Writing for the Skim
How to structure marketing copy so the readers who skim still get the message.
Most marketing-page readers don't read. They skim. Eye-tracking studies, attention metrics, our own session recordings — all confirm it. People land, they look for the thing they need, they're gone.
This isn't a problem to fight. It's a constraint to design around. The structure that works:
- A headline that promises something specific.
- One paragraph that delivers the promise, in short sentences.
- Three bullet points that recap. (You're reading them right now.)
- A single, unambiguous call to action.
That's it. Everything else is decoration. If your copy doesn't survive the skim test, no amount of clever rewriting will save it — you need to restructure.