How to write persuasive copy for your landing pages to drive more sales

“Gotta write persuasive copy for your landing pages to grab the attention of your customers, but don’t know where to start?”

Well, we’ve all been there! 

Maybe you’re a fresh-faced copywriter who’s just getting started or a very busy marketing manager that can’t seem to manage all their tasks during a typical workday. But somehow, you are also someone that wants to know how to write a landing page that converts, so don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! 

Copywriting isn’t a high form of art, so you don’t need to be Tolstoy to write killer sales copy if you want to create high converting landing pages. Why? Because at the core of how to write great landing page copy, there’s a simple ingredient that can make your customers tick, and that is persuasion. Effectively, it’s communicating the right message at the right time, with the aim of convincing people to take action. And what does that mean for your business? Persuasion equals conversion! 

This blog will show you everything you need to know about how to write landing page copy to increase your conversions whilst also having some fun. From how to lay out the structure of your landing page, crafting persuasive headlines, toning your body copy, and spicing it up with some social proof, we have everything you need to know on how to write copy for a landing page, so keep on reading!

1. What does persuasive copy mean?
2. Step-by-step guide on how to write persuasive copy
3. Landing page copy will always be a work in progress

What does persuasive copy mean?

 

The most experienced copywriters write compelling sales copy with two things in mind: their audience and the action(s) they want them to take on their landing pages. This means that you must adjust your copy for every single marketing channel your business has. 

Also, it’s essential to keep in mind that writing a landing page that converts visitors into customers it’s the same as writing social copy, a blog post, or an email. To help you to understand the difference there, head over to our awesome blog to find out what is the difference between copywriting and content writing. 

The aim of persuasive copywriting is to grab your readers’ attention, and the greatest way to do so is with catchy titles and headlines. So let’s dive into the juicy stuff! 

Step-by-step guide on how to write persuasive copy

To help you start writing high-performing content for your landing pages, we’ve put together 6 easy and practical steps that you can follow.

1. Find your value proposition

 

Even before thinking about what grabs people’s attention in terms of content, you should think about who you’re talking to and what makes them convert. The fundamental rule is to craft messages that resonate with your target audience! And in case you feel a little bit out of the loop, check out our article on how to build your perfect target persona. 

Straight after that, you should start asking yourself questions like: 

• Who are you creating the landing page for? 
• What is it that you are selling or offering? 
• Who will benefit from it the most, and why?
• How are you going to drive traffic to your landing page? 
• What problems does your product or service solve? 
• How much does your customer know about their problems and your solution? 
• What reservations and fears might they have? 
• Why should they buy or come to you, and not your competitors? 
• … and the list goes on

Write down on a piece of paper what you are offering, why people should want it, and how it separates you from competitors. Your value proposition, or known as USP(s), will influence every single piece of copy you will write on your landing page. So, to dig into the action, you have to: 

1. Decide on a landing page goal to establish precisely what your landing page will do 
2. Think about how to position your offer for your customers
3. Consider all your traffic sources
4. Come up with a value proposition that will inform the rest of your sales copy

Accelerator

Your landing page copy must help your ideal target audience to solve their frustrations and achieve their dreams. Start with sneaking into your potential buyers’ minds by thinking about what kind of problems they are trying to escape from and how they make them feel. Essentially, what you have to offer them must be a bridge between where people are right now and where they want to be. 

Once you understand the importance of aligning your offer with what online visitors want to achieve, and you do so by using their exact words, you’ll become a pro in driving more conversions with the least amount of effort!

2. Plan out your information hierarchy 

 

Put it this way – you would never start building a home without a blueprint, would you? This is precisely why you need to create an information hierarchy, figure out what kind of content your landing page requires, and then create it using attention-grabbing statements. 

The information hierarchy will act as a blueprint for your landing page copywriting, and it will take all the guesswork out of writing. In this way, you will be able to sort out the exact information you need to get your visitors to convert. So start figuring out what pieces of information are the most important, and then present them logically. Start working backwards from your landing page goal. 

Think about the action(s) you want people to take and how you can convince them to do so. Brainstorm and write down:

• people’s pain points that you will help solve
• benefits of your product or service 
• how are you different from others 
• what could prevent people from acting
• how will people get the thing you are offering, and what happens when they click on your CTAs

Try to write as much as possible under each category by being as specific as possible. Once you are done, you will pretty much know what needs to be written on your landing page for your visitors to take action. Once you’ve done that, you can move on to your landing page elements. 

