Is your company jargon confusing customers? Are your pages and pages of text getting hard to read? Time for some problem solving…involving making your content concise
Is your company jargon confusing customers? Are your pages and pages of text getting hard to read? Time for some problem solving…involving making your content concise
Just recently, it was stated The Guardian reported that a Wi-Fi firm had contracted people to 1000 hours of community service through the terms and conditions that are stipulated in their contract. Only one person identified the stipulation and was rightfully rewarded with a prize.
But why are we writing about the complexities and jargon that stops us from reading terms and conditions? Because when signing up for a service or product, it’s a common inconvenience to be greeted with reams and reams of text making sure that we do certain things and adhere to certain objectives.
There are still questions over whether terms and conditions actually are a contractually obligatory clause or whether they are more instructions for the end user. But as a business that provides for numerous clients, terms and conditions are a mere formality, you should always outline the main points clearly to your potential customers.
Surely this is the same with your website?
It is, if you start putting lots of text on your website. Less and less people are likely to read it. And you could be losing out on important business.
It’s always an essential part of the customer journey that they don’t get bogged down with information and jargon, you want to keep the process moving and well-paced.
This usually isn’t the case when terms and conditions are introduced into the mix. It’s revealed that 73% of people admitted they don’t read the fine-print. So, you can expect the same when you put too much jargon on your website.
Creative Thinking?
An independent cartoonist on Tumblr has taken to drawing the iTunes Terms and Conditions as a cartoon strip. You can view this here. However, once the novelty of this wears off there is still a lot of text to read and can you really take the effort to read through an entire comic book series of the iTunes terms and conditions?
The answer is, probably not. This means even splitting your content up into breaks, boxes and diagrams, it’s still going to be a task for people to read.
How to Tackle It
The best way to get people to understand what you do is offer them a few bullet points. If you head over to our about us page, we could get a whole lot more technical, but people prefer clear and concise information. So that’s what we give them.
They don’t want all that text to read. More often than not, if you’re getting a web agency to design a website and monitor your social channels then you probably don’t have time to constantly read through what our service offers.
By offering customers a clear message of what goes on and what to expect from the business, you won’t need to make them read through everything. It’s about putting out expert content on your website so that people will trust you.
