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Your finance director just signed off on a £2 million marketing budget. New website. Fresh campaigns. Premium advertising slots. But there’s a ticking time bomb in your spreadsheet that nobody’s talking about – and it’s haemorrhaging money faster than a burst water main in your server room.

The true cost of bad copy extends far beyond a few lost sales. It’s the silent profit killer that compounds daily, affecting everything from your conversion rates to your customer acquisition costs.

 The Numbers Nobody Wants to Add Up

Consider this scenario: A mid-sized company discovers their poor website copy could be costing them millions in lost revenue over just 18 months. Not through some dramatic failure or PR disaster. Just through the slow, silent bleed of visitors who landed, got confused, and clicked away.

“Companies are essentially paying to drive traffic to websites that can’t convert,” one frustrated CFO told me recently. “It’s like hiring a brilliant sales team and then not letting them speak during client meetings.”

You probably track your cost per click, your customer acquisition costs, and your lifetime value metrics religiously. But when did you last calculate the cost of copy that doesn’t convert? Let’s examine the data that should concern every finance leader:

  • Average website conversion rates across industries: 2-4%¹
  • What leading companies achieve with compelling copy: 5-7%
  • The difference: Potentially almost double your revenue from the same traffic

The Compound Failure Effect

Poor copy doesn’t just fail once, it fails exponentially. Think of it as reverse compound interest, eating away at your returns day after day, quarter after quarter.

Here’s the cascade of costs:

1. The Spiralling Cost of New Customers
You’re paying £50 per click on Google Ads. Your landing page copy is generic, jargon-filled corporate speak. With a conversion rate of just 0.5%, your real cost per acquisition could be £10,000 when better copy might bring it down to £2,000.

2. The Sales Team Time Drain
When your sales team spends 70% of their time explaining what you actually do – because your website copy didn’t – you’re paying highly qualified professionals to do work that good copy should have handled.

Potential annual cost: Consider the impact of your average sales salary multiplied by the percentage of time wasted, then multiply by your number of sales staff. The figure could make your shareholders very uncomfortable!

3. The Customer Service Avalanche
Confused customers don’t always just leave – they also call. And they email. And they consume resources trying to understand what should have been clear from the start.

Hidden cost: At, say, £25 per customer service interaction multiplied by thousands of preventable queries, you could be burning through your entire customer service budget on confusion alone.

orange and blue symbols of money flowing out of a computer screen and website, on a dark background

The Trust Tax

Here’s something that doesn’t show up in your P&L but directly impacts it: Research by Global Lingo found that 59% of consumers wouldn’t use a company that had obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes² on its website. Another finding from the same study showed that 74% of people notice the quality of spelling and grammar² on company websites.

Bad copy isn’t just ineffective, it actively damages your credibility. It’s a trust tax you pay on every interaction, compounding into lost deals, extended sales cycles, and reduced customer lifetime value.

Entrepreneur Charles Duncombe found that a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half³. His analysis of website figures for tightsplease.co.uk showed that correcting just one misspelling increased revenue per visitor significantly.

The Competitive Bleeding

While you’re losing customers to confusion, your competitors with clear, compelling copy are swooping in. Every badly written page on your website is essentially a referral service for your competition.

Research by Website Planet found that landing pages with spelling and grammar mistakes had an 85% higher bounce rate⁴ than those that were error-free. When these visitors bounce, where do they go? Straight to a competitor with clearer messaging.

The competitor’s secret weapon? Not necessarily a better product. Not always lower prices. Just copy that actually explains the value in terms customers understand.

The SEO Sinkhole

Google’s algorithms are increasingly sophisticated at recognising quality content. Poor copy doesn’t just fail to convert, it fails to rank. You’re essentially invisible to the 75% of users who never scroll past the first page of search results⁵.

Website Planet‘s research also showed that high bounce rates from poor copy signal to Google that a site isn’t trustworthy, leading to lower rankings[^4]. This creates a vicious cycle:

The double whammy:

  • You pay more for paid traffic because organic isn’t delivering
  • The paid traffic you buy doesn’t convert because the copy is poor
  • You increase ad spend to compensate for low conversion
  • The cycle continues, burning cash like a bonfire

The Internal Productivity Pandemic

Bad external copy is costly, but bad internal copy – unclear processes, confusing documentation, ambiguous communications – creates a productivity nightmare.

