If you want your website to be profitable, you need to secure a higher conversion rate. For some sites, that means getting more people to buy your products. For others, it means getting more people to sign up for your newsletter or have them contact you for more information.
In any case, conversions will help you secure more revenue, but you’ll need to think carefully about your copy if you want to optimize for them.
The Role of Copy
Conversions can be influenced in a number of ways, including the design of your landing page and the quality of your offer, but copy plays three important roles:
- Your copy will be responsible for telling customers what they’re about to purchase (or sign up for). Without that information, your visitors won’t be willing to part with their money or personal information.
- Your tone and word choices can evoke a mood within your target audience, setting them up to want a certain purchase more, or to be more willing to follow through with an action.
- You also need to give users a compelling argument to push them over the conversion threshold; copy can accomplish this through persuasion.
How to Write Better Copy
So what can you do to maximize these effects, and write copy more capable of earning conversions?
- Get straight to the point. Try to avoid any unnecessary language, especially above the fold of your landing page. Instead, get to the point. You’ll need to hook a reader’s attention within the first few sentences of your copy, and if you spend too much time dancing around the point, they’ll lose interest. Take Junk Car Traders as an example here; within a few sentences, the company describes exactly what it does and exactly what customers can expect. There’s no obfuscation or pushiness to be found.
- Keep everything squarely within your brand voice. All your copy should consistently conform to the standards of your brand voice, in tone, vocabulary, and audience targeting. Keeping your written materials in-brand allows you to differentiate your company from others, and add to the overall experience your customers are getting (possibly improving trust at the same time).
- List the advantages. At some point on your landing page, make sure you list all the benefits of converting in a simple, easy-to-read format. Take Tubshroom’s landing page as an example; it lists five key benefits of the product in bullet point format, to make it easier for customers to understand why they’d make the purchase.
- Imply urgency. Most customers will delay a purchasing decision, even if they know they want to make it eventually. Unfortunately, the longer they procrastinate, the lower the chances that they’ll finalize the conversion. The best way to compensate for this effect is to use your copy to imply a sense of urgency; give your readers the sense that they need to convert now to see the most benefits or advantages.
- Use strong action words. On your call-to-action, make sure to use strong action words to drive your visitors to complete your form or finalize their purchase. Phrases like, “start saving money!” or “get me my free whitepaper!” are far more motivating than passive phrases like “submit form” or “download.”
- Avoid clichés and sales-speak. It’s tempting to put on your sales hat and fall back on old clichés from sales, marketing, and advertising. But these phrases are unnecessary, at best, and might make your brand seem insincere or overly pushy. The Mac app Muzzle takes this to the next level by keeping its landing page copy minimalistic: “a simple mac app to silence embarrassing notifications while screensharing.”
- Add objective data. It’s hard to argue with objective metrics. If you can, include high-level statistics that either prove that your product or service works, or demonstrate why it’s important. In a pinch, you could just state how many people have converted already.
- Finally, take the time to experiment with your copy, preferably in an AB test format. Copywriting is both an art and a science, so it’s hard to predict which variables will affect your final conversion rate, and which ones won’t. The best way to move forward, then, is to try everything out under similar circumstances and objectively measure which ones perform best. Keep the winners and ditch the losers.
It may take you several rounds of tweaks and adjustments before you find a selection of copy that works for your niche, but your efforts will be worth it if it means securing a higher conversion rate. The more you practice, and the more types of copy you experiment with, the better you’ll get—and the quicker you’ll be able to optimize new pages for your brand.
