2016年2月12日星期五

Taking inventory of your landing page copy

If you look at a typical landing page, you’ll see it’s mostly made up of text. It’s of paramount importance that you take the time to get it right. If you remember back to The Anatomy of a Landing Page, there are a number of building blocks you need copy for:


  1. The headline

  2. The subheader

  3. Introductory paragraph

  4. Benefits/feature bullet points

  5. The form header

  6. Call-to-action copy

  7. Privacy statements

  8. Testimonials (though you don’t write these, they’re part of your copy)

Looking at an example landing page, you can see where each of these elements lives:


landing page copy elements


TAKE AWAY

On your landing page, the copy takes up the vast majority of the total area of the page. As such it’s a great place to start when building your page, to ensure you craft a story that will make sense to your visitors.


Crafting an effective headline


Copywriter, Roberta Rosenberg shares this headline writing tip with us:


Your headline has one job and one job only. To get your visitors to continue engaging with your message, increase their desire for what you’re offering, and motivate a Call-To-Action click. That’s why when it comes to crafting effective landing page headlines, choose clarity over clever.


Clever calls attention to itself at the expense of the message.


Clarity smooths the way to conversion.



Again, we turn to copywriting expert Joanna Weibe, to define some techniques and formulas you can use to get a good start on your headline creation.


Here is the process Joanna follows to write conversion-rate-optimized (CRO) copy:


Joanna Wiebe Copywriting Process


If you’re unfamiliar with headline formulas, check out some easy-to-complete ones below:


Formula 1

The Only Way to [Do Something Desirable] Without [Doing Something Undesirable]


Example

The Only Way to Turn Off the Lights Without Clapping or Getting Out of Bed


Formula 2

[Do Something Hard] in [Period of Time] or [Promise]


Example

Tune Your Piano in 15 Minutes or “Piano Tuner App” Is Free


Formula 3

[Do Something Desirable] Like [an Expert] Without [Something Expected & Undesirable]


Example

Learn to Play Chess Like Bobby Fischer – Without Any of the Crazy!


An example of this is a headline from a Freshbooks.com landing page:


freshbooks landing page headline


Some similar examples of headline formulas


You can take portions of these formulas and extend them in different ways depending on your needs. You can take the three headline approach from the landing page anatomy to construct a story. As a reminder, these three elements are:


  1. The main headline

  2. The reinforcement statement

  3. The closing argument

You can construct your story like this:


Statement of uniqueness

Backed up with a supporting statement to establish credibility


Expand on the experience

And explain how you solve a pain point


Close with urgency to encourage a call-to-action click


We’ll show this technique in action in the video at the end of today’s lesson.


TAKE AWAY

You can use simple formulas to construct an effective introduction to your landing page.



Writing an effective call-to-action


According to Michael Aagaard, your call-to-action represents the tipping point between bounce and conversion. When you ask someone to do something online, they have to go through your call-to-action in order to do it – regardless of whether you’re asking them to download a PDF, fill out a form, buy a product, or even just click through to another page.


This means that clicking the CTA is a mission critical conversion goal, and every extra click potentially means money in the bank.


Michael recommends asking yourself 2 questions in order to optimize your call-to-action copy:


  1. What is my prospect’s motivation for clicking this button?

  2. What is my prospect going to get, when he/she clicks this button?

The answers to those 2 questions are going to be the basis for the new button copy. You’ll have to spend time tweaking and refining it before it’s ready for testing, but asking these questions is a great way to get started.


Let’s use a gym membership call-to-action as an example:


  1. The prospects’ motivation is to get a membership in a local gym.

  2. When they click the button, they’ll get the opportunity to find a gym and buy their membership.

This leaves our final button copy as: “Find gym and get membership”


TAKE AWAY

A call-to-action that conveys the value of your offering and the relevance to your prospect will lead to more conversions.

Tips for writing effective privacy statements


The privacy policy statements you add to your lead generation forms can have a significant impact on how people perceive your trustworthiness, in turn affecting your conversion rates. Michael Aagaard ran some A/B test experiments on this in order to determine which type of messaging works best.


In the first experiment, the original form (with no privacy statement) was tested against a version that said “100% privacy – we will never spam you” beneath the call-to-action. The results of this were surprising.


privacy policy a/b test


As you can see, the version with the privacy statement actually produce 18.7% fewer signups.


