Offer copy

What offer copy is

Offer copy is the part of a sales message that states the transaction: what the buyer gets, what it costs, what is included and excluded, what happens after they say yes, and what genuinely changes if they wait. It is written once, properly, and then reused everywhere the thing is sold.

It is the piece most businesses are missing. A service page can run to nine hundred words on craftsmanship, experience and care, and never say what a buyer receives, for how much, or how to start. The reader has to email to find out, and most of them do not.

It is not conversion copy, which rewrites a whole page that is failing to get an action; offer copy is one block inside such a page, and sometimes fixing it is all the page needed. It is not a value proposition either, which is the single positioning sentence about who you are for. And it is not pricing page copy, which handles the whole price list and the awkwardness of publishing numbers at all.

When you need one

You need it when people who clearly want what you sell keep asking the same two questions before they will move: what exactly do I get, and what does it cost. If your inbox answers those questions by hand several times a week, the answer belongs on the page.

You need it when a service that used to be quoted every time is being turned into a named package, or when a promotion is coming and there is no settled offer underneath it to promote.

You do not need it if the problem is the button rather than the substance. If the offer is already stated clearly and readers still do not act, that is smaller and cheaper work on the wording of the ask. I will say so on the first call rather than sell you the larger job.

What goes in it

Five things, and an offer is weak wherever one of them is vague.

• What they get. Named components, in the buyer's words rather than your internal ones. Not "a comprehensive package" but the four things that arrive and roughly when.
• What it costs. A number, a band, or an honest statement of what the number depends on and when they will have it. Silence about price is read as expensive.
• What is not included. The exclusions stated on purpose. This loses you the wrong enquiries and wins trust from the right ones, and it prevents the argument in month two.
• What happens when they say yes. The first three steps, with timings. Most hesitation is not about money, it is about not knowing what they are walking into.
• Why now, if there is a why. A real deadline, a real limit on places, a price that genuinely rises on a date, or a season that ends.

On that last point I am firm. If there is no real deadline, I will not invent one. A countdown that resets, a sale that never ends and a limited intake that is not limited are all noticed, and the customers who notice are the ones you most want. The damage is not to one campaign; it is to every honest deadline you ever set afterwards. Where nothing genuine exists, we either build a real limit into how you work, or the offer stands on its own merits and says nothing about time.

What you get

The offer block, in three lengths. A full version for the service or product page, a short version of about eighty words for an email or a proposal, and a one-line version for an ad or a button. All three say the same thing, so nobody improvises a shorter one under pressure.

The exclusions and the terms, in plain words. What is not covered, what costs extra, what you need from the customer, and the guarantee or the refund position if you have one. Written to be read, not to be defended later.

A one-page note on where it goes. Which pages, emails and documents carry which version, and what to delete from them when the new block goes in, since the old vague paragraph rarely survives beside it.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A bookkeeping practice in Kamloops has one service page that says it offers "full-cycle bookkeeping tailored to your business". Enquiries arrive at roughly one a week, and almost all of them ask the price. The owner has quoted individually for nine years and privately knows the answer lands in one of three places.

The work turns those three places into three named packages, each with its own offer block: what arrives monthly, what arrives at year end, what the client must send and by when, a price band in CAD, and a plain statement that corporate tax filing stays with their accountant. No deadline is invented, because none exists. Instead the offer says onboarding takes two weeks and two new clients are taken per month, which was already true and had never been written down. The decision that came out of it was to stop quoting by email, and let the page hold the first half of that conversation.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, what it really costs you to deliver, and which parts of the answer you have been giving verbally for years. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. How many offers are in scope, the versions of each, and the revision rounds, agreed before anything starts.
3. The awkward questions. A written list from me about exclusions, timings, limits and what you will actually guarantee. It takes you an hour and decides how good the result is.
4. The draft. Four to six working days after the answers come back, all three lengths together.
5. Final copy and the placement note. One round of revisions included, then a short call with whoever updates the pages.

One to two weeks from first call to final copy is typical for a single offer.

What it costs

Offer copy is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. It depends on how many offers there are and whether the packaging already exists or has to be worked out with you. The number is agreed in writing before I start. The pricing page shows the four ways of working and how quoting goes for everything outside them.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The offer goes onto the pages that sell it, which often means the product or service page is rebuilt around it. It gets announced, with a date and an end, as a sale or a launch. Or it goes into paid advertising, where a stated price filters out the enquiries you did not want. This piece of work stands on its own, and nothing further is assumed.