Accelerator 

Try to address the top-most objection people might have in your sub-headline, commit to a clear subheading, and section your differentiators, and keep going down the page. Try to be as straightforward as possible when writing your copy to keep persuading visitors as they scroll down your landing page. 

What about design? Check out our excellent articles on how to design a landing page that converts and how to design the best eCommerce landing pages to get you started on the right foot. 

3. Write attention-grabbing landing page headlines

 

Your landing page headlines are the most visible and important copy on your page, so you have to make them count! And by that, we mean that you need to know how to write headlines, sub-headings, and subheadings that will capture people’s attention. We could have a whole conversation on this topic, but for now, you need to put in the work, figure out how your headlines fit in your campaign and understand your audience to pull it off. 

The good news is that there are many certain time-tested headline formulas you can rely on to connect better and attract the right audience. Keep in mind that when writing effective headlines, you have to: 

• always prioritise message-match between your landing page and the rest of your campaign 
• bring in some personality to leave a stronger impression, especially on those who aren’t familiar with your brand 
• use clear, easy-to-read language that sets expectations for the rest of the page 
• study existing headlines to get inspiration and ideas

Accelerator 

Your headline should ultimately focus on at least one of the following goals: 

• Sell a benefit
• Solve a problem 
• Hook readers and get them to keep on reading

These are the key elements that you must include in your landing page headlines to make a real impact on your audience. If you can mingle all three together without forcing it, much better! Try to remember that your hook can be as simple as colourful language or something unique to your brand!

Ok, so let’s move on to those much-promised formulas that will help you write landing page headlines to drive conversions. But before you keep on reading, remember that product, brand, target audience, and the context will greatly inform which formula you should follow in your landing page. 

• The How-To Headline – here, you’re clearly stating the benefit of your offer whilst promising a solution 

The basic formula is: “How to [achieve x goal]”

• The Agitator Headline – here, you remind people about a problem they have and start rubbing on their pain points 

The basic formula(s) are: “Tired of [x problem] We can help” or “Don’t you hate [x,y,x]?”, etc.

• The Promise Headline – this is the opposite of the agitator, and the idea is to promote the benefits of your offer 

The basic formula is: “Say hello to [x benefit]” 

• The Superlative Headline – here, you niche down to one thing that you are the best at, and there is no specific formula here, as it depends on your brand

However, a headline like this could be “Discover the easiest way to learn how to master your time without effort”. 

• The Call-To-Action Headline – this can be applied whenever your goal is to inspire immediate action, like registering for a course or filling out a lead generation form, without having a specific formula 

However, a headline like this could be “Intensify Your Run” if you are a sports clothing brand or “Slim Dow Faster” for a fitness brand. 

• The Special Offer Headline – in case your landing page goal is to attract new customers, drive sales, or promote products, you can simply state your offer in the headline 

Headlines as such could be “Get 25% off your first order”. 

• The Playful Headline – start being creative with your headlines, and use humour rather than clarity 

An example could be “The Journey of Working Out” for a sports centre business, where they reveal the duality of working out: the experience of feeling like people are in a “journey” when they work out and the actual process of getting fitter and healthier. 

Make sure to use these headline formulas as pure inspiration, and start creating your own great landing page headlines. Oh, and in the meantime, check out our 5 best practices for eCommerce landing pages for some more juicy info! 

4. Craft persuasive body content

 

You know the saying: every head headline needs a body! Whether your landing page is short or long, you must aim to persuade people to take action within your body copy. 

Here, the real trick is to write the essential information about your offer without bombarding people with too much content. Knowing how to make the text easier to read starts by using simple language, and that less is more! So try to sell the outcome and not the product itself by focusing on the benefits and not the features. Ideally, your landing page benefits should directly reinforce the promise of your initial value proposition that we were talking about at the beginning of the article. 

Accelerator

Your headline should communicate your offering quick and easy, and your body copy should illustrate how you are going to deliver your promised value. Also, remember that humans are very emotional and self-interested, which means they will care more about what’s in your landing page for them, instead of the how and why beyond your offer. 

To put it short and sweet, try to write your body copy in a way that puts people’s motivations first and subtly introduce the benefits of your offer. This will significantly help your visitors imagine how your proposal could improve their lives whilst showing them that you understand what they want. Some other great tips for writing persuasive sales copy are: 

• apply psychology to your content to accelerate people’s path to conversion
• join the conversation already happening in your customer’s mind
• make your copy easily scannable with short and broken sentences
• incorporate high-quality images and video to reinforce your copy
• captivate your audience with powerful words like “you” by focusing your copy on the reader, and make sure to use it more often than your brand, product or service names

And the most important tip of all, write like a human! 

