Tired of spending a ton of money on ads and barely breaking even?
You wonder what it takes to get people to open their wallets and say YES to your call to action.
You’re in the right place.
You’ve put a ton of love into your product or service. Now it’s time to find the right words to sell it.
In this post, we’ll go over the best tips and techniques when it comes to creating landing pages that convert.
So you can skip the guest work and crush your conversions!
Stick to the Rule of One
The rule means that you’re always writing for one:
- One reader
- One big idea
- One promise
- One call-to-action
1. One Reader
You’ve probably heard this before, but I’ll repeat it here:
If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.
Don’t cast your net wide and write to every visitor that lands on your page.
Instead, write to your one ideal customer.
It’s either Sally or Joe, not both.
Because here’s the thing, although your readers are unique individuals, they have a lot in common.
They share the same goals, aspirations, and concerns surrounding your offer.
They are one audience.
When you write to your one audience, your copy will be better.
Your message will become so much stronger and clearer.
Sure, you may lose some readers writing this way, but that’s expected.
Those readers are not your prospects. They are unlikely to become your customers and raving fans.
But the right people, those who are most likely to buy from you, will be drawn to your copy.
Average people are good at ignoring you. Average people have too many different points of view about life and average people are by and large satisfied. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one.
2. One Big Idea
Your big idea needs to be important to your customer and easy to understand.
Here are some examples:
- Reverse years of your life with fasting.
- Prevent the caffeine crash by adding butter to your coffee.
- Prevent breast cancer by drinking non-dairy milk.
- Retire early by buying and selling websites.
- Have more time by outsourcing most of your work.
- Manifest THE ONE with meditation.
There should only be one big idea in your copy.
You’re either helping your customer save time or money, not both.
You do not want your ideas to compete with each other.
When this happens, our copy becomes less clear and, therefore, less convincing.
And doubt is the number one enemy of conversion.
3. One Specific Promise
Having a single specific promise is more convincing than many general ones.
Here’s an example of an offer with many promises:
“Buy our course. If you don’t get more e-mail subscribers, higher open rates, and more clients, we’ll give you your money back, no questions asked.”
Now, as a digital marketer, all of these promises are important to me.
But, the outcome is much harder to imagine than if there was only one specific promise:
“Buy our course. If you don’t increase your e-mail subscribers by 5K in one month, we’ll give you your money back, no questions asked.”
Now that’s powerful.
The promise is more real and achievable.
It’s also more believable.
As marketers, we eliminate doubt by making a promise to our readers.
But this strategy can easily backfire if you make too many promises.
Most often, the response you get is: what’s the catch?
And it can’t be helped.
As Julia Kirby puts it:
“If you’re running a business, you contend with the rampant assumption that your main goal in life is to part fools from their money.”
Don’t give in to making more than a single promise, even if you can deliver many.
Make a list of all the promises you want to make. But only use the most desirable promise you can make to your customer.
4. One Call-to-Action
All landing pages have one objective: to get readers to take action.
But the action you want them to take should be clearly defined.
Don’t ask your reader to sign-up to your e-mail newsletter, download your free e-book, and buy your product.
Don’t include any links on your landing page, either.
Write your copy so that your reader can only answer to one call-to-action.
Write With the Stages of Awareness in Mind
In his groundbreaking book Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene Schwartz broke down prospect awareness into five stages. These five stages measure how much your prospect knows about your product:
- Unaware
- Pain Aware
- Solution Aware
- Product Aware
- Most Aware
This helps you tailor your messaging to match what they know and expose them to what they don’t.
- Unaware→ A person hasn’t identified their pain.
- Pain Aware→ A person who’s aware of their pain, but is unaware that solutions exist.
- Solution Aware→ A person who knows that solutions exist but doesn’t know about your product.
- Product Aware→ A person who knows about your product is one of the answers to their pain.
- Most Aware→ A person who knows your product is the best solution for their problem.
The idea is to write a copy designed to move your prospect to the next stage of awareness.
That means you should not try to sell your product to a customer on stage one, or unaware.
First, you have to show them that there is a better way to do things.
In my travel photography blog, I once ran a campaign targeted to avid travelers with no interest in photography.
