March 10, 2008 7:00 PM

I was reading a number of articles on the language used by marketing professionals and it made me think. Can a simple change of words result in effective communication? and can using words that resonate with your audience increase the conversion rates and response rates of your communication and email campaigns?

Quote from one of the articles:
"The difference between marketing language and real language is that people don't think in marketing-speak. That is, their actual thought processes don't include the words found in marketing language."

The following examples were some talked about in the articles I read:

• Think about your audience as opposed to verticals or markets
• Think user experience as opposed to features and functions
• Think memories as opposed to promotions
  
• Think of creating a lasting impression as opposed to generating interest
• Think of telling a relevant success story as opposed to listing testimonials
  
• Use real language instead of marketing language
  

I disagree with most of those examples. It really depends on some many external factors that to just generalize and say "their actual thought processes don't include the words found in marketing language" is wrong. Marketers have invested time and money on research that justifies the words and messaging used in their campaigns. For the most part, if it didn't work, marketers wouldn't use it.

My lesson to be learned from reading the articles is to take a moment to think every time you are adding content to your website. If there is a better choice of words or messaging that is more relevant to your target audience it could potentially increase the overall length of time a visitor is on your site, increase email campaign conversion rates, and generate leads for your company.

The best way to succeed is to test, adapt, and refine. Multivariate testing can be used to test multiple combinations of elements on a landing page. So you can swap about picture-1 with headline-2 and button-3 and see how it works against picture-2 with headline-4 and button-2, etc. Its basically just testing a bunch of different variables and see which combo is the most effective (e.g., yields highest conversion rate)

The answer to the title "Can a simple change of words result in effective communication?" is Y-E-S. Even a 1% increase in conversions can substantially increase revenue.

Posted by Greg Matthews at March 10, 2008 7:00 PM

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