Michael Aagaard summed up the test like this:


However counterintuitive it may seem, adding a privacy policy does not guarantee more sign-ups. In fact, it can seriously hurt conversions.


My hypothesis is that – although the messaging revolves around assuring prospects that they won’t be spammed – the word spam itself give rise to anxiety in the mind of the prospects. Therefore, the word should be avoided in close proximity to the form.


Another test was then run with different copy for the privacy statement. This time the statement read “We guarantee 100% privacy. Your information will not be shared”. The results are below:


privacy policy A/B test


This time the copy change resulted in 19.47% more signups! A great result. Michael summed this up by saying:


Credibility, clarity, and authority is really what you want in a privacy policy, and I believe that the combination of those three factors is what made this test perform so well.


TAKE AWAY

The lessons here are that you really need to try different versions of your privacy statements, and also that with the right type of statement you can make a big improvement in the outcome of your landing page performance.


Writing benefit statements


Listing the features of your offering requires your visitors to figure out for themselves how your product or service can help them.


A more effective way to communicate how you’ll solve their problems is to talk in terms of benefits. This lets you speak directly to the needs of your visitors as opposed to talking about yourself.


Copyblogger provides great insight into all kinds of copywriting, including an excellent technique for turning your feature descriptions into benefit driven statements.


How to turn your features into benefits


Copyblogger recommends a 4 step process to extract the benefits from your features, to find the underlying desires of your prospects. Using a WordPress blog theme as an example, here’s how you can create your own benefit statements:


  1. List all of your product’s features. Narrowed down to the features that are most likely to hook your prospect:
    • Point-and-click site design controls

    • Mobile responsive layouts

    • One-click automatic theme updates


  2. Examine what each feature does, or why you’ve included it:
    • Easily customizes your site in fewer steps

    • Adjusts to fit any device, hand-held, tablet or PC

    • Keeps your site updated and secure at the click of a button


  3. Take your list of what your features do and ask yourself how they connect with your prospect’s true desires:
    • The ease and ability to change your own website in minutes without the need or expense of a developer

    • No complaints from customers that they can’t find your product or services or see your site’s content correctly on their mobile device

    • No more worrying about hours of redesigning or coding to get your site to look the way it did before platform updates


  4. To get to the bottom of each feature’s true benefit, keep asking the question “What does this mean for your prospect on an emotional level?”:
    • Freedom and flexibility from having to pay a developer every time you want to change something on your website, and full creative control at your fingertips

    • The relief and happiness of knowing that your prospects will always be able to get in touch with you or buy your product or services no matter what device they are using

    • The confidence that your website is secure, looking great, and working for you regardless of how many versions of WordPress come out


TAKE AWAY

According to Copyblogger’s Kelton ReidBenefits sell, features support

Features have their place in your copy too, don’t get me wrong.

They play the supporting role to benefits and are most effectively used to justify and support the claims of your benefits.


Having your customers write your copy for you


According to Copyhackers founder Joanna Weibe, if you want know what messages to put on your landing page, you can swipe it from your visitors, customers and prospects. The more you reflect what people are thinking, feeling and experiencing when they arrive on your landing page, the greater the likelihood that they will trust you, believe you’ve created the solution to their problems and buy from you.


In this example, a testimonial was used to extract a benefit statement of the solution offered on a landing page and use it in a new headline.


copywriting benefit statement from customer testimonial


An A/B test experiment was run to test a piece of this testimonial against an existing heading, as shown below:


Original headline


copywriting a/b test benefit headline


New headline based on the testimonial


copywriting a/b test testimonial


The result was a conversion improvement of more than double.


To gather this type of information, think of yourself as an editor… and think of your customers as your copywriters. Your customers are writing your copy all over the place, including:


  • In support emails

  • In raving-fan emails

  • In tweets, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, in YouTube comments

  • In online forums

  • In LiveChat transcripts

TAKE AWAY
Joanna suggests that you:Go collect their words. Then, put on your editor’s hat and comb through all that copy, weeding out the ho-hum stuff and keeping the best phrases, analogies and descriptions.

From: http://thelandingpagecourse.com/landing-page-copywriting-for-conversion/








Taking inventory of your landing page copy

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