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What are good practices when writing texts?
What are good practices when writing texts?

Writing impactful messages for my paywall

Madeleine White avatar
Written by Madeleine White
Updated over a year ago

Your Dashboard gives you the chance to customize the texts displayed to readers.

If you want to reword the default texts that we have created, that we believe give a simple, optimal effect, here is some advice on how to write them!

Our advice about the content of the messages

  • Be educational: the economic model of a media is not generally understood by readers, especially online

  • Be informative: why this paywall? what will this action bring?

  • Avoid discrediting free content and the use of ad blockers: it can be negative and risky

  • Adapt messages to your tone of voice: the user experience will be even more persistant

Our advice about the style of the messages

Offer your audience dynamic, simple and short messages! When online, one spends an average of only a few seconds per Web page and reads just a fifth of the available text. So, the more concise you are, the more information is read by the reader. The content must embody the voice of the media but it must also be seen as useful to your reader.

Advice about length of text

  • For a title: less than 50 characters, ideally less than 30 characters and 6 words.

  • For a description: less than 120 characters, ideally less than 80 characters and 20 words.

Advice about calls-to-action

  • Verbs stimulate actions

  • Actions should not contain more than 1 or 2 words, which can sometimes be difficult to comply with

  • However, don't delete important words to save space: for example, "read article" looks better than "read this exclusive article" but perhaps "read for free" works better than "read"...

The key is A/B testing!

In a nutshell

To write good texts, you must think about the user's point of view. To do so, ask yourself some questions - "As a user ... would I expect this sentence at this point? Would I read this? Would I understand it? Would I really need this login link while this article is already offered?", etc.

Once written, you can update your default texts on the Dashboard.

Feel free to contact us on Intercom if you have any questions!

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