Out of all the elements on a web page or a featured ad, headlines are the ONLY element that ALL USERS will read. They serve to grab your target audience, tell them they’ve arrived at the right place, and filter out individuals who are disinterested in your product or service. A great headline is unique, clear, and straightforward. It signals interested shoppers to stick around on your page or to click on your ad.
On the flip side, a bad headline is cute, abstract, and appeals to everyone (and therefore no one). If customers can’t tell what’s in it for them by reading the headline alone, you’re going to lose them forever.
Here’s how to write world-class headlines and capture your target market in one fell swoop.
Start with a Headline Formula
Headline formulas are great because they work more often than not. Marketers who try to be abstract and overtly artistic with their headlines usually end up losing sales and learning the hard way. Before long, they revert to using tried-and-true formulas to compose their headlines.
According to John Caples, author of Tested Advertising Methods, headline formulas can be split up into five groups:
- Keyword-based headlines
- Benefits-oriented headlines
- News headlines
- Price related headlines
- Extremely short headlines
Let’s take a more detailed look at each one.
Keyword-based headlines
These types of headlines often start with an interrogative adverb or words that are used to ask a question. Questions work great as headlines because they stimulate the reader to want to learn more.
Popular interrogative adverbs you can start your headlines with include:
- How
- Why
- When
- Where
Example: “How To Write an Earth-Shattering Headline That Converts Like Crazy”
In addition to these, you can also use interrogative pronouns as well. These are:
- What
- Which
- Who
Example: “Who Moved My Cheese?”
Lastly, you can also use other words outside of these categories to generate interest in your readers. Examples include:
- Wanted
- This
- If
- Because
- Advice
Example: “If You’re Not Buying at a High Discount, They’re Taking You for a Sucker”
Benefits-oriented headlines
These headlines perform well without taking too much effort to create. Benefits-oriented headlines are great at describing HOW the product or service will help your customers, instead of drowning them in product features that few people will care about.
You can leverage the power of benefits-focused headlines by:
- Using client testimonials (“Here’s What Tim Ferris Said About Our Chilli Recipe”)
- Creating a test for your readers (“Can Your Bedroom Pass the Airbnb Test?”)
- Offering information that adds value (“How To Become 7x More Productive Without Caffeine”)
- Telling a compelling story (“She Tripled Her Revenue in a Single Year! Here’s How and Where It Started”)
- Warning the reader to postpone buying (“Hang On to Your Wallets: Lenovo’s Gaming Rigs Aren’t There Yet”)
- Writing the ad in first person and speaking directly to the reader (“Apple Stans: You Might Want To Hear Me Out On This One”)
- Addressing your target audience (“Diligent First-Time Homeowners Do This One Simple Trick to Future-Proof Their Homes”)
- Offering fact-based benefits and figures (“Did You Know That 83% of Parents Play Video Games Together With Their Kids?”)
News headlines
News headlines are a little different than commercial headlines. Here, the news is the product, so journalists must adapt this sentiment into their headlines. However, both online news publications and print media have been known to feature ads from external sources, which blurs the line between independent journalism and commercially incentivized news outlets.
Nevertheless, the core purpose of a news-related headline remains the same: to motivate users to click on your article. To do this effectively, start your news headlines with the following words:
- Introducing
- Announcing
- New
- Now
- At Last
- Finally
- Presenting
- Just Released
Example: “At Last, A Caloric-Dense McMeal That Won’t Blow a Cosmic-Sized Hole Into Your Allotted Budget”
Price related headlines
These headlines are great for a couple of reasons. First, they contain a number in the title, and headlines with a number have a higher click-through rate (CTR) than headlines without one.
Second, they are enticing because price-related headlines signal a discount, a bulk sale, or some kind of deal that provides additional value to shoppers beyond the product’s starting price. In their mind, users can get more for less.
Third and final, these headlines can be a viable excuse to promote your products or services that aren’t selling that well. It’s a way to clear your inventory and attract new customers at the same time.
Good ideas for composing price-based headlines include:
- Featuring the price (“Deals Galore: Best-Selling Apple Earpods for Just $129.99”)
- Featuring a discount (“Shave 25% Off This Hello Kitty Silverware Collection—Today Only”)
- Featuring a special offer (“Sale Alert: Up to 50% Off for Military Personnel, Veterans, and First Responders on Selected LeBron 20 Colorways”)
- Offering an easy payment plan (“Buy Now Pay Later With Our Exclusive Credit Card Installment Program”)
- Presenting a free offer (“Choose 3 FREE Shampoo Samples, Shipping’s On Us!”)
However, there’s a catch. Relying too much on price-based headlines can hurt your brand in the long run. When your only strategy is selling via price reduction, you run the risk of lowering the prices to a point where it becomes unsustainable to keep up with your self-imposed discounts.
So, use price-related headlines sparingly and with caution.
