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Spent 3 weeks fighting a client pitch email because of one dumb line about pricing
So I had this pitch email I was sending out to a batch of local businesses back in March, and it was converting okay but not great. The problem was one line near the end where I talked about pricing, and clients kept replying with questions that made no sense, like they thought I was charging per project when I meant per month. I rewrote that single line maybe 14 times over three weeks, trying different versions, testing them on small groups, and getting nowhere. What finally fixed it was when a friend in Austin read it out loud to me over the phone and I heard how confusing it sounded when spoken. I changed it to one plain sentence, no numbers buried in the middle, just flat out said what the cost was and what it covered. Replies with pricing questions dropped off basically overnight after that. Has anyone else had a pitch email where one vague sentence was tanking the whole thing?
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brooke_murray9h ago
Small pushback on one part of this: when people replied with pricing questions that made no sense, that probably was not just your wording being vague. Hearing it read out loud helps you catch clunky spots, sure, but the real fix was that you stopped burying the cost and the billing period in the middle of a sentence. Readers skim. They grab the first number they see and then guess at the rest. I've watched this happen with my own stuff. One mention of a price with no clear "per month" right next to it, and people fill in whatever meaning they already expected, which is usually per project because that is what most local businesses deal with. So the confusion was not random. You were basically asking them to do math and read your mind at the same time. The plain sentence worked because it left no room for guessing, not because spoken word has some magic to it.
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