When it comes to creating marketing websites, a lot of people think that: “People don’t read.”
“There’s too much text.”
“Say this in less words.”
“Who’s gonna read all this?”
And while you definitely don’t want to overwhelm your website visitors with excessively long text-blocks that distract from the core messaging…
… don’t make the mistake of pruning away too much copy from your website, especially if it comes to copy that conveys your value proposition.
A recent experiment by the ConversionXL team showed that a bullet list with descriptions helped readers understand and recall the value proposition more accurately than shorter versions.
You can see the 4 variations here. The red boxes highlight the areas that have been modified.
Variation B, titled “Bulleted Descriptions” is the one that got the most views.
A lot of people would describe this page as “overloaded” and containing too much text.
But the test revealed that this very version was the one that was most successful at helping website visitors understand the value proposition of this website.
Unfortunately, they didn’t test (or if they did, they didn’t share the test results) of these landing pages and what the engagement metrics were. All they did was survey participants and track participants’ eye movements on the website.
So we don’t know if Variation B got less engagement than other variations – but the main takeaway from this experiment is this:
If you want people to actually read the value propositions you’re composing, limit other elements on the web page. Elements that stay on the page should be extremely relevant to the value proposition’s message.
The eye tracking also revealed that more text caused visitors to notice the value proposition faster, and spend more time reading it.