Good conversion copywriting is the key to growing your newsletter to thousands of subscribers, increasing engagement on your socials, and pinging sales on your website.
It’s not like it’s a secret, either — I mean, you are reading this to improve your copywriting skills for a reason, right?
And yet, there are more people who believe they can write a bestselling novel than get into med school.
(lol, I wish)
Great conversion copywriting hooks your audience in, keeps them engaged, and inspires them to buy. And, like anything else, your copywriting will improve the more you practice.
But look, we get that *gestures broadly at everything* life is weird right now. The thought of building a new skill isn’t the most appealing thing.
Which is why we put together our lil ol’ guide to copywriting, with the top 5 copywriting tips you can use right away — along with some copywriting examples from some of the world’s top brands.
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1. Make them feel seen
The most powerful brands are the ones that make you feel seen. The ones that, when you read their content, make you go “hey, they’re actually talking to me.”
Conversion copywriting does just that: tell a story, where your customer is the main character.
To get started, you’ll need your user persona. A word to the wise: for a user persona to be effective, you need to make sure it’s built on real insight from your customers.
How do you get that?
Through customer interviews, talking to your sales team, and combing through reviews and testimonials.
Haven’t talked to your customers yet? Here’s how to ask the right customer interviews + a template to get you started.
Your core user persona needs to answer these questions:
- Which of your key messages resonate most with your customers?
- What are your customers’ main pain points?
- What are the key benefits your customers get from your product/service?
- What are your customers' key objections to purchasing from you?
- What do your customers say about you when they are absolutely delighted?
Take these answers, and build out stories from them. This process is going to help you get into your customer’s heads, and help them see themselves in your content.
Here are some prompts to get you started:
- What wakes up your customer at 3 am?
- What is your customer struggling with at work?
- What does your customer do now, that would be improved by buying your product/service?
The best copywriters use frameworks for their writing — of which there are many. One of our favorites is AIDA, which stands for:
- Attention: Jar the reader with a bold value prop
- Interest: engage their mind with unique, unusual and fresh info
- Desire: engage their emotion, think benefits not features
- Action: ask them to take the next step with a CTA
Using these tools, you’ll develop one of the most important copywriting skills out there: empathy, increasing it for your customers, by understanding their experiences and imagining their stories, while finding out exactly where your product or service fits into their lives.
With this insight, you can start writing copy that really hooks your customers in, because it’s speaking directly to them.
2. Kill pain
There are, broadly speaking, three main types of copywriting.
- Painkiller copy: Here is the problem your product or service solves
- Vitamin copy: Here is the way your product or service makes something better
- Ecstasy copy: This is how your product or service will change your customer’s lives
Of these three, painkillers work best.
Just try and take a moment to consider how much time you spend, every day, thinking about a problem — be it something as minor as running out of toothpaste, or as major as wanting to find a new job.
According to psychologists, this is partly because we believe that the more we think about our problems, the more likely we are to find a solution, that this rehashing validates our feelings and gives our suffering a sense of importance, and because we identify our challenges as being a core part of our identity — we are who we are because of the things we’ve overcome.
So when you acknowledge, address and offer a solution to your customer’s pain points, you’re speaking directly to their most pressing experience.
3. Benefits vs. features
To really drive home how your product or service is helping relieve a pain point for your customer, you want to speak about its benefits, not its features.
So, what’s the difference?
Features are objective. Benefits are their emotional appeal.
It’s the difference between saying that your products are vegan, or that no animals were harmed in their creation.
Benefits continue to validate your customer’s feelings, and make them the protagonist of your story. By using benefits to describe your product or service, you’re showing your customers why this matters to them.
4. Resolve objections
Despite your best efforts, your customers are likely to still have objections when it comes to purchasing your product or service.
Good copywriting anticipates this, and addresses it right away (as in, you best have these acknowledged in your landing page). If it doesn’t, your customers will likely go somewhere else to find a solution that does.
The 5 most common objections from customers are:
- I don't have enough time
- I don't have enough money
- This isn’t gonna work for me
- I don't believe you
- I don't need it
Think about the most common objections your customers might have. If you need some help, go back to your sales data, and look through your customer emails.
If you’re just starting out, look at what people are saying about products and services like yours on Reddit, Quora, or anywhere else where you can find reviews (such as directly on your competitor’s sites/resellers).
At the end of the day, you want to focus on why people are, or might, say no.
Once you’ve finished your list, list out your key benefits. Now, add “even if” after your benefit, and before your objection.
Take Growclass, for example:
Growclass will help you build a growth strategy for your business even if you’re a solo founder with a ton on your plate.
Notice how you can reframe your customer’s objections in light of your value proposition? This gets you fully in the heads of your customers: empathising with their problems, anticipating their objections, and presenting a solution that kills their pain.
5. Keep it simple, and kinda stupid
To my fellow English majors: we were lied to.
When you’re writing copy for your customers, you want to talk like a real person — which, for most of us in casual conversation, is around the sixth grade level.
This makes it easier for your customers to process what you’re saying. After all, you’re likely trying to pull your customer’s attention away from something else when you’re targeting them: be it with an email in the middle of work or a ‘gram in the evening.
That means writing with short, punchy sentences and no overly academic language.
The Hemingway app is a great, easy way to keep your writing in check, with an overview of what reading level you’re writing at, and call-outs whenever your sentences get a lil’ too complicated, or passive (because you want to keep things active and engaged).
BONUS: A quick web audit
Go ahead and copy all the text from your landing page into a document. Now search (ctrl + f) for any time you wrote “we.” Highlight all the times when you’re talking about what you offer in your business.
What you want to do is change all of those instances into “you” statements, where you put your audience back in the center of your story.
And, hey — don’t feel bad if you see a lot of “we”: it’s a common mistake a lot of brands make, where they focus on themselves, instead of how their business is helping solve a problem for their customers.
Writing is the most important skill you’ll need to develop as a marketer — and, like any other, it takes practice to improve. But, as long as you keep your customer at the heart of your copywriting, you’re going to produce engaging content that will ultimately help ping those sales.
Your checklist for copy that converts:
- Make them feel seen. Put your customer at the centre of your story.
- Kill their pain. Validate your customer’s experiences and show them how you can fix their problems.
- Focus on benefits over features. What’s the emotional appeal for your customers?
- Resolve objections. Get ahead of your customer’s “no.”
- Keep it simple (and kinda stupid). Because nothing kills the vibe more than making your customers feel dumb.
🦀
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