Extremely short headlines
This group of headlines consists of one, two, and three-word headlines. They create intrigue by way of omission, having between one and three words to tell a story. A word of caution: unless you know exactly what you’re doing, it’s better to leave these headlines up to the seasoned pros.
Examples:
- One-word headline: “Theranos?!?”
- Two-word headline: “Juicero Blows?”
- Three-word headline: “Crypto King Jailed”
Get Really Deep into Your Prospect’s Frame of Mind
Knowing your audience is the first step toward improving your organic and paid campaigns. It’s a step you must take if you want to increase sales, improve your reputation, and grow your business. Specifically, crafting an amazing headline requires a deep understanding of your prospect’s mental and emotional state.
Here are five proven ways to accomplish just that.
Research previous successes that resonated with your prospects
When looking into their behavior, don’t forget to examine your past and even current campaigns that performed well with your prospects. What were the products, services, customer service approaches, and marketing headlines that put your business on the map?
This should tell you whether your current audience likes what you’re doing and why they continue to support your brand. As your business evolves, refer to these past and current successes when crafting your headlines for your future campaigns.
Monitor your audience’s feedback, comments, and suggestions
You can learn a lot about a potential shopper by monitoring their actions over time, including their favorite pages, what they don’t like, and, for example, how they approach buying a new item for their household.
Keep note of audience feedback by following their comments on your blog, as well as their engagement with your website as a whole. You can do this manually, or with the help of a social tracking software such as Hootsuite or Buffer.
Follow influencers in your market
What types of buyers are you trying to reach with your headlines? Are they Millennial gamers looking to repay their student loans, or retired Boomer homeowners who are entering the market for a new family car?
By reverse-engineering your ideal target audience, you can discover a trove of micro, medium-sized, and popular social media influencers that occupy any of those segmented markets.
Then, start listening to their podcasts (most of them have one), monitor their behavior, and watch how they address their audience. If your target markets overlap, you can learn a lot about how to tailor your headlines to maximize conversions.
Conduct surveys
Properly conducted surveys can open up a whole new understanding of your prospects’ frame of mind. They are effective for understanding what types of headlines your audience expects from your brand, as well as articles or ads with titles they dislike and would rarely click on.
In addition to asking about headlines, you can pose questions to your audience about loyalty, brand recognition, and customer satisfaction. Their answers will provide you with a more well-rounded picture of how to build your campaigns and what types of headlines to use.
Lastly, the good thing about surveys is that you can make them anonymous to incentivize more truthful answers, which leads to better and more complete answers.
Keep an eye on your competitors
Keeping a close eye on your competitors will provide you with invaluable insight into their headline strategies and methodologies, including the tactics that they tried but weren’t successful. This will open up the doors for new approaches you can test without spending too much time and resources on headline formulas that were proven to be subpar.
Use AI Tools to Get Inspiration When You’re Stuck, Don’t Copy and Paste
Generally speaking, asking an AI tool to generate headlines from scratch gives inferior results.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet came up with some interesting headlines from scratch. But, it’s missing the digital marketing angle since it assumed a more scientific approach in generating a headline.
This time, let’s try again by offering Claude a more descriptive starting point.
In our second attempt, Claude recognized the angle and created more apt headlines for our upcoming article.
Point being, if you have a headline that’s “just okay”, you can improve on it by asking an AI tool to make it more engaging. In other words, when you give these tools something to start with, you can get some decent ideas on how to improve your initial drafts.
Finally, don’t simply copy and paste the output from your AI tool. Instead, take its ideas and then refine them a bit further to achieve your goals.
Use These 5 Headline Tips
Becoming a master copywriter can take years. With these five tips, you can facilitate your way into headline mastery without going through the painful woes of predictable digital marketing failures, and here’s how.
Follow the 4 U’s
The four U’s of composing effective headlines include: Useful, Unique, Ultra-Specific, and Urgent.
Useful
The first U may sound obvious, but many marketers get lost in the weeds by writing excessively creative headlines that stop becoming useful. This confuses readers and makes them avoid your brand in the future. If the headlines aren’t useful to them, why should your prospects read your copy or click on your ad?
By extension, your copy that follows must deliver on your headline’s promise as well. If it doesn’t, then people will lose confidence in your brand’s integrity, and your sales, exposure, and reach will take a major hit.
Example: “This Organic Foot Brush Will Scrub your Dead Skin Clean Off”
Unique
Using a headline formula doesn’t mean you should write the same headlines over and over again. This extends to copying your competitors as well. If a prospect has read an article with a similarly-worded headline somewhere else, why should they click on yours?
Today, this is easier said than done. The SERPs are overflowing with sameness everywhere you look, so it’s challenging to be unique when the most effective headline strategies have been copied to death.
