13 tips to write persuasive landing page copy that converts
Betânia, Customer Support
Landing page copy is like a written elevator pitch. It quickly grabs the attention of the person you’re addressing and tells a story so compelling they need to know more.
The difference is that copy can work on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people simultaneously, 24 hours a day (try doing that in an elevator). And it works at all stages of the funnel, from generating interest to making sales.
Writing effective landing page copy takes practice, but there are plenty of tips that will quickly boost your skills once you master them. What’s more, we’ve got 13 of them in this article.
How to write persuasive landing page copy (plus examples)
These 13 landing page copy tips help with every part of the page, from creating strong headlines to crafting CTAs. We’ve also included great landing page examples that show each point in action.
Let’s walk through each one, shall we?
1. Impress with a strong headline
Your headline in big, bold letters is the first thing a visitor will see when they land on your page. And you want to grab their attention and continue the momentum so that they read the rest of it.
If you’re stuck writing an attention-seeking headline, leave this task to the end. It’ll come to you after you write the subheadline, CTA and put the rest of the landing page together!
The famed Dead Rabbit bar in New York uses a captivating headline that’s also a clever pun. Not only does the phrase mean asking for a stiff drink, it also refers to the two bartenders delivering the virtual cocktail class.
2. Use the active voice
The best landing pages use an active voice to convey a strong and confident tone. This is where the subject of a sentence performs the verb’s action. A passive voice, on the other hand, sees the subject acted on by the verb.
For example:
✅ Active: Ambitious companies use our email marketing software
❎ Passive: Our email marketing software is used by ambitious companies
To help you remember how to write in the active voice, think subject → verb → object.
We love the adrenaline-fueled copy at Epic Man Trips’ landing page. The active voice here—you → ride → snowmobile—gives it a vigorous and assured tone, perfect to showcase their transformative adventure retreats for men.
3. Be positive
Let’s go back to the elevator pitch comparison. Imagine you begin your pitch by saying “I’m so glad I didn’t miss you in the lobby this morning!” This starts the conversation off on a negative note. It’s better to open with something positive like: “I’m so glad to bump into you this morning!”
Likewise, the best way to influence behavior with landing page copy is to put across your message in a positive way. It takes practice to unlearn the habitual use of double negatives, but doing so can have a big impact on your copy by inspiring visitors to take a certain course of action.
The positive version of your sentence will often be shorter than the negative one. Try it!
JennyRebecca, a singer and songwriter, frames artistic burnout in a positive way for her free workshop. She doesn’t mention “burnout” in her headline at all. Instead, she focuses on using the opposite word: pursuance.
She further frames being an artist as positive by including the phrase “favorite artistic expression” in the lead capture form.
Here are more ways to put a positive spin to your landing page copy.
❎ You won’t regret taking up this challenge!
✅ You’ll love taking up this challenge!
❎ Please do not hesitate to contact us
✅ Please feel free to contact us!
❎ You can’t seem to get enough time in a day
✅ You can get more time in a day
❎ Don’t forget about mental health week
✅ Remember mental health week
❎ You’ve never seen a beach like this!
✅ What a beach!
4. Write how you speak
Have you noticed how your spoken words are more casual than the way you write? That’s because when talking in real-time, we don’t have the ability to draft and revise our conversations.
To write effective landing page copy, transfer this conversational tone to your writing. Your readers will feel more engaged when you write in a way that feels real and natural. So drop stuffy words and speak to your audience.
Write your landing page copy and then read it out aloud. Then find a cat or a friend and read it to them. Does it sound like you’re having a casual chat? If not, rewrite it.
Read the following introduction from Chynna Benton, a virtual assistant consultant. Now read it out aloud. Its heartfelt sincerity would be a perfect pitch to someone asking her in an elevator, “So, what do you do?”
5. Talk like your audience
Connect with your target audience by using words, phrases and acronyms that they use. They’ll see you as a BFF because you know them. By establishing rapport, you’ll increase conversions and turn them into customers and raving fans.
Adulting With Pam, a lifestyle blogger, is great at this. Her millennial audience instantly knows what Pam is talking about while the rest of us are left a little puzzled. She engages her Gen Y audience with grown-up topics like buying your first home and paying off debt.
Talking like your audience is easy when you’re part of the community. But what about when you have to write landing page copy for groups you aren’t familiar with?