Here’s what I wrote:
You get to your travel destination. It’s breathtaking. You take out your camera so you can capture and cherish the moment forever.
But every image you take looks like a watered-down version of what you see.
You wonder, “What could I possibly be doing wrong?”
Sounds familiar? I’M HERE TO HELP.
Learn the skills you need to take amazing travel photos from anywhere in the world– ALL FOR FREE!
Get your FREE copy of my E-book “Non-Photographers Guide to Travel Photography” HERE.
I know from traveling full time that many travelers struggle to translate what they see and feel into photographs.
But most of them are unaware that there’s a better way. They just haven’t been exposed to it yet.
I didn’t offer them my main course on editing images in Lightroom and Photoshop.
That’s not something they would buy… yet.
My e-book was designed mainly to introduce them to the world of travel photography.
It’s also important to note: do not address visitors in every stage of awareness in your landing page.
Instead, write to a prospect in a particular stage of awareness.
Trigger Emotions
As a copywriter, your goal is to make your audience feel something by the time they reach your call-to-action (CTA).
Why? Because emotions, not logic, is what motivates people to take action.
The more you trigger their emotions, the more they will respond to your CTA.
That said, if you don’t know what emotion you want your prospect to feel, chances are they won’t feel anything.
As the maxim goes: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.”
So before you sit down to write your copy, identify what emotional response you want to trigger.
Some of the best copies play FEAR AND GREED.
The fear of losing something, such as money and love, can be very persuasive.
The greed to have more money, happiness, and success powerful emotional buttons to push too.
Another effective strategy is to indulge in humanities age-old emotional triggers (a.k.a. deadly sins):
- Pride
- Envy
- Wrath
- Gluttony
- Lust
- Sloth
- Greed
While they are generally “negative,” the 7 deadly sins, you can use them strategically in your campaign.
Know Your Prospect
Spy on your prospect on forums, amazon book reviews, blog comments, or doing surveys.
Find out what they do, think, and see relative the problem your product solves.
Also examine how they see themselves and the world around them.
The more the more details you can gather, the better.
Say you’re selling a weight loss program.
What your prospect does:
Jane is a 27-year-old graduate student.
She wants to lose 20 pounds in time for her best friend’s wedding.
What your prospect sees:
Jane knows it’s possible because she’s seen testimonials of others doing it with your product.
What your prospect believes:
Jane wants to believe that your product is the solution to her problem.
But she is experiencing an emotional barrier. A limiting belief that she is not worthy of your product.
She doesn’t have the confidence to take your program because she has failed in many other weight loss programs before.
What your prospect think:
Jane is continually looking for permission.
She is dying to hear you say that it’s ok to try again.
That she didn’t fail because she’s incapable but because she wasn’t in the right program.
All of this may seem like a lot of extra work, but it is what makes a successful copy.
By knowing your prospect you’ll be able to know not only what to say, but how to say it.
When you understand your prospects’ universal truths, you’ll be able to respond to their needs and objections skillfully.
Simplify Your Copy
When creating your landing page, your goal should first and foremost be clarity.
The best way to do this?
Simplify your copy.
Remove verbal fluff.
And avoid using words that are difficult to understand.
Your readers are busy and impatient.
If they don’t understand you, they’ll leave.
And even if they do understand your complicated vocabulary, chances are they’ll dislike you for it.
It’s difficult to trust people who use overly-complicated words.
It comes off as either pompous or B.S.
Don’t try to dazzle your audience with brilliance or baffle them with B.S, as W.C Fields puts it.
You’ll only confuse, not impress your reader.
Write in plain, simple English.
Limit your:
- Words per sentence
- Syllables per sentence
- Syllables per word
- Number of letters per word
- Passive and complex constructions
You can easily do this by using free tools like Grammarly, Hemingway, and Yoast.
Also, write less.
The longer the text in your opt-in, the higher the chance it’ll confuse your reader.
The leaner the text in your form, the clearer and more impactful your message will be.
Write a Strong Headline
A strong landing page headline:
- Stands out
- Trigger an emotion
- Are easy to understand
1. Stand out
Make your headline the most prominent element on your landing page.
You don’t want it to compete for attention with other components in your copy.
2. Trigger an emotion
Write your headline to trigger an emotional or psychological response.
