conversations going on and we"€™re currently working on a project which will begin to pull content and the experience of content into a measurable framework.

The other really important trend is that organisations are taking back copywriting as an activity. What they"€™re more interested in is using companies like ours to help them visualise why they are talking with website users and how to best configure that experience.