When this is the case, spend time-consuming the content these people read before you pick up your keyboard.
Look for blogs, YouTube videos, social media profiles, and online communities that serve this audience and make note of things like:
The slang they use
Industry jargon
In-jokes and memes
How they address each other
The challenges and goals they discuss
It won’t be long before you talk like an insider and write landing pages that truly connect.
6. Write with conviction and certainty
Back to our elevator pitch scenario. Your speech won’t be effective if you don’t meet your listener’s eyes, speak in a shaky voice, and trail off with a hopeful shrug. To convince an audience, you first need to believe in what you’re saying.
If visitors to your landing page sense that you’re not confident, they won’t be confident handing over their email address either! Tell them that what you are writing is true and correct. Back it up with figures if you have to.
Start by removing weak words such as “appears”, “seems” and “really”. Replace them with strong words such as “can”, “will”, and “must.”
At Journey to KidLit, a resource for children’s book authors, they back up their claim to being a more productive writer with Grammarly statistics. If they can write more by following their tips and writing challenge, you can too!
7. Put important information above the fold
When you pick up a newspaper, it’s typically folded in half. The top section you see first is known as the part that is above the fold, and it’s usually home to the most important stories of the day.
Do the same thing when writing your landing page by putting all the most persuasive elements at the top of the screen. This ensures visitors see them as soon as they land on your website.
If you plan to have a long landing page, divide your copy into sections that fit into a web browser’s window.
Karla Myra, a success coach, brilliantly divides her landing page into color-coded sections that fill your screen as you scroll down. She’s able to communicate a lot of information without overwhelming you.
8. Keep it simple
It’s well known that web visitors have short attention spans. Your landing page has only seconds to put your message and value proposition across.
Avoid making visitors read long paragraphs. Put the most important information in the title and subheadings. Then summarize your offer and use bullet points to quickly highlight important information.
Kiwi Eco Box, a monthly subscription box service, uses an unconventional landing page template to get their message across in large type. By the time you reach the bottom of the page, you’re ready to nod your head in agreement with the CTA.
9. Highlight benefits, not features
Visitors care about what you can do for them, not what you do. Write copy that explains how using your product or service (feature) helps your prospects achieve a certain goal or outcome (benefit).
Your value proposition is not a list of features, it’s the benefits customers get when they use your product. An easy way to define your benefits is to think about how you would reply if a visitor said, “So what?”
Morning Brew is a newsletter that curates business and news stories and sends them to subscribers every morning. This is the feature.
The benefit is that subscribing to these stories keeps you informed in a fun way, which ultimately makes you smarter. The Morning Brew landing page makes these benefits very clear.
10. Use action verbs
Action verbs like start, download, or get are an effective tool when writing landing pages because they persuade the reader to take action. Use them at the start of your sentence to get straight to the point. You’ll sound confident by not hiding behind introductory clauses.
Take a look at the screenshot below to see how SaaS platform Zendesk does this. Every sentence starts with a verb—you can see delight, engage, start, explore, and reimagine. This is a powerful way to encourage the reader to sign up for the service.
Use synonyms if you feel like you are running out of appropriate words. Just search for the word you want to use on Google followed by “synonym” to get a list of alternatives. Instead of a common word like start you could use begin, kick off, commence, or create.
11. End with a clear call-to-action
So, you managed to deliver your pitch in the elevator. There’s a chime before the door opens and your target is stepping out. This is when you hand over your business card and arrange another meeting.
Similarly, once your visitors make it to the bottom of your landing page, use a call-to-action (CTA) to encourage them to take your desired action.
Increase your chances of conversions by letting visitors know what to expect when they click on the CTA button. Have fun with this and avoid using generic labels.
The landing page for The Creative Accountant offers a free email course on how to launch a blog for accountants. Instead of generic button copy such as “Submit” or “Sign up”, they pre-empt your behavior with “I’m in, let’s launch!”
12. Bonus best practice: Make humor work for you
This tip deserves a special mention. Not all landing pages need to be serious. Bring a smile to someone's face with tasteful and appropriate humor.
If you’re not sure whether your joke hits the mark, share it with your people you trust and ask for their opinion.
Here’s a great example from nutritional therapist Valerie Neslen. She starts her landing page copy by walking visitors through a checklist of things she’ll cover in her workshop. But she ends the message with an unexpected line that’ll bring a smile to any supermom!
