What readers in the past often referred to as good copy, today is just not good enough anymore. To really stand out, your copy needs to sound, feel, and look amazing. On top of that, it also needs to be persuasive, urgent, and hit all the critical storytelling beats to drive readers into immediate action.
Here’s a handy list of 21 copywriting tips to get your copy from good enough to exceptionally amazing.
1. Write Punchy Headlines
Whether you’re creating a landing page, planning a cold email outreach campaign, or drafting a sales letter for your new Python course, the first thing readers will see is your headline. The punchier, the more memorable you can make your headline, the greater the chance people will read your copy in full.
Bombas’ landing page is a great example of a punchy, yet relatable headline.
2. …Then Enrich Your Headline With a Parallelism
Parallelism is a type of literary trope intended to emphasize a sentence or phrase and make it rhythmically more impactful in the reader’s eyes. It can also be used for catchy slogans like a radio jingle, a subheadline to embolden the main headline’s point, or a call to action (CTA) to make it more memorable.
Apple Pencil makes great use of the parallelism concept: “Dream it up. Jot it down.”
3. Be Straightforward—Not Clever
Whatever you need to say, use straightforward language in your copy. Any convolution or lack of clarity will provide an exit door that your readers will take repeatedly until you clear up your messaging. Note that using an occasionally clever language, in the right spot and in the right amount, is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with what you’re trying to say.
Bowers & Wilkins follows the concept of clear and straightforward copy down to a tee.
4. Use the Rule of Threes
For some reason, people seem to respond well to the rule of threes. Whenever you’re listing product benefits, product cons, or simply naming items in an array, go ahead and list exactly three elements to reap the rewards of this powerful framework.
Here’s how Basecamp leverages the rules of three:
5. Embrace the Cliffhanger Technique
In copywriting, the cliffhanger technique refers to unfinished information you leave out about the product or service and promise your audience to reveal whatever you’ve deliberately omitted in your next post.
Why is this so effective? Turns out, this technique is deeply rooted in how humans think about tasks, reflected through the Zeigarnik Effect.
In short, the Zeigarnik Effect posits that people with unfinished tasks keep any information about that task deeply lodged in their brains until the task is finished. Once they complete the task, it becomes more likely they’ll forget about any information associated with the task–such as restaurant waiters remembering complex orders and forgetting them as soon as they’re delivered.
Anyway, here’s an interesting example from Mike Sager that uses the cliffhanger method in direct response copywriting:
6. Escape Dullness With Word Swapping
Word swapping is a simple tactic where you swap, edit, or shuffle around words in existing phrases to surprise the reader. In particular, the surprise factor isn’t there to scare them away, but to break the pattern, get their attention, and build intrigue in the reader’s mind. Intrigued prospects are more likely to read your copy and take action.
For example, Barkbox is turning the overused phrase “We’ve got you covered” into a fun and playful headline: “Our Pack Has Your Back.”
7. Touch Up Your Copy With a Slight Jot of Sarcasm
Sarcasm is a potent weapon in the copywriting toolkit, if done right. Too much of it, and you start astounding like an asshole. Not enough sarcasm in a sarcastic environment, and suddenly you’re branded as the token nice person, an outcome that isn’t particularly well received in the business world.
However, if your product or service aligns more with snappiness than professionalism, you can use sarcasm to highlight the main benefits and make it pop off the page.
To demonstrate, take a look at Cards Against Humanity’s FAQ page:
8. Limit Your Copy—Intentionally
Writing is hard, not because you’re picking which words to use out of a limited word pool, but because you’re choosing what word or phrase combinations to discard from a set with an unlimited number of items.
By limiting your copy to something like 100, 200, or 300 words, you’ve suddenly eliminated an entire set of combinations you were never going to use anyway. Then, you can focus on the things you can use within the self-imposed limits to reliably come up with a working draft, most of the time.
Brew Tea Company’s About Page is as short as it gets:
9. Get Your Employees To Vouch for Your Skills
Your employees’ professional demeanor is a reflection of your leadership skills, and by extension, your company as a whole. If you can get one or more of them to vouch honestly for your capabilities, you’ll unlock an entirely new demographic you never knew were interested in your products or services—all thanks to the power of first-hand employee testimonials.
Matt, Rapid Crush’s lead copywriter, doesn’t shy away from praising his boss, Jason Fladlien:
10. Tell a Captivating Story
Nothing bores the reader more than an endless wall of text listing all the product’s features, history, and use cases. On the other hand, nothing excites the reader more than a captivating story that carefully unravels like a line from a mysterious thread ball.
Heads up: Use the “because of” concept instead of the “and then” concept to connect your lines and build an action-consequence system in your story, where every consequence is preceded by an action until the story ends.
Jus Jus, a verjuice variant, does this well.
11. Get Up Close and Personal
This is more akin to an overarching strategy than a single tactic, but if you can show your customers how and why they’ve used your product or service (and why they love it), they’ll be more inclined to stick around and recommend it to their friends and family.
Spotify Wrapped is a textbook example of a personalized campaign that spans multiple social platforms, news outlets, and short-form media corners.
12. Identify (and Run With) the Product’s USP
Most good products have a unique selling point (USP) you can use to your advantage. If they don’t, they’re likely not a good product. In short: identify your product or service’s USP and make it the focal point of your copy.
