Section

Digital marketing

These pieces stay with the offer. One reduces it to a sentence a stranger can repeat. The other keeps that sentence intact on the page, in the email, and in the announcement.

The sentence is written before it is copied. If the stairwell test fails, the email and the card will spread a sentence that is not the offer. Fix the sentence, then seal it in the three places.

One sentence, then the three rooms

The stairwell test is the whole of the first piece. You are on the landing, someone one flight up asks what the page is for, and you have one sentence before they turn away. For the booking page that sentence names who it is for, what they can do, and where everyone else goes. “Returning visitors can book Thursday at 6. Beginners use the other list.” If you have to point at a logo, a price, or a row of equal buttons to finish the sentence, it is not ready to leave the building.

Proof you can open sits under the sentence. On this example the proof is the schedule: real times, and a plain line about what a returning visitor should bring. When a session is full, the schedule says full. A full row can be checked. A rounded count of happy visitors cannot, and this publication leaves that count off the page. The large action is the one the sentence named. A quieter control points at the beginner list. Two large actions mean the stairwell sentence was never one sentence.

The second piece starts only after that sentence exists. It is sealed in three rooms: the page, the email, and the card. The email subject may be the sentence cut at a word the mail program will still show. It may not become a warmer line that names a different offer. “We saved you a spot” against a sentence about returning visitors is a fork. The person who reads only the subject has been told something else.

The card has less room than the email. It keeps the sentence and may drop the second line about beginners. The beginner line stays on the page even when the card drops it. The card may not replace the sentence with a pun. A detail moves to the room that has space. The claim does not move.

When Thursday at 6 fills, the page, the email, and the card either say full or the card comes down. Leaving the card up because it was already posted is how a person arrives from the card and meets a full row the card never mentioned. A later campaign does not get a new slogan for the channel. It gets this sentence again, or a new sentence that has passed the stairwell on its own. Read the sentence piece before the three-rooms piece. The section does not merge them.