It’s time to get down to business. Through one or more of your marketing channels, your customer has entered your sales funnel and arrived on your landing page. It took a lot of “heavy lifting” to get them here and now your challenge is to justify the effort by getting them to convert.
If you leave anything to chance, you’re letting yourself down.
Every element of your page has a role to play (if one doesn’t, get rid of it), each one is very important and together they combine to foster conversions. But none of them are more important than the words on your page.
Your landing page is like an online salesperson. It is the face of your business, it is in a direct one-on-one interaction with the visitor, and what it says can be the difference between a lifetime customer and a bounce (which puts you back to square one in landing that prospect).
So What Do You Say?
Your landing page copy must speak the visitor’s language, tell her what she wants to hear (even if she doesn’t yet know what she wants to hear) and give her the fuel she needs to continue through your conversion funnel.
The following copywriting tips will help you say all the right things.
1. Give Her a Reason to Stay – Unless you have a monopoly on your product or service, your customer can find it, or something similar, elsewhere. The first answer your visitor seeks from your page is to the question “why am I here?”.
And she won’t find that answer in copy that tells her the same story she found on the last website. She’s looking for something different. For what makes you different. So don’t just tell her you are “dedicated to customer service”. Your competition tells her the same thing.
Tell her what makes you unique.
Let’s say a customer is looking for “patio umbrellas”. And she lands on your page. Now’s your chance to wow her with what makes you different. What should your page title be?
It should same something more than “Patio Umbrellas”. Interestingly, on the landing page above, the body copy reveals that the umbrellas are made of wind-resistant fabrics. So these aren’t just “patio umbrellas”, they’re different. And if they’re different, the customer needs to know what makes them different.
These are actually “Patio Umbrellas that Stand Up to the Wind”. When the customer is told what sets these umbrellas apart, she will be more likely to stay on this page.
2. Offer Pain Relief – Relatively few people buy something for no reason at all. The mere fact that they found their way to your page is proof that they have a problem, need or want for which they seek a solution. The body copy on your landing pages needs to speak to your customer in terms of solutions, or benefits, instead of simple features.
If you’ve ever stuffed envelopes – in bulk or one at a time – a major pain point revolves around the flap; either moistening it, folding it or getting it to stick.
If you’re selling envelopes, and you have your customer’s undivided attention, what will you tell her? That your envelope flaps are “open end with gummed flap” (which is exactly like every other envelope) like in the page above?
Or that yours feature “easy-folding, quick-sealing flaps”?
Take a look at the body copy on one of Amazon’s Kindle landing pages. Yes, selling a Kindle is a bit different than selling envelopes, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t always seize the chance to tell your customer how your product solves her problems.
3. Tighten Up Your Copy – While we have likened your landing page to a real-life salesperson, obviously there are significant differences. One of the biggest is time with the customer. Your landing page better not waste her time because there are lots of other places on the web that she might want to be and she can get to any of them at the speed of a click. Your copy must be as tight as possible.
Have a read of the following excerpt from a live landing page:
“Come and check out our freshest options that have just landed here at Site. With the latest arrivals from your favorite brands, including Converse, Nike, Adidas and much more.”
The following copy says the same thing, but in almost half the words:
“Check out the freshest options from your favorite brands like Converse, Nike, Adidas and more.”
4. Gather a Crowd Around Your Product – When you have walked around a consumer products show, have you ever noticed that you’re drawn to booths that have a crowd around them, even if you’re not particularly interested with what’s on display?
Humans – and your customers are human, not just numbers on your analytics reports – are curious beings. When they see that something has attracted the attention of others, they want to see what it is. Many purchase decisions are based on the popularity of the product.
You can highlight that popularity with the copy on your landing page. It’s called social proof.
The Commun.it homepage demonstrates social proof in four ways:
- Logos of major brands (if it’s good enough for Coca Cola …)
- A personal testimonial from a leading tech media company
- Branded testimonials
- A counter that indicates the page has been tweeted over 100,000 times
5. Divide (your copy) and Conquer (the customer) – Almost as important as what you write is how well it’s presented. Again, your web visitors have no time to waste. If they see long, unbroken chunks of copy, they are less likely to read it because it means it will take too long to find the tidbit they’re looking for.
Break up your copy into bite-sized chunks and make each bite at least as tasty as the previous one.
I hate to tell you this now that we’re down to the last few lines of this post, but nothing here is definitive. Every business, website and landing page is different and optimizing them for conversions is different. But there is one thing that is true for all.
You should never waste an opportunity to tell a customer what she wants to hear.