To evoke emotion and persuade your audience, you must understand and relate to it fully. So be empathetic, and try to use words like “you” and “we” in the same sentence to show that people have landed on your page to tackle problems together, not alone. But also, be wary of sounding inauthentic! Avoid over-expressing empathy, as it could come off as insincere, and it may harm how people perceive your brand. We’ve found a very helpful article from HubSpot on 13 great landing page examples you’ll want to copy in 2021 that we think you’ll like as well for some more ideas.

5. Encourage action

 

If there could be a golden rule on how to write effective sales copy, we would say it is to encourage people to take action! How? Focus on concise and powerful action verbs and keep your copy purposive instead of going round and round with too many adjectives when describing your offer. 

Actionable CTAs are very important to increase conversions, so spice up your landing page copy with the first and second point of view writing style. Use words such as “me” and “my” or “you” and “yours” to help your audience envision themselves buying on your offer. 

Another great way to write persuasive but actionable content is to create a sense of urgency in your copy by noting deadlines, expiration dates, and limited supply. This will increase your chances to encourage people to claim your deals out of fear, or FOMO (fear of missing out), which works like a miracle when it comes to clever marketing! This is simply because people seem to be more motivated by the idea of losing something than by the thought of gaining something that has the same value. Interesting, right?

Always be action-oriented in your CTAs, and motivate people by illustrating that signing up for your offer or making a purchase means that they’ve got a lot to gain. Use verbs like “get” and “start” to inspire action, and remember that having just one CTA doesn’t mean that you can only have a single landing page link. It simply means that all the links on your page should point to the same place. 

Considering the length of your landing page, you could even have multiple CTA’s well sprinkled throughout, but make sure to deliver the right message every time!

6. Validate your copy with social proof

 

Curating the right testimonials and reviews can bring a lot of value to your landing pages whilst supporting the overall copy. To be even more precise, 91% of people said that positive reviews make them more likely to use a company’s products or services. 

Take a look at the girl in the picture for a moment. Let’s say you are a DIY meal company that delivers ready-to-cook meals at your front door. You’ve been thinking for a while if you should give it a go, and if you can cook on your own by simply following the company’s recipes, so you want to find out if it will be that simple. And boom, you land on a page where you see a lovely and positive review, paired with that image, where Amanda speaks all about how she loved her vegetarian pasta, mainly because it took her under 25 minutes to cook, which gave her more time to spend with her boyfriend after a long and tyring working day. Pair that with a cheeky CTA button that includes powerful verbs, and there you have it! New conversion – check! (at least we would, because who doesn’t love quick and easy pasta?). 

 

Here are some great tips to optimise your social proof for your high converting landing page:

• source testimonials from your top customers 
• get specific reviews that speak to your buyer persona and the products and services they pursue 
• use relevant endorsements from other sources (if you have any), like online magazines, newspapers, etc 
• Be mindful of negative social proof as it could give mixed signals
• Cite your scores on recognised reviews sites like Amazon or even from customer reviews on your website
• try and find social proof on social media 

Focus on finding the right people who can have a positive say about your company and who are already getting the benefits of your offers. Once you found them, start writing quotes that describe real-life use cases of your offer in natural language, and encourage people to try your offer for themselves. 

Landing page copy will always be a work in progress

 

By now, you should have a pretty strong list of how your persuasive landing page would look like, or at least how to get started. Once you’ve followed all the steps above and made sure to proofread yourself and someone else for clarity, click that publish button! 

But keep in mind that content will always be a work in progress, no matter how good your landing page copy is! Your job is to make sure that your copy is as compelling as possible and that it translates into continuous optimisation, even after you’ve made your landing page live. Also, the only way you will increase your conversions is through a constant process of informed data, which you can gather by analysing how your landing page is performing. 

But trust us, taking your time to understand how to incorporate persuasive writing techniques into your landing page copy is well worth the effort! At Lnet Digital, we have all the expertise you need to help you create engaging and persuasive landing pages that will boost your sales and ensure your company stays in your customer’s minds. You can book your FREE landing page consultation with us today to start directing your visitors to your desired call to action in no time! Alternatively, you can simply get in touch with us, and one of our friendly agents will get back to you as soon as possible with their best advice and answers to all of your questions.