“Free” isn’t a value proposition.
If you want to boost signups for all your freebies, watch me optimize this free workout landing page. And grab next-level copywriting tips like:
- How to spot (and avoid) emotionally charged words. Why? Because if you trigger too much resistance, potential leads will happily pass up on downloading your freebie.
- How to modify keywords to soften disbelief. So you can tap into the mindset path that’s more open to your offer.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi there, and we’re back with another mini copywriting review.
Hi, I’m Paige from The Impact Copywriter, and today we’re looking at a landing page that is promoting a free 90-day home workout plan.
We’re going to look at some ways we could potentially optimize this landing page in order to increase its conversion rate.
So, to turn more visitors into signups, now keep in mind this isn’t in the wild landing page. I don’t have a whole lot of background info about their target market and their customer personas and kind of how this free offer fits into their overall larger sales funnel.
So, we’re going to have to make some inferences here, you know, using what I know about the company, using observations we can make from the landing page itself, and from my personal experience of kind of interacting with this brand.
Alright, so let’s get to optimizing. The first observation I made was that the headline is purely informative.
It’s essentially describing the download, just telling you what it is—a free 90-day home workout plan. So, other than it being free, nothing about the present headline hooks the visitor with why they’d actually want to download this. Just it being a home workout plan, you know, those are all over the internet.
So, what makes you want to download this specific plan? My first recommendation would be to rework the headline, the main headline for the landing page, to focus more on what these visitors are trying to achieve. Like, what is that ultimate goal?
Here’s what a potential rewrite of the hero section could look like. Instead of using the 90-day home workout plan as the core headline, which doesn’t really say anything about the value of the resource, instead we’re using that as eyebrow copy.
So, we can still maintain a message match if we’re using ads or social media posts or links on the website that are leading or sort of advertising or promoting the home workout plan. By using it as eyebrow copy, we’re keeping with that message match; they know they’re in the right place.
Now, for the core headline, we are connecting back to the bigger goal, of course, assuming that we’re pulling this from VOC. Something like “Sculpt Sexier Muscles from the Comfort of Your Living Room.”
Now, I’ve highlighted that even though this is a home workout plan, push yourself to be more specific, you know, anywhere you can that it makes sense.
So, in this instance, instead of saying “Sculpt Sexier Muscles from the Comfort of Your Home” or “from Home,” “Home” is kind of blah, right? It’s just, um, it’s not as specific as we could be.
So, that’s why I’ve chosen to use “From the Comfort of Your Living Room.” You could easily choose another room in the house, “From the Comfort of Your Garage,” but most likely anyone reading this page is going to have a living room; not everyone has a garage.
Now, remember to pull from VOC. If you know that people are working out from home and the majority of those are working out from their garage or outside or in their yard or wherever, you want to pull the data that you have from the research that you have so that you can better align with that real experience of the people who are coming to you.
And then we have a bit of body copy underneath the headline that says “Yes, Really.” So, if they’re thinking, “Can I really sculpt sexier muscles from home?” Maybe they’ve tried a lot of things and there’s some resistance; maybe we know that there’s a little bit of disbelief around them being able to do this without having an expensive gym membership and access to all that equipment that you would find in a gym.
You know, we’re already meeting that a little bit. We’re not really countering the belief, but we are acknowledging that they might have some disbelief in that. We’re saying, “Yes, really, you can. All you need is two dumbbells and a resistance band.”
With that sentence, we’re already pre-countering some potential objections that they might have around the type of equipment—either being expensive or complicated—that they might have to use, even if this is an at-home workout plan.
Now, as always, when we’re doing optimization and coming up with things to test, we want to make sure we’re going back to that VOC or voice of customer research. Because we want to make sure that all of our decisions are based on some sort of data so we know that we are making decisions that are more aligned with the ideal buyer or the ideal customer that we’re trying to reach.
Something I flagged when I was coming up with ideas for the headline was “muscles,” the word “muscles,” because I know in this space for women, building bulky muscles or thinking that resistance training builds bulky man-like muscles is something that a large group of women are afraid of.
So, muscles in this context may be the wrong word because there’s too much resistance there. You know, before we actually do all that belief breaking down and reframing so that they understand that that’s not necessarily true. But if a visitor who has a lot of resistance towards thinking that resistance training will build bulky manly muscles, and that’s not what they want, “muscles” is a word that we don’t want to use, right?
Because it’s going to trigger hesitation and concern and, you know, connect to that resistance that that visitor has. So, if our research did in fact suggest that “muscles” was too much of a trigger word because of objections around building bulky manly muscles, then a potential solution for that would just be to swap “muscles” for a similar word that carries much less resistance.
So, in this example, you can see that I’ve swapped “muscles” for a word that doesn’t carry any of that emotional baggage—”sculpt a sexier figure from the comfort of your living room.” Now, we could just as easily have used a word like “physique” or even something more general like “body.”
I liked the word “figure” because, you know, it’s a common way for women to express, “I’m watching my figure.”
The next observation was that our button is also very functional and informative and it doesn’t tie back to any big benefit as well. So, keeping in mind that we would be revamping the headline, then we want to rework that button just a little bit to make sure that we are connecting back to that benefit.
So, we might use a button that said, “I’m Ready to Sculpt. Send Me the Plan.” In the beginning part of that button copy, we’re connecting back to the benefit that we’re using in the headline. And then the ending part of that button copy, we’re being consistent with what they’re downloading.
So, instead of saying, you know, “Free Ebook” like we’re using here in the current version of the landing page, when we’re actually offering a plan, even though it comes as a free ebook, there’s a little bit of a mismatch there.
So, we want to make sure that we’re very consistent with how we message our thing that we’re offering. So, if we’re calling it a plan, let’s go ahead and call it a plan in the button as well.
Now, something I want to mention before we move forward is the difference between using the word “sexy” and using the word “sexier.”
Now, this is something that I have just observed through conversations and talking with people and working kind of in the mindset space a little bit. So, I opted to use the word “sexier” because for someone who comes to this page and maybe they’ve tried a lot and they’re really discouraged and, you know, they have a lot of resistance towards even believing whether or not they can actually achieve a certain transformation, you know, using an absolute term like “sexy” could be, could feel unbelievable and it could, you know, bring with it more resistance because it feels like something that’s unachievable.
But if you use the “sexier” version of the word, it feels like an improvement. It feels like, “Well, I can get closer to that goal” than just, you know, using the absolute form of that word.
Now, the next thing that snagged my attention was this “Train Like an Athlete” bit of copy here, you know, starting at the next section.
My concern is, do these women, you know, knowing what we know about them, which is not a lot, we just know that they’re women, do they resonate with “Train Like an Athlete”? And that’s something we would want to go back to our VOC to validate.
Now, based on what I know about the women who come into this brand, into their free Facebook group, who are starting out, who are kind of in these earlier stages of awareness and sophistication, you know, I would question whether or not they would resonate with “Train Like an Athlete.”
Because based on my observations and time spent in the Facebook group, it seems that training like an athlete is a mindset that they don’t have coming in. It’s a mindset that they’ve developed as they take Kim’s paid programs and they learn to think about this transformation, this journey, like an athlete would.
When they come in, that’s not how they think. So, you know, if that’s true, if we go back to our VOC and we discover that, you know, that observation is actually pretty spot on, then we would want to, you know, get rid of that copy because it’s not going to resonate with these women who are just coming in.
Right, so then what do we do? So, I think this is a great place to actually use a little bit of proof because, you know, luckily the founder, Kim here, she has an amazing transformation story and she has tons of photos.
She’s achieved an incredible physique using the same types of techniques and resistance training and weightlifting techniques that she teaches.
So, this section could be used as a proof section to help prove the claim we’re making in the new headline. I would use this next section as a way to introduce Kim and tell the visitor about her transformation because it does prove to some extent that this is possible.
We might write a proof section a little something like this: Sculpted bodies aren’t chiseled by secret diets, magic pills, or fat-melting coffees. Resistance training is still the most reliable and lasting approach for building the body of your dreams. I’m proof.
What I’ve done here is set it up to introduce Kim’s transformation, which is powerful proof alone. But what I’ve also done is kind of acknowledge where they are in the buyer’s journey.
With our crosshead, we acknowledge that they have tried the secret diets seen on magazine covers, the magic pills with the new superfood of the month included as an ingredient, or those fat-melting coffees that people are still messaging you about on Facebook. We’re acknowledging those failed solutions and then setting up the key shift they need to understand that resistance training is the only way to build the body of their dreams in the most reliable manner and the way that’s going to be long-lasting.
I’ve also messaged it in a way that we’re not claiming that resistance training is the new thing because it’s not. By saying resistance training is still the most reliable, we’re hinting at the idea that it worked before, it works now, and it’s going to continue to work. It’s not just some sort of gimmick. There’s actually scientific data behind resistance training as the right, reliable means to get the type of body they’re wanting.
Of course, those are things we would need to expand on throughout the messaging for the funnel. Now notice that I said resistance training and not weightlifting. Kim does teach weightlifting techniques, but we’ve already established that the term muscles and potentially weightlifting could be associated with that objection of not wanting to lift weights and build bulky, manly muscles.
That choice was intentional because we could easily say weightlifting here, and that would be accurate since she does teach weightlifting techniques.
However, weightlifting is also resistance training, and resistance training could potentially have less emotional resistance. So, for this section, after we’ve written the crosshead, we want to expand a little bit on her story—kind of where she was, what she struggled with, what she tried, then what she discovered, and how that changed or how that’s played a role into where she is today.
We want to briefly recap that transformation and then, of course, support it visually by showing before and afters. So, what did she look like before she started doing resistance training the way that she teaches? And then also an after picture, potentially of her standing in a bikini, sculpted on stage in one of her competitions.
Something else we could do on this page is to push our bullets a little bit further. For example, the first bullet reads “35+ exercise instructional videos.” We could ask ourselves, “So what? Why does that matter?” We can add a little bit to the end that says “35+ guided videos that show you how to complete the exercises the right way.” We can even talk about using the right form so you don’t injure yourself or using the right form to get the most out of every rep you complete.
Our third bullet is “training to failure: what it is and why it’s important.” I would consider flipping that a little bit, focusing on the “why it’s important” part and leaving out the “what it is.” I wouldn’t even mention training to failure because that’s the technique. We could create more curiosity by not naming the technique, instead focusing on why the technique is important.
For example, you could say something like “The secret transformation technique that sculpts your muscles in the quickest time possible.” So you can see here we’re naming the technique in more general terms without giving it away, which creates curiosity because we don’t tell them what it is, but we do tell them why it’s important in a way that ties back to what they care about. In this example, what they care about is sculpting muscles in the quickest time possible.
Again, with our note that we would want to make sure that we are not using the word muscles if there’s a lot of resistance to building muscle. Make sure you’re paying attention to those word choices when specific words carry more emotional resistance.
To wrap up, when you’re optimizing a landing page for a free resource like this one, remember that just because it’s free doesn’t make it valuable. There are lots of free things offered on the internet. You really do have to communicate what’s in it for them. What is it about this resource that’s going to interest people in downloading it? Remember to channel that desire throughout the copy on your landing page.
Happy optimizing!