Igloo’s electric-powered cooler builds on its USP in the product description.
13. Be Empathetic And Approachable
A little empathy can go a long way in establishing trust with customers, regardless of their current status in life. An approachable copy, full of honest empathy (and bereft of melodrama or fake emotions), can incite curiosity in readers and make them want to talk to you, share their experiences, or even meet you in person. This is one way to build and maintain a brand reputation.
Marie Forleo, a popular entrepreneur, follows the rule of approachability and empathy in her landing page’s copy masterfully.
14. Address Your Target Audience
If you don’t know who you’re writing to or writing about, your marketing’s going to suffer as a result. Your target audience should shape your copy, and you should always strive to address their needs and desires as specifically as possible. Otherwise, you’ll end up writing about a non-existent audience or an audience that isn’t enthusiastic about your products or services, leading to an inevitable revenue decline.
Huckberry’s tagline is simple, yet it perfectly encapsulates its main target demographic: men with an interest in the casual outdoors experience.
15. Sneak In a Readership “Bribe”
A readership bribe refers to a tidbit of information you’re promising to reveal in exchange for the prospect’s time. Ideally, these so-called bribes will hint at some knowledge, truth, or a lesser-known tip that will be featured in the full copy, whether you’re composing an advertisement, a sales letter, or an email newsletter.
Agora Financial’s sales letters are the perfect encapsulation of effective readership bribes.
16. Use a Copywriting Formula
Whenever you’re stuck, use a copywriting formula like AIDA or PAS to dig yourself out of a creative drought.
AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Use it to make the reader pay attention to your copy, stir up their interest, make them want the product by addressing their objections, and, finally, give them a nudge in the right direction to make a purchase. AIDA is great for a long-form copy, like a sales letter or a landing page.
PAS is short for Problem, Agitation, Solution. You can leverage PAS to outline a problem customers often face, exaggerate the problem to its logical extreme, and offer a solution in the form of your product or service. PAS excels at short-form copy, like an email pitch or a short video commercial.
Here’s how Gary Halbert thought about the AIDA formula in action:
17. Offer Exclusive Membership Status (+ Free Goodies!)
People love getting stuff for free, as long as the effort of getting a free item doesn’t eclipse the final reward.
For example, customers will gladly fill out and send a coupon to receive exclusive book club membership status if the application itself takes no longer than 5 minutes. If, on the other hand, there are 15 people standing in line to sample Walmart’s newest in-store cheddar cheese, the 16th person will likely pass on the opportunity because it simply takes too much time to obtain the reward.
The solution? Strike a delicate balance between the effort prospects need to make and the reward waiting for them on the other side.
Cooking Club of America has perfected the direct mail package game, offering tons of free stuff, exclusive membership status, and lots of other goodies that make it worthwhile for the reader to actively participate in their campaign.
18. Turn It Up a Notch With Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is a trope that phonetically imitates the word or sound it describes, like “Ouch!” when somebody gets their toe stubbed on the side of the furniture or “Click!” to describe a plastic gear falling into place.
In advertising, the best use case of onomatopoeia comes from an old video ad that was originally written in 1953 by Paul Margulies, but didn’t air until 1975. The catchy slogan that apparently made customers double their use of the advertised product, Alka-Seltzer, did it in just 10 words: “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is.”
19. Get Visual
Modern copywriting is much more than just text on a screen. It’s also become deeply embedded in how it visually appears to prospects, fighting over every inch of customers’ attention against a constantly evolving competitive landscape—including AI-generated copy.
To really, really stand out, you need to present information in such a way that it’s visually appealing, easy to digest, and geometrically complementary with your site’s theme.
Take a look at Wunderkind’s delivery. It’s using a simple visual representation to describe how things in marketing are going from bad to worse, offering an actionable solution for affected ecommerce stores.
20. Use An Inviting CTA
CTA buttons and forms come in all shapes and sizes. Some work better than others, but to compare the effectiveness of different CTA variants in the wild, you’ll need to run an A/B testing tool for at least a month.
If you don’t have access to an A/B testing environment, go with an inviting, pleasant CTA to ease customers into giving out their contact information.
Tim Ferriss makes a great first impression. There’s a welcoming hero image at the top of the page, showing Tim in a good mood, sitting next to his dog. On the right-hand side, you can see a creative headline (“Don’t miss out on the 5 coolest things I’ve found each week”) and a descriptive subheadline (“Join 1.5M+ subscribers and sign up for 5-Bullet Friday, my free weekly email newsletter”) working in unison to deliver key information to potential subscribers as gently as possible.
Finally, there’s a warm “Try it” CTA against a soft yellow background that completes the invitation to Tim’s subscriber list.
21. Break the Rules
To become a chess grandmaster, first you must learn the basics, master them, and then proceed to break all the principles when facing an opponent of comparable strength.
Similarly, the copywriting grandmaster must learn the basics of the craft, ply them to perfection, and then break the rules at the right time.
Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to mastery. You need time, effort, and experience to get your copy from good enough to exceptionally amazing.
Here’s a pertinent example from Ubisoft’s X social media handle, a meta-marketing stunt that ratioed twenty-fold the richest man on the planet and helped Assassin’s Creed Shadows become the third most-played entry in the series. Just don’t ask for context, and you’ll be fine.
