Redundant Copy - Where is the Happy Medium?

Repeating calls to action, and other valuable sales content

[Nick_W]

Hi all,

In this thread on usability [webmasterworld.com] tedster brought up the subject of redundancy as applied to page design.

What about sales copy?

Calls to action, such as 'buy now' and product features are often repeated during the copy of a page but:

• How much is too much?
  
• What is the minimum/optimum repitition of calls to action on a page?
  
• Does it become 'annoying' at some point?
  
• Does it become hard to buy if there is not enough?

If anyone can share some personal experiences that would be great, just interested in members opinions on this topic...

Nick

[digitalghost]

>>Does it become 'annoying' at some point?

Yes, at the point where you overcome your sense of 'natural' copy and 'know' that you are becoming obnoxious. I usually have a call to action in before the body copy, and another at the end of the body copy. Buy links should be prominent.

It only becomes hard to buy if the potential consumer has to click more than once to get to the cart or if the price isn't prominent or if they do not believe your copy.

On websites it is extremely easy to use many variations on calls to action, (buy me), on different pages and track what is effective.

Don't labor under the impression that people will enter the site through the index and logically page through to a sale. Use each page as a selling page.