Promotional copy

What promotional copy is

Promotional copy announces one thing that is happening, with a start and an end: a sale, a product launch, an open day, a season, a closing-down, a new location. It is written once as a single announcement and then adapted for every place the news has to appear, so that all of them say the same thing in the same words.

The test it has to pass is one read. A customer glancing at an email on a bus should come away knowing what is on, what it applies to, when it ends and what to do. If they have to read it twice, it has failed, and no amount of design rescues that.

It is not offer copy, which settles the substance underneath: what is included, what it costs, what is excluded. Promotional copy assumes that exists and announces it. It is not campaign copy either, which carries one idea across every channel for months and includes the thinking behind it. A promotion is smaller, shorter and dated.

When you need one

You need it when something is happening on a date and more than two places have to tell people about it. That is the usual failure: the sale is written on the home page by one person, in the email by another, and on the shop window by a third, and the three versions disagree about what is included.

You need it, too, when a promotion did not work last time and nobody knows why. Often the offer was fine and the announcement was unreadable, hedged with conditions, or never actually said the date.

You do not need it if nothing is actually on. A discount decided this morning with no end date and no reason is not a promotion, and dressing it up wastes the attention of a list you will want later. You also do not need the full set if only one email is going out: that is a launch email on its own, and it costs less.

What I write

One announcement, then its adaptations. The announcement is settled first and everything else is cut from it, which is why the versions agree.

• The core announcement. Around a hundred words: what is on, what it covers, what it does not cover, when it ends, and the one action. Every other piece is a translation of this.
• The web version. The banner line, the paragraph on the page it links to, and the button. Written so the page works for someone arriving from anywhere.
• The email versions. Usually three: the announcement, a reminder in the middle, and a last-day note. Subject lines and preview text included for each.
• The social versions. Written for each platform you actually use, not one caption pasted across all of them, with the first line doing the work before the fold.
• The spoken version. Two or three sentences for whoever answers the phone or stands at the counter, so the staff answer matches the printed one.

Print pieces are included when there are any: a window card, a leaflet or a sign. The dates and the exclusions have to be identical across all of it, and that is largely what I am checking on the way through.

What you get

One document with every version in it. Ordered by where it goes, with the date each piece should appear and the date it must come down. The coming-down dates matter more than people expect: a finished sale still live on a page in March is the most common promotional mistake there is.

The conditions written once. The exclusions, the limits and the small print in plain words, in a form short enough to sit under the announcement rather than on a separate page nobody opens.

A one-page schedule. Who posts what, on which day, and who takes it all down at the end. Written for a small team with other jobs to do.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A garden centre near Guelph runs a spring sale in the last two weeks of April. Last year it produced eleven separate pieces: a home page banner, four emails, four posts, a printed sign and a radio read. Three of them said the sale covered all stock; two said all stock except trees; the sign did not carry a date at all.

This year the work starts with one hundred-word announcement: sale prices on nursery stock, trees included, seeds and tools excluded, until the last Sunday in April, in store only. Everything else is cut from that paragraph. The email count drops from four to three, the posts from four to two, and the sign gets the end date in the largest type on it. The decision that came out of the work had nothing to do with words: staff had been improvising answers about whether trees were included, so the counter version was printed and taped by the till.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What is on, the dates, what it covers, and every place it has to appear. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The list of pieces, the revision rounds and the delivery date, agreed before anything starts and before the promotion does.
3. The conditions, settled. I send back the exclusions and limits as I understand them, and you correct them. This is where most of the disagreement gets found.
4. The draft set. Every version together, four to six working days after the call, so they can be compared side by side rather than approved one at a time.
5. Final copy and the schedule. One round of revisions included. Delivery is at least a week before the promotion starts, so nothing is being written the night before.

One to two weeks from first call to a complete set is typical.

What it costs

Promotional copy is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, based on the number of pieces and the number of places they have to run. A single announcement with a page, three emails and a few posts is a small job. A launch with print, a landing page and a staff briefing is a larger one. The pricing page explains how quoting works when a service has no published band.

What happens next

Afterwards, three things tend to happen. The promotion is reviewed against what it actually produced, which is the habit behind direct response work. The posts get written properly for each platform on an ongoing basis rather than only when there is a sale, which is social copywriting. Or the next season gets planned early, with an article published before the season starts rather than during it. This job is complete in itself and nothing further is assumed.