Eight important things you should know about how people read

 If you knew how people read, you could get them to read more. Right?  Well, that’s certainly what I believe.

 That’s why I am constantly checking out the latest research. My attitude is simple – the more I know about people’s reading habits, the more effective my writing will be for my clients.

But it’s also important that you know these things, too. The digital age is wonderful for all sorts of reasons – not least of all because it can give us instant feedback on works and what just ain’t repaying your investment.

Below are just a few of things which I already know are important – and they’ll all get dealt with in more detail in the coming weeks.

1. 75% more people read copy that provides them with useful information.
2. If you can get people to read the first 350 words of anything, they’ll probably read as much as you want them to.
3. People believe numbers more than adjectives – and numbers which haven’t been rounded up even more so. Therefore 87% has more credibility than over 85%.
4. Headlines don’t have to be short.  Up to 17 words is fine according to one respected source.
5. A Swiss researcher named Siegfried Vogele produced a readability index. It showed that most people found an average of over 20 words per sentence hard to follow. The most readable average sentence length was only 8 words long.
6.  Five times more people read the headline than the body copy. However, when the headline contains a benefit, readership of the body copy goes up even further.
7. Captions to pictures achieve at least double the readership of body copy – and often as high as four times as much. So it’s always worth including captions – and then saying something worthwhile in them.
8.  The PS on a sales letter is the second highest read part. It is in effect, a second headline. What’s more, 82% of people read letters the same way – and it’s the reason single page letters rarely work.

I’ll be covering the subject of how people read sales letters in the next issue but, if you can’t wait and want to know now, leave me a comment and I’ll let you have an advance copy of the article.