Conversion Current 2.2

The first step toward high performance UX/UI on your landing pages and site? Copywriting from a design perspective. After all, your killer copy isn’t going to be read if its buried in huge blocks of text and other off-putting formats. 

And your copy deserves better! The way we ensure our best copy gets a fighting chance at performing well is by thinking through how copy will translate to design while writing. Here are a few of our best strategies:

1. Clearly define your goal 

Whether it’s generating qualified leads, educating a cold audience about a solution to a problem, or prompting actual purchases, a successful landing page is written to facilitate users to take that final action. Obvious, right? Not necessarily. 

We constantly see brands structuring their landing page copy around benefits and benefits only. As if listing benefits – even in a big block of text – should be enough to convince the average user. And don’t get us wrong – product benefits should be woven into nearly every aspect of a landing page. But it’s not enough to say “the product does X, Y, and Z” without thinking through how to display that info in a way that moves the user closer to that end goal. 

The first thing we should all be doing when writing a landing page is imagining how the general layout may look, based on the primary goal. 

For example: on a landing page designed to educate TOF users about a product, we may be thinking about a more graphic, diagram-forward page flow. We need to fit lots of info into a small space, so copy that can be easily broken into subsections, steps, or bullets will be critical in getting your point across while reducing reading/scrolling fatigue for the user.

2. Use visual hierarchy to your advantage

As an eComm copywriter, you’re not writing for a one-dimensional page where your strongest tools of emphasis are caps-lock, heavy font weights, and italics. Instead you get to communicate in a multidimensional space, directly influencing where users look, how much time they spend reading, and what their biggest takeaways will be. 

All this to say: badges, buttons, and icons are tools for you, too! 

Is there a critical product benefit that you feel needs to be reinforced? Add it as a badge. Want to encourage users to take action by promising them a certain benefit? Get creative with your CTA button text. You aren’t just writing in the context of headers and body text — every dimension of the page is an opportunity to draw in your reader.

3. Write for different attention spans

when thinking about how users interact with a built-out page, we need to consider attention span. Is it usually woefully short? Sure. But among the quick-scanners there will always be the middle-ground perusers and the full-out readers who don’t miss a single word.

The challenge? Writing to all three of these users at once. Before you panic, though, I have some good news: the vast majority of this can be done during your editing process. We find that getting copy down on a page, then going back to read it as a scanner, a peruser, and a read-everything user is a great way to hone page copy. This ensures – after you’ve gotten your main points across – that everyone is getting roughly the same information.