How Long Should Headlines Be?

Some­one once asked me what my strat­egy is behind using long headlines.

As I’m sure you know, var­i­ous other mar­keters teach that one should write head­lines no longer than 17 words. Whereas oth­ers teach that head­lines should be real short as their test­ing has shown those head­lines to pull bet­ter than long ones.

Here’s my answer.

Either one is fine. I usu­ally like to test both.

Granted, I’m a fol­lower of Dan Kennedy, who’s a big believer in long head­lines. And I’ve tested short head­lines, too, and they do pull bet­ter in terms of response, click­throughs and readership.

But not nec­es­sar­ily sales.

My the­ory? Per­haps smaller head­lines (and I do mean good ones) don’t offer enough infor­ma­tion, so they pull peo­ple in. Which is a good thing…

… *IF* they are qualified.

Long head­lines tend to pre­qual­ify read­ers. If they hit your web­site or saleslet­ter and fail to read fur­ther because a long head­line offers too much infor­ma­tion, that’s good in my opin­ion. They weren’t qual­i­fied to read a long copy saleslet­ter either — much less the offer. Tire kickers.

Again, I’m speak­ing strictly for long direct response copy. Short copy may be totally dif­fer­ent. And I do use short head­lines if it tells the story I want it to tell. Sure, it’s best to pithi­size as much as pos­si­ble (as copy­writer John Car­leton calls it)… But not at the expense of telling the story that’s needed to qual­ify read­ers AND pull them into the copy.

From my expe­ri­ence, I’ve tested both — sales con­ver­sion on copy with short head­lines under­per­formed the longer ones almost every time.

(Now, a caveat — doesn’t mean to use one big sen­tence and doesn’t mean using a long head­lines that doesn’t give you a chance to come up for air while read­ing it. A long head­line can have 2, 3 or more sen­tences. I also used split-​​headlines — 2–3 head­lines. And they worked extremely well.)

About the Author

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