Writing Effective Teasers: Inspiring people to [Read more...]

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

How do you know whether “Click here to read more…” inspires readers to actually click?

This leading sentence is called a “teaser,” and is used to persuade or inspire readers from reading in one location to reading in another location. Teasers are similar in nature to how magazines such as Vanity Fair or Playboy start an article in one part of a magazine — then cut it off halfway to finish it an another part of the magazine.

On the web, teasers should be used to support your headline, and to save reader’s time. A well-written teaser will provoke a reader’s curiosity to continue reading on your web site. Conversely, if you use teasers and you don’t get any click throughs at all, either you’re attracting the wrong audience, or your writing is not very good, or both.

Teasers… love ‘em or hate ‘em…

On the web, there is an extremely vocal group of people against using teasers in RSS. Some of these people will reactively unsubscribe from any feed that uses teasers. I used to think making these people happy was important. Now, I want to know whether they are real prospects… because if they aren’t prospects, I want to know how to get rid of them instead. If they aren’t a possible customer in the long term, appeasing their demands will put you in the poor house. Furthermore, spam blogs will steal articles from your RSS feed, which is another reason to consider using teasers in RSS.

Measuring the effectiveness of teasers is a tricky proposition. Nobody’s going to click through on all your teaser copy. At best, they may click on a one or two, then read the rest of your material once they are at your website. Personally, I don’t believe clicking through teaser driven RSS feeds is the correct metric. A better metric for effectiveness is how many posts inspire your readers to Take Action Now, and clicking through a teaser is only part of that. Look at the opposite point of view, including the entire contents of every post in your feed. A post your reader just scans in your feed and discards has no more effectiveness than a teaser your reader doesn’t click on.

Writing teaser copy

Writing compelling teaser text is an art, just as writing headlines is an art, writing bullet points is an art, and it takes practice to write smooth, effective teasers leading your readers on, into your website full of useful and valuable information.

There’s several ways to do it:

• Tell a story, and break the story at a point of tension. The reader will have to “turn the page” to relieve the tension. “It was crazy! Totally out of control! I didn’t know what to do!”
• Induce curiosity, such that relieving the curiosity requires clicking through: “I was walking down to the my local coffee shop, and I had the most unusual epiphany…”
• Make a promise to the reader: “Turning information into knowledge is easy. Here’s how…”
• Promise a list to follow. For example, “Three things you can do, right now, to increase the readership on your website:”

Quick recap of teasers

A very good reason to employ teasers is to allow readers to very quickly skim a list of headlines and summary paragraphs, allowing them to decide whether they want to continue to read further. Teasers should be designed to compress the information on a webpage, without crowding it nor without annoying the reader.

Teasers that are poorly written, or written with obvious marketing or sales intention, won’t inspire readers to continue reading. You have to promise clearly defined value in the teaser, then deliver that value (and more) once the reader clicks through.

In closing… writing effective teasers is a subtle and devious art. No one masters such arts overnight, so get started now!

Tagged as: Evergreen, Teaser