Copywriters have long squabbled over a false choice: brevity versus detail. The better question is not how long a sales pitch should be, but whom it is trying to persuade.
Buyers, it turns out, come in two varieties. The first is impulsive—harried, distractible, and disinclined to read past the headline. The second is analytical, treating fine print not as an afterthought but as evidence. Any copy that ignores one in favour of the other is leaving money on the table.
Winning over the impulsive buyer is a matter of design as much as prose. Bold headlines and punchy sub-headlines do the initial work; photographs, captions and judicious use of shading and varying fonts do the rest. Bullet points, far from being a lazy shortcut, are precisely what a skimmer wants: the argument in miniature.
The analytical buyer requires more patience, though not an entirely different structure. The same headlines and sub-headlines that catch the impulsive eye can double as an outline, with the necessary detail—facts, figures, justifications—slotted beneath each one. Rather than writing two separate pitches, the canny copywriter nests one inside the other.
This is the trick too few marketers exploit: the two audiences are not in conflict. A well-organised piece of copy serves the skimmer and the sceptic simultaneously, at no extra cost in space. The impulsive buyer gets his headline; the analytical buyer gets his footnotes. Everyone, including the copywriter, comes out ahead.
Understanding how buyers actually read—rather than how one imagines they ought to—remains the closest thing this trade has to a guaranteed return.
