Page 153 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

70 GET A CROSS-HEAD

One of the biggest barriers to the sale is simply that your prospect
doesn’t, won’t, or can’t get to the end of your body copy. Maybe they
don’t even start. Research has shown that 80 percent of people who
read an ad at all only read the headline.
And one of the biggest reasons why people don’t read body copy
is that it looks too daunting. They are confronted with a gray,
forbidding slab of text with all the visual allure of a steel door. You
may have written copy that were it to be read would convince a vegan
to buy flash-frozen bison steaks. But they ain’t reading. So they
won’t buy ’em.

The idea

From Inform Recruitment
Your best tool for breaking up long copy is headings. Specifically,
those headings that run between paragraphs or groups of
paragraphs, often, but not always, centered. I call them cross-heads
and I use them all the time. The only time I avoid them is when
I have a particular need to make a letter resemble correspondence.
Which is almost never.
Inform Recruitment is a specialist recruitment consultancy that
places qualified teachers, teaching assistants, and ancillary staff in
schools across London. For head teachers looking for staff to cover
absence the imperative is to find the right person, fast. The letter I
wrote had the following headline:

144 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS