Usable Words

One of the things good web copy does is answer objections – the niggling blockages people have that prevent them from buying what you’re selling. According to marketing guru Sonia Simone, “FAQs” should really be called “FROs” – Frequently Raised Objections.

So when you’re developing web content, you should certainly try to anticipate objections your potential customers might have. But here’s something that might sound a bit odd: you shouldn’t answer every single potential objection! Let me give you a (rather gross) example to show why not.

If you’re eating, stop reading now. Especially if you’re eating ice cream.

Say you’re writing copy for a restaurant website, and the restaurant happens to be one that recently served ice cream containing human faeces to some lucky customers. Call me crazy, but I suspect this is going to be a significant objection for a lot of your potential customers. But does that mean you should make one of your FAQs “Are you still serving shit-flavoured ice cream?” I’d suggest not.

The reason? When you’re writing web copy, everybody is going to see what you’ve written. Any objection you answer will only be an objection for some of your readers. But you need to think about the others as well! In the case of the restaurant, there will be readers who:

• haven’t read or seen any news stories about the ice cream excrement incident
• are aware of the incident, but haven’t made the connection to your specific business

In other words, there are ignorant customers you want to stay ignorant, and vague customers you want to stay vague. (Copywriting can be a black art at times! This might be a good time to point out that if a client approached me needing this level of whitewashing, I’d turn the job down.)

Talking to customers who aren’t talking back

Writing copy is like doing sales in a lot of ways. But there’s a basic difference between answering objections in written form and answering them in a one-to-one sales context.

To see why, let’s think about conventional sales for a minute. If you’re a salesperson in a call centre or on a shop floor, you’re talking directly to the customer, and they’re talking back. So the objections you answer are mostly the ones the customer actually brings up. They say “wow, that sounds expensive”; you tell them why it’s worth it.

If you’re very good, you also answer the objections a customer has but doesn’t bring up. (You do this by reading and responding to nonverbal cues.) If you’re very bad, on the other hand, you start answering objections the customer doesn’t even have! (That’s why I was a very bad salesperson: “It costs $500. I know that sounds incredibly expensive, but it’s totally worth it!”)

But if you’re writing something like an FAQ page, the situation is totally different. You don’t know whether any given reader has or doesn’t have a given objection. Instead, you have to answer objections for three types of people at once:

• people who have the objection and would bring it up if you were talking to them
• people who have the objection, but wouldn’t bring it up if you were talking to them
• people who don’t have the objection at all

In Part 2, I’m going to talk about the various ways customers can fit into one of these three categories, and how to write copy with all of them in mind. As it turns out, this isn’t just a challenge; it’s also an opportunity.

Image: Sklathill