13. And finally: don’t forget to test!
Consider creating multiple versions of your copy and using landing page A/B testing to see which is the most effective.
This idea is that you show website visitors different versions of your page. You can then track your website analytics metrics to see which page has the highest conversion rate.
You can easily use a tool like MailerLite to automate these tests. Just create two versions of the page in our landing page builder and then set up your split test by deciding the percentage of traffic to send to each version.
You’ll soon be able to see if one of your pages converts a higher percentage of visitors than the other. If there’s a clear winner, send all of your website traffic to this page.
Learn more about A/B testing in the video tutorial below.
Only change one element when testing landing pages. This will show the impact of the specific variable without other factors influencing the result. For example, if you want to test your landing page headline, keep your CTAs, page design, and body text the same.
Quick tips before you start
You’re almost ready to write copy for your landing pages. Before you start, remember that there’s more to effective landing page copy than the words you use. You also need to know who you’re writing for and the stage of the marketing funnel that they’re at.
Understand your visitors and their pain points
Ask yourself: Who is your ideal customer? Picture them in your mind and then create a customer persona. This is a representation of your target audience that you can reference during the writing process to ensure your copy is targeted towards them.
Here are 6 points to consider when building your customer persona.
Are they baby boomers or Generation X, Y or Z?
What’s their job title and likely responsibilities?
What’s their highest education level?
What are their interests, cultural background and marital status?
Which countries do they live in?
What are the goals and tasks that they’re trying to complete?
Answering these questions helps you step into the shoes of potential customers. You’ll think like them and identify the pain points and challenges they face when writing landing page copy.
When you start writing copy for your landing pages, tailor your message to these personas. Keep your copy focused and targeted: use one landing page for one customer persona.
If you have multiple customer personas, prepare a landing page for each one. If you use a single page for all audiences, your landing page copywriting might not resonate with any of them—and the chances of conversion will decrease.
The Intentional Influencer’s landing page is a good example of a page that calls out to their ideal customers: content creators. They know that being a creative entrepreneur can be challenging and lonely at times—so they created a support network.
Align your message to the customer journey
Visitors to your landing page arrive with varying degrees of buying intent. Some may have only just heard of your brand. Others have done their research and want to compare solutions. And there are even those who are ready to buy.
A single landing page can’t possibly address the different intentions of all of these visitors. You need to tailor your landing page copy and content to match where the visitor is in the marketing funnel.
A typical marketing funnel has three stages: awareness, consideration and decision.
1. Awareness
In the awareness stage, people are experiencing symptoms of a problem and trying to find out more. Landing pages for this stage of the funnel should introduce your brand and offer helpful content such as eBooks, useful infographics, guides and reports.
Amy Lynn is a consultant for mom-focused online businesses. She offers a free eBook that helps female business owners find and launch an idea. Notice how she targets moms who are aware of online opportunities but unsure how to start.
2. Consideration
At the consideration stage, people have identified their problem and are actively looking for a solution. Your landing page must convince them why you’re the best choice by offering free courses, workshops, webinars or videos. They may also include content like testimonials, social proof, and case studies.
The landing page for Rachel Evans, an expert on eating disorders, targets visitors who know they have an unhealthy relationship with food. As a solution, she offers a free online class where she shares tips, techniques and answers any questions that her target audience may have.
3. Decision
At the decision stage, people know what’s available and have shortlisted a few solutions. They’re going to make a decision soon and they just need a nudge in your direction.
Huckstepper, an e-bike retailer, knows that you’re looking for a cool electric bike. Their landing page doesn’t waste time and shares product and pricing information with you. You’re now ready to compare your shortlisted e-bikes and make a decision.
Now it's your turn to write high-converting landing pages!
You now have the knowledge required to start writing effective landing pages. But the next step is the most important one: taking out your computer and practicing.
An easy way to start is to choose some of your favorite products and create your own landing pages for each one. Identify the benefits of the product and craft copy that targets the customer persona.
Getting feedback is helpful too—it will show you places your copy can improve. Consider joining online copywriting communities and asking people to critique your work.
It’s also useful to see how your words fit into the structure of a landing page. Use a landing page builder like MailerLite to create pages (or use templates) and add your own copy.
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Editor’s note: This article was originally published in August 2020, and it has now been updated with some extra tips and examples.
