Imagine you’re talking with a prospect or client on the phone and right before the critical word or phrase that almost always closes the deal, you suddenly hang up.
You’d never do that, would you? I mean, you’d think that might make it a tad difficult to close a sale.
What if I told you that your email, social media and website might be doing exactly that?
Missing just a tiny bit of attention to the details of your internet communications can really impact the message you’re trying to get across to a client or prospect.
In particular, I’m talking about the repercussions of being just a tad too wordy. Imagine that: Me talking advising you on being too wordy. Can you say irony? Yeah, thought so.
Still, I suggest you bear with me and I’ll show you why it’s important.
First, there’s Twitter:
In Twitter, your message can be 140 characters long.
BUT…if the message is more than 120 characters long and someone retweets it (sends it to their followers, something that’s a good thing for you), the characters past 120 are cut off as shown below.
See the … after “Jonathan Bu”? You’ve been snipped. Cut off.
If a part of a URL or some other important info is at the end of the message and it’s lost in the …, then your message is likely to be less effective and you might never realize why.
Next, there’s Outlook Cutoff
Outlook’s notification window shows approximately 30 characters of the title of your email. The number varies slightly because a proportional font is used in that window, meaning that some letters and numbers are wider than others.
A photographer friend in Edmonton put up with my prodding just long enough to send me two sample messages that illustrate this problem, as seen below. He sent me 2 emails with totally different subjects. As you can see below, they look the same in the notification box.
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So we have identical notifications, yet their messages are totally different: One says “Mark, Are you voting for Obama? You’d be crazy not to”, while the other says “Mark, Are you voting for Obama? I wouldn’t dream of it”.
How’d you like to make that mistake?
You’ve probably seen it in your inbox. In fact, some people do it on purpose in hopes it will provoke you to open their email. My position on that is that they aren’t likely to gain your trust through trickery.
Another example from Outlook shows that at the default width, Outlook’s inbox shows you only a part of the email’s subject (see below).
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As you can see above, having the subject cut off might cause a big problem, especially if someone doesn’t bother to read the email (like that ever happened).
The actual subject of the email above is “Dude, I caught your wife cheating last night at our weekly poker game” – a significantly different message than the image above conveys, don’t you think?
In fact, the cut off subject might just keep your email from getting read – and that’s what this is really about.
Finally, there’s Google cutoff
In Google results, page titles longer than 70 characters get cut off with a “…”.
Here’s an example:
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In the example above, the title tag is too long (thus the … after “smart business moves”). No matter how important the word after “moves” might be, your prospect will never see it. In this case, it says “moves wisely to accept competitors’ cards”, or similar.
You might argue that it should occur earlier if it’s that important, but sometimes it just can’t.
Eliminating the “…” is important for two reasons: 1)You want the words in your title to be optimized for Google and 2) you want prospects to be motivated to click on the link.
In each of these 3 cases, you want the truncated info to help answer a question that’s on their mind or motivate them to take an action.
From where I sit, “…” doesn’t even begin to do that.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.