Thankfully, you can use this in your favor. Run a search with tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to identify existing permutations of your keyword. Then, make sure to avoid the repeat offenders and come up with your own combination of unique headlines and headline structures.
Example: “RzrRzrRzrRzr!!! This Heavy Duty Air Drill Sounds as Good as It Works!”
Ultra-Specific
The more specific you can make your headline, the more interested your prospects will be to take you up on your promise and click on your post. Remember: you’re attracting qualified leads and filtering out users who aren’t interested in your offer. An ultra-specific headline helps you achieve just that.
For example, consider these two headlines:
- “How To Brush Your Teeth”
- “7 Proven Techniques to Brush Your Teeth Carefully and Prevent Gum Bleeding”
The first headline is far too generic to be interesting. The second headline is more specific, descriptive, effective, and more impactful. It signals that the copy will help affected individuals improve their dental health in a demonstrably proven way.
Don’t be afraid of throwing in some extra words in your headline to make it as specific as it can be. As long as you’re following the best practices of your chosen platform, you should be good to go.
Urgent
Urgency is a powerful marketing tactic to create additional demand for your product or service on the spot. If you can persuade your prospects to act immediately by leveraging urgency in your headline, it means you’ve done a great job.
Here are some examples that illustrate the notion of urgency well:
- “How Working Out Now Helps You Avoid Love Handles in the Future”
- “11 Basketball Secrets You’ve Been Oblivious to All Along”
- “Car Lovers, Rejoice: 5 Limited-Time Offers for First-Time SUV Buyers!”
Knowing all that, let’s put all four U’s to work by referring to one of Gary Halbert’s headlines: “The Amazing Secret Of The Local Furniture Dealer Who Is Giving Away All Those Free Samples.”
Useful: The Amazing Secret
Unique: Of The Local Furniture Dealer
Ultra-Specific: Not present
Urgent: Who Is Giving Away All Those Free Samples
The Ultra-Specific part is missing. Let’s add one: “Queens, NY.” The final headline that ticks all 4 U boxes now looks like this: “The Amazing Secret Of The Local Furniture Dealer from Queens, NY, Who Is Giving Away All Those Free Samples.”
Start with the phrase “I can’t believe that…”
If you’re strapped for ideas, start with “I can’t believe that…” and fill in the remainder of your headline.
Example: “I Can’t Believe That Bitcoin Soars Past $95,000 for the First Time, Leaving Many Jubilant and a Few Cautious in Its Wake.”
Then, go back and delete your placeholder phrase.
Example: “Bitcoin Soars Past $95,000 for the First Time, Leaving Many Jubilant and a Few Cautious in Its Wake.”
Pose a funny question
Often, it’s a good idea to interject some humor into your headlines to create anticipation in your audience and break the proverbial ice. Just make sure that you’re not being extremely sarcastic, aggressive, or condescending towards your readers to avoid offending them with your headline and achieving the opposite of what you set out to do.
Example: “Have Lace Bras Fallen Out of Favor and Why Not?”
Use an em-dash (—), a colon (:), or a semicolon (;)
Punctuation matters more than you think. In headlines, it can help break the monotony of repeating structures and drive reader interest through the roof. Thanks to Google’s ranking algorithms and how they work, these punctuation marks allow you to break the headline into two parts and improve your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs.
Example: “The Ultimate Secret to Kazoo Mastery—Not What You Think”
Use rationale-inciting words
In headline writing 101, rationale is an encouragement to click. It provides the reader with an excuse to click on your headline and read your post.
The most popular rationale-inciting words include:
- Tricks
- Tips
- Takeaways
- Types
- Ways
- Times
- Lessons
Example: “9 Key Takeaways from Steve Jobs’ Famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech”
Don’t Steal Headlines, Steal Headline Structures
Another way to instantly uplevel your headline is to find great headlines from other sources, including Reddit posts, viral Buzzfeed articles, or Pinterest pins.
However, don’t just copy and paste their headlines. In a best-case scenario, it’s considered unoriginal and lazy. Worst case scenario, however, and some of these outlets can start legal action against your brand for stealing their work and enacting copyright infringement on their materials.
Instead, take the structure of your favorite headlines and adapt it for your space.
A/B Test Your Headlines
Ultimately, it all comes down to testing and hard data. The only way to get THE best headline is to pit your favorites against each other and adopt a variation of the best-performing headline for your upcoming posts.
Crazy Egg has an effective A/B testing tool that offers both manual and automated split testing for a variety of web elements, including headlines, CTAs, and full web pages. It also comes equipped with a powerful AI module to help you generate catchy text suggestions for your new copy. Additionally, Crazy Egg A/B testing also supports seamless Google Analytics (GA) integration for a granular overview of your tests’ performance over time.
Finally, coming up with a highly effective headline is equal parts art and science. However you’re doing it, make sure to test different headlines and gather real data on which versions get the best response.