Find out where your
prospect is emotionally when she lands on your page. Then press on that emotional trigger. So he can’t
help but keep reading.
3. Easy to understand
Aim for clarity.
If your headline isn’t able to describe how your product will solve their problem, it’s not clear enough.
To learn more about writing compelling headlines, read our article “11 Tips for High Converting Headlines.”
Write a Compelling Call-to-Action
Clicking the CTA button is the final step your audience needs to take to convert.
You could nail all the tips in this post, but if your readers don’t click on your CTA button, none of that would matter.
So, what compels prospects to click?
Some main factors you should consider are:
- Text
- Color
- Font Size
1. Text
By far, the most critical aspect of a CTA button is the text.
It’s your last shot at convincing your audience to click, so make it count.
Don’t just use bland language such as Sign Up, Submit, or Subscribe.
These words have been so overused; they’ll be invincible to your viewers.
Instead, use the precious space on your CTA button to motivate your readers to take action.
Write your button copy in the first person, and make it compelling.
Here are some examples:
- Get Access
- Get My [Freebie]
- Instant Download
- Let Me In
- Send Me the [Freebie]
- Send Me Everything
- Show me
- Strike now
- Yes, I Want It!
You’ll also want to make sure that the action on your CTA button matches or reflects your headline.
This is especially true if your button and headline are in the same visual space.
For example, say your headline is “How to Learn Photography in 30 Days.”
You can write “Show me How” or “Teach Me” or “I am Ready to Learn.”
2. Color
Choose a color that stands out from the page.
Generally speaking, green, orange and yellow buttons tend to perform best.
But the right color for you will depend on the overall opt-in form and site design.
An easier metric to make sure your opt-in button pops is color contrast.
Choose a color with high contrast from your overall design to make sure that your button stands out.
3. Font Size
Make sure your text is large enough to draw attention and read quickly.
But be careful not to make it too large that it completely overwhelms the rest of your form.
Message Match
Your ad’s copy, offer, and design should match your landing page.
If you’re offering a 30% off coupon on your ad, that should be the first thing visitors see once they land on your page.
What happens if your add headline promotes a discount coupon, but when clicked, it is nowhere to be found?
Simple. Your audience will click away. Now that’s a waste of click and ad spend.
Take your ad’s key messages and make sure to place them on your landing page.
This means you’ll need to create a particular landing page each time you modify your ad and vice versa.
Excite Visitors with Bullet lists
Write your bullet points to inspire and excite your visitors:
- Don’t use black or dark dots. Use checkmarks, arrows, etc with bright colors.
- Show a clear benefits to the reader for every bullet point.
- Write clearly and concisely.
- Put the most impressive bullet points at the beginning and the end. This strategy applies every time you use a list, not just bullet points.
- Tease. Do not tell your prospects exactly what they’re going to get. Instead, pique their curiosity and increase their desire. In copywriting, this type of bullet list is called fascinations.
Some examples of fascinations:
- Learn how to find low competition, high-traffic keywords that will drive tons of organic traffic to your site.
- Have a proven method to write blog posts that gets thousands of shares.
- Get access to the often-overlooked social media strategy that can 10x your traffic in less than a month.
- Learn how to generate thousands of new visitors per month by getting free publicity from big websites.
Focus on Outcomes
Humans tend to take action based on emotions, not logic.
To get your visitors to say YES, focus on outcomes rather than features.
What’s the difference?
Features are a part of your product. Outcomes are the result of the features.
Whereas features describe what your product does, outcomes paint a vision of a better future for your prospects.
And painting your prospect a picture of a better version of himself is one of the most effective ways to build that emotional desire to say YES.
I once heard a marketer say this, although I can’t remember who: “You’re not selling a spatula; you’re thanksgiving dinner.”
That pretty much sums up the difference between features and outcomes.
As Mark Ford puts it, “Sell to the heart first … not to the head.”
Conclusion
As business owners, our job is to help our customers improve their lives.
But we’ll only be able to do that if we can speak their language and get them to convert.
That’s why copywriting is one of the most critical skills any entrepreneur online can learn.
In this post, we went over the best tips and techniques for creating landing pages that convert.
Try them out and watch your copy turn even the frostiest traffic into sales!