Does Emotion Belong in Your Landing Pages?

Your words are an essential part of communicating with others and being understood. This is not only true in everyday life, but also in marketing – especially in the case of landing pages. After exerting so much time and effort into piquing your reader’s interest enough to get them to a landing page, you want to make it count – to inspire action – to increase sales!

While you may be super excited at this point, you don’t want to scare your prospects off by pushing too much emotion. At the same time, you don’t want to be so flat and boring that your readers nod off before they take the actions that you want. So, what’s a marketer to do? Which types of emotions are appropriate on landing pages, and how much emotion is too much? Read on for the answers to these questions.

When to Keep It Light and Positive

If you’re in the travel or hospitality industries, it’s important to use positive emotions and language throughout your landing pages. A recent HubSpot study found that when even one percent of a page’s copy uses feelings of fear or anger, conversion rates could drop by as much as 25 percent. When people are looking for a place to travel or dine, they are ready to be inspired by words that uplift and inspire trust, like “enjoy”, “save”, “friendly”, “award”, and “star.”

When to Ditch Fearmongering

Fearmongering can be a little bit tempting when writing the copy for a landing page. After all, you want your readers to take immediate action, and what better way to inspire that than to make them believe that your offer is going to expire soon, and that they can’t live without it? While The Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report found that a very minimal usage (1-2% of total copy) of words that create a sense of fear can help conversion rates, other research has shown that using excessive fear mongering can turn consumers off. The takeaway here is that you should be very sparing with your usage of fear-generating verbiage on landing pages.

When to Spread Joy

It’s a pretty exciting thing when a person decides to take steps to advance his or her career. It’s not too surprising, then, that marketers in the education sector have found that when words associated with joy are used on landing pages, they see much higher conversion rates.

…And When to Lay Off the Joy

Not everybody jumps for joy, though. Those in the legal and home improvement fields will find that using too many words related to joy could actually result in fewer conversion rates.

When to Shoot for Trust

If they don’t like the joy concept, what approach can you take? “Trust” is an emotion that is highly valued in industries related to home improvement, travel, business services, and law. Take note, though, that people shopping for credit and lending services don’t like to be inundated with too many “trust” words. Perhaps they feel that if you’re pushing the trust idea too much that you’re not so trustworthy after all.

When to Keep It Concise

In some industries, consumers want to feel that you are short, sweet, and to the point. If you’re in the business services industry, you should treat your landing pages like a great elevator pitch. The credit and lending sectors also benefit from being concise, as less copy is frequently correlated with more conversions.

Using the right emotions on your landing pages can make a huge difference in your conversion rates. Let Madison Taylor Marketing help you express your emotions properly.