The hidden haemorrhage includes:

  • Meetings to clarify what should have been clear: 6 hours/week per employee
  • Mistakes from misunderstood instructions: 15% productivity loss
  • Onboarding delays from poor documentation: 3-months instead of 1 month

Companies that invest in improving their internal documentation and communications can potentially save millions annually in recovered productivity.

The Real Cost Calculator

Let’s get specific about what bad copy might be costing your business right now:

Your Monthly Metrics:

  • Website visitors: [Your number]
  • Current conversion rate: [Your rate]
  • Average order value: [Your AOV]
  • Customer acquisition cost: [Your CAC]

The Bad Copy Tax: If poor copy is reducing your conversion by just 50% (and research suggests it often does³):

  • Lost monthly revenue = (Visitors x Potential conversion rate x Average Order Value) – Current revenue
  • Inflated acquisition costs = Current CAC x 2 (at minimum)
  • Annual impact = Monthly losses x 12 + increased marketing spend to compensate

For a mid-sized B2B company with 10,000 monthly visitors and £5,000 average order value, bad copy could potentially cost between £3-7 million annually.

The CFO’s Copy Checklist

Before you sign off on any marketing budget, ask these questions:

  1. ROI Reality Check: “If we doubled our conversion rate through better copy, what would that be worth?”
  2. The Clarity Test: Can an intelligent 16-year-old understand what we do from our homepage in 10 seconds?
  3. The Differentiation Audit: Remove our logo from our website copy. Could it belong to any of our competitors?
  4. The Trust Evaluation: Would you invest your pension in a company whose website reads like ours?
  5. The Sales Support Assessment: What percentage of sales calls start with “So, what exactly do you do?”

The Investment That Pays for Itself

woman with short brown hair, wearing a white blouse, sat at her desk in front of her laptop with a notebook and pen in front of her. She has both her arms raised in celebration

Here’s what CFOs love about investing in professional copy: It’s measurable, it’s scalable, and it’s one of the few marketing investments with genuinely compound returns.

Professional copy investment can deliver:

  • Significant ROI improvements within 6 months
  • Substantial reduction in customer acquisition costs
  • Decreased sales cycle length
  • Fewer customer service queries

Compare that to your latest technology investment or that expensive rebrand. Copy improvement often delivers better ROI than many other marketing investments – and faster.

The Path Forward

The good news? Unlike complex technical problems or market conditions, bad copy is entirely fixable. And unlike other business improvements that take years to show results, copy improvements can impact your bottom line within weeks.

Your 30-Day Action Plan:

Week 1-2: Audit your current copy’s performance. Track confusion points, drop-offs, and clarity issues.

Week 2-3: Test new copy on highest-traffic pages. Measure. Iterate. Measure again.

Week 3-4: Roll out improvements. Watch your metrics transform.

Week 4+: Calculate the money you were leaving on the table. Learn from the experience.

The Bottom Line for Your Bottom Line

Bad copy is the silent killer of profitability. It’s the hidden cost that doesn’t appear as a line item but affects every line of your P&L. It’s the competitive disadvantage you’re choosing to maintain every day you ignore it.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in better copy. It’s whether you can afford not to.

Because while you’re reading this, your competitors are probably rewriting their copy. And every word they improve is potentially a customer you’ll lose.

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Let’s calculate exactly what bad copy is costing your business and create a recovery plan. Schedule a copy audit with our team at Aitkens Media. Your words should work as hard as your money.

About the Author
Joanna Aitkens transforms complex business offerings into clear, compelling copy that converts. With 30 years of experience working with technology, healthcare, and professional services companies, she specialises in copy that CFOs love: profitable, measurable, and impossible to ignore.

Sources

  1. Multiple industry sources confirm average website conversion rates of 2-4%: Statista Q3 2024 Report, Speed Commerce 2025 Benchmarks, Amasty E-commerce Analysis
  2. Global Lingo Survey – Study of 1,029 UK consumers on spelling and grammar impact
  3. Charles Duncombe Analysis – Research showing spelling mistakes can cut online sales by 50%
  4. Website Planet Research – A/B testing showing 85% higher bounce rates on pages with errors
  5. HubSpot Research on Search Behaviour – As cited in “The Small Business Guide to Writing Powerful Website Copy”
    by Joanna Aitkens