What are the best practices for using emotion on landing pages to boost conversions?

Here are two key steps to help you understand your audience's pain points: Research your core audience demographic and establish what needs and wants they have in life that could be helped by your business. Gain an understanding of how their current experiences are failing them in these areas and use their exact language to describe the problems. Make sure your design resonates emotionally with them – draw upon emotions such as fear, hope, joy etc., that they experience when facing those particular issues. Employ user-centric design principles to create a landing page where people can relate to it on a deeper level and monitor data regularly to make adjustments accordingly.

Think of what your target consumer wants to move away from and move towards instead. Every problem that your audience experiences has an emotion associated with it. Describe what it's like to experience the problem, and illustrate what it's like to see the problem solved.

In my experience, it’s not just emotion but engagement. What small action can you ask the reader to do that gets them a little further down the path of being an informed consumer. For example, if you are a CPG brand that focuses on regenerative farming, ask the reader to look in their cupboard and see if they can find that word on any packaging. Or if you are a service-based business, have send them a DIY template for one of your services (I promise the people that still need to hire you will, and the rest will be grateful for the shortcut). Scarcity and joy only get you so far but getting your consumer to pay attention to one thing means all of the sudden, they will see it all around.

Be succinct. Attention spans are increasingly short; if that’s not an oxymoron. Using words to trigger other sensory memories can be effective at showing you understand, and identify with, your audience: “Remember that knot in your stomach when you thought your bank account had been hacked?”, “Remember that first time you felt the heat as the aircraft cabin door was opened?”.

Think beyond copy using the written word. A well chosen image, custom gif or short video (with captions) can speed up the human connection that drives emotional response in humans. Using an alternate medium gives you a richer range to work with, and disrupts the “omg not another landing page” over-familiarity.

Design is essential. It’s not just making it pretty at the end of the process, but it helps the reader quickly understand tone + voice, and if done well, removes barriers from users being able to quickly